November 2, 2010: 1994 all over again

In November 1994, Hal Crowther published in The Independent an article about that month's national election. Our current month's election seemed so similar to 1994's that last week, The Independent reprinted Crowther's article last week, under the title "We've seen this movie before: 1994 revisited." Some excerpts:

I remember my first editor laughing at me because I seemed to require logic in my politics. But can you deliberately block your opponent from achieving anything, then ask the voters to sack him for his lack of achievement?....
    The stuff that animates rightwingers in my part of the world is so inchoate and simplistic you couldn't accurately call it ideology. My guess is that neither ideology nor widespread misery derailed the Democrats...Throwing out some of the best politicians along with some of the most expendable was a voter's irrational reaction to a profoundly irrational system.
    The one thing in this country that's indisputably wretched is the way we conduct our politics, and the way we govern ourselves as a consequence of those politics.
    "Every Senator who participates in it knows this system stinks," says the [in 1994] retiring Senate majority leader, George Mitchell. "What matters most in seeking public office is not integrity, not ability, not judgment, not responsibility, not experience, not intelligence, but money...Money dominates this system. Money infuses this system. Money is the system."
    ...
    "We think the diametrically opposed party system is an absurd joke," one college student told The Washington Post [in 1994]. "We're just watching the whole American experiment and wondering 'Can this go on?'"
    ...
    Do Americans grow dumber as they grow older, through some insidious process that probably involves television? Is there intelligent life after 30? Trust the young people. If the two-party system isn't dead already, it smells pretty funny to me. Resisting even the most basic campaign reforms, perpetually posturing and positioning themselves for elections years away, the Democrats and Republicans have reduced democracy to a rowdy, childish tug-of-war that provides almost nothing but expensive entertainment.

Some questions for Pastor Ullage

Pastor Ullage, thanks for providing a summary of your sermon on P.U.S.H.: Pray Until Something Happens.  I'd like to follow up with a few questions, if I may:

1. Why didn't you count your wife's coming into your study as "something happening"? I mean, her leaving seemed to qualify, so why not her arriving? Aren't you being awfully selective in what counts as a happening?
2. When she was sitting there not interrupting your praying, what were you praying about (or for)? Your billboard didn't have room for you to specify what, if anything in particular, we should pray about while waiting for "something" to happen, but I can be forgiven for expecting your sermon to address this.
3. Actually, your "Amen!," immediately following the information that "she got up and left the room," rather suggests that you were praying for her to leave. Is that what you were praying for?
4. In connection with Question 1, was the reason you didn't count your wife's coming in perhaps because you weren't praying for that to happen?
5. With regard to that, apparently not much is happening in your relationship with your wife. Would you care to comment on that?
6. Do you do marital counseling as well as prayer counseling? Which do you figure you're more competent to do, if not equally competent in both?
7. When something happens that you weren't praying for, is that because someone else was praying for it, or do some things happen without anybody's praying? How is that possible?  

Pastor Ullage's signature homily

Brethren, I say unto you, God hears and answers prayer. Nothing happening in your life? God can make it happen.
    God can make it happen. Let me hear it back!
    God can make it happen!
    Amen! God can make it happen. And you can pray to make it happen! When nothing's happening in your life, PUSH! Puh-ray until something happens!
    Puh-ray until something happens!
    God can make it happen!
    Amen. Just this morning, Brothers and Sisters, I was in my study, and nothing was happening. So I prayed. And I prayed. And I kept on apraying. And I prayed some more.
    And my wife opened the door and came in. She sat down and kept quiet. She knows not to interrupt me when I'm praying to God. And she sat, and she waited. And she waited some more, until finally....
    She got up and left the room. Amen!
    Something happened.
    God answers prayer!
    And I got the idea for today's sermon. Pray Until Something Happens, Brethren. When nothing is happening in your life, God can make it happen. And you can make it happen through prayer.
    Turn in the hymnal now to Push Through to the Promise Land....
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October 10 Word of the Day from dictionary.com: ullage: –noun 1. the amount by which the contents fall short of filling a container, as a cask or bottle....

Morning on the Carolina coast

Actually, the photograph was taken on November 10, on Pea Island, at about 7:15 a.m., just before my wife and I were met by our guides for a personal walking tour around the lake at this winter wildlife refuge.

Wings over water

At Pea Island, dateline today (White Egret):

Added December 29th, after I finally incorporated the names of birds as identified to me by guide Audrey Whitlock, to whom much thanks, as well as thanks for her and Peggy Eubanks's companionship and guidance that day:

Black-bellied Plover in winter plumage:

Brown Pelicans:

Yellow-rumped Warbler (used to be called Myrtle Warbler):

Great Egret:

Pied-billed Grebe:

White Pelicans with two Great Black-backed Gulls:

Belted Kingfisher:

Raccoon:

American Coot:

Egrets:

More Pelicans:

Swans:

More Egrets:

The birdwatchers:

Watching Sherlock sitting still

As I may not have disclosed in this web log, which seems to have become a story of my life, I twitch. Most of the time, or at least while I'm otherwise trying to sit still.
    "We have two Sherlock Holmeses going now, you know?" I said to my wife this morning.
    "Two? I think we have only one episode of Sherlock we haven't watched." She was referring to Masterpiece Mystery, its new 21^st century Sherlock Holmes.
    "Yes, two. Sherlock and Luther." I was referring to the British psychological crime drama. "Luther makes large deductions from minute observations, honing in on the likely serial killer."
    My wife said humph. "I guess we have one and a half Sherlocks to watch, since you fell asleep last night."
    "How did you know I'd fallen asleep?"
    "You stopped twitching"

Jané's diary

How strange, that conversation at Costco. Who says it so straight-out like that? There is no God. I never saw that coming. They usually say how true or nod their heads or at least say hmm. But to just come back with No, there is no God, God doesn't exist. And to say it so matter of factly, without heat, reasonably.
    And so, am I wrong, and God didn't plan things? How do I think I know that? Or how did I think I knew it? And did I believe it anyway, really? I wanted to believe, maybe. But why? Anyway, if God planned for younger people to take care of their parents when they get old, then why are fewer and fewer doing it?
    And can I say for sure that God has ever answered even a single one of my prayers?

I wish I could remember that man's name. He said it very clearly, but then he asked me what my name was and how was Jané spelled, and my husband's curiously pronounced last name. I should have asked him again after the restroom.
    But isn't the fact that he was still there when I came back, eating his yogurt, somehow a sign that maybe God does exist, after all? But why would God send someone with the message that he doesn't exist?
    Maybe I'll see him at Costco another time. I have so many questions.

Ken Marks turned up

How fortunate for the rest of us that digital photographer Ken Marks took the Wilmington Turnout #3 on his trip to New England a few weeks ago:

See Ken's other photos from the trip at New England 2010.

God comes up at Costco

I pushed my cart to the back of the shortest checkout line. I didn't notice that the couple ahead of me had a child in a stroller until its mother said to me, "We're going to purchase him."
    I dutifully looked the child over and said, "You can't afford him."
    "No, actually, we can't."
    "Well, maybe if you can hang in there with him for a few decades, he can help support you when you get old."
    The boy's mother thought for a moment and said,"Yes, that's the way God planned things, isn't it?"

Steve Glossin is back!

Prophecy of the Medallion. "What happens when a Shiite Muslim cleric in Baghdad (‘the Imam’) goes on a fanatical quest to fulfill a prophecy of Muhammad and crosses the..."

I highly recommend this very satisfying read. Since the author is in the process of revising Prophecy for distribution on Kindle, remaining copies of a private early edition could become collector's items. They certainly deserve to be. Let me know if you want to acquire one.

Testimony of a nonbeliever

The several dozen statements of nonbelievers collected in Christopher Hitchens's Portable Atheist just keep on being rationally inspirational. Here's an excerpt from the next-to-most recent I've read, by Elizabeth Anderson, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:

Surveying the religious booths every year at the Ann Arbor art fair, I am always struck by the fact that they are staffed by people who are convinced of their own revelations and miracles, while most so readily disparage the revelations and miracles of other faiths. To a mainstream Christian, Jew, or Muslim, nothing is more obvious than that the founders and prophets of other religions, such as Joseph Smith, the Rev. Moon, Mary Baker Eddy, and L. Ron Hubbard, are either frauds or delusional, their purported miracles or cures are tricks played upon a credulous audience (or worse, exercises of black magic), their prophecies false, their metaphysics absurd. To me, nothing is more obvious than that the evidence cited on behalf of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is of exactly the same type and quality as that cited on behalf of such despised religions. Indeed, it is on a par with the evidence for Zeus, Baal, Thor, and other long-abandoned gods, who are now considered ridiculous by nearly everyone. –If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted? [no], pp. 345-346 in Hitchens

What's inspirational about Professor Anderson's testimony is that we have reason to hope that religion will fade away eventually. Two problems with this, however: (1) Religion isn't rational and doesn't listen to reason very well. (2) Everyone alive on the planet now, and for some time to come, will die long before religion does.¹
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1. As my friend Ken privately wrote me recently:

   ...when religious institutions begin to fragment and wither. We still need several more centuries for that. [emphasis mine]

   I quote Ken, not because he is my friend, but, like Professor Anderson, he is an astute, critical thinker.
   

I voted early

I'm still wearing my little "I Voted Early" sticker from Wednesday. As I wrote to a friend on whom (and his wife) I depend for recommendations in judicial races,

Having received no recommendation from you or [your wife] as to voting for judges, I went ahead and took my best shot. I excluded as potential my-vote-getters anyone on the list of nominees recommended by the Republican Party, then, if that didn't do the entire trick, I read about the individuals in the voting guide (preferring blacks, women, and non-business types). [emphasis mine]

My friend's wife wrote me this morning:

Absolutely, you voted well. I was trying to learn who your district court judges would be. Now I know how to do that—although a little late. I think your rationale for voting choices excellent. [emphasis mine]

My friend's new car

I went with my friend to take possession of her new Volvo this morning:

She is very happy, and her salesman and his boss are happy.

She let me be in one of the photos:

I am happy too.

A funny from Bertrand Russell

My wife didn't laugh when I read her the following excerpt from Bertrand Russell's 1909 essay, "Pragmatism," but I did, and I hope you might too:

The legitimate conclusion from [William James's] argument [that if we don't have the necessary information for deciding between, for example, "God exists" and "God doesn't exist," we ought to choose one anyway in order to have a 50% chance of being right] would be that, in such cases as William James has in mind, we ought to believe both alternatives; for in that case we are sure [emphasis mine] of "knowing" the truth in the matter. If it were said that to believe both is a psychological impossibility, we would rejoin that, on the contrary, it is often done, and that those who cannot yet do it need only to practice the "will to believe" until they have learnt to believe that the law of contradiction is false—a feat which is by no means as difficult as it is often supposed to be.

Who said philosophy couldn't be a barrel of laughs?
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Another passage a page further down:

To go about the world believing everything in the hope that thereby we shall believe as much truth as possible is like practicing polygamy in the hope that among so many we shall find someone who will make us happy.

Bertrand Russell was a great writer. Did you know that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950? Well, he was. "..."in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought."

Spiritual connectedness

Riding with Bill yesterday to join Ralph for a walk at Johnston Mill, a couple of miles from where my wife and I lived for twenty-five years before moving to Mebane, I took the opportunity to try to find out whether Bill's term spiritual applies to me. I asked him how he would characterize it.
    "Connectedness."
    I instantly saw that indeed, in Bill's sense of the term, I am spiritual. I acknowledge, intellectually, that I am related to all other living creatures and to very "star stuff," as cosmologist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) termed the matter of the Universe. And I feel the connectedness, sometimes profoundly, but more often only latently, out of the neglect of taking for granted. And I mean to honor the connection by humility and compassion.

Ralph and his dog arrived at the entrance to the trail a minute after us. On the walk, we all three chatted about no fewer or less significant things than Ralph and I alone would have done. Bob Dylan. Yoga instruction. The logic of grammar. Growing old, losing one's memory. Julie Christie (from her 2006 movie, Away from Her, in which she played a woman being institutionalized because of Alzheimer's disease). Zen Buddhism. Philosophy scholarship (Ralph had discovered Peter Kingsley, a new name for me). Later, Bill told me that Ralph had demonstrated his own spirituality by picking up a piece of paper on the trail.
    And of course spirituality and religion came up. I told them about Mert's retort Friday to my statement that I didn't believe any of that about the Good Lord's working in mysterious ways. "And I don't believe that!" Mert had said.

    I mentioned that my wife and I had the night before watched a film about the child evangelist Marjoe Gortner on the tent revivalist circuit. I was surprised to learn that I had apparently never told Ralph that in my childhood my mother had taken me to the same sorts of church events at which Marjoe as a child and young man had preached.
    But it wasn't until this morning that it occurred to me that, since Marjoe was starting to preach in 1948 (at age four), precisely when my mother was beginning to take me to revivals, where I witnessed people apparently ecstatically "speaking in tongues," it is likely my mother had heard of him. Could it be that my mother's oft-spoken wish that I would "become a preacher" was influenced by reports of that fabulous child preacher?
    Perhaps Marjoe, with whom I only just became familiar from the movie's being mentioned in a book I'm reading by Daniel Dennett¹, influenced the very trajectory of my "religious life." I told Bill on the ride home that I've always thought I majored in philosophy because of my desperate "search for God" informed by those early church experiences. In fact, I likely chose to apply to Yale because of that interest, since it was Yale's catalog of undergraduate academic programs that most appealed to me because of its "Directed Studies" program, then centered around philosophy and the humanities.
    What a world.

Ralph had asked me how, then, I'd become an atheist. I guess I must not have told him before because I had depended on his reading the answer here on my blog—even though he's told me that he spends so much time on the Internet in his work at IBM that he doesn't spend much or any on it outside work. (Because I go onto the Internet both at work and at home, I must not have believed him.)
    So I summarized my Sudoku analogy for him. I had rejected theism as a "forced move" after eliminating the pertinent possibilities.
    Ralph recounted the Zen parable about the fish in water who reasoned logically that water didn't exist.
    I laughed. "Ralph, that's about the same as Mert's retort, isn't it? He didn't believe that I couldn't believe in water."
    Ralph said that Mert's retort was different; it sounded like a trick of the evangelical trade. Mert might have been trying to convert me. Ralph said I was free not to believe, and recommended Zen Buddhism. "Zen Buddhists don't believe in God," he said.
    On the ride home, Bill pointed out that Zen teaches letting go, detachment. "That's the very thing you do when you accept things as they are and laugh."
    I like it.
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1. From Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, pp. 167-168:

   Every good doctor knows that a few simple tricks of self-presentation that compose a good "bedside manner" can make a huge difference. It isn't really dishonest, is it? Every priest and minister, every imam and rabbi, every guru knows the same thing, and the same gradation from knowingness to innocence can be found today in the practices of revival preachers, as vividly revealed in Marjoe, the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary film that followed Marjoe Gortner, a charismatic young evangelical preacher who lost his faith but made a comeback as a preacher in order to reveal the tricks of the trade. In this disturbing and unforgettable film, he shows how he makes people faint when he does the laying on of hands, how he rouses them to passionate declarations of their love for Jesus, how he gets them to empty their wallets into the collection basket.