One considers the universe to be "an organism", however and whyever it is here (wherever "here" is), and notes that it is changing, evolving, etc., without speculating upon its origins or end--one, I suggest, must then equate "acts of God' with "acts of Nature". Europeans in ancient Greece and Rome, a brilliant few, first framed this vital conceptual connection, as "philosophers".Our Founders in the United States--returning via the Renaissance to Greco-Roman Republic ideas, made that exact equation also; and they did this despite their lip service and genuine practiced devotions toward "religiosity" and its necessary actions.
So, in accepting the as yet and sometimes eternally "uncontrollable" within the space-time universe, we do not need, I assert, to forego self assertion in Reality as a theatre-of-operations... Instead we must only carefully avoid the "elephant walk" hubris of trying to ignore or wish reality out of existence (the basis of "postmodernism" and all totalitarianisms, I suggest); and instead of pretending to knowledge that we do not possess, we ought instead to carefully equate 'knowledge' with: "Understanding of anything real in Nature or man-created and real as requiring us to comprehend the inner workings of whatever this is on the basis of its prioritized 5 to 6 absolutely necessary, most important or most central functional or structural workings or parts, described with full parameters of amount and states, influences, conditions, etc., considered in prioritized functional order or sequence."
In this pursuit, I suggest that, avoiding dogmatic and dictatorial and reality-annihilating schemes, each man can then claim the sovereignty of his own mind by means of studying reality in order to gain categorizing or "science-level" knowing, and the learned and mastered benefit of such actions as make this mental attainment and its ultimate full absorption possible. Such categorizing mental activity is thus seen to be the basis of 'education'; of learning how to do this sort of thinking under supervision and then applying it to word definitions, basic grammatical architecting of ideas and knowledge into reality pictures, of decoding and communicating these, along with applying these to practcing and learning msterings of physical sport, artistic expression, physical activities, etc. for one's growth.
This then becomes "Education: categorical training in how to think successfully as a perfectly self-assertive denizen and capital investing purposer acting within the Reality space-time secular universe". Each man capable of self-responsibility in this regard--the educated proto adult ego--needs thereafter to be free to check what he thinks he has seen, comprehended, felt, learned and formulated into a categorizing definition or "rule of science", a way of proceeding, etc. And proceeding by tiers called "readiness levels", gaining experience requisite to higher and higher levels of personal and local, county, state, and national performances, the individual grows toward 37 1/2 to 45 year-old full adulthood, both as a self and as a citizen of a society of responsible and responsibly governed interacting others.
This is the European idea in a nutshell; that society is a responsibility; yet in the ancient models, it was never wholly separated from otherworldly schemes. But to a great degree, I assert, there was such a de facto segregation as to the actions men undertook in the real world, such that the excessively pious or unrealistic man as well as the man who strove to interfere unnecessarily with other men's beliefs and practices would both be blamed and held up as a negative example.
The separation therefore of otherworld and thisworld was imperfect even in ancient Europe; but early Christians for instance had no problem knowing that they must give up this world in order to practice an approximation of life in the "nextworld", which is exactly what they did as anchorites or in communities at the beginnings of Christianity, for instance. (The fact that they took their children along or gave birth to children therein is extremely unfortunate, but it does not alter the essence of what, I believe, they thought they were doing.)
But ancient states' leaders never managed, I argue, except in the case of the Ionian Greeks, to establish the idea of a secular government; of a government which expected responsible actions of its citizens not as a sacrifice but as a duty of fully human-level or "civilized-societal" existence being lived under reality-based earthly conditions.
We are still paying a very heavy price 2500 years later for that philosophical breakdown. And the secondary problem, the one that destroyed the Greek experiment in democratic election (largely) I assert was that as non-secular or quasi-secular states ruled by de facto infallible, mystically-correct leaders, the Greek city states were unable to conceive a basis on which in emergencies to concord their separate polis-based "political interests" as an interfunctioning whole. My argument is that while such city states had no trouble in forming leagues, they did so without successfully solving the question of "states' rights versus central authority". For that matter, neither did the Romans, although postmodernist academics praise their efforts in this regard all tool loudly.
The proof that any man or any state is on the 'right' track toward separating otherworld from thisworld comprises three arguments thereafter.
1. Having claimed liberty, one then asks any man what he can DO with his knowledge in real space-time. And if he cannot understand, define, teach, repair, improve, predict, control nor become happier through what he knows--he is a called a false prophet, pretender or worse. Such I claim as were Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush (both born-agains), Napoleon, Metternich, Hitler, Lenin, St. Paul, Frederick the Great, James I of England, all pseudo-Christian monarchs or their equivalent, etc.. and all the others throughout history from Plato to the present who have mixed otherworldist or antithisworldlist philosophy with practical secularity, under the aegis of postmodernist status quo protecting public interest tyranny or "pragmatism".
2. Those who argue "human insufficiency", the insufficiency of humans, as did Freud, Plato, Jesus, Genghis Khan, every caesar, Tolstoy, L. Ron Hubbard, Billy Graham, Edna Ferber, Karl Marx, etc., have been using this provable falsehood as a shield - to stop men from discovering the inadequacies of their own pretensions to knowledge and "infallible leader" or "mystical-influential source of wisdom thinker status".
3. The only way to avoid this power-seeker being mistaken for a secular (practical) leader paradox, I claim, is to require a categorizing definition and/or a demonstration of capabilities, evaluations, etc. that work by someone who is claiming practical "powers" on Earth; those that are supposed to be effective for someone investing human values or capital by doing work upon and within Reality.
All we as thisworldly thinkers can want and need therefore, whether in Europe or in the United States, is legal freedom. One needs as a self liberty from restraints, to be uninterfered with in thinking for ourselves; to be enabled to seek forms of knowing and neither be enslaved to nor to make slaves of anyone else; rather we seek to deal with others through signing "limited partnerships" or implicit or explicit agreements concerning our mutual ideas and exchanges of values, hirings, votings and non-fictional and fictional media expressions, etc.
We do this virtual signing of an agreement I suggest every time we buy a can of corn, purchase a work of fiction or talk to someone. We as human minds, born without knowing how to know nor kowing anything, need some form of clear categorizing information at the start, before we ever get involved with a product, an idea or another person (even if we have been 'educated"; and we manifestly also require freedom to enter into mutually contracted agreements within a marketplace of ideas and actions, productions and evaluations - freedom from being stopped from doing so or being forced to do so against our evaluations, priorities and judgments, and in case we have been lied to or are otherwise liable to be shortchanged in a value-for-value dealing via any form of collectivizing crime: force, fraud, coercion, illicit blackmail, property damage or breach of contract.
This is why I claim when one goes to church, one visits those living a religious life (in retreat from a world where their ideas contradict a thisworldly life); but even if I or anyone else went to stay in a monastery and obeyed all the anti-worldly organizations "house" rules, that would still not make me or anyone else 'religious' - it would make me a guest in some religious persons' house, in their chosen approximated-otherworldly universe, in their simulation of a categorically-different space-time, one which they consider to be preferable to and much better enough or much worse enough than thisworld in order to require their abandonment of the secular space-time realm.
This too was a European idea; the extensive monastic system which was constructed during two millennia was the outgrowth of the recognition bu Europeans, one which nearly all Asians and Africans did not agree with, that simulation of otherworldly existence was both possible and necessary to those who had given up thisworld for the next and reason for faith. This triumph of European practicality is still being maintained in many places. But its basis - the categorical separation between otherworld and thisworld as theatres-of-operation is under fraudulent and dangerous attack in many quarters.
Those who find any such interpersonal trading contacts by one free person with any other stimulating must be freed, I argue, to seek out antiworldly or thisworldly persons, for whatever reason they choose; but predominantly, I argue, one must be compelled under regulation of law to choose between giving up this world for a supposedly much better or worse other, and living by thisworld's rules. One cannot live I assert with "one foot in heaven"; one cannot live with half a brain on Earth and the other half citing rules that do not apply in this space-time. The morality, ethics and science of thisworld it must be admitted cannot be mixed with those belonging to a significantly different universe.
No man can claim to act reasonably, to be paying regard to others' rights, nor to be self-responsible toward reality so long as he is using the phrase, "God, my gangster boss, my sect's leaders, my generalissimo, or ineffable mystic urges told me to do x, y or zed." This has to be a true man's logic, because once such a principle of contradiction is introduced into humans' inter-citizen behavior, it is precisely like introducing poison into food: the additive has no value, and all it does moreover is to poison the life-value of that which it ruins, to the exact degree in fact it is believed or employed. Or both.
That is why it is demonstrable that less-overtly sectarian nations' citizens, such as the ancient Greeks, Republican Romans, and European constitutional societies, whatever their shortcomings, protected and avenged individuals' philosophy as "the concern of each secular self only, not of a government', vastly outperform members of societies whose leaders handed spears, swords or guns to sectarian believers (to be pointed at the minds of youngsters being educated and later choosing for themselves either worldly or otherworldly milieus), and at citizens trying to get on with creating their lives in Reality space-time by investing life-positives (or 'capital') and doing practical work on space-time reality.
Albert Einstein, Ayn Rand and I all agree on one single point. "You must treat reality as if it were real". When asked how he could study the laws of the universe and maintain that he was religious, the physicist replied, in effect, "When I study physics, I have to forget about that." That was, I suggest, the correct answer. The Rand-Cerello Law states the same idea a bit differently: "You cannot fake reality in any way and still expect to succeed in creating results in the real universe."
There is a day in the U.S. that our nation's citizens once celebrated as their "Independence Day" - not from British Imperial leaders alone but from any would-be tyrants' control as well. I am proud to invite all the readers of this journal to renew the former American commitment to a Renaissance for America, for Europe, and, eventually, for the rest of the world and planets men will inexorably colonize in the long result...
This will be one in which the Ionian and American idea of a secular state, a marketplace of lives, ideas and actions, of values and contracts inhabited by individuals free to think for themselves and free to choose thisworldly or otherworldly spheres is zealously guarded by our empowered public servants; one in which no man is brainwashed nor by any other crime deprived of the freedom to think for himself and then in prioritized purposfulness to act on behalf of his own life good as he rationally conceives it, among but neither for nor against others.
Now the individuals and leaders of the European Union are wrestling with the great problem of creating the sort of league-based constitution which the ancient Greeks and the Romans and the United States' in regard to its individual sub-states have failed to create for three thousand years. We wish them well; and we will be watching (of course) with avid interest to assess the progress or failures of such an undertaking.
This problem (I assert) can never be solved on a federal or imperial or union-league level. Its basis is a fundamental and category-level (absolute) contradiction between thisworldly and otherworldly philosophies, and between what such incompatible ideas enjoin as practicable actions upon their adherents...
Just as grammar is the structural-architectural basis of thisworldly or any other universe-based statements or non-fictional truths or fictional analogue-utterances, fantasies for the sake of ideas, etc., so too constitutional regulations of how men must operate and co-operate as self and among others are the structural-architectural basis of thisworldly statements of non-fictional constitutional truth and of practical results-making, result-maintaining, result-trading and result-expenditures, maintainings or consumings.
In other words, the unit upon which the constitution of the EU, Rome, Greece, the British Empire / Commonwealth, ancient China, or the US should have been based was the 45-year-old adult self acting responsibly toward the moral secular universe and toward all other persons. I claim it is only on this basis, the Ionian-American basis, that any organization of citizens, in non-emergency conditions, can and must be organized to function effectively in space-time.
We read with misgivings about a Europe whose leaders have been oligarchs, divine-right adherents and socialist or statist incompetents for centuries. We worry when they cannot agree on an energy policy, elective and responsibility sharing schemes, economic safeguards and the like; just for the same reason, we cheer when we see barriers torn down between nations that have been maintained for centuries, such as easing border-crossing restrictions and fomenting cooperation where contradictory competition existed before.
But the reality behind the opportunity, risk and probabilities of changing European nations into a truly lasting, effective and legal union is that they are still being poisoned by the pseudo-religious pretensions, bureaucratic corruption and unadmitted postmodernist infallible-leader schemes harbored by many of their member states' inadequate leaders. Despite the brilliance of their artistic and cultural attainments over the centuries, without categories being defined and set constitutionally in place, these achievements have been poisoned over the same centuries by otherworldly and anti-thisworldist ideas.
When presented with the idea of liberty for all individuals, French thinkers rather quickly reacted extremely negatively to the entire idea; as did those who might have been expected to embrace it most fully - men of England, Central Europe, Protestant Holland and Germany, for instance. Even now, hundreds of years after "republicanism" was adduced as a challenge to totalitarianism in governmental schemes, the uprisings of 1848 have scarcely I suggest achieved a sufficient result in changing governments' behaviors for us to be able as thinkers to argue that a secure future for individual rights can be posited on any continent.
Realism is a selfish matter, I assert. And I argue it a matter defined solely by categorizing concepts. These are:
A) The existence of Reality (space-time) as a theater-of-operations (Nature);
B) the reality of the universe as what it is, a naturally-developed system free of any deific or otherworldly influence, powers, creations, etc; and
C) the Natural operations of that theatre-of-operations as what it is, free of all contradictions, beliefs, and opinions that men can maintain toward it.
If and when the EU's leaders return to the Ionian individual as the building block of their nuclear organization, I suggest they may then achieve the progress which we as denizens of the planet hope for for them and for all. Until they do, so, I assert that they must fail to achieve anything of lasting worth on secular Earth.
This will be so because they will be seeking to put into practice otherworldly ideas--concepts having an imperfect basis in real space-time. And what therefore they will effectively be doing is what men did after 1902, when they assumed the elections and public-interest governmental pretensions were all that was necessary to human governance, society and happiness.
They will I claim be sowing the seeds of a vast disappointment; one whose cynicism and unhappiness may further poison the enterprise they have boldly sought to extend to millions after so many centuries of avoidance, denial and misgovernment.
Therefore, here's to a human future - a future of individuals' responsibly wielding rights, careful regard for others and their prioritied liberty, using clear categorizing thoughts and leading to categories of definition, interpersonal contractings for mutual benefit, and to carefully-specified responsibilities for checking those thoughts back against the reality which is our theatre-of-operations and our home as men...and not against biblical nor pseudo-divine ideas about "leadership" and other imperialist purposings.
I praise therefore the Ionian Dawn and the American idea, at last; for as "Star Trek's" creator argued, "The human adventure is just beginning."
Mediterre
I love the style call'd 'Mediterre": walls white,
With frescoes, stripes, cool running-key motif;
Tall columns propping roofs whose whose form (in brief)
Bulks simple or ornate. Above--blue skies
(Azure or lapis) fretted with bubble-shap'd clouds;
Strong stone walls embrace;; wharves stretch on for miles;
Dozing, lav'd by white rays, long sleepy isles
Apex in a fierce peaks; waves warm winds provoke
Lave shores white, sun-drench'd; harbors face to the East,
Where yachts bob, fishing boats; biremes once seem'd
No diff'rent here (that once serv'd vivid dreams
Of Greek or Roman)...This is style (at least),
When urns scorn huee, blue awnings serve strong use;
Where rug, jar, platter, cloth serve--and often stun;
And glass andtesseract each dawn glow like new...
True Glory T'was
Athens--forget! Ionia I sing....
Here is where selfhood-secular was birth'd.
Think of that Dawn Age! First upon this Earth
Men shrugg'd the yoke of deity and king,
Of tribe's extortions. Minds liberate and glad
Gaz'd from their mild shore on a wider sea--
A world of lands, isles, peoples--then set hands
To building ships, walls, temples, moles, maps, plans,
The strategy to change a world of darks,
Fears, harms, myths, dangers to a charted zone!
They fac'd a daunting hope, each man alone,
Together (in war defensive) taking up arms
To win to mutual joys. We love them still--
The rights they claim'd, their governance, their bold,
Young unstain'd courage--for Man's, not Zeus's will!
...by Robert David Michael Cerello
