A little bit of nostalgia

I can still remember when horse drawn wagons laden with milk and bread plied the streets of my Edmonton hometown, sharing the road with streetcars. In the winter the motive power of those wagons provided us with free pucks for street hockey. I liked the bread wagons because they had a little step in the back that you could hop onto and ride. Not many of the side streets were paved, giving rise to great clouds of dust in the summer and muddy boots when it rained. People didn't walk their dogs. When Skippy had to do his business he went to the door and barked until someone let him out. When he wanted to come back in he used the same method. What he did while he was out was not something that worried us.
Children had similar freedom to roam. We were expected to fight our own fights and if we hurt ourselves doing stupid things we got little sympathy. For most of my childhood in the old neighborhood we spent a lot of time climbing the trees that lined our street. I don't know of anyone who broke a bone. Boys mostly played cowboys and Indians with toy cap pistols, and girls mostly played with dolls and tea sets. Most of the fun things we boys liked to do were frowned upon by adults; girls were tattletales who we avoided as much as possible. The other thing about girls was that they didn't like the games we boys played, but they always wanted to butt in. So we avoided them as much as possible. It was a great time to be a boy. We had bb gunswith which we pestered the rabbits in the ravine. We climbed on top of box cars down at the train yards. We made rafts to float on the ponds during the spring melt.
On the other hand in school we were expected to be quiet and listen and there was the strap if we didn't. It was considered sissy to cry when you got the strap and nobody wanted to be a sissy, even though we didn't know what the word actually meant. Far worse was in store for you if Dad got word that you were misbehaving at school. Nobody got driven to school, and we weren't let in until just before school started no matter how cold it was outside.
A desire to read comics motivated me to learn the alphabet and how it worked and so I knew how to read before I went to school. No teacher necessary. A comic book cost ten cents and had 52 colourful and intriguing pages. I also liked to listen to the radio--TV did not exist in the scope of my knowledge base. It wasn't until I was almost in my teens before TV came along and I didn't like it as much as the radio shows. My imagination conjured up an image of superman that was far superior to what I saw on the fuzzy black and white TV set.
I didn't know of any kid's mother in my neighborhood who worked. It was a man's lot to bring home sufficient funds to put food on the table and pay for the home. Women were first and foremost mothers and were loved and honored because of it. Most people grew vegetables in the back yard. A chicken was a large bird that would feed a whole family, arriving from the market with head, feet, and many interior items still intact. My grandfather liked the gizzard. The chicken had been plucked, but pinfeathers had to be burned off over the gas stove.
Most people went to church regularly, rules of behaviour, based on deeply held Christian beliefs, were strictly enforced in school, our history and moral standards were praised as an example to the world. Great men in history were admired and we were urged to emulate them. In my Catholic school saints and martyrs were especially revered. We were taught about the recent war, how our young men had sacrificed their lives to preserve us from a malevolent tyranny. We were taught about the secret police and the concentration camps in Soviet Russia and the relationship between Soviet expansionism and the Korean War. (It hadn't yet been dubbed a 'police action.') We had the best, wealthiest, freest society the world had ever seen, where poverty, disease and fear were vanquished. Edmonton was a new city, the fastest growing city in the world, a city with destiny and every day came breathtaking news of some new development.
As far as I knew this was how things had always been and how they always would be. Little did I know that under the surface of our collectivity of thought and belief big changes were brewing. The surface of the sea was calm but turbulence from below was welling up and it would soon generate a tsunami that would inundate the seemingly solid continents of conventional certainties. The tsunami hit while I was in the Navy between 1961 and 1965. When I went into the navy the world was still recognizably normal, when I got out everything had changed. The drama took place on campuses where students rioted in the name of free speech. Somehow, in the minds of these campus radicals the freest, wealthiest civilization in the history of the world had become something evil and tyrannical. These same campus radicals, who are now firmly tenured in their little academic domains thanks to the thuggish tactics they used, are now the most virulent opponents of free speech and they have seeded the media and the education establishment with their brainwashed graduates. It's lunacy, a lemming like dash over the cliff, a will to suicide. (I don't know how lemmings got that rap, but it's too good an image to let mere accuracy spoil things.)
But underlying the lunacy has been a long evolution of thought and belief in the western tradition, one major current in an ongoing dialog, in opposition to another counter current. It's like a great wrestling match that's been going on in one form or another for centuries. The contestants represent two different and seemingly incompatible strains of thought, the idealist and the materialist, and for the last several centuries, and especially in our present epoch, the materialist has the idealist pinned to the canvas. It seems.
In my view all humans are idealists, or to put it another way, we are religious beings. We can't help it. But there are individual elements of society who fancy themselves atheists. They are misled. Caught up in arcane proofs and disproofs of god they are unable to see themselves, or the fact that the materialist world view they espouse is itself a metaphysical statement, and one that is just as impossible to prove as the claim others make for a supreme being.
It's not only in the arena of thought and philosophy this battle is waged, but also in the arena of politics. So many blogs are focusing on politics that the internet has, as somebody recently remarked, become an echo chamber. Or a suite of echo chambers, depending on which echo you prefer. I would rather avoid those and get back to where we were before the sixties came along. Not that many things aren't better now, but I think they could be a lot better. A lot of very good things are happening now...the internet, for example, and all the miracles of the digital age. And yet, I think our civilization, which engendered the digital age, is in real danger, and that its greatest threat comes from the inside. The exterior threats would be inconsequential otherwise, mere pinpricks. In particular, science, while it is the source of so much good, has adopted the philosophical construct of scientific atheism, and for not very good reasons. Furthermore, that philosophy, a pillar of our modern age, is ultimately self destructive.
But first, and this might take a while, I will try to show that Materialism, the basis of scientific atheism, is just plain wrong, and that it can be shown to wrong by simple observation. I don't know how well I'll succeed in this project. but I'll give it my best shot.