I'm curious to know who it is who reads these posts. I know someone does, having gotten the occasional e-mail (thinkingcriminal@gmail.com), and even the occasional comment.
Last week I looked at the blog stats, something I'd sworn to never do and was surprised to see I do really get readers. As I don't have the kind of blog that has a commenting community and some of my pieces are kind of long and involved, I'm wondering who reads it and what they get from it. Whether or not I find out, it probably won't change what gets posted, I usually write things based on what seems important that isn't covered elsewhere. Often it's a way for me to figure things out. There isn't anything like putting your thoughts down and reviewing them to bring your thinking into some kind of order.
Whoever you are, I hope you're finding it worth while to read these things. It's got to feel like work, at times. Sorry for the editing. I'm not very good at that.
I was drawn here by a search for Lou Harrison, whom I'd heard only recently.
ReplyDeleteYour forthright defense of religion against attacks from people trapped in the prevailing scientistic mindset appealed to me.
What's rapidly depleting my interest is:
1) The lack of apparent concern with actual religion beyond its organizational embodiments and its political uses.
2) Long rants against well-established, even no-brainer scientific principles based on their unsavory origins, their common popular misinterpretations, & their frequent misuse for shoring up anti-human political policies.
3) A good mind too much on a war footing. "The war between Good and Evil is the sickness of the mind."
Yes, people often are stupid. Pointing that out doesn't make them (or us) smarter.
"...
using the medical model of sin
we of the Staff are attempting
to bring all patients to salvation
meanwhile I'm feeling odd myself
I had hoped, by the end
of this poem, to remember
and make more sense of things
but poems end; I'm still here
traveling toward enlightenment
another episode in
a continuing series."
Peace. (I may be back. Have some writing of my own to do.)
I don't force anyone to read what I write. If my addressing widespread misunderstanding of what science is and what it isn't, what science can do and what it can't, etc. those things so entrenched in the habits of thought of, not only non-scientists but many, many professional scientists takes a long piece, I'll write a long piece.
ReplyDeleteThe same for the follies of materialist, scientistic atheism and anti-religion. Those are centuries in the making habits of thought. I think too many people have either not responded to those misconceptions or responded inadequately to them.
I am more familiar with the history and literature of Quakerism and, frankly, I think, especially among those in the North East of the United States make a fetish out of not asserting the truth in favor of niceness. George Fox and his early followers certainly didn't do that, which is why so many of them got thrown in jail and worse. I think the criticism of Elias Hicks someone made, that his quasi-unitarianism would lead to a gradual decay of Quakerism might have been both right and wrong, Quakerism was already devolving into the quietism (not to mention prosperity) that made it less effective as it continued, much of the effective abolitionism begun so well in the 18th century was more effectively waged in the 19th century by Congregationalists.
I'm kind of surprised that you accuse me of being concerned mostly with "its organizational embodiments and its political uses" because I think if you read all of what I've written you'd see a. I'm skeptical that its "organizational embodiements" as those are found today will continue - read what I wrote about the emerging phenomena of Roman Catholic Womenpriests, intentional eucharistic communities, etc.
B. I've grown in the course of writing these pieces to believe that politics which isn't an expression of religious principles as found in the Jewish-Christian-(perhaps Islamic) and other religions which have the right kind of moral basis will be an oppressive gangsterism that leads to the destruction of egalitarian democracy. I hold that any so-called democracy which is not egalitarian is not legitimate and will not endure as a democracy and I have repeatedly pointed out that in no other place than religious belief can that argument be made (I wrote a few pieces sometime in the last two months on Marilynne Robinson's question of how Jefferson's formula of the existence of rights, equally endowed by God and the consequences of that in legitimate government could be said in other than religious terms. I stated that as a challenge for my detractors to come up with a secular articulation of those ideas without which, I am entirely convinced, egalitarian democracy will not last long as I think we are witnessing it dissolve away in secularism now.
That politics as a moral practice is inescapably dependent on finding the religious basis of it is a realistic necessity of defending and promoting egalitarian democracy, government of, by and FOR The People is nothing I'm going to apologize for. That kind of wishy-washy practice of the post-war period among liberalish college grads has led to the destruction of what people like Martin Luther King jr., Diana Nash, The Black Churches, Cesar Chavez, etc. risked and sacrificed their lives for as "lifestyle" issues proved more interesting to them than the exigencies of living a moral life according to The Law, the Gospels and the Prophets.
That, in short, is a description of why I write most of what I do. I'm not apologizing for it.