Sunday, November 22, 2009
POSTING FOR QUESTION 3 HAS ENDED
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Mr. B
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Question A
Question A
Are the kinds of self-sacrifices promoted by the Eastern religions and philosophies neccesarily healthy I have to disagree. Physically Siddhartha went for a long period of time without eating or keeping basic hydriene. Emotionally Siddhartha just up and left his family behind without any word as to whether he will ever come back. That doesn't seem to help make Siddhartha and his wife's relationship stronger and Siddhartha wasn't even around to see his first child being born.
I personally don't think that it is wise to willingly give up your conscious. Even though it may have worked out in some cases for Siddhartha, growing up in the time and society that I have grown up in today I don't need to reach a "higher" conscious, not in the religious sense at least. I understand that there will always be some kind of suffering in the world but that it is balanced out with the good also. There are other ways to try to end suffering without changing who I am and how I think. Yes, my conscious thoughts may be influenced and slightly different than they were when I was younger because I continue to learn and grow, but I would still have some element of my past conscious intact.
Question A
Second, our consciousness is what allows us to function in society. Without any sort of strong inner views, it seems as though it would be very difficult to even get along on a day-to-day basis. If everybody sacrificed themselves in this manner, it seems possible that some sort of uber-peaceful, deep society would exist, but if only a small amount people would do this, it would be difficult to maneuver in society.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Question B
In class we talked about Yin and Yang. To fully comprehend the meaning of life we need to see things in our own and other people’s eyes, we need to see things in each other’s perspectives. If everyone loved the same things and the same people there would be no growth as an individual and as a society, which would make it hard to create a harmonious social order. But to truly create a positive social order we need to respect that we have different views and take them into consideration or else our different views would be pointless. Love is essential but it can not stand alone
Question A
B
Honestly, I think it is impossible for everybody to love everybody. Because we are humans, naturally we are going to have tons of emotions other than love, and one of those emotions is hate. No matter how good a person one is and how much good will and benevolence that person has, there are still going to be people who they dislike or do not respect. We live in a world where there are tons of different ideas and beliefs and because we are human everyone is going to have different opinions about these ideas and beliefs. Now I am not saying that people who have different beliefs can not get along peacefully but I am saying that these differences often cause conflict. So how come society is functioning relatively well as it is while there are so many differences and conflicts? It is because we have standards in our society for how to deal with differences. When there is a problem people respect the law and try to solve issues as peacefully and morally as possible. I have a pretty strong feeling that if we were to simply trust humans to solve all there problems with love and just abolish all our laws and say we no longer need to respect any customs or set guidelines for dealing with certain situations we would have a pretty big problem on our hands. Do not get me wrong, society would probably be pretty hopeless and sad without love but without respect for rituals and customs society would become a chaotic mess.
Question B
First of all mankind is not and never will be perfect. So saying that we should all live in love is a highly unrealistic idea. But it is a good idea to strive to this perfection and realizing that it is a goal that will most likely be unreached but still try and aim for it.
I feel that Love is not the only factor that needs to be considered in this. In order to achieve this society we need to have the experiences of the bad things we are trying to eliminate. This is because in order to reach the good outcome of harmony, we need to experience the trials and tribulations of life. With out them we would never know if we reached our final goal of perfection. This perfect world would be like living in a world much like in the Novel The Giver by Lois Lowry. In this novel everyone is regulated to live pain free lives with out most emotions and seeing everything in black and white. This is what I imagine life to be like if it were lived all in love. We would not know that we lived perfect lives because we would not know anything else. That is why I think that confrontation would be vital to having a perfect world. There would be no conscious way to tell if it were perfect with out the experiences of the Highs and lows in life.
Question B: "All we need is love"
Then the idea of Confucius, needing li or respect for ritual and custom to have pure jen or good will. This would seem more logical to most people as well. Too much love can also create social problems, utopia, so the idea of have a certain balance and following rituals and customs to allow yourself to be peaceful and loving within is a start to being able to be loving and understanding towards others.
Personally, I would have to agree with the idea of Confucius. I think that having this balance is necessary. You need good to knock out the bad, and bad to knock out the good. What will the world come to if EVERYONE is “loving”? Though I do agree that times that we’re in now, where there’s just so much hatred around the world and millions of innocent people are dying rapidly; it would be ideal to just make it all stop. Unfortunately that can’t be done. But if everyone were balanced and loving within themselves, then things would be very different. Not necessarily saying that with this method that we’re going to find world peace, but I definitely feel as though there wouldn’t be as much hatred as we have in the world right now.
Question B
From my experience, many people consider it a message stating that everyone should love everyone, and that in itself will create a perfect world.
Confucious, however, counters both those statements with his belief that a "counterforce" is needed.
As much as I like The Beatles, I'm going to have to go with Confucious on this one. I think his point that we need li to balance out jen is valid, especially in our society. Being happy and loved is obviously important, but think about why we are happier at one point as opposed to another. I'm happy when I get a good grade not only because the grade is good, but also because it is not bad. A contrast of things that are loving and/or "good" is necessary to make us happy. If all we did was love, then the significance of that love would diminish. That is why I must disagree with The Beatles and say that perhaps simply respecting someone is often more beneficial than always loving them. It makes the love all the more important.
Question B
Question B
question b
Question B Response!
There are many views on how to create a harmonious social order and maintain civil and social stability. One may have an optimistic view and say these can be based on a foundation of love and kindness. However, this is highly unlikely as humans allow their own fear of rejection and failure to overpower their will to love. This isn't to say that humans can’t love one another unconditionally or act kindly towards others, but that since the known beginning of mankind, there has never been a society that's been unaffected by anger or fear, thus it is possible to say that humans may be incapable of holding permanent respect for all of mankind and approaching all people and situations with a caring attitude. This approach would be necessary for civil and social stability to be based only on love and kindness.
Others may believe that society won’t allow us to base our interactions only off of the kindness with which we treat others and ourselves, and that kindness and love is only a small factor. Because of the constant fear of failure that humans hold deep within themselves, kindness and love are sometimes difficult for us to express and because of this reluctance, it would make it difficult to build a stable society on those concepts alone. This would be difficult because during the times that people (or even one sole individual) can’t express love and/or kindness, it would throw the society off-balance and therefore make it unstable, even if it is for just a short period of time. Therefore, it would not be society itself that would make a kindness-based society difficult to build and maintain, but rather human nature.
Personally, I believe that social order must be based on more than just love. It isn't realistic to assume that any individual is capable of loving anyone and everyone, especially all the time. While it is a nice ideal, I think that too much is allowed to get in the way of expressing love and performing acts of kindness. Because people have a mentality that makes them strive to achieve things they view as having a higher value, they may think that the concept of love has become of lesser value than something tangible, which they would then incorporate into society instead. Rather than having a society based on kindness, I think that shared beliefs are important. Civil and social stability can be harmonious if a group comes together for a common cause and has a sense of unity and common identity. I think a shared core value and a sense of connection to others can create stability within a society, as people tend to look for things they have in common with each other and they tend to associate and identify with people who have goals, ideas, values, and beliefs that are similar to their own. Overall, stability denotes something that is strong and resistant to change, and when a society is built on something as abstract and ever changing as an emotion, a concept, such as love/kindness, it is difficult to categorize it as “stable.”
Question A- Eastern Religions & Philosophies
In Buddhism, suffering is cause by the attachments and cravings of desire. Therefore, if we end desire than suffering also ends. I think this approach is healthy because it teaches a person that desires like lust, bitterness, and cruelty are not the right way. In Hinduism, a person needs to realize the unity of all existence, knowledge of one’s self and be unselfish to be able to achieve nirvana where they are free from all suffering. I think that this is a healthy way because it benefit’s a person mentally and psychically when they don’t put themselves above everything else. For Taoism, however, I have a different opinion. The Wu Wei basically says that a person needs to do what everyone else is doing. They also need to let things unfold their own way so that there’s no desire outcome or manipulation. As a result, a person is always in a state of non-doing because they are letting others take the decision for them. It is wise to willingly give up our consciousness because you are in search of yourself by reaching higher spiritual levels.
Question B
No matter what, everyone could not give an equal amount of love to every other person in the world. There will always be disagreements, hatred, cruelty, or just indifference towards one another. It’s just human nature. In order for social and civil stability to exist there has to be much more then love. There must be respect, tolerance of other opinions, and conflicts. Of course, there will be disagreements, but that can lead to growth and change. As with li and jen society could not be stable with out opposites. Without conflicting philosophies people wouldn’t be able to learn from each other and create a stronger community. If we all decided to treat each other lovingly then the strength of love would be lost because love cannot exist without the contrast of hate. Opposites must exist to balance each other and create a stronger whole.
Beatles vs Confucious
The beatles make a good point with this song because if there is no corruptive forces on people and all they did was to be kind to others and to love them then society would be peaceful. there would be no need for any control or custom because there would be no uprisings or violent acts against anything. The only problem about this is, I dont believe that the human race could ever just love everyone. Our race is too selfish and greedy, therefore in an ideal world this society may exist but in ours, not a chance!
Response To Question B
Question B: All you need is love(?)
Then there is the view of Confucius that says we also need li, or respect towards rituals and customs to balance out goodwill and benevolence, or jen. With respect to a certain set of rules, many of which involve being loyal to your parents and authority figures, comes social order.
Personally, I see eye to eye with Confucius that we do need more than just love. The world to me seems to be filled with opposites that balance each other out. We learned about Taoism's similar idea of yin and yang, and their idea that opposites are the key to life. So then we come back to Confucius that we need li to balance out jen, which makes sense. The world needs love. That is definitely a fact we can relate to after watching the Westboro Baptist Church invade our turf with signs of hatred. But we also needed to respect their right to protest no matter how much we disagreed with their views. We respected them by letting them come and say what they thought was goodwill, and through this respect of the practice of protesting came social order between the protesters and the students. That and maybe a few cops, yeah, but still there was no violence against any person. This is just one of the many examples of how social order is cause through respect and goodwill. It also proves that examples of Confucius' ideas are present in everyday life, whereas the Beatles would be too difficult to see if it worked because obviously there is too much hate in the world to see what would happen if everybody loved everybody. It's the sad truth.
So in conclusion, I have to agree with Confucius over the Beatles because when deciding between a somewhat realistic idea and a very abstract idea, it's an easy decision.
Blog Response B
Question B- Do we need more than love?
The statement “all you need is love” can only be evaluated if we ignore the improbability of every being on the planet all acting with love instead of fear towards each other. With this new, hypothetical environment in mind, I submit that we need more than love to achieve civil and social stability.
At the moment, human society is unstable because human emotion is unstable. This is because at our core we are all fearful, whether that is fear of death or fear of failure. This fear makes people distrust and even hate each other. If we did not fear but instead trusted one another, society would be better off for it. Without fear of each other, there would be no conflicts over anything from who stole the last cookie to who bombed who. With love as our moral guide, we would have no need to fear each other. Thus, there would be no need for laws to restrict human actions against each other.
While this hypothetical environment would be peaceful and loving, it would not promote social and civil stability as defined above. If social stability is an unchanging society, then benevolence and goodwill (jen) alone would not serve to stabilize society. Instead, pure jen would likely erase what differentiates any culture from another. If civil stability is an unchanging system of governance, pure jen would make for an unstable government. Benevolence alone cannot rule a people or save a culture. It is only with respect for ritual and custom (li) that social and civil stability can be accomplished.
With such respect, the rituals and customs of a society would be preserved, leading to the social stability of members of that culture. With li, the laws and systems of government that were pre-established would be preserved as well, which is the definition of civil stability.
Taking all of this into account, it is apparent that love and the preservation of cultures together would be the foundation of social and civil stability.
Question B
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Question B Response
Another possible way of looking at this is accepting completely the fact that we should all simply be kind to each other. While some might argue that this is impossible in our society that does not make it impossible. If we were to set up our civilization in another way it could be possible. The reason it couldn't work now is because we seem to live in a very hostile and competitive world. Any child growing up is exposed to this and because of that it would take something very drastic to change our current society to one that is simply based on love and kindness.
Some might say that it is not our society, but out nature that keeps us from being completely harmonious as a people. History tells us that at no time has the entire world truly been at peace since man became man(or since we kept records).
Nevertheless, the possibility of this situation is not the question. What we are really aiming at is whether this society would create a harmonious social order.
Lets say that somehow, the circumstances around it are not important, the world comes together as one. All fighting stops and we agree to be a single people. This sounds like a great world, and it might be. But don't our greatest satisfactions come from the absence of failures? When I do well on an essay, perhaps I get an A, I am celebrating the fact that I did not receive an B, C, D, or E. In a kind, loving society this everyday rejection would not occur. Our whole society is based on the absence of failure.
A society that only loved and was only kind could exist. However, it would not progress as ours has. Yes, we would get along better. But wouldn't our loss of sadness decrease our happiness? I think so.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Blog Post 3: Eastern Wisdom
Question A: Is the kind of self-sacrifice is promoted by the Eastern religions and philosophies we’ve studied healthy? Is it wise to willingly give up our consciousness in search of a “higher” one?
OR
Question B: The Beatles sang that “All we need is love.” However, Confucious held that, even if it were possible, treating everyone lovingly would not create a harmonious social order. He posited that li, respect for ritual and custom, was an important and necessary counterforce to pure jen, or good will and benevolence. Do you agree that a civil and social stability cannot be based merely on being kind and loving to everyone? If not, what else is needed? Explain your answer.
POST DUE: Thursday, November 12 by start of class.
2 RESPONSES TO POSTS DUE: Monday, November 16 by the start of class.
Note: Remember to create your own post for your main response (your teacher modeled this in class). That way, people will be able to click on the word “comment” below your post to respond to what you said.