Kev's Musings and Shared Journal

T O L E R A N C E
And the Brotherhood of Man


Reading my 'Thanksgiving' post gives me pause.

In the post, I am grappling with modern Christianity and it's place in the intellectual sphere.

Re-reading the entry though, I want to make clear on where I am coming from.

The individual and the community.

Concerning community, consider the following:

A droplet of water evaporates from the ocean and condenses in the cold atmosphere to form ice. As the droplet-ice falls from the sky, it becomes a snowflake. The snowflake returns to earth, now warmed, and returns to a droplet of water.

I believe this illustration sums up my feeling concerning human dignity. The humanity in all of us is the water in the illustration. The manifestation of the ice crystal and the snowflake is the religion or worldview we take on. But underlying each worldview and each religion, there is that common humanity that exists no matter what manifestations it takes. Political. Religious. Social and Personal. At the base is humanity, and I gladly share this humanity with those who don't subscribe to my particular worldview or religion.

Concerning the individual.

If a droplet of water can take at least three manifestations of existence, how much more can an individual?

Each of us seeking out our own salvation. Each of us as unique as a snowflake, yet common as water. The manifold colors of skin, hair and eyes. The multitudinal layers of memory, intelligence, imagination, belief and knowledge. All of this found in each and every individual.

So much to admire in ourselves. So much to learn from each other. So much for each of us to give to each other.

This is the tolerance I believe is called for in the world today. An understanding that we all suffer, we all rejoice, we all have the same basic existential needs.

To be tolerant is to be human, and not neccessarily vice versa. God help me to love those who are different than me. God help those who are different than me love me.

God Bless

Thanksgiving.

'Out of your bounty, O Lord, we receive Thy blessings', a favorite uncle of mine used to pray at our Thanksgiving dinner.

Then there is the news today that several retail chains, including Target and Wal-Mart, will not be allowing their employees to wish shoppers a 'Merry Christmas', but rather will have to issue a 'Have a Happy Holiday'.

It has taken me this long to realize that not only are we living in a postmodern society, but we are living in a post-Christian society.

True, the personage of the post-Christian society is mainly the American Jesus, but with the retail advice listed above, it is obvious society is attempting to move away from the Divine as a whole.

Used to be, J.C. Penny's was closed on Sunday, the Lord's day. A profit would not be turned in the materialistic sense, but rather a different profit was allowed to be turned, as workers were subtly expected to gain profit in a house of worship.

Sure, there is the threat that some of our Islamic friends could be offended by the 'Christ' in 'Christmas', but my God, at what expense will we become so sensitive?

I suppose the Jewish people have been offended for years by J.C. Penny's being closed on Sundays, in obvious beneficience to the Christian Sabbath.

But how sensitive are we to become? Remember, politeness is not considered to be a virtue, only the door to virtue, and we can only indulge our non-Christian brethren with the saccharine sweet of our manners for so long.

In the past, there have been certain syncretistic societies that have existed, Alexandria and Judea to name two, where there were a melting pot of cultures and certainly rival gods to be contended with.

But the Christians had Christ. The Zoroastrians had Zoroaster, and the Pagans had Zeus. From what I've read, these people did not tippy-toe around each other at the expense of their Divinities.

If America continues down this road, we soon will be worshiping the 'Bland', an intermingled Deity consisting of Islamic, Jewish, Pentecostal, and Evangelical Deities. The 'Bland' will have no salt to savor, and will be so mundane as to be negligent.

Can we each take the nicest part of our Saviours and combine them into one new Super-Saviour?

It seems the religions, as manifested in the American west, are attempting to create a new God whose feet have been chopped off so He cannot step on anyone's toes.

Gone is the dynamism, the wonderful, the fearfulness, replaced with the effete, the well mannered and the gosh-shucks disposition of the New Mundane.

But here I will, and must digress.

After reading much of our American history, I have become convinced that we were not founded to be a Christian nation, but rather a re-public. A re-public of european settlers who were seeking out a new world without the yoke of a euroopean despot-King.

If we had, I believe, been meant to be founded as a Christian nation, then surely Jesus Christ would have been mentioned at least once in the Constitution. But He is not.

Much of what I have read about George Washington, for example, is that he was a freemason and a Deist, not neccessarily a Christian. I have read Washington never intoned Jesus or Christ when he prayed, but rather referred to Providence.

I think that the early europeans who settled here were not content to set up a 'Christian' government, because the two, Christian, and government, are incompatible. Also, the europeans were living under so called Christian governments and were inflamed at the policies and hypocrisies of said governments before they arrived in the new world.

In 1492, the Ferdinands had issued a pogrom to expel the Jews from the spanish territories. The church of England was founded by Henry VIII because the Holy Mother Church would not grant him a divorce.

These supposed 'Christian' governments, thought the new european settlers, were not all they had cracked up to be, and I believe the settlers were more than willing to be represented by a secular government that recognized a Deity.

So perhaps, America is shifting away from the american Jesus, and simply is embracing it's original Saviour. That Deity, That Providence, That Great Architect and Father of all, Who was seen as playing a part in the establishment of a new society.

That being said, today I thanked the Lord for the blessings I had received through His bounty, and patted my son's head, as he sat beside me at the dinner table, head bowed, eyes closed, and hands clasped.

Happy Thanksgiving!

You might be a redhead if...


This is not my writing. I picked it up from a Google search:



General Custer was one. So was Napoleon Bonaparte. Underneath Oliver Cromwell's severe helmet was a mass of red hair. Cleopatra enhanced her auburn tresses with henna, while Christopher Columbus took ginger hair to America. But while redheads crop up with alarming regularity, evidence is emerging that red hair may be a relatively new phenomenon for humans.
According to estimates, the first red hair sprouted only 20,000 years ago, long after the advent of modern homo sapiens and towards the end of the last great ice age. Some have even argued that redheads such as Nicole Kidman could have inherited a trait originally passed on by the Neanderthals.
The redhead rollcall is impressive. It includes Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, William Blake, Lord Byron, James Joyce, J.K. Rowling, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria and William the Conqueror.
Hair colour, like skin colour, comes from the pigment melanin and, in particular, eumelanin, the most common form, ranges in colour from brown to black, while pheomelanin is red or yellow.
Hair and skin colour arise from the balance of these two types and the total amount of melanin produced. White skins produce less melanin than dark skins. Japanese black hair is almost entirely made of eumelanin, while Irish red hair has almost only pheomelanin.

Melanin is a good sun block, preventing damage from ultraviolet rays. It is unlikely to have evolved as a protection against skin cancer, but might protect against burns, secondary infection and loss of fluids.
Several years ago, Jonathan Rees, professor of dermatology at Edinburgh University, and colleagues discovered a gene responsible for melanin production, the melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R). If someone has one of about four of five variations of this gene, and if the variation is inherited from both parents, then they are likely to be red-haired. If the variation has been inherited from only one parent, they have an increased chance of being red-haired. What was surprising was how recently this genetic trait first appeared.
"We don't know with certainty when the first redheads walked the earth," Rees says. "But we believe these changes arose in less time than we thought, maybe 20,000 to 40,000 years ago." The red-headed gene mutation is rarely found in people of African descent. Evolutionary experts have argued that it cropped up after ancestors of white Europeans moved northwards 70,000 to 100,000 years ago.
The team's analysis of the gene, however, found little evidence that red hair and pale skin were a positive trait added to mankind's genetic heritage by natural selection outside Africa. The clue came from an analysis of codons - the sequences of DNA or RNA that provide the recipe for any one of the 20 amino acids that form the building blocks of proteins. The sequences consist of three base pairs of DNA, three "letters" of the genetic code. Two of these letters are crucial to the make-up of the amino acid. But some changes in the third base pair make little difference to the result.
By studying the ratio of changes in this third base with the changes in the two other base pairs, it is possible to identify genetic traits that are the result of natural selection and those that have just cropped up by chance.
"With the redhead gene, you don't see any evidence for selection," Rees says. "The changes we see are compatible with just random change."
If the team is right, and the redhead gene originated only 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, it may kill off a theory that emerged last year that the red-hair gene originated in the Neanderthals. The idea was based on a claim that the gene was at least 100,000 years old and so may have been present before modern man left Africa. To pass into our DNA, our ancestors would have had to have interbred with Neanderthals, an unfashionable theory among experts.
Another research team, based in Paris, is helping explain the purpose of hair. Researchers at L'Oreal believe the common perception that hair is purely about keeping warm - and is therefore expendable - is wrong.
In the early 1990s, scientists reported the discovery of the hair bulge, the area they believed contained the stem cells, just below the surface. However, a team led by L'Oreal's Bruno Bernard has discovered that the bulge is only half the story. Another reservoir of cells was also found four millimetres below the skin. During the three-week period when hair destroys itself as part of a person's normal hair growth, the stem cells in the lower part climb up to reach the reservoir. They fuse until the hair starts growing again, then separate into their distinct reservoirs. Bernard believes that the reservoirs are not just for hair growth, but may also act as the skin's emergency services.
"It has been observed that when you have a wound, the epidermis (the thin, protective outer layer of skin) is rebuilt from the follicle," he says. "These stem cells play a role. We believe our recent discovery feeds off this observation. The epidermis is an essential component of the body because it separates the inside from the outside. If there is a wound, it has to be closed as quickly as possible. I believe the existence of these two reservoirs is a survival tool.
"The presence of a stem-cell reservoir deep in the dermis (the inner layer of the skin) might ensure a proper renewal of the follicle, especially when the upper part is destroyed by wounding ... This is of key importance for people since the epidermis wound-healing process starts from hair follicles. The lower reservoir may help maintaining this organ.
"When people say they want to get rid of all their hair, they should be careful," he says. "I would question whether laser treatment to permanently remove hair is such a good thing," Bernard says.

My Brush With the Dark Side

The Earth, when looking downward from above the North Pole, rotates counterclockwise. Therefore the day is followed by night.

Night brings with it robbers and thieves and bad men roaming the streets. Better to stay indoors locked up tight in the house.

In the house, the lights are turned off to conserve electricity, rendering half the house enshrouded in darkness.

Ghosts and goblins can be in the next dark room. The light falls off to shadow at the doorway. An unwanted intruder could be hiding in the house.

The upstairs is light, while the basement is dark.

Spiders, slugs and cockroaches could be scurrying about in the basement.

But I need to go down there to retrieve something. I must go.

The field is aglow with artificial lighting, but there is the encroaching darkness of the woods beyond the boundary lines.

A ball has rolled into the woods. I must retrieve it.

All experiences from childhood. All very real nominally and phenomenally. One constant reminder of darkness after another.

I built up an immunity to the point I learned to exploit the darkness.

I learned to hide there when playing hide and go seek. I learned to pop out from a dark closet to scare my mother.

So that is why I know the Darkness I encountered in my late thirties was not natural.

I was frightened right down to the instinctual level. I could find no light to step into, no doorknob to lock out the Darkness.

The Darkness was real, right down to the acidity in my stomach, the mercury on my tongue, the slowness and sluggishness of my gait.

The only hope, Love.

I knew intellectually Love would drive out the Darkness. So I reacted in kind with a very forceful Love to overcome the Darkness.

But I pushed too hard at first (the Darkness gave way so easily), so that I could not bear to be separated from my Loved ones.

I checked up on my son at school. I followed my wife to work to make sure she arrived safely. I feared for my parents and brother and sisters' safety.

Then my mind, accustomed to the Darkness, made up stories in Darkness's absence. It played tricks on me. There was meaning to be found in every little gesture, every small word, every minute detail.

And the meaning was Dark. Full of foreboding. Now that I understand foreboding, it no longer sounds cliche' to me.

So Darkness left a vacuum my unconsciousness filled at full throttle. Myths and Dreams and Superstitions and Terrors, all awakened from their primordial state, worked their way into my everyday life.

I learned I needed to cope. I learned that now that they were awakened, the Myths and Dreams and Superstitions and Terrors would not fall away so easily. They enjoyed consciousness too much. The latent made manifest.

I prayed. I sought spiritual counseling from local ministers. I read the Bible. I requested others pray for me.

Little to no effect. I needed more than what the ministers and pray-ers could give.

I sought professional help.

I saw a psychiatrist, an Indian man in his late forties to early fifties who smelled of musk, or was it?

He told me I needed to be hospitalized, for I was at risk of losing everything. My family, my sanity, and so forth.

I agreed, and disagreed. My mind oscillated back and forth over whether or not I needed such treatment.

At the behest of my family, I entered a psychiatric hospitalization program.

I was diagnosed by my Indian psychiatrist as suffering from schizoaffective disorder, depression with mild psychosis.

I was told there was an imbalance of dopamine in my brain that needed to be counteracted with psychiatric drugs.

More or less, I acquiesed. Surrendering, while in the hospital, in lack of loved ones, in lack of ministers, I agreed to take some very powerful psychiatric drugs, and be monitored to see how I would respond.

While in the hospital, I met others, not unlike me, who were going through the same as I. Depression, Paranoia and Anxiety that completely blindsided folks in the middle of a summer day.

They, like me, lived garden variety lives. They were married. They had children. They had extended family members whom they loved. They went to work during the day and came home at night. They attended church. They tried to lead decent, moral lives.

I was taught, through workshops in the hospital, cognitive techniques to cope with anxiety and depression. Thankfully, I responded well to the medication I was given by my Indian doctor, who I still see.

After several days of drug therapy and behavioural workshops, I was sent home, to be seen by the psychiatrist within the week.

My wife and son were glad to have me home. They had visited while I was in the hospital, but it was not the same family life we were accustomed to. At home, things were more normal.

I landed, through a newspaper ad of all places, a job as an inventory supervisor at the bookstore I work at now. After two years, I was promoted to my current position of inventory manager.

I work forty hours a week. No more loads of overtime and tight deadlines, for the time being anyway.

Forty hours is just enough to have plenty of time well spent with the family and my friends.

I suffered nervous breakdowns July 2001, December 2001 followed by a small recurrence in April 2005.

I take my medications daily, as well as nightly, and see my Indian psychiatrist on a regular basis. I understand my schizoaffective disorder, depression and anxiety are being managed and not cured.

Every day, I try to keep things in balance and in perspective.

This is for those who are fighting the good fight.

Peace.

Harold Bloom and Jesus and Yahweh.

I recently read Harold Bloom's 'Jesus and Yahweh the Names Divine'.

Bloom confuses me. To be fair, any literary critic applying the literary lense to Divinity would confuse me.

Literary criticism for me ultimately is two dimensional. Ultimately, the critic judges words on paper, not living, breathing characters.

As I believe both Jesus and Yahweh are each living and presumably breathing, I believe any two dimensional analysis is incomplete.

But Bloom seems to believe this sort of judgement is complete. Does he have a personal relationship with Jesus? Does Bloom pray? Does Bloom worship?

The most Bloom will own up to is that he views Gnosticism to be the religion or worldview of Great Literature.

Bloom, analyzing Jesus and Yahweh, each on terms I think they would find absurd, allows Divinity to be created by the 'Old Covenant' and 'Belated Covenant' writers, as if they were two characters out of any popular novel.

As a result, there is no unified theory for Jesus or Yahweh. Mark's Jesus is different than Matthew's Jesus, etc. etc. etc.

But for me, human personality transcends literary criticism, as it's aspects are more than manifold and too numerous to literally count.

And if human personality is manifold, how much more so is the Divine Personality?

Where I see Jesus and Yahweh as being greater than human understanding, and as a result only grappled at by the best means possible, Bloom finds literature to be the know all be all Truth.

I am of the mind that the Biblical Literature serves to illumine the modern day Christian, not to replace saving Faith for the modern day Christian.

Jesus spoke in a dynamic way, his parable anchored in the dynamism of Nature and the Pastoral. His Gospel was decidedly to be rooted in action for the early Church, not to be rooted in intellectualism. Yahweh, whether commanding Abraham to sacrifice his only son, or destroying the twin cities of Tyre and Sidon is utterly incomprehensible to me as a literary character. Motivation, environment, parentage and political circumstances, just a few of the literary devices, simply do not apply to the Creator.

Bloom is not going to answer if the 'Old Covenant' and the 'Belated Covenant' are spiritually true, only if they are existentially true. And I am of the persuasion that God chose not to reveal Himself in these terms.

If God had wanted to be critiqued literally, I believe He would have chosen the urbane Greeks and Romans to write His story as opposed to the disciples, most of whom were uneducated in rhetoric, grammar and so forth.

I think Bloom gets the cart before the horse. The Scriptures are there to serve the Faithful, and not vice versa, and I don't see much Faith in Bloom.

Myth Versus Science

Karen Armstrong, author of 'The Battle for God', and perhaps our most popular modern day theologian, puts forward an interesting argument concerning myth and logic. Myth, Ms. Armstrong states, governs the realm of yesterday and all of history, while logic governs the realm of tomorrow and the future.

Auguste Comte, the social scientist who first coined the term 'sociology', had a theory that was not so distant from Armstrong's. He argued that knowledge passes through three stages: the theological phase, whereby experience is explained by animism and 'gods', next the metaphysical stage, when knowledge is understood on abstract philosophical grounds, and lastly the scientific view, which positively defines knowledge through experimentation and the complete scientific method of observation.

Contrasting Armstrong's theory that the future is the domain of logic, with Comte's last stage of knowledge being scientific, one may view the times ahead as embodying a sterile, cold world of experiences with no hope for divine intervention. And certainly there is plenty of science fiction that depicts such a world.

But oh, what a glorious past!

The past is what we always have the most of as there is always more consciously behind us then there is consciously ahead of us! I interject here that Kierkegaard wisely stated that we live forward, but learn backward.

And since we have so much of the past, my mind turns to myth and what role it plays. I used to hear people talk about the Bible as being full of myths, and would become quite offended by their ideas. But now I understand that the Bible is mythical in the sense it is not scientifically valid in many cases. And certainly when one reads of miracles and the suspension of all physical laws that seemingly govern the Biblical universe, like it or not, the mind has shifted into the realm of myth.

Quickly here I might add that what I did yesterday is also in the realm of myth, as it is not thought of in scientifc terms. It would be absurd to attempt to explain my morning with the family and my day at the store in terms of 'length', 'mass', 'charge', and 'time'. 'Honey, I exerted fourteen newtons of force while I was at work yesterday'. The languages do not match up. It becomes absurd to speak of the realm of myth in scientific language.

But both languages are true, in the sense they describe the same experience, but in different ways.

I think of my son. I think of my wife. I think of even my pet beagle dog. Not in terms of how much mass they carry, or in how much atmospheric pressure they displace, but in terms of how much I love and care for them. The love and care is is what takes precedence over the pure existential facts.

In other words, I have shifted my thinking from the cold existential facts to the warm significance of my family circle.

And this is what it boiled down to for William James, who noted that science can explain the existential facts, but it cannot provide significance for the experiencer.

Measure man. Measure Earth. Measure moon. Measure the solar planets. Determine the sun's vanishing point. It's true, the numbers simply will not go away.

But explain the wonder of looking into a night sky and pondering the essential unlimitedness of the universe. Explain to me the beauty of the spiraling sunflower and the spiraling galaxy.

This Mythical Truth, this Mythical Beauty, this Mythical Significance cannot be explained adequately in scientific terms, so there always will need to be those religious, those poetic, those dreamers among us to step in where the scientist simply cannot.

Twenty thousand years from now, on planets who knows where, Myth will not have died, nor it's personages with it.

On my part, very thankfully so!