“You know the past and the future of all things. You know exactly where we’re going!” (exclaims Richard)

He(Shimoda, our reluctant messiah) sighed. “Yeah. But I try not to think about it.”

It’s a funny line, but also very deep, and a little sad. Something to think about.

Jack
I Listen.

Basic Ideology 101
Aside
The Battle for Focus

Now, at the bottom of every post and page, you can find Sociable buttons! This makes it easy to share my posts with all your friends and neighbors through whatever social network you prefer(or all of them!).

I’ve also added a formspring widget in the right sidebar, so you can ask me anything directly from Loki Listens! Ask anything at all! I don’t care how ridiculous or inappropriate the question is, it’ll receive an answer. To go with this widget, there’s an RSS feed above it with previous questions and answers.

Lots of new stuff.

Jack
I Listen.

update.

Read the new piece here!

Miss the first 2? Check them out here:

Tribe of the Star Part 1
Tribe of the Star Part 2

Jack
I Listen.

HubPages
Fiction

This is not to say that I stopped writing all together. I’ve made a lot of headway on my two big fiction projects, The Cost of Magic, and The Tribe of the Star. The Tribe of the Star has taken on a pleasant change of tone, which I think, and my girlfriend concurs, will be much more appealing to the reader. You’ll get to see the first of those pieces online here in the next couple of days.

I started out posting The Cost of Magic here at Loki Listens every time I added to it. I dropped that in favor of completing it and polishing it after 20 some-odd parts. It’s become a bit of an epic work for me, being the longest piece of fiction I have ever written. It’s still a long way from completion, but I have very high hopes for it. To be cliche, it’s a labor of love.

Jack
I Still Listen.

Update

————-

The Fear permeates the city with a dense fog in the mornings. As the day lingers, the fog dissipates, but the Fear just stretches out over the people, engulfing us all in its decadence.

We stroll the streets, looking for some kind of trouble to get into. But nothing comes. Sometimes it’s like that. No matter what you do, or where you are, you can’t get anything done. Creativity fades and seeps through the cracks in the sidewalk and you are left with nothing but some sunburn.

Courting the muse is a long forgotten path. These days people don’t wait for inspiration, or even try to draw in inspiration. They just do. And so we end up with a bunch of crap that is passed for “art” or “poetry” or “fiction” or any number of other things. But when you see it, it just fucking bores you to tears.

Court your muse. Find your inspiration. Then bang out that piece of crap you’ll never be proud of. Life keeps on moving down the line. The train will not remember you, and it does not forgive. Walk out on the tracks and stare at the ground. See those are steel rails? Is this what we’ve become?

And so here I am, waxing melancholic, for no reason other than I know not what to write.

Jack
I Listen.

Fragment #7
May 06, 2008

Jack
I Listen.

Fragment
#6
Stories

In the simplest of terms, ideology is the study of ideas.

In the previous philosophical series, Developmental Theology 089, we talked about very basic ideas that can help develop an open mind, and teach us how to create our own philosophical views, overlooking prior prejudices. You can read the entire Developmental Theology series in this PDF.

With the foundation built in Developmental Theology, my hope is to extend this learning with my Basic Ideology lessons. These lessons haven’t seen the kind of popularity as the former lessons. I think this is because the ideas and concepts are more complex. I’ve struggled with making the subject itself more accessible to the everyday person, with no prior knowledge of philosophical concepts. I’m beginning to think this is the mistake. It has been suggested that to better understand the current lessons, one should have read the prior lessons.

Which leads us to this lesson. I’ve provided a back link, so those who are behind, but would like to catch up, can. I’ll be working on better ways to do this as we continue these lessons.

Back to the question at hand: What is ideology?

Well, it is indeed the study of ideas, but it is also much more personal than that. Every person adheres to an ideology, whether they realize it or not. It is the sum total of one’s beliefs concerning right and wrong, and the degree to which things are right and wrong. Further it includes a person’s concepts of justice, punishment, reward, and how to deal with our own actions, as well as the actions of others.

Sometimes these ideologies have names, such as Humanism, which we talked about in the last two lessons, or a religious grouping. More often, one’s ideology is very personal, and crosses over many identified ideologies, as well as those without a name. It is influenced by events in life, and their effects, the things children are taught by their parents and other authority figures, books read, and things studied. Personal ideologies are constantly changing and evolving as new ideas and experiences are introduced.

I believe that by talking about these ideas, we can shift our focus and purposely evolve our own concepts. And in this sharing, we might find that we are not so different, despite our personal ideologies. Helping to build the community of man is the most important thing to which a person can aspire. And it’s what I aspire to here, and I hope at least some of my readers are with me on this cause.

Jack
I Listen.

Basic Ideology 101
Lesson #25
The Battle of Focus

Check out the first piece now!

Jack
I Listen.

HubPages
Fiction

In this lesson, we’ll talk about Humanism, using the information that is generally available across the net, and some of the remarks Ryan made.

Humanism has several off-shoots, with a variety of beliefs. Some are based in religion, others in atheism, but agnosticism seems to be most prevalent. The basic ideas involved with Humanism do not require a religious concept of God, or laws laid down by a religion.

So, let’s set out the base of Humanism in bullets.

• Democratic
• Humane Action
• Human Reason
• Ethics
• Justice
• Rejection of Superstition.
• Charity and Philanthropy

So, when we take a look at these aspects, we can see a lot of what Ryan was talking about in his email.

Humane action and ethics play the most important part in this, to my view point. The way we treat other people should be with kindness and understanding. Whether or not there is a God(or gods) should have no effect on how we treat each other. Most Humanists take this a step further and volunteer, work for charity, or donate money to charitable organizations.

I’d like to take a moment, and focus on a couple of things Ryan said.

Do what is right because it’s right and there may be nobody else to do it.

That is a powerful statement. Doing what is right, when you are in the position to do so.

If we want to see good in the world we have to do it ourselves.

Again, there is a lot to this statement. Responsibility. I think that is what it really boils down to; human responsibility. It’s not just a responsibility to ourselves, but to society, and our world.

So, looking back on Humanism, I think it’s easy to see that, at its very core, it is merely the idea of treating people well and doing what we believe is right. Doesn’t sound so different from many other ideologies or religions, does it?

Jack
I Listen.

Basic Ideology 101
Lesson #24
The Battle of Responsibility

I explained to Ryan what I was looking for, and what he sent me was so personal and informative, that I asked if I could publish the entire email. So, here is what Ryan Sutter has to say about Humanism, and how he found it. Enjoy.

I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and stayed one until I was 30 years old at which point I lost my faith in it and didn’t know what to call myself or what I believed. I took the Beliefnet Belief-O-Matic and found out that my beliefs were most closely defined as humanist. Not having really ever thought about humanism before this, I was a bit surprised to find a web site telling me that I was one.

I went on to study it a little and found that the whole idea of humanism was fairly straightforward and could be boiled down into the statement: Do what is right because it’s right and there may be nobody else to do it. In other words, we live in a world that may or not have any supernatural element, but that really should have no bearing on being a good and moral person. Goodness and morality are things you need to practice if you want them to exist in the world, they don’t come from somewhere other than us and if we don’t do them, they don’t exist. This is a compelling alternate reason for living a clean moral life as opposed to the reward/punishment model of Christianity.

You don’t do good and avoid evil in order to reap a reward or avoid a punishment, you do so simply because you wish for good in the world and you wish to avoid evil in the world and you let the supernatural aspect take care of itself, if there is such a thing.

That is humanism and it is my deep belief that even the religious person who hates or fears the “godless atheists and secular humanists” basically lives a moral life for the same fundamental reasons, if you press them on it. Most Christians will admit that they aren’t restrained from killing their neighbor and raping his life because they are afraid of God but because they know it’s the wrong thing to do. They know this innately, because they wouldn’t want it done to themselves. “Do unto others” is a very humanist statement.

Of course, in conversations with religious believers (including my own father) I’ve come to realize that this is not what humanism means to fundamentalist eyes. To a lot of people it seems that humanism means “whatever man decides to do is right” or “there is no god so we’re screwed, ACK! let’s call our pathetic plight ‘humanism’ and worship ourselves”. The first commits the naturalistic fallacy and the second conflates humanism and atheism. Humanism does not glorify people or set them up for worship. The whole concept of worship means to give praise and obedience to a higher power. When you are a human, and a humanist, you are not suddenly a higher power. In fact, it’s humbling. You look at yourself and your limited capabilities and you look at humankind and their messy psychological and sociological situations and you realize that we all need to work really hard to solve our problems, cooperate more, communicate more, help each other more, because if we are all we have then none of us is an island, none of us can operate without considering the fates of the others, and we all need each other. Kinda’ knocked me down a peg from when I thought I was personally fashioned in God’s image, while simultaneously making me feel a sense of civic and moral obligation as opposed to how I felt when I thought God would charge in and fix everything. The sense of personal responsibility implicit in humanism is extremely powerful. I think that explains why so many humanists are involved in social justice and activist causes, as well as volunteerism. They have to be, on some level, or their conscience nags at them because all it takes for bad people to have their way is for good people to do nothing.

I have found a lot of prejudice against humanism over the last 5
years. People say Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot were humanists, to
which I say bullshit. Humanism is a philosophical justification for moral and humane behavior. If a psychopath or despot commits acts of atrocity and cruelty, their actions are immoral and inhumane and therefore anti-humanist, whether they believe in a supernatural or not. Like I mentioned earlier, humanism does not say there is no God, humanism says that regardless of the metaphysical state of things, if we want to see good in the world we have to do it ourselves. The sad fact is that some people decide their is no God so they DO murder their next door neighbor and rape his wife, and other people do the exact same thing and say God made them do it, or the Devil, or whatever. The point is, that any behavior that is anti-human is anti-humanist and people can decide to be evil with or without belief in God. When people start to connect the two questions of “Does God exist” and “How should I behave” as if they are inextricably linked they are committing a fallacy. They are two separate questions that do not necessarily relate.

Thanks for the insight, Ryan.

Jack
I Listen.

Basic Ideology 101
Lesson #23
The Battle of Human Action