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To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. – Buddhist Proverb.
In case you haven’t gathered as much, I’m not the mystical sort. I’ve got no use for the waxworks inhabiting the pontificals of my youth, really; but save your three bong hit dissertations on rationalist ethics too. If Darwin is your pope, you’ve still got a pope.
The Golden Rule. Sermon on the Mount. The Ten Commandments. I’d bet 99% of the people who have ever trod the earth would agree to live under that framework. Then they’d kill each other for ten millenia over punctuation or something. Things are only useful in practice. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
I “invent” things all the time. They are of the most modest and unpretending sorts of accomplishments, and not very interesting to anyone not intimately involved in what I’m doing. I’ll take a scrap of plywood, and screw some blocks on it just so, and a table leg will fit between some of the blocks, which likewise register the position of a tool that cuts a mortise in the leg in a precise and repeatable pattern. Thus I am more efficient, and eat more often.
The utility of such a thing is apparent to me. It is obscure to my best friend. To a stranger, it is literally unknowable. You can never know everything. You can’t even know very much about very little any more. We are not agrarian subsistence farmers in a Newtonian Universe any longer. You’re reading this, aren’t you?
Is the Internet Good, or Evil? How about a gun? A chainsaw? Petroleum? A jig to mortise table legs?
The question is silly. But I can assure you, that when you see someone ask such questions, with the intention of allowing them to regulate you on the basis of an assessment of inanimate things being “Good” or “Evil,” you are looking at: Evil.
8 Responses
Evil…because they KNOW they are right, and they KNOW we are wrong, and we must therefore be PREVENTED from doing whatever.
Indeed, Sipp. Well said.
Spot on Sipp .
Nothing pleases the Evil One more than laws to ban evil things.
I have guns and chainsaws, and I use petroleum to run the latter, so those are all good. But a table leg mortising jig? I think you may have crossed the line with that one! EVILLLLLL!!!
As William Burroughs (an evil man who know a lot about it)wrote: "Anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."
"Things are only useful in practice"
Well put. We can also say that things are only evil in practice. And just as "Hell is other people", it is also true that Heaven is other people.
So the good or evil, the heaven or hell, is not in the thing, or in the people, but only in the practice; in the doing.
In other word, the ends can never justify the means, because the ends derive from the means.
I've been a primary school art teacher for years…14 years in barrio schools and the past 3, in a private school. I miss working with the "disadvantaged" – they knew their hands were for making things.