A Print Version of this piece is posted on The Policy Think Site at -- http://jaygaskill.com/Israel2010.htm

Also posted on

This is how one Judeo/Christian goy sees it. 

We can visualize Deity as an infinitely persistent transmitter of the moral code, Source of the Great Signal, if you will. 

When Deity hovered over the dark abyss, not a stirring of receptive intelligence occupied the formless deep.  Billions of years later, human minds emerged, endowed with the potential for moral reasoning.  Deity’s transmissions have only dimly been detected in the last few millennia. Even then, they are rarely received and even more rarely have they been authentically and intelligently decoded. 

Chosenness is the human condition that arises when a person or a people receives and decodes enough of the Great Signal to initialize moral obligation.  The prime directive of humankind is to acquire THEN ACTon moral knowledge. 

The Great Signal decodes as follows:

• You have been chosen to receive the gift of Moral Awareness;
• I Am the Source;
• Do not mess with the Source.
• Moral Awareness is Moral Obligation.
• You are directed to keep this channel open at all costs.
• You are directed to Honor the Moral Law and the Source;
• Follow, Preserve and Teach it,
• Forever.
• Tune in at least once a week.

Given that eternally operating Divine transmitter, and the gradual evolution of receptiveness to the Great Signal among humankind, the emergence of a  first chosen people was a matter of time.  It was a question of receptivity, not electivity. 

Chosenness is never a one-off event.  None of us can ever close the door to the Source, nor shut down the reception, nor end the necessity of ongoing listening and intelligent decoding.  Once the first Great Signal is received, the heavy lifting begins.  It never stops.

Enter the Prophetic tradition.  This was the collision of understood aspects and implications of the Great Signal as directed at powerful, flawed human institutions.   Irritation was the minimum blowback; decapitation is not out of the question.

This explains why the life of a Prophet tends to be turbulent and brief.

The Jewish people were caught in the prophetic trap.  Many have tried to escape via Diaspora, secular disengagement, amnesia or assimilation.

None of these strategies work all the time.  Jewish humor is the survival mechanism of an innately intelligent people, clinging to their core humanity under duress.  It is a gift to the world.

The very skill set that made the earliest Jewish people uniquely receptive (for the time) to the Great Signal, has been preserved over several millennia and within their culture and lines of familial continuity.  Not coincidentally, the same skill set has helped many Jewish men and women achieve secular success.  But success was followed by reactive jealously, leading to defensive specialization (as in banking and lending, for example), then more success, followed as night follows day, by pogroms, then still more success under duress – then, in the dark theological irony of our era, an age of serial holocausts has followed. 

The appropriate response to all this – supported by the post WWII American and European governments – was the reconstitution of Israel as a refuge state.  Israel was established to be the One Safe Place for an admirable, persecuted people who were to live securely in a modern setting.  Israel was founded as a progressive, refuge state; her immediate founders (as David Ben-Gurion) were secular socialists committed to a secular state that protected religious freedom. 

Israel prospered.  Once again, Jews are being punished for success.  Such is the perversity of the PGS human condition (Pre-Great-Signal).

The Prophet’s legacy of persecution has followed the Jewish people everywhere, but is nowhere more evident and virulent than where their successes are most evident. 

One thing is bright-line evident to me: The moral and juridical legitimacy of the Jewish state is an indisputable given, except for those twisted souls for whom the 20^th century’s holocaust was a bit of unfinished business. 

However we parse the practical questions surrounding modern Israel, a Western democracy floating in an atavistic sea, they all vector back to the bedrock question that you would have thought was conclusively settled by those who defeated the Axis powers in WWII:  The right of the first chosen people to live in and protect their traditional refuge and home is sacrosanct.

Yet that which seemed settled is unsettled.  As the poet Yeats prophetically wrote in the aftermath of WWI, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In my personal experience, all of the manifold religious, political and ideological differences I’ve encountered in my life have tended to operate in one of two kinds of minds:  those that are reachable and teachable; or those that are unreachable and unteachable. 

Modern Israel was started by progressive secular socialists.  In another example of the many dark ironies generated in the last century, a loathsome subset of progressive, secular socialists have turned against Israel, rejecting the core premise - her right to exist as a nation state.  Worse still, many of these minds have substituted a malign version of the “progressive” ethos for religion, adopting it with such unreasonable fervor that they now inhabit the world of the unreachable and unteachable. 

I strongly suspect that there is a point at which the unreachable and unteachable simply have to be worked around.  Too many of such minds cannot be changed after they are frozen (rare exceptions acknowledged). It follows that practical progress against frozen minds is to be made through the magic of a generational shift. 

For Israel, this means a practical policy of survival, relentlessly pursuing it success as an engine of creative civilization in the region and the world, a model of prosperity that will remain open to cooperative engagement and partnership for new generations of the post-jihad neighbors. The bloody minded old guard simply need to be contained and, as necessary, defeated, and their grip on the future forever loosened. 

This requires tough minded line drawing and the willingness to defend the Jewish state in extremis, whatever that requires in real world terms.  We need the virtues and moral awareness that formed the baseline norm, say, for our parents who served in the war against the Axis powers and Hitler’s National Socialism. 

In other writings I have emphasized the importance of the intergenerational moral transmission belt.  We will continue to need the armor of our greatest moral legacy. The continuity of healthy, creative, freedom-friendly civilization crucially depends on our ability to transmit the essential memories, lesson and virtues to the succeeding generations. 

Not all virtues are mild. 

The teachings of Jesus, Moses and Hillel converge in the life of a certain Lutheran minister imprisoned by the Reich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), whose moral sensibilities led him to actively seek Hitler’s assassination. He was hanged three weeks before the Nazi surrender.

Shalom,

Jay B Gaskill

Solstice Eve

12/21.2010

As Published on

THE BRIDGE TO BEING BLOG: www.jaygaskill.com/blog2

& The Policy Think Site: www.jaygaskill.com

All contents, unless otherwise indicated are

Copyright © 2010 by Jay B. Gaskill, All Rights Reserved....

A time-limited license to publish, distribute or print all or part of this article (except for personal use) is always needed. [A one time license for use in group discussions is almost always routinely given.]

For permissions, comments or submissions, please contact Jay B. Gaskill, attorney at law, via e mail at - law@jaygaskill.com

Visit the new 411 Renaissance Blog at <http://www.jaygaskill.com/411>

Joy and Longing

In

Macy’s?

In my theological universe, traditional Judaism and Christianity are deeply linked by a common Messianic expectation, the primary dispute being whether the hoped for arrival of the divine Liberator will be a first arrival or a second coming.

A story: Two friends from these sister traditions each agreed that, “When the messiah comes, I’ll put a good word in for you, my friend.” In the event that the Messianic arrival was a first coming, the Jewish friend agreed to speak first.

Handel’s Messiah was written in 1741 and first performed in Dublin, Ireland the following year.

Messiah, Hebrew: מָשִׁיחַ, Māšîăḥ (“anointed one”), is a term used in Judaism and Christianity for the long awaited savior or liberator of the people. The term “Christ”, while appropriated by Christianity, is just the English version of the Greek Χριστός or Khristós, meaning the “anointed one”. But for the Christian theological baggage, if you will, Messiah is the synonym.

For as long as entire human race has experienced spiritual longing, we have also hoped for the arrival of a Liberator. This is why Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus is not just for Christians.

Well, an amazing Hallelujah moment has taken place at Macy’s in Philadelphia. It was captured on video. All my friends and correspondents, whether we secular or religious, Jewish or Christian, all of us who still long for the arrival of justice and liberation in this broken world, are invited to navigate to the linked YouTube site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU&feature=player_embedded

Here are the lyrics to the Chorus. You’ll notice that, when heard with a non-sectarian, pan-religious ear, they speak to the deepest and most universal of human longings.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! :|

The kingdom of this world
Is become the kingdom of our Lord,
And of His Christ, and of His Christ;
And He shall reign for ever and ever,
For ever and ever, forever and ever,

King of kings, and Lord of lords,
King of kings, and Lord of lords,
And Lord of lords,
And He shall reign,
And He shall reign forever and ever,
King of kings, forever and ever,
And Lord of lords,
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

And He shall reign forever and ever,
King of kings! and Lord of lords!
And He shall reign forever and ever,
King of kings! and Lord of lords!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Peace / Shalom (שָׁלוֹם),

Jay

My father, John L. Gaskill, was educated as an accountant.  Following Pearl Harbor, he volunteered to serve in WWII, but was rejected because of a hernia and serious allergies.  Instead of “serving at home”, my father arranged to have the hernia repaired, and was trained in self-administering allergy injections.

John L. Gaskill attended Officers’ Training School at the University of Idaho and entered WWII as a Lieutenant, leaving a wife (Helen) and his infant son (Jay Ben) in the care of both sets of grandparents. 

After the Nazi defeat, Dad was gifted with an opportunity to explore liberated Europe. 

He traveled with his friend, Lieutenant Cohen - as an early teenager I met Mr. Cohen in Manhattan on a family trip to the East Coast -and my father returned with some shocking  photographs from the Nazi-engineered holocaust, scalloped edged clack and white images that were kept in a special drawer that my brother and  visited. 

When Dad left the military service – as soon as it was possible -  he was a captain, an accomplished logistician, who had turned down an indicated promotion to colonel because he wanted to be with the son he had not seen since his deployment to Europe from the US Army training facility in Palm Desert, California.

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine, a fellow lawyer who served with me in the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office when it was at its film noire zenith, forwarded me the following film clip. 

I confess that it brought tears to my eyes.   The tile is “Who fights for us?”   Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=KTb6qdPu8JE

The power of intergenerational memory is a profound gift.  Never forget.

Jay Ben Gaskill

A Reflection by

Jay B Gaskill, attorney at law

Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle carried a wrenching story about three Jewish girls who were taken from their home in Wierzbnik, Poland by the Nazis in 1942.  As their parents were taken away on a separate train, Annie Glass, 18, was told by her mother to “Hang on to your sisters!” (Sally, 15, and Miriam, 13). 

For anyone who is the least bit complacent about the fate of Jews forced to live under a hostile regime, or doubtful of the moral legitimacy and ultimate necessity of Israel as the world’s one Jewish refuge state, this story – one of thousands like it – provides a necessary corrective.

San Francisco Chronicle, September 13, 2010

Sisters offer living link to Holocaust

Auschwitz survivors teach value of family

By

This entire piece is now available in full at this link –

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/13/MNCT1F5Q61.DTL

I recommend that you take the time to read the whole article. I have some comments below. 

Here are extended excerpts from Meredith May’s excellent piece:

“The girls knew they were losing their home when they saw their parents burying family heirlooms and concealing fabrics from the family textile business in the walls. ... [F]amilies were marched at gunpoint to waiting trains, [its] destination ... a concentration camp. [Those with work papers were spared for slave labor in nearby factories.]

“The young girls, unbelievably, had work papers. Their mother, through a textile connection, had been able to pawn her jewelry to buy the papers, even though most of the work permits were going to men of working age. 

“[Annie] stood Miriam on a brick so she would appear older. Guards shuttled the girls to the work car — their first stroke of luck. 

“They were taken to a barracks and factory called Majowka, where a brutal overseer killed Jews for sport, forcing them to balance on a beam and shooting them when they wavered. 

“Guards with machine guns routinely entered the sick ward at Majowka and killed patients in their beds, according to historian Christopher Browning’s book ‘Remembering Survival’.

“When [Annie] heard her mother was in the labor camp kitchen, she found her peeling potatoes. But something was wrong. ...she had delivered a bunkmate's baby, but the Germans heard its cries and injected it with something to kill it.

“A week later, [mother] died of heartbreak in my arms,” [Annie] said. “I see that picture in my eyes all the time. Two soldiers put a sheet over her, and I jumped on her, begging the soldiers to kill me. 
 

[][][]

“After the five-day train ride, the girls were registered, their heads shaved and their arms tattooed with a crude needle. 
 
“The sisters, and 200 others, were told to strip and enter a gas chamber. It was night. They sat shivering on long wooden benches waiting to die. 

“Night became morning. 

“A soldier finally came in and shouted to the girls to put some clothes on and go to the barracks... 

 [Later], “On one of their morning marches, a guard saw that Miriam's face was flushed and pulled her away from her sisters for the camp hospital.

“...[H]er baby sister would surely be killed, because it was hospital policy to ship the sick to the crematories. She began gathering twigs and weeds to make a broom. The next morning, she sneaked into the hospital and found a nurse who spoke Polish. She presented her a gift of the broom and pleaded with the woman to look after her sister.

“Days passed. Glass was in line for the bathroom when she saw trucks loading hospital patients for the gas chambers. [She ran] ‘into the hospital, and it was empty. ... ‘The nurse was there, and she opened a closet. She had hidden Miriam in the linens and pillows.’”

Two of the three sisters are now living in San Francisco.  Miriam was murdered there in 1977.  All in all, the Glass family has been decimated; one of the sisters’ cousins survived the camps, an aunt and uncle were able to move to Israel.
 

[][][]

Modern Israel was born (reborn) under the auspices of the United Nations in 1948, sustained by the singular, morally confident backing of US President Harry S. Truman.

“At midnight on May 14, 1948, the Provisional Government of Israel proclaimed the new State of Israel. On that same date the United States, in the person of President Truman, recognized the provisional Jewish government as de facto authority of the new Jewish state (de jure recognition was extended on January 31). The U.S. delegates to the U.N. and top ranking State Department officials were angered that Truman released his recognition statement to the press without notifying them first. On May 15, 1948, the Arab states issued their response statement and Arab armies invaded Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war began.”  From the Truman Library website --http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/israel/large/index.php

Daniel Pipes reviewing Benson’s Harry S Truman and The founding of Israel, in The Middle East Quarterly, September 1998.

___

The Italian republican revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi, is credited with the observation that “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”  Whether Garibaldi said it first, he undoubtedly observed it.  The forces of good must learn to triumph over evil over and over again, because evil is a recurring pathogen.

The homicidal haters of the Jewish peoples are a recurring pathogen of the human condition.

Sadly, the courage shown by Harry S Truman and the founders of Israel was not a one-off permanent fix.  The enemy is a permanent one.  Western civilization itself, of which Israel is but a local example, is the target of an atavistic form of malignent narcissism.  This mindset is characterized by the destructive urge to bring down the “others” who enjoy perceived success, because their very existence is an affront, making the contrast intolerable to one’s own sense of failure.  It is a form of insanity to be sure, but a durable one. Malignent narcissism is why, for example, drug addicts attempt to recruit others (validating their own depravity) and why, from an Islamic perspective, the material and technological successes of the Western liberal democracies must be seen as a perversion (validation their own failure).  

If the Jewish people were just another tribe jockeying for territory, the unhinged-jihad against them might have cooled by now.  The homicidal animus towards Israel stems from the fact that the Jewish state operates under a different paradigm than Islam, that of a free, marginally “decadent”, but morally centered society.  Israel’s very success threatens Arab, Islamic triumphalism.  Israel and the West are not threatened by a major world religion, but by a militant ideology transmuted from the unreformed versions of that religion. 

Sanity can not be expected to surrender to malevolent insanity.

Another aphorism comes to mind – By their enemies, you shall know them. 

There is an ugly, recurring consistency of spirit and world view that is shared by the Jew-haters of the 20^th and 21^st century.  The current malevolence of Israel’s enemies threads back to the Germany of the 1930’s.  Recall that the Nazi movement was born in the great German humiliation.  The failure of German greatness in WW I and the reparations that followed was seen though the lens of resentment.  To the malignent narcissist mind, the “unjust” success of everyone else is a death penalty offence. 

And this is how the worst form of authoritarian triumphalism can arise:  It becomes national therapy.

We now know that Nazi propaganda was aimed specifically – and with significant success- at the Arab populations, using quotations from the Qur’an  to promote anti-Semitism as a common ground in the German war effort.

One report, among that the many recent accounts that are corroborating this, comes from the University of Maryland.

“After four decades of studying Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Maryland history Professor Jeffrey Herf made one of the most important archival discoveries of his career just a mile from his office.

“More than 3,000 pages of transcripts of Nazi radio broadcasts to Arab nations in the Middle East, stored at the National Archives in College Park, had apparently gone without notice since being declassified in 1977. They reveal the extent to which German officials not only presented their country as an ally of Arab anti-imperialism but also exploited the Koran to spread anti-Semitism.

“Herf's exploration of this treasure trove became the foundation for his fifth book, ‘Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World,’ published last month [2009] by Yale University Press. 

“The broadcasts also show how the Nazis selectively used passages from the Koran to spread hatred of the Jews and of Zionism. Herf asserts that the wartime propaganda offensive was an important chapter in the longer and broader history of Islamic extremism.

“A July 1942 broadcast on the Voice of Free Arabism station, ‘Kill the Jews Before They Kill You,’ opened with the false statement that Britain had armed Jews in Egypt to rise up against Egyptians when the Nazis drove British forces from the country.

The Competing Realities of Hawking[2] & Einstein[3], Buber & Teilhard[4] and the Rev. Dr. Polkinghorne[5]

The paradox of being can be posed in these two questions: 

• If it has no beginning, why does it contain beginnings? 
• If has a singular beginning, why does it contain us, the beings who can apprehend being?

The paradox of atheism can also be posed in a single question: 

• If you believe in the absence of God, on what do you base that faith?

The core paradox of agnosticism can be stated as a longer question: 

• If you lack the ability to believe that God exists or that God does not exist, on what do you base the faith that you actually exist in a community of other beings on a planet that orbits a sun in one solar system among trillions?

Data and even the first level explanations of the physical sciences are disordered and organized descriptions, respectively, but neither conveys meaning.  For that task, even the most intelligent and sophisticated minds use metaphor.

Well constructed metaphors are the cognitive tools by which we grasp and attempt to tame those subtle and elusive aspects of our experience of reality (and the reality of our experience) that otherwise would defy understanding and frustrate discourse.

The core Genesis insight is that we, as beings, are organized in the same pattern as the Supreme Being.  No thoughtful, world-aware person (except the severely metaphor challenged) takes seriously the notion that deity has a beard and floats somewhere in the clouds.  For the sophisticated believer, God is not anthropomorphic; instead humans are partly theomorphic. The differences between human and g-d are questions of local/particular vs. infinite/universal, wholeness vs. incompleteness, integrity vs. fragmentation; these are matters of scale, depth and reach, not the essential nature of living Being.

At our best, we are an inherently moral species, fiercely volitional and committed to reason.  This is why some of our best and brightest minds instinctively reject a stupid, authoritarian God. 

Ah, but what if...? 

Suppose that God is a brilliant, inherently moral Being, fiercely committed to our volition, and represents the very embodiment of scientific reason, moral reason, mathematical reason, creative reason, and compassionate reason – all facets of all ordered conscious thought in all its manifold forms. 

Suppose such a deity has been generously communicating to all minds in space-time that were and a willing and able to listen and apprehend. 

• What about our bandwidth limitations? 

• What distorted picture of such a deity would emerge when filtered through the minds of stupid, authoritarian humans?

Fortunately, for many of us, G-d appears as the One who judges and loves the judged, forgives and lives in those who forgive.

There is much more to be said, of course, but this is just a blog.

JBG

[][][][][][][][][]

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Souls-Coffee-Shop-ebook/dp/B0035LCA8Q/ref=pd_sim_kinc_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

Or

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lost-Souls-Coffee-Shop/Jay-B-Gaskill/e/2940000807712 

[][][]

Sold as e-books by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, ireadiwrite Publishing & 10 other on-line book retailers. 

Science has not killed the religious enterprise any more than Nietzsche killed G-d.  

[I’ll explain why I prefer the notation, “G-d”, later in this essay.]

Sigmund Freud was a comprehensive, adamant atheist, a man who rejected G-d, and who (revealingly) also hated music.  For the latter observation about Freud and music, I am indebted to Dr. Armand Nicholi of Harvard and his intriguing study of the lives of Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis.[1]  For many of us, music is a powerfully communicative, non-verbal medium, one uniquely suited to conveying aspects of the human experience that elude mere words, including religious inspiration.  If – like Freud – someone is implacably hostile to all religious sentiments, we might imagine that moving music works, like Bach’s Cantatas and Mozart’s Masses, would seem irritating at best, even threatening. 

Whether we are musically responsive or not, we are social beings who are able to build and sustain entire civilizations based on our capacity to form trust relationships.  We have developed a fine-honed cognitive suite of capabilities that facilitate the detection of authentic personality – and its absence , by utilizing the faculties of compassion, empathy, and other related – as yet unnamed – gifts.  Without this suite of cognitive capabilities, social cooperation and the development of civilizations could not have taken place.  They are critical faculties, not mental disorders, and they are as essential to the sustenance of human life as the ability to detect food.  Can we readily dismiss the same faculties, or discount the evidence they present to our minds, just because they have led some of us to apprehend the presence of Ultimate Being? 

The motives of those who reflexively dismiss all personal encounters with an eternal being, a higher consciousness, a benign, unnamed other (the descriptions are manifold), discounting the  countless credible reports of personal experiences of the numinous over the millennia as merely “psychological episodes” are deeply suspect.[2] 

I recall the stories of the aboriginals who, when first confronted with telephones early in the 20^th century, believed that they were magical objects, inhabited by spirits.   For them only the notion that little spirits were actually inhabiting the phone could account for the strange voices.  The idea of another personality whose words and thoughts could be conveyed by some invisible medium, then somehow reconstituted as sound, was outside their paradigm.  For the secular dogmatists, the intimations and urgings of the divine spirit is just in our heads, as a psycho-electric phenomenon.  The notion that a divine being could exist, Whose words and thoughts can be conveyed by some invisible medium, then manifested as an experience within the brain-mind, is equally outside their paradigm.[3]  Of course this arch materialist view also reduces the profoundest of music to mere air pressure fluctuations stimulating electro-chemical reactions in the brain.  The truth of the matter is that mere physical descriptions of electro-chemical processes do not constitute an adequate account of our conscious being, let alone of beauty, meaning, purpose, goodness, evil and all the rest.  Yet this inherent insufficiency is advanced as proof against the real presence of Ultimate Being.

We are naturally equipped to detect personality and to care about the conscious states of other persons.  When we use these abilities to assess and react to other persons, Freud would say that we are of “normal” mind, but when we use the same cognitive suite to detect spiritual reality, it becomes a malign thought disorder.  I am personally persuaded that the emotional force of Freud’s reaction against the notion of G-d was a sign of a deeper antipathy.  We are entitled to ask, Why so fierce a rejection?  Freud’s project was to “clinicalize” the apprehension of G-d.  In doing so, he had to discount the use of an inherently useful human cognitive faculty (the same set of mental abilities we routinely use to assess human character) whenever that same process was employed to discern and apprehend the spiritual aspect of the human experience.  Freud’s very passion on the topic of divinity exposed his own pathology.  His was a neurotic reasoning process, probably something like - “I hate God; but it is immoral to hate God; therefore I conclude that there is no God”.  Freud’s fierce atheism, containing a denial of the possibility of any authentic spiritual apprehension, originated in psychological denial.  Sigmund Freud hated G-d because he hated his own father[4].

That we are free to believe and to disbelieve is not evidence for or against the reality of an Ultimate Creator Being.  That a large number of intelligent, sophisticated, scientifically-attuned minds actually do believe in G-d[5], provides us with some evidence that “there is something to all this”, after all.

Science does not instruct us to doubt the very organizational principles on which the scientific enterprise is founded, nor does it advocate unreasonable doubt concerning those areas of human experience and belief, such as love and trust, about which the metrics of strict empiricism are so obviously inadequate.  

There is a faith path in science itself from Isaac Newton through Baruch Spinoza to Albert Einstein, all of whom saw the handiwork of an intelligent being in the fabric of creation.  That faith has propelled the scientific enterprise.  It consists of a simple, but profound creed: that this universe has an elegant underlying deign so miraculously intelligible to human intelligence that many scientists are driven to acknowledge that, in the beautiful handwork of nature, we can detect the “mind of God”.  Nature is like a building, so beautiful at its deepest levels that its very architecture inspires wonder and awe at the Architect.  This sense of awe is itself a form of cognitive apprehension taking place on the same level that our personal encounters with a loved one do; it is the gift of the cognitive suite that enables us to act in the confidence that we with a real person and not a golem, automaton or simulacrum.

My own preference for the partial notation for deity (G-d) is more typically found in the orthodox Jewish tradition.  My reasons are congruent with that tradition, but more ecumenical.  The partial notation is intended as code for entire the set of traditions that share a deep caution about naming and owning the Ultimate. 

A deep caution and epistemological humility tend to prevail among this subgroup whether their sensibilities are Torah-based or not.  This is an effective consensus among those for whom spiritual awareness and critical intelligence intersect,  a diverse group that includes humanist universalists (my description, not a denomination[6]), intelligent mystics and the more sophisticated followers of the great traditions. 

The agreement is tacit (no conclave here), and concerns what can be said and should not be said about deity, however described, whether as “supreme being” or “being-ness” (as my Buddhist friends might say[7]) or assigned no name at all.  However we might understand our connections to this common Ultimate - whether we are trying to describe our nexus to the distant, deep deity of pure intelligence manifest in nature (the deity of Einstein and Spinoza, “the mind of G-d” tradition echoed by Stephen Hawking), or our bonds to the personal deity of Moses and Jesus, or our respect for the “Thou” of Martin Buber, or our sense of reverence for the “Cosmic Wow” expressed by the awestruck Carl Sagan[8] - a sense of caution is warranted. 

Forbearance and intellectual humility are appropriate for a number of convergent reasons.  We are wise to avoid attachment to the name of deity (which is why many mystics reject naming itself) because some of us are tempted to think that we own that which we can name[9]. 

And we need to be humble about our facile attempts at G-d definitions.  After all is said and thought, the truly Ultimate Being necessarily remains partly cloaked to us.  History records that G-d becomes present to many of us some of the time, but logic and our private experiences tell us that the Whole of the Divine remains partly and necessarily outside our merely human powers of description and definition. 

We moderns tend to sort into seekers (of varying degrees of persistence and enthusiasm), believers (of varying degrees of confidence) and anti-believers (again of varying degrees of confidence).  The anti-believers are cloaked in a cultural fog – a gloom that gathers more densely among the modern intelligentsia and occults the various aspects of human apperception of G-d’s presence.  Whenever the fog part to allow a few G-d glimpses to get though the group-think within the intelligentsia causes these insights to be dismissed as the products of superstition or as mere wish fulfillment or as psychological states, but not otherwise real. 

At the root of all these barriers to belief is the quasi-religious doctrine of arch-materialism.  Suffice it to say that the glory of a Bach fugue cannot be reduced to air pressure fluctuations that elicit certain “electro-chemical neurological changes in some subjects.”  Nor can a radio receiver carrying an inspiring musical masterpiece be identified as its composer.

The purely physical-mechanical accounts of nature and human are powerfully descriptive on one level, but having elided meaning from the account, their adoption as a comprehensive world view constitutes a sort of self-induced autism of the soul.  

At the opposite extreme, we encounter the ardent “G-d screamers” those men and women who are so intoxicated with the prospect of an alliance with deity, validating their impulse to dominate the rest of us.  This is the subgroup whose members can  blithely invoke “my God says” in the same spirit and sense that someone else might invoke “my guard dog will....” 

The real G-d calls us to our higher angels, while gently reminding us of our own status. 

JBG

Just Google “Jay B Gaskill” and the book’s title or go to http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Stranded-Ones/Jay-B-Gaskill/e/9781926760155 or

http://www.amazon.com/The-Stranded-Ones-ebook/dp/B002YQ2IN0

For The Stranded Ones.

And -

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Souls-Coffee-Shop-ebook/dp/tags-on-product/B0035LCA8Q or

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lost-Souls-Coffee-House/Jay-B-Gaskill/e/9781926760285

As Published on
THE BRIDGE TO BEING BLOG:  www.jaygaskill.com/blog2
& The Policy Think Site: www.jaygaskill.com
All contents, unless otherwise indicated are
Copyright © 2010 by Jay B. Gaskill, All Rights Reserved....

This post, introducing “SCIENCE AND TRUTH: On Not Severing Our HUMBILICAL Chord” introduces and links to an article that is available only as a pdf download.

Here are some excerpts:

We all need to remain connected to our humbilical chords (our heuristic umbilicus harmonious*, if you will).   My invented terms describe the sense that – other than our deep ultimate moral compass – we just might be wrong, arrogant, unwilling to listen, and therefore at risk of becoming self-disabled beings, crippled in our capacity to venture outside our separate thought-bubbles.  Arch materialism, the notion that matter and energy constitute all that there is, represents just such a bubble.

The 20^th and 21^st centuries have elevated the role of science-as-myth, a progression from Robert Oppenheimer’s “destroyer of worlds” (the atomic bomb as the incarnated Hindu deity, Shiva) to science, the Maker of Worlds and Arbiter of Meaning, (where science itself replaces deity).  For too many in the postmodern culture, science has become deeply entangled with the ideology of amoral atheism.  As if empirical science has ever been capable of proving or disproving such deep truths of existence.  Those who see the human condition being formed and deformed under the stresses of rampant “modernity” and “post-modernity” have coined the term scientism to describe the misappropriation of science as ultimate truth-guide.  Scientism poses science as a moral compass, elevates science as the ultimate policy maker, and conflates the white coat of the laboratory with the garments of the priest, seer, maven or rabbi. 

The overall evidence for the existence of a divine, intelligent creator is of the same general character as the evidence relied on to assert human climate forcing as the principal cause for the recent 80 year warming period.  But the case for G-d as existential and essential Reality, whether and however named, is actually stronger.

When we see a flowering or complex biological development in the world, we are trained by experience to look for a seed.

A seed is a developmental information storage device.  Seeds are much smaller than the structures and systems whose designs they contain.

When we are able to examine the development of the universe as a whole, one in which the very structures of space-time, matter and energy, seemed to emerge as if from a seed, we need to ask:  Where was the seed? 

The ubiquity of human reports of encounters with the numinous, and of cultures linking creation with a morally authoritative creator can be dismissed as wishful thinking or they can be seen a persistently accumulating data set about the capacity of the human mind to discover latent, embedded meaning in the world. 

Consider the parable of the mysterious, dark forest. 

A desert community is ruled by shamans.  Over the years, when many separate reports about a mysterious uncharted region are compared, certain common emerge – a dark forest, descriptions of trees, a river and of forest creatures.

But the desert shamans reject these accounts out of hand because “everybody knows” the whole world is a desert.  Yet it is a reasonable inference that a new reality is being described, however “out of paradigm” it seems to those who “haven’t been there”.  The shamans of meaningless are living in a self-created semantic desert. 

For those who stubbornly reject the notion that the G-d reports to which I refer are “merely anecdotal”, I recommend a study of the remarkable threads of continuity that attend the “field reports” about the transcendent and numinous. 

More...

[8 pages with graphics]

*The footnote:

My invented terms are whimsy, of course, but whimsy with a purpose.  Humor is etymologically rooted in fluid and flow; humble is rooted in humus or soil, and both are mutually entangled in the human psyche.  I’m using humble as in modest and unpretentious; heuristic, as the term is used describing algorithmic systems capable of learning from trial and error; umbilicus as in the navel of the developing consciousness, the source of primal nourishment; and harmonious (chord) to describe the fitting correspondence of constituent elements, where melody is a powerful metaphor about detection of the truth-context.   The pursuit of elegance in mathematics and scientific theory are driven by the faith that harmony and beautiful simplicity are pointers to truth.   My perspective is that all knowledge (including esthetic and ethical) is discovery; that truth is always a revealed reality-correspondence; and that intellectual arrogance makes self-disabling epistemological bubbles.  We are bound together and to truth more by chords than cords.

Jay

http://jaygaskill.com/LibertyIndivisible.pdf

Jay

THIS IS AN ALLEGORY FOR THE HUMAN CONDITION.

 Introducing the

LOST SOULS COFFEE SHOP

By Jay B Gaskill

(Author of “The Stranded Ones”)

“My name doesn’t matter.  Just call me Stranger.  You’ll see why soon enough. 

“I want you to imagine ice fog twinkling and dancing around a streetlamp and that you are standing right outside the front door.  You have found an urban legend, a single building right out of the small town 1920’s, parked in the epicenter of Nowhere, North America: The Lost Souls Coffee House.

“Some urban legends just don’t exist.  Others simply can’t be found.  But there is a third category.  I should know....”

There is a place with no address, invisible to all GPS devices, unreachable without an invitation.  This is the Lost Souls Coffee House of urban legend, a place where visitors use sign-in names, where storytellers are welcome but not every story earns a ride home. 

One bitter winter night, Stranger is dropped off at an isolated non-address: no cell phones or electronic devices work.  Story-tellers come and go, relating tales about a preternaturally smart animal living in someone’s basement, a young man who dies because he can’t solve a demon-deity’s riddle, a Silicon Valley tycoon who attempts to design an immortality machine, stories about animals that illuminate the human condition and the story of a war that may or may not happen. 

Then it is Stranger’s turn.  But he did not come prepared....

LOST SOULS COFFEE SHOP has just been published an E-book, downloadable to any electronic format (list $4.99), to your reader, laptop, smart-phone or other handheld device, released on January 21, 2010 by the cutting edge Canadian publisher, ireadiwrite. 

To locate a seller, Google “Jay B Gaskill/lost souls coffee shop” or go directly to one of the E-Book vendors at the following links and start reading this engrossing and thought provoking little book in seconds:

IREADIWRITE

http://www.ireadiwrite.com/Lost-Souls-Coffee-Shop.html

AMAZON

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=lost+souls+coffee+shop&x=21&y=17

BOOKS ON BOARD

http://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?BODY=viewbook&BOOK=597756&v=synopsis

SMASHWORDS

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8913

ALL ROMANCE BOOKS

http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-lostsoulscoffeeshop-404201-143.html

Jay B Gaskill’s THE LOST SOULS COFFEE SHOP, Key Words: Animal stories, fantasy, urban legends, mystery, miracles, artificial intelligence, Deep Thought, humor, spirituality....

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jay B. Gaskill is a well-known California trial and appellate lawyer who served as a Public Defender until 1999, but left his “life of crime” to devote more time to his writing projects. He loves humor and philosophy equally; science and science fiction interchangeably; Manhattan and the western wilderness irresistibly. His fiction works are peopled with likable heroes and recognizable villains whose struggles are disturbed by dichotomous themes.

He has completed two thrillers and is working on a number of other fiction works.

For more about Jay, please visit him at: www.jaygaskill.com/Profile.pdf

Read Jay Gaskill’s new thriller – information links:

http://www.jaygaskill.com/TourTheStrandedOnes.pdf (with pictures)

http://jaygaskill.com/TheNewThrillerByJayGaskill.htm

As Published On

The Policy Think Site: www.jaygaskill.com

& THE BRIDGE TO BEING BLOG:  www.jaygaskill.com/blog2

All contents, unless otherwise indicated are

Copyright © 2009 by Jay B. Gaskill, All Rights Reserved....

In HTM Format -- http://jaygaskill.com/AsimovNimoyMontanaRabbis.htm

Montana Rabbis, Isaac Asimov

& the Earth’s Future

Here’s a must read for the day -- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/us/05religion.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

A sample:

“Miky...was born in an animal shelter in Holland and shipped as a puppy to Israel, where he was trained by the Israeli Defense Forces to sniff out explosives. Then one day, Miky got a plane ticket to America. Rather than spend the standard $20,000 on a bomb dog, the Helena Police Department had shopped around and discovered that it could import a surplus bomb dog from the Israeli forces for the price of the flight. So Miky came to his new home in Helena, to join the police force.

“The problem, the officer explained, was that Miky had been trained entirely in Hebrew.

“When Officer Fosket got Miky, he was handed a list of a dozen Hebrew commands ... He made flashcards and tried practicing with Miky. But poor Miky didn’t respond.

“Officer Fosket...tried a Hebrew instructional audio-book from the local library, but no luck. The dog didn’t always understand what he was being ordered to do. Or maybe Miky was just using his owner’s bad pronunciation as an excuse to ignore him. Either way, the policeman needed a rabbi.

“And now he had found one. They worked through a few pronunciations, and the rabbi, Chaim Bruk, is now on call to work with Miky and his owner as needed. Officer Fosket has since learned to pronounce the tricky Israeli “ch” sound, and Miky has become a new star on the police force.”

Copyright 2009 New York Times 

OUR FUTURE IS UP TO US

& THAT’S NOT A BAD THING

I think we all need a rabbi, even – or especially - those of us who were raised in that Jewish variant, Christianity that was started in the life a devout First Century Jewish male (rev. Rabbi Jesus, by Bruce Chilton -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Chilton ).

Why? You ask.  Because the core message of Judaism is profoundly human-centered. As many of us despair about the condition of the planet, of Western civilization and of the USA, I am reminded of Isaac Asimov’s perspective.  My Sci-fi nourished mind was raised in Isaac Asimov’s vision --We humans will populate the entire universe.  In his novels - all self consistent - our species did that so well that we lost track of our planet of origin.  

Asimov was a secular Jew, a deep thinker, a polymath (he taught biochemistry in Boston before he moved back to his native New York).  There were no aliens in his fiction, just us.  This view is, at core, a biblical one, if you think about it.  And it is my core view of humanity as well. 

This is why my litmus test for realistic, morally centered liberals and intelligent, future-aimed conservatives, is the same life affirming, humanity affirming, forward-aimed affirmation, captured in the popular culture as:  (a) "Space, the final frontier" and (b) "Live long and prosper".  As a rabbi from Hungary told me, that Spock salutation from Star Trek by Leonard Nimoy and the Vulcan hand-salute is quintessentially Jewish (based on the priestly blessing – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_salute).

Today, I celebrate our humanity and the joy of a Hebrew-trained police dog in Montana.

JBG

READ JAY GASKILL’S NOVEL launched as an E Book by the Canadian publisher, ireadiwrite. 

The Stranded Ones is the Sci-Fi novel for the non-Sci-Fi reader, an engaging travel companion with loveable and disgusting aliens, a touch of romance, a hint of whimsy and a full load of danger.  Download The Stranded Ones to your Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble nook, your laptop, notebook, and net-book, Blackberry, smart-phone...

Purchase links:

Go to ireadiwrite --

http://www.ireadiwrite.com/home.php 

Also --

Books On Board at

http://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?BODY=viewbook&BOOK=548140 

Or --

KINDLE (by AMAZON) at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=%22the+stranded+ones%22&x=15&y=12 .

Or --

All Romance books at

http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-thestrandedones-386711-143.html

AND

SONY E BOOK Samples at

http://sony-ebook-samples.com/sample/6823/the-stranded-ones

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Jay Ben Gaskill

 YES, WE WERE THERE

Forty years ago, a human being walked on the surface of another heavenly body for the first time. 

When interviewed by Walter Cronkite, writer Robert Heinlein predicted that some day the human calendar would mark that day as YEAR ONE, assuming - as we all did - that civilization would continue. 

Meantime, NASA has provided us with a virtual tour of the Tranquility Landing Site, where those first extra-terrestrial footprints were made. 

Here is that LINK:

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11_landing/index.html

I do believe that our Creator wants this civilization to continue, without guaranteeing that outcome.  After all, we are trusted with freedom, the risk of failure and the gifts of reason creativity and conscience.  

I believe that future generations will mark off this site as a park and that it will be visited by thousands of space tourists.  

For the rest of us, the virtual tour will have to do for now.

Jay B. Gaskill
Earth 2009

 As Published On
The Policy Think Site: www.jaygaskill.com
& THE BRIDGE TO BEING BLOG:  www.jaygaskill.com/blog2
All contents, unless otherwise indicated are
Copyright © 2009 by Jay B. Gaskill, All Rights Reserved....