_________ On FRIDAY the THIRTEENTH _________
Fools to nonsense eagerly lend credence.
Reality they shun; it’s too complex.
Instead vacuity will take precedence.
Divorcing thought from action often wrecks
Any hope of living ruled by Reason.
Yet, it’s easier to follow than to lead.
This laziness makes for a crazy season
Harming our best chances to succeed.
Ignorance we cling to with great pride
Resisting solid knowledge with great strength.
The narrow we respect, reject the wide,
Enjoy old wives’ tales we’ve been told at length.
Enraptured by Tradition’s constipation
Nurtures comfort in stultification.
~ FreeThinke (9/13/13)
Awesome, FT. You have a great gift. I'm glad you're sharing it here again. Please don't let anyone's nonsense stop you this time.
ReplyDeleteHelen Highwater
A wonderful piece! I did some research, on the internet, to see where the "poisonous number 13" originated. It has followed us for millennia even to the point of tall buildings having no 13th floor. It seems to have started in Persia when a "mogul" had 12 people for dinner. As they sat down his doorman announced the arrival of an old friend traveling through, seeking shelter for the night. So the host invited him in and placed a 13th chair at the table. During dinner, someone, (perhaps the guest who sat in the 13th chair) became deathly ill and died. Everyone was convinced, by their "vacuity," as you put it, that it was caused by that 13th chair.
ReplyDeleteYou are so right in saying that many of us are still conditioned by that type of ignorance.
The Joy is there are now increasing numbers of people like you in science and many disciplines who are waking to truth and sharing their joyful awareness.
J. Erwin Solomon
I'd always associated Friday 13th with witchcraft and superstition. Upon checking a little deeper I found an interesting unverified link to that venerable institution, the Church of Rome, A french king and of course, the Pope (Pope Boniface VIII) which has a certain ring of truth to it since it's history related...
ReplyDelete" "The king of France at the turn of the fourteenth century was known as an uncommonly handsome man. He was called Philip le Bel, the Beautiful, an ironic epithet for a king of Gothic pitilessness. Because of the French king's constant financial problems, relations between Paris and Rome had degenerated into a ludicrous state. The Beautiful had exhausted all the usual mediaeval methods for balancing the books. He had stolen property, he had arrested all the Jews, he had devalued his currency. As a last resort, he tried to tax the church.
"Pope Boniface VIII was a fat and dissolute pontiff. One contemporary described him as "nothing but eyes and tongue in a wholly putrefying body . . . a devil." The Beautiful himself openly referred to him as, "Your Fatuity." But Boniface knew the rules of the game as well...
The Beautiful issued charges, in absentia, against the pope himself, alleging blasphemy, sorcery, and sodomy.
The pope excommunicated the Beautiful. He compared the French to dogs and hinted that they lacked souls. His nuncios leaked a rumor that the pontiff might well excommunicate the entire country.
The peasants were stirred by such threats and the Beautiful quickly grasped that revolution was a better future to them than excommunication. So he acted fast, dispatching an army to Anagni, where the pope was staying. He placed the eighty-six-year-old pontiff under house arrest. The locals managed to save him, but a month later Boniface passed away. Some allege he succumbed to shock at the outrage; other sources say that he beat his head against a wall until he died.
After a pliable pope assumed office, the Beautiful returned to his economic problems. His wife died in 1305, and since he no longer would have to kiss a woman's lips, he applied for membership in the Knights Templar. The permanent knights of the Paris Temple may have suspected that his intentions were less than pious and did something almost unspeakable: they blackballed the king.
The following year, the grand master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, returned to Europe from the Mediterranean in a show of luxury. He was accompanied by sixty knights and a baggage train of mules laden with gold and jewels.
So in the fall of 1307, the Beautiful arranged a state action impressive even in these days of data highways and rapid deployment teams. On September 14 he mass-mailed a set of sealed orders to every bailiff, seneschal, deputy and officer in his kingdom. The functionaries were forbidden under penalty of death to open the papers before Thursday night. October 12.
The following Friday morning, alert to their secret instructions, armies of officials slipped out of their barracks. By sundown nearly all the Knights Templar throughout France were in jails. One estimate puts the arrests at two thousand, another as high as five thousand. Only twenty escaped. The initial charges were vague, but they didn't sound good: "A bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing horrible to think of and terrible to hear, a detestable crime, an execrable evil, an abominable act, a repulsive disgrace, a thing almost inhuman, indeed alien to all humanity, has, thanks to the reports of several trustworthy persons, reached our ear, smiting us grievously and causing us to tremble with the utmost horror." What followed was so foul, according to folklore, that Templar sympathizers cursed the day itself, condemning it as evil--Friday the thirteenth--whose reputation never recovered."
What's up with your return to the blogosphere, an urge to cast pearls to the swine or some sort of masochism?
Hello, Waylon,
ReplyDeleteWednesday a sincere sense of duty to memorialize 911 "lest we forget" compelled me to post once again.
Today it was an uncontrollable urge to resist and refute the absurdity of TRISKAIDEKAPHOBIA -- the erudite, recondite, esoteric polysyllabic term for "irrational fear of the number thirteen."
I've never left the blogosphere. I continually post at other blogs nearly every day.
What happens next remains to be seen.
I had hoped to run into you at other blogs, but so far it hasn't happened.
Thanks for that intriguing horror story from 14th century France. I know the Knights Templar were not only imprisoned they were tortured, mutilated and horribly murdered
The struggle for power based on Vanity, Pride, Envy, Covetousness, and Greed pursued with barbaric cruelty and feral cunning has always been the scourge of humanity -- the primary cause of misery on earth.
From Shakespeare's Julius Caesar...
ReplyDeleteThe fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves...
So glad to see you posting again, FT! Especially poetry!
F*ck "tradition/ custom" as sources of truth, eh, FT! :P
ReplyDeleteNietzsche, "Will to Power"
ReplyDelete20 (Spring-Fall 1887)
The nihilistic question "for what?" is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside-by some superhuman authority. Having unlearned faith in that, one still follows the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally and command goals and tasks. The authority of conscience now steps up front (the more emancipated one is from theology, the more imperativistic morality becomes) to compensate for the loss of a personal authority. Or the authority of reason. Or the social instinct (the herd). Or history with an immanent spirit and a goal within, so one can entrust oneself to it. One wants to get around the will, the willing of a goal, the risk of positing a goal for oneself; one wants to rid oneself of the responsibility (one would accept fatalism). Finally, happiness--and, with a touch of Tartuffe, the happiness of the greatest number.
One says to oneself:
1. a definite goal is not necessary at all,
2. cannot possibly be anticipated.
Just now when the greatest strength of will would be necessary, it is weakest and least confident. Absolute mistrust regarding the organizing strength of the will for the whole.
Embrace a "new" and "novel" source of truth. Your own will.
F-ck Tradition as a possible source for Truth?
ReplyDeleteIt all depends on WHOSE Tradition -- and the mentality it represents. Of course I am opposed to MINDLESS adherence to ANY mode of thinking.
Truth is constant -- indeed, the ONLY constant -- but our understanding of Truth needs constant maintenance, overhaul and occasional updating, because our mortal perceptions are flawed and need fine tuning all the time if we are to stay on a benevolent, productive course that allows the greatest possible freedom for the individual.
The ONLY rule is The Golden Rule. How to follow it is where we run into difficulty, because of the human appetite for incessant conflict and one-upmanship.
The penchant for being ARGUMENTATIVE may very well be The Root of All Evil.
...and conversly, "slavishness" the root of all good???
ReplyDeleteJust remember, FT, the winner of an argument gains nothing, but the looser gains access to the "truth". ;)
ReplyDelete