 by Flemming Funch
I'm working on various changes in the NewsLog program. Not as easy as I thought it was. First of all I'm trying to better accommodate the format I'm trying to use myself here, of posting many little stories that add up to one daily issue published to my log. That's how most other weblogs, like Radio Userland, tend to be working. But it is a different underlying structure. And I'm trying not to break the way most people use this program right now, creating less frequent, but bigger, stand-alone articles.
Various U.S. news media had to run corrections of their reporting of the anti-war protest rallies last weekend. They had at first tried to pretend that it wasn't much at all. Just a few thousand scattered people. But they were barraged with complaints about their deceptive reporting. So, now, for example, the New York Times wrote: "The demonstration on Saturday in Washington drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers. They expected 30 buses, and were surprised by about 650, coming from as far as Nebraska and Florida. A companion demonstration in San Francisco attracted 42,000 protesters, city police there said, and smaller groups demonstrated in other cities, including about 800 in Austin, Tex., and 2,500 in Augusta, Me." I saw "Bowling for Columbine", a feature film documentary by Michael Moore. Powerful, excellent movie making about America's obsession with guns. Very provocative and direct. See it! It doesn't really give the answers, but mostly it adds up to the fear that is being promoted 24/7 in the U.S. media, and how it pervades the system from the top down.
When asked "Why is it so difficult for us westerners to understand the earth as a living system?", Elisabet Sahtouris answered:
"It goes back to the Cartesian worldview, I think, in which Descartes proposed that God was a great engineer and his creations were mechanisms. That meant that all nature was an array of mechanisms created by God, the engineer, who then put a piece of his God-mind into his favorite robot -- man -- so that he, too, could create machinery. Now, whether you like it or not, that was a rather complete worldview that accounted for everything.
"When the scientists decided that they didn't need God in their worldview, they eliminated God from their Cartesian worldview but kept the idea of an array of mechanisms. Now how do you explain the origin of mechanisms without a creator? By definition, a machine cannot exist without a creator. If they are there and couldn't have been assembled on purpose by an intentional creator, the only alternative is to say they came together by accident. So you got these bizarre theories that literally say that if enough parts of a Boeing 747 blow around in a whirlwind in a junkyard eventually one will assemble itself. This is going to appear to us as perhaps the most bizarre and perhaps harebrained concepts of how things work that has ever been proposed in the history of the world. And I think it will be seen that way in the very near future, because it is fundamentally an illogical point of view. The problem was that they thought you had to choose between God, the purposeful inventor, and accident. We had no theory of self-creation as a perfectly natural, biological, universal event. Now we do, so we don't have to invoke either hypothesis." Right on! The idea that everything in the universe sort of sprung into existence randomly and accidentally is just as wacky as the idea that some ornery guy with a grey beard commanded it all into existence. I think the idea of a self-creating, living universe is more simple and useful and satisfying than any of those. And if we all understood that a little better, there would be much less reason for us to fight each other.
Picture is by Burningbird
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