By Kifah Zaboun
Ramallah, Asharq Al-Awsat – Two high-level ranking Hamas leaders have vehemently emphasized that the Hamas organization does not operate in any Arab or non-Arab territory and that it has no military activity except in Palestine. In statements to Asharq Al-Awsat, Yahya Musa and Atif Adwan stressed that Hamas is satisfied with the Syrian role in supporting the Palestinian issue, and noted that Syria's stance is different from the stances adopted by several Arab countries. They said that Hamas respects the Syrian option to hold dialogue with Israel, that these negotiations are legitimate, and that there is no reason for concern about the outcome of these negotiations.
Both Hamas leaders were commenting on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's interview in Asharq Al-Awsat where he stated that Hamas and Hezbollah would not attack Israel from Syria. He pointed out that in the direct negotiations with Israel through Turkish mediation efforts, he reached a stage closer to an agreement than that reached in the era of his father's negotiations with the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former US President Bill Clinton in 2000. more
Why I don't want to be a philosopher? "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here."
As time passes by in the twilight of one's career, the most painful predicament is when one becomes aware of 'so much to learn with so little time available.' It is always the inadequacies and gaps in my comprehension of universal truth, the very idea of knowing so little and the very dynamic nature of truth, infuriates me sometimes and razes the peace of my mind. Follies of intellect are difficult to argue with. It is a fact that knowledge is bestowed to mankind in dots and drips. I have always maintained that history cannot be judged from our own vantage point. It would be mockery of a fair deal to pass judgments based on realities of today. No knowledge is flawless, neither is any philosopher or a prophet. "Contemporary transformation" and the dominant and invasive modifications taking place throughout all aspects of human existence beg the questions: Where are we potentially heading and, perhaps more importantly, where should we be heading? As I have put it mildly on my introduction on Newsvine under my picture 'Searching the purpose of our existance and where do we end up?'
We discover truth with the passing of eons. The definition of truth keeps changing; the dynamics of the change is what our minds need to train for. As if 'facts' are not fixed, they keep changing over time. Let's take an example: joblessness causes frustration and extreme anger, we saw what that Dutch man did the other day when he lost his job yet, Aristotle said that all paid jobs cause degradation of mind. Aristotle could not imagine a society with 1 billion job seekers, this scale of human degradation has inevitably caused momentous strides in research and development. He also postulated that ''the universe is perfect; the Earth is the center of this perfect universe, and that everything in the universe revolves around the Earth.''
In Athens, his teacher Plato also believed with the Pythagoreans that the stars, planets, Sun and Moon moved around the Earth attached to the surface of crystalline spheres which slid over one another while circumscribed about the five regular solids. Plato founded a school of learning in a place that once belonged to the Greek hero Academos (from whom "academy" is derived). Over the academy's door was written: "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here." It flourished for over 900 years, from 387 B.C. to 529 A.D. when it was closed by the Christian emperor Justinian who claimed it was pagan. It sadly remains a time honored tradition of man, that reason and free thinking has always been considered pagan for a holy man.
The claim looks so embellished, the idea so embroidered as we, with the benefit of time and burning at stake of those who disagreed, realize how little of geometry Plato and his generation knew. It is astounding as to why the human race is turning into skeptics, cynics and pessimists? In every challenge we face, be it on the front of the economy or health, instead of recovery we see depression, disease and destruction as our fate. Albeit spanned only over 10,000 years of restricted written history of man (mostly irrelevant in terms of astronomical timelines), the narrative of human life stands as a tangible witness of triumph of man over adversity. The limits and extent of our awareness is swelling exponentially. Disappointingly, most of us remain sheltered within the 'time frame' of our physical life or knowledge of the past. So much has changed in the realms of global economy in the last 100 years and on the front of the medicine, yet, when it comes to economic meltdown or pandemics, we keep making comparisons to 'the Great Depression of 1930' or the great flu epidemic of 1918. Little do we realize that we are not on the gold standard, and that we have tools which effectively deal with the interconnected global economy in a different way. Printing money was not an option in 1930; it is today. That also goes for the strains of flu we have, that death is caused by the aftermath or the side effects of the flu. But the lines between the pre-penicillin world and post penicillin world are blurred.
It is hip to be pessimistic, and an optimistic person is considered to be "weird." What an irony! We always imagine the worst but live longer. It is better to live happily and expect the best out of any outcome. That in itself gives a boost of confidence to the fabric of mind. It is the war of minds that needs to be won. If your mind is awake and healthy, your response will be proper and sharp whatever the challenges be. The mind just cannot reconcile the new help that advancements of knowledge of this century bring to answer the disasters of the past. Part of humanity is preoccupied with the dangers of darkness associated with deity, and the other part, the guiltless victims of intense media hype.
From what we know now of the universe, the limited scale of the genesis of human understanding is so humbling. We know that our greatest philosophers and prophets were so imperfect; infallibility of thought is the 'Achilles' heel' of man. Luckily, we can criticize our philosophers without much impunity but forget about prophets. Their sanctified position remains too virtuous to be subject of debate.
Our inability to subject the popular wisdom of "creation" to the test of reason shall be considered by many of us as blasphemous. Noah existed 6000 years or 15 billions years ago; that is a miscalculation that we can live with serenely, but the same obstinacy and inflexibility where freedom of thought is moderated by the Holy Scriptures leads to maniacal display of medievalism by extremists of the world.
One can not even envisage the horrors in 387 B.C. if Copernicus or Galileo entered the academy and would declare the legitimacy of the heliocentric cosmology. Rubbishing earth as the center of universe would have been considered as heretical and blasphemous in the sacrosanct environ of the academy, as it was by the clergy of Rome, nearly 2000 years later. Italian philosopher Galileo Galilei was one of the supreme figures of contemporary science. His rank as a "saint" of the modern world hinges on his discrimination by the Catholic Church for boldly championing the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun, in contradiction to scripture, church tradition and the ancient authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy.
It looks as if destiny has its own time scale. The overthrow of man from the central role of the keeper of the universe was not an easy acceptance by saviors of mankind. Copernicus and Galileo were not entirely correct, that it was the Sun instead at the centre of the Universe and the stars being some bright heavenly bodies of an unknown nature. It was only 'partial truth.' The truth remained concealed by the fate from the curious minds of philosophers in the multilayered shrouds of ambiguity. It was as if waiting for the genius of Bruno. Giordano Bruno is known as 'The Forgotten Philosopher' who predicted ' Infinite Galaxies, Infinite Life.' He claimed that the sun was only one star among the many thousands, and therefore, like the sun, many other stars also have planets around them and living beings inhabiting them." By the time Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 on Rome's Campo dei Fiori for his provocative ideas about the infinity of the universe the Inquisition, condemned him to death in Rome as part of a yearlong jubilee. Giordano Bruno is one of the enormous figures of renaissance Europe. He is an intellectual peer of the greatest thinkers, a thinker whose dream of the world foreshadowed ours.
When science becomes a "cult," persecution follows. The Pythagoreans who followed the teachings of Pythagoras believed that science was meant only for the chosen few and that commoners should have nothing to do with it. Philosophers can be cruel too; sometimes when reason failed, persecution took over the better part of judgment. Inquisitions and burning at stake was not just a sacred preoccupation, even Pythagoras to his eternal shame sentenced Hippasus to death by drowning.
One story claims that a young student by the name of Hippasus was idly toying with the number √2, attempting to find the equivalent fraction. Eventually he came to realize that no such fraction existed, i.e. that √2 is an irrational number. Hippasus must have been overjoyed by his discovery, but his master was not. Pythagoras had defined the universe in terms of rational numbers and the existence of irrational numbers brought his ideal into question. The consequence of Hippasus's insight should have been a period of discussion and contemplation during which Pythagoras ought to have come to terms with this new source of numbers. However, Pythagoras was unwilling to accept that he was wrong, but at the same time he was unable to destroy Hippasus's argument by the power of logic. Source
We discover truth with the passing of eons. The definition of truth keeps changing; the dynamics of the change is what our minds need to train for. As if 'facts' are not fixed, they keep changing over time. Let's take an example: joblessness causes frustration and extreme anger, we saw what that Dutch man did the other day when he lost his job yet, Aristotle said that all paid jobs cause degradation of mind. Aristotle could not imagine a society with 1 billion job seekers, this scale of human degradation has inevitably caused momentous strides in research and development. He also postulated that ''the universe is perfect; the Earth is the center of this perfect universe, and that everything in the universe revolves around the Earth.''
In Athens, his teacher Plato also believed with the Pythagoreans that the stars, planets, Sun and Moon moved around the Earth attached to the surface of crystalline spheres which slid over one another while circumscribed about the five regular solids. Plato founded a school of learning in a place that once belonged to the Greek hero Academos (from whom "academy" is derived). Over the academy's door was written: "Let no one unversed in geometry enter here." It flourished for over 900 years, from 387 B.C. to 529 A.D. when it was closed by the Christian emperor Justinian who claimed it was pagan. It sadly remains a time honored tradition of man, that reason and free thinking has always been considered pagan for a holy man.
The claim looks so embellished, the idea so embroidered as we, with the benefit of time and burning at stake of those who disagreed, realize how little of geometry Plato and his generation knew. It is astounding as to why the human race is turning into skeptics, cynics and pessimists? In every challenge we face, be it on the front of the economy or health, instead of recovery we see depression, disease and destruction as our fate. Albeit spanned only over 10,000 years of restricted written history of man (mostly irrelevant in terms of astronomical timelines), the narrative of human life stands as a tangible witness of triumph of man over adversity. The limits and extent of our awareness is swelling exponentially. Disappointingly, most of us remain sheltered within the 'time frame' of our physical life or knowledge of the past. So much has changed in the realms of global economy in the last 100 years and on the front of the medicine, yet, when it comes to economic meltdown or pandemics, we keep making comparisons to 'the Great Depression of 1930' or the great flu epidemic of 1918. Little do we realize that we are not on the gold standard, and that we have tools which effectively deal with the interconnected global economy in a different way. Printing money was not an option in 1930; it is today. That also goes for the strains of flu we have, that death is caused by the aftermath or the side effects of the flu. But the lines between the pre-penicillin world and post penicillin world are blurred.
It is hip to be pessimistic, and an optimistic person is considered to be "weird." What an irony! We always imagine the worst but live longer. It is better to live happily and expect the best out of any outcome. That in itself gives a boost of confidence to the fabric of mind. It is the war of minds that needs to be won. If your mind is awake and healthy, your response will be proper and sharp whatever the challenges be. The mind just cannot reconcile the new help that advancements of knowledge of this century bring to answer the disasters of the past. Part of humanity is preoccupied with the dangers of darkness associated with deity, and the other part, the guiltless victims of intense media hype.
From what we know now of the universe, the limited scale of the genesis of human understanding is so humbling. We know that our greatest philosophers and prophets were so imperfect; infallibility of thought is the 'Achilles' heel' of man. Luckily, we can criticize our philosophers without much impunity but forget about prophets. Their sanctified position remains too virtuous to be subject of debate.
Our inability to subject the popular wisdom of "creation" to the test of reason shall be considered by many of us as blasphemous. Noah existed 6000 years or 15 billions years ago; that is a miscalculation that we can live with serenely, but the same obstinacy and inflexibility where freedom of thought is moderated by the Holy Scriptures leads to maniacal display of medievalism by extremists of the world.
One can not even envisage the horrors in 387 B.C. if Copernicus or Galileo entered the academy and would declare the legitimacy of the heliocentric cosmology. Rubbishing earth as the center of universe would have been considered as heretical and blasphemous in the sacrosanct environ of the academy, as it was by the clergy of Rome, nearly 2000 years later. Italian philosopher Galileo Galilei was one of the supreme figures of contemporary science. His rank as a "saint" of the modern world hinges on his discrimination by the Catholic Church for boldly championing the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun, in contradiction to scripture, church tradition and the ancient authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy.
It looks as if destiny has its own time scale. The overthrow of man from the central role of the keeper of the universe was not an easy acceptance by saviors of mankind. Copernicus and Galileo were not entirely correct, that it was the Sun instead at the centre of the Universe and the stars being some bright heavenly bodies of an unknown nature. It was only 'partial truth.' The truth remained concealed by the fate from the curious minds of philosophers in the multilayered shrouds of ambiguity. It was as if waiting for the genius of Bruno. Giordano Bruno is known as 'The Forgotten Philosopher' who predicted ' Infinite Galaxies, Infinite Life.' He claimed that the sun was only one star among the many thousands, and therefore, like the sun, many other stars also have planets around them and living beings inhabiting them." By the time Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 on Rome's Campo dei Fiori for his provocative ideas about the infinity of the universe the Inquisition, condemned him to death in Rome as part of a yearlong jubilee. Giordano Bruno is one of the enormous figures of renaissance Europe. He is an intellectual peer of the greatest thinkers, a thinker whose dream of the world foreshadowed ours.
When science becomes a "cult," persecution follows. The Pythagoreans who followed the teachings of Pythagoras believed that science was meant only for the chosen few and that commoners should have nothing to do with it. Philosophers can be cruel too; sometimes when reason failed, persecution took over the better part of judgment. Inquisitions and burning at stake was not just a sacred preoccupation, even Pythagoras to his eternal shame sentenced Hippasus to death by drowning.
One story claims that a young student by the name of Hippasus was idly toying with the number √2, attempting to find the equivalent fraction. Eventually he came to realize that no such fraction existed, i.e. that √2 is an irrational number. Hippasus must have been overjoyed by his discovery, but his master was not. Pythagoras had defined the universe in terms of rational numbers and the existence of irrational numbers brought his ideal into question. The consequence of Hippasus's insight should have been a period of discussion and contemplation during which Pythagoras ought to have come to terms with this new source of numbers. However, Pythagoras was unwilling to accept that he was wrong, but at the same time he was unable to destroy Hippasus's argument by the power of logic. Source
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