John Burnheim,

What a date for remembering Myths.

Brian Holden is determined to broadcast his wisdom to all and sundry.

But what wisdom can be gathered on the way to superannuation?

Earlier I tried to tell him that the harm that holds the deadliest weapon is the one that dictates the choice.

Has he ever heard of Patrice Lumumba or the Rwanda genocide or Kosovo or the conditions of Palestinians?

Why some people choose to be so blind?

The original inhabitants of Australia do know what the claim of freedom of choice issuing from the pen of Brian Holden or any other newcomer to their land means.

Had we only the decency to shut up.

correction: arm not harm.

We all make decisions coloured with our own bias and self interest.Very few of us make decisions based on the greater good for all humanity.

The globlal consenus at the moment is that there is just too many people on the planet and we are destroying the environment.This is not an absolute since science can expand food production way beyond what is now possible.

So there is a movement towards more wars,economic austerity and even a reduction in the food production capacity.Some like Maurice Strong, want the world's pop reduced to under a billion.This is their free will in operation that over rides the will of the vast majority.

We have never had free will in our democracies,because the ruling elites control the money supply.They then tell us about the flaws in a system to justify their totalitarian solution to a crisis of their own making.

What a pile of waffle!

Typical of academia in general, & Philosophy in particular.

Is it a plan, or just an accident that they manage to waffle on long enough to avoid ever making a decision? Before they've done waffling the reason for, or opportunity to, make a decision is long gone.

I guess it avoids these people ever having to exercise any freewill, or take responsibility for their lives. Perhaps that's why they think the rest of us don't exercise our free will.

No, wrong there, they are still waffling on about what they think.

Even worse, we pay them to do this.

Prof. Burnheim,

Anyone who has had the serenity to think about the human condition cannot but see that we have one and one only freedom; that of killing ourselves.

For man, as any other organism, living on the surface of a physical structure as a Planet, is subject to the quirks of its Elements, the feral and parasitic among the other living entities and the unstoppable greed of his fellow man.

Death to man can come from all angles.

We have no alternative, hence no choice.

No Professor, we understand the plight of Mr. Holden.

He has been a good boy, never saw the inside of a prison camp and never was a salaried educator, so he deserves our tolerance.

But we do not deserve a string of sophisms either!

Look! the lesser brains will fire unclear weapon's. We should of not given them the technology.

Thats going to come back on us, for sure.

Free will is how mankind got here in the first place and to stop it, well....your stopping our own evolution......think about it.

The free thinking mind is aloud to explore new grounds, and why would you stop this?

Like Charles's Darwin, (even though his papers were hidden by cause) and yet, the work did get published ( no thanks to religion ) and the truth was told.

I don't want to go on, I mean no ill to my fellow worshipers.

If one can teach love without profit, that's what I call, the true human-being.

Good free will the world needs, not bad free will......and I think this is the way to go as we explore our earth.......what do you lot recon:)

CACTUS

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12872#222209

Arjay, the situation is not neccessarily that bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JihQw39hyG0

We have more rights than we have been led to believe. Sheeple get the politicians they deserve. Our small but strengthening nation was headed in the best direction after 1945. The rot set in around the mid 1960's. The damage can be undone, if we stop supporting the lame stream media & major mistake political parties.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12872#222214

Hasbeen, spot on mate, what rubbish, of course we have free will, the only exceptions i can see are when somebody has been fed MISinformation & acts incorrectly. The other, mental illness, including addiction.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=12872#222263

Cactus..2, i agree about the DEvolution bit.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8630135369495797236# failure training at its very best, has been going on for about half a century in the land of OZ.

Well I'm sorry, but I think both this article and the comments that follow completely missed the point of Mr Holden's argument.
I won't presume to speak for Brian Holden, nor do I think he needs me to. But I really thought he came very close to my core philosophy:
http://thecomensality.com
None of us get to choose our names.
We don't get to choose our parents.
We don't get to choose the schools we go to, or the pool from which to choose our friends, or the teachers we have, or any of the things which will eventually make us what we are.
All these things will determine how we make decisions.
In our society, we accept largely without question, the paradigm that smart people will always make better decisions than less smart people.
But is it necessarily true?
I would suggest anyone with an ounce of honesty who has or is in a close relationshop (say marriage) should know what I mean. Your spouse may be smarter than you, or they may be dumber than you. Either way, does it necessarily follow that they are always invariably right, or invariably wrong?
Good decisions require more than just intelligence. They require relevant experience, and perhaps most important of all, objectivity.
If your childhood experiences predisposes you to think in a particular way, your intelligence won't necessarily overcome that.
The bottom line remains: we don't choose our level of intelligence, and we don't choose our childhood experiences.
We have absolutely no control over the very things that predispose us to make the decisions we make.
When I look back on my life, yes I have regrets. Yes, I wish I was a better man.
But the fact is, I did what I did because I am who I am.
To have taken a different path would have required me to be a different person.
All I can do, and all I can recommend to my children, is be the best you can be. Always strive for excellence, but don't bother comparing yourself to someone else.
They have their own problems.

With the up/and/comings.....there will be only one sound.....

BANG!

Rememmber the ten rats in a box?.

Ok....lets say everythink goes the way of Mr holden?

Then what?

CACTUS

Sorry!.....that last post was just me thinking out loud.

Please continue......CACTUS.

Would you risk your job on a moral point - what if you had a mortgage or rent to pay? Restore @landrights4all to restore moral choice.