Letters to the Editor
michaelben
Published Letters: 23
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Peru Pictures
[Read the article: Beyond the Multiplex: Cannes]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hmmm. I don't think the two Peru pictures, purportedly showing glacier melt, are of the same place. Note rock embankment near water in the left picture.
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Brain states prove little
[Read the article: Divining the brain]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It seems to me that little is proved or disproved by neural imaging studies. As we think different things and do different things, so different parts of the brain become active. That's what brains "are for;" that's what brains do. What kind of discovery would it be to find out that we use different muscle-groups to move our bodies in different ways?
With sufficiently detailed imaging, I am sure we could find brain-states that correspond to every word we read, and every nuance of every sentence, plus the memories it evokes etc. This says nothing about the reality of language, which is real in an uncanny way from the start. Just like God. (I mean, where, exactly, is "language?" Or "tennis," for that matter?)
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God is the good we do
[Read the article: Are you there, God?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]For me, the son of holocaust survivors, God, to remain God, cannot be held accountable for the atrocities humans have committed upon each other for hundreds of thousands of years, nor for the natural calamities and accidents that have befallen uncountable innocent creatures before that and since. Nor could or would God have created a world in which these things had to happen. There was no God at the beginning. Rather, I think, God emerges with human, conscienced life, as a new layer of and over Nature.
In the biological realm, evolution cannot proceed without natural or sexual selection, i.e., without death, disease, bad luck, infertility, or deformity. In human cultural evolution however (and also in biological evolution insofar as humans can manage part of it), evolution need not be so painful. Kindness is a new thing in the universe. As is design. The felt imperative to preserve, honor, and promote all forms and instances of life is a new thing in the universe. We call it goodness, and we call its imagined and yet real agent God. We are not done with God, and God is not done with us. God is the good we do, and nothing is more inspirational.
Atheism of the kind now being put forth by Richard Dawkins is directed at a concept of God very few believers today actually hold. It is adolescent, not to mention old hat (read Robert Ingersoll c. 1870). For me there is no question that God exists. The only question is how.
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Good advice, but for reasons Cary might not subscribe to.
[Read the article: My Christian daughter says I'm going to hell]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Two points: First, I doubt that Unholy Father has never been to church, or that he does not understand the game that is Christianity (or organized religion generally). So telling him to "try it out" by watching the game and even talking to an "official" of the game will likely not do him much good, faithwise. Admittedly, it might do his daughter some good...until her mother accuses Unholy Father of hypocrisy. Then what? Would mother (and then daughter) not demand a more stringent test, a more sincere show of faith? Unholy Father needs a way to pass this test, if only in his own mind.
Which brings me to the second point. Cary's analogizing God to football is potentially an interesting metaphysical move, suggesting that God is not a person or an entity, or even a force, but rather an activity--and perhaps just a human activity. If so, the question becomes: is that activity church-going? I doubt it. That activity is likely something both more common and more profound: acting in kindness and courage, creating, healing, loving...in short, doing good. God is the good we do. On this understanding, it is the going-to-church-with-his-daughter that is, itself, God; and maybe that's what Cary is actually saying.
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Havrilesky
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The best and funniest writing about television (and popular culture) anywhere.
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"Since You Asked" reaches escape velocity
[Read the article: My childhood dreams are shattering as I approach adulthood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know...there's something about Anonymous's letter today ("My childhood dreams...") that makes me think it was written by no contemporary 18-year old, but an older aspiring novelist and/or fan and mimic of Cary's interests and sensibility. It's not just the writing style (also like Cary's), but that the childhood described seems to have happened in the 1950s at the latest, or is a fantasy itself.
Has "Since You Asked" has become its own art form and venue, an elegaic verbal tennis game in which each player longs only to play on, and neither lose, nor win, nor die.
I don't know...
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The likely truth
[Read the article: My husband of 12 years suddenly says he never loved me]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The likely truth, alas, is that hubby has found love in someone else's arms: smoldering, illicit, adult, child-free, perfume-driven, what-he-always-wanted billowing-curtain erotic love...compared to which his we're-in-this-together, harassed, house-bound, and repetitive love--no, care (yes he does care)--for his wife seems, well, not to be love at all, indeed, never to have been love. (He/they were too young to know better, married for the wrong reasons, etc.) What hubby does not realize--cannot realize now--is how hellish is the hell that awaits him in the process of divorcing: the pain his children's pain will cause him for the rest of his life, not to mention his wife's anger turning to hate, not to mention his complete financial ruin by divorce at the end of which process, or weeks after, the woman he loves will no longer love him or want him in part for what he "did to his family," in part because he is now self-pitying, guilty wreck and has to "have" his kids weekends, and in part because she has struck a better deal with another man (probably someone she has been seeing [again] all along). Been there.
The only thing that "heals" this is time--a long time--and new love for both parties...starting again really, and lots of taking care of kids, crying and yelling in cars.