About my father

My father married my mother in the late 1960s; she was 17 and he was 34. She was a Unitarian Universalist and he was a Jew. My mother doesn't say so, largely because of her love for her children, but it was probably one of the biggest mistakes of her life.

My sister was born nine months to the day after the wedding, one day after my mother's 18th birthday. I was born about two and a half years later. Sometime between, my mother converted to Judaism, and in the process became probably more knowledgeable about the religion than my father was. I'm pretty sure my father had a very secular Jewish upbringing; he hardly spoke any Hebrew, and didn't seem to understand kosher rules. (My mother told me one time my father asked for a ham sandwich for lunch, but he wanted it on matzoh because it was Passover.)

My parents divorced when I was two. I actually have two faint memories of them being together; in both of them, they are fighting. My mother didn't tell me until years later that the reason she left was because he was physically abusive. She took us kids and went back to her parents. On the first day of my sister's first grade, my father showed up and took her from school. He hid her away somewhere and came to take me; I also dimly remember this happening, and my grandfather blocking him from coming in the house. Eventually, the court gave my father custody of my sister and my mother custody of me. There was a joint custody arrangement that focused on Jewish holidays; if Passover fell on school's spring break, we would spend that week with my dad, and if Hannukah fell on the winter break, the same. I took a lot of flights as a child, as my father lived in Silicon Valley, and my mother lived in the greater Los Angeles area.

My father was abusive, mainly emotionally and not physically to us. (He actually spanked me just one time, but I honestly feel it was appropriate and I respected him for it.) My sister told me one time she forgot to take out the trash the day before her birthday, and that next morning, dad dumped the trash on her bed and told her that her party was canceled. Most of my fights with my dad were over food, as I was a picky eater, and he wouldn't accept it. If I didn't clear off my plate, he would often save my leftovers to serve to me at the next meal, refusing to give me any other food. This was a battle we both lost, as he wouldn't get me to eat it, and I would starve until my visit was over. One time, I remember completely finishing everything on my plate and he loaded me up with seconds I didn't ask for; when I didn't finish, he refused to give me dessert. This happened to be at my aunt's house, and everyone in the family told him he was being unreasonable, but I got no dessert anyway.

While my father worked as a disk jockey in the early years of his marriage to my mother, eventually, he got a nursing license. He seemed to really love the job, and took a lot of pride in his work. He worked in the emergency room most of the time, I think, as he often had stories of people coming into the hospital in very bad shape. Something that my father managed to drill into me effectively was a fear of motorcycles. He somehow found out that my stepfather had a motorcycle, and he always told me that he wanted to take me on a tour of the ICU to see all the mangled bodies of people who had been in motorcycle accidents. I would always turn him down and assure him I didn't need to be convinced, and I really didn't. I've only been on a motorcycle once in my life, and I was terrified.

While I tend to say a lot of bad stuff about my father, because I think it's the traumatic stuff that sticks in your head, I think the majority of the time I spent with him was positive. He had a great sense of humor and was always trying to find fun things to do with us. I really loved my dad and looked forward to visiting him, despite knowing there were bound to be unpleasant parts to every trip. He knew I liked visiting (and I think my sister did too after my mother regained custody years later) but wouldn't want to live with him year-round.

Most of the family was convinced he had undiagnosed mental illness of some sort. Part of that problem was his apparent inability to understand that love wasn't like pie where he had to compete with my mother for his share of our love. I truly loved him as much as I loved my mother, but could never convince him of that. He spent far too much time trying to convince me that my mother was a terrible person, something my mother never did in return. The fact that I preferred to live with her convinced him that I didn't love him enough, and his insecurity showed. One time, he actually offered to buy me an Apple II computer if I agreed to live with him. I was dismayed that he would stoop to bribing me for choosing him; although I knew what bribery was, I couldn't put into words what I felt, as I didn't want to put it that bluntly.

We went to synagogue with my father, and as a child, I was just as curious about religion as I am today. I would often ask him questions about Judaism, to which he would usually tell me not to question. I thought you weren't supposed to ask questions as a Jew, which was very unsatisfying for me. I really believe that if my questions had been answered, I'd very likely still be an observant Jew today. I realized as an adult that it was just my dad's ignorance that stopped my questions, and Jews are actually generally encouraged to question. My father should have directed me to ask the Rabbi instead of shutting me up, or maybe supplied me with books about Judaism. I actually believe I learned far more about the Jewish religion after I became a Christian than before. Knowing so little was a big part of why I left Judaism.

When I was twelve, my father called me on the phone and told me he had just returned from a trip to Israel. He had decided that in order to be a good, observant Jew, he had to go and live there. He asked me if I was coming with him. My mind reeled at this question. Leave everything I had ever known behind? I'd never been outside California, much less the country. Do they even speak English in Israel? My Hebrew was very meager. Except for apparently my dad now, all of my family was here in America. I told him no. "You don't love me then," he said, and hung up. Nobody in my life has ever approached saying anything that hurt me as much as those five words. It was like being stabbed in the heart.

I canceled my bar mitzvah, and walked away from Judaism. I realized that everything Jewish I was doing in my life was to please my dad, and not to please God, so why bother? For years, I called myself an atheist, although it wasn't that I didn't beilieve in God, I just didn't believe in religion.

Somewhere around 25 years later, my sister informed me that she had discovered that my father had moved back to the US, and had lost his nursing license. There was a legal document describing an incident when he was working at a nursing home, and after an elderly patient soiled himself, my father beat him with his fists. We didn't attempt to reconnect.

At about 30 years, he wrote my sister and me letters expressing a desire to catch up with us. It didn't seem particularly sincere (he said he had been searching for us for years, but my mother had the same mailing address she had when I was twelve), and both of us forgave him for the hurt he had inflicted on us 30 years previously (which he claimed to not recall, perhaps sincerely, perhaps not) and told him we were only interested in reconnecting if he truly wanted it. He didn't write back.

Now at about 40 years on, this week my sister received a letter informing her that a reading of my father's will is taking place in mid-January, so it seems he is dead. I didn't know how I would feel about this until now. It seems I feel nothing. I loved my father very much, but perhaps he died to me when I was twelve years old, and he hung up that phone on me. I wish I could have told him that he was being unreasonable, and we didn't have to end our relationship because he was leaving the country. I wish I could have told him that if my mother had gone crazy and decided she needed to join her ancestors in England, I would have moved in with him. I wish he had known that I loved him as much as I loved my mother, and in the time he was in my life, one of the driving emotional needs in my life was to have him approve of me and be proud of me, and it was sad that that never seemed to happen.

.נוח על משכבך בשלום, אבא

Facing the truth

I suppose I ought to file a followup report, so to speak. I decided to break down and finally join Facebook.

I gotta say, it's been fun. I just signed up less than two days ago, and I already have 51 "friends". Now, none of these people are strangers, but admittedly a few of them are people that I probably wouldn't have shed a tear over not getting to contact again someday. (I won't mention who, just in case someone comes to read this and gets their feelings hurt; not that I think it's likely many of them care so much either.)

It's been eventful, too, not just "friendful" if I may coin the term. I recontacted an old friend I haven't seen in nearly 20 years who just happened to join the day before I did. I found out another old friend just got engaged. I had another friend about whom I was thinking "I wonder if this person is still friends with so-and-so," to immediately find that "so-and-so" had just sent me a friend request. And the cherry on top was probably connecting to an old friend whose immediate action upon "friending" me was to post an 18-year-old picture of me with a condom on my head.

Actually, there were certain things that are interesting in a more cerebral way. One friend pointed me to a tool that would map how my "friends" were "friends" of each other, revealing that although everyone seemed to be immediately connected, in fact I seemed to have two or three "clusters" of friends: people from my the town where I grew up, and people from a place where I used to work and my church. It was interesting to think about how looking at specifically the "friends" that I have, those clusters seemed to form, and I suspect that many other people would also find their "friends" forming into the same sort of clusters, and yet while clustering is no doubt common, if one were to look at the whole community of Facebook in a relational diagram, the fact that everyone belongs to various peoples' clusters in different ways implies that the overall effect would be more difficult to show in a diagram than the structure of this massive run-on sentence you're reading.

Of course, such thought, along with others made me think about the whole "six degrees of separation" concept (One of Will Smith's early movies, and very good!) and how Facebook plays into that. There was actually a "six degrees of separation" group that one could join, the purpose of which was to see if everyone in Facebook was connected in such a manner. I actually don't doubt it after the small taste I had, or at least that something like, say, 98% of Facebook members with at least two friends are part of the same interconnected mass of digital humanity. Really, there's something interesting about the way it works as an experiment in social dynamics.

As well as everyone being there, it seemed as well like every thing was there. The six degrees group was just one of thousands. I thought I'd join a group of fans of the show "House, M.D." and found myself wondering which one of the dozens there were to join. Any television show, any movie, any book, any celebrity or other pop culture phenomenon in the world probably has a fan club on Facebook. (Yes, they have a fan club for gay penguins, I checked.)

Now, do I feel more connected? Yeah, a little. I'd still rather spend time with my wife and kids, though.

A death in the family

It's an odd sensation to pick up the newspaper or, in my case, a magazine, and find out for the first time about the death of a family member. Not that it was a close family member, nor that I was unaware of the fact that they were dead. Actually, the real news was the former: the fact that they were not as close a relation as I had been led to believe.

Of course, as I'm sure you realized the instant you began reading this that the relative I was talking about was homo erectus, who apparently died, oh, tens of thousands of years ago, I guess, I don't know the specifics. I was reading a fascinating article in Newsweek on a number of interesting developments in the study of human evolution, and I marveled, not at the information, but at the manner of presentation of the information, and the implications it might have for both those who put their trust in fundamentalist Christian dogma about the origins of man and those who put their faith in Darwin, or whatever, I think you know what I mean, although I am here and no doubt throughout this writing going to be far less than scientifically precise. Here I present another meandering musing on evolutionary theory that may be almost as random and aimless as the supposed forces of natural selection themselves.

So anyway, it turns out that the paternity test came back, and erectus is not the baby's father. The article itself is vague on exactly when the test was performed, but really, when erectus has been gone for thousands of years, it's not clear exactly how much it matters; suffice it to say that the suspected connection was never there, at least not in the way many scientists suspected. Rather than being our father, the family tree of the hominids that is now considered more accurate shows erectus as a sort of "first cousin twice removed" or grand-uncle, something of the sort. I don't know whether this came as a surprise to evolutionary scientists, but it sure does seem to have come as a surprise to the author of the article. Homo erectus was a species that, according to what is known about it, managed to thrive for around two million years and spread across various parts of three continents. They didn't make tools, or at least not more than very crude ones, but they walked upright, looked a lot like modern humans and are believed to have had a pretty good cognitive ability, based on what appears to be the structures of the brain. Still, they died out, and--along with homo neanderthalensis--seem to have not been our ancestors, nor the ancestors of any living species.

The author of the article seems to be very surprised to find that such seemingly advanced species of hominids could have lived and yet not been our ancestors. "More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later." The author's view of evolution is interesting to me, both because many of the things they seem to find surprising seem obvious to me, and because it's the sort of surprise that I think for some people may be based on commonly-accepted ideas of evolutionary theory. If evolution is indeed an unguided force of nature (more or less, "force" may be a poor choice of words) then why not create something randomly that turns out not to be useful at the time it's created? Heck, species die out all the time, so why should it be so unusual that hominid species have also done so, even if they were similar to other ones that did survive?

For that matter, does the author really think of evolution as an unguided force? Would one say of an impersonal force, "evolution created", or "let it go", or "trying again"? It sounds more like the description of a cosmic tinkerer or scientist, trying little experiments to see what happens. Of course, that's hardly the view of any world religions I know, either, which is why this evidence, while it "upended traditional ideas" about evolutionary theory hardly gives weight to creationism. Certainly the God of the Bible isn't the sort of being that would have created numerous nearly-human species just to let them die out, right?

Both the author's view of an age-old understanding of evolution and the implications of a theory of theistic evolution favor the idea that human descent is a matter of a straightforward, linear progression of "{Sahelanthropus tchadensis} begat Australopithecus who begat Homo habilis who begat Homo erectus who begat Homo sapiens." Of course now it would seem that few if any of these ancient hominids are direct descendants of our modern species. There are two mistaken assumptions here, firstly that evolution is linear, and second that the whole point of evolution is to yield an end product of homo sapiens. Both of these concepts are worth exploring, though.

The author says about these dead-end branches that "It's like discovering that your great-great-grandfather was not an only child as you'd thought, but had a number of siblings who, for unknown reasons, left no descendants." I say, is that so momentous? My grandfather was into genealogy, and it's interesting to me to note that while scientific studies of genealogy like to focus on the Y-chromosome as a pointer to study lineage, my grandfather has left behind no descendants with his Y-chromosome. On that side of my family, I have only one male cousin, and he, like me, was born of one of our grandfather's daughters, while my grandfather's only son has only daughters himself. Now that Y-chromosome may exist in a distant relative somewhere--and probably does, actually--but if by odd chance there was a genetic mutation in my grandfather's Y-chromosome that might have been significant in some way, the world will never know. If it happens on a small scale with my own maternal family (and possibly paternal family, as I have no sons or brothers), then why not on a larger scale? That being said, while those branches seem obviously likely to exist to me, it's not completely wrong to look at evolution as a linear process in one sense, because my own Y-chromosome came from a direct line of male descendants before me, obviously, and if you wanted to track its origin, my lack of genetically significant male cousins doesn't matter at all. Homo erectus may be interesting biologically, but only tells us things about who we are indirectly.

As for the concept of evolution being directed at the creation of modern humans, oddly this is a sort of yes and no, and it's only yes due to random chance, one might suppose. It seems sometimes like humans are the pinnacle of life on this planet, but that's only out of an anthropocentrist sort of view. Evolution seems to focus on humanity because the study of evolution largely focuses on human evolution. Biological science will no doubt study all life, but put its primary focus on our own life because, despite occasional claims to the contrary, we as a society do try to use science to answer the same questions we struggle with in religion. We want to know how we got here, and what possible purpose we may have in being here. Sometimes it may make us forget that science does try to be dispassionate and unbiased as much as it can be. It makes sense to want to study ourselves, but in doing so, we inflate our own abstract sense of self-worth sometimes, and pure science doesn't give us that. To the undirected force of evolution, while today we may be the dominant species, thousands of years from now we may be another homo heidelbergensis: a stepping stone to a new, more advanced species, or tomorrow's homo erectus: just another evolutionary dead-end. That being said, while in a grander scale our place in the order of things may be temporary, at the moment we may indeed stand at the apex of the animal kingdom.

But as we stand at the summit and view those others that fell off of cliffs along the climb here, the surprise at what we see is interesting. While I strongly suspect the author is perhaps somewhat clumsily presenting information in a newsweekly that's not really "news" (I mean, aside from the fact that this is all stuff that happened hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago), there was a time not too long ago when this information was being newly processed by scientists and shaking up their own more sophisticated assumptions of hominid descent. After all, it's only been a little over 150 years since the first skull of a neanderthal was discovered, making scientists start to think more deeply about our biological place in the world, but every time a discovery is made, claims are made about what significance such and such fossil has, charts are rearranged to reflect new thinking, and human evolution is turned upside down, shaken out of its box and put back together.

Even now that we have begun to use more sophisticated methods of examining fossils, including DNA analysis (although I don't understand how one gets DNA from a fossil, but no matter) there seems to be a lot of assuming going on. In the opening of the article, we are assured that "...DNA...accumulates changes at a regular rate." Later, we are told that (my emphasis) "...DNA changes at a fairly regular rate." Technicality, right? Molecular biologists supposedly can use this rate of change like a clock, which is why we are told about it, but then about halfway through the article we are told of a specific gene:

It had changed in only two of its 118 chemical "letters" from 310 million years ago (when the lineages of chickens and chimps split) to 5 million years ago. But 18 letters changed in the (relative) blink of an eye since the human lineage split from chimps'...

How's that? We know that the change is regular, except when it's not regular? It seems that in these huge time scales of millions of years, so much is assumed. The article tells an interesting tale of how DNA of body lice tells us that they evolved about 114,000 years ago, and since they live in the habitat of human clothing, that must be when we evolved to lose most of our body hair. Oh, it's a fascinating theory, no doubt, but then, does it really make sense?

Why evolve to lose our body hair if it's just going to force us to invent clothing to keep ourselves warm? Why not invent clothing, which leads to the evolution of body lice, which between the two leads us to evolve to lose body hair, since clothing means it is no longer needed, and it's easier to delouse if you have less hair? Could we have the cause and effect backwards? Not to mention the fact that there are plenty people alive today that still have lots and lots of body hair, so it's not quite a common trait of the whole species.

And how do we really know what is a common trait of a whole species? The briefly-mentioned sahelanthropus tchadensis had a big part to play in rearranging the diagrams of hominid descent with its discovery, but then it's only a single fossil! Using the family tree metaphor again, it seems sort of like finding a single picture of a man in an old family photo album who looks sort of Italian, and dumping out all the pictures in your (non-Italian) family's album to rearrange the lot of them. Surely there must be a more rational approach, but then I'm not a photo album arranger, nor am I a biologist. Still, if a person who's never been to the U.S. saw a broadcast of a basketball game from Houston, would they be fair to assume that there exists in the U.S. a race of seven-foot-tall Chinese men?

My personal observation on all of this? There are far too many fossils of our ancient, branching family tree to deny that there is something to the theory of human evolution, but at the same time, there seem to be far too few fossils to say anything about it with definitive surety. Maybe in the end I will be proven wrong, but it seems to me that the science of evolution, in studying things that happened millions of years ago that left behind scant evidence, we operate far more on speculation than anything else.

Awakening the sleeping dad

After complaining about my own lack of consistent posting in my other blog, I've now gone over a week without posting at either of my blogs. It's not like I have a big enough audience of regular readers that I really need to explain myself, but I guess I personally feel the need. Plus, it gives me a chance to vent and complain, which we all really enjoy don't we? Or is it just me? (I noticed a few years back that I am actually entertained by the rants of people who seem to complain all the time. Whether it's an unexplainable personality quirk of mine or whether hearing other people's complaints makes me feel better about my own life, I don't know. I've always said that that's why I enjoy listening to The Smiths, who, for those of you not familiar, here's the lyrics of one of their biggest hits. I pop in an old tape, and the more pathetic Morrissey gets, the more cheerful I get. Go figure.)

Anyway, the thing that's getting me down is just life in general. As I'm sure I must have mentioned, I'm working two jobs right now, and it's wearing me out. I like a good solid eight hours of sleep, but tend to get four most nights these days. It's not fun making just enough money to get by while you don't get sufficient sleep or time together with your family. The way it's affecting my blogs is that I don't seem to have the mental energy to think coherently enough to write in a manner that feels proper to me. I actually have several unfinished posts stored up in this blog, and one in the other, but when I go to write on them, it doesn't sound right. For now, writing a little post of personal complaint, I feel more accepting of sloppiness, but the post I was working on this Monday seemed like an important one, and pretty much every post on my other blog is one I consider important. (And anyway, Exodus 21 is a really tough chapter to comment on!) The random gibberish that I type in a half-sleeping haze just doesn't seem sufficient for some topics.

Perhaps the worst of it for me personally was Tuesday. Blogs aside, which in the grand scheme of things are of course nothing, I got up before the sun, and came home after dark, never seeing my family at all. That sucks. I remember the one thing I worried about when I got a second job was that I'd turn out to be like my father.

Time for personal disclosure here. When I was two, my parents divorced, and so I really have virtually no memories of my parents together. (I do have a few, which surprises me, as I don't know that many people remember being two years old.) Most of my early childhood was spent with my mom, with something like twice-yearly visits to my dad's house. My dad at that time worked as a nurse, pulling the graveyard shift at the hospital. He always told me that doing graveyard was a great opportunity, because he was able to pull down lots of hours, since nobody wanted the shifts. However, on those twice yearly visits, he didn't often take time from work, and I would sit and watch television while he slept off the night shift. I wanted desperately to spend time with my dad, and grew to dispise his work and his dedication to it. Oddly enough, as an adult, I get a feeling of comfort rather than unease that most others feel when visiting the hospital; somehow I associate it with something warm and parental.

When I was discussing with my wife whether or not to get a second job, it was something I mentioned to her: the fact that my dad was someone who, from my point of view, seemed to sleep through my childhood. I didn't want to be that for my children. I wanted to be someone who would hear "Yay! Daddy's home!" rather than "Shhh! Daddy's home." and have my children wonder who I was beyond a snoring lump in the master bedroom.

The thing is, this is the sort of thing that I hope people only do because they have to, while I suspect my father did it because somewhere inside, he valued money more than relationships. This is the part where I start to feel sad about other people's problems rather than enjoying hearing complaints, because the people with the real problems in life hardly ever seem to be the ones complaining; they're too busy working to dig themselves out of their problems. I can complain, but in the end, this is only a temporary thing. My wife will be going back to work soon part time, as my childen are now old enough to start preschool. I'll drop my second job, and get some training to start a new career that will bring me more income. I've got a Bachelor's degree, and am looking to get a Master's in the future, and I have a lot of opportunity for upward mobility, even though my present situation is far from ideal. I'm not looking to own a big house and a fancy sports car, only to live my life with my family with some savings in the bank for emergencies and knowing that I will be able to send my children to college some day if they choose to go there (which I hope they will). I really think that I'll get there some day, maybe even within the next year or so. I also realize that there are many, many people who are not only not there, but will never get there.

There are people out there with families to support that they have to work two full-time jobs at minimum wage in order to do so, and their children must hardly know them. They sacrifice having the sort of personal relationship that (I hope) we all want to have with our children, not for a brighter future, but so that they don't starve. Sometimes it seems like one of the biggest injustices in life: that there are people who are trying hard to make life and families work, and are contributing to society in an irreplaceable manner no doubt, but never quite make things work out for themselves. Call me an anti-capitalist, but I have a hard time stomaching people who make millions of dollars who are doing it only for the purpose of making tons of money while there are others making next to nothing who only want to feed their children and put a roof over their heads.

So, depressed over my blog, depressed over my own problems, depressed over other people's problems, and even depressed over other people's successes, I take a moment out to complain. I hope I have entertained.

What's up with the youth in Asia?

So, I got official word yesterday. Turns out it wasn't a bruise after all. The lump on my cat's shoulder, which grew rather than shrinking away, is in fact a serious tumor.

It's serious enough that I very likely am going to have to consider having her put down. She's already clearly in some discomfort, no longer walking on that leg, but you never know... If our cat could talk and understand the situation, would she rather be dead than struggle through pain that is probably slowly increasing day after day? Or is that even a question that should be asked?

One of the hard things for some people to understand is that morality isn't often about what someone wants so much as what is right, independent of desires. I hear it come up in various discussions of numerous moral issues that it would be unloving to not let a person do {fill in the blank} if they really wanted to do it. If my cat really wants to die, does that mean it's right to have her put down?

Of course, for most people, this issue is easier with animals than fellow humans, where the issue nonetheless comes up. What I end up deciding about my cat and her treatment is likely to be largely based on affordability. The vet has suggested that the oncological surgeon would most likely charge over $1,000 for the removal of the tumor, and it's unlikely that I could justify that expense. On the other hand, if it were my wife or one of my kids with the tumor, I wouldn't be deterred by a price tag of $1 million. But what if it was my wife, and she just wanted me to let her go?

This sort of thing enters not just muddied waters morally, but legally. I don't know what the legal status of human euthanasia is here, but there is probably a difference between choosing to not treat a deadly tumor because the patient doesn't want treatment, and giving a cancer patient a lethal dose of pain medication. Generally, the former is not considered murder, while it's much more likely the latter is. But then, whatever individuals think of it, most likely the real issue is that morality trumps legality anyway, even though morality is less often as clear-cut.

Oh it is clear-cut, people will assure you. The value of human life is without measure. You don't have the right to choose who will live and who will die. Maybe, but then, by that standard, perhaps choosing no treatment at all is the only moral choice, since you leave the fate of the person with the tumor entirely in the hands of God, rather than anything else, right? Some people probably actually have this view, but I'd suspect it's a rare one. More likely, people claim that anything that one can do to preserve human life simply must be done, and no price tag is too high. Fight that tumor with everything you can throw at it, and extend the life of the patient in any way possible. Furthermore, of course one should never assume people in comas or folks like Terri Schiavo are actually dead unless their bodies finally refuse to function. And on top of that, of course, no abortions.

But do we really believe that as a society? Do we really think human life has value without limit? Would you do anything you could within your power to avoid letting people die? You know, lots of people die in car crashes every year. Lots and lots of them. Souldn't you stop driving a car? That would also cut down on pollution, which would reduce cancer rates, and now to think of it, utilizing fossil fuels in any way increases pollution as well, so you probably should not do anything that directly or indirectly uses them. After all, you could save a life! No, we as a society place a finite value on human life, and really, we should, because if we're making mental calculations as to the value of our actions, you know that throwing in a value like "infinity" makes things difficult to factor out. What if you have to choose between one life or another? How do you choose that?

Getting back to what started this, there is still a question that I think can be asked. If life (and human life in particular) has such a high value, isn't it possible that we can be dishonoring that value by letting it exist at times? In the case of my cat, her value to herself is the value to run and play and eat and climb into people's laps. To us, her value is our enjoyment of seeing her happy, and letting her be an active part of our lives. If the time comes that she can no longer enjoy these things, and we can no longer bear to see her suffering bringing no joy to anyone, doesn't it cheapen the value of her life as it existed before to let it continue as it is now? I don't know, but it's something that shakes me at times.

Personally, I find euthanasia distasteful, but I wonder if it's what we sometimes conveniently call a "necessary evil". I don't want my cat to die. But I wonder if not only the humane thing to do is to have her put down, but maybe even to do it myself rather than a stranger in a lab coat in a scary place far from home. Does a loved one wasting away on her death bed in pain and suffering have value? Her life essentially over with no hope of recovery, and nothing but pain and loneliness, what value is that? Yes, we as Christians believe there is value in a human soul, but what good does it do the soul to keep it trapped in a decaying body?

Years after my grandmother died after a painful bout with cancer, I heard a rumor that some of my relatives brought it upon themselves to inject her with morphine in her sleep, ensuring she wouldn't wake up to another day of suffering. It shocked me. While I don't know if it's true, I do wonder if it may have been morally right. It's too big of a question for me.

Imagine no John Lennon

As what seems to me to be an interesting bit of coincidence, I was thinking about the subject of John Lennon's death this morning, having no clue that today was the 25th anniversary of his murder. The song "Imagine" was stuck in my head, and I don't think I had heard it on the radio or anything, and it got me to thinking about that song that which I usually do. Namely, that John Lennon's funeral seems like just about the only funeral at which playing the song would be appropriate.

About 15 years ago, my family got together for a memorial service for my grandmother who had passed away about a month previously, and the first thing we did at the actual service was have my sister and cousin sing "Imagine". Even being a non-Christian at the time, I thought there was something vaguely tacky about it; after all, the opening line of the song is, "Imagine there's no heaven," which hardly seems like a sentiment one wants to imagine in the context of a beloved friend of family member passing from this life. Don't we really, at such times at least, want to imagine that there is a Heaven (assuming we don't already believe there to be one), and that our departed loved one is surely there at this moment, perhaps floating on a cloud playing a harp, lounging on soft cushions with their personal cadre of seventy houris, or perhaps looking down lovingly upon us, bathing us in the radiant warmth of their unleashed spirit?

Maybe Lennon's right though. After all, if we "imagine there's no heaven," then we can also imagine "no hell below us". Once we start coalescing on the idea of an afterlife, it's hard for many of us to imagine an eternal paradise without the flipside to that coin. Imagine that there's a Heaven after all; how can we know that my grandmother is there, or John Lennon?

Not that I have anything against John Lennon. First and foremost, he was a wonderful musician who had a profound effect on pop music ever since the Quarrymen changed their names to The Beatles. Also he was, as far as I know, a great humanitarian, activist for peace, and loving father. It's a mystery to me why any sane person would want to kill him, but apparently the person who did kill him wasn't. But does any of that matter in the final tally?

Lennon would also like people to imagine "no countries" and "no religion, too". It's funny, but I suspect many conservative Christians would tend to think of these ideas as subversive and anti-Christian, but it seems to me that this is the state of affairs described at the end of the Book of Revelation in the Bible, perhaps particularly chapter 21. Heaven passes away, there is an end to governments, and even an end to religion in the usual sense at least. Sure, the words of the song are a bit subversive, but in the end, aren't the words of our own scriptures? Still, I do have to say that it does seem unlikely that the message of John the Apostle was the same one as John the Beatle, although there are some parallels, no doubt. The book of 1John says, "Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God," while Lennon put it simply, "All you need is love."

My grandmother was definitely a loving person, although I don't know of her writing anything profound on the subject. She was very passionate about political activism, the environment, and her family. One thing that I have no idea whether or not she had any passion for, and thus I would feel fairly safe to assume against, was religion and God.

The maternal side of my family are Unitarian universalists, and have been for generations. I have no way of knowing if anyone reading this knows anything about this sort-of-Christian sect, but they're largely known for believing in erasing the borders between belief systems. Want to be a Hindu, but also be a Unitarian? Why not? Don't believe in God, but still like to go to church? Sure, if it floats your boat... I don't know if they invented the concept that what you believe doesn't matter so long as you're sincere, but they went a long way towards perfecting it.

Still, at the memorial service, the song was sung, and while there may have been no intentional drive to choose a song with meaningful lyrics in a spiritual sense, it's that first line that sticks with me after all these years. I'm comforted by the thought of no countries; I've often said that maps are made up of two kinds of lines: connecting lines and dividing lines, and we need more of the former and less of the latter. I like the idea of no possessions; an idealized anarcho-communistic state in which all possessions were shared to the point where the concept of "possessions" ceased to have meaning sounds delicious. But no Heaven? Universalists believe everyone goes to Heaven, so why would we like to believe it's not there?

Maybe because despite the fact that so many of these ideals presented to us in Lennon's little lyrical daydream seem so nice, they simply aren't realistic. Nations will continue to exist, and so long as they do, men will continue to fight and even kill over who will control them, and the possessions found therein. Maybe because Heaven is one thing that we do have to imagine, since it's not here on earth with us, it's easier to imagine it gone, than to imagine it existing without its supposed polar opposite. If Heaven's there, there's probably a Hell, too. And if there's a Hell, it's probably got people in it. Maybe even John Lennon. Can we do something about it, or is it easier just to imagine it away?

Imagine there is a Heaven, and that the things we do on this earth can make a difference in making people a little closer to Heaven every day. Or better yet, believe in it, like I do.

I'm not the only one.