Renewable Revolution

Thank you Surly and GO for responding in gentlemanly Diner mode.   

I try to be polite here but, beneath the surface, if I let loose, my tirades would leave Karpatok in the dust! Early on, she recognized me as a potential freedom fighter and used all her considerable rhetorical skills and vocabulary to try to shame me into going out there and kicking some empire ass. Don't believe for a second that I haven't considered it. But Christianity, the real kind, does not justify tit for tat, period. Raulito figured that out towards the end.

Here, From Chomsky, is another reason I have very little patience for claims of an evil encroaching presence in the world (NOBODY has one upped the USA YET, GO).

Chomsky on the REALLY evil empire.   


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeaqOfvPiMc&feature=player_embedded


My Cousin was a great actor. But he was every bit as angered by, and FAR MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE of, than most people in the USA in general, and the Doomstead Diner in particular, of the LEVEL of EVIL in this world and WHO is RESPONSIBLE for it.

THAT is what is just below the surface in Agelbert. Raulito reconverted back to Catholicism after doing the movie Romero. He went from Catholic as a child to Buddhist for most of his life and Catholic at the end. You can claim it was due to his method acting technique.   I suspect the IN YOUR FACE reality of massive evil in this world had something to do with it, PARTICULARY what PREDATORY CAPITALIST TERRORISM FUNDED BY OUR TAX DOLLARS visited on El Salvador. The Crusades, the Inquisition and ISIS butchery all amount to PEANUTS compared with the BUTCHERY in Latin America by OUR GOONS.

When you are a person that walks the talk, like Raulito, it gets REAL HARD to pretend there IS NO GOOD AND NO EVIL EITHER as the core beliefs of monism require.  He fought ALL HIS LIFE to live his principles through good deeds and millions of dollars in funding nutrition programs for the poor, not just to FEED the poor, but to get them a job and/or some land to FEED THEMSELVES, freedom movements for the politically oppressed and the defense of the environment in places like Brazil where Mking's pals KILL people for defending the rainforest,

Monism and Ethics

In accounting for the origin of evil, a problem which, though it belongs to metaphysics, has important bearings on ethical questions, some philosophers have adopted a Dualistic doctrine and explained that good and evil originate from two distinct principles, the one supremely good, the other completely and absolutely evil.

This was the doctrine of the ancient Persians, from whom it was borrowed by Manes, the founder of the Manichean sect.

Opposed to this is the Monistic view, that God is indeed the cause of all that is good in the universe, and that evil is not to be assigned to any supreme cause distinct from God. Whatever explanation be given of the existence of evil in the world, it is maintained that a supreme principle of evil is utterly impossible and even inconceivable.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10483a.htm

Monism is magical thinking in a world where evil agency exists that is opposed to good, and MUST BE fought! Karpatok believes that spiritual warfare is magical thinking. I beg to differ. I engage in it RIGHT HERE (and other places  ). And I will die doing it because it is the most efficacious way to FIGHT EVIL, PERIOD.

GO, believe it or not, I have a LOT more common ground with you  than you are aware of. Thomas Jefferson said that if you have a government powerful enough to protect you from all enemies and provide for your every need, you also have a government powerful enough to TAKE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE AWAY FROM YOU.

We are there. 

THAT, as you have said often, is EVIL. I agree.