Absolutism is a social construct

I was sitting in Starbucks not long ago when 3 teenagers came over and asked if I would answer a couple of questions for an assignment they were working on.  They were teenagers from a local Christian school putting a survey together.  "Sure," I said.

Question 1: Do you believe there is an absolute right and wrong?
My answer: No.
Question  2: Do you believe there is such a thing as right and wrong at all?

The second one is a trick question.  Right and wrong seem to be related to what a society wants to have as their values.  Thus, the answer to the first question.  Given that reasoning, then the second question is only a reiteration of the first.  Of course, societies everywhere want to dictate what people can and cannot do as they live together in communities.  The oldest law code discovered, the Code of Hammarapi from Sumeria, governed people living about four millennia  ago.  Their sense of right and wrong matched what they expected about their culture.  I don't have to worry about most of that today.  For example, a law specifying damages for my bull goring my neighbor's child is not a concern I have - at all.  Rules about slavery and flooding my neighbor's fields fall in the same category.  Right for them, not a concern for me.

So, is there a right and wrong?  Only if I'm living around other people and we have to get along.  I understand that others see matters differently from me.  So, I allow for that and follow their rules in the interest of cooperation, but not in the interest of right or wrong.  Sometimes people live with things they don't fully agree with because the laws that exist may be the result of compromise.  It's not pure right and wrong, it's a compromise measure, so we live with it.

Explaining all that probably wouldn't make too much sense to teenagers at a religious school for an assignment that would lead them to tally percentages of people who believe or don't believe in right and wrong.  Life is not dualistic like that.  It has contingencies.  Right and wrong change over time and exist only when people want to live together cooperatively.  Otherwise, nature dictates necessity and that is not a matter of right and wrong, but of survival.  That's why I answered the second question with "probably not."  I just didn't want to explain to teenagers with preconceived notions derived from religion.

It's that time again

Edward DeVere via his pseudonym William Shakespeare penned poignant words when it came time for his main character Hamlet to act.  He had to approach his mother because he had to confront her with the theory of the affair he thought she was having.

'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the bitter day
Would quake to look on..

I love that phrase, "'Tis the very witching time of night."  It has several meanings and was probably meant to be a pun like so many other of his lines.  The witching hour was the hour of midnight.  In times gone by that would have been about 4 to 5 hours after dark.  People were asleep at that time of night.  No one would see him stealing away to confront his mother.  Also, a witching time was in modern vernacular a bewitching time.  So, he was referring to his mother being bewitched into having an affair, but he had to find out.  Hamlet was so mad that he could drink hot blood, like vampires who want their subjects to suffer but live with them forever.  Hamlet didn't really want to kill his mother, only to return the hurt that her actions had made him feel.

The witching hour does strange things to people.  I get there more often than I need to get there.  It drives me to want to do bitter business.  But, it's contagion from a terrible place, so I refrain.  Life goes on.  Hamlet paid for his rashness with his life.  I won't make that mistake.  But every night has  a witching time of night.

A pocket full

My little granddaughter came from her bedroom tonight calling my name.  "Poppey," she said in that little squeaky voice that immediately tells your heart that you will do whatever she is asking.  "I'm scared."  She climbed into my easy chair with me, leaning her head against my chest.  About 3 minutes later she was sound asleep.

It's that kind of night tonight.  Sleet coming down on top of rain that has lasted all afternoon.  Blankets in chairs where we have been sitting in the warmth of the living room, watching TV, scrolling through Facebook,  watching nursery rhymes on the Ipad Air 2, working online.  Schools have made their cancellations as have workplaces.  Everyone's socked in.

It's pleasant tonight.  Serene tonight.  Thought full tonight.  Tomorrow will come in due time.  More sleet will arrive in about two to three hours ensuring that tomorrow will be a very dangerous place for those who venture onto the freeways.  But in the pocket of time named tonight, I am enjoying every second as it passes by me on the highway of time.  I'm loving the serenity full of thought, the pleasantry of the seconds passing with notice.  Oh how I needed this pocket full of such seconds.

What you see is not...

The iceberg teaches a good lesson.  It appears above the water as something beautiful as it sits there floating on top of the water.  It invites you to come and touch it, climb it, skate or ski on it, just enjoy its slick,cold surface.

Even as teenagers, though, people learn about icebergs.  They are taught there is more to them than appears above the surface.  And the Titantic is a story people know as a notice of what happens when they get too close to the part of ice under the water.

There are ways, of course, to know what lies beneath the water, to map the entire iceberg so that there are no surprises.  It's true with people as well.  We're all like icebergs floating in water, taking up our space, some below water level, some above.  People can know how to map the unseen.  It's called experience, sometimes science, or just long friendship.  But we can know.

The experience factor comes from the tracks we all leave in the water.  The science includes the various methods developed in detecting truth and deception.  And, the friendship factor allows people to see where the average is for someone as we go through the ups and downs of our friends' lives.

Life teaches us about icebergs, for sure... sometimes Titanic style, sometimes with life-long friends, and sometimes with the ability to connect dots.  We all change through time, in part due to our redirection to miss unseen icebergs.

Great spin on an old tale

Mount Olivet Baptist Church Federal Credit Union - that was the sign across the top of the building.  Diagonally across the street was the Mount Olivet Baptist Church building, built, I'd say, in the 1950s or 1960s.  The auditorium looked like it would hold about 500-600 members at one service.

I like the concept.  That's a great application of the 2000-year-old Good Samaritan parable, a really old tale.  I don't even know what the business includes or entails at this credit union, but what it represents is helping people where the rubber meets the road. Interest alone is probably a good generator of revenue for the church. I like too another comparison.  Leprosy was a dreaded disease of that ancient world. Some of Jesus' recorded healings are about ridding people of this disease.  I'm sure the credit union is also a form of healing for its members since money problems could easily be viewed as a modern plague.

Somebody at this church was thinking.It's a great spin on an old tale. Religion would do well to give new spins to old tales if they want to remain the least bit relevant in this age.

Tomorrow - it's raining now

This time of night sounds stand out.  I hear the slight but uneven strike of rain against the window and deck of the back yard.  I don't know why rain is so refreshing and cleansing to me.  I think it is partly due to the illusion that time has stopped or slowed and I have time to think about things more clearly.  Perhaps it is partly due to the aroma that fills the air as it is raining and the pure air smell immediately following the rain, as if the world is ready to accept me now or as if I can start again with no strikes against me.

Tomorrow I will face the same problems that have presented themselves today, but for now those are suspended.  It's raining. Softly.  I'm thinking pleasant thoughts, seeing sacred memory screenshots in my mind's eye.  I have been washed.  Clean again.  I'll get dirty again tomorrow.  It's time for rest now.

No pity here

With the advent of the daycare in the 1970s, the boom period when women began working to provide second incomes for families, (I know that WWII is the usual marking point for this, but the 1970s solidified the trend because after that point the workforce shared with women never fell below the 60% point of women who opted to stay home instead of working), an argument arose over television's affect on children.  Some said a lasting detrimental effect would happen, that children would be dependent on others to do their thinking for them.  Parents were no longer providing trips and play for their children.  TV was raising children rather than parents.

We're at the half-century mark since that time, but one can easily see that the reaction then was an over reaction.  Children didn't have lasting damage from watching TV.  Children learned to control TV when they became adults.  They didn't sit mindlessly waiting around for someone to tell them what to do.  They invented TIVO and DVRs to record only the shows that they really wanted to see.  They invented HULU and other sites to stream to them only what their interests were.  They invented games to play on TV monitors and skip the programming altogether.  They invented cable in order to make available the specialty types of programs they wanted to watch.

Today, I hear a lot of talk about the use of the cell phone and how children will not learn to communicate with each other like people should do, face-to-face.  The last time that happened was with the advent of the telephone and people said that the younger generation would stop going to visit their families and friends, opting instead to talk on the telephone. Ha, ha.  Those children developed faster cars and more airplanes to handle their travel needs.  They actually increased the number of friends and family that they can see.

There's a lesson from the last 50 years.  Both examples above tell us what to expect.  Today's children are very capable and will learn to control the smart phone environment.  Already there are some really good apps to control the environment.  The most recent is Apple's "Pay" app.  Use your phone to pay for goods at any store.  Paypal has the same ability with their app.  Apps already exist to control cars and houses.  That will both increase, become cheaper, and get better and easier.  Drone delivery of items ordered from Amazon will soon have an app.  Order in the morning and come home to what you ordered sitting on your front porch.  Personal apps accessing camera shots of intersections, residential blocks, stores and other public places is in the offing.  This is the tip of the iceberg.

Children are not going to become more and more stupid, texting and leaving voicemails all of their lives.  They already know how to share, very specifically, what they want with all of their friends on various social media venues, in addition to their normal fraternizing as they always have.  They're just better at it because they know how to control their environments.  What will they do in the next 20 years?  I can safely say they will not to sit idly by and let their lives waste away.  People are industrious.  Survival of the fittest dictates it so.

I don't pity modern teenagers.  They will take the world to a new and much better place than at anytime in the world's written history.  I would love to join them.  And may - if they concentrate their energies  on longevity of life as some predict they will.  I hope they do.  I'm with them.

Because of an ancient town in China

China has enchanted those outside its domain for a long time.  Marco Polo journeyed to China in around 1275 and was enamored beyond telling, writing about it in very glorious terms. 350 years later, Samuel Purchas of England wrote an account of some of the Kahns in China using Marco Polo's account.  He, too, wrote enchantingly about China and about a city in particular.  Its name has a number of spellings since Chinese script is not alphabetic, and travelers there approximated the sounds they heard in different ways, Ciandu and Shangdu being the most popular.  One of the Chinese Kahns of the region wrote an account of his city about a hundred years after its establishment, however, and it is from this account Samuel Purchas immortalized the current spelling of this beautiful capital city.  Purchas wrote of the inner court of the city, "In this enclosure or parke are goodly meadows, springs, rivers, red and fallow deere, fawnes carrying thither for the hawkes...," and a great number of other descriptions about the splendor of this city.

122 years after Purchas wrote his book about this city in China, a fellow Englishman, Coleridge, read Purchas' account of this beautiful capital city of China built in the time of Kubla Kahn, son of the great Genghis Kahn and was taken by its description.  Coleridge was actually reading the description and smoking opium for his illness (so he says) when he fell asleep and a dream came to him about this great capital city.  Upon waking from sleep, he sat down and began to write the images he saw in his dream.  He began his poem with the same words that Purchas started his account, "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn."  From there Coleridge constructed a poem of vivid imagery, clear in its every detail.  It begins,

In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

I particularly like the end of the poem, or fragment as Coleridge calls it.  A woman playing a dulcimer binds a spell on everyone with her music wooing people to see that she had inspired Kubla to build this city for all to admire him, the builder.

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his golden hair!...

For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I retreat in my mind often to the sacred scenes of Xanadu, to the pleasure dome, to the sacred river, to the caverns, and to the woman playing the dulcimer providing inspiration to do something people are in awe of.

Good advice

I was listening to Danielle Bradbery's new album and a particular line in her song, I'll Never Forget You, caught my attention.  In the song's first verse she has the line "take it one tear at a time."  I often hear people say "take it one step at a time."  During the NFL season, players and coaches alike speak to the press and use the phrase, "one game at a time."  Alcoholics Anonymous has made the phrase famous, "take one day at a time."  I have even heard psychologists tell clients, "take one year at a time."

The whole first verse says, "Sooner or later, they say, it all gets easier.  Take it one tear at a tme."

I remember vividly a conversation with a colleague who asked about how things work out in life.  I answered that precious few things work out.  I suppose that some people have a different experience of life, but I have never really had success with any plan of mine working out how I had imagined it in the first place.  Some of that is due to my limited vision of what I wanted to have happen, but even when I could see the whole plan, life didn't really happen in that fashion.

I have had some great moments in life without a doubt.  And there have been some steps, games, days, and years that have provided great memories.  But, when talking about life as a whole with all of its stages and phases, I think the line in this song captures the essence of my experience.  It's true that life gets easier, but that is only because you learn how to respond and react better to tearful situations.

It's good advice for life... take it one tear at a time.

Piercing mysteries

I used to look to the skies in awesome wonder of what was there.  I didn't know a lot about what was there or how it operated.  It was quite the mystery.  I am certain it was quite the mystery for our ancestors as well who knew less about it even than I did when I was young.

Today I heard a song about the mystery people see when they look to the skies.  The whole song was about the wonder and mystery of God and was based on thoughts written by ancient person recorded an ancient book.  I think modern people take comfort in a song like that because they don't want to know about the details.  It seems that they want to depend on laziness than apply the basic astronomy they learned in school to their understanding of a tremendous frontier lying just above their heads.

Learning about the skies diminishes one's mystery all right.  But, it increases understanding.  And that understanding pierces the mystery - only to lead one to see more wonder, more marvel, more splendor, more majesty than (s)he could think possible.  So, I don't have much appreciation for songs that perpetuate the wonder of the mystery of the sky.  It's so worth the effort to pierce the mystery and gain a fuller understanding of the grand design we're a part of.

It's not a mystery, and it's still a wonder.

Not new, just evolved

No one knows for sure.  Is it alien or is it human?  What does it say or mean in either case?

I haven't really heard people venture a guess as to the symbol's meaning should it be alien.  What would it mean?

I have a suggestion..  We've seen the sign before in a little different form.  The idea is from a myth. The Earth was chaos.  From the chaos came order and harmony.  Its an old, old story, and it's not Hebrew in origin, but Chinese.

Everything evolves, even alien semiology.  Their message is the same as it was from the beginning of their exploration.  If the Chinese explanation of their Yin and Yang is right, we know the meaning of the recent symbol.  If not?  Well, then all bets are off and we're back to square one.

It's too late

I saw a picture on Facebook today of a book with the title How to Read a Book: a Classic Guide to Reading More Intelligently.  The person who posted the picture was a young father of about 28 years with three children.  His caption read: Better late than never.

Maybe for him.  But it's really too late even for him.  A person cannot ignore the blitz of media available in today's society.  Learning to manage the media is what he should be reading.  His three children are dead in their tracks if they follow the advice in this book.  They need to know how to present with all of media's available tools including streaming video.  YouTube is merely an intermediate step to what will be available when his children are adults.

There is nothing about reading that will prepare the children of today for what they will need tomorrow! Nothing!!  Absolutely nothing!!!  Zero to the nth power!!!!