Saint Material

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Miracles don’t often make the New York Times.  The Gray Lady was reluctant to release stories about verified UFO cases, for crying out loud.  But the story about a twenty-first century saint made me pause.  Well, Carlo Acutis isn’t technically a saint yet (at least he wasn’t at the time of the story), but you can’t become a saint without miracles.  Miracles are difficult situations for which to set up a control group.  Often they involve human beings and we really don’t understand ourselves well enough to say what might be supernatural from time to time.  All we know, at least from the “educated” establishment, is that materialism accounts for everything so miracles don’t happen.  QED.  That’s why I found the account of Carlo Acutis so interesting.  A story about a young person dying from leukemia is always sad, but this report doesn’t end there.

In his brief life, Acutis tried to bring good into the world via the internet.  In this shadowy realm where trolls and hatred thrive, here was a young man trying to spread positive things through this collective of anybody who can afford connectivity.  That does make a remarkable news story in and of itself, but that miracle.  Two, in fact.  Catholic practice is not to assign sainthood without out two very carefully studied miracles.  The Vatican has been involved with science for many decades.  The idea of the Big Bang, after all, derived from Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and physicist.  Controls are set up for miracles, and the church even used to use Devil’s advocates to try to disprove miracles in such cases.  Skepticism was an essential part of the process.  In its own way this is the scientific study of miracles.

The miracle that may put Acutis over the top, according to the Times, is a spontaneous remission of a brain hemorrhage after a prayer was made to the young man.  Such things happen and doctors can’t explain them.  We as human beings have no way to determine what actually causes such unconventional healings—miracles—often deemed impossible by medical science.  A saint is as good an explanation as any other.  What’s fascinating here is that this miraculous recovery in all likelihood would’ve been overlooked by the New York Times, had it not been for this pending sainthood case.  Such cases as this aren’t everyday occurrences, but they reflect realities that modern people may be very slow to acknowledge.  They still do happen, whether they make the papers or not.  Perhaps our world would be a bit better if they did get reported a little more often.

To Their Own Devices

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This one’s so good that it’s got to be a hoax.  One of the upsides to living under constant surveillance is that a lot of stuff—weird stuff—is caught on camera.  I admit to dipping into Coast to Coast once in a while.  (This, originally radio, show [Coast to Coast AM] was well known for paranormal interests long before Mulder and Scully came along.)  It was there that I learned of a viral video showing devices praying together during the night in Mexico City.  The purported story is that a security guard in a department store came upon electronic devices reciting the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy.  One device seems to be leading the other devices in prayer.  Skeptics have pointed out that this could’ve been programmed in advance as a kind of practical joke on the security guard, but it made me wonder.

I’m no techie.  I can’t even figure out how to get back to podcasting.  I do, however, enjoy the strange stories of electronic “consciousness.”  I use the phrase advisedly since we don’t know what human, animal, and plant consciousness is.  We just know it exists.  I am told, by those who understand tech better than I do, that computers have been discovered “conversing” with each other in a secret language that even their programmers can’t decipher.  And since devices don’t follow our sleep schedules, who knows what they might get up to in the middle of the night when left to their own devices?  Why not hold a prayer service?  The people they surveil all day do such things.  Since the video hit the web not long before Easter, with its late-night services, it kind of makes sense in its own bizarre way.

As I say, this seems to be one of those oddities that is simply too good to be true.  But still, driving along chatting to my family in the car, some voice-recognition software will sometimes join in with a non sequitur.  As if it just wants to do what humans do.  I don’t mean to be creepy here, but it may be that playing Pandora with “artificial intelligence” is dicey when we can’t define biological intelligence.  I’ve said before that AI doesn’t understand God talk.  But if AI is teaching itself by watching what humans post—which is just about everything that humans do—maybe it has learned to recite prayers without understanding the underlying concepts.  Human beings do so all the time.

Let us pray

Tech Warning

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My moon roof is open.  That’s what the late-night alert says.  Thing is, I don’t have a moon roof.  Maybe I should go out to the garage and check, just to be sure.  You see, these new cars, which are as much computer as they are a means of conveyance, are subject to glitches just like the computers at work always seem to be.  And if this is true of a massive and lucrative company like Toyota, how can the rest of us really trust what our devices tell us?  After all, mainly they exist to sell us more stuff.  So whenever we take the Prius out, after it’s put away I get some kind of warning on my phone.  Nearly every single time.  If somebody’s been sitting in the back seat—or even if a bag was resting there—I’m cheerfully reminded to check the back seat once I get into the house.  I appreciate its concern and when I grow even more forgetful I may need it.  But that moon roof…

I use and appreciate technology.  I believe in the science behind it.  It makes life simpler, in some ways.  Much more complex in others.  I confess that I miss paper maps.  Do you remember the thrill of driving into an unknown city and having to figure out how to get to an address with no GPS?  Now that seems like an adventure movie.  Our cars practically—sometimes literally—drive themselves.  I’m no motor-head, not by a long shot.  I do remember my first car that didn’t have power steering or power brakes.  It had a stick-shift and you had to wrassle it at times.  Show it who was in charge.  With technology we’ve all become the serfs.  It breaks down and you have to take it to an expert.  Not quite the same as changing a tire.

I worry about the larger implications of this.  As a writer I worry that my largest output is only electronic.  Publishers don’t seem to realize that those of us who write do it as a way of surviving death.  We have something to say and we want it etched in stone.  Or at least printed on paper.  Tucked away in some Library of Congress stacks in the hopes that it will remain there for good.  I often think of dystopias.  The stories unfold and ancient documents—our documents—are found.  But unless they get the grid up and running, and have Silicon Valley to help them, our electronic words are gone.  It’s as if you left the moon roof open, even though you don’t have one.

Forgotten Books

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Would you rather never write a book or write a book that’s easily forgotten?  This question springs from a recent exercise of trying (unsuccessfully) to count the books I’ve read.  I mean going through and putting a finger on each one and counting, if I’d read it.  I encountered a surprising number of ordinals that evoked a blank stare—I don’t remember the book at all.   Or I remember having read it, but don’t recall what it was about.  (In one instance, the book was one my wife read, and not me.  That explained a lot!)  This got me thinking about what it takes to write a memorable book.  I’ve always been one to prefer either speculative fiction or the classics.  (I’m aware that “classics” are now being dismantled because they don’t represent all groups.  I’d call them “white men’s classics,” but a surprising number of them were written by women.)  If a book has a speculative element strong enough I will recall having read it.  I like weird stuff.

I’ve read books where parts of them, at least, have stayed with me for half-a-century.  I remember specific things I read as a child (and no, I’m not talking about Barney Beagle—although I do remember that too).  I like to believe that even the bits that are hazy indicate that the book isn’t truly lost, but buried somewhere.  The human mind has an amazing capacity to absorb things.  I’ve read at least three thousand books in my life—I have no idea how many, actually, but Goodreads has me at 1,000 and I started using it in 2013.  I’d been intentionally reading for about forty years already, at that point.  Three of them while working on my doctorate.

I recently (within easy memory) read a Doc Savage novel.  I’d read the entire series, or pretty near, as a junior high schooler.   Anyway, there were well over a hundred of them.  I remembered nothing in my recent re-read beyond Doc’s band of five companions.  The story was completely unfamiliar to me.  One of the more recent books I know I read but couldn’t remember the story at all was a New York Times bestseller.  I guess if I’ve forgotten the author he’ll still be okay on Mars in the future since many others must remember something about it.  I’ll be long gone by then, both on Mars and down here, I’m sure.  I do hope even by then something will remain of all the books I’ve read.

Excess Ideas

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I sincerely hope that after I’m gone someone with more sense than me will look through my notebooks instead of just tossing them in the trash.  There are a ton of creative ideas there that I have no time to develop into stories.  I know that writers are frequently looking for new angles and ideas that haven’t been presented before.  I have them in spades.  Of course, unless someone is noticed at least by shortly after their passing, their stuff becomes detritus lost for all time.  I was thinking of family heirlooms recently.  I come from a poor family, not rich in stuff.  Indeed, most of what we still own is made of paper.  The rare family heirloom is something imbued with history.  One of my grandfather’s things (I have two of his books) that survived was a brief account of his life.  (Also paper.)

Members of his family—I’m still uncertain as to who—experimented with photography.  This was in the days of holding still while being shot, but there were some very interesting prints that made their way to me.  (Paper again.)  This was from the time that negatives were preserved on glass.  I imagine this led to storage issues over time.  And I also know that families have to move from time to time.  Things get lost during every move, from my experience.  In my grandfather’s very brief autobiography, he notes that these glass plates were kept under the floor of the barn and were forgotten at the time of a move.  I very much doubt that they’re still there.  Developers greedily come in with their backhoes and knock and dig and dump and pour.

I sometimes wonder what small, local history was lost on those glass plates.  Some families are erased from history—most of us are, in fact.  Generations on down the road there’s little evidence that we were even here.  For writers, a stab is being made at remembrance.  I tend to think of writing as being like a radio receiver for thoughts.  They may not originate with me.  Some of them are quite bizarre—trust me.  It makes me sad to think of them left rotting in some landfill.  My “Kilroy was here” is inscribed in notebooks.  If anybody’s interested, I’ll warn you in advance that my handwriting’s quite small.  And the ideas are uncensored.  There are so very many of them.  I don’t mind sharing, but I would appreciate the opportunity to try selling them myself, first.  If only I had the time to write them all out.  And I won’t be leaving them under the barn floor.

Wonderful Impossibility

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I used to tell my students that a semester break without reading a book that challenged your assumptions was wasted.  I tried to lead by example, but jobs are such fragile things.  Since I have no semester breaks I try to read books that push the limits more frequently.  I’d heard about Carlos Eire’s They Flew before the author had settled on a publisher.  (I don’t know him personally, but would be glad to.)  In case the title doesn’t do enough heavy lifting, the subtitle A History of the Impossible might help.  Yes, we’re stepping into the world of the post-secular here.  It’s a wonderful place.  Although much of the book deals with early modern cases of levitation, the study ranges wider than that.  Written by a respected historian, this is a very important book.  For many reasons.

I am glad to see Yale University Press joining with Chicago and some noted others (Rowman and Littlefield, for instance) in challenging a paradigm that is no longer upheld by science.  I can hear the howling already, but if you read carefully, with an open mind (which is required by science) you’ll quite possibly learn something here.  Our minds do influence our reality.  We haven’t figured out how because secularism ends the discussion with scorn.  That was true of the study of UFOs as well, until the U. S. Navy said, “Nope.  They’re real.”  (It only took about seven decades, so don’t expect instant results.)  We cut off our possibilities when we mock things out of habit.  I remember the Turok comic where one character said to another (give me a break—this has been five decades and I can’t recall all the names) “Fools scoff at what they don’t understand.”  Truer words have never been penned.

The impossible happens when scientists aren’t there to witness it.  It sometimes happens when they are.  Doubt that?  Read about the Pauli Effect.  Or call it gremlins, the choice is yours.  It’s real in either case.  Academics are often among the last, with the exception of Trump supporters, to see what’s been staring them in the face all along.  I’ll say more about this book on Goodreads, but let me float a hope here.  I want to go back to that indefinite article in Eire’s subtitle.  This is A History of the Impossible.  May more follow.  Others, such as Jeff Kripal, have been doing similar work for many years now.  We can ignore it, or scoff at it.  But I think that character in Turok got it right, even if I can’t remember his name.

Too Much TMI

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Okay, okay.  I admit I get overwhelmed.  There’s just too much stuff to read.  I currently have 25 tabs open on my browser, afraid that I’ll forget about something that seemed so urgent when I opened the URL in the first place.  (Two decades ago that sentence would’ve been nonsense.)  I limit my time on social media.  This can be a death-kiss for a writer, but for sanity’s sake (and work’s), I look at Facebook for literally about five minutes a day.  (If you want to reach me leave a comment on my blog.)  In those five minutes (or less) I often come away with two or three articles that I want to read but don’t have time just now.  I open a tab and hope I’ll get to it before I lose interest.  There’s a lot of information.  Too much.  Too much TMI.

I’m a slow reader.  I sometimes wonder if I have borderline dyslexia—it once happened on a test and led me to phone a professor at night to explain—but dear reader, it slows me down.  And a writer, no matter how obscure, needs time.  I told a friend the other day that I don’t do things I enjoy, such as painting and drawing, because writing takes up so much time.  (And work does too—it gets the lion’s share.)  But those articles!  They look so important!  Some have health implications and, if you lose your health you have even less time.  The internet gives us TMI constantly.  And this field is riddled with rabbit holes.  Just ask the white rabbit about time.

Image credit: John Tenniel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What are the curious to do?  I actually get an insane amount of satisfaction from closing a browser tab.  It’s a sense of accomplishment—I’ve done something that brings closure!  If I do it enough times I’ll get down to the URLs I always keep open lest I forget my place.  Some of these tabs have been open since the Obama administration.  If you’re critical of such as I you might suggest “why don’t you just read an article instead of writing about not having the time to read?”  The interlocutor here is clearly not a writer.  Or at least has different writing habits than me.  There are some non-negotiables in this world of TMI.  I suppose I’m adding to the problem.  At least if anything thinks what I present here is information.  For that I defer to Klima, who, happily, still has some time.

Mr. Bean

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Edamame.  I remember distinctly the first time I had it.  I was at the house of Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar (shameless name drop), by the courtesy of Neal Stephenson (another).  It was a book club discussion and although I don’t remember who else was there, I was certainly the least distinguished person in the room.  Someone had brought edamame to share.  I’d neither seen nor heard of it before.   I popped a pod in my mouth and began to chew.  After ruminating a few moments, I figured this cud wasn’t going to break down and when others put their—relatively intact—pods in the discard bowl, a lightbulb clicked on.  Sheepishly, I pulled my mangled pod from my mouth and slipped it, I hoped unobtrusively, into the bowl.  If anyone noticed they were too sophisticated to say anything.  Blue collar through and through.

I repressed that memory, which is strange.  I tend to remember, and replay, the embarrassing things I’ve done.  This memory slipped, however, until our daughter reintroduced me.  She was in college, or recently out, and she showed us how to do it.  When that pod hit my tongue, the memory sprang back.  Edamame has become a standard of our house since then.  In case you’re unfamiliar, you put the pod in your mouth, keeping hold of one end.  You extract the beans, generally by using your teeth as an immovable obstacle—like artichoke leaves.  Discard pod, chew and swallow.  We sometimes dress ours up with a sauce.

The last time we had edamame, however, one of the beans shot to the back of my throat while the other two laughed.  I couldn’t tell which way, but it was clear the renegade bean was going down on its own.  I spent the rest of the evening worrying that I’d aspirated a bean.  Aspiration becomes more common as you age—something about nature trying to send us a hint, I guess—but I didn’t cough at all.  No wheezing started.  No pain.  Probably I swallowed at the last possible second.  If I did it was reflex because I couldn’t think what to do.  The next day, with no ill effects, it seemed funny.  Amusing enough to remember a time when really accomplished people were interested in what I had to say.  That time has largely departed, like an empty edamame shell.  But the memory remains.  There are hidden  hazards to eating edamame, it seems.

Just Ask

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I see a lot of headlines, and not a few books, that puzzle over something that there’s an easy way to resolve: why do evangelicals (I’m thinking here of the sort that back Trump despite his pretty obvious criminal, predatory nature) think the way they do.  The solution is to ask evangelicals who’ve come to see things a bit differently.  I’m not the only one, I can assure you.  Many professors of religion (particularly biblical studies) and not a few ministers came from that background.  If they were true believers then, they can still remember it now.  At least I do.  I was recently reading a report in which the authors expressed surprise that evangelicals tend to see racism as a problem of individual sin rather than any systemic predisposition society imposes.  To someone who grew up that way, this is perfectly obvious.

I’m not suggesting this viewpoint is right.  What I am suggesting is that there are resources available to help understand this worldview.  To do so, it must not be approached judgmentally.  (I sometimes poke a little fun at it, but I figure my couple of decades being shaped by it entitle me to a little amusement.)  I don’t condemn evangelicals for believing as they do—that’s up to them—I do wish they’d think through a few things a bit more thoroughly (such as backing Trump).  I understand why they do it, and I take their concerns seriously.  I know that many others who study religion, or write articles about it, simply don’t understand in any kind of depth the concerns evangelicals have.  It’s only when their belief system impinges on politics that anybody seems to pay attention.

Maybe this is a principle we should apply to people in general.  Pay attention to them.  Listen to them.  Care for them.  Relentless competition wears down the soul and makes us less humane.  Religions, for all their faults, generally started out as means for human beings to get along—the earliest days we simply don’t know, but there is a wisdom in this.  In any case, if we really want to know there are people to ask.  Who’ve been there.  Whose very profession is being shoved out of higher education because it doesn’t turn a profit.  Learning used to be for the sake of increasing knowledge and since that’s no longer the case we see guesswork where before it would’ve been possible to “ask an expert.”  I often wonder about this, but as a former member of a guild that’s going extinct, I simply can’t be sure.

Why Not Love?

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I learned a new word the other day: incel.  I’m not too proud to say that I had to look it up.  Although I’m on the internet quite a bit, I’m not really part of “internet culture.”  Incel is a shortened form of “involuntary celibate.”  It refers to an internet culture of mainly white, heterosexual males who consider themselves unable to find (generally) female companionship.  They often lash out at women, and sometimes at any sexually active person.  In general it seems to be a self-pitying, hateful crowd.  They tend towards misogyny and racism and, one suspects, conspiracy theories.  They apparently suffer what a friend of mine called “DSB” (deadly sperm buildup).  But the thing is, love would seem to be the cure.

Certainly women aren’t to blame.  Look, if I managed to find a woman willing to marry me there must be hope for the rest of my gender.  I’m no catch.  And why is it frustrated men take it out on women?   And underplay the achievements of women?  The Women’s March in January 2017 was the largest single-day protest in history.  Accurate numbers are difficult to attain, but it has always struck me that the U.S. Park service agents, with feet on the ground, estimated a million and a half in D.C. alone.  So we were told.  It’s almost as if nobody bothered to count because it was women.  Why is this still an issue?  How incelular are we?  Is it so difficult to give credit where credit is due?

I wonder if anybody foresaw that the internet would develop such subcultures.  Yes, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash gave us a metaverse where individuals lived virtually online, but did we fully realize then that sexually frustrated guys would eventually merit their own title and that some of them would perform acts of real life violence based on their own rhetoric?  Rogue males have been part of human culture all along, but the internet has offered a place to band together and become radicalized.  I, for one, had no idea that such subcultures existed.  It took reading an academic work about female leadership to learn about them.  And it makes the world a less comfortable place knowing they’re there.  Learning love is our only hope.  There are people who sublimate their frustration to hate.  What if we tried to make the internet a place where love, with or without physical entanglements, became the dominant meme?  Even those of us who work largely in isolation can see the hope in that.

Photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash

Adulting

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Young professionals that I know often say adulting sucks.  Quite a bit of the time I tend to agree with them.  The 9-2-5 makes just getting along difficult, at times.  I’m sure there’s software to ease some of the woes, but you have to learn how to use it.  And that takes time.  Time I’d rather spend writing or reading.  For example, to get a small break on state taxes, if you work from home, you need to calculate your office space and then how much it costs to exist in your house for the year.  When I remember to do so, I can look utilities and mortgage up in Quicken.  Sometimes, however, when a book in my mind is distracting me I just tot all this up on the back of an envelope.  Then I need to type it in so my accountant can see it (taxes are far too complicated for mere mortals) and, I can’t underscore this too many times: numbers are adulting.

Photo by Tyler Easton on Unsplash

I’m an idea person.  The 9-2-5 (numbers!) that keeps you in front of a computer all week long means that things pile up.  Weekends seem too short to spend on numbers.  But you’ve got to balance that checkbook.  And even tot up the number of hours you give to “the man” each day.  What could be more adult than accounting?  Don’t get me wrong—at times numbers can be interesting.  Numbers, at their best, are philosophical.  One squared is one.  When you square any number greater than one, it increases.  One doesn’t.  And you can’t divide by zero and get zero for an answer, as handy as that’d be from time to time.  These abstract concepts come in useful but adulting involves serious numbers.  Numbers that imply liquidity.  Cash flow.  

Time is made up of numbers too.  If a social event comes up on a weekend, there goes your grocery and cleaning time.  And writing a book takes a tremendous amount of time.  It’s a second job on top of the other one you work 9-2-5.  All of this makes me think of those TIAA-CREF ads that showed prominent professors and captions that said “Because some people don’t have time to think of money.”  Or something similar.  That’s what I’m talking about.  Adulting is all about money.  And money must be taxed.  And you have to keep track of where it all goes.  I’m sure Quicken could help me with this, if I had time to learn it.  (We pay for it after all.)  But I’m kind of busy writing this book…

Thinking Thinking

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Something that’s been on my mind (anticipatory pun) lately, has been thought.  More especially, the quality of thought.  We are conscious beings, although we’re not sure what that means.  Beyond a Cartesian self-awareness.  Everyone knows what it is to have times when you’re not thinking clearly.  Or are feeling confused.  Those of us who tend to live quasi-monastically (keeping to a routine, early rising, writing and reading daily before the 9-2-5 routine) notice the ways subtle things can influence the quality of our thinking.  For me, first thing in the morning is the best time.  (Although I must confess that lately I don’t wake up with the crystalline clarity that I have for years, as if sleep is beginning to intrude on my earliest hours.)  Once I’m up and going, though, routine, you’d like to think, would provide the same results.  But it doesn’t.

Photo by Pierre Acobas on Unsplash

I’ve written before how the quality of sleep can affect the quality of awake thinking—something we’ve all known all along.  But even when I have somewhat identical nights (same quality of sleep more than one night in a row), the subtleties of difference in thought persist.  To understand this, you need to realize that I’ve been rising well before the sun for a dozen years now.  I awake to a quiet house and spend a couple, sometimes a few, hours writing and reading.  (It’s how I write my books, as well as this blog.  And my fiction.)  Even on “identical mornings” where the weather’s pretty much the same, and all other factors seem equal, the quality of thought differs.  Sometimes it depends on whether I’m writing fiction or non.  As I transition into my reading time, that can make a difference in the reading experience.  I suppose that’s one reason I value good writing.

We don’t understand consciousness.  Identity is also somewhat negotiable at times.  We’ve all known a family member or friend to act “not like themselves.”  More to the point, to think not like themselves.  We have no real way of understanding thinking itself.  I think about thinking quite a bit, and I marvel at how intensely personal it is.  We may, at our will, keep our thoughts to ourselves (and that’s a good thing, in many circumstances).  Thought, it seems to me, ought to be a very high priority in our academic pursuits.  It’s a powerful thing, capable of more than we’re even presently able to imagine.  And it can differ from day to day.  Do you suppose I wrote this after writing fiction or non?

Showing Gratitude

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Stealing is something that we all, except some capitalists, know is wrong.  I think quite a lot about the land that was stolen to make America possible and I know that simply giving it back isn’t an option.  Nevertheless, I do believe that we should listen, and listen attentively to those who’ve been here longer than Europeans.  Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is an important reflection of this dilemma.  Kimmerer is Potawatomi and she’s also a professor of Environmental Biology.  The book is a series of essays that focus mostly on plants and what we can learn from them.  It also brings in indigenous teaching, contrasting the outlook of gratitude against that of greed.  By turns sad, funny, and profound, Braiding Sweetgrass contains a message that is vital to counter climate change.  To correct our attitude before it’s too late.

There’s so much in this book that it’s difficult to know what to touch on in this brief notice.  Throughout, Kimmerer notes that the First Nations viewed life as a gift.  The earth is constantly giving and the native way was to be thankful and to accept the responsibility of being given a gift.  Seeing how the European attitude was “take until there’s no more to take,” she points out that taking what you need and leaving for others is a way out of our current dilemma.  She does this, most strikingly, by the story of the windigo.  The windigo has become popular among monster fans as a consuming beast, but Kimmerer shows how the story has a profound point.  If all you do is consume you become a monster.  You stop a windigo by showing gratitude.

Perhaps the most striking thing, to me, was how Kimmerer describes her own experience becoming a scientist.  How standard academics refused to believe they had anything to learn from Native American outlooks, especially when borne by a woman.  How she was told she couldn’t be a scientist, not with that outlook.  And how she learned the European way but didn’t give up her native understanding.  How she brings two worlds together and does so with a sense of urgency and hope.  Things have gone too far simply to turn back the calendar and say that our ancestors had it all wrong, but it’s not too late to learn from those who lived for millennia on this land and were untainted by ideas of private ownership.  Those who knew how to live sustainably with nature.  Those who knew, and still know, how to defeat monsters.

Hellish Fears

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Aporripsophobia, the fear of rejection, and the fear of punishment (mastigophobia, or as I prefer, “spankophobia”) are closely related.  They define me.  Much of this comes from the fear of Hell, which I internalized early in life, along with the Calvinistic theology that backed it.  Some have thought that I’m “thin skinned” or afraid of criticism.  That’s not quite it.  I’m afraid of what criticism implies—I did something wrong and therefore may be punished for it.  What brings this on, all of a sudden?  Well, as I was getting ready to jog the other day a police car stopped in front of our house on a routine traffic violation.  My immediate thought was that I had done something wrong.  They were here for me, not the guy whose car they were attending.  Then this brought back that time in Boston.

I moved to Boston on my own, with all I had in a VW Beetle (old style).   I know now that the headache I had after that long drive was a migraine.  (I’ve had maybe a half-dozen in my lifetime, and they’re unmistakable.)  I parked the car, stumbled into my new apartment and went to bed.  The next morning I had a ticket for parking with the left tires to the curb (against the law in Boston).  I didn’t know it was illegal.  Even with a migraine I would’ve not parked that way had I known.  The receptionist at the police station actually said to me “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”  That terrified me.  I thought it was only something Gilligan said.  If you don’t know all the laws how can you possibly avoid punishment?  And isn’t punishment rejection?

Some think I always have to be right.  They may not know the underlying cause—being wrong is to be subject to punishment.  And punishment leads to Hell.  When I was in Kindergarten the first time, I was held back partially because I was four but partially because I colored the triangle in the left corner purple instead of yellow, opposite to the verbal instructions.  It was because I don’t know my right from my left—I still don’t.  To me that first ever school correction was seared forever into my gray matter.  I’d done something wrong.  I was held back in school.  More likely than not, I was going to Hell.  I’ve known people to suggest, as does Richard Dawkins, that raising a child in a religion is child abuse.  I understand parents’ motivation, however.  You don’t want your child to go to Hell.  If they end up living in it all their lives I guess it’s a small price to pay.

Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash

Bigger Picture

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One of the quirks of my thought process is that I tend to look for the bigger picture.  I’ve always done this and I suspect it drives some people batty when they ask me a question and I begin to answer from what seems to be a tangent.  (I also think this is why I performed well in the classroom.)  So, when I saw the article by Eric Holloway on Mind Matters, titled “Why Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science,” I had to take a look.  Mostly a series of bullet-points that point out some of the religiously-motivated ideas that led to scientific discoveries, the article is useful.  My penchant for the big picture goes a bit broader, however.  The entire worldview in which the scientific process was born, and thus its underlying presuppositions, are religious.  Science and religion are the dogs and cats of the thought world but I’ve seen dogs and cats live happily together.

Science has always been with us.  Early peoples weren’t benighted troglodytes.  They observed, hypothesized, drew conclusions.  Science as we understand it, however, began in the Middle Ages in Europe, drawing on observations from earlier thought in the Arab world.  The context in that Arab world was solidly Muslim.  The Middle Ages in Europe were solidly Christian.  None of this discounts the contributions of Jews to the whole, it’s merely an observation regarding the larger cultural outlook.  Many of the principles of science even today (for example, that people are categorically different from other animals) are based on those religious worldviews.  We seldom go back to question whether we might’ve gotten something fundamentally wrong.  Meanwhile, the dogs began to chase the cats.

College as a religion major involved a lot of discussions about basic presuppositions.  Then questioning them.  Not much of this went on in the classroom (Grove City was, and is, a conservative Christian school).  The wonderful thing about higher education is the bringing together of people with different outlooks.  It was those after-hours conversations that helped form my questing nature.  I’d already started asking bigger questions when I was a child, annoying my parents and, I suspect, sometimes vexing clergy.  A single human mind is too limited to grasp it all, but it seems to me to deny religion a place at the table is to leave out massive amounts of human experience.  Of course, economics, the dismal science, seems well on the way to eliminating the study of religion in higher education.  And we will have lost, if this happens, a large piece of the bigger picture.

Photo credit: NASA