An Anthem for the Young: Power to the People v2

Yoriyos on YouTube, Hurricane John

Yoriyos on YouTube

Check out Yoriyos on Youtube, the song is Hurricane John from his first and only album Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:
Hurricane John by Yoriyos.

From Age of Reason--Paine

As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.

What could qualify as "internal evidence of divinity?"

Kant (using others), sanguine, Dalai Lama, scrumping

"Kant famously articulated the principle that a rational being should never be used as merely an unconsenting means to an end, even the end of benefiting others."

sanguine Meaning "cheerful, hopeful, confident" first attested 1509, since these qualities were thought in medieval physiology to spring from an excess of blood as one of the four humors.

"If it was possible to become free of negative emotions by a riskless
implementation of an electrode - without impairing intelligence and
the critical mind - I would be the first patient."
Dalai Lama (Society for Neuroscience Congress, Nov. 2005)

scrumping The act of stealing apples from a cider orchard.
Kind of silly when you think that our alleged original sin was merely an act of scrumping.

Ulysses and Faith

You should approach Joyce's "Ulysses" as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
-- William Faulkner

Koan of Spiritual Life, Jamais Vu

"How to become just what we are? That is the conundrum, the koan of spiritual life."

"déjà vu or its opposite, jamais vu - the feeling, during a familiar routine, that we're doing it for the first time"