Archive for June 13th, 2005

This “God is Sort of a Spirit” Thing Mystifies Me

As I have said more times than you probably wanted to hear, I understand hard-core Catholics, Calvinists, Bible literalists and atheists. In the conservative movement, the Randian Objectivists made atheism a sine qua non of belonging to their group while the Sharon Statement required with equal rigidity that one had to believe in God in some form to belong to the Young Americans for Freedom.

These were the two groups I mostly worked with in college.

In Washington rock-hard Catholics, Calvinists, Bible literalists and some atheists, all of whom considered the other positions intolerable and said so, were my regular allies.

I am about 99% atheist and 1% Christian. For me it’s one or the other.

The one position I truly find alien is wishy-washy religion.

If you believe in salvation, there is not a lot of room for a wiggle. I am completely mystified by a “sort of” God.

I guess I was just not born to be moderate ANYTHING.

They are certainly free to practice whatever this is. I will defend their right to do it, but I refuse to try to understand it.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

8 Comments

Not That Long Ago

Not That Long Ago

Brick plants are never build in fashionable places. So when I worked on a plant in Germany in the late 1950s, it was in a tiny town. Some of the old order was still there which might be forgotten, so I thought I would record it here.

Dr. Ludowici was the plant the town’s big house, called the Landhaus. That was his official address with the post office. When he came onto the plant the older workers would take off their hats when they spoke to him.

When I ate with his family his son, who was in his late twenties, would ask his father’s permission to leave the table. Dr. Ludowici told me that when he was a boy the children STOOD at the table to eat and asked permission to leave the table.

Everyone referred to Dr. Ludowici as “Der Herr Doktor.” The servants addressed me as “Herr Robert.” which was exactly what our black workers called me back home, “Mister Bob.”

Back home, when Yankees would visit, they would hear us talking with black people and they would not understand what we were saying or what the black people were saying. When my father came to Germany, the few Germans who spoke English, even Dr, Ludowici who was fluent in English, couldn’t follow our conversation at all.

A few years ago I was talking to one of the black people from our plant and I had extreme difficulty remembering the language I had routinely spoken as a child.

It was a different world and a different language, and it gave me a glimpse of a world before then that no one has any idea of today.

Being in Pontiac, South Carolina and Jockgrim, Germany back then I half lived in the Old South and the Old Germany. This probably gives me a view of history most people lack.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

2 Comments