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More impactful impressions as a youth. One fictionally dystopic and the other historical (as dramatized in the play, The Crucible).

The cage was nearer ; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats.

The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless.

" It was a common punishment in Imperial China ", said O'Brien as didactically as ever.

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then - no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment - one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over.

" Do it to Julia ! Do it to Julia ! Not me ! Julia ! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me ! Julia ! Not me ! "

George Orwell's, 1984

Winston Smith was defeated. No worthwhile semblance of himself remained. He held out as long as he could and finally surrendered the one thing that he had tried so hard to hold onto, his love of Julia. Thus, he became "a living dead."
Under the most extreme coersion, he had given away what no one could take from him, his integrity.

Juxtapose Winston's solution to eleviate the pressures of heinous coersion to Giles Corey's who had defended his wife Martha against the baseless charges that she was a Salem witch. He was put to death by having heavy stones placed upon him while remaining mute until he said "more weight."

PROCTOR: And Giles?

ELIZABETH: You have not heard of it?

PROCTOR:* I hear nothin�, where I am kept.

ELIZABETH: Giles is dead.

(He looks at her incredulously.)

PROCTOR: When were he hanged?

ELIZABETH (quietly, factually): He were not hanged. He would not answer aye or nay to his indictment; for if he denied the charge they�d hang him surely, and auction out his property. So he stand mute, and died Christian under the law. And so his sons will have his farm. It is the law, for he could not be condemned a wizard without he answer the indictment, aye or nay.

PROCTOR: Then how does he die?

ELIZABETH (gently): They press him, John.

PROCTOR: Press?

ELIZABETH: Great stones they lay upon his chest until he please aye or nay. (With a tender smile for the old man.) They say he give them but two words. �More weight,� he says. And died.

PROCTOR (numbed � a thread to weave into his agony): �More weight�.

ELIZABETH: Aye. It were a fearsome man, Giles Corey.

-Arthur Miller�s The Crucible

Hello Les,
Phew, heavy breakfast indeed and won't engage for several reasons.

But will add some whole works for impressions rather than go for individual section quotes of which there would be many. Do you remember the impact of William Golding's Lord of the Flies? Or Conrad's Nostromo or Heart of Darkness? Or the desperation of the blind King Lear? Or Shooting an Elephant, that George Orwell short story?

Do you remember that telling of the Khmer Rouge in the movie The Killing Fields?

I think I will stick to wrangling with mulch and planting beauty.

Thanks for the reminder of the days when chewing over such challenging works was second nature and good grist for the mill!

Roger that and all and all,

P.S. Did anyone out there like Jane Eyre as a character?

Good stuff Lestie. I particularly liked your references to King Lear, The Lord of the Flies, and the Killing Fields.

Changing gears with another random thought...

About a week ago a baby house sparrow (definitely not as "sexy" or even perhaps sacred like a baby hawk or eagle but...) fell out of its nest (I think) in our side yard. He(?) is too young to feed itself, can only fly a few feet, and it looks like one of its feet is badly deformed- although he seems to ambulate fairly well. Mostly he tries to stay in the shade and waits for his parents to come feed him which they do quite often which I find to be amazing, fantastic, and miraculous. I do not think that the prognosis for this little guy is very good and we are letting nature take its course with him.

In this instance and other similar ones that I am exposed to in nature (such as when we saw a ground dove suddenly fly out of the brush and flew straight into a gate, killing itself or when our 13 week old puppy died after consuming a baby lizard (after we had puppy-proofed the house as much as we could) which had come onto our property which had eaten rat poison apparently from a neighbors home), it just reinforces my atheistic agnosticism. Survival of the fittest and natural selection is indeed the way of nature for all sentient beings and from my perspective is ungodly.

Hello there,

Well now I am walking on thin ice, for in a couple of things I want to say, for even if I wanted to, I would not be able to have a really cogent conversation. But then what comes to mind wouldn't come to mind unless there was something there, even if it is a disparate thought from disparate reading etc. Still.

Speaking of natural selection and survival of the fittest, I do remember coming across a lot of correlated research within a human context in the 'survival of the fittest' column where it seemed 'proven' that, and most interestingly 'quite out of our hands,' is that many women do not conceive and do not bear children as a means to this end (of survival of the fittest).

And here the researchers were not talking of any kind of choice or lifestyle or specific set of circumstances. Some women just don't procreate. And the hypothesis was just that, they do not conceive as a result of selection of the strongest and fittest � a natural and selective way of cleaning up the general gene pool of humanity. If I remember, there were individual studies done in terms of countries, nations, ethnicities, tribes etc. etc. and so on though the scope of this was gigantic.

There is so much to say on this (memory a tad hazy too!) so I have to hope that you will skip the logical steps until you come to the conclusion they came to in that some women are not up to scratch when it comes to said procreation. Their particular gene pool ends with them. Now of course the argument stands also for a man. There are those who do not produce children (�produce no issue� I think they pompously wrote). It is as if on a natural selection basis, that is it. Could be one or two of the children in a family go ahead and have children, while others in the same family or clan don't. One only has to think about this a while and it will become quite interesting to see how many people, parties, families, characters etc. that you know who would stand in this queue.

The study/paper/research or whatever ended with ignominy as I recall. It was attacked as preposterous conjecture and from all directions ... homosexuality, religion, ethics and morals, medicine and pharmaceutical inputs ... I am sure you can add your own. They shot the messenger even before the whole message had been delivered read absorbed part-accepted let alone discussed.

Nevertheless, I found it very interesting. Perhaps the research continued for research sake. I would hope so. I have not had the time in general to follow it up - maybe I will make the time available for my 70th birthday present to me when I will catch up on all the reading I never did as a kid. And maybe, just maybe I will try and tackle Joyce's Ulysses yet again!

There are other thoughts that spin off your post above Les, but this one reply is long enough. Also, I am not sure that this post particularly belongs in an Atheist/Agnostic forum but it does go with Random Thoughts so there it is for who kisses Polly!

P.S. What of whales that beach themselves?

Cheers now

Lestie and all,

Sure your above post belongs in the A/A forum as natural selection is a concept/theory of biology that has answered some questions about the historical and continuing development of sentient beings but certainly not all... so that there is still a lot to be agnostic /"without knowledge"
about.

However, the below insertion is something that I do find to be fascinating and likely to be valid.
(from 2005) and I hope that there will be more research published about it.

"The most detailed analysis to date of how humans differ from one another at the DNA level shows strong evidence that natural selection has shaped the recent evolution of our species, according to researchers from Cornell University, Celera Genomics and Celera Diagnostics."


And in terms of the survival of the fittest (in a way), the conflict between secular and religious interests, and the philosophy of life, family, and time in Mexico, you might want to take a look at the forum topic "Chartered Bus Trips in Mexico" in the Mexico forum area (Travel and Culture) as I posted there a short story (only 8000 words, mas o menos) that I wrote in a hopefully funny and somewhat sarcastic style about 3 years ago. You might get a kick out of it!

Impactful quotes from Inherit the Wind above and beyond "Give me that old time religion. Give me that old time religion. Give me that old time religion. If it's good enough for Brady, it's good enough for me."

"Can't you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we'll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!"

Matthew Harrison Brady: "We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing!"
Henry Drummond: "Then why did God plague us with the capacity to think? Mr. Brady, why do you deny the one thing that sets above the other animals? What other merit have we? The elephant is larger, the horse stronger and swifter, the butterfly more beautiful, the mosquito more prolific, even the sponge is more durable. Or does a sponge think?"

"In a child's power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted "amens" and "holy holies" and "hosannas." An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters."

"Tell them what your father really said, that Tommy's soul was damned and burning in hellfire! Religion is supposed to comfort people, not scare them to death!"

"The Bible is a book. It's a good book, but it is not the only book."

"We're growing a strange crop of agnostics this year."

Did I ever really sing as a youth, "so please don't give me that old time religion"? You betcha, in a non-Sarah Palin sort of way, thank God!

My musical interests really stopped in the 1960's. Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration as the recording artists that I have most recently discovered are the Eagles. Nonetheless, when I was trying to think of what agnostic songs influenced me the most (at all) I was really hard pressed to come up with any. Try as I might I just could not justify considering "Puff the Magic Dragon," "Garden Party," Town Without Pity," "If I had a Hammer," "Mr. Tambourine Man, "Tom Dooley," Last Kiss," "Charley Brown," "He's A Rebel," "Bridge Over Troubled Water," "Hotel California," "Tears on My Pillow,""Abraham, Martin, and John," or even "Teen Angel" as being inspirationally agnostic or atheistic.

Keep in mind that there are no agnostic or atheistic holidays that songs can pay homage to. Even if there were, I would not know what type of lyrics would be appropriate for
let's say "No Saints Day."

So, the best that I could come up with agnostically song-wise is "Imagine" by John Lennon

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one


What songs have you drawn philosophical or belief system inspiration from?

I would also have chosen John Lennon, however, my 2nd choices is:
Affirmation lyrics
Songwriters: Darren Hayes;Daniel Jones

I believe the sun should never set upon an argument
I believe we place our happiness in other people's hands
I believe that junk food tastes so good because it's bad for you
I believe your parents did the best job they knew how to do
I believe that beauty magazines promote low self esteem
I believe I'm loved when I'm completely by myself alone

I believe in karma what you give is what you get returned
I believe you can't appreciate real love 'til you've been burned
I believe the grass is no more greener on the other side
I believe you don't know what you've got until you say goodbye

I believe you can't control or choose your sexuality
I believe that trust is more important than monogamy
I believe your most attractive features are your heart and soul
I believe that family is worth more than money or gold
I believe the struggle for financial freedom is unfair
I believe the only ones who disagree are millionaires

I believe in karma what you give is what you get returned
I believe you can't appreciate real love 'til you've been burned
I believe the grass is no more greener on the other side
I believe you don't know what you've got until you say goodbye

I believe forgiveness is the key to your own happiness
I believe that wedded bliss negates the need to be undressed
I believe that God does not endorse TV evangelists
I believe in love surviving death into eternity

I believe in karma what you give is what you get returned
I believe you can't appreciate real love 'til you've been burned
I believe the grass is no more greener on the other side
I believe you don't know what you've got until you say goodbye

I believe in karma what you give is what you get returned
I believe you can't appreciate real love 'til you've been burned
I believe the grass is no more greener on the other side
I believe you don't know what you've got until you say goodbye
Until you say goodbye

Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode (Can't stand that Johnny Cash redid this song, he ruined it!!!) It was one of my favorites during my rebellion against,you already know....

"Reach out and touch faith
Your own Personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
Your own Personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who's there

Feeling's unknown and you're all alone
Flesh and bone by the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer

Take second best
Put me to the test
Things on your chest
You need to confess
I will deliver
You know I'm a forgiver
Reach out and touch faith"

I got a couple more but I'll post em separately.

Drive by Incubus - I LOVE this song for so many reasons but I still choose the wine

"Sometimes, I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear
And I can't help but ask myself how much I'll let the fear
Take the wheel and steer

It's driven me before and seems to have a vague
Haunting mass appeal
But lately I'm beginning to find that I
Should be the one behind the wheel

Whatever tomorrow brings
I'll be there with open arms and open eyes yea
Whatever tomorrow brings
I'll be there I'll be there

So, if I decide to waiver my chance
To be one of the hive
Will I choose water over wine
And hold my own and drive?
Aah ah ooo

It's driven me before and it seems to be the way
That everyone else gets around
But lately I'm beginning to find that when
I drive myself my light is found

Whatever tomorrow brings
I'll be there with open arms and open eyes yea
Whatever tomorrow brings
I'll be there I'll be there

Would you choose water over wine?
Hold the wheel and drive

Whatever tomorrow brings
I'll be there with open arms and open eyes yea
Whatever tomorrow brings
I'll be there I'll be there."