A miraculous story of survival from Britain

Recently, I offered my own, tragic in ways, yet inspiring story. Here, I offer a wholly inspiring one, of Hannah Clark of Great Britain, the kind of amazing story that has helped keep me alive for these 30-plus years. Her full story, which can be found here, details how surgeons grafted a donor heart “directly onto her own failing heart.”

Image: Heart operation patient Hannah Clark

Clark, 16, had, for a period of 10 years, in fact, two hearts:

After 10 years with two blood-pumping organs, Hannah Clark’s faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: It healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart. — The Associated Press

The heart, according to Dr. Douglas Zipes, a past president of the American College of Cardiology, has “major regenerative powers, and it is now key to find out how they work.”

NAACP irrelevant today?


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Above is a decent discussion of the relevancy, or not, of the current manifestation of the NAACP, an organization all-but founded by a hero of mine, W.E.B. Dubois, who  authored “The Souls of Black Folks” and the epic, “Black Reconstruction.”

Today, most certainly, the NAACP is all but irrelevant and unnecessary. Twenty to 30 years ago, it was probably not irrelevant. Forty years ago, it played an instrumental part in winning civil rights for many who had previously been treated as second class citizens. On this, just imagine: almost 100 years prior, slaves had been emancipated. But the real fun was yet to come, wasn’t it? As if slavery wasn’t bad enough, the newly freed slaves had to figure out how to make a living and raise their families and amalgamate with white society, and they did this, largely, in spite of jeers, sly remarks and snide glances from their still skeptical and racist neighbors. The horrific Black Codes were already in place, but even more fun began in 1890, when some Southern states adopted new constitutions restricting certain people from being able to vote. Those same people who had been able to vote for more than 30 years prior were turned away on the claim they did not qualify to register.

So, up through the 1960s, the NAACP was very much a necessity, and it can even be argued, up through the entire 1980s decade. But today, we don’t call African-Americans colored anymore, we call them black, which to me, at least symbolically, says that we have far advanced past the need for such an agency. We don’t use cutesy terms for groups of people anymore, like colored or yellow (Asians). Plus, we now have an African-American leading the free world, untold numbers of black folks teaching in colleges and other schools around the world, black doctors, black astrophysicists, black astronauts, you name it. Admittedly, some inner-city communities are still struggling, and the opportunities for self-improvement are still nill for some, but the equalization is nearly complete. That said, racism has not been snuffed out yet, I’m sad to say. And for us to look anything like a progressive country like some in modern Europe, it must be.

A year-plus in the books

Welp, folks, I just renewed the registration on this domain for another year. I had a free credit somehow or another, so it didn’t cost anything, and as an added bonus, you get to see me babble for another year! I know you couldn’t be happier.

I was watching a Christopher Hitchens interview today from 2002 (I know, I apologize. I keep harping on this crass Englishman, but I’m fascinated with the guy.) Anyway, he was saying that at some point in his life, he came to realize that he was a born writer and that he really couldn’t imagine doing anything else. That the career of writing was really decided for him, not by him. And that struck me as something I could relate to.

To present a brief sketch of my background, I began college at Lander University in South Carolina with no clue at all what I wanted to do. At first, I believe I was a music major, when I realized that if I continued on down this path, I would grow up penniless. So, I moved to a more lucrative endeavor: computer programming. I could handle Pascal, the language, not his wager, fairly well. I performed decently in the introductory Pascal class, as I remember. But as I transferred to Clemson University, I came in contact with this fast-speaking, fast-moving, coffee-overdosed programming professor blathering something about the Java language (who obviously took the title of the language too seriously), objects and functions and infinite loops, and it was all quite frustrating. Today, I understand some of JavaScript, a Web programming language, but at the time, my anti-math mind was not grasping this fellow’s speedily-rehearsed lectures at all. So computer programming was out.

English was the last gasp. I did not know what I would do with an English major, even after graduating college. I just took the wise words of a professor of mine. He told me to just study what you enjoy. And I did enjoy that, at least. I was inspired by John Milton, Shelley, Keats, Emily Dickson, Bronte, and others, and later, Thomas Wolfe, Jack Miles, Stanley Fish, Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck and others. I had early aspirations of going on to becoming an English professor. This would, of course, require graduate school somewhere other than Clemson. And in order to stay closer to my family and friends, I declined that option and started working at a retail store in Clemson to make ends meet. But we’re getting bogged down. To make it short, a journalism instructor at Clemson University (S.C.) saw something in me, I suppose, and gave me a favorable recommendation, thus allowing me to get an interview with a local newspaper in Clayton, Ga.

My future aspirations would lead further than this blog and my current position. I would like to do some writing for a major magazine on the topic of either politics or religion or history … or perhaps, a well-read online publication, by way of a weekly or monthly column, if the opportunity ever presented itself.

But back to writing as a career. I think at some point in the latter part of 2007-08, I came to the realization that a writer is what I am, like Hitchens and others. I think before then, I was just trying to scratch by, have fun and the like. Although, I was attempting to write some (bad) poetry and fiction in high school, so the interest was there early on.

Today, I take a certain pleasure when I am in the company of fellow writers, like the editor at the paper for which I work. And I don’t mean pulp fiction writers who crank out 10 novels a day. Those folks aren’t writers; they are entertainers. I mean people who appreciate the language and have something meaingful to say through it, like Milton, Wolfe, Paine, Locke, Vonnegut and others.

At the expense of this getting too long and to catalog the renewal of the domain name and this site for another year, here are 15  of my favorite posts from the last year and four months, beginning in May 2008. Thanks for reading!

On Dobson’s ‘dissection’ of Obama’s June 2006 speech 

Why I assume a god (I ironic to the core, since more than one year later, I would make an opposite case.) 

2012 Olympics go intergalactic?

Comments on the presidential debate

 Zimbabwe: House of cards 

Debunking reincarnation

On Cruise, thetans, Hubbard and Xenu

Limbaugh, unhappiest, most miserable person alive? Perhaps

The newspaper crisis as I see it

 Unrevolutionary tea

On ‘Milk’ and homosexuality (Revised)

Glimmer of hope in Zimbabwe

Our forward-thinking Founders

Hare brains defeat reason in Iran

The God question: My testimony

Debate with Rev. Sharpton

The following is an entertaining and civil debate between the Rev. Al Sharpton and author Christopher Hitchens on the topic of whether morality can exist without God. 

One predominant topic of the debate was the question of morality. Sharpton obviously asked the question, “On what do we basis morality” without a supervisory being, falling back on often-quoted verbatim (but not by Sharpton) argument that if there is no god, everything is permissable. This is a line from “The Brother’s Karamazov,” which, even when I first read it many years ago, and knowing little about philosophy, theism, deism or any of it, struck me as a “profound” line, as Hitchens duly noted it was. In his rebuttal, Hitchens quoted Steven Weinberng: “Left to themselves, evil people will do evil things and good people will try to do good things, but if you want a good person to do a wicked thing, that takes religion.”

The question-answer session near the end, skipping past the crude jokes at the beginning, introduced topics like, Do we as humans have an innate need for ritual (church services, communion, mass, etc), Who created God, if he exists, and the last question, why  didn’t Sharpton, who holds the Christian title of reverend, not once defend the Bible. Sharpton answered that he was not there to defend the Bible, but to argue for God. And his argument seemed to boil down to personal experience (I feel him in my heart; therefore he’s real, for example), which can’t be quantified.

Despite Sharpton’s round-aboutness and, sometimes nonsensical answers, and Hitchens in-kind crassness, this entertained me enough to watch all the way through. And I must say, even if Sharpton didn’t quite match Hitchens’ arguments, Sharpton did match Hitchens’ overt confidence (even in the midst of the reverend’s sometimes puzzling responses) point for point.

The God question: My testimony

The debate on the god question has come up recently on Facebook between a couple friends of mine, and I thought it might be interesting if I laid out and clarified a few points about my own experiences regarding this matter to attempt to come around to an overall theory. Some family, friends, former church members of mine have probably noticed peculiar postings of mine regarding religion and God, and I thought an explanation was in order. This post took me a couple weeks to write (Thus the reason for no other recent posts), so bear with me. I’m not saying my conclusion won’t or can’t change, but my thoughts right now as they stand are recorded in this post. To borrow a religious term, here is my “testimony:”

First, as I have stated to a couple people in the last year, I set about in Oct. 2008 or so to the task of trying to figure out precisely why I believed what I proclaimed to believe. I will say here that I was raised in the Christian tradition, as most people in the southeastern United States are, and spent many years performing musically and otherwise toward that end. I sang with my grandfather, whom I miss to this day, in more than one Southern gospel group. I played acoustic and electric guitar for seven or more years in a contemporary-style church in Upstate, South Carolina. Until I reached college, I knew little of teachings other than what was in the Bible. Despite taking and passing a philosophy class and many English classes which served to, at least, introduce certain issues that would later challenge my faith, I maintained my core beliefs through college and even through numerous years after college.

Like so many with physical ailments who have wanted desperately to believe in a god who had the power to, not only save souls, but to physically heal, I tried my best to read the Bible and believe. In the years after college, my life was largely dominated by loneliness and despair over various issues, the most immediate of which would be emphysema.

I had heard stories that many people back home prayed me out of certain death when I was a baby hospitalized for 3 1/2 years in New York City, apparently saving me from dying from a critical immune system disorder. I don’t want to discredit or marginalize family members’ and friends’ efforts or concerns back home. They were doing what they thought was best.

So, poof, after much research and after three years of testing and poking and prodding at me, doctors came up with a way to give me an unprecedented unmatched bone marrow transplant to set my immune system on the right course. In the early 1980s, this was no small thing.

Now, I’m wise enough to recognize that science and research saved me in my infancy. I’m wise enough to know that, had I been lying in a crib inside my home in South Carolina, with the same prayers but without the same science and medical treatment, I would be a memory, and would probably not have even made it past my first year. So, at 4 1/2 years old, with medical research providing and setting my path toward adulthood, I set out on a vast world that I had never known cramped inside my little, sterile hospital-world.

And, of course, my parents not only gave me life … but a second life. I was a dead man, but they packed up their things in their early 20s at the time (I’m now 32 and can’t imagine doing such a thing at their age) and moved 900 miles north to a cockroach-ridden Manhattan apartment with their young daughter … all for me. For all my hard-boiled, emotional determinism, the thought of what they went through to keep me alive still brings a lump to my throat … and I’m thankful beyond words.

Back to religion, I decided a year or so back that it would be the most insincere and dishonest thing that I could imagine if I were to continue to lead the people in church worship without believing myself in the words of the songs I was playing (I think even believers can agree with me on that point.) I surmised that it would also be distasteful to not know full well why I believed in what the folks around me were singing, and not be able to articulate what I believed, and why I believed it. I concluded, even before I began questioning faith, that to believe and live my entire life and then die some day without knowing precisely why I believed such and such, without evidence and without a good explanation for any of it, essentially giving my entire life to something, sheepishly, was a most foolish and tragic thing (In fact, the word “tragic” probably represents an understatement).

Believing simply based on a “feeling” that we get on Sunday morning in the presence of nice music and other believers — which is all it is, since there’s not a stitch of evidence for any of it — was not good enough for me, and this was the realization that hit me between the eyes at some point last year. I can, perhaps, pinpoint the precise time. It may have been during a long car ride to Boston with my wife, when I had a fantastically long time to do a lot of thinking.

To catalog a few of the works I’ve studied thus far that have influenced me one way or the other since and before that particular trip:

  • “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
  • “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles
  • “Mere Christianity” “Surprised by Joy,” “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis
  • “The Case for Christ” and “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel
  • “Godless” by Dan Barker
  • “Why I Became An Atheist” by John Loftus
  • “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
  • “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris
  • “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” By Albert Camus
  • “Notes from the Underground” By Fyodor Dostoevsky (To a lesser degree, “The Brothers Karamzov” and “Crime and Punishment”
  • This does not mention, of course, most of the Old and New testaments, numerous Christian commentaries, two decades of Christian teaching from various workshops, sermons and classes, and many of the gospels and texts that did not make it into the “official” King James Bible as pieced together by various church officials centuries ago.

I’m under no illusion that my recent thoughts and studies are crushing to any possibility, or any fraction of a possibility, that I might supernaturally be made better physically some day (For I deny even the possibility of a being capable of such things … nothwithstanding his unwillingness). I dare say no one has called out more to God than I for answers, even for answers about his own existence. No one has pleaded more with God for help. No one has been on their knees more than me. But I’ve heard nothing. Not one thing but my own voice, until eventually I got the impression that my prayers were merely floating to the ceiling and falling back down like stillborn stars. So, I got off my knees and determined, like the human that I am, to find the truth.

Believers will probably question this, saying something like, “Well, you can’t just give up. God is faithful to answer prayer in his time on his watch” or with, “God answers all prayer with either a ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ or ‘Maybe.'” But those are the only three possible options, aren’t they? We can write off or explain away any unanswered prayer (or perceived answered prayer) by that logic to help God escape an explanation for his own silence.

We have, indeed, for centuries, received nothing at all but silence from the God of the Old Testament, just as we have received no recent word from Jesus or Zeus or Apollo or Allah or Osiris. Thousands of years have passed and not an utterance. Does that not strike anyone else as peculiar? Believers, again, will say the Bible is God’s revealed word or his instruction manual and that he exists in the hearts and minds of those who are filled with the Holy Spirit because they have believed in him. Well, I have believed — I have with all my heart — and other than some hormones jostled around, stimulated by some inspiring tune in the company of believers, have felt or heard nothing but my own voice.

So, I know there will be those to whom these words are very troubling — family, friends, former churchgoers, etc. but please know that I expect none of the same thoughts from any of you and am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m merely stating my experiences, and don’t particularly want this to meltdown into a large debate. Again, I did not set out at the start to disprove anything. I set out to find the truth. And these truths we can’t escape: Earth is billions of years old, Earth exists on a spiral arm of our galaxy, an insignificant spot, and not the center of the galaxy as many of our forebearers thought (which, by the way, gave creedance to the argument that we are the special planet, and a special species, in all of creation). The Earth will one day be uninhabited by people once again, not by a rapture, but either by a wayward asteroid or gamma ray burst or by the sun losing power. The truth is the canonical Bible contains many irreparable self-contradictions; condones slavery, mass slaughter, rape, the mutilation or altering of children’s genitalia, among other things; and cannot even get the details straight about the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Again, when I set about my studies, I was not seeking hope or spiritualism or miracles or wishful-thinking, I was seeking the truth, which in the 17th century when John Milton was alive, “a wicked race of deceivers … took the virgin Truth (and) hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds.” But they are not at the four winds anymore. Truth is much closer to us in modern America. So, at least at this juncture, I have concluded that the ancient, contradictory books of the Old and New testaments, written in a time of widespread myth and legend, are not good enough to make me, first, believe, and second, to base my entire life on such things contained therein.

I feel compelled to say that I apologize to certain people (of whom I still hold a great deal of respect) for that statement, whom I know, would want me to conclude differently, but that’s how I feel. The Christian tradition is so embedded in this part of the country (the Southeast), that to say such things, is almost like seceding a second time from the Union. But again, I ask, what’s more important? The truth or wishful thinking? When I set out about this, I resolved to be comfortable with whatever philosophical pathway on which my studies took me down. And that’s what we all must do.

And at some point, all us of have to make a similar choice: Do we want to be complacent in living our lives for a faith that may or may not, in reality, be true, or can we mentally and emotionally handle another possibility: that we are an insignificant dot in a vast, vast universe. As a friend of mine was saying, we need religion. We do indeed. But can’t we be strong enough to move past it and accept our place in the cosmos? As one writer, John Loftus, said that we humans think we are so special that we can’t imagine a fate that would see us go extinct like all the rest of life on Earth. Yet, that is our fate. Our extreme intelligence compels us to think of other worlds or other dimensions like heaven or hell, but our humanity also compels us to surmise that we are on a small planet in an insignificant galaxy, of which, there are millions. It is quite believable to think other species in some undiscovered galaxy thought themselves self-important, like us, and then, saw their own existence come to a crashing hault.

Of course, we may never know 100 percent if there is a god or not and we may never know 100 percent how life began, but I think we can be pretty sure it did not happen as the Bible, with its self-contradictions, recounts. (Note: I do not cite examples of the Bible’s contradictions here because they are well documented and this post is long as is. Search Google for “bible contradictions” and you can view them for yourself.)

For me, the option that we are an insignificant dot in a vast universe, takes much more wherewithall, and frankly, is a quite liberating axiom, to know that we are, at the core, connected and interconnected with the universe, not just Earth, and everything in the universe is quite a beautiful thing, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted.

Thus, again, I did not seek hope (specifically for my health conditions or otherwise) or karma or spirituality or wishful thinking. I sought the truth. For truth, should we reference the record of science, which says this planet has existed for billions of years and will again be vanquished or a book authored by superstitious people thousands of years ago during a time consumed with myth and legend? I have to side with the former.

On using amateur sports player names

In an article published July 3 by The New York Times, Sam Keller, former quarterback for the Nebraska Cornhuskers, has filed a lawsuit against the NCAA and Electronic Arts, claiming “they illegally profit from the images of college football and basketball players,” as reported in The Times article.

“We signed a paper at the beginning of college saying we couldn’t benefit from our name,” said Keller, who is now 24 and living in Scottsdale, Ariz. “So why was the N.C.A.A. turning a blind eye to this and allowing EA Sports to take our likenesses and make big bucks off it?” — The Times, July 3, 2009

For one, names and likenesses are not the same thing. As a semi-famous football player, your likeness, Mr. Keller, as a college player, was in the public domain, just like any Little Leaguer or recreational player across the country. Any one, a reporter, someone interested in sports or someone off the streets can frequent a public recreation department, and take as many sports pictures of you and publish them as he/she likes. College players do not get paid, and last I checked, play on public, state-funded property (As opposed to private college athletes, who, for the most part, indeed, play on private property.) So, the image of your face is public property. Your name, however, cannot be the source of reaped benefits, and EA Sports, from what I understand, has done nothing of the sort. I do understand the frustration, but suck it up, Mr. Keller.

You played football in the public domain, just like any Little League or recreation-league player in this country. Your image, and their’s, was likely profitted upon in some form or fashion. Surely, pics of you playing football appeared in some newspapers. News flash: Newspapers, like EA Sports, are in the business of making a profit off your amateur image and others. This is no news.

‘When in the course of human events …’

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more. — “Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776, ‘Had a Declaration…’“. Adams Family Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/aea/cfm/doc.cfm?id=L17760703jasecond. Retrieved on 2009-06-28. 

In a particularly busy week at work — nothing unusual there — I was asked to compose the editorial for the week at about 9 p.m. the night before it would be published in the paper. I got started about about 10:30 p.m. or so that same night and this was the result. If I had to summarize what the July the Fourth holiday means to me, I suppose this would be pretty close to my personal feelings. (As a point of clarification, “institutional editorials” as they are called in the newspaper business, have no author, per se. They are supposed to be the “collective” position of the paper’s editorial staff, which would be me [news editor], the editor and the publisher.) I have to clarify that point because we get calls occasionally asking, “Who wrote that darn editorial!” which likely blasted some public official or another. We reply, “It’s the collective opinion of the paper and has no author, per se.” Anyway, I felt compelled to make that point because for practical purposes, although I was the author technically, I was only the vessel by which the editorial sprang forth … or something like that.

That said, as “we” laid out in the editorial, our very ability to be able to celebrate the liberties and freedoms we enjoy in this country were anything but inevitable, and it’s truly remarkable that we have come this far, given our sundry and violent history.

This weekend — and I’ve already started with a concert by some military orchestra band — I am covering a couple July 4th events including a Fun Run near one of the local lakes and a fireworks display the night of the Fourth. I have covered the fireworks show before, but I dare say Dillard, Ga. will again be brimming with locals hoping to catch the show. We in American have a bad habit of thinking too little about history and too much about the future. I do hope that as folks go out and shoot fireworks, grill, swim or whatever, that they will take a moment to reflect about how we got here. The path, as noted in the editorial, was not laid out so much by God’s providence, but by much sacrifice, sweat and tears … many of those tears coming from peoples we either oppressed, displaced or enslaved. The Enlightenment ideas, eventually, and quite slowly, took hold finally in the mid-1960s, and we today are less apt to publically denigrate our fellow man as we did for centuries prior. So, I wanted to quickly make the point to say that, as we celebrate where we are in this country and celebrate our place in the world, we need to also celebrate how far we’ve come. There was no “Ready and Easy Way,” to coin a phrase from John Milton, and the present reality we know was anything but a given and nearly resulted in a country torn asunder.

Adams got it right when he said July 2 (the actual day America made a resolution declaring  independence. The famous “Declaration of Independence” was an explanation of that resolution) will be “the most memorable epoch in the history of America.”