GROVELING

This morning I had a bad start. I’m not sure why, but, suddenly, I felt weary and defeated, scared and lost and, popping into my head, came an urge to fall to my knees and pray. A picture of myself on my knees, head bowed, emerged into my consciousness.

I’ve had that urge in the past, back in my drinking days and in my early days of recovery, when despair would overwhelm me, and I usually gave in to the urge to drop to my knees back when I believed. There seemed to always come some relief in the act of lowering myself down to my knees or falling face first onto a bed or couch and letting a pile of prayer words flood my consciousness. This morning, I didn’t want to give in to the urge to pray, but I did sit down and close my eyes and silently self-talk myself. Just sitting down helped. I didn’t try to meditate, just sat there, silently talking to myself.

Finally, as my weak, ex-Christian loser emotions subsided, I asked myself why this despairing feeling happened, what was it about? This is the moment among believers that they say is proof of god. They say this desperate urge comes from god directly and is a sign that humans have a hole in themselves that only god can fill. And I must admit the feeling of lostness can be almost overwhelming. So I entertained the idea for a second, but, then, another idea began to emerge, a more rational idea.

Suppose, I told myself, this urge to lower oneself (bow down, grovel) is a purely animal instinct that animals feel when they lose a fight or feel overwhelmingly outmatched by an opponent. The urge to get down on one’s knees and pray might be the instinctual, animal self struggling with the human mental self, and, at times, human consciousness loses and just wants to surrender and fall back on all fours like the animal it once was. Praying on one’s knees is halfway back to an animal on all fours.

Now that makes good sense to me—the god idea in some of us is that animal part of us that rules over our conscious selves, pushing us to bend and crawl up the earth once more. It’s as if, at times, our minds grow tired of remaining human and standing upright, then the evolved animal body takes over and forces us to our knees. This is another proof to me that believers are, ironically, bound by their urges into agreement with evolution even as they consciously resist it. And, I suppose, neither am I totally free of my animal self or the urge to pray (i.e. be an animal on all fours) would no longer strike me.

Later, as I wrote this account out, I began to realize two reasons why I felt so defeated and needy of succor this morning. Last night, a young woman snubbed me, not me exactly, but I was talking to her boyfriend about Dancing Wu Li Masters and after a time she just got bored or threatened by the topic (my atheism) and walked away. My ancient troubles with women can still strike very deep (they echo evolutionary struggle and male defeat when I’m spurned, don't they?) and can cause out of proportion emotional reactions of helpless defeat. Then, also, this morning I overheard during a TV segment that 60% of Americans still believe that the world was created in 6 days. Their ignorance, of course, is an enemy still too huge for me to overcome so, of course, my animal self wanted to bow to that ignorance, give up and surrender, and, the irony, is that the surrender would be a victory for me, through them, because I would return closer to my animal self when I get down on my knees to pray, thus, proving to myself that evolution is true and still active in me and them.

Finally, the realization of what emotional forces were at work in me and perhaps an awareness of how deep the struggle is between the on-all-fours animal in me and the upright human in me brought me back to peace and sanity. Science, reason—the truth will definitely set us free. Religion, superstition—their lie will certainly enslave us.

REPUBLICANS PERVERT AMERICAN JUSTICE TO OWN ENDS or
NOTHING NEW ABOUT FUNDAMENTALIST REPUBLICANS?

In more revelations coming from investigations into the Justice Department’s firing of fair-minded attorneys and their replacement by rightwing lawyers (from Liberty University? we must ask), American patriots can see that in every which way but loose these fundamentalist Republicans have sought to turn our American justice system into an attack dog for fundamentalist Republican’s religious and political, partisan aims. This is serious stuff, folks.

[SNIPPIT]
Federal law and internal Justice Department rules bar taking such affiliations into account in hiring career personnel, the Justice Department has said. Yesterday's letter revealed that the internal inquiry will examine the hiring practices of Justice officials besides Goodling and outside the attorney general's office.

The expansion comes in the wake of claims by former Justice officials that selections by the Attorney General's Honors Program and the department's Summer Law Intern Program were rigged in favor of candidates with connections to conservative or Republican groups. In response, the department this spring agreed to place them back under the control of career officials.

The programs were overseen last year by Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, and both Elston and McNulty approved the recent change.

The inquiry will also look at hiring practices within the Civil Rights Division, from which dozens of career lawyers have departed. The career personnel repeatedly clashed with Bush administration political appointees, who overruled them on pivotal voting-rights cases in Georgia and Texas.
[PASTEIT]

YOU KNOW YOU’RE GETTING OLD WHEN

it’s a real effort to peel off your support hose. Give me credit for this one!

MON AMI MACLANDIA

In the Mon Ami today, my favorite espresso drinking shop, I noticed that 4 of 5 laptops being used were iMacs.

BUMPER STICKERS—AN EVOLUTION

We’ve all seen the bumper sticker “Have you hugged your kid today?” Today I saw a variation on that theme on a small grey car before me: “Have you tugged your kite today?” Immediately, I thought of another sometimes overlooked person who might need a bumper sticker on which to be commemorated. Mine would read something like this—“Have you groped your wife today?” Of course, that is the toned down version.

DANCING WITH WU LI MASTERS

Much like Going Inside: a tour around a single moment of consciousness opened my head wide open and dumped a whole new world into my consciousness, so reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters has made another huge gash in my forehead. Though the book has been around since 1979, I only heard about it several years ago and only bought the book recently when I found it at a used book store in my newly adopted coffee zone, The Uptown Village, in Vancouver. So those of you far ahead of me can just ho-hum all you want—I’m going to quote from this book.

[SNIP]
We have come a long way from Galileo's experiments with falling bodies. Each step along the path has taken us to a higher level of abstraction: first to the creation of things that no one has ever seen 
(like electrons), and then to the abandonment of all attempts even to picture our abstractions.

The problem is, however, that human nature being what it is, we do not stop trying to picture these abstractions. We keep asking
 "What are these abstractions of?", and then we try to visualize whatever that is.
[PASTE]

I can’t help noticing that the human brain has evolved something like seven, or nine, layers also—I believe—changing from a collection of adapted mechanisms grounded in perceptions of the physical world needed to avoid predators and find food into a mechanism that can put together synaptical language patterns that allow us to discuss “justice”, a thoroughly abstract concept, almost as if, as Wu Li would suggest, it prepared us to not be able to “see” the real world anymore that lies inside Einstein’s unopenable watch. If the brain continues to adapt to the world of abstractions running through it, continues to add “layers”, the world it perceives is bound to alter too. Perhaps someday human’s will be able to see the 11 dimensions that string theory suggests are “out there”—that is, if there is really any “out there” out there! But I would like to suggest something else—that perhaps the real world is out there, but, because our brains have added those extra layers, we are getting farther out of touch with the physical world because of the mathematics that science has given us to cast falsely over the “out there”.

Whatever! The dance itself is fun enough. You should read the book!

JESUS WAS A POLITICO AND A FATHER

Time for a little more Holy Blood, Holy Grail:

[SNIP]

THE SCENARIO

We had already sketched a tentative hypothesis that proposed a bloodline descended from Jesus. We now began to enlarge on that hypothesis and—albeit still provisionally—to fill in a number of crucial details. As we did so, the overall picture began to gain both coherence and plausibility.

It seemed increasingly clear that Jesus was a priest-king—an aristocrat and legitimate claimant to the throne—embarking on an attempt to regain his rightful heritage. He himself would have been a native of Galilee, a traditional hotbed of opposition to the Roman regime, At the same time, he would have had numerous noble, rich, and influential supporters throughout Palestine, including the capital city of Jerusalem; and one of these supporters, a powerful member 
of the Sanhedrin, may also have been his kin. In the Jerusalem
 suburb of Bethany, moreover, was the home of either his wife or his
 wife's family; and here, on the eve of his triumphal entry into the
 capital, the aspiring priest-king resided. Here he established the 
center for his mystery cult. Here he augmented his following by 
performing ritual initiations, including that of his brother-in-law.

Such an aspiring priest-king would have generated powerful opposition in certain quarters—inevitably among the Roman administration and perhaps among entrenched Judaic interests represented by
the Sadducees. One or both of these interests apparently contrived to
thwart his bid for the throne. But in their attempt to exterminate him 
they were not as successful as they had hoped to be. For the
 priest-king would seem to have had friends in high places; and these 
friends, working in collusion with a corrupt, easily bribed Roman 
procurator, appear to have engineered a mock crucifixion—on private grounds, inaccessible to all but a select few. With the general populace kept at a convenient distance, an execution was then staged—in which a substitute took the priest-king's place on the
cross or in which the priest-king himself did not actually die.
 Toward dusk—which would have further impeded visibility—a
 "body" was removed to an opportunely adjacent tomb, from which, a day or two later, it "miraculously" disappeared.

If our scenario was accurate, where did Jesus go then? So far as 
our hypothesis of a bloodline was concerned, the answer to that 
question did not particularly matter. According to certain Islamic
 and Indian legends he eventually died, at a ripe old age, somewhere 
in the east—in Kashmir, it is claimed most frequently. On the other 
hand, an Australian journalist has put forward an intriguing and
 persuasive argument that Jesus died at Masada when the fortress fell
 to the Romans in A.D. 74—by which time he would have been
 approaching his eightieth year.

According to the letter we received, the documents found hy Berenger Sauniere at Rennes-le-Chateau contained “incontrovertible proof” that Jesus was alive in A.D. 45, but there is no indication as 
to where. One likely possibility would be Egypt, specifically Alexandria—where, at about the same time, the sage Ormus is said to have created the Rose-Croix by amalgamating Christianity with earlier, pre-Christian mysteries. It has even been hinted that Jesus' mummified body may be concealed somewhere in the environs of
 Rennes-le-Chateau—which would explain the ciphered message in Sauniere's parchments "IL EST LA MORT" ("He is there dead.”). We are not prepared to assert that he accompanied his family to Marseilles. In fact, circumstances would argue against it. He might not have been in any condition to travel, and his presence would have constituted a threat to his relatives' safety. He may have deemed it more important to remain in the Holy Land—like his brother, Saint James—to pursue his objectives there. In short, we can offer no real suggestion about what became of him—any more than the Gospels themselves do.

For the purposes of our hypothesis, however, what happened to Jesus was of less importance than what happened to the holy family—and especially to his brother-in-law, his wife, and his children. If our scenario was correct, they, together with Joseph of Arimathea and certain others, were smuggled by ship from the Holy Land, And when they were set ashore at Marseilles, the Magdalen would indeed have brought the Sangraal—the "blood royal," the scion of the house of David—into France.
[PASTE]

TIME FOR SOME POLITICS THIS BLOGDATE

or GEARING UP TO SMASH THE POOR

Not only has Republican Party policy, beginning with Reagan, slowly and surely shrunk the numbers in the middle class and increased the disparity between the rich and the poor in America, now they are attempting to make sure that their newly-created poor will not be able to vote. If the poor can’t vote, the Republicans figure, they can’t replace Republican governments which are out to make America a theocracy of the rich ruled over by Gingrich and the very richest Christians. (Mitt Romney is only the toe-in-the-door beginning. In Utah, private charity is tied to membership in the Mormon Church, and, of course, one of the Republican Party’s primary goals is to privatize everything in America.)

The full story about voter suppression, you can find HERE.

[SNIPPET]
Efforts to stop voter fraud may have curbed legitimate voting

By Greg Gordon/McClatchy Newspapers

During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article.

Writing as "Publius," von Spakovsky contended that every voter should be required to produce a photo-identification card and that there was "no evidence" that such restrictions burden minority voters disproportionately.

Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.
[PASTE-IT]

or HERE’S MORE OF SAME FROM LA TIMES

[CHOP]
WASHINGTON — Weeks before the 2006 midterm election, then-New Mexico U.S. Atty. David C. Iglesias was invited to dine with a well-connected Republican lawyer in Albuquerque who had been after him for years to prosecute allegations of voter fraud.

"I had a bad feeling about that lunch," said Iglesias, describing his meeting at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen with Patrick Rogers, a lawyer who provided occasional counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party.

When the voter fraud issue came up, Iglesias said, he explained to Rogers that in reviewing more than 100 complaints, he hadn't found any solid enough to justify criminal charges.

Iglesias recounted the episode in an interview with The Times after meeting behind closed doors with federal investigators this week to provide new details of the events leading up to his termination as U.S. attorney. He said he now believed he was targeted because he was seen as slow to bring criminal charges that would have helped GOP election prospects.
[GLUE]

or I WAS READING NEWSWEEK

Long before we invaded Iraq, I would read about the findings (introduced below) in Newsweek magazine. What I read there caused me to be out on the streets marching prior to Bushmaniac launching his invasion of Iraq. What I’m suggesting is that if you want the plain unvarnished truth, discussed calmly and intelligently, subscribe to Newsweek.

[CUT AND SLASH]
WASHINGTON — Two intelligence assessments from January 2003 predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq could lead to internal violence and provide a boost to Islamic extremists and terrorists, according to congressional sources and former intelligence officials familiar with the prewar studies.

The two assessments, titled "Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq" and "Regional Consequences of Regime Change in Iraq," were produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and will be a major part of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's long-awaited Phase II report on prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq. The assessments were delivered to the White House and to congressional intelligence committees before the war started.
[PUT BACK TOGETHER]

Copenhagen 
Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics or
REALITY IS OUR CONSCIOUSNESS

The following snippet is from Dancing Wu Li Masters, pages 62-63, from which, though I may not understand all of it, I’m receiving mucho stimulation. This passage is about the beginning of our being cast out into darkness upon the waters in our little cockle shell brains and losing contact with the “real” world. It’s the next step into darkness after Freud said that our actions are actually driven by our subconscious minds rather than our conscious minds. Now all that docks us to the “real” world is a thin hawser of mathematics, and most of us don’t understand enough mathematics to guide us from one to two—or, maybe, four. The Xtians, the Moslems, and all like them, fear this water most mightily for it leads to relativity and situational ethics and all manner of reasonable things rather than the things of the unconscious about which they also know nothing even though it drives them most mightily. They haven’t even emerged from the shadows of the 19th Century, let alone the 20th, to enter the 21st Century with the rest of us. They’ve fallen so far behind that the dunce cap rests permanently upon their heads, and they sit in the corner, thumb sucking like starved infants. But, these finding also present us with the potentiality for their being a source of energy that some might call god, though this god would not be a little peckerhead called, Jesus. It would be a force that makes the whole universe dance like a drunken sailor. PS: Call the photo, "What's out there in the damn fog?"

[SNIP]
In the autumn of 1927, physicists working with the new physics met in Brussels, Belgium, to ask themselves this question, among others. What they decided there became known as the Copenhagen 
Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Other interpretations developed later, but the Copenhagen Interpretation marks the emergence of the new physics as a consistent way of viewing the world. 
It is still the most prevalent interpretation of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. The upheaval in physics following the discovery of the inadequacies of Newtonian physics was all but complete. The question among the physicists at Brussels was not whether Newtonian mechanics could be adapted to subatomic phenomena (it was clear that it could not be), but rather, what was to replace it.

The Copenhagen Interpretation was the first consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. Einstein opposed it in 1927 and he argued against it until his death, although he, like all physicists, was forced to acknowledge its advantages in explaining subatomic phenomena.

The Copenhagen Interpretation says, in effect, that it does not matter what quantum mechanics is about! The important thing is that it works. This is one of the most important statements in the history of science. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics began a monumental reunion which was all but unnoticed at the time. The rational part of our psyche, typified by science, began to merge again with that other part of us which we had ignored since the 1700's, our irrational side.

The scientific idea of truth traditionally had been anchored in an absolute truth somewhere "out there"—that is, an absolute truth with an independent existence. The closer that we came in our approximations to the absolute truth, the truer our theories were said to be. Although we might never be able to perceive the absolute 
truth directly—or to open the watch, as Einstein put it—still we tried to construct theories such that for every facet of absolute truth, there was a corresponding element in our theories.

The Copenhagen Interpretation does away with this idea of a one-to-one correspondence between reality and theory. This is another way of saying what we have said before. Quantum mechanics discards the laws governing individual events and states directly the laws governing aggregations. It is very pragmatic.

The philosophy of pragmatism goes something like this. The mind is such that it deals only with ideas. It is not possible for the mind to relate to anything other than ideas. Therefore, it is not correct to think that the mind actually can ponder reality. All that the mind can ponder is its ideas about reality. (Whether or not that is the way reality actually is, is a metaphysical issue). Therefore, whether or not something is true is not a matter of how closely it corresponds to the absolute truth, but of how consistent it is with our experience.

The extraordinary importance of the Copenhagen Interpretation lies in the fact that for the first time, scientists attempting to formulate a consistent physics were forced by their own findings to acknowledge that a complete understanding of reality lies beyond the capabilities of rational thought [So far and to this point—perhaps a few more synaptical layers will change our blindness or increase it. Maybe the real concrete world is all there is, and all the sub-atomic stuff is just our imaginations working overtime. Maybe we'll learn that with a few more brain cells working.]. It was this that Einstein could not accept. “The most incomprehensible thing about the world," he wrote, "is that it is comprehensible." But the deed was done. The new physics was based not upon "absolute truth", but upon us.
[SUPERGLUE]

REASON IS A FARCE

I’m reading a bit, from time to time, in a collection of John Updike’s essays called Odd Jobs. In Updike’s critique of the Library of America’s volume of Franklin’s collected writings, imagine my surprise to come across an idea of Ben Franklin’s which very much predates one of my own conclusions.

It seems that Franklin was for a time a vegetarian, then, one day he was confronted by a piece of tantalizing cod. He writes, “When the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs—Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you…. So convenient a thing to be a Reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

Such a sly wink in the words, eh?

It’s only in the last few or many years that I’ve concluded that reason is nothing more than an empty talker, a wheedler and excuse maker for, a justifier of the feelings which we try to pretend are not the true drivers of human behavior. All the endless hours of TV talk and newsprint spilled and book and magazine words arguing this and that, and all of it only to justify one’s feeling threatened or safe or to, as Franklin so nicely put it, justify one’s doing what one has “a mind to do” anyway. In short, there is no reason for doing anything except that one has a mind to do it.

But where Franklin wrote, “a mind to do”, I think we must all be honest and say that we have a “feeling to do”, even though we now all know that feeling is not in the heart but in the brain, in the limbic system. I’m serious here—we all pretend there is reason for everything we do, but I think we, most of us, act first and think later, or, at least, spend a lot of time trying to reason ourselves out of behavior and feelings we are bound to feel anyway. Can’t we always spot the man who’s just talking and we know that we can’t trust him further than we can spit a boulder? Wasn’t I a man much like that myself? That’s why you could trust President Carter when he said that, sure, he’d lusted in his heart after other women. He was admitting to having a “feeling self” which was not always in line with his spoken self. Any man who says he hasn’t lusted for a woman other than his wife is either a liar or totally out of touch with himself. And that’s a man to stay clear of—either way.

In the same collection of Updike’s writings is his critique of a many-paged volume of selected entries from Leo Tolstoy’s diaries. When one reads some of Tolstoy’s agonizing over the battle between his instinctual self and his reasoning, moralizing self, one understands that an honest man must conclude that his reason is no more than a nice piece of background music, elevator music, for the rising and falling instinctual urges of his animal self. Even if one does not act upon his feeling self, it’s usually the feeling of fear or some other feeling that suppresses the dangerous action contemplated. Then, of course, his good old wheedling self will come up with a noble reason for his not having done what he was afraid to do.

TAKING A WALK—
A BREAK FROM BLOODY WU LI HOLY WHIRLING GRAIL MASTERS

Something has come over me. I don’t understand it. I can’t explain it, but it must be something I want to do. Since for nearly three weeks now, I am walking every day, as much as an hour and a half a day, sometimes as little as 40-50 minutes, but every day I walk. I’m not even power walking; I’m just strolling, strolling down by the river (see photo) or all around Vancouver Central Park and Historic District near Fort Vancouver, or through the streets of downtown Vancouver which is a pleasant place without too many tall buildings. As the lady at the Visitor’s Center told me—tall building aren’t allowed in downtown Vancouver. Portland’s airport takes off and lands up the river from Vancouver, and there’s a small public airfield right on the edge of downtown Vancouver. According to her, that busy airspace controls the heights of buildings in downtown Vancouver.

THIS IS THE WAY IT WAS. . . .
NO, THIS WAY. . . .
ARE YOU KIDDEN, I SAW. . . .
EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNTS ARE LEAST RELIABLE

How the Jews came to be the fall guys or here are some more paragraphs from the book pictured below:

[SLICE]
Modern scholars are unanimous in concurring that the Gospels do not date from Jesus' lifetime. For the most part they date from the period between the two major revolts in Judaea—66 to 74 and 132 to l35—although they are almost certainly based on earlier accounts. 
These earlier accounts may have included written documents since lost—for there was a wholesale destruction of records in the wake of the first rebellion. But there would certainly have been oral traditions as well. Some of these were undoubtedly grossly exaggerated and/or distorted, received and transmitted at second, third or fourth hand. Others, however, may have derived from individuals who were alive in Jesus' lifetime and may even have known him personally. A young man at the time of the Crucifixion might well have 
been alive when the Gospels were composed [doubtful].

The earliest of the Gospels is generally considered to be Mark's, composed sometime during the revolt of 66-74 or shortly thereafter—except for its treatment of the Resurrection, which is a later and spurious addition. Although not himself one of Jesus' original disciples, Mark seems to have come from Jerusalem. He seems to have been a companion of Saint Paul, and his Gospel bears an unmistakable stamp of Pauline thought. But if Mark was a native of Jerusalem, his Gospel—as Clement of Alexandria states—was composed in Rome and addressed to a Greco-Roman audience. This in itself explains a great deal. At the time that Mark's Gospel was composed, Judaea was, or had recently been, in open revolt, and thousands of Jews were being crucified for rebellion against the Roman regime. If Mark wished his Gospel to survive and impress itself on a Roman audience, he could not possibly present Jesus as anti-Roman. Indeed, he could not feasibly present Jesus as politically oriented at all. In order to ensure the survival of his message he would have been obliged to exonerate the Romans of all guilt for Jesus' death—to whitewash the existing and entrenched regime and blame
 the death of the Messiah on certain Jews. This device was adopted, not
 only by the authors of the other Gospels, but by the early Christian Church as well. Without such a device neither Gospels nor Church 
would have survived.

The Gospel of Luke is dated by scholars at around A.D, 80. Luke 
himself appears to have been a Greek doctor who composed his 
work for a high-ranking Roman official at Caesarea, the Roman 
capital of Palestine. For Luke, too, therefore, it would have been necessary to placate and appease the Romans and transfer the blame
 elsewhere. [colors mine] By the time the Gospel of Matthew was composed—approximately A.D. 85—such a transference seems to have been 
accepted as an established fact and gone unquestioned. More than
 half of Matthew's Gospel, in fact, is derived directly from Mark's, 
although it was composed originally in Greek and reflects specifically Greek characteristics. The author seems to have been a Jew, 
quite possibly a refugee from Palestine. He is not to be confused 
with the disciple named Matthew, who would have lived much 
earlier and would probably have known only Aramaic.

The Gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew are known collectively 
as the Synoptic Gospels, implying that they see "eye to eye" or
" with one eye"—which, of course, they do not [colors mine]. Nevertheless, there 
is enough overlap between them to suggest that they derived from a 
single common source—either an oral tradition or some other document subsequently lost. This distinguishes them from the Gospel of 
John, which betrays significantly different origins.

Nothing whatever is known about the author of the Fourth Gospel. Indeed there is no reason to assume his name was John. Except for
 John the Baptist, the name John is mentioned at no point in the 
Gospel itself, and its attribution to a man called John is generally 
accepted as later tradition. The Fourth Gospel is the latest of those in 
the New Testament—composed around A.D. 100 in the vicinity of the Greek city of Ephesus. It displays a number of quite distinctive features. There is no Nativity scene, for example, no description whatever of Jesus' birth, and the opening is almost Gnostic in character. The text is of a decidedly more mystical nature than the other Gospels, and the content differs as well. The other Gospels, for instance, concentrate primarily on Jesus' activities in the northern province of Galilee and reflect what appears to be only a second- or third-hand knowledge of events to the south in Judaea and Jerusalem—including the Crucifixion. The Fourth Gospel, in contrast, says relatively little about Galilee. It dwells exhaustively on the events in Judaea and Jerusalem that concluded Jesus' career, and its account of the Crucifixion may well rest ultimately on some first-hand eyewitness testimony. It also contains a number of episodes and incidents that do not figure in the other Gospels at all—the wedding at Cana, the roles of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and the raising of Lazarus (although the last of these was once included in Mark's Gospel). On the basis of such factors modern scholars have suggested that the Gospel of John, despite its late composition, may well be the most reliable and historically accurate of the four. More than the other Gospels it seems to draw upon traditions current among contemporaries of Jesus, as well as other 
material unavailable to Mark, Luke, and Matthew. One modern researcher points out that it reflects an apparently first-hand topographical knowledge of Jerusalem prior to the revolt of A.D. 66. The same author concludes, "'Behind the Fourth Gospel lies an ancient 
tradition independent of the other Gospels.” This is not an isolated opinion. In fact, it is the most prevalent in modern biblical scholarship. According to another writer, "The Gospel of John, though not adhering to the Markian chronological framework and being much later in date, appears to know a tradition concerning Jesus that must be primitive and authentic."
[SEW]

PHYSICS IN THE BRAIN—
AN ADAPTED SCIENCE?

The following passage is from Dancing Wu Li Masters, pages 181-82:

[SNIP]
The general theory of relativity shows us that our minds follow different rules than the real world does. A rational mind, based on the impressions that it receives from its limited perspective, forms structures [synaptical patterns of firing] which thereafter determine what it further will and will not accept freely. From that point on, regardless of how the real world actually operates, this rational mind, following its self-imposed rules, tries to superimpose on the real world its own version of what must be.

This continues until at long last a beginner's mind cries out, "This is not right. What 'must be' is not happening. I have tried and tried to discover why this is so. I have stretched my imagination to the limit to preserve my belief in what 'must be'. The breaking point has come. Now I have no choice but to admit that the 'must' I have believed in does not come from the real world, but from my own head."

This narrative is not poetic hyperbole. It is a concise description of the major conclusion of the general theory of relativity and the means by which it was reached. The limited perspective is the perspective of our three-dimensional rationality and its view of one small part of the universe (the part into which we were born). The things that "must be" are the ideas of geometry (the rules governing straight lines, circles, triangles, etc.). . . . The long-held belief was that these rules govern, without exception, the entirety of the universe. What Einstein's beginner's mind 
realized was that this is so only in our minds.

Einstein discovered that certain laws of geometry are valid only in limited regions of space [and the human brain]. This makes them useful since our experience physically is limited to very small regions of space [and the human brain], like our solar system [and the human brain]. However, as our experience expands, we encounter more and 
more difficulty in trying to superimpose these [adapted brain] rules upon the entire expanse of the universe. Einstein was the first person to see that the geometrical rules which apply to one small part of the universe as seen from a limited perspective (like ours) are not universal. This freed him to behold the universe in a way that no person had seen it before.

What he saw is the content of the general theory of relativity.
[GLUE]

What is not made clear in the foregoing paragraphs is that the human mind, or brain, with its “limited perspective” is limited not necessarily by choice or stubborn whim or prejudice (though prejudice is also an adapted trait) but by its long accretion of adaptations which shaped it to “see” reality exactly as survival dictated that it should see reality. Later it adapted a language instinct through which, interestingly, Zukav in his blindness is trying to explain the peculiar blindness of physics. I think that physics and evolutionary psychology must merge before further advances can be made in the physical sciences. By this I mean that we must first understand the mental rules or processes by which the physical brain grasps, interprets or interacts with the physical universe before we can make decisions about how it webs those connections into physics and the Cosmos. Or—could the dancing of sub-atomic particles in and out of existence actually be the dancing into and out of existence the firing synapses or something like that?

TENET’S MENDED MENDACITY REMAINDERED

No matter how much I enjoy Tenet trying to put GWB on the hot seat, according to this report in the Village Voice, George Tenet ain’t no virgin when it comes to being a Bush trollop.

[RIP AND TEAR]
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell made the Bush regime's case for war at the U.N. Security Council . . . . The next day, February 6, was the National Prayer Breakfast, where the blood lust was palpable.

The AP's Ron Fournier wrote a perfunctory account of "the 51-year-old tradition that brings hundreds of lawmakers, military leaders, foreign heads of state, and spiritual leaders together in prayer." The crowd, wrote Fournier, "included 56 senators, 240 House members, first lady Laura Bush, National Security Director Condoleezza Rice, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA Director George Tenet. . . ."

[To this assembled multitude of sycophants, before the invasion began, George Tenet made the following prayer/speech.]

God teaches us to be resolute in the face of evil, using all of the weapons and armor that the word of God supplies.

In chapter six of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, we're told, Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stance against the devil's schemes.

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Therefore, put on the whole armor of God so that when the day of evil comes you may be able to stand your ground and after you have done everything to stand, stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of justice in place and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes with the gospel of peace.

Take up the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and pray at all times.
[GLUE AND TAPE]

What shivers me timbers about Tenet’s prayer is that it reveals the stance by all the religious Tenets of the world—Bushies, Bush, Xtian fundamentalists, Islamic fascist terrorists, American terrorist Pat Robertson, Falwell and all—that their enemies wear the “faces of evil". Such beliefs are a threat to democratic debate and freedom of expression. On every hand we meet these people who do not seem to have an American bone in their bodies. They seem to have been born in Iran or some other theocratic country and, then, to have melted and congealed on the streets of Washington DC like rancid hamburger fat from the loins of the Idi Amins, Hitlers and Saddams of the world.

TODAY WAS ZEN-TERRIFIC

Usually covered with holy gore and political egg, today’s blog entrée is light as a summer’s day. The first photo is shot down the long sidewalk of Vancouver’s Central Park, along what is called Officer’s Row. The last one is the walk along the Columbia River, taken a month earlier than the one in Central Park—quite a bit less greenery. The one in the middle is just outside the door of one of the credit unions I use here in Vancouver, but the color is so typical of many places here in the wetlands that I just had to snap it to share with all my many few readers.

Today (Tuesday, May 8, 2007) I couldn’t get enough of reading and walking. I started my day at a coffee shop down by the Columbia R. where I worked some math problems—finding roots. Then I hiked for an hour all along the Columbia and under the I-5 bridge and further west until I ran out of places to walk just west of the Red Lion Inn, then back to my Rio, parked outside the coffee shop, after a short detour north to check how I might walk from the river north to Vancouver Central Park. Certain maps tell me I can, and I found that I could when I’m ready for that walk which is a long one. As it was, I walked more than an hour and a half. Then I drove to the Mon Ami on Main Street in the Uptown Village neighborhood and got a cup of drip to go and drove over to Vancouver Central Park and parked and read some more of Dancing Wu Li Masters, but the day was warm and drowsy and wonderful on my shoulders and head so I put aside my Dancing, took up my camera and began to walk some more. I snapped a few photos, then I got off behind the buildings of Officer’s Row and found a tall hedge and walked west along that hedge under tall maples, some elms, and many types of fir trees until I came to a gap and passed through the hedge, finding myself behind the Central Vancouver downtown library. I went in there and read some little snatches of a biography by Kim Stafford of his father William Stafford, the Oregon poet who I have always much admired. Then I retraced my steps to my little Kia Rio and drove home.

You know? I almost think on days such as this that I am as I was as a very young boy when I walked everywhere around the city of Dayton, sometimes walking clear out into farm country. I recall the strongest sort of sense of my own freedom when I walked whole days at a time around that city I grew up in. I was in touch with that boy today. The day was magical.

PS: Must mention today that it took me forever to arrange the photos like I wanted them to be. And they still aren't right. As usual in the world of websites, nothing ever runs smoothly. Probably it's a computer glitch or blogger/google has made some changes without consulting their clients (US). I don't know why or how the American has had his psyche manipulated in order to make him stand still for these continued psychic rapes, but the young American has been somehow compromised. A company like most of these websites and their emphasis on themselves over their customer wouldn't have lasted a year back when the customer came first. I think one can understand how America stood still, bent over, for Bush for 8 years. Now, there, I've dragged in politics on what was supposed to have been a peaceful day.

OFFICIAL APOLOGETICS

In this snippet, the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail explain their approach to their book, and they also point out that their findings do not diminish Christ’s acheivements nor reputation—if one remains open to the real message of the Gospels. From the facts in this book and from facts much like the facts in this book, The Davinci Code was imagined which I have not read. But I saw the movie!!!!!!!!

[SNIP]
Even before we began our research, we ourselves were agnostic, neither pro-Christian nor anti-Christian. By virtue of our background
and study of comparative religions we were sympathetic to the core of validity inherent in most of the world's major faiths and indifferent to the dogma, the theology, the accouterments that make up their superstructures. And while we could accord respect to almost every creed, we could not accord to any of them a monopoly of truth.

Thus, when our research led us to Jesus we could approach him with what we hoped was a sense of balance and perspective. We had no prejudices or preconceptions one way or the other, no vested
 interests of any kind, nothing to be gained by either proving or disproving anything. Insofar as "objectivity" is possible, we were 
able to approach Jesus objectively—as a historian would be expected to approach Alexander, for example, or Caesar. And the conclusions 
that forced themselves upon us, though certainly startling, were not shattering. They did not necessitate a reappraisal of our personal convictions or shake our personal hierarchies of values.

But what of other people? What of the millions of individuals
 across the world for whom Jesus is the Son of God, the Savior, the Redeemer? To what extent does the historical Jesus, the priest-king who emerged from our research, threaten their faith? To what extent 
have we violated what constitutes for many people their most cherished understanding of the sacred? To what extent have we committed an act of desecration?

We are well aware, of course, that our research has led us to conclusions that, in many respects, are inimical to certain basic tenets of modern Christianity—conclusions that are heretical, perhaps even blasphemous. From the standpoint of certain established dogma we are no doubt guilty of such transgressions. But we do not
 believe that we have desecrated, or even diminished, Jesus in the eyes of those who do genuinely revere him. And while we ourselves cannot subscribe to Jesus' divinity, our conclusions do not preclude
 others from doing so. Quite simply there is no reason why Jesus
 could not have married and fathered children while still retaining 
his divinity. There is no reason whatever why his divinity should be dependent on sexual chastity. Even if he were the Son of God, there is no reason why he should not have wed and sired a family. [Let me point out that many gods of this world who are just as authentic (or inauthentic?) as Jesus have sexual identities—some Greek gods, certain Egyptian gods, Hindu gods, at any rate, many gods are sexual as well as godly. So godliness and a healthy sexual appetite are not mutually exclusive.]

Underlying most Christian theology is the assumption that Jesus is
 God incarnate. In other words, God, taking pity on His creation, incarnated Himself in that creation and assumed human form. By doing so He would be able to acquaint Himself at first hand, so to speak, with the human condition. He would experience at first hand the vicissitudes of human existence. He would come to understand,
in the most profound sense, what it means to be a man—to confront from a human standpoint the loneliness, the anguish, the helplessness, the tragic mortality that the status of manhood entails. By dint of becoming man God would come to know man in a way that the Old Testament does not allow. Renouncing His Olympian aloofness and remoteness, He would partake directly of man's lot. By doing so He would redeem man's lot—would validate and justify it by partaking of it, suffering from it, and eventually being sacrificed by it.

The symbolic significance of Jesus is that he is God exposed to the spectrum of human experience—exposed to the first-hand knowledge of what being a man entails. But could God, incarnate as Jesus, truly claim to be a man, to encompass the spectrum of human experience, without coming to know two of the most basic, most elemental facets of the human condition? Could God claim to know the totality of human existence without confronting two such essential aspects of humanity as sexuality and paternity?

We do not think so. In fact, we do not think the incarnation truly symbolizes what it is intended to symbolize unless Jesus was married and sired children. The Jesus of the Gospels and of established Christianity is ultimately incomplete—a God whose incarnation as man is only partial. The Jesus who emerged from our rcsearch enjoys, in our opinion, a much more valid claim to what Christianity would have him be.

On the whole, then, we do not think we have compromised or belittled Jesus. We do not think he has suffered from the conclusions to which our research led us. From our investigations emerges a living and plausible Jesus—a Jesus whose life is both meaningful and comprehensible to modern man.
[PASTE]

NIETZSCHE CONTEMPLATES AN UNFORESEEN IRONY


JAGGER, BOOMERS AND ME

The recent Rolling Stone magazine celebrated its 40th year in publication. It’s crammed with interviews. Nicholson is hilarious. The piece below is part of an interview with Mick Jagger by Gerri Hirshey, photo of Jagger by Anton Corbijn. Jagger's comment gets at something I’ve thought about often, though Jagger doesn’t draw the lesson out as clearly as I would. War is what causes civilizations to go out of kilter. War causes disjointing of society. Fathers and mothers gone, children parentless, fear everywhere. George Bush and his cronies, and the warhawks of previous generations, have disjointed society and, then, they have nerve to blame others for their messes. Recall “Dances With Wolves”? Recall what the Lieutenant realized about war, how it was so much different when you were clearly defending home and family, rather than some abstract cause? Why do some old farts never get the message? If there were a case for capital punishment, it ought to be meted out to those who propose to send others off to war. That’d be the end of war. And so many more mental and social ills.

[SNIP]
Would you agree that baby boom children after the war precipitated a significant generational
 break?

I don't completely agree. The first cultural break probably started as far back as the Twenties—after the First World War, when girls started wearing short dresses and didn't wear bras. The jazz thing was quite wild, and people who had money took quite a lot of drugs. If they didn't, they got drunk. So I think there was a huge break after the First World War—culturally, musically with the Jazz Age. My mother knew
 those Twenties dances, which were quite wild. She used to teach me how to do 
them—the Charleston and the Black Bottom.

That's quite a visual, you and Mum in the Jagger front parlor.

I loved jumping about, and my mother knew them all, the generational new dances. My mother also used to jitterbug. We called it jiving. When the girls jumped around there was
 much more freedom in those movements than there had been. The previous dancing, which I tried to learn as a child and was terrible at—ballroom—was the only other dancing you were 
taught. So jitterbugging was part of another youthful 
break. I think that was a tremendous cultural break, 
this kind of behavior.

Around the time of the Second World War, you had the big rebellion with the clothes, with the [swing era] zoot suits. In England, that became Edwardian, which was the teddy boys in the early Fifties. You had all these rebellious-youth things. I think they were all sequential. As far as clothes and fashion are concerned, making a statement vis-a-vis your parents, cultural tastes, that was certainly going on in the Forties, after the war.
[PASTE]

JESUS H. CHRIST!!! WHAT’S IN A NAME?

The following is on pages 326-27 in the book pictured to the left.

“Jesus' lifetime spanned roughly the first 35 years of a turmoil
 extending over 140 years. The turmoil did not cease with his death, but continued for another century. And it engendered the psychological and cultural adjuncts inevitably attending any such sustained defiance of an oppressor. One of these adjuncts was the hope and
 longing for a Messiah who would deliver his people from the 
tyrant's yoke. It was only by virtue of historical and semantic 
accident that this term came to be applied specifically and exclusively to Jesus.

“For Jesus' contemporaries no Messiah would ever have been
 regarded as divine. Indeed, the very idea of a divine Messiah would have been preposterous, if not unthinkable. The Greek word for Messiah is Christ or Christos. The term—whether in Hebrew or Greek—meant simply "the anointed one" and generally referred to a king. Thus, David, when he was anointed king in the Old Testament, became, quite explicitly, a "Messiah" or a "Christ." And 
every subsequent Jewish king of the house of David was known by the same appellation. Even during the Roman occupation of Judaea, the Roman-appointed high priest was known as the Priest Messiah or Priest Christ.

“For the Zealots, however, and for other opponents of Rome, this puppet priest was, of necessity, a false Messiah, For them the true Messiah implied something very different—the legitimate roi perdu or "lost king, "the unknown descendant of the house of David who
 would deliver his people from Roman tyranny. During Jesus' lifetime anticipation of the coming of such a Messiah attained a pitch verging on mass hysteria. And this anticipation continued after
 Jesus' death. Indeed, the revolt of A.D. 66 was prompted in large 
part by Zealot agitation and propaganda on behalf of a Messiah whose advent was said to be imminent.

“The term "Messiah," then, implied nothing in any way divine, 
Strictly defined, it meant nothing more than an anointed king, and in the popular mind it came to mean an anointed king who would also be a liberator. In other words, it was a term with specifically political connotations—something quite different from the later Christian idea of a "Son of God." It was this mundane political term that was applied to Jesus. He was called "Jesus the Messiah" or—translated into Greek—"Jesus the Christ." Only later was this designation contracted to "Jesus Christ" and a purely functional title distorted into a proper name.”

MACHIAVELLI GEORGE


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