“Abram put his faith in the LORD, who reckoned it to him as righteousness, and said , ‘I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land as your possession.” Genesis 15:6-7

This is the moment, according to the Bible, where everything begins. This is the moment when Yahweh makes contact with a human being on a human level. What follows is Yahweh’s promise to give Abram the promised land and descendants too numerous to count.

The amazing moment is the bit about his faith being “reckoned to him as righteousness”.

Abram was not a spotless person. He was not without sin. But in virtue of his “faith” he is treated as if he was without sin. There doesn’t seem to be anything about him that makes him special. There must have been thousands of wandering refugees of that time that had been displaced from the cities that had sprang up in Mesopotamia. The crops were failing. The good times were over between the Tigris and Euphrates. Time to find better pastures.

Even if Abram/Abraham is mythological, the context seems to have a ring of truth.

This passage is critical to Christian theology. This is the first expression of grace, after the fall. A substitution is taking place. Abram’s faith in this God is more important than his fidelity to law (this is before Moses, of course). Faith is the most important feature of the relationship between man and the deity. Faith in the power (which is not so hard), and faith in his goodness (which is more difficult).

From my atheist perspective, I see man seeking, desperately, for benevolence in the cosmos. We are mere humans. There is some greater power that oversees us. This is a moment where the real test is changed from one of absolute obedience to one of faith. The man is willing to risk everything, to be a fool, to suffer for the ultimate purpose that this other, greater, absolute power has in store.

I find this part of Genesis utterly believable. I can imagine this actually happening to an ancient Abram–even the strange part in verse 17. The Garden of Eden and Noah’s arc are obviously myths, but this is where the Bible gets serious and strikes me as compelling.

Who is programming the Robo-Romney? They need to get it back into the lab and figure out why it keeps uttering these alarming sound-bites.

I’d like to start a bible study for atheists. And I think it should be serious and thoughtful and not some smug attempt to find every silly reason the bible doesn’t make sense.

A good topic to start with is the evolution of the concept of sin. How encumbered is our culture with the biblical concept of sin? I don’t know. I’m curious about it.

As I have mentioned, my brother is dying of alcoholism. If you have ever seen someone die of alcoholism, you know that this is one of the most gruesome ways to go. My family is on a death watch. They seem eager for it to end. And I can understand that. It’s excruciating. One wonders how this can continue… The man has overdosed on combinations of pills and booze that ought to kill a much larger mammal. And yet he persists.

My family is religious. Evangelical. I find it unfathomable.

My brother is a heathen through and through. A kind-hearted, but deeply flawed, narcissistic heathen. He has caused untold suffering to countless friends, lovers and worst of all forever damaged his one and only child who I know he loves deeply, but to whom he has given nothing but hurt. But people love him.

I am less enthusiastic about his dying, and less inclined to believe it is imminent. The sad fact of the matter is that the dismal state he is in could continue for years. Earlier today he made contact again from a local hospital (how many trips to the hospital have there been this year?). Apparently he was assaulted, again. His back has been broken. His spleen has been kicked in. His lungs have been perforated by broken ribs from beatings on the street.

You may ask why I am not caring for him here in my little suburban house with my two young children… He has been welcomed here from time to time, but extreme, blind, insane drunkenness does not a tolerable roommate make. Nothing is safe. He is a thief and liar. Above all, a liar.

The first time I took him in was when I was 17. After my mother booted him out he landed with me. In and out of my life he went over the past thirty years. The state was kind enough to care for him for a few years.

Despite all that I love him. There but for the grace of Tyche go I.

So back to the topic at hand. Existentialism. I kind of adopted this point of view a while back, with some Nietzsche under my belt, and huge doses of Dostoevsky. I cling to the ideal of existence precedes essence (Sartre’s formulation) and insist that I am responsible for whatever my life is. But I know down deep in my heart that this is just a psychological ploy. I want to believe it, but in my heart of hearts I’m a fatalist. I don’t see any hope for my brother. There’s no meaning to what has become of him.

From a relational perspective, however, it makes more sense. Whether I have the ability, or will to make more of myself than I am at this moment is beside the point. What matters is that I respond to others as if that were the case. And as hard as it is in my brother’s case, I give him the right to live the life he has chosen, even though the idea of “choice” in his case seems wildly out of place with the current facts.

I added the blog From Wine to Water to the blogroll today. I haven’t read everything on it, yet, but I’m guessing I will with time. He really touched a nerve for me. From what I’ve seen so far he has an excellent Christian pedigree… a lifetime of bible study and understanding of faith from the inside. But he’s out there talking about this strange experience of becoming an atheist. I can relate. It encourages me to write more about my non-faith which is kind of what got me going on this blogging thing in the first place.

***Can’t believe I did this, but an earlier version of this called Ivan’s blog “From Water to Wine” which kind of misses the whole point of the title of his blog. I guess that’s some old, deep-rooted bible reading coming through on my part…

A week ago, after the South Carolina primary, I wanted to write a little piece called “Anarchists for Newt.” Too late, sadly.

I can’t take this race seriously, although I follow it compulsively.

I wish Gingrich could have held on. A general election between Obama and Romney will be like being trapped in a focus group for six months. What do you want to hear? OK. How about this. Can you rate the following statement on a scale of one to ten…

The proles are up in arms (I wish literally) over Romney’s effective tax rate of 13.9%. Let’s review the facts:

Romney benefits from being taxed at the current capital gains rate of 15%. That’s a sweet rate compared to the highest rate paid on earned income of 35%. The conservative argument is that low rates on capital gains spur investment. This argument has some validity for those who would benefit from a one-off or infrequent return on a significant gain, such as the sale of a business. A high rate of tax on the sale of a business asset reduces the likelihood that an investor would be willing to sell if the tax rate diminishes the potential return of the transaction (especially when the transaction eliminates future material gains through ordinary profit from the business). That’s a pretty good argument, but it doesn’t mean anything to the likes of Romney and his cohort.

Sales of business income-producing assets that will produce a short-term gain are major decisions for a small business owner that has invested years of his or her life building up the business. Say you own a moderately successful coffee shop and one of the big corporate entities want to buy you out. If you can cash in and pay a nominal rate on the gain, it might make sense. If you have to pay a third of the gain on your lifetime investment, you might just hold on to your inefficient little neighborhood store and keep working 80 hours a week to keep it in business instead.

What does that have to do with the likes of Romney? Not a thing. Since he received “fees” from other rich people and re-invested the gains from the private capital that he “managed” he never had any of the risk of loss of income that the average small business owner must consider when making this decision.

The argument that without a low rate of tax on capital gains money would no longer be invested is just wrong. What the hell else are rich people going to do with their money? Stuff it in giant mattresses? Small business owners would need a break though if the rate were to get jacked up.

Earlier I argued that corporate income tax should be eliminated. I still stand by that argument. Recently I saw that some were claiming that Romney’s real rate was more like 50% since his income was from corporations (taxed at a fixed rate of 35%) plus his capital gains rate of 15%. That’s just pure bullshit. Although corporations do pay a current rate of 35%, few of them pay any dividends anyway, so what difference does it make? I doubt that the bulk of Romney’s earnings were from dividends (although there might be a few insignificant millions of dollars of dividends in the mix). Corporations have innumerable ways to avoid generating taxable profits, not least of which is off-shoring their most profitable divisions in low-tax countries such as Ireland.

Here’s a good trade-off: Eliminate corporate income tax altogether, but require that all profits be distributed (less prudent reserves) and be taxed as ordinary income.

(As an aside, whatever the rate on corporations, I don’t feel sorry for them. There are a wide variety of benefits available to both shareholders and employees of C-Corps that are not available to sole proprietors or even S-Corps. Not to mention the fact that even medium-sized corporations are usually at a huge advantage (vis a vis regulations and taxation) over their start-up rivals.)

Finally, from a moral perspective, is the sweat of one’s brow worth less than that pile of cash your daddy gave you? Just wondering.

Oh, and by the way, I’m still an anarchist and think all taxes are bullshit and serve only to sustain a governing elite, but that’s beside the point.

In a couple of hours I will be dropping off my wife at the county jail for a 24-hour visit. Our travails with the state began a little over a year ago when a routine traffic stop devolved into an opportunity for a smug motorcycle cop to try out his new training in detecting chemical intoxication. When I say chemical, I mean legally prescribed pharmaceuticals. My wife, not being a very good driver to begin with, and suffering from nearly crippling anxiety disorder, had a panic attack on the roadside and failed the roadside sobriety test.

After wasting a couple of thousand dollars on a lawyer, we were forced by empty pockets to abandon our fight and submit to the mandatory sentencing that our legislative overlords prescribed. This includes not only the obligatory suspension of one’s license, but thousands of dollars of punitive fines and this ridiculous junket to the now world famous “Tent City”.

Unless you are fortunate enough to live in one of the few dense urban centers of this country that have adequate public transportation, raising a family and functioning in this society is nigh to impossible without the use of 4,000 lb. hunks of metal and plastic hurtling down our millions of square miles of asphalted landscape. What to do for those who find the task of driving to be a challenge? Boo hoo for us.

Yes justice is blind. And a middle-aged housewife, school teacher and mother of two small children is as equally culpable in the eyes of the law for taking her prescriptions and driving a couple of miles to the grocery store as the inebriate at the local tavern who has gulped down a few too many and is driving with one eye closed.

It’s a one-size-fits-all approach that becomes laughable. In addition to the jail time and income redistribution, there are the mandatory alcoholism classes and the absurd requirement that we pay another few hundred dollars for an interlock device on the car to detect what? Xanax?

Meanwhile my kid brother, who actually is an alcoholic, is dying from his disease on the streets of the city. And how does he manage to get his booze? Shoplifting. He literally steals multiple quarts of liquor a day. The same state that has made drinking outside of ones home virtually illegal (without a chauffeur) makes liquor available in the checkout aisle of every Piggly Wiggly type grocery outlet in town.

First, thanks for the comments. I insist on persisting whether I like it or not…

On to a new topic.

Had a little scuffle with my spouse the other day. She has some chronic health problems (both physical & mental). I tend to get very prickly when she’s not feeling well. This has been a source of much discord between us over the years so I have tried to figure out why I am so impatient about it. As we were discussing my weaknesses as a spouse it occurred to me that my sympathy for her was inversely proportional to my empathy. Her unwellness makes me feel unwell, and that kind of makes me mad. OK, so maybe that’s not what you usually consider empathy. I’m stretching it a bit. But I do think there’s a negative correlation here.

When we are emotionally affected by another’s emotional or physical state, that can interfere with our rational response to another person’s suffering. Sympathy for another’s situation is based upon one’s moral or ethical framework. Where one’s sympathies lie is determined by what one believes is fair, right or just. Empathy can occlude this rational response because now we are in some sense sharing the suffering of the other.

So what good is empathy? What benefit is there in”sharing suffering”?

I started writing about my recent depression and came up with the following:

In youth some cultivate melancholy: an emotional blanket to be wrapped around a tender shoot of a soul. The warmth of ones first taste of true sorrow is like a fine brandy, or better, an Irish whiskey (a personal favorite). But like other pleasures, melancholy loses its taste with time.

The adultish version of melancholy–for when it is full grown it is as different from its immature version as caterpillar to moth–falls upon its victim without regard for sentimental affections, unmoored from the sublime shore of weighty meaning. It is a ship without a port, listing to one side, it’s hovering bulk black in the night, blotting out the stars. A cargo ship, packed full of empty crates, each full of empty fear. How can something so empty have such mass?

Not wishing to discard it entirely, I include it here as introduction. What is worth writing about? Locked in that question, and faced with an overwhelming sense of dread, I have abstained from the blog for some time. I continue to peruse the usual suspects, but cannot will myself to comment.

But it is an election year. I don’t want to be left out of the commentariat entirely.

Thank you to BLCKGRD for checking in on me… Those things he does with the written word (as in actually written with a pen) are amazing.

Still hanging in there…