Thursday, August 25, 2005

Good

Etc, etc. ... And God saw that it was good.
When the Jews wrote down their key oral traditions, they juggled that around till it was right at the top, one of the first ideas.
And of course the Jews saw that they were good. I bet that the Jews weren’t the first culture to invent the idea of goodness and then attribute the quality to themselves as well as to their special magician in the clouds, but, best we can tell, they were the first to write it down.
There! two things: "good": and "written" records.

The universe that we know a fragment of was already upwards of fourteen billion years old when the Jews’ God created heaven, earth, and the Garden; the earth was upwards of four and a half billion years old. (Pardon the necessary ridiculousness of that statement: if a "year" is the period of the earth’s revolution around the sun, then how can there have been years before there was an earth?) When a spider is born, does mama spider teach it that it’s good? How about bacteria?
When India squashed into Asia throwing up the Himalayas, did the mountains think they were good?
No. The concept is a human concept. But humans had been around for quite a while before the Garden. Indeed, modern humans had been around for roughly one hundred and forty thousand years. Talk-talk-talking human beings had been around for forty thousand years at least.

Nevertheless, the concept of good, and the attribution of the concept to one’s group -- the United States is good -- is essential to the essence of what constitutes, not modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens, but civilized Homo sapiens: kleptocrats.

I’ll do more with this at Knatz.com’s Society section (temp. offline): in the part on Social Epistemology.
One thing I must be sure to tie in involves my oft-iterated distinction between elements of what we must call "design" in the universe and the so embarrassingly recent magical creation of the Jews' blood-demon.
How blood clots is irreducibly complex. We have no non-laughable way to put it in the camp of evolution. So, until our vocabulary improves, we might as well say that "god" did it: meaning: put it in a black box, the contents not mapped at present (and perhaps permanently unmapable!)
Black boxes are how we can talk with some sense without knowing every detail of every component of what we are saying. It's not quite the same as not knowing what the hell we're talking about: though we do plenty of that too.

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