Daily Desperation

April fool edition

There is plenty of hope. An infinite amount of hope. But not for us.
— Kafka

So may it be with God

Gary Gutting: You say you’re a naturalist and deny that there are any supernatural beings, yet you’re a practicing Jew and deny that you’re an atheist. What’s going on here? What’s a God that’s not a supernatural being?

Howard Wettstein: Let’s begin with a distinction between participation in a practice and the activity of theorizing, philosophically and otherwise, about the practice.
Just as a practicing mathematician need not have views about the metaphysical status of numbers, so too religious life does not require a theoretical stance on God’s existence.
Richard Feynman said that he lived among the numbers, that he was intimate with them. However, he had no views about their metaphysical status; he was highly skeptical about philosophers’ inquiries into such things. Do numbers exist? Feynman had no opinion on the question.

— more from The Stone column in NYTimes

And the fact that I practice Theravada meditation every morning doesn’t mean I believe in Buddhism.
–JJM

To evade the whirlwind

To evade the whirlwind and to espouse the sky
Is now all my mental imagery
The rocket’s red glare is dense nowhere
For mankind’s best ruddied energy

The myth of mankind demands the honest heart
The occult seas and occult trees treat
Of things foreknown but in their farthest art:
Most male is being hale in this heavenly heat.

— Richard Eberhart, born this day in 1904

Again and Again

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

— Rainer Maria Rilke - See more at 3 Quarks Daily

There is within each of us a modulation, an inner exaltation, which lifts us above the buffetings with which events assail us. Likewise, it lifts us above dependence upon the gifts of events for our joy.

— Albert Schweitzer

Nesting

It is the accumulation of year,
an awakening to each other slowly,
that allows us
to take in the long view.
Not for everyone,
but a few
who withstand winter upon winter,
after the long frost of both body and heart.
A bounty purifie sweet again.

Like a stream cutting deeply
into the land,
carving a road of determination,
against our individual wills,
against our knowing anything.

Or a river,
arriving someplace
we’ll never see with our eyes.
A mystery –
content to be so.
The infinite in the limit of day,
immobile agains the backdrop of uncertainty.

Loving naturally,
cast in the bronze of day,
we are the density of concrete.

Undone in the intimacy of evening,
bound in a simple pair,
shielded against the chaos
we choose not to endure.

— Kim Empson

Teleology

Since the fabric of the universe is most perfect and the work of a most wise Creator, nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear ... there is absolutely no doubt that every affect in the universe can be explained satisfactorily from final causes, by the aid of the method of maxima and minima, as it can be from the effective causes themselves ... Of course, when the effective causes are too obscure, but the final causes are readily ascertained, the problem is commonly solved by the indirect method... ‘’ “”

— Leonhard Euler, born this day in 1707, was first to realize that adding one imaginary number (the square root of minus one) completes the ordinary (real) numbers, and assures there is a solution to all algebraic equations.

“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit-world’, death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.”

Das ist im Grunde der einzige Mut, den man von uns verlangt: mutig zu sein zu dem Seltsamsten, Wunderlichsten und Unaufklärbarsten, das uns begegnen kann. Daß die Menschen in diesem Sinne feige waren, hat dem Leben unendlichen Schaden getan; die Erlebnisse, die man «Erscheinungen» nennt, die ganze sogenannte «Geisterwelt», der Tod, alle diese uns so anverwandten Dinge, sind durch die tägliche Abwehr aus dem Leben so sehr hinausgedrängt worden, daß die Sinne, mit denen wir sie fassen könnten, verkümmert sind. Von Gott gar nicht zu reden.

— Rilke

Easter Exultant

Earth Day

O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
Cover'd all over with visible power and beauty,
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees,
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,
Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee.

— Walt Whitman

Listen to Vaughan Williams’s setting of these words from his Sea Symphony.

Experiment on the Origin of Life

Markus Raiser of Cambridge University reports having observed fundamental processes of cellular metabolism arising spontaneously in a test tube. The particular reactions involve the conversion of sugars to phosphates that underpins a fundamental mechanism of energy metabolism. New Scientist article

It’s an interesting result, but it doesn’t tempt me to revise my view that the origin of life is a great mystery. This experiment is about a process of metabolism, not reproduction. Metabolism is the easy part.

Traditional Science tends to assume that of course there must have been some self-reproducing system of molecules that was simple enough to arise spontaneously under conditions prevailing in Earth’s first billion years, because…well, how else could life have arisen? But the truth is that we have no idea whether such a simple-enough self-reproducing chemical system exists, and we have never found one, and to the extent that we are able to judge such probabilities in the absence of examples, the probability of self-reproducing systems appearing spontaneously would seem to be vanishingly small. It’s fair to say we don’t understand the origin of life, and our conjectures lack substantiation.
— JJM

The Ubuntu Party Platform

We have all been led to believe that money is absolutely necessary for our survival and that money makes the world go around, and that without money humanity would go back to the dark ages.

Well, nothing can be further from the truth – because money does nothing… people do everything. People plant the seeds, grow the food, build the bridges, develop the technology, find cures for diseases, build the rockets, create breath-taking works of art and play music that reduces us to tears. Only people have the capacity for compassion and infinite love for each other. Money cannot do this.

In fact, it is money that stands between people achieving their dreams – it is money that constantly prevents people from doing all of these things that they so eagerly want to do. Money is the hurdle to all human progress, because there never seems to be enough of it. WHY? Because the supply of money is not in the hands of the people or the government of the people – it is in the hands of private, multinational corporations, called banks.

— The Ubuntu party aims to take over South Africa with a radical program that puts people ahead of corporations.

Competition is a crime. –John D Rockefeller