What's A Hero?

 On a run the other morning I thought about Jackie Robinson.

I don't know a ton about Jackie Robinson; a little more than the casual baseball fan I would guess. The Ken Burns 'Baseball' documentary enlightened me a bit and the movie 42 followed what I learned from the documentary. These coupled with the book I read to my sons (who are in full baseball obsession mode at the moment) Jackie and Me by Dan Gutman solidified my view that Jackie Robinson was a hero.

Despite the question the Coen brothers ask in The Big Lebowski, What's A Hero?

Well, in my estimation Jackie Robinson is a hero because of what he did...for so many others...at great cost to himself.

Now what got me on my run the other morning was how I compared Jackie Robinson, who's life was so clearly cut short because of the stress from breaking the color barrier in baseball, to my parents.

Now my parents were not heroes, to many, but their lives were most definitely cut short from the stress of raising six children in abject poverty. One of the things that slaps me in the face most days is how fortunate my children are: food to eat, clothes to wear, resources like health insurance and dental coverage. Most of this is provided by my wife just so we're clear, but the children are fortunate and, gulp, privileged. 

Despite my own generational poverty trauma I carry and I impose upon them indirectly.

So my parents had no resources and still managed to get us out of childhood alive. Maybe not mentally/emotionally top-tier, but breathing and operating on a level with the average citizen. Again, they did this with no resources. No safety net (no health insurance, no dental coverage), no net to catch parents falling with six children in tow. Did I mention we were all crammed into a 2 bedroom house. 2 bedrooms. Our current home has 4 full baths. 

Imagine the mental toll. I honestly can't. I hate taking my car for an oil change because I fear news that x is broken and its going to cost y, even though I have a little money saved.

What the fuck is it like to avoid going to the doctor for an entire life because you just can't afford it? What is it like to get up and go to work even though you are sick as a dog? Cory Booker, in an interview with Jon Stewart, talked about how a speeding ticket can ruin people working in a gig industry. My father was self-employed and if he didn't work, he didn't eat - no personal days, no vacation days, no sick days, no my kid has this or that day. Work, or else. 

That's pressure.

That's stressful.

It shortens lives.

So my parents died early. 

Did they die heroes?

I don't know. 

What's a hero?

Pearly Gates Toll

Ass, grass, or gas, nobody rides for free.
No such thing as a free lunch.
Ass, grass, or gas, nobody eats for free.
Eat in.
Eat out.
Take out.
Take it in. All the way in.
It's a sin.
Ass, gas, or grass, nobody gets through the pearly gates for free.

Mammalia, Christianity, and The Singularity

 Thinking a lot about christianity and human nature lately.

Well, “nature” is a bit of a misnomer, but I am thinking about what it means to be human and how this intersects with christianity.

The singularity will come later.

In its essence, christianity purports to turn you, a formerly mortal mammal, into an eternal being. How this is done is not sufficiently explained. Entropy is undefeated in physics; any christian explanation, metaphysical it can claim, will not remedy the problem of parallelism. For example, christianity can claim humans are never mammals but eternal “souls” from the get go. Again, how do souls, eternal, very unphysical, immaterial beings, interact with physical bodies, i.e. mammals?  

So christianity promises to change the nature of humans from mortal mammals to eternal souls. But it doesn’t deliver on its promise. Worse, it has eroded public health in the process.

Perhaps technology is our real savior–salvation being a relative concept, and a very earthly one. Ray Kurzweil claims that in the very near year of 2045, humanity will merge with technology to create a new species. Behold, the singularity. 

See https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045 for some fun.

Will this suffice for salvation? Is it more realistic than believing a man from 4 B.C. can turn you into an eternal being? 

If one digs into Kurzweil or historian Yuval Harari one will discover that immortality will still lose out to entropy, though life can be greatly extended–Kurzweil talks about uploading your brain/cognitions into various substrates. Kooky.

I may be down for an extended life with some more earthly pleasures like seeing grandkids and being in a band again but if you asked me to bet that I would live long enough to see the Browns win a superbowl, I wouldn’t take the bet.

Haiku Tuesday

Time for haikus now
So count your syllables now
What! You forgot how!

Time, a function of...what?
Value, a function of...that.
Take time, to value.

Behold, the theists
That occupy the SCOTUS
They are your missionaries.

Insurrection, twas
No dustup, no mere dustup
lives were at stake, Drake.

We got a kitten
It's...well... not the friendliest
Challenge: purr, purr, purr

Summer has begun
Cue the sun, cue the pool and
Count the days til school

Field of dreams, heaven
Is this heaven? That depends:
Meta...physics...man!

Aristotle, dude.
Simone De Beauvoir, lady
Category, Ouch!

Talk: evil: yeah, nay?
Nah, a debating tactic.
Evil, live, backwards!

You just think you know
But nothing is what you know
Ah, so much to learn.

New Kitten Exposes Myth of Morality

Morality, by definition, is objective. In contrast to ethics, which admits of relativity.

If something is morally wrong (or right), it is that way NO MATTER WHAT. This is the essence (from the greek ontos) and crux of morality.

So we got a kitten. We have yet to name the little gal but my fave so far is Mojo.

When asked to research the timing of shots and spay for the kitten, I come across:

Obligate Carnivore (insert intense music).

It seems this little gal, and cats like her are obligate carnivores.

In short, cats must eat animal flesh...to survive.

So lets go down a couple of holes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predation_problem

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/18/8802755/peter-singer

Some folks want to stop owls from hunting. And cats from surviving. 

Some folks just sidestep and say, "Oh, animals aren't moral agents." 

What are the conditions for moral agency? Who decides? Are the conditions immutable? 

Some talk about collective suffering. Is the cat who can't eat factored into the suffering component?

At bottom, there is no "no matter what" moment for any moral position. It's a myth. 

Thanks Mojo.

Baseball And The Afterlife

I am not going to say that Ken Burns is ruining my life.

I am not going to say he's bettering my life either.

Alas, I ruin and better my life. I leave it to you dear reader to decide if I have bettered or improved.

I am going to say that the Ken Burns Baseball documentary is taking up my time. Whenever I fold laundry I take the time to catch up on the Baseball documentary. 

Now here is the reveal: the damn thing makes me emotional; often welling up tears, sometimes near sobbing. What can I say, the historical drama resonates with me. This probably has a lot to do with my mid-life crisis (now in it's tenth year or so), marriage crisis (coincidentally in it's tenth year), parenting crisis (huh, also in about the tenth year) and career crisis (too many years to count) but it also speaks to the depth and power of the documentary. The fact that my sons are smitten with baseball right now and that we are reading through the Dan Gutman Baseball Card Adventure books before bed is also playing a role.

But that it not what I want to tell you about today. I will connect the documentary to another thesis in my life however. 

The documentary covers the Black Sox and the Shoeless Joe Jackson bribe in the 1919 World Series. And Shoeless Joe Jackson is part of the backdrop for the plot of the movie Field of Dreams, which this fool decided to plop down and watch on...wait for it...Father's Day, with his baseball loving sons.

I had to fight off tears for a good portion of the movie (I know I know, get some help you stubborn idiot - something is amiss!) because there is so much of the movie that hits my heart. 

Now you know that he crux of the movie is Ray Kinsella's relationship with his father and the the denouement is his having a catch with his father at the end of the movie.

But there is a trope that runs through the movie that highlights the main thesis of my life right now: There is no afterlife; you and mammals like you, are finite. 

Really? This is in Field of Dreams? The movie about baseball? 

That's the one.

You see, when Shoeless Joe (played by the *late Ray Liotto) first appears, he asks Ray, "Is this heaven?"

To which a beaming Ray quips, "No, it's Iowa."

Upon reuniting with his father, after never getting the chance to apologize..."Son of a bitch died before I could take it back,"

his father also asks, "Is this heaven?" And Ray again says, "It's Iowa," but follows by asking his father, "Is there a heaven?"

It's where dreams come true.

And Ray looks around at his land, his wife and daughter on the swing and realizes:

There is no afterlife.

I wrote this for my Writing In the Public Interest Course:

"I can hear you now: our souls will be in eternity. Souls can’t be anywhere. But I’ll look past this and still ask, how are you going to enjoy eternity when you can’t grab anything? What’s even the point if you can’t grab a beer, hold a lover, whack a golf ball, strum a guitar..."

Or in the case of Field of Dreams, have a catch with your dad.

Heaven and the afterlife is a bad idea. It doesn't help the species. It's regressive. It's unhealthy, on the individual and public health level.

After the movie I went out and threw batting practice for my sons. I tucked my daughter in that night.

The Imagination - Bigger Than Me

 Atheists, like myself, can run the risk of protesting too much. It gets very Freudian, almost like a defense mechanism:

"Why all the atheism? Huh huh? Why all the mistrust of religion? Huh huh? Who hurt you? Huh huh."

Still, I do think about this stuff...and have since my late teens and my first philosophy class, back in 1990 or so.

One theme with the theists is the ole something as opposed to nothing. I won't tackle this one head on but I will morph this theme into something I consider kin:  the something bigger than me theme.

I think a fear among theists is that if there is no sense of something bigger than me, then there will be no order:

Mass hysteria will rule unless we humans accept something bigger than us. 

An interesting context here is, Alcoholics Anonymous and step 2 of the 12 steps (or traditions if you prefer):

"2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."

So what is an atheist to do in the midst of such a, let us say, predicament/quagmire/conundrum? 

Maybe this atheist realizes something bigger than him, alone, in his closet studio every night. 

Stay with me.  

At night in my studio, I will play along to a rhythm track and solo. 

"Is this guy about to tell us he touches god with his stratocaster?"

Stay with me.

As I am playing I begin to hear things I want to play; sounds I want to realize and bring into the world, birth if you will.

"Is this guy about to have a guitar baby or some shit?"

Often times my technique will prevent the sounds from being realized - my fingers won't fly like I need them to, and the sound idea, parishes, if you will.

I tell you this because this sound idea, waiting to be born, is my imagination at work, and it is bigger than me.

This is the crux - my imagination is bigger than me - my imagination creates. From nothing - ex nihilo.

Let there be sound.

And here is the public health angle: I othered not a single person. I condemned not a single person to hell nor did I promise eternal salvation to like-minded folk. 

I simply found the head space to listen, and IMAGINE something not yet here and try to will/birth/create it. 

This is bigger than me. This is enough for me. The precludes mass hysteria and allows me to remain sane, whatever AA means by sane. 

"Is this guy actually going to try to save humanity with a pentatonic scale? Is this some bullshit fundraising in disguise for the National Endowment for the Arts?"

Of course not. I'm simply showing you that you can recognize something bigger than you without anthropomorphizing or indoctrinating or othering your fellow sapiens to hell. 

I like to think I'm offering you a public health opportunity. Because personal beliefs are a public health issue.

You're welcome. 

If you have some money burning a hole in your pocket, you can help others create something bigger than themselves.

 "I knew it, this motherfucker is after my money."