Weapons

[am4z1ng]

My birthday was recently, and one of the gifts I received from a thoughtful friend was a set of three very real, very sharp, and very beautiful Samurai swords. This gift, although fantastic, could obviously pose a threat to the safety of any fool who decided to play with it. With that in mind, and a general pacifist mindset, the powers that be

Comments

Have you been reading Locke lately?

[tophergopher500]

Right when I got to your third paragraph, about not being predisposed to anything, I knew I had heard something similar to it before when we were studying the Enlightenment in AP Euro last year; I looked it up and what I was thinking of is John Locke's tabula rasa ("blank slate") theory. He argued that, at birth, the mind is a blank slate with no set ideas that, over time, is molded chiefly by experience, and that the only thing that cannot be denied is a person's identity as part of human society. Locke used the idea more to discount religion and the Christian doctrines of predestination; your point is more about what society has the power to do to us and what we have the power to do for ourselves.

I find myself believing strongly that we are, like you say, exclusively the products of our upbringings and experiences. I read statistics about the percentage of serial killers and sex offenders who did not have stable childhoods, and I believe them all. I look at people like Drake Childress, someone who works inhumanly hard at school and has an unusual set of mannerisms and social skills, and I don't think it has anything to do with him at all. When he was three years old and in preschool, was he that different from all the other kids? Probably not ... he might have been a little more polite and well-spoken than his classmates, because his mother taught him to be, but I doubt he was as far off on his own as he is now. Something or someone, probably his mother, has been pushing him along the path that he is on and molding him into what he is now, but I doubt he started off, as a newborn, with any specific gene or inherent propensity for hard work or politeness.

You say at the end that you would prefer for people to be able to make their own decision, but I think that very few people ever get to make that choice. I suppose the only people that really can are the people who have experienced everything -- enough sin, enough grace, enough leisure, enough hard work and struggle, enough money, enough poverty, enough interaction with different types of people, etc. The people who have gotten the widest and most balanced spectrum of those kind of experiences are the ones who have the ability to consider their options, consider their past influences, and make decisions that are based on what is good for themselves or good for others (or whatever combination of both they find to be appropriate).

That's basically what you said at the end of your third paragraph, now that I look back on it. But oh well, I was on a roll and wasn't thinking about that ... I hope you liked my meandering comment regardless.

- Chris

Re: Have you been reading Locke lately?

[sgtscruffy]

DID SOMEONE SAY JOHN LOCKE