Fifteen Meditations on Masculinist Physico-Spiritual Experience :: Philosophical Philosophy essays

Fifteen Meditations on Masculinist Physico-Spiritual Experience I am not my body, I am not my mind, I am not my soul. I am the breath of life, I am the breath of God. A golden retriever was once abused by a man and rescued by a woman who had a daughter in an all-girls Catholic high school. I paid them a visit one day. The dog stood behind the clear plastic door, wagging her tail, but as I ascended the steps she suddenly soured, and by the time the door opened and I was inside, she was cowering under the dining room table where she stayed for the duration of my visit with intermittent miserable howls. "She won't have anything to do with men," my friend explained. Even the scent of testosterone has its spiritual message. Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. The founder of modern philosophy had a number of disciples who applied the master's theoretical teachings in the practical field of dog-torturing. They felt these experiments demonstrated the superiority of man as a spiritual creature. Rene Descartes wanted to rewrite the philosophical canon by asserting only what he knew to be true or could logically derive. Sequestered in a stove-heated room, he realized he could doubt that his body, or even the whole world, existed, but he could not doubt was that he was thinking. I think, therefore I am. Descartes is a spiritual, immaterial, thinking thing; the rest is mere body, a separate substance. Continuing in this vein, he determined that human beings are the only animals who have souls. Therefore humans are the only animals who can think, feel, experience, or matter to God. I am going to drive nails through this dog's paws. I am going to vivisect its chest and show you its beating heart-such awesome machinery, praise the Architect on high! Its howls, this deafening din of a universe shattering-a purely mechanistic response! I am taking over this operation. If you cringe, you may leave, and don't come back. The serious student of philosophy thinks with his mind, not his body; his soul, not his flesh. Air my breath and fire my spirit, earth my body, water my blood. Tertullian, who lived in the Roman city of Carthage in the third century, was a sensual man who loved spectacles. After seeing how bravely Christian prisoners endured public torture, humiliation, and death, he became intrigued with the persecuted religion and eventually converted.