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.
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"You can no more drive a fact into a Bushman's head than a car into space." —Geo (1937—?)
Monday, September 27, 2004
Sunday, September 26, 2004
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.
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.
Saturday, September 25, 2004
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.
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"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. )
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. )
Friday, September 24, 2004
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.
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Confucius says, "If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves."
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."
Thursday, September 23, 2004
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
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
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
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."
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."
Monday, September 20, 2004
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)
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)
Saturday, September 18, 2004
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."
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."
Friday, September 17, 2004
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.)
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.)
Thursday, September 16, 2004
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
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
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