estebanana -> RE: WhErE iS ANDERS? (Sep. 19 2011 16:47:44)
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Rufus, Have you ever read Hemingway? Just curious. He might be fun for you. I'm Areligious personally- not atheistic or agnostic or non believing, but simply non religious. I'm a skeptic of 90% - 95% of all codified religious practice. So you're preaching to the choir here as they say when you enumerate on the ways in which the great religious books treat the subject of animals. The three largest religions all come from the same area and originate at about the same time and feature the same characters. The big three are what I call ' The Desert Religions', not the great religions. They are all from the desert and the laws and ethics are those of ancient desert dwelling societies. The ways in which animal husbandry is dealt with is based on the ancient techniques of keeping animals in hot arid climates. So I agree there are hierarchical moral constructions in those Desert Books which are rooted in a paternalistic world view and at that time of writing the world was pretty darn small for those writers. If only those boys had had Google Earth, a better search engine or Encyclopedia Britannica they could have cross referenced their patriarchal ethical system with those of other of the peoples of other parts of the globe living at the same time. You can't really fault those fellas then can you? They were doing the best they could out there in that hot dusty environment to keep stuff together. And what with those hostile Egyptians and Romans trying to subjugate them, life must have been a real bitch. But, wait, who went out a thousand years later in Western Europe and the New World and said "Hey we have these Desert Books and golly our geography and world view and knowledge has expanded since these were written, but we must keep doing and saying these things they mandated in the desert 4000 years ago because if we don't bad things will happen". ~? Oh I'm scared now, bad things will happen? But what bad things? "Well, we'll lose patriarchal control of this big blue mud ball and that we can't have. We've been running the show ever since we wrote those books in the desert two to four thousand years ago and we just can't change any of that because, because we, .....we.... just can't. Now stop asking questions." But those those books were written for desert dwellers, why do we have to stick to them? " Just because you do. You'll just have to pretend you live in the desert and stick to those books." Ok. But if King Solomon had had google he could have done a search on 'Nearby Kingdoms and Royalties' to see if there were other guys like him to talk to. He may have found some dudes over in India who were writing books too. Only those books were the Tropical-Sub Tropical Upanishads and Vedas. Goodness can you imagine if they had hooked up? The Songs of Solomon could have had Sitar and tabla accompaniment it could have been like a world music fusion band before Paco de Lucia and without those stupid lyrics that Paco's band members insisted on writing. Bwana Bwana King Kong! What the fukc is that all about? If Solomon had hooked up with the writers of the Upanishads they could have caravaned over to his pad and had ten day long spoken word poetry jams and eaten ripe mangoes while prancing around with court groupie chicks. Yes there is a hitch. You have all these college folks saying the Desert books are treasures and must be understood because all the great writers secular, religious, dissenters or non dissenters over the last one thousand years of literature were taught to read and reason by reading those three Desert books. The great novels, poems and texts of Western Literature are based on ways in which the Desert books were written, remember the same three books written at the same time, in the same desert, with almost all the same characters who could never get along? The Desert Book read like a script from The Cosby show or Fawlty Towers, only in a huge tent, and the production set would have been sandier, drier and hotter, because they were in the desert. I don't know about you, but I'm just waiting in for a huge plagiarism lawsuit to come thundering down on every writer from Pliny to Norman Mailer. Hi I'm the lawyer for the God of the Three Desert Books and we are serving you a with a lawsuit for copyright infringement on two of the chapters in the one of the Desert Books. You can just see old grouchy Solomon sitting on this throne saying. "Yeah, you gonna sample, my songs and write about it bitches you gonna pay me royalties!" Makes Hollywood hack writer thefts look like kindergarten....oh, well bad analogy. A thousand years of royalties must add up to something. How did the Norse write Beowulf without consulting the Desert Books? Or is Grendel character in one of the Desert Books, but we just can't tell because the name was changed to protect the Norse writer of Beowulf? And those Central Africans and Indian had the audacity to sit down with a scribe and write about their lives without even talking to those Desert guys up there in the hot dusty desert. I almost forgot about the Chinese too, they had this other way of writing around five or six thousand years ago that was revolutionary, it worked with small pictures. Like tiny abstract films made on cow scapula bones with inks. If only those ancient Chinese had lived in the other desert with the guys who wrote the Desert Books, if that had been the case we could all be fluent in Chinese!
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