Holiday In

Monday May 26th is National Blueberry Cheesecake Day

Today is Memorial Day and we have the old standbys Christmas, Easter, Passover, New Year’s, Thanksgiving Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Presidents' Day, Veterans Day. But what will the future bring? Over the past 5000 years mankind has moved from the edge of hunting and gathering to the point where it’s gained the capability to depart from the habitat in which it came into being. When the sun dies humans will be forced to leave the earth for good and it won’t necessarily mean a migration over centuries in which mini worlds become stop off points to a final destination—say one of the planets amenable to human life, circling Kepler 186f. Indeed by that time human consciousness would have long found a home in its own safe and eternal cybernetic ether, with the body turned into a relic of a past way of life. When it comes to holidays, man in whichever form he’s manifest will be confronted with a whole new range of civilizations whose triumphs, struggles and mythology of survival will be commemorated in ways that it’s almost impossible to conceive today. Remember the Pilgrims came to the colonies in the 17^th Century, making Thanksgiving only four hundred years old, Christmas celebrates an event which occurred only a couple of thousand years ago, as does Easter and the contributions that made Martin Luther King someone whom we celebrate occurred in the lifetimes of a good portion of the extant population. Who will be the new  Christ, the new father of the United States of the World or whatever entity exists in another one or two millennia? Will we be celebrating those who gave up their corporeal forms and settled in cyberspace the way we commemorate the pilgrims? Will there be a day to celebrate the first space travelers who defied time by way of a wormhole? And what will happen to our old holidays? Will it come to pass that in a far off time January 1^st will no longer be New Year’s Day?

Soul Power

Christmas and Hanukkah are deeply religious holidays yet joyful as compared to say Lent and Yom Kippur which being thoughtful and penitential involve some degree of bodily deprivation—particularly as it relates to the ingestion of food. Both Christmas and Hanukkah also celebrate miracles. In the case of Christmas, it’s the virgin birth and in the case of Hanukkah, it's the miracle of the Menorah which only had enough oil to burn for one night but still burned for 8. Believers and non-believers enjoy these holidays, but they ultimately make the theological assertion, if there are miracles, there must be a God. Miracle on 34 Street is a delight, yet it’s also an argument for divinity. And if there is a God, there must be a soul. But there’s the rub. If we look at life in an evolutionary perspective (and as a number of scientists have said, “evolution is not a theory, it’s a fact), we would have to accord the existence of souls to the whole of Noah’s Ark and even to lower forms, like one-celled amoebae. We may be acting a trifle like the medieval scholastic asking how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. However, is the soul of an amoeba the same as the soul of a man? Let’s say there are 50 or l00 trillion cells in the human body, does the amoeba then have a soul that is one l00 trillionith the size of man? Is the soul equatable to consciousness, with creatures lower down on the evolutionary ladder, with only vestiges of consciousness possessing fractional degrees of soul power? Children wake up on Christmas and run to look at the presents under the tree and as they excitedly unwrap the gifts that have been delivered from the North Pole by Santa in his sled, their parents are left with the responsibility for finding answers to the unanswerable.