Top blogging of July-September

Data is of early October. Not all posts were written in the past three months.

First was my hard-hitting modern religion piece on the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and its multiple ethical failures and looming massive legal problems over the closure of Concordia University-Portland.

Second was my long-ago, but still relevant, libertarian pseudoskepticism pseudoscience piece about Brian Dunning and Michael Shermer.

Third was my not nearly so long ago, but even more still relevant, piece about Saint Anthony of Fauci and his telling of Platonic noble lie(s). (It eventually became plural, then Not.Even.Platonic.Or.Noble, to riff on Wolfgang Pauli.)

Fourth is from about 15 months ago, but getting new eyeballs when I retweeted it about the dreck that is this year's Dallas Symphony Orchestra schedule. I said the DSO had stepped backward in hiring Fabio Luisi as music director.

Fifth? Almost as old as my Dunning-Shermer piece, but also about classical music: Stravinsky vs. Prokofiev and what constitutes neoclassicism.

Sixth, a recent piece, about how Harvey Whitehouse seemed promising on new studies on the origin of religion, until he went way wrong on both that and a definition of what religion is.

Seventh? My burning take on the often laughable, usually conceited Mark Carrier thinking early Christians believed Jesus was a space alien.

Eighth, and also recent, my philosophical take on an ambulance-chasing journalist's experience with PTSD after his own car crash, and a psychologist discussing the issue with bad takes on free will and control.

Ninth and also nearly a decade old, like No. 2 and No. 5? My take on reviews of books by Dan Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter.

Tenth and trending probably due to a tweet by my to blogging friend Tales of Whoa? My poem about the death of friend Leo Lincourt, "Sitting Shtetl for the Living."

Top blogging of 2019

 It was a very interesting year here by what readers liked.

A mix of debunking, takes on things Luther, pseudoscience debunking, philosophical hot takes and my poetry made up the 10 posts most read by readers this last year. More than half of the posts were pre-2019, but that's fine. Good stuff ages well.

No. 1? A decade-old blog post that I'd originally forgotten to put a header on and that eventually took off. (Spammers, maybe?) It was about "libertarian pseudoskeptic pseudoscience" and looked at some of the worst in pseudoskepticism, and sometimes pseudoscience, by leading libertarian lights in the Skeptics™ world like Brian Dunning and Michael Shermer.

No. 2? My take on a recent revelation that  early research on which Benjamin Libet based his "brain delay" studies, "undermines his research angle but also reinforces his philosophical scrivening." I chided some not to throw out the baby with the bath water; in other words, Libet ain't dead yet.

No. 3? My rewrite and update on Edward Arlington Robinson's classic "Richard Cory."

No. 4? A throwaway post, at least on the surface, from a decade ago. I encouraged intellectual types to be themselves in making small talk.

No. 5? An update to a 2017 blog post, where I further call out the cultural Catholicism lies of alleged atheist Tim O'Neill and his History for Atheists blog. (I found out, in the process of the update, that I'm far from alone.)

No. 6? Gun Nuts for Luther? Headquartered here in Tex-ass? My brother a member of their Facebook group? Whoda thunk? Here's the details.

No. 7? More Luther, this time my extended review of Lyndal Roper's 2017 biography. A solid 4-star work, but at the end of the year, with books newish and older, I still hadn't found a total 5-star tome.

No. 8? My uncle died just over a year ago. Rather than attend the funeral and be laden with religion and religious-based guilt-tripping, I wrote a poem about all that.

No. 9? Also from late 2018? I smacked around Andrew Sullivan for his latest (at that time) stupidities, and attached one of my most delightful Photoshoppings.

No. 10? Daring to touch the third rail of American foreign policy discussions, and based in part on my review of Yuval Noah Harari's "Homo Deus," I dared ask "Who's a Jew vis-a-vis Zionist claims?"

Finally, it was the most productive year blogging here since 2012. It's given me a diversion from my main blog. And, as 2019 readers can see, for the next two years, expect more Lutheran Reformation 500th anniversary posts.

If funerals are for the living, I shall not attend: Thoughts, poetry, Schnittke

If funerals are for the living, what then when the living, or one of the living, doesn't want to do to the funeral of a dead relative?

My uncle died a couple of days ago. My dad had the one sister and no brothers, and my mom was an only, so I have just his sister and her husband, the dead uncle as aunts and uncles. The funeral is Tuesday. I could surely get off work, but I am not interested.

I semi-swore to myself after my mom's death, at her funeral, that I would never need to see my oldest brother again, for various reasons. I put the issues of deaths of siblings out of mind as being decades in the future, barring accidents or early cancer or similar.

But, I forgot about aunt and uncle, and now he is dead.

And I don't want to go, and not just because he's is surely going to be there.

I also semi-swore to myself that, other than for possible courtesy visits to church when visiting my sister and her minister husband, that I never would set foot in a church again except to attend a concert or other artistic event.

I have no desire to go there, and, at a minimum, to be a hypocrite, and, at a maximum, be proselytized by my aunt, or her daughter (both former parochial school teachers), or my oldest or second-oldest brothers, with the likelihood from greatest to least being in that order. Years ago, my aunt sent me an Easter card that, in not so few of words, said "You know it's true," about fundamentalist Easter beliefs. A religious funeral among conservative Lutheran Christians is only likely to bring that all to the surface, not to mention that, pre-deconversion, I had been to her church umpteen times and some oldsters there may still know me.

No desire.

If funerals are for the living, I'm not going.

I then, with this adapted from handwritten journaling, thought about a poem. I had been thinking about writing one this afternoon. Hadn't sat down to do that.

Then, just after finishing up these notes, this extended haiku started to work its way out.

Death is for the dead
And life is for the living.
So don't fence me in.

Better yet, I won't
Fence myself by attending;
We're all better off.

Namaste for all —
A word that might well offend
Some others itself.

I touched dad's cold skin,
Satisfied that dead is dead
And shall remain so.

Schnittke's Requiem
Challenges old conventions;
Death is chaotic.

Emotional wounds
I shall not give, nor receive.
They will still result.

We will drift further.
I accept that is the price
Of preservation.

Not the first poem in this general vein. I wrote in the summer of 2017 about a dying secularist friend, and what to say to him, or not.

Poem: SITTING SHTETL FOR THE LIVING

SITTING SHTETL FOR THE LIVING

He has six months left,

If it's even that.

What can I say to ease his pain?

We're both secularists; we both accept

The reality that presents itself to us.

Why do I feel the need to speak?

Is it to ease my pain, not his,

To ease my frustration for him?

He is not the first secularist friend

That I have had die.

But, he’s the first for whom

I’ve had this much advance notice.

Sitting shtetl is about listening.

Only then about speaking.

I can ease his pain best

By dealing with mine in other ways.

But, I’m still talking about me.

What, other than listening,

Will ease his pain?

I hope he knows of what will help

And reaches out

To one or more of his listeners.

It doesn’t have to be me.

“Control freak” is just a label that

I don’t have to use.

Others surely feel the same.

Helpless, frustrated, angry.

I’m sorry.

Rest in peace among the living,

For as long as you can.

Waxing poetic, philosophical and literary on selfhood

Note: This is the sixth part in a semi-regular series of posts about selfhood and related issues of cognitive philosophy. For more, see parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Many poets have written about time and its flow, from the author of Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and beyond.

I don’t claim to be old myself, and unlike an occasional “I’m getting old” column that today’s younger editorial staffers at my newspaper company have thrown up on its pages in the psat, I’m not going to pretend to be what I’m not.

However, although I’m not getting old, I am getting older. And since I’m on the far side of 40, I think I can offer a little comment on that.

Bear with me, those of you who like poetry, and literary allusions, through a poetic dialogue between myself and poets and authors of the past, and between Shakespeare and others of those poets and authors.

I loathe growing older,
And the way life,
With its past choices made and not made,
Python-like encoils my existential freedom.

I hate the constriction
Of a funnel-like previous history
Flowing downward into an ever-narrowing future
Which can often appear drain-like;
A metaphor with less than the most pleasant implications for tomorrow.

Ah, yes, tomorrow.
What was it Shakespeare said about tomorrow?
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty place from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools,
The way to dusty death.”

Shakespeare knew.
He knew constriction.
The pettiness of that eternally recurring tomorrow,
The tableau of the anti-Proustian “Envisioning of Things Future,”
Produces not humility, but caution, restraint, tentativeness, apprehension.
Apprehension, yes, that’s it.
An apprehension of taking steps too big,
Lest I walk out on a fragile limb,
Getting stuck, cat-like, in the tree of life.
Eliot knew that apprehension,
Where a life measured in coffee spoons often results.

And yet, I appreciate the freedom of maturity
Even while I loathe the responsibility it entails, nay demands.
And struggle to live with, and embrace, the dichotomy.

But the future can also be expansive.
With songs of ourselves (do I not feel as brash as Whitman to sing of myself alone?) to be sung across seas of grass and time and space,
And across starless nighttime voids of the soul,
Yawning within, with their own expansiveness.

Who is this “I” to sing of himself?
“Who am I?” asked Dickinson.
Am I nobody, and you?
Or can we sing ourselves as somebodies?
“Who am I,” I ask, just like Dickinson.

Shakespeare admonishes again:
“To thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not be false to any man.”
Indeed, as he would have doubting, brooding Hamlet know,
Thou canst not be false to thyself if you but know it.
We hope.

But know myself?
Far back in the dust of history, beyond Shakespeare,
The ancient oracle of Delphi urges just that:
“Know thyself.”
And if I don’t?
If it is not possible?
Who is it that is making these choices that the world says are mine?

And the Bard saw true here as well, asking us whether that self that trods through life
Is but really walking the boards in front of the footlights,
But playing a part, or different parts for different stages, scenes and acts of life.

Is that me, or but a role that you see,
A convenience, a contrivance of my self to fit the scene,
To fit the clamor of the world around, or the madding crowd?
Do you know? Do I?

I don’t claim to have the answers for all of these questions,
To have asked the right questions,
Or even to have asked enough questions,
Enough to … know myself … very well.

At least, maybe I’ll buy some new, larger coffee spoons,
And stamp my name on them.

Perhaps I’ll brew a pot, and lift a cup high to old Will,
If he has been himself, and I myself.
Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.
The word, like his “tomorrow,”
Can creep in this petty place from day to day.
Or not.
If only old Will had ever met Prince Siddhartha.

To thine own self be content, as well as true,
Or the closest you can;
And when you toe the mark, and exclaim your lines,
Accept them as your own, the best you can.

Fear of death, or of life?

FEAR OF DEATH, OR OF LIFE?

The dead, nobly and ignobly alike,
Sleep deep in orthogonal plots of countryside.
Their selves matter not one whit to the breathing world,
Save one elemental fact – their death.

And yet, I feel that emptiness primordial
As I speed by each country-yard site,
The fear that I am giving a life unlived as boon
Not living fully out of fears of hurt,
Not surrendering my self as hostage to life – or death.

That poignant mix of ache and dread,
That desire to do else but search out not what,
That fear to act and fail, to live and be struck down,
To reach and fall short –
Abides deep in this troubled soul.

The fear of death? Nay, that’s but light grace.
The fear of dying? That’s but bit more,
Save some physical pains.
The fear of living?
The fear of letting die old fears, of murdering old ways of being myself?
That poignant drive
Invokes my envy of those with black rest in the country yards.

     Steve Snyder
     July 4, 2001

Death is...

From an “assignment” from “Writing as a Road to Self-Discovery”

A bitch… and not just metaphorically. It’s Kali devouring life. It’s the ultimate speed limit of life. Death is the ultimate focal lens of life, too.

And that’s a great metaphor. It’s like death is a zoom lens, with a wide range of f-stops. The long-distance future looks very clear at f/32 on a young 80-200 lens.

But, like the lens of the eye, that lens gets less supple as we age. It can’t focus in and out so far, so it loses its distance. The long-range future doesn’t have as much clarity, focus, or depth. It lacks depth, because we’re stopped down to 22, then 16, then 11.

However, it seems to acquire a better macro quality as we age. The close-ups of life’s literal and metaphorical flowers get sharper and more brilliant. Plus, the lens takes on more and more wide-angle capabilities. We see more around ourselves. We are able to take in more at one time.

Unfortunately, not all of us clean or take care of our lenses as we age. Some of them acquire intellectual glaucoma, a tunnel vision of the mind. Others mist up, or lose the ability to focus forward.

But without death, there would be no focal point… only an endless stretch to infinity.

Mañana would recur day after day. The boredom of the Christian heaven could be life here on earth. And, with no death ever, the overcrowding, the stifling lack of space of Vanarasi compounded, would be too much.

Death, a good and timely death, is a butler and a servant, as Dickenson well knew.