John D. Brey
Well-Known Member
A person I know well, has enough cats to be considered a hoarder. But when you go to her house, all the cats are well-behaved and the home is clean and organized so that no one would ever know how many cats live there in communal harmony of a somewhat remarkable dimension. All her male cats are altered eight days after they're born so that rather than their sole goal in life being to control as many female cats, and chase off all competitor male cats, instead they live in relative harmony seeking out other things.
Take Mason for instance. He's a beautiful male Siamese. Instead of chasing females and fighting males, he's learned to open doors to more freedom rather than being shackled to sexual desire. He jumps up and grabs the handle of the door, pulls down with his paws, and kicks backward a bit to get the door to open. When his owner locks the bolt so he can't get out, he walks over to the hinges of the door and thoughtfully examines them. Though he hasn't figured out the bolt lock yet, he's fully aware that the hinges are the mechanism that allows the door to open. He thinks it's there that he should search for why it suddenly won't open.
John
Take Mason for instance. He's a beautiful male Siamese. Instead of chasing females and fighting males, he's learned to open doors to more freedom rather than being shackled to sexual desire. He jumps up and grabs the handle of the door, pulls down with his paws, and kicks backward a bit to get the door to open. When his owner locks the bolt so he can't get out, he walks over to the hinges of the door and thoughtfully examines them. Though he hasn't figured out the bolt lock yet, he's fully aware that the hinges are the mechanism that allows the door to open. He thinks it's there that he should search for why it suddenly won't open.
It is the glory of the human cerebral cortex that it -----unique among all animals and unprecedented in all geological time ---has the power to defy the dictates of the selfish genes. . . We can devote our lives to philosophy, mathematics, poetry, astrophysics, music, geology, or the warmth of human love, in defiance of the old [reptile] brain's genetic urging that these are a waste of time ---time that "should" be spent fighting rivals and pursuing multiple sexual partners: "As I see it, we have a profound choice to make. It is a choice between favoring the old brain or favoring the new brain. More specifically, do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here, namely, natural selection, competition, and the drive of the selfish genes? Or, do we want our future to be driven by intelligence and its desire to understand the world?"
Richard Dawkins, introducing Jeff Hawkins, One Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (bracket mine, based on earlier comment in intro. Last quotation is Dawkins quoting Hawkins).
In the case of the Jewish male, the mark of circumcision is identified as the divine image (selem elohim) in virtue of which he is called adam, that is, the true nature of what is to be human is linked to circumcision, which empowers the Jew over the beastly nature of the other nations, who are not considered to be in the category of human in the fullest sense.
Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret, p. 154.
John