Council of Elders

In Failure of UN we talked on why the UN is structurally constructed to be a failure to prevent war.
So if the UN must fail, can there be any kind of organization at the highest international level to oversee and guide the affairs of the world??

Yes we believe there is — a Council of Elders. Widely respected, revered elder beings for which there is widespread acceptance of their meritorious status. Below is a tentative list.

Principles

One theme running through this blog is that without religion  this planet is not saveable. See

• Humans as metaphysical animals
• Secularism and religion 1
• Secularism and religion 2

Some may prefer a different word to 'religion' such as 'spirituality'  'mysticism' and so on. Each has its own finesse and its own set of problems.

Some criteria for the below selections

• Religious leaders whose reach is far wider than their immediate sectarian reach — Dalai Lama, Pope Francis
• People whose wide and deep understanding encompasses science and religion (mysticism/spirituality/etc) — eg Sheldrade, Ravindra
• People — preferably with strong science/math background! — who are willling to take on the science establishment at its most oppressive, reactionary, totalitarian eg — Berlinski
• Go-getters with vision/capacity/position — Gabbard, Musk, DiCapricio
• Those who have opened the door of (clean!) joy to millions — JK Rowling
• Those willing to call out the bullshit in the international political establishment — Chomsky, Pilger, Galloway

Negative factors

Here are some factors as to why zillions of others who may have something good did not make it.
Of course our own ignorance is not accounted 😇

Patriotism/Nationalism

Part more important than whole

Religious sectarianism

Part more important than whole. A big yes to religiousness and a big no to sectarianism is the tightrope-walk that we must figure out

History of lying

Obvious! Helps to prune out most of current political/journalist establishment!

No skin in the game

People need to have shown that they are willing to stand up to what they claim to believe at non-trivial personal cost

The…

Single biggest factor 

why someone should be in or out is a strong sense of humanity. 

Of course each individual will manifest that in his/her own idiosyncratic way.

This also shows what is the central challenge of this enterprise of visioning and creating a better world — the idiosyncrasies need to somehow(!) stay subordinate to the sense of the larger common good.

This has been the defining hallmark of the great founding fathers of the great countries eg Jefferson, Mazzini, Gandhi, etc.
If we remember that

• these greats were welding current narrow, limited visions into a larger yet-to-exist vaster whole.
• today's acutest troubles accrue from the narrowness of patriotic/sectarian sense…
• which these great founders have forged!!

we would see that the new need of today is to have this classic sort of commitment and visionary-ness of these great founding fathers without narrow limitation

Organization

Perhaps in due course the council should be organized into two levels. The first level consists of names such as the ones suggested below whose responsibility is to set the vision for the world.
The second level would consist of (1–4) younger go-getters selected by the members of the first set who would actually thrash out the implementation of what the first set envisage

Tentative List

with some characteristic quotes in purple and my comments in blue

HH Dalai Lama

Compassion is the radicalism of our time

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives

Pope Francis

There is no hell!

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! 'Father, the atheists?' Even the atheists. Everyone!

I believe in God — not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being

Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of God

Dada JP Vaswani

Neither rites nor rituals, neither creed nor ceremonies are needed to improve the condition of the world. All that is needed is love for one another

There is one type of gambling which should always be encouraged. It is betting on goodness. When a person has wronged you, be good to him. If he adds insult to injury, double the bet. And keep on doubling it. You will surely win!

Ravi Ravindra

It is necessary to face the idea that the Earth will fall if we do not work. This will help your work and help you understand that your work is necessary… In fact, this idea is not new. Many traditions talk about disaster befalling the Earth if there is a lack of consciousness.

The problem is not of ethics; one needs a Science of Being. One needs to inquire in freedom. When one sees the need for right conditions, the need for help, for instruction, the need for other people, the need for payment, then one sees that discipline and obedience sustain freedom and are not opposed to it.
Then one sees from the inside the need for discipline, or submission, the need for freedom not so much for oneself but from oneself.

 A key theme of these writings is that human-value is currently based on unreality:

• bank balance
• skin color
• passport
• educational qualifications
• etc

More organized/effective organizations (UN?) do not conduce to a better world.
A better world necessarily requires a different more essential shared sense of human value. Our world will stop being horrible when our values become real. And key to that is the Science of Being that Ravindra talks of

Noam Chomsky

No less insidious is the cry for 'revolution,' at a time when not even the germs of new institutions exist, let alone the moral and political consciousness that could lead to a basic modification of social life. If there will be a 'revolution' in America today, it will no doubt be a move towards some variety of fascism. We must guard against the kind of revolutionary rhetoric that would have had Karl Marx burn down the British Museum because it was merely part of a repressive society. It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order. One who pays some attention to history will not be surprised if those who cry most loudly that we must smash and destroy are later found among the administrators of some new system of repression

Rupert Sheldrake

Science is two things:

1. A method of inquiry based on reason, evidence hypothesis and collective investigation
2. Science as a belief system or world view

It would be better to only call only the first as science and the second as materialistic philosophy.

The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith

The Science Delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in

The appropriation and capture of science-1 by science-2 ie by materialistic philosophy, must be viewed as a totalitarian act and a foment to violence and terrorism.  Like all illegitimate regimes the more delusory the foundation the totalitarian it gets. Sheldrake is a wonderful elucidator of this delusion

Russell Brand

Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me

Daniel Berlinski

Has anyone provided proof of God’s inexistence? Not even close. Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close. Have our sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close. Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough. Has rationalism and moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough. Has secularism in the terrible 20th century been a force for good? Not even close, to being close. Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy in the sciences? Close enough. Does anything in the sciences or their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even in the ball park. Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on.

Commentators who today talk of 'The Dark Ages' when faith instead of reason was said to ruthlessly rule, have for their animadversions only the excuse of perfect ignorance. Both Aquinas' intellectual gifts and his religious nature were of a kind that is no longer commonly seen in the Western world

Note Berlinski is a Jew not a Christian!

Before you can ask 'Is Darwinian theory correct or not?', You have to ask the preliminary question 'Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?'. That's a very different question… Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined or delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So we're talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach evolutionary biology.

Not-even-wrong was the principle applied by Pauli to bad science.
Berlinski stands Pauli on his head by showing that the currently core fashionable tenet of science is not-even-wrong

Darwin's theory of evolution is the last of the great nineteenth-century mystery religions. And as we speak it is now following Freudians and Marxism into the Nether regions, and I'm quite sure that Freud, Marx and Darwin are commiserating one with the other in the dark dungeon where discarded gods gather.

Not quite 19th century but important to add Ayn Rand.
Marx, Darwin, Freud and Ayn Rand are the most striking examples of how atheism as a foundation for philosophy leads to seeming profundity of thought but actually stupid shallow ugliness. And thence to unimaginably vast scales of violence, depredation, murder [@Separate post elaborating this]

Personally I dont know if it would be easy currently to disprove Darwinism (evolution). What we do need to emphasize is the commitment to this idea conduces to unspeakable brutality. These are two v different questions — fact and value

Also note that in engaging with Berlinski's ideas he rigorously skirts the factual question Does God exist? And engages exclusively with the ethical question: As belief in religion drops what happens to our world? A distinction that Christopher Hitchens — whether malevolently or just stupidly — refused to acknowledge

If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.

And finally in summary

Darwinism is…  a necessary condition for a phenomenon like Nazism

which should be coupled with the obvious: Marxism is the necessary condition for communism. And the human cost of these two — usually called communism and nazism but more correctly called marxism and darwinism comes to about 150 million.

Leonardo DiCapricio

Think of the shame that each of us will carry when our children and grandchildren look back and realize that we had the means of stopping this devastation, but simply lacked the political will to do so

Elon Musk

I think its possible for ordinary people to be extraordinary

J K Rowling

We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.

J K Rowling is added because

1. Wonder and violence cannot coexist [Ravi Ravindra?] And by bringing magic into our humdrum lives she has done huge service against violence
2. In our muggle-world she has set the record of demoting herself from millionaire category by vast donations to authentic causes

Tulsi Gabbard

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war

A woman who did the so-called unpatriotic, criminal act of going to Syria to check out ground facts. She is chosen because

1. She is a brave woman
2. It is morally right to do criminal acts against criminal laws
3. She exposed the fact that the Dems who pretend to be the good guys are in fact the same as the Republicans

George Galloway

I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when the British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas

I am an opponent of Saddam Hussein, but an opponent also, of the sanctions that have killed a million Iraqi children and an opponent of the United States' apparent desire to plunge the Middle East into a new and devastating war

Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known

A warrior against war… A firebrand politician fighting for a voteless cause

John Pilger

It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it

If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.

In these surreal days, (post 9-11) there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else

Like Galloway a warrior against war… A firebrand journalist fighting against the odds of the vastly corrupt field of journalism