GOD & NATURE: SYNONYMOUS?

To what extent are God and Nature the same thing?

IF Nature was created by God, then it reflects His mind.

Since, in nature, a Darwinian survival of the fittest APPEARS to be the driving factor, should we try to correct God's intentions, by dragging the unfit along?

If an earthquake flattens a country, who is to say that this is not God's will? If it is not God's will, why did it happen? Is there something that God does not control?

If God doesn't exist, then is nature all that there is?

If nature is all that there is, isn't nature, according to Darwin, merely "survival of the fittest?"

If a deer is born with two heads, it isn't fit to survive, and it dies.

If a bug is so deformed at birth that it can't eat, or can't fly, it dies.

If a person is deformed at birth, then, if we are merely animals, why should we attempt to help it along, and help it to survive?

If someone is weak, or has a terrible disease, why shouldn't we just let nature take its course?

Why should we have health insurance at all? Doesn't it go against nature to fight the forces of nature? Why on earth should we do this, especially if nature is God's will?

The left screeches that Darwin is the truth, and that the Bible is false.

If so, why isn't nature the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? If nature is everything, then why shouldn't we only look to the Book of Nature for authority? If a creature isn't well-made in nature, it dies. Here, we drag along our elephant men and women, and succor them. Should we do that?

Fish don't.

Bugs don't.

Monkeys throw up their hands and scramble along.

If, however, we should always care for each other, and "do unto others," as Jesus taught, why do we stop at wild animals? Why aren't we out proselytizing among the wolves?

Why do we still try to get rid of viruses? Shouldn't we do unto viruses as we would have them do unto us, and leave them alone, instead of trying to eradicate them? Shouldn't we liberate the smallpox virus that has been kept alive in refrigerators in Siberia, in order to unleash its magic on the world once more?

Who are we to decide?

If NATURE is the only criterion, then why do we write books at all? Why not just be natural, and stink and live like beasts?

On the other hand, can we teach beasts to sit up at the table, and say their prayers with us? Can we teach cows good English, and get them to read the Bible? Why are horses so reluctant to say the Lord's Prayer? It must be something beastly about them!

If God made all the animals, and at least until the Fall, we could talk with them in Hebrew, then why are some of the animals to be eaten, and others for pets?

If God never existed, and everything is just survival of the fittest, and power is the only game in town, why should we even pretend that there is such a thing as decency or kindness?

If we believe in God, then animals must also be part of the divine will, and also be able to understand morality, and behave as such.

If the Fall represents the beginning of a schism between Man and Nature, then how can we heal that schism? Or how do we live with it?

If some people want to go to strip clubs and act like animals, why shouldn't they?

If others who claim to believe solely in Darwin, believe that we have a moral obligation to care for all people, where do they find this authority in nature?

IDENTITY POLITICS

Marx claimed that the working class had more members than those they worked for, and so if they closed ranks against the bourgeoisie, they could create a "dictatorship of the proletariat" which would vault them into power.

Gender advocates, and race advocates, have used a similar logic.

I find the logic strained, and resentment-based, as it must perpetuate itself by constantly finding evil "on the other side," and constantly trying to make a sharp division between permanently embattled groups. Closing ranks in the face of the evils of "the other side." I think all large generalizations collapse in the face of intensive scrutiny.

As a white male, and Christian, it is hard to understand how it would be to be black. If I were black, would I side with all other blacks? Would I like Mike Tyson, and would I support Idi Amin, and Jean-Francois Duvalier and his son? Would I think rap music beautiful, just because gangstas of color were its primary proponents?

If I were a woman, would I side with all other women, that is, against men? Would I support the likes of Valerie Solanas, and believe in her S.C.U.M. Manifesto?

I find the logic horrifying, and to be like dancing a two-step with Nazism, even if it is meant as a counter-step, it's still locked into the same logic.

I prefer the logic of the Good Samaritan. The idea is to find what's good in those sides we supposedly hate, and to talk with them. It breaks us out of the militaristic trance, and puts us into a more open framework. This is also an idea that you can find in the Buddhism of the Dalai Lama. The Dalai says that hatred is founded on ignorance. And the idea is to look at all aspects of another person in an attempt to reach an understanding of them.

(Buddhists have a very ugly statist structure in Myanmar, where Buddhism is the established church. In Sri Lanka, they have adopted Buddhism as a winner take all system, which they use to destroy all opposition. In Japan during WWII, Buddhism formed an ugly alliance with the Emperor.)

If I were president of the United States, I'd hate to be thought of as having gotten there through the color of my skin. I can't understand why you'd want to create any inkling that skin color represented character, or that getting there constitutes a "first," and thus perpetuates the notion that skin color and history are like moving flags up and down a football field. Shelby Steele argues that CONTENT OF CHARACTER should be the only thing we decide upon, borrowing this phrase from MLK.

Michael Steele, who is to some extent BO's Republican counterpart, has argued along the lines of Shelby Steele (is there any relation?) that CONTENT OF CHARACTER should be the criterion by which we elect. And yet, at the same time, Michael Steele has sought to expand Affirmative Action.

Michael Steele has been subjected to Oreos thrown at him at political events. Some doubt this contention.

If it happened, someone thinks Steele's character consists of pretending to be black, but being white on the inside. Plus, these people are wealthy enough to throw cookies around. Meanwhile, last week revelations erupted that Steele used public funds to attend an orgiastic S & M theatre in San Francisco.

I don't know what it is to be white. Albert Schweitzer was white. So was Adolf Hitler. Mozart was a white man. So was Charlie Manson. Roseanne Barr is white. So was Eleanor Roosevelt. Countess Bathory was white. So was Emily Dickinson. I don't think you can generalize much on the basis of a color, whether the color is purple, or white.

MLK's "content of character" is difficult to discern. We don't know what kind of a character our current president is. Time will tell. You never know what a person is like unless and until you live with them. But it's not possible to live with more than two dozen or so people in your life.

So we tend to judge people on where they've been to school, how they talk, whether or not they go to church, if they've been in prison, and perhaps also by the color of their skin, and their gender.

These last two are probably the most hazardous, and the most dangerous, and yet they've become major standard ideas in the academic left of how to think about people.

What could replace them?

I think what could and should replace them is how well an individual lives within the Ten Commandments as defined by Martin Luther in the Small Catechism.

What would you suggest?

Brett Swanson Wins LS Landmarks Poetry Contest

Here is the winning poem:

Give us your tired, your poor,
Your weary and strung-out
Your old and wasted, your young and stupid
Your Doe-eyed and dreamy-eyed and lusty-eyed
Your phallus-driven gangstas, your unwed mothers
Your hard-working dullards, your unkempt retards
Decadent oil barons and snot-nosed
dirt-faced children.
Your abundant curly hair,
your fractious factions and moth-ridden
memories of what you never knew. Your
broken bodies and genius perverts and
unstoppable prejudice and you who breathe
with the uncertainty of the wind.

Welcome.

For we here are,
and always have been,
The same as you.

2 Problems: Lust and Gluttony

Sex and food are religious problems.

If we could do without these two things I think we could be saints. But, people become icky when they're having sex or eating. Eating is the worse of the two perhaps, because there's nothing you can eat that wasn't or isn't alive. Therefore, you are consuming the life of another thing in order to perpetuate your own.

While this may have its aesthetic side, it's difficult to find an ethical side. One can do less evil by eating a veggie burger rather than a cow, but vegetables have lives, too, even if they can't run when you go into the garden with your knife. In the painting above by Mathijs Naiveu, you get an inkling. This is Christ blessing food. In the Jain religion (a version of Buddhism), you can't eat anything without it being a sin.

Sex also seems to bring out some kind of prehistoric beast in humanity. I can't explain it, but there is something -- in sex -- that makes people into a T. Rex. It's not even done once the act is over. There are jealousy rages, and constant scheming, and possessiveness, plus there is domination in the act itself. It's fun, too. Here again there is an aesthetic side to sex. Your partner can be lovely, and kissing is sweet. But what about the ethical side? Marriage is ethical, as well as aesthetic. It offers a promise to care for the other, and the kids that result. This is sweet. And kids are sweet when they are not raging, or jealous. Kids are lucky. They are mostly dealing with the food problem.

Today's kids are about 20% fatter than two generations ago. These are the first kids in American history who will die younger than their parents on account of how fat they have become. This fills me with sorrow. We must attract them with other aesthetic ideas: the baseball diamond! The hike! The basketball game! The two-hour session in a swimming pool! Foot races! Soccer matches!

Christ blessed food, and priests bless marriages. Did he ever participate in an athletic contest? I can't think of an instance. How did he stay so thin? could he have run the marathon? There is a sense that he was quite light, or else how could he walk on water? There is the sense that one without sin should be light, and that sin is heavy. I think this is because eating too much is a kind of sin! At least that's how I feel when I eat too much! There is the problem of gluttony, and obesity, with food; and one can forget about love in sex, which also makes one feel heavy and leaden.

This is why the angels have it easier than we have because they don't have sex and they don't need to eat. This is also why they can fly, but we cannot. Angels are without substance, but have only form (Aquinas). In the afterlife, sex and food will be abolished, right? Many think: call that heaven? I think we can have form and substance, but only through dieting and exercise, and maintaining strict supervision over the kitchen and who eats, how much, and when. It should be part of the health care bill that people with unhealthy eating and sexual habits should pay more. In heaven, we don't have to worry about this. At least not in the Christian heaven. But it should be a provision in the stealthcare bill that only people who have a normal BMI should be entitled to receive it at standard cost. (At 5'10", and 169 pounds, I am at the upper end, but actually do fit into the "norms" albeit barely -- I should lose another fifteen pounds.) Perhaps there should at least be a modest bonus if you meet the BMI suggested ratios. Perhaps the whole thing should dispense with penalties (fines and jail sentences) and give bonuses instead? I want a bailout. But then if I got it, wouldn't I just spend it on chocolate?

In the Muslim heaven, you get 72 VIRGINS. This means that for them, sex will be very much a part of the afterlife. I suppose this means that food will be part of their afterlife, too. Without food, what is sex? Sex is even a religious thing among the Tantric practitioners (those rascals!).

Not so for Christians. For us, song and prayer are the feast. Ok, throw in a wafer to represent Him. But what are we going to do in heaven? Can we still play baseball? Can we compete in any organized athletic contests? Poetry contests? Can we play cards? Sit on a cloud and sing songs all day? Getting sex and food were what people did for most of our biological history, and on a strictly Darwinian basis, that is pretty much all that each member of the species had to achieve. It was the bare minimum. We had to pass on our genes, and we had to get enough calories in order to chase the woolly mammoth.

I've thought for some time about how to bypass the sex-food problem. However, it just seems to be part of our condition. But many of our sins go back to these two things. Lust and gluttony! Lust and gluttony! The aesthetic side of these is apparent. The ethical side is less apparent. The religious side? I don't think there is any truly religious side to sex or eating, and that they always represent stumbling blocks. At the same time, Christ did attend weddings, and he ate and drank. What was his favorite food? Did he ever say, "Pass the lasagna?" Was he ever attracted by women? If so, what were his preferences in terms of body parts? Did he pay attention to things like lovely noses, and well-turned feet?

CHARLES SUMNER ATTACKED WITH A CANE

On May 22, 1856, South Carolina DEMOCRAT Preston Brooks attacked REPUBLICAN senator Charles Sumner with a gold-headed cane on the floor of the Senate.

At issue was a speech Sumner had made against slavery several days before.

Sumner took three years to recover from the beating, but eventually returned to the senate.

Brooks died about a year later from the croup.

We forget how difficult the years before the Civil War were. The Fugitive Slave act forced northern states to repatriate escaped slaves. The Missouri Compromise was overridden when Kansas went slave (freedom voters were often frightened from the polls). Part of the problem was profits. The cotton plantations required slaves, and apparently cotton needed continually new ground because it leeched out the nutrients so quickly.

REPUBLICAN Mrs. Howe's Battle Hymn brought a powerful set of thoughts into a powerful melody and is still sung today, and still is quite moving. I cannot sing it without weeping. It ends:

"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me
As he died to make men holy let us die to make men free
As God goes marching on."

Profit is what drove the slavers. And even in a book like Galatians you can still find a rationale for slavery. But there is in the same book a rationale for universal freedom based in Christ.

America is about freedom. But we also need rules and laws. Those laws largely came down to us from the ten commandments. As we face forward, we need to look back, too, to our roots.

While it isn't clear who threw the brick a few days ago (it may have been a Pelosi supporter, or it could be something staged by MSNBC), or whether the bad words were really used (or whether they are a convenient truth like the Tawana Brawley incident), it is not just a few government officials from the majority party who should be allowed to speak. The ability to peacably assemble (as the Tea Partiers have), and to speak against elected officials, is part of our nation's rights.

Shouldn't these be human rights around the world? Including in China, in Vietnam, in Islamic countries? Shouldn't there be multi-party systems, and freedom of the press, as well as religious freedom? Again, the Democrats, using a system of rationalization similar to that which the Confederates and their northern supporters among the Democrats called States' Rights, said these freedoms were locally decided, and not universal. Charles Sumner said, no. They are universal rights. I agree with Charles Sumner.

Everyone has the right to speak in this country. And to vote their conscience, too.

Shouldn't this be true all over the world?

THE HEALTHCARE BILL

Slowly floating around the room with a will-power bordering on the hyperbolic, I want to be surrounded by people who are doing nothing with their lives.

Like your clothes, it is necessary to change your ideas from time to time.

It is fun to think like a fascist (is it only Mussolini, or was his a real philosophy?).

We should be against everything ever said or done. It's spring!

Race car drivers bother me. They go so fast, but are only going in circles.

Diogenes lived in a barrel. Alexander "the Great" said if he wasn't himself he would have liked to be Diogenes. Doing as little as possible with your life can be like conquering the world.

I should know more about the ins and outs of natural history.

I should dress up like a cat and try to improve my common sense.

Criminals are out, like daffodils. They sense the sun, and they need the green.

Phantom barbers in mobile homes drift through the desert.

Spring. A mathematical description of a spring. Its coiled intensities are as potentially energetic as Salvador Dali's moustache.

The mobile homes fan out like trikes on a playground heading for the national campgrounds.

Migrations of bison.

Rockettes kick at Radio City. I can't find my scissors.

The healthcare bill heads for reconciliation, while Dali pulls his moustache, and Obama flexes his long thin fingers, twirling his pen on his nose.

CONSERVATIVE/LIBERAL

Conservatives mean that they are liberal in the old sense, and liberals are Marxist.

Liberals mean that they are good, and that conservatives are fascists in a sense they never quite define.

Not sure if this holds. Not sure any longer what people mean when they define these terms. I think it is good to avoid any kind of enthusiasm. More and more I think of all terms, and all attempts at definition, at bill making, as a shell game.

LARGER EVEN THAN THIS BLOG

Apparently, stealthcare will come to a "final" vote tomorrow night. Thousands of tea partiers have converged on Washington, DC. The left says the right is racist, and are chanting racist taunts on the lawns before the White House.

One side tries to demonize the other.

Obama is getting prizes out from underneath his desk to tempt recalcitrant congressmen into his web.

Perhaps as many as 30 million more people, including illegal aliens, possibly even aliens from places beyond our solar system, will receive health insurance. The uninsurable will be part of this newly enfranchised group.

Companies threaten to close and move their tentacles elsewhere, releasing giant new numbers of people on the other end from the ranks of the employed to the ranks of the unemployed and homeless.

Where is ACORN? Out doing Census work?

What nefarious underminings of law will they now be set to perform?

Meanwhile, the ants have invaded my kitchen now that the thaw has come. I just poured a bowl of Raisin Bran for my four-year-old and the bowl overflowed with ants. She sat fascinated and laughed and laughed. "Dad, the raisins have come alive."

150 years ago (more or less) was the Civil War. All those people are now dead.

The war between red state and blue state is a lot more civil these days. Inside of every blue stater is a worried red stater, and inside of every red stater, is one that longs to party down with the dissolution of the Republic as voting itself is replaced by deeming, and so many bills are stuffed inside of bills that it resembles a Russian doll. Even if a senator did know one bill they were voting for, they wouldn't know what else they were voting for. "We'll see what we've voted for once the voting is done!" Mad Nancy giggles.

Prestidigitation and poetry combined, as the Battle Hymn of the Republic appears to be a song for the soldiers, but turns out to actually be about mothers who have born these sons, and borne such songs as to bring a Republic to the boiling point, ants pouring out of bowls, boiling, roiling, spilling, pooling, thrilling, trilling, drooling, milling, pilings of words inside of words, as the Host goes marching on.

No Name in Any Language

Is there some person, place, thing, action or state of being with no name in any language?

CAN CONSERVATIVE LITERATURE STILL BE TAUGHT?

I was encouraged to edit this by more than one person.

I'll put it back up after I've read more carefully how they're supposed to go.

LANDMARKS POETRY CONTEST

Emma Lazarus wrote a poem called The New Colossus, which is now on a plaque next to the Statue of Liberty. The poem ends:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This contest asks you to rewrite those lines. What should the plaque now say? Can we still afford to invite the tempest-tost to these shores after Katrina? Can we still say that America, which is drowned in debt, is a "golden door"? On a day after the clock is set forward one hour, how many of us feel energetic enough to get up and welcome the "wretched refuse" of other lands into our living room?

Many of them come in uninvited speaking lousy English, and insisting that their culture remain intact, refusing to assimilate. They bring with them crime, stupid habits, and bad posture. Many don't even know the ten commandments, or observe them only in the breach.

And yet still they come. They cross the Rio Grande, they come in storage tankers, they come on tourist visas and disappear. The police can't find them all, and they smash airlines into skyscrapers.

Meanwhile, many groups inside our country are not yet by any means free. The CDC reports that 50% of American women in inner cities have STDs. Identity politics Balkanizes the nation. The president (who has not only inhaled marijuana and now decriminalized it, but has admitted to using cocaine) wants to pass a devastating healthcare bill that will mire the country in permanent poverty, mandating sentences for anyone who isn't on board, filling our jails with would-be entrepreneurs, as the bill is virtually incomprehensible, with thousands of pages of possible crimes, vaguely worded, unclear sentencing guidelines, while illegal aliens take their jobs and houses.

Give us twenty lines or less, that use an American landmark of your choosing, to speak your truth about America, and shine the lamp anew.

Every individual who contributes a poem is entitled to a vote, and the one with the most votes wins. You can enter any number of times. You get only one vote. Anyone who comments regularly may also vote. Contest ends on Friday, March 26th, at midnight (for no particular reason), and votes are tallied by midnight on the 27th. May the best poem win!

LANDMARKS

Let's say America is a set of images and certain landmarks mark its most important features, and that these landmarks HOLD ITS MEANING.

To me, Gettysburg is the most important landmark that we have.

Beside that, Wall Street is a sick joke.

But the Statue of Liberty is very important.

Central Park in NYC is very important.

The Lincoln Monument in Washington, DC.

The Metropolitan Museum, and the Natural History Museum in NYC.

The Brooklyn Bridge.

Name the top ten PUBLIC LANDMARKS in American history.

Which landmarks are over-rated?

Gregory Corso Biography

For those who have always wished to read a Gregory Corso biography, I have started a do-it-yourself blog where you can contribute your own anecdotes.

I already have about 50 pages. I shall put them up one piece at a time while also putting new pieces in. It will probably take a couple of years. If you have a good story, give it to me, and I will put it in. Be sure to read the Introduction and the Stellar Example by Anne Waldman before you add anything, ok?

http://gregorycorsobiography.blogspot.com

Reading Marianne Moore's Critics

I'm about 20,000 words into my Marianne Moore book. I need another 50,000. So far I've only written about one poem.

I intend to write about three others.

As I read the extant criticism, I'm generally disgusted. Most of the critics tend to take the viewpoint that they want to enroll Moore in their agenda, and basically conscript her to fight for some crypto-communist viewpoint or another with which Moore herself would have had no truck (Moore backed Herbert Hoover even in the depths of the Great Depression, and never wavered -- wearing a Nixon pin in the 1960 election).

So it was with pleasure that I read Donald Hall's book on Moore (The Animal and Its Cage). Hall had AESTHETIC insights. He's a POET. And it made me realize what I find troubling about the humanities now. So few people in the humanities are POETS, or have any inclination toward poetry. They are instead political hacks, and when they read poets or novelists they read them through the lens of their political hack viewpoint, reducing poetry to "liberal" or "conservative" (one book on Moore which I shan't name uses the term "radical" 123 times in 145 pages).

At any rate, for a good overview of Moore's poetry, with a genuinely readable text, and exquisite samples of Moore's verse, Donald Hall might be the front runner. I haven't read all the criticism (so much of it is drek!), but this book was an oasis.

It's long been a kind of litmus test for me when thinking about the humanities. I ask myself: is this writer capable of writing poetry, or even of appreciating it on its own terms? About 87.3% of the time at the very least, the answer is nope.

I don't know how people can go through life without poetry, but they do. I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy.

I'm too lazy to quote from the Donald Hall book. I know if I was writing a competent review, I should do that, but I'm actually not writing about the book so much as kvetchng about all the drek.

*

While I'm kvetching I have another kvetch. Basic math as people who follow the blog know is one of my bete noires. Right now my third grader is bringing home multiplication questions having to do with fractions.

A half times a half equals a quarter. I find this problematic, because I try to put it in real-world terms for him. If you take a half a sandwich, and multiply it by a half sandwich, he said, how do you end up with only a quarter of a sandwich?

Even in New York State, the restaurant tax is not that high. It's more like 8 %.

FILL IN THE BLANKS TEST

Fill in the blanks. Answers Thursday.

1. What ladybugs are to aphids, bloodhounds are to - .

2. What communists are to sleeper cells, - are to marigolds.

3. Tomatoes are to cucumbers, what airplanes are to - .

4. Picasso is to astronauts, what - is to Columbus.

25 points for every right answer. Anyone getting a fifty or better receives prize.

1 Corinthians 15:52

"In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed."

To deny the above is the entire job of the heathens and their consorts.

To believe it is the only job of the Christian.

The dignity of the body, as well as of the soul, separates us from Gnostics, and Buddhists, and Marxists, and all other faiths.

Each of us is made in the image of God. To think of some part -- whether skin color, or gender, as determinative, is a false idol. To separate people by class is itself a blasphemy. Any mark of distinction is not permanent. God is impartial, and we are to be impartial likewise. We accept each face as divine, even if it sees itself as an animal such as an armadillo or a caterpillar that does not know it will one day turn into a butterfly.

1st Cor 15:44: "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body."

Walking on water, turning water into wine, making bread fall out of the sky: all of these are parlour tricks compared to the Resurrection, and the new body that shall result in our exaltation.

SPELLING BEE HALL OF FAME

I moderated the spelling bee this afternoon with two academic colleagues and the former publisher of THE ONEONTA STAR.

26 students were eliminated after 106 words. I'm not allowed to tell you any of the words, since the process is being repeated all over this great nation.

I believe that competition can bring out the best in our youth, not only in athletics but in intellectual contests, too.

Let competition bring us all to our senses!

A home-schooled girl from Cooperstown won the event. It did in fact make me reflect on the efficacy of public schooling.

Meanwhile, the National Soccer Hall of Fame will close this weekend forever. It's been housed in the same town as the Spelling Bee. People wonder what to do with the building, which will soon be vacant.

I would like to suggest a National Spelling Bee hall of fame. We need to support our children's intellectual growth through competition. Athletics supports their physical growth. There's nothing wrong with athletics, but intellectual growth through competition can also be a plus. Aside from spelling bees, chess leagues, disputational leagues, writing contests, philosophical discussion groups, other beautiful things not yet invented could be advanced through a National Hall of Intellectual Interests especially designed for children!

Competition doesn't mean cutthroat viciousness. It just means bringing out your best in a sporting manner, and honoring your opponents. In today's contest, the children supported one another. They clapped as each contestant bowed out, and they high-fived. It was a neat thing to see.

A National Spelling Bee hall of fame could be a mecca for certain types of parents and their charges.

COMMUNISM, CAPITALISM & PLUTO

There are only two economic modes. One is communism and the other is capitalism.

The Democrats seem to go communist, and the Republicans capitalist.

Last night I was watching a Republican Congressman from Iowa talking about the Community Reinvestment Act which apparently outlawed red-lining, and forced banks to make loans to inner city neighborhoods which they knew were bad loans. The congressman was something like Representative King. He said that Obama's stealthcare plan was doing something similar with insurance, in which companies would be forced to give insurance to people they knew to be bad risks, and this would torpedo the system, initiating in turn a new kind of Freddie Mac, or Fannie Mae, as a bailout bank to the system.

I felt my fury rising, as I can't stand ACORN and all the other people the congressman was mentioning, as they don't seem to care at all what happens up around the bend, as long as there is an immediate gain to be made today. I decided to switch the channel to see what was on the public station.

It was something about the furor over the planet Pluto having been downsized from planet to an asteroid (terms differ).

On the station was an African-American physicist whose name was something like Degrasse Tyson. I was doing a Sudoku, and finishing a book about Brooklyn's Prospect Park, monitoring laundry, and remembering to take out the trash, and the wife kept coming in and out of the room with jokes and details about events in Finland and on her Finnish blog, but found myself getting more and more absorbed in the story of Pluto.

A farmboy named Thomas found the planet, and a schoolgirl in England named it after her dad read to her about it in the morning paper.

Degrasse Tyson went to Iowa to meet the farmboy's descendents, and to apologize for downsizing the planet. They were farm people still, with overalls, looking quite decent. They showed the affable Tyson the telescopes their father had built out of grain shafts and car parts and glasses he had ground for himself. A local church had a stained glass panorama of Thomson (I think his name was) gazing up into the heavens.

Tyson was impressed because he said this was a man who had risen above his station, and that's how he interpreted the stained glass.

I wouldn't have thought of it in that way. Tyson must be an atheist, because he interpreted the stained glass in a secular way. I saw the stained glass as representing how each one of us is made in the image of God, and how every human tries to understand Creation.

Tyson runs a laboratory or something in NYC. (I looked him up, and it's Hayden Planetarium, whatever that is.)

Pluto is a chunk in the Kuiper belt, which is a bunch of rubble in the outer reaches of our solar system. 400,000 chunks of rubble, some quite tiny, and others 50 miles across.

The program was called something like The Trouble with Pluto. I liked it, and wish I had time to watch the whole show several times. The host was gracious, and the world it showed was one in which people had actual brains and actual souls.

What a relief.

It doesn't mean that most people aren't termites destroying the very foundation of America as I type, but it does mean that some people are doing something else. Looking into outer space isn't that cozy, or warm (Pluto is 300 degrees below 0), but it does give a needed break. I loved this program. The host was a soft-spoken man. I thought he put on the best show I had seen in years: filled with detail, humor, human and scientific interest, and a certain flexibility of thinking that could allow in new data.

Thank you to Neil Degrasse Tyson (I just looked up his name)! You gave me hope for our entire solar system, and renewed my faith in God, even if you don't believe in God, by taking my mind off the vicious political struggles that beset our country. I liked especially how you found a place for Pluto.

I don't know anything else much about Neil Degrasse Tyson, but I enjoyed this program, and would probably watch another one if he was at the helm.

THE RISEN BODY

The risen body will possess the attributes of impassibility, luminosity, agility, and subtlety.

Vision, and enjoyment, will be two of its wondrous capacities. Clarity refers to the risen body's brightness, radiance, splendor, its matchless beauty.

But brightness is the principal attribute.

If one wills to be in Paris, or Jerusalem, it is no sooner thought than done. This is an aspect that isn't talked about much, but the risen body will be much like that of Christ's after the trials of Gethsemane. One can appear in several places at once.

Impassibility means that one can no longer be injured. So if you want to see Beirut, you can, or if you want to see Iraq, no problems. The IEDS have no effect.