a person without faith

A person without faith is nothing.  As in no thing.  What is meaning without a belief that meaning exists.  What is reality without a subject to percieve it?  And without faith that one's consciousness is legitimately more than the fated interactions of strings or atoms or energy or whatever theory comes up next, then it is nothing.  Even those theories have no meaning, they are models of a reality brought to us at a distance through perceptive systems constructed in that reality.  How does one observe when they are what is being observed.  There is no difference between the object of observation and the subject that is doing the observing.

perspective

One's feeling of importance, of specialness, is self-inflicted.  It is a matter of perspective.  From one's own eyes they are the largest thing that exists, and all things perceivable flow towards them.  But what is a human to a galaxy a billion light years away.  Our planet is a blip in time, our species is far less.  A fluke, we are statistically insignificant to all the universe except ourselves.

materialism

I detest materialism, but there is no evidence scientifically that anything exists beyond physical energy and its condensed forms as matter.  As such we are nothing more than the physical interactions of atoms and fields, energy and matter.  Nothing more.  Being alive is nothing more than the coordinated interactions of matter in various physical states.  As much as a galaxy or a solar system is born or dies, so do we.  It is painful to see myself as nothing more.  To see my consciousness and will as nothing but evolutionary advantage.  And what of happiness, or anger, or sadness.  Why do they exist?  Or love...

Sometimes passion dies.  Sometimes God dies.  When one's soul begins to fade, why not hasten it?  Why hang on?  If one can easily be replaced, if all their responsibilities can be fulfilled by others, if they are invisible, are they needed?  Is there a reason to stick around?  Why not fade into the background?  The background of time, of memory.

navigating the holidays(holy days?)

Thanksgiving(marginally a holy day, but certainly a holiday) is upon us, then Chanukah is right after, then Christmas.

My son is Jewish, or rather, my wife asserts his Jewishness. I am nominally Christian, though I haven't been to church or made any outward signs of my faith in a while. The holidays are always difficult for a variety of reasons. In some ways Christmas means a lot more to me than it does to others in my family, though my sister may say that is untrue. My faith is tied up in feelings about my Dad, in what I think it means to be a good person, my thoughts about God, and about the whole story that we call Christianity. I feel very sentimental about Judaism, but I am not Jewish, and it is hard for me to assent to calling my son Jewish, at least exclusively.

I had a talk with him the other night when he was asking who was Jewish in our family. He would ask "Is Uncle G. Jewish" and I would say yes, then "Is Nana Jewish", and I would say "No, she is Jewish". We got through all the relatives that he has met in person and I think he got the idea that my side of the family is Christian and mommy's side is Jewish. He then asked if Bashful Lamb was Jewish or Christian, so I asked if he was from Mommy's side or Daddy's side. We decided that Bashful was Jewish and Hans Bear was Christian.

I don't want him to choose sides, but I want him to appreciate what each religion and each heritage has to give.

I know this post isn't really a revelation or an answer to any question, but I felt like letting it out.

Happy Holidays, or Holy Days if you prefer.

A warm day

I was inside most of the day, but when I had a chance to go out I recalled many of the beautiful moments I have experienced on campus. I remembered girls I had had crushes on, and some I had the fortune of dating and fun times with friends. It was a perfect day for nostalgia.

The sun was warm and you could feel the golden hue it cast on every face, every leaf, every smile, every step. When I was young we had HBO and I remember an intro where a camera descended into a model town. Every individual thing was in its place, the colors were surreal and carefully planned. On a day like today when the breeze and the colors seem so perfect I am reminded of that model town perfectly arranged, cars moving exactly on cue, a single bicycle riding down a suburban street, and every shadow cast at the same angle. That nostalgic feeling of comfort mixed with the disconcerting calm of an overly planned existence both pleased and panicked me as I walked through a perfect fall day.

when I leave this place

When I go, waste no time in putting me in the ground, don't put any chemicals in me, but leave me for the earth. Plant a tree on my grave, something I would remember from my youth, maybe a pecan tree. If someone needs a marker to remember where I lay, then wait until the tree is grown and mark the tree.

my semi-annual post.

It is a new year, and about 5 months since I posted last. I am not particularly diligent about finding topics to discuss here, but today I have two. They both regard frustrations I have run into in the last week, but the first is less academic than the second. Happy new year everyone. Enjoy.

Firstly, fatherhood is a difficult road to travel. I don't really understand those men that do not find it challenging. It seems to me that there one suddenly has to be ultraconscious of how their actions are interpreted by a growing, learning little child that doesn't have the perspective to understand personal fallibility, task prioritization, or depressive lethargy. I end up doing things I do not desire or wish to do, because I care about my son. I cannot let loose with my emotions because I know he would not understand that sometimes a person just needs to let go. This last weekend I really didn't feel like being a dad. I didn't want to answer all the questions or play or deal with little toys on the floor or any of the other things that go along with fatherhood to a toddler. At the same time, he doesn't understand that I was not in the "mood" for such things. I had to put myself in a time out so I could let my frustration dissipate and then continue with the day. Fortunately, I was able to get over my momentary pissyness and the next day was much better.

Secondly, why are discussions of faith taboo? I saw an article about Brit Hume's comment about suggesting Tiger Woods consider Christianity since it has a framework for forgiveness that he could use to move past his transgressions and try to figure out his life. Apparently Brit was lambasted over the advice, but why? Is religion just a market place where things are supposed to be neatly packaged and we just choose the one that is prettier or cheaper? Can we not get recommendations or discuss the differences between religions? Supposedly Tiger is a buddhist, which means he should have recognized his actions as a source of suffering for both himself and his family and used that knowledge to avoid those actions or else endure the karmic repercussions. Okay, but what is wrong with acknowledging that people have personal failures, introducing a concept of forgiveness and then allowing them to use that experience to change future actions, is that not the idea behind Christian forgiveness? I know that the supermarket Christianity would profess that forgiveness is so abundant and flowing that it seems like one need not even think about personal effort as a part of forgiveness, but that is naive. In reality, Chrisitanity recognizes that change is hard, and extends divine forgiveness as a way to recognize that one has committed an act that is wrong, but also that one can recover from such failings. It is not easy to recover, and it may require more forgiveness down the line. However, that Grace is not cheap, one should not use it like a disposable kleenex. Self-reflection and self-determination are required so that one might change their character over time, indeed over a lifetime. I present this concept of Christian forgiveness with out the list of what is regarded as sin, since I personally believe that sin and what is wrong is circumstantial.(brief, potentially heretical diatribe about sin to follow) Sure there are things that are almost always wrong, but somehow we find ways to justify almost everything in someway, so when evaluating what is wrong and right I claim no special authority there. I mean really, in the Judeo-Christian holy books we have plenty of instances where God condones and/or requests acts that are in conflict with the big Ten that Moses brought down to the people. What that tells me is that God is more elusive and flexible than a set of commandments etched in stone, and more permanent. Jesus, in an effort to summarize the commandments said that there are only two commandments, to love God with your heart, soul and mind and then to love your neighbor as much as yourself. He said the entire Judaic Law hinged on those two commandments. In presenting the commandments in this way he reveals the spirit behind the Ten Commandments and at the same time gives a way of trying to understand why God would ask someone like Abraham to sacrifice their son. Anyway, my point was originally, that I find it a little annoying that in America, it is considered low-brow and inappropriate to truly discuss the merits and differences of religions. The dialogue almost always devolves into a discussion about the actions of adherents to particular faiths, which in some ways is irrelevant to the concept of religion, since religion is meant to transcend human failings and present an ideal to strive for, not to embody the failings of those who follow that religion. If anything those human failings serve to show how well the adherents of a particular religion pay attention to the tenets of their faith.

looking up

It is almost the end of my birthday. My 32nd celebration of my inauguration into this world.

I just came in from a few minutes of staring at the stars from my mom's back porch. It has been a while since I have seen so many stars. You can only see the brightest ones from the city so it seems that your focus in drawn downward, rather than upward.

It is easy to loose hold of oneself in a place where you feel rushed, and pressured and torn in many different ways. Looking up sometimes gives one some perspective, a realization that there is so much more in the universe than waking up, working, coming home and sleeping.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam all tell us that there is something flawed about humanity. That we tend to "sin" or in more familiar language, make mistakes. For some of us, that is our character, we constantly make the same mistakes over and over, these are the black sheep, the family members we don't talk about, the guy that everyone knows as a living example of how not to be. Then there are some of us who are generally on the straight and narrow, but they make a mistake, and it is not something you would expect. Those people react in different ways, usually based on how they view themselves.

They can either hide their mistakes or make them known. Hiding is a function of not acknowledging that one has made a mistake. It is the action of trying to erase the mistake by making it fade with time. But that mistake will always live with whoever committed it and it will shape their future actions. Owning up to one's mistakes allows them to be put to rest however, acknowledging that one has erred allows that person to call on help from others to help prevent that error in the future.

Since I don't profess to know a significant amount about Judaism or Islam, I can't say I know how they deal with the idea of sin. In Christianity(at least in Orthodoxy), sin is dealt with as a disease, something that infects a healthy organism and that organism tries to fight it off. One characteristic of Orthodoxy is that sin is not transmitted at birth, meaning that a baby is sinless and has the possibility of staying sinless. What is transmitted is the potential, even the propensity toward sin. Think of this as analogous to someone that is very fair being born in the desert. They have the possibility of avoiding sunburn and eventually sun cancer, but they are far more likely to get a sunburn and eventually a complication because of it. The tools of the church are supposed to be like sunscreen, in a way. You confess to prevent yourself from hiding and letting your mistakes and errors fester in secrecy, you pray for forgiveness to attempt to unburden yourself so that you can have the strength to avoid those mistakes in the future. This is a long, and arduous process of self-perfection that tries to account for the fact that humans aren't perfect.

I suppose in some ways I find that process beautiful and simple and incredibly hard to put into practice for myself. I come from a family and background, where emotions are bottled up and one tried to fix stuff on their own. My heart is full of misdirected pride and the tendency to hide my mistakes because I don't want others to know that I make mistakes. But, trust me, I do, in spades. Whenever I do something that is really out of character for me, I hide that more. I convince myself that it will be better off if I hide it and just focus on avoiding that behavior in the future. This routine never works and I end up disclosing my mistakes at a time when the consequences of those errors in action and judgement have been compounded by the secrecy and hiding. In general, I am not very good at being a Christian. Thankfully, I am not asked to be good at it, but rather to not give up and be honest with myself.

This last year has been hard, and I have to work on being better about acknowledging that I make mistakes. I have made more mistakes than there are stars in the sky. Perhaps my vision of myself has just been blurred the way the light of the city obscures the billions of little stars shining above me. Sometimes I just have to be in a dark place to see things more clearly.

Lost time

I haven't posted in a while, but that doesn't mean my mind hasn't been active and processing the relationship between day to day life and the eternal. Eternity is an interested word, many people conflate the idea of eternity with time unending, or a continuation of time with out end. I prefer to think of eternity as an alternative to temporality, living outside of time and its constant forward motion. Some religions believe that there is an immutable soul that passes from the temporal to the atemporal, or from this world to eternity at the time of death. There are lots of wonderful ways to express this poetically, but for the most part our knowledge of life after death is either divinely inspired, raw/cold observation or comforting suppositions. I do not claim to be divinely inspired, and I have a hard time saying there is nothing after this life, so I usually grasp at ways to comfort myself when a loved one passes.

Recently my mother-in-law, passed away. I used to call her Mama Ro. She was funny, and lively and as my wife and I come to find out she seems to have lived many lives. We took on the task of cleaning out her apartment and saw the types of things she collected, pictures of herself, family and friends, clothes, shoes, and lots of memories. As we continued this work over the last month or so, I had a chance to get to know more about Mama Ro before I met her. To see some of the back story in her life and to fix a picture of her in my mind. I have been trying to understand her more so that I have stories to tell my son about his grandmother. In this way, she has passed from this world to eternity for me. She has fixed herself, outside of the turbulences of the constant march of time and become a whole person, from start to finish.

One time I was describing to a friend the impact a person has on the world, and history and the future. I described each person as a stone thrown into the lake of human history. As the stone enters the lake, ripples vibrate outward, affecting firstly the immediate surroundings of that person, but eventually the entire lake is somehow affected by that one person, and the ripples, while they diminish, never actually end. This is another way that a person achieves eternity, as they affect others, even in the smallest way. Sometimes this affect is good, sometimes it is bad.

I will miss Mama Ro, I am glad I got to do the work of cleaning out her home and hope that I can help share her impact on the world with my son.

Walking

In Boston, Spring is tantalizingly close. The plants look a little more perky, the sky promises warmth, the wind has a little less bite, and there is light out when I get home from work. I can feel my spirits rising. My desire to be outside is getting stronger. Soon the trees on Bay State Road will blossom and the street will be fragrant and colorful.

Boston in the Spring is like awakening from a black and white dream to be reminded that the world is in color. You can almost feel the pulse of the city quickening.

On Wednesday, I went to a client downtown before work. It was early and the T wasn't packed. The air still had a chill, but it wasn't the same as a month ago. I did my work and left, and walked toward BU through Boston Commons, and the Gardens. The pigeons weaved in and out of my path. There were people hustling to work, homeless people sleeping in tattered lumps, new flowers planted so they will bloom early in the spring, and a sense of relief that winter might just be over. But as any good Bostonian knows, saying winter is over in Mid-March is just madness. But maybe, the winter that clouds up our minds is lifting and we can start to dream in color again.

Tired

I just feel tired, stagnant. I spend my days fixing things when I want to explore. I thought this morning about how the day felt like Scotland did so many years ago. I tried looking at the street I was walking down in a new way. But all I saw was my memories. Fourteen years of memories. I have spent nearly half my life in Boston. I remember how when I was a freshman here for undergrad I just wanted to finish school and leave. I felt like the place, the tenor of the place was hostile to me. I was an invader in a new town and it desired me gone. Now I go other places and I miss Boston. But when I am at home I miss the feeling of seeing the world as a big place for me to learn about. I am itching to see new things, and I want to be able to see new things here, for convenience sake, but every where I look it is something I know. The neighborhood I live in now is the first neighborhood I saw in Boston. Sometimes I hear my senior year AP Lit teacher saying, "it is the circularity of the novel". Is my life some novel with a circular narrative. Am I just a living version of "Light in August". Where is the burning house? Where is my mixed heritage, my outsiderness. I fear getting old sometimes, not because of death but because I feel like I am getting farther and farther from greatness. Perhaps it was profound hubris, but when I was young I thought I really could be or do anything. It wasn't just that my mom told me that, I actually thought I had the capacity to be as great, in an epic sense, as I wanted to be. As I get older that feeling is fading. I feel myself edging towards complacency and normalcy. It is all just making me tired.

Why Christians should read Nietzsche

I consider myself a Christian. I can't really identify which denomination or say that I agree with church doctrines one by one. I am even skeptical about parts of the Bible as historical truth(that doesn't mean there isn't value there however). But still, through all my imperfections, misguided notions, bad decisions, hypocritical actions and thought, etc. I am Christian.

I had a number of years where I knew that I was Christian, in that I believe Jesus was the Son of God, become man, to proclaim the kingdom of Heaven and then die as a subsitute for our own deaths, but I didn't say that I was a Christian. If someone asked I would say "I didn't know", or "maybe". This period of doubt was in many ways inspired and instigated by a philosopher named Frederich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is pretty famous and very maligned. Many call him anti-semitic, but I think they are wrong. Many say he hated religion, which may be true but was not his point. The essence of Nietzsche is to force one to live their lives because they have chosen to live it.

Complacency, blind acceptance, the meaningless sway of fad and mindless obedience was disgusting to him. It is ironic that the Nazi's justified their horrible campaign of suffering and conquest using his words, he would have found the mindless mobs committing the atrocities to be like sheep, subhuman, and would have been offended that they used him to do it.

What Nietzsche did to me was make me choose to be a Christian. He made me look at what I was and make a choice about my identity that I would either accept or reject. I didn't want to call myself something because I felt like my friends thought I should be, or my family had always been, or I was born that way. I have a natural tendency towards analyzing my beliefs and behavior anyway, but this particular philosopher, challenged me to believe in Christianity because that is what I believe, not because someone else wanted me to believe it.

I am attracted to Christianity for the same reason I like reading Nietzsche or even Plato. It is a challenge. I am challenged to identify myself, to make choices about who I want to be, what I want to do, how I want to think. I will admit, I do not make the same choices as the churches I have attended, I will never. But I will consider why those churches make those choices and choose my own actions accordingly.

Even if you aren't a Christian or don't believe in God, I would recommend reading Nietzsche. Start with something like "Twilight of the Idols", it is short and it was written late in his career when he had started to more clearly form his worldview. Read it once quickly, don't worry about the meaning, then read it again and think. Don't be literal, consider what the words mean and then think about your life. By the way, this is the way I read the Bible as well. I try do away with the preconceptions about the text like that it must be historical fact, but I read it to see what it might mean, or what it might have meant at the time.

Coming home

Asher always has this great look for me when I get home. It is like he is so happy he can't contain it in his little face. He smiles really big and I see his baby teeth speckling his gums. It is a great feeling and sometimes it makes me forget work and lack of sleep and such.

about national health care

I am removing this post because I think the explanation here is better, BTW, my cousin susan pointed out that my hyperbole was incorrect because the 15,400 charge was for a family, not per person. What it basically means is that if you take the figures I used(very reserved assumptions) that healthcare would add at least 1.2tn to the federal operating budget.

Anyway, go here for more info. http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

BTW, I am not against national healthcare, but I think that people are not conscious of how much it will cost and the fact that the money will come from us(the middle class) even though many politicians want to make you believe it is being paid for by some anonymous group called the super-rich.

Another blast from the past, Gen. 6.6

Here is another thought from a 19 year old Brent.

8/31 Genesis 6.6

I don't understand how it says that he Lord was sorry that He had made mankind.  Why did He make us if it would grieve Him.  He must have known that the world would go down this path.

Blast from the past, notes on Genesis 3.1-14

I was sorting through old papers and I ran across this old journal entry and thought I would post it, I am not going to edit it though I could think of a few modifications I would make if I wrote on the same subject today, for now you get to see the way I was thinking when I was 19:

From 8/12/1996

In this chapter we have the fall of mankind.  The serpent knew what he was saying as he told Eve that she would know "good and evil".  As she ate the fruit, she obtained a whole new view of the world, the moral view.  However, this view compromised the most important part of her existence, her innocence.  The rush/high of the experience overcame her and she shared that sin with her husband.  Adam could have refused the fruit and saved his future, but he took of the fruit, and he too was changed.  (This situation is much like a child that is told not to touch fire.  The child sees the flames dance and is drawn by the light and the warmth, and he touches it.  He is then burned.)    The first indication of sin's burn was the realization of their nakedness.  Then there is the fear of God as He approaches the couple.

Both Adam and Eve knew God was great, and they feared Him after they shared the knowledge of Good and Evil.  They lost their innocence, and they found themselves separated from God... They also lost their trust in God, and God cannot talk to those who don't trust Him.

My son is one

A year ago today, my little Asher was brought into the world.  It was a tough day, or rather week.  My wife tried to have a natural birth, but my little boy was too big and she had to have a C-section after 72 hours of labor.  He was having trouble breathing when he came out and my wife was exhausted and in serious pain after an emergency surgery.  At that moment I became a father.  I realized that day that I no longer belong to myself.  I stayed with my son and talked to him as he laid under an oxygen hood with and IV in one arm and an oxygen sensor on his toe.  He didn't have the strength to move and I just told him to breathe.  I would go to my wife and report on the status of our new little man.  I was a bridge between my wife who was constrained to her bed and my son who could not leave the nursery.  He overcame those tense few hours and now he is a strong little man.  I got past those first days of sleeplessness and I cannot imagine a world without my little boy.

Not really a comment about God

My gov't is buying banks.

WHAT!!!

I am disgusted with the bailout plan. There was a cabal of financial executives that developed a complex plan to create value when there was none and that plan collapsed. Now, rather than closing those companies and imprisoning those people that understood how bad this would be and still signed off on it, we are propping up their business with tax dollars. But, not even tax dollars. We are doing it by issuing treasury bonds which means that we are mortgaging the future of our children to bailout people that defrauded us because they ran organizations that were "too big to fail". McCain and Obama have coddled this bailout as a measure to stop the downslide of our economy. I have news for them. The economy will rid itself of non-value regardless of how much money we pump into fraudulent companies. It will just take longer and we will suffer for a longer amount of time. Someone needs to read some Machiavelli and realize that if you have to do distasteful things, get them all done at once and then work on rebuilding. People can forget a single disastrous blow but long drawn out suffering breeds contempt and resentment. Just ask Bush. There is a reason that he is the least favored president in US history.

Back to the bank thing. Paulson rounded up execs from the top banks and extorted them to sign the agreement to allow the treasury to purchase their stock. The CEO of Wells Fargo objected to the plan(probably because his bank managed to steer clear of the tempting ponzi scheme which was being peddled on Wall St.) and the response given was something like "if you don't sign now, the Gov't may not be so generous later". Why didn't Paulson just tell Rocco to take them out for a walk by the pier? Hopefully, I will be proven wrong, but I am not happy about the way this bailout plan is shaking out. It seems more like a shakedown to me.

Happy Pascha

This year I observed Lent, as much as I could, and I attended the Paschal Liturgy at my church. Pascha is the Orthodox name for Easter and their calculation of the date for Easter is different than the Western tradition largely because of a continued use of the Julian calendar (and they rely on a real full moon, rather than a calculated one). The result of the calculation difference means that Pascha is always after the Western Easter, and it usually falls on the close of Passover(since the calculation for the two is essentially the same).

I arrived at Holy Resurrection at about midnight just as the paschal flame was being passed to the congregation. The church was dark except for a small light in the Holy Sanctuary where the Priests performed the rites of the service. I then saw those lights multiply as the priests lit candles and emerged from the sanctuary to light the candles of the parishioners. The paschal light was spread backwards through the church until it found me, in the very back, just outside of the door to the nave(where the parishioners are during the service). There was no artificial light and the room was filled with little candle lights. It was a beautiful sight. Chanting begun and the Paschal Hymn was sung. I like the Paschal Hymn a lot, and have since I first heard it. The English of the hymn is as follows: "Christ is risen, from the dead. Trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life" – then repeat. This short verse is full of theological depth and captures the crux of Christian belief, I like it very much and I tend to say it in my head often.

As I was in the back of the church, I watched my candle, protecting its light. We processed around the church, all of us holding our candles. I thought about how the candle must be protected from the wind and how sometimes it is blown out and you have to ask someone if you can use their candle to light yours. It seems like this is a perfect analogy for Christian life, or life in general. We cultivate what we believe, but there are sometimes doubts and having a community to fall back on allows our "flames" to be relit. Pascha is the annual resurrection of our(Orthodox Christians) faith and reminds us that life is a process that requires nurturing and care for growth to occur.

The rest of the service was good as well, after the procession, the lights are turned on in the church and liturgy continues with interjected bouts of "Christ is risen" and "Indeed, He is risen" in many languages. There are a number of different hymns sung which make the service longer than usual. Many of the children in the congregation were asleep by 2ish. I saw some kids on the pews sleeping and two others in sleeping bags under the pews. My friend Aaron's baby seemed determined to stay awake though looking at her little face; I could tell she was tired. She didn't cry during the service even though at one point I looked over and she seemed to be making grumpy-mouth – it was pretty cute.

When the service concluded with communion and blessed bread we gathered downstairs for the Paschal Feast. There was a ton of food, mostly the stuff that one could not eat if they had been fasting. Many of the kids, and adults, were walking around with hard boiled eggs and playing a game where they crack eggs with another to see whose egg will break. One thing I noticed that was different from the other time I had attended Pascha at Holy Resurrection is that the food tables were in a straight line. When I had attended in college, the tables were laid out in the shape of a cross. I suppose the linear shape facilitates getting food easier, but I enjoy the little symbolic details sometimes.

I talked with a few people and met some people that I didn't know before. I spoke with Fr. Patrick briefly and then came home. I managed to sneak in the door around 4am. I was tired, but I am really glad that I went to service.