Your further elucidation, ekunin, confirms my suspicians that you’ve got an important ‘handle’ on some critical, and timely, notions.

Insightful books, such as yours, could well help revive a renewed interest in reading, generally, as well as to encourage many people to develop the thoughtful, well-reasoned analytical skills so desperately necessary if the species is to survive with reasonable hope AND with more than a modicum of dignity …

To carry it a bit further collective inferiority creates collective thinking, things that are generally believed. Science deals with what we perceive as an external world. Its theories are verified when that external world reacts as we predict. When we deal with something like God, we deal with the unverifiable. My belief that God, if he or she exists, couldn’t care less about what happens to us has the same philosophical weight as the belief of the millions who go to church every Sunday, but those millions use their numbers to turn faith into a fact. They believe what is unverifiable is verifiable because so many believe. Big problem.

Such ideas, as you suggest it concerns itself with, are critical to human survival.

“Punative” must not be confused with ‘accounting’, nor even with consequence. Yet we cannot move ‘forwards’ until we understand the collective ‘psychology’ which has circumscribed our ‘better’ angels and obscured more equitable, humane horizons with myth and the deliberate quashing and malignment of both intellect AND imagination.

Certain ‘philosophies’ must be exposed for what they are. Too many are simply justiifications for greed, gratuitous destruction, and inhuman behavior, based upon pathetic assumptions of superiority and entitlement.
None of which are enhanced by the claims that they represent what a supposed deity ‘wants’ or ‘commands’.

Our stone-age sensibilities are overwhelmed by our even more ancient emotional apparatus far too often for the species to remain sanguine at present, especially as we’ve failed, as yet, to realize that we are out own greatest resource, but only if we are ALL free to use our imaginations and full capacities as human beings, in a world where none suffer at the hands of less conscious fellow beings, and where the ‘necessities’ of life are available to all, not as a ‘given’, but as a fundamental right of human existence.

Setting that aside for the moment, we need to use the internet to give power to the people. I can think of a way to get local communities on line, but how to moderate a discussion among millions of people I have no idea. Here at FDL there’s an attempt in that direction with the links to other blogs, but it remains a bunch of us preaching to the choir. We don’t do anything to attract non-believers. Indeed they are considered “trolls” who should not be fed. Jane has a new post on Lieberman. I live in Connecticut and voted for him once. I hate that SOB but I’m coming to believe Obama is right. As a start, it’s time to put punative aside.

Especially the part regarding,” … ignorance, mythology, or illusion.”

Though it might require the ‘unseen hand’ to seek other endeavor.

Hopefully, the ‘hand’ won’t go any further into pollyticks …

We might have to ‘monitor’ phone calls of those claiming to ‘hear’ otherwise, on a daily basis.

When a society turns its back on knowledge and excellence, there is little hope that it will survive, no matter how rich and powerful they style themselves. And your observations on those at the top are well placed, maybe slightly restrained from the dangerous pathological misfits they are. As of now, there is no other operative system conceived to replace the one from which that wealth and power derive their sustenance. That alternative system must be created, but cannot be created out of ignorance, mythology, or illusion. That is the point which we find ourselves. One thing is certain, when this economic system fails, it will take the top with it, they have no escape from that fate.

I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right.

If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur