From: QUINTIN PHILLIPS Area: Base of Set To: MICHAEL AQUINO 5 May 94 19:39:00 Subject: Re: Group-Hierarchy UpdReq ELE> Can moral values be a product of intelligence or are they solely ELE> dictated by survival? Where can we find a truly open minded ELE> person, someone who is not a product of his environment? Even a MA> I think that you have more room for morals - and philosophy, for that MA> matter - in any society the more it has flexibility beyond raw survival. MA> As soon as some of your behavior towards others becomes discretionary, MA> then you can choose between various codes and standards, both MA> individually and as a community. My feelings are that it is very difficult to be objective enough. Modern day morality tends to be money oriented. We still have the populate or perish mentality which was valid for early agrarian society but was not valid for hunter and gatherer society and IMHO is not valid for our survival. The Innuit practice euthanasia and the Indigenous Australians practiced infanticide (in the case of twins). Now we have the discretionary power to keep weak and defective genes alive, basically for the benefit of the medical profession. In the States as in Australia encouraging a weak gene pool is morally "good" but in the third world the weak are allowed to die or as in Bombay India babies are mutilated to ensure them of a living, to survive as beggars. My personal ethic weighs on the side of the Innuit/Aboriginal and away from the "keep them alive at any co$t". Does this mean that I am immoral? Xeper Quintin 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: QUINTIN PHILLIPS Area: Base of Set To: BALANONE 5 May 94 20:22:00 Subject: Re: Group-Hierarchy UpdReq Ba> Given that societies (read: influential members of society) do Ba> impose social mores upon many members of those societies, are It is morally acceptable to kill hundreds of Iraqis but not acceptable to put a cancer ridden octogenarian out of her pain. These moral codes tend to be money oriented. Ba> you suggesting there are *no* values which an intelligent and Ba> open-minded adult could not achieve for himself? Ba> And are you suggesting there are *no* values which such intelligent Ba> and open-minded adults would not hold largely in common? EL> Here I am trying to side step my knee jerk reaction. :-O EL> Assuming that we are the products of a Darwinian evolutionary EL> environment, where survival is the "prime directive", then our EL> inate (human/animal) "values" would be for survival. EL> Can we be more objective than our environmental conditions EL> dictate? Ba> Put the question from a different direction, and you see that if there's Ba> any value to our philosophical pursuit of Xeper, then we *must* become Ba> more objective than dictated by our environmental conditions. This is where an understanding of LBM is important. Your personal objectivity is dependant on your understanding of the LBM being worked on you. Moral codes are one of the main LBM influences over us. The medical profession want to look "good" so they rely on the J/C myth that extending life is morally "good" (especially if the accountant deems it so!). Ba> The only questions remaining become, how, and how do we measure our Ba> success in this endeavor? We have to question everything which enters our ears and eyes - even to the point of music, why does some music make you feel good and some make you cry? And when is that music used on you? The danger is becoming the ultimate cynic! According to my Guru, Helen, morals are mostly subjective as each individual has his own reality. That grey line between the subjective and the objective. "You may believe you understand what I said, but I believe that what I said is not what I meant to say." Xeper Quintin 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Albertus Magnus Area: Base of Set To: All 7 May 94 01:45:42 Subject: Remembering Satan UpdReq Chicago Tribune, Books Section (Nonfiction) Sunday, April 17, 1994 Credulity run wild Accusations of sexual abuse lead to a 'modern witch hunt' Remembering Satan: A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family By Lawrence Wright Knopf, 205 pages, $22 Reviewed by Penelope Mesic Film and theater critic for Chicago magazine In "Remembering Satan" Lawrence Wright, adopting a tone of sober clarity to offset the sensationalism of his subject, tells the story of a modern witch hunt. As in Salem in 1692, the trouble began when a blurted accusation was met not with a will to determine the truth but with a climate of credulity, in which those in authority were strangely eager to believe the worst. Kind, fatherly police officers, a clergyman of particularly stern virtue and members of the "helping professions" who naively underestimated the flourishing powers of invention of the supposed victims, innocently combined to destroy a family's life and such happiness as its members possessed. Wright's story, which first appeared in serial form in The New Yorker, begins in 1988, when 22-year-old Ericka Ingram attended a Pentecostal Youth Retreat held near her home in the small town of Olympia, Wash. There, after a charismatic speaker described receiving a divinely inspired vision of a terrified child hiding in a closet, Ericka told counselors she had been sexually abused by her father Later it would emerge that during two previous retreats Ericka had made similar statements about other men. One incident proved to consist of a married man putting his hand on her knee. A second accusation, of a sexual assault by a neighbor, was so full of inconsistencies that no charges could be filed. Nevertheless, her distraught manner and the response of a younger sister, Julie, 18, convinced investigators of Ericka's truthfulness. Julie, who had won the state championship in the Junior Homemakers of America contest two years in a row, was too upset to speak to the investigators. Sobbing uncontrollably, she also described being abused, in handwritten notes. Thus Paul Ingram, a fervently religious man who served as an officer in the Thurston County Sheriff Department and as the chairman of the local Republican Party, was arrested by officers who had been his friends and colleagues for years. It was during these officers' attempt to secure a confession that the case went from being heartbreakingly commonplace to genuinely odd. Ingram asserted that his daughters wouldn't lie, yet remembered nothing about crimes stretching back over 10 years. However. after prolonged prayer, he seemed, in the words of a detective who was present, to "go into a trance-type thing." A full confession followed--in the conditional tense. Ingram didn't say he'd done a thing; he said, "I would've done it." To later, more impartial investigators, this was the first clue that the confession, although made in good faith, was somehow false. Meanwhile, Julie and Ericka made fresh accusations, involv ing a sex ring of police officers who abused them during poker parties held at the Ingrams' home. Although these accounts implicated family men without a blemish on their characters, the young women were again believed, without any confirming evidence and almost without question. These stories soon metamorphosed into fullblown accounts of satanic ritual abuse. The reason these accusations, too, were readily believed almost certainly had to do with a debate raging in the psychotherapeutic community at the time. cont... 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718 From: Albertus Magnus Area: Base of Set To: All 7 May 94 01:46:28 Subject: Satan, II/II UpdReq Therapists were, and still are, bitterly divided over the interrelated issues of patients' memories of satanic cults, multiple personality disorder induced by childhood trauma and the emergence in adulthood of long-repressed memories of abuse. At the time of the Ingram case, experts such as Dr. Bennett Braun of Rush-Presbyterian St. Luke's here in Chicago, gave credence to stories of cult rituals. The idea that victims of childhood abuse are likely to repress all memory of it was also spreading like wildfire and helped to make stories like those of the Ingram sisters more plausible. However, many experts now believe that in some cases therapists themselves, by asking leading questions and rewarding lurid tales with sympathy and interest, unwittingly evoke in highly suggestible patients "memories" of abuse that have no factual basis. Wright is particularly good at giving a fair and succinct account of this troubling controversy, but he nevertheless makes it clear that he puts no credence, for example, in Ericka's "memory of giving birth to a baby that was immediately sacrificed by her father one of many murders of infants and adults the sisters claimed to witness. When Paul Ingram, in a normal waking state, was then asked if he had ever dabbled in black magic, he responded as always -- gamely trying to help his accusers -- that he used to read his horoscope in the newspaper. Yet, despite this unpromising start, when aided by his pastor and interrogators, he was soon "seeing himself" engaged in a predictable inventory of loathsome acts. If the consequences were not so grave, there would be much to marvel at in this ceaseless torrent of invention. Luckily for the beleaguered interests of common sense, Ingram was finally interviewed by Dr. Richard Ofshe, a professor of social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Ofshe recognized almost immediately that Ingram was not recalling events but inventing "memories" while in a hypnotic trance induced by prayer and the emotional pressure of being interrogated by former colleagues. To prove it Ofshe asked questions that planted the details of a crime that never happened. Ingram promptly "remembered" this illusory event and confessed to it. Although Ofshe had been hired as a witness for the prosecution, he filed an evaluation exonerating Ingram, who unfortunately refused to accept his innocence until after sentencing. He has since spent more than four years in prison. Two fellow officers, identified by the sisters as cult members, endured more than five months in jail before they were released without charges, their careers and reputations destroyed. This story, so tragic for Paul Ingram, his wife and accused fellow deputies, has elements that in a less credulous society would be worthy of satire. The luxuriant banality of the young women's stories; the scene of Ingram's pastor unconsciously planting "memories" of fiendish antics in his poor parishioner's head, only to be shocked as they emerge are moments fit for a connoisseur of human self-de lusion, a modern Swift. But Wright, in his sober insistence on the plainest, least emotional account chose well. After so much unwholesome fantasizing and such compelling evidence of reason's frailty, the bare facts, logically resented, are as welcome as clean water. 201434369420143436942014343694201434369420143436942014343694718