Satanist (i.e. Primary) Jinx: "Oh, it's you.... what are you here to bother me with?"

Christian Jinx (yes there is such a thing): "Hey, wait a minute, about that last entry... couldn't one argue that actually all human beings are like dogs lapping up their own vomit repeatedly, hence the need for salvation?  I mean, doesn't that even apply to us?"

I found this article about evolutionary psychology insights into the behaviour of underprivileged classes to be rather interesting. 

This article, about supposedly-human traits that have been found in animals, is also rather interesting.

These articles, along with an excellent book I read recently entitled "The Biological Roots of Human Nature" by Timothy Goldsmith, convince me that there really needs to be a clearer distinction between evolutionary psychology and evolutionary pop psychology.

The following entry is of a rather personal nature.  If you don't know me well, I wouldn't blame you if it made you uncomfortable.  On the other hand, the longer you've known me, the more likely it may make for fascinating reading.

I don't like doing locked entries, however, so I'm putting this disclaimer here so that if you do not want to a) read lengthy, potentially "Too Much Information" anecdotes from my life and b) hear me philosophize and/or moralize about sexuality, the BDSM scene and related topics, you can skip it easily.

Incidentally, I'm braced for this entry to seriously alienate some people, but I've just gotten to a point where I want to speak my mind about this subject regardless.

* * *

I'm tired, but I have two quick thoughts about love to share:

1) Effort

You know what?  If you try and try and try, it might not work.  But if you don't try, because you assume that it won't work, it will definitely not work. 

That's why people stick with things.  Sometimes they stick with stupid things, it's true, but I don't think that unfortunate tendency entirely invalidates the principle.  Hence the sentiment of last year's Valentine's Day post, i.e. fuck the naysayers.

2) Compromise

As in, relationships require it.  "I will not compromise!" is the battle cry of an alienated ego rebelling against the concept that other people also have needs. 

If you don't want to adjust yourself to someone else's needs, don't be in a relationship.  If you don't want to change anything about yourself, then keep to yourself instead of looking for a partner whose primary role is just to validate you.  If you don't want to have to think about how the things you say sound to the other person, or about why they feel and think and respond the way they do, or how the world looks to them, why bother even being with them? 

By all means, don't just try to be someone you're not in order to please and impress another person, but fuck off with this "I will never change myself" attitude so many people seem to have.  How are you supposed to learn and grow and otherwise have a life together if you are not open to being transformed by one another?

That's all I've got for now.  I've got plenty of other things going on in my mind re: love and the nature of the universe, but upon reflection I don't think it's appropriate for what I want in my V-Day entries, so I'll share it some other time.

This is a list I saw on someone else's journal:

Acceptance (inner acceptance)
Belonging (feeing an attachment to people)
Competence (how to conduct yourself in the world)
Equity (a feeling of being treated fairly)
Identity (purpose in life)
Security (feeling safe physically and emotionally)
Significance (a sense of value)
Transcendence (a spiritual meaning)

Seeing this raised a question that I find interesting:

What exactly does transcendence/spirituality mean that is not already covered by the other items above it in the list?

I can formulate the answer to this question very easily from a traditional religious perspective (theistic especially), but from a "spiritual not religious" perspective I'm not so sure.  That is, if human life is to be oriented toward something outside of itself, it's pretty clear to me how transcendence is distinguished from the other qualities, but if the spiritual realm is "within," then I'm not so clear.

Which in turn raises additional questions.  e.g. when divorced from a religious context, does spirituality become equivalent to some combination of the other items in the list?  What does this imply about the relationship between religion and spirituality? 

Also: if spirituality just means something like "knowing yourself really well" (or some other statement that is "self"-oriented), is there some element of hubris in calling this "spirituality" instead of talking about it in more down-to-earth psychological terms?  Or is the term an appropriate one nonetheless?

I'm under the impression this list arises from a therapeutic perspective, and I want to be clear that this entry is not interested in questioning the efficacy of that, e.g. implying that there is a "problem" if the meaning of transcendence in this context can't be clearly spelled out.  But the issue I'm raising - what does the term 'spirituality' actually refer to? - is one that's on and off my mind on a regular basis, and seeing this list just gave me a new idea as to a question I could ask to possibly help clarify my own thoughts... that being, primarily, the question in bold print above.

So, any ideas from the audience?  I am really interested in hearing back from other people about this subject, the wider the variety in backgrounds and worldviews the better.

Edit: Actually, I tag the following people in particular, if you're reading: Zyclobonzaron, Mauler, Hindmost, Cory the Raven, Electric Maenad, Kabuki, The Serious Elf.

I had a random thought today about devising a formula for "original sin."  It looks sort of like this:

"I [should do / am entitled to do] X, because Y somehow magically makes Z not the case."

Where:

X = a) an action + b) an assumed lack of negative consequence.
Y = an impulsive sentiment notable for its neglect of long-term implications, effects upon others and/or reality in general.
Z = circumstances that ought to overrule the preoccupation with one's own little time/space/circle in anyone who isn't an idiot.
Note: a sufficiently-strong Y cancels attention not only to Z, but also to the b part of X.

I seriously could think of examples of this all day long.  "I should be able to eat the apple yet still have everything be fine afterward, because doing so sounds awesome even though I was told by my creator that I shouldn't do it."  "I should be able to kill the guy who pissed me off, because I'm angry and I don't care about the consequences beyond this moment."  "I am entitled to drive drunk and still get home safe, because I want to, even though everybody knows the risks of drunk driving."  "I am entitled to have a mistress behind my spouse's back without my spouse feeling betrayed, because my dick/pussy is bored and somehow that overrules anything to do with people who aren't me."  Etc. etc.

What I mean by this is, if I were going to employ the religious notion of "original sin," this is how I would do it: the above formula is, in my view, the flawed thought process (or more accurately, thoughtlessness process) that is the birthright of humanity, and a cause for guilt even prior to any actual concrete wrongdoing.

I'm not saying I'm immune either, because you can bet that when I'm grumpy and tired, I notice like 5 different examples of this in myself, every damn time I leave the house.  "I am entitled to not have people randomly walk in front of me, because I don't feel like dealing with them, even though obviously they have as much right to be there as I do."  And so forth.

Notice too that this personal example illustrates something useful: that I'm counting cases in which I feel hostile toward people even if it doesn't manifest outwardly.  This then covers the Buddhist angle of things: the formula also covers the manner in which attachment (to Y) causes suffering (X), to the individual even if to nobody else. 

Which, due to my current interpretation of Satanism, actually then applies to that religion as well: the number one Satanic sin is stupidity, and what could be stupider than acting in a way that both fucks yourself over and benefits nobody else either? 

Though with Satanism, the interesting thing is that "I want to fuck with the life of so-and-so, because I am entertained by their suffering, accept any and all possible negative results of it for me and mine, and don't care that society says it's wrong to feel that way" actually does not fit this archetype - which is fine, because indeed, I don't think that train of thought to be a "sin," rather I consider it a precursor to the "responsible" use of black magic.

I don't know what all I'm doing with this insight yet, but I just wanted to get it down.

I was just reading this interesting article about differences in approaches to airport security in America vs. Israel.

This in combination with some other stuff that I also read awhile back via Boing Boing made me wonder:

Would it be more useful to put armed, uniformed, trained, well-paid, highly visible, scary looking security people on planes instead of just adding more elaborate routines to the whole "security theatre" song-and-dance? 

Obviously, you'd have to train such people to not be assholes to every brown person who comes on the plane, but the racist issue aside I increasingly think that this might legitimately be a good idea.  I mean, if nothing else, personally I'd feel that the presence of someone like that would contribute more to my personal sense of security than not being allowed to have a blanket or use the washroom for the last hour.  Or, for that matter, naked scanners run by bored, underpaid, undertrained lackeys.  (You know that's just going to lead eventually to some terrorist hiding explosives internally, and thus literally blowing up his own ass.)

However, it's probably one of many ideas (like euthanasia, or selective breeding, or even certain types of optimization toward efficiency) that has been ruined by the Nazis.  i.e. "oooh, that sounds like something the Nazis did, therefore it is automatically bad in all future circumstances ever-ever!!"  Not that the Nazis didn't do awful things, obviously, but I hate when people use that connection to seemingly turn off their critical thinking skills in preference for moral black-and-white.  "Nazis were organized, therefore organization is bad!" = that's the kind of idiocy I expect from people on this front.

I could also go into a tangent here about how in my experience, the people most often whining about something turning into a "police state" are big guys more capable of protecting themselves than I am of protecting myself, and how I thus fail to see why an extreme anarchist/libertarian situation in which I potentially get pushed around by random big guys is in any way an improvement over the current situation of potentially getting pushed around by police officers, but I won't. 

Nor will I have a go at the, in my opinion, stupid hippies who either don't think about, or don't care about, the likelihood of someone like me having to worry 100x as much about getting raped in their unrealistic happy-happy law-free paradise wherein the bestial side of human nature has magically disappeared all by itself.  (Or does that count as "having a go at"? )

Returning to the point though: Now, I do grasp that most people these days have a fucked-up view of how likely or not terrorism actually is, i.e. your odds of getting killed by a lightning strike are higher.  From that perspective more security is a waste of resources.  Yet at the same time, it seems hard to avoid the argument that the less security there is, the more likely there would be more terrorist attacks than there already are.

Last thought on this subject: "we should stop fucking up those other countries with Western imperialism and pissing them off, and then terrorism would go away."  I hate this kind of naive crap from my fellow university-goers.  To me, this is like the pro-life feminists who say "well, instead of letting women have abortions we should fix all the poverty issues in the world and then women wouldn't want to have abortions because they'd have enough resources to have all the kids they want."  To which two responses come to mind:

1) it doesn't address the fact that some women just don't want kids
(compare: there are ideological motivations for terrorism - e.g. issues with "infidels" and the very existence of Israel - that I don't think will go away even if the economic ones do), and

2) you can't do that overnight, so what the fuck is the point of making women suffer in the meantime by "making" them have children they can't support?
(compare: you can't fix the Middle East overnight - if ever - so as long as it's not fixed, isn't it wise to anticipate extremist behavior in order to protect your own citizens?)

Not the best of parallels, I know, but it's just something that occurred to me just now.  And to cut down on some of the more useless flaming I can anticipate this sparking, I'm not advocating surveillance of everyone all the time or anything retarded like that, okay?  Don't assume that I'm stupid or have no respect for individual liberties just because I happen to feel safer with a little bit more authority structure in certain situations than you do.

It's funny how the mind works sometimes.

Example #1: you decide it's too much work to get out of a chair to reach something, so instead of standing up, you sit in place and move the chair over in little jumps, ultimately expending more energy than it would have taken to just get out of the chair.

Example #2: you don't want to have to re-write your current thesis chapter, so you keep trying to revise what you had previously written so as to fit into the new mould, only to expend more energy than it probably would take to just rewrite it from scratch.

Oh well.  No doubt struggling with it was needed in order to see that it wasn't working.  I'm not going to stress about it further, because that does nothing.  Especially since this may turn out for the best, as I'm seeing my supervisor on Thursday, and if it turns out that she has any issues with the general approach I'm taking for the chapter, it's probably better to catch them before I've wasted time fully fleshing out the whole thing anyway. 

So, by coincidence, it so happens a book about abortion that I was reading today actually contained a study of how a group of pro-choice and pro-life women reacted to the artificial wombs scenario.  This study, interestingly, said that:

1. The pro-choice women were almost all against the idea of artificial wombs for the same reasons they were against adoption: a) bringing the child into the world but giving it up would be more painful to them than not having the child, and b) both the artificial womb and adoption struck them as leaving your mess for someone else to clean up, i.e. if you don't think you're up to motherhood, then don't bring a child into the world at all to begin with.


2. The pro-life women were also against the idea of artificial wombs.  Why???  Because they had the attitude that once the woman is pregnant, she is already a mother, and both giving up the child for adoption and putting it in an artificial womb equally constituted 'being a bad mother.' 

Given that both the authors who I heard being all 'sunny' about how great artificial wombs could be were guys, this amuses me greatly.

I also found it fascinating to hear that according to this study, pro-choice women tend to assume that women have all kinds of widely ranging reasons for wanting abortions.  Pro-life women, on the other hand, tend to assume that most women who have abortions are young, unmarried, irresponsible dumb sluts who abort just so that they don't have to postpone their ski trips, and who therefore should be forced to become mothers so that they become more self-sacrificing, responsible and thus 'feminine.'  

This very much backs up my own 'Satanic feminist' view that women will never be liberated so long as they keep oppressing themselves/one another with their painfully stunted imaginations of what women can do and are supposed to be.  How are we supposed to get anywhere so long as women themselves keep buying into this your whole life is supposed to revolve around people other than you nonsense?

On a more constructive note though: the study also indicated, interestingly, that pro-choice and pro-life women alike tend to morally justify their decisions about abortion through reference to taking the responsibilities of motherhood very seriously - i.e. either I must bear the child because motherhood is serious business, or I must have an abortion because motherhood is serious business.  Also noteworthy was that both groups of women agreed that there are some circumstances in which having an abortion is obnoxious, e.g. getting pregnant on purpose and then aborting.

But then, this is the whole point of the book, entitled "The Abortion Myth": that male ethicists (probably many of them theologians) and/or female motherhood fanatics dream up the concept of 'frivolous abortion,' and use it to imply that women are too silly to make serious moral decisions, when actually the vast majority of women do see abortion as a morally-serious issue that there would never be frivolous reasons for.

Oh, except that women wanting to do anything with their lives whatsoever other than be mothers is 'frivolous' to some people.  Fuck those people.

Here's an ethical question pertinent to my research that I'm interested in peoples' reactions to:

Say some scientist created artificial wombs, and that with this technology it was possible to remove any fetus from the womb and safely grow it elsewhere until such time as it was able to survive outside the womb.

In such circumstances, does it automatically follow that abortion is always unethical?  Or put another way: does your understanding of pro-choice (if such is indeed your leanings, which it may not be) refer to the woman's choice to end the pregnancy and not share her body with the child, or to the woman's choice to not reproduce, period?

A few of my own thoughts about this scenario:

1. I vaguely take for granted that if the fetus can be removed from the womb and grown elsewhere, the parents ought to both have an equal say in whether it lives or dies beyond that - if they have any say at all - since neither one is being biologically imposed upon more than the other in such circumstances.


2. I think one possible defense of a right to kill would be ecological in its basis.  i.e. the pro-life position is anthropocentric and assumes that human population should always increase regardless of how that affects the earth as a whole; we've already got enough humans messing up the earth, so why would there be any obligation to add another one?


3. Personally I am very moved by an emotional consideration, namely that if a woman is a victim of rape or incest, or even of a spectacularly bad 'consensual' relationship (assume for the sake of this particular argument that the father doesn't want the child), then she shouldn't be obligated to assent to the existence of a living monument to her violation.  I 'get' that it's 'not the child's fault,' but I just don't see a sufficiently positive future for a child like that to justify aggravating the woman's suffering by bringing it into existence.  (Note: while theoretically nothing prevents women from putting children up for adoption, statistics show that in practice most feel obligated to keep the child themselves if they do indeed go through with the pregnancy, so I don't think we should dismiss the scenario I just mentioned as if adoption is a cure-all to it.) 


4. Some pro-lifers are really 'sunny' about the prospect of artificial wombs 'solving' the abortion debate.  I'm trying to figure out whether this irritates me because I think they are seriously overlooking some aspect of the implications of artificial wombs, or just because I don't like 'sunny' people. This being why I'm throwing the subject out here on my journal and asking for reactions.

Thoughts?  If so, please try to share without being cocks to one another.