Don't we all agree? Isn't that what our Mother's told us?
Of course it's unfair. In its rawest, most unmediated way, life is short, nasty, and brutish...and exceedingly unfair. There is no moral/social/economic arbiter, no Bureau of Universal Equitable Balance that ensures that...'hey, you're a nice guy...you should have a nice life!'
Certainly over the last 10,000 years of increasingly organized civilization, the emergence of law and social structure, to reduce & control & prevent (and punish) the nastier and more brutish aspects has been successful in moderating those more painful extremes. But -- still, life remains intrinsically unfair. We are all slower, fatter, stupider, less successful, uglier, grumpier, less popular, and shorter than any number of someones...and equally we're all faster, thinner, smarter, more successful, prettier, happier, taller, and more popular than someone else.
So what?
It is not the State's job to rebalance Unfair Life.
It is not the State's job to somehow measure and compensate each of us for the unfair genetic luggage we were handed at conception. Nor is it the State's job to examine the lives our Parent's had (into which we were dropped) to determine whether or not they were up to State Standard (requiring the intervention of State Compensators). No.
Rather it is the State functions to leverage public funding to provide the goods and services we cannot individually manage: national infrastructures, safe food, product standards, military protection, police, fire, rescue, etc....and, to some limited extent, social safety nets for those who are unable to survive, independently, within the wider world.
This means not only that the Gaps created by an Unfair Life will continue to exist...but that those Gaps will widen and other new ones will be created. The taller, beautiful, well-spoken will become Movie Stars and Talking Heads and be paid millions to sell soap. Those who can throw a football 70 yards on a frozen rope will win championships, be paid zillions, and find their picture on Wheaties boxes. The brilliant and innovative will build better mousetraps and the world will beat paths to each of their doors. All this will occur on big scales and little, and all of it will be sprinkled with fate, fortune, luck, and happenstance. The mighty will fall and the meek rise. Families will slide, generation to generation, from one end of the economic scale to the other. If we look at 18th century America we won't find the Gates or Bezos Estates. If we look for the Bingham Empires in 21st century America (William being the richest man in the United States in 1776) we won't find them either.
In many ways the fact that Gaps CAN be created means that this is, indeed, a free country with an open market. And equally if what we witnessed was universal equity, what we'd there inhabit would be a totalitarian nightmare: all of us Winston Smith's, dressed in grey, living in 'little boxes on the hillside...all made out of ticky-tacky'... all looking just the same'.
"You wanna talk about how do we improve young childhood education, how do we talk about improving family structure, how do we deal with healthcare, how do we deal with childcare support for the very young, especially for parents who are overwhelmed with work, who don't have the time or the energy sometimes to be there for their children." No, actually I don't.
The State has no place seeking to 'improve' the family. Rather it is the family which must improve the State. And if we wish to raise good, productive, and successful sons and daughters...who will eventually grow to become good, productive, and successful citizens and neighbors... that responsibility begins with Mom & Dad...with Grandma & Grandpa.... and with the neighborhood itself. It begins with decisions about whether or not I'm having sex and getting pregnant at 15....whether I go to school or do my homework....whether I smoke dope, do drugs, and hurt other people...whether I go to Church and honor my father and mother and the policeman on the corner. It begins with taking responsibility for the lives we have.
Sure healthcare can be improved but the so-called Greatest Generation was raised in the absolute absence of any State funded national healthcare system. Sure, young childhood education can be boosted but that same Greatest Generation was raised in the total absence of young childhood (pre-school) education. Sure to all those grand, and nice-sounding things. But the problem we are trying to address is not subject to State-sponsored exogenous correction.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves". And correcting it requires first, that WE, admit that the problem is ours. Not the State, not the Man, not the System, not our History, not SOMEONE ELSE....but ME. I own it.
I don’t rightfully know that you own all that. Unless you believe in original sin. But there ain’t Jack Schitt that you, as one individual, can do about it.
You could try “Howling at the Moon” as Hank Williams did. Or try “Blowing in the Wind” as Bob Dylan did.
But kudos to you for quoting Pete Seeger and the great Bard in one fell swoop.
It’s all sounds about right to me.
It almost sounds as if you are proposing a change in human nature.
Appreciate the kudos! (And actually, interestingly enough, that song was written by Malvina Reynolds. Seeger, of course, was the one who made it a hit). But heck no. Human nature is human nature and that's not changing.
Fundamentally -- deep in our heart of hearts -- we all contain within us the appetites and predilections of toddlers: we're happy when our belly's full and unhappy when it's not. We're angry & frustrated when things don't go our way. And when we have to do things we 'prefer not to' we get upset. We're very content letting the world come to us (with cookies and ice cream!) and irritated if we have to, instead, change ourselves to fit the world.
Now growing-up (if our parents are doing their job) requires teaching those toddler selves that we can't be toddlers forever...that we have to 'get a job' (I can hear Maynard G. Krebs now!)... That appetites need to be moderated, and temper tantrums eliminated, and anger leavened. We learn that yes, we do get more flies with honey than vinegar. That sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do...AND (surprise surprise!) sometimes that kind of discipline really does pay off. We develop -- if we've grown-up successfully -- a mature, adult perspective on 'life in the real world' and learn self-accountability.
And the State should stay out of all of that.
But if, instead, parenting gives free rein to the child... If we're indulged instead of disciplined... If Mama fights like mad to make the world accommodate Little Johnny's idiosyncrasies (rather than teaching Little Johnny that his behavior must be normalized)....and if the State insists on double-coddling both Mama and Johnny (and throw in Grandma and Great Grandma)... well then, we never put away childish things. We just more of them.
I'd suggest that the single thing we CAN do about all this (indirectly) is to stop (as best we can) the horrendously counter-productive practice of trying to solve human behavior problems (family problems) by writing ever larger checks. Since '65 we've spent $23Trillion on so-called Anti-Poverty Programs. Did we get anywhere near our money's worth?
In 2020, The National Museum of African American History and Culture published a "teaching paper" on "Aspects of Whiteness and White Culture"...which should a have been titled..."How to live the American Dream and Thrive"...it ascribed a profile of behaviors and attitudes only to Whites. It asserted that POC only think these ways and do these things in response to White authority and power.
Their list (with the exception of a few racist and some what humorous remarks about mate selection and food preference) would be a profile for success in 21st Century US society no matter what you look like:
Have a family raise children, be self reliant, employ linear thinking and scientific study, hard work is key to success and comes before play, be action oriented and always seek better results...to win, practice deferred gratification save and invest for the future, be timely, learn to use proper English, respect authority, be polite.
Think about a person who lives by exactly the opposite of all these aspects of life...who would hire them...always late, doesn't work, hard can't think logically, doesn't respect an organization's goals?
The last two attributes (respect authority , be polite) might explain our policing interaction difficulties .
In a 60 Minutes interview years ago, Morgan Freeman suggested that one of the best means of addressing racism is to stop talking about it incessantly. Instead of that, we now have "white supremacy" at every turn, a condition whose supply cannot keep up with the demand. Every single thing that happens to a person, especially a minority individual, is not the result of that person's melanin level.
Sullivan falls into the trap a bit, and Glenn rightly corrects him, on the topic of wealth and income. Racializing everything was poison when tried before. Why anyone wants to repeat that, other than the hustlers for whom it's a business, is beyond me. There are other dynamic at play, among them being the change in household dynamics from the time of Glenn's youth - a time in which racial animus was far more open than it is today. Like many white kids of the time, he had an extended family to look out for him and for the other kids in the neighborhood. Something changed since then. It was not more racism.
Re: early childhood education -- the Princess of Wales is about to launch some major initiative in the UK regarding what Ferguson calls the Basics. Her life's work apparently is going to be devoted the first five years. She has spent the last decade studying the subject. It will be interesting to see if any good/new ideas come out. But she underscored the importance for society as a whole. The details are to be released on Tuesday. Her letter said: “During our very early childhood, our brains develop at an amazing rate - faster than any other time of our lives. Our experiences, relationships, and surroundings at that young age shape the rest of our lives.
“It is a time where we lay the foundations and building blocks for life. It is when we learn to understand ourselves, understand others and understand the world in which we live.
“But as a society, we currently spend much more of our time and energy on later life. I am absolutely determined that this long-term campaign is going to change that.”
Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they aren't right. My father smoked most of his life. At one point he quit for almost 2 years. But one night he was at the bar drinking with friends and he bummed a cigarette. He didn't quit again until he was literally too sick to go to a store to buy cigarettes. He died in 2001 at age 59 from heart failure. My father always told me never to start smoking. That made him a hypocrite, but it was certainly good advice to follow.
I have identified as agnostic since I was 16. My own crisis of faith was not an emotional reaction, but really more the result of an intellectual thought process. My 10th grade English class was reading Greek mythology when I began wondering about the similarities between ancient Greek religious beliefs and my own Catholic faith. Why did they believe in these fanciful tales that pretty much everyone rejects the truth of today? I came up with 3 reasons. First, it was what they were taught by parents and teachers. Second, it was what everyone around them believed. Third, it provided explanations for phenomena that they couldn't otherwise understand. For example, the reason that the sun moves across the sky is because Apollo pulls it with his chariot. Then I asked myself why I believed in God? I decided that it was for the same 3 reasons. I also decided that those reasons weren't sufficient to justify believing. There were all kinds of stories in the Bible about miracles, but there had also been many stories of miracles performed by the Olympian Gods. God was a possible explanation for where the Universe, Earth, and life had come from. But just because Science can't answer those questions currently, doesn't mean that God is the correct answer. Occam's razor and all that.
I can't say for certain there is no God, but I think it's extremely unlikely. I actually considered Pascal's wager before I had ever heard of it. Isn't it safer to believe in case God exists? But I decided that if what I had been taught in Catholic school about God was correct, if I lived a good life treating others as I would want to be treated, I don't think that God would damn me to Hell because I didn't go to church on Sundays. After all, God gave me the ability to reason. If he wanted me to believe he could certainly provide evidence that would convince me. I have avoided the atheist label, both because I can't disprove God's existence and because I didn't like the attitudes of most high profile atheists. At least that was true of the people famous for their disbelief. I hate the way certain atheists delight in mocking the faithful for their belief in "superstition." Bill Maher anyone?
I have struggled most of my adult life with depression. It took many years before I realized that was what my problem was. It wasn't until recently that I connected my first symptoms of depression during my junior year of high school with my crisis of faith the year before. In retrospect, it's hard to believe I missed the connection. I believe that faith can be very powerful irregardless of whether that faith is justified by reality. Faith that God will give you the strength to overcome adversity might be the only reason a person might try to overcome it instead of giving up because they see their situation as hopeless. Faith can also provide comfort. We lost my mother a few years ago. I so wish that I believed I would see her again. My own health is generally poor. My one saving grace is that I never smoked. But I suffer from complications from diabetes and a back injury sustained when I was rear ended at a red light. Today, I am retired on disability. I live alone and haven't dated anyone in over a decade. I have siblings as well as 2 nieces and a nephew. My nieces live in CA. My nephew I get to see every couple of weeks. As much as I love them, I wish I had more to live for. I honestly wish I could believe in God again. But my rational mind keeps telling me that the more I desperately I want something to be true, the more skeptical I should be. Maybe I should rethink Pascal's wager.
"If (God) wanted me to believe he could certainly provide evidence that would convince me." No, not in the least.
What you describe is not Faith, it's fact. I don't have to 'believe' in a hamburger, I can hold & snarf any number of hamburgers. God is not hamburger...nor is He interested in providing 'proof' to Man beyond the proof in which we swim.
Reminds me of the David Foster Wallace story (from a graduation speech): "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
Faith is not belief in the presence of proof indisputable (like God's fingerprints on a tree.....or His footprint in the garden) but belief in the absence of CSI forensics.
You wish to believe...so BELIEVE. We see Beauty; we feel Love; we are haunted by a sense of ineffable transcendence: what is all that other than 'proof'? As CS Lewis put it, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
"As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.” Mark Helpin, "A Soldier of the Great War"
You say your 'rational mind keeps telling me' to be skeptical. To what purpose?
“Reason excludes faith.... It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.” (Helprin, again.)
I'm familiar with the argument that faith is belief in the absence of evidence. But I fail to see how that is an argument in favor of believing something. I realize many people would say it is arrogant to demand that God prove to me that he exists. But I am not demanding anything of the sort. If my Catholic school teachers were correct about God, I believe that he wouldn't condemn me for an honest lack of belief. I am not demanding proof. I am just pointing out that he has that option if he wants me to believe. If I am surprised to discover that there is an afterlife that includes Heaven and Hell, I will hope that I lived a good enough life, treating others well, that I have at least earned a place in purgatory if not Heaven.
One of my favorite TV shows was Lucifer. The premise is that the Devil decides to abandon Hell and take a vacation on Earth running a bar in LA. He ends up as a consultant to the LAPD. In the first season, a priest enters his bar to ask a favor. He wants Lucifer to help prevent a boy from becoming a drug dealer. Lucifer initially refuses, but he ends up befriending the priest. At the end of the episode the priest is shot and dies in Lucifer's arms. Before he dies he says to Lucifer "I didn't understand why God put you in my path. But now I realize he put me in yours." It was at that point I realized the show nominally about the Devil, actually had a very Christian message. No one is beyond salvation, not even the Devil. I am not sure that the Catholic Church would agree the Devil could be reformed, but it sounds like something the God I was taught about would want. Hopefully, I can be saved even if I lack faith. The alternative is everything ends. Either way, I am OK with it.
It's not an argument to believe anything. That is exactly the point. Faith is belief in the absence of evidence, in the absence of Proof (as in Proof, with a capital P) but not in the absence of what our heart tells us is true.
It is knowing without the sworn affidavit, absent the notary, without a single repeatable experimental finding. Still, we know.
I'm not saying you're demanding anything. Nor am I suggesting that God would condemn you for a lack of anything. Who am I to offer a Guide to God's thinking, assuming God thinks? I'm not even particularly concerned about your salvation, or lack thereof -- that issue is not mine.
But when you say you starve for Belief.. when you tell us you suffer in its absence...then I say Believe. When you hesitate or back away from such a leap because you've somehow come to feel that Belief is a 'sucker's game' (not to put words in your mouth but that seems like what you'd say)....I say Believe anyway! Choose it; embrace it. The only one to say you're a 'sucker' is you. So don't say it. Just Believe. Have Faith. Choose Faith.
Look at the glories of the world which surround you. The beauty of the ineffable. The sweetness of a single note, the Mother's softly lingering touch of her child's sleeping face...and Believe.
I'll leave you with one last Helprin quote, also from A Soldier of the Great War:
"...and even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.”
“I believe that faith can be very powerful irregardless of whether that faith is justified by reality.”
I agree with your thoughts on the powerful role faith plays in many peoples lives, but if your faith is “justified by reality” then it is no longer faith. For me, thats the problem with Pascal’s wager. It assumes one can choose to believe. Choose to have faith. If you are inclined to interrogate religious beliefs, but still want to have faith, you have to be able to eventually satisfy your doubts with the answer - “God is mysterious”. That answer will just never do it for me.
Indeed you can choose to Believe. Why not? We do it all the time in countless little ways every day. I believe that my car will start, despite an absolute lack of understanding of the mystery of the internal combustion engine. I believe that when I take my seat on a plane that somehow, mysteriously, that massive chunk of steel will rise and safely take me to my destination. When I'm sick and the doctor says, 'Take this!', I swallow it gladly with faith that, mysteriously, my ailments will vanish.
These are little leaps but we all make them....and sometimes we tell ourselves it's OK that I don't know how the electricity finds its way into my coffee grinder-- but someone does! At least that's what I believe.
The thing is, life itself is a mystery. Love is a mystery. It's a mystery why, when we hear someone sing 'Nessun dorma' by Puccini that our eyes fill with tears. It's a mystery why we are consumed when our newborn wraps her tiny hand around our finger. Existence is mystery; consciousness & self-awareness is mystery. It's mysterious as to why we worry such questions that have never haunted a single cow.
Of course God is mystery...what else could He be?
When we mortals struggle to understand Calculus, and need a specialist to fix a leaky pipe....how could we possibly think God would be MORE comprehensible?
None of the examples you give are examples of faith. I don’t have faith my car will start, I have evidence. That evidence being the fact it has started the previous 1000 times I have tried. Which is why I am 99.9% certain my 2019 truck will start and about 50% confident my 1970 nova will start. I have a track record to base my confidence (or lack thereof) on. It also means little that I do not have the technical expertise to understand how an engine works or a plane flies. I know that they were designed and engineered based on the scientific method and have to meet standards of proof. If I was buying a car and noticed it didn’t have a motor, I would ask the salesman how exactly it was going to run. If his answer was “it works in mysterious ways”, I would not believe him. I see no evidence for Gods existence so even if I wanted to believe, I could not. I could choose to hope, but I could not choose to believe.
You almost certainly require explanations for every one of the examples you gave. You want the doctor to explain the reason he is giving you the pill, what the pill will do, and what the possible side effects might be. You also might want a second opinion to check the reasoning of the first doctor. You are aware of the safety records of air flight in general. That it’s safer than driving a car. You also require that the pilot is qualified and know that the airlines are regulated so they have to provide certain levels of maintenance. You don't make these decision based on faith, you make them based on probability.
Life is full of mysteries, I agree. But science routinely takes mysteries that are credited to God and reveals their natural cause. It has been doing this for hundreds of years.
“It's a mystery why we are consumed when our newborn wraps her tiny hand around our finger.”
My friends father was a loving and caring man. He certainly felt the way you described above about his children. At work one day, he fell off the back of a truck and had serious trauma to his head. He recovered, but noticed that he no longer felt the same way about life. He felt no real empathy and was almost entirely emotionally detached from his family and friends. This is a well documented and established effect of certain types of head trauma. If that feeling we get about our children is due to our spirit and connection with our creator, are you saying my friends dad damaged his spirit when he fell off that truck? Or is it more likely that our brains are why we feel that way about our children and my friends dad damaged his frontal lobe when he fell off that truck?
And, of course, there is evidence and then there is evidence.
The fact that our car has started before builds my faith, my conviction, that so it will always be. The fact that the plane has lifted me, mysteriously, before gives me faith it will again. And if in fact we put some Primitive/Pre-Scientific upon that same plane, he too would share that faith (increasing with every trip) absent any scientific understanding at all of the principles of aerodynamic lift. The fact that science can explain -- to a degree -- why the plane lifts does not change the fact that it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.
Science explains a lot, no question...to a point...but with each explanation we simply reach another question: why is "X" so? Why does a spark ignite? Why is a vapor flammable? Why does steel work in the way it does? And with each question answered we simply push the question that much further:: why matter? why energy? why consciousness? why beauty? why love?
Certainly those transcendent feelings are -- as you say -- filtered through and processed by our brain. And certainly an injury to such an organ can impact that processing. But the fact that a blind person cannot appreciate the Mona Lisa does not make da Vinci's work somehow less transcendent. The fact that your friend no longer felt an empathy he felt before does not mean that his very human feeling was unreal....it only means he was no longer equipped to recognize it as he had.
The lack or the destruction of an ability to perceive does not change the truth of what had been perceived. Your friend was, quite obviously, very much aware of what he had lost...just as the blind man who lost his sight would be aware of what he is missing, even if he can no longer perceive it.
The evidence of God surrounds us .... just as the infinite beauty of the universe surrounds us. That you can't see it...or, perhaps, refuse to see it...even in the grip of a newborn's hand, even in the heart-piercing chords of the 'Nessun dorma', even in the shattering kiss of an eternal love, even in a million other things that fill our days and our dreams. Even if, in some misguided post-modern surety we dismiss it all as "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato"... that doesn't change the truth of what is.
So of course we can choose to Believe...to make that little leap... given the evidence, given the mysteries which always and forever will surround us.
This is a semantic argument. You have changed the accepted meaning of the word “faith”.
You state that evidence builds your faith and then in another response state (correctly) “Faith is belief in the absence of evidence” - How can both of those things be true? In the presence of evidence faith is unnecessary. So evidence doesn’t build faith it supersedes it.
You also keep calling well understood and proven processes “mysterious”. Flight is not mysterious. Electricity getting to your coffee grinder is not mysterious. Medicine curing ailments is not mysterious. Just because you don’t understand the process does not mean it is mysterious. I understand you have to establish their mysterious nature in order for them to make any sense in an analogy to faith in God, but they just aren’t. Those things are in an entirely different category.
—“The fact that science can explain -- to a degree -- why the plane lifts does not change the fact that it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.”
If there is evidence that planes reliably fly then it is simply false to say “it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.” Let’s replace the word faith with the correct definition (that you provided) of the word faith. — I have decades worth of evidence that planes fly, but “it is (belief in the absence of evidence) that allows me to buy a ticket. Does that make sense?
—“Certainly those transcendent feelings are -- as you say -- filtered through and processed by our brain.”
I didn’t say any of that. This description makes no sense to me. You believe “transcendent feelings” exist independent of us and they are somehow filtered through our brains? What form do these transcendent feelings take when they are outside of our brains, before they are “filtered”? It makes far more sense to me that our brains are the originators of these feelings.
The last argument is more sermon than rational claim, and would be better received by a congregation. I have heard it countless times and the fact still remains, the beauty of nature or vastness of space is not evidence of God. It is beautiful and vast. It inspires awe and can even bring a person to tears. The jump from there to “god did it” is not a “little leap”. It is a gargantuan and unnecessary one.
And lastly you say “And, of course, there is evidence and then there is evidence”
Of course it's a semantic argument. But it's an accurate semantic argument. You also confuse evidence & proof.
'Faith' is complete trust, a strong conviction. The fact of faith has nothing to do with proof, per se, but accumulated evidence may reinforce "strong conviction". I have faith my wife loves me...and every loving act she performs does indeed reinforce that trust with the evidence of her act, but I have faith in her love even in the absence of that evidential act...and utterly in the absence of proof, for love itself is unprovable. There is no litmus test for Love.
Equally we can say that faith in the existence of God is buoyed, or reinforced by all kinds of evidence -- the glory of the universe, the shock of beauty, the transcendence of love, your child's first smile -- but none of those 'clues' proves God. Evidence may reinforce faith but evidence, per se, proves nothing, it simply nudges.
You say 'electricity getting to your coffee grinder' is not mysterious. But in fact it is mysterious to any of us who have no knowledge or insight or 'proof' of the process. Instead, in the absence of that proof, we have 'complete trust' that the coffee grinder grinds when we plug it into an outlet.
The fact that I can't prove electricity does not alter my faith in electricity. The fact that I can't prove God does not alter my faith in God. And just as we might say, an Electrical Engineer or Physicist can prove electricity....so too might some insist that Aquinas or some learned Theologian can equally prove God. In either case, I don't really care. The arcana of such exercises are beyond me. In either case, my Faith remains.
Let me see if I can clarify my meaning, re: "transcendent feelings'...because you're right, that construction was sloppy.
Consider: a newborn reaches out and curls his hand around his father's finger. At the most mundane of levels it's just a simple touch, 'perceived' by the skin, the nerves and transmitted to the brain where the pressure and warmth of that touch are combined with the visual data processed through the eyes, and the olfactory data processed through the nose (that fresh-baked scent of babies) to arrive at 'brain central' where our various knowledge references interpret all that raw data to tell us: it's a baby's grasp. Tears come to our eyes....the same tears, chemically speaking, which are generated when just that afternoon we heard Pavarotti sing the 'Nessun dorma'. That is the transcendent feeling and it is, indeed, processed by the brain.
It obviously does not exist outside us...not in the same way the baby's little fist does, or the scent, or the warmth -- those are all independent phenomena. But the combination of all those things upon a dog, though perceived by the dog as the child's touch, are not transcendent. Why? Why would our brains attach some kind of extraordinary meaning, to that mundane combination of stimuli such that we cry, and our heart yearns? Why, to your point, would we see nature as 'beautiful' or the universe as 'awesome'? Dog's don't. Why do we? Why & how would the human's mammalian brain create such perceptions when they serve absolutely no utilitarian purpose? Why do we feel this sense of wonder, dread, and veneration ... how can the universe seem 'sublime'?
But never mind. The answer matters little. Faith requires, actually, that it matters not at all. Belief, always, is a matter of choice. And it is a choice exercised with eyes wide open. Either we have faith in God, in Truth, in an absolute Morality, a transcendent & eternal justice, in Love, in Beauty, in Awe....or.... as I said.... we dismiss it all as that 'fragment of an underdone potato' and say God is an unnecessary leap.
I'm reminded of a passage from De Lubac...just encountered it a few days ago, in fact: "So, in the matter of God, whatever certain people may be tempted to think, it is never the proof that is lacking. What is lacking is taste for God. The most distressing diagnosis that can be made of the present age, and the most alarming, is to all appearances at least, it has lost the taste for God. Man prefers himself to God. And so he deflects the movement which leads to God; or since he is unable to alter its direction, he persists in interpreting it falsely. He imagines he has liquidated the proofs. He concentrates on the critique of the proofs and never gets beyond them. He turns away from that which convinces him. If the taste returned, we may be sure that the proofs would soon be restored in everybody’s eyes, and would seem—what they really are if one considers the kernal of them—clearer than day."
Best wishes going forward.
Sorry for the long response...too much time on this already.
I feel that I should defend Jamelle Bouie because I am a subscriber to his newsletter. Andrew Sullivan may have been made fun of by Bouie on Twitter more times than he can count but the things I remember Bouie writing about are his theories that the Electoral College is racist, the Supreme Court has too much power, and the Senate should be elected by the state legislatures again in return for giving up some power. Every week he also has a photo which he has taken and a recipe which he has cooked. I think his perspective is much more about the legacies of white supremacy in how public power works than how individual Black people can succeed because he has had little trouble succeeding (before he was at the Times he was Greg Sargent's second-in-command at The Plum Line which has gone to a succession of very talented people).
I don't see how it mitigates the injustice of the racial wealth gap to say "Wealth is created by human creativity, ingenuity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship and all of that." Sam Walton, for instance, began Walmart in Arkansas in the 1940s, with a loan that was the equivalent of $300k today. Today, Sam Walton's children are some of the richest people on earth. You can say "Well, Walton built that wealth through ingenuity and risk-taking." But what Black entrepreneur in Arkansas in the 1940s could have accessed the capital necessary to start the first mega-store chain? The first megastore was always going to be built by a white person, because the opportunity arose during Jim Crow. The Walton family's wealth today may be the result of "creativity and risk-taking" but it was creativity occurring under conditions that kept Black people from competing in the marketplace. Their wealth here in 2023 is Jim Crow wealth. If the racial wealth gap has existed continuously since the end of the civil war, and if access to capital builds wealth that can build more wealth, then the racial wealth gap is the injustice of the past passed down to the present, no matter how much "creativity" led to the creation of that wealth. I don't think there's any more reason to wave away the injustice of the wealth gap today than there would be in 1940.
Counter-factual assertions are simply silly. How many Sam Walton's have their been? Of all the millions and millions of White, Black, Yellow, Green, Purple people in the world who were born in 1918, why was there only one Sam Walton / Walmart? Did Jim Crow also keep out the other non-Black millions who also failed to found a multi-billion dollar retail chain?
Sam's actual independent start was the purchase of a Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas with a $20K loan from his father-in-law + another $5K he had saved from his army service. Can we assume that no one else's father-in-law ever loaned their daughter's husband $20K.
As for the 'injustice of a wealth gap'...I'm not sure what that really means. Everyone experiences a wealth gap. Your great-great-great-great-grandparents (and do you even know all 64 of their names? I sure don't!) undoubtedly had more or less 'wealth' back there in the early 1700's than my 64. Did ANY of that wealth somehow trickle down to us (from people whose names none of us recall)? What about the 128 grandparents, five greats ago? Or the 256 another generation back?
The truth is, "70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the next generation, with 90% losing it the generation after that." Is that just? Who's to say? Is it just that your folks had more or less than my folks? In the end, it's a meaningless question...nor is there any reason to believe that the State has or should have any role in rebalancing whatever wealth imbalances which may exist. [Though I'd sure like it if LeBron did some personal rebalancing and sent a chunk of his my way. The inequity between the two of us is chasmic!]
Glenn - "It seems to me, if you wanted to actually get it done, whatever the “it” is ... you need political majorities. And the mustering of those political majorities requires formulating your claims in terms that are universally applicable to the people whom you're trying to persuade."
This thread is an excellent illustration of a point I came here to make in regard to this statement from Glenn, which I think gets to the root of his philosophy of overcoming inequality. Everybody who thinks they are poor thinks they are deserving, maybe not necessarily of a handout but at the very least of getting to keep what they have. Everybody who claims redistribution, whether racially or non-racially based, is necessary always thinks the redistributed share should come from somebody else.
The Woke project quite specifically avoids universally applicable claims to redistribution of some wealth and quite openly claims, just like you did, that specific wealth should be confiscated because the point of the project is *not to equitably redistribute wealth*. The point is to give one set of white people a way to gain power over another set of white people (since white people are still a de facto political majority in this country) by claiming their opposition to wealth redistribution is based on 'racism'.
Madam C. J. Walker (1867-1919) was “the first Black woman millionaire in America” and made her fortune thanks to her homemade line of hair care products for Black women. Born Sarah Breedlove to parents who had been enslaved, she was inspired to create her hair products after an experience with hair loss, which led to the creation of the “Walker system” of hair care.
Why on earth do you want to take the Walton family wealth away? Has it not been earned? Didn't Sam spend his life building it? If he'd been your grandfather would you give it all away? (of course you'd have to argue with the other maybe 20-30 children and grandchildren who currently share in that wealth).
Who do you think deserves what the Waltons spent lifetimes building more than the Waltons who have undoubtedly already given billions away while employing millions and millions of others over the last 60 years?
Do you have some 'basement level' of wealth that you would allow families to retain? Or do you demand that ALL wealth from every generation somehow pass to the State upon that generation's death, for use as the State sees fit?
If a father dies first, does his wife get to keep the family wealth until her death, or does she have to relinguish 50% to the tax man at the funeral of her husband? And if any one of us is foolish enough to still be living in our parent's basement when they die, are we immediately out on the street as the State soaks-up all their assets?
Do you think such a world somehow more 'just'??? What is just about anyone other than the individual who earned a dollar being given that dollar?
Taken away by whom and for what purpose? This sort of change makes a thief, not someone to be exalted. How long will white saviors treat black people like pets before a better argument than stealing someone else's wealth is made. We're long past the 1940s, with black billionaires to show for it.
You're indistinguishable from the Walton's in your example. Give up your wealth. You're just as guilty of Jim Crow being in your favor, but obviously on a lesser scale. Or, perhaps not obviously. We're going to need to see some receipts.
Haha I'm "indistinguishable" from a billionaire, except for the fact they have a billion dollars whereas I have 150k in student debt. Get real, man. If I had wealth, you might have a point. But I don't.
A law degree from Yale, and you aren't able to pay back your student loans? Briahna Joy Gray once remarked to Dr. Loury, also bemoaning her student debt (paraphrasing), "I have a law degree from Harvard, what am I supposed to do with it?"
What kind of racket are those Ivy League law schools running?
[By the way, folks, Briahna is superb on Rising. She and Robby Soave make a great team. They sometimes have serious disagreements and go at each other hard, but there is no carryover into the next segment/topic. Great chemistry. They are better than their much-heralded predecessors.]
I do have a point. Why only the Walton's? Why not you? Why not me? Why not every person who isn't black? Why not go to year zero and redistribute all the wealth white folks have accumulated in the US thus far to black folks? I don't care how poor or downtrodden some of the white folks prove to be or how rich and affluent many of the black folks are. White guilt after all. You're a Charlatan and a hypocrite. There is no Shangri-la. Give it up.
I saw my first Shakespeare performance at the Walton Art’s center in Fayetteville Arkansas. If we define this position as “the right” with letting the Waltons keep their money and minding our own business, and we define my experience as a seminal moment in the life of a developing artist, and you want to take away that wealth, then I’m left asking the question, why does the left not care about the humanities? I saw a professor pose this question about “the right” this week, but I’ve seen the Walton’s investment in the arts first hand, it’s a social capital, only seizure required is the cost of a ticket to Othello, and you want to take this away? This isn’t the “right” by the way, I don’t know or care how the Waltons vote.
Life is unfair.
Don't we all agree? Isn't that what our Mother's told us?
Of course it's unfair. In its rawest, most unmediated way, life is short, nasty, and brutish...and exceedingly unfair. There is no moral/social/economic arbiter, no Bureau of Universal Equitable Balance that ensures that...'hey, you're a nice guy...you should have a nice life!'
Certainly over the last 10,000 years of increasingly organized civilization, the emergence of law and social structure, to reduce & control & prevent (and punish) the nastier and more brutish aspects has been successful in moderating those more painful extremes. But -- still, life remains intrinsically unfair. We are all slower, fatter, stupider, less successful, uglier, grumpier, less popular, and shorter than any number of someones...and equally we're all faster, thinner, smarter, more successful, prettier, happier, taller, and more popular than someone else.
So what?
It is not the State's job to rebalance Unfair Life.
It is not the State's job to somehow measure and compensate each of us for the unfair genetic luggage we were handed at conception. Nor is it the State's job to examine the lives our Parent's had (into which we were dropped) to determine whether or not they were up to State Standard (requiring the intervention of State Compensators). No.
Rather it is the State functions to leverage public funding to provide the goods and services we cannot individually manage: national infrastructures, safe food, product standards, military protection, police, fire, rescue, etc....and, to some limited extent, social safety nets for those who are unable to survive, independently, within the wider world.
This means not only that the Gaps created by an Unfair Life will continue to exist...but that those Gaps will widen and other new ones will be created. The taller, beautiful, well-spoken will become Movie Stars and Talking Heads and be paid millions to sell soap. Those who can throw a football 70 yards on a frozen rope will win championships, be paid zillions, and find their picture on Wheaties boxes. The brilliant and innovative will build better mousetraps and the world will beat paths to each of their doors. All this will occur on big scales and little, and all of it will be sprinkled with fate, fortune, luck, and happenstance. The mighty will fall and the meek rise. Families will slide, generation to generation, from one end of the economic scale to the other. If we look at 18th century America we won't find the Gates or Bezos Estates. If we look for the Bingham Empires in 21st century America (William being the richest man in the United States in 1776) we won't find them either.
In many ways the fact that Gaps CAN be created means that this is, indeed, a free country with an open market. And equally if what we witnessed was universal equity, what we'd there inhabit would be a totalitarian nightmare: all of us Winston Smith's, dressed in grey, living in 'little boxes on the hillside...all made out of ticky-tacky'... all looking just the same'.
"You wanna talk about how do we improve young childhood education, how do we talk about improving family structure, how do we deal with healthcare, how do we deal with childcare support for the very young, especially for parents who are overwhelmed with work, who don't have the time or the energy sometimes to be there for their children." No, actually I don't.
The State has no place seeking to 'improve' the family. Rather it is the family which must improve the State. And if we wish to raise good, productive, and successful sons and daughters...who will eventually grow to become good, productive, and successful citizens and neighbors... that responsibility begins with Mom & Dad...with Grandma & Grandpa.... and with the neighborhood itself. It begins with decisions about whether or not I'm having sex and getting pregnant at 15....whether I go to school or do my homework....whether I smoke dope, do drugs, and hurt other people...whether I go to Church and honor my father and mother and the policeman on the corner. It begins with taking responsibility for the lives we have.
Sure healthcare can be improved but the so-called Greatest Generation was raised in the absolute absence of any State funded national healthcare system. Sure, young childhood education can be boosted but that same Greatest Generation was raised in the total absence of young childhood (pre-school) education. Sure to all those grand, and nice-sounding things. But the problem we are trying to address is not subject to State-sponsored exogenous correction.
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves". And correcting it requires first, that WE, admit that the problem is ours. Not the State, not the Man, not the System, not our History, not SOMEONE ELSE....but ME. I own it.
Now what am I going to do about it???
I don’t rightfully know that you own all that. Unless you believe in original sin. But there ain’t Jack Schitt that you, as one individual, can do about it.
You could try “Howling at the Moon” as Hank Williams did. Or try “Blowing in the Wind” as Bob Dylan did.
But kudos to you for quoting Pete Seeger and the great Bard in one fell swoop.
It’s all sounds about right to me.
It almost sounds as if you are proposing a change in human nature.
Appreciate the kudos! (And actually, interestingly enough, that song was written by Malvina Reynolds. Seeger, of course, was the one who made it a hit). But heck no. Human nature is human nature and that's not changing.
Fundamentally -- deep in our heart of hearts -- we all contain within us the appetites and predilections of toddlers: we're happy when our belly's full and unhappy when it's not. We're angry & frustrated when things don't go our way. And when we have to do things we 'prefer not to' we get upset. We're very content letting the world come to us (with cookies and ice cream!) and irritated if we have to, instead, change ourselves to fit the world.
Now growing-up (if our parents are doing their job) requires teaching those toddler selves that we can't be toddlers forever...that we have to 'get a job' (I can hear Maynard G. Krebs now!)... That appetites need to be moderated, and temper tantrums eliminated, and anger leavened. We learn that yes, we do get more flies with honey than vinegar. That sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do...AND (surprise surprise!) sometimes that kind of discipline really does pay off. We develop -- if we've grown-up successfully -- a mature, adult perspective on 'life in the real world' and learn self-accountability.
And the State should stay out of all of that.
But if, instead, parenting gives free rein to the child... If we're indulged instead of disciplined... If Mama fights like mad to make the world accommodate Little Johnny's idiosyncrasies (rather than teaching Little Johnny that his behavior must be normalized)....and if the State insists on double-coddling both Mama and Johnny (and throw in Grandma and Great Grandma)... well then, we never put away childish things. We just more of them.
I'd suggest that the single thing we CAN do about all this (indirectly) is to stop (as best we can) the horrendously counter-productive practice of trying to solve human behavior problems (family problems) by writing ever larger checks. Since '65 we've spent $23Trillion on so-called Anti-Poverty Programs. Did we get anywhere near our money's worth?
In 2020, The National Museum of African American History and Culture published a "teaching paper" on "Aspects of Whiteness and White Culture"...which should a have been titled..."How to live the American Dream and Thrive"...it ascribed a profile of behaviors and attitudes only to Whites. It asserted that POC only think these ways and do these things in response to White authority and power.
Their list (with the exception of a few racist and some what humorous remarks about mate selection and food preference) would be a profile for success in 21st Century US society no matter what you look like:
Have a family raise children, be self reliant, employ linear thinking and scientific study, hard work is key to success and comes before play, be action oriented and always seek better results...to win, practice deferred gratification save and invest for the future, be timely, learn to use proper English, respect authority, be polite.
Think about a person who lives by exactly the opposite of all these aspects of life...who would hire them...always late, doesn't work, hard can't think logically, doesn't respect an organization's goals?
The last two attributes (respect authority , be polite) might explain our policing interaction difficulties .
In a 60 Minutes interview years ago, Morgan Freeman suggested that one of the best means of addressing racism is to stop talking about it incessantly. Instead of that, we now have "white supremacy" at every turn, a condition whose supply cannot keep up with the demand. Every single thing that happens to a person, especially a minority individual, is not the result of that person's melanin level.
Sullivan falls into the trap a bit, and Glenn rightly corrects him, on the topic of wealth and income. Racializing everything was poison when tried before. Why anyone wants to repeat that, other than the hustlers for whom it's a business, is beyond me. There are other dynamic at play, among them being the change in household dynamics from the time of Glenn's youth - a time in which racial animus was far more open than it is today. Like many white kids of the time, he had an extended family to look out for him and for the other kids in the neighborhood. Something changed since then. It was not more racism.
Re: early childhood education -- the Princess of Wales is about to launch some major initiative in the UK regarding what Ferguson calls the Basics. Her life's work apparently is going to be devoted the first five years. She has spent the last decade studying the subject. It will be interesting to see if any good/new ideas come out. But she underscored the importance for society as a whole. The details are to be released on Tuesday. Her letter said: “During our very early childhood, our brains develop at an amazing rate - faster than any other time of our lives. Our experiences, relationships, and surroundings at that young age shape the rest of our lives.
“It is a time where we lay the foundations and building blocks for life. It is when we learn to understand ourselves, understand others and understand the world in which we live.
“But as a society, we currently spend much more of our time and energy on later life. I am absolutely determined that this long-term campaign is going to change that.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2023/01/28/princess-wales-pledges-will-champion-better-future-children/ (I believe you can press esc to get around the paywall) in case any one is interested.
Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they aren't right. My father smoked most of his life. At one point he quit for almost 2 years. But one night he was at the bar drinking with friends and he bummed a cigarette. He didn't quit again until he was literally too sick to go to a store to buy cigarettes. He died in 2001 at age 59 from heart failure. My father always told me never to start smoking. That made him a hypocrite, but it was certainly good advice to follow.
I have identified as agnostic since I was 16. My own crisis of faith was not an emotional reaction, but really more the result of an intellectual thought process. My 10th grade English class was reading Greek mythology when I began wondering about the similarities between ancient Greek religious beliefs and my own Catholic faith. Why did they believe in these fanciful tales that pretty much everyone rejects the truth of today? I came up with 3 reasons. First, it was what they were taught by parents and teachers. Second, it was what everyone around them believed. Third, it provided explanations for phenomena that they couldn't otherwise understand. For example, the reason that the sun moves across the sky is because Apollo pulls it with his chariot. Then I asked myself why I believed in God? I decided that it was for the same 3 reasons. I also decided that those reasons weren't sufficient to justify believing. There were all kinds of stories in the Bible about miracles, but there had also been many stories of miracles performed by the Olympian Gods. God was a possible explanation for where the Universe, Earth, and life had come from. But just because Science can't answer those questions currently, doesn't mean that God is the correct answer. Occam's razor and all that.
I can't say for certain there is no God, but I think it's extremely unlikely. I actually considered Pascal's wager before I had ever heard of it. Isn't it safer to believe in case God exists? But I decided that if what I had been taught in Catholic school about God was correct, if I lived a good life treating others as I would want to be treated, I don't think that God would damn me to Hell because I didn't go to church on Sundays. After all, God gave me the ability to reason. If he wanted me to believe he could certainly provide evidence that would convince me. I have avoided the atheist label, both because I can't disprove God's existence and because I didn't like the attitudes of most high profile atheists. At least that was true of the people famous for their disbelief. I hate the way certain atheists delight in mocking the faithful for their belief in "superstition." Bill Maher anyone?
I have struggled most of my adult life with depression. It took many years before I realized that was what my problem was. It wasn't until recently that I connected my first symptoms of depression during my junior year of high school with my crisis of faith the year before. In retrospect, it's hard to believe I missed the connection. I believe that faith can be very powerful irregardless of whether that faith is justified by reality. Faith that God will give you the strength to overcome adversity might be the only reason a person might try to overcome it instead of giving up because they see their situation as hopeless. Faith can also provide comfort. We lost my mother a few years ago. I so wish that I believed I would see her again. My own health is generally poor. My one saving grace is that I never smoked. But I suffer from complications from diabetes and a back injury sustained when I was rear ended at a red light. Today, I am retired on disability. I live alone and haven't dated anyone in over a decade. I have siblings as well as 2 nieces and a nephew. My nieces live in CA. My nephew I get to see every couple of weeks. As much as I love them, I wish I had more to live for. I honestly wish I could believe in God again. But my rational mind keeps telling me that the more I desperately I want something to be true, the more skeptical I should be. Maybe I should rethink Pascal's wager.
"If (God) wanted me to believe he could certainly provide evidence that would convince me." No, not in the least.
What you describe is not Faith, it's fact. I don't have to 'believe' in a hamburger, I can hold & snarf any number of hamburgers. God is not hamburger...nor is He interested in providing 'proof' to Man beyond the proof in which we swim.
Reminds me of the David Foster Wallace story (from a graduation speech): "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
Faith is not belief in the presence of proof indisputable (like God's fingerprints on a tree.....or His footprint in the garden) but belief in the absence of CSI forensics.
You wish to believe...so BELIEVE. We see Beauty; we feel Love; we are haunted by a sense of ineffable transcendence: what is all that other than 'proof'? As CS Lewis put it, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
"As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.” Mark Helpin, "A Soldier of the Great War"
You say your 'rational mind keeps telling me' to be skeptical. To what purpose?
“Reason excludes faith.... It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.” (Helprin, again.)
We should too.
Best wishes on your journey!
I'm familiar with the argument that faith is belief in the absence of evidence. But I fail to see how that is an argument in favor of believing something. I realize many people would say it is arrogant to demand that God prove to me that he exists. But I am not demanding anything of the sort. If my Catholic school teachers were correct about God, I believe that he wouldn't condemn me for an honest lack of belief. I am not demanding proof. I am just pointing out that he has that option if he wants me to believe. If I am surprised to discover that there is an afterlife that includes Heaven and Hell, I will hope that I lived a good enough life, treating others well, that I have at least earned a place in purgatory if not Heaven.
One of my favorite TV shows was Lucifer. The premise is that the Devil decides to abandon Hell and take a vacation on Earth running a bar in LA. He ends up as a consultant to the LAPD. In the first season, a priest enters his bar to ask a favor. He wants Lucifer to help prevent a boy from becoming a drug dealer. Lucifer initially refuses, but he ends up befriending the priest. At the end of the episode the priest is shot and dies in Lucifer's arms. Before he dies he says to Lucifer "I didn't understand why God put you in my path. But now I realize he put me in yours." It was at that point I realized the show nominally about the Devil, actually had a very Christian message. No one is beyond salvation, not even the Devil. I am not sure that the Catholic Church would agree the Devil could be reformed, but it sounds like something the God I was taught about would want. Hopefully, I can be saved even if I lack faith. The alternative is everything ends. Either way, I am OK with it.
It's not an argument to believe anything. That is exactly the point. Faith is belief in the absence of evidence, in the absence of Proof (as in Proof, with a capital P) but not in the absence of what our heart tells us is true.
It is knowing without the sworn affidavit, absent the notary, without a single repeatable experimental finding. Still, we know.
I'm not saying you're demanding anything. Nor am I suggesting that God would condemn you for a lack of anything. Who am I to offer a Guide to God's thinking, assuming God thinks? I'm not even particularly concerned about your salvation, or lack thereof -- that issue is not mine.
But when you say you starve for Belief.. when you tell us you suffer in its absence...then I say Believe. When you hesitate or back away from such a leap because you've somehow come to feel that Belief is a 'sucker's game' (not to put words in your mouth but that seems like what you'd say)....I say Believe anyway! Choose it; embrace it. The only one to say you're a 'sucker' is you. So don't say it. Just Believe. Have Faith. Choose Faith.
Look at the glories of the world which surround you. The beauty of the ineffable. The sweetness of a single note, the Mother's softly lingering touch of her child's sleeping face...and Believe.
I'll leave you with one last Helprin quote, also from A Soldier of the Great War:
"...and even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.”
“I believe that faith can be very powerful irregardless of whether that faith is justified by reality.”
I agree with your thoughts on the powerful role faith plays in many peoples lives, but if your faith is “justified by reality” then it is no longer faith. For me, thats the problem with Pascal’s wager. It assumes one can choose to believe. Choose to have faith. If you are inclined to interrogate religious beliefs, but still want to have faith, you have to be able to eventually satisfy your doubts with the answer - “God is mysterious”. That answer will just never do it for me.
Indeed you can choose to Believe. Why not? We do it all the time in countless little ways every day. I believe that my car will start, despite an absolute lack of understanding of the mystery of the internal combustion engine. I believe that when I take my seat on a plane that somehow, mysteriously, that massive chunk of steel will rise and safely take me to my destination. When I'm sick and the doctor says, 'Take this!', I swallow it gladly with faith that, mysteriously, my ailments will vanish.
These are little leaps but we all make them....and sometimes we tell ourselves it's OK that I don't know how the electricity finds its way into my coffee grinder-- but someone does! At least that's what I believe.
The thing is, life itself is a mystery. Love is a mystery. It's a mystery why, when we hear someone sing 'Nessun dorma' by Puccini that our eyes fill with tears. It's a mystery why we are consumed when our newborn wraps her tiny hand around our finger. Existence is mystery; consciousness & self-awareness is mystery. It's mysterious as to why we worry such questions that have never haunted a single cow.
Of course God is mystery...what else could He be?
When we mortals struggle to understand Calculus, and need a specialist to fix a leaky pipe....how could we possibly think God would be MORE comprehensible?
None of the examples you give are examples of faith. I don’t have faith my car will start, I have evidence. That evidence being the fact it has started the previous 1000 times I have tried. Which is why I am 99.9% certain my 2019 truck will start and about 50% confident my 1970 nova will start. I have a track record to base my confidence (or lack thereof) on. It also means little that I do not have the technical expertise to understand how an engine works or a plane flies. I know that they were designed and engineered based on the scientific method and have to meet standards of proof. If I was buying a car and noticed it didn’t have a motor, I would ask the salesman how exactly it was going to run. If his answer was “it works in mysterious ways”, I would not believe him. I see no evidence for Gods existence so even if I wanted to believe, I could not. I could choose to hope, but I could not choose to believe.
You almost certainly require explanations for every one of the examples you gave. You want the doctor to explain the reason he is giving you the pill, what the pill will do, and what the possible side effects might be. You also might want a second opinion to check the reasoning of the first doctor. You are aware of the safety records of air flight in general. That it’s safer than driving a car. You also require that the pilot is qualified and know that the airlines are regulated so they have to provide certain levels of maintenance. You don't make these decision based on faith, you make them based on probability.
Life is full of mysteries, I agree. But science routinely takes mysteries that are credited to God and reveals their natural cause. It has been doing this for hundreds of years.
“It's a mystery why we are consumed when our newborn wraps her tiny hand around our finger.”
My friends father was a loving and caring man. He certainly felt the way you described above about his children. At work one day, he fell off the back of a truck and had serious trauma to his head. He recovered, but noticed that he no longer felt the same way about life. He felt no real empathy and was almost entirely emotionally detached from his family and friends. This is a well documented and established effect of certain types of head trauma. If that feeling we get about our children is due to our spirit and connection with our creator, are you saying my friends dad damaged his spirit when he fell off that truck? Or is it more likely that our brains are why we feel that way about our children and my friends dad damaged his frontal lobe when he fell off that truck?
Sure they are.
And, of course, there is evidence and then there is evidence.
The fact that our car has started before builds my faith, my conviction, that so it will always be. The fact that the plane has lifted me, mysteriously, before gives me faith it will again. And if in fact we put some Primitive/Pre-Scientific upon that same plane, he too would share that faith (increasing with every trip) absent any scientific understanding at all of the principles of aerodynamic lift. The fact that science can explain -- to a degree -- why the plane lifts does not change the fact that it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.
Science explains a lot, no question...to a point...but with each explanation we simply reach another question: why is "X" so? Why does a spark ignite? Why is a vapor flammable? Why does steel work in the way it does? And with each question answered we simply push the question that much further:: why matter? why energy? why consciousness? why beauty? why love?
Certainly those transcendent feelings are -- as you say -- filtered through and processed by our brain. And certainly an injury to such an organ can impact that processing. But the fact that a blind person cannot appreciate the Mona Lisa does not make da Vinci's work somehow less transcendent. The fact that your friend no longer felt an empathy he felt before does not mean that his very human feeling was unreal....it only means he was no longer equipped to recognize it as he had.
The lack or the destruction of an ability to perceive does not change the truth of what had been perceived. Your friend was, quite obviously, very much aware of what he had lost...just as the blind man who lost his sight would be aware of what he is missing, even if he can no longer perceive it.
The evidence of God surrounds us .... just as the infinite beauty of the universe surrounds us. That you can't see it...or, perhaps, refuse to see it...even in the grip of a newborn's hand, even in the heart-piercing chords of the 'Nessun dorma', even in the shattering kiss of an eternal love, even in a million other things that fill our days and our dreams. Even if, in some misguided post-modern surety we dismiss it all as "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato"... that doesn't change the truth of what is.
So of course we can choose to Believe...to make that little leap... given the evidence, given the mysteries which always and forever will surround us.
This is a semantic argument. You have changed the accepted meaning of the word “faith”.
You state that evidence builds your faith and then in another response state (correctly) “Faith is belief in the absence of evidence” - How can both of those things be true? In the presence of evidence faith is unnecessary. So evidence doesn’t build faith it supersedes it.
You also keep calling well understood and proven processes “mysterious”. Flight is not mysterious. Electricity getting to your coffee grinder is not mysterious. Medicine curing ailments is not mysterious. Just because you don’t understand the process does not mean it is mysterious. I understand you have to establish their mysterious nature in order for them to make any sense in an analogy to faith in God, but they just aren’t. Those things are in an entirely different category.
—“The fact that science can explain -- to a degree -- why the plane lifts does not change the fact that it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.”
If there is evidence that planes reliably fly then it is simply false to say “it is faith that allows me to buy a ticket.” Let’s replace the word faith with the correct definition (that you provided) of the word faith. — I have decades worth of evidence that planes fly, but “it is (belief in the absence of evidence) that allows me to buy a ticket. Does that make sense?
—“Certainly those transcendent feelings are -- as you say -- filtered through and processed by our brain.”
I didn’t say any of that. This description makes no sense to me. You believe “transcendent feelings” exist independent of us and they are somehow filtered through our brains? What form do these transcendent feelings take when they are outside of our brains, before they are “filtered”? It makes far more sense to me that our brains are the originators of these feelings.
The last argument is more sermon than rational claim, and would be better received by a congregation. I have heard it countless times and the fact still remains, the beauty of nature or vastness of space is not evidence of God. It is beautiful and vast. It inspires awe and can even bring a person to tears. The jump from there to “god did it” is not a “little leap”. It is a gargantuan and unnecessary one.
And lastly you say “And, of course, there is evidence and then there is evidence”
I have no idea what this means
Of course it's a semantic argument. But it's an accurate semantic argument. You also confuse evidence & proof.
'Faith' is complete trust, a strong conviction. The fact of faith has nothing to do with proof, per se, but accumulated evidence may reinforce "strong conviction". I have faith my wife loves me...and every loving act she performs does indeed reinforce that trust with the evidence of her act, but I have faith in her love even in the absence of that evidential act...and utterly in the absence of proof, for love itself is unprovable. There is no litmus test for Love.
Equally we can say that faith in the existence of God is buoyed, or reinforced by all kinds of evidence -- the glory of the universe, the shock of beauty, the transcendence of love, your child's first smile -- but none of those 'clues' proves God. Evidence may reinforce faith but evidence, per se, proves nothing, it simply nudges.
You say 'electricity getting to your coffee grinder' is not mysterious. But in fact it is mysterious to any of us who have no knowledge or insight or 'proof' of the process. Instead, in the absence of that proof, we have 'complete trust' that the coffee grinder grinds when we plug it into an outlet.
The fact that I can't prove electricity does not alter my faith in electricity. The fact that I can't prove God does not alter my faith in God. And just as we might say, an Electrical Engineer or Physicist can prove electricity....so too might some insist that Aquinas or some learned Theologian can equally prove God. In either case, I don't really care. The arcana of such exercises are beyond me. In either case, my Faith remains.
Let me see if I can clarify my meaning, re: "transcendent feelings'...because you're right, that construction was sloppy.
Consider: a newborn reaches out and curls his hand around his father's finger. At the most mundane of levels it's just a simple touch, 'perceived' by the skin, the nerves and transmitted to the brain where the pressure and warmth of that touch are combined with the visual data processed through the eyes, and the olfactory data processed through the nose (that fresh-baked scent of babies) to arrive at 'brain central' where our various knowledge references interpret all that raw data to tell us: it's a baby's grasp. Tears come to our eyes....the same tears, chemically speaking, which are generated when just that afternoon we heard Pavarotti sing the 'Nessun dorma'. That is the transcendent feeling and it is, indeed, processed by the brain.
It obviously does not exist outside us...not in the same way the baby's little fist does, or the scent, or the warmth -- those are all independent phenomena. But the combination of all those things upon a dog, though perceived by the dog as the child's touch, are not transcendent. Why? Why would our brains attach some kind of extraordinary meaning, to that mundane combination of stimuli such that we cry, and our heart yearns? Why, to your point, would we see nature as 'beautiful' or the universe as 'awesome'? Dog's don't. Why do we? Why & how would the human's mammalian brain create such perceptions when they serve absolutely no utilitarian purpose? Why do we feel this sense of wonder, dread, and veneration ... how can the universe seem 'sublime'?
But never mind. The answer matters little. Faith requires, actually, that it matters not at all. Belief, always, is a matter of choice. And it is a choice exercised with eyes wide open. Either we have faith in God, in Truth, in an absolute Morality, a transcendent & eternal justice, in Love, in Beauty, in Awe....or.... as I said.... we dismiss it all as that 'fragment of an underdone potato' and say God is an unnecessary leap.
I'm reminded of a passage from De Lubac...just encountered it a few days ago, in fact: "So, in the matter of God, whatever certain people may be tempted to think, it is never the proof that is lacking. What is lacking is taste for God. The most distressing diagnosis that can be made of the present age, and the most alarming, is to all appearances at least, it has lost the taste for God. Man prefers himself to God. And so he deflects the movement which leads to God; or since he is unable to alter its direction, he persists in interpreting it falsely. He imagines he has liquidated the proofs. He concentrates on the critique of the proofs and never gets beyond them. He turns away from that which convinces him. If the taste returned, we may be sure that the proofs would soon be restored in everybody’s eyes, and would seem—what they really are if one considers the kernal of them—clearer than day."
Best wishes going forward.
Sorry for the long response...too much time on this already.
I feel that I should defend Jamelle Bouie because I am a subscriber to his newsletter. Andrew Sullivan may have been made fun of by Bouie on Twitter more times than he can count but the things I remember Bouie writing about are his theories that the Electoral College is racist, the Supreme Court has too much power, and the Senate should be elected by the state legislatures again in return for giving up some power. Every week he also has a photo which he has taken and a recipe which he has cooked. I think his perspective is much more about the legacies of white supremacy in how public power works than how individual Black people can succeed because he has had little trouble succeeding (before he was at the Times he was Greg Sargent's second-in-command at The Plum Line which has gone to a succession of very talented people).
Excellent commentary on the issues of the day. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing, Glenn. I hear you in there, Uncle Albert!
Anyone listened to Bari Weiss’ conversation with Ken Burns on the Holocaust?
Why?
I don't see how it mitigates the injustice of the racial wealth gap to say "Wealth is created by human creativity, ingenuity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship and all of that." Sam Walton, for instance, began Walmart in Arkansas in the 1940s, with a loan that was the equivalent of $300k today. Today, Sam Walton's children are some of the richest people on earth. You can say "Well, Walton built that wealth through ingenuity and risk-taking." But what Black entrepreneur in Arkansas in the 1940s could have accessed the capital necessary to start the first mega-store chain? The first megastore was always going to be built by a white person, because the opportunity arose during Jim Crow. The Walton family's wealth today may be the result of "creativity and risk-taking" but it was creativity occurring under conditions that kept Black people from competing in the marketplace. Their wealth here in 2023 is Jim Crow wealth. If the racial wealth gap has existed continuously since the end of the civil war, and if access to capital builds wealth that can build more wealth, then the racial wealth gap is the injustice of the past passed down to the present, no matter how much "creativity" led to the creation of that wealth. I don't think there's any more reason to wave away the injustice of the wealth gap today than there would be in 1940.
Counter-factual assertions are simply silly. How many Sam Walton's have their been? Of all the millions and millions of White, Black, Yellow, Green, Purple people in the world who were born in 1918, why was there only one Sam Walton / Walmart? Did Jim Crow also keep out the other non-Black millions who also failed to found a multi-billion dollar retail chain?
Sam's actual independent start was the purchase of a Ben Franklin store in Newport, Arkansas with a $20K loan from his father-in-law + another $5K he had saved from his army service. Can we assume that no one else's father-in-law ever loaned their daughter's husband $20K.
As for the 'injustice of a wealth gap'...I'm not sure what that really means. Everyone experiences a wealth gap. Your great-great-great-great-grandparents (and do you even know all 64 of their names? I sure don't!) undoubtedly had more or less 'wealth' back there in the early 1700's than my 64. Did ANY of that wealth somehow trickle down to us (from people whose names none of us recall)? What about the 128 grandparents, five greats ago? Or the 256 another generation back?
The truth is, "70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the next generation, with 90% losing it the generation after that." Is that just? Who's to say? Is it just that your folks had more or less than my folks? In the end, it's a meaningless question...nor is there any reason to believe that the State has or should have any role in rebalancing whatever wealth imbalances which may exist. [Though I'd sure like it if LeBron did some personal rebalancing and sent a chunk of his my way. The inequity between the two of us is chasmic!]
Glenn - "It seems to me, if you wanted to actually get it done, whatever the “it” is ... you need political majorities. And the mustering of those political majorities requires formulating your claims in terms that are universally applicable to the people whom you're trying to persuade."
This thread is an excellent illustration of a point I came here to make in regard to this statement from Glenn, which I think gets to the root of his philosophy of overcoming inequality. Everybody who thinks they are poor thinks they are deserving, maybe not necessarily of a handout but at the very least of getting to keep what they have. Everybody who claims redistribution, whether racially or non-racially based, is necessary always thinks the redistributed share should come from somebody else.
The Woke project quite specifically avoids universally applicable claims to redistribution of some wealth and quite openly claims, just like you did, that specific wealth should be confiscated because the point of the project is *not to equitably redistribute wealth*. The point is to give one set of white people a way to gain power over another set of white people (since white people are still a de facto political majority in this country) by claiming their opposition to wealth redistribution is based on 'racism'.
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/madame-c-j-walker
Excerpt:
Madam C. J. Walker (1867-1919) was “the first Black woman millionaire in America” and made her fortune thanks to her homemade line of hair care products for Black women. Born Sarah Breedlove to parents who had been enslaved, she was inspired to create her hair products after an experience with hair loss, which led to the creation of the “Walker system” of hair care.
Be the change you want to see. Start writing those checks, Nathan.
The change I want to see is for the Walton family's wealth to be taken away. How can I be that change?
Why on earth do you want to take the Walton family wealth away? Has it not been earned? Didn't Sam spend his life building it? If he'd been your grandfather would you give it all away? (of course you'd have to argue with the other maybe 20-30 children and grandchildren who currently share in that wealth).
Who do you think deserves what the Waltons spent lifetimes building more than the Waltons who have undoubtedly already given billions away while employing millions and millions of others over the last 60 years?
Do you have some 'basement level' of wealth that you would allow families to retain? Or do you demand that ALL wealth from every generation somehow pass to the State upon that generation's death, for use as the State sees fit?
If a father dies first, does his wife get to keep the family wealth until her death, or does she have to relinguish 50% to the tax man at the funeral of her husband? And if any one of us is foolish enough to still be living in our parent's basement when they die, are we immediately out on the street as the State soaks-up all their assets?
Do you think such a world somehow more 'just'??? What is just about anyone other than the individual who earned a dollar being given that dollar?
Taken away by whom and for what purpose? This sort of change makes a thief, not someone to be exalted. How long will white saviors treat black people like pets before a better argument than stealing someone else's wealth is made. We're long past the 1940s, with black billionaires to show for it.
~60% of Black Americans are firmly in the Middle Class.
And given to whom, ffs? And by what means? Nonsense.
You're indistinguishable from the Walton's in your example. Give up your wealth. You're just as guilty of Jim Crow being in your favor, but obviously on a lesser scale. Or, perhaps not obviously. We're going to need to see some receipts.
Haha I'm "indistinguishable" from a billionaire, except for the fact they have a billion dollars whereas I have 150k in student debt. Get real, man. If I had wealth, you might have a point. But I don't.
A law degree from Yale, and you aren't able to pay back your student loans? Briahna Joy Gray once remarked to Dr. Loury, also bemoaning her student debt (paraphrasing), "I have a law degree from Harvard, what am I supposed to do with it?"
What kind of racket are those Ivy League law schools running?
[By the way, folks, Briahna is superb on Rising. She and Robby Soave make a great team. They sometimes have serious disagreements and go at each other hard, but there is no carryover into the next segment/topic. Great chemistry. They are better than their much-heralded predecessors.]
I do have a point. Why only the Walton's? Why not you? Why not me? Why not every person who isn't black? Why not go to year zero and redistribute all the wealth white folks have accumulated in the US thus far to black folks? I don't care how poor or downtrodden some of the white folks prove to be or how rich and affluent many of the black folks are. White guilt after all. You're a Charlatan and a hypocrite. There is no Shangri-la. Give it up.
I saw my first Shakespeare performance at the Walton Art’s center in Fayetteville Arkansas. If we define this position as “the right” with letting the Waltons keep their money and minding our own business, and we define my experience as a seminal moment in the life of a developing artist, and you want to take away that wealth, then I’m left asking the question, why does the left not care about the humanities? I saw a professor pose this question about “the right” this week, but I’ve seen the Walton’s investment in the arts first hand, it’s a social capital, only seizure required is the cost of a ticket to Othello, and you want to take this away? This isn’t the “right” by the way, I don’t know or care how the Waltons vote.
Heard it last week. AWESOME.