Sumth'n not right 'bout that boy

Everyone who knows me knows I love gray weather. The gloomier the better. I like everything about it, in moderate doses - lightning, puddles, rain on a metal roof, rolling clouds, early twilight, oil lamps, the smell of lit candles and extinguished matches, board games, battery-operated radios, and the thought that in the most severe of those inclement times, everyone else, like me and those close to me, are inside, together, sharing a moment that the sun would scatter into a million irrecoverable pieces were it to part the clouds.

There is no deeper significance behind liking or disliking something, no intrinsic meaning behind one's attachment to gray skies or sunshine.


We don't ask ourselves why we stop and listen to a child's giggle, stop and watch the sun briefly hug the horizon, a bird float on a tuft of air, or a maple tree whirlybird twirl to the ground like a miniature helicopter.

You develop a fondness for these things in the same way you do food or music or people or anything else.

I think I know why some people think other people are crazy that don't like something most people like most of the time: Because those odd preferences are associated with 1) activities the majority don't prefer, and, more importantly, 2) judgment.

A trivial example:
a) I don't like football. I don't like anything about it. I don't like the game, the sound of the announcer's voice, the ubiquitous presence on TV, the whistles, the crunching tackles, the brain damage to the players, the poor example set by some players, the marketing, the noise, the enthusiasm of others enjoying the game, the cost of tickets, and the fact that it delays 60 Minutes 1/2 hour on Sunday nights to finish 2-1/2 minutes of the game.

b) Anyone reading this that really likes football may think I judge them for it. Not so. I think it's a huge waste of time and a thinly guised surrogate for warfare[1], but I don't begrudge anyone any enjoyment they get out it.

A considerable example:
a) I am tolerant of homosexuality. Not only am I tolerant, I accept it as a perfectly normal behavior that should be tolerated by others. I do not view it as a sin and I do not think other Christians should either.[2]

b) Anyone reading this may assume that because I am so insistent on tolerating what they believe to be aberrant, I must have a deep-seated, hidden reason for doing so, ie, that I am gay. Not so. But I understand the tendency to think so. It is a burden that tolerant people bear. When an issue touches uncomfortable racial, sexual, political or religious subjects, tolerant people are lumped together with the same group of people they are tolerating. That will never change. Anyone familiar with fundamentalist religious thought will know that even the word "tolerance" itself is associated with a sort of Christian treason.

I guarantee there will be people who read this who won't understand. They'll think, "Hmmm... don't like football, likes gay folks, there's something not right with that boy."

I love all people of all faiths and colors and persuasions. I celebrate life and marvel at its delightful variety and consistency despite the differences, and feel the pain, no matter how small, no matter why, of of anyone who is marginalized because they are different.

Tolerance sometimes means acceptance without understanding, often without liking,often while disliking.


-- --- ----- -------


I started this on October 5, a day that happened to offer a fresh, thick, humid layer of fall scents. The air was so full of seasonal innuendo, every breath provided a new delight.



[1]
I started this article and this example before Calvin College sent out its alumni survey on whether or not they should begin a football program.

[2]
If you have an open mind that is not yet made up one way or the other, you owe it to yourself to read retired physicist and pastor John Burgeson's balanced view on the topic. I first came to know him while reading his posts in a Christian Creation/Evolution forum, which often splintered into topics like this. I read everything he wrote there, as well as another man, Glen Morton, who was nothing like Burgy but had a lot of insightful things to say. I ran out of time and haven't been reading posts there for years.

http://www.burgy.50megs.com/more.htm#10

Else Whence the Joy of Baseless Speculation?

Undersea Stonehenge
or crashed UFO?

I'm following this story closely, but there's more speculation than story right now.

The exploration team that found the anomaly on the ocean bottom, led by Swedish researcher Peter Lindberg, apparently doesn't have the funds to take a closer look right now.

It's just as interesting to me if it's a submerged archeological site. Not knowing is half the fun. Actully, not knowing is most of the fun, else whence the utter joy of baseless speculation?

UFO, USO, Stonehenge found under the ocean June 2011?

Everything is Relationships

Writers as much as anyone else (perhaps even more so) want to live forever. They write because they can't not write, just as any normally wired human being cannot stop eating or breathing. A writer believes as long as his words remain, some tangible aspect of his being remains. Painters and musicians and artists of all persuasions would probably agree.

The entire object of a life is to persist after death.[1] There are other ways in which we do this besides creative expression. The most common ones are children (DNA) and religious beliefs (the soul) in which we persist eternally in a state of pleasure or punishment.

I am increasingly pricked by questions of my own mortality. I think often about those I care about and have cared about, of those that will precede me in death and those that will follow, those that no longer think of me though I think of them, and those that do and that I've forgotten.

We keep things that others have touched when the others meant something special to us. It's a very old practice and shares a psychological kinship with animism. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we think the item carries with it some part of the nature of the person that touched it.

That could be a football jersey, a signed book, a perfumed letter, a pillow that smells like your child, a baby blanket, a shred of giftwrap from an office party, a sticky note, a coffee cup, etc. The more intimate the item, the more powerful the connection. A football jersey has the sweat of the player. A cup once touched someone's lips (like the Holy Grail).

This connection between a thing and the person that touched it seems to be accepted universally. It no doubt had and may still have some evolutionary benefit, perhaps one that assists in the cohesion of larger communities when a key personality no longer exists or the community is too big for everyone to know and touch the personality.

There are other things that outlast us:

• It is said that all of us with each breath take in at least one molecule of air exhaled by Julius Caesar. The air we exhale is inhaled by others, and so one.
• Each time we touch another person, we exchange electrons.
• Each time we catch a cold, we are sharing not only viral DNA thousands or millions of years old, but the encapsulating host cells sneezed out in our vicinity or left on a doorknob or a piece of paper, etc
• The compression waves of our voices become undetectable by the human ear but continue to move molecules long after they can be heard, and they are still there until they become indistinguishable from the natural jostling of molecules due to ambient energy. The heat signatures of our bodies are the same.
• We leave our DNA everywhere we go, and when we decompose, everything that is in us becomes part of something else, just as everything we drink and eat comes only at the death of something else, actually a lot of something elses, from bacteria to insects to plants to animals.

We are all connected, and the connections persist after we are gone, because connections are relationships between physical things, not the things themselves; they are the laws and happenstances that relate things to each other, from traditional relationships like family and friends, to chemical ones like digestion, to mathematical ones like gravity.

"No man is an island" might just as well be said "No man exists apart from his relationship to something else."

We know this instinctively and it's expressed in aphorisms like that above or in popular culture.

In It's a Wonderful Life, Clarence tells George, "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?" Scrooge watches others celebrate his death. Dorothy gets to see the deeper qualities of farmhands Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory in Oz.

The list is infinite because you can't describe any human experience without a reference to something else; everything is fixed in some medium, whether it's film or paint or words or memories.

Whether or not that has meaning is a matter of individual predilection and insight.

And if you have a religious faith as I do, we do live on in a different way, but in a way that may be, just perhaps, a combination of all of these.


[1]
Which seems rather pointless if all there is to being is to continue being.

Existence is horrifying if plumbed too deeply

Old saying: The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I'm listening to Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , a very good, easy-to-listen-to perspective on the brain and faith by a former fundamentalist (pleasant and inoffensive even if you are a believer, in fact almost disconcertingly sensitive; you can imagine him just as easily discussing the delicate folds of an origami swan).

The book covers a wide variety of topics, but the ones I find especially interesting are physiological. The experimental basis of a chemical explanation for supernatural phenomena is basically two-fold: 1) We can induce the same sensations in a laboratory with electrical stimulation (and other things like sensory deprivation), and 2) we cannot verify the paranormal claims experimentally. (There are also many insights from history, psychology, anthropology, etc, that indicate we are wired for a propensity to believe and even to believe many of the same things; very interesting to be sure, but as Shermer notes, the fact that we believe or the number of believers does not correlate to the veracity of the beliefs.)

I got to thinking however, about something a wise uncle[1] told me once when I asked him if he accepted the Documentary Hypothesis of the Old Testament, ie, that several authors and a redactor (JEPD) contributed to the Pentateuch (first five books of the bible). I mentioned that no early source exists with all the pieces, so we assume they were knitted together later from different sources. He said that just because we haven't found an original source with all the pieces doesn't meant it doesn't exist.


This is more complicated than it seems on the surface, since as you know we routinely find earlier examples of human activity around the world, and that activity doesn't arise in a vacuum. Just as when you find a Tyrannosaurus Rex that's 65 million years old, you know that there were many similar dinosaurs that preceded it, so if you find a written account that is 6,000 years old, you know that writing and the culture that produced it is older and we may or may not ever find evidence of it.

So: Just because we can induce a religious experience with an electrical jolt to a certain area of the brain doesn't mean that it cannot be induced in other ways. (A jolt to a different area induces sexual arrousal, and we know there are myriad other ways to do that.) It does certainly cast doubt on paranormal phenomena, but it doesn't rule it out. 

If I have only ever eaten oysters my whole life, it does not mean I could not be equally satisfied with hot dogs, it just means my taste buds have never enjoyed them.

I wrote elsewhere allowing for the possibility that invisible things may interact with us. I'm a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut. I've read most of what he wrote.[2] I'm not reading much anymore (my free time is so limited, I spend what little I have traveling, writing here and there, and listening to books, which I find just as enjoyable as using my eyes). When Bagombo Snuffbox was released, I devoured it, as it promised to be the last work of Vonnegut's I'd get a chance to read for the first time. In it is a short story, "Thanasphere," in which an astronaut encounters the souls of the departed.I don't recall the specifics of the story, but it struck me as eerily possible, and permitted by the laws of physics. Read Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds for an amazing speculation on how a conscience could survive the slow stretching out of the Cosmos (should it expand forever and not collapse); that scenario posits scales of time, distance, and temperature so vastly large and small that we can not conceive them; it is not hard to imagine how the energies of the lives of perhaps 300 generations (back to the earliest written human records) could still be circulating and interacting in the ether.



[1]
Davis A Young, geologist, professor and author. Science Held Hostage: What's Wrong With Creation Science and Evolutionism

[2]
One of the few books I've put down and never picked back up was Vonnegut's Palm Sunday. At the time, I was dieting and exercising vigorously and simultaneously had to deal with an onset of anxiety; I associated the themes of the book with the anxiety and decided I had to let go of both, at least for the time being. That was 2004 or so and I never picked the book up again, though I think I could now. Vonnegut understood the utter absurdity of existence that is horrifying if plumbed too deeply.

Happy Birthday, Truman.

Truman Streckfus Persons, Tuesday, September 30, 1924, New Orleans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_capote