Blog Posts

The "Avengers" Phenomenon and the Endurance of Mythology

5/3/2019

   Over the last weekend, the latest movie in Marvel’s “Avengers” series became the biggest hit in history, with over a billion dollars taken in in a matter of days. To produce this film, a great deal of sophisticated technology was put at the service of a Mythological Tour De Force that makes Homer’s Iliad look like a newsreel - superheroes, super villains, massive liberties taken with space and time, even a few resurrections. Despite our increased knowledge of the blind forces that make our universe work and a steadily decreasing interest in participation in formal religion, the human need for mythology continues unabated. That is unlikely to change.

   The heroes in this film have special powers. They can do things ordinary people can’t. One of them, in case anyone might accidentally miss the point, is actually a God. The heroes use their powers to protect ordinary people and the right of ordinary people to live their own lives and make their own mistakes. The villain also has special powers, which he uses to force his will on ordinary people (in this case the entire universe) because he knows better. This is not a subtle movie. It’s good vs. evil, self-sacrifice vs power, freedom vs. subjugation. The good guys and everyone who follows them does so by choice. The bad guy’s minions follow him blindly, and enjoy inflicting harm on the innocent. Like I said – not subtle.

   Humans aren’t motivated by facts and figures, or even by information. Nobody ever fell in love with a spreadsheet. What gets to us are stories, songs and images that reverberate with our deepest fears, joys and yearnings. The very demographic (20 - 40 year-olds) who aren’t going to the same church their parents did are lining up by the millions to see their CGI-assisted angels and devils slug it out. Despite cynical assertions to the contrary, we need our heroes, now more than ever. If Captain America ran for president, the election would be over tomorrow.

   The upcoming American Presidential election won’t be won by facts, figures and statistics. It will be a battle of competing mythologies. The question is not which side is better for me economically or even which candidate is more “qualified” (an almost meaningless term given the way each new president at this point in history redefines the office). It will be a question of which candidate’s mythology best defines “America” as I see it.

The side with the more compelling mythology will win. The right have their mythological ducks pretty much in order – America First, Rugged Individualism, Old Time Religion, Family Values and whoever makes the money gets to keep it. The left not so much. The raw material is there – Belief in a Global Human Community, a Society that takes care of all its members, religious, racial and sexual inclusion, a fair system of taxation, environmental responsibility, the Statue of Liberty as a welcoming symbol of freedom. There’s a lot to work with, but the crowd running for office are not going to be mistaken for the Avengers any time soon.

Many of the young people who lined up to see this movie are not going to bother to vote. They aren’t voting for the same reason they’re not going to church. A candidate who can move beyond right and left to create a Mythology of a Unified America in a way that says “Yes, this is who we are!” could change that.

   Captain America, where are you?

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Easter - the Line in the Sand

4/21/2019

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Easter is the centerpiece of the Christian faith. Especially in western cultures, it is the line in the sand between belief and unbelief.

Either

Jesus was a good man and wise teacher who was seen as a threat by the political and religious leaders of his time, was executed and died like anyone else, but whose teachings on charity and the value of all human beings, the poor as well as the powerful, went on to transform the world and are responsible for much of what can be considered good in human civilization.

Or

Jesus was the anointed one of God, sent to save us from ourselves, the creator assuming the weaknesses of the created, in an eternal act of love and forgiveness which went on to transform the world and is responsible for much what can be considered good in human civilization, with his resurrection from the dead validating his divine status and the sanctity of his message.

Take your pick. Or as somebody once said “There is no neutral ground”.

Or is there?

It is my belief that the line in the sand between these two positions is not as deep as it appears. I intend to erase it. That will obviously take more time than a blog, but Easter Sunday seemed like a good day to start.

   Just to get started, “Easter” isn’t a word Jesus ever heard. It’s derived from an ancient German word for the goddess of Spring, which transitioned over to an old English name for the same goddess and from that to our own use of the term. As opposed to cheapening the Christian idea in any way, this derivation links the Easter celebration with the celebrations of the arrival of spring that occur in virtually all the original human religions, especially those in the northern hemisphere. The annual reemergence of life after the long, dark winter reverberates naturally with the idea of resurrection. This connection also links Jesus' resurrection with what is sometimes called the “universal drive toward religion in the human species”. This is a concept that has fallen under a lot of fire lately, a fire that’s been fueled by the extremes practiced by current “believers”, but it’s not an idea we can easily do without.

The idea of human transcendence, that we are meant to be more than our biology, is central to our sense of human identity. It’s all that separates us from wolves. Pretending that the survival value of cooperating within the tribe is the actual, real, scientific reason for human morality goes against the evidence both in human history and in the heart and mind of every human who has ever lived. And what does that have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? Everything. The simple, absolutely historical fact is that if anybody in history didn’t stay dead, it was Jesus of Nazareth. His ethnic brother Mohammed acknowledged him and so does most of the world. Mohammed was more successful during his lifetime and his influence has been equally far reaching and long lasting. There are some bad reasons why both of their ideas have lasted – power games on a large scale played by the same kinds of people who crucified Jesus. Finding and embracing the good reasons why these ideas have lasted may be the best shot we have given the divided world we live in. Some form of Secular Christianity/Islam/Humanism may be our only way out of this mess.

   Jesus may save us yet.

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Notre Dame on Fire - Why it Matters

4/16/2019

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It seems as if the whole world took a deep breath yesterday when Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire. It didn’t matter if you weren’t French. It didn’t matter if you’d never actually been to the Cathedral in “real life” (I have – more on that in a moment). It didn’t matter if you were or weren't a believer – in the Catholic Church that built it 850 years ago, in the Virgin Mary for whom it is named, or in any God at all. French or not, believers or not, we all felt something important was being lost, or at least threatened. In an increasingly divided world, I think we need to take a good look at anything that brings us together.

An evangelical atheist might be quick to point out that the building is a living symbol of the union of Church and State that oppressed millions for centuries and that the modern world might be better off without it. The raw fact is that it was built with funds extorted from the sweat of the working people by a Church and Nobility who were glorifying themselves as much as they were honoring Jesus’s mother. This was not lost on the crowds during the French Revolution, who beheaded the Cathedral’s statues of Kings (but spared it’s Pieta). All true. In this case, however, the truth is beside the point.

I visited Notre Dame many years after leaving the Catholic Faith I was raised in. It made no difference. In that looming hall, lit by its gigantic stain glass windows, in all that echoing silence, I knelt. I couldn’t just be a tourist. The question of what I was kneeling to has been placed on the table by fire.

Notre Dame means many things symbolically. First of all – Paris. Paris is more steeped in mythology that any spot in the Western Hemisphere and Notre Dame is central to that mythology. Second perhaps only to the Eifel Tower, Notre Dame is Paris. And Paris is love, romance, illusion – the city of light. To have so massive a light go out would be unthinkable. It would shake our world. It did. Why?

The answer is painfully simple. Human beings don’t live by the sweat of our brows. That’s how we eat. We live by the strength of our symbols. Notre Dame is a symbol not only of Paris, but, perhaps more importantly, of immortality. If it had been built in the 1990’s, the fire would have grabbed the headlines but nobody would have held their breath. This Cathedral has lasted. It has survived wars, neglect and time itself. Adolph Hitler ordered it burned with the city around it and his own general refused, the mythology of beauty being stronger than the mythology of war, even for a warrior.

These days, I’m enjoying a sojourn among the Red Rock mountains of Sedona, Arizona. The fact that Sedona is a center for New Age activities is, I believe, entirely due to its surroundings. Walking a trail among these massive stone monuments, I find myself having the same feelings I did when I knelt in Notre Dame – a sense of humility before the beautiful, the immortal. The fact that the mountains are no more immortal than Notre Dame’s flammable wooden ceiling is, as I mentioned before, beside the point.

To the human observer, both the mountains and the church are, ultimately, works of art. And art is art because of how it speaks to us. The argument about whether the Red Rock Mountains are the work of a chance geological upheaval a few million years ago or the work of a Divine Artist I leave for another discussion. The impact is the same.

Mountains are called “cathedrals in stone”. The reality is that churches are mountains in brick and wood. From the beginnings of human religious thought, the gods came down from the mountains. Art of any sort is our attempt to make our own mountains, our own immortality.

A thousand artists took 300 years to build Notre Dame. The kings and bishops didn’t lift a finger. Beauty that endures says something to all of us. It’s what keeps us going. It’s what keeps us human. We need it now more than ever. Parts of Notre Dame are made of wood. Other parts are made of stone, stone from the mountains of France. The wood is gone as all things go in their cycle. The stone remains. New artists will rebuild the rest.

Long live Notre Dame!

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Notes on Palm Sunday

4/14/2019

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Although I have not been a practicing Catholic for many years the powerful symbolism and messages contained in the stories that fueled my belief still affect me deeply. Although I’m not in church, I know very well what day it is.

In the Christian tradition, Palm Sunday is seen as the first step on the final path of Jesus of Nazareth’s ministry – steps that would lead him to the Temple, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the Cross and finally to Resurrection. The event is reported in all four gospels and is described as the first time in his ministry that Jesus, the itinerant preacher, entered Jerusalem, the center of the Jewish faith. He had initially built up a following in Galilee, his home district, and his influence had steadily grown despite, or perhaps because of, his ongoing criticism of the official religious leadership. His entrance into the city in so public a manner was an overt challenge to that leadership and set in motion all the events that followed. Whether or not any or all of this took place exactly as reported is beside the point. In matters of religion, as with most serious events in human life, the significance of the event is more important than the details.

In Jewish religious tradition, Jesus arriving riding on a donkey was significant in that it invoked the prophecy from the prophet Zechariah, "See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey". The combination of arrogance and humility in this act is worth looking at. Riding in at the head of a procession of cheering supporters was a dramatic statement that “I am important” and a clear challenge to the existing order. The fact that the mount was a beast of labor and servitude, as opposed to a horse, a beast of combat and military authority, sends a message that is central to the Christian Idea: your “King” is one of you.

In the Roman world, a victorious general would enter Rome the head of his army in a horse drawn chariot, in an orchestrated display to the public of the power of the existing order. The irony of this Passover in Jerusalem was that the Jewish people were celebrating their deliverance by God from oppression in a situation that found them once again under the control of an oppressive power, with no Moses in sight. There is little doubt that to many of Jesus’ followers, he was seen as the one who would drive out their most recent political oppressor along with the religious leaders who were cooperating with them. The poor, the vast majority of the population, paid taxes to both Caesar and the Temple. How times have changed.

The twist, or, given its massive historical impact, the “swerve” in the Christian message is that the “King” did not oppose his enemies by force of arms or thunderbolts from heaven, as in all previous mythologies, Jewish or Roman, but by his total and utter humiliation and surrender – not by the sword but by the cross. The only crown he would win was a crown of thorns.

Palm Sunday sets that dynamic in motion. Its implications continue to be celebrated, revered and for the most part misunderstood. On Palm Sunday, Jesus was riding not to a celebration but to his death. The burning of today’s palms to be used as next Ash Wednesday’s ashes acknowledges this. Given the continuing similarities between his world and ours, It’s not a message we can afford to miss.

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America as a “White Christian Culture”

1/21/2019

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One of the major seeming contradictions in the contemporary national meltdown over immigration is the insistence by some that America’s identity as a “White Christian Culture” is being corrupted and threatened by a constant influx of non-white non-believers. Those on the other side of the debate, citing the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth about charity toward all people, sees this position as anything but Christian. The answer to this seeming contradiction is actually very simple if you look at the facts. “American Christianity” has little or nothing to do with the Jewish preacher who faced down a lynch mob two thousand years ago to save a woman caught having sex with a man she wasn’t married to.

          To start with the obvious, Jesus wasn’t white. He was a Semite. He was of the same race as Mohammed, Albert Einstein, Osama Bin Laden and all those Muslims we’re trying to keep out. The only white people Jesus ever met were the Italians who executed him. He never heard a word of English in his life. In fact, anything we would recognize as English didn’t exist during his time. By the time Christianity came to America, in this case the thirteen original British colonies, it was twice removed from its Palestinian origins.

First Remove:

          Christianity started out as a small Jewish sect centered around Judea and Galilee, but very quickly took off as an international religion of the poor, who were, even more than now, the vast majority of mankind. It was the first religion to jump tribal/national boundaries. As Christianity spread through the Greco-Roman world, it took on many of the mythological and philosophic underpinnings of the existing cultures. The most significant of these underpinnings was the idea of Jesus as divine. In the Greco-Roman religious world, demigods were plentiful. In the Jewish religious world such an idea would have been incomprehensible. God was one, an invisible spirit, who could not even be depicted artistically - remember the commandment against “graven images”. The idea that he would impregnate a physical woman would have been blasphemy. The apostle Paul, a Jewish Roman citizen who never actually met Jesus in the flesh, is credited with fusing these two traditions into the “pregnancy by the holy spirit” that became the core of the Christian tradition.

          The destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD effectively put an end to the original Jewish version of Christianity. Alexandria and Rome became the centers of Influence among the numerous Gentile-driven sects that replaced it. In 325 AD or thereabouts, the Roman emperor Constantine, recognizing that the spread of this new religion was a threat to the State/Church union that supported his empire, made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. But in return for that, he insisted that the various local sects organize their divergent regional beliefs into a consistent body of dogma. The resulting Council of Nicea effectively created the Catholic Church, with Rome as its center of influence.

          For the next 1,200 years, the Catholic Church for all practical purposes was Christianity, with the Popes, the vast majority of whom were, unsurprisingly, Italian, exercising a high level of international influence that both supported and competed with the existing secular Governments. The fact that the Church outlasted the Roman Empire might be seen as Jesus’ revenge, but the fact of the matter is that the wealthy and dogma-driven Church that emerged had little in common with a penniless Jewish carpenter executed for stirring up the common people.

Second Remove:

          In 1517, Martin Luther, the real father of American Christianity, wrote his “95 Theses” in Latin, protesting what he saw as abuses in the Catholic Church. The printing press, which had been invented less than 100 years before, allowed his objections, after being translated from Latin to German, to be widely distributed among the newly literate populations of Germany and Austria. The resulting Protestant Reformation was centered in Northern Europe, in opposition to the Italy-based Catholic Church. Luther’s most transformative idea was that the individual rather than the Church was chiefly responsible for his own relationship with God and had the right to both read and interpret the scriptures as he (or she) saw fit. Perhaps Luther’s most important contribution was a translation of the entire Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into German so that everybody could read it.

          Luther’s bible influenced William Tyndale, who lived in Catholic England, to translate the New Testament into English from the Latin version used by Church clerics. His translation was too much influenced by Luther’s ideas for the Catholic Authorities, and he was arrested in Brussels and put to death for heresy. But the damage was done. Henry the Eighth of England was influenced by Tyndale’s earlier writing in his decision to break with the Catholic Church and create the Church of England. Tyndale’s translations became the basis for subsequent English translations culminating with the King James Version in 1611.

          The impact of the fact that these events in the religious sphere were occurring just as America was being opened to European colonization cannot be overstated. The thirteen colonies that became the foundation of the United States of America were populated by English Protestants, with a small Catholic population in Maryland (the non-white, non-Christian indigenous population either fled west or were decimated by smallpox).

          Luther’s principal of the individual’s right to read, think and choose for himself took fertile soil in the White Americas and culminated in a revolution against English rule that swept aside the very concept of a State religion. When the colonists threw out the King of England they also threw out the Church of England. For the next couple of hundred years, America was a white, Protestant country, the Civil War notwithstanding. Other religions were allowed to practice, but certainly not to run things. As recently as the 1960’s, the biggest obstacle to John F Kennedy’s bid for the presidency was that he was a Catholic. The black population, who had been forcibly converted to Protestant Christianity at the time they were imported for slavery, were kept for the most part illiterate, just as the Church had done with its people before the printing press, and were definitely kept out of the centers of influence.

          Since the 1960’s, this “White Christian Culture” has taken some serious hits, with the election of a Catholic President, the insistence on equal civil rights and education for minorities, and culminating with the election of a half white, half black president. Although Barak Obama was a Protestant, the same push back that kept trying to prove he wasn’t an American also kept insisting he was secretly a Muslim.

So Here We Are:

          Those who are trying to cling to a “White Christian” national identity are clinging to a Christianity that the Carpenter of Nazareth could not have imagined, far less endorsed. Those who think that the true American ideal is an acceptance of all races and religions on every level of society also look to statements attributed to Jesus for their moral underpinnings.

          The question of our national identity is one we will have to answer for ourselves. Jesus, who never once in his life heard himself called by that name, has nothing to do with it.

          Anyone wishing to fact check any of the above has only to boot up their Google.

          We’re on our own.

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Heartbreak at the Border - the Tip of the Iceberg

6/23/2018

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The only good thing to come out of this past week’s series of horrific images of refugee children being taken away from their parents and caged by American immigration officials is that it’s shoved the situation in our faces in a way that is impossible to ignore. What may get lost in the moment is that the situation at the Mexican border is the tip of the iceberg – an iceberg that humanity’s ship is steaming for at full speed.

It’s public information, though not being paid much attention to, that immigration from Mexico by Mexican citizens has been on a steady decline, while immigration from refugees from Guatemala and points south who are using Mexico as a conduit to the US is on a steady increase, especially among those attempting illegal entry – slightly more than half at this point. The reasons are also public knowledge – unstable or corrupt governments, civil wars, massive unemployment, mass starvation or near-starvation, total breakdown of fragile infrastructures. People risk sending their children north unaccompanied at the risk of their getting caught, killed or sold into modern slavery for one reason – to give them a fighting chance to survive. At least in their cages, they’re eating.

          Take the situation global - over 200 million people displaced by Middle Eastern and African civil wars, crashed economies and “disrupted food chains” looking for someplace to go. Europe is being flooded. Italy is getting heat from the rest of the E.U. for turning away a shipload of refugees. America isn’t the only bad guy this week - small comfort.

          The real issue, the big picture, like it or not, is that the world is simply getting too small to sustain the human race or, to put it more correctly, we’re getting to big for it to keep feeding us. The developed world, who are using most of the planet’s resources (that would be us) have finally begun to level off their population growth. The rest of the world, especially the poorest, don’t have access to a drug store full of birth control options and couldn’t afford them if they did. They also don’t have access to a lot of things we take for granted, like toilets. If they did, the Ebola virus wouldn’t exist. We’ve got most of the food, they’ve got most of the people. Do the math.

          What the situation at the Texas/Mexico border tells us is simply that there’s no way we can shut this situation out. And if Ebola solves somebody else’s population crisis, they’ll take us with them. There’s no wall high enough. The rest of the world isn’t going to sit there and starve while we check our Facebook pages. The entire human race will make it though this or none of us will.

   Anyone who wants to fact check any of the above is free to use Google. Like I said, nobody’s trying to hide it. The answer isn’t in the stats and never will be. The answer is right in front of us, where it’s always been - in the part of the human soul that looks at a refugee child crying and sees their own son or daughter.

          We’ve got a lot of work to do.

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The Price of Survival

6/12/2018

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I have been away from this blog page for quite a while. Life has proved a major distraction from writing about it. But things have settled down, and I have recently begun work on what will hopefully turn into my second book. The working title is: “Cease Fire: the Common Ground between Faith and Science that May Still Save the Human Race” – somewhat pretentious, but unfortunately necessary. If we can’t get these two sides talking to each other, we’ll be finished as a species in the fairly near future. Whether you look at that prospect as a scientific probability or a biblical prophecy, it’s definitely on the table and has to be dealt with - or else. Tragic events of the past week have been just a bit too on target with my subject matter not to evoke a response.

          In a world where the most private of events quickly become public events, the back to back suicides of two people who by every standard of our world had it made does not so much raise the question “What makes life worth living?” as slam it in our faces.

          Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain had each achieved financial success in their chosen fields, had family, friends and a measure of fame and admiration from people they had never met and were making a living doing things they had actively chosen to do. Neither was in the middle of a messy divorce or secretly in bad health. The fact that each chose the same method may suggest that the first event inspired the second, at least in terms of timing, but that is something we will never know. What we do know is that as good as either of their lives may have looked to the rest of us, they wanted out.

          One of two things will happen now. Exhaustive research will go into trying to find out what unseen “demons” are responsible so the rest of us can rest easy or, as is more likely, we’ll move on to the next news cycle and try to forget about it as a “bad week”. We shouldn’t let that happen. There’s a lot at stake here. In the United States, where life is still better than in most of the rest of the world, twice as many people kill themselves every year as kill other people. The fact that many of the recent rash of multiple homicides are also suicides only reinforces the point. And then we have all the Opioid-related deaths, which could be called at the very least “accidental suicide”, and which, in addition to physical addiction, also point to a major lack in motivation to survive. Let’s look at that.

          The will to survive has been hammered into us as the prime mover for all life, ours included. What if it’s not?

          The reason that the religious mind-set has had such an attraction for and such a strong hold on the human species from our first emergence from the general herd is that we are different from the rest of the herd – biologically, not so much, but in everything that makes us human – our thoughts, aspirations and capabilities – we’re a whole new ball game. We’re the only life form of all the millions joining us in using up this planet’s resources who want more than this earth has to offer. What’s important to us is not what we can see, hear, touch and taste. That’s just the raw material, the “earth, formless and empty”, that the God of Genesis started out with (religious reference entirely intentional). There’s a lot of stuff out there, always has been, always will be - but we give it form - in the only place that matters - between our ears.

          We do it obviously when we take the rocks and mud out of the ground and build the Empire State Building. We do it less obviously when we pause to appreciate a beautiful sunset. The sunset has no idea it’s a sunset. The billions of forces of energy, temperature, moisture and gravity that worked together to give us a beautiful picture are operating blind. We’re the only ones who appreciate this work of art. And it’s only a work of art because we appreciate it. The religious mind attributes it all to a divine artist, an artist who makes it for us to appreciate. And thinking of the whole thing as God’s will makes it easier to take if it’s pouring rain tomorrow night. At least somebody’s in charge, somebody who cares about us.

The people I work with on a day to day basis, in two senior buildings in Philadelphia, are people who life hasn’t handed any favors. Those who don’t have chronic disabilities have worked their whole lives for peanuts and are surviving on meager social security checks and food stamps. All are old, many are ill. For some, just getting out of bed is an exercise in pain that would have an Olympic athlete begging for mercy. Many have lost children. Nobody’s rich, nobody’s famous. Yet they endure. And for most, what keeps them going, what gets them out of bed every morning, is their religious faith. They spell it out, with full sincerity – “God is good”. They appreciate every breath they take. Don’t get me wrong. Jesus isn’t getting them out of bed in the morning – their faith is.

          So what does this have to do with two famous people deciding not to see any more sunsets? Everything.

          Deciding that life isn’t enough, that all the wealth, fame, love and good food in the world isn’t ever going to fill the empty space inside is not a problem for the mentally ill, for the chemically unbalanced, for the people whose parents didn’t give them enough love, for the unlucky or the too lucky – it’s a problem for all of us. It’s the human condition. Anybody who isn’t bothered by it isn’t looking. Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain were obviously looking.

          Those of us still in the fight need to know what we’re up against. The same intellect and capacity for living symbolically that make it possible for us to mass produce designer handbags and fly to Paris for Beef Bourguignon opens the door to our realization that the world will never go along with our image of it. It can’t. It’s not its fault. It’s ours. We can do without religion, but we can’t do without belief.

   Belief is what makes life worth living.

   It’s also the price of survival, payable in cash, one day at a time.

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The Thing About "Years"

12/31/2016

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Everybody can’t wait for 2016 to be over. It’s been a bad year for iconic celebrities, people who represent a particular era for those who shared it with then – David Bowie, George Martin, Carrie Fischer, Debbie Reynolds, Glen Frey, Muhammad Ali, Patty Duke - dozens more. We never met these people really, but we identify with them. They represent us, both as a generation and individually. And if death can get them, famous as they are, we all feel a bit more vulnerable. So a lot of us are thinking that if we can somehow sweat it out until this “dangerous” year is over we’ll all be somehow safer. That may be a comforting thought, but, unfortunately, it has very little going for it.

Death doesn’t know what a year is. The remorseless process of decline, decay and recycling the left over material has been going on for billions of years all over the universe (which is itself expanding towards inevitable burnout). The process seems unlikely to stop when the ball drops.

What’s a year anyway? The approximate time it takes a single small planet to orbit its star. That was figured out by some very clever people a long time ago, and they used the information to help organize their time -but the rest of the universe could care less. Pluto takes 248 of our years to orbit the same sun we do and there could be planets out there that take a million to orbit theirs. So why does it matter? It matters because it matters to us. It’s our earth, our sun, our lives. This is where we live and this is how we manage it.

We are more than our biology. The body-soul split that many formal religions have espoused over the years isn’t supported by the physical evidence, but it still gives a pretty good picture of how we actually live our lives. Our sense of identity isn’t located in our hands, legs or kidneys. It’s in a symbolic “heart” that has little or nothing to do with the organ in our chests that keeps the blood pumping. We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

And a year is a year because that’s how we experience it. There are inexplicable trends in the way things go. Some years are better than others, for individuals, for a country, for a sports team, for the human race. We can analyze it all afterwards to try to explain why, what forces are involved, but that’s just to make ourselves feel better. There’s more going on here than we get or are likely to. If organizing it by years helps get us through the night, especially New Year’s Eve, so be it.

Hopefully next year will be a little kinder to us all.

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The Presidential Election – All About Belief

11/15/2016

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             If hindsight can tell us anything about the “surprise” election of Donald Trump, it can tell us this – don’t mess with human belief. Belief isn’t about facts and figures, it isn’t about conclusions reached after careful deliberation - it’s not even about observable reality. It’s about what works for us.

          Our deepest held beliefs, the things we feel most - who we fall in love with, our sense of right and wrong, which sports teams we root for – are for the most part unexplainable. Something out there hits us and a part of us responds “that’s me”. And that sense, once acquired, is hard to shake. Religious belief is obviously so, especially for people whose sense of reality from birth has been molded by it, but it applies to other beliefs as well. It takes a lot of bad behavior on your loved one’s part to make you stop loving them. If you’ve never been a thief it requires a pretty high level of desperation for you to grab someone else’s money and run. Your team can lose all season and you’ll be back in the stands next year convinced that “this year we’ll do it”.

          What happened in the election was that Donald Trump was able to inspire belief in his followers and Hillary Clinton wasn’t. It’s as simple as that. Trumps’ message, hammered home over and over again, was straightforward an uncomplicated: “Your political leaders have sold you out to foreigners – your jobs, your neighborhoods, your security. Elect me and we’ll take our country back.” The “foreigner” definition got spread pretty wide, taking in religious and ethnic “others” of all sorts - in short, anybody who’s not us. Almost exactly a quarter of the country locked into that message the minute they heard it. All the confusion, frustration and anxiety of the past two decades, especially the world since 9/11, was explained and solved in a single sentence: “They did this to our country and it’s up to us to fix it.” Once that moment of connection was made, additional information was neither welcome nor relevant. It didn’t matter that none of the experts (the ultimate others) thought that Trump’s simplistic solutions (“a fifteen minute meeting in the oval office”) would work, or how many women he groped. He was the man with the message and the message transcended the man.

          Poor Hilary was obviously more “qualified”. But to the true believers, this just made her one of them. The true believers wanted a “non-politician” for the most important political job on earth and Hillary Clinton was the living embodiment of everything they despised. And, worse, while she was able to inspire confidence in her supporters, she was not able to inspire belief. Her message wasn’t simple. She honestly faced the world for the complicated mess it is. The true believers didn’t want to hear it. And even her own supporters were followers not believers. She didn’t have the armor and shield of the message bearer to protect her from the non-stop attacks the other side kept throwing at her. It’s the same problem secularists have with fundamentalists. The fundamentalist’s message is simpler and stronger. When the battle lines are drawn, open mindedness loses out to someone with God on their side. In the end, confidence wasn’t enough. Belief was. It always is.

          Half the country didn’t vote. You can bet that the believers did, every one of them. That silent half, whether they meant to or not, have validated Trump’s message – that the American people have lost Faith (capital F) in their political system. He was right about that. Unfortunately being right about that doesn’t mean he knows what to do with the presidency now that he’s got it.

          What we do about it now will require more faith then we’ve ever had.

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Dylan Won the Nobel Prize – But Does He Actually Exist and Does It Matter?

10/13/2016

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I had two interesting things happen today. The first was getting the news, the minute I turned on my computer, that Bob Dylan, a guy who dropped out of college so he could go hit the open mics in Greenwhich Village, had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since the first thing I did after I dropped out of the Catholic Seminary (though I did hang around to graduate), inspired by this same Bob Dylan, was to go hit the open mics in Greenwich Village, I was of course interested.

       The second thing happened a few hours later while I was waiting for the bus. A couple of Watchtower ladies were sitting at the bus stop next to a rack of little magazines, one of which bore the intriguing title “Did Jesus Really Exist?”. I took a copy, thanking the ladies for contributing to my chances of salvation (I need all the help I can get) and paged through the magazine while I waited for the bus. It turned out to be the usual attempts to document the actual flesh and blood existence of “Historical Jesus” from various sources, some more reliable sounding than others. I was still reading when the bus arrived, and that’s when the two interesting events smacked into each other and the question hit me: Does Bob Dylan really exist?

          Dylan has some advantages over Jesus in this regard. We know for a documented fact that Robert Zimmerman was born on May 24th, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. He’s been photographed and recorded to an almost ridiculous extent. On top of that, he’s still alive and breathing. I’ve even seen him myself on several occasions, once from about ten feet away (after some serious pushing). But that’s not what we’re really talking about here. Robert Zimmerman clearly exists. But in many ways Bob Dylan, the fictional character he created in Greenwich Village some twenty years after his biological arrival, is as hard to pin down as Jesus.

          To get down to basics, nobody knows for sure when Jesus was born and the Bethlehem story has come under some fire lately. That being said, his birth is the turning point of our entire time measurement system. It’s 2016 because people decided to start measuring time from when they thought he was born. And let’s not even talk about Christmas. If evidence suddenly emerged that Jesus of Nazareth, Mary of Galilee’s flesh and blood baby boy, was actually born on September 22nd, there’d be a major financial meltdown – Macy’s would be out of business. My point is that the biological facts don’t really matter. What matters, and why there are still magazines about Jesus at a Philadelphia Bus Stop two thousand plus years later, is that, whenever and wherever he was actually born, his ideas are still inspiring people. The same thing goes for Dylan. If it came out that Robert Zimmerman was actually born on May 23rd and somebody made a typo on the birth certificate, it wouldn’t change a damn thing.

          One of my favorite early Dylan Songs is one called “Long Time Gone”. In it he tells the story of how he ran away from home young and traveled around the country singing songs and working in carnivals. It’s a great song. There’s not a word of historical truth in it, but it’s still a great song – Bobby Zimmerman creating the fictional character Bob Dylan who just won the Nobel Prize, and whose work is still inspiring people. You could say the same thing about the Gospels, and somebody needs to.

          The Sermon on the Mount didn’t happen on a mount. I’ve seen it. It’s a great big hill and nobody standing on top of could have been heard by anybody more than ten feet away. Bob Dylan had actual microphones at those open mics - Jesus didn’t. The word that the poor would inherit the earth and that we were all responsible for each other was delivered to small groups on street corners and in houses with dirt floors. Those words inspired the people around him and turned the world upside down long after he was dead. The same thing goes for Dylan (and will keep going long after Robert Zimmerman passes on). There was a biological Jesus of Nazareth. You don’t get this much smoke without some kind of fire. And there is a biological Robert Zimmerman. But it’s what they inspire in other people that matters, not the raw facts.

          Jesus exists and, fortunately for us all, so does Bob Dylan.

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The "Avengers" Phenomenon and the Endurance of Mythology

Easter - the Line in the Sand

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America as a “White Christian Culture”

Heartbreak at the Border - the Tip of the Iceberg

The Price of Survival

The Thing About "Years"

The Presidential Election – All About Belief

Dylan Won the Nobel Prize – But Does He Actually Exist and Does It Matter?

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