MONKEYS WEARING PANTS

The Theological Lie of Free Will

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 18:46:36 GMT

The idea of free will in Christian theology is absurd. God gives you only one choice – choose me or go to hell. All other choices are an illusion or more aptly put a lie. Free will implies that you are free without censure to make your choice. You may have to suffer the natural consequences of your action good or bad but these are the direct result of your choice. Eternal damnation is not a natural consequence it is the reaction of an angry and jealous god of monstrous proportions.

For those who say that God’s choice is a free will choice I would ask that you place a plate of your child’s favorite treat within reach. Tell him he can choose to have some or wait until after dinner. When he or she takes a treat beat them severely and throw them in their room without supper because the only choice you would allow is waiting until after dinner for a treat. I suspect that you would not do this (at least I hope so.) as this is a vile parenting tactic that all reasonable people would consider abusive.

Fortunately for us God does not exist. Therefore we are free to make our choices…

A Self- Portrait

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:58:24 GMT

The Mad Monk himself

Endorphins & Delusion

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:30:45 GMT

Jerry the Evangelical Neighbor accused me of being anti-religion.

“Its not that I am anti-religion,” I explained, “It’s just that I am pro Humanism.”

I came from a religious background and it played a large role in making me the person I am today. I just prefer rational explanations to supernatural ones. If something exceeds my present understanding or seems unexplainable in the light of reason, I simply take it to mean I am lacking all of the information needed. I don’t abdicate reason and make the assumption that something paranormal, supernatural or even mystical occurred.

I also don’t deny that it didn’t happen (Unless there is an obvious explanation). There is so much that I don’t know. It would be profoundly foolish to close ones mind off to the infinite possibilities of our universe, much of it still largely unknown to us. That is the essence of open mindedness that the credulous and religious minded people accuse people such as me of not having.

Unfortunately, they misunderstand what it means to be open - minded. Like so many people who prefer religious or supernatural explanations they confuse credulity for being open minded. Often, they are offended or upset because you do not share their beliefs or perhaps disagree with their conclusions. An open minded person does not accept subjective or supernatural beliefs or ideas simply on the say so of some book, prophet or well meaning clergy person. They ask for proof.

It’s this demand for proof that stymies Jerry the Evangelical Neighbor. What he believes is subjective. This makes any evidence offered on its behalf suspect, because the proof offered is as subjective. It’s the defining of the word using the word itself that our grade school teachers told us couldn’t be done. Eating means eating. While it is true it is meaningless because it requires that you already understand what it means
to eat.

To define it requires that you go outside the word. Proof needs to be supported by something external to the “thing” you are seeking to prove – at least in the case of religious and supernatural claims. The bible tells me so is not proof. I can simply respond with a passage from the Koran or the Vedas or even the Tao Te Ching. Why are these texts any less “proof” than the bible?

What happens is the religious minded person accepts a creed and then looks for evidence to support that creed. From their uniquely subjective viewpoint everything they see is proof. This does not pass any true load test of reason. An open minded person will consider new ideas or beliefs, but only if there is something tangible that can be offered to support it. It is not open - minded to concede a possibility of such a thing in the absence of said evidence. That is credulity. At the very least it’s a form of political correctness offered so as not to offend.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principal helps explain the challenge of objectivity in the pursuit of science. How much more difficult when dealing with the subjective world of the psyche?

Jerry misunderstands the stand I take on issues of separation of church and state. He assumes that I hate religion and want to do away with it. Frankly, in my moments where my ire is piqued I do take that stand. But, when reason and fairness sets in I simply want to protect the rights of all Americans to believe or not to believe as they choose. Because I am against prayer in school doesn’t mean I am against people in school praying. It is that the event needs to be a private individual moment. Specific times set aside for chapel services, bible studies and prayer groups need to be done off campus. That is what homes, churches, mosques and temples are for.

If you want this as part of your educational life then attend a private religious school. If you can’t afford one then your church should help you. The problem with allowing it in schools is that if you allow Christians to pray publically pray then you need to allow Muslims, Jews and Hindus to do so as well. Then we need to consider the Buddhist or the neo pagan. Given how religions tend not to play well with each other it is best to leave it outside where it belongs. Not to mention every attempt by religious conservatives to create a “year of the bible” or “Spiritual Heritage Month” or even bring back prayer in school is nothing more than an attempt to create a place of superiority and dominance for their own peculiar brand of God.

I don’t trust the mindset that seems to need something mystical in life. Mysticism can be dangerously close to delusion. A marathon runner once shared with me that while running he often experienced something mystical or “otherworldly.” He often felt himself floating and rising up to God.

“It couldn’t just be the endorphins?” I asked him.

As a runner I have experienced something similar. I tend to dissociate when brimming to overflowing with pain and endorphins. Mystical or religious experiences often seem dissociative to me. It’s an alternate state of consciousness. But, so is sleep and even an orgasm.

“It isn’t runner’s high,” my friend growled.

I suggested that there is no way I can really know as his experience is not mine. Ultimately, I can’t know because of the individual nature of subjective experience. It may be God or it may be wishful thinking being gratified through brain chemistry. That is why the need exists to demand proof. How do I know you are correct? Why must I take your word for it simply because you have the right to believe as you do?

Coffee

Alcohol

Drugs

Nicotine

Trauma

Are all substances or experiences (as in the case of trauma) that can create alternate states of consciousness and in some cases work with neuro receptors in ways similar to our naturally occurring endorphins The danger of mysticism is that it can lead us into worshiping a mystery. We don’t want to open the door and look inside because we may not like what we see. So the mystery becomes sacrosanct. The questioning of beliefs is treated as blasphemy.

For me life is still pretty breathtaking and amazing. A mystery solved is no less breathtaking when you consider the high degree of improbability that we shouldn’t be here at all. The pursuit of knowledge; the pursuit of understanding is not arrogant. It is the product of an intensely inquisitive mind. What is arrogant is to write proverbs about the foolishness of intellectual pursuit. Ignorance is not wisdom. Ignorance is darkness.

Jerry the Evangelical Neighbor hates natural selection, evolution and Darwin. Life and the universe need an intelligent creator because it’s just so highly unlikely that random events could have set off something that lead to humanity.

I agree.

But, the idea that an eternally existing and intelligent super being created everything that exists out of nothing is equally and, quite possibly, even more highly improbable than the circumstances of chance.

Yet, regardless, here we are.

We exist and it is absurd.

But absurd or not we are here.

Even if by all counts we shouldn’t be.

I have my own supernatural enthusiasms. Enthusiasm comes to us from the Greek en theos or literally God within us. It is just that I don’t assume that these beliefs are true. Religion has offered me insights into my psyche. I especially value the religion of men such as Thomas Merton or the eternally skeptical and searching mind of an Aldous Huxley, whose work, The Perennial Philosophy, has provided more than a small amount of understanding. There are many others.

The problem that I have is that religion is about transcendent answers to a terminally mortal life. It’s more about our fear of death and not existing than anything else. Even though post modern religion boasts of an “inner life” and finding the answers we need within rather than “out there” somewhere it is pathetically transcendent. It fools itself though semantics and theological games.

By seeking for something eternal and subjective we avoid the truth of our anxiety. This may, indeed, be all there is. Mystical experiences seems like escapism from living our life now. The mystic looks for transcendental meaning, which may or may not be real, to avoid creating meaning from where they stand in their life at any given moment. They want transcendence because death is around the corner and they are afraid of not existing.

Humanism is superior to me because it puts the human being and the society he or she lives in first. Humanism has no righteous and tempestuous god to placate. Humans come first vs. God first. The morals we share have human value and do not need threats of hell or the promise of heaven for us to strive to be ethical and good people. Religious history offers enough evidence that religion is not any better at promoting decency, kindness or ethics then the lack of it. In fact when religion fails in these areas it is all the more tragic.

THE LIST

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:20:29 GMT

I have heard the saying, “Do what you love and the money will follow,” so many times now that if I hear it one more time I am likely to punch the next person who says it. The things I love don’t necessarily make money. Frankly, if I could get paid to sit around my favorite coffee shop in Salem Oregon, read, scribble in my journals and talk to the weird and eccentric people who come in and out all day I would be happy as a pig in poop.

Unfortunately, people will only pay for what they deem has value. What I value and what people with money value are not the same. Have you ever made a list of things or jobs that you thought might be interesting? They don’t have to be practical (it’s brainstorming after all) nor do you have to worry about how you can afford to finance it. Just list what seems interesting to you.

Here is my list:

Respiratory Therapist
Nurse – RN
Economist
Journalist
Bank Robber
Hit Man
Professional Psychic or Con Man
Radio Talk Show Host
Climatologist
Cult Leader
Third world dictator
Motivational Speaker
Forensic Sculptor
Actor
Screenwriter
International Man of Mystery
Mafia King Pin
Massage Therapist
Chiropractor
Lobbyist
Dog breeder
Pharmacist
Brew master
Coffee Trader / Importer
Book Store Owner

Sacred Cow Tipping

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:14:04 GMT

SACRED COW CAFE
Please remember to tip generously

Our staff will slaughter all of your sacred cows and serve them with a nice side of country potato salad. All entries come with your choice of steak fries or baked potato. 50 Imported micro brews to choose from. Your head will be reeling from the unfettering of your mind, but at least you will be well fed.

The Fatal Assumption of the Ego

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:24:11 GMT

The inflated ego always assumes. It always takes for granted that what it perceives is the reality – the truth – that everyone experiences. It sets itself up in a position of authority and treats critical analysis harshly. The priest, minister, rabbi or new age teacher need to be treated fairly, but with equal skepticism. Faith is anathema to truth. Faith is pure ego inflation. It requires no critical evaluation; no collection of objective data. It requires you to believe and responds harshly to those who chose to have a differing opinion.

First there is no Mountain: Misunderstanding the role of the ego - Part 1

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:22:39 GMT

Post modern spirituality misunderstands the role of the ego. Part of the problem is their attempt to use the terminology of 20^th century western psychology as a template for understanding the philosophical and psychological traditions of the east. The average person is not properly grounded to adequately approach the subject.

What little knowledge they have is gleaned from books whose authors have less than second or third hand knowledge of their subject matter. They are simply commenting on the more scholarly commentators who are immersed in both culture and language from where the philosophy originates. Post modern spirituality is akin to a morbidly obese person at an all you can eat buffet. They skip the fruit and vegetables and pile on fatty, greasy and starchy foods. Needless to say their diet is not going to sustain them in a long term and healthy way.

The ego is neither good nor bad. It is simply a vehicle that allows us to maneuver through the material world with a certain degree of order and sanity. It is unwise to surmise the goal of Buddhism and other traditions as the annihilation of our understanding of Ego. Obliterating the ego would obliterate the individual. If they survived they would quite literally be insane. What we are really looking at is a transforming experience of the interconnected nature of being underpinning the reality we experience. In the traditions of the west we might refer to this as the atonement or reconciliation (literally “again with the eye lashes”) which implies that we have turned around to face each other and we stand so close we can feel each others eyelashes. Atonement has been described by some as at-one-ment or becoming one.

The Ego acts as a safeguard or a shield that prevents us from receiving too much transpersonal data while our minds are not capable of processing and assimilating it. A healthy mind works on the expansion of the ego allowing bits and pieces of the transpersonal in to their experience. Transformation occurs as the ego expands taking on more of “the stuff” that allows us to move toward an integration of our psyche.

Ego inflation – the exact opposite of expansion – is the malady of the psyche that we must safeguard ourselves from. This inflation is the problem with so much of what passes for spirituality these days. The term spirituality itself is western in origin deriving from the Latin spiritualis or spiritus – translated as “of breathing.” Spirituality or “of the Spirit” implies literally the breath of God. It is the breath of the tempestuous God of Western religion that moves and fills everything that lives. In fact some scholars suggest that the modern YHWH is a left over storm God from the Sumerian traditions picked up by the patriarch Abraham. It would certainly go along way in explaining the blustery, angry and blood thirsty nature of this deity’s interaction with his chosen people.

Even though there may be similar concepts in the East it is with the cultural centric notions of our Judaic and Christian faiths that we approach these subjects whether we realize it or not. The teachers of the east who have made the trip westward understand this and they often adapt and modify their teachings to accommodate our worldview. The late Tibetan Buddhist master and founder of the Shambala movement, Chogyam Trungpa notoriously exploited the depravity of the west to teach his brand of “crazy wisdom.”

The challenge to post modern spiritual seekers is that so many of its teachers are truly not qualified to be teaching. Spirituality has blossomed from a cottage industry to a multi million dollar industry. Enlightenment is for sale and often times it comes with a premium price tag. These self styled gurus – many who are, indeed, sincere –prey upon the more credulous among us who are ready to believe just about anything if it promises a way out from their existential crisis. They fail to realize that it is escapism and does nothing to return them to the ground of being.

Just because you have had some insight does not mean you are qualified to teach. Sometimes it is best to keep ones mouth shut and remain silent. In the Hasidic tradition of Judaism it is believed that teaching is way down on the list of things a seeker of wisdom should do. Christians have the warning found in the epistle of James who warns that the teachers will be judged the most harshly. Teaching should only be done after a person considers the lacerations one will receive while walking that razors edge.

Never trust someone who makes a living at being spiritual. It seems that the great spiritual leaders never charged for their teaching or services. As far as we know Jesus, Mohammad and the Buddha accepted all who came to them. They seemed to give rather than to take. The Apostle Paul may have encouraged collections to support the missions of the early church but he also counseled that believers work to support themselves so that they would be above reproach.

It’s the ecclesiastical mindsets that followed the initial teachers that traded practice for theological discussion and doctrinal cataloging. They preferred creeds and membership requirements to the love taught, be it the bodhicitta of the Buddha or the agape of Paul.

The minute a person hangs a shingle and sets themselves up as teacher, counselor, guru or coach their egos and their livelihood start to get in the way. There is no way around it. They run the risk of becoming too attached to their “work” and to their reputation. They esteem what they have to offer a little too highly. If they lack the critical skill of discernment their students will lack it more. Spirituality is often misleading. Delusion and fantasy is often mistaken for the mystical. We seek the sizzle of the peak experience. We fail to understand that the true nature of reality is far more mundane. Enlightenment is not in the peaks and valleys – it’s to be found in the monotony of our day to day existence. The difference is we learn to see it for what it really is.

Donovan paraphrased the meaning of the paradoxical Zen koan when he sang:

First there is a mountain

Then there is no mountain

Then there is…

First what we have our perception of a mountain. When we understand how our perceptions color our experience the mountain disappears or, rather, our perception of the mountain disappears. When our perception disappears then we see with clarity the mountain as it really is. What we see around us, what we think of reality is simply our categorization of our personal experience. It’s our interpretation of the experience of our shared reality that gets in the way. We see what we have been taught to see. Yet we really don’t experience it in the exact same way. My experience of the color blue cannot be said to be exactly the same as your experience. We have no way to evaluate it empirically so we make do with unreliably subjective agreement or hearsay. We simply assume.

To Be Continued…

The Jesus Birther Scandal

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:42:41 GMT

Where is the birth certificate?

"THE SEX"

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:06:12 GMT

Love and sex are easily confused.

Love is an emotion – an interpretation of endorphins stimulating the pleasure centers of our brains.

Sex is too. But, sex has a more visceral purpose. It is our biology urging us to fuck like bunnies so we can perpetuate our species. It’s a deeply ingrained animal urging – a drive not an instinct. Human beings have lost our inborn pre learned patterns of behavior over the course of our evolutionary journey. We just have impulses now.

We like to pretend we have instincts. It seems more romantic or spiritual. We don’t like to think we are creatures of biology arising out of nature only to return to it upon our death. We want to believe that our “urge to merge” our desire to make love is more than just hormones stoking the fire of lust so we will be motivated to procreate.

We think our sex is instinctual.

But we have to learn it.

By, the time we have our first encounter our friends and society have indoctrinated us into the “how to’s” of having sex. Just because you know that an erect penis fits inside a lubricated vagina doesn’t mean you know how to have sex. A lot of the information gleaned over our virginal years is bad. Men often learn the hard way that our buddies have no idea what they are talking about. Our porn lies to us. Some women really don’t want your engorged member in their butts. And so on…

Sex is often accidental.

I have heard tell that some people plan their first time. They supposedly have figured out some pre-determined moment when the time is right and they are ready. I think that is rare. Most of us end up having sex by accident – at least the first time. It’s raw, awkward and sometimes painful. It’s almost always disappointing. It fails to live up to our overblown expectations, but not so much we aren’t ready to try again and again as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

I think all of my experiences were accidental. I am often surprised that women want to sleep with me – any woman. But, occasionally they do. My middle aged body struggling against my efforts at fitness by way of yoga and running seems to not be a problem for them. I suspect these women would make love to their teddy bears if they could. I am just a stand in. I am a comfortable lover. Sex with me is really about the need to be comforted and cared for. When I realized that I ended up having less sex in my life and spent more time comforting.

My therapist says it’s a sign that I have matured. That I am making appropriate and rational decisions and have begun to learn the value of true intimacy. The angel on my shoulder nods in agreement. The devil shakes his head over all the pussy were are missing out on. I empathize with the devil. But, the angel is right. So is my therapist.

Our highly advanced cognitive nature complicates sex. We have overlaid our need for love, comfort and intimacy on top of a drive that at its core is a pure animal need. Our biology cries out to make more like us. We need progeny to replace us when we are gone even if we are not fit to be parents or if our genetics will create a child that is not healthy or has little chance of living a decent life because of its infirmities or birth defects.

Nature doesn’t give a shit. It just wants to procreate and produce. Nature understands you need large output because not every creature will live. Nature operates within the laws of natural selection. It is survival of the fit. It doesn’t worry about our feelings, our suffering or our experience of loss. Nature doesn’t take into account our stubborn and sometimes less than heroic efforts to save all the lives that would have been lost years prior.

Medical science has offered us abortion and testing to help us make such determinations. But our religious centers of influence rail against it. All life is precious even if it is going to suffer and be deformed. We have no right to take that experience from them. The most extreme religious conservatives such as the Catholics will even prohibit contraception.
It sees God where only nature’s unemotional hand is at work. Would God really create deformed children or let little ones come into the world just to suffer and experience pain, abuse and neglect? I think not.
I grew up Catholic. And even though my parish was an upper middle class church operating fully under the ideals of a post modern and post Vatican II spirituality its inability to grasp the power of human sexuality was still keenly felt.

Sex is power

It is raw power and that makes it dangerous. I think this is why the church and temple are embarrassed by it. It’s better to keep it for the sanctioned relationship of marriage. Its okay to enjoy it, but only if you don’t impede the procreative process. You don’t have to get knocked up every time. You just can’t prevent it from happening.

Sex uplifts and brings to people closer together. But, it can just as easily destroy you or be turned into a weapon attacking people at their most vulnerable. Rape is about power. It’s about rage. It’s this dark side of sex – the energy of rage, rejection and the inability to connect in meaningful ways scares us and so we create an oppressive and repressive morality around it. The potentially addictive power of sex forces us to sanitize our sexuality instead of learning how to make it healthy.

It would be easier if someone would just give us the dope on sex when we are young. But our parents are embarrassed to talk about it, if we are lucky, and, if not so lucky, deem themselves liberated and give us more information than we want from them.

We start out on this journey with nothing – barely a map and a working compass to guide us.

It starts with hand holding and nuzzling each other on a couch.

A nervous and unsteady hand sliding up the shirt of a girlfriend – fumbling inexpertly with the clasps of her bra as we man handle her sensitive breasts.

We hotly dry hump each other in the back seat of a car or on some scratchy blanket hidden behind a copse of trees in some forgotten city park or behind a driftwood log on a semi-secluded beach.

Somehow pants become unfastened – skirts lifted up. Foreign hands touching our genitals stroking and caressing them. A young women giving her first hand job squeezing and pulling on her lover’s penis as if she was trying to start a stubborn lawn mower. The young man fumbling with the clit, speaking of stubborn…It pokes its tiny head out teasing you then goes into hiding while you frantically search for that little bud.

Some of us eventually learn how to have sex. Others fumble around in the dark forest, wandering lost for years – the rest of their lives in some cases. Part of the problem for men is that sex is often about the release. Once we have achieved orgasm – expelled our procreative fluid we are done. It’s difficult to maintain interest. Our lovers have to wait for our next erection. The lovers of young men have it lucky in that department. Lovers of older men need to hope they have chosen well and that he is sensitive to their needs and is willing to learn the landscape of her body. Hopefully this man will be concerned about her sexual and emotional needs.

I can’t profess to know much about the inner working of a woman’s mind. Her heart is an even more confusing and mysterious place. But, I have learned that just because your lover says it’s not important for her to have an Orgasm every time or sometimes just the closeness is what she is after doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to cum – at least once in awhile. Men have to put away their performance anxiety and toughen up their fragile egos. If you pay attention, if you allow yourself to be vulnerable she will show you what she wants and how she likes it. A lot of times guys just don’t want to take the time. We love the vagina but we are afraid of it too. I wonder how much of the violence against women is due to this perplexing fear and reverence of their sexual power over us.

Women have the same equipment. But, you all seem to be wired different. What works for one lover is unstimulating or boring to another, at worst it’s uncomfortable or painful. One woman loved to have her nipples bitten and sucked on hard and I mean hard and the lover following her could barely stand to have you touch them when she was aroused. The same woman loved having her anus stimulated with her largest vibrator while performing cunnilingus on her. Another lover didn’t want you any where near her back door.

One lover liked it rough. She didn’t want romance. She wanted to be taken by surprise. She loved it when I came up behind her while she was doing the dishes or folding laundry and “gave it to her” while she stood against the dryer or kitchen counter. She was very clear about this. Another lover wrapped her arms and legs around me tightly while I sank into her slowly. She would pull me against her hard. I swear to God if she could she would have stuffed me entirely into her womb and carried me around in her belly all day. She was my favorite and her death left me bereft.

I had a vanilla lover who would rouse you from sleep her long hair tickling your nose and her heavy, pendulous breasts brushing against your chin as she rocked gently on top of you. I have had lovers who could only get aroused in public places. I have had others who were content to have it once a month still others who thought there was a problem in the relationship if we had sex less than three times a week.

I have had lovers who faked orgasms and one who used to cry after cumming. She would bury her face in my chest and just sob. I tried to get to the bottom of that but she could not or would not explain that. She said it wasn’t me, but my fragile ego had a hard time not blaming myself. I eventually broke up with her because she always seemed so sad after sex even though I let her be the one to initiate it – which was often. It felt like I was hurting her deeply somehow. Yet our sex was as gentle as the rest of the relationship. She was a sweet lamb. But, I sensed a strange violence churning beneath her surface.

Sex is complicated.

You wouldn’t think it so.

Its penises and vaginas

Its vaginal juice and semen

Its nerve endings and biochemical electrical impulses

Its simple biology

But our damn brains get in the way

We want more from sex – even need more from it

The rubbing and grinding of bodies and the aromatic scents of our musky genitals are a poor substitute for what most of us crave. We want the removal of our bone sacks – the barriers between us. We want to crawl deep inside each other and never come out.

Dain - An American Tragedy (An Earlier and Shorter Version)

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:14:22 GMT

Young Dain makes me sad; she is beautiful and perfect in every way and despises herself with a razor sharp anger over her lovely aquiline nose, long neck and small perfect breasts – she is not a cookie cutter beauty (I tell her), which makes her all the more beautiful but, she only threatens rhinoplasty and breast augmentation believing that surgical violence will correct the very flaws that makes the hearts of her admirers flutter and their knees go rubbery and weak when she passes by – let me cover you in kisses, let me drink you in (I cry), but she can’t hear me over the crisp sounds made by the pages of her Vogue magazine as she leafs through it searching for her next face.

Dain - An American Tragedy

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:11:31 GMT

Young Dain makes me sad; she is beautiful and perfect in every way and she makes my heart ache with a desire to shave twenty years off my life. Her lovely and prominent nose (not quite aquiline, but definitely Jewish), dark almond shape eyes and soft pouty lips send torrents of arousal cascading through my body. I want her. But, I am just a big brother type (old enough to be her father really) and she sits on my lap for comfort – not sex – her face burrowing into my neck. The cold dampness of her nose tickles. She has been crying.

My hands – resting just above her hips – aching to slide up her toned, slender torso until they cup her small perfect breasts. I want to press my lips against her long, lovely neck made accessible by her stylishly short hair. Her warm breath caresses the back of my neck I shift my hips awkwardly so as not to give away the evidence of my desire – my arousal pulsing through my jeans. My face flushes. I am every bit the awkward adolescent I was years before this young beauty was even born.

She is not a cookie cutter beauty (I tell her), which makes her all the more beautiful. This just stokes the fire of her razor sharp anger over her body, her self image destroyed because she leaves it in the hands of the men she dates. They’re boys really. They don’t understand anything beyond their genital and hormonal urges. I didn’t at that age either. Twenty is a rough time. Not really a man; not really a child. Society expects so much more from them. They want men, but they are really just animals driven by a procreative urge they don’t understand.

I love you! My heart stops as the words escape my lips. They are a barely audible whisper and I hope Dain is too in her head to notice. But she does. Taking my face in her hands she kisses me softly on the forehead, my eyes and chin before saying I love you too – a curious moment of intimacy with a young woman who has daddy issues. But, since I don’t drink and yell obscenely at her not daddy enough. She feels safe (she says again for the umpteenth time) and she wraps her arms around my neck and presses herself hard against me for all she is worth. She is so small and vulnerable. I am ashamed by how she makes me feel.

The angel and the devil dance their centuries old dance. The devil says “take her.” The angel says, “Resist the urge.” I resist the urge and just hold her close to me as she collapses into another sobbing fit. Her tears tickle as they drip on to my cheeks and down my neck cooling my overheated flesh leaving me to wonder what would happen if just this once…

Later that night I wake to find her reading in bed next to me – some horrible fashion magazine from the size and glossiness of it – I remember her laying her head on my chest at some point, lately she has been sliding into bed next to me when she isn’t sleeping with one of her boyfriends. I am a life sized stuff animal. There is nothing sexual about me as far as she is concerned. And that makes me sad…even a little depressed. There was a day once…but, that was years ago when I was as young as she was. All men travel this road eventually. It’s a desperate little path starting somewhere in middle age when people stop seeing you as a sexual being and look upon you with a more companionable affection – if they see you at all.

Dain stares intently at some cute young face – an actress whose name I can’t quite place – but cookie cutter cute. I tell her she is much prettier. But she just threatens rhinoplasty and breast augmentation believing the lie that surgical violence will make life better. My heart cries out to her. Let me love you. Let me cover you in kisses and drink you in, but she can’t hear my heart over the crisp sounds made by the pages of her Vogue magazine as she leafs through it searching for her next face.

The Stop Gap Process

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:26:21 GMT

Activism is an essential part of the political process in a democratic republic. We can hardly dispense with it if we are to keep moving toward an honest expression of liberty and justice. However, activism is still largely about changing others. It is about forcing others to conform to your ideas of fairness and justice. Compromise is often a last resort when it appears the battle is lost.

An activist is a revolutionary in miniature. They carry with them the violence of the full blown revolutionary but dole it out in smaller, more condensed amounts. Instead of guns and bombs they use petitions, sloganeering and the bully pulpit. They seethe with hatred for those who would thwart their idealism.

Conservatives are racists and selfish…

Liberals are immature and ignorant…

The media gives us larger then life taking heads whose very bellicose natures often distort the truth. A spiritual activist asks more of him or herself then they do of those they are talking to. They understand that unless they change themselves at some fundamental core level none of the work they do will succeed – not for the long run.
Compromise

Fairness

Justice

These words only mean something to those whose reasonable nature allows them to build bridges to span the divide that separates them from their others. An unreasonable person is incapable of participating because their irrational responses and stubbornness make change difficult if not impossible.

Politics is a distasteful game that is the result of human nature. It is the lack of enlightenment that makes the process necessary. If everyone really understood how interconnected we all were the divides would come down and the wars and debates would stop. We would only want what was good for our neighbor. The politics of democracy is a stop gap process. It is a band aid covering a seeping wound. We use it because we have nothing else to use in its place.

The Question!

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:40:26 GMT

The question is not how do I change the world; the question is how do I change myself so that the world I live in is a better place? What is my relationship to the people around me? How do I respond to people in need? Do I say, “There ought to be a law” or do I ask, “How may I help?”

The Value of Skepticism: Why Doubt Trumps Certainty

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:07:48 GMT

My mother recently told me that she feels sorry for agnostics.
“It must be really difficult to never be convinced of anything,” She said.

Naturally what she means is that she can’t possibly understand what it would be like to not have supernatural beliefs. I quoted Voltaire in response.

“Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.”

Given that more often than not the skeptic is busy casting doubt upon claims of the supernatural it is easy to understand how many who hold such beliefs would come to despise the skeptic. I have always felt that is the real reason behind the hatred many religious folk have for atheists.

A Christian will easily converse with a person of another religion or spiritual tradition even if they disagree theologically. The discussions may turn into contentious debates over the veracity of finer theological points or moral statements. But, in the end they at least have a common ground. They share a belief in a god or gods. At the very least they have a mystical outlook on life. The Christian can hold hope that a pagan may be converted to the one true faith. A true non-believer who is rooted firmly in the epistemology of the material cannot be converted.

You show me an atheist who became a believer and I will show you someone who was looking for a reason to believe and not a true skeptic. This is not derisive. I am in this category myself. I would like nothing more than to believe. I am a skeptic in so much as I don’t grab onto every supernatural idea or new age sensibility that comes floating toward me willy nilly on the wind. That has not always been the case. This is a more recent development in my inner life.

I have known only a handful of atheists. Each of these people was firmly rooted in the material. A few who called themselves atheists were often not even agnostic as they were people wounded terribly by life and had a certain anger toward their concept of God and his universe. Their wounds were so deep that finding meaning and purpose in life was difficult if not a seemingly impossible task. At times the believer can find it extremely difficult to reconcile the seemingly randomness and uncertainty of life with the concept of an omniscient, loving and benevolent God. This may lead a former believer into atheism or at least profound doubt, but often the former believer retains a residual faith even if it is buried deeply in their hearts.

I am an agnostic. I believe that God or something I call God may very well be a reality. I am simply skeptical that I can ever be sure of any such knowledge proving it to be true. I refer to myself frequently as the blissfully agnostic Gnostic. I am not sure of God, but I am content to keep searching in hopes that I find some proof. The danger is my less than perfect objectivity. This is why I value atheism and the work of rational minded skeptics. I can count on them to keep me honest and on my toes. I can trust they will ask me the really difficult questions. Questions I cannot often answer.

An agnostic is less easily persuaded- an atheist even more so. They require something tangible. They need a coat rack to hang their coat on. Don’t tell me that its there if I can’t see it. Show me. The problem is that proof of faith is not tangible. It is not objective. If I toss my coat in the corner and it falls to the ground your assertion of the coat rack’s existence is doubtful.

Objectivity is the true value of skepticism – if the skeptic is intellectually honest. We tend to form our beliefs first. Then we look for evidence of those beliefs. This is not objective. There is too often a vested interest in proving what I believe to be true imbedded in my search. When my Christian friends tell me that everywhere they look they see “evidence of God” this is really what is happening. They accept their proof of God and disregard anything that may contradict it. They will look for a neat theological answer to wash the doubt away or refer to it as part of the “mystery.” The least educated may even choose to blame Satan.

The challenge of Western Religion is that it is based entirely on revelation. This is especially true of Protestant Christian theology. In order for humanity to know anything about God at all he must reveal himself to us. This is a problem given the scope and depth of the human imagination and our ability to create meaningful stories. These stories are often heavily laden in symbols and as time progresses each succeeding generation loses a little something of its ability to interpret them. This is made more difficult when new knowledge is uncovered that weakens the credibility of their face value interpretation. Religious faith often has more of a psychological factor than it does a historical one.

Another problem with revelation is that it only counts as revealed to the person who receives the message. Everyone who listens to the prophet gets hearsay. They must decide to accept and trust the messenger before they can trust the message. So how does one “test the spirits” as the Apostle Paul admonishes us to do? Once again we look to our pre-formed beliefs rather than anything external and objective.

This leaves all revelation in doubt. The Jews of the first century looked to their belief system regarding the messiah and many found that Paul’s concept of Jesus simply did not fit the bill. The problem is that revelation is rooted in the culture and time of the prophet. It is as much about their personal history as well as their cultural history of the time. Why should the Koran be less a revelation than the Gospels of Christianity? Why should we adhere to ancient tribal beliefs far removed from our post modern world?

This is why Gnosis must be an important part of the journey toward truth. It seeks the truth and not a credulous acceptance of supposed evidence. Faith requires no proof. It simply requires you accept the special revealed knowledge of its appointed prophets. In and of itself this is not necessarily an alarming thing. But, when this special knowledge creates divides among peoples and then leads to violence against others it becomes repugnant.

That humanity is violent is nothing new to even the most casual and unconcerned person. But, religious violence seems the worst because it is masked with stories of love, peace and a loving God who is expected to reward the believer for spilling blood or at the very least discriminating against others. Religious violence suggests that doing evil is actually a good thing and makes a person righteous.

A final problem with revelation that we will address here and is suggested above with Paul’s admonishment to test the spirits speaks of the prophet’s mental health. How can we trust that a person who speaks for God is in their right mind and is not suffering some type of delusion or mental illness? The mindset through which one receives revelation is often described by psychologists and mystics as an altered state of consciousness. Often times the person experiencing or, perhaps suffering, this state is lead to believe that they have clarity even if momentary. Somehow the veil of blindness is removed from around their eyes and they are seeing the “really real” for lack of better words. Why the blindness the rest of the time? Is this simply not wish fulfillment for life being something more than it is?

Mystics such as Emmanuel Swedenborg claimed to have walked in the realms of Heaven and Hell. Paul, himself describes having been lifted to the “seventh heaven.” The Marion seers of Medjugorje have claimed to been given brief glimpses of heaven, hell and purgatory. Given the diversity of these experiences how are we to trust any of it? Why should the Catholic version of God be any truer than the Lutheran or Quaker version?

Prophets themselves should be treated skeptically. How many Pauls, Muhammad’s, Joseph Smith have come and gone giving their believers each a different understanding of the truth? Christian Sects such as the Jehovah Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists were the result of a split of post civil war cult called the Millerites. Col Miller claimed to have studied biblical prophecy and had determined the time and day the world will end. Naturally his predictions failed.

They are many sick and unstable minds that often turn to religion. If they have decided that they have heard a voice be it God or angel it may be untrustworthy. Often times the prophet or holy man or woman is depicted as a mad fool or clown. Perhaps the truth is due to mental illness and not some special communication with the divine.

The human mind often jumps to conclusions. It rapidly closes the gaps between experience and past knowledge so that we can navigate this uncertain world as rationally as possible. This leads us to forget that correlation does not prove causation. We often stop collecting facts when we have found something from our grab bag of beliefs that make it easier to move on. If I fart at the same time a loud thunderstorm breaks outside we would not assume my flatulence produced thunder. If I believed this wholeheartedly you would think me silly, at the very least, or mentally unsound.

This is the problem with revelation. We mistake the fart for the cause of the thunderstorm. And we often do it with great relish ignoring the inconsistencies in our beliefs when they seem to be contradicted by fact. Science becomes suspect. Instead of moving on toward understanding we laud the gaps in our knowledge as failure of scientific theory. We prefer talking serpents to mathematical certainties. Science recognizes its missing pieces and works toward finding them. Religion purges them from their doctrines to maintain the false purity of belief.

Finally it is difficult to trust scripture. Given the historical inaccuracies (despite protestations to the opposite) and inconsistencies in the message scripture should be looked at through the lens of skepticism. Simply claiming that the inconsistencies are a proof of moral advancement is an untenable position. The actions of believers have done very little to back that up. It’s most often a case of seeing what they want to see. Naturally they will make this claim of skeptics. We choose to debunk so we see only evidence that proves our point. Indeed a dishonest skeptic may do this. But, the honest skeptic does not. We are quite open to being proven wrong.

My mother may feel sorry for skeptics. But I pity those who believe with any degree of certainty. It’s not the peace their beliefs bring them but the way the way it closes them off, often violently, to other possibilities. Why search for the truth when you can claim you already have it? Small mindedness does not seem a fair trade for the so called peace of belief. I do believe in this untenable concept that a universal truth may actually exist. But, I do not subscribe to the new age notion that every religion or spiritual philosophy contains elements of the truth. That is more political correctness and a desire to not offend while appearing open minded. It is simply illogical to conclude that with all the diversity in belief that everyone is correct. Someone, perhaps most of us, are incorrect.

The integrity of Gnosis means that we do not assume that we are correct and you are not or vice versa. It assumes that everything that is to be taken as a truth be scrutinized. Worshiping the mysterious is ignorant and dangerous. A mystery solved is no less breathtaking.

Christians Lighten Up! It's Just Yule

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:59:09 GMT

Christians lighten up! Christmas isn’t actually Christmas. It’s Yule, a winter festival celebrated in Europe in the days before the early followers of your Middle Eastern God man brought their heavy handed religion to those fair pagan lands.

It’s no secret that the Christian church, having no actual birth date for Jesus or proof he existed for that matter, stole the festival of Yule from the pagans and then subverted those traditions into Christian ones in an attempt to establish their political and religious superiority. That Christianity was heavy handed from the days of Theodosius I on is perhaps one of its greatest shames.

Yule singing became Christmas Caroling and the garnishing of winter trees with the entrails of your vanquished enemies became garland. In fact just about every tradition we associate with Christmas including Yule logs and mistletoe are non-Christian in origin. Mistletoe was used in Druidic celebrations of the winter solstice by the peoples of Gaul (France) and Great Britain. There is some debate over the origin of the Christmas tree. Some folklorists cite a tradition of Yule or winter solstice trees, but many Christian scholars claim the decorating of a tree to be entirely Christian in origin.

The Christmas tree was the source of the infamous Yule log – a tradition that started in Germany. In Medieval Germany trees were considered to be a source of good luck. The name Yule is also of Germanic and Nordic origin. The Christian Church simply absorbed everything it came into contact with. The final insult was moving the lunar based solstice from its date around the 21st of the month to the 25th because of the preferential use of the Julian calendar.

Christmas has further perverted the ancient traditions with marketing. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was a marketing gimmick created in 1939 by Robert L. May, a writer for Montgomery Ward. Rudolph was born to sell more products to wrap and put under the tree. Christmas is a retail holiday despite all the religious organizations that want us to put “Christ back in Christmas” and cajoling us to remember “the reason for the season.”

These are not necessarily bad ideas given that the idea behind holiday implies “holy day.” But, marketing and commerce are the American secular religion and we dress it up in Christian clothes. That is, unless we want to get some of that prime Jewish or Buddhist market share. Given the modern secularization of Christmas it is a real head scratcher to consider why the American Family Association got so pissed off over the GAP’s recent holiday ad campaign. They just begged retail businesses to further their secularization and piracy of their sacred day.

The AFA launched a boycott of GAP stores because of their failure to mention Christmas along with the other holidays. It would seem that they really aren’t as concerned about the birth of their personal Lord and savior as they are over maintaining exclusivity on the holiday season they stole fair and square several centuries ago.

The AFA website now boasts that the boycott has ended because the GAP “has heard you loud and clear” and now released “a very Merry Christmas television commercial.” But who really won here? The AFA who sought to preserve the proprietary nature of their holiday or the GAP who stands to benefit fiscally by pocketing more conservative Christian money now that they won’t be boycotting their stores?

Sadly this time of year is the make-it-or-break-it season for retail business. Their success and overall profitability is measured by how much crap they can sell you for Christmas morning. Pandering to the mouthy Christians of the AFA only benefits them and is really a victory for them rather than the Christians who are patting each other on the butt right now over their victory.

The AFA is perhaps the most supercilious religious organization I know of. They may or may not be preserving the sanctity of Christmas, but one thing is certain, they are preserving the conservative Christian traditions of intolerance and small mindedness.

Have a happy and safe Yule Season. May the pantheon of non-Christian gods grant you health and good fortune this year.

So mote it be!

The Farce of Post Modern Economics and the Free Market

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 20:33:11 GMT

The farce of post modern economics is that it considers consumption as the measurement for the standard of living and not quality of life. In other words the more we seem able to consume the better life must be for everyone. After all more disposable income must mean people are happier. Yet in a credit based economy people consume by buying things with money they have not earned yet. Some may actually never earn that money at all and end up defaulting on their contractual credit obligations.

Rate of consumption is a false measurement. It fails to consider other important factors such as emotional well being and the health of the individual. It also assumes that a person using credit is credit worthy and will be able to repay what they have borrowed. The failure of the home lending market has demonstrated, with tragic consequences, how impoverished this thinking is. The deregulation of lending in recent years made it possible for people who were not credit worthy and, dare I say it, not generally responsible with money to purchase homes they had no business buying.

This is not so much a statement about these individuals moral character as it is about the general state of our education system that does not teach people economics and finance as part of their basic education. Most people truly do not understand money and how it works. They are sold deceptive ideas by marketing professionals and purveyors of crap. They have been convinced that we need these items. Congress attempts to free up lending so Americans can start spending again is only adding to the problem. A good American is one who consumes and consumes conspicuously. How can we solve our problems by falling back into the same patterns that got us to where we are today?

Americans are less healthy then we were 20 years ago even though our life spans have been extended. We are more obese, sleep deprived, stressed out and prone to depression and anxiety. Heart disease has become the number one killer of women. This is not factored into the government’s stimulus programs as they try to get people spending money again.

We are no longer an agricultural economy or even an industrial economy. We are not even an information based economy. We are an economy of consumers. It is only as solid as our ability to purchase all the gadgetry and cheap plastic shit we import from China. Most of which we could live just as well – if not better – without.

The American way of life is not sustainable. The problem is that many are unwilling to admit this. It’s a lot like the person who has an aneurysm that has not burst yet. It could happen at anytime but he has no way of predicting it. So, instead of doing something about it he elects to ignore it and go about his life as usual. On the surface life is good.

At the moment the lights are on and we able to drive our cars and use our portable handheld computing devices. The free market supports this because it follows the path of least resistance. It goes to where the demand is. Right now the demand is oil. The demand is for business as usual. It cannot cost effectively create alternatives since the demand is quite small and perhaps non existent in most places.

The free market will only address problems once the demand is there for it. By the time there is such a demand we could well be too far off to effectively solve the problem. It could very well be too late.

Despite CRU Scandal the Science is not cooked.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:50:27 GMT

The anti-global warming crowd is heading to their bully pulpit using the dubious scandal of emails obtained illegally from The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). The emails supposedly obtained by hackers allege that data regarding global warming have been manipulated or falsified where the data doesn’t support the preferred model of global warming favored by the United Nations and the international community. Those who adamantly insist that human beings and the copious amounts of green house gasses we are emitting into our atmosphere do not cause global warming have been making this claim for years. So this is nothing new. However, it is fascinating that this scandal comes to light just one week before the United Nations Climate Change Conference convenes on December 7th in Copenhagen.

I find it challenging, as an average educated citizen, to determine the difference between factual information and so-called junk science. My science background is limited to my undergraduate credits received at a local community college. In other words I have just enough information to fool myself into thinking I know what is really going on. I believe that most of us are in this very same predicament.

First of all we live on a geologically active planet and with this come the phenomenon of climate change. There is plenty of credible research indicating that the earth’s climate has changed over its long history – heating and cooling, perhaps several times. At one time Antarctica was not covered in snow and ice. This is why climate change is preferable to the overused and misapplied term Global Warming. In fact there is research to indicate that global temperatures have been on the decline since 1998. I remember a lecture I attended in 1991 where the speaker suggested that one of the paradoxes of “global warming” is that an ice age may occur first.

It would seem that with all the research being done no one can accurately describe what is really going to occur next in the climatological history of our blue marble. I have read where it is possible that human beings may find themselves living on a planet with virtually no ice in the next 50 to 100 years. Another researcher claims that increasing temperatures is melting off the permafrost in the arctic tundra releasing mega tons of trapped methane. The methane will make the air on our planet unfit to breathe. Still others suggest that the planet will freeze over first. The only thing anyone can seem to actually agree on is that overall the climate on our planet has been changing. Even the most ardent of conservatives will now acknowledge that even as they deny humanities culpability.

Yet even while temperatures may be cooling globally it is still hard to ignore the dramatic footage of melting glaciers at our world’s poles. But, is this even what the debate should be about in the first place? It seems that with the issue of carbon emissions we are missing the most immediate problem – clean air and clean water. It seems odd to me that we actually debate this issue at all. When you consider that asthma is the number one cause of school related absences and that diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis are increasing you would think it would make perfect sense to talk about cleaner air and water.

My brother-in-law is a pilot and he finds himself flying through some of the nastiest muck as he takes off and lands around the world. We hold differing views on the whole issue of global climate change, but we both can get behind the need to improve the air and water quality in our cities and around the world.

Another little factoid I have come across over the past couple of years suggests that if we were all suddenly to stop driving our cars and to shut down every factory producing green house gasses it would still take close to 200 years before the gunk we put in our atmosphere cleared out. This is even more alarming that climate change. We need to concentrate on this issue first. If we reduce or slow down climate change then all power to us. The fact is we are profoundly affecting the ecosystem in which we live. We are doing so beyond its capacity to repair itself quickly.

Common sense would seem to dictate – global warming or not – that we can’t continue to pollute our air and water without dire consequences befalling us. Could you imagine storing a coffee can in your kitchen so you could take a shit while you prepare food? We do seem to be fouling our planet and wrecking the ecosystem. The evidence supporting our culpability in climate change is still more compelling then the evidence against it especially when that evidence is the result of illegal activity.

The only people that are taking the CRU scandal seriously are those who are invested in proving that green house gasses are not affecting the climate. What it gets down to for these folks is that the cost of reducing our carbon debt is expensive. In other words it cuts down on their profits. During an interview Senator Inhofe ( R ) of Oklahoma could not directly answer the questions put to him. This is typical of conservative opponents. When confronted with information that runs counter to their view point they never offer solid data to the contrary. They simply try to confuse the issue by discrediting those whose opinions differ. The senator could not provide an adequate response to the interviewer’s assertion that those who have reviewed the alleged emails claim that there is no proof of falsified and manipulated data.

Talk of global warming and green house gas emissions is uncomfortable in a society that was built on a platform of cheap fossil fuels. Oil is a finite resource. There is some evidence to suggest that our chief suppliers, such as the Saudis, have hit peak production despite their reports to the contrary. We are no closer to replacing foreign oil supplies. Here in Colorado the local natural gas supplier has the audacity to air commercials where actors representing the average American has a “eureka moment.” The eureka being their discovery that we have 100 years of gas right beneath our feet. Here is my eureka moment – what happens in year 101? This is the real conspiracy.

The real tragedy of the CRU hacking is that it makes it difficult to determine the facts from fiction. A recent poll shows that fewer Americans believe in the threat posed by climate change even as they believe that our government should actively work to reduce carbon emissions. This is a page ripped from the former Bush Administration’s playbook. If you don’t have solid data to the contrary you work at undermining the credibility of your opponent’s data. Given the deficiency in the average person’s science education it is not difficult to create deadly doubt in the minds of the voting public. As long as we can still afford cars and gas we seem destined to ignore the problem until it is too late. We would rather deny the potential threat to our grandchildren believing the cost is too high to move us in a more carbon neutral position. But, the cost will be much greater to the generation that follows.

The Seeds of Destruction: Activism & Democracy

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:11:14 GMT

We have mentioned before the old axiom that everything carries the seeds of its own destruction. This would be the second rule of activism. The first rule, being of course, that no one asked you to save the world which we have discussed previously. After all your plan of salvation is based on your personal worldview and what you consider to be right or wrong.

Activists, as a broad group, are not moderates. Moderates are quiet and often observe the status quo while occasionally voting their conscience in matters of morality and justice. A moderate tries to be even handed and fair. You don’t bother me and I won’t bother you. They are they good neighbors who smile and wave at you from the street and invite you over for backyard cookouts regardless of how they feel personally about what is often deemed “your lifestyle.” In religious circles we might call them Episcopalians. They may titter and gossip behind your back, but to your face they are more than pleasant.

Activists are idealists. Idealists always lean in one direction depending on where they determine the winds of change to be blowing from. The harder the winds the more extreme they can become. They see the ideal they revere and often little else. If you agree you are a comrade in arms. If your opinions differ then you are the enemy – the barbarian at the gate that must be doused in boiling oil lest you batter their ramparts and enter the citadel unbidden.

They pine for what they see as solutions to the problems before us. But, they are not always realistic. An activist not grounded in reality can become jaded if things don’t work out or, at the worst, extremists willing to do anything for the cause – whatever the cause may be. In the United States activism often degenerates into small bouts of social unrest, sign waving and name calling. Occasionally a real lunatic such as a Timothy McVeigh may resort to outright terrorism.

If you want to be a successful activist; if you want to help create the change you desire then you must see beyond the upsides. You must see the downsides as well. Every solution carries with it challenges. Challenges of implementation – yes – but, often more far reaching challenges as not every downside can be predicted and unfortunate and far reaching problems can upend any good you seek to do

You must be willing to go beyond just admitting the problems presented by solutions you seek to impose. You have to recognize them. You need to determine ways to overcome or at least compensate for them. The Labor and Environmental movements have not done this well and our economy has been wounded because of it. The blame is often left at the doorstep of the corporations and they accuse the beast of capitalism for its appetites.

The problem is that often times the anti-capitalist activist here in the United States points to Europe’s implementation of democratic socialism as if it were without problems. But, the implementation of socialist idealism has played a big role in the decline of Europe and the problems besetting the European Union even as it has solved some issues of inequality.

That is not to say that American Capitalism is necessarily any better. The decline and devaluation of the dollar, the erosion of job loss overseas and the greed of Wall Street and the insipid day trader have dealt a near mortal blow to the American economy as well as the world economy.

The purpose of this short piece is not to present a systematic outline of the pros and cons of each system, but rather, to suggest that both have potential benefits that should be well considered as well as potential negative impacts that often get overlooked by the idealist who prefers one system to another.

Another old saw that is a favorite of mine is, what once was, is no longer. The needs of post modern Americans are different then they were when we first formed our democratic republic. The world we live in is different. We have different challenges even though human nature has remained the same.

For one thing our population is much larger and is far more diverse. We are no longer a society of famers and artisans. We no longer have the power of a mighty industrial nation. We are nation of information specialists and consumers. We are in a sort of post modern decline that the old ideals of Capitalism vs. Socialism can only fail to address if we try to adhere to rigidly to them.

For the first time since the Great Depression we are, as a nation, facing the possibility that the majority of us will not be able to adequately provide for ourselves and our problems. Sadly, many of us are in denial about the problems beyond our own immediate needs. We expect the government to solve it. We blame the previous administration in the White House and then elect one whose rhetoric we currently are willing to believe.

When that administration fails to meet our expectations then the cycle of blame will begin again. In fact, it is currently underway. The need to blame others for our predicaments prevents us from taking charge of our lives now. We split along the left and the right, the liberal and the conservative and the religious and the secular and duke it out with each other. Each group sees the gains of the other group as an infringement upon their own inalienable rights. Is it any wonder that our problems seem to get much worse before they get better?

Economies, as anything in this world, are cyclical. But today we are facing some new challenges that will hammerlock us into a very long downward spiral if we don’t start making tough decisions today. Today’s tough decisions will morph into tomorrows more difficult ones. The next generation may end up facing decisions that will seem inhuman making tyrannical regimes such as Stalin and Hitler seem like boy scouts in comparison. But those decisions may well need to be made in order to preserve the continuity of our species. Some will end up being cast into the outer darkness despite our desire to do otherwise.

We are getting ahead of ourselves here. In discussing our somewhat arbitrary rules of activism we are attempting to lead you down the path and to a deep ravine. The ravine is filled with jagged tree stumps and rocks and losing your footing will result in death. What we need is to build a bridge. It is a bridge of compromise. The more willing we are to compromise the sturdier that bridge will become.

Before compromise can be accomplished we need to decide what is important? This is, and almost always will be, the problem. This is the greatest weakness of any democracy. Competing voices create dissention more often than they build the much needed in roads. Compromise is the only way the economic and social equality can ever be achieved.

The American Lie

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:07:33 GMT

{No one}, who seeks liberation and spiritual freedom, can afford to yield passively to the appeals of a society of salesmen, advertisers and consumers.

Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation

Sometimes I think the United States is based on a lie. If not a lie, then at least a perversion of the ideals our democratic republic’s founders forged out in sweat, blood and sleepless nights. Men and women gambled their lives, and some surely died, in pursuit of an ideal of justice and personal liberty that had been largely untried through the course of human history.

We have mentioned before that as noble as our founding principals are, it is still a largely imperfect ideal as we have not perfectly translated it from paper to action. That all men were created equal is a lofty idea, but in the early years we forgot to include women, Native Americans and the countless black men, women and children who toiled, suffered and died under the under the oppressive yoke of America’s slavery institution. Today the gay man or women and the transgendered person struggle.

It took years to right these wrongs and then even after they had been addressed they were not perfectly redressed. There is still a great gap of injustice in this country. We fool ourselves into thinking that there is equal justice among the divergent ethnicities that cohabit this land with us. The gap seems to be getting wider and deeper even as we have elected our first president of mixed racial background. Even as the race barrier to the nation’s highest office has been overcome many are still poor and living substandard lives; lives of violence and despair. It isn’t just blacks, but Latinos, whites, and people of every race.

The problem comes in living as a self serving individual working toward the achievement of their own American dream in the midst of a community. We see ourselves as separate from our others. We have rights and expectations. We live in a free country after all. We meet those who would dictate to us with vitriol, but are ourselves part of self serving groups who seek to dictate to others.

No doubt the patriot and the conservative will point their finger at me – as the always seem to – shouting me down and telling me that I am what is wrong with this country today. As if a single person observing injustice and our failure to meet the ideals of our nation’s founders is the reason this country is seemingly in decline. Generally these people label themselves “libertarian” but their peculiar post modern evangelical Christian faith is anything but “libertarian” in any true sense of the word.

Everything - every noble purpose carries the seeds of its own destruction. Just as socialism and the general disregarding of religion (an odd position for someone who considers himself a humanist) has lead to the decay of Europe so will our rampant religious idealism, selfish individualism and pursuit of capitalism lead to the decline and failure of the America we know today. We see this in the debates over health care reform, immigration and the rights of same sex couples to marry and enjoy the benefits of that union.

We can no longer ignore the others among us. The Gospel of Christianity and the principals of Humanism demand that we rethink the way we are living – radically – and then take action to change it. The false libertarian sees every attempt to do this as creeping socialism and believes anyone needing help to be a lazy lay about looking for a free hand out. Rather, our culture has created an incubator for the so called slacker to be born. Children today are being birthed to be drones in a hive of out of control consumerism. This attitude robs those who, with a little helping hand, could live productive lives.

Resources for education are at an all time minimum and vital programs that could enrich the minds and lives of our children are cut from school budgets. Instead of the arts and the humanities we focus on the new industries of the information age. We are bred to consume information. We raise children to play video games and compete on the new age of game shows – the life deadening reality show that brings out the worst in us for sheer entertainment value. The infotainment industry elevates celebrities to a status they truly do not deserve. When they get bored of the Paris Hiltons and the Lindsay Lohans they create new celebrities from the deep pool of insipid and shallow people who have nothing useful to contribute except to entertain us with their appalling moral deficiencies.

The Capitalist has taken hold of the wonderful promise of our Declaration of Independence which states all have a right to the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and twisted it to include consumerism. We need this computer, this satellite television set and we need to drive this car to be happy. We need to have rock hard abs and drink the right beer so we can get into the pants of the right people. Yet, all the while they are taking our jobs and giving them away overseas.

Labor has forgotten its purpose which is to protect the lives and livelihoods of the working class and in its greed and complacency helped create an environment that allows the greed of the capitalist to send our jobs away. The politician has twisted the so-called protestant work ethic – a lie of Calvin – to make the religious pursue nice things as a sign of holiness.

We are entering a new era. We must understand that the platform of fossil fuels that made our suburban post modern lifestyle and hegemony possible is not sustainable. We have to decide to do something different while the choice is still ours to make. A commercial on television recently has people talking about their “eureka moment” when they realize that domestically we have 100 years of natural gas in the ground.

My eureka moment is what will happen at year 101? Fossil fuels are finite. How do we solve the merging crisis of climate change and economic melt down that seem to be looming toward us? I am not sure we can? Certainly we cannot solve them and maintain the style of living we believe we have a right to. Compromises must be made. Change is coming.

Maybe that change isn’t today or even in the next 25 to 50 years. I am not certain we can predict that with any real sense of accuracy. But, it should be common sense that we are being beggars to our own demise. We cannot continue to live as if we have unlimited resources and can do whatever we want without eventually incurring the wrath of nature or God – if he exist and cares about this world at all.

Simplify, simplify, simplify, come the quiet words of Thoreau. We have too much stuff and we strive to collect even more. Once upon a time I read – in Reader’s Digest I believe – that for every month a person lives in a home they accumulate 40 pounds of stuff. Now multiply that by 12 months and by the number of people in that home and you can see the staggering accumulation. How much of that stuff is unnecessary to survival or even to happiness? What is the financial cost of such accumulation? Do you ever ask yourself who went to bed hungry tonight so that I could be surrounded by my shiny baubles?

We need to throw out the tired political ideas of the left and the right – Capitalism and Socialism – and toss them to burn on the funeral pyre of our misdirected religious idealism. We need to seek a new way to live. Politics is part of the human condition. We are social beings and we will clump together in groups of people in order to survive. We need each other. The rugged individualism of America’s past has gotten us into trouble. But most people don’t see that yet. As long as we still have mind numbing technology to plug into and shiny baubles to buy it may be too late for those poor unaware folks.

We need to think in terms of sustainability. We need to decide the difference between our needs and our desires. We need to scale back our consumption and use only what we truly need and share with those around us.

Next: Creating a sustainable humanist or spiritual economy

Bad Theology: My Imaginary Friend is Better Then your Imaginary Friend

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:14:42 GMT

Bad theology!

That’s what Jerry the Evangelical’s friend, Marcus the Holy Roller told me after reading several of the entries on Hello From Uranus. Apparently Jerry had confided in Marcus about his concerns for my hell bound humanist soul.

“Isn’t all theology bad in its own way?” I asked him.

Seriously, if God’s ways are not your ways and his wisdom is beyond human understanding how can you even be sure you are on the right track and not deluding yourself?

“Would you say that your intellect is superior to a squirrel’s?” I asked Marcus the Holy Roller.

“Yes,” he replied albeit somewhat reluctantly. He smelled bait sitting in the trap of reason and he was wary of losing a leg.

“Have you ever tried explaining yourself to one?”

Jerry pointed out that this was the proverbial apples to oranges conundrum. I didn’t disagree. But, here is my problem with theology. Who is to say that any one individual or group possesses the truth that gives them the right to declare a particular theology good or bad? If God’s capacity for wisdom and knowledge is larger than ours how can we be certain that we have a true grasp of his word?

“Grace”

The magic power of Grace, but it would still be like trying to stuff a water buffalo in a VW Bug. God’s mind won’t fit into ours.

Why must it be the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity that are considered the inerrant word of God? Why not the Koran or the Vedas? I read somewhere once that scholars believe the Vedic scriptures to possibly be the oldest sacred texts in the world even predating some of the oldest Hebrew Scriptures?

With all of these sagely and holy voices each from different traditions, emerging from wildly divergent cultures how can we be certain of the truth? I have never bought the odious argument that each faith tradition has a sliver of the truth. That bit of New Age baloney leaves the door open for some traditions to posses more of the truth than others. It also makes it possible to declare a tradition as being incorrect. The Big Three – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are already a little too big for their britches without adding fuel to the fire.

“We have the bible and we have the capacity for reason,” Marcus replied.

“Is Marcus a theologian?” I asked Jerry, “He talks like a theologian.”

Only a theologian could use their imaginations in this way and claim that they are using the faculty of reason. That isn’t to say that the imagination doesn’t play a role in our thought processes. Even the scientific process makes use of imaginative or subjective thinking, but only after collecting hard, tangible evidence does it declare it anything other than speculation.

Theology cannot say the same despite its many attempts to claim over the course of the history of ideas to the contrary. Theology is a lot like making up a biography for an imaginary friend. In this way, I am not certain that it can ever be said to be a true academic discipline. It’s an exercise in creativity to be sure, but as an academic discipline – hardly.

Theology looks around at the world and jumps to conclusions. It mistakes correlation as causation and doesn’t stick around to collect any further evidence. It’s Ray Comfort and his banana all over again – and again, and again, and again. The best example of this thinking is the Creationist debunking of Evolution. It sees gaps in knowledge and they declare it a failed theory. But, they completely overlook the impoverished quality in their own thinking. Evolutionary scientists do not lay claim to having it all figured out. They are well aware of the problems presented by their research and discoveries. But, they press on collecting more data with the understanding that as our knowledge changes so will our ideas and our theories.

Theology is like trying to catch a thought in the palm of your hand. It’s an impossible task that no one benefits from attempting. Even in the Christian world theologians disagree. Who was Jesus? Was he an historical person or a template of God-Man mythologies laid over an obscure figure we cannot prove existed? Was the resurrection real or metaphorical? Theology – at least in the Western sense – is gleaned from accepted scriptural texts. It requires that God reveal something of himself to us. Natural Theology – the notion we can prove God’s existence through nature with out the aid of revelation will lead us only to deism.

We can only know of God through revelation. The problem with revelation is that once the prophet, who received the revelation, shares it with others its no longer revelation. It becomes hearsay. Several thousand years later it is hearsay stacked upon hearsay. The stories are no more reliable than the mythology of any other culture in terms of historical reliability. At best they represent stories that might shed light on the collective processes of our psyche. But, more often they reveal nothing more than the clannish nature of the human being and how elitism and tribalism can lead to violence against those other than us.

When I was a child I had an imaginary friend named Sammy that only I could see. Sammy and I had our language and our own shared history. One day my dad sat down next to me on the couch while I was watching cartoons.

“Dad!” I shouted, “You are sitting on Sammy.”

Dad immediately jumped up and moved over apologizing profusely to Sammy in the process. I assured Dad that Sammy forgave him. My dad could not see or hear Sammy, so he took my word for it. He had no choice. Since he was not privileged with the special relationship that I had with Sammy his only choice was to dismiss it as the work of a child’s imagination. I had already given him the complete story of my friendship with Sammy so he was aware of the story. No rational adult would base their entire life around my invisible friend who seemed to be everywhere and at all times. Yet, we do this with religion.

This is theology. I have an imaginary friend that only I can see or experience. Therefore, in order to get others to see him – if I care at all for what they think – I must create a system of thought to support his existence. I look out into the world that I commonly share with others and try to use that to create a systematic and rational means by which others can come to the same knowledge and experience that I have. Unfortunately, with all the competing spiritual voices how is one to know whether I am delusional or I come about my “revelation” honestly.

If one man hears the voice of God he may be insane. But, if others can be persuaded to accept it then we call it a religion. My imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend. Who wants to fight?

The Crucified Christ: Further Reflections on Loss & Grief

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:20:47 GMT

Growing up Catholic the crucified Christ; the suffering and sorrowful God-Man was ever before me. I often wondered why God would have to “send his only son” and allow him to suffer so greatly in order to redeem humanity. Wasn’t it enough that God was supreme, all powerful and sovereign? If the Blessed Virgin could emerge from her mother’s womb born of the flesh, yet free of the stain of original sin could not God make that happen for everyone? Why the pain? Why the loss? Why the grief and blood letting?

Perhaps the problem is with the idea of the immaculate conception of Mary, a doctrine that is not alluded to in any way in the scriptures. In fact, when it was introduced the great theologians of the Church debated it heavily. I have many problems with the doctrine of Original Sin, but at least in the Pauline letters we see its antecedents. It can be said to at least be based in scripture.

I have trouble conceiving of the notion “God is Love” and trying to reconcile it with the condemnation that a metaphorical first man – Adam – brought upon us all. I suspect that these doctrines are impoverished attempts to theologically explain the human condition.

If the story of Christ Crucified; Christ resurrected is true then why did this have to be the pathway for redemption? Is it possible that as infinite and omnipotent as God is he still cannot spare even himself from suffering? If he cannot even prevent his suffering, which must – indeed – be greater than all of ours combined – how can we expect to be spared our own loss and grief?

Loss and grief is part and parcel of the human experience of love. We enter into each intimacy knowing, at least in the back of our minds, that one day we will be separated from our beloved. We know loss and its resulting grief is an inescapable part of our human life. If we cannot be spared loss and grief while we are separated from our eternal beloved while in the flesh than is it possible that God’s only choice is to suffer along with us until such time when we die and join him in eternity?

The inevitable pain of love is enough to make weaker hearts eschew intimacy altogether. But, it is truly and impoverished man or woman who lets that happen because without its persistent stalking we would never experience the wonders of joy.

Still I wonder why the pain? God’s must come from the tremendous responsibility for his creation and ours from our smallness and pettiness – what the orthodox would call our sinful or fallen nature.

The Cosmic Sadist

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:19:13 GMT

There is something unnatural and surreal about a child’s funeral. I haven’t always felt that way. But, my mind has been opened to this pain. On Friday – a Friday the 13^th no less – I went out to Colorado Springs to join my sister and her husband in saying good bye to the sweet little guy who had charmed our lives for less than a year. It was the hardest thing I have had to do in years.

I am generally dispassionate about the death of children. To my way of thinking all life is precious whether it is 9 months old, 19 years old or even 90 years old. Death is something that is an unavoidable part of life. We all must enter into that experience. I have never quite understood the fuss generated over the age of a person who has died. Death is…However, I had a glimpse into the sorrow and feelings of injustice that follow when a young person seemingly dies what we would deem an untimely death.

A week ago Sunday my 9 month old nephew lost his struggle to live. His body had been racked by countless infections including bacterial meningitis, pneumonia and H1N1. By the time the poor little guy had contracted the swine flu the sepsis had pretty much ruled out any chance he had of survival. A CT scan earlier that day had shown no brain activity and he was non-responsive. An autopsy demonstrated that his vital organs had all been severely ravaged by disease. So even if he had been responsive there was no possibility that he would survive.

Seth, who had been sickly since his birth, was paradoxically one of the happiest babies I had ever met. He needed little reason to smile. Even as his little body was wracked by fits of coughing the grin would return once the coughing stopped. Babies have this precious way of communicating joy, or at least what I perceive to be joy. The kick their legs and flail their arms as the coo and giggle in that bubbly baby way. I find it easy to fall in love with children, especially when they are so joyful. If only we could retain a small amount of that experience as we grow into adulthood. It seems that a little light that could have illuminated the darkest of hearts has been taken from our midst and for no apparent good reason

It was heart wrenching to see his tiny shoebox casket at the front of the generic evangelical church his parents go to. If I had dared to open it I was convinced that my nephew’s body would not be there, but rather a plastic baby doll from my sister’s childhood would be staring at me with blank plastic eyes.

The question I can’t answer is why? Why this child? Why was he born sick and prone to dying so early? As an agnostic I have come to feel that the world makes more sense to me when you remove God from the equation. Without God we don’t have to answer the delicate and tricky question as to why a loving and compassionate God could allow the death of an innocent.

God is an absurdity created by the human mind in order to make sense out of life, the universe and everything. It helps us order our world in such a way that allows us to hold at bay the anxiety created by the gaps in our knowledge. The problem is that the more we contemplate this issue of theodicy the more we must conclude that the God of our choosing may not be real at all. If God exists then perhaps it is the God of the Deists who is a part of the natural order of things and not a separate supernatural entity that need be cajoled, petitioned and prayed to.

After the events of this past couple of weeks the practice of prayer seems to be wasted effort and time that could have been channeled into something more productive than beseeching a supernatural entity that seems to have forgotten his promises. I can see God ignoring my prayer. I am, after all, not his most faithful son. I am certainly no prodigal returning home after various misadventures. What of the prayers of the deeply faithful? Believe me when I tell you the faithful prayed and they prayed hard.

I know to a devout individual my understanding of prayer seems puerile. It is with the reasoning of a child – an angry one to boot – that I approach this subject. But, I give you Matthew 18:19.

If two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by your Father in Heaven.

If there was ever an agreement by a group of people then we had it here. We needed a miracle. We prayed for a miracle. But, we got no miracle. There was no miracle to be had. The fortunate thing was that Seth died quickly. He would not have to live with brain damage caused by the swelling from the meningitis or other potential problems caused by the level of illness. It was a severe mercy, of sorts, that when his parents decided to take their child off life supports that he passed quickly. He passed before they could get all of the machines and monitors disconnected.

I say it is merciful because it helped remove all doubt that they had made the correct decision. Their son was dead and there was no saving him unlike, my father whose passing took four long agonizing hours to pass once they removed his life support. My brother, who was there and an integral part of the decision, is still plagued by doubt. The doubt and uncertainty troubles him even though our father was not eligible for an organ transplant and would never be able to resume normal activities even with oxygen equipment.

This is the problem with taking scripture at face value. The Gospel says, “If any two of you agree…” It is hard to take that to mean anything less. This is not the only biblical promise of this kind. There are others. Yet, I am hard pressed to think of any time in which God granted any of my petitions.

I think of The Doors song, The Soft Parade.

Jim Morrison: “In seminary school we learned you can petition the Lord with prayer.”

Jim Morrison (shouting): “You cannot petition the Lord by prayer!”

Perhaps it is as the writer of the Epistle of James tells his readers: I have prayed amiss.

My prayers must not have been inline with God’s plan. Yet, Matthew 18:19 belies this. Perhaps, “Whatsoever you ask in my name” is an empty promise. Yes, I realize that the prayer must be one of wholehearted faith. But, once upon a time I did have faith. I know that my sister and brother in law and their whole damn church had the kind of faith that should move mountains.

No – the only thing that was amiss was our trusting in something outside ourselves in the first place. The unheard cry for meaning still remains unheard. The word of God is just a word. It is writing on a page that has value because of a subjective decision to imbue it with meaning and nothing more.

Friday, night I was unable to sleep so I stayed up rereading C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed hoping that the great apologist of the Christian Faith – a man who had experienced great grief himself – could give voice to the words hiding at the edges of my mind.

Lewis’ had a towering and brilliant intellect. He was also a man of reason who made a compelling case for the Christian faith. If a man of his intellectual stature could find it possible to have faith, then why can’t I. Still when I read his work it is hard to remain unconvinced when I am finished. But, unconvinced I am.

A Grief Observed was a different kind of book for Lewis. It was gleaned from several notebooks that he kept following the death of his beloved wife Joy Davidman after a brief but intense marriage of only four years. She had died of cancer leaving Lewis angry and bereft. Years ago a spiritual mentor of mine told me that when Lewis published this book many people were angry at him. They could not accept his anger and bitterness toward God.

I suppose it is for the same reason that a posthumous publishing of collected letters and writings of Mother Theresa caused a similar stir when it revealed moments of darkness and doubt in her life. The faithful cannot face the humanity of those whom they place on the great pedestal of religious faith. If these great giants of spirituality flair, doubt and occasionally despair then what hope do they have? Yet was it a saint but a man or women whose doubt, bitterness and despair have been used as in instrument of God’s grace? Indeed, these maybe the tools of sanctification itself. This is the true baptism and not the dunking or sprinkling of water.

Those who were angry with Lewis needed only give the man a chance to speak his mind. His anger, his grief was a journey back to the faith. Yet, I can’t help but think that the pastor of my sister’s church – a supercilious man – would disapprove of this kind of bitterness and anger. In fact, in his funereal sermon he warned against it.

But, unless you experience this level of anger and pain I am not certain you have anything close to true faith. What you have is mere superstition. It is indoctrination and nothing more. I am glad that my sister and her husband find comfort in their church and in their pastor. They will need it in the long weeks and months ahead of them. As for me if it had been my son’s funeral he was presiding over I would have slugged the fucker. I might have unzipped my pants and offered to give his mouth a more meaningful task to occupy itself.

His God is the God of Job. He is the God of original sin and eternal damnation. He is the cosmic sadist or cosmic vivisector, as Lewis said during the height of his anger and grief. This is the God that wagers on the lives of his worshippers with the dark angel and when they complain tell them to shut up. This is the punisher and torturer of innocents – A god who has punished everyone that has ever been born for the actions of one man – whether he was metaphorical or real it matters not. This cannot be anything remotely close to a good god. This god is the demiurge of
the Gnostics, at the very least.

In the end life has nothing to do with supernatural beings regardless of their temperament. Human life is finite. Sometimes babies are born sick and they don’t survive. We are creatures that arise out of nature like every other creature. What we are is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection.

To Be Continued…

The Justification of God: Science vs. Mythology

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:24 GMT

Lying on the grass with my dog last night, back to the ground and eyes staring up at the growing twilight it is easy to understand our collective impulse to worship something. We have a desperate need to make sense out of the seemingly incomprehensible mysteries of our life. Random chance and the possibility that there is no inherent meaning to our individual existences cause us great emotional and psychological pain. If there is no purpose then what is the point of living? We ask.

Here we are floating on this tiny island in an ocean of mystery. Science and reason are like the lighthouses that use to shine the way for passing ships making their way through the murky darkness of a foggy or stormy night. Science and the understanding it brings does not always occur at a pace that makes us feel comfortable with our place in the universe. We are anxious standing at the edge of the abyss. We get vertigo easily and sometimes get this overwhelming urge to jump or, at the very least, faint from the dizzying height.

For every question science seems to answer new ones, more complicated, more awesome in their scope take its place. It seems that we are in no shortage of mystery. The gaps in our knowledge fuel others on in their journey toward truth. Some choose science; still others prefer the irrational to the rational. Confronted with gaps in our knowledge they begin to worship the mystery. The call it God and imagine it to have an independent sentient quality apart from the natural universe.

This God or Gods we imagine to have created our universe, the world and every form of life on this planet. We tell imaginative and, often, psychologically insightful stories about God and our relationship to him or her. We explain everything away so that we are comfortable. That is, until, something traumatic such as the unexpected death of a child or a natural disaster that takes many lives occurs.

Then we get mad at this God, we struggle to find meaning to what happened. How can such a good loving God allow such terrible injustice in the world? We blame God’s cruelty or, if we are truly twisted by theology, we imagine this world to be a corruptible place and that everyone in it is under a death sentence. We realize that our sinfulness is the root cause and that we are lucky that more evil doesn’t befall us as it rightly should. This is the plight of the monotheist. They have only one god, one source to turn to. He must be the end all to their be all. They think, contemplate and meditate.

They change their views to meet the challenge of their experience and believe it to be spiritual insight or growth. All the while they miss the fact that if we were truly created in the image of God the world would be a different place. On the other hand, the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims is often angry, violent and temperamental, especially if he doesn’t get his way. Perhaps, human kind truly is created in the image of this god after all. Still, I prefer to think that we created God in our own image and not the other way around. Our concept of God and the theologies that surround it are an irrational attempt to make sense of a basically rational world, albeit one that is seemingly random and irrational at times.

The world seems indifferent to human beings. On the other hand that indifference may very well belie any sense of a special creation. We are no less or no more than the other creatures that occupy this planet. We simply have ascended the evolutionary latter in such a way that our cognitive abilities, imaginations and skills with language give us feeling of superiority. When in fact we just followed a specific pathway created by natural selection.

Does it seem logical and improbable that events such as the big bang and processes such as natural selection should give rise to us? It’s the old fill a room full of monkeys and typewriters and eventually they will bang out the works of Shakespeare scenario. It does. But, the notion that some supreme, eternal, supernatural being created the universe also improbably and defies all reason in ways that evolution and natural selection do not.

To Be Continued:

Vindicating God - Theodicy, Human Nature and The Reality of Human Evil

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:49:39 GMT

Theodicy – The vindication or justification of God as omnipotent and good despite the presence of evil in the world.

Can God be vindicated? If God is the all powerful, all knowing and most importantly supremely good creator of the universe how can we reconcile the torture and suffering of innocents in the world? The old bat of a nun who taught my 4th grade catechism class would say yes. To her way of thinking even an infant is a sinner and a supremely selfish creature the same as a fully cognizant adult.

My 10 year old mind could not grasp that concept and my 42 year old mind all these years later cannot either. This was my first encounter with the injustice of the doctrine of original sin and later would become pivotal in the formation of my developing skepticism. If there is sin in the world than I side with the Gnostics and other heretics who thought that, if there was any sin in the world at all, then the blame should fall at the feet of the creator. After all he is supposed to be all powerful and all knowing. Presumably he has the foreknowledge of where his creation was headed even before he spoke the first word. This presents us with a supreme being that may simply be amoral. His needs or wishes are more important than the resulting creation and the creatures who must toil away in it.

The crusty, hateful old bitch taught that an infant is selfish and cited its cries to get its needs met as an example. My sister, having just been born, made it difficult for me to comprehend how the sweet little bundle at home could be selfish for crying when at the time that was the only way for her to communicate. I saw sweet innocence. The nun saw a child born under the death sentence of original sin. I saw promise; she saw justice where there could not possibly be any.

The justification of God through theodicy seems nothing more to me than making excuses for a supreme being who should intervene way more than he does in the world. The arguments of the philosopher Leibniz and others are pretty, erudite and intellectually interesting, but they are nothing of substance.

Even if you argue that God must honor our free will how can that apply to a child or to someone whose diminished capacity makes a truly honest and open exercise of free will questionable, if even possible at all? If I invade someone’s home and torture and murder those inside I can see God leaving me to suffer the consequences of my actions. But, what of the people whom I tortured and murdered? What is the justification to allow their suffering? Why should my free will to murder override my victims need to be safe and live their life unmolested by my decisions?

The answer is that there is no justification. I believe in evil, but it has a human face. Human evil is real; supernatural evil is not. Human evil is the result of the decisions and actions of individuals and the groups they belong to. It is easier to accept the existence of evil when you examine human nature and remove God from the equation.

We are born self interested and self centered beings. It is our socialization at home and then among our peers and the society that we live in that gives us an understanding that helps temper and tame our tendency to live entirely for ourselves. A young child does not naturally have empathy. While there is some debate as to when a child first develops the capacity to empathize with others – some suggest four years of age – it is clear that they are not necessarily born with it as if it were some inner spiritual trait. In fact given the evidence presented by victims of trauma and child abuse it seems that it is quite easy to retard and even prevent that quality from developing or fully forming at all.

We need to understand evil as the result of free will choices of individuals and not the result of anything else. The persistence of a belief in supernatural evil continues to some degree because once the believer removes that from the equation than the value of a supernatural source of good disappear along with it. We need to blame Satan so we can continue to grasp at God. If there is no supernatural evil then there is possibly no hell, which casts doubt on heaven. If there is no evil then there is no good and therefore no eternal reward which can be lauded over those you believe are destined for hell.

I am no expert in psychology but it seems that sociopaths are made not born. A person may have some genetic predisposition that might push them over the edge one way or another if the circumstances for creating a sociopath or its exact opposite are there, but it still depends largely on the environment they find themselves in.

This is why I loathe comments made by law enforcement personnel or the victims of crime who appear on the true crime reality shows that are in over abundance today. It is easy to refer to person as evil and heap upon them the full derision and hatred we have for those who commit atrocious antisocial acts. Some of these people are the very sociopaths that we have talked about previously. Most often they may be truly incapable of remorse and appreciating the pain they have created. Some of them may even love the pain. The perpetrators of evil are often victims of evil first. It is this victimization, which is often repeated in escalated fashion over time that leads to continuing cycle of violence. I am not convinced that every perpetrator is capable of making a conscious decision to behave contrary to their impulses. This makes them extremely dangerous.

The problem is where is God in all of this?

To Be Continued….

Paranormal Activity - Claustrophobic and Eerie Fun

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:41:25 GMT

Paranormal Activity is a genuinely eerie piece of minimalist filmmaking. But, the marketing hype may well blunt some of the impact. The same thing happened to the Blair Witch Project. The hype, the word of mouth built the film up and inflated my expectations to the point that when I actually got around to seeing it my reaction was –“meh.” I didn’t allow the same thing to happen to me this time. I largely ignored what is being said and ended up having an enjoyable moving going experience.

The great thing about this film is that it is not infected with A-list celebrities and splashy over the top special effects. Its low budget and demonstrates quite effectively that less is, indeed, sometimes more. The movie builds the tension effectively and it’s what we don’t know or can’t foresee that keeps our nerves buzzing along a razors edge. This movie is all about what we can’t see and the things that go bump in the night. It’s those undefined and shapeless fears that follow us from childhood into adulthood often going dormant for years until, for unknown reasons, it comes out of the closet and taps us on our shoulder.

The film introduces us to an attractive young couple, Micah and Katie. They are the young couple next door and it’s not hard to fall in love with them from the moment Micah points his hand held cam at his girlfriend as she pulls her car into the driveway. Our affection even endures as their relationship disintegrates under the strain of the bizarre events that take place in their home. The couple has been experiencing some apparent paranormal events and have decided to try and catch them on film. Clearly, Micah is a skeptic and hobbles across that thin line between taking Katie’s fear seriously and thinking she is just imagining things. He jokes and often mocks Katie. It would seem he is more interested in filming them having sex rather than catching anything paranormal on video. But, to be fair Katie is very cute and even with the unflattering angles and camerawork comes across adorably.

The film is tight and claustrophobic and shot entirely with the herky jerky handheld camcorder skills of the amateur. It’s often out of focus as the camera spins from shot to shot trying to follow the events occurring around. The story is not tightly scripted. The dialogue sounds just like what you might expect to hear from a couple enduring the strain of frightening and unexplained events. Much of the film’s action takes place in their bedroom at night while the young couple is sleeping.

Those of us who really love truly scary and eerie films understand that the trick isn’t gore or special effects that really frighten us. It’s the gaps left by the filmmaker for us to fill in with our imagination as we teeter perilously to the denouement. Rumor has it that Steven Spielberg bought the rights to this film with the intention of remaking it with bigger names and an even bigger budget. But, after viewing it decided to leave it as is. Once you see it you will understand why.