I'm not an expert except having listened to hundreds and hundreds of radio dramas and audio dramas and read and watched lots of plays and read a fair bit about them. And I'm a musician who once worked in an electronic music studio, back in the tape and patch-cord era who occasionally does some recording work even now when it's so much easier to do so much better with digital recording.
If I were setting out to try it I'd start short and try to really do complete pieces on a time schedule. 10 minute plays are a thing. Some of them are surprisingly good ones written by real writers. There are lots of radio dramas I've liked, especially comedies, that are fifteen to twenty minutes long. If you cut out the commercials and text free visuals, lots of TV shows are about that length. Only being TV they're more likely to be stupid and entirely more likely to just be a copy of something else. TV likes what is safely proven to have sold, before, it seldom tries anything new. I think if you can't get it together to work through a few of those, this is probably not your thing. I'd certainly try to do it unrecorded before spending any money on it, it's stupid to buy equipment before you try it to find out if you're willing to make the commitment.
I would stress trying it on a set time schedule. There are few things that are more of a guarantee of getting nowhere than leaving the completion date into an infinite future which no one has. If you couldn't do a two-character 10-minute play in two weeks, forget it. If I had a student who couldn't learn one of the 2-part inventions in a week I'd be worried. If they couldn't learn one in a month, I'd advise them to stop trying. The deadline is your friend, at this point, it will tell you if you're wasting your time before you put too much of an investment into it. If you're working with someone else, it will tell you if they are not going to work out.
If you are going to have music, which easily five times out of four isn't done well by non-musicians, DON'T USE THE FREE CRAP THAT THEY RUN BEHIND SO MANY YOUTUBES. It would be better not to use any than to use that. Make your own or get a musician friend to contribute something. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece, it just has to not be obnoxious or stink too much or get in the way. If you imagine you're going to make money out of this (dream on) you should write out an agreement.
I have no experience with and know nothing practical about sound effects so you're on your own with that.
For recording I like the Zoom H1N and Zoom H5 that I've got. A friend of mine who does production work for a local radio station gets fantastic results from a Zoom H2 that she uses for live recording of events, or used to up till now. I have heard audio-dramas that are recorded live with the cast standing around a Zoom H2 which were quite effective, though they were the horror genre that doesn't interest me much. One of my nieces who does some audio work swears by her Tascam (can't remember the model number) and she makes some good recordings with it. It's a heck of a lot cheaper to get excellent sound than it was forty years ago. I would go with WAV format instead of mp3, you can always cheapen the sound quality later but you can't improve it.
I have used this kind of set up to do two-channel recording of music on the Zoom H1N with lav mics, though the audio quality is quite good - better than just about any recording I ever did on very expensive tape machines -it's slightly less life-like to my ears than the mics on the device. It's good for recording duos. Using the H5's built in multi-channel capacity with good mics does the same thing if you need to have two separated channels. But you might not need the sound fidelity for the cost, one good basic quality mic costs almost as much as the Zoom H1N.
I use the, sadly discontinued, extremely simple to use and very good, Acoustic Labs Audio Editor, which I hope to continue using as long as I am doing this - I'll always keep an old Windows machine to use it on, I hope. I have also used the pretty much universally available and free Audacity software which has a lot of features I don't need. I have tried trial versions of very expensive software (those came with the Zoom machines I bought) and didn't find them superior for what I do. The full cost of one of those cost more than the entire setup described above, including the equipment . I haven't tried to use them on the single-board computers I've been making the shift to. I might try that in the coming weeks and report on that. If it would work on a Raspberry Pi, that would be sweet.
Anyway, I USED to do that kind of thing. I am falling into hard times as fast as anyone else is, now and I'd never try to get together with someone to do something live. If I were writing something I'd have it take place on a phone, right now. You could certainly go through 2-handers on the phone.
Hate Update: Someone can do both, Bunky. I heard the Canadian actor who started out and continues as a song-writer, singer, Hugh Dillon, once make the connection between being a musician and being an actor in that songs are generally telling a story. The skills and experience transfer, if someone is smart enough to use them. Maybe that's why you don't think someone else can do both. He'd know more about that than I would. I like his acting work that I've seen and I like his songs. He's done a bit of pretty unconventional acting work, some of which he's produced, too. I will admit my limited experience with working with theater productions in college was awful - my advisor practically commanded me not to get involved, my advisor was right - but that doesn't mean it can't turn out better than that. You can certainly do both. There are musicians and singers who have done well in both.
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Monday, May 4, 2020
Hate Mail
A man in his senectitude who had his mind made up at the age of ten has the mind of a ten-year-old. It's funny how many atheists are proud of that status and brag about having attained it. It's hilarious that one can gull his girlfriend into sharing his pride in it. I guess she likes them dumb and immature.
Update: I used to figure she was more to be pitied than censured but then I said, hell with that, she's an adult, no one made her choices but her.
Update 2: A man who would base his views of religion on what Woody Allen said is an ass. It would be like trying to learn about the demographic character of New York City on his movies and concluding it's lily white, affluent and college credentialed and fucked up. I'd guess someone who would do that would figure ol' Woody has it all together, as demonstrated by his life and how his kid thinks of him. Used to like his movies, can't watch them anymore, not now that I know they're too much based on life. Ol' Woody replaced religion with psychoanalysis, and look where it got him. I have to say the reporting on how Woody and Mia's analysts (and the ones they subjected the kids to) conferring about what to do with their clients pretty much put an end to my respect for him. God an underachiever? Ha! Psychoanalysis is one of the most disgustingly stupid god replacements ever invented by atheism, one that has been successfully peddled as "science", no less.
Update: I used to figure she was more to be pitied than censured but then I said, hell with that, she's an adult, no one made her choices but her.
Update 2: A man who would base his views of religion on what Woody Allen said is an ass. It would be like trying to learn about the demographic character of New York City on his movies and concluding it's lily white, affluent and college credentialed and fucked up. I'd guess someone who would do that would figure ol' Woody has it all together, as demonstrated by his life and how his kid thinks of him. Used to like his movies, can't watch them anymore, not now that I know they're too much based on life. Ol' Woody replaced religion with psychoanalysis, and look where it got him. I have to say the reporting on how Woody and Mia's analysts (and the ones they subjected the kids to) conferring about what to do with their clients pretty much put an end to my respect for him. God an underachiever? Ha! Psychoanalysis is one of the most disgustingly stupid god replacements ever invented by atheism, one that has been successfully peddled as "science", no less.
We Need American Scientists To Set One Of These Up Right Away And To Force The Media To Cover Its Open Meetings
The scientists who know what they are talking about should stop depending on Dr. Fauci and Brix who have to worry about getting fired by the criminally insane baby, Trump.
Update: If you wonder why we need this Elizabeth Warren Is Calling for An Essential Workers Bill of Rights BECAUSE THEY ARE GETTING KILLED.
Jared Kushner Deserves To Be The Alfred E. Newman Of Trump Criminality
Watching John Oliver's show, I suddenly wondered why Jared Kushner isn't as ridiculed as OJ Simpson's household pet, Kato Kaelin was after people found out he was. Why isn't he as universally disdained and despised as the totally innocent, actually admirable, Louis Freeh era FBI- cabloid TV convicted Richard Jewell was?
Jared Kushner may not be the most abominable of the abominable Trump era figures but I have absolutely no doubt that he will prove to have gotten many, many people killed, including heroic health care workers and first responders who are dying as he steals and hoards protective equipment and, I have a very strong feeling, was in on the for-profit American test scheme. If I am at the point of death during this thing - have been exposed,still cannot get anywhere near being tested and who knows if I might be one of the many false-negatives the Kushner-Trump test is giving - if I am gasping for breath in the terrible way we can now hear happens, I will have a will to live on the possibility that someday I will see Kushner and his skanky families, Trump-Kushner perp walked on orange on his way to a long if not life term in prison. But he's only one at the front of the list of those I want to see imprisoned and fined into the flames of hell.
Jared Kushner may not be the most abominable of the abominable Trump era figures but I have absolutely no doubt that he will prove to have gotten many, many people killed, including heroic health care workers and first responders who are dying as he steals and hoards protective equipment and, I have a very strong feeling, was in on the for-profit American test scheme. If I am at the point of death during this thing - have been exposed,still cannot get anywhere near being tested and who knows if I might be one of the many false-negatives the Kushner-Trump test is giving - if I am gasping for breath in the terrible way we can now hear happens, I will have a will to live on the possibility that someday I will see Kushner and his skanky families, Trump-Kushner perp walked on orange on his way to a long if not life term in prison. But he's only one at the front of the list of those I want to see imprisoned and fined into the flames of hell.
Freedom From Morality Is Death
Television and other media have brought us to the state we are in where we have not only a criminally insane but a criminally senile chief executive who is not only laying waste to our institutions, our elections, our minds but the very soul of the United States and TV and other media are doing nothing to stop him, FOX and Trump using the Lincoln Memorial as the backdrop for one of the most degenerate scenes in the history of the decay of American Democracy is of vile insignificance compared to the totality.
This is the definitive disconfirmation of modernism in so far as modernism is the abandonment of morality which inevitably ends up in privileging of lies as "free speech," the privileging of ignorance as savvy, the privileging of pleasure as opposed to hard truth. It is a disconfirmation of pretty much the all of the freedom from the moral content of monotheistic religion, which, unsurprisingly, produces never ending atrocities, hypocrisies, lies, delusion and a total dissolution of all that is humane and all that is good and even all that is real instead of make believe. Television has in hardest fact, created Trump just as it and the movies created Reagan before him. The New York City media, including the august New York Times, in its feuillerton pages helped make him into the all too real monster that ate American democracy. There is absolutely no mystery in that. The Republican Party which has been the political entity that the wealthy who own and staff the media have promoted is the other leg that the trashy Trump tyranny stands on. I would say the billionaires and millionaires but the Republican Party is a department of that clique so it would be a tautology.
It is the total degeneration of culture that would follow on the degeneration of morals under modernism that Nietzsche foretold and gloried in, though that idiot believed that art could survive it.
The election in November followed by action bolder than a Democratic Congress and President would be able to or dare to take is the last, dim hope for American democracy. And if we achieved that it would almost certainly lead to widespread armed insurrection against any attempt to even reestablish the status quo of what got us into this. Any attempt would certainly have to pack the court with enough anti-fascist justices to render the McConnell-Trump packing of the courts moot, a radical enough action in itself that I am certain Biden wouldn't attempt it and, other than Elizabeth Warren, I haven't heard anyone say they would do that. And, though it would certainly violate nothing in the Constitution, as something unaccustomed, though essential to save democracy, it would be met with a chorus of disapproval of the media, including the New York Times, I am sure of it.
And there is the pandemic that will, I would not be surprised, give us a Vietnam casualty rate a month.
We are in dire straits because the Warren Court told the media they could lie with impunity on behalf of the secular left in a period when the secular left miscalculated wildly and believed it was in a permanent state of ascendance. I have come to believe that, Board v. Brown and a few other decisions apart, the Warren Court was no where near as wise or good as we were all required to believe. That is something I am absolutely certain of in the "free speech" "free press" rulings that freed the mass media to lie us into this catastrophe and which I doubt more than a tiny fraction of Americans see. the slogans used to sell that regime of lies and pornography being so salable. That's the problem with enabling lies, lies are easy to package to be readily bought, the truth is almost always a far harder sell - little wonder that our media loves lies so much, they're so profitable. And show-biz helps with that.
We aren't in a crisis of knowledge - most of those spouting lies for the suckers to by have educations from top-notch schools - so much as we are in a crisis brought on by the abandonment of morality, of freedom from moral inhibitions, of consequences for immorality, of a belief that there are things that are not to be done no matter how much you want to do them, no matter what it gets you, no matter how willing the courts and regulatory bodies, the Congress are willing to allow you to get away with it with impunity. And that whatever you can get away with, you should be free to do.
We are in this crisis as we have been in virtually every human caused crisis we have been in because of the abandonment of morality, by which I don't mean that people are having sex they shouldn't be, though that is certainly relevant and a related matter, it would turn into a distraction. We are here because lies and theft are now the freely permitted laws of the land, lies magnified by mass media which lie on behalf of the thieves and plunderers and, with this pandemic, those who get people killed for their profit. And, since it began in the meat industry, as so many pandemics have - it is a product of human choices made with the permission of a government, through that most beloved thing of all for American conservatives, deregulated market action. All of this will turn out to be entirely OK with the Republicans on the Court as it is with the ones in the Congress, in governorships and legislatures and those who control and staff the media.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
If that dumb arithmetic teacher wants to address what I said the stupid bint should read what I said. A college teacher who doesn't know that you've got to read something to know what it said, there was a time that would have shocked me, sometime before I went online and read the thinking of the college credentialed and even some of the college credentialing.
Update: My guess is he couldn't get work acting because he was lazy and obnoxious, not too bright and didn't have anything much to offer.
What I said was essentially what Imelda Staunton said, what Judi Dench said, what Derek Jacobi, etc. said, that without learning the skills all of them said they learned during their apprenticeship in repertory theater that some people in theater crash and burn. That's not any great shock. Unless you don't know anything about it.
Update: My guess is he couldn't get work acting because he was lazy and obnoxious, not too bright and didn't have anything much to offer.
What I said was essentially what Imelda Staunton said, what Judi Dench said, what Derek Jacobi, etc. said, that without learning the skills all of them said they learned during their apprenticeship in repertory theater that some people in theater crash and burn. That's not any great shock. Unless you don't know anything about it.
"What would you suggest someone start with?" - Not Hate Mail For A Change
Off hand? How about trying the late, very great Brian Friel's American Welcome, it's effectively a monologue with, essentially, no physical action or much of a set, the other character being more or less part of the set. If you can't learn that and play with it, it might either show you've got no hope but it could mean that you just need to try something else. If you try recording your performances, you'll learn a lot about recording and finding out what you like and what you don't like about your own work.
If I were an actor, which I have no intention of being, I'd find someone and go through a lot of 2-handers with them. And if it didn't work with them then trying it with someone else. If you could do a bunch of them on the schedule of the repertory theaters described in that video, the two-week or one-week schedules, it would probably be a good sign.
That's translating my experience as a musician, we do that kind of thing all the time without anyone's permission or expecting anyone to pay us or even listen to us. It's just what you do. It's a lot of fun, especially if you're working with someone who's good and who you like. Sometimes it's even good when it's someone who's good (or not) and who you find a challenge. Challenge is good.
Update: Imagine that, me, the musician, the non-actor, the person who has no aspirations to act knowing enough about the theater to know what a 2-hander is and knowing who Brian Friel was, one of the most significant playwrights of our lifetime as he, the holder of, if you please, a degree in "theater arts" doesn't know either. American Welcome seems even more apt now then it did when I posted this post.
Update 2: THIS is a 2-hander, as its author, the actor in it with Judi Dench, Alan Bennett called it before one of the performances of it that I posted once.
If I were an actor, which I have no intention of being, I'd find someone and go through a lot of 2-handers with them. And if it didn't work with them then trying it with someone else. If you could do a bunch of them on the schedule of the repertory theaters described in that video, the two-week or one-week schedules, it would probably be a good sign.
That's translating my experience as a musician, we do that kind of thing all the time without anyone's permission or expecting anyone to pay us or even listen to us. It's just what you do. It's a lot of fun, especially if you're working with someone who's good and who you like. Sometimes it's even good when it's someone who's good (or not) and who you find a challenge. Challenge is good.
Update: Imagine that, me, the musician, the non-actor, the person who has no aspirations to act knowing enough about the theater to know what a 2-hander is and knowing who Brian Friel was, one of the most significant playwrights of our lifetime as he, the holder of, if you please, a degree in "theater arts" doesn't know either. American Welcome seems even more apt now then it did when I posted this post.
Update 2: THIS is a 2-hander, as its author, the actor in it with Judi Dench, Alan Bennett called it before one of the performances of it that I posted once.
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Charles Tidler - Pocket City Blues
A series about a narrator- lead character, Horton Spring, his brat of a 14-year-old son, his hostile ex wife and all kinds of strange people and odd problems. I listened to them a long time ago and thought they were pretty off-beat. I was going to post something else but decided to post these as an example of how off-beat shows can be done when not much money is involved. I've mentioned what Rod Serling said about his fond memories of freedom when he was doing radio drama because all his supervisors cared about was filling air time. These are kind of Rod Serlingish. It's a bit heavy on the beat poet stuff but Horton isn't the asshole that the beats were.
There used to be a website that had the credits for all of the Mystery Project shows but I can't find it. They have full credits given at the end of them, as I recall. Listening to the first one again I think I'll listen to them all again tonight as I'm transplanting. They have a real late Saturday night being at home alone vibe.
The Actor's Apprenticeship | Documentary | Feat. Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton, Derek Jacobi
With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.
George Burns
I doubt anyone much remembers how my practice of posting a Saturday Night Radio Drama started, it started when I got into a brawl with one of the people who troll me after I wondered why I'd never heard of actors, on their own, as a part of practicing their art, getting together to go through great plays by themselves with other actors trying to learn how to act, the way that musicians routinely do as part of their practice.
That some might or might have, I don't doubt, though I've never heard any of the actors I've known talk about doing it. It's something you'd think was as much a no-brainer as a musician practicing the repertoire of their instrument or voice or a painter drawing pictures or a writer writing stuff they rip up and don't present to the public. An actor or director who doesn't practice is about as likely to produce good work as a musician who never does, it's not likely to happen.
That was before I knew that radio drama, in most places not much done on radio anymore, was being transformed by writers-actors-directors into computer based audio drama much of which is as bad as most movies and TV but which doesn't waste anything like a tiny fraction of the resources and time that those most expensive and, so, least creative of media do. And, being a voluntary effort, they are as creative as the creators, the writers or improvisers or actors or directors want to make them - no producers or backers or a paying audience to answer to. The audio-drama that stinks is a good thing, it's trying and trying is better than not trying and it's a chance to make the mistakes that you have to make to get better.
Somewhere in that brawl I pointed out the excellent series of TV productions based on Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe that A&E financed in the 1990s, which were some of the best TV ever produced with some of the most incredibly good actors I've ever seen but which must have cost a fortune to produce because they reproduced, slavishly, the period look and costumes and settings of the period of the books, between the 1930s to the 1960s. Though Archie, the fine Timothy Hutton, and Nero Wolfe, the excellent, late, Maury Chaykin, didn't seem to age along the way. I contrasted that with the excellent radio production that the CBC did of many of the same Rex Stout novels, the ones I'd read quite faithfully reproduced in full-cast productions but without the cost of visuals. I'd love to know the cost difference between the two. The acting in both was excellent, though I certainly would never talk down the work of some of the extraordinarily fine actors in the TV version, Kari Matchett, Christine Brubaker, Debra Monk, James Tolkan, Robert Bockstael, etc. in some ways I think it would have been better if there weren't the visuals. I'd rather have foregone the costumes and sets for having more of them.
This video of some of the best British actors, many of whom, such as Judi Dench, have done radio acting, lamenting the decline of municipal and regional repertory theaters in Britain - the apprentice system that makes so many British actors so much better than most American actors - is probably something that is not going to be turned around. I think any actor or director, any would-be playwright who wants to be better at what they do should consider that their best chance is to do what a musician who wants to get better has to do and that if they want their practice to be presented to a public that their best hope would be to buy a good, inexpensive digital recorder, learn to get the most out of it that they can, write their best script and do it in audio form. They can listen to it themselves and learn from their mistakes because unless things turn out a lot different from how they appear to, they're not going to get to do it on stage. They won't learn much from doing it on TV or movie set, they probably won't ever get the chance to try.
What is said about people who get a chance and who, once they've made a splash have no learned skills to back it up getting spit out by TV and the movies is all too true. If they'd gotten their chance when they didn't have the money to get into serious trouble before a public - before the inevitable amnesia that TV and the movies induce sets in - they might walk away with at least their dignity intact. I wonder if there would be fewer stories of self-destruction associated with show biz if they went through an apprenticeship.
I love theater when it's good. I love it when it is fun but more when it says something. I think you're entirely more likely to get that through audio drama than through something with sets and makeup.
Wrapping Up For Now But, No Doubt, To Be Continued - Hate Mail
One of the things in current American language use that bothers me the most is the misuse of the word "tragedy" to describe intentional mass murders and other horrible crimes committed with full intent by human beings. Those are not "tragedies" that happen at the whims of the gods or because of fate or the atheist-materialist-scientistic god of random chance, they are crimes. It romanticizes them, lessens them, in the apt words of Hans Kung, it does what he explicitly and strongly states IS NOT TO BE DONE, it reinterprets it, it lessens it, it adds some kind of aura of glory to it. To turn intentional criminals into the mere toys of external forces is to let the the criminals off too easy, them and, the extent to which others up to and including the entire society that they arose in, it enables that to be repeated.
There are crimes which are tragic but the only ones that I think are relevant are when those are committed by someone driven beyond tolerance by circumstances, either through mental debility or through their own terrible suffering. A person driven past the point of endurance at witnessing of fearing unendurable pain for a loved one may be led to kill them, someone who is starving may shoot someone during a robbery (though they are probably more liable to being killed, themselves). But that is a rare circumstance that would require a different and longer general discussion. Only looking deeper at the circumstances of a particular case could do them justice.
That my general objection to that confusion of language is related, I suspect, to the distinction that must be made between evil and suffering. Suffering is a general condition, it is the condition of much of if not all of sentient life. Evil is always suffered by someone, a person or animal or other sentient being but not all suffering is a result of evil, the intentional or indifferent causing of pain by a reasoning creature - a created being who thinks. It might be something which only people do, I don't know how the mind of a cat tormenting an animal before it kills it thinks, how aware they are of the pain and terror they are inflicting. If that's related to the delight that people take in causing pain,I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me. if it was like it. I don't know if cats have an excuse for that, I know people don't in so far as people can comprehend it.*
In the passage I posted from Hans Kung's book On Being A Christian yesterday he said two things that contradict the accusation that "Christianity is all about causing pain and death".
Suffering and death remain as an attack on man's life. Suffering is not to be reinterpreted belittled or glorified. Nor is it to be accepted stoically, apathetically, unemotionally. And certainly, it should not be sought masochistically, making asceticism a source of pleasure. It is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures.
The Crucifixion of Jesus was, by human design, a "freak show" as intended by the Roman authorities who killed him, not by his followers, those who after his Resurrection started what became the Christian religion. Part of the use of crucifixion as an instrument of imperial state terror was its public torture and degradation, the spectacle used as terror is always meant to be used as a tool for controlling "the masses" of making them afraid to exercise freedom and demand justice.**
He also said:
It [evil, pain] is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures.
"As must be made clearer, later." This book is part of what I think even Kung considered something of a trilogy of long, extensively documented, tightly argued books, including Does God Exist? and Eternal Life? I may not get around to going into that clarification as Hans Kung presented it but I will point out that it is obvious from the teachings of Jesus, Paul, etc. that that is a task given to the people who would like to be followers of Jesus, that they become that by doing the will of God. He would certainly have meant as set out in The Law and in his teachings.
If you were really interested, get Kung's books and read them, look up as many of his citations as you can if you doubt he's a reliable scholar. He is quite excellent, as it happens.
The Mosaic Law is probably the most radical prescription for lessening evil and suffering yet set out, especially as modified by the teachings of Jesus - all those death penalties were certainly not intended to be retained by Jesus. That is what is asked of human beings, humans only having the capacity to do what humans can do. The periods when churches and religious establishments did quite a bit of evil through holding earthly power are definitively in opposition to the words of a man they claimed to believe spoke with the authority of God. Which supports the Gospel statement of Jesus that his kingdom was not of this Earth, no matter what "most Christian monarchs" most "Christian" prime ministers, presidents, legislators, judges, "justices" princes, etc. wanted to pretend, they could't possibly know even the most well known of the teachings of Jesus and believed they were acting as those commandments told them to. "Do unto others . . . " "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword," "Judge not lest you be judged."
I'd think humanity had enough to be getting on with, to the extent we are humanly able, to ending the evil that we choose to do. Making that distinction as to what is in our power and what isn't would certainly go a long way to doing that.
The endless taunting of Christians by raising the question of evil, demanding an answer in terms atheists, materialists and the cult of scientism would demand should be treated for the absurdity that it is. If that has not been done in the period since the Book of Job was written down, it's not going to be given. Even the Buddha who is held by so many millions as the best hope of a non-theological solution to the more general problem of pain didn't present an answer in those terms. Atheism has certainly never given one nor do I believe it ever really cared about the problem.
If that is dissatisfying to them, or, rather their polemical purpose, well, life's tough, ain't it. Tell me what happened before the Big Bang, or even right after it. Tell me why the atheist god of random chance indicates that by an incredibly enormous factor to one, we shouldn't be here and that all of the atheist attempts to get out of that cannot escape the most absurd of mythological entities, multiverses - either simultaneous or in a clearly absurd infinite regression in pasts that would have to come "before" every indication we have, now, time begin.
The solution as presented by Hans Kung is one that is there, it doesn't end pain, it doesn't end evil, not in human understanding. It doesn't even give an explanation of it but it does present that if humans cannot know the answer to it they can find a way out of it. But, as I pointed out, the pain that is the vehicle, the substance and the meaning of evil is the most intimate of experiences - it is entirely "subjective" - and no answer which will satisfy anyone is going to be had except as the most personal of choices. There will be no "objective" explanation of it. Human evil is the responsibility of human beings. So is ending it.
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And a related, insoluble problem.
The most difficult situation in trying to live this way I can think of is the killing of someone who is a present danger to someone else, I have absolutely no answer to how that is compatible with the teachings of Jesus though I can't bring myself to condemn it when that is what it really is. In Matthew, even as he is being arrested to be crucified, Jesus rejected violent protection but even then he said that his death was part of his purpose. I don't know how to relate that to the problem of killing someone in defense of someone else or yourself. If there's one thing I know, I'm not Jesus and I doubt anyone else is. Short that present danger, there is absolutely no way to justify killing someone who could be prevented from harming other people by non-lethal means.
The "just war" theory associated with Augustine along with all of the late classical, medieval and modern Christian theology that so obviously violates the teachings of Jesus on behalf of worldly power leads into nothing but the justified rejection of what calls itself "Christianity" which has nothing to do with Jesus or what I'm talking about here.
* I wonder if redemption doesn't include the idea that even the worst of us can, perhaps ultimately will fully know our guilt and will be offered the choice of rejecting that. I like to think it does. The argument that that is what the New Testament and even some of the First Testament indicates is possible.
** Remember that the next time you hear some play-lefty excusing the use of terror by dictators they support or terrorism as a tool of "revolution" or change. Terrorism is always a certain signal that those who use it will almost certainly not turn out to be democrats or "social democrats". Though there have been extremely ruthless despots who used terrorism who were not atheists, in the modern history of the West and those who have been influenced by the west, especially as fascists and Marxists, the worst of those have been anti-religious. That is a simple fact of history.
No one ever followed the teachings of Jesus into using terror. You can't do that while doing to them what you would have done to you, loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you, etc. You can't even hold them as a slave, slavery being entirely about treating others as you would never want them to treat you.
There are crimes which are tragic but the only ones that I think are relevant are when those are committed by someone driven beyond tolerance by circumstances, either through mental debility or through their own terrible suffering. A person driven past the point of endurance at witnessing of fearing unendurable pain for a loved one may be led to kill them, someone who is starving may shoot someone during a robbery (though they are probably more liable to being killed, themselves). But that is a rare circumstance that would require a different and longer general discussion. Only looking deeper at the circumstances of a particular case could do them justice.
That my general objection to that confusion of language is related, I suspect, to the distinction that must be made between evil and suffering. Suffering is a general condition, it is the condition of much of if not all of sentient life. Evil is always suffered by someone, a person or animal or other sentient being but not all suffering is a result of evil, the intentional or indifferent causing of pain by a reasoning creature - a created being who thinks. It might be something which only people do, I don't know how the mind of a cat tormenting an animal before it kills it thinks, how aware they are of the pain and terror they are inflicting. If that's related to the delight that people take in causing pain,I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me. if it was like it. I don't know if cats have an excuse for that, I know people don't in so far as people can comprehend it.*
In the passage I posted from Hans Kung's book On Being A Christian yesterday he said two things that contradict the accusation that "Christianity is all about causing pain and death".
Suffering and death remain as an attack on man's life. Suffering is not to be reinterpreted belittled or glorified. Nor is it to be accepted stoically, apathetically, unemotionally. And certainly, it should not be sought masochistically, making asceticism a source of pleasure. It is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures.
The Crucifixion of Jesus was, by human design, a "freak show" as intended by the Roman authorities who killed him, not by his followers, those who after his Resurrection started what became the Christian religion. Part of the use of crucifixion as an instrument of imperial state terror was its public torture and degradation, the spectacle used as terror is always meant to be used as a tool for controlling "the masses" of making them afraid to exercise freedom and demand justice.**
He also said:
It [evil, pain] is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures.
"As must be made clearer, later." This book is part of what I think even Kung considered something of a trilogy of long, extensively documented, tightly argued books, including Does God Exist? and Eternal Life? I may not get around to going into that clarification as Hans Kung presented it but I will point out that it is obvious from the teachings of Jesus, Paul, etc. that that is a task given to the people who would like to be followers of Jesus, that they become that by doing the will of God. He would certainly have meant as set out in The Law and in his teachings.
If you were really interested, get Kung's books and read them, look up as many of his citations as you can if you doubt he's a reliable scholar. He is quite excellent, as it happens.
The Mosaic Law is probably the most radical prescription for lessening evil and suffering yet set out, especially as modified by the teachings of Jesus - all those death penalties were certainly not intended to be retained by Jesus. That is what is asked of human beings, humans only having the capacity to do what humans can do. The periods when churches and religious establishments did quite a bit of evil through holding earthly power are definitively in opposition to the words of a man they claimed to believe spoke with the authority of God. Which supports the Gospel statement of Jesus that his kingdom was not of this Earth, no matter what "most Christian monarchs" most "Christian" prime ministers, presidents, legislators, judges, "justices" princes, etc. wanted to pretend, they could't possibly know even the most well known of the teachings of Jesus and believed they were acting as those commandments told them to. "Do unto others . . . " "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword," "Judge not lest you be judged."
I'd think humanity had enough to be getting on with, to the extent we are humanly able, to ending the evil that we choose to do. Making that distinction as to what is in our power and what isn't would certainly go a long way to doing that.
The endless taunting of Christians by raising the question of evil, demanding an answer in terms atheists, materialists and the cult of scientism would demand should be treated for the absurdity that it is. If that has not been done in the period since the Book of Job was written down, it's not going to be given. Even the Buddha who is held by so many millions as the best hope of a non-theological solution to the more general problem of pain didn't present an answer in those terms. Atheism has certainly never given one nor do I believe it ever really cared about the problem.
If that is dissatisfying to them, or, rather their polemical purpose, well, life's tough, ain't it. Tell me what happened before the Big Bang, or even right after it. Tell me why the atheist god of random chance indicates that by an incredibly enormous factor to one, we shouldn't be here and that all of the atheist attempts to get out of that cannot escape the most absurd of mythological entities, multiverses - either simultaneous or in a clearly absurd infinite regression in pasts that would have to come "before" every indication we have, now, time begin.
The solution as presented by Hans Kung is one that is there, it doesn't end pain, it doesn't end evil, not in human understanding. It doesn't even give an explanation of it but it does present that if humans cannot know the answer to it they can find a way out of it. But, as I pointed out, the pain that is the vehicle, the substance and the meaning of evil is the most intimate of experiences - it is entirely "subjective" - and no answer which will satisfy anyone is going to be had except as the most personal of choices. There will be no "objective" explanation of it. Human evil is the responsibility of human beings. So is ending it.
------------------------------------
And a related, insoluble problem.
The most difficult situation in trying to live this way I can think of is the killing of someone who is a present danger to someone else, I have absolutely no answer to how that is compatible with the teachings of Jesus though I can't bring myself to condemn it when that is what it really is. In Matthew, even as he is being arrested to be crucified, Jesus rejected violent protection but even then he said that his death was part of his purpose. I don't know how to relate that to the problem of killing someone in defense of someone else or yourself. If there's one thing I know, I'm not Jesus and I doubt anyone else is. Short that present danger, there is absolutely no way to justify killing someone who could be prevented from harming other people by non-lethal means.
The "just war" theory associated with Augustine along with all of the late classical, medieval and modern Christian theology that so obviously violates the teachings of Jesus on behalf of worldly power leads into nothing but the justified rejection of what calls itself "Christianity" which has nothing to do with Jesus or what I'm talking about here.
* I wonder if redemption doesn't include the idea that even the worst of us can, perhaps ultimately will fully know our guilt and will be offered the choice of rejecting that. I like to think it does. The argument that that is what the New Testament and even some of the First Testament indicates is possible.
** Remember that the next time you hear some play-lefty excusing the use of terror by dictators they support or terrorism as a tool of "revolution" or change. Terrorism is always a certain signal that those who use it will almost certainly not turn out to be democrats or "social democrats". Though there have been extremely ruthless despots who used terrorism who were not atheists, in the modern history of the West and those who have been influenced by the west, especially as fascists and Marxists, the worst of those have been anti-religious. That is a simple fact of history.
No one ever followed the teachings of Jesus into using terror. You can't do that while doing to them what you would have done to you, loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you, etc. You can't even hold them as a slave, slavery being entirely about treating others as you would never want them to treat you.
Friday, May 1, 2020
Dušan Bogdanović interview
This is the guy whose music I am told is "dry as dust"
who, a couple of years ago the same troll stupidly and absurdly ("surd" meaning unable to hear) called an "academic serialist." Listen to his answer to the question asked after 3:00 in which he's asked how much freedom for the performer is contained in his music.
I think what troll guy meant about the Chromatic Prelude and Fugue posted yesterday is that it's too hard for a stupid guy to follow counterpoint. And that guy pretends he's a professional musician.
who, a couple of years ago the same troll stupidly and absurdly ("surd" meaning unable to hear) called an "academic serialist." Listen to his answer to the question asked after 3:00 in which he's asked how much freedom for the performer is contained in his music.
I think what troll guy meant about the Chromatic Prelude and Fugue posted yesterday is that it's too hard for a stupid guy to follow counterpoint. And that guy pretends he's a professional musician.
Reason can never show why this is so, why this is good and appropriate for man, why things would not be better without suffering
The senseless death acquires a meaning only with the resurrection of Jesus to new life with God, as known by faith. Only in the light of this new life from God does it become clear that the death was not in vain. That God who seems to have left him without support in the public gaze, did in fact sustain him through death. That God had not forsaken him who felt God's abandonment as no one had ever felt it before. That human suffering and death thus acquires a meaning that man as he suffers and dies simply cannot produce himself, which can only be given to him by someone who is wholly other, by God himself.
Cannot the already completed suffering and death of this One also reveal a hidden meaning in the otherwise meaningless suffering and death of the many? Man's suffering remains suffering, death remains death, past suffering is not made not to have happened, present suffering is not rendered innocuous nor future suffering made impossible. Suffering and death remain as an attack on man's life. Suffering is not to be reinterpreted belittled or glorified. Nor is it to be accepted stoically, apathetically, unemotionally. And certainly, it should not be sought masochistically, making asceticism a source of pleasure. It is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures.
------------------------
Breaking in more directly as a political blogger.
Behind this last paragraph is a catalog of the pathological ways in which people become obsessed with and controlled by suffering and death, pain and, in much of the living out of that pathology, evil. If a lot of that pathology is attributable to religion - some, though not nearly as much of that attribution, fair - as much of it and more can be attributed to atheism. The malignant content of popular culture, such things as the gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire (abolished during the Christian period) bull fighting, bear and badger baiting, fox hunting, big game hunting, sexual sadism, the promotion of sado-masochism (one of the most disgusting and bizarre things held up as a libertarian "value" in modernism, Camus could see where that led even as the "feminist" girlfriend of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir made him a symbol of "freedom" of the twisted form that takes in so much of modernism.
In 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced "sadism" as a pathological term, and De Sade -- both the man and his writings -- became a subject for psychiatrists. The avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire dubbed him "the Divine Marquis" and "the freest spirit that ever lived," and later he became a hero to the Surrealist movement. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Albert Camus condemned De Sade as a spiritual forerunner of the Fascists and the Stalinists, but Michel Foucault credited him with giving the Western world "the possibility of transcending its reason in violence." De Sade's works are now published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, an honor reserved for acknowledged classics, and their prestige in academic and critical circles has never been higher.
And Camus is more than matched by today's ringing endorsement of any and all expressions of cruelty as "freedom," to be listed as a protected "right" as in the Supreme Court decision protecting sadistic pornography, even that in which prostitutes in high heals stomp small animals to death. In the atheist establishment of the late 20th century such sexual sadism as is guaranteed in the adult sexual use of children was considered to be such a value that the porn and pedophilia "rights" advocating editor of the Dutch magazine (pedophile ring) "Paidika" Vern Bullough was not only the "human sexuality editor" at the Regnery of American atheism, Prometheus, he was named a "Humanist of the Year" by the "Humanists". He was hardly the only figure in organized and cultural atheism who was an advocate of even that advocacy for the most exploitative and damaging use of innocent people.
And that doesn't even make a dent in the entirely secular, often opposed by religion, often not only defended by participated in promotion and protection of an obsession with and glorification of pain and evil. There is certainly the cult of death of the type of which Nazism was only one species, much of that deriving from Darwinism, especially as articulated by his foremost European champion, Ernst Haeckel. Marxism with its adoration of violence and killing, even when that is named by the euphemism "struggle" glories in pain and evil. Anarchism is guaranteed to result in little else as gangsters vie for control - do I need to remind you that the anarchist goddess Emma Goldman adored Nietzsche for his inversion of morals? And there are the more cold-blooded expressions of the same thing in the French, English, Scottish, American etc. enlightenments. I would say that the romantic obsession of gothic literature is also an expression of the same thing.*
When you remove morality that can't be articulated in science or mathematics from the discourse of freedom and rights, that is a guaranteed result. And that doesn't get to other pain, disease and death that is routinely involved in the pathological uses of sex, all of that intimately connected with the evils of inequality and the exercise of power by those who have power and strength through natural or entirely man-made means.
All of that could not possibly be more relevant to the question of evil, the question of pain and suffering, much of which the very same ideological atheists who use the question of pain and evil as a polemical weapon come down heavily on the side of the freedom of those who can use others to be free to use them. That is always, in my reading of history, going to be the main effect of the 18th century, enlightenment ideology, a few minor examples aside. The articulation of freedom in the anti-Christian ideology of that cultural movement and even in the nominal Christianity that sought to modify Christianity to be compatible with it on the terms of materialist scientism - see Jefferson, as an example - will come to support pain and evil for some and the guaranteed callousness of even those who suffer less as they enjoy their unequally endowed freedom and "rights".
---------------
In the light of the suffering and death of this One who senselessly suffers and dies only one thing can be said, but this is decisive; even manifestly senseless suffering and death can have a meaning, can acquire a meaning. A hidden meaning. Man cannot himself attach this meaning to suffering, but he can accept it in light of the perfect suffering and the dying of this One. A meaning is not given automatically no wishful thinking is to be satisfied, no glorification of suffering proclaimed, no tranquilizers provided and no cheap consolation offered. But a meaning is offered which can be freely accepted. Man has to decide. He can reject this -hidden - meaning; in spite, cynicism or despair. He can also accept it; in believing trust in him who endowed the senseless suffering and death of Jesus with meaning. Protest, rebellion or frustration then become superfluous. Despair is at an end.
The Christian, looking to the raising up of the One sufferer to life, has himself the resurrection not behind him, but before him. Suffering remains an evil. But with trust in God it is not absolute evil which - as in Buddhism - would have to be dissolved in a nirvana by denying the will to live. Only separation from God is absolute evil and apart from God evil has no meaning. Suffering belongs to man. It belongs in fact to the fullness of man's life in this world' even love is linked with suffering. Man is meant to reach life through suffering. Reason can never show why this is so, why this is good and appropriate for man, why things would not be better without suffering. But, with trust in God, in the certain ope of a revelation of its meaning at the consummation, it can be accepted as meaningful even at the present time in the light of the suffering, death and new life of Jesus.
As I have been pointing out this week, those who most often raise the "question of evil, pain, suffering" do so, not looking for an answer but to use against one very set definition of God as all powerful and all good at the same time. Of course they are asking that of people and, unsurpisingly, the people asked have never been able to come up with an answer that will satisfy those asking it - or themselves, by the way. It is no surprise to religious people that this is a hard question, the question of evil, in that articulation of it, is a mystery to those who hold the only possible framing in which the distinction between good and evil can be given a solid foundation, in the will of God, it's not as if people who accept that belief haven't been trying to find an answer to that from before the time the story of Job was invented. The book of Job is such a developed and sophisticated treatment of the problem that it, itself, must be the product of a long cultural history which must, as well as belief, contain both doubts and the unhelpful religiosity of Job's comforters.
But as I have pointed out, the atheist-materialist devotees of scientism, the anti-Christian-anti-Jewish-anti-Islamic hecklers have got nothing better. They've got nothing, that they promise nothing doesn't change that at all. The Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all of us into God, that consummation of the Creation in the end, have a plausible promise of understanding, an end to the suffering we know in this life. I would still mark that as a point for belief.
* I would not, though, say that the paintings of the great Boston painter, Hyman Bloom, of decaying corpses is the same thing though I don't think he realized how easily they could be taken as part of that same adoration of pain and death. His intention was mystical, showing through color the freeing of the soul, or so those who knew him said. It's a lesson in how dangerous it is to use the most extreme of symbols that could easily be mistaken in their intent. Those who copied him, especially later photographers had a malignant and sensational intent using similar imagery.
One of those I've critisized in the past, Andreas Serrano, shows that the visual artist who spends most of their time creating sensations by the use of content free visual content fraught with potent associations is liable to not be understood. His recent exhibition that uses Trump junk bought on E-bay has apparently not achieved what he intended it to. Though, if the description of his intent given in that article is accurate, he understands more of it than many others. Trump, like Serrano, is a creation of the mass media. The article points out,
Among the many objects with his visage, signature, or name (or his family’s and fellow con men and con women) are items spouting porn-y headlines, branded resort souvenirs, sponsorship logos, mementos of his failed businesses and golf courses, foreclosure notices he took out on others and that were taken out on him, and evidence of the never-ending coverage by his most important 30-year enabler: the press. See the numerous New York Post covers featuring racy stories about Trump’s divorces and bad business deals. See the Post’s “Best Sex I Ever Had”—supposedly a quote from his soon-to-be second wife, Marla Maples, that turned out to have been phoned in and spoken by Trump himself masquerading as a Trump Organization spokesperson named “John Barron.” (The reporter recorded it. Trump denied it was him. This is one sick fuck.) See his face on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Spy, TV Guide, People, GQ, Fortune, Palm Springs Life, The National Enquirer, this magazine, and many others, not to mention the endless promotion by television networks. Having taken it all in, I find it hard to feel that the collection merely tells the story of one man, no matter how flamboyantly fame-crazy, tasteless, ruthless, and full of entitlement and rage. It is a portrait of us, America.
When I saw the phrase "30-year enabler," I realized that for most of that 30 years the free press had given Hillary Clinton the exact opposite treatment, including the elite New York City press that was the most to blame for creating Trump. That is the entirely successful answer to the question of who created the evil that is Trump, the pain and suffering he has gloried in creating.
Cannot the already completed suffering and death of this One also reveal a hidden meaning in the otherwise meaningless suffering and death of the many? Man's suffering remains suffering, death remains death, past suffering is not made not to have happened, present suffering is not rendered innocuous nor future suffering made impossible. Suffering and death remain as an attack on man's life. Suffering is not to be reinterpreted belittled or glorified. Nor is it to be accepted stoically, apathetically, unemotionally. And certainly, it should not be sought masochistically, making asceticism a source of pleasure. It is to be fought by every human means - as must be made clearer later - in both the individual and the social sphere, in both persons and structures.
------------------------
Breaking in more directly as a political blogger.
Behind this last paragraph is a catalog of the pathological ways in which people become obsessed with and controlled by suffering and death, pain and, in much of the living out of that pathology, evil. If a lot of that pathology is attributable to religion - some, though not nearly as much of that attribution, fair - as much of it and more can be attributed to atheism. The malignant content of popular culture, such things as the gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire (abolished during the Christian period) bull fighting, bear and badger baiting, fox hunting, big game hunting, sexual sadism, the promotion of sado-masochism (one of the most disgusting and bizarre things held up as a libertarian "value" in modernism, Camus could see where that led even as the "feminist" girlfriend of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir made him a symbol of "freedom" of the twisted form that takes in so much of modernism.
In 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing introduced "sadism" as a pathological term, and De Sade -- both the man and his writings -- became a subject for psychiatrists. The avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire dubbed him "the Divine Marquis" and "the freest spirit that ever lived," and later he became a hero to the Surrealist movement. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Albert Camus condemned De Sade as a spiritual forerunner of the Fascists and the Stalinists, but Michel Foucault credited him with giving the Western world "the possibility of transcending its reason in violence." De Sade's works are now published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, an honor reserved for acknowledged classics, and their prestige in academic and critical circles has never been higher.
And Camus is more than matched by today's ringing endorsement of any and all expressions of cruelty as "freedom," to be listed as a protected "right" as in the Supreme Court decision protecting sadistic pornography, even that in which prostitutes in high heals stomp small animals to death. In the atheist establishment of the late 20th century such sexual sadism as is guaranteed in the adult sexual use of children was considered to be such a value that the porn and pedophilia "rights" advocating editor of the Dutch magazine (pedophile ring) "Paidika" Vern Bullough was not only the "human sexuality editor" at the Regnery of American atheism, Prometheus, he was named a "Humanist of the Year" by the "Humanists". He was hardly the only figure in organized and cultural atheism who was an advocate of even that advocacy for the most exploitative and damaging use of innocent people.
And that doesn't even make a dent in the entirely secular, often opposed by religion, often not only defended by participated in promotion and protection of an obsession with and glorification of pain and evil. There is certainly the cult of death of the type of which Nazism was only one species, much of that deriving from Darwinism, especially as articulated by his foremost European champion, Ernst Haeckel. Marxism with its adoration of violence and killing, even when that is named by the euphemism "struggle" glories in pain and evil. Anarchism is guaranteed to result in little else as gangsters vie for control - do I need to remind you that the anarchist goddess Emma Goldman adored Nietzsche for his inversion of morals? And there are the more cold-blooded expressions of the same thing in the French, English, Scottish, American etc. enlightenments. I would say that the romantic obsession of gothic literature is also an expression of the same thing.*
When you remove morality that can't be articulated in science or mathematics from the discourse of freedom and rights, that is a guaranteed result. And that doesn't get to other pain, disease and death that is routinely involved in the pathological uses of sex, all of that intimately connected with the evils of inequality and the exercise of power by those who have power and strength through natural or entirely man-made means.
All of that could not possibly be more relevant to the question of evil, the question of pain and suffering, much of which the very same ideological atheists who use the question of pain and evil as a polemical weapon come down heavily on the side of the freedom of those who can use others to be free to use them. That is always, in my reading of history, going to be the main effect of the 18th century, enlightenment ideology, a few minor examples aside. The articulation of freedom in the anti-Christian ideology of that cultural movement and even in the nominal Christianity that sought to modify Christianity to be compatible with it on the terms of materialist scientism - see Jefferson, as an example - will come to support pain and evil for some and the guaranteed callousness of even those who suffer less as they enjoy their unequally endowed freedom and "rights".
---------------
In the light of the suffering and death of this One who senselessly suffers and dies only one thing can be said, but this is decisive; even manifestly senseless suffering and death can have a meaning, can acquire a meaning. A hidden meaning. Man cannot himself attach this meaning to suffering, but he can accept it in light of the perfect suffering and the dying of this One. A meaning is not given automatically no wishful thinking is to be satisfied, no glorification of suffering proclaimed, no tranquilizers provided and no cheap consolation offered. But a meaning is offered which can be freely accepted. Man has to decide. He can reject this -hidden - meaning; in spite, cynicism or despair. He can also accept it; in believing trust in him who endowed the senseless suffering and death of Jesus with meaning. Protest, rebellion or frustration then become superfluous. Despair is at an end.
The Christian, looking to the raising up of the One sufferer to life, has himself the resurrection not behind him, but before him. Suffering remains an evil. But with trust in God it is not absolute evil which - as in Buddhism - would have to be dissolved in a nirvana by denying the will to live. Only separation from God is absolute evil and apart from God evil has no meaning. Suffering belongs to man. It belongs in fact to the fullness of man's life in this world' even love is linked with suffering. Man is meant to reach life through suffering. Reason can never show why this is so, why this is good and appropriate for man, why things would not be better without suffering. But, with trust in God, in the certain ope of a revelation of its meaning at the consummation, it can be accepted as meaningful even at the present time in the light of the suffering, death and new life of Jesus.
As I have been pointing out this week, those who most often raise the "question of evil, pain, suffering" do so, not looking for an answer but to use against one very set definition of God as all powerful and all good at the same time. Of course they are asking that of people and, unsurpisingly, the people asked have never been able to come up with an answer that will satisfy those asking it - or themselves, by the way. It is no surprise to religious people that this is a hard question, the question of evil, in that articulation of it, is a mystery to those who hold the only possible framing in which the distinction between good and evil can be given a solid foundation, in the will of God, it's not as if people who accept that belief haven't been trying to find an answer to that from before the time the story of Job was invented. The book of Job is such a developed and sophisticated treatment of the problem that it, itself, must be the product of a long cultural history which must, as well as belief, contain both doubts and the unhelpful religiosity of Job's comforters.
But as I have pointed out, the atheist-materialist devotees of scientism, the anti-Christian-anti-Jewish-anti-Islamic hecklers have got nothing better. They've got nothing, that they promise nothing doesn't change that at all. The Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all of us into God, that consummation of the Creation in the end, have a plausible promise of understanding, an end to the suffering we know in this life. I would still mark that as a point for belief.
* I would not, though, say that the paintings of the great Boston painter, Hyman Bloom, of decaying corpses is the same thing though I don't think he realized how easily they could be taken as part of that same adoration of pain and death. His intention was mystical, showing through color the freeing of the soul, or so those who knew him said. It's a lesson in how dangerous it is to use the most extreme of symbols that could easily be mistaken in their intent. Those who copied him, especially later photographers had a malignant and sensational intent using similar imagery.
One of those I've critisized in the past, Andreas Serrano, shows that the visual artist who spends most of their time creating sensations by the use of content free visual content fraught with potent associations is liable to not be understood. His recent exhibition that uses Trump junk bought on E-bay has apparently not achieved what he intended it to. Though, if the description of his intent given in that article is accurate, he understands more of it than many others. Trump, like Serrano, is a creation of the mass media. The article points out,
Among the many objects with his visage, signature, or name (or his family’s and fellow con men and con women) are items spouting porn-y headlines, branded resort souvenirs, sponsorship logos, mementos of his failed businesses and golf courses, foreclosure notices he took out on others and that were taken out on him, and evidence of the never-ending coverage by his most important 30-year enabler: the press. See the numerous New York Post covers featuring racy stories about Trump’s divorces and bad business deals. See the Post’s “Best Sex I Ever Had”—supposedly a quote from his soon-to-be second wife, Marla Maples, that turned out to have been phoned in and spoken by Trump himself masquerading as a Trump Organization spokesperson named “John Barron.” (The reporter recorded it. Trump denied it was him. This is one sick fuck.) See his face on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Spy, TV Guide, People, GQ, Fortune, Palm Springs Life, The National Enquirer, this magazine, and many others, not to mention the endless promotion by television networks. Having taken it all in, I find it hard to feel that the collection merely tells the story of one man, no matter how flamboyantly fame-crazy, tasteless, ruthless, and full of entitlement and rage. It is a portrait of us, America.
When I saw the phrase "30-year enabler," I realized that for most of that 30 years the free press had given Hillary Clinton the exact opposite treatment, including the elite New York City press that was the most to blame for creating Trump. That is the entirely successful answer to the question of who created the evil that is Trump, the pain and suffering he has gloried in creating.
"let me know when Jesus cures you" - Hate Mail
Certainly among the best poets in English that America has produced is the reclusive Emily Dickinson who, among other things posed the question of evil and a rather dim hope that the incomprehensible aspects of it will be revealed in the coming life.
I reason, Earth is short —
And Anguish — absolute —
And many hurt,
But, what of that?
I reason, we could die —
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?
I reason, that in Heaven —
Somehow, it will be even —
Some new Equation, given —
But, what of that?
If there is a better short presentation of the issues and the seeming fact that an answer doesn't appear to be had that will satisfy REASON that she is using to consider the questions, comparing that effort to balancing an equation, that such a rational and universally accepted answer, doesn't appear to be available, I'd like to know where that presentation is.
And, though she doesn't state it, she wants an effective answer - perhaps even one that will relive the anguish as well as doubts, something that seems to be secondary or absent in such ruminations and certainly is absent from the polemical use of the issue. Certainly in her other work Dickinson, flourishing in the middle of a dangerous century in which separation by death was a guaranteed common experience, practically makes separation by death the equivalent of hell, at least in human experience.
The attempted mixture of mathematical reasoning and faith in what was certainly a very Christian concept of heaven which reasoning is left empty, nothing more than a content free question at the end - the empty evacuation that is the core substance of anti-religious ideology - stands for me as a short version of what the 18th century Unitarianism of Priestley and Jefferson turns into, as well as all of the "enlightenment" effort to turn mathematical reasoning into the one and only and ultimately unsatisfying method of granting legitimacy to our thoughts about our experience.
I think it has that effect in real life because mathematics and science are inapt tools to deal with that most central and vital issue of human experience in its most acute forms, the forms that medicine cannot address, the decay that "the best Vitality cannot exceed". It is like using a hammer to try to manufacture carbon dioxide or isolate oxygen. Clearly after the long effort to try to use mathematics and the debased though more generally useful form of that which is science doesn't get you to an answer.
As I said, the experience of pain and evil is personal to every single animal who experiences, the most searingly personal experience even when it is the a second-hand experience of loss of a loved one. It is unreasonable to expect something that yields impersonal and universally acknowledged ideas, impersonal "truths" which are as cool as room temperature and devoid of emotional content, to be the one and only way to an answer to the question of suffering and evil. One of the greater dangers of science and mathematics is that it serves evil at least as well as it serves the good. The best that gives you is the useless question that Emily Dickinson realized is the result of that.
Emily Dickinson, somewhat isolated in her father's house except for her brief though excellent years of education at the Amherst Academy, was certainly heavily influenced by the transcendentalism that the Unitarianism in the eastern area of her state was devolving into. I'd say that she was one of the two best writers of that era though I'm not sure she would have considered herself to be part of any movement. She consulted one of the lesser figures of the movement for advice, got some bad advice and didn't follow it. She certainly was a better writer and clearer thinker than Emerson and less neurotic than Thoreau. Famously, she refused to be involved with the Calvinism that her family was steeped in and stopped going to church. Though I think the atheists laying claim to her could only be done if, as I suspect, they never read her poems or letters.
Her repeated question doesn't get an answer in the only framing that someone living in the light of the distant de-Calvinated Harvard of the middle 19th century would have thought was reliable because its answer depends on making a choice of what to believe on other grounds.
I can't say that my views of Unitarianism and other attempts to paste Christianity to mathematics and science have not suffered enormously in the past twenty years. That is matched by my increasing skepticism as to the status of the "enlightenment" and the romantic form of that which has dominated Western intellectualism since the 18th century. Oddly, the thing that did the most damage to my view of Unitarianism was listening to and thinking about what I heard presented when they had the Cambridge Forum on as a public radio show in Maine, straight from the heart of the Unitarian world in Cambridge.
If they hadn't managed to attach Universalism to it the Unitarian movement would probably have died out by now except as local efforts to maintain some of the beautiful churches which either were built as Unitarian churches or which devolved into them from Congregational or Presbyterian ones. It's sort of like the efforts to maintain the old Grange Halls as community activity centers when there aren't farmers or old folks left who want to keep the quasi-Masonic falderal going. Though there is some service-committee work that gets done by Unitarians sometimes, which is admirable but I don't think Unitarianism is going to do much of anything to solve the problem of evil. Just as I don't think you're ever going to reason your way out of it. You have to choose your way out of it.
I reason, Earth is short —
And Anguish — absolute —
And many hurt,
But, what of that?
I reason, we could die —
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?
I reason, that in Heaven —
Somehow, it will be even —
Some new Equation, given —
But, what of that?
If there is a better short presentation of the issues and the seeming fact that an answer doesn't appear to be had that will satisfy REASON that she is using to consider the questions, comparing that effort to balancing an equation, that such a rational and universally accepted answer, doesn't appear to be available, I'd like to know where that presentation is.
And, though she doesn't state it, she wants an effective answer - perhaps even one that will relive the anguish as well as doubts, something that seems to be secondary or absent in such ruminations and certainly is absent from the polemical use of the issue. Certainly in her other work Dickinson, flourishing in the middle of a dangerous century in which separation by death was a guaranteed common experience, practically makes separation by death the equivalent of hell, at least in human experience.
The attempted mixture of mathematical reasoning and faith in what was certainly a very Christian concept of heaven which reasoning is left empty, nothing more than a content free question at the end - the empty evacuation that is the core substance of anti-religious ideology - stands for me as a short version of what the 18th century Unitarianism of Priestley and Jefferson turns into, as well as all of the "enlightenment" effort to turn mathematical reasoning into the one and only and ultimately unsatisfying method of granting legitimacy to our thoughts about our experience.
I think it has that effect in real life because mathematics and science are inapt tools to deal with that most central and vital issue of human experience in its most acute forms, the forms that medicine cannot address, the decay that "the best Vitality cannot exceed". It is like using a hammer to try to manufacture carbon dioxide or isolate oxygen. Clearly after the long effort to try to use mathematics and the debased though more generally useful form of that which is science doesn't get you to an answer.
As I said, the experience of pain and evil is personal to every single animal who experiences, the most searingly personal experience even when it is the a second-hand experience of loss of a loved one. It is unreasonable to expect something that yields impersonal and universally acknowledged ideas, impersonal "truths" which are as cool as room temperature and devoid of emotional content, to be the one and only way to an answer to the question of suffering and evil. One of the greater dangers of science and mathematics is that it serves evil at least as well as it serves the good. The best that gives you is the useless question that Emily Dickinson realized is the result of that.
Emily Dickinson, somewhat isolated in her father's house except for her brief though excellent years of education at the Amherst Academy, was certainly heavily influenced by the transcendentalism that the Unitarianism in the eastern area of her state was devolving into. I'd say that she was one of the two best writers of that era though I'm not sure she would have considered herself to be part of any movement. She consulted one of the lesser figures of the movement for advice, got some bad advice and didn't follow it. She certainly was a better writer and clearer thinker than Emerson and less neurotic than Thoreau. Famously, she refused to be involved with the Calvinism that her family was steeped in and stopped going to church. Though I think the atheists laying claim to her could only be done if, as I suspect, they never read her poems or letters.
Her repeated question doesn't get an answer in the only framing that someone living in the light of the distant de-Calvinated Harvard of the middle 19th century would have thought was reliable because its answer depends on making a choice of what to believe on other grounds.
I can't say that my views of Unitarianism and other attempts to paste Christianity to mathematics and science have not suffered enormously in the past twenty years. That is matched by my increasing skepticism as to the status of the "enlightenment" and the romantic form of that which has dominated Western intellectualism since the 18th century. Oddly, the thing that did the most damage to my view of Unitarianism was listening to and thinking about what I heard presented when they had the Cambridge Forum on as a public radio show in Maine, straight from the heart of the Unitarian world in Cambridge.
If they hadn't managed to attach Universalism to it the Unitarian movement would probably have died out by now except as local efforts to maintain some of the beautiful churches which either were built as Unitarian churches or which devolved into them from Congregational or Presbyterian ones. It's sort of like the efforts to maintain the old Grange Halls as community activity centers when there aren't farmers or old folks left who want to keep the quasi-Masonic falderal going. Though there is some service-committee work that gets done by Unitarians sometimes, which is admirable but I don't think Unitarianism is going to do much of anything to solve the problem of evil. Just as I don't think you're ever going to reason your way out of it. You have to choose your way out of it.
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Dusan Bogdanovic, Chromatic Prelude and Fugue, Judicael Perroy, Guitar
It's been a while since I posted any of Bogdanovic's music, some of the finest music being composed these days.
An Answer Maybe The Answer
Of course Jesus' suffereing cannot be taken merely "existentially" as a symbol ("the fact of being dead") for our personal understanding of our existence as involved in death. Nor can it be understood purely "futuristically"" as promise of a utopian freedom from suffering, sin and death, still lying completely in the future. Nor finally highly "speculatively" as in inner-trinitarian (eternal) historyof suffering of a crucified god, enacted dialectical between God and God, God against God; Jesus being directly instead of indirectly identified with God and the distinction between Father and Son played down in favor or one divine "nature" or "substance" as understood by later Hellenistic or especially Latin speculation on the Trinity. [The footnote contains a reference to criticism of Moltmann's trinitarian interpretation of the history of salvation by J. B. Metz. I tried to access it but couldn't, perhaps others can. ]
The historical suffering and death of Jesus therefore may not be dissolved either by existential reduction or by utopian futurization, nor by lofty speculation on argumentative theology, but must constantly be narrated afresh as what it was. But, unless we are content with a scarcely helpful naive repetition of the biblical stories or even with a new acceptance of myths (like the descent into hell), historical-critical reflection perused with an eye on the present is also necessary. This sort of reflection has show us how Jesus' Passion was so shattering just because it was consistent with his whole action. From the standpoint of the official religion the condemnation of the heretic, pseudo-prophet, blasphemer and seducer of the people to an ignominious death was quite right and made it obvious that he had nothing to do with the true God. In his death he was forsaken by men and, as we saw, his abandonment by God was also unparalleled and boundless; left utterly alone by him on whose presence he had staked everything. It was all in vain; a pointless death, which cannot be made into a mystery.
One of the points in the Gospels which is most incomprehensible to anyone holding a traditional (medieval, monarchical) view of Jesus (at least as taught by much of Western and some of Eastern Christianity) is when in Mark and Matthew, he cries from the cross, Father why have you forsaken me?
Though there is a path towards understanding that in Paul's statement that Jesus was like us in all things but sin, it would mean that in the agony of a death by crucifixion, at the very height of the pain and suffering, what Hans Kung notes is a circumstance that brings us to experience the very point at which our life, our body, our human person, our minds comes into its most direct and agonizing connection with a universe which, as the materialist sees it, wants to destroy us, that has no meaning, goal or good. Jesus was the equal of others who were crucified, tortured, suffered the agony and fear and terror of death. I don't think Jesus would have said that merely to demonstrate a point to witnesses so it could be told, what they witnessed was the most personal and concrete of experiences of the person, Jesus. I think at that point Jesus was his most intensely human.
Some point out that the idea is the same as at the beginning of Psalm 22
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
I have cried desperately for help,
but still it does not come.
During the day I call to you, my God,
but you do not answer;
I call at night,
but get no rest.
Which is a pretty good statement of the problem of pain and evil and something which, since he quoted so many of the Psalms, Jesus would have had on the tip of his tongue.
If Jesus was consciously (or by attribution) calling attention to the Psalm is open to speculation. The Gospels in question don't give much to go on. In the Psalm the poet who lived on to finish his thought that starts out in a long doxology:
But you are enthroned as the Holy One,
the one whom Israel praises.
Our ancestors put their trust in you;
they trusted you, and you saved them.
They called to you and escaped from danger;
they trusted you and were not disappointed.
But Jesus - in a unified combination of the four Gospels - asks for a drink, is given wine in a sponge on a branch of hyssop - declares that it is finished or consummated or the debt has been paid (depending on how you would translate the Greek word), commends his soul into the hand of God and dies. It is unknowable if he was referencing this Psalm as a statement of his faith as that terrible experience happened to him.
What I think this shows is that in agony, at the point of death, even Jesus, "more than a prophet" could feel the very human fear, agony and experience of total abandonment which is the very human experience of evil. That is something that certainly many people experience as their own death. In that Jesus may be at his most human.
I don't think there would have been any reason for any of his followers or any of his supporters to have bothered to tell or record that, it's a common enough event in human experience and fear. In the context of their time and place and culture, it was an ignominious and common death meted out to the lowest among them. As Kung also points out, the only reason for giving an account of the Crucifixion is that the same people also experienced the Resurrection or heard from it by people they trusted to tell them the truth who said they experienced the risen Jesus. And there wouldn't be much of a reason for them to care about even that if they didn't also believe that his Resurrection was relevant to them and their loved ones. The deist god of deism isn't anyone anyone has to care about much, like the morality of material determinism, it is meaningless. It just happens. Yet both of those are considered preferable by the foremost wielders of the question of pain and evil for reasons their own ideology can't articulate.
But the record of the Crucifixion of Jesus might show why death might be necessary if there is a resurrection, that we must leave the state of being we are accustomed to in human experience, the experience we have through our merely physical bodies, for more than that. That is my answer, at least for now. It also, I will note, matches what those who experience "clinical death" and come back to tell of their experiences, in many cases, and other testimonial evidence. If you're holding out for science about any of this, you are either posing something you don't really believe or you are terrible naive about what science is and can do.
That would do nothing to lessen our experience of suffering but it would leave us the hope that even Jesus included in that cry of agony, that God, our Creator, our Parent, is still there even at that most horribly intense point of human physical exposure and experience. The only way for any of it to make any kind of sense, to be any kind of good - if you are going to have evil, you're not going to get away without having good - is by there being more than the ending in terrible, useless, meaningless death. If you leave it there, your questioning about pain and evil are as useless as the god of conveience invented by the atheists who call themselves "deists".
The historical suffering and death of Jesus therefore may not be dissolved either by existential reduction or by utopian futurization, nor by lofty speculation on argumentative theology, but must constantly be narrated afresh as what it was. But, unless we are content with a scarcely helpful naive repetition of the biblical stories or even with a new acceptance of myths (like the descent into hell), historical-critical reflection perused with an eye on the present is also necessary. This sort of reflection has show us how Jesus' Passion was so shattering just because it was consistent with his whole action. From the standpoint of the official religion the condemnation of the heretic, pseudo-prophet, blasphemer and seducer of the people to an ignominious death was quite right and made it obvious that he had nothing to do with the true God. In his death he was forsaken by men and, as we saw, his abandonment by God was also unparalleled and boundless; left utterly alone by him on whose presence he had staked everything. It was all in vain; a pointless death, which cannot be made into a mystery.
One of the points in the Gospels which is most incomprehensible to anyone holding a traditional (medieval, monarchical) view of Jesus (at least as taught by much of Western and some of Eastern Christianity) is when in Mark and Matthew, he cries from the cross, Father why have you forsaken me?
Though there is a path towards understanding that in Paul's statement that Jesus was like us in all things but sin, it would mean that in the agony of a death by crucifixion, at the very height of the pain and suffering, what Hans Kung notes is a circumstance that brings us to experience the very point at which our life, our body, our human person, our minds comes into its most direct and agonizing connection with a universe which, as the materialist sees it, wants to destroy us, that has no meaning, goal or good. Jesus was the equal of others who were crucified, tortured, suffered the agony and fear and terror of death. I don't think Jesus would have said that merely to demonstrate a point to witnesses so it could be told, what they witnessed was the most personal and concrete of experiences of the person, Jesus. I think at that point Jesus was his most intensely human.
Some point out that the idea is the same as at the beginning of Psalm 22
My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
I have cried desperately for help,
but still it does not come.
During the day I call to you, my God,
but you do not answer;
I call at night,
but get no rest.
Which is a pretty good statement of the problem of pain and evil and something which, since he quoted so many of the Psalms, Jesus would have had on the tip of his tongue.
If Jesus was consciously (or by attribution) calling attention to the Psalm is open to speculation. The Gospels in question don't give much to go on. In the Psalm the poet who lived on to finish his thought that starts out in a long doxology:
But you are enthroned as the Holy One,
the one whom Israel praises.
Our ancestors put their trust in you;
they trusted you, and you saved them.
They called to you and escaped from danger;
they trusted you and were not disappointed.
But Jesus - in a unified combination of the four Gospels - asks for a drink, is given wine in a sponge on a branch of hyssop - declares that it is finished or consummated or the debt has been paid (depending on how you would translate the Greek word), commends his soul into the hand of God and dies. It is unknowable if he was referencing this Psalm as a statement of his faith as that terrible experience happened to him.
What I think this shows is that in agony, at the point of death, even Jesus, "more than a prophet" could feel the very human fear, agony and experience of total abandonment which is the very human experience of evil. That is something that certainly many people experience as their own death. In that Jesus may be at his most human.
I don't think there would have been any reason for any of his followers or any of his supporters to have bothered to tell or record that, it's a common enough event in human experience and fear. In the context of their time and place and culture, it was an ignominious and common death meted out to the lowest among them. As Kung also points out, the only reason for giving an account of the Crucifixion is that the same people also experienced the Resurrection or heard from it by people they trusted to tell them the truth who said they experienced the risen Jesus. And there wouldn't be much of a reason for them to care about even that if they didn't also believe that his Resurrection was relevant to them and their loved ones. The deist god of deism isn't anyone anyone has to care about much, like the morality of material determinism, it is meaningless. It just happens. Yet both of those are considered preferable by the foremost wielders of the question of pain and evil for reasons their own ideology can't articulate.
But the record of the Crucifixion of Jesus might show why death might be necessary if there is a resurrection, that we must leave the state of being we are accustomed to in human experience, the experience we have through our merely physical bodies, for more than that. That is my answer, at least for now. It also, I will note, matches what those who experience "clinical death" and come back to tell of their experiences, in many cases, and other testimonial evidence. If you're holding out for science about any of this, you are either posing something you don't really believe or you are terrible naive about what science is and can do.
That would do nothing to lessen our experience of suffering but it would leave us the hope that even Jesus included in that cry of agony, that God, our Creator, our Parent, is still there even at that most horribly intense point of human physical exposure and experience. The only way for any of it to make any kind of sense, to be any kind of good - if you are going to have evil, you're not going to get away without having good - is by there being more than the ending in terrible, useless, meaningless death. If you leave it there, your questioning about pain and evil are as useless as the god of conveience invented by the atheists who call themselves "deists".
Hate Mail
As I said a couple of days ago, if atheists want to raise "the question of evil" as a weapon against religion, to encourage the choice of atheism, they don't get to do that halfway. They have to provide an alternative which is superior to what they want others to reject. Here's the passage from Hans Kung you seek to turn around against religion.
Of course the question constantly recurs, what sort of God is this incomprehensible, unconcerned, aloof from all suffering, who leaves man sitting, struggling, protesting, perishing in his immense desolation?
As Kung said of that:
But this question too can be reversed.
If you think atheism provides for an alternative to the description of God in that which is more of an answer to the question of pain, the question of evil, where is it?
Is it in Richard Dawkins or the myriads of atheists who would agree with his statement of atheist faith?
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
At least the incomprehensible God is said to, perhaps incomprehensibly to human discernment, posses good, to have purpose to command justice, to require the exact opposite of evil and pitiless indifference. So, atheism doesn't score a point there.
Is there some commandment to make moral choices, thus at least lessening pain in this life or even to take the pain of others seriously, as something we should care about in Jerry Coyne or those who would agree with this?
Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains. We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses.
If I thought he'd give me a straight answer, I would like to go through how Jerry Coyne, or any materialist determinist can tease out a "good of the masses" out of their ideological position. I don't think it can be done, and, as a superior scientist there when he said that proved, they won't buy it. It is remarkably in line with that passage mentioned here the other day from Danton's Death put in the mouth of the atheist hero Thomas Payne by Georg Buchner, if your nature is to be a nice guy you do that, if your nature is to be Adolf Eichmann, you do that.
As an aside, never, ever, in a jillion years think that someone who calls the human population other than their elite "the masses" is ever going to do anything except try to use them as a natural resource for their own ends. Under materialism everyone is material for use or disposal.
How about the nuclear physicist whose snarky put-down of the moral dimension of religion has made him a minor idol in the pop-atheist hierarchy - even inspiring a D list rock band -Steven Weinberg? Whose discourse dissolving moral responsibility I went to the bother of transcribing from the Youtube of Sean Carroll's weekend camp for famous atheists a few years back, where I got Coyne on morality from, as well.
... There are competing things which are all good like happiness and truth. For example, we sacrifice some happiness when we accept the truth that we're not going to have life after death. Should we tell other people that they're not going to live after they die? It probably will reduce their happiness on the other hand truth has a value of its own how do you balance truth and happiness there isn't any algorithm for balancing that. I think you just have to accept that there is no postulate that allows you to judge how much happiness you're willing to give up for how much truth.
Even people who accept all this will say, all right we're not going to agree on what is the good but at least we can agree on the fundamental principle of morality that something like Rawls original condition [I think he meant "Original Position"] that we should not treat other people worse than we treat ourselves. Rebecca [Goldstein] was saying something like this that everyone equally deserves whatever is good, happiness or whatever it is. That's not the way I feel either. And I think it's probably not the way most of you feel if you think about it because. I could probably increase the total amount of happiness by making my family live on rice and beans and live in a one room apartment and just barely keep enough money to keep us alive and healthy and send all of the rest of the money to poor parts of the world where it would do to me. I'm not going to do that I'm not going to .... and I well, I'm not confessing immorality. I'm saying that my moral feelings tell me I should be loyal to my family.
Similarly when my university tries to recruit a bright young star in physics I suppose I could calculate, well, he could do more good for some other university and the greater good would imply we shouldn't go after him let some other university go after him. I don't care, I care about my university I'm loyal to my university similarly. So there loyalty is a value it's not an absolute value I wouldn't cause, like Edward the Third, I wouldn't cause the hundred years war to advance the interests of my family. But it is one of these things where we have no algorithm for balancing loyalty against distributive justice.
And I think we have to live with that. I think we have to live with the fact that although we can reason and try to uncover what our moral feelings are. And if we get into that I think a very good example would be arguing about abortion ... maybe I'll come back to that in the discussion.
We can reason, the reasoning uncovers how we feel morally and perhaps allows us to identify areas of agreement so we can cooperate with each other and bring about what we want.
I think in the end we have to live with not having a moral philosophy that really works in a decisive way. I think we have to live the unexamined life. I think this is part of the tragedy of the human condition just like we have no absolute way of determining that Mozart is better than Led Zeppelin we feel it but it's not something that we can argue, we can rationally show. We have to live with the fact that... this came up yesterday.... when we discover the fundamental laws of physics from which all in some sense follows, that all other principles follow, we won't know why they're true. This is something that we have to accept, that the position of human beings is tragic and part of the tragedy, that there is no way of deciding moral issues on the basis of - well there is no way of deciding moral postulates which should govern our actions. And in fact we don't have moral postulates that govern our actions when we behave morally.
That is vapid mush which I can assure you will do absolutely nothing to solve the question of evil, or pain - apart from, maybe, Steve Weinberg's nearest and dearest and HIS university department.
That is what comes of making the choices that atheists, especially ideological, actively anti-religious make. And they make it for various reasons. Let's be honest about this, a huge part of that is because affluent people don't like to give their stuff to poor people, they don't like the egalitarian aspects of Christianity or Judaism but, since the revelation of the Shoah, it has not been as fashionable to attack Judaism as it still is to attack Christianity - no matter what lie you tell as you do so.
Some of it, though not as much, is a result of insisting that reality is in line with materialistic scientism when those not only do absolutely nothing to come up with an explanation of the question of pain, as we can see above, they exacerbate the problem. The worst regimes of the 20th century were materialistic in their ideologies, Marxist in those who explained themselves by Marxism, Darwinist for the Nazis and various facists though all of those regimes were far more based in the merely vulgar materialism that is most universally named "gangsterism". I think that the second thing that that atheist avatar of atheist ersatz moralism, Weinberg named as the only legitimate focus of his moral discernment, his university department, shares a bit in common with a gang mob.
Of course the question constantly recurs, what sort of God is this incomprehensible, unconcerned, aloof from all suffering, who leaves man sitting, struggling, protesting, perishing in his immense desolation?
As Kung said of that:
But this question too can be reversed.
If you think atheism provides for an alternative to the description of God in that which is more of an answer to the question of pain, the question of evil, where is it?
Is it in Richard Dawkins or the myriads of atheists who would agree with his statement of atheist faith?
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
At least the incomprehensible God is said to, perhaps incomprehensibly to human discernment, posses good, to have purpose to command justice, to require the exact opposite of evil and pitiless indifference. So, atheism doesn't score a point there.
Is there some commandment to make moral choices, thus at least lessening pain in this life or even to take the pain of others seriously, as something we should care about in Jerry Coyne or those who would agree with this?
Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains. We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses.
If I thought he'd give me a straight answer, I would like to go through how Jerry Coyne, or any materialist determinist can tease out a "good of the masses" out of their ideological position. I don't think it can be done, and, as a superior scientist there when he said that proved, they won't buy it. It is remarkably in line with that passage mentioned here the other day from Danton's Death put in the mouth of the atheist hero Thomas Payne by Georg Buchner, if your nature is to be a nice guy you do that, if your nature is to be Adolf Eichmann, you do that.
As an aside, never, ever, in a jillion years think that someone who calls the human population other than their elite "the masses" is ever going to do anything except try to use them as a natural resource for their own ends. Under materialism everyone is material for use or disposal.
How about the nuclear physicist whose snarky put-down of the moral dimension of religion has made him a minor idol in the pop-atheist hierarchy - even inspiring a D list rock band -Steven Weinberg? Whose discourse dissolving moral responsibility I went to the bother of transcribing from the Youtube of Sean Carroll's weekend camp for famous atheists a few years back, where I got Coyne on morality from, as well.
... There are competing things which are all good like happiness and truth. For example, we sacrifice some happiness when we accept the truth that we're not going to have life after death. Should we tell other people that they're not going to live after they die? It probably will reduce their happiness on the other hand truth has a value of its own how do you balance truth and happiness there isn't any algorithm for balancing that. I think you just have to accept that there is no postulate that allows you to judge how much happiness you're willing to give up for how much truth.
Even people who accept all this will say, all right we're not going to agree on what is the good but at least we can agree on the fundamental principle of morality that something like Rawls original condition [I think he meant "Original Position"] that we should not treat other people worse than we treat ourselves. Rebecca [Goldstein] was saying something like this that everyone equally deserves whatever is good, happiness or whatever it is. That's not the way I feel either. And I think it's probably not the way most of you feel if you think about it because. I could probably increase the total amount of happiness by making my family live on rice and beans and live in a one room apartment and just barely keep enough money to keep us alive and healthy and send all of the rest of the money to poor parts of the world where it would do to me. I'm not going to do that I'm not going to .... and I well, I'm not confessing immorality. I'm saying that my moral feelings tell me I should be loyal to my family.
Similarly when my university tries to recruit a bright young star in physics I suppose I could calculate, well, he could do more good for some other university and the greater good would imply we shouldn't go after him let some other university go after him. I don't care, I care about my university I'm loyal to my university similarly. So there loyalty is a value it's not an absolute value I wouldn't cause, like Edward the Third, I wouldn't cause the hundred years war to advance the interests of my family. But it is one of these things where we have no algorithm for balancing loyalty against distributive justice.
And I think we have to live with that. I think we have to live with the fact that although we can reason and try to uncover what our moral feelings are. And if we get into that I think a very good example would be arguing about abortion ... maybe I'll come back to that in the discussion.
We can reason, the reasoning uncovers how we feel morally and perhaps allows us to identify areas of agreement so we can cooperate with each other and bring about what we want.
I think in the end we have to live with not having a moral philosophy that really works in a decisive way. I think we have to live the unexamined life. I think this is part of the tragedy of the human condition just like we have no absolute way of determining that Mozart is better than Led Zeppelin we feel it but it's not something that we can argue, we can rationally show. We have to live with the fact that... this came up yesterday.... when we discover the fundamental laws of physics from which all in some sense follows, that all other principles follow, we won't know why they're true. This is something that we have to accept, that the position of human beings is tragic and part of the tragedy, that there is no way of deciding moral issues on the basis of - well there is no way of deciding moral postulates which should govern our actions. And in fact we don't have moral postulates that govern our actions when we behave morally.
That is vapid mush which I can assure you will do absolutely nothing to solve the question of evil, or pain - apart from, maybe, Steve Weinberg's nearest and dearest and HIS university department.
That is what comes of making the choices that atheists, especially ideological, actively anti-religious make. And they make it for various reasons. Let's be honest about this, a huge part of that is because affluent people don't like to give their stuff to poor people, they don't like the egalitarian aspects of Christianity or Judaism but, since the revelation of the Shoah, it has not been as fashionable to attack Judaism as it still is to attack Christianity - no matter what lie you tell as you do so.
Some of it, though not as much, is a result of insisting that reality is in line with materialistic scientism when those not only do absolutely nothing to come up with an explanation of the question of pain, as we can see above, they exacerbate the problem. The worst regimes of the 20th century were materialistic in their ideologies, Marxist in those who explained themselves by Marxism, Darwinist for the Nazis and various facists though all of those regimes were far more based in the merely vulgar materialism that is most universally named "gangsterism". I think that the second thing that that atheist avatar of atheist ersatz moralism, Weinberg named as the only legitimate focus of his moral discernment, his university department, shares a bit in common with a gang mob.
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