Telic People, not Nihilists, Produce Great Art.

Flowers, at Monroe County Community College

Charles Murray, in his essay "Future tense, IX: Out of the wilderness," reasons that one of the conditions needed to produce great art and foster creativity is belief that life has a purpose. He writes: "A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose."

Nihilists, as regards human creative accomplishments, are at a disadvantage in two ways.

1) "The first disadvantage is in the motivation to take on the intense and unremitting effort that is typically required to do great things. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of great accomplishment...  The willingness to engage in such monomaniacal levels of effort in the arts is related to a sense of vocation. By vocation, I have in mind the dictionary definition of “a function or station in life to which one is called by God.” God needn’t be the source. Many achievers see themselves as having a vocation without thinking about where it came from. My point is that the characteristics of nihilism—ennui, anomie, alienation, and other forms of belief that life is futile and purposeless—are at odds with the zest and life-affirming energy needed to produce great art."

2) "The second disadvantage involves the artist’s choice of content. If life is purposeless, no one kind of project is intrinsically more important than any other kind... If instead [the artist] has a strong sense of “This is what I was put on earth to do,” the choice of content will matter, because he has a strong sense that what he does is meaningful. To believe life has a purpose carries with it a predisposition to put one’s talents in the service of the highest expression of one’s vocation."

Telic people, not nihilists, produce great art.

Stop Typing and Give Thanks to God

Faces by Gary Wilson

This morning I was really praying and asking God to heal a friend of great physical pain they were experiencing. I knew of their physical condition, and went into massive google mode searching for an alternative and credible way to treat it. That was 6:30 AM.

At noon I spoke with them. Their excruciating pain (there was no body position that alleviated it) was gone!

2:20 PM. I'm doing sermon work for this coming Sunday. The thought comes to me, "My good friend's pain is gone." And I lifted my hands from the keyboard, paused, and said, out loud...  "Thank you God!"

I will not forget to stop and thank God for such demonstrations of his healing goodness.

No Comment Needed

I begin this morning reading James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. I quote, with no comment.

"Before he was lynched in Oxford, Mississippi (1899), Steve Allen testified to his "peace with God," saying that "Jesus died on the Roman cross for me; through his mercy all my sins are forgiven. I am anchored in Christ." With that testimony, "he went to his death without a tremor." Before Charles Johnston, a black minister, was hanged in Swainbora, Georgia, "he preached his own funeral sermon, inducing the crowd to sing, kneel, raise their hands, and pray along with him." (26)

The Lynching of Thomas Brooks

I asked for a copy of James Cone's new book The Cross and the Lynching Tree for my birthday. I received it today. I'm reading it now.

"Hundreds of Kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope.... Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day's routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man."
- The Crisis 10, no. 2, June 1915, on the lynching of Thomas Brooks in Fayette County, Tennessee
(In Cone, 1)
Cone writes: "In its heyday, the lynching of black Americans was no secret. It was a public spectacle, often announced in advance in newspapers and over radios, attracting crowds of up to twenty thousand people." (xiv)

Tim Curry Speaking at Redeemer This Friday Evening

This Friday night, May 4, Tim Curry will be speaking to our Young Adults at 7:30 pm in the sanctuary about worship.

Kellie Robinson and Kellie Reaume will be leading musical worship as well.

Everyone is invited to come.

If You Like Birds... Watch From May 4-11 in Monroe

Sharp-shinned hawk in our backyard

I am an amateur birdwatcher. My mother was, and passed this on to me.

I've got a bunch of feeders in my backyard, attracting a lot of different birds. Yesterday, while mowing on the back of our property, I saw a baltimore oriole. Very cool!

Monroe County is an excellent place to see birds. We're on Lake Erie, and birds make their crossing from here to Canada, especially arriving in Canada at Point Pelee. For the next week it will be an exceptional place. Today the Monroe County Historical Society published this on their Facebook page.

"Look up in the sky! From Friday, May 4, 2012 to Sunday, May 13, 2012, the largest song bird migration of the year will take place. The song birds will be flying over Lake Erie or following the shoreline to their northern breeding areas. "Birders" from all over the world will be in the area to watch the flight. If you feed/water birds, put out extra food and water. The song birds will be resting in our back yards. This area is blessed with many wetlands that attract the song birds. Take a walk down the River Raisin Heritage Trail to Sterling State Park for some fine song bird viewing."

"The Scream" Sells for $119.9 Million

Edvard Munch's famous painting "The Scream" sold for $119.9 million dollars yesterday.

Here's the original.

Here are some parodies.

Neuroscience and X's Moral Attitude Toward Cows

Neuroscientist David Eagelman writes (in a dialogue with Raymond Tallis here):

"An individual brain reflects its culture. Our opinions on normality, custom, dress codes and local superstitions are absorbed into our neural circuitry from the social forest around us. To a surprising extent, one can glimpse a culture by studying a brain. Moral attitudes toward cows, pigs, crosses and burkas can be read from the physiological responses of brains in different cultures."

But surely that is incorrect. Even if we had an exhaustive knowledge of the physical state of affairs of X's brain at time t, such knowledge would not allow us to point to a network of neural connections and conclude: "And here we have X's moral attitude toward cows." Only X has the key to such first-person subjective consciousness.

Krauss (sort of) Recants

Warren Dunes State Park, SW Michigan

Physicist Lawrence Krauss has become more famous than ever for his non-scientific claim that:  “Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, ‘those that can’t do, teach, and those that can’t teach, teach gym.' And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever. ... they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn’t.”

Last week philosopher Massimo Pigliucci counter-attached Krauss. Pigliucci is both brilliant and funny; therefore he is brilliantly funny (that statement is logically false, committing some kind of informal fallacy). From Pigliucci's "Lawrence Krauss: another physicist with an anti-philosophy complex" :

• Krauss calls philosopher David Albert a "moronic philosopher." Pigliucci writes: "Still, I wonder if Krauss is justified in referring to Albert as a “moronic philosopher,” considering that the latter is not only a highly respected philosopher of physics at Columbia University, but also holds a PhD in theoretical physics. I didn’t think Rockefeller University (where Albert got his degree) gave out PhD’s to morons, but I could be wrong."
• "The reason physicists such as Weinberg, Hawking and Krauss keep bashing philosophy is because they suffer from an intellectual version of the Oedipus Complex (you know, philosophy was the mother of science and all that... you can work out the details of the inherent sexual frustrations from there)."
• "The business of philosophy (of science, in particular) is not to solve scientific problems — we’ve got science for that (Julia and I explain what philosophers of science do here). To see how absurd Krauss’ complaint is just think of what it would sound like if he had said that historians of science haven’t solved a single puzzle in theoretical physics. That’s because historians do history, not science. When was the last time a theoretical physicist solved a problem in history, pray?"
• "And then of course there is the old time favorite theme of philosophy not making progress. I have debunked that one too, but the crucial point is that progress in philosophy is not and should not be measured by the standards of science, just like the word “progress” has to be interpreted in any field according to that field’s issues and methods, not according to science’s issues and methods. (And incidentally, how’s progress on that string theory thingy going, Lawrence? It has been 25 years and counting, and still no empirical evidence...)"
• "Krauss also has a naively optimistic view of the business of science, as it turns out. For instance, he claims that “the difference [between scientists and philosophers] is that scientists are really happy when they get it wrong, because it means that there’s more to learn.” Seriously? I’ve practiced science for more than two decades, and I’ve never seen anyone happy to be shown wrong, or who didn’t react as defensively (or even offensively) as possible to any claim that he might be wrong. Indeed, as physicist Max Plank famously put it, “Science progresses funeral by funeral,” because often the old generation has to retire and die before new ideas really take hold. Lawrence, scientists are just human beings, and like all human beings they are interested in mundane things like sex, fame and money (and yes, the pursuit of knowledge). Science is a wonderful and wonderfully successful activity (despite the more than occasional blunder), but there is no reason to try to make its practitioners look like some sort of intellectual saints that they certainly are not (witness also the alarming increase in science fraud, for instance)." (I know I'm quoting a lot, but these are so funny, and true. Therefore they are truly funny (another informal logical fallacy).

Yes, Krauss has published a (sort of) recantation, a quasi apology. It's here - "The Consolation of Philosophy." To which Pigliucci responds:

"Postscript: As people have pointed out, Krauss has issued an apology of sorts, apparently forced by Dan Dennett. He still seems not to have learned much though. He confuses theology with philosophy (in part), keeps hammering at a single reviewer who apparently really annoyed him (in the New York Times), and more importantly just doesn't get the idea that philosophy of science is NOT in the business of answering scientific questions (we've got, ahem, science for that!). It aims, instead, at understanding how science works. Really, is that so difficult to understand, Prof. Krauss?"

Breaking Free From the Ladder of Success

Monroe County

I've been reading Richard Rohr's Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. So far this is a good read for me, especially since I estimate that I am now in the second half of my life. Here's how I figure this. Last Wednesday I turned 63. If I live to 125 then I am now officially in the second half of my life.

I want to make this second half of life count more than the first half. To do that I need to be free from the cultural values of the "American Dream." Rohr puts it this way.

"Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life. Shocking and disappointing, but I think it is true. We are more struggling to survive than to thrive, more just “getting through” or trying to get to the top than finding out what is really at the top or was already at the bottom." (K270)

I've met a lot of "second half" people who have not matured beyond the "first half." Some try to cling to the first half by spending their resources on their fading physical appearance. Years ago I met such a man. Linda, I, and our boys had gone for a weekend getaway at a motel in the north suburbs of Detroit. Dan and I went into the sauna. This older man began talking with us. He started to share his life story. He was a rich man who had spent his life accumulating wealth but in the process lost his wife and children in a bitter divorce. I remember his words that day. "I gave her a million dollars in the settlement"....  "My plan was to eventually retire and spend the rest of my life with her"... "I miss my children" (he said this to Dan)... and when he left us he spoke words of wisdom which he had failed to follow. Looking at me he said, "Enjoy your family." Which was exactly what I was doing.

Thomas Merton once wrote that "we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall." (Ib.)

In this half of my life I will pray more, take more time alone with God, read Scripture more, invest more in people, and be free from the ladder of success.