9/21/23

 An  Thursday, September 21, 2023

In bed by 10, awake on the brr at 5, up from bed at 5:15, unable to sleep, thinking thoughts of eulogies, TSJ's, Jessie's partner, Roland, RJA, Dad.  Let Lilly out at 5:45.  60°, high of 73°, cloudy all day, AQI=65(PM), wind NE at 2 mph, 1-6/10, DPs 59-63.  Sunrise at 6:37, sunset at 6:51,  12+13.  

Atheism/Calvinism?  I got to wondering this morning whether I am a bit of a Calvinist, at least with respect to one of his core beliefs, i.e., the utter depravity of mankind,  and perhaps to other of his beliefs, like predestination,  Calvin taught that we are unavoidably enslaved to Sin, fated to prefer our own selfish interests rather than to adhere to the will of God.  I have thought for a long time that instead of teaching the views of Thomas Aquinas in the Philosophy of Man course that was required at Marquette in the late 50s and early 60s, they should have taught H. L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Thomas Hobbes, and St. Augustine and John Calvin who wrote that human nature is corrupt and radically sinful and has been since the Fall of Adam & Eve, i.e., Original Sin.  These thinkers and writers didn't mess around with notions of human beings having been created "in the image of God."  Doesn't all of human history tell us that our species is predatory, exploiting, and self-seeking?  That we do good when it is in our interest to do so.  It's the stuff of Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics with its acknowledgement that the ethical life as taught by Jesus is literally impossible for men to follow, and his thoughts in Moral Man and Immoral Society.  In Leviathan, Hobbes wrote: "Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, . . . the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."  Twain put it more pithily: "The more I know about men, the more I like dogs." St. Augustine and John Calvin don't seem to fit easily in a grouping with Mencken, Twain, Bierce, and Hobbes, but they all seemed to share the same jaundiced view of human nature.

And I'm also a getting a bit partial to Calvin's notion of predestination, the total Sovereignty of God, and the myth of 'free will', personal responsibilitiy for our own destinies, the 'meritocracy.'  If God is ever-present, omniscient, and all-powerful, He/She/It/They (let's just say Ω) willed the shitstorm we know as human history including wars, crimes, disease, suffering, disasters, etc.   Calvin's preaching on 'Unconditional Election' asserts that God has chosen from eternity those whom he will bring to himself, i.e., be 'saved,'  not based on foreseen virtue, merit, or faith in those people; rather, his choice is unconditionally grounded in his mercy alone. God has chosen from eternity to extend mercy to those he has chosen and to withhold mercy from those not chosen.  In Ken Kesey's lingo, you're either on the bus or off the bus and you have nothing to do it; it's all up to Ω.  Or as William Blake put it Every Night & every Morn  / Some to Misery are Born  / Every Morn and every Night  / Some are Born to sweet delight  / Some are Born to sweet delight  / Some are Born to Endless Night.  The lottery of birth.  A few are big winners, most are losers.  Or as the Anglican hymn, 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' put it (in verses rarely sung anymore):  All things bright and beautiful, / All creatures great and small, / All things wise and wonderful, / The Lord God made them all./ The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / God made them, high or lowly, / And ordered their estate.  Flip Wilson's Geraldine character used to say 'The Devil made me do it!'; she should have said, 'Ω made me do it!'

I recall sitting in Tom and Sue Clark's kitchen one day discussing Ω and saying I just couldn't buy the description of Ω that I was forcefed in my many years of Catholic education/indoctrination - the All Good, All Powerful, All Knowing, All Loving Father stuff.  The party line never changed from grammar school through college, but it seemed to me that a pretty good case could be made that Ω is a mean prick, not a loving Father.  Rather than blaming Ω for all the human suffering Ω created, I opted to stop believing in Ω and rid myself of the anger I would otherwise feel.  Of course I understand that on that point, John Calvin and I part ways.  It's the classic problem of theodicy and I can't buy any of the proffered explanations from the theologians.  Maybe it's one of those many conumdrums the nuns and brothers and priests disposed of with the always available answer: "It's a Mystery."  You don't have to understand it, just accept it and believe it, like the bodily Assumption of the BVM into Heaven, the Trinity, and Transubstantiation.  Pray, pay, and obey!  Or, ss Pope Pius X wrote in his 1906 encyclical  Vehementer Nos:

It follows that the church is by essence an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.  So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end  of the society and directing all its members toward that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors.

No thanks, Pius.  Baaa basss.

Cognitive decline, memory, confusion.  Yesterday, I went to the VA without a half dozen Trulicity injection pens to be deposited in the 'Sharps disposal' container at the hospitalls entry.  I also couldn't remember if I had taken a HCT pill in the morning.. Today I forgot to inject myself with Trulicity after breakfst, as I have done for years on Thursdays, or has it changed to Wednesdays?  This afternoon I wondered whether I had indeed injected myself, hoping that the number of pens in the Trrulicty container would provide me with a reliable clue since I was loathe to miss a week's dosage and more loathe to double on a weeklu dosage in one day.  And I couldn't remember whether I had applied the Ketoconozole cream this morning.   I am experiencing more and more of these short term memory and confusion problems, aw well as some other problems with 'executive function,' especially doing processes in the proper order.  Worrisome.

Another CPP day. 'nuf said.

Disappointing trip to Blick.    I went looking for 2 36 inch canvas stretches or, failing that, a pre-stretched  28 X 25 inch canvas.   Struch out on both, but picked up a few liner brushes.

This is Us.  We've been watching this long, long series on Hulu.