Thanks.

Society can still be fairly disturbed even if there's not much violence, so I take what you're saying a bit further: fanaticism too is a predictable byproduct of our economy.

My dad left me his books, so after several years, on my way to the can recently, I pulled down his "Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" (which I bet he didn't read.) Almost the first thing Leonardo says is, "Every part is disposed to unite with the whole, that it may thereby escape from its own incompleteness."

I take this to be unintentionally fanatical. Whether it's Rush Limbaugh's sad furious Ditto Heads or our own liberal communitarians, if we're doing it to escape from our incompleteness, we're fanatics.

That is, while we're reducing the military-industrial complex, and while we're tipping back level the uneven playing field 80% of us have slid to the down end of, we also do our best to get and keep our heads screwed on straight.

And this bit more: Even when the economy becomes fair - that is, when there's democracy at work - we can still be riddled with incompleteness, fanaticism, and, yes, violence. Not that it won't be better. But it's never just that they did it to us.

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Thanks.

Blame has gotten a bad name over the last several years - phrases such as "the blame game," whining, etc. It is, yes, a problem to get lost in blame, and to get caught looking just backwards when we've got enough on the ball to look in a few directions at once. Blame's nice. It's at the center of our justice system. OJ slipped out of being blamed. Would we prefer that Bernie Madoff be free?

Re: our torturers - I assume Nuremburg is getting mentioned these days but I'm not hearing it; that just following orders doesn't get one off the hook for atrocities. And of course we don't give a pass to the order-givers. Plus how else do we effectively shore up the eroding Constitution and the insult to the dignity of every person that's the foundation of the country?

I assume Obama's going to make this good but at this point I don't see how.

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What stands out in this case is the low reading comprehension of the conservative loud mouths. Sotomayor's quote was specifically saying that she would be fairer than a racist white man. Are we surprised, on grounds of both racism and literacy, that Newt and the rest don't get it?

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I've heard said, "A person who is not rich voting Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders." It's ruinous for a working person to vote Republican, while it hardly hurts the rich to be governed by Democrats (though rich Republicans would have you believe any tax drains heart's blood.) So some working class people who voted Republican are switching. In part it's actually because they're beginning to see that we're not their enemies. Cool.

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Glad to hear Robert Wright say that spiritual experience is available to atheist and religionist alike, and others. Since atheists might react against the term "spiritual experience," the term egolessness works just fine.

I agree with Joseph Campbell that egolessness is at the core meaning of all religion and, as he would say, myth. Most practitioners of most religions have, alas, abandoned this core practice.

I quibble with Robert Wright's use of the word morality. Morals can be a useful back-up, as is the letter of the law relative to the spirit of the law when you get into court. But when you do the appropriate thing through egolessness it carries the spontaneous meaning genuinely, versus the herky-jerky ratiocinations of morality, fighting as it so often does against revealing one's hypocrisy through one's real feelings. - see Mark Twain: "She's a good person, in the worst sense of the word." One comes up against Chogyam Trungpa's spiritual materialism, so central to the idolatry of Biblical inerrancy.

By the way, apocalyptic stuff misses the point, that the texts are talking not about the coming end of the world but about the individual's experience - the dark night of the soul, for instance - when one is on the brink of the egoless experience. Bliss seems apocalyptically cataclysmic when you're still trying to hang onto ego. Note that when Jesus said the second coming would be within a hundred years, he was telling his apostles that each would have a spiritual awakening within that time.

So, yes, religion and atheism are incidental.

This is too long.

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