From Blogger: "This post was deleted because it violates Blogger Community Guidelines. To republish, please update the content to adhere to guidelines."
Yes, this blog article was deleted by
Blogger. Certainly it wasn't read by anyone associated with Blogger. They don't read; they just delete. Most likely, I perhaps offended someone who found the title offensive. It certainly did not offend the dead children
killed by both Hamas and Israel. My purpose was to defend them and all the
other civilians killed in this war and the war in Ukraine where children
are killed, kidnapped, and then sold online to pedophiles. Did I say something amiss about Putin? I was told to
review the extensive guidelines but was not told what the problem was, so I was
like a blind man looking for a needle in a haystack. In fact, the notice didn't
indicate which article had been deleted. In the past Blogger would at least
indicate the criticized blog post. In one case, I didn't know what the problem was so I simply deleted the post. Now
Blogger does the deleting and tells you to go find out why. You can repost if you kept a copy.
The deleted “Hamas Victorious” post
was highly critical of Hamas and Israel and mocks Netanyahu, the guy Spain's
top criminal court has launched legal action against for war crimes. Was that
my faux pas? Or was it my joke about Epstein, described by Wikipedia as a child sex offender? Or does someone think I
disrespected God. Well, if God has the knowledge of horror that is occurring to
children and has the power to prevent it, but doesn't, then he doesn't deserve
to be respected because he lacks moral goodness. Or perhaps I disrespected the
religious ideologies of the people involved in the conflict. Ideologies are
cultural inventions. If they encourage doing harm, causing suffering,
especially of women and children, then they are evil and deserve to be
condemned.
Basically what Jesus said—not
Christ, a mythic figure invented by Apostle Paul and the other writers of the
New Testament*—is enough of the hatred and violence. There is a better way to
live than hating and harming people, especially children. And actually what he
meant that was ignored by Christians is that living altruistically is living
spiritually. Paul talks endlessly about the spirit but knows nothing about it.
It was just an idea he picked up from Plato who picked it up from Pythagoras.
None of those men know anything about spirit. They just considered it
non-material thus it must be good. Christians believe living spiritually is
being a Christian. Wrong. American slave owners were all Christians. And both
the Old Testament and New Testament condone slavery. That is hardly spiritual
thinking but a good example of the harm ideologies can cause. The brilliant Jew
Jesus came up with a new idea (a moral principle). The spiritual life requires
action, not just being a member of this or that religious cult. And the action
must be beneficial (lessen suffering) in order to be spiritual. Causing
suffering and living spiritually are incompatible.
That is why Jesus sought to modify
or reinterpret, not necessarily reject, the religion of his people. Both he and
John the Baptist were Jews. John knew there was a better way of living. And he
offered baptism as a means of washing away the old way of living in order to
begin a new way of living. What was the new way? Jesus’s way of life, a way of
life that wasn’t God centered but human centered. The God centered way of life
did little to nothing to benefit people. Most important it lacked a human-centered
morality, which became for Jesus the basis for living a spiritual life. First
of all, you must take with a grain of salt what Jesus says in the Gospels because the words are
untrustworthy having been written by the Gospel writers who were—like Paul—Old
Testament Christians, not followers of Jesus. Their Christ-God man declared war
on humanity—a bringer of war, he says, not a bringer of peace. That’s not
Jesus.
The true Jesus is revealed mostly through
his actions, not his words—the existential Jesus. He heals the sick, stands up
for the poor, and defends rather than browbeats women. And he sends his disciples
to spread his spiritual morality to his
people. He was not interested in the pagans. He tells his disciples, “Do not go
among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost
sheep of Israel.” And what should they do? “Drive out impure spirits and to
heal every disease and sickness.” Heal rather than harm. The assault on pagans
was Paul’s idea, and as an Old-Testament Christian he wanted the
cultural destruction of the pagans. He was a brilliant, evil man. The Old
Testament Christians who invaded America followed his lead. They wanted Native Americans (who were pagans) destroyed by either bullets or conversion.
Jesus was ignored by his own people—both
traditional Jews and Christians. Jesus might have had the same influence on the
pagans as Buddha had on many cultures. Buddha was the first spiritual leader
who chose a life-centered rather than God centered spiritual life. He was not a theologian
but a wise man typical of the Eastern world. He was an ethicist who offered a
complete ethical philosophy. His two great insights are to recognize significance
of suffering as an absolute concern and humanity’s greatest undertaking is to
minimize suffering in the world, for both human and other life forms. What
Buddha offered was a spiritual philosophy because in recognizing suffering as a
tragic aspect of life he recognized the absolute value of life. In this sense,
his concern for suffering goes beyond that of Jesus because he recognized the
value of all life. So what he offered that Jesus didn’t was a way of perceiving
that was spiritual. I don’t see Buddha meditation as being inward-focused but outward-looking.
His philosophy of the tragedy of suffering implies the valuation of all life.
Albert Schweitzer was more of a
Buddhist than a Christian. What he experienced on the boat while “looking at
the hippopotamuses* was a sudden deep feeling of awe and wonder for being in
wild nature and realizing that all life is equally valuable and connected.
Reverence for Life is an ethic that says that all life is valuable and for
humans to fully feel and comprehend this truth they must engage in deep contemplation. It is only in deep thought that a
person can establish an inner profound reverence for all life.” This is pure
Buddhism. Important here is ethics is also about recognizing value, inherently
value in this case, not utilitarian value. So Buddha and Jesus offer ethical
philosophies that are simple yet profound. And at time they were unique and new. Before
these men societies were indifferent to suffering and even accepted causing harm as
a norm.
*Blinded by Christianity, T.S. Eliot could not see that the hippopotamus is a magnificent thus captivating life form, like all creatures really. Intoxicated by Catholicism, he became blinded to the magnificence of the lifeworld. His blindness is expressed in his poem "The Hippopotamus." Whereas Buddha sought clarity of vision that required suspension of religious ideologies (and other conceptualizations) that distorts reality, Eliot allowed Catholicism to distort his perception and understanding of the magnificent hippo.
And the spiritual way of life based
on ethics would have appealed to the Greek and Roman pagans who were looking
for a more spiritual way of life that Greek philosophy failed to provide.
Socrates’s great revelation is that men must adopt a rationally skeptical approach
to ideas and actions. Without using reason as a guide, especially a moral guide,
men will act foolishly and destructively. Of course, like Buddha and Jesus,
Socrates was ignored. What we see in the horrific carnage occurring in the world
today says as much. What we see in the behavior of Hamas, Netanyahu, and Putin
is irrational, unethical stone-age barbarity driven by masculine aggression.
And I find it odd that someone
decided that my post contained a faux pas as significant as the cruel carnage
the post/article condemns. Does a Blogger algorithm decide that a complaint requires
deletion of the post? Couldn’t be an AI because AIs are not that simpleminded. A
reader claims that a word or phrase is inappropriate so the algorithm deletes a post! And AI would indicate the faux pas with an X so that the author could
delete what the reader considers offensive. Or was a photo or image that I used
a copyright infringement? I make no money from my blog, and I find it quite weird
that an unauthorized use of a photo or image would be considered more important
than the mass murder (and kidnapping in Russia’s case) of children.
In any case, Blogger seems to be
following Trump’s method of dealing with critical commentary: delete it or
delete the entire program, which in my case would be to delete my blog. It is a
procedure adopted in authoritarian societies such as Russia, China, Iran, and
so on. So, perhaps we should stop criticizing war criminals and child sex
offenders because God's in his heaven thus all's right with the world even
though children continue to be murdered and kidnapped and are starving in Gaza.
I suppose this will be the next post of mine to be deleted. A complaint will be made and the algorithm will do the rest. However, I believe silence
isn’t golden. It’s repression. That is exactly what happened to Socrates and
Jesus. They were silenced.
Melania Trump recently revealed the
importance of expressing one’s ideas. Her husband is a hard-hearted,
tough-minded man. His way of doing business is transactional and essentially
commercial. Profit rather than ethics is his dominate concern. He is not
interested in the people of Canada, Greenland, or Ukraine but in the wealth
that can be taken from their countries. His use of tariffs has revealed his concern
for people is less than his concern for monetary profit. He has cancelled more
than 90 per cent of U.S. aid programs such as U.S. Agency for International
Development that helps fight disease and starvation in poor nations. He has shown
that he is not motivated to help the Ukrainian people unless he or U.S. profits
in some way. He is not a Good Samaritan but an opportunist. He will help
someone if doing so is profitable. Then comes along Melania. Trump has been soft on
mass murderer Putin. He tells Melania that he had a wonderful conversation with
him, and she responded, “Oh, really? Another city was just hit.”
What Melania was able to do with
her soft-hearted feminine response was to pierce through Trump’s tough-minded,
hard-hearted indifference. In some way her compassionate feminine voice echoed within him.
Trump’s White House crew are all fueled by masculine aggression—both the men and
the women. But Trump doesn’t care about any of them as much as he cares about
Melania. From the very beginning of his presidency Trump has been forgiving of mass-murderer and kidnapper of children Vladimir Putin, who is also responsible for getting
nearly 1 million Russian soldiers killed or injured. Now Trump has said that he’s
only going to give Russia 10 to 12 more days to reach peace with Ukraine,
shortening a 50-day deadline he gave Putin two weeks ago before imposing punishing
sanctions and tariffs. This change of heart resulted from what Melania told her
husband. (Unfortunately, the change of heart did not result in action. Melania's heartfelt goodness was no match for her husband's masculine aggression.)
What Melania expressed reveals how the feminine
worldview differs from the masculine. Melania cared about the human suffering
Putin caused by hitting another city with drones and missiles. She saw beyond
the destruction to the suffering—empathy Putin and Netanyahu are incapable of
feeling, and Trump as well so it seems, in spite of the brief wisdom provided to him by his wife. For a moment, he became a
changed man because he took serious an idea from a woman he loves, respects,
and values. He should listen more to Melania than to the cruelly indifferent opportunistic fools he has surrounded himself with in the White House. To her concern for those who suffer, especially the suffering of children, that
my critics believe is less important than the mysterious faux pas I committed.
On a more positive note. I had
always taken Melania for granted. Even when present, she was eclipsed by Trump’s
presence. No longer. Beauty tamed the beast if only momentarily. Oddly, Melania might have redeem Trump’s presidency if he had only allowed her profound moral insight to have greater influence on his thinking and behavior.
