George Eliot Quotations and Kate Wolf

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

It's never too late to be who you might have been.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.

What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

Most interesting is that George Eliot was actually a woman. It was the pen name of Mary Evans who lived from 1819 to 1880. According to Wikipedia:

Mary Ann (Marian) Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were taken seriously. Female authors published freely under their own names, but Eliot wanted to ensure that she was not seen as merely a writer of romances. An additional factor may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.

One more addition tonight....a poem I found on a blog from Minnesota. They are words from the late singer Kate Wolf,

So I'll take the day and run out across the open fields

Where the grass grows high and the shadows fall

Where my eyes can see all the colors in the air

So quiet that the wind whistles in my hair

And takes the rising dust and carries it away-

Kate Wolf, from "Unfinished Life"

BTW......

Kate Wolf (Kathryn Louise Allen) (January 27, 1942 – December 10, 1986) was an American folk singer and songwriter. Though her career was relatively short, she had a significant impact on the folk music scene, and many musicians continue to cover her songs.
Born in San Francisco, California, she started her music career in the band Wildwood Flower before recording ten records as a solo artist. Her songs have since been recorded by artists such as Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris (whose recording of "Love Still Remains" was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1999).
She died in 1986, at age 44, after a long battle with leukemia.

A Different Way of Thinking

Just when I was trying to give the "faith crowd" the benefit of the doubt. I saw this article from Villanova University. The article doesn't give science the credit it deserves and left me feeling very empty.

Faith in a Scientific Age

With all the advantages of living in the age of technology, there is a temptation to apply the experiential method of learning to every discipline, including theology. Even scientific methods frequently demonstrate a theory or an event as happening pretty much as Scripture described it. But faith adds a dimension, as Augustine says: "Observe what you see, and see what you cannot see. Believe in the one whom you cannot see, on account of those things you can see" (Sermon 126, 3).
The Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe is such an event, and it turns out that God didn't need seven days to do the job. The source material of everything in the universe could have come into existence in one burst of energy. As cited in the previous installment of "All Things Augustine," St. Augustine believed that "the universe was brought into being in a less than fully formed state but was gifted with the capacity to transform itself into a truly marvelous array of structures and life forms."
However, Augustine, like the other early Church fathers, took his Bible literally. He believed that Adam and Eve were created and set on Earth; they did not evolve from a lower life form. He also believed that the Gospels were written by four eyewitnesses to the life and death of Jesus.
There is no reason to think that Augustine, with his giant intellect and open mind, would have ignored the physical evidence that modern archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered to support the theory of evolution. Nor would he have refused to examine the work of modern experts in Scripture who have discovered that at least three of the four Gospels were written by Christians born well after the time of Christ.
For him, such knowledge, based on reason, would simply enhance his knowledge based on faith. For Augustine and for the modern Church, which relies so strongly on him, reason and faith never are on a collision course. And faith itself is a journey. As he noted in Sermon 27, 6: "At the moment we are still on the road. What is the road? It's faith."
Father Burt stated it simply. "Belief [faith] is a necessary means to beatification [blessedness] but it is not the ultimate stage in our knowing. We believe now so that some day we will finally and forever understand ourselves and our God. We seek now by faith; then we shall find by understanding. Then we shall know the truth of Augustine's words: 'Understanding is the reward of faith.' Then we shall finally see what now we can only believe."

A man told athiest Richard Dawkins (upset over his attempt to use reason to explain religion), "There's a reason they call it faith!"

Again, you cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into in the first place. One they play the faith card, all reason is disqualified.

It's seems like vacuous tripe bordering on the inane.

I'm done venting now.

Christopher Hitchens the William F. Buckley of the Neo Athiest Movement

I am fascinated with Christopher Hitchens. I like the way he thinks. He's a bit militaristic for me but his thinking patterns are very interesting to try to follow. Case in point, this recently published piece......

Op-Ed
Christopher Hitchens
Belief in Belief
A question that interests me very much (and always has) is this: I know that I do not believe in either any god or any religion, and I can give my reasons in a manner that the other side can at least understand, but can the same be said for those who claim that they do believe? A shorter way of putting this is to ask whether our antagonists in this ancient argument truly mean what they appear to say.
The recent disclosure that Mother Teresa had for almost half a century been unable to feel the presence of Christ in the Eucharist or the ear of God listening to her prayers, is of great im­portance here. (See the recent book of her despairing letters, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light.) Not even her most fervent admirers regarded this woman in any sense as an intellectual, and she evidently struggled to combat her doubts in a highly traditional way—namely, by making ever-more extravagant and even masochistic professions of “faith.” This would be superb confirmation of Daniel Dennett’s hypothesis about "belief in belief"— the strange idea that, though faith itself may be ludicrous and incoherent, the mere assertion of it may possess some virtues of its own.
Even though I have sometimes described her as a fraud (for her collusion with rich oppressors of the poor like the Duvalier family in Haiti and for her other corrupt dealings), I would now hesitate to put Mother Teresa in the same category as a Falwell, a Haggard, a Sharpton, or a Robertson. These men have never done a day’s real work in their lives and are or were simple parasites who pinch themselves every morning at their good fortune at living the easy life of exploiting the gullible. For them, religion is nothing more than a trade, or a racket.
The same, I think, can be said of the numberless clerics convicted of child-rape (why on earth do we allow ourselves the silly euphemism of “abuse”?). Their foul crime is not one of hypocrisy. No priest who sincerely believed even for ten seconds in divine judgment could conceivably endanger his immortal soul in this way, and those in the hierarchy who helped protect such men from punishment in this world are equally and obviously guilty of a hardened and ob­scene cynicism.
But the racketeering and exploitative side of religion, as with its no-less-mark­ed tendency to generate wars, atro­cities, and repressions, isn’t the whole story. What of those who try their best to help others and lead a decent life, attributing this conduct to their belief in a Virgin, a Prophet, or to the story of Exodus, or any other such fabrication? I never cease to wonder, in dialogues with such people, whether they are really saying what they mean or meaning what they say.
To any humanist, for example, it’s perfectly obvious that the city of Cal­cutta would benefit from an influx of volunteer nurses, doctors, inoculators, sewage experts, and others, just as it would not benefit from the attentions of people who regard poverty and death as a secondhand share in the "mystery" of the Crucifixion. There are actually quite a good number of activists of the first type (I spent some time there once, watch­ing the great Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado do his work for UNICEF documenting the massive campaign for vaccination against polio), but for some weird reason the only person anyone can name is a woman who spent her entire life campaigning against birth control—a stupid campaign that Bengal most definitely did not and does not need.Is it not possible that the missionaries of "faith" regard the objects of their charity as mere raw material—human subjects for a tortured experiment in their own psyches? It seems that, the more Mother Teresa lost conviction in the teachings of her religion, the more energetically she silenced her doubts by ostentatious crusades against divorce, abortion, and contraception using "the poorest of the poor" as her backdrop and her excuse. And does this not degrade such work as she actually did? For her, the helpless beggar was just that—helpless, to be sure, yet for that reason easily available for her own exhausting propaganda. The case for assisting starving Bengalis is complete on its own terms, but most of the money raised for the "Missionaries of Charity" went—as Mother Teresa herself happily admitted—to the building of convents that were consecrated, in effect, to her own ambition and her own very extreme teaching of Catholic dogma. These preach­ings went dead against the only certain cure for poverty—the emancipation of women from the status and condition of breeding machines—that the human race has ever discovered.
In other words, "faith" is at its most toxic and dangerous point not when it is insincere and hypocritical and corrupt but when it is genuine. At that point, its energy of certainty and self-righteousness can be used, not only to reinforce the Church but also (as Mother Teresa’s continuing reputation demonstrates) to impress even the secular. The evidence now is that this is how she and her confessors squared the circle. Repress your misgivings, overcome your de­spair, re­double your efforts, and we will make you a saint and later claim that you cured the sick even after your death. It’s at this point that the cynical loops round to meet the naïve and say in effect that anything is permissible as long as it keeps the illusion alive. Again, one has to stand amazed before a clergy who can use, as a recruiting sergeant, a wretched old lady whose own faith, as they well knew, had worn to a husk.

My obsession with Hitchens is a fascination with his intellect. Right or wrong, he will go right to the jugular and challenge your thinking and logic. That is to be respected. My sister in law Iris may openly say Hitchens is simply a male chauvanist pig, but I like him. Have a great weekend everyone, and happy reading. Peace be with you :)

One of My Role Models: Carl R. Rogers

Over the weekend we went to a graduation party up north to the town where my wife grew up. I took a book along for the trip and this time chose "A Way of Being" by Carl Rogers. It has been twenty years since I read those pages. In the book, I found the extreme wisdom of a man who was fascinated by the concept of human potential. I had a good time discussing the passages that I had read that profoundly interest me with my lay minister and friend Tim recently. We meet for coffee or tea once a week. I think I really got Tim interested in Roger's ideas. (Someone with a Christian perspective being influenced by a humanisitic theorist) Highlite passages I most liked:

Dr. Irvin Yalom wrote the forward to "A Way of Being." He says quote, "Rogers was persuaded of the reality and significance of human choice; he believed that experiential learning swas a far more powerful approach to personal understanding and change than an endeavor resting upon intellectual understanding; he believed that individuals have within themselves and actualizing tendency,an inbuilt proclivity toward growth and fulfillment."

Rogers said about listening, "When I say I enjoy hearing someone, I mean, of course hearing deeply. I mean that I hear words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the pesonal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person. "

He also says, " I am terribly frustrated and shut into myself when I try to express something which is deeply me, which is a part of my own private, inner world, and the other person does not understand. When I take the gamble, the risk, of trying to share something that is very personal with another individual, and it is not received and understood, that is a very deflating and lonely experience. Creative, active, sensitive, accurate, empathetic, and nonjudgmental listening is for me terribly important in a relationship.

Realness was very important for Rogers, but he went farther and coined his own term. "In place of the term 'realness' I have sometimes used the word 'congruence.' By this I mean that when my experiencing of this moment is present in my awareness and when what is present in my awareness is present in my communication, then each of these three levels matches or is congruent. At such moments I am integrated or whole, I am completely in one piece. Congruence is the fundamental basis for the best communication."

In other news today. My brother in law Bill lost his mother over the weekend. Some sort of pancreatic condition. She felt ill Tuesday and was dead on Saturday. She was a wonderful person and will be missed greatly. Such events make many of us want to hug our spouse and kids and say "I love you" to the people who mean the most to us in our lives. Carl Rogers said of death, "Ten or fifteen years ago I felt quite certain that death was the total end of the person. I still regard that as the most likely prospect; however, it does not seem to me a tragic or awful prospect. I have been able to live my life---not to the full, certainly, but with a satisfying degree of fullness---and it seems natural that my life should come to an end.. I already have a degree of immortality to other persons. I have sometimes said that, psychologically, I have strong sons and daughters all over the world.. Also, I believe that the ideas and the ways of being that I and others have helped to develop will continue. So if I, as an individual, come to a complete and final end, aspects of me will still live on in a variety of growing ways, and that is a pleasant thought."

Minds Over Matter

by Dinesh D'Souza

In his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, V.S. Ramachandran says it "never ceases to amaze me" that "all the richness of our mental life--all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions--is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our brains. There is nothing else." Here is the voice of materialism, the doctrine that holds that matter is all that there is, and mind is simply an epiphenomenon of matter. It is the intellectual foundation of the new atheism espoused by Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett and others.
Dawkins, Pinker and Dennett offer nothing to prove the doctrine, and neither does Ramachandran. The best Ramachandran can do is cite exotic ailments: the fellow who could recognize shapes but not faces; the fellow who thought his mother was an imposter in disguise, the patient who responded to pain with laughter, and so on. Turns out that these peculiarities emerge as a result of damage to particular parts of the brain.

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I won't torture you with the entire article. But the jist of it is that the new athiests are silly because they SHOULD know there is something more but they are too dull to see it. He makes a pathetic argument that mind over matter is probably possible, but never tells us what the mind is and how this possibly could be done. Not much of a scientist are you? The truth is that Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and Pinker make the most sense of anyone because of their passion for truth and almost disarming honesty and directness. Those of a spiritual bent with a chip on their shoulder should do more listening than playing the "I'm so offended" card every time new ways of looking at spirituality are brought to light in a scientific manner.

Thanks for letting me vent. Whew.

Cognitive Dissonance is Common?

Keith Miller, a professor at Brown University and an expert in – and passionate advocate of – evolution states: “The categorical mistake of the atheist is to assume that God is natural and therefore within the realm of science to investigate and test. But God is not and cannot be part of nature. He is the answer to existence, not part of existence itself.”

Wow! Is this an objective scientist talking? How about Francis Collins, a geneticist during the weekdays and a passionate church goer on Sunday? Collins says he sees the trinity in a waterfall. He sees the sacred but has to think scientifically to make a living. This cognitive dissonance is amazing. How could he be so conflicted? But as Christopher Hitchens says on the DVD "The Four Horsemen," cognitive dissonance is a very common human trait, that we all have our public and our very private selves. He cites an a example of a follower of http://www.moveon.org/ thinking the U.S. is an imperialist nation who is hated by the rest of the world, a nation which is seen as a an unfriendly police man in the world, starting fights instead of solving problems. Yet this person pays his taxes and goes to church and is a good citizen with a nice family. He still benefits from all the amenities of society, but criticizes it vociferously in his role of a moveon.org antagonist. He is sort of living a double life criticizing the U.S. but enjoying the immense freedoms the country gives him and his family.

From Wikipedia: Cognitive dissonance is psychological state that describes the uncomfortable feeling when a person begins to understand that something the person believes to be true is, in fact, not true. Similar to ambivalence, the term cognitive dissonance describes conflicting thoughts or beliefs (cognitions) that occur at the same time, or when engaged in behaviors that conflict with one's beliefs. In academic literature, the term refers to attempts to reduce the discomfort of conflicting thoughts, by performing actions that are opposite to one's beliefs.
In simple terms, it can be the filtering of information that conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one's beliefs. In detailed terms, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, where "cognition" is defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance states that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments have attempted to quantify this hypothetical drive. Some of these have examined how beliefs often change to match behavior when beliefs and behavior are in conflict.

Hitchens goes one step further by saying many clergymen do not believe in God but perpetuate the myth with their flock. How many people really believe? What does it mean to really believe? Good questions! Doesn anyone really know the answers? Let's not be afraid to talk about the questions.

This Blog's For You Uncle Charlie

As I listen to JS Bach's Sonatas for Viola de Gamba and Harpsichord(a 1994 recording featuring Keith Jarrett on harpsichord and Kim Kashkashian on viola) I think of my uncle's vast appreciation of classical music. I wish my late Uncle Charlie would have written a blog like this. It would have been a good way to articulate all of his complex feelings and to write about music interests too. My relationship with Charlie got dramatically better toward the end of his life, but there were still things to do, to stay that leave me with a profound sense of frustration. Our best talks were our "Tuesday nights with Charlie" phone conversations, the memories of which I will treasure forever.

A recent study in American Sociological Review based on interviews with nearly 1500 people by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago states that 25% of Americans feel that there is no one close with whom they confide in about things that are important to them. Eighty percent of respondents confided solely in family. This study has been continuing since 1985, when the average person reported 3 people to confide in (compared to 2 in 2004) and only 57% of people relied solely on family members to confide in. In a society that is designed to tear us apart in good times and bad, our most radical act is to strengthen the bonds between us across all our social divisions. We must actively resist any attempts to force us or our neighbors to suffer alone or to fear invisibility.

So Charlie, whereever you are, this blog is dedicated to you. You suffered alone far too much. You had many thoughts and feelings but you held up because you perceived the thoughts to be too socially unacceptable. You reached out at end, but in some ways it was too late. His feelings about God? "I don't believe any of that stuff." Hopefully my dear uncle had something to cling to at the very end, at the very least he clung to the fact that I believed in him very much. One of my friends from out east put it succinctly, saying that I carry on many of the traits of Uncle Charlie and that is the best tribute possible to him. Amen.

An Athiest's View of Life from Infidels.org

"Atheists ought to stand for inquiry and doubt. They ought to stand for logic and sound empirical method as the only things capable of sorting true facts from false, to every reasonable person's satisfaction. They ought to stand for the humility to admit ignorance, and the wisdom to not assume too much, as well as the consequent political reality that finding common ground and negotiating differences is far wiser, and better for all, than maintaining adamant opposition on matters that do not even warrant an adamant opinion in the first place. The atheist ought to stand for using faith as justification for inquiry rather than belief. And the atheist ought to stand for happiness, and the understanding and accomplishment that are needed to achieve it. Above all, the atheist ought to stand for being a hero to himself and his fellow humans, rather than a villain. I believe that when the reasons for these values are truly understood, any man would hold to them and keep them, even if god himself appeared and ended all dispute as to his existence. Indeed, I believe an atheist ought to live her life so she can say with all sincerity, "even if God's existence were proven, I would change only my understanding of the facts, and not the values by which I guide my conduct and thought."

Richard Carrier


This quote is interesting. It says that athiests(many more are comfortable with calling themselves freethinkers) should not be afraid to stand up and say what they think. It is so politically incorrect to talk about religion in public. It might as well be the athiests.



Another great article I came across this week was from the Oxford University student newspaper entitled "Dawkins, Einstein and God."

Some excerpts from the article:

Einstein’s true thoughts on the supernatural: ‘The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.’

Einstein is often cited as a deist by a number of religious apologists looking for support from someone who knows what he’s talking about.
Those looking for a romantic, tantric love-in between religion and science are always reminding us that Einstein once said, ‘science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’

Here's another insightful excerpt:

"As for Einstein and Hawking, the concept of Einsteinian religion is well understood. ‘God’ and ‘religion’ are certainly being used as metaphors to explain the deep mysteries of the universe and the enticing nature of science, not a supernatural creator.

In fairness, there are a number of very famous scientific icons who were deeply religious: Newton, Faraday and Kelvin for example. However, a 1998 Nature article by Larson and Witham showed that only 7% of members of the National Academy for Sciences believed in God.

Eminent modern day scientists who do believe in a personal God (such as Francis Collins, a leading figure in the human genome project) are anomalous and often the subject of bemusement. "


Very interesting....Hmmmm.

Prayer or Science?

The death of 11 year-old Madeleine Neumann could have been prevented. Her parents decided that prayer instead of medical science would save her life. She died of diabetes. This kind of religious extremist thinking really exists in the United States and it must be confronted. An article in the Chicago Tribune talks about the parents from Wisconsin who face reckless homicide charges. It also states that 309 cases like this have been recorded in the United States. That is pathetic. It's pathetic that compassionate and reasonable people have not shown their shock and alarm to a greater degree. Why does this keep happening over and over again. Madeleine could have led a full life, but ignorance stopped her in her tracks. She was a straight-A student who weighed only 65 pounds when she died from undiagnosed diabetes. Her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, told investigators she had not been to a doctor since she was three.

Are there lessons we can learn from this? Will stories like this help increase awareness? Or is it impossible to reason with people who do not like to reason? Hmmm.

Sitting on the Fence

Are you an athiest or an agnostic? Do we really care? Well, the question is certainly important to writer and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins says more people who call themselves agnostics are just closet athiests. I think he might have a point. Look at how athiests are demonized in this society. An athiest would never be elected president because as Dawkins says, people are too afraid of their beliefs. The problem with this is how little it is discussed in public. People need to openly admit they don't know, and we are too proud to do that. We are all so "safe" in our public comments.

So which is it?? Athiesm or agnosticism? Whatever you do, don't sit on the fence.