© Merle Harton, Jr. | About | XML/RSS

Why We Do It

From Louisiana Quaker eLetter, vol 1:8-9 (2004):

There was a time when I thought that the most important question on earth was: Why is there something rather than nothing? Now I think the most chilling of questions has to be this: Why do we bother getting up in the morning?

It is not enough, surely, that there be a world and that we live in it. It must have meaning for us. Some of us go about with the many small purposes given to us; some of us make our own meaning—we literally create a reason to get up in the morning. To serve someone, to make things, to work, to eat, to play, to spend, to frolic, to enjoy. Rarely do we not have a choice. We could go further and say, too, that we can get meaning from several natural sources: biology and culture. We can get purpose from biology by merely heeding our animal nature: hunger, thirst, sexual desire, all the pleasurables that are presented to us by sense experience. We get purpose from culture by heeding the pleasurables that our social nature prescribes: television, music, cars, houses, money, clothes, gadgets, rituals, laws, etc., etc. From one standpoint, one could construct a perfectly natural human being from biological parts and from social parts. This is what humanism states.

A critical flaw of humanism, though, is that it never leads to any purpose beyond either the biological or the social, for within humanism there really is nothing beyond the merely human. We exist, we have purposes, and we can create for ourselves—individually and collectively—sundry other purposes. But we can never legitimately fashion for ourselves any plausible purpose beyond the merely human; the attempt to do this yields only more psychological phenomena. Thus spirituality, religiosity, higher moral aims—these are mere natural expressions of psychic needs and wants. From one perspective, then, one might argue that the logical consequence of humanism is always a type of existentialism: Life is absurd; we exist, but there is no reason for it.

I wish I could claim credit for having discovered this, but, curiously, such is the very point made by the author of Ecclesiastes. From a humanist perspective, absolutely everything is inevitably meaningless: Real estate and wealth [Ecc 2, 4, 5:8-20, 6], secular wisdom and folly [Ecc 2, 7], the natural order of things [Ecc 3:1-8], inductive science [Ecc 7:27], occupational labor [Ecc 2,4], pleasure in accomplishments [Ecc 2], perfunctory religious behavior [Ecc 5:1-7], positions of power [Ecc 5:8-9], honor and prosperity [Ecc 6], success [Ecc 9:11-12]. So, too, oppression, loneliness, hard work [Ecc 4]. Death, the ultimate fate of human life after the fall, also fails to give our life meaning [Ecc 6, 9].

In a fallen world, separated from God, we will always be frustrated in our search for genuine meaning in anything—for it is not there. As humanists, what we find instead are mere facts, pointing to nothing beyond themselves. Only as a gift from God does our life derive its meaning. Indeed, we have as a gift God's revelation, giving us a stalwart tradition of his presence in our lives. We have as a gift the resurrected Jesus Christ, for through Christ we are released from the meaninglessness of the fall. We have as a gift the Holy Spirit, by means of which we are sanctified [John 17:17; Rom 15:16; 2 Thess 2:13; 1 Peter 1:2], taught, and reminded of Christ's teachings [John 14:26]. And, as a gift, we have meaning for every aspect of our life.

This, says Paul, was a part of the great plan: "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." [Rom 8:19-21]

In the end, whether from an Old Testament or from a New Testament perspective, our duty as Christians is to do as the author of Ecclesiastes himself advises [Ecc 12:13-14]:

In other words, we are to fear God, obey his commandments, and look for the coming judgment.  But how do we escape the humanist charge that this is religion, arising out of a bio-psychological need for meaning in an absurd world, pointing inevitably to nothing beyond a natural impulse to create meaning where there is none? We escape this because we have not created God. He has created us, and revealed himself to us—through Adam, the patriarchs and Prophets, and Jesus Christ—and continues to reveal himself through the Holy Spirit. We are not of this world, and neither is the meaning of our lives.

[ MORE ]

The Way of All Florida Hotels

I was out on my bike this afternoon (105 degrees!) and decided to snap this picture of a beachside hotel at 251 South Atlantic Avenue in Ormond Beach. It's looked this way for several years, and it's one of several such hotels along the beachside. Some have been torn down to make the sand dunes of my youth, only now the dunes are surrounded by low concrete walls, chain-link fences, and no-trespassing signs. Once these hotels were very busy.

I read in the news today that Walmart is delaying its construction of 24 acres (at Nova Road and Mason Avenue in Daytona Beach) which used to be Father Lopez High School. Slower economy and tighter credit, they say.

I took this photo with my Helio Drift cellphone and its 2-megapixel camera and then resized and optimized it with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.

Whither the American Empire?

This article by Chris Hedges charts and references what may be the end of the American Empire, built on money and military might, both of which we are about to lose. And we aren't going to like the outcome.

Don't expect the corporate media to devote resources to discussing this with the American public—at least not until we're already swimming in the deep end.

Fiction: In the Family Way

The wealthy man opens his wallet and sees a fat wad of money; when the poor man opens his, he sees only a deep black hole. And yet the real difference between these two men is this: whether the wallets contain anything at all is entirely irrelevant. I know this now, and wish I had known it then; I could have saved myself a lot of grief.

The grief began when my new company developed "cash flow problems," which is corporation talk for the time when more money goes out than is coming in. There are of course innumerable ways this can happen, but it usually starts when not enough money comes in, because no matter how much you cut expenses, trim the overhead, bite the bullet, step back from the challenge, etc., you cannot in the end spend what you do not have. Credit, as I learned, only extends the period of grief. But I was ever hopeful that my business would pick up and the coffers would be full, and my two feet would be firmly planted on the golden road to Rich City. When my Visa card reached its limit, I knew I was in trouble. When my MasterCard hit the max, I was in trouble. I started scraping bottom when I began using my gas card to by milk, eggs, and bread.

Christine was worried and carried bags under her eyes, but I was ever optimistic. God would take care of us. I was so optimistic, in fact, that I started walking around with a special look on my face; it was not quite a smile, not quite a simper, but it was the smile a man makes when he knows something no one else knows; it was also the kind of look that is commonly seen on the faces of morons.

But I am getting ahead of the story here. Much happened between the time I had money and the time my wallet showed me its lining.

It was about the middle of January when a friend of mine, Paul Smythe, called me on the phone. I was in the kitchen at the time. I had known Paul for about two years, but not extremely well; most of my contact with him was at the hospital where I used to work. He was a medical practice administrator for a large clinic in the area. Since leaving the hospital, I had not been in touch with him. Now, he told me, he and his live-in girlfriend, Collette, had just gone into a marketing business for themselves; it was something they were very excited about, and they were looking for two or three sharp people who are looking to make some extra money, but who need to keep doing what they are doing.

"Marc, are you looking to make some extra money?"

"Sure," I said. "But I can't say I've got a lot of time to devote to outside activities—I mean, this computer business of mine just about consumes all of my time. But I'm open to listening. What have you got?"

"Since this is a business opportunity, it's not something I can really go into in depth on the phone. Besides, I need a paper and pencil to go over the numbers with you. I think you understand that."

"I do. But I don't want to waste your time. Are you looking for investors? If you are, I can tell you right now I'm neither in a position to do that nor interested in any expenditure of money on something outside my own business."

"The company we are doing business with is fully capitalized. We're not looking for investors."

"Well, how much time would I have to devote to this venture of yours?"

"About six to eight hours a week."

"Does it involve selling?"

"Do you like to sell?"

"Not particularly."

"Then you'll like what I've got to show you."

"You said it was a marketing business. What are the products, and how do you market them without selling?"

"Those are good questions, Marc. But again the telephone is not the place to answer them, and I'm a little pressed for time right now. What I'd like to do is set aside about ten to fifteen minutes with you and go over some of the basics of the business, answer a few of your questions, and see if this would interest you and see whether you are the right person to involve in my business. How about tomorrow evening—Monday—say about seven o'clock?"

"Let me get my schedule book," I said. I put the phone on hold and left the kitchen for the study, looking for my schedule for the week. "Monday night's free," I said, picking up the phone and poking my finger on my next day's schedule.

"How about seven o'clock?"

"That's okay."

"Good. I'll see you at your house at seven. Now, I'm not going to be in a position to answer all of your questions, Marc. I'm only going to be there about fifteen minutes. I'm really just checking interest."

"No problem," I said, adding a few pleasantries before hanging up.

"Who was that?" asked Christine.

[ MORE ]

Cheney and the Endless Lie

Tonight Jay Leno joked that we've seen Dick Cheney more in the past eight days than we got to see him during his entire eight years in office. Of course Cheney's been out and about making speeches, typically critical of the Obama administration.

His latest speech, presented today at the American Enterprise Institute, continued the Bushevik's clever use of language to cloak the real meaning of what can be easily conveyed in simple English for the nondelusional. For example, he says:

We keep letting him and his cohorts get away with this abuse of language. It is easier to talk about the detainess at Guantánamo as "terrorists" than to state the facts of their status. Perhaps they are terrorists, but this is neither obvious nor proved. Putting aside the issue of Cheney's credibility (we know that most of the detainees never posed any threat to the US), the remaining detainees have not been convicted of any crime and the evidence against them (possibly gathered through torture or, in the parlance of the euphemism du jour, "enhanced interrogation techniques") has not been properly examined by impartial judicial bodies. So to call them the "the worst of the worst terrorists," as Cheney does here and as Donald Rumsfeld did before him, is to state and, under these circumstances, to perpetuate what is in fact a lie.

Frog and Rain

It's been raining steadily for two days straight. Today was especially bleak with only a few minutes of bright sky. Before turning in for the night, I noticed a tree frog sitting casually on the porch rail in the carport, possibly to escape the rain. It looks like it might be a Cuban Tree Frog, but I didn't handle it and have only this photo to use in identifying it. I thought it was a toad at first, but the adhesive pads clearly suggest otherwise. It moved on after a half hour of this attention.

I snapped this photo using my Nikon P50 digital camera and reduced it for web presentation with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.

The Way of All Steel

While walking Pepe the chihuahua this evening, we happened upon this tree that was in the process of growing around an old chain-link fence post. I noticed that it's also starting to grow over the wooden post on the right. That might take a while.

I should make sure to bring my digital camera with me when I walk around, but maybe it's not a necessity. My reliable Helio Drift cellphone with its 2-megapixel camera did the job, I think.