Science has not killed the religious enterprise any more than Nietzsche killed G-d.  

[I’ll explain why I prefer the notation, “G-d”, later in this essay.]

Sigmund Freud was a comprehensive, adamant atheist, a man who rejected G-d, and who (revealingly) also hated music.  For the latter observation about Freud and music, I am indebted to Dr. Armand Nicholi of Harvard and his intriguing study of the lives of Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis.[1]  For many of us, music is a powerfully communicative, non-verbal medium, one uniquely suited to conveying aspects of the human experience that elude mere words, including religious inspiration.  If – like Freud – someone is implacably hostile to all religious sentiments, we might imagine that moving music works, like Bach’s Cantatas and Mozart’s Masses, would seem irritating at best, even threatening. 

Whether we are musically responsive or not, we are social beings who are able to build and sustain entire civilizations based on our capacity to form trust relationships.  We have developed a fine-honed cognitive suite of capabilities that facilitate the detection of authentic personality – and its absence , by utilizing the faculties of compassion, empathy, and other related – as yet unnamed – gifts.  Without this suite of cognitive capabilities, social cooperation and the development of civilizations could not have taken place.  They are critical faculties, not mental disorders, and they are as essential to the sustenance of human life as the ability to detect food.  Can we readily dismiss the same faculties, or discount the evidence they present to our minds, just because they have led some of us to apprehend the presence of Ultimate Being? 

The motives of those who reflexively dismiss all personal encounters with an eternal being, a higher consciousness, a benign, unnamed other (the descriptions are manifold), discounting the  countless credible reports of personal experiences of the numinous over the millennia as merely “psychological episodes” are deeply suspect.[2] 

I recall the stories of the aboriginals who, when first confronted with telephones early in the 20^th century, believed that they were magical objects, inhabited by spirits.   For them only the notion that little spirits were actually inhabiting the phone could account for the strange voices.  The idea of another personality whose words and thoughts could be conveyed by some invisible medium, then somehow reconstituted as sound, was outside their paradigm.  For the secular dogmatists, the intimations and urgings of the divine spirit is just in our heads, as a psycho-electric phenomenon.  The notion that a divine being could exist, Whose words and thoughts can be conveyed by some invisible medium, then manifested as an experience within the brain-mind, is equally outside their paradigm.[3]  Of course this arch materialist view also reduces the profoundest of music to mere air pressure fluctuations stimulating electro-chemical reactions in the brain.  The truth of the matter is that mere physical descriptions of electro-chemical processes do not constitute an adequate account of our conscious being, let alone of beauty, meaning, purpose, goodness, evil and all the rest.  Yet this inherent insufficiency is advanced as proof against the real presence of Ultimate Being.

We are naturally equipped to detect personality and to care about the conscious states of other persons.  When we use these abilities to assess and react to other persons, Freud would say that we are of “normal” mind, but when we use the same cognitive suite to detect spiritual reality, it becomes a malign thought disorder.  I am personally persuaded that the emotional force of Freud’s reaction against the notion of G-d was a sign of a deeper antipathy.  We are entitled to ask, Why so fierce a rejection?  Freud’s project was to “clinicalize” the apprehension of G-d.  In doing so, he had to discount the use of an inherently useful human cognitive faculty (the same set of mental abilities we routinely use to assess human character) whenever that same process was employed to discern and apprehend the spiritual aspect of the human experience.  Freud’s very passion on the topic of divinity exposed his own pathology.  His was a neurotic reasoning process, probably something like - “I hate God; but it is immoral to hate God; therefore I conclude that there is no God”.  Freud’s fierce atheism, containing a denial of the possibility of any authentic spiritual apprehension, originated in psychological denial.  Sigmund Freud hated G-d because he hated his own father[4].

That we are free to believe and to disbelieve is not evidence for or against the reality of an Ultimate Creator Being.  That a large number of intelligent, sophisticated, scientifically-attuned minds actually do believe in G-d[5], provides us with some evidence that “there is something to all this”, after all.

Science does not instruct us to doubt the very organizational principles on which the scientific enterprise is founded, nor does it advocate unreasonable doubt concerning those areas of human experience and belief, such as love and trust, about which the metrics of strict empiricism are so obviously inadequate.  

There is a faith path in science itself from Isaac Newton through Baruch Spinoza to Albert Einstein, all of whom saw the handiwork of an intelligent being in the fabric of creation.  That faith has propelled the scientific enterprise.  It consists of a simple, but profound creed: that this universe has an elegant underlying deign so miraculously intelligible to human intelligence that many scientists are driven to acknowledge that, in the beautiful handwork of nature, we can detect the “mind of God”.  Nature is like a building, so beautiful at its deepest levels that its very architecture inspires wonder and awe at the Architect.  This sense of awe is itself a form of cognitive apprehension taking place on the same level that our personal encounters with a loved one do; it is the gift of the cognitive suite that enables us to act in the confidence that we with a real person and not a golem, automaton or simulacrum.

My own preference for the partial notation for deity (G-d) is more typically found in the orthodox Jewish tradition.  My reasons are congruent with that tradition, but more ecumenical.  The partial notation is intended as code for entire the set of traditions that share a deep caution about naming and owning the Ultimate. 

A deep caution and epistemological humility tend to prevail among this subgroup whether their sensibilities are Torah-based or not.  This is an effective consensus among those for whom spiritual awareness and critical intelligence intersect,  a diverse group that includes humanist universalists (my description, not a denomination[6]), intelligent mystics and the more sophisticated followers of the great traditions. 

The agreement is tacit (no conclave here), and concerns what can be said and should not be said about deity, however described, whether as “supreme being” or “being-ness” (as my Buddhist friends might say[7]) or assigned no name at all.  However we might understand our connections to this common Ultimate - whether we are trying to describe our nexus to the distant, deep deity of pure intelligence manifest in nature (the deity of Einstein and Spinoza, “the mind of G-d” tradition echoed by Stephen Hawking), or our bonds to the personal deity of Moses and Jesus, or our respect for the “Thou” of Martin Buber, or our sense of reverence for the “Cosmic Wow” expressed by the awestruck Carl Sagan[8] - a sense of caution is warranted. 

Forbearance and intellectual humility are appropriate for a number of convergent reasons.  We are wise to avoid attachment to the name of deity (which is why many mystics reject naming itself) because some of us are tempted to think that we own that which we can name[9]. 

And we need to be humble about our facile attempts at G-d definitions.  After all is said and thought, the truly Ultimate Being necessarily remains partly cloaked to us.  History records that G-d becomes present to many of us some of the time, but logic and our private experiences tell us that the Whole of the Divine remains partly and necessarily outside our merely human powers of description and definition. 

We moderns tend to sort into seekers (of varying degrees of persistence and enthusiasm), believers (of varying degrees of confidence) and anti-believers (again of varying degrees of confidence).  The anti-believers are cloaked in a cultural fog – a gloom that gathers more densely among the modern intelligentsia and occults the various aspects of human apperception of G-d’s presence.  Whenever the fog part to allow a few G-d glimpses to get though the group-think within the intelligentsia causes these insights to be dismissed as the products of superstition or as mere wish fulfillment or as psychological states, but not otherwise real. 

At the root of all these barriers to belief is the quasi-religious doctrine of arch-materialism.  Suffice it to say that the glory of a Bach fugue cannot be reduced to air pressure fluctuations that elicit certain “electro-chemical neurological changes in some subjects.”  Nor can a radio receiver carrying an inspiring musical masterpiece be identified as its composer.

The purely physical-mechanical accounts of nature and human are powerfully descriptive on one level, but having elided meaning from the account, their adoption as a comprehensive world view constitutes a sort of self-induced autism of the soul.  

At the opposite extreme, we encounter the ardent “G-d screamers” those men and women who are so intoxicated with the prospect of an alliance with deity, validating their impulse to dominate the rest of us.  This is the subgroup whose members can  blithely invoke “my God says” in the same spirit and sense that someone else might invoke “my guard dog will....” 

The real G-d calls us to our higher angels, while gently reminding us of our own status. 

JBG

Just Google “Jay B Gaskill” and the book’s title or go to http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Stranded-Ones/Jay-B-Gaskill/e/9781926760155 or

http://www.amazon.com/The-Stranded-Ones-ebook/dp/B002YQ2IN0

For The Stranded Ones.

And -

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Souls-Coffee-Shop-ebook/dp/tags-on-product/B0035LCA8Q or

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lost-Souls-Coffee-House/Jay-B-Gaskill/e/9781926760285

As Published on
THE BRIDGE TO BEING BLOG:  www.jaygaskill.com/blog2
& The Policy Think Site: www.jaygaskill.com
All contents, unless otherwise indicated are
Copyright © 2010 by Jay B. Gaskill, All Rights Reserved....

This post, introducing “SCIENCE AND TRUTH: On Not Severing Our HUMBILICAL Chord” introduces and links to an article that is available only as a pdf download.

Here are some excerpts:

We all need to remain connected to our humbilical chords (our heuristic umbilicus harmonious*, if you will).   My invented terms describe the sense that – other than our deep ultimate moral compass – we just might be wrong, arrogant, unwilling to listen, and therefore at risk of becoming self-disabled beings, crippled in our capacity to venture outside our separate thought-bubbles.  Arch materialism, the notion that matter and energy constitute all that there is, represents just such a bubble.

The 20^th and 21^st centuries have elevated the role of science-as-myth, a progression from Robert Oppenheimer’s “destroyer of worlds” (the atomic bomb as the incarnated Hindu deity, Shiva) to science, the Maker of Worlds and Arbiter of Meaning, (where science itself replaces deity).  For too many in the postmodern culture, science has become deeply entangled with the ideology of amoral atheism.  As if empirical science has ever been capable of proving or disproving such deep truths of existence.  Those who see the human condition being formed and deformed under the stresses of rampant “modernity” and “post-modernity” have coined the term scientism to describe the misappropriation of science as ultimate truth-guide.  Scientism poses science as a moral compass, elevates science as the ultimate policy maker, and conflates the white coat of the laboratory with the garments of the priest, seer, maven or rabbi. 

The overall evidence for the existence of a divine, intelligent creator is of the same general character as the evidence relied on to assert human climate forcing as the principal cause for the recent 80 year warming period.  But the case for G-d as existential and essential Reality, whether and however named, is actually stronger.

When we see a flowering or complex biological development in the world, we are trained by experience to look for a seed.

A seed is a developmental information storage device.  Seeds are much smaller than the structures and systems whose designs they contain.

When we are able to examine the development of the universe as a whole, one in which the very structures of space-time, matter and energy, seemed to emerge as if from a seed, we need to ask:  Where was the seed? 

The ubiquity of human reports of encounters with the numinous, and of cultures linking creation with a morally authoritative creator can be dismissed as wishful thinking or they can be seen a persistently accumulating data set about the capacity of the human mind to discover latent, embedded meaning in the world. 

Consider the parable of the mysterious, dark forest. 

A desert community is ruled by shamans.  Over the years, when many separate reports about a mysterious uncharted region are compared, certain common emerge – a dark forest, descriptions of trees, a river and of forest creatures.

But the desert shamans reject these accounts out of hand because “everybody knows” the whole world is a desert.  Yet it is a reasonable inference that a new reality is being described, however “out of paradigm” it seems to those who “haven’t been there”.  The shamans of meaningless are living in a self-created semantic desert. 

For those who stubbornly reject the notion that the G-d reports to which I refer are “merely anecdotal”, I recommend a study of the remarkable threads of continuity that attend the “field reports” about the transcendent and numinous. 

More...

[8 pages with graphics]

*The footnote:

My invented terms are whimsy, of course, but whimsy with a purpose.  Humor is etymologically rooted in fluid and flow; humble is rooted in humus or soil, and both are mutually entangled in the human psyche.  I’m using humble as in modest and unpretentious; heuristic, as the term is used describing algorithmic systems capable of learning from trial and error; umbilicus as in the navel of the developing consciousness, the source of primal nourishment; and harmonious (chord) to describe the fitting correspondence of constituent elements, where melody is a powerful metaphor about detection of the truth-context.   The pursuit of elegance in mathematics and scientific theory are driven by the faith that harmony and beautiful simplicity are pointers to truth.   My perspective is that all knowledge (including esthetic and ethical) is discovery; that truth is always a revealed reality-correspondence; and that intellectual arrogance makes self-disabling epistemological bubbles.  We are bound together and to truth more by chords than cords.

Jay

http://jaygaskill.com/LibertyIndivisible.pdf

Jay

THIS IS AN ALLEGORY FOR THE HUMAN CONDITION.

 Introducing the

LOST SOULS COFFEE SHOP

By Jay B Gaskill

(Author of “The Stranded Ones”)

“My name doesn’t matter.  Just call me Stranger.  You’ll see why soon enough. 

“I want you to imagine ice fog twinkling and dancing around a streetlamp and that you are standing right outside the front door.  You have found an urban legend, a single building right out of the small town 1920’s, parked in the epicenter of Nowhere, North America: The Lost Souls Coffee House.

“Some urban legends just don’t exist.  Others simply can’t be found.  But there is a third category.  I should know....”

There is a place with no address, invisible to all GPS devices, unreachable without an invitation.  This is the Lost Souls Coffee House of urban legend, a place where visitors use sign-in names, where storytellers are welcome but not every story earns a ride home. 

One bitter winter night, Stranger is dropped off at an isolated non-address: no cell phones or electronic devices work.  Story-tellers come and go, relating tales about a preternaturally smart animal living in someone’s basement, a young man who dies because he can’t solve a demon-deity’s riddle, a Silicon Valley tycoon who attempts to design an immortality machine, stories about animals that illuminate the human condition and the story of a war that may or may not happen. 

Then it is Stranger’s turn.  But he did not come prepared....

LOST SOULS COFFEE SHOP has just been published an E-book, downloadable to any electronic format (list $4.99), to your reader, laptop, smart-phone or other handheld device, released on January 21, 2010 by the cutting edge Canadian publisher, ireadiwrite. 

To locate a seller, Google “Jay B Gaskill/lost souls coffee shop” or go directly to one of the E-Book vendors at the following links and start reading this engrossing and thought provoking little book in seconds:

IREADIWRITE

http://www.ireadiwrite.com/Lost-Souls-Coffee-Shop.html

AMAZON

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=lost+souls+coffee+shop&x=21&y=17

BOOKS ON BOARD

http://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?BODY=viewbook&BOOK=597756&v=synopsis

SMASHWORDS

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8913

ALL ROMANCE BOOKS

http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-lostsoulscoffeeshop-404201-143.html

Jay B Gaskill’s THE LOST SOULS COFFEE SHOP, Key Words: Animal stories, fantasy, urban legends, mystery, miracles, artificial intelligence, Deep Thought, humor, spirituality....

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jay B. Gaskill is a well-known California trial and appellate lawyer who served as a Public Defender until 1999, but left his “life of crime” to devote more time to his writing projects. He loves humor and philosophy equally; science and science fiction interchangeably; Manhattan and the western wilderness irresistibly. His fiction works are peopled with likable heroes and recognizable villains whose struggles are disturbed by dichotomous themes.

He has completed two thrillers and is working on a number of other fiction works.

For more about Jay, please visit him at: www.jaygaskill.com/Profile.pdf

Read Jay Gaskill’s new thriller – information links:

http://www.jaygaskill.com/TourTheStrandedOnes.pdf (with pictures)

http://jaygaskill.com/TheNewThrillerByJayGaskill.htm

As Published On

The Policy Think Site: www.jaygaskill.com

& THE BRIDGE TO BEING BLOG:  www.jaygaskill.com/blog2

All contents, unless otherwise indicated are

Copyright © 2009 by Jay B. Gaskill, All Rights Reserved....

In HTM Format -- http://jaygaskill.com/AsimovNimoyMontanaRabbis.htm

Montana Rabbis, Isaac Asimov

& the Earth’s Future

Here’s a must read for the day -- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/05/us/05religion.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

A sample:

“Miky...was born in an animal shelter in Holland and shipped as a puppy to Israel, where he was trained by the Israeli Defense Forces to sniff out explosives. Then one day, Miky got a plane ticket to America. Rather than spend the standard $20,000 on a bomb dog, the Helena Police Department had shopped around and discovered that it could import a surplus bomb dog from the Israeli forces for the price of the flight. So Miky came to his new home in Helena, to join the police force.

“The problem, the officer explained, was that Miky had been trained entirely in Hebrew.

“When Officer Fosket got Miky, he was handed a list of a dozen Hebrew commands ... He made flashcards and tried practicing with Miky. But poor Miky didn’t respond.

“Officer Fosket...tried a Hebrew instructional audio-book from the local library, but no luck. The dog didn’t always understand what he was being ordered to do. Or maybe Miky was just using his owner’s bad pronunciation as an excuse to ignore him. Either way, the policeman needed a rabbi.

“And now he had found one. They worked through a few pronunciations, and the rabbi, Chaim Bruk, is now on call to work with Miky and his owner as needed. Officer Fosket has since learned to pronounce the tricky Israeli “ch” sound, and Miky has become a new star on the police force.”

Copyright 2009 New York Times 

OUR FUTURE IS UP TO US

& THAT’S NOT A BAD THING

I think we all need a rabbi, even – or especially - those of us who were raised in that Jewish variant, Christianity that was started in the life a devout First Century Jewish male (rev. Rabbi Jesus, by Bruce Chilton -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Chilton ).

Why? You ask.  Because the core message of Judaism is profoundly human-centered. As many of us despair about the condition of the planet, of Western civilization and of the USA, I am reminded of Isaac Asimov’s perspective.  My Sci-fi nourished mind was raised in Isaac Asimov’s vision --We humans will populate the entire universe.  In his novels - all self consistent - our species did that so well that we lost track of our planet of origin.  

Asimov was a secular Jew, a deep thinker, a polymath (he taught biochemistry in Boston before he moved back to his native New York).  There were no aliens in his fiction, just us.  This view is, at core, a biblical one, if you think about it.  And it is my core view of humanity as well. 

This is why my litmus test for realistic, morally centered liberals and intelligent, future-aimed conservatives, is the same life affirming, humanity affirming, forward-aimed affirmation, captured in the popular culture as:  (a) "Space, the final frontier" and (b) "Live long and prosper".  As a rabbi from Hungary told me, that Spock salutation from Star Trek by Leonard Nimoy and the Vulcan hand-salute is quintessentially Jewish (based on the priestly blessing – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_salute).

Today, I celebrate our humanity and the joy of a Hebrew-trained police dog in Montana.

JBG

READ JAY GASKILL’S NOVEL launched as an E Book by the Canadian publisher, ireadiwrite. 

The Stranded Ones is the Sci-Fi novel for the non-Sci-Fi reader, an engaging travel companion with loveable and disgusting aliens, a touch of romance, a hint of whimsy and a full load of danger.  Download The Stranded Ones to your Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble nook, your laptop, notebook, and net-book, Blackberry, smart-phone...

Purchase links:

Go to ireadiwrite --

http://www.ireadiwrite.com/home.php 

Also --

Books On Board at

http://www.booksonboard.com/index.php?BODY=viewbook&BOOK=548140 

Or --

KINDLE (by AMAZON) at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=%22the+stranded+ones%22&x=15&y=12 .

Or --

All Romance books at

http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-thestrandedones-386711-143.html

AND

SONY E BOOK Samples at

http://sony-ebook-samples.com/sample/6823/the-stranded-ones

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Jay Ben Gaskill

 YES, WE WERE THERE

Forty years ago, a human being walked on the surface of another heavenly body for the first time. 

When interviewed by Walter Cronkite, writer Robert Heinlein predicted that some day the human calendar would mark that day as YEAR ONE, assuming - as we all did - that civilization would continue. 

Meantime, NASA has provided us with a virtual tour of the Tranquility Landing Site, where those first extra-terrestrial footprints were made. 

Here is that LINK:

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11_landing/index.html

I do believe that our Creator wants this civilization to continue, without guaranteeing that outcome.  After all, we are trusted with freedom, the risk of failure and the gifts of reason creativity and conscience.  

I believe that future generations will mark off this site as a park and that it will be visited by thousands of space tourists.  

For the rest of us, the virtual tour will have to do for now.

Jay B. Gaskill
Earth 2009

 As Published On
The Policy Think Site: www.jaygaskill.com
& THE BRIDGE TO BEING BLOG:  www.jaygaskill.com/blog2
All contents, unless otherwise indicated are
Copyright © 2009 by Jay B. Gaskill, All Rights Reserved....

The arrival of Rosh Hashanah (this year on my wife’s birthday) is a reminder of the universality of the Moral Law, its origins in the Creator of All That Is, and of our shared human frailty.

Since the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, Rosh Hashanah is to be celebrated for two days, as a day of rest (Lev. 23:24) and moral renewal. 

Rosh Hashanah is accompanied/announced by the blowing of the shofar.  This is intended to awaken the gathered and alert them to the coming judgment. 

On the first night of Rosh Hashanah after the evening prayer, it is customary to wish Leshana Tova Tikoseiv Veseichoseim (Le'Alter LeChaim Tovim U'Leshalom) – “May you immediately be inscribed and sealed for a Good Year and for a Good and Peaceful Life”.

All who love life take note.  This is a universal call.

I note from the Bhagavad Gita, “Two Paths”:

1.  “Be fearless and pure; never waver in your determination to the spiritual life....  Do not get angry or harm any living creature, but be compassionate and gentle; show good will to all....

6.  “Some people have divine tendencies, other demonic....”

7. “The demonic do things they should avoid and avoid the things they should do.   They have no sense of uprightness, purity or truth.”

8. “‘There is no God’, they say, no spiritual law, no moral order.’....”

{Trans. Eknath Easwaran, © 1985 Blue Mountain Center of Meditation}

I also note from the Book of Common Prayer (American Anglican/Episcopalian)

“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.”

And, as I’ve noted in earlier writings, the biblical shema, the obligation to love G-d with all one’s heart, mind and strength [Deuteronomy 6:4-5 “And you shall love the lord your G-d with all your heart and with all your soul and all your might.” [V-ahavta et Adonai Elohecha b-chol l’vavcha u-v-chol m’odecha.], is perfectly coherent within Judaism and Christianity. 

In Mark’s gospel, for example (12:28-30 28), we find this passage:

“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, ‘Of all the commandments, which is the most important?’

“‘The most important one,’ answered Jesus, ‘is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our G-d, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your G-d with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’”  

[][][]

The Creator of the universe has given us the Moral Law, without which human life would indeed be “nasty, brutish and short.” 

Whatever our differences, I believe that our faith touches the same Law and invites us to enter the same Dialogic.  [http://www.jaygaskill.com/i2i.htm ]

To all who are within the reach of the Moral Law:  May we awaken, repent and renew our deepest connections to each other and to the deeper Truth that binds us; may we all have a good year and a good and peaceful life.

JBG

I expand on this notion at the following LINK: http://jaygaskill.com/HealthCareWind.html  .

Jay

As Published On

→The Bridge to Being Blog: http://www.jaygaskill.com/blog2

→The Policy Think Site: http://www.jaygaskill.com

All contents, unless otherwise indicated are

Copyright © 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 & 2009 by Jay B. Gaskill

I took this photo of a destroyed firetruck near Ground Zero a few days after 9-11-01

 and this window, late in the afternoon on 9-11-01....

911 ---- NEVER AGAIN!

September 11, 2001 is the Day that will live forever in the hearts of courageous Americans because we were called to defend the most precious gift of all....

Eight years ago today, I awoke in a small apartment on Madison Avenue in Manhattan -- about a three mile walk down Broadway from Ground Zero.  

Soon, we saw hundreds of traumatized office workers, covered in white dust, walking in the middle of that street.  A friend (husband of a classmate) would be walking across the Brookline Bridge from One Liberty Plaza, unable to reach his wife by phone. 

Thousands of others, Mayor Giuliani among them, made that grim Broadway walk.

When I first opened my eyes on 9-11-01, it was just a few minutes after the first airliner had struck the first target.  On a computer screen, I saw the tiny color image of an aircraft, blooming with flame at the moment of impact.  

Other terrible images, smells, sensations and impressions - real and immediate - would quickly follow.  For the rest of that day and for ten days more, my wife and I were immersed in a sea of grief, raw patriotism and a holy sense of shared compassion and resolve. 

I last talked to a group about my experiences four years ago.  LINK: http://www.jaygaskill.com/91105d.htm .

The park at Union Square became a shrine. 

The nearby Armory became a wailing wall. 

I’ve written and talked about this transformative experience more than once.  And I will never forget.  My identity as an American took on a new armor on that day.  And I understood with new, terrible clarity what my Jewish friends meant by “Never again.”

I was most deeply impressed by the insight that we were in the presence of a great existential Evil, but that, somehow, that recognition prompted an immense outpouring of Good.  The photos I took on 9-11 and 9-12, are images that are even brighter in my memory.

A girl endorses a scroll that ran the full length of the park.

 Everyone who was there was changed forever....

 God bless America.

JBG

A FEW MILES FROM THIS SPOT, IN HALEY, IDAHO, UPS DRIVER, BOB BERGDAHL, HIS WIFE JANI, TOGETHER WITH THOUSANDS OF FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, ARE PRAYING FOR THE WELLBEING AND SAFE RELEASE OF THEIR SON, PRIVATE BOWE BERGHADL, WHO IS BEING HELD CAPTIVE BY THE TALIBAN IN AFGHANISTAN.

BY THE ACCOUNTS I'VE READ HERE, BOWE IS A FREE SPIRIT, WHOSE INTEREST IN FENCING LED HIM TO JOIN THE SUN VALLEY BALLET SCHOOL. THERE HE SERVED A BACK STAGE ASSISTANT AND OCCASIONAL MALE LEAD. BOWE JOINED THE MILITARY SERVICE TO PLAY HIS PART TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. NOT EVERYONE WHO SHARES THIS SENTIMENT IN THE ABSTRACT IS WILLING TO PUT ONE'S VERY LIFE ON THE LINE.

THIS YOUNG MAN IS WORTHY OF OUR DEEPEST RESPECT AND MOST FERVENT PRAYERS....