Bill's Comments

Mothers-in-law are the common subject of jokes and often a source of tension in the family. That was the case when I was growing up. Neither mother-in-law liked the offspring's spouse, and the feeling was reciprocal.

However, I was lucky. For thirty years my mother-in-law was good to me, often better to me than to her own daughter. Yesterday she died from the complications of cancer and chemotherapy. She was 84. For a long time we thought she would live "forever." However, once the end started it completed quickly. She went in the hospital last Thursday, and died five days later.

She raised five daughters, all of whom are successful, productive women. She had nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren when she died yesterday. She managed to see all of them one last time before she passed away.

I will miss her. There are few like her left.

My McAfee anti-spam folder had the following item in it:

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Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to command.
--Liturgy of St James
--17th century French carol

The preceding lyrics from the Liturgy of St James and set to a French 17th century carol, offer a distinct contrast to our modern, secular preparations for Christmas. While the rest of the world in this Advent season frantically competes with “National Lampoon’s Christmas” to combat the earlier darkness and late morning light, and blasts the sounds of Christmas music, the lyrics of which have lost all meaning in their repetition, to drown out the voices in our heads that wonder what we are really doing, this gentle song says to stop, wonder, and feel the great blessing that was once and forever bestowed upon us and that we celebrate every year.

God gives us what we need, and as this song tells us, we do not need more things and more distraction. We need more wonder, more gratitude, more willingness to worship, to stop our insane pace and find the peace being offered.

The Great Chicago Fire in a play---an extremely intense afternoon of drama, at the Lookingglass Theater in Chicago, IL.

The Great Fire lasted 36 hours, burned 2200 acres, displaced 100,000 families, and destroyed esentially everything south of Fullerton street. The conditions could be described as a perfect storm--drought-parched, solid wood, houses, sidewalks, streets, and a steady, high wind. The spark was in the O'Leary barn--supposedly due to a cow kicking over a lantern. The play that it inspired is a complex creation, both in the script and in the execution.

It's structure is the interwoven stories of six survivors. But the central figure is the personification of the fire, who constantly threads through the scenes, battles the people and destroys property. Apparently there were places that were supposed to be humorous during the play--I never saw them. From the start with the ominous sub-sonics on the sound system as The Fire staged the O'Leary incident with toy animals and people and a play barn, it was greater and lesser tension throughout, until the final scene when the rain came.

Technically this show was a tour-du-force. The sound design, the lighting design, and especially the set design, with falling walls, all added to the tension and foreboding. The representations of buildings with wood and paper models, and their symbolic destruction as they were taken down or cut down and let fall, gave a definite feeling of the losses that were incurred. The management of the performance was perfect by my observation. I detected no mis-cues or mis-operation of props.

The actors were all superb, some of them playing as many as three or four roles with varying characters and accents. But to me, Lindsay Noel Whiting as the Fire was far and away the star. She was dressed much like a young, 1870's girl, and wore her hair as two large braids adding to the effect. One might have thought she were only 12 or 13 at first glance, until one observed her bearing. She is a phenomenal acrobat, scaling the supports at unbelievable speed and hanging in poses most people could not accomplish. But what stands out is her ability to be malevolent. There was no doubt that as The Fire, she was evil. It is this malevolence, despite the surface childlike look, that kept the mood constantly tense.

This play is drama at its best, providing a complex view of life, and leaving one with much to think about. It cannot be called entertaining, it took effort to watch and keep track. However, it is definitely worth the time.

Last Friday I attended a preview performance of "Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy," written by Sarah Gmitter and Jason Burkett. It was presented by The New Suit Theater Company at West Stage of the Raven Theater Complex in Chicago, IL (SW corner of N Clark and W Granville).

New Suit produces plays that explore complex issues and make them understandable. This play and production certainly met that goal. Additionally Jason Burkett's plays always have a subtext. In this case, it was that people need to quit listening only to what they themselves are saying and actually listen to other people. Also, they need to learn to restate their ideas if they are not being understood.

The play took its inspiration from a documentary on global warming created by Randy Olsen. The comedy aspects come from the imagined misadventures of Randy Olsen as he produced the film, and the exaggerated characters he works with and meets. The play affirms a belief in anthropogenic global warming, but not in the apocalyptic manner of Al Gore and other environmental doomsayers. Though I would be called a global warming denier, I would still recommend seeing the play because it does present the sides in a reasonably fair manner and does not approve of blocking out the other sides message.

The play used a cast of seven, with two of the cast doubling in speaking roles and all of the women in the cast at one time or another during the play doubling as walk-on airline hostesses. Andrew Nowak was an excellent harried, nervous, and confused Randy Olsen, and Jovan King was outstanding as his street-wise videographer. The two really worked well together. Michael Reyes as the larger-than-life egotistical and slightly bizarre producer was phenomenal. The remaining cast members provided excellent, well-acted support.

The venue at Raven Theater Complex is very well suited to the kind of play that Jason Burkett writes. It is a major improvement over the venue at which New Suit produced his previous play, "JedIraq: Megan's First War." It is easy to get to, and comforable, being on the ground level. The execution of the play was well managed. All the scene changes went smoothly and that is despite the use of the cast as stage hands and their need to do costume changes. The sets were minimal but completely fulfilled the necessary functions.

This was an extremely enjoyable evening of theater, making a serious issue both interesting and entertaining without trivializing it. "Sizzle" plays through November 14. I strongly recommend seeing it.

After eleven years one lives with it, but never gets over it. He was truly a gentle giant, 6'5", 240 lbs, easy going, a great comedian, excellent musician, and a very creative writer. When a 19 years-old fills a church to overflowing at his funeral, you know he was a special person. To quote somebody else, "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased."

The political news is filled with the rise of Herman Cain to lead Romney in several states by double digits. At the same time the pundits are in the tank for Romney and bombarding us with the weaknesses of Cain. Romney whom I see as a Republican version of John Kerry, a principleless person who will say whatever seems to be the right thing at the time, is touted as the one who can win with the independent voters. Note that there is no discussion of his principles or his programs (particularly RomneyCare). Just the bleat that he can win.

They have learned nothing in the last six years. The Republicans lost the Congress during Bush's term because they went for winning and betrayed every conservative principle, becoming Democrats-lite. They won the house back because they suddenly rediscovered their conservative principles with a lot of help from the TEA Party. Now they think they can with the presidency without those principles?

Obama won, not because he presented principles, but because the disgust with Bush and the Republicans was so overwhelming, the Democrats could have run anyone and won. But in a race defined by personality and not principle, Obama will beat Romney hands down, save that his record is now so bad many people are in the same attitude towards him that they were towards Bush.

But lets get back to the independent voter. To listen to the commentary, one would think and independent voter is some sort of fence-sitting Republicrat or Demlican. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the 2010 election showed. Independent voters are exactly that--independent. They vote based on what is important to them, not on party loyalty or ideology. In 2008 getting rid of incumbents was a primary goal of independents and they were quite successful. In 2010, getting rid of Democrats that passed ObamaCare was the primary goal, and boy was there a blood-bath in the House. This year, I expect a blood-bath in the Senate, but the House Republicans had best look to their votes. A number of freshmen appear to have succumbed to belt-way disease and may get a permanent cure, along with some more incumbents.

Independent voters tend to vote on principle, not party, or perhaps on desired result. They get it in their mind that some Congressman or Senator is the bad guy and they will work to get rid of him. They will jump party lines in primaries in order to either prevent the nomination of a notably bad candidate or to at least insure the least bad alternative if their preferred candidate fails to win in the Fall. Independents are not impressed by wishy-washy, half-elephant, half-ass, candidates. They are perfectly capable of making choices between two imperfect candidates.

As an independent, I am disgusted with the Republican party. I am conservative to the point of reactionary at times, but am willing to work with opposite viewpoints to make progress overall. What I see in the Republican party right now is a set of people in the background sucking all the juice out of the process, trying to create an inevitability in Romney because they think he can win, and in winning continue their gravy-train of business as usual in Washington. The most interesting candidates have problems, but would shake things up and in a good way. Among the ways would be the loss of the professional politician.

....there was Homer W. Smith, fifty years before, in fact. In 1952 Homer W. Smith published his book, "Man and His Gods." The book is out of print, and is not available from the used-book dealers that Barnes and Noble associate with. Smith was a renal physiologist and was sufficiently notable that he was able to ask Albert Einstein to write a forward to the book.

The essence of the book is that all religion is oppressive and that pure intellect is the saving of humankind. He also tries to make the case that religions are simply warmed-over and co-opted versions of other religions, especially Christianity, towards which he has a particular animosity. He considers Christianity to be co-opted Mithraism. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he cherry-picks the worst cases, in fact he goes in for sensationalism to such a degree that one could characterize the book as, Western religious history as told by The National Inquirer.

Unlike Dawkins and Hitchens, however, or any of the other Evangelical Atheists, he has actually read widely and deeply, including the historical Christian literature. He read with a jaundiced eye, but nonetheless, he covered a lot of detail and presented a highly detailed history from ancient Egypt to the turn of the twentieth century. He writes well, but I often became fatigued by the constant drumming of a point of view that considered all religious leaders to be con artists and in it for power and money, essentially hypocrites. He never fails to provide exquisite detail of the failings of religions, but never once presents any good. His discussion of the use of torture in the Middle Ages is the exemplar, with many pages listing of all the possible tortures that could be applied and the rules by which they were to be used. I also think his numbers of victims are exaggerated.

There are no credits given for the sources of his material until the final semi-autobiographical afterword called "About This Book." There he lists many of the authors and books he read over the years. Notable was that most of them were nineteenth and only early twentieth century. The latest I saw was 1932. This means that his interpretations were definitely out of date compared even to his years of publication. From the 1950's on, there has been a great revisiting of the relationship of religion to society over time. One of the casualties was an author that Smith seems to give much credit to and who appeared to have a great influence on Smith's thinking of the relation of religion to science--Draper. Draper's conflict scenario of science suppressed by religion has been very thoroughly discredited in recent times.

Homer Smith would not be considered as one of the "New Atheists," despite his obvious hostility to Christianity. He is too well-read, and not sufficiently rabid in his rhetoric. He does have the same filters operating on what he takes in and writes about. He, like almost all the intellectual atheists, places science and reason on a pedestal, failing to consider that the intellectual effort they exert to arive at their life positions via reason are beyond most people, nor do most people have the time or inclination to spend their energy on such efforts. They are ideologues for reason, failing to see that life is much messier than they know.

Wretchard (Richard Fernandez) in a post entitled " Only the Good Die Young " embedded a clip of the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill. Of all the men in recent history, he can arguably be considered responsible for saving the world through his leadership in WW II. (He died old, almost 90)

It strikes me that we won't see a Churchill or much of any other heroic type of leader anymore. We would have condemned him long before he became Prime Minister for his personality, his abrasiveness, his smoking, his appearance. We are obsessed with appearances now--and look what we elected as a leader--an incompetent classic narcissist. Anyone that shows competency is hounded by the press and pilloried in any way possible, even to the creation of lies. The Republicans have a whole group of competent people vying for the candidacy for President, but all of them except Romney, a pretty-boy, Obama-lite politician, are constantly subjected to insult, dismissal, and contempt.

We have no idea anymore of what a hero is, what he/she looks like, or what she/he acts like. We want perfection or nothing, being unable to prioritize our needs and desires in a leader, and as a consequence being unable to compromise effectively.

It is no wonder the barbarians are at the gates.

The allusion in the title is to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to which the four most widely known atheists, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett have been compared, callling them the Four Horsemen of Atheism. I have discussed Dawkins and Hitchens here, and Harris, briefly, here. This post concerns Daniel Dennett.

Dennett's book, Breaking the Spell[1], is what places him with the other three atheists, but I don't think it is a fair characterization of his writing. Actually the whole allusion to the four horsemen is unfair to both Harris and Dennett, much like lumping Fundamentalism, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism together and calling them Christian. In many ways the differences are just as great among the atheists as among the three types of Christianity.

Dennett is an atheist, but he doesn't rub one's nose in it like Dawkins or Hitchens, nor does he outright condemn belief in God as do the other three, nor does he attempt to destroy religious belief. As a philosopher, he is stepping back a bit and in effect saying, "Religion is a big deal in the lives of many if not most people, we should understand why." He is proposing that religion should be studied like any other natural phenomenon, such as reproduction or social structures, with a view to understanding both what is beneficial and what is detrimental to people. He is also aware that in the studying of it, it is possible that it might be broken, that a part of its efficacy is its mystery.

The concern over understanding how religion really works, is "the spell" that he is proposing to break. He spends the first chapter pointing out that from a biological perspective, religion does not make sense. He also points out that religions enjoy "traditional exemption from certain sorts of analysis and criticism." [ital in original] This exemption is the spell. The spell is also the feelings that religion inspires in some people. The danger in studying religion is that this spell will be broken. He spends most of the book making the case that the study is worth the risk. But then he is not a believer.

I am not a fan of Dennett, but neither am I a foe. I have disagreements in one of his areas of expertise, the mind, but I found much to respect in this book. If one gets around or ignores the rank egotism of his wanting to refer to the intellectual atheists as "brights" the book is generally respectful of religion and religious people. He tends to elevate evolution to the same quasi-religious plane that Dawkins does, but is less offensive about it and provides quite a bit more information along the way.

He also brings in some very different illustrations from nature than the usual ones. Being a philosopher of the mind, he is fascinated by natural events that reprogram the minds of animals. In Elbow Room, he discusses a wasp call sphix, that has a very complex behavior that it turns out is not at all thinking though it appears that way. In this book he describes an ant that is infected with a fluke that changes the ant's behavior so that the fluke will be eaten by a cow or sheep. Dennett draws upon a much broader base of knowledge than any of the other authors I have read among the atheists. It shows in that his arguments are much stronger, and at the same time more temperate, with little dependence on rhetoric.

This book has caused me to reassess my opinions of Dennett. It now behooves me to acquire his entire output and carefully read it. I don't expect to come to agreement with him, but he is important for me to understand and be able to discuss, since we have at least two common areas of interest, religion and the mind.

[1]Dennett, Daniel C., Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Viking Penguin, New York, (2006)

Being slow to catch up, I just came across this excellent piece by Paul Greenberg in Townhall. He not only accurately places Steve Jobs at the head of the pack, but also properly identifies the reasons he got there.

Read it.

This is the title of a recent book[1] by Bart D. Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It is an thorough presentation of the problem of suffering in the world as discussed in the Bible. It is also a personal statement by Dr. Ehrman on why he is an agnostic. He became an agnostic in response to the argument from evil against the existence of God.

This book is a very readable and excellent guide to what the Bible says about suffering, and points out that the answers are contradictory. Along the way, Dr. Ehrman points out the illogic of people who thank God for saving them when they are among the few saved in a disaster, when many others died at the same time. The obvious question is, "Why didn't He save them also?" or "Why did He allow the disaster in the first place?"

I have discussed the problems of good and evil and theodicy in other posts, so won't repeat the discussion. My answer, rather than agnosticism or atheism, was to decide that God was not omnipotent. [My thirty years of agnosticism were due to logical, philosophical issues not the problem of evil.]

Dr. Ehrman's presentation of the problem of evil is excellent. I think his attempted resolution is a bit weak, but then many would say my resolution leads to a God that is not worth worshipping. (Actually, I can't say as I worship God so much as revere, respect, and listen to Him.)

For anyone concerned with the theodicy, this is an important book. It presents all the sides of the issue, and all of the answers that have been offered. I strongly recommend it.

[1] Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer, HarperCollins, New York, 2008

This is the title of Fredrick Forsyth's latest book, published last year. This time instead of international politics, warfare, or terrorism, he tackles the drug trade, specifically the cocaine trade. As always, he uses a story to tell us some unpleasant truths about the real world. What makes him a master at this is that the story is always primary and the message almost incidental. In telling about the world as it really is, or as he perceives it for you post-modernists out there, he illustrates some important truths that would be ignored otherwise.

Forsyth uses the President of the US as the means to start and end his story. The beginning sketch certainly resembles the current occupant of the White House, but I seriously doubt he has the fortitude to make the decisions that lead to the action in the book. His Chief of Staff has a certain similarity to Emmanual Rohm, in his personality.

The plot is one of the President providing the means, legal and financial, via declaring drug trafficking to be a form of terrorism and burying the funding in other budgets, to allow a no-holds-barred approach to stopping the cocaine trade. Entire our central character, The Cobra. The Cobra creates and executes a plan that brings the drug cartel and its clients into a destructive war with each other.

This is all under the covers until the war breaks out. It is here that Forsyth provides the unpleasant truths about our society and our politicians--when we see the actual carnage, we will do anything to make it go away, including letting the drug traffic continue.

In the Penquin Signet Edition (paperback) pp 375-379 have the punch line. Here is the one-line summary from p 378:

"Our great nation can kill up to a million abroad, but not one percent of that figure of its own gangsters without sustaining a fainting fit."

Unfortunately, from my perspective it is all too true. We get what we ask for.

The September, 2011, issue of The Lutheran had this item on p. 9:

Meeting with Obama
"Despite committing himself fully to resolving the debt-ceiling crisis that cominated summer headlines, President Brack Obama took time to meet with Christian leaders, including ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson. The leaders a statement called 'A Circle of Protection,' in which they articulated need for the president and Congress to avoid cutting programs that protect the poor both in the US and globally. The statement urged approaches that help share the sacrifices necessary to eliminate the nation's deficit."

First of all this is a violation of Matthew 22: 15-22

15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words.
16 They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are.
17 Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is is righ to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”
18 But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me?
19 Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius,
20 and he asked them, “Whose portrait is on this? And whose inscription?”
21 “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said to them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
22 When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

In meeting with a politician, any politician, and promulgating policy, Bishop Hanson and cronies has rendered unto Caesar that which is God's. (See my earlier post on the discussion of this.)

The second evil they have committed is endorsing the use of force to support what is supposed to be voluntary charitable assistance. ALL money that the government takes in and disperses is obtained by the use of overt or implied force--pay taxes or go to jail. The ultimate enforcer is the gun in the hand of a government official. Helping the poor and down-trodden is virtuous only if it is voluntary. Coercion removes moral value. Apparently the "leadership" of the the Christian commmunities has finally succumbed to pragmatics, the end of poverty relief by the dole justifies the forceable collection of taxes.

It is no wonder the mainline Protestant faiths are losing membership--their leaders are morally bankrupt. Their politics dictates their theology rather than the other way around.

The big news in science is the publication by CERN that they may have measured neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light. Actually what they have measured is their arrival time as slightly sooner than expected, and it computes to moving faster than light.

Immediately everyone is in a twitter over the possibilities of time travel because Special Relativity formulas give negative time values when velocities are faster than the speed of light.

Hold it right there.

This is an instance of something I have discussed before, the equating of a model of reality with reality itself. Special relativity actually is a description of the world when it is measured by light particles, which move at a constant speed in a vacuum. Actually it does not forbid faster than light movement, it simply says we can't measure it with light particles. The new measurements are not based on light but neutrinos which have some very different properties from other particles.

Once all the whoopla dies down and the press goes away to another story they can exploit for the moment, the results will be recast in a number of different hypotheses which will be tested and retested. Out of it will come new descriptions of the world we live in. My guess is that the description of the dimensional structure of the universe will be modified, and possibly time will be treated not as a fourth dimension as it is now, but in some different way. Stay tuned.

We often relegate the role of ideas to an inferior position in dealing with the world. However, if one takes the time to look back at history, the philosophers have a profound effect on history, allbeit very delayed. Case in point, our current turmoil with "liberalism" comes ultimately from Rousseau, an 18th century philosopher.

One current error is that of attributing Michelle Bachman's ideas and policies to "dominionism". Before you accept this particular over-reaction of the Lame-Stream Media (OK, I don't trust them and don't believe anything they say) read this particular analysis.

"Throughout Hurricane Irene, the Army kept guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: a reminder that the phrase “duty, honor, country” really means something. "

Thanks to Political Mavens via Jewish World Review.