8/28/23

 Monday, August 28, 2023

In bed at 9:10,  awake and up at 4:17. 58°, high of 77°, sunny day ahead, AQI=52, wind W at 4 mph, 1-11/20.  DPs 52-61.  Sunrise at 6:11, sunset at 7:33, 13+22.

No GERD.  7 hours of sleep, 2 or 3 pss.  Liver sausage sandwich for dinner, only water with and after dinner.  3-pillow wedge on the bed.

Up and down an 82-year-old yo-yo string.  Totally out of commission yesterday after a hellish night.  Today a different person.  Each day, each night, a crapshoot.😁😧  On the topside of the string, I'm full of potential: reading, writing, painting, soup making, bread baking, etc. (but not much etc.😀).  On the bottom, I'm spent, out of commission, out of steam, no potential energy, no kinetic energy.  I start each day somewhere on that old string, no telling where.

Speaking of which, two pieces in the morning papers attracted my attention this morning.  The first was a collection of reader responses to Perry Bacon's WaPo op-ed on 8/21, I left the church — and now long for a ‘church for the nones’.  The second was an 8/25 printed interview by David Marchese of philosopher and noted atheist Daneil C. Dennett, How to Live a Happy Life, From a Leading Atheist.  Perry Bacon's essay drew 5,888 reader comments.  The Dennett interview has drawn 387 so far.  

The articles are unrelated except in my thinking.'  One of the reader comments to Bacon's essay was by a reader identified only as "AlexanderTheGoodEnough" who wrote: "What Bacon pines for is not at all new. Plato recognized the problem about 2,400 years ago in “The Republic,” and what Plato proposed, and what Bacon lacks, is the essential Socratic “noble lie.” In “The Republic,” a “noble lie” is a myth or a lie knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony. For nearly two millennia, the Christian church supplied that essential myth for Europeans. The problem now is that, thanks to modern science and the information environment, religion is rapidly losing its power.  The loss of community that has resulted is real and painful. While people might have lost their religion, they’ve not lost their religiosity. People still crave the “religious” communal experience. Thus, they are now substituting all manner of secular communal experiences for effete religion such as rock concerts, sports fandom and, recently and too often dangerously, extreme political involvement and politician worship.  Without a compelling “noble lie” to motivate people, I really cannot offer a truly satisfactory alternative to his lost and bereft religiosity."

In the Dennett interview, the following Q & A appear: So how do you understand religious belief? No problem at all. More people believe in belief in God than believe in God.  We should recognize it and recognize that people who believe in belief in God are sometimes very reluctant to consider that they might be wrong. What if I’m wrong? That’s a question I ask myself a lot. These people do not want to ask that question, and I understand why. They’re afraid of what they might discover. I want to give them an example of somebody who asks the question and is not struck down by lightning. I’m often quoted as saying, “There’s no polite way of telling people they’ve devoted their life to an illusion.” Actually, what I said was, “There’s no polite way of asking people to consider whether they’ve devoted their life to an illusion, but sometimes you have to ask it.”

Dennett is simply urging people to distrust, to question, and ultimately to disbelieve "the noble lie" of theistic religions.  He argues, with Nietzsche, that there is no God, that the existence of a God is essentially 'the noble lie' invented by elites to help maintain order among their lessers.  Nietzsche went further with Christianity in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, writing: "“Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, failed; it has made an ideal out of whatever contradicts the preservation instincts of a strong life; it has corrupted the reason of even the most spiritual natures."  Even the exalted Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr recognized that the Christian ideal - Love your neighbor as yourself - is impossible.  "It is natural enough to love one's own  family more than other families and no amount of education will ever eliminate the inverse ratio between the potency of love and the breadth and extension in which it is applied."  Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics.

I've been living with this timeless struggle between Truth and 'The Noble Lie" since I was in 6th grade at St. Leo Grammar School, training to become an altar boy, fearing that I was guilty of the Sin or Doubt, and wondering, as Tom St. John put it  to me decades later "Do you really believe that shit?"  Of course, I am mindful of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.'s insight that "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless."

The early morning sun is shining on the south end of the sofa on its slow way north towards the bricks of the fireplace wall.  The sun rose at 76°E this morning, fully 20° south of its position on the Lake Michigan horizon at the summer solstice and on its way to its 90° due East rise less than a month from now, shortly after the autumn equinox.  My knockoff Modigliani looks down from the wall thinking Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

LTMW at rush hour feeding at the Clausen Corner Feeding Station.  Traffic has slowed as a female Hairy Woodpecker takes her time assessing the choices available in the sunflower seed tube which contains safflower seeds, millet, peanut and some other morsels.  Once she has had her fill, she flies away and a White-bellied Nuthatch takes her upside-down position on the tube.  A male Cardinal preceded the woodpecker and positioned himself on the tube so that the morning sunlight illuminated his crest making it almost translucent.  After the woodpecker and the nuthatch, the finches and chickadees come back until they are harassed by some English sparrows, each of which deserves a Does not play well with others comment on its report card.

Old friend  Larry Anderson, MULS '70, USMC 30 years, coming up from Atlanta on 9/7.  Looking forward to seeing him, good friends for 57 years, a blessing.

Outings.  Busy day.  Trip to Sendik's, trip to the library to drop off and pick up, a trip to Winkie's to get a birthday card for Anh.  Geri called at about 7:30 p.m. to say she was between Kenosha and Racine on her way home, making me glad I had a big bowl of beef barley soup at 6:45 to avoid eating late (GERD).