Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Saturday, March 16, 2002 All roads lead to ... The parallels between America and ancient Rome are quite remarkable. Militarily, we are the greatest power in the world and our capabilities increase rather than diminish. Socially, what once was a reasonably pious nation with a strong religious tradition has become an exceptionally pagan and decadent one. Economically, what once was a nation of farmers and small businessmen becomes increasingly a nation of corporations and bureaucracies. Politically, the nation seems to becoming more and more polarized and headed for civil wars of one kind or another. We seem increasingly divided between producers and parasites, the moral and immoral, and competing, conflicting population groups. Sports, popular entertainment, and pornography seem to dominate as our national interests and pleasures and are afforded unnatural amounts of attention and fervor. These are all things we have in common with ancient Rome as it became the world power during the time of the first Caesars when it tried to maintain a pretense of a republic. Rome first came to dominance in the Mediterranean when it was finally able to defeat Carthage in the last of the Punic Wars. America stepped onto the main stage of dominance with the two wars against Germany and its allies and became the central power of the West. England is to us what Athens and Greece was to Rome both militarily and culturally. Rome came to dominate the entire world with the fall of the Parthian empire. (By whole world, I mean that there was not a country in the world that could have defeated Rome or withstood its legions if Rome had so desired to travel to India and China.) With the collapse of the Soviet empire, America is now unchallenged in its hegemony. China remains a threat but really isn't in the game. If the U.S. is able to build a relative well functioning missile shield, even nuclear armaments become less meaningful for other nations to acquire. We tend to think of the grandeur that was Rome for their engineering skills and their military might, but Rome more than anything else was an economic and mercantile powerhouse. The Roman pedlars did more to spread culture than the armies and engineers ever did; and the merchants spread out everywhere throughout the empire and its fringes. We think of the Romans as bloodthirsty because of gruesome entertainments such as gladiator games, but human death was not usually the primary purpose of the games. As gladiators became more and more popular and well paid, they died less and less since they were worth too much The contests between the popular combatants was usually to the first wound. The gladiators became immensely popular. Even nobility sought to emulate them and enter the spectacles. The Emperor Commodus entered the games and his enemies contrived a way to assassinate him through that interest of his. There is not a big difference between our football and Roman games, between our Nascar and their chariot racing, between our movies and their theater and mime shows, and between our pornography and their brothels. Also, our movies are considerably as or more gory than the arena spectacles. One area of difference is that they had slaves. We have illegal immigrants but nowhere in the same number. The large majority of people in Rome and the empire were slaves. Another difference is that Roman government was extortionate. They basically robbed other nations at the point of their swords. America has run a trade deficit about as long as I've lived, and has done more to build up other nations and give humanitarian aid than any nation ever has. For all its power, America has been the least exploitive in the history of mankind. Rome fell through over-taxation (and the inability to collect them after awhile) and the lack of manpower for its armies as more and more foreigners became its core and the Romans were less and less interested in a martial mentality. As their silver mines in Spain played out, they lost the power to pay for all the goods they imported and the armies they needed, and power shifted East. The population of Rome decreased, food and goods were made mostly in the East, the power to withstand invaders diminished, and the people were soft, decadent, and vulnerable. America faces some similar challenges. Our armed forces are increasingly a kind of mercenary class in that most people now will never be required to sacrifice anything of their lives for the nation and the good of all. Can we survive economically as we produce less and fewer tangible goods? Human needs are now quite easily satisfied in that it takes very few people to grow our food, make our clothes, build our cars and appliances, produce our housing, and maintain the infrastructure. Areas where we continue to dominate the world are in the science and technology fields, but there is no guarantee that we will always dominate such fields. Particularly if welfare state policies drive capital out of the country as it's doing in Europe and Canada, for example. We benefit from the brain and investment drain of others now, but over-regulation, unmitigated legal challenges and suits, and redistribution of wealth schemes can quickly put an end to American drive and innovation. Some might say that Rome lasted a good long time and so will we, but history is accelerated now. Between the first Punic war and the dissolution of the Parthian empire, hundreds of years passed. Between the first World War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, less than a hundred years went by. The moral decay of Rome and the empire also took quite a while whereas between 1960 and the now, this nation has made pornography one of its largest industries and products of consumption. In 30 years, professional ball players have gone from being very well paid to absurdly paid. The same with heads of corporations and entertainment figures such as movie stars, singers, and TV newsmen. The #1 conversation starter has gone from - read any good books lately? To - seen any good movies lately? Popular music has descended to mere noise, percussion, and vulgarity; while an R rated movie means wall to wall swearing. It will interesting for our children to see if they can manage to survive the onslaught of self- destructive forces each great nation seems to inflict on itself. Human nature being what it is, I am not optimistic, but I am not entirely pessimistic either. We remain a democracy and I think there is some reason to have faith in people that they will generally correct many errors as they go along. It may be a somewhat slow process, but truth eventually dawns on majorities I believe. Addendum The situation in Israel (first designated Palestine by the ancient Romans) is not dissimilar to what the Romans faced. After ancient Israel defeated the Greeks, Antiochus vs. The Maccabees, Israel began falling apart like a modern Arab state into internecine struggles for power much like Afghanistan or Somalia and its warlord problems. Prior to that, they had asked the Spartans for help in their struggle against Antiochus and made a treaty of alliance with the Romans. But the Middle East proved unstable and eventually the Romans moved in to govern it permanently. But the Jews were restive, as always, and invented the Zealots and Sicarii to agitate for freedom from Roman dominion. They were terrorists and assassins. Eventually they rebelled at large and brought nearly total destruction on them, Jerusalem, and the Temple about 70 A.D.. The process was repeated about another 70 years later during the Bar Kochba revolt. That finally put an end to Jewish occupation of the land as the primary population group and turned Palestine into a backwater for the next 1800 years or so. Today, we have the Arabs who are restive, fanatical haters and terrorists. We have another governing population (the Jews) that suffers from attack (as Greeks suffered in that place as economically dominant and more successful interlopers), and we have a world power of America that seems to be getting forced to destroy and stabilize governments and peoples in the region. Like Rome, we have been drawn into conflicts we have no real interest in simply because we now have the responsibility of keeping the peace, the Pax Americana, for our own sake. posted by Mark Butterworth | 2:00 PM | Whose story is it, anyway? I've only had a few encounters with newspaper reporters in my life where my beliefs or opinions were solicited, but those encounters were enough to clue me into the profession. Reporters are basically disingenuous which is a fancy way of calling them liars. I don't mean that they lie about not being reporters (although they do that sometimes, too), but they do their best to create a false sense of reality. Reporters exist to do one thing really, and that is to collect good quotes from any situation. A good quote is an emotional outburst, remark, conclusion, or statement of prejudice, hatred, anger, rage, despair, or attack. A good quote is brief, provocative, sarcastic, mean, or inflammatory. A good quote simplifies an issue into black and white which the reporter can then accuse the speakers of such as being what? - why simplistic, of course. What is it about quotations that are so important? For some reason, we love what talking reveals about others and might it tell us about ourselves. Novelists have been trained for many decades now to try and base their stories entirely on dialog. Dialog conveys meaning in a way that's shorthand. We pick up cues and clues about character through dialog. The famous phrase in a writing class now is, "Don't tell, show!" That is, don't explain or narrate a great deal. Show a lot of talk and action. In a sense, Shakespeare is king because a playwrite, after all, is all show - talk and action. The great critic, Samuel Johnson, complained of the Bard's set pieces of soliloquy as the worst part of Shakespeare as the poet brought everything to a halt for the sake of his ruminations. A reporter pretends to be a regular human being just wanting to talk to you about something. He wants to come across as sympathetic yet a tad quizzical - "Explain to me how it was you thought..." And people, God love ‘em, have this God-awful compulsion when in a jam to want to explain their way out of it. Police count on the fact that wrong doers invariably want to explain much more than they want a lawyer present to protect their rights and advise them to shut up. It's like the child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He swears it wasn't his fault and if you just give him enough time he can explain Everything. Reporters prey on that impulse in people just like the police, but the police have some justification for doing so; reporters have none. Oh, they talk about the public's right to know, but no one appointed them guardian of the public and their own self-interest undermines such rationalizations. The press primarily exists to exploit others and human weakness for a "story". So, reporters are users and like agent provocateurs, will instigate controversy whenever they can. The press depends on conflict to sell newspapers. When people don't provide enough of it in the course of events, the media has to try and manufacture it. It's like all those entertainment shows that wave a bunch of money in front of people just to see how far they'll go; and the damage they'll do to others or themselves for it. The media waves a banner of attention to your cause or situation. I have a book. Wouldn't it be nice if everybody got to hear about it? It might make me rich if they did. So what am I willing to do to get that attention? Same with others. So now we compete to be the most interesting, provocative, and controversial in order to win attention. We start cynically feeding each other's worst impulses. But who's the buyer and who's the whore. Each becomes both. After awhile good or bad doesn't matter in the least because the line has been blurred by the constant proclamation of goods which aren't that good and bads which aren't so bad. All that remains most true is that there is a giant maw which never ceases to say, "Feed me!" That maw is not simply the media, but us. We are that monster which demands constant distraction or stimulation of some kind. We used to be people who could sit on the front porch, watch the grass grow, finding that pleasant and peaceful, but not anymore. I have no absolute idea of what heaven is like, but I expect we won't be bored or disappointed. Nevertheless, I'm sure our entertainments will not be as unsatisfying as we now find them, for conflict and stimulations are rather artificial and inhuman, just as reporters are most often unreal and working an angle for their own benefit and no one else's. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:56 PM | Government by a Person From Debra Saunders at the SF Chronicle"A funny thing happened to Gov. Gray Davis' effort to paint GOP rival Bill Simon as an extremist nut bag. Davis opened his mouth. This is what he told the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board last week. Davis said of the energy crisis: "This is like a war. This is worse than being in Vietnam. This is a full-out war against me." And: "I kept the lights on. And this sounds a little presumptuous, but I think I should get a round of applause. I don't get squat." Asked if he panicked when he agreed to pricey long-term electricity contracts, which he is now trying to break, Davis answered, "If I didn't panic, you wouldn't be able to put out your paper. I saved this friggin' paper. I kept the lights on in this state. Do you understand that? I kept the lights on. " "Worse than Vietnam?" "A full-out war against me?" Did somebody steal Capt. Queeg's strawberries? " posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:54 PM | A Land of Milk and Honey While walking my dog yesterday afternoon, I was resting on a bench in a park by the American River. The beauty of my dog attracted an old woman and we began to talk. She was an 80 year old widow who had originally come from Kansas during the depression through Arkansas, Missouri, then here. Her father picked plums and fruit. She and her sister (both children) boxed and packed them. In the summer they would save enough money to join their church group for camp up at Lake Tahoe. "It was a pretty nice life, " she said. "When we hit the border of California, we met a man who said to my dad, ‘They say it's the land of milk and honey, but it's not for me.' He was leaving as we were coming, but we found a pretty good life here." Yet, aren't we always hearing about those dead end jobs that lead nowhere good for poor people? That first they need education, health care, day care, and an upwardly mobile career in place before they can be expected to make anything of themselves? The fact is, it doesn't matter where you start in this country; you can always improve yourself if you've a mind to. It also and always helps to have some religion to support you as you go. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:50 PM | Friday, March 15, 2002 Thought for a Sunny Day (from my book Contentions) 113 As a man who loves the physical beauty of women, I am sometimes tempted to gaze and admire when such gazing and admiration ought to be restricted to my spouse (though we are both past the age of such beauty if we ever had any). It has caused me to wonder how a man can exist in heaven where every woman (supposedly) is beautiful and have no desire to gaze, touch and intimately know each one? The answer, I think, is rather simple. When a man is in love with a woman, he doesn't have eyes for anyone else in the same way. We see and relate to others, but not as we see and relate to a beloved mate. One secret of heaven is that love lasts there. Beauty does not decay; admiration does not wane; communication does not fail; nor identity alter. Passionate love of God is transformed into passionate love of a mate because the mystery of God's Otherness is embodied in another person; while at the same time the other person is also you in heart, mind, and soul - the difference being gender and a separate person. The narcissist's desire to love himself in another is realized, but in a completely different way because the other is not an imposed illusion, but an actual similarity (not mirror). It is more like a matter of twins and it is permanent. After all, what do we do after God disappears in us when prayer becomes mature? He is no longer an object of our love and we need objects of love in life (and being). That is where other people come in. People whom we dearly love and who respond - who are not us and yet perfectly fit into our hearts without mismatch or dilemma. We are created social. The myth of romantic true love turns out not to be a myth but a destiny. First with God and then with humans. Jesus advised us not to seek that marriage fulfillment in this life because no marriage now can ever achieve the mutual selflessness and perfection of soul necessary. It is by first undergoing the process of love in and through God that we emerge fully able to love others. Most people never achieve that emergence in life. Couple that to our mortality, decay, and illnesses and we have an imperfect situation with temporal impediments to the satisfaction of heavenly love. It is possible for a man and woman to achieve moral perfection and knowledge of love through prayer that may allow them to enjoy married happiness in this world, but I would guess it's rare if ever at all. There are always differences, no matter how slight, in this world. posted by Mark Butterworth | 2:11 PM | Oh the Slog of it Not many comments to make about the Bee today because the Bee, for all its loony leftism (let's quote its Editor Daniel Weintraub - "...government's primary function, when you come down to it, is to take money from some people and give it to others") is boring. I thank God that the Bee has assembled such a staff of boors because no one then reads its columnists, editorials, and political stories. It really is heavy lifting to have to read the various ideologues over there. Which is why some days, I simply cannot bear slogging through paragraphs of such pure tendentiousness. Whereas papers like the Wash. Post and NY Times have writers to promote its leftism that can be interesting and occasionally persuasive to the less informed. posted by Mark Butterworth | 2:03 PM | Worst of all possible Worlds In a Bee reprint from a NYT OpEd (must be registered to access but click here for it), Clancy Sigal wants us to be afraid, be very afraid of our government's hunt for terrorists. The consequences of it may be as evil as what occured to his family. "In the summer of 1919 a series of dynamite bombings, carried out by anarchists, swept over several American cities. A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Washington home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Then, on Sept. 16, 1920, the House of Morgan in lower Manhattan was blown up, killing 33 people and injuring 400." "My Russian-immigrant parents fit the profile (as "Reds"). They were foreign-born, Jewish, radical labor organizers who had actively participated in several turbulent strikes. They had no fixed address and were living in sin. They were arrested, jailed and almost deported during the infamous Palmer raids of 1920 and 1921" "Using existing sedition laws, he and his chief investigating officer, a ravenously ambitious 24- year-old named J. Edgar Hoover, ordered 500 agents of the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation to go after Communists, socialists, union activists, and pacifists and arrest them without warrants or judicial hearings. Homes were ransacked, political literature burned. Estimates vary, but between 4,000 and l0,000 people were secretly, efficiently rounded up." His parents were picked up - "but my mother told me federal agents had beaten him (the father) on the way to jail. Both of my parents were released to go back to their lives — my mother after a few days and my father after a few weeks" Many years later, the FBI came looking to talk to Clancy and only found his mother who, " politely met them at the door, invited them in for coffee and charmed them out of their intended purpose. But she was pale and terrified when I got home. " "The Palmer raids, though long ago, cut deep and left scars on individuals caught up in them and on America's views of how government could be permitted to deal with anyone dissident and different. What scars is our government inflicting today? " Let's recap. The Palmer raids probably saved this country from untold numbers of acts of subversion and destruction. In the process, the author's parents were tortured, deported, and later killed by the brutal police state tactics - no, wait! They were only briefly detained, the dad might have gotten a few lumps or not (every agitator exaggerates police brutality), and then released to return to their activities. That's America all right. No one has ever suffered worse than here at the hands of this country. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:50 PM | A Three L lama The Bee wants us to know (click here if you like) that junk science never gives up and never surrenders. Construction work at an El Dorado high school "carved into rock rich with asbestos of the most hazardous kind and created athletic fields with contaminated soil while school was in session last month." Now all these people who will probably live to 85 unless they do something silly like get killed in a car accident or go to work in places that are terrorist targets, should spend the next 70 years fretting about the cancer they have now contracted. The asbestos the Bee mentions is the worst kind, tremolite, but what makes it bad is when tobacco smoking miners inhale it year after year. But it's the news' job to terrify the public whenever it can like all those "Health Moments" on TV that turn your chocolate cake into a serial killer. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:29 PM | Thursday, March 14, 2002 Thought from a Sunny Day (from my book Contentions) 114 It is funny that I thought the encounter with God meant an eternal love affair with him in a direct and visceral way. I had no idea that the encounter with the living God would lead us through a fire of purgation where we emerge pure of heart (I hope), and God disappears as an object of love and desire - only to reappear in the faces of others whom we love according to boundaries of friend, parent, child, or mate. We are created to touch, see, and sense ourselves and others in a way that is not spiritual (or immaterial), but that is physical. There may be much more than this in Eternity, but that awaits further development which is not available to scrutiny now. No, our first task is to know Love and perfect it, and thus become free and selfless in our love of others. What we miss in this life, both with God and others, is the sensation of being in love. I do not mean that heaven is a constant ecstasy of "feeling" in love. I am sorry we only have the pejorative "infatuated" to describe the sensation of love. In heaven, love for a mate means a kind of eternal infatuation - or call it eternal fascination, wonder, delight, and awe of the other. How is it possible not to exhaust endearment? That's easy - contemplation. When people have discovered how to contemplate God - the freshness of it never wears off or out. For instance, I have never tired of beauty whether in the face and figure of a woman, or in watching a tree tossing its branches in the wind, or in noticing a cloudscape of gorgeous shapes and rhythms amidst a brilliant azure sky - and so on. As gaudy as some sunsets might be described, I have never complained of a single one of them. If it impossible to ever tire of beauty (here on earth), how much more shall we appreciate others and their beauty in heaven? We were made to love beauty, to draw pleasure and delight from it always and ever. I'm surprised that more people don't realize this - it seems obvious - right before our eyes. But it means a confrontation and annihilation of the self which is what many strenuously resist and fear. Love destroys egotism and selfishness. Our failure to know, practice, or receive love breeds pride and lust for power. posted by Mark Butterworth | 4:57 PM | Econ 101 not for the Bee Liz Ruskin in Washington tells us that the vote in the Senate against new fuel rules on cars "was a blow for environmentalists, who said the rules would have saved far more oil than is believed to lie under the coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." What she doesn't tell us is that oil in the ground has no value and can't be "saved"; anymore than we save iron by leaving iron ore in the ground. Something must have value before it can be saved like money. Nor do you save oil by making me pay more for it, since the implication is that there is some good in not using it. You might make the case that not using it improves the environment and "saves" the atmosphere of the planet, but that only works if the alternatives to oil are more satisfying and helpful to people than cars and oil. By the same token - you can "save" oxygen by not breathing, thus, not converting it to carbon dioxide, but you haven't done yourself any good if your desire is to keep living. posted by Mark Butterworth | 4:33 PM | Wednesday, March 13, 2002 Thought for a Sunny Day (from my book Contentions) 115 People are so out of step with love and each other that it's small wonder that the Church should be so out of step with God. So long as inmates run the asylum, we suffer the insanity. Since we know vast numbers of people are severely imperfect, should we wonder that the Church is horribly so? posted by Mark Butterworth | 10:59 AM | Tuesday, March 12, 2002 Battle by proponents to get Intelligent Design mentioned in classroom biology is going on in Ohio. The question of source and origins in science must be speculative when theory fails to provide facts. Here's a fact - there is not the slightest shred of evidence that life can be created from non-life. The God in that gap is the 600 pound gorilla. It has never been shown that we can manufacture or get life from that which is non-living. To call life, then miraculous is speculative, but rational and valid as any other notion. Better than most, actually. posted by Mark Butterworth | 1:55 PM | Monday, March 11, 2002 Thought from a Sunny Day (from my book, Contentions) 116 Failure of love leads to Law. Failure of Law leads to Prophecy. Failure of Prophecy leads to Apocalypse. Failure of Apocalypse leads to Emptiness. Emptiness leads to God. God leads to fulfillment in love. posted by Mark Butterworth | 2:17 AM | |
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