Talk with a Pastor: Presumptuousness in Knowing God

While I was editing some writing at a coffee shop a few days ago, one of the employees asked me what I was writing.  I replied that I was writing on Augustine.  He was very interested.  Well, last night his pastor stopped by to give him something.  Introductions were made and before I knew it the pastor and I were discussing religion.  He is an evangelical Christian and I view religious faith as an inherently personal matter.  I told the pastor that public utterances (and collective displays) seem to me to be at the surface, and therefore distorted manifestions of what is really much deeper (i.e., the soul’s relationship to God).  I told him that I thought there is much to much certainty regarding what people think they know about God (as evinced by stating the creeds as if they refer to known facts).  I even said I thought it rather presumptuous what people tend to assume they know about God (and then try to impose on others).  Well, as you might expect, this didn’t stop him from doing just that.  The manipulation (and self-absorption) was palpable.  I was astonished that even after I had made my statements he went ahead undaunted.   I felt disrespected (and ignored…or disregarded).  It was all about getting me to come to his church.  All about him.  Of course it was for God, of whom the pastor knows very well.   All I could do was let him speak; I had already decided that would be the last substantive discussion I would have with him.  I was left with a sense of the sheer presumptuousness and how blind the guy was to it…even as he presumed to know God with so much certainty.  Ironic to say the least.

Rooting for a Record-Breaker at the Movies: But Who Pays?

The last weekend of 2009 was Hollywood’s best year ever, taking in a record $278 million in the US.   The film industry had previously seen its highest dollar figure for a three-day weekend in July, 2008, with $260.8 million in ticket sales.   The NYT article (see link below) cites these figures fails to mention the attendance figures.  Without knowing them, it is difficult to know whether the difference was due to more people or higher ticket prices.   I am inclined to believe it was the latter, for the article does state, “Aided by a steady rise in ticket prices, Hollywood has taken in $10.4 billion at the box office this year, moving well past a previous full-year record of $9.68 billion set in 2007… But a few years earlier in the decade it actually made more money when the totals are adjusted for inflation.”  Inflation here means movie ticket increases. 

So when we join in the excitment over whether a new movie will shatter box office records, we are most likely rooting for the price we pay at the box office to increase.   There is something about having a record broken at the moment that blinds us to what it really represents: us paying more for essentially the same stuff.   In setting up for the excitment, the media omits mention of this, and we happily take the bait.  Will a movie reach break-even?  Will it break a record?  We actually root for these things, then we turn around and complain about the recent price increase at the movie theatre.   We aren’t very good at connecting the dots when we have a media (owned by corporations) urging us on to root for the business of the studios.  It is as though we become corporate cheerleaders, excited by whether Christmas sales figures will beat last year’s.  Are we really this gullable?  Are our lives really this pathetic?   Do we realize what we are doing?   Meanwhile, business continues to play us like a fiddle…and we don’t even know it.   We are so caught up on the record-breaking business of business that we don’t stop to ask whether it is in our interest to root for business, or for record-breaking.  Maybe we should turn our attention to the more mundane question of whether anti-trust law should be used to break up the oligarchy of the film industry such that we wouldn’t have to pay $9 or $10 a movie so actors can make as much as $20 million (or higher…I dare not look it up) per film. 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/movies/28box.html?_r=1&ref=movies

Ratzinger at the Vatican: Hindus can’t love

The pope in his homily at the 2009 midnight (actually 10pm) mass quoted Origen (early Xn theologian) who wrote that pagans (who worship stone images of God…which would include Hindus today) can only have hearts of stone (meaning they cannot love…even each other).  Specifically, according to Ratzinger, “Origen, taking up one of John the Baptist’s sayings, saw the essence of paganism expressed in the symbol of stones: paganism is a lack of feeling, it means a heart of stone that is incapable of loving and perceiving God’s love. Origen says of the pagans: “Lacking feeling and reason, they are transformed into stones and wood” (in Lk 22:9).”  So a Hindu believer cannot feel love or use reason.  Being as though lifeless matter, such humans are in effect not human, or sub-human.  This is the implication from Ratzinger’s quote of Origen.  At the very least, one must wonder how insulting good-meaning Hindus (and people of other religions where the deities are in images other than that of Jesus, the “true image of God” according to Ratzinger) can possibly be reconciled with subscribing to a religion wherein God is love and that love is in neighbor-love universalized. 

Ratzinger continues in his homily,  ”The God of whom no image may be made – because any image would only diminish, or rather distort him – this God has himself become visible in the One who is his true image.”   Is this not a contradiction?  If no image can be made, then none–even one believed to be correspond to the divine essence–could be made or seen by humans without distortion.  Otherwise, the statement would read, “the God of whom only one image can be made.”   Any image is distorting because God as the source of existence transcends any image within the limits of human cognition and perception.  Also, even if there were a true image, it would be presumptuous to assume that human beings can know which, if any, is the true image.  Even revelation must go through human hands in being written down.  Furthermore, the presumption that one’s particular image of God is THE true image involves a conflict of interest.   In other words, it is convenient for Joe Ratzinger that his image of God is THE true image of God.  At the very least, Joe Ratzinger’s claim ought to be doubted because it is self-serving. 

C’est vraiment incroyable.  Certainement, un mauvais homme qui croit que il est bon.  …Ratzinger, je veux dire.  Bien sur (ou naturalement), les journalists ont dit rien de ca plus tard.  Hindus ne pouvent pas aimer ou penser.  Sprechen das ist schlecter als  ”they can’t be saved” because “being saved” is a Christian artifact.  Ratzinger’s homily represents Christianity on steroids.  …or an 82 year old man on steroids.  No wonder some (other) crazy person jumped on him during the procession.  To be sure, that was crazy too, but after he got up, it is telling that his eyes were shifty.   In watching him, I got the sense that he is not a very trusting person.  It is difficult to judge, but I would not be surprised were he a spiteful rather than a spiritual man.  I view his decision to quote Origen as just as crazy, and him comments on God’s image as convenient at the very least.  …yet in spite of his comments, the legitimacy is presumed to go with him so no one questions it, at least publically.  The Roman emperor, I submit, is not wearing any clothes.  Yet unlike the baby in the manger, he is all decked out.  It is time, in other words, to see through the glittering robe to uncover the man behind the curtain.

Source: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20091224_christmas_en.html

Conflicts of Interest at the Vatican

The Vatican said at the end of December, 2009, that moving Pope Pius XII  closer to sainthood is not a hostile act against Jews, even though the wartime pontiff has been criticized for not speaking out enough against the Holocaust.  According to the NYT, the Vatican “sought to quell the outrage sparked among many Jewish groups after Benedict signed a decree on Pius’s virtues.”

Had the Roman Catholic Church clergy in Europe known about the Nazi atrocities–not only against the Jews, but the 20 million Russian civilians killed in their villages–it is an interesting question whether “taking up your cross” would have meant risking death in preaching out against the murder.  Being a silent “witness” of God’s presence would probably not cut it, under those circumstances.  Would prayer be a viable alternative to action, were a priest aware that a girl was being raped down the street in an alley?  I submit that it would not. 

However interesting the religious-ethical question of the clergy’s responsibility is, I want to point to another ethical issue that is involved in the sainthood of so many clerics…by other clerics.   There seems something odd, if not nepharious, about a church organization recognizing its own as saints.  It can be likened to a sort of spiritual masterbation.   At the very least, it evinces an institutional conflict of interest…a pope pushing the canonization of two popes from his century (at least one of whom he knew well).   “Make me pope and I’ll make you a saint” may be a bit too much of a stretch, but it is possible that such a deal was struck.  Joe Ratzinger was not, after all, an outsider to the hierarchy under John Paul II.   Indeed, look at the names they pick for themselves.  Joe Ratzinger decided that he would be called Blessed (Benedict).  Pope Pius had decided that he would be called pious.   Besides being hardly humble (Jesus didn’t tell people to call him Pious or Blessed), selecting one’s own name in such terms can be viewed as involving a personal conflict of interest.  

Essentially, my argument here is that we do not recognize institutional or personal conflicts of interest (though we do have a nose for the latter when it involves money!), and that consequently we don’t go far enough in critiquing organizations and the people who run them.  Instead, we get sidetracked into heated polemical debates, such as in whether the pope during WWII knew about the Nazi crimes and yet did nothing to stop them.   We need to take a hint from stories like the Da Vinci Code…we are not going far enough as investigators; paradoxically, some of the answers are left undiscovered right under our noses. 

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34571154/ns/world_news-world_faith/

Pre-Winter-Solstice “Autumn” Snow Storm: Autumn in Mid-December in New York?

I am writing this post on the Winter Solstice of 2009 (December 21st).   Technically, I suppose, that means that last week was still autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. So yesterday was still Autumn in Quebec, Alaska, and New York.  The huge snow storm that travelled up the east coast a few days before the solstice was thus dubbed by the NYT as “Winter Arrives Early.”     One line is particularly strange: “On its way out the door, autumn gave the New York region a mighty foretaste of winter.”  Odd that mid December in NYC would be referred to as rightfully autumn.  Even if “autumn” is used to refer to the earth’s tilt relative to the sun from the equinox to the winter solstice, such usage represents a misuse of language, especially if it is used in this way outside of scientific circles.  Indeed, “autumn” is mostly used in quite another meaning…one that does not include highs in the mid 30s and snow.  That is clearly winter.  

What I am getting at here is the oddity that is behind sticking to a technical usage that is so obviously ill-fitting.   Prime facie, winter does not arrive early when it snows in New England in mid December.   This might be the case in thirty years if global warming takes hold, but for now the statement evinces a rather strange form of journalism.  At the very least, it implies that we should communicate as dictionaries even where it doesn’t make sense.   Rather than resisting playing fast and loose with language, I would argue that it does just the opposite because it involves using terms against their central meaning.  

What might the mentality be that so proffers such an obviously misfit even in technical terms?  I believe the technical term should be changed because the term’s normal usage is at odds with it (at least where winter weather is significant).   Is a person using a technical term in common usage even though the technical meaning doesn’t apply trying to be cute?  Or an insistence on the technical meanings of terms even when they don’t fit?  If so, there is presumption in it.  I don’t view an ill-fitting technical meaning as trumping ordinary usages in ordinary discourse such as a newspaper.   In any case, snow in mid December in the Northeast is not “winter arrives early.”  

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/us/20snow.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=central%20park%20snow&st=cse ; http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/plenty-of-snow-but-hard-to-get-anywhere/?scp=1&sq=central%20park%20snow&st=cse

Proof of the Sainthood of John Paul II

In a curious use of phraseology, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi described the next stage in the canonization process of John Paul II:  “Now comes the examination of a miracle, which is the proof of the divine interceding power of John Paul II on behalf of God.”  Proof.  This is what caught my eye in reading the quote.  Someone prays for the intercession of JPII, and gets well, but is positive correlation proof?   I pray for an end to the rain during a rain-shower and it suddenly stops raining.  Proof?  David Hume argues that we really don’t understand the links in a cause/effect.  We don’t even have to go to Hume to make the point that positive correlation is not causation.   Were a religionist to reply that religious proof is of a different sort than that which is ordinarily used, I would say that religionists should find another word.   Otherwise, I would be justified in taking liberties too, such as calling a veggie burger a hamberger.  Too bad if vegitarians miss out on the burgers because I took liberties with the terms.   Of course, my overall point is that the canonization process of the Roman Catholic Church is fundamentally flawed.  Because positive correlation is easier to reach than is causation, the gates are indeed open quite wide for whomever the Church officials wish to make a saint.  When they consider one of themselves, we can add a personal and institutional conflict of interest to the problematic nature of their “proof.”  Perhaps November 1st should be called “Friends Day” rather than “All Saints Day.”  Essentially, the canonization process is a way for clergy to recognize their friends (and themselves).  Such convenience is hardly of the humility of self-emptying agape as evinced on the Cross.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/12/19/pope.john.paul.sainthood/index.html

Penny Cheap; Pound Foolish

I intended to buy a few items at a grocery store today (of the Copps chain in Wisconsin).   I used the auto checkout line.  The apple had been under a sign “.99 per lb.”  However, the check-out register showed $1.59 per pound.  I mentioned the error to the clerk looking over the self check-out machines (really watching the customers).  She called for a check on her phone as I waited.  No response.  So she said she would go check it herself.  The implication was obvious: She was presuming that I could not be trusted–I was presumably trying to get away with forty cents.  I told her I was in a hurry (I had already waited through her call), but she ignored me and walked off to verify the signage.  God forbid the customer’s word could be taken on such a serious matter.   Well, I walked out without the items, and the store lost more than forty cents.   That a company whose employees are so distrustful and cheap could survive simply amazes me.   How a person could be so small (and not realize it) is so foreign to me I can’t explain the mentality.   I followed my instinct and simply walked away.  The items…her…her company…were not worth dealing with.   In hindsight, I can visualize that employee wrestling a customer on the dirty floor for a dime.  “It’s mine!  Gimme it!  You can’t have it!”   …for a dime.   How, I wonder, can an adult (the employee is perhaps 22) lose perspective so and yet not have a clue?

Morning TV Personalities Skirt Barak Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Speech

On the morning that Barak Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, the people running the morning “news” shows were more interested in exploring Tiger Woods’ affairs.  CBS’s Morning Show covered the first few lines of the speech, when one of the morning personalities spoke over him to tell the viewer what the President had just said.  Of course that meant that we could not hear what he was saying, but that apparently didn’t matter to her or her director.  “The President said he realizes there has been controversy about him being awarded the prize.”  Yes, we heard that; we are not idiots.  What is he saying now?   In case it is not blatantly obvious, I want to call attention to the implications from the voice-overlay (and the fact that little more of the speech was covered).   Someone at the Morning Show must have been assuming that the viewers are pretty stupid to need to have what the President said almost instantly repeated by the “journalist.”  With regard to all of the morning shows (ABC, NBC and CBS), the directors (or producers) must have had a rather strange sense of priorities because NBC and ABC did not even show any of the LIVE acceptance (making a reference to it then going instead to commercials) or the speech.  Barak Obama is the first sitting U.S. president in 90 years and the third ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize–but this apparently isn’t important enough for the personalities on and behind the morning shows.   It is perhaps too much of a temptation for them to put themselves up front–their voice-overs, their profit-motive–and yet they no doubt consider themselves journalists.  In actuality, they are merely personalities–full personalities…full of themselves rather than having a sense of responsibility to report the news.

Racial Jokes Out of Fashion: How Much Has Changed Since the 1970’s

I remember Don Rickels among the matured celebrities of the second half of the twentieth century.  I saw him just recently on the Jimmy Kimmel late night show.  My first impression of Don was how masterful he was at humor.  I don’t think we see such skill much today.  At the same time, he reminded me of how much times have changed since the 1970s.   After Rickels made a casual remark that there probably weren’t many black people in the audience, the camera surveyed the room to find a black person. Finally, the cameraman located a black employee at standing at the edge of the stage.  As the camera moved in on the man, Don or Jimmy noted that there was indeed a black person present.  

I am not a black person, but I was astounded nonetheless that deference to a Hollywood legend could enable or excuse singling out a black person for being black.  Even when the camera was panning the audience, the laughing had already ended and the attention was on whether there was indeed a black person present; it was not part of a running joke.  

It occurred to me that such racial humor was common in American comedy in twentieth century–at least through the 1970s.  So too were alcoholic jokes.  The rat pack, for example, made much of the perception that Dean Martin got drunk a lot.  Alcohol was funny.  So too were racial jokes.   Often times, the comics were smoking (i.e., another addiction) as they stood in front of a camera.  The confluence of alcoholic and racial jokes along with nearly unbiquitous smoking in the twentieth century attests to the decadence then.   Remember Foster Brooks?  Sammy Davis Jr?  They played off the sick humor.  The Dean Martin show relished in it.   Now most of those characters are gone, and so too is their world.   Just enough of them are still hanging on to show us how much American society has changed.   Health is making gains against alcohol consumption,  and smoking is in retreat, at least in public places.   Even already, I tend to think of smoking as “twentieth century” rather than “today.”   There are admittedly those people who are still of the last century, but they are behind the times–hangers-oners, as it were.

All of this is not to say that we do not have our own demons.  The next century will probably look back at our political correctness as decadent presumption on the part of some to impose their agenda on others.   Perhaps by seeing the decadence in the last age, we can confront our own variety rather than use it for laughs.

Source: http://abc.go.com/watch/jimmy-kimmel-live/93521/243271/jimmy-kimmel-live-124

Local News: When Vaunted Self-Importance Manifests as Teases at the Expense of Vital Information

Have you ever been watching an evening television show, when at about mid evening during the commercials the local television affiliate’s weather “personality” comes on the screen and says “snow coming…find out at eleven”?   (or ten)   Oh, snow is coming?  When?  How much?  Suppose it is the next day and 12 inches are called for, and you could very much use that information to arrange for a babysitter for your children who will be home on a snow day.   Or suppose the tease is “hurricane changing course…find out at eleven.”   Well, there is not much actual public service information in such a tease.   It’s all about keeping us hanging so we will watch the “personalities” on their show. 

If the local television news has a licence to broadcast news, using that licence to promote the news program at the expense of providing important information when there is a chance evinces a warped sense of priorities and perhaps even a breach of the license.  A conflict of interest exists when a news producer is more concerned to promote his or her broadcast than to provide information on a timely basis that has a stong public interest.  That such a conflict of interest would trump even information on an impending emergency demonstrates just how bad the mentality has been allowed to get–just how entrenched the selfishness is.   What is wrong with “12 inches expected tomorrow before 5, Full weather after the movie”?   Instead, the news producer wants to manipulate us…rather than inform us.  We have to wait.  It is just another version of the attention-seeking selfishness that we essentially enable by not criticizing.  

To the local broadcasters:

Newsflash: it is more important to get vital information out to those who won’t get it at 11 than to withhold it in an effort to manipulate them into staying up to watch you.    We can make our own decisions about whether we want more information without essentially being given an ultimatum.  If the vital information is sufficient, there is absolutely nothing wrong with skipping your show.   It is not all about you, or even your profits.  The money your program makes is conditional on your license, which permits you to use the public airwaves.   Shirking in order to get more is ultimately (hopefully) counterproductive, even for your interests.

For more, pls see http://twitter.com/deligentia