* The Fever God(s) ? Angry maybe?

I was born into a mysterious world. In 1950 Pope Pius XII decreed ex cathedra that the Bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven is now church law and Mary can be worshipped as a Saint.

The psychologist, Carl Jung, published that same year  his small volume, The Answer to Job, in which (among other things) he declares that Pius XII’s decree is nothing less than the return to divinity of the Pantheon goddess Sophia (banished with dozens of other gods by monotheism), i.e. the return of the feminine element to the godhead.

He revealed that the idea and text for the book came to him in an flash in a dream.

James Hillman, the psychiatrist and polytheist, heavily influenced by Jung, declares in the next decades that mental illness is the result of the 2000 years of monotheism’s ignoring of the other banished gods. In other words, monotheism causes mental illness.

Since mental illness often causes suffering (for example, Hitler; Auschwitz; W.W. II) this raises an interesting twist to the problem of theodicy (How can evil exist in a world run by an all powerful, benevolent god?):

Does the evil attendant on some mental illness exist because monotheism is making the multiple gods of polytheism angry? (e.g. are they punishing the world for NOT worshipping them by creating mental illness?)

I prefer to answer the question with a now out-of-print book by a Cornell professor: Tragedy: A View of Life by Henry Alonzo Myers.

His premise is that the only justice in the universe is an aesthetic justice: That in exact and equal reaction to one’s capacity to suffer, is one’s capacity to experience ecstasy . Privilege, education, blue blood—all of these are irrelevant.

The theodicy question then becomes an axiom:

If you delete from the world the suffering caused by evil, you also delete from the world the joy caused by ecstasy.

Any takers?

True egalitarianism.

PK



If these ideas interest you, watch the Hillman lecture (three, 9-minute YouTube clips) and the Jung YouTube video below.

Review: [untitled]
Willard Farnham
Reviewed work(s): Tragedy: A View of Life. by Henry Alonzo Myers

Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Winter, 1958), pp. 59-61
(review consists of 3 pages)
Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2867180
________________________________________________
From Wikipedia

Assumption of Mary




This article is about the theological concept. For works of art with this title, see Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Art.

The Assumption of the Virgin Mary has been a subject of veneration, doctrine and Catholic Marian art for centuries. This painting is by Rubens, 1626.According to the belief of Christians of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Anglican Communion, the Assumption of Mary was the bodily taking up of the Virgin Mary into Heaven at the end of her life. The Catholic Church teaches as dogma that Mary, "having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory."[1] This doctrine was dogmatically and infallibly defined by Pope Pius XII on November 1, 1950, in his Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus. This belief is known as the Dormition by the Orthodox. In the churches which observe it, the Assumption is a major festival, commonly celebrated on August 15. In many countries it is a Catholic Holy Day of Obligation.

In his August 15, 2004, homily given at Lourdes, Pope John Paul II quoted John 14:3 as one of the scriptural bases for understanding the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. In this verse, Jesus tells his disciples at the Last Supper, "If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will receive you to myself; that where I am, you may be there also." According to Catholic theology, Mary is the pledge of the fulfillment of Christ's promise.

* The Friends of Dr. Bob, Class of '02

check out the video "A Tribute to the Animated Alcoholic" under the post entitled THE QUITTER.

* There's nobody left to put-down? "THAT TIME HAS PASSED."

EDITORIAL
The New York Times
Marriage Is a Constitutional Right
Published: August 4, 2010

" . . . One of Judge Walker’s strongest points was that traditional notions of marriage can no longer be used to justify discrimination, just as gender roles in opposite-sex marriage have changed dramatically over the decades. All marriages are now unions of equals, he wrote, and there is no reason to restrict that equality to straight couples. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” he wrote. “That time has passed.”

*Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing . . .

The Sleeping Giant, a mountain in Mt. Carmel

Hamden Veterans Memorial

43 Norwood Avenue, Mt. Carmel (my birthplace)

Pretty cocky at 14


For Eddie and for Bobby and for my lost 16-year-old Self

We didn't have much money when I was young; but, I thought we were rich because we had a television and "two" cars, a 1951  and a 1954 Nash (how uncool!)

I lived in the shadow of The Sleeping Giant, a mountain in Mt. Carmel--- a quiet post-WW II neighborhood, ten miles from New Haven and Yale.

It was the 1950's and all was well in America.  Eisenhower was president and I still remember him "ending" the Korean War "on tv", or so it seemed to me.

In 1955 modernity came to our neighborhood when a "development" was built at the end of my street along the pine forest abutting the Water Company property which encompassed the Mill River. It was the first time I had seen a "ranch house."

A family much like ours bought the first new house at the end of the street: mother, father, and two brothers, Eddie and Bobby, about my age and my own brother's age. They were handsome, athletic boys.

I stayed in that neighborhood until 1961 when I was 16 and my parents moved "up" by building a house nearer to 'the Giant'.

Time passed.

I went to college and I lost touch with my old neighborhood and those brothers.

Six years later my sleepy moderate Republican mentality was shattered when the graduate school I was attending, Kent State University, became the the most infamous university in the world on May 4, 1970.

Fast-forward 40 years to 2010.

I am living in Vermont and a Hamden friend sends me a copy of The Hamden Almanac, a summer news sheet created to advertise my old hometown. Inside is a feature about the Hamden Veterans Memorial with a huge color photo of a small section (the "h" section) of the alphabetized bronze memorial to Hamden's fallen veterans. There, right there, staring me in the face, are the bronzed names of my two neighborhood chums, Eddie and Bobby, one after the other: Bronze, but brothers still---side by side.

While I was watching blood be shed at Kent State,  apparently their blood was being shed in Viet Nam.

Today's New York Times Op-Ed Page has a column by the indefatigably irate and brilliantly articulate Bob Herbert.

Hear what he says:

War is a meat grinder for service members and their families. It grinds people up without mercy, killing them and inflicting the worst kinds of wounds imaginable, physical and psychological . . .

July was the deadliest month yet for American troops in Afghanistan. Sixty-six were killed, which was six more than the number who died in the previous most deadly month, June. The nation is paying little or no attention to those deaths, which is shameful . . .

We’re getting the worst of all worlds in Afghanistan: We’re not winning, and we’re not cutting our tragic losses. Most Americans don’t care because they’re not feeling any of the tragic losses. A tiny, tiny portion of the population is doing the fighting, and those troops are sent into the war zone for tour after tour, as if they’re attached to a nightmarish yo-yo.

And I think of  Eddie and Bobby, gone for decades without my knowing it,  and my own loved ones in the military right now.

Long time passing . . .

* Beware Egomaniacal Ethnocentricity

Perspective

Of the seventy institutions in the world which have existed for at least 800 years (Parliament, the Roman Catholic Church, etc.) five of those institutions are universities.*

John Sexton
President of N.Y.U.



In thirty-five years China will  [again] be the largest economy in the world, which it has been for fifteen of the last eighteen centuries.*


David M. Rubenstein
Co-Founder and Managing Director of The Carlyle Group


*quotes taken from interviews on The Charlie Rose Show, July, 2010

* Blind Faith: Deus ex Machina

Editor
The Valley News




The August 1 Sunday New York Times reports hundreds of cases of radiation overdoses administered to stroke victims in six California (and one Alabama) hospitals, due primarily to CT scan devices sold by GE Healthcare which have a feature which hospital technicians “thought would lower radiation levels" but which "actually raised them.”

Since the FDA was not “aware of the magnitude of these overdoses until the Times brought them to the agency’s attention” it is a bit tardy (sadly for hundreds of exposed patients) in “considering extending its investigation” which may bring to light a nationwide problem and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of more cases with risks as serious as potential brain cancer.


One Alabama hospital denies the overdose phenomenon exposed by the Times among its patients by saying, of the total number of alleged victims,  “the number is actually zero since the state does not define an acceptable dosing level. ‘No such thing as an overdose,’ said James L. McNees, director of the Alabama Office of Radiation Control."


Last year Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center was voted among the top five hospitals in America. I would like to know what leadership it has exerted ---or is planning to exert --- to make sure this error does not occur to patients at DHMC, especially since stroke victims are not in any condition to ask their radiation technicians to make sure they know how to accurately use the radiation devices they wield, perhaps unknowingly, as potential weapons.


So much for blind faith in god-the-machine.




Paul D. Keane
Hartford Village

* Yale's West Campus: An Acropolis of Acronyms ?

" . . . Among the crown jewels are three fully operational technology centers and five scientific research institutes in various phases of start-up. As this special edition of ELIne shows, West Campus—with 136-acres including 1.6 million square feet of office, research and warehouse space—is well on its way to becoming what Michael Donoghue, vice-president of West Campus Planning and Program Development, calls a transformational asset for the university in both the sciences and arts. "

The Yale Eline
West Campus Edition
July 2010





Even I (who am philosophically wary of surrendering the Academy hook, line, and sinker, to scientific imperatives) am impressed by the potential for scholarly, scientific discovery implicit in Yale's new West Campus. (See quote from the Eline, July 2010, West Campus Edition, above.)


May I presumptuously propose then that, in the midst of this dramatic new scientific campus, Yale plop down a Poet in Residence?


S/he would have as her/his mission not only to reflect on the ethical and social implications of what is brewing in this Ivy League-scientific-tsunami, but also to act as a kind of humanizing watchdog over what could become a nightmare of professional jargon, an appalling apotheosis of acronymity.

Let's build poetic insight and humor into the place in the beginning, before we discover we have created  a wasteland of scientific babble punctuated by quantums, quarks, and quotients.

Where is T.S. Eliot when we need him:

Scuttling across the Gulf of Mexico floor?