Does Jesus Matter?

When I became an atheist at 13 I figured I wouldn’t have to worry about who Jesus was anymore, and I could stop reading The Bible.  Around age 55, I returned to reading The Bible, to understand its place in history and to find out why so many people claimed it was so significant.  I’m still not religious, or even spiritual, but The Bible is like the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzle, you start to put a few pieces together and you get hooked.

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik describes the latest crop of books about Jesus in, “What Did Jesus Do?”  I highly recommend you taking the time to read this essay.

Gopnik claims ten books came out about Jesus in just one month.  I always figured Jesus was a real historical person, that we have very little actual evidence about him, and that there is a difference between Jesus the philosopher and Christ, the deity with infinite aspects.  I might be right or wrong about all points.  In fact, there are so many interpretations of who Jesus the real person was that I have to wonder if I shouldn’t write him off as unknowable.

The trouble is about 2 billion people want to define reality by their interpretation of Jesus.  Would reading all of these books that Adam Gopnik surveys put enough puzzle pieces together to produce a consistent view?  No, you won’t get a conclusive answer to who was the historical Jesus, but your sense of history and reality would be greatly expanded.  Here are links to some of the books he reviewed, and some others I ran across.

And there is no end in sight.  I put “Jesus” in the search box at Amazon, and then set the order to date, and there were over twenty pages of books scheduled to be published.  So I have to ask, should I even study a subject that produces so many opinions?

I know the faithful will say Jesus is someone I should study forever, but I don’t think that’s true.  He either had a definite message or he didn’t.  I also know the faithful will claim the definitive message is found by reading The Bible, but that’s also not true, because of the zillions of books trying to interpret The Bible.

And why try to understand Jesus and not all the other religious figures who have thousands of books written about them?  I do know from the many books I’ve already read, that the more one studies Jesus, the more one tries to understand him in a historical and political context and not as a metaphysical being.

In other words, if we can get a clear picture of the time in which he lived, it reveals much about what he supposedly said.  Studying history is fascinating, but why spend so much time on one person in one tiny portion of the globe for one very short period of time?  Wouldn’t it be more important, and even more spiritual, to study now?  Let’s assume Jesus was an astute observer of life, and his message was different from the teachers of his time, because he was revolutionary, choosing not to look backwards. 

All religions eventually come up with the golden rule.  The basic direction of religion is to inspire people to be better people.  Do we really need to know about people and their problems 2,000 years ago, when we have plenty of people and problems now?  My guess is people would be more Christian if they forget the past and just worked and studied in the present to improve their own lives and help other people around them.

The only real reason to study Jesus is to study biblical history and that eventually leads to studying ancient politics and sociology.  I think the reason why there is so much scholarship on the historical Jesus is because his life is such a delicious mystery.  And if you study biblical times you’ll eventually migrate into classical studies and the study of prehistory.  It’s a deep well to fall into.  Obsessive scholars even take up ancient Greek and Latin.  Eventually these studies turn into the psychoanalysis of the western mind.  Look what happened to Bart D. Ehrman.  He started off as a Evangelical Christian and now he’s almost a  pure historian.

I’m not the kind of atheist that wants to convert the faithful to the scientific worldview.  I don’t want to argue The Bible with others.  I can live with an indifferent reality, but most people need the comfort of answers, even if they are fantasies.   I wish the religious wouldn’t kill each other, or go on jihads and crusades, but I can’t do much about that.  Attacking their beliefs doesn’t do much good.  I do think I contemplate many of the same concepts Jesus is said to have meditated on, and seek many of his same goals, but I just don’t believe any of the stories written about him after he died. 

I’m willing to accept Jesus as a philosopher, say like Plato.  But does he matter?  Not to me.  But then neither does Plato.  In terms of leading a good life one only needs to endlessly explore the golden rule.  The study of history is like the study of science, it is meant to explore the nature of reality.  In this content Jesus is the most famous person in history, and understanding why does matter.

JWH – 5/25/10

Three on a Match (1932)

three-on-a-match-bette-davis-joan-blondell-ann-dvorak

I wish I could put into words how I feel about old movies from the 1930s.  I wish I could understand why I love them.  I didn’t live through that era like my parents, not being born until 1951.  I grew up with black and white television and reruns of old films were a staple of TV stations back then, so that’s how I got hooked.  Millions of my fellow baby boomers growing up at the same time never learned to enjoy these films.

So why did I?  I think it has something to do with staying up late and watching them in the dark, with their flickering black and white light creating a strange alternate reality that imprinted on my mind.  I like to watch them best now late at night, when my mind is half dreamy, when they put me in a trance.

Last night I watched Three on a Match, a film I’ve seen before.  This DVD I got from Netflix is part of a collection called Forbidden Hollywood, Volume 2, a series that focuses on pre-code films (before hard censorship in 1934).  A good book that introduces that era is Sins in Soft Focus by Mark A. Vieira.  Many of the great pre-code films deal with feminist issues, and Three on a Match is one of them, even though it’s ending completely supports the status quo.

I think the best of modern movies are better made, better written, better acted than the old shows from the 1930s, but my soul resonates with the old black and white films.  Three on a Match is not a great movie, and most young people if they did watch it, would find it strange and clunky, if not silly and laughable.  For me, Three on a Match oozes history, both about life in America before 1932, and tinsel town.

What the moral police wanted back then, was to censor Hollywood from showing strong willed women.  The kind of women who wanted their own careers, or ones that wanted to explore their sexuality or escape the bondage of marriage, motherhood and even morality.  Three on a Match is actually a slight film, only 64 minutes, and much of that is filled with filler and back story.  Young Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart have minor roles in this film, but story is about Vivian Kirkwood, played by Ann Dvorak, who is little remembered today.

Vivian Kirkwood does well in school, marries a rich New York lawyer, and has a child, but is bored.  In the scene pictured above she runs into two old friends from school.  The Bette Davis and Joan Blondell characters envy Vivian’s success and can’t understand why she’s not happy.  The flaw in this film is the audience is not shown why she’s unhappy.  We are given in a few short scenes where Vivian avoids her husband, especially his touch, and shows little interest in her son.  I wanted much more.  Maybe real explanations were too explicit even for pre-code Hollywood.

Mrs. Kirkwood asks her husband, a slightly older man played by Warren William, if she can go off on a vacation without him. William, another forgotten star, is wise enough to indulge his wife.  He hates to see her take his son, who he dotes on, but feels the kid belongs with his mom, and assumes the mom is less likely to go running around if she has the kid.  He was wrong.  Three hours after her husband leaves her, Vivian takes up with low life Michael Loftus, nicely played by Lyle Talbot.  Everything happens way too fast in this movie.

The movie is too short, but well illustrated by a few key scenes.  Vivian gets caught up in parties, drinking, and even cocaine if you catch a gesture that Humphrey Bogart makes.  Ultimately, Vivian comes to a tragic, but heroic end.

I wished the movie had been twice as long so we could have gotten deeper into Vivian’s head.  What made her so unhappy with riches, marriage and motherhood?  What drove her to risk everything?  We know the subject all too well, because we see it happening to young women today, with modern films telling the same story far more explicitly, depicting girls taking a walk on the wild side, but are today’s films any better at explaining why?

Personally, I think Bette Davis or even Joan Blondell could have played Vivian Kirkwood better.  Ann Dvorak does a good job, but she doesn’t look the part.  Ann Dvorak looks more suited to play the Joan Blondell part, and we know Bette Davis had the personality for the role.

Even though this film was slight, it was delicious.  I almost feel like watching it again tonight, to savor the beautiful black and white cinematography and to study all the character actors, but I’ve got to watch the end of Lost tonight.

I’ve leave you with this clip that mostly shows the back story, but it has many fascinating news reel clips – especially notice the two girls dancing, something that couldn’t be shown after the code was enforced.  There is practically nothing in this clip that deals with the heart of this film, so don’t judge Three on a Match by it.  It’s design to showcase the music, and uses extra content from the film for imagery.

JWH – 5/23/10

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi just won the Nebula Award, and is one of the finalists for the Hugo Award to be announced at the end of summer.  Time, in their Top 10 Everything in 2009, called The Windup Girl the #9 novel of 2009.  Jason Sanford gave The Windup Girl five stars at SF Signal in his insightful review.  In fact, The Windup Girl gets so much great press I don’t think I should try to review it.  When I read Wake by Robert J. Sawyer, also up for this year’s Hugo award, it was so good I couldn’t imagine another novel beating it.  Well, The Windup Girl is such a tour de force that now I can’t imagine anything beating it.  I’ve got four more novels to read before September, including Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America by Robert Charles Wilson, that like The Windup Girl is another view of our world gone mad next century.

Look at the cover of The Windup Girl to see the future:

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Paolo Bacigalupi pictures the future without oil,  powered by weird clockwork “kink-spring” devices that stores kinetic energy, plagued by relentless blights on genetically engineered food crops, a future that struggles against the rising oceans and global warming, while enduring complex political intrigues.  But the most interesting aspect of this future is the new people, called windups, designed by gene splicing, who are outlawed and despised.  The title of the novel refers to an abandoned Japanese new person struggling to survive in Thailand as a sex slave.

As one of my reading friends told me, “The Windup Girl is dark.”  One reviewer even called it a dystopian novel, but I don’t think that’s correct.  Let’s just say it’s a very gritty future.  I suppose every century is full of hardships, so this future might not be any more bleak than the next.  If 19th century people could have read about a fictionalized but true version of the 20th century, they would think we lived through hell.  But the overall quality of life now is better than any time in the past, even though we might have millions complaining about how our present time sucks.

I really admire Bacigalupi’s creative vision of the future, but I don’t expect the 22nd century to be like The Windup Girl.  Our current problems, can be seen as evolving into the world of The Windup Girl, but on the other hand, I think by then we will have solved those problems and the 22nd century will have new problems we can’t imagine today.

No one can predict the future, but I’d like to believe in a future where we get smarter and solve our present problems.  But our world is diverse beyond any measure.  How would the past judge 2010 if they saw two films:  It’s Complicated and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?  One film shows the world as light-hearted and cheery, and the other as brutal and perverse.

If we read dozens of science fiction novels about the 22nd century, will they all be bleak?  I want life to be like Wake, where the problems are mathematical and scientific, which is why I liked that book so much.  I loved Wake, but I have to admire the creative writing of The Windup Girl.

JWH – 5/20/10

Netbooks: Windows 7 versus Linux

I’ve been playing with Linux since 1994, but it always disappoints me in use, even though I love the concept of Linux.  Recently, I thought Linux for the desktop was going to make it on netbooks.  My Toshiba netbook came with XP, and it was okay.  Because I didn’t depend on my netbook I felt like experimenting, and tried several netbook specific versions of Linux, including Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Jolicloud and Moblin.

They were cool, especially Jolicloud which tries to control it’s environment like the iPhone/iPad with HTML5 apps, but ultimately I discovered that Windows 7 was by far the best netbook OS for me.  I’m sure the Linux people will have technical reasons to argue that I’m wrong, but for me the aesthetics of how Windows 7 looked on the small screen, it’s speed of booting up, running and shutting down, and it’s battery life just seemed overwhelmingly obvious.  It’s a shame that XP still comes on some netbooks.

However, I’d gladly trade my Toshiba netbook for an iPad.  The small size of the netbook makes it useful for on-the-go computing, but ultimately, various needs will determine whether or not a user wants a netbook or tablet.  If I was a student taking a computer to class, I’d probably want a netbook, but I’m not a student.  Nor a traveling salesman.  I now wished I hadn’t bought a netbook because I think a iPad would better suit my portable at home needs.  And I might even be wrong about that too. I might be better served by a smartphone, like an iPhone or Android.

I’ve read that Windows 7 is too big and power hungry to run on tablet computers and compete with the iPad, and that’s a shame.  I’m very happy with Windows 7.  If I could afford to own a Mac OS machine it might compete, but I’m so happy with Windows 7 that I’m not sure I’d switch if the prices came down on Macs.  Having Windows 7 on my desktop, HTPC and netbook works so well it makes me not want more.  I’m OS satisfied with Windows 7.

After having Jolicloud and Windows 7 on the same machine for awhile, I realized that Windows 7 has won the OS war for me.  I removed Jolicloud, and I gave my second desktop I kept for Ubuntu away.  I now just have three machines: desktop, HTPC, netbook.  All run Windows 7 and they all talk to each other easily.

JWH – 5/14/10

Get Rid of Textbooks!

Every year I acquire a few K-12 textbooks that are given away where I work.  I am amazed at the quality of these textbooks as compared to those I studied 40-50 years ago.  Mine were much smaller, plainer, and simpler.   Modern textbooks are marvels of knowledge presented in beautiful full color multimedia layouts.  And they are HUGE.  If children are studying these books this generation should be the most well educated generation ever.  Then why all the bad press about failing schools and under achieving kids?  Could the textbooks be part of the problem?

At first glance modern K-12 textbooks look more comprehensive than my general education textbooks in college.  If high school students mastered these books they should be much smarter than college students from the baby boom era.  But then I got to thinking, maybe these giant tomes provide too much content for young people.  Could academic apathy just be a rejection of being over programmed?  Are we trying to stuff too much into growing minds?

I picked up these textbooks for reference works.  I can’t imagine being in the 11th grade and having to master five of them in nine months.  Three of the volumes I picked up this year where American Literature (10th), British Literature (11th) and World Literature (12th).  I got the teacher’s editions and each volume has hundreds, if not thousands of teaching suggestions, questions, quizzes, activities, etc.  This is a lot to learn and to teach.

The goal is the systematic injection of facts, more facts, and endless concepts.  On the surface, the desire to educate is motivated by wanting children to have a deep and wide knowledge of the world and history.  This is great in concept, but I’m wondering is its wrong.

I can imagine an interesting experiment for some school systems to try.  Take 11th graders, and instead of giving them a textbook on British Literature at the beginning of the year, start the year by telling them they are required to each edit and produce a textbook on British Literature to be handed in at the end of the year.  All great literature before the 1930s is available on the Internet in public domain versions, and even selections of copyrighted material after that is available.  Students could collect the content, write an introduction for each piece, and an analysis afterward.  They could do the layout and graphics, and if they wanted, have a hard copy printed-on-demand for less than the cost of buying a professional textbook.

Wouldn’t students learn more by doing?  Wouldn’t learning about British Literature be more fun as a treasure hunt than rote memorization?  Teachers could still guide the students lesson by lesson by discussing a required reading list, but they could also expect students to find their own supplemental reading.

Teachers could lecture on authors, assign a standard poem, story or essay for all to read, and then require students to collect additional works from the author’s output that they felt an affinity for, to add to their personal textbook/anthology.  Lesson plans could be built around students sharing their experiences.  Competition would arise to who could find the coolest works to collect.

And why not let the students collect art work, photos, letters, diaries, and other content to supplement their poems, stories and essays.  Encourage them to study history, science, social studies, economics, etc. to help explain their selections.

It we had students create their own textbooks they’d have a book for life they could keep, revise and expand, and it might be more memorable and meaningful than being forced to study a book for one year that they turned in when school was over.  Also, they would have something to show their kids and grandkids.

What if college acceptance was based on the textbooks they created in high school?  I know this is a bizarre, radical idea, but the Internet is changing our society in all kinds of ways.  With computers, software and the Internet, students shouldn’t have too much trouble creating their own textbooks, and imagine what kind of textbooks they could create for the iPad, which adds the dimensions of sound and video.

Instead of buying students hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks, buy them Adobe Creative Suite and require them to be creative.  Expect them to work instead of memorize, I believe they will learn more that way.  Can you imagine a K-12 system that was based on productivity instead of passive learning?  And students would learn so many practical skills as a byproduct of this kind of schooling.  And the same concept could be applied to all other courses. 

We might have more scientists, engineers and mathematicians if students spent their time doing productive work rather than memorizing.  K-12 students in the course of their academic careers should make a telescope and microscope, design a house, assemble a car, build reproductions of all the classic science experiments, reinvent mathematics century by century, put together a radio, television and computer, and so on.

Every school year in a student’s K-12 life is really trying to learn about reality from the Big Bang to the present.   We weave the language skills with math skills and then start studying the history of reality over and over again, with each school year expanding on the previous one.  That’s a lot of knowledge to catch up on.  Maybe kids would learn better by recreating how it was discovered rather than being forced to memorize the facts.

I remember my elementary, junior high and senior high years, they were like a 12 year prison sentence that I had to endure by sitting and being forced fed a curriculum not of my choosing.  Study, memorize, test, study, memorize, test.  It was all so painful.

JWH – 5/14/10