Land of the Living; Land of the Dead.

Chinoisville

Readable

Basically, there were two young Jamaicans doing the young male macho bullshit in the yard. They were going to fight for unknown reasons, and Simon, who was very large if white, walked into the circle, stood between them and told them to cut it out because we'd end up having to go inside and none of us wanted that. Suddenly, the Jamaicans who were about to fight had a common enemy: Simon.

Harmony in the rudebwai world, great, but not so much for Simon. He was lecherous because he ran a brothel and had some crazy pink rubber mini-skirted strumpet visit him. You were there, because I only saw her because she was visiting him, and if I saw her visiting him, then you were visiting me. He was lecherous because he boasted in a paradoxically quiet way about how he "helped" girls who "were confused" and "needed him". God knows.

No, we were able to continue ordering pinepples in tab-ring open cans. I also remember we could buy like sardines and other canned foods. The sardine lids were good for making knives which the Serbian war criminal I was sharing a cell with briefly used for making late night snacks. He would chop up the sardines or whatever and make some sort of salad. It passed the time, which is all you're really trying to do in jail. Jails' great for reading, so long as no one is threatening you.

As far as I recall, the can of pineapples ended up briefly in my possession, with a big dent in it in a way that's hard to dent that kind of cylinder. It wasn't just like a dent in the side. It was like it got stomped on on one side from the top sort of.

I can't remember if they took it from me for "evidence" or what. I don't think I got to eat them though.

We could buy them from the commissary, with the 2 quid and change the Queen gave us every week. She gave us just enough to buy a pack of Golden Virginia but not papers, and smoking was more important than pineapples. The papers thing though... that was so fucking annoying. I wish I still had a commissary form. I would scan it and put it on my blog.

You helped me get through that time. I wish I learned my lesson then, though. I'm a pretty retarded fuck.

Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit?

This exploration highlights the contributions of early Enlightenment theologists on the nature of religion and the issues their positions raise. These ideas will then be considered in the frames of later thinkers of esteem, and finally focus on application in modernity. Roles that religion has played will be identified, the purposes it has served identified, the needs it has met identified, and where those needs still survive it will be sought how, if they can be met, shall we find the way to meet them. While the discourse these Enlightenment thinkers set into motion is essentially relevant, the the practice of discrediting the unlikely truth of religion leaves us in a spiritual vacuum. Karen Armstrong presents in her paper “The Great Western Transformation” a possible way to fill that vacuum in an application of myth as art, and this paper endeavors to relate the various voices to be introduced so as to outline the character of this vacuum, and place Armstrong's suggestion as a part of the answer in filling that void.

Theology will remain relevant provided religion continues to loom authoritatively on morality, identity, mortality, and politics. The media and social dialogue of modern Western society frequently mocks religion. It does so sometimes affectionately but often enough in derision. This implies some popular movement away from religion. Nonetheless, a significant number of Americans believe in miracles and angels, celebrate the religious holy days, rely on religion to inform their values, politics, and define their identities. Whether the degree of devotion of a believer to their faith is vague social convention or enthusiastic, rigorous study, practice, and promotion of the doctrine when the custom calls for it, the institutions of religion aren't going anywhere until science can provide some answers about our natural realm, abiogenesis, space, time, and matter. Notwithstanding these mysteries, human experiences such as identity, community, and mortality may perpetuate religious tradition in need of a philosophy through which to practically relate to them. As long as religion remains in the popular psyche, theology in one form or another will flourish. The challenge seems to have become how to place these religious elements of the psyche in some rational, sane, and ideally peaceful way.

Generally, the scope of this examination is limited to consider religion in the Judea-Christian sense, as the primary models of the authors cited and that of this work are those of the West. Prior to and unfortunately during and after the Enlightenment, in waxing and waning frenzies, combinations of Church and State holding authority persecuted those who antagonized that authority in heretical or blasphemous deed. The works of Spinoza, Reimarus, and Hume, in opening up the dialogue and working an honest attempt to examine religion through the lens of reason at the dawn of the Enlightenment, marked the beginning of an era that allowed unfettered debate regarding incongruous religious features in public discourse.

Spinoza challenged the veracity of the interpreted accounts of miracles but kept a divine entity in regard. His approach in “Of Miracles” indicated the need to give canonical accounts license for poetic turns of phrase, hyperbole for increasing the impact of the account, and allowance for the limitations of the authors' grasp of sciences in their renditions. Importantly, he points out the problem of miracles being events which require the suspension of natural law to come to pass, seeking to explain the contradiction in the authors' subjective, motivated, and otherwise limited perspective rather than to consider that a divine actor should suspend its own natural law in the course of deeds. Reimarus, in “Third Fragment: Passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea” focuses but exclusively on the logistical improbabilities of the account. The Reimarus piece does not address divinity or religion any more than in challenging the truth of the words in the scripture, and so seems to follow Spinoza's line that it all doesn't add up as written.

Hume has a different approach, less reverent and more ordered to do away with what he presents the miraculous core of Christian religious belief as being: bigotry, superstition, and delusion. He writes, as introduction to his piece which adheres very much to a purely rational approach:

“I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature (decisive arguments that silence the most arrogant bigotry and superstition, freeing us from impertinent solicitations), which, if just, will, with the wise and learned,be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion...”

His argument is that belief must be proportionate to the evidence. With scriptural accounts being at best founded on the accounts of eye-witnesses, he sums, “Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses” with the further logic that the credibility of the evidence is diminished in passing to the disciples' disciples, as no account from another sourced by yet a third party can compare with the evidence of what one personally experiences. It could be argued that this line is extraneous, until it becomes clear that he asks his reader to consider the distinct lack of supernatural occurrences one witnesses, or hears testimony of from credible or multiple source. He mentions specifically the core Christian belief that a dead man came to life as exemplary of the very implausible nature of miracles as they contradict all evidence of our experience. In light of his challenge to the essential Christian belief, it is reasonable to interpret his view as one of anti-religious nature.

Regardless of these authors' beliefs, their pieces do represent the natural questions that will come to those that encounter the claims and demands of belief that religious doctrine make. Their work opened the honest public examination of the veracity of claims of religious institution and the hermeneutic awkwardnesses involved. It would appear that the institutions of religion had long been protected from question as representatives of god, brokers and proxies of god's will, by the fear of the common believer to blaspheme or appear blasphemous. Whatever the reason it had not been previously addressed publicly, Spinoza, Hume, and Reimarus were among the vanguard of Enlightenment writers applying reason to religious institutions' claims.

Unlike doctrinal accounts of miracles and the dictates of god inherited from history, modern claims of divinity and miracle would now be examined through the Enlightenment's frames of reason. For instance, if a contemporary man claiming to be god, cultivating a following and persuading witnesses of miraculous powers encountered state authority, the result would undoubtedly differ from historical accounts. Imagine said authority executed this man by hanging, yet he was subsequently discovered invigorating crowds and proselytizing in his miraculous reanimation. He may become a cause célèbre, but this account would certainly invite examination.

Modern scientific examination would apply reason in examining the effectiveness of the hanging, the manner of his death pronouncement, the consideration that he may have an identical twin, and other potentially viable explanations. Interestingly, the existing religious institutions may label this returned messiah a charlatan, an impostor, and a heretic while chastising his followers for offending god and truth. For, as Hume put it, "...let us consider, that, in matters of religion, whatever is different is contrary; and that it is impossible the religions of ancient Rome, of Turkey, of Siam, and of China should, all of them, be established on any solid foundation." In other words, these competing and conflicting truths are an impossibility. It is in this Enlightenment critique, and in working with Hume's presentation of the practice of weighing evidence anchored in experience, that the claims of religion leave it in an awkward and, in varying degrees, incredulous position.

Yet today religious temples fill regularly and people on the street proselytize, hawking salvation and pamphleteering of eschatological doom. People see Jesus in toast and ultrasounds. Claims are made that statues of religious figures cry and bleed. Like Harris observes in The End of Faith, pentecostal congregations test scriptural promise by trying their fate with venomous snakes. In fairness, this is representative of a minority of extremist believers. The majority practice their religious rituals with moderate and cautious regard for all things supernatural. Sampling a few dozen persons on the street in metropolitan or small-town America will reveals a belief in entities like angels and life after death. This means what, though?

Bultmann, in the 20^th century, makes clear that mincing words and feigning beliefs is not worth much to the believer and is dishonest of the cleric. One of his many cogent observations is the obsolescence of a three tiered realm, with heaven “up” and hell “down”, God and angels' strings attached to us in influence against contrary Satan and demons' persuasions. This myth leaves us in the middle of a planar realm, which the scientific revelations of Copernicus rendered absurd. That we can abandon this myth, on his line, gives that we must continue. As a man of the clergy, he notably addresses the paradox of claimed belief and actual belief, that people on the street may claim to believe in things that they cannot really possibly believe. Ultimately, Bultmann leads to a conclusion that, in modernity, we must regard the New Testament as myth and charges his readers to regard the symbolism in terms of the experience of existence in individual responsibility for action and redemption. The claim of belief in angels and miracles, while a very loyal act, is fundamentally complicated in the direct challenge to the standards applied for belief in every other area of the believers' lives.

Strauss, along Bultmann's examination of the claims of belief, moves to divide those who would preserve the historical accuracy of scriptural text from the preference of a view where god can intervene supernaturally in affairs. He leaves the options of scripture being either mythological or contradictory. He extends the line that Spinoza and others made that nothing occurs outside of the laws of nature by handling the accounts of supernatural as myth, and undermining the apparently desperate rationalist attempts of theologists to save Jesus from being thrown out with all of the scriptural bathwater. The aforementioned thinkers have left the concept that the ideal is the relevant value, the meaning of scripture and religion is what is important, not the perhaps irreconcilable accounts of miraculous affairs. Strangely, given the legacies of Hume and Spinoza, centuries later scholars are still wrestling with familiar theological ideas.

Religion, as an institution brokering knowledge of the will of god, such knowledge vested in antiquity to and preserved by the faithful, and offering a relationship, if by proxy, with god makes an indefensible presumption of proprietary knowledge of truth that can not endure the standards of reason. Simple agreement with any of the irreligious perspectives, however, without consideration of the methods and determinations of the philosophes, Aufklärer, British, and other Enlightenment philosophers on religion is to make a “leap to faith” in their own doctrine, and no more steeped in careful self-conscious thought than the stubbornly religious zealot's antics.

One of the best defenses the faithful to a religion can make is that god is omnipotent and omniscient, beyond understanding and thus irrefutable. After all, can one really understand the notions of an infinite universe if this universe should be infinite? This concludes the discourse, but makes only one point. The faith of an individual is based on that individual's standards. While some public claims that could be described as magical thinking might, in some cities, be grounds for a committed psychiatric evaluation, a popular belief with a history of tradition is somehow exempt from this. This indicates, in the midst of popular movement away from religion, a significant degree of tolerance and acceptance of belief and thinking in the religious vein.

Attempts to explain the need for religion anthropologically, along the lines of Frazer's suggestions of early ritual manipulation of microcosmic models to affect the macrocosm, imitative ritual magic, and the petition of deities for favor, or Tylor's proposal that religion is a "survival" of a phase along a track of progress in human social evolution are borne in reason. It is difficult to imagine credibility of a method outside of rationale and science to explain some of the features of shared human spiritual habit and thought. Yet the fact that reason, as consideration of evidence and premise of experience through rationality and logic in search of conclusive explanation, is the most sound and preferred intellectual method does not necessarily oppose religion with any hostility.

The functional and reductive approaches these examinations employ in attempting to identify the social role played by religion and those elements that constitute religion do not reveal an outright hostility towards religion. If the enlightenment critique may be characterized as challenging the credibility of the unseemly accounts of miracles and prophecies in scriptural canon and tradition, a potential threat to religious institutions, then Pals' remark that this indicates the enlightenment critique is still at work could be correct. Hostility or none, the dialogue remains alive and relevant.

Modern multiculturalism and relativism may have stunted the effect that Enlightenment thinking makes on moderate believers. Harris observes that by offering tolerance of other faiths, it grants moderates license for personal beliefs in fundamental elements of doctrine that are, if not impossible to prove, beyond the need for proof. Crucially, though, the believer doesn't have to meet any standards for their beliefs but those they choose to accept.

Whether or not a believer professes biblical inerrancy, the core of Christian belief is that Jesus literally died and after literally being killed, he literally came back to life from having been dead and, after a brief posthumous sermon, literally traversed the heavens. Without that belief, one is not really a Christian. While the symbolism is inspiring, even if the myth of Jesus is meaningful, true Christianity requires literal belief in the resurrection. A believer can't explain this belief rationally without denouncing the core doctrine or finding an explanation within the realm of natural experience. Accordingly, reason and religion appear mutually exclusive.

If reason cannot explain questions like, "What is the universe expanding into?" and "Where did all this matter come from?", even the most reasonable, enlightened thinker is at a loss to place themselves in life and the universe. Spinoza's proposition of divinity as a set of natural laws is not only more congruent with reason, it is also perhaps more palatable to believers finding a need to reconcile their views with their living experience and reason. Spinoza, like Newton, allows for some god of order.

Science as an enterprise in reason does not claim to authoritatively present the answers to questions it cannot. The scientific method allows for theory to be modified. Importantly, religion also must accommodate developments in science. Evolution, for example, is a theory. It is not proven, but it is a theory that works, in spite of the challenges of intelligent design arguments, because science is a search for answers rather than a catalogue of them.

That religion is frequently inherited and serves to define identity are principal features of its survival. Environment strongly informs morality, society, values, integrity, and order. Most importantly, parents are the first arbiters of right and wrong. Before a mind can work freely to place itself in life, society, and the universe through personal experience and commerce of ideas, learning to frame thought in reason and rationale, it must first subjugate the dogmatic certainty instilled by parents, encouraged by community, and echoed by state leaders. It may be practically disadvantageous or psychologically contrary to do so. Historically and today, families, relationships, communities, and civilizations are fractured and never repaired because of conversions between faiths and other modifications to religious identity. We are plagued by war and threat, perpetrated and suffered from collectives identified by, among other features, religion.

Armstrong informs that Newton believed he was proving the existence of god in the context of Francis Bacon's imposition “All the myths of religion should be subjected to stringent criticism and if they contradicted the proven facts they must be cast aside.”

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who synthesised the findings of his predecessors by a rigorous use of the evolving scientific disciplines of experiment and deduction. He believed that he was bringing his fellow human beings unprecedented and certain information about the world, that the cosmic system he had discovered coincided completely with the facts, and that it proved the existence of God, the great 'Mechanik' who had brought the intricate machine of the universe into being.

While Bacon's rule would set to determine the provability of myths, he would have us cast aside the tradition of a spirituality that which we appear to have needed socially and psychologically as long as history has been written. Maintaining a respect for Bacon's rigor of determination in what is worth keeping and the demand that Hume's reason makes for purpose of evidence of belief, religious institution has long served us in various capacities.

Religion has served to repose knowledge and religious institutions have served as centers of information exchange and social organization. In recent history, for example, the civil rights movement was substantially coordinated in the American South through church networks. Churches have acted as patrons of art. The Gutenberg bible became a gateway to literacy in the 13^th century and onwards, and various translations had given slaves in the United States opportunity to teach themselves to read. Along with these practical services and the charities that religious institution has provided, the symbolism and framework of life have been a precious asset to our developing civilizations.

While it has come with a price, religion has given us a way to make sense of our lives, our place in the universe. With Copernicus' revelations, we began the journey to our present condition where one, if one follows the rigors of scientific thought, we find ourselves as primates on a rock rotating and revolving around a star of limited lifespan. Further along this line, one finds an idea that the only value of one's life is that which one ascribes to it. In this barren cosmos there is no need to be virtuous unless it is to one's personal advantage. There is a figurative Pandoran jar that is opened, and we are left in an existential crisis. Among other problems, one can fairly ask “what is the purpose of living?” and arrive with equal substance at suicide or an epicurean life. The psyche suffers, if not in the individual, certainly in the social. For when one decides they only have but to think of themselves they are already primed for criminal deed that imposes on others.

Armstrong makes a succinct vignette of the essential role that myth is needed to play in our collective psyche:

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national, or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource'. This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

We are not ready, willing, or well advised to abandon our mythology. As Armstrong presents, we should not if we want to survive as a species. What would serve us, and mark progress, would be a recognition of the value of symbolism in religious myth as we come to terms with the notion that our religious traditions are legacies of more primitive eras, and a promotion of humility and self-consciousness in regard to the beliefs we adopt and abandon as we grow and evolve individually and socially. It is one thing to identify as coming from a particular religious tradition and heritage, but until we can place the myths of religious doctrine as such, we are stalled and stagnant in a precarious place in our social evolution.

Armstrong suggests that we may find inspiration in heroes of aspirational character. Her suggestion places them in novels, and while there are complications with that idea it is in the right track of multicultural and tolerant form. Perhaps Spinoza and others have shown some example. As dogmatic religious institutions become more and more recognizable as very much human organizations, and as modernity pushes the genuine belief in the supernatural farther from our collective frame of reference, we may intuitively salvage the god of order that Spinoza presents. Our motives, divorced from the mythological scale of evaluation where the balance of transgression and virtue determines an infinity of suffering or pleasure, may very well be compassed on notions of honor represented in myths and recognized as such. This magical sort of thinking may be more practical than the most critical agnostic or fanatic religious would accede. So long as the myth is recognized as myth and has a function that provides for society, it is by far a more reasonable answer than notions of existential space-time and personified diety.

"Magical Thinking"? ...va te faire foutre

I want to write a story. Really, though, I think I need to live a story. I know we all live stories, but I need some serious plot development. It makes for difficult writing when it feels like the life lived, the collection of experience from which to draw is lacking. Let this not be so much a complaint as an examination of the problem. I want to write, but I don't feel like I have anything worth writing, or rather, reading, as my life feels only barely, no, not even barely, worth living and having lived.  Well, it's been worth having lived for the most part, unless one looks at the really big picture, but that picture depresses people and I don't want to depress people.

It's not young gizz in the wind anymore. People seem to have all these sorts of expectations. It must be true that I have expectations. I think they're different, the expectations I have of life and myself and those of other people. Generally speaking, I mean. Samuel Hargestam, a sort of genius, was able to articulate that he was “special needs”. I thought that was sort of funny, but we're in different spots Sam and I financially. I have no money. He probably doesn't have much money, I don't know, and he might be contending with some hell that I am not aware of.

That's just the thing. I need some mission. Some enormous, encompassing, consuming mission. I don't mean like Save the Whales or Children or whatever. At least, that's not what I think the mission I should be sent on is. Something more important, something ineffable. Ineffable, but completely believable, a mission in which I am invested with my life. Perhaps, for example, I could assist Samuel in his North American arctic destiny. Karma is an idea that's been corrupted, I think, and I am not confident that I perceive it in any accurate source sense but the idea that, “Do good stuff and good stuff will happen” appeals to me. The good stuff doesn't even have to happen to me, but that would be cool.

I'm not going to be an Oxford Don, but maybe I could be a Bucknell grad or something like that. As loathesome as some of the arrogance of academic antics can be, I can't claim any sustained humility that would put me above it, and believing I'm above stuff makes me an asshole. I think the term I'm looking for isn't “Karma” but “Misión dirigido Humilidad” or “Mission guided Humility” if it doesn't demand I work in the spanish language realm. If my sense is then true, that my life and experience, experience I must collect for mining metaphoric gold to filigree a fiction, then my course, as such, is right and true. My flighty spirit though, the nature of my spirit, knowing myself, must be checked. Follow some rules: don't fly to close to the sun sorts of things, etc.

A Letter Titled "Love and Respect" from August 6th, 2009

I believe in big and beautiful things. I'm sort of sad that you didn't note my "murcielagos en el campanario" phrase. Maybe it doesn't mean what I think it means. You taught me the word "murcielagos" and it's one of my favorites. I've even heard it, though I can't remember if it was a movie, tv, or on the subway or where -- I got excited when I heard the word used in conversation. I mean to say, "bats in the bell of the church" as in "bats in my head". Borges, eh? Three brujas on the subway in New York City were grouped around me. I am telling you the truth, what happened in my life, in reality as G- E-. The one witch had a letter in her very stylish bag with a postage stamp from España. I started flicking my teeth in a silent lisp, like some sort of serpent spell had been cast upon me. She noticed and we had a brief salutatory conversation in my peculiar brand of Castellano which is, in truth, just Joshuese with a bifurcated tongue. The bruixa behind her asked me if I were a writer. I'm not joking, and I'm not making this up. I said nothing and the reason she probably asked is because I had a very beautiful notebook in my hand, and surely somewhere a nice pen attached to my jacket, shirt, or cravat, my own accessory and weapon. The reason I was on that train is because I was in Brooklyn to face the Court in regards to an old warrant for my arrest. The judge heard me issue two or three sentences to my public defender and then he interrupted and said, "The warrant is vacated, I'm considering it satisfied." I told the bruixa that no one paid me to write. She looked at me and said, "They will. Don't worry, they will." It was so freaking strange. The third in the multidão de bruxas insisted that I read a book called "The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis" and I didn't understand what she was telling me, the language didn't make sense until I got home to look it up. I haven't read it. I hope that they do pay me to write someday.

What I haven't told you yet with all these words is that your suggestion that I teach ESL or just English to my Haitian brethren resonates with a desire I'm harboring. I told my grandfather and my mother that I wanted to go to Afghanistan to teach English and they said it wasn't a good idea. It isn't. To teach English, however, could be a perfect and humble role for me to play in this strange tragicomic drama of life. I have always been fascinated with the tower of Babylon and language and communication. Hermes / Mercury with his Caduceus and whispers of divine knowledge make my eyes sparkle with life. The lingua franca isn't French anymore, and Afghanistan will have to wait. I'm pretty sure -I- could survive there (Afghanistan(because I'm insane?)), but I am getting long in the tooth to keep testing God with my antics. 

I'm actually capitulating so much of my rebellious spirit and am doing the GED. So far I have passed the Math, Writing, Social sections; now I have to pass the Reading and the Science sections. Then, I will be a man. I feel like Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli in the United States, and I have a US passport. Your email, however ethereal and sadly unlikely to last much longer than as it is read in the electronic eye, speaks to what is happening to me. It feels like Jung's synchronicity. The insane can see patterns where there are none, so I am cautious with my own words now but please believe that it seems like your voice, your writing are all resonant with something greater. 

My old signature was an O. Wilde quote:

"God knows; I won’t be an Oxford don anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious. Or perhaps I’ll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too." - O. Wilde

My old motto was borrowed from a lover:

"Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse."

I couldn't read "The Republic" so I listened to it on mp3 in bed. I'm not young. In fact, I'm 31. My corpse isn't as pretty as I'd like for it to have been, so I figure I'll just try for my full threescore and ten. Thank you for thinking of me. Let Merle know that I hold her in a pantheon of characters in my heart, a special set of eyes and words. Just smile at Petra. I don't think I could ask anything more of you. Let me know if there is anything that you liked on utsuprainfra.blogspot.com. I think I wrote the witches story somewhere. It really happened, even if it wasn't really much that actually happened, it meant something to me, as did your email today.

Signatures come and go and apparently I live through mottos. Son cosas de la vida.

Return from outpost of The Man; meet with Agent