MORE EXCHANGES WITH FUNDAMENTALISTS

Dear H________,

Our conversations sure set me to thinking. I came up with this series of thoughts while showering this morning. Here goes:

If we are made in god’s image, then we need only look at ourselves to see what god looks like. It means that god is (to put it simply) a confused, immoral, moral, benevolent, hateful, loving, murderous being, full of greed and loathing and compassion and charity, etcetera. God must be capable of betraying himself. God must be no more perfect or perfectible than his creation. The humanists who believe all values come from man are just as right as the religionists who say that all values come from god, since they are both one and the same image with, I suppose, the capacity to do wrong or perform aright. But Christians would say that only Adam and Eve were born perfect and the rest of us are being tortured for their wrong doing so that the rest of us have now fallen away and are imperfect because of those two bad people. Frankly, I think it’s pretty unfair that I have to suffer death for those two malcontents, but that’s not my point.

If we go back to perfect Adam, then our image of god is of a naked man, walking around in plenty and happiness who doesn’t know right from wrong. If Adam, created in god’s image, with a pancreas, brain and brain pan, libido and sex drive, chemical capacity for anger and love, two legs and arms, etcetera, doesn’t know right from wrong, then neither does god at the beginning, right, if Adam was in god’s image, both physically and internally, with the same organs for feeling pain and suffering and making decisions?

If Adam didn’t know right from wrong, how could he and Eve have been expected to know that to disobey god was wrong, even if god told them not to eat of the fruit. After all, they had free will, but they would not have known they had free will until they had something to disobey. So if god gave them an order, knowing that they wouldn’t know they were wrong until after they had disobeyed him and exercised their free will, then he is fully responsible for Adam and Eve’s original sin. God is the sinner, not the two innocents. So our earthly parents are innocent of any wrong doing in the beginning unless god would be so crazy as to blame a man he created blind for not being able to see.

Sincerely,

Geo
_________________________________________________________

BALANCING A FUNDAMENTALIST IN EITHER HAND

From: George Thomas
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 12:39 PM
To: Dave O ; Howard K
Subject: Luther's take on reason. . . .

Dear Dave and Howard,

You see, I am a man who believes in human reason and the need for the human animal to become ever more human and ever less irrational or emotional or animal, if you will. But the founder of your sect of Christianity, Protestantism, nailed my objection to Christianity right on the head. As Luther says, “Whoever want to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason” and “you must part with reason and not know anything of it and even kill it; else one will not get into the kingdom of heaven” and “reason is a whore”.

Of course, I’m not prejudicial when it comes to religion; it’s obvious that Islam, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, you name ‘em, are without reason at the core of their faith. To be religious is to live in the past. We must transcend our animal, irrational, emotional past if humankind is to ever make peace on earth. We’re probably still millennia away from that goal, but I think evolution is on our side rather than against us.

Peace on,

Geo

_______________________________________________________________________

"Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless" -- atheist Bertrand Russell.


D.F. O________

_______________________________________________________________________
From: George Thomas
Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2004 12:35 AM
To: D___ O_______
Subject: Slight corrections on last message. . . .

Dave,

You didn’t respond to what Luther said.

And I understand what Russell meant. Russell isn’t afraid of life being meaningless as a Christian would be. Meaninglessness is a part of the existential doctrine, just what a logical person would conclude, starting without a hypothetical god. So Russell is logical and rational, coming from the premise that god doesn’t exist. Have you ever read any of Samuel Beckett’s or Franz Kafka’s works or Camus’ The Stranger? Then you’d understand how logical Russell’s statement is. And to the existentialist each human must wrest his own meaning from the universe. It’s not a given meaning you borrow from something outside yourself.

Now, what about Luther telling you guys to be irrational and to ignore reason?

Sincerely,

Geo

______________________________________________________________________

From: "D____ O_______"
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 15:31:31 -0700
To: "George Thomas"

here's the problem with responding to you, george ... time. you have all the time in the world to research, type e-mails ad nauseum and debate. i don't. i'm sure you pulled luther out of context. just as i apparently pulled russell out of context. then, didn't russell write a piece about "why i'm not a christian"? one of your atheist brethren threw that in my face for months before i finally took time to read it -- and was amazed at the holes in his logic, the biggest of which was his extremely loose definition of what a christian is. anyone who believed in a historical Christ, by his estimation, was a christian. but i digress. although i enjoy a written format for a battle of wits, i question the value of it. as you observed before, we're talking past each other. you have chosen, against everything your senses and the universe around tells you, to deny God. at your age, it won't be long before eternity will reveal the error of your ways.
on top of that, you keep misrepresenting your experience as fact and dismissing my experience out of hand. for example, you think i'm naive for respecting lt. col. george nadler's service to his country. i've been in the news business 34 years, pal, and i'm now an editorial writer and columnist for a decent-sized paper. you don't survive that long in this business by being naive. you have any idea how many george thomases i've encountered during that time? or how many war heroes? or how many big-shot politicians? naive. c'mon. also, you dismiss g. n.'s service because he was an officer. and grunts, in your world view, knew more about what was going on than officers. here's a guy who flew supplies into backcountry outposts for special forces and racked up 1,200 combat hours. on three tours of duty, including one tour when he extended his duty three times. i'd say he knew a lot more than your average grunt on a 13-month stint.
on another point before i quit this way-too-long response, you once said that i went back to my roots when i embraced christianity at age 22. in other words, i was such a weakling that i had a need to embrace the religious crutch again in my senior year of college. for you atheists, religion is always a crutch. i believe one of your kind described it as the opiate of the masses before his foul creed led to the slaughter of hundreds of millions in the old soviet union. religion can be a crutch. and it can be the discovery of the truth. my faith, tested by life's experience, involves a relationship with a person, the risen Lord, not so stale set of rules. i won't explain it to you, just to have you mock it. i don't need freud to tell me what goes on inside mankind because he can't touch the revelation of scripture re: man.
howard has more time than i do to debate for debate's sake. i find such debate tiring because that's what i do every work day in the liberal bastion where i work. for you, it's relaxation and fun. for me, it's so much more work. if i have time, i will respond to your e-mails. but don't bank on it every time -- dfo
___________________________________________________________________

Dear Dave,

After this letter, I’ll try to back off in respect of your time, but, Dave, do you have any real scientists to send my way in debate? If Howard was ever a scientist, he no longer reasons like one. All his beliefs are now based on appeals to authority, i.e. the Bible and, according to Thomas Paine, the hearsay method, i.e. the Bible. Neither of those hold any water to a rational man in search of truth in the natural world.

I won’t deny or make fun of your choice to have an emotional and purely subjective relationship in your own head with some figure, real or imagined, from a book. We all do that in one way or another, considering the fact that the outside world comes into us all through waves of various kinds and each of us is a prisoner in his own mind. It’s all relative and subjective, that’s for sure, and you have every right to decide how to make sense out of the world for yourself.

But that’s the difference. Christians are perfectly happy to go for a subjective interpretation of the world while atheists try to stick to the scientific method of arriving at the truth, one which can be duplicated and passed on for peer review and verification. And only then can any truth about the relative world be decided on. The subjective experience you describe is personal and truly outside the realm of scientific verification. That’s why it must never be allowed to dominate a country because, then, the subjective experiences of a few can be used against people who don’t even recognize the subjective experience of that ruling majority. Only if you can prove it with scientific evidence should it be considered as an objective test for everyone’s reality.

This, too, is one paragraph too long. I’ll be patient and back off.

Geo
___________________________________________________________

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." —Ahhh, come on, you know? (G.W.B.)

LETTER TO A CREATION SCIENTIST

I discovered my brain considering the proposition, early this morning as I lay abed, awake with the old alpha waves purring away, “How can a human being, trained in science, go back to myth for his answers to the puzzle of life in the universe while I, a man trained in literature, find my way to the scientific answer?”

Then I recall that Einstein and most of our greatest scientific thinkers were and are very imaginative thinkers. Einstein often pictured concrete situations from which he reasoned to mathematical formulae. Take his “elevator in the sky” image and the image of an “approaching and receding train”. So he gave the human consciousness images of a universe which has neither up nor down in it, but mostly “around”. He gave us an entirely different way of “imaging” or “imagining” our space environment through which we human animals travel. As you probably well know, “literalism” is the opposite in meaning to “imaginative”. So that’s part of my answer. Literalists have no imagination, thus, no faith and so must cling to materialistic support.

My other hypothesis is that a brain which has not been stimulated in the imaginative faculty might find itself vulnerable to mythological explanations of reality whereas a man trained in literature would be “hip” to all the mythologies of the world and be inclined not to take any one of them more seriously than another. Since much of my reading these days is currently in the “evolution of consciousness”, I will keep my brain open to what answers I find there as scientists research the imaginative areas of the right hemisphere.

As for me, braggart that I am, who has written thousands of poems and several unpublished novels, thousands of LTEs and more than a few essays, I know about creating myths about reality which is what a man of literature does. He strikes lines of meaning across experience (so says Frost) to make sense of reality. It’s obvious to me that humankind makes up the factual universe fresh every day, so I can accept quite well how the Christian interpretation of the universe came about and the Native American one and the African ones, the Greek and Norse sagas, etcetera. If it had not been for the power of the Roman Empire, spreading its state religion around the world, Christianity wouldn’t be quite so ingrained as it now is in the western world.

How did I get to science, you might ask. Or you might not. But I went to a Catholic University, the University of Dayton, for my early education and got a solid general education there in the arts and sciences. I recall an A and a B in my physics courses, and I recall vividly (I hope “vividly” since memory is a tricky coyote) that I was buffaloed by how mechanical experiments were turned into mathematical formulae. I recall our instructor rolling a ball down an incline and then generating data by which he discussed inertia, motion, acceleration, etcetera, for us, Newtonian stuff I now realize. Despite my courses in Logic there, I was not a very logical thinker. It was incomprehensible magic to me how he turned matter (i.e. the rolling ball) into thoughts or, if you will, into mathematical principles.

Also while there at the University, I recall one day walking down a hallway, thinking about how our senses receive waves from the environment and how we don’t actually see the environment but only our brain’s interpretation of the environment. (The idea which most reveals that to me now, about our perceptions, is the idea that the brain actually receives images of the world upside down, yet the brain yields a conscious of a right side up world.) Though that’s not what concerned me at the time; then, since I wore glasses and had worn glasses since age 9 or 10, I remember I was worried about going blind and also that my vision of the world was forever different from others. I literally didn’t “see” or “experience” the world as others did. So you can see that what truly struck me was the “relativity” of perception though I didn’t work that out till later. I recall stopping in the hallway and leaning against a wall while my brain told me that I was trapped in my cranium, that my senses might fail me, and that I was or could be literally cut off from my fellow man. Whew, quite a lot for a young fellow, fresh out of the Navy! No wonder I became an existentialist, eh? Now, of course, as we learn more about the evolution of consciousness and I read books like The Moral Animal, Going Inside: a tour around a moment of consciousness, The Language Instinct, How The Mind Works, Freedom Evolves and The Synaptic Self, more is being revealed about this inescapable relativity of our perceptions.

Several facts, coming from the study of consciousness, now support this concept of the relativity of meaning in the universe. You may have heard about experiments done with people who have had their corpus callosum severed? Some unfortunate people have seizures so severe and recurrent that no medicine or treatment has been discovered to help them, except for the complete severing of the right hemisphere from the left which gives them relief. Funny things happen in these cases.

Either hemisphere can run the body more or less efficiently. Two persons now seem to inhabit one body. They work in tandem but can function separately as well. And an odd thing happens when they are run through experimental paces for observation. If the right side of the brain is given a command to get up and walk while the left side of the brain is not allowed to see or hear the order, the person will arise and walk quite well. Later, the left side of the brain is asked why it got up and walked, and it says things like, “To get a Coke.” Note, it doesn’t say, “I have been a part of these experiments for a long time now and I often find myself doing things I don’t understand” or simply “I don’t know.” No, the left side of the brain is, as Steven Pinker says, “a spinmeister”.

The left hemisphere constantly makes up reasons and justifications for actions in the world as it goes along. It’s in a reality all its own. In fact, to my way of interpretation (my left brain tells me), each human animal is exactly in that condition and has evolved explanations for reality, based on its explorations of all the various environments consciousness has evolved within. There is, factually, no one right way of belief, though there are ways of doing things which will more or less lead to survival and procreation. There’s just all these various sensibilities exploring around the environments they find themselves in, like any good animal (like a mouse in a maze) will explore, and arriving at certain agreements with other consciousnesses about how to do things because we are also social animals in need of being part of a group.

One of the strongest impulses for religion, according to surveys of Christians, is to find a fellowship of “like-minded beings” from which to draw comfort and support and (I might add, after watching young Christian bucks display their religiosity to attract the female of his species) within which to find mates, etcetera. Being a man in his 27th year of alcohol recovery, I can well accept the need for fellowship, and to be honest, I also discovered my current spouse after an AA meeting. She’s a practicing Buddhist and a member of Alanon. My AA home group meets every Sunday morning, which is another reason I’d have to decline your kind invitation. Besides, as I think about it more, I realize I’d just be a disruptive force in your classroom just as I was an argumentative force in the classrooms of the poor brothers who had to teach me Thomistic philosophy. I gave them hell. When I give people hell nowadays, it costs me peace of mind. Should I come to your group, my only comment, which I’d repeat over and over until you dealt with it, is your claim that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” I’d say, “Can you demonstrate for me how that was done through a scientific experiment (like rolling a ball down an incline and developing data)?” Until we get past this first claim in the “scientific” literature of the Bible, I could go no further because what is begun with a falsehood can’t yield much truth.

I’m going to stop here because I realize that I enjoy thinking by writing my way through complex and nuanced issues (unlike Bush) and I can overwhelm someone with sheer numbers of written words. I think I may have done that to Dave who’s got to write for a living while I just write and think and explore for the pure joy of it, of the process of thinking asilence (not “aloud”) on paper. I made the mistake of going to college for an education rather than for a job. It’s spoiled me forever for living in the civilized world.

Waiting your replies,

Geo
_____________________________________________________

"Eunuch: A man who has had his works cut out for him." —Robert Byrne

COMMUNICATION WITH FUNDAMENTALISM (THIS IS LONG POST)
FIRST HIS LETTER, FOLLOWED BY MY REPLY:

> Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 02:36:41 -0700
> To: geothomas@icehouse.net
> Subject: missing link scenario
>
> Hello, George
> My name is H_______ K____, and I am a friend of Dave O______. We both go to
> Hayden Bible Church.
>
> A little about myself:
> I completed four years of college at Iowa State University as an atheist. I
> took courses in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Zoology, and so on, all the
> while believing evolution, which of course, was taught to me as fact.
> In 1971 I was confronted with the Christian Gospel, which I will condense as
> follows:
> 1. God created me and loves me.
> 2. Because of sin, I am separated from God and condemned to death.
> 3. Jesus Christ died in order to pay the penalty of death for me, so that I
> could be reunited with God.
> 4. I can accept or reject the offer of peace with God; the choice is mine.
>
> At that point, I became greatly afraid that if I did not choose to trust
> Jesus as my savior, I would face the wrath of God in the (possibly near)
> future. I prayed, "Jesus, if you are real, come into my life and make
> yourself known to me."
> Putting my faith in Jesus was for me an extension of putting my faith in the
> Bible, because I knew the information about Jesus came from the Bible.
> Therefore, out of respect for my own intellect, I got a Bible and began
> reading it, to see what else it said. I have been reading and contemplating
> it ever since.
>
> The fascinating thing is that the more I adjusted my thinking to the words
> of the Bible, the more science (observable facts) made sense.
>
> For instance:
> I have never observed order come from disorder, particularly not from an
> explosion.
> I have never seen any mechanical thing improve on it's own: things always
> wear down and out.
> I have never seen an inanimate thing become a living thing.
> I have never seen one species come from another.
> I have never seen a dead animal turn into a fossil; they always get eaten,
> rot, and disintegrate.
>
> Evolution flies in the face of all my observations.
> Have you seen any of these things?
>
> The fossil record tells me that billions of creatures were buried in layers
> quickly, suddenly, and deeply, on a worldwide scale.
>
> The Bible agrees with all of that; evolution does not.
>
> In regard to your "missing link" scenario, yes, it is conceivable, if you
> accept evolution as a given.
> I no longer do so.
>
> My worldview now assumes that there is a God Who intervenes in history, and
> Who has revealed Himself in the Bible, and in the person of Jesus Christ.
>
> Does your worldview only allow for things to be explained by natural
> processes?
> If so, consider this question carefully:
> Why exactly is it that you preclude the possibility of God?
>
> I'd like to invite you to come to the Adult Sunday School class that I teach
> at 9:30am. We are going through the book of Genesis. Last Sunday was the
> first time we met, and we are in chapter 2. It is very informal, and
> discussion is welcome.
>
> Be open,
>
> H_______


Dear H_______,

I must admit your first letter has triggered a cascade of thoughts through the synapses of my body and brain. My exchanges with you and Dave have allowed me to crystallize my thinking about the reality of the universe. Things I have been reading for the last five years about the “evolution of consciousness” I now discover in my writing them down are synthesized in the bigger scientific picture of reality that has grown in me. I am pleased to see that my picture of the world has indeed grown. So I can see that I continue to learn even though I’m just an old codger. Hopeful, eh? I can only hope that you find the same flexibility of imagination as you go on with life. We Americans would not like to see any Taliban-like religious people flourishing among us who lack the imagination to escape the box their religion has put them in. Americans are not dogmatists like them, we hope.

Speaking of that, I noticed in my second or third reading of your missive that you closed your communication to me with the words, “Be open.” Let’s hope that we all have the same openness to ideas, and an ecumenical acceptance of others visions of reality, religions or non-religions and to life itself. This does not just mean “tolerance”, this means accepting others visions of reality to be as “true for them” as our own views of reality are “true for us” to the point that “proselytizing” will grow to be a taboo action in America. From that, true peace and coexistence can flourish. Otherwise, human animals will continue to tear at each others throats like the dogs in their lineage.

Speaking of dogmatic thinkers, I come to Hitler and an interesting thing I recall (if my memory recalls correctly) from reading Mien Kampf. PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING: When I say the next few things, I’m not comparing you to Hitler; I’m only making an example about a mental phenomena which I observed in him, in all of us and in you. When you describe your conversion experience back to Christianity, I noted that it was not “logical”; it was irrational. It was a sort of leap based in fear, i.e. you wrote, “At this point I became greatly afraid. . . .”

I understand how fear can motivate the human animal. Evolution tells us fear is pretty basic to our existence, but in the human animal, which has language, fear can become attached to “ideas”. As far as we know, no animal has an abstract level of consciousness that allows him to foresee a danger in the anticipation of an act which might occur in the future, though when an animal “freezes” just before it is struck (the human animal has the same instinctive reaction) by a predator, he freezes in “anticipation” of the actual happening. In fact, this reaction a moment “before” something happens is the basis of what I think is the human animal’s development of the concept of “future” and “past”. My hypothesis, only, at this point. What I’ve noticed lately is that I get an idea, then I discover that someone else has already had it. Very humbling.

But, back to Hitler. While he was a starving artist in Munich, he worked as a porter in a train station, carrying the bags of rich Jews and others. One day, he stopped in mid act and “noticed” that the people with the side curls were “Jews”, and he felt hatred. It’s an odd thought, out of nowhere, coming to him in the middle of humiliating circumstances after Germany has lost the war. All these things occur to him “out of nowhere” so to speak. Your turning away from science to religion has the same unplanned quality, just like the quality of my insight that I was trapped in my brain at the University of Dayton. I have had many moments like that in my life. Some turned out to be real moments of change, others only temporary, and others just gave me tremendous insights about how psychology works in me and in others. Scientists have leaps too, but then, they go on to develop real material evidence for their insights.

The odd thing about Hitler’s leap is that it was toward an irrational belief from which he never recovered. In fact, he even forced science (somewhat like Bush) to teach things such as that Jewish blood is different from Aryan blood and that Jewish skulls are different from Aryan skulls. Thus does superstition alter science in the regimes of true believers and alter truth based on nothing at all substantial. We all hope nothing like that occurs in America, don’t we? Perhaps we’ll reelect Bush, perhaps, we won’t.

Now I’m returning to that list of “beliefs” you say are unproven in the observed world around me. It’s the list after your words “For instance” in you first communication with me. May I counter with another list? And if, as you say, your list must prove to me that a force of nature you call god does exist, then, I say, on the same kind and quality of evidence, that many of your beliefs must be cast aside in the real world. Okay? Fair enough?

1) I have never observed a god force stoop down, take earth and make a man and, then, pull from the rib of that man, a woman, but I have seen the act by which a man and woman make another human like themselves. And I have seen a puppet master make puppets out of cloth, wood and string. I know I’m not a puppet who comes from puppets, unless I’m out of my mind.

2) I have never seen anyone return from the dead if they were really dead. They were always in a coma.

3) I have never seen anyone lifted up into the sky from earth except by plane or rocket.

4) I have never witnessed an animate thing being created from an inanimate thing, but that is no proof that it didn’t occur, and if it can occur, it can come from evolution as well as from some god force too, can’t it? That particular argument cuts both ways, I believe. But then I can’t see a quark either and it’s hard to decide how much “life” an atom or quark have and where life begins and ends and what life truly is, isn’t it? I do think that little spermatozoon which swims to the already living egg is “animate” but, then, it’s made up of proteins and other things which are inanimate of themselves in the natural world. So, who knows?

5) I have never witnessed a person walk on water.

6) I have never witnessed the laying on of hands return vision to anyone who was not first suffering from “hysterical” blindness. I have seen doctors perform “miracles” with the science of medicine however, and I have observed religious charlatans who with the help of accomplices pretend to cure people.

7) I have never witnessed anyone claim they were the son of god, an angel or a virgin woman with child except in my volunteer work in mental hospitals or during my discussions with street people who were clearly out of their minds during my days of wine, women and song.

Since I’ve never witnessed any of these things, except within the limited circumstances I mentioned, then, they couldn’t have happened. Is that the basis of your argument with your list? Clarify, if I misunderstood.

Now, by the way, as more comments to your list: I have seen many fossils of animals in my back yard. I pick up their bones all the time as I dig in my flower gardens.

Further, though I have never seen one species come from another, I have watched the many changes a butterfly undergoes and a maggot become a fly. To me, these are sorts of mini-species changes, viewed in the light I want to see them in, perhaps, maybe some left over vestiges of evolutionary change which is more rapid than the almost infinitely long pace of species drift we call evolution? Another interesting hypothesis, I think, don’t you?

Further, are computer programs inanimate or animate? There are computer programs which are self correcting and which improve themselves. To extend this further—there is quite a bit a interesting debate going on about freedom and free will in the human being, created by our new knowledge of how the brain functions. If this ever gets decided, then we’ll know that there is no difference between animate and inanimate. We’re all just matter and thoughts are matter just as a rock is matter, only the rock is an animate/inanimate thing which doesn’t have the power of motion.

Further, what is meant by the word, “order”? There is only “change”. Whether one chooses to call the result of any single change “order” or “disorder” is a value judgment, not a scientific or objective observation. When I arrange my desk drawer, I bring order out of disorder all the time, but my wife, not understanding my arrangement of items, might say that my drawer is now in disarray. And I would not consider today’s world particularly orderly, nor the human animal’s form particularly orderly because change is constant, moving from one shape to another. What I suggest is that the big bang has not led to order in the limited sense that you are using the term “order” (i.e. a drawer arrangement). There is only a continuous change going on from one form to another, one arrangement to another. The only order in the universe are the laws of physics which we can measure and quantify, but those laws underlie the universe in a way that the drawer analogy does not.

Man O man, Howard, I’m enjoying this. I didn’t know how much of my current reading I understood until I got into these discussions with you and Dave.

I’m growing tired again. That’s one difference between me at 66 and me at 22—thinking itself proves to take more energy than I realized (that’s probably why so few people do it) and I can’t sit for hours at a time reading, thinking and writing without getting dizzy and tired.

Finally, and to return to your invitation to attend your class. I now know that my debate with your adult ed. class wouldn’t begin with the first line of the Bible; it would begin outside the Bible and in history, for first, I would challenge you to prove that this Bible you are studying in was the word of that hypothetical superbeing Christian’s call “god”. Most people begin with a bias that this book is some sort of holy book, yet there is no proof of its being a holy book except within itself, and having a scientific background as you do, I know that you know that this is a circular argument and, therefore, invalid in any logical argument. Thus, I conclude, you wouldn’t want me in your class, stopping all discussion until you proved that these poems, stories, tales, and bits of history and law were the actual work of god. We could get nowhere. Science is one thing and religion another, and never the twain shall meet. The one depends on appeals to literary debate, to books and to authority for its validity while the other to appeals to the methods of scientific research in the natural rather than the unnatural world.

Anyhow, I’m awaiting your response, and at least poor Dave has gotten a reprieve from my many emails to him. Something useful has been accomplished, hasn’t it?

Love in reality’s name,

Geo

PUTTING A FACE ON IRAQ

I’m pretty skeptical. It’s hard to make me care. I’ve come to know that the world’s a hard place with plenty of suffering to go around, and nobody past infanthood is empty of deceit. Then I see this picture of an American soldier’s face in Iraq, and it gets in my head and won’t go away till I put it in my Blog. (See page 31 of Newsweek’s Sept. 20, 2004 issue.)

His face is bloodied, but it’s his eyes that get me. He’s on his back, and his eyes have lost focus. The trooper’s dying or he’s in deep shock. They’re working on his guts. He’s deep inside himself and going fast, and I want this shit to end. Not too long ago I tried to help a combat medic, Nam vet stop drinking. One of the things that haunted him was the look of the face of a dying man when he’d hold him while he died. Okay—gruesome enough? Just don’t tell me I’m on the side of the enemy because I want this man home and all his comrades.

Or, at least if we’re going to kill them, let’s aim them at the right target. Okay?

So this guy is dying or dead. For what?

Newsweek reports in the Fallows’s report that “impartial counterterrorism specialists. . . all agreed that the Iraq war has increased rather than decreased the threat to the United States.” (p. 29)

And Newsweek reports that “sixteen months after the war’s supposed end, Iraq’s insurgency is spreading.” Relief groups and some of our Coalition of the Willing are pulling out. Costa Rica announced just a few weeks back that it no longer supports the U.S. in Iraq. U.S. forces have conceded entire cities to the insurgents and last week the total of casualties reached 1,007.

On the same Newsweek page (p. 30), we are reminded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once referred to America’s foes in Iraq as ‘dead enders’. But, what was once estimated to be 5000 insurgents is now grown to have ‘dozens of regional cells’ that can access about 20,000 fighters.

Also we hear that so many Iraqi professionals were seeking to flee the country last week that they mobbed the Baghdad passport office, ‘desperate’ to escape. Police fired shots in the air to control the pro. crowd.

Another detail I remember about Vietnam is how its capital, Saigon, was corrupted by the American presence until it became an Amerinam mongrel dog, full of prostitution, crime and black market activity. On page 33, we get a picture of the Green Zone inside Baghdad and see the beginning of that corruption too. The story which leaps out at me is the mental picture of “Sheik Fuad Rashid, the U.S.-appointed imam of the local mosque” who “dresses like a nun, dyes his hair platinum blond and claims that Mary Mother of Jesus appear to him in a vision.” (pp. 33-34)

Finally we learn that we are so unpopular now with all Iraqis that the provisional government wants us out, but the last executive fiat that outgoing bossman Bremer issued (Order No. 9) “extends the right of occupation forces to control properties until the Iraqi government decides otherwise.”

A fine kettle of fish, they used to say. And over it all, the eyes of that dying soldier looks on.


SOME ITEMS FROM "THE PASSOVER PLOT" BY SCHONFIELD

I introduce these ideas just to whet the whistle of anyone who might like to look a little deeper into the fictions of the Bible, accompanied by Bible scholars of the first magnitude. Go forth and read and know. . . .

Page 22: The messianic nature of Jesus's self-proclaimed mission, as interpreted and proclaimed by John, would be blasphemous to the Jewish Jesus. A Jew like Jesus could not have seen himself as replacing the Jew's monotheistic God, Yahweh. Jesus did see himself as the Messiah, but that meant to him only that he was a holy one who must be sacrificed before the Kingdom of God could be established on earth.

Page 24: For some time, the Jewish leadership imagined that the Kingdom of God couldn't return to earth until all the Jewish people were perfected. But time passed and they knew that all the Jews would never be perfected. At that time, they began to look for a few perfect ones, messiahs, to die as sacrificial lambs. Jesus saw himself as that Messiah.

Page 41: "The very term, the Annointed One, indicates a call to office." Hugh Schonfield's argument is that Jesus never saw himself as the Son of God but only as a Messiah come to earth to shepherd in the Kingdom of God. Jesus knew what he was doing and what he hoped would happen but he was quite wrong in what did happen.

Page 49-50: "With the birth stories [of Jesus and John the Baptist] we pass directly from the world of sober reality into the world of fairy tales. . . . they [the gospel writers] mingle the legends of the heroes of Israel and of Hellas, and draw upon these legends for their basic ingredients. . . . they suitably adorned and compensated for the meagre facts at their disposal."

Page 22: In Jewish legend, the coming of the Messiah was to be closely followed by the final age of peace and bliss, the Kingdom of God. Jesus believed the Kindgom of God was near and must have believed he was the Messiah predicted to come. He, of course, was quite wrong.

Page 23: Jesus said, "the time is fulfilled" and he meant that God was expected very soon. This literal reading of the passage cannot be denied. You can imagine the feverish expectancy which seized Jesus's followers at that time, a fever which eventually cooled when they discovered their "Messiah's" error.
_________________________________________________

"You can no more drive a fact into a Bushman's head than a car into space." —Geo (1937—?)

EVOLUTION: A SIMPLE PRIMER FOR CHRISTIANS

I have found this analogy pretty effective in, if not convincing, at least in explaining some of the key elements in the evolutionary facts of the story of life.

"The Ages Of Man: An Analogy For The Missing Link Debate"

All analogies break down. They’re not perfect, but here’s the best I can do to illustrate where the missing link charges by the creationists break down.

Imagine that at the moment of birth, an unmanned camera begins to take snapshots of a person every second from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. At the moment of this being’s death, a record of his entire existence is now stored on file in the Whole Earth Library along with the photo records of all the people in Whole Earth County.

Now, with that moment by moment record of existence for your perusal, if I asked you to point to the exact moments when the being changed from infant to toddler and toddler to preadolescent, from preadolescent to post-adolescent, from post-adolescent to young man (you get the picture), could you identify those moments? No, of course not, because there is no missing link. The change is so gradual that you can’t visualize it. Same with the whole history of life on earth, only we’re talking about “species creep” in reality and not Shakespeare’s Ages of Man.

Creationists say, “But I can still tell that’s a male child and a man all the way through.” But that wasn’t my point. I was only talking about the difficulty of finding a missing link if there is no missing link. But, okay, all analogies break down, so, for fun, let me make the analogy even a little closer to the larger case of evolution at hand.

Let’s add some details to the being’s life. At some point in the being’s life, he fights in a war, becomes a one-legged, one armed paraplegic in a wheel chair whose face is so badly disfigured by fire and shrapnel that nothing can reconstitute it because he’s in a fairly unscientific age. But since we have his entire record on file, stored in the archives of the Whole Earth Library, we still know this man to be the same being all the way through. It’s all on record, but we can definitely now see a change between the prewar and the postwar being.

But let’s add another bit of reality to the case.

Suppose a hurricane tears into the Whole Earth Library long after the man is dead and passed away. It spreads the record of his existence over a twenty mile area. Some of the photos drop into fires which are burning, some onto the surfaces of the river and float away, some onto the surface of a lake to soak and sink, some drop into wells and crevices (you get the picture—destruction and dispersal of the record of our man). But if you get to the spot of the catastrophe soon enough, given the amount of evidence still remaining, you will probably pretty easily figure out that this series of snapshots are of one being, unless, of course, many other series of snapshots are lying around and mixed up with his.

But the problem of finding the “moments of transition” is getting very complicated by too much evidence and by it’s being randomly dispersed and mixed with other kinds of photo evidence all over the county. In fact, I’d say the evidence to identify any missing “link” or “moment when his age changed” is pretty well lost to time now, even though we know they occurred. Probably we could never have done it in the first place, given the nature of the reality of his change’s slow time frame and the superficial nature of photographic evidence anyway, which doesn’t see into the underlying structure.

So, let’s add more reality to our analogy.

Over a period of a zillion thousand years, many wars are fought over this very ground where the remaining photos lie. Bombs blow craters and refill them. Nature does its work too. Wild fires cross and re-cross the ground, rains fall on it, sun burns down, winds blow, natural catastrophes sweep over the land (you get the picture). Surveying the ground where the Whole Earth Library once stood, we’ll be lucky to find evidence that a library was there at all, let alone a photo of a single man, and our man in particular. Any photo that might lie on the surface will be weathered and faded, and it will even be hard to identify it as a photo. Our photos of the man would seem like bits of the earth itself. Not only that, man fled the earth a million years previous because the environment would no longer support oxygen breathing life.

Now, how will we be able to identify the “moments of transition” through Shakespeare’s Ages of Man of this particular example of our species, even if we find four or five photos? I think it’s impossible, don’t you? At this point, I’ve brought us somewhere near to just before our current age of exploration where we humans stood when Darwin and cohorts arrived on the scene.

So let’s get even more real.

Suppose an alien “Darwin consciousness” appears (the key word is consciousness) with the body of what we might call an ant, a consciousness which has never heard of humankind and its culture and which evolved somewhere far from Whole Earth County (maybe another planet) but which eventually grows curious enough to travel over the earth to see what’s up.

Standing on the grounds of what was once Whole Earth County, the alien consciousness finds one fairly intact and unfaded photo which, fortuitously, has been protected inside an upside down ration tin which one of its many feet kicks as it walks. It’s the picture of a human infant in a crib. The ant consciousness has no idea what it’s seeing (doesn’t even know what a crib is) but it’s curious nonetheless. The ant calls for backup.

More ants arrive and begin to search the ground and dig it up. After decades of human time, the ant researchers come up with three more photos of our original being. Of course, they don’t know that. We do because we are a sort of objective camera which is observing and recording this whole tale. One photo is a full length view of him as a young man before the war. Another shows him from the waist up in a hospital bathrobe. He’s in early convalescence just after the war, with face burned beyond recognition, missing limbs, in a wheelchair built for bipedal persons. The third photo is from our man’s death bed scene with a now aged, but reconstructed face which looks nothing like the young prewar male face, hairless, toothless, peeking over the edge of a hospital sheet.

At this point in our story, the ant consciousness can’t even tell if this “thing” in a barred place which you and I recognize as an infant is the same kind of thing that sits in the wheeled carriage or as the thing peeking out of the covers. They just have no concept for these “things” they’re seeing in the snapshots.

Eventually, though, one bright researcher ant notes that all the things have heads and maybe eyes, except for the thing in the wheeled thing. The researcher can’t make out that thing’s blasted, burned head too well. You know? No one can really tell if these things they’re looking at are one thing or four things. Not really. So they’re stored away in fossil drawers.

Eventually, however, other ant consciousness begins to understand from other photos that these photo phenomena they are studying are somehow connected, and they learn through chemical analysis that photo paper has distinctive traces and that some photos are numbered or marked in some way or another. Call the discovery of paper types and of human numbering systems for photos, the underlying and connecting thread of all the photos, “carbon dating” and “natural selection” and “DNA”.

Now, to wrap this analogy up, a researcher near Whole Earth County pulls the four photos of our man out of the fossil drawer and study’s the paper. The researcher finds the four photos are made of the same batch of paper. By their numbering, research can sequence them.

Finally, as a few more photos from Whole Earth County drift in, the ants can reliably predict that these different “beings” or “things” are connected in a line by the DNA and numbering of photo paper, but the transition points between the thing in the barred cage, and the prewar thing squinting in sunlight, and the thing in the wheeled carriage and the old thing under the sheet are forever missing. Still, our evolving ant consciousness has snapped the picture correctly, even though many of the ant population at large won’t yet admit all of the things, though they call them different species, are the same thing and are even in the ants’ family bush.

WHO OWNS THE OWNERSHIP SOCIETY?

Allan Sloan in Newsweek’s September 13, 2004 issue points out what so many of Bush’s happy plans for everyone owning a piece of the pie fails to account for: it takes money to make money.

In a time of declining wages, most of us use just about all we have to make ends meet. What blue collar man of the future will be able to save money for the purchase of that snappy travel home like his father owned to go on the road with when he retires after he sends his kids to college so that they can get ahead in ways he never could and pays off his too expensive, roomy house and pays off that last SUV he shouldn’t have purchased (if he doesn’t buy that SUV, how many good paying jobs will Detroit lose).

All Bush’s plans for “retirement savings accounts” and “lifetime savings accounts” are for those in the upper end of middle class America (I call them the rich). As Sloan says, “all this would be great for people who already have plenty to invest, but not helpful for people who don’t already own plenty of capital. It’s all part of a long-term plan to turn the income tax into a wage tax, make inheritances and income from investments tax-free and fill the budget gap with a national sales tax or value-added tax.” (p. 33)

In the long run, Bush’s plan sounds really American pie, but the poor will still be with us, and if the economic slide continues, there’ll be more of them for those of us who pay wage taxes (that’s you and me, Mr. Blue Collar) to support while the rich buy their yachts, move their businesses offshore, sail the seven seas and almost completely escape their part of the cost of keeping America safe and stable so that they can pursue ever more money which will increase exponentially under Republican control.


HYPOCRISY

There’s always enough hypocrisy to go around. I recall this from the 60s, don’t you? How many of these Republican hawks also want to stop abortion? There’s nothing like saving a zygote on the starting side of life so that you can send a young man off to die in the anti-abortionist’s war later. I think it’s pretty sadistic to want newbees to hang around long enough to build lots of friendships, families of their own and love relationships so that the suffering can be multiplied. Don’t give this “respect for life” society Mr. Bush pays lip service to too much credit yet.


REV. SUN MYUNG MOON (MOONIES) OWNS A LOT

This guy who calls “homosexuals ‘dirty dung-eating dogs’ and American women ‘a line of prostitutes’” is growing ever more powerful in American political circles according to a report in The Humanist magazine (September/October 2004, p. 14)

Moon’s front groups include the “Interreligious Federation for World Peace” and “the Women’s Federation for World Peace, the American Family Coalition, the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, a New Jersey after-school celibacy program for teens, the Washington Times Foundation, and United Press International.”

You know, as I helplessly watch men like Moon and Murdock buy up news organizations, I think it behooves us to firmly grasp public broadcasting in hand, fund it well so they can find news on their own, and also make sure that they have independence from law makers to do a thorough job of reporting the news.


JUDGES SHOULD BE ABOVE POLITICS

As an aside, I’ve been thinking about American judges and the way they’re being tossed around like political footballs. I think all judges who want to move up in life to higher positions of trust ought to have to test for the position with serious testing. Then everyone’s name who wants to move up and who achieves a certain level of tested competency should have their name put in the hat and drawn out to fill open positions. No favoritism, no owing any special philosophical position loyalty or any politician, either.
_____________________________________________________

"I think we must save America from the missionary idea that you must get the whole world on to the American way of life. This is really a big world danger." —Gunnar Myrdal (Myrdal, Nobel laureate in Economics, was born in Gustaf's parish, Sweden, on December 6, 1898 and died in 1987. )

A NEW TEE-SHIRT!!!!!!!!

I just purchased a new tee-shirt from a friend who had them made up to order. It reads,

One More Atheist Praying For the Rapture

Actually, I'd be happy if they just all moved South and flagellated themselves with a Bible belt.


CHARLIE ROSE AND SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

I was watching Charlie the other night, interviewing Tim Robbins, Samuel Jackson and the Shawshank director (who?). Robbins commented that Shawshank was the only film that he could think of which featured a two male friendship which didn’t involve car chases. Later they spoke about the film’s theme of “hope”. They praised hope and admired those who persevere. I got to thinking about that, about whether hope or despair is the best teacher, and about the best way to approach contentment in the modern world.

Frankly, I learned to find a reasonable amount of happiness in life not by embracing hope but by looking the dog eat dog nature of evolved humankind square in the chops and changing from there, from that despair, to acceptance of a brutal nature without flinching. Acceptance of a life without hope is the key to my own moderate happiness. I almost always sense something manic and unbelievable about that Christian happy-faced person telling me about her newfound Jeeees-us!

Funny, too, that I remember another film which concerns male bonding without car chases which ended not in hope but with a scary reality that removed all hope, that ended with Ratso’s death on the bus trip to Florida. I have in mind Midnight Cowboy. That was the kind of film that informed my younger days, that and films out of the French New Wave, like 400 Blows (I know that I keep bringing that film up). Or Clockwork Orange with its ambivalent ending. Or Doctor Strangelove which ends in the annihilation of the world. My films are films of reality and many times leave not a shred of hope. There is no escape from death.

There is no such thing as a happy ending in real life. There’s just being born, living and dying with moments of happiness and joy and sorrow and terror in between. Anyone who pursues happiness will surely not find it. Anyone who looks for a happy ending is almost certain to be disappointed. But anyone who accepts life on life’s terms (which are not pretty) has a chance of a moderate contentment. Though the films of my youth over and over dumped me into despair, they also made me find a way out of despair without tacking on a happy, unreal face or pretending there’s a god who’ll make it all right in the end. I can now look life in its scared and eyeless face and not shudder. Me and The Stranger can stare out of the same prison window and be okay with that.
___________________________________________________

Confucius says, "If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves."

AYE, MATES, I TOLD YOU SO: BUSH COMPULSIVE.

Bob Woodward’s book confirms the rambunctious nature of the Bush drive to attack Iraq from the earliest days of his term. Newsweek reporters, after reading the book, quote Woodward as saying: “. . . it is striking how little Bush talks to his top advisers about whether to go to war. He meets constantly with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top military commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, to go over war plans. But there is almost no debate over whether invading Iraq is a good idea to begin with.” (Newsweek, Sept. 6, 2004, p. 36)

“The clear impression is that Bush made a quick gut decision. The debate, says one knowledgeable former administration official, was ‘pro forma’.” (Newsweek, p. 38)

Again, let us mourn our going into Iraq. Many of us just have not been able, yet, to figure out why we really went into Iraq. What was it all about? All I know is that some of us “knew” instinctively that Bush was going in from the first time we heard the idea issue from Bush’s Gray/White House. I knew even as I walked the street in an early antiwar protest that we were going in; I knew my protest was not going to move this man. I don’t know how many others also knew it except we may have known conservatives in the past and knew them to be hair trigger sorts of guys, dictatorial and authoritarian sorts, who put their heads down and blunder on, who act first and think later. In short, the school yard bullies we all remember so well from junior/senior high, implacably aggressive . That’s what I saw/see and feared/fear in Bush to this moment. I hate to use the term, but it’s obvious Bush was “obsessive/compulsive” about the Iraq attack he was having.


ON READING A BIT OF DOSTOEVSKY’S
NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

In mid-eighteenth century Russia, Dostoevsky was stating some of the concerns which are still alive in the debate about determinism and free will being battled out in Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves” and among other determinist/ free will scientists:

“. . . you say. . . science itself will teach man. . . that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him.” (p. 70)

But, then, the gambling addicted Russian goes on to question reason just as the current debates about the brain also come to question it.


GOOD NEWS FOR ALL IN CONVENTION BOUNCE NUMBERS

Believe it or not, even the Dems can take solace from the 10 point swing toward Bush after the Republican Convention. It means that only 5% of the American populace are mindless and impulse driven enough to be moved by a silly advertising campaign such as conventions are. It at least means that most of us have been paying attention to the issues which matter to us. For the Pubes, it’s religion, for the Dems, it’s economic issues. At least that’s something.
_______________________________________________

"Cabbage: A . . . vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head." Ambrose Bierce

DOWN AND DIRTY SYLLOGISM

Christians love to claim that all we have to do is look at the world, and we’ll see god at work. Stupid, they cry at us, can something come from nothing!

Lemme splain: If, as they claim, something cannot come from nothing, and if god is something rather than nothing, then where did god come from?


IRRATIONALITY, THE CHRISTIAN WAY

In Kaufmann’s anthology, “Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre”, we discover another two renowned Christians willing to admit that they love irrationality. Although, the way Kaufmann introduces the quotes, it’s hard to tell whether Martin Luther or Kierkegaard wrote the words which follow. “. . .he [Kierkegaard?] echoes Luther’s famous dicta: ‘Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason’ and ‘You must part with reason and not know anything of it and kill it; else one will not get into the kingdom of heaven’ and ‘reason is a whore.’” (p.18)

I find that many Christians must have read these two and taken their advice to heart when I try to have a logical conversation with them about their so-called holy writings.


WELL. . . THIS IS HARD TO BELIEVE

Recall Pinker’s statistical analysis of what factors most influence what a child becomes and how he ends up? Pinker says that 50% of what a child becomes is decided by it’s genes and 50% is decided by its peers. The most influence parents can have is to get their child into a good school with stable conditions, high intellectual standards and in safe neighborhoods. My most recent “Newsweek” which goes on and on about why a parent needs to say, “No” (The Power of No), seems to be completely ignorant of Pinker’s conclusions. What are we to make of that?

I think Pinker is mostly correct, remember? For if a child grows up to be like his parents he’ll have no success in his working relationships with his job peers and friendships and so many other things. Yes, a child will like the music of his peers, use the language of his peers, adopt the values of his peers, share common values of beauty and morality. But isn’t there left a little room for a parent to yell a big loud, “NO!” Honestly, folks, ain’t this a tough one to swallow? Don’t we think we’re in the catbird seat when it comes to how our children turn out?


HERE’S ANOTHER THING FROM “GOING INSIDE”

In studying how the senses take in the outside world, we learned from “Going Inside” that the brain experiences bits and pieces of the world rather than a continuous flow of info. We experience reality as a series of snapshots rather than as a continuous consciousness, just like a motion picture is a series of snapshots rather than a continuous reception of images.

The doctor, Oliver Sacks, who wrote “Awakenings” from which the movie of that title was made concurs in a New Yorker article (8/23/2004, p. 64): “This does much to suggest that conscious perception. . . is not continuous but consists of discrete moments, like the frames of a movie, which are then blended to give an appearance of continuity.”

It’s a wonder we can make a police report that makes any sense at all. Perhaps that’s why eye witness reports are becoming ever less respected when it comes to truth. What can we trust in this world if reality is so fragmented and piecemeal? What about all this Swift boat stuff from 40 years back if memory is so holey?


TODAY'S JOKE TO STRING YOU ALONG

Such is the world of physics with string theory, and I don't know what'all! Merlin Donald in A Mind So Rare (my newest read which claims that free will does exist) mentions that Niels Bohr (Nobel laureate) is reported to have said to a colleague, "We all agree that your theory is crazy; where we disagree is whether it is crazy enough."

NO EARS, NO EYES, NO TONGUE FOR IT

In a recent post, I think I mentioned the tribe of natives who didn’t have concepts for the numerals one, two or three. They were unable to perform tasks which required that they be able to count. For example they couldn’t tell when a box was empty of things even though the experimenter counted aloud the items put into a box and counted them as they were removed. They couldn’t tell the difference between a box with two fishes painted on its lid and three fishes painted onto its lid. The story was in our local newspaper, the Spokesman Review.

I must have personally had this insight something like 15 or 20 years back as I struggled to understand why more people were incapable of understanding the current facts of evolution or the implications of the evolution of consciousness and many other things. Now you may ask why I should credit myself for having these insights when I don’t seem to have the words or concepts of religious fundamentalists.... Can’t they charge me with the same failing?

But I have had their insights, and they are the old facts in the human machine we call the brain. I’ve already incorporated them into the mix and moved on from them. They were given to me with my mother’s milk and to graduate into the modern world, I had to comprehend them and move on from them. It’s how a person comes to live in the modern world and not in his mom or dad’s outmoded world. I sense myself already being transcended by that literate guy and gal with the body piercings so profuse that it hurts me to look at them. My daughter for one....

Also in the recent movie, "What The Fuck Do We Know?", we are told that the natives who first experienced the arrival of Christopher Columbus’s ships couldn’t see the ships because they had no concept for them in their minds. Hard to believe? For me too. Supposedly, one of their shamans went to the beach and stared for a long time and finally saw the ships. Then he communicated to his tribe what he saw and they could then see the three ships. This tale is related as gospel truth in the flick.

Hard to believe, yet I don’t think people can understand the concept of the unconscious and what it means for humans if they really don’t have the language for it. They can hear the words, but until enlightened understanding, comes, they are almost unable to understand the import of the concept. My own education has been a process of struggling with new ideas, sometimes for years and decades, until they finally come alive in my brain. Then I truly SEE! O, yes, now I see.... Without that “Ahaa!” the brain remains dark.

Now to add an appeal to authority to my personal experience, the example from a movie and the scientific experiments for this idea, I go to Nietzsche and a passage from his “Ecco Homo”. He writes, “In the end, nobody hears more out of things, including books, than he knows already. For that to which one lacks access from experience, one has no ears. Let us imagine an extreme case; that a book speaks of all sorts of experiences which lie utterly beyond any possibility of frequent, or even rare, experiences—that it represents the first language for a new sequence of experiences. In that case, simply nothing is heard; and the people have the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing.” (From Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufmann, p. 132)

Unlike the fundamentalist with his mere appeal to authority, I’ve brought evidence from science, example, authority and personal experience. If this were an English composition essay, I’d get an A for evidence.
__________________________________________

"Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow." —Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

A PACK OF WILD CHIHUAHUAS

That’s all; I just wanted to say that and picture it. O my goodness, nipped to death!

That’s cause we’ve got a chihuahua named Chi Chi.


CHILDREN’S TV AND ITS SHORTCOMINGS

Was watching Barney yesterday morning. One segment had to do with playing together and playing nicely together. Now isn’t that one of the platitudes parents always try to inculcate in their children with very little success? If you ask me, children are born with more or less aggressive or cooperative personalities. These traits are genetic. You can see it in kittens and puppies too.

But if you make cooperation a virtue and praise it until it runs out of children’s ears, what of the introvert who mostly likes to be alone or the little damn bully I was who didn’t like or trust anyone? Those poor kids trying to play nice with me sure got some surprises. When Mr. Wilson many years later met me at the imported food store where I was working my way through college, I was surprised when he said, “Gosh, I thought you’d be in prison by now.” But I guess I shouldn’t have been.

After watching that Barney segment, I guess I know why I’ve had so much contempt for the middle-class life and its values. Play nice now, world. . . . All those zillions of shrill mothers throughout history, warning junior to play nice in Jesus’s name, or whatever god they appeal to, and I can’t see the world’s people one whit less violent and cruel to one another. Talk about carrying water in a holey bucket!


KIERKEGAARD AND NIETZSCHE FOREWARN US

Lately, I’ve been warning that America is about 200 years behind Europe in sophistication, manners and mores and that we might pass through a fascist phase of our own. We’re close to that now if Bush can imagine America has the unilateral right to just do anything it likes in the world community. Most interesting, how Kierkegaard warns us about the press nearly 150 years ago and worries, it seems to me, about intellectual chaos. “The fact that an anonymous author by the help of the press can day by day find occasion to say (even about intellectual, moral, and religious matters) whatever he pleases to say, and what perhaps he would be very far from having the courage to say as an individual; that every time he opens his mouth . . . he at once is addressing thousands of thousands; that he can get ten thousand times ten thousand to repeat after him what he has said—an with all this nobody has any responsibility. . . .” Kierkegaard also seems to dislike the “voting” public. (Existentialism From Dostoevsky to Sartre, pp. 97-98)

Then I find Nietzsche jumping into the fray too. “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently; the advent of nihilism. . . . Our whole European culture is moving for some time now, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end. . . .” (Existentialism. . . , pp. 130-131)

Nietzsche was prescient about Hitler and about the wars coming. The 200 hundred years he speaks of still have between 5 and 8 more decades to go.
___________________________________________________

On Berlin, Tracey Ullman says, "I wish they hadn't taken the wall down. Now it's full of East Germans wearing Versace shirts."

BUSH'S LIPS ARE MOVING. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Bush is campaigning the country, telling us how well things are going in Iraq. Well, here's the real story: REAL STORY.


HERE'S A LITTLE ESSAY I WROTE ABOUT CREATION ?S?C?I?E?N?C?E?

Recently I fired off an email to an acquaintance in which I discussed the problem of men who call themselves scientists even though they make a mockery of the scientific methodology.

Dear Dave,

You’re right, our discussion is unfair as I do have time to sit and think and read almost every day, but my volunteer duties are mounting up. So I’m trying to stick to one point every email so that they’re shorter. This is my thinking on “creation science”.

My hypothesis is that the men who support creation science claim to be scientists, but their minds don’t work like scientific minds because they support hypothesis over theory which no real scientist would do. Therefore, I can honestly and without prejudice discredit anything they have to say. Here’s what I mean.

Creation scientists believe there is some force outside time and space, which they name “god”, which created all the matter in the universe. That is their “hypothesis”. They present absolutely no experimental data to support their hypothesis; that’s why it’s called an hypothesis. These “creation scientists” lay the proof of their claim in the authority of the writings in “one” book, and literary claims, true or false, are not scientific and experimental evidence.

Now, a true “scientific finding”, as you know, must stand the test of peer review and be capable of duplication by a second party before any hypothesis can be proven true in the scientific community. And, of course, evolution is not an experiment capable of being duplicated. Humankind is still right in the middle of the experiment, but we can observe “change” and observe the experiment as it goes on around us in things like continental drift, the movement of stars, volcanoes and other natural acts, and we can pick up the evidence of the animal part of the experiment in fossils and other signs of it all around us now.

So, evolution is far beyond being an hypothesis; it’s a theory. Some in science are ready to say that enough proof exists to call evolution a proven fact, but, for the sake of this discussion, I’ll stick with the term “theory” to bow to your side. Still, evolution has so much evidence that it fills up drawers and closets in departments of science all over the world. Evolution explains so many other sciences too. Everything in biology is explained by and makes sense by evolution. The findings from the fact of “continental drift” fits with evolution. DNA proves evolution. The salty, oceanic contents of human blood chemistry is explained by evolution. To take evolution out of science would be the same as taking god out of the Bible; neither would make sense. Almost our entire understanding of how the natural world works would cease to make sense without evolution in it. But, still, that isn’t the point.

My point is that any scientist who claims to be a scientist (1) starts with an hypothesis, (2) makes observations and creates experiments to see if his hypothesis has any basis in fact, and only then (3) calls it a theory or discards it as false. Only after his peers (4) review it and also come up with experimental verification does an hypothesis arrive to the force of the truth. And even then, scientists only claim to have the truth as the evidence shows it to be now. To a true scientist, the facts of the natural world will always be open to further interpretation and experimentation.

The point is that no real scientist can put an hypothesis before a theory. That would be the same as putting two before one in counting objects. Ergo, creation scientists who put their unproven “hypothesis of creation” before the “theory of evolution” don’t operate as true scientists with the scientific method and their claims must be discarded. Ironic as it may sound, the only scientist who could be trusted to honestly prove the existence of god would have to be an atheistic one.

Who knows? Maybe in the future, real scientists, working with dark matter or anti-matter or string theory, etcetera, will come up with a process by which something does come from nothing, and if they’re real scientists, they will tell us that and seek peer review and corroborating evidence for their claims. Until that happens, my mind remains open to the claims of the Christian book, but for now I remain an atheist.


NEW CAR

I bought a new car and turned in my Ford Aspire at about 128,000 miles, one of the best little cars I ever owned. It's still getting 30mpg and cruising along but some uninsured driver wanged my door pretty badly while I was parked the other day, and I've been idly test driving some newer cars on the spur of the moment. And a funny thing happened on my way to the dealer. . . . Tell me, George, what happened?. . . Well I decided after my weekly bank trip to drive out about ten miles to the Spokane Kia dealership east of Spokane on Interstate 90 to test drive a Kia Rio. . . What happened then, George? . . . I pulled up to the very front door of the Kia place and turned the key in my ignition and broke the key off, deep in the ignition. A salesman came out, and I said, "I need to use your phone to call a locksmith. I came here to test drive a Kia, not to buy." I told him I thought I was going to drive my Aspire for another year. He said, "You're driving a Kia right now." Then he showed me on the VIN that my Aspire was made in Korea by Kia. Later, after the drive, I told him truthfully that the checkbook was with my wife 30 miles away, then when I was rummaging in my glove box for something, I found the new box of checks which I picked up two weeks previously and forgot in the glove compartment. At that point, I bowed to coincidence and gave in and paid cash by check for a new Rio, about 8,600 dollars, and I've got a full 5 year warranty, plus 100,000 miles of body warranty after that. That's okay but not as impressive as it sounds when you come to think of it. Still they'll tow me for any reason for the next five years if I run into any trouble. If I get another 125,00 miles out of this Kia, I and my car may reach our death beds at about the same time.
__________________________________________________

"I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose." —S.I. Hayakawa (He was, I think, Chancellor at Berkeley when Mario Savio's freedom of speech protest was in full swing. I could be wrong.)

CATHOLICS HANG TIGHT AGAINST THE CHURCH

A recent poll reveals that Catholics, by and large, don’t share their bishops’ priorities when it comes to how they’ll vote or who they’ll vote for. Further, “a majority of 83 percent believe that politicians have no religious obligation to vote according to a bishop’s recommendation.” (The Humanist Magazine, Sept./Oct., 2004, p. 45.)

Hurrah for the spirit of American democracy which continues to triumph over religion’s attempts to force dogma on us. Though many Protestant Christians say they are Christians first and Americans second, maybe Catholics are not so blind as to know what’s important if American liberty is to continue to grow in the world. Maybe Catholics remember how Protestants made them pay for their own schools all these years until, now, the Protestants want to hog on to federal dollars themselves. Think how much that says about the strength of the Catholic faith as compared to the Protestant faith. The Catholics were willing to sacrifice to put their kids into Christian schools, but Protestants show little interest in it and want my atheistic federal dollars. Funny how the worm turns, ain't it?

KIERKEGAARD, MORE ON. . .

Not only do we find evidence that Kierkegaard, the Christian existentialist, didn’t approve of “voting” for the average man, I also see that he is not clearly an existentialist. Sometimes he’s a Platonic idealist. Listen to how he speaks of Christianity:

“Christianity exists before any Christian exists.... it contains the determinant by which one may test whether one has become a Christian, it maintains its objective subsistence apart from all believers.... Though Christianity comes into the heart of never so many believers, every believer is conscious that it has not arisen in his heart....”

How can an ideal exist without being in human brains, like a virus of some kind? Without human nonsense, no religion could exist. The idea of god wouldn't exist.

I’d say that Kaufmann is wrong in calling Kierkegaard the first existentialist, at least as witnessed by the forgoing passage. Events historical supposedly happened to an individual named Jesus. Other people supposedly witnessed these events. These activities were written down and passed on long after this Jesus guy died. The incidents came to reside in other minds. Christianity arose by its presence in individuals, by its being passed on from individual to individual. If Christianity did not exist in any minds, then Christianity would cease to exist in the world outside the brain. Neither did Christianity exist until some early follower of the fad called someone a Christian and those like him were grouped under the heading of Christianity.

The real Christianity is the sum total of all the individual minds which think they are Christians. Christianity has never had an existence separate from the individuals who bought the myth of the crucified Christ, and we are not sure whether or not that the crucifixion happened to a real person to be witnessed by anyone. My own knowledge of history convinces me that Christianity is only one name, arising out of Judaism, from a continuous series of religious practices as far back into time as the first consciousness tried to make sense of its surroundings. Ain’t everything a lot less mysterious when its boiled down into real existentialism and the evolutionary facts which led to the rise of consciousness?


A SMALL HEADLINE NEARLY MISSES THE EYE

Yesterday’s Spokesman contained a small story about a Guantanamo, Cuba (or Gitmo as we called it when I was a gob) detainee. Found to have absolutely no connection to the Taliban after three long years, this poor Moslem was finally released. I cast my swift eye over the story, barely reading and stopped short of finishing. Who really cared about the story, about the foreigner in American keeping? Except as a comment on the absurdity of the aftermath of 9/11 who cares that some poor Moslem youth got caught up in the big world picture? He’s not us, he’s not me, he’s a foreigner to boot. No, only if it were me or if you were in his boots, would it really matter.

Most likely, even those who do care and who think about what went on for that poor kid, still fucked their spouse that night or had a good dinner or drove to work, thinking about the son’s soccer practice or daughter’s basketball game as more important than three years torn out of an innocent man’s life, never to be returned to him. We do the same sort of thing with our awareness that innocent men die all the time in the gas chamber or under the executioner’s needle. So what if one innocent guy dies by mistake? Who really cares, eh, among the mass of men?
—————————————————————————————

"Anyone who thinks there's safety in numbers hasn't looked at the stock market pages."
—Irene Peter

ILLITERACY STINGS

A Spokesman Review report on 9/3/04, p. A8, tells us that many people are fighting back in court when their credit reports are used by others to make decisions about them when they apply for rental properties, auto insurance and jobs. Look, we all know that sometimes, people fall on hard times when sudden adversity hits them in the pocket book. Put those unfortunates out of the equation, but. . . .

From now on people must be forewarned to manage their finances better. Anyone the least bit literate must have read by know about the increasing use of credit reports in making all sorts of decisions about them. Have they not read a book or paper lately? The illiterate are becoming the uninformed, and the uninformed are being squeezed out of our fast paced, information based economy. Another report I came across recently estimated that 2 in 3 citizens of the globe may soon be living in grinding poverty without potable water, adequate food or sufficient housing. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but compassion won’t be enough to meet the needs of so many people squeezed out of our modern world. Read, damnit, read!


WHEN NOTHING ELSE HAS BEEN TRIED, PRAY

A report from the school hostage situation in which hundreds died amazes me, specially since it came from Russia where praying ought to be suspect. One woman survivor reported that some of the hostages prayed and if some “did not know how to pray, we taught them.” How interesting. And while these captives prayed away the hours, what were they doing to help the more rational among them try to figure a way out, a way to defeat their captors? And the praying may have been effective in some cases but why not in all cases? Were the unfortunates who died actually praying to the Moslem god? Why is prayer such a hit and miss proposition? Atheists have that answer down pat. Why don’t you?


STICKING WITH THE POLITICIAN WHO’S BEHIND

Sometimes the act of rooting for a candidate is pretty painful, specially if, like me, America’s destiny really matters to you. The other day, when I came across the information that Bush’s lavishly staged convention drama had swung five percent of the voters in his direction (a ten point swing), I was in a lot of pain. It’s hard to be in a minority for some of us, very hard for a small percentage of us. I’m one of the latter. Then, I was thinking about what I’ve learned about the human psyche, how some of us love to be with a winner, and I realized that some Americans (5%?) are unable to stick to their guns when the going gets tough. They’ll swing like a tower bell in the slightest breeze. My own pain convinced me that some human animals might easily give in only not to feel like an outsider or a minority. There’s a tremendous pressure to give in when pain knots its bony fingers around your heart and squeezes. I have a wonderful admiration for those who are in a minority by other than choice. We must all hope that America will always be a place which treasures its minorities and makes them welcome and protects them with the Bill of Rights.


DOGMA GETS IN EVERYWHERE

Came across the program called MAMA—Mothers Against Meth Addiction. The woman who started it says that the more traditional “twelve step” programs have “watered god down” until god means little in the program. She claims her Christian program has 80% success while traditional twelve step programs have only 20% to 30% success. I challenge her to back up her statistics. I think they’re bogus and unfounded. People in twelve step recovery programs know that many a man and woman with 20 and 30 years in recovery will go out and use again. I want to see what the statistics are when each of her graduates comes to the end of their trail.

Historically, many religion-based programs have tried to wean the sick from their addictions. In AA, the saying goes that real alcoholics can’t recover with mere religious instruction. If religion were a real cure-all, why are there so many religious pedophiles! Some people do recover with only religious instruction, but the success rate is minimal for religious programs, and even those who do recover through religious instruction, often end up with the still grandiose ideas and distorted psychologies of their alcoholism. Many recovered alcoholics recognize Bush’s fantasy that his god speaks through him as a classic case of what they call a dry drunk.

Humility is a key trait that fully recovered alcoholics demonstrate. You’d not find one of them claiming that god speaks through them. When they do, they are usually in an asylum after a slip. Only a dry drunk can believe such an idea without slipping.

And I also see in MAMA’s program an old evil which undermines every program the religious try to offer to people, the evil purpose which does not put first the recovery of the sufferer but attempts to make converts of them. Eventually, the intelligent sufferer sees through the bogus aim and goes elsewhere, many to antidepressants which have a much greater success rate in removing depression than does religion.

Since religion itself is the chief cause of unhappy adjustments to the real world, people made crazy by religion may be quite susceptible to religious conversion and recovery.

I don’t know. . .

Just like many murderers admit to their Christianity on death row, maybe it’s the same case with drunks and addicts. Killers were always Christians who just became drunks for awhile in an attempt to escape the oppression and distortion of reality which are so much a part of religions everywhere. Then when the course of their drinking has petered out, they return to the fold they never really left. In the final analysis, AA is always happy to see a recovered addict and so tips it hat to anybody who manages to get real drunks sober and addicts clean. We’re all in the same business and shouldn’t fight among ourselves and ought to compliment the other’s successes rather than belittle them as our momma of the meths does.
————————————————————————————

"Only the mediocre are always at their best." —Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944)

BERGMAN ON THE INFANTILE IN THE ARTIST

“Like all other children, it seems to me I remember deciding to go out into the forest and lie there and pretend to be dead until everyone was sorry. Everyone knows that all their lives artists—particularly if they’re the sort that function as I do—retain a strongly infantile streak; or, to put it better, the creative streak is so deeply tied up with a sort of infantility, or a leftover of the child’s attitude to the world about him, that the artist also retains a lot of marginal behavior traits.” (Bergman on Bergman, p. 83)


WHO’S THE REAL GIRLY-MAN?

Arnold Schwartzensomething has a lot of nerve calling other real men, “girly-men”. This oiled up, perfumed, curly-haired little big man who wants all other males to look at and admire his body had better stare into his own mirror. Who is more narcissistic than a body builder? What type of man is more body obsessed than a female cover girl model than a body builder? What kind of male is so sissified inside that he has to build up a huge exterior to cover up that sissy side? Remember the guy on the beach who always got sand kicked in his face until he built his body up to hide the little guy on the beach inside? I think the real girly-man is Arnold Schwartenyoumaycallit himself. And, you all know, if a man’s got to tell you he’s a real man by putting down your manhood, we know what that means, don’t we?


FROM BERGMAN TO SCHWATRZENEGER TO DENNETT: or
FROM GREAT ARTIST TO DUMBBELL TO INTELLIGENT

Dennett (the last of him for awhile) in Freedom Evolves (p. 287) summarizes threats to freedom. “The real threats to freedom are not metaphysical but political and social. As we learn more about the conditions of human decision-making, we will have to devise, and agree upon, systems of government and law that are not hostage to false myths about human nature, that are robust in the face of further scientific discovery and technological advances. Are we freer than we want to be? We now have more power than ever to create the conditions under which we and our descendants will lead our lives.”

Dennett is onto the real thing for humankind. We must develop a value system that is based on real men and real women and on how their biology ticks and not on a value system based upon some pie in the sky hypothetical superbeing's mumblings about this and that coming from four or so millenia ago.


YOUR BIG REPUBLICAN BROTHER IS WATCHING

You think we don’t live in a fascist state yet? Well, don’t hold your breath. What are we to make of Republican efforts that smack of Nazi dirty tricks to suppress and intimidate voters all across this land?(Read it.)

In Florida, Republicans tried to remove Democratic voters from he rolls by insinuating they were criminals. Republicans in Kentucky intend to send “poll watchers” to harass voters by pretending to check into voting credentials of black voters. Who gave them this right and duty? In other places, Republicans have sent out false fliers about times and places of elections to confuse Democrat voters. A Republican in Michigan spoke of the need to “ ‘suppress the Detroit vote’. Detroit is 83 percent black.” In South Dakota, Native Americans were turned away from the polls in a special election by Republicans who demanded they have picture ID.

Let me tell you, these Republicans are nasty and dirty street fighters without a shred of democracy running throught their veins. Real intelligence like Kerry's won't make the grade. We'll have to get as fascist as Republicans are before we'll retake American democracy and put it back on the right track. (This information is from a longer report by Jo Becker, Washington Post, as it appeared in the Spokesman Review, Thursday August 26, 2004.)
___________________________________________________

"Only the mediocre are always at their best." —Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944)

FREE OR “LUCKY” TO BE FREE???

More from Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves” to open this post: “If you are free, are you responsible for being free? As we saw in Chapter 7, cooperators capable of solving commitment problems and establishing their reputation as moral agents get to enjoy the many benefits of being a trusted member of he community, but if you have not yet achieved that status, what hope, if any, is there for you? Should we regard the frequent defectors among us with contempt or compassion?” (p. 271)

In response to Dennett, I say maybe we should regard them with complete emotional and benign detachment and put them out of their misery. I didn’t really say that; I just thought it.

But what if some people are determined, by their genetic makeup, to be always outsiders, miserably and/or violently dangerous to themselves and society? What will we realistically do about their and our situation with them?

Then Dennett adds, “Those whom we end up punishing are really paying a double price, for they are scapegoats, deliberately harmed by society in order to set a vivid example for the more ably self-controlled, but not really responsible for the deeds we piously declare them to have committed of their own free will.” (p. 272)

Thus are the victims doubly victimized by the genetically lucky, those of us who are by our genetics more or less easily self-controlled.


COMMUNICATION—PATHWAY TO BELONGING

More from Dennett: “. . . if not by a miraculous leap of self-creation, did you get here (moral agency) from there (the amoral unfreedom of an infant)?

“The first threshold on the path to personhood, then, is simply whether or not one’s caregivers succeed in kindling a communicator. Those whose fires of reason just won’t light for one reason or other [the retarded] are consigned to a lower status, uncontroversially. It’s not their fault, it’s just their bad luck. . . . But while we’re on the topic of luck, let’s first try to calibrate our scales. Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back billions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a hundred or a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.” (Dennett, Freedom Evolves, p. 272)


MORE BERGMAN ON HIS CHRISTIAN UPBRINGING

“If I’ve objected strongly to Christianity, it has been because Christianity is deeply branded by a very virulent humiliation motif. One of its main tenets is ‘I, a miserable sinner, born in sin, who have sinned all my days, etc.’ Our way of living and behaving under this punishment is completely atavistic. I could go on talking about this humiliation business for ever.” (p. 81 of Bergman on Bergman)
_________________________________________________________

"The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory." —Paul Fix

IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM

Again, I've missed a day. That's because I was sick with some strange bacteria in my colon who got the upper hand becuase I was taking some antibiotics to combat the bacteria causing a sinus infection in my nose. Help! Help! They're swarming in from all directions.


DONE DENNETT TO DEATH

Today, September 1, 2004, I finished Daniel Dennett's “Freedom Evolves”. (Yes—it took that long! And, no, I don’t understand everything that I read!) I’ve got several more things to include in this Blog from Dennett’s book. In the final pages (pp. 303-304), Dennett presents a hopeful prognosis for the spread of freedom:

“The freedom of thought and action that is necessary for discovering truth is a precursor, as we have seen, to the more expansive ideal of political or civil freedom, a meme that spreads easily, apparently. It is much more infectious than fanaticism, thank goodness. The cat is out of the bag. There is no way that enforced ignorance can win in the long run. [Although, I must remind Dennett that Islam has done a pretty good job of stuffing the cat more than halfway back into the bag, and the know-nothing Christian fundamentalists are doing their best with home schooling to pretend to educated their children free from the nasty influence of current scientific truths.] You can’t readily uneducate people. As communications technology makes it harder and harder for leaders to shield their people from outside information, and as the economic realities of the twenty-first century make it clearer and clearer that education is the most important investment any parent can make in a child, the floodgates will open all over the world, with tumultuous results. All the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture, all the trash and scum that accumulates in the corners of a free society, will inundate these relatively pristine regions along with the treasures of modern education, equal rights for women, better health care, worker’s rights, democratic ideals, and openness to the cultures of others. As the experience in the former Soviet Union shows only too clearly, the worst features of capitalism and high-tech are among the most robust replicators in this population explosion of memes, and there will be plenty of grounds for xenophobia, Luddism, and the tempting ‘hygiene’ of backward looking fundamentalism.

“. . . In the next century it will be our [freedom] memes, both tonic and toxic, that will wreak havoc on the unprepared world. Our capacity to tolerate the toxic excesses of freedom cannot be assumed in others, or simply exported as one more commodity. The practically unlimited educability of any human being gives us hope of success, but designing and implementing the cultural inoculation necessary to fend off disaster, while respecting the rights of those in need of inoculation, will be an urgent task of great complexity. . . .”


CONSCIOUSNESS, LANGUAGE AND MORALITY

“Human consciousness was made for sharing ideas. That is to say, the human user-interface was created by evolution, both biological and cultural, and it arose in response to a behavioral innovation; the activities of communicating beliefs and plans and comparing notes. This turned many brains into many minds, and the distribution of authorship made possible by this interconnectedness is the source of not only our huge technological edge over the rest of nature but our morality. The last step required to complete my naturalistic account of free will and moral responsibility is to explain the R&D that has given us each a perspective on ourselves, a place from which to take responsibility. The name for this Archimedean perch is the self. This is something about us humans that sets us apart as potential moral agents, and it is no surprise that language is involved. What is harder to see is how language, when it is installed in a human brain, brings with it the construction of a new cognitive architecture that creates a new kind of consciousness—and morality.” (Dennett, pp. 259-260)


A BIT OF A DISAGREEMENT WITH DENNETT

On page 260 of “Freedom Evolves”, Dennett writes that “. . . the point of morality is manifestly not restricted to ‘the good of the species’ or ‘the survival of our genes’ or anything like that.”

At this place in his book, Dennett tries to free moral behavior from deterministic and, therefore, selfish motives, but, his argument demonstrates that he hasn’t been down in the trenches of self-destruction as I have where one learns, to his eternal sadness, that every action is selfish, even an altruistic one. But, actually, coming to lose this innocence is the beginning of real happiness and useful living.

Morality is merely another playground for those seeking power. First, look to early priest craft where magic led to power. Next, one need only look to televangelists to see morality put to money-grubbing purposes. Also, people try to emulate the mores of those around them to prove their worthiness to be mates and comrades. Morality shows our worthiness to be trusted and to fit in and ultimately to survive. I wonder if Dennett has carefully observed the youthful religious and seen how each young man tries to put his morality on display in order to win like-minded women to his side. Morality on display is part of the courtship ritual. And, in the rare case that the young religious is pursuing his religious persuasions for personal fulfillment only, he is doing it to try and find peace within his own heart—again, a selfish motive. No more selfish person ever existed than Mother Theresa.

Finally, even criminals live by codes of behavior, values and morality. They’re just not my codes of value. Some of them more rigorously than others. So I would challenge Dennett’s attempt to free moral behavior from selfish, survival motives.
_______________________________________________________

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." —Unknown