Max Bialystock in the Oval Office

An unprincipled, selfish charlatan bilks gullible people out of their money for years to support his failing enterprise. One day a clever accountant, noticing the fraud in his financial documents, remarks that  no one pays particular attention to financial failures, only to the successful ones. The grifter immediately sees an opportunity to score the mother of all scams by making sure his con is doomed to fail.

Enter one Donald J. Trump - a greedy, pompous charlatan with a penchant for unscrupulous and ultimately unsuccessful financial ventures, who has a serious cash flow problem. He learns that if he collects millions of dollars for a Presidential bid and loses, he can still keep the money and then fade back into relative obscurity.

His scheme backfired: the sure-fire failure succeeded, despite breaking every accepted rule of civilized political behavior. Now the spotlight shines brightly on him and his enablers and it remains to be seen if he will suffer the same fate as Bialystock and Bloom.

Does Christ Have to be the Son of God?

There are very intelligent people who consider themselves devout Christians but do not follow a literal reading of the Bible. Their faith comes out of choosing to believe that there is a power in the universe greater than ourselves, whatever that power might be and the story of Jesus provides a moral and ethical foundation for that belief and a spiritual guide on how life should be lived.

In a historical context, there had to be validity to accept the teachings of Jesus, especially to Jews who followed a strict, ancient set of rules. To teach ways of living that modified or contradicted those rules required the acceptance that he was not just a prophet but of God itself and not just by magical feats, such as healing the sick, walking on water, and turning water into wine, but by rising from death himself.

Of course, any of those events - including the virgin birth - can be explained away with very convincing arguments which leaves the question: do we need to deify Christ in order to follow his teachings? And if we can dismiss the supernatural aspects, is there purpose or value in the rituals of the Christian churches in which we participate, such as Baptism and communion?

I think there is, and I will tell you why and leave it to you to decide whether the analogy is valid.

A number of years ago I heard about a study of school districts that had taught elementary math using modern methods, stressing understanding of mathematical concepts, and others that used more traditional rote methods where the times tables and basic rules were drilled into the students rigorously. They found that the students who had been taught with the traditional way fared better when studying higher mathematics.

The point? Perhaps the rituals of repeated reminders of the events that formed the person whom we choose to follow is such a not a quaint waste of time.

Randomness

Do we love God because we fear randomness in the world? If the universe is more orderly than chaotic does every event have a purpose? Fear of randomness informs our politics. Do we love computers because they are predictable and only logical?

How did we become so shallow and superficial?

American Balance of Terror

I've come to see the overarching tension in American society as that which exists between the intellectually struggling and those who fit comfortably in an increasingly complex world.

The former are terrified about being controlled by the brightest and most powerful while they, in turn, are terrified that those who fear them have all the guns. It stands to reason, then, that as more people are replaced with high-tech machinery the more guns will be sold to the economically displaced - like narcotics giving the illusion of safety, power and well-being.

American Power

I had a conversation with my father a number of years back after purchasing a handgun, ostensibly for personal protection. He told me about being on guard duty when he was a sailor during World War II and feeling a great sense of power when he strapped on the .45 caliber sidearm. He said it changed his whole personality and gave him the illusion of being strong and safe.

I thought about that for the longest time and began to understand what he had experienced in a broader context.

Human beings are not inherently strong creatures. To survive in the wild against predators and competitors, and even the environment, man had to multiply his power through the skilled use of material and objects available to him. Those who developed the necessary skills survived and those who did not either perished or were dependent on those who had.

But the greatest power was enjoyed by those who mastered the skills of fire creation and management.

With the power of fire, he could produce metals to create tools and weapons that gave skilled users even greater control of their environment and human competitors. Applying fire to other elements produced effects that multiplied human power even further and those with the ability to control that power developed an immense sense of personal power.

With such power at man’s disposal it could be directed, at man’s pleasure, towards constructive or destructive purposes.

Explosives - put within reach of any person wealthy or clever enough to obtain them - allowed the destructive release of power by anyone with evil intentions. When man discovered how to release the monstrous power of the atom on his fellow man his actions became collectively less impulsive simply out of the need for self- preservation. No longer could there be unbounded warfare between nations as man’s desire for domination, power and control had clashed with its primal instinct for survival.

This self-imposed discipline forced humans to advance the power of weapons of less-than-mass destruction: bigger and more massive bombs delivered more precisely, guns that fire more bullets in shorter amounts of time, and pilot-less planes with deadly weaponry controlled by operators thousands of miles away.

Americans could now vicariously strap on instruments of destructive power and, through ubiquitous video, feel like part of the action. And if the reality of actual mayhem was not satisfying enough, 21^st century man (and woman) could boot up a simulated battle game so gruesome and detailed that the player could experience an intoxicatingly rapturous sense of power and triumph.

But the greater society’s technological advances, the more numerous were those who felt hopelessly removed from involvement in the manifestations of those advances leaving them with feelings of powerlessness and questioning their very purpose in life.

A gun is the basic switch that provides the impotent the ability to express destructive power in a final desperate attempt to attach significance to their lives. The greater the feeling of powerlessness in a society out of reach the greater the need for the comfort of the power-restoring gun.

We like to defend our fondness of guns with the platitude “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” but do not acknowledge that a person who has a gun in hand is mentally not the same person as one who does not. They are living in a different reality. 

• Taking Responsibility for Your Faith

How many people with a deep, abiding religious faith would admit that they have their faith because they have chosen to have that faith? While it may sound like a statement of the obvious, we like to think the faith we hold so dearly is above human choice or something that can be as casually selected as which cereal to eat for breakfast.

Ask someone why they have their faith (or just faith, as no one wants to believe their chosen faith is their own) and you might get answers such as "because I am a believer" or "because the bible tells me so". My sense is that the more fundamental and unquestionable one's religious beliefs are the less they are willing to take responsibility for their faith: God said it, I believe it. Their own choice in the matter never comes into play.

Is that a problem? I think so. The 9/11 terrorists would never have crashed the planes into the World Trade Center if they thought they had any choice in the matter; they were on a holy mission from God as interpreted by Osama bin Laden, a holy man much smarter than they. His articulation of God's commands compelled them to die for God's glory. Even the promise of the heavenly virgins was considered a gift from God, and not a tale they chose to believe. No choice, no responsibility.

That is an extreme case but we can see in our own society- and even in our holy scriptures - cases where by removing our choice in matters of faith we abdicate responsibility for our actions deferring to a higher authority, that, of course, is channeled through someone we believe has a closer, more authentic relationship with God.

But, what about when we recognize that we are responding to a calling from a higher power? We like to think that a calling that sends us on a noble course is a calling from God; a course that only could have come from God. Are we not choosing to believe that calling came from a higher power, noble, rational and even logical as that choice might be? Does admitting to ourselves that we were compelled more intellectually than spiritually in any way diminish the nobility or authenticity of our chosen life commitment?

I think not. If we hold as faith that God calls us through options presented to us and we choose ones that  honor and respect the words of God - whatever  we choose to believe those words are - then we have honored and respected God, not just simply followed God in the direction we choose to believe he is leading us.

• Hearing God

I remember buying my first CD player in 1985, convinced that the precision of the digital recording technology would produce music of incomparable fidelity. After all, vinyl records still used the same basic analog recording technology pioneered by Edison over one hundred years earlier. Mechanically or electronically amplified sound waves moved a stylus that etched analogous patterns into a soft medium. These patterns could be copied onto disks that were easily damaged and could suffer just from frequent playing. And the need to limit the spacing of the grooves imposed a corresponding limitation on the dynamic range of the recorded sounds.

To prove what I expected to be true, I purchased the highest-quality vinyl recording I could find - RCA Red Seal 1/2 speed mastered of a Tchaikovsky symphony played by the London Symphony Orchestra - and the same album on compact disk. I started the CD and album as closely to the same time as I could, turned my back to the stereo and asked a friend to switch the output between the two recordings. I would raise my hand when I thought what was being fed to the speakers was the superior sound. To my great amazement, puzzlement, an disappointment, I had chosen the vinyl recording over the CD each time.

But those recordings were unfamiliar to me. Maybe if I compared music that I knew well and  listened to closely and often in the past would I be able to make a much better distinction. Off to the record store to find CDs of Hendrix's Electric Ladyland and Santana's Abraxas. Both albums had songs with passages that would blow the back of your head off even at normal volume levels and without the influence of drugs.

To eliminate room acoustics as a factor I used a high quality pair of headphones and queued up All along the Watchtower. Two minutes into it I felt the hair on my head stand on end as Jimi made his guitar moan. Same as it ever was. Now for the CD and what I hoped would be an out-of-body experience. I braced myself and at the big moment...nothing. It was like the difference between looking through a pane of fine crystal and a sheet of transparent plastic. How could that be?

Fast-forward twenty years. I'm listening to a performance of bell-ringers during a church service and I hear the answer.

CDs - or any digital recording, for that matter - include only the amount of  the recorded audio that the engineers who designed CDs decided was adequate to capture the range of audio frequencies the the human ear can hear. So, about 44,000 times per second the sound to be recorded is sampled. When played back, we hear only those samples converted back into sound waves that approximate what was originally recorded. The engineer's thinking went if the ear can't hear it then it won't be missed if it's not there.

But when the bell ringers struck their bells, the crystal-clear sound waves propagated off those instruments in a wide range of frequencies and faded from loud to silent in a progression of infinite steps. It was not music carved up into discrete portions that rose and decayed at a fixed rate. It was the type of sound that could only be produced in a manner intended by God. If God is infinite, then I was listening to the echoes of heaven. And even though Jimi Hendrix's guitar was highly amplified and processed before it was recorded as grooves on a vinyl disk, those squiggles were direct paintings of vibrations of the air created when he plucked his guitar strings. There was a direct relationship between those etched vinyl patterns and the waves coming off his guitar. Nowhere in the process were the vibrations converted to binary numbers representing the parts of the music deemed "good enough".

In our search to be like God, at best we can only ever come close; something is always missing.