Oh, I understand them already. They are insanely mentally sick, and without a cure, we have to quarantine them any way we can. And in some cases, that means hunting them down like the rabid animals they are and killing them.

That is as far as my understanding goes, and as far as I want it to go.

They've proven their unfitness to be an active part of our society, and, while we don't necessarily need to execute them, we certainly don't need to try to "understand" them.

If we don't execute them...then what do we do with them?

~Zoo

If we don't execute them...then what do we do with them?

Try Dante's Inferno for a few suggestions.

Gid I think people who are not of the faith can equate the two because they don't know the God of either.

Before I became a Christian I didn't differentiate between the church down the street and the seemingly money grubbing televangelist slapping people on the head on tv. You have to be familiar with the faith to understand the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences in each denomination. Most unbelievers (and some believers)are ignorant when it comes to those distinctions, so they lump anyone who says they are Christian in together.

When I read comments like that, I take it in the light its given.

I don't care to understand them either. Their actions have proven that there is no reasoning with them, no trying to negotiate or understand with people of that mindset. That's what a lot of people who cry for understanding refuse to accept. Some things are just lost causes where you have to just throw in the towel and forget the humanitarian efforts!

How can there be reasoning with someone who straps a bomb on and don't care if their own people gets hurt in their pledge to kill anything American? They would as sooner chop your head off than listen to you praying for them! That's the reality!

Oh no. You are going to offend the terrorists and make them mad. That will increase terrorism in the world.

That is what political correctness gets you.

We really should make every effort to understand the terrorists. We should try to know what they really want and how they think.

It makes it much easier to hunt them down and exterminate them.

The comparison between Christian extremist and Muslim extremist is valid in some aspects Gid. Extreme fundamentalism is extreme fundamentalism whether they are Christian or Muslim. Fortunately there’s really nothing in the Bible that can be interpreted to say it’s okay to kill non-believers, unlike the Koran where some of Mohammed’s statements can be interpreted that way.

Christian extremist are just as unreasonable as their Muslim counterparts and if there were something in the Bible that if interpreted literally would say it was okay to kill non-Christians then they would probably be doing so as well.

If we were fighting Christian terrorists you can bet we would be looking hard for other ways to deal with them, and making every effort to understand them, even it was to no avail.

Your partner is not your enemy. The soldier, pointing a gun at your head, is not your enemy. The boy who beat you up, when you were six years old, was not (and is not) your enemy. The enemy lies within. His name is Fear. He is masculine. Very masculine. Totally devoid of the healing feminine-energy which has been ruthlessly suppressed (among so many other things) by the chain of control, Fear is a demented, unbalanced psychopath. Fear is like a macho man with a score to settle, carrying an automatic assault-rifle. Fear will gun you down without a moment of compassion or hesitation.

It is your inner power which will supply your needs in the future. Up to now, you have been deceived by a scam. Fear has taken over your supply routes, without you realising it. Fear has provided you with weapons, so that you could fight with your brothers and sisters. In your upcoming offensive, you will put those weapons down, and prove that you are much, much smarter than Fear. Now that you know what Fear has been up to, you are going to out-smart him. You are going to switch your supply routes. You are going to discover your inner power, which will heal you, nurture you, and inspire you to feel as strong as a lion.

You are approaching the gateway to enlightenment, and you may cross the gateway into Nirvana, if you cleanse your mind of all fears and doubts. Don’t just believe it; know it. Your beliefs operate at the mind level (i.e. not the soul level), and they are perpetually misinterpreted by the people in your life. Your thinking mind is a precious gift and a powerful tool, but it is not your centre. As you approach the gateway to enlightenment, cultivate the highest confidence in yourself, your ideas, and your intuitions. Your centre is your soul, which radiates its loving energy through your heart, throughout your body, and into the world. Learn to trust, and to know. Know that you are powerful. Know that you have substance and purpose. Refuse to be frightened, intimidated, or manipulated. Know that you are advancing, and that you will continue to advance.

Ask the universe, with feeling, and that is exactly the feeling which the universe will boomerang back to you. Detach yourself from the form. Enjoy each and every form that you create, then move on, to the next form. What is important, at every moment, is that you experience the most desirable feelings. If a particular form is working very well, and is facilitating the feelings that you desire (for example, a loving relationship), then by all means, retain that form. When an existing form no longer facilitates the feelings that you desire, then either re-create that form, or create an entirely new form.

-----------------------------------------------

A Message From The Iraq Resistance

People of the world! These words come to you from those who up to the day of the invasion were struggling to survive under the sanctions imposed by the criminal regimes of the U.S. and Britain.

We are simple people who chose principles over fear.

We have suffered crimes and sanctions, which we consider the true weapons of mass destruction.

Years and years of agony and despair, while the condemned UN traded with our oil revenues in the name of world stability and peace.

Over two million innocents died waiting for a light at the end of a tunnel that only ended with the occupation of our country and the theft of our resources.

After the crimes of the administrations of the U.S and Britain in Iraq , we have chosen our future. The future of every resistance struggle ever in the history of man.

It is our duty, as well as our right, to fight back the occupying forces, which their nations will be held morally and economically responsible; for what their elected governments have destroyed and stolen from our land.

We have not crossed the oceans and seas to occupy Britain or the U.S. nor are we responsible for 9/11. These are only a few of the lies that these criminals present to cover their true plans for the control of the energy resources of the world, in face of a growing China and a strong unified Europe . It is Ironic that the Iraqi's are to bear the full face of this large and growing conflict on behalf of the rest of this sleeping world.

We thank all those, including those of Britain and the U.S. , who took to the streets in protest against this war and against Globalism. We also thank France , Germany and other states for their position, which least to say are considered wise and balanced, til now.

Today, we call on you again.

We do not require arms or fighters, for we have plenty.

We ask you to form a world wide front against war and sanctions. A front that is governed by the wise and knowing. A front that will bring reform and order. New institutions that would replace the now corrupt.

Stop using the U.S. dollar, use the Euro or a basket of currencies. Reduce or halt your consumption of British and U.S. products. Put an end to Zionism before it ends the world. Educate those in doubt of the true nature of this conflict and do not believe their media for their casualties are far higher than they admit.

We only wish we had more cameras to show the world their true defeat.

The enemy is on the run. They are in fear of a resistance movement they can not see nor predict.

We, now choose when, where, and how to strike. And as our ancestors drew the first sparks of civilization, we will redefine the word “conquest.“

Today we write a new chapter in the arts of urban warfare.

Know that by helping the Iraqi people you are helping yourselves, for tomorrow may bring the same destruction to you.

In helping the Iraqi people does not mean dealing for the Americans for a few contracts here and there. You must continue to isolate their strategy.

This conflict is no longer considered a localized war. Nor can the world remain hostage to the never-ending and regenerated fear that the American people suffer from in general.

We will pin them here in Iraq to drain their resources, manpower, and their will to fight. We will make them spend as much as they steal, if not more.

We will disrupt, then halt the flow of our stolen oil, thus, rendering their plans useless.

And the earlier a movement is born, the earlier their fall will be.

And to the American soldiers we say, you can also choose to fight tyranny with us. Lay down your weapons, and seek refuge in our mosques, churches and homes. We will protect you. And we will get you out of Iraq , as we have done with a few others before you.

Go back to your homes, families, and loved ones. This is not your war. Nor are you fighting for a true cause in Iraq .


video: Islamic Jihad Army - iwilltryit.com/iraq1.htm

That is an absolutely ridiculous comment. Understanding how each positive or negative element functions is key to the survival of any thing, system, network, society, whatever. If you understand it, you can deal with it from an informed, and hopefully helpful, point of view. If you don't understand it, your efforts to deal with it may be more detrimental.

I honestly can't believe that you don't see this reasoning.

Like a splinter in your mind.

I will assume that the reader is familiar with all three Matrix films in my analysis and discussion. One theme running through these movies is freedom's connection with the concept of a person.

At the beginning of the story, "Neo/Mr. Anderson" (Keanu Reeves) is an employee of the Metacortex corporation, whose building resembles a spinal cord, topped by a brain. He is imprisoned in a constricting social role, living in a dream world of normality, conjured by machines and plugged in to the Matrix -- the computer brain as energy source -- and also plugged in within the dream world to his personal computer, on which he reads skewed news reports identifying Morpheus (played with Shakesperean zeal by Lawrence Fishburne) as an international terrorist. Mr. Anderson is a slave in a system of exploitation.

There are laws governing the pirating of software, which Neo clearly flaunts -- by selling bootleg data -- which he keeps in a hollowed-out book, bearing the title of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations. Just as Neo's world is an illusion, so we are seeing a movie (which is also a set of illusions, conjured with celluloid or digitally these days) for the benefit of an audience and its makers. One problem posed in the films is the challenge of subtle forms of intellectual enslavement (a prison for your mind) against which we must now rebel.

At the outset, Neo is something less than human. His doubts about the dream world (like a splinter in your mind) are analogous to the serpent's invitation to Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of forbidden knowledge. Morpheus is both John the Baptist and serpent in this cybergarden. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) is, simultaneously, feminine principle and Neo's other self. Neo and Trinity are aspects of a single representative human essence: the One. They may be associated in Christian iconography with Jesus and both Marys (Trinity is three).

The movie audiences are also plugged in to an illusion-generating matrix in a commodified, media-saturated environment. The films gesture at everything from Alice in Wonderland to the Upanishads, as well as any number of movies and texts, like Cool Hand Luke and High Noon. Morpheus hopes to free Neo, through awakening him to his predicament. These film makers -- who are bending the rules of the carnival culture in the so-called real media world -- are gently prodding the viewer to consider his or her plight as passive consumer of entertainment products and political circuses, of news, or a view of reality as entertainment for cynical and/or sinister purposes. The movies ask: How real is your world? Also, how real are you?

If there are many levels of control, then what if entertainment is only one of them? The audience members become batteries for the Hollywood factory or capitalist system.

A. Information and Knowledge.

You cannot free yourself if you are unaware of the prison built for your mind. The computers have created a dream-world for sleeping persons. Power in the viewer's real world has also created a dream world -- including the movie seen in the darkened theater -- a dream world for the passive consumers of entertainment, as a way of keeping them in harness.

B. Rules and Principles.

There are rules governing the workings of the Matrix, which is a program. Are persons programs? Are we merely executing the blueprint provided for us by DNA in an environment? How much improvisational freedom is provided to us? Can the rules be bent? Broken? Agent Smith's liberation from the machines arrives when he ignores the rules. Thus, by disobeying rules, evil arrives on the scene as an effect of freedom. The essential human act, assigned to the first woman in the Bible, is disobedience producing both freedom and evil. The choice to disobey is close to the source of our humanity.

Is freedom a principle limiting the scope of the rules, as one of the dual aspects,/b> of persons that seems to limit the extent to which determination applies in the Lebenswelt? Are the rules themselves a prison? How many levels of imprisonment are there in this social nightmare? Or in the so-called real world? Are they aspects of the same world? Foucault will come in handy at this point.

C. Politics and Religion.

The revolution is concerned to awaken the sleeping slaves of the machines, which can only be accomplished by first awakening the liberators, an advance guard, to lead the oppressed to their emancipation. There are echoes of Marx and all of the theorists of revolution in these themes: Jefferson/Madison/Paine, Marx/Lenin, Castro/Guevara -- all may be quoted at this point, depending on your politics. The analogies are both to spiritual awakening and political revolution. Freedom becomes a process symbolized by the Mithraic mysteries of antiquity, in a manner similar to what Neo experiences, as represented in the Christian mass and theology.

We are saved by being born again -- think of Neo's journey through a kind of birth canal to a vessel awaiting him in the real world -- also by coming to know ourselves and our true motivations, psychoanalytically and politically. Self-knowledge is freedom, for both Hegel and Freud, also for Marx.

Finally, there is the metaphysical question of ultimate reality itself as a system under construction, subject to flexible rules, spiritually and materially. So that the journey is from an externally imposed dream world to the construction or dreaming of one's own world: Try to remember that there is no spoon, Neo is told by a Buddha-like child, but that it is only yourself that bends. At the point of bending, the self becomes all.

A common misunderstanding of metaphysical idealism is to suppose that, say, someone like F.H. Bradley is a relativist because he sees the partiality of all appearances, when he is actually the opposite of a relativist, in light of the ultimate trajectory of history -- or necessary integration of all Appearances -- in a total system of dependencies that includes and makes meaningful every particular, or what idealists call ultimate Reality. This ultimate and totally inclusive entity is the Absolute. Wherever you are now, you're part of this Absolute. Hence, WE are always members of this community. We are one.

The quest for freedom takes place externally and internally, the flaw (or genius?) in the design of the system of rules is choice. It is choice which introduces the element of randomness into human reality, just as chaos and uncertainty introduce unpredictability into a determinate universe, making both freedom and evil possible, yet compatible with causality. This is to suggest a dialectical dance between Agent Smith's order and predictability, law (it is purpose that guides us) against Neo's liberty or creativity, equity, which makes us human, by allowing for the possibility of agency and evil (the problem is choice). Agent Smith is determinism; Neo is freedom.

Recall the embrace between the two rival leads at the end of the final film. Notice that it is only at that moment of embrace and acceptance by Neo of his brother Agent Smith, that Smith refers to the One -- for the first time -- no longer as Mr. Anderson, but now as Neo.

Agent Smith represents order, rules, predictability, authority, power, control, causality, science, fascism, super-ego (there is an explicit invocation of Steven Biko's murder as Morpheus is tortured); Neo represents unpredictability, democracy, creativity, agency, self-creation, spirituality, philosophy, religion, art, eros, altruism, id (romance, revolution, justice).

Freedom is seen as a political, spiritual, psychological challenge that is always both external and internal, collective and individual, positive and negative. Multiple ideas of freedom are always interacting in this film, suggesting that full humanity is only possible with the achievement of individual freedom (psychological and spiritual liberation from an external/internal illusion system), while also requiring communal liberation, which is another word for social justice, which must be shared with others, who are recognized as part of a system of dependencies -- like the machines which both keep humans alive and threaten them with extermination.

Multiple layers of narrative in these films resolve themselves into a set of dialectical interactions and entaglements. Philosophically we begin with Aristotle and Plato, move on to Spinoza, then arrive at Kant, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Freud, ending with Foucault and Baudrillard.

The various notions of freedom should be more clearly specified at this point, along with some of the ontology/metaphysics of the films.



video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVU_pAIPLPc