With great respect,
I liked all the quotes Dr. Courtney Brown read; however, I had a problem with Martin Luther King's quote that begins, "One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws."
The term "law" as used today was created by the Romans and their statutory law system as a mechanism to control and loot the state's citizenry.
Proof: In a truly free society, individual beings have all the possible rights in existence, with the caveat that should they harm or infringe on another, then they owe restitution. In such a free society system, there are no "laws." In fact, the notion of laws would be redundant and unnecessary, do you see?
So, with this understanding, all "laws" being inflicted upon free individuals by others are immoral as well as lacking authority. If the reader disagrees with that statement, then let me ask, where does the authority to do so come from? When you explore that, you will find it does not exist.
So, if all state-created "laws" are immoral & without authority, then MLK's quote makes no sense when we plug it in: "One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey immoral laws."
ps. The USA was supposed to function using common law but has since been swindled into using Roman statutory law. "Law" as used in common law meant a compilation of the best-known rules of thumb for arbitrating disputes—which is not at all how the term "law" is used today.
Welcome to the concept of being "chaotic good":
➡️ https://www.farsightprime.com/forums/general/78594-chaotic-good
Nice to see a philosophical approach to the material.
I believe all leadership should be repudiated. We can follow anything or anyone as a matter of choice, and we should equally be able to withdraw at any time without penalty. No individual being is fit to exercise command over any other. A law of nature that every parent is confronted with. We can all agree to follow someone else's ideas or requests but we can also question and refuse those things if we believe them to be wrong.
Collaboration not obedience. We enter the territory of, "I was only obeying orders ..."
The military gets in a mess with this. As a soldier you have an obligation under pain of death to obey without restraint the orders you are given, unless some greater law is being transgressed. But the nature and source of that greater law is ambiguous. Soldiers have to discriminate between, actions that are legal under the terms of engagement and agreed international norms, and actions that can see them punished as war criminals. But soldiers versed in how to countermand direct military orders would be of little use in actual warfare.
I can still see those first words I ever read in a Bible as a small child - Thou shalt not kill.
I guess Martin Luther King was looking for a formulation of words that expressed a palatable step forward in the social reality he perceived. He was looking for reform as opposed to revolution, he saw the way forward through some sort of democratic gradualism. He was trying not to scare whitey - not too much anyway.
The young demand justice while the old cry out for mercy.
I find much in Courtney's material that speaks of pragmatic realism - you do need a military, you do need to be prepared to fight and die, or be killed. As a fully realised IS-BE of course this is a different prospect than if you are a quivering human. In our world it can seem like the only way to achieve anything is with strong leadership and committed discipline from the followers. You have to get your revenge in first.
I can only say that revolution lies in the ideas we use to create the reality we live in. A revolution can only be observed when you can look back and see that people understood the world in a different way.
Revolution has not taken place if one violent group overthrows another violent group. They who hold the monopoly of violence get to shape the world. Such overthrows are not revolutions - all they prove is that the most violent inherit the earth, for a while. Seeing an ants nest as a miraculous ecological contribution to the world that nurtures us, as opposed to seeing vermin that need to be dosed with boiling water - that is an example of a sign that a revolutionary change is underway.