Thursday - - Adressat unbekannt
Stretching and straining toward my goal before next Tuesday morning's weigh-in for my annual consultation with my Primary Care Physician, for some weeks now I'm taking special care about what I eat - - proteins and green vegetables, no carbs, no sweets. One meal a day: breakfast, a single serve of avocado or guacamole with lots of liquid to fool the stomach; noon dinner the protein mainly fish or chicken and one green vegetable; supper with another avocado/guacamole single serve or a salad with maybe a sprinkle of chicken or seafood. FuroForty Sixty or Eighty to keep ankles, feet and legs down to size against the CHF, and instead of any salt, NoSalt, which is potassium and should replace potassium drained off by the Furosemide. Noon dinner today will be a perfect serving of salmon left over from last evening's dinner with friends, crookneck squash reclassified as a green vegetable, and a tiny sliver, just a taste of the most unusual and scrumptious seven-layer chocolate cake imaginable. I still have Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to shed the remaining 37 pounds before Tuesday morning's weigh-in, nomesane? Life is Good.
But this morning from The Atlantic, one of my two lifelong favorite magazines, a sentence that rattles me - - ->
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Moralism Is Ruining Cultural Criticism
The left has embraced an approach long favored by the evangelical right.
When I was growing up in a conservative evangelical community, one of the top priorities was to manage children’s consumption of art. The effort was based on a fairly straightforward aesthetic theory: Every artwork has a clear message, and consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith. ...
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begins an article in The Atlantic this morning.
Regardless of one's IQ or span or level of intellectual curiosity, the idea that makes us uniquely human now that Adam has eaten the apple in the Garden and opened our minds to acquisition of knowledge and development of wisdom, is to seek the truth. Or as the proverb etched into lintel over the library door at my Episcopal theological seminary had it, "SEEK THE TRUTH, COME WHENCE IT MAY, COST WHAT IT WILL"
The "cost" to me has been immense, total, incredibly great. Still, in all my years, it's the wisest, most perfect advice I have ever received. Thinking back to that day on campus, I remember being startled the first Time I read it, being taken aback that a theological seminary where one was to learn scripture and absorb doctrine would give such advice! What about Genesis One, what about ..., what about the Virgin Birth, what about the outrageous assertions in the Nicene Creed, what about ..., what about the risk of being disillusioned, possibly even totally disillusioned? And I remember feeling suddenly set free
to experience that sort of seeking at theological seminary. At first offended, stunned, but eventually, especially with my Lutheran seminary's approach to "modern Bible criticism", coming round to "Oh! I see! Okay!" And remembering back to my lifelong fascination with astronomy, the nature and origins of creation, the Universe, wondering what I needed to rationalize between the night sky and, for example, Genesis One; and all my years of ongoing curiosity and unending study during ordained ministry ever since. The notion of being restricted by someone else's fear that, as Adam Kotsko's sentence has it "consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith" is the most outrageously offensive notion I can muster: that someone in some kind of real or presumed authority over me might dare to control my reading and thinking lest I be disillusioned.
Shades of the USSR, and the Third Reich, and now censors and book-burners creeping out from under the rocks all around us. Truth, wherever or whatever it may be, is illusive, one spends one's Time of life seeking and never feels satisfied. In our unraveling free society, one does not need authoritative fundamentalist absolutists laying on their matrix of evil to control seeking, thinking. Already they are laying on their dogmatic brands of religious certitude to control others' actions, decisions, and possibilities. Once people realize what has happened, it will be too late to slow, halt, reverse, and all the apocalyptic warnings and dystopian writings will be too late. I think we are already there, and I am thankful to have lived my Time before they seized power over my mind.
RSF&PTL
T
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https://timboyce.com/adressat-unbekannt-addressee-unknown/
For many years I have kept as a treasure, a 1939 Reader's Digest anthology, found on a bookshelf among long forgotten books in my parents' home, that included a condensed version of Tim Boyce's writing Adressat Unbekannt - - kept as I say, both as my memory of how Europe was during my early years and as my confidence that this could never happen in my beloved America. I now see it happening around me with people either totally oblivious or totally complicit, and my sadness about it is almost unbearable. TW