Atheist Meditations

For posterity, my brain has been occupying itself with a definition of Liberalism. Like, the word is so thrown around all the time, with all the fucking haters and all.

When I was still developing one notion got its hooks into me good: 'The Liberal Education.' How many of the stories that I absorbed contained that magical phrase? It seemed every historical figure at some point, 'had access to a Liberal Education,' and thus had the resources necessary to accomplish his life mission. I think the term is well laid in the paperwork of historia. In particular the Founding Fathers, I know that their level of education is often seen as an elitest station. John Adams understood both latin and greek, in fact considered greek the 'most eloquent of language.' Jefferson rewrote the Bible! There's a guy with too much time on his hands.

So what is the Liberal Education? Does on need to understand Greek to grasp it? I don't think so, since the point of learning greek was to read thinkers who had written in greek. A few hundred years of English translation has withdrawn that prerequisite.

My pursuit of the Liberal Education involved a whole lot of reading, which lured me into a costly affair with an English Literature degree - there was no closure for either of us.

I'm confident that the key to a Liberal Education is the reading of the memoirs and biographies of the 'Great Men.' Well, that's part of it.

A few months ago I was having a discussion with a co-worker about genocide. I was explaining how genocide operated, how the operator would first rip out the tongue of the peoples - targetting and killing any member of the race with access to academia, politics, or the press, before moving on to - when he cut me off to correct me; he then provided the U.N. definition of genocide as a war crime. I was struck by the understanding of the thing.

Genocide is more than the definition. It is a deliberate act, and the perpetuators of said act do not just make shit up as the murder along. A genocide requires a level of organization, and that organization is implemented for a reason. This is part of what academia does, it preserves the dark science of genocide, so that the next generation can improve on the efficiency of it.

To be continued. . .