12-31, Sunday. NEW YEAR’S EVE

So warm today, the last day of December, we turned on the air conditioner. 81 outside and high 70s inside. If this is global warming it is happening a lot faster than I expected it to happen. I’m currently waiting for a line of thunderstorms to move through our area. Perhaps the rain and lightening will dampen the enthusiasm for fireworks. Sure, it’s New Year’s Eve but celebratory gunfire on two holidays damaged our house.

I watched a little of the  Jaguars/Houston game.  Same old inconsistent football team.  Good thing football is only an intermittent curiosity to me.  The rest of the day I was either watching part of the CSI marathon or slowly working through detritus collected over the last three decades and tossing most of it into the trash.

12-29, Friday

Today was a perfect sort of southern winter day. Highs in the 70s, lows in the mid-50s. Gee, this retirement living is OK. Slept in until 7am, took a long walk, spent an hour at Panera munching on a bagel, drinking diet Pepsi and reading the New York Times. After this leisurely respite I went home and cleaned out my closet. Hardly an afternoon reflecting on life’s mysteries, and anticipating

“the tumult and excess/of act and passion under sun” (this is Elizabeth Barrett Browning???).

No, instead I sorted through shirts that no longer fit or are suffering from the indignity of underarm stains, shoes long unused but never thrown away, and pants that have shrunk beyond manufacturer specifications. All clean and all going to Goodwill.

Went to the Movies

We saw Dreamgirls today . You can see the Broadway musical origins in this movie heavy on long musical interludes and the cardboard characters. The story itself fits into a very recognizable and predictable moral narrative. But the music is wonderful, the singers breathtaking, the staging quite impressive. Although I found it quite interesting to find so many white patrons into a movie featuring black performers. Must be the good press from white critics.

I think we witnessed the beginning of a career for Jennifer Hudson. Her acting remains a work in progress but her singing is quite remarkable. I see her Internet presence already is blooming with at least 5 sites featuring stories or are entirely devoted to her.

12-28, Thursday

Back from The Mountains

We went to our place in the Blue Ridge Mountains for Christmas. Also the reason for the gap in my blog — no Internet connection. We were hoping for some winter weather and some snow. The traffic up on Saturday morning wasn’t bad but the trip back, a trip that started later than we should have started, was bad. Essentially 10 hours of rush hour driving.

But our time there was good. First day was mild but a Low from the Gulf moved north and brought first rain and then cold and snow on the backside of the circulation. Three inches all together. While our trusty Jeep had no problem with the snow or slippery roads, a couple of Floridians getting all that ice and snow off the windows is always a challenge.

Our north-facing wall is all windows and a deck. We look out on a landscape virtually unchanged from what we imagine it looked like in the 19th century. Of course there has been lots of logging over the past century and most of the trees we see probably are second-growth trees but we can’t see roads or towns or skyscrapers. Lights at night and the occasional farm sitting on top of a rise is about all we see. Lovely. Almost worth 10-hour rush hours.

But no Internet!!!!! The Internet cafe in town closed and I haven’t talked myself into spending the money to have high-speed Internet six weeks a year up there. I realize how much I take instant information for granted. And how much I rely on the Internet as an information storage device instead of going to the trouble to put an item into long-term memory. Dependence on technology is fine until the technology is not available.

Christmas

Marian and I spent our 32nd Christmas together. We had given each other new wedding rings earlier this year as kind of an early Christmas present so we just gave a couple of presents to each other. Quite lovely.

That Egyptian Exhibit

More on that exhibit we attended last Friday. The attendees were the usual art museum group: white, older to elderly, the educated, the upper middle-class. Maybe 10% were not stereotypical musuem types. Marian reminded me of the Egyptian exhibit we saw last Christmas.

A much more ambitious exhibit, much more inventively set up. And very popular. We ended up behind a group from a local assisted-living facility. They were quite a group. A tough-to-please group and a little short on technological expertise. Everyone was given an MP-3 type device to provide a narrative. Most of this group in front of us had never operated such a device. We encountered a number of hilarious situations as a result. One woman was yelling to her husband (she had the earphones on, of course, and so was not monitoring her voice level) “I can’t hear a thing, I can’t hear a thing” at the top of her voice. I looked down and noticed the headphones were not plugged into the player. Another woman was yelling (headphones on, muffling what she heard), “it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work). We helped her with the controls.

Our favorite were the two women talking to each other as they gazed at one of a number of 5,000 year-old funerary objects, “It’s all just the same, all just the same.”

All said with good Long Island accents.

Books I’m Reading

I’ve finished The God Delusion . How controversial is this book? A Google search comes up with 1,210,000 hits. A quick survey through the first few pages of hits shows a majority are very critical of Dawkins and his argument.

And his argument is both reductionist and unwavering. He dismisses Thomas Aquinas’ 5 Ways to prove the existence of God in a mere 3 pages (pp. 77-79), the argument from scripture in a mere 5 pages (pp. 92-97). He goes on to conflate the most outrageous religious zealots and televangelists with the beliefs of the average Christian. He offers no quarter to believers. It is all superstition and irrational belief in an unprovable supernatural world.

To Dawkins all religious belief is rooted in a child’s impulse to believe his or her parents. Religious beliefs are a bundle of memes, “a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another”. These bundles of memes are complementary, creating a supporting network of ideas that helps sustain it within and across cultures and generations.

Dawkins quite ably documents the faults and destructiveness of religion and the vast contradictions contained in the Bible but he does not acknowledge its positive characteristics. And he reduces complex philosophical arguments to a test of empirical proof. I sympathize with his argument and agree with his final conclusions, but his reductionism of Christian belief is troubling.

The New York Times Book Review has an excellent review of The GOD Dilemma. Dawkins’ book is included in a larger review of books on Christianity in The New York Review of Books. This review accurately summarizes Dawkins’ goal in this book is to attack

not only extremist sects but moderate ones. Indeed, he argues that rearing children in a religious tradition amounts to child abuse.

I’ve just begun to look at several books of Irish poetry published The Gallery Press. This includes Oar by Moya Cannon, The Girl Who Married the Reindeer by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, and Medbh McGuckian’s The Currach Requires No Harbours .

 

View From Our Place

This is a winter view from our place in the Blue Ridge. You can see the hoarfrost on the trees and a long-distance view we get on clear days. But we have noticed that summer views are becoming increasingly hazy. More moisture or more pollution?

What we like so much is the view.  And, naturally, a view with few reminders of human habitation.  A nice change from our worklives.

12-22, Friday

I spent part of the day getting ready to travel to the Blue Ridge Mountains.  We are spending Christmas there and it takes a little effort to put together stuff to take.  And since this is Christmas, we are packing food as well.  Not much is open on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day up there, contrasted to the 24/7 commercial hubub here completely uninterrupted by holy high days.  Warm clothes, books, DVDs, magazines, some retirement paperwork to peruse.  Some we won’t get to but it is good to have a choice.  Oh, and a few Christmas ornaments for the little tree we have up there.

We went to an opening of a new Egyption exhibit at the local art museum tonight.  Most everyone was older than us. We must look like schoolkids in the eyes of some of those ancients attending the opening.  Always a remarkable exhibit, even if most of the objects were from the British Museum vaults rather than from their prime collection.  Wooden figurines nearly 5,000 years old.  A 4,000 year old sheet of papyrus from the  Book of the Dead  .  And the sophistication of the work is remarkable.  I’ve read their tools were so intricate and complex modern sculptors and toolmakers are not able to duplicate them.

More later.    

12-21, Thursday

Today Marian and I got new drivers licenses. Regardless of a heightened sense of security we have been able to renew our licenses via mail for the past decade and a half. As a result, our license photos are old, old, old.  We don’t look like our photos anymore. I had a beard back then and Marian looked, well, different. Since I no longer have my FAA ID I thought I needed to get an updated ID.

Tonight we went to a play at our local museum of contemporary art. Santaland, by David Sedaris . Very funny, focusing on Sedaris’ time as a 42 year-old elf at Macys. Sedaris gives a hard and personal edge to the gears behind commercial presentations of a presumably spiritual holiday. The actor, memorizing 55 minutes of dialogue, did a fine job. Going to MOCA in the evening had a sophisticated, urban sense to it. Surrounded by well-dressed patrons. Sipping wine whilst perusing high-end holiday gifts in the museum shop allowed us to feel quite exclusive, I must say.

Books I Continue To Read

I continue with The God Delusion. He evokes Bertrand Russell’s Teapot Metaphor. Russell is making the point that if ancient documents revered by our culture described a teapot circling the earth we would accept this notion without question rather than deride the idea as lunatic. Of course, both Dawkins’ and Russell’s point is that we accept unlikely claims with no critical analysis simply because the claims exist in these revered texts. Here is Russell’s metaphor:

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.” (Collected Works, 1997)

But I did not know the resonance of Russell’s original teapot metaphor until I Googled it where a search of Russell’s Teacup yields 191,000 hits. You can go to the Russell’s Teapot website to get the spirit of Russell aficionados. This site appears to focus on pedophile priests and other sexual embarrassments rather than a reasoned discussion about the rationality of religion, unfortunately. But there are lots of other sites such as Wikipedia’s, the Christian Courier’s version which appears to casually stroll directly into Dawkin’s bullseye of making rational claims based on supernatural belief, and a delightfully nonsensical exchange on the teapot metaphor amongst users of a game developer website.

I never really did make the connection between gaming and Russell’s refutation of religious belief. But I AM just some retired guy after all.

A Very Neat Stop-Action Video

Tony vs. Paul

Here are a pair of artists who have found a better use of their spare time than me.