Comment from Cal
Time November 3, 2009 at 9:05 pm

Prayer lists. Good idea. As they say, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Comment from Logic
Time November 3, 2009 at 11:55 pm

What silliness is this? Of course there are atheists in foxholes. Foxholes that the neocons always make sure are there with their incessant warmongering. The vast majority of us will never see a foxhole, but if you’re saying that sheer terror can make you say/do/believe silly things, then yes, I’d have to agree with that.

Comment from Carl
Time November 4, 2009 at 12:29 am

Logic,
If that’s the best retort you can think of for a well used saying, then please stop posting. Foxholes are a metaphor for any difficult situation; situations that come up because sometimes life’s just tough. Pretend you have a child hit by a car, can you imagine sitting by stubbornly refusing to hope that there’s a God who will help your child get better? No, I think you would break down and say a little prayer for your child. The vast majority of us will see foxholes and we’ll all pray. It’s not silliness, it’s hope.

Comment from Logic
Time November 4, 2009 at 3:47 am

Just because life is tough doesn’t mean you have to succumb to delusion. Evolve.

Comment from geoff
Time November 4, 2009 at 8:08 am

Carl: just to put things in a different perspective, I often tell my students that some of the ancient Greeks used to view hope as the last & greatest evil in Pandora’s box: the cause of all kinds of suffering.

Comment from Carl
Time November 4, 2009 at 6:32 pm

Logic,
Belief in God isn’t delusion. You can’t prove to me that there is no God, therefore I’m not deluded by believing something is true that is not.. Belief in God and belief that there is no God require the same amount of self-convincing. People see what they want to see.

Geoff:
That’s interesting, I’ve never studied the Greek view of Pandora’s box. I’m familiar with the story but not in depth. Maybe this is just my Western view, but I don’t understand how hope is the cause of all kinds of suffering. It seems to me that hope is what gets us through all the trials that were released from the box.

Comment from Art W.
Time November 4, 2009 at 6:43 pm

Logic: “Just because life is tough doesn’t mean you have to succumb to delusion. Evolve.”

Let’s all join Logic and ‘evolve’ into hopelessness.

Comment from geoff
Time November 4, 2009 at 6:48 pm

Carl: they sort of argued that you put up with a whole lot of suffering because you have hope. Without hope, you would give up and avoid suffering. Now that I think about it, it almost seems Buddhist, but it’s probably tied in with the stoics somehow.

Comment from Carl
Time November 4, 2009 at 7:51 pm

Geoff:
Again, interesting. To me, the idea of being able to avoid suffering while alive seems ridiculous. The only way I can see to avoid all suffering is to kill yourself. Having lived beyond childhood, I’ve become convinced that suffering is a part of life and that hope is necessary to deal with the trials that come to all regardless of our circumstances or choices.

Art W.:
I almost made the same comment as you but it seemed so obvious that I thought Logic might have logicked his way to that conclusion. I suppose that some people should never be underestimated.

Comment from geoff
Time November 4, 2009 at 8:10 pm

Carl: well, the Buddhists preach “non-attachment,” but the result seems kind of boring, kind of like the old adage about it having been “better to have loved & lost than to never to have loved at all.” I was looking thru some of my reference books, but most of what I have specifically on Greek mythology is pretty superficial: references to Hesiod and some later interpretations. The wikipedia article has some interesting discussion tracing it back to problems of translating Hesiod, and a fairly cynical take on the whole thing from Nietzsche (who was an old-style Classical philologist by training, so he should have known).
Interestingly, she’s a parallel to Eve: the first woman, basically; vague memories of some mother/earth goddess, so almost an inversion of the idea that with the garden of Eden you get the snake…

Comment from geoff
Time November 4, 2009 at 8:12 pm

And the inversion of the snake/garden with the evils/hope imagery reminds me that Claude Levi-Strauss died on Saturday: that was the kind of study he did on the structures underlying South American myths.

Comment from Cal
Time November 4, 2009 at 9:33 pm

“Neocons.” “Incessant warmongering.” Do all liberals use the same buzz phrases? Polar, Paddington, and now Logic. Hmmm.

Just who got us into all these wars over the last 100 years anyway?

WWI Woodrow Wilson Democrat 116,000 Americans killed
WWII Franklin D Roosevelt Democrat 406,000 Americans killed
Korea Harry Truman Democrat 33,000 Americans killed
Vietnam John F Kennedy Democrat 58,000 Americans killed

Persian Gulf Bush, Sr. Republican 39 Americans killed
Iraq/Afghanistan Bush, Jr. Republican 5,270 Americans killed

I guess there really ARE a lot of warmongering neocons out there! Logic? None seen here.

The sacrifices were worth the effort to bring freedom and liberty to oppressed people, but I don’t think it was the “neocons” who were in the Oval Office for most of it. In fact, I’m sure of it. It’s a shame and an embarrassment we gave up and quit in Korea and Vietnam but we’ve done pretty well everywhere else in spite of liberals demanding we quit since 1967. And yes, I remember it was tricky Dick who ultimately threw in the towel in April of 1974 before being thrown out himself in August of that same year. (And I was only trying to wish Martha well!)

Comment from geoff
Time November 4, 2009 at 9:52 pm

Cal: when it comes to buzzwords, what about your “liberal,” “socialist,” “communist,” “Taliban-loving,” etc.?
Don’t you know what a neocon is?
“The term neoconservative was used at one time as a criticism against proponents of American modern liberalism who had “moved to the right”. Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist, coined the current sense of the term neoconservative in a 1973 Dissent magazine article concerning welfare policy. According to E. J. Dionne, the nascent neoconservatives were driven by “the notion that liberalism” had failed and “no longer knew what it was talking about.” The term “neoconservative” was the subject of increased media coverage during the presidency of George W. Bush. with particular focus on a perceived neoconservative influence on American foreign policy, as part of the Bush Doctrine.
“The first major neoconservative to embrace the term, Irving Kristol, was considered a founder of the neoconservative movement. Kristol wrote of his neoconservative views in the 1979 article “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed ‘Neoconservative.’” His ideas have been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited Encounter magazine. Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. By 1982 Podhoretz was calling himself a neoconservative, in a New York Times Magazine article titled “The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy”. Kristol’s son, William Kristol, founded the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.”
Sort of interesting how the Bush years are whitewashed away already as the infighting and purges and battles over who gets to carry the label of true “conservative” get bloodier.