B. U. G. S.

One thing I want everyone to understand is that I am absolutely serious about this being a GRADUATE SEMINAR. Under our present system, there are no graduates and there are no seminars.

“Seminars” today are extensions of first-grade classes: Memorize and repeat.

To the extent there is discussion, you are graded on how you have learned to repeat the Party Line. You also have an examination at the end so that you will cough up what you are supposed to have learned, as in grammar school.

This is a SEMINAR. No exam. And I demand you come up with something on your own.

You are being prepared for postgraduate WORK, which means you go out into the world on a mission and you use me to learn how to do it.

HOW to do it. Not WHAT to do. Pain will be out there more capable of spreading his Protestant Christian world view. Backbaygrouch will learn to expand on his Catholic viewpoint. Others will go out and extend their atheistic approach.

You will go our well aware of the weaknesses and artificialities in your approach. You will carry heresy back with you. There is not and never has been a way of thinking that doesn’t need basic, hard rethinking. True Believers who have not been HERE will be offended and shocked.

But any point of view which is not regularly shocked in this way dies.

Dave talks about professional standards. That is what you are here to develop.

Zoroastrianism today is claimed by a couple of tiny groups in India and Iraq. They are colored people the original Zoroastrians would have rejected as non-Aryans. The original Olympic oath required one to swear that “I am of pure Hellenic blood…”

One of the least-noticed phenomena today is the steady dying off of the mainline Protestant denominations. If you do not want your world view to become a dead end, you have to take a brutally new view of it.

Naturally I mention religion here because THOSE outlooks are more definable. What I say is true of ALL world views. If you diddle along like mainline Protestantism, going along with every latest fad of social thought, you are heading for a dead end, which means everything you have thought of will be a complete waste.

As Shari remembered, the last Zoroastrian Shah was a mulatto. The degenerate Persian Empire by then was a house of cards waiting for any wind to knock it over.

I have pointed out repeatedly that the mental rot that was Zoroastrianism after twelve centuries poisoned Christian thought and twisted it into self-hatred and sterility. At the time of the Gospels, Z had degenerated into the Political Correctness of its time, a construct of “intellectuals” who listened only to each other.

After all this time in BUGS, you should have deduced that for YOURSELF.

Dave says I am UNIQUELY qualified. In fact, that is why you are here. If Dave did NOT think I am UNIQUELY qualified, he wouldn’t BE here, and neither would you. I spent my life getting these qualifications, and I, too, don’t want MY thinking to end up in some little colored Whitakerist dead end.

I really enjoy reading the kind of exchange Dave and mderpelding are having in the last set of comments, where they are hammering out BASICS with EACH OTHER.

As I keep repeating, there is all the difference in the world in things that would go utterly unnoticed in today’s Kindergarten “seminar.” In a Kindergarten seminar, people will say “X said …” as a matter of AUTHORITY. No one does that with “Bob” here. No one says, “You can’t say that, because BOB said…”
What is important is that it would never OCCUR to you to do that. You may say, “Bob made this point” or Shari made this point,” but only because it is a USEFUL approach to reality. Today’s “seminars” are full of Jesuit-like correction from the Party Line.

EVERYTHING HERE INTEERRELATES. The particular view of Zoroastrianism I give here relates in a way most of you did not say, and may not have thought of.

In short, you must step back and ruthlessly reevaluate your point of view, or your point of view will die.