That being said, it seems like this movement has gained some traction, and is somewhat supported by the likes of Peter Thiel and even Bill Gates. So let's have a look.
The idea of Effective Altruism is very simple: if you want to do good, spend your resources on the most effective cause: the one that leads to the greatest increase of well-being and the greatest decrease of suffering. Don't trust your instincts or your interests, but dispassionately look at graphs, calculate which cause (or program1) is objectively the best bang for the buck, then execute. If it means you need to invest time and money into helping an African tribe fight deadly pandemics, so be it — even if your neighbor might desperately need some money to buy her child new shoes.
Oh dear, oh dear.
Naturally, the EA movement is obsessed with "saving lives." They think, no doubt, that all the philosophical conundrums about ethics, truth, values, and so on can be avoided by starting with something uncontroversial: who could possibly object that "saving lives" is always a good idea, and maximizing the number of "saved" people is an obvious goal, and that saving lives is among the top payoff-providers in the utilitarian game?
Well, except that this is ridiculous. It might hold true on the super-local level, like when I witness an accident and somebody is about to die: in that situation, we certainly need to forget about everything else and just pour all our resources into saving that life. It is a limit case. But in no way can this obvious observation be generalized and scaled up, not to the broader local level, much less to the global level.
To see this, we don't even need to point to the atrocities that have been committed historically and recently in the name of maximizing the "saving" of lives. It is enough to argue, as Kant did, that what makes a life worth saving in the first place is a person's status as an autonomous moral agent: someone capable of moral growth. Without such a grounding in the dignity of the soul, we might just as well, in good utilitarian fashion, kill off a bunch of people to save a bunch more.
But if moral development is life's prime goal and value, the very thing that gives it dignity and unalienable rights, then we can clearly see how this value can come into conflict with the maximization of well-being and the reduction of suffering: moral growth involves both suffering and the conscious abandonment of well-being. If you take that away from people, and are out to "save" them, you are eradicating what gives them, and all life, purpose. You will lock them into a Brave New World of eternal bliss and hostility towards death and destiny. This will lead to capital-S Suffering: spiritual agony and hell on earth.
You might have your difficulties with this idea, based on your intuition about the limit case of witnessing a car accident. You might say that there can be no doubt that saving a life, for example, is better than not doing so. But this argument derives all its power from a fictional abstraction: no variable can ever be isolated in real life. There is always an infinite contextual horizon involved in everything we do. No amount of analysis and research can change that, because these can only ever look at a limited number of dimensions. Worse, people who conduct such research inevitably rely on a huge number of assumptions and presuppositions, many of which are entirely unconscious or simply taken for granted without any reflection whatsoever. These presuppositions determine their choice of which facts to look at, which areas to focus on, their ideas about values and ethics, how they interpret their data, how they conduct their research, and so on. "Saving lives" can never happen in a vacuum: moral decisions about such things must be, and are, grounded in the totality of reality.
Moral decisions, therefore, can only be a matter of deep intuition, which must be connected with rich, direct experience and relationships: encounters between souls. Such decisions are basically acts of faith, informed by the nexus of conscience, emotion, body, and intellect. This nexus, if it is to be useful, requires growth and development: a process of tuning into an informative landscape where objective morality originates — not in the sense of a set of rules, but in the sense of a deeper intelligence, a sphere of all-encompassing information that we can learn to access by a process of personal growth on all fronts. Such development can only happen directly, in real life, on the local level: in our relationships with family, our immediate community, our spouse, our work colleagues, friends, neighbors, and so on.
The example of witnessing an accident I gave above, aside from being a limit case where reality exceptionally collapses into a single dimension, as it were, and which cannot be generalized, also shows something else: opportunities to help announce themselves in one's life, in a personal and individual way; they are not actively sought out. To put it differently, someone or something must ask for our help before we can give it: the iron law of Free Will. A car accident that we witness which requires immediate intervention is a form of asking as well, albeit, again, it represents a limit case that cannot be generalized.
When nobody is asking for help, more often than not, we shouldn't give it. If someone does ask, it is our responsibility to decide whether our "help" actually would lead to growth or stifle it. This includes the help for countries and projects, even when it concerns the so-called saving of lives: maybe there are people in that country, or among those groups that we supposedly want to help, who strongly oppose certain interventions for very good reasons — even if these interventions might, in theory, save lives. Someone suffering or dying somewhere does not automatically oblige us to intervene. If we thought that, we would immediately set out to build an imperialist, technocratic Brave New World nightmare on earth.
Decisions about helping, even when directly asked, are anything but trivial. We cannot simply assume that reducing people's immediate suffering, or even saving lives, is always the right thing to do. In fact, such questions are so non-trivial that I would argue no general statements can ever be made about them: it all comes down to the embodied interactions between specific individuals in their specific circumstances. Imagined scenarios and thought experiments, beloved by certain philosophers, that turn real life experiences into one-dimensional mind games, are not only entirely useless, but positively deceptive. They are a form of make-believe based on intuitions that only make sense in real-life situations, not in imagined scenarios stripped of all context, depth, and connectedness to Reality.
Before going on, perhaps it's best to say a few words about what real charity, real altruism looks like. This will make the stark contrast to the abstract fantasy world of the EA crowd apparent.
Charity begins with moral transformation. The best work has always been done by people who suffered personally, won the age-old spiritual battle against their inner demons, and came out transformed. They then feel the urge and obligation to share what they have learned, to help those who suffer just like them. Countless self-help groups, medical charities, AAA programs etc. have been founded that way.
There is even a word for it: post-traumatic growth.2
Needless to say, it would be the height of absurdity to advise those wonderful people to abandon their cause, their very destiny, because of some sterile utilitarian arguments. The same is true for donors, volunteers, etc.
Second, a charity needs to be based on a relatively small community that is deeply connected. True, in some cases, it is possible to "scale" a charitable organization up to a certain point (although there is always great danger in that). But you always start small: you get a group of people together to help them, and help them help each other. People you know and are involved with. People whose character you can judge. People you feel close to because you share certain experiences, such as certain hardships, traumata, and problems.
This is true for donations as well. Nobody who has any sense should donate to any cause that he or she cannot judge based on the people involved, their characters, and their moral development. You give to people you know, because you have followed them for a while, know how they think and act, whether their words match their actions, and so on. And, again, you give to causes that are dear to your heart, because they relate to your own experience, your own suffering. It is part of your unique journey, your calling.
In this day and age, such closeness doesn't always have to be local. There are many online groups, and even if you follow someone on YouTube for a while, just to give an example, you might develop a connection that is close enough to form the basis for a decision to donate some money, or even to become a volunteer in one of his projects.
Keep these things in mind next time someone wants to convince you to spend your resources on a cause based exclusively on hyper-abstract arguments and statistical make-believe!
The Effective Altruism movement is rooted in the roughest sort of utilitarianism, which can only produce monstrous results. Have a look at this3:
Most people would agree that, all else being equal, it's good to reduce suffering and increase well-being. There might be other things of value as well - promoting art, or preserving the natural environment - but effective altruism only considers these things to the extent that they improve lives.Oh dear. Oh dear.
First, "all else being equal" translates "my argument belongs to the fantasy world," because all things can never be equal: all things is an infinite number of things, so you can never consider them all, or even a tiny fraction; but if you miss just one thing of this infinite number of things, this could be the crucial one — the one that renders your whole reasoning utterly pointless, and your premises utterly false. Hence the argument is an exercise in futility.
Second, the line about art and nature: it is positively barbaric. Sacrifice beauty and the wonders of nature for some technocratic cause somewhere far away? Oh dear indeed. I urge these people to read Roger Scruton's book Beauty for a passionate defense of the crucial importance of beauty and nature. It takes a fine and perceptive soul like him to muster that defense. Then again, it also takes a fine soul to understand it, which means some of the EA people might have difficulties. So, in the spirit of bluntness: you want to make the world a better place? No better way than developing some taste and making it more beautiful — as always in small ways, in your own surrounding. Beauty lifts up everyone who comes in contact with it; even one single contact with beauty by one single person might have far-reaching ripple effects that change the whole world. Give me beauty any day over number-crunching do-gooders colonizing foreign cultures with their primitive, sterile, technocratic worldview. It is nothing but tragic that they don't even know how primitive their presuppositions are even while they make statements that relegate art and nature to some unimportant side show that can only be valued for its direct practical utility.4
The EA people (seriously!) write things like this:5
It's common to say that charity begins at home, but in effective altruism, charity begins where we can help the most.Should I spend months on end sitting beside my dying grandmother, when it is clear that it won't save her life, which will be over soon anyway? Shouldn't I rather work hard during that time to earn extra money, which I can then donate to a cause that could save 100 lives in Africa with my donation?6
What if I believe (like I most certainly do) that even the smallest moral action can change the entire cosmos — butterfly effect and all that? And that I therefore think the most "effective" way of helping the world is spiritual guidance and development? This would make donating to the local priest that you deeply trust, just to give an example, by far the best "investment." An no puny little graph can show otherwise.
And what does "help the most" or "maximize well-being" even mean?
It is telling that utilitarians use the abstract word "well-being" to describe the goal of their pursuits: a word which has no meaning in the human imagination. Fulfilment, contendment, personal growth, reaching one's potential, fulfilling one's destiny, overcoming personal crisis and learning from it, a balanced life, the joy of non-useful pursuits, bonding as a community, meaningful friendships... These are richer expressions to describe what humans aspire to, and what we should focus on. Even John Stuart Mill recognized that there are higher and lower forms of pleasure. Given this state of affairs, how could any utilitarian calculus make any sense ever? It is by no means obvious, for example, that saving lives should take precedence over preserving a beautiful cathedral. And "maximizing" meaningful friendships, deep beauty, or the fulfilment of people's destinies sounds as ridiculous as it is.
Bottom line is: you cannot use hyper-rational, detached arguments to get your moral compass straight. What you need to do, instead, is what life has always been about: grow your moral being by trying your best to embody your morality in real, immediate life, unbelievably hard and prone to error that it is, and learn from your experience. Don't try to maximize "happiness" and instead practice moral restraint, and use your inevitable suffering as a springboard towards embodied understanding and learning rooted in real life — and to find your calling.
Utilitarianism is a form of madness, practiced by people who are disconnected from the embodied world of rich, immediate experience, who prefer living in an unreal abstract land where concepts, calculations, and disconnected "facts," unconsciously chosen because of personal presuppositions, rule supreme.
That some modern thinkers, starting with the madman Jeremy Bentham, lived in this fantasy land as well, and that others, like John Rawls with his "veil of ignorance," literally elevated ignorance and disconnectedness from reality to a virtue, cannot be an excuse for not seeing the monstrosity that is much of abstract, utilitarian thought.
To be fair, it is possible to believe in utilitarianism or generally engage in hyper-abstract ethical thought and still be a morally upright person. But this only works because such people have a soul and a heart, which find expression in their decisions in spite of their utilitarian ideology, which is only used to justify and rationalize after the fact what their soul had told them before their number crunching.
There are so many more errors and misconceptions in the Effective Altruism texts, there is so much more hyper-rationalistic blindness — remember the image of a car accident where you don't know where to look, and the most sensible option is to simply avert your eyes. So we'll just do that for now.
On a final note, if you feel attracted to Effective Altruism but have your suspicions, what will help you, I think, is to read works that the rationalistic mindset can grasp, and which can help you recognize the limits of precisely this mindset to gain new, deeper insights: using the rational ladder to climb over that wall, so to speak, to then kick it away, Wittgenstein-style. Start with R.G. Collingwood's An Autobiography (short) or McGilchrist's The Matter With Things (long but worth it).
And if your impulse is to do good and help the world, when in doubt about such grand projects (which should be pretty much always), opt for working on yourself to become a beacon of sincere morality in the small things, in your immediate environment. I not only believe, I know that this can change the universe, in ways which the hyper-rationalist mindset will never be able to comprehend.
Oh dear, oh dear.
L.P. Koch writes about philosophy & religion. German living in France.Notes:
- As a reviewer on Amazon for the movement's foundational book Doing Good Better points out, there seems to be a lot of confusion between causes and programs: causes are the thing you want to achieve and the value this achievement has in your estimation; programs are the bureaucratic ways of realizing these values.
- For a variety of examples, see: Jim Rendon, Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth, Touchstone 2016
- Frequently Asked Questions and Common Objections
- Of course, you could play definition games and proclaim that "usefulness" also means gaining fulfilment from non-useful things such as art etc.. But such moves are not only confusing, they are most often deliberately so: proponents of utilitarianism can then live in the illusion that their hardcore utilitarianism is on the right track, while simultaneously appeasing those who level obvious objections at them, even while their expansions of definitions destroy the entire enterprise and whatever appeal it had in the first place.
- Introduction to Effective Altruism
- EA people might try to weasel out of this criticism by proclaiming that local decency and donating to countries far away are mutually exclusive. Sorry, this won't fly: having limited resources makes prioritization crucial. Heck, helping us make these choices is the whole point of Effective Altruism! It is a standard move by those who espouse philosophies that fly in the face of common sense to pretend that we can somehow still preserve it while following their ideas: they present a Janus face to the world — when you confront them with common sense, they redefine their theory to conform to it but render it pointless; when you ask what the advantage of their theory is, they lay their theory out in pure form, which initially seems attractive to the rationalistic mindset, but which collapses entirely the second you switch on common sense. No folks, you cannot have it both ways.
Reader Comments
Everyone knows that baby formula is better than mother's milk.
A mother needs to be free of the breast-feeding burden, so she can join the work force.
At the work place, as part of the work force, she will be able to do more 'good' and save more lives.
Everyone knows that baby formula is better than mother's milk.
And if not, they can be educated.
(sarcasm)
ned,
out
"Effective Altruism (EA) is an intellectual project and social movement that advocates the use of careful reasoning to determine the most effective ways of improving the world .
The core idea is simple: the world is filled with so much injustice and suffering — from climate change to global extreme poverty to pandemics & infectious diseases— yet each of us only have one life and career to try to make the world a better place . Effective Altruism provides a framework to think about the scope of different global problems, determine which causes are most pressing, consider which cause is the best fit for you to work on, and plan your career to improve the world in that domain." I added the bold emphasis.
My first impression, the use of "world" and "reasoning" tell me that this is a save the "world" project, and we all know that the WEF is going to save the "world" with its Great Green Reset. "Reasoning", in my view, is talking about AI as the true "mind" that can create a "model" and determine the "statistical" best course of action for one to take. What we have is a Gates Foundation and Welcome Trust foundation mission statement. It sounds so "altruistic", just like "all vaccines are safe and effective".
In my view, psychopaths use "altruism" and its various "ideologies" to deceive the general population that they are the good guys that are doing good things. Actually they are the bad guys using "altruism" as the emotional hook.
The USA Southern border is to give “refugees” from other countries a chance for a better life and freedom.
The Ukraine War is to “protect the Ukrainian people” from the “injustice” and “terrorist” invasion of Russia.
The WHO declared a “covid pandemic” to save and protect humanity from the deadly “virus”, and the “vaccine” protects and saves humanity.
The Russian sanctions are to “unite the world” against the “tyranny” of Russia.
The Iraqi invasion was to “save the world” from Weapons of Mass Destruction that Hussein had.
The 2008 financial crisis led Obama to- save the financial system for all of us, by keeping the banks afloat.
In Neuro Linguistic programming, linguistics, framing, words and phrases are used to manipulate people. To understand the manipulation, you look at the results of the actions. Do any of these above do what they say? No. They all have created damage, death suffering and destruction.
Think about this. Prior to writing, everything oral. Oral history, passed on through stories, using mnemonics, where the imagery (signs/symbols) have meanings relevant to the actual time period, and people knew what it meant. A talking point, so to speak. You can remember things, better that way, kinda like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge Always, in music. You can do it with you mind to, like the memory artists when quickly memorizing names. Everytime someone says their name to them, they may (in their mind) envision filiing that name away like a book on the shelf, then a book on the table or whatever in a room, garden etc. So when it comes time to recall the name, in their mind they take a walk back through the room in the order they filed it, hence remembering the name. So the speaking part of oral tradition (the story), is a memory mnemonic of the brain.
Then along came pictographs, a visual aid to help the shaman to repeat back the story.
Then the pictographs, became more elaborate and have a duality about them, where the shaman used them to tell the story to the people and at the same time had a hidden meaning for those that knew. Eventually the pictures got smaller and more representative and what not, to eventually become letters, used to "spell" words.
Spelling didn't come from kings, it came from the shaman's, wizards, magi, priests of the religions. The controllers of the stories. They then used this to control the minds of the people as well as for the administration of government and eventually it was taught to the common people and a way to communicate, without telling them, the dual purpose behind it.
To this day Satanists/witches/magicians cast spells on us, them or whatever or whoever in their rituals. They don't and can't do this, simply by reading text, which on one level is potent, but not potent enough to actualize the magic is contains, they have to also correctly pronounce ( to employ the organs of speech to produce) it.
Spelling - the way in which a word is spelled
Spell - 1a: a spoken word or form of words held to have magic power
b: a state of enchantment
2: a strong compelling influence or attraction
Writing - Letters or characters that serve as visible signs of ideas, words, or symbols
Pronounce - to employ the organs of speech to produce
Enchanted - placed under or as if under a magic spell, made to feel delightfully pleased or charmed
Magic - the use of means (such as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces: an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source
Magi - plural of Magus
Magus - a member of a hereditary priestly class among the ancient Medes and Persians
Read - (1): to receive or take in the sense of (letters, symbols, etc.) especially by sight or touch(2): to study the movements of with mental formulation of the communication expressedread lips(3): to utter aloud the printed or written words ofread them a story
Number - a word, symbol, letter, or combination of symbols representing a number
Music - the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity
Notes - a written symbol used to indicate duration and pitch of a tone by its shape and position on the staff: something (such as an emotion or disposition) like a note in tone or resonance
Numbers also serve this purpose to, as well as music.
So in essence, reading anything, is like reading a magic spell. Listening to someone sing, is listening to a spell being cast.
An example of evil magic would be the Satanic Bible or anything Alister Crawly wrote for instance, and in the case for good magic would be the Bible, just to keep it simple.
Now apply that to everything you read, hear and everything you write.
No wonder people/we here get upset, elated, sad, mad, crazy, whatever just reading something.
Spelling takes us away from our actual reality. Hence His Story is a spell of what they want us to believe.
Yeah the Da Vinci Code, a tail spun around the information in the Holy Blood, Holy Grail, that I read years earlier. The movie was entertaining. I also read another book around the same time, that looked at old art, from the masters of the renaissance, that found hidden symbolism in the paintings (for those with eyes to see). Prior to that, I read a book that talked of the murder of John Paul I and a hidden favorite gem of mine Holy Grail across the Atlantic. While I don't agree with everything these books tell you, they definitely do make you go Hmmm. Holy Blood, Holy Grail has holes in their theory and some stuff has since been disproven, it still has rabbit holes to go down. The false hope it gives (that the blood line of Christ was past down to today) serves as a distraction and contradicts the written word. Christ's blood line ended with him dying on the cross for our sins. There was no family, no children. What these books all have in common, is money, wealth, history and intrigue, followed with lots of rabbit holes. Mary Magdalene is key to this false hope. Her persona has been bastardized and corrupted by the church and all other non-canonical stories about her. Think about it, Jesus's most beloved disciple, of the little flock, was called a whore by the church and now the spin is, that she is the mother of Jesus's descendants. Something completely not supported by the Bible. In short, a lie. What I do believe though, is that, the mystics, Templars and other such societies latched onto her (Chirst's most beloved) and corrupted her image and created a whole mother goddess cult around her. The lady of lake, in the king author stories comes to mind.
But the key to understanding it all, is the symbols. It was through books such as these, that were a big part my awakening. After All.....[Link]
coersion.....uses words.....
Taxation is the strongest spell they have.
The game, Good vs Evil, had all the elements captured in Tolkien's books and included the processes of Magic and Pagan rituals. It's because I played this game, that I never wanted to or ever had the need to, read any books on magic, witchcraft or evil. To this day, I have no reason to read any book speaking Evil doctrines wrapped up in lies, like books by Crowley, Manly P Hall and the like. I read lots of books about psychic's though, mostly because of my mother and her experiences, mainly because she was afraid of the gift she had. We still haven't hit the time or event of her worst dreams. I call it a gift, because she had a near death experience as a child (of 13), when she fell on a pitchfork that went through her and nearly killed her. That's when her dreams began, after she was sent back. So even before I played the game, I had a relatively healthy awareness, that there is more around us than meets the eye. I understood, the power of the dark side. So my characters, stayed away from the dark side of the game. Then we got into playing Traveler, a British version of D&D, but space based. It too allowed for magic in the form of psychic powers, but we never delved to much on that part.
So my take away, is this, there is a dark side to these games you need to be aware of and on guard about when playing. Now I started playing at 15, so I was impressionable, but I was aware, so I can see how it could disrupt a persons young impressionable mind. It's not a game younger children under the age of 13 (say) should be playing. It still is a fun game to play, just remember, it's just a game and evil is a part of it.
The problem is people don't accept themselves, hide their abilities, and call it imagination. Everyone is given experiences that are paranormal, but most don't value the experience as real. As Shakespeare noted in Hamlet, there is far more to this world than your philosophy Horatio.
But this business of not actively seeking out victims to help, but rather being able to respond in your local environment when such need arises spontaneously, that is what the Yoga of Patanjali and the Vedanta of Adi Shankaracharya offer, and as expressed by Ghandi: "Be the change you want to see in the world." I don't think it was "Beat the change you want to see into others."
Umm, didn't precisely that happen? Of course, the primary motivation was never anyone's life except for those trying to usurp control of society on planetary scale.. They certainly value their lives a lot, even money got invented for that reason.. easier evaluation. All what this AI governed human hive mind technocratic thingy is all about. All safely hid behind a façade of pleasant words and reassurement of "democratic" standards & values being applied.. We all should know how that works by now, but obviously even poisoning vast majority of "civilized" world with toxic substance does little in terms of awakening humanity.. I guess the evil will need to get to a much more personal level before the masses ever begin to realize.. Technocratic carbon footprint forced bug-diet might do that to some of the people, at least.. I guess most people like to follow and some like to lead them, but why does it always end in an abyss? Just a rhetorical question, no worries..
At the same time nobody knows how They will react should they find themselves at the controls of that train.
I know, but you wouldn't like it. 😉
Stay Fresh!
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Ex-BlackRock Manager: Global Financial Collapse a ‘Mathematical Certainty’ [Link]
In an interview with Dr. Joseph Mercola, Edward Dowd, a former equity portfolio manager for BlackRock, explained why he believes the global financial system will collapse within the next six to 24 months.
Right now, I'm watching Mike Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money series.
I wish we weren't living in such "interesting times."
Consider the Yugas of Vedanta. The golden and supposedly highest age, Satya Yuga is supposed to be the most difficult to become enlightened (hate that word/concept as it's an inadequate and contradictory pointer), and Kali Yuga, the age lowest which we are in now, is the easiest.
" Learn and Serve." HH Sri Svami Purna Maharaj
In this time, the more we understand about finances, Big Pharma, propaganda, the Military Industrial Complex, government corruption, child trafficking, drug trafficking, Epstein Island, Hunter's laptop, the more free from manipulation we will be.
For example, we have a homeless issue throughout the USA. What is the solution? Setup soup kitchens in the area? Move the homeless into hotels ? Set up a shower and bathroom facility in their tent area? Create a commission to study the problem? Create an education program that teaches people that to be homeless is being a “useless eater”, the new sin? Provide needles for the drug addicts? Study how becoming homeless happens? Study how financial slavery, evictions, and broken families led to homelessness? Study how crime and drugs led to homelessness? Create a study of the psychology of the homeless individuals? Create a program that makes the homeless “useful members” of society? Ensure all the homeless are vaccinated? Move them all to the “new eden” from the movie The Humanity Bureau?
By asking questions we see that the homeless crisis is not solved with band-aid solutions. It also tells us that the issue is a financial, family, drugs and crime dependent issue, and therefore a societal systemic issue. When we say systemic, we need to think of systems. What are the systems that are failing? Family, church, community, education, moral, ethical, scientific, financial, etc. This will not be fixed with a band-aid.
What has worked and does work? One of the major organizations that have addressed a societal problem is Alcoholics Anonymous. Why is it successful? They have a 12 point system praised by many spiritual individuals. In my view, the first point is the most important because addicted drug and alcohol users usually have the lie they tell themselves, that they can control it. So the first step is accepting who and where you are, and taking responsibility for where you are. The second step is about affirming that there is Power beyond yourself that can help. The third step, decide to give up your self will to God. The rest of the steps are self evaluation, forgiveness and connection to a Higher Power. In my view, this works because to help another means to change their consciousness, to raise there level of being.
If I were to judge the poor before I give them money or clothing or food then it would not be true charity and I would playing 'God' in judging who lives and who dies.
This bullshite philosophy is another step away from our connection to God and the rest of humanity around us.
Transactional charity is not charity. True charity recognizes the non-zero nature of Creation.
It's one reason why studies show poor people tend to give more than rich people as a percentage of wealth, like a humble worker getting a cup of coffee for a vagrant outside 7-11 on a cold day even though same worker lives paycheck to paycheck. It's not transactional. The worker has nothing to gain from it except making the world a better place.
The equivalent would be Gates et.al. giving the same vagrant many millions of dollars. It's calculating rather the comforting that's involved. Cold and inhumane.
Of course, most recognize there's much more to give than money, just not those who have tons of money but little else.
Quote: "Moral decisions, therefore, can only be a matter of deep intuition, which must be connected with rich, direct experience and relationships: encounters between souls. Such decisions are basically acts of faith, informed by the nexus of conscience, emotion, body, and intellect. This nexus, if it is to be useful, requires growth and development: a process of tuning into an informative landscape where objective morality originates — not in the sense of a set of rules, but in the sense of a deeper intelligence, a sphere of all-encompassing information that we can learn to access by a process of personal growth on all fronts. Such development can only happen directly, in real life, on the local level: in our relationships with family, our immediate community, our spouse, our work colleagues, friends, neighbors, and so on."
In my view, Luc is writing from McGilchrist's right brain description, a more holistic, connected view that includes emotional and spiritual truth.
A medical tyranny awaits us by the feel of things.
This is a speech he gave to world leaders, so they have their marching orders. The "speech" to come from the crowned king, will just be for us plebes.
A pound of weed is good at any time of year, for any occasion, especially the end of the world as we know it.
DARPA is older than I am?!? WTF? I didn't know that.
Apparently Ms. Dugan is an integral part of the U.S. military machine and has been for some years; " Ms. Dugan's contributions to the U.S. military are numerous. She led a counterterrorism task force for the Deputy Secretary of Defense in 1999, and from 2001 to 2003, served as special advisor to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, completing a "Quick Reaction Study on Countermine" for Operation Enduring Freedom. The results were successfully implemented in the field.
She also served on the Naval Research Advisory Committee and Defense Threat Reduction Agency and Technology Panel.
Prior to her appointment as director of DARPA, she co-founded Dugan Ventures, a niche investment firm, where she served as president and CEO. In 2005, Dugan Ventures founded RedXDefense, LLC, a privately held company devoted to innovative solutions for combating explosive threats. She is the sole inventor or co-inventor on multiple patents ."
Elon has a sister.
Allowing a criminal murder class take 25% of every pound you earn (at source) whereby allowing them oportunities to lend that money at USARY to the next generation creating an unfair advantage that will result in the future realization of having wielding a sword in your enemies hand without them ever having had to do anything but "promise the future".
Welcome to the future.....tax payer!
The Sword is now sharp and ready.
Time to reap the wages of sin.
Time to cash in on your own personal investment!
The masks are falling off I see..
That was great! Thanks
It's going on my FB.