Is God mute?

[Ricter]

Ernest Becker Hmm. The Denial of Death. 1974.

I know that year because it has several reasons for me to remember it.

1. I bought one of my most precious possessions that year. A grandfather clock. The year is embossed in gold so I see it every time I clean the clock.

2. I left my academic position in that year to start my own company.

#2 connects to Ernest Becker.

Ernest Becker was a classic example of the horribleness, and uselessness of being an academic. He spent his whole life shuffling from academic position to academic position.

Working and reworking the same ideas trying to justify keeping his job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Becker

Yes he got to write a Pulitzer prize winning book. A Pulitzer gets you $10,000. Not enough to finance a down payment on a house. Won't even buy you a decent used car. There is an Ernest Becker Foundation. Funded by a rich doctor who read and liked the book and, having a lot of money, created a foundation. Why not. Becker himself died a relative pauper.

The book is read by students who then put it into their book shelves and forget about it. When they die it sells for fifteen cents.

His ideas were actually quite pedestrian. Swinburne is 1866. A lot of water under the bridge.

Have I read him? His book used to be on my book shelves but it's not there any more. It must be in those boxes in the back of my garage waiting for me to die.

Just thought I'd ask, since what you wrote previously sounded just like his denial of death thesis. It may be "pedestrian", but is largely unknown nowadays. Most folks would prefer to forget the idea immediately on hearing it, I'd wager.

 

[oldnemesis]

Yes I'd agree that Becker's book "The Denial of Death" posits that civilization is an elaborate defense mechanism against our knowledge of our own Mortality.

AND

Yes I'd agree that what I wrote about God being a myth to hide from our own mortality says the same thing.

Becker says it much more elaborately and extends the idea to cover a lot more ground.

I say the idea is pedestrian. I guess I say that because I had a classical education at a Jesuit college which was very traditional and the idea sounds very commonplace to me. I am sure that Becker was quite familiar with Swinburne, Julius Caesar (the Gallic Wars), and other classical authors so that it should have seemed pedestrian to him also.

As I write this I also realize that as a catholic schoolboy I used to serve as altar boy at a number of catholic funerals. Holding a censor, standing next to a coffin and singing Kyrie Eleison might have made personal death more pedestrian an idea to me than to most.

 

[nitro]

Why bother explaining anything at all? Why not just say, "Because God said so." That is what these guys do in every other instance? They are already brain washed? Why try to explain this one case? Since when do Jesus lovers care about logic and explanations?