Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 964 Editor's Choice: 127
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I Had High Hopes for This One....
[Read the article: The joys of life without God]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...but Shermer has let me down just like every other self-professed skeptic, cynic, Christian, Muslim, atheist and scientist: he just takes the very model that he is debunking and sets it up there as The Thing that Doesn't Exist. We already have churches, synagogues and mosques full of such objects. By claiming to debunk a thing one begins to "wrestle with the angel" which , of course, does not exist.
Shermer does, near the end of his screed, say that "it doesn't matter what we call it...". In this one statement he is right and in this one alone. As Krishnamurti, that most divine human, said, we must learn to look at everything, each piece of the world within our view, and see it for what it is, without judgement, without emotion, but simply evaluate it and its relationship to us. It is this relationship which is the "holy ghost", or what William Heard has called "The Space Between" and his friend Rollo May called "The Discovery of Being." Paul Tillich had already pronounced being as the definition of God, and he was on to something, I think. So was Krishnamurti. So was Heard, et al.
For evangelical Christians, by the way, Zeuss is still God. Just look at the pictures.
I feel smothered by our homegrown Christianity, and I'm sure I would feel smothered by fundamentalist Islam, Hinduism, atheism or anything else that comes in a box into which I must climb. But when I look out at the night sky, those "meaningless" stars, those molecules acting up out there, I see something. I don't care what it is; it is a part of me, of my experience, and of my consciousness. That consciousness includes self-awareness. This is as near as I need to come to describing, defining or otherwise recognizing something we might call "God." It is what is so.
Shermer crossed my field of vision tonight. He exists. There is no explanation for that in science, despite all the minds that created all the technology that allowed this to happen. It was an accident. Darwinism doesn't stand upon any accident. Neither does intelligent design. What does is possibility, and Out There lies all possibility, all the universes, and somehow they are, as Kerouac so innocently and cogently observed, are "coming in my window." I cannot stop them. I don't want to. I am too enraptured by the knowlege that I Am.
When Shermer can tell me what happens to my consciousness after my body is dead, with moral and scientific certainty, then I will be more than happy to sit and listen to him. Until then I'd rather go out for beers with Heard, May, Tillich, John Lennon or Root Boy Slim. And because of this phenomenon of imagination, I can do that.
Skepticism is the cynic's dildo. Leave him place it wherever it turns him on, but not in my ass, if you please.
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Desecrating Holy Ground
[Read the article: George Allen raises money for Jim Webb]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While I am currently living in Orange County, California (ironically enough named after Orange County, Viriginia, by one Charles Fuller, a Virginian transplant from back in the day), I am preparing my pullout before I get eaten by the "Surf Nazis" and the worse-than-racist, experience-impaired locals who talk about black people as though they exist on the moon, having almost never seen one, and don't know the difference between an A-rab and a wog. This is George Allen country, here, and Virginia is where my mother, my grandmother, and many of my aunts, uncles and cousins were born, all the way back to a descendant of Pocohantas. George Allen's father was an asshole. George II is Beelzebubba. I loathe and despise this man as I have loathed and despised few in my lifetime (the sitting President owning the tie for the Number One position; Birds of a feather flock). Allen makes it painful to be aware I am still registered with the same political party he and his neo-Nazi ilk have hijacked.
George Allen is evil. He is from out here, he has, indeed, invaded Virginia as Mudcat says, and defiled "our" culture. His use of the term "macaca" could not conceiveably have been anything but a carefully planned potshot, since if brains were dynamite Allen couldn't even blow his own nose, so I'm quite certain he asked around or looked it up somewhere. That kind of "accident" doesn't happen down in Fallwell country - nobody would have known the word. Not even Allen, to whom we can now all say with a sneer, "Yew not frum aroun' here, are ya'?" He's not, and that makes his use of the word utterly personal.
Oh, and to the responder who commented on the grunt Rebel soldiers who weren't charging into the jaws of death because they wanted to "own a slave": Thank you, sir. There actually are people who continue to labor under the notion that the Unpleasantness was about that. It was not, you have pointed it out most eloquently, and yes, it does matter a great deal, so those of you also "not from around here", don't give the dude any shit. He's correct, and I'm sick of living around people who believe otherwise and think that's just awesome.
To quote Steven Van Zandt, "I'm coming back, back for what's mine; ain't nobody gonna stop me this time." George Allen take notice: The Party's Over.