With plenty of room to move around, herewith are considerations of current events both within and without an MT head.
A blog by Mario Tosto, aka Victor Mariano
Thanks for your article "Healthcare provision seeks to embrace prayer treatments." As a former Christian Science practitioner ("healer") for over 30 years I can vouch for the statements from the critics to which you refer:
But critics say the measure could have a broader effect, conferring new status and medical legitimacy on practices that lie outside the realm of science.
There is no true "spiritual healing." Most of what passes for it are anecdotes where there is no objective diagnosis or controlled testing, from people whose main problems are psychosomatic. Herbert Benson, MD and others have shown that a "relaxation response" accounts for the relief from such problems.
Toward the end of my involvement with Christian Science, and becoming suspicious of the claims I had been taught, I carefully observed if my prayer or lack of it made a difference in my patients. It didn't. People who believe in spiritual healing, and Christian Scientists in particular, are quite defensive about challenges to their faith in this approach to health care and eagerly strive to provide "evidence" for its efficacy. It's also why the Christian Science church in Boston has a large department of people who do nothing but lobby around the world for the kinds of accommodations being advocated in the present health care legislation.
I agree with Dr. Norman Frost, quoted in your article, that more resources need to be devoted to "evidence-based medical practices" and less to long-disproved, and dangerous, systems.
** After 60+ years of carrying the torch for religion in one form or another, it might not be so remarkable that I would choose to spend my final years as a contented atheist. But new research from The Barna Group, which specializes in studying the religious beliefs and behavior of Americans, and the intersection of faith and culture, shows that the thrill is also gone for most younger Americans. Here are some highlights of the report (via DC)
As the nation’s culture changes in diverse ways, one of the most significant shifts is the declining reputation of Christianity, especially among young Americans. A new study by The Barna Group conducted among 16- to 29-year-olds shows that a new generation is more skeptical of and resistant to Christianity than were people of the same age just a decade ago.
The study of Christianity’s slipping image is explored in a new book, entitled unChristian, by David Kinnaman, the president of The Barna Group. The study is a result of collaboration between Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Project.
The study shows that 16- to 29-year-olds exhibit a greater degree of criticism toward Christianity than did previous generations when they were at the same stage of life. In fact, in just a decade, many of the Barna measures of the Christian image have shifted substantially downward, fueled in part by a growing sense of disengagement and disillusionment among young people. For instance, a decade ago the vast majority of Americans outside the Christian faith, including young people, felt favorably toward Christianity’s role in society. Currently, however, just 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a "good impression" of Christianity.
One of the groups hit hardest by the criticism is evangelicals. Such believers have always been viewed with skepticism in the broader culture. However, those negative views are crystallizing and intensifying among young non-Christians. The new study shows that only 3% of 16 - to 29-year-old non-Christians express favorable views of evangelicals. This means that today’s young non-Christians are eight times less likely to experience positive associations toward evangelicals than were non-Christians of the Boomer generation (25%)...
**An update for myself in the future and for anyone who cares:
In September 2006 I took part in a poetry workshop at Berkeley led by Richard Silberg, did ten weeks there and then joined another workshop, led by Kim Addonizio at her home in Oakland. They were both good experiences for different reasons, and forced me to hack out some bits of poetry, meet some interesting fellow poets and give myself a hell of an editing assignment. Most of those poems aren’t ready for even late night time, so they will undergo revisions, rewritings and scrapping before I venture to make them “public” – if this, the most microscopic audience in the world, can be considered “public.” What I consider done for now appear on my poetry site, couldbeverse.
Toward the end of my second poetry workshop I got involved with the RPM Challenge project, about which I’ve blogged here before. This opened up the long-closed gate of my interest in music. I wrote my first song in high school and had it performed at the Spring Concert, probably in 1957 or 1958. I remember being shoved out on the stage to play the piano by Sister Mary Whoever because Dur Daggett, the school genius pianist, was a no-show. Funnily, the song was called “Memories,” but I can hardly remember it now.
Songwriting remained pretty much dormant until long after college, poetry being my muse in the intervening years. Bought my first guitar from a guy at work who had a music store. Paid $40 and it was worth almost every penny. But I started to learn some Bob Dylan and Beatles on it. In 1968 my wife bought me a real guitar, the one I still have, and about which I wrote the poem “Attachments.” Soon after, I began writing songs and that continued for several years into the 1970s, producing dozens until I got religion in 1976 or 1977. Suddenly all that artistic stuff looked crass and unholy compared with the lofty goals and mission I had taken on. So songwriting remained more or less dormant for the next thirty years and the songs, typed or scrawled on yellow paper mostly, lived in the back of the lowest draw of the least used file cabinet. I had also recorded most of them on some reel-to-reel tape machines I owned at various times. I have boxes of these and until February of 2007 hadn’t listened to them. But I still had an old Wollensak kicking around and got it working well enough to listen to some of those songs. That led quickly into the RPM Challenge project.
But my interest in songwriting has flared up and I am involved with music again as in the old days. These days I’m concentrating for the most part on recording some of my oldies, using the wonderful technology available to the layman today. Some of them are just tunes, so now and then I take a crack at writing lyrics to them.
ENTER RED HOUSE
I met John Cunningham at Fitness 19 where I had been working with him as a personal trainer. We discovered our mutual interest in music and began jamming on Friday nights at my place. John laid down awesome lead guitar tracks to two songs I was producing for the RPM project.
Then one day he told me about a place in Walnut Creek, just 8 or 9 miles from here, where guys like us could go and jam. It’s called Red House. We visited it one Saturday and a week later joined. It has been a great experience for me. John and I meet there instead at my place and have a couple hours to jam in a beautifully equipped studio. I made a brief video last Friday, which you can see here.
But the big breakthrough for me has come from playing in a group, something I have always wanted to do, but the logistics posed formidable obstacles – and excuses. Now, with Red House providing a gathering place for musicians I find I’m playing a lot more. Apparently most of the members play blues lead guitar, and there seems to be few keyboard players. There are several “Players Clubs” where members can jam on the Red House stage. Next to guitarists there are several drummers and bass players so there’s always a core rhythm section and people take turns paling a couple songs on stage. I have found myself expanding that rhythm section on keyboards. And the neat part is that I get to sit in on all the sessions! So I’m getting more experience playing, and having the fun of interacting with the other players.
Will this lead to a whole new career? No. Being now of a certain age, I can do this sort of thing for the sheer pleasure of it without the slightest trace of guilt. Being “retired” means not only never having to say “hello Boss,” but not having to defer doing what really resonates for the sake of earning a buck. I didn’t feel this way when I was first let go from my job. I felt I had been cut off from the most satisfying work I’ve every had. It took about a year to realize that I had been handed one huge favor and, useless as it is, I am loving my life.
Where I go from here is completely unknown to me. More of the same, something new or all of the above? No plans other than to stay healthy, appreciate what I have and look for new opportunities.
**The folks at RPM Challenge sure know how to motivate. My son heard a story about this bold experiment on NPR. The gist of it is to "record an album in the month of February 2007."
BACKGROUND: I had recently unearthed boxes of old reel-to-reel tapes of songs I'd written back just after the earth cooled, in the late 60s thru mid 70s. With some ridiculous brute force techniques I got an old Wollensak monophonic tape machine to play some of those tapes and remembered what I'd long suppressed: I had wanted to be a songwriter! Lots of material in those miles of reddish-brown ribbon, and I wanted to save it in some other medium. I happened to have an analog-to-digital conversion box and so set about to digitize some of those old recordings.
Then Pete, my son, told me about the RPM Challenge and urged me to sign up for it. In fact, he went so far as to attempt to sign me up himself but didn't have enough info at the time. I told him I'd do it - this was around February 11. So I had just 17 days to complete the project.
Fortunately there are lots of great tools available today, so the old impediments of professional studios, musicians, tape, etc just don't exist today. Everyone can be a music producer. Here's what I used:
And so, the rest of February has been almost non-stop recording, re-writing some songs, and even singing them myself (always a challenge for both singer and listener - but there are tools to ease that pain too). The result is the disk pictured above. RPM will make the audio available on their site. If you're interested, look up "For the Record," the only "band name" I could think of at the time of registration. What you'll hear is what I call "30-year-Oldies," an eclectic collection of ballads, blues and rock that was my music world - and life - at the time.
The important thing is that this challenge has helped me get closer to my own roots, and get a more complete sense of myself after more than 30 years of disowning this essential element.
PS: Here's a little video about "The Making of..." of this album:
