He dipped his nervous hands into his pockets and fumbled for the remote, and heaved a sigh of relief when he found it. He pressed the button and a light of the order of the infrared wavelength diffracted outwards and towards the photosensitive receptor on the gate. The automatic gate responded and slid open. Amazing how the remote performs its "duty" perfectly without much effort! He sighed, got in and and closed the gate behind him.
Image source : pixabay
He walked across the lawn adorned with exotic flowers and made to enter his house but something caught his attention. He doubled back to read it: "..Be ye therefore Perfect!". He cursed under his breath and inserted his door key into the key hole and turned it. The turning effect of the force went a perpendicular distance to unlock the door. He couldn't help laughing: even the key performs its duty efficiently without much stress! The most annoying part was that it couldn't operate itself but had to rely on an external influence to carry out its function. And yet it does its work efficiently, whilst man with all the resources locked within had to be riddled with different shades of imperfection.
He relocked the door and opened it again. He exerts a force on the key, he thought; and the turning effect of that force goes a perpendicular distance to perform the work of unlocking the door. Amazing! Where had he picked up that knowledge from ? Oh from his secondary school physics- "moment of a force". Incredible; even the brain, his own subject is efficient in its duty. He remembered what Socrates had said when he saw some sculptors of his time trying to carve out an image from a stone: " they take such care to make stone resemble men, while they neglect and suffer themselves to resemble stones". Maybe that's the secret, man should suffer himself to resemble stone. The stone does not think neither does it have anything bothering it. Yes, the stone, the key, the remote, the moon, the wind ... neither of them think or worry yet they perform their duties perfectly. They just have to surrender totally to their master: the stone to the sculptor, the moon and wind to nature, the key and remote to man. That's all they do and they come out perfect.
Image source: pixabay cco
Perhaps that was what Ruskin discovered when he wrote, " the power and glory of all creature and matter consists in their obedience not in their freedom. The sun has no liberty, a dead leaf has much ". Why wouldn't man, in obedience, resolve to the wishes of his master then, thought Sly. But who is man's master anyway? Does man even need one, whereas he has an ever efficient brain to think with and solve his problems. No, man hasn't got any master. He is the lord of himself, the principles of Humanism proves that. That's why man is termed a higher animal.
Again the Humanist will say people matter, meaning that man and his welfare should be sought first above all other things. There by insinuating that man is the master of himself; for a "slave" will first seek to satisfy the wishes of his master. In hoc the Humanist,Swinburn wrote: " Glory be to man in the highest! For man is the master of things".
Truly man should be worshipped and exalted in the highest. After all, Sly thought, according to the staunch Humanist, Auguste Comte, philosophy should be concerned with man and not God, the gods or any other entity thought to be man's master, for none of them has any contact with the world. And man thus being the "centre of the universe", should be worshipped and his problems taken care of through sociology and science in place of religion or any other human act in favour of any deity. True, Sly concluded, "people matter".
He locked the door behind him and went further
He locked the door behind him and went further into his house. He halted at the hallway leading to his living room and decided to take a peep. Beautiful! He looked up at the highly relfective ceiling and the reflection there gave him a bird's eye view. A real wonder, what a world of excellence! All that, yet his world was alien to the "Divine Abstracts": peace, happiness and joy. He hissed. Vanity upon vanity, says the Philosopher, all is vanity! How much truth that assertion holds.
Image source: pixabay cco
Foolish him, he thought. How could he have so easily concurred with the sodding views as expressed in Comte's and Swinburn's Humanism! How far has man fared with his sociology and science? So far, some would so readily say. But was there anything stemming out of man's knowledge of science and its application in technology vital for a meaningful existence for man which was not there in his living room ? Yet his life was as empty of happiness and the other divine abstracts as void is of matter and vacuum of air, and none of those could fill that void-emptiness.
And about theory of Geocentricity, of the earth being the centre of the Solar system around which the Sun and the other planets revolves propounded by Claudis Ptolemy and later corrected to be a Heliocentric["sun-centered"] system by Nicolas Copernicus, Tyco Brahe and Johaness Kepler.
For if man,being the lord of himself, is "the centre of the universe" that must be worshipped as the humanist doctrine of Anthropolatry suggests, then man would have sought that all things around him comformed with and concurred with his wishes.
Now here he was, Sly continued rummaging in his psyche, the so called "centre of the universe" that must be worshipped, around whom all things revolves, and in favour of whose wishes all things resolves as he wants them by virtue of his power as lord supreme as embodied in his sceptre-like tools science and sociology. Here he was with everything science can offer to make man's existence meaningful and comfortable within his beck and call and yet his life was devoid of the divine abstracts.
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