TBGO, Sunday: God A& Man

In answer to the rhetorical question, on another Wall, "what good is God," a correspondent wrote: Some would argue that belief (in God) fosters beneficial socialization among like-minded believers.

I replied: That is unquestionably true, but offers a further conundrum, because that necessarily erases any distinction between any objects of worship, and makes any belief which unites a given number of people the functional equivalent of any OTHER group. Those social entities we name 'religions' exist primarily to create and enforce distinctions--fundamentally between one's own god and all the other ones.

Then someone else wrote: The Ipad is the opiate of the masses.

I replied: The flickering, blue screen (television and it's scions) is the numinous outer limit of the national skinner box, inside of which the nation, each and every one of us, will-we, nil-we, is being led into the eternal double blinds of learned helplessness. Read up on learned helplessness. It was perefected by the guy who is now--or was until recently--the psychologist in charge of fguring out how to 'break' prisoners, and this is the preferred method. His name is Martin Seligman. He was president of the APA, for a term I think--which caused a schism in the group. The dogs on which he perfected the technique had to be destroyed.



Bang Bang:

Leave it: Woody's definitely ambivalent about "progress" like this.
We humans don't have sufficiently developed gray-matter to organize the regulation of fire-arms in ways that protect the innocent. The majority of USer citizens "believe in god" as described by a culture of bronze and early iron-age shepherds.  We have not mastered the (moral) technology of drone warfare. Almost 50% "believe in angels." We punish women for demanding control of their own bodies. 
There is no technological fix which does not also entail its own fatal contradiction. That is: We aren't smart enough to control what we can now do. Why should we want to add to the chaos with replicative technology which asks us questions we can't even decipher??
So we can live forever?
Ask Faustus about that...

Pruning:

It's true! Woody agrees: An admirable sentiment...Unfortunately, for us anyway, to them "we"--the USofA--ARE 'the top one percent.'