Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law,

Do What Thou Wilt is not the same as do what you want.

It refers to the True Will, the essential path a particular individual must take to realize the potential lying in their own talents and inclinations. It does not refer to passing whims and desires.

Shinyblurry, the spiritual paranoia you are expressing here is definitely a sign of self-restriction. I'm not talking about restriction from hurting other people to get your own way, or restriction from harming oneself by indulging unwisely in drugs, alcohol, or sex. I mean restriction from developing yourself spiritually, from working to attain a direct vision of the divine.

To escape these bonds you would, of course, have to give up the comfort of pat answers and easy decisions. You would have to face the awful realization that no one, really, is telling you what to do. You would have to abandon the warm embrace of a spiritual father figure who tells you where you stand in the universe. These are difficult things to give up.

But they are necessary if you want to grow up spiritually, if you don't want to remain a child for the rest of your life.

Love is the Law, Love Under Will

The cop is probably more or less okay. He'll be sore with some soft tissue damage. He'll probably need to see a chiropractor, and he might have an injury to his knees.That's assuming he had an airbag in the car--I think I heard the pop as it deployed. It'll be very painful, but probably not anything you can't recover from.

I'm more worried about the driver of the van. Vehicles these days do really well with front-end collisions, with various safety features in the car design, including impact cages and airbags that pop at greater or less speed based on the speed of the collision. Side-impact collisions are a lot more dangerous. Even if there are airbags, the geometry of the car just won't stand up as well. People hit like that tend to be a lot more likely to sustain serious injury. Probably the biggest risk, assuming the driver was wearing their seat belt, would be the driver's head striking the door window. She would have at least a concussion, possibly serious injuries to her left leg, and soft tissue damage up and down the right side of her body.

I'm a customer service associate for a major insurance company. My job is basically to take new claims from people who have been in accidents. The good news is that since I've started the job, I've learned just how safe our cars are these days. It's relatively rare even with highway accidents that people are seriously injured as long as we're talking about something like straight on damage or a collision at an angle. (A head-on collision is obviously going to be a lot more dangerous. Fortunately, the van did come in at an angle, so the cop car didn't take nearly as much force as it could have.)

Side-impact collisions are what send people to the hospital these days. Drive careful, folks!

There are far more mistruths in this interview.

He (I believe in part 3) that he has never had to submit a retraction of anything he has said. This is blatantly false. Though it's no longer on his website, for years he did have an article on Wallbuilders apologizing for his use of supposed quotes from the Founders for which no source could be found--quotes in some of his earliest books.

He claims that John Adams seriously meant to say that the Holy Spirit was a necessary foundation for just government in a letter to Benjamin Rush. He even invites people to go on his website and view the original in its entirety. If you go there and read it for yourself, you will clearly see that, as John Stewart averred, the statement is clearly ironic. Immediately after describing a view that says all legitimate government must be blessed by the Holy Spirit, Adams decries this view in the strongest terms as deceptive and inspiring awful fanaticism.

Barton claims that the Unitarians did not reject the trinity until 1839. This is also blatantly false. It was in 1839 that the Unitarians came together as a formal body. Before then, the Unitarians were largely a disorganized religious movement. But the rejection of the Trinity by the Unitarians occurred well before the Revolution. The preaching of the unity of God, as opposed to the Trinity of God, preceded its adoption by a formal body.

Barton notes that the Treaty of Tripoli as held in the State department archives indeed does not have an Article 11. But he falsely claims that the original did not have this article. But we know for a fact that the Treaty as signed by the President, and as published in numerous newspaper throughout the country, did indeed contain this article. It was not until later that it was somehow removed from the State department archives--perhaps by someone embarrassed by its statement that the US is NOT a Christian nation.

Barton's characterization of the text of the treaty is also incorrect. Read the text of the article itself. It very clearly states, with no caveats, that the United States government is "not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." The following clauses do add focus and weight to the statement, making it clear that the intent of including this passage was indeed to clarify that the government of the US has not enmity toward Islam. But these clarifying statements do not change the broad qualifier "in any sense."

In nearly every case in this interview, when Barton makes a declarative statement about history, the history he presents is either false or misleading.

Ye gods, QM, do you have anything to say that isn't a reactionary cliche? How boring.

I've watched it twice now.

That man has clearly spent a great deal of time with the sword. I know it looks ridiculous--and the suit doesn't help at all--but he pulls off some fairly difficult cuts with fairly smooth form. He cuts a water-filled two-liter cleanly in two. At one point, he tosses one into the air with his sword, and easily divides it on the way down.

At no point was he flailing or out of control. I didn't even see him over-swing.

I'm definitely a critic of some of the things Dan Savage says. His attitudes about bisexual and transgender folk are... not terribly helpful, for instance. (A bisexual man who happens to end up in a long-term relationship with a woman is suddenly /not/ bisexual anymore? Really? And if he ends up with another man he's just gay? Sorry, Dan, doesn't work that way.)

The It Gets Better campaign, however, is just fantastic.

Hell, wouldn't you get in bed with Criss Angel?

Yowza!

>> ^legacy0100:

Far East Asian media is dominated by feminine mentality simply because the female audience and fan participation vastly outnumber the male audience. Both men and women in public media are depicted as people with feelings and pretty hair and such. But this doesn't mean there's less domestic violence in Asian cultures.
In fact, there are more unreported domestic abuse in Asian countries than there are in United States. People also fight, people get hit by cars, people get killed in Asian countries with the same rate as any other countries. How do you explain that according to your ad images?

The valuing of the masculine over the feminine doesn't need to be advertised in East Asian culture; it's taken as read. Fish don't advertise water. In Japan, for instance, it's extremely difficult to find a career as a woman that would come close to the social status and earning potential that men can acquire.

I think you're conflating individualist values with masculine values, to be quite honest. There is nothing "masculine" about cooperation, and nothing inherently "feminine" about individualism. The reason the Northern European peoples were able to have female leaders going back centuries had everything to do with their individualism, and not much to do with their masculinism; they shared the latter with their military foes, and only with the valuing of the individual was it possible to conceive of, for example, Queen Boadicea, who gave the Romans so much difficulty in Britain.

Eh?

I'm not an atheist, myself. And I don't think atheists get too much of a home advantage here. It's kinda nice to see them feel free to talk about their beliefs; it doesn't happen nearly as often as it should.

Of course, Christianity doesn't quite get much positive press here, but that's as it should be. 1,500 years of getting to hang or burn at the stake everyone who didn't agree with them is plenty of time enough. Give someone else a turn, guys.

Not being a biologist, I feel free to say that this creature's strange magnificence is purpose enough to flash like fire in the seas. For me, at any rate.

This video makes it seem like there are no good reasons to want to avoid deflation. But the vast majority of economists recognize that it's a bad thing. And they're probably right.

The lower costs of deflation are good for consumers in the short term, for certain. But lower prices means less production--companies just aren't going to be able to afford to pump out as many goods or provide as many services. That means companies can't afford to hire as many people. There will probably be layoffs.

The result of this would likely be that, since people have less money, companies will yet again have to lower prices in order to sell their goods. Which means more layoffs, which means lower prices, and so on. A downward spiral as deflation increases.


I wish the people who make these kinds of videos would at least take Economics 101 at their local college--heck, a community college would probably do.

I can't help but wonder, given the rather low-key Republican response to the recent court findings on Prop 8, whether his choosing to come out is part of a larger strategy to reform the Republican image on gay rights.

Wait, why doesn't this belong in the sexuality channel, exactly? Pregnancy and birth are huge aspects of human sexuality.

Yeah, I noticed this during the movie. Quite clever.

Heh, this showed up on the Sift just the next day after I started giving serious consideration to joining the O.T.O.

As it happens, it's the only serious initiatory order with a presence within three hundred miles, so far as I can find. And, having bought a copy of Crowley's Thoth Tarot years ago, I've finally begun seriously studying it. Beautiful artwork, profound symbolism.>> ^gwiz665:

Ultimately Crowley was as hypocritical as the religions he disliked though, creating his own based on Magick and weirdness. As usual the small cults are based on hedonism and sex, and while everyone likes that, it doesn't make for intellectual honesty. Magick isn't real.


Crowley repeatedly cautioned against ascribing objective reality to the phenomena experienced in the practice of magic. Which is why he phrased the first goal of magic in such a ridiculous fashion as "the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel." It is absurd, precisely in order to remind seekers that ascribing objective reality to such theories is always absurd. He did all sorts of things like this. He asked followers, for instance, to align their rituals so that "East" in the books always faced his home--indirectly indicating that it was entirely arbitrary what direction one faces.

People who assiduously practice magick really do have visions; experience communication with demons, angels, and gods; experience mystic transport; and realize the integration of the self. The reality of the experience trumps, for Crowley, any "objective" claims.

>> ^enoch:

"do what thou whilt may it harm none" was a traditional pagan saying

Eh, not really. Most pagans prior to the rise of Christianity would have shuddered at the statement, aside from a handful of obscure philosophers. Certainly not Plato, Pythagoras, or any of the other pagan writers so often accorded great spiritual insight.

Though such formulations do begin to make an appearance whenever Paganism arises in post-Christian contexts.