What Happens When ...

Indeed.

What does happen when ... Rua, Sass, and Alianora in one of her  ... umm ... moods ... come face to face with a situation that demands their attention in a most emphatic way?

Say, for example, they're visiting someone from a very different culture from theirs, where the only thing that matters is conformity.

Rua runs afoul of the status quo, Sass jumps in to exacerbate everything by taking Rua's unintentional faux pas and exaggerating it to emphasize how ridiculous the situation is, which lands her and Rua both deep in the soup and enrages Alianora's sense of justice, sending her into a word-flinging rage of - well - of Alianora proportions.

Keep in mind that the rest of the Characters are standing by, half amused and half concerned, holding their peace for the time being.

Sass and Rua are perhaps the most powerful of a very powerful Cast of Characters and mild-mannered Alianora is infamous for her infrequent but extremely potent 'temper'. 

Yep.

No wonder everyone else is kind of keeping their distance for the moment. If these three can't handle whatever it might be, which is unlikely, they're right nearby - but not too close.

*laughing*

Sometimes stories pop up out of the strangest of places.

Let's just hope MammTwo stays in the wings, with the Sidhe of the Ages, and doesn't ... umm ... join forces with Alia. What a whopping pair the two of them would be. The rest of them would say, 'Uh-oh' and step back another pace or two but be rattling their swords against their shields, yep.

I tell ya.

Finding humor in truly ridiculous situations can be a life-saver.

Sometimes a person just has to shake their head and sigh.

Free Will and the Right to Choose - How are we going to use them?

Before we go any further here, I need to emphasize something. 

I think that humankind has an inherent need, an instinct if you will, for a relationship with God or whatever Higher Being you believe in. Organized religions can and do meet that need and satisfy that instinct - there are enough of them out there that a person can choose whichever best suits. 

I happen to believe that there has been, is, and will only ever be One God  (Trinity or no, God is One) and that God is the SAME GOD for each and all of us - any conflicts among us on the issue are of our own making, for our own purposes, and are not of God. 

When we judge, condemn, harm one another, we are doing likewise to the bit of God that belongs to each and all of us equally by birthright ... that's the spiritual part of us, which balances the physical and intellectual parts. Harming one another in any way is counter-productive at best and an abomination when done under the guise of 'serving God'.

We've all of us got individual tempers, you can take that to the bank. How we choose to use them is up to us.

Nobody's perfect and nobody expects anybody else to be, but we should at least try to avoid harming one another as much as possible.

Call me naive and idealistic - it won't be the first time.

That having been said ...

NOW:

Here's a hypothetical situation and an equally hypothetical question:

What if, back in the day, it dawned on 'leadership' that the peace, love, and obedience taught by Jesus and His followers would provide an ideal population-mindset for the peoples said leadership wanted to dominate? Everyone, whether they had a choice in the matter or not at first, would eventually just fall into line (almost everyone) and go with it because it's mainly a matter of being Nice to everyone, except when the Boss says otherwise. Tweak it a little and you're the Boss of the whole thing with the Powers of God Almighty, get 10% of everyone's income and generations born into the mindset to provide even more ... and what if it worked like a charm for hundreds of years?

Now what if, back in the day, it dawned on someone else's leadership that this system was working pretty darned well, with generations of pliant and obedient people donating of their own free will to the 'cause' - these people born and bred into this mindset would be easy pickings (considering they were supposed to love and forgive everyone, especially those who did them wrong) so these other leaders did a little creative writing and tweaking - and brought a whole different but perhaps even more numerous population to THEIR way of thinking and believing - but the tweaking was to include the clause that you don't necessarily have to be Nice about stuff, and if someone believes differently than you do it's perfectly all right (expected even?) to do them harm if they won't agree with you - and you get bonus points for expanding the territory controlled by this mindset.

Wrap them both up in nice pretty packages, add plenty of sugar so they're easy to swallow, butter it up with the promise of eternal happiness (so your current misery or even your death doesn't really count), destroy anything left over from before, silence anything/one that might possibly cause someone to question your authority to Speak for God, and you're good to go.

Never mind that God gave humankind a free will and the right to choose. What people don't know doesn't matter.  Just keep those obedient and generous generations coming, the bigger the families the better and who cares what the brood mares think or feel or want or need; duty is duty.

Hmmm ... I could take this in any number of directions, couldn't I? Perhaps I'll explore all of those directions one of these days.

For now I'll just leave it as is for you to make of it what you will, as you choose.

You've got a mind: use it. Figure out what makes sense to you and let me know what you think. I'm not hard to find - just watch the spelling of S-H-I-E-L-A :) 

Not Just Physical and Intellectual Beings

http://transhumanity.net/baggage-culture-and-why-embracing-transhumanism-doesnt-come-easy/

Baggage Culture and Why Embracing Transhumanism Doesn’t Come Easy

Zoltan Istvan
...
'The twisted history of our baggage culture extends back many millennia. It started long ago with the inception of civilization, when charismatic leaders and ruling clans began forming permanent communities. Over time, these rulers learned they could preserve their platforms of power by controlling their communities’ thinking and behavioral patterns. Their agendas were simple: dominate with fear through violence; stifle revolutionary and freethinking ambitions; teach adherence to leadership and community before self; implement forms of thought and behavioral control that encourage social cooperation and production, such as communal customs, prayers, taboos, and rites. Variations abounded, but these were the early convoluted versions of human culture and its main intent: to control. Henceforth, culture’s core function became a means of forcing conformity, to transform the individual into a tool of submission and production for the ruling elite.'
...

This makes it sound as though 'culturalization' has been wholly successful in producing forced conformity and in controlling the lot of us.

I would argue that physics trumps culture.

A long time ago I learned this :  For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

Now I'm no scientist; I'm not a mathematician; I'm no expert on anything at all.

But this bit stuck itself somewhere in my mind and out it has popped just now in 'reaction' to someone seeming to imply that I have no will of my own but am simply a product of 'culturalization'.

My gut tells me that we as a species aren't all that easily 'controlled' - else there would be no independent thinkers among us at all by now, and obviously there are among us those who evidently can and do 'think outside the box'.

When we're pushed, we push back; or, just standing still will have the effect of making the pushing force rebound back in the direction from whence it came.

Either way, it's action-reaction.

And the thought crosses my mind: is Zoltan generating action, or is it a reaction?

While I'm being abstract, here's another question: Is atheism the consequence of religion having pushed too far and too hard?

I'm thinking back to the times of my stories again ... it wasn't until rome started quashing diversity that Christianity loomed powerful, a force to be reckoned with not just spiritually but secularly. 

A person's Faith wasn't a personal Choice any more; all citizens of the Holy Roman Empire were automatically Roman Christians, unless I'm seriously misinterpreting my research. It was no longer a matter of personal spirituality; it was mandated.

Me being me, I have my doubts that the sole interest was in the well-being of anybody's soul. More likely it had something to do with a couple of other things, namely a power base and financial considerations.

While the strategy apparently worked to a degree, it also ended up eventually setting off a backlash in opposition. The Protestants broke with the main church. AND there were elements, Christians, who never did conform.

Also, the apparent success of the roman church in its bid for control wasn't happening in a vacuum. The East was without a doubt watching and learning. And up springs a counter-religion. 'If they can do it, we can too.' 

And so the diversity of religions narrowed and the competition was on; at least that's my take on it.

What does this have to do with transhumanism or atheism you ask.

There has to be Balance. 

It's that PHI thing again, the Spiral, the Golden Mean, yada yada.

When religion seems to dominate (I'm talking about organized religion here, not personal spirituality) there's got to be an equal and opposite move. Hence the rejection of religion and focus on technology.

Likewise when technology seems to dominate there's going to be an equal and opposite move - people looking to spirituality as a balance for the tech world we live in. 

With organized religion increasingly being recognized as not entirely benevolent there's pressure from two fronts on us - and we start to look within our own selves because the outside forces of technology and religion aren't bringing us much of anything except a 'choice' between them as to which is 'in control' of us. They aren't offering us the balance we need and want - both want full and utter control of us.

With these outside forces bombarding us, is it any wonder that more of us are beginning to look inward to find our own balance? 

Just as physical balance is maintained by adhering to the simplicity of ergonomics (we're designed to function best when we pay attention to the requirements of that design, so posture actually does matter) and one tiny part of our bodies (the inner ear) is vital to our balance, so too is our emotional or spiritual balance maintained by paying attention to the design requirements - and the 'regulating factor' may very well be an elusive but vital 'something' that lies within us each and all.

Because we've made enormous advances in science, we know the importance of our inner ears.

Maybe further advances in other areas will one day show us the importance of that 'something' which helps us to find and maintain our spiritual balance and personal Peace.

We are not just physical and intellectual beings. We have a spiritual part to us as well - for lack of a better term.

When we lose our physical balance, what do we do? We reach out and construct for ourselves a third contact point to stabilize our stance.

By focusing on the two points of physical and intellectual existence, I think that Zoltan and the others risk losing sight of the value of that third component, the one that stabilizes us.