Gadfly's blog

Cross posted at Gadfly's Muse

That is the thought that dominated my mind this morning as I sat and watched the seemingly endless stream of large vehicles dropping off teenagers at our local high school.

Granted, the town in which I live is and has always been known as "yuppie heaven" and so there is no reason why I should expect anything different than what I observed.  But it sure is a saddening sight.  If anyone denies that there is a caste system operative in the United States of America, I would only ask that he or she require their 15 year old or older  to (horrors) ride the bus to school .  At least, that is the dynamic that I imagine is behind this ridiculous situation.

I was on my way to the office when the crossing guard signalled our lane to stop.  The left turn lane from the opposite direction was stretched all the way around a curve  and beyond the next traffic light.  I noticed that there was not a single vehicle with its turn signal operating, of a size even as small as a Dodge Caravan.  Though I did not see any Hummers, yet for all practical purposes it looked like a staging area for a military expedition.  As each successive vehicle turned in front of me, uniformly the sight was the same:  a single parent, overwhelmingly moms, with a single teenager in the passenger seat.

Cross posted at Gadfly's Muse

With family still unaccounted for in Mississippi, blogging hasn't been high on my list for the last few days, but the images and stories coming out of my beloved South have affected me deeply. 

I grew up in a "community".  I am not certain how many people can truly say that anymore.  I suppose most of us are dying out as the baby-boomer generation passes into the initial stages of gentrification and approaching senility.  But  to my thinking "community" is pretty much synonymous with "civilization" and pretty much antithetical to "barbarianism."  In "community" it is not so much the legal codes which regulate human behavior, but the social mores (from Wikpedia - strongly held norms or customs ...  the established practices of society rather than its written laws ).  In "community" there is a sense of place and worth which is, in part, communally derived.  It matters what our neighbors think of us and whether or not that esteem or disapproval is justified.  In community the social bond helps sustain and elevate noble impulses and restrain those which demean and degrade us.

There are some occasions when all that was best about the "Old South" floods back over your awareness like a gentle changing tide on the Mississippi river.  You just sense the lift and the inescapable  pleasant contentment  that it brings.  Only someone who knew her and loved her can ever truly understand the bittersweet experience.  The "Old South" will always be feminine in our remembrance, because, I suppose,  Southern Ladies epitomized all about which I am speaking.  There was a gentleness, a sense of propriety, a firm conviction in the "way things ought to be", that characterized the externals of Old Southern society.  And it was not the least bit hypocritical, though it is easy to think it was by those who never knew her.  But that which made the gentleness, the sense of propriety and conviction more than mere gloss, was the tempered steel which provided its foundation.  The Old South, at its best, was the conviction that civilization meant moral conviction and apart from that conviction, barbarity reigned.  And barbarity simply was not allowed.  It 'twasn't nice.  Nowhere was that more evident than in Southern womanhood and hence, the Old South is "she."

cross posted at Gadfly's Muse

Discussions of the war have never been elevated, but they have now degenerated to a Warner Brother's cartoon -- with Sylvester, Tweety, Elmer and Bugs all cranked up on speed and self-righteousness.

STRATFOR GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT 08.02.2005  Stratfor.com

A friend sent me this link the other day because he thought it offered some worthwhile reading.  I agree.  This particular report focuses on the strategic geo-political objectives of Al Quaida and the manner in which this war serves to frustrate them.  It does not specifically say that this is the best arena for such an effort nor that it is being prosecuted in a way best suited to thwarting those objectives, but it does give some needed discussion.

The sentence quoted above is correct also.  Too much of what is passing forth between the parties dividing this nation is centered on emotional rhetoric and not enough is focused on finding a perspective that can serve to unite us.  Too much discussion is motivated by blind desire on both sides.  Some are willing to do or say anything to discredit the current administration.  Others, out of fear or an equivalent blind support, make similar statements.  What all of us need to do is find some common ground for analysis.  I am not so arrogant as to consider that I can supply that ground, but perhaps I might offer some pointers which might be helpful  toward that end.

JY writes
My 'hermeneutic', or interpretive approach, is to assume that the works were written by one or more humans to communicate to humans, and that they largely mean what they say. It's fairly straightforward. One runs into difficulty, of course, when you encounter poetic sections, highly metaphorical sections, and so forth, at which point you have to understand what various metaphors mean, which requires understanding things about the period. Nevertheless, it's easy to find plainly written, non-poetic sections of the Bible which contradict other non-poetic, plainly written sections of the Bible.

Approaching a text attempting to prove inerrancy is not honest, if one is already committed to the idea of inerrancy and divine inspiration, because of the ease at which literary 'problems' can be rationalized. The types of justifications that 'rescue' problems in the Bible from being seen as inerrant can rescue any text from such problems. The Bagavad Gita, the Quran, the I Ching, or Moby Dick, all could be approached with the assumption of inerrancy, and post-hoc rationalizations can always be used to 'solve' problems in the text. Ishmael famously declares whales to be fish (in Moby Dick, not the Bible). This is an obvious error. But it's easily rescued by pointing out that the goal of Moby Dick is not to provide information about the nature of whales, but the nature of man, and the whale is being used throughout Moby Dick in a metaphorical sense.

Movie Review:  What The Bleep Do We Know?  (I know, the title should have math symbols in it)Captured Light Distribution, 20th Cent. Fox, available DVD

Cross posted at Gadfly's Muse

I liked this movie and I will tell you why, but first, contrary to all the movie promotes, let's get the negatives out of the way first.

1.  The movie is solidly anti-Christian in the sense that it is solidly anti-organized religion.  Like the prevailing trend in modern spirituality  it promotes a primary individualistic theology while seeking to promote unity.  It clearly seeks to remove any ultimate distinction between good and evil reducing them down to harmful and positive constructs originating in the human mind.

2.  The movie is solidly pantheistic rather than atheistic.  Like all  pantheistic philosophies it reduces the Ultimate down to a mindless Unity which embraces all, is in all and originates all.  It offers no explanation for this Unity nor seeks to understand it further than the individual's contribution to it.  It accepts this unity in the same way that pagan religions accept the reality of magic or Luke Skywalker accepts the Force.  It is simply the construct on which all subsequent cosmology is understood.

Originally they were intended to establish the first dependent colony in the new  frontier of Mars.  There was not much which would have recommended their sophisticated and complex ship to the original Conestoga wagons, but the concept was the same.  Go to Mars, carve out the first steps of an envisioned future space port, a way point for further galactic or even inter-galactic travel.  Settle down, have children, become the space-age equivalent of the Mayflower.  Even the title of their mission, Plymouth Venture, pointed back to those nearly forgotten years when the promise of a new land, new beginnings and the opportunity to be involved in a dream of enormous potential claimed the imaginations of so many.

The key concept was "a dependent colony."  Mars held no immediate prospect of independently supported human life.  For the envisionable future, the colony would have required a steady stream of logistical support, rotation back to the "main land" for some, infusion of new talent and gene pool expansion.  The ultimate hope always lay beyond Mars, beyond Pluto, even beyond the galaxy.  Somewhere, out there, was another planet whose delicately balanced ecosystem would approximate that of earth.  Somewhere, out there, the gigantic experiment that constituted the infinitely complex and ultimately fragile nature of that insignificant rock orbiting a medium sun of no particular consequence, might have been duplicated or perhaps duplicated to some approximate extent such that man, by application of his powers, could bring it whatever distance remained necessary to support life.

JY on July 25, 2005 , said the following about my previous post...

"As Retropolitan said, your idea of 'power' seems fuzzy. If a 'spiritual being' is say, the ghost of a departed mouse, which can't be seen or heard but can nevertheless steal material cheese and spring material mousetraps, is this spiritual being more, or at least as 'powerful', as us? I'd say no, but then, I don't think there's a real 'thing' we can call power, except the specific concept in physics."

If anybody cares what I think about the Potter books - here's something I just posted.

Gadfly's Muse

The previous two postings  laid out the elementary principles on which I think any coherent (if that matters to a person) world view is built.  Most of us don't ever really examine what we believe or how it all fits together, but good old Socrates once stated that "an unexamined life is not worth living" (Plato: The Apology of Socrates, Other quotes if you want 'em )  and I suppose I subscribe to that idea pretty closely.

Hank Fox (not verified) in his comments to my earlier post, takes me to task for lack of clarity and insufficient meat.

Gadfly, um ... forgive me, but it doesn't sound like you've really thought all that much about this stuff. You've tossed out some fairly predictable comebacks, but not much MEAT -- thoughtful substance.
....
Your initial post contained a couple of worthwhile points, but even that wasn't much fun to read. And a construction such as "There is no cause/effect relation that originates in the world of sense which guarantees a corresponding inbreaking from any world outside of the senses. If man is to know anything about a world beyond the senses, it must make itself known to him, he cannot require it to be made known" is virtually opaque.

OK - it's always good to know how you're coming across and talking above people's heads doesn't help anything. So, thanks Hank, for the admonishment. Being "fun to read" is probably not a criterion that I will ever attain though I do hope to be "worthwhile."

DarkSyde extended a wonderfully cordial invitation to me to cross post with him on issues of mutual interest. Who could resist such a winsome offer from a self-professed athiest whose interests range throughout the hemisphere of "evolutionary biology, science in general, classical apologetics, thoughts on Sep of Church and State, etc." Although dealing with someone called "DarkSyde" leaves me feeling somewhat like a Wookie standing before Darth Vader - here goes.

The field is apologetics and the focus is presuppositions.

A place to start. There exists only two internally consistent , logically coherent frameworks within which any person may form a worldview that furnishes him or her with a rational, intelligible means of interpreting the world about them, their relation to the world about them and their own life within that world. Other frameworks exist but do not meet the criteria mentioned above.

There are only two, because all such frameworks reduce down, through the varying levels of complexity with which they have been filled, to the answer to one basic question, the starting point for all rational discourse on this topic. That question is: Is the world of the senses all that there is or does there exist a dimension to the sphere of universe and time ( I am explicitly avoiding the use of the word "creation") that is beyond the senses?