DWDaniel Waterman

18 collected words

Daniel Waterman

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

The so-called spiritual inquiry must necessarily address questions of authority and power since both individuals and the organizations that represent them generally seek legitimacy from hegemonic interpretations of truth and reality. The only way to maintain the integrity of spiritual inquiry is to encourage radical questioning of all precepts/percepts and their interpretations.

Daniel Waterman / quote

02Undated

The term entheogen proposes a radical inversion of customary attitudes towards religion as faith or as something concerned with an ultimate reality or truth that is not a construct: ‘en-theo-gen’ is less ‘enthused by an experience of God within’ than something akin to 'empowering our ability to imagine or create the divine.

Daniel Waterman / quote

03Undated

With drug use related harms, explanatory models are often presented as predictive tools, even though they ‘are [rarely if ever] predictive of consequent behavior’ or outcomes. Hence, we feel confident in asserting at outset, that prohibition based approaches in drug policy lack a sound basis in empirical research (despite sounding logical, i.e. remove drugs or the means of their production and less drugs will be available to users, thus minimising or eliminating harm), and are not animated by well-defined goals, goals that are not only consistent with the ethical and humanitarian aims of public health policy in general, but also with the fundamental principles of democracy) such as empowering or enabling those best placed to act, but by beliefs, assumptions, hypotheses and expectations.

Daniel Waterman / quote

04Undated

What better way to oppose the monopolisation of truth and meaning than to go in search of their foundations within one’s own psyche?

Daniel Waterman / quote

05Undated

Moral ideas about what constitutes a meritorious or meaningful use of one’s life and opportunities produce specific attitudes towards drug use and intoxication.

Daniel Waterman / quote

06Undated

It is easier to exploit and manipulate people if they are fearful or confused, (and discouraged from trusting their own judgment). Our investigation identifies the ‘policy of prohibition’ as a major source of ignorance, fear and confusion concerning psychoactive substances, their uses, users, effects and outcomes.

Daniel Waterman / quote

07Undated

Being Jewish did not compromise the humanitarian and universalist ideals of my close relatives who, having experienced persecution close hand, were more concerned with bringing about peace, justice and equality in the world than in trying to cut out a niche where they could continue an insular — Jewish — fantasy.

Daniel Waterman / quote

08Undated

Systems of retributive justice work well as long as they are proportional. However, in complex societies, where the State is the arbiter of justice, proportionality may break down: offences created by the elite few become offences against the entire community.

Daniel Waterman / quote

09Undated

Believing in the possibility of resurrection and eternal life, Christians seek ‘redemption’ through moral behaviour. But moral behaviour does not, in itself, assuage fear of death, on the contrary, when people come to view themselves as marred by Sin, for instance because they are taught to believe that their most intimate feelings are sinful, this may increase significantly their anxiety about dying.

Daniel Waterman / quote

10Undated

Introduction of rational standards to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable forms of drug related conduct allows us to hold drug users fully accountable for any harm resulting from irresponsible, stupid or ‘anti-social’ drug use in a manner consistent with current alcohol and tobacco policies, and more importantly, in a manner consistent with our commitment to the principles of liberty, freedom of choice and so on.

Daniel Waterman / quote

11Undated

As Ernest Becker observes in The Denial of Death, the very thought of disobeying authority appears to awaken the anxiety connected with the possible loss, during infancy, of parental love, respect or support. The unexamined beliefs and experiences that generate our reliance on, and deference to authority, seem rooted in a profound existential uncertainty: the patient looks to the doctor to relieve this uncertainty, not only about not feeling well and not knowing why, but also about not knowing what to do, what action to undertake. In other words, the expertise of the physician relieves the patient of some of the burden of responsibility.

Daniel Waterman / quote

12Undated

if we want individuals to take responsibility for their actions we must first establish a rational, effective and empowering means of separating individual responsibility from that of the collective.

Daniel Waterman / quote

13Undated

The failure of individual responsibility must be compensated for by a collective response and the consequences of such a failure at the collective level often devolve to individuals. The net result is that a lack of responsibility becomes culturally acceptable and that both individuals and societies as a whole adopt explanatory models that construct the prevalent condition as an unavoidable situation, rather than one that could easily be transformed by taking responsibility where possible.

Daniel Waterman / quote

14Undated

A significant factor often overlooked by those considering the failure of drug policy is the general aim of deflecting or assigning responsibility away from the policy-makers and the ‘moral-majority.

Daniel Waterman / quote

15Undated

The drug problem’ cannot be understood without a critical examination of the language and narratives of underpinning the explanatory models invoked to prove that there is a 'drug problem.

Daniel Waterman / quote

16Undated

We are particularly concerned with the question to what degree approval and implementation of an explanatory model minimising collective or institutional responsibility for certain problems and emphasising individual responsibility promotes detrimental perceptions and behaviours amongst individuals, who adopt and adapt similar explanations to justify their own lack of responsibility. For instance, admissibility of diminished responsibility arguments in criminal sentencing can be viewed as a direct consequence of a broader public acceptance of explanatory models purporting to prove a direct causal relationship between pharmacology, mental health and/or diminished ability to function.

Daniel Waterman / quote

17Undated

State sponsored medicine and science can function as ideology, inspiring blind commitment, fanatical defensiveness and denial, particularly of outcomes inconsistent with the preferred explanatory model. The social etiology of compromised health, insists on an understanding of these conditions and the way they impact the objectivity or neutrality of scientific and medical interpretation.

Daniel Waterman / quote

18Undated

The recasting of the Origin Myth as a story about the perils of disobedience precipitated a kind of decoupling of scripture from religious experience: when religious authorities began to insist on the literal truth of scripture, they were effectively promoting a kind of secular rationalism that states that one does not need to have a religious experience of any kind to live a moral life: all one has to do is declare one’s faith in scripture, in the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity and such, and accept the authority of the Holy Catholic Church as God’s representative on Earth.

Daniel Waterman / quote