Funny you should mention Roger Bannister…I was just listening to Jerry Savelle talk about him. His message was about how faith and beliefs can overcome obstacles in life. So many people said it never could be done….the 4 minute mile. Yet Roger Bannister proved them wrong, and because he did, now athletes are following his footsteps. Same thing with the guy who broke the sound barrier….people believed that it never could be done, but he had the right stuff. Makes me think of the scripture: “with God all things are possible”…..

I will be honest I had to read this post twice to completely take it in!

But another amazing post Allison, it’s another post that makes you think!

Well, I think that if everyone sets their mind to it,they can do it. Sometimes us ourselves plague ourselves with negative thoughts and think that we can’t do it. But I beleive every one can do things that are incredible and change history. Because God created us all in his image, perfect, and he never makes us think that we are inferior or that we can’t do something.

I think that partly it’s us and another part is our laziness. Let’s face it we all have a lazy side of us that doesn’t want to do anything and always that side pushes us down and drags us down.

I think like I said in my last response, We all have to believe in something and we all need someone to believe in us. I also want to add that, also the people around us help us be better sometimes. Sometimes all we need is a few words of encouragement. You’d be amazed at what a few simple words like “You can do it” can do to your self-esteem.

And it’s so funny you mention Michael Phelps since that has been the main topic in my family right now. Me and My family are addicted to the Olympics right now and we saw the Michale Phelps race. And they mentioned two things first, that Micheal Phelps didn’t think he would be able to be a swimmer because the size of his EARS!It made me realize the kind of negative things that can pop into our heads and make us think that we can’t do things! And now look what Michael accomplished!!
Secondly, that a five time gold medalist was quoted that he believed that Michael wasn’t going to be bale to win 5 medals less eight. And again look what Michael did!

It made me thing also that there will always be some people who don’t beleive in us and will not want us to accomplish what we want. But it’s really our decision if we let the negative comments take over our lives or if we simply shake them off and go ahead in our lives and do incredible things.

This makes me think of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote that I read really recently that has pretty much become the theme of my life right now:

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

In the end it is us,ourselves, who decided if we can do it or not. God created us, he gave us talents, but it’s our decision to use them to our fullest or not.

XoXo

Maria

I need to take this post in again in order to grasp what is being said, but I need to nit pick for just a second.

It’s Michael Phelps who has won the most medals at any Olympics, not Mark Phelps.

I’ll be back with a more thoughtful repsonse–when my brain actually works :)

hey,

I thought of sharing my thoughts about these theories. It doesn’t really matter what theories we believe in, evolution, or even naturalism or creationism.

All these theories are construct of how we as humans make sense of the world. The are ideas, just ideas that were made into a reality through culture. Everything that we say, every word is an idea which we as a society normalise (the notion of “it goes without saying” by Foucault)

Also when we saperate us to this and that…etc we are actually creating the “we -dom and they-dom” which is one way to make sense of the world but however this idea makes the “they-dom” part as a deviant in the society and thus we create what we call discrimination.

We then look at the term discrimination as something that we consider bad, the “opposite” of what we do. Like history tells us how we fight for the human rights of the black slaves back in those days. Yes, they are free from slavery now but they are still discriminated. They are still discriminated or separated as the “other”.

Even the division of states and countries are considered as discrimination. I mean, why do we go like “I’m an American, Australian, German….” Why can we be citizens of the world instead of a citizen of a particular country?

On the free will perspective, we will never be free willed (literary) because we have been governed by our very own culture. What we are today is shaped by culture and ideas. The notion of negotiation is the trick behind the idea of a free will.

Ps: Sorry if I have repeated anythingthat was stated above…too much booze in the night and early mornings murders me

Well I must admit I’m a little lost,just a little because my English isn’t so so good.So here I go,I understand that human construct is what we humans build in our life,what we create in the place we live,what we made by being humans,those creations can be values or models of lifes,we have control in our actions by doing what we think is the right thing because that’s how we being raise,and that can’t change us,all the contrary,we have to change this built by breaking rules like discrimination between cultures,racism,etc,etc.We can’t judge nobody just because they are from another place or country or just because they have a high quality of life.We have to be gratefuls that we can make a change,make a difference……Stay out of the rules just to make the right thing is AWESOME!!!!
Greetings to everybody.
Bye,Melissa.

Considering “grade inflation,” the more modern approach to breaking world records might be to redefine the minute. With the box office records being broken on “Dark Knight,” I wonder how well modern movies would stack up if movie tickets cost as much today as they did in the 70s or the 40s. What does all that mean? Probably nothing. My particular construct has had a particularly bad sinus headache that kept me in bed most of the day and I’m just coming out of it in time to get to bed for tomorrow. Part of how bad it got was, despite how I felt this morning, I went to church to hear my Father’s (possibly) last sermon — having retired now for the third time at age 83.5. His fist sermon at his first church at age 17 was in 1943. He got fired twice from churches: Once for attending a march against above ground nuclear testing and once for attending a rally in Washington DC in protest of the war in Vietnam. He was a civil rights advocate when that wasn’t very popular and helped set up mental health help centers where ever he was assigned to minister. On days like today that I can’t help but measure my own life and I certainly wouldn’t be setting any world records … even with a longer minute.

Justice. I loved some of the throw away comments in the movie “The Golden Child.” In the movie, if the child’s protector fails and the child dies, the quality that the child represented will be forever lost to the world. Eddy Murphy asks if any protector has ever failed to save the life of his Golden Child. The answer was, “Yes, the Golden Child of justice died several centuries ago.” [Quoting from memory ... so look it up if you want an exact quote.] To translate, the comment meant that there is no justice in the world.

But … in the scheme of everything, does the equation balance? Is there an ultimate justice? That brings up the topic of Karma. In thinking about Karma, I was wondering if even Karma could be a true equalizer. If someone slaps someone else and is in turn slapped … do those slaps mean the same to the individuals receiving them? I finally hit on a concept that works. I have shared it with a few people over the last few years and I will share it with you all now. Hopefully, no one will make a religion out of it. It’s just a concept.

Let’s say that God, who is capable of anything, only made one soul. All lives and times could play out instantaneously for a supreme being. So let’s say that each and every one of the billions and billions of lives were lived by a single soul. It wove its way from one lifetime to another on its journey of experience. Every kindness done by one person to another was an act of kindness to them self. Every trauma inflicted on another was inflicted to them self. Only if that was true, would I believe that absolute justice would exist. People would truly reap what they sow and the golden rule would be a very literal piece of advice.

Chew on that one for a while.

Bump for the Forums!
http://forum.allisonmack.com/index.php/board,6.0.html

Nice to have you back, allison and david hayes, anybody has seen amanda recently?
I have been waiting for “Justice” for a long time, I mean as a topic.
Justice systems, are usually there to keep societies in order. Law, a set of rules for every body to follow.
Now back to my story telling; Years ago I worked in a book store in downtown toronto, I caught a guy once stealing our books, he was a homeless drug addict trying to find something to sell for his next fix. It was a chain bookstore and we caught the same guy three times in three of our locations and each time we called police. Each time they asked him a few questions asked him to return the books and let him go. Now if the same guy did the same thing under Taliban in Afghanistan first time they would chop off his fingers, second time his hands and if he still would manage to go for the third time he would lose his arms.

Another example, a guy somewhere in africa stole some money from church ( the amount was equal 50cents $US) he was jailed for 5 years. Another guy used to hide in bushes in York University, toronto, attack female students and rape them, he got arrested after the fifth victim, he was jailed for 1.5 years.

Justice Systems, how do we decide what is just? Are there ever two crimes exactly identical ? Do we even have a universal defenition for each moral value?

Can we oppose religeous, caltural or ethical laws and rules ?

What if you are a part of the justice system, how will you trust your own judgement ?

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Maria,
It is an interesting quote. An insult doesn’t work unless you believe it is true.
So by our reaction to an insult we can learn about ourselves.
SteveK

I’m not altogether sure how I feel about this, but I figure I’ll take a stab at eloquence and thoughtfulness.
I believe that differences in perception are the biggest catalysts for differing opinions/views on issues like social justice and the human potential. To invoke a cliche, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Personally I prefer more morbid analogies.
Say you (Allison) get hit by a car. Your initial reaction may be something along the lines of “Damn, this is quite unfortunate” combined with thoughts of “ouch” and “I hate bleeding in public”. Now take that same experience and repeat it with another person. Common sense tells us that, generally, the reaction will be similar to that of Allison’s, but, of course, not exactly the same. Then there are those of us who may have what some perceive to be a warped view of the whole fiasco. Instead of “Damn, this is rather unfortunate”, someone may think “Maybe now people will pay attention to me”, or “Excellent, I can forego the experience of jumping off a building or shooting myself.”
My point is that while people may generally have similar thoughts about certain experiences, we are such a mentally diverse species that we cannot or will not fathom anything outside of the status quo. We value familiarity so much that we tend to forget that in order to truly understand requires a willingness to view things from alternative perspectives.
Excuse the rambling and eccentricities, I hope that you might find sense in that.

The human construct to me is basically split into two parts. The half we are born with and the half we learn.

The first half is what most people have. A body, brain, two eyes, a mouth (the whole ten fingers ten toes kinda thing). I know people are born with infirmities but go with me here. We are all born with the basic blueprint.

Now, the second part is what we learn. Because of our learning experiences and environment, a person builds a personality, conscience (sense of right and wrong), mental capacity, etc completely unique to that person.

Together these two things make up who we are and certainly affects what we say, so and act.

I love your posts, keep them coming.

hellz yes.. looking forward to discussion on that maybe.
I remember saying I wanted to have a discussion on it sooo yay for that?
id really give my opinion on the whole blog… but im limited to online phone access and small phone keyboard *sigh*
couldn’t even read the replies…. so im a little upset! can’t wait to get back home and read them all

taylor nikole

David Hayes and arash got me thinking…

Once, when I was walking through a neighborhood that some might deem as sketchy, some random guy on a bike zipped by and snatched my cell phone from my hand. As he was racing away, if I had seen him hit a curb and fall over flat on his face, I admit…I would have felt triumphant, with a self-satisfied grin plastered on my face. But…if you told me that he was stealing in order to help his family pay for bills because no one was hiring, or that he came from a broken home and he had to steal in order gain entry to a gang…you would see that self-satisfied grin disappear pretty quickly.

One of the difficulties I have with concepts like karma is that it seems to view suffering as a zero-sum game and wrongdoers as isolated individuals, when in fact life is rarely that simple. Oftentimes, the people who cause suffering are suffering themselves. This doesn’t mean their actions are excusable, but it does make me wonder. Say that guy got caught and was sentenced or fined or whatever. Great…so things are balanced from my perspective – he gave me stress and in return he received stress. What about things from his perspective? In all likelihood, he started off with a negative balance sheet, whether it’s a broken home, a dangerous neighborhood, an underperforming school, etc. When does his balance get restored?

(sorry if this double posts… )

It is not a Justice System. It is just a system. ~Bob Enyart

One of irony’s greatest accomplishments is that one cannot punish the wrongdoing of another without committing a wrongdoing himself. ~Anonymous

Two quotes today – one to say that Justice alone is a difficult subject, let alone delving into the so-called justice system. Because to address a justice system, you must subsequently address the ethics of the society in belong to, as other people have mentioned.

For me, my instinctual response is that justice is an infliction of suffering upon a person who has chosen to cause suffering upon another living being. This might be karma, the legal system or social repacussion. Then, however, I question: despite being an atheist, is my opinion based on judeo-christian moral that largely influence my white western society? Do I believe justice is suffering based on the addage “An eye for an eye”? Or is justice a social/human construct derived from a need to preserve our species? Did we create a belief structure to curtail our biological urges that would otherwise lead us to cause harm upon ourselves and threaten our survival?

Being an atheist, I’d like to believe that the concept of justice derives from a biological impulse of “don’t cause pain to other because pain might then happen to me.” I’m heading towards the realm of conditioning, but here is an example… one reason puppies shouldn’t be removed from the litter early is because it prevents developmental learning. Puppies that bite littermates get bitten back and that often leads to them stopping the behaviour. Because it’s an animal we ascribe it to biology, but if man 2 hits man 1 because man 1 hit him first, is that also biology or is it justice?

The argument could be that man has a more evolved brain than a puppy and that pain caused by conscious choice is a different circumstance. But then justice becomes determined by initial motive, as arash and skahahoo and others have brought up.

I think I’ve started to ramble and ask more questions than answer… so I’ll finish with this opinion:

We would not need the concept of justice is we could follow the ideal of Bill and Ted and simply always “Be excellent to each other.”

ok i just watched ask allison mack….and u seem like such a cool person…just thought id say that…anyways….yeh

It seems like everyone is focusing on Justice as a response to a negative act. So let me just mention the aspect of justice where someone works hard and gets the promotion or wins the medal or gets honored in some special way. That too is Justice.

Also, there is a type of “universal justice.” If I find myself overly critical of someone else’s behavior for something and I pay close attention, I will find that somehow I will inevitably be drawn to do the very thing I criticized. It’s like the universe telling me, “Hey Buddy! You’re not so perfect. Better be a little more tolerant!” Looking around, I see hose lessons being taught to people all the time, … but usually it seems that people don’t notice the lesson when it happens to them. Like a puppy in the pack that Puffy talked about not understanding why it got bit when it bit the others.

I love reading these discussions (sometimes a bit too deep for me) but all I have to say is what makes the world so exciting for me is: New records are broken every day. It is human nature to push beyond the limits and strive to do better. That’s why we compete against and work together.

Thanks Puffy and others along the way. I hope that people who read these posts understand that often my purpose here is to broaden the scope of the discussion. If I find that everyone is thinking on only one side of the subject, I will raise the other aspects. It’s not to attack people’s point of view but help them expand it … or be better prepared to defend their own point of view. Hopefully this is in line with what Allison would like to see happen here.

Back to the negative side … or the positive aspect of the negative side? Punishment for the sake of the person being punished. Think of the case of a child who likes to run free in parking lots – crossing the paths of cars without looking around. A swift, gentle swat on the rear may not be politically correct, but if it catches the child’s full attention and prevents a tragedy, then it is Justice-fied. People who grow up learning that there are never any consequences to their actions don’t really grow up into the person they could have been. Eventually life will slam into them somehow and they will feel totally unprepared and cheated. And, in a very real sense, they were cheated.

Punishment for the sake of protection of society. If someone’s problem is that they get a kick out of hurting people, it is a Christian ideal that these people should be helped to see what is wrong with their actions … but in the meantime, there needs to be some kind of shield between the people intent on hurting others and their potential victims. People minding their own business should have the right to be safe from an unjustified attack against them. If prison life is a worse punishment than the crime deserved, what options do we have? As there is an increase in the number of people who think ‘wrong’ is defined as anything they can’t get away with, there is left a smaller number of people capable of generating enough income to build and staff prisons to separate the offenders from the innocent. Eventually, it seems, we will have to wall in the innocent and expel the people that won’t play by the rules.

Maybe we should form a group devoted to making justice on Earth a reality … a Justice … League. Yeah! That’s the ticket!

Sounds like a plan David!

However, a “Justice … League,” just screams spndex to me.

I’ll join, but I don’t do spandex.

I saw part of a television program last night on the subject of brain health. What I heard was interesting. The doctor was talking about a couple that had gone through a couple years of marriage counseling and the counselor had finally suggested a divorce. They came to him and he did brain scans. He found that the wife had a healthy brain but the husband showed damage due to drug abuse. When confronted, the man swore that he didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs of any kind. His wife verified that her husband didn’t do drugs .. that he was just a jerk. The doctor asked the woman why she would marry a jerk. She answered that he had been a wonderful husband up until 5 years ago. So the doctor asked what the man did for a living. He worked in a furniture factory putting the finishes on wooden furniture. The doctor told him that the brain scan was correct, that he was a drug abuser. The fumes he inhaled daily were the same as the practice of sniffing glue. He had the man find a new job before the therapy on his marriage could resume. Without having a healthy brain, the marital counseling would be useless. The program seemed to tie into some of the topics being discussed here.

I guess that’s why the 4 principal books of the New Testament are Matthew, Mack, Luke and John.

Hey Allison,
I recently had the opportunity to take the Myers- Briggs test on personalities. It is a brilliant way to learn about other personalities and get along with others. A task which too often gets ignored by the general population. I was wondering if you have taken the test, if so I was wondering what personality you are? I am an ENFP.

Vegas911 Said:
August 18th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
“I was sent an email today about a two legged dog named Faith, and at the end of the email I read the most profound sentence and I thought that I would share it with everyone…….Life is the continual demonstration of the Strength of Life! Thats what I believe!!!”

I have a picture of a two legged dog. I don’t know what his name is, but everytime I look at the picture I think of lean beef.

I knew a man that had a dog with no legs. He named the dog “Cigarette” because he took the dog out for a drag every night after dinner. I don’t think that was so cruel because most people don’t name dogs with no legs … because they don’t come when you call them anyway.

Where are my rim shots?

Totally off the subject but I was at work today counting pills for angry customers who don’t get why it takes more than five minutes to fill ten prescriptions and I got to thinking… What happened to my life? It seemed like just yesterday I was a kid dreaming of being a writer and working in Hollywood with people like Luke Perry and Molly Ringwald, and now I’m thirty-one years old and I haven’t done a thing that I dreamed of. I mean I still write in my spare time, and I have a box full of screenplays that I’ve written but never tried to publish. My husband keeps telling me to go for it. And I want to so bad. But I let one day after another pass me bye. I keep putting it off saying maybe tomorrow, but when tomorrow gets here I get caught up in what I’m doing that day that I don’t get to what I want to do.

It’s sad how we let life slip bye us. I’m not complaining, because I have a great life. I have a husband that is loyal and understanding and loving and caring. He is my superman and I’m his Lois. I have parents that taught me right from wrong and that the world is not black and white. People are people and they all deserve to be loved. And I work in a place that allows me to help other people and I love it. But we aren’t promised tomorrow so why do we let things that we want to do in life pass us by? I’m thirty-one and have never seen the ocean. I’m thirty-one and never had a child. These are things that I wanted to do by the time I was twenty-five and now they seem so far away.

Don’t get me wrong I’ll keep the faith and I know someday I’ll see my name up in lights with the number one box office movie in America, I just need to slow down and enjoy the day that I was given.
Thanks for letting me share my crazy thoughts with you.
Kathy-Lynn Brown.