God = Good

Understanding of this equivalence in my early childhood is what makes me what I am today which is a great admirer of Christian ethics an quite enough of an Episcopalian to pass, but not interested in being either evangelistic nor passive to atheists.

So the question was asked can atheists and theists find something to agree on. It's actually very simple; they merely need to agree that God = Good. Now comes the question of ego, which is whether any atheist or devotee can assert with certainty that they know everything any human needs to know about Good God. The failures of atheism and faith come from misapplication which is a function of arrogance. It's something atheists ought to know considering the scientistic awe at the greatness of the Universe.

I find it interesting considering this proposition of equivalence that with respect to arrogance and overproduction that two books come to mind. The first is that by Hitchens: God is Not Great. The second is the famous business book Good to Great. In the stretch between saying that God is Good to God is Great is perhaps that fudging of the supernatural that Spinoza weighed against. Does God have to be Great, or is Good enough? Why, in fact, does God have to be so incredibly transcendent? Is not the proposed greatness of God merely the whip across our backs to get our donkey attention? Perhaps so. The summation of Good is so far and away from us. It ought to be enough for eternal inspiration in our present. But somehow we are not satisfied with that. God must be great, man must strive to understand transcendental greatness. Great becomes unimaginable, which is just enough to twist all the rest of the rules.

I invert something in this passage I read this week.

One of the books I am currently re-reading is C.S. Lewis' THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. For those that haven't read this classic, it is a collection of letters from a senior and experienced satanic demon, Screwtape, to a junior and struggling satanic demon, Wormwood, on how best to snare and keep ensnared the souls of men; how to hold them in thrall until such souls can be harvested into Hell for all eternity.

As I was escaping from the unremitting BS flow that oozes out of the government when it comes to BS budgets yesterday, I found myself reading this passage from Chapter XV of The Screwtape Letters:

We sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make [humans] live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men's affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

All afterlife is the Future. And while I don't quite understand the author's use of 'eternity', we can surely see how the overly pious wring their hands in anticipation of a Judgment by a Great God at some point in the Future. A bit of passive aggressiveness I think.

A Good God, the summation of Good, the concept and the entity only need to be that. Our duty, whether deist or atheist is to approach that good, remembering Cobb's Rule #11: Perfect is the enemy of Good.

Joy to the World

I read somewhere that Christmas isn't mandated by the Church as a high holiday. It's truly not a solemn occasion. If you think about that which might be a co-opted pagan celebration, this one has probably been the one that most often does not use Christian symbols. Happy Birthday Jesus doesn't quite fit so much as Happy Birthday Baby Jesus. And so the word Joy best describes what this time of year is all about. Joy to the World.
It's not actually even a message we Christians are likely to be known for. There's always an evangelical hook in there somewhere - or for me in my blend, a Jesuit mind trick. Proper Christianity challenges your mind and soul, but in late December the challenges are more about getting a parking space and all other sorts of preparation for joyous celebration. This year we got duck.

Right now, everything is as perfect as it gets. All the family phone calls have been made and all the news is good. People are healthy and in good spirits. Them that had no jobs, now got jobs. Some travelling has been done and old faces have been seen, warm embraces had in defiance of winter and quiet talk over hot drinks have given us another chance to pause, smiling and look down at the table for that moment when we say to ourselves nodding, "that's really good". The confessions are done as well. People like to come clean around this time of year. According to the guy on the radio, almost nobody breaks up on Christmas Day, but starting at Black Friday if your affair is in jeopardy, be prepared to handle the truth. The truth is that we know and we admit it finally, that human beings can be awesome, and sometimes we have to just let go of our fears and tell the honest truth. We play that game when the family is in a good mood and as parents we promise to forgive confessions of mischief - we call it BOL, for blurt out loud. Blurt. That's a good and giggly word. You just can't wait to talk about everything so that you can tell your good news, and feel good and prepare for the joy.

There's a kind of inevitability about Christmas joy. This year it was a long time coming. As it turns out, I'm between jobs and have had lots of time to think about other things, a good seven week sabbatical it turns out. Christmas couldn't sneak up on me this time; it felt like it took forever to get here. I started singing carols in public last week, and although I didn't burn a CD for the car, I did have it on the home system. The first thing I did yesterday morning was I listened to several renditions of O Holy Night. Whitney Houston, Celtic Woman, Celine Dion, Susan Boyle, Charlotte Church, Mariah Carey, Carrie Underwood, NSync, Alicia Keyes, another Mariah Carey version. Right there in bed on my iPhone via YouTube. No matter how many times I listened to it, I still love the song. I still don't know all the words, but man when they get to the 'fall on your knees' part, it just melts me when they do it right. And yeah I have to say, Mariah does it best. You know the words are coming, and it still gets you in the gut. Advent. What a wonderful word.

We're at that family age with three teenagers. They know what they want, we know what to get them. It's wonderful watching all the bubbly subterfuge as we raid the bag of ribbons and wrapping paper. Everybody snatchs the roll of scotch tape from my desk and scampers off to their rooms to wrap another gift. We color code the sticky bows, if it's red it's mine. It seemed to take almost no time at all to get the tree and decorate it and now it's surrounded. There have been sleepovers and videogame parties. We baked cookies and made many runs to the stores.

.and that's all I'm writing this morning...

Merry Christmas, and may your thoughts be more coherent and complete than mine. Pass the eggnog.

Dissonance & Faith

Dissonance is a keyword in the story of my life. For me, it is the experience of living the truth of the false claim that blue is not blue. It is the experience of the epistemological nightmare, of hearing people tell you after you have explained something profound with precision that you have nothing to say and are at any rate incapable of saying it.

I have, like you, wished that I could read people's minds and that they could read mine, because I hate dissonance. So writing has become an indispensable part of my life. I have, in my adult life, always considered myself a writer - a writer for people and for machines with the emphasis on people. In every opportunity to write software for machines, I have always discounted the value. Software that doesn't engage the end-user was never interesting to me. The machine was a logical substrate. It was never my desire to escape the complications of humanity. In fact, I never grew to learn enough of the mathematical universe to appreciate the ability to get a computer to think mathematically, nor enough about any scientific discipline to feel rewarded by shaping the computing tool. What I have learned instead are matters of finance and ethics.

Roger Ebert writes about the experience of being mute and of being blind, and then conveys a letter sent to him by someone rendered mute by surgery. Both the blog entry and the letter are longish, but I understood them implicitly. In my ethical journey, the first intellectual country was characterized by the landscape of race. What I discovered early on was how the hunger of those wanting to understand and sympathize led them to jump to whatever seemed to lead them to a proper conclusion, to forge instantaneous brotherhood at the first hint of commonality. But this kind of sentiment was never sufficient to bear the burdens of reform implicated by the scope of anti-racist politics and action. Most everything became symbolic. The dissonant supply and demand of dialog on the matters of race in America sometimes ossified over time into the kind of hostility that could be called racism. That characterizes our epistemological nightmare well, because it isn't true racism but most people do not possess the words to make this clear. They only possess the sentiments appropriate towards the ethics of anti-racism. Smarter folks substitute culture for race and welcome culture wars often to the point of the political and the politics of difference underlies a great deal of what sparks frustration in American public life. This is all dissonance to me. It is dissonance until it is crime.

I don't believe that man is a social animal in the way many do. I think that we are evolutionarily hardwired to be constrained in our affairs to Dunbar's Number. Everything else is maintained by hegemonic forces and, of course, ignorance & incuriosity. You have your number of Facebook friends, and that's about it. You either fit the profile of the person you always wanted to be or you suffer from the ignominious underachievement. You don't need to communicate to more people, and in fact you cannot. You can only be leveraged by the impersonal, which means you will be interpreted. The French have a verb for that. Connaitre. Connaitre is for people. Savoir is for things. Both verbs mean 'to know'. When you write a program and compile it, the computer knows what you are telling it - almost instantaneously. Savoir. You, on the other hand, will be interpreted.

You will be interpreted.

Interpretation is imprecise, and there are for humans very distinct advantages to being interpreted. For in dissonance is the ability to play both sides of the coin. Human social identity should be worn, as James Baldwin wrote, loosely like the clothes of the desert. Give a little room for the mind to shape the body. Let some ambiguity in. We don't want to live in a bot-mediated world. We want to live in a world where we have permission and license to be what we want to be, to go where we like and to behave as we please. If we strive to achieve a precise goal and redefine ourselves in pursuit of that goal it is only to ultimately attain that freedom. At least, that's my philosophy. It is about the Dosh Point.

Next year I'll be 50. I'm slimming down and realizing that I look more like I did at 35 then at 45. I've been a bit too chubby for a bit too long. Dr. Sakurai tells me, even after I shed 20 pounds this year, that I'm too fat. He's over 80 years old, so perhaps I should listen. Do you see all of these unambiguous numbers? Why do we try to express ourselves that way?

Dissonance is a permanent factor, and I've been thinking about the epistemological problems of the age. It's a constant itch for me since I have continually evolved my thinking and so span political, geographical, religious, class and racial lines. I've gotten to the point at which I'm convinced that I have achieved a level of mature wisdom which is the result of years of writing and thinking. I've more than done my 10,000 hours on the blog, writing for people. Now I get people. I am people. People are me. Like Chaka Khan. No, actually deeper still without the flash, like the people who wrote it. Ashford & Simpson.

Humans have faith, but they often forget their faith in themselves, in humanity. We need to interpret each other with faith in mind. Then the nightmare dissolves.

Spinoza

I have been unable to sleep lately. For one thing I've been staying up late and waking up later and extending a cycle of madness. For another I just got rid of a bad tooth after a weekend of suffering. So in a bold attempt to get some sleep, I decided to put on the most boring podcast I could think of. I made a mistake and put on Will Durant.

Will Durant is one of those names from my childhood that used to arise whenever people asked who was the smartest man in the world. Aside from the typical answer of Einstein, people used to say it was Bertrand Russell who was such a super-genius that took a genius to appreciate him. It seemed that only Will Durant was smart enough to understand Russell, whereas once the bomb was built anybody could steal the blueprints. But I've already talked about information thermodynamics...

So I put on the podcast and this time, unlike the last time I had insomnia, I actually absorbed a bit of it. And so decided to play it during the daytime as well. So now I know what the big deal about Spinoza is, and I am happy to say that I have found in Spinoza's remarks, precisely some of the same troubles I've had with lesser forms of Christianity.

I'll boil it down thusly. If you are like me, then you simply refuse to gamble that there is no possibility for the existence of God. To put it simply God's mind is the Universe. God's law is physics. God's name is Pi. Or maybe e. Or better yet, e to the power of pi. People struggle mightily to understand the universe, and the lazy people think such knowledge will be Revealed, in the meantime industrious people are figuring it out. It's not wrong to have faith, but the real value of faith is not found in its ability to explain the working of the world. Spinoza recognizes as do I, the false dichotomy between the natural world and God's miracles and explains religious dogma as the dumbed down version of communicating the nature of things to lazy or otherwise non-brilliant people. If God created everything, why would he need to suspend the rules of nature in order to make himself known? 'He' doesn't and he wouldn't. It's just superstition maintained for the interventions of religion. Something lazy thinkers need to believe.

There are a great number of other quotations I have forgotten, but that one is a stunner I have long believed myself, without of course, the ability to put it concisely before my encounter with Spinoza.

Thanksgiving Haps

Thanksgiving is one of those days that is very telling in that it's also the one holiday that nobody can do for you. I have found that you really can't wish people a happy Thanksgiving, they either have something to be thankful for, know it and are given comfort by that or they don't. Every Thanksgiving wish is therefore a dual-edged sword, because you can't really evade the fact that there is nothing else to do but look to your family and assess what life has brought you.

Christmas has been externalized to fit every different shape. You can objectify it and get through it without having to deal with its deeper implications. If you're Jewish, you probably have a tradition of eating Chinese food. If you're an atheist, or a materialist you can do the unreformed or reformed Scrooge act according to your mood without bothering to think about Christ in the Spirit of Christmas(tm). If you're a harried parent, you can get caught up in the busy work of it while getting more or less satisfaction depending on your budget and mall traffic. New Years Day, you can get your kiss at midnight and party like it's 1999, or just watch the ball drop eating cheetos in a bean bag chair in your underwear. It gets easier now that Dick Clark has finally become the ghoul he has avoided appearing in the prior century. On the Fourth of July, you don't have to call it Independence Day. On Memorial Day and Veteran's Day you're not expected to *do* anything but take the day off. They've changed President's Day and MLK to fit the schedules of ski venues, and the white sales of JC Penney. But while Black Friday gets more and more like Wall Street's triple witching hour, Thanksgiving still has that unavoidable weight and presence. You *have* to think about giving thanks and family. There's not much else you can do except be with your intimates and deal with the your measure of gratitude.

Dennis Prager and I share a definition of happiness in that we recognize that it cannot be faked. Happiness is the end result of accomplishment. It is in a three legged stool with gratitude and goodness. You cannot be happy if you are not grateful. You cannot be happy if you are not good. These are two qualities that I cannot wish for you or grant you. They are things you must accomplish for yourself. So in that way, I cannot really wish you a happy Thanksgiving, if you are not grateful and good, then you won't have happiness on this or any other day. While you might be able to fake some cheer on the other holidays, and there is something to be said for having that positive attitude because at least you are spreading cheer, Thanksgiving makes you think seriously about what you have to be happy about.

All that sounds like an elaborate excuse for me to be stingy with my holiday greetings, and to be honest, that's how I started off. I mean I just wrote about North Korea and Neil Farage, two rather in your face bad news subjects. So I said, well so many people are wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving, oh crap I better write something. But what am I doing, and why is my Thanksgiving going to be happy no matter what people say? Aha. Happiness.

There are not happiness chicklets dropping from heaven in my happy Thanksgiving so much as there are happenings in my life that are more or less under control that are contributing to my sense of accomplishment. Some fraction of those efforts are bearing fruit and I am grateful for that. So I will be happy, and now is the time to recognize. Every day should be the time, but today is the day to speak up and share that recognition and that means recognizing how the people around you have contributed to that sense of achievement and real accomplishment. Our better selves know this and live in the moment, recognizing real accomplishments as they happen, championing them along their curve to success and anticipating that success by spreading cheer before the fact.

So the haps are good. I'm learning again. I'm enjoying good health, although I really need to check a few things. I'm finding ways to stay home and stay here as my kids finish high school - the most important matter of all. I'm finding satisfaction in simple things.

I'm grateful for the attention I get here and for the opportunity to share. I'm grateful that my car didn't break before I paid it off (fingers crossed, one more payment on the Transporter). I'm grateful for the backup on my files, and that I have a record of my children's early lives. I'm grateful for the good things people see in me - that I've been able to turn my obsessions into knowledge and work and that work has helped others accomplish what they desire to. I'm grateful for all of my baseball caps sitting over in that box. I'm grateful that I can afford my electric bill and that nobody has come over to my house to steal the things that use all those kilowatts. I'm grateful that my children are mine, that I possess them and that they possess me. I'm grateful for my wife, for that woman who was patient with me and that we made it work 22 years now. I'm grateful for the teachers who work hard to discipline this community's children. I'm grateful for the gifts of the intellectually generous, and for the spirit of people whose faith in humanity encourages us all. I'm grateful for my cultural inheritance - that I have music to hum to over a dinner whose ingredients we all know, speak it in a word.

I know in every way how I have worked to make all of those things work - that I have no right to it, but that I made efforts that might not be fruitful to attract those virtuous blessings towards me and mine. It's all a part of something we all control and I know that. We do for us. We've done pretty well. So I believe we all have something accomplished. So I just ask you to look at what your work has done.







I'm going to say something else here that I have come to understand, I think. It would be easy, and I almost did it on reflex to say 'All things work together for good for those who love the Lord'. That trips off the tongue a bit too easily. My Christian education helps me understand a great deal, but I also know that I cannot impart that education on others. If I could only speak English then I would never speak anything else. If I could only understand Christian ethics then I would speak only in that dialect. But I am beginning to know things beyond that and with any luck will be able to communicate beyond that argot. So I call attention to the spirit of God in every man even to men who do not see it as God's grace or doing. In doing so I am aiming to be consistent to the ends of faith and reason and the laws of the universe, all as one, all that is seen and unseen. All ends of proper faith and proper reason are the same.

And that's what's happening today. I wish you the peace you require.

Death & Dishonor

"If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels."
-- John Donne

I'm still riffing off the idea of Hitchens that some civilized people must remain to civilize religions, or at the very least police them. I am not convinced, as Hitchens is, that this is a permanent matter. I observe that we simply have a poor set of self-selected clergy on the whole, and that the organization of organized religion is not quite as our regimes of say bond trading. Hitchens' Boesky is the Pope, and so it goes.

If you ask me why I don't like Islam, it is because I don't think it scales. What is truly admirable about Islam is that it appears to me to be the kind of religion I would invent were I to live on a desert island with 1000 others. And apparently this is a sentiment shared around the globe, because Islam does a fairly fantastic job of working in tribal areas like Afghanistan. And in such tribal areas seeking to add a bit of supernatural gloss to their authority and mores, Islam accommodates such pre-civil taboos such as tyranny over women. Without much getting into it, tyranny over women is appropriate in desert island situations so long as they are the sort of women who can't do pull-ups, kill snakes or stand still when spiders crawl over their bare feet. To the extent that women don't feel compelled to manage such tasks, it falls to men, and in reciprocity men will define power in such brutally ignorant terms. That's the basic exchange when it comes to the basics, and such arrangements work in small clans and tribal situations. But I think Islam doesn't scale, and thrives best in such enclaves. But then again, so does any faith, fable, superstition, or wives tale. And for the counter-exemplary women who flip the snake over the bar, snap it in two after 10 pull ups, then squeeze the blood out of it's dead head to drown the spider on her big toe, well they tend to be one in 10,000. And in many places around the world, they get stoned.

If you read Robert Fisk's latest piece in the Independent, you will come to understand how gruesome stoning is. All the heinous details are there. 20,000 women per year are murdered for preposterous reasons around the world.

This is the evil that men do. My point is not to suggest anyone indulge in any sort of outrage, but to toll the sad bell that reminds us that although life is precious, there are a million convolutions of logic inspiring men to forget that. And if there is anything to the universality of the defense of liberty and human rights, then there are a few good ideas that counter all those convolutions. At our best, we will fight with that in mind.

Here in America we do have our liberty, and we also have our million convolutions and corruptions of moral logic over our million channels over the air and through the broadband. Each tiny corruption is a small piece of evil doing its work chopping away not only our virtue but our ability see the virtue of justice in action. We can watch horror movies and then just go home and watch romantic comedies to soothe them away. Americans watch the true crimes of these killings and those of every other preposterous rationale around the world as if they were nothing more than lessons and fables. We can excuse ourselves from the action of justice as if we were grossed-out teenagers at the slasher flick. Eww. Let's get outta here. So the skill of intervention atrophies. Justice is considered but not clear and present.

I sometimes have difficulty explaining my friends why America is exceptional. It is a combination of complex interweaving threads that makes for that fabric. It's not just "we are a Christian Country". It's not just "we revere the Founder's and Original Intent". It's not just that we are a Global Policeman. It's the emergent force we can be and it is the reason men like Robert Fisk write to us in our language, alerting us to what happens out there. America is expected to do something, to act, to bring justice. Because we can. Because we must. America is a civilization, and here, like no other place, we civilize ethnics and languages and religions into a highly robust plurality. We have secured the blessings of liberty.

Our domestic liberty is our wedge of gold, and as we withdraw our forces from the world, we hoard it without coining into the money of moral intervention. The world dies without justice, in small bloody pieces. So are we in a Long War Against Terror or not?

A Pleasant Sociopath

Part of being Bowen is being philosophical. Deet is no exception, and so last night in Pasadena he expounded on the spiritual ramifications of the journey of self-discovery in Krakauer's story of Chris McCandless. I haven't read the story but my take on this dude was that he was a pleasant sociopath.

We have a number of physical journeys in our contemporary life that substitute for moral journeys. So whenever I hear stories about people who are bound and determined to discover the world and go adventuring in any sort of extreme or 'authentic' way, I am always drawn to the conclusion that it is some part of rejection. It is a trope in the modern West we have seen. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of which of the classics in our literature stands as the best accounting of this impulse although I suspect Rudyard Kipling is close to that mark. Whether it was Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet or Forrest Gump jogging across America or W. Somerset Maugham's character, someone is always searching to live on the razor's edge and thus prove that they are more alive than their slugwort contemporaries. I imagine myself in younger days attracted to that selfsame social rejection, seeking a higher moral order than seems accessible or even possible despite our privileged upbringing. However self-serving, it is a journey better taken than ignored.

The pleasant sociopath is a personal revolutionary. He has the good sense to understand that his reconciliation with society must begin with himself. Sometimes a physical journey can initiate the purification, but it is the idea that isolation in extremity from society is the sine qua non of spiritual purification that gives me a headache. That is why I suggest such an adventurer is sociopathic. There is an implicit cynicism that suggests that this can only be done without assistance. It implies that nobody else has similar desires. Ultimately is is a rejection of one's one social circle which is an admission that one has lived too close to home. Inevitably, those sojourners, having found Truth or Enlightenment or whatever golden epiphany they were chasing returns home to find in the very people he rejected some true measure of humanity. Suddenly, he is more sure of those things he only had a vague sense of propriety about and he becomes in deed the man he thought should have been there in his own youth. In the end, such journeys are about a crisis of faith, not an absence of truth. It would be more noble to resolve one's crisis of faith in community with one's fellows rather than in splendid isolation from them.

For much of my younger days, I lamented the absence of the 'noble arena'. I too, wanted men to be men and women to be women instead of dudes and babes. I have always sensed an imbalance in myself as I strove to exemplify what I desired to see in others. I have always feared becoming completely isolated within society as the last moral man left on earth, doomed to obscurity for following my conscience to spite the ignoble throngs around me. But I have somehow regained my faith in mankind and have found in simple ways and manners the means by which I can believe the best about my neighbors while being prepared for the worst. Perhaps this is a lesson sunk into my head subconsciously from 'A Man for All Seasons', because this is the essence of the Law. Let me find the quote:

Roper:

"So now you'd give the devil the benefit of law?"

More:

"Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?"

Roper:

"I'd cut down every law in England to do that."

More:

"Oh, and when the last law was down, and the devil turned on you, where would you hide, Roper, all the laws being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man's laws not God's, and if you cut them down -- and you're just the man to do it -- do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

"Yes, I'd give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety's sake."

In this regard, should we disregard every man and be faithless in our fellows in order to make some journey to perfection, how will we be to them upon our return? We have cut them all down in turning our backs to them.