Tag Archives: philosophy

December 19, 2014 · 9:22 pm

The Truest of Magicks

Okay, life is like this; you are born, a lot of dumb stuff happens that you are mostly not in control of, you suffer a little bit, you are happy a little bit, and then you die.   That is a pretty gloomy prospect, and most of us spend our entire lives obsessing over it, examining it with microscopes, doctoring it with needles and potions and chainsaws, trying to make it last a little longer, wailing and complaining about our sorry allotment, and wasting what little time we have.  So what secret exists that could ever make a difference?  Could ever open up our eyes… even just a tiny bit?

Zoric

The secret, as far as I can tell (and I am certainly one of the dumber and more random among you because I am cursed with insight and wisdom won through suffering and making huge mistakes), is reading the right books.

Eli Tragedy

I am not alone in this sort of thinking.  There are those who believe that if you gather the best books together into a personal library and read them, they add experiences and knowledge to your life that you would not otherwise have.  (Of course, one must acknowledge, especially if you read fiction, that most books are filled with lies and misinformation, and some, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus leaps to mind, might leave you stupider than you were when you started.)  It deepens, broadens, and intensely colors the experience of life.

Skorpio

People who read books a lot… really read them, and re-read them, and collect them, and study them, and think about and write about them… are called wizards.  Wizards are wise men.  It is what the word means.  Being one does not make you better than anyone else.  In fact, wizards are generally weaker than normal men.  It comes from all that ruining of eyes and fuddling up brains with too much thinking.  You don’t want a wizard to back you up in a fist fight.  You will certainly lose.  And you don’t want a wizard to tell you how live your life.  They are not good role models.  But if a wizard tells a story, you should listen.  Because if you really listen, and the wizard is really wise, you can expand the borders of your life, and push on nearer to immortality.

Ice Alchemist

2 Comments

Filed under humor, Paffooney, wisdom, wizards

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

October 21, 2014 · 2:35 am

Cardinal Points

166926_2922766384906_1370595126_n 205990_10151147941282298_2038421647_n 62722_574692719263587_14180130_n

The cardinal is a personal symbol of mine.  Cardinals, for those who only see them in the south where they live in relatively comfortable surroundings year around, are tough little birds of bright color.  When the winter comes, and the snow piles deep, the cardinal digs in and stays put.  I hope I am like that.  Six incurable diseases, financial problems, being forced to retire from a job I loved by poor health, are all winter things that have not driven me out yet.

And, of course, my favorite teams are Cardinals.  (Sure, you can argue that it’s a St. Louis thing, the Arizona Cardinals were once from St. Louis.)  The St. Louis baseball Cardinals just ended their season with a loss, but the loss was in the National League Championship Series.  They were in that series for the fourth straight year.  They have been doing well, a good sign for me.

The football Arizona Cardinals are at the head of their football division with a record of five wins and one loss.  They had a winning record last year, but were left out of the playoffs because they were in the same division as the Superbowl champion Seattle Seahawks and the San Francisco Forty-Niners.  Things are getting better for cardinals everywhere.

So things are looking up.  I am happy, in spite of anything that stands in my way.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

September 5, 2014 · 11:07 pm

The Gawd Problem

Dansegawd 4

In my little town in Iowa there were only two Midwestern churches, a brown brick Methodist church and a beige-brick Congregational church.  Midwestern Christianity tends to be very brown or beige.  So I was raised believing in God.  I was taught that there was God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  Three people in one.  And, since Methodists, the religion of my parents and grandparents, were basically puritans, we were raised believing sex was dirty and shameful, possibly evil, and we should save up all our sexual energy for the one person in life that we would most love, as long as that person was the opposite sex and also pre-conditioned to believe that sex was evil and we should not enjoy it.

The thing is, deeply ingrained religious beliefs like that, based on faith and the words in the Bible, is almost the exact opposite that highly intelligent people who get turned on to science tend to believe.  I had the misfortune to locate myself directly in the middle between these two high-powered magnets that were destined to pull me in two opposite directions at the same time.  Why are such things always based on contradictions?  Religion depends on faith, which Mark Twain suggests means devoutly believing what you know ain’t so.   Science depends on evidence and experience, and rejects anything your heart tells you is true that conflicts with the evidence.  Is there no middle ground?  Of course there isn’t.

So what do I actually believe?    I am a Midwesterner to my very marrow.  I believe there is a God.  The universe has an intelligence, a spiritual element, and is deeper and wider than my mere five senses can verify.  In fact, Carl Sagan said in Cosmos that because we have intelligence and discernment, we ourselves make the universe conscious of itself.  This is a profound point.  The universe is alive and aware because our existence gives it those qualities.  That’s the basic truth at the center of Existentialism.  Existence precedes essence.  A rock has to exist before its “rock-ness” becomes real.  So I am an Existentialist who believes in God.

At this point many of the Christian people I know begin yelling at me.  “You can’t be both a Christian and an atheist!”  But I am not an atheist.  I believe in God.  Further, because I believe that love is the most necessary quality in the universe, I choose to be called a Christian because Jesus Christ preached forgiveness, helping the less fortunate, and everything else based on love.  I also understand that the other major religions of this world are, at their core, based on love.   So I call myself a Christian Existentialist (though I realize I could just as easily be a Buddhist Existentialist, or some other kind of Existentialist).    I love people, even the bad ones, the ugly ones, and the ones who disagree with me (meaning practically everyone).    I don’t wish to be stupid or blind.  I don’t wish to be unfeeling.  I think the Truth (with a capital “T”) lies between the poles.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

May 18, 2014 · 9:17 pm

Danse Macabre

Every good writer writes about love…  Well, not love exactly…   Love.  Every theme, every idea, every character basically boils down to that one very human emotion.   You know that every religion says that God is Love… at least they say the good God is.  But love has many facets, and leads to many other essential ideas.  Life and Death, Sex and Birth, Love and Hate… all are part of the great dance… Camille Saint-Saens called it the Danse Macabre, the Dance of Death, and wrote about it in symphonic music.  I reached a time in my youth where I had to confront the fact that people live and people die and I was no exception.

Image

I have never believed in Hell.  The God I know does not punish His creations with eternal torment… especially for reasons like having the wrong religion or making the wrong choices.  I have to admit that once I rejected the notion of eternal punishments, I also began to doubt eternal rewards.  Looking forward to a time after life is just as foolish and just as much a waste of time as fearing it.  We do have to look carefully into the darkness, however, because in the unknown  are concealed many traps and terrors.  Fear is a real thing, and it does an important job warning us and making us prepare for the worst.Image

We always seem to associate innocence with goodness and purity.  But as important as grappling with the idea of our own death is, is grappling with the loss of our own innocence.  There comes a moment that we are confronted with the awful truth.   It came for me when I was ten and was sexually abused by a neighbor.  Feelings of guilt and humiliation were not totally new to me, but they dropped on me then like a landslide of granite and lava.  That which is child-like and trusting is replaced distrust, fear, and loathing.

Image

Where do we find the answer?  Where do we find release from suffering and pain?  Where do we find peace of mind?  Religion can fuel love and forgiveness.  It does it well.  But it also fuels guilt and self-loathing.  Unfortunately it does that well too.  Psychiatry is an inexact science and needs a lot of further research.  So what is the conclusion to this philosophical quest?  What is the answer?  What are the last steps of the Dance?  I tried to sum it up the best that I could in the final panel of my cartoon Danse Macabre.

Image

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , ,