The Road to Compassion and Freedom
Glen Allport
2007-05-06 16:00
Exclusive to STR
May 7, 2007
- 1 -
Freedom has been fading in America for more than a century – in America of all places, where "freedom" is the national slogan and where enormous personal freedom (relative to most times and places) characterized the nation's beginning.
This increasing lack of freedom in America has brought forth the natural response of a freedom movement,...
Dogs and Love, Part II
Glen Allport
2007-04-22 16:00
Exclusive to STR
April 23, 2007
"We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us." ~ Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 - 1949)
One way dogs and other animals illuminate the duality of love and freedom is by being the same as us, yet different. Ultimately, sameness is the...
Marooned in the Quantum Wrongness Field
Glen Allport
2007-04-15 16:00
Exclusive to STR
April 16, 2007
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-- Albert Einstein
"Everything you know is wrong."
-- The Firesign Theatre
Surely you've noticed the phenomenon: a thing is widely believed to be true and even "obvious" – and yet it is wrong. The "truth" turns...
Dogs and Love, Part 1
Glen Allport
2007-04-08 16:00
Exclusive to STR
April 9, 2007
I am continually amazed at the dog's ability to love so unconditionally and without ambivalence. ~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson [1]
Q: To turn a friendly puppy into a vicious guard dog, what must you do to it?
A: Restrict its movement and beat it often.
~ Jordan Riak
In Feeling, Emotion, Intellect, I used dogs in general, and my own small dog Zoomer in...
Opening Up to Paradise: My Journey to an Optimistic View of the Future
Glen Allport
2007-04-01 16:00
Exclusive to STR
April 2, 2007
There is nothing like dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow. ~ Victor Hugo
For most of my life, I believed that a healthy world – a world characterized by love and freedom, instead of by widespread emotional damage and tyranny – was an impossibility. Even thinking about such a world, much less longing for it, seemed a waste...
The Earthly Lesson of Jesus' Crucifixion, and Why His Secular Teachings Live On
Glen Allport
2007-03-25 16:00
Exclusive to STR
March 26, 2007
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
-- Jesus of Nazareth, as quoted in The Gospel According to Saint John, 13:34
This column was begun (and then set aside, unfinished) two years ago in response to Henry Lawton's 'The Obedient Son Sacrificed: Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in the Spring 2005...
No Humans Were Harmed in the Making of This War
Glen Allport
2007-03-21 17:00
Exclusive to STR
April 30, 2007
"War is the health of the state." ~ Randolph Silliman Bourne
- - - - -
Where is the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Humans?(1) You know, the larger, better known, and better funded analog to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Where is the Humane Society – for humans? Surely we have such a group, but I am unable to...
Feeling, Emotion, Intellect
Glen Allport
2007-02-26 04:00
Exclusive to STR
A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it. ~ Henry David Thoreau
What do “logical” and “rational” mean?
The freedom movement prides itself on being logical and on behaving rationally, but these are relative terms. A human action can only be rational or...
The Yin and Yang of Love and Freedom
Glen Allport
2007-02-18 17:00
Exclusive to STR
February 19, 2007
All men are brothers and each man is free.
~Rose Wilder Lane , The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority, 1943
Love and freedom intertwine in human life, forming a core duality in harmony with the ancient concept of yin and yang.
Because love and freedom are connected parts of a whole, each requires the other. A lack of love harms freedom; a...
How the Baby Boomers Almost Saved the World . . . and why they failed
Glen Allport
2007-02-11 17:00
Exclusive to STR
February 12, 2007
Say the word and you'll be free
Say the word and be like me
Say the word I'm thinking of
Have you heard the word is love?
It's so fine, It's sunshine
It's the word, love
-- John Lennon & Paul McCartney, The Word
In the 1960s, the first half of the Baby Boom generation began to emerge from childhood into – well, teenhood. Already...
Free Societies in the Real World
Glen Allport
2007-02-06 17:00
Exclusive to STR
February 7, 2007
Civilization is sick and unhappy, and I claim that the root of it all is the unfree family. Children are deadened by all the forces of reaction and hate, deadened from their cradle days. They are trained to say nay to life because their young lives are one long nay.
~ A.S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960), page 102
Is a...
Womb, Birth, Infancy, Childhood
Glen Allport
2007-01-28 17:00
Exclusive to STR
January 29, 2007
Like characters in a gloomy sci-fi novel, many found work in the secret police, where their lack of loyalty and ability to make "friends" were saleable traits.
~ David Tenenbaum, 'Drastic Deprivation', on adults who had been raised in Romanian orphanages with massive deprivation of contact and affection
To have good manners means...
The Root Evil of Widespread Emotional Damage
Glen Allport
2007-01-23 04:00
Exclusive to STR
"As the twig is bent, so grows the tree." ~ Traditional
"The Study makes it clear that time does not heal some of the adverse experiences we found so common in the childhoods of a large population of middle-aged, middle class Americans. One does not ‘just get over’ some things, not even fifty years later." ~ Vincent J....
Roots and Branches (Part 1 of 2)
Glen Allport
2007-01-15 04:00
Exclusive to STR
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. ~ Sir William Bragg (1862 - 1942)
Trying to fix a symptom of distorted thinking, rather than attacking the root problem, is usually a time- and resource-wasting mistake. As long as the distorting lens remains in place, new symptoms will emerge to...
Blinding by Paradigm
Glen Allport
2007-01-07 17:00
Exclusive to STR
January 8, 2007
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. ~ Epictetus (c.55-c.135)
A paradigm arranges the world, or some portion of it, into a mental framework. While the term is generally used in regards to science, it clearly describes thought and behavior in a much broader context. Paradigms define the importance and character of...
Saddam's Lesson for Us
Glen Allport
2006-12-31 17:00
Exclusive to STR
January 1, 2007
It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person. ~ Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
When introducing a...
Call Me an Abolitionist, Please
Glen Allport
2006-12-17 17:00
Exclusive to STR
December 18, 2006
Imagine two groups struggling to win (or, in one case, to retain) public support for their respective, opposing causes. The dominant group has managed to define the other's name to mean 'violent, uncivilized destroyers of property and enemies of functioning society' in the public mind, despite that definition being the polar opposite of the truth.
Still, the...
An Open Letter to the Red Cross
Glen Allport
2006-11-07 17:00
To: Dr. Jakob Kellenberger, President
International Committee of the Red Cross
Cc: International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
Amnesty International
Genocide Watch
Human Rights Watch
Reporters Without Borders
Re: Inspecting America's new domestic detention camps
Dear Dr. Kellenberger,
I am writing in regards the $385 million contract for vast detention camps announced by...
The Two Great Evils and the Hammer of Infinite Power
Glen Allport
2006-09-12 16:00
Exclusive to STR
September 13, 2006
There are two great and ancient evils in this world, and the beginnings of a Power that will either amplify or help diminish them.
The first of these evils is widespread emotional damage (neurosis) – the underlying human cause of violence, addictions, racism, child abuse, intentional cruelty, inner misery, and inappropriate and damaging behavior of all...
An Open Letter to Tom White
Glen Allport
2005-09-11 16:00
'I believe that it is a clash of religions, not of civilizations, and I don't mean Christian against Islamist but God-fearer against Unbeliever. The latter, by definition is always in the service of the Anti-Christ. And I further fear that our awful regime, while flying the false flag of Christianity and conservatism, is in fact a Mammonite show from top to bottom and as about as Christian as...
Six Books on Compassion and Freedom
Glen Allport
2003-01-27 04:00
Birth Without Violence by Frederick Leboyer
The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost by Jean Liedloff
Free at Last: the Sudbury Valley School by Daniel Greenberg
For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in...
Government Is Not Compassion, Part 2
Glen Allport
2002-12-04 04:00
Is coercive government a necessary evil? Or merely an ancient one?
And if the latter, why are we still confused about it?
Every argument in favor of government -- any kind of coercive government -- is utterly demolished by government's frequent mass murders and other crimes throughout history, which continue in the present...
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