Reflections From a Murky Pond

For good or ill I was exposed to a great deal of literature as a young child and encouraged to take full advantage of that privilege. Consequently, I became an avid reader starting at what most would consider a very young – I won’t, however, say “tender” – age.

It followed quite naturally that my reading greatly influenced my thoughts upon many things

While many, many books of varied sorts influenced my views on myriad topics, I truly believe that no single work influenced my thoughts on living more than Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love.

Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein finishes his “Future History” as presented to world by his then-editor, John W. Campbell. In it we are given a cornucopia of other stories, as Lazarus Long, now some 2300 years old, is induced to reminisce about his life as part of a complex deal to preserve the ‘wisdom’ of the oldest man alive. Each of the stories that Lazarus relates are fairly complete by themselves, and many authors would have chosen to publish each of them separately so as to maximize his monetary returns.

Heinlein, being the author and the man that we was, chose to keep them all as one piece, as each story helped to illuminate his overriding theme, on just what is love in all of its myriad aspects and why it is so important to man’s survival as a species.

This is a book that I strongly and most emphatically recommend for everyone, though not, perhaps, for children as young as I was when I first read it as it contains much that I prepubescent child cannot viscerally understand. This does, however, present a problem as many of the “lessons” contained within this work are best learned as young as possible.

Many Christians will have issues with this work; of this I have no doubts. I would suggest trying to get past this as the work contains many ethical and behavioral lessons of great worth.

If you can bring yourself to do so, put the situational details aside and absorb the underlying context and message.

Go to your your library and check it out if they have it. If not, buy it. In any event, read it. Personally, I’d suggest buying it since I’ve been returning to it for nigh on 40 years and love it still. It’s the sort of book that becomes an old friend and teacher – one that you keep coming back to and finding new meaning, joy, and sorrow in.

Time Enough For Love also contains two “interludes” which comprise the 64-page The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (Kindle), which I believe is a useful addition to anyone’s traveling library in the same fashion that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Mushashi’s The Book of Five Rings, and Machiavelli’s The Prince are.

And yes, I know; it’s more than odd to include a work of fiction – science fiction at that! – alongside philosophical works such as I have done. Mr. Heinlein was that sort of man though. He, much like that radical rabbi from Nazareth, knew that parables teach far better than anything else.

It’s hard for people and societies to become who the God(s) intended us to be. It’s a complex process will little direct feedback. It’s also clouded by the plethora of disparate visions of just what the God(s) intended.

Becoming Who God Intended Is Hard

It seems to me that we need to make it easier for people and society to understand what leading a moral and ethical means. Rather than focusing upon what the God(s) intended us to become, people – and the world as a whole – would be better served by looking to Man’s Best Friend.

Becoming The Person Your Dog Thinks You Are Is Easier

For most people, if they concentrated on being the person that their dog already thinks that they are, almost everything else will fall into place quite naturally. Perhaps that’s even part of Natural Law, a part we’ve chosen to overlook with disturbing consistently over the last 15,000 years.

And let’s face it, there’s a solid chance that the God(s) intended each of us to be the person our dogs already think that we are.

I’ll even go so far as to posit that this may be why we have dogs. The God(s) may have provided them for just this purpose – to make it easier for us to be what we were meant to be. Of course, if this is true, then it’s equally likely that the God(s) provided cats to keep us in our place and from being too prideful. 😛

When dealing with activists of any stripe, be it racial, gender, sexuality, or a pet cause, be aware of one simple thing – They will almost invariably speak their subcultural allegiance first and the truth second if at all. This is a negative trait that is self-reinforcing because all of these causes preach a form of orthodoxy that requires such relegation of the truth to, at most, secondary standing as a metric of “authenticity” on the activists’ parts.

What this means for us is that, due to the activists’ mental and ethical deformity and the constant reinforcement of that deformity, they can rarely, if ever at all, be reasoned with. In some extreme cases, elder Black and Feminist demagogues being the most common example, you can’t even placate them because the war they have created in their minds is an end in itself and they couldn’t – not wouldn’t – recognize victory even if they achieved it.

Remember, since the truth is less than important to them than solidarity and orthodoxy in their cause, these activists and their core followers cannot be reasoned with. As such, there is no point or purpose in engaging with them. It is better and saner to either ignore them or silence them through denying them a venue and audience, through ridicule, or through applied targeted force in the most extreme cases.

You here a lot about “inclusivity” from the various stripes of Liberal and Progressive elements living withing our borders. To some extent this is the Left’s professed mantra insofar as social practices are concerned.

It’s, however, nothing but a well-told lie. The inclusivity myth is false and is nothing but a rationalization of the Left’s oikophobia.

The Left does not seek inclusivity; they seek to shift societal mores to a more libertine model and espouse even less tolerance for those with normative ethical, moral, an societal practices than those that they seek to displace and destroy.

All it that the Left’s “inclusivity” really is is an attempt to exclude and marginalize people who might otherwise be included in favor of those who society has previously, rightly or wrongly, censured.

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Recently there’s been a rash of forced and false – or, at least, less than convincingly sincere apologies making the rounds of the media.

Somewhat interestingly, these false apologies seem non-partisan or bipartisan in nature. Both Liberals and Conservative have been forced by circumstances to bow to outside pressures and offer what they hope will be acceptable apologies.

Two such false apologies come quickly to mind:

• Conservative media icon and pundit, Rush Limbaugh has been forced to offer an apology for describing Liberal activist, Sandra Fluke as a slut and prostitute after various of his sponsors pulled their advertising in the wake of Liberal outrage over his comments.
• Liberal “bioethicists,” Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva have been forced to offer an apology for advocating the legitimacy of infanticide for any reason or no reason at all in the wake of a broad spectrum of people calling for their deaths.

It’s somewhat interesting that both coerced apologies differed from the normal bordering upon trite, insincere, “I’m sorry if anyone was offended by what I said,” vein.

• Limbaugh claimed he made poor word choices in his attempt to apply a humorous analogy of the situation and went on to imply that the blame, if there was any to be cast, should be laid at the doorstep of the absurdity of “discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress.”
• Giubilini’s and Minerva’s apology, if one can call it that, seemed to based upon the idea that we normal people, lacking the bioethicists’ special education and ability, should never have been granted access to such material since we couldn’t be expected to understand it or approach it clinically.

Unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh’s apology was not considered sincere and was not accepted, nor was that, by and large, from Giubilini and Minerva.

Leaving the question of whether either of these apologies was warranted and, as well, leaving aside the utter lack of believable sincerity in these two disparate attempts at apologizing, it had to be expected by anyone with an iota of sense that they would be rejected. It’s obvious that the vast majority of people would consider these apologies worthless.

Both apologies were given only after people were taking direct action against these people.  Hence, the apologies cannot be expected to be considered anything other than an attempt to avoid the natural consequences of their actions – even when they appear to be sincere.

Perhaps, many years ago, people were more attached to the “moral high ground” of forgiving other for the shear sake of forgiving. That was then; this is now, and people have well learned that the wages of mercy are often recidivism when such forgiveness is granted before reprisal has run it course.