Thoughts

Am I the only one who has lost patience with the atheists? Apart from the fact that the abolition of theism would leave them without a worldview, most of them spend their time carping from the sidelines but refuse to put together a credo for examination.

In the New York Times’ review of Christopher Hitchens’ book, ‘God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’, the reviewer makes the following astonishing point:

And all the logical sallies don’t exactly add up to a sustained argument, because Hitchens thinks a sustained argument shouldn’t even be necessary and yet wouldn’t be sufficient. To him, it’s blindingly obvious:

Of course, when Christopher Hitchens thinks that a debate doesn’t require “sustained argument” because “it’s blindingly obvious” then the NYT describes the book as “serious and deeply felt”. The review continues:

 … the great religions all began at a time when we knew a tiny fraction of what we know today about the origins of Earth and human life. It’s understandable that early humans would develop stories about gods or God to salve their ignorance. But people today have no such excuse. If they continue to believe in the unbelievable, or say they do, they are morons or lunatics or liars.

Well I guess that settles it. The apotheosis of two thousand years of human experience is the acknowledgement of our prior ignorance and an embrace of our new enlightenment.

Destruction is certainly part of the creative process but at some point I wish the high priests of atheism would assemble and thrash out a manifesto. That way the rest of us can comment. And write witty, engaging books without regard for reason and substance.

Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders is always compelling investment insight. His 2006 letter contains this gem:

In 2006, promises and fees hit new highs. A flood of money went from institutional investors to the 2-and-20 crowd. For those innocent of this arrangement, let me explain: It’s a lopsided system whereby 2% of your principal is paid each year to the manager even if he accomplishes nothing – or, for that matter, loses you a bundle – and, additionally, 20% of your profit is paid to him if he succeeds, even if his success is due simply to a rising tide. For example, a manager who achieves a gross return of 10% in a year will keep 3.6 percentage points – two points off the top plus 20% of the residual 8 points – leaving only 6.4 percentage points for his investors. On a $3 billion fund, this 6.4% net “performance” will deliver the manager a cool $108 million. He will receive his bonanza even though an index fund might have returned 15% to investors in the same period and charged them only a token fee. […]

Its effects bring to mind the old adage: When someone with experience proposes a deal to someone with money, too often the fellow with money ends up with the experience, and the fellow with experience ends up with the  money.

I have written about this broad daylight heist before but it continues to astonish me that people aren’t aghast at the inequity of the system.

I am sitting in my hotel room looking over the Las Vegas Convention Center where hundreds of thousands of global citizens are thronging the cavernous halls. It is easy to lose perspective when you are down there, pressed on all sides by televisions and cell phones and audio equipment and pimped-out cars and computer games.

Back in my hotel room, though, the thought occurred to me, as it does every time I come to CES, that there is a vast difference between life and technology. Technology only provides the infrastructure for life. We still have to provide the rest: the creativity, the relationships, the laughter, the intimate connection. As far as I can tell almost every gadget in those halls serves either to bring us entertainment or to make us more efficient. But at times I wonder whether it is possible for technological progress to increase our entertainment. Was an hour of ‘I Love Lucy’ on a 27″ black and white TV that much less entertaining than ‘Heroes’ on a 102″ plasma screen?

And how much more efficiency or productivity are we really gaining from technology these days? The limiting factor in the information age seems to be the rate at which we can absorb and process new information in our finite brains. There seems to be very little left to automate in my life.

As I write, the Apple hordes are ecstatic over the announcement that Steve Jobs will produce a phone just for them. A bigger screen on a trendier phone will not make us any more likely to pick it up and call the person in our life who yearns to hear from us, to connect with us, to hear again that we love them. Or will it?

“In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love.”

– St. Augustine

Last night I watched one of those movies (“In Her Shoes“) that is thoroughly enjoyable while you’re watching it but you know you won’t remember it in a few months time and it will have very little impact shaping your life. Afterwards I was inwardly cursing the waste of time when a thought occurred to me: How long am I going to defer gratification until some later time in my life when I will conclude that I have earned it? And do we sometimes delay gratification because we’re not even sure exactly what it is that we enjoy doing? Because we’ve never allowed ourselves to slow down enough to explore all the fun in the world? And then before we know it, we lose the ones we love.

One Art – Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

Feel led to keep a record of my thoughts for the questionable benefit of others.