Thomist:  'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form'!  You Buddhists say the real, physical world is as empty as a dream, showing nothing of actual existence or substance.  How have you arrived at this conclusion?  

Zen Master:  Never left in the first place.

Evolutionist:  Observable patterns and merely perceived complexities in nature in no way connote the work of some Intelligent Designer.

UFO Hunter:  If you say so.  I don't have a dog in that fight.

Evolutionist: Wait a minute!  Did you see that light in that sky?  It just made four right-angled turns and shot away!  It must have been an alien spacecraft!

UFO Hunter:  No, just the business end of my laser pointer.  Leave intelligent design to me, will you?

Atheist:  It is impossible that there can be a god.

Trekkie:  What about intelligent life on other worlds?

Atheist:  That of course is fully possible.

Trekkie:  Could there be such beings as Orions?

Atheist:  Yes.

Trekkie:  Andorans?

Atheist:  Of course.

Trekkie:  Vulcans?  Vidians?  Ocampans?  Borg?  Betazoid?

Atheist:  Yes, yes, yes!

Trekkie:  Other intelligences made up of pure energy or else of silicon?

Atheist:  I suppose so.

Trekkie:  What about the Q then?  The omniscient, omnipotent beings of the so-called Q Continuum?

Atheist:  Yes, ye-....no wait, I mean...  This is disingenuous!

Trekkie:  Checkmate. 

Atheist:  As an atheist, I believe there is no God.

Zen Master:  You talk too much.

Pentecostal:  Can you quote one thing Our Lord said that supports your twisted view that all war is unchristian?

Quaker:  "Love your enemies."

Catholic:  How can you worship at that dinky church?  You have no ceremony, no Canon Law, no precedent, no Tradition, no Feast Days, no unity either doctrinal or corporal.  Can you even hope to be able to describe to me a better way to celebrate the Eucharist than in a Catholic chapel?

Protestant:  Twelve fisherman in an attic with Our Lord. 

Marine:  You have no shame!  You have the gall to picket for 'No War' when everyday young soldiers are fighting and dying for our safety?  Your own safety comes directly from their fighting our wars with honor!

Quaker:  Pardon me, but none of us are safe, neither you nor me.

Marine:  How can you say war is not keeping us safe?  If not for the sacrifices of our soldiers in World War II, we'd all be speaking German right now.

Quaker:  Perhaps, but what clinched the victory in World War II?

Marine:  Well, the atom bomb, of course.

Quaker:  So do you then say that the knowledge to build the atom bomb has perished with that war?  Or isn't it true that its secret has traveled far and wide?

Marine:  It's gone far and wide, true enough, and too many people know how to make it.  But we had to develop it--it was expedient to do so.

Quaker:  And so now, many more factions may possess the expediency to destroy American cities; not only nation-states whose policies have ever led to the slaughter of millions through the machinations of competing governments, but also more diminutive cliques, movements, causes, fringes and terrorists. 

Marine:  The atom bomb's invention was maybe a little short-sighted, I grant you that.  But republics must maintain the readiness to wage war!

Quaker:  Once they are willing to carry it out, they indirectly grant violent and untrustworthy minds the potential to destroy life perhaps to whatever degree is achievable.  That's precisely what has happened here.  Surely, it is all the same thing--the same logical conclusion.  Humanity by being divided only increases the likelihood that it will die together, united only in death.

Marine:  Are you calling the military untrustworthy?  I take personal offense to that!  We can keep war from decimating everything: we have the intelligence to control it, to hold it at bay.  We can ensure it will always be used to preserve life.

Quaker:  To the extent that smaller and smaller groups of people gain a greater and greater capacity to wreak catastrophic damage on societies by means of science--a capacity provided by the military, the worse are our chances as a living species.  It may already be too late.  Don't talk about control.  We've lost control a long time ago.  Humanity is a child with a loaded gun! 

I wanted to add a second part to the title of this entry to the effect of: Circumstantial Observations and Some Airy and Unfounded Speculations on the Cultural Dissimilarities between New England and the Mid-Atlantic Region and Other Broad Brush-strokes but there was no room.

You see, my wife took a corporate job in New England and I was forced to come along, along for the ride if nothing else.  To be truthful, that's how it turned out having spent most of that time unemployed since jobs in my former field are scarce where we've come. 

In Delaware, let's just say I was responsible for some half-dozen old and retired policemen and soldiers in an unspecified job setting.  Nowadays, it's cooking (which I love) and housework (which you can have) and writing a fantasy novel of a very self-serving nature which I hope will result in an unusual retelling of a Buddhist legend largely unknown in our climes.

But I was actually reporting to a job up here, at first, as soon as I came to the Land of Damn Yankees, before I was absolutely forced to flee, running for my life, to put it metaphorically.  I had not been employed there long before I very quickly realized I was "a stranger in a strange land."

"What?" you say.  "You speak as though you were transferred to Nepal.  Only the most squeamish of wimps would talk like this!  Cultural dissimilarites between New England and the Mid-Atlantic?!  Quit wasting my time!"

Au contraire, mon ami. 

My first clue that I had actually departed from a familiar culture was in the manner of professional conversation.  Let me explain.  As I was being being trained for a job up here, I quickly found myself in a state of "cultural vertigo" because of the odd fashion in which people spoke and addressed one another at work.

For example, I was talking to a young man on the job who had been charged with training me--a very sharp lad.  Suddenly, he started to ask questions about the site.  I looked at him quizzically.  Not because I didn't know the answers, but because it felt so unusual.  I looked at him for a moment because I had to verify that the questions were not rhetorical, where it is expected they ought not to be actually answered in normal discourse.

But they were not rhetorical.  Wow, was I flabbergasted!  It was actually a real oral quiz!  I was in fact suddenly being subjected to the Socratic Method, where someone questions a person on fine points of assumptions for purposes of reinforcing a learning process.

I hear you talking, reader.  "Well, he was training you, wasn't he, you dumb Southerner?  I find that rather astute.  There should be more of that in America, goddam it!  Why when I was a young man, I...."  Don't misunderstand.  I am not at all saying that the Socratic Method is bad or is not effective, or even that it should not be immediately implemented all over the country and throughout the schools.

But it was just a very strange and embarassing fact that I had not experienced that kind of an interchange before.  By more southerly standards, the act of wielding the Socratic Method on an unsuspecting victim is considered...well, rude, discourteous (this is only my own persepective which may be erroneous) and showing a lack of grace.  Conversely, I suppose New Englanders find their southern neighbors perhaps flippant, insincere and soft--particularly in the head.

Whatever notion I had that this "Socratic treatment" was the personal peculiarity of the young lad was quickly dispelled.  I talked to a superior soon after this, and lo and behold, he started using the Socratic Method on me.  I was at a terrible disadvantage, as I felt it, and I had the immediate feeling that I was like some lab animal with its innards opened.  My wife also described the similar Socratic procedure in play at her job.  Very peculiar, but strangely consistent!

These people are nothing if not thorough, you had to give them that.  But they were often thorough in ways that, quite frankly, took a lot of getting used to.

One topic that engrosses me more than most is that of different cultural methods for castigating shortcomings in others which have to be addressed: for correcting persons in need of correction, whether for errors of logic, performance or behavior.  Various cultures have different ways of going about this bitter business which I find as unsavory as wormwood myself, though indeed a necessary evil.  I particularly dislike people who seem to get off on the activity to broaden their own ego.  And the mere thought of corporal forms of this stagger my mind, and I believe some cultures still practice face-slapping, very loud shouting, and even shoving. 

However, I could admit that in the Mid-Atlantic, castigation is perhaps underdone and neglected too much.  The region may very well suffer from not exhibiting a good castigation in season.  For there, it is very much the custom not to berate a fellow too harshly (except at a Flyers game) and more importantly, too quickly.  More commonly, people dance around issues like revelers around maypoles, and that only when the appropriate festival has arrived.

New England, on the other hand, does not suffer from this ailment. 

A shortcoming on the part of an individual is met with swift and sure force.  Of course, if you come from the Mid-Atlantic and are met with this custom, you may find it disorienting to a huge degree.  At my job here, I would have to say (only by Mid-Atlantic standards, mind you) that I was treated worse than a cur on a few notable occasions.  In fact, I had no choice but to consider it the worst treatment I had ever received at a job ever, at least as far as my perceptions were concerned.  Many folks here are brusque, there can be no doubt.  

Shouting, loud denunciation, and open and expedient castigation are all in full effect here, for better or for worse.  It gets to be such that I can imagine any human being would just get used to it, since after all it's the order of the day.  One would develop a "thick skin" and this mode will soon pass for normal.  Enough of it and you will develop the hide of a pachyderm.

But before you can get to that phase, it's a hard road.  I often find myself feeling out of sorts.  You can't help it, really: all that interpreting the ways here according to the cultural lexicon back home.  Of course, the Mid-Atlantic's prescriptions for certain behaviors have indeed troubled people who've come there from foreign places.

I remember a woman from Iran who went to a dojo I trained at in the Delaware Valley.  She complained to me one day that she and others from countries like Germany found it unsettling that people's faults were not expressed to their faces quickly and fiercely enough, and it was a tendency she thought endemic to the region.  One never knew where he or she stood among their fellows.  Well, being a local, I heard this and blinked as though to reply, "And.......?"  Suffice it to say I had yet to live anywhere else at the time and had not yet been expanded by the experience of this.....

I'm always stumped when I have to choose a screen name.  There are so many possibilities and so many bad puns to be made.  There are so many ways to try to be cute.  In a way, a screen name (the descendant no doubt of the Pen Name used by authors back when only they and office secretaries typed things before the Internet Age), gives us freedom.  Under a pseudonym, we can rant, rave, postulate, opine and shout politically incorrect sentiments and slurs without endangering our real-life reputations. 

As for me, I always felt that putting your real name out there on the web to be potentially hazardous; after all, what if some homocidal maniac took exception to your opinion on the Patriot Act or souffles, and came looking for you?   

Screen names facilitate the opening of a release valve, enabling men and women to vent and opine and to practice opining, making it feasible for them to hone their opining skills and writing, slowly discovering at what point their speech becomes a rant, or when their logic becomes so strained it will incur catcalls and insults from respondants, particularly from our atheist friends who use the Rules of Logic against sentimentalists like a razor-sharp longsword or like various other deadly weapons.  

So how did I come up with Servetus?  To tell you the truth, I didn't so much 'come up with it' as it had come up with me.  I wanted a good name quickly and 'Piers Plowman' was taken.  My mind raced.  I had no good puns, no cutsie wordplay at my tongue's tip.  I liked using the names of philosophers and theologians as passwords and pseudonyms but surely they would all be taken on the b-net site.

Then, BOOM!!! 

That old Reformation heretic, Michael Servetus, came to mind for some reason.  I had no idea why.  It was certainly no person I had been inspired by at any time.  I first read about him in Watchtower Society pamphlets, which though they are pure proselytization tools, still are delightful in a way: being fairly-well written and lavishly illustrated by fine artists. 

Anyway, Michael Servetus was a Renaissance scholar, a Spaniard who probably went by Miguel Serveto on the street.  But he was a theologian and a Renaissance Man in every sense of that word, literal and colloquial.  He's credited with among other things being the first European to describe pulmonary function, beating out the more famous William Harvey in England.  

But he will be most famous for his singular application of sola scriptura. 

You see, he had read his Bible in good Protestant fashion (in the original--well, as original as it gets anyway--poring over Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic) and concluded that Scripture taught no concept of the Trinity.  Convinced that God had spoken to him through his Word, he published his views and began a correspondence with John Calvin, the founder of Reformed Theology in Geneva.

Well, the latter didn't take kindly to it.  Neither did Martin Luther or any of the rest of the Reformers.  Servetus took it upon himself to go to Geneva to discuss the matter with Calvin in a scholarly fashion, certainly well within the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance.  We still have the words Calvin wrote swearing what he would do to Servetus if he should come to him.  It's something to the effect of:

                           "I swear he shall not leave Geneva alive..."

The rest you can guess for yourself.  Servetus was arrested in Geneva and burned at the stake.  All of this you can read online for yourself, if you wish.  But why should he have popped up in my mind as he did for purposes of a screen name?  And to think, many people are perfectly content with Google User or Screen Name for their online moniker.  I suppose they're the same people who name their dog, Dog, not imagining for an instant they're lacking in originality.

Perhaps I have an irrational fear of posting online: an uncanny picture in my mind of a lynch mob coming to my house because I posted a bad thing.  Maybe I could end up like Servetus if I say what I think.  We all have days when the content of our thought can only be faithfully represented in words as slurs, insults, and vitriol.  We get cut off in traffic, we lose our jobs, we suffer indignities at the hand of evil and tyrannical bosses and supervisors.  And still, in our advanced society, our words are watched and regulated.  The context in which they are spoken is becoming all the more irrelevant as our thought becomes increasingly policed by various forces.

We disparage the Reformation times and the Age of Inquisition, thinking erroneously that we've gone beyond that behavior, that we've evolved.  But it is still possible to blaspheme in our time.  It is always possible to utter something in a well-meaning spirit that scalds the Spirit of the Age or the General Consensus.  Anyone can at anytime be read out of the meeting...

...or burned at the stake.