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The Cognitive Dissident

A blog by Ronald P. Thompson, Ph.D.

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The Eternal Message of Adam & Eve

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The book of Genesis presents the early monotheist’s vision of nature of humanity and of life.  Like monotheism itself, it is a huge step from the elaborate conceptions of reality and nature of older religions, to one stripped down to the basics.  Compare the creation story in Genesis to other ancient traditions. There is no war of the gods, no birthing of a god race, no complicated story line; just one simple and elegant idea. Everything was created from nothing by a power that was beyond comprehension to humans.   Sadly this beautiful and honest simplicity is completely missed by conservative Christians today.

The story goes on to present Adam and Eve as the protohumans. They are the embodiment of the human condition as it was for many thousands of years prior to the first written records. I would suggest, this story is an important allegory that can give us insight that the basic challenges of life are intrinsic to the human condition, not some modern invention of technology, modern society or capitalism.

Consider this, the story of Adam and Eve show that the binary of male and female is not a modern construct; rather it is a biological construct that predates human civilization. This does not say we must be constrained by that construct any more than we must be constrained to travel no faster than we can run, but it does say the argument that the male-female binary is some form of modern oppression is a false claim.  We humans now have the power to move from our evolutionary roots. In many ways, that freedom is a good thing; but, we should never buy into the lie that those evolutionary roots are some sort of evil conspiracy by a nefarious group of people. Continue reading “The Eternal Message of Adam & Eve” →

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honor killing

Yes, we could always do better, but to often the rhetoric implies that in “The West” women have it worse than in other parts of the world.  That is simply not true. Yes there are tiny societies where women are treated as well as in Western democracies, but compare the status of women in the most populous nations: China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria & Bangladesh.  This list represents 6 of the 8 most populous countries and nearly half the world’s population.  Take a look at women’s political power, women’s economic power and women’s social status, then compare them to the status of women in North America and Europe.

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Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

Note: I’ve been working on this for some time, but due to the nature of the content have been slow to publish it.

It has become a refrain from the left (and the media) to hear how Islam is a religion of peace and those who engage in violence have are not “real” Muslims.   If one questions this premise the interesting moniker of Islamophobe is tied to the questioner.   However, the question “Is Islam a religion of peace?” is legitimate and should be considered.  However, the more I have looked into the issue, rather than get a simple answer I find it becomes ever more difficult to make simplistic answers.

To be a Muslim, a person simply has to agree there is only one God and Mohammad is his prophet.  Though the mantra does not expressly say so, the assumption is that one accepts the Quran as the literal words of the one and only God and that the Quran supersedes all other older religious texts. All that is beyond question.  The problem is that the Quran is not a book of systematic theology, nor is it a single narrative; but rather it is a book of various styles and subjects and content.  Muslims say this style is because it is divine and its unique style is due to that fact.  Secularist would respond that the lack of clarity is due to the fact that the Quran is nothing more than a mishmash of Persian, Arabic, Jewish and Christian ideas plagiarized by Mohammad and his immediate successors.

The divine or secular nature of the Quran is a matter of faith, but for this discussion the significance of this is that such a non-linier text is infinitely subject to interpretation.   Of course issues of interpretation is true with all religions; but it seems monotheistic religions struggle with variations in interpretation more than most. I would suggest that this is because practitioners tend to be far more dogmatic about the unique rightness of their theology than other religions. In the case of Islam the initial schism in interpretation goes right back to the origins of the religion itself as if to make the point that there is not just one Islam a prima fascia case. Continue reading “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?” →

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Of Human Migration

In both Europe and the United States, issues of human migration are front and center.

My ancestors left the region that is now Denmark around two thousand years ago in search of a better life in a less harsh climate.  They headed south.  However, there was already an established culture in north-western Europe.  The Celtic peoples populated most of the heart of Western Europe.

My ancestors were not there to assimilate or to work their way up in the established social system. They did not come prepared to pick crops and wash dishes. They came with ax and spear and shield to displace (kill) the locals. And they did. By the time the Romans arrived, the Celts were gone from northern Europe, they had been annihilated by my migrating ancestors.

The Romans held them up for several hundred years, but the southern march continued and did not stop till they had conquered nearly all of Western Europe from the Alps to Brittan to Rome and even parts of North Africa. Though they were not able to keep control of all that land and they grew into a number of distinct language and cultural groups, they never went “home”.  Some of their descendants, the Angles and Saxons became the English and ruled the oceans for 200 years. Today, the richest country in Europe is named after one branch of these migrants (Germany); and, in the United States, the world’s super-power, the largest racial group is the descendants of those Nordic peoples. Whether they are called English, German, Dutch, Norwegian or Swedes, they are all children of those same migrants. Continue reading “Of Human Migration” →

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Gay North Carolina waitress receives bible verse instead of tip

From the article:

“Alexandra Judd was working at Zada Janes in Charlotte, North Carolina on Tuesday, when she claims that two patrons left her a bible verse on the tip line of their bill instead of cash — followed by a note at the bottom that says “praying for you.”

The customer wrote “Leviticus 20:13,” which reads, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

From Me:

Perhaps it is good that neither the person who wrote the article, nor the woman herself, seems to get the point. This person who left the note actually believes that homosexuals should be put to death.

It is hard for those who are not fundamentalist to grasp how extreme those who claim to believe in the supremacy of the Bible’s moral laws can be.

 

 

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Just a photo I took when I worked as an early intervention social worker.   I was asked to do a photo essay on the children my program served.

It is important to remember that the goal of a liberal democracy is that every child starts life with a fair chance of success. Sadly, it is my experience that all too many children, never get that fair chance.

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Of Fairness and Equity

 

I recall hearing a news story a few years ago about the Chinese government’s ban on billboards that glorify royalty and lavish lifestyles.  What got my attention was a comment about a wealthy young man regarding the huge divide between rich and poor in China today.  The young man blithely said that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor because they rich work hard and the poor do not.

I’m not sure you could find a wealthy American who would plainly and publicly say what the Chinese young man said; however, I suspect there is a fair percentage of Americans that believe in that basic sentiment; life is basically fair in its distribution of gifts.

I think that is nonsense.  Life is not fair.  I was born into the family of an up and coming engineer in the United States; did I somehow deserve that fate as opposed to being born to an impoverished family in Bangladesh?   Of course not.  That family of birth and the genetic gift of IQ has given me options that only a very few in this world enjoy.  My mother and father were both born to poverty, but in the United States where their natural gifts of intelligence allowed them to rise into the middle class.  Again, had they been born in another place or with less intelligence they would not have been afforded that opportunity.   Any effort to rationalize the distribution of ability and opportunity is doomed to failure; there is no reason for it. Continue reading “Of Fairness and Equity” →

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PayPal Nixes 400 Jobs in North Carolina Over Anti-LGBT Law

PayPal announced Tuesday it will not hire more than 400 people in Charlotte, North Carolina, after the state repealed anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people. “The new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture,” the company said in a statement. “As a result, PayPal will not move forward with our planned expansion into Charlotte.”

My Thought: How does this make sense?  The City of Charlotte passed LBGT  a protections law, then the state (driven by rural concerns) passed a law to invalidate the Charlotte law. Now PayPal is going to punish the people of Charlotte who started the issue by passage of an LBGT protection law because their efforts were overridden.

So is the message for other cities in conservative states to not pass LBGT protections so as to keep from being punished?   Of course PayPal doesn’t care one wit for the people of Charlotte, strait or LBGT. They see this as an opportunity to burnish their image.  This whole thing is a sad commentary on how real justice gets run over by PR justice.

 

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marriage

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