Some thoughts from a commencement address.

[Jim__]

I'm posting this in the R/T Forum because I think some of what he says ties directly into things that have been discussed here.

It's an old address, but I enjoyed reading it. The whole address takes about 5 minutes to read; I think it's worth reading. It's from David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement address to the graduating class at Kenyon College:

...There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" ...

...

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, ...

[trotsky]

1. So if one guy says that 9-year-old girls are old enough to marry...

and have sex simply because of his "individual template," does the other guy have any right to disagree?

On edit: I myself am pretty damn certain that child rape is disgusting and inexcusable. Does that make me arrogant in that belief?

[darkstar3]

2. Well done.

This whole idea that everybody is right only goes so far.

[Jim__]

3. Not surprisingly, you're confused.

Wallace is explicitly talking about the interpretation of phenomenal experience, not the moral evaluation of various acts. He's also suggesting that we should question where these various beliefs (interpretations) really come from.

... the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice.

As to marriage at a young age, I tend to accept the cultural teaching that I am surrounded by, 18 is young but acceptable, later than 18 is preferred. In many cultures, marriage at a much earlier age than 18 is the norm. For example:

Child marriage in Judaism was traditionally restricted to female children; the earliest point at which a male is permitted to become betrothed (Hebrew: erusin) is when he reaches the age of majority, 13.<4> According to the Talmud, it was permissible for an adult male to marry a girl as young as 3.<5><6>

...

In mediaeval times, cultural pressure within Jewish communities lead to most girls being married while they were still children - before they had become a bogeret(18)

more...

Google can give you lots more examples of cultures that married at a young age (it is less prevalent today). I don't put any interpretation on this because I am really not familiar with the cultures. For the same reason. I don't make any moral judgments about it.

[trotsky]

4. Confused? You're the one who actually went there.

I can't say that I'm surprised. Justifying child rape because it was "acceptable" in primitive cultures. Thanks for going on record on that! This'll be a good post to bookmark and reference in the future.

But I do find it fascinating that to escape the consequences, you draw a line. You - perhaps the wishy-washiest po-mo disciple I've seen on DU - draw a line for po-mo. That's very telling.

Nonetheless, I'll follow your moving goalposts into the realm of "the interpretation of phenomenal experience." My experience, my knowledge, my reasoning - leads to the conclusion that the earth is a sphere. What about the guy who follows a very narrow, literal interpretation of a holy text and believes truly that the earth is flat? Are we both right? Is one of us wrong? Am I being an arrogant bastard when I launch a satellite because in doing so I'm telling the flat-earther he is wrong? Tsk, the arrogance!

[Jim__]

5. Po-mo? Where, in this thread, have I said anything about postmodernism?

I cited Wallace's talk. I don't consider that talk to be postmodern in any sense of the word. Wallace, although he is considered a postmodern writer, often speaks out against postmodernism, for example:

LM: . . . yeah, another commodity. I agree with Fredric Jameson and others who argue that modernism and postmodernism can be seen as expressing the cultural logic of late capitalism. Lots of features of contemporary art are directly influenced by this massive acceleration of capitalist expansion into all these new realms that were previously just not accessible. You sell people a memory, reify their nostalgia and use this as a hook to sell deodorant. Hasn’t this recent huge expansion of the technologies of reproduction, the integration of commodity reproduction and aesthetic reproduction, and the rise of media culture lessened the impact that aesthetic innovation can have on people’s sensibilities? What’s your response to this as an artist?

DFW: You’ve got a gift for lit-speak, LM. Who wouldn’t love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis—you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I’m clever"—which of course is itself derived from commercial art’s axiom about audience-affection determining art’s value.

What’s precious about somebody like Bill Vollmann is that, even though there’s a great deal of formal innovation in his fictions, it rarely seems to exist for just its own sake. It’s almost always deployed to make some point (Vollmann’s the most editorial young novelist going right now, and he’s great at using formal ingenuity to make the editorializing a component of his narrative instead of an interruption) or to create an effect that’s internal to the text. His narrator’s always weirdly effaced, the writing unself-conscious, despite all the "By-the-way-Dear-reader" intrusions. In a way it’s sad that Vollmann’s integrity is so remarkable. Its remarkability means it’s rare. I guess I don’t know what to think about these explosions in the sixties you’re so crazy about. It’s almost like postmodernism is fiction’s fall from biblical grace. Fiction became conscious of itself in a way it never had been. Here’s a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see Cameron’s "Terminator" movies as a metaphor for all literary art after Roland Barthes, viz., the movies’ premise that the Cyberdyne NORAD computer becomes conscious of itself as "conscious," as having interests and an agenda; the Cyberdyne becomes literally self-referential, and it’s no accident that the result of this is nuclear war, Armageddon.

...

DFW: But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.

more...

As for your assertion that I am a "po-mo disciple", that has nothing to do with this thread, so I'm completely ignoring it.

Your further questions only show that you still don't understand what Wallace is talking about.

As to your assertion that I am "justifying child rape," all I can say is that you are being ridiculous. Again, no surprise.

[trotsky]

6. It doesn't need to be said, it saturates all of your posts.

And I can't blame you for trying to side-step my examples and questions. They are difficult ones, exposing the lie that is po-mo. Which is why you have to stay within a little box, declaring anything outside the box incapable of challenging your extremely verbose but amazingly limited philosophy.

At some point though, to get along as a society we have to be able to say to someone else, "You are wrong." To use a recent example from the news, when a child is sick with leukemia, is it just another "individual template" when their parent insists they will cure the cancer with herbs and diet? Should we allow the parent to pursue this course of action, when the "individual template" of evidence-based medicine and clinical trials shows that chemo & radition will cure upwards of 90% of this cancer? Or is that arrogance to insist that science and reason are correct here, and herbs and alt-med spells are nonsense?

Some "individual templates" are superior to others, whether you want to admit it or not.

[Jim__]

7. I'll try to make it a bit easier for you.

Here's what Wallace says about interpreting experience: It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis:the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. You keep confusing interpretation of experience with moral judgment. It is true that limiting the scope of a statement to the boundaries that it explicitly sets makes it harder to attack the statement; but that's only because you now have to attack what the statement says; rather than any old boogie man you want to dredge up. BTW, he is criticizing this type of analysis

As you your confusion about individual templates, here's what Wallace actually says: we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. He's actually encouraging us to dig a little deeper and not just accept these templates and beliefs as given.

His writing seems pretty clear to me. Yet you don't get it. Maybe you're just blinded by the need to strike out at things you don't understand at first reading, rather than trying to learn something.

[trotsky]

8. No, the problem (for you) here is that I'm seeing through the bullshit.

Wallace is simply repackaging and rewrapping the "standard liberal arts analysis" in new terminology like "individual templates." Wallace is putting out lots and lots of words, but neither he (nor you) are actually SAYING SOMETHING.

As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice.

Which may be true, but it doesn't address any of the real-world examples I have given in this thread, and which you quite tellingly have dismissed or ignored while implying I'm a simpleton merely because I see through your linguistic games.

[Jim__]

9. Have you read the entire essay?

He's pretty specific about his point.

[trotsky]

10. One can be very specific about bullshit.

You can find out what the bull had been eating, any diseases or parasites it might have, or even if it harbors the more deadly (to humans) E. coli. You can say lots and lots of very specific stuff about bullshit.

Doesn't change the fact that it's still bullshit. Address just one of my examples, if you dare.

[Jim__]

11. Your "examples" have nothing to do with what he is saying.

From the citation posted in the OP:

...blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, ...

He's not saying that there are no moral choices that just about everyone agrees on. He is saying that blind certainty is a prison; and that learning how to think means, in part, escaping that prison. It's hard for me to imagine that that simple claim is particularly upsetting to any one.

[trotsky]

12. So I'll follow your goalposts one more time.

Please address just ONE of my examples: What "moral choice" is involved with belief in a flat earth? Is my "blind certainty" that the earth is a sphere (or darn close to it) also "a prison"?

It's hard for me to imagine that that simple claim is particularly upsetting to any one.

Because that's your strawman. I don't find it upsetting, I find it absurd.

[Jim__]

14. Once again, read what he said.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, ...

What is hard to understand here? He is not saying that there are no certainties. He is saying that a large percentage of the things we are automatically certain of are wrong.

[darkstar3]

15. And where is the wisdom or incredible clarity in that statement?

It isn't just old, it's common sense. Are you trying to apply it specifically to something religion-based, or are you just pointing out the tired old fact that "everybody could be wrong"?

[Jim__]

20. Wisdom in a statement?

Maybe in some statements. But I expect that is extremely rare.

IMHO, the important advice in this talk is in how to approach the "day in day out" routine.

[trotsky]

22. Now you've ventured away from the absurd into the downright laughable.

If anything, this line of thinking INTERFERES with how we need to approach our "day in day out" routine. You'd suffer from analysis paralysis. "Will the car start this morning? It has for several years now but what if the principles of combustion changed overnight? Maybe oxygen won't feed a flame anymore, I need helium now? Can I still breathe oxygen? I'd hate to arrogantly assume that these physical laws have remained constant while I was asleep! And what about my desk chair at work? Will it support my weight today? Gosh, I can't be sure, I mean it supported me yesterday and the day before that and has done so for the past 4 years but what if it's an illusion? What if today the molecular structure of plastic is no longer one of the toughest, lightest substances we have? What if today it's as brittle as balsa wood?"

Meanwhile the arrogant mean old atheist just drives in, sits down, and starts working. What a jerk.

[Jim__]

23. Once again, did you read the essay?

He talks a lot about how to approach the day to day routine, not being on a default setting. He is not talking about questioning the laws of physics, or how to start your car on a day to day basis. He talks about not drifting through days in a default setting.

[trotsky]

33. Actually he doesn't specify - that's why I asked you on another post (which you have ignored).

What's the criteria by which we determine if we can be "arrogantly" certain about something?

[Jim__]

38. (Sigh)

But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, ...

He's talking about being willing to question your beliefs. He's not giving you any specific criteria - hopefully you have enough sense to know how to question things; just that you should be able to question your beliefs. In the essay, he does tell you why you should do this. That's what he's talking about when he talks about the "day in day out" routine and the mind's default setting.

[trotsky]

39. Then he and you are saying nothing at all.

Because neither he, nor you, understand the concept of scientific certainty and how it differs from religious certainty. You make the (intentional or ignorant) mistake of equating the two so you can place yourself in the "sensible" middle.

[Jim__]

42. If you actually want to discuss what he said, you should take a deep breath and read the essay.

You're just going off half-cocked. In the beginning of the essay, he's talking about how to interpret experience, neither "scientific certainty" nor "religious certainty" enters into the question. As the essay progresses, he gets more explicit about exactly what he's talking bout, namely his advice on how to approach the "day in day out" routine.

Not every thing in life breaks down into a disagreement between atheism and religion. You should really try to broaden your perspective. There's a whole world out there.

[trotsky]

43. Right back to the same old tune.

I'm just too stupid and narrow-minded to understand the oh-so-complex thinking that you and Wallace are capable of. Good thing it's the rest of us who are arrogant, and not you!

[Jim__]

46. I'm not saying his thinking is complex at all.

I'm saying you're just rushing down the same old path you always rush down, and you're completely missing the point of the essay.

[trotsky]

49. No, the problem is that I *do* see the point of the speech.

(It's a speech - a commencement address - not an essay. I don't know why you keep referring to it as such.)

And I'm not swallowing the same bullshit you did. The guy even made the trite, absurd, Josh-McDowell-ish, and meaningless claim that "everyone worships something." This is a DEAD GIVEAWAY that he didn't understand what scientific certainty means. Hell, it's a giveaway that he didn't even understand what the word "worship" means. He (and you, evidently) are far more interested in placing yourself in a position of apparent intellectual superiority so you can dismiss others just like your strawmen characterizations of atheists, scientists, and rationalists allegedly do.

[Jim__]

50. See post #48.

You're doing the same thing, making proclamations, but not supporting them.

[trotsky]

53. Ta da!

And now you see what your posts have been too! You haven't supported a single thing you've claimed - because you just keep repeating the mantra "read the essay." Obviously since we're too stupid to understand it, maybe you should prove you DO understand it and put it into simpleton terms for us?

David Foster Wallace committed suicide due to clinical depression. This speech is basically a glimpse into a depressed mind. I mean, look at this:

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Fuck, I'd kill myself too if this is how I viewed and experienced my life. Sure, he went on to say you can "choose" to look at this differently. I certainly do - I don't let the occasional dreariness of everyday life get me down. But it's clear from this speech that the guy's thinking was radically influenced by his depression. And in the course of thinking oh-so-deep thoughts, he never even begins to scratch the surface of the ACTUAL mystery of the universe and how even rational atheists can appreciate that, think about it, and have some pretty damn deep thoughts about it too. Something you definitely seem to have in common with him.

[Jim__]

54. David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September 2008.

This speech was given in 2005. He went off his medication in early 2008. He and his doctor were working on coming up with a new medication that worked for him when he committed suicide. To make it simple enough even for you, his depression was under control when he gave this talk.

As to the paragraph that you quoted, yes he describes that as a typical adult day. If you've read the essay, you should know that his point is, it doesn't have to be that way. He's talking about your choice to see this day as you wish:

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

That's the awareness that he's talking about. Being aware of what is all around you.

[trotsky]

55. You make completely unsupported claims.

You have no idea if his depression was truly "under control" in 2005. I'm just going to let the irony soak in of you claiming to know what was going on in someone else's mind.

To make it simple enough even for you, his depression was under control when he gave this talk.

Can't even make a point without an insult, can you? How enlightened you are indeed. And you bash others for imagined "arrogance." :rofl:

That's the awareness that he's talking about. Being aware of what is all around you.

And clearly only you, he, and just a select few other people who are smart enough in your humble opinion are truly aware of what's around you. My goodness, how can you handle the burden of interacting with us clueless morons all the time?

[Jim__]

56. Wallace wrote about his treatment for depression and what it did for him.

So, yes, I do have an idea of whether or not his depression was under control.

[trotsky]

61. Sure you do.

You know exactly what was going on in his mind in 2005. Foolish me for doubting your psychic time-traveling powers.

[trotsky]

36. Just pinging again to see if you will answer my question. n/t

[trotsky]

16. I assure you I have (and understood). Better than you realize.

He is saying that a large percentage of the things we are automatically certain of are wrong.

And what determines whether you are allowed to be certain about something?

[trotsky]

37. Just pinging again to see if you will answer my question. n/t

[BurtWorm]

19. He's saying, don't be so sure there is no god to pray to who will answer your prayers.

Would you agree that that is the bottom line of what he is saying?

[Jim__]

21. He is saying be aware of what happened.

Don't just accept your default evaluation of the situation.

That is my interpretation after reading the whole article. But, when I had just read that part of the article, I interpreted to mean don't be too ready to dismiss what just happened.

[BurtWorm]

24. His example or parable or what have you seems to suggest

that the nonbeliever would be making a mistake to conclude that the Eskimos happening by had nothing to do with his prayer. Isn't that what Wallace was getting at? I mean he's talking about a disagreement of interpretation between one who believes in prayer and one who ordinarily doesn't for a reason, right? He was trying to tell these young graduates not to be so sure of the tendency of the rational mind, which they've just spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on to hone into fine, economically valuable instruments, to discount miracles and mysteries. This is why you've shared this with this particular forum, obviously. Right?

[Jim__]

25. He is saying, don't just dismiss what happened because of prior "certainty."

... The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

Be aware of what is happening. Don't just go by blind assumptions.

Edited to add: I shared it with this forum because we have talked about people being "certain" about things that are open to interpretation.

[BurtWorm]

26. I guess I have a problem with the idea that the nonreligious guy has a 'problem.'

What is he missing? He knows what happened to him. He knows what happened in the world around him. He knows what happened in his mind. He has all the facts he needs to interpret the events. If he's missing some facts and he needs to, he can revisit the evidence, his memory, the scene, the eskimos if need be.

It's only a 'problem' if there's something really, seriously fucked up about paying no attention to the slight possibility that god and its feelings were somehow part of the picture and this would absolutely have cosmic consequences. Right?

[Jim__]

27. Well, he was in a desperate situation and he prayed.

Then 2 eskimos happen along. It sounds like this would be highly unexpected. The eskimos don't prove anything. But, to not question whether the prayer could have had anything to do with it seems somewhat presumptious.

He should question what actually happend. I would think he would want to try this again if he is ever in as desperate a situation.

[BurtWorm]

28. Why bother questioning, though? What if he hadn't 'yielded to temptation' and prayed?

Would he be wrong not to consider that there was a god who might have, for some awesomely unfathomable reason, decided to favor this nonbeliever with a visit from eskimos? Is it only someone who, in a moment of weakness, prayed to god who should be saddled with this burden of staying with that moment and looking at it from the eyes of a simple believer?

[Jim__]

29. Well, he said he gave prayer a try.

It seems a bit silly to try something, then it seems to work, so you decide it doesn't work. If this were a true story, I have to believe that the guy who tried prayer, would want to put it to some more tests.

[BurtWorm]

30. I don't see why he should. He won't get very far exploring that line of thought.

What good will it do anyway, unless there were a way to definitely prove that God had something to do with answering the guy's prayers by sending him Eskimos. Just a very little thought ought to show him that believing that the prayer worked requires faith. *Blind* faith. There's simply no way around that problem for believers in prayer. So then it amounts to a trivial choice whether to have that faith or not--trivial, because no amount of reason or thought or anything else can determine whether the decision will be right, no matter what it is.

[Jim__]

31. If that's what he thinks, testing it was pointless. - n/t

[BurtWorm]

32. We 'test' that all the time by falling into our magic thinking habit, which is very old in us.

I mean in each of us. It takes many years of using the brain and living in the world to get over that habit. People pray when they're in danger because they simply don't know what else to do. They're praying to the same god of the gaps the intelligent design people appeal to to explain "irreducible complexity."

[Jim__]

35. That's interesting. I don't ever pray.

I wonder of some of this strong anti-religion sentiment we get here is because some people are overly defensive of their atheism. I mean, if some atheists fall into magical thinking "all the time," then it sounds like they're not very convinced of their atheism.

[BurtWorm]

57. Atheism is not something you talk yourself into.

You're not an atheist, I take it, or you'd know that. It's more like a scientific theory that gets confirmed for you as you gain experience over time. It's why atheists tend to say thngs like, show me evidence for your god and I'll believe in it. The will (or lack of will) to fall into magical thinking is not the kind of evidence atheists are looking for.

Magical thinking, by the way, is fallacious thinking. It's the kind of thinking that most people start to lose when the game of peek-a-boo loses its fascination. It's a type of thinking that many people never fully lose. They rub a rabbit's foot, they win a bet, they think the win is a consequence of the rabbit foot rubbing. Prayer works on exactly the same level as a rabbit's foot.

Maybe DFW would have told those Kenyon graduates not to dismiss the power of rabbit foot rubbing to win bets? Maybe it is wise not to dismiss the power of rabbit feet?

[darkstar3]

59. "CJ, on your tombstone it will say 'Post Hoc, ergo Propter Hoc."

I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist. :hi:

[BurtWorm]

60. That's going to be on a lot of people's tombstones!

;-)

[Jim__]

65. Actually, I am an atheist.

I don't pray. Not even in dire situations. That's why I was somewhat surprised you said "we" test all the time. I don't test. I'm comfortable in my atheism. I am also not anti-religion and it appears that a lot of atheists on this forum are anti-religion. If they are "testing" all the time, maybe they are insecure in their atheism and that leads to their anti-religious stance.

DFW's story to thiose students seems very clear to me. The atheist in the storm prays and says God I;m gonna die if you don't help me. He doesn't die. Then he dismisses his prayer. It seems like consummate idiocy to make that prayer and then ignore that you got what you asked for.

[BurtWorm]

66. By 'we' I meant we humans.

You're fine with relgiion, but you call human nature "consummate idiocy." But I understand your point. You've become an enlightened religion-tolerating atheist and if only we would grok where you're coming from we'd be enlightened religion-tolerating atheists like you. (In that instance, my "we" meant trotsky, darkstar3 and I, just to be clear.)

[Jim__]

69. You shouldn't claim that your weaknesses are universal to humanity.

but you call human nature "consummate idiocy."

No, I don't. I said It seems like consummate idiocy to make that prayer and then ignore that you got what you asked for. It is not human nature to pray and then ignore the good results. Most people have more sense. If you don't believe in prayer, don't pray. If you pray and get what you prayed for, don't ignore the result.

[BurtWorm]

70. Most people have the 'sense' to rub a rabbit's foot and not ignore the extra lottery ticket

they think it won them. If you get what you rubbed the rabbit's foot for, don't ignore the result. If you play your anniversary every day for 15 years and finally win $100, surely you got married on that day for good reason.

[Jim__]

72. Not exactly in the same ballpark.

[BurtWorm]

74. Why not? What makes them different?

[Jim__]

76. Well, for one thing, the storm was about to kill him (according to his prayer)

That makes it far more important and immediate than winning an extra lottery ticket or winning $100 over 15 years. Also, based on the story, it's one test, one result; not something that happens once every, say 50 - 100 tries.

[darkstar3]

77. STILL Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc. n/t

[Jim__]

78. No actually its not.

DFW is not saying that the person in the story has to conclude that his prayer did it. He's merely saying that it makes no sense to not consider the possibility. Given the prayer the guy said; he's already committed to the possibility that prayer can help; if he gets what he prays for, it makes no sense to then just dismiss it out of hand.

If A causes B, then its always the case that A precedes B. So, when A precedes B, and you're basically testing whether or not A can cause B, it is not "post hoc" to then consider the possibility of causation.

[darkstar3]

80. And his "consideration" of this possibility will do what, exactly?

To place undue weight on a single action as a possible cause of a result simply because that action precedes the result IS Post Hoc. There are many other actions that could have yielded this result, including whether the man kept walking, whether he cried for help, whether the rescuers saw his footprints, and this is just the beginning.

You, and Wallace, are placing undue weight on the possibility that prayer had something to do with the man's rescue.

[Jim__]

85. You need to go back to logic 101.

[darkstar3]

87. Such wit! Your retort has convinced me!

:eyes:

[BurtWorm]

82. So if the guy thinks, "Hmmm, maybe my prayer worked..."

before going through the steps trotsky, darkstar3 and I have tried to take you through to show you that it's ultimately silly and pointless (not to mention solipsistic and narcissistic) to ponder whether or not his prayer conjured two Eskimos out of the wilderness to recue him, then he's somehow living a better, fuller, richer, more spiritual life?

[Jim__]

84. If it's ultimately silly and pointless, he shouldn't have tested it.

There's no way around that. His test. His result. A critically important result.

Actually, he's living a fuller life if he's paying attention to what is going on around him rather than ignoring things. The talk contains more than that story. The context fills out the meaning.

[BurtWorm]

86. Well, god damn him all to hell for trying something silly and pointless when all hope is gone.

Don't you wonder why god would bother to send two Eskimos to save such an ungrateful lunk?

[BurtWorm]

79. If he had been rubbing a rabbit's foot instead of praying to god

that would be more in the ballpark? Or if he'd been picking a daisy saying, "I will be saved, I won't be saved, I will be saved, I won't be saved"? It's the situation that determines whether or not we should overlook Occam's razor and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy?

[Jim__]

81. He claims that he is testing prayer.

He said:

It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'"

If you are seriously testing anything and the test works, the only thing that makes sense is to investigate further. The fact that he prayed for his life when he was in serious danger (at inevitable risk according to his prayer) makes the test serious.

[BurtWorm]

83. How is he going to test this again?

Is he going to sit around praying for Eskimos to appear? Or is he going to get himself back into danger and then pray?

PS: If the Eskimos don't show up again, THEN can he conclude that he really can't know if god sent him Eskimos in his darkest hour?

[trotsky]

75. Yup, it's exactly in the same ballpark.

Our evolutionary niche as human beings is that of pattern seekers. No animal on earth does this better than we do. Our brains are hard-wired to find patterns, and so finely honed are they to this task that we constantly see patterns even when there aren't any - worse, some will continue to cling to a specific pattern even when it's tested and found to be false. The examples of this are too numerous to count, but current topical ones include the belief that vaccines cause autism, or that prayer can heal. Confirmation bias haunts us. The same principle is at work with the rabbit foot-rubbing lottery winner as it is with the person who prays for help with their mortgage and lands a new job. (Or is rescued by Eskimos in a snowstorm.) And that's the trap one will fall into if they follow your and Wallace's advice - being distracted by every shiny object and treating it as if it had equal relevance.

[BurtWorm]

73. .

[darkstar3]

67. There's Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc again. n/t

[trotsky]

68. "I don't test."

Well then clearly you aren't taking Wallace's advice and keeping your mind open.

The atheist in the storm prays and says God I;m gonna die if you don't help me. He doesn't die. Then he dismisses his prayer. It seems like consummate idiocy to make that prayer and then ignore that you got what you asked for.

Or he could just be logically applying Occam's Razor. Why postulate unnecessary entities? Is it required for the explanation? Did 2 Eskimos just happen to simply wander by, or did the all-powerful creator of the universe decide to intervene to interfere with the Eskimos' supposed free will to have them out in a snowstorm near the petitioner in order to save that petitioner's life when thousands of similar live-saving requests go unanswered every day? Children die of starvation, people die in plane crashes, murder and rape victims, etc., etc., etc.? Seems to me that even beginning to accept the existence of a god in this situation opens up FAR more difficult issues than it resolves. Therefore it can be logically and reasonably dismissed.

This goes directly back to the point darkstar3 tried to get you to understand: "There are many absurd ideas that can and should be rejected out of hand. To do any less is to invite ignorance and even chaos..."

[darkstar3]

13. Not surprisingly, you're missing the broader point.

You're attempting to compartmentalize and constrain Wallace's speech to very specific examples of human experience when his own point is broader than that. He is stating flatly that we should all be introspective when confronted with different perspectives on the same facts.

If I may use an example that I know you will agree with:

Assume that I am a 16th century man. I am convinced that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around it. Everything that I have ever seen daily reinforces this conviction. When someone tells me that the earth is round and revolving around the sun, I should look within myself to analyze WHY I believe what I do before rejecting their POV out of hand. This is Wallace's broader point, and to a certain extent, it makes sense.

Where the paradigm falls apart, though, is somewhere between the 16th century flat-earther being confronted by science, and the 21st century person being confronted by the beliefs of the FLDS. Trotsky may have pole-vaulted over the gray unknown directly into the place where this intellectual relativism is unfounded and dangerous, but that makes his point no less valid.

There are many absurd ideas that can and should be rejected out of hand. To do any less is to invite ignorance and even chaos, not to mention specific horrors like child buggery.

[trotsky]

17. You've boiled down my posts to two brilliant sentences.

There are many absurd ideas that can and should be rejected out of hand. To do any less is to invite ignorance and even chaos, not to mention specific horrors like child buggery.

Thank you. That's perfect.

[darkstar3]

34. I do have occasional moments of clarity.

Thank you. :hi:

[Jim__]

18. Yes, of course there is a broader point. But, he's talking about awareness.

At the opening of the talk, he tells the joke about "Morning, boys. How's the water?". Toward the end of the talk he says:

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

We do not know we are in water through introspection. It's by being aware of what is all around us.

[darkstar3]

40. No, he's really not.

At least, not awareness alone. His entire talk boils down to the age old chestnut that "we don't really KNOW anything." This, to him, seems to necessitate not only the awareness of which you currently speak, but also introspection and acceptance of possibilities.

It is a tired, not to mention false, assertion. There are many things about our world and our universe that we most certainly DO know, and we don't need to accept other "possibilities" just in case they could be right. The speed of light, the inviolate rules of kinetics, the complex but constant rules of deformation mechanics...it is required that scientists and engineers KNOW these concepts, otherwise things in your daily life like your computer, your car, and many others would never work.

[trotsky]

41. The common characteristic I've seen in everyone who espouses an idea like this...

is an arrogant sense of superiority, that somehow they think about the world more deeply than anyone else. Which is hilarious, because they then bash both ends of the spectrum (fundie religionists and rational scientists) by lumping them together and calling THEM arrogant. LMAO

On edit: Oh, and the guy even threw in the tired old cliche about how "everyone worships SOMETHING"! This is supposed to be deep thinking?

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Equivocation seems to be the only intellectual trick folks like this have. Too bad he committed suicide, or he could have given us even more worn-out stereotypes and insults.

[darkstar3]

45. What I find really interesting

is that someone so determined to spout the fact that they are non-religious or agnostic or atheist (depending on the thread) goes to SO much trouble so often to defend religious ideas and religious apologetics. Methinks there is a disconnect somewhere in his argumentation.

The entire point of this thread, as well as others, has been transparent from the start. The desire to paint anyone who doesn't agree with one particular flavor of "woo" as arrogant and closed-minded is not new, not exclusive, and not amusing.

[BurtWorm]

64. When you get right down to it, this is your basic commencement address.

What commencement address doesn't try to tell graduates to be open-minded to possibilities? There's a kind of canned wisdom that goes into the making of them, and this is no exception. Being by a novelist, it's not a badly written one, though.

[Jim__]

44. Yes, he really is.

Your first hint is that he opens the talk with a joke about being aware of what is all around you - what the hell is water, and he closes talking about awareness:

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

And, in the middle of the talk, he is talking about the "day in day out" routine, and the importance - the importance to the individual - not to approach this routine in the "default setting." He's talking about what is all around us that we are not aware of. Having read the essay, what do you think that is?

[darkstar3]

47. So, your answer to me is to repeat yourself and pull the same quote?!

Fine, then see #40, and have fun running in circles.

[Jim__]

48. My answer is to support my argument.

It's really simple communication, his topic is probably the theme he opens and closes with. You haven't supported your assertion at all; just proclaimed it.

[darkstar3]

51. You are deliberately attempting

to limit Wallace's words to those which reinforce your own opinion. I have shown you that he was talking about much more, but you will not recognize that because his broader point is worthless and doesn't support your POV.

[Jim__]

52. I'm not trying to limit his words at all.

However, he has an opening, a middle, and an ending that are all talking about the same thing, namely, awareness of what is all around you. Yes he talks about other things; but there is only one main topic, and to me, it is clearly what he opens and closes with. Since he is explicitly telling you to be aware of what is around you, I don't see how you can say that his main message is that we can't know things about the world.

[darkstar3]

58. His opening, middle, and ending

talk about more than just simple awareness. You recognized that when you posted his little parables about the man lost in the snow and the fish in the water. There is obvious and deliberate context and subtext to what he is saying, context and subtext that point exactly to the old phrase "we don't REALLY know," but you are ignoring it. Why you choose to do this I cannot be sure, but the fact remains that Wallace most certainly meant more with his speech than you are allowing in your interpretation.

Do you always forcefully limit your analyses of speeches to the surface text, or is Wallace a special case because his surface text supports your position?

[Jim__]

62. His surface text supports my position?

What position is that? I am not denying that his speech talks about "other things." I'm saying his speech had a main point, and I consider that point to be awareness of what is all around you.

His story about the fish in the water seems to fit right in with his main idea. I mean the young fish are not aware they are in water.

The second story seems to be largely about the same thing. The atheist says that he tested prayer. He said that if God didn't help him he was going to die. Then 2 eskimos happen along and save him. He didn't die. The clear implication, based on what he said in his prayer is that God saved him. Yet, after the fact, he can't see it.

To me the whole talk is strongly unified around 1 theme. Yes there are other things said. But to claim that I missed Wallace's broader point, and I am compartmentalizing what he said, makes no sense.

[darkstar3]

90. The same position as Mulder and Scully.

You WANT to believe.

As for the rest of your repetition, I'm not interested in playing parrot.

[trotsky]

63. The frustrating part of this thread is that the OP *had* to be aware of it,

because of the exact passage he chose to quote. If it were really about nebulous "awareness," he could have chosen passages much later in the speech that were more clearly about that particular aspect.

Which makes it patently obvious, his original point was shredded to bits, and now he's shifted his assertion to this "awareness" gambit hoping we won't notice.

[BurtWorm]

71. And now he seems to have scarpered again!

This must be the way he spends his lunch hour.

:popcorn:

[trotsky]

88. Naw, he just ignores the questions he can't answer. n/t

[Silent3]

89. I think it takes more "arrogance" to believe that a god made a special effort...

...to save your own sorry ass when you have to know how many other people in the world have suffered far greater hardship, far worse fates than even dying alone in a storm, and no deity intervened to save those people, many of whom surely prayed for help as well.

I can easily see an atheist in a desperate situation trying prayer simply because there was nothing else he or she could do anyway, so it "wouldn't hurt to try". This would hardly be a serious "experiment" as you like to call it.

Once out of danger, I don't see any particular reason to suddenly dismiss all of the negative data against the efficacy of prayer just because you get lucky with one personal correlation between prayer and a good outcome.

None of the talk about "awareness" in this thread excuses the implication as told by Wallace of the guy being rescued by the Eskimos. The rescue might warrant a moments idle speculation of the idea "Maybe God answered my prayers by sending the Eskimos for me" -- but nothing more than that. Just how much serious consideration of divine intervention by the hypothetical atheist do you think would be the right amount of consideration after the story's rescue?

[trotsky]

91. The OP has abandoned his shit-stirring thread just as the heat was turned up.

Figures.

[Jim__]

92. Once again, it's awareness. In this case, your awareness of what the story is saying.

So, the story as it appears in the article:

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

So, you say: I can easily see an atheist in a desperate situation trying prayer simply because there was nothing else he or she could do anyway, so it "wouldn't hurt to try". This would hardly be a serious "experiment" as you like to call it.

Direct from the story:

Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'"

So, first of all, "experiment" is not what I like to call it, it's what the atheist calls it in the story.

Second, you say, this wouldn't be a serious experiment. But, in the story, it sounds pretty serious to me:

I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'"

Then you say Once out of danger, I don't see any particular reason to suddenly dismiss all of the negative data against the efficacy of prayer just because you get lucky with one personal correlation between prayer and a good outcome.

So, we're back to awareness of what is happening around you. (S)uddenly dismiss all of the negative data. Suddenly? (A)ll of the negative data? Well, I'm not sure I would just dismiss the new data; data that was rather important to me - I survived the blizzard against all odds. Being aware of my experiment, the experiment that I bring up in this conversation, this new data is certainly critical. What is my basis for ignoring it? How pertinent is all the negative data to me. And why dismiss? Why not reevaluate this data in light of my latest experience. This event should force him to review his beliefs, review what they are based on, and come to a deeper understanding of them. Come to a deeper understanding of life.

None of the talk about "awareness" in this thread excuses the implication as told by Wallace of the guy being rescued by the Eskimos.

What implication?

The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

The implication that he might give more serious consideration to this than just rolling his eyes? The implication that he might do something other than dismiss this as all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by ...? Since it is the atheist who fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, .... Yes, I think this deserves a little more thought, a little more contemplation about life and its meaning. This may be one of the most meaningful experiences of his life, nothing about it should be dismissed with an eye roll, dismissed with blind certainty.

Just how much serious consideration of divine intervention by the hypothetical atheist do you think would be the right amount of consideration after the story's rescue?

I don't think divine intervention is all he has to consider. Usually, when I hear stories like this that are true, stories where someone almost loses his life, the person considers it a life-changing event. I think that's natural. we all know we're mortal; but this brings our mortality home to us. To listen to that story, and believe that the dismissive attitude makes sense is incomprehensible to me. He should have learned something, something that would prevent the eye roll.

[BurtWorm]

93. What would a deeper understanding of life in this case look like?

I know you're having trouble coming out and admitting it, but it sure sounds as though you're taking the position that the "deeper understanding" is that maybe his prayer worked. Maybe there was a connection between asking for help and help suddenly appearing, you seem to be saying. And yet, you can't answer the question of how he could get any closer to the truth of that hypothesis than just the vague term "awareness."

Do you think the problem is the belief common among non-believers that science can answer the question implicit in this scenario? Can you be more specific about what instrument he could use to gain awareness about this?

[Jim__]

94. One thing is for sure, he wouldn't roll his eyes when he talks about being rescued from the blizzard

As to your other questions, they've pretty much been answered previously. Some of them in post #92. There is no point in answering the same questions over and over.

[BurtWorm]

95. We are talking about an anecdote, Jim__, not a real slice of life.

As you can imagine, in real life, people who are rescued from life and death situations tend to think pretty deeply about them. If I were in this guy's exact same situation, I would be focused on the terrifying realization that I might have died, and then what would my life up till then have been for? This is, from what I've read and heard from other people who survived disasters, exactly what most survivors think about.

On the other hand, I recently read a book by a woman who was held hostage for six years by FARC in Colombia--not Ingrid Betancourt, but her friend and campaign manager Clara Rojas. She went into the forest believing in prayer and came out of it believing in it. But she seems to me to have a very hard time being able to look at what happened to her. She probably wrote the book to make money, but it's a curiously empty read. A lot of God talk. Not much grappling with the quetion of why, despite her lifelong devotion, God allowed her to go through that ordeal. She probably believes it was a personal lesson about suffering meant just for her. If she thinks that, she doesn't share it with us.