“If you have to kill a snake, kill it once and for all.”
--JAPANESE PROVERB:
“A snake can never be our friend. It can pretend to be a friend, but once a snake will always be a snake: traitor and wicked both in appearance and character. We can trust and forgive the nincompoop, but not the snake.”
--ALEX P. VIDAL
“He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.”
--MARCUS AURELIUS :
“He who is always at odds with his neighbors, officemates, classmates, board mates, relatives, colleagues even under normal times, will soon be at odds with almost anybody in the world, including the mosquitoes, termites, ants, spiders, butterflies.”
--ALEX P. VIDAL
“The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.”
--SAMUEL BUTLER :
“If we lose our money, we can still recover it through hard work and luck. If we lose our health, our life would be in grave danger but we continue to live. But if we lose our reputation, we might find it useless to stay alive because life becomes meaningless.”
—ALEX P. VIDAL
"I have always thought that the actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."
—John Locke
By Alex P. Vidal
TO better understand tabula rasa, we must read part of John Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding.
I got interested about this English empiricist, who was best regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers.
Locked influenced our favorite philosopher, Voltaire, and his contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
We sometimes mistook Locke for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French romanticist who authored The Social Contract, a book that theorized the best way in which to set up a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society.
SIMPLER
Tabula rasa is one of the simpler great ideas which means "blank slate," which, according to certain philosophers, is the original state of the human mind.
Locke studied the origin of ideas and their relationship to reality in the Essay concerning Human Understanding. He theorized that all ideas come from experience and that knowledge is simply relations among ideas.
Locke's theory tells us we can't have ideas until we have experiences, so in effect the newborn's mind is empty. He called it "white paper" (tabula rasa literally "erased tablet" predates him and suggests, contrary to his doctrine, that something was once there to be erased).
Author Michael Macrone explained that the upshot of Locke's "white paper" is that not only are we born without concrete ideas, but we also lack abstract concepts such as morality, God, and freedom. "Such things must be learned, as language is, and they are learned either by experience or by reflection and reason. These views lead Locke to reject idealism and the whole notion of innate ideas in favor of common-sense philosophy," explained Macrone.
UNDERSTANDING
Though reason has its place in human understanding, Locke said, it doesn't dominate experience. Mind is not over matter, because matter, through experience, provides the mind with ideas.
"Our simplest and most basic concepts (such as 'loudness,' 'hardness,' and 'sweetness') are furnished by sense, and all more concrete ideas are built upon them," Macrone explained.
"Other ideas come to us through reflection, including awareness of our own thought processes; 'thought' itself as well as 'perception,' 'belief,' 'consciousness,' 'doubt,' and so on are furnished by reflective experience. That such ideas are simple, however, doesn't mean they're innate."
The doctrine of tabula rasa derives mostly from simple logic. If we are all born with an innate idea of God, then we would all have the same idea of God. But of course we don't. Similarly, if we were born with the idea of moral right, we would all agree on what is right and what is wrong. But we don't.
ANALYTIC
Macrone stressed: "Analytic truths such as 'whatever is, exists' and '2+2=4' are not ideas obvious to everyone--for example children and idiots." Locke also thought the premises if rationalism--mind over matter--were much too complex to be useful or valid. Like Occam, Macrone emphasized, Locke thought simpler is better, and any account of knowledge that doesn't require innate ideas is simpler.
While tabula rasa seems a simple idea, Locke's argument ends up rather complicated. He sometimes contradicts himself and is eventually forced to admit that certain "faculties" must be innate.
Among these, Macrone pointed out, are the five senses and the capacity to reason, which do count as "ideas" in some circles. Whatever the difficulties of his argument, Macrone said it did not steer British philosophy into what remains its characteristic empiricism.
He failed to convince the French, however, who by and large remain rationalists. Just another reason so many English worry over European union and the Channel Tunnel.
"The masculine energy was about survival. The male was the hunter who risked his life and had to be in the fight-flight mode."
"If you have a secret, people will sit a little bit closer."
—ROB CORDDRY
WHY FRIENDS SHOULDN'T LET FRIENDS EXERCISE SOLO. Natalie Gingerich says that working out a deux can make a tough routine feel easier.
A University of Oxford study found that exercisers tolerated discomfort better when working out in a group, compared with doing it alone.
Researchers believe partner workouts may heighten levels of hormones such as endorphins that boost mood and block pain signals.
HEART DISEASE AND DIABETES. Lack of sleep is associated with higher levels of stress hormones that may raise blood pressure and affect glucose metabolism. A new study found that the risk for high blood pressure among insomniacs who slept less than 5 hours per night was 500 times greater than those who logged more than 6 hours.
SLEEP! IT'S NON-NEGOTIABLE. I was bed-ridden because of colds as a result of less sleep these past weeks. I just learned from Health News & Trends that a good night's sleep isn't just about hitting the ground running in the morning.
If we get 7 to 9 hours experts advise, we can expect these added benefits, said Catherine Winters.
ABOUT EDUCATION. Careful, dear students: Education can make you lonely. Academics are single more often than people without degrees. The reason: They often spend their evenings working overtime.
"Men can not afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her."
Let’s be fair to all bar examinees and call spade a spade, this time.
It’s not fair and proper to hear that about 900 of the 3,962 passers in the 2024 bar exam were “pasang awa.”
There is no such animal as “pasawang awa” in the bar exam. Every examinee, in fact, deserves to pass given their sacrifices and dedication that no ordinary examinee in any other exams can match.
Let’s not misinterpret Bar Committee chair Associate Justice Mario Lopez’s words when he elucidated that “they allowed 900 more passers because the country needs more lawyers especially in the countryside” and “instead of 75, which I proposed, the good (Supreme Court) justices—headed by the chief justice—voted unanimously to adopt a grade of 74 as a passing grade.”
Congratulations to all the 10,387 examinees.
WE aren’t supposed to ask personal favors from God that will instantly benefit us when we pray.
In our silent communications, we should first and foremost thank Him for all our blessings.
Showing or paying back kindness and doing good to others are the best means of paying back God’s love and kindness.
Christmas Season or normal days, we must continue to appreciate and value our friendship and promote kindness and love. We must love one another.
I mean it from the bottom of my heart. Merry Christmas 2024 and Happy New Year 2025.
AS I WRITE THIS, 2024 is “fighting for its dear life” in the cosmology’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
In 2025, let’s 1. Be healthy (eat more vegetables and fruits); 2. Earn an honest and decent living (beg only if it’s a matter of life and death); 3. Be positive (again); 3. Don’t expect too much (in order to avoid pain and frustration).
4; Don’t avoid toxic characters (because it’s impossible and hyperbole to think we can). Deal with them rationally and humanely; 5. Don’t envy the success and popularity of others both in the social media and in real life.
6. Accept that the world’s population is aging rapidly and we age with it each year (therefore it’s normal to have wrinkles, forgetful mind, etc.); 7. Don’t waste (hard earned) money; 8. Never neglect our spritiual needs (we don’t live by food and sex alone) even if we aren’t religious.
9. Always choose (to work and deal with) humans over Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated technologies; 10. Prioritize our families; 11. Love God unconditionally.
“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”
—Bertrand Russell
By Alex P. Vidal
SEXUAL behavior has been often judged by clergymen whose qualifications include their solemn renunciation of sexual intercourse.
“Tragically, those who undertake to control our sexual destinies are often sexually sick themselves,” protests Dr. David Reuben in Beyond the Birds and Trees.
“The decency league dedicated to abridging sexual behavior—except on their terms—are simply trying to deprive others of the reasonable use of their sexual orgasms.”
Reuben adds: “Every one of us has made that seven-inch journey through the penis into the vagina to meet the other half of our future protoplasm and has then settled in the uterus for the 280-day wait. There is no reason now to be ashamed of how we traveled and where we grew—there is no more suitable place.”
In Any Woman Can, Reuben, a psychiatrist and sex expert who lived in California, says sex started with the crocodile.
“This scaly cold-blooded distant relative of man was the first animal to develop a penis. Before then, life was much simpler. All the earth’s inhabitants had about the same type of sexual equipment and used it about the same way.”
This was how Reuben explained further:
The male and female simply backed up to each other, wiggled their sexual equipment into contact, and oozed primitive sperm into contact with primitive eggs.
There wasn’t much to see, hardly anything to feel, and in many species if a couple turned on like this once a year, it was sufficient. Twice a year was oversexed and many animals copulated only once in a lifetime.
VISIBLE
For one thing penis was visible. Secondly, it revolutionized sex by fitting inside the female body. In those days there was no such thing as a vagina. The female sexual equipment was a cloaca consisting of a common channel for urine, feces, and semi-annual eggs. (Things have improved a lot for women since then.)
Obviously, the crocodile penis too has undergone major design modifications as it was handed down over the years to homo sapiens. From the evolutionary point of view the modern American male sports the latest in phallic equipment. But problem still remained.
Men equipped with this wonderful organ quickly developed a lively interest in the female sexual apparatus, by then improved and expanded into a closely-coupled vagina, labia, and clitoris.
Like the crocodiles before them men and women discovered that combining their sexual resources resulted in immense pleasure for both contributors.
For the next 50,000 years all went well. Sex was a normal psychological function as routine as swimming had been to the crocodile and as essential and enjoyable as eating was to early man. Then came the Dark Ages.
About 400 A.D. Western civilization abruptly lurched in a different direction. Suddenly sex was out and guilt was in.
As some long-forgotten genius in the field of medieval motivational psychology discovered, men and women are unbelievably responsive to the liking up of sex and guilt.
From that moment on, the fate of society (and most of its members) was sealed. The most efficient means of controlling human behavior had been put into effect: focus on an activity which everybody must engage in—sex; select its most joyable aspect—copulation; finally provide the threat of severe and relentless punishment for its enjoyment.
As the machinery of sexual repression creaked into action, the power and influence of those in control grew enormously. There were, to be sure, a few hitches at first but all resistance finally yielded to the crushing force of sexual repression.
PROBLEMS
One of the major early problems was that the moralists actually underestimated the potential of their new weapon to change the destiny of the Western world.
Apparently, the original idea was to make sex only a minor transgression. However, all levels of society almost immediately succumbed to the irresistible urge to feel guilty about perfectly normal sexual feelings. In effect this was the “new morality,” Dark Ages version.
In some ways a most frightening form. Sex rapidly became an emotional commodity to be consumed under the strictest prohibitions, if at all.
Like the famous insurance policy that pays off is the insured is killed by a cable car on the Fourth of July while carrying an Easter bunny, sexual relations came to be allowed only under the most rigid restrictions.
According to these forerunners of our modern moral guardians, sex was to be limited to married couples in bed, in the dark, fully clothed, ideally involving an important man and a frigid woman with just enough sperm dripping onto the lady’s private parts to bring on a joyless impregnation.
That was another challenge for the moral reformers. Since it sets a liberal tone toward sex, a major hatchet job was in order.
The Good Book was extensively distorted and misinterpreted to make it appear to endorse sexual repression.
Genesis was reinterpreted to make Adam and Eve seem like sinners who were evicted from the Garden of Eden for daring to engage in sexual intercourse.
SANITIZED
Later versions were further sanitized and Adam’s penis was replaced by the ever-present serpent hovering greedily around Eve’s pubic fig leaf.
The sexual purifiers smugly ignored reality: if God had not intended His first man and woman to copulate He would simply have molded their mortal clay a bit differently and left them nothing to work with.
Some of the changes were downright silly. In the Revised Version of the Bible of 1881, the word “whore” was changed to “harlot” and the term, “whoremonger” was replaced by “fornicator.” No exact figures are available to the number of souls saved by these semantic gymnastics.
The Bible was only the beginning. After emasculating this once lusty and vital Scripture, every other possible work of man, artistic and literary, were purged and distorted to eliminate any mention of rational human sexuality.
Fifteen hundred years ago the single most enduring principle of Western society was forged: SEX IS BAD.
From that moment to the present, hundreds of millions of innocent people have been brainwashed into believing a silly bit nonsense: sex is synonymous with sin.
Regrettably, no force on earth has been able to turn back the emotional calendar and the misconception goes on, constantly reinforced.
For more than a dozen centuries every persuasive force available has been harnessed to desexualize the most highly-sexed animal this planet has ever known—the human being. Their message is always the same and always untrue: sex, except under nearly impossible circumstances, is wicked.
One of the real tragedies of recent times is the attempted corruption of the human body. A small group of moral crusaders, working with that fevered devotion seen only in the mentally deranged, has been trying to convince everyone that the perfectly synchronized beautifully designed, elegantly planned mechanisms of their bodies are nasty, filthy, and horrid.
That psychological masterpiece which makes human reproduction unique has been distorted by those who should know better into a curse and a sickness.
MENSTRUATION
In reality menstruation signifies perfect health. The ounce or two of blood that is passed each month is the banner of a normal reproductive system. If blood is unclean, imagine what the moral crusaders can make of a nosebleed.
When it comes to sexual intercourse, the guerrilla fighters for purity bring on their big guns. Their favorite word is “dirty”—and they are wrong again.
By every test, sexual intercourse is probably the purest and daintiest activity that a man and woman can engage in, aside from being the most enjoyable.
The genitals themselves are normally free of harmful bacteria, the secretions are perfectly sterile, and the penis and vagina were obviously designed to be brought together in their own inimitable style.
By contrast, the throat of every person, including the anti-sex orators, is crammed with a dozen varieties of lethal bacteria.
These include the bugs that cause diphtheria, gonorrhea, strep throat, and rheumatic fever. If they want to start a crusade, it should probably begin in their own noses and mouths.
Actually the sexual reformers are on the wrong track. If they really hope to make men and women afraid of themselves, they might devote their attention to other organ systems.
Breathing offers a good opportunity. We take in good clean air and pervert it into bad breath! Only a few cynical mouthwash salesmen have jumped on that one, but there is plenty of room for moral education about how the body ruins God-given oxygen.
Sweating is another good area. Fifty thousand years ago human beings used their noses as much as their eyes. They could identify a stranger by his smell and could distinguish approaching animals and men by their specific odors.
The need for that talent has diminished somewhat but the human aroma still clings to man. It is now known as “body odor” and must be eliminated at all costs.
A human who smells like a human is headed for social and occupational disaster. In order to be accepted by the rest of his race, his breath must reek of carbolic acid, his armpits give off the scent of gardenias, and his skin exude hexachlorophene.
A few years ago chlorophyll tablets were developed to expunge once and for all every trace of human smells. (As a tribute to man’s sanity, they were tried and quickly discarded by all except fugitives wishing to avoid the bloodhounds.)
FRONTIER
Perhaps the last frontier for those reformers who want to protect us against ourselves is the digestive system. If they really concentrated they might be able to spoil the pleasure of eating for a hundred million or so fellow citizens. All they would need to do would be to explain, “When you take that beautiful food, provided for you by Heaven’s bounty, and put it into your body, it is attacked by filthy chemicals and changed into a green stinking mass. Do you know what that food finally becomes? Do you know what it is turned into?”
The lecture would have to stop at this point because the devoted moralists couldn’t say the word.
Every organ, every secretion, every cell of the human body was put there by nature, by the Creator, for a purpose.
The respiratory system, the digestive system, the sweat glands, all have a vital function in the preservation of the body. The sexual organs are no exception. For the past few hundred years, not more than a fleeting moment in the history of mankind, a strange collection of misguided do-gooders and moralizing misfits have tried to make us forget how we all arrived in this world. They miss the point. Ever since the beginning of the human race, sexual intercourse has been the most noble and wholesome of all man’s activities.
In spite of the shrill protests of those self-appointed moral guardians, nothing is going to change that.
Every woman, married or not, deserves the freedom to enjoy the ultimate expression of her sexual potential. With knowledge and determination and courage, that achievement is within her grasp.
