Home Page of the Once and Hopefully Future Rsartis.com
A transmogrified live work in progress for readers interested in the arts, music, literature, and Civil Discourse about Life on Life’s Terms
THIS HOME PAGE WAS REVISED ON MAY 10, 2025. retitled and repurposed, VERBUM DEI
While Rsartis.com had already established itself as a life-long work in progress for me, it was little more than a concept, barely begun, not yet even qualifying as a work in progress until this spring.
The vision remains that of an on-line forum where people of good will engage in civil discourse on ideas and share the results of those human endeavors that enrich, edify, and enhance the human spirit: Art, Letters, Music, Religion, Science, and Life on Life’s Terms.
However, the car-bombing in Palm Springs, California, is evidence that time, tide, and insanity wait for no one. Advances in information technology and genomics are transforming world and humanity itself.
Neoreactionary denial and aspirations not withstanding, everything is changing and inter-connected.
My candid estimate a decade ago was it might be two generations after me (I’m pushing 84) to understand when we passed a tipping point sending humankind into another millennium of chaos and pain analogous to the Medieval Dark ages and unimaginable environmental physical privation and and spiritual destruction to boot.
Forces are combining to undo 50 million years of human evolution and progress on a global scale. Finding understanding and solutions will demand integrity of data, information, and accurate knowledge and understanding. More critically it will depend on the human willingness to show the courage, wisdom and compassion (or the lack thereof) to make the sacrifices necessary for survival. To paraphrase Rudi Giuliani, Hope is not a strategy, and denial of the realities of physical science foolhardy to the point of patent idiocy.
Ronald Reagan’s Shining on the Hill, if still standing, has been badly tarnished by discord, conflict, and ideological conflict. The fault lines in the unity of The People are many and deep.
The major fault lines: partisan politics, religion, the distribution wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, are deep and active. A complex dendritic system of faults branch from them. Instability and activity in any one branch increasing or releasing strain in others can trigger major seismic events. It is every citizen’s right and duty to become informed and ask hard questions of those who govern and genuine subject matter experts where ever they may be found.
There citizen experts in law, hard science and engineering, technology, humanities studies psychology, medicine and mental health, education, law, social studies, history, religion, and even (G-d help us, Insh’a Allah), Information systems/AI). To that end it needs to embrace all persons of faith. That includes atheists, who have faith that there is no G-d, and agnostics, whose faith in a Higher Power than transcends their understanding is informed by their experience of how it well it works.
The only requirement for being part of the discussion is that what is “said” demonstrate a good faith effort to meet the criteria laid out in Hargrove’s First Post–Revised
The purpose is civil discourse. It is not intended as a political forum for any agenda–and in particular (assuming it becomes anything) a forum for mean-spirited passive-aggressive discourse. To quote my grandmother, “There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.”
This does not mean that hard and pointed questions can not be asked and right answers demanded. Comments will be allowed and will be moderated for civility.
The problems we face today are complex and daunting. Asking the right questions and finding the right answers to some may well determine the viability of Spaceship Earth in the long run.
There’s a growing awareness understanding that everything is connected. Maybe simple answers, but the process of arriving that answers to the most difficult what a man questions and answers arrived at in civil discourse requiring time energy and most important, goodwill and integrity.
The “.com” suffix is misleading. Rsartis.com is devoutly, even pathologically non-commercial and not-for-profit. Somebody beat me to Rsartis.org.
To save readers having to stumble through the crystal caverns of an obsolete menu, links to existing actual content will in reverse chronological order, the most recent first, grouped by Categories under general headings with a brief statement as needed.
PHILOSOPHICAL BASE:
Truth, Belief, Faith, and the Slippery Slope Originally Posted in March of 2020, this post was the culmination of a long thought process that ultimately lead to the site’s transmogrification [a neologism, I credit to Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes] into VERBUM DEI. Or, as surviving Roman Catholic altar boys of a certain age may remember, Word of God .