Emergency - choice

[lupinesque]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "catlady_de_los_angeles" <catlady at w...> 
wrote:

> Oh, Mike, I hope you were able to reconstruct your sermon before 
> having to speak it. When I saw a Reply from lupinesque, I thought 
she 
> might be offering to e-mail her sermon to you, which would probably 
> be a funny (funny ha-ha) combination.

Nice thought.  The problem is, I wasn't giving a sermon yesterday, and 
if I had been, at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday, Mike's time (4 a.m. mine) 
I'd still be writing it . . . <g>

Wise ministers keep an extra ready-to-go service in a file at the 
church for emergencies such as suddenly falling ill or having a death 
in the famiy Sunday a.m., or a guest speaker failing to show up, for 
that matter.  I've never gotten it together to create one.  If I 
couldn't make it one Sunday that I was supposed to lead the service, 
they'd have to have a hymn sing or something.

Mike's theme reminds me of the experience of a friend of mine:  she 
wrote a sermon about trust and going with what life presents you even 
when it's completely screwed-up and unpredictable (sounds like an 
accurate description of most of life to me).  Fifteen minutes before 
the service, as she was getting her stuff settled on the pulpit, she 
realized she had everything else but had left the sermon at home.  
There was no hope of going back for it, as she lived over half an hour 
away.  She was running around trying to get a hold of her husband to 
e-mail it to her or read it to her over the phone, with no luck, when 
she realized that this was what her sermon was *about,* damn it.  She 
closed her office door, took a few deep breaths, wrote a sketchy 
outline of what she had been going to say, and went out and gave the 
sermon from those notes and memory.  She said she wouldn't want to 
repeat the experience, but she did get a lesson in exactly what she 
was trying to teach the congregation.

Choice:  Every time I've logged onto OTChatter I've thought, "must 
respond to David's choice post," but I've gotten stumped each time.  
Mike summed it up pretty well.  I stopped trying to wrap my mind 
around free will/determinism a long time ago because all I know is 
that I feel like I am standing on that cusp, deciding which way to 
go.  Even at those moments that I'm doing something I know I "don't 
want to do," e.g. I'm losing my temper even as a part of me is 
thinking "don't lose your temper," the feeling of being able to choose 
seems real.

On a tangential note, Clarence Darrow wrote a very famous summation in 
the Leopold and Loeb case in which he basically argued that they had 
no choice but to act as they did (L & L were two young men in the 
1920s who decided, as a sort of experiment, to kidnap and murder the 
cousin of one of them).  By their inborn dispositions, by their 
upbringing, by each previous "choice" they had made (each of which 
had been inevitable because of their dispositions and upbringing), 
each step of their way was determined.  He was a brilliant man, 
but I find it hard to imagine that he didn't understand the end 
result of his reasoning, which would be that there can be no criminal 
justice system whatsoever; no one is responsible for his/her actions. 
 Each of us has the ultimate defense "I did not choose my own path."  
I'm not talking about arguments in specific cases that a particular 
person, e.g. a psychotic, was unable to make moral choices, which is 
of course sometimes true; Darrow's argument was about 
choice/determinism per se and therefore universal.  I just came across 
a quote in a newspaper by a lawyer who said that that Darrow's 
work in that case was what made him decide to go into law, and I was a 
little frightened.  

Amy Z