John wrote
> There is a strange irony of human nature: we are absolutely responsible
> for our actions and that is absolutely out of our hands. It is true that
> we must live with the consequences of our actions, and we don't have a
> choice about that.
I saw a statement on display outside a church building yesterday, and
it said something like "who you are and what you do today are far more
important than mistakes you may have made in the past". The actual
working was somewhat different and gave me the idea that the statement
was meant to address "the opposite feeling", addressed a person's
individual performance as outweighing earlier error, and had no
indication of the empowerment - to misuse the word - of forgiveness. I
realized that the things that I consider to be forgiven are virtually
gone; and I've been seemingly neurotic making efforts "to have it be
so" - asking forgiveness probably thousands of times - to others'
surprise!
Anyway, I like the freedom of former errors, misjudgement, efforts
that were too harsh, and efforts without awareness of resulting
hurtful effects becoming voided and no longer on my account. The
results at a distance concept seems to make some errors likely
unavoidable for many people during their learning phases.
I'm not sure that there's much that's factually relevant in what
I'm saying to the idea of "living with the consequences of our
actions". King David wrote in one of the Psalms, "your gentleness has
made me great", meaning to me that finding escape from some of the
possible "consequences of our actions" might be needed for people to
excell.
Another point about "necessity" of human thoughts and resulting
actions occurred to me when auditing a philosophy class about "Minds,
Brains, and Computers". Never before had I encountered the eye-opening
evidences for the biological functioning of the brain to the neuron
level, and it shook me up. One day I was on my bicycle going to work
on campus and I rounded a corner at the library where I work. There
are bricks arranged into the walkway there and as I went over one of
them, it shifted back and forth as a small lever. Then from out in
left field the thought came in, neurons could be like that too, not
doing a precise job of holding up the thoughts that they maintain,
sometimes saying left and sometimes saying right, so that they
couldn't be said to "always say right because they had been
conditioned to say right". Admittedly, that's a minor thought and not
as scientifically validated as other research. It's just a small
evidence that the course of our thinking may not be so evidently
determined. That's all :)
-- Have a nice day John Paul Fullerton jpf6745@acs.tamu.edu