Saturday, April 21, 2007

America

The default attitude of many Canadians to the United States is a craven, sanctimonious, poorly thought out hostility. The higher one climbs in our cultural strata the more pronounced becomes this peculiar type of ignorance, but in just about any bar conversation if something about our southern neighbor comes up the usual snide and knowing remarks will be made. Their military is too big. They want to rule the world. They have an empire. This from people who have a pretty dim idea of geography and history. Canadians do have reasons to be annoyed at Americans regarding certain issues: the ongoing softwood lumber farce, for instance, where powerful lumber interests in the U.S. try to protect their business from Canadian competition. This has had the opposite affect from what they had hoped as the duties and levies imposed on Canadian producers have motivated them to increase efficiency and productivity to keep costs down. Thus Canadian mills are just that much more competitive than they were before. Other similar issues go back to the influence local American politics has on Congressional power brokering. But this is not what Canadians usually think of when they think of the perfidious Americans. Most Canadians don't even know about these disputes where the issues are complex and hard to understand. Does Canada subsidize lumber companies as the American lobby insists? It depends on what you call a subsidy, among other things, and as the arguments unfold their complexity quickly leaves the average interested citizen in a state of perplexity. The perception that we are being bullied is a strong one, but what does that mean? To me it's not so much an indication of American power as Canadian weakness. We have allowed ourselves to become a wimpy nation. Americans play hardball, they expect us to play that way, too. If we don't fight back they lose respect for us. It's also true that they have legitimate trade grievances with us. I'm thinking of all the marketing boards that hurt the Canadian consumer far more than they hurt the Americans. But we can hardly criticize American protectionism if we practise it ourselves.
But I would like to say more about the idiotic notion that Americans want to rule the world. Far from it. The United States may dominate the world in many ways but it is not an empire as many writers claim. If what they have is an empire then we'll have to think up another name for what the Romans, the Persians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the English and many others have had in recorded history. That's where the dominant power completely takes over another territory, loots it, settles it, occupies it, takes slaves and rules it. Like what the Romans did to Gaul, Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, Britain, etc. If the Americans wanted to rule the world would Castro still be doddering along after a half century of being a damned nuisance to the Americans even forgetting what a curse he's been to his own people.
The vast majority of Americans not only don't want an empire, they would rather stay at home and ignore the rest of the world. They did not want to involve themselves in either world wars. But after Pearl Harbor they had to face the fact that the oceans were no longer a sufficient barrier to protect them from foreign agression. Since then they have managed to defeat a major totalitarian threat without going to all out war, and now they are fraced with another enemy that may even more dangerous. Just as in the past there are powerful currents of opinion that want to deny the obvious and so we will probably have to face another 9/11, and it could be far worse now that this hostile force senses weakness in the object of its hatred.
The stupidest of conventional wisdoms is that Americans invaded Iraq for the oil. These people can't believe George Bush when he says he wants to bring freedom to Iraqis. But there are all sorts of ways Americans could isolate themselves from the consequences of a disruption in the Middle East oil supply. The United States has the scientific resources to make the adjustment and Americans would be willing to undergo any temporary inconvenience. It's Europe that would be in trouble. That's where Americans have a responsibility as the foremost world power of our time to use its power to ensure the free movement of goods and services across the globe. In the old days it was called freedom of the seas. It has always been one of the first things a rising power has always wanted to establish. That was what the Punic wars were about in Roman times. And the first projection of military power to foreign shores made by the newly minted United States under Thomas Jefferson was to subdue the Barbary Pirates of North Africa. At that time these pirates roamed all over the eastern Atlantic taking slaves and disrupting trade. For some reason the Europeans wouldn't help themselves, even though whole villages were carried off.
It was after the Romans defeated the Carthaginians that the Mediterranean became known as a Roman Lake. It was the only time in history that the whole Mediterranean basin was brought under one law and it ushered in a golden age of prosperity and cultural cross fertilization. It may be that a Roman Governor authorized the execution of a certain Judean holy man, but without the ability to freely travel as a Roman citizen St. Paul wouldn't have been able to spread Jesus' message.
Now we are potentially on the cusp of a new golden age and if so it will be due to the Americans. Americans don't want empire but they do want to spread their message: freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of the marketplace, freedom to choose who will make the laws, freedom of speech, freedom of debate. Additionally, in the American way of thinking happiness is a good thing, a rich and rewarding life is something that everyone is entitled to provided he can take up the challenge. Empire is not an aspiration of the American people. They do not want Iraqis, Russians, Japanese, to be
American subjects. When they defeat an enemy they help him get back on his feet, as they did with Germany and Japan, as they are trying to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is reality folks. It's easy to figure out.
Americans have so far in my lifetime defeated Nazis and Bolsheviks, neither of whom believed in any of the above. They are now engaged in another fight. They didn't want the previous fights and they don't want this one. It seems there are aot of people in our democratic societies who don't believe there is a deadly enemy that wants nothing more than to kill them, their families, their friends, but there is. And whether or not we go into a new golden age or a new dark age depends on the outcome of this war. I know whose side I'm on.
Incidentally I have noticed one curious thing about all my American hating countrymen. Judging by the lineups at the Victoria passport office they all want to go to the States.

Friday, April 20, 2007

A newspaper headline this morning in the local rag reads, "Kids drive home their environmental point." The text of the article tells us that grade four and five students at a local elementary school put on a little skit or something in support of the idea that people should not idle their vehicles while waiting to pick up and drop off at the premises. It's not a bad idea to shut down a motor while waiting anyplace. Who wants to breathe the fumes? Their teacher made the connection to the global warming hysteria. No, she didn't call it hysteria. for her it's an established fact. It was her opinion. And instead of helping her students explore both sides of the controversy and try to understand the issues involved she preferred to use them as little puppets to promote her own ill-informed judgement. This kind of behaviour by the teacher seems to me a testimonial to not only her competence but to her sense of morality. Are children nothing more to her than props for her own ego?
Our courts don't seem to understand why children should not be used by teachers for propaganda purposes either. A few years ago the teachers union used their students to propagandize the union demands. The parents who brought a lawsuit against the union lost.
"This is a tribute," says the teacher, "to the students from the school, who came to the board last month and told us how important it was to make the school properties idle-free zones..." Right. It began during conversation during a lull in skate board practice when some of the guys started talking about how important it was to combat global warming and pretty soon they had a study group set up and... whaddya know. We all know this is not what happened, so the teacher is lying. It was a class project organized and prepared by the teaching staff. No contrary views were allowed. The class had to toe the line. So this whole exercise had nothing to do with a spontaneous demonstration before the city council; it was a case of the teachers using their students as remote controlled puppets to promote their own opinions. There is an advantage in doing it this way. As adults making a presentation they might be challenged on their logic or their facts. But you can't make mincemeat of a ten- year-old's arguement without looking like a cad.
"We are on the forefront of this," she said, because "We are the first school district on Vancouver Island to use biodiesel..." One presumes this is what she said to the reporter not to the council. The reporter was probably already vetted to make sure he didn't ask any awkward questions. One such question would have to do with the affect of biofuel use on the price of food. There are already indications that it has raised the price of cornmeal in Mexico, and may raise the price of meat in Canada. This is elementary supply and demand. If the owners of SUV's are able to offer a higher price for the corncrop than poor Mexican peasants, guess who loses out. Somehow I doubt if any of these considerations were raised in the classroom.
And since when does a skit or a demonstration, ie stupid looking people dressed up in funny looking outfits, contribute to rational discussion? This is in itself a form of dishonesty, stupidity or both. Whenever I see a parade of such idiots, and we have a lot of them in Victoria (both parades and idiots), It makes me think the world of modern civilization is not dangerous
enough...otherwise these nitwits would have been long ago eliminated from the gene pool. So it really bothers me to see teachers teaching their students how to be idiots.
The effect of all this imbecility is to dumb down public discourse to the level of imbecility. It's absolutely impossible to find anything said by a politician on some of these issues. Plain speech is verboten. But why? Why can't we have a politcian run for office that comes right out and challenges all the BS? I thought Harper might have that ability but I'm quickly losing hope.
Of all the idiotic displays of public stupidity it would be hard to beat that British cleric who paraded down the geographical unit formerly known as the Island of the Mighty wrapped in chains and bearing a sign on his chest that read, "I am so sorry." When the Iranians saw that I'm sure that was when they realized they had nothing to lose by taking a few British Marines hostage. You know that song with the verse that says, "Britons never ever ever will be slaves" is so 19th Century.
But of course this is straying from my theme. One that includes my ongoing theme of "As above, so below," is that seemingly minor details like an elementary school presentation orchestrated and masteminded by a bunch of adult control freaks can connect up to a much bigger picture. In another newspaper, one with national pretensions, we are informed that the cost of Kyoto is recession. Innocuous word, recession. Well, I've been through a few recessions and have personal experience of such. They are not pleasant, although there are always people in the know who do very well during recessions. I was never one of those. The most recent one was pretty much the result of stupid policies by a socialist provincial government that drove away investment money. The econazis who are closely allied to our local NDP are infinitely more dangerous.
I don't use the expression econazi lightly, but I think of them as much more closely akin to the Bolsheviks. I don't mean this in the sense of them having well though out Marxist doctrines. Far from it. They don't have much at all in the way of doctrines, except that they think that humanity is invariably evil and is a contaminent on the face of the earth. By contrast, the Bolshies at least had a theoretical allegiance to improving the lot of the working class. What they most have in common is arrogance. They think they know better than anybody else what's good for us all. And it's very good to look at where that arrogance led when the Bolsehviks took over Russia. One of their bright ideas was that if all the serfs on the farms took the land away from the owners and divided it up among themselves then more food would be grown more efficiently and everyone would be happy. This process was called collectivization. It resulted in death by starvation of millions of Russians and Ukrainians. Are these lessons taught in the classrooms of our local schools? I don't know for sure but I seriously doubt it.
And yet this terrible, terrible experience of the Russian peasantry should be learned and understood by every single one of us. Personally, I think the econazis are potentially far worse. And I say this even though I know that most of the rank and file enviroactivists are sincere and caring individuals who only want the best. That was also true of most rank and file Bolsheviks but that didn't help them when Stalin launched his reign of paranoia. Once the beast is loose it's very hard to stop it.
Remember the Crosby, Stills and Nash song, "Teach your children well"? It was kind of a nice song. Unfortunately many teachers confuse teaching with indoctrination and now that we are confronted with some potentially lethal dangers to our way of life these youngsters are very poorly prepared to confront them.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Virginia Tech

I don't really want to comment on emerging news stories in this blog because I believe many of the problems facing us are the result of more subterranean forces. News events are surface outbreaks of lesser understood deeper tectonics. But I'll make an exception in the case of the Virginia Tech rampage.
There have been so many incidents of seemingly random murders, both large scale and small committed by unbalanced individuals, either serially or in a bunch that have occurred in my life that I don't often pay much attention. They happen. Some crazy runs amok and ordinary people are snuffed out for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But here's to the power of the web and the blogosphere to put faces to the names. It's no longer just a matter of numbers. Fifteen killed here, eight killed there, shooter turns gun on self, shooter perishes in a hail of bullets. I couldn't help but feel sick looking at the photos of all the young, vibrant, everything to live for faces for whom life, plans, dreams, and a future came to a sudden end. Who knows what we have lost? Aside from their intrinsic value as human beings endowed with a soul, what might they have accomplished? What might they have contributed to the wealth of human attainment?
Already the letters to the editor in our local paper are dripping with scorn about America's supposed infatuation with the gun. More gun laws are needed they say. I guess they haven't noticed that Virginia Tech did have a total firearms ban on campus. It makes me wonder how the trial and the charges would have gone if the killer had survived. Might I suggest that he would have been out on bail by now. In fact, after all the legal maneuvering and posturing on the media the only thing he would be charged with would be violating the rule about guns on campus. As it is, even in death he is getting far more attention than his victims while the gun control lobby is jubilant at another propaganda opportunity. I don't own a gun and I don't have any desire to own a gun, but the fact remains that if you take guns away from people who obey the rules of society then you turn them into so many sheep in the fold ready for any bloodthirsty animal come along and rip them to shreds. That's what predators do. They have a blood lust. I know about all that and I know from personal experience as a cab driver that they exist. Still, I was never tempted to carry a weapon because I know that if you have a weapon you have to be willing to kill with it. Otherwise the weapon will be taken away and used against you. Since I know I don't have it in me to kill somebody I know it would just put me in more danger. That's without taking into account the vindictiveness of the courts.
As for the often criticized American constitutional right to bear arms its main purpose was not to enshrine people's right to defend themselves against criminals and madmen, though it does that too. The American frontier was a dangerous place when the constitution was drawn up. It's purpose was to ensure that Americans would have the right in perpetuity to protect themselves from an unscrupulous and bloodthirsty government. The framers of that constitution have been proven correct. As somebody once said, the first thing a government does when it wants to kill its citizens is to take away their guns. I emphasize: VASTLY MORE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN KILLED BY THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS THAN BY ALL THE BERSERK NUTCASES COMBINED. Think of the holocaust. Think of the Bolshevik collectivization program in the Ukraine. Think of Mao's great leap forward. Think of Pol Pot. Is it purely coincidental that leftists who have historically been in sympathy with such regimes are also the ones who want to impose gun control? It's a powerful lobby and very influential in the media. The letters to the editor that appear in all the local papers don't just get there by accident. Where do these lobby groups get their money? That's something I've always wanted to know.
Looking at the picture of the murder gave me an entirely different feeling. As a Catholic I was always taught that no matter how evil a person is I should love him and save my hatred for his sin. But I couldn't help hoping the evil creature in the picture is roasting in Hell.
While the gun contol lobby seizes on the opportunity to push its agenda an opportunity to learn from the experience is lost. I don't know enough yet about his mental stuation to comment on his logic, but I do know one thing. Just because somebody is crazy it doesn't mean they are stupid. If he had known that there was a good chance that someone with a gun would interrupt his rampage he might have given up his plans.
As I said, I have never been tempted to own a gun. But I am not against the idea in principle. As a cab driver my first line of defense has been the power door lock and an iron rule not to let anyone into the cab without getting a good look. The second line of defense, on the rare occassions when I make a misjudgment, is to use my wits. It worked for twenty five years so it wasn't a bad system. Employees of gas bars, convenience stores and so on are especially vulnerable because they don't have gate control. Any crook can walk in at any time secure in the knowledge that the person behind the counter is at his mercy. They might as well put a sign on the door saying, "Rob me." The police endlessly advise us not to resist. And if you do the criminal might sue you. In other words, if the crook doesn't rob you in the traditional way he might get the judge to collect for him. In Canada we seem to be further advanced along the road to emasculization than the U.S.so you will never see a sign on the door saying, "Protected by Smith and Wesson" here. Too bad. There was one time a crackhead threatened me with a needle. I told him that if he jabbed me with his needle I would break his arm. He abruptly exited the tax.
How all this applies in the case of the Virginia Tech atrocity is that as an increasingly domesticated populace we have lost the will to resist forces of evil. Since the abandonment of our Christian underpinnings we have even repudiated the idea that there is such a thing as evil. But there is, and we have just seen one of his many faces. Being a peaceful person is not the same as being a pacifist. Good men have not only a right but a responsibility to kill an evil person.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Makin a livin


I must confess I gave up cab driving for lent and have gone over to being a security guy. Instead of driving around I walk around, stand around and sit around. Where I perform these onerous tasks provides some interesting variety. So far I have been assigned to keep an eye on a movie crew while they filmed on a sensitive location. Kirstie Allie said hello to me once, and she didn't look at all fat to me, except for those bulges in the right places that most guys, myself included, like. Next week I willspend a couple of days patrolling a cruise ship while it's being worked on in dry dock. On weekends I am a watchman at a construction site. With all the theft of construction materials going on these days it is one more expense for the contracter to hire me.
They're digging the hole for a fancy condo here. In Victoria that's not such a simple thing what with massive rock formations sticking out all over the place and others lurking underneath the surface soil at various depths. That means the profession of blasting is much in demand here. If we ever get into the IUD thing here we have lots of guys who would know how to do it.
Usually not much happens on a Saturday but today the excavators are scraping away some of that surface soil and loading up trucks with chunks of rock from yesterdays blasting. I've been working on the site for several weeks now and every week I see new extrusions waiting to be blown to bits.
There's something about watching an excavator work that is endlessly absorbing. Beats TV all to hell. (I don't have a TV I should mention and I can't stand to be in the same room with a TV going. I've gone through a couple of generations of TV shows since I got rid of mine. That was the year the Expos were the best team in baseball but got screwed out of their day of glory by a baseball strike) So I've never seen an episode of The Sopranos, never seen an episode of Steinfield, and I haven't played the game of avoid-the-commercials for many a year.
Getting back to my construction site, the most interesting thing, far more interesting than the world's skinniest fat woman (Oprah), was watching a field service technician repair the pin on a thrown track of one of the excavators. That's the picture in the window. Of course, no jack is needed- the excavator just puts his shovel down and presto, the starboard side is in the air.
And it's a nice day today, one of the precious few we've had this spring. But when I read about the snowstorms they are having back east I guess we can't complain too much. Of course to the econazis everything is evidence of global warming-oops I mean climate change- but I say to you that we better hope there is enough warming going on to prevent the return of the ice sheets. But I doubt it. And that could happen anytime.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Swans


My usual spot at Swans, where the creative juices are on tap.

The meaning of life

When I was a boy Life magazine came out with its marvelous dinosaur issue, or issues, in which stupendous foldouts depicted a world filled with amazing animals unlike any I had even heard of before. Here be Dragons. Following up on that revelation I read all I could find about the ancient creatures that had once roamed the earth. My interest in the subject regressed back in time from dinosaurs to the age of amphibians, to the age of fishes and further and when I exhausted all the literature in that direction I skipped forward in time to the eocene and the age of mammals. Eventually I came to the primates and the emergence of human beings. Just like any boy I was most interested in the lurid details and not that concerned with accuracy and so I read lots of boys novels about dinosaurs and cavemen. In one novel I recall the hero progressed from spear to atlatl and at last the bow and arrow in one lifetime, helping his tribe withstand a race of savages. That wasn't quite as far removed from reality as the movie "One Million BC," where cave men battled dinosaurs. I couldn't see that movie often enough.
It wasn't until I was older that I began to think about the theory behind evolution and when I did learn about Darwinism it didn't occur to me to question what was presented in the texts. But then one day I was listening to my anthropology lecturer outlining the theory and I thought of the human ear. It's a complicated arrangement of tubes, fluids and tiny bones. The exact anatomy doesn't matter in this instance, only that each component by itself is useless for hearing and so I could think of no intermediate stage that would confer an advantage on the organism. The thought didn't cause me to doubt the theory but I was bothered enough to ask the teacher. Well. It was as if I had asked if he had ever done the nasty with his mother. The chill in the air was palpable. And he didn't answer my question, he dismissed it. I felt kind of stupid.
Although I just assumed at the time that I didn't understand the deeper aspects of the theory, the seeds of doubt were planted and over the years they have grown into a pretty vigorous tree. Not that I doubt the fact of evolution. There's no question in my mind at all that the ancestry of all living things on this planet can be traced back to one source but I no longer believe that random mutation and natural selection are reasonable explanations for how that one source branched out and diversified into the myriads of variations that exist now and have existed in the past.
I don't really buy the intelligent design theory either. Associated with fundamentalist Christians, that scenario envisions God on the outside manipulating us on the inside as in a diorama or some kind of doll house. Nevertheless, some good arguments for that theory have been made. For instance, there is the watchmaker thought experiment. If you were from an alien civilization exploring an earth where human beings had long been extinct and you found a Rolex watch then you would naturally take it as evidence that it was made by an intelligent being. It would be difficult to think of any other way it could come into existence and if he had a colleague who proposed that it might have come about through a random accumulation of bits of metal and glass that colleague would probably be recommended for stress leave. Considering how vastly more complex even the simplest of life forms are compared to a watch it's a little hard to understand how anyone in his right mind could think for an instant that random mutation and natural selection could account for zebras and butterflies and orchids and hummingbirds. Nevertheless, that's the conventional view of evolutionary scientists, and for all their wriggling and special pleading and attempts to fit the evidence to the theory it just doesn't add up. And I think they know it, which is why they are so panicky about having an alternate theory presented in the classroom. To my way of thinking these scientists are holding back progress in the field. New thinking is needed if we are to ever understand how evolution really came about, and even more importantly, how life originated.
I have another thought experiment shamelessly using those innocent aliens to illustrate what I think is wrong with materialistic science. These aliens are radically different than humans. Since they communicate via a pheromonal, chemical system they have never had any need for writing or books. All their cultural knowledge is contained in some gigantic telepathic queen bee on their home planet. So when they come to earth and find the remains of libraries filled with books and magazines they don't have any idea what they can be for. However, they are resourceful and persistant. They can see they are the artifacts of an intelligent race and they have been searching fruitlessly for thousands of years for evidence of another intelligent race. So they analyze the paper. They analyze the ink. They learn about the chemistry and the materials and figure out how they were manufactured. They learn everything possible to know about these books. But it never occurs to them that the marks on the paper are coded messages and so they are unable to learn anything about human beings, their history, their culture, and their way of living. In other words, the meaning in the books has nothing at all to do with what they are made of. That's why they can be converted into digits and pixels or put on parchment or strings of knots. Writing is already abstracted from spoken language and is not required for the needs of a simple cultural organization. But without it advanced civilization would be impossible. Even the spoken sounds of language are abstracted from the thoughts being communicated. Whether you say this is a word or a mot or a wort is of no consequence. One phoneme will work as well as any other as long as it is known among the communicants. And this is the mistake that scientists make. They confuse the material of creation with its meaning. Living and existing have some meaning over and above the material constituents which give it shape and form. Science has nothing to say about this greater meaning and scientific atheism denies there can be any such greater meaning.
Because this controversy is important on an intellectual level doesn't mean it isn't important in our everyday lives. Science is a religion for some but it does not take the place of religion. It takes the place of magic. It performs miracles. It cures the sick. But it does not help us understand why we should go to the trouble of raising a family and working all our lives only to die in the end. It doesn't explain why we need to love and be loved. It doesn't explain (although it tries feebly) our love of beauty. It can't. And so it leaves us twisting in the wind.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Easter Sunday

A few weeks ago I read of an educator somewhere, in California I think, who wanted to ban the bible from discussion and study in public schools. There's a lot of that going around so I didn't pay much attention then, but it's been stewing in my mind ever since. I fully accept that someone of reasonable intelligence can read and think about the same things I read and think about and yet come to the opposite conclusion. But no matter how fervent an atheist one might be, why would he want to remove from the curriculum the study of what may be the greatest piece of literature ever put on paper. Simply on account of itthe bible's literary merits it is worth knowing intimately and when it is realized how ancient some of the texts are, and how important they have been in the molding of human thought and history, it seems insane that anyone would want to keep a knowledge of of it out of the reach of childeren...as if it was some sort of toxic substance.
The only reason I can think of would be to erase that history, and many social revolutionaries have known and understood that to make it possible for their pet doctrines to prevail all knowledge of old beliefs had to be obliterated. This was true of the Bolsheviks, and it is true of the jihadists. They know that traditional Christian belief is the single biggest obstacle to their desire to dominate the world. It's also true of assertive atheists who are convinced that religion, and especially Christianity, is the root of all evil. As if Christians invented murder, war, oppression, injustice. Quite the contrary. If the bible is about anything it is about the saturation of Jewish and Christian culture with ideas of moral and ethical justice, about the equality of all souls before god, of the importance of charity and love. Love is God in the Christian way of thinking, and that has not changed in 2000 years. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad people who are nominally Christian, or that bad things didn't happen under Christian rulers, but that even the worst of us commit our crimes in the knowledge that we are doing evil. We are no longer prisoners of our instincts, we are reasoning, moral beings. Almost all western political movements have been predicated on that assumption, even the atheistic Marxists and especially the envirocultists.
Aside from the biblical texts themselves both Jewish and Christian literature abounds in commentaries and writings based on the bible that try to understand the question of evil- where it comes from, and how to overcome it. The idea of evil has gone out of favour in our therapeutic society but thanks to the jihadists we are going to have to think again about the meaning of evil.
This is Easter Sunday, the day when Christ rose from the dead according to the new testament writers. It is the culmination of Easter week. On Good Friday Jesus- a man of peace if the idea of him being the son of God is too preposterous to you- was crucified as a common criminal by the Roman authorities to keep the peace in a part of their empire that was as refractory then as it is today. According to scripture, Jesus was put on earth expressly so god could know from personal experience what it was like to be a man, to feel agony, to suffer injustice. More than that, his purpose was to take on himself all the sins of the world and suffer in their place the punishment men had earned for themselves.
This only makes sense in the context of the story in Genesis of how Adam was tempted by the devil and disregarded the warning of God who had created him. I have read many creation stories from many parts of the world and while some of them have a superficial resemblance to Genesis, the underlying meaning of them is entirely different.
The creation story most familiar to educated westerners is the one told by modern cosmologists. It involves abstruse concepts of relativity and quantum physics which lead back in time to the Big Bang, when time and space was created from nothing. This theory is now accepted by most scientists and I have no quarell with it. To the scientists, even non atheistic scientists, the Biblical creation story is nothing but a myth, a fairy tale, that never was intended to be anything else. Personally, I'm not so sure that Genesis is as simple as all that.
There is more than one creation story in the Bible. The first is a lovely poem, a poem of wonder. God divided the darkness from the light. And the light he called day and the dark he called night. In this story God created man and woman together.
In the second story, of Adam and Eve, following the creation of everything else God created Adam first, and then Eve, to be his companion. As created beings they had no need to cover themselves. There was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. All was truth. The Bible implies that they would live forever in the paradise God had created for them where all things would be provided for nourishment and life. Thus there was no need to kill for food, no need to have children, no need to struggle, no need for pain, no labor, no death. But there was one thing they were forbidden: the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Now why would God put something there that they could not have? It's a question any intelligent audience would want to ask.
To me the answer couldn't be plainer: Adam- us- was not a simple automaton subject to some preordained plan over which he had no control. How he behaved was entirely up to him. He had free will. He was responsible for his own actions. True it was that even in the garden of eden lurked a force that could convince Adam to exercise his freedom to his own detriment, in defiance of what he knew was right. And he chose to disobey his creator. This may seem unfair, because Adam did not have God's perfect knowledge. Adam could not tell what would be the result of his action. But the temptation to find out for himself was too strong. What did that low hanging fruit taste like? The point is that without the option of choosing wrong, the idea of free will is meaningless. In this case, Adam chose to go with his own judgement even though it was against the express orders of God.
By indulging his curiosity, Adam unknowingly chose his destiny which was to prefer his own judgement to faith in God's judgement. Now he had knowledge. Now there was time and space. Nothing would ever be the same. From then on his world would be as he created it. He would have to till the soil, build shelter, weave clothing, protect himself and his family from danger. For now there was death, death and time. Death had come into the world, and no matter what Adam did it would inevitably claim him and his loved ones. He would grow old, he would experience sickness, he would become the food of creatures larger and fiercer than he. Only through birth of a new generation was death cheated, a sort of echo through time. But he was denied the foresight to know the ultimate outcome of his actions. He had become a slave to necessity, barred forever from what he had lost, the memory of it fading in his descendants. In other words, the world as we now know it is the result of a moral decision made by Adam, the primordial man who lived in a place outside of time. For Christians the significance of Easter is that man on his own is unable to rescue himself from this fate. Only God can do that, and so he sent his son to appear before us to take that original sin onto himself and show us how to overcome it...through him, his teachings and example. That's the essential meaning of Easter as I understand it.
As an explanation for the origin of the universe my little analysis seems highly improbable and maybe it's not entirely orthodox either. I don't know. But the more I think about Christian belief the more I think that if it's not true then everything is hopeless. I wonder if the atheist who wants to deny children any exposure to this tradition has thought of that.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Episode 1 Chapt 2

Because of my tussle with the flu and a few other factors I've been tardy with this second installment, but I hope to do one most weeks until we all find out what happens to him.

Anak laki laki woke up when the sunlight slanting into the cabin fell on his face. He blinked his eyes and saw the gnats and midges dancing in the sunbeams. He often wondered how such tiny things could be alive. Why did they buzz around like that? What did they eat? What did they think about? He rocked back and forth in his hammock. It was so comfortable and pleasant he didn't want to get up. But he was hungry, and he wanted his breakfast. Where was his Ibuku? She was at the well house getting water. Then she would make breakfast. He should go and help her, he knew, but he didn't feel like getting up. Besides, it was funny to watch the very comical lizard stalking crazily in the bamboo rafters. Colored the same as its surroundings it was hard to see, but Anak laki laki's eyes were very keen. First he would lift his right legs in the air and stop, and then when you got tired of looking he set them down and raised his left legs in the air. Eventually it made its way from one end of the bamboo pole to the other. All the while, one eye would roll in one direction while the other eye would roll in another direction. Suddenly the lizard froze and didn't move at all, not its eyes, not its legs. And then his long red tongue shot out so fast Anak laki laki could hardly see it and plucked a big, glittering blue black beetle that was minding its own business doing nobody any harm. It just seemed to be washing its legs and head. The poor beetle's legs wiggled while the lizard chomped on him happily. That's how it worked. Sometimes you ate breakfast, sometimes you were breakfast.
Anak laki laki tried sticking out his tongue to catch a passing fly but he missed. Maybe he didn't really want to catch it. That wasn't the kind of breakfast he had in mind. A bowl of rice with papaya juice and and coconut crab meat was what he liked best. He himself had caught the coconut crab a few days ago and they had been eating him ever since. He was very proud of that exploit.
Where was his Ibuku? He was tired of laying in the hammock. He would go and help her get the water. But first he would climb on the roof and see if he could see his Bapak's prua coming into the lagoon. It had been so long since he had seen his Bapak that he had trouble remembering what he looked like, but he knew he would recognize their prua from among all the rest if he saw it. From the roof top he could see the lagoon down below and the little beach covered with black sand that got so hot he could hardly walk on it. A series of terraces led down from where the two mountains of his island joined and widened down to the lagoon. Anak laki laki's cabin was about half way to the beach and there were three more terraces to go. They were high enough so no tidal wave could wash away their cabin, high enough so that a breeze helped keep them cool, but not so close to the mountains that they would be in danger of a landslide if there was an earthquake. Nobody knew who had built the terrace walls, they had been built long, long ago, of huge blocks of black basalt, and were carved all over with strange designs.
Anak laki laki was a happy boy, mostly. The island he lived on was a paradise for an active boy like him. Palm trees waving in the wind invited him to climb them, a lagoon of calm warm sea water full of all sorts of creatures was at his doorstep, an overgrown jungle was full of colorful birds, snakes and lizards to catch and chase. Some of the lizards were almost as big as he was, and once in a while a meat eating monitor bigger than he was would jump out of the shrubbery. But Anak laki laki wasn't afraid. He had his spear and if that failed he could run pretty fast. There was no such thing as school where he lived and so he could run and play all day, every day. Nobody besides him, his Ibuku and his aunt lived on the island and so he didn't have any playmates, but he wasn't lonely. In fact he didn't know that he should be lonely.
The only thing that made him gloomy was that he missed his Bapak. He had gone out fishing one day many months ago and had never come back. His Ibuku said he would be back any day, but that was many, many days ago. How many days would he have to wait? He missed his Bapak. So every morning he climbed up on the roof of their cabin and looked out over the ocean to see if a prua, his Bapak's prua, the fastest prua in the islands was coming into the lagoon or pulled up on the shingle. Sometimes he would see one sailing in the distance and he hoped and hoped it would turn out to be his Bapak.
He was always disappointed, but he never stopped hoping, and this morning he climbed up on the roof just like he always did. The sun was already high in the sky. The islet that stuck up like a black tusk at the entrance to the bay smoked a little more than usual, but not much more. Someday Anak laki laki knew he would have to go over there and find out for himself if it was haunted like his aunt Bibi said. He wasn't thinking about that today. He wasn't thinking about much today. A small fleet of pruas, tiny in the distance, skimmed the waves. They were out fishing. How Anak laki laki dreamed of going fishing and catching the biggest tuna anybody had ever seen. If only his Bapak was here to take him out on the ocean and show him how to hook a line, how to spread a net, where to go to find the giant tuna. His Bapak would sail faster than anybody else, he knew, he just knew, and he would sing his fishing song to attract the giant tuna and make him happy to come into the boat.
That was what Anak laki laki was dreaming about as he watched the pruas sailing on the ocean so far away they looked as small as the gnats and midges that danced in the sunbeams.
So he didn't hear at first his Aunt Bibi's voice calling his name.
"Where has that boy gone?" he heard her say just below him. He was very quiet, afraid she would have a job for him. There was nothing he hated worse than cleaning out her chicken house. But he liked the eggs she brought sometimes. And he liked it when they had chicken dinner. He thought it was the funniest thing to see the chicken run around the yard after its head had been chopped off. But he didn't like to clean out the hen house.
But just then he saw something that made him forget all about chickens and his Aunt Bibi. Around the Smoking Isle a fast prua sailed into the lagoon and ran up on the beach.
"My Bapak," he shouted at the top of his voice, "my Bapak has come home."

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Killer drivers, feckless courts

In the news this morning was an all too typical headline. A verdict had been reached in the case of the young male who drove around a corner at high speed, lost control and plowed into some people waiting at the bus stop. One elderly woman died and another was crippled.They were just minding their own business and doing nobody any harm. The young man was given a suspended sentence. He said he was sorry and that not a day goes by that he doesn't think about it. Poor boy, and I guess the old gal was 85 anyway and was going to die pretty soon, so what's the big deal. Why ruin a young man's life over such a little thing. And the lady's granddaughter was in a forgiving mood. Not so the other elderly victim who, though still alive, can no longer dance because of the injuries she suffered. This event took place in Victoria in 2005.
Another case of an innocent person killed by a car was settled in court last week in Vancouver and while the Victoria driver was careless and irresponsible at least he didn't deliberately kill his victim. Not so this other incident. The young man had filled up with gas at a service station and decided to drive off without paying. The only problem with his plan was that the gas station attendant was blocking his way. Well, it would be a problem for most of us, even if we were the type to drive off without paying but for this fellow it was no problem at all. He just ran over him. The initial impact didn't kill the attendant. Death took a little longer as he was dragged under the car for the next few blocks leaving bits and pieces of his anatomy on the pavement. He had a little time to think about it before he died, and maybe even briefly hoped that someone would save him. Our enlightened judiciary seemed to be more interested in the sordid details of the young driver's unhappy life, and his Native Indian ethnicity was also a factor to be taken into account. Written into the lawbooks somewhere it is apparently asserted that Native Indians are not to be penalized as severely as others convicted of the same crimes. The reasoning behind this policy escapes me. Could it be that Indians are too dumb to know the difference between right and wrong? Sounds pretty insulting to me. If I was an Indian I would want to know why I was singled out to be incapable of being responsible for my actions. (In fact since my ancestors have been in North America since the 1600's I probably do have a drop or two of native blood in me...at least I hope I have)
As a cab driver I am very aware of the fact that the courts don't seem to much care when a citizen's life is terminated by a criminal act. All their sympathies seem to go to the criminal. Maybe this indifference to the fate of us ordinary folk is because we don't seem quite real to the denizens of the legal world. I wonder why that is. It doesn't seem very 'just' to me.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Willows Beach in spring





It was far too nice yesterday to think deep thoughts so I did a little walkaround through the Willows Beach area and took a few pictures.

Monday, April 2, 2007

High and low

It's a beautiful, clear morning in Victoria and I see from my window that the Sooke Hills are covered in snow. Walked across the Blue Bridge passing the usual bundles of discarded clothing and needle cases that littered my route. Oblivious to the beauties of the day, the "homeless" already on a prowl for the next fix are taking up their favored stations. One regular emotes his pitiful complaint, "I'm so hungry." Formerly his face was a tangle of beard and hair but last week he was shorn like a sheep and now he's not even recognizable except from his oddly stooped gait, like a tall wounded bird and his customary script. I do indeed feel pity for him and wish I could do something to help him because he is a pathetic creature who desparately needs help.
Unfortunately, he's an unpaid prop, a little bit of unwitting propaganda. As large as the drug addicted "homeless" population is, I'm sure it is dwarfed by the size of the social activist crowd who make their living off it. Formerly one of the rackets of organized crime, the shakedown has gone mainstream. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton refurbished the technique and applied a modern gloss of self-righteous anger guaranteed to provoke a cowering response among the prosperous white bourgeois who who have been conditioned to believe that everything bad that happens in the world is their very own fault. Looked at in that way, Jackson and Sharpton sell indulgences to afflicted white souls who can then continue to enjoy their BMW SUVs with a clear conscience.
Native Indians picked up the technique pretty quickly, as did the econazis. As somebody has recently pointed out more money is made off the seal hunt by environmental groups than by the hunters. The last thing the econazis want is for the seal hunt to end. How would the wreck that was Brigit Bardot still get her ravaged mug in the paper without the help of those cute baby seals? And so it goes. Where would the AIDS industry be without lots of dead queers and Africans?
But the biggest shakedown of all depends on everybody believing that free enterprise and the market economy are somehow responsible for the starving children in Biafra...or the "homeless" that clutter every downtown streetcorner. This calls for more social programs, we are scolded. And only bigger government agencies can help, for which it will be necessary to raise taxes of course. What a load of rubbish. What high taxes do is punish people for working hard. What are taxes but a way of confiscating the fruits of somebody else's labor for...the benefit of who?
Certainly not for the benefit of the hapless creature haunting the sidewalk. Whose child, brother, former schoolmate is he? I wouldn't be at all surprised if somebody somewhere still loves him. For the activists these personal details only matter as a propaganda tool. He collects a few dollars every day, enough to buy a hit of something off the scummy pusher man across the street. I would really like to follow these little trickles of cash downstream to the larger rivers and ultimately find out where the tributaries end up. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the money river from that watershed ends up in the same pockets as the the other watershed that starts with your T4 slip. There is a synergy here. The more homeless there are the more money can be collected off them or in their name. Everybody wins! Except the raggedy man on the streetcorner.
There are huge amounts of cash collected by both these methods but very little of it actually gets to this poor sot and his plight is absolutely not the fault of Walmart, MacDonalds or Halliburton. MacDonalds probably feeds more poor people than all the social agencies put together while Walmart clothes them...and it employs the poor too, teaching them how to get up in the morning and go to work, giving them a chance to get out of poverty.
And now we come to the so-called "Peace" activists. Boy, do they ever make lots of money off of war. Look at the Democratic Party in the United States. Where would they be if it weren't for American soldiers getting killed in Iraq? The worse the headlines, the better they do. No wonder Nancy Pelosi is going to Syria. She wants to give Boy Assad a great big thank you, because if it wasn't for him a lot fewer U.S soldiers would be getting killed and how would Nancy get elected and have the taxpayers pay for a jet plane and all. Possibly he has a nice big donation for her Party, too.
It's amazing how far you can go in this day and age with a compliant media and a gullible public. Doesn't say much for the educational system though.

Sunday, April 1, 2007

St Augustine

In the first few chapters I'm reading in "City of God" Augustine tries to explain why the good and the innocent must suffer disease and misfortune if God is a loving being. The fact that he is less than successful is not a reason to criticize than it is to appreciate his humanity. Clearly, he does not want the innocent to suffer. Clearly, he knows there is something unjust in thus he sees a need to understand why. It helps to put his thinking in the context of his day, which is a transitional phase between high paganism, largely washed out, rational philosophy, which offered nothing to nourish the soul, and the new and evolving Christian belief system. The Roman control of the Mediterrannean world was drawing to a close. The Northwest borders of the Empire were mostly guarded only by local warlords. Soon after Augustine's lifetime the only men who stood in the way of utter barbarism in the west were the Christian Bishops who were largely of the formerly powerful senatorial class. They could read and write. They knew how to administer estates. And above all, they had a moral view that they had only recently adopted from Christianity.
The impulse to see mercy and justice as a legitimate right of every human being irrespective of status and class was not really known to classical civilization. Slavery was as normal in the Roman world as running water is to ours, and although the Romans had laws regulating slaves there was never any question about the morality of the practice. And slaves were generally regarded as a lower form of humanity. Strangely, slaves often became very wealthy...but that's another story.
Only the new Christian beliefs questioned why God should make some of us slaves and others of us princes. Only Christianity questioned why good men should suffer while bad men prospered, and Christians came to these questions through the study of Hebrew scriptures. These questions of suffering were posed most graphically in the Book of Job and largely left unanswered.
To this day one of the commonest reasons given for rejecting Christian beliefs is the one of why an innocent child should suffer. But these questioners should remember that before Christianity came along such questions weren't even asked. Like slavery and disease it was merely accepted, or appeals were made to various godlings and spirits through offerings and sacrifices. But the appeals were not to abolish suffering for all but merely to exempt one's own self in this particular moment of need.
This is the context of these early chapters, as it has been in Christian thought ever since. Now, in the context of my own time I can't help but compare the thought of St. Augustine with the thoughts of a certain jihadist whose name and claim to infamy escapes me. Asked about the morality of using children as suicide bombers or targeting them for terror purposes he merely shrugged his shoulders, saying that in war people always die. Why there should be a war, or why he should be waging it was a subject that never came up. Not only were such questions irrelevant, but they were proof to him of the weakness of the west.
St. Augustine was from North Africa, what is now Algeria. The French ruled Algeria for 150 years and established industry, trade, universities. Since 1962 Algeria has been left on its own and there is not much left of the peace and prosperity left behind by the French. It's now back in the Islamic dark age that France briefly disspelled. Now Algeria's main exports are murder and destruction.
Friends, do not believe the retarded characters who say that Islam is a peaceful religion or that Christianity is equally violent. Christianity and Islam are radically different despite the fact that they share many of the same rootstock. Don't believe the other retarded characters who tell you that the problem is religion itself. If you think that a society of peace, justice and prosperity is a good thing then thank Christianity for justifying your belief.
I would like to close by a quotatiion from Chapter 16 of book I regarding "The violation of chastity without the will's consent cannot pollute the character."
"But there can be committed on another's body not only acts involving pain, but also acts involving lust," which may "engender sense of shame, because it may be believed that an act, which perhaps could not have taken place without some physical pleasure, was also accompanied by a consent of the mind."
In chapter 18 he answers thus: "There will be no pollution if the lust is another's...purity is a virtue of the mind." Contrast this statement from 16 centuries ago with the present understanding expressed in Sharia.