Give it up! Expecting or hoping that the Iranian Ayatollah is anything other than an irrational religious fanatic hell bend on killing off western civilization is delusional. It is them or us. It is them or Israel to the death. Peace is a pipe dream.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics should be mandatory reading at the High School level as their life long decisions are being made. There are no mulligans in life, no do overs. No matter where one starts, the striving for excellence in whatever we do, will bring to us the better way called happiness or fulfilment.
Most books in this book are rather short, easy to read but a bit wordy. Every page has fantastic discussion points. Get the kids talking about real life and the happiness possible with decisions for excellence.
Where there is no vision, the people perish (authored by another wise man, Proverbs 29: 18).
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Happy 250th Birthday of Our United States of America Army Corp!
Our Flag is
flying at `1990 Gibralter Rd. Landers, Ca.
(Democracy
is messy but freedom is worth the fight.)
Happy
Birthday President TRUMP our fighter in chief!
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Certain supposedly conservative news outlets defend Obama by pointing out his deportation record. This was never who Obama was or is to this day. As president he had to keep the lid on the radical left because he was much too busy getting rich. The mortgages had to be paid on all those mansions. Oppositional heat would spoil the stew.
When the
presidential torch was passed to Biden, the controls were no more because he no
longer had to take the heat. Obama could run his socialist, communist ferry land
by proxy with his supposed reputation intact. Biden tried to enrich himself like his boss
but he wasn’t as cool about it.
Meanwhile the
radical left, Obama’s radical left, was running the country visa the auto pen. The
radical left governed with a Marxist game plan which is in short, “burn to the
ground what has been in order to build back the socialist ideal”.
The supposed
ideal is only government control of everything and everybody, control by the
few. Democrat leadership is and has been clamoring to be among the privileged few.
The socialist ideal is ignorance resulting in broken dreams for the rest of us. We live to dream.
May Obama’s daddy worship never again work its evil among us? As President Reagan warned, as a country, we are never more than one generation away from socialism. Democrats want the people dumb and unaware.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Book II, Chapter I, is where Aristotle and this newbie thinker part company. Who are we as humans? What is significant or unique about you and me, as humans? Aristotle is virtue signaling but some of us blew that out of the water a lifetime ago.
“The Virtues
then come to be in us neither by nature, nor in spite of nature, but we are
furnished by nature with a capacity for receiving them and are perfected in
them through custom.”
Virtues for the few is secondary but Aristotle puts them up on the front pew. No wonder the purveyors of Christian
Church tradition and its easy doctrinal believism made the thinking of Aristotle
their bread and butter. Spirituality and the pursuit of virtue is about being good
little boys and girls, so they say. Aristotle called it “custom”.
O. K., if
virtue is secondary, what is primary? Are you not asking that question? Instead
of Virtue, what other desire could we plug into the above quote? What other
desire is primary and universal among we humans? Maybe, the personal, one by
one, search for God reality is primary. Some have called the search, the
problem of God. A problem it is because the search desire “is in us neither by
nature, nor in spite of nature, but we are furnished by nature with the
capacity for receiving” messages from the spirit world.
The best and
possibly only way of thinking about this is the natural reality of imprinting. Why
does the salmon return to their natural spawning pools? Does the Salmon have a “homing organ”? What
about the homing pigeon? Can anyone, including the A.I. gurus, explain how the
homing pigeon navigates? The homing capacity just is. We humans have a home in
God land, who knows, wherever that may be.
G. Goslaw
Landers, ca.
As individual people, when we choose the good our lives are better, happier, more productive and less complicated. This is a no brainer, we all know it because we are living with the consequences, positive and negative. Forming the habit of choosing the good is called moral character formation. This is an ongoing, life-long, simple lesson we began to learn in childhood but for some strange reason, we too often, young or old, insanely choose to be miserable.
This is my
story and probably yours as well. This popular understanding seems to be what
Aristotle in saying in the remainder of Book I but he makes it so damned
complicated. “Happiness is a kind of working of the soul in a way of perfect Excellence”.
Is perfect Excellence a goal or is it supposedly attainable? We are then taken into a confusing description
of the soul, rational and irrational, vegetative, etc. One thing is clear,
Aristotle’s understanding of soul is not our 2400 years removed understanding. Before
we pat ourselves on the back, 21th century man is equally confused
by soul talk, what it means to me is probably not what soul means to you.
Aristotle finishes well with a short paragraph on what he means by the Excellence of Man. Maybe, somewhere within this Aristotelian definition is an answer to the question, who are we? Some say, as does Aristotle, we are intellectual and moral beings who daily shape our own futures by our choices. Choices we make to think or not to think, choices for the Good or not. Welcome aboard!
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
Question, if happiness is our Chief Good, our moral center, what then would our world look like? Let’s call it “La La Land”! In such a world, who in their right mind would storm the beaches of Normandy? All of us would avoid any cause that would threaten our well-being. Aristotle must have a broader definition of happiness in mind or is death happiness? To this point this happiness thing seems very elitist, for the very few who can avoid the daily vicissitudes of living and dying. We shall read on.
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.