A most excellent New Year

There was a new Bill and Ted excellent Adventure movie this year, gotta give a nod to that. It was about the fulfillment of their original mission, to bring the whole world together with their music, which keeps seeming to happen and then not happen in each of the movies. I've followed a similar pattern through the years. You could review last year's New Year's post for example.

In February, I almost got a local chapter of Braver Angels off the ground, then, that thing that 2020 will be most remembered for happened. Braver Angels has continued online, so that's good, but getting people together in living rooms has not been happening so much. 

I'm sliding toward a "year in review" blog here. That's not I want but I did come across an excellent review of the last 100 years of the Conservative vs. Liberal battle. It's a short summary but covers a lot. If you haven't read any Heather Cox Richardson, this is a good start. 

The article marks this year as the year that we will probably stop referencing the "Reagan legacy" and start using "Trump legacy". Before Reagan, we were very much under the influence of the "Roosevelt legacy", The New Deal. Today, we have people who are confused about all of this, who are afraid of "socialism" but don't want "the government" to take away Medicare or Social Security. The details of this battle between the social safety net and big business are in the article. 

Photo: Race and Reagan

It also describes how racism has been used as a weapon in this battle. That legacy goes back to the Civil War and the years that followed; Reconstruction. It mixes our identity as strong individuals who have high morals and ethics with a focus on vague enemies, like "communism" or "terrorists". It leverages these tools and uses legal maneuvers to selectively apply votes so it appears to be democratic and patriotic. It draws lines, and sets up each side to believe they are the "real" America. I'm using tons of scare quotes because all of these definitions are in flux.       Photo: Deconstructing Reconstruction

Many genies have been released from their bottles lately and they don't like being put back in. They will continue to impress us with their magic tricks. But as everyone knows, you have to be very careful what you wish for because genies can be so literal in their interpretations of your words and the trick is then played on you. 

As the article notes, we are at a point where millions of people are openly asking for votes to not be counted and questioning the entire system and willing to overturn the results of our duly run democratic process. It is not logical, but it is the inevitable result of playing on people's righteous belief in their ideology. 

The tendency to be blinded by ideology and forget that the person in front of you is a loving human being is not limited to Republicans. Righteousness can bind us and it can blind us. Moral indignation can override our reasoning skills. 

https://righteousmind.com/

There are scenarios where the same righteousness could have resulted in a Left Wing disaster. But don't confuse the danger of government that is too liberal with the reality of one that was captured by and run by conservative big business. Both can lead to oligarchy; rule by a rich elite. The "liberal" and "conservative" labels lose their meaning when you look at who makes the rules, that is, the ones with the gold.

Corona Blog

So, I’m a blogger, so I guess I should do this. It’s about change, about lots of changes through history and what that means to us now. I might seem a bit annoyed. If you want to get a teenager to read this, preferably one who doesn’t want to, they might get the proper tone of voice for it.

Everybody is talking about change. Of course we will change. Hasn’t every President run on that platform for the last 50 years? Make America Whatever or Hopey Changey, I don’t care. Throw the bums out. That’s a desire for change. But there is always tension, against the fear. Too much rapid change to greater rights for more people and a move toward socialism resulted in populism, on the left and the right. I have watched the constant battle between the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the good old traditions since I was born in 1960. Look at what’s happened in the last 100 years since the 1918 flu pandemic. That’s in your parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime if you are older, so hopefully you talked to them. If you are younger, hopefully you know someone in the next generation up. They might have an old recording or at least some pictures.

They went through:
Nuclear weapons
Invention of vaccines
1918 flu
World War I (1914 to 1918)

Despite the pace of change having increased in the recent centuries, we haven’t developed new ways to cope with it. I don’t have much to suggest for that, but for me, getting some perspective on how much has happened, how far we have come in a short time, and how it has always been the people pushing leaders to change. That has helped me understand it.

My Public Education history spent too much on the days before the Revolution in this country, that’s my opinion. I always wanted to get to the World Wars and why those happened.

It was a major change in how the world worked. Before then, we were a world of royal families. Generals road on horses with colorful uniforms and battles lasted for a few days. With the arms buildup of the late 19th century, a result of the industrial revolution, these in-bred idiots who had no idea how to live in a time of electronic communication and world travel, put a match to the powder keg they built. To defend against heavy artillery, they created trench warfare, to breakthrough that they invented tanks, and on and on.

If you don’t want to have a love for history, don’t click here. Dan Carlin has a great ability to tell the story and provide the facts. His “Blueprint for Armaggedon” series is the story of WWI. 

Going back through the 19th century further you had:
The Industrial Revolution, steam engines, mechanics, oil. Horses were no longer the best source of power, but we still use the term “horsepower”.
Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859.
Michael Faraday, who died in 1867, advanced our understanding of electromagnetism. That’s kind of important to whatever device you are reading this on.

Pause for a moment on this guy. He discovered the mysterious energy floating around that we could use to move things and to communicate across miles. Click to see David Tong giving a lecture in the same hall where Faraday gave his. Tong is talking about the newly understood forces of quantum physics, that we now understand are the fundamental forces behind all things. He’s giving that lecture in the same hall, with the same desk, that Faraday did. It’s like we just figured out stone tools yesterday, and now we all have scalpels in our medicine cabinets. 

While Faraday was alive, we were finally throwing off the last myths about race and changing laws so we could no longer justify slavery. There are still slaves in the world, I know, but most people know that’s wrong now. What will be commonly thought of as wrong by end of your lifetime?

Change takes a little longer in the centuries before that, but let me connect just a few more things. Once the empires that grew out of ancient history started bumping into each other and “discovering” each other, we started accumulating our knowledge, sharing it actually, but not always in a nice way. You might have heard of Thomas Aquinas, who tried to reconcile the Catholic religion with Greek philosophy. He had a little help from the Muslims by the way. Not too long after that, we had Protestant kingdoms, so there was a lot of fighting with the Catholics.

At the end of all that fighting, after the Thirty Years War, 1648, a treaty was signed called the Peace at Westphalia. It took away powers from the Pope and created a new type of nation. That’s what you live in, a Westphalian nation-state. Sure, your way of life is rooted in a Judeo-Christian/Western Civilization/Constitutional Republic/Democracy/melting pot, sure. But the basic structure of our politics has only been around for 400 years, and it was formed under duress, and it’s not working. A bunch of morons from the Middle Ages made it up to get the Pope out their business and we can get the billionaires out of our pockets if we create the next system.

Something else happened once the European Princes and Bishops quit making us kill each other. It was the British Royal Society, founded in 1660 to promote scientific thought and learning. It was the fertile ground where Isaac Newton flourished. Newton created the mathematics that got us to the moon (along with some of those other folks above). Computers were first put to the test during that work. That pretty much brings us up to where we are now.

To have that sort of creative energy, to allow the brilliant people of the day to discover something, you have to first have some degree of peace. You have to have a little extra left over at the end of the day to give to the general welfare, to build some roads, to have some nurses ready to take care of us instead of working overtime to pay off student loans and a mortgage from that house they bought before the bankers destroyed the economy.

What gets left out of historical discussions like this is none of it happens if we don’t care about people that we will never meet; people on the other side of the world and people who are not born yet. If we aren’t keeping the world clean and free from violence and filled with beauty, if we aren’t nurturing the people who grow our food, or who are sitting in a room somewhere coming up with formulas that who knows what they will do, but we can bet they will do something, then none of this happens. Then we slip back into using those stone tools to harm each other and take whatever we can just because we can. None of this happens if we don’t realize we need each other.


A note on the present: We aren’t purposely crashing the economy by shutting it down, just so we can save a few million lives. The economy would have crashed if we didn’t do anything because the hospitals would have been overrun. People would have chosen to quit interacting with others after it was far too late. Services would be much more disrupted because the closures would be random; we wouldn’t be choosing to keep groceries open as opposed to restaurants, we would be choosing from far fewer options.

It would not be some simple math of 2 or 3% more people dead. We would be surrounded by sick people and no one would want to touch them for fear of getting sick themselves. This would multiply the problems. Any normal illness or regular medical attention needed would be almost impossible. We would have new priorities, like disposing of the bodies.

The stock market selloff was recognition by those who understand how their system works, that it is not working, that it is not designed to respond to a problem like this. It is not designed to take care of the people that actually create the wealth that they accumulated. Ironically, it created the problem by changing the environment, putting workers under stress, and prioritizing profits over health. It put messaging over science. They know this, they saw it coming. They didn’t tell us until they cashed out. But cashing out is a strategy of the dying system. I don’t know what the next system will be, but it won’t be the current leaders who create it.

Intermission Summer of 2019

Summer is always a slow time for blogging for me. It's rainy and cold today, so maybe our one day of summer has past. I do have article #10 ideas, but it's getting to where I need to write a PhD thesis, or just keep rambling. Or, something in between. For now, here's an article that expresses some of the things I'm working on or towards or around. 

Six things I wish people understood about Atheism

1. There are lots of different types of atheists, and we don't all feel the same way about religion.

For me, I've felt differently at different times. Many people have some anger immediately upon leaving their church. As they find more people who have already worked through that, that might subside and give way to more reasoned thoughts about why people think the ways they do.

2. Atheist organizations are starting to do better at helping people and promoting social justice.

Really, secular groups have been around for a long time. Religion might inform your values, but different worldviews can and do lead to the same values. There have always been people who believed in the good works of religion but had private doubts about the theology.

3. Seemingly little things that religious people might not even notice can really drive us atheists bananas, and for good reason.

What Jay is saying here is that religion is everywhere. It's our calendar, many of our holidays, in political speeches, on our money, everywhere. It would be nice if they at least noticed this and acknowledged it.

4. There's a big difference between private individuals promoting their religious beliefs and the government doing the same. But this doesn't mean the government cannot promote facts and ideas that are inconsistent with some religious beliefs.

This one is a little more complicated. There are subtle differences between "freedom of religion" and "freedom from religion". This goes way back to before the Constitution was written.

5. Atheists and other secularists are getting pretty good at participating in public.

This relates to #2, plus, more people have grown up without religion in their homes now. More than that, they have found other ways to develop their world view and value systems and to articulate why they feel the way they do. It's help that they are able to do with less threat of being ostracized from their community. There are now strong secular groups on campuses and those people will go on to fund those groups and they will likely continue to grow.

Index to blogs about skepticism

These entries are almost all non-religious. When you leave a believe system, you have to rebuild a foundation for how you figure what is true. The same problems keep coming up, like we can't be 100% certain and that there are many experts that need to be sorted out but we don't have the expertise to challenge all of them.

I've argued with Libertarians as a way to try to understand them, with gun advocates to try to find a peaceful solution and with my liberal friends who often use the same flawed logic that they accuse conservatives of using.

I put what I think are the best in bold. They are in reverse chronological order, but only a few mention something topical.

Gun control http://winter60.blogspot.com/2018/06/how-to-argue-on-internet.html

The War on Science http://winter60.blogspot.com/2017/07/fake-news.html

Critical Thinking http://winter60.blogspot.com/2017/05/critical-thinking.html

Monsanto Documents http://winter60.blogspot.com/2017/05/unsealed-documents.html

What Liberals are missing http://winter60.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-liberals-arent-hearing-from.html

Complexities of fighting for peace http://winter60.blogspot.com/2016/11/veterans-day.html

Libertarian book review http://winter60.blogspot.com/2016/04/republican-constitution.html

Bad math about Muslims http://winter60.blogspot.com/2016/01/moderate-extremism.html

Columbus didn’t invent slavery http://winter60.blogspot.com/2015/10/in-1493-columbus-took-everything-he.html

Wrote this one to a young person who linked to this rapper who was saying everything needs to be torn because it’s so messed up http://winter60.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-i-think-this-world-should-end.html

I link to this one whenever someone tries to tell me that we can’t really know anything http://winter60.blogspot.com/2015/05/out-of-philosophical-trilemma.html

Would letting starving children die solve the hunger problem? http://winter60.blogspot.com/2015/05/shouldnt-we-just-let-them-die.html

This is my ongoing challenge, to speak to the problems and to acknowledge the beauty and genius we meet every day http://winter60.blogspot.com/2015/03/everyday-wisdom.html

Dealing with our lack of certainty http://winter60.blogspot.com/2015/01/how-to-end-any-argument.html

Reconciling personal and social responsibility http://winter60.blogspot.com/2014/01/it-takes-two-wings-to-fly.html

A series on GMOs (links guide you to 3 others) http://winter60.blogspot.com/2013/05/summer-series-starting-principles.html

Another GMO, how anti-GMO news uses inflammatory language (about the so-called Monsanto Act) http://winter60.blogspot.com/2013/04/frankenfoods-are-coming-to-kill-our.html

A little more geared toward woo, but I think I made a decent point here about how Aquinas actually forwarded the conversation, while Chopra takes us backward http://winter60.blogspot.com/2012/06/aquinas-and-chopra.html

Jesus didn't say that

A response to a response, from the Counter Apologist.

http://counterapologist.blogspot.com/2018/08/atheism-is-preferable-to-christianity.html

There are few ways to go with this. CA’s original statements stands well on its. Also, in any current form of religions I know, there is no preferable universalism that I know of. My problem with Randal is, he doesn’t go far enough with interpreting hell out of Christianity. I think that can be done, although it strips Christianity down to its Jewish roots, even into some type of Reformed Judaism, so it probably is not a popular route. My problem with the Counter Apologist is the use of assuming beliefs by the gospel writers when it’s convenient while claiming we don’t know what they meant most of the time. I think this hinders the very reforms we want to see in religion.

Starting with the reforms; I don’t think it’s a stretch to say the arc of the Biblical narrative is that history has a goal, that there is some inherent reason for our existence, and it’s something good, and we need to discover our part in making it happen. This is the MLK thesis on justice and even if you take the atheist view of meaning created by the individual, it is compatible with a goal oriented form of utilitarianism as a theory for morality. To have this discussion across cultures, we need to be reasonable and accept that neither modern philosophers nor the Bible have a clear sense of what “justice” and “good” are. Modern philosophy accepts that, practically as a premise. The Bible has its moments, like Job arguing with God, but for the most part modern day practitioners of Abrahamic religion believe a supernatural force is the source of “good” and don’t care if they can’t prove it with scripture.

The above point is somewhat proven in the way Randal backtracks on his own religion when confronted with a rather straightforward problem like eternal or long lasting punishment. So let’s look at how CA supports the argument.

If atheists want to make the point that the Christian version of hell is wrong, I don’t think they need to stray deep into what the Bible says hell is. The Bible is not clear on that, that’s clear. Atheists don’t need to quote Jesus to prove Jesus was saying something. This degrades their own arguments since they begin with the understanding that the gospels are a poor reflection of any actual Jesus. This is the consensus of scholars, including religious scholars, but it seems to get forgotten when atheists start looking for proof texts. We are always quoting unknown authors and worse we might be quoting many authors in the course of just one passage.

For example, “torments” and “flame” in Luke 16 might be an allegory of justice for the rich man who neglected to care for the poor man at his gate. The thrust of the parable up to that point is about upending the power structure, and rewarding goodness for goodness sake instead of rewarding the powerful just because they do their rituals. This passage looks like a Greek version of hell getting tacked on to an earlier tale. Whether that was for better marketing of the book or because that belief was creeping into Jewish culture is debatable and barely relevant to a debate on the reality of hell.

What I think is important here is to recognize the opening Randal gives us. Christian scholars are quick to say things like Hellenism had crept into and corrupted Judaism at the time the gospels were being written, but they are slow to say exactly how. Christian scholars probably won’t lead those discussions because they suspect or fear they will result in less believers. This is exactly why atheists should be pushing in that direction.  Two passages from Revelation were included in CA’s list. Maybe Randal is open to eliminating Revelations from the canon. It has been debated since it was first proposed and is not in some Bibles. If it is an inaccurate depiction of hell that is incompatible with 1^st century teaching, then let’s settle that and then move on to the next misinterpretation, redaction or mistranslation.

This might sound daunting, but I don’t think every line of scripture will need to be addressed before Christian culture begins to change. This approach to the Bible has been happening for a long time and has altered many denominations and led to reforms like women and gays being accepted. Atheists would do well to understand it.

New Year 2018

I know some of you might find this surprising coming from me, but looking back over this last year, the world is actually pretty awesome. I know about the bad things, you know I do. I argue for change all the time. I want things to be better. That’s why I speak up. I considered moving to a cabin in the woods a long time ago, but I decided it’s better to stay engaged with the world.

I fight because I can. I have accumulated advantages from previous generations and I paid my dues to show that I return value for what I have. Life isn’t fair so that formula doesn’t work for everyone. As we found out this year, a lot of women didn’t have that choice. If they had spoken up, their careers would have been over and we would have never heard of them. Some of them lived long enough to see justice. They are preceded by many who did not.

I know the word “divided” has come up a lot this year. As if generations were always on the same page before, or North/South and East/West are some never before known demographics that have been discovered. But we don’t fight the same kind of wars over these like we use to. We respect boundaries and cultures. We don’t pillage. We vote. We don’t conquer. Not everywhere in the world of course, but a least in the US that means no matter where you are, you’re going to bump into someone who didn’t vote the way you did. You can argue with them if you want, or you could celebrate that our children are healthy and are getting an education despite those differences. Maybe we should make sure that happens first, then get back to arguing about a policy that only affects people who have more than 10 million dollars in the bank.

This idea that people with slightly different values than us are tearing apart the fabric of society is very old. It used to be that you were sacrificing the wrong things on the wrong altar. More recently it’s about how wealth is distributed and how ownership is claimed. It has become less of an academic exercise and more of a spectacle. As it becomes more of a farce, the easier it is for the looters to walk off with whatever they want. It’s not a secret conspiracy, they do it right out in the open.

Meanwhile, we keep making progress. We see farther into space which means seeing back in time. We understand our bodies and minds better. We can read things from thousands of years ago that very few people, even those from the time they were written, have ever read. We see connections between keeping our hair in place and ripping a hole in the protective layer on the edge of space. We take corrective actions before we kill ourselves. Hopefully.

In case you didn’t get the reference:https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-hole-healing-fingerprints/

Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy

We all know the verse that Linus recites at the climax of Peanuts Christmas. Charlie Brown is questioning what Christmas is all about. Linus ends his reading with “Peace on earth and goodwill toward men.” That’s great, and by 1965 when that was made, most Christians throughout the world agreed this is the meaning of Christmas. Trouble is, this was written before there was the modern version of Christmas and it originally said, "Peace on earth for those whom God likes." You need to understand a bunch of Greek and Latin to understand that, but simply, you drop one Greek letter and you have to also change the whole subject/object stuff of the sentence and that’s what you get.

I heard this a few times, and it just sort of passed by me. It’s an interesting artifact of history from a time when there were no copy machines. A simple mistake. No real harm done. Except, when you start digging through the various copies throughout history, it was not a mistake at all, it was quite deliberate. This didn’t just happen in the third century and now, with better tools of historiography, we are discovering it. This has been known throughout the history of Christianity by the few people who had control of these books. Just like now, where we have neighbors who are happy to break bread at their ecumenical gatherings and multi-denominational dinners and also fundamentalists who want holy war, there were people who said they wanted peace in the world and others who knew their scripture said only some of them should see that peace. Sometimes it was the same people, saying one thing while knowing the other.

http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de/manuscript-workspace?docID=20022

The difference between now and then is the balance of power. For the most part, those who truly believe in tolerance and peace are in power. But every day we see signs that it is still a struggle. Mainstream religion may appear to hold these values, but the facts of these discrepancies in our manuscripts raises some questions. If you accept the expert opinion on this, if you accept that people who spend their days pouring over these fragments of paper and studying the ancient languages actually got it right, then why don’t we change the Bibles? That is, correct them to what they originally were. Even if we don’t change the Bibles, why don’t preachers tell us this is only what modern people believe, not the people who first wrote the words. Those were the people who were closest to the events that inspired the words. If we are saying that we should listen to what they say, that their ancient wisdom has value, why shouldn’t we be listening to what they really said?

There are a few ways to go from here. We could believe that peace should be for only a select group. We can believe that something from outside of the physical universe somehow guided these hands and created these words on paper once, then had another hand erase it or misspell it and somehow that series of changes was slowly revealing this truth to us. We can believe that the original authors had some special vision, maybe divinely inspired or maybe just some special set of circumstances that they observed that helped them tap into this wisdom. Or, we can believe we are creatures with the ability to reflect on the past and future, trying to figure out what to make of our existence on this lonely planet. There may be millions of other planets like ours, but the universe is rather large, and we can calculate the odds of contacting one of those other planets, and they aren’t good. We might want to figure out how to get along with just each other for the time being.

To put it simply, we need to say that whoever wrote the gospel according Luke, was wrong. And when I say “we”, I mean it needs to come from the people who make a living interpreting this book. Those authors were wrong on this account, and they were wrong about some of the other things they said. We have fought wars based on religion. That includes Christians fighting over the meaning of words like these. We have had Kings anointed by gods and we have died for them. We have believed that the world could unite under one set of laws, inspired by some spirit, and experience a thousand years of joy. We were wrong.

We have found that allowing for borders and respecting the sovereignty of others is a way to deal with our differences. We found we have universal values despite theological differences and tried to create international laws, and sometimes we even got it right. Sometimes, nations put aside their differences to keep one nation from getting out of control and imposing its will on weaker people. It’s rarely pretty, but we muddle towards a world where we talk more than fight.

Instead of looking to something that was said hundreds or thousands of years ago, we look to what can be demonstrated by our senses. We extend our senses with tools created by an understanding of basic principles that have been tested over and over again. We know the sun has come up every day regardless of what sacrifices were made, so we don’t make ritual sacrifices anymore. We know the earth compressed the organic material from millions of years ago to give us fuel to light our universities so people can work late into the night curing what was once called a curse. To make that happen, we also know that we need to have some degree of peace with the people who are sitting on a lot of that organic material. The same goes for copper and materials needed to create more sustainable energy infrastructure. What is important is, so far, we just have this one planet.

You can accept what I’m saying or not. You also have the tools to research this yourself. The manuscripts with these words on them have been cataloged, numbered, digitized and are available to you free right now. The 1% of today only have power over us because we don’t do this work. The 1% in the time of Luke had a much easier time of it because they were the only ones who could read at all. The fact that I learned these things is the result of the accumulated knowledge I mentioned above and the cooperation of people across borders. The internet began as a way for scholars to share their work. It has become a way to avoid the lines during the Christmas rush. How it will be used tomorrow is our choice.

Resistance is inevitable

I was at a Christian camp the other day, not as a Christian, it was a cross-country skiing group. I like to poke around their libraries. This one was just a bookshelf will old Bibles, old Sunday School guides, except one book from 1982 by Francis Schaeffer, The Christian Manifesto. I didn’t have time to read the whole thing, so I’m not sure just what the “manifesto” was, but I’m pretty sure he was promoting violent overthrow of the US government. That might sound like something from a 60’s radical rather than a leader of evangelical conservative Christians, but it was definitely in there. His justification was that the government was allowing, and in fact supporting the killing of innocent children, via abortion.

I’m not going to dwell on the violence part too much, and he doesn’t lay out any kind of plan. What was interesting was how he made parallels to those 60’s radicals and lots of other radicals through history. He kinda of made violently overthrowing your government sound completely rational and logical. I’ve seen this sort of thing in my travels with counter cultures. When I took a paid position as a canvasser against the transportation of nuclear waste for example; it would have been right about the same time Francis was writing this book. One night, an anarchist joined us and took a few minutes to explain that she thought the only way to ultimately end the nation’s support of nuclear weapons was to violently overthrow the government, take control of said weapons, and of course, she and her minions would do the right thing and dismantle them. She didn’t say too much about killing untold numbers of people in gaining that power, but it seemed to be her plan. No one joined her army that night and I have no idea what became of her.

Schaeffer takes a longer view of history. In this book for instance, he builds his case by listing many of the wars that took place between Protestants and Catholics. When the Protestants won, he tells the story about an evil Catholic King who was deposed and the people of that kingdom were saved further oppression, because they now had a Protestant ruler and were free to be, well, Protestants. When the Protestants lost, he said they were martyred. Just as modern news of war talks of the brave soldiers defending freedom and is less generous about those who die daily from our constant shelling, these stories soften you up for the call to action.


He then further builds his case using a “just war” theory from Lex, Rex, or The Law and the Prince; a Dispute for the Just Prerogative of King and People, published in 1644. Apparently this is a quite famous work. As shown in the bottom paragraph here, Shaeffer, using Rutherford’s logic, believed it was the duty of the people to execute God’s will when the government body does not. On the next page, he compares this to Bob Dylan. He says the differences in language changes nothing, although I would say Rutherford is a little stronger in his suggestion of an actual uprising, and Schaeffer later minces no words at all.

There certainly were those who listened to Dylan and were inspired to shot at cops or bomb government buildings, but Dylan was not telling them to do that anymore than the Beatles were sending secret messages to Charles Manson. I couldn’t copy the whole book, but on page 110 Schaeffer says it is time to use appropriate forms of protest, and in other places, he is definitely leaning toward what Rutherford called “lawful resistance”. He was suggesting doing more than marching around with cardboard signs. On this page he is talking about how the ACLU  has taken God out of the schools. In later pages he speaks to the problem of the government supporting abortions.


To be very clear, I advocate none of this. I don’t want people to have abortions, but there are better ways to reduce the need for them than by picketing abortion clinics. Until it becomes a regular part of our government to throw people out of their homes, or force people to worship one way or the other, or to lock people up for their thoughts, I’m not ready to take up arms against them. I know those things happen, and more often than I’d like, but we still have legal means to undo them and to punish our police when they need to be policed. There was a time in my life when I broke the law on a daily basis, but I never thought that the system of law itself was unjust. It has unjust aspects, but that’s part of living in a democracy, you aren’t supposed to like everything about it. Nor are you required to. If you don’t, you can work to change it.

So, back to this book. I could be wrong about what Francis Schaeffer actually meant. A central point of it though, and I think he does a good job of making this point, is that the idea of there being a higher law, one that transcends temporary governments and power structures, has been around for a long time, perhaps for as long as there have been power structures. There has always been a resistance of some sort. Most of them we don’t hear about, because they don’t have the power and never get it.

It doesn’t matter if that resistance is fighting for “free love” or for “moral power”, the rhetoric will sound very similar in either case. They will call the law makers law breakers, or worse they will call them rapists and murderers. What Schaeffer is a little less quick to mention, is they, or someone who hears them, will then justify bending the rules just a little in the name of their higher authority. When you can convince someone that you have tapped into the transcendent reality, and that they are now privy to that special knowledge, you can get them to do just about anything.

I’m trying to present all of this without judgment. When you are unfamiliar with the background information of a culture, something like a doctor being shot in cold blood for performing abortions or a protest erupting into violence can be a shocking story with no rhyme or reason. But rarely do such things come out of nowhere. Manifestos by people living in shacks in the woods are rare, and typically less coherent. Anarchists like the one I met, show up, break a few windows and fade into the background. But organizations like the ACLU and the Evangelical Church will probably be around for a while. We’re going to need to find ways to get those two camps together.

If you click around the link to the L’Abri Institute above, it’s more than just an introduction to who Francis Schaeffer was. It tells of his work that included trying to understand just what the 60’s counter culture wanted, something I'd like to see more of from that side. If you follow the link to the ACLU, you’ll see they fight for everyone’s rights, not just against religion or for liberal causes. And as we found out last November, there is something they are not listening to either. If you are unfamiliar with one or the other of these histories, I can see how it would seem like there is some evil force in the world that needs to be countered. If you are unfamiliar with both, the world would seem chaotic indeed.

Naturalization of teleological language. Say what?

I’ve been tracking Bart Campolo lately and finding him well worth a listen. In a section of this podcast, about 10 minutes long, so many things are tossed around, it could take hours to develop. It’s a rapid exchange. Bart was passionate about his desire to incorporate the many voices he hears on campus while Tripp was trying to explain the value of the language of the traditions he holds so dear. Both were pointing in the same direction, but many differences need to be worked out before they can really work together toward that same goal. Or maybe there’s a third way.

Listen to the whole thing, or jump to around 20 minutes in and try to catch up. I took their words for the next 15 minutes and made these “study” questions. Some of them get expanded on later, but mostly they are left unanswered. I hope the two of them get together for more.

Questions that depend on belief

Did the human technologies of eating together, singing together and performing rituals develop naturally, through evolution, and then get incorporated into religion, or were they developed by inspired religious leaders?

Did all of that get associated with a supernatural explanation at a time when the only explanations we had were supernatural, or do they actually have a supernatural origin? Is there another explanation?

Questions that could be separated from the belief question

Did science emerge from monotheistic assumptions then move through secularization, removing the supernatural aspects?

Since we are now developing more natural explanations, is theological language being “naturalized” to apply to our teleological relationship to creation?

How are these two sets of questions related?

How does our language hold our beliefs in place?

How do we develop the language to serve the need of bringing people together to lead happier and more productive lives?

Discussion of Volf's pluralism

In chapter 4 of Miroslav Volf's “Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World”, he attempts to make the case that exclusivist religion can be compatible with pluralist politics. I'm not sure how many blogs it will take to cover this somewhat lengthy chapter. I'll begin with an overview.

The words “exlcusivist” and “pluralist” seem to make their own case against “compatible”, but his argument is thorough and compelling, complete with historical precedent. Even if he is wrong, I think the discussion of the possibility is worth the effort. Any attempt to address the current problems of fundamentalism, Christian or otherwise, deserves consideration. A program of elimination of religion or quarantining it is similar in exclusionary tactics to a program of converting everyone to believe in a particular god. A truly pluralist society consists of people with open minds, willing to engage any reasonable argument.

I have already laid several land mines for myself in that opening paragraph and I can see the jaws clenching and the eyes rolling. To allay some of those fears of hearing the same old arguments, Volf begins by noting the Puritans left the religious persecution of England, only to set up their own exclusive system in America. A seeming contradiction. He later explains how pluralism had roots in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and how the exculsivist and pluralist factions had to part company. He admits that there are limits to the use of reason by fundamentalist. That it is often used only to defend their own preconceived notions and breaks down when challenged. He quotes Popper and Rousseau. He admits not all who embrace exclusivist religion will go along with his ideas. He asks very little of the pluralist society and demands much from his fellow Christians.

When considering the possibility that religion can continue to some extent in the forms we see it now, it's important to take a broad perspective. We are decades into a movement sometimes called the Christian Right, but it is a recent phenomena and it's dominance is starting to wane. Before that, sociologist were pretty well agreed that science would continue to advance and religion would fade. Further back, people like Thomas Jefferson expected the world to move toward some form of the Unitarianism, akin to religion but without all the miracles. He was wrong about that, but he did pretty well with shaping democracy, so I'll cut him some slack. 500 years before that Aquinas attempted to reconcile Greek rationalist thought with his faith. There were other failed attempts, but the important point is that the dominant view of religion changes throughout time and we can influence that view.

In a rare moment for Christian theologians, Volf presents Peter Berger's steps toward the gradual disappearance of religious exclusivism. He contends social pluralism naturally leads to the affirmation of religious pluralism. When religious people mix with other ideologies, they experience a degree of “Cognitive contamination”. Certainly any cult leader who keeps his minions isolated knows this.

Whether this contamination is other religions or not, it eventually becomes secularism. This phenomenon could also be observed in the recent acceptance of homosexuality in America. As more and more people came to know a gay person personally, they found out they weren't so bad. The steps are:

1 Live with others

2 Learn to appreciate them

3 Realize their ways of living aren't utterly false

4 Their truth is as good as yours

Volf points out at least one flaw in Berger; not everyone makes that last step.

This is where Volf's theology steps in, providing a way to live between steps 3 and 4. He notes that the three major monotheisms and even Buddhism contain ideas not only that their god (or in Buddhism's case their ideology) is the only one, and the right one, but also that you should not be arrogant about this. If you are right, and of course you are, you should not need to boast. God will give you the strength and wisdom you need to endure the unbelievers and to convert them. Indeed, you should not fear hearing the ideas of others, you should apply the golden rule and treat those ideas with respect, just as you would expect your ideas to be treated, knowing that in the end you will prevail.

I would like to interject at this point, that Volf, throughout the entire book is notorious for ignoring large swaths of history. He never mentions the dozens of other versions of “do unto others”. I can't tell if this is purposeful or if he is actually unaware that Jesus did not invent that.

He shows a strong grasp of world history, so it is to hard understand how he could miss certain details or why he thinks them unimportant. He covers the unique aspects of Judaism and Christianity, and how they ended up being religions that grew beyond their tribal beginnings. He calls them “world” religions. Christianity for instance took a stand of consciousness against imperialist Rome. Those ideas lived on and have been adapted and used by many revolutionary cultures and oppressed groups. I would have liked it Volf did not slide past the harsh versions of that, when Christianity later partnered with empire and brutally oppressed and enforced its exclusiveness. He may think it would hinder his argument to do so, but I think it hinders his argument to not do it.

I am not suggesting that he, or anyone, meld their precious ideologies into some grand philosophy that is a mix of all human knowledge. I would like to see that, but I don't expect it to happen in my lifetime. What Volf suggests, and I would accept as a minimum, is that religions find an interpretation of their ideology that allows for co-existence with other ideologies. If they can do that, I'm fine with them hanging on to hope of a second coming, or for implementation of as many as their purity laws as they can find agreement for. As long as they maintain values of peace and order while attempting to achieve those ends, the rest of us can continue to work toward those shared values in our own ways. Hopefully we can all find ways to form partnerships and move toward those shared values.

Return to the Shack

Somehow, this podcast came up in my Facebook feed. I read “The Shack” a while ago and thought the interview might be interesting. The length of it was a bit intimidating, but, I know where the “off” button is. It takes about 7 minutes before the interview starts, but it was fascinating from the get go. Paul Young, the author of “The Shack” moved to New Guinea when he was 1 year old. His father had gone from lumberjack to missionary in a few short years. Paul learned the native language as his first language and became an invaluable asset for translators.

The details of his life are full of interesting facts like that. His life journey is also quite a trip. His fundamentalist upbringing was as rocky as any, including abuse and bullying, and then add the strange cultural identities of an aboriginal lifestyle crossed with Christian missionary. By time he was in his twenties, he was leading a double life. He came clean to his wife and spent the next 11 years working it out while he wrote “The Shack”. The child in the book who is kidnapped and killed represents his lost innocence and the shack is a symbol of the things he kept hidden for so long.

Then they start talking theology. It is an unusually respectful conversation, with each side making standard arguments, with a few modern twists, and each allowing the other to speak and acknowledging their points. Cass, the interviewer, takes the time to point out the creativity of Paul’s writing, despite their ideological differences. If you want to skip to those parts, go to the 50 minute mark or so.

The two of them have a similar but distinct take on the idea of arriving at theism via atheism. Paul quotes Brian McClaren, “Every movement towards an authentic relationship with God has to go through atheism.” Cass sees the cry from Jesus, “God, why have you forsaken me”, as a moment of atheism. He says, if there is a god out there, he is begging the world to ignore him. Whenever we try to define the ineffable, we fail. We come to seeing how the help comes from each other. God does not favor nations, and we should stop appeasing the celestial dictator. We should turn our energies to one another. If we did that, he thinks God would applaud those efforts and say “Well done good and faithful servants.”

********************

The interview ends around 1 hour and 15 minutes, and with no introduction, Cass brings in his friend Tony Woodall to discuss it. Tony is a Christian turned atheist, turned theist again. He is currently a working preacher, very willing to question his beliefs, but also committed to them. Cass attended seminary after he quit believing in God, so the two are able to quote scripture easily as well as bring in their own narratives.

Cass asks for Tony’s opinion on something Paul Young said. Paul said that the evolutionary explanation of humanity and morality is “too easy”. He said, “There is a god that created us, knowing we’d make a mess, then climbed in it with us in order to begin to reveal the truth of our humanity and the centrality of relationship.” He says that is something we need to get to know, and the idea that there is no source of meaning is too easy. Cass tried to counter that in the interview, then follows up with Tony, saying that creating a narrative from the imagination, that is, a story of God, is easy. Facing a meaningless universe and trying to find purpose in our lives, that’s hard.

Tony’s response is to not try to sort that out at all. He says, “It was a good first conversation. The two of you have not yet spent enough time together to get to know each others' opinions.” Cass is tickled by this response. And what a great observation it was. How much better would such encounters with two people from differing worldviews go if they thought of it as getting to know each other instead of as a chance to sell their ideas and change the others mind?

********************

The discussion continues to be lively, with Cass building on the symbolism of dying. In movies or books, and especially in spiritual writing, death or near death symbolizes change. Cass talks about how too often, people don’t seek change. They stay only around and with people that are like them and agree with them. He includes himself in this, and says if we do it, we are not going to grow. It’s saying, “I’m here, waiting for others to catch up”. When we get that way, when we think we’re right and are waiting for others to come in line with who we are, we want to build a wall. I think it was Tony who added, when we decide that the others' agreement is required for us to walk with them in community, the wall is already there.

Cass provides a possible way to break down those walls. When we die to the thinking that things are going to start working, that we have ideas that can fix the world, these ideas of religion and politics that we've argued about for thousands of years and have had only rather modest success, when we just let go of that and accept that others will remain others and things are going to break and it’s just going to be like this for as long as we live, when we say say “yes” to the moment, what happens is, someone drops by, something funny or interesting passes by on whatever media is playing, we encounter something we didn't plan for. When we stop looking for and expecting happiness, we are surprised that it comes anyway. It will likely come from things that we don't expect and wane from the things that made us happy before. If we cling to those new things, try to recreate those new experiences, we will put ourselves right back into the old pattern. So the answer is not firing our politicians or closing our churches. We don't even need to agree on everything. We just need to do the thing that humans have done for 200,000 years, care for each other.

That's what I got from this podcast anyway.  

Secular Humanism and The New Atheists

I've listened to all Ryan Bell's podcasts so far, and this one I've listened to 3 or 4 times. Philip Kitcher is a philosopher with an interesting theological story of his own, and as he says, "is probably further left than Bernie Sanders". By that he means that he thinks every human being is worthy of being given a chance to find out what their talents are and to pursue them. I will address that in a separate entry. Before they get to discussing that, Ryan and Philip discuss the "New Atheists".

That discussion starts around 20 minutes. Ryan applauds Philip for going to great lengths in his book to NOT create a straw man of religious thinkers. His book speaks to "refined" believers. I think that's great and I hope to find some time to read his book. I have no problem with the idea of a "refined" believer.

What I didn't care for, was that Philip had to expand that to putting down people who speak to "unrefined" believers. As he says, "Some of the religious believers I know are completely different from the way the religious believers are portrayed in the books of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, even my good friend Dan Dennet who I think of as the best of the so-called New Atheists." He goes on to describe a couple of these believers that he thinks well of, but he does not describe what Dawkins or Hitchens are addressing. Of believers, he says he "will not caricature them." He seems to have no trouble caricaturing New Atheists.

He does not mention, and maybe he doesn't know, that those authors and others have, on regular occasions addressed this criticism and pointed out that they are referring to specific behaviors of people. Behaviors that are real and commonly observed. Pointing out behaviors that are common is different than making caricatures. They are addressing those particular behaviors of those particular people, because they are dangerous behaviors. I can't imagine Richard Dawkins having a problem with someone running a soup kitchen or being a good Godmother (one of Philip's examples).

Christopher Hitchens famously had a problem with Mother Teresa, but he never complains about her helping people. On the contrary, he complains that she generated a significant amount of income for the church and used very little of it to help people.

Ryan goes on to talk about a universal human attitude of wonder that is seen in mathematicians or authors as well as religious people. To me, Dawkins is actually an excellent example of someone who does the very thing Ryan says he should do. You can pick on him for not knowing about Paul Tillich or the details of Augustine's writings, but those are not his central themes. He came to his anti-religious evangelism by way of biology. His discussions about evolution brought fundamentalists to him, he did not seek them out. Once they discovered him, his response was to do what he had been doing all his life, to educate people about what he knows about how the world works.

Perhaps Ryan and Philip have a problem with that part of the education that includes telling people that what they are currently think is wrong. Unfortunately, they did not mention anything specifically that anyone said or wrote, so I can't evaluate exactly what they have a problem with.

So that's what Phillip and Ryan DON'T do. They do spend 10 minutes trying to explain what can be salvaged from religion. They do quite a bit of qualifying of their remarks; Ryan says believing in supernatural agents is not intellectually responsible, but he sees value in the impulse behind the search for meaning. Phillip states the transcendent doesn't exist, but some people believe it does and can express those feelings with poetry and allegory that can inspire all of us. He doesn't agree with using religion to get there, but he respects it.

They seem to be describing these things with the implication that atheists in general and the authors they mention specifically, don't see this stuff. Phillip begins this segment with a particularly off-the-mark statement, saying there are some believers that see their traditions as important although they aren't attached to any particular detail, but they see that it, "points in the direction of a part of reality that atheists just dismiss completely."

I don't know how he can make that generalization about what anyone dismisses. He certainly has no data to back it up. Atheists I know and atheist material I read and view is very interested in what lies beyond our limited human understanding. Science is the pursuit of the unknown, by definition. Neither Ryan or Philip explain what is wrong with wanting evidence before adding something to the known. Nor do they describe how someone could dismiss the unknown, but be interested in learning. Neither one explains what this "part of reality" is that is being pointed to.

After I left religion, I found I was much more open to thinking about how the mind works, or how our ancient ancestors came to cooperate instead of fight, or what forces must there be that cause a tiny root to make a nearly microscopic decision to grow in this or that direction and that supports a huge tree. I find myself freer to explore those parts of reality because I'm not thinking about an alien intelligence from 14 billion years ago or one currently hiding in the clouds and wondering how or if they are affecting my life. I'm not trying to find an alternative method to discover truth, when the existing ones are working quite well.

I don't think religion is going away soon, but if it does, the world isn't going to miss the poetry and the allegory of religion because it is going to be replaced by a much more beautiful compendium that does not require knowing what it means to "wash your hands of" something, or what a "cross to bear" is. Instead the beauty that is actually seen everyday will inspire us to be stewards of that very beauty. We won't have an abstract notion of "neighbor" that we then re-translate into meaning our cousins across the oceans, we will instead understand that "we are all related" is a truth about biology and we are much more closely related than any religious tradition ever imagined. We won't wonder why we are here, we will accept that we are and we will make a purpose for our existence.

That's what I'm saying

I went looking for more on Irshad Manji, the author of the book review that I responded to last week. That led me to the interview below. If you would, read what I have to say, then see what you think about her idea of “reclaiming God's good name.”

The more I listen to so-called moderate believers, the more I find that we are in almost total agreement. They are saying that their prophet, Jesus, Mohammad or Buddha or whomever challenged the earlier prophets. That the religion they created was a step forward for human progress, a movement of love and inclusion and forgiveness that did not exist before they came along. They then use that to justify continuing to study their prophet's words and actions thousands of years later.

I agree, almost. When the New Testament was written, Jews were enslaved, they had no homeland, no army. Rome was a brutally oppressive society with a pantheon of gods and emperors who were claiming to be born of a virgin and claiming they were gods. When the Koran was written, female babies were killed and tribes traded off enslaving each other as power shifted back and forth. Gautama Buddha was born into a wealthy family that kept him isolated from the horrors of the caste system. When his eyes were opened to it, he knew it had to change.

The story of Jesus challenged not only the Romans and their gods, but it directly spoke to the corruption within Judaism. This can be found in the early chapters of the book of Mark, as well in the character of Herod, a puppet Jewish King who cut deals with the Romans and of course Judas selling out to the High Priests. Even ignoring the scripture and just looking at how the early Christians acted shows a break from traditions. They held small meetings in homes where women studied alongside men and they took care of their neighbors, regardless of their backgrounds.

I hear words and passages thrown around when moderate Muslims talk about the Islamic golden age, between 800 and 1200. They may use ijtihad, which has to do with reasoning, or falsafa, meaning philosophy. I'm not sure where exactly these are in the scripture, and when I've seen them, they are mixed with praise for Allah. I don't really care. I note that they are explicitly honored in Islam as opposed to the way philosophy and thinking are denigrated in the Bible, but words from history only matter if they did indeed influence a culture. We know that Muslims built libraries, improved their infrastructure, their agriculture, wrote poetry and generally flourished while Europeans were 99% illiterate and worrying about the end of times.

But of course all this ended. We know more about the tribal aspects of Islam that are left over from before Mohammed than we do about the progressive movement that people would have actually embraced at the time. Conquering was the normal course of events at the time, so the fact that they swept across North African “converting” people was partially due to their military power, but just as important was that the conquered people accepted them as leaders because they did a better job than the idiots they overthrew. And they allowed people to practice the religion of their choice, with restrictions, but it was allowed.

When I say I “almost agree” with these moderates about how their religions are based on peaceful and progressive ideas, I'm not not sure where we actually disagree because they won't talk about why those progressive movements failed. Once you start talking about how the Catholics eventually partnered with the Romans and started burning pagan churches or how the Islamic golden age ended and Jews were expelled from the universities and the death penalty for apostasy was actually enforced, the discussion becomes irrational. You get accused of bringing up the worst aspects of religion or of cherry picking history. This is ridiculous of course because it is they who are refusing to discuss that history and only want to discuss the times and the players in history that promoted what we now think of as modern ethical behavior.

I don't bring up Augustine or Al-Kahzali as proof that religion will always fail, I bring them up to ask the question of why did the progressive movements fail? For that matter, why are they failing now? Right now, we are all hoping that the leaders of the Westboro United Baptist Church will just die and no one will replace them or continue on with that work. They don't allow anyone to have a reasonable conversation with them and I don't know of anyone interested in trying. Once someone has chosen the Bible as their only guide for how to act in the world, it is not possible to use that Bible to change their minds. But just because you aren't a Bible thumping fundamentalist, it doesn't automatically make you reasonable. What is the progressive movement doing to directly address the problems created by fundamentalism? 

The first century was a time when Jews changed how they looked at their own laws by bringing in a new way of relating to god. Slavery ended because the world grew to where more people could see that no single tribe had a special place in the hierarchy and that thinking that way was toxic to the world. Homosexuality is gaining more and more acceptance because we are gaining a better understanding of the mind and we know that just because we don't have certain impulses that doesn't mean other people don't. We have learned to examine right and wrong by examining the whole world, all living things, the entire eco-system and the future of the planet. Soon we will be considering the future of other planets.

Those religious movements failed because they couldn't incorporate new information fast enough. The Islamic movement is the last time in history that a new world view took hold and united enough people to become an empire and last for generations. Cultures were already mixing and oddly enough, Islam accelerated that by taking paper making from China and translating and copying knowledge from all over and spreading it further West. When they got to translating not only the words but the ideas of the ancient Greek texts they reawakened philosophies that had been lost due to the barbarism of the 4^th and 5^th centuries. After that, people had tools to question why they were being forced to worship a god. They began to expect a logical argument for it.

Where I agree with these moderates is on the amazing work some small groups of people in history have done to bring reason and progress into cultures that were literally killing babies and promoting horrendous acts we would never allow today. What they don't want to discuss is that those same small groups also had some backwards ideas about where the universe came from and how to deal with meat products or what clothes we should wear. We've dealt with many of those beliefs and they don't seem to mind that we all break most of the rules every day, but if you suggest something like their prophet does not deserve to be worshiped or that prayer doesn't work or the resurrection didn't happen, they lose the ability to form a coherent argument, sometimes to form a coherent sentence. If you suggest we shouldn't teach children these things until they are old enough to think critically, they bring up ethics and traditions and community and other issues that to me are completely unrelated.

My suggestion, and I have brought this up with pastors, friends and whomever cares to engage me, is that their prophet had something to say, and so did a bunch of other prophets and philosophers. Why not just include them all? Why fight over which character in a story is the coolest and instead really dig into which ideas can actually bring about progress right now? I have as yet not received an answer. 

Not so alone

Another thing that kept me away from blogging last month was that I spent half of it in Alaska. I wrote a two page epic hiking adventure in the journal at a yurt one night, visited a couple Russian churches, and took a few notes on my visit to a cabin in the wilderness that is on the National Registry of Historic Places. The cabin was built by Richard Proenneke and has been made semi-famous by a half-hour documentary featuring him.

He is known for his longevity, he spent 30 years in that cabin. He was also known for his craftsmanship, the handle mechanism on the door is ingenious. He is a little lesser known for his environmentalism.

In 1967 he was retired from the Navy and decided that building a cabin in Alaska would be a challenge he’d like to try. Challenging himself was a way of life. He had a friend who had a cabin on Upper Twin Lake, just north of Port Alsworth, so he spent that summer walking the area, finally settling on a spot right next to his friend.

There were no hardware stores in the area so whatever he needed, he had to bring or build. Space was saved by bringing only the metal parts of drills or chisels and fashioning the handles once he was there. This also led to one of my favorite lines from the documentary, “today I needed a spoon, so I made a spoon.”

His skills were excellent, and his hiking pace was legendary, but many people have accomplished such things in Alaska and elsewhere. Mr. Proenneke felt the lifestyle of accomplishing things on your own, not wasting anything and spending time reflecting on the wilderness, was worth sharing, so he also filmed himself as he built and stocked the cabin. Originally, he probably had no more in mind that simply making some instructional manuals so others could share the experience.

As he returned to that isolated wilderness year after year, he noted changes in people who came to the area. He saw people no longer caring about the values he cherished. Something you’ll see in his film or if you visit his cabin is a lot of gas cans. He fashioned many useful storage and carrying items by recycling old gas cans. But where did they come from? He didn’t have a chainsaw or gas stove. They came from the hunters. They would come out, shoot their moose and sometimes leave everything behind except the antlers.

He wrote not only about how to live in the woods but of the experience. Others, Sam Keith in particular, put those journals and film into production and he gained a little fame. This was not his goal, since of the gifts he said, “My cabin and cache have been full to overflowing for quite some time and each new load makes me wonder where I will stow it all. ... I do appreciate everything but wish they would consider the poor miserable brush rat more fortunate than they and spend their money to beat death and taxes.”

When you see him talking about himself, it’s easy to assume a level of conceit, but if wasn’t for his friends, we probably would have never heard of him. One of the park rangers at the cabin said he corresponded with Aldo Leopold and Willard Munger, but I haven’t been able to confirm that. She said Dick did not save his letters, something that comes from living a sparse lifestyle. So whatever he did, that’s lost to history.

Summing up my feelings about this pilgrimage has been more of a challenge than I expected. The man remains a bit of a mystery, and as with any public figure, he’s what each of us want him to be. What struck me most on this trip was that he did not harbor much anger. In any of the short descriptions of him, no one ever called him “crusty” or a curmudgeon. Instead they went out of their way to note how friendly he was despite his isolation. Even his hunting was kept to a minimum, apparently out of a kinship with the animals who shared his valley.

This is not to say that he withheld his opinion. Throughout his discussions about carving handles or constructing a food cache he scatters tidbits of the value of making something useful, and being able to make something with quality and craftsmanship. He ends his first book with a longer discussion on those philosophies and on the positive affects it would have on all of us if more people adopted them.

To try to give some sense of the man, here’s part of a note that was left on his table,

“You didn’t find a padlock on my door (maybe I should put one on) for I feel that a cabin in the wilderness should be open to those who need shelter. My charge for the use of it is reasonable, I think, although some no doubt will be unable to afford what I ask, and that is – take care of it as if you had carved it out with hand tools as I did. If when you leave your conscience is clear, then you have paid the full amount.

This is beautiful country. It is even more beautiful when the animals are left alive.

Thank you for your cooperation.”

R.L Proenneke

Somehow he managed to be “alone” yet engaged. While alone he was listening to the world. He saw the rise of polluters from the hunters to corporations. He also saw that just as no single person can solve our environmental problems, no single person caused them. Instead of loudly broadcasting anger over the changes in the world he did not care for, he quietly showed us how to live not just in nature, but with each other.

Read more about the man.

Why I think this world should end

I don’t think that, but this rapper does. Here’s a few of the lyrics from his poem:

The world is coming to an end
The air is polluted, the oceans contaminated
The animals are going extinct, the economy’s collapsed
Education is shot, police are corrupt
Intelligence is shunned and ignorance rewarded
The people are depressed and angry
We can't live with each other and we can't live with ourselves

Isn’t that special? Whenever I hear something like this, my first question is, compared to what? By “world”, he means this particular version of civilization, and that’s happened a lot. That’s why we have Mayan RUINS and the Great Wall is now just a tourist attraction and why we marvel at buildings built thousands of years ago that are still standing, but the people are gone. Civilizations end.

The difference today is scale. If you compare us to a primitive village, they polluted their streams, then they just moved away from it, upstream. Why did you think they were nomadic? Did they just like to travel? My favorite though is “education is shot”. This from a guy who knew more than most people in history by the time he was 10 years old. This from a guy who has a command of the English language and has uploaded it onto a world wide communication system that I watched from little cabin in the woods in mid-Northern nowhere.

And if you can’t live with yourself, get help.

So everyone’s medicated
We pass each other on the streets
And if we do speak it's meaningless robotic communication
More people want 15 seconds of fame
Than a lifetime of meaning and purpose
Because what’s popular is more important than what’s right
Ratings are more important than the truth
Our government builds twice as many prisons than schools
It’s easier to find a Big Mac than an apple
And when you find the apple
It's been genetically processed and modified
Presidents lie, politicians trick us
Race is still an issue and so is religion
Your God doesn’t exist, my God does and he is All-Loving
If you disagree with me I'll kill you
Or even worse argue you to death

92% of songs on the radio are about sex
Kids don’t play tag, they play twerk videos

You think that’s new? There are 7 billion people on this planet, someone’s talking about sex somewhere. And games change. Go get a dreidel if it makes you happy.

The average person watches 5 hours of television a day
And it's more violence on the screen than ever before

Again, before what? I grew up seeing the violence in Vietnam on TV. It’s why we ended Vietnam, because we were aware of it. Or we could go back to seeing violence in the streets, I’m not just talking about Detroit, go for a walk in Paris in the year 1420, be sure to wear your knife. Or how about that great civilization of Rome? The Pax Romana was maintained by killing anyone who threatened it. Then they’d nail you to a cross in public as an example, you might have heard of this practice.

Technology has given us everything we could ever want
And at the same time stolen everything we really need
Pride is at an all time high, humility, an all time low
Everybody knows everything, everybody’s going somewhere
Ignoring someone, blaming somebody

I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say this is intentional irony.

Not many human beings left anymore, a lot of human doings
Plenty of human lingerings in the past, not many human beings
Money is still the root of all evil
Yet we tell our kids don’t get that degree
The jobs don’t pay enough
Good deeds are only done when there's a profit margin
Videos of the misfortunes of others go viral
We laugh and share them with our friends to laugh with us
Our role models today
60 years ago would have been examples of what not to be
There are states where people can legally be discriminated against Because they were born a certain way

It’s natural to fear the unknown, those who aren’t like us. It is a survival mechanism that goes back to our earliest ancestors. We are now aware of it and are learning to trust and live together. Look at your main street and count how many different churches there are. Now show me a town in history, more than 500 years ago, that can beat that number. For most of human history, your leader decided what your religion was and if you didn’t like it, you had to leave. If you were lucky you could leave with all your body parts intact. Go back far enough and it wasn’t even called religion, it was just the culture of your tribe, your way of life.

Prejudice is taught, no doubt. But it is also created by a few people who’s fear of change and feelings of being threatened get out of hand and the blame they place is believed by others. Everyone is “born a certain way”, with different advantages, physical and social. We created this “all men are created equal” thing a mere 250 years ago, and we didn’t have it right then, we left out women, obviously, and everyone at the time knew they meant “white” men. We have since improved on it, but there is still work to be done.

If you don’t know this, you weren’t paying attention in High School history. Read a book. If you are learning this from a rap song, you’re behind in your education. We need you to get caught up and join those of us who are working toward a more just and peaceful world.

Companies invest millions of dollars hiring specialists to make Little girls feel like they need “make up” to be beautiful Permanently lowering their self esteem
Because they will never be pretty enough
To meet those impossible standards

I kinda covered this in the sex part above. Really? You think treating girls like sex objects is new? Really? Ever hear of foot-binding? http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/why-footbinding-persisted-china-millennium-180953971/

Corporations tell us buy, buy, buy, get this, get that
You must keep up, you must fit in
This will make you happy, but it never does for long
So what can we do in the face of all of this madness and chaos?
What is the solution? We can love
Not the love you hear in your favorite song on the radio
I mean real love, true love, boundless love
You can love, love each other
From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed
Perform an act of kindness because that is contagious
We can be mindful during every interaction
Planting seeds of goodness
Showing a little more compassion than usual
We can forgive
Because 300 years from now will that grudge you hold against Your friend, your mother, your father have been worth it?
Instead of trying to change others we can change ourselves
We can change our hearts

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. This is a song. It’s not action, but it is a call to action, and we need that. What we don’t need is more angry people shaking their fists at things they don’t understand. It doesn’t do much good to get angry at those you say are making you angry. If that’s what they want, and you say it’s not what you want, then why are you doing it? Be angry, it’s an indicator that you’re alive, but you don’t need to feed that anger. Of course life is hard and something’s wrong. We used to live in trees until someone decided that was stupid. The question is, what are you going to do?

We have been sold lies
Brainwashed by our leaders and those we trust
To not recognize our brothers and sisters
And to exhibit anger, hatred and cruelty
But once we truly love we will meet anger with sympathy
Hatred with compassion, cruelty with kindness
Love is the most powerful weapon on the face of the Earth
Robert Kennedy once said that
Few will have the greatness to bend history
But each of us can work to change a small portion of events
And in the total of all those act
Will be written in the history of a generation
So yes, the world is coming to an end
And the path towards a new beginning starts within you