Addie...
Image by Adam Melancon
"All Day I dream About Photography" Flickr Roundup! Voted #1!!!
adidap.com/2008/06/08/adidap-flickr-round-2008-06-08/
Thanks for the Link Geekdad.com!
blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/06/more-great-pi-1.html
Thanks for the Link EpicEdits!
blog.epicedits.com/2008/06/29/photodump-06-29-2008/
Thanks Digital Photography Blogs! For picking this photo as the winner of the “Getting in Close: People” contest.
digitalphotographyblogs.com/2008/08/11/august-first-week-...
Flickr Explore Jun 7, 2008 #496
Maggie, FERRIS_6598
Image by \!/_PeacePlusOne
Juggling Contest Winner Maggie
Earth Hour at the 3 Finger Club LOHHAS Lifestyle Lounge
Lights were out between 8:30 and 9:30 while we told stories and discussed our Lifestyle Of Health, Happiness And Sustainability (LOHHAS) using the 3 Finger "Peace Plus One" Sustainability Salute to remind us about Peace, Harmony and Balance between Society, Environment and Economy
People were the best jugglers of "Society, Environment, Economy" balls won "EARTH HOUR 60" T-Shirts WOW \!/O\!/
Photo Courtesy of the McMaster Institute for Sustainable Development in Commerce
www.SustainabilitySymbol.com
www.PeacePlusOne.com
www.Dragonpreneur.com
all participants in the Earth Hour Discussion got a copy of "Letter to Maddie" featured below:
We Screwed Up
A Letter of Apology to My Granddaughter
By Chip Ward
[Note: I became politically active and committed on the day 20 years ago when I realized I could stand on the front porch of my house and point to three homes where children were in wheelchairs, to a home where a child had just died of leukemia, to another where a child was born missing a kidney, and yet another where a child suffered from spina bifida. All my parental alarms went off at once and I asked the obvious question: What’s going on here? Did I inadvertently move my three children into harm’s way when we settled in this high desert valley in Utah? A quest to find answers in Utah’s nuclear history and then seek solutions followed. Politics for me was never motivated by ideology. It was always about parenting.
Today my three kids are, thankfully, healthy adults. But now that grandchildren are being added to our family, my blood runs cold whenever I project out 50 years and imagine what their world will be like at middle age -- assuming they get that far and that there is still a recognizable “world” to be part of. I wrote the following letter to my granddaughter, Madeline, who is almost four years old. Although she cannot read it today, I hope she will read it in a future that proves so much better than the one that is probable, and so terribly unfair. I’m sharing this letter with other parents and grandparents in the hope that it may move them to embrace their roles as citizens and commit to the hard work of making the planet viable, the economy equitable, and our culture democratic for the many Madelines to come.]
March 20, 2012
Dear Maddie,
I address this letter to you, but please share it with Jack, Tasiah, and other grandchildren who are yet unborn. Also, with your children and theirs. My unconditional love for my children and grandchildren convinces me that, if I could live long enough to embrace my great-grandchildren, I would love them as deeply as I love you.
On behalf of my generation of grandparents to all of you, I want to apologize.
I am sorry we used up all the oil. It took a million years for those layers of carbon goo to form under the Earth’s crust and we used up most of it in a geological instant. No doubt there will be some left and perhaps you can get around the fact that what remains is already distant, dirty, and dangerous, but the low-hanging fruit will be long-gone by the time you are my age. We took it all.
There’s no excuse, really. We are gas-hogs, plain and simple. We got hooked on faster-bigger-more and charged right over the carrying capacity of the planet. Oil made it possible.
Machines are our slaves and coal, oil, and gas are their food. They helped us grow so much of our own food that we could overpopulate the Earth. We could ship stuff and travel all over the globe, and still have enough fuel left to drive home alone in trucks in time to watch Monday Night Football.
Rocket fuel, fertilizer, baby bottles, lawn chairs: we made everything and anything out of oil and could never get enough of it. We could have conserved more for you to use in your lifetime. Instead, we demonstrated the self-restraint of crack addicts. It’s been great having all that oil to play with and we built our entire world around that. Living without it will be tough. Sorry.
I hope we develop clean, renewable energy sources soon, or that you and your generation figure out how to do that quickly. In the meantime, sorry about the climate. We just didn’t realize our addiction to carbon would come with monster storms, epic droughts, Biblical floods, wildfire infernos, rising seas, migration, starvation, pestilence, civil war, failed states, police states, and resource wars.
I’m sure Henry Ford didn’t see that coming when he figured out how to mass-produce automobiles and sell them to Everyman. I know my parents didn’t see the downside of using so much gas and coal. The all-electric house and a car in the driveway was their American Dream. For my generation, owning a car became a birthright. Today, it would be hard for most of us to live without a car. I have no idea what you’ll do to get around or how you will heat your home. Oops!
We also pigged out on most of the fertile soil, the forests and their timber, and the oceans that teemed with fish before we scraped the seabed raw, dumped our poisonous wastes in the water, and turned it acid and barren. Hey, that ocean was an awesome place and it’s too bad you can’t know it like we did. There were bright coral reefs, vibrant runs of red salmon, ribbons of birds embroidering the shores, graceful shells, the solace and majesty of the wild sea…
…But then I never saw the vast herds of bison that roamed the American heartland, so I know it is hard to miss something you only saw in pictures. We took lots of photos.
We thought we were pretty smart because we walked a man on the moon. Our technology is indeed amazing. I was raised without computers, smart phones, and the World Wide Web, so I appreciate how our engineering prowess has enhanced our lives, but I also know it has a downside.
When I was a kid we worried that the Cold War would go nuclear. And it wasn’t until a river caught fire near Cleveland that we realized fouling your own nest isn’t so smart after all. Well, you know about the rest -- the coal-fired power plants, acid rain, the hole in the ozone...
www.tomdispatch.com/images/managed/fear2.gifThere were plenty of signs we took a wrong turn but we kept on going. Dumb, stubborn, blind: Who knows why we couldn’t stop? Greed maybe -- powerful corporations we couldn’t overcome. It won’t matter much to you who is to blame. You’ll be too busy coping in the diminished world we bequeath you.
One set of problems we pass on to you is not altogether our fault. It was handed down to us by our parents’ generation so hammered by cataclysmic world wars and economic hardship that they armed themselves to the teeth and saw enemies everywhere. Their paranoia was understandable, but they passed their fears on to us and we should have seen through them. I have lived through four major American wars in my 62 years, and by now defense and homeland security are powerful industries with a stranglehold on Congress and the economy. We knew that was a lousy deal, but trauma and terror darkened our imaginations and distorted our priorities. And, like you, we needed jobs.
Sorry we spent your inheritance on all that cheap bling and, especially, all those weapons of mass destruction. That was crazy and wasteful. I can’t explain it. I guess we’ve been confused for a long time now.
Oh, and sorry about the confusion. We called it advertising and it seemed like it would be easy enough to control. When I was a kid, commercials merely interrupted entertainment. Don’t know when the lines all blurred and the buy, buy, buy message became so ubiquitous and all-consuming. It just got outta hand and we couldn’t stop it, even when we realized we hated it and that it was taking us over. We turned away from one another, tuned in, and got lost.
I’m betting you can still download this note, copy it, share it, bust it up and remake it, and that you do so while plugged into some sort of electrical device you can’t live without -- so maybe you don’t think that an apology for technology is needed and, if that’s the case, an apology is especially relevant. The tools we gave you are fine, but the apps are mostly bogus. We made an industry of silly distraction. When our spirits hungered, we fed them clay that filled but did not nourish them. If you still don’t know the difference, blame us because we started it.
And sorry about the chemicals. I mean the ones you were born with in your blood and bones that stay there -- even though we don’t know what they’ll do to you). Who thought that the fire retardant that kept smokers from igniting their pillows and children’s clothes from bursting into flames would end up in umbilical cords and infants?
It just seemed like better living through chemistry at the time. Same with all the other chemicals you carry. We learned to accept cancer and I guess you will, too. I’m sure there will be better treatments for that in your lifetime than we have today. If you can afford them, that is. Turning healthcare over to predatory corporations was another bad move.
All in all, our chemical obsession was pretty reckless and we got into that same old pattern: just couldn’t give up all the neat stuff. Oh, we tried. We took the lead out of gasoline and banned DDT, but mostly we did too little, too late. I hope you’ve done better. Maybe it will help your generation to run out of oil, since so many of the toxic chemicals came from that. Anyway, we didn’t see it coming and we could have, should have. Our bad.
There are so many other things I wish I could change for you. We leave behind a noisy world. Silence is rare today, and unless some future catastrophe has left your numbers greatly diminished, your machines stilled, and your streets ghostly empty, it is likely that the last remnants of tranquility will be gone by the time you are my age.
And how about all those species, the abundant and wondrous creatures that are fading away forever as I write these words? I never saw a polar bear and I guess you can live without that, too, but when I think of the peep and chirp of frogs at night, the hum of bees busy on a flower bed, the trill of birds at dawn, and so many other splendorous pleasures that you may no longer have, I ache with regret. We should have done more to keep the planet whole and well, but we couldn’t get clear of the old ways of seeing, the ingrained habits, the way we hobble one another’s choices so that the best intentions never get realized.
Mostly I’m sorry about taking all the good water. When I was a child I could kneel down and drink from a brook or spring wherever we camped and played. We could still hike up to glaciers and ski down snow-capped mountains.
Clean, crisp, cold, fresh water is life’s most precious taste. A life-giving gift, all water is holy. I repeat: holy. We treated it, instead, as if it were merely useful. We wasted and tainted it and, again in a geological moment, sucked up aquifers that had taken 10,000 years to gather below ground. In my lifetime, glaciers are melting away, wells are running dry, dust storms are blowing, and rivers like the mighty Colorado are running dry before they reach the sea. I hate to think of what will be left for you. Sorry. So very, very sorry.
I’m sure there’s a boatload of other trouble we’re leaving you that I haven’t covered here. My purpose is not to offer a complete catalog of our follies and atrocities, but to do what we taught your parents to do when they were as little as you are today.
When you make a mistake, we told them, admit it, and then do better. If you do something wrong, own up and say you are sorry. After that, you can work on making amends.
I am trying to see a way out of the hardship and turmoil we are making for you. As I work to stop the madness, I will be mindful of how much harder your struggles will be as you deal with the challenges we leave you to face.
The best I can do to help you through the overheated future we are making is to love you now. I cannot change the past and my struggle to make a healthier future for you is uncertain, but today I can teach you, encourage you, and help you be as strong and smart and confident as you can be, so that whatever the future holds, whatever crises you face, you are as ready as possible. We will learn to laugh together, too, because love and laughter can pull you through the toughest times.
I know a better world is possible. We create that better world by reaching out to one another, listening, learning, and speaking from our hearts, face to face, neighbor to neighbor, one community after another, openly, inclusively, bravely. Democracy is not a gift to be practiced only when permitted. We empower ourselves. Our salvation is found in each other, together.
Across America this morning and all around the world, our better angels call to us, imploring us to rise up and be as resilient as our beloved, beautiful children and grandchildren, whose future we make today. We can do better. I promise.
Your grandfather,
Chip Ward
Cassius Dio ...The Jewish Impact on Civilization (August 17, 2012 / 29 Av 5772) ...item 2.. Moody Blues - Question - Royal Albert Hall ...
Image by marsmet542
A STRANGE PEOPLE -- "The Jews are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life," wrote Roman philosopher Deo Cassius, expressing his disapproval. "In particular ... they do not honor any of the usual gods, but show extreme reverence to only one God."
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Lucius Cassius Dio Cocceianus[1][2] (Ancient Greek: Δίων ὁ Κάσσιος, c. AD 150 – 235,[3] known in English as Cassius Dio, Dio Cassius, or Dio (Dione. lib) was a Roman consul and a noted historian writing in Greek.
Dio published a history of Rome in 80 volumes, beginning with the legendary arrival of Aeneas in Italy through the subsequent founding of Rome (753 BC), the formation of the Republic (509 BC), and the creation of the Empire (31 BC), up to AD 229; a period of about 1,400 years.
Of the 80 books, written over 22 years, many survive into the modern age intact or as fragments, providing modern scholars with a detailed perspective on Roman history.
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.....item 1).... aish.com ... www.aish.com/ci/s ... HOME CURRENT ISSUES SOCIETY ...
WORLD PERFECT: The Jewish Impact on Civilization
Where did the values and principles of the modern world come from?
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by Rabbi Ken Spiro
August 17, 2012 / 29 Av 5772
www.aish.com/ci/s/48899267.html
An excerpt from Rabbi Ken Spiro's recently published book, "World Perfect."
While developing an idea for a lecture program, I conducted a series of surveys over a period of two years, asking people to list the fundamental values and principles which they felt we needed to uphold in order to make our world as perfect as is humanly possible. In total, some 1,500 individuals were questioned. Overwhelmingly, my respondents – predominantly Westerners, from the United States, Canada, South America, England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc – came up with remarkably similar answers, which could be grouped into these six categories:
1.. Respect for Human Life. In a perfect world, all people would be guaranteed certain basic human rights, paramount among which must be the right to life. They should be able to live that life without constant fear of its loss and with certain basic dignity.
2.. Peace and Harmony. On all levels – whether communal or global – people and nations should co-exist in peace and harmony with respect for each other.
3..Justice and Equality. All people, regardless of race, sex, or social status should be treated equally and fairly in the eyes of the law.
4.. Education. Everyone should receive a basic education that would guarantee functional literacy within society.
5..Family. A strong, stable family structure needs to exist to serve as the moral foundation for society and as the most important institution for socializing/educating children.
6..Social Responsibility. On an individual, community, national and global level, people must take responsibility for the world. This should include an organized social network to address basic concerns such as disease, poverty, famine, crime, drug-related problems, as well as environmental and animal protection issues.
The respondents to my survey came from all walks of life, yet regardless of their backgrounds, they were in agreement. Indeed, they, and I venture to say most human beings the world over, deeply believe that a perfect world must include these universal values.
The question is: Why?
Are these six basic ideas intrinsic to human nature? Have people always felt this way? And if not, where did we get these values? What is the source of this utopian world vision?
My search for answers to these questions has produced this book. Where did the values and principles of the modern world come from? The answer I found will surprise, perhaps even shock, the reader.
As the respondents to my survey were predominantly residents of democratic countries, they naturally assumed that the values they hold dear have originated – as did democracy – with the Greeks and, to a lesser extent, with disseminators of Hellenistic, i.e. Greek ideas, the Romans.
Indeed, this issue is subject to much debate in academic circles these days. Traditionalists continue to insist that the values of ancient Greece and Rome underlie all our learning, philosophy, art, and ethics, while their opponents accuse them that their idealization of Greco-Roman standards of virtue, wisdom, and beauty is sentimental if not downright unreal.
Reporting on this bitter controversy, the New York Times (March 7, 1998) asked in a headline:
"THE ANCIENTS WERE: A) BELLICOSE ELITISTS OR B) THE SOURCE OF WESTERN VALUES?"
It would be pointless to negate that Greece and Rome, besides being the most advanced civilizations of antiquity, have also been the most influential of civilizations on Western Europe and by extension, the Americas. Without a doubt, much of our ideas about art, beauty, philosophy, government, and modern empirical science do come from classical Greek thought. Western law, government, administration, and engineering were also powerfully shaped by Rome. Indeed, we do overwhelmingly get the lion's share of our culture from these civilizations.
But can the same be said about our values, ethics, and principles?
Let me hasten to say that this is not a trick question; I am not hinting here at some far-fetched notion that we really got our values from the Far East. Although, with the recent interest in Eastern philosophies a few voices have been raised advocating this view, the undisputed historical fact is that only within the last few hundred years did the West have any significant interaction with the East.
So the question remains: How did we come to order our moral values in this particular way?
To answer this question we shall begin our examination by taking a look just how those civilizations – which, without a doubt, shaped our political and social systems – related to the values we hold dear today.
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----- A SOCIETY WITHOUT MERCY
As we begin to trace the history of the values of our world, we shall, first of all, take a look at how the ancients – who bequeathed to us so many of our ideas – regarded the values we cherish today. Did they consider them essential to the making of an ideal world? Or was their worldview considerably different than ours?
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Of all the principles we might list, the basic right to life seems certainly the most fundamental. We all want to live without fear of being arbitrarily deprived of life. We all want to live with a certain minimal amount of human dignity. We all want certain protection in the law against oppression by tyrants who might consider certain segments of society expendable simply because they are too weak or too poor to protect themselves.
As obvious and important as this concept seems to us today, it was not so obvious or important in the world of antiquity.
To begin with, Greeks and Romans – as well as virtually every ancient culture we know of – practiced infanticide.
By infanticide, I mean the killing of newborn children as a way of population control, sex selection (generally, boys were desirable, girls undesirable), and as a way of ridding society of potentially burdensome or deformed members.
A baby that appeared weak or sickly at birth, or had even a minor birth defect such a cleft pallet, hair lip, or cleft foot, or was in some other way imperfect was killed. This was not done by some Nazi-like baby removal squad. This was done by an immediate member of the family, usually the mother or father, and usually within three days after birth.
The method of "disposal" varied, but generally we know that, in antiquity, babies were taken out to the forest and left to die of exposure, dropped down wells to drown, or thrown into sewers or onto manure piles.
The horror of a parent being capable of killing his or her child is shocking enough. But that this parent should have so little regard for the child, as to unmercifully dump it where it might die slowly and painfully, or be picked up by someone to be reared into slavery or prostitution (as sometimes happened), suggests a level of cruelty beyond our modern imagination. Lloyd DeMause in his essay "The Evolution of Childhood" (pp. 25-26) reports:
"Infanticide during antiquity has usually been played down despite literally hundreds of clear references by ancient writers that it was an accepted, everyday occurrence. Children were thrown into rivers, flung into dung-heaps and cess trenches, 'potted' in jars to starve to death, and exposed in every hill and roadside, 'a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend.' (Euripides, Ion, 504)"
Gruesome evidence of this practice has been found in various archeological excavations. Most notably, in the Athenian Agora, a well was uncovered containing the remains of 175 babies thrown there to drown.
Lest we assume that was the practice of the poor and ignorant, one of the most influential thinkers in Western intellectual history – none other than Aristotle – argued in his Politics that killing children was essential to the functioning of society. He wrote:
"There must be a law that no imperfect or maimed child shall be brought up. And to avoid an excess in population, some children must be exposed. For a limit must be fixed to the population of the state." (Politics VII.16)
Note the tone of his statement. Aristotle isn't saying "I like killing babies," but he is making a cold, rational calculation: over-population is dangerous, and this is the most expedient way to keep it in check.
Four hundred years after Aristotle, the practice of killing babies was a firmly entrenched practice in the Roman Empire. This is an excerpt from a famous and much-quoted letter from a Roman citizen named Hilarion to his pregnant wife, Alis, dated June 17th, circa 1 CE:
"Know that I am still in Alexandria. And do not worry if they all come back and I remain in Alexandria. I ask and beg of you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I receive payment I will send it up to you. If you deliver a child [before I get home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl discard it..."
Hilarion, as we see, is very much concerned about his baby son, his heir. Indeed a typical Roman family might be made up of two or three sons – to insure succession should one son die – but seldom more than one daughter, who was considered a burdensome responsibility and was all too expendable.
Of course, it could be argued that on other fronts the Greeks and the Romans were capable of refined thinking and an elevated approach to behavior. Seneca, the famed Roman philosopher and writer, developed a lengthy treatise on the control and consequences of anger. In it, he draws the distinction between anger and wisdom, using the following example: "Children also, if weak and deformed, we drown, not through anger, but through the wisdom of preferring the sound to the useless." (Concerning Anger, I.XV)
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----- EXPLOITATION OF THE INNOCENTS
The whole attitude toward the weak and helpless was totally skewed in ancient societies. Apart from thinking nothing of killing infants when they saw fit, the Romans engaged in the practice of mutilating unwanted children to make them at least "useful" for begging. (Incidentally, this horrifying practice is still seen today in India.)
Our morally-minded friend Seneca, who was so concerned with the issue of useful vs. useless, also came up with a tortured justification for this abomination:
"Look on the blind wandering about the streets leaning on their sticks, and those with crushed feet, and still again look on those with broken limbs. This one is without arms, that one has had his shoulder pulled down out of shape in order that his grotesqueries may excite laughter ... Let us go to the origin of those ills – a laboratory for the manufacture of human wrecks – a cavern filled with the limbs torn from living children ... What wrong has been done to the Republic? On the contrary, have not these children been done a service inasmuch as their parents had cast them out?"
Today, we would view the killing of newborn babies because they were unwanted or mutilating of tiny infants for profit as probably the most heinous acts a person could commit. What is the weakest, most defenseless, most innocent member of society? A little child. Therefore, we believe that a child, a baby, deserves the protection of society even more than an adult. But in Greek and Roman thinking, rather than being accorded the most protection, children were given the least; this happened simply because, as totally powerless, they were the easiest people to trample on or get rid of.
Points out Harvard Professor and former President of the American Historical Association, William L. Langer (in his foreword to The History of Childhood):
"Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways..."
So we see how very different the attitude of antiquity was to ours. The most basic right – to life (never mind, to life with dignity) – was by no means guaranteed.
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----- HORROR SHOW
Surely, there can't be a better example of a total disregard for the value of human life than killing people for entertainment. And here the Romans take first prize. No civilization before or since was so bloodthirsty in this regard. Throughout the empire, more than 200 stadiums were specifically erected for the exhibition of this particular "sport," which required that people and animals be housed and displayed in such a way that they couldn't escape before being murdered in front of a cheering and jeering audience.
The practice was extremely popular, and Emperor Augustus in his Acts brags that during his reign (29 BC to 14 CE) he staged games where 10,000 men fought and 3,500 wild beasts were slain. While savage fights to the death between gladiators – who were usually slaves trained for the purpose – were the highlight, to keep up the novelty of death, Nero and Domitian sent in even women, children, blind people and dwarfs to fight each other. Anything went just so the crowds were happy.
This form of entertainment reached its pinnacle with the inauguration, in the year 80 CE of the Coliseum, the ruins of which are today a big tourist attraction in Rome.
The Romans were justly proud of the engineering feat that the construction of the Coliseum represented.
The giant 600-by-500-foot arena, built by Vespasian and completed by Titus, seated 50,000 people. It had a removable roof and a floor that could be raised or lowered, depending on what the day's atmosphere demanded. Sometimes the Coliseum was transformed into a desert or into a jungle, and it could also be filled with water and turned into a lake so boats could sail in it.
Why was this incredible place built? To feature death as an elaborate form of amusement for the masses.
On a typical day when the Coliseum was playing to a full house, the place was crowded with men, women and children – yes, the Romans thought nothing wrong with exposing children to this kind of grotesquerie. Admission was free, and a pillow for your seat, meat and wine were provided, also for free.
The opening act to start off the morning was an exhibition of wild animals. The Romans went all over the empire to find wild, exotic beasts to astonish the crowds. Next, the arena was lowered to feature combat between them – Romans cheered as lions tore apart tigers, tigers went up against bears, leopards against wolves. It goes without saying that the Romans had never heard of animal rights.
Then came the bullfights, except that the toreadors, being slaves or convicts, had been given no chance to practice, so the bull usually gored them to death. The crowd roared. This is what they came to see.
You'd think that would be enough carnage for anyone. That was only the warm-up act. Next came feeding people to the animals. Keep in mind that Rome was a very law-and-order-minded society and everything had to be done legally – you couldn't just throw anyone to the lions, only people convicted of a capitol offense. But if they didn't have enough victims for a good day's fun, the Romans would conveniently condemn even minor criminals to death and replenish the supply. (Christianity, being a capital offense in Rome ever since the great fire of 64 CE, for which its adherents were blamed, provided a steady supply of victims.)
During intermissions, giant fountains sprayed perfume in the air to reduce the stench of death. Entertainment did not stop, however. In between the spectacular killings were held run-of-the-mill executions by burning, beheading, and flaying (that is, skinning people alive).
The main event was saved for the afternoon, and this was what the crowd was really waiting for – gladiatorial combat. The gladiators fought to the death, although the lives of particularly brave fighters could be spared by the emperor or the vote of the crowd.
In the year 107 CE, during a four-month celebration of his conquest of Dacia, Trajan – who was perhaps trying to match Augustus' record – held a major tournament in which 10,000 gladiators and 3,000 animals fought. This meant that whoever sat through that spectacle watched at least 5,000 people die.
Trajan was so fond of this kind of massacre – and he had a large supply of Dacian prisoners of war for the purpose – that he apparently sent 23,000 people to their slaughter between 106 and 118 CE.
It was all horrible and perverse, and if you thought it couldn't get worse, consider that Commodus (emperor from 180 to 192 CE) organized fights between crippled people and finished them off himself.
Of the Roman philosophers and great thinkers, only Seneca saw anything wrong with death as entertainment ... Other Roman greats were not as soft as Seneca. Cicero, for example, thought that gladiatorial contests promoted courage and endurance, although he was of the opinion that they were not all that entertaining. Juvenal, who criticized everything, loved the games. And Pliny found that watching people be massacred toughened the audience and therefore had educational value.
That about sums up the ancient world attitude toward the value of life. The key thing to keep in mind, however, is that the Greeks or Romans did think that law and order were essential to the efficient functioning of society, and laws under both empires were many and strictly enforced. But the idea that along with your status as a human being came the right to life (forget about life with dignity) was not a given by any means.
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----- AGAINST THE GRAIN: THE JEWISH VIEW
"I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation ... fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations." (John Adams, 2nd president of the United States)
"Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without Jews it might have been a much emptier place." (Paul Johnson, Christian historian, author of A History of the Jews and A History of Christianity)
Could that be true?
Is it really possible that our moral values do not originate in one of the great civilizations but have been bequeathed to us by a small, otherwise insignificant nation inhabiting a tiny piece of real estate in the Middle East?
I venture to say that the ancient Hebrews (who later came to be known as the Israelites and still later as the Jews) would have disagreed with the statements of Adams and of Johnson above. They would have insisted that they had nothing personally to do with inventing the values which ran against the grain of the world around them, and indeed were totally unknown to other peoples. They would have insisted that these values came from God, and they were merely the people chosen to disseminate them worldwide.
This was the story they told from the time they appeared on the world scene around 1300 BCE, hundreds of years before the ascent of the Greek civilization. Back then, they were still a newly emerging nation that functioned more like a large extended family, all family members tracing their ancestry to a man named Abraham who had lived somewhere around 1,800 BCE. They were a strange people with an even stranger religion:
They believed in only one God – all-powerful, infinite, and invisible – who had created everything known to man, a notion totally foreign to every ancient people that preceded them.
They claimed that all of them – some 600,000 men and untold number of women and children – had miraculously escaped from slavery in Egypt, then the mightiest empire on earth, through the miraculous intervention of their God.
They claimed that after their great escape, they reached a mountain in the wilderness, Mt. Sinai, where they all had an encounter with God; during that encounter, and through the person of their leader Moses, they supposedly received a code of behavior – compiled in a holy book known as the "Torah" – which they scrupulously followed.
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----- A STRANGE PEOPLE
It was a story bound to raise more than a few eyebrows in the ancient world. Of course, the ancient people believed all sorts of wild things about divine relationships with human beings, so the Jews' story was not in itself all that outlandish. Nor was a society governed by laws so strange, after all, previous law codes, the Code of Hammurabi being the most famous, set forth rules governing property rights and the like. What the ancient world couldn't fathom was this particular code. Indeed, it was a code that to the ancient mind seemed irrational.
"The Jews are distinguished from the rest of mankind in practically every detail of life," wrote Roman philosopher Deo Cassius, expressing his disapproval. "In particular ... they do not honor any of the usual gods, but show extreme reverence to only one God."
Part of that "extreme" reverence translated into following that God's law, a law which could not be altered as was convenient. It was an absolute, God-given standard, and by that fact alone it stood apart from any law of any other society.
But there was more about the Jews that was strange, besides their God and their law. The Torah – or the Biblos as the Greeks would call it – was like no holy book of any people before or since, in yet another way. It made the Jews look bad. In it, they are shown as shirkers and complainers, often sinning against their own God and His law. And yet they insisted that they needed to carry around with them the history of their failures as well as their successes in order never to lose sight of their mission to elevate humanity.
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We shall now take a look at how the ancient Jews related to the basic human right to life and see how close they came to our standard...
[A note to the reader: This is the just the beginning of one of the most fascinating dramas in human history. Despite all odds, the tiny Jewish people not only outlasted the great Empires of Greece and Rome – the unique ideology of Judaism ultimately triumphed over the paganism of the West.
Directly and indirectly – through the Bible, Christianity, Islam and modern democracy – the vast majority of humanity has been profoundly impacted by Judaism and the monumental quest of the Jewish people to perfect the world.]
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.....item 2).... youtube video ... Moody Blues - Question - Royal Albert Hall ... 6:47 minutes ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmOZFAYeurY
Uploaded by neo1az on May 25, 2008
Moody Blues - Question
Moody Blues - Question
Moody Blues - Question
Moody Blues - Question
Why do we never get an answer
When were knocking at the door?
With a thousand million questions
About hate and death and war.
Its where we stop and look around us
There is nothing that we need.
In a world of persecution
That is burning in its greed.
Why do we never get an answer
When were knocking at the door?
Because the truth is hard to swallow
Thats what the wall of love is for.
Its not the way that you say it
When you do those things to me.
Its more the way that you mean it
When you tell me what will be.
And when you stop and think about it
You wont believe its true.
That all the love youve been giving
Has all been meant for you.
Im looking for someone to change my life.
Im looking for a miracle in my life.
And if you could see what its done to me
To lose the the love I knew
Could safely lead me through.
Between the silence of the mountains
And the crashing of the sea
There lies a land I once lived in
And shes waiting there for me.
But in the grey of the morning
My mind becomes confused
Between the dead and the sleeping
And the road that I must choose.
Im looking for someone to change my life.
Im looking for a miracle in my life.
And if you could see what its done to me
To lose the the love I knew
Could safely lead me to
The land that I once knew.
To learn as we grow old
The secrets of our souls.
Its not the way that you say it
When you do those things to me.
Its more the way you really mean it
When you tell me what will be.
Why do we never get an answer
When were knocking at the door?
With a thousand million questions
About hate and death and war.
Its where we stop and look around us
There is nothing that we need.
In a world of persecution
That is burning in its greed.
Why do we never get an answer
When were knocking at the door?
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Essential Care
Image by United Nations Development Programme
Amateur Category: Winner Goal 4
Oliver Belarga, The Philippins
A healthy newborn baby in a Philippines hospital. The Government has been working to reduce infant deaths, especially in rural areas.
Formula 0 / 5th Race of Zero Emission Cars
Image by antaldaniel
Probably the most advanced center in Central Europe’s automotive hub, the Audi motor factory gave ground to the 5th annual race of zero emission electric, hydrogen- and fuel cell driven cars, go-karts and motorbikes.The rules follow the original rules of the Grand Prix of the infant automotive industry a hundred years ago. The aim is similar: to build fast cars that can cover long distances and become commercially viable, this time without petrol. Read more here, and please vote for this picture to promote the idea and the race in a changing world photo. journalism contest!
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