The Paine(s) of Reason

           Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason is a text that, in my opinion, was way ahead of it’s time. From the very first chapter where he states his belief about a governmental revolution precluding a religious one that would undo the connection between church and state, his ideas about the existence of a God are ideas that would not be seen again for a number of years after his death.

            His prediction that a religious revolution overthrowing the connection between church and state proved to be 100 percent true, at least as far as the United States is concerned. The church went from having a hand in almost everything government related, to not even being able to teach it’s doctrine in public schools. As far as the relationship between church and state goes between Paine’s time and now, society has made almost a complete 180.

            Coming from a Catholic education myself, I did learn a bit about Thomas Paine in high school, but I did not get to actually read anything regarding his writings. In fact, looking back, all I really remember learning about him was who he was, and that his ideas about God conflicted with the church’s, and not much else. Learning about him now, and actually being able to read his book, I was a little surprised to find that not only were my original thoughts regarding Paine incorrect, but his beliefs regarding the existence of God, as well as the writings in the Bible are actually not that far off from my own.

            Paine critiques the writings in the Old Testament Bible, saying that the writings were most likely written by poets, which I tend to agree with, seeing as a lot of the stories in the Old Testament are stories that appear to be based off of tales from earlier civilizations. He also states that science is something that is discovered, not a creation of man, which I also agree with; just looking at Mathematics alone, one can see that its laws can not be ‘created’ by a person, Mathematics is the language that man uses to understand the mechanics of the world around us. Two plus two equals four because the laws of reality make it so, not because man decided that was what two plus two should equal.

            Originally, I had considered Paine to be atheistic in his beliefs (which is understandable, given how he was presented at my old school), but reading through his book, I can see that this belief could not be any further from the truth; not only is he not an Atheist, but I get the vibe that he is also staunchly against Atheism.

His beliefs are based mostly (if not completely) on reason and logic, which is largely how I formed my beliefs, and for that, especially given the time period he came from and their outlook on religion at the time, I find him a highly respectable person.

Conflicting Philosophy?

                        The philosophies of both the East and West are both very intriguing. At face value, they both appear to be very different, but how different are they really? Sure, there are some differences, like-

-Western Religion (Christianity) has a God or deity that it teaches should be worshiped

-Eastern Religion (Daodeijing) seems to focus more on its system of values and morals than a deity.

But while differences like this are present, both religions strive to accomplish the same thing – to get us to live a good moral life, the only real difference between the two is their reasons for why we should follow their morals. Christianity (particularly in the Genesis section we read in class) seems to be trying to deter us from committing immoral acts with threats of Holy vengeance from God, whereas the Daodeijing seems to be saying that we should follow its morals simply because they will lead to happiness.

            When we look at the actual morals that the two books try to get across, we can see that, while there are some differences in certain places, their overall messages are the same. For example, in chapter 74 of the Daodeijing, the book speaks of the idea of an executioner, and how the threat of death could be used to keep people in line so to speak. The reading then goes on to explain that those who would carry out the executions would probably be guilty of committing crimes themselves, thus creating a sort of paradox. In short, the message I got out of this passage was that murder, particularly capital punishment, is wrong.

            Western religions also seem to support this outlook, as the Catholic church is opposed to the death penalty in almost all cases because of the Bible’s depiction of the idea. The most common reason for using the death penalty is for when the convict is themselves, guilty of murder, but this idea is refuted in our first Genesis reading during the story of Cain Kills Abel. Cain murders his brother Abel, and God punishes Cain by exiling him, and branding him with a mark. Cain then goes on to say to God, that he would surely be killed, to which God responded by saying that anyone who killed him would be punished sevenfold. In other words, no one should kill Cain just because he himself committed murder.

            There are many other examples of where the moral virtues of the two religions seem to converge, as well as areas where they seem to diverge, but the ultimate goal of the two seems to be to get people to live a good moral life, so that society will be peaceful. So in that respect, they really aren’t all that different.

Du Bois and Booker T.

             Education is a fundamental right of all people, regardless of race, sex, religion, or anything else. W.E.B. Du Bois believed that during his time however, this was not the case. In his book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois analyses the importance of education, he also shows how this lack of education has affected the African American community. He also critiques Booker T. Washington’s ideas.

            Coming from an excellent educational background himself, Du Bois explains that without such education, people will become lost. He shows this in his explanation for why crime increased after the emancipation; if the former slaves had no idea of how the world worked, then how are they going to be able to take care of themselves? They will not be able to, they needed to be shown how the free world at the time operated. Further, he says that someone – namely the government – should have taken on that responsibility.

                       

            Du Bois also takes the time to analyze Booker T. Washington’s ideas. Du Bois explains that while Washington’s ideas did have their benefits, he believed that African Americans should not settle for it. Du Bois believed that African Americans needed to band together and get good educations so they could vote for African supporters into the Senate, that way new laws promoting the equality of blacks could get passed. Washington’s idea called for African’s to go to Tech/vocational schooling; he believed that Africans could show their importance in society by doing this, and ultimately gain equality as time went on.

            Du Bois believed that because Democracy was founded on the right to voice one’s opinions on unjust laws, that African Americans should assert themselves now, not wait for equality to come to them. They needed to act if they wanted to gain equality.

            I tend to agree with Du Bois, in that if someone wants to be recognized as an equal, they need to assert themselves. This has always been the case, during the Union Labor movements the workers needed to band together to show that they did not intend to stand for being treated with the injustice that the businesses were showing them, and it was not until they did so that they were treated better. It is nice to think that they would have been treated better by showing their worth through their work, but as history shows us, this was not the case.

 There are many other examples of this shown throughout the course of history as well, how did the Jews gain their freedom from Egypt? It wasn’t by pleasing their Egyptian overseers. How did Women gain equality in America during the early 20^th century? It wasn’t by sitting around and performing housework. As sad as it may sound, if people have wanted to gain equality in this world, they have needed to fight for it. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, it’s just the way that the world has worked over the passed few thousand years; sitting around and accepting your current condition is not going to get you a better place in society.

The Timeless Clouds

In his play, Clouds, Aristophanes presents the ideas of the Superior and Inferior arguments. These arguments represent the old Athenian way of education and the new Athenian way of education, as taught by the sophists. The play criticizes these ways of thinking, making the Inferior Argument out to be a corrupting and negative influence, and the Superior Argument out to be a blind fool. The point Aristophanes was trying to make, was that neither of these arguments was the correct way of educating the youth of Athens at the time.

This idea that Aristophanes presents in his play, is a timeless theme. The idea of new (liberal) ways of doing things, is almost always seen by society to be immoral at first, whereas the old (conservative) ways of doing things, are sometimes seen to be foolish and ingrained in society for no other reason than tradition. While the play itself does not suggest that the Inferior Argument's (liberal) ways of education hold any unseen virtues, it does show that the Superior Argument's (conservative) ways are also not entirely correct.

We can look at any point in history and see the clash of new ideas with society. During the Civil War, which was fought over the idea that slavery was unjust, or the Women’s rights movement, which was fought over the idea that women should have all the rights that men do, or anytime before or after these examples, we will find ideas and concepts that we could relate to the Superior and Inferior arguments.

Even today, we can look at ideas that only until recently, and even to this day in some cases, were seen to be corrupt and immoral, just look at homosexuality. This idea was regarded a majority of the population to be obscene until only fairly recently, even to this day, there are many people who will argue that acting on homosexual impulses goes against the laws of nature, or the will of God. We could also look at the idea of sex outside of marriage, while there are also many other reasons to not have sex outside of marriage, such as STD’s, the immorality of the act was what had prevented the act from being widespread in society for many centuries. It was not until only recently that these ideals (Superior Arguments) were challenged by new ways of thinking (Inferior Arguments) during the sexual revolution during the 1960-80’s.

Aristophanes seemed to present Socrates in a rather bad light in his play, but what was his real intent behind his satirical representation? Looking at the play’s surface, one might think that he was merely insulting Socrates, but Socrates himself is said to have “Characterized Aristophanes as not attacking him, but a generic intellectual or sophist of his own invention.” (Quote on page 86 of the book) Socrates did not see Aristophanes as insulting him, so perhaps his representing Socrates was not an attack on Socrates or the Sophist way of thinking in particular, but the conventional idea that all new, or ‘Inferior’ ways of thinking are immoral, and that the traditional, or ‘Superior’ ways of thinking are always perfect. If this was indeed the thought process behind Aristophanes’ Clouds, than I for one, think the man was a genius.

Identity in the Borderlands

In her book Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua describes a remarkable struggle in discerning self identity. She describes the ostracism faced at coming out as a lesbian, as well as the hardships she needed to face in society for her choice of language.

In chapter four of the book, she introduces the Coatlicue State. She named this state after the Aztec Goddess of life and death, Coatlicue. She compares the many contradictions found in Coatlicue to her own difficulties and contradictions faced in uncovering her own self identity, and she claims that this Coatlicue State is a period that all Chicana's undergo.

I found her description of Coatlicue to be very interesting in that it can be applied to almost any conflict in  identifiying ones self. Like the Goddess Coatlicue, an Identity crisis is usually accompanied by a seeming contradiction in our sense of self. Anzaldua was torn between speaking English and Spanish, identifying as Mexican or Latino, Homosexual or Heterosexual, the Goddess Coatlicue is torn between Life and Death.

These ideas are prevalent in Anzaldua's poem, To Live in the Borderlands. This poem provides a perfect description of how an identity crisis can affect one's life, with both external and internal conflicts. In lines five-six of the poem, she says "While carrying all five races on your back, not knowing which side to turn to, to run;" This line shows how Anzaldua considered herself a member of many different races, yet at the same time, she did not know which one she belonged to. In lines eleven and twelve she says "That denying the Angelo inside you is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black." These lines show that Anzaldua feels that we should embrace all parts of our ethnic identity, not just certain parts of it. She believes we should be proud of our heritage.

The remainder of the poem describes how one should incorporate all aspects of your heritage into your identity by:
"Putting Chile in your Borsch"
"Being both man and woman"
"Speaking Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn Accent"
The poem also goes on to explain that sometimes, you may need to fight in order to get society to accept your identity- "You are the battleground... the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off your olive red skin".

Her last stanza in especially powerful-
"To survive the borderlands,
you must live sin fronteras,
be a crossroads."

This stanza summarizes the solution she arrived at in identifying oneself. We should not live as 'just' Mexican, or 'just' White, but embrace both, and be a 'crossroads' for the two cultures to meet together. She shows that even though the way we identify ourselves might not be preferred by society, but that it should not stop us from being who we are.

Dr. Freud

I found Sigmund Freud’s Intro to Psycho-Analysis to be very interesting, not so much on a level of accuracy, but more on a historical level. His ideas are the first of his kind to be thought of, and while a lot of them are not accurate, they were the first step towards psychology as we know it today.

One of the examples of Freud’s inaccuracies is the sexuality of an infant. I find the idea of a newborn child getting a sexual thrill from suckling its mother’s breast to be not only repulsive, but also incorrect. There are plenty of other reasons for why a baby will seek out milk from its mother, many of which are far more logical than sex. For example, without a mother's milk, the baby would not survive because it would not have sustenance, and it would die. Looking at Freud's theory from a strictly evolutionary standpoint, it would be far more suitable for the baby to want food than for it to want sex, as an infant is not even at the proper stage of 'self awareness' to be capable of performing a sexual act, the only thing the child should be concerned with at that point in its life is staying alive. Again, this is looking at it from an evolutionary perspective.

Freud also mentions the topics of young girls being envious of young boys’ penises, and how boys will become terrified of losing their penis at the sight of another human being who does not have one. Sure, girls might be curious as to what the small organ protruding from a young boy's body is, and she may even wonder why she does not have one, but this hardly qualifies as envy; the most one could conclude from this is that the young girl is curious. One thing that I think would be interesting to hear Freud talk about is the transsexual community, how would he explain a child's lack of desire for a penis? Not only would the child not be afraid to lose it, but the child may even desire to. His theory seems to be based on the idea that every child wants a penis, which does not seem very well founded in my opinion.

Freud makes a lot of claims throughout his book, a majority of which are based on badly supported evidence. For example, he performs numerous analyses on people who he claims are 'ill', but nowhere that I read did I see a mention of any control group. I have taken statistics classes before, and I know from experience that having a control group is crucial in performing any experiment. For example, I could feed cake to children throughout their childhood, and then when the child is fully grown, I could claim that cake cause children to grow, however, one thing I forgot to do is test this theory by raising a group of children without feeding them any cake, which, if I had done, I would have seen that cake has no effect on the overall growth of a child. Freud makes a lot of claims in his book, but he has no well founded evidence to back it up with, even he admits on a few occasions that some of his ideas are a bit mucky. If he thought his ideas were a bit ill-founded, then why would he start advocating them as Gospel truth instead of first trying to find proof?

Again though, I read this book not as a psychology book, but more as a historical piece, so I was not expecting a lot of his theories to be necessarily correct.

A Darker Side of Humanity

Humanity is capable of truly terrible things, and Bartolome wastes no time in proving that in his Journal. The Destruction of the Indies shows a gruesome depiction of what can only be described as the predecessor to the Holocaust. The atrocities described in this book are truly staggering, mind-blowing, disgusting, aweful, horrid, and many more terrible things that I will not bother to list.

 Throughout this journal, Las Casas provides numerous (perhaps too numerous) accounts of the Spaniards comeplete disregard, and lack of respect for human life. At one point in the book, Las Casas describes a scene where a Spaniard's dogs become hungry, and so in an effort to appease the hungry pups, he takes a human native child, cuts off its arms and legs, and feeds the live babe to the animals. The complete lack of value for human life shown in this passage left me utterly appalled. Did they really value their dogs more highly than their fellow man? Being Xenophobic is one thing, but the mass genocide described by Las Casas is something else entirely.

At one point in the book, Las Casas describes a situation where one of the Native leaders escapes torture, and flees to a nearby island where other natives are living. The Spainards chase after the man, over the course of several islands, and when they finally catch him, they burn him alive. Whether they chased the man out of pure sport, or out of a feeling that they might lose pride if one 'got away', I do not know, but this example goes to show how adamant Las Casas makes the Spaniards out to be in their intent to kill/ enslave every last native.

I recall learning about the pilgrims arrival in America, and how the natives helped them to grow them survive the winter, and celebrated a Thanksgiving, and when I got older I remember looking back at what I learned in retrospect and thinking, 'there's no way things went that peacefully...'. Even so, I never would have imagined that it would have been this violent. How the Spaniards could have committed these heinous acts, and then go on to call themselves Christians is baffling, I wonder what the Pope of the time would have said if Las Casas had been writing to him instead.

I'm sure that some of this story is exaggerated, but I'm also sure that not all of this is false either. Books of today profess how barbaric the natives seemed to be, but this book shows that the pilgrims and Spaniards were not so civilized in their relations either. The truth usually lies somewhere in between; maybe both sides were guilty of committing crimes against one another. I say this because I am sure that the Natives did not take this as nicely as Las Casas made it seem that they did.

While I have to say that I did not find this book particularly enjoyable, I do think that it is important for people to read. It recounts a history of humanity at one of its lowest, most horrible points, and hopefully by reading it, we will understand the mistakes that our predecessors made, and be able to learn from them.