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Philosophical Thoughts
(if you care to read them, start at the bottom of the page)
or on the Red Cross web site. You may have trouble accessing the site due to high
traffic. Please keep trying.Today I added the Site Map feature to these pages so that you can see just how pitifully few pages are actually on this site by looking at links to them collected all in one place. In addition to this it will make browsing my pages easier for text-only browsers and visually impaired web surfers. Some of my fancy menus may not load sometimes, too, so it'll be a handy tool in case you have Java turned off. I hope that if you spend some time exploring what I have to offer here that you'll find the Site Map useful.
I don't have any particularly patriotic or unpatriotic words to say on the Fourth of July, as you might have expected since I picked this day to add something to my home page. Actually, I just wanted to say that I added something useful. Think of this as a Utilitarian Philosophy today.
Today is the day when the straw begins to break the camel's back. When is enough enough for the place that I currently call my employer? Today they sent out an e-mail saying that the direct deposit of our paychecks was not possible at the usual time. In fact, those of us with direct deposit will be taking paper checks today. But the paper checks didn't arrive until nearly 6 PM with much speculation that they would not come at all. They came...too late to take them to the bank to cash them. And the company's reputation is now so bad that the grocery stores aren't taking the checks. They won't cash them because they're afraid they'll be the ones stuck with a meaningless piece of paper. It does look like a real check to me and since the paychecks are actually delivered via a third party payroll, I believe that the check is good. The problem is that the holiday pay I am owed for working on Memorial day comes to a grand total of ¼ of an hour of my pay. Nice. There are rumors that this company is on the verge of bankruptcy. How do I know they will continue to meet their obligations to pay me while I sit at work fulfilling my part of the bargain? How do I know that next pay period they won't simply fail to deliver the checks? This time they were late. Next time they might never get here. Should I stay here tonight? There's a philosophical question for you.
This just in. Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Oh, this is a great place to be working right now.
Ok, first of all, some of you have been saying that I don't update my web pages very often. Well did you ever consider that I do other things with my life? It's not like you're paying for a magazine subscription here. This is free. Not to mention the fact that it's a dubious service to begin with. Who wants to read my rants and complaints? Come to think of it, have I ever written anything remotely positive here? Hmph. So? This is MY web site after all!
Well, I deliberately over reacted to the gentle reminders that I haven't added anything much to this space in a while. You folks don't deserve to be dumped on. But just for your information I have added a few pages to the links on the "Miscellaneous" page. There's a page there about my cats and one that gives a short autobiography. Neither is very interesting and neither is complete but hey, I have made those small additions in recent months. Check it out if you get the chance.
As for particularly Philosophical thoughts (with a capital 'P'), I don't think I can really deliver much. There are some thoughts percolating in my head about the book Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. He writes some of the best books I have ever read and though I pretend that I understand what they are about I feel sure that I'm missing a great deal of their depth and complexity. Take this one for instance. I'm not going to attempt a plot summary here since I don't have the book with me to back me up. So what I'm going to do is just skip to the climax of the whole book. The setting is a bar and there are artists in town on the eve of a huge "Arts Festival". The town is Midland, IN and it's a sad old industrial town in which skid row grows in size every year and crime rates are soaring. One of the artists is a painter who painted a huge canvas lime green (with paint from a hardware store) and covered about a fifth of the surface with a vertical stripe of orange tape. The orange stripe is flush with the left side of the canvas. It is entitled "The Temptation of St. Anthony" and was bought for the news Arts Center for the round sum of $50,000. Needless to say there is a lot of animosity against this cocky young man who made so much money with so little work. The people think that their own children could have done as well. And yet they must trudge along and earn each dollar one by one. Suddenly the artist insults the town idol, the only person from Midland that everybody loved and everybody was proud of. The crowd turns on him and starts screaming for his blood. Somehow he gets their attention and explains that the stripe of orange is the light of the soul of St. Anthony. His awareness, the core of who he is can be viewed on that plain canvas. The artist had cut to the bare essentials of the scene and depicted the only thing that was important: the awareness of a human being.
Throughout the book Vonnegut talks about how people act very much like machines. He explains that the people who do bad things in the book do so as a result of the bad chemicals in their bodies. The people who do bad things do them because they had to do them. The people who do good things do them because they were that kind of machine. The artist had captured a truth that denied everything else that the book had to say. Namely, he denied that people are nothing but machines who do the things they do because they are programmed to do them. It's easy to think that this is so. It's tempting to think that you are the only thinking feeling human being in creation and that everyone else is just a robot. But the artist showed that it's not so. Every one is aware and everyone has a soul. And that soul is sacred.
A quote I read somewhere once about Kurt Vonnegut from a source I wish I could remember went something like this: Kurt Vonnegut puts a bitter coating on a sweet pill whereas many other writers attempt to sugar-coat the truth. Breakfast of Champions was a fine example of this. A story sometimes too horrible to keep reading is hiding something as beautiful and profound as the ideas I talk about above. Or try to talk about.
One final point about this book that sticks in my mind is something that he said about human survival instincts. He feels as I have often felt that many people just don't expend much effort on thinking. Vonnegut makes an interesting point when he attributes this seeming fact of human nature to the survival instinct. People need friends because this world can be so terrible and terribly lonely. And so it's easier to agree with what someone else is saying than to think for one's self. If you agree then you have something in common, a bond of friendship. If you take the time to think then you might find that you disagree and you would lose your friend. This is so unbearable that most people simply don't think unless forced to do so. I always wondered why that was.
Whoa! Think!? I don't remember how. Don't ask me to do anything so vulgar. I mean really. I haven't done any thinking since I graduated from college. Heck, I BSed my way through so many of my classes that I'm not sure that I really did any thinking then either. There wasn't a need to think. It was work that I did with my fingers. Really it's my hands that have done all my thinking for me. They type, they write, they move when I talk. Certainly my mouth doesn't do any thinking...at least, not judging by what comes out of it most of the time! My hands sometimes do come up with some interesting thoughts. Such as this paragraph. My brain was not involved in writing this at all. If it were, I probably wouldn't be making any sense at all. This is all reflex action on the part of the muscles and tendons of my forearm. Amazing, isn't it? That all of these words could be written completely without cognition!
I don't think anyone is buying this. I certainly don't. My problem is that I think far too much and far too confusedly (if that's a word. Heck, even if it's not a word, I used it and you'll just have to deal!). I can't keep track of what I'm thinking about because I'm always thinking about so many things at once. They all mix together until I start wondering what time breakfast is the product of two times the square root of the metaphysical implications of the apparent lack of modern miracles in the realm of Microsoft software and how it's undermining basic American values that indicate a reduction in the rate of growth of colonies of anaerobic algae. Do you see what I mean? Hang on. Let me try to narrow this down to just one important thought at a time...
OK, just one thought.
Yup, I think I might be getting close.
Drat! My mind is blank!
OK, here goes. I'm just going to let my fingers do the thinking again and not concern myself with what I'm actually typing. But when I do this it tends to sound really self-conscious and never get around to saying anything other than how self-conscious I am. I'm reading this book right now by John Irving called "A Son of the Circus". I can't even begin to write about it. I don't think I'll be ready to until I've finished reading it and even then I think I'd have to read it again: it's so long and complicated that I don't think I could even manage a coherent plot summary. OK, so that was a dead end.
Let me try again. Winter is supposed to be over around here. I don't think it will ever really warm up. What was I thinking moving to Maine? Anyway, I guess I don't really want to talk about the weather. I really want to talk about what I want to do with my life. I wish angels would come down from Heaven and tell me what my mission in life is. Maybe I already know what it is and I'm just too darn lazy to do it. That would be annoying. There's nothing worse than someone who's just a lazy good-for-nothing who complains about what a lazy good-for-nothing he is!! So I'd better get on the ball and do something about this quandary. What do I like to do? I like to write...but I don't do it very well or very often (although this could be remedied...Don't get side-tracked!!). I like to work on my computer but that mostly amounts to fooling around with programs that I download. I don't really produce much in the way of art and literature or their internet equivalents (if any). I like to sing. Well, I don't have the background of training and instrumental knowledge to make a career out of singing. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. I like working with people but I get irritated when people get irritated with me or whatever faceless being (i.e. company) I represent. So customer service is out. (Isn't it for everyone??) I like working with my hands but I don't have any crafting skills nor many tools. I'm fairly intelligent and I guess I could learn to be a teacher or a professor or even a minister/priest. But I don't know if I'm cut out for that either. I guess you could say I've got a confidence problem in addition to not really knowing what I want to do with my life. I don't think I'm cut out to do any of the things that I like to do. Another complicating factor is that I'm married and I have to take my wife's ambitions and plans into account. I can't just up and move to California or New York to go to school when she might want to stay put for a while. Don't get me wrong, I know she would love for me to follow my dreams. I just wish I could remember my dreams when I wake up. I never can. At least, not past the first few minutes of drowsy wakening. I'm changing the subject. Unashamedly.
And I'm done writing this for now. I'm tired and cranky and I'm sure no one wants to read my writing when I'm tired and cranky. :)
Does it strike you, dear reader, that most of what I write here is to convince myself that I have an opinion about these important issues? I think I write these big important thoughts down not to provoke you into thought, not to explore the depths of what it means to be human and moral but just so that I can say to myself, "Look how philosophical I am." I just keep hoping that Wisdom will descend upon my poor brain from above. When it does, I'll let you know.
I don't know how far I'm going to get with this today, since I spent all afternoon driving home from Maine after a grueling weekend of 'relaxing' and visiting friends. We went up because my wife, Dani, had an interview with L.L. Bean's this morning and because we're still looking for a place to live up there. I can't wait to move! Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I'm pretty near exhausted. But here goes nothing.
I've been trying to puzzle out why there is suffering in the world. Why do people do bad things? Why do bad things happen to good people at the hands of bad people? And why do bad things happen to good and bad people at the 'hands' of blind forces, like hurricanes and earthquakes? Perhaps you, whoever you are reading this, know that I believe in God. Perhaps you didn't know that, but you do now. At any rate, if you're thinking about the questions I just asked, you must be thinking about how in the world I reconcile my belief in God with evil in the world. I haven't figured it all out yet but here's a rough idea of where I think I'm going with this...
God made the universe, God is all powerful, all good, all merciful and all just. God is Love. He is perfection. But how did he make an imperfect world if those statements about Him are true, especially the one about 'love'? That's a trick question (I'm sure you knew that). All of those statements are true, and despite appearances, this is not an imperfect world! God created a universe in which there are beings who are just like Him. Humans have free will. (I hate to be speciesist but humans are the only critters I know that fit this description). This is what makes humanity like God. If humans have free will, then they must be able to choose to be like God as well as to be unlike Him. If God did not leave that option open, then humans would not have free will. And if humans don't have free will, then they can't love, not really love, since love is a choice to be devoted, regardless of inconvenience or trouble. Since God wants us to love Him, and one another, He has to leave us the choice not to love. Otherwise, the love is not freely given and not real. The key here is that real love is never forced from someone from without. One either loves of one's own accord or one does not love.
So what does this have to do with suffering and evil? Again, this is preliminary but I think the answer is fairly simple given what I discussed above. Bad things that happen because of a person's deliberate actions are the result of a choice to do something which is not loving, or shall I say godlike. People do bad things because they value something other than God, other than love, more than love. This is a fundamental mistake which is the root of everything that people call sin. As to 'bad' natural phenomena? Well, that's harder to say anything about. God is responsible in a way for everything that happens, even hurricanes and earthquakes. My guess, for the moment is that since humans have free will, so must the universe be allowed to be both good and bad. I'll make another guess, which warrants much more attention than I can give it right now (remember, I'm still really tired). My guess is that suffering is essential to learning to love. Don't ask me how just now, though!
Before you make objections, let me just mention that I already know one and I'm still working on answering it. What about the fact that God is responsible for giving people free will, the will to disobey? Therefore isn't he also responsible for the actions of those who do disobey? Email me if you can answer this objection.
I know that what I wrote sounds like I know all the answers, that I'm just about ready to be lifted up into Heaven to my rightful place with the Angels. I don't mean to write that way, it just comes out that way when I try to make sense out of these complicated issues. If I'm wrong, I'd sure like to know it.
Know thyself!
If there is nothing for thee to know, then make thyself and forget not one step on the way to thy making.
Sometimes I think there is nothing about me to know. I am just a collection of memories and learnings. Trivia and recollections from what up to now has been known as my life. I feel like I have no identity more than that. I know what I want to be. I want to be noble, pure and wise. Possibly I just want peolpe to look up to me and think that I'm wise. That might be easier. But I would never be satisfied with that. I would hate myself for a fake. Maybe that puts me partway toward true wisdom. Maybe there isn't a partway when you're on the road to wisdom. Maybe wisdom is admitting that you're a fool. But if that were so, then I could be wise without knowing it. Which just isn't what I want.
Know thyself!
I have to do something to make myself knowable. I am the unobservable. Incapable of detecting me, scientists search in vain for what makes me, me. When I was first inroduced to Philosophy, in a Philosophy of Logic class in my Freshman year of college, we read a dialogue about personal identity and immortality that ended up concluding that our hopes for immortality are nothing more than hopes. Immortality depended on the continuance in existence of the personal identity. Since then the central question in the back of my mind, the one I have been too afraid to face and too timid to touch, has been "Who am I?" Or, if you want me to put that philosophically (that is, too generally to have any bearing on anything in the real world) that central question has been, "Who is anyone? What is the core of identity? Is there such a thing as identity? If not, then does anything exist and how could you tell?" Maybe I should have become a scientist. With small specialized goals that are achievable even if every goal ends in failure. Even in failure a scientist succeeds! He finds out that he was wrong! What I wouldn't give if I could find out for sure that I was wrong about some of the things that I'm so sure of! But even scientists end up wondering whether their research is worth it, whether what they're finding out is useful. Or whether it's only useful to the depraved and evil. And so the scientist is only the philospher with a day job! Maybe if I just had some work to throw myself into I could forget about morality and the meaning of life. But here I am at my job, writing this drivel, wasting time.
Maybe if I had just had some coffee this morning. I am addicted to coffee. Some people are addicted to caffeine. My addiction is more specific. I don't want my caffeine in any other form than in coffee. That bittersweet bean that is the friend and the bane of the poet and the philosopher. I think that's what has me down. Lack of coffee. Coffeeeeeee.
I'm getting carried away.
See the website www.tmcm.com
This free floating depression and foolish fultility that I'm feeling can be traced to my chemical dependence and my willful refusal to give in to it. I'm paying for that decision. I haven't written this much, on my own, with nothing to guide or goad me, for a long time. Which means that I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that I don't have anything else to write about. Back to the of this entry
Gosh, I had a thought here somewhere a minute ago. I must have been distracted when I went away to work on Christmas dinner. Well, Merry Christmas!
I think I've been spending too much time thinking about the meaning of life and too little time actually living any sort of real life. For several months now I've been working at a go-nowhere, learn nothing, completely unchallenging job. I'm sure that in other ways my life isn't going too badly, but when I'm not satisfied with how I spend most of my waking hours in a given week, I think that something has got to change. The meaning of life has to come from how you live your life. This applies to all religious discussions as well as practical.
You know what? God doesn't talk to me. I have never heard Him speak. When I'm having a tough day and I'm just sick to death of everything, He doesn't come to me and comfort me. When I'm worried about the victims of the earthquake in Taiwan, or the one in Turkey or Greece, when I'm angry that people are killing each other for reasons no one comprehends in Yugoslavia or Africa, God doesn't come down from Heaven and explain it all to me...
He's silent about every issue that I care about. Or maybe I'm just not listening close enough. God has a very quiet voice and I'm just too busy talking to hear Him. Could be. It might be that He's yearning to talk to me but He's waiting until I'm ready to listen. Or perhaps He is already talking to me in ways I just haven't yet learned to pay attention to. This falls under what I was talking about before. You know, when I said you don't know God unless you change yourself to be receptive to that kind of knowledge. The problem is knowing just exactly how to change yourself to be receptive to God's will. It's so easy to generalize and say that you should be kind or self-less. It's so hard to get specific and figure out just how to change your attitude in situations that are never the same from day to day. It's easy to talk about being close to God. It's so hard to actually do it.
Back to the topI wasn't thinking about God particularly, but since I never finished that, I'll write a little more about it. I have come to believe that you have to commit yourself to a certain kind of life in order to come to know God. You can do this as a Christian, or course, (and as a devout member of just about any other religion) but perhaps not in the way you might think. Most people, when they think of religion, think of it as learning a bunch of rules for how to think and act. In addition you have to give up your time for rites and rituals for an hour a week. Most of the time this sort of thing is pretty boring, distasteful, and sometimes downright unpleasant. Especially the part about loving thy neighbor. Especially when your neighbor is a real jerk who's always telling you how to cut your lawn and which fertilizer is best. Especially when you don't follow his advice and his lawn looks better than yours...But I digress. Sure, the religious life looks like what I described from the outside. Most of the time it's not a lot of fun. (Well, church potluck suppers can be delicious...) But the catch is that if you keep at it: if you keep loving your neighbor as yourself, and you keep volunteering, and you keep praying, and (in short) you just keep working, eventually, you get to the point where it is a deepseated satisfaction for you to do these things. And from then on it should only get better and better. (I hope. I'm certainly not there yet.) When you come to that point in life when you are completely suffused with love and everything you do, you do for the love of God, this is when you can say that you know God. This is what it means to know God. And this is why you can't know God except directly, through your own experience. So God is best described by the word 'ineffable'. But He is not best described by the word 'unreachable'. I believe that every human being has the potential for a holy life that leads ultimately to knowledge of God. I also believe that this is the best kind of life.
...Hm?...What's that? And what was I actually thinking about today? Oh, you're referring to what I said at the beginning of the last paragraph. Yes. I was thinking about doughnuts today. Do you want to read my thoughts about doughnuts? I like them.
I am wondering how I might train myself to empty myself of myself. How do you practice becoming nothing? How do you voluntarily choose to stop choosing? How do you will yourself to stop willing? I think that selflessness is the way to true religion. No matter what tradition you come from, whether Hindu, Muslim, or Jew, you are in the end just as much a seeker of truth as someone from any other tradition. Here's a quote from the anthology by Aldous Huxley: "The Perennial Philosophy". The quote is from Archbishop Temple: "The right relation between prayer and conduct is not that conduct is supremely important and prayer may help it, but that prayer is supremely important and conduct tests it." So here's an answer to some of my questions. Or at least a partial answer. The answer is that I should stay in contact with God at all times. In order to become close to God, to come to know His will, it is necessary to think always about Him, and what He might want. An image that Huxley uses to show how this works is the vacuum. Unless you present eternity an empty space, it cannot flow in. Just as water will not move upwards into an overturned cup unless the air is exhausted, God will not move into the human spirit unless the self is exhausted. When the self leaves, God takes over. When I talk about "the self leaving" I don't mean that the person is in some sort of stupor, induced by drugs or mind control. I mean that the self lets go and lets God. It is no longer the will of the self that guides its actions, it is God. The enlightened soul can truly say "not me but God in me".
But that makes me wonder if I can say just what God is. Visions of a large man with a long white beard sitting on a throne in the clouds somehow seem to belittle something so powerful and majestic as the Principle of Creation, Eternity in Itself, the Holy One on High. How about God as a mighty Spirit who pervades everything with His presence and power? That too belittles what God is. God is Being Itself, He is Substance. He is the uncreated origin of all creation. He is Indescribable. The only way to get to know God is by learning from those who know Him.
I think that the purpose of human life, indeed, of all life, is to realize our disunity with God and all Creation, and rectify that disunity. I mean that we should all strive to live in Harmony and that that is the purpose of our lives.
Here begin my musings. I hope they are as edifying to you as they are to me. Or as I hope they will be to me, I haven't written anything yet, after all.