THE WILD GEESE OF BETHLEHEM
a child's Christmas story
by Murray Andrew Pura
You have heard that there were animals in the stable when Jesus was born and that these animals - a donkey, a milk cow, a pony, an ox - were all farm animals. This is only partly true. What no one has told you is that there were also geese, but not any kind of geese, wild geese, geese as wild as the great Canada Goose that flies over many of our towns and ranches by the hundreds and thousands this time of year. Yes,there are wild geese in Germany and China and India too. They are everywhere. Did you know there are more than 40 different species of wild geese in the world? One kind is the graylag goose. It has grey and brown feathers, an orange bill, and pink legs and feet. This goose winters all across southern Europe and southern Asia. It was thiskind of goose that flew into Bethlehem on Christmas Eve two thousand years ago.
A group of 77 of them - what we call a skein - was crossing the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas, flying south into India from China. Geese fly over the Himalayas at more than 29,000 feet. That’s over five miles high! No other bird, not even the great condor, flies that high. But that’s how far up you have to go if you want to get over the tallest peak in the world, Mount Everest. And that’s how high this skein’s leader, whose name was Fashida, was taking his friends and family.
Fashida is a name for the wind in Arabic and perhaps it was because of this, and because the wind always loved to play with Fashida, that a great wind from the East came and blew upon him. This wind blew so long and with so much strength it carried the 77 geese off their course and took them west over what we now call Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq. That is how they wound up landing in a field outside of Bethlehem. Don’t be surprised. Although it was a journey of 1500 miles wild geese can stay in the air for over 1000 miles at a time. And the 77 had a big wind to help them.
They were tired but they were also hungry. Fashida - who, because he was a male we call a gander - led his geese toward the smell of corn. Geese love corn and there was some in a sack in the stable where Jesus was sleeping. Wild geese are afraid of people, but Fashida went first and saw that no one was moving by the stable or hiding nearby with a stick. When a group of geese are on the ground they are called a gaggle and the hunger of Fashida’s gaggle was so strong they all came into the stable and began to eat out of the sack. It is impossible for a gaggle of geese to stay quiet all the time so this one did make some noise. But Joseph was exhausted and in a deep sleep. And Mary, who had just given birth to Jesus, was even more exhausted. Only Jesus had his eyes wide open. He was not asleep because he had twisted out of the blankets wrapped around him and he was very cold.
Fashida sensed this. So did Fashida’s mother. It was as if Jesus was a gosling in trouble and they both climbed into the manger with him, one on either side of his little body. Goose down is still one of the warmest things we can put in our sleeping bags and winter jackets and Jesus was surrounded with it. In no time at all he was as warm as the sun. Even cow elk have saved children’s lives in the Rocky Mountains by lying beside them when they were lost in the forest. So this was not so odd a thing for two of God’s creatures to do for the baby son of God. But no one saw it. When Joseph woke up - he had been hearing the rustling and flapping of wings in his sleep and had dreamed about angels - there was only the donkey, the cow, the pony and the ox. Jesus was sound asleep and his body was warm as a candle to Joseph’s touch. Joseph tucked the loose blankets back around his baby boy. Then he found something he could never explain but something Mary kept in a special wooden box all of her life. In one of his tiny hands Jesus clutched a feather. A feather big and soft and long and coloured grey and brown.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
writing by moonlight
My favourite part of the film Dr. Zhivago is where the Russian doctor, played by Omar Sharif, sits down at a table in front of windows looking out over a moonlit field of snow and forest. Excited by the feeling it gives him, and that he is ready to write the poetry he loves to create, the doctor sets out clean white sheets of paper and a pen, once more looks out over the gleaming snow and dark trees, and, inspired, picks up the pen and begins to write.
I know this feeling so well. I have known it all my life, ever since I was a child. Obviously the script writers knew it too and - if they lifted the scene directly from the book - the writer Boris Pasternak knew it as well.
Last night I watched a waning moon, that is still more full than not, rise in the east over snow and forest from our breakfast nook windows. There shouldn't be this much snow down this time in November. I resented it when I returned from England on Saturday night. But now I am writing the last 20 or 30 pages of my novel, the sequel to ZO. This denouement takes place in late December in white snow and sharp cold amidst dark trees, just like the land I survey from the windows of my house, and having it all around me, gleaming under the light that rules the night, makes me feel like Zhivago, putting my white pages in order, and taking my favourite pen in hand, and - inspired and blessed - beginning to write the end of the longest story and novel I have ever written.
The wilderness has always transformed me from death to life and though I have many struggles within and without right now the moon over the snow gives me hope. I stood ringed by pines and bare branched cottonwoods a few nights ago with my two Alaskan Malamutes when the moon was even more round and clear and all the snow on the branches and our feet seemed lit from within. All the white blazed. Moreover, we could not see any houses or cars so it was just as if we had been transported deep into a northern forest. Indeed, 150 years ago, all there would have been around us was vast herds of bison and Blackfoot winter tepees and the tall trees. I stood in awe of the sensation all this gave me and the dogs and I watched the moon make mystery.
Writing a novel is kind of a long slow dance by moonlight anyway, a waltz with different partners - the characters of the story - that goes on all night on the terrace under the moon, carries on in sunlight and shadows, then continues in the moonlight once again. It is a beautiful experience. I have been writing this novel most of 2010 and have spent thousands of hours gliding over the polished dance floor. I have other books I wish to write immediately after I've finished this dance, but I must not hurry this waltz to a premature conclusion. The band is playing, the music is not yet done, there are more sure-footed steps that need to be taken. The moon is just right, and the long stretches of snow, and by the time this moon is gone and there is darkness while a new one is born, the novel will have been completed. There is no rush, there is plenty of time, and my various dancing partners all have their own beauty and grace. When you end something substantial, you must end it as well and completely and with as much joy as you began the work of art to begin with.
So I thank God for the Zhivago moon and the shining snow that lies beneath its unearthly light. And I thank God for the paper and ink. And I thank him that he made me a writer and a son.
I know this feeling so well. I have known it all my life, ever since I was a child. Obviously the script writers knew it too and - if they lifted the scene directly from the book - the writer Boris Pasternak knew it as well.
Last night I watched a waning moon, that is still more full than not, rise in the east over snow and forest from our breakfast nook windows. There shouldn't be this much snow down this time in November. I resented it when I returned from England on Saturday night. But now I am writing the last 20 or 30 pages of my novel, the sequel to ZO. This denouement takes place in late December in white snow and sharp cold amidst dark trees, just like the land I survey from the windows of my house, and having it all around me, gleaming under the light that rules the night, makes me feel like Zhivago, putting my white pages in order, and taking my favourite pen in hand, and - inspired and blessed - beginning to write the end of the longest story and novel I have ever written.
The wilderness has always transformed me from death to life and though I have many struggles within and without right now the moon over the snow gives me hope. I stood ringed by pines and bare branched cottonwoods a few nights ago with my two Alaskan Malamutes when the moon was even more round and clear and all the snow on the branches and our feet seemed lit from within. All the white blazed. Moreover, we could not see any houses or cars so it was just as if we had been transported deep into a northern forest. Indeed, 150 years ago, all there would have been around us was vast herds of bison and Blackfoot winter tepees and the tall trees. I stood in awe of the sensation all this gave me and the dogs and I watched the moon make mystery.
Writing a novel is kind of a long slow dance by moonlight anyway, a waltz with different partners - the characters of the story - that goes on all night on the terrace under the moon, carries on in sunlight and shadows, then continues in the moonlight once again. It is a beautiful experience. I have been writing this novel most of 2010 and have spent thousands of hours gliding over the polished dance floor. I have other books I wish to write immediately after I've finished this dance, but I must not hurry this waltz to a premature conclusion. The band is playing, the music is not yet done, there are more sure-footed steps that need to be taken. The moon is just right, and the long stretches of snow, and by the time this moon is gone and there is darkness while a new one is born, the novel will have been completed. There is no rush, there is plenty of time, and my various dancing partners all have their own beauty and grace. When you end something substantial, you must end it as well and completely and with as much joy as you began the work of art to begin with.
So I thank God for the Zhivago moon and the shining snow that lies beneath its unearthly light. And I thank God for the paper and ink. And I thank him that he made me a writer and a son.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
in praise of whimsy
If you're a person who has read a number of my blogs on writing you'll know I lean to writing stuff with weight and significance. However, I have friends who write in all sorts of genres - mystery, for instance, which seems to be a format used by Christian intellectuals to relax with, for example, GK Chesterton (Father Brown mysteries) and Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries). A couple of years ago, for a bit of fun, I decided to spin a yarn, the kind I might have told my kids when they were 9 or 10. It was indeed relaxing to write the piece, a cross between a western, frontier epic, romance and historical novel. My agent took it and peddled it around the block. After many adventures and - definitely - misadventures, I inked a contract for the story's publication in a book length format. Strange things happen on the writer's road.
Now I am researching another piece of whimsy: a young man wants to learn to fly, circa 1917, despite objections from his religious community. How would I spin doctor this for my used-to-be 9 year old daughter and used-to-be 10 year old son? Well, the adventure of flying the first aircraft, biplanes, and doing loops and dives with them in the blue sky in an open cockpit - that would excite them for starters. Learning how to handle these first flying machines - almost crashes and a few wrecks, that would keep them listening. Flying through thunderstorms, punching through cloud banks, throttling into sunrises and canyons, putting the pair of them in the cockpit so that the wind is running through their hair and whistling over their goggles - that's how you make sure everyone is having a good time, including the writer who has always wanted to fly open cockpit biplanes himself and feel the wind in his hair and the raindrops on his hands, in addition to wearing the awesome leather gear that was an essential part of flying without a canopy and which protected an aviator from the cool air that bit into the arms and chest and legs. And that is the heart of the matter, I suppose - I write the whimsical books because I want to live them and no one else is going to write the stories for me exactly the way I want them to look, sound, and feel.
So there you are. I write the heavies because I love to author them too, but that's not the same as wanting to live out a flight of fancy in your imagination. I'd never write a steady diet of whimsy because there are too many important stories to be told in the novel format. But now and then, when there's been a steady diet of thesis and academic writing and literary fiction, years of it, it's nice to slip on wings and go to frontier land, or adventure land, or fantasy land and create your own kingdoms of sheer colour, wonder and delight.
Just for yourself. But others can come along for the ride if they want.
Now I am researching another piece of whimsy: a young man wants to learn to fly, circa 1917, despite objections from his religious community. How would I spin doctor this for my used-to-be 9 year old daughter and used-to-be 10 year old son? Well, the adventure of flying the first aircraft, biplanes, and doing loops and dives with them in the blue sky in an open cockpit - that would excite them for starters. Learning how to handle these first flying machines - almost crashes and a few wrecks, that would keep them listening. Flying through thunderstorms, punching through cloud banks, throttling into sunrises and canyons, putting the pair of them in the cockpit so that the wind is running through their hair and whistling over their goggles - that's how you make sure everyone is having a good time, including the writer who has always wanted to fly open cockpit biplanes himself and feel the wind in his hair and the raindrops on his hands, in addition to wearing the awesome leather gear that was an essential part of flying without a canopy and which protected an aviator from the cool air that bit into the arms and chest and legs. And that is the heart of the matter, I suppose - I write the whimsical books because I want to live them and no one else is going to write the stories for me exactly the way I want them to look, sound, and feel.
So there you are. I write the heavies because I love to author them too, but that's not the same as wanting to live out a flight of fancy in your imagination. I'd never write a steady diet of whimsy because there are too many important stories to be told in the novel format. But now and then, when there's been a steady diet of thesis and academic writing and literary fiction, years of it, it's nice to slip on wings and go to frontier land, or adventure land, or fantasy land and create your own kingdoms of sheer colour, wonder and delight.
Just for yourself. But others can come along for the ride if they want.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
women in black
I spent the weekend with a mate in Blackburn (as in the Beatles' line: "4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire," from Sgt. Pepper). Staying with his family was superb. Blackburn itself was a mixed bag. Half of it is, in my own words, a Muslim ghetto. Many of the women are in black from head to foot with their faces covered. Very little smiling from the men whose faces you can see. A lot of grim countenances. By their own choice they do everything amongst themselves and mingle as little as possible - their own schools, sports teams, shops. Being in Iran and Afghanistan in the 70s was far less oppressive than this enclave in Blackburn.
Thank goodness the antidote to this depressing world was one of ex-Muslims or non-sharia Islam just a few blocks away. We went to a Muslim curry house on Saturday night where the women were not smothered in black, where you could see their faces, where men and women smiled at you and said hello and where almost all were in the clothes of English women and men. I even saw lipstick. It was refreshing and gave me a lift beacuse the atmosphere was not one of dehumanization, but of humanity mingling happily with humanity in good spirits and with good will. In addition, the food was delicious.
A trip to the Lancashire countryside also rinsed the sour taste out of my mouth. Long green fields, the Pendle hills, a river called Ribble, hobbitish stone cottages neatly arranged in the village of Ribchester which, from 100-400 AD, was a garrison of Rome's XXth Legion. A stone church with a tower dating to the 1000s-1100s, the first priest, circa 1100 or 1200, being a man named Drogo, obviously a pagan convert. Aye, a peaceful village of stone and green grass and sheep and a nearby river where the Roman cavalry would have watered their horses. The sun tossing gold about freely as it set. It was two hours of restoration.
But the lovely lush Pendle hills brought back a reality as old as the stones the Ribble plunges over. This was one of England's Salems where people, including a child who condemned almost her entire family, accused various women of casting various spells and called for the Witchfinder, who found them and had these poor women (and a few men) tried and hung, executed. Why, one had a cat, another grew herbs, another plucked wild plants from the meadows, another glanced my way just before my cow delivered a stillborn calf or my little Davey took a fever that like to killed him. The Witchfinder found them and murdered them and, spiritually, had them clothed in black.
He had them clothed in black.
Thank goodness the antidote to this depressing world was one of ex-Muslims or non-sharia Islam just a few blocks away. We went to a Muslim curry house on Saturday night where the women were not smothered in black, where you could see their faces, where men and women smiled at you and said hello and where almost all were in the clothes of English women and men. I even saw lipstick. It was refreshing and gave me a lift beacuse the atmosphere was not one of dehumanization, but of humanity mingling happily with humanity in good spirits and with good will. In addition, the food was delicious.
A trip to the Lancashire countryside also rinsed the sour taste out of my mouth. Long green fields, the Pendle hills, a river called Ribble, hobbitish stone cottages neatly arranged in the village of Ribchester which, from 100-400 AD, was a garrison of Rome's XXth Legion. A stone church with a tower dating to the 1000s-1100s, the first priest, circa 1100 or 1200, being a man named Drogo, obviously a pagan convert. Aye, a peaceful village of stone and green grass and sheep and a nearby river where the Roman cavalry would have watered their horses. The sun tossing gold about freely as it set. It was two hours of restoration.
But the lovely lush Pendle hills brought back a reality as old as the stones the Ribble plunges over. This was one of England's Salems where people, including a child who condemned almost her entire family, accused various women of casting various spells and called for the Witchfinder, who found them and had these poor women (and a few men) tried and hung, executed. Why, one had a cat, another grew herbs, another plucked wild plants from the meadows, another glanced my way just before my cow delivered a stillborn calf or my little Davey took a fever that like to killed him. The Witchfinder found them and murdered them and, spiritually, had them clothed in black.
He had them clothed in black.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
weary of hate
For years I have felt uncomfortable with a growing emphasis in certain Christian circles. No doubt this happens, to greater or lesser extent, in all religious groups and nonreligious organizations: an intolerance to those slightly or markedly different from your group's ideology, philosophy, theology, doctrine, principles, call it what you will. I have seen political clubs act this way, gatherings of atheists, left-wingers, right-wingers act this way, so I know it is not just a Christian failing, but a human failing, and not just others' failings, but mine as well.
I began, over time as a Christian, to tire of feeling I had to make enemies in the cause of Christ. That if I disagreed with others' beliefs, not only could I not be close to them, but that, as a general rule, I needed to remind them, from time to time, that I was opposed to them. Nor could I like them. Of course I had friends that believed differently from me. But if they really believed differently from regular evangelical Christian beliefs, if they were gay or sexually promiscuous or partied hard or voted wrong or supported a woman's right to choose, I actually should not have them as good friends in any way, shape or form. Part of this was my take on it, part of it was what I was taught. Then, one day, I thought: How is this attitude like Jesus?
He was not the one who went around shutting others out of his life. He was not the one who said, "Oh, no, I don't talk to those people, I don't love them, I don't heal them, get them out of here, stone them, call down fire on their village." Quite obviously, he was the kind of person who did not do or say those kinds of things. So, if I was supposed to be a Christian, why wasn't I allowed, or why wasn't I allowing myself, to be more like him and less like what happens in certain churches and certain denominations? If I believed in Jesus, why couldn't I act and talk and include and embrace like Jesus - even to the point of touching those with leprosy?
I had grown weary of having to hate to call myself a believer in Christ. Sure, the word hate was never used in various evangelical circles, the whole idea of hatred was denied, but the way we were encouraged to act or dispute or put up a wall, to my mind, amounted to the same thing. THEY were the enemy - homosexuals, abortion clinic doctors, women who promoted abortion and the men who supported them, people who voted for politicians and parties that supported the gay revolution and a pro-choice platform - and nobody talked about loving those enemies or befriending them. They were to be opposed, resisted and, inevitably, shunned. You didn't go to their social events, you didn't attend their rallies and listen to what they had to say, you did not hang with them.
This cold shoulder was not the Jesus way. But a certain kind of church-taught Christian way.
I was never comfortable with it. I felt un-me, un-myself, restricted in who I could like and who I could love because of doctrine, philosophy, theology. But I thought, for a time, it was the way to go.
Now when I see this becoming increasingly more of a trend, not less, when people are being driven to adopt a kind of tribalism of sticking with and defending their own kind and not having anything to do with those whose allegiances are to other and often opposing tribes or factions, essentially at the expense not only of love and peace but also of truth, I realize it is well past time to stop taking sides and stand where Jesus stood - which was with everyone.
He had a freedom fighter who was opposed to Roman occupation among his closest companions, but he healed a Roman soldier's servant.
A Jewish man was not supposed to be alone with a woman, let alone a woman with a reputation for sexual promiscuity, but he did it anyway at the well in Samaria.
Biblical law said to stone and kill a woman (or man) who had engaged in extra-marital sex. He wouldn't do it. Instead, he defended the accused and saved her life.
He made the enemies of the Jews, the Samaritans, the heroes in his story about a Samaritan saving a Jew's life when other Jews wouldn't even save it.
When people rejected him and his teaching his friends wanted to call down fire from God and kill them. Jesus not only vehemently said no, but was upset with them for even suggesting the idea.
He forgave the people who killed him, a mix of Italians and Israelis, and not only them, but all of us, the whole human race replete with kindnesses and replete with cruelties.
So when you look at Jesus you see something and someone completely unlike intolerance or shunning, utterly unlike unfriendliness, unkindness, nonacceptance, a lack of openness, a lack of empathy, a lack of love.
Christian teaching, based on the New Testament, says to look at Jesus is to look at the face of God.
If that is what Christians believe, perhaps Jesus is the one who should be telling us how to treat those who are different than us and who oppose us rather than church groups and religious organizations and denominations. Not that they can't point us to Jesus. It's just that, in this day and age where there is such a sense of warfare between different faith groups and political parties, when there is so much polarization within many of our nations and communities, it seems to be harder to find those who make Jesus more important than their human leaders and their agendas.
For myself, it's time to stop flirting with intolerance, unkindness and hatred that goes under other names (commitment, devotion, faithfulness) and get back to the Jesus way, the Jesus stance, the Jesus heart.
Not wanting to call myself a Christian because the word means very little in terms of Jesus himself anymore, I have in the past called myself an incarnational theist, admittedly a mouthful of a phrase, and a Christwalker.
Time to walk the walk again.
I began, over time as a Christian, to tire of feeling I had to make enemies in the cause of Christ. That if I disagreed with others' beliefs, not only could I not be close to them, but that, as a general rule, I needed to remind them, from time to time, that I was opposed to them. Nor could I like them. Of course I had friends that believed differently from me. But if they really believed differently from regular evangelical Christian beliefs, if they were gay or sexually promiscuous or partied hard or voted wrong or supported a woman's right to choose, I actually should not have them as good friends in any way, shape or form. Part of this was my take on it, part of it was what I was taught. Then, one day, I thought: How is this attitude like Jesus?
He was not the one who went around shutting others out of his life. He was not the one who said, "Oh, no, I don't talk to those people, I don't love them, I don't heal them, get them out of here, stone them, call down fire on their village." Quite obviously, he was the kind of person who did not do or say those kinds of things. So, if I was supposed to be a Christian, why wasn't I allowed, or why wasn't I allowing myself, to be more like him and less like what happens in certain churches and certain denominations? If I believed in Jesus, why couldn't I act and talk and include and embrace like Jesus - even to the point of touching those with leprosy?
I had grown weary of having to hate to call myself a believer in Christ. Sure, the word hate was never used in various evangelical circles, the whole idea of hatred was denied, but the way we were encouraged to act or dispute or put up a wall, to my mind, amounted to the same thing. THEY were the enemy - homosexuals, abortion clinic doctors, women who promoted abortion and the men who supported them, people who voted for politicians and parties that supported the gay revolution and a pro-choice platform - and nobody talked about loving those enemies or befriending them. They were to be opposed, resisted and, inevitably, shunned. You didn't go to their social events, you didn't attend their rallies and listen to what they had to say, you did not hang with them.
This cold shoulder was not the Jesus way. But a certain kind of church-taught Christian way.
I was never comfortable with it. I felt un-me, un-myself, restricted in who I could like and who I could love because of doctrine, philosophy, theology. But I thought, for a time, it was the way to go.
Now when I see this becoming increasingly more of a trend, not less, when people are being driven to adopt a kind of tribalism of sticking with and defending their own kind and not having anything to do with those whose allegiances are to other and often opposing tribes or factions, essentially at the expense not only of love and peace but also of truth, I realize it is well past time to stop taking sides and stand where Jesus stood - which was with everyone.
He had a freedom fighter who was opposed to Roman occupation among his closest companions, but he healed a Roman soldier's servant.
A Jewish man was not supposed to be alone with a woman, let alone a woman with a reputation for sexual promiscuity, but he did it anyway at the well in Samaria.
Biblical law said to stone and kill a woman (or man) who had engaged in extra-marital sex. He wouldn't do it. Instead, he defended the accused and saved her life.
He made the enemies of the Jews, the Samaritans, the heroes in his story about a Samaritan saving a Jew's life when other Jews wouldn't even save it.
When people rejected him and his teaching his friends wanted to call down fire from God and kill them. Jesus not only vehemently said no, but was upset with them for even suggesting the idea.
He forgave the people who killed him, a mix of Italians and Israelis, and not only them, but all of us, the whole human race replete with kindnesses and replete with cruelties.
So when you look at Jesus you see something and someone completely unlike intolerance or shunning, utterly unlike unfriendliness, unkindness, nonacceptance, a lack of openness, a lack of empathy, a lack of love.
Christian teaching, based on the New Testament, says to look at Jesus is to look at the face of God.
If that is what Christians believe, perhaps Jesus is the one who should be telling us how to treat those who are different than us and who oppose us rather than church groups and religious organizations and denominations. Not that they can't point us to Jesus. It's just that, in this day and age where there is such a sense of warfare between different faith groups and political parties, when there is so much polarization within many of our nations and communities, it seems to be harder to find those who make Jesus more important than their human leaders and their agendas.
For myself, it's time to stop flirting with intolerance, unkindness and hatred that goes under other names (commitment, devotion, faithfulness) and get back to the Jesus way, the Jesus stance, the Jesus heart.
Not wanting to call myself a Christian because the word means very little in terms of Jesus himself anymore, I have in the past called myself an incarnational theist, admittedly a mouthful of a phrase, and a Christwalker.
Time to walk the walk again.
cold sweat
Now and then I have this concern that the right wing of Islam will join up with the right wing of Christianity and create a movement, a theology and a political party.
After all, they agree on many of the same things that appear to irk them about the present world order.
First of all, they - the religious, ultraconservative right - are not in control of the world and everyone in it. That seems to be the primary bone of contention.
Then, in this world they do not have control of, there are all sorts of people who are not Christian (or the right kind of Christian) or Muslim (or the right sort of Muslim).
To top it all off, in this world there are now gays running around with the full protection of their governments, practicing their lifestyles and getting married, there are women who are working out of the home and doing things like practicing medicine, practicing law, running corporations and, horror of horrors, teaching religion and theology to men.
Women can have abortions whenever they want. Marry whoever they want. Ignore religious practices if they want.
Who is going to put a stop to this?
Who is going to put an end to fornication and adultery? Pornography? Sex trade employment? Infidelity and divorce? Drug abuse and alcoholism?
We already know how some of this is dealt with in Islamic republics. We already know how the Taliban deal with these issues. In the old days, when the religion was the state and the state was religious, Christians got away with the same things - stoning, decapitation, torture, mutilation, drowning, burning, crushing to death under great weight - you name it, Christian states employed it in the name of God to make sure the state stayed, supposedly, pure and Christlike. But the democracies of the West eventually separated church from state and made sure people couldn't be punished or executed for offending religious sensibilities any longer.
A great gain in some people's eyes, a great loss in others' eyes.
For Christians who have always seen it as loss, finding common ground with another religion that has never separated faith from state - allowing all kinds of people in the 21st century to be punished and executed for having bad theology or for violating religious commandments - looks and sounds like a great idea.
Instead of the old and liberating and gracious Judeo-Christian heritage they propose a new Islamic-Christian heritage that will put everybody in their place, and quickly, by the power of the sword of God.
No doubt this movement will work out something where people can convert to Islam or, a violation of shariah law, Christianity, but everything else will not need to be contested. All sorts of religious people think freedom of press, speech, and belief have gone too far, in addition to such nonsense as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
When someone mentions to me that studies indicate Christians have left Christianity because there is not enough control, and measures are not stern enough, and joined Islam it does not surprise me.
Jesus is not the same Jesus in Islam as he is in the Christian gospel, but why should that trouble any ex-Christian who wants to be part of the right wing element of a faith that won't put up with leniency for adulterers, prostitutes, homosexuals and women who overstep their bounds? Jesus is not quoted much nowadays in many Christian circles except as a rubber stamp to heaven. His emphases on love and mercy and forgiveness and inclusiveness are out of touch with the times. It's much better to quote other writers in the New Testament and infinitely preferable to quote those in the Old Testament who wrote long before Jesus showed up and reinterpreted everything.
For the Christian, the Old Testament is meant to be something to learn from but not to live by.
But some modern elements of Christianity have turned this around. We should live by the Old Testament laws and learn a little from Jesus on the side.
They are quick to point out, "Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. That's what we're looking for, a way to bring those laws back and fulfill them!"
What they don't want to discuss is how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament law - by expanding it in mercy and grace and compassion and scope. "You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist an evil person, if they slap you on the right cheek, let them do it on the left as well. You have heard it said, love your neighbour and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." This does not mix well with shariah law or Old Testament law. So, in order to bring about any right wing amalgamation that puts God back in control of the planet, Jesus will have to be left out of the limelight for a while - still honoured, but off to the side a bit, just for now. What counts is the law. What counts is control.
That's why it's not hard to believe some Christians are joining an Islam that emphasizes the law because that's already where a lot of Christianity is or is headed. That's also why, if I wake up in a cold sweat at the idea of a merger of right wing Christianity with right wing Islam, it isn't that far-fetched. A marriage of convenience that will bring about a world governed by law and by God (or at least certain people's interpretation of law and vision of God) might appeal to many who feel like everything is spinning out of control and tough measures are required to bring Earth back in line with God's will.
For myself, I prefer Jesus and his words and attitude, and I prefer to look at everything in the Old Testament, New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, in fact everything in the world, through Jesus' words and through Jesus' eyes.
But not everyone wants to go there anymore. Not even every Christian wants to go there. We're in a time of war and in a time of war certain other portions of the Holy Book, unaltered by the philosophy of Jesus, need to be brought to the fore.
That's what those parts of the Bible are there for, aren't they? To supersede Jesus in the darkest of times? Like declaring martial law?
I only know that John the apostle claimed that the law came with Moses but grace and truth came with the Jesus Christ.
I also know that Jesus, in documents as reliable as any others that have been preserved from antiquity and often a lot more reliable, said to love our neighbour as much as we love ourselves.
That still seems to be the hardest thing to do.
Especially for people who are religious and who claim to know God.
After all, they agree on many of the same things that appear to irk them about the present world order.
First of all, they - the religious, ultraconservative right - are not in control of the world and everyone in it. That seems to be the primary bone of contention.
Then, in this world they do not have control of, there are all sorts of people who are not Christian (or the right kind of Christian) or Muslim (or the right sort of Muslim).
To top it all off, in this world there are now gays running around with the full protection of their governments, practicing their lifestyles and getting married, there are women who are working out of the home and doing things like practicing medicine, practicing law, running corporations and, horror of horrors, teaching religion and theology to men.
Women can have abortions whenever they want. Marry whoever they want. Ignore religious practices if they want.
Who is going to put a stop to this?
Who is going to put an end to fornication and adultery? Pornography? Sex trade employment? Infidelity and divorce? Drug abuse and alcoholism?
We already know how some of this is dealt with in Islamic republics. We already know how the Taliban deal with these issues. In the old days, when the religion was the state and the state was religious, Christians got away with the same things - stoning, decapitation, torture, mutilation, drowning, burning, crushing to death under great weight - you name it, Christian states employed it in the name of God to make sure the state stayed, supposedly, pure and Christlike. But the democracies of the West eventually separated church from state and made sure people couldn't be punished or executed for offending religious sensibilities any longer.
A great gain in some people's eyes, a great loss in others' eyes.
For Christians who have always seen it as loss, finding common ground with another religion that has never separated faith from state - allowing all kinds of people in the 21st century to be punished and executed for having bad theology or for violating religious commandments - looks and sounds like a great idea.
Instead of the old and liberating and gracious Judeo-Christian heritage they propose a new Islamic-Christian heritage that will put everybody in their place, and quickly, by the power of the sword of God.
No doubt this movement will work out something where people can convert to Islam or, a violation of shariah law, Christianity, but everything else will not need to be contested. All sorts of religious people think freedom of press, speech, and belief have gone too far, in addition to such nonsense as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
When someone mentions to me that studies indicate Christians have left Christianity because there is not enough control, and measures are not stern enough, and joined Islam it does not surprise me.
Jesus is not the same Jesus in Islam as he is in the Christian gospel, but why should that trouble any ex-Christian who wants to be part of the right wing element of a faith that won't put up with leniency for adulterers, prostitutes, homosexuals and women who overstep their bounds? Jesus is not quoted much nowadays in many Christian circles except as a rubber stamp to heaven. His emphases on love and mercy and forgiveness and inclusiveness are out of touch with the times. It's much better to quote other writers in the New Testament and infinitely preferable to quote those in the Old Testament who wrote long before Jesus showed up and reinterpreted everything.
For the Christian, the Old Testament is meant to be something to learn from but not to live by.
But some modern elements of Christianity have turned this around. We should live by the Old Testament laws and learn a little from Jesus on the side.
They are quick to point out, "Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. That's what we're looking for, a way to bring those laws back and fulfill them!"
What they don't want to discuss is how Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament law - by expanding it in mercy and grace and compassion and scope. "You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you, do not resist an evil person, if they slap you on the right cheek, let them do it on the left as well. You have heard it said, love your neighbour and hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." This does not mix well with shariah law or Old Testament law. So, in order to bring about any right wing amalgamation that puts God back in control of the planet, Jesus will have to be left out of the limelight for a while - still honoured, but off to the side a bit, just for now. What counts is the law. What counts is control.
That's why it's not hard to believe some Christians are joining an Islam that emphasizes the law because that's already where a lot of Christianity is or is headed. That's also why, if I wake up in a cold sweat at the idea of a merger of right wing Christianity with right wing Islam, it isn't that far-fetched. A marriage of convenience that will bring about a world governed by law and by God (or at least certain people's interpretation of law and vision of God) might appeal to many who feel like everything is spinning out of control and tough measures are required to bring Earth back in line with God's will.
For myself, I prefer Jesus and his words and attitude, and I prefer to look at everything in the Old Testament, New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, in fact everything in the world, through Jesus' words and through Jesus' eyes.
But not everyone wants to go there anymore. Not even every Christian wants to go there. We're in a time of war and in a time of war certain other portions of the Holy Book, unaltered by the philosophy of Jesus, need to be brought to the fore.
That's what those parts of the Bible are there for, aren't they? To supersede Jesus in the darkest of times? Like declaring martial law?
I only know that John the apostle claimed that the law came with Moses but grace and truth came with the Jesus Christ.
I also know that Jesus, in documents as reliable as any others that have been preserved from antiquity and often a lot more reliable, said to love our neighbour as much as we love ourselves.
That still seems to be the hardest thing to do.
Especially for people who are religious and who claim to know God.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
why write?
If a church - and perhaps this happens at mosques, temples, synagogues, shrines and at gatherings for atheists and agnostics too - if a church talks about doing something important in its community you can be sure one thing that will never come up will be art.
Soup kitchens? Food banks? Study groups? Special speakers from out of town? Seminars on marriage? Grief counseling? Helping friends through a divorce? Raising teenagers? Prayer, meditation, critical thinking? Programs for youth? Programs for seniors? Programs for college students? Understanding the Bible or the Koran or the Torah or the Bhagavad Gita or the Book of Mormon or Das Kapital or Betrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian?
Sure.
But outside of a gathering of university faculty or students or a group of artists, no one says, "Hey, how can we get better art out into the community, stories that entertain but that also make people think, paintings that mean something, better music, better dance, better film? How can we support those that write, draw, sculpt, do ballet or modern dance, act on stage, make films?"
Yet all of us are affected powerfully by what we read in print or online, the movies or DVDs or television stories we watch, beautiful paintings or photographs, powerful theatre.
So what's the deal?
All my life I've been used to churches asking, "Okay, how are we going to reach this community? How are we going to bless it? How are we going to make a difference?" There are plans for free car washes, friendship evangelism, Christian block parties or rock concerts or Christian films. Never do they talk about writers or photographers or painters or sculptors or actors.
I guess making a difference in a community almost never involves the artists that shape culture in the real world on a daily basis.
I've always loved to write short stories. But most Christians, apparently, don't read short stories, so the Christian publishers will not publish them. Yet in the world outside the church, at places like Borders and Amazon and Chapters and Barnes & Noble, short story collections abound. It's one of the voices of the people of the earth. Except in the evangelical Christian subculture.
I've always liked to write stories in a longer format, i.e., novels. But again, most Christians, apparently, won't read them so Christian publishers won't publish them. Oh, they'll publish Christian versions of Harlequin romances, prairie romances, Amish romances. But not novels as good as The Chosen or Cider House Rules or War and Peace or Message in a Bottle or All Quiet on the Western Front - which I can find outside the Christian bookstore in the same places I find the collections of short stories.
I've always loved poetry, but guess what? Books of serious poetry - like the kind created by John Donne or Robert Frost or Walt Whitman or W.B. Yeats or Dylan Thomas or T.S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins or Emily Dickinson - well, they aren't published by Christian publishers either and they aren't sold in Christian bookstores either, apparently because Christians can't get past the cutesy rhyming greeting card verses that pass for poetry in churches - but which don't pass for poetry in the world outside the church doors where books of deep and thoughtful and meaningful poems are a staple of existence in colleges and universities and at Amazon, Chapters and Barnes & Noble. People who aren't locked up in churches read deep poetry and wonder about life and death and faith.
So who needs me? Especially when a car wash really makes a difference in the world and a good book or story doesn't?
Well, first of all, for me, as a theist and Christwalker, God gave us a book of stories, of poetry, of drama, and that shows me he has a place for writers, not to mention poets, not to mention the sculptors and painters and makers of art he rates favourably in his own book, a book of art which they sell plenty of in Christian book stores.
Secondly, all my life God has kept opening doors for writing and publishing, regardless of the fact that to really bring life into a community, according to churches, what you need are food banks and sports programs. God has told me otherwise for half a century and I doubt this Person, who is an Artist of Artists, is ever going to tell me writing is a second rate way of serving God or the human race.
Thirdly, guess what? Not all Christians are squeezed into the anti-art jelly mould. Millions of Christians, who are not defined as evangelicals but who believe in God and in Jesus in a big way, care about novels and short stories and poetry and painting and music that is other than pop or rock. I found that out in Toronto last March when the Orthodox Ukrainian Christian community gathered to honour writers and poets and I was blessed to be there. I had more affirmation as an artist and writer in one night in that Orthodox setting than I've had in a lifetime in churches and Christian schools, with a few notable exceptions.
Fourthly, as I've just alluded, some evangelicals do care about creating and they do care about art and artists and they do think art matters as much to a person as food or drink or a youth group or a well-scrubbed Ford pickup. Because if you're going to eat and drink to live, what are you going to live for? And if you need a clean car, where are you going to drive to with it? And if art doesn't matter and neither do the people who make it, then why do you have a Bible, why do you go to movies and buy DVDs, why do you listen to music, why do you go to pop concerts (where all the songs are nothing more than poetry put to guitars and drums)?
Fifthly, if the evangelical Christians or Muslims or Hindus or atheists don't want to read, there are plenty of other spiritual people who do. In fact, there are plenty of other non-spiritual people who do. So I can write for them.
Finally, just a caution, even a warning, especially for Christians who, in a culture surrounded by various forms of art, don't think it matters. In the past, it was not so. Christians in Europe did amazing things in the sciences AND the arts. Look at the paintings of the great masters. Look at the sculptures. Look at the novels and poetry. Look at the classical music. Even in the 20th century, look at what Tolkien gave God and the world or C.S. Lewis or Tolstoy or T.S. Eliot or Graham Greene or Anthony Burgess or . . .
A people that do not have a poetry or a literature do not have a voice.
A people that do not express themselves in art and spirit do not have a presence.
A people that do not embrace depth will grow increasingly shallow and irrelevant.
A people that do not create in the colours and mysteries and complexities and deep simplicities God creates in will cease to exist.
Support your local artist. If you are a Christian, begin to bring these women and men seriously and intentionally into your prayers and plans along with missionaries and pastors and youth leaders and evangelists and food banks, youth programs and Christian rock concerts and movie nights.
If you are spiritual but not a Christian, do art within your own spaces and gatherings and beliefs.
If you are an atheist or agnostic, steer away from art as propaganda that you have scorned in many religious settings. Instead, let it be what it should always be, an exploration of the human experience and a quest to find the truth and understand it.
Christians, non-Christians, those of you who embrace theism and those who do not, those who run with the supernatural and those who are indifferent to it - make room for the artist, the writer, the dancer, the painter, the photographer - make room for the deep creations of the deep creators and their ever-deepening journey to discover, finally, the deepest truth.
The world you save may be your own.
Soup kitchens? Food banks? Study groups? Special speakers from out of town? Seminars on marriage? Grief counseling? Helping friends through a divorce? Raising teenagers? Prayer, meditation, critical thinking? Programs for youth? Programs for seniors? Programs for college students? Understanding the Bible or the Koran or the Torah or the Bhagavad Gita or the Book of Mormon or Das Kapital or Betrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian?
Sure.
But outside of a gathering of university faculty or students or a group of artists, no one says, "Hey, how can we get better art out into the community, stories that entertain but that also make people think, paintings that mean something, better music, better dance, better film? How can we support those that write, draw, sculpt, do ballet or modern dance, act on stage, make films?"
Yet all of us are affected powerfully by what we read in print or online, the movies or DVDs or television stories we watch, beautiful paintings or photographs, powerful theatre.
So what's the deal?
All my life I've been used to churches asking, "Okay, how are we going to reach this community? How are we going to bless it? How are we going to make a difference?" There are plans for free car washes, friendship evangelism, Christian block parties or rock concerts or Christian films. Never do they talk about writers or photographers or painters or sculptors or actors.
I guess making a difference in a community almost never involves the artists that shape culture in the real world on a daily basis.
I've always loved to write short stories. But most Christians, apparently, don't read short stories, so the Christian publishers will not publish them. Yet in the world outside the church, at places like Borders and Amazon and Chapters and Barnes & Noble, short story collections abound. It's one of the voices of the people of the earth. Except in the evangelical Christian subculture.
I've always liked to write stories in a longer format, i.e., novels. But again, most Christians, apparently, won't read them so Christian publishers won't publish them. Oh, they'll publish Christian versions of Harlequin romances, prairie romances, Amish romances. But not novels as good as The Chosen or Cider House Rules or War and Peace or Message in a Bottle or All Quiet on the Western Front - which I can find outside the Christian bookstore in the same places I find the collections of short stories.
I've always loved poetry, but guess what? Books of serious poetry - like the kind created by John Donne or Robert Frost or Walt Whitman or W.B. Yeats or Dylan Thomas or T.S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins or Emily Dickinson - well, they aren't published by Christian publishers either and they aren't sold in Christian bookstores either, apparently because Christians can't get past the cutesy rhyming greeting card verses that pass for poetry in churches - but which don't pass for poetry in the world outside the church doors where books of deep and thoughtful and meaningful poems are a staple of existence in colleges and universities and at Amazon, Chapters and Barnes & Noble. People who aren't locked up in churches read deep poetry and wonder about life and death and faith.
So who needs me? Especially when a car wash really makes a difference in the world and a good book or story doesn't?
Well, first of all, for me, as a theist and Christwalker, God gave us a book of stories, of poetry, of drama, and that shows me he has a place for writers, not to mention poets, not to mention the sculptors and painters and makers of art he rates favourably in his own book, a book of art which they sell plenty of in Christian book stores.
Secondly, all my life God has kept opening doors for writing and publishing, regardless of the fact that to really bring life into a community, according to churches, what you need are food banks and sports programs. God has told me otherwise for half a century and I doubt this Person, who is an Artist of Artists, is ever going to tell me writing is a second rate way of serving God or the human race.
Thirdly, guess what? Not all Christians are squeezed into the anti-art jelly mould. Millions of Christians, who are not defined as evangelicals but who believe in God and in Jesus in a big way, care about novels and short stories and poetry and painting and music that is other than pop or rock. I found that out in Toronto last March when the Orthodox Ukrainian Christian community gathered to honour writers and poets and I was blessed to be there. I had more affirmation as an artist and writer in one night in that Orthodox setting than I've had in a lifetime in churches and Christian schools, with a few notable exceptions.
Fourthly, as I've just alluded, some evangelicals do care about creating and they do care about art and artists and they do think art matters as much to a person as food or drink or a youth group or a well-scrubbed Ford pickup. Because if you're going to eat and drink to live, what are you going to live for? And if you need a clean car, where are you going to drive to with it? And if art doesn't matter and neither do the people who make it, then why do you have a Bible, why do you go to movies and buy DVDs, why do you listen to music, why do you go to pop concerts (where all the songs are nothing more than poetry put to guitars and drums)?
Fifthly, if the evangelical Christians or Muslims or Hindus or atheists don't want to read, there are plenty of other spiritual people who do. In fact, there are plenty of other non-spiritual people who do. So I can write for them.
Finally, just a caution, even a warning, especially for Christians who, in a culture surrounded by various forms of art, don't think it matters. In the past, it was not so. Christians in Europe did amazing things in the sciences AND the arts. Look at the paintings of the great masters. Look at the sculptures. Look at the novels and poetry. Look at the classical music. Even in the 20th century, look at what Tolkien gave God and the world or C.S. Lewis or Tolstoy or T.S. Eliot or Graham Greene or Anthony Burgess or . . .
A people that do not have a poetry or a literature do not have a voice.
A people that do not express themselves in art and spirit do not have a presence.
A people that do not embrace depth will grow increasingly shallow and irrelevant.
A people that do not create in the colours and mysteries and complexities and deep simplicities God creates in will cease to exist.
Support your local artist. If you are a Christian, begin to bring these women and men seriously and intentionally into your prayers and plans along with missionaries and pastors and youth leaders and evangelists and food banks, youth programs and Christian rock concerts and movie nights.
If you are spiritual but not a Christian, do art within your own spaces and gatherings and beliefs.
If you are an atheist or agnostic, steer away from art as propaganda that you have scorned in many religious settings. Instead, let it be what it should always be, an exploration of the human experience and a quest to find the truth and understand it.
Christians, non-Christians, those of you who embrace theism and those who do not, those who run with the supernatural and those who are indifferent to it - make room for the artist, the writer, the dancer, the painter, the photographer - make room for the deep creations of the deep creators and their ever-deepening journey to discover, finally, the deepest truth.
The world you save may be your own.
Monday, November 01, 2010
in the midst of war we find an oasis it created
An excerpt from the chapter VESPERS in the (incomplete & unpublished) sequel to ZO:
“We are something special here,” Zhanna Yeva added one evening while I stood among the communicants, but did not partake. “The Germans and Ukrainians are at peace with one another in this place. Our Soviet prisoners, whether Russian or from some other part of the USSR, are fed and clothed and given medical treatment. We do not work them to death. They worship with us, embrace the God of Love just as the rest of us do. We have Jews here, do we not? Sometimes Roma pass through or remain among trees for weeks at a time only a few hundred metres from the village. Catholics rub shoulders with Orthodox, Orthodox pray alongside Uniate, Jew blesses Lutheran and Lutheran kisses Jew. High church take the cup and bread of Christ with low church. Or no church. Even those who believe this world is nothing more than our hands and our minds and the grass beneath our feet have a home in Mir. You do not have to be anything to live amongst us. Only kind. And for those who believe there is something more than what our fingers touch and our eyes take in, we only ask you to choose to see God everywhere and among everyone – even our enemies. Such a choice does not mean we permit our enemy to destroy who and what we love. Yet it must stem our blood from hatreds and cruelties even in the murk of shellfire and machine gun bullets.”
“We are something special here,” Zhanna Yeva added one evening while I stood among the communicants, but did not partake. “The Germans and Ukrainians are at peace with one another in this place. Our Soviet prisoners, whether Russian or from some other part of the USSR, are fed and clothed and given medical treatment. We do not work them to death. They worship with us, embrace the God of Love just as the rest of us do. We have Jews here, do we not? Sometimes Roma pass through or remain among trees for weeks at a time only a few hundred metres from the village. Catholics rub shoulders with Orthodox, Orthodox pray alongside Uniate, Jew blesses Lutheran and Lutheran kisses Jew. High church take the cup and bread of Christ with low church. Or no church. Even those who believe this world is nothing more than our hands and our minds and the grass beneath our feet have a home in Mir. You do not have to be anything to live amongst us. Only kind. And for those who believe there is something more than what our fingers touch and our eyes take in, we only ask you to choose to see God everywhere and among everyone – even our enemies. Such a choice does not mean we permit our enemy to destroy who and what we love. Yet it must stem our blood from hatreds and cruelties even in the murk of shellfire and machine gun bullets.”
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
the beginning of the thesis on what it means to be human
CHAPTER 1 – MAJOR PROPONENTS OF STRONG AI AND TRANSHUMANISM
I. INTRODUCTION
The field of research that is involved with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is generally divided into two categories: Weak AI and Strong AI. The terms originated in the work of John Searle, presently Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Searle felt he had to distinguish between the idea of AI that could achieve human intelligence and consciousness and AI that only looked like it could.
In practice, Weak AI has come to be used to define all the research and development in AI-related fields that is not attempting to emulate or surpass human intelligence: robotic vacuums, aircraft takeoff and landing software, computer-driven rocket systems, etc. For this reason, Weak AI is also called applied or narrow AI. Strong AI, on the other hand, is strictly used to denote AI that is attempting, basically, to create a nonbiological human with human intellect and self-awareness. This needs to be an AI that is not simply task or problem specific like narrow AI. It needs to be an AI that is competent in the area of general intelligence, thus a broad or all-encompassing AI. (It is often called Artificial General Intelligence or AGI due to this.) This attainment has eluded AI researchers ever since proper AI research began in the middle of the 20th century.
Transhumanism is a movement closely allied with the quest for human-level artificial intelligence. It promotes the enhancement of humans by means of technology as well as genetic engineering. The World Transhumanist Association defines itself as “an organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives.” A number of researchers believe Transhumanism will eventually merge with Strong AI to create future strains of nonbiological human intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick are three prominent leaders among the researchers who are predicting the attainment of human-level intelligence by machines well within the first half of the 21st century. Kurzweil and Warwick are also major proponents of Transhumanism and the eventual merger of enhanced humanity with artificial intelligence. Understanding their different approaches offers a helpful introduction to the field and to the evolution of this thesis: Kurzweil believes a fully nonbiological human can and will be created; Moravec believes a being that surpasses human intelligence will be created but that it will not be human; Warwick does not believe a fully nonbiological human will be created, but he does believe an intelligence will be produced that surpasses that of humans, so that the only way to save biological humanity is for it to interface with and remain in control of advanced artificial intelligence.
I have chosen Kurzweil, Moravec and Warwick as key figures to interact with in my thesis because of their prolific writing and publication, their high visibility in the Strong AI field, and their commonality as well as diversity of views which permits an in-depth discussion of numerous topics connected with AI research.
While exploring their views, I will be implicitly and explicitly working around the following questions (not necessarily in this order): 1) Is it possible to achieve human-level intelligence in a machine? 2) How soon will this take place? 3) Can a machine ever be considered a nonbiological human being? 4) How successful will Transhumanism be? 5) How can these goals be realistically achieved? 6) Are there any dangers inherent in Strong AI research? 7) What sort of ethical and metaphysical issues does this research raise?
What I will be looking for with regard to these questions, at this point, is primarily what their thinking is regarding the issues raised. I will interact with their responses from time-to-time, but my main concern is to ensure they speak for themselves about the topics surrounding Strong AI research.
With reference to question 7, I will be paying particular attention to the metaphysical issue of the human soul: What do AI researchers think about it, how do they define it, do they consider it a significant aspect of a human being, will a nonbiological human have a soul? This question of the human soul will be dealt with at length in Chapter 5, but it remains an important part of the debate about the creation of nonbiological humanity from the outset.
I. INTRODUCTION
The field of research that is involved with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is generally divided into two categories: Weak AI and Strong AI. The terms originated in the work of John Searle, presently Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Searle felt he had to distinguish between the idea of AI that could achieve human intelligence and consciousness and AI that only looked like it could.
In practice, Weak AI has come to be used to define all the research and development in AI-related fields that is not attempting to emulate or surpass human intelligence: robotic vacuums, aircraft takeoff and landing software, computer-driven rocket systems, etc. For this reason, Weak AI is also called applied or narrow AI. Strong AI, on the other hand, is strictly used to denote AI that is attempting, basically, to create a nonbiological human with human intellect and self-awareness. This needs to be an AI that is not simply task or problem specific like narrow AI. It needs to be an AI that is competent in the area of general intelligence, thus a broad or all-encompassing AI. (It is often called Artificial General Intelligence or AGI due to this.) This attainment has eluded AI researchers ever since proper AI research began in the middle of the 20th century.
Transhumanism is a movement closely allied with the quest for human-level artificial intelligence. It promotes the enhancement of humans by means of technology as well as genetic engineering. The World Transhumanist Association defines itself as “an organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives.” A number of researchers believe Transhumanism will eventually merge with Strong AI to create future strains of nonbiological human intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec and Kevin Warwick are three prominent leaders among the researchers who are predicting the attainment of human-level intelligence by machines well within the first half of the 21st century. Kurzweil and Warwick are also major proponents of Transhumanism and the eventual merger of enhanced humanity with artificial intelligence. Understanding their different approaches offers a helpful introduction to the field and to the evolution of this thesis: Kurzweil believes a fully nonbiological human can and will be created; Moravec believes a being that surpasses human intelligence will be created but that it will not be human; Warwick does not believe a fully nonbiological human will be created, but he does believe an intelligence will be produced that surpasses that of humans, so that the only way to save biological humanity is for it to interface with and remain in control of advanced artificial intelligence.
I have chosen Kurzweil, Moravec and Warwick as key figures to interact with in my thesis because of their prolific writing and publication, their high visibility in the Strong AI field, and their commonality as well as diversity of views which permits an in-depth discussion of numerous topics connected with AI research.
While exploring their views, I will be implicitly and explicitly working around the following questions (not necessarily in this order): 1) Is it possible to achieve human-level intelligence in a machine? 2) How soon will this take place? 3) Can a machine ever be considered a nonbiological human being? 4) How successful will Transhumanism be? 5) How can these goals be realistically achieved? 6) Are there any dangers inherent in Strong AI research? 7) What sort of ethical and metaphysical issues does this research raise?
What I will be looking for with regard to these questions, at this point, is primarily what their thinking is regarding the issues raised. I will interact with their responses from time-to-time, but my main concern is to ensure they speak for themselves about the topics surrounding Strong AI research.
With reference to question 7, I will be paying particular attention to the metaphysical issue of the human soul: What do AI researchers think about it, how do they define it, do they consider it a significant aspect of a human being, will a nonbiological human have a soul? This question of the human soul will be dealt with at length in Chapter 5, but it remains an important part of the debate about the creation of nonbiological humanity from the outset.
the beginning of the sequel to the novel ZO
The sun had been hung like a brass circle over the fields of grass and snow. A long line of vehicles crawled over the road that Brother Martin had plowed with the garden tractor, a straight road, and flat, like the roads of all prairies and plains and steppes, and one that took people right to the gate of the monastery.
The cars and trucks were dark. In them, Tanks and troop carriers had come the same way through snow and wheat 60 or 70 years before when I lived a different existence in a different century.
But these were not soldiers with guns and bombs and malevolent intent. These were musicians with cellos and violas and trumpets and timpani. These were women and men who wished to recreate and renew and replenish. Yet I could not ignore that they came in that long dark line, pulling the sky down with them. They were bringing more than music. They brought the long night. And of all the hours in the year and in a life, those which were most impenetrable.
The new abbot was very much in favour of my sister Zoya being declared a saint. He had flung open the doors of our chapel, with its perfect acoustics, for works that had been commissioned in her honour. The musicians were here to make official recordings of those works. They knew her brother was at the Trappist monastery. Whether they would recognize him as the one with his hood up and leaning on a snow shovel was another matter. In the hard red granite of the sun’s fall, as they drove towards our gates, drove implacably as fate or divine will, I prayed I would be missed and forgotten in the turbulence of rehearsals, miles of black cord, microphone stands and violins being tuned to perfection.
The Vatican had phoned. There were still some unanswered questions. Some gaps. Would I – Andrii, Brother Nahum – be available for the Holy Father’s personal emissary? Could the abbot place him at Archbishop Frederick’s disposal? They scarcely needed to ask. The new abbot would do whatever was necessary - and more. How opportune, how blessed, that the retinue from Rome would arrive during the celebration of the Holy Nativity, exactly when the recordings of the sacred music written for Zoya were to be done. The abbot saw God’s hand in all of it.
Dom Alexander, the abbot who had died, would have shielded me as much as he could from the prying and probing. The new one simply threw me to the wolves. He did not understand, nor would he support, my reluctance. I had taken a vow of obedience. It was up to me to get on with it.
The cars rolled past where I stood. I saw the faces of the musicians and the sound people and the producers, the long-haired women and sometimes long-haired men, the large black cases that held basses and harps and drums. I expect they thought I looked strange and medieval in my monastic garb, my hood peaked like a steeple. No stranger than God or life itself, I said to them without moving my lips.
The archbishop would come in the same way down the same road. His cars would also be dark. They had been the first time. Perhaps he would be in a foul mood because the devil’s advocate had picked apart his case for my sister’s canonization. Or perhaps he would have made peace with his disappointment and be as calm as a windless prairie. He might even be glad to see me, though that was doubtful. We had not left on the best of terms the summer before.
I walked away from exhaust fumes that rose like river mist in the ice of the evening air. Three, four, five stars had appeared overhead. The shovel was in my right hand and I pushed back my cowl with the left. I welcomed the sting of the night.
Come then, your grace, I whispered to the sky, to the last flash of light, to the white road streaked with the dark stripes of tires, I find I am surprisingly eager to see you, to talk of that other life I knew as a young man, that terrible life. Perhaps it will be a confession that releases me. Perhaps it will be a revelation and I will see what I have never seen before. Perhaps it will be a resurrection and I will live again. Perhaps it will permit me to lay my old bones on my bed one final time and die a good death. I have no idea. But I am not reluctant or obstinate or afraid. Come quickly, your grace. I will not be hard to find. I stand at the great gate of Kyiv.
The cars and trucks were dark. In them, Tanks and troop carriers had come the same way through snow and wheat 60 or 70 years before when I lived a different existence in a different century.
But these were not soldiers with guns and bombs and malevolent intent. These were musicians with cellos and violas and trumpets and timpani. These were women and men who wished to recreate and renew and replenish. Yet I could not ignore that they came in that long dark line, pulling the sky down with them. They were bringing more than music. They brought the long night. And of all the hours in the year and in a life, those which were most impenetrable.
The new abbot was very much in favour of my sister Zoya being declared a saint. He had flung open the doors of our chapel, with its perfect acoustics, for works that had been commissioned in her honour. The musicians were here to make official recordings of those works. They knew her brother was at the Trappist monastery. Whether they would recognize him as the one with his hood up and leaning on a snow shovel was another matter. In the hard red granite of the sun’s fall, as they drove towards our gates, drove implacably as fate or divine will, I prayed I would be missed and forgotten in the turbulence of rehearsals, miles of black cord, microphone stands and violins being tuned to perfection.
The Vatican had phoned. There were still some unanswered questions. Some gaps. Would I – Andrii, Brother Nahum – be available for the Holy Father’s personal emissary? Could the abbot place him at Archbishop Frederick’s disposal? They scarcely needed to ask. The new abbot would do whatever was necessary - and more. How opportune, how blessed, that the retinue from Rome would arrive during the celebration of the Holy Nativity, exactly when the recordings of the sacred music written for Zoya were to be done. The abbot saw God’s hand in all of it.
Dom Alexander, the abbot who had died, would have shielded me as much as he could from the prying and probing. The new one simply threw me to the wolves. He did not understand, nor would he support, my reluctance. I had taken a vow of obedience. It was up to me to get on with it.
The cars rolled past where I stood. I saw the faces of the musicians and the sound people and the producers, the long-haired women and sometimes long-haired men, the large black cases that held basses and harps and drums. I expect they thought I looked strange and medieval in my monastic garb, my hood peaked like a steeple. No stranger than God or life itself, I said to them without moving my lips.
The archbishop would come in the same way down the same road. His cars would also be dark. They had been the first time. Perhaps he would be in a foul mood because the devil’s advocate had picked apart his case for my sister’s canonization. Or perhaps he would have made peace with his disappointment and be as calm as a windless prairie. He might even be glad to see me, though that was doubtful. We had not left on the best of terms the summer before.
I walked away from exhaust fumes that rose like river mist in the ice of the evening air. Three, four, five stars had appeared overhead. The shovel was in my right hand and I pushed back my cowl with the left. I welcomed the sting of the night.
Come then, your grace, I whispered to the sky, to the last flash of light, to the white road streaked with the dark stripes of tires, I find I am surprisingly eager to see you, to talk of that other life I knew as a young man, that terrible life. Perhaps it will be a confession that releases me. Perhaps it will be a revelation and I will see what I have never seen before. Perhaps it will be a resurrection and I will live again. Perhaps it will permit me to lay my old bones on my bed one final time and die a good death. I have no idea. But I am not reluctant or obstinate or afraid. Come quickly, your grace. I will not be hard to find. I stand at the great gate of Kyiv.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
the ESV Bible
Though it's more fun to read the New testament in Greek - and the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures too, since the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible is what Jesus used and the early Church too (the LXX or Septuagint), I like to read in English as well. I suppose, over the years, I've preached most of my messages from the NIV, but I have spent time with the NEB (now the REB), the NRSV, the Good News Bible (I'm dating myself), the JB Phillips translation, The Message, yes, even the Elizabethan era's KJV. A number of people have been talking up the ESV, and since that translation is being widely used in the American South where I will be preaching in a little over a week, I decided to check it out.
Okay, let's cut to the quick. To my ears, the ESV has a stately cadence, religious and ceremonial. There is a slight stiffness to it, it does not flow like other English translations - there is a reason for that, its literal approach to translating from the Greek and Hebrew. I can live with this. Unfortunately, the translators have the annoying habit of tossing in words like BEHOLD and BE GONE and LEST and TRULY, I SAY TO YOU and O! O! O! Now why would they do this unless they had an express purpose of very obviously connecting with 1611? No one in the 21st century runs around saying BEHOLD or BE GONE or TRULY, I SAY TO YOU. They didn't in the 1st century either in Israel. But they did in Shakespeare's time.
I intend to read the whole translation and give it it's due. I will preach from it in the South as well. But I shudder that I might be treated to gems like STIFF-NECKED PEOPLE when I wander into the Old Testament. Already I was looking up Ezekiel 22:30 and instead of "stand in the gap" I got "stand in the breach"! Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! Henry V, where chunks of this Bible belong.
Instead of BEHOLD why not say something real world like LOOK! Instead of TRULY, I SAY TO YOU why not say something comprehensible to this present generation such as LISTEN, I'M TELLING YOU or HONESTLY, I HAVE TO TELL YOU! The ESV seems fine for people that hang out in a church culture and like to use different grammar, syntax, vocabulary and voice when they're at a service - in other words, religious-ese or Christianese - but it's not great for helping newcomers understand you don't have to get all formal and religious in your language when you're worshiping or praying or talking about God.
With all the hype I was expecting something better than an anachronism but that is what the ESV is. Personally, the only way I can enjoy it - accepting its rather more ceremonial sound that echoes with the courts of King James and Elizabeth I and the stages of William Shakespeare - is to mentally drop those dreadful 400 year old prefixes like BEHOLD! and O! and BE GONE! - or verbally drop them if I'm reading out loud. If I do that, I can enjoy myself. Otherwise I'm happier in the Greek which is far more dynamic and contemporary than the ESV.
Look, there is no way this is a NEW translation. It's clearly in the KJV, ASV, RSV family line. And if you like that, have at her. I'm not here to say NAY to the ESV the way one of its editors, Wayne Grudem, said NAY to the TNIV (which, by the way, translates John 1:18 far better than the ESV). Only, please, don't tell new Christians they have to talk like the ESV in order to talk to God and please don't tell them words like BEHOLD and LEST and TRULY, I SAY are the way you talk when you get really spiritual. (And don't tell them it was the way Jesus talked on earth or the way angels talk now as if those frozen-in-time expressions are the real spiritual thing.) I was hoping we'd left all this behind or at least left it in the hands of the KJV worshipers.
The notes for the ESV Study Bible are quite good - they don't treat you like an imbecile and they have some good things to say, even some deep things to say that involve the original languages. And, as I said, though I'm more of a dynamic equivalency sort of guy, I can enjoy the more stately rhythms of the ESV within reason. But O! those jarring 17th century pet expressions. Why? Why on earth would you make a translation for the 21st century and deliberately put those back in? Go ahead, read the translation without them and you'll find you don't miss them, in fact, to my ear, dropping them vastly improves the translation and takes it from a 3.5 to a 4+
So enjoy it if it's your thing. But, to me, it leaves a lot to be desired, is not a big breakthrough translation and sounds a lot like other literal translations I read a long time ago when there were few other good contemporary English options out there. I'll read it, God will use it in my life, but I am waiting with even greater anticipation now for the 2011 NIV, which will give me something I can really celebrate (I hope) and which is tied into 2011 and beyond, not 1611 and ne'er another foot forward if we can help it, m'lord.
Sorry, Wayne.
Okay, let's cut to the quick. To my ears, the ESV has a stately cadence, religious and ceremonial. There is a slight stiffness to it, it does not flow like other English translations - there is a reason for that, its literal approach to translating from the Greek and Hebrew. I can live with this. Unfortunately, the translators have the annoying habit of tossing in words like BEHOLD and BE GONE and LEST and TRULY, I SAY TO YOU and O! O! O! Now why would they do this unless they had an express purpose of very obviously connecting with 1611? No one in the 21st century runs around saying BEHOLD or BE GONE or TRULY, I SAY TO YOU. They didn't in the 1st century either in Israel. But they did in Shakespeare's time.
I intend to read the whole translation and give it it's due. I will preach from it in the South as well. But I shudder that I might be treated to gems like STIFF-NECKED PEOPLE when I wander into the Old Testament. Already I was looking up Ezekiel 22:30 and instead of "stand in the gap" I got "stand in the breach"! Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! Henry V, where chunks of this Bible belong.
Instead of BEHOLD why not say something real world like LOOK! Instead of TRULY, I SAY TO YOU why not say something comprehensible to this present generation such as LISTEN, I'M TELLING YOU or HONESTLY, I HAVE TO TELL YOU! The ESV seems fine for people that hang out in a church culture and like to use different grammar, syntax, vocabulary and voice when they're at a service - in other words, religious-ese or Christianese - but it's not great for helping newcomers understand you don't have to get all formal and religious in your language when you're worshiping or praying or talking about God.
With all the hype I was expecting something better than an anachronism but that is what the ESV is. Personally, the only way I can enjoy it - accepting its rather more ceremonial sound that echoes with the courts of King James and Elizabeth I and the stages of William Shakespeare - is to mentally drop those dreadful 400 year old prefixes like BEHOLD! and O! and BE GONE! - or verbally drop them if I'm reading out loud. If I do that, I can enjoy myself. Otherwise I'm happier in the Greek which is far more dynamic and contemporary than the ESV.
Look, there is no way this is a NEW translation. It's clearly in the KJV, ASV, RSV family line. And if you like that, have at her. I'm not here to say NAY to the ESV the way one of its editors, Wayne Grudem, said NAY to the TNIV (which, by the way, translates John 1:18 far better than the ESV). Only, please, don't tell new Christians they have to talk like the ESV in order to talk to God and please don't tell them words like BEHOLD and LEST and TRULY, I SAY are the way you talk when you get really spiritual. (And don't tell them it was the way Jesus talked on earth or the way angels talk now as if those frozen-in-time expressions are the real spiritual thing.) I was hoping we'd left all this behind or at least left it in the hands of the KJV worshipers.
The notes for the ESV Study Bible are quite good - they don't treat you like an imbecile and they have some good things to say, even some deep things to say that involve the original languages. And, as I said, though I'm more of a dynamic equivalency sort of guy, I can enjoy the more stately rhythms of the ESV within reason. But O! those jarring 17th century pet expressions. Why? Why on earth would you make a translation for the 21st century and deliberately put those back in? Go ahead, read the translation without them and you'll find you don't miss them, in fact, to my ear, dropping them vastly improves the translation and takes it from a 3.5 to a 4+
So enjoy it if it's your thing. But, to me, it leaves a lot to be desired, is not a big breakthrough translation and sounds a lot like other literal translations I read a long time ago when there were few other good contemporary English options out there. I'll read it, God will use it in my life, but I am waiting with even greater anticipation now for the 2011 NIV, which will give me something I can really celebrate (I hope) and which is tied into 2011 and beyond, not 1611 and ne'er another foot forward if we can help it, m'lord.
Sorry, Wayne.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
the world war against the jews (part 2)
Here is another important post I am passing along regarding the irrationality of a growing global antagonism towards Israel and the Jews:
Saborami65@aol.com
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 23:21:53 -0400
Subject: It's long--But Fantastic Article about the Jews- we are sick of moving!!!
Here’s the thing. I’ve been thinking about poor Helen Thomas, who I believe was probably just saying what everyone thinks and has therefore been made a scapegoat. Not that I really care, because we ought to share the scapegoat status once in a while. It’s the least we can do to dispel the stereotype that we are stingy, us irritating Jews.
Irritating enough, apparently – like the too-talented and bossy fame-hog Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) on Fox’s Glee – in our discovery of the written word, monotheism, modern physics, psychology, vaccinations, and the film industry, that every country that has ever “hosted” us has found it necessary to tell us to get the hell out, like Thomas did. (Ironically, the aforementioned Jewish character Rachel, in a particularly annoying moment in one episode, was told by classmates to move to Israel. I doubt the writers coordinated this telling joke – Jews do equal Israel in the eyes of the world, sorry J Street - with the State Department.)
Anywho. Helen, you know why we were in Germany and much of Eastern Europe in the first place? (And by the way, if I follow your advice, do you think the nice old ladies who got my grandmothers’ large houses and farms from theNazis in what was once Czechoslovakia will kick the property back two generations? That would be cool because I’d love a vineyard and an agricultural estate.)
…We were in Germany and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Russia (where we were regularly just plain killed by Cossacks), and also, for many centuries, Poland (ditto), cuz we were told to get the hell out of England, France, andSpain. (Or, you know, just plain killed by handsome and heroic fairytale knights.)
And you know why we were in Western Europe to begin with? Cuz we were told by the Greeks and the Romans – wait for it – to get the hell out of “Palestine,” where we had been living since the beginning of recorded history.
We also ended up in Babylonia (Iraq) and other Middle Eastern and North African countries, where we stayed as second class citizens for hundreds and hundreds of years, till the Arab world finally caught up with the pagans and theChristians in their hatred of the Jews. Amazing how the student has now far surpassed the teacher. But I digress.
(By the way, I am aware that the Arab narrative has us Ashkenazi Jews as descendants of the Khazars, but the actual facts have it different. See this new DNA study linking European Jews with their Middle Eastern counterparts, all stemming from one original population of Holy Land Jews predating Roman times. Never mind our own texts that say the same thing; I know they are inadmissible in the international courts of the mind.)
In any event, there is no way around it: Jews being asked (usually not by old ladies on the White House lawn) to get the hell out of anywhere and everywhere is just the way it goes.
So it came to pass that about 200 years BCE the Macabees got sick of it and established a Jewish state in Palestine, within the Roman Empire, which lasted till about the time of Jesus (another Pesky Jew) and the destruction of the Second Temple.
And it also came to pass that Jewish settlers began arriving in Ottoman Palestine in the late 1800’s, after the Russians and the Poles made it clear that Jews were persona non grata in Eastern Europe. Palestine was as good a place as any to escape to, since it was the last place, about 2000 years before, that the Jews had a sovereign state (see above). Never mind Jewish liturgy and texts pining for Jerusalem, since I know these, too, are inadmissible in the international courts of the mind.
Anyway, nowhere else wanted European Jews any more than Russia did, not even America really, where there were very strict quotas, although the Americans, again politely, refrained from all the messy European killing, which was apparently in vogue until after Hitler. Besides, those Ottoman Turks, as now, were known around the world for their amazing human rights activism and the Jews were excited to see it first hand. (No, not really. But anyway…they were better than the Polish peasants. Unless you were Armenian.)
It is true that there were people in Palestine before the Jews arrived en masse (for there was always a handful of Jews that remained here….), not *A People*, but rather a group of assorted regional Arabs (think Native American tribes in North America…who by the way were treated much worse by the Colonialists…) who had settled the area with not much agricultural success and had endured various rulers over the millennia.
But when the *Jews* came back, it was suddenly necessary, once again, to tell them to get the hell out. There was no living side by side, even though that was an express Jewish desire right up until 1947/8, when the Partition Plan was summarily rejected by the Arab League, who started the war that Israel won. If keeping land you win in a war others provoke (when you wanted to make peace) is called occupation, Helen, the world’s axis of furious justice has a lot bigger fish to fry than shitty little Israel.
The Arab desire to kick the Jews the hell out of Palestine did not begin in 1967, and not in 1948. It began the moment the initial groups of Jews arrived and started to make the land flower and produce crops.
That’s when the attacks on Jews began, and when the Arab world decided a new Jewish presence in the land would not do, back when there were about half a million Arabs and just under 100,000 Jews in the Holy Land, in the early 1900’s. 20% was too much, apparently, to bear. (The Hebron Massacre of 1929, where marauding Arabs killed nearly 70 Jews and wounded countless others, took place long before a single house was built over the Green Line.)
I can only imagine how awful it was – probably for both the Arabs and the British – when it became clear we were here to stay and grow to much further percentages. We are that annoying, what with trying to get rid of malaria and tuberculosis and everything.
At any rate, it seems that every time a Jewish minority starts to make a society too successful – so annoying!!!! – the indigenous people start to feel very uncomfortable, and tells them one way or another to get the hell out.
But now, alas, there is nowhere left for us to go, except the eternal place Ahmadinejad wants us to go, and Haniyeh and Nasralla, and Hitler before them, and Chemilniki before him, and Haman before him, and so on. And, I suspect, in her heart of hearts, perhaps Thomas and the likes of her, who, the pesky Jew Freud may have observed, seriously let her slip show.
Let me make it clear: I know that Israel has made mistakes over its 62 years, some clumsy and inept (was there no intelligence regarding the terrorists aboard the Mavi Marmara?!?), and some borderline immoral. But none worse than every other democracy on earth has also done, and most much better than the large majority of the UN rogue nations which condemn Israel daily have done…daily.
There is MUCH to improve in the way we govern, I will be the first to say it. I will also be the first to say that various Jews of the Bernie Madoff and Greed-is-Good-Goldman-Sachs ilk make me want to crawl under a rock. I know that the world is only waiting for these guys to emerge in order to pin their crimes on all of us, even though everything they do is in direct contradiction of actual Jewish values.
But let’s be honest: the international community’s human rights crusades on behalf of the Palestinians are just the latest Crusades, and the ones who REALLY suffer are not the Jews or the Israelis but the poor occupants of the Third World who are ignored while the enlightened First World castigates the Jews… and yes, of course, the Palestinians, who are kept in misery *by their own leadership* in order to provide the polite Jew haters with a media club to beat them with.
So here’s the thing: We are not going anywhere this time, Helen. We totally get it: Ya’ll pretty much hate us. It’s just the way it is, like a natural law. Nothing we can do – not giving away pieces of Palestine / Israel (witness our evacuation of Gaza in 2005, and handing over the keys to army bases and greenhouses- a new economy!
Food for the children! – which were summarily torched as property of the infidels); not donating billions annually to global charity, nor discovering a cure for Polio or the
Theory of Relativity, or writing revered legal and religious texts, or co-founding Google, or manufacturing the microprocessor in the majority of laptops that spew Jew hatred to the Internet, or founding Christianity itself, or championing women’s rights and gay rights in the US and helping to bring about a *human rights revolution* in America in the 60’s - None of those things will absolve us of our real sin: Existing and overcoming.
I’m really sorry they told you to get the hell out of the White House, Helen. It really wasn’t your fault that you thought you could say what you said. It’s not like it’s a secret: That’s what people think.
But this time, seriously. Getting the hell out is not in the cards. We’re just sick of moving all the time.
I know. Irritating.
Saborami65@aol.com
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2010 23:21:53 -0400
Subject: It's long--But Fantastic Article about the Jews- we are sick of moving!!!
Here’s the thing. I’ve been thinking about poor Helen Thomas, who I believe was probably just saying what everyone thinks and has therefore been made a scapegoat. Not that I really care, because we ought to share the scapegoat status once in a while. It’s the least we can do to dispel the stereotype that we are stingy, us irritating Jews.
Irritating enough, apparently – like the too-talented and bossy fame-hog Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) on Fox’s Glee – in our discovery of the written word, monotheism, modern physics, psychology, vaccinations, and the film industry, that every country that has ever “hosted” us has found it necessary to tell us to get the hell out, like Thomas did. (Ironically, the aforementioned Jewish character Rachel, in a particularly annoying moment in one episode, was told by classmates to move to Israel. I doubt the writers coordinated this telling joke – Jews do equal Israel in the eyes of the world, sorry J Street - with the State Department.)
Anywho. Helen, you know why we were in Germany and much of Eastern Europe in the first place? (And by the way, if I follow your advice, do you think the nice old ladies who got my grandmothers’ large houses and farms from theNazis in what was once Czechoslovakia will kick the property back two generations? That would be cool because I’d love a vineyard and an agricultural estate.)
…We were in Germany and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Russia (where we were regularly just plain killed by Cossacks), and also, for many centuries, Poland (ditto), cuz we were told to get the hell out of England, France, andSpain. (Or, you know, just plain killed by handsome and heroic fairytale knights.)
And you know why we were in Western Europe to begin with? Cuz we were told by the Greeks and the Romans – wait for it – to get the hell out of “Palestine,” where we had been living since the beginning of recorded history.
We also ended up in Babylonia (Iraq) and other Middle Eastern and North African countries, where we stayed as second class citizens for hundreds and hundreds of years, till the Arab world finally caught up with the pagans and theChristians in their hatred of the Jews. Amazing how the student has now far surpassed the teacher. But I digress.
(By the way, I am aware that the Arab narrative has us Ashkenazi Jews as descendants of the Khazars, but the actual facts have it different. See this new DNA study linking European Jews with their Middle Eastern counterparts, all stemming from one original population of Holy Land Jews predating Roman times. Never mind our own texts that say the same thing; I know they are inadmissible in the international courts of the mind.)
In any event, there is no way around it: Jews being asked (usually not by old ladies on the White House lawn) to get the hell out of anywhere and everywhere is just the way it goes.
So it came to pass that about 200 years BCE the Macabees got sick of it and established a Jewish state in Palestine, within the Roman Empire, which lasted till about the time of Jesus (another Pesky Jew) and the destruction of the Second Temple.
And it also came to pass that Jewish settlers began arriving in Ottoman Palestine in the late 1800’s, after the Russians and the Poles made it clear that Jews were persona non grata in Eastern Europe. Palestine was as good a place as any to escape to, since it was the last place, about 2000 years before, that the Jews had a sovereign state (see above). Never mind Jewish liturgy and texts pining for Jerusalem, since I know these, too, are inadmissible in the international courts of the mind.
Anyway, nowhere else wanted European Jews any more than Russia did, not even America really, where there were very strict quotas, although the Americans, again politely, refrained from all the messy European killing, which was apparently in vogue until after Hitler. Besides, those Ottoman Turks, as now, were known around the world for their amazing human rights activism and the Jews were excited to see it first hand. (No, not really. But anyway…they were better than the Polish peasants. Unless you were Armenian.)
It is true that there were people in Palestine before the Jews arrived en masse (for there was always a handful of Jews that remained here….), not *A People*, but rather a group of assorted regional Arabs (think Native American tribes in North America…who by the way were treated much worse by the Colonialists…) who had settled the area with not much agricultural success and had endured various rulers over the millennia.
But when the *Jews* came back, it was suddenly necessary, once again, to tell them to get the hell out. There was no living side by side, even though that was an express Jewish desire right up until 1947/8, when the Partition Plan was summarily rejected by the Arab League, who started the war that Israel won. If keeping land you win in a war others provoke (when you wanted to make peace) is called occupation, Helen, the world’s axis of furious justice has a lot bigger fish to fry than shitty little Israel.
The Arab desire to kick the Jews the hell out of Palestine did not begin in 1967, and not in 1948. It began the moment the initial groups of Jews arrived and started to make the land flower and produce crops.
That’s when the attacks on Jews began, and when the Arab world decided a new Jewish presence in the land would not do, back when there were about half a million Arabs and just under 100,000 Jews in the Holy Land, in the early 1900’s. 20% was too much, apparently, to bear. (The Hebron Massacre of 1929, where marauding Arabs killed nearly 70 Jews and wounded countless others, took place long before a single house was built over the Green Line.)
I can only imagine how awful it was – probably for both the Arabs and the British – when it became clear we were here to stay and grow to much further percentages. We are that annoying, what with trying to get rid of malaria and tuberculosis and everything.
At any rate, it seems that every time a Jewish minority starts to make a society too successful – so annoying!!!! – the indigenous people start to feel very uncomfortable, and tells them one way or another to get the hell out.
But now, alas, there is nowhere left for us to go, except the eternal place Ahmadinejad wants us to go, and Haniyeh and Nasralla, and Hitler before them, and Chemilniki before him, and Haman before him, and so on. And, I suspect, in her heart of hearts, perhaps Thomas and the likes of her, who, the pesky Jew Freud may have observed, seriously let her slip show.
Let me make it clear: I know that Israel has made mistakes over its 62 years, some clumsy and inept (was there no intelligence regarding the terrorists aboard the Mavi Marmara?!?), and some borderline immoral. But none worse than every other democracy on earth has also done, and most much better than the large majority of the UN rogue nations which condemn Israel daily have done…daily.
There is MUCH to improve in the way we govern, I will be the first to say it. I will also be the first to say that various Jews of the Bernie Madoff and Greed-is-Good-Goldman-Sachs ilk make me want to crawl under a rock. I know that the world is only waiting for these guys to emerge in order to pin their crimes on all of us, even though everything they do is in direct contradiction of actual Jewish values.
But let’s be honest: the international community’s human rights crusades on behalf of the Palestinians are just the latest Crusades, and the ones who REALLY suffer are not the Jews or the Israelis but the poor occupants of the Third World who are ignored while the enlightened First World castigates the Jews… and yes, of course, the Palestinians, who are kept in misery *by their own leadership* in order to provide the polite Jew haters with a media club to beat them with.
So here’s the thing: We are not going anywhere this time, Helen. We totally get it: Ya’ll pretty much hate us. It’s just the way it is, like a natural law. Nothing we can do – not giving away pieces of Palestine / Israel (witness our evacuation of Gaza in 2005, and handing over the keys to army bases and greenhouses- a new economy!
Food for the children! – which were summarily torched as property of the infidels); not donating billions annually to global charity, nor discovering a cure for Polio or the
Theory of Relativity, or writing revered legal and religious texts, or co-founding Google, or manufacturing the microprocessor in the majority of laptops that spew Jew hatred to the Internet, or founding Christianity itself, or championing women’s rights and gay rights in the US and helping to bring about a *human rights revolution* in America in the 60’s - None of those things will absolve us of our real sin: Existing and overcoming.
I’m really sorry they told you to get the hell out of the White House, Helen. It really wasn’t your fault that you thought you could say what you said. It’s not like it’s a secret: That’s what people think.
But this time, seriously. Getting the hell out is not in the cards. We’re just sick of moving all the time.
I know. Irritating.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
the world war against the jews
Some still have morals, like Pilar Rahola:
Pilar Rahola is a Spanish politician, journalist and activist and member of the far left. Her articles are published in Spain and throughout some of the most important newspapers in Latin America.
She says:
"Why don't we see demonstrations against Islamic dictatorships in London, Paris, Barcelona ?
Or demonstrations against the Burmese dictatorship?
Why aren't there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection?
Why aren't there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs?
Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of Islamic dictatorship in Sudan ?
Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel ?
Why is there no outcry by the European left against Islamic fanaticism?
Why don't they defend Israel 's right to exist?
Why confuse support of the Palestinian cause with the defense of Palestinian terrorism?
And finally, the million dollar question: Why is the left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the left doesn't care.
And then, to the concept of freedom. In every pro Palestinian European forum, I hear the left yelling with fervor: "We want freedom for the people!"
Not true. They are never concerned with freedom for the people of Syria , or Yemen , or Iran , or Sudan , or other such nations. And they are never preoccupied when Hammas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. The resulting consequence of these ideological pathologies is the manipulation of the press.
The international press does major damage when reporting on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. On this topic they don't inform, they propagandize.
When reporting about Israel , the majority of journalists forget the reporter code of ethics. And so, any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide. So many stupid things have been written about Israel , that there aren't any accusations left to level against her.
At the same time, this press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel ; the indoctrination of children and the corruption of the Palestinians. And when reporting about victims, every Palestinian casualty is reported as tragedy and every Israeli victim is camouflaged, hidden or reported about with disdain.
And let me add on the topic of the Spanish left. Many are the examples that illustrate the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments that define the Spanish left. For example, one of the leftist parties in Spain has just expelled one of its members for creating a pro-Israel website. I quote from the expulsion document: "Our friends are the people of Iran , Libya and Venezuela , oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel ."
In another example, the socialist mayor of Campozuelos changed Shoah Day, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, with Palestinian Nabka Day, which mourns the establishment of the State of Israel, thus showing contempt for the six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Or in my native city of Barcelona , the city council decided to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, by having a week of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus, they invited Leila Khaled, a noted terrorist from the 70's and current leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization so described by the European Union, which promotes the use of bombs against Israel .
This politically correct way of thinking has even polluted the speeches of president Zapatero. His foreign policy falls within the lunatic left, and on issues of the Middle East , he is unequivocally pro Arab. I can assure you that in private, Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East , and the policies of foreign minister Moratinos reflect this. The fact that Zapatero chose to wear a kafiah in the midst of the Lebanon conflict is no coincidence; it is a symbol.
Spain has suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe and it is in the crosshairs of every Islamic terrorist organization. As I wrote before, they kill us with cell phones hooked to satellites connected to the Middle Ages.
And yet the Spanish left is the most anti Israeli in the world.
And then it says it is anti Israeli because of solidarity. This is the madness I want to denounce in this conference.
Conclusion:
I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not anti-Israeli like my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel . To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.
As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles.
Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty, I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too."
Pilar Rahola is a Spanish politician, journalist and activist and member of the far left. Her articles are published in Spain and throughout some of the most important newspapers in Latin America.
She says:
"Why don't we see demonstrations against Islamic dictatorships in London, Paris, Barcelona ?
Or demonstrations against the Burmese dictatorship?
Why aren't there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection?
Why aren't there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs?
Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of Islamic dictatorship in Sudan ?
Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel ?
Why is there no outcry by the European left against Islamic fanaticism?
Why don't they defend Israel 's right to exist?
Why confuse support of the Palestinian cause with the defense of Palestinian terrorism?
And finally, the million dollar question: Why is the left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the left doesn't care.
And then, to the concept of freedom. In every pro Palestinian European forum, I hear the left yelling with fervor: "We want freedom for the people!"
Not true. They are never concerned with freedom for the people of Syria , or Yemen , or Iran , or Sudan , or other such nations. And they are never preoccupied when Hammas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. The resulting consequence of these ideological pathologies is the manipulation of the press.
The international press does major damage when reporting on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. On this topic they don't inform, they propagandize.
When reporting about Israel , the majority of journalists forget the reporter code of ethics. And so, any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide. So many stupid things have been written about Israel , that there aren't any accusations left to level against her.
At the same time, this press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel ; the indoctrination of children and the corruption of the Palestinians. And when reporting about victims, every Palestinian casualty is reported as tragedy and every Israeli victim is camouflaged, hidden or reported about with disdain.
And let me add on the topic of the Spanish left. Many are the examples that illustrate the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments that define the Spanish left. For example, one of the leftist parties in Spain has just expelled one of its members for creating a pro-Israel website. I quote from the expulsion document: "Our friends are the people of Iran , Libya and Venezuela , oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel ."
In another example, the socialist mayor of Campozuelos changed Shoah Day, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, with Palestinian Nabka Day, which mourns the establishment of the State of Israel, thus showing contempt for the six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Or in my native city of Barcelona , the city council decided to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, by having a week of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus, they invited Leila Khaled, a noted terrorist from the 70's and current leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization so described by the European Union, which promotes the use of bombs against Israel .
This politically correct way of thinking has even polluted the speeches of president Zapatero. His foreign policy falls within the lunatic left, and on issues of the Middle East , he is unequivocally pro Arab. I can assure you that in private, Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East , and the policies of foreign minister Moratinos reflect this. The fact that Zapatero chose to wear a kafiah in the midst of the Lebanon conflict is no coincidence; it is a symbol.
Spain has suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe and it is in the crosshairs of every Islamic terrorist organization. As I wrote before, they kill us with cell phones hooked to satellites connected to the Middle Ages.
And yet the Spanish left is the most anti Israeli in the world.
And then it says it is anti Israeli because of solidarity. This is the madness I want to denounce in this conference.
Conclusion:
I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not anti-Israeli like my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel . To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.
As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles.
Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty, I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too."
Monday, May 31, 2010
a world less spiritual?
When lethal and dangerous things happen because of religious people - suicide bombings, wars, book burnings, hate marches - there is always a group of people, or many groups of people, who call for religions to be banned.
As if that would solve all the major problems of the human race.
In the first place, not all wars and hate marches and other serious issues are caused by religious people. Atheists are pretty good at instigating wars in promoting their own doctrines and agendas, for instance, and so are agnostics. Consider Communist and atheist North Korea. Banning religion might please them. But it would not stop their lethal and aggressive inclinations.
In the second place, suppose you could ban all religions? People would remain with their hunger to know and understand the mystery of human life and the creation of our planet and the universe. Who would satisfy that craving? Well, others would with their own ideas and philosophical systems. They might claim to be atheists. But they would still be taking on the role of priests. It would be religion all over again just in different robes. In their own way they would be seeking to help people find the meaning of life and the universe and their purpose. Some of these new priests might even become god-like in their inclinations and authority.
But in the third place, you can no more ban religion than ban the inhalation of oxygen. Or ban sex. Or ban alcohol. People will find a way. Ask those who lived through the 70 years of the USSR whether Moscow was successful in banning religion. Ask them if the Kremlin succeeded in eliminating the need for faith and the spiritual quest. Ask them if Christianity ceased to exist.
Ask China.
Ask North Korea, come to think of it. Not that we'll get the truth on the matter out of Pyongyang. But I guarantee you they have not eliminated all religious faith though I'm sure they have tried hard.
People have sought religious and spiritual explanations from the beginning of the human race's ability to wonder and imagine. Archaeologists tell us they have found evidence of the quest. So do anthropologists. Religion and the spiritual cannot be banned because hearts and minds and thought cannot be banned. Soul and spirit cannot be banned. The quest to know cannot be banned. It does not matter what you believe or refuse to believe. It does not matter if you do not care about religion. There are many others who believe differently than you, people who are religious, and they cannot all be silenced or eliminated.
Those who cry for the banning of religion because of the damage they see religion can do conveniently forget about the good religion can do. They forget about the Martin Luther Kings, the Mother Teresas, the Francis of Assisis.
Yet most importantly they forget it appears to be endemic to the human race.
It will not go away. There will always be bad religion and good religion just as there will always be bad atheists and good atheists. Atheism is part of the religious equation too.
It is not a world, despite the crime and immorality and intolerance, that is less spiritual that we see in the 21st century.
People are still looking for God.
They look for a Messiah.
They look for a special Word, a Logos.
They are on a quest. Many of them. All of them, really, all of us. Some of us do not call it a quest and some of us do not call it religious.
But we are looking for the meaning of life and life after death and the meaning of creation.
And by whatever name we call it, it is still spiritual.
The world is as spiritual a place as it has ever been. And the people who live here are just as desperate for answers, for hope, for purpose, for light.
Nothing has changed in that regard for thousands of years.
It will never change.
How can it, if it really becomes clear to all one day that spirituality, from beginning to end, is the essence of our existence as human beings?
As if that would solve all the major problems of the human race.
In the first place, not all wars and hate marches and other serious issues are caused by religious people. Atheists are pretty good at instigating wars in promoting their own doctrines and agendas, for instance, and so are agnostics. Consider Communist and atheist North Korea. Banning religion might please them. But it would not stop their lethal and aggressive inclinations.
In the second place, suppose you could ban all religions? People would remain with their hunger to know and understand the mystery of human life and the creation of our planet and the universe. Who would satisfy that craving? Well, others would with their own ideas and philosophical systems. They might claim to be atheists. But they would still be taking on the role of priests. It would be religion all over again just in different robes. In their own way they would be seeking to help people find the meaning of life and the universe and their purpose. Some of these new priests might even become god-like in their inclinations and authority.
But in the third place, you can no more ban religion than ban the inhalation of oxygen. Or ban sex. Or ban alcohol. People will find a way. Ask those who lived through the 70 years of the USSR whether Moscow was successful in banning religion. Ask them if the Kremlin succeeded in eliminating the need for faith and the spiritual quest. Ask them if Christianity ceased to exist.
Ask China.
Ask North Korea, come to think of it. Not that we'll get the truth on the matter out of Pyongyang. But I guarantee you they have not eliminated all religious faith though I'm sure they have tried hard.
People have sought religious and spiritual explanations from the beginning of the human race's ability to wonder and imagine. Archaeologists tell us they have found evidence of the quest. So do anthropologists. Religion and the spiritual cannot be banned because hearts and minds and thought cannot be banned. Soul and spirit cannot be banned. The quest to know cannot be banned. It does not matter what you believe or refuse to believe. It does not matter if you do not care about religion. There are many others who believe differently than you, people who are religious, and they cannot all be silenced or eliminated.
Those who cry for the banning of religion because of the damage they see religion can do conveniently forget about the good religion can do. They forget about the Martin Luther Kings, the Mother Teresas, the Francis of Assisis.
Yet most importantly they forget it appears to be endemic to the human race.
It will not go away. There will always be bad religion and good religion just as there will always be bad atheists and good atheists. Atheism is part of the religious equation too.
It is not a world, despite the crime and immorality and intolerance, that is less spiritual that we see in the 21st century.
People are still looking for God.
They look for a Messiah.
They look for a special Word, a Logos.
They are on a quest. Many of them. All of them, really, all of us. Some of us do not call it a quest and some of us do not call it religious.
But we are looking for the meaning of life and life after death and the meaning of creation.
And by whatever name we call it, it is still spiritual.
The world is as spiritual a place as it has ever been. And the people who live here are just as desperate for answers, for hope, for purpose, for light.
Nothing has changed in that regard for thousands of years.
It will never change.
How can it, if it really becomes clear to all one day that spirituality, from beginning to end, is the essence of our existence as human beings?
late night music with felix mendelssohn
One of the great things about growing up in Winnipeg is the arts.
I well remember the first time I went to the symphony. The gleam of the brass section, the rich wood of the stringed instruments, the black dress of the musicians, this and all the other instruments such as drums, a harp, oboes and a piano, it all combined to give me an overwhelming sense of beauty and anticipation.
The first album my brother gave me as a gift (he is an artist and teaches at the University of Manitoba) was not The Rolling Stones, though we both liked the band, but Bella Bartok. It was an LP. On the flip side was Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. Though I knew the regular tunes we're all supposed to know when it comes to classical music (The Moonlight Sonata, Fur Elise, The Beautiful Blue Danube, The Nutcracker, The 1812 Overture, etc.) I did not know Bartok or Stravinsky. The album opened up new worlds of the senses and the imagination.
I have hundreds of classical CDs now. I was just listening, for instance, to Rachmaninov's Vespers, a piece I have used to help get me in the mood for writing a novel set in mid-20th century Russia and Ukraine. If I walk over to one of my stashes of classical CDs, which is arranged in alphabetical order in a tower, I come pretty quickly to Bach, one of my favourite composers (someone many of us might never have known but for Felix Mendelssohn introducing his works to the world).
I used to think, well, one rendering of a piece is sufficient. If I haul out my CDs of Bach's unaccompanied cello suites you see an interpretation by Janos Starker done in his golden years, magnificent, my current favourite. But I liked Yo Yo's early interpretation too (I gave the double set to a friend who could not afford a copy but not before I downloaded it into my iTunes). I have Peter Wispelwey's take on it. Also Haimovitz with his three disc set (because he plays at a slower tempo). I want to get Gastinel and Queyras (his treatment of Britten's unaccompanied is marvelous). So you see? This makes me, I fear, something of an audiophile.
Pianists? The list would be too long. But in Bach you see Angela Hewitt and Glenn Gould whose version of The Goldberg Variations (the slow one made just before his death) is still the one I prefer. If we glance over all of the CDs we see Lang Lang and Argerich and Aimard and Volodos. And violinists. And trumpet players. And different conductors doing different interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius and Shostakovich.
Okay, enough already. My point? People have different takes on the Bible and we need to listen to them before we agree or disagree. People prefer different translations of the Bible - I enjoy The Message but I have a friend in BC who teaches English Lit who detests it. So? Make room for Gould and Hewitt and Aimard. On my shelf I also have JB Phillip's translation of the New Testament, made for his young people while London was being blown to bits in World war Two, still a fine rendering in my opinion. There is the NEB and the REB and the ESV and NRSV and the NIV and . . . yes, some in Greek and Hebrew as well. They all have their place but I prefer some over others just as I do in my classical music.
But I'm not blogging this just as an appeal to variety in Biblical translations or to ask others to respect a friend's opinions or a stranger's views when it comes to Biblical interpretation or the arts.
I'm saying YES to classical music. It's deep, complex, melodic, all-enveloping, overwhelming and extremely satisfying. I've already blogged about how I enjoy other forms of music, such as the blues. If I can be caught up in jazz or the blues and then come along and get caught up in Prokofiev's wonderfully intense piano pieces, why can't a few more of us? Hey, I open a drawer at my computer desk here, right now (events occur in real time, Kiefer) and there is Ryan Bingham nestled up to Steve Earle who is cozy with GKB (Glenn Kaiser Band) and shoulder to shoulder with them all is Rachmaninov and Shostakovich and Stravinsky. Why not? It's all good.
But classical takes you to some incredible places and I fear, in this day and age, a lot of it is being lost and forgotten just as Bach was for 150 years until Mendelssohn brought the stuff out of hiding and touched a million souls.
Classical remains soul music today. Try some at your local Soft Classic Cafe and see how it goes down. Want something with even more fire and darkness and breaking light? The Hard Classic Cafe is just down the street.
It can take you to another galaxy and back. But not back as the same listener.
I well remember the first time I went to the symphony. The gleam of the brass section, the rich wood of the stringed instruments, the black dress of the musicians, this and all the other instruments such as drums, a harp, oboes and a piano, it all combined to give me an overwhelming sense of beauty and anticipation.
The first album my brother gave me as a gift (he is an artist and teaches at the University of Manitoba) was not The Rolling Stones, though we both liked the band, but Bella Bartok. It was an LP. On the flip side was Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. Though I knew the regular tunes we're all supposed to know when it comes to classical music (The Moonlight Sonata, Fur Elise, The Beautiful Blue Danube, The Nutcracker, The 1812 Overture, etc.) I did not know Bartok or Stravinsky. The album opened up new worlds of the senses and the imagination.
I have hundreds of classical CDs now. I was just listening, for instance, to Rachmaninov's Vespers, a piece I have used to help get me in the mood for writing a novel set in mid-20th century Russia and Ukraine. If I walk over to one of my stashes of classical CDs, which is arranged in alphabetical order in a tower, I come pretty quickly to Bach, one of my favourite composers (someone many of us might never have known but for Felix Mendelssohn introducing his works to the world).
I used to think, well, one rendering of a piece is sufficient. If I haul out my CDs of Bach's unaccompanied cello suites you see an interpretation by Janos Starker done in his golden years, magnificent, my current favourite. But I liked Yo Yo's early interpretation too (I gave the double set to a friend who could not afford a copy but not before I downloaded it into my iTunes). I have Peter Wispelwey's take on it. Also Haimovitz with his three disc set (because he plays at a slower tempo). I want to get Gastinel and Queyras (his treatment of Britten's unaccompanied is marvelous). So you see? This makes me, I fear, something of an audiophile.
Pianists? The list would be too long. But in Bach you see Angela Hewitt and Glenn Gould whose version of The Goldberg Variations (the slow one made just before his death) is still the one I prefer. If we glance over all of the CDs we see Lang Lang and Argerich and Aimard and Volodos. And violinists. And trumpet players. And different conductors doing different interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius and Shostakovich.
Okay, enough already. My point? People have different takes on the Bible and we need to listen to them before we agree or disagree. People prefer different translations of the Bible - I enjoy The Message but I have a friend in BC who teaches English Lit who detests it. So? Make room for Gould and Hewitt and Aimard. On my shelf I also have JB Phillip's translation of the New Testament, made for his young people while London was being blown to bits in World war Two, still a fine rendering in my opinion. There is the NEB and the REB and the ESV and NRSV and the NIV and . . . yes, some in Greek and Hebrew as well. They all have their place but I prefer some over others just as I do in my classical music.
But I'm not blogging this just as an appeal to variety in Biblical translations or to ask others to respect a friend's opinions or a stranger's views when it comes to Biblical interpretation or the arts.
I'm saying YES to classical music. It's deep, complex, melodic, all-enveloping, overwhelming and extremely satisfying. I've already blogged about how I enjoy other forms of music, such as the blues. If I can be caught up in jazz or the blues and then come along and get caught up in Prokofiev's wonderfully intense piano pieces, why can't a few more of us? Hey, I open a drawer at my computer desk here, right now (events occur in real time, Kiefer) and there is Ryan Bingham nestled up to Steve Earle who is cozy with GKB (Glenn Kaiser Band) and shoulder to shoulder with them all is Rachmaninov and Shostakovich and Stravinsky. Why not? It's all good.
But classical takes you to some incredible places and I fear, in this day and age, a lot of it is being lost and forgotten just as Bach was for 150 years until Mendelssohn brought the stuff out of hiding and touched a million souls.
Classical remains soul music today. Try some at your local Soft Classic Cafe and see how it goes down. Want something with even more fire and darkness and breaking light? The Hard Classic Cafe is just down the street.
It can take you to another galaxy and back. But not back as the same listener.
highway 61 south
In a few weeks I'll be flying into Jackson, Mississippi. Once there I'll be whisked off further south to places like Laurel and Soso and Hattiesburg. A friend is being ordained as a minister down there and he's asked me to do the ordination message. After that, I'm doing a series of evening messages based on chapters from my book STREAMS - this is kind of like a "deeper life" series of gatherings. And yes, I have thought about what I'm going to say, especially on the first evening which is the ordination: Jesus as healer, lover, warrior, God. Something like that.
I am a student of history so I'm not ignorant of Mississippi or the South's history. I know about the slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow and segregation, I know that Medgar Evers was killed in Jackson, I know about the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County in 1964.
I also know that the pain of Jim Crow and sharecropping and emancipation delayed brought the world the musical form known as the blues just as slavery brought the world black spirituals. I know that rock and pop music and probably a lot more came out of the blues. I know that Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and that he was heavily influenced by gospel music and the blues.
The Mississippi Delta, that is, the culture and reality and blues music that is the Mississippi Delta, begins on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I may not get to Memphis on this trip but I will get to Vicksburg. And I will not only be looking at the Civil War battlefield but hunting out whatever's left, if anything, of Catfish Row.
I know that Highway 61 South will take me through the heart of the Delta and I intend to drive on that road, suh.
But the biggest thing, really, is the friends I've made in Mississippi and Louisiana over the past five years. Church groups have come up three times to help us with youth work at our church of Heartland in Alberta (someone else got a hold of the name Graceland first). The cool thing is, all three times it was my pleasure to work with Bucky, the genial and energetic young man whose ordination I am going to preach in a few weeks.
First time he was newly married and they were living and serving people and God in Franklin, Louisiana. Second time too. Third time he was coming up from Britney Spear's hometown of Kentwood, Louisiana where he served in a church. He's in Mississippi now but on the way to the Delta he helped us make a lot of great friends with Southern accents. So yes, blues and Mississippi's dramatic history aside, I am a fortunate man because I am not taking Highway 61 South as a tourist but as someone who is visiting with friends. And not only visiting, but getting to do God and soul stuff with those friends as well.
I don't know if anyone from Mississippi reads my blogs, but if you do, hey, maybe we'll get a chance to meet. Drop me a line.
I'm looking forward to this. A lot. I remain grateful, oh yes, grateful is the word.
I am a student of history so I'm not ignorant of Mississippi or the South's history. I know about the slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow and segregation, I know that Medgar Evers was killed in Jackson, I know about the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County in 1964.
I also know that the pain of Jim Crow and sharecropping and emancipation delayed brought the world the musical form known as the blues just as slavery brought the world black spirituals. I know that rock and pop music and probably a lot more came out of the blues. I know that Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and that he was heavily influenced by gospel music and the blues.
The Mississippi Delta, that is, the culture and reality and blues music that is the Mississippi Delta, begins on Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I may not get to Memphis on this trip but I will get to Vicksburg. And I will not only be looking at the Civil War battlefield but hunting out whatever's left, if anything, of Catfish Row.
I know that Highway 61 South will take me through the heart of the Delta and I intend to drive on that road, suh.
But the biggest thing, really, is the friends I've made in Mississippi and Louisiana over the past five years. Church groups have come up three times to help us with youth work at our church of Heartland in Alberta (someone else got a hold of the name Graceland first). The cool thing is, all three times it was my pleasure to work with Bucky, the genial and energetic young man whose ordination I am going to preach in a few weeks.
First time he was newly married and they were living and serving people and God in Franklin, Louisiana. Second time too. Third time he was coming up from Britney Spear's hometown of Kentwood, Louisiana where he served in a church. He's in Mississippi now but on the way to the Delta he helped us make a lot of great friends with Southern accents. So yes, blues and Mississippi's dramatic history aside, I am a fortunate man because I am not taking Highway 61 South as a tourist but as someone who is visiting with friends. And not only visiting, but getting to do God and soul stuff with those friends as well.
I don't know if anyone from Mississippi reads my blogs, but if you do, hey, maybe we'll get a chance to meet. Drop me a line.
I'm looking forward to this. A lot. I remain grateful, oh yes, grateful is the word.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
the lady and the writer
With the publication of my novel ZO in December of 2008 and its inclusion as a finalist for the Kobzar Literary Award in Toronto last March, many people became interested in what this work of fiction was about. To many readers' surprise, it was the first in a trilogy, and they found this out when they were left hanging - somewhat - at the conclusion of ZO.
Since I currently live in a small town it was easy enough for a number of readers to track me down and ask questions about the story and, most importantly for many of them, ask when the second novel in the trilogy was coming out. When I told them, casually, "Oh, about two years," some of them flew into a passion: "Two years! How can you expect people to wait two years after an ending like that?"
Well, it takes time to write and then revise and then edit. Then it takes time to choose a cover and a blurb for the back cover, to get it printed and bound, get the ISBN stuff squared away, etc., etc. But even at that, with a number of other writing opportunities suddenly falling into my lap, I had to wonder when I would get around to writing the sequel to ZO. Would it actually be two years - would it be that fast? Or might it be three or four? At the back of my mind, I sometimes thought: So much is going on. Maybe it won't happen.
Then one day my wife, who is an RN, came home with her own tale to tell. One of her patients, an elderly lady, after making make sure that her nurse was also my wife, said to her: "Well, I want to read the next book. You tell that man of yours that I'm in my 90s and I don't have as long as he has to get around to it. He needs to get it done and get it published."
Humorous as the story is I can't imagine any writer not being affected by her roundabout plea that the story continue and, eventually, be properly completed. So now the sequel to ZO is well underway. At certain stages I have been at it 8-12 hours a day or more. At first I scarcely knew how to start the sequel. Now I can't get all the characters to stop talking at the kitchen table in my head. Idea after idea is gushing forth. It's what Frederick Buechner called an artesian well effect. At one point two weeks ago I was so tired from unending days of writing and word processing I thought I couldn't go any further - I was only human, not a machine. But a few days writing more slowly out of doors rejuvenated me. Now I'm back to running to keep up with my characters and their story. I even tried to stop at the beginning of April, right after Easter, with an "All right, that's enough for a bit, I need to look into some other writing projects." Immediately a new character was in my head, talking, right at me, and I agreed to put his words down for the beginning of the second part of the book, but no more than that.
Fat chance. That was 35,000 words ago.
He's not the only odd incident. I brought a woman military driver into the story just to have a woman military driver. Talk about trying to leash a panther. She's such an important part of the novel now I don't think I'll ever be able to let her go. This happened with another person I brought in with the idea they would need to be "killed off" a few thousand words later. Yeah, right. There is too much to them. They are obviously not going to be killed off a few thousand words down the line. Who knows if they will ever be?
This story has too much energy for me - almost. I've never quite run into this sort of extended depth and complexity and intensity with my fiction writing before. Oh, sure, there's been moments and seasons, but this has no let up. If I could go at it 24/7 without ever eating or sleeping and never losing my edge I might just be able to hold my own with this crew. As it is, I'm hanging on for the ride and my hair is streaming out behind me.
I'll get there. And every indication of re-reading is that it appears to be worth the trip.
I hope the lady thinks so too.
I'm shooting for a late fall or early 2011 publication date.
cheers
Since I currently live in a small town it was easy enough for a number of readers to track me down and ask questions about the story and, most importantly for many of them, ask when the second novel in the trilogy was coming out. When I told them, casually, "Oh, about two years," some of them flew into a passion: "Two years! How can you expect people to wait two years after an ending like that?"
Well, it takes time to write and then revise and then edit. Then it takes time to choose a cover and a blurb for the back cover, to get it printed and bound, get the ISBN stuff squared away, etc., etc. But even at that, with a number of other writing opportunities suddenly falling into my lap, I had to wonder when I would get around to writing the sequel to ZO. Would it actually be two years - would it be that fast? Or might it be three or four? At the back of my mind, I sometimes thought: So much is going on. Maybe it won't happen.
Then one day my wife, who is an RN, came home with her own tale to tell. One of her patients, an elderly lady, after making make sure that her nurse was also my wife, said to her: "Well, I want to read the next book. You tell that man of yours that I'm in my 90s and I don't have as long as he has to get around to it. He needs to get it done and get it published."
Humorous as the story is I can't imagine any writer not being affected by her roundabout plea that the story continue and, eventually, be properly completed. So now the sequel to ZO is well underway. At certain stages I have been at it 8-12 hours a day or more. At first I scarcely knew how to start the sequel. Now I can't get all the characters to stop talking at the kitchen table in my head. Idea after idea is gushing forth. It's what Frederick Buechner called an artesian well effect. At one point two weeks ago I was so tired from unending days of writing and word processing I thought I couldn't go any further - I was only human, not a machine. But a few days writing more slowly out of doors rejuvenated me. Now I'm back to running to keep up with my characters and their story. I even tried to stop at the beginning of April, right after Easter, with an "All right, that's enough for a bit, I need to look into some other writing projects." Immediately a new character was in my head, talking, right at me, and I agreed to put his words down for the beginning of the second part of the book, but no more than that.
Fat chance. That was 35,000 words ago.
He's not the only odd incident. I brought a woman military driver into the story just to have a woman military driver. Talk about trying to leash a panther. She's such an important part of the novel now I don't think I'll ever be able to let her go. This happened with another person I brought in with the idea they would need to be "killed off" a few thousand words later. Yeah, right. There is too much to them. They are obviously not going to be killed off a few thousand words down the line. Who knows if they will ever be?
This story has too much energy for me - almost. I've never quite run into this sort of extended depth and complexity and intensity with my fiction writing before. Oh, sure, there's been moments and seasons, but this has no let up. If I could go at it 24/7 without ever eating or sleeping and never losing my edge I might just be able to hold my own with this crew. As it is, I'm hanging on for the ride and my hair is streaming out behind me.
I'll get there. And every indication of re-reading is that it appears to be worth the trip.
I hope the lady thinks so too.
I'm shooting for a late fall or early 2011 publication date.
cheers
ROOTED & STREAMS
Two books of mine have been released from Zondervan over the past month.
One is entitled ROOTED, the other STREAMS.
ROOTED has a longer history. When I lived near Banff, Alberta, a famous tourist resort, I first realized that we had a number of major gardens in the Bible that had strong spiritual connections to one another. Eden, of course, was first and obvious, and it had a direct link to Gethsemane, another garden, where Jesus made up his mind to go forward and undo the curse of humanity's sin in Eden. Then I looked and no sooner is Jesus taken down dead from the Cross then his body is placed in a tomb in another garden. And in that garden where he has been laid out dead he will rise from the dead on a spring Passover morning.
These three gardens were enough to give me a sermon series which I preached at the church I pastored near Banff in the town of Canmore. I used Eden, Gethsemane and the Garden Tomb. I spoke this message in various other locations as well, including the next church I pastored which is located only a few hours south of Banff. As time went on, I found En Gedi, another garden, and also felt that many portions of Revelation present the Kingdom of Heaven in a garden-like state, so I included those and wound up with five gardens in all.
The first time I put this idea in book form was a work entitled The Five Gardens of God. A couple of years later Zondervan asked me to re-work the book, make it more appealing to the mainstream without sacrificing its strengths, add more story, and ROOTED was born.
STREAMS came to be because they wanted a companion volume to go out with ROOTED and they indicated an interest in the water theme (I had suggested deserts or wilderness or high places and mountains). I spent several months working with water in the Bible, especially rivers and lakes and seas, in the same way I had worked with gardens. This time I included a lot of personal story from the start.
So far the feedback from both books has been positive and there has certainly been a lot of interest in the "new kid" of the two, STREAMS. Both are being distributed in Canada, the USA and Britain. Recently, the rights for a Deutsche ROOTED was sold to a publisher in Germany.
I'm grateful to God for the opportunity to tell stories and Biblical truths in such a way they might help others to see Christ and see the sometimes smooth and sometimes rugged road of believing that lies ahead of them. I hope I will get the chance to try out another couple of themes in two different books.
cheers
One is entitled ROOTED, the other STREAMS.
ROOTED has a longer history. When I lived near Banff, Alberta, a famous tourist resort, I first realized that we had a number of major gardens in the Bible that had strong spiritual connections to one another. Eden, of course, was first and obvious, and it had a direct link to Gethsemane, another garden, where Jesus made up his mind to go forward and undo the curse of humanity's sin in Eden. Then I looked and no sooner is Jesus taken down dead from the Cross then his body is placed in a tomb in another garden. And in that garden where he has been laid out dead he will rise from the dead on a spring Passover morning.
These three gardens were enough to give me a sermon series which I preached at the church I pastored near Banff in the town of Canmore. I used Eden, Gethsemane and the Garden Tomb. I spoke this message in various other locations as well, including the next church I pastored which is located only a few hours south of Banff. As time went on, I found En Gedi, another garden, and also felt that many portions of Revelation present the Kingdom of Heaven in a garden-like state, so I included those and wound up with five gardens in all.
The first time I put this idea in book form was a work entitled The Five Gardens of God. A couple of years later Zondervan asked me to re-work the book, make it more appealing to the mainstream without sacrificing its strengths, add more story, and ROOTED was born.
STREAMS came to be because they wanted a companion volume to go out with ROOTED and they indicated an interest in the water theme (I had suggested deserts or wilderness or high places and mountains). I spent several months working with water in the Bible, especially rivers and lakes and seas, in the same way I had worked with gardens. This time I included a lot of personal story from the start.
So far the feedback from both books has been positive and there has certainly been a lot of interest in the "new kid" of the two, STREAMS. Both are being distributed in Canada, the USA and Britain. Recently, the rights for a Deutsche ROOTED was sold to a publisher in Germany.
I'm grateful to God for the opportunity to tell stories and Biblical truths in such a way they might help others to see Christ and see the sometimes smooth and sometimes rugged road of believing that lies ahead of them. I hope I will get the chance to try out another couple of themes in two different books.
cheers
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
the holodomor
Holodomor is a Ukrainian word. It means "murder by starvation."
After the recent Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, I read some blogs where people expressed a longing for a return of the old Soviet Union, the nation that produced powerhouse athletes that truly challenged those from the USA and Canada and Germany, especially during the Winter Games.
I've even seen a song on TV where some American country-folk-roots singer is also pining away for the old Soviet Union. "Mister Gorbachev," he croons, "please put back that wall," meaning the Berlin Wall. Give us back the good old USSR, he goes on.
People that blog like that or write songs like that obviously never had family in Latvia or Lithuania or the Czech Republic or Slovakia or Georgia or Estonia. Or, like myself, the former East Germany and Ukraine.
It was the "good old USSR," under the leadership of a person considered a hero now in the new Russia - Joseph Stalin - that murdered millions of my people on my father's side in the early 1930s. The Communist government in Moscow wiped out whole villages and towns and left the bodies to rot in the streets and fields. A New York Times reporter saw the slaughter and yet wrote back glowing reports of life in the Stalinist Soviet Union in direct contradiction to what he was experiencing first-hand. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times with his dispatches. Bizarrely enough, the paper still touts this Pulitzer as one of their prizes, when the reporter long ago admitted his reports were a lie. The Times owners, management and staff should be in sackcloth and ashes and hanging their collective heads in shame.
The Times wasn't the only paper to sing the praises of the USSR, nor was their reporter the only one to say it was heaven on earth. George Bernard Shaw did a tour of the Soviet Union and proclaimed it was something of a paradise and any rumours to the contrary were false. (It was a rigidly controlled tour that you'd think a smart man like he was would have seen through, even with his rose-coloured Socialist glasses on. Obviously he saw what he wanted to see.)
One of the few papers that told the truth was The Manchester Guardian and one of the few journalists who tried to get the world to cry out in anger was Malcolm Muggeridge. He was ridiculed and ignored. Oh, that love for the good old murderous USSR, it clings to so many from generation to generation.
Stalin took all the crops and he took all the seed to plant new crops. He terrorized farms and towns to get both the harvest and the seed that would guarantee another harvest the coming year. He starved six to ten million to death. But then, he hated the Ukrainians anyway, and their pride and independence and unwillingness to bow the knee to the new czars of Soviet dictatorship, so this was a convenience to his Soviet-winter-cold-heart. He killed more people in two years, just by taking away their food, than Hitler did in ten with his gas chambers and ovens and SS. Nor did Stalin mind murdering millions of Russian farmers using the same methods that worked so well in Ukraine.
Ah, but for Shaw and The New York Times of the 1930s and 40s, and that American singer, the Soviet Union is something wonderful to behold.
The cover-up has been so long-lasting that when a woman I knew sat down and read my novel ZO, she came away saying it was a good story but that the part about the mass starvation in Ukraine was over the top and hard to believe. Once I explained to her that I had not thought it up, that it was true, she demanded to know why she hadn't heard of it (whereas everyone knows about the Jews and The Holocaust).
Why? It's that old twisted romanticism for the USSR that many on the left, and some on the right, cling to like a sweet dream that, in actuality, is no more than the result of an opiate, a drug-induced hallucination, a stupor that blinds the eyes to the human hell the Soviet Union produced from 1917 to 1989. There are some who still want the USSR to look like utopia, who believe it was utopia, and who deny The Holodomor ever took place, just as there are still those, from generation to generation, who deny the Jewish Holocaust ever occurred.
On Thursday night, March 4th, at the Palais Royale in Toronto, I'm privileged to be one of several finalists for The Kobzar Literary Award, an award that celebrates the people of Ukraine and the people blessed with Ukrainian ancestry who write and are written about in Canadian literature.
I stand there with the others to say thank you to the people of Ukraine who immigrated to this country and put their blood in me.
I stand there to celebrate their strength, their love for freedom, their passion for the land on both sides of the Atlantic.
I stand to say The Holodomor did happen, thank God Ukraine is free from the grip of the old USSR, and may the Soviet Union never return and the ghost of Stalin never haunt the fields and hearts of Ukrainians in any place, especially the homeland, ever again.
After the recent Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, I read some blogs where people expressed a longing for a return of the old Soviet Union, the nation that produced powerhouse athletes that truly challenged those from the USA and Canada and Germany, especially during the Winter Games.
I've even seen a song on TV where some American country-folk-roots singer is also pining away for the old Soviet Union. "Mister Gorbachev," he croons, "please put back that wall," meaning the Berlin Wall. Give us back the good old USSR, he goes on.
People that blog like that or write songs like that obviously never had family in Latvia or Lithuania or the Czech Republic or Slovakia or Georgia or Estonia. Or, like myself, the former East Germany and Ukraine.
It was the "good old USSR," under the leadership of a person considered a hero now in the new Russia - Joseph Stalin - that murdered millions of my people on my father's side in the early 1930s. The Communist government in Moscow wiped out whole villages and towns and left the bodies to rot in the streets and fields. A New York Times reporter saw the slaughter and yet wrote back glowing reports of life in the Stalinist Soviet Union in direct contradiction to what he was experiencing first-hand. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times with his dispatches. Bizarrely enough, the paper still touts this Pulitzer as one of their prizes, when the reporter long ago admitted his reports were a lie. The Times owners, management and staff should be in sackcloth and ashes and hanging their collective heads in shame.
The Times wasn't the only paper to sing the praises of the USSR, nor was their reporter the only one to say it was heaven on earth. George Bernard Shaw did a tour of the Soviet Union and proclaimed it was something of a paradise and any rumours to the contrary were false. (It was a rigidly controlled tour that you'd think a smart man like he was would have seen through, even with his rose-coloured Socialist glasses on. Obviously he saw what he wanted to see.)
One of the few papers that told the truth was The Manchester Guardian and one of the few journalists who tried to get the world to cry out in anger was Malcolm Muggeridge. He was ridiculed and ignored. Oh, that love for the good old murderous USSR, it clings to so many from generation to generation.
Stalin took all the crops and he took all the seed to plant new crops. He terrorized farms and towns to get both the harvest and the seed that would guarantee another harvest the coming year. He starved six to ten million to death. But then, he hated the Ukrainians anyway, and their pride and independence and unwillingness to bow the knee to the new czars of Soviet dictatorship, so this was a convenience to his Soviet-winter-cold-heart. He killed more people in two years, just by taking away their food, than Hitler did in ten with his gas chambers and ovens and SS. Nor did Stalin mind murdering millions of Russian farmers using the same methods that worked so well in Ukraine.
Ah, but for Shaw and The New York Times of the 1930s and 40s, and that American singer, the Soviet Union is something wonderful to behold.
The cover-up has been so long-lasting that when a woman I knew sat down and read my novel ZO, she came away saying it was a good story but that the part about the mass starvation in Ukraine was over the top and hard to believe. Once I explained to her that I had not thought it up, that it was true, she demanded to know why she hadn't heard of it (whereas everyone knows about the Jews and The Holocaust).
Why? It's that old twisted romanticism for the USSR that many on the left, and some on the right, cling to like a sweet dream that, in actuality, is no more than the result of an opiate, a drug-induced hallucination, a stupor that blinds the eyes to the human hell the Soviet Union produced from 1917 to 1989. There are some who still want the USSR to look like utopia, who believe it was utopia, and who deny The Holodomor ever took place, just as there are still those, from generation to generation, who deny the Jewish Holocaust ever occurred.
On Thursday night, March 4th, at the Palais Royale in Toronto, I'm privileged to be one of several finalists for The Kobzar Literary Award, an award that celebrates the people of Ukraine and the people blessed with Ukrainian ancestry who write and are written about in Canadian literature.
I stand there with the others to say thank you to the people of Ukraine who immigrated to this country and put their blood in me.
I stand there to celebrate their strength, their love for freedom, their passion for the land on both sides of the Atlantic.
I stand to say The Holodomor did happen, thank God Ukraine is free from the grip of the old USSR, and may the Soviet Union never return and the ghost of Stalin never haunt the fields and hearts of Ukrainians in any place, especially the homeland, ever again.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
loving enemies
Most people are aware of how both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were heavily influenced by Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount.
This led to both of them acting as catalysts for independence movements that were characterized by their dynamic non-violent approach. In Gandhi's case it brought about India's liberation from Great Britain. In King's case, it brought about the liberation of America's African-American population.
For many, the idea of loving one's enemies and interacting with them in a non-violent manner is all right for mass movements like King's and Gandhi's, but it is impossible to make work on a day-by-day, person-to-person basis. How do you love, let alone like, someone who hurts your children, back stabs you at work or trashes your family to others whenever they get the chance?
I believe the best way to love your enemies is to do exactly what you do when you love your friends.
If a good friend embarks on actions I think are not only unwise, but dangerous, I sit down with them, have a coffee, and express my concerns. Out of love. They may or may not listen, but it is what good friends do.
If a good friend is out of line with me, I tell them. If they do things that will hurt not only themselves, but my wife and children and other friends, I do what I can to make them stop. If they are engaging in actions that will hurt strangers, I challenge them on that too. Outside of self-defense, or their involvement in law enforcement or necessary military operations, if they are doing things that harm others - psychologically, physically, emotionally, spiritually - I make it a point to challenge them to cease and choose another manner in which to resolve their issues. And I do it out of love for them as well as love for those they intend to harm.
There is no difference with my approach to my enemies.
Loving your enemies does not mean letting them run rampant - destroying your reputation, indulging in harmful gossip towards you with others, hurting or killing your wife or husband or children or friends. Love does not permit that because loving your enemies means not only keeping them from harming themselves, but harming others, because harming others is a blow against their own lives and souls. And loving your enemies certainly does not mean you stop loving others and allow enemies to destroy them.
Loving your enemies means challenging their harmful behavious towards yourself and others. It means taking action to stop them from doing what is wrong. It means defending yourself and others not only for their victims' sakes but their own sakes as well.
Since when did love mean being a spectator when people hurt people? Since when did love mean doing nothing when you could do something to stop people from harming people? Since when did loving your friends meaning letting them self-destruct? Since when did it mean letting them indulge in whatever vicious behaviour they desire without you, their friend, saying or doing anything to attempt to change their minds and behaviour?
Since when did loving your enemies mean never challenging their destructive behaviour towards yourself and others? Since when did it mean letting them do whatever terrible things they wish? Since when did it mean never resisting their efforts to do yourself and others harm? You don't permit the friends you love to engage in that sort of viciousness towards yourself and those you care about and even those who are strangers. Why would you act any differently towards the enemies Jesus has commanded you to love?
Love your friend. Love your enemy. Act in the same manner towards each when they take a path of darkness and destruction. Loving them means helping them not to do the things that harm others and, by so doing, also harm themselves.
Love does not mean letting others do the things that make the world most ugly and wicked and which also make themselves most ugly and wicked.
Love does not only mean saying yes at the right times. It also involves saying no.
This is how friends are loved. This is how enemies are loved.
This is how our worlds and the one greater world is changed.
Jesus said, Love one another as I have loved you.
He also said, Love your enemies. Do good to those who hurt you. Pray for those who try to treat you in dark and destructive ways.
Talk. Pray. Challenge. Resist. Embrace. Forgive.
Love your enemies as you love your friends.
It's not just rhetoric. Not just wishful thinking.
It works.
This led to both of them acting as catalysts for independence movements that were characterized by their dynamic non-violent approach. In Gandhi's case it brought about India's liberation from Great Britain. In King's case, it brought about the liberation of America's African-American population.
For many, the idea of loving one's enemies and interacting with them in a non-violent manner is all right for mass movements like King's and Gandhi's, but it is impossible to make work on a day-by-day, person-to-person basis. How do you love, let alone like, someone who hurts your children, back stabs you at work or trashes your family to others whenever they get the chance?
I believe the best way to love your enemies is to do exactly what you do when you love your friends.
If a good friend embarks on actions I think are not only unwise, but dangerous, I sit down with them, have a coffee, and express my concerns. Out of love. They may or may not listen, but it is what good friends do.
If a good friend is out of line with me, I tell them. If they do things that will hurt not only themselves, but my wife and children and other friends, I do what I can to make them stop. If they are engaging in actions that will hurt strangers, I challenge them on that too. Outside of self-defense, or their involvement in law enforcement or necessary military operations, if they are doing things that harm others - psychologically, physically, emotionally, spiritually - I make it a point to challenge them to cease and choose another manner in which to resolve their issues. And I do it out of love for them as well as love for those they intend to harm.
There is no difference with my approach to my enemies.
Loving your enemies does not mean letting them run rampant - destroying your reputation, indulging in harmful gossip towards you with others, hurting or killing your wife or husband or children or friends. Love does not permit that because loving your enemies means not only keeping them from harming themselves, but harming others, because harming others is a blow against their own lives and souls. And loving your enemies certainly does not mean you stop loving others and allow enemies to destroy them.
Loving your enemies means challenging their harmful behavious towards yourself and others. It means taking action to stop them from doing what is wrong. It means defending yourself and others not only for their victims' sakes but their own sakes as well.
Since when did love mean being a spectator when people hurt people? Since when did love mean doing nothing when you could do something to stop people from harming people? Since when did loving your friends meaning letting them self-destruct? Since when did it mean letting them indulge in whatever vicious behaviour they desire without you, their friend, saying or doing anything to attempt to change their minds and behaviour?
Since when did loving your enemies mean never challenging their destructive behaviour towards yourself and others? Since when did it mean letting them do whatever terrible things they wish? Since when did it mean never resisting their efforts to do yourself and others harm? You don't permit the friends you love to engage in that sort of viciousness towards yourself and those you care about and even those who are strangers. Why would you act any differently towards the enemies Jesus has commanded you to love?
Love your friend. Love your enemy. Act in the same manner towards each when they take a path of darkness and destruction. Loving them means helping them not to do the things that harm others and, by so doing, also harm themselves.
Love does not mean letting others do the things that make the world most ugly and wicked and which also make themselves most ugly and wicked.
Love does not only mean saying yes at the right times. It also involves saying no.
This is how friends are loved. This is how enemies are loved.
This is how our worlds and the one greater world is changed.
Jesus said, Love one another as I have loved you.
He also said, Love your enemies. Do good to those who hurt you. Pray for those who try to treat you in dark and destructive ways.
Talk. Pray. Challenge. Resist. Embrace. Forgive.
Love your enemies as you love your friends.
It's not just rhetoric. Not just wishful thinking.
It works.
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