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Institutionalizing Evil . Singh. After a page or so on the events of 1. No other species spends billions every year around the world to prevent cruelty to other species; on the other hand, none can outdo mankind in devising systems to destroy others as effectively either. A brief prelude to the precarious situation of Sikhs in India today is necessary. At the same time, the most decorated soldiers of the British Indian Army were Sikhs, and the cemeteries of Italy.
Belgium and France bear ample testimony of their valor. The Constitution of the new nation defined Sikhs as Hindus for legal purposes - an anomaly that persists today after 6. This is not the place for all of the political- economic issues that could have been easily resolved given a modicum of commonsense and a view of belonging together as members of the same secular nation. Their tools: vilification and historical amnesia. I concede that my very brief summary does no justice at all to the Sikh grievances or the Indian government's handling of them over the years but that is not my mandate today.
Esquire, November 1984. I last saw Hiers in a rice paddy in Vietnam. He was nineteen then--my wonderfully skilled and.
In 1. 98. 4 the Indian Army attacked the premier Sikh place of worship, the Golden Temple, on a high holy day, killing thousands of men, women and children, arresting uncounted numbers without trial and sealing the state of Punjab off from the rest of the country. Five months later, in retaliation for this high handedness, the Prime Minister (Indira Gandhi) was shot dead by two Sikhs. That led immediately to a time of utter darkness that speaks to the realities in India then and which lies at the heart of a festering issue today, 3. Within six hours of the death of Indira Gandhi, truckloads of armed Hindu mobs appeared in Sikh neighborhoods of India's capital city, Delhi, and several other cities of India. They systematically and selectively looted Sikh businesses and houses, and they burned, raped and murdered thousands of unarmed innocent civilians. The mayhem continued for three days.
- Is American Football Evil? Those who know me well, have long known that I do not watch American football, including events like the annual Super Bowl.
- A description of tropes appearing in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of the most horrifying and depressing codifiers for the Dystopian genre,
- Author’s Note: This essay was originally presented as an adult Bible Study lesson at Idlewild Baptist Church, Tampa Florida, in the wake of the tragic killings of.
- Of course the return of 'The Walking Dead' is on our radar this month. See which other movies and TV shows we're excited about in IMDb Picks.
They were simply not deployed. Trucks and petrol were not freely available nor were arms and guns which had to be registered. Yet, in many cities across the vast country at the same time, the mobs came in trucks with guns, machetes and kerosene within six hours They did what they were assigned to do and two days later the murderous frenzy stopped as if at the behest of an unseen commander's hand. Neither India's civilian bureaucracy nor its massive army has ever shown such precise organizational competence and management skills before or since 1. The government, supported by the press and state owned television, instantly labeled the killings . What happened elsewhere across India remains a closed book even today. Many Sikhs survived because of the kindness of their non- Sikh - primarily Hindu - neighbors.
Some killings are rightly labeled genocide, a term first used by Lemkin, a Polish Jew, during the Second World War and widely used during the Nuremberg Trials. Early instances of genocide include the ethnic cleansing of Greeks and Armenians by the Turks in 1. The intractable attitudes towards such matters become clear when we look at a remarkable irony: In Turkey, mentioning that the Armenian genocide occurred is a crime, while in France suggesting that it did not happen is prosecutable. Noted scholar Helen Fein notes that genocides have been reported on every continent; 1. A problem in documentation stems from the definition of terms. I shall leave such fine parsing to academicians. I have heard it said that .
Baruch Spinoza (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Bento (in Hebrew, Baruch; in Latin, Benedictus) Spinoza is one of the most important philosophers—and certainly the most radical—of the early modern period. His thought combines a commitment to a number of Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological principles with elements from ancient Stoicism, Hobbes, and medieval Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system. His extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being and knowledge serve to ground a moral philosophy centered on the control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. They also lay the foundations for a strongly democratic political thought and a deep critique of the pretensions of Scripture and sectarian religion. Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth- century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza. Biography. Bento (in Hebrew, Baruch; in Latin, Benedictus: all three names mean “blessed”) Spinoza was born in 1.
Amsterdam. He was the middle son in a prominent family of moderate means in Amsterdam’s Portuguese- Jewish community. As a boy he had undoubtedly been one of the star pupils in the congregation’s Talmud Torah school.
He was intellectually gifted, and this could not have gone unremarked by the congregation’s rabbis. It is possible that Spinoza, as he made progress through his studies, was being groomed for a career as a rabbi. But he never made it into the upper levels of the curriculum, those which included advanced study of Talmud. At the age of seventeen, he was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family’s importing business.
We do not know for certain what Spinoza’s “monstrous deeds” and “abominable heresies” were alleged to have been, but an educated guess comes quite easy. No doubt he was giving utterance to just those ideas that would soon appear in his philosophical treatises. In those works, Spinoza denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a transcendent, providential God—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claims that the Law was neither literally given by God nor any longer binding on Jews.
Can there be any mystery as to why one of history’s boldest and most radical thinkers was sanctioned by an orthodox Jewish community? Within a few years, he left Amsterdam altogether.
By the time his extant correspondence begins, in 1. Rijnsburg, not far from Leiden. While in Rijnsburg, he worked on the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, an essay on philosophical method, and the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well- Being, an initial but aborted effort to lay out his metaphysical, epistemological and moral views.
His critical exposition of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, the only work he published under his own name in his lifetime, was completed in 1. Voorburg, outside The Hague. By this time, he was also working on what would eventually be called the Ethics, his philosophical masterpiece. However, when he saw the principles of toleration in Holland being threatened by reactionary forces, he put it aside to complete his “scandalous” Theological- Political Treatise, published anonymously and to great alarm in 1.
When Spinoza died in 1. The Hague, he was still at work on his Political Treatise; this was soon published by his friends along with his other unpublished writings, including a Compendium to Hebrew Grammar.
Ethics. The Ethics is an ambitious and multifaceted work. It is also bold to the point of audacity, as one would expect of a systematic and unforgiving critique of the traditional philosophical conceptions of God, the human being and the universe, and, above all, of the religions and the theological and moral beliefs grounded thereupon. What Spinoza intends to demonstrate (in the strongest sense of that word) is the truth about God, nature and especially ourselves; and the highest principles of society, religion and the good life. Despite the great deal of metaphysics, physics, anthropology and psychology that take up Parts One through Three, Spinoza took the crucial message of the work to be ethical in nature.
It consists in showing that our happiness and well- being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and to the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue; nor in the related unreflective attachment to the superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason. To clarify and support these broadly ethical conclusions, however, Spinoza must first demystify the universe and show it for what it really is. This requires laying out some metaphysical foundations, the project of Part One.
God or Nature. “On God” begins with some deceptively simple definitions of terms that would be familiar to any seventeenth century philosopher. They are followed by a number of axioms that, he assumes, will be regarded as obvious and unproblematic by the philosophically informed (“Whatever is, is either in itself or in another”; “From a given determinate cause the effect follows necessarily”). From these, the first proposition necessarily follows, and every subsequent proposition can be demonstrated using only what precedes it. God is the infinite, necessarily existing (that is, uncaused), unique substance of the universe. There is only one substance in the universe; it is God; and everything else that is, is in God.
Proposition 1: A substance is prior in nature to its affections. Proposition 2: Two substances having different attributes have nothing in common with one another. Spinoza writes that “if you deny this, conceive, if you can, that God does not exist. Therefore, by axiom 7 . But this, by proposition 7, is absurd. Therefore, God necessarily exists, q.
Proposition 1. 2: No attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided. Proposition 1. 3: A substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible.
Proposition 1. 4: Except God, no substance can be or be conceived. First, establish that no two substances can share an attribute or essence (Ip. Then, prove that there is a substance with infinite attributes (i. God) (Ip. 11). It follows, in conclusion, that the existence of that infinite substance precludes the existence of any other substance. For if there were to be a second substance, it would have to have some attribute or essence. But since God has all possible attributes, then the attribute to be possessed by this second substance would be one of the attributes already possessed by God.
But it has already been established that no two substances can have the same attribute. Therefore, there can be, besides God, no such second substance. Those things that are “in” God (or, more precisely, in God’s attributes) are what Spinoza calls modes. His definition of God—condemned since his excommunication from the Jewish community as a “God existing in only a philosophical sense”—is meant to preclude any anthropomorphizing of the divine being. In the scholium to proposition fifteen, he writes against “those who feign a God, like man, consisting of a body and a mind, and subject to passions. But how far they wander from the true knowledge of God, is sufficiently established by what has already been demonstrated.” Besides being false, such an anthropomorphic conception of God standing as judge over us can have only deleterious effects on human freedom and activity, insofar as it fosters a life enslaved to hope and fear and the superstitions to which such emotions give rise. But even the most devoted Cartesian would have had a hard time understanding the full import of propositions one through fifteen.
What does it mean to say that God is substance and that everything else is “in” God? Is Spinoza saying that rocks, tables, chairs, birds, mountains, rivers and human beings are all properties of God, and hence can be predicated of God (just as one would say that the table “is red”)? It seems very odd to think that objects and individuals—what we ordinarily think of as independent “things”—are, in fact, merely properties of a thing.
Spinoza was sensitive to the strangeness of this kind of talk, not to mention the philosophical problems to which it gives rise. When a person feels pain, does it follow that the pain is ultimately just a property of God, and thus that God feels pain? Conundrums such as this may explain why, as of Proposition Sixteen, there is a subtle but important shift in Spinoza’s language. God is now described not so much as the underlying substance of all things, but as the universal, immanent and sustaining cause of all that exists: “From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes, (i.
God produces that world by a spontaneous act of free will, and could just as easily have not created anything outside himself. By contrast, Spinoza’s God is the cause of all things because all things follow causally and necessarily from the divine nature. Or, as he puts it, from God’s infinite power or nature “all things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles” (Ip. The existence of the world is, thus, mathematically necessary. It is impossible that God should exist but not the world. This does not mean that God does not cause the world to come into being freely, since nothing outside of God constrains him to bring it into existence.
But Spinoza does deny that God creates the world by some arbitrary and undetermined act of free will. God could not have done otherwise. There are no possible alternatives to the actual world, and absolutely no contingency or spontaneity within that world.
Everything is absolutely and necessarily determined. Some features of the universe follow necessarily from God—or, more precisely, from the absolute nature of one of God’s attributes—in a direct and unmediated manner.