In today's society, you know this decadent, lazy, egotistical, money-driven mass that we call society, we are sitting on a fence, precariously perched. It is now the time that we must choose if we are going to get off the fence and which side we are going to go to.
Are you going to continue to allow yourself to sit on the fence, blatantly complacent with the facts that our world, our children's world is in danger of becoming a much harsher place for them to live.
We sit on the fence because we are in the wrong reality, in which the private thinking of all individuals who cannot make the world conform to their inner morality, but will neither capitulate to the amoral norm, tries to reconcile these apparent irreconcilables so as to make life livable. It is a compromise, a truce that the majority of us call for a lifetime, opting out of responsibility for the struggle between our humanity and the Machine by taking a neutral personal position. Certain individual or group characteristics and classes of activity come down on one side of the fence, some on the other side. On one hand we pursue competitive drives according to automatic lore, in the positive interests of the Machine but contrary to the true interests of humanity. On the other hand we try automatically to control some of the ill-effects of these drives with instituted laws, and meet some others with charitable compassion. The general truce is broken from time to time as collective opinion or action shifts now closer to the Machine, now to the human. Politics, as it swings from Right to Left and back, is one agent of this shifting which, like the extremes of war and peace, effects no real change but leaves the human race, its potential unrealised, sitting on the fence. Some praise to us that at least our senses insist on this balance - that we have not yet gone over to the Machine altogether. But the great weight of our reality is on the automatic side, and we could not have contrived this balancing act had we not invented something to which we gave equal and opposite weight on the human side. - John Bapty OatesWe need to come to the realisation that we are currently a very dysfunctional global family. If we saw are children torturing an animal, would be not intervene? However, we turn a blind eye to the fact that the some of the world's most powerful government's has used, and more than likely still uses torture to this day. Some of you may think its acceptable. If that's the case, then perhaps you should take up the rod and see if you can handle being a torturer.
Our history burdens us with guilt and our past neglect of truth is visited on us in the present. Even though we are well practiced in applying the denial factor to many of the worst features of existing reality, it still offends the conscience enough that we would be unable to bear it, or our automatic selves, but for the invention already referred to. This is religion, of course, by which is meant some system of faith in and worship of, or deference to, a supposed divine power or wisdom. Religions afford an escape from human moral responsibility by giving weight to the humane characteristics on the automaton's side of the fence on which we are sitting. As long as we are prepared to believe them, and sustain our faith, religions restore the balance between our humanity and the automaton but only in our wishful imagination. And in any case, even if this balance were a fact, that still leaves us sitting on the fence, only half way human. Religions strike this balance by calling acts such as torture 'evil', and repentance good; by isolating the good self from bad events so that faith can be maintained without having to eradicate acts such as torture. The fact of 'evil', which is allotted a fantastic place - Hell - is balanced by pretensions to good which are also given a place - Heaven. But it is true that our reality is imbalanced on the automatic side, which means it's going downhill towards dehumanization or destruction. Even if an unequal balance between our humanity and the automaton were a fact, it might ensure our survival but nothing approaching our true fulfillment. Nothing but a wholly humantrue reality can be acceptable to morally aware intellect. - John Bapty Oates
In general, humanity abnegates our responsibility, through faith, why? To remove the fact that we continue to allow 'evil' to happen across the world, well as long as you didn't personally do it, you are fine right? Wrong, we are all one body, one soul, 6.8 billion experiences. We are responsible for everything that happens on this planet, we need to accept that responsibility. We always are looking for a scapegoat, when things go wrong, we need to accept they went wrong, find out why they went wrong and fix the root of the problem.
If you are to become truly aware you have to keep your head above the vast sea of automatic conditioning in which practically the whole of humanity is immersed. When you are sunk in this sea you may not see it as conditioning. You will then judge with a mind conditioned by a false reality, and therefore falsely. You have a sense of the true meaning and purpose of life, perhaps arrived at by applying reason to your instinctive feelings of care and compassion, yet cannot find these adequately reflected in the world. So you may well turn to one of the religions, because it satisfies your moral senses and feelings yet does not disturb your conditioned reasoning because it has been made to fit acceptably into the automatic norm.
It is unlikely that anyone with firmly and willfully fixed religious faith will have been able or willing to read this far, but likely that the minds of the persevering reader and this writer shall be broadly in sympathy. It is easy for us to dismiss religions just as it is easy for 'believers' to dismiss us. Yet we share the same moral concerns, so what stands between us? It is that they put a false construction on the meaning and purpose of life that they sense, whilst we are dedicated to realising its truth. What matters about this difference is that religions take away from humanity its responsibility for ourselves and Earth.
Surely it must be accepted that truth is the prime object of intellect. Whatever may be the humantruth the honest search for it should not begin with any fixed prejudice such as that against religion. On the other hand that search, however well-intended, will be brought to an abrupt and unsuccessful end by the adoption of a blind faith in things of the imagination. Such faiths might keep the fence-sitting human race from toppling over too far into automation, but they bring to a halt or at least hinder true progress. - John Bapty Oates
We need to start to progress in a fashion that is true to humanity, not true to the automated functions of this world. The more automated we become, the more humanity dies. Some people say I have an unrealistic, altruistic view, I ask, why don't you? Is it so much to ask that if we all carried this view, would our world not change for the better, nearly instantly, or are you just to comfortable within your automated reality to be shaken from it, even at the cost of making life for your children, grandchildren and generations to come better?