Recently I've had some time and been cleaning out my files. I found a two year old English Comp. essay from before I made up my mind about god, but after I quit going to church. The assignment was supposed to be about a personal experience related to a hotly debated subject and I was to convince the audience that my actions/choices were correct. It was basically supposed to test our understanding of ethos as a tool of argument and I naturally chose the subject of religion and why it's bad. Anyway, after a little polish, I thought I'd share.
Jesus On The Cross
I grew up in a very Catholic family, and so, naturally I grew up to be a very Catholic person. This was reinforced by my family being so close-knit and comfortable together. We rarely go longer than three weeks without seeing one another and as much as we're together, so our meetings are permeated with religion. Every meal at grandma's house is begun with the familiar family prayer. Someone who is said to be a "friend of the family" is a friend from church. Everyone's house bares weaved Lenten palm fronds and attending mass on holidays is as common as bread rolls at the dinner table. It has always been taken for granted that we were Catholics in the same way we call ourselves German. It is an unstressed but inseparable connection. Those who don't attend mass regularly are no less Catholic for their decision than they would be German if they denounced Germany. Simply belonging to the family is enough to ensure your everlasting place in the Catholic community.
Community is an apt word for it, because I never just went to church regularly. Being a part of the church was a big portion of my life and I spent a lot of time there. I took classes, volunteered on various projects, went to parties, met friends, taught classes, attended Girl Scouts, listened to lectures on politics, and I even received a scholarship from the church. It was the hub of my life around which all my family, friends, and interests revolved. Most importantly, it was a calm intellectual place where I could think about my life and decide what I want. Peacefulness and comfort radiated from the walls and made me feel safe. I sometimes just spent afternoons lost in my thoughts there.
And so, I was fascinated with the church, its teachings, and its functions. I listened intently to the father's homilies, making it a point to take notes and ask questions. I involved myself in every aspect of the church in attempts to understand it better. I was entrusted with duties in the service of the church which normally went to much older people. I was even chosen as a delegate to the bishop's first Diocesan Synod for Phoenix, in which we were researching an overhaul of diocesan methodology in order to advise the bishop.
And so for a few years I spent my time at church casually introspective, until my Confirmation began to loom and I knew I had to get serious. You see, in the Catholic Church there are certain spiritual rites that are said to elevate one's soul. They are a very serious matter and among them are Baptism, Communion, Reconciliation, Confirmation, and Marriage. Now Confirmation is when a young adult, being now an adult, consciously decides to continue as a Catholic. It's a spiritual commitment, blessed by the bishop himself, and is generally preceded by a year of contemplation on the matter. So at this critical crossroads, when I was charged with deciding my spiritual fate, I asked myself the one question I had been avoiding in all my past years of happy ponderings. Do I believe in God? Tricky.
What I finally did just before my Confirmation is separate from that question two concepts: trusting in a god to guide my life and believing that God exists as an actual entity. And once I had made that simple distinction, the question was suddenly very easy. I don't believe in god, though that doesn't mean he couldn't possibly exist. The second part is irrelevant because nobody can know if god exists, and whether he does or not has minimal bearing on my life. What I really mean by claiming that I don't believe in god is that I don't have faith in him. I don't put my trust in any superior being and I can't remember a time when I ever have. When I'm scared or alone, I look to myself not god.
Since I made that decision I have considered the church not a place of worship, because I don't worship god, but a place to gather my thoughts and study theology as a philosophy of life. This is a necessary part of anyone's life, one can't think or do anything without knowing why or how. Humans need a cohesive philosophy of how life works so they can fit themselves in it. It's a compass, a moral compass, and with this realization about myself I proudly and happily went through with my Confirmation with every intention of committing to Catholicism, even if I am indifferent to god. So let it be eminently clear that when I finally did break with the church, it was over irreconcilable philosophical differences, and has never had anything to do with god.
I went to church weekly and participated in my various activities, just as I always had. In fact, I did so with much more vigor and enthusiasm than I had before. I really looked forward to church because now I not only considered what the religion was teaching, I was also deeply concerned with my own ideas and developing those. And I didn't keep my thoughts to myself, I talked with long-time parishioners and the priests, and I wrote letters to higher clergy begging advice and clarification on certain aspects of Catholicism, and sharing with them my own thoughts. Some viewed me as a bit of an eccentric, but mostly I was vibrantly aware of my own ming and I did everything I could to make religion work for me in the way I thought it should. I think a lot of people were able to appreciate that, so rather than receiving a great deal of criticism for my probing, I was encouraged to continue my "inward journey" and was looked upon by most members of the church as oddly mature for my age. So I continued to listen to the Father's preaching, while bearing in mind that Noah didn't really fight the great flood, and Jonah wasn't really swallowed by a whale, and it didn't really matter if god existed. I took what I wanted from the stories and the sermons and the rest - well, that was all very childish, like the Easter Bunny.
It was then then, when I began separating the morals from the myth, that I became interested explicitly in morals for the first time. What was meant by those adventuresome stories, and how did they relate to form a standard for living. One auspicious Sunday I was seated in the cozy pews, listening to a traveling priest recite the story of Abraham who was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The story bothered me a little because I couldn't immediately see the moral behind such an obvious absurdity. I thought about it while the familiar narrative was being replayed, then leaned over and whispered to mom, "killing his son on an alter is a symbol of the great devotion it takes to implement god's word [read morals] in your life, right?" She quietly assented. Well, that was fine, I had first hand experience on the kind of conscious effort it takes to consistently apply rules you've decided are good in your life; there are always times when it seems so hard to be good, and so easy to fudge a little. But one can't just acclaim morals to be good and then not follow them, that's hypocritical and ridiculously useless.
The Father surprised me when he spoke of "sacrifice" and the "betterment of others" in his homily, rather than devotion to your own morals. He called us to "perform our moral duty as Catholics," which he described as working hard to be prosperous so one could provide for our family, our community and our needy. He described personal success and prosperity as the best means to self-sacrifice, that we should work for the poor. Supposedly, a successful man is to be the mule of the failure. I was repulsed by this man's view of brotherly "compassion", that I should bear a yoke in order to feed a demand for my work, sweat and blood for the benefit of the rest of humanity. And he was so very explicit in this manner, there seem to be no way to get past what he was saying. Why, I wondered, in order to be a good Catholic, should I not expect to reap the benefits of my own work, but to work continually for others? Then, he resounded, not only should we work for others, we are also "obligated to love all of our fellow man". Such a command turns love and respect, the highest honours we can give, into stuff as common as clay for any person who might happen to demand it of you. To do so defiles any value one's love and honour could give, because you have placed the unjust on the level of just in your heart. Can you imagine, for someone to say that they love you, not because you're worth being loved, but because you exist? How much lower could you feel? That isn't love, that isn't compassion, that is the systematic destruction of love and compassion. I was very upset by this experience, and didn't know what to think of it.
During the following week, I tried not to think of it altogether. I did my school work, read books, played computer games, went out with friends, and at all cost did not think about that sermon.
The next Sunday I dismissed the whole ordeal as the rantings of an insane priest. I figured there must be a few of them around, and I was bound to run into one sooner or later.
I walked into the warmly lit lobby, greeted by acquaintances, feeling fine again. I performed by usual routine of checking the sign-up sheets, making sure all the lay ministry jobs were taken care of, and chatting with friends before I found a seat with my family. I was sitting in the middle section near the front waiting for the father to begin with the familiar welcoming prayer and as I stood up I noticed the giant statue of Jesus on the cross hanging above the alter in front of me. I had never paid much attention to it because it is such a fundamental part of the church, it's always there, so I guess I never saw it clearly. But that day I noticed Jesus was writhing in agony, his spine twisted and his head bent upward. He had blood, sweat, and tears beading down his chest and his mouth was opened in mock scream. It shocked me how violent and gruesome the figure was compared to the calm of the church, the muffled prayers, and the serene bent faces. For the first time I looked at the cross and I didn't see Jesus and His Amazing Adventures, I saw a man gasping, dying, bleeding, groaning his life out in pain. And I saw everyone around me worshiping it, bowing down to it, begging it to forgive them while they pounded in the stakes. It occurred to me that this is the model of the perfect man to them, and they call for his destruction as a means to save everyone else. We are taught in Sunday School that not only did Jesus die on the cross, it was necessary for him to do so, that to appease out sins one man, the perfect man, must be slaughtered. And this was to be my model? This was how I was to live a virtuous life, continually strive to be great, and toss my greatness as alms to save the poor of wealth and spirit.
I left the church and declared myself atheist two weeks later, I did so out of sincere moral outrage, and with the fullest awareness of saving my soul.
The reason the system works is because it's based on hundreds of years of rationalizing. It rests on the thousands of brilliant men and women that tried to make a bad thing work for them in the way they thought it should, without ever considering that they could do so much better without the weight of dogma on their shoulders and with the ability to think for themselves.
Ezra Levant was a Canadian publisher of The Western Standard who printed the Danish cartoons. Recently he was called to appear before Alberta's Human Rights Commission for an interrogation of these actions. He has kindly provided us via his website with video footage of said farce. He also has a talent for speaking directly and succinctly on the issue, and so I give you these, reasons why I'm rooting for Levant:
It's not these cartoons that create hatred, it's radical muslims who blow things up
You're a thug, your whole company's a thug
I don't grant you at all the right to sit in judgment of whether or not I'm reasonable. I'll grant that to my advertisers. I'll grant that to my readers. I'll grant that to friends and people in the social society who may marginalize me or shun me if I'm too rude, or who may like me if I'm their advocate, or who may oppose me or to debate me.
How ironic that something that calls itself the human rights commission is the one corroding those rights.
[Officer McGovern responds] You're entitled to your opinions, that's for sure.
[Levant sallies] Uh, I wish that were the fact.
I should preface by saying I'm a fan of David Harriman. He's a physicist and teacher at the Van Damme Academy. Among many articles/lectures available through the Ayn Rand Bookstore and two forthcoming books, he published a lecture series based upon his teachings at the Academy. I've been eying his "Fundamentals of Physical Science" for a while, though the price tag scares me. But now, he's offering an hour introduction to the series for free! So to get a better idea of his lecture style and to decide if $900 is a fair price for the series I downloaded the lecture and these are my notes on what he says are the greatest scientific discoveries and why he thinks so. My purpose is to give myself some context as a starting point for when I decide to read more in depth about each of these characters, because I find such context makes it easier to integrate the biographies of particular individuals with the rest of my knowledge of history.
Thales [~600 BC] - He starts out, properly I think, with epistemology and the development of the methods of scientific inquiry, though I'm a bit surprised Lucretius didn't make the cut. Thales "discovered natural science" by postulating that "everything is water". Now this turned out to be wrong, but: (1.) Thales presents a natural, physically observable, explanation of matter and (2.) attempted to integrate particular facts, instead of accepting them at face value, into more fundamental truths.
Aristarchus [~280 BC] - Figured the dimensions of the Moon and it's relation to the Earth based upon careful observation and basic math when it was taken for granted that such distant bodies were unknowable to man. In this way Aristarchus "gave people the idea that man really can understand the universe".
Archimedes [~240 BC] - He was the greatest pioneer of mathematical physics, or math applied to physical problems. Some examples: buoyancy/water displacement and law of levers. He demonstrated how narrow truths modeled mathematically can help you to understand aspects of the physical world.
Galileo [~1600] - Harriman cites Galileo's law of pendulums as his greatest discovery, though it's a simple physical phenomenon and not his work in astronomy, because it uses mathematical physics, like Archimedes, to understand moving bodies, which is something the Greeks didn't understand how to do. This law lead to Galileo's law of free fall which lead to Newton ...
Newton [~1666] - Newton's law of universal gravitation which infamously started with a falling apple. What's so great about this discovery is that Newton could take that one simple principle and, having developed a new branch of mathematics, could work out in detail all the implications including the orbit and revolution of planets, the motion of tides, and an apple falling.
Newton [~1669] - His experimental work in optics lead him to be the first to associate wavelengths with visible colors and develop mathematical formulas to describe the phenomenon. This was previously an entirely unquantifiable field and his discoveries gave birth to the laser and imaging/display technology we have today.
Galvani/Volta [~1800] - Both discovered that electrons move in currents that can be harnessed to do work in a battery. The significance of this discovery is again motion. Coulomb's work in electrostatics made way for currents, but it is really understanding how currents move and do work that technology advances.
Faraday [1831] - With his development of electric field theory and the link to electricity and magnetism his most important discovery was then the relationship between electricity and motion, how they may induce one another, and how to make it do work in the first electric generator.
Maxwell [1864] - Who discovered the relationship between electromagnetism and light, or how light is an EM field, by defining the mathematics of Faraday's discovery and working out the implications.
Rutherford [~1910] - His discovery of the basic structure of the atom opened the entire field of atomic physics for generations to explore.
Every year, once a year, I go back to Arizona where I was raised to spend Thanksgiving with family. I have an interest in our family history and I've recently realized what a great source the older generations are for family history, especially grandma. So, I've stepped up the pace in my casual lifelong interest and now it's a full-fledged search. Here's some pictures I got copies of over my most recent Thanksgiving vacation:
This is my father at a wedding when he and mom were dating. This is the one of the youngest picture I've ever seen of him and I'm struck by his resemblance in this photo to me.
By the way, if any of my more net-savvy relatives happen upon this post and share my enthusiasm could you please send some of your own photos and stories. I'd really appreciate it.
During the course of my reading in Calculus I came across this interesting little anectdote. After a cursory search I'm happy to relate it here because I've always enjoyed the sense that words make.
"Minute" is shortened from the Latin phrase pars minuta prima which translates first small part [of an hour]. It's the first sexagesimal division of an hour, which was the common base unit in ancient times. "Second" is from pars minuta secunda [second small part]. It's no coincidence then that the term for our small moment of time, the second, is similar to the number two, it's the second order of smallness in dividing an hour.
You know, I don't really like the show, but Alec Baldwin's character is so fantastic and hilarious. It's worth it just to watch him.
Liz: It was terrible, I went to her apartment. I don't think she has a toilet. I saw my future, Jack.
Jack: Never go with a hippie to a second location.
Traditionally the Vikings raided the northern coasts of Europe, rarely moving very far inland and generally remaining mobile looters. But in the early 10th century King Charles III [the Simple] of France made a deal with once such Viking lord who had been trolling his northern coasts, Rollo of dubious yet certainly nordic origins. The King of France gave Rollo a large bit of land in northern France on which to settle and, in return, Rollo declared fiefdom to France, mostly stopped looting French land, and protected the northern coasts against other Vikings. Charles the Simple's strategy worked, Rollo and his men settled the region well, inter-marrying with the locals and developing a mixture of French and Norse for a language. They became known as the Normans [Norsemen] and their land Normandy. Viking raids on English coasts continued into the late 10th century when King Ethelred the Unready of England [which had only united within the previous century or so] married Emma the daughter of Richard I [the Fearless] Duke of Normandy [and grandson of Rollo] in an attempt to get his own Viking protection.
After the terrible reign of Ethelred the rule of England was captured by a Danish line of kings and for almost three decades England was a part of the Danish empire while Emma's sons by Ethelred were exiled to Normandy. While there Edward II [the Confessor] developed an affinity for Norman society. When the Danish line ended he was restored to the throne, however his Norman sympathies and favoritism of Norman nobles put him in conflict with the powerful Anglo-Saxon earls of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria [collectively, the better part of the English Kingdom]. In 1066 Edward died without an heir. Harold Godwinson Earl of Wessex with the authority of the Witenagemot, and by blood relation to Emma William the Duke of Normandy, and by a specious claim Harald III King of Norway - all claimed the throne of England and had armies ready to fight for that claim.
First, Tosig Godwinson, the exiled brother of Harold, attacked England from the southeast. Harold drove him north north where he was beaten by the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria. He retreated into Scotland and then met up with King Harald's forces who began their attack on the north. Mercia and Northumbria were defeated at the Battle of Fulford and King Harald took up residence in York. All the while, Harold Godwinson waited with an army on the south coast for William. But with his supplies dwindling through the wait, he dismissed his army and moved north gathering troops on the way. Tosig and King Harald were taken by surprise and killed by Harold at the Battle of Stamford Bridge and Harold's army was left severely weakened.
During this time William had been gathering troops from all over France by promises of English lands and entitlements. He was delayed in setting sail by bad weather and thus missed Harold who had been waiting with his army. William arrived in Pevensey, Sussex and set up base [so chosen because it was the personal property of Harold] days after the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Harold ran south at the news with his depleted and weary army and met William at the Battle of Hastings. It was a close battle but near the end Harold was killed.
The Witenagemot tried to elect another King, and some of the Anglo-Saxon nobles resisted but William defeated them and was crowned King of England late in 1066. This began the Norman rule of England and was the last time England was militarily conquered.
Recently I've been thinking about the topic of charity, and how it is enforced. I've been playing with the idea of comparing modern taxes in the context of charity and foreign aid to tithes. And so, it is with some interest that I discovered this article about a website, DonorsChoose.org, which is gaining popularity in Indiana. The site list the wish lists of teachers with plans for special educational projects for their classes, which [I guess] can't be funded by the school board. The public is then invited to peruse the project proposals and donate whatever they like to those they deem of merit. The merit of certain projects aside, I'm quite impressed with the scheme. Not only does it allow people to support only those causes which they judge worthy, but it also gives parents the oppourtunity to have more of a say in what they're children are learning in public schools by direct funding. Anyway, I'd like to set it aside as an example for possible later use.
The program works by matching the public's desire to give with projects, many at high-need or high-poverty schools. This can range from books to computers to student field trips.
DonorsChoose allows anyone to donate as much or as little to a project of their choosing. When it's fully funded, the site purchases and sends the materials to the teacher. It includes a camera to take photos of students using the donated material and instructs teachers and students to write thank you notes to the donors.
"The model of DonorsChoose enables somebody with $10 to get the same level of choice and impact and feedback from the classroom as Bill Gates gets when he makes a million dollar gift," Best said.
[...]
"I think there are a lot of people out there who want to give and want to donate or be involved in schools but don't know how," Allen said. "This gives them a chance to look around and find a reason that compels them." [emphasis added]
I've finished the last book and I finally understand what the whole series is about and thus why I'm drawn to it. It's theme [analogous to "the significance of Atlas' and the conditions under which they exist or not" for Atlas Shrugged] is "the vast difference between living a fulfilling life rather than avoiding death at any cost, and the superiority of the former".
There are of course some curse words bandied about throughout the books, such as 'selfless', 'guilt' and 'for the greater good' but within the given context their actual meaning reinforces the theme. For example, when Harry is "selfless" he is more concerned for the safety of his dear loved ones than his own, the very people who help bring a treasured joy to his otherwise suffer-filled life. Such an act is not selfless, it is profoundly selfish. I dare anyone who might contest my use of those terms to look at Voldemorte, the picture of ruthless "selfishness", and with a straight face state that what he did to himself, how he destroyed his life, was is his own self-interest. Voldemorte hasn't a decently selfish bone in his body, not a single shred of respect for the soul he ripped apart. Whereas Harry covets his soul, loves the life he's been trying to build with the people he admires, so much that he's willing to walk into his death to protect them. So, though Rowling uses commonly mistaken terms, her loyalty to a noble soul, a life well-lived, is unerring.
