Milledgeville Revisited

"Obscurity is common to human intelligence, because intelligence can only perceive what has taken place in its own experience, not that which makes it what it is."

-- Oswald Chambers

To answer the riddle about the visitor to Milledgeville, the visitor was the quarterback for the world champion Pit Bull Stealers, Ben Roethlisberger. I don't think he came to this largely girls college town to deliver a message, although a strong message was certainly delivered by his actions. He was in fact accused of sexual assault on a college student. Of course, the presumed stature of the assailant will probably protect him well from any consequences. In fact, it is one of the privileges of power that one can call forth only the best lawyers to basically turn back any counter- assault in court. We have already seen what happens to famous football players when accused, which results in a show trial in which murder is basically gotten away with -- not wishing to end with a preposition of course! How good a lawyer, do you think, this girl's parents can afford?

The same of course is true of the kings of the earth, and the multitudes who consider themselves kings in their own little bubble. Certainly however this subject would have been worthy of treatment by Flannery O'Connor who was a student at the same college. We had the privilege of walking around the campus and picking up the student newspaper, "The Colonnade," in which the subject above was covered. Until very recently this was a women's college only and still the vast majority of students walking around seem to be female. I had the privilege also of being able to view copies of all the cartoons Miss O'Connor did for this paper for three years running, all linoleum cuts and some of them quite funny but generally not as sardonic as her writing would later be.

Over the past month or so I have had some time to look further into the nature and prominence of evil. While it is difficult to get anyone to agree about what is evil and what is not, there are some things in what CS Lewis called the Tao, that tend toward universality. Probably because of the universality of crude raw human impulses. Not too many people will aver that sexual assault without consent is anything but evil; but the continued common occurrence of this in "civilized society," does suggest that these impulses have to be dealt with, but dealing with them from some kind of hypothetical neutrality does stretch probably even beyond the absurd. Of course, there is no wrong action or attitude in the human world that does not have its proponents; many of these in secret of course but more among what the songwriter called, "A Small Circle of Friends." Also much of the obscurity of the mind noted by Mr. Chambers is self -designed and self-induced and really deliberate in spite of being kept subconscious or unconscious.

Of course there IS the matter of brain size. Perhaps it does matter! It does weigh only about 3 pounds. While it is, according to Isaac Asimov, the most complex thing that we have discovered in the known universe; it is still much more limited in scope than we imagine. In the latest issue of The New Yorker there is a cartoon of a physician looking into a patient's ear with an otoscope while commenting, "I'm always amazed at how small brains are." (I continually wonder at the mythology that doctors can look at the brain through the ear ha ha) This of course poses a universe of difficulties for the scientist and even for Mr. Darwin, who had a nagging doubt that a human brain -- coming so biologically recently from a monkey -- would possess the competence to be in charge of, much less come up with, a theory so all-encompassing as his own. And still have have a one-to-one correspondence with objective reality.

(Scope in the morning, anyone? Scope plural?)

I suppose my point is that, yes, Virginia, we do have a choice or should I say choices. And yes, I am in that sense, "pro-choice." How many people do you think are antichoice? Certainly God and Christ say to us, "Choose this day whom you will serve..." but the other inherently good phrase is, "pro-life." So God is "both/and", not "either/or". As so often is the case making it humanly impossible to comprehend His overwhelmingly universal point/s of view about almost anything or anyone.

Existence/life is certainly pointless if the word "choice" is meaningless, which most certainly it is in a purely materialistic universe which of course is a completely hypothetical construct. There are a few "honest atheists," who do say that we have no meaningful choices, no free will, etc. However the vertical and empirical evidences certainly do suggest that we have way too little information or mental capacity to rule out any possibility of things well beyond our five senses and logical abilities. Issac Asimov himself admitted that, but then said that he did not have enough interest to pursue it. Certainly none of us have, or can, pursue metaphysics to the nth degree but we still come up with Absolutes no matter who we are or how much we protest against them. Postmodernism is another variant of denial which goes back to the Greeks and has always been with us in one form or another. As one other commentator said, "Man does not live by bread alone."

To be continued....