Month: June 2012
BELIAL
[noun]
Belial (also Be’lial, Belhor, Baalial, Beliar, Belias, Beliall, Beliel, Bilael, Belu; from Hebrew בְּלִיַּ֫עַל Bəliyyáʻal; also named Matanbuchus, Mechembuchus, Meterbuchus in older scripts); one of the four crown princes of Hell and a demon in the Bible, Jewish apocrypha and Christian apocrypha. It is also a term used to characterise or embody immense wickedness or iniquity.
The etymology of the word is uncertain, but is most commonly translated as “lacking worth”. Some scholars translate it from Hebrew as “worthless” (Beli yo’il), while others translate it as “yokeless” (Beli ol), “may have no rising” (Belial) or “never to rise” (Beli ya’al). Only a few etymologists have assumed it to be an invented name from the start. In the Book of Jubilees, penilely uncircumcised heathens are called “sons of Belial”.
Ave Babalon
Three hundred years ago, the Irish empiricist George Berkeley contributed a particularly prescient observation: The only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.
Oakland protests school closures
June 19, 2012The Oakland Unified School District has planned to close five public elementary schools and hand children’s school buildings over to private charter schools and district administration offices. Hundreds of the displaced students have been placed by the district in elementary schools that are 10 miles away, and the school district has offered no guarantee that transportation will be provided for families. Hundreds of teachers, families & students have been protesting at Lakeview since Friday.
The same group of protesters plans to open “The People’s School for Public Education” on Lakeview’s campus this summer, at which a group of volunteers will teach courses ranging from art and gardening to social justice and activism.
“This is going to be the hub in Oakland, the place for public education,” Joel Velasquez, whose son attended Lakeview, told Oakland North. “We are going to take back our public education system—it belongs to us.”
We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge, have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.
Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity