Nominating Col. Bruce Hampton Ret.

Dear Governor's Awards for the Arts and Humanities:

" I Jeff Mosier support the nomination of Colonel Bruce Hampton to the Governor’s Awards for the Arts & Humanities".

Bruce Hampton has affected the careers of many artists in ways that are hard to describe. I would not have the career that I have, nor would I have had the chance to accomplish the things that I've done, without the influence and example of Col. Bruce Hampton. To have an artist like Hampton who comes from Georgia and remains a resident of Georgia, is a blessing for our State. His true value over time, in my opinion, has been to mentor artists by teaching them to "give themselves permission in their own art" and to be themselves, to not only replicate their artistic influences, but to find their own voice. His influence in fostering artists, in so many pervasive ways, has spread into multiple genres of music, avant-garde performance art, spoken word, poetry, and film, from major motion picture to experimental and independent film.

Even today, Bruce maintains an incredible work ethic and continues to influence a young generation of musicians. He continues to produce cutting edge versions of his work through various band configurations and is touted as "mentor" by many of today's most popular artists as the documentary film about him portrays - including accolades by Dave Matthews, Phish, REM, Widespread Panic, and more. The film about his life and work ("Basically Frightened: The Musical Madness of Col. Bruce Hampton") has just been released, and in my opinion is the first credible capturing of the depth, nature, and power of the artistic influence and works of this deserving award nominee.

May you consider him in your nomination process as a true gem for the arts here in the great state of Georgia. Thanks.

Jeff Mosier
Atlanta, Ga.

Excerpt from Albert Einstein's - "The World as I See It"

"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature".

- Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

Steven Pinker on "Beliefs"

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. (Voltaire)

From Steven Pinker’s, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”: (pp. 139-140)

Human sacrifice and witch burnings are just two examples of the harm that can result from pursuing ends that involve figments of the imagination. Another may be seen in psychotics who kill in pursuit of a delusion, such as Charles Manson’s plan to hasten an apocalyptic race war … But the greatest damage comes from religious beliefs that downgrade the lives of flesh-and-blood people, such as the faith that suffering in this world will be rewarded in the next, or that flying a plane into a skyscraper will earn the pilot 72 virgins in heaven. … The belief that one may escape from an eternity in hell only by accepting Jesus as a savior makes it a moral imperative to coerce people into accepting that belief and to silence anyone who might sow doubt about it.

A broader range of unverifiable beliefs is the temptation to defend them by violent means. People become wedded to their beliefs, because the validity of those beliefs reflects on their competence, commends them as authorities, and rationalizes their mandate to lead. Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali was the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them—or worse, who credibly rebut them—they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

My Favorite Hymn (also the reason I don't go to church)

Dear wife I found a model church
And worshipped there today
It made me think of the good old times
Before my hair was gray

The meeting house was finer built
Than they were years ago
But I found out when I went in
It was not built for show

The sexton did not sit me down
Away back by the door
He knew that I was old and deaf
And saw that I was poor

He must have been a Christian man
He led me boldly through
The long aisle of that crowded church
To find a pleasant pew

I wish you'd heard the singing, wife
it had the old town ring
The preacher said with trumpet voice
Let all the people sing

Oh Coronation was the tune
The music upward roared
I thought I heard the angel choir
Strike on their harps of gold

I tell you wife it did me good
To sing those hymns once more
I felt just like some wrecked marine
Who gets a glimpse of shore

It made want to lay aside
This weather beaten form
And anchor in that blessed port
Forever from the storm

Dear wife the toil will soon be o'er
The victory soon be won
The shining strand is just ahead
Our race is nearly run

We're near to Canaan's happy shore
Our hopes are bright and fair
Thank God we'll never sin again
There'll be no sorrow there

There'll be no sorrow there
In heaven above
Where all is love
There'll be no sorrow there

Ernest Becker on depression

The ego, after all strives to create a continuity of integrated experience. As [Erik] Erickson's work shows so eloquently, the identity is a painstakingly fashioned work of art. It is symbolically constructed, continually refashioned, never complete. The individual can be compared to a movie director who is saddled with a lifetime job of staging a plot, the outcome of which he never knows. Indeed, he never knows what will happen in the very next scene, but he must strive to give the whole thing credibility and self-consistency. This he can only accomplish by reworking the previous material as new events joggle his creation. When one gets down to the last twenty years of a life drama, it becomes more and more difficult to justify abrupt changes in continuity: there is too much preceding plot for it to be re-manipulated with ease. Whole portions cannot be re-interpreted with credibility, much less re-staged. Hence, if the continuity is radically undermined, the individual grasps at whatever straws his ingenuity can muster. No movie director would accept such an assignment, yet each individual is burdened with this ultimately and perilously creative task. The remark that an individual cannot know if his life has been satisfactory until the moment before he expires then becomes understandable. Life is symbolically re-appraisable until its very last second. The proverbial drowning man who passes his life in review is merely exercising the last impulsion of the reclaiming artist. Ernest Becker - "Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Depression"

What Would Andy Do?

In my life as a child, long before WWJD, (What would Jesus Do?) was WWAD. He always kept the Barney Fife's of the world in line without beating them up as bad people. He added such a balanced sense of love and justice to his world. How much better off would we all be if we had been treated like Andy treated those in his town. The world needs laws, but we really need them enforced with the love of a Sheriff who let's the town drunk sleep in the jail cell by leaving the key within reaching distance, and who, as a single father, cared nothing more than to love his son by teaching him life lessons and always listening with awe to every single one of Opie's stories. There's nothing like a real man when you see it, and for me, even though Andy was just a character written into a script, he gave me as a child my first real sense of how to be in a world full of characters like the ones in Mayberry. I really just wanna go to Mayberry when I die, not heaven. It was so much more than just a TV show because we made it so much more. To see what TV has become is as sad as the death of one of its great artist. Goodbye Sheriff Taylor.

Thoughts on Human Thought - Ernest Becker

Human   Advancement in Language

"As part of the evolutionary genesis of species, human beings share the physical and even emotional traits of their animal cousins. However, human behavior is in most areas quite different from other primate behavior. It is the uniqueness of human behavior that intrigued and fascinated Ernest Becker. Drawing on a broad range of investigations and writings, Becker pointed toward human language as that which qualitatively sets human thought and behavior apart from other primate behavior.

We do not have concrete knowledge of when language developed among that peculiar ape species from which human beings have descended. Nor are we able to adjudicate decisively between the various theories for how this development took place. But we are sure of the fact that with the development of language, human self consciousness was made possible, replacing instinctual stimulus-response behavior. This is what is, in essence, distinctive about human behavior and human existence.

Becker dwelled at length on this development.(6) He repeatedly suggested, in a way that somewhat reifies the evolutionary process, that this development of individual self consciousness in one species is a great experimental leap forward by the evolutionary process itself. This development of self consciousness in one species Becker presents as the first really great revolution in evolution; that is, where something qualitatively new came into existence.(7)

The history of the human species is a story describing the steady outworking of this great evolutionary experiment in self consciousness, an experiment that gave to human beings the real possibility of rising above the constrictions of nature itself. But the very gift of human subjectivity contained within it its own special constrictions. While the development of language and symbolic expression allowed for conscious cooperative efforts among human beings far beyond that of any other species, this also created in human beings a peculiar kind of socialization into group behavior.

The subjectivity and sense of self which each individual achieved is dictated directly by the cultural symbol system into which that individual is born.(8) Each person gains a sense of well being by automatic and uncritical performance within that cultural symbol system. In short, by our upbringing and entrance into the social environment, we are symbolically "reinstinctivized" within a particular world view.(9) The individual sense of self, of nature, of morality, are all imparted in a reflexive and uncritical manner by the human environment. It is as if the evolutionary process raised the human individual up from the other animals, only to quickly and quietly tuck him right back down again, as solidly and firmly as before."

From - http://www.ernestbecker.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=234%3Aa-five-part-introdution-to-ernest-becker&catid=1%3Aabout-the-ernest-becker-foundation&Itemid=11&limitstart=1

Understanding this about ourselves safeguards us from the unquestioned mental abductions of childhood thus setting your mind free to work on its own apart from what you've been "converted to" by your environment.  This could assure you the ability to really think on your own for the first time. Though it may be seem scary, it remains necessary, in my mind, for full mental potentiation of human thought, thus human living.  J.M.