Starting out by saying that Bill Maher is a comedian who isn't funny, a thinker who doesn't think and a liberal who is no liberal is only the honest thing to do. He is a copy cat, as well, stealing his unfunny schtick from the late stuff from the late George Carlin who was no funnier as a scolding anti-religious bigot than Maher is, today. To repeat a point I've made before. I don't like the man, I don't like his form of entertainment and I don't like the milieu in which he is positioned, the mid-brow, anti-religious, scientistic, atheist, up-to-date, ever morphing with fashion, pop culture base that richly rewards talentless hacks to tell their niche audience that they are superior beings. TV, if you will. His is exactly the same message as the one you'll see on FOX "news" only the audience is different so a few of the words are.
This is in response to this article in Salon, Bill Maher’s atheist values: Why progressives must defend enlightenment, critique religious extremism.
He is right, of course, that there are huge problems of violence, killing, misogyny and intolerant bigotry to be found among Muslims. You show me any definable group comprising more than a billion and a half people which doesn't have the same or similar problems and I'll insist you prove their unlikely existence.
Since Maher's shtick is hatin' on religion using the pose of Western, scientific enlightenment, I'll point out that you can identify the same or equivalent problems to be found among European and North American countries which fall within that quite artificial category.
The modern age in Europe and North America includes many genocides, including that encouraged and waged against the indigenous population of North America, dehumanized by no less a hero of that enlightenment, the also slave holding, slave raping Thomas Jefferson in that emblematic document of the enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence.
There is a very easily documentable case which could be made that the secular, scientific enlightenment has a higher kill count than just about any other identifiable movement in the cultural history of human beings. I would point out that its use of science is intrinsic to its effectiveness in producing violent effects and that other intellectual identities have science available to them, as well, which makes them more scary than we are used to thinking of ourselves - among the most accomplished killers in history. Europe and the United States combined have killed more Muslims than Muslims have killed people in those places. We being "enlightend" doesn't make those killings OK.
It's certainly true if you include those more than merely aggressively secular governments -also claimants to the mantle of scientific enlightenment and modernity - which have been officially atheist. If atheists want to use such practices to attack Islam or religion in general, it's entirely fair to make atheists and atheism answerable for the sexual slavery, slave camps, wholesale terror and murder that those governments still practice. I'm all in favor of holding all ideologies and framing up against the full range of their results, not allowing anyone to grant themselves and their ideas indulgences, declaring large parts of those out of discussion or beside the point.
An honest look at the groovy, happening now culture of his fan base, that of his fellow entertainers such as Penn Jillette and the atheist-skeptical movement that he is identified with will show pretty much the same things, only expressed differently, if, at times, one of degree. But the massive topic of sexism within organized atheism, something which I think is an inevitable result of viewing people as material objects, is an issue in itself*. I'll leave it at whether or he would publicly call for the banning and outlawing of the use of underage or intellectually disabled people in the porn blogs that comprise such a horrifyingly large percentage of Tumblr blogs. If he called for the regulation of Tumblr for compliance with existing laws against using children in porn, he would be afraid that his fan base would leave him. I dare him to address it on his show.
It is plainly dishonest for Maher to claim that "liberals" ignore issues such as female genital mutilation practiced in some Islamic countries. The first times I heard that condemned, even as I was learning of such a thing, it was liberal, "second-wave" feminists who raised the issue. It wasn't part of the current anti-Islam fad that Maher is a part of and it wasn't a part of a campaign against religion, in general. That atheists want to claim they own the issue is easily seen to be false, as it is with so many other issues that people like Maher claim. And you can say the same thing about most of what he says. As has been much discussed recently and documented from the beginning of movement atheism, it shares in and, likely, concentrates the sexism that is commonly found in any subset of human beings. As I noted earlier this week, you can even find it among those who claim to be feminists.
But what exactly does Maher want people in The United States and "the west" to do about issues such as female genital mutilation, the killing of apostates, etc. in Islam majority countries? I mean, what does he propose we do that will actually end the abuses and fix the damage in those countries where we do not live and where we do not comprise a majority, as opposed to striking a pose about that on American TV to get him into the news and the online buzz feed? What does he want us to do that will produce the desired results instead of creating a backlash even before anything in the lives of women, LGBT folk and religious apostates improves? Something that will have to be far deeper than merely changing laws but changing the culture of hundreds of millions of people living in those countries who are as set in their ways as any other socieites and people are? Does anyone with a mind that can observe reality really believe that what Maher says about it to his audience is going to end the practice or even cause governments to outlaw it? Not to mention the fact that banning the practice will probably be about as ineffective as outlawing abortion of pot smoking has been here.
Any improvement in the lives of women in those countries is dependent on what the people living there, women and men, think and do. It isn't something that can be imposed on them by the audience of a hack comedian on American TV or even the American government. Of course the sciency, enlightened man knows they can do that because that has worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan within relatively recent history, hasn't it. I don't like that we are effectively powerless to do that but that is a fact. And the only thing we have which will have any possible effect on that is good-willed persuasion that they consider changing things. In that an atheist asshole like Maher is probably the worst possible person to stick his two-bits in. I would say, considering the position of women in the entertainment industry he works in and champions, porn-prostitution included, you couldn't find a worse advocate for the rights of women and others than someone like Maher.
* I'd like to ask Maher where he finds support for the existence of the rights he claims to champion within atheism. I can tell him where they're found in the monotheistic religions he hates so much but there is nothing I can see in atheism that leads anywhere except an ultimate denial of their real reality. If he knows of one, I'm all ears.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Friday, October 10, 2014
Unequal Time for An Opposing POV: Debussy - Beau soir Mary Garden
Well after her prime when Debussy, himself, chose her to sing Mélisande, singing Beau Soir but still sung with astonishing artistry.
When the rivers are rosy in the setting sun,
And a warm shiver runs over the wheat fields,
Advice to be happy seems to rise up from things
And climb toward the troubled heart.
Advice to taste the charm of being in the world
While one is young and the evening is beautiful,
For we are going away, as this stream goes away:
The stream to the sea, we to the grave.
Paul Bourget
And with the, for us mere drudges, discouraging information that Debussy was 15 or 16 when he wrote that immortal masterwork, I can't think of a more beautiful song to disagree with, ultimately. NTodd, I'm looking at you.
Score
My Great Ambition The Revolt of the Land Grant Graduates
My most infamous blog brawling opponent didn't start in on me over religion or politics, not even free speech absolutism or, most vitally important of all, my dissing the mopheads and Mick and his old stones. No, the issue that provided the definitive break was when I dissed the Ivy League and its products who mount their campaign against The People, The World and democracy from the leadership of politics, the judiciary, the media and the military-industrial-banking complex. I dissed Harvard quite early one morning. And the funny thing is, the guy isn't even an Ivy league product but one of the many sycophantic lesser beings who attended a non-prestige private college.
Since then I've gotten into the habit of looking up the educational history of some of the most repugnant people in public life and, indeed, a stunning number of them have passed through those institutions for training the ruling elite class of pirates and crooks, especially the most prominent of those, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton.... and the equivalent of The University of Chicago and those who did a stint in those Brit places, the one in the other Cambridge and Oxford. I'll insert here the observation made by some British author, whose name escapes me this morning, that Oxford boys never grow up.
Well, I do rather despise those places that so few seem to get through without being determined to become career criminals. They've got a lot more in common with juvie than they'ed ever like to hear, only, they being elite and massively expensive institutions, the crimes of its grad are proportionately worse. If, as Balzac famously said, behind every great fortune there is a crime, the Ivies are where they learn how to commit those crimes, get away with it and turn the crimes they commit into financial, economic and political doctrine and where they elevate them into legal principle.
So, what is my great ambition? I would like to foment a rebellion of the graduates of public schools, the great American land grant universities and smaller colleges whose ambition was the education of a democratic nation, of social mobility and which are inevitably under attack from the product of the stinking rich private schools. The attitude is, beyond doubt, that a real education comes from the private system and that public schools are for stupid people. As my online opponent put it at the time of our split, "You want a community college graduate as president?" If I had to choose among George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Lyndon Johnsons as opposed to, say, Bill Clinton or George H.W. or W. Bush or, indeed, Barack Obama, their credentials gained from big name colleges or lack of those wouldn't be the deciding factor but there is no doubt who were the better presidents. I have no doubt, at all, that there are thousands of graduates of community college who would have done far better than George W. Bush, graduate of both Yale and Harvard as well one of the most elite prep schools in the country. I think you'd have to be stupid to not realize that is the case.
So, my fellow graduates of public schools, let's dump them. It's time to break the prep-ivy stranglehold on American democracy. It's not as if we couldn't find those among us who couldn't do better than they have. I'd say, considering the serial idiocies of Ivy Leagueers with power, we can do a lot better, it's unlikely we could do worse. When both the Republicans and Democrats parrot the con job lines they cook up in those joints and we inevitably lose to their college buddies, the chances we will do worse is almost certainly lower.
There are many times more of us than there are of them. The first step is to make it a rule never, ever to vote for a president who has never spent any time attending a public school as a student.
There are many times more of us than there are of them. The first step is to make it a rule never, ever to vote for a president who has never spent any time attending a public school as a student.
And those enormous endowments that grow so obscenely fat that a gilded age trust baron would drool in envy - so massive that someone like a Larry Summers can blow enormous pools of money from one without a serious impact on it - TAX THEM AT A HIGH RATE TO SUPPORT PUBLIC EDUCATION. I'd give a good part of it to places like Roxbury Community College, a quick ride from Harvard and almost as much of a contrast as you can find in any third world capital where the obscenely rich lead obscenely corrupt and opulent lives as the middle class is ground up and the poor languish in hopeless conditions. That's what the Ivy Leaguers are clearly bent on doing to the United States. Look at the all Ivy League Supreme Court for all the evidence you will ever need of that.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Why Affluent Atheists Slam Religious Charity
On the radio program, On Being, last month, the host, Krista Tippett had this exchange with Richard Rodriguez:
MR. RODRIGUEZ: Well, the deepest, I mean, the most radical Catholic spirituality I know of, is Spanish. And it’s a mystical tradition of the dark night of the soul.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
MR. RODRIGUEZ: Um, we often, you know, I end this book with Mother Teresa, who was, um, hounded by Christopher Hitchens, our great American atheist going from cable channel to cable channel to tell us God was dead. Um, at a time in which — I live part of the year in London. And I assure you, God is not dead in London. Muslims are plentiful, as are Hindus. Uh, but nonetheless, Mother Teresa, after her death, these letters, uh, to confessors and bishops were revealed. For 40 years of her life, Mother Teresa describes her life as a darkness. And there she is, more and more famous in the world, uh, mocked by Christopher Hitchens in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. I mean, In Vanity Fair magazine, Christopher Hitchens tells us that Mother Teresa is ugly.
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
MR. RODRIGUEZ: And I think to myself, what is that? What is he playing on in America that you can say about a pious old woman who is bathing the dying in Calcutta. What is that?
Adding information to the issue of the members of the scribbling elite's utter pigishness when writing about related activities of religious folk is this piece by Brian Palmer on Slate magazine. At this point in the developing Ebola catastrophe, Mr. Palmer, a magazine scribbler who obviously believes he is a member of the scientific enlightenment, an atheist, of course, pauses to snipe and Hitchens (to make a verb of it) over the fact that many, if not most, of the Westerners who were on the ground attempting to provide medical care to those in West Africa who can't access the most advanced available for-pay medicine, are, and there is no delicate way to put this horrific fact, religiously motivated to do what they are doing.
I say that he pauses to condemn these faith heads who are dying of the very disease they are treating, which many of them realized they were at risk of even before these living Fr. Damians realized they were confronting this dreadful disease. But as being roused to notice something on the news out of West Africa and casually following it in order to find a hook to scribble on, Brian Palmer's activity has been, it was very minor level pausing. He shares that with so much of the western educated class, those who elevate science into an actual religion. He begins the piece, this way.
I recently sat in on a course for infectious disease specialists in Austria. Around 40 young doctors and academics were discussing infection control in hospitals and communities in the developing world, and the talk inevitably turned to Ebola. Controlling the spread of the disease continues to challenge the medical world, but there is consensus on one issue. “MSF is the only group on the ground,” said one doctor, using the French acronym for Doctors Without Borders. “They are the only ones making any difference.” The congregation nodded in agreement.
The statement was probably intended as a jibe at the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it slighted another group by omission: missionaries. Missionary doctors and nurses are stationed throughout Africa, in rural outposts and urban slums. Rather than parachuting in during crises, like some international medicine specialists, a large number of them have undertaken long-term commitments to address the health problems of poor Africans.
And yet, for secular Americans—or religious Americans who prefer their medicine to be focused more on science than faith—it may be difficult to shake a bit of discomfort with the situation. Our historic ambivalence toward missionary medicine has crystallized into suspicion over the past several decades. It’s great that these people are doing God’s work, but do they have to talk about Him so much?
So much arrogance, not to mention predictable arrogance, so little time to address it. I will summarize what he says, Yeah, me and a bunch of my fellow sciency types hanging in Austria are going to use this threatening pandemic to say that all those faith heads who were there, on the ground years before this should just STFU about what they think about religion and keep washing wounds and delivering babies with little to no resources because..... well, what's there you don't get about the word "SECULAR!", you stupid faith heads?
One of the things that came to me is that they seem to believe that all of the people who work at Doctors Without Borders are atheists or at least Palmer's kind of non-religious people, an idea whose truth I'd seriously wonder at. I did have an online atheist claim to me that DWB was an "atheist organization" a couple of months ago. I looked at their online sites in English and French and could find not the first thing that would support that contention. Perhaps Brian Palmer is merely tapping into a commonly held superstition of American atheists. I've noticed lots of atheists try to claim organizations which aren't explicitly religious, even those who were begun by and led by quite religious people.
Palmer keeps asking in his article why he doesn't like that so many of those who are putting their lives at risk to try to provide treatment for those ill with and at risk for Ebola are missionaries motivated by religion, an odd question to keep asking because he keeps betraying his motives, hatred of religion and, surprise, especially Christianity - through the piece, even as he presents reasons to not have those motives. There are some pretty bizarre things in his article, for example.
There are a few legitimate reasons to question the missionary model, starting with the troubling lack of data in missionary medicine. When I write about medical issues, I usually spend hours scouring PubMed, a research publications database from the National Institutes of Health, for data to support my story. You can’t do that with missionary work, because few organizations produce the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed data that is required in the age of evidence-based medicine. A few years ago in the Lancet, Samuel Loewenberg wrote that there is “no way to calculate the number of missionaries currently operating in Tanzania,” the country he was reporting on. How can we know if they’re effective, or how to improve the health care systems they participate in, if we don’t even know how many missionary doctors there are?
Apparently it's the fault of religious medical missionaries to not spend enormous amounts of their often nonexistent resources on record keeping and reporting to the very bureaucrats from governments and para-national organizations who have not provided adequate resources to medical care in a secular context. I, on the other hand, suspect that if they did spend the money and person-hours on documenting what they did, Palmer would dismiss it as self-serving and unreliable propaganda and demand the "objective" oversight which is not going to happen. He would speculate on religious motives polluting the purity of data.
The ebola disaster provides western atheists with just another opportunity to take shots at one of the most popular and admirable features of some, though not all religions, active and real and risky generosity, even unto the death of the provider. Such atheists are compelled to make such jerks of themselves, in this their ideological war against religion confront one of its greatest hurdles. In this activity we see religion at its most admirable and desirable. It's pretty hard to argue with that aspect of religion, going up against the most real of all real facts, they are knowingly willing to risk their lives for the benefit of people they don't even know BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE GOD WANTS THEM TO. Perhaps, finding ourselves in the tightest of pinches, we might rise to the occasion but none of us seems to have done so in the unimmediate and rather abstract, in which medical missionaries decide to do what they do. Their planning and training to put themselves at risk for others can take a long time, even years of sustained and dedicated planning. And as they plan and, even more so as they begin to confront the often horrific reality their vocation addresses, they continue. Becoming a medical missionary clearly takes more advanced planning and personal sacrifice than going to a confab in Austria so you can write about it on an online mag does.
The casual atheist creepiness that has become a common feature of English language magazine journalism is entirely out of hand. On this issue it was clearly the late and swineish Christopher Hitchens who led the way with his star turn attacks on Mother Teresa, but it is more generally a sign that the most unattractive attributes of our eutrophic, decadent, so-called educated class have become a habit of thought. That kind of thing comes with material affluence all too often. Unsurprisingly, servicing materialism leads to different results from trying to follow the gospel and The Law.
You would think that by the time he reached his last paragraphs that Palmer would have realized he should have scrapped the piece which is not only riddled with self-contradictions but which consists of them.
Like it or not, though, we are deeply reliant on missionary doctors and nurses. The 2008 ARHAP report found that in some sub-Saharan African countries 30 percent of health care facilities are run by religious entities. That system is crumbling due to declining funding, possibly motivated in part by growing Western suspicion of missionary medicine. We have a choice: Swallow our objections and support these facilities, spend vast sums of money to build up Africa’s secular health care capacity immediately, or watch the continent drown in Ebola, HIV, and countless other disease outbreaks.
As an atheist, I try to make choices based on evidence and reason. So until we’re finally ready to invest heavily in secular medicine for Africa, I suggest we stand aside and let God do His work.
Well, as history shows what he begins with is not likely to start happening BECAUSE OF THE BASIS ON WHICH THOSE DECISIONS IN SECULAR INSTITUTIONS ARE MADE NOT LEADING THERE, while the work of medical missionaries has a history longer than either modern science, the nation state or secular, international organizations. The motivating force of religion, sorry Palmer, IS THE REASON THAT THOSE MISSIONARIES DO WHAT THEY DO. For someone who claims to believe in the methods of science to demand that what causes lead to those effects is a forbidden topic of discussion is ridiculous. There is no real reason for them to shut up about the very cause of the entirely admirable effect which their religious belief brings about. And why should any rational person believe they should be coerced to shut up?
Those who serve Mammon produce the results they do, people who try to serve the will of God do what they do. There is a real difference between the two, It is as real a difference as anything science can demonstrate. That atheists don't find that fact serves their ideology is evidence that there is something lacking in their ideology. Atheism lacks what brings about self-sacrificing generosity even as religious missionaries often lack the resources to do more good than they can. It is a failure of secular institutions that can raise and distribute those resources, not the religious motives of those who are actually trying to do it, even when the western media aren't looking.
MR. RODRIGUEZ: Well, the deepest, I mean, the most radical Catholic spirituality I know of, is Spanish. And it’s a mystical tradition of the dark night of the soul.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
MR. RODRIGUEZ: Um, we often, you know, I end this book with Mother Teresa, who was, um, hounded by Christopher Hitchens, our great American atheist going from cable channel to cable channel to tell us God was dead. Um, at a time in which — I live part of the year in London. And I assure you, God is not dead in London. Muslims are plentiful, as are Hindus. Uh, but nonetheless, Mother Teresa, after her death, these letters, uh, to confessors and bishops were revealed. For 40 years of her life, Mother Teresa describes her life as a darkness. And there she is, more and more famous in the world, uh, mocked by Christopher Hitchens in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. I mean, In Vanity Fair magazine, Christopher Hitchens tells us that Mother Teresa is ugly.
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
MR. RODRIGUEZ: And I think to myself, what is that? What is he playing on in America that you can say about a pious old woman who is bathing the dying in Calcutta. What is that?
Adding information to the issue of the members of the scribbling elite's utter pigishness when writing about related activities of religious folk is this piece by Brian Palmer on Slate magazine. At this point in the developing Ebola catastrophe, Mr. Palmer, a magazine scribbler who obviously believes he is a member of the scientific enlightenment, an atheist, of course, pauses to snipe and Hitchens (to make a verb of it) over the fact that many, if not most, of the Westerners who were on the ground attempting to provide medical care to those in West Africa who can't access the most advanced available for-pay medicine, are, and there is no delicate way to put this horrific fact, religiously motivated to do what they are doing.
I say that he pauses to condemn these faith heads who are dying of the very disease they are treating, which many of them realized they were at risk of even before these living Fr. Damians realized they were confronting this dreadful disease. But as being roused to notice something on the news out of West Africa and casually following it in order to find a hook to scribble on, Brian Palmer's activity has been, it was very minor level pausing. He shares that with so much of the western educated class, those who elevate science into an actual religion. He begins the piece, this way.
I recently sat in on a course for infectious disease specialists in Austria. Around 40 young doctors and academics were discussing infection control in hospitals and communities in the developing world, and the talk inevitably turned to Ebola. Controlling the spread of the disease continues to challenge the medical world, but there is consensus on one issue. “MSF is the only group on the ground,” said one doctor, using the French acronym for Doctors Without Borders. “They are the only ones making any difference.” The congregation nodded in agreement.
The statement was probably intended as a jibe at the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it slighted another group by omission: missionaries. Missionary doctors and nurses are stationed throughout Africa, in rural outposts and urban slums. Rather than parachuting in during crises, like some international medicine specialists, a large number of them have undertaken long-term commitments to address the health problems of poor Africans.
And yet, for secular Americans—or religious Americans who prefer their medicine to be focused more on science than faith—it may be difficult to shake a bit of discomfort with the situation. Our historic ambivalence toward missionary medicine has crystallized into suspicion over the past several decades. It’s great that these people are doing God’s work, but do they have to talk about Him so much?
So much arrogance, not to mention predictable arrogance, so little time to address it. I will summarize what he says, Yeah, me and a bunch of my fellow sciency types hanging in Austria are going to use this threatening pandemic to say that all those faith heads who were there, on the ground years before this should just STFU about what they think about religion and keep washing wounds and delivering babies with little to no resources because..... well, what's there you don't get about the word "SECULAR!", you stupid faith heads?
One of the things that came to me is that they seem to believe that all of the people who work at Doctors Without Borders are atheists or at least Palmer's kind of non-religious people, an idea whose truth I'd seriously wonder at. I did have an online atheist claim to me that DWB was an "atheist organization" a couple of months ago. I looked at their online sites in English and French and could find not the first thing that would support that contention. Perhaps Brian Palmer is merely tapping into a commonly held superstition of American atheists. I've noticed lots of atheists try to claim organizations which aren't explicitly religious, even those who were begun by and led by quite religious people.
Palmer keeps asking in his article why he doesn't like that so many of those who are putting their lives at risk to try to provide treatment for those ill with and at risk for Ebola are missionaries motivated by religion, an odd question to keep asking because he keeps betraying his motives, hatred of religion and, surprise, especially Christianity - through the piece, even as he presents reasons to not have those motives. There are some pretty bizarre things in his article, for example.
There are a few legitimate reasons to question the missionary model, starting with the troubling lack of data in missionary medicine. When I write about medical issues, I usually spend hours scouring PubMed, a research publications database from the National Institutes of Health, for data to support my story. You can’t do that with missionary work, because few organizations produce the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed data that is required in the age of evidence-based medicine. A few years ago in the Lancet, Samuel Loewenberg wrote that there is “no way to calculate the number of missionaries currently operating in Tanzania,” the country he was reporting on. How can we know if they’re effective, or how to improve the health care systems they participate in, if we don’t even know how many missionary doctors there are?
Apparently it's the fault of religious medical missionaries to not spend enormous amounts of their often nonexistent resources on record keeping and reporting to the very bureaucrats from governments and para-national organizations who have not provided adequate resources to medical care in a secular context. I, on the other hand, suspect that if they did spend the money and person-hours on documenting what they did, Palmer would dismiss it as self-serving and unreliable propaganda and demand the "objective" oversight which is not going to happen. He would speculate on religious motives polluting the purity of data.
The ebola disaster provides western atheists with just another opportunity to take shots at one of the most popular and admirable features of some, though not all religions, active and real and risky generosity, even unto the death of the provider. Such atheists are compelled to make such jerks of themselves, in this their ideological war against religion confront one of its greatest hurdles. In this activity we see religion at its most admirable and desirable. It's pretty hard to argue with that aspect of religion, going up against the most real of all real facts, they are knowingly willing to risk their lives for the benefit of people they don't even know BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE GOD WANTS THEM TO. Perhaps, finding ourselves in the tightest of pinches, we might rise to the occasion but none of us seems to have done so in the unimmediate and rather abstract, in which medical missionaries decide to do what they do. Their planning and training to put themselves at risk for others can take a long time, even years of sustained and dedicated planning. And as they plan and, even more so as they begin to confront the often horrific reality their vocation addresses, they continue. Becoming a medical missionary clearly takes more advanced planning and personal sacrifice than going to a confab in Austria so you can write about it on an online mag does.
The casual atheist creepiness that has become a common feature of English language magazine journalism is entirely out of hand. On this issue it was clearly the late and swineish Christopher Hitchens who led the way with his star turn attacks on Mother Teresa, but it is more generally a sign that the most unattractive attributes of our eutrophic, decadent, so-called educated class have become a habit of thought. That kind of thing comes with material affluence all too often. Unsurprisingly, servicing materialism leads to different results from trying to follow the gospel and The Law.
You would think that by the time he reached his last paragraphs that Palmer would have realized he should have scrapped the piece which is not only riddled with self-contradictions but which consists of them.
Like it or not, though, we are deeply reliant on missionary doctors and nurses. The 2008 ARHAP report found that in some sub-Saharan African countries 30 percent of health care facilities are run by religious entities. That system is crumbling due to declining funding, possibly motivated in part by growing Western suspicion of missionary medicine. We have a choice: Swallow our objections and support these facilities, spend vast sums of money to build up Africa’s secular health care capacity immediately, or watch the continent drown in Ebola, HIV, and countless other disease outbreaks.
As an atheist, I try to make choices based on evidence and reason. So until we’re finally ready to invest heavily in secular medicine for Africa, I suggest we stand aside and let God do His work.
Well, as history shows what he begins with is not likely to start happening BECAUSE OF THE BASIS ON WHICH THOSE DECISIONS IN SECULAR INSTITUTIONS ARE MADE NOT LEADING THERE, while the work of medical missionaries has a history longer than either modern science, the nation state or secular, international organizations. The motivating force of religion, sorry Palmer, IS THE REASON THAT THOSE MISSIONARIES DO WHAT THEY DO. For someone who claims to believe in the methods of science to demand that what causes lead to those effects is a forbidden topic of discussion is ridiculous. There is no real reason for them to shut up about the very cause of the entirely admirable effect which their religious belief brings about. And why should any rational person believe they should be coerced to shut up?
Those who serve Mammon produce the results they do, people who try to serve the will of God do what they do. There is a real difference between the two, It is as real a difference as anything science can demonstrate. That atheists don't find that fact serves their ideology is evidence that there is something lacking in their ideology. Atheism lacks what brings about self-sacrificing generosity even as religious missionaries often lack the resources to do more good than they can. It is a failure of secular institutions that can raise and distribute those resources, not the religious motives of those who are actually trying to do it, even when the western media aren't looking.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Color As Vehicle of Enlightenment:
For some reason, listening to this piece by the greatly under noticed American composer Miriam Gideon, BÖMISCHER KRYSTALL,
made me think of the greatly under noticed American painter, Hyman Bloom. Bloom underwent a profound mystical experience of color* and seems to have come up with a universalism that seems to be more Jewish than Christian, though, along with synagogue chandeliers, Bloom also painted a series of Christmas trees as a result. I wonder if it's possible for universalism to be categorized that way.
I'm not sure about the chronology and if another of his great subjects, cadavers being dissected, is from the period after his enlightenment, it would certainly be interesting if they were all a result from it.
I don't know why the piece reminds me of Bloom, I don't think it was the word "Krystall" so much as the intense, flashing colors against dark that Gideon managed to get from the "Pierrot" ensemble. The piece is a result of a project to set the poems in the collection that Schoenberg chose not to set in his famous Pierrot Lunaire cycle.
* One night in the fall of nineteen thirty-nine, Bloom was alone in his studio and felt transported by a cosmic sense of color. “I had a conviction of immortality, of being part of something permanent and ever changing, of metamorphosis as the nature of being.”
I Get E-Mail
Uh, no. If I ever need a really, really easy post all I have to do is say "mop heads" or diss John Lennon or Mick Jagger. That I haven't done that is proof that I was not looking for an easy post today. My eyes are too bugged out to look for anything.
Sometimes It's the Simple Points
From the United Church of Christ website
Edith Lee • a day ago
“In the beginning was THE WORD and THE WORD was with GOD, and THE WORD was GOD…” and THE WORD of GOD says “…but for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD GOD caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was
sleeping, HE took one of the man’s ribs [took part of the man’s side] and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD GOD made a woman from the rib [part] HE had taken out of the man, and HE brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” [John 1: 1 (NIV); Genesis 2: 20-24 (NIV)]
“Haven’t you read,” HE replied, “that at the beginning the CREATOR ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what GOD has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6, NIV)
“If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.”
(Augustine of Hippo)
Anthony_McCarthy • a day ago
I believe that God made me in such a way that I need another man. Perhaps it's simply the case that "Adam" was made heterosexual (understandable if he was to be the father of all people) but I wasn't.
Edith Lee • a day ago
“In the beginning was THE WORD and THE WORD was with GOD, and THE WORD was GOD…” and THE WORD of GOD says “…but for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD GOD caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was
sleeping, HE took one of the man’s ribs [took part of the man’s side] and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD GOD made a woman from the rib [part] HE had taken out of the man, and HE brought her to the man. The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” [John 1: 1 (NIV); Genesis 2: 20-24 (NIV)]
“Haven’t you read,” HE replied, “that at the beginning the CREATOR ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what GOD has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6, NIV)
“If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.”
(Augustine of Hippo)
Anthony_McCarthy • a day ago
I believe that God made me in such a way that I need another man. Perhaps it's simply the case that "Adam" was made heterosexual (understandable if he was to be the father of all people) but I wasn't.
Very Ill
When I'm sick I sometimes get around to watching various dvds that friends send me. I've got a Canadian friend who thinks I don't get enough Canadian culture - as compared to most Staters? I ask him. He has sent me various self-recorded Canadian TV series. I've watched all of the wonderful Republic of Doyle from them, except the last season which hasn't aired yet. I love to hear a Newfoundland accent and the local dialect of what might be English. I've also watched the good but far more mixed Cracked, which I was sad to read had been canceled due to government cutbacks at the CBC. I really like the actors, especially the lead David Sutcliffe, one of those guys who is so good looking it makes me wish I were a decade and a half younger and Canadian. And I'm watching the very dry humor of Corner Gas, a half hour sit-com that takes part mostly in the gas station-store and associated lunch place in Dog River Saskatchewan. Say whatever you will, I have never seen another series set in a small town in Saskatchewan. I like it. Really, Canada isn't the United States, at least I hope it isn't yet, though the Harper government seems to be doing its best to make it so.
One of the things I learned from it is in the opening song which begins "You can tell me that your dog ran away. And then you tell me that it took three days. I've heard every joke...." Well, it took me a lot more than three times hearing that to understand the joke, having lived my entire life in hills and woods where the flattest place I've ever seen is the farm belt in south-central Maine. Even there a dog could run away in a quarter of an hour, here, about two minutes. I didn't get it until they made a joke about the vistas of sameness that apparently the prairie can look like. Oh, now I get the joke, I said to my dog. But that will get me on terrier humor and that's really an acquired taste.
It's funnier after you've taken a couple of Benadryl. No, he's not the kind of Canadian who records every hockey game and rewatches them like a brain dead, superannuated hipster watches old Seinfeld recordings.
One of the things I learned from it is in the opening song which begins "You can tell me that your dog ran away. And then you tell me that it took three days. I've heard every joke...." Well, it took me a lot more than three times hearing that to understand the joke, having lived my entire life in hills and woods where the flattest place I've ever seen is the farm belt in south-central Maine. Even there a dog could run away in a quarter of an hour, here, about two minutes. I didn't get it until they made a joke about the vistas of sameness that apparently the prairie can look like. Oh, now I get the joke, I said to my dog. But that will get me on terrier humor and that's really an acquired taste.
It's funnier after you've taken a couple of Benadryl. No, he's not the kind of Canadian who records every hockey game and rewatches them like a brain dead, superannuated hipster watches old Seinfeld recordings.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Your Provocative Idea for Tuesday: Camille Paglia Is A Male Chauvinist Sow
In her great short essay, I Am The Cosmos, Molly Ivins got what should have been the last word on Camille Paglia, the allegedly thinking man's Judy Tenuta, going on a quarter of a century ago. But the arc of the actual cosmos, being long even as it bends towards justice, Molly Ivins is the late Molly Ivins even as Camille Paglia spews ever more of the bilge that should have gotten her universally ignored instead of in the second page headlines.
One of her latest attention getting statements, the entire substance of her, uh, thought, was to the effect that men are hard wired to be rapists, that changing that is impossible and efforts to prevent rape on college campuses* is done by puritanical sticks in the mud who aren't groovy and who are not cool and who are emasculated by emaculating second wave feminists and.... Well, I am putting words in her mouth but as I've come to consider Paglia as sort of the intellectual bastard child of the late Timothy Leary at his most fragmented and Professor Irwin Corey at his most brilliant, it's easy to imagine what kind of thing might come out of her. Not any possible substance, just the texture of it. The Paglia product isn't discursive, or coherent, it's not patterned, it's splatter painting in words and seemingly randomly chosen phrases and cultural references. You could empty a card catalog on the floor and randomly arrange randomly chosen texts on those and come up with the equivalent.
With Paglia, we don't have purpose of substance but we do have motive of form and content. The first and foremost purpose of her entire career before the public is to get attention for her and her stuff published and, more importantly, her on camera and in front of a mic. Getting into ink is all there is to it. The way to do that, even in 2014, is to appeal to the college educated, ignorant, affluent, white, straight, men who determine who gets what she wants. And, so, we get her telling men that they should just get in touch with their inner rapist and women that they should groove on it. It is the one thing that I've come to conclude about her and, more generally the pathetic shambles that backlash "feminism"** is that it is a capitulation to the men who run the publishing and media industries and the advertising industry.
Yeah, I know this is a bit on the disjointed and attenuated side, even for me. I've got Benadryl intoxication as an excuse. What's hers?
* Like so many a second and third rate piece of lit and, so much of what the dolts who work on college campuses concern themselves with is campus life, hardly a reliable representative sample of humanity.
** It's a lie to call what she and the "third wave" "feminists" call "feminism," It is to feminism what democracy is in a "Peoples Democratic Republic," the name used to cover a lie. It was produced, first and foremost, by women who wrote for men in porn and other parts of the publishing industry that sponsored the backlash against feminism so they could continue to use women as objects.
One of her latest attention getting statements, the entire substance of her, uh, thought, was to the effect that men are hard wired to be rapists, that changing that is impossible and efforts to prevent rape on college campuses* is done by puritanical sticks in the mud who aren't groovy and who are not cool and who are emasculated by emaculating second wave feminists and.... Well, I am putting words in her mouth but as I've come to consider Paglia as sort of the intellectual bastard child of the late Timothy Leary at his most fragmented and Professor Irwin Corey at his most brilliant, it's easy to imagine what kind of thing might come out of her. Not any possible substance, just the texture of it. The Paglia product isn't discursive, or coherent, it's not patterned, it's splatter painting in words and seemingly randomly chosen phrases and cultural references. You could empty a card catalog on the floor and randomly arrange randomly chosen texts on those and come up with the equivalent.
With Paglia, we don't have purpose of substance but we do have motive of form and content. The first and foremost purpose of her entire career before the public is to get attention for her and her stuff published and, more importantly, her on camera and in front of a mic. Getting into ink is all there is to it. The way to do that, even in 2014, is to appeal to the college educated, ignorant, affluent, white, straight, men who determine who gets what she wants. And, so, we get her telling men that they should just get in touch with their inner rapist and women that they should groove on it. It is the one thing that I've come to conclude about her and, more generally the pathetic shambles that backlash "feminism"** is that it is a capitulation to the men who run the publishing and media industries and the advertising industry.
Yeah, I know this is a bit on the disjointed and attenuated side, even for me. I've got Benadryl intoxication as an excuse. What's hers?
* Like so many a second and third rate piece of lit and, so much of what the dolts who work on college campuses concern themselves with is campus life, hardly a reliable representative sample of humanity.
** It's a lie to call what she and the "third wave" "feminists" call "feminism," It is to feminism what democracy is in a "Peoples Democratic Republic," the name used to cover a lie. It was produced, first and foremost, by women who wrote for men in porn and other parts of the publishing industry that sponsored the backlash against feminism so they could continue to use women as objects.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Im Herbst - In Autumn Brahms op 104 no. 4
Here is the piece by Brahms I posted last week, again, it's a masterpiece and stands up to more than one hearing. I should have posted a translation, the pictures on the video didn't really get the idea across.
1. Ernst ist der Herbst.
Und wenn die Blätter fallen,
sinkt auch das Herz zu trübem Weh herab.
Still ist die Flur,
und nach dem Süden wallen
die Sänger stumm, wie nach dem Grab.
2. Bleich ist der Tag,
und blasse Nebel schleiern
die Sonne wie die Herzen ein.
Früh kommt die Nacht:
denn alle Kräfte feiern,
und tief verschlossen ruht das Sein.
3. Sanft wird der Mensch.
Er sieht die Sonne sinken,
er ahnt des Lebens wie des Jahres Schluß.
Feucht wird das Aug’,
doch in der Träne Blinken
entströmt des Herzens seligster Erguß.
Still ist die Flur,
und nach dem Süden wallen
die Sänger stumm, wie nach dem Grab.
2. Bleich ist der Tag,
und blasse Nebel schleiern
die Sonne wie die Herzen ein.
Früh kommt die Nacht:
denn alle Kräfte feiern,
und tief verschlossen ruht das Sein.
3. Sanft wird der Mensch.
Er sieht die Sonne sinken,
er ahnt des Lebens wie des Jahres Schluß.
Feucht wird das Aug’,
doch in der Träne Blinken
entströmt des Herzens seligster Erguß.
English translation
1. Autumn is sad.
And when the leaves are falling,
sinks too the heart in troubled grief to lave.
Still is the field,
and flown to Southwinds calling,
are songsters, still, as to the grave.
2. Drear is the day,
and pallid clouds are veiling,
the sunlight as the spirit free.
Soon comes the night:
then rest all powers empaling,
oblivion falls on all that be.
3. Tender grows man.
He sees the sun declining,
divines that life too as the year, must close.
Moist are the eyes
but thro’ the teardrops shining,
outflows the heart and holiest solace knows.
And when the leaves are falling,
sinks too the heart in troubled grief to lave.
Still is the field,
and flown to Southwinds calling,
are songsters, still, as to the grave.
2. Drear is the day,
and pallid clouds are veiling,
the sunlight as the spirit free.
Soon comes the night:
then rest all powers empaling,
oblivion falls on all that be.
3. Tender grows man.
He sees the sun declining,
divines that life too as the year, must close.
Moist are the eyes
but thro’ the teardrops shining,
outflows the heart and holiest solace knows.
The poet, Klaus Groth isn't someone I was at all familiar with, probably because he wrote his poetry in "Low German" which I can't read, perhaps something I have in common with a lot of Germans because, if I'm not mistaken, Brahms' many settings of his poetry are in standard German translation. I believe Brahms knew "Low German", though I'm not certain.
I hadn't ever noticed that Groth's poetry accounted for a very large percentage of Brahms' song settings. It was interesting reading this weekend that his friendship with Groth was very likely Brahms' longest lasting and least tumultuous relationship, over four decades. Given how turbulent Brahms' friendships could be and how many of them ended with some bitter words from him (which he sometimes deeply regretted later) that makes him worth looking at more closely. Here's a Klaus Groth website with a number of translations of his poetry. This one is especially interesting for people from the US, Low German in Chicago.
Still Ill
I looked some more at the secularly sainted Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. and have to say that he has every attribute of someone who should never have held public office in a democracy, no, not even in a republic which claims to be based on the assertions about human beings and their rights and moral obligations contained in The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. He is a perfectly horrible mix of indifference to human suffering, an arrogant assumption of inequality and worth of human beings, an assumption that existing inequalities is an atavistic phenomenon that people should not attempt to change and that any attempt to do so is a sign of a fool and a pudding head. Mixed with that, or perhaps the origin of it, is a towering sense of self worth and the worth of those in his own circle and an utter and happy disdain for those who he considers to be biologically, certainly intellectually inferior to him.
He had thoroughly class-centric willingness to assert that what is beneficial for him and his class is a result of their innate superiority and that, as the superior class of human beings, that what enhances their wealth, power and privilege is the very definition of the good. I have to say that, as with Darwin, the more I read of what he wrote and what those who were close to him said about him, the more repulsive he is.
While he might have been a tolerable and cranky member of a faculty at a private law school, he never had any business holding public office. That those who elevated him to his position and confirmed him in it thought he was an acceptable Supreme Court member is proof that there is something seriously wrong with the mechanism of government found in the United States Constitution, the political system that results from it and the culture that operates the "free press" under it. And he is hardly the only member of the courts about whom that can be said.
As mentioned before, that people who are taken as liberals champion him as an admirable example is solid evidence that there is something seriously wrong with liberalism as it is widely if not commonly understood. Any liberalism that could overlook Holmes' repugnance needs to be scrapped and a real liberalism based on an absolute moral obligation to observe and respect the most common and banal or rights held in real equality must replace it.
He had thoroughly class-centric willingness to assert that what is beneficial for him and his class is a result of their innate superiority and that, as the superior class of human beings, that what enhances their wealth, power and privilege is the very definition of the good. I have to say that, as with Darwin, the more I read of what he wrote and what those who were close to him said about him, the more repulsive he is.
While he might have been a tolerable and cranky member of a faculty at a private law school, he never had any business holding public office. That those who elevated him to his position and confirmed him in it thought he was an acceptable Supreme Court member is proof that there is something seriously wrong with the mechanism of government found in the United States Constitution, the political system that results from it and the culture that operates the "free press" under it. And he is hardly the only member of the courts about whom that can be said.
As mentioned before, that people who are taken as liberals champion him as an admirable example is solid evidence that there is something seriously wrong with liberalism as it is widely if not commonly understood. Any liberalism that could overlook Holmes' repugnance needs to be scrapped and a real liberalism based on an absolute moral obligation to observe and respect the most common and banal or rights held in real equality must replace it.