Bill's Notes

So the Methodist Church* sells out the gospel in the name of inclusiveness. Hey, go figure. The Methodists already sold out the unborn. Can't expect a firm line on too much after that. But the gospel according to the Methodists is apparently some are more included than others.

Anyway, what's funny to me is the good reverend's name: Karen Dammann. With a little punctuation and clean-up of the spelling, her name is an ironic sentence: Karen, damn man!

This is the kind of stuff you'd never get away with in fiction because it would be too obvious.

* I was baptized and confirmed in the Methodist Church ... so I'm not just picking on the denomination.

Sad news in Dallas. A gorilla was shot to death after escaping from its enclosure. The story is here.

The gorilla injured three people slightly with bites and scratches. Then he charged two zoo officers, who shot him to death like they shot Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway at the end of Bonnie & Clyde. If the gorilla had meant harm, there would've been a stream of bodies. But it was frightened and proceeded to act exactly as a gorilla would when frightened, with displays of dominance.

Didn't anyone have a dart gun? Granted, it would've taken more than a few darts, but there aren't many gorillas left, and shooting one should've been avoided at all costs.

In case you haven't guessed, I really like gorillas. They're the best of the animal kingdom.

UPDATE: It was a Western Lowland Gorilla, common to Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon. Info here.

Reasoning by analogy only works if the analogy is not ridiculous. Dings and chips off the drywall of the soul, requiring spiritual spackle ... stop me before I continue this analogy.

What exactly is jazz? Got to thinking about art in the 20th Century this morning. Concluded jazz becomes central in this way. Jazz was a form of musical modernism, that is, jazz is musical cubism. John Coltrane — now if you think you're cool you should genuflect now because Coltrane was very very cool and a Philly boy besides — John Coltrane once covered, "My Favorite Things." Yeah, the queer song Julie Andrews did in The Sound of Music. By the way I don't think jazz is all that cool. It's good, but I think it's one of those things that most people think if they have any chance at cool they have to like jazz, when in fact they don't like jazz as much as they think. And then there's the folks who come to that realization that I just wrote about in the previous sentence and decide they're even cooler for realizing they like jazz and like cool but they're so cool now because they realize they're not afraid to admit now they don't like jazz as much as others think they should.

So I'm thinking about Coltrane's version and how it barely saved the song and how Coltrane is so cool that if he knew Julie Andrews was going to do the song he still would've done it because her anti-cool is still no match for his invincible cool ... do you hear what I'm saying, he's saying his cool can move mountains, even those in Switzerland. And since it's morning I'm also thinking I better shave before I get to work so I won't look like a bear. Once I went in that way and some folks threw a picnic basket at me and ran out the back door. Bunch of chicken sandwiches and some Cokes. Yum. Anyway, Coltrane's my favorite things is kind of plodding at first. Really friggin' earnest version of the melody the first time through. Then he does the cubism thing with it — one piece at a time is turned and twisted, and his sax part starts to go above, below, around and anything but the melody, all while sort of doing the melody. That is, it was jazz. And I liked it but I changed the station before it was through. Yeah, I shaved before I went to work but my razor was dull. Ouch. Didn't cut myself but ouch.

Anyway, so did Picasso listen to jazz and apply it to painting and call it cubism? Or did Picasso influence black musicians in the American South, and they musicified the perspective shifts? Or was it one of those convergence things, where both things happened at the same time? I don't know. I don't know the history of jazz. I just don't know. I'm just a small man, except when I eat.

But it seems regardless of who started what, that jazz is central because postmodern writers were deeply influenced by jazz. Kerouac and the Beats — all that comes out of WWII veterans, still too keyed up from the booms and splurts and exhilaration of not dying after being shot at to settle into middle class life — going into the jazz clubs in the cities and listening to a new kind of music to them and talking all night in laundromats. That was the beats, you see. The Beats embraced the music, rooted in cubism, but they reinterpreted it in their own way. And then postmodernism in a way came along on a parallel track.

Naahhhh. This is bullshit. This entry has gone off the rails. The Beats were their own movement. Hippies and their New Agey/Leftist successors were not the heirs of the Beats. Some went that way, yes. But mostly the Beats just died off. They were no longer necessary. They embraced black culture but reinterpreted that ... and jazz was part of that.

Oh hell. Never mind. I don't know what I'm getting at.

I used to just sit down and write, back when I thought I was going to be an artist. Can't seem to access that anymore. God used to love me before i got all crazy, and then my Aunt Mary took off for Brazil with my passport and $20,000 from my bank account leaving me high and dry for 40 weeks while I worked my ass off in the casinos. Had to cut the pockets out of 20 men a day and damn it, what's that noise. SHUDDUP OVER THERE. In South Philly a chick named Jessica used to do too much speed and her boyfriend kicked her out. She came to me and I told her to f--- off.

Yeah, like that. That stuff used to just flow out. I always meant to write my version of Robert Coover's The Babysitter. Tell the story and then just warp the technique. Shatter the point of view. Screw with the metaphors. Blow up the characterization. While telling something like Little Red Riding Hood. Except you know Donald Barthelme did that with Snow White. So that left me where?

My novel, well, I can't tell you about my novel. It's kind of a sad story about a young man whose knees are cut out from under him just as he's beginning his life. It's a coming of age story except a giant hammer comes down from the sky and goes WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! on all the important thing in his life ... and he's left going, "What the hell was that?"

Except he's still young and he lives near the beach and so he sits on the beach at sunset and the seabreezes make him feel good and he's got a buzz on and thinks it's gonna turn out all right somehow or it won't but won't that be so really tragic in a very cool kind of way, but you know we the reader know neither of those options are gonna happen. He's gonna end up selling out, cheap, because he's not foolish enough to persist in his own folly (thanks Blake) and not smart enough to make a bundle and hell he's just so shallow that you know and I know that he's not going to die young and he's not going to set the world on fire, either, and he's going to just forget and forget what he used to want. One day he's gonna look in the mirror and not ever remember the hammer from the sky going WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! on the drywall of his soul.

Hey, I did it. I got back there. Whew!

Have a good day, everyone.

On the essay two posts down, one important note is that I'm only arguing about rational perceptions. I'm talking about what we'd expect based on our knowledge of the physical world and how that contradicts, on first impression, what Christianity teaches.

The below essay is the one that twice suffered untimely demise at the hands of Windows98. But this time it made it. No superstitious comments please — the system failure most likely had to do with the application stepping all over the operating system's memory addresses. Or something like that.

Anyway, I'm a bit relieved that I will not have to write that response a fourth time. (Yes, I would've. I can get stubborn that way.)

As part of our ongoing discussion on mysticism and the role of reason in coming to faith, Chris over at Work in Progress writes:

It is true that it is absurd that God became a poor Jewish carpenter, dwelt amongst us, and then was killed by us. Please write a post explaining how the existence of existence is not absurd.

That is, without taking the man next door for granted, explain why God becoming a Jewish carpenter is any more absurd than there being a man next door, or a door to separate you two. That is, explain how God becoming a man is any *more* absurd than everything else without recourse to arbitrarily defining everything else as normal but
[incarnation] as absurd. Or, more simply, say clearly what you mean by 'absurd'.

Because if you mean nothing more than "not predicted by experience", it's obviously a philosophically worthless term, since it's not even of great practical value (unless you particularly enjoy getting burned in the stock market or blown up by terrorists in the world trade center).

We'll just use a handy dictionary definition, with an emphasis on the bolded section.

absurd
\Ab*surd"\, a. [L. absurdus harsh-sounding; ab + (prob) a derivative fr. a root svar to sound; not connected with surd: cf. F. absurde. See Syringe.] Contrary to reason or propriety; obviously and fiatly opposed to manifest truth; inconsistent with the plain dictates of common sense; logically contradictory; nonsensical; ridiculous; as, an absurd person, an absurd opinion; an absurd dream.
This proffer is absurd and reasonless. --Shak.
'This phrase absurd to call a villain great. --Pope. --p. 9
Syn: Foolish; irrational; ridiculous; preposterous; inconsistent; incongruous.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

Categories of Speculation
The challenge seems to be to describe why existence itself is no less absurd than God appearing as a Jewish carpenter. I could probably argue that we're really not dealing with the same kinds of categories here — one comparing being and nothingness and thus a rather abstraction and metaphysical set of thinking, and the other is more concrete and can be based on things we can see, hear, feel and touch, that is, the physical world.

It is not arbitrary to choose to make logical inferences in one arena and keep them in that arena. The incarnation occurred in the physical world. It's a physical world question. We can make predictions based on experience in that physical world, and the claims of Christianity flatly contradict those predictions. The stock market and the terrorist attacks are based on social and individual behavior. But we're not talking about behavior; we're talking biology.

Arguing from Induction
Jesus allegedly was born of a virgin — that is absurd (contradicting our known experience) on its face. Human babies cannot be born of virgins (without some sort of test tube support). There have been about 10 billion humans in all of human history. If we were to construct an inductive logical argument, we would have 10 billion cases that claim one thing, and one thing that claims the other. I would argue reason is clearly on the side of the 10 billion. Now, logically, the side of the one may be correct — but I would argue that the dictates of common sense would place the burden of proof on the side arguing the one.

A similar argument can be used against the resurrection. About four billion humans have died so far, plus lots of animals. Every one that has died and not resuscitated fairly quickly is still dead, and will always be dead. An inductive argument in this case would include about 600 trillion beings, except for the one. The argument of the one has the burden of proof because it is manifestly clear that this contradicts all we know about death.

Arguing from Proportionality
A second argument concerning the absurdity of the idea of Christian incarnation relates to the relative sizes of God and man. (Unlike in the linked essay, I'm actually discussing size here.) This is an aesthetic argument. the Holy Trinity is inelegantly formulated based on what we know now about physics, and contradicts our experience of what we know.

If scientists using the Hubble telescope have informed us that there are a trillion galaxies, each containing 100 billion stars, we have a serious proportionality problem between God the Father and God the Son in the Holy Trinity. God the Father (and God the Holy Spirit) can be expected to be big enough to encompass the entire universe, no matter how big. God the son is a little smaller than I am.

This may seem a ridiculous argument but after all we're discussing absurdity, but suppose we made a pizza out of three ingredients: cheese, crust and pepperoni. Assume the crust is God the Father, the Cheese is the Holy Spirit. If God the Son contains His normal human dimensions relative in the universe to the other two persons of the Holy Trinity, how much pepperoni is on the pizza? And, considering we're talking perhaps a molecule of pepperoni, could we in any sense call that a pepperoni pizza?

Does that answer the question?
I'm not sure. I think it does. This is one of those open-ended discussions. It'll be interesting to see how it ends up.

So how do we get to Jesus?
Grace. Faith is a gift granted to us by God. We know from our experience of the physical world that we have an intuitive knowledge of how the world works that is wrong. Rationally, there is always a window of possibility ... but this is so about all the world's religions and even the one's that don't exist.

Reason, Scripture, Tradition ... all these things are tools but you still have to have some kind of experience rooted in Grace. You cannot trust experience along, or tradition alone, or scripture alone, or reason alone. But they work together, tuning one, then another, much as you'd tune an old TV vertically, then horizontally, then you'd need to make sure the frequency was correct, and then of course the electricity was on.

So how do you come to Jesus?

You pray to God for the gift of faith. That's first. Then, you come to realize that the path to God is not a bright shining Walt Disney monorail to a gift-dispensing God in a very nice hotel, but a narrow, often lonely pathway that leads first to awareness of sin, then to the grace of forgiveness, then to the desert, and then to the feeding of the 5,000, and then to the Cross, and then to the grave, and then to resurrection in Christ.

And as you go along that path you realize more and more the necessity of coming to God that way, but far more important, of God coming to man that way.

St. Patrick:

Drove all the snakes out of Ireland. Used a three-leaf clover to demonstrate the concept of the Holy Trinity. Brought the Holy Gospel to heathen celts struggling in darkness. Led to the establishment of God's holy church on the Emerald Isle.

And what do we do in his honor every March 17?

Do we drive snakes? Teach the Trinity? Convert the heathen? Establish churches?

Of course not. That's for the rest of the year. Today, we remember the accomplishment of St. Patrick and missionaries everywhere, and celebrate them. (And it breaks up Lent pretty nicely, too.)

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone.

Last night, I wrote an essay answering a question that Chris posed to me. It's part of our ongoing discussion of the role of reason and mysticism in faith. I finished the essay, and then took a couple of quick run-throughs to hone it a bit. The screen froze. Had to restart. Lost everything.

This morning, I got up early and re-wrote the essay. Entirely. Again, I was finished. And again, just as I was about to publish, the screen froze. I lose everything. Again.

Then after a few choice words, I went outside to go to work. And it's snowing.

Not an auspicious start to the day ... the world needs to start today over. Did anyone save yesterday? Let's just revert to saved.

One issue where some folks go off the beam concerns family values. Families are great — if you've got a good family. But families can also be prisonhouses of ignorance, pettiness, narrow-mindedness and even spiritual evil.

Jesus Christ Himself said He came to set a father against son, son against father, a man against his parents ... he told a man to "let the dead bury the dead" when the man hesitated to follow him. God knew that families can be a straightjacket, and that fathers and mothers can be tyrants, brothers and sisters can take out their frustrations on each other.

So, yes, middle class life in the United States can be a source of happiness; realistically, it's the best chance of happiness many of us have in this world. Yet, middle class life in and of itself doesn't mean all that much. And it's hard work getting to the middle class, and hard work staying in the middle class. And for what? Two gross of broken statues? A few thousand battered books?

This is an interesting post about liberals' need to get tough. Here's the intro:

Let the word go forth: The age of the wimpy liberal is over.
by Paul Waldman, Editor-in-Chief
3.15.04
All across America, progressives are riled up. They saw George W. Bush lose the 2000 election yet manage, through the intercession of a friendly Supreme Court, to take control of the executive branch. They watched as he rolled over seemingly impotent Democrats again and again. Their patriotism was questioned when they raised objections to a war of dubious justification. On nearly every national issue, from abortion to economic policy to health care to environmental protection, their agenda enjoys majority support among the public, yet all three branches of government, not to mention a majority of governorships and state legislatures, are controlled by conservatives.

Let's set aside the 900-odd erroneous suppositions embedded in that paragraph and just address the key issue: Some liberals have decided to get tough.

Good. It would be a good thing not to deal with a bunch of nancies for once, and deal once again with the party of Scoop Jackson and Harry Truman.

Suggestions for reducing your nancy-quotient:

Find some honor. Figure out that your rights are inalienable, and thus come from your creator, not your mother. Stop whining about Florida. Don't use the term "civil rights" or "equal protection" when talking about gender-free marriage. Limit yourself to one evil euphemism per argument. Don't be too quick to attribute evil motivations to your opponents and good motivations to yourself. Decide the merits of an argument based on the merits of the argument, not on speaker's race, sex, class, sexual orientation, Vietnam-era status or previous history of depression. And remember that irony, not class struggle, is the underlying theme of human history.

That should get you started.

Beautiful morning. Back to work for most of us. Hope your Sunday night depression wasn't too bad, and the week goes well.

If you're one of those college students that periodically drop by (half the Big Ten is represented so far), enjoy sleeping in and having breakfast at noon. The rest of us would like to change places with you -- but only for a week.