CHAPTER TEN. THEOLOGY 101: WHY DESPAIR IS A SIN

Written by: Rick Staggenborg, MD on Jun 26, 2009 7:07 AM PDT

This essay is dedicated to Eric Shinseki, a soldier's soldier who stood up to Rumseld in telling Congress that the projected fighting strength Rummy was preparing to deploy to invade Iraq was grossly inadequate. 

Unlike political generals, the men and women who served under him were not mere cannon fodder for the politicians working for the international corporate terrorists who started that war and planned the occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. As a military man, he knew better than the chicken hawks in the White House what would have been necessary to give our military a fighting chance of success at carrying their mission out. 



It has been customary for centuries to pray to God when preparing for battle, hoping that God will favor our cause. We inevitably believe that our forces fight for justice, and we pray that God agrees. The battle for a single payer health care system and the larger war against the corporate assault on democracy is one cause whose righteousness no one can doubt. Therefore, it is a moral imperative that as we engage in this battle, our confidence must not falter. When the fate of our children depends on our success, we cannot worry about our chances of success, because failure is not an option.

Human progress depends on the vision of those who dream of a better world and have faith in their own ability to create it. To lose hope in the sight of difficulties is to abandon that faith and to risk  leaving future generations to the vagaries of fate. 

According to the second law of thermodynamics, the natural tendency of things is to decay. Humanity must continue to resist entropy in order to survive and to thrive in the Universe. We must learn from our mistakes and constantly devise new strategies to ensure human progress, even as threats to our survival and vitality multiply in number and dangerousness.

As we stand at the edge of the opportunity to bring a single payer health care system to America, we also have an opportunity to strike a blow at the heart of one of the most dangerous enemies of freedom. The insurance industry is one of the corporate forces which have thwarted the democratic will in America since 1889, when the Supreme Court granted corporations human rights under the Fourteenth amendment clause assuring that the Bill of Rights applies to all “persons.” 

In a blatant reactionary response to Teddy Roosevelt’s attempts to rein in the dangerous power of corporate monopolists, these counter-Revolutionary “justices” used this precedent to systematically grant human rights to these legally fictitious “persons.” Ignoring the fact that a corporate “person” cannot be imprisoned or executed for the crimes it commits in the name of free enterprise and the pursuit of profit over human need, the court gave them the same constitutional protections that you and I enjoyed until they began to be stripped from us under the guise of a “war” on terror.

Belief in progress is not naïve. Self styled “realists” will tell you that human nature is such that moral compromise is always necessary and will inevitably lead us to accommodate individual self interest in any personal or governmental decision. This assumes that men and women are not capable of governing themselves either individually or collectively. Thus, those who hold this view essentially reject the core assumption necessary to believe that democracy can work.  Why do these people hate America so much?

Religious conservatives take it as an article of faith that we are all “sinners.” While it may be true that we all fall short of the Christian ideal, this should not stop us from making every effort to follow Christ’s example, rather than allowing this to become an excuse for our willful moral failings. Abraham Lincoln pointed out that we must strive to become a "more perfect" union so that the American experiment in democracy would not fail and the hope for freedom in the world would be ended for generations, if not forever.

Just as striving for perfection is a moral issue on a personal level, so does the manner in which a nation addresses social justice issues determine the character of its soul. The fight to assure that medical care is available to all when needed is one of the great social justice issues of our time.

If the United States is truly a nation whose people believe in the principle that all humans have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness then we must ensure that all citizens have the right to physical and emotional health. We must preserve life in order to use our liberty to pursue the means of happiness.  

It is a sick society in which the murder of those who regretfully terminate potential lives is condoned and even encouraged by men and women who call themselves "Christians." The majority of the morally twisted individuals who approve of this form of murder in the name of God are typically willing to callously abandon children once born, in the delusional belief that individual responsibility is the defining feature of the American character. Those who reject the idea of social responsibilty ignore the fact thar our collective well being is also the responsibility of each of us. Those who choose to be willfully ignorant of this truth commit the gravest sin of all.

As Reverend Martin Luther King observed, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. When we allow injustice to be done to one of us, democracy is endangered. Those who care only about accumulating wealth and power would use our divisions to conquer us all. We have to recognize that the  well being of each of us is intimately dependent on assuring the well being of all of us.

A society that does not care for the least among it is a dying society. Strong citizens build strong governments and will fight any attempt to undermine the foundations of democracy through the authoritarian rhetoric of self-interested power-mongers. They believe they have a divine right to rule over the rest of us. This is the greatest threat to our democratic Republic, which is founded on the principle that every citizen has the right and duty to help make decisions that affect all of us.

Rick Staggenborg, MD


Ketchikan, Alaska

CHAPTER FIFTY SIX. THE BRAVE NEW WORLD

 Written by: Rick Staggenborg, MD on Nov 29, 2009 7:30 AM PST






This chapter is dedicated to Aldous Huxley, who credited the experiencing of nearly total blindness in his youth with opening the doors of his perception. He perfected the art of seeing and gave us the terrifying vision of our possible futures in 1984 and Brave New World.








As I drifted toward consciousness this morning, I visualized myself at a crossroads. This image seemed to represent a choice I had to make that would determine the path my life would take from that point. It came to me that this did not have to represent some critical decision, but any of the choices that I make every day that together determine my personal future. With every decision that I make, my individual destiny changes.

The same can be said of our collective future. Every day we make the decisions that shape the future of Mankind and each day we awaken to a new world. The nightmare of an inexorable march to self-destruction is not possible if we awaken to the fact that our interdependence requires of us that we consciously choose to love life itself enough to show in every choice our love for ourselves and each other. We need only choose this path to free ourselves and choose the high road toward cooperation and ultimate peace.


There are an infinite number of futures that we might inhabit. Our choices are but one force among many that determine our individual and shared fates. The decisions of others play largely in our destiny, as do apparently random events that may have unpredictable consequences.

At times, small and seemingly insignificant occurrences may change the future in ways impossible for us to recognize. This is termed the butterfly effect, which may be the basis of karma, if such a thing exists. The theory of karma postulates that our fortunes depend on our actions not only in this life but in past lives. In Buddhist and earlier Hindu traditions, it is accepted as a given that all of our actions are punished or rewarded in the fullness of time.


There is a vast gulf between various schools of religious thought as to whether there is a God who can intervene in our individual and thus collective fates. At one extreme, it is believed that there is no God and that our individual choices determine our ultimate fate. Obviously, this is only true if reincarnation is a fact of existence, since there would be no other way to explain why some are so disadvantaged a birth or by later life circumstances, regardless of their conduct in this life.

It strikes me as extremely illogical to begin shaping my personal reality by making the a priori assumption that life itself has no inherent purpose. If the answer to the question of God's existence is unanswerable with certainty, then I choose to believe that God exists and is perfect love.


At the other extreme of religious belief are those religions that argue that God determines all things, thus presupposing that free will is an illusion. It is clear that many of those subscribing to this notion of blind faith in the unseen have abrogated their responsibility to act upon the world with care and the sense that there are consequences to their actions that are under their control. They blithely choose to follow the path of least resistance toward perceived rewards that they convince themselves they have earned or have been granted by their special relationship to a God who exists only in their imaginations.

Thus in America we find religious fundamentalists hastening what they see as the inevitable destruction of the world, and throughout the world jihadists kill in the name of a perverted version of Allah that they believe wills their craven acts of destruction and will reward them in the next world.


Physicists engaged in constructing models of physical reality concluded long ago that God does indeed “play dice with the Universe,” to use Einstein’s evocative phrase. At a subatomic level, the physical location of a particle such as a photon cannot be predicted if it interacts with another particle or object. This is the basis of both the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the wave model of light and other “particles.” It is easily demonstrated by passing photons or electrons through a diffraction grating. The result is a diffraction pattern showing the characteristics of a wave.


The easiest way to explain this is to postulate that the position and direction of a given particle passing through a diffraction grating is determined by the probability that the particle exists at a certain location in space with a particular velocity at any given moment. This uncertainty is expressed mathematically as quantum fluctuations in these variables.

Thus, if there is a God acting on the world, it may well be through altering these probabilities. If there are miracles occurring that help us to shape the destiny of ourselves and mankind, then it may be that we can only detect them by recognizing the extraordinarily improbable nature of some of our experiences. In other words, if Schrödinger’s cat suddenly appeared to be outside the box in which he had placed it, he would have to conclude that a miracle has occurred.


We cannot know whether God is acting in the world, but if we accept our responsibility to act with love and compassion toward our fellow man then we may have faith that we are doing the right thing, whether or not we believe that we are acting in accordance with the will of God. We can then sleep easily at night, knowing that whatever dreams may come, we will awaken to a new world of our own making that will be better than the one we last saw.








Rick Staggenborg, MD






Coos Bay, OR