RIMATARA

I'm Going to San Diego

2009-04-08T14:59:00.003-04:00

I've been a lot of places but never set foot in California, so, its about time. I will be at conference for the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, presenting some of my work on love and post-structuralism. I am still cleaning that piece up--as I write this--and may post some of it for your curiosity. But, if I do not, I hope my all-too-absent-these-days colleges will help me out.

Before the end of the day I may try and put up some stuff to read while I'm gone, but no guarantees.

The New God Debate – Why bother?

2009-04-07T14:53:00.013-04:00

Note: This is a work-in-progress I started this morning.

Over the course of the last couple centuries, the subject of the existence of God has periodically emerged as a popular discussion topic in the public marketplace of ideas. Recent books by Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens¹ seem to indicate that now is just such a time – atheism is making another go at popularity and perhaps even some cultural acceptance in the generally born-again United States.

While the “Four Horsemen” (as the authors above have been dubbed) have participated in numerous debates during their respective book tours, the topic is also being taken up in the emerging online community, and battle lines have certainly been drawn. YouTube, once a place useful only for finding hilarious videos of chimpanzees riding Segways, now is the medium of choice for a growing number of video-bloggers, who record videos of themselves speaking into a webcams and taking on whatever topic they feel passionate about (or, often, simply rambling incoherently). YouTube allows not only text commenting on uploaded videos, but it also allows users to “respond” to videos with videos of their own, which seems, in some cases, to create a “discussion” not unlike a formal debate.

Young people (mostly in their early 20s, apparently) aren't just watching debates, they're joining in. This may be a counterbalance to the more stupefying general effects of “social networking” sites, even if it still represents only a tiny minority of Internet usage among 16- to 30-year-olds.

That's a question that can be left for social researchers for the moment. My interest at the moment is in the nature of the debate itself. In many cases, whether the topic is on the existence of God or the soundness of the theory of evolution by natural selection, believers will attempt to appeal – at least temporarily – to logic or science (or, at least what sounds like science). While this makes a certain amount of sense (there has to be at least some agreement on terminology), it remains confusing to me why believers would agree to join the debate to begin with – at least in many cases.

The exercise of proving the existence of God stretches back through the history of philosophy (which in itself may indicate a rather long history of nascent atheism, even in the time of Thomas Aquinas, whose “five proofs” in the Summa Theologica seem to be in answer to some skeptical objections to the existence of God). But why engage the debate? Why construct proofs? Holy books extol the use of faith, not reason, as a means to know God and his will. Having proof positive of either of those would tend to decrease the amount of faith – that is, belief without the support of evidence – required.

It's worth pointing out the distinctions between different understandings of the word “atheism,” of which there are at least two. The first is the strict etymology of the word, a-theist, or “not theist.” Problematically, the “ism” at the end creates the perception that is the second understanding of the word, that “atheism” is a dogmatic and religious set of beliefs. While this dogmatic version of atheism may indeed exist, it isn't the variety being championed by the likes of Harris or Dawkins, and it may be dismissed out of hand as childish religious anarchism or rebellion. Rather, the “new atheism” (and the old David Hume variety as well) is a rejection of the idea of dogma, by which I mean “rules for which there is no explanation given and which must be accepted on faith.” Thus, “dogmatic” atheism is just as repugnant to the first type of atheist as any religion.²

Douglas Adams, in his usual hilarious style, makes an interesting point in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, during a brief side discussion on the marvel of the Babel fish - a small fish that a person can place in his ear in order to understand any alien language:

Now it is such a bizarrely impossible coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful [as the Babel fish] could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.” “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn't thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

What Adams was really illustrating here was the characteristic ridiculousness of logical debates over the existence of God, but the point about faith is important, too. Ultimately, religious belief is, by definition, unprovable. It's belief without evidence – that's why it's called faith.

This is one reason it's so strange to see fundamentalist Christians attempting to assume the auspices of science in proving their “Young Earth” creationism, which holds that the Earth (and universe) are about 6,000 years old and were created in six 24-hour days, as per a literal reading of the book of Genesis. I recently watched an interview of a Dr. Georgia Purdom, who apparently holds a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Ohio State University and now works as a “researcher” at the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. During the interview, Purdom said she was looking into the way that bacteria went from benign to “pathogenic,” since this “must have happened after the fall of Adam.”³

Could there be a more farcical parody of real scientific research? Since Dr. Purdom is willing to accept the literal truth of Genesis, what's there to puzzle out? Clearly, if bacteria had to be benign in Eden and now are “bad” because of Adam's sin, then God made it happen, right? Nobody needs a Ph.D. to make that assertion – it's a statement of faith! For some reason, though, the so-called “Young Earth” creationists feel the need to dress up their religious beliefs with the trappings of rational inquiry. But since their starting point is a statement of faith, their attempts at “science” are merely so much pretension – and not very convincing pretension at that. So why the insistence on a “Christian” science?

I'm guessing here, but it probably has to do with the fact that Christianity's explanatory power has necessarily diminished as humanity has gained a better natural understanding of the world and its workings. Science as an enterprise necessarily involves a threat to anyone who believes strongly that scriptures must contain the final answers to any questions that can be posed about the world. Since imprisoning and torturing troublesome scientists has gone out of vogue, a new strategy is required for fundamentalists – and today, that strategy seems to be writing off evolution by natural selection as merely another pseudo-religious belief system (hence the insistence on the term “Darwinism”) and restating their own beliefs in the language of science. This is what has led to trials like Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District, or the Texas Board of Education's vote to allow teachers to raise doubts about the validity of the theory of evolution in biology classrooms.

What's sad about this is that efforts to dress religious belief in the language and trappings of scientific inquiry always make the believers come off looking ridiculous – which in this case they certainly are. But they will presumably continue to quixotically use scientific language and engage in “debate,” perhaps only to validate their beliefs to themselves. To do this is to misunderstand the difference between the claims made by religion and those made by science. It's not bringing a knife to a gun fight – it's bringing a carrot to a gun fight so as to make a salad.

Interestingly enough, Christian thinkers as far back as St. Augustine have recommended against a dogmatic and literal reading of Genesis. Here is an oft-cited example, which Augustine penned in A.D. 408:

It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.⁴

I've found that intellectually honest Christians (who tend not to be fundamentalist) are much more comfortable with the idea of evolution, and instead are interested in discussing the nature of the beginning of the universe, which is a much more appropriate conversation to have. They realize that Darwin's evolutionary theory makes no claims about the beginnings or nature of the universe itself, and that answers to what Adams might have called the “ultimate questions” are to be sought elsewhere. This, however, is not a topic of biology, but of metaphysics and ontology. The existence of God may be controversial, but Darwin's On the Origin of Species is not.

___________________________

1 Breaking the Spell, The End of Faith, The God Delusion, and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, respectively. Witness also the innumerable rebuttals to these works published in their wake, and my point is more or less made.

2 Indeed, some among the “new atheists” have sought to draw that distinction by discouraging the use of the word “atheist” and in some cases making their own suggestions. I count myself alongside Hitchens, who says he “cringes” at the label bright that Dennett and Dawkins have adopted (as in, “We are brights”). I think “rationalism” is probably a better term.

3 Watch the debate here.

4 The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, 1:19–20 [A.D. 408]. Later in the same text, Augustine goes on to say, “Seven days by our reckoning, after the model of the days of creation, make up a week. By the passage of such weeks time rolls on, and in these weeks one day is constituted by the course of the sun from its rising to its setting; but we must bear in mind that these days indeed recall the days of creation, but without in any way being really similar to them.” Writing more than a thousand years before Martin Luther was born, Augustine would be viewed by today's creationists as “too liberal.”

Capitalism and Property: Pragmatically Speaking

2009-04-06T12:15:00.006-04:00

A lot of interest seemed to be generated by my experimental musings on socialism and capitalism, but I grew tired of the shoot-from-the-hip tone of that project and left it behind until I felt better about things. I am not sure whether this is what I've been waiting for, but, it is something (for me) to think about.

One of the basic principles of a free-market or capitalist (or call it whatever you like) stance is that freedom from big-government or a socialist state gives the human person the ability to flourish autonomously. And autonomy is key because we like to think that we are all self-possessed, that we own our own self and identity. One of the pragmatic effects of this principle of freedom is the ability to own private property.

I share this intuition in practice because my family rents a small apartment (one bedroom for my two sons, my wife, and I) and look forward to the day that we can buy a modest home of our own.

And this critique is something that socialists of all types are keenly aware of. Marx mentions it in his (and Engels') Manifesto and, overall, it seems to follow that if socialism removes private property and personal autonomy, then, there is something bankrupt about it.

Now, leaving socialist apologies behind, I think it is important to ask the question, "How?" How is it that capitalism can provide private property to a person? In other words, under what conditions can this private ownership take place?

I would submit that, in order to for the capitalist principle of freedom to actually happen in the form of the ownership of private property (which is a subset of the idea of self-belonging, I think), at least these two things need to happen from the get-go, pragmatically speaking:

1. There needs to be property to be owned in the first place.
2. The person needs to be able to own that property in some reasonable way.

Now, if we accept those conditions, then, we must ask the question of, "Can?" Can capitalism provide those conditions to begin with? Or, we might ask the more cynical and leading question, "If not, then, what?" If capitalism cannot meet those conditions, then, what are we to think about it and do?

It might be possible for a capitalist utopia, that we create out of our heads, to meet those conditions with certain ideas about human nature and so on. But, in the present moment that is relevant to us, I find it very hard for capitalism to meet such conditions unless some kind of redistribution was to happen.

The reason I say this is that very few people actually own their stuff these days, much less their property--their home. For most, the reality of life is that a few people own lots of property that they may let us borrow for our houses, business, and so on.

Having said that, we might also reflect on the reality that nations (like the USA) also exist on credit these days. Both scenarios seem to deeply erode at the principle of freedom that enables the human person to own, and therefore have autonomy over, their property and, ultimately, their self.

By this analysis, one might argue that the freedom of the free market has produced much of the same, problematic ownership issues that a fascist communists states have (for more about that comparison, see my ongoing series on fascism and liberal society)

Here is the conundrum, as I see it: Capitalism in its principled form cannot exist in any relevant manner without some way to make it happen in pragmatic, daily affairs. Therefore, one might be well advised to keep the principle of freedom provided that we reject the notion of freedom to amass wealth and favor the notion of freedom to control one's desire for things--the kind of freedom a person who stays fit and healthy displays and a glutton does not--and from that begin to see the role of the government as the authority to make sure that people control themselves.

This means that when someone wants to come back for thirds and fourths (or eighteenths) at the buffet of capital, there would be a principled reason to restrict that. In doing so, we might find that people would live under conditions that would actually allow them to own property in real, practical affairs and, most importantly, to regain a sense of what means to exist as a human person, not a human resource.

In short, it seems to me that without the socialist principle of redistribution we cannot, in the present age, achieve the capitalist principle of freedom.

On The Dangers of Liberal Society, pt. IV

2009-04-04T12:33:00.003-04:00

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
~ Gandhi

Here is another, shorter, argument: Namely, that since it does not really matter what name oppression takes, we might as well know about it. Now, this is all very unqualified when speaking in general. But, when we frame it in terms of the actual victims, I think we have a rather clear view of the matter. Now the hard part is distinguishing between victims. But, as Gandhi puts it, there are those who do not make it so complex to understand.

On The Dangers of Liberal Society, pt. III

2009-04-03T13:27:00.003-04:00

In my previous post I asked the question: What does it mean to long for an end of liberalism and its desensitizing sense of freedom that traps our ability to live and, perhaps, to love at the height of our powers? In this post I would like to clarify what I mean in that question. At some point, I suppose, I will get around to answering it. But I'm in no rush.

Let me be as clear as I can about my project and this question: It is a cowardly and rather self-indulgent thing, to be sure. I mean, I have no intentions or courage to actually "desire" for an end of liberalism. Instead, I am, in one sense, just testing the limits of possibility for myself thinking this way about things.

At the same time, I think there is something else going on here. Pretending that it is the only thing going on will fuel my own self-righteousness on the matter. You see, the actual point of the matter is simply a question of meaning. In other words, I am not theorizing, hypothesizing, or, much less, making empirical claims about the world. All this question should do is to ask what it means to imagine that things are not as they seem.

Now, that is all a bit trite and makes this sound very esoteric, but, at least for me, it is not. All this question should do is the very same thing we tend to do when we encounter genuine novelty. There is nothing so novel to me as a new idea. When I come across one (usually in a book) I can't ask much else other than, "What does that mean?" or "What could that possibly be like?"

But, ideas are never really that new, they are merely new-to-me or new-to-us. So, we can glean intelligibility out of the meaning of a novel thing and toy around with whatever meaning we have, or think we have, and that's what it all about. One big game of hokey poky.

So, we need to know what is really grinding the axe of this question and this general notion of defending fascism and cautioning against liberalism. Here it is, as I see it. It is a myth that when given the opportunity people will live with less instead of more. "Plenty" seems to be a rather normative human desire elevated to the level of virtue. We desire to be full, not hungry. Yet, hunger (metaphorically speaking) keeps us, well... hungry. Restless. In love.

What I mean to say is that the political question at hand is more fundamentally a question of how to deal with what seems to be a reoccurring thing in human experience: cycles of oppression, revolution, and oppression. The second oppressor is usually dressed in the garments of a liberator, a populist, a democracy, ourselves or people like us, and so on. And, for that very reason, she is very hard to distinguish from the Gandhi's of the world. The first oppressor, however, is clearly who she really is and, while we may have good reason to fear her, at least we know when she is around.

Here is the virtue of fascism: honesty. That is not to say that fascists do not lie, indeed they do. But their lies are lies. In a liberal society it is hard work--and counterintutive work--to spot lies because they come on silver spoon covered with honey.

But, as I said in my first post: You get more bees... To continue my reliance on "as the saying goes" to make my argument, I am asking what it means to say: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Even if it means that we are required to take up Zarathustra's advice to love our enemies and hate our friends.

Glen Beck is a Copycat

2009-04-03T12:59:00.002-04:00

During my morning musing of talk radio I heard that Glen Beck is going to be featuring fascism in his evening show tonight. He must have heard that I am writing about it here. Copycat.

An Ode to Pat Buchanan

2009-04-02T16:13:00.004-04:00

Just in case my recent use of the GOP as a foil for bad social science research and my raving over the Solidarity Party in Spain (see below) makes anyone think I lost my fond memories of reading Edmund Burke and other great conservative minds, here is one who I find myself reading, disagreeing with, nodding my head, and hoping he keeps on going: Pat Buchanan.

Yes, he has said some things that really ring my ears like, "Ten years after NAFTA, Mexico's leading export to America is still--Mexicans. America is becoming Mexamerica," in his popular books like, Where the Right Went Wrong, but he also writes--in the very same book--things like, "The Bush Doctrine is a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics."

My point is this: We need more of his ilk in public discourse, not less. If you don't want to read his books, and since I would never recommend that you watch television, you may want to read him here, at his active blog and website.

Speaking of Political Parties, I May Have Found the One for Me...

2009-04-02T12:25:00.007-04:00

I got this lead from Vox-Nova, and did some digging on my own, and I think that I may have found the first political party I would ever hit the street for. To bad it is in Spain.

I will continue to do my homework, but this may need to get imported over with the next shipment of rioja.

Here is a striking platform they have put quite straightfowardly: Rechazamos El Aborto Porque Somos de Izquierda (We Reject Abortion Because We Are of the Left). They also are vigorous admirers of John Paul II. In case you are not a Spanish reader, here is a representative of their abortion stance in English, the essay is entitled: Abortion, Euthanasia and Capitalism.

They are the Solidarity Party of Spain. I hope that this is the future of leftism. If so, then, sign me up.

I'll wait and see.

Bad Social Science: Exibit A

2009-04-02T11:42:00.004-04:00

I am an online-registered Republican and Democrat (along with a few other parties: Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty, Greens, Libertarians, Socialists and Chuck Norris), so, needless to say, I get a lot of mindless propaganda.

Now, at the heart of it they usually want money, but I was surprised in the latest mailing from my most frequent e-party, the GOP, when they wanted me to fill out a survey--and then give them some money. For the record, I have never given a cent of money to any party, but I was willing to try and give them some honest feedback. Unfortunately, their survey is a complete joke, but not entirely without its lessons: Namely, that most surveys in social science are smarter versions of this anyway, so, we should ignore or treat like the funnies page most "studies" and "findings" from our dear friends the social scientists.

Here is an edited (for space and format) version of the survey. If you want to see it for yourself, click here.

Part I. The Republican Party

1. Why did Republicans lose the White House and Congressional seats in the 2008 elections? Check all that apply.

- Iraq War
- Poor Economy
- Government's Response to Katrina
- Republican Scandals
- Republicans acted like Democrats
- President Bush's policies
- Liberal Media

2. What are the key strengths and beliefs of the Republican Party that we can build on? Check all that apply.

- Social Issues
- Family Values
- Ethics
- Free Markets
- National Security
- Fiscal Discipline
- Limited Government
- Personal Responsibility
- Pro-Life

3. What are the weaknesses of the Republican Party? Check all that apply.

- Bad Messaging
- Poor Response to Democrats
- Republicans who don't vote like Republicans
- Standing Up for Principles
- Need to Lead in Congress

4. What is the best way to encourage and register new voters in your community? Check all that apply.

- Door-to-Door visits
- Online Social Networking
- E-mail
- Personal Appearances by Republican Leaders in Your Area
- Radio Ads
- Interaction at Community Events
- Online Advertising

5. What technology would you like to see the RNC make better use of to grow our Party? Check all that apply.

- More Aggressive E-mail Campaigns
- More Aggressive Text Messages
- More Aggressive use of Twitter
- More Social Networking Sites like Facebook and MyGOP
- No Opinion

6. What can the Republican Party do to earn and maintain your trust?

Part II. Domestic and Social Issues

1. A recent national poll reported that nearly 25% of Americans want the government to pass more socialism. Do you agree or disagree?

- Agree
- Disagree
- Undecided

2. Which do you believe creates more jobs for the American economy: Government Programs and Spending or The American Free Enterprise System?

- Government Programs and Spending
- The American Free Enterprise System
- Undecided

3. The Obama Administration has proposed spending as much as $1.5 trillion to bail out the banking industry. Do you agree or disagree with this proposal?

4. Do you oppose so-called "card-check" legislation, which eliminates secret ballot elections during unionization drives and puts workers at risk of intimidation by labor bosses?

5. Should Republicans unite to block new federal government bureaucracy and red tape that will crush future economic growth?

6. Should Republicans in Congress oppose the new wasteful government spending programs passed in the recent "stimulus" bill by the Pelosi-Reid Democrats designed to "spread the wealth"?

7. Do you agree that we must secure our borders to stop illegal immigration?

8. Should we do everything we can to block Democrats who are trying to shut down conservative talk radio with the so-called "fairness doctrine"?

9. Should we resist Barack Obama's proposal to spend billions of federal taxpayer dollars to pay "volunteers" who perform his chosen tasks?

10. Should Republicans unite in opposition to judicial nominees who bring a personal, left-wing agenda on social issues to their jobs as judges?
11. Should bureaucrats in Washington, DC be in charge of making your health care choices instead of you and your doctor?

Part III. Homeland Security and Defense Issues

1. If Barack Obama tries to gut the USA PATRIOT Act and other important laws that promote the safety and security of all Americans, should Republicans in Congress fight back?

2. Should we stop Democrat leaders from cutting funding from our intelligence agencies or bringing back Clinton-era restrictions on inter-agency communications?

3. Do you support the use of air strikes against any country that offers safe harbor or aid to individuals or organizations committed to further attacks on America?

4. Should Republicans unite in support of full funding for border and port security when Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid try to make cuts in these areas?

5. Do you think U.S. troops should have to serve under United Nations' commanders?

6. Do you agree that our top military priority should be fighting terrorists?

7. Should we fight military-cutting efforts in Congress, such as the proposal from liberal Barney Frank to slash the Pentagon budget by 25%?

8. Even though Barack Obama pledged to meet personally with the likes of Raul Castro, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should Republicans continue to focus on supporting democratic movements in oppressive states like Cuba, Venezuela and Iran?

Best Hits of William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, pt. V

2009-04-01T13:32:00.001-04:00

LECTURES VI AND VII: THE SICK SOUL

“If we admit that evil is an essential part of our being and the key to the interpretation of our life, we load ourselves down with a difficulty that has always proved burdensome in philosophies of religion.” (p. 129)

“The philosophy of absolute idealism, so vigorously represented both in Scotland and America to-day, has to struggle with this difficulty quite as much as scholastic theism struggled in its time; and although it would be premature to say that there is no speculative issue whatever from the puzzle, it is perfectly fair to say that there is no clear or easy issue, and the only obvious escape from paradox here is to cut loose from the monistic assumption altogether, and allow the world to have existed from its origin in pluralistic form, as an aggregate or collection of higher and lower things and principles, rather than an absolute unitary fact.” (pp. 129 - 130)

“Does it not appear that one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from the one who habitually lived on the other?” (p. 133)

“Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness.” (p. 138)

“So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows. Since these experiences of melancholy are in the first instance absolutely private and individual, I can now help myself out with personal documents. Painful indeed they will be to listen to, and there is almost an indecency in handling them in public. Yet they lie right in the middle of our path; and if we are to touch the psychology of religion at all seriously, we must be willing to be willing to forget conventionalities, and dive below the smooth and lying official conversational surface.” (p. 142)

“Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, interest, or perspective… The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of this fact. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like grey to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new issue to his life.” (pp. 147 - 148)

“So with fear, with indignation, jealousy, ambition, worship. If they are there, life changes. And whether they shall be there or not depends almost always upon non-logical, often on organic condition. And as the excited interest which these passions put into the world is our gift to the world, just so are the passions themselves gifts—gifts to us, from the sources sometimes low and sometimes high; but almost always non-logical and beyond our control.” (p. 148)

“How can the moribund old man reason back himself into the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well? Gifts, either of the flesh or of the spirit; and the spirit bloweth where it listeth; and the world’s materials lend their surface passively to all the gifts alike, as the stage-setting receives indifferently whatever alternating colored lights may be shed upon it from the optical apparatus in the gallery.” (p. 148)

“It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” (p. 160)

“If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself!” (p. 160)

“…the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.” (pp. 161-162)

On The Dangers of Liberal Society, pt. II

2009-03-31T22:51:00.002-04:00

In my first post in this series I argued that freedom or liberty--or whatever you would like to call the thing that I think we can all agree that we find in what is generally called "liberal society"--is not good on its own. In fact, it seems quite plausible that freedom can serve as an intoxicating sedative for human flourishing. I hate to use the rather stale analogy of the boiling a frog to death by slowly raising the temperature until he poached, but I think that it can apply here. To be clear, my point was this: Liberty need not be benevolent.

But this is not a surprising thing to say. What may strike us as a surprise is the implication that such an idea may have in the context of political authority. Could it be that, while fascism is never a moral thing to desire for its own sake, it offers us a unique opportunity to exist in the sober reality of the world as it is? In other words, I would contend that, while one need not make an outright case for fascism and offend those who in their own life have suffered at the hands of fascists, one can explore what is it about living in the midst of salient injustice and poignant illiberality that might cause the human person to flourish in a distinctly different way than the person who lives in apparent freedom.

This is the issue I would like to raise and while it may seem flamboyent or controversial, I actually think it is a rather normative thing to ponder. I mean, we rarely see movies that glory at the abilities of the human spirit to thrive in the midst of plenty. No, instead we like to see underdogs, slumdogs, and other caninesque things in our drama.

Now, this may seem overly simplistic, but, I wonder: Could it be that these cases are not extraordinary feats, but, instead, natural things that are proper to such dire conditions? What I mean to say is that instead of thinking about the heroism of the person who can rise out of oppression, what would it look like to think about that same event as something that the non-oppressed cannot do?

This reversal leaves the liberal societies and their (our) comforts behind as crutches that keep us from encountering the brute force of life and death, pain and suffering, and, of course, love. It turns an ironically tragic, but beautiful, light on the very places we long to escape from.

Politcally speaking, this would be fascism. What does it mean to long for this to happen? What does it mean to long for an end of liberalism and its desentitizing sense of freedom that traps our ability to live and, perhaps, to love at the height of our powers?

Social Science & Shameless Self-promotion

2009-03-30T13:56:00.003-04:00

If you are interested in social science as it pertains to the general disputes over what constitutes legitimate scientific inquiry, then, you may want to read this recent essay review I co-authored from Education Review. It is a review of Bent Flyvjerg's book, Making Social Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it can Succeed Again. My contributions are mostly critical, but the basic argument is a worthwhile one to think about, I think.

The things dad's (or, at least I) say...

2009-03-28T14:03:00.002-04:00

NO! DO NOT HANG MY KEYS ON YOUR PEE-PEE!

-As said by me to my diaperless son this morning.

Best Hits of William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, pt. IV

2009-03-28T12:22:00.001-04:00

LECTURE IV AND V: THE RELIGION OF HEALTHY-MINDEDNESS

“The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end in which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world really is.” (p. 89)

“I believe the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature. The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific, sect allows for.” (p. 120)

“What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true?” (p. 120)

“Science to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically.” (p. 120)

“And why, after all, may not the worlds be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time comes out right? On this view religion and science, each verified in its own way from hour to hour and from life to life, would be co-eternal.” (p. 120)

Happy Elephant

2009-03-27T01:16:00.003-04:00

Best Hits of William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, pt. III

2009-03-27T01:16:00.001-04:00

LECTURE III: THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN

"Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and that they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions. If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it." (p. 72)

Best Hits of William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, pt. II

2009-03-26T02:40:00.000-04:00

LECTURE II: CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC

“Totals reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone possesses.” (p. 35)

“There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences.” (p. 38)

“The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor jest.” (p. 39)

On The Dangers of Liberal Society, pt. I

2009-03-26T02:13:00.005-04:00

I am re-posting an old note from my archive of Facebook notes to serve as a preface to some things I hope to write about in defense of fascism--yes, you read that right. But first things first.

The saying goes, "You get more bees with honey than vinegar." In other words, there is really nothing sweet about the honey other than being really good at trapping bees.

In a similar way, it might be plausible that other seemingly sweet, innocent, and good things can serve as "honey" for less than sweet, innocent, or good purposes. Anyone skilled at marketing or sales understands that the best way to peddle something is by being nice to people, making them feel cared for, and gaining their trust in as personal and authentic a way as possible. That way, people lose focus on the thing being sold.

Many times people remind me that the very fact that I am free to question and even dissent is proof that things are better than they seem. And, of course, this is a very reasonable thing to assert. The fact that I feel confident enough to show strong disagreement without repercussions is certainly a good thing. However, I wonder: Is it sweet or is it "sweet"? In other words, could it be the case that the hallmark "freedom" we supposedly enjoy in the US is largely a means of appeasement or even oppression?

I think this could, in many cases, be true. You see, when freedom serves as the sole idol, then, as long as things are not overly intrusive no one will complain. And, paradoxically, if intrusiveness is needed for more freedom, then, most will agree to it; and those who disagree will do so thinking they are already free enough. But these are all relative judgments about how "free" we assume to be, when, in fact, we may be quite indoctrinated.

For example, the idea of compulsory school attendance was considered a radical intrusion on American freedom from the revolutionary period to the last state (Mississippi) to ratify it in 1916. Now, even school choice advocates agree that school attendance is a perfectly normal--and good--thing to have.

This is not to digress on to the issue of schooling (frequently confused for education); rather, it is just one case in which there is historical proof that what we consider to be "freedom" is a rather elusive thing that, over time, erodes silently. As true freedom erodes, we find that we are peddled a different type of "freedom" that, many times, is used against those who assume to be free--us, you and me.

So, it seems (at least to me) that the greatest marketing icon of the US--"freedom"--might be one of the very things that oppresses us. It is much more effective to let people do things you don't want them to, and then remind them that they are "free," to suppress their ability to effectively protest or revolt, than to beat or kill them. Do not be mislead, whether violent or benevolent, oppression is oppression.

As the saying goes, "you get more peasants with freedom..."

Dear Rocco:

2009-03-26T01:32:00.004-04:00

for saying that you can't read (see the comments section of Obama at Notre Dame). Quite the contrary, you are a splendid reader and, especially considering that you are the only non-contributing reader of this blog (apparently), I would be remiss to piss you off too much. I owe you a drink. In the meantime, please accept this tiny bouquet of cyber-flowers delivered by this cute little rodent.

A Sober Moment in the Drunken Fray

2009-03-25T15:40:00.000-04:00

I wanted to post about this when I read it but it has become even more poignant as I sit around embroiled, once again, in fighting my leftist friends over the severe shortcomings and dangers of Obama, and--simultaneously--reprimanding my rightist friends for being too simplistic. This is a royal hack of a characterization, to be sure, but such is the violence of quick-fire prose.

Nonetheless, I was sitting with my son this afternoon at the tire shop trying to keep track of his whereabouts and make it through some recent issues of Newsweek. While reading through the tiresome, haven't-I-read-this-a-million-times-already? pages of Newsweek, my mind wandered to a recent, tearful evening I spent with my favorite journal, First Things.

Their most recent edition, honoring the memory of Richard John Neuhaus, was one of the most genuine, sane, and sober things I have read in print to date. Now, anyone who knows me and my sense of politics knows that I slam First Things a lot and disagree with a great deal of their erudite founder's ideas. But, make no mistake, the outpouring from every side of the global political spectrum was moving, to say the least.

It reminded me of the days that I am told that public dialogue was fierce as ever, but still had sanity to spare. In the U.S., these were the days (or, so I am told) when the Civil Rights Act--that Neuhaus bravely marched in support of--was squared off between the political aisle on the basis of activism or gradualism from the coherent philosophies of conservatism (a la Goldwater) and liberalism (a la New Deal progeny and friends). Those days are gone. If anything, LBJ's nasty campaign killed what was left of it. But not everywhere, not for everyone.

I am quick to assert that any self-respecting leftist (or whatever) ought to engage with the serious and smart ideas that come from the coherent, self-proclaimed right. The problem is that next to Pat Buchanan (a man I respect but, more often than not, rabidly disagree with) sits Monica Crowley who fills in for Laura Ingram (the new guard of the Limbaugh and company types) from time to time. Now, the so-called liberals have their lion's hare of wackos too and, to their discredit, their discussions are worse than stale, more often than not they seem flat out rancid.

So, if I have to sit in a serious discussion on public affairs, give me the likes of a Neuhaus any day--conservative warts and all. It is a shame that he will only live on in his voluminous writings from here on out. And, even worse, there don't seem to be many replacements easily found--on either side--in the druken fray that is public discourse in the U.S. It is my hope, however, that the virtues of catholic (that's for you Ian) dialogue could bring us some smarties out of the ranks of the public Church to help things out.

To put it another way: I pray for the day that dialogue will happen somewhere, anywhere, in a way that is elevated from the simple--and all to convenient for the status quo--rubrics of U.S. political identity.

Best Hits of William James: Varieties of Religious Experience, pt. I

2009-03-25T12:44:00.001-04:00

For my anxious readers out there who desire more than this blog seems to be offering these days I will be posting a few "best hits" of the opening chapters to William James' seminal text, Varieties of Religious Experience. Enjoy!

LECTURE I: RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

“It seems a natural thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.” (p. 3)

“If the inquiry be psychological, not religious institutions, but rather religious feelings and religious impulses must be its subject, and I must confine myself to those more developed subjective phenomena recorded in literature produced by articulate and fully conscious men, in works of piety and autobiography.” (p. 4)

“We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as dull habit, but as an acute fever [madness] rather.” (p. 8)

“But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. ‘ I am no such thing,’ it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.” (p. 10)

“Modern psychology, finding definite psycho-physical connections to hold good, assumes as a convenient hypothesis that the dependence of mental states upon bodily conditions must be thoroughgoing and complete… But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance?... Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul.” (p. 15)

“To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of psychological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even out scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor’s body at the time.” (pp. 15-16)

“By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.” (p. 20)

“To understand a thing rightly we need to see it both out of its environment and in it, and to have acquaintance with the whole range of its variations.” (p. 23)

“Few of us are not in any way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world.” (p. 26)

“What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fiber in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?” (p. 26)

Obama at Notre Dame: Why not?

2009-03-24T16:55:00.001-04:00

This seems to be a spicy issue in the Catholic blogosphere (e.g. this one from Vox-Nova and this one from Pro-Ecclesia) so, I'll take the bait.

Here is the main problem, as I see it: Commencement addresses in the U.S. have become mired in the politics of the modern academy and the propagandist relations of academia to the bought-and-paid-for dynamics of Washington.

If this were simply a public lecture, then, there would be little room for outrage. After all, dissenting views and rigorous debate ought to be a hallmark of any healthy university. However, this in one of "those" lectures, or should I say, after-the-fact stump speeches.

I feel that commencement addresses by presidents and other politicians, CEOs and other executives, and TV personalities, ought to removed altogether. But, certain politicians, execs, and TV personas may also have a contribution to offers to the academy. And, this may (and I give a very shaky 'may') be the case with this president.

One of the oddest things to me about Obama's campaign was the omission of his decorated academic career. If his speech were limited to an academic discussion of whatever subject is his expertise, then, that would be wonderful. But, sadly, I highly doubt that. He will be there as "Mr. President."

In that case, I think it is the wrong choice to make. I know for a fact that inviting G.W. to say anything at a University is an academic abomination. This is a different case, but, still, nonetheless, it seems like a bad idea to me. Notice, that the brand of ideas the person brings has very little to do with my evaluation of what is appropriate at a university. Much less a catholic university. As far as I'm concerned, any university that is not catholic, isn't really a university to begin with.

One major factor I chose to leave out of this discussion is the implication of giving someone an honorary degree. I still cannot get the bad taste out of my mouth from puking after witnessing Raymond Arroyo get an honorary degree while selling his book on Mother Angelica in his speech at my undergraduate commencement ceremony. Yuk.

Where's the Magic?

2009-03-11T11:36:00.000-04:00

I am a very cranky person. Too often, I rant about love. There is something amiss about this. So I figured that I need to try and make some sense of my general discontent, especially since it seems to render impotent whatever constructive things I want to say. When I think about it I guess I am suspicious of the superstitious nature of most forms of human belief. The magical sense we give to things we like a lot or that we cannot imagine ourselves to be able to live without. Now, I am a romantic and a believer in God, faith, mystical reality, and other things most confuse with magic. However, the difference between the magical and the mystical--the sacred mysterious--is mostly dispositional, as I see.

Magic renders itself so intelligible that it is not really magical in any mythical sense, it is real. So real that we can possess it as an object, as a thing. The mystical, on the other hand, never quite becomes intelligible to the point of comprehension, much less possession. Like questions of physical, biological, or chemical fundamentals, explanatory power is very, very limited. We run out of intelligibility and begin to guess and wonder and pray. The magic of things we want to be true so badly that we distort them to our own image is nothing really. Nothing other than lesser images of ourselves. And magic wrecks havoc on our language. We say all kinds of silly things like this or that could change the world or do this or that intuitively good thing.

The fact of the matter, it seems to me, is that there is no magic, there is no fancy trick that renders things intelligible to the point that we no longer need to wonder and pray. Mystery is not magical, it is simply the real that sits outside the horizon of human understanding and keeps us trying to reach that unreachable horizon, until we find our rest...

Obama on Education

2009-03-10T14:59:00.000-04:00

One of the most difficult political identities to understand comes from views on education. Today, Obama signaled a rather conservative (merit pay) and liberal (federalized mandate) direction for education reform (read it here). He stated that, under this administration, we would treat "teachers like the professionals they are while also holding them more accountable."

This makes sense at one level. More responsibility, more pay, more accountability. But, truth be told, "accountability" means more standards to pass and more tests to teach to. If anything this proposal will only exacerbate the problems of No Child Left Behind.

If Obama wants to reform education, then, he may want to think about re-envisioning the very thing itself. That is, be sober enough to realize that this student is not a person, not a homo-sapien. This is a resource-person, a homo-economicus, whose sole value is in her ability to collect information and use it in the ways deemed worthy by that other tyrant: science.

Schooling has never--and I mean never--been intended to educate at the federal policy level. It is well understood that such a thing is not the purpose of schooling. However, many teachers try their best in spite of it and succeed. Succeed in executing the art of teaching, the art of teaching human persons to be artists themselves in whatever they do.

The failure of reforms today and the ones to come, lie in this basic conflation: teaching and education as a science, or, to put it another way, science as science. Science is not a science, it too is an art, and the same goes for the rest, I think.

Selling '68

2009-03-09T00:51:00.000-04:00

First of all, I am sorry about my recent hiatus, but I am in the middle of preparing for my general exams and program approval, among other things. Hopefully my comittee of writers will follow Bill's good example and help me out very soon (hint, hint). I just wanted to pop in to vent a bit and get your reactions.

I am writing a book review in my apartment lounge with a PBS fundraising marathon of 60's music running in the backround. Over and over they sell this as "the music of '68" or "the music of the death of JFK, King, and so on..." and it really bothers me. I mean, I wasn't alive then and I am not naive enough to think they care (although I do expect better from PBS even though I shouldn't), but everything is for sale. And that sucks.

What doesn't suck is my new bike. I just got it this weekend. It is a deep green, 1969, Hercules, three speed, British Roadster (made in Nottingham). I am sure I will be the most stylish biker on my way to the office tomorrow morning.

Peace!

The Wisdom of Conversion

2009-03-02T23:28:00.000-05:00

“At the same time I warn them that to have the mirror of the external world placed before them is of little significance unless the mirror of the mind is cleansed and polished. Therefore, O child of God, awaken yourself first to the remorseful sting of conscience before you raise your eyes to those rays of wisdom that are reflected in its mirrors. Otherwise it might happen that the very act of looking on these rays might cause you to fall into an even more treacherous pit of darkness.”
– St. Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum

Aristotle once said, “All men desire to know.” Whether this is true or not is of little consequence for me. That people desire to know, simply generally speaking, is enough to begin with. For it is clear that in all cases, from the moment of our birth to the inevitable moment of our death, we are engaged with the world and this engagement requires a certain understanding and a certain meaningful grasp of the world around us. The mind is, from start to finish, thrown out upon and among the objects of the world and the persons we encounter in the world; and all the hopes and longings of the human heart are acted out amidst this maelstrom of the exterior world.

If, then, we cannot avoid a certain attempt to understand the world, at least in order to survive in it, and more importantly to flourish in it, then one can admit that knowledge holds a certain importance as something of a universal goal among all persons. Knowledge, however, is one thing. Wisdom, something else entirely. Wisdom is concerned not with an understanding of the facts of the world, not an understanding of what this particular object before me happens to be or how it might be used, and it is also not the possessing of a particular theory of the world and how it works. Wisdom penetrates deeper than this. And this is why so many of the most knowledgeable people in the world can nevertheless fail utterly in wisdom. Wisdom, and the pursuit of wisdom, is something different entirely from the pursuit of knowledge, however much a certain knowledge might be necessary for wisdom to be born.

What makes wisdom different, one might ask? For one thing, knowledge implies nothing about how we live our lives. It implies no action at all. It simply implies a certain resonance of our concepts with the world. Wisdom, on the other hand, supplies the meaning and direction of how we live in the world. Wisdom, above all else, is concerned with life and with action. Knowledge, merely with the static character of having certain facts readily available. Thus, knowledge without wisdom is meaningless. Without wisdom, all we have are lifeless facts and our lives are lived out with the same aimlessness of a ship without its rudder.

Those who would live out a life of meaningfulness, a life of direction, must be seekers and lovers of wisdom. These are those we once might have called philosophers, the first to be called lovers of wisdom. But, those lovers of wisdom are perhaps long dead; philosophers today, and in fact for many generations, have made themselves men of science and nothing more, intellectuals of the worst variety in all their hypocrisy. But if the philosophers as philosophers have nothing to say about wisdom, then how is wisdom to be achieved at all? Where are we to turn for it and to whom are we to go?

The world is the always already given fundament of all knowledge and we are always left with the world before us. It makes sense that we should start there. But, as I have said, wisdom is not a matter of knowing the world. Our knowledge is already operative to the extent that the world appears clearly. But the mind on its own cannot peer around the indistinctness in which the world appears because all knowledge is first and foremost structured by the way in which we live out our lives. That is to say, when we desire to live out our lives in a particular way, we tend to interpret the world according to those desires. Thus, the man who longs for power and wealth interprets the meaning of the world in terms of what will furnish these ends. If, however, we are to attain wisdom, if we are to grasp meaning, to acquire the direction in life which only wisdom can give, then we are faced with a fundamental task.

The world can only be given in its ultimate meaningfulness when, as Bonaventure says, the mind is disposed to reflect it most clearly, or one might say, when the mind is sufficiently free from its vicious desires and expectations for the world to see the world itself and how the individual is called to live. In short, wisdom cannot be attained by the vicious individual. Wisdom will always elude the man and woman of hatred, of egoism, of resentment. To the extent that one seeks to be wise, one must also seek to be good. But, this implies an alteration in the very direction of one’s life; it involves a dynamic movement in which both straightforward viciousness as well as contented mediocrity must be abandoned altogether. Total conversion is the only road to wisdom. It is only on the road to perfection, with the burning desire for total conversion of heart that the mind is itself perfected and disposed for wisdom, a wisdom which goes beyond knowledge and which provides a direction for life and seizes upon a meaning which gives life its sense.

We have entered into the season of Lent. The time in which we go out into the deserts of the spirit in search of the wisdom of the children of God through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving; the time in which we become men and women of authentic and intense desire, when we become desirous of wisdom itself. May you all have a very blessed and fruitful season of Lent, that the mystery of Easter might complete you in wisdom, faith, and perfection. God bless you all.

Some More Poetry I Wrote

2009-02-25T19:00:00.000-05:00

Tell Me Something About Myself

If you dare to look, then, take a peek.
I know its dark and clouded.
What can you say without mistake?

When you say the things you speak,
Make them clear, not shrouded.
Don't hold back for my sake.

Tell me something... something bleak.
I know the space is crowded.
Pile me up like leaves to a rake.

Tell me something all too weak.
Something altogether confounded.
Just be sure its fake.

Rhetoric

Words come cheap,
And speeches come cheaper.
But, when they make you weep,
They mean something deeper.

A Psychoanalytic Critique of Cults in the Catholic Church: Part IV

2009-02-23T12:59:00.000-05:00

Mexico. I never understood this move as a "community" initiative, it was more of a family decision. In fact, the entire web of relations we had there seemed somewhat different and removed from Bread of Life. Ohio and the community over there was only referred to distantly and, for me, it had always been distant to a certain degree. But I wished it wasn't. As far as daily life went, nothing changed significantly from the previous ways of living according to the norms of the "Cultural Approach." In fact, things got a bit more rigorous. Living in daily proximity to the others set a frequent list of engagements and meetings. The most frequent one was 6:30 am daily Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan. After Mass, everyone would go through their routine prayers which involved certain postures of standing sitting and kneeling. I never knew them exactly, but I tried to mimic them as best I could. In Mexico we were meeting with the local charismatic community, Palabra de Dios, and seemed to be poised to integrate our movement with their social network. Their big meetings were different. The people were very secular looking. The men wore jeans and cowboy boots and the women wore make-up. I couldn't help but notice that these women were astoundingly attractive. Especially the one that played the tambourine and smelled like roses. One of the men there had an "Ovation" guitar and I was sure that it must be the nicest guitar I'd ever seen. These people provided us with a house in a quaint Mexican neighborhood. They helped us get settled and came over frequently for meetings and gatherings. There were some men working on the house next door and they seemed very amused by my still-developing Spanish. My sister and I went to the school where one of the women from the Mexican community taught, and we sat-in to listen to classes. I loved learning Spanish and meeting all these new people. Sometimes I worried about my sister. Mr. Herman had a house in Pharr, Texas where we would have important meetings, none more important than a visit from the Bishop of the Mexican Diocese of Matamoros. It went well, I was told. My dad was very important in all of this--crucially important. His fluency in the language and culture made me soon realize that he was being underappreciated by Mr. Herman. When the Hermans moved to a house in Mexico where we would have morning meetings with pan dulce and hard boiled eggs, I started to sense a beginning tension between my Dad and Mr. Herman. With those first intuitions I left my idolatry of Mr. Herman behind and began to see him a stifling disciplinarian. But there were really fun people too. Keith was one of the single guys who always got into trouble for things and he became my new idol. But, with time, we became very distant from the "community" way of doing thing. At the same time, we still lived according to most of the basic norms of community life. Many of them were being integrated with the new movement for family renewal that was starting at all these meetings. When Grandpa Rocha got sick, I remember hearing that Mr. Herman recommended that my Dad send him to a home or something. When we moved in with them I left the community behind. I no longer had any desire to be in it, not even remotely. My Grandpa was the most fascinating person I had ever met. He had taught me math when I was doing my make-up lessons during second grade and now he helped me with my times tables. He could tell me stories of growing up on the rancho all day long. My dream went from being a community coordinator to being a vaquero like my Grandpa. Grandpa never quite understood the life-style we adopted from the community and, when he started feeling better after his knee surgery, he started speaking up about it. Especially about the food. I agreed with him. I began to resent the community and the movement, especially Mr. Herman and his peons like Ms. Murphy. When Mr. Herman's son would get into trouble and I'd hear about it, I would smile. I was still devoted to my Dad's work though. We would go to Weslaco on Thursdays and help Fr. O'Malley give the Life in the Spirit Seminar there. I was the photographer. Eventually I became the music minister. The best part was going to Wendy's afterward. When we went back to Mexico, I took some joy in the movement but for my own reasons. When I was told that I would not be allowed to play music because I was called for the drama team, I was convinced that these people were nuts. I started to outright hate them. My memory began to transform my one-time allegiance to them in Ohio into painful memories of spankings, rules, and a cold relationship to my family--especially my parents. We had a "formula" for everything given to us by order of Mr. Herman and the inner circle, Servants of the Cross. I began to find it all so formalized and stale. When we visited our relatives in Colorado, we were told that they lived shallow lives aimed at pleasure and entertainment, which were empty. What I found to be amazing was how they treated each other, it was so warm and so natural and fun! I wanted that. I wanted the world. Even if it was bad; I wanted it anyway. I didn't care if it was "for the Lord" or not. And that made me feel sneeky, guilty and free all at once.

A Lenten Reflection on Love & Fasting

2009-02-22T16:00:00.000-05:00

For those of you who, like me, have been surprised by the proximity of Ash Wednesday, here are some thoughts of mine on the season. For those of you wo0ndering when I will finish my series on Cults, this is an afterword of sorts to the still-incomplete series.

In my recent meditations of the meaning of Love, I am offered a fresh and better way to focus on fasting than I am used to. I would like to share some of those thoughts with you.

Sure, I have read and heard a lot about love, but the idea that love cannot be reduced to its components (the classic divide between agape and eros) and is, perhaps, most properly understood as both things at once makes sense to me in a very synthetic, universal and new way. What I mean to say is that the enlightening relationship of agape and eros is something I must ponder and contemplate more and more to begin to comprehend—with heart and mind—the meaning of Love.

Too many times I suffer from reductionism, thinking that goodness, truth, or even God can be reduced into a concentrate that is exclusive, homogenous, and comfortable. I am reminded of the need to be who I am: an image of Love—imagus Dei. I am further reminded that as much as I may look to my self-constructed images of who God is and who I am, I must only to look to Love in order to simultaneously see who He truly is and who I truly am.

One way the Judeo-Christian tradition gives us to accomplish this mysterious end is through fasting. Yet, too many times I reduce fasting much like I can tend to reduce God and love. To not eat seems to serve the purpose of denying myself to become more soulful and less bodily. Francis of Assisi admitted a similar reductionism; before he died he offered his “Brother Body” a heartfelt apology for having ignored and mistreated him.

Like the mutual enlightenment of eros and agape is crucial to understand what love is, so too my body and soul must enlighten each other to gain understanding of who I am. In other words, when I fast it cannot not be a deprivation of my body for the sake of my soul or the simple converse, instead, it should lead to an enlightenment of both realities of human existence in the Light of Christ that “enlightens all men.”

The Light of Christ certainly does not enlighten the spiritual souls or physical bodies of humanity exclusively, it does not pick or choose one or the other; this Light enlightens the person as person holistically—body and soul. So, I ask myself, how can I fast in a way that enlightens my body and my soul? How can real hunger and pain—real sacrifice and suffering—bring Light to my body when my stomach hurts? Moreover, how could the beating, tearing, and puncturing of the Flesh of Christ pierced on the Cross bring glory to His Body?

I am challenged to reframe the purpose of fasting. I had become accustomed to think that I should want to neglect my bodily hunger and desire (eros) for food so that I could eventually push my erotic sense of physical vitality aside and become more spiritually alive—more soulfully vital. It seemed like: less food for my body, more holiness for my soul. But, too often it can become less food for my body and more fuel for my ego to perceive my own will-driven holiness.

If Love is more than its parts and if we are more than a duality of body and soul, flesh and spirit, then, the vitality and love I seek for my spirit should not be at the expense of my body’s desire (eros). This redefines fasting! To not eat is not to push my body aside; it is an embrace of a higher and deeper—holier—sense of spiritual and physical vitality.

No wonder Christ says in Mathew: “When you fast, anoint your head and wash your face.” Surely Jesus wasn’t asking me to be unauthentic or dishonest; this teaching tells me to be look happy in suffering and pain because I am happy and nonetheless hungry or suffering. To put it another way, we are called to “rejoice in the Lord always.” And this joy is real. When we unite ourselves to the cross we find ourselves more alive and more vital, not the other way around.

This discipline frees us to rejoice and to love without restraint and without regard for ones’ self. This is fitting since the New Commandment was to “love one another, even as I have loved you...” And in this love we are known to be disciples. This is the sign of the true disciple: Love. And this love is not of our own making or design; it is grace, the primordial gift of perfect Love.

This love is the parental affection of the Father and the mad eros of the Son who died, rose, and gave us the ever-present gift of the Holy Spirit. So too, like love and the Trinitarian God, fasting cannot be purely soulful at the expense of the body—I must resist reductionisms and oversimplifications. In looking at “Him who they have pierced” I am called anew to fast and suffer to experience a deeper vitality—a holier vita (life). This helps reframe my approach to fasting, but most of all it helps me love. I hope that it brings Love to your mind, heart, intellect, will, body and soul in some way too.

Buying a Degree

2009-02-18T16:02:00.000-05:00

I never read spam but this was just too creepy not to read:

To buy a degree is quite easy these days. Nevertheless most students just sit around in their usually boring local University classes, wasting money. Why would you do that? These days buying a degree is a matter of personal motivation. But why should you buy a degree? The main reason is the fact that buying a degree on1ine is going to save you time, a lot of time. Usually you have to verify your life experience and you instantly qualify. Even though that is not the main cause why people are buying life experience degree.

The actual reason why people buy a life experience degree is because they can not go to a institution in their surrounding area that offers the diploma program they are heading for: For example, if you live near a College which only offers renowned marketing degree, then this doesn't help you a bit if you're looking for a marketing degree. To attend classes you might have to travel long distances. Then it might be that the degree that you want is only offered by a institution which costs a fortune. So you have to leave your place, look for accommodation in the University's place and do all the other stuff involved costing you tons of cheeze.

If you buy a degree by verifying your life experience or work experience, you can find the right degree for you without ever having to leave your workplace and instead get all the documents like the diploma certificate with the University's legal verification and official seal certifying the degree chosen, the transcript, a cover letter, copies of the College's or University's official certificate of accreditation, the institutions postal prospectus approval and a few important things more.

Having a University degree is very important these days, and as always in life you should only stick with something you want.

Beware choosing to be something just because it was the only good degree your local institution offered. After all, you are only going to be good at your job if you like to do it. Thus, you have to get a degree that means something to
you. This used to be a task that could take you years.

Buying a degree is nothing harmful. It's a win-win situation for the Colleges involved as well as for you, getting the degree you dreamed of.Give us a call if you are interested to buy a degree from an University!

This speaks volumes about the state of (mis)education in our world today. Sad.

The Story of Occor the Monster

2009-02-17T14:56:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there lived a monster named Occor. Occor was the nicest and prettiest thing to be found in the entire forest. Everyday he would weave through the trees greeting whatever animals he met. Often, creatures of all kinds would come out to say hello as they heard him approaching. You see, as he would make his way through the forest, songbirds would strike a pleasant tune and Occor would hum a simple melody. This soft, harmonious greeting would often end disagreements and bickering and is even said to have opened hearts to true love. For this reason, Occor never had to work to find food or drink; he just wandered and found everything he needed as he went. As the seasons changed, Occor met different friends who were always happy to share what they had with him. As they saw it, it was worth the joy he brought with him. After all, Occor was the nicest and prettiest thing to be found in the entire forest.

One day a frog told Occor that beneath the water of ponds and lakes, and sometime even streams, there were other kinds of things that he might want to meet too. These fish-things could be quite nice to watch and to play with. Occor decided that he must meet these fish so, naturally, he waded into the first pond he came to. When he put his monster eyes into the water and looked for fish all he could see were water-grasses and rocks. No fish. He tried again and again until he was very tired. So, he walked back to the shore and began to walk into the woods when he noticed something strange. Silence. There were no birds singing. When he saw a squirrel on a nearby tree, it threw a branch at him instead of the usual "hello" and offering of something to eat. Things went on like this for the rest of the day. By nighttime Occur was tired and hungry and cold – and wet. For the first time, Occur was sad. He cried and wondered what this thing to be sad was. The raindrops coming out of his eyes mystified him. He wondered why things had changed. Then, he realized that until he went into the pond things were the same. So, he went back to the pond to try and find the past. But it wasn’t there.

As the moonless night hid his despair, Occur stood on the bank of the pond, paralyzed by fear. It was like his lungs had shrunken and his mind weighed a thousand tons. He had never been afraid before and, like his tears, his fear mystified him. When he tried to speak, nothing came out but sterile huffs of breath. Even his vision seemed different, the darkness haunted his feeble sight and the stillness became lonely and void.

Slowly, Occur began to gain mobility in his limbs and mind and he decided to sit down. When he sat, the waxy blades of grass that poked his seat reminded him of something: the past. Yet, still, he could not find it. It was not there as anything but a distant and cold memory. "It must be gone forever", he muttered. So, he decided to get up and venture into the woods to see what they had in store.

The sun was rising. As rays of light began to pierce the canopy of branches and leaves, Occur's sadness and fear became something different. He was free. He needed no one. He would no longer hold on to that distant past of others and their feeble offerings. He would make his own way in the world. Never again would he seek out new things. Never again would he be betrayed. "From now on, I will be a monster", he said proudly.

More from VN: Deem on Chaput on the Pitfalls of Partisanship

2009-02-16T10:35:00.000-05:00

Mr. Deem, who goes by Policratus, has posted an interesting piece from Archbishop Chaput on the dangers of entrusting issues of moral import to a particular political party of choice. Here is my own quick and dirty summary:

If you want to fight poverty, then, don't expect the Democrats to feed the hungry and if you want to advance life, then, don't put your trust in the Republicans to love every human person unconditionally. Both of them are deeply invested in these things, and more, not getting done. It is the tragic, sick cycle they feed on.

Click here to read the article.

I do, however, have my reservations about Chaput's argument. His analogy between rape and abuse and the Civil Rights Act seems to be very similar to the kind of bickering that transpires between the trenches of political aisle warfare. And its a bad analogy because it does not exclude broader reform from happening in an ongoing way--very similar to the theological idea of conversion as a way of life. All in all, I like that he has the insight to step away from polemics but I dislike his inability to see his own polar attitude on these things.

A Psychoanalytic Critique of Cults in the Catholic Church: Part III

2009-02-15T14:24:00.000-05:00

"Who is this king of glory? The LORD of hosts is the king of glory." (Psalm 24:10)

"For the Lord" meant to be against the world and its list of dysfunctions. These worldly things became more and more numerous as time went on. I knew that there were some cases where we didn't observe all the worldly things as problematic, but I wished we did. The more radical a life "for the Lord" was, the more things it had rejected. I wished that Mom and Dad would take away our bed mattresses so we could be like the really radical members and sleep on a wooden plank of a bed. I always envied the people who lived in Akron and wished we could move there to do all the things during the week I heard about from the other kids. The kids had a private and secret sect of conduct and, even though I didn't really approve of it, it was fascinating. The older boys would send down the line stories and tales of bad things they had done and when no one was around they would shock us younger ones with their antics. Most of these antics were using bad words and spitting, but sometimes they talked about girls too. That made me feel really uncomfortable. The world became clearer to me as I grew. I began to see the difference between an "ordinary" person or Catholic and the truly dangerous ones. I suspected people who were not charismatic and especially those who dressed suspiciously. I was not shy. I would boldly correct someone from the world. I was confused when my Mom told me to not tell the goat lady that using the Lord's name in vain was a sin. I was getting better at guitar. Even Dad was noticing this. I could strum better than him already. He always played things in that other way the Spanish songs went. Living "for the Lord" meant that we had to be different and at school this was hard. I never made that many friends; but it didn't make me sad. I understood why and I liked it that way. I never felt like a victim. As I grew in prayer I learned the zenith of approval could be found in public worship. Especially if, during the time of prophesy or spontaneous singing, I could think of something poetic or deep to say. I made the adults so proud when I did this. And I knew it must be "for the Lord". This affirmation led me to believe that "the Lord" could be found in the approval of community. In a certain way, I secretly wanted to be even more radical than my parents were. Sometimes I wondered if we were being radical enough. I burned with passion for these things. Now, I was in trouble plenty and got into my own share of mischief, but there was no doubt in anyone's mind that I was fully committed to "the Lord". I had a personal relationship with Him. I did my daily prayer in mimicry of the adults. But when I read the Bible, I read it in earnest. I poured over it seriously and intensely. I loved to read. I loved to read big book, adult books. Sometimes I would peruse my Dad's collection of books and read the back of the cover. I learned how to read the descriptions and the table of contents and pretty much get a good gist of what the whole book was about. I learned about how important defending the faith and the tenets of the Charismatic Renewal (like praying in tongues) was and how important countercultural ways of living were too. I always clustered these authors together with my Bible reading and the things from the community. Mr. Herman and others went to Honduras and I slowly forgot about him for the most part. But by now my parents were deeply involved in the community and other subgroups like Couples for Christ. For me, it was all part of the same thing. We were to go to visit Grandma and Grandpa for a while during the second semester of my second grade year and we would be doing something with Mr. Hermann there. Little did I know that we would go to Mexico City in a train and decide to move to Mexico by the next school year.

Commentary:
So far I have rambled between the late 80's and early 90's. What strikes me most about thinking about this as it happened it how very pleasant it was to me then. Also, I am struck with how many skills I use today (in my musical and academic work) were begun at that time. My greatest regret, however, is that my "Lord" was not God. My God was not infinite or limitless or mysterious. He was so understood and codified that I never looked twice at one of my favorite Psalms: Psalm 24. I never really wondered who "the Lord" was. Skepticism or questioning were clear tools of the devil--really, they were. Intellectual explanations or even Catholic interpretations were just excuses for giving in the the world. I was sure who the Lord was and how to live for Him. The details were in whether I would be radical enough.

This is one of the reasons that, while I look fondly on this part of my life in so many ways, I see such an approach as cultish. The sign of a cult is not in some straightforwardly evil plan, instead, it is in the incredible narrowness of that plan. Narrowness at the time was good thing. There could be no room for the world in our lives. But, as I re-read the Cultural Approach today, I see it rooted in a certain insecurity. "The Lord" is nothing more than an image of the angst of Mr. Herman and his followers. But this angst is not a true property of the Lord of Psalm 24. That Lord is God. And this God is not a mere placeholder for our own radical proposals. This God is infinite, mysterious, and catholic (universal). This does not do away with real things, but it also saturates them with more than they can contain. It humbles them and us in the process.

This is the hallmark of a cult: hubris. As a religious organization it is the ultimately the arrogance of idolatry. To belief that one can so neatly and tyrannically give meaning to the person or the family is a pure act of selfish pride. It is to create God using our own finite ideas. With it comes a different god, one fashioned in the image of something altogether different. Discipline and threats of expulsion into the wretched world--or, to put it another way, fear tactics--preserve this god, this idol.

However, when we ask "Who is the Lord?" in humility we are not threatened--we are loved.

A Psychoanalytic Critique of Cults in the Catholic Church: Part II

2009-02-13T13:50:00.000-05:00

When I entered the room I knew there was something very special about this dinner we were invited to. I was wearing a striped shirt. Everyone else was dressed up in ties and white shirts with faded navy blue pants. I wished I could dress like they did. We went through the night of Lord's Day and soon began to return for whole weekends. We were welcomed and everyone was very nice to us and soon I began to want to help Mom and Dad with the changes we were learning. I loved the big meeting--especially the music. I had never heard such a big sound before and the songs were new and exciting. Some of them were sung in parts, women and men, and others had sign language that the women did. Everyone was so happy, the women glowed and the men were all so serious but positive and friendly. Soon we began to have the kinds of prayer meetings I had only seen at Church or people's houses in our own house. They all began with music, soon a guitar stand would sit next to the dinner table. I worked to learn to play the faster tempo music and also began to learn some Spanish songs from the Spanish prayer meetings at Church. My siblings seemed to not quite get it, but I knew that I wanted everything that this new life from Akron had to offer. I was no older than six or seven years old. You see, I had seen it all before. I mean, I was no stranger to the raising hands during worship or the other things that other people would have found strange. I had always loved to go to prayer meetings and when they were in our home, when I was "asleep" I would try to listen in. But until now things at home were never this serious or this organized--this official. But the seriousness made it seem more important and soon I jumped into the process by trying to grow in prayer and reading the Bible and writing my own songs. I would consult with my sister to see how they sounded and she would always give me feedback that mostly said that I sounding like I was howling. But I knew that these changes were "for the Lord". With time I began to understand the urgency of this movement and began to revere the leader, Mr. Herman. He had written a book! I was so impressed by that. I had never known anyone who had written a book. This book, A Cultural Approach to Christianity, laid out every aspect of the Christian life. It explained what was wrong with the world today and how to fight it by living a radical Christian life. And it went into grave detail to put everything in its place. From how to dress, eat, behave, worship, and more, it was clear--painfully clear. The pain was all the spanking. One of the biggest changes were generous helpings of corporal punishment for violations of the precepts of the cultural approach. Now I knew that we weren't doing all of them, but I wanted to. I hoped that we could become Servants of the Cross someday. They wore special patches on their oxford shirts and sometimes wore a brown colored pants instead of blue. My brother was really young but he was not deterred by any of this. He would do anything to break rules and even when I tried to warn him, he would willingly disobey and pay for it. But, he had to learn somehow. I struggled the most with the food. It was so gross. The first time I took a step back was when I felt that I couldn't physically eat the dense peanut-butter and jelly sandwich and was ordered by one of the leaders to be spanked by my parents--and they did. That moment was the first time I felt an intuition of injustice. But, on the whole, I was committed to seeing our family grow in this new lifestyle. When Dad quit his job at Church--where a lukewarm priest had taken over--and devoted all of his time to the charism of the community, family renewal, I was proud. When we were to move to Mexico to help Mr. Herman start a new mission, I was excited. It was "for the Lord".

Dear Sam: Stop using the 'C-word'

2009-02-12T16:55:00.000-05:00

Before I move on in this series, many people has been e-mailing me complaining about my use the the term, 'cult'. I will try and explain here briefly.

All I mean by cult is an organization that has formally established methods of conditioning people's lives in a way that puts them under a single lens of authority and credibility that cannot be questioned or dissented from. The effect this often has is the formation of a powerful community that shares--under threat of expulsion or discipline--a single mind controlled by the narrow prescription established and codified by the leader and the inner circle of leadership.

You may wonder: Well, I can think of lots of organizations that function that way. What about the Catholic Church? Is that a cult too?

Here is the difference: In the non-cult there is a democratic sentiment--an openess to dialogue and debate--and a general lack of concreteness to the prescriptions in the organizations, especially evident in the practice of its members. In a cult, on the other hand, there is a tyrannical sentiment. In fact, many of the practices of the cult are intended to prevent dissent or justify it when it comes along.

This disciplinary aspect of a cult is its hallmark. It cannot survive unless the minds--and the bodies--of its members are thoroughly regulated and, more importantly, self-regulated. Carter G. Woodson makes this point clearly when he wrote:

If you can control a man's thinking, you don't have to worry about his actions. If you can determine what a man thinks, you do not have to worry about what he will do. If you can make a man believe that he is inferior, you don't have to compel him to seek an inferior status, he will do so without being told and if you can make a man believe that he is justly an outcast, you don't have to order him to the back door, he will go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the man will demand that you build one.

So, when I refer to a cult, I am mourning one, or both, of two things:

1. An organization that disciplines the human mind and conscience with formal strcutures of discipline and authority in order to limit the horizon of one's thought.
2. The person who has lost the dignity of thinking--and even feeling through intuition--for herself.

A Psychoanalytic Critique of Cults in the Catholic Church: Part I

2009-02-12T11:34:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, during my daily-randomized ritual of news browsing, I found the story on Fr. Maciel's scandalous double-life. I do admit that such a story brings out the worst in us--and maybe that has something to do with it--nonetheless, this story just won't stop itching. For days now I have spend considerable amounts of time scouring commentaries, points, and counter-points in English and in Spanish and the biggest question I ask my self is: why? A few friends of mine have asked me if I am a member of Regnum Christi, and, since I am not, why do I care so much? Other friends who are members of RC have asked me why I insist on torturing them with my commentaries and inquisitions. So, this question of, "Why do I care so much?", has moved me to write this very different--even risky--kind of entry. I am not entirely sure what I have to say, but, after some thought and reflection, I have a general idea.

You see, there is something special to me about this tragic cycle of events that has affected Regnum Christi and the Catholic Church at large and, at the same time, I am completely removed from it. In the nonsense that can be our consciousness, I seem to have woven these events together to my own life. What I mean to say here is that, for some reason, there is a deep connection for me between the scandalous events and lessons coming from these current events and my own life in the Church. For years I have flirted with the idea of writing about my experiences, but there was never anything to make them relevant or interesting. You see, I do not have what seems the "standard" stories that garner immediate attention. Yet, I find myself in deep empathy when I hear those stories. It is as if I did in fact go through those cycles myself, even though I know that I did not; at least not directly.

Those are the psychoanalytic reasons. But there are many more, I think. For too long has the genuine goodwill of certain people guarded other well-intentioned people from making critical statements about the general organizations they belong to. Organizations that have, and continue to, wreck havoc on many lives in the name of something is not as they say it is. Let me be clear. Painfully clear.

Many movements in the Church that have responded against the "modern turn" of the post-Vatican II church and the evils of secular society at large in the name of orthodoxy, radical calls to holiness, evangelization, and more, have implicitly or explicitly claimed a monopoly over the faith. A monopoly over God. They often guard against critique by citing the radical nature of their call and uniting it to the radical witness of the saints and, especially, the martyrs. That way, any strong arguments against, or ridicule of, their work can be relegated to "persecution". Guarded by these and other methods of seclusion, they... Wait a minute. Let me be even clearer. I will name names.

I am talking about organizations in the Church that were sprung from a variety of things (e.g. the Cursillo movement, the "Duquesne revival", the protestant evangelical/Pentecostal movement, the tele/stadium-evangelical movement and more) and collectively created the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. You see, this movement did not exist on its own within the Catholic Church. It was mostly supported by private, lay initiatives like prayer meetings that grew into communities and traveling retreat-like gatherings and seminars (most popularly being FIRE rallies and The Life in the Spirit seminar). The community I am most familiar with is Bread of Life Charismatic Covenant Community in Akron, Ohio, founded by Dick Herman and run by an inner circle called The Servants of the Cross. Their remnants, that is their founder and the inner circle, can be found today in a Mexican mission called, Seguidores de la Cruz (Followers of the Cross). The community itself does not exist anymore, to my knowledge.

The larger cultural impact this community and others like it (and I am told that most other ones were not as draconian as this one) served as the vehicle for the rise of many other movements; even ones that are not charismatic in their worship. One of these is Regnum Christi. While RC predates the Charismatic renewal by several decades, perhaps the most popular face of the American Legionaries of Christ (their order of priests) is Fr. Johnathon Morris, LC. He comes from a family who were registered members of Bread of Life. And, I should say, that this family have been nothing but kind and generous to me and I count several of the younger siblings as my friends. And Fr. Johnathon isn't the only one who left a community for RC. I met several of them when I was in Rome at a private screening of "The Passion" enabled by Fr. Johnathon who was the spiritual adviser for the movie shooting. And I know of many, many more.

One "person" left-out of this discussion is my alma mater: Franciscan University of Steubenville. And I intend to leave them out. This is not blind affection, but, in my life, the University has had nothing, or at least very little, to do with this psychoanalytic memoir directly. At least not with this chapter of it. Nonetheless, with very little trouble, thick lines could be drawn to connect Franciscan to this movement for historical purposes.

Now, I do not want to sound like--or actually be--a bitter former member railing against something that made me mad. I am very sympathetic to the work done by this movement. When I say this I am not just posturing. This movement saved my father from drug addition in the seventies and served as the first place I learned exegesis through reading scripture and other books. Also, generalities are cheap. Very cheap. I will happily retract what I say in the particular, that is, in the case by case or person to person basis, but, make no mistake, the general phenomena I describe was and is real.

So, when I continue, I hope to do the work that seems appropriate to take place in Regnum Christi--because they got caught. What I mean here is that many informal and formal movements on the past century have gone unquestioned--or, to put it another way, never got caught in a way that forced them to question--and, even if they have now disappeared, they should be held accountable to the truth. The truth that no one has a monopoly--not even a weak monopoly--over God, or those things that flow from such an excessive source. To pose as such is to create idols that substitute for the things we want and--here is the heart of my point--the methods used to preserve that spoken or unspoken monopoly are not religious or spiritual. They are nothing more or less than degrees of social manipulation that are in direct conflict with the freedom and authority of the human conscience to exist in whose image it is made in. To be blunt, my first point is to say that such methods (the ones I will soon describe in greater detail) are the line that separates the religious movement from the cult.

More to come.

Vatican Darwin Conference & the Lowly Status of Intelligent Design

2009-02-11T11:58:00.000-05:00

Here, in the midst of my Maciel obsession, is an interesting piece of news about the Vatican's efforts to discuss the scientific and theological implications of Darwinism and evolution. The odd-person out, it seems, is intelligent design. That theory has only been added to be considered as a cultural phenomena, not as a scientific or theological issue. The Church has come a long way since Galileo.

Click here to read a report with additional sources from CathNews.

Las Hijas de Maciel

2009-02-10T14:07:00.000-05:00

"¿Es ella, la ahora famosa, más hija del P. Maciel que lo que soy yo? No, creo que no."

Is she, the now famous, more "daughter" of Fr. Maciel than I am? No, I think not.

"Esa chiquilla, hasta ayer desconocida, sin deberla ni temerla, se ha hecho famosa en el mundo entero en un solo día y no puedo negar que eso me ha hecho sentirme un poco celosa, pues yo no saldré publicada en todos los diarios (tal vez en ninguno) y ¡también soy hija del P. Maciel! No llevo su sangre en mis venas , pero gran parte de lo que soy (casi todo) se lo debo a él. Sí, el P. Maciel es mi padre (Nuestro Padre, como cariñosamente le llamamos los miembros del Regnum Christi) y lo digo con mucho orgullo."

This little girl, undiscovered until yesterday, without owing or fearing her, has made herself famous in the whole world in only one day and I cannot deny that this has made me feel a little bit jealous, since I will not come out published in all the daily news (perhaps none) and, I too am a daughter of Fr. Maciel! I do not carry his blood in my veins, but a great part of what I am (almost all of it) I owe to him. Yes, Fr. Maciel is my father (Our Father, as we, the member of Regnum Christi, lovingly call him) and I say it with much pride.

--Comments from a story on Univision.com with my own translation.

Before I write a longer post explaining my fascination with the recent developments in the Maciel scandal, I wanted to mention a trend I have been reading from Legionaries of Christ writing in response to Latin American (for the most part Mexican) coverage of this story. In a fascinating twist of prose, there are a great number of women who are posting as the other, or another, "daughter of Maciel." Now, by this they mean spiritual daughters. But, they seem to express a certain dismissal--and even envy--of the biological daughter of Maciel since, after all, they are just as much his daugthers too.

If you read Spanish, you will find a striking difference in the rhetoric and polemics on this issue. For my part, I find it fascinating and gut-wrentching. There is no doubt, however, that the Spanish commentary reveals what most English-speaking sensibilities will not. In that graphic and less-deodorized rhetoric there is much to be learned from.

In my next post I will begin, at personal risk of crossing into the realm of self-pyschoanalysis, to describe my own reasons for finding these tragic events so important. I hope whatever lessons I might convey will have some impact on the culture at large (or small).

Vox-Nova on George Weigel on Regnum Christi

2009-02-09T14:56:00.000-05:00

Since this has been the only thing going here lately, here is more on it from Vox-Nova

A Heartfelt Exchange on Regnum Christi

2009-02-05T11:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I received a kind, while critical, message about my title choice, "Regnum Creepy?," for the article on the recent scandalous discoveries about the revered founder of Regnum Christi and Legionaries of Christ, Fr. Maciel. I agonized over a response and wanted to post snippets of the exchange here for a more through evaluation. I will refer to this person as "Nice Person."

Nice Person: The recent revelation about Fr. Maciel is devastating to me personally and to many. Though you may not be able to understand this and you are entitled to any opinion you like about the Regnum Christi movement, Fr. Maciel himself, or even me, you may be unaware that many people are grieving and that your blog title "regnum creepy" is hurtful. Fr. Maciel is personally responsible for my growth in holiness, and to discover such a shocking double life is heartbreaking.

You don't need to change the title or do anything really, I just thought you might want to know that some who will read this will have open wounds like me and those words are like salt.

My Response: Thank you for your charitable and generous e-mail. You're right. Many people are grieving--myself included. I grieve as a Catholic, but I rejoice in the truth and I am restless know more and more of what that means, exactly.

Regarding the movement, however, I have seen it from the inside out and, in particular, I saw it swell with community members after the covenant community we belonged to (Bread of Life) dissolved. That process of dissolution took many years and along the way I met many casualties who came from our own community, other ones, and subsidiaries or allies of them like RC and Opus Dei and more.

It is my belief fundamental belief that despite the spiritual formation I received from those organizations (including RC), the truth does not belong to them exclusively, they have no monopoly over it or over my conscience. While their teachings carefully shelter themselves under the generous mantle of the Church, their hubris as movements can only lead to humility or dissolution of some kind.

No matter how we parse it out there is a genuine creepiness--evident in the tragic nature of this scandal--that we ought to wrestle with and, when we come out of it, we will find that we owe them nothing, for the truth is not a possession to be had.

I mourn for you and many of my friends who are faithful Catholics who have found good counsel in RC or alike. At the same time, I also rejoice for you to be in such a poignant, salt-to-the-flesh process of death and resurrection--conversion--in the discovery of truth. I can only hope and pray for more of it in my life too. Please pray for that in me.

Final thoughts: I have thought more about the specific word "creepy" and what it means to describe this scandal. As I give it more and more thought it not seems to convey the feeling of things, it also describes them in more literal terms. To "creep" is to be sneaky and secretive. These discoveries of Fr. Maciel crept along while he was alive and he kept them hidden. That is creepy--literally.

More News: Tintanoboa

2009-02-04T15:46:00.000-05:00

A snake that could eat a cow.

Regnum Creepy?

2009-02-04T11:34:00.000-05:00

This in yesterday from the NY Times: Catholic Order Jolted by Reports That Its Founder Led a Double Life

On Words

2009-02-02T14:46:00.000-05:00

I found myself making another linguistic distinction and remembered that my post, "Oh Sam You're Just So Special", seemed to go by too quietly. In case you wondered, the intention of that piece was to defend my way of looking at words and their meanings. Several people have objected to the sense in which I have treated 'socialism' and 'life' (within the term 'pro-life'). Their argument is that there is a mostly common and agreed upon meaning that I should abide by too. Any other meanings are ill suited for the purposes of doing anything other than empty, intellectual semantics.

I disagree. Words like 'socialism' that distill into "something about social," or 'pro-life' that clearly means "for, not against, life," are not defined by popular sentiment. They very well may function that way, but that does nothing to change what they mean to say. To question their meaning and posit a fuller representation is not to theoretically quibble, it is actually to advocate for the use of the language in ways that are consistent with common--not exclusive--intuitive senses that originate in human life, not apart from it.

So, in defense of what I coined the "weak intuitive" meaning of socialism or my abiding sentiment that 'life' is a broad expansive term that cannot be limited to this or that special interest group's own usage, I think that some words (certainly not all of them) have meaning that cannot be ignored simply because of their popular usage. At the same time, I think word games are parts of the primitive dance of the human struggle for truth, so, I am not arguing for some essentialist correspondence between language and objects.

Compulsory Schooling

2009-01-31T12:56:00.000-05:00

From Education in the United States, by Robert Church (New York, 1976, p. 107) with parenthetical remarks and italics added by me:

At the same time Sheldon, sensing the inadequacy of a single ragged school, began caimpaging for the city to establish a free (and mandatory) school systsem. The politics of his caimpaign were quite similar to those in other cities. The city's elite supported the idea but one man whom Sheldon identified as "a politician" urged the city's Catholics to oppose a free (and mandatory) school system on the grounds that it was a protestant plot against Catholic children. The Catholics, with the help of other portions of the (lower class) population, successfully blocked Sheldon's efforts. When it become clear that the mass of the city's population would not consent to the plan, Shledon and his influential supporters determined to circumvent the popular will. In 1853 (5 years before the first state-ratified compulsory school in Massachusetts) they persuaded the state legislature to to pass legislation establishing free (and mandatory) schools in Oswego; that legislation contained no provision for a popular referendum on the issue within the city. The law, Sheldon remembered somewhat gleefully, "was in truth sprung on the people, as one might say, contrary to their will" (this quote is taken from Sheldon's own autobiography [New York, 1911, p. 93]) . The need for reform was so great as to outweigh democratic principle.

Here is the dilemma: For the most part, we have democratic feelings about how things should be done in public affairs. We would like to think that we cannot be required to do things (obey laws, pay taxes or levies, and so on) without some kind of democratic choice or representation. In some cases we don't mind indirect representation, but on big issues (like casinos and school levies) we want to vote. Sadly for some and gladly for others, this is not the case historically with many big things and the school is one of them.

We generally trust the public will in a democracy because we think that if something is so good for the general public, then, they will obviously vote for it. In the case of compulsory schooling, most (if not all) people think it is for the general good today and would clearly vote for it if they had the chance, but it was historically created against the grain of popular sentiment. In other words, with time we have become accustomed to being forced to go to school by a rule of law that was not instituted democratically and that just might explain why we do not question the authority of the state or school anymore--we kinda forgot, or were allowed to forget, those historical memories.

This raises the question: What is more important: Freedom or obedience to a common rule of law? The rule of the people (i.e. democracy) or the rule of laws instituted by an elite (i.e. aristocracy or poliarchy)?

Much more to come...

Some Poetry for a Snowy Day

2009-01-28T15:58:00.000-05:00

Classes are canceled and I am revising a paper, so, in the meantime, here are three poems I wrote this past year.

Aliens

Aliens come and go,
In time and space they wander.
Aliens say hello,
Yet too much time they squander.

For by the time of greeting,
The alien is no more.
The alien face is fleeting,
Like the sandcastle on the shore.

And while the alien wishes,
For just a while longer,
It must be washed like soiled dishes,
Before it grows any stronger.

Baby Eyes

Baby eyes don't see that well,
At least that's what experts say.
Baby arms aren't all that strong,
Baby heads loosely bob and sway.

Baby teeth don't exist quite yet,
And baby legs can't stand alone.
Baby hearts beat ever so softly,
And baby words say the unknown.

Baby is the one that needs me,
Baby is so helpless thus it seems.
When really I'm the helpless one,
Wishing for my baby's dreams.

The dream of complete surrender,
The silent radiance of peace.
The dream of conscious thoughtlessness,
The moment of complete release.

While baby's eyes don't see that well,
They see more than I for sure.
For in my baby's blindness,
Lies an answer and a cure.

To Be Original?

To be original.
To be the same.
To be different.
All along the way.

Too much madness.
Too much sense.
Too much normal.
Sing an older hymn instead.

Why not listen?
Why not whisper?
Why not linger?
All along the way.

This just in from Vox-Nova

2009-01-23T15:34:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting piece from our dear friends at Vox-Nova:
The Vatican and Obama

Oh Sam, you're just so special!

2009-01-23T13:32:00.000-05:00

No I'm not.

I mean, that's not what you mean. You mean I am weird or odd or maybe downright stupid and out of touch with reality. You say 'special' but you mean other words that you would rather not say to me. You are deodorizing the meaning of your other words and relying on the private meaning they have to us here (culturally, regionally, personally), how you inflect your voice, and what the context is to convey the meaning. But you do not mean that I am really special. You mean something else. Right?

So here is my suggestion: If you like to say things that are not what you mean, then, go ahead; but don't think--even for a second--that the meaning of the words go away. It's there, all the time. Now, I imagine you will get away with saying things you don't mean and many people will forget about the meaning of your language, but, when people happen to remember, you must admit to them what you are doing. Otherwise, you are tricking yourself.

So, by the way, what do you think about socialism? Are you pro-life?

Onward pro-life soldiers???

2009-01-23T11:57:00.000-05:00

The commentary offered on the March for Life thus far has been interesting, and I'd like to add my two-cents, for whatever they're worth.

First of all, I agree with Skogey about the March ending at the Capitol and not the Supreme Court---certainly, the Supremes are probably, to some extent, influenced by protesters, the wealthy, political expectations, etc- but to support this sort of influence, and even to participate in it, is something any American who believes in the rule of law ought to be ashamed of. Nevertheless, anyone in the legal profession knows as well as I do that good law, and bad law, both come under pressure from political expectations and desires, and that law is the product of compromise to begin with-- pragmatic, dissapointing, and dispiriting, obviously, but unless we determine to have all of our laws made by those ideal philosopher-kings of utopia...law will be an imperfect attempt to reflect a society's values.

Sadly, of course, law has lost any teleological grounding at all-- the idea that law exists to shape and direct a community's values, rather than merely to reflect them, has been all but lost by anyone but the most traditional legal scholars---I include myself in this category because I beleive in the very basic proposition that law might make us good, but this notion is largely lost on the legal community, particularly in the United States. But, as is often the case, I digress.

I had wanted to blog about the March for Life and its role in the pro-life movement in the United States. For my purposes, I will define pro-life as the movement to reduce the nubmer of abortions taking place in this country. I understand the seamless garment issues that narrow definition raises, and, to some extent, I support them, but I also support the notion that the body has many parts- and it isn't wrong to expect different things from hands and head and feet, etc.

So- does the March for Life contribute meaningfully to a reduction in the number of abortions in the United States? I'm not certain. In one sense, as Steve pointed out, its capacity to influence politicians is insignificant. Seeing a constituency may remind lawmakers of their obligation to that constituency, but I believe that it is actually on the agenda of precious few lawmakers to do sometihng to reduce the nubmer of abortions in the United States. Pro-lifers are an easily trusting lot, and by and large we accept the rhetoric of the Republican party, demand very little in the way of results, and profess profound gratitude and adulation for those who toss us even the tiniest of crumbs. The political impact of the March for Life, therefore, seems to be negligable. In fac,t we may be doing ourselves a dissservice by providing "pro-life" politicians the easy opportunity ot appease the masses with one day of lip service rather than substantive results. Furthermore, the March for Life may have the impact of villifying politicians who do not believe in making abortion illegal, but whose agendas, including greater access to health and prenatal care, childcare for working mothers, significant maternity leave, etc would acutally contribute to a culture of life. While we should never be compromising on our attempts to render abortion illegal, we need to stop being averse to working with politicians of all stripes to create an overarchign Culture of Life--and if these folks are villified, that becomes all themore difficult.

Does the March for Life contribute meaningfully to a reduction in the number of abortions in any other way? Again, I'm not certain. Unfortunately, since the political battle does not seem to be working ,the real way to reduce the number of abortions is to help provide those services and resources to pregnant woman who need them in a way that they'll feel compfortable accepting them. In short, to build an authentic culture of life. Unfortunately, the March for Life may impede these sortso f efforts too. If the March becomes our "pro-life activity" and well-meaning people can go, check "do pro-life activity" off their to do lsit, and feel fat and happy and good watching the Super Bowl, then the kind of complacency we've encouraged has not been helpful at all. However, if the March inspires people to create all kinds of creative initiatives for building a culture of life on the lcoal level, it has osme value. I don't know if it does.

Finally, Sam is right. The polemical nature of sidewalk debate can create hatred. No abortions are stopped by villfiying politicians with incorrect ideas, nor is sidewalk debate valauble to anyone. Encouraging this kind of argumentative, militant stance, as opposed to one that is creative, collaborative, and overwhelmingly positive is a dangerous thing.

The folks who may get the most out of the March for Life are those who areworking every day, in some capacity or another, on pro-life initiatives. THese folks might be bouyed up, encouraged, and inspired by seeing other s come out to support them. Or they might grow cyncial at the nubmero f people willing to walk around in the cold, but unwilling to volunteer to stuff envelopes, or put pregnant women up, or collect bottles, or whatever it is. I suppose that depends on temperment.

In spite of the drawbacks, and perhaps the limited means by which the March for Life helps anything, I would, if it were accessible to me, continue to attend, if for no other reaosn than t odemonstrate solidarity with the unborn, and with women in crisis pregnancies. I would like ot demonstrate tihs ina more meaningful and tangible way, but a start is a start, and I'd rather see well-intentioned people do sometihng ,however ineefeictive it might be, than do nothing at all. Perhaps our efforts sohuld be focused on encouraging the March for Life to make sosme changes, to become an expression of solidarity and aplace ot commit to authntic change---perhaps we who oppose many elements of the March should see the seminal goodness in such a gathering and work to nurture it into all that it could be. Ultimately, the entire pro-life movement needs a new and different generation of leaders, working to make authentic changes on a grassroots level. Maybe the AMrch is the right place to start.

JDF

Another Alternative View on the 'Life' Movement

2009-01-23T11:48:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of an anonymous comment, here is a different spin on the March for Life from insidecatholic.com, entitled, "Why I Didn't Attend the March For Life", by Steve Skojec.

You can read it here.

How the 'Pro-Life' movement left me behind

2009-01-22T16:39:00.001-05:00

This image is usually used to imply that 'pro-life' advocates are somehow violent people in general or, at the very least, that they are somehow meaner or crankier than most. Let me be clear: This caricature is an indefensible generalization. Truth be told, either side of the abortion debate can be vicious, mean, and pig-headed.

However, it describes a different sense of why I have slowly felt left behind by the 'pro-life' movement in the United States. I will spare you a long, drawn-out chronological anecdote and be direct. Intentions aside, it is very confusing. What I mean here is that despite the very best--even heroic at times--intentions and beliefs of individuals (many of whom I personally respect and admire), the movement in general can only commit to one thing. That thing being, that, since life begins at conception, abortion at any stage and for any reason is tantamount to murder and ought to be illegal. This one thing is supposed to exhaust what it means to be 'pro-life'. Any questioning of, or embellishment to, that meaning is seen as a nuisance at best and a threat at worst.

I find that, as I have grown in my understanding of what 'life' means, I have become far too radical for this movement. Here are two simple points:

For one, I don't think that we can say that life begins at conception. That biological idea to me is to give into the need for science to dictate when life begins and ends using human rationality. I am of the inclination to take the verse, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you." (Jer 1:5) very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that I am not willing to concede that mysterium tremendum of the genesis of life to biological distinctions. Secondly, I think that murder is something that needs to be parsed out very carefully, as we do juridically in all other cases of suspected murder. It seems very reasonable, based on just these two reasons, that we can have a thoughtful and measured discussion of abortion based on rather different principles than those of the mainline 'pro-life' movement in the U.S.

Then, there is my inconvenient (to 'pro-lifers') belief that life is something that is never excluded in any human issue whatsoever. In other words, my conviction that what makes a thing 'human' is precisely because it involves life (which ought to be radically included into any cause for the preservation and defense of life), is something that I have found resisted by the 'pro-life' movement in general. In my post below, this point is made quite plainly.

Finally, the battlefield setting of this testy discourse in protest rallies and signage, which all-too-often has lead (from personal experience) to sidewalk polemics--and, at times, hatred--has also left me very alienated. I would love to see the efforts used to demonstrate and protest directed towards opening up forums for discussion and rigorous (re)evaluation of the robust issues of life which would include, not the other way around, as much goodwill as possible. It may be controversial, but it seems to me that each argument on either side of the abortion debate is based in what is understood (perhaps wrongly) to be good for the person. Getting a meaning we can understand and implement culturally and legislatively will require much more than signs, I think.

So, while I do not see myself on the sidelines, I am playing on what I see to be a somewhat different playing field. This field does not exclude the 'pro-life' vision, but it is also much more than that too. I am pro-love.

Why the National Right to Life Comittee isn't really 'Pro-Life'

2009-01-22T14:07:00.001-05:00

From the NRLC's own mission statement which you can read here.

The primary interest of the National Right to Life Committee and its members has been the abortion controversy; however, it is also concerned with related matters of medical ethics which relate to the right to life issues of euthanasia and infanticide. The Committee does not have a position on issues such as contraception, sex education, capital punishment, and national defense.

check your facts

2009-01-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

Um, Sam, not to be rude, but, check your facts. MLK, Jr was a Republican. Most of the civil rights leaders were.

Speaking of Socialism...

2009-01-19T13:13:00.000-05:00

Here are some lesser quoted words from Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech (a title I think poorly describes the message of the speech). He was also a registered Democratic Socialist Party member, along with many other people this country holds in high regard.

*UPDATE: MLK, Jr. was NOT a 'registered' democratic socialist, but there is much to justify calling him an 'unregistered' one.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

The Ressentiment of Socialism and Class Struggle

2009-01-18T23:48:00.000-05:00

Against my better inclinations, I've already been compelled to write on political philosophical issues. But, I've taken issue with Sam's description of intuitive socialism, along with his implicit defense of this sort of socialism as the better solution, as the response to capitalism which opens on to a society in which one finds the importance of community and the response to the excesses of individualism. My claim is that, first of all, I fail to see how this weaker form of socialism is at all 'intuitive' in a very meaningful way. Or I should say that if this is the intuitive form of socialism, it can only be etymologically intuitive -- that is, "social" - "ism" is that ism which speaks to the urge towards the social. If this is the intuitive sense of socialism, then as the response to capitalism, it remains fairly meaningless, since capitalism also doesn't do away with the social element of the capitalist community. This socialism would speak nothing at all to class struggle, nothing at all to alienation, and nothing at all to the teleology of history that characterizes the whole history of the tradition of socialist thought.

However, every socialism which opposes itself to capitalism always does so on the basis of the historical struggles between classes, in particular the lower classes against the higher classes. This is why Marx, and every other socialist theory or system, always speaks to struggle of the "worker." The teleology of historical socialism is the rise of the lower classes terminating in the evolution of a classless society. However, a classless society only occurs on the basis of the disappearance of the other classes. The privileged class, in the sense of the surviving class and the class which attains an historical normativity and absoluteness of perspective, is that of the "worker." Every other class becomes an obstacle to this class and its historical destiny, and herein lies the problem and the clue to the fact that socialism does not and cannot purport to be anything but the ressentiment, or hatred, of the "workers" over their situation.

I use the term ressentiment, a French term first used in its technical, philosophical sense by Friedrich Nietzsche which can literally be translated as "resentment," though it means much more than that, in order to describe a certain type of reponse and feeling of hatred and resentment, a certain longing for revenge or reversal of power relationships, that I believe characterizes every socialism. The "workers" of socialism rise up in hatred and jealousy against the upper classes, demanding a redistribution of wealth and power, which cannot be accomplished without the destruction of the upper classes and the bourgeoisie. The ressentiment of socialism is often covered up and disguised in the form of vague humanisms, the love of mankind, which becomes really only the love of a certain class, the "worker," or perhaps, in it's most deluded moments, in the "tough-love" for the upper classes who would be "better" people, perhaps, without all of their wealth and their abuse of power. However, from a Christian standpoint, it must be remembered that "love is never jealous," it never rejoices in the destruction of others or other classes, but "rejoices only in the right."

In contrast to the capitalism-socialism debate of the nineteenth, twentieth, and now again twenty-first centuries, Christianity has posed itself as a third option, one which rejects both options of two sides of the same bad coin. While I have certainly rejected socialism as nothing more than the ressentiment of the "worker," I do not mean to defend the upper classes against the lower, nor to reject the need for justice for the poor and the development of a just economic situation. However, this must only be accomplished on the basis of the universal love which Christianity preaches. Christianity does not preach a classless society, but rather preaches that class distinctions are not important before God and shouldn't accord any greater honor or dishonor among men. However, there must be justice for the poor and the rich alike. Charity, as the defining virtue of a Christian community, demands that society should take care of all of its members, though it is important to recognize that for the Christian, society does not equal government, but rather society as Christian society equals the "Kingdom of God," the "People of God," i.e. the Church. It is the Church and Church communities that are responsible for building a society of virtue and thus of ensuring that people take care of one another and develop a community in which there is justice for the poor and rich alike. But this must a society in which greed and jealousy are rejected in all forms and in every class.

One can, however, hardly expect a philosophical theory ever to accomplish or encompass this sort of love which builds virtue and alters the very character of a society. In all likelihood, the philosophers will continue to be caught up in this debate and will never extricate themselves from these systems of ressentiment. In the process, I fear that society will continue to be subjected to incessant references to Adam Smith and Karl Marx and get nowhere in the process.

Introducing myself, and some comments on socialism

2009-01-18T16:47:00.000-05:00

Hi everybody,

Awesome blog! I already love Rimatara! Thanks for inviting me, Sam. I look forward to discussing things with you all. To introduce myself, I’m a Philosophy grad student at University of Kentucky. The discussion unfolding recently caught my attention, since socialism is one of my academic (and non-academic) interests. I consider myself Marxist, in a rather loose interpretation of that term. (To be technical, I'm roughly a "Marxist humanist" in Erich Fromm's sense of the term.) I am also a Catholic, and during the summers I go back to my undergraduate university (University of the Incarnate Word in Texas) and take graduate theology classes. So, all that does not explain the totality of my interests (academic or non-academic), but it does explain why a couple of the recent blog posts have finally led me to emerge from winter hibernation and throw in my two cents (sorry for the mixed metaphor). (Sam's comments about death counts are interesting to me too...but I drafted the following comments on socialism before his piece on death counts, so here goes...)

Defining socialism is a gargantuan task. Asked for a definition, socialists seem to flounder around in a morass of technical jargon about alienation, praxis, theory, historical events, class struggle, value, price, human nature, and so on. Socialism is sometimes defined as "worker ownership of the means of production," but that is a controversial definition, because many people (like me) would argue that socialism is about more than just "who owns what" (contra the watered-down definitions that both socialists and supporters of capitalism like to offer). Mere economic redistribution--like the Swedish welfare state--also doesn't really seem to qualify as socialism, nor does merely placing the ownership of the means of production in the hands of the *state* constitute socialism, at least not if one wants to be true to something like a Marxist approach to socialism. (Marx rarely speaks of the "state" at all, saying far more about the "workers.")

Nor, however, would I be satisfied with saying that socialism is merely non-capitalism(although if one were to add a commitment to "community" of some kind, as Sam suggests, that might get us closer to what we're looking for). From a practical standpoint, it would probably be awesome if everyone opposed to capitalism would jump behind the banner of socialism. But from a theoretical standpoint, there has to be more to socialism than just being anti-capitalist, because a movement for major change in society should be able to say something about what it is for, not just what it is against.

Of course, various historical events make the task of defining socialism even more difficult. On the one hand, it would be wonderful if a new definition of socialism could be developed that would enable socialists to get away from tiresome and hacked-over debates about why various historical attempts at socialism failed (or didn't fail)--I try to avoid those debates--and focus instead on addressing the pressing issues of the present (the increasing gap between rich and poor, ongoing U.S. military invasions, etc.). On the other hand, grappling with historical events seems unavoidable in attempting to define socialism. Slavoj Zizek says somewhere (can't recall where) that, whether they like it or not Marxists have to grapple with Lenin, like Christians have to grapple with Paul (the analogy doesn’t work perfectly). And non-Marxist socialists can't really avoid historical issues either, if they want to explain how they differentiate themselves from Marxist socialists.

Perhaps, rather than striving for a definition of socialism, we would be better off if we could address some pertinent issues relating to socialism, and thus dance around the topic, without attempting to hit the nail right on the head (sorry for another mixed metaphor). I'm not sure what alternative approach to suggest, but here is a possible question (to which I don't have an answer prepared): Does capitalism foster alienation, and how could alienation be reduced? (But if people want to discuss my worries about defining socialism, or some other topic altogether, have at it! :))

Anyway, that was fun! Nice to meet you,

Peace~
Joan

Stop the insanity

2009-01-18T00:22:00.000-05:00

During my days as a wide-eyed youth in the '90s, I recall seeing a best-selling book just about everywhere books were sold: Stop the Insanity, by a spiky-haired woman named Susan Powter. I never read the book, but I do remember being irritated at its ubiquitousness and the vagueness of the title. What insanity, I wondered.

Well, now I'm writing a post called "Stop the Insanity," and the subject is clear. We need to stop pretending that "Magical Mystery Tour" is a good album.

That's right, I said it. The Beatles made a bad record. For decades, the Beatles have been cited as an influence for just about every successful rock/pop act that has followed them. The band's catalog has become something like holy scripture -- "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is widely regarded as either the best or first concept album ever, and the post-Beatles solo projects the band members were involved in after the fact are granted nearly the same reverence.

Or they would, had the ex-Beatles not definitively shown us what silly people they really were following the band's breakup. Paul McCartney dabbled with the very hit-and-miss band Wings, George Harrison wound up getting eclipsed by his involvement in the "Free Tibet" movement, John Lennon married Yoko and produced a seemingly endless series of audio abortions, and Ringo Starr emerged as the tiny conductor of Shining Times Station on the "Thomas the Tank Engine" program for children.

To be fair, Lennon and McCartney did pen and produce some good music following their stint in the Beatles, but I think it's safe to say that the majority of the work they did in the '70s and '80s was garbage.

But let's not get too far into the post-Beatles weeds here. What I want to discuss now is the set of rose-colored glasses the Fab Four's work is regarded with in retrospect. Specifically, I want to deal with the atrocity that is "Magical Mystery Tour."

First, some historical information. "Magical Mystery Tour" was originally released as a six-track EP in late 1967, the soundtrack to an ill-fated Paul McCartney project, which had "ordinary people" going around in a bus and having "magical" adventures... which was an idea Macca stole from the late Ken Kesey (author of "One Few Over the Cuckoo's Nest") and his band of "Merry Pranksters," who ate a bunch of acid, climbed aboard a colorfully-painted bus, and traveled the United States. The film project was a flop, since no magical adventures ever materialized, but the soundtrack proved to be a hit, and stayed on the number-one spot on the U.S. lists for eight weeks in 1968.

The record's A-side begins with the title track, "Magical Mystery Tour," which has about as much depth and musical interest as the soundtrack to any pre-'80s sitcom... in fact, the soundtrack to M*A*S*H is far better, using the instrumental version of "Suicide is Painless" for a show about the Korean (and really, the Vietnam) war. Next up is McCartney's "Fool on the Hill," which is perhaps the only decent song on the album... although it's certainly no "Penny Lane."

Track three, "Flying," is an instrumental, and is incredibly forgettable. This is followed by "Blue Jay Way," which is terrible and makes LSD seem like something to do to get yourself into the mood for a psychedlic suicide. "Your Mother Should Know" is a half-decent, and rather boring, McCartney piece, which may constitute the only evidence that "Magical Mystery Tour" is indeed a Beatles record at all.

Finally, we make it to the album's supposed tour-de-force, "I Am The Walrus." I'm not exactly sure where to begin, other than to say that this is a dogshit song. Worse than that, really. But let me tell you about my first experience with it.

Back when I was a teenager, I got it into my head that I'd missed out on an amazing movement in popular music -- the '60s and early '70s. Having been born in 1980 to a pair of bluegrass-lovers, I grew up listening to Willie Nelson and Clint Black and Rickie Nelson and Alabama (the band, not the perennially-racist state).

When I was 15, I received three important albums: "The Cream of Clapton," Paul Simon's "Graceland" (which I still regard as the greatest album ever made) and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Up until then, I'd been listening almost exclusively to a cassette tape of Billy Joel's "Piano Man" I'd purchased in British Columbia a year earlier after hearing "River of Dreams" on the radio. I decided that the '60s clearly were an important time in music history, and set out to listen to as much of that era's rock and roll as I could get my ears around.

It wasn't long after I got these first three key albums that I found myself, with a freshly-earned twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, driving my parents' car to the record store, where I found a copy of "Magical Mystery Tour" on CD. "Ah ha!" I thought. "This is the Beatles, and it's in the 'acid period.' If I listen to this, I'll gain insight into that strange and phenomenal era."

Well, I bought the record and eagerly tore through the wrapping plastic as soon as I got back to the car. I felt like I was going to gain some secret knowledge, some kind of illumination. Imagine my disappointment on placing the CD in the vehicle's sound system and turning up the volume. I believe my reaction was something like, "Oh."

I didn't want to believe it at the time, and I know there are a lot of people who still don't believe it. But it's a shit record. "I Am The Walrus" eventually came on, and I'd had enough.

I've listened to that song countless times in the 12 intervening years, and it's just indefensible. That hasn't stopped people from trying: "It's absurdist," "It's a study in juxtaposition," "It's sheer genius." No, it isn't. It's John Lennon being as high on hallucinogens and yogi spirituality as he could possibly get and writing a cretinous parody of a Bob Dylan song. The nonsense lyrics are often mistaken for being "deep" -- they aren't. There is no trenchant meaning hidden in the phrase "Semolina pilchard / climbing up the Eiffel Tower." That's just stupid. It's meaningless, and, anticipating a probable objection, meaninglessness does not confer depth.

I want to point out that I have no problem with drug usage. I've actually tried a few myself. If eating LSD and staring at a shrub for nine hours makes you happy, I say, go ahead. But please, keep the insights you discover to yourself -- don't foist them on the rest of humanity. That's what "I Am The Walrus" really is: the ramblings of someone who's been high for the better part of three months directed at people who haven't been. It's nothing less than infuriating, and I am sick and tired of everyone pretending that it's avante-garde genius. In fact, if Mark David Chapman had his lawyers bring up "I Am The Walrus" during his murder trial, he might have gotten off on a manslaughter charge.

It's only fair to point out that "Penny Lane" and "The Fool on the Hill" are terrific tracks, but they're out of place on what is otherwise a rotten, meaningless record. McCartney wrote those anyway, and he can be righteously lambasted for having penned "Ebony and Ivory" and "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" later, during his solo career.

The 1960s were an amazing time of cultural exploration and experimentation. While we have many gems that came out of this time, there are also a fair amount of turds -- William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" is a fine example of the latter. "Magical Mystery Tour" certainly falls into the "failed" category, and my view is that now, forty years later, we really need to quit pretending that it's a landmark record.

Counting Dead People

2009-01-16T12:48:00.000-05:00

I am putting aside my series for the moment to write something more important, I think.

I have grown weary of hearing people put causes and ideologies before human persons. What I mean here, concretely, is the use of casualty reports to attempt to justify one side or the other in Gaza. On Facebook there is a growing trend for Israel supporters to post how many people (especially children) have been killed by rockets and, for Palestinian supporters (or people who do not sympathize with Israel) on the other hand, to post how many people have been killed in the recent warfare by Israeli forces. The same tactic exists when anti-war types tote Iraq War death counts to stand down the war supporters who tally up the dead at 9-11. Or the people who oppose capital punishment who cite the number of dead executees against the dead people murdered by criminals noted by capital punishment supporters. And, then, you have the reproductive rights supporters who cite the dead girls trying to get illegal abortions against the dead babies legally aborted who are brought up by anti-abortion advocates.

Counting dead people, it seems to me, is to treat those persons -- those mothers and fathers and children and brothers and sisters and babies and 5 year olds and 79 year olds -- as objects, numbers. This numerical objectification attempts to argue that certain collections of human life are somehow more important or to be mourned more so or less so than others. I know there are cogent arguments for this kind of thing (e.g. innocent life is more valuable than criminal life). Nonetheless, I think we ought to do less counting of dead people as a means to advancing the causes we claim to be fighting for. We should pause -- even stop -- to remember, over and over again, that these are human persons! Real, bleeding, breathing, fearing, sweating, loving, and beautiful human subjects who do not die to be counted and listed as casualties of some cause we support or oppose.

Nothing can become more important than this. All life is sacred and all death is sad. Justice, desert, politics and its subsidiaries must be humbled by the raw existential angst and beauty of life and death. They should yield and become sobered by it.

Right now, I fear, we are drunk.

Three objections to what I have written so far

2009-01-15T15:47:00.000-05:00

Before I go any further in my musings about socialism and capitalism (see the sidebar for those essays), I think it would be useful to spend some time clearing the air -- albeit only partially, if that -- of certain objections that have come up. I find each of them very compelling (and thank those who brought them up) and think that in order to give them just attention I should "advertise" them here briefly and, then, post responses to each of them. I hope that this method is not too tedious and that you will bear with me if it is. On the other hand, I am sure there are far too many credible objections to what I have written thus far to number, so, if these three are insufficient to you, I am sorry about that too.

These are the biggest objections people have raised so far, it seems to me:

'Capitalism' is a biased word to begin with and what it means is less than clear if not problematic. No one calls herself a capitalist, rather, this term is coined and used by socialists or alike. And even if it were an appropriate name to call the converse of socialism, what does it mean? Why have I neglected to pay that any attention?
My weak, intuitive sense of defining socialism is too weak, even nihilistic maybe. 'Socialism' is reduced to fuzzy, warm feelings we have for one another. This may be something, but to call it socialism is about as productive as calling oil "black stuff." More importantly, it forgets that socialism is, as Boston put it, "more than a feeling." It is a real thing that happened in the history of ideas and in recent political history. Which leads the third point.
Esoteric meanings of thing we have mostly clear definitions for in dictionaries and so on only complicate things needlessly. No one in their right mind needs -- not to mention that no one wants -- another theoretical nuance or more intellectual parsing out this or that from the language we use and can, generally, agree on. This may serve a certain small circle of blowhards and cloud dwellers, but it does no good for these terms as they work in the world for the rest of the population. Weak, intuitive socialism is nothing more than nerdly self-gratification. If I want to say something about socialism or capitalism (or whatever word we prefer for what socialist and alike call capitalism) I should stick with the pre-established, normative definitions and, then, try and say something smart about it.

Does this seem like a fair assessment so far?

A Belated Introduction

2009-01-15T12:51:00.001-05:00

Hello, all. I've already written one blog entry on the crisis of science, mostly in response to other discussions already going on here, and never got the chance to introduce myself and where I'm coming from intellectually and otherwise.

I am a Ph.D. philosophy student at the New School for Social Research trying to specialize in ethics, but for the purposes of my writings here, that's probably entirely beside the point. My writing tends to range from the philosophical to the theological, being not only intellectually Catholic but religiously so as well, and every so often to the political, although my distaste for politics and political debate compels me to do this only in the most extreme instances where holding my tongue is no longer possible for me. That being said, I am very upfront with that element of my writing and my thought that is the most contradictory and perhaps the most urgent: I am a philosopher with a hatred of philosophy, a future professor with contempt for the Ivory Tower of Academia, and an intellectual who would like nothing better than to leave the intellectual life behind to get down to more important and urgent matters.

In either case, I hope I can keep things interesting here at any rate and pass on what ever insight or wisdom I may have acquired along the road. But my hope is not to spark more questions or a deeper thirst for knowledge so much as to promote action, a vital and dynamic embrace of life, and a care and concern for not just thinking but doing what is right.

on how stuff is...

2009-01-13T19:05:00.001-05:00

i was going to write a book review for this post. i even started it. hell, i even read the book. long story short: go out and buy a copy of the valkyries, by paulo coehlo, and pretend you've never read the alchemist, because this is nothing like that.

several years ago, when i was living in washington, dc, i came across liberation theology, in all it's glory, and nothing has been the same since.

i think we can talk all we want about communism and socialism, or the real versus the simulated. i spent a good portion of college writing papers about aristotelian political theory, the rise of empire in europe, the divine right of kings, the arab/israeli conflict. i wrote papers...i read journals...i studied my way into reading glasses. what i can tell you about machiavelli, or hitler, or marx, or lenin, or hobbes, or locke, or cromwell, or the sun king, or any of the rest of them is fairly pointless. the minute you realize that all the isms in the world boil down to who really owns your stuff, and how much your stuff really owns you is the point at which real education takes place.

orthodoxy must meet orthopraxis, or it's all empty. it's all vanity. and i think, i know, i believe you can have an orthodoxy and a fully integrated orthopraxis that is separated from a relgious structure. ultimately, everything filters down to the basics...no systems, no theories, no excuses. bone meets bone, and you must deal in flesh, in relationships, outside of G-d, or god, or gods, or just the voices in your head. and that kind of relationship exists out of the time and space where religion or dogma or theory have any real bearing on who we are or how we are.

that's what i think, today.

mil besos,
rachel

But 'Socialism' was not a Marxist Invention!

2009-01-13T13:50:00.000-05:00

I would like to thank those who have spurred these musings on socialism and capitalism into a series of sorts. I only hope I can stay engaged. The title of this post is a rip-off from a chapter in Michel Foucault's Remarks on Marx, "But Structuralism was not a French Invention." Also, the point I would like to make here is indebted to certain questions posed by readers and I hope there are many more to come (questions, that is). Answers seems so entirely far fetched at this point of bloggery. Now, on to the my point(s).

Historically, socialism is a (if not the) reaction against capitalism. And, we are usually led to believe, it is the thing that began in the frustrations of Marx and Engels, that climaxed in their seminal writings. This caricature of socialism portrays it as something 'invented' by the Marxist reaction against capitalism. As I wrote previously, I think this interpretation leads to a smelly, too-strong kind of socialism that is too easily ignored or attacked (and for good reason, I think).

However, recognizing that the weak, intuitive sense of 'socialism' was not a Marxist invention, then, we begin to understand what I have argued is the earliest -- and most serious -- meaning of 'socialism'. What I mean by this is that a weak sense of socialism is not intuitive only because it makes sense historically, empirically, or what have you, pure and simple. Socialism, in the weak sense I outlined earlier, is a another word for the human struggle for justice, freedom, and love. It only becomes something situated in particular situations that, to us here and now, are political and economic after the fact. After the weak sense has been raped of its meaning and turned into an ideology. That is to say, that the economics, politics, or what have you, of this weak socialism is not the usual, modern polemic. At the same time, it is addressing a distinctly modern problem.

I choose the word 'addressing' instead of 'fixing' for good reason, I think. The hubris of strong socialism is that it is teleologically identical to modern capitalism. It offers an alternative all-to-similar to the completeness of its predecessor. Socialism as a weak, intuitive thing only says what it can say. In other words, it addresses capitalism as a something different, but not newer than the vices it displays in history. So, we find that socialism, in the weak sense, is something that precedes and exceeds its supposedly Marxist invention.

Now, I should be held accountable to reducing socialism to nothing (in the critical view of some unforseen objectors). I think that will be my next task.

Howdy

2009-01-13T13:23:00.000-05:00

Hello,

I'm JD, the newest edition to the blogging team here at Rimatara.

So who am I?

I'm the very conservative, old-school Catholic guy. Except when I'm not. Sometimes, I'm the fairly progressive and open-minded Catholic guy. Except when I'm not. Sometimes I'm the ambivalent guy who sees both sides of a good argument and can't choose. And sometimes, I'm the guy who looks at the argument, and decides its the intellectual version of "self-abuse"...so I just sit back and watch the show.

You'll get a mixed bag from me. I'm not bright enough to disagree with Sam on matters philosophical, and, like I said, I try to steer away from anything that smacks of sophistry. I'll talk a little bit about politics, a little bit about me, a little big about Catholicism and religion, and a little bit about hockey. At which I suck.

Hope I keep things interesting, and, at least on occasion, hilarious.

Thanks to Vox Nova!

2009-01-13T12:23:00.000-05:00

In a fit of charity, Policratus, from Vox Nova, has featured RIMATARA on his wonderful group blog. Being new and all, about all we can offer by way of reciprocity is thanks and strong wishes that those of you who are not yet familiar with Vox Nova will get familiar soon. The erudition and verve that their writers display day in and day out is well worth your time.

What Does Socialism 'Mean'?

2009-01-13T10:11:00.000-05:00

Oftentimes, people who are sympathetic to socialism (who may or may not be socialists themselves) argue that socialism's meaning is misunderstood. The basic sentiment of this argument is that if people only understood what it "really means," then, socialism would be accepted by all (or many).

In response to this, those who oppose socialism (who may or may not be capitalists) will often retort with a definition of socialism or a quote from a socialist, Marxist, or alike. Using whatever definition they provide as a foundation, they will provide arguments as to why they both understand what socialism is and have good reason to oppose it.

I find this dance very tiresome and circular -- not to mention boring. I think there is another -- perhaps better -- way to go about things that may offer a place we can begin to have a more fruitful and interesting discussion. Namely, we ought to ask, again in an entirely different sort of way: What does socialism mean?

What makes this question different is that when I ask what the 'meaning' of socialism is, I am not asking for a dictionary definition or a convenient quote from Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Mao. What I am asking are more direct questions that are usually excluded from these kinds of discussions altogether. These are questions like: What does it mean for the events we can call 'socialist' to happen? In other words, what does it mean for capitalism to be rejected by so many people at different times for so many different reasons? Where does that sentiment come from? Is it justified? Does it make sense? Can we empathize with it?

Answers to these questions will reveal a different sense of socialism. A weaker sense than the strong, pungent scents of theoretical or historical socialisms. This is what socialism is, I think, in its infancy, its intuitive beginnings. Those early intuitions are the sense that something is wrong with capitalism. Or, to put it more aptly, something is wrong with the human person objectified by the modern, capitalist reduction of persons into objects -- human resources.

I think that those who can agree with this weaker sense of what socialism is, can begin to talk about alternatives that may vary in ideology or political sentiment, but will not be reduced to what John Mayer calls, "slow dancing in a burning room."

Movie Review: "Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater"

2009-01-12T14:31:00.000-05:00

I picked up Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater on my way out of the public library and figured that I could stand to learn something about Barry Goldwater or -- to put my expectations more accurately -- what people think about Goldwater. Since the latter is the larger portion of my belief about narratives in general, I find the subtitle useless. And, still, I'd like to think that the subtitle is not entirely off the mark -- or, to put it another way, although Goldwater was not resurrected in this movie to speak to our times about his conservatism and his life, I found the movie to be quite fascinating. The most fascinating part was the way the movie was done, who commented on Goldwater, and what they said. Ranging from Al Franken and Hillary Clinton, his son (Barry Goldwater Jr.) and granddaughter, and plenty of snippets of Goldwater himself, this was a story told in a very complex way that had an agenda: "conservatism" has lost its way.

Many would agree with this and might also find it odd to hear such a view coming from the likes of Clinton (a former Goldwater Girl in her youth) and Franken, but the what is important, I think, is not that "conservatism" as outlined by Goldwater is lost and needs to be restored, but, rather, that politics has lost its way and has been reduced to fundraising. Goldwater is presented as a deeply complex man -- with his fair share of demons and angst in his own life and those his life affected (most poignantly in the lives of his neglected children) -- who represented more than a brand (that I find very unpersuasive) of political ideology.

The Goldwater of this film represents one of the last "human" politicians. By "human" I mean Goldwater, in this film, is treated as a political subject, not a mere object of that machine we call politics.

Like him or not (Goldwater, that is), this film seems to be a timely thing to watch. And, as far as I can tell, it seems to be a pretty decent piece of documentary journalism too. You may want to check it out at your local library. Something tells me that it is not leaping from the shelves.

Membership Dues

2009-01-10T16:53:00.000-05:00

There are many sophisticated ways to write about taxation and I doubt that this is one of them. Still, I'd like to make a few simple points on the matter using membership dues as a simile.

I don't mind paying dues as long as: a) I can afford to pay them and b) they provide things I like. So, when I could afford to play golf (which I can't anymore) I was very interested to find a golf course I could join. By "join" I mean paying an amount of money which would entitle me to the benefits of the golf club. There is nothing ideological about this scenario and I would like to think that it is a generalizable thing to say about most people.

This seems to be why no one complains about public benefits and programs that they use. I don't see many people railing against libraries or firefighters. We largely get mad about paying for things we find unimportant or think could be better spent elsewhere. This means that no one is wholeheartedly against an institution (be it a government or a country club) charging a membership fee for things we like. No one wants to dissolve the state completely. Even an anarchist would simply like to see a conglomeration of people that occurs in, what seems to them, a better way. Conglomerations, governments, country clubs, families, churches, dating and what have you are the water we swim in. There is no way out. The question is simply a matter of what we think we need and how we are to pay for it. And I do mean "we." This includes the 'I' and the 'we'. There is no 'I' outside of the 'we', I think.

When those "things we need" are inalienable rights, then, we find ourselves in a very difficult predicament. This is because certain things, like life, are provided by extension of certain services, like medical care. So, to say that it is an inalienable right is one thing, but to say it is something we should charge for as part of the membership package is another one altogether, at least to many people. There are many more issues to discuss here. Nothing stranger (at least to me) then why we never seem to object to public parks. Although I do think that beauty is an inalienable right too. But that is for another time.

What does not help the matter, is to send people to this corner or that and assume that by inhabiting that space (e.g. liberal, conservative, anarchist, socialist, and so on) they have said everything we need to hear. This is messy stuff and I think that walking away from shallow corners and empty allegiances and opening up some free space to think deeply about these things is a good start.

Socialism and Capitalism

2009-01-09T14:12:00.000-05:00

If we strip the words of their historical context and simply look at what they seem to say as plain terms, I think it is easy to say that socialism intuits as more humane than capitalism. Comparing social (human) and capital (non-human) things as ends seems to be an easy choice to make. The problem is that that basic meaning, plain and simple, isn't nearly enough. I should reveal, as a matter of honesty, that there has always seemed to be a certain empathy I can share with my committed socialist friends that I cannot with my capitalist ones. Putting that aside for the moment, I do know that, in many (if not most) ways, the sentiments of my capitalist friends are similar (if not the same) as their converse socialist opponents. Their issues go back to a basic misunderstanding in the root intuitive appeal of what makes someone decide to "be" a socialist or a capitalist.

I think that socialists and capitalists both want to see a better world. The capitalist, on the one hand, finds the excesses of free markets excusable (to a certain extent) because of the principles of freedom they hold dear. These are principles that clearly desire for the human person to be free and flourish. The socialist reacts against the excesses of modern capitalism and finds the evils of historical socialist states excusable (to a certain extent) because of the principles of solidarity and community that also desire for the human person to exist in freedom and flourish.

Yet, both are deeply misguided, it seems to me. If there were an ideology to be had, I think we would have to move past the individualist vs. pluralist polemics. Truth be told, persons are deeply inscribed with both individual freedom, uniqueness, and dignity that is manifest in their desire for community, solidarity, and relationships. Unless we have a paradigm of politics, economics, or what have you, that accounts for that complex relationship between the person and the community, we will be left with too little.

What we can find some hope in is that, for those not exploiting these ideologies, most of those who ascribe to this or that want the same things: joy, peace, hope, goodness, and, of course, Love.

An Elementary Introduction to an Elementary Introduction to Quantum Physics

2009-01-08T14:20:00.000-05:00

Earlier I described the two basic sensibilities of science as, on the one hand, a Newtonian Outlook and, on the other hand, a Quantum Outlook. I am always annoyed when people invoke technical terms, like "quantum," and fail to show even the slightest idea of what it actually is, or seems to be to them. Lest I be a complete hypocrite, I would like to describe what I mean here from a very simple explanation of what quantum physics is, or, at least, seems to be to me at this point.

To begin to sum it up, it is best described as a perceptive quandary posed by the fact that we, humans, are very big and very slow when compared to many things, including hummingbirds and mosquitoes, but, especially, subatomic particles and their own subparticles. That is, if we could exist at the tinyness and fastness of an electron, for example, we would see things so differently that our intuitions about the way things work, that is move and function, would change completely.

One way we can observe this is with light waves/particles and how they behave rather oddly when pushed to conform to little spaces (see: Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle). But, the gap is so vast between our own big/slow world and the tiny/fast world of the subatomic (and smaller) world, that our minds have a lot of trouble getting at what they need to get at in order to say true things about the subatomic world and, especially, the smaller ones than that. So, we find that notions of time, space, motion, thermodynamics, and so on get rather messy and unsettled.

This impovershied description is what I mean to invoke when I used the word, quantum.

Dinner Report

2009-01-06T15:58:00.000-05:00

Vegetable wild rice soup on Saturday, turkey lasagna on Sunday, bella-mushroom pizza on Monday. Topo Chico mineral water, southern-style homemade iced tea, and Miller High Life to drink. Yum yums in my tum tums.

Freud, Football and the Marching Virgins (and William James)

2009-01-05T15:28:00.000-05:00

If the title isn't fun enough on its own, read this wonderfully playful little essay about Freud and football by Thomas Hornsby Ferril. A very interesting thing about it is that it expresses the religious sense in ritual and meaning in a way that is very foreign to the rather clumsy religous sensibility that seems to monopoilize what we mean by "religious".
To book drop again, another person who I am doing lots of work with is William James (1842-1910). And, it just so happens, I am particularly interested in his work in philosophy of mind as it addresses religion, human immortality, and human blindness. The funny thing is, he has no formal religious creed to speak of. Lest he be ignored as some non-denominational hack, his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, is a must read for anyone interested in these things.

An Audacious Review of Book Reviews

2009-01-05T12:51:00.000-05:00

I mentioned Foucault as an interest of mine in an earlier post and I thought I would clarify that endorsement by referring you to two book reviews that I wrote on Foucault 2.0, by Eric Paras.

Foucault has been interpreted, for the most part, as a structuralist, anti-humanist, and fairly obsessed with power. With the recent arrival of Foucault's lectures given at the College de France during his final year when he was not writing, a new interpretation has become available. Namely, that Foucault was really a humanist, that is concerned deeply about the human subject, which is the main point of Foucault 2.0.

If this interests you, you may want to look at my short education-focused review in Education Review or my longer philosophical treatment in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy.

The Crisis of the Sciences

2009-01-05T12:41:00.001-05:00

There can be no question that in popular culture as well as in scientific culture, science has attained a type of normativity, a type of authority that has established itself over and against every other sort of authority, whether religious, philosophical, cultural, etc. This can be seen very clearly in the way in which we always run to scientific objectivity to resolve disputes. Where no such objectivity can be found, it is simply assumed that we have arrived at a position for which there can be no claim to truth. The simple result of this modern cultural phenomenon is this: all truth is nothing more than objectivity and all objectivity is nothing other than scientific objectivity.

I would submit that inasmuch as science always operates upon this assumption, and inasmuch as it must do so in order to maintain the absoluteness of its authority in contemporary discussion and debate, science always proceeds uncritically, and thus naïvely. Scientific naïveté, then, consists in the fact that science has never grounded the assumption that knowledge and truth consist in objectivity. This has only ever been assumed by science. In part, this is because science doesn't need to ground this assumption in order to arrive at its conclusions. That is, in order to have a scientific understanding of the fact that the chemical composition of water is H2O, one need not have previously grounded the assumption that this chemical composition is an objective fact. For scientific knowledge to work here, this can be taken for granted without difficulty. However, to the extent that science no longer self-critically restricts itself to the performance of its own tasks and field of validity, but seeks to become a totalizing theory, an all-encompassing "philosophical" view of the cosmos, actuality, and being, reducing all to objectivity, science and scientific theory proceeds wholly uncritically and without grounding. That is, inasmuch as it seeks to become "philosophical" is requires a philosophical grounding, but one which it is incapable of furnishing.

Herein one will find the crisis of the sciences. The lack of fundamental grounding in the sciences is connected to a lack of understanding in the sciences of problems of epistemology which then have resulting problems in ontology and indirect problems in ethics, philosophy of religion, etc. to the extent that they become subjected to scientific judgment and critique. Fundamentally, what science forgets is that every object is an object only for a subject which perceives and objectifies it. The object, then, is not object in-itself, but is only an object for me who perceives it. Morever, inasmuch as the validity of scientific objectivism depends upon a notion of the object as wholly self-standing, as primordially objective in-itself, scientific objectivism, or any theory which posits truth as objectivity, could only work by taking up a "view from nowhere" wherein the object can be perceived and understood simultaneously from all its sides and throughout the history of its development. This, however, is impossible and ignores the ultimate ineluctibility of the subjectivity of perception, understanding, and ultimately of truth and being itself. There is no going around the subject, and thus, there is no doing away with the subjectivity that must underly and support every objectivity.

The object, then, is only constituted by an act of objectification which makes it possible as object in the first place. This, however, is the never-understood state of affairs out of which science as an institution arises as a cultural construction of humanity. This is not to say, however, that science and the object, as constructions, are "merely" constructed, or voluntaristically constructed. Rather, they do maintain their spheres of validity. However, the sciences must recognize the limits of their horizons of validity. They can never expect to arrive at any unified theory that can be the expression of all that is and has validity as truth. Instead they must be understood as holding sway within spheres that are limited to mere objectivity, an objectivity which they must come to recognize, if they are to rise out of their naïveté, still requires an explanation which the sciences themselves can never furnish. If the sciences can recognize their limits and, in recognizing these limits, if they can further recognize the validity of other horizons of experience, truth, etc. beyond the limits of the physical, substantial object, then the sciences can recognize that they have nothing to say at all, either positively or negatively, about the phenomena of religion, theology, etc. Failing this, the sciences will remain forever in naïveté and will thus, in failing to be self-critical, fail to be fully scientific in the first place.

To Make Ian Feel Better:

2009-01-04T14:29:00.001-05:00

SMILE!

Why no one should feel uncomfortable, I think

2009-01-04T13:54:00.000-05:00

I think we have Adam to blame for launching us into this thread that seems to have jump-started RIMATARA. And, I think we should thank him for that. Ian and I have done our fair share to heat things up, so to speak, and it seems now (at least according to Ian) that this might just turn out to be yet another tiresome "atheist vs. theist" debate. If it were true, it would be something to signal a rather normal -- not to mention boring -- blog has begun and you should ignore it so it can die quickly. Now, you may indeed want to spend your time in better ways than reading this blog since, after all, there are better -- much, much, much better -- things to do, I am sure; but, if these recent exchanges have anything to do with it, I think they might be an indication of good things, not bad ones, to come. Let me explain.

Adam and Ian are not religious atheists. What I mean here is that they are not devotees of a non-god. They are not claiming certainty over their skeptical views about theism. This is a very good thing indeed. Otherwise we could simply dismiss them as adherents of another religion: atheism.

Now, my quibble with them is that they are not totally godless. They seem to represent the modern turn towards a religious devotion to science. There are two clear differences in modern scientific outlooks as I see it. Let me sketch them here briefly.

One, is a Newtonian outlook. This is not to claim any entry into Newton's mind, it is just a place holder. This outlook see the world as "explainable" through what we call scientific inquiry or method. The hard thing to put your finger on, though, is where human inquiry gets "sciencey". Where and why does it become the new religion of modernity rather than the old, outdated ways of looking at the flat, Ptolemaic world? This view of things is still the dominant one, as I see it.

The second view is the Quantum outlook. This one is still suffers from a great deal of assumptions about epistemology (that is, how knowledge gets "sciencey") but it has one great insight -- the world, at its core, is a mystery. This mysterium tremendum of the world opens the door, once again, for a discussion not so unlike the pre-modern one. Only this one has been augmented by the things we can say about the world (e.g. the earth revolves around the sun, thus far it seems to us), albeit carefully and modestly.

I may have some big problems about science with Adam and Ian, however, none of them centers around belief in a higher power or not, it is just a dialogue over the foundations of knowledge, which is a good dialogue to have, I think. So, to restate what I meant to get across earlier, I wonder what we mean by "sense" here (hence the openness to mental "disorder"), I am not denying it completely, I just think that we could be much smarter -- and humbler -- about it.

Lighten the mood, maybe

2009-01-03T13:57:00.000-05:00

It occurs to me that we may have found ourselves in the middle of a God vs. atheism debate far too early on in the run of this blog. It might be a good idea to table that issue for the time being and move on to other topics -- at least for now.

I think it's a good discussion to have, and I'm genuinely interested in the viewpoints of other people -- I certainly don't consider myself to be in possession of the absolute right perspective on this, or anything else. However, I don't want to scare people off right out of the gate.

Madness, Retardation and God

2009-01-02T18:33:00.000-05:00

There is a significant difference between what could be, and what absolutely cannot be.

That is, at first blush, a statement about as profound as "the sky is blue." Perhaps a better statement would be that there is a significant difference between what probably isn't and what absolutely isn't.

Regardless, it's a statement that has always kept me away from being an atheist.

"My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose," is a quote that's been attributed to many but was, as far as I can tell, first said by the British-Indian geneticist J.B.S. Haldane.*

In a world where we've proved that things like black holes and quantum physics exist, the idea of some kind of being, even a transcendant being that defies "sensibility" is something that I cannot discount. It is something that could be, even if the evidence seems to be thus far against it.

Sam noted that my objection to a "transcendant, supernatural being who created the universe in 7 days" as being "fucking retarded" was primarily an objection to fundamentalism. Fair enough. I hold to science and sensibility over fundamentalism because science has proved that many of the beliefs held to strongly by fundamentalists (of every religion) simply cannot be. The sun absolutely does not revolve around the earth. The Earth was absolutely not created in 7, 24-hour days a few thousand years ago (though it's definitely possible to get into a more nuanced discussion about what place a creator could have in the process of evolution and the creation of the universe.)

This, in and of itself, is not an argument against the supernatural. Fundamentalists hold so strongly to these ideas because they've painted themselves into a corner by claiming that their various religious books contain no errors. Therefore, for them, proving that any part of their book is wrong really does defeat their religion.* For those with a more nuanced and mature view of faith, no such problem presents itself.

I still resist what Sam refers to as the "spooky stuff" though, because science and sensibility provides a much more satisfying explanation of my universe. I see no evidence of the spooky that cannot be explained by the mundane.

Humanity is destined to religiosity by a combination of madness and retardation. We developed intelligence that was significant enough that we were able to understand our own mortality, and we were forced (to avoid madness) to come up with a system of belief to defeat the crushing realization of our own impending deaths. Because, at the time, we were not advanced in our development (retarded if you will) we hit on the supernatural.

Again, do I believe that there is absolutely no place or possibility for a supernatural, transcendent being in our universe? No. This is something that could be, or at least has not been proved impossible. At the same time, however, my science and sensibility has slowly and steadily turned things that could be into things that absolutely cannot be.

P.S.

There are two other categories of supernatural that you never seem to defend. Ghosts and other people's gods. My science defeats them too (though I, once again, can't say for sure they don't exist), and yet I see no impassioned defense. Could it be because you have no stake in spectres or Zeus?

* Amusingly, though not relevantly, Haldane has also been quoted as saying that the only thing one could deduce about the mind of God from looking at creation was that the creator had an "inordinate fondness for beetles."
**Though, interestingly, most of those who fight so strongly against the idea of evolution seem to let the whole heliocentric thing slide. Not to mention the flat earth.

Crab Cakes, Stuffed Mushrooms and Mental Retardation (and Lesprosy)

2009-01-02T16:01:00.000-05:00

So, since my primary role here is to tell you what I ate for dinner, I must report the ongoing quest my wife and I have to find the best recipes for crab cakes and stuffed mushrooms while living on a graduate student budget.

To put it briefly, crab cakes are a beast of a thing to make well and portabello mushrooms vastly improve the flavor of a stuffed fungi over an ordinary one. I find that a cold Miller High Life brings out the best in a rich, fried crustacean and a chilly, light and not-too-sweet Riesling offers a great pairing for darker-flavored, baked fungus caps. You can have all this fun for well under $20, total.

On a completely unrelated note, I've been thinking about Adam's amusing introduction that ended in the choice words: "fucking retarded." While this may seem blatantly offensive to some, I think it could stand to be cooked a bit longer.

I mean, the very idea of retardation adding a degree of insanity into what, on its own, is merely profane -- would make a French guy (who has no religious system to speak of) I like to read a lot chuckle. So, to all those who are enticed by this opening line: "At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy dissapeared from the Western world." Or, if you think it might be neat to read a philosophical geneology of madness, then, take a peak at Michel Foucault's, Madness and Civilazation which bears the pithy subtitle, A History of Madness in the Age of Reason.

Besides name (not to mention, book) dropping, I think that Adam's statement more correctly reveals antipathy toward the "fucking retarded" than towards the transcendent. That is to say that Adam (and, perhaps, Ian as well) seems to reject the "spooky stuff" because it makes no sense. This notion of sensibility, however, born by the Enlightenment and incarnate as science, seems to be just as, well, fucking retarded at times too. So he (and perhaps Ian) might want to stop the name-calling and do some name and book dropping of their own.

Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?

2009-01-02T11:02:00.000-05:00

(My deepest apologies to all who, like me when I wrote it, are dismayed by the cheesiness of the cheap play on "Carmen San Diego." I'm sure its been done before, I just haven't had time to Google it yet.)

Really now, where is he? Some say he's hiding in London, Pakistan, Afaganistan, Turkey and others say he's been dead for some time but the mystique keeps up curious. Me? Well, I don't have a single clue on the matter. But, in the snippets of time (and I do mean snippets) I spend thinking about it, I find it hard to disuade the intuition that we, the USA, would have found him by now if we really wanted to.

But alas, I have no juicy conspiracy theory to go with that intuition. Its just a hunch. The reason its so strong, though, is largely because I am slowly learning that when any government, especially the USA, is asked these kinds of questions (like where?, who?, how?, when?, and, that deepest one of all, why?) -- which is the exception to the rule of unquestioned belief in the State, or, at least, what the States tells us about itself -- all kinds of embarrassing things spill out and stain the carpet of naivete with deep red stains of blood, booze, and lipstick.

Cheers!

On Specificity

2009-01-02T09:14:00.000-05:00

This is a test for a certain idea that I am working around in my head recently.

We, that is human persons, never exist with specificity.

We never act with specificity either. We are always doing and being something else too. Our full attention is never given specifically to a thing. All the while, our hearts beat, our heads itch, our muscles flex, our minds wander, and our tummies growl.

Regarding perception, we never see something with specificity, we only see a side of it. To see something specifically we would have to be presented the whole thing. This dimensional proviso provides a limit on what we perceive as this or that and reveals that we only perceive in parts, fragments. Computer imaging tries to overcome this limit by presenting a rotational view of a graphic thing (like a car or a house or something), but, still, we can only see one side at a time. And event then, we are affecting and affected by more than just that thing, otherwise we would see nothing -- the room would be dark and so on.

I think I want to extend this idea to everything -- to the world.

What do you think?

National Hangover Day

2009-01-01T10:36:00.001-05:00

This post is a response to Sam's last reflection (below).

It is indeed interesting to note to correlation between religious observances and bizarrely-calendar-based festivals in modern culture -- such as the coincidence of New Year's and the Catholic Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God -- but I don't think it's accurate to assume that people have grafted binge drinking onto religious feast days.

In fact, something like the opposite is true. Since certain broadcasters have taken it upon themselves to lead the charge against a so-called "war on Christmas" (these people tend to be rather limited in their choice of metaphors), I decided to take some time and look up some of our cherished Christmas traditions to find out how much of the holiday has ever really been devoted to Jesus. As it turns out, there's very little Christ to take out of Christmas -- most of the dearly-held traditions, such as Christmas trees, Advent calendars, and the date of the holiday itself, are culled from either Roman or Germanic pagan rituals that centered variously on one or another war god or the Winter Solstice. Since time immemorial, these celebrations involved orgiastic bouts of drinking and gallantry, which were, presumably, upsetting to church authorities when the emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official Roman religion in A.D. 380. A trend of superimposing religious observances over previously-existing (and probably more entertaining) pagan festivals was established, presumably for reasons that are not too difficult to guess.

While new connotations became associated with the holidays, the "party" element apparently wasn't entirely suppressed. The nativity became the pretext for the December feast day, but it seemed to still include a fairly large amount of public intoxication, which led to religious authorities actually discouraging the celebration in England. Christmas was not routinely observed by the initial colonists in the New World (Puritans are no fun at all). What we now think of as Christmas in America did not really exist at all until after Charles Dickens popularized the rather ecumenical "A Christmas Carol" in 1843. It now involves not only a celebration of the birth of Christ, but also visits from "Saint Nick" (whose feast day is Dec. 6) and the exchange of presents (which is sometimes done on the pretext of commemorating the visit of the gift-bearing Magi -- although the Feast of the Epiphany is observed Jan. 6).

The season happens to be packed with feast days, actually -- as noted above, the Solemnity of Mary is Jan. 1, Dec. 26 is the "Feast of the Holy Innocents," and so on. As a child, I remember being frustrated every year by the rather high frequency of compulsory Mass attendances that my family took me along to, which got in the way of assembling the Lego kits I'd received Christmas morning.

All this to say, that the New Year's eve drinking tradition has deeper roots than just about all the rest of the holiday practices, and the more devout might consider it fortunate that the all-night party has at least been moved to a week after the date set aside to commemorate the birth of Christ. While Sam (party-pooper though he might be) may feel, understandably, that there's too much party in his religious observance, I would put it the other way and say that there's too much religious observance in my party.

N.B.: For years, I've considered Jan. 1 to be "National Hangover Day," since even normally-restrained people are apt to tie it on a little during New Year's celebrations. This year, however, I'm up, clear-headed and blogging, at 10:30 a.m. My plans for the evening fell through, and my fellow-revelers and I couldn't even muster up the joy to finish a bottle of rather good champagne. There's always next year.

Happy New Year?

2009-01-01T09:09:00.000-05:00

I must admit that celebrating New Year's day as a major holiday is quite perplexing to me. I do acknowledge the interestingness of this day as it marks a passing of time and the need to refresh ourselves every so often with days like this, but a day of celebration (or should I say recovery from the its eve) just strikes me as a bit odd.

I was told last night that this makes me weird and party-pooperish. So be it. It might have been better, I think, to make the passing of time more poignant by, perhaps, marking it with the seasons. Like establishing and celebrating the generally accepted end of Winter and beginning of Spring or something like that. Much like Christmas, Easter, and Harvest celebrations are seasonally -- if not purely astrologically -- measured.

As a Catholic, it always irks the heck out of me when Masses celebrating the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God (the feast of January 1st), become "Happy New Years!" ceremonies. When Fr. Nice Guy reads his resolutions, gives the predictable "do your best in 2009!", or offers the more palatable "let's be grateful for 2008" during the homily, I feel like I'm at, well, a New Years celebration. For the intents and purposes -- that, religion aside, suit me much better, at least from a time-division standpoint -- of the Church the (liturgical) year ended and begun right before Advent.

In spite of all that, Happy New Year to all of you. I hope 2009 is a nice time-space thingy for us all.

This Should Get Interesting

2008-12-31T16:30:00.000-05:00

What? No theme, no guidelines, no carefully laid out structure. What sort of mess have we gotten into?

By way of introduction, I confess, I am a friend of Sam's. We met during our M.A. programs and supported each other intellectually as we were forced into classes with non-thinking colleagues. My name is Katie and I fear I will be representing a centrist view here on the blog. Sometimes I'm rather liberal and on other issues I seem like an odd-ball conservative. I defy any socially-constructed labels of any sort.

I look forward to all topics including religion, politics, cultural critique, as well as other areas that we are supposed to avoid in polite conversation or on a first date.

About me: I now work for the online division of a career college. I work for a corporation and a place of higher learning all at the same time. A very odd combination. I'm also Eastern Orthodox and Scandinavian. This means I am the only white person when I go to church. I eat my vegetables and believe in community supported agriculture. I've traveled quite a bit for my (relatively) youngish age; once in a while I get the travel bug, and move.

Can't wait to start the discussions...

The terrible mistake...

2008-12-31T15:29:00.000-05:00

Greetings. My name is Adam, and I'm the newest and most exciting addition to RIMATARA.

While some of my politics and religious views might seem to be superficially similar to Ian's, they are also less burdened by hacky, awful jokes about in-flight service.

Though I appreciate intellect and intellectuals, and pepper my speech with words like "rebarbative" and quotes from people much smarter and deader than myself, I also have points of view and a style of speaking about them that may be a little unfamiliar to some of the more Baby-Jesus-loving contributors here. I hope that won't get in the way of our friendship. That, or my far too frequent use of ellipses.

Let's just get it out of the way, shall we?

I think the idea of a transcendent, supernatural being who created the universe in 7 days is fucking retarded...

What's going on here?

2008-12-31T12:06:00.000-05:00

As you can see on the side bar, RIMATARA is slowly growing into a blog by committee. You might wonder what, exactly, you should expect to go on here. The answer is quite simple: I don't know.

I invited some of my brightest friends who already seem to be writing on their own (some of them have their own personal blogs) to join me here and do as they wish. By the way, there are still a few more on their way (friends that is).

The only suppressed expectation I seem to have, is that the quality and breadth (which I find very impressive) of their abilities will provide more than yet another simplistic regurgitation of the daily news or updates on what one had for supper. Those subjects, of course, will be left to me.

As far as a theme goes, this blog has none. I am sure that from time to time themes will emerge and polemics may arise, but none of it will be predetermined in any formal kind of way. For my tastes, this seems like a recipe for great success or horrible disaster. I am obviously hoping for the former.

Very soon, I would expect that we will stop the introductory mumblings and start writing "real stuff" for you, but, for now, I find the anticipatory, "non-real" fanfare quite fun on its own.

The godless heathen

2008-12-30T16:16:00.000-05:00

*BONG*

Hi there! My name's Ian, and I'll be representing your friendly, neighborhood atheist/materialist point of view on tonight's flight. We'll be taking off in a few moments, but I thought I'd mention a few of the safety features of the RIMATARA blog that are available to you, our passengers, during whatever it is I wind up posting here.

To your immediate left and right, you'll find other points of view (probably including my own, if you look hard enough -- I suppose I'm a bit "out there." Ha! Ha!). These will come in handy if we should chance to encounter any tricky-subject-turbulence after takeoff. Below your seats, you'll find a "comments" section, which can be used as a life preserver in the unlikely event that I'm ever wrong.

There will be no meal service on tonight's flight (the economy has forced certain cutbacks in amenities), but our attendants will be around with a drink and snack service shortly after we reach our cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. Be aware that snacks may contain trace amounts of David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, and Richard Dawkins, and passengers with severe, insurmountable allergies to any of these thinkers are advised to avoid them. As for drinks, we have the choices of water and 12-year-old cask-aged bourbon.

Well, that's about it -- I hope you enjoy your flight, and remember our motto: "Beatings will continue until morale improves."

*BONG*

the girl speaks...

2008-12-30T15:25:00.000-05:00

hi. i'm rachel. sam is a friend i appropriated from my little brother. sam is possibly one of my favorite appropriated friends, mostly because he loves the Baby Jesus, is smart, and puts up with my drivel.

i'll be posting from time to time about what i'm thinking about...from the Random to the Real. i like brussels sprouts, jaques lacan and jean boudrillard and paulo coehlo, ts eliot, chocolate, tex-mex food, the san antonio spurs, liberation theology, the art work of marc chagall, lyrically driven music, literate poetry, the tuna anthology of plays, chasing my three year old nephew across the state and backyard, cold mountain (the book and the movie), jack white's voice, heavy bass lines, going new places to see old friends, string theory, parallell universes, and living in south texas. oh, and i talk on the phone A LOT.

i'm working on my memoirs, which i've organized around odd bits of bathroom graffiti i've run across over the years. i know...totally bizarre. that's my real job. but momma have to make the bacon, so she can keep making mortgage payments on the barbie townhouse and the blue vw bug with the convertible top, so i'm a slave to the Baby Jesus, at an Episcopal church, where i am the lay pastoral care coordinator ( i do hospital visits, home communions, social service referrals, and "other duties as assigned".)...i am never bored, and only rarely suprised.

that's about it...for the moment.

mil besos,
rachel

Why RIMATARA?

2008-12-30T10:50:00.000-05:00

Blog names are scarce these days, not to mention good ones. That being the case, I decided to consult the globe that sits in the corner of my desk and see what she suggested. After looking at a bunch of obscure names in the continental portions of the planet, I decided to head for the open seas. There I found all these neat little specks and knew they must have a blog title in them. So, I settled on Rimatara. The name is still growing on me, but, like all good things (except the exceptions to this shaky rule), it needs to age, I think.

What is RIMATARA?

2008-12-30T10:33:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Wikipedia's erudition:

Rimatara is the westernmost of the Austral Islands in French Polynesia. It has a total surface area of 8.6 km² (3.3 square miles) and a population of 815 inhabitants (as of 2002 census). It is located 550 km (341 miles) south of Tahiti and 150 km (93 miles) west of Rurutu. The commune of Rimatara includes the small and uninhabited Maria Islands.
Rimatara is a circular volcanic plateau surrounded by a reef with a height of 8 to 10 meters (26 to 32 feet). The highest point, at the peak of Mount Uhau, is 83 meters (272 feet). The main villages are Amaru (the capital), Anapoto and Mutuaura.

Rimatara was one of the last Polynesia islands to welcome European visitors. Captain Samuel Pinder Henry discovered the island in 1811. Two missionaries arrived in 1821 and established a Protestant mission. France established a protectorate in 1889 and annexed Rimatara in 1900.

Welcome!

2008-12-29T19:19:00.000-05:00

For better or worse, I have decided to join the blogosphere.

So, here it is. My official blog: RIMATARA.

I will use some of my previous writing from my Facebook notes as filler for when I get busy or don't have anything new to write. But, for the most part, I plan to make this the place for my frequent musings. My writing usually includes social commentary, fiction, poetry, music, reviews, religion, philosophy, and more, so I don't really have a single focus or theme here.

Please pass the word around, if you please. Posting begins tomorrow!

UPDATE: "My" blog only lasted a day (if that). I decided that I am not nearly prolific or interesting enough to keep anyone's daily attention. So, I have recruited some help. Together, we will make this space whatever it turns out to be. I hope its good.