On the Edge of Winter

I got a chance late this afternoon to walk out over the Duxbury bridge to the beach. Work is very slow and the winter looks to be a lean one. The air was surprisingly warm and the walking pleasant.

I saw several older couples walking the bridge, several young women walking or running their dogs, I saw a cormorant fishing in the bay, and sandpipers in their winter colors feeding between the beach stones and the surf. There were about five crows at the beach end of the bridge. A bright green grasshopper caused me to stop suddenly on the way back and stare into its oddly blank eye, the intensity of its greeness shining in the late afternoon sun.

Pumpkin Moon

I have been one aquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain-and back in rain
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

Last night I walked my old route out to Cove street and back down Lover’s Lane in the dark. The moon was rising over the far beach a great orange globe suspended over the bathhouse. This evening I did it again and walked further around the circle of Cove street which is a hidden little neighborhood on a peninsula surrounded by the marshes of the back river. There was a football game in progress, the football field for Duxbury High School backs up on the marsh just off the little peninsula and in the dark the sounds of the game seemed to be not more than a backyard away.

In my father's color slides taken during the sixties, there are two photos; one my Dad took of me standing on a country road on a fall day with a shotgun across my arms, and another that I took of him in the same pose. That was a scene from one of the best times of my childhood. My Dad used to take me hunting in the fall to a place in Littleton, Massachusetts.
Leaving my mother and sisters behind, we would leave early in the morning from our house in Watertown and drive through Belmont, past McLean’s Hospital and onto Route 2, passing, each time, the familiar landmarks which were, for a boy, the opening up of the wide world, passing the granite walls of the road cuts oozing ice, stopping at Howard Johnson’s for coffee and doughnuts, going around the rotary at the Concord Reformatory and then driving west to the woods and farmland of the Nashoba valley.
We would always park the car at the same spot at a farm where there was a dirt access road through the fields leading to the woods beyond. We would take the guns out of the trunk of the car, careful to leave the shotgun unloaded and open and walk down the road between barbed wire fences and manure piles. We walked on cornstubble, crunching the stalks and frozen, half rotten apples, and fallen leaves, between juniper trees and under the great old pines into the wild to walk all day and see, as Thoreau said, what men who stay at home in parlors never dream of.
It was cold starting out but I would soon warm up from walking. The sun would rise up and the ice in the edge of the dirt road would melt. The little ponds would sometimes make whooping sounds like someone striking a large piece of sheet metal. When we stopped to rest, the chickadees would fill the branches in the pines near ground level calling chee dee dee to each other and the bluejays would call from higher up. I became attached to the sounds and sensations of the woods and to the easy measured pace of traveling by foot, fortified against the cold by an inner furnace. The woods were a place of escape, a place of freedom and peace. There were old stonewalls, overgrown gravel pits, rusty farm machinery; harrows and plows, and abandoned cars usually filled with rusty bullet holes. They were relics, to me, of a distant and mysterious past; these signs of a long history of people working the land gave me a sense of place in time no less than if we had walked through the ruins of Rome and Greece.
He was careful to teach me to carry and use a gun with great care and responsibility. He told me, never point a gun, loaded or unloaded at another person. The first time I shot it I aimed it at a little dead tree as he stood behind me to brace me. I still remember the copse of woods and the uneven ground under my feet and the feeling of dread and anticipation, the squeeze of the trigger, the leap of the barrel and bang of the gunstock against my shoulder, dead leaves fluttering, and the giddy feeling as my brain tried to piece together what had happened; the blast by my head exploded the world for a brief instant. It was a thrill I’ll never forget, I think I was seven years old.
He knew what gunshot wounds could do to the human body. He had served in Graves Registration in the army during the second world war, which meant that he had to take the bodies off the battlefield, prepare them for burial and bury them. The war to me was like those old cars from some lost age, but was, no doubt, hardly passed to him. The boots that he wore only on these trips were from the army; he had worn them in France and in Belgium. And his field glasses were a German officer’s, for they buried German as well as American dead, taken from the battlefield, an officer whose brothers and sons and parents were likely still living. Older men stack up decades in their memories like old newspapers but I had little perspective on time and place when I was scarcely ten.
By noon, we were pretty hungry and had walked probably for four hours, so we would make our way back to the car and drive into Littleton to an old time diner in a silver-bodied railroad car to have lunch. My dad's favorite was liver and onions, I would have a hamburg or a clam roll and a chocolate frappe. There is nothing like good food after working up an appetite.
After lunch, we would hunt on the other side of the road where we parked where there was an apple orchard. My dad explained to me how the pheasants would run ahead of you in the grass until they ran into an obstacle and then they would take flight. I remember many times scaring them up into the air with their loud drumming wings, and then the blast of the shotgun and my heart pounding. He sometimes came home with a pheasant or a duck when he went hunting with his friends, but I don't remember ever bringing one home when we went together, and I don't think I cared. We rarely, if ever, shot an animal just tin cans and dead trees.
We estimated we walked ten or twelve miles a day, so by the late afternoon, I was tired, the light and my energy fading rapidly. There are two things that mean a lot to children; one is routine or repetition because it creates anticipation and a sense of security, the other one is candy. My father knew how to provide both. A short way up the road heading home we always stopped at the country store. It had real cracker barrels and cheese wrapped in cheesecloth and it had a glass display counter filled with bins of different candies for a penny a piece. He would let me pick out what I wanted and I would eat it all on the way home. We sat quietly in the car and hardly said a word retracing our route to Watertown, looking out at a long line of red tail lights, going home to a smaller more confined world.
That was what we did each autumn, from the time I was 5 or 6 until I was in my teens. I scarcely think about it now, about how much that simple activity meant to me. About the age of fifteen I lost the ability to talk easily with my parents. I entered adulthood with mixed feelings of anger and love for my parents which took me years to sort out. But I had something I think many boys never had and that's a father who spent time with him and taught him about the world and his place in it and who taught him about himself. And who gave his son the things that boys need from their fathers and who really knew how to make him happy.

The Problem of Distinguishing Good from Evil.

to say all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds is to say we cannot distinguish good from evil. Quoted from the CED mailing list

I have trouble trying to understand why so many Christians support the war in Iraq, which, to me, seems unequivocably wrong. It is true that some good could come out of it, the fall of Saddam, the re-building of the country etc. And it may also be true that it is part of God’s plan, as in the book of Revelations we see Him visiting war on humanity as just punishment for evil. Can it be then that George Bush is God’s instrument of vengeance. On one hand I can see that possibility, however, for the most part, for the apparent motivation, and manner of the attack on Iraq, I do not see the hand of God at work myself, perhaps others do. Yet the possibility alone leaves me baffled and unsure of what is evil and what is good as the atheistic contributor to the mailing list uses just the same stumbling block to justify his atheism.

In an an attempt to reply and to clarify my own thinking I made the following notes.

All of us can innately distinguish good from evil. This is my first premise and what I actually believe to be true.

The question is, does it matter? If there is no God, it does not matter if we do evil or do good. Debate about the matter becomes irrelevant because good has no intrinsic worth and evil no intrinsic harm. If the rapist rapes, it does not matter that he is doing evil, at least from his perspective. We should say that without God, good and evil are irrelevant because the consequences are relative, and not say that good and evil themselves are relative because even the rapist will acknowledge that his actions are evil, although he might rationalize rather than admit.

If God punishes an evil world with evil, is God evil?

The world generally is about evil on evil.

Human beings innately know good from evil and they have an innate system of justice expressed as a craving for vengeance when evil is done.

My biblical reference for this is Deuteronomy 30:11-14

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so that we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so that you may obey it.


And in Romans

8:28:

All things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.

1:32

Although they know God’s righteous decree, that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.



Topic: The Distinction between Good and Evil

Thesis: We are all innately capable of distinguishing good from evil.

Discussion:


The argument that the contributor to CED gives for his conversion to atheism for stumbling on the block of Good versus Evil are:
1. In the Old Testament God occasionally commands men to kill, yet he also gives the general command, “Thou shalt not kill”.

2. Bad things happen to good people. And we say it was the Lord’s will or that all things will work together for good, apparently unable to distinguish good from evil. And then he says,

“But if we cannot distinguish good from evil, then all our moral judgments are
compromised -- including any trust in any so called covenant with the deity that created that condition”.
3. God has shown that he will break his promise because that is what is really good for us.

This man is saying that :

1. God is a hypocrite.
2. God is a shallow ingrate, not rewarding those who do his will or punishing those who do evil.
3. God is a liar.

These personal impressions are what lead him to state that we cannot distinguish good from evil, therefore we cannot know that there is a God, therefore he does not believe there is a God.

Or perhaps he is saying that if there is a God, based on his personal observations and reading of scripture, he is a hypocrite, an ingrate and a liar and he chooses to have nothing to do with him.

Questions:

Is the pain one experiences at the dentist or the doctor good because the end result is good?

Is pain good because it warns us forcefully of damage occurring to our bodies?

The real evil is the damage, the pain is symbolic.

…
In the case of the war in Iraq, either I am misinformed and my conclusion about the evil nature of our part in the war is wrong or I am not misinformed and my conclusion is correct. There is no possibility that Bush is doing good but disguising it as evil. In other words it is possible to distinguish good from evil.