Letters to the Editor
Ben Sen
Published Letters: 541 Editor's Choice: 98
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The Inevitable End of Your Time Here
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not going to read any replies until I've written. I've seen it before--the acrimony is too much for me. It betrays a deeper loss and deeper trauma than the intellectual discussion deserves at this point in human history.
The "religionists" adopt a scientific framework to promote their "position," while the "scientists" have made a religion out of atheism. Then the screaming begins.
Ugh. I'm a Buddhist, a Zen Buddhist. I don't look "out" at concepts or data to justify my belief or lack of it. I look "in" through the practice of meditation to find purpose and serenity. It is a totally satisfying intellectual and emotional experience for me. There is no dogma but still a community to be a part of which gives me pleasure and solace.
I have no interest in winning an argument with anybody and don't wish to promote it. I don't really care what you believe unless you want to impose something that may be necessary for you to believe onto me. That's where the fundamentalists of any faith and I do draw the line. I will in fact fight you to the death if you try to take what I have away from me.
It doesn't matter whether my body evolved from other bodies and substances, though it is totally plausable, or that some "concept" of creation put me here. In the greater scheme of life and death it is of little or no consequence.
My faith is personal. It is my choice. That to some extent is what gives it a value to me, and to you, I believe because it helps me PERSONALLY to live a life with a little less suffering in it and that makes me capable of greater compassion.
So go ahead. Hammer away at one another. Get it out of your system. When your turn comes and you face the inevitable end of your time here may whatever choice you make serve you.
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Emerson Was Not a Fundamentalist
[Read the article: America's first Me Generation]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think the point here is that Emerson and the transcendentalists represent a form of philosophy originally based on Christianity that did not become fundamentalist. They were pretty much the first American philosophy, prior to the pragmatism of Pierce, James and Dewey (who is having a resurgence too.)
There is also a biographical movie currently being escorted around the country by the current head of the Emerson society that is looking for a distributor. I saw it at the Open Center in NYC last week. They didn't consciously make the movie to counter the "literalist" movement, but the message is clear: you can have an indigenous faith and not peg it to one of the creeds based on biblical interpretation.
Reading Emerson directly is tough sledding (though not Thoreau.) He was a savant who burned out on organized religion by the time he was thirty, and went to Europe where he learned the ideas that formed him--mostly the Romanticism of Rousseau--which confirmed in him the belief that the individual was the source of change when communicating "directly" with a "higher power," or "purpose" that "trancends" communal based faith. In a way, it can be interpreted as Protestantism brought to it's final destination.
Not many fundies show up on Salon.com, but if any do I wonder how they do it. All those denominations and sects based on one or another interpretation and no evidence that it makes any difference except whether or not you believe it. You've got to be desperate in my view to not see through the sham, which is exactly what Emerson did and will be enshrined forever as one of the great American thinkers as a result.
It's only been about two hundred years, but it still makes you wonder when these folks are going to stop being led around like sheep.
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Enough "Me Generation" Misinterpretations, Please
[Read the article: America's first Me Generation]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Susan "Sunbright" and other posters are absolutely right about the title of this article. There was little if any "me" to the transcendentalists, or "idealists" as Emerson liked to call himself.
Therein "perhaps" is the connection because the "Me Generation" were nothing if not idealists. That was a tag we were given by a news magazine at the time thoroughly under corporate control. (Remember: we threatened not to buy a lot of things.)
Why the tag won't die, and why it is so readily mis-interpreted by the "new" generation is another question. Personally, I resent it. I sacrificed almost ten years to the anti-war movement, was blacklisted from college and disinherited because of my views--and I sure as hell wasn't alone.
I fear the entire era has been horribly misrepresented. I know since I've tried to sell manuscripts that try to rectify the situation. Consequently, even otherwise informed writers and editors keep making the same mistake. There was a core of people in my generation, many of them totally unsung, who were serious about changing the world and not the drug addicted narcissists we are still made out to be.
Hopefully, somebody is still looking at this trace.