Regarding the above quote, I note that Byron York nudged back in 2007 at the claim (made by Huckabee) that Huckabee's theology degree set him apart from the pack in understanding the issues because, well, theology is what Huckabee's got and it isn't properly a theology degree anyway. Back in 2007/2008, Governor Huckabee had been a proponent of containment of Iran, even while considering the "war" between the West and the Islamic world a theocratic one--apparently, his position has "evolved" (or devolved, depending upon where you stand). The reason I bring this up is because Mike Huckabee let his chief criticism of the containment plan produced by President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, and the rest of the P5+1group (the P5+1 group having actually assembled with this thing in mind since 2006) rest on a Godwinning metaphor, one might be tempted to believe, is because he doesn't mind using the Nazi metaphor and uses it often--
But he uses it a lot for abortion rights.
Which tells me that in his mind, the idea that pro-choice people are de facto Nazis and that he and a righteous Godly Army should fight them as if in a World War is not entirely out of the question. I mean, isn't the alternative to the Iran plan military force? And here he is, referring to military force regarding these clinics. Given that these services are sought out by pregnant women who have reason to terminate their pregnancies makes me wonder what role he sees those women as having? Kapos? Or Aufseherrinnen?
It's a bloody disgusting metaphor in no way analogous to the tragedy wreaked upon aware, born, feeling, thinking people and their families and their generations in Europe all those years ago. He is implicating every woman who seeks an abortion as being responsible, in part, for a genocide. He's condemning a lot of women. And he's dismissive of the use women have for contraception. When I put together all his comments on the subject, it really seems to me that he wants an actual, armed war against the agency of women to determine our own reproduction.
I really don't want someone in the White House with a mentality similar to Eric Rudolph, who doubtless also considered himself part of an Army of God. But kudos to Huckabee anyway for reawakening the idea that there is an actual GOP War on Women. They were almost gonna pretend that wasn't a real thing, but looks like the government will shut down over defunding Planned Parenthood, which does pap smears and STD tests and pregnancy tests and all sorts of other nice stuff that Medicaid pays for poor women--not because of the bogus hoax-ass nonsense where people are somehow rooked into believing that PP makes bank off of selling itty-bitty baby body parts (For what? Folk art? Protein smoothies? Seriously assholes, this is about Parkinson's research and cancer studies, etc. Miss us all with your lack of critical thinking!) But because for some reason, the idea that some women can use health services to control their reproduction to get control of their lives pisses them off to no end.
Like sex ed does. Like not demonizing gays does. So many bad things flow from that kind of theocratic thinking, that I don't even know how in a First World country, some of these folks in the GOP race have a straight chance at winning the nomination for a major party. But Huckabee is there. So, yeah. Theocrats and wars against an entire gender. Which almost beats Confederate bitter-enders and fighting against the Voter's Rights Act, but only just--unless one considers it all apart of the same pathology.
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Aleister Crowley wrote an entertaining book called Moonchild.
Jack Parsons, one of the originators of the Jet Propulsion Lab and a Thelemite, tried to produce a Moonchild, and eventually blew up himself and his mistress into a thousand pieces. Crowley was for creating a gateway for a Moonchild in some instances, but was very frustrated at Parsons because he, like so many, was venturing into an area with audacity and psychic inflation rather than knowledge and spirituality.
Leaving aside all the details, which should not be openly discussed, here is a 101 about what a Moonchild is.
Some people want to try and give birth to a very highly spiritually evolved baby so that the infant can grow up to offer something remarkable to the world.
A variety of procedures are used to attract an entity from the astral world or even conceivably a higher world that would not ordinarily be attracted to a regular incarnation. So various prayers, invocations, consecrations of the bedroom with blessed fire and water, and some eugenic practices to draw a higher entity into a close enough proximity to start the process in the mother's womb. A lot of intense practices must be done by the prospective mother and father to make them a much more spiritually suitable couple for such an endeavor.
If a couple of homicidal crack freaks decided to go through the whole process, it would not make them eligible to conceive a Moonchild. The people have to be high level.
Crowley fully understood that an infant in the mother's womb was a part of the process connected to a long chain of spiritual, living entities. He was fully aware that this was not a blank slate that came into a mother's womb.
Here's a 101 on how this works in very simplified and streamlined terms.
We all have an absolute nature as the most fundamental, rock-bottom point of who we are.
The absolute nature, for reasons I will leave aside, generates a causal body. The causal body generates a mental body. The mental body generates an astral body, and the astral body generates an etheric double. The etheric double generates a physical body. (I'm intentionally avoiding technical QBL words, or Egyptian or Babylonian designations and the rest, because I am trying to be very simple.)
A number of these bodies gradually, over time, integrate themselves into the complex that we know as the mental, astral, etheric body complex.
But this is really no different than the evolution of the physical body, which does not start out with the abilities of a seasoned athlete; it takes years.
The initial problem of both sides on the abortion issue is that they foolishly think that this whole process can be arbitrated on the basis of political expediency. Both sides act as if the incarnating personality is a tabula rasa and only develops through nature and nurture.
The fact is that the incarnating individuality (a reference to Tipareth) has been around a long time and has decided or been forced for one reason or another to give earth life another shot.
So the truth is that the aborted baby is, in fact, a spiritual being which is eliminated. And the other fact is that it's too bad that all ISIS members could not have been aborted in the first trimester. It's not a tabula rasa. There are a lot of factors I won't try to get into that causes them to have a predisposition in various directions. And earth life at its finest hour is a rough and nasty border town.
Theocracies ultimately are part of the system of government known as Empire. A theocracy can work only so long as the superiors in the hierarchy are enlightened in the Buddhist sense of the word, for which, incidentally, there is an exact definition and not some vacuous notion.
We have reached a point in the counter initiation that the Vedas refer to as “Advaita,” which means Ignorance. The late Alan Watts wrote a book entitled The Conspiracy against Knowing who you are. Today ignorance battles ignorance to come up with inadequate conclusions.
the use of federal troops or the FBI to close abortion clinics kind of fails to make me bat an eyelash.
Well, but. When he says the FIFTH AMENDMENT OF THE BILL OF RIGHTS would entitle him as president to throw people in preventive detention (fetuses have 5th Amendment rights: you can't impose capital punishment on them without giving them a trial, so abortion is obviously unconstitutional, because lolwut? whereas adult women presumably have no 4th or 5th Amendment rights because they are of the Devil) and he thinks he's come up with such a brilliant and unanswerable constitutional argument, I am batting eyelashes so hard I may set the eyelash home run record.
There's a lot I find interesting in what you say. Jack Parsons was an interesting character--he wasn't a stupid man, but man, when he blew it...essentially, the idea of letting a spirit-based being advise you how to find it a body is pretty much the astral version of "just holding this nice foreign gentleman's bag" at the airport, but then again, the Hubbard episode suggests that Parsons wasn't the best judge of character on this plane either. That he "hadn't finished", and rumors that his ill-fated final experiment had more to do with an attempt to pull off a working regarding homunculi rather than tinkering with rocket fuels have made me wonder if he "pulled up something he couldn't put down"--maybe developed a fixation with magick precisely because his lifestyle resulted in shunting his career opportunities into a hole. Or maybe his Babalon represented something he wanted just a little more than life. Fascinating figure. (His "Woman girt with a Sword" is an interesting mythopoeic feminist statement.)
I'm not qualified to judge the spiritual nature of a conceptus--to me that kind of edges into "angels on the head of a pin" territory. But I think there is a squeamishness in discussing the direct question of life in the fetus: Is it human? Absolutely, but so is a toe. Is it aware? (Which I think the "pain capable" argument pretty much dumbs down by boiling "awareness" down to the most obvious nerve-stimuli.) Beats me--I simply can't remember being fetal. Has it language, awareness of the future, the ability to form memories, the capacity to anticipate events? Would we call its state "conscious" as such? Is the ability to suck a thumb or turn in the amniotic sac itself an indication of volition or exercise of self?
For a lot of those latter questions, I think we can safely say it is not capable of driving, voting, and would make a lousy doctoral candidate. For the first two trimesters it can't survive outside of the womb, certainly, and genetically, much if the persona it will develop is there--I definitely don't think we have a tabula rasa because the link between inheritance and certain aspects of a character indicate as much. There's links between eye color and degree of introversion/extroversion, for example. Some genes that express MAOI enzymes have a lot to do with ability to moderate behavior--hyperactivity, depression, etc.
The genetic landscape as all about potentials, though--nothing about the genetics itself sets a personality in stone, even to the extent of how the physical characteristics of a being will emerge.
(Continued)
This is something I've given a lot of thought to regarding my own fascination with human potential. That the fetus is not a tabula rasa, but is affected throughout the gestational process, is something a lot of child-bearing age women have impressed on them regarding things like not drinking, smoking, or eating poorly, while pregnant. Many women who have carried children have expressed to me that they experienced shifts in their own personality while pregnant in terms of having certain cravings--and different kinds of cravings during different pregnancies, as if there was something in the developing child that was making demands on the mother. In other words--they are affected by their pregnancies in turn in the symbiotic relationship that develops.
In my research into "class warfare", I've looked into the ways in which the environment already stacks the deck against children growing up in poverty--this begins in the womb. Things like drug and alcohol abuse, lead exposure, poor nutrition, and stress, have a measurable impact on the development of the brains of preborn children. This leads me to speculate that it is not out of reason to suppose that psychic impacts may also effect a developing child--not being wanted. Being the child of rape/trauma.
One of the arguments pro-life proponents use is "What if the aborted baby was another Einstein/Gandhi/MLK?" I tend to think, well, it won't be, obviously, but it probably had the deck stacked against its becoming any such a person anyway because of the various inhibiting factors that caused the mother to choose abortion in the first place. (And if it's a being slated to reincarnate, there are no lack of vessels being created on this planet of eight billion and counting.)
In government, people debate life and death issues all the time: when to wage war, how to handle a famine, what to do with refugees, in ways that impact the lives of millions at a time. It seems appalling that we can easily discuss the merits of, say, capital punishment, or drone targeting, but suddenly become squishy when talking about whether a woman has a right to terminate a pregnancy because--
(Since we aren't talking about the one in a couple billion shot at snuffing an Einstein.) They don't want a child of theirs who reminds them of their rapist. They don't want a child of theirs whose hungry mouth strains the budget already feeding others. They don't want a child who will become a hostage to a hostile relationship. They don't want a child who will be a football in a custody controversy. They don't want a child who has genetic issues so vast they have no means to begin to care for that child, and would be damned if any child of theirs is a ward of the state. They don't want a child who will give an employer a reason to terminate employment, because even if one had a suit against this employer, one has no means to care for a child and sue for her employment with no income. They don't want this child, in this environment, and they know, as a parent, that not giving them this life, is the only gift they have. They are incarcerated and the state of Alabama has so thoughtfully provided a lawyer for their fetus, so that they can give birth in shackles to a child who will be raised in a kind of shackles of his or her own--so long as she or he is born to suffer like any other thing on this rough border town we love. Separated eventually from its incarcerated mother, and its who knows what father. Made to suffer and make his or her mother suffer further on its behalf. To be adopted by who knows who, and maybe not even treated right--as how many adoptees and foster kids all over aren't?
I'm not here to say that abortion is ideal. For those women who are miscarrying, or whose baby has no chance to suck one untroubled breath in this world due to disease, I think this is the most humane surgical treatment they can have to get this difficult thing over with. Because of that commitment, I reserve my judgment rather a lot with how other women deal with their pregnancies. If the crack addict knows she can't overcome her addiction to make this child come into this world in any healthy way, so be it. If the abused woman doesn't want to give birth to a kid only to see it also abused because she can't walk away yet--so be it.
Like a lot of liberals, I lean towards the "healthy, safe, and rare" construction regarding these services. I would prefer all women started with healthy, safe lives in which to choose the when and how to have the babies they really want when the time is absolutely right for them. And this is why I appreciate the mission of Planned parenthood to provide education and birth control with the idea of providing health and choice to women, to hopefully limit their ever needing abortions. But I recognize not all situations are ideal. I recognize the primacy of mothers to take charge of their bodies, even towards the life that may be developing in them. Most of these arguments are whether the mother whose body has the pregnancy has a right to choose these things anyway--arguments that disappear her and her choice alarm me.
For the pro-choice person, it isn't that one likes abortion. It's just that not every conceived baby is ready to be brought into this world in anything but a world of hurt. And that isn't what we want for mothers or children.
The preceding was @ Formerly Amherst--but considering Huck's weird legal construction--"let's leap frog Roe v Wade with a bogus Executive argument and eliminate the 4th and 14th amendment for women's bodies is disgusting. It's saying that women's bodies have no right that a theocratic male government should respect. I basically makes pregnant people a potential criminal class.
Hi Vixen, in many respects I do not have a dog in this fight. When the issue first began to rear its head years ago, my first thought was “Why should I, who have assiduously managed to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, be forced into having to deal with it because of the insistence of government?”
In the terms of our politics, which I regard as insane, I would say I am a moderate. However, that is not my issue.
My issue is that because of religion and government and consensus opinion trying to protect itself, we are basing our conclusions on a faulty model.
My view is that the model we have ignores centuries of evidence and thinking of a vastly expanded view of the nature of Man and the nature of the universe. My view (and Bob shared this, by the way) is that to be happily in the center of the bell-shaped curve today is to be literally insane and disassociated.
Now if the model were more to my liking, how would the abortion issue be resolved? I don't know, but in my view it would be based more attentively on realities of the universe rather than convenient fictions.
I will say that the issue is not without its ironies. In a way some of the contingencies are reversed. In the days before commonplace birth control opportunities there was a much greater need for abortion services. Coming forward to the present though, we have birth control up the wazoo and now is the time when abortion services are commonplace.
Maybe the robots will take care of all this, as I continue to read articles suggesting a new form of authority will develop because of cybernetic intelligence.
You bring up the fact that an argument against abortion may be fallacious because most aborted fetuses do not become Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. The converse is also true. A lot of pregnancies come to term to grow up to be Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or Jeffrey Dahmer.
The esoteric model suggests many of these incarnations occur because of karmic factors, and often people seek an incarnation with people they were friends with or had relationships with before they passed on.
There's a kid, I forget his name (could be easily found), who has become somewhat famous because at about 6 years of age he had enormously precise memories of his life as a World War II pilot. He knew the kind of plane he flew. He knew the mechanics to make this plane fly. He remembered the names and backgrounds of others in his unit. In fact this was so remarkable that his parents got him together with some of the still living members of the squadron, and they chatted expansively about the old days, people they knew, wartime operations, etc.
You can read Old Souls by Tom Shroder, who collects a number of these children's stories. (One kid was actually pissed at his relative, because the relative still owed him money!)
I'll mention that this is a problem for those of you who like government. Government is just as likely to do something you're against as for. Huckabee is government. A former governor who is running for president. All these Republicans are government. And that's why I don't trust government or either party.
You may remember I once mentioned that the first three chakras we share with animals. And virtually 95% of all our thinking and activities involve reflections, in one way or another, of what animals do. And it's not until we begin to have reflections of a higher order that there Is any lift above the first three chakras.
Joseph Campbell once responded to a man insisting he had no need or reason to consider Campbell's subject or anything else outside the realm of practicality. Campbell responded by telling him, well you don't have to. A dog doesn't reflect on anything beyond practicalities, but it's a dog's life.
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