Day # 196 And the wrap...

I meant to wrap up my long digressions on the nature of good and evil, really I did.  I was momentarily side tracked by the impending doom of the human race, but since that danger seems to have passed for the moment I will carry on.

In the aftermath of Nietzsche and, with it, the death of God, one must turn to other sources to deal with the nature of evil in the world.  Short of abandoning everything to the Existentialists, one could look to meta-physics.

(This is the guy.  You can blame him, although he would tell you that we all did it.)



Without a creationist view of the cosmos, one has to turn away from a dualism based on deities.  What then is the nature of evil?  How does it relate to good?  An oft-cited meta-physical view of the nature of good and evil is that evil exists only in the lack of good.  Evil exists, but it has no essence.  Evil is the destruction of good rather that the opposite of good.  If human beings stop creating evil, it ceases to exist.  Thus, evil depends upon good to exist, but the reverse is not true.  Good has essence.  This view is based on the premise that humans know what good is and, in the actions we value, in our mores and our social systems, we strive to advance good in the world.

I have to say that I derive a certain degree of comfort from this philosophical outlook.  Stripped of the trappings of good gods and bad gods, of light and darkness, it is a blessing to think that we, all of us scurrying little insects, have the essence of good blended into our beings.  It is only when we go against our essence that we are capable of evil.

Whether or not this is true, it is a lovely idea.

Day # 196 Breaking News

Despite my news boycott, I find that stories of a certain enormous import quickly make their way into my consciousness   Today one such story broke through into my little world with the clarity of a cut diamond.

I have to buy a Blu-Ray player.  I never wanted a Blu-Ray player.  My high definition television rocked my little visual world to a level I did not think possible.  Despite the incredible detail imparted to the faces of the young and the restless, my current level of technology falls short in the face of all this new shit that's come to light, man.

"The Big Lebowski", the source of all things Dude-istic, is coming out on Blu-Ray.  As if that were not enough, there is a special 28-page book to accompany the disc, which, of course, makes it more of a Must Have.  Must have, must have, must have!!  I mean really, like, why else do I have a job if not to consume things?  What do you think I'm going to spend my money on?  Certainly not the Eagles Greatest Hits.

Day # 193 Filters

What gives a news story enough impetus to bypass news media altogether and travel by word of mouth?

It hadn't been a day before I heard about the Governator's marital infidelities with the babysitter.  The aftermath of the earthquake in Japan has apparently disappeared from the public discussion altogether but who Schwarzenegger is having sex with is able to transcend media delivery and make its way into my life by word of mouth.

The royal wedding was distilled down to the single important question of how Kate got into that dress.

Oh, and the end of the world.  That seems to have some serious legs.  Although no one was actually taken up, its seems that a few people volunteered to go.  Poor bastards.  They missed the announcement that the day has been pushed back to October 21st.

I am informed by sources extremely close to home, in fact at home, that all of the news issues out there pale in comparison to the last Oprah show.  In fact The Kid and I were exiled out into the rain whilst the last show aired.  It was that or suffer through the vale of tears that my living room became.

I couldn't tell you if Newt is in the race or out of the race but neither can anyone at Fox or CNN so I guess that isn't news either way.

The wander ways of the Terminator's tool, Judgement day, Kate's butt, Oprah's finale and Newt's follies.  I guess I'm really not missing that much.

Day # 191 Stuff

I have stuff.  George Carlin has my number.  I love my stuff.  There are two types of stuff that I love the most:  Motorcycles and Guitars.

Now that I am a geezer I realize that I have more than a few of both types of stuff. At the same time that I have gathered about me motos and axes aplenty,  I am actively developing strategies that will allow me to live and work abroad.  It is obvious to me that these two pursuits, acquiring and travelling, are not compatible with each other.  Something, it seems, has to give.

The other day I made a list; a list of my guitars and my motos.  I love making lists.  Checklists get me through complicated projects.  I cannot, for instance, say to myself "I'm going to build a new race bike" and then set about to do it.  I can, however, make a list of all of the things I need to buy, build or scavenge that will amount to a race bike.  Once I have the a list, I can start down a path of checking off this item or that item until, surprise, there is a new race moto sitting in my shop.

As I said, the other day I made a list, a list of things, the stuff, that I love the most.  In the last column of the list was where the action item lived.  There where three choices:  Sell It, Keep It or Undecided.  Seeing the choices in written down was a revelation.  Is it possible that I could actually part with either a moto or a musical instrument?  For proof I needed to look no further than the Craigslist ad that I placed last week in which I offered up for sale my 1979 Fender Vibrolux amp.  It is true, I swear it!

Have I since sold all of my stuff and renounced the allure of worldly goods?  No, I have not.  I have, however, relaxed, ever so slightly, my death grip on some of my most important things.  I guess there is some real hope that I can let slip the shackles of possession.  The truth is that the only way I part with my stuff is for the reward of further and lighter travel.

College Classes?  Selling off guitars?  The lure of living and working abroad is strong indeed.  

Day # 190 Still here...

The morning has broken and aside from the normal attrition, the world is not lighter by even one fanatic.  It is a lovely dampish Sunday morning, a fine day for playing pooh-sticks. Regardless, I feel a twinge of disappointment that the rapture did not occur and suck the faithful up into the air like so many dust bunnies attacked by a sturdy Hoover.

Well, the world abides and the whole durn human race along with it.  Until we don't, I reckon.

Day # 187 So Far

I suppose this is a progress report of sorts, a look at the shadows cast on the wall of the things I haven't seen.

The avoidance of the daily news continues as does life.  Most of my friends and neighbors have gotten into the swing of things.  They will start a query with.... "Did you read about the thing is Tribecistan?" until they remember and say, "Oh, right, the news thing" and then we move on to something else.

From my perspective in the cave looking at the mere shadows of the news events, it is interesting to see what becomes word of mouth news, which eventually I end up hearing.  The tragic events in Japan were, of course, quickly discussed on a person to person level and so I heard a good bit about those sad happenings.  Interestingly, the recent royal wedding in Old Blighty had even greater word-of-mouth buzz than the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.  I have heard as much on the street about Kate's diet to fit into her dress as I have about radiation from the Japanese nuclear reactor.

Since the end is coming this weekend, it doesn't really matter, but I have not risen from my bed irradiated nor have I lain awake at night and wondered just how Kate did manage to slither into that gown.  In the context of my experiment as to whether the not listening to the news will make me happier, I would have to assert that in this case, yes it has.

Some news is unavoidable, such as the laborious and inexorable countdown to Oprah's last show.  I have to flee the house to miss out on that.

An obvious blessing derived from avoiding the news is the absence in my life of the pre-pre-election shenanigans for the 2012 presidential race.  Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich?  Seriously?  I would have to say that given the choice between living amongst a populace that would elect either of these buffoons or joining up with Harold Camping and company for the final departure on Saturday, I would have to settle for option two.

Wait a minute.  If the hard core believers are vanishing on May 21st, won't that greatly alter the balance of voters in America?  Hey, maybe I should stick around.

Day # 183 No Blues

Today, friend and neighbors, I do not have the Blues.  No I do not.  Can I get a witness?

Although it is a Sunday morning of drenching, persistent and seemingly endless rain, I do not have the Blues.

And why is this so?  How can I be dodging that sure-footed lowdown-ness that ought to accompany a morning such as this?  You might ask yourself, Sisters and Brothers, and rightly so  "How can a man look out his window on a Sunday, his day off from the labours of the week, see a vision that looks frightfully similar to what Noah saw a day or so before his ark actually floated off, and not have the Blues?"  How indeed!

The answer to this conundrum is:  The Rapture.  That's right, the day cometh and not on little cat's feet.  A mere week from today, May 21st, the fanatics are going to Rapture right on off of the planet  O! Blessed day!  So instead of getting all down at the heels about the dampness of my day off, I wrote a little song to cheer myself up.

I'm a-shinin' my shoes ...
Gonna straighten my tie.
Ain't having no blues.... No Sir!
As I waves them goodbye.

Goodbye fanatics...
And you hate mongers too.
Get gone you dogmatics....
Please, please, please don't come back
Whatever you do


Think a sort of hill country blues in the key of E and you've got it.

Day # 177 Calvin and Hobbes

No, not the tiger and the cute kid.  That Calvin and Hobbes did not have any huge issues with good and evil. Their value system was based on what was fun.

Speaking of fun, the other Calvin, John Calvin the Reformation preacher and the founder of Calvinism, was not.  He was, by most accounts, less fun than Martin Luther and that is no small feat.  John Calvin most assuredly viewed human beings as inherently evil and headed for damnation, each and every one.

But what about non-religious thinkers, if such could be found in Europe during the heady days of Reformation and Counter-Reformation.  What had they to say about good and evil?

Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, believed that human beings were weak natured and capable of great mischief if left to their own devices.  As such, Hobbes believed the populi needed the benefit of a strong government to keep them out of trouble; an absolute sovereign being best for the welfare of the common man.  Out of fear for our base nature, we humans enter into a social contract to avoid the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" aspects that life takes on when people are left to their own whims without a strong central government.  Hobbes may have been fun, but he was not remembered as such.  Conservative, yes, fun, not so much.

I'll grant you that Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived and wrote after the spasms of the Reformation had mostly run their course, but he is still worth the trouble to remember.  Rousseau, being of the period know as the "Enlightenment", has a lighter view of the basic nature of humans.  Rousseau thought that men and women were basically good at heart and when left to themselves would choose the right course.  Jean-Jacques wrote of a different sort of social contract than Hobbes.  In Rousseau's view "Man is weak when he is dependent, and is his own master when he comes to be strong.."  Although briefly a Calvinist in his youth and then a Catholic, Rousseau is generally regarded as having been much more fun than Hobbes.

So, a strange dichotomy of sorts takes shape.  On the one hand, you have Hobbes, the conservative, who advocates a strong and controlling social contract for the role of government.  On the other, we have Mssr. Rousseau, of the liberal view, advocating a social contract that empowers the individual.

This is quite a stretch from todays political dogma in the USA where the "Conservatives" want the teeniest little government possible, save for an enormous standing Army, Navy and Airforce. The other side of the dogmatic coin has the "Liberals" who want the biggest and most expensive government possible especially if it can spend everybody else's money.

The only thing that remains the same is that the Conservatives still aren't as fun.

Day # 176 The Good, the Bad and...

Sorry, no Lee Van Cleef or Eli Wallach in this blog entry although one could probably come up with some dandy allegorical references on the nature of good and evil using the famous Sergio Leone movie as a vehicle.

Human beings have been trying to explain good and evil for a very long time.  The biggest struggle, of course, is justifying the existence of evil.  As different tribes and then societies invented their creation myths and religions they understood that the two forces of good and evil had to somehow be reconciled.

Evil has always been the stickier wicket.  Human beings understand goodness.  If a group of humans conceive of a deity, he or she is generally believed to have the best interests of the worshipers at heart.  Good is to be expected.  Where, then, does evil come from if the gods are good?  How do the priests or shamans explain to the people the cause or source of sorrow, pain and catastrophe?

The early pantheists had an easier time dealing with evil.  There were gods or spirits for everything.  If the fertility god was properly attended to, healthy children were born.  If not, the people were barren.  Likewise, the harvest gods had to be kept happy or the people went hungry.  There was no need for a single explanation of where evil sprang from, evil came about if the people let the deity down.  If the sacrifices or offerings or rituals appeased the god or gods, the crops got better, the people got happier and the shaman kept his job.

In an interesting twist on pantheism, the Greeks gave their pantheon of gods and goddesses completely human emotions, only amplified to god-like dimensions.  The Greek gods were jealous, petty, lustful, proud, vengeful and deceitful to an almost childish degree.  The problem, for humans, was that the gods had the super-powers that are a side benefit of deification.  When evil came into a Greek's life, it was generally one of the gods directly giving him or her grief.

The Dualists had a different take on how to reconcile the obvious forces of good and evil in world.  Starting with Zoroaster, the Dualists posited various systems of belief in which there was a god of light and a god of darkness or a lessor god and a greater god.  One of these gods or forces represented the good in the world and the other the evil.  The tension between these two forces explained the waxing and waning of evil times in the lives of the people.  The Dualists tended to value free will and the benefit of morally positive individual action.

The tradition of Dualism, as we know it in the historical written record, begins about 600 BCE with the writings of Zoroaster (also know as Zarathustra) and continued down through the Gnostics, Manicheans and the Cathars.  The nature of Dualism was changed and debated amongst these different religions and there were differing sects in each of these broader groups, but the tension between some force of light and darkness or good and evil remained a central tenet.  The deity that personified darkness or evil was independent of the good deity which effectively absolved the good deity from responsibility for the evil deity.  The advantage of Dualism is that it allows the good deity to remain untarnished of the responsibility for creating evil in the first place.

As a side note, Dualism was a major threat to what would become the dominant European religion, Christianity.  The Zoroastrians were virtually wiped out during the Islamic invasions of Persia in the 7th century CE and was also geographically isolated from the West and as such it was only an idealogical threat.  Many scholars believe that Isaiah 45:7, for example, is a direct reference and refutation of the ideas of Zoroastrian Dualism (see the verse for yourself or previous blog entries).

The Manicheans and Cathars were not so lucky.  Even though as great a pillar of the early Roman Church as Saint Augustine was himself a young Dualist, the Church developed a particularly intolerant attitude towards Dualist sects.  This intolerance would evolve into a holy war.

Monotheism, as the name suggests, posits a single deity that is over-arching in the cosmos.  The three large monotheistic religions in the world are Judaism, Islam and Christianity.  As an aside, it is interesting to note the similarities between all three of these religions and Zoroastrianism, which preceded them.

The Christian religion teaches the doctrine of Original Sin.  Based on this doctrine, all human beings are destined for hell unless he or she does something to alter that inevitable course.  The concept is that the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden caused all of the humans that came after them to be inherently sinful as well.   The only action that will save humans from automatic damnation is to accept the divinity of the Christian God.

The difficulty for a monotheistic deity is that if humans create an omnipotent cosmic force it follows that all things in the world spring from that one source.  Good things come from one's god and so do bad things.  Bounty and peace come from the same source as famine and war.  This philosophical dichotomy troubled the early Christian church and is still a source of theological debate to this day.  Biblical scholars from antiquity to the present cite various bible verses to explain how god is always good, incapable of evil.  This calls for other verses to show that the serpent, Satan, the fall of humans, the tempting of Job and the other troubles that befall humans are somehow linked to forces other than god.  The question then becomes, if the deity is omnipotent, what forces could be outside its control?

The Church fathers, seeing the threat that Dualism posed, declared anathema on the the concept of Dualism.  Further, the Church would declare Gnostics, Manicheans and other Dualistic followers to be Heretics in the eyes of the church.  Persecution of the heretics followed, but all of the trouble that fell on the earlier Dualists paled in comparison to the ferocity with which the Church reacted to the Cathars, also know as the Albigensians.

The Cathars were a Christian sect in Languedoc, which is now Southern France.  In 1208 Pope Innocent III preached a crusade against the Cathars and in an amazing display of barbarity, fellow Christians answered the call for the crusade.   Driven by the lust for free lands and the call of the Pope, the Christian neighbors of the Cathars fell upon them and slaughtered them.  Estimates of the dead from this crusade range as high as 500,000 over two generations, although the actual death toll may be closer to 200,000.  The most famous incident was at the siege of Beziers.  When the besieged town finally fell, the victorious crusader leaders asked Abbot Arnaud-Amaury, their spiritual commander, how to tell the true Catholics inside the walls from the heretical Cathars.  His reply has been recorded as "Caedite eos.  Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."  The translation is "Kill them all.  God will know his own."  Following his comments, between 5,000 and 20,000 (medieval records vary widely) of the former inhabitants of the town of Beziers were slaughtered.

The Albigensian Crusade is certainly not an isolated incident of wholesale persecution in the name of a monotheistic deity, nor was this type of behavior attributable solely to the Christians.  The tribes of Israel warred across Palestine and Islam spread out of Mecca by means of the sword.  Countless heads have been removed from countless shoulders in the name of religion.

Spreading death and destruction in the name of this or that god only adds to the difficulty of a rational explanation of the nature of good, the nature of evil and the relationship between the two.  The struggle to clarify these explanations would continue on into modern philosophy long after the Medieval bloodshed ceased and the bloodshed of the Reformation began.

Day # 175 A lot of ins and outs....

It is another rainy, breezy morning in the GreyNorWet.  But, Hey Man, its like, Saturday.

Today I intend to strive to abide.  If someone micturates on my rug, I am not going to let go of my inner-dude.  Whatever issues the rug pissers have its just, like, their opinion, man.

Yesterday I completed my Admissions Assessment Exam for starting college classes.  What a hoot, my quinquagenarian ass attending college classes.

Well, its all part of the plan.  And a swiss watch of a plan it is.  Ingenious if I understand it correctly.

Gotta get back.  Take 'er easy, Man.

Day # 173 Opposites

I don't really mean to be picking on the Christians, but no discussion of the nature of Good and Evil can  be carried on in the West without at least a bit of a Judeo-Christian backdrop.  Until we move completely into meta-ethics there will remain a smackerel of religion lying about.

Yesterday I was on about where did the serpent come from and why a tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  If God created all things, surely he created the serpent.  This path is well trodden.

Call me a literalist but something just doesn't add up for me:

James 1:13   Let no one say when he is tempted "I am tempted by God" for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He himself tempt anyone.    This passage in the Bible is often cited to show that God cannot be a part of evil.  Further in James 1:14 & 15 we are told that it is our desires that draw us away and in which lie the seed of our sin.  Desire as the cause of suffering.  That sounds familiar.

Isaiah 45:7  I form the light and create the darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things.   There are arguments that this passage is referring to and refuting the teachings of Zarathustra which would have been known at the time of Isaiah.  Other biblical scholars comment that this passage can only be interpreted in the context of God's comments to Cyrus and that Cyrus' success or failure in battle is a direct result of God and no other.  Regardless of the opposites contrasted, Isaiah pretty much has God saying that everything, even calamity, is his bailiwick 

Job 1:12  So the Lord said to Satan, "Behold, all that he has is in your power: only do not lay a hand on his person"  Then Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.   God clearly gives Satan free rein to test Job's faith as long as he does not kill him or lay his had on Job's person.

Christianity certainly did not concoct the idea of Good and Evil.  The existence of Christian dogma, however has certainly coloured the debate.  I list the passages above to at least illustrate some of the contradictions in the biblical teachings of Christianity, the teachings I was raised with.

God does not tempt anyone.  Thus it is written.  God created everything.  Everything.  Thus it is written.  The serpent, the tempter of Adam and Eve, was created by God.  God created everything.  Job was tempted by Satan with God's permission.  God created Satan.  God created everything.

If the origins of the debate began with Christianity, this would be even harder to explain, but the first known organized teachings that attempt to explain good and evil come some 600 years before the birth of Christ.

I have picked on the Christians enough.  We have to go a little further back in time to find out what pre-existing belief systems the writers of even the Old Testament were trying to synthesize when they wrote the works we now call the bible.

Day # 172 Mr. Smith

As I was watching the movie "Dogma" yet again (hey, I've been sick, it's how I cope, OK?) I realized two things.  The first thing is that I never noticed that the nun that Loki corrupts can be seen cavorting about in the background a few shots later on as Loki and Bartleby are leaving the airport.  More importantly, I realized that despite hearing over and over about how Satan rose against God in heaven and how the Morning Star was thrown down to hell for his presumption and pride, I have never seen any real evidence of this in the Bible.

Hmmmmm.... now the TV evangelists go on and on about Satan.  Ole' Slewfoot is just waiting to catch you with your faith down.  Lucifer, the Morning Star, had a starring role in John Milton's "Paradise Lost", a very long poem that is on everyone's greatest classic books of all time.  Most people have never read it.  The Devil made me do it.  Lucifer revolts against heaven and eventually, after losing the battle for paradise, he is cast out along with the angels who foolishly allied with him.

The trouble is, there just isn't a lot of basis for Satan's existence as a rebel angel.  Certainly not in the according-to-Holyle tried and true King James Version or the New King James Version which I happen to have sitting here next to me.  Yup, its time for fun with scriptures.

Before I torture anyone any further, I have to admit that my motivation for this little exercise is the basic problem I have with the biblical version of good-and-evil, or the lack thereof.  "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"  Genesis 1:1.   "Then God saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good."  Genesis 1:31.  "Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made."  Genesis 3:1.  Now the obvious question is:  where the hell did the serpent come from?  Did God make the serpent?  Why is the serpent evil?  If God created everything and it was good, where did the  evil come from and why did God create the tree of knowledge and then stick it in the garden and tell the children he had created not to mess with it?    Sorry, sorry, I digress.

Back to it, where did the serpent come from?  Almost every tale I have ever heard tell about the tempting of Eve in the Garden by the serpent included the assumed fact that the serpent was Satan.  I mean, Satan is all through the Bible, right?  The entire story is based on the struggle between good and evil in the world, yes?  Well, actually no.

There is the serpent, of course, in Genesis.  But no mention of the serpent being Satan or the Devil or Lucifer until way at the end of the story, in Revelations.  Just a serpent.  Ok, there is a single mention of Lucifer in Isaiah 14, right after the Fall of the King of Babylon.  The word "Lucifer" is from the latin.  The latin of Saint Jerome, mostly, whose translation from previous latin translations and greek versions of the bible became the Vulgate.  The Vulgate became the vesion of the Bible officially sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church.  The King James is based directly on that.  Lucifer comes from latin for "light" and "to bear or bring".  Light bringer, hence Morning Star.

Isaiah 14 starts with the fall of the King of Babylon, then verses 12-21 that deal with Lucifer and the back to the rest of the destruction of Babylon, Assyria and Phillistia being destroyed because this was the wrathful God.  The problem with reading Lucifer as Satan as Devil into these passages is that the author of Isaiah is taunting the enemies of the Tribes of Israel.  First he is taunting the downfall of Babylon, then a swift change to Lucifer, then back to Babylon.  This is only in the King James Version and the New King James.  It doesn't read well as a sudden history of Lucifer, but it is a nice taunt of the same King of Babylon.

The role of Satan as the God's tempter seems to be deserved.  In the book of Job God 's sons (Job 1:6) assemble and Satan also.  There is no mention of the fall of Satan or any rebellion.  Satan is God's servant.  He tempts Job per God's direction.  We have to go all the way to the New Testament for the next mention of Satan, Matthew 12:26 when Jesus casts out demons and annoys the Pharisees and of course the temptation of Christ which is in all of Gospels save that of John.  Satan, again, is God's tempter. Satan as the servant of God?  There is lots of evidence for that scenario.

And lastly, as it should be, Revelations.  This is where Jesus gives a prophecy of things to come through the Apostle John.  Things to come.  Prophecy.  Revelations 12:9 does, indeed, describe the battle in heaven but it is a thing to come and to be rejoiced over.  It does name Satan as "that serpent of old" which could be revisionist or it could just be Satan in his normal role as God's tempter, his old left-hand-man.  And in 20:1 Satan is bound for a thousand years.  This is a prophecy.

So I am left without a justification for a heavenly battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.  If all was the void and in the beginning was the word, who created evil?  Who created Satan?   Was Satan's job, all along, to tempt human beings and then report back to God on if they passed the test.  If we humans were not supposed to have free will, why put the tree and the serpent in the garden to begin with.  Why not just stick with the void and save a whole lot of trouble.

Be careful if you trot out the notion of a dualistic deity.  That one will get you burned to a crisp.

Day # 169 No Reason

I have maintained the news boycott almost half of a year.  Regardless, some things quickly become known without the benefit of the news media.

According to President Obama, Osama Bin Laden is dead.  Within hours of the event I had heard about it by means of an email from a friend.

I gather that there is celebrating occurring in some quarters.  I cannot imagine why.  The world will not be a safer place tomorrow because of this.  Regardless of how justifiable it might seem, the government sanctioned killing of anyone should be cause for sombre assessment, not celebration.

Whether you believe that war is terror or that the USA is at war with terror, nothing will be fundamentally change because of the death of one individual.  Osama Bin Laden alive was a bogey man that the advocates of the war on terror could hold up as an object of fear and hatred.  Now others can hold up the same man as a martyr to their cause.  Live bogey man or dead martyr, either is just a focal point to deflect from the larger events of a collision of cultures.

While I do not mourn this man's death I find not reason to celebrate it.