"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"

I wish I could tell you that I made that up myself, but I don't think I did. I seem to remember it was the title of a movie I saw, but the title didn't seem to have a lot to do with the story line. Maybe the movie people didn't make it up either, maybe they were quoting somebody else, but I don't know who. Anyway, I thought it would be an appropriate title for this blog. People have always associated emotions with the heart, and they still do, even though we now know that emotions originate in the brain. Maybe it's because emotions can make your heart beat faster, probably to prepare you for flight or fight.

When I said that I left the Christian faith, all I meant was that I stopped going to church. I still believe in God, although I'm not so sure about Jesus Christ. He kind of lost me when He promised those people that He was coming back to establish God's Kingdom on Earth in their lifetimes, which He never did. To be fair, though, I don't know for a fact that He said that in so many words. He may have been misquoted or the original meaning might have been lost in translation. That's why I try to keep an open mind about things like that, you never know if the version you heard is what really happened.

Faith is sometimes defined as believing in things not seen, and this is supposed to be a good thing. Truth is, you can't always believe what you do see, without trying to believe in what you don't see. Perceptions are not always reliable, logic is not always reliable, but emotions are the least reliable thing of all. We ignore our emotions at our peril, but that doesn't mean we should blindly follow them either. It's all a balancing act, what we think we perceive, what we think we ought to perceive, and how we feel about both of them.

I guess I was being kind of flippant when I said that the meaning of life was life. What the hell did I mean by that? I think I meant that the meaning of life is to be found in life itself, not in some pie in the sky philosophy. As much as I take pride in my cognitive and communicative skills, I do believe it is possible to overthink or over communicate some issues. Sometimes it's best to just be, and let it be. Of course you can err in the opposite direction too, another balancing act.

According to the Bible, God has, on occasion, spoken verbally to certain people, but most religious people will tell you that God speaks in your heart. I used to believe that too, but I eventually came to the conclusion that, when something appears to come from your heart, it's probably an emotion, which really comes from your brain. If you are thinking evil thoughts, you will likely have evil emotions. If you are thinking good thoughts, you are more likely to have good emotions. You can control that to some degree. Sometimes thoughts just pop into your head, but you can decide whether or not you want them to stay there.

Jesus told his disciples that the way to tell a true prophet from a false prophet is by his behavior. He said something about an evil tree bearing evil fruit and a good tree bearing good fruit. When evaluating your thoughts and emotions, it's a good idea to consider what the consequences would be if you actually acted on them. If you think that God or somebody is telling you to walk into a church and shoot a bunch of people at random, common sense should tell you that's wrong. No god worthy of the name would tell you to do something like that, so it must be coming from Satan, who is the personification of evil in popular culture. Even if you don't believe in the literal existence of either God or Satan, common sense should still tell you that it's a bad idea coming from a bad place.

Oh yeah, the "lonely hunter" thing. What I think I hear you saying is that you sometimes get the notion that life should be about more than eating Italian beef and painting pretty pictures that don't look exactly like their subjects. Well, maybe it is, but maybe the meaning you seek is within those sandwiches and paintings, or the potted garden on your balcony, or the blogs you write for the institute. Maybe it's really within your own heart, or mind, or whatever. All you need to do is grab hold of it, jerk it out of there, and hold it up to the light for all the world to see.

what nothing means shit means

I think the faith they are talking about is something more inward, not a faith in the people who run the churches, but just feeling the presence of god, like the warm breath of spring I suppose.  There is kind of a disconnect there, ok god is in your heart, got that, but what does that have to do with the Rev Billy Bob and what he is preaching, and whether he represents god anymore than the Rev Bob Billy down the street?  And of course I always wonder, how do you know that that guy in your heart isn't the antichrist?  Isn't the antichrist supposed to be a smooth talking devil that an ordinary mortal can't tell between him and the son of god, so how do you know that that warm breath of spring is just a distant breeze from the fiery lake?

I think the problem is the good book, I mean it is just a book after all, just a bunch of books written back in the bronze age by a bunch of guys who didn't know very much, and then added to by some other guys, and nobody is exactly sure of who they were and the whole matter looked over by the descendents of the empire and picked over and, well a whole ragbag.

To me the odd thing about protestantism is the way the book is so revered, like this is the whole religion in a book of about the size of Gone with the Wind.  Why don't they instead of calling it the good book, call it a pretty good book, but there is more to the religion than that? 

But you know i still don't understand why you questioned Christianity.  If people claim to believe in it when they don't know what's in it, and don't seem to be trying to find out, how is that any skin off Beagle's nose?  What does what other people are doing have to do with your faith?

How did you come about your faith?  Well I imagine you just grew up on it, and everybody around you believed so you believed it in the same way that you believed in Santa Claus and that Wanzer on milk is like sterling on silver.  And you know as a kid you realize that you don't know much and that adults know a lot and you figure you can trust them because they keep you fed and roofed and from being run over by a truck.  So even when what they are doing seems a little screwy, you figure they most know what they are doing. 

But the older you get and the more you learn, you realize they don't really know all the much and often they are guessing.  You know even as I was ranting and railing in my hippie days, I kind of felt like all those grey haired guys in suits maybe really knew what they were doing, but now that I am a grey haired guy I realize they don't know anymore than I do.

So was it something like that for you, that you realized the church elders didn't know as much as they claimed to know?


Maybe some things can be more meaningful than other things.  That Italian beef has meaning enough as a meal, and it has the added bonus of it is all good, maybe the only bad thing is that you eventually become full and you can't eat anymore.  But I guess art is more meaningful to me, stays with me longer than just mealtime.

The Italian beef is a part of the world of the senses, but that art thing is not quite, it has elements of well I don't know what, but it seems like it's more than the pieces, yes I like the sound of that, more than its parts, more than the sum of its parts, that's the way you normally hear the phrase.  Ok, if I break down my art experience, Lucinda singing Pineola, everything in it is from the world of the senses, the sound, the words, Lucinda herself, but when I consider each one of the parts separately there is something missing, so that part of it must be from somewhere outside of the world of the senses.

That's what I think people want, particularly the questers, something outside of the world of the senses, something more than what they see when they look out the window.  In a way science can do that.  You can't see microbes, atoms, gluons, the speed of light.  But this is kind of like just more of the same, what people want to see are other people, maybe not people exactly, but things that are alive, god, devils, angels, spirits, something we can relate to, because don't we relate to animals by pretending they are people?

I don't think there is anything living out there, or anything living that we can ever know about, which is the same thing.  There is just matter and energy and the laws of both, and none of that cares about what we do.  That's what I mean by nothing means shit.

But that seems a little bleak, even to a committed atheist like myself.  I like to think there is something.  I don't know what I want that something to be, but I get a little bit of it listening to Lucinda, and dreaming a bit I suppose, even though if I had to go down to the place where I would be betting money, I would bet that nothing means shit.  So deep down I know it is an illusion of meaning but I like it anyway.

Faith, Hope, and Clarity

Everybody who is religious says that you're supposed to have faith. I think they mean faith in God, but everything we know about God comes from other people, so it's more like they want you to have faith in these other people who claim to know more about God than you do. Then there's faith in the Bible, but the Bible was written by a whole bunch of different people over a period of centuries, and we're not even sure that everything that is supposed to be in there is in there. Who knows what has been lost in translation? But that's not what turned me away from Christianity. What caused me to question the faith of our fathers is the way people claim to believe in it when many of them don't even know what's in it, and don't seem to be trying to find out.

Like I said before, Elsdon was more of a social club than it was a religious institution. On the other extreme, you have you're fundamentalists, who are so religious that they border on fanaticism. They claim to believe that the Bible is literally true, every single word of it, and doesn't need to be interpreted. But then you quote them the part where Jesus says the Apocalypse is coming in this generation, and they say that He meant the generation that is alive today. Well, people have been saying that for 2000 years and it hasn't happened in any of the generations that have come and gone in that time. Be that as it may, as soon as they say that, when Jesus said one thing, He meant another thing, they are interpreting. Then you've got your Catholics, and we all know what they're like. None of these people are necessarily bad people, and I would rather associate with them than some other people I can think of, but they don't seem to know what they really believe and where it came from. So how are these nice people who don't know what they're talking about supposed to teach me anything about it?

I think Rev. Anderson had similar concerns, but I'm not sure because he didn't say that in so many words. Of course, this was a guy who studied for the ministry, and one would assume that he took his faith more seriously than the average church goer. His decision to go back to school and learn more about it suggests that he wasn't so sure that he really knew what he thought he should know, or even that he wasn't so sure he believed what he thought he believed. Too bad he's not here now, we could ask him. He wasn't that much older than us, so he might still be alive. Alan Anderson is a pretty common name, but I wonder if it would be possible to track him down on the internet.

Can Italian beef add meaning to your life? Sure, why not? If I can find meaning in hunting, fishing, and forestry, why couldn't you find it Italian beef? I would have thought it more likely to be found in art, but I still don't think I understand what you have told me about your art. I find your statements about "illusion of meaning" and "nothing means shit" particularly perplexing. Perhaps you would like to elaborate on that theme.

john, revelator or sorehead, oh and that poet fella

You know I am no bible scholar, but I do pick up stuff here and there, and one thing I have picked up is that many scholars don't think that John the revelator and John the disciple are the same guy.  I believe they have traced him down to some sorehead somewhere in the eastern hinterlands who had a thing against Rome and the whole thing is a screed against the empire.  All those arcane numbers and animals are believed to be things that would have a meaning for people living at the time, but are now lost to us.

And I think the book of revelations barely made it into the bible.  There were all these other books, like Judah and Jubilee that got tossed on the scrap heap, and Revelations just barely snuck in.  Well of course that doesn't matter because God was overseeing the whole deal and He made sure it got in.

Are you saying that the fact that nowhere in the bible does it say that we rise up from the grave and go up or down soon afterwards, was responsible for you drifting from your faith.  So what, you were only in the game because you wanted to go to heaven, and then when somebody pointed out that that wasn't guaranteed in the bible you decided to quit the game?   I don't get it.  If faith is the name of the game than why did Rev Anderson need to learn more in divinity school?


I don't think I understand your distinction between meaning of life and meaning in life.  Maybe you are talking about the meaning of life or all humankind, and I guess the meaning in life for Joe Sixpack which might be different from Joe Eightpack's.  Or maybe you mean the difference between short term and long term goals.  It seems to me that a cruiser would find meaning in life in an Italian beef sandwich, where the climber would find it in owning the Italian beef store, and the warrior would be happy if Italian beefs were handed out equitably to everybody, and the quester might find it in a map of all the Italian beef shops.

Well I have been thinking about the meaning of life lately.  I am a big fan of Lucinda Williams, and one day I was researching her on the web and I learned that her song Pineola, was based on the funeral of this poet guy who Lucinda had a fling with, and who committed suicide at age  and I looked up the guy, Frank Stanford, and it turned out that he had written, among other things, a poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You which is 542 pages of line after line with no breaks and no punctuation.  I read a couple pages at random and it was pretty good, but really, am I going to read 542 pages of that?

Well you know I go on about how art has nothing to do with the truth, that in fact it is the enemy of the truth, making up things so that there is an illusion of truth (or meaning, these words can be used interchangeably because we are not sure exactly what we are talking about at this point), so that nobody has to face the hard fact that nothing means shit.

But it's kind of like you and the bible, I sort of believe that, and I sort of don't.  I kind of like that illusion of meaning.  There is Lucinda with her angry/sad voice singing about tossing a handful of dirt on his grave, and there is the music, the composition that she wrote, there is that whole human thing about death and burial, there is their fling, there is the poet himself, from the size of his output he must have been scribbling away most of his waking hours, and why put that bullet into his heart?

See there is all that, all rolled up into some big messy ball, and quite a sight it is, but if you begin to pull at its strings, well burial is burial, Lucinda is Lucinda, none of these things mean much in themselves, but when you put them altogether, well it feels like meaning, it feels like some deep current is going through you. 

So that's what I think of meaning in art.  It's nothing I can prove or anything like that, and it's just meaning in art, which is maybe not the same thing as meaning in general, but that's just the path I wandered down this morning.

The Here and the Hereafter

It seems to me that the meaning of  life and meaning in life are two different things. The meaning of  life implies that we are here to fulfill some kind of holy mission as part of some grand design or plan, while meaning in life gives us a reason to get up in the morning. When people complain that their life has no meaning, it implies that they are just going though the motions with no clear direction or goal. The meaning of life is primarily the domain of philosophers and theologians, while almost anybody can find meaning in their lives if they want to. It would seem that things like Italian beefs and other temporal pleasures have little to do with either type of meaning, I would classify them as diversions. Nothing wrong with that if that's all you want to do but, if you want something meaningful, I don't think you'll find it there.

What many Christians think they believe about Heaven is not consistent with what the Bible says about it. In the Old Testament, Heaven is the domain of God and his angels. The only mortal I remember going to Heaven was Elijah, and he is, or was, supposed to come back some day. Satan and his angels used to live there two, but they tried to pull a coup and take over, which resulted In them getting kicked out. Well that part is actually in the New Testament book of Revelation ("Apocalypse" in Greek), but it's not clear if the author (John the Revelator) means Satan's rebellion and subsequent expulsion have already happened in the past or are predicted to happen in the future. If it's ancient history, it seems like it should have been mentioned in the Old Testament, but I don't think it was. At any rate, Satan was not kicked out of Heaven into Hell, that comes later. He was sent to inhabit the Earth for a thousand years, although that's probably an  allegorical number. During this time he either has, or will, lead as many people astray as he can. Meanwhile, the Christians are charged with recruiting as many people as they can to their cause.

The Book of Revelation reads like a surrealistic nightmare, which may well have been its inspiration. It's full of cryptic symbolism, which may or may not have made sense to the people of the time, and theologians have been arguing over its interpretation ever since.  The bottom line seems to be that, eventually, Jesus will come back to Earth and judge the living and the resurrected dead. Satan and his angels, along with all the converts he has recruited during his time on Earth, will be cast into Hell once and all. A relatively small number of the good guys, known as "The Elect", will float up to Heaven, and the rest of us will inherit God's Kingdom on Earth.

Most of the remarks about the afterlife that have been attributed to Jesus seem to be consistent with John the Revelator's version, minus all the cryptic symbolism. Jesus never wrote anything that we know of, so all of His quotations come from secondary sources, some of which knew Him personally, and some of which did not. John the Revelator is believed to be the same John who wrote the Gospel of John, and the same John who was an actual disciple of Jesus. If so, I don't know why he had to experience a revelatory dream or hallucination to understand the Resurrection. It seems like Jesus would have already told him all that he needed to know about the subject.

I think it's unlikely that all the comments Jesus ever made about the Resurrection are quoted in the Bible, but one of them that is predicts that the event is going to happen within the lifetime of some of His disciples: "This generation will not pass away before all these things have come to pass." Christians took this literally for centuries, but were finally forced to confront the reality that it hadn't happened according to schedule. What they seem to have done is reinterpret the prophesy. The fundamentalists still believe, even unto this day, that, when Jesus said "this generation", he meant "our generation", and each new generation expects it to happen in their lifetimes. The non-fundamentalists seem  to have put the Apocalypse on the back burner and  focused their attention on the personal salvation of individual people. Although they regularly recite the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene creed, both of which refer to "the resurrection of the body" and the eventual return of Jesus to "judge the quick and the dead", if you ask most parishioners about it they will tell you that they expect their soul to leave their body and float up to Heaven immediately after they die. This notion may have come from the Greeks or the Persians but, wherever it came from, it wasn't the Bible.

This discrepancy was first brought to my attention by Rev. Anderson at an MYF meeting, but it took years for it to really sink in and, after being confirmed by additional research, lead to my drifting away from the Christian faith. The last I heard of Rev. Anderson, he had quit his job at Elsdon and gone back to divinity school, believing that he needed to learn more than he already knew about this stuff before trying to teach it to others.

Italian beefs

I'm kind of with you on that, about the meaning of life.  What's the big deal?  Why does there have to be something behind the curtain?  You wake up and you do this or that, somewhere along the line you eat an Italian beef sandwich, wash it down with a pale ale, maybe watch a little crime tv and trundle off to slumberland.  Why does there need to be more than that?

I do seem to harp on Italian beefs don't I?  I'm guessing they probably don't have them up there on the top of Michigan.  Do you miss them?  Probably you don't miss anything about Chicago now that you have the freehold to roam wild and free in.  What kind of food do you guys eat up there?  I guess a lot of meat.  Surely you have bbq, but what kind?  The sweet southern or the smoky western, or maybe something different.  Is there a northern bbq?  We never hear about it.

Well the thing about Italian beefs is to me they symbolize the pleasures of the flesh.  Those eastern religions that neither of us knows much about, but doesn't stop us from talking about them, seem to be disdainful of the material world, and there is a strong strain of that in Christianity too.  There is the idea that in heaven we will all be kind of clouds and there will be no eating or fucking, because we won't need to, but won't we want to? 

Maybe I should pause here to ask Beaglesonia's resident bible expert what does the good book say about heaven?  I remember something about there being many houses, and I think I gold was mentioned once or twice, but I am not sure, I never spent any time in bull sessions with the Young Methodist Fellowship.  And by the way whatever did you guys do?  I assume it was mostly some way to meet girls, but nice Methodist girls.

I did some wiki research on John Wesley Harding and Methodism.  I have to say they came out pretty good, in favor of peace and love and the common man, and a total rejection of that awful predeterminism.  I do believe that John Wesley did come from a predeterminist background, but I always suspected those Calvinists, if they ever let themselves think about things, thought it was kind of screwy.

You know I see myself as a pleasure cruiser, a guy who looks over the railings of my luxury liner and laughs at those wacky questers looking under every rock, and those humorless warriors fighting their endless battles for what?  But now that I am pretty old, I find myself thinking that maybe I should have done something, left some message, and I suppose there is still time Brother.

What I should do is go through the whole blog and distill only the finest wisdom and phrase it just so, and present it to humanity who will bang their foreheads and think Damn, why didn't we think of this, and live forever, well until the sun turns red giant, in peace and prosperity, toasting Beaglesonia, before they eat their Italian beefs.


I was thinking about those shamans.  And you know me Beagles, I don't believe in no holy book or wisdom of the east and surely not much of what I imagine those shamans were peddling.  So I kind of assumed that those shamans didn't either, they were just hoodwinking the common man for their own benefit.  But upon further reflection they probably believed in what they were peddling, they probably thought they were doing a good thing, healing the sick, providing household tips, and then there was that meaning thing. 

See I don't know this, but I think people have this hunger for meaning, for thinking that surely life is more than the next Italian beef (like I said even I, a proud dedicated pleasure cruiser, am beginning to have doubts in my old age), and it's hard to say what exactly meaning means, but if there was somebody else, more powerful, wiser, and preferably invisible, so that you could never see Him stub his toe, why you could just dedicate your life to Him, and then that hunger for meaning thing would be filled and you could enjoy your Italian beef with a clear conscience.

Meaning, Schmeaning

I don't know why this has to be so complicated. The meaning of life is life. Ipso facto, case closed. It's the meaning of death that's complicated. We know that we are alive, and our natural instincts tell us that we should try to stay alive as long as possible. Then there are the people who commit suicide, but that's not normal, that's an aberration. I can understand somebody who is in a lot of pain wanting to end it all, although most of them don't. I suppose being mentally ill is a lot like being in pain, so maybe that's it. Most of us, though we might bitch and complain about it, still prefer life to death.

I don't know how long man has been contemplating his own mortality. We're pretty sure that the early Hebrews didn't worry about it all that much but, at some point, they started anticipating a mass resurrection when all the dead would rise up and go vote for Mayor Daley, or something like that. After that still hadn't happened centuries after it had been predicted, people began to shift their focus to their own personal afterlife, which they supposed would be in Heaven, not on Earth as had been previously supposed.

Speaking of dead people voting, I saw on the news the other evening that some kind of audit was recently done and it was discovered that millions of dead people in this country are collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits. See, that's what happens when you let dead people vote, before long they are voting themselves all kinds of benefits. The next thing you know, they'll be running for congress, or even the presidency. Don't laugh, stranger things than that have happened!.....Now where was I?

Funny you should mention Jean Auel, I had forgotten her name, but she was indeed the author of the series I was talking about. Of course it was fiction, but I like my fiction to at least be plausible. The only part I remember that was patently absurd was the way she had one woman doing all those heroic things in one lifetime. That's probably why some of those old Biblical heroes lived for centuries, there was no way they could have done all the stuff the were supposed to have done in a normal lifetime. There was another series like that, but it was about Aleutian Islanders. This one was written by Sue Harrison, a Michigan girl. What she did was collect a bunch of Native American legends from the Pacific Northwest and then put her own spin on them. This one was almost too realistic for my taste, featuring a lot of gratuitous graphic brutality, but I found the other parts interesting. You're right, though, we don't really know a lot about Stone Age people, but we can speculate based on the evidence we do have.

I agree that shamans were probably more observant than the average cave dweller. They also would likely score pretty high on a modern I.Q. test, providing that it was adjusted for cultural differences. They must have passed their accumulated knowledge on to apprentices before they died, and the data base grew from one generation to the next.  They didn't have writing yet, so they organized the data into stories and chants to make it easier to remember and teach to others. That might also have been the purpose of those cave paintings, although they could just as likely have been the product of unemployed artists with too much time on their hands.

I think they had a sense of morality in those days, although it was probably different from ours. They were probably more communal than we are today, so the focus would be on cooperation and sharing. They may have believed that good behavior would get them into the Happy Hunting Grounds when they died, but it's just as likely that the more imminent prospect of being banished from the tribe for their sins would provide sufficient incentive for them to walk the straight and narrow path. People must have screwed up occasionally, just as they do today, so there would have to be some way they could repent and redeem themselves. If they kicked everybody who screwed up out of the tribe, there eventually would not have been enough hunters left to bring down those hairy elephants, or enough women folks to cook them.

what is meaning?

I am surprised to hear that about the Elsdon Methodist church MYF.  I wouldn't have suspected it.  Of course that would have been before Martin Luther King decided that Gage and Marquette parks should be integrated and led those marches.  We were both gone from Chicago by then, but I wonder what the hood was like at that time. 

I meant gods in general rather than the Christian god, but speaking of Him, the only reason He had to send His only begotten son to die for us was because He decided to punish all of us, innocent babes not even yet in the womb, for that little garden of Eden incident, so I don't know, what the hell kind of love is that?

I hope those novels you read about stone age societies were not those awful Jean Auel Clan of the Cave Bear books, some of the worst writing I have ever come across, but they were bestsellers, so what do I know?  I think the idea that they were based on archaeological evidence is as valid as a movie being based on a true event. 

I'm pretty sure we don't know anything about the religion of our stone age ancestors.  We have those cave paintings, but we have no idea what their purpose was.  But we do have some hunter gatherers, and I think we can assume that their beliefs are close to those of our distant ancestors. 

I think the way this whole shaman thing starts is almost scientific.  He notices maybe that the last two times fishing was good during a full moon, and decides the tribe should always fish during the full moon.  Well this is what I am thinking, he just notices coincidences, maybe that sick guy ate some of those red berries and then he got better, so maybe they cure whatever the guy had, and if you just go by coincidences you will still be right more than you are wrong, and so he develops some cred.

But I guess gods are a different thing.  Well there are all these mysterious things going on, the river floods and shrinks, the sun rises at different points as the year progresses, so what is going on?  I think it's just natural for the human to believe that the object is somehow alive, so there you go with a river god and a sun god.  But these gods are kind of neutral, all they ask is the proper sacrifice (and of course only the shaman knows the proper sacrifice) and they don't care who gives it or why. 

But spirits are mysterious things, nobody knows where they begin or end, maybe some guy is thinking even then what does it all mean, and eventually they get to having some kind of god who is like the god of the tribe, their local god, their bud.  And since he is their local god, he is going to be partial to them, rather than those other guys who live downstream. 

But I don't think morality comes into it yet.  I think this is just a matter of playing your cards right and getting ahead. 

I'm trying to get my head around the idea of meaning, what is meaning?  Don't you have to know that before you can realize that there ought to be meaning?

Maybe that shaman just stumbles into it, that here is our god and we ought to obey Him, and maybe love Him, because He is our god, period.  And then the rest of the tribe goes gaga over it, because there is meaning, and it doesn't take much effort to think it out.  But it's not like the shaman just makes this up, he probably believes it too because he is just like the rest of the tribe.

Well I don't know, this is all speculation, I am trying to think something out as I am writing it and seeing where it goes.  Speaking of which it is time for me to go, see you tomorrow.

Good and Evil in the Stone Age

If there were any racial issues at Elsdon, I wasn't aware of them. I do remember that Rev. Anderson took the M.Y.F. downtown once to hear Martin Luther King speak. That's right, live and in person. I don't remember what he talked about, but I remember being favorably impressed with the man. We  must have discussed it afterwards, but I don't remember there being any controversy about it. As Christians, we believed it was our duty to love everybody, and I assumed that the rest of the congregation was on the same page. Looking back on it, that might not have been the case. I know that some of the congregants were not particularly fond of Rev. Anderson, but he was popular with the M.Y.F., probably because he wasn't a lot older than we were and seemed to understand our problems.

I think we are supposed to love God because He loves us, not just because He is the boss man. For it is written: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." (John 3-16 RSV) I'm not saying I totally believe that myself, you understand, that's just what it says in the book. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't believe it either. I try to keep an open mind about things like that.

I have read some novels about Stone Age societies. Although they were fictional, they were supposed to be based on archaeological evidence. According to them, good and evil in the Stone Age mostly had to do with the survival of the clan or tribe. All the silly little rituals and taboos that they followed were meant to keep the spirits on their side, so the clan would survive and thrive. The shaman, being smarter than the average cave dweller, may or may not have believed this stuff himself, but he told it to his people for their own good. The hocus pocus stuff was probably rigged, but the shaman knew that it was necessary to put on a good magic show to get and hold people's attention. There were probably some unscrupulous shamans who were just in it for their own power and glory, but it seems like that would have not been beneficial to the tribe, and would have resulted in their ending up on the cull pile of evolution. The headmen also didn't rule just because they could kick the ass of the competition, although that certainly wouldn't have hurt their chances. If it was anything like the Native American cultures, an ineffective leader would usually be abandoned by his followers. It wouldn't be necessary to overthrow him, people would just wander away and find somebody else to follow. You know, that might not be a bad way to run a society today. Has anybody thought of this before?

why bother?

I think they gave us some propaganda about John Wesley (not to be confused with John Wesley Hardin) in Sunday school, but clearly it didn't make much of an impression on me.  The Anglican church was kind of strange ideologically.  Since it was the only church allowed in England it was constantly switching between a more Catholic (without the pope) to a more puritan ideology depending on who was the king and what the aristocrats at the time wanted. 

The Elsdon church was still a Methodist church in the nineties.  When my mother complained that she didn't have enough English speaking friends in the neighborhood, we encouraged her to go to the church.  She went a couple times but it appears she didn't like sitting still and listening any more than I do, probably where I get it.

More recently the building was some kind of African (not African American) church, and the last time I was by there it appeared to be abandoned.  I will look into it during my next trip back to the hood sometime this summer.

The pastor might have allowed Black people into the church of our youth, but I doubt that the congregation would.  Do you remember if the church had a position during the local racial troubles of the sixties?

I think you are right about Elsdon's most prominent doctrine was We Ain't Catholic.  I am sure that is why my family sent us kids there, neither of them had much of a religious upbringing, but they thought maybe the kids should have one, and they didn't know what they were, but they were pretty sure they weren't Catholic.

What I mean by incurious is the way people so seldom question anything, the way it is so hard to get them into any kind of philosophical discussion and then when you do it is apparent they have never thought too much about anything.

Modern day philosophers, well maybe I mean the existentialists since they are the most fun to read about, but they used to get all upset about the lack of meaning in life, I think it was Camus who said the only important issue for philosophy to discuss was why don't we all commit suicide. 

Well that's what I meant by maybe it is more adaptive to not have much curiosity beyond your own job and hobbies, but that is just speculation on my part.

I think of those shamans as more like scientists than religious figures.  They were trying to figure out how things worked and spells and sacrifices probably made as much sense as math and physics to them.  I think they were more interested in what seemed to work than in what is good and evil. 

If you look at those early religions, probably what we call myths these days, they don't seem to have much in the way of morality in them, just my god is stronger than your god and don't cross god or he will mess you up.  See I don't know, the headman would mess you up to if you crossed him, but you weren't expected to love him, you just obeyed him because that was to your mutual benefit. 

So why love god, just because he is the big man?  I've never understood that.

Methodists and Specialists

I'm not sure what the relationship was between Methodists and Calvinists, but I do know that the Methodists never believed in predestination. The Methodist Church spun off of the Anglican Church which, in America, is called the Episcopalian Church. At some point the Methodists broke up into several factions and then, at another point, most of them merged back together. The Free Methodists were one group that never rejoined the flock, and it seems that the African Methodist Episcopalians didn't either. I knew that the Blacks used to have their own church, but I didn't know that they were still separate until I read about the latest mass shooting in South Carolina. According to the newspaper accounts I have read, the church in question is an African Methodist Episcopal church, A.M.E. for short. Maybe they only stayed separate in the South. I never saw any Blacks in Elsdon, but that's probably because no Blacks lived in the neighborhood. If one had showed up, it may have raised a few eyebrows, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have been told to go elsewhere.

When the Elsdon Church building was first erected, it was a Methodist Episcopal Church. You might remember the sign on the outside that said "Elsdon M.E. Church". Since it was cast in concrete and was part of the wall they never bothered to change it after the big merger. The early Methodists would be considered holy rollers today, and some of their doctrine might still be on the books, but nobody pays any attention to that stuff anymore, except the Free Methodists, which is why they never merged back with the mainstream Methodists. I understand that, sometime after I left Chicago, the Elsdon Church either went out of business or moved to the suburbs. My mother told me that the building was converted into a non-denominational community social center which, in  my opinion, is not so far away from what it was when we went there. The impression I had was that most of the congregation didn't care about Methodist doctrine, they just went to Elsdon because it was the only church in the neighborhood that wasn't Catholic.

I find it curious that you say humans are so incurious. Of course, some of them are more curious than others, but I'm pretty sure that it has always been that way. I read somewhere that specialization of labor is one of the main human traits that distinguished our ancient ancestors from the other animals of the forest. Some of them were spear chuckers and some of them were spear makers, which enabled both groups to get really good at what they did for a living. Of course the women were the mothers who kept the home fires burning while the men were out making spears and chucking them at hairy elephants.

The really deep thinkers probably became shamans and medicine men or women. Sometimes one guy held down both jobs, but often there was a shaman, who was usually male, and a medicine person or healer, who was usually female. While the chief or headman was the boss, the shaman was the power behind the throne. Some of his influence was likely due to hocus pocus, but I think most people were happy to trust their spiritual well being to a specialist like the shaman. You've got to chuck a lot of spears to bring down a hairy elephant, but it only takes one good shaman to invoke the aid of the spirits who, if they're pissed at you, can make your spears all miss the mark, which might aggravate the hairy elephant and encourage him to stomp all over you.

what does it all mean? again.

You're right the Babylonians took the Israelites into captivity and Cyrus set them free.  I guess Cyrus was okay as conquerors go.  He did fuck with the Greeks, but the Greeks made some pretty good stories out of that, and finally along came
Alexander and settled the Persian hash, but just for a bit because his empire soon fell apart about the time the sun was rising over my favorite conquerors, the Romans. The Romans did that same plan of letting the conquered keep their religion and their rulers, to a lesser extant so did the Ottomans. 

We just seem to be recapping history here.  I read history all the time, and I have to because it seems like I forget it as soon as I read it.  I've been reading a lot about the early prots.  I wonder where the first Methodists came from.  I think they were renegade Calvinists who didn't like that predestination thing, and were all kind of peace and lovey.  Well I guess Beagles knows about that. 

My youngest sister took up with liberal Methodists in California, and I remember talking to the preacher at my sister's memorial and she was explaining the theology and structure of the Methodists, and I was rather surprised because I had never known they had one.  I thought it was just dress up when you go to church and don't do anything really bad and most likely you will end up in heaven.  Probably sitting in pretty celestial pews but I bet singing from those awful dogeared hymnals.

Where were we?  Life imitating art which imitates life which imitates art.  One supposes that life came first. 

Well here's a thing.  My cats do very well going about eating and sleeping and crapping, no doubts seem to fill their fuzzy little heads.  Likely it was the same for our hunter gatherer forbears, but somewhere it must have occurred to one of them, what does it all mean, and with that the very idea that there was meaning.  Maybe it disturbed his day and his aim was off and he missed with his spear and his family went hungry and died and his sons had no children, but his neighbor it never even occurred to, and his aim was true and his family was fat and his children made many more children and that is why the human of today is so incurious.  What do you think about that, thinking man?

Shooting From the Hip

I got a late start tonight, so this will have to be brief. I can look some of this stuff up later if you want, but tonight I'll be shooting from the hip again.

I think you have the Persians mixed up with the Babylonians. The way I remember it is that, after Solomon's death, the kingdom split into two parts, Israel and Judah, because they couldn't agree on Solomon's successor. Then the Assyrians conquered Israel and trashed the Temple, carrying off the Ark of the Covenant, which was never seen again until Indiana Jones dug it up in the 20th Century, but that's a whole nother story. Some time later, The Babylonians conquered the Assyrians. Israel came with the territory, and the Babylonians subsequently knocked off Judah to make it unanimous. They then rounded up all the Jews that had any kind of leadership potential and carried them back to Babylon in captivity, where they languished for something like 50 or 60 years. It is believed by some historians that most of the Old Testament was put together during this period, being assembled from scraps of parchment and stories told around the campfire. Then Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered the Babylonians and set the captives and their descendants free. He encouraged them to go home and rebuild the Temple, and may have even coughed up some cash to subsidize the project. Some Jews may have went back to Persia with Cyrus, but they were probably ambassadors or something like that, certainly not captives.

Cyrus was like that. He was a kick ass conqueror to be sure, but he was frequently hailed as a liberator by the people he conquered. Coming from Persia, he must have been a Zoroastrian but, by then, the religion had evolved so much that Zarathustra must have been turning over in his grave. Cyrus undoubtedly had a lot to do with that because he never suppressed the religions of his conquered people. Indeed, he believed that all religions, including his own, had some value and encouraged people to take pages out of each other's books. Because of Cyrus and his ilk, there is no such thing as a pure religion, a pure language, a pure culture, or a pure race even unto this very day.

 

why herc rescued promethus

I was reading a book some years ago about the history of languages.  I think there are maybe five or so different major language groups and he traced them back and seemed to be happy at the end that he had traced them all back to one common language, but it was all pretty shaky and I wasn't convinced.  Well languages change all the time, you get a people all talking the same language and then something happens where they get separated and in a couple hundred years they can't understand each other.

So that story about the sons (are they actually called sons?  I can see where that would wreak havoc with the new testament) of god interbreeding with the daughters of men is actually in the bible?  I suppose we never hear about these giants again.  It does seem like it was something that somebody just slipped in while nobody else was looking.  I think a lot of the Persian religion shows up in the early books of the bible and since the Jews were hanging there for awhile you can see how that would happen.

It's interesting these movies come out, and a lot of times you will read the critics come up with comments like that was what the war in Vietnam was like, or that is how life is in the ghetto, and I am always thinking how the hell do they know?  The directors, the critics, the audience, how do they know what the war or the ghetto are like to compare it to? 

I just saw this movie Leviathan, set in Russia.  This guy has his ancestral home and the local party boss decides he wants to build something there, so he condemns the land and offers to pay maybe a third of what it is worth.  The guy has an old army buddy who is now a lawyer in Moscow, and they go through the legal motions but the local law is all in the pocket of the party boss, but the lawyer has dug up some dirt on the party boss and pretends to have the ears of some big shots in Moscow.  The party boss kidnaps the lawyer and gives him a mock execution which sends him scrambling back to Moscow, meanwhile the guy's wife has slept with the lawyer and this caused all kinds of trouble so she commits suicide and then just for the hell of it they charge the guy with murdering his wife and railroad him into a 15 year sentence.

It was a good movie, I like them bleak, and afterwards I went to Rotten Tomatoes to read the reviews.  I was curious as to whether they thought the lawyer had been motivated to help his buddy or was he into it just to sleep with his wife, but all the reviewers were like, see this is how life is in Russia these days, and I was all like what, this could have happened anywhere.  It could have happened in Chicago, though with a little less brutality and certainly less drinking of vodka.

It does go along with that life imitating art imitating life thing.  You read a book in your youth about some guy, oh, standing up for what he believes in, and then sometime later in life, bolstered by that book, you stand up for something you believe in, and are successful and then some guy writes a book about you, and later in life he stands up etc.

Oh I like Prometheus.  Fuck his titan heritage, those guys were a bunch of assholes.  Didn't Saturn try to eat Jupiter?  And he self-sacrificed to help man, that's us.  Where is your gratitude?  I think the Greeks began to feel bad about having this great man chained up with that pesky bird, and that's why somebody later on decided to have Hercules, the Rambo of his day, free him.  That's the power of the pen.  If that same guy who wrote that was making movies today he would have had that lawyer guy keep his pants zipped and smashed the party boss and when the wife was jumping off the cliff she would have been caught by her husband in the nick of time.  That's art Jack.

The Point

We did kind of lose track of the point, didn't we. It was probably my fault, I went off on a tangent and forgot where the centerline was. I think you said that monotheism paved the way for science, and I said that it may have been the other way around. You pointed out that was unlikely since monotheism preceded science by a few thousand years. Of course you're right about that, but it got me to thinking that something like the Western mind might have paved the way for both of them. The more I think about it, I'm not so sure there is a clear cut distinction between the Western mind and the Eastern mind. Well, maybe there is now, but both cultures probably had a common ancestor way back in the ages lost to memory. I read once in National Geographic that the Indo-European language group probably didn't originate in either India or Europe but rather somewhere in between, possibly in Central Asia where the Stan countries are today. I don't think they know this for sure, it's just a theory. Then there are the Chinese and other Oriental cultures which originated somewhere else because their languages are nothing like ours. Funny, what we call "Western civilization" is supposed to have started in Mesopotamia, which is now part of what we call the "Middle East". No wonder a guy gets confused!

Truth be known, all the major civilizations were influenced by contact with other civilizations. Some of the evidence for that may be found in the Old Testament. A good example is that story about gods or angels interbreeding with mortals. For it is written: "When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose........The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of  God came into the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown." (Genesis, chapter 6, verses 1,2, and 4 -  R.S.V) The King James Version translates "Nephilim" as "giants", so there you go. This passage is sometimes called "the second creation story", and has been an embarrassment to theologians for centuries. It is out of context with the text that precedes and follows it, so it must have been stuck in there by somebody, but I don't think anyone knows who for sure. Other mythologies commonly feature gods and mortals interbreeding, but I think this is the only example of it in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I wasn't aware that the gangsters of the 1920s got their inspiration from the movies, I thought it was the other way around. I have long believed that the hoodlum/motorcycle gang culture of the 50s was inspired by all those dreadful Hell's Angels movies, but maybe it went both ways. I understand that there really was a motorcycle gang called "Hell's Angels" that formed shortly after World War II, and that they once trashed the town of Bakersfield, California. From there, a legend was born and became ingrained in contemporary mythology. What are the movies, if not contemporary mythology?

I looked up Prometheus last weekend and decided that I don't want to be like him when I grow up. First he betrayed his Titan heritage and crossed over to Zeus' camp. Then he betrayed Zeus and got chained to a rock for his efforts. Years later, Hercules comes to his rescue. I didn't look up Hercules, but I seem to remember he wasn't even a god, or maybe he was only a half god. So, if Prometheus, who was all god, couldn't rescue himself from that rock, how was Hercules able to pull it off? By some accounts, Prometheus was a friend of the human race, and may have had something to do with their creation, which may explain why we often find ourselves in unpleasant situations brought on by our own actions.

jehova vs buddha/batman vs superman

I didn't mean to be beating a dead horse with that creation thing, I was just pointing out the way you kind of pooh pooh the creation thing, but then you seem to take that thing about the animals and the fishes seriously.  As a matter of fact you call the author of that quote "our" god.  What do you mean 'we' Kimosabe?  You certainly didn't mean me, and I thought you were  a deist.  Well you are and you aren't, you keep going back and forth.

I believe the point of the whole thing was that you prefer western, no Christian, religion to eastern religion because Christianity is more get up and go and the others are more lay back and think about things.  I think there is more to eastern religions than that, but frankly I am not willing to research it beyond the wiki so I have only my assumption.

Hey where is this story about the sons of god interbreeding with the daughters of men?  When I was doing my wikisearch on Prometheus I came across the titans and I remembered once long ago hearing Jimmy Swaggert going on about how angels interbred with people and produced titans or something like that.  It was confusing but then he got into asking for money (which was crystal clear) and I don't think he ever got back to the subject.  But you say it's in the bible?  How did those guys in Nicea ever let that in the bible?

This whole thing about eastern religions vs Christianity, especially since I don't think you know anything more about eastern religions than I do, sounds like a couple kids arguing about who is a better superhero Superman or Batman.

I already told you that art doesn't imitate life, art makes stuff up.  Interesting though how life sometimes imitates art like the way those 1920s gangsters started patterning themselves after movie gangsters.  I remember as a young hippie coming across a poster for the play Hair, and wondering are these guys the real hippies?

I suppose mythology is art.  I suppose if you understand some group's mythology you can understand them better, but how can you know if your understanding of it is the same as theirs?  Also mythology changes all the time, current Christianity looks nothing like it did at the time of Nicea. 

I think last weekend we were researching Prometheus.  Well see there is a myth and some people like him and some people don't.  And I'm ok with talking about him because I don't think anybody really believes in him.  But a lot of people believe in Christianity so when they talk about it I have a hard time telling whether they are talking about what they believe to be a myth or what they believe to be true.

"Let There Be Light"

You keep forgetting that I am a Deist, not a Christian, although I tend to side with the Christians and Jews against the Muslims because the Muslims are still stoning people to death, while the Christians and Jews haven't done anything like that for a long time.

I don't believe that the Bible was written by God, it was written by people who may have believed they were being inspired by God. The Creation story is mythology at its finest. Since there were no eyewitnesses to the Creation, we can assume that it is a made up story. As with most mythology, it probably wasn't made up by a single person pulling an all-nighter in his college dorm. It's more likely that the story evolved over centuries of telling and retelling long before it was written down. It's possible that it was never intended to be believed literally, its value being largely allegorical. The reason I'm interested in this story, and mythology in general, is that it tells me something about the mindset of the people who told it and heard it told so long ago.

Some of the other creation stories of the era have their gods fabricating the world and its inhabitants out of salvaged parts left over from some cataclysmic event like a war or natural disaster. Others have them using basic raw materials like mud or clay. There are actually two creation stories in Genesis, three if you count the one where the sons of God interbred with the daughters of men, fathering a race of giants or heroes. In one version, God does indeed make man out of mud or clay, but most of the other stuff was created by verbal command: "And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light."
Here we have a god who commands things into existence. Then He makes man "in His own image", and gives him dominion over all the other creatures, which indicates that He thinks we are something special. Instead of being chained to the Wheel of Life, which runs us over with every revolution, our destiny is to invent the wheel, then the axle, then the wagon, then hitch up a couple of oxen and train them to pull the wagon for us.

Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Maybe a little of both, and the same can be said for mythology.
  

evil st augustine pops up again

Well that's what I was saying, the idea that there is one omnipotent god leads to the idea that maybe you can figure it out, but if you have several fighting each other you can never figure out what is going on so why try?  I don't think that goes for the early church or the church of the darkest of the dark ages, people sometimes forget that churches change over time, but probably when they picked up the knowledge of the Greeks when they were picking on the Arabs, that spurred the Christians to try to figure things out. 

I don't think that the eastern religions teach that life sucks and then you die, you got to have some kind of appealing message if you want to get any converts, but I do agree that they had kind of a contemptfor the things of this world so there wasn't much reason to study them. 

Modern cosmology does tend to believe that the universe was created out of nothing, or at least nothing that we can ever know anything about.  But then wasn't God created out of nothing?  Actually I think the idea is that He was always around, but He didn't decide to create the Earth until six thousand or thirteen billion years ago.  So what was He doing before then?  Why did He decide just then to create it?  And what did He create it out of?  Believing the earth was created out of some well whatever, something we maybe can't ever know, does not seem so hard to believe compared to believing some Guy, Whose ways are beyond our understanding, and nobody knows how He got there, and He just decided on a lark one day to create the universe. 

If our current thirteen billion year old universe was God's plan all along then why didn't He just say so, instead of giving us that six day crapola?  If all that is a myth and not really to be believed then how come you believe Him when He was talking about the fish and the birds?  Maybe that was just another myth too.

Well I guess they had to wonder when they were counting down the years that maybe if they had started from the year 20,000 instead of 10,000, they'd still have 10,000 more years until the big shit hit the fan.

It was evil St Augustine, the Father of the awful doctrine of original sin, who was the inspiration for the prots.  The Catholic church's doctrine then was that you could avoid the fiery lake by following the instructions of the church (good deeds), and the prots said bullshit.  Martin Luther said you have to love god, Calvin said it doesn't matter what you do, you are too puny for such a thing, God has already decided.  I guess the Calvinists took the focus on Augustine from Martin Luther, but they thought up that predestination themselves.  And it's not like the prots were all together against the catholics, they hated each other too.

I suppose there is something to kneading bread, probably you have some new age music going on in the background and you feel like you are doing something as old as civilization itself.  Bread and beer, the staffs of life.

If It's Broke, Fix It

That's the converse of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". While monotheism didn't pave the way for science, perhaps the same kind of cultural mindset paved the way for them both. I think the Eastern religions are generally more fatalistic than the Western religions. The Eastern mind generally thinks "Go with the flow", while the Western mind generally thinks "Paddle your ass off". Our god tells man to "Be fruitful and multiply, and till the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and every living thing that moves upon the earth." (Genesis 1, 28) The Eastern gods tell their people "Life sucks and then you die. If you do a good job, we won't make you come back and live this sucky life all over again". (It loses something in the translation, but that's the general gist of it.)

I shouldn't have used the term "intelligent design" because that has political overtones. What I meant was that Somebody has a plan, and we should try to figure out what it is and work with it. Now that you mention it, though, what's the alternative to intelligent design, random chance? I find it easier to believe that Somebody did all this on purpose than to believe that the universe spontaneously created itself out of nothing. That doesn't mean that He did it all in six days and rested on the seventh, that's mythology. Mythology represents somebody's attempt to explain something that he doesn't understand, and to make the story entertaining enough that people might sit through it just to see how it comes out.

I don't think the Hebrews believed in an afterlife until just before Jesus showed up. In those days, there was a sect or two that believed the Resurrection was imminent, possibly because they used to count the years backwards and they were getting uncomfortably close to year zero. Common sense would tell you that, when you run out of years, something big is going to happen. I think the Calvinists got the idea of predestination from Martin Luther, but I'm not sure their version was exactly the same as Luther's. I agree that it doesn't make a lot of sense, and I don't think many people still believe in it today.

If you knead your bread dough with a machine, I suppose it would come out the same every time but, when you do a job like that with your own bare hands, you can't help but put a little of yourself into it. With my recipe, you put most of the ingredients into a bowl and stir them with a spoon. Then you start adding flour and continue stirring until it gets too think for the spoon to work. Then you add some more flour and begin kneading the dough with your hands. At first it seems to be too dry, then it starts getting sticky, so you rub flour on your hands and knead some more until it kind of firms up. There are basically two kinds of yeast, but I'm pretty sure everybody uses the one kind nowadays: active dry yeast. Some brands might label it "brewer's yeast", and some brands might label it "baker's yeast", but it's all the same stuff. You can also put it in your septic tank to keep it perking along so you don't have to have it pumped out as often. Remember that if you ever have a septic tank.

nothing intelligent about intelligent design

What I mean by science is I guess the scientific method, where you do experiments and make your decisions on the results.  The Chinese had some clever gadgets, but they never thought much beyond them.  They had what they thought, or the emperor thought, was the perfect kingdom, and they didn't need to learn nothing from nobody. 

The Greeks weren't going to get their philosopher king hands dirty doing any experiments.  If you couldn't think it through deductively it wasn't true.  If Aristotle was into observation how come he never discovered that if you drop a big and a little stone from a tower that they both will reach the ground at the same time?

You know deductivity is a marvelous thing. Look how well the Greeks did with mathematics, but then look at their dismal cosmology, crystal spheres within crystal spheres, that earth, water, air, fire thing.  Crazy man crazy.  Well when you are talking math, the numbers are all perfectly well defined, but if you are talking cosmology you are using words like 'perfect' which really has no exact definition.

I don't see how science could have paved the way to monotheism since monotheism preceded science by about two thousand years and I don't see how it would address the issue of monotheism.  Intelligent design, as the term is commonly used is just a way for its proponents to sneak god into the classroom.  The idea of it is that all of evolution was directed by some unseen hand (god) to produce that shining apple of the universe, man.  Science believes that man just came about the same as cockroaches and eagles, just the result of the process that brought us dinosaurs and mammals, and if it wasn't for the fact that we are seriously fucking with the earth, would bring us something else.

As I said before I don't know much about eastern religions, but I don't see anything logical about them.  They seem to be more otherworldly and speculative without really nailing anything down.  Generally I don't think they have a god in the sense that we do, a big guy who wants us to do things in a certain way and if we don't he will punish us.

Just a little aside here, but you know the Jews generally don't have the afterlife and the Calvinists thought that no matter what you did it had already been decided whether you were going to heaven or hell.  So what was the incentive to obey god?  If I had a boss who said he was never going to promote me, or told me that he had already decided on my promotion, I think I would just goof off the rest of my job/life. 

I don't know anything more about baking bread than I do about eastern religions.  I guess there are ingredients, that seems pretty cut and dried.  There is that yeast thing.  Are there different kinds of yeast or is one as good as the other?  Kneading, isn't that just like mixing it, like shuffling a deck a cards?  As long as you do it to a certain degree, it will be as mixed as it's ever going to be?  i guess you can bake it at various temps for various times.  So unless there is some secret ingredient it shouldn't be that hard to come up with your grandmother's rye bread.

But then the recipe is lost to the erosion of time so all you have left is the memory of the taste and you are not the same person that you were the last time you ate it, so it's like walking into the same river twice which the philosophers tell us we can never do.n

East Side West Side

Didn't the Chinese have science before the Europeans? I suppose it depends on what you call "science". I understand the Chinese were doing some pretty fancy navigation long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, which is impressive when you consider that their ships were all junks. Then there was Aristotle the Greek, way back in the B.C. years. Plato was all pie in the sky, but Aristotle pioneered the concept that you could learn more by observation than by speculation. Maybe it would be more correct to call those guys "proto-scientists" because, although they were ahead of their time, they weren't in a class with Newton and Galileo.

Interesting concept that monotheism paved the way for science, but couldn't it also have been the other way around? Maybe cultures that were more logical were naturally disposed to consider the possibility of what we now call "intelligent design". The old polytheist myths were kind of chaotic, with their gods always fighting among themselves. To be sure, some of that bled over into Judeo-Christian mythology with its angels and demons but, with them, at least there were good guys and bad guys. With the poly guys it was all about might makes right, with a little treachery thrown in for variety.

I think that the Eastern religions are more logical than we give them credit for. Those guys like to shroud their teachings in ritual and mysticism, but I think that's mostly for entertainment. People the world over have always been impressed by light and magic shows. I think that underneath all that hoopla is a logical foundation, but its difficult to see from the surface. It may be structured that way by design, not wanting to make it too easy for the newbies. People do tend to value more highly the things that are difficult to obtain. The Buda had to sit under a tree and starve himself for 40 days and 40 nights before he could come up with the precept, "Eat when you're hungry and sleep when you're tired." I don't think it would have taken me that long, but we Americans are always in a hurry.

The more I think about it,  I've only been making bread from scratch for about eight years. Before that I used to buy those frozen ready to bake loaves that you stick in a pan, let them thaw and rise, and then pop them into the oven. Before that I used to buy homemade bread from this guy in the school bus garage. When they fired me, the only thing I asked was that I be allowed to come to the bus garage once a week to get bread. They said that was fine as long as I didn't cause a disturbance, which I had no intention of doing anyway. Sometimes I got there too late and the bread guy was all sold out, so I eventually started making my own. My hypothetical wife taught me the basics. She used to make bread occasionally, but then she got arthritis or something in her hands and couldn't knead the dough anymore. Maybe that's why different people's bread comes out differently even though they use the same recipe. The skill of dough kneading is hard to put into words, you just have to do it until it feels right to you and, what feels right to you might not feel right to somebody else.

peaches and mangoes

I think the main difference between science and art is that science insists on one truth.  Either the atom is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons or it is not.  Well actually protons and neutrons are made up of quarks which can be either up or down, and then I think there are red, blue, and green varieties, not they are actually those colors, it's just a way of saying they are different.  As of my last reading electrons are still electrons.  Still, since neutrons and protons are made of quarks you could say it's protons and neutrons.  It's certainly not made of apples and oranges. 

But see I can see myself already reading a science fiction story where atoms are made of apples and oranges, and I suppose I could make a painting where the apples circle the oranges, and I suppose Beagles could write a song about that.  Could the book, and then the movie be far behind?  And then how about peaches and mangoes, bowling balls and billiard balls?

So how come western Europe came up with science way back around 1500 and nobody else did?  Well there is some suspicion that it was monotheism.  If there is one god ruling everything and he has absolute power then if we understand him we can understand everything else.  Actually the motivation of those early scientists was to understand everything so that they could understand god. but really, same difference.

If you have more than one god, well they are probably always fighting, or trying to muscle the other guy out, and now you got two guys to understand, or maybe three, or maybe twenty or a hundred, and it's not enough to figure out each one of them, you have to figure out all of them and how they get along before you can understand everything else, and you might as well just go up on a hill and contemplate your naval. 

I don't pretend to understand those eastern religions.  I've read their wiki pages but I expect that there is more to them than that, but let me just say, they seem more like philosophies than what we know as religions.  They seem more like, maybe this or maybe that, unlike the Abrahamic religions, which are more pragmatic, more like a rule book, here is how to lead the correct life, and this is the only way, any other path and you are lost forever.

So anyway that's why some people think science developed first in western Europe.  I'm inclined to think they make a pretty good point.  And I think the main point of science is either something is true or it isn't.

But if art thought that way, wouldn't there only be one painting, one song, one book, one movie, everything else would be, well untrue.  But I think the world of art is the art of the untrue.  It's all made up, nothing looks like that painting, the novelist is making things up from the first paragraph.  Well there is always that thing where they say something like by taking the path of many untruths, or by expressing something in a different way, art is pointing the way to some deeper truth.  I don't really understand what that means and I suspect it is a bunch of hogwash, the sort of thing that artists peddle to make their stuff seem more important.

You know it's like beer.  I love beer.  Some people think the truth lies in drinking a bunch of beer, or what is said after drinking a bunch of beer.  I don't believe that, but that doesn't mean I don't want to drink beer.

I think art is all showbiz.  Shakespeare is smarter than the three stooges, but it's just a relative thing. 

What were we talking about?  Art and science, are they apples and oranges or apples and anti apples?  Well I suppose it is not apples and anti apples, but I think they are closer, or more comparable than apples and oranges.  Mainly I just wanted to run on about scientific and artistic truth I guess.  You know we writers, we just write to see what we have to say.

Well there goes the early morning.  That bread thing sounded interesting, especially after our talk about rules and recipes.  Maybe we can get back to that.

It looked like a big night in Chicago.  We had that big storm, and then the Cubs had a game which was not such a big deal, but the Blackhawks were playing for the Stanley Cup, and if they won, surely they would congregate around Wrigley Field (a more party friendly attitude than the area around the Blackhawk's stadium) and mix with the Cub fans and trash things up a bit.  But then the rain cancelled the Cubs game, and then it kept on raining so that even though the Blackhawks won, the rain put a damper on the drunken celebration so not much happened after all.

Apples and Oranges

I don't think that art and science are either friends or enemies, I think they are two different things like apples and oranges. Art is largely about feelings and, although people can get emotional about science, science is supposed to be about facts. As you have said, two people can look at a painting or listen to a piece of music and come up with two different interpretations of it. Science, not so much, not if it's done correctly. Of course people can choose to believe or not believe something that a scientist says, but that's because we have all seen pronouncements of scientists that have turned out not to be true. Then again, people are prone to believe what they want to believe and reject anything that's not compatible with that. The problem here is not with science, it's with people. If two people do the same experiment the exact same way under the exact same conditions, it should come out the same both times. If it doesn't, then somebody made a mistake or didn't control all the variables.

I've been making my own bread for a long time now. I started out trying to duplicate my grandmother's Bohemian rye bread. She had told me how she made it decades previous, but I didn't write it down and now it was too late to ask Grandma about it. My hypothetical wife knew more about making bread than I did, so I told her what I remembered about Grandma's bread and figured that, between the two of us, we could figure it out. After several failed attempts, I found a couple recipes for Bohemian rye on the internet. Neither of them were even close, so I tinkered around and developed my own version. It's good bread, and I've been making it the same way for years now, but it's not Grandma's Bohemian rye. I once asked a professional baker about this, and he told me that no one can duplicate somebody else's bread. You can make a consistent product yourself but, if you give the recipe to somebody else, his won't come out exactly the same as yours. There are obviously some variables in the process that we don't know about. Of course, we were talking about home made bread. I didn't think to ask him if the same was true about mass produced commercial bread. 

I saw on the news that you guys had a tornado scare in Chicago today. They said that a funnel cloud was spotted near Midway Airport and that sirens were set off in the Loop. They didn't mention any injuries or damages, so I assume that the tornado didn't touch down. I remember the Oak Lawn tornado of 1967. Well, I didn't actually see it, but I was driving from Palos Park to the old neighborhood shortly after it hit. I hadn't had my radio on, so I didn't know about the tornado. The road was blocked up ahead, which I assumed was because of a car wreck, so I turned down a side street and got lost. Well, I wasn't exactly lost, I just didn't know how to get out of there. I finally met some kind of emergency worker who directed me back to the main road and told me that, once I got there, I was to keep driving and not come back. For some time after that, the affected area was cordoned off by police and National Guard, who wouldn't let anybody in who didn't live there. I found out later that the tornado, after plowing through Oak Lawn, skipped right over Chicago and went out into Lake Michigan to die. Pieces of Oak Lawn washed up on the beaches of New Buffalo, Michigan all summer long.

art and truth, friends or enemies

I stand corrected on my Beagles history.  It's funny how when other people are telling their life stories we never pay as much attention as when we are telling ours.

There are rules.  If you follow the rules you can build a fine birdhouse and a batch of lasagna that is mighty tasty, but there are no rules for painting a picture or writing a song or a book or a movie.  Well there are rules, but they are more like guidelines and then there is something else, and I think that is the thing that pops out of your subconscious.  Hard to describe, just something kind of odd and ambiguous, and people recognize it I guess in their subconscious, and maybe they take away something that they can't quite explain, or maybe they don't see anything.

Or something like that, I don't know, hard to explain and really not sure that I understand it at all.  There are all these discussions about creativity, but I don't think they ever define what they are talking about very well.  Maybe you just look at the world a little sideways so that you see it a little different and then when you reproduce it you bring in all these extra little things that you noticed when you looked at it sideways.  Well I don't know if that makes any sense either.

The strangest thing is that when you follow the rules you make a birdhouse that the birds love or you make a lasagna that everybody cleans their plates of, but maybe you put a whole lot of effort into your painting or song or book or movie, and everybody thinks yeah so what.

I agree with you on the lag time thing.  Orally is way too short, you know you just open your mouth and whatever comes out comes out, and you don't really think too much, you may try to make your point, but then you can't find the words, or maybe you are unsure if you are right about this thing but you have to keep on talking because you are in a conversation and nobody wants to talk to someone who keeps taking breaks, and sometimes you don't remember what you said earlier.  I mean it's a fine thing, I love to talk, and sometimes something may just spark in you and you get a new idea, but really writing is the best.

You can read and reread it, take a little time to think before you put your words down, you can see where somebody might misinterpret something you wrote and rewrite it, everything is just so much clearer when you write it out

And you do kind of need that relatively immediate response that you can't get with snail mail.  After a few days you might not remember as well what you said, and maybe you don't care about it anymore.  I email some people who only respond every couple of weeks and I always tell them to reply rather than start a new letter because I don't remember what they said the last time.

One nice thing about painting over writing is that I can always show my paintings.  I can spring them on people who visit my house or I have those shows where people walking on Ashland can see them.  But writing, just try to get somebody to read what you wrote, it's like pulling teeth.  One of my early shows, I wrote little stories that went with the paintings.  I thought they were great but nobody would admit to reading them.  http://www.bckat.com/KenSchadt/woment/storieshtm.htm

I don't know about your truth thing.  You hear talk about art revealing some kind of truth, but i don't know if I buy into that, and sometimes you hear about art being like science, or science being like art, in seeking truth, and I think that is just crazy man crazy.  I think art and science are almost polar opposites.  We can discuss that this week in our nice baby bear mode of conversation.

Creativity and Interactivity

I boarded a plane for Alaska the day after we graduated. I turned 18 on September 7, and left Alaska in late October. I joined the army on March 16, 1964, and was discharged on March 1, 1967. I stayed with my parents at their new place in Palos Park until June, and then I moved to Cheboygan. I had visited Cheboygan for a weekend in mid March, and didn't think much of it. My old army buddy, who was my contact in Cheboygan, wrote me a letter in June, and I could tell he was having problems. My intention was to visit with him for a couple of weeks and see if I could help him straighten out his head, and I've been here ever since. We got him stabilized for awhile, but his problems came back years later and we kind of drifted apart. He transferred to Green Bay, Wisconsin when the mill closed, and came back a couple years later. I saw him a few times after that, but then we lost contact, and I don't know where he is now.

I think that one of the differences between crafters and artists is creativity or originality. What you said about ideas coming from your subconscious seems to bear this out. It appears that your inspirations come from within, while mine are mostly external. I am capable of embellishing an idea and putting my own spin on it, but the core idea usually comes to me from the outside world. When I was writing songs, the tune was usually borrowed from another song, or it was some kind of generic folk tune that could have come from anywhere. The words usually came from experience, my own or somebody else's. Sometimes, somebody would say something clever in conversation, and it would strike me that there was a song in there somewhere.

I'm with you on the writing thing. I do it because I like to do it, but one thing I found out early on was that it's no fun unless somebody responds to it. They don't have to necessarily agree with me, or even like my work, but they have to respond to it in some manner. All my life people had been telling me that I should write because I was so good at expressing myself. When my daughter gave me her old laptop, she suggested that I use it to write down some of the stories I had been telling orally for years. At first I thought I would be writing for my own satisfaction but, before I knew it, I wanted to print the stories up and pass out copies to my friends and family. When that proved to be more trouble than it was worth, I went on the internet to share my stories with the whole wide world. While I got some positive feedback, I never had the feeling that the stories meant as much to others as they meant to me. It wasn't until I got into forum groups, and later into blogging, that I discovered that I liked that feeling of interactivity. You know, I say something, you say something back. It's kind of like regular oral conversation except that there is enough lag time that you can think about what you want to say next, and I like that. Exchanging letters by snail mail involves too much lag time, and oral conversation doesn't involve enough lag time. It's like Goldilocks trying out the three bears' beds: This one is too soft, this one is too hard, and this one is just right.

I never got into writing fiction, which is what you have to do if you want to become rich and famous as a writer. I suppose it's a skill that can be learned, but there are plenty of other people cranking out fiction. What the world needs, and has precious little of, is truth. I don't mean the great immortal truths of the universe, that's already been done. What I mean is the little day to day truths that somehow seem to evade the public consciousness. Sometimes I think that many people don't even distinguish between truth and falsehood. They're not exactly liars because that would imply a deliberate intention to deceive. They just don't seem to know the difference between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, or reality and fantasy. It's all the same to them. I suppose, then, that I am a quester as well as a cruiser, and I think you are too.

arts and crafts

I have heard the story of Big Red.  But I am wondering why you were registering for the draft after you had already been in the army, unless I have The Life of Beagles mixed up and you went to Alaska before you joined the army, but I think I am a better Beagles scholar than that.  But still you had to register at eighteen, so wouldn't you have been in high school then?

The words art and craft overlap into each other.  Sometimes they will talk about a job that is very difficult as an art.  Like they might say heart bypasses are a job, but brain surgery is an art.  I think they are saying that brain surgery is more difficult, but beyond that you have to make some guesses, it is all so complicated that sometimes you are going only on a hunch.

I don't know anything about either of course, but from the way they do bypasses anymore, like oil changes, I imagine it is pretty clear cut.  There are certain procedures that if you follow them you are almost certain to come up with a good outcome, while with the brain who knows what is going where and there is a point where you are beyond the written procedures and just hunching.

Like my last painting, that blue stained glass window on the right, it seemed like it needed more punch, but it's not like there is a book somewhere where I could have looked up how to put in more punch.  I just kind of put my chin in my hand and reached back into my subconscious, and the idea popped up to alternate the columns with different shades of blue. 

Like I said it was my subconscious, so I don't really know where it came from, and I certainly couldn't write out a procedure for it.  By subconscious I don't mean anything mystical, just that part of the brain that is, well who knows, doing something the conscious brain doesn't know anything about.  I imagine it's the same with the brain surgeon, except instead of reaching for something that would look good, he is reaching back through all his experience for what would most likely work.

So I am going to say that the craftsman is the guy who knows the procedures, is adept at following the procedures, and devotes himself totally to the job.  The artist may or may not follow procedures, but there is always some point where he has to reach into his subconscious and hope he can pull out a plum.  He may or may not be a good artist, and indeed the critics will disagree on whether or not he is, but everybody who looks at the craftsman's birdhouse will be able to tell that he has done a good job.

Of course it is more complicated than that.  I'm sure the craftsman reaches points that are beyond procedures and he has to reach into his subconscious and hope that he pulls out a plum, and sometimes the artist is doing something that is strictly routine.

You are right that generally the artist is insulted by being called a craftsman.  There is this idea among artists that somehow they are, or should be, in touch with some mysterious knowledge and their job is to impart that knowledge, and pretty pictures are irrelevant.  Myself I don't go for that.  I don't think that there is any mysterious knowledge, and I think a pretty picture is just fine, but maybe it has to have something more, most likely some odd little thing to make it interesting.

And sometimes an artist, particularly one that has had a lot of schooling, will sneer at one who hasn't, because how can you properly be an artist if you haven't learned all the skills and applied them well?

I think about this a lot.  I usually think of it more in terms of architect than artist (because artist has so many different meanings).  The architect tells the craftsman to go paint those stripes over there, say the green horizontal ones on the bar, but then the craftsman has to decide which shades of green and how thick and how much does one stripe blend in with another, so there he becomes an artist, excuse me architect.

And writing is also a craft.  You know I spend an hour of my life five days a week writing this, and I know nobody else is reading this besides Beagles, who half the time will think that it's a bunch of bullshit, so why am I doing this?

Well I just enjoy it.  I like the way my unformed thoughts go into words, I like choosing the words like shiny pebbles and arranging them just so, I get a kick when I think I have turned a nice phrase (like that shiny pebbles thing.  Should I have said, pretty pebbles?  Ah no, shiny is more to the point, and it won't be confused with the pretty pictures discussed earlier).

Clearly I am cruising. 

Much more to be said on the subject, and we have a weekend to think it over.

I Think I've Found a Word For it

The word is "crafter". At first I was thinking of "craftsman", which is the more familiar usage, but that's too gender specific. My dictionary says that the female version is "craftswoman" and the gender neutral version is "craftsperson". Both of those sounded too politically correct for my taste, so I kept looking. There are several definitions of "craft", and they all seem to involve some kind of skill. As a verb, it means "to make or produce with care, skill, or ingenuity", and a person who does that sort of thing is called a "crafter". I like it because it neatly nullifies the gender issue without making a public spectacle of itself.

There are also several definitions for "art", and one of them is synonymous with "craft", but I don't think an artist and a crafter are exactly the same thing. The difference is largely subjective. If you call a crafter an artist, he will likely take it as a compliment but, if you call an artist a crafter, not so much. Sometimes it's a fine line between arts and crafts, which is why events that display and sell such things are usually called "arts and craft shows". There is at least one show in our region, however, that is reserved for arts only, no crafts allowed. What they say is the difference is that a craft is something that can be put to a practical purpose, while art is something you just hang on the wall and look at, or words to that effect. If we buy into that, it would seem that the difference between you and I is that you are an artist, while I am a crafter. An artist paints a picture of a house, while a crafter paints a house. Truth be known, house painting is not a craft of which I am particularly fond, but that's not the point.

Be that as it may, I think we can agree that both artists and crafters fall into the category of cruisers. When either of them is working on a project, they might have some notion of how their efforts fit into the grand scheme of things, but their primary focus in on the task at hand. That's what I meant by "the job comes first". Of course, if an emergency arises, we will drop what we're doing and attend to it. Other than that, we all have our priorities. Sometimes it's better to leave a project and do something else for awhile than to keep slogging through it till it's done, which is a judgment call. Some projects will never be done anyway, at least not in our lifetimes, but that doesn't mean we can't keep working on them, however intermittently, till someone pulls the plug on us.

When you think about it, talking and writing can be considered crafts unto themselves so, when we sit here discussing matters of deep political or philosophical import, we are still crafters. If we thought for a moment that any of our permutations were going to result in mankind actually being saved from its own folly, we might be considered questers or warriors. Meanwhile, we're just "shootin' the shit", as we used to say in the army.

World War II was the last of the old fashioned wars, the ones that had a beginning, a middle part, and an end. Since then, each conflict seems to be just another chapter in a continuing saga, like the soap operas on TV. Nobody in his right mind would enlist in a war that had no foreseeable conclusion. Even a career soldier does not expect his career to be one long continuous battle. With troops stationed all over he world, and some assignments more desirable that others, it makes sense to rotate people through them on some kind of regular basis. I could believe that the whole thing was deliberately contrived to insure that we would never actually win a war again, but that would be just paranoid.

I remember registering for the draft. I had to hitch hike about 80 miles and, since traffic was almost non existent in Alaska in those days, it took me the better part of the day to get there. I decided that you needed your own car to live in Alaska, so I bought an old clunker and drove it back to the lodge in an hour and a half. Big Red, the lady who registered me for the draft, also handled the transfer of title and plates. She was also ran a store and a post office, and I later found out that she was the coroner. Big Red was an interesting woman, but I think I've told you about her before.