Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

There's nothing I can add or take from these quotes from Vonnegut's Galapagos, other than to say that Kazakh and James Wait are two characters, the first a dog and the latter a man, who have just met an untimely end:

I say now of Kazakh's untimely death, lest anyone should be moved to tears, "Oh, well -- she wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

I say the same thing about the death of James Wait: "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn't my own invention. I first heard it spoken in Swedish at a funeral while I was still alive. The corpse at that particular rite of passage was an obtuse and unpopular shipyard foreman named Per Olaf Rosenquist. He had died young, or what was thought to be young in those days, because he, like James Wait,had inherited a defective heart. I went to the funeral with a fellow welder named Hjalmar Arvid BostrÃm, not that it can matter much what anybody's name was a million years ago. As we left the church, BostrÃm said to me: "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

I asked him if this black joke was original, and he said no, that he had heard it from his German grandfather, who had been an officer in charge of burying the dead on the Western Front during World War One. It was common for soldiers new to that sort of work to wax philosophical over this corpse or that one, into whose face he was about to shovel dirt, speculating about what he might have done if he hadn't died so young. There were many cynical things a veteran might say to such a thoughtful recruit, and one of those was: "Don't worry about it. He wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway."

Looking back over a million years of evolution since his own death, the mysterious, disembodied author of the book says something even more telling - but we can hear another author talking, talking about his art, about his legacy, but most of all about the only thing we all have in common:

I have written these words in air -- with the tip of the index finger of my left hand...Does it trouble me to write so insubstantially, with air on air? Well -- my words will be as enduring as anything my father wrote, or Shakespeare wrote, or Beethoven wrote, or Darwin wrote. It turns out that they all wrote with air on air, and I now pluck this thought of Darwin's from the balmy atmosphere:
"Progress has been much more general than retrogression."

What Does the Bible Really Teach?

This is the title of a book published by Jehovah's Witnesses. The book itself is intended as a simple introduction to what Jehovah's Witnesses really teach. It is used in "Bible Studies" with individuals who consent to "study" with the Witnesses (in their own homes, the first step towards conversion) but it is much more widely used by the Witnesses themselves, either in family or congregation study (it is currently being studied at the Tuesday night "book study").

Now, questions of the need for Witnesses to study their own basic beliefs to one side, I'd like to (as with the "Creation" book in my last blog) consider the title of the book itself. It tells us a lot about the Bible, the Witnesses, and religion in general, I think. OK, here's what I want to say:

The fact that you can ask "What does the Bible Really Teach?" shows that the Bible teaches nothing at all.

That's a bold statement I know, but let me explain. I'm only refuting the claim, hidden in the title of the book, that the Bible as a book (as a complete work) teaches something, that it has an overall "lesson" or truth. I'm not disputing that we can learn many things from the sayings ascribed to Solomon or Jesus, I am disputing the claim that there is an obvious teaching in "The Bible" that contains these sayings (and lots more besides).

As an example, if you finished reading a textbook on the biology of the human body and could ask yourself "what was that book really teaching?", then you haven't just been (really) reading a textbook on biology. You couldn't say that about such a book. Or if you went to a lecture on, say, the history of the printing press, you couldn't in all seriousness walk up to the lecturer afterwards and ask him "what were you really teaching?" So what I'm saying is, the fact that you can ask such a question about the Bible means that it's not a textbook or a lecture on anything, for if God is the writer or the lecturer, surely he, more than any earthly writer or lecturer, could make it clear what he is really teaching? So the hidden assertion in the title of the Witnesses' book is wrong, and obviously the question framed around this assertion is wrong, or nonsensical, too. In my view it may as well be called "How high can pigs really fly?".

I think wanting the Bible to be a neat package, a neat and tidy message from "our Father who art in heaven" is natural, but wanting it doesn't make it so. A little personal study reveals what the bible really contains and - the more difficult discovery - what it doesn't. Unless you're prepared to be inventive, or to suppose that the Creator's message is as hidden in the Bible as the Creator is from the world itself, for some reason hidden from the majority of his children, I can't see a way round the Bible itself, to God. It seems to me rather to stand in the way, rather than show the way to that One. The plethora of religions using this same book but believing widely different things is another sad testament (no pun intended) to it's ambiguous nature.

I don't think I am being unfair in using the Witnesses own question against them - I mean, it is written that Jesus did the same. And the thing is, the Witnesses do view the Bible in this way - as a textbook, a manual on life. They say things like "If your car is broken, what do you do?" and the answer is "consult the car's manual". You know what they're saying - we're all broken, we need to consult the Bible. OK. Thinking about what I've said though, and thinking about what the Bible really contains - if car manuals in this world were anything like the Bible, you would have every car that ever got repaired by it's owner consulting it's manual repaired differently from every other car that ever got repaired by it's owner consulting it's manual. Perhaps many of them would share one thing in common - they started off as cars and ended up as tanks. I'm not joking.

Again, if God meant the Bible to really teach anything, it would surely surpass any crystal mark standard in use today, so that all his children could understand. "What Does the Bible Really Teach?" with it's simple language and logical development, chapter by chapter, probably would reach such a standard. It's just the Bible itself that wouldn't.