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Post by jb on Jul 16, 2019 9:14:01 GMT -8
When I was a lad, my 10 month-older brother and I eagerly anticipated and vigorously celebrated each passing of D-Day. The closest rival for our routine neighborhood war games was imagining that we were this or that Secret Agent Man, whether James Bond or Our Man Flint, which required pretty much the same skillsets, e.g. parachuting from mimosa trees, fort construction out of native bamboo, railroad track-hopping of bicycles accelerated by gravity in our descents from the top of a muddy Mississippi's levee, bomb-making out of the river's dusty silt deposits & Mom's plastic sandwich bags, etc The only difference between our war gaming and spy sleuthing was our musical sound-tracking, i.e. whether we would hum Johnny Rivers or whistle the Colonel Bogey March from Bridge On The River Kwai. We could even time travel to World War I by switching to the tune our grandmother had taught us: " I’m a son of a gun if I see a Hun, I’ll make him understand, We’ll knock the Heligo, into Heligo, out of Heligoland." We've another childhood friend who's group texted us most every D-Day: " Never forget. Den 3" Now, mind you, that was a Cub Scout den, but only ostensibly; truth is, we remain brothers-at-arms. This 75th anniversary of D-Day was especially poignant for me, as it also marked the passing of another hero, Herman Wouk. He died on May 17th at 103. (cf. www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/07/herman-wouk-storyteller ) So, I've re-immersed myself in WWII stories, watching the old movies, like Battle of the Bulge, Midway, PT-109, Bridge on the River Kwai, Great Escape and such, as well as the documentaries available for streaming. Most enjoyably, I've been listening to the audiobooks of Herman Wouk's Winds of War and War & Remembrance.
My early childhood fascination with WWII battles was refocused in my late teens onto the Holocaust (and Russian gulags). It became a meaning in life quest and a transformation of suffering mission. It turned my attention to the wisdom of Viktor Frankl, Corrie ten Boom and others as could be mined from their concentration camp stories. I was haunted by these stories and threatened, too. The transformative nature of suffering and resiliency of the human spirit, when nurtured by the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, is the life lesson I've harvested from such authors. It helps me through my own sufferings to this very day, as I've learned that nothing in life can provide sufficient consolation - for me - other than faith, family and friends. What prompted this particular reflection was that, last night, as I neared the 100 hour mark in listening to Wouk's war chronicles, I was, once again, very profoundly moved by the lecture given by the fictional talmudic scholar, Aaron Jastrow. This lesson was delivered the night before his friend Udam is to be put on a train to Auschwitz, where they both know he will perish. Jastrow, Udam and that lecture audience are imprisoned in the "paradise ghetto" of Theresinstadt. His lesson is an exegesis on the Book of Job as contrasted to Homer's Iliad. At the end, Udam helps Jastrow down, then commences to solemnly sing and dance, that is, to worship. It is profoundly moving. One can watch a depiction here: m.youtube.com/watch?v=FwqohkCRylYI won't belabor this. This is not a book review. And it's not an academic essay. It is, for me, a prayer for each of you, that, in the way best accessible to you, you will also always experience the consolations of family and friends. Faith, too. And, if you don't have faith or the little faith you have is on some wane, I certainly don't judge you. I am, however, grateful to those who, though without faith themselves, do not judge me, either. Still, as one who has long studied philosophical theology, I heartily affirm Wouk's disquisition, below, as eminently defensible, philosophically: " Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled." ~ This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life (This is My God) by Herman Wouk as published in 22 editions www.goodreads.com/work/editions/102482-this-is-my-god |
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 16, 2019 9:30:04 GMT -8
The joy boys derive from pretending to be warriors and heros is wonderful. Aspiring to goodness and greatness is taboo to today's leftist totalitarians.
Somewhere in my boxes, I have a 1st Edition Society leather-bound "War and Remembrance" which I read after it first came out. As I recall, it was just as good as "The Winds of War" which had come out some years earlier.
That is a very good quote from Herman Wouk. I have often I wondered why people consider thoughtful guidance and inspiration i.e. religion, a crutch? Of course, hubris could be part of the answer. Some forty years back, I coined the phrase for such people, "Your arrogance is only exceeded by your ignorance."
By the way, I was also a Cub Scout and still have my uniform shirt, which my mother kept all these years. Den 2.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 16, 2019 10:31:24 GMT -8
I suspect most males our age were Cub and Boy Scouts. I made it to Star Scout. Since most of this was while we were in Greece, we even did the original (more or less) Marathon. (I made it about half-way and took 5 hours to do that, by which time some people had probably finished it.) I think it was our Cub Scout den that made a trip to the First Bull Run battlefield (we lived in Alexandria at the time).
My religious views have generally varied between agnostic and deist over the past half-century, but I never was one to mock the religious. Too many of them were friends and family. (My maternal grandmother was unforgiving of my high school for including Paine's "The Age of Reason" in our reading. That is one of the main things initiating my religious skepticism, having been raised Episcopalian when that still referred to a Christian religion. Actually, there are still Christian Episcopalians today; they just don't head the hierarchy either in America or in England. The only Episcopalian service I've attended since then was my mother's funeral over a decade ago.)
William Safire, a more-or-less conservative Jew (though he wasn't too conservative to be the alternative viewpoint at the New York Slimes for many years), wrote a book on Job. As with nearly all my collection, that was abandoned when we sold our house with its contents. But I did read it a couple of decades back.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 16, 2019 11:23:09 GMT -8
As a more or less believing Jew of Southern heritage, Marine, Israeli and general disrupter of progressive notions. I don't think the future of our people is tied just to the past, but more to the future. The idea, in liberal minds, of the passive Jew who recoils in horror at violence rightly belongs in the past.
The world was amazed when survivors of the Shoua entered Israel after WWII most of the world believed that these Jews could never defend themselves. The last 75 years of war seem to have put that fantasy to rest. Barney Greenwald in the Cain Mutiny says "while you gentlemen were chasing skirts Captian Queeg and others like him were holding the line against the thugs who were turning Jews into soap". It is a damning inditement and all too true. I will not let it happen again.
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Post by jb on Jul 16, 2019 11:41:36 GMT -8
My religious views have generally varied between agnostic and deist over the past half-century, but I never was one to mock the religious. I've many agnostic, deistic, atheistic, nontheistic and variously theistic friends, all who are eminently reasonable and of profound goodwill, none who mock others. For that, I'm thankful. Alas, there are folks of every stripe who get rather militant and triumphalistic, often due to some type of fundamentalism, not just of a religious bent but coming from what an old friend called "Enlightenment fundamentalism," which comes in several brands of positivism and ignosticism, which are just so mid-last-century! |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 16, 2019 12:04:03 GMT -8
Or, as other Jews have put it (harking back to a previous Jewish catastrophe), "Masada shall not fall again." The history of the Maccabees should have made it obvious that the Jews were capable of fighting. By the way, did you know that the Waco holocaust occurred on the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? I think Janet Reno could have found a better way to remember the event. A friend of mine once did a parody of a report on the events at Waco in the style of Jurgen Stroop's "The Warsaw Ghetto is no more" report.
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Post by jb on Jul 16, 2019 12:50:45 GMT -8
Although neither Jewish by lineage nor tradition, I have prayed the Sh'ma daily for near half a century. For a couple of long summers, as a late teen, I learned it as a camp counselor, assigned to the waterfront as a Red Cross sailing & swimming instructor, at a Jewish boys' camp on Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire. (Fallon & Timberlake are too young to have overlapped with my tenure.) At reveille and dusk we would pray: "Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad - Hear, O Israel: the LORD, our God, the LORD is One."
Another very cherished childhood memory was standing on the levee, not a tenth of a mile from our house, watching the WWII aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, go by on the way to & from some naval display, 40 miles upriver in New Orleans. It had participated during the Attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway, the Guadalcanal Campaign and other engagements.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 16, 2019 13:55:08 GMT -8
The Enterprise (which was used solely in the Pacific) was one of three carriers that served from the beginning to the end of World War II. The others were Saratoga (also used solely in the Pacific) and Ranger (the least of them, used only in the Atlantic where it never faced an enemy carrier). It did indeed play a minor role at Pearl Harbor: It was approaching the base and sent some dive bombers in to land. They showed up at the tail end of the attack, and not surprisingly encountered some "friendly" fire. It was a lot more available during the war than Saratoga, which seemed to have some special attraction to Japanese I-boats that kept it out of action until after Midway.
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Post by artraveler on Jul 16, 2019 18:35:39 GMT -8
Sooner or later every Israeli, most as a finish to basic training with the IDF, makes the trip to Masada. Sunrise is spectacular and every person takes their oath that Masada shall not fall again.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 17, 2019 8:40:30 GMT -8
On Amazon Prime Video, I’m currently watching a series called Life and Fate. This is centered around the battle of Stalingrad from the Russian side. It is based on the book, Life and Fate. As one reviewer at Amazon note: Hey, sounds like a laugh a minute. But this would appear to be a very well done production. I’ve watched about 1-1/2 episodes and it does seem to be a quality series…if bleak. And about JB, no one can see he isn’t “Wouk.” |
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 17, 2019 9:29:01 GMT -8
If religion isn’t a crutch, Mr. Kung, it really ought to be. Life is hard. It is full of injustice. And it ends (at least in this world) with death. But it is inherent that we grapple with metaphysics. We’re steeped in them whether we want to admit to it or not. It’s without question that religions are full of ideas that can’t even be marginally verified. It also goes without saying (but we are here to say things, so I’ll do that too!) that religion is a means to give thanks to the Creator for stuff that isn’t trying to kill or maim us.  The problems or mystery of existence are there whether we want to acknowledge them or not. I acknowledge the real possibility of both revelation and mystical knowledge. Both are hard to pin down and verify and in this case this will go without saying. My problem is with dishonesty. Sure, in all religious people may believe things that aren’t true or that certainly can’t be shown to be true. But those inside of religion who have integrity (and there are many) will acknowledge this. My problem is with materialists/atheists. It is at least absurd (if not outright dishonest) to declare that matter and energy are all there ever was or will ever be without acknowledging that only through the immaterial mind and consciousness are we able to communicate this bit of self-evidently incomplete metaphysics in the first place. |
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Post by timothylane on Jul 17, 2019 9:57:07 GMT -8
The pure materialists believe that the mind can be explained in material terms. Even our thinking may be determined by our genes and certain environmental factors, such as birth order: Older children tend to be more conservative than younger ones. Thus, I'm the youngest in my family, and my Maoist sister is the oldest. This is a good example of how well their ideas actually work. Global warming aka climate change aka climate disruption isn't the only place where many scientists no longer pay attention to the scientific method.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 17, 2019 10:07:26 GMT -8
Explain the taste of strawberries. It can’t be done. At best, you can talk about receptors and neurons and neurotransmitters. But as far as I can determine, there is no strawberry-flavored atom or quark.
Mr. Kung said something to me the other day that was his usual directness and succinctness: A large number of people in this culture simply do not wish to learn something new (or listen to other people).
Regarding the lack of strawberry-flavored atoms or quarks, this aspect is self-evidently so. But some people (and I consider much of scientific thinking to be fundamentalistic) must try to shove even the round pegs through their square holes.
Of course, it’s human nature to want to be a know-it-all. It’s painful to be in error and to be corrected. But if one, via formal schooling or elsewhere, has learned that the overall accumulation of knowledge (and the purging of error) is a worthy pursuit, the moments of unlearning wrong concepts becomes just an overall part of learning…a necessity. Even fun.
Humility is not a trait being taught anywhere that I know of. Even inside of many churches, a pompous know-it-all-ism is masked as “social justice” or some other thing. If you assume, for instance, that poor people are only ever poor because they’ve been exploited by Donald Trump and his ilk, you are just as guilty of intransigence even if you wrap up your arrogance in a supposed care for other people.
I really would rather surround myself with people more informed than I am. How else am I going to learn something, especially in a culture that regularly lies about big things?
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Post by timothylane on Jul 17, 2019 12:02:23 GMT -8
Yes, the materialists would talk of the chemicals in the strawberries, the receptors in the tongue, the neural transmitters, and the way the brain cells react. What else is there to explain? Oh, they don't have all that knowledge yet (and never will), but in theory everything can be explained that way. What that says about them is an interesting question. How do genetics, nerves, chemicals, etc. explain their materialism? I don't think they want to consider that question.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 17, 2019 12:34:56 GMT -8
I think that gets to the essence of it, Timothy. Very well said. What else is there to explain?
Much of this has to do with culture and cliques, not facts. Of course we can’t put God in the docket and interview him. We have no way (despite many naive physicists’ claims of the multiverse, etc.) to look outside our universe and see what lays prior to or superior to it. We can even admit that many of our religious beliefs are, at best, analogs of what otherwise (like the taste of strawberries) is ineffable.
But a reasonable fellow would admit that matter and energy are the mediums (the bricks, the clay) which are the conduit (in ways we will likely never understand in this lifetime) for amazing things such as consciousness.
And as I noted elsewhere, despite rigorous and well-formed mathematics that have a tight correlation to physical phenomenon (this surely tells us something, but what?), when you get down to it, the atom, upon close inspection, is noted even by materialists to be but a blur, a chimera, a function of some obtuse quantum probability that we can’t begin to understand (although, as I said, the math works out very tightly).
That is, we (the materialists, at least) pretend to know what matter and energy “really is.” But we don’t. And it’s this egotistical and/or social need to own The Sacred Knowledge that is central to this.
The clearly immaterial aspects are a precise problem for fundamentalist materialists because the reality is that “mysticism” is not the work of deluded minds but is inherent to the project of reality.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 17, 2019 12:44:42 GMT -8
I wonder if that series about the Russians during World War II will explain why so many volunteered to help Germany (Hilfswilligen) or even fought for it (or against Stalin, such as the nationalist Ukrainian partisans who killed Soviet Marshal Vatutin in early 1944). Not to mention the slave laborers in Berlin who didn't want the Soviets to take the city and restore them to their homes. Being a slave laborer to people who called you racially inferior was better than life as a Soviet peasant.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Jul 17, 2019 12:58:20 GMT -8
Well, the series I’m reading came from a book that was apparently a no-no for a long while in Russiabecause it was critical of some of their craziness.
Nothing clarifies one’s principles and resolve than having your homeland invaded by Nazis. But at the same time, Stalin killed way more Russians than Hitler could have dreamed of. One wonders what great sin the Russian people ever committed to have deserved both of these monsters. Some of that is starting to come through in the series. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.
Therefore I think it’s extremely monstrous for Democrats, or anyone else, to want to replicate parts of that system here. We don’t want thought police. We don’t want state control of everything. We don’t want people informing on each other out of spite or to gain a favor from government. All of this is happening now and it is getting thicker. That the flawed Donald Trump is the voice or reason (and the other side is completely lunatic) shows you how rock-and-a-hard-place we ourselves are becoming.
There is no substitute for good, brave men and women acting with wisdom and motivated by other than a lust for power, fame, or grievance. Since George Washington, we’ve been in rather short supply of that.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 17, 2019 15:10:16 GMT -8
Throughout history, it has been the case that, more often than not, it is the worst not the best who have risen to the top in life, particularly in politics. In general, it has been the most corrupt, most cruel, most dishonest, most bloodthirsty, and most aggressive who have imposed their wills on the rest of mankind.
Through our Western, specifically British heritage, we in America have inherited a system which has mitigated the evil which is common to history. This does not mean we have not erred and that only good men have arisen to lead us. It does mean that other countries and nations have not been able to replicate this boon, without our help. This is something which our leaders should remind the people, constantly.
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