The Hag

"Freedom is what prohibition ain't."
- Merle Haggard

Interesting Quote from Mother Teresa

Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.

— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979

The Rising Tide by Rick Bragg

They say college football is religion in the Deep South, but it's not. Only religion is religion. Anyone who has seen an old man rise from his baptism, his soul all on fire, knows as much, though it is easy to see how people might get confused. But if football were a faith anywhere, it would be here on the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Ala. And now has come a great revival.

Read the whole story here.

Bear Bryant and Redemption

I had never heard this story before.

Story

Football Season is Near!

Dostoevsky and Wheat Germ

I was helping a friend pack today when we ran across a copy of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. Knowing that I like to read Dostoevsky, he asked if this was something he should read. I told him that the first paragragh pretty much sums up the mood of the story (It is a short story and not really a book). I just wanted to share that pararaph with all of you.

In Walter Kaufman's book on Existentialism, he says that the first part of the story is the most important. Dostoevsky's range and depth of thought is simply astounding. Woody Allen says reading him is like a full course meal with dessert, vitamins, and wheat germ at the end (rent Husbands and Wives - it is fantastic). I imagine one could study the man all one's life and still be challenged and stupified. Well, I really have no thoughts to share on this (maybe in a couple of years when I can study what I want). I just wanted to share it and get your thoughts as to how this strikes you.

I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!

- Fyodor Dostoevsky from Notes from the Underground

Tolstoy on Faith

Whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it may give, and to whomsoever it gives them, every such answer gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death. This means that only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility. What, then, is this faith? And I understood that faith is not merely "the evidence of things not seen", etc., and is not a revelation (that defines only one of the indications of faith, is not the relation of man to God (one has first to define faith and then God, and not define faith through God); it not only agreement with what has been told one (as faith is most usually supposed to be), but faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.
- Leo Tolstoy A Confession

This is a really important observation. I think it is one the Bible gives in Ecclesiastes (quoted at length by Tolstoy in this book). A faith in that which is finite (e.g. career, personal identity, human goodness, football teams [in my case], the mind, one's own perceived goodness) is ultimately misplaced without the infinite. The infinite is what gives purpose to the finite. Without the infinite, there is no rhyme or reason to put effort into anything. It will ultimately die. Ecclesiates shows us the futility of the finite and that is the conclusion of great thinkers like Tolstoy and others as well.

Maybe that which is called "sin" is placing one's faith in that which is finite. Think about the sin of Adam and Eve. They wished to know good and evil like God. They wanted to be gods. Therefore sin is self-assertion, of course. They never could be and we never can be. But, ultimately, it is the worhip of that which will cease to exist. Think about how Satan tempted Jesus in the desert. He offered Him temporal kingdoms and sustinence. All of that was finite and could never last. Maybe calling the worship of the finite "sin" is actually a very kind move by God to take our focus away from that which will perish. All of things like personal identity (i.e. self-assertion) has no use in the finite because, one day, a meteor will crash into Earth and all will be obliterated. What good is one's identity then? What good is being an Alabamian, Scots-Irish, black, gay, straight, American, Hispanic, successful, orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, the most admired investment banker in Manhattan, brilliant, President, congressman, or athletic then?
- DOB