Purely from my academic understanding of the subject; the Nick that is, at this moment / in this incarnation, is a product of karma accrued and shed over multiple instances of existence. Hence, what you are now is precisely what you _deserve_ to be. All persons may have been created equal some untold incarnations ago and before they had any opportunity to accrete karma.
davew On Thu, Aug 26, 2021, at 2:04 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote: > Sarbajit, > > If I understand the shape of the globe correctly, you are waking up pretty > soon, and I would like to pick up the conversation about caste, if you don’t > mind. > > I believe the proposition in the subject line. Given the many ways that > proposition can be understood as plainly false, I feel that my belief in it > must be defended. > > In what sense equal? Not in genes. Not in uterine environment. . Not in > early nutrition and cognitive stimulation. Not in social capitol. Not in > financial capitol. Not in access to health care. Not in exposure to future > parasites. Not in almost anything that I can think of. So, why is the > aphorism not just nonsense. > > I find, that if I examine my thinking in this matter, a very primitive > metaphysics about the moment of an individual’s creation. What follows is > flagrantly silly, but here it is. On my account, at the moment of birth a > soul is taken out of storage and assigned to a body. By “person” in the > aphorism, I mean the combination of a particular soul with the particular > body. These assignments are at random. So, for good or ill, no soul > deserves the body it gets. I cannot claim credit for my genes, my good > uterine environment, my social capitol, my financial capitol, my bad hip, the > draft deferment it provided, my getting a phd at absolute peak of demand for > phd’s, my good education, even my FRIAM membership. They are all > consequences of that initial, random assignment. Now YOU may credit me in > some ways, because knowing that all these advantages have been assigned to me > may make me useful or pleasing (or the opposite) in many ways, and that may > bring me the advantages of your association. But è I ç do not èdeserveç > those advantages. > > This odd metaphysics leads me to enormous gratitude for the life I have been > allowed to live and great sympathy for rigorous taxation of the advantaged, > so that so much a soul’s future is not determined by that moment of > assignment. > > I have no idea what happens to this primitive metaphysics if I try to > integrate it with my monism. The religious scholars among you might > recognize as some backass weird perversion of Calvinism. > > > Nick Thompson > thompnicks...@gmail.com > https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >
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