It Ain't Necessarily So

I remember when they put "ain't" in the dictionary. It must have been in the 1950s because I was in elementary school at the time. Funny, you hardly ever hear people say "ain't" anymore but, back in those days, everybody said it a lot. Our teachers wouldn't let us get away with it in school but, as soon as we got out for the day, we were back to saying it. The teachers told us that we couldn't use it in school because it wasn't in the dictionary, and that was that. Well, one day a kid came in with a brand new dictionary and "ain't" was in it. The teacher didn't believe him until he looked it up and showed her. She was flabbergasted at first, but she quickly regained her composure when she saw that the dictionary listed it as a slang word. "We don't use slang words in school.", she said, and that was that.

Another thing about school in those days was that we were not allowed to call people by their nicknames. If a guy was named William, you couldn't call him Bill or Willie, the teachers all insisted that the only acceptable name for you was the one on your birth certificate. I had a friend who everybody called Jack. One day I saw his signature and it said "John", and I asked him about it. He explained that Jack was actually a nickname for John and, since his father was also named John, his family had always called him Jack to avoid confusion. When the teacher called his name at school, he didn't always respond because he was so used to being called Jack. Later, I met a guy in the army whose name really was Jack, that's the way it was on his birth certificate and everything. I said that must have driven his teachers nuts, and he said that it certainly did. He even carried a copy of his birth certificate around with him in case a teacher insisted on calling him John.

Okay, there are two stars, one is 10,000 light years away and the other is 20,000 light years away. If God or somebody instantaneously shut both those stars off at the same time, and somebody on Earth happened to be looking at both of them through a telescope at the time, would he see them both disappear at once, or would he see the second one go out 10,000 years later? See that's what I don't understand. If the speed of light is absolute and constant, and light travels so many miles in a year, the light from the farther star should take twice as long to get here, but they say that it doesn't. Wait a minute! You said that the speed of light appears to be absolute and constant regardless of the observer's position or state of motion. Does that mean that it's not really absolute and constant, it just appears to be? Then there's the time difference. The Earth and both of those stars are in three different time zones, or something like that. If God or somebody snuffed out both stars at the same time, would He do it in Earth time, first star time, or second star time? I know you don't believe in God, but hypothetically.

Sound is different. For one thing it's a lot slower than light and, for another thing it needs a medium like air or water to transmit its vibrations. Sound doesn't work in outer space, but radio does, because radio waves are electromagnetic like light waves. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and it takes eight or nine seconds for them to get here from Mars. If a radio signal was transmitted from Mars, and an other signal was simultaneously sent from the Moon, would they both be received on Earth at the same time? And which time, Earth time, Moon time, or Mars time?  Makes Daylight Saving Time look simple by comparison, doesn't it.                                                           
    

hopefully you will be able to utilize the light from the locomotive and read my message and become empowered

Back in the day I had a friend who was mighty proud of getting his degree in English. The first thing he did was go out and buy an Oxford English Dictionary because, like you, he believed it to be the foremost authority of the English language. It was a big sucker, in some ways more like a small encyclopedia then a dictionary. But then he got nervous, hanging with druggies and commies, and moving around a lot, the way we do in our youth.

Then, twenty years later, he pulled it out and showed me what he had done to protect the foremost authority from theft in those turbulent times. He had printed his name across the face part of the book, the part opposite the spine, which was mighty clever because if he had written his name on the first page, or any other page, the thief could just tear it out, but the way he had written it one would have to tear out all the pages to obliterate his name, and then the book would be useless. He smiled and his wisdom and then he started laughing at the thought that he thought anybody would want to steal an Oxford English Dictionary.

I recently read a book about the creation of Webster’s Third dictionary, The Story of Ain’t by David Skinner, which according to the blurb, was the most controversial dictionary ever written, though we must have missed that, it being published in the early sixties when we were otherwise occupied. The main controversy being it added a whole lot of new words, which I guess was akin to taking off it’s suitcoat and loosening its tie. The work mostly involved guys staring at piles of index cards with words on them and, like everything else, lots and lots of politics.

There are a lot of academic style organizations that periodically issue lists of words that should be banned from the language, because it gives them the only ink in the papers that boring guys like that will ever get. Usually these words are kind of like buzz words which get swept up and everybody has to use them in whatever context to show that they are up to date, but then everybody gets a bit of a hangover when they see how stupid it sounds, you know like when you repeat the same word a hundred times. There was a big todo about hopefully which I never minded at all, but I hate utilize with a mighty passion and don’t even get me started on empower.

The thing about the speed of light is that it’s constant, not instantaneous, it is something like 186,000 miles per second. What is constant about it is that it appears to be traveling that speed to you no matter where you are or how fast you are going. That is, if you are standing on a hill with a puny flashlight and the midnight express roars up at a hundred miles an hour and flips on its light at the same time you turn on your flashlight, its light appears to you to be traveling at 186,000 miles per second, not 186,000 miles per second plus 100 miles per hour. If the locomotive blows its horn at the same time that you click on your flashlight, the speed of that sound will travel a hundred times an hour faster than the speed of your click because the speed of sound is not constant, not constant in the way that the speed of light is.

I kind of understand it and I kind of don’t. I understand it when I read the explanation slowly and carefully, but half an hour later I’m like, could you run that by me one more time? It’s like daylight and standard time (which is just around the corner, so don’t forget) which I understand well enough left on my own, but if somebody tries to explain it to me I get all turned around.

Light from the sun takes 8 1/2 hours to get here, light reflected from the moon will take a little more than a second. The light from the star 20,000 years away started traveling towards us 20,000 years ago, whereas the light traveling from the nearer star left only 10,000 years ago. That’s why, if we had a huge telescope and those stars had planets, we would be seeing what was going on on those planets 20,000 and 10,000 years ago.

The World's Foremost Authority

One of my old army buddies used to claim that he was "the world's foremost authority". When he did that with somebody who wasn't in on the joke, they would inevitably ask, "The world's foremost authority on what?" My friend would reply, "I'm the world's foremost authority on being the world's foremost authority." For some reason it doesn't sound as funny now as it did then, I guess you had to know the guy. He was a lot like the character "Winchester" in the MASH series on TV. It doesn't take much to make a GI laugh, especially when he's been drinking.

The world's foremost authority on the English language is supposed to be the Oxford Dictionary, which is published by Oxford University in England. In the US we generally regard the Merriam Webster's Dictionary as the world's foremost authority, but I think that, in the event they would contradict each other, most scholars would go with the Oxford. I've never seen the Oxford, but my Webster's says that they add new words when they start regularly turning up in newspapers and magazines. I suppose they must pay people to sit around reading newspapers and magazines all day and make a note of any new words they come across. Then these guys must meet once a year and discuss their findings. I wonder how you get a job like that, you must have to know somebody.

There is an outfit in the Upper Peninsula called "The Unicorn Hunters", I think they work out of Lake Superior State University, that claims to have the authority to ban the use of words and phrases for "misuse, overuse, and downright uselessness". People send them nominations and they meet once a year to vote on them. I must be out of the loop because, when the list is published, I usually have never heard of most of these banned words and phrases that are supposedly being misused and overused.

I gave up the semi colon shortly after I went on the internet. Some writers use it a lot, but I decided that I didn't need it. A semi colon seems to be something that can't make up its mind if it's a period or a comma, and there's enough uncertainty in the world today as it is. Either make it a period or make it a comma and be done with it! I still use the full colon occasionally when it seems appropriate, although you're right that a comma would work almost as well.

Maybe you can help me understand this speed of light thing. I like the idea that it's absolute and constant, because few things are nowadays and it seems like something ought to be. The part I don't understand is how somebody can turn on a light 10 miles away, somebody else can turn on a light 100 miles away, and both lights get here at the same time. Well, on that scale you wouldn't notice the difference anyway, but what about all those stars that are thousands of light years away? If a light year is the distance light travels in a year, one star is 10,000 light years away, another star is 20,000 light years away, and the light from both stars get to Earth at the same time, it would seem to contradict the whole meaning of a light year. What am I missing here?

I don't know if our lone commentator will return to us or not. I left her a message on the Ipernity site repeating my invitation for her to join us, but I only go there on the weekends so I don't know whether or not she responded. She seemed to be interested in our work here at the institute, but maybe she was just being polite. My contacts on Ipernity are always polite to each other, nothing wrong with that, but Susie indicated that she was looking for something a bit more challenging, which is why I recommended the institute to her in the first place.

the language guys

Well written Beagles, and look at that, a full colon in the very first line. I use the colon sometimes, though I am generally aware that I am being show-offy, and a little self conscious, because I am not a hundred percent on the rules for one. I suspect a comma would be just as effective, and a little quicker because you don’t have to pause to consider the grammatical complications. But, I have to add, it looks pretty cool, and it has an authorative, almost military, buzz about it. Not so the semi colon. I believe I experimented with it in my youth, but now that I am mature, I have eschewed it completely.

I like that little girl, sometimes the tykes, unburdened, as we are by all the junk we accumulate as we walk the dusty road of life, see right through us. I expect she would have had Socrates scratching his chin and saying, “Well, I uh...” Maybe a day after mankind invented rules, he began thinking of ways to get around them, did I say a day, I meant five minutes.

Ah that elusive common sense. Common sense would tell you that common sense is the way to go. But it is often wrong. The sun does not go around the earth, the light from a train speeding north travels just as fast as the light from a flashlight held by a man standing beside the track and facing north. See, I can see that little girl piping up, “But what if the train and the man were facing south?”

I remember in my teaching days, a kid would ask me why is two and two four, and I could pick four pennies out of my pocket and separate them into two groups of two and count them, and there I was absolute proof, but if the kid asked me why it was geese instead of gooses, I could only shrug, that’s just the way it is.

I don’t think the rules of grammar were based on common sense, I think they were formed by a committee, actually several committees, making rules and then competing with each other and winning some battles and losing some battles, maybe like the church at the dawn of the dark ages and one faction finally wining out. Take that rule about prepositions, who made such a rule? Who sez? I don’t remember if we were taught that rule in school or not.

And your point is exactly correct, these rules are debated by clusters of dusty professors in ivory towers that nobody really pays attention to. When they notice that nobody is following that rule anymore, they declare that that rule is invalid. Actually there are several of these committees and they decide different things at different times.

How about those newspaper articles when a dictionary comes out with this year’s new edition and tosses some words and embraces some new ones? Nobody remembers the words being dropped, which is the reason they are dropped, but there is generally a bit of ado as people debate which new words get to go in. I miss the language columnists, like Safire, seems like there once were several of them and now there are none. Maybe we could do that, instead of Car Talk, we could be the Language Guys. We’ve already had one comment, our popularity is soaring.

Rules and Common Sense

It's like I used to tell the kids on my school bus: "Rules are supposed to be based on common sense. If you have common sense, you don't really need rules and, if you don't have common sense, all the rules in the world aren't going to do you any good." Don't feel bad if you don't understand that, I don't think any of the kids did either. I don't think that they really cared about being right, all they cared about was finding some loophole in the rules so they could get away with something. I remember one middle school girl who asked me for some special privilege, I don't even remember what it was. I told her that, if I let her do it, I'd have to let everybody do it, which would cause problems on the bus. She said, "I'm not asking you to let everybody do it, I'm just asking you to let me do it."

I think the rules of grammar were originally based on common sense and, when they don't make sense anymore, they eventually get changed. The one that immediately comes to mind is about prepositions, you know, the words that you were not supposed to end a sentence with. Some time ago, I read in the paper that rule had been rescinded in the latest edition of he dictionary. The reason they gave for the change was that, to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition, it was sometimes necessary to resort to clumsy wording like, "That's the place to which I am going." instead of "That's the place I am going to." Truth be known, most people had been using the second form for some time in casual conversation, the dictionary people just made it official.

I think the purpose of teaching standardized grammar and spelling in school is so that, anywhere you go in the English speaking world, you can communicate effectively and be easily understood by he locals. Regional dialects are not nearly as diverse as they once were, but various subcultures are still coming up with their own mannerisms of speech all the time. The longer a group is together, and the more isolated they become from other groups, the more their speech patterns tend to evolve into their own private dialect. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they can still communicate with people outside their group. School English is supposed to give us the ability to do that.

As you have pointed out before, written language is not the same as the spoken word. In oral conversation, nobody knows whether or not you are following the rules of capitalization. I think the current trend among young people and, apparently, not so young people, to dispense with capitalization altogether originated with the internet chat rooms. Come to think of it, I don't know if they even have those anymore, but the same principle should apply to text messaging. What you have here is something that's between a phone call and a written letter. The rapid back and forth exchange is like an oral conversation, yet it's done with typing keys. As you mentioned, when you hit the shift key, it doesn't always work, so you have to go back and correct the error. This can be frustrating if you're texting in real time, but it shouldn't matter when you're posting a message that is going to be read hours, or even days, later. Indeed, one of the things I like about blogging and forum discussion is that you get to think about what you want to say, read it over, and edit it if necessary before you post it.

Bottom line is that I don't really care if you capitalize or not, but I intend to keep doing it myself. In 50 years or so, if capitalization has been totally abandoned by the general population, I may consider going with the flow. I am not the kind of guy who embraces every new thing that comes down the pike, I prefer to wait and see if it's going to last or not. It's like when I got my first computer in 2001. I figured that, since we were well into the 21st Century, it was high time that I caught up with the 20th.

Capital Letters Si, Capital Punishment No

You know I have that problem with authority. I don’t mind things like red and green lights that ease the flow of traffic and keep people safe, but now that I think about it, why red for stop and green for glow and yellow for I’m changing so be careful now you know, and why those specific colors? And maybe now I am getting testy. But now that I contemplate it, I note that red is kind of a universal color for danger, as in that fire is out of control, and green is always nice because it means it has probably been raining lately and the crops are doing well, and yellow is plumb in between the two.

You know normally I praise everything urban and look down my nose at rural things, but one thing that bugs me is the way whenever they give the weather here they get glum when predicting rain and all smiley when they predict a sunny day. Myself I would think that farmers are generally happy to see those rain clouds. I have this image in my head of some dust bowl farmer in a battered straw hat looking up at the clouds and holding out his hand to catch a drop of rain and smiling that wrinkly smile that one gets from spending all that time out in the sun.

The urban guy however, feeling a drop of rain on his salon-styled hair, is all like, “Oh fuck, now I have to go back and get my goddamn umbrella, and I’m already late,” that’s the way city folk are, always in a hurry, always crabby, cursing the gentle rain that makes his gentle rural cousin smile, because now his humble crops will grow and when he takes them to market there will be money enough for little Mary Ellen to get a new pair of shoes, so she can go to the big dance down in Bartlesville where all the soldiers go, and maybe she can make some young service man smile, and embolden him to defend this great country of ours.

Where were we? Oh yes, the stoplights, devices that make sense. Unlike capitalization which makes me no sense, just a bunch of arbitrary rules that constrain the free expression of thought because you have to pause every now and then and think, should I capitalize this or that, and for what? It doesn’t make the meaning any clearer, it doesn’t follow any logical pattern, it’s just rules for the sake of rules, something a bold young rebel such as myself eschews.

But of course Beagles doesn’t mind them, Beagles the good boy who respected his parents while the rest of us hooligans ran wild in the streets. Beagles who thanked the wrinkled guy in the battered straw hat for letting him dance with his daughter in her spiffy new shoes, and even though he was never able to guide her into some little dark nook away from the stern eyes of the chaperones, he still went off to war to defend his country, even if that only meant getting into bar fights with the soldiers of our allies.

Well there I am getting crabby again. Well those vagaries of language, they just get to me. What about all those rules for titles? If we just capitalized all the words, arbitrary as that might be, at least it would be consistent. But then those fascist Masters of the Language want us to leave out the articles, unless they come at the start of the title, but what if it precedes some mighty noun, like The Lord? Surely you wouldn’t write a title like this: So Sayeth the Lord. 

And prepositions, they are left out too, even though they are energetic actors pointing out actions, while the adverbs and adjectives, the slow-witted sycophants of the pompous verbs and nouns are given the full cap treatment.

Oh the Injustice, The Social Injustice, I don’t see how Beagles can tolerate it, now that he has become a lefty and rails at the injustice of sure and swift punishment for bread thieves and fain would allow them to keep their heads while the poor bakers stand by with empty shelves while he dances a lively two step with the farmer’s daughter to the tune of “Capital Letters Si, Capital Punishment No.”

A Capital Idea

I agree that the rules of capitalization can be a bother at times, but it doesn't bother me enough to make me want to abandon the effort. I think that the Industrial Revolution should be capitalized to distinguish it from an industrial revolution, but I could be wrong about that. I also get confused about the Universe. Back in the day when there was only one universe, it didn't matter, but now, with all those other universes out there, it seems that our own Universe should be capitalized, but maybe not. I do know that you always capitalize the name of a country or nationality, even when it appears as part of another term that would not ordinarily be capitalized, like "German shepherd" or "Dutch oven". Species of plants or animals are not usually capitalized, except when they are used as titles. If there is a picture of a German shepherd with a title under or over it, the German shepherd becomes "German Shepherd" because it's the title of the picture. If you write a story about German shepherds, and you title it "The German Shepherd", then the whole thing is capitalized, including "The" because it's at the beginning. If the "the" appeared anywhere else, like "Gunther the German Shepherd", then it wouldn't be capitalized.

During the 18th Century, they used to capitalize all nouns, which must have been easier. I don't think they had always been doing that because it's not done in the King James Bible, which was written in the 16th Century. One thing they did differently in the KJV was they began a lot of sentences with "And", which would not have been tolerated when we went to school. I seem to remember reading somewhere that they did that because it was written that way in the original Hebrew language, so I guess they were trying to make it sound authentic. You think written English has funny rules? Try written Hebrew! First of all, it's backwards, you read it from right to left. I'm not sure about modern Hebrew, but in Biblical times they didn't write the vowels, just the consonants, which is why nobody to his day is sure how the Hebrews pronounced the name of God, which they spelled "YHWH".

I'm not sure why I used the leftist term "social injustice" in my last post. Maybe you are a bad influence on me. I'm sure there was social injustice in the old agrarian days, but it seems like it got worse when people started living in cities. I was thinking about how they used to hang people for stealing a loaf of bread. Maybe they had done that previously but historians don't write about it as much.

Slum neighborhoods are also usually associated with cities, but of course there are also rural slums. Maybe they're not so noticeable because they're more spread out and concealed by vegetation. That little church I visited in Georgia must have been part of a rural slum, judging by the appearance of both the building and the congregation, but I don't remember seeing any houses around there, or farm fields either. The only thing I noticed was lots of pine trees, which was about the only thing that would grow in that sandy soil. On the army base we didn't have any grass, or even weeds, just pine trees and bare sand. They used to make us rake the sand around the barracks every morning before we left for training. There was nothing to rake up, we just walked up and down dragging a rake with each hand, which made parallel straight lines in the sand. I don't know why, maybe they were frustrated because there was no grass to cut or weeds to pull.

I was only in Georgia for a couple of months, which (lucky me) happened to be July and August, and I only got to go downtown a few times. There wasn't a lot to do there, but it made a nice break from military life. I was too young to drink in the bars, but not too young to engage the services of a nice lady who came to visit me in my hotel room after I mentioned to the elevator operator that I was looking for female companionship. There was a USO facility where they held dances on Saturday night, with local girls about high school age as volunteer dance partners. That's all you could do with them was dance, though, because they had chaperones who watched us like hawks. Truth be known, being hornswoggled by those church people was certainly not the worst thing that happened to me. Like I said, it was an educational experience but, then  again, so was most everything else in those days.

capitalize this america

I was reading along there where you were saying:

The Industrial Revolution broke that cycle by enabling more people to live on less land, but then you get pollution, crime, and social injustice.

Caps for industrial revolution? Before I pass from the subject, what is the deal with caps anyway? Sometimes it’s so hard to figure out, like Russian navy is capitalized, but what about russian dressing? Well maybe that is too because my spell check clearly disapproves. But still sometimes it’s a prickly thing to tell what is a proper noun and what isn’t. And then you get to that political thing where generally Blacks are in caps and whites aren’t. And the whole thing is, it’s not like they add anything to the understanding.

And it’s even worse when you were typing, because the shift key was way over at one end of the typewriter, and you really had to hold it down hard while you hit the other key, and once it was over you had to settle your hands and fingers back in their correct positions. It’s a wonder Hemingway ever get anything written.

It got a little better when personal computers came around because you didn’t have to hold down the caps key as hard, but now I have a laptop which was a big mistake because the keys are teeny tiny, and the shift is right next to the enter key so a lot of times I try to cap a letter and suddenly I am at the beginning of the next line.

And for what, for some stupid rule that got put into written language (wiki pause), well wiki is uncharacteristically vague, about three hundred years ago, and which has changed its rules several times in that span? Wiki does allude to the trend where there are fewer words capped as time goes on, and I can only say hurrah, no, what the hell, Hurrah!

Myself I am ahead of the times, I have been dropping caps for some time. Well I see that I still cap I, but it’s such a habit, and my fingers have it down so well that I never hit the enter key instead of the shift key doing it. And I do it at the beginning of the sentence, but that is not so bad, because when you are beginning a sentence, you naturally take a little pause. But still I don’t see where it adds anything to the meaning of the narrative. I don’t use it on our topic headers anymore. I hardly ever use it anymore for things like moslem or american anymore, and I think I am doing the right thing. I feel free.

Well that was all going to lead into I can see where the industrial revolution led to more crime and more pollution, but I am puzzled as to how it led to social injustice. Actually I am surprised that you used the term, usually that phrase is only thrown around by lefties.

But anyway, in the countryside it was mostly big estates where the lord was served by semi feudal peons. Isn’t that the height of injustice? Wasn’t it a little fairer in the factories where somebody could work hard and become a foreman and then some kind of executive? Not that it happened very often, but I don’t think the butler ever became the lord of the manor.

But it all sounds so boring compared to whether to cap or not to cap. Are we shall be subject to some rules made up by a handful of people three hundred years ago? Now there is Social Injustice!

I think you would have been better off if those bumpkins had picked your pocket. That way the other bumpkins would have gotten a buck to alleviate their Social Injustice and you could have spent the time you wasted on the bus ride and belting out Old Rugged Cross (Number 369 in your hymnal), in the local bar, perhaps making time with the local ladies.

It Depends What You Mean by "Better"

I agree that all that stuff is a two edged sword. If you improve the infant survival rate and lengthen the life span, you increase the population, which means more people to feed. When that happens to any other species, they either have to expand their territory or the population will crash. Humans are pretty good at expanding their territory, but eventually they run out of good land and end up fighting over it. The losers are exiled to the desert and the mountains, where they find themselves living much as their ancestors did. The Industrial Revolution broke that cycle by enabling more people to live on less land, but then you get pollution, crime, and social injustice. The alternative is to go back to the country and live in poverty. I think we're better off today because we have more options. We can live in the city, or live in the country and work in the city or, if we don't mind making less money, we can find a home in a small town like Cheboygan.

There have been climate changes before, you know. During the three digit years there was something called the "Medieval Warming Period" followed by the "Little Ice Age" in the four digit years. Then of course, there was the Big Ice Age back in the cave man days. Taking a broader view, there was a Really Big Ice Age that, by some accounts, we are just now pulling out of. I read somewhere that, for most of Earth's history, there was no ice on the planet at all. During that time there were no people on Earth either, so you can't blame them for it.

What makes everything seem worse nowadays is that we are more aware of the problems. If there's rioting in Africa, hurricanes in Florida, starvation in Spain, or Texas needs rain, we all know about it. A few hundred years ago, most people didn't know how to find any of those places on a map, even  if they lived in one of them.

I got captured by a religious group like that when I was in the army, only they were Christians. I was on a weekend pass in Augusta, Georgia. Sunday morning I ran into some guys who asked me if I wanted to go to church. I said sure, but I don't know where one is around here. They told me to get on the bus and they would take me there. The bus drove out of town, way out of town, to a little dump of church out in the middle of nowhere. This place was poor, I mean dirt poor, like in the movie "Tobacco Road". As a matter of fact, I found out later that the original Tobacco Road, upon which the book and movie were based, was located not far from there. I put a dollar or two in the collection plate, which was probably more than all the locals together put in. I'm not sure what the other GIs put in but, if it was anything at all, it must have made a big difference to the little congregation. On our way back to town, the two nice young men who recruited us explained that they were members of a different congregation, and that they did this to help out the poorer churches in the area. I suppose I could have felt resentment at being exploited like that, but I didn't. If someone had told me people were living like that in the United States of America in that day and age I wouldn't have believed them. The educational experience was well worth a dollar or two and an hour or two of my time.

fasten the seat belt on your handbasket

Yes Buddhism was all the rage during my hippie days. Indian mysticism was okay, hell any mysticism was okay, but Hinduism never caught on and I think it was because of that caste thing which sounded a lot like racism, which of course we abhorred.

Of course you know I hated all that crap so I never got into it, but I suspect that most people never got beyond a few snappy phrases which sounded all peace and love. It was exotic and it was a way to be a little religious without being Christian. Christianity was just soooo straight.

Oh and there was chanting. Chanting was big in some circles. When I first arrived in Berkeley there were these little old Chinese ladies in pockets along Telegraph Avenue. As I said, I was not of that bent, and my girlfriend had warned me so I steered clear of them. But other unsuspecting hippies on their way to purchase some pot would find themselves accosted by a knot of these ladies. Oh well, how cool, actual Asian Buddhists, oh yes I believe in peace and love, oh yes, the universalism of all and all that far out stuff, oh I’d love to visit your Buddhist temple. And then the trap was shut, because it turned out there was a bus just around the corner that would be leaving in a quarter of an hour. It’s hard to be rude to a little old Asian lady, so they would have you standing in a rounded up group while they went out for more prey, and when they had enough the bus would roll up, and the hapless captive hippies, losing their buzz, would be packed up in the bus and taken to the temple where they would get their very own unique chant, and would be relieved of whatever scant money might have been in their pockets. It was quite a racket.

I kind of believe we have been going to hell in a handbasket ever since the industrial revolution. Well there are many good things that came from it, cures for diseases and this very machine I am using to communicate with you. There are some who also decry how nice bucolic lives hanging around the fishing hole and singing folk songs were transformed into twelve hour days of slaving, along with your children, in filthy factories under mean bosses. But you know those people flocked to the city from the country to take those jobs, nobody forced them to do that. And I part a little with my liberal brethren on sweatshops. Nobody makes anybody work in them and when they are shut down all the workers are still poor and now they don’t have even their cruddy jobs.

But it’s pollution, overpopulation, and global warming that bother me. If we had stayed in the middle ages we could have gone that way forever, well until the sun began to run out of steam, but the way it is now, we are headed for some big crunch which we may or may not survive. I don’t think you believe this but I do, and we can discuss this later.

Probably not for Europe, but for the USA, times after WW II were just great. Our factories were pumping out goods that everybody wanted, nobody worried about the smoke, you could drop out of high school at anytime and get a good paying job in a factory. And almost like people today look forward to those Apple trinkets, we looked eagerly towards what our scientists would invent next. Cars that you didn’t have to drive, jet packs, moving sidewalks everywhere. There used to be a series in the comic strips that predicted what the future would be like, and everybody was all, oh I can’t wait.

And then somewhere, maybe in the late sixties that turned to, thank God I will be dead before that happens. Some blamed Kennedy’s assassination, some the unpopular war, some the Beatles, some all those hordes of chanting hippies. Remember Ms Stark and her proselytizing to the Sophomore class about Silent Spring. What a batty old lady I thought at the time.

So in short I think that our progress in technology is a two edged sword, and what little we have advanced in love for our fellow man is only because we have full stomachs and time on our hands, and if you took that away we would be back to savagery just like that. And, speaking of death, all those fine thoughts we accrued in our lifetimes goes out like a candle once we are gone, and our offspring are born as savages.

Yes I do

I'm not saying that I particularly admire the Unitarian-Universalists, I was just telling you what I found while looking up the Unitarians. They had come up in a previous discussion and neither of us knew a whole lot about them, so I looked them up and reported my findings. I thought the Unitarian-Universalists were worthy of mention because there aren't many religions as tolerant as they are. The only one I can think of is the Hindus, and maybe the Buddhists, although it's hard to tell with the Buddhists, I never could make a lot of sense out of their beliefs. Zen Buddhism was all the rage with the hippy set back in the 60s. I read few books on the subject and, the more I read, the less I understood what they were talking about.

I know that people like to say that the human race has been going downhill since the Industrial Revolution, but I think it just seems that way because people are more aware of things like social injustice today, which is a sign that people are getting better. Take Hitler for example. His problem was that he was born too late. A few centuries earlier and he would have been hailed as a mighty conqueror, but the 20th century rejected him as a madman. Well, most of the Germans liked him at first, but even they eventually decided that he was bad news.

I think that people started getting disillusioned about he future of humanity right about the time you and I were born. That doesn't necessarily mean that it was our fault, it's just that they were finishing up the most destructive war in human history at the time, and people were appalled at the prospect of what the next war would be like. Turns out they needn't have worried, nuclear weapons have not been deployed in any war since then, and they're still decapitating people with rusty swords in the Middle East. Sure we still have wars, we've always had wars, but now we've got people who are against war. How many anti-war protests do you think were held in the Middle Ages? Then there's things like abuse of women and children. Of course it's depressing to see that stuff in the news every day, but it wasn't so long ago that it was so commonplace that it wasn't even considered newsworthy. Nowadays we argue about capital punishment, but a few hundred years ago they hung a man for stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread, and then put his body on public display in a cage until it rotted away.

It's like that Black preacher said right after slavery was abolished: "We ain't what we want to be, we ain't what we should be, we ain't what we're gonna be, but thank the Lord we ain't what we was!"

you call this progress

It doesn’t bother me that much going out like a candle. I kind of look at it like just as I will never go to London, I will never go to the year 2100 either. And in a way teenage Ken never died, but he isn’t really quite alive anymore. I have some of his memories but I don’t know where he is.

I don’t see the good in burning in hell for eternity. It’s not like you are traveling the earth or eating Italian beef sandwiches, you’re just in some cruddy hole and you can’t see your hand in front of your face what with the smoke and all, and it’s not like you get used to it after awhile. Probably for you they would pipe in Obama speeches on a loop, and there is no way you are taking old Betsy with you.

The thing is if you were a catholic or a muslim or an Elsdon methodist, why would you want to go into a Unitarian-Universalist church? Well maybe if they have free Italian beef sandwiches in the hands of their open arms. Oh I suppose the hindus and buddhists would be fine, but we Abrahamites are notoriously intolerant types. We Elsdonists wouldn’t like that banging of foreheads on the floor or the playing of bingo and probably nobody else, including the normally tolerant eastern guys, would like our belting out The Old Rugged Cross.

I was kind of tinkering with my own religion for awhile, where Willie Nelson was god, and at the end of times he would look at the mass of saved and sinners and say, “What the hell, you guys may be assholes, but you’re my assholes, everybody is getting into heaven.” And even as the wings were sprouting there would be some of them saying I don’t know why they are letting that other guy into heaven.

You know I am a bit puzzled by your ideas of advancement and progress. You seem to think that this is our job on earth, but what does that mean? Advance how, improve how? I can think of how things are different, but not how they are necessarily better. Certainly we are more comfortable these days through advances in technology, but in our hearts we are still the same mean-spirited buggers we were back in the stone age. Oh, I suppose in richer parts of the world we have the leisure and the full stomachs to behave nicely, but if someone was to take away our stuff we would be banging each other over the head just like everybody else.

If I Had My Druthers

If I had my druthers, I would druther  spend eternity right here on Earth. I wouldn't mind getting old as long as I had reasonably good health and enough money to live comfortably, kind of like I do now. I wouldn't want to be young again, too intense and chaotic for my taste. Of course the best scenario would be to be young again but knowing what I now know. I wouldn't let on either, I'd play dumb to keep people from getting suspicious. Every time they wanted me to do something that wasn't in my own best interest, I'd just say, "Yeah, right", and then go about my business as if I hadn't heard them. They'd all be scratching their heads trying to figure out how I was able to evade their shit so smoothly, while I would just smile innocently and not tell them. Wouldn't that be fun?

Since you don't believe in God, I suppose you don't believe in human immortality either. Doesn't that bother you, knowing that, when you die, you just go out like a candle? I think I'd rather burn in Hell for eternity than to have my consciousness extinguished forever. Burning in Hell might not be a lot of fun, but at least you would be aware that you were burning in Hell, so that would mean that you were still kind of alive. You might be able to fight back too. You would certainly have nothing to lose, being already dead and in eternal torment. What more could they do to you?

When I said that the Unitarian-Universalists believed in everything, I meant everything pertaining to religious beliefs. According to Wiki, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim, an Atheist, or even a Catholic could walk into a Unitarian-Universalist church and feel right at home. They would be welcomed with open arms and not be required to change any of their beliefs to gain acceptance. I understand the Hindus are like that too, at least on paper. Of course they don't get along with the Muslims, but even the Muslims don't get along with the Muslims.

I wish I could tell you that I was confident about my own immortality, but I'm not. The Deist position on the subject is not very comforting. As with their other beliefs, lacking material evidence or divine revelation, all they've got to go on is logical speculation. Thomas Paine said that he believed in an afterlife because, without it, this life didn't make any sense. What would be the point in learning all the stuff we learn if we weren't going to get to use it and build upon it in another lifetime? The thing is, Paine didn't know anything about the Theory of Evolution, where Mother Nature doesn't seem to care about the individual, just the species. We believe that it's God's plan that we improve ourselves and our environment, but that could be accomplished without granting us eternal life. Maybe we're supposed to pass all our hard earned knowledge to the next generation, whose job it is to use it and build upon it after we're gone. The human species would continue to advance just fine without us. Of course that's also just logical speculation, but it's at least as logical as what Paine said.

People mostly believe whatever makes them feel good, but feeling good is not enough for me, I want to be right. It would be nice to both feel good and be right but, if I could only choose one, I would rather be right than feel good. Being an objective realist, I don't believe that I can make something true just by believing that it's true. If it's true, it would be true whether I believed in it or not and, if it's not true, no amount of believing is going to make it true. Lest you should boast, the same goes for you. If God exists, you can't make Him cease to exist by not believing in Him. Of course, if God doesn't exist, then all bets are off.

trinity shminity

I never heard of Fiddler’s Green. Sounds like a nice enough place. Sometimes I ask people what they would like heaven to be like. Would they like marathon harp sessions, rivers of beer, endless golfing, whatever? I always thought that what I would like for heaven is for it to be like our current life only a little better, shorter winters, easier jobs, tastier pizza, that would be enough. And of course we would never grow old and we would never die.

Never die, how different the world would be if we could never die. There probably wouldn’t be any poets or philosophers, and maybe there would be all sorts of other things that would make life better.

So what if god, I assume it would be god, sat down next to you as you were enjoying a highly hopped pale ale at your local pub, and said he was in a mood, and if you wanted eternal life here on earth you could have it, but you had to decide here and now. Well I suppose most of us would take it, but you would kind of worry, what if after a billion years it became really boring or something, and there you were with all eternity before you? It would be like some kind of hell, worse probably because I think most hells end after awhile but this one would go on forever.

I think the holy spirit was just another name for plain old god, like Jehovah, or The Creator, or The Big Kahuna, and then when they had this whole thing with Jesus who was or wasn’t man or god, but I guess they thought three were better than two in the way a triangle is better than a line. Neither of us believes in any of this so I don’t know why we keep talking about it. There are some things you can learn from antiquity, but the trinity was just a pointless argument then and now.

I don’t know how you can believe in everything. Can you believe two plus two is four, and also five and six, and a billion? You know those eastern religions are more like philosophies, and they can admit to several different philosophies, but the western, the Abrahamic religions with their single god, are pretty much is you is or is you ain’t? There is one answer, one path. Either god doesn’t want you to eat meat on Friday or he does.

I’m all for ecumenical movements, I’m all for not fighting it out about the trinity. But this thing well, the Jewish god is their god, and the muslim god is their god and the catholic god is their god and the elsdon methodist church god is their god. That only works if you are an atheist and you think all those gods are figments of their imaginations.  

Fiddler's Green

Don't know much about Limbo or Purgatory. Like you said, Methodists don't have them in their doctrine. If I had a choice in the matter, I would rather go to someplace like Fiddler's Green. It's not in the Bible, it's just one of those anecdotal things that pop up in popular mythology from time to time. Since it's called "Fiddler's Green", I assume that it was originally about musicians but, at some point, it was extended to include soldiers, sailors, or any other group of guys who were closely bonded in a common cause in their lifetimes. Fiddler's Green is a campground just outside the gates of Heaven, or maybe Hell, depending on who's telling the story. You hang out there waiting for all your comrades to catch up with you. When everybody from your group is reunited on Fiddler's Green, they have one last drink and march through the gates together. Meanwhile, you get to hang out with your friends, telling stories and singing songs around the campfire. If I liked it, I might even volunteer to stay there permanently and greet the newcomers as they arrive, but I don't know if they recruit their help from the ranks or not.

I looked up the Holy Spirit on Wiki over the weekend, but they didn't tell me any more than I already knew, which is not much. They did have quite a spread about the Unitarians, though. Apparently there is more than one kind of Unitarian. They all don't believe in the Trinity, but each congregation holds a variety of  beliefs about other matters. There are several national and international umbrella groups with which a congregation can affiliate, but there is no central authority that tells everybody what to believe.

Then there's the Unitarian-Universalists, which were founded in 1961 by a merger of some Unitarians with some Universalists. These guys believe in like everything. They hold that all belief systems have some truth in them, including Atheism. It seems that these guys would be fun to hang out with because you would never know what was going to come up in a conversation.

Then there's the Unity people, which Wiki says are not to be confused with the Unitarians, although I don't think they believe in the Trinity either. These guys believe that God doesn't live in Heaven, but dwells within each and every one of us. They say that Jesus was somebody who figured out how to fully develop his god-like potential, and that we should do likewise.

So you see, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, dear Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophies". I think Shakespeare said that.
"What I like about being old is that, every time you think you've seen it all, you find out you ain't seen nothing yet." I said that.

limbo, how low can you go?

I couldn’t agree more with our commenter about Augustine. Though I always did like the concept of limbo. Not that I know that much about it, but I always assumed it was kind of a rundown heaven where you never got to actually see god, but then who wants to see him anyway, it’s like the when the boss comes over and lingers over your desk, you are more comfortable when he’s gone. And since you didn’t have to spend all day singing hymns and there was no saving you anyway, you were pretty much left alone.

So I kind of guess you hung out with your buds, played some cards, some basketball, went down to one of the corner pubs in the evening, and though they didn’t have a fine pale ale like I like, they would have something like PBR and though it was probably not ice cold, it was cold enough.

And I believe this was not only the stomping ground of unbaptized babies (okay there would be a lot of bawling going on upstairs while you were dealing poker in the basement) but of pretty good guys who died before Christ was even begotten, and those who lived faraway and never even heard of him.

So there you are living your pretty good life somewhere in China or one of the
Americas or wherever, and you’re bound for limbo, which as I’ve said, seems like a nice enough place, and along comes this missionary and tells you about Christ, and now limbo is over, now you have to really toe the line to get into heaven, and odds are that you will end up in hell, so how has that missionary done you any favors? You would be better off if you never heard of Christ. If these missionaries wanted to help mankind they would do a better job of it by staying home.

The Catholics have dropped limbo, and I think purgatory too. Brrrrr. I never liked purgatory, because it wasn’t like ten to twenty you did, the sentences always seemed to be more like thousands of years. Of course we Elsdon Methodists only had heaven, as I recall, and hell was iffy, and I got the impression that as long as you didn’t kill anybody and dressed nice and went to church most Sundays, Saint Peter (though he wouldn’t be a saint, we didn’t go for that Roman tomfoolery, but he would be a nice enough chap, and certainly well-dressed) would wave you in. Which was all pretty nice, but I didn’t like dressing up so I dropped out.

We Have Gotten a Comment!

We have been at this for about a year, and we've finally gotten our first comment. I am pleased to introduce Susie Scarfe, a friend of mine from Ipernity and, before that, Multiply. She is an excellent writer, and I hope she decides to join us here at the Institute. Susie lives in The Republic of Ireland, so her participation would make this an international forum. How about that!

All that stuff I wrote about sin is not necessarily my own belief, it was kind of a sarcastic interpretation of the classic Judeo-Christian obsession with guilt and forgiveness. A lot of people think that religion is all about following the rules and, if you do that, you're okay. Truth is, there is no way you can be good enough to get into Heaven on your own merits. Well, the early Jews didn't even believe in an afterlife, but they did believe that, if you're good enough, God will reward you in this life. Jesus put a different spin on it when He said, "God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike." which is closer to what really happens.

I believe that the Law of Moses was an honest attempt to define a code of conduct that would forge 12 tribes of raggedy desert nomads into a mighty nation. It soon became apparent, however, that nobody could possibly obey all of those laws all of the time, so there had to be a way to make it right when you screwed up. Animal sacrifice had been practiced by other cultures in the region for a long time, and the Israelites adapted it for their own purposes. I think that, originally, sacrificing animals was a lot like putting money in the collection plate at church. Most of the wealth in those days was tied up in livestock, so it wasn't so much about killing animals as it was about kicking a portion of your wealth back to the god from whence it came. Moses wanted the Israelites to distinguish themselves from the heathen tribes they were about to conquer, so he had them do their sacrifices a little differently. For one thing, they could only sacrifice in the Temple which, at that time, was a tent, while the other cultures sacrificed on any convenient mountain top. For another thing, the Israelites were to pour the blood of the sacrificial animals on the ground, and not divert it for human consumption. They were also not allowed to consume the blood of the animals they slaughtered for their own use. From this we can deduce that blood was something special to those people, I suppose because it represented the life force, or something like that.

One of the names for Jesus is "Lamb of God", obviously an allusion to the practice of sacrificing young lambs, which had become a symbol of innocence and purity. The shedding of innocent blood for the atonement of sins was a familiar concept to the Jews, so the idea that Jesus died for our sins wouldn't have seemed all that far fetched at the time. Most of us who accept it today, whether or not we really understand it, grew up hearing about it over and over again, so it is familiar to us, at least as an abstract concept. I don't remember when, but at some point I came to the conclusion that it just doesn't make sense. I suppose I imagined trying to explain it to somebody from another planet who had never heard of it before, and realized that it would be hard to justify.

I don't know a lot about the concept of Original Sin. I never took much stock in it myself. It's hard enough staying out of trouble for my own screw ups without worrying about being blamed for something Adam and Eve did thousands of years ago. If God judges me for that, then so be it.

casting the first stone

I have nothing against stories, I love stories. I like them more for being entertaining than for relating facts. They are useful for providing a framework for discussing ideas, but that’s about it.

What I was talking about as anecdotal evidence was things like somebody cites an instance of somebody foretelling an event that later turns out true and from that concludes that it is possible to foretell the future.

Those early church conferences were not occasions where everybody got together and hammered out their differences, they were basically power politics where the strongest party became the church and the weaker party became the heretics. Maybe like our current day political conventions.

In that next to the last paragraph I can’t tell whether you are speaking for yourself or just explaining what you think the Christians are all about. That whole idea about people being born with the taint of sin is from that awful Augustine who thought it up around 400 AD, linking it to the fall of Adam, which because we are all his descendants we are born with. It is nowhere in the bible.

Well I can’t be sure of that because I am not the biblical scholar that you are. There is that line about he who is without sin casting the first stone, which implies that none of us are without sin, but I don’t think that implies that we come out of the womb with sin on us. I don’t think Jesus ever said that he was going to die for our sins. And that whole idea seems suspect because it implies that if we hadn’t sinned Jesus would never have had to die for us, but then he would probably never have been begotten, because wasn’t that his whole purpose, and if god hadn’t given us the proclivity to sin we wouldn’t have sinned, so doesn’t that make god complicit for the death of his son, but then he didn’t really die, he spent some hours on the cross, but so did a lot of others, so what’s the big deal?

I never understood why pride was a sin? It always seemed like it was one of the best parts of us. Don’t we behave well so that we can be proud of our behavior? Aren’t we always exhorted to show pride in our work? Aren’t we proud to be Americans?

Let me introduce an anecdote from the mouths of babes. A kid, being told that he was here to serve others, then asked, what is everybody else here for then.

Anecdotal Evidence

Some things don't lend themselves well to scientific study. To be studied scientifically, or even statistically, a phenomenon has to be measurable and repeatable. For everything else, anecdotal evidence is all we've got to go by. While I don't swallow that stuff whole, I think it's a mistake to just totally blow it off. People were telling stories long before the scientific method was developed, it's the way knowledge was handed down from one generation to the next for thousand of years. If it wasn't for the story tellers, each generation before the Renaissance would have had to re-invent the wheel. Not only that, stories are entertaining, they catch people's interest more easily than dry academic lectures. Of course they're not all true, but most stories have a certain amount of truth in them, and part of the fun is trying to figure out exactly how much.

I think that most of what I know about the Trinity came from "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", by Edward Gibbon. He was kind of cynical about it, but I think he tried to be historically correct. One of my favorite quotes came from that book: "Man, who imperfectly understands his own nature, presumes to exactly define the nature of the deity that created him."

According to Gibbon, there were several factions of early Christianity that had some very different ideas about the nature of Jesus. When the Romans adopted Christianity as their official state religion, they felt it was necessary to unite all these factions under one flag. There were several conventions of bishops over the years which eventually hammered out a compromise that they felt most Christians could live with. Many of their people remained unconvinced, however, preferring to settle the matter with their swords, as you mentioned. Most of the controversy seems to have involved the Father and the Son, with the Holy Spirit being thrown in for good measure at the end.

The Holy Spirit is mentioned in the Bible, but there isn't a lot of explanation associated with it, which leads me to believe they thought that everybody already knew about it. I think the King James Version calls it the "Holy Ghost" and the Revised Standard Version calls it the "Holy Spirit", both words meaning about the same thing in Greek. Jesus referred to it as "The Comforter" and promised that God would send it to comfort his people when they needed it. A long time ago, somebody on the internet told me that he believed the concept came from the old Pagan days, and that it might have been female. That's about all I know about the Holy Spirit. I suppose Wiki has something on it, and I may look it up one of these days.

Deists talk about right and wrong, but I don't think they use the word "sin" very much. I think the Jews invented it and, of course, Christianity is all about forgiving it. The whole purpose of sin seems to be making people feel guilty so that they will atone for their sins by sacrificing animals. Jesus made this unnecessary by sacrificing Himself, which, if you think about it, doesn't make a lot of sense. I suppose it made more sense to the Jews of the time, since they were used to the concept of atoning for their sins by shedding innocent blood. There is no way you can be sinless, you have to commit the sins so that you can be forgiven. If you did manage to evade all the snares and pitfalls of sin and lead a perfect life, you would certainly be proud of that, and pride itself is a sin. So there you go!

Let us close with an anecdote. I read this in Reader's Digest a long time ago, it's supposed to be a true story: A Sunday School teacher had just finished teaching her class about the historical practice of sacrificing animals, and asked if there were any questions. A little girl raised her hand and asked, "What does God want with a dead sheep?"

 

a breath mint, a candy mint, or maybe just the holy spirit

I think I remember reading that prayer thing, and I think I remember it later being debunked. You know how I am about studies, if you already believe something it’s no problem to design a study to prove it. Studies have to be studied. Generally the more interesting studies hit it big in the papers while the subsequent, more boring, debunking studies never get past the last page.

I remember way back in seventh or eighth grade I was kind of interested in all that paranormal stuff. Michael Weber and I used to do experiments where one of us looked at a number and the other tried to guess what it was. I think we did a little better than the odds, but not much. All these things like ESP and predicting the future, and astrology, they have all these anecdotal evidence, but whenever a hard objective study is done on them they reveal zilch, but like I said, debunking theories are boring.

I overstated when I said the Unitarians didn’t believe in god. They believe in the cosmic marshmallow (as opposed to the hairy thunderer of the hard shell Baptists.) They are probably like you deists where they sit around and try to figure out his nature, which sounds to me more like you are talking about morality than an actual being.

That Trinity thing is crazy man crazy. It all goes back to the early days when some folks (the Arians) thought Jesus was more like a man, and others (the catholics) thought he was more like a god. But back in those days, as you know they didn’t do things like the Unitarians and the deists, they settled their differences with swords, because what is better than dying for your faith? Somehow that resulted in the trinity so that Jesus could be both, and they threw in the holy ghost who nobody knows who the heck he is. I see where you mention that the holy spirit is in the bible, who is he there?

You say if god didn’t want us to improve ourselves he wouldn’t have given us the desire to do so, but conversely if god didn’t want us to sin, he wouldn’t have given us the greater desire to do that. Like I said earlier I think you guys are just discussing morality, which is fine just fine, but when you drag in the holy spirit and the gang, the next thing you know you are eating fish tacos on Friday while all your pagan and atheist pals are whooping it up over pepperoni and sausage pizza.

When I was flipping the coin I was thinking that since 76 we have had equal election victories for the reps and the dems. Of course I have always been for the dems (except for 60 when I was inexplicably for Dick, but that was around the time when I believed in ESP too), and I assume that you would have been for the reps, so we might as well have flipped a coin. Well I have never believed, as all those pols claim to believe, in the wisdom of the American people. The best thing about democracy is not that we choose the best leaders, but that if we lose, we know we get another shot four years later so we don’t have to get out our swords.

Public Prayer

Say what you want about Jesus, but He certainly did produce some good quotes. This is one of my favorites, and I thought you might like it too. I took the time to look it up to be sure that I got it right:
"And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." - Matthew, chapter 6, verses 5-6

I don't think I ever did get the hang of praying. I kind of envied the Catholics in that respect because they had prayers for every occasion all memorized and at their disposal. It didn't matter if they understood them, so long as they could say them from memory really fast. We Protestants were supposed to pray from the heart and mean what we said. The thing is, God already knows what's in our hearts and minds, so why tell Him something that He already knows? As far as asking Him for favors, well that seems kind of petty, like a little kid begging his Mommy for a candy bar in the supermarket. Studies have been done that suggest praying for sick people helps then get better, even when they don't know that anybody's praying for them. Well, maybe, but I'm sure there's a logical explanation for it. Maybe praying helps us access the inner reaches of our consciousness where we may unlock powers that we don't even know we have. Maybe praying is kind of like ESP, but you don't believe in that either, do you.

I didn't look this up, but I think the Unitarians believe in God, they just don't believe in the Trinity. I've always had a problem with that one too. I understand that the Trinity is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are mentioned separately from time to time, but not all together like they say in church, "The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost". Jesus did say, "I and the Father are one.", and "He who has seen me has seen the Father",  but that could have just meant "Like Father, like Son."

Okay, back to Deist logic: If God can do anything He wants to do, it follows that He doesn't have to do anything He doesn't want to do. God could have made us perfect, but He obviously didn't, so that must mean He didn't want to. That doesn't necessarily mean that God wants us to stay the way we are forever. If He didn't want us to improve ourselves, it seems that He wouldn't have given us the desire and ability to do so. I like the Zoroastrian version of this, which may have inspired the Deist version: God deliberately set us down in an incomplete creation, and He expects us to finish the job. It's like God wrote the software and gave us the job of de-bugging it. If we ever finally get this thing out of beta, then God will know that we are ready for bigger and better things.

I was kind of kidding about both the majority and minority being too stupid to govern themselves. It does seem that way sometimes, but that's only because people like you and I are so far ahead of the curve and we are impatiently waiting for everyone else to catch up with us. I'm sure that other people feel the same way about us but, of course, that doesn't make them right. Seriously though, a well organized group working together can usually accomplish more than a bunch of individuals trying to do everything themselves. It's the "well organized" and the "working together" parts that we can't seem to get the hang of.

let's just flip a coin

Perhaps I was too quick to dismiss those Abrahamic pagan tribes. I was reading lately about Carthage and they were talking about the legend of Hercules and how he was a figure knocking around during the bronze age and not exclusive to the Greeks, so maybe it was something like that for Abraham.

I used to be one of those more militant atheists, like the guys who want to take In God we trust off our coins, but anymore what I think is what the hell, how does that hurt me? I still don’t like things like public prayers because I think they are coercive. Of course you can just stand there and whistle Dixie, but then everybody is going to think there is something wrong with you. And those Christians (because it is always some form of Christian who wants to pray), can pray anytime they want.

And while I’m on the subject what is the purpose of prayer? To ask God Who has set up the whole cosmos to change His plan because you don’t want it to rain tomorrow? To commune with Him somehow? Wouldn’t He rather you were fighting satan than standing around with your hands in front of your face?

About my usage of the term church: When I am talking olden days I mean the Catholic church, in present day I guess I mean all churches because I don’t think there is that much difference between any of them.

I don’t get the benefit of believing in god, but I think it’s better to believe in god and not go to church like you, then to be a Unitarian and not believe in god, but still go to church. I never liked going to church. Mostly it is the dressing up. Who are these guys who are always telling us to dress up because somehow it makes us look more ‘professional’? A pox on their houses.

I like your axiomatic approach to deism. I don’t agree with your axiom, but I can’t prove it false either, so as long as you proceed logically from there I guess that puts you in a pretty good place. But if god is supreme and can do whatever he wants, why does he need people to do him favors, why doesn’t he just do it himself? And just because he is the supreme creator, how does it follow that we have to obey him?

I’m not sure that the majority was any wiser in the past than it is now. What if we went back in history and instead of voting, replaced every election with a toss of a coin between the two main candidates?

Abraham, Father of Nations

I seem to remember that was the title of the article about Abraham that National Geographic ran some time ago. They said Abraham was a central character in Middle East folklore long before the Bible or the Koran was written, and that lots of different tribes claimed to be his descendants. They also said that he was probably a composite character because nobody could have done everything that he was supposed to have done in his lifetime, even if he lived more than a century as the Bible claims. It's possible that Abraham represents a whole tribe or clan that left Mesopotamia and struck out on its own.

I guess I got the idea of "organized Atheism" from all the lawsuits that have been filed over the years about keeping religion out of the government and the schools. I figured there must be something like the ACLU that was behind it all. I guess you're right, though, there isn't one big Atheist Church, just there isn't one big Deist Church. I usually call myself a "self styled Deist" just in case there really is a Deist Church somewhere that I wouldn't want to join. That's one thing I find attractive about Deism, you get to believe in God, but you don't have attend church, give them your money, or sing in the choir. By the way, you frequently refer to "the church", like there was only one. I know that the Catholics do that, but Protestants don't usually. Of course there's lots of churches in the world, and everybody who has similar beliefs to one or more them isn't necessarily a card carrying member. Some of them don't even keep track of their membership, the Muslims for one.

Unlike the members of some other religions, Deists do not claim to know exactly what God wants. Its all based on logical speculation. We start out with the "given" that God is the creator and supreme intelligent being of the universe. We then postulate that God can do anything He wants, so it is logical that everything He has made is what He wanted to make. Since everything changes over time, either spontaneously or in response to external influence, we surmise that must be what God wants it to do. Since humans have the ability to change things more than any other species, we figure that God must want us to do a lot of the changing. Of course, any god in his right mind would want us to change things for the better, not for the worse. Since God doesn't tell us what's better and what's worse, we suppose that He wants us to figure it for ourselves. The fact that people disagree about stuff like that is a problem. Thomas Paine, one of our Founding Fathers, believed that the best way to settle our differences was majority rule. That might have been true in 1776, but it doesn't work anymore because nowadays the majority is stupid. Of course, the minority is stupid too, so minority rule won't work either. So you see, we certainly don't claim to know all the answers, but we're working on it.

religion is positive, atheism is negative

I don’t think the church’s monopoly on literacy was because they discouraged it in anybody else, who like you said, were not particularly interested in it. But if you happened to be a scholarly type there was nowhere to go but the church. Literacy doesn’t do you any good if there is nobody else around to be literate with. Besides copying the bible and religious writings over and over the church also needed literacy to run their empire.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of atheists. There are the guys who think about it and reason things out, and come to the conclusion that there is no god, and then there are the natural born skeptics who pretty much don’t believe anything anybody tells them. Back then I think that anybody that was of a learned bent was a member of the clergy, and if he came to the conclusion that there was no god, he knew enough to keep it to himself to keep his job, and the natural born skeptic was likely a peasant and didn’t know how to read or write.

Atheism used to be a term thrown around to mean anybody who didn’t follow your religion. The Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists all called each other atheists. Guys like Spinoza, whose philosophy was abstract were called atheists, even though they didn’t deny god, they just made him a cosmic marshmallow. Maybe the turn of the century was when people first started openly calling themselves atheists. There was a kind of god is dead furor in the early sixties, but that had nothing to do with the hippies. The hippies were basically new agers or maybe pagan, but they were certainly not atheists. There is no organized atheism. There may be organizations composed of atheists, but they hardly include all atheists. Atheism is not, contrary to what many claim, like a religion. A religion is positive, and atheism is negative.

There were no pagans who claimed Abraham. These pagans you speak of were likely sects of the Abrahamic religions who were declared pagans by the more orthodox believers.

How do you know what the story of Abraham means? It was written thousands of years ago, by some stranger who lived in times much different than ours? Oh I’m sorry, I see you said, that you think it means so and so. Sometimes I don’t read what you write closely enough, my bad. Anyway that is one of the things I like about the bible, the stories that can be used for examples to make some point.

Authority and rebellion are in everything. Everyone is a rebel when they want to overthrow the king, and when they become the king they they become the authority. It’s not the authority of the church that makes it closed minded, it is the fact that it claims to know pretty much everything that is knowable, and any new thing can only be explained in its own terms, like Marxism, Freudism, many other isms.

Oh you deists, you are as bad as the agnostics, no I take that back, nobody is as bad as the agnostics. But you deists, and correct me if I’m wrong, believe that god doesn’t take much of a hand in the affairs of the world, and doesn’t talk to you, but then you claim to know what he wants. How do you know if he doesn’t talk to you. And then if you figure it out by talking among yourselves, what do you need god for?

Authority and Rebellion

I don't think that the church's monopoly on literacy during the Middle Ages came about because the church leadership wanted to control it and keep it from others. I think it was more likely that nobody else was interested in literacy at the time. The nobility didn't need it to hack on each other with their swords, and the peasants didn't need it to hack on the ground with their primitive tools. The church people needed it so that they could read the Bible and make copies of it before the originals wore out. The type of paper they had in those days didn't last long, and the only way to make copies was with a quill pen. This kept lots of people busy, and they probably thought it was a pretty good job compared to what the nobility and the peasantry were doing for a living.

I don't think there were many Atheists in those days. I always thought that Atheism was invented in the 1960s by rebellious youths who just wanted to aggravate their parents. I wondered what would happen when all those Atheists grew up and had children of their own. What would their children do to express their rebelliousness? Would they all become holy rollers? I think that some of them did, because the traditional religions have lost membership in our lifetimes, while the holy rollers have prospered and proliferated.

The story about Abraham almost sacrificing his son has been around for a long time. In addition to the Jews and the Muslims, I understand that several Pagan cultures in the Middle East claim Abraham as their patriarch, or at least they did before the Muslims exterminated and/or assimilated them. I think the story is supposed to teach you that you should blindly obey God and, if you do, He won't let you really do anything wrong, but will stop you just in the nick of time. If you think that God was playing games in that one, you should read the book of Job, where God makes a bet with Satan that Job will remain loyal no matter what He does to him. Of course, the god we know would never do something like that, but the gods of the Mesopotamians did stuff like that all the time. This leads me to believe that the Israelites brought stories like that with them from Mesopotamia when they set off in search of the Promised Land.

Yes, most religions are all about authority and telling people what to do, but they also are about rebellion. Christianity started out as the radical fringe group of the Roman establishment. As soon as they became the Roman establishment, they tried to suppress the other radical fringe groups, with varying degree of success. Just about the time they figured they had everybody under control, the Protestant Reformation broke out. Throughout most of human history, the people who rebelled against established religions were people who wanted to establish different religions in their place. I don't think you can find any reference to organized Atheism until about the 20th Century.

I don't think that the Deist beliefs about human nature preclude further discussion or inquiry. We talk about stuff like that all the time. Just saying that something comes from God does not mean we understand what we're supposed to do with it. Since God doesn't talk to us, we have to talk to each other if we want to figure that out.                       
                      






 

dancing on the head of a pin or submitting to the crucible

Certainly Christianity has had a big influence in Western Civ. If you read one of those books that give you a capsule of western philosophers, there is maybe a thousand years, from the collapse of Rome to the early Renaissance when all the philosophers were men of the cloth. I used to just skip them with a sneer of contempt. What did they know? They didn’t even know that there wasn’t a god for Chrissake.

But the church had a firm grip on literacy, and anybody who wanted to know how to read and write or have any access to books had to be a member of the church. And even though they talked a lot about god, they were still tackling issues of the nature of good and evil, truth and untruth, that are big issues in philosophy.

I wonder about the atheists of the day. Surely there were some, but I guess it would be dangerous to say so out loud, and certainly nobody was going to print anything like that.

But what to make of the bible? Some think it is the unerring word of god, written by men, but under the influence of the holy spirit, but still, hard for us mortals to figure out what it means. Again if he wanted us to do something or behave in some way, why didn’t he just tell us in plain language? Others think the bible is just a miscellany of old books collected over the centuries, some left out, some left in, almost randomly selected. Of course I am one of these people, and so I think what difference does it make what it says? I would no more let it influence my life than I would an Ouija board of a fortune cookie.

But I agree it is good to know, it is a big part of our history. People who believed it had a big influence on our history. And it does have a certainly literary lilt, and there are all those little stories that everybody knows just because they are in the popular culture, and you can use them as examples of some kind of point you are trying to make. What is with that thing where he wanted Abraham to kill his son? Should Abraham have said no? Was god just playing some practical joke?

I’m not sure that religion is an attempt to try to understand the universe. Maybe in its early stages when there are a lot of ideas floating around, but once it gets a firm hold on things, it is just the guys at the top telling you what to believe and what not to believe. That’s why any kind of search for knowledge was stifled in Europe for those thousand years I mentioned earlier, and the muslims had a pretty good run as far as science and philosophy until their religion became calcified. The hardest guy to teach anything is the guy who knows everything.

See, it’s like I keep asking why do humans have this urge for fairness, and you say it’s part of god’s grand design, so what the hell, that’s the end of the discussion right there. Instead of doing something like studying other animals who exhibit altruism, and seeing how this increases their chances of growing to maturity and passing on their genes, and maybe learning something, you just turn to god and say thanks for that, because we all know he likes to be thanked, but our knowledge doesn’t get any bigger. I suppose you could ponder why god gave us fairness, but we already know that we can’t understand him, so it’ like talking about angels dancing on the head of a pin.

God and Religion

I have always been interested in religion, ever since my Catholic neighbors, who were learning their catechism at the time, told me that I was going to Hell because I wasn't Catholic. Then, when I started attending Elsdon, I heard a totally different version of the story. I started reading the Bible at an early age, but it seemed to raise more questions than it answered, so I started reading other books and articles on the subject. Somewhere along the line I came to the conclusion that all those different accounts probably had a certain amount of truth in them, but that none of them were 100%.

I still think that what the Bible has to say is important, at least as important as the works of Plato and the other dead Greeks, and certainly more important than Shakespeare. People quote Shakespeare all the time, but I don't think anybody considers him to be a god or prophet. All this stuff is part of our cultural and literary heritage, and offers insights into human nature, both past and present. Whether or not they are religious themselves, most historians will tell you that some knowledge of religion and mythology is essential to the understanding of human history. Religion is more than just a set of rules and regulations, it represents man's attempt to make sense out of things that he doesn't understand, and to become empowered by an association with the source of all power. Nowadays we have science for that, but it wasn't always so and, even today, many people are suspicious of science. I suppose you could think of religion as kind of a proto science, part of man's eternal search for knowledge and truth.

Deists believe in God, but not religion. They believe that the best way to understand the will of God is by observing His works. I suppose you could consider Deism to be a transitional phase between religion and science in that respect. Since all things come from God, it's reasonable to assume that everything that is here is here because God wants it here. That doesn't necessarily mean that God wants it here forever, just that He wants it here for the present. We don't really know why God wants it here, or how long He wants it to remain here, but we believe that, if God wants something changed, He wants us to change it. If He doesn't want it changed, all our efforts will be in vain and, sooner or later, we will figure that out and move on to something else.

The human quest for fairness is probably part of this grand design. It's human nature to try to improve things, and there's probably a reason for that. Maybe we are a species in training. Maybe God is waiting to see how we handle the challenges He has given us before He moves us up to the next level, whatever that may be.

all roads lead to politics

I never know where you stand on god. It seems like sometimes you believe in the deist god, sometimes a god that wants us to treat the land well, sort of a happy hunting ground kind of guy but a little vaguer, and you are always quoting the bible as if what it says is important.

If fairness is a human concept, and there is a god, surely god put it there, since he is god after all. And a lot of people believe all goodness comes from god, he is the epitome of goodness. If you are doing good, you are right with god, no?

From what I’ve read of Karen Armstrong, popular writer on religion, originally the various gods were gods of specific tribes and the tribes had to appease these gods or else bad shit happened to them. But other than being appeased the gods didn’t concern themselves with the behaviors of their followers. Be good, be bad, they didn’t care as long as the offering was on the altar. Judaism was the first to include good and evil in its agenda. Not only did you have to have the offering on the altar on time, but you had to treat your brother right. Unless your brother was not Jewish in which case fuck him, as a matter of fact Jehovah himself would help you topple the walls of his village and kill the guy and take everything he had.

Still it was a step forward in the advance of morality. I suppose Christianity, as founded by Paul, broadened the population you had to be nice to beyond Jews. You had to be nice to everybody. But as Christianity got more organized and got to have an army, you only had to be nice to other Christians, unless they weren’t your kind of Christians in which case they were heretics, and you needn’t feel any qualms about getting out the thumb screws.

I’m roughly equating being fair with being good, and it always seemed odd to me that if you just obeyed god you were doing the right thing. If god wanted you to do something why didn’t he just come out and tell you instead of having these other guys tell you? And what if god wanted you to do something unfair, like sacrifice your son? Should you do that? I always thought there was some disconnect between doing what you thought was right and obeying some all powerful creator just because. Is it too much to ask that god be fair?

But there he is willy nilly stuffing them souls like olives one after another and some land in a good place and others in not such a good place, and is that fair? No, but what are you gonna do? Clearly the stronger, better-looking, and smarter you are the farther you are going to go in life, nothing to be done about that. But what about two guys born equally endowed but one into a rich family, and another into a poor family, and the one gets to go to college and the other has to work in the fields? That’s something we can do something about, and we should, and that gets into my whole political agenda. It’s kind of odd, you start out talking about something philosophical, and next thing you know you are talking politics.

I think there is an instinct to fairness in humans. When we see it we are upset, and think something should be done about it. I think that instinct comes from us being such a social animal, and it’s a bad social structure for some to have a lot and some to have a little. See there I am back at my political agenda. Do you think some people are more political than others? Some people never want to talk about politics. What is with them?

Those ideas that pop into your head is no big deal. I was just trying to distinguish them from déjà vu. Déjà vu is like you walk into a bar and some girl winks at you, and you immediately think that this has happened to you before, but you can’t remember how or when. But sometimes you are just riding on a train and the memory of that bar and the wink pops into your head, and again you don’t remember how or when, and maybe it was a dream, or something you saw in a movie, or maybe it was just some kind of brain fart.