Guess What, We're Still Here!

If I am writing this and if you're reading this, the world did not end on October 21, 2011. Harold Camping and Jesus had a lot in common, both of their prediction about the end of the world did not come true. Jesus supposedly said "Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in "this" adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power." i.e. Jesus was supposedly talking about to the "adulterous and sinful generation" who were alive when these words were spoken. Jesus predicted that some of his audience would be alive when the "Kingdom of God or Heaven" came with power. Mark 13:30-33: Jesus is recorded as saying: "....This generation shall not pass away, until all these things be accomplished....But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. I interpret this to mean he was not saying that it was not going to happen within the generation, but it was going to happen in "this generation" but no one knows the exact day or time but to be ready within this generation. A "generation" is normally a forty year period. If Jesus spoke those words circa 29 CE - 30 CE, then all of the events predicted in Mark 13:24-27 would have happened on or before 70 CE: "“But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; 25 the stars of heaven will fall, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26 Then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. 27 And then He will send His angels, and gather together His elect from the four winds, from the farthest part of earth to the farthest part of heaven." Sound a lot like Harold Camping prediction doesn't it, here's Mr. Camping words on May 24th, 2011 "The great earthquake and rapture and the universe melting in fervent heat will be happening on the last day – October 21 2011... It’s all going to happen on the last day...The great earthquake didn’t happen on May 21 because no-one will be able to survive it for more than a few days or let alone five months to suffer God’s wrath because everything will be leveled and destroyed after that earthquake and there will be no food or water to keep everyone alive." Yes Mr. Camping and Jesus have a lot in common they both are failed apocalyptic prophets. Think about it.

Occupy Wall Street and Reality

I was listening to Dead Prez, song "Police State" in the introduction of the song Omali Yeshitela states "You have the emergence in human society of this thing called the State. What is the State? The State is organized bureaucracy. It is the police department…the Army, the Navy It is the prison system, the courts. The State is a repressive organization. The reality is the State becomes necessary only at that juncture in human society where it is split between those who have and those who ain't got!" He seems to be summarizing what we are seeing in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Several Months ago I blogged about Socialism vs. Capitalism, I asked are we as a species more inclined with socialism or capitalism? In other words, which system is more our true nature as a species, socialism or capitalism? Socialism is any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of means of production and distribution of goods. In other words, it's a system where everyone collectively gets a share of the pie, because the collective owns the pie. Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market. In other words, it is a system where only a few own a piece of the pie and sell the crumbs to the rest, it automatically creates a class based system. I think we lived in social groups because the need to bond and band together to survive and pass on our genes (DNA) , and this bonding and banding occurred for millions of years and evolution selected groups who bonded and banded together that out competed groups that didn't. Why did humans move toward egalitarianism? On a website Anthropology.net an article entitled Modeling The Egalitarian Revolution states: "The observation that Gavrilets et al. make is that while our closest living evolutionary cousins form alliances and cooperate in groups, their social systems are extremely hierarchical. The most glaring example can be seen in a gorilla troop where a dominant silverback presides over a few adolescent males and a harem of females. The group dynamic is fluid throughout life history, but each member of the system ultimately plays a role in the dominance hierarchy. But early human societies, such as the quintessential hunter-gatherer society, is generalized as being egalitarian. Prior to the agricultural revolution, hunting and gathering is thought to have been the only subsistence strategy deployed by early human cultures. Studying modern day hunter gatherers, ethnographers have noted that such societies distribute dominance much more equally and thus tend to be non hierarchical. Leaders are comparatively weaker than their subordinates which reverses the pyramid of power." "So why was there such a big behavioral shift during our evolutionary history? We may never know for sure. There are ideas floating around that all seem to suggest the lack of food and realization that cooperation, rather than competition, was more beneficial for overall survival. When food sources became more dependable, as seen after the Neolithic and the dawn of agriculture and pastoralism, is when we've seen a return to a traditional hierarchy." (http://anthropology.net/2008/10/09/modeling-the-egalitarian-revolution/) In other words, all one needs to do is observe the remaining hunter-gatherers to see how we lived for the most part from 200,000 to 10,000 years ago. However, with the rise of agriculture and the new abundance of food, the focus changed and class or hierarchical social order emerged or perhaps reemerged, and with surplus food, trading developed and this lessen the need for cooperation our (primitive) default natural state reestablished itself. As stated above if all our primate cousins (Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gorillas, Monkeys, etc.) are hierarchical then this must have been our way of living for millions of years until we broke away evolutionarily from them to a Socialist/Egalitarian system as hunter-gatherers. Therefore, I think our default position is hierarchical for it is the older and primitive state, and our primate cousins are hierarchical and what make us think we are the exception? As a result, egalitarianism is a late player on the evolutionary time scale. However, Egalitarianism is close to Socialist idea of a classless society where everyone has an equal chance and has the opportunity to optimize their talents without regard to the class you happen to be born. As I watch the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and the little national coverage it is getting and it seems to be a reaction to the 2009 petty bourgeoisie revolt of the Tea Party. Which side will win, will we evolve or default to our primitive hierarchical or class system? I think it depends on which system gives our DNA the best chance to survive and continue the game, for nature does not care which system exist, its only function is to keep the gene (DNA) successfully replicating itself and how it is done Nature does not give a damn, it does it by any means necessary! Think about it.

What's your Answer to Life?

I ask this question because so often I am bombarded with inside and outside influences telling me to find my life somewhere other than where I am, in other words, there is a 10 billion dollar industry for personal development, plus all the nonsense religion propagates, everyone telling us how f@cked up we are and how they can fix us or they have the cure. My philosophy or way of living and thinking is life is its own point, it does not transcend itself to get to somewhere else, but I will be the first to admit that I could be wrong. However, if life transcend itself where is it going and what will it do when it get there and will there still be another point beyond that point that it need to transcend? These are interesting questions, at least to me. As I stated before, I think life is its own point and this means to me it is something that cannot be improved but, it is something that as one who is "in" life should participate. In other words, I will take an active role in life, its good, its bad and its indifference, it is like Sisyphus with his rock, it is mines and this existence is all I know and is the one thing am certain of, anything that transcends it is to me irrelevant or meaningless to the life I am experiencing for it is not "in" life but outside of it. It is like Epicurus conclusion on death, Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not or to put it in slang, death aint sh!t to me, for when I am, it aint and when it is, I aint, why should I fear sh!t that does not exist when I do? This is why suicide philosophical or physical is not an option because to me it is trying to escape the one certain thing we have for something we don't. My answer to Life is "hell yeah!" Think about it.

Think for yourself?

On the way home, I was listening to George Hrab's Song entitled "Think for Yourself", the Beatles had a song with that title as well. It is a song, that I as a Free Thinking advocate agree, it is a song about learning how to be a critical, skeptical thinker, to don't accept what someone else say, believe, or sale you without asking who, what, when, where, how, and especially why. As I listened to the lyrics, I had an insight in which, I thought about evolution, especially Human Evolution. We primates emerged on the scene about 30 million years ago, then the hominids separated from Chimps and Bonobos about 6 to 8 million years ago. The most famous of our early ancestors is Lucy also known as Australopithecus afarensis who lived 3.2 million years ago in Ethiopia although she wasn't the first hominid, a recent fossil of Ardi (Ardipithecus Ramidus) pushes hominid evolution back to approximately 4.4 million years ago when, due to probably climate change some primates begin to walked on two feet. Being bipedal in an environment where the ancestors of lions, leopards, cheetahs, and hyenas where looking for their next meal was a tremendous risk but also gave them advantages it freed up their hands and allow them to see their predators in the changing environment, and this with many other variables led to higher development and evolution of the hominid brain, which eventually gave us an advantage on the East African plains and here I am writing about it,(isn't evolution da bomb!). In order to survive the early hominids had to cooperate and work together in order to survive. This led to us being a social species and it led to human primates having longer childhoods than our primate cousins. For example, a Daniel Dennett wrote in Breaking the Spell, Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, "Natural Selection build child brains with the tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them", it had survival benefits because it you were warned about going near the water hole because of crocodiles, if someone disobeyed and was eaten this reinforced the authority and social order of the clan or tribe. Another example, would be if someone was kicked out of the group and was later found dead or eaten by hyenas this reinforced the social order.Therefore, my argument is thinking individually or thinking for yourself is a recent phenomenon in our species way of thinking for a species who lived for millions of years who lived in social groups in order to survive, and propagate they had to think collectively therefore, I think group-thinking is the default position in our brains and to think for yourself take effort and practice and we don't do this well as a species, because for most of our evolutionary history we had to groupthink. What is Groupthink? Groupthink, "a term coined by social psychologist Irving Janis (1972), occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of "mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment" (p. 9). Groups affected by groupthink ignore alternatives and tend to take irrational actions that dehumanize other groups. A group is especially vulnerable to groupthink when its members are similar in background, when the group is insulated from outside opinions, and when there are no clear rules for decision making. source: (http://www.psysr.org/about/pubs_resources/groupthink%20overview.htm) This is why religion thrives because it's probably a byproduct of groupthinking. In Summary, I think groupthinking evolved out of our sociology need to survive, cooperate and pass-on our genes (DNA) and thinking as an individual is a new phenomena and we default to groupthinking because we evolved in social groups that banded together to survive on the East African plains. Think about it or think for yourself, but it will take practice to override our default towards groupthinking. John D. Socrates a.k.a. The African Socrates.

The Big Whimper

I have been thinking about the meaning, purpose, and perhaps the function of my existence. Today, I read an article on the website The Universe Today, titled "The End of Everything" by Fraser Cain , and according to the website Dark Energy is constant, and based on the models the best estimate is that it will remain constant and this means the universe will, approximately 100 Trillion years from now, be one big lifeless, cold, and energy-free nothing, it is called the Big Freeze. In other words, the universe started with a bang but will end in a whimper. Therefore I ask; if the universe will end, why should I care of what I am doing now, it is all for nothing, as Ecclesiastes states in Ecclesiastes 1:2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” However whoever wrote this book concluded in Ecclesiastes 12:13 "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind" but how can this be our duty, how is this a point or give us a meaning? What if a person for instance, like when she was six years old a girl name Rosanna (now 11 years old) was shot by Charles Roberts IV when he shot 10 Amish girls at a school five years ago, in which five died. Rosanna survived but as her father Christ King states, "She cannot walk, talk or eat, yet Rosanna is aware of her surroundings and attends an Amish school" how can she fulfill her "duty" if she is in a vegetative state? Additionally, there are some kids who are born in vegetative states from the womb; how will they too fulfill their "duty"? I think the so-called teacher's conclusion is bullsh!t, a big whimper! How is god going to judge someone who has been in a vegetative state most of their lives through no fault of their own, she happen to be in the wrong f@cking place at the wrong f@cking time or this the way people are born, and there isn't a d@mn thing you can do about it! Yes, we can have improvements in science and have societies without guns, yet there will be people who are sociopaths and psychopaths who will kill and not everyone in the world will have access to these discoveries in science or live in a gun free society. Why should we care if it ends in nothing? I think the reply in the Power of the Myth by Joseph Campbell put it best when Bill Moyer stated Zorba says, "Trouble?" Life is Trouble" Campbell replied "Only death is no trouble. People ask me "Do you have optimism about the world?" And I say, "Yes, it's great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct it or improve it." Campbell goes on to state " It is joyful just as it is. I don't believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," And the way to wake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all." To me it means, I care because this world as flawed as it is, it is all we have; take it or leave it, and my participation in life is my affirmation of it even though it ends in a whimper, it's my whimper. As meaningless as it is, it is still my meaning! Think about it! John D. Socrates a.k.a. The African Socrates.

Palestinian Statehood

The Palestinians submitted a request to be recognized as a nation. How can you have statehood and the boundaries for your state were never settled? From my research the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started with Zionism and European Imperialism during and after World War I, with the Balfour Declarations in 1917. This led to the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922 adopted by the League of Nations, who goal was to create a Jewish Homeland for Cultural and Religious Jews. Zionism,the national movement lead by Thedor Herzl which cultivated in late 19th and early 20th century Zionist Congress that called for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. I think the land is disputed and not necessarily occupied, in that the Israelis in the original mandate, their homeland were suppose to be an area that includes not only the current state of Israel but also, what is now called Jordan. From 1922 to 1947 there were many riots and conflicts with returning Israelis and local Arabs as a result, the UN in 1947 agreed to give and Israel accepted to take the right bank of Jordan but the Arabs did not accept it. Israel declared independence and their Arab neighbors declared war. The Arabs lost the war in 1948, and lost subsequent wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973. The Palestinians fled their homes and this created refugees. The Arab and Muslim neighboring nations refused to accept the refugees who fled in the wars thus creating so-called refugees (how can you be a refugee for 63 years). I think it is all based on religion. The idea of a promise land, that is based on the myth of an Exodus from Egypt that never happened. There is no archeological evidence to support a massive exodus of over 600,000 people living in a desert for 40 years. Plus if this was true, all the Egyptians had to do was go around the Red Sea into the Sinai Peninsula and recapture their slaves. As most scholars concluded what emerged to become Israel where probably ancient Canaanites who gave up polytheism and idol worship for so-called monotheism. I must admit I admire these Canaanites who became what we culturally call Jews. Judaism is not a race, some claim they are the founders of monotheism, I think Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV, 1364-1347 B.C.) would disagree. The reason I admire them is because they somehow kept their culture for 2600 years. They are not homogeneous as some claim. The main ethnic element of Ashkenazim (German and Eastern European Jews), Sephardim (Spanish and Portuguese Jews), Mizrakhim (Middle Eastern Jews), Juhurim (Mountain Jews of the Caucasus), Italqim (Italian Jews), and most other modern Jewish populations of the world is Israelite. The Israelite haplotypes fall into Y-DNA haplogroups J and E. Ashkenazim also descend, in a smaller way, from European peoples from the northern Mediterranean region and even less from Slavs and Khazars. The non-Israelite Y-DNA haplogroups include Q (typically Central Asian) and R1a1 (typically Eastern European). Dutch Jews from the Netherlands also descend from northwestern Europeans. Sephardim also descend, in a smaller way, from various non-Israelite peoples. Georgian Jews (Gruzinim) are a mix of Georgians and Israelites. Yemenite Jews (Temanim) are a mix of Yemenite Arabs and Israelites. Moroccan Jews, Algerian Jews, and Tunisian Jews are mainly Israelites. Libyan Jews are mainly Israelites who may have mixed somewhat with Berbers. Ethiopian Jews are almost exclusively Ethiopian, with little or no Israelite ancestry. Bene Israel Jews and Cochin Jews of India have much Indian ancestry in their mtDNA. Palestinian Arabs are probably partly Israelite or Israelis are partly Palestinian Arab. (Source: http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html) The last sentence is a kicker, Palestinians and Israelis share ancestry and those who are not in the Haplogroup E and J, ancestor's converted to Judaism during the Jewish Diaspora. The Bible stories of Abraham,Isaac, and Jacob being a common ancestor to the Israelites and Arabs (Ishmaelites) are not true, because the haplogroups J and E means there were two different founders, and not a common ancestor via Abraham. Think about it... John D. Socrates a.k.a. The African Socrates.