Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): Benedictus

In the eighth sermon by Dr. Rayburn on the book of Numbers, we have an excellent exposition about the concept of the Benediction in the worship service. We learn what it is, why it is, and the benefits of the practice. The whole sermon is good, but I especially liked this passage from Dr. Rayburn's sermon:

The history of the Christian ministry bears witness not only to the universal practice of bestowing God’s blessing upon his people this way as the conclusion of services of worship but of ministers understanding very well that they were, in so doing, communicating God’s blessing and favor directly to his people. Here is Charles Simeon, the great Anglican pastor in 18th and 19th century Cambridge.

“I feel that in pronouncing [the benediction] I do not do it as a mere finale, but that I am actually dispensing peace from God and at God’s command. I know not the individuals to whom my benediction is a blessing; but I know that I am the appointed instrument by whom God is conveying the blessing to those who are able to receive it.” [Moule, Charles Simeon, 85-86]

I spoke last week of the way worship allows us every Lord’s Day to reenter reality and to have that reality – that counter-reality to the imagined reality that so many accept and believe and which we ourselves are so sorely tempted to accept – I say to have that reality impressed afresh upon our minds and hearts. Here, in the benediction as part of that worship, we are reminded that God alone is the source of all that we long for; he and he alone can give it to us and keep it for us; and that, therefore, the hope we place in other things, in other people is misplaced, futile, and bound to disappoint us, a very important thing to hear and understand as we leave the church and reenter our daily life. We are also reminded that the Lord stands ready to bless his people; that he will bless them if only they are faithful to him. The three-fold repetition of the Lord’s name, the emphasis placed on the Lord’s blessing being in the priests mouth in vv. 23 and 27, all of that is no doubt necessary precisely because we are so inclined to look for our blessing in all the wrong places and because the Devil will be very happy to give us a kind of blessing from other sources that can distract us from looking for real blessing from the only one who can give it to us.

In Jeremiah 2:13 the Lord laments this very tendency on the part of his people.

“My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that hold no water.”

In other words they looked elsewhere for their blessing and found only the cheap and temporary imitation. [Duguid, 88]

In any well-ordered worship service, everything that is done is important and valuable. Everything renews faith, hope, love and our lives in some way. Everything addresses our need in some significant way. But not everything, every Sunday, has subjective power over our hearts. Our sins may be forgiven because we have asked for that forgiveness in Jesus’ name – and that is the truly important thing – our sins may be forgiven but we may not feel the freedom from sin and guilt that is the appropriate consequence of such forgiveness. We may have sung God’s praise and glory – and that is absolutely important for us to do – but we may not have felt the divine majesty in our hearts. Sometimes we come to the end of the service and still our hearts have not been lifted up and our spirits raised, however we may have heard the Word of God and traversed the gospel ground once more. And for the real believer, whose faith is often downcast because of his own sins and failures or because of the afflictions of life, that blessing being granted to him at the end of the service and resting upon him, the Lord’s name being put upon him in that way, is a matter of the greatest conceivable importance whether or not we feel the effect of that blessing in our spirits. Who can possibly say what difference it would make to our lives not to have the blessing that has come to us from the sermons we have heard, the prayers we have offered, the Lord’s Supper’s we have participated in. We cannot know how God pours his help, his forgiveness, his strength, his provision into our hearts by the means that he has appointed to communicate his favor – so many of which are concentrated as parts of the service of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day. And the benediction is another of those parts. No one can say what a difference it has made to countless multitudes and generations of Christian people through the ages to have the Lord blessing them, to have that benediction granted them in that divinely appointed and ordered way, that way the Lord himself promised would be his way of smiling upon, keeping, being gracious to, and blessing his people. Must we not believe, can a believer of the Bible here in Numbers 6 not believe that this benediction as often as it is offered by a minister and received by a congregation is a means of some blessing granted by God to his people every time it is uttered? Have you so much of that blessing that you care to have no more? Are you sated with God’s blessing? Or, rather, do you want as much of it as you can possibly obtain and so are jealous to take the fullest advantage of every opportunity to obtain more of that blessing?

ORP: TP: Gravity's Rainbow, part "n"

Haven't had much time to read this novel, but I knocked off a few more pages and I have to say that I am disappointed with Thomas Pynchon. There is material in this novel that is profoundly obscene. I think one could (I won't, but...) use a restrained amount of borderline material and still get across the cesspool-like nature of the average human. I will still continue on with the book for the sake of examining post-modern novel writing in detail, and TP has some brilliant passages. It is a shame when someone so excellent in the skill of writing pours out material that is unworthy of their talent.

Update: After a little consideration, I have decided to shelve this book until after Lent and Easter. So the only literary work I'll be likely to mine any loftiness & beauty from will be the on-going tome that is Les Misérables.

W: General: Another Great Writer Dies

As everyone is now announcing, Philip Jose Farmer died yesterday. He may not have been as socially significant as Solzhenitsyn, who died last August, but he was an imaginative writer and I appreciated some of his works.

Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): God is both Immanent and Transcendent

In the fourth sermon on Numbers by Dr. Rayburn, we have this excellent summary of the proper dialectic about God's "nearness" and "farness" (if you will); here is the quote:

I cannot stress the importance of our grasping the uniquely Christian view of God that is demonstrated to us in these regulations that we might otherwise take to be boring and irrelevant. Do you see how utterly different this view of God is that we are given here. It is not the view of our culture, to be sure, but it is also not the view of any other religion in the world. In every other worldview God is either immanent, near to us, or he is transcendent, far above us. In Buddhism to the extent there is a god, he is in everything. God is absolute immanence. In Islam God is high above us and cannot be known by us. God is absolute transcendence. In corruptions of Christianity, again it is one or the other. In deistic forms of Christianity God is distant and far above his creatures. In popular forms of secular and sentimental Christianity, now so common in our land, God is a harmless, avuncular figure standing nearby to help but never to provoke fear or even awe.

It is only in biblical Christianity that we get both: the living and true God, the maker of heaven and earth, the judge of all men, whose glory no man has seen or can see, who inhabits eternity and dwells in unapproachable light, on the one hand, and, on the other, the God who draws near to us, to love and care for and concern himself with his people and their small and ordinary lives. Here you have the living God in the camp of his people, right near to them to help them and guide them; but he remains the holy God of infinite glory to whom his people owe great fear and reverence and whose approach they must take care to make only in those ways appropriate to his holiness.

And let me remind you this does not change in the NT. There too God is a God of fearful majesty and faith in him requires that we live in godly fear. It is the transcendence of God that makes his immanence so wonderful and amazing and it is his immanence that makes his transcendence so glorious and so wonderful to behold and admire. We have a God who is worthy both of our fear and our love at one and the same time. And it is because and only because he is worthy of both that he is a God who can save us and deliver us to the Promised Land. It is only because he is a God who made the vast universe and rules the wheeling galaxies with absolute sovereignty that we can utterly rely on his word and his power. And it is because he is a God of love and fatherly affection that we can count on his caring for us no matter that our lives, in so many ways, seem too small to be of any consequence to even other human beings, much less to Almighty God. People are usually either sympathetic or strong, but rarely both. But the living God offers both company and help, sympathy and power, affection and sovereign rule. Our God lives in a high and holy place, we read in Isaiah 57:15, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit. He offers salvation to sinners and promises indescribable joys to those who trust in him, but he threatens the impenitent and the unbelieving with doom. He rules over this world to such an extent that every single thing that happens is in some respect his will, so that no one will finally get away with disobedience to him, but he feelingly and tenderly sympathizes with his children as a loving parent. He pitched his tent in the midst of Israel, but that tent was surrounded by guards, by mystery, and by danger. [Duguid, 61]

That is your God, Christian. Not the sentimental and toothless god of American civic religion and not the distant and unapproachable God of deism and Islam, but the God who must be loved and feared at one and the same time. There is no other God but the true and living God who is also our Savior and father in heaven. “Behold the goodness and the severity of God!”

Theology (the Prince of the Sciences): On Ritual

I am reviewing some of the earlier sermons of Dr. Rayburn on this current series on the book of Numbers. In the introduction to this series, Dr. Rayburn makes some very good points about ritual in the Christian faith and in society in general.
While I recommend reading (or listening while it is still available) the entire sermon, I do want to draw your attention to this large section that I quote below:

But not only is there precious little proof, real proof, of this evolutionary understanding of Israelite religion, not only does the OT itself give us completely different view of things – for example, in the OT the regulations and rituals were given early to Israel as the explicit provision of God for her life as his people – but all through the Bible we are taught that law and ritual are vital to a truly faithful life and a truly fruitful church. Laws and rituals are as limiting and stifling in the Bible as wings are limiting and stifling to a bird! Nevertheless, no matter that we protest this whole theory of the literary origin of the Pentateuch, nowadays among American evangelicals, the same prejudice against ritual and organization can be seen almost everywhere we look. [Ian Hamilton made a very perceptive comment at the 30th anniversary celebration the other evening. Remember he said that the great divide between Christian believers in our time may not prove to be between different theological outlooks – for example, Calvinists and Arminians or Cessationists and Charismatics – but between believers who understand the role of historic Christian worship and are committed to that worship and believers who do not and are not.]
For many, if not most American evangelicals the sacraments are virtually an incidental feature of their religious life. Most flagship evangelical churches in the United States today which are typically the mega-churches almost never or never have the sacraments in their Sunday services. Amazing! Rituals seem to them far removed from the free expression of the soul and they have been taught to believe that such expression is all that matters. That that is what is the authentic Christian experience. Churches are independent of one another, the Christians in them related to the church only in voluntary ways, and a hue and cry goes up whenever an attempt is made to enforce some kind of order upon the life of God’s people; the sort of order that is imposed by God himself on the people of Israel in the book of Numbers. You probably have experience yourself of how such ritual acts as kneeling to pray or dressing ministers in robes or having the Lord’s Supper more frequently have proved controversial and divisive in evangelical churches of your acquaintance. The new American evangelical church service – twenty to thirty minutes of singing, an offering, and a sermon – is intentionally a service, at least so it is thought, shorn of ritual. The congregation does almost nothing. There is little to no sense of an order of acts relating the visible to the invisible world. The congregation sings (though in some of the churches I have attended recently I couldn’t tell that the congregation was singing; I couldn’t hear the voice of the congregation over the amplified voice of the singer or singers in front). The congregation may sing but it does not act. There is certainly very little resembling the worship of the book of Numbers in American churches today.
And this is supposed to be a virtue. American evangelicals in particular have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing ritual from ritualism. Ritualism is an unhealthy confidence in rituals in themselves, in the acts of worship themselves, as if these acts had some intrinsic power, apart from the worshiper’s faith or the blessing of God. But however sternly the Bible condemns ritualism, it is full of ritual from beginning to end. It commands it. It celebrates its importance, and has no fear of an ordered, even strictly ordered life for the people of God.
What we find in Numbers – the ritually ordered life of God’s people and the importance of a rightly ordered worship – we find in the New Testament as well and nowhere more emphatically than in Revelation and its picture of the ideal worship of God’s people as that worship goes on in heaven. That worship as it is described for us in the first half of the book of Revelation is clearly some picture of how early Christian congregations were worshiping the Lord on their Lord’s Day and John is drawing from his own experience of the worshiping community in his day, but it is also clearly understood by John to be a heavenly pattern that the earthly church is imitating, following, copying. Remember how we are told that the sanctuary Moses built was built as a copy of the sanctuary in heaven (Heb. 8:5) and that the rites of the ancient tabernacle and temple were “copies of heavenly things” (9:23)? I debated whether to read this to you it is a rather long reading, but give your best effort at capturing the point that is being made in this description of worship as John gives it to us, heavenly worship, in the opening chapters of Revelation.
“At the beginning of the book of Revelation, St. John tells us that he ‘was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day’ (1:10). [Interpreters of Revelation] commonly hold that the visionary’s ensuing account of life and events in the heavenly Jerusalem reflect in some ways the worship practices in the churches of his time… By divine inspiration St. John’s experience of contemporary Christian liturgy was heightened into the vision of worship in the city of God.
The historical function of the early Church finds its fulfillment in worship. John, the liturgist among the apostles, indicates the place that the worship of the Church has in universal history. The Church on the mainland of Asia assembles for worship on the Lord’s Day, while John is…on the island of Patmos. But then all earthly limitations are removed and the heavenly temple itself is opened to the inward eye, as once it was opened to Isaiah. John saw ‘the tent of witness,’ the ‘ark of the covenant,’ the ‘altar,’ the ‘seven lamps,’ the ‘censer of sacrifice,’ whose smoke filled the whole temple. Men and beasts alike prostrate themselves before God and the Lamb and adore. Angels and martyrs play on their eternal harps. The lonely figure on Patmos is both witness of and sharer in the worship of heaven itself. The heavenly trumpets sound. The Trisagion [the “Holy, Holy, Holy”] is sung. The praises sung by the creatures, the stars and the worlds surge around the Creature like some fugue of Bach’s [sic] that knows no end. The heavenly choir sings the Agnus Dei. The drama of salvation rolls onward like Palestrina’s Marcellus Mass. The 144,000 voices sing a new song in words no human ear can learn. The angel proclaims an eternal gospel in unearthly glory like the final chorus of Handel’s Messiah. The final Church comes together for the ‘great Eucharist,’ a Church of priests who are to serve God throughout eternity. That is the liturgy of universal history that the seer of Patmos knew and shared in. But the brotherhood is also gathered around him, invisible, here and now a Church of priests. It receives the heavenly epistle and shares in the heavenly worship with its solemn ‘yea’ and ‘amen’ and ‘Maranatha,’ ‘even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.’ So the apocalyptic liturgist understands the doxology of the persecuted church in the framework of a liturgy that embraces all worlds and times.” [Geoffrey Wainwright, “The Church as a Worshipping Community,” Pro Ecclesia (1994) 57 and Ethelbert Stauffer, New Testament Theology, 202, cited in J. Meyers, The Lord’s Service, 132-133]
In other words, the ritual of the Christian church, the acts that believers perform in their worship in the presence of God, from ancient times to the modern day, in those acts our faith has been expressed and our understanding of our lives, their meaning, their future given shape and invested with power. John tells the entire story of the history of the world by describing Christians at worship! Their rituals reveal and express not only their most fundamental convictions but also the most fundamental of all realities: the connection between God and man; heaven and earth; the meaning and the nature of the progress of history; its coming consummation; the glory of God. So it was in the days of the book of Numbers. This explains the place and the importance of ritual acts and rules of organization we find given so solemnly in the book Numbers and other books of the Pentateuch. These rituals, that organization, create, nourish, sustain and direct the life of the community of God’s people in that way that enables their worship, not only to please God, but in fact to be an instrument of binding the community together as the people of God directing them in the service of God and indeed directing history to its appointed end.
One scholar puts it this way:
“Rituals reveal values at their deepest level…men express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is conventionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the group that are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies.” [M. Wilson in Wenham, 26]
Well the essential society of the human race is the Christian church and its ritual is its essential constitution. The importance of ritual and organization was not lost on Moses’ contemporaries, but it is much harder for modern Americans to appreciate. We are a culture that has moved so far in the other direction – from the communal to the individual, and from a ritual-shaped life to one now virtually devoid of rituals (at least intentional rituals) – that we now face the very real threat of actual depersonalization. We have so exalted the individual and his freedom to live in whatever way he chooses, even alas in the Christian church, we have so romanticized freedom that not only have we lost a sense of community in Western culture, we are now in very great danger of completely losing any sense of personhood as well. As God made man to be a person in relationship, a personhood in community, to lose the community – and community is shaped and sustained by ritual – is finally to lose the personhood as well. We now are thinking and speaking more and more of human beings as simply exalted machines or as simply higher animals and the result is that more and more we are treating other human beings as machines and as animals. But animals and machines cannot create true community and they cannot form a community that actually will bless and save the world. Accordingly, the acid of individualism has eaten away at our communities, at marriage, at family, at national cohesion – I don’t know the extent to which you realize this but it is an extraordinary thing that we are talking about the United States of America nowadays as red and blue states – we are coming apart as a people. Our sense of a shared life and a shared community is disappearing in our time and before our eyes. And, alas, and even more important it is eating away at the church, where, again, everyone does what is right in his own eyes. I’m not sure if many of us in this congregation know how individualism and subjectivity rules in American Christianity in our time. Little holds us together, little gives us a sense of our life as the life of a single community to which we are bound, in which we serve the Lord, whose community is the instrument of God’s work in human history, whose acts together are the ultimate acts of Christ’s presence – of Christ’s body – in the world.
Now, it needs to be observed that human beings, being what they are, cannot escape ritual. Man’s communal nature, his craving to embody his internal states, leads to a life of ritual. It cannot be helped. And so, even in anti-ritual cultures like our own, rituals proliferate. What we have done is simply to replace divinely ordered rituals that reflect eternal reality for our own: rituals that express, wittingly or unwittingly, the diminished and debased values of our post-enlightenment world. People would never sit through an hour and a half church service, regulated and created and formed of rituals, but they will gladly sit through a three hour football game and do the wave at the appropriate time. Our community has been transformed from a community of faith to one of entertainment; our rituals have redirected our attention from heaven to earth, from God to the self.
The modern evangelical thinks extemporary prayer is more spiritual than the written prayers of the liturgy but what is the result? We end up with prayers that are empty of any reverence for God, are overly familiar which is to say they are anti-elitist even when speaking of God. They are the expressions of our subjectivist and individualist culture even when speaking to God. I am sure the ordinary Christian who prays this way does not understand this or appreciate it but it is obviously true. And the prayers are often little more than a list of almost selfish expressions of desire for this or that. Our way of praying brings God down to our level whether or not this is our intention. It shows you how fabulously important rituals are for the maintenance and preservation of a right understanding of unseen things. It is our modern way of prayer, a ritual that expresses the modern Zeitgeist or spirit of the age. “Lord we just want to…” And this has become the church’s prayer! “Lord, we just want to love you, or to ask you…” That prayer, brothers and sisters, will not conquer the world. It does not trade in the power and reality of heaven and the glory of God! Or the robe is taken from the minister – too formal, stuffy, elitist, too P and not enough J and E – but a new uniform is put in its place – either $1000 suits and $100 ties, or a Hawaiian shirt and sandals – but is this the organization of the people of God that will confront the powers of darkness and the present world system? Is this the form of God’s people and community that will carry human history forward to its consummation? School children are freed from uniforms but immediately adopt the official uniform of their peers, but a uniform that expresses now a very different set of values, one that doesn’t threaten the world at all and conveys nothing important about our convictions as the people of God or even the calling of a young student. House churches spring up that dispense with liturgy and ministers but very soon have created their own idiosyncratic worship and forms of leadership because without them they would soon wither away. But their forms are not the Bible’s forms and they lack the authority and the power that comes from a form being a copy of what is in heaven.
The question is not whether we will have ritual and organization but whether it will be the ritual and organization that God has taught us in his Word, the ritual and organization that will shape us into his “divisions,” the military term used so often in the Pentateuch to describe the people of God on the march through the wilderness of this world and doing battle with their enemies as circumstances require. In the army one is taught to salute higher ranks on every occasion. It is done all through the day, day after day. The point is that the ritual shapes the soldiers view of himself, his life, and his relationships. Those realities become so much a part of him that when they are tested in battle, they continue to rule his life. Rituals and principles of organization convey values at a deep level. Outsiders are always more conscious of them than insiders but at a deep level they convey, they reinforce, and they direct the moral, spiritual convictions of a people.

ORP: TP: misc. & Gravity's Rainbow

Usually when I discover a writer, I try to read their works in chronological order. So I began with "V", then "The Crying of Lot 49", and then it broke down and I skipped to "Vineland" for some reason. I am now back-tracking to read "Gravity's Rainbow", which some have characterized as an unintelligible post-modern mess. It is probably on par with "Ulysses" by James Joyce, but I think I can handle it. Since the novel is indeed post-modern, I won't even try to lay out the story line, but instead I will just quote passages that strike my fancy. For a springboard to discuss this book I recommend Wikipedia's entry.

I haven't yet gotten into Joyce's Ulysses as I want to know more literature and nineteenth century background before I jump into reading the novel. This is so that I can appreciate all of the obscure references. In this novel of Thomas Pynchon, I am going to just jump right in, because I have lived most of my life to this point in the last third of the twentieth century and have been exposed to the culture of that century, unlike the nineteenth century that I am currently studying by reading Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Dickens, Austen, Victorian literature in general, and some American writers of the period.

After I get my head around the whole post-modern warp, I'll probably relapse back a few centuries to get straight.

ORP: TP: Vineland: Social Philosophy

Here is another passage from the book that makes an interesting socio-political commentary. Officially, "for the record", I am completely neutral about this passage and disavow any implied endorsement or rejection. But I had to quote this passage, because it illustrates, from another point of view, the wrongness of the one policy of the Reagan administration that is completely out of accord with Libertarian and Conservative values (like the respect for and obedience to the U.S. Constitution), that is the "War on Drugs", the advent of the RICO statutes, and various other abominable abuses of our Constitution.

The passage quoted here is the conversation between two characters during the early 1970's:

Mucho blinked sympathetically, a little sadly. "I guess it's over. We're on into a new world now, it's the Nixon Years, then it'll be the Reagan Years--"
"Ol' Raygun? No way he'll ever make president."
"Just please go careful, Zoyd. 'Cause soon they're gonna be coming after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your senses, because they need to control all that. And they will."
"Fat police?"
"Perfume Police. Tube Police. Music Police. Good Healthy Shit Police. Best to renounce everything now, get a head start."
"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count. Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew..."
They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."
"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."
"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming--just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after awhile they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk.
"I'm not gonna forget," Zoyd vowed, "fuck 'em. While we had it, we really had some fun."
"And they never forgave us." Mucho went to the stereo and put on 'The Best of Sam Cooke', volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and listened, both of them this time, to the sermon, one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into.

And now this passage, taking place in 1984:

The burden of proof, Elmhurst explained, would be reversed here--to get his property back, Zoyd would first have to prove his innocence.
"What about 'innocent till proven guilty'?"
"That was another planet, think they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the Fourth Amendment. You were automatically guilty the minute they found that marijuana growing on your land."
"Wait--I wasn't growin' nothin'."
"They say you were. Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?"

I talked recently (yesterday) to a fellow Christian who had been in prison recently (he had converted in prison), and he could see quite plainly that our whole nation is gradually evolving (devolving?) into 'lock down' status. The Republicans of the last administration might have given us Fascism-lite, but with this new Régime, the gloves will come off. And we will have the full flavored version of Fascism. And in regard to the health nuttiness, remember the Nazi's were all 'health nuts'. The current 'stimulus package' includes the set-up for the aggregation of everyone's health records into one national database. Wait 'till you get denied health insurance because you ate too many cheeseburgers. Ah the joys of Totalitarianism.

Historica: A Russian Skete

Russian Old Believers in the Sharpansky Skete (the Kerzhenets River Woods) in 1897:

ORP: TP: Vineland: disclaimer & another lyric passage

I have this ability (some would say a fault) to compartmentalize when I am reading a book--I had to deal with the fact long ago (maybe 6th grade?) when I would read things that I would either not agree with or violently disagree with. The same is true for literature in the English language in the twentieth century and later. In the Thomas Pynchon novel, "Vineland", that I am almost finished reading is a case in point. There are passages that, as a Christian, I would consider 'downright' obscene in this novel. I don't think it is necessary to go into explicit detail when describing the typical immoral behavior of the common character of a story. So, I give warning that in this novel, as in much modern fare, there are portions that I not only don't endorse, but heartily disavow. As long as these features in a work are not excessive, I can edit them from my consciousness and imagination and still enjoy the work.

I came across this description of a character's journey down the Ventura highway in California that shows why I can still enjoy a novel that unfortunately will have the above mentioned unsavory passages. Here is the description:

...swept along on the great Ventura, among Olympic visitors from everywhere who teemed all over the freeway system in midday densities till far into the night, shined-up, screaming black motorcades that could have carried any of several office seekers, cruisers heading for treed and more gently roaring boulevards, huge double and triple trailer rigs that loved to find Volkswagens laboring up grades and go sashaying around them gracefully and at gnat's-ass tolerances, plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world.

:)

ORP: TP: Vineland

So after blowing through Thomas Pynchon's novel, "The Crying of Lot 49", I was still needing some more mind candy/good light to trippy entertainment. I turned to another of TP's novels, this one entitled "Vineland". There is a great mixture of a rollicking adventure and paranoia in this story and some great passages, but I just have to share this piece:

It was there, gazing down a long aisle of frozen food, out past the checkout stands, and into the terminal black glow of the front windows, that she found herself entering a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized. She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were swinging everywhere, that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume...as if they'd been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of something in power, must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final--but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least--and angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name--its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, and the only thing He we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

{:>)=

Social Philosophy: Civilization End Game: Jim Rogers & the coming US bankruptcy

In a nod to Mark Horne's linking to the following site, I want to recommend taking a look at the two parts of the video from an interview on Dutch TV:

Jim Rogers

Let's hope he is wrong, but I have my doubts.

ORP: TP: The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon uses the stream-of-consciousness technique in all of his writings that I have read thus far. But I have to say, he has a distinctive American voice and I enjoy in this current novel, the playfulness of light paranoia, literary (not as severely intense as James Joyce, of course) and scientific allusions.

This current novel that I am reading (as of this post I am only about a third of the way through it) has a flowing naive party spirit characteristic of the late fifty's/early sixties (20th century) before the price had to be paid (as Philip K. Dick alludes to in his novel, "A Scanner Darkly"). In the case of this novel, the MacGuffin is the conspiracy. See the various blogs and wiki's on the novel. The learning point for me is that I think many Americans, subconsciously, expect certain aspects of life and reality to be influenced/directed/affected by some conspiracy and so this should perhaps be an element one could bring into a novel (as another of the thousand points of light, I mean factors to enhance interest, er...) to enhance the suspension of disbelief necessary for a good story. Of course one would have to have the right balance to avoid obsession but still provoke believability.

Personal note: if I had finished my education earlier in life and had been an engineer, I could 100% relate to the passage from this novel that I am going to quote. As it is I am enough of a technical geek to still almost completely relate to the following:

"Sure this Koteks is part of some underground," he told her a few days later, "an underground of the unbalanced, possibly, but then how can you blame them for being maybe a little bitter? Look what's happening to them. In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor--Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grew up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some 'project' or 'task force' or 'team' and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent--only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook. What's it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a nightmare like that? Of course they stick together, they keep in touch. They can always tell when they come on another of their kind. Maybe it only happens once every five years, but still, immediately, they know."

In a sense, the modern 'military-industrial-complex has replaced the individual inventor with the harvest of group-mind. Unfortunately, in reality, many engineers working for companies like Boeing, et al, experience this.
Of course I can hear the arguments--just form your own company--but then you don't have time to invent either, because you are doing management, supervision, accounting, collections, advertising, marketing, etc. ad nauseum--but not engineering.
And one can go on into the whole realm of social philosophy viz-a-viz anti-technology vs. progressive aesthetic of design, etc.; I recommend the following book: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (ISBN-13 978-0312141042).

But just in the passage quoted, you can see that Thomas Pynchon, a technical worker himself in between writing, has some sympathy for all of us who have been "borg-ed".

Social Philosophy: You can spend your money better than the gov't can.

Check out this video.

Musica: Alison Krauss w/Robert Plant

I am just finding out about Alison Krauss, and I was a Zeppelin fan from way back so I thought I would share this video that Amazon.com shared. What a trip; even if you don't care for videos (one can always start it and continue surfing) the vocals are good and even if the lyrics aren't profound, I liked the song anyway.

ORP: Reading general: Kindle

Amazon.com's Kindle 2 is about to be released. When (& if) this recession is over, I am so going to get one.

ORP: Mind Candy 001

I finished "The Chronoliths" by Robert Charles Wilson. This science fiction novel was a fairly quick read, but I liked how the writer developed the characters and how he incorporated near-future trends and some of the latest scientific theories which could have some impact on the idea of time travel. The novel takes place in the years from 2021AD to c.2040AD and has to do with the impact of a future warlord in China sending large monolith markers backward in time to commemorate battles that had not yet taken place. The writer cleverly deals with the sociological impact of such a series of events occurring. It was a good read; I recommend it for anyone needing an entertaining story to take your mind off our wretched current socio-political reality.

Another novel I am about 2/3rds through is entitled, "Radix" by AA Attanasio. I had read this novel years ago and still remembered major portions of it and how it had some influence on my thinking at the time. In rereading this novel, I have had the opportunity for that feeling of "the warm thrill of confusion and space cadet glow...". The novel is a lyrical tale of life on Earth 1200 years from now after the alignment with the center of the galaxy (I imagine the writer is thinking of the alignment on Dec. 21, 2012 where the Earth will line up with the center of the Milky Way galaxy.) causes a gravity wave to shut down the magnetic field of the Earth allowing increased levels of radiation and disruptive "climate change" to reshape geography and the nature of mankind. Beyond this concept, the writer also takes it to the spiritual level and waxes shamanistic. I can enjoy this story because I know its all a science fiction story; unfortunately there are many people in the New Age movement that actually believe all the mumbo jumbo. I haven't finished the story yet, but there is stuff going on like humanity's intelligence evolving to the point of a "godmind" consciousness emerging (It kind of reminds me of some aspects of Frank Herbert's novel, Dune.) and all sorts of psionic stuff going on. Well, it's well written mind candy.

W: LP: LG: VH: LM: part "n" etc.

By the end of the first part of Les Misérables, Jean Valjean had to have his identity revealed since another man had been wrongly identified as himself. He went to the courthouse on the day of the man's trial and revealed himself. He was able to withdraw some money and hide it before he was eventually caught and sent back to the galleys. During a storm while on a ship, he volunteered to rescue an endangered sailor and in the process "accidentally" fell overboard. In the second part of the book, he has made his escape and rescued Cosette from the clutches of the Thénardiers and moved to Paris. In this section of the book Victor Hugo makes an historical digression to recount the battle of Waterloo before moving the plot along. At the half-way point of this section we come to the end of our assigned reading and the story brings suspense as Jean Valjean discovers that Javert is hot on his trail.

For a more detailed summary of each section of this novel I recommend the following link: Cliff's Notes of LM. I will still make mention in this blog from time to time of passages from this novel as our group makes progress through it. Victor Hugo's writing style isn't dense and 'polyphonic' like that of Dostoevsky but I do like the poetic way that he writes, the glimpses of the sublime & beautiful, and the enjoyable historical stimulus. This novel is a great work and has something in it that will appeal to every reader.

Social Philosophy: Civilization's End summaries

Ron Hart's letter of apology to his grandkids.

And here are a bunch of comments on Ron Hart's article.


Here is Ron Paul's latest statement that bears reading:

Statement of Congressman Ron Paul
United States House of Representatives

Statement on Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act

February 3, 2009

Madame Speaker, I rise to introduce legislation to restore financial stability to America’s economy by abolishing the Federal Reserve. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary policy. In addition, most Americans have suffered a steadily eroding purchasing power because of the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies. This represents a real, if hidden, tax imposed on the American people.

From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the current economic crisis caused by the housing bubble, every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has followed a consistent policy of flooding the economy with easy money, leading to a misallocation of resources and an artificial “boom” followed by a recession or depression when the Fed-created bubble bursts.

With a stable currency, American exporters will no longer be held hostage to an erratic monetary policy. Stabilizing the currency will also give Americans new incentives to save as they will no longer have to fear inflation eroding their savings. Those members concerned about increasing America’s exports or the low rate of savings should be enthusiastic supporters of this legislation.

Though the Federal Reserve policy harms the average American, it benefits those in a position to take advantage of the cycles in monetary policy. The main beneficiaries are those who receive access to artificially inflated money and/or credit before the inflationary effects of the policy impact the entire economy. Federal Reserve policies also benefit big spending politicians who use the inflated currency created by the Fed to hide the true costs of the welfare-warfare state. It is time for Congress to put the interests of the American people ahead of special interests and their own appetite for big government.

Abolishing the Federal Reserve will allow Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over monetary policy. The United States Constitution grants to Congress the authority to coin money and regulate the value of the currency. The Constitution does not give Congress the authority to delegate control over monetary policy to a central bank. Furthermore, the Constitution certainly does not empower the federal government to erode the American standard of living via an inflationary monetary policy.

In fact, Congress’ constitutional mandate regarding monetary policy should only permit currency backed by stable commodities such as silver and gold to be used as legal tender. Therefore, abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a constitutional system will enable America to return to the type of monetary system envisioned by our nation’s founders: one where the value of money is consistent because it is tied to a commodity such as gold. Such a monetary system is the basis of a true freemarket economy.

In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to stand up for working Americans by putting an end to the manipulation of the money supply which erodes Americans’ standard of living, enlarges big government, and enriches well-connected elites, by cosponsoring my legislation to abolish the Federal Reserve.

There's always more.

As I always say these past few years:

"It's disconcerting to be alive during the end of your civilization."

Technos & Social Philosophy: Robotics: EATR

I just had to link to this quick tech announcement that my brother found about self sustaining robots. Now when we can program them to repair themselves, we'll have some interesting times (click on the play button below blip.fm).

W: LP: LG: VH: LM: part 3c

As Victor Hugo introduces us to the character of Javert, a narrative is given of how Jean Valjean, under the name Madeleine, had used his shorted back pay from the nineteen years servitude and the silver from the Bishop of Digne to capitalize a business venture in the town of Montreuil-sur-mer. I want to quote a few excerpts here because, though it is fiction, it illustrates perfectly what Adam Smith wrote about that if government does not interfere with true free enterprise, someone with a little capital and a good idea can create wealth (putting the lie to the idea that wealth is only a static pie that only so many slices can be cut from). Here is the passage from book five of the first of five parts of the book, Les Misérables:

From time immemorial the particular occupation of the inhabitants of Montreuil-sur-mer had been the imitation of English jet beads and German black glass trinkets. The industry had always been slow because of the high price of the raw material. At the time of Fantine’s return to Montreuil-sur-mer a complete transformation had been carried out in the production of these “black goods.” Toward the end of 1815, an unknown man had come to settle in the city and had conceived the idea of substituting shellac for resin in the manufacturing process; and for bracelets, in particular, he made the clasps by simply bending the ends of the metal together instead of soldering them.
This minor change had caused a revolution. It had in fact reduced the price of the raw material enormously, and this had made it possible, first, to raise wages of the workers—a benefit to the district; secondly, to improve the quality of the goods—an advantage for the consumer; and third, to sell them at a lower price even while making three times the profit—a gain for the manufacturer.
Thus we have three results from one idea.
In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich, which was good, and had made all those around him rich, which was better. He was a stranger in the region. Nothing was known about where he came from and little about his early history.
The story went that he came to the city with very little money, a few hundred francs at most.
From this slender capital, under the inspiration of an ingenious idea, made productive by order and attention, he had extracted a fortune for himself and a fortune for the whole region.

Thanks to the rapid progress of this industry, which he had so successfully recast, Montreuil-sur-mer had become a good-sized business center. Huge purchases were made there every year for the Spanish markets, where there is a large demand for jet work, and Montreuil-sur-mer, in this branch of trade, almost competed with London and Berlin. The profits…were so great that by the end of the second year he was able to build a large factory, in which there were two immense workshops, one for men and the other for women: Anyone in need could go there and be sure of finding work and wages.

All in all his coming had been a blessing and his presence was a providence. [Before his arrival], the whole region was stagnant; now it was all alive with the healthy strength of labor. An active circulation stimulated everything and penetrated everywhere. Unemployment and misery were unknown. There was no pocket so dark that it did not contain a little money and no dwelling so poor that it did not contain some joy.

Jean Valjean goes on to use the profits he has earned from his successful business to endow some beds in a hospital and finance several charities. It was a win-win situation because the product was improved and made less expensive benefiting the consumer, the workers had jobs at reasonable rates of pay, and the entrepreneur gained profits from an investment of his capital (with the a long-term view about investing instead of the short-term profit motive of your typical American capitalist).

W: LP: LG: VH: LM: part 3b

In the nineteenth century, the idea that one's personality could be somewhat determined from an analysis of one's physiognomy. Look for this element in this description of the character of Javert who is the personification of Law without mercy:

The peasants of the Asturias believe that in every litter of wolves there is one pup that is killed by the mother for fear that on growing up it would devour the other little ones.
Give a human face to this wolf's son and you will have Javert.
Javert was born in prison. His mother was a fortune-teller whose husband was in the galleys. He grew up thinking himself outside of society, and despaired of ever entering it. He noticed that society irrevocably closes its doors on two classes of men, those who attack it and those who guard it; he could choose between these two classes only; at the same time he felt that he had a powerful foundation of rectitude, order, and honesty based on an irrepressible hatred for that gypsy race to which he belonged. He entered the police. He succeeded. At forty he was an inspector.
In his youth he had been stationed with the work gangs in the South.
Before going further, let us describe Javert's human face.
It consisted of a snub nose, with two deep nostrils, bordered by large, bushy sideburns covering both his cheeks. One felt ill at ease on first seeing those two forests and those two caverns. When Javert laughed, which was rarely and terribly, his thin lips parted, showing not only his teeth, but his gums; a cleft as broad and wild as on the muzzle of a fallow deer formed around his nose. When serious, Javert was a bulldog; when he laughed, he was a tiger. Beyond that, a small head, large jaws, hair hiding the forehead and falling over the eyebrows, between the eyes a permanent central crease like an angry star, a gloomy look, a pinched and ferocious mouth, and an air of fierce command.
This man was a compound of two sentiments, simple and good in themselves, but he made them almost evil by his exaggeration of them: respect for authority and hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes theft, murder, all crimes were merely forms of rebellion. In his strong and implicit faith he included everyone with a function in the state, from the prime minister to the constable. He had nothing but disdain, aversion, and disgust for all who had once overstepped the bounds of the law. He was absolute, admitting no exceptions. On the one hand he would say, "A public official cannot be deceived; a magistrate is never wrong!" And on the other, "They are irremediably lost; no good can come of them." He fully shared the opinion of those extremists who attribute to human laws an indescribable power of making, or, if you will, of determining, demons, and who place a Styx at the bottom of society. He was stoical, serious, austere: a dreamer of stern dreams; humble and haughty, like all fanatics. His stare was cold and piercing as a gimlet. His whole life was contained in two words: waking, watching. He marked out a straight path through all that is most tortuous in the world; his conscience was bound up in his usefulness, his religion in his duties; and he was a spy as others are priests. Woe to any who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father if he escaped from prison and turned in his own mother for breaking parole. And he would have done it with that sort of interior satisfaction that springs from virtue. His life was one of privations, isolation, self-denial, and chastity--never any amusement. It was implacable duty, the police as central to him as Sparta to the Spartans; a pitiless detective, fiercely honest, a marble-hearted informer, Brutus united with Vidocq.
Javert's whole being expressed the spy and the sneak. The mystic school of Joseph de Maistre, which at that time enlivened what were known to be ultraconservative journals with pretentious cosmogonies, would have said that Javert was a symbol. You could not see his forehead, which disappeared under his hat; you could not see his eyes, which were lost under his brows; you could not see his hands drawn up into his sleeves, you could not see his cane carried under his coat. But when the time came, all at once would spring from this shadow, as from an ambush, a steep and narrow forehead, an ominous look, a threatening chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous club.
In his leisure moments, which were rare, although he hated books, he would read; so he was not entirely illiterate. This was also perceptible in a certain pomposity in his speech.
He was free from vice, as we have said. When he was satisfied with himself, he allowed himself a pinch of snuff. That proved he was human.
It will be readily understood that Javert was the terror of the whole class which the annual statistics of the Minister of Justice include under the heading "Persons without a fixed abode." To speak the name of Javert would put them to flight; the sight of Javert's face petrified them.
Such was this intimidating man.

This the description of the character of Javert; in the next entry for this novel that I am examining, I want to describe what Jean Valjean had done for the community of Montreuil-sur-mer. (Stay tuned...)

Picture of preamble of US Constitution

Edit (Here is the text of the preamble.):

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Note: this was written before standardization of spelling for English and before Americanized spelling for the version of English that we speak and write.

Lord's Day

Ave verum corpus, natum de Maria Virgine;
Vere passum, immolatum in cruce pro homine,
Cujus latus perforatum fluxit unda et sanguine.
Esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine.
O Jesu dulcis, O Jesu pie,
Jesu fili Mariae, in nobis miserere.
Amen.



Hail true body born of the Virgin Mary;
Truly suffered, sacrificed on the cross for man,
Whose pierced side flowed with blood and water.
Be to us food in the trial of death.
O sweet Jesus, O holy Jesus,
Jesus, son of Mary, be merciful to us.
Amen.