Atheists For Jesus

Years ago, I reflected on how "much of atheism amounts to straw man argument decrying the absurdity of the notion of some higher-powered dude sitting on a cloud. Who, aside from pinheads and atheists, thinks any such thing, anyhow?"

I’ve never heard atheists deny anything having the least thing to do with god as I parse the term. Which means atheists are arguing a whole other thing in a whole other direction with nothing to do with spirituality. As such, atheism is not incompatible with religion!

So one might easily be devout while also atheist. All you need to do is attest (snidely, if possible) that no supernatural dude perches on a cloud pulling strings and making it all happen. 

God, posited as a crony of, like, Santa Claus, is a ridiculous conception believed only by idiots? I agree! And this makes me an atheist!

And so I propose a new org: “Atheists For Jesus”.

Post-Covid Psychopathology

I've been trying for some time now to try to get to the crux of post-Covid psychopathology (see postings labeled "Post-Covid narcissism", and browse in reverse-chronological order to follow the developing insight). I think I've finally boiled it down to its essence:

If someone is explaining astronomy to you and gets stuck remembering a term, and you fill in “gravitational lensing”, there is 0% probability they will stop their spiel, look freshly at you, and declare “Oh! You know astronomy!”

Pre-Covid, it was more like 60%.

They will continue their explanation - their performance - without hesitation. You have nothing to do with it. It’s like you’re not even there. This is the framing: My thoughtstream is paramount. My assumptions are sacrosanct. Actual evidence is inconsequential; flimsy and unreal.

A friend replied "Do you think things were trending in that direction before Covid, and then super-ultra-accelerated?"

After thanking him for his insight on acceleration (the fact that I hear no one else talking about this stuff makes me hesitant to characterize it as some huge broad thing) I replied:

Yes. One word: narcissism.

Lock narcissists up in isolation for a couple years and this is what you get. Not only can't they custom-tailor their speech to your unique reality, they'd never imagine any imperative to do so. "I'm talking now. My thoughtstream is paramount."

"I'm talking now. My thoughtstream is paramount." Even parodized here for mockery, it strikes us as nearly reasonable, no? That's new! And in a few years, we may be unable to imagine any alternative. It won't seem the least bit loony for people to be entirely performative and utterly nonresponsive. And even that might be optimistic. As I type this paragraph, I hear the readership in my head ask "But what do you mean?"

We’re way too narcissistic to recognize how extremely narcissistic everyone is.

What Abraham Lincoln Didn't Say About Politeness

A few years ago I worked out an alternative perspective on what terms like "politeness" and "courtesy" really mean. (It was an arduous dig because getting to bedrock re: human intentions requires the worst sort of impoliteness; it involves bluntly pointing out what's actually going on rather than smoothly, frictionlessly going along with the cover story. You must be obscenely impolite to grasp what politeness actually is.)

The gist came to this: "Politeness is in the pretending."

Well, it looks like Abraham Lincoln got there first:

"Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves."

Whoops. Not Abraham Lincoln after all. It seems like fewer than half the quote attributions on the Internet are correct. I've started to double-check before passing them on, and caught this one right in the nick of time.

Playing along is everything. I'm unusually benign in intention, but my disinclination to "play along" makes me an absolute monster.

Strangely, it never seems to work the other way. I've never found anyone the least bit willing to go along with (or even begin to try to determine) my own self-image and self-drama. This reminds me of the fact that a great many people have told me what offends them, expecting me to adjust accordingly, yet no one's ever inquired as to what offends me. Nor cared much when informed.

Without incoming examples, I never learned to adjust behavior. My preferences seldom coddled, I assumed this to be a laissez-faire world. I obliviously missed the groundrule: solicitous care and pandering are demanded, not offered.


When I was a child, there was considerable pressure put on me to write letters to my grandparents, who I didn't know well, and who never once wrote back. It took decades for me to realize that my sense of discomfort and imbalance was perfectly understandable. Decades!

Narcissistic Friendship

It happens periodically, and never fails to shock: A total stranger pipes up to tell me they like my writing. And therefore we need to meet and be friends.

They offer nothing. No paint chip sample card of who they are or what they're like. No indication of what they do well, which might be of interest to me. No banter, no rapport. No conceivable reason for me to engage, much less submit to instant-on friendship.

Their unilateral appreciation strikes them as quite sufficient. They've decided, and the notion of me as an independent soul existing outside their head would never occur to them. By having invested their attention in me, a relationship has already been kindled. They've done their part; now it's time for me to do mine!

I had my first taste of this mindset (framing!) back when an early ex-girlfriend, shortly after I'd told her we needed to give it a rest, replied "You can't break up with me! I love you!" That was her entire pitch, and for her it seemed suficient (this was also the declaration that started me pondering what love actually is...at least for most of us).

It becomes clearer and clearer that one human calling another "narcissistic" is like birds calling each other "flighty". The narcissism on this planet is hilariously thick, and we only miss it because we're all too narcissistic to notice how narcissistic everyone is! To notice the narcissism, you'd need to have a vague notion of other people as other people!


A lot of readers seem to like my posting about what it's like to have fans.

Even scarier, consider what happens when Mike Tyson goes into a bar.

ChatGPT is Getting Really Good

What I don't get is why it didn't suggest twelve septillion waters. Just that one single "water" is not, well, logical.

On second thought, it might interfere with that essential "balance".

The Idiocy of Voyager

As a teenager, I was furious with Carl Sagan and his possee for equipping the Voyager space probe with detailed instructions on how to find us.

What could go wrong, right?

"Carl Sagan may be high-minded enough to assume that extraterrestial life would be benevolent," I'd have explained to you at the time (1977), "...and that lifeforms would stop by to happily wave at us, sharing technology and milkshake flavors. How delightful of you, Carl! And perhaps you're even right!"

"But, here's an idea; maybe don't hinge our race's entire future on your irresistible optimism. Maybe you, a decent astrophysicist and infinitely thirsty publicity hound, shouldn't even be the one to make the decision. Maybe this call was way above your pay grade, and you ought to have taken a step back and...asked around a little. Seen what your neighbors think. The teeming billions of us."

"I can tell you what *I* think, Carl. I think this was a shmuck move, marking you as the worst possible example of stupid-smart."

I understood it was vanishingly unlikely that any intelligence would come anywhere near this tiny probe amid the enormity of space. But that was no excuse for Carl being permitted to smugly make this unilateral decision on behalf of the rest of humanity.

To my enormous satisfaction, Omni magazine published a short story in 1980 positing widely divergent scenarios for how Voyager could lead to planetary ruin. I've spent years hunting for it. And today I tracked it down to the author's web site, virtually unsearchable as an image scan from Omni. And it's glorious.


Yes, I remember the Star Trek movie. I saw it when it came out. But it wasn't half as good as Ian Stewart's short story.


Postscript: Ooh, it's not an author page. It's some guy who's posted scans of some of the best stuff from Omni (which, some of you may remember, was great!). Here's the index page .

Another Nice House with Good Vibe

A while ago, I bemoaned the lack of appreciation, cognizance or even just availability of housing that's "nice" without being regal. I offered an example of a "good vibes nice place": surrealistically, the former Manhattan apartment of saxophonist David Sanborn.

Here's another. This time it's a bona fide mansion, yet completely unpretentious, situated a bit west of Lisbon. Just need to ditch those damned candelabras. I can't find a way to extract the video tour, so you'll need to click here and scroll down to it.

It's not that a good-vibes nice-place place is any easier to find in Portugal, though one might imagine so in a land of seemingly sturdy, grounded folks. No, "nice" homes in Portugal have 1200 pound doors which close like bank vaults, and shiny, hard surfaces ensuring that an egg dropped anywhere would create a 12 yard splatter circumference.

Iberia is actually the hardest region in the world to find a nice, soulful place where (quoting my posting linked above) "everything works and there's a good vibe [but without] magnificence. No 'presentation'. Nothing 'impressive'. Nothing to announce to visitors that I am 'A MAN OF FRIGGIN' SUBSTANCE.'"

The house in this video is a unicorn.

Susan Feldman

In first grade, the glamorous Susan Feldman told me "I can't believe I liked you in kindergarten!"



First, I had no idea she'd liked me in kindergarten. The revelation gave this otherwise traumatizing public announcement (issued loudly at the communal lunch table) an oddly positive overall cast.

Second, I hadn't actually done anything to affect her esteem. She just perceived a consensus that my social cachet was not what she'd previously imagined.

Third, the proper response, "I can't believe I gave a scintilla of my attention to a person vicious enough to make such a public announcement re: someone who'd never wronged her", was unavailable to me. I lacked the psychological sophistication to game out the playing field. My intuition was better attuned, offering up a visceral impression of having been wronged. But I mentally attributed that gut reaction to the superficial tickertape of bad news; that Susan didn't like me. Ever since, I've aimed for more penetrating astuteness. Alas, to infinity.

Bodies

A young body is a shiny new car. You mourn every new scratch. 

An old body is a used junker. As long as it still gets you there, you thank your lucky stars.

More Seneca

Following up on yesterday's posting, see, below, more great quotes from Seneca, courtesy of mindofastoic.com. (Note: his essential "Letter's From a Stoic" can be downloaded as a PDF for free from Internet Archive. It's pretty high up my list of recommended books.)

You'll notice that the quotes are pretty much my own shtick, only more elegantly and tersely stated. I haven't read any of this since college, and had forgotten much of it. As I browse through, I find myself getting excited about how deeply it corroborates my own understanding - having goofily forgotten that it helped form my understanding.

I guess it's the same thing as when, a few years ago, I viewed a short clip of my old trombone teacher playing with the Boston Symphony, and felt gratified at how he was applying exactly my own approach...when it was, of course, exactly the other way around. (Rewatching three years later, I think I'd have played it a bit less sweetly and considerably more seductively. Ideally, Bolero should get under the listener's skin; a reaction I was working on inducing in my prime (here's an example from 1992.) Anyhoo, take it away, Seneca:

- We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

- While we wait for life, life passes.

- Cease to hope and you will cease to fear.

- Wealth is the slave of a wise man and the master of a fool.

- While we are postponing, life speeds by.

- Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms, you will be able to use them better when you are older.

- He who is brave is free.

- It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.

- Difficulty comes from our lack of confidence.

- Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

- For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.