No such thing as a free dove?

[Tony]

Too heavy here, man!

[~greg]

Too heavy here, man!

Curious you say that.
Because just a few months ago, on this very forum, you

"The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it."

Lines from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Written a long time ago.

You need to know, Tony, that what you wrote there
(particularly your comment about it having been written a long time ago)
put many of us into a clinical depression from which we are just now
beginning to extricate ourselves.

A doctor pointed out that Leonard Cohen had equated the serious
with the sensual. But I couldn't see how that helped me any.

But then one day, in group disco therapy, somebody put on the Staple Singers.
And I was cured!

So try to see clearly now all obstacles in your way, Tony.
And you will soon find that gone are the dark clouds that had you blind.

And it's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright) Sun-Shiny day, for you too,
Tony, some day. Trust me.

HEAVY MAKES YOU HAPPY (SHA-NA-BOOM BOOM)
(Barry / Bloom)
The Staple Singers
----------------------------------------------------------
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, whoa
--Great gosh a mighty now ...

(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Say it, y'all
(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Tell me, tell me, tell me, come on
(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Well, well
(Sha-na-na-na-boom boom, yeah)

I've been trying to find what's heavy
That's been messing up my mind
I think I found the answer,
'Cause it was right there all the time

Heavy makes you happy, (yeah, yeah, yea)
I just got to say
Put on no heavy,
If I can't feel this way
( ...I'll be a gloomin' na)

(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Come on, come on
(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Do it, do it, do it, do it
(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah)
(Sha-na-na-na-boom boom, yeah)

By talking to my people,
You know that it occurred to me
It's more than just a feeling
It's a philosophy

Heavy makes you happy,
Drying up your drink
Oh now spread a little heavy
And makes somebody sing

(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Come on, y'all
(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Right on, right on, right on
(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah)
(Sha-na-na-na-boom boom, yeah)

Oooo

(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) A little bit softer, now
(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Oh, do it easy, now
(Sha-na-boom boom, yeah) Lay it on down
(Sha-na-na-na-boom boom, yeah)

[~greg]

Tom, ...everyone, ..., I really didn't mean to sound ungrateful
for your very kind comments.

I know that I have always ignored kind comments here,
or else actually dismissed them with a flippant remark.

But I don't honestly know why I do it. .

Because the truth is that I am really extremely grateful for
any and all kind comments I get.
And I couldn't post for long without at least some positive
feedback like that.

"Modesty" suggests itself as the first-order hypothesis here.

But what is 'modesty', really?

As far back as I can remember (and I can remember
smiling faces over my crib) I remember getting positive
feed-back.

But always, whenever I remember those bright spots,
there are other, darker, memories, lurking just around the corner,
under the bed, and in the closet, --memories of negative-feedback.

David Hume said that the only thing we really know of
relationships between events is the statistical correlations
between them.

But in kindergarten school, carrots and sticks were always spoken of together.
And that somehow seemed to me to be a clue to the true relationship
between positive and negative feedback. .

I realized of course that carrots and sticks were both phallic symbols.
But even in kindergarten I knew that Freud was out-of-date.

Now, you could eat a carrot.
And girls looked especially good eating carrots.
I knew that.
Whereas boys looked stupid eating sticks.

So I knew I was onto something!

However, over the next several decades of my life,
I found myself content just to watch girls eat carrots.
And the stick side of it receded from my thoughts.
And so therefore I made little or no progress on the real problem
of the relationship between positive and negative feedback.

And since the issue has only just now re-arisen,
--due to your kind comments about my posts,
-- I haven't got any new insights about it yet.

I will let you know if I make any progress.


~greg

[~greg]

and by the way, have you seen the list of "things" that JP II apologized for?
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/17092006/2/w ... -paul.html

(Before I clicked on that link, I was afraid it would be about Catholic apologetics.
In other words, I was afraid you were putting me on, Joe! :)

No, I hadn't seen a list like that before. But I was aware of most of those
apologies when they occurred and were reported in the regular news.

The list mentions the apology for the condemnation of Galileo.

But Galileo recanted, and wasn't executed.

(The most interesting thing about the Copernican controversy was that
the Church was at first glad for the heliocentric point of view,
since it simplified their calculations of important dates such as Easter.
Just as long as it was thought of as a pure mathematical fiction,
(which is what it is,) then they had no problem with it. Only when
someone claimed it to be reality did they get upset about it.
In fact, of course, it isn't reality. There is no fixed point or preferred
frame of reference in the universe at all. Moreover Ptolemy's
old way of calculating things with epicycles wasn't in the least bit
absurd. Nor is it out of date. It is essentially just a Fourier analysis,
and it lives on, more or less, in calculations of perturbations.)

So the Galileo apology wasn't any big deal.

Much more important to many people was another one of Pope JP II's
apologies (which isn't listed there): ---the
"official Catholic expression of 'profound sorrow'
and acknowledgement of error at Bruno's condemnation to death. "

Giordano Bruno had been imprisoned six years before he was even tried.
And yet, unlike Galileo, he never recanted.

At his trial he said:
"Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me
with greater fear than I receive it."
Which, I think, is what's made Giordano Bruno the greatest of heroes to humanists.

Then of course he was gagged and "hung upside-down naked and burned at the stake"
for speaking his thoughts.

(snipped quotes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno )

~~~~~~~~~~

I enjoyed your defense of the Pope!

I wasn't defending the Pope.

I was merely attacking one of a great many idiotic lies
that are in current circulation.

And later on I will have reason to do something like 'apologetics'
for a couple of things that Pope JP II never did apologize for -- namely
his attitude about birth control and abortion. Because this subject has
come up again, in this very thread, just as I feared and knew it would.
So I'll have to clarify PJPII's actual point of view about it, or else
burn in my own private hell for my laziness and cowardice.
(the Pope is NOT responsible for AIDS or over-population.)

But I won't defend the Pope per-se. With me it's all about the love of
pure unadulterated blind equity.

And to be truly fair, I know that when I am tired, and force
into the kinds of moods that I have been forced into lately,
then I probably will wind up just like everyone else, attacking
and defending things from my gut of childish loyalties.

~~~~~

Joe, I wonder if you remember
when Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli became Pope John XXIII?

I was 10, but I remember it very well. The colors of the smoke.
The conspiracy theories. I didn't understand what was going on.
But nobody else did either. To this day nobody knows what happened.
But Mel Gibson's father has ideas about it.

Then, a couple of years later, due to my father's Fulbright grant,
we were living in Rome, about 2 blocks from the Vatican,
when the second Vatican council was going on.

I think you have to admit that what happened at that council
was more important than Pope JP II's obviously sincere, but tepid apologies.

I subscribe to the American philosophy of 'pragmatism'.

The dictionary definition of it will do fine here:

Pragmatism: a philosophical movement or system having various forms,
but generally stressing practical consequences as constituting the essential
criterion in determining meaning, truth, or value.

Thus for example, to my way of thinking:

1995: Issues document saying church is "truly sorry" for discrimination or mistreatment of women.
- http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/17092006/2/w ... -paul.html

has no meaning, truth, or value,
since nothing changed in that department.

And now I am going to break off for awhile
while I try to figure out how best to get back on track.

~~~

Meanwhile, here are a couple of pages from
Bamber Gascoigne's "Christianity, A History".

It's just a quick survey of recent Catholic history for anyone who's
interested enough to read a few paragraphs about it, but not enough
to read a book about it.

But it is well written, and it isn't pro or anti anything,
and the part I quote at least shows that some things that some people
have undoubtedly been thinking of as eternal immoveable Catholic dogma
aren't that at all. They are really more like fads. (And anyone who's studied
the history of the Catholic Church knows of very many others of the kind.)

My point is that the Catholic Church can and does change over time.

(Which is what makes reading ex cathedra statements so fascinating.
Because no matter how radical a change any one of them really is,
it is always worded so as to sound as if it doesn't represent
any change at all. Things were always its way, from the beginning of time.
And all it is supposed to do is make that clear.)

And it should change. And it will change.

from Christianity, A History, by Bamber Gascoigne,
Garroll & Graf Publishers, N.Y., 2003,
pgs 207-209

The Christian churches have suffered the same pressures and challenges
as their individual members, and nothing shows the result more clearly than
the change in the Roman Catholic church over the past hundred years
- or, more precisely, between the first and second Vatican Councils.

A single pope, Pius IX, ruled for thirty-two years in the middle
of the nineteenth century, the longest pontificate in history.
When he mounted the papal throne in 1846 he was the type of pope
familiar for a thousand years - spiritual head of all Roman Catholics,
but also absolute sovereign of a large slice of central Italy,
the papal states.

At this time he had decidedly liberal views,
but they perished in the year 1848, when a revolution made him flee
for his own safety from Rome. By the time Pius died, the papal states
were part of the new nation of Italy, Rome was her capital city,
and Pius himself was the type of pope with whom we are familiar today
- still the spiritual head of the entire Roman Catholic world, but sovereign
now only over one-sixth of a square mile, the Vatican City.

As his temporal power had declined,
so his claims to spiritual authority had increased.
And the nature of that authority was increasingly reactionary.

At precisely the time when liberal theologians were beginning to classify
the Virgin Birth as a myth, Pius elevated to the status of a dogma
the equally magical concept of the Immaculate Conception.
This idea (that Mary, alone of all human beings since Adam and Eve,
had been born free from original sin) had long been part of the popular
and specifically Roman Catholic cult of Mary: by giving it at this late stage
the authority of dogma, the pope was making a deliberate gesture
both against Protestantism and against scientific rationalism.

He followed this up with a more precise broadside, his famous Syllabus
of eighty modern errors. these included such things as socialism, civil marriage
and secular education; the final error on the list was the view that
'the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress,
liberalism, and modern civilization'.

Pius completed the high defenses round his diminished state
by presiding over a Vatican Council in 1869-70 (the first such council
for over 300 years) at which he made a dogma of another long-standing
but unspecified tradition - that the pope, when speaking ex cathedra
on a matter of faith or morals, is infallible.

The Roman Catholic church maintained this high authoritarian stance
for nearly a century.

As recently as 1950 Pius XII put out an encyclical, Humani Generis,
warning against false teaching in schools. No one was to maintain, for example,
that there had been any human beings on earth since the Garden of Eden
who was not directly descended from Adam and Eve. (Behind this insistence
lay the need to safeguard the doctrine of original sin:
'original sin is the result of a sin committed, in actual historical fact,
by an individual named Adam, and it is a quality native to all of us,
only because it has been handed down by descent from him'.)

But twenty years later there had been the most profound transformation.

It was as though a fairy wand had miraculously translated
the church of Rome from one side to the other in all the old arguments.

The man who had wielded the fairy wand was himself
a most improbable piece of casting. In the conclave
which followed the death of Pius XII there were twelve ballots
before a decision was reached.

Clearly the seventy-seven year old Cardinal Roncalli
was no more than a compromise candidate, mainly acceptable
because his reign was certain to be short:
and it was equally obvious from his very conventional past career
that he would do nothing unusual as pope.

Instead, in his brief five years, John XXIII changed the Roman Catholic church
almost out of recognition - and incidentally endeared himself to the entire world
in a way that no other religious leader has ever done in his own lifetime.

By preserving the simple virtues of warmth and openness among the baroque
trappings of high office, he gave even the non-religious a sense of what religion
should perhaps be about. There was a feeling that we were watching something
never before seen by so many, the living reality of a saint. And indeed in
September 2000 he was beatified ( the first step towards canonization).

The act of John's which brought about such changes within the church
was his entirely unexpected calling of a council. From the start
it was evident that this would be a different sort of council.
In Vatican One the papacy had dictated; in Vatican Two it would listen,
and there was a great deal to listen to. Pope John had evidently
kept liberal ideas to himself during a lifetime of obedience,
and so - it turned out - had many others.

The resulting upsurge of free debated had widespread repercussions.
The most startling result, to the ordinary Catholic, was the changes in the form
of worship. Services are now in the vernacular. Lay people play a large part in them
and on occasion receive the wine as well as the bread. The Reformation
has finally reached Rome.

But the Protestant Reformation refused to stop where Luther intended:
the new sense of inquiry and of self-responsibility led inevitably to the hundreds
of Protestant sects with which we are familiar today. Change, once it is in the air,
will always be too fast for some, too slow for others.

And conservatism remains always a force to be reckoned with.
The reign of John Paul II, elected in 1978, almost rivals in length
that of Pius IX in the mid-nineteenth century.

Like his predecessor, his natural tendency has been to resist change
- particularly on such contemporary issues as birth control and abortion.

[Tony]

Would you care to go over that again in a bit more detail?

[tomsakic]

Since last Friday I am haunted by images of young girls eating carrots.

[Sue]

Well now! It's taken me a while to check back for responses to this post and now I see there were some very long and, I suspect, interesting ones. Which I must and shall read. But in the meantime, the text size in which messages here are reproduced seems to have shrunk dramatically since my last visit (or something). Does anyone know if it is possible to enlarge it?? I have tried using the IE command Page/Text size/Larger but nothing changes when I do this. As it stands it's barely large enough to read.

Sue

[lizzytysh]

Hi Sue ~

I know exactly what you mean about the print size. All I can tell you is that eventually your eyes adjust and then you manage to forget how it was before. Promise. Just hang in there. I've no clue on any way to make it larger.


~ Lizzy

[lazariuk]

Well now! It's taken me a while to check back for responses to this post and now I see there were some very long and, I suspect, interesting ones. Which I must and shall read.

Hi Sue

In your ponderings about the sea being blind did the idea ever suggest itself to you that faith might be blind to what our beliefs are. ? religions and dogmas etc.? Suggesting that when he sings about faith that it is not religion that he is singing about even if it is thought to be one of religion's words.

Jack

[Sue]

Thank you for the encouragement to persevere, Lizzy. This is suitably pragmatic advice and there does, already, seem to be an element of truth in it. I have noticed, however, that it is also possible to choose a larger print size when you compose a message, as I have done here. I shall now be able to read my own contributions quite easily. Not that it helps much, as I already have a pretty good idea what they say.

[Manna]

hi Sue. what browser are you using? in many you can press [ctrl, + ], and that will enlarge the print you see.

[Sue]

Manna, thanks a lot! I knew it would be something very simple and that works fine for me.

[lizzytysh]

Hi Sue ~

Interestingly enough, your posting at 8:53 PM appears almost to be a slightly different typestyle, but is at least [as I look at it] more closely spaced [the words horizontally and the lines vertically]. When you thanked Manna for her suggestion and said it works for you , the result [at least in that posting] appears the same as all the other ones here for me [save your 8:53 PM one]. Go figger. I guess I'll try Manna's suggestion, too... at least for easier reading?


~ Lizzy

[Sue]

When you thanked Manna for her suggestion and said it works for you , the result [at least in that posting] appears the same as all the other ones here for me [save your 8:53 PM one]. Go figger.

That's because when I found Manna's suggestion DID work I went back to the smaller type. The 8:53 post should look bigger -because I was using larger type, and so should Manna's reply because, most courteously, she replied using the same larger type so that I would have no difficulty reading it. That is what I call manners (or Manna's)

[Sue]

In your ponderings about the sea being blind did the idea ever suggest itself to you that faith might be blind to what our beliefs are. ?

No Jack, I must confess it never occurred to me - but my ponderings were interrupted because I went on holiday and forgot all about it.