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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 186: When does an Idea become a Fact?

March 25, 2019


An Idea. The most powerful force in the Universe.
When does an Idea become a Fact; and when does a Fact become an Idea?

In this context, I have to explain what I mean: I believe that Ideas drive us further than simple Facts. “Naia” above, is a fact; her DNA consists of combined Asian and Siberian strains in a pattern that is not found west of the Alaskan longitude. Her DNA is consistent with all the Indigenous peoples that populate the Americas [some of this information comes from the study of a younger skeleton, a male child found in Montana, which did not have a representation of his face constructed]. The face above is not what most of us would call, ‘an American Indian’. Naia’s face is not our Idea of an American Indian. But “Naia” is a fact. It requires an Idea for us white folk to understand that all the Indigenous people, throughout the Americas, are Naia’s forebears’ descendants. One family. This Idea is shown, scientifically, to e a much earlier time.

In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all currently living humans, i.e., the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers, and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

Does science therefore prove that the Bible is correct? The Older Testament contains a Hebrew story about how the world began. Many civilizations have similar stories. The Book of Genesis also talks about the Creation of the sun, moon and stars. Stars that were light years away from Earth. Starlight from stars that take years to reach Earth.

The two [nearest] stars [to our solar system] are Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, which form a binary pair. They are an average of 4.3 light-years from Earth.
https://www.space.com/18090-alpha-centauri-nearest-star-system.html

How many stars are there within 1,000 light years from our Solar System? The space within 1000 light years is (1000/50)³ = 8000 times as large. Assuming a homogenous distribution you can expect 7 to 8 million stars in this range.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-stars-are-there-within-1-000-light-years-from-our-Solar-System

Scripture does say that to the Creator, one day is like a thousand years; and a thousand years is as a day…

People throughout history have overcome the Facts of their lives by focusing on an Idea that carries them beyond the Facts. An Idea that becomes the driving force of their lives.

For generations, there has been an Idea that all mankind are members of one family, our brothers and sisters. A Fact.
For generations there has been Idea that only those people within our generation of people are our family—often the people who our grandparents sired, or the people sired by our great-grandparents. Another Fact.
Research into our ancestry can enlarge our view of how we came to be. An Idea.

You are an Idea.

You are more than an Idea; however, when someone asks for information about yourself, you probably describe yourself by your job, or your role in life. You possibly identify yourself by your passions—sports, gaming, mountain climbing; the person you are married to, your children, your famous relative…these roles are facts about you. Or facts that you wish were about you. What you choose to do with these facts can become your guiding Idea.

People with a mental illness struggle with finding their identity—a post-medicated identity that doesn’t match the person they were before the medication. Being unable to reach a personality they no longer have. The struggle to understand who they are now. They need to find a new Idea of who they are going to be.

People with physical illness struggle in the same fashion—they can no longer participate in a life they enjoyed before. The athlete who is missing limbs, the singer who can no longer sing, the musician who can no longer play their music. The ‘ordinary’ [I believe we are all extraordinary—but we have been taught not to be] person who can’t walk anymore, or can’t climb trees, or walk along a mountain path. They need to find a new Idea of who they are going to be.

When one is a high-achiever by nature or learning and can no longer achieve to the level they consider necessary, they struggle with finding value in lesser achievements. The person with large dreams for the future who finds that the dreamed-of future will never happen.

I currently deal with an unexplained fatigue, on top of my Polyneuropathy of Unknown Cause. I can’t do what I used to be able to do. To a degree, I can’t do what I could do last year, and this is only March. The wrist that won’t support my weight without collapsing. The pain involved in getting out of bed. The morning walk that drains more energy than it did months ago. I won’t go through the details.

However, I refuse to describe myself by the things that I cannot do. This refusal is an Idea. The Idea that I have a choice about the way I see myself; succeeding or failing. On many days, I don’t succeed; I still refuse to accept the Idea of failure, as my self-definition. I am uniquely able, rather than using the dis- word. Life was simpler when I thought life was about facts.

Each of us is an Idea. We all make the decision as to what that Idea is.

The reality is that a large portion of the world’s population has no Idea at all. There are those who never seem to make it past adolescence, no matter how many years they have been around. There are many who are never permitted to have an Idea of who they could be. There are those who have lived in Privilege [however that is defined], whose world collapses underneath them; and now that have no privileges at all. The ones who have the weight of the world on top of them, when they were on top of the world last week. Then there are people who are uncontrollably damaged through no fault of their own. Shit Happens.

Who we become next is an Idea.
Where do we find the Ideas?

This is going to upset some people:
The Creator [aka God] is an Idea. I happen to believe that the Creator is also a Fact; perhaps The Fact of human existence. But I can’t prove this to be true. Countless wars have been fought, are being fought, because opposing peoples can’t reconcile their Idea with someone else’s Idea. Frequently wars are started because opposing peoples cannot agree on how a Book should be read. I’m a heretic. My most substantial evidence for the existence of the Creator does not come from a Book or Books; my evidence comes from my experiences. The Books back up what I’ve learned by way of the Spirit of the Creator.

I think one starts with ‘painting a mental picture’ of who you want to be; imagining what characteristics the who you want to become would have. How that person would act instead of how you react without being that person.
In 1726, at the age of 20, Benjamin Franklin created a system to develop his character. He created a ‘score card’ with thirteen character traits he wanted to have. He kept this list with him at all times and marked his chart whenever he demonstrated that characteristic. Over time, more of the characteristics were marked. Over time, he changed who he was. It works; I’ve done it myself.

http://www.thirteenvirtues.com/

There are two men in my life who are very important to me. Fifty years apart in age, they struggle in similar ways with the question of who they are going to be. Both of them explore the concept of ending their existence. I know that I can’t ‘fix’ either of them—we can never ‘fix’ another human being; the most we can do is provide an environment where change can occur, when the person decides that change is necessary—and yet I know that they can change. They don’t yet have a new Idea for their lives. I can’t download an Idea from my brain to theirs; and I know this wouldn’t work either, because it would be my Idea, not theirs.

Where do we find the Ideas? For me, the Ideas come from a search for new truths. I have a soundtrack that plays through my head for most of my waking hours. Perhaps during my sleeping hours as well, since the music plays 24/7. Maybe my ears pick up sounds while I’m asleep, better than when I’m awake. A soundtrack for the person I want to be, even if I’m not there yet. Last night I was listening to an artist I admire; however, his music is mostly from the ‘pop charts.’ I find songs from pop charts to be fairly vapid; and yes, I’m a music snob.

I continually read. Each morning I read something specifically related to my Idea; during the day I read about what’s happening in the world. I read novels a few times a week; I’m a fan of hero stories. Before going to bed each night, I watch hero stories on the black rectangle in the living room.

I believe the Ideas we accept for our lives begin with our upbringing; whether positive or not. I’ve come to the realization that what parents assume is being taught to their children isn’t what their children are learning. I realize that I didn’t spend enough time engaging my children as they were growing. Partially because I never talked with my parents; but that is simply an excuse. The reality is that I placed a higher priority on my own struggles than engaging with my children and their struggles. We can’t go back and correct our mistakes. I’m a fan of time travel stories; however, I also realize that time travel is science fiction.

Find an Idea. Make it yours.

 

Enough of that.

  • Illustration Tip #11: More Marketing

Being self-employed, I need to be marketing my work all the time. I hate marketing myself; the guy that mutes commercials on the black rectangle; the one that hides all the ads on Facebook. I usually quit reading Fb when I’m tired of deleting spam. I mark all the spam as Irrelevant; my magical thinking expects that someday, I will reprogram the Fb algorithm.

So, this guy who hates commercials needs to create ‘commercials’ for myself, in order to make my presence known. I’m this guy:

Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and the internet did not exist, we needed to use print advertising to get our message out to the world. The rule of thumb at that time was that only 4% of our ads would create a response by a prospective client. To put that in a better perspective, if one sends out 199 fliers, one should not expect to receive more than 4 inquiries. If one sends out 220 fliers, one might hear from 8 prospects. The average number was an average; it wasn’t a guarantee.

According to the Netcraft January 2018 Web Server Survey there are 1,805,260,010 (over 1.8 billion) websites. Yes, the Internet is very big. However, most of those websites get almost no visitors. If I was really into marketing myself, I would tell you that “I have the formula for bringing thousands of customers to your website,” but I would be lying. There is no formula. MY guess is that the 4% number is probably still accurate.

Among the things I do, I make videos:

You may, or you may not, realize that most, if not all of the ads on Social Media now feature videos. The concept being that movement attracts attention. Movement does attract attention. For me, movement signals that I probably need to delete the ad…

I struggle with the Idea of what my business is. Creating videos is fun; it’s also tedious. If you follow the image link above to my mjarts.com home page, you’ll see a video that I enjoy, conceptually, but there is movement in the titles [vertical words] that shouldn’t be there. Correcting the movement is tedious. I think the plan was to do something different, rather than making the correction; my life being what it is, I forget what the plan was.

Even more than making videos is ‘photo manipulation’. When dinosaurs ruled the earth, and digital images did not exist, one sometimes ended up with a paper photograph that did not do the subject justice. Or one ended up with old photographs whose image degraded due to sunlight or other forms of abuse. Back then, it was called ‘photo restoration’. The need still exists, because people have old photographs they want to be proud of, and the photo is no longer cooperating:

I have just illustrated for you one Idea about marketing your business. Did it work? You tell me: marty@mjarts.com

[OMG: I posted my email address on a webpage. Yeah, that’s pretty much the point…yes, I get a lot of spam]

 

 

 

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The Witch Hunt

March 24, 2019

For those who want to keep track…

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 185: The Audience of One

March 15, 2019
“…mushrooms, 30-40 feet high” from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth

Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants.
C.S. Lewis, ‘On Stories’, Of Other Worlds

Clive Staples Lewis is in my opinion, one of the most brilliant theologians of our time; perhaps of all time. Of course, my opinion and $5.00 might enable you to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Lewis died on the same day as John F. Kennedy; my guess, since I was only eleven years old on that day, is that Lewis’ passing did not warrant much media attention. He probably would have liked it that way. Lewis was a scholar, and he was a professor of English Literature, which also made him a scholar of history. He disliked the ‘celebrity’ which hounded him. He wanted to be able to quietly read.

Raised without a concept of personal faith, although a student of many forms of religion, Lewis came to faith at University; much like myself. An academic who found himself thrust into the limelight in England during World War II, presenting concepts of faith to ‘the common man’; and then across the world, through the publication of his theological works, his science fiction and his Chronicles of Narnia.

C.S. Lewis on The Modern View:

The whole modern estimate of primitive man is based upon that idolatry of artefacts which is a great corporate sin of our own civilisation. We forget that our prehistoric ancestors made all the most useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture.

The Problem of Pain, ch. 5

Between Jane Austen and us comes the birth of the machines…This is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy. It alters Man’s place in nature…

I conclude that it really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man.

‘De Descriptione Temporum’, Selected Literary Essays

‘It is the same with all their machines. Their labour-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent; their amusements bore them; their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving time have banished leisure from their country.’

The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk 10, ch. 6

It took me as long to acquire inhibitions as others (they say) have taken to get rid of them. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.

Surprised by Joy, ch. 4

In the early years of this century, I illustrated a Korean children’s book based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia. The story of a King who is being blackmailed for his dalliance with an American opera star, Irene Adler. She who was later described by Holmes as The Woman; the only person to outwit the Great Detective. I was chosen as the illustrator because the Korean publisher wanted the book to have a ‘western’ design, rather than an Asian design. I have no idea where they found me; typical for my projects. People inquire about my availability, and they rarely seem to remember how they found me.

The book was published; the publishing house was purchased by another company; and that company went ‘bust’. However, I own all the art that went into the making of the book. In the years since I illustrated the Korean children’s version of Doyle’s story, A Scandal in Bohemia has entered the Public Domain. A couple years ago, I decided to publish a digital version of the book, illustrated the way I would have liked to illustrate the book, all those years ago; using Doyle’s manuscript. Being a project for myself, it always takes second- or third place in my time priorities. So, most weeknights find me working on A Scandal in Bohemia while I listen to MSNBC’s coverage of the Scandal in Washington DC…

Os Guinness [yes, that Guinness] wrote a book entitled The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life; one of his stories comes from his own family history. His great-great-grandmother found herself widowed at a young age; her foolish husband having been killed in a duel in Scotland. Destitute, she had taken her children to a bridge, from which she intended to jump, along with her children. While gathering her courage at the bridge railing, she became entranced by watching a farm hand plowing a field. The farm hand was plowing his rows as carefully as a painter would have painted the scene. She realized that if a farm hand could take that amount of care in his plowing, perhaps she could make something of herself. She left the bridge railing; eventually found Faith and eventually married one of the Guinness sons; and is known to have prayed for the generations that would follow her, for the rest of her life.

She learned to live for an Audience of One.

Also from The Call:

Yehudi Menuhin, the renowned maestro and violinist, has held audiences all over the world spellbound with his conducting and virtuoso playing. Like many great musicians, his gifts were precocious. He made his violin debut in San Francisco at the age of seven and launched his worldwide career at the age of twelve with a historic concert at Carnegie Hall. In his memoirs, Unfinished Journey, Menuhin tells the story of how he began his long love affair with the violin.

From the time he was three years old, Menuhin’s parents frequently took him to concerts in New York where he heard the concertmaster and first violinist Louis Persinger. When Persinger broke into solo passages, little Yehudi, sitting with his parents up in the gallery, was enchanted.

“During one such performance,” Menuhin wrote, “I asked my parents if I might have a violin for my fourth birthday and Louis Persinger to teach me to play it.”

Apparently, his wish was granted. A family friend gave the little boy a violin, but it was a toy one, made of metal with metal strings. Yehudi Menuhin was only four. He could hardly have had the arms and fingers to do justice to a full-sized violin, but he was furious.

“I burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing to do with it.” Reflecting years later, Menuhin said he realized he wanted nothing less than the real thing because “I did know instinctively that to play was to be.”

Stories like that are common lives of creative artists. Artie Shaw, a famous clarinetist in the old Big Band days, shared his heart with an interviewer. “Maybe twice in my life I reached what I wanted to. Once we were playing ‘These Foolish Things’ and at the end the band stops, and I play a little cadenza. That cadenza—no one can do it better. Let’s say it’s five bars. That’s a very good thing to have done in a lifetime. An artist should be judged by his best, just as an athlete. Pick out my one or two best things and say, ‘That’s what we did: all the rest was rehearsal.'”

I get up each morning and create illustrations for an Audience of One—the One to whom I gave my life 46 years ago. I opened my heart to my Creator and said, ‘here, take my life. I’ll only screw it up on my own.’ And my hope is that today I will create something beyond ‘rehearsal’; knowing that one can’t create ‘best’ without rehearsal.

This is not to say that I create religious illustrations or illustrate religious books. I mostly don’t. I’m not fond of religion. At the same time, I want all of my work to be a work of Grace—“unmerited favor”—humans do not merit the Creator’s favor—we are a cruel and monstrous lot. If you don’t believe that you should be counted in this cruel and monstrous lot, you haven’t read enough history; you haven’t read the news today. There is only one race; it is called “human” and every day, our government is in the process, directly or indirectly, of killing our brothers and sisters. I did not do anything noteworthy today to stop the murders. I signed some petitions; I’ve donated some money. I put the needs of my family above the needs of others. This isn’t ‘wrong’, per se; while I have been focused on the needs that I value, my fellow humans have been harmed. I bear that guilt, even if I don’t want to. I did nothing to stop the killing.

When the future Mrs. Guinness stepped away from the railing on that bridge, it was because she had decided to live for the future, rather than dying because of the past. She decided to live for an Idea.

I live for an Idea. I can’t prove that there is a Creator who guides my steps, although I believe this is true. I get out of bed each day for an Idea. It has become painful to get out of bed each day; I take a lot of medication—not nearly as much as some people—enough that my body now has a different smell than it had years ago—and my sense of smell is rubbish. There was a time, long ago, when my doc had to say, ‘take the damn pill, Marty,’ because I didn’t want to live medicated. Pain can be an addiction. It doesn’t seem that different from the barbiturate addiction I used to have.

I get out of bed for an Idea; that Idea is my Audience of One.

Who we individually are is Idea; nothing more, nothing less. As I keep writing, over and over, our bodies are collections of atoms that are largely composed of space, and electromagnetic forces; consequently, even though we seem to be solid, we are mostly space, and the electromagnetic forces that create an illusion of solidity. We are energy; when the shells of our body die, we remain energy in the form of Identity. How this all works is something we really can’t understand on this side of Life.

I believe that the Idea that is us, exists in a spiritual dimension; which is also an Idea. I believe that this Idea is also called the Soul. Ideas can build magnificent futures; Ideas can rob us of the future we might have had, were we willing to trust the Idea of us.

One of my mentors once said: ‘If you have to move 12 inches in order to be happy, you will never be happy’. People who live in chronic physical or emotional pain have a difficult time finding ‘happy’—happiness is largely circumstantial. Joy is a more achievable emotion, one that is less dependent upon circumstance. Living in Joy can happen even when happiness doesn’t occur. Joy is a decision. Joy is an idea.

How do we find our Audience of One? I think that we must first decide that we cannot do this life on our own, without screwing it up. For many of us, we have been proving this to be true for decades.

There have been alcoholics in my family; I have grown fond of the Twelve Steps. Steps 2 & 3 are:

[I] Came to believe that a Power greater than [myself] could restore [me] to sanity.
[I] Made a decision to turn [my] will and [my] life over to the care of God as [I] understand Him.

https://www.addictioncenter.com/treatment/12-step-programs

Overcoming the Human Propensity to F*ck things Up.

I realize that there are a lot of people who just can’t believe in the concept of a Creator [an Idea]—the sciences explain ‘everything’ without the need for a Creator. The sciences don’t explain everything, any more than religion explaining everything. I believe that the sciences are a language of the Creator. My understanding is that before he died, Stephen Hawking proved that the creation of the entire Universe could be explained by Gravity. I don’t know that he explained the existence of Gravity.

 

Enough of that.

  • Illustration Tip #10:

Marketing. I hate marketing myself. People who spend weeks at a time, alone in a room, creating something, aren’t particularly social. To market oneself, one must learn to be more sociable. For me, Social Media and the internet are ideal ways to be sociable. I am anonymous; my interaction with people is structured; a fairly effective way to avoid saying things I don’t want to say [it’s called proofreading]; and I can deliver images.

ONLINE PORTFOLIOS

Websites that currently have my images [if you find a bad link, please let me know] are below. The websites marked in bold have brought verifiable sales or customer inquiries. Something more than “likes”.
The $ means that I pay a fee for the service. These fees are far less than I’ve paid for print advertising. Of course, at this point in time, my business income is less, which makes the fees a larger part of my income.

mjarts.com                       Society 6 Retail Store
MJ Arts website               https://society6.com/mjartscom
http://mjarts.com/portfolio.html

Artist.com Retail Store
https://artist.com/name-lt-marty-jones/arts-list

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/mjartscom

about.me                                    The Creative Finder        $
https://about.me/martyjones       http://thecreativefinder.com

childrensillustrators.com     $
http://www.childrensillustrators.com/illustrator-details/martyjones/id=62

Dripbook:
http://www.dripbook.com/mjartscom

picture-book                 $
http://picture-book.com/mj-arts-illustration-2

hireanillustrator.com             $
http://www.hireanillustrator.com/i/portfolio/marty-jones

behance.net                                    deviantart.com
https://www.behance.net/mjarts    http://mjarts.deviantart.com

Pond5 Stock Media
http://www.pond5.com/artist/mjarts

Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators          $
https://www.scbwi.org

localsolo.com
https://localsolo.com/portland-or/profile/18258

Chronicles in Ordinary Time         Facebook
https://mjarts.blog       https://www.facebook.com/mjartscom

LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjarts

Twitter
https://twitter.com/mjarts_com

youtube: mjartscom’s channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgJQUsjr0nmHieNcNpa8oeg

pinterest
https://www.pinterest.com/mjartscom

Artists Info          $
https://www.artistsinfo.co.uk/artist/marty-jones

Amazon Author pages:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B016GG2LPS
UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B016GG2LPS

IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur68910572

Redbubble
http://www.redbubble.com/people/mjartscom

Dribbble
https://dribbble.com/mjartscom

The collection above represents a huge amount of my time for uploading information. Every portfolio page has different sizing requirements. Nearly all of them require the use of keywords. I generally don’t create images that are designed only for the purpose of selling images. In the process of creating larger/more complex images, I create small images which, in theory, can be used as stock art. Apparently, I’m not good at selecting images that sell well.

Is it worth it? To be honest, I don’t know. I want to do illustration/graphic arts work; searching job boards takes a lot of time.

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 184: Telling Stories

March 3, 2019
Serra Pelada Gold Mine Brazil; Sebastião Salgado

I am a story-teller.
Sadly, I lack the ability to craft a narrative tale of any length. So, I tend to tell the stories of other people, mostly through my illustrations.

There was a time when I thought I would become a better photographer. Time and circumstance being what they are, I found that my neurological challenges won out over the steadiness needed to be a photographer.

The other night, I watched The Salt of the Earth; a documentary about the life and work of Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian economist turned photographer, and his 40-year quest to show the world to the world. By the end of the 20th Century he had become heart-sick over the abject cruelty of the human race; and our continuing, endless history of warfare upon each other. He photographed genocide, starvation that could have been stopped and incredible poverty. By the end of the 20th Century, he had decided to quit photography.

Early in this century, he and his wife took on the ‘impossible’ task of replanting a Brazilian rainforest that had existed on- and adjacent-to the Salgado farm; but had been decimated by years of drought. Having planted over a million trees, over several years, by last year the Brazilian Rainforest had returned, along with its wildlife. Their work, called Instituto Terra, has been given to the Brazilian people in the form of a National Park; and has become the model of recovery for abused landscapes. Sebastião was healed by the replanting, and began a new chapter of his career, photographing nature.

Early in his photographic career, Sebastião Salgado went to the Serra Pelada Gold Mine in Brazil; when it was a giant hole in the ground being mined, by hand, by 50,000 men from all walks of life, lured by the power of gold:

“Though Salgado felt compelled to document what was at the time one of Brazil’s largest gold rushes, he was ill-prepared for the frenzied scene he encountered at Serra Pelada (or “Naked Mountain” in English). “I was left speechless… droves of men of all colours and ages were carrying their feverish dream of instant wealth, a dream that had led them to leave their families and homes…to dig for a dull yellow metal that promised them a new life..
“Swept along by the winds that carry the hint of fortune, men come to the gold mine of Serra Pelada. No one is taken there by force, yet once they arrive, all become slaves of the dream of gold and the need to stay alive. Once inside, it becomes impossible to leave.
“Every time a section finds gold, the men who carry up the loads of mud and earth have, by law, the right to pick one of the sacks they brought out. And inside they may find fortune and freedom. So, their lives are a delirious sequence of climbs down into the vast hold and climbs out to the edge of the mine, bearing a sack of earth and the hope of gold.
“Anyone arriving there for the first time confirms an extraordinary and tormented view of the human animal: 50,000 men sculpted by mud and dreams. All that can be heard are murmurs and silent shouts, the scrape of shovels driven by human hands, not a hint of a machine. It is the sound of gold echoing through the soul of its pursuers.”

Jesus taught about the dangers of pursuing wealth. ‘It is easier to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven’. And the disciples were disturbed by this teaching. All sorts of explanations have been made as to what Jesus was saying. Some say the disciples were disturbed because they were wealthy men; perhaps they desired wealth. Some people talk about a narrow gate in Jerusalem called ‘the eye of the needle’—a place where a camel had to be unloaded before it could enter. People don’t like to take the teaching literally.

I had a digital conversation the other night with a guy I respect; his understandings of Faith are remarkable. However, he seems to be caught up in the making of money. Probably a good program; but I realized that he’d been running in the same ‘circles’ that I had run in a few decades back…
My wife and I spent several years in the company of people who put a priority on gaining wealth. Financial principles were taught in the context of Scripture and the ability to buy one’s freedom from a job. My own motivations were simpler, I simply wanted to be in the company of individuals I admired. I had some talent for selling tech; but I could never make it an important part of my life. I could not live with the slogans like ‘Jobs are for Losers’. Categorically labelling people as “losers”—something that happens far too often at this point in our capitalistic history—removes the possibility of change and growth.
Helping others to fulfill their dreams became important for me; but things fell apart when I nearly died, months after doing my utmost to make sure that my sister didn’t die [see my previous post]. Late in 1988 I did some research that indicated that adult victims of a ruptured appendix had frequently gone through a period of stress. All that I know is that my recovery ‘nearly killed me’—the metaphor. It was the rupture and a day of internal leaking of nasty stuff that nearly killed me. The rest was 8 months of frustrating recovery.

How do we return?

As supported by historical research in recently-released government records, Rachel Maddow and her team at MSNBC created a podcast called “Bag Man” which focuses on Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew. Richard Nixon, despite his protests to the contrary, was a crook. During the early days of the Watergate investigation, Federal Prosecutors found evidence that the Vice President, successor to Richard Nixon, if he left office, was a real crook. For years, as Governor of Maryland, Agnew took kickbacks on lucrative government contracts; and sacks of money were delivered to his office on a regular basis. This practice continued after his becoming Vice President, and the sacks of money were regularly delivered to the Vice President’s office. Prosecutors having found evidence supporting charges of extortion, bribery, and income-tax violations, Agnew agreed to leave office having pled ‘no contest’ to a felony charge of tax evasion; and forfeited his license to practice law. Senator Gerald R. Ford was quickly confirmed to the office of Vice President; Republican Senators presented the Prosecution’s case against the President to Richard Nixon; he agreed to leave office; and was later pardoned by President Ford for crime[s] Nixon did not admit to having done.

This last week, the President’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, was questioned by Congress for three days: two closed sessions, and one open session. He will be returning this coming week, bringing additional paper records to support the allegations he is making.
In these days, when there is a week’s worth of news every day, the narrative sometimes becomes lost…

“…Just over a month later, on Aug. 21, 2017, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in Manhattan to eight felonies—including campaign finance violations, tax evasion and making false statements to a bank—before Judge William H. Pauley III. The federal sentencing guidelines call for about four to five years on those charges, which were brought by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, known as the Southern District.

“Surprisingly, Mr. Cohen entered his plea without a traditional cooperation deal in which the Southern District would write to the judge and seek leniency when he was finally sentenced.

“Last Thursday [November 28.2017], Mr. Cohen entered his second guilty plea in Manhattan, this time to a charge of making false statements, which was filed by Mr. Mueller’s office. In court, he admitted he had misled congressional committees about negotiations he carried out on Mr. Trump’s behalf during the 2016 election campaign on a proposed tower in Moscow. Those negotiations, he said, lasted until five months before the election, far longer than previously known, and Mr. Trump was kept in the loop.

“For lying to Congress, Mr. Cohen faces a potential sentence of up to six months under the federal guidelines. And although there was no traditional cooperation deal, Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors agreed to bring Mr. Cohen’s assistance to the attention of the sentencing judge.”

https://theworldnews.net/ca-news/why-michael-cohen-donald-trump-s-fixer-confessed-to-it-all

Not to attempt to ‘paint’ a convicted felon heroically, Mr. Cohen’s second set of indictments were not the result of an arrest; on November 28, 2017 Cohen walked into a courtroom and pleaded guilty to felonies, on his own volition. He was seeking to clear his conscience for the sake of his family; I’d begun to believe that consciences did not exist anymore in Washington D.C. and NYC.
During the open session, many members of Congress continually accused of Michael Cohen of being a liar [for which he has already been indicted—more lying would likely increase his prison time], but no one disputed his allegations. Let that one sink in for a moment. No one disputed his allegations. They simply did not like what he said.

In the weeks and months ahead, facts about the current President will become more well known. The open questions regarding his support of- or by foreign powers hostile to the United States will be out in the open; as well as alleged financial crimes committed by the President’s family corporation.
15-20% of the population will no doubt consider these facts, not yet in evidence, as lies promoted by “Fake News” and the “Deep State”. Half of the Electorate did not vote in 2016; refusing to choose between a morally compromised businessman, and a liberal, female candidate who came with political baggage. Those who did not vote are guilty of allowing the President to gain his office. They could have voted for someone else.
Less than a day after Mr. Cohen appeared before Congress, alleging that Donald Trump committed felonies during his Presidential campaign, and his Presidency; at this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, CEO Mike Lindell stated, “As I stand before you today, I see the greatest president in history. Of course, he is. He was chosen by God,” Lindell told the audience.
“God answered our prayers, our millions of prayers, and gave us grace, and a miracle happened on Nov. 8, 2016,” Lindell continued. “We were given a second chance and time granted to get our country back on track with our conservative values and getting people saved in Jesus’s name.”

Statistically, 80% of White Evangelicals who voted, voted for the President. While they probably would not have let their daughters date the candidate, because he was publicly, morally compromised, they did not object to his running the country, because he promised to place Conservative judges on court benches; and would oppose funding for apparently-offensive publicly-supported programs that serve the underprivileged and those not holding to the strict moral code the Evangelical Church was willing to ignore when it comes to Presidential office. For decades I heard Evangelical preaching as to how I was to raise my children—none of it included behavior boasted by the current President.

The Conservative Evangelical Church condemns those whose behavior does not match their moral standards; and yet are willing to ignore the fact that a Federal Court has determined that the President of the United States is already an Unindicted Co-Conspirator in the conducting of multiple felonies. The man is a crook.
Perhaps I have a better understanding now:

(Matthew 27:15-26; Luke 23:13-25)
6 Now it was Pilate’s custom at the feast to release to the people a prisoner of their choosing. 7 And a man named Barabbas was imprisoned with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection. 8 So the crowd went up and began asking Pilate to keep his custom.  9 “Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asked. 10 For he knew it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over. 11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas to them instead. 12 So Pilate asked them again, “What then do you want me to do with the One you call the King of the Jews?”  13 And they shouted back, “Crucify Him!” 14 “Why?” asked Pilate. “What evil has He done?” But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify Him!” 15 And wishing to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed Him over to be crucified.

The Garden of Gethsemane

Enough of that.

  • Illustration Tip #9: [I know, I’ve jumped from #6 to #9]

Keep lists. This will help you keep information straight, when your brain gets too full; like when jumping from Illustration Tip #4 to Illustration Tip #7 without realizing it; because I hadn’t started keeping a list of these tips…

I keep lists of keywords, I keep lists of websites where I have portfolios of some sort. These two lists are in .txt files—a digital file card that takes very little space on the computer and can be useful in telling me when I need to restart the computer. If I can’t save a change, Windows 10 needs restarting. Windows 10 often needs restarting…

I keep passwords in lists. After twenty years of digital marketing, I sometimes have trouble remembering why I have a specific website on my password list. If I was really diligent, I’d go through and clean them up… As it is, I receive extortion spam from people who claim to have access to an email address I may have used for a month, a few years back [if you use MySpace, change your password]. I have no idea what my password is for that site. I forward the extortion spam to the Feds. I do not have cameras on my computers.

Back up your work. Another form of list. I have tens of dozens of DVDs, upon which are twenty years of illustration/graphic art/consulting work. Some of my larger-scope projects have required a dozen DVDs to store the images. Now I use terabyte drives. Since terabyte drives are not impervious to damage, I generally have duplicate backup files. Sometimes that isn’t enough…

Having your work visible in one spot on the internet is not enough. I have my work visible in a lot of spots on the internet and it still isn’t enough. Redbubble advises that having at least 15 tags/keywords per image increases the chances of getting found.

I have my images on a number of ‘retail store’ websites. Upload your image to a website, and have it duplicated onto clothing, tech cases, furniture. Eventually you will find that your work is making sales without your knowledge. Before you get too excited about the idea, your earnings will probably allow you to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks…

For me, the marketing of my illustrations is painful. Mostly metaphorically. I’ve had ‘agents’ who’ve claimed that they will sell my work for a small commission. I do not have a problem with sharing profits with people who are willing to do the work of marketing; they seem hard to find.

Over the years I have paid for ads [usually a full sheet of paper] in printed workbooks; paid for advertising in digital catalogs and paid for inclusion on ‘graphic art’ websites. I have an IMDB listing for creating a movie poster. I pay a company in the UK to advertise my work. My general standard for deciding whether or not I should continue that advertising is fairly simple—have I gotten inquiries from the source? I don’t focus on sales as much as on inquiries. There are many factors involved in generating sales as a commercial artist. Sometimes there are factors that have absolutely nothing to do with my work. An upcoming exhibition in London:

 

 

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 183: I don’t believe in ‘random’.

February 27, 2019

Not an original image. My hope is that 2019 becomes the year that is worth talking about again. When the guilty are brought to justice.

I don’t believe in ‘random’.

I handed the idea of ‘random’ over to my Creator in the late 70s, when I gave back to my Maker, the life I had been given. So, when one or two songs out of the 1689 songs on my ‘random’ playlist start up at the exact moment I’m writing someone, or thinking about something specific, I am no longer surprised. From the seemingly inane to the incredibly portentous events of my life, I believe things happen for a reason. I also believe that I am probably not yet wise enough to understand what that reason might be. Small things; huge things; ‘miracles’, by which I mean events that seem to happen in an ‘interventional’ way, for no discernible reason. I believe the Spirit of the Creator intersects with moments in my life, moments that may have nothing to do with me, beyond allowing me to be a witness…

And then there are the Awful Things that the world has plagued with from the beginning:

The Human Propensity to F*ck things Up

I know a lot of people who say that it all happens according to a Plan. I believe that is a mistranslation of Scripture. I believe that we, our souls, the part that makes us, us, is made for Eternity. The Creator exists outside of Time. We are incapable of understanding the concept. The beginning of time [Kairos] is happening simultaneously with the end of time here [Chronos]; The Creator knows about our lives here–in all of its ugliness and all of its wonder. The Creator is never surprised by our actions or the things that happen. Bad stuff happens; it is not ordained; it is not permanent. Our souls are permanent, and we are not able to understand what this means.

Clive Staples Lewis was a brilliant man, a scholar of English Literature, which also made him a scholar of history. While at college he encountered Faith; an encounter that came within a dislike he describes as ‘a mouse looking for a cat.’ He and I encountered Faith at much the same time in our lives, with much the same opinion. One of my favorite works of C.S. Lewis is an anthology of his writings, which filled volumes. One of the works that makes me wish I had an eidetic [photographic] memory; so many ideas that I would like to be able to quote at will…

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps’. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.

Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 10

I love movies. I think I began watching visual stories as a means of understanding how other people think. The reality is that I don’t understand things that the mass of people seems to understand. Within the realm of visual storytelling is my love for science fiction and time travel. ‘How would my life have been different if…’

Within the realm of understanding of the nature of the Universe are the people Lewis mentions above—the people who take the religious Scriptures literally—these people exist throughout the Abrahamic faiths; and are, in truth, the cause of war and terrorism in the Middle East today; and for centuries across Europe. The idea that only one idea can be the correct idea. A source of discord in American society.

There are those who believe that the Universe consists of an infinite series of parallel universes where each of our decisions create separate realities. I can’t wrap my head around that one. There are those that believe we are each, ‘ideas within the mind of God.’ I have less trouble with that one, when I realize that none of us are solid creatures; solidity is an illusion. Every atom is composed mostly of electromagnetic forces; we are each composed of atoms; therefore, we are each composed mostly of electromagnetic forces.

Getting back to ‘random’ and my lack of belief in ‘random’.

An intersection of my seeing someone across the room, a person I wanted to meet, but lacked the nerve; who, years later, was still in the same place when I returned. The person I eventually ‘adopted’ as my sister; who was plagued by the deaths of family members every other year. The person who had her own ‘death warrant’ delivered to her; the mother of the son who would become an orphan because the hospital that was willing to transplant her liver would charge $185,000 in 1988—an impossible sum of money. She had no insurance, worked part-time and had a retired mother of her own, living on Social Security. I took her son to the State Capitol one day, to be part of an explanation to State Legislators about the challenges of people in dire health situations who do not have health insurance. We had started a fundraising campaign [the internet did not exist] with beef jerky containers on countertops, asking for spare change. On that day in Salem, Oregon, there was a reporter from the Washington Post looking for an interesting story, and a reporter from CNN on the same mission. Two people from far away who ‘happened’ to be in Salem, Oregon on the afternoon when my sister’s son cried for his Mom in front of the State Legislature. He was 12, then; he’s in his 40s now.

We did interviews with the two reporters in the following week; within a couple of weeks, money started pouring in from across the world. The Post article was on the front page of their ‘Living’ Section; that article inspired other articles from writers across the country. Newspaper stories about the working poor and the high cost of medical expenses [again, 1988, before the internet]. Having made all of the arrangements with Baylor including preliminary medical tests, when the reporter from CNN contacted me about an offer of a free transplant from a California hospital that was beginning a liver transplant program [the doc in charge saw the CNN report while in Hawaii—who watches CNN while vacationing in Hawaii? Pocket computers did not exist]; I gave the CNN reporter the contact information for an Oregon woman in the same condition as my sister. I recently learned that she had received the transplant, around the same time as my sister’s.

My sister was turning green when I wheeled her into Baylor University Hospital with a check for $185,000 taped to my belly. She was nearly dead when an organ donor ‘turned up’ and once again, a life was given for another. Something like 30 years later, the drugs that kept my sister alive caused Cancer. She survived chemo. Only to come up against Breast Cancer. She survived again; chemo and radiation. Then she learned that blood transfusions over the years had led to Hepatitis C. She survived that as well. Her joints are damaged from the steroid use.

Her grandchildren turned four, recently. A miracle she never expected [their survival had not been guaranteed].

Every now and then I send an update to that Washington Post reporter. He saved two lives. According to the Talmud and the Holy Quran, the saving of one life is the saving of the entire world.

My sister’s story is the most dramatic ‘interventional’ story; there are countless smaller ones.

What I call my ‘Re-birthday’ is today; February 26th. My ‘end-of-random’ happened a few years later, when I better understood how the ‘interventional’ had happened in my life. So, I now also realize that the ‘dissolving’ of my body due to a “polyneuropathy of an unknown cause” also is not random. I do not understand ‘why’ but it is not required that I do. What is required is Trust. Every week, new heroes come into my life. People who, for me, are dealing with much more awful ‘train wrecks’ than I deal with. I subscribe to the ‘shit happens’ School of Theology. It happens; I don’t try to explain why. Job dealt with that issue 8,000 years ago.

If I could see, with greater perspective, much of my life might actually look like these images—a chaotic scene of dreadful moment, that is virtually invisible from a distance…

http://rebloggy.com/post/gif-mine-owen-wilson-steve-coogan-night-at-the-museum-rewatched-this-because-ram/15887816072

 

Enough of that.

  • Illustration Tip #6:

Work for which I was not paid.

See image below. If you do Work for Hire; if you troll Craigslist for illustration/graphic arts jobs; if you subscribe to job boards, you will probably be asked to provide some sort of sample imagery to demonstrate that you can do the desired work. Sometimes I’ve created images specifically for a project posting that was different from work I’d done before; and the investment of time proved to be a poor investment. The client bails for some reason. It may be something that doesn’t have anything to do with you. The image below was created for a real project for a greyscale image book jacket; it didn’t happen. I never learned why.

I keep a folder of images called “Service Provider Samples” and have separate folders within the master folder, for specific types of work. Not that it’s particularly important, but I have over 1300 images in the folder. Twenty years.

I’m sure that there are smarter ways to work than I’ve used. However, I did not know what those smarter ways were. Next week I do a ‘Networking gig’; haven’t done one of these in several years. One of my most frequent clients retired last month. Serious dent to my income. So, I need to start looking for new clients again.

For one who prefers to spend solitary time in a room, interacting with ‘art’—however that may be described—rather than human beings; sometimes for a week at a time, it is not surprising that this person does not find interaction with like-minded professionals to be a positive thing. There are a lot of introverted artists in the world. The creation of art requires a different set of ideas, from the marketing of art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 182: The Blind Spot, Part Three

February 18, 2019

Yes, same image, one more time. If I could have chosen my profession, I might have chosen to be a Medical Illustrator. The above image is not signed; and isn’t entirely original. I have ‘adopted’ and altered portions from unsigned illustrations found on Google. Much of it is my own.

Blind Spots. The importance is somewhere other than the idea in front of us. Our brain ‘hides’ the blind spots in our vision; our brain also hides the blind spots in our thinking.

My goal in life, in all the different ways that I interact with chronos-life is to help people catch a glimpse of Kairos-life; and possibly encourage people to see ‘with new eyes’. We live two lives—the one you and I are reading this in; and the world of Eternity. The Creator lives in Eternity, without the hindrance of Time. The English language is deficient, in that there is only one word for ‘time’—in Greek, there are two words for time—chronos—clock time; and Kairos—Eternal time. ‘Eternal’ does not mean, ‘a really long time.’ Eternal means existence outside of Time. In the time-controlled-to-an-incredible-degree 21st Century, the concept of ‘life outside of time’ falls into the realm of science fiction. I wrote more on this subject in my previous post. I believe we were created to live Eternally; just not all in this place.

I am a man of Faith; I also believe in science. Headlines and social media rhetoric to the contrary, these two aspects of life are not contradictory. I believe that the Laws of Physics, Time, and Space didn’t just ‘happen’. The Laws of the Universe are Laws, not because Science says they are Laws—ideas proven by repetition; they are Laws because they are products of the Creator of the entire Universe. It is merely lack of imagination that attributes these Laws to ‘Nature’ instead of attribution to a Creator. Quantum Physics was understood by the ancient Hebrew scholars, who also recognized the scientific contributions of the Greek philosophers. They used a different vocabulary, but the information is there. The Bible was never intended to be a physics text. The Bible is the story of the Hebrew people, who provided the foundation for the Creator’s entrance into Time and Space in the form of a single cell, planted into the womb of a teenager. Human history is centered on that single cell. Most of human history has been oblivious to that single cell; ‘oblivious’ does not mean, ‘mistaken’. It usually means, ‘too busy’.

I learned, a long time ago, that my brain works along pathways that many others don’t. Not ‘better’—simply different. I fail to understand the ideas most people have, and the things most people do. This notion is possibly best stated in the concept of ‘clubbing’. I don’t know why people dance, I don’t know why people get drunk. I’m not offended by either idea; I am simply incompetent in these activities, and they don’t make any sense for me. This morning in church I realized that while I can recognize harmony, I have no idea how it is created vocally. “Competence” is what drives me; “incompetence” is among my FEARs. False Evidence Appearing Real.

I don’t try to ‘convert’ people to my way of thinking; to try to ‘convert’ someone implies that I know more about someone else’s life than they do. Another example of my incompetence. HPtFtU. The Human Propensity to F*ck things Up [the asterisk is for those who may be reading these words; I don’t particularly care]. The word has a strange history. The World has a strange history. I’ve been intentionally interacting with an old guy, nearly every week for almost four years; in some ways, I probably know things about this guy that his children aren’t aware of. However, he’s in his 80s; what I know is a small sampling. While I can see patterns from his past, he can’t see them. His relationship with his family is contentious. And there are nearly 80 years of his life that I haven’t seen first-hand. All I hear is his side of the stories.

We live in a society that categorizes life to an incredible degree. If we can categorize someone, we don’t need to think about them anymore. This is probably why people don’t listen; truly listening to someone—not waiting for your turn to talk—is one of the most powerful therapeutic tools that we all have at our disposal. If we made the effort to listen, we might solve some of the issues that face us. ‘We don’t have time’ to listen. ‘We don’t have time’ to save the planet…

We also live in a time of moral crisis. Politicians have always lied. Some portion of the lying has been to protect sensitive information—we don’t need to know information regarding international negotiations at the time the negotiations are taking place.

Now we have Government Leaders who simply lie; when they get caught in a lie, they cover it up with a bigger lie. Our current President doesn’t even hide is ‘misdeeds’—he does them in public all the time. He seems to believe that he is the CEO of Trump America, rather than President of the United States of America; a country bound by the Constitution of the United States. In the days before declaring a National Emergency that does not exist on Friday, February 15th, he tried to coerce the Tennessee Valley Authority into funneling money to one of his large contributors…

https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/opinion/times/

Rachel Maddow asks a very important question:

“Yes, this is the story of just another destructive tributary of Presidential corruption that is flowing though U.S. government policy out of this White House. But it is also another element in this age of — sort of — moral bewilderment we’re now in as citizens. There’s no way to embarrass somebody [the President] if they’re happy to be seen in public selling the government for cash. And if you can’t embarrass or shame anybody about it and increasingly, you can’t shock anybody about, then what do you do with it? How do you stop specific government actions like this, if there is no shame from public officials doing it; but also, how do we once again become a country where that kind of thing would at least be a scandal?… If it doesn’t matter anymore, if we’re not surprised and nobody is embarrassed, how do we not just become that?”

Can we once again become a country whose leaders understand honor? If our leaders do not act honorably toward the citizens of the country, how can we expect the citizens themselves to act honorably toward each other?

Enough of that.

Humor: Still Life, with Sea Urchins

A correction to:

  • Illustration Tip #4:
    “As an editorial note regarding Windows:” this should have said “Word”.
  • Illustration Tip #5:

Provenance. Copyright. Publication. Pixilation.

Digital “Provenance”—the art world is always concerned about the ‘provenance’ of artistic works—who made it, who did it get sold to, how often did it get sold before it landed here; is there any external proof—sketches, etc. to establish a link between artist and seller?

I now create digital images as opposed to painted images; I publish these images on the Internet; I ALWAYS ASSUME that my internet-published work will be ‘adopted’ by someone. Even when I sign the work. I have a Physical Therapist who seems to have been born with an incredibly high set of ethics—she says she is incapable of lying, and I believe her—I was not born with that gift. I’ve ‘always’ [not, ‘since birth’] believed Ethics are Situational.

Upon entering into Church Culture when I did, I could never understand the furor over “Situational Ethics” that was stirring in the 70s. However, I’ve never believed that the Creator has ink stains or granite dust on His Hands, from having created Tablets of Stone or original documents. The first use of graphite for drawing appears to be somewhere in the 1500’s A.D.; an entertaining description of a forerunner of the brush can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil#Camel’s_hair_pencil

My suggestion is that if you are REALLY concerned about the ownership of your work, and the notion that you deserve to get paid for every hour you work, DO NOT publish your work in a reproducible fashion on the Internet. I know illustrators who invest a lot of energy into the subject of Copyright. I’m not one of those guys.

ALWAYS use a resolution of 72dpi [dots per inch] for images published on the Internet. 72dpi images will pixilate when printed.  If you do not know how to reduce the size of your images, it would an excellent thing for you to learn. Images that are published on the Internet will get copied by someone, at some time. It’s unavoidable. I’m a prime example. I download images from the Internet all they time; I use these downloaded images instead of hiring models. Hiring models requires the paying of models, which requires more money than I’ve been able to earn in my 20 years of work as a commercial artist. I earn enough to pay bills. I download high-resolution images, digitally cut them into pieces, and create a new ‘photo’ of something that does not exist. From that ‘photo’ I create new illustrations.

For what it’s worth, Norman Rockwell used a similar technique, using an opaque projector to project an image onto a canvas; which he then traced. Rockwell, however, hired models and a photographer. It’s possible that Johannes Vermeer used a similar technique with a camera obscura; many of Vermeer’s paintings have a photographic quality to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer

I only aspire to be in the same category as Rockwell and Vermeer. It will never happen. There was a time, when I could still paint, that I thought some sort of miracle might happen. I’ve resigned myself to simply being a commercial artist who specializes in digital images.

 

 

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 181: The Blind Spot, Part Two

February 10, 2019

The majority of people with something like ‘normal’ vision have two blind spots’—one in each eye—where the Optic Nerve connects with the Retina. There are no light-sensitive cells in these locations. The reason that most of us are unaware that we have these blind spots is due in part to the fact that each eye views that which is in front of us from a slightly different angle. Consequently, there is an overlap between the two sets of images. The other part of the reason is that our brains ‘cheat’—they fill-in the missing signals with related, nearby information. Essentially, the brain essentially uses a ‘higher-resolution’ image than is necessary for vision [a concept, not a definition].

The concept can be demonstrated in ‘Pixilation’—Raster-based images use square ‘pixels’ of color to create images on a computer. The higher the resolution of the image, the easier it is to represent curves with square pixels. In the right-hand image above, there is a ‘sawblade’ demarcation between the darker brown color and the lighter brown color—the closest representation to a curved line the computer can make with squares. In this detail image, the ‘camera’ is zoomed-in to 1000% of the facial close-up. The computerized image fills in the space around the square pixel with square pixels of similar colors, camouflaging the ‘sawblade’ curved line by ‘shading’.

The absence of blind spots in our vision is aided by the brain’s filling-in of the missing ‘pixels’ of color by using similar colors to create a consistent image.

The mind-numbing part of this is that the brain does not have a flat-screen embedded inside the grey matter. What you see is an ‘illusion’—light transmitted to the brain by means of electro-chemical signals from light-receptive ‘rods’ and ‘cones’ connected to specific nerve cells, and ‘sent’ by the Optic Nerve to specific portions of the brain that translate those electro-chemical signals to something we perceive as sight. The ‘projection’ as it were, exists within our brains—signals between nerve cells. Depth perception is also an illusion, based on the degrees of difference in signals between the light hitting the retina on the inside of either eyeball. Our heads are less than a foot in depth, and yet we can perceive ‘depth’ over a large distance. We can also perceive ‘depth’ in a piece of plastic that has been designed for an illusion of depth.

How does our brain know how to do this? A very interesting question which many don’t want to answer. This illusionary process of ‘seeing’ really can’t be construed by the simple word, ‘evolution’ or the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’. Start with a ‘pinhole’ camera—the simplest camera that can be made. Then look at the camera in your cell phone. The finest camera made cannot duplicate the human eye—the camera cannot be connected to our brains.

Non-human animals can perceive light that is outside of the human range of visible light. Light visible by humans is a relatively small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Heat is ‘visible’ in the infrared spectrum; ultra-violet light makes for fun parties…

The ‘swath’ of religious perception seems to be nearly as wide as the electromagnetic spectrum, and of similar variety. Having been following Jesus for four of my six-plus decades, I’ve discovered that there are far more than two Blind Spots in most people of ‘religious persuasion’. There are huge blind spots when it comes to the subject of Faith.

We live two lives—the one you and I are reading this in; and the world of Eternity. The Creator lives in Eternity, without the hindrance of Time. The English language is deficient, in that there is only one word for ‘time’—in Greek, there are two words for time—chronos—clock time; and Kairos—Eternal time. ‘Eternal’ does not mean, ‘a really long time.’ Eternal means existence outside of Time. In the time-controlled-to-an-incredible-degree 21st Century, the concept of ‘life outside of time’ falls into the realm of science fiction.

The Creator exists in Kairos—our past, our present, our futures have been known since the moment of Creation. Our souls have been made for Eternity; not for a handful of decades. I believe that nothing we do can ever surprise the Creator. We have Free Will; at the same Kairos, the consequences of our choices are already known. ‘Known’, not ‘controlled’. The Creator ‘observes’ what humans do; the Creator does not ordain or control what we do. Religious people will balk at this—their Bibles say ‘God ordains’. The problem being that the Greek word translated ‘ordains’ has a different meaning:

Original Word: ὁρίζω [horizó]: refers to the Lord (literally) “horizoning” all the physical scenes of life before creation. From this Greek word, comes the English word, horizon.

Lutheran doctrine [about which I am not a scholar], says that we are saved by Christ alone and not by our works. Yet the Church, historically, places a great emphasis on Works—how we behave. Many people in the Church, today, seem to believe that behavior determines whether or not one is ‘saved’ or ‘condemned’. We believe our eyes and emotions; and apparently forget the Love of Christ. Myself included.

I believe that there are ‘lost’ people in this life. Thousands new each day. They make choices and those choices head toward ruin; they need to learn how they can find themselves again. I am not convinced that these people are truly Lost, in the sense of being condemned to Eternal Separation. People grow up in excremental situations. People begin their lives in ‘negative numbers’ through no fault of their own. Some never find their way to ‘positive numbers’. The Creator understands all of this. People in the Church condemn our fellow brothers and sisters every day, people who carry the face of Christ in their own; and have a story completely different from many who condemn.

I simply have trouble understanding how a Creator who Created each and every individual on Earth could condemn to Hell 3/4 of all the human beings that have ever lived. This is what many are saying, although they probably don’t think about it. Arrogant ones don’t care.

The Faith Jesus called people to was Judaism. Jesus was not a Christian. However, Judaism got messed up in 60AD with the destruction of the Temple and the obliteration of a place to make atonement for our brokenness. It is believed that all of the Gospels were written after the destruction of the Temple, about 30 years after Jesus’ Crucifixion. The chronology isn’t spelled out in the New Testament. Everything in the New Testament happened after Jesus’ resurrection. There were no journalists; there were no pencils, there was no paper. Paul dictated his letters to a scribe, who wrote at a desk, of sorts, in ink on parchment. If we told Paul and the Apostles that their writings would overshadow Torah, I think they would be offended. And yet, that is what has happened for most of the history of the Church.

I come from a background that does not include Church. I was reading Existentialists before I heard the Gospel. I originally ‘got in’ for Fire Insurance. For the first time in my twenty-plus years, I had friends. They were all these Christian people that I had avoided for 2.5 years in college. They told me Jesus was coming next month, and they were all going away, and I’d be Left Behind. So, I ‘signed up.’ And studied and tried to make sense of the very confusing world of the Church, the Bible and denominations. At the end of my 4th year of college, I went to a Retreat Center in the LA Hills [after the fires, I don’t know if it still exists]. There I encountered the Holy Spirit. Encounters I could not explain by any other means. These occurrences continued in my 5th year, and in the years that followed graduation. I would have to be a dolt to not accept the reality of the Spirit of the Creator in my life, without regard to what is written in books.

If one travels widely enough among the denominations, one finds that people believe all sorts of weird stuff; and they can usually find Biblical verses to back them up; apparently without any understanding of hermeneutics. [Hermeneutics was initially applied to the interpretation, or exegesis, of scripture, and has been later broadened to questions of general interpretation. Hermeneutics is a wider discipline which includes written, verbal, and non-verbal communication. Exegesis focuses primarily upon the word and grammar of texts. wikipedia]

There are people of all faiths, and none, who worship the Creator; using different words and different methodology. I choose to believe that worship of the Creator is worship of the Creator, without regard to practice. I know pagans [not a lot, but some—however, I avoid people who are strange to me] who are more devoted to the Creator than I am; they just don’t think of it in the same terms. And they certainly don’t want to be compared with members of the Church…

In the words of the late, great Rich Mullins—”bear in mind children, that they listen to you because you are kids; not because you are right. This is how the Father listens to us.”

 

Enough of that.

  • Illustration Tip #8: “Work Product” vs. Original Art

Who owns an illustration; who owns the painting? The person who creates the art, or the purchaser?

The language below was reviewed and agreed-to by the attorneys for the Yellowstone Park Foundation. I use it in all my contracts/ Services Agreements. You are welcome to use this language in your own Services Agreement as desired. I have yet to create the next Pixar image icon [especially because I don’t work for Pixar], so I’m not worried about loss of royalties that may exist in the unforeseen future. I always consider my work as designed for a specific client.

If you are certain that you are going to create a new ‘cultural icon’ in illustration, you might not want to use this language, because it causes you to give up your copyright to the Work Product; in return you keep all of your original images and sketches; and get a guarantee that you can use the work you created for your own self-promotion. They own the Work Product; you own what goes into the making of the Work Product.

I have never been taken to court over Work Products that I have created. I consider the concept of ‘going to court’ as having already lost. I may have clients who did not like the quality of Work Product they received; however, they have never paid for the disliked Work Product. If they don’t pay, they don’t own anything; and I have merely a disgruntled client. I do not have a client who has any monetary claim over work they were never billed for. That’s simply the way I do business.

Grant of Rights.  Upon payment, the Illustrator relinquishes all rights of copyright and hereby assigns to Client all rights of copyright to all artistic work delivered under the terms of this Agreement (“Work Product”), including all rights to reproduction, modification, distribution, public performance, and/or public display of the Work Product, and agrees that all Work Product shall be the sole property of the Client.  The Illustrator agrees that all such Work Product shall be considered “works made for hire” and shall be the exclusive property of the Client, and the Illustrator hereby expressly waives any right or interest it may have therein. The Illustrator agrees to provide such assistance as may reasonably be required by the Client in obtaining copyrights for such Work Product and in enforcing any rights and interests relating to such Work Product or to any copyrights resulting therefrom.  The Client will provide the Illustrator with credit on the Client’s credit page.

The Illustrator will provide to Client digital files in an appropriate format corresponding to Client’s permanent use, and the Illustrator will be entitled to retain all original artwork, including sketches and any other materials created in the process of making the Work Product. Client hereby grants to the Illustrator a perpetual, royalty free license to use and publicly display the Work Product only for the Illustrator’s own promotional use. The Illustrator shall not resell the Work Product to any one at any time.

Work for Hire sucks. The pay is poor. On the other hand, it is a way to get published, and to demonstrate that one can create a series of illustrations. Creating one great illustration is good; creating another one like it is usually a requirement. One can begin to create a reputation for a style of work and demonstrate responsibility.

I’m sure there are better ways to break into the publishing business; but I don’t know anything about those other ways. I’ve been doing Work for Hire for twenty years. I was able to create illustrations; I got paid. Work for Hire comes with a minimum of artistic direction—one of the factors that distinguishes Work for Hire as opposed to ‘being an employee.’ The down side is that there isn’t anyone around to provide editorial direction—’perhaps you could view the scene from a different direction’. You get paid for a project, and as long as you meet the deadline with work that matches the description, the client doesn’t have a lot of room for argument. It’s best to get input along the way, before you invest a lot of time into an unsatisfactory project for yourself and the client.

“mushrooms, 30-40 feet high” an entry for a Jules Verne Exhibition; Journey to the Center of the Earth

 

 

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Posted in art, careers, children's books, depression, Illustration, neuropathy, pain, self-employment, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Chronicles in Ordinary Time 181: The Blind Spot, Part Two

Chronicles in Ordinary Time 180: The Blind Spot

February 3, 2019

Doug sent me a link to a scholarly article that presents a very thought-provoking idea—in Science, there is a Blind Spot.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=atom-feed&fbclid=IwAR1gF1WS-0jGyYwTGJuEMhehnFDz5b3f6msVOZTV_vkAOA1m5YKG0mqrUjs

“…the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science—including biology and computational neuroscience—doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us, is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness…”

The Scientific Method assumes that observation during an experiment occurs outside of the experiment’s physical limits; scientists cannot make objective observations from within the experiment’s parameters. However, all observation of our Universe takes place within our Objective Experience of the Universe; we cannot step outside of our Reality to observe our Universe. Consequently, the Scientific Method cannot observe Consciousness; although science is getting closer:

https://techxplore.com/news/2019-01-brain-speech.html

Brain waves can be turned into recognizable speech with the aid of artificial speech algorithms. Science can observe Consciousness; science does not yet have the capacity to interpret Consciousness.

We cannot make objective observations of our own Consciousness.

We cannot observe the Soul. Many people doubt that the soul even exists. In my opinion, the presence of the Soul is what Scripture means in the phrase, “made in the image of the Creator:” The Imago Dei. We are created in the image of Jesus; although it is probably more accurate to say that Jesus was created in the image of humans. Jesus claimed to be the person of the Creator—this is only evident when reading Scripture in its original languages. When Jesus speaks of Himself in the phrase, “Before Abraham was born, I am,” in English, He is referring to the unpronounceable Name of the Creator YHWH—the answer given to Moses from the bush. The four consonants [English] correspond to four breath-sounds in Hebrew; ‘the Name of the Creator is the sound of our breathing.’

There are many Scriptural literalists that would find exception to the above paragraph. For them, the Imago Dei means that the Creator has 10 fingers, and 10 toes, and sits on a Heavenly Throne all day; and has a vague resemblance to Charleton Heston. I won’t bring up facial hair.

We have a Blind Spot.

Technically, the majority of people have at least two Blind Spots, one in each eye. The Blind Spot refers to the portion of the Retina where the Optic Nerve connects to the Retina. This portion of the Retina has no optical receptors and is unusable for translating light into electro-chemical energy.

So, how is it that most of us cannot detect these blind spots? Two reasons—one, the two eyes are set a distance apart from each other; consequently, the light that hits the two Retinas contain information received from two different perspectives; and the brain merges the two images, reducing the visual overlap. Two, the brain interprets the information it receives, and ‘cheats’—the brain ‘photoshops’ the image we see on the imaginary ‘monitor/flat screen’ located directly in front of our eyes.

What we sighted people ‘see’ is electro-chemical-information-translated-into-images-by-our-brains. However, there are no monitors in our brains. This is why no two people see exactly the same thing. Colors are translations of electro-chemical-information by our brains. What my nearsighted, astigmatic, cataract-containing eyes see, without my glasses, is far different from what my corrected-vision eyes see. Since my glasses need replacing, what I am seeing now will be different if I ever get around to replacing my glasses.

At present, when one walks around any group of people, one will see people staring at the screen of some sort of Internet-connected device. You may be reading these words on some Internet-connected device, part of the Internet of Things.

You are staring at a piece of glass, behind which are tiny electronic inventions that emit light. As in the candle in the above image, the reflected light from that candle on your screen travels through your corneas, through your lenses [where the image is inverted—why aren’t we all upside down?] where receptors in the retinas turn the perceived light into an electro-chemical signal that travels along your optic nerves into specific portions of your brains [portions that appear to be outwardly identical to other portions].

Once in your brain, those signals somehow create the ‘imaginary’ image of a visible world. People who are blind and people who choose to close their eyes to the world, confirm by sensation that the ‘imaginary’ world exists. I reach out my hand, and I can still feel, to a degree, the keys on my keyboard [neuropathy sucks]. Because I learned ‘touch-typing’ in high school, if I can find the F and J keys, I can produce some reasonable facsimile to words that are also on a screen on my desk.

But all of these images, including this one, are constructs of our brain. There is no ‘flat screen’ in your head.

Enough of that.

The above image came to me from my Dad’s mother, at some point, long ago. I have a vague recollection that the story was that I had some relative I’d never heard of, who worked for Disney. This was long before I ever thought I would have a career as an illustrator. I did some googling tonight and was surprised to discover—searches of years past didn’t provide any information—that Milt Kahl was one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men”— illustrators that had worked for Disney from ‘the beginning’. 1937 [the year on the calendar next to Goofy] was the year Snow White came out. My life having turned out the way it has, I like thinking that I have some history in common with someone at Disney—I never had the impression that the someone might be famous. Milt Kahl seems to have lived his life in California; my Grandmother never left Oregon. The “Milt” signature could be from a different Milt…

  • Illustration Tip #7: The psd file and Digital Art

It may not be common knowledge that one does not need Adobe Photoshop to ‘photoshop’ images. One only needs a graphics program that can read psd files. The ‘magic’ in the psd file is that this file has the ones and zeroes in a formation that can create transparent layers. These transparent layers can be stacked to create new images that are independently alterable. All of my digital images are created using layered psd files; however, I only use Adobe Photoshop for specific tasks—tasks my usual programs aren’t able to accomplish.

Transparent layers created from the original image

Once you digitize an image, the image becomes a ‘thing’. Scan a photograph, and the photograph becomes a digital ‘thing’, that can be manipulated to whatever degree you want. In the above image, I’ve taken the original Café image, and distorted it using a ‘skew’ distortion. I am then working with a parallelogram, rather than a rectangle. The parallelogram nature of the image gives the impression of ‘perspective’. I can then remove the separate characters from the ‘background’ and I can re-create them in a separated background layer. I could colorize each of the characters, so that they weren’t in black/white. The possibilities of this technique are almost endless.

I use two Paintshop Pro programs [versions 6 and 8] from the 90s for 95% of my work. Paintshop Pro is a lot like GIMP—an open source graphics program that has the same features as Paintshop Pro. Version 6 of PSP can use Bezier curves to create Vector images.  I use Version 6 for drafting. These curved lines are versatile tools, once one gets the hang of thinking in terms of tangents. Version 8 does not include Bezier curves for whatever reason.

99% of my work uses Raster images. Raster images are ‘fixed-size’ images. One can shrink Raster images without pixilation; but enlarging Raster images can cause the stair-step outline that is obvious if the image has too few dots per inch. Vector images are actually mathematical constructs, rather than the lines one sees in the interface between monitor and computer language. It looks like a line, but it’s actually more like a GPS location at a tiny scale. One can enlarge Vector image all one wants to, and a line will remain a line, rather than a set of steps. Because the line only exists in the software one is using. The printed output can be very large.

Since I have never made the effort to learn how to shade a Vector image, I don’t use them. I’ve seen wonderfully shaded Vector images; I am an impatient student. I can create a Raster image at a high-resolution that will allow the image to be enlarged without Pixilation. A 600dpi image can be enlarged to 3x scale and still work well in a printer. 4x, depending upon the image. Printed images can usually work well at 200dpi; however, printers prefer 300pdi images.

The psd file for this image has 8 separate layers

 

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Posted in art, careers, children's books, depression, Illustration, neuropathy, pain, self-employment, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Chronicles in Ordinary Time 180: The Blind Spot

Chronicles in Ordinary Time 173: HPtFtU vs. Theology

November 12, 2018

I’ve been on a ‘theology’ theme for a while; it really hasn’t been planned, not in the sense of, “I’m going to do a series on theology’. It’s been a response to this Time in our country, and because of the ever-growing flight from the Church that I’ve been seeing in Social Media. The reality is that when the Church stops following the teaching of Jesus, then leaving is appropriate. But where does one go…

Christ_Pantocrator_Deesis_mosaic_Hagia_Sophia

Seems like all I could see was the struggle
Haunted by ghosts that lived in my past
Bound up in shackles of all my failures
Wondering how long is this gonna last
Then You look at this prisoner and say to me
“Son, stop fighting a fight that’s already been won”

Redeemed
Big Daddy Weave

I’ve known a lot of people who have felt trapped in the darkness of their soul. A lot of them doubted that they even have a soul. Trapped by the memories of all the crap they’ve lived through.
I too have felt trapped in the darkness of my soul, and this was before I knew I had a soul. “Having a soul” had been left out of my training as a human being. Having been raised by an authoritarian father I didn’t want to be angry with me, I hadn’t acquired a very large pile of crap that I regretted—he was paying for my college education, in a ‘world’ he did not control. I had experienced freedom for the first time. I wasn’t about to mess that up for some minutes of pleasure.

Nonetheless, I felt trapped in a world I did not like; and I could see no way to fix it. I had evaded the Draft by something like 6 hours; being a 10-month baby born on a day that was assigned a very high draft number. The day before those 6 hours had a very low Draft number. Some would call this chance; I now call it Grace.

Today is Veteran’s Day; while I value the choice that soldiers in all branches of the Armed Forces made to serve their country, I’m angry that our government threw away the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers for reasons that had nothing to do with national defense.
When I started college, and had to address the subject of the Draft, I began to look at the ‘god and country’ patriotic environment of the American Legion, which was my parents’ ‘church’. I never had any sense that there was a God—‘God’ was a word in a sentence, and I had no idea how God might be involved in war and patriotism. God, as a subject, was never raised in my hearing. The subject was not unlike my being White in a largely-White environment, without ever realizing I was White in a largely White environment. I knew very few brown-skinned people. That was my ‘normal’.

“Having a soul” became something to consider when I entered college; the subject had been raised in my high school studies of Existentialist writers; in college I began reading the writings of earlier philosophers. Over time, as a result of a lot of research and thought, I discovered that I do have a soul; that we all have souls; that the soul is a gift from the Creator.
The soul speaks to us all the time; sometimes we hear, when the soul isn’t drowned out by modern life. Sometimes we listen. In some people the soul seems to flourish; in others, the soul seems stunted and damaged by Life. I believe that the soul remains undamaged; but our ability to ‘hear’ is damaged. Not unlike my tinnitus—there’s a background ‘noise’ in my head that is ever-present—this ‘white noise’ often interferes with my ability to understand what people are saying. I hear everything, non-discriminately, in a crowded room. I hear a person on the other side of the room; but I can’t understand the person in front of me. People with tinnitus also have a challenge with vowel sounds.

Sometimes, when we perform what I consider an ‘act of Grace’, we reach out to someone we would normally ignore; and for a moment we bring Light to someone in darkness. This is our soul speaking to us. The soul is that ‘best’ part of you; the joy you once felt as a child. But the soul is not intended to be only for children. We are intended to carry that ‘child-likeness’ into adulthood.

I’ve also discovered that, in general, religious people are just plain weird.

My goal, with these writings, is explaining this bizarre world, as I see it. I don’t claim great wisdom; however, I am a ‘control freak’ and therefore require Explanations so that I can make some sort of sense of my world. I believe the Creator of the entire Universe entered time and space on Earth in the form of a single cell implanted in the womb of a teenaged girl; that cell divided and subdivided and in about 9 months’ time became the infant who grew to be a 30-something guy that changed all of human history. All of the HPtFtU that preceded and followed this event was humans being humans…
I’ve visited a lot of churches in my adult life—the process of learning how this strange life I’ve entered functions. There’s a huge disparity between the various denominations [including the ‘non-denominated’ denomination] and what they practice. Black churches can go on for hours, as the Spirit moves; Presbyterian worship seems to be run by a clock. My experience is that people in one denomination don’t realize that people in other denominations do ‘church’ differently. And I’m not going to begin to discuss Doctrine.

A lot of religious people will tell you that the above song lyrics only apply to “those who have confessed Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior”. I believe this interpretation is not what Jesus taught.

John 3:17 “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save** the world through him.” emphasis added

** “saved” (sṓzō) is the root of: sōtḗr (“Savior”), sōtēría (“salvation”) “(what is “saved/rescued from destruction and brought into divine safety“)” emphasis added

God either accomplished the task for which Jesus came to Earth; or God failed, and only partially-saved the world [an Impossibility]; and all of the rest is religious claptrap. God saved the world through Jesus. Period.

Disclaimer: My opinion, plus $5, will probably buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  

One of the most famous verses in the Bible precedes the above verse; one sees the reference in the grandstands of every televised sporting event. This verse, and others, taken out of their context—sometimes called ‘proof-texting’—imply that only Christians will find themselves with the Creator in Eternity; and that something over 75% of all the humans that have ever lived will find themselves in a very hot place… I think it’s probably a very cold place. Read the disclaimer above.
Somehow, these people believe that only Christians will spend Eternity in the Presence of an Omniscient [all-knowing], Omnipotent [all-powerful] Loving God; who burns up all that don’t believe the way this god believes; but he still loves those who believe properly.
Man, I thought my Dad was tough…

The Human Propensity to F*ck things Up.

The Prophet Isaiah_3

There seem to be Christians who miss a few things:
* The New Testament only recounts some of the things Jesus taught and did over His three-year ministry, written from memory, decades after the events. No computers, no scratch pads. Writing took a lot of preparation and work. In no instance was there someone taking dictation from the verbal utterances of God. There were no journalists at hand to take notes about what happened.
* Jesus practiced the Jewish faith, and when He used words like, ‘Scripture,” and ‘it is written’, He was referring to the Jewish Scriptures, not the New Testament. Some will argue that Jesus was speaking the future into existence.
* Jesus never commanded his followers to begin a new religion; He never told anyone to convert to Judaism. He told people to follow Him. There is no mention of the [hated by Jews] Samaritan woman going to the synagogue on the Sabbath. Scripture says the people in her village believed in Jesus. There is no description of what they believed. In theory, the Samaritans in that village, and all ‘who believed’ in Jesus, believed He was the foretold Messiah—but many had no idea what that name meant. The same applies to all of the people Jesus healed, and sent on their way, usually with orders not to tell anyone what had happened. Because of HPtFtU, they didn’t follow Jesus’ orders, and Jesus was followed by crowds. Jesus had trouble getting away from the crowds.
* When Gentiles started to follow the teachings of Jesus in large numbers, the Jewish leaders of what became called “The Way” [of Jesus], had to figure out what to do with these uncircumcised [the identifier of the Jewish male] people who had never followed the Mosaic eating restrictions. Through visions given to these Jewish leaders, by the Spirit of the Creator, Gentiles were given ‘a pass’. They were directed to not eat food that had been dedicated to idols. We aren’t told what mental gymnastics these Jewish leaders went through to ground their belief without two of its mainstays.
* Christianity, as a religion, got its formal birth about 300 years after Jesus was crucified [compare today, to Revolutionary America]. Prior to the pagan Emperor Constantine’s deathbed conversion, “The Way” was what we today would call a Movement. It wasn’t a new religion.

The first chapter of John makes it clear that all things were created by/through Jesus—a statement about Incarnation on Earth; but also, a statement about the entire Universe. I believe that everywhere in the Universe where sentient life forms exist, they will either have their own ‘improbable’ Incarnation and ‘crucifixion’ stories; or they would be so ‘naïve’ [unfallen] that we couldn’t adapt to/understand their way of life.

John 14:6, Berean Literal Bible
Jesus says to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, if not by Me.

I believe that everyone who spends Eternity in the presence of the Creator does so by the Creator’s adoption of humanity in Jesus. The above statement does not present Christianity as the means of coming to the Father/Creator. That idea is an interpretation.

Crucifixion was the common method the Roman government used to get rid of opponents of Roman rule—people were nailed to a wooden beam suspended in the air. Crucified people died by asphyxiation. The crucified Jesus died; Jesus was buried in a borrowed tomb and started appearing to people three days later. He could walk through walls and could eat fish without the fish falling to the ground. He apparently could control His solidity [see my earlier writings]. The important part of the story is not how Jesus died; the important part is how Jesus lived, and lived again.

There are people who really get hung up on sin and repentance; people come into adulthood damaged; and demand punishment for that which they call sin. Sin has many definitions.
From And Now I See by Robert Barron:

Jesus’ opening speech in Mark’s Gospel: “repent and believe the Good News.” The word so often and misleadingly translated as “repent” is metanoia. This Greek word is based on two words, meta [beyond] and nous [mind or spirit], and thus, in its most basic form, it means something like, “go beyond the mind that you have.” The English word, “repent” has a moralizing overtone, suggesting a change in behavior or action, whereas Jesus’ term seems to be hinting at a change at a far more fundamental level of one’s being. Jesus urges his listeners to change their way of knowing, their way of perceiving and grasping reality, their perspective, their mode of seeing…

 There will be people of every faith and none, in Eternity; these souls will be there because of the Creator’s becoming human in Christ. There are Believers who will have to change their ideas about Forgiveness.
The idea that someone’s belief system is the dependent factor in their spending Eternity with the Creator, is what is known as Salvation by Works. I’m not a Lutheran, but I believe in Salvation by Grace; not by Works.

As to determining who is with- and without the Creator for Eternity—that’s not my job.

condon-1930s

The Human Race is at a crisis point.

If we in the U.S. continue as we are going [the desires of the President], in a few decades, we will have helped bring the world to a point where the world is unsafe for human life.
I know a lot of people who say, ‘just relax, God is in control; God will take care of things. “Let not an angry word proceed from your mouth…”
Well, I am angry. Look at American history—not in a school textbook—and see what we Americans have been guilty of. You will find a history of total annihilation of those we consider enemies; regime change of democratically-elected governments by invasion, and forty years of war, in my 66-year lifetime. There are service men and women still serving in the Middle East whose children are getting close to enlistment age. This is wrong.

Some people believe that our destruction of this world will usher in the New Earth the Creator will bring into existence; based on interpretations of the Book of Revelation.
Some people don’t open their eyes—because they refuse to watch/listen to news reports [‘they are all full of lies’] and consequently have no idea of just how much the world ISN’T FINE. Some people ‘put their trust in God’ and are blind to the injustice that surrounds us. Some foolish people believe that because such prophecies exist, we bear no responsibility for being the stewards those writings command us to be. To truly be stewards we need to coexist with each other; which requires an acceptance of The Other’s beliefs that sometimes we simply can’t accept. Human history is the history of greed and non-acceptance. We were not made to live this way, we choose to live this way.

Human beings throughout the history that is recorded on walls, on clay, on shards of stone, in carved rocks—human beings throughout history have known that there is more to us than ourselves. We don’t have the vocabulary to properly describe that which we [collectively] know; but we know that it is More than us. Newton’s Laws are an attempt to describe The More. Quantum physics is an attempt to describe The More. Scientists who are wise know that we have only begun to scratch the surface of an understanding; and that nearly everything we now know will be replaced with new knowledge, if we manage to not destroy ourselves by our negligence.
Earth scientists have given us until 2030 to get our act together and reduce the damage we have done in the last century. Otherwise, this world is toast, and the world we know will become extinct. I know Believers who think this is a good thing. Those same Believers believe that we will all be Judged at the end of time.
How do they think they will fare, when asked what they did to be a steward of Creation? Stopped using plastic bags at the supermarket?

globular cluster NGC 1898, which lies toward the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud
globular cluster NGC 1898, which lies toward the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud

 

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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 172: Apparent failure does not have to be final

November 5, 2018

Feeling a tremendous sense of despair last week, as I tried to find something hopeful in the media, without much success; I turned to a film I ‘happened’ to bring home from the library [I don’t believe in coincidence]. The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, is the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a poorly educated, Indian, mathematical savant; who, in the years before 1920 constructed completely original mathematical formulae that are being used today to study Black Holes. Sadly, he died at the age of 32, as a result of what was probably amoebic dysentery.

A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and stated that the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. “An equation for me has no meaning,” he once said, “unless it expresses a thought of God.”

His mentor, R.G. Hardy, was a self-avowed atheist:
G.H. Hardy:  You see, I am what you call an atheist.
Ramanujan: No, sir. You believe in God. You just don’t think He likes you.

I often find ‘the footprints’ of the Creator in science.
The Cambridge scholars, for the most part, did not believe that Ramanujan’s calculations were flawed—only a few could even understand them—they did not believe anything worthy of being at Cambridge could spring from an uneducated Indian.
When I read the Facebook posts from people who claim to have a knowledge of God, I can fully understand why people who have been trained in Critical Thinking would never consider ‘God’ as something worth thinking about.

Been there. Done that. Here’s what I found [if you are an Evangelical Christian, you probably won’t agree with most of what comes next. Save yourself some grief]:
I prefer science to the American Civil Religion; commonly called “Evangelical” in the media, but that term is so far away from what the Christian term actually stands for, it really shouldn’t be used.
From Gerald Schroeder: Genesis and the Big Bang:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005KB0V62/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Nahmanides’s account of the first seconds of the universe [written in about 1200 AD, 200 years before Galileo] reads like this:
“At the briefest instant following creation, all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was so thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so. As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it. From this initial act of creation, from this ethereally thin pseudo-substance, everything that has existed, or will ever exist, was, is, and will be formed.”

Back to Schroeder:
“Nahmanides’s reference to a grain of mustard is the traditional way of saying, “in the language of man,” the tiniest imaginable speck of space. Nahmanides taught that at the beginning, all that is on and within the Earth and all the heavens, in fact all the universe, was somehow packed, compressed, squeezed into this speck of space, the size of a mustard grain…”

We know this description as the Big Bang. The expanding Universe. About 200 years before Galileo, Nahmanides described the Expanding Universe. Nahmanides learned this description by his extensive study of the Jewish Scriptures, where the shape of every character in Hebrew can add to the meaning of a word. The Church in America rarely studies the Hebrew Scriptures in Hebrew.

Imagine, if you will, the hydrogen atom:
hydrogen-atom

The hydrogen atom consists of a single proton, and a single electron which continually orbits around the proton. Atomic hydrogen constitutes about 75% of the baryonic mass of the universe.
If the proton/nucleus in the diagram above was the size of a basketball, the diameter of the electron’s orbit would be about two miles. To put the idea in a more understandable context, imagine a water molecule—two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom:

stadium

If the nucleus of the molecule was the size of a baseball, the orbits of the electrons would create a ‘boundary’ something on the size of a baseball stadium. A space the size of a baseball stadium with a nucleus at the pitcher’s mound and nothing inside the stadium space, beyond a few electrons bouncing around. Each hydrogen atom, each oxygen atom, being comprised of atomically large, empty, spaces filled only with electromagnetic energy.
The ‘atomic model’ is the basis of nearly everything that exists; electrons almost endlessly orbiting protons and neutrons and subatomic particles that are still being discovered. Duplicated at enormous scale by the orbit of planets around a sun. The Universe is comprised mostly of empty space.

Like the Universe, at the atomic level, we are comprised mostly of empty space, filled with electromagnetic forces. It is this electromagnetic force that creates the illusion of our solidity.
Hence, my preference to thinking of the Creator and the movement of the Creator’s Spirit within us as being something like The Force in Star Wars.

the-force-1

Yoda: Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you, hmm? And well you should not, for my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. [looks around him] Life creates it. Makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you. Everywhere. Here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere. Yes, even between the land and the ship.

the-little-known-nebula-iras-054372502-an-enigmatic-cloud1
The little-known nebula IRAS 05437+2502 billows out among the bright stars and dark dust clouds that surround it in this striking image from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is located in the constellation of Taurus (the Bull), close to the central plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Unlike many of Hubble’s targets, this object has not been studied in detail and its exact nature is unclear… This image was taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble. It was part of a “snapshot” survey. These are observations that are fitted into Hubble’s busy schedule when possible, without any guarantee that the observation will take place — so it was fortunate that the observation was made at all.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2018/hubbles-lucky-observation-of-an-enigmatic-cloud

My understanding of the Creator is that of a ‘being’ comprised mostly/entirely of Energy; a ‘being’ so unlike human beings that we cannot begin to understand the Creator’s nature. Everything that ‘religious people’ [those that believe in Creation] say about ‘God’ is an abstraction [there are so many, sometimes-strange beliefs about ‘God’ that I prefer Creator]. A large percentage of these people do not even understand the concept of ‘abstraction’.
My greatest understanding of the Creator, and the subject of Faith, takes place in a Christian environment. I believe that ‘serious devotion’ [more abstraction] to the Creator, in whatever form this devotion takes place, is equivalent to ‘serious devotion’ to the Creator in any religious form [Evangelical Christians are aghast]. This equivalency occurs, because there is only one Creator; the name by which one ‘speaks’ to the Creator is irrelevant—because devotion is about the Creator; not about us. If one is devoted, in a spiritual way, to Nature, one is devoted to the Creator, who created all of Nature.

The Abrahamic Faiths [Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in chronological order] refer to the ‘Children of Abraham’ as the Chosen People. In terms of world history, my view of having been ‘Chosen’ is mostly bad news. The portions of the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians largely ignore, are about the Creator, through Prophets, telling the Chosen people that they act like ungrateful whores. HPtFtU—the Human Tendency to F*ck things Up.
Because the Creator already knew, when the Creator created human beings, that we would have Free Will and the resulting HPtFtU; we were given a Grace Gift. The Creator of the entire Universe entered time and space in the form of one cell, implanted into the womb of a teenaged girl. From there you have the Jesus story. The story that ends with Jesus walking through walls and eating fish [think about it. How does that work? Jesus apparently was able to turn His solidity off and on].

Every sports broadcast shown has someone in the bleachers holding up a sign with the most famous Bible verse in history: John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The verse has a context; and according to some translations, John 3:16 and following are written by the writer of John but aren’t necessarily Jesus’ words [designated by not using the traditional red font for Jesus’ words]. The writer of the Book of John apparently was present when Jesus had His conversation with Nicodemus. However, it’s the next verse that explains the most famous verse:
John 3:17: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

This is how you know that Apparent Failure does not have to be final: you win in the end. You already are ‘saved’ if you want to be—it has nothing to do with you. This is what Luther understood as ‘salvation by Grace’. However, even the Creator will not force one to spend eternity in the presence of the Creator if it isn’t desired.

Because of HPtFtU there are Christians all over the planet that have all sorts of explanations as to why this promise does, or does not, apply to you. Their opinion does not matter, because the Creator of the entire Universe entered time and space on Earth, to compensate for our HPtFtU.

If we ever encounter a sentient species from another world [I’m of the opinion that the are “WARNING: PLAGUE” signs floating in the space around our Solar System], I believe we will find that they, too, will have a totally improbable story about how the Creator of the Universe entered their time and space in the form of a single cell…

 

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