Infinite Challenge

**Well, it’s taken several weeks and several odd strategies but I managed to get through Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace on my third attempt. 

One strategy was to get the Audible version of the book (free to new members, which you can immediately opt out of). I played it back at 1.5x speed. But I also had the text version that I could read in a browser on a large display. Because of this I was both audibly and visually kept on track. While I was at it, by using an earphone with a pause control, I could stop and mark the many, many instances where the narration differed from the text. These marked places are easily condensed into a document that I can send to the publisher or Audible.com, which will probably not initiate any re-aediting, but at least it’s on record. Oh, and I did this only while walking on my desk treadmill with the keyboard and display on the versa desk. 

Reading the book is a tedious task, and without multiple inputs the reader could easily get lost, or lose much of the writing. There’s hardly any plot but the text explodes like a firehose of words describing in minutest detail things that are not essential to understanding what’s going on, hence the tediousness. On the positive side, there are engaging descriptions of addiction, addiction therapy (mostly AA), depression, suicide and family relationships. Its often funny, both in the action or in the premise or description. Read the Wikipedia entry on it and you’ll see that the whole thing has a gigantic tension between reality and hyper reality.

I read this book mostly because it’s been praised so much, especially on its 20th anniversary. But frankly, I don’t think I’m up to its challenges. And don’t know who could be. I think I understand addiction better, depression better and even suicide. But reading the book is like having a large neurotic pet that is physically ill. A lot of work, and you’ve gotta love it. Or else, like me, take it on as a challenge for private reasons.

Reply to comment on previous post

**I’m always impressed when someone notices this blog, which I write mostly for my own amusement. Once in a while there comes a courteous, thoughtful comment that I appreciate. This is one that came through, anonymously, recently. It’s worth a complete post and not just a reply in the comment section. I’ve included the commenter’s text in italics. 

This is your blog. Your space. Your MT space. So if others come here to read & comment, hopefully it's out of respect & consideration.

Yes, it’s my space but it’s a public place. Anyone can come and read and make comments. It’s the way blogs work. But I wish all commenters were as gracious as you. Thanks.

You being a former CS teacher/lecturer, you're bound to be remembered by some in the small-world CS community where you were known by many. 

Yes, I met many good-hearted people during that trek through the desert. Only a few of them have stayed friends with me since I left, and I value them. 

Being that CS is a practice of mental grappling & reasoning, out of the spirit of respectful consideration, you may have some here who are innately different from your current perspective, making comment.

Yes, I expect such.

Regarding your comments that "There is no spiritual healing," and "the CS movement is coming to a grinding halt," how could you possibly know? These claims are as unscientific & unsubstantiated as what you are claiming to be unscientific & unsubstantiated!

I beg to differ. Thirty five years in the religion and half of that as a practitioner and teacher never showed me an actual healing that could be verified by the same kinds of rigorous standards used in medicine or in public health. In fact, as noted in the post, during those years I saw lots of people encouraged to wear their failures on their bodies for all the world to see. And if you follow the link, you can see where I starred in one of the most painful tragedies imaginable: encouraging a mother not to seek the simple medical treatment that would have kept her child alive. I can never forget that, though for several years I tried. 

As the post noted (and as others of my posts have also) a reasonable person would “follow the money.” It’s a pretty good indicator of what people think will do them some good. The money isn’t going into spiritual healing. And not just because Big Pharma has a lot of influence. It’s because nobody is coming forward submitting a physical healing that can be reliably tested. Everything is still in the realm of the anecdotal. Even the CS pubs don’t ask that "healings" be verified by professionals. The only requirement is that the testifier and “witnesses” have good reputations, which smacks of collusion.

If even one CS healing would pass an objective, professional examination, and if the result could be replicated over a wide range of conditions and time, there might be serious interest in what produced it. In that case CS healing could become a big BUSINESS, because people would flock to a method that resulted in such convincing proof of healing. It isn’t happening.

How many practitioners are actually making a living solely from the work they do as pracs? I could never make it, and I was somewhat popular. And most of the pracs would not be in the business if not for wealth outside of income from the practice. Many have spouses who work. Many are just plain wealthy, making their practice more a hobby than real work. And a few, mostly young people, are willing to live at a subsistence level for a time. Pracs may be busy, but it’s mostly because (mostly elderly) people call for inspiration and support as they struggle with the inevitable physical and mental issues associated with aging. Either that or if they’re teachers, they have a ready-made pool of starstruck customers willing and eager to sustain them.

Bedside manner is actually the most potent element of a successful CS practice. People can be talked out of psychosomatic problems, talked into feeling more hopeful and less stressed (stress being a major component of many problems), or given little busywork assignments that help them ignore the fact that physically they aren’t getting better and in most cases are getting worse. I’ve been in the same room with pracs on the phone troweling on platitudes to people who call them, often every day. This is not spiritual healing. It is a consensual con game. Somewhat useful, but not marketable to a public that simply wants to be cured, and not just schmoozed. 

As for the “movement,” it is hardly moving, growing gelatinous as it wanes. I used to work in the 26-story “Administration” building on the CS campus. Even then there were some floors only sparsely populated. But now the whole building is leased out to non-church occupants. It's a pretty clear sign of less “administration” to do. The former Colonnade building is now named for its address and is occupied by Northeastern University. Obviously the church is on life-support from its property holdings and other investments, and not from the bequests and contributions of its increasingly expiring members.

It’s even gotten to the point that today when a case of child abuse based on spiritual healing practice makes the news, Christian Science is hardly ever mentioned, other than as an historical reference. CS parents are now too smart (or afraid) to rely on spiritual healing for their kids, because they don’t want to be arrested and have their lives and faces plastered across the news media for being guilty of child abuse. And they’re also patronizing medical practitioners and pharmacies like everyone else, but more or less sub rosa. 

To a certain logic, all may appear to be one thing, but what if the framework of that logic only represents a level or layer of comprehension that is infinitesimally small? What if there is way more going on underneath that is just not known or understood to that logic? What if there IS a lot more to a man than the physical body?

You can go as low or as high as you want, but in the end people want actual healing in their lives. Practical results. Not just a good feeling, or patience with their pain and disabilities. Or even a satisfying theory. They don’t want some intellectual abstraction, some fondly wished for reality. They have a pain, or a functional failure or a deformity and they want to get back to normal. Normal as in humanly normal. Until CS can deliver that kind of result, it will remain a mind game and a conspiracy, won’t generate much interest and will continue to diminish as an influence in the world. My post was ultimately about being in step with reality vs. simply being theoretical. You can be logical within a theory but if you start off wrong you will end wrong (even MBE said something like  that). 

The shoes of CS do not fit everyone. 

Because most people don't want to contort themselves to fit a rigid, fruitless mold. MBE claimed that physical healing would verify the validity of CS. We have yet to see that evidence.

That is to be expected in our big world. One would not expect a ballet dancer to moon-light as a logger. Different shoes. In those two worlds, one could not be the expert of the other's field. 

The "field" we're talking about isn't a specialty. It's normal human life. 

A non-believer cannot claim to be an expert of the beliver's field - it simply cannot be. Different realms & different focuses of thought.

Whoa! I AM an expert in this field. For too much of my lifetime I studied it, practiced it, taught it, lectured about it, wrote about it and went to jail for it. Don't tell me I'm not an expert.

The post you’ve commented on was exactly on your point. One can be completely  consistent with a theory but ultimately wrong because one's premise was wrong. Intellectual consistency and logic just don’t matter to someone with a cancerous organ, or a cataract, or a blocked artery. The ONLY thing that matters is that the diseased condition is reversed and normalcy re-established. Whatever your “realms or focuses of thought,” the pain, the malfunction, the contagion, the deformity and so forth inhabit the only real dimension of interest to a sick person. Make a conclusive demonstration in that realm and you will get the millions to investigate and take up your belief.

Otherwise slide into history like the Shakers, who at least made something useful.

Right sequence, wrong foot

**In order to get out of marching around on an October's cold, muddy field in Buffalo, I volunteered for the ROTC band. It didn’t seem to matter that I said I played piano, they needed drummers and so I was handed a drum. I can keep a beat pretty well, though I don’t do all the flourishes real drummers can do. I enjoyed rehearsing with the band up in a nice, warm third floor lecture hall that overlooked the frozen sleety grounds where my less fortunate comrades slogged around hefting icy rifles and soggy boots. The band practiced all winter for the big spring parade, which of course occurred outdoors in a still-cold Buffalo spring, like March or April, maybe even May. One of my first impressions on reaching the street was that the drum was damn heavy to walk with, and had sharp hardware that bashed against my thigh with every step. Never having been fleet of foot, and concentrating so much on dodging the pain of marching with a drum on my hip, I lost track of the “left-right-left-right” cadence bellowing from the drum major ahead. While everyone was stepping with their left foot, I was stepping with my right, and vice versa. So while I was perfectly in time step to step, I was completely out of step with my group. Of course I was soon made aware of this mistake and skipped around to reverse it - with corresponding extra jabs to my thigh.

A current luminary in the Christian Science movement, is also an astrophysicist. So he’s not only a scientist who happens to be Christian, he’s a Christian who also claims to be scientific about Christianity. About the only thing these two disciplines have in common is that their arguments follow in logical progression. But like my faulty marching, CS starts on the wrong foot. Which pretty much invalidates all of its conclusions. And results in pain. I recently read the text of a talk he’d given in which he made many unsubstantiated claims, using the same quotes and cadences I used to make when I was on the same lecture circuit. 

I was once impressed with that tight logic. Until I discovered that the starting assumption — that there is a divine entity managing everything in perfect harmony— was bogus. It had previously, over many years, been an unchallenged assumption, I having been brought up with that assumption and participating in all the religious activities that sprang from it. So, while the CS arguments stemming from that assumption are in time with each other, they are totally out of step with reality.

Another kind of theist might find the logic of CS convincing, if they were free enough from parochial influence. But in the end they’d wind up just as disappointed and frustrated as I was. While some may argue that the existence of God cannot be proved, or unproved, the claim of CS to be true is defeated by its own measure. All through its literature is the claim that the truth of its assumptions are demonstrated by physical healing. Not just feeling better, or bearing up optimistically or becoming a nicer person. Physical healing. The kind of healing that millions (billions?) of people seek and find without resort to prayer of any sort, least of all “Christianly scientific prayer.”

No matter how strenuously Christian Scientists claim to be healed, there have been no convincing instances of it in my experience. Just the opposite. I’ve seen people so sick and unhealed through prayer that they let growths develop on their face or body; who put up with days of migraine pain; who even let helpless children endure suffering, sometimes to the point of death. Despite all kinds of rationalizations, it is not the patient but the practice that is at fault. 

If “spiritual healing” were effective, people would seek it, pay dearly for it. It would be so popular that whole industries would spring out of it, and educational institutions would teach it. And there’d be no bad press. Believers say that such can’t happen because of the perversity of humanity, its materialism and false education. But a healing practice based on the principle that there is an infinite, omnipotent and readily available divine source cannot have such conclusive and consistent failures. At least there should be some spectacular successes! And those successes would drive further interest and patronage. But what do we have instead? An increasingly inward-looking church, members and publications quietly congratulating themselves that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, real physical healing is going on and therefore they are in step with the truth. 

The CS “movement” is quietly grinding to a halt. The decline is aided, of course, by the fact that a large segment of its (lucky) membership is aging and dying. The righteous claims of younger, more robust members are being shredded as they age by the ailments typical of a human body that is exceeding its evolutionary design. Many secretly use medical services. Most parents are compelled by community laws to have their sick children treated by real medical doctors, cutting down on the most egregious of their practices. Many of their kids, not brainwashed by parents and grandparents, don’t join churches and thus don’t make up for the deceasing membership. 

Whatever can be said about the sound logic of Christian Science, it does not deliver on its promises. There is no spiritual healing. None. And if there is no such healing then the logic that would predict it is totally internal, and its practice is out of step with reality.   

Intelligence and theism

** For a long time it was a mystery to me why intelligent people stay religious once they encounter and contemplate the powerful arguments against theism, especially when they've been victims of its inconsistencies and failures. Something has captured the core of their identity and won't let go, as the following video shows (thanks to DarkMatter2525 via Matt at SouthernSkeptic.)

Birth of atheism

Newborn babies are naturally atheistic and need prolonged systematic indoctrination by parents and/or religious institutions to overwrite this natural state. I have intelligent friends and family who no longer practice their religion but still indulge in bits and pieces of it. Some go to church now and then. Others still revere and study the Bible. Others claim they still believe in the essential truth of a religion but don't get involved with its church. As the above video suggests, these die-hards were "carefully taught" from an early age, making it so hard to break out of those primordial brain grooves. 

Why didn't it work with me? 

I'm clean. God-free. Spirit-Free. Holy book-free. Church-free. I'm probably not even that good a humanist -- though I try. What I've just figured out is that I didn't receive my indoctrination from a personal source. It came mainly from institutions, which is a few clicks weaker than personal imprinting. It came from early church involvement and all levels of Catholic schooling including college, where I was taught by the "Defenders of the Faith," the Jesuits. 

Top of the slide 

Ironically, that Catholic college was my gateway to atheism. In the last half of my senior year, a young Jesuit brother, whose name I've forgotten, introduced a new class called "Existential Phenomenology." I don't remember much from that class but its impact was immediate and radical anyway, beyond its content. Imagine having been immersed for twenty years in the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and their spinoffs and implementations, and then suddenly you behold a vast field populated with more than Catholic philosophers. Of course I was naive, made that way on purpose by a system that scorned heterodoxy. In that class I learned of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Hussrl, Camus, Sartre and a pantheon of other philosophers who not only propounded views divergent from each other, but also from the only philosophy I'd ever known, one that supported the Catholic religion with which I'd so identified. That expanded view started a process of doubt and questioning that led in a couple of years to my disengagement from the church and its doctrines.

Down, and out

But that awakening wasn't enough. Though for ten years I wandered agnostically through the intriguing landscapes of philosophy, I never found a home in any of them. Until Christian Science. For complex reasons detailed here many times, this quirky Victorian relic had convinced me it held the true view of reality I’d been searching for. I set out to make a spiritual home there, and even tried to eke out a living practicing its brand of "spiritual" healing. I never could make a living charging people for my prayers but somehow I hung on for over thirty-five years. (Second degree indoctrination is weaker, but still damned strong.)

But THAT didn't work out either! Hence, this blog since 2005.

What finally broke the spell

After much reading and thinking and time, came the realization that the problem wasn't with any particular religion – that was just brand dissatisfaction. It was a categorical error: my blind acceptance of the very existence of a god, the grand assumption beneath all the brands, theism. In all my searching I hadn't noticed this, focussing only on finding one right explanation and practice. With the removal of this central pillar of belief the whole superstructure of religion collapsed around me, leaving hardly a scratch from the debris.

Degrees of imprinting

One of the reasons I'm so against religious indoctrination of children by their parents is that its crazy-making influence works too well. I've been able to turn so completely from theism and its by-products because I wasn't imprinted as deeply as those with a more conventional upbringing. If anything, I have been at heart an anti-authoritarian. Since the root of religious imprinting is parental indoctrination, deference to a strong leader (parent) underlies religiosity and conservatism. In my own case, indoctrination didn't come mainly from parents. My father, in addition to being strong to the point of violence, was anti-religious, the opposite of my mother. Since institutions were more influential than personal indoctrination in grafting theism onto my psyche, maybe the failure of an institution to help me in my great need cleared the last mile to my atheism

Why do I care?

Religious conviction in itself wouldn’t be very dangerous, except perhaps to the believer. It's supposedly a free country and people are entitled to whatever private fantasies get them through the night. Proselytizing is odious enough, but too often religious convictions and right-wing political ideologies coalesce, which has widely disastrous effects in the public sphere. For example, Georgia, where I now live, has been kicking around several pieces of legislation that would breach the wall of separation between religion and the State. Whether these efforts make it into law isn't as galling to me as the continuous pressure to do so. This depressingly reflects the desperation and power of religious constituencies fighting against the inevitable trend of American society away from theism.

Daddy issues

Why do the two so easily go together? Consider the "strong father" complex, the need of frightened people to be approved of and commanded by a superior entity, whether a supernatural Creator, a parent, a religious leader, or an ideology – anything with the power to punish and reward, create and destroy. Today's conservatism seems to be an example of this, characterized as it is by a resistance to change, reluctance to take risks, to explore territory that might revise one's views and behavior, a need to be certain, to be a winner, to be reactionary, etc. This resonates with a recent Vox article citing a survey that suggests authoritarianism is the fundamental characteristic of the conservative voter, and the explanation for the Trump phenomenon (he poses as the strong father and supporters expect he'll beat up the people they fear.) I've also written about it here.

Hope and fear

I continue to hope in the slow attrition of religious influence through generational dilution (none-sense). If we can avoid some apocalyptic event (most likely religion-based), reason will do its work and elevate the human race to where intelligence and theism will universally be acknowledged as polar opposites.

Atheism is not a religion

**Thanks to Matt from SouthernSkeptic

The Bible as bad writing

**When I was a Bible student, reading it every day, reading about it often, interpreting it for various audiences I would deal with the obvious mess that the Bible is by explaining that the message got so polluted by various political, mental, technical and cultural influences that the REAL meaning, the SPIRITUAL meaning became obscured.

This is how Mary Baker Eddy explained it. She of course set herself up —as so many have —as someone who had the unique divine inspiration to comb through it and discern the SPIRITUAL meaning that others mostly missed. But in the end she did what just about every Bible thumper does: cherry-pick passages here and there and weave them into support for a particular thesis. (Her "proof" that she was indeed this inspired scribe was that the system of "spiritual healing" that she invented based on it worked. But it doesn't.)

I didn’t grasp this at the time because I, too, was working under the assumption — delusion — that there is a divine Agent active in the universe who is trying to get through to us but for some never-explained reason has to use these woefully inadequate scribes to do it. As I studied more about the history of what we today call the Bible, I learned that it was a particular compilation of various myths, rumors, cultic rituals and other so-called doctrines of christianity, which freely circulated within that halcyon land mass we today call the middle east. Which stories got compiled into the present Bible depended on the opinions and political clout of various church authorities and scholars at the time. The Emperor Constantine, knowing that nothing unites like a common delusion — diverse people holding to the same religious precepts — decided that there should be one religion, and therefore one religious document that everyone would have to take as the final statement on the truth of Christianity. So he commanded that it be created. Yes, the Bible was created at a certain time and place. Those texts that became the canonical “winners” excluded many — most — of the “gospels” floating around in the 4th century and earlier. With the discovery of the Nag Hammadi, an ancient library, biblical scholars had to deal with some of those contemporaneous texts: The gospel of Thomas, of Mary Magdalene, and a slew of other luminaries that would have been quite well known to the average person in the 4th century but who got obliterated by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. Not that those other pieces of oral tradition were much clearer or more “inspired” than what got canonized but they illustrate the arbitrariness of what so many people consider a finished, divine work. And reading them was one of the reasons why my faith eventually crumbled.

From Southern Skeptic article

Recently, it was refreshing to encounter a blog called Southern Skeptic, since I now live in the middle of the Bible belt where the State legislature is currently working on six or seven bills about “religious freedom,” which obviously is only about freedom for the mainline christian religion, preferably of the evangelical variety, and oppression for everybody else. (You can imagine what atrocities they will try to push through.)

The writer, known only as “Matt,” explores his journey from fundamentalism to skepticism. His article, 7 Reasons God is a Terrible Writer does a good job of filleting this revered mashup that has been directly responsible for so much evil in human history. He asks: 

“So what would we expect to find in a book that was written by God (or “divinely inspired”)? Here are seven suggestions.

 (I’ll just quote the top line items and encourage you to read the details:)

1. It would be well-organized.
2. It would be more specific.
3. It would be easy to understand.
4. It would be perfectly consistent.
5. It would have specific, verifiable prophecies
6. It would contain knowledge that humans couldn’t have had.
7. It would have beautiful, heart-rending poetry and stories 

While many would object to that last feature, he makes a convincing case that most of the stories are strange, pointless and/or disgusting. He prefers hundreds of other, human writers. As do I.

Ask a believer why the Bible is inspired and the answer you get is, the Bible says it is. That's known as a tautology. But even if you accept that it could be inspired and absolutely true and an unerring guide to righteous human living, that acceptance would most likely crumble once you start reading it Because the writing is so bad.

Maintenance or Revolution?

**The following is response to a FB post made by a friend:

___, I’ve appreciated your posts on FB and have wanted to chime in on the conversations about the campaigns, but I really don’t want to get into scraps with the likes of ___, who rails against a polarized nation and then goes to show why it’s so polarized. A one-issue voter is a failed voter, one who doesn’t/won’t understand that governance is complex. The Tea Partiers in Congress are a good example of what happens — and doesn’t happen — when these narrow thinkers get power. Worrying about unborn, non-viable “babies” is an effective distraction/excuse for not dealing with the general realities of life. Some of these realities concern actually born babies — most of whom are black or brown, poor and extra susceptible to poisoning — who have to suffer the consequences of such blinkered thinking, 

There is an important distinction between the two Democratic candidates. As Robert Reich has said:

I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have.

But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change.

I just turned 75. I will feel no effects from the outcome of this election. My Social Security will continue. So will my Medicare. I live in a comfortable home with all the gadgets and amenities I could desire (thanks Apple discount). I even live now in a Red State but don’t expect to be persecuted much for being a Liberal/Progressive. Rednecks tend to leave old farts alone. 

BUT, my kids and grandkids and people of your generation will have to live with the consequences of this election for a long time. And those consequences could be quite severe, — sometimes I think even apocalyptic: voting rights curtailed, police violence unrestrained, mass incarcerations, more medical bankruptcies, and other kinds of right-wing destructive lunacy rampant.

Despite being actuarially insulated from its consequences, I’m really concerned about how this election goes. It’s different from elections of recent times, even 2008’s watershed. That moment gave the first hint of the stakes on today’s table. Obama’s election wasn’t just about a black man being elected president. It was an indication that the public wants to be involved in the political process. Another word for that is “revolution.” 

With all the trumpeting of personalities in the campaigns, the media is missing the point — maybe not missing it but attempting to distract from it: the choice is between maintenance and revolution. If a Democrat is elected the people either will get more power or they will stay unempowered. If a Republican, it’ll be the end of democracy, religious fanaticism will lead to the western version of sharia law, segregation, inequality and poverty will increase, and we’ll probably invade somewhere and lose.

I’m often tempted by Hillary’s “competence” and political savvy. She may maintain Obama’s management of government, but that would not be an entirely good thing. Obama has disappointed progressives by being a left-centrist. I understand that political realities may dictate that, and one person can hardly do what has needed to be done since the 2000 election debacle. No, it wouldn’t be as bad as a Republican victory in November. But that isn’t the only choice this season. Hillary would be maintenance. Bernie would be revolution.

No, Bernie can’t do it all by himself. But as a seasoned member of Congress he certainly knows the ropes when it comes to bipartisanship — after all, he’s had to work with both parties most of his career! But just as Obama’s inexperience was mitigated by his choice of advisors and Cabinet, so Sanders will lead in concert with like-minded people. And let’s not forget the importance of Supreme Court posts that will likely be filled during the next president’s term. A Democrat will help steer the court leftward, whereas a Republican will steer it toward more Citizens United, etc.

So, this year I will “waste” my vote on the prospect of revolution. I will vote for Bernie in the Primary and the Democrat in November. 

I’m heartened by your activism and hope you will increase and extend it.