peter krey’s web site

Suggestions that I hope are helpful:

For the wars:

1. Could dogs be trained for protecting soldiers and civilians from suicide bombers? I think they are already used; but could the usefulness of trained dogs become expanded?

For the economy:

2. Could Pres. Obama have economic revival conferences in strategic places throughout the country, the way Bill Clinton and Al Gore did beginning their administration? Or conferences with strategic CEO’s and business leaders? For an agenda look at the 6/25/09 Charlie Rose interview  of the CEO of GE, Jeffry Immelt. Just an elite, intellectual group of economic advisers, should not replace a grassroots and corporate economic revival for the sake of job creation.

3. I loved the idea that representatives from all the Indian nations in our country met with Pres. Obama and his cabinet. Can I get more information about the meeting? Reconciliation with Native Americans alone would make Pres. Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, let alone many of his other “firsts.”

I’m a Dr., i.e., not an MD but a PhD, and also a pastor praying that Pres. Obama win out on his wholesome agenda. Lack of health insurance kills 45,000 a year. That’s an angel of death more fierce than the terrorists. See Nicholas Kristof’s Op Ed article in the NYTimes today 11/12/09.

lovejoypeace,

peter krey

China’s Premier Warns Obama to Get America’s Deficit to an “Appropriate Size”

Aren’t Walmart, Target, and all the other retailers, 99% of whose merchandise is made in China, Chinese Trojan horses?

When I equipped my apartment in Philadelphia a few years ago, virtually everything I purchased was made in China, except the china, which was made in USA.

Check out Deuteronomy 28: 12-13: You will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow. The Lord will make you the head and not the tail: you shall be only at the top and not the bottom. (This same idea comes up in 28: 44 again.) So the creditor nation (China) becomes the head of the dog and the debtor (The U.S.A.) becomes the tail, meaning that the dog is going to wag the tail and the the tail is not going to wag the dog.

This post is about becoming indebted to China, but the same holds true for the debtor class in America. Going into debt makes us the tail of our society, while the creditors become the head of the dog.  The tail can’t wag the dog.

Reading the final chapters of Deuteronomy was very rewarding. It is one thing to read the scriptures when one is young and quite another when one has some self-knowledge and experience. In the latter case, a much deeper understanding can be won.

In chapter 27, the use of only unhewn stones for the altar of God can be related to justification by faith, in which we can do nothing for our own salvation: it has to proceed by God’s hand alone. We are the living stones, which God alone must shape and fashion to God’s purpose. We don’t reinvent ourselves the way politicians do who want to use their artificial public images for power purposes. We surrender in Luther’s completely passive way to God, who justifies our margins and creates us by God’s Word. Using computer and word-processing metaphors, makes me want to say, we are “word-perfect” divine expressions, but Luther has it right: we are sinners and saints at one and the same time.

In the Tao te Ching, in chapter 57 and elsewhere, the uncarved block is like this unhewn stone. The state and intelligence of God’s created nature is still far superior to ours, by which we disrupt nature from its harmonious course. In Taoism, wu wei or no action is much like the passive righteousness in Luther’s justification by faith. Doing no action in the force of tao, the way, is accessing God’s divine action amongst us. In chapter 48, the Tao Te Ching has the lines:

In the pursuit of the way one does less every day.

One does less and less until one does nothing at all,

And when one does nothing at all, there is nothing

left undone (108).[1]

And chapter 47:

Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,

Identifies without having to see,

accomplishes without having to act (107).[2]

The paradox involved is that faith, according to Luther, is “a mighty, active, restless, and busy thing, which immediately renews the person, gives a second birth, and leads the person into new ways and into new being. It is impossible for this same self not to do good works, continuously, [spontaneously] without interruption.”[3] Thus this human inaction is really God’s continuous creation doing the humanly impossible through those who have completely surrendered to God, like a leaf, blowing in the wind (the Wind of the Holy Spirit).

Our deacon in St. John’s used to always pray that her sons be made the head and not the tail and I was surprised that the expression was biblical. It comes up in Deuteronomy 28:13 and 44. It refers to the class of creditors, who are the head and the debtors, who are the tails: those who make money with their money as the heads and those who buy their money with debt, as the poor tails of our capitalist society.

Luther usually uses the word “the true corpse,” instead of “the true body” of Jesus Christ our Lord, when he deals with communion. In the curses over Israel, should they be disobedient, it says, “your corpses shall be food for every bird of the air and animal of the earth, and there shall be no one to frighten them away” (Deut. 28:26). Jesus continually uses the expression, “For where the corpse is, the vultures will gather,” (see for example in Matthew 24:28). I believe that Jesus turns the corpses as food for the birds and animals around and goes spiritual with it. The idea is that Jesus carries the cross on which he will die, and he and his followers, in a sense, are already dead, and they are the food for all who are hungry, thirsty, or needy in any way. When someone dies, the family can claim the corpse, but the dead has no claim upon it anymore. It and everything the person possessed, are free for the concern and taking of others. Thus his body is food indeed and his blood is drink indeed. (I like the way Moses’ song has the words, “you drink fine wine from the blood of grapes” (Deut. 32:14).)

For those who refuse to obey the One true God, Moses describes their bottoming out in the curses of chapter 28 very graphically. I kept asking myself, “How low can you go?” while reading the passages of Deuteronomy 28:54-57. If you don’t diligently observe all the words of the law that are written in this book, you will be reduced to cannibalism and even worse, no matter how refined and gentle you may have become! I believe Jesus was totally immersed in Deuteronomy and he could have had these passages in mind when many of the disciples took offense at him. The Savior wanted to answer and overturn the scenarios of the cursed at even their worst, (if you’ll excuse the rhyme).

In chapter 29, verse 18, turning away to the gods of the nations means turning away from the reign of the Kingdom of God and the Messiah, God’s Christ, to be somewhat redundant from the Hebrew to the Greek: “the anointed one” is the meaning of “Messiah” and “Christ.” There is a real place and need for the nations, but in them our hearts have to belong to God and they have to submit to God. (See Psalm 2.)

I do not yet understand verse 29 of chapter 29. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever, to observe all the words of this law.” I think that kind of a conception is part of Luther’s Theology of the Cross, but I cannot yet explain it.

The beautiful passages about “the word being very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, for you to observe” (Deut 30:14, see 11-14) made me write this blog today. I studied early modern European history and the way the word (the writings and literature) contained the classic civilizations of Greece and Rome and could challenge the life of society in the Barbarian “Dark Ages” – until the European civilization could overtake them; in the same way, the Kingdom of God and the Christ are contained in the Word, until God’s will is done on earth as it already is in heaven. Every sermon should spell it out and bring some aspect of it to life. The Word will not return empty.

Finally, the way Moses and Aaron angered God by “breaking faith with him” (Deut. 32:51) could have something to do with the sacred lots, which may have contradicted the command of God. If Deuteronomy 33:8 has such high praise for the Levites, why does it mention the Thummim and Urim with their testing God at Massah and their contending with God at the waters of Meribah? Did the method of divining interfere with their living trust in God? Was it that they took credit for the water gushing out of the rock or that they said, “Let’s see if God can make water gush out of this rock” mistrusting God?

Going back to Exodus 17:1-7, it seems that all of Israel was putting God to the test and even Moses and Aaron became caught up in their disloyal and selfish doubt. Was God really in their midst and could God produce water out of the rock for them to drink with that old rod of Moses? This is the way, it seems to me, that Moses and Aaron broke faith with God in what transpired at Massah (meaning “test”) and the waters of Meribah (meaning “the quarrel”).

---

[1] Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, translated and with an introduction by D.C. Lau, (Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc., 1963), page 118.

[2] Ibid., page 108.

[3] Luthers Werke, Weimar Ausgabe, vol 10, part 3, page 285, lines 24-30. For Luther’s full quote see my website: Increasing our faith and Luther’s developing notion of faith. Or see Peter Krey’s, Sword of the Spirit, Sword of Iron, (Berkeley: GTU Dissertation, 2001), page 167, footnote 177.

That’s the headline in the New York Times article today (Friday, August 7, 2009, page A5) and the article moved me deeply. Like Harry Patch, my father was also a machine gunner in World War I, after being drafted out of the seminary, where he was studying to become a pastor for German speaking congregations in America. On the Western Front he fought in some of the most bloody battles and in their trenches during the night when the wounded Tommies lay dying unable to be rescued by others from their trenches, he heard them scream, “Jesus” before they died and he asked himself, how could he be killing those who loved and served and believed in Jesus the same way he did?

My father was born on the 29th of December, 1897, and he would be 111 years old, just like Harry Patch, whose funeral took place yesterday. Mr. Patch only began speaking about the horrors he endured in the war 80 years later, after he was 100 years old. My father preached to our family, his captive congregation, and relived his war experiences through many sermons. Writhing in guilt and anguish he told about a Frenchman, getting out of his trench and smoking a cigarette, looking at them one human being to another. “Should I shoot?” my father asked the officer. “Yes.” came the reply and my father shot him. Nothing he could do, because he had done it and he could not get out from under his bitter guilt.

War is the complete failure of civilization and Harry Patch said it well, when he broke his eighty years of silence: “I’ve seen devils coming up from under the ground/ I’ve seen hell upon this earth.” “War is the ‘calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings,’ too often sent into combat as ‘cannon fodder’ by politicians who should have settled their conflicts by dueling among themselves. ‘War isn’t worth one life,’ he said. ‘Too many died.’ As for the carnage in the Western Front, on both sides, he said, [nearly 900,000 lost their lives in the Battle of Ypres in Flanders] “  all who fought, whether British or German should be mourned. ‘Irrespective of the uniforms we wore,’ he told the BBC, ‘we were all victims.’”

As the last fighting Tommy, in London last November, on the 90th anniversary of the armistice  that ended that war, he pressed the message home: “Remember the Germans.” And two German soldiers in full dress uniform, part of a six man contingent, that also included soldiers from Belgium and France, were his honorary pallbearers. A German diplomat read a passage from Corinthians that spoke Christ’s “message of reconciliation” which Harry Patch, a devout Christian, stood for.

I’ll just conclude by telling how “he came across a fellow soldier in the Battle of Ypres, ripped from his shoulder to his waiste by shrapnell’ during the British assault on German lines.” He was beyond all human help and asked Harry to shoot him. But before he could pull his revolver he was dead. “And the final word he uttered was ‘Mother!’ It wasn’t a cry of despair, it was a cry of surprise and joy.”

In the words of Mr. Patch: “I’m positive that when he left this world, wherever he went, his mother was there, and from that day, I’ve always remembered that cry, and that death is not the end.”

My father had that same faith and coming to America, he had to experience cruel rejection by the church he loved, worked in the Ambridge, Pittsburgh steel mills through the great depression, only to return to Germany, and as a man of faith, leading his family of ten and then eleven children (at that time) through the burning rubble of Hamburg, fleeing the Russians and the SS, and bringing his family safely through that aftemath of World War I called World War II. He did the same for his little machine gun company. The slogan they were taught was: “It is an honor and a glorious thing to die for your country.” He told his men, “It is more glorious to come back alive and to live for it.” He brought all eleven men from his little company back alive.

It occurred to me that the way to the universal is through the particular. I’ve been arguing with someone who wants to change the system and finds that more important than changing persons. I’ve been a radical existentialist, so that does not sit well with me. Yet I find that the holistic approach is also necessary.

I believe that “changing the system” is too simple a term for such a complex endeavor. Bourdieu’s fields can be considered. They could provide several angles that approach a system. Systems may also be made up out of fields. But then consider Habermas, his Life World and the Two Systems, economic and political. Habermas states that the systems are there for the sake of the Life World and not vice versa. What would “changing the system” mean for his theoretical model?

I get this way of thinking from the formula: Finitum capax infinitum (the finite is capable of containing the infinite). Luther upheld this view in order to affirm the Incarnation: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Thus the way to God is through Jesus the Christ and through his life we glimpse Heaven.

Just now I watched how Rick Santellli and Steve Liesman get into it on the CNBC Business Channel and I wonder if there is a way to analyze their strong disagreement to determine the fundamental issues involved.

I believe that the toxic assets produced by the unregulated financial securitization instruments, i.e., the derivatives of the sub-prime mortgages and loans (a $65 trillion market) insured by credit default swaps (introduced by J.P. Morgan in 1997 and by mid-2007 ballooned to $45 trillion market), pretty much brought down the main brokerage houses that were leveraging at $30 to one: Lehman Brothers took the real hit going bankrupt. But Merrill Lynch was a forced purchase by Bank of America and Bear Stearns, forced to sell at $2 a share to A.I.G. by Hank Paulson, who then injected $173 Billion into this obscure deal. Now Paulson had been the CEO of Goldman Sachs before George W. Bush made him the Secretary of the Treasury. (I wonder about what would have happened if he had been the CEO of Lehman Brothers!)

The great investment banks all collapsed into the banks that were, by and large, too large to fail: Goldman Sachs into Citigroup and Morgan Stanley…. The Federal Reserve allowed Morgan Stanley to change from an investment bank into a Bank Holding Company, while 21% of it was purchased for $9 Billion by Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the largest bank of Japan.

That spelled the collapse of four of the great brokerage houses in the wake of the housing bubble and Wall Street’s novel financial instruments that had been so lucrative. Far from their reducing risk, they placed and still place the whole financial system as well as the whole economy at risk.

Now Rick Santelli is asking for the good old days of leveraging and big chunks of GDP for the United States produced by the financial community lost with the loss of the great brokerage houses. (I wonder what kind of a reality these chunks of GDP had and what justified that kind of leveraging for our financial gain?) He seems to blame the government intervention for the financial collapse. (My point in a previous “blogging my thoughts” was that the government is priming the pump to get the markets up and going again.)

Steve Liesman is saying that the government had to step in because of the collapse of the markets. This was not merely a business cycle, but a bubble that burst, destructive enough to bring a total collapse of the market. This is what Steve Liesman’s language about “the end of the world” stands for.

Rick Santelli and Steve Liesman clashed over Bank of America, CEO, Ken Lewis’ decision to comply with Hank Paulson over not disclosing the shape of Merrill Lynch (the trillions in magnitude of the toxic assets in question is the skeleton in the closet, I believe.) Thus for the sake of saving the whole financial system, the independence of the market, was taken away by Hank Paulson, who acted like a CEO of the government in his treasury position.

Now Rick Santelli took a very ethical position: just because Paulson tells you to cover up the liabilities that Merrill Lynch brought to Bank of America was no reason to do so. Be an independent CEO. This is business and the government has no right to interfere and ask for an illegal cover up. That is why he mentioned David Frost and Nixon. Steve Liesman had argued that Paulson felt non-disclosure of Merrill’s situation at that moment could save both Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, and with it the collapse of the financial system. Rick Santelli argued that a crisis situation is not an excuse to break a rule or a law. Now the government is embedded in the financial system and he wishes it were not.

But the collapse of the whole system could spell a great depression that would take a decade or more to get out of. I wonder why Rick Santelli would ask who Steve Liesman voted for? That sounded like a Republican trying to scapegoat a Democrat in a Republican business ethos. If Steve’s position was “dumb,” then Rick’s was completely unrealistic. (Rick sometimes hits below the belt!) How could the issues between Ken Lewis and Hank Paulson have been taken to the Supreme Court?  Although Rick Santelli seemed to take the ethical stance, he seems to think that the market operates in a world of its own and is an autonomous realm independent of government and society. The jury is still out about whether or not government intervention will get the markets up and running again, but I submit that the markets are always running to the government for contracts, hand-outs, and bailouts, meanwhile giving lip-service to free markets. The government representatives are also taking whopping amounts from Wall Street lobbyists to bring huge profits at the expense of the health of the markets and the society. Perhaps there is a difference between healthy free markets and those gone wild in a frenzy for fast capital that does not help real production and meet the needs of the society, for which the economy, as supported by the financial system, is responsible.

Perhaps the real issue involves irrational distortions of the markets that got out of hand, because real risk is involved with production for fulfilling the needs of society and false instruments are sold to insure the purchasers that they will be immune from any risk in the market. But the management of risk should not include the stand that allows the whole system to collapse because of instruments that promised all risk had been overcome.

Markets are filled by those whose values are trust-worthy and those who trust them. It is faith that fills the financial world as well as its investments in the economy with profitability as the needs of society are met. (This is the economic version of justification by faith.) The distortion of the market took place as some really used the market to avoid the risk that the market constitutes. That is why it came to no risk at all versus risking the whole financial system.

I hope Steve Liesman and Rick Santelli keep fighting. But the latter will not get those great chunks of GDP into the US again by leveraging and using the phony derivatives and credit default swap markets. I guess the question remains, do the irrational financial markets spread healthy global markets or end up destroying them and failing the societies for which they should provide?

See the CNBC video, the “Bernanke Re-Cap”: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1114536023&play=1

for viewing their argument on this Business Channel.

I woke up in the night worried about our economy and all the people losing their jobs and houses. Remember, if we learn new ways of public and private sharing, they could still have homes where they are welcome. I also worried about the fact that I have lost three fifths of my pension, meaning that any hope of retirement is unrealistic. But how do you retire from underemployment? I have a quarter time call in which you cover for a full time pastor, preach for a mid-week Lenten service, teach a bible study, help with a funeral, meet with a worship committee, and get a sermon ready for Sunday? Sorry, I love to complain.

I realize that I don’t work only for others, but basically for God. I am a servant of my Lord Jesus Christ. That is my faith statement. There you have it.

Back to the economy: Ben Bernanke answered those who asked why they should help someone who made bad decisions in buying a house and now were in foreclosure. He said “If your neighbor smokes in bed and sets his house afire and you live in a neighborhood of closely packed wooden houses, you could punish him very severely by refusing to send the fire department. And then he would probably learn his lesson about smoking in bed. But unfortunately, in the process you would have the entire neighborhood burning down.”

Rugged individualism does not see that social part of reality. That naked homeless man, trying to cover himself with an old raincoat and wracked with all kinds of diseases will infect everyone on the New York subway. His smell filled half of the subway car. The bacteria from his infections will not avoid the rich, the middle class, or whatever a person might be. His diseases will spread to all.

The economist, D’Anghel Rugina, used to chant, “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom!” in the classroom at Northeastern University, and said it depended on the free enterprise and market system, but he nuanced his analysis of society carefully, because socialism was appropriate for some sectors of the economy and not for others. Who wants to see doctors multiply unnecessary exams, procedures, and operations because of the profit motive? It happened with open heart surgery and examination procedures here in Redding, California. Deregulation of the utilities was used to pilfer the people of California. The private inspectors auditing the peanut factory in Georgia, assessed the food level safety of the plant to be “superior.” Judges get kickbacks from a privatized juvenile detention center and get paid for every teenager they sentence and send to it. Privatized military stand ready to introduce all kinds of new conflicts of interest. Private Auditing companies work in a complete conflict of interest relationship with the companies they audit.

We have to advance beyond the slogans of big government versus little government. We need government representing public interests as a check and balance for unethical practices that can metastasize in the private economy. Rugina said that the market needed to be like the cockpit of an airliner with all the controls and gauges to keep it flying freely. Free enterprise is related to freedom. The private needed to be checked for fairness by public institutions and the common wealth dare not be drained by one segment of the private sector.

That article of his from the International Journal of Social Economics bears rereading. (See my Blog on his important essay.) But that is reformation of our economy for the long term. What to do in the short term, in this crisis?

Prime the pump. When we put in a pump to pump the water from our well, we had to pour some in at the top, until the suction increased enough to get the water flowing from the real source below the ground. The government is priming the pump to get the market working again. Why are people saying, that’s big government, earmarks, and irrational spending? Has our problem been market fundamentalism? We need to understand the proper limits of the market, that is, in what sectors it is appropriate and where it will not function. What good are tax cuts to the unemployed? What help were Bushes giant tax cuts in the last administration? They might have been a factor in the melt-down. Isn’t big government a necessity when the markets have collapsed? What other source of capital is there to prime the pump of the economy?

Look at it. There could well be a dead $63 trillion market of deregulated derivatives that have changed our Banks into zombies, but we could suspend those derivatives in a bad bank and slowly bring that bank around once again, when the markets recover and rationality has been introduced into the financial industry. But the priming of the pump means that millions of private investors should let their capital flow into the market once again to let that important source of value, the markets start working again.

What about letting Warren Buffet recruit 20 million investors to prop up the banks and AIG while Geithner and Bernanke prime the pumps? That is what their insurance program for the banks needs to stress. They are priming the pump. Insulate the toxic assets until they can be dismantled and revalued in a recovering market. When it recovers, what is too big to fail either has to be decentralized, broken down, or given global oversight and regulation.

GM should be taken over by the government and they should produce green cars, similar to the Volkswagen, even if I despise the originator of it. Insure that every car produced will be bought, with government vouchers, if necessary. Prime the pump and do so for the Asian cars as well. Chart out the market share in the global economy where these cars will be sold. Help pay for them until the companies and their markets revive.

But conservatives should not prevent the administration from priming the pump until the markets function again. Then an analysis is necessary to determine what went wrong. It is a failure of the relationship of the public and private sectors, of the markets and their government. Did we get the bubble because of cheap Chinese capital and their powerful productivity? Can we figure out a way to regulate global debt, savings, and production to allow the markets to function without these bubbles bursting and causing such havoc?

There should not be a blame game, except in that we went into debt way over our heads without the manufacturing and production supporting the increasing standard of living we desire. The global economic forces are very real and corporations outsourcing labor are not beholden to the needs of a country. Economics should not be another form of warfare but a form of mutual help and support. Somehow the market has to be guided and regulated to the extent that it not destroy the standard of living in a country but enhance it, if ever so slightly; or decrease it gradually to a realistic level. We have to understand that we all live in wooden houses and after we have put out the fire, we have to forbid the smoking in bed or Adam Smith’s invisible hand will come out and smack us right in the face.

16^th of May, 2008

Today’s New York Times had an interesting article about Chinese superstition spread by bloggers over the Internet. (It is on page A 10 and authored by Andrew Jacobs.) In the days before the earthquake in the Sichuan Province, the stories go, that ponds inexplicably drained, cows flung themselves against their enclosures, and swarms of toads invaded the town of Mianzhu. The latter event was confirmed and took place two days before the earthquake. 3,000 people died in Mianzhu and 4,500 are still missing.

The draining of a lake would have something to do with the quake, but the prescience of the cows or toads may well be a fallacy of thought, or perhaps not. The fallacy in reasoning that I am referring to is false cause: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. In English that means “after which, therefore because of which.” Because the earthquake happened after these events, they therefore happened because of them. But my reasoning is not yet precise.

A draining of a lake, if true, would be correspondence; it corresponded with the seismic events and could have indicated some geological event was afoot. But that is, if it really occurred.

The argument is not, in terms of the other cases, a matter of cause, but whether the cows and the toads were prescient of the coming quake and thus could have given the people an indication that it was coming.

Let’s step back. Empiricism, that reliable knowledge derives from the senses, and rationalism, that it derives from logical reasoning, need to be aided and abetted by the scientific method in order to determine whether or not an event is a false cause or a real one. Just because something happens after something else, does not mean that it caused it. After the people of an ancient city built a statue of a god, an earthquake hit. They tore it down, reasoning that it had caused the event. Superstition is rife with false causes.

But the argument is not that the toads, for example, caused the earthquake, but that they were prescient of its coming and their swarming into the town was a portent warning the population that a natural disaster was about to come. The Internet bloggers argue that the government did not care enough to warn, evacuate, and protect the people.

First of all, the sign that the toads represented was negative, and interpreted as such by the frightened population, but otherwise very ambiguous. How would the government or any sages for that matter, know that it meant a coming earthquake and not a fire, storm, or other natural catastrophe?

Two days before the earthquake, when the toads had swarmed into the town, the director of the Mianzhu Forestry Bureau tried to calm the terror of the residents on TV by saying that the mass migration of the toads was a normal part of their breeding season. That, of course, does not seem reasonable, because the people would not have reacted with fear, if such a swarm of toads was a normal occurrence. The people had insisted that the invasion of toads was a harbinger of bad things.

Here is where the scientific method has to come in. could animal life in some way become prescient of coming natural disasters? Perhaps that is the rational reason behind the ancients’ trying to read portents and signs from the flight of birds. In the sixteenth century, abnormal births of animals also were read as portents of evils to come. Our genetic understanding of mutations clears up that superstition.

But animals may well be closer to nature than human beings and may react more sensitively to indications of a coming catastrophe. The ability of dogs to read and understand smells, far surpasses ours and lets them guide us to people buried under the earthquake rubble. Birds may have instincts attuned to magnetic forces that guide their flights. The problem becomes that such signs may not be ambiguous about whether or not a coming event is negative, but it is ambiguous about what event is indicated. Stories go that animals were aware of the coming Christmas Tsunami and ran for higher ground. Such an occurrence is hard to read accurately and there is no evidence that the story is true. I myself have been awakened by dogs barking very strangely in the night and then the jolt of an earthquake hit our house that sounded like a truck.

It might be the case that in our separation from nature, creatures more fully embedded in nature, may have some prescience to natural catastrophes that we do not have. Meteorologically, science and technology have given us great advance; it is wished that the victims of the Tsunami and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar could have had it! We are not there yet with earthquakes, however, and portents remain ambiguous.

Our bodies, however, sometimes know more than we consciously know. Thus our dreams often contain symbols that give fruitful instruction at the incomprehensible edges of our lives. When a bright cross covered the full moon in a deep blue sky in Gruenberg, Silesia, (Schlesien) during World War II, my father, a pastor, was asked by the people to interpret it. All those who gazed at the cross felt that it was a portent, a sign of things to come. “It foretells a time of great sorrow.” he said. I think it crystallized my father’s foreboding that the Russian army was closing in and the days would become very evil.

Despite the kindly bishop, who calmed the people and tried to persuade my father not to take fight, the family packed all its belongings and left. I was one year old at the time so we were a family of eleven. Dreadful things did happen when the Russians Army took revenge on the Germans. My father, who always seemed to be praying, had read the sign accurately.

Here I was going to just describe a fallacy of thinking and look at where I’ve ended up!