Of Moose and Men

Of Moose and Men: Redux

Like moose drool down from his jaw
Liquid drip of much after thought,
The human chews his abstract cud.

Drooling brought-back cussedness

This brainy mammal with his huge
Mental jaw ruminates and masticates
Difficult philosophical concepts.

He chews and chews and chaws
Minding repeatedly, and pondering
Into his daily life for good or ill

Drooling, brought-back cussedness

The meta-conundrums, the ones
He can't stomach, that ethical gristle
Imponderable quandaries.

Like the massive moose of yonder glen,
Man stands as king and all get out
In this damned lake he calls civilization;

Drooling brought-back cussedness

Then walking admidst verbal tall trees, he
Rummages through this forest of ideas,
Philosophical redwoods towering above.

And he peers up searching the heights, but
Stands sludged mired in his soggy morass,
The moral muddle of his shallow bog.

Drooling brought-back cussedness

What festering future, or fertile destiny
Awaits this drooling race of primate
Caught in the quagmire, a hypocrite?


Any St. Bernard dog, as Thoreau said,
Has more basic moral sense than
Most men who swallow gross wrong whole,

Drooling and drooling and drooling...


--Daniel E. Wilcox

First pub.
Dark Energy,
by Diminuendo Press

"Strange...a God..."

"Strange...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones;
who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short;
mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness
multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell;
who mouths morals to other people
and has none himself;

who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all;
who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man,
instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself;
and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!"

— Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger*

1. This "a God" described by Samuel Clemens is horrific and alien to me--was so even back when I was a young Christian teen growing up in Bible-belt southern Nebraska. We certainly didn't believe in any such deity.

YET I do know--from my having read many tomes of history and theology, and from personally speaking with a few famous Christian leaders--that Mark Twain's "a God" is a fairly accurate view of creedal Christianity, especially of the Augustinian, Reformed, and Lutheran branches.**

2. Here is background for the assertions of Clemens' anti-creed:

A. "a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones;"

It is very baffling why an, allegedly, perfectly good God would intentionally foreordain, before the creation of the universe, that all the many billions of infants be conceived and born totally "sinful" and "in essence, evil."

But remember the famous Puritan, Michael Wigglesworth, in his poem "The Day of Doom" emphasized that infants will get the "easiest room in Hell." :-( Line 370-72, http://www.bartleby.com/400/poem/171.html

No wonder that Twain was so bitter about this ethical obscenity.

B. "who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short;"

If you had a dollar for every Christian book which emphasizes that Christians ought to accept, even glory in their suffering because it brings glory to God, you would soon be rich.

Titles will be added here later.

Of course, think of the millions of young children and young adults who suffer and die terribly from cancer and other agonizing and death-dealing scourges which God pre-planned for his own glory and "good pleasure."

One of the last tragic cases that happened shortly before I finally realized that organized Christianity CAN'T be true was a young lady of about 32 in our church who suffered and died leaving her 3 pre-schoolers without a mom.

C. "mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness
multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell;"

Strange as it may seem to many, the sort of Christianity dominating the U.S. where Clemens grew up--and which still dominates some areas--does emphasize that even Hell was created for God's glory.

Heck, one famous Christian theologian said that even the Jewish Holocaust will bring what ever glory to God that he wills!

D. "who mouths morals to other people and has none himself;"
and
"who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all;"

This is called Divine Command Theory in the Christian religion, or God's total sovereignty. According to many Christian leaders, God has two separate contrary wills; in one he commands humans to obey certain laws, but in the other will, God's hidden will, God causes every evil including molestation, rape, murder, slaughter, natural disasters, diseases, plagues, famines, etc.

Not a molecule moves in the cosmos but that it is by this "a God's" will.

Because God's ultimate nature is his absolute sovereignty, then whatever God wills, then becomes "good." That is why God could order slaughter, slavery, abuse, lying, stealing, and so forth in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament.

If you question this, Christians will ask you, "Who do you think you are to question God?"
--

"That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence
slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven,

whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm,
and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, and ain't agoing
to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most
dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften
it up somehow for myself, by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame;
but something inside of me kept saying, "There was the Sunday school, you could a gone to it;
and if you'd a done it they'd a learnt you, there, that people that acts as I'd been acting
about that nigger goes to everlasting fire."

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie-and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie- I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter- and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville
and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.
HUCK FINN

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell...

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again;
and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too;
because as long as I was in, and in for good,
I might as well go the whole hog."
--from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens on the theme of his book: "A book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience [because of Christian society and the Bible] come into collision, and conscience suffers defeat."

*As a literature teacher for many years, I used some of Clemens' bitter satire and deep ethical insights for a whole unit on the nature of ethics, and the dangers of conscience, duty, and honor.
But I've not written on Twain or his books for a long time.
Thanks to Bruce Gerencser and Infidel753
for bringing up Twain's keen ethical passage this week on their blogs.

**I won't bother with ranting and raving against the bad three, have done that enough in the past here on the blog. And, since encountering their theological and ethical horrors first 55 years ago have virtually driven all my close loved ones to drink;-), especially my patient wife. She, being non-theological and non-philosophical, doesn't worry about what famous leaders and famous Christian denominations teach. Maybe that is why we share a margarita or wine once in a while for dinner. Much better than the bad spirits.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Is This Presidential Election a "Seeding Time"?

Would you agree or disagree with the following statements?

#1 Usually, war is justified when there is a dangerous enemy.

#2 The only way to understand what is happening and what ought to happen is to wait a couple hundred years to get a more objective perspective.

While we wonder at the tragedy, uncertainty, and even absurdity of our times, so have humans in the past.

We, at present, deal with Muslim jihadists, but the colonists dealt with savage Indians resisting the confiscation of their lands, and with the complex conflicts between the British and the French Empires on the American frontier, and then against the British government itself.

If one skips the nationalism, even the admirable patriotic legends of the Revolution, and reads a few history books, one soon discovers that those troubled times weren't clear cases of good versus evil, or right versus wrong, or justice versus injustice (nor are most--maybe all--historical events).

Nor is the present time. Who is correct? who is right?

The Syrian Government of President Assad which protected all of its citizens except for Sunni Muslim jihadists?

The Sunni Muslims jihadists that the U.S. Government supports, hoping they will overthrow the Syrian Government of Assad?

The Russian Government which is bombing the jihadists to protect the Syrian Government?

The Turkish Government which is killing Kurdish Rebels?

Etc.

T'was Seeding Time by John L. Ruth is a powerful narrative about the troubles and tragedies of that period, but not told from the perspective of the Revolutionists such as Adams, Jefferson, or Washington,
or told from the opposite perspective of the British Parliament and King George and the evangelist/reformer John Wesley,
or even the Indian tribes losing their homelands,
but
from the perspective of a few contrary American immigrant groups--the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Brethren.

Ruth starts out his historical account in December 1755 at the start of the worldwide 7 Years War (known in the colonies as the French and Indian War).

The war involved all the European powers and "affected Europe, North America, Central America, West Africa, India, and the Philippines. Considered as the greatest European war since the Thirty Years War of the 17th century, it once again split Europe into two coalitions," Great Britain against France. (Wikepedia)

From the first page of Seeding Time:
"Angry Indians had crossed the long Blue Mountain...and left behind in the ashes of [immigrants'] cabins the smoldering, scalpless bodies of European settlers...their Swiss Amish father had forbade them to fire at the Indians..."

"The wounded Jacob Jr. and his sister were tomahawked on the spot, and the mother as well, after having been stabbed in the heart with particular malice"

"...No one was more troubled by such events than the Quakers, who up to this point had controlled the Pennsylvania legislature...Israel Pemberton...with fellow Friends...organized the "Friendly Association"...appealed to the Mennonites..."

"for aid in building up a fund from which presents could be purchased for meetings with the aggrieved Indians...on account of the unjust treatment of the Indians...This enraged the Scotch-Irish...[but] the devout Quakers...believed that nonviolence was the essence of the Christian faith..."

Benjamin Franklin (later one of the Revolutionaries) took a dim view of the Mennonites, Quakers, and their nonviolence toward the Indians.

So on the eve of the Revolution, these formerly oppressed Swiss-German Anabaptist Brethren and Quakers were living diligently in the Quaker Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in "Penn's Woods."

Then following the first battles in Massachusetts, during the spring of 1775, fervent war fever spread again like fire through the colonies including Pennsylvania. All men were under pressure to sign up to fight the British or to contribute money for the Revolution.

Thus whether we live now when nearly all presidential candidates are claiming we Americans should attack the Syrian government
and continue supporting the Islamic jihadists
(who we gave about 300 million dollars alone several months ago)
or
back in the volatile slaughter of the 1700's, there are no easy answers.

So, too, as at the time of "Seeding Time" described by Ruth, those who oppose war find it very difficult to follow the way of peace-making when everyone is crying "War!
Go Fight!
Stop the Enemies!"

A fine short history book well worth the reading time.

'Twas Seeding Time by John L. Ruth, Herald Press, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other book stores.

In the Light of Peacemaking and Seeking,

Daniel Wilcox

The Wonder of Our Finite Species

Many factors influence human choices including our evolutionary past, our temperament, our family background, our culture/worldview, etc., but we aren’t determined fatalistically
by any God or Allah or the Cosmos or Nature or the Big Bang.

As aware humans, (homo sapiens, reasoning and creative primates), we have the amazing ability to choose among various alternative thoughts, plans, actions. We have alternative choice. Our decisions change the world around us and change us.

Homo sapiens aren’t like some modern thinkers claim—only “wet robots,” “puppets,” “bags of chemicals,” or inanimate “bowls of sugar” only being acted on, with no choice.

Existence (space and time) isn’t a cosmic block of amber with all sentient life including humans’ finite lives only petrified termites within.

On the contrary, the cosmos is in creative flux and has at least one species which has rational and creative ability--US.

According to many humanistic thinkers, every human has at least 5 abilities:

#1 Self Awareness:

We primates, unlike many more basic life forms such as a clam;-), are aware that we exist, and aware that we are aware. Also, we are aware to one degree or another of our own eventual ceasing to be in death.

And if each of us becomes a student of history, each “I” can become aware that millions of years existed and billions of humans before this finite “I,” came into being.

We have great ability to learn about our environment from our backyard to far-flung galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and from this present moment in February 2, 2016 to back to the beginning of time billions of years ago, and to speculate about the eventual demise of the cosmos many billions of years in the future.

#2 Ethical Sense of Ought:

NOT only do we have those amazing learning skills to learn facts of what IS
and what was,
we also have a deeply embedded sense of conscience of what OUGHT
to become—
what is transcendent, what is essential
what is ‘beyond’ the basic facts of matter and energy.

Our conscience doesn’t tell us precisely what is right and what is wrong, but that we ought to do right and to reject wrong.

However, as all humans usually learn, growing into a reliable sense of ought ‘ain’t’ easy.

Not only does one need to guide, even restrain impulse and instinct, one needs to question the basic assumptions of one’s ethnic, cultural, and national background.
But then all difficult learning takes time and much effort.

Think of learning calculus to build bridges and skyscrapers, or how to perform brain surgery, or to play multiple musical instruments well.

Why should ethics be any simpler?

For more details on this, read a good philosophical book like the skeptic Martin Gardner’s The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.

#3 Ability to Reason:

Using our thinking ability, we rationally think through possible future actions. We can observe our self, our situation, “stand apart from our self,” in order to make as objectively accurate decisions as possible.

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
Thomas Paine

#3 Imaginative Reflection/Empathy:

Furthermore, before acting, we can project in our mind how our actual action may affect others. We can seek to understand the feelings of other individuals and understand why they are different in their views and behaviors.

#4 Creativity:

Even when a human is aware, can trust his conscience, uses reason, and engages in empathy—even then everything isn’t solved.

Sometimes much creative thinking needs to take place in order to figure out how to implement good ideas, especially in situations with conundrums and in dilemmas.

#5 Free Choice (opposite of determinism)

Lastly, then we can use all of these qualities to act. Finally!

Of course, usually, we won’t have enough time to do each of these steps for most daily choices. But if we practice these skills regularly, then a shortened method can take place even when hasty decisions and actions have to be made in the moment.

For instance, if I am at the grocery store standing in front of the meat and fish cold bin trying to decide between salmon or crab for supper, and another person walks up and grabs the last filet of salmon, I can respond ethically rather than instinctively or impulsively.

Then if the lines are long at the cash registers, rather than tapping my fingers impatiently, thinking how this is going to make me late for my next appointment, I can be aware in the present, think empathetically about others in the line and the clerk, and smile, even carry on a 30 second positive chat.

The wonder of human consciousness, reason, and alternative choice.

In the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox

To Us a Baby Is Given

Toward an Understanding of Childhood...

What is an infant?

Don't ask theologians or become entangled in illusions and delusions, long-winded metaphysical splits/spit;-) of religious thinking.

What if we didn't focus on abstract philosophical doctrine, but viewed each baby as a gift from God, just as Christmas does?

Instead, most traditional churches claim the doctrine of original sin-- that all babies are born guilty sinners. In contrast, New Thought religion declares all babies are born divine. What a philosophical split!

What does either doctrinal extreme have to do with the real living being who is birthed from her mother?

Human beings at birth are neither divine nor depraved. A baby is a natural offspring of a primate species. But uniquely (probably unlike any other species of life, even dolphins and chimps) a human being has the potential to grow spiritually--to relate to her Creator, and to create, bring newness and improvements into existence since she has been created in the image of God.

What a wonder a baby is! I recently held my first grandchild. Experientially, the moment was blessed. How perfect her tiny living body. What a true gift from the Divine.

But a little later, when she got hungry, wow, what lungs and what a puckered face she suddenly developed!

I must admit, I don't think something called a "soul" enters a baby at conception, or for that matter anytime later.

At conception a new life begins with amazing characteristics from the genes of her/his ancestors. At conception, the life appears to have no awareness. But brain wave activity begins early in the womb.

Even after birth, however, a baby is sort of an eating and pooping blob;-) She has awareness, but probably not much except she wants to be fed, and fed now!

Then gradually her awareness grows month after month. Finally she becomes self-conscious. Then later her sense of conscience develops.

Finally, an awareness of her finiteness and the mystery of existence comes into her consciousness.

No, a baby doesn’t come into the world a walking, talking, mentally active philosopher/theologian/moralist/saint.

On the contrary she is a living breathing consciousness at the most simple level.

As she grows in the next 6 to 7 years in her consciousness, self-awareness, and her ethical conscience develops with a sense of ought, then she will become a moral and spiritual individual who acts. Sometimes she will fail, sometimes "miss the mark."

But even then she is still an innocent child struggling to function and to understand and to fulfill needs and desires and hopes, and the demands of the big people in her life.

Is not this the stage that Jesus referred to when he said those who enter the Kingdom of God must do so as a little child? And where he said to people to let little children come to him for of such is the Kingdom?

And this was my own personal experience—when so young. I don’t remember being a sinful-driven child that fundamentalist Christians claim all babies and small children are.

Instead, as far back as I can remember, I had very deep desires to do good, to be good, to know God and to love him. And I had a lot of childlike wonder questions about God, life, others…always asking why about everything:-)

Of course the slither of wrong thought, wrong action, wrong living does come to us all, but not yet.

A child's awareness will grow if she is introduced to God and is shown her responsibility to share, to think of others and their needs, even though she still doesn’t voluntarily give outwardly if it is to her own privation.

Finally, the ethical consciousness kicks in mid-childhood. At each given moment, there will be a tussle between her babyhood past (all spontaneous need and desire) and her adulthood future (potentially all give and bliss).

At that moment by moment juncture—that possibility moment--she must make continual ethical, spiritual decisions. She is finite and so will make mistakes and fail. She is learning in her emotions, her mind, her conscience, and her body as she moves through time. Her choices are a much more complicated version of the way she learned to walk and to talk three years earlier--by trial and error.

But now a new possibility rears its ugly or saintly head. If she doesn’t continue to develop holistically, widening outwardly her care, her helpfulness, her compassion, then she slows, stalls, or even regresses backward to a total need/want level. However, since she isn’t an infant but has the outer body and will and growing mental ability of a 6 or 7 year old, her regression hurts herself and other persons.

To try and fulfill life as a growing child, by returning to the barely conscious self-focused life of an infant actually distorts life and will bring harm to others to varying degrees.

Continued growing, in contrast, takes her through new stages of human development and new challenges. Each developmental advance brings new ethical and spiritual choices—either good or bad, advancing or regressing or a combination of both.

As anyone knows, when climbing a mountain, the higher one goes the more dangerous the climb becomes—not because the action of climbing mountains is evil, or because individuals who climb mountains are depraved sinful beings, but because the very nature of going "higher" also offers more options of choosing. Some of the ways are wrong, even could cause one to plummet to the bottom. Some of the ways are right, and lead toward the peak.

If a baby cries when she hungry that doesn’t show she is sinning.

On the contrary that is how God designed an infant, to get the attention she needs to survive. If a 4-year-old child throws a tantrum and takes her little brother’s bottle because she thinks she isn’t getting enough attention from her parents, while her action is wrong and to be corrected, it isn’t wrong yet because she hasn’t developed enough in her conscious awareness and ethical conscience to make altruistic decisions.

However, if at 8, she hides her little brother’s medicine, because she wants all the attention instead, this is wrong because by then her mental, moral conscience has developed enough to know that her action isn't the right way to get attention. And, besides, by this point she should be widening her compassion and care for others out beyond her own needs and desires.

If at 18, she steals her younger sister’s boyfriend to build up her own ego, deep wrong has occurred. By 22 if she joins with her countrymen and demonizes some other country and lies, steals, and kills the enemies, we do have actions of evil,
just as if in contrast,
she joins an outreach organization such as Habitat for Humanity or World Vision and sacrifices her time, talent, and money and inspires her younger sister to do so as well, we have actions of goodness.

Then the two sisters think of a way to get other people in their neighborhood, school, and city to get involved. One such inspired girl, about 13 years of age, raised thousands of dollars for starving, hurting people in a far off country.

See how the ethical growth of human beings happens. A human being is in process from simple surviving to becoming the acting being of ethical truth.

Now that is the beginning of Good News. Reminds me of several of Jesus’ ethical parables…

Go and do thou likewise...please stop talking about babies being guilty sinners…
Think instead of Christmas’ joy—

“Holy infant so tender and mild*,” except when she cries at 3 a.m. and the parents haven’t slept through the night for weeks;-)

Have a Blessed Christmas,

Daniel Wilcox

*”Silent Night” Christmas Carol