Whoever and whatever God is

We wear the chains we forge in life

2008-07-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?" – A Christmas Carol

What is the reality of any literary or cinematic image? Is it to be found literally or metaphorically? Are the words above simply the product of the imagination of Charles Dickens, or do they reflect a real process Dickens observed? Are these words about an archaic notion of sin, or are the links made not of sin but a different sort of burden we create for ourselves? Was Dickens describing events he thought an observer could witness or was his entire story occurring only in Scrooge’s mind?

What is imagination anyway? Explain the anatomy and physiology of it to me. Where does our will guide what we imagine?

We rarely reflect on how symbolism dominates our consciousness. We are in much better touch with how our senses stimulate us. How symbols do the same is so surreptitious. I look at a word, and I always know I’m using my eyes. I know a lot about how I do this thanks to science, if I care to reflect on that. In contrast, I rarely think about just how many symbols are involved with such reading. There are letters and language, the symbols that let me recognize a word, then the concepts symbolized by the word, with whatever ambiguity there may be in that, then the overall meaning of phrases, sentences, and entire stories, the larger symbols for which that word is a piece. These symbols affect me according to so many connections to experiences, values, and desires I carry with me. A Buddhist might summarize these as delusions and attachments. People vary in what symbols they use to describe reality.

Is there one person on the planet whose view of reality is best? I might be interested in that question except for how quickly knowledge increases, the world changes, and I change. I doubt any one person is keeping up with all of that.

Is there one sort of view of reality that’s best? Are literal descriptions better? Are metaphors better? Is objective data over entire populations better or do subjective anecdotes flesh out or even replace data in some essential way? So many parts of us like our imagination are impossible to detail currently in any material way, yet I’d hate to rely only on metaphors to talk about my experience of life. That would be maddeningly ambiguous. I think we’re stuck with both the literal and the metaphorical for the foreseeable future.

That gets me back to the metaphor that we wear chains that we’ve forged in life. As I have no hope of describing the burden we carry through purely literal means, I embrace this metaphor. I prefer it to the passivity implied by the idea of memes. I doubt that I see this exactly as Dickens did. Chains are not just a burden, but also security, stability, strength. This I would point out to anyone advocating complete freedom from them, be that person a Buddhist who is bad-mouthing attachments or some secular youth advocating a freedom of expression that is one step short of anarchy. In giving up all restraint, all that is left is nature. Such is my experience.

So what’s wrong with nature? Have you seen the physical and mental suffering that comes from living a life entirely by whatever thoughts and feelings come to us naturally? All that’s wrong with politics is just this. All that’s wrong with religion and the lack thereof is just this. To escape our nature we not only have to learn the discipline of the scientific method, a philosophical method and/or psychotherapy such as cognitive therapy, we have to use such discipline throughout our lives. A scientist who knows how to be scientific about genetics, but has natural prejudice about the rest of life has at least one arm in chains.

There is a lot one could write about how we are chained by the thoughts and feelings that come to us naturally, by everything that is unhealthy in that. Yet what reaches people? Most people can agree Scrooge’s life needed improvement. Our own chains are another matter. Who is willing to see that Republicans are restricted by the neo-con triad of low taxes, an aggressive foreign policy and wanting to rollback every social change since the fifties? Their opponents are, but not so much true believers. Likewise Democrats would have difficulty seeing the bondage in believing that every problem has a simple solution, a solution that would be in place already except for greed and corruption.

We are in chains, some foundational from our biology and culture, the rest of our own making. We are surrounded by spirits, some of whom would free us, the rest who would eat our livers each day as they did to Prometheus. In saying that I’m being at least as metaphorical as Dickens was about what was binding Scrooge really and what really freed him. Was it 3 dreams? Were the space and elements for these 3 spirits already in his mind or did they need to enter him? Whatever these spirits were, they were not that part of Scrooge’s mind he called his self. So are spirits in everyone’s minds beyond the boundary of oneself.

Dickens wrote of a solution that is forced on Scrooge. Marley’s ghost intervenes. Three spirits intervene, whether they are dreams or something even more strange, whether they are purely psychological or also spiritual. None of them asked Scrooge for consent.

If such freedom from our chains can be forced on us, why don’t we hear of it happening more? I would think that’s because it can’t be forced on us, naturally or supernaturally. Courts can order psychotherapy or 12 steps as an alternative to jail, but even they can’t force a person to accept what they hear. Supernatural experiences like Scrooge’s are rare, and ones I’ve experienced or read about do not involve anyone as resistant as Scrooge. It seems such experiences only happen to people who welcome them at least a little.

We wear chains we’ve forged in life. Some ask for help getting rid of them, yet rarely does that help come dramatically. Try to dive into this realistically and so much time will be spent on what really is a false belief and then which false beliefs are binding us too tightly and which provide necessary support to living. Thank God cultural evolution will sort this out for people as a whole, regardless of which metaphors they like. It’s enough for me just to sort it out in my own life.

The hateful words of Maureen Dowd and everyone else

2008-06-17T18:03:00.001-07:00

Media Matters recently documented a pattern New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd follows as she ridicules political candidates. Dowd often has portrayed Hillary Clinton as masculine, such as writing that Senator Clinton won the Indiana primary by playing “The Man”. She has portrayed Barack Obama and John Edwards as effeminate, even claiming that historians will note that one reason Obama defeated the first serious female candidate for President was because voters were drawn to his “more feminine management style”.

I had been meaning to look up how Dowd started calling Senator Obama “Obambi”. Was that the fawn Bambi or the grown-up Bambi? Now Media Matters has helped me with that. Frequently procrastination does have that benefit. It turns out that Dowd in her column of December 13, 2006 foresaw the manly Clinton as Godzilla, taking on the not-so-black Obambi in a way that in Dowd’s mind presumably followed the very brief plot of the movie Bambi vs. Godzilla, something all of us born in the fifties must know. Dowd’s analysis of the race thereby fell short of reminding anyone of Cassandra. Apparently Dowd compensates for such lack of vision with her biting ridicule of the candidates. It wasn’t just straight analysis that got her that 1999 Pulitzer Prize for her columns on Monica Lewinsky.

Interestingly, Dowd once made the same claim for which Christopher Matthews had to apologize this year, that Clinton, “won her Senate seat only after becoming sympathetic as a victim”. Meanwhile Dowd victimized Senator Edwards, calling him a “Breck girl”. Before the current campaign, Al Gore seemed effeminate to her as well. Didn’t Dowd have any men in her life to show her that helping people is not effeminate?

At the same time Dowd finds few emasculating nicknames for Republican candidates. She didn’t ignore Rudy Giuliani dressing up as a woman, of course. But to find any sexist insult of John McCain, Media Matters had to go back to April 30, 2000, when Dowd called him “McDiva” on comparing Senator McCain to Diana Ross.

It’s not that Republicans can’t be funny as the butt of jokes. Those are easy to find in the blogosphere. But Republicans as effeminate? Well, I think I’ve seen those, but perhaps Dowd’s readers wouldn’t think that’s as funny. I’m sure Dowd knows her audience.

One thing I did notice in looking at Dowd’s columns in the Media Matters links is how much she calls Senator Obama, “Barry”. Is this where so many in the blogosphere decided this was a cool thing to do? Much more subtle than “Hussein”, I suppose.

Maureen Dowd, trendsetter for hateful words one can pretend are cool, only there’s no chance that Dowd invented such a disguise for hate. Go through any newspaper archive and look at 19th-century political attacks, words and cartoons. I’m sure “Ape” Lincoln was thought to be a clever and penetrating insult at the time. Yeah, we’ll keep that ape from becoming President. Then when he did, we’ll secede. We won’t stand for being under that ape. Then if they want to fight us, bring it on. Yeah, it was really clever to make such an extreme caricature of Lincoln.

I know of no place on either the political spectrum or the religious spectrum where there aren’t some people who think such ridicule is funny, as long as it’s directed at those other people, the ones not as cool as we are. Part of me would preach for the better way, the way of love, even for one’s enemy, instead of hate, indifference or the strange way some people combine both in their contempt for some scapegoat. Yet the more interesting part for me is to look at Maureen Dowd and know she’s not at all unique. She’s prolific in her insults, but not unique.

Maybe Dowd shares my beliefs that all religions are false and all politics corrupt. Maybe that’s where her contempt for just about everyone comes from. Is it cynicism or does she find existential joy in attacking the powerful? I don’t know Maureen Dowd well enough to tell the difference, but either way I’d rather be more straightforward. She’s not that right in relentlessly insulting candidates through gender roles. She just has a taste for that sort of insult, whether it tastes bitter or sweet to her.

There is a better way than hate and indifference if people want to choose it, but again and again, people choose hate and indifference. There is power in the latter, power in finding people who agree with you in mocking those other people, enough people to win elections, even to establish a political philosophy that will last more than one election. Such a winning political philosophy and coalition is still transient, of course, but that’s enough power for many people to embrace it.

Plus look at all the fun various people are having calling Senator Obama “Barry”, from anti-McCain libertarians and neo-cons to loyal Republicans to those who still say it’s Senator Clinton or nothing for them. They have at least 5 months to enjoy that. Then one just has to tweak one’s hatred a little after one’s position has been defeated at the polls. It can still be so clever. What do those stupid voters know?

I don’t think hatred and indifference are going away. I think it’s human nature. People so often subdivide hatred, so it becomes OK to hate racism or hate sexism or even try to decide which is being favored more, racism or sexism. It’s all hatred, whether it’s more traditional, more institutionalized or more organically from the present, whether the purveyors of a particular hatred are in power or out of power. Only some people say it’s just those other people who hate. “We’re fine. We’re being clever. They’re stupid” Right.

"Whatever God wants, He keeps!"

2008-06-14T21:38:00.000-07:00

I heard a joke many years ago, more than once I think. I considered retelling it here in a way that’s neither sectarian nor ethnic, but since I heard it told by a Jewish man and the link here is about Jewish humor, I’ll just reproduce it this way:

As retold by Bruce Lowitt

A Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew are discussing tithing. They draw a circle in chalk on the pavement below them.

The Catholic says: "We should take the money and throw it in the air, and whatever lands inside the circle, we give to God."

The Protestant says: "No, we should throw it in the air and whatever lands outside the circle we give to God."

The Jew says: “No, we throw it in the air; whatever God wants, He keeps!”

Apparently the joke is supposed to resonate with the stereotype of the miserly Jew, but I have remembered it often over the years as something one reasonably could expect of an omnipotent God. Why not? Given enough faith, why not expect the omnipotent God to pluck whatever money He wants from out of the air?

And if God has no direct need for money, but would like it to be sent to some approved cause, why not announce that, either to a single individual or in some sort of broadcast? Some believe that the Bible is a broadcast from God. There are many verses there that encourage charity. Some like Matthew 25 described fearsome consequences for those who fail to help others.

Yet many claim to be believers while doing little to help others. Do they pick and choose what parts of the Bible to believe, maybe even while accusing liberals of being inferior for doing just that? Do they expect the omnipotent God to speak to them individually, something like, “I mean you!” Is it the absence of this that has them believing they don’t need to do more than they are?

This is not just about charity. People seem to have the same attitude towards their beliefs, their lifestyle, and the judgments they make. If the omnipotent God wanted them to be different, wouldn’t He tell them? If not through a great, big booming voice, then perhaps one can hear a still, small voice. If not even that, surely God can reach us through our conscience, as secularly as any of us may see that happening.

I often think of this when I hear anyone proclaim that their beliefs are right, and everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, be that person atheist, liberal or traditionalist. I’ve heard that recently from some who claim Jeremiah Wright can’t be Christian, along with calling him racist, hater, demagogue, anti-American, whatever else.

Do people even consider the possibilities that their judgments are exactly the opposite of how God sees it unless God Himself tells them? I suppose someone less than God might make a dent in such judgments, a religious leader perhaps, someone trusted by the person making judgments. Yet religious leaders tend to make the same judgments as their followers. Jerry Falwell didn’t shy away from saying that he knew God’s mind about sexual orientation. Who says he did?

Of course many people make claims not based on their theology, but supposedly supported by logic. Only I’ve been online for ten years, and one of the most pointless things I’ve done online is try to point out the lack of a foundation for judgments such as these. That doesn’t change anyone’s mind.

People believe what their group believes, their political group, their religious group, the people at work. People may extend those group beliefs in some idiosyncratic way or even abandon some of them should their experience teach them otherwise, but how often do you go wrong deciding what someone’s religion or politics is based on their rhetoric? I don’t think it’s very often.

People largely conform to their group and if they’re open to God leading them in another way at all, it’s only the God as seen by their group who can lead. Even that might not be enough. Otherwise, why don’t all those who believe in an omnipotent God assume things such as God’s power to whisk money out of the air? Because they’ve never seen it? Oh come on, people believe all sorts of things they’ve never seen, as long as enough other people back them up in those beliefs.

This year’s Presidential campaign is not going to be about whether or not Jeremiah Wright deserves the judgments various people make about him. I’m not sure if there ever will be a dialog about this during the lifetime of those involved. Instead people have their opinions based on their experience and wherever they get their beliefs, and I expect those opinions to be quite stable, because I don’t expect God to do anything to change this.

Personally I believe that’s because God lacks the power to communicate to those who have no idea who the real God is. That’s what God tells me. It fits with what I see, and most of what God tells me I find to be helpful, so I believe it.

Ancient people saw it otherwise. They supposed gods controlled everything. Who was there to say differently? Theologians built on that to make this perfect God with absolute and infinite properties, making Him completely different from any of us profane creatures, just as Aristotle decided celestial movement must be entirely different from terrestrial movement. It’s been known that Aristotle was wrong for at least 400 years. It does take time for the consequences of new knowledge to take hold fully.

God is whoever and whatever God is, even if He is no more sacred than anything else, even if nothing is omnipotent or omniscient. An omnipotent God could proclaim who and what He is to a few individuals, to everyone, however He wants to do it, but you’d think that would be a reliable process, not like the mess of this world. A non-existent God can’t tell anyone anything. If those were the only two possibilities, God’s failure to correct the most obviously incorrect judgments of His followers would be so incomprehensible to me, it would be yet one more observation that makes me sure He doesn’t exist.

There are possibilities between those two, however. What I observe of people’s opinions, both religious and political, may be almost entirely the result of biological evolution and cultural evolution, with only a little bit of input from people who have tried to understand God directly. So we have the contrast of a Bible with a verse like Matthew 7:1 in it, a verse that says not to judge, yet Bible-believers are just as judgmental as anyone else, and not any more accurate in their judgments. It seems that many say they are Bible believers from their culture, from their church, but they don’t actually believe words from the Bible. An omnipotent God would do better than that. Even a God with some power over such believers would do better than that. What about a God with very little power over Bible believers or idolators of the Bible, whichever term is more accurate?

All religion is false. All politics is corrupt. That’s not absolutely true, but isn’t it amazing how close to being true it is?

People pretend that’s not true. Their religion is fine, but Jeremiah Wright’s Christianity certainly isn’t or maybe it’s John Hagee’s Christianity someone would say isn’t really Christian. Their own politics is fine, but not the politics of those evil people on the other side or stupid people or selfish people or crazy people.

I watch people come at these conflicts rationally. What a waste of words, time, and effort. Professional politicians know how to win elections. Their efforts are not so wasted. It matter some who wins. Cultural evolution is built up from such choices. But what an excessive amount of attention politics gets, religion, too, especially when so much of both are pride and idolatries.

Hardly anyone looks to God directly. To some degree, that can be just as crazy as expecting God to pull your money out of the air unless He doesn’t care if you keep it all. Yet looking to God doesn’t have to involve any physical miracle, the likes of which I have never seen. One can talk with God not sure if there is a God. I suppose it helps to have some expectation there is a God. Otherwise who would stick with this enough to consider how God might answer one of us profane creatures?

However it works, I’m convinced there is a God who is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, yet helps me with direction, strength, comfort, love, and hope, through prayer, through words that are better than my words. He can’t change anyone’s mind involuntarily, so those who are sure God would fix them if they need to be fixed might better reconsider that. Few will. It’s human nature for people to keep certain beliefs until they die. Because of that cultural evolution has to wait for younger generations to replace older ones.

Individuals can change faster than cultures, but we have to give up the delusion that we know so much for that. Giving up that delusion didn’t send me into my backyard to give God whatever part of my money He wants. If I threw my money up into the air and claimed God didn’t want it, I’d be lying. I don’t believe in a God who can do physical miracles. I’d be lying if I suggested I did. I know that. The God who somehow shares my consciousness knows that. There’s no point in lying to someone who knows me that well.

I don’t rely on any kind of casting lots to know what God wants. I don’t trust any ritual, doctrine, religious leader, book, or institution to substitute for God. Why should they? Who says God wants them to? Have you asked Him?

Few people have. They believe whatever words pass their lips, whatever excuses they have to say they can say and do whatever they say and do and be in the right. Anyone is free to live that way. It is such a natural thing for our brain to think of how we are right in what we say and do. Yet people on both sides of a conflict insist they are right despite having completely contradictory opinions. They can’t all be right. They may all be wrong.

That’s what I’ve come to in recent years. They are all wrong. Each of the characters in the above joke is wrong. Each pretends they can know God through a ritual. In real life it’s doctrines and leaders people fight over more than rituals, but it’s the same process. People want to know what to do quickly, too quickly to consult God seriously. People want to say and do what they’ve already decided on saying and doing, whether it’s some judgment they’ve made of other people or some action they decided for themselves. Few even pretend to ask God. So the world is full of falseness, hatred, and indifference. Before you decide that means there isn’t a God, consider another possibility.

If you want to know what God wants, ask Him. Every other method is hopelessly flawed. There are flaws in how we ask God anything, but my experience in this has surprised me and made me a believer in whoever and whatever God is. That is not hopeless.

So few fear that God is on the other side of the fight

2008-04-30T21:23:00.000-07:00

George Will wrote a column for the Washington Post yesterday that’s such junk, I’m not going to link to it. In it he calls Jeremiah Wright a demagogue and says that Obama’s association with such a man for 20 years should be a central issue for the Presidential campaign. Ah yes, judging a black man for having poor judgment while all these white people making that judgment don’t worry at all about how strangely any white preachers preach. What a world.

Reverend Wright doesn’t strike me as a demagogue, defined in my dictionary as a leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace. Wright only has power inside a church, where being a pastor is a lot more about getting things done and serving people than manipulating them. Yes, he is emotional, and that is unacceptable to some people, isn’t it? So many people have such inexperience with emotion that they see anger and they say it is hate. No, not necessarily.

A big part of my story since first experiencing God 19 years ago is that I wanted to know God wherever I could find him. I went to liberal churches and conservative churches. The difference there is simple enough. The latter believe the Bible was almost dictated by God. The former drifted away from that. They don’t often drift away as far as I have. I’m sure the Bible is strictly the words of men, even if some of those men knew a little about the real God.

There is another dimension that defines churches, namely how emotional a church is, what kind of music they play. Unfortunately for me there isn’t such a thing as a very liberal, very charismatic church, not one with a grip on reality as well as spirituality. That’s where I’d like to go. I know that from my time in more sedate liberal churches and fairly conservative, charismatic churches like the Vineyard fellowships. Ooh, I’d like to do some cultural engineering combining things I like about those while leaving out things I don’t like, such as the prejudices of sedate liberals against strong spiritual experience and the prejudices of conservatives against both liberal religion and liberal politics.

It’s occurred to me before that a Spirit-filled African-American church might be closest to what I want, but then I have this obvious reason not to fit in there, even if there’s plenty of testimony from whites attending Trinity United Church of Christ that they felt comfortable there, testimony lost on so many who have judged Reverend Wright recently. Still I wouldn’t fit in that well culturally, and I’m still too liberal for them theologically. I don’t think God punishes anyone with weather or strife. I don’t see that God controls the physical world at all. I don’t see any reason to believe in physical miracles. I don’t receive any revelation from God that I should believe in them anyway, just the opposite. I’m not sure what kind of church would put up with such beliefs from me.

I do know that I can have church just with God, communing with Him away from any distractions in prayer and in other ways. From that I’ve received God’s direction, comfort, strength, love, and hope for many years. Anyone could join me in that church. No one has wanted to. I understand. It’s too different.

I could be wrong. Maybe those few Catholics are right who claim their church is the only one God established. Maybe it’s that broader belief that conservatives have that believing the Bible to be the Word of God is what is critical. Maybe the real God goes even further than that, but not as far as I go.

I’ve worried about that at times, talked with God about that many times. That’s one reason I’ve explored every kind of church, even religions beyond Christianity. Where is God? I’ve wanted to know, relentlessly.

That’s how I’ve come to seeing my basic belief as being that God is whoever and whatever God is, not what any human being says God is, as that human being has no way of knowing anything of God except by God, and the mistakes human beings have made about this are plentiful and obvious.

That doesn’t exclude God being the traditional God of absolute power, knowledge, love, and goodness despite how this world looks, but that’s not the God I experience. My experience is no guarantee that God is as I experience Him to be. I can only rely on God to lead me past my experience if that is the direction I should follow, so that has been my constant prayer for years, for God to do just that. So from that, here I am, an extremely liberal, extremely charismatic Christian who understands Jeremiah Wright a lot better despite my light skin than so many know-it-alls in the media.

I know God might be very much with Jeremiah Wright. “God Damn America” is just as biblical as he said it is. Every “woe to” in the Bible, such as Luke 6: 24-26, can be replaced by “damn”. Instead of “woe to hypocrites”, “damn hypocrites” means the same thing.

Is that for this world or the next world? You can do what I do and ask God such questions. It’s usually slow getting an answer that way, but I’m quite grateful for how that’s worked for me. It doesn’t seem Sean Hannity has gotten good answers about Jeremiah Wright. Who do suppose Hannity asked? Perhaps it was his image in the mirror.

God is whoever and whatever God is. One can call that a tautology, but it isn’t if each “is” is somewhat different. Oh, someone beat me to that one, but it’s true. Words can be so ambiguous, any of them. How can people never wonder if God is on the other side of their fight? How can people dismiss the possibility that they’re wrong so easily?

It must be human nature. Yet when one becomes aware of the true range of possibilities, such as what science shows compared to what we learn only directly with our senses, one can learn not to be so limited, even to think that there might be more than just the physical universe. Experience helps in many ways. One way is that once you have considered that you are on the wrong side of God, it’s not as hard to imagine that possibility the next time.

My first experience with God was God telling me that I was wrong in giving up on the possibility that there is a God who loved me. That teaches me that I can drift off into being wrong again. It’s easier to consider the second time, the third time, ….

So many in politics and religion don’t seem to know this. I find that to be much more important than whether one expresses emotions “arrogantly” or suppresses one’s emotions so much that one’s anger and fear only comes out in intellectual prejudices.

Is God on the other side? I’ve asked that regularly. I’m with Jeremiah Wright, not that everything he says is right, but I’m with him, and I’m against the uninformed judgments in the media that says Wright should be shunned. That doesn’t mean God is with him also, unless you’re willing to believe how God answers me.

Yet all these conservatives are sure that God is with them or maybe that God is above all this. How do they know if they don’t ask that question from the only One who can answer it accurately?

Will lies ever be completely unacceptable?

2008-04-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

I paused on Fox News while channel surfing today. Fred “Beetle” Barnes and Morton Kondracke were expressing such sympathy for the Democratic Party. Barack Obama is in trouble they say because he can’t carry the traditional Democrats Hillary Clinton won in Pennsylvania, such as union members. Yet it would divide Democrats terribly for superdelegates to give the nomination to Senator Clinton. I guess Democrats just have to get used to the inevitability of President John McCain. I’m glad that such a mainstream neo-con as Barnes and Republicanly minded independent as Kondracke would take the time to give us Democrats such compassionate advice as just to give up all hope.

The lies these two were telling were not entirely invented. The exit polls indicating how union members voted in Pennsylvania are a matter of record. Yet consider the possibilities that The Beltway Boys didn’t, that Obama will win the votes of many who voted for Clinton in the primary, that there are many groups that will determine the next President, not just union members, that the number of McCain Democrats will not challenge the phenomenon of Reagan Democrats. There are always many more possibilities than know-it-alls on TV are likely to consider. Why don’t they consider them? Well, there are a number of possibilities.

However one labels lies that aren’t complete fiction, be that spin, concern trolling, a false front, partisan speculation, poor documentation, rationales or false hope, they are less than the whole truth. People tend to pick out what’s wrong with the other guy instead of what’s wrong with me or my guy. It seems to be human nature. Was that nature all The Beltway Boys were expressing, or were they more deliberately being optimistic for McCain and pessimistic for us enemy Democrats? I don’t know, but I know it was some kind of lie. Otherwise why didn’t they consider other possibilities? Why didn’t they consider how they might be exactly wrong? Oh, would that be bad for ratings? So that’s just another type of lie, irrational confidence so as to impress viewers.

Everyone lies sometimes, but some go farther than others. Both Obama and Clinton claim to have misspoke in the past month, “misspoke” for me meaning someone made a slip of the tongue such as if I said Iran when I meant Iraq. Neither misspoke in that sense. Senator Clinton told the same story about her courageous experience several times, and it was so different from what actually happened when she landed in Bosnia that to say she “misspoke” is just another lie. Then Senator Obama copied her “misspoke” label to explain away his going too far in his analysis of the sociology of bitter votes.

Some in the media essentially called Senator Clinton a liar by juxtaposing her story with what is documented. I didn’t hear anyone suggest Senator Obama did more than misspeak, but then I didn’t search for that. Yes, I’m sure there are different degrees of lying, and this is an example. To me Senator Clinton’s lies are simply unacceptable. They are forgivable if she wanted forgiveness for them, but I have no reason to think she wants that. It seems she wants to say she’s said nothing morally wrong, just factually incorrect. Oh come on. You may keep most of your supporters with that claim, but not me.

Senator Clinton continues to lie today by saying she is ahead in the popular vote without explaining what an eccentric definition of popular vote she is using. That’s a lie. It’s deception. It’s deliberate. It’s to make her look better than she is. It is immoral according to any moral system that says love and truth are the ultimate good things. There are many such systems, theistic and atheistic.

How many people care if the person they support politically lies? I’m sure it depends on how bad the lie is and what trouble that lie causes. I myself have given up on Senator Clinton because of her lies after voting for her on February 5. I haven’t done that with Senator Obama’s lies. They aren’t as bad as Clinton’s lies, in my judgment.

Is it OK if every individual decides for himself or herself when lies are unacceptable? It doesn’t seem to be OK, judging by how much politics is full of lies. It seems many individuals are letting political liars off the hook. Of course religion is also full of lies. Just about anything people believe about themselves, other people, life and the world is full of lies, from nutritional fantasies to what one thinks about one’s job. Human beings desperately want to be seen in a certain way, such as how Bill Clinton doesn’t want his wife to be seen as a quitter. So people tell lies that they like better than reality. Not many people tell them they can’t do that. In this current world I observe I’m not sure whom I would trust to be a judge of who’s lying except doing that for myself. That’s one reason I wish we could be more effective at identifying and having sanctions against all lies, not just the worst ones. I actually would like to be able to trust some random purveyor of information, instead of thinking through or researching whom I can't trust.

I don’t suppose this will change anytime soon. Will it ever? Experience does make people more sensitive to why people say and do what they do. “Concern troll” is recognized by many in the blogosphere, when the deception involved in that wouldn’t have been as obvious in the past. Will people in the future be even less easily fooled, sometime after the Fox News Channel collapses in shame around 2025?

I hope so. Can you imagine just how many words 6 billion people waste on lies? What if we used those words to work on reality instead of on fantasies?

Will cultural evolution go in the direction where lies are less acceptable today? Will people be less partisan so that when they say, “That’s a lie,” they’re more likely to be right than telling their own lie? Will voters and other supporters abandon their leaders if that leader tells lies as big as Hillary Clinton’s lies? It hasn’t happened yet, but I for one don’t want to go through another 8 years where every communication from the government is as creative as they have been in the last 8 years. The specter of that is unacceptable to me. Experience changes us, both individually and collectively. I’m not sure if there are sufficient forces to keep lies as prevalent as they are despite such experience. I don’t find that I want to explore them much. If my hope for the future is false, I don’t mind. False hope is sometimes better than no hope at all. That makes us suckers for some lies, but I hope not too much.

Half empty, half full

2007-12-31T14:10:00.000-08:00

I was halfway into a profound thought while seated at my computer recently when I noticed my water glass. Hey, it’s half-full, as exactly as I can tell just looking at it! Now there’s a metaphor that’s been beaten to death. Before everyone had experience with transparent drinking glasses, there was a saying about half a loaf being better than none. I’m sure there’s a series of sayings on this point in various languages going back nearly to when humans first spoke about their possessions, sometime after our ancestors first appreciated that having more is better. Was that even before we had brains? Is there anything that is more of a no-brainer than that having some is better than having none, even if we want more? But where do we go from there? Do we ration what we have? Is only a new supply of resources going to make the situation better?

The thing is that while I do indeed tend to focus on the water or other things I have rather than what I no longer have, it’s not as though there are only two ways to see this. The truth about how I look at my water glass when half the water is left is more complicated than that it is half full. I see my water. Half of this last round I poured is gone. Half remains. When that’s gone, I’ll pour some more. As long as I know there’s more water coming after this, it’s not much of a challenge emotionally or intellectually. A third, three quarters, overflowing, the overall reality remains the same.

If the glass of water or its metaphorical equivalent were the last glass of water that ever would exist, I’d much more likely be a half-empty kind of guy. Like many metaphors, the circumstances of what’s really under discussion are important.

“Do I have enough?” is not a simple question, whether one is discussing physical needs, emotional needs, or spiritual needs. It’s not a simple dichotomy of whether it’s best to look to what one has or to what one no longer has. Aren’t both possible, with other possibilities as well? Yet human nature tries to make everything a dichotomy.

On spiritual topics, I’m forever writing about the atheist vs. traditionalist dichotomy, in my case rejecting both. Within theism, there’s the rigid, conservative vs. the experimental, liberal dichotomy. I firmly belong to the latter school, but that’s not the whole story. People get stuck on such things, on some simple identity, either for ourselves or for the world around us.

There are always many possibilities, not just two. Yet there is always one reality. God is whoever and whatever God is, as is anything else. The things I need form a set that is a single reality, though it’s a different set of what I need to survive vs. what I need to be happy. How I look at my wants is not the most important part of that.

Yet people talk about that last part, because we have this very visual and understandable metaphor of whether a glass is half empty or half full. Right now my water glass is both. Later today I will refill it the same way regardless of how I label it now. It’s not a big deal. Nor is it a big deal for many other things in my life where I might wonder if I have enough, material things or more abstract qualities to my life.

But thinking of all the possibilities, that I think is a big deal. I look at those who seem needy spiritually, and I think that’s what they’re missing the most. It’s not so much what they wish they still had, such as youth, wealth, family, companions, or a place that felt more like home. It’s not so much focusing on what they have now, as if God has to have given them what they need as far as theology, customs and materials. Otherwise they might need to rethink whether they know anything about God. Who wants to do that?

I think what’s missing is not appreciating the possibilities for becoming content. They are many, though for any one of us, they may boil down to just one possibility, one we may already have in our possession or not. Many possibilities, one reality, it’s not a simple dichotomy. It’s not that feeling empty is bad while full is good, or the opposite. It’s not that the beliefs I have are good, while everything else is bad. There’s more to it than that.

Dead faith walking

2007-12-24T21:43:00.000-08:00

“If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendents of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it. I don’t know how far they will march that back, but I believe all of us in this room are the unique creations of a God who knows us and loves us and who created us for His own purpose.” – Mike Huckabee, New Hampshire Republican debate, June 5, 2007

With Mike Huckabee getting a lot of air time recently, both pro and con, I was curious to look back at some of his videos. So I came across this quote from 6 months ago. The first thing that hit me was the idea that beliefs are based on what we want to believe. Is that just us fools who disagree with Rev. Huckabee, or would the right reverend say everyone believes what they want to believe?

I don’t believe what I want to believe. I want to believe that the Chargers will win the Super Bowl and the Padres the World Series. I want to believe that I’ll meet a beautiful woman 20 years younger than I am who for some reason is utterly devoted to me. I want to believe ice cream has no calories. Instead I believe just the opposite. My experiences have taught me to expect other than what I might want. That’s part of growing up.

There’s evidence that we are descended from primates in comparative anatomy and physiology. I wonder if some even thought of that before the 19th century. It’s so obvious. Then in the 20th century there’s so much biochemistry that connects not just some species, but all of life, at least DNA-based life, so much that education will teach you the truth is much more profound than that we are descended from primates. All of life is made up of cousins of varying distance. Even an animal and a plant are cousins. They weren’t separate creations. Just look at all the data.

Now with fossils that aren’t just an isolated skeleton here and there, but part of a mountain of data to document the 4+ billion year history of the Earth, and molecular clocks that are amazingly consistent at putting together who our ancestors are, for the last 50,000 years or 50 million years, one can be a lot more detailed than saying we’re descended from primates. It’s not some whim. It’s not even mere hypothesis. Either Rev. Huckabee doesn’t know that or dismisses such knowledge. Either way he is deluded that people believe this because they want to believe it.

I learned evolution in school, with a lot of supporting data. It made sense to me. Since then I’ve heard a lot of arguments against evolution. There’s always a flaw in them. I didn’t find those flaws because I wanted the argument to be flawed. I scrutinize any new information skeptically, whether it’s a report of a new experiment or some comment on an old one. I learned that from role models in science and other analytical pursuits. People make mistakes. Sometimes they’re honest mistakes. Sometimes they’re stupid mistakes. Sometimes they’re just engaging in rhetoric and never have done the work to examine all human experience that relates to their topic. It’s good to recognize this.

I suspect that when Genesis was written thousands of years ago, it was the best any human being could do at the time at imagining where the world, life, and his people came from. I suspect when other Bible verses were written, such as God knitting us together in our mother’s womb, there was no data to suggest otherwise. It wasn’t known we had DNA that knitted us together, with no additional supernatural action needed. A lot wasn’t known.

It’s known now. It’s known so well that I can only imagine Mike Huckabee being filled with contempt for such knowledge when he said that believing we are descended from primates comes from wanting to believe that, completely the opposite from when he says that people are welcome to such beliefs. People have such difficulty labeling emotions in their rhetoric designed to make them look good. So they lie a lot.

It’s not that my fellow liberal Christians do much better on this point. Many accept evolution because science says so or for the same reasons that science says so, yet they still want the same Creator God who loves every bit of His creation and has a purpose for each little bit.

Almost 20 years ago I decided to ask God about such things. I’m satisfied with the direction and other answers that approach has gotten me. It’s impossible to recreate a course like that for someone else. Most people come to their beliefs differently than I have. But just believing what they want? I don’t see people doing that, no matter how many people in our culture belittle the beliefs of others that way.

Yet any public figure will likely get away with claiming beliefs are chosen by want and that God’s purpose is in every bit of existence, every open wound, every desperate mind, everyone who is crushed by the world instead of being loved by anyone. I don’t believe that such claims will be accepted forever. God tells me each year will pass without a Rapture. Science tells me that the details of our molecular heritage will become so detailed that it will require no thought at all to see that our creation required neither an omnipotent God nor an accident, but a physical process that Rev. Huckabee doesn’t realize is a third possibility besides his metaphysical dichotomy.

God is whoever and whatever God is. So is the world. So is life. So am I and everyone else. If people don’t consider fully the possibility that they’re wrong, if they only consider straw man arguments as the alternative to their beliefs, what is the chance that their beliefs happen to be the one possibility that is reality? I wouldn’t bet on it. Exploring that takes me farther from tradition every year, farther from atheism, too.

Many people are ducking the conflict between how science shows God does not micromanage the world and how that means God must be different than tradition sees God. Is God Creator at all? What is your definition for God? I’ve written about mine before. I don’t see people doing that. I see people always talking about the Creator, whether theist or atheist. Such talk has a limited future. I suspect someone will still be talking like Rev. Huckabee in 100 years, but not 500 years. It’s a pity so many will waste their time on this in the meantime. Mike Huckabee is just a dead faith walking.

I don’t welcome Mike Huckabee spouting simplicities and fantasies in a public forum. I think people would be better served by a well-informed critique of the contradictions in his beliefs, as well as where he is just ignorant. But there’s very little I can do about that, nor can God. Ask Him. Think about it. Look into it. Ask Him again. It works for me. I don’t know why that doesn’t work for everyone. I know it doesn’t. That it doesn’t is one reason for a dead faith, one that claims that the Bible is all there is to faith. Time will tell. In the meantime I could write for days about why I believe very little of real faith comes from the Bible. I wanted to believe something a lot simpler, whether something as simple as what Mike Huckabee believes or even as simple as what atheists believe. It turns out I can’t believe either one. Reality is more complicated. You do have to want reality instead of fantasy, a reality where God is whoever and whatever God is, whether just inside my head or beyond physical reality in a grander way than any human being has imagined. But to do that you have to be pretty flexible about who your Daddy is, not just limiting yourself to who you want Him and/or Her to be.

Some problems from having a human brain

2007-09-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

What single emotion has the greatest representation in our cerebral cortex? I believe the answer is fear. I base that on studies of epileptic foci in patients who have an emotional aura to their seizures, whether those seizures stay as simple partial seizures or progress to a more complex or generalized seizure. I learned about those studies over 20 years ago as I went through Elsevier’s multi-volume Handbook of Clinical Neurology preparing for my board exams, which I was happy to pass. In reading since then I haven’t anything as specific in neuroimaging studies, so I believe this old knowledge remains valid.

Fear is also the most common emotional aura for seizures, though if you count confusion as an emotion, you’ll see more confusion among seizure patients post-ictally than fear pre-ictally. Confusion suggests a wide area of dysfunction, though. Fear doesn’t. Many small areas of either temporal lobe can produce fear. The area that does this overlaps with a part of the temporal lobe that produces a pleasant sensation, “contentment” being the best word for it, I think. Fear extends more anteriorly. Contentment extends more posteriorly, with a lot of overlap. Still there is this duality that makes sense with the basic function of our limbic system being whether we should approach or avoid something in our environment.

Our amygdala is wired up to get our attention if there is a behaviorally significant stimulus among our sensations, but it doesn’t determine the specific reason for such attention. Whether a stimulus is something to eat, something to mate with, something to otherwise make mine or something to run away from requires much more of our brain to determine. The fear vs. contentment coming out of our temporal lobes relates to this.

Not all emotions are so localizable. Perhaps fear and contentment are this localized because they are so sensory. Emotions that are more about what action to take as well as some sensation, like anger, are less likely to correspond to a small area of cortex and less likely to be the aura of a seizure.

Still the above knowledge is so much more than the pitiful knowledge we have of the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of desires, will, imagination, and such. What do we do when we try to think of something, whether imaginary or remembered? It’s hard to say. There’s a lot of neuroscience about how the hippocampus helps to make memories, but what is the physical basis of how we experience long-term memory, including not recalling something when we try, yet it comes to us hours or days later without effort? Anyone can speculate about such things, but actual neuroscience about such aspects of our mind is scarce.

Yet we understand that we are biased. We are biased by emotions. We are biased by having taking shortcuts to thinking that are natural for us to take. We oversimplify, whether by dividing everything into two absolute qualities or by assuming that some simple model we have for a process inside us or out in the world is in fact that simple. We believe the words we use to label an event more than the many possibilities for that event that actually exist. We overgeneralize. We see the faults of others much better than we see faults on our side. We overvalue our own experiences and own beliefs compared to the possibility that others have seen something better than we have.

I understand the difficulty of being emotional. It creates new problems. It stops productive discussion of some issue in order to deal with the emotion. I’ve had occasions to want to be an emotionless automaton. Yet I think the biggest problem with human intelligence isn’t emotions. It’s these cognitive distortions where we think we know much more than we do. We all know when our emotions are tugging at our sleeves, making it hard to be rational. But we don’t know when our thoughts are even more human in their bias than our emotions. Most people speak and write as if they know what they say, yet most people I listen to and read don’t know. It’s not usually because they’re just missing some data. It’s because they’re human, and human beings can be way off in their beliefs.

It’s not just that we’re emotional. It’s not just that we have cognitive distortions. Human beings are often childish, irresponsible in their actions, irresponsible in their beliefs. People cling to their groups, no matter how bad their group might be at thinking. I have a hard time thinking of any strife today where this group bias isn’t a big factor in the strife. People’s desires do indeed conflict over how we should live. Some value selfishness more than others. But the strife over such conflict isn’t just about different desires. Biased beliefs don’t let people even get to the real conflict. The strife winds up being about beliefs, sometimes irrational on both sides.

What is the future course of such human strife? I don’t know. There are many ways that shortcomings of the human brain can be improved. Maybe we’ll be replaced by thinking machines, hopefully more benevolently than in the Matrix or Terminator movies. Maybe we’ll be improved by merging with technology, like the Borg from the later Star Trek stories. Maybe genetic engineering will improve our brains.

I don’t know if any of those are at all likely, but I know how science has helped me with these problems. My emotions sometimes make me want to take shortcuts in how I think of things. I might be willing to jump to conclusions so I can DO SOMETHING. But science has given me many examples of why it’s best to consider all possibilities. When you read about one idea being replaced by another in physics, biology or social science, it makes you consider the possibility of any first idea being wrong.

Cognitive distortions pop up easily, but examples from science have taught me how often something is a spectrum, not black and white, how often a dispute is like whether light is a wave or a particle. The right answer is both, at all times. It’s only human shortcomings that keep anyone from that understanding, even today.

Partisanship pops up even among scientists, yet watching even scientists argue for their side instead of being detached in their analysis doesn’t make me want to be partisans like them. It makes me want to be even more detached, an even better scientist. That’s where the truth is.

Maybe science isn’t enough for most people. Maybe my loyalty to the scientific way of thinking is overdone. Maybe it’s one of those three other solutions to human bias that will dominate our future. Either one of these four possibilities will take over the future or people will decide they’d rather live in strife, a fifth possibility.

I feel like making odds. Maybe I’ll get over that. After all, there’s always another possibility.

If Satan can't be redeemed, what hope is there for anyone?

2007-08-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

ABC Family finished a triology last weekend entitled Fallen. I didn't see it when it was a movie last year about a boy who is nephalim, the product of sex between an angel and a woman, the sort of unnatural activity that the Bible says provoked God to cause Noah's flood. But they replayed that along with two new two-hour episodes to take the story to its apparent conclusion. So in six hours I could watch the whole story. Then they replayed each part of that at least once, so I could watch a confusing section yet again.

Our hero in Fallen is not just any nephalim, but the most special one possible, the son of Lucifer and a woman Lucifer claimed to love, even though the plot of this story has all mothers of such children dying in childbirth, and the angels know that, so they know they are murdering women by having sex with them. Such nice boys.

So nephalim in this story are all orphans. Then on top of that they are hunted down by rather dim-witted and uncaring angels called "powers", different from what the Bible means by "powers", who believe their duty to the Creator is to kill all these nephalim and some number of innocents in their immediate vicinity.

Nephalim that can survive to the age of 18 are magically delivered from a transitional state of headaches and other distress into having supernatural powers like flying, throwing fire, and being able to make a sword or two of "angel fire" appear at will. Our hero has an additional talent. Lucifer spread an apparently accurate prophecy that this boy is the Redeemer to fallen angels. If fallen angels come to him sincerely wishing to return to heaven, this boy can lay his hands on them and redeem them, causing them fleetingly to resume the appearance of an angel and then either return to heaven or be distintegrated in a flash, an ambiguity that never is clarified.

Such a redemption is all Lucifer seems to want from his son. The script makes this difficult. Lucifer is deceptive in meeting his son, giving the impression that he is just another fallen angel at first. If there is honor among theives, isn't there genuine love among the malevolent? There isn't according to this script. Still our hero is about to redeem Lucifer even though he now fully understands that this is Lucifer, but is stopped by visions of so much evil when he puts his hands on Lucifer, images of war and the like. I'm sorry, Dad, you've just been too darn bad for me to redeem you.

Lucifer doesn't take this passively. Now he resorts to intimidation, which breaks down into both Lucifer and our hero bringing forth their swords of angel fire to do battle. A routine cinematic conflict ensues with our hero pushing Lucifer off a cliff back to the depths of hell. Happy ending.

Somewhere along the line in a story like this I wonder about the way authors take such traditional characters, ones that are only in our culture because of Christianity and change their story into something that isn't Christian at all. Jesus is mentioned briefly in Fallen, but apparently both Jesus and the Father are off on some other planet, and these angels are deciding their own fate much as humans do naturally. There isn't an outright denial of God here, but God has no role to play.

I forget about this point as I watch, knowing there's bound to be another father/son battle coming, as with Star Wars, wondering how that will play out here. Isn't it strange that in the somewhat secular Star Wars, there was redemption for the evil father at the end, but not in Fallen, which is supposedly out of a tradition that emphasizes forgiveness?

Of course in Star Wars, there was no redemption for the epitome of evil, the Emperor, though maybe a quick death is something of a redemption compared to other possibilities. Is that the issue in Fallen? If the epitome of evil is redeemed, does that make evil meaningless?

No, it means evil is temporary, which is very different from meaningless. Suffering is temporary, but it is horrible, much more horrible than people will acknowledge, because then they would be obliged to do something about it. For a very long time, humanity has wanted suffering to be the result of what people deserve. Much of the Old Testament is based on such a belief. Arguments against redemption are bound to make this point, whether it's arguing against redeeming Lucifer, a pedophile, a mass murderer, or a corrupt politician or other leader. They must be punished!

Why must they? Is the only reason people have for being good a matter of avoiding punishment? I'm sure that's true as a matter of fact for many people. It's hard for us to say why anyone is Christian, but surely many Christians accept faith out of fear of the consequences of not accepting faith. Some on the internet have even said to me directly that unless my faith is to avoid hell, my faith is meaningless, as if they know anything about that.

But what does God say? The God of the Bible says that He wants mercy, not the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament. You would think it wouldn't be hard for people to take a step beyond that and understand that God also wants love in general, not worship or any of these other artificialities that we make supposedly to honor Him. But that's hard for people. It's hard for people to understand just how much of what's traditional, anyone's tradition, is wrong.

God tells me there never was a being named Satan. Isrealites imagined an adversary to them among God's angels, whom they also imagined. With time both a backstory and stories set in the future grew, making Satan into God's greatest angel named Lucifer, the one associated with such a fundamental element as light. Who else could commit a greater sin of pride than the greatest angel?

Can the greatest sinner be redeemed? Not if sin continues, or sin would have no consequences. But if sin continues, who are any of us to escape it?

Redemption is a tricky business. I finally decided that the ambiguity regarding the redemption of the fallen angels in Fallen is a good thing. Do they really go back to heaven, or is their redemption in fact just a quick death? Who knows? Human beings face the same dilemma. Is there really an afterlife that will be a good place for us or is the best we can hope for a long, productive life with an easy death, as much of the Old Testament suggests? One can have faith about such things, but which is true faith, and which is false faith? Such uncertainty drove me to God. People can say anything they want about how their way is superior to my way. I know there's no way to know that, unless something beyond me knows and tells me.

How does that knowledge beyond me feel about redemption? How about redeeming the epitome of evil? My understanding is that if there is any redemption, it cannot be only for those who need it a little. It must be for everyone, the only requirement being that people accept the redemption. Surely the Satan of myth would be smart enough to be first in line for such a redemption. Well the idea of needing to redeem everyone doesn't preclude requiring someone like the mythical Satan to be last in line, and not cause trouble while waiting. The myths surely would make Lucifer capable of that. Yet stories of good and evil don't make evil so smart. It makes evil too evil to be smart. That's one reason evil needs redemption.

To forgive or not to forgive. The God of my understanding is not completely one-sided on this point. When everything is said and done, if He feels the need to inflict vengeance on a small set of evildoers, He will do exactly that. Maybe there will be enough love that such vengeance won't be needed. Maybe there won't be. It's hard to predict. God is flexible and can go either way.

Yet if anyone is subject to vengeance in the end, there can be redemption in that person's surrender, maybe redemption that requires some amends to be made, but still some redemption. If the worst offender is not eligible for such redemption, then how can redemption exist at all? How can the volume of one's sins matter? If God's capacity for forgiveness is so limited, who says it will be enough to extend to you? You can say the Bible says so or anything else. You're just trusting in that. You don't know.

God tells me He is optimistic. The worst evils in our world can be redeemed, but will they surrender? It's hard to say. If they're smart, they'll surrender. Then what is there for the worst evils who are too dumb to surrender? Won't God have sympathy for those who are more ignorant than evil? We'll see. Don't count on knowing the answer to that one.

However the mythological Lucifer is portrayed, he is not dumb, or the author has just changed his character. If he's not dumb, then he must know how to be redeemed and will act accordingly. I'd hope redemption is so easy that Lucifer has already managed to be redeemed. God tells me the only reason he hasn't is that Lucifer doesn't exist. But the idea exists. Somewhere among the men hated by our culture is the greatest evil who ever lived. I don't see a principle by which I can be redeemed and that greatest evil can't be. Maybe I cling to God enough to realize my redemption while someone with no interest in God wastes his, but redemption was available to us both. That's how I see it.

I wasn't expecting Fallen to think it through like that. In Fallen, the bad guys lose, and the good guys win, even the good guys who aren't all that good. We forgive them because they're good guys, just as we don't forgive the bad guys because they're bad guys. That's human nature. If human nature is all there is, there is no redemption. Those who hate who I am will always hate me. Those who love me can overlook my shortcomings, if I don't make them too obvious. That's not redemption. That just staying in character.

The God who came when I prayed, "God help me!" wasn't like that. Our relationship has changed. We both have changed. I have been redeemed from my confusion, from my having no Lord but myself, maybe much more than that. I understand Him in ways I didn't once. If the God who came to me was a bad guy, then He has been redeemed, because He is now a good guy. Either way He is significantly different from the traditional God. He is whoever and whatever God is, not what someone who doesn't know says He is, a concept I wish more people could use as a starting point for God.

There is redemption. I don't know exactly how it works. Willingness is important. How can I know more than Lucifer knows about this? I didn't think that as I watched Lucifer fall back into hell in Fallen, but it didn't take me long to think that. I ask God such things. I'm happy how that's turned out. There's a lot of redemption in life, even enough for Satan, if there were such a person. Maybe even people who insist on being left out of that redemption are not left out. I wouldn't count on that, though.

A natural/cultural/spiritual transition

2007-05-15T08:13:00.000-07:00

One of the most profound changes of our time, if not the most profound change is how we see nature. I understand someone 200 years ago thinking that nature is so complex, God simply created it all in His wisdom, even someone with the best education available. 200 years from now it may be hard for anyone to imagine seeing nature that way, when all the mechanisms of nature are so obvious and known to incredible detail. We are in between.

I've listened to so much fighting over creationism and evolution, and it's nothing more than a natural response to such a big transition. It's a clash of worldviews, not psychoses, but understandable views, even if anyone with a decent education knows that the creationist view is obsolete. I think it's important that there is an additional view that though God is understood to be not the Creator as He once was, He is still Helper, but I get tired of saying things that no one hears.

People know what they know and are ignorant and arrogant about the rest. That nature continues even as knowledge expands. I wonder how long it will take before we transition our way past that into something new? Science is good for that, for teaching us what we know well and what we don't, yet so many scientists don't seem to distinguish between what they know from science and their opinions about other things that are no better than anyone else's. It will take more than science for people to admit what they don't know. Will it be culture that teaches us that, maybe even something spiritual?

There is a garbage pile of ideas for things that can't be answered by science, such as how we should live our lives, what our minds know beyond our senses. Someday people in general may be able to see that, as opposed to now when both atheists and Bible-believing Christians insist they're right with very little understanding of where they're wrong . I hope that the transition about the nature of ideas goes better than this one about the nature of our bodies has. I suppose the odds are against that.

The mustard on the face dream

2007-05-13T12:51:00.001-07:00

I watched Christopher Hitchens this morning on CSPAN2. He’s angry at religion. He’s sick of people who want to teach his children creationism, among other grievances. So many people have their own plans to reshape our culture into their own vision of perfection. Such plans conflict, don’t they?

I gave up watching during their time for questions. There was one man in the audience who started yelling when it was his turn at the microphone. He didn’t like what Christopher Hitchens said. At least he waited his turn. Both Christopher Hitchens and a security guard encouraged him to leave. It could have been worse. Fortunately our culture has some standards of behavior, regardless of whether it’s the law or embarrassment that’s more important for policing them.

Instead of watching something else, I closed my eyes and started having dream-like symbolic images, as I often do. One was especially memorable because there was all this bright yellow. It started as a face, not necessarily my face, not necessarily someone else’s face, but a universal face. Then a plastic mustard container appears and something off screen squeezes it forcefully on the man’s face. Hmmm, the revenge of culture that everyone is trying to change? It will leave us like a man who has to be told at the end of a meal that he has mustard on his face? I’m sure some would think of a sexual analogy, but no, it wasn’t like that.

It was memorable enough that I thought about how the mustard was squirted on this man’s face. I recognize that pattern. It’s how I squirt mustard on a slice of bread for a sandwich, in an S-pattern, but with wiggling so that it covers enough of the bread. I don’t have to get a knife out to make it perfectly smooth. It wouldn’t be right if somehow I could put peanut butter on bread that unevenly. That I’d have to smooth out, but mustard? That pattern’s fine for mustard. So squirt and go.

I like the freedom of that. I have enough perfectionism in me that I could imagine getting a knife and making the mustard even all the way across the bread, but I save that for other things. I like that I don’t have to do that with mustard. There really is a lot of freedom in our culture if you think about it, especially in comparison to the past

What about the face? Well, it’s more personal than someone’s feet. A face has one’s eyes, out of which we could see this world in a much more functional way, if our society was big on that. Instead there are all these fantasies about getting rid of religion or making everyone a Christian or Republican or Democrat. It’s not that I like diversity so much. I just think there’s one reality and many people are delusional about what that reality is, especially those who get up in public and insist that they know all these other people are delusional. That people have delusions is reality as well. They are human nature. People overvalue their opinions. They don’t know how much they don’t know. They have simplistic visions of how the world could be better. They pretend cultural evolution is merely a matter of people deciding what they want. That’s not what I see cultural institutions doing over generations. To some degree they have lives of their own.

People see themselves as in charge of their future. I see something greater than we are using us for the bread in a sandwich. What is that thing? Is it God? Is it more natural forces that have shaped us through both biology and culture? I’m not sure, but I am glad to see we use the same technique with mustard. Having things in common allow for some bonding.

Taking a break from time

2007-05-06T08:13:00.000-07:00

I had a dream where many things happened in a series of public places. A funny thing was that everytime I looked at a clock it was about the same time, always a little before 1PM. One clock said it was 12:59, almost time to go back to work. Then I'd go somewhere else, and the clock said it was 12:55. Then the next clock had moved forward again, but only by a couple of minutes.

Maybe I've been watching Heroes on TV too much, wishing I could stop time like Hiro Nakomura. Then again, dreams are simply different from reality. Maybe whatever scripts my dreams had all this ground to cover in the setting of a lunch break that I don't have any more as a volunteer. So the only way to fit it all together was to have time be unrealistic. Not a problem for a dream.

Actually I don't think being unrealistic is difficult for any of us to be in real life, too. It's just that in real life the clocks keep time moving, unless they're broken. If we don't give up on external reality teaching us, we can't get too lost in fantasy. Still it's amazing how beliefs can defend people against reality being contrary to those beliefs. I'm sure that reality wins in the end.

So for me stopping time is only for my dreams or a show with really good character development. As a military tactic around Jericho? No, I don't think so. Such a thing happens in dreams and fantasy, not reality.

(For anyone interested in a long fantasy about how NASA confirmed the lost day of Joshua, and a thorough discussion debunking it, that's here: http://www.snopes.com/religion/lostday.htm)

Fixing blame

2007-04-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

One of the strange features of our society is how much people value personal responsibility, yet then spend much time blaming others for falling short of the standards of those doing the blaming. That’s not leaving responsibility to the other person, is it? No, it’s saying my standard of behavior should be everyone’s standard. It’s saying someone should be responsible for behaving as I would, not responsible according to their own understanding.

“They made me do it.” It’s easy to say, “No, you could have done something else,” if you have no sense of how those other choices would have affected that person. Was it just self-indulgence? Was it just narcissism? Or was it surrendering to something greater than he was? Most people who label Cho Seung-Hui as simply evil or something else contemptuous have no idea of the conflict within him, no idea what it was like to walk in his shoes.

I think a suitable afterlife would be for judgmental people to experience life from the perspective of those they judged. It’s probably too much trouble or beyond the power of whoever and whatever God really is, but that’s what’s missing from all these judgments one comes across in the media, blogs or real life, on all sorts of issues. Opinions are so often more about ignorance than anything else.

If only everyone carried guns

2007-04-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

Michelle Malkin and the guys at Fox News wasted little time to cluck that if students at Virginia Tech carried concealed weapons, “this tragedy could have been avoided”. Really?

Oh ye who would say anything to support your bias. Have you no memories? Have you no ability to explore your thoughts just a little? Let’s see, what state has the greatest reputation for carrying guns? I would say Texas, though I might be wrong. Immediately after thinking that, I remembered a little incident in 1966 at the University of Texas, an incident that used to be the record for killing people at a school, until today.

The Wikipedia article on Charles Whitman gives many details.

Concealed weapons do not prevent mass murder. They merely require a shift in tactics by the man determined to commit murder/suicide. These are not impulse killings. These are a premeditated expression of rage where the killer will do whatever he needs to do in order to feel some power before going out while he’s ahead. All of you creeps who never listened to him will get yours, directly or symbolically. I bet if Charles Whitman had a higher death toll in mind to exorcise his demons, he could have met that goal. You don’t have to be a genius to plan for concealed weapons if people have them. You do have to be willing to die, but that’s the idea.

Guns make people more efficient killers. More guns don’t change that. They just require a different plan to maximize one’s killing spree.

Actually not everyone does it

2007-04-16T05:29:00.000-07:00

I watched The McLaughlin Group yesterday. Pat Buchanan and Tony Blankley were defending Don Imus by attacking others. I forget whom they attacked vs. other attacks I’ve heard on this subject, but there have been at least these people whose bad behavior supposedly mitigates Imus’ guilt:

--- black rappers who use harsh words for black women and others
--- others in the media and blogosphere who are racist and sexist
--- David Brock, who is CEO of Media Matters, which first publicized Imus’ description of the Rutgers players, since in his book Blinded by the Right, Brock admitted lying not only when he was a conservative, but even when he was a student, so who is he to talk about someone else?

This came up a lot the last time Ann Coulter was in the news, how people defend their own by attacking the other side as being just as bad. Interestingly that last time with Ann Coulter also demonstrated that sometimes people criticize their own as well. I don’t expect that’s a trend.

One problem with the “everyone does it” defense is where do you go from there? Should we take all the bad people out and shoot them? Why not? How about a lesser, but uniform sanction against such bad behavior? Of course people using this defense aren’t interested in any such logical action based on their rhetoric, extreme or not. They’re just using words to defend their own and to set up some future attack on an opponent. It’s not morality. It’s just rhetoric for the sake of power.

There is a world beyond the fantasies of rhetoric. There is a surprisingly large amount of good behavior out there as opposed to those who spend a lifetime engaging in oneupsmanship by attacking their opponents while puffing up themselves and those like-minded. Does the anonymity of being behind a microphone or keyboard promote that? Is it the freedom to be as nasty as someone wants to be in that anonymity that is the biggest factor? Maybe other things are more important, such as the fantasy that anyone will make much of a difference behind that microphone or keyboard and the ego involved in that.

The morality of anyone speaks for itself. It’s complicated how one chooses to respond, but I can’t believe that many people mistake the immorality of the media and blogosphere for something good. Hatred, indifference and falseness are always evil and immoral. It may be a necessary evil, useful for flushing out a greater hatred, indifference and falseness, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time that this is as things should be.

It's been fun

2007-04-15T10:46:00.001-07:00

Both the media and the blogosphere are so strange. For some of that they are each strange in their own way. There was a lot of criticism of Markos Moulitsas this week when he essentially said “big deal” to vile threats against blogger Kathy Sierra, as part of his dismissal of a code of conduct for the internet. Judging from so many similar dismissals, some bloggers see it as essential that they use the f-word and the worst sexual putdowns they can imagine as well as posting fake photos showing violence to their enemies. Somehow this is not yet an issue with which the mainstream media struggles. They have strayed some from the fairness doctrine and from past standards of obscenity, but no one there seems to think the f-word is necessary to explore any controversy.

In some ways, though, the problems with the media and blogs are exactly the same. Partisanship guides almost everything. It’s not just liberals vs. conservatives, but many subgroups, too, for politics, religion, and other issues about life. There’s no exploring for common ground, little exploring for facts.

What is the morality of all these words? There was no morality that was going to fire Don Imus simply for what he said. If Media Matters hadn’t pointed out his racism, sexism and stupidity, would anyone have cared? It was when public outrage bled through to advertisers pulling their commercials that Don Imus was fired. So some say the public is overly moral, as if the lack of morality among the media is to be preferred. It doesn’t seem that way to me. I suppose it’s arguable. The public may not be that consistent in its morality. But one thing that’s for sure, there’s very little morality in all the partisanship that fuels both the media and the blogs. There’s demagoguery about morality, in service of partisanship, but little real morality.

Both the media and blogs keep fighting a war of words on topics where any unbiased, complete exploration of the subject leads to a simple conclusion. These things really shouldn’t be arguable from a factual point of view, but people pretend to argue facts when really they’re starting with some partisan fantasy. Only false premises cause anyone to deny certain truths.

Abortion is sometimes a good thing. Homosexuality is a natural trait. Evolution is a fact, both biological evolution and cultural evolution. Global warming is a fact. I understand that many disagree with those statements, but it’s only bias that leads anyone to disagree, unless they’re nitpicking about some more perfect way to say them. Fine, be perfect, but that doesn’t change facts. Neither does a public opinion poll. Neither do arguments that go on and on, saying the same false thing from the same false premises. What a waste.

Yet so much of the media and blogs are such a waste, and it’s not just because religious conservatives and political conservatives live in their fantasies. Some media insist that there are two sides to every issue, no matter where they have to dredge up “experts” for one side. Other media like Fox News just go with the fantasies as being some oppressed minority, even majority. Meanwhile blogs on any side go on and on, as if not repeating their arguments again and again with a contemptuous tone toward the other side means something awful will happen. Sometimes it’s apparent what the greater agenda is, such as those who defend that evolution is a fact and also insist that all religion is evil. There are plenty of resources to convince anyone with an open mind that the former is true. The latter is its own fantasy piggybacking on the fact of the former. Everyone is prone to fantasies, not just conservatives.

God is a more difficult topic. I understand that. Good people can have various views about it. Bertrand Russell was a good person. That atheism made sense to him didn’t change that. Gandhi was a good person. Some Christians are good people from any part of the spectrum of Christianity. Other Christians are judgmental ideologues who seem never to have considered that someone else’s way might be God’s way. I don’t just mean conservatives.

God is whoever and whatever God is, not what people say God is. I like that as a place to start about God, but so many people insist their own beliefs are all that matter, unless they are ridiculing those with other beliefs or demonizing them. Both the media and the blogs cater to such people. Why? It’s so repetitive.

I’m at the point of becoming repetitive. I find myself more and more referring to things I’ve already written here. I think I have in fact written everything that’s important for me to write. Unfortunately the search feature here is not the best as just the most recent page related to a search seems to pop up, not all of them. Still anyone who wants to read what I think will find it here.

I firmly believe in what I wrote on April 10, that the way to deal with sociopaths is to turn away from them. That doesn’t apply to patients or clients who are sociopaths and come to me for help. I’ll help anyone. But in my private life I only want to be with people who know what love is. I wouldn’t think it would be that hard to know what love is with so many examples of love in literature and real life, albeit together with many examples of hatred, indifference, and falseness. To know that God is love is hard. But not to know love at all? People have to choose that, I think, and I think some choose that in part by paying a lot of attention to the media and blogs. No, there’s little love here, lots of words, little love.

The hero's journey

2007-04-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed watching Joseph Campbell’s series on PBS in the eighties, The Power of Myth. There was an egalitarian quality to his idea that many people are heroes, that many people undergo transformation in their lives, which by itself is heroic. At that level of heroism, every child who grows up and every adult who has raised a child or overcome the adversity of illness or failure follows a hero’s journey. More often Campbell used “hero” to mean someone who had encountered something new in his or her journey, leading to a transformation that was unique in its details, though likely similar to the transformation of other heroes. Following this, most heroes return to their people to share their experience, like honey bees telling their sisters where to go for pollen, though Campbell mentioned the possibility of a hero never returning from his or her journey, instead staying in the bliss of their transformation as a yogi.

I don’t remember other possibilities discussed during the TV series, but I looked at the book The Powers of Myth, which is a transcript of Campbell’s conversations with Bill Moyers. There is in fact some brief dialog about another possibility, that a hero’s people cannot absorb what he or she would teach them. This might lead to some secondary teacher bringing back the hero’s experience at a later date when the people are ready for it, if that experience has been preserved. Then again, the whole thing might be forgotten. Then who would know about it? God might, but then the God of my understanding is limited in remembering.

Classical myths involve heroes traveling somewhere physically. As much as I’ve traveled in my life, everywhere I’ve gone physically has been thoroughly explored already. There are plenty of maps, pictures, and histories that could explain those places better than I can. The places I’ve gone where no one has gone before are intellectual, emotional, and spiritual. Some of those surprised me. Those are hard to explain. It’s easy to explain what doesn’t surprise anyone, but even some relatively common experiences are so hard to explain to the uninitiated, such as how beneficial Al-Anon is to someone with an alcoholic spouse or that it’s not that children are so loving, but how they draw out love we their parents didn’t know we had.

Even for those things the spiritual aspects of them are harder to get across than the biology of it. So what else is there to do but be grateful for our individual knowledge and use that in our own lives? There’s no living on a mountain top when one’s never left the physically ordinary life.

In science, old ideas regularly find new life. By about one hundred years ago several scholars had suggested that the continents on either side of the Atlantic resembled each other in shape, geology, and fossils. But geology was not ready for the idea of continental drift then. Few geologists could take seriously the idea that continents could be plowing through the dense rock of the sea floor to take up new positions. Then after World War II the crucial data was found. It wasn’t just the continents that move. Magnetometers showed a very clear pattern that the sea floors were spreading apart from mid-ocean ridges. Plate tectonics now made sense when continental drift alone hadn’t. It wasn’t rocks plowing through other rocks. It was convection in the layers of the Earth, like convection of any fluid with a crust on top.

This is what experimentalists have done many times, provided a missing piece that makes obvious what was debatable before. The discovery of cosmic background radiation in the sixties made the Big Bang obvious. Some combination of Earth history, fossils, comparative anatomy, population genetics, and molecular genetics makes evolution obvious today. Those who venerate the Bible still resist, but there’s even more evidence for evolution coming from the genetics revolution. That evolution is a fact is irresistible in the long run.

There are many heroes in science, but there’s only a particular type of knowledge that they can provide. Science tells me the facts of my world and to some extent facts about my body and my mind. There’s still that matter of how do I live. What’s most important in life? It’s not whatever feels good, or I’d be eating pizza right now instead of writing this. Does the one who lives the longest win? Does the one who lives the healthiest life win? Does the one who lives the most productive life win, be that wealth, intellectual production, or some social measure? Is it one’s peak production that matters or an entire life?

That’s how we analytical types approach the question of how we should live. What exactly does “should” mean? Heroes apart from science are not good at being so explicit. How much did they do that was their doing anyway? Are we all pawns of biology, culture, and spirituality?

From Joseph Campbell’s perspective, those questions aren’t so important. Every hero’s journey is much like another’s. All religions are true, even if the only way to make that so is to make them all metaphorical. So every founder of a religion is a hero, unveiling some metaphorical corner of the truth by wandering away from the convention of his or her time, overcoming obstacles because the only other choice is to turn back, and finally coming to see whatever is new and fulfilling in that journey, in a way that is not new to everyone, but to who this individual is and the culture from which this individual comes. To Campbell being a hero is as easy as falling out of a boat and hitting water. There are some preconditions to such an event, but they’re easily met.

It’s different for someone who believes as I do that all religions are false, including atheism. Founders of religion aren’t heroes to me. They each made their own house of cards in terms of beliefs, rituals, organizations, and leaders. The hero to me is the one who sees that and doesn’t do the same. Atheists who insist that theirs is not a religion, but just going their own way don’t qualify as such a hero from what I see. If atheism is not a religion, why is it so many atheists spend so much time working on ideas that support atheism, on places in the real world and in the blogosphere where people support each other in their atheism, and to promote leaders for atheists to follow?

Being a hero is not just about falling out of our boat of conventional wisdom and hitting water. People who climb back into the boat either with stories about how wonderful the water is or what a delusion the water is are just doing what people do, telling stories they like with little understanding of the reality involved. It certainly would be heroic for someone to fall out of the boat and walk on the water or leap to the far shore. That’s what some of these dripping wet prophets say can happen. I don’t believe them. The totality of such stories doesn’t make sense to me. I’d find the story of someone who fell out of the boat and realized he or she could swim more believable.

Now whose story is that? I haven’t found that to be anyone’s story. I admire stories of people being devoted to ending poverty or some other such service. Yet as much as I admire Mother Teresa’s story of serving the needy, she was always as devoted to Catholicism as to the poor. People are forever hanging on to some part of conventional wisdom from inside the boat as well as whatever they learn from the water.

I try to tell my own story of the water. It’s not a simple story. Sometimes the water is cold. Sometimes the water is warm. Sometimes it’s scary. Sometimes it’s comforting. The God whom I’ve met in the water is not the same God as those in the boat say He is. The God I know has limits, limits that explain why the world isn’t better than it is and why I haven’t heard the voice of God coming through so many religious leaders who claim to speak for Him. The place to start with the real God is to understand that God is whoever and whatever God is, not what people say He is. People don’t like that. They prefer to say God is just so or nothing real at all. They’d rather do that than learn how to swim.

God is not a hero. He/She just is. I am not a hero. It was circumstances more than it was my choice to go into the water, and while I did decide to let go of the side of the boat, it was the obvious choice at that point. After that one just has to endure, and whether one endures passively or aggressively is so much trial and error more than anything heroic. I wish there were a hero’s wisdom to guide me, but I’ve looked at all the candidates. They all have baggage left from having grown up in the boat. Paul wrote about the Spirit living in him and he in the Spirit, but he was stuck seeing the world through the artificial duality of clean and unclean. Jesus presumably had the same problem. I’ve been amazed at how easily God cuts through my confusion to give me a clear direction through prayer at times, but it’s always less than perfect, despite how many claim that God must be perfect.

If any of us makes it to the far shore, will we still see the boat? Will we care? Will it be, “I made it. They’ll have to figure it out for themselves.”? Is anything of religion truly coming back to us from heroes? Is anything of God a hero returning to help us? God tells me no, that’s not who He is. He is helpful, but not because He used to be one of us.

We can say we’re all heroes just for surviving childhood and whatever transformations we’ve had since, but has anyone been the ultimate hero? Anyone is free to follow whoever they think is the ultimate hero, but what if there isn’t one? What if there is only help for me to make the most of my life, not an example to follow? And that “most of my life” may be something that few see as an honor, such as helping the needy. Whether I follow the ultimate hero or a God who would make me as much a hero as He can, I follow. I would tell that to my culture more than I already have, but I’m quite sure everyone in my culture is up to their neck in ideas as it is.

Is life about being a hero, or is it just about enduring? If there’s a hero to tell us that, his or her voice doesn’t stand out well. I suspect both God and any hero would have that be different, yet that’s not enough. Maybe that’s the first step of the hero’s journey, toward optimism or away from it, towards there being somewhere to go or not. Then eventually report back. Maybe people will be ready to listen. Maybe they’ll prefer not to know or will be as sure as geologists once were that continents don’t go tearing through sea floors. Can we get partial credit on that last one?

Sociopaths are everywhere

2007-04-10T17:52:00.001-07:00

I was following links today and came across a claim by atheist Brent Rasmussen that altruism is ultimately just what some people do to feed their self-worth. I’ve encountered similar cynicism before. One can search Google with “altruism” and various other words. It’s easy to find others making a similar claim, though never with data in my experience, despite the large numbers of people who help others in need. Instead it’s always an argument based on the meaning of “selfish” to the person making the argument. I’ve written before about my high school teacher who did that many years ago.

The answer to this is not that hard to understand. People can indeed choose to be selfless. Whatever selfishness there is in making a choice doesn’t make the whole behavior selfish. The only way to deny that is to engage in black and white thinking. Maybe that’s hard for high school students to see through, but adults who do it strike me as trying to excuse their sociopathy, from my high school teacher on. That’s not because they like black and white thinking. It’s what they’re doing in denying the concept of altruism in the first place, being subversive, justifying their own selfishness as the only thing that’s real.

Of course not everyone is so honest about their sociopathy. Conservatives make many excuses why it’s OK to neglect the needy. They say the needy should help themselves. They make up simplicities about how the homeless are mostly mentally ill who choose to be homeless as they choose not to take their pills or how anyone can get a job if they just choose to. Those Bible-believing Christians who therefore should be following Matthew 25: 31-46 find that their God instead wants them to evangelize, fight against abortion or work on themselves personally. There are lots of excuses not to help the needy. My fellow liberals often find some excuses, too.

But not the people I know who help the needy. How many would I say are volunteers this way for the sake of their ego? There are none that I can tell. Yet sociopaths argue otherwise. Brent Rasmussen insisted I must be a liar for claiming there is such a thing as altruism that is an expression of love, not selfishness. There is something in me that wants to feel sorry for people who know so little of love that they claim everything in life is selfish. Yet there is something else, the anger I often feel on behalf of my clients for their suffering and on behalf of myself that just to talk about something basic like love in this world is so difficult. Some people really don’t know love exists. Some people don’t know there is a God who is love. Some people who think there is a God have no idea what love is, just rules, power, and inexplicable mystery.

There is love. There is more to life than just selfishness. I embrace that through God, but if someone can find the same thing in a different way, as Bertrand Russell did for one, I would think that’s a step in the right direction. To say no, there is only ego and selfishness, those are fighting words. That’s the enemy. That’s hatred, indifference and falseness all wrapped into one, the things that make life difficult for all of us.

I feel anger at such hurtful things, but they are too big for me. They may even be too big for God. Maybe the only reasonable way for any of us is to turn our backs on such ignorance and arrogance and embrace love and truth where it exists, not where it is absent. Everyone dies eventually. Love may die, too, or it may survive those who deny it, whether that’s complete denial or trivializing love as being something no different than chocolate. Either way I find it better to live with love than with sociopaths. Sociopaths are everywhere, but not everyone is a sociopath. Thank God.

A simple dream

2007-04-09T05:44:00.000-07:00

I was speaking to one of my daughters yesterday so naturally I had a dream as if I had roommates again as she does. In my dream one of them hadn't been paying the cable TV bill. The amount owed on the bill I saw was so large I had trouble telling if it was 5 figures or 6 figures. Yet in the dream I was perfectly accepting that this was possible. Hmm, that's too much for me to pay. I wonder how high the bill will go when no one pays it.

I remember feeling some fear about this in the dream, but as I've learned from my needy clients, if some situation is impossible, you just have to turn your thoughts to something that is possible. At least I remembered that much in my dream, even if I didn't remember my actual life or that the cable TV company shuts off service long before the bill even reaches a thousand dollars.

Dreams fascinate me. Some people pretend they understand them so well, whether they see them as messages from the unconsciousness or something even more mystical. Yet they're just guessing. Neuroscience understands the brainstem mechanisms for REM sleep somewhat, but what generates the content for dreams is such a mystery. Dreams are so mysterious scientifically some trivialize them as if they are merely dumping data from the previous day. My dreams aren't that trivial.

Dreams are so different from wakefulness. Dream-like images are incredibly detailed, like waking sensations, instead of the flashes I get from memory or willful imagination I engage in while awake. I regularly get dream-like images while awake, not often enough from my perspective, as they are almost always interesting associations to something I'm doing, as that image of a fairy tale I mentioned in that last post. Why is that so infrequent? If it's my unconscious trying to tell me something, why doesn't it just tell me, in images if it has no words? Why doesn't it tell me everything it knows in one straight story? Maybe it doesn't know that much, but it is creative.

And somehow I'm not the same person in my dreams. I accept whatever I see. Not so when I wake. On awakening my brain quickly figures out that there's no way a cable TV bill ever could get that high. Besides I pay the cable bill in real life, and it's not due for another 2 weeks in reality. There is no threat as there was in my dream. Dumb, naive dreamer. Why so dumb and creative at the same time?

I don't know, but that way of thinking is in me, and I'm sure it's in a lot of people, some while awake. Someday science will understand. For my lifetime I'd settle for people understanding just how much no one understands, but that's something like a cable TV bill of $100,000. It's beyond me to do anything about.

Transient global amnesia as an experiment in consciousness

2007-04-01T17:14:00.000-07:00

Mostly here I refer to the consciousness that neuroscience studies, sometimes called phenomenal consciousness. Toward the end I get to implications about consciousness in the sense of something beyond our biology. As I was writing this my mind was mostly on memories I have. A different sort of image popped up in my mind several times. I dismissed it each time until I realized what name I would put to it. This was not a fleeting image as a memory is, but a dream-like image, one that is startlingly clear and detailed, more so than any actual memory, even one from earlier today. It was a book cover with a drawing on it where a few people were in a medieval scene, something worthy of either The Arabian Nights or Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It was a new creation from somewhere within me or outside of me, a mimicry of book covers I have seen, but not a memory. It was exactly the same each time until I gave it words, “This is a fairy tale?” It didn’t come back after that. What I am saying here isn’t a fairy tale. It relates my professional experience. Is the concept of consciousness a fairy tale? Which part? Who says so? I have more on that later.

On my last day as a first-year neurology resident in 1982 I had to get up early to see a woman of around 60 years old in the ER. Even earlier that morning she had awoken her husband, saying she had chest pain and needed an ambulance. Shortly after he made the necessary call, she asked him what he was talking about. She didn’t have chest pain. She didn’t need an ambulance. I’m sure this latter conversation repeated many times before I made my way to see her.

When I saw her she had as dense an anterograde amnesia as one will ever see. Amnesia is nothing like it’s portrayed in the movies. Some psychiatric patients may deny knowing who they are as a dissociative symptom, but that’s never a neurological condition. With the brain, our vulnerable memories are the ones we’re making now and next most vulnerable the ones from the recent past, ones lost in the retrograde part of an amnesia. Many things can interfere with making new memories, what’s called anterograde amnesia. It’s unusual though to have a profound dysfunction of memory without any other impairment neurologically, which is what transient global amnesia is.

Everyone with this condition acts the same way, the way this woman did. When the impairment in making new memories is total, the patient will engage in conversation that recycles about every 5 minutes. The patient might say he or she just woke up, as this woman did repeatedly. Then they’ll ask what’s going on, where they are. The conversation follows a rational course. Then 5 minutes later it starts all over again as the patient has forgotten everything and believes again he or she has just awoken, because that’s what it seems like to them. Their motivations and strategies in asking questions are about the same as they were the time before, so there is a striking similarity to how the patient proceeds on each “awakening”. Fortunately this rarely lasts more than an hour or two until the patient is starting to make some memories again. Usually people have complete recovery within 24 hours. Early on though, it’s like the movie Groundhog Day, only it’s every 5 minutes instead of 24 hours that things start again, and I’m the one who remembers, not the patient.

Traditionally such a patient is said to have normal consciousness, but this only means that someone looks awake and normal. One difficulty with studying consciousness is that we do take an all or nothing approach to the meaning of that word. We are either conscious or unconscious ordinarily. We do allow a state of drowsiness when this is about the difference between being conscious and asleep, but then we speak of drowsiness as a special state of consciousness where one has not quite become fully conscious. If instead one is looking for states that are between conscious and unconscious, transient global amnesia is one, an altered state of consciousness.

It’s curious that we don’t take such patients at their word that they continuously must have just awoken because everything before just now is dark to them. Of course I saw that this person wasn’t asleep 5 minutes ago, so officially we go with that. But imagine what it’s like for the person who has no memory of the last few hours, none at all. No wonder they all talk alike, searching for a handle on how they suddenly wound up with me. Any other handle is completely different from their long-term memories of how such a present can happen. Many have seen someone suddenly materialize somewhere on Star Trek, but no one thinks of that. People go to what they know personally. We remember waking up from sleep many times, but not being transported ourselves, so we go with what we know for an explanation.

When people have permanent anterograde amnesia of this magnitude, which rarely happens from trauma or some radical epilepsy surgery once done in the past, they aren’t quite so obvious. We do have a second unconscious memory that helps us feel more comfortable without the conscious images to tell us what we’ve been doing recently. The well-studied amnesiac H.M. whose memory stopped in 1956 due to surgery was able to locate things around his house that were new since the surgery, such as where the knives and forks were in his kitchen, without remembering anything explicit about why he could do that. That is unconscious memory, similarly to motor memory of how we walk, talk, or use a tool with no thought of how, once we’ve practiced enough to know how.

Still such patients will write in journals about how it feels they just woke up or became conscious for the first time, as Susan Blackmore describes in her book Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Blackmore comments on a number of neurological syndromes that profoundly affect perception, mentioning each time that no spiritual or supernatural consciousness manages to rescue the brain from the affects of injury. So isn’t the brain all there is when it comes to what a mind is?

Most of those syndromes are about the consciousness that’s left when a brain injury takes away half the world from consciousness or one of our senses in one way, but not another. What’s left is consciousness, albeit on a different stage. What maintains it?

Mainstream neuroscience says that what maintains consciousness is something trivial. We have all these modules, perhaps 30 places where a visual map of the outside world exists in a portion of our brain, some for seeing color, some for seeing movement, some for detecting objects. Then there are modules for other senses, both senses that map the world around us and senses that map our bodies. Then there are cognitive areas, some that contain everything we know in terms of verbal symbols, in the speech areas of the left hemisphere, some that are non-verbal associations, including who I am and who and what is close to me, even essential to me. There are memories involving all these things to give us a context for the present. Cobble all those things together and boom (to mimic John Madden), we’re conscious. That’s the mainline theory of consciousness as an emergent property, a trivial expression of everything else we know to be real.

Memory may be the last piece in that puzzle. Most people have the experience that their conscious memories don’t begin until around age 3. We learn before that age, but it’s not through the event-based memory that we can replay in our minds, not what we think of as memory ordinarily. It’s through unconscious memory that we first learn anything. Then we change, unfortunately at a time when no child is able to appreciate the change, much less describe going through it. Is it a coincidence that this is the age when we see children as going from those who say, “No,” to those who say, “Why”?

Age 3 corresponds to when the hippocampus becomes fully myelinated, when it is fully mature. All neuroscientists think these two things go together. The hippocampus is the oldest mammalian structure in our cerebral cortex. It is vital to making new memories. This patient I describe turned out to be one bit of evidence for that as a research PET scanner was available that morning, so while we waited for her to recover, we did the first PET scan ever done during an episode of transient global amnesia. It showed decreased metabolism in the medial temporal lobes bilaterally, where the hippocampus is. Others would point to other evidence, but this evidence I can remember directly, through these fleeting images we have of the past called conscious memory, through which I can remember a few pieces of one day in 1982 as if they were happening now, even if most days in 1982 have left me no such memories. It may be the closest to time travel we ever get.

Our limbic system built up from these, as emotions attached to memories, as relationships between people and things in the world and me, something vital to mammals for mother-child relationships, often more than that. Toward the end of all this evolution came our symbolic abilities, so that we could not only express ourselves in words, but abstract words, even words that make no sense.

What is all this? Is the hippocampus the seat of consciousness? Mainstream neuroscience doesn’t talk that way, having been burned when Descartes said the pineal gland was the seat of the soul. The mainstream view is that memory is just one more module to consciousness, so patients with transient global amnesia are seen as fully conscious, but lacking the memory making module. The patients just don’t remember their consciousness from one moment to the next, while an observer does. At least the observer remembers from moment to moment that the patients looked conscious and rational.

Furthermore, children before age 3 seem conscious, and the maturity of the hippocampus at age 3 isn’t the final development in our consciousness. Our ability for abstract thought isn’t complete until our teens. So isn’t the hippocampus just another actor in the play?

Children before the age of 3 may not have the ability to replay entire scenes in their head or maybe what scenes they do have all fade until the hippocampus is mature. Somehow they look like they maintain a stream of consciousness without that, though not as well as an adult does with an adult’s will, desires, language, all these things that fill our mind.

For things like will and desire we have no clear anatomy as we do for conscious memory. Experiments have been done during brain surgery with awake patients where electrical signals in the brain related to a patient’s intent to push a button to change a slide projector, as instructed, are used to change the slide projector electronically before the patient can do that manually. The patients reported that what happened was that they were going to push the button, but the slide projector changed itself first. It was their will that this happened, but unless that will goes through what we’re used to as our voluntary muscles, we don’t recognize it. Scientists aren’t much better at recognizing what we do by will.

Our memories give us our models of what we think and do. Patients with transient global amnesia have a concept of self. At any moment they see a scene that makes sense to them except for how they got there. They know what objects are outside of them and what objects are them, like their hands. Memory in the sense of that sort of knowledge is intact. They have some remote memory because they used to have a functioning hippocampus, but they are making no new memories, none. So the last few hours are a blank. They must have just awoken. Only observers know they haven’t. They weren’t asleep. 5 minutes ago they were just as they are now. It’s just that some writer has been failing to move the plot along, and the patient doesn’t realize that.

Normally many things move our consciousness along. The outside world moves along at its normal pace. We keep up in terms of perception, memory, and planning what we’re going to do about what goes on around us. We may even develop our own plans out of something within us, our will and desires. Somewhere they enter our consciousness as well and turn into wordy thoughts or images of what we desire or why we are so determined.

Neuroscience soon may do better at following all that through neuroimaging than it has before now. But what there is now is the link between the hippocampus and memory, something that happened in mammals before any other expansion of cerebral cortex. It is a strange plan to the brain. There are sensory areas in the midbrain and the thalamus. In birds these are the most important areas for vision and hearing, not so in us. In us everything in cerebral cortex recreates sensory and motor areas that already exist in the brainstem, apart from new abilities like language. Why? Is it so these areas can be conscious in being linked up to the hippocampus? Is it so our consciousness can be seamless, apart from things such as how the world looks behind my head? Many of us in neuroscience equate cerebral cortex with conscious brain. That’s not quite true as many things happen in cortex that are not conscious, but nothing to my knowledge outside of cortex can be conscious. An entire section of the brain had to be built for us to be conscious, and that started with the hippocampus, with an ability to replay scenes from the past, the present being the most detailed scene we can have played. We see it as it happens, but only through our consciousness built for memories.

Consciousness could be what our brain had to create to make memories as well as it does, to create a virtual reality where we pick out useful or emotionally significant pieces to be stored as memory. Without that our minds in their current state just spin their wheels, confabulating as best they can to explain why we don’t have explicit memories of how we got here – we just woke up, yeah that makes sense. It doesn’t if the condition goes on. If the condition goes on, people learn just to accept the absence of new memories, except when they’re freely writing in a journal. When the absence is fresh, people do what we do easily with the memories we already have. They ask where their mind went. I must have been asleep.

We know so little about the details of making memories. Something is known about the electricity and chemicals involved in a normally functioning hippocampus, how there are long-term changes in the hippocampus which seem to relate to a new memory starting. Then this new memory is transferred to be stored diffusely in the cerebral cortex. At some point a memory is so mature in the rest of the brain that it will persist despite the hippocampus losing function. How long does this take? One can investigate how far back a retrograde amnesia goes in a patient with a brain injury or stroke that isn’t quite as restricted as transient global amnesia, but is close. One can test such subjects on historical events. Compared to controls, subjects perform poorly on events weeks or months before they developed amnesia. Yet for events 25 years in the past, the groups perform equally. How far back does the deficit preceding the amnesia go? According to studies by Larry Squire of UCSD, the two groups differ as far back as 15 years into the past. 15 years?!

That means the hippocampus is helping to support our memories for up to 15 years. After that they are finally permanent, some of them becoming more permanent all that time. Imagine that. My mental processes that I think of as being in the present are reaching back 15 years to provide an immediate context for me, in addition to the context that I call the distant past. Without that immediate context, I can only imagine that I just awoke. That is my only experience like this. I awake each morning, and I remember the things around me. I remember who I am. Even if I awoke in strange surroundings, things would be behaving in familiar way. Gravity would be obvious. If there were no gravity, that would be a big clue – I’ve awoken on a spaceship! I’d know that from video of astronauts I remember that video along with however that association is stored cognitively. My joining them would be something to remember, if I could.

Such elements would fill whatever this consciousness is I have, and if my hippocampus isn’t working, I’ll think exactly the same thing 5 minutes later, instead of being able to build on my recent memories as I usually do. All other memories and associations were formed when my hippocampus was working, long enough ago that they have become permanent, capable of filling my waking mind even when my hippocampus has shut down.

How does that happen? Good question. 36 years ago Karl Pribram likened such recall of memories to a hologram. If a stimulus matched a little of the memory, the brain is wired to reproduce the rest of it, having been rewired because of what the hippocampus does when the memory is formed. That continues to be how neuroscientists think a memory becomes permanent.

None of this would happen without a hippocampus. There would be unconscious memory and learning, as happens in all species, but it may be that only mammals are conscious because only mammals have this system that keeps stimuli reverberating within our brain to become this seamless ongoing virtual reality that our brain makes, and we live in. In that consciousness we have will instead of merely reacting to everything. In that consciousness we have desires that we can choose to embrace or deny depending on how we feel about the consequences of either one. It is a different world to be conscious, a world we try to re-enter if our hippocampus shuts down, just as we re-enter it from sleep, but without a functioning hippocampus this doesn’t work. We just keep waking up, waking up, and waking up, using our permanent memories to orient us and tell us what to say and do. It’s not enough for us to be ourselves.

I don’t know that there is a formal theory in neuroscience that consciousness exists so we can make better memories. Susan Blackmore argues in her books that the concept of consciousness is a delusion, which seems silly to me, a denial of the unknown more than anything. More mainstream would be to say that consciousness is just the sum of its parts. I don’t know that this will change until scientists can fully explore all those parts and say, “You know, there is something else.”

Will they have to do that in this century, in the next century, sometime? Will those who see consciousness as primary and the brain as trivial have to admit that the brain is not trivial? I myself have wondered if our mind might control the brain the way our brain control the spinal cord. An injury to the spinal cord prevents the brain from expressing itself through the corresponding limbs. Does an injury to the brain prevent the mind from expressing itself through the half of the world that no longer exists for the brain or through language that no longer exists? Is that so strange a perspective?

Of course the big dividing line is whether my consciousness extends beyond my brain or receives input from beyond my brain. I am forced to conclude that it might because of my spiritual experiences, though I’ll never have proof that these experiences are beyond my brain’s capacity to teach me or entertain me. It just seems too much to be entirely natural to me.

Consider the image I described at the beginning, a symbol for “fairy tale”. Who said that? It wasn’t a verbal part of me, or it wouldn’t have been an image. It could have been some dissenting part of me I keep locked up in some dungeon of my consciousness, but I don’t have any sense this was a dissent. I wasn’t starting to tell a fairy tale. Yet there are certainly fairly tales told about consciousness. I think Susan Blackmore is telling a fairy tale in calling the concept of consciousness delusional. I think those who say the brain is irrelevant are telling a fairy tale. From wherever that image came from I feel satisfaction at saying that, both of those, just as the image no longer needed to repeat once I realized what it was saying. I’m used to this, some Other sharing my mind. She says She is not just a different part of me. I’ve gotten used to trusting Her.

I know that I pray to God. I know that I get direction, strength, hope, and comfort from doing that, but I don’t know exactly where that comes from. Is it from inside me or outside? Some say they know. Their words don’t read to me as though they know. How far out does consciousness reach? However far it is, I am constantly surprised at how things come to me beyond mechanisms I know. People confabulate to fill in what they don’t know, as those with transient global amnesia do their best to explain the state they find themselves in. In fact one would have to be a neurologist to have transient global amnesia and guess that is the case from the inside. And then what? I would still make that guess again five minutes later if it were me. Knowledge isn’t everything. There is something more. I’ve lived as if that something is helpful. I believe it is, and I don’t find any way to cram all of that helpfulness into me.

So call it God, Spirit, whatever you want, there is something more than me in this.

The ambiguity of "deserve"

2007-03-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

Since October 2003 non-religious-right evangelical Christian Fred Clark has been writing semi-regularly on his blog slacktivist about the Left Behind novel by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. So far I’ve read all of Clark’s pages written during 2003 and since the beginning of 2006. Clark mostly writes about a specific page or two, humorously and perceptively wondering why this book was so badly written in a style that talks about action instead of portraying action, with all the characters speaking the way the authors speak, is utterly unrealistic about human behavior, and pushes a theology that is so much about, “we know the truth, and you don’t,” without much justification for such pride. It’s engaging reading, Clark’s words that is. It may be a much more enjoyable way to read Left Behind just through Clark’s quoting and discussion of it. I’m sure I’ll get to 2004 and 2005 eventually. Currently Clark is up to page 258 in this book that amazon tells me has 352 pages. I wonder if Clark is on a pace to write more pages than the book has, but not so curious for me to count them.

Gee, if the plan is to go through all 12 books on this blog, Fred may need a replacement at some point.

Clark obviously knows theology, something he demonstrates in pointing out the flaws of the authors' brand of dispensationalism. At one point Clark used a standard description of salvation by God’s grace. He said Christians don’t deserve salvation. It all comes from God, as traditional Christianity says it does. God is everything. We are nothing. Jesus did everything to save us on the cross. We can add nothing. There was a time I just accepted that. Now I doubt any absolute like this. There is so much about traditional religion that is black and white thinking, something loved by human nature, but rarely an accurate depiction of anything.

Why didn’t God prevent this suffering or that? Because He can’t or He would have. Why not? Well it’s a long discussion that begins with God being whoever and whatever God is, not the perfection we want Him to be. Instead of what seem like obvious answers to me, tradition finds excuses to make God perfect despite appearances to the contrary, rationales for why any unsettling issue is part of the great plan that God knows and we can’t. Right.

I’ve lost count of how many ways such traditionalism unravels, unless one is committed to believe the best apologetics can do. One way is in considering this idea that grace is 100% God. The basic idea is understandable. I can’t earn God’s love. Well, that makes sense. How is it love if I have to earn it? Yet only a small change in the verb makes that so different. Do I have to allow God to love me? A Calvinist would say no, but must people would make the analogy to interhuman love where of course one can reject love or accept love. A parent may always love a child despite being rejected, but the power of that love changes if it’s rejected.

What’s more my dictionary’s definition of “deserve” is to be worthy, which is in turn defined as valuable or useful. Who decides that? If God loves an octopus, doesn’t that mean there’s something about that octopus that is worth God’s love?

There are so many points in theology where a word is used as a symbol that is more restricted than the word’s general meaning. We don’t deserve God’s love in the sense that we’ve done anything to earn that love, but we do deserve God’s love in some sense as God’s love for us proves. Otherwise God loves every rock and every bit of vapor in the universe, and theology is very far off the truth of God’s love.

Do you love me for who I am or for what I’ve done? I understand answering that as just the former, but to say the answer is neither is a very different thing. And what’s so wrong about saying, “Both”? It’s not like I can take back what I’ve done. Love grounded in what I’ve done doesn’t have to be conditional on it.

I helped people in my career and now in my volunteer work. Did I love all of my patients and clients? In some sense yes, but that was sometimes a very distant love that let me care for all of them, even when I didn’t like who they were and felt nothing positive about anything they had done except having come to me for help. My caring for them was more about me than them, but even then it wasn’t entirely about me. If these people were hamsters, I wouldn’t have done much for them.

One can say that God’s love is so much more than that, deity that He is. How? It must matter that people are human beings, not squirrels, not that rats with puffy tails aren’t cute, but our brains let us conceive of God and come to Him, even if everyone misunderstands that. I can’t imagine that God’s love is any different than what came through me as a professional, except that this is a minimum for what God’s love is. Why shouldn’t God’s love be more for those who do what pleases Him?

OK, so God is like a parent who doesn’t play favorites. He loves the prodigal son the same as the son who has stayed with Him, and God’s joy at the return of the prodigal confirms that instead of being a slight to the son who stayed, except in the inferior mind of that son. I understand this as a parent. I don’t allow favoritism exceeding say 20% toward one daughter than the other, not always the same one. They can each play me for more love if they want, for a greater expression of the love that is theirs whether they ask for it or not, but it all works out close enough to even.

Yet I never would say my daughters don’t deserve my love. Who they are to me deserves my love, even if they don’t understand that. I made them. Perhaps God doesn’t say that about us biologically, but He still may have made us spiritually, becoming the first element in the love between God and us, building on our need for love that perhaps biological evolution gives us. That’s more complicated than the Creator Father, but many things are more complicated than ancient simplicities.

I have a history of love with my daughters, much of which I’m sure they don’t remember, including those times when they were merely dependent on me, not capable of any selflessness in that, even though people often call just childish dependency love. My daughters brought out my love for them not because their looking toward me was loving, but because it was so needy, and they were who they were to me. That made them deserve my love.

So many people who recognize our not deserving God’s love as proper theology act and speak otherwise. The authors of Left Behind do that. Fred Clark comments on this a lot, how the heroes of Left Behind focus on their own selfish desire to be saved, then force a few others of their choosing to be saved. Not only do the authors believe one is saved by surrendering to some magic words and magic beliefs, the whole concept of the book is about those who deserved the Rapture vs. those who didn’t, and those who will be on board for the next bus to heaven vs. those who won’t. Meanwhile Jesus of the gospels taught that salvation was about giving up everything and following Him.

I wish theologians would allow that we deserve God’s love, or He wouldn’t love us. We can’t earn God’s love. We can’t force Him to love us. But we are not such scum to God that He will not love us, even those of us who come as close as they can to that. Still we have to be open to God’s love as any human being has to be open to be loved by another human being. And we can work at our relationship with God, to find love within us for Him, to deepen what we get from God, to increase the expression of love between us both ways.

I don’t know if it’s missing out on that process of building up love that is most responsible for people failing to live their lives to end poverty and/or live their lives to end strife. Whatever it is, something tells evangelicals that it doesn’t matter what they do, except when it does. The authors of Left Behind see accepting God’s grace as a one-time deal, and those who get in on the first phase get a better deal. Do they deserve that better deal? Their words would say no, but everything else would say yes, we believed the right way when you didn’t.

I admit it. In coming to believe that God is whoever and whatever God is, I believe that my beliefs are superior to anyone who has settled on one specific theology, a theology that is merely one possibility out of countless possibilities. But people with such a theology believe they are right, because God Himself revealed their theology to someone, because someone who thought through their theology was so enlightened, or because reason shows their theology or anti-theology to be flawless or at least the best bet. I’ve explored all the major theologies. They are artificial and not to be trusted. So I think the superior way is not to trust them.

Does that make me more deserving of God? Yes and no. In coming to God directly for help with what is true, I find I get more attention from God, deservedly so. But am I doing something anyone else can’t? Not to my knowledge, I’m not. And if God were not inclined to love me, could I demand that He love me? No, I have no sense that I deserve God’s love in that sense. There’s no getting around that “deserve” is an ambiguous word.

Theologies are ambiguous, in part because they use words like “deserve”. God is ambiguous. I suppose neither can be helped. What can be helped is deciding where I am and who I am in this fog, only it didn’t work well for me to do that on my own. I needed help. I prayed for help, as I was taught to do. I got help. Then I did better. That’s not so ambiguous.

Getting nature exactly backwards

2007-03-29T20:27:00.001-07:00

In his work Optica, Euclid developed Plato’s ideas about vision into a mathematical model. That model is useful to understanding perspective despite that its understanding of vision is exactly backwards. Both Plato and Euclid believed that vision comes from something leaving our eyes and perceiving objects out in the world.

I think of this sometimes when I’m out looking at some scene in nature. It seems more natural to think that I am reaching out to see my surroundings. My focus of attention seems to bring some things into more detail. It seems that I’m actively looking while the scene is passive.

Yet at this point in the scientific revolution there is no question that what is actually happening is that photons are flying at me from everything I see, from the smallest leaf on a tree to the smallest detail on a distant mountain. No only that, but there are many more photons I don’t see, all the ones that are flying around in different directions from the one very narrow range of directions that will enter my eye. As long as the sun is above the horizon, these photons keep this up. It doesn’t matter whether someone is looking or not. It’s interesting that people ponder whether a tree falling makes a sound if no one is listening, but not whether the sky is blue is no one is looking. Do we think vision is more real?

Besides how wrong our instinct is about how we see, thinking about this reminds me how much there is I’m not seeing. Forget about all those parts of the EM spectrum I can’t detect, from radio waves to x-rays. Just in the visible part of the spectrum, there are so many photons bouncing off the distant mountains that make them just as bright in every other direction as well as mine. If I could see all of them, the mountains would be much brighter, and in 3-D, too. But I only see the light I’m used to, the mountains I’m used to, not what they really are, despite my bias that my everyday perception of them is what they really are.

Just in those paragraphs there are connections to getting other things backwards. It’s actually the horizon that moves up, not the sun that moves down. Then there’s the issue that Plato thought there was an ideal reality for which the world of our senses is merely shadows. Despite Plato’s low expectations for this world, science has found an order to our world that many find stunning in its simplicity and comprehensiveness, one that is indeed perfect or nearly so, at least for those things we understand such as our molecular makeup and how electromagnetism is involved in that.

Some understanding doesn’t suffer from getting vision backwards or thinking the sun orbits the Earth. The rules of perspective don’t depend on which way sightlines are going. The tides are as predictable whether one understand the true relationship of the Earth, moon, and sun or not. But when it comes to looking for a fundamental reality, is that in this world or in some other place where Platonic ideals reside?

What is the true nature of those mountains I see everyday? Those who still believe Plato would have that true nature be in some perfect world, a world I think only intellect could love, except it does conveniently support the idea that there is a perfect God in contrast to our imperfect world. That idea continues to be part of many Christian theologies as it has been from the beginning.

In recent centuries, though, science has been demonstrating something. Modern optics lets anyone realize the above understanding that a mountain is lit up in many directions and how that relates to its 3-D structure and reflectivity of its surface. Satellites provide perspectives beyond anything I imagined standing on the ground. Geology shows not only the rocks that make up the mountain and erosion patterns, but now can show the mountain’s place in a much larger story of plate tectonics, how it is that ocean sediments can become the highest peaks in the world.

Plato can’t compete with that. And there are so many places in life where science now has built up an understanding far beyond what ancient people knew, such as with the biochemical and physiological basis of life and death. There is no need for Platonic ideals in understanding that.

Still some people hold out for Plato and tradition. My greatest wish for the intellectual discussions about this would be for people to seriously consider the possibility that Plato had the fundamental idea of a perfect world beyond our imperfect Earth exactly backwards. People have their own reasons for wanting God to be perfect and unchanging, more than just conservative Christians. What about the other possibilities?

What if the physical world is perfectly real, and the spiritual world adapts to that, whether that’s a more traditional God having only real materials and real human beings to work with, not some idealized “essence” of them, or a Spirit that is much less controlling than the traditional God, but is also quite used to dealing with the physical reality that is, not some master plan.

Did God really change from a tribal warlord to a more universal agent of love? Those who follow Plato must say no. God has always been perfect. We just see different sides to Him in different contexts. Again that’s not just conservative Christians saying that. I myself suspect that change is more about the people involved putting so much of themselves into their images of God than a change in God, but who knows? Maybe it isn’t all a communication problem between us imperfect humans and a perfect God. Maybe God has learned a great deal from watching us, and has changed His agenda.

Unfortunately there’s no science to open anyone’s minds when it comes to whoever and whatever God is. Some put God into the same universe we’re in, in everyone and everything. I don’t experience God that way. I think atheist scientists have it right when they say they find no need for God to understand our world and our life. Maybe even consciousness actually will be understood someday in a purely material way.

But I’ve experienced God, and He didn’t seem physical. He seemed both mental and beyond anything I could dream up, different from what I would have dreamed up if it had been truly up to me. Whatever explains that, it’s a real experience, though one I find easier to understand as the spiritual side of reality than the physical side that is my brain. That’s always where I start in thinking about God, from the God I’ve experienced. So many people start at the other end, from some Platonic ideal, wherever that resides. I think that’s exactly backwards. There’s precedence for that being the case.

Grandmother cells

2007-03-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

I was watching UCSD-TV last night, a presentation from last year by Christof Koch of Cal Tech, with his pink hair, matching tie, German accent, and occasional inability to find the obvious word in English. It didn’t remind me at all of Mike Myers playing “Dieter”, no. It was interesting to watch him demonstrate a phenomenon I’ve seen before where someone was fluent in scientific jargon in English, but got stuck on describing ordinary things in English. Science is indeed its own culture, a global one at that.

Koch described experiments involving the placement of depth electrodes into the temporal lobes of epilepsy patients at UCLA, in order to plan surgery to best cut out their seizures. Researchers used the opportunity to record from single cells in the amygdala or hippocampus. They found cells that responded to many different pictures of particular famous people, such as Bill Clinton, Halle Berry, or Jennifer Anniston, or famous places, such as the Sydney Opera House. A cell they found that was excited by Bill Clinton didn’t care if Hillary was in the picture or not. Another cell that fired away with a picture of Jennifer Anniston was silent when Brad Pitt was in the picture with Jennifer (This was from a couple of years ago). A cell that fired away at various pictures of Halle Berry, including one as Catwoman, was silent to another woman as Catwoman.

I discovered that John Horgan, a much better writer than I am, wrote about this at the time, so I’ll leave the rest to him, except for my memory of how this wasn’t supposed to be the way the brain works. When I was in neuroscience, the smart guys said it would be too limiting to have a single cell stand for something as specific as one’s grandmother. It might sit idle for years. How would it be able to recognize grandmother in every context in which she might appear or as she grew older? They thought it more likely that the brain extracts features from a scene and makes judgments about those features in a broad, cooperative effort, one’s grandmother being recognized by many associations to specific features, using cells that could recognize many people that way.

Horace Barlow (Barlow, H.B. 1972 "Single Units and Sensation: A Neuron Doctrine for Perceptual Psychology?", Perception 1, 371-394.) wrote the first publication I know that tagged this problem as being a matter of grandmother cells. His idea was that one would have to show not only that a cell is selectively activated by one person’s image, but that stimulating that cell brings that person’s image to consciousness. Researchers have yet to report on that second part.

Then there’s the question of how are all these cells organized in the temporal lobe. What are they mapping? The amygdala is about signaling us that there is an emotionally significant stimulus around, something to eat, someone to have sex with, or something to run away from. Does it really contain cells corresponding to everyone we know or are these results about archetypes of men and women we’d have sex with, spend time with, or want to be like? Or places we’d like to visit like the Sydney Opera House? How long a wish list like this might we have in our temporal lobes and how specific does it get?

Neuroscience will remain limited by how clever we can be at challenging the brain with a stimulus and then recording a reliable response. People keep pushing ahead with both of those, though. I expect that the most predictable outcome of this is that there will be something to surprise anyone.

Selflessness

2007-03-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

When I was a senior in high school I had a Humanities teacher who decided to have some fun with us one day by arguing that there is no such thing as selflessness. Everything we do is selfish in some way, unless we’re a slave or a prisoner. For those of us who are free, we’re always doing what we choose to do. Therefore what we do is always selfish, no matter how noble it might be.

Most of the students felt there was something wrong with that, but no one did well saying why. That bastard didn’t let us off the hook by showing us how to defeat his argument. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe he actually believed it. Teachers can be so subversive.

It wouldn’t be hard for me to defeat this idea today. I spent a career helping people. I still help people in my retirement as a volunteer, something I started when my time was still valued in money. It’s true that there always has been something for me in that, but often that is much less than what I give up, what I endure, even what I suffer sometimes for the sake of others.

Then I’m also better able to recognize a logical fallacy now than I was in high school. Ah, once again here is the old problem of black and white thinking! This time is the version of that which says things can have only one reason or only one thing can be going on at a time. No, selflessness can coexist with some selfishness. It’s true of sex, of friendship, of many things everyone experiences, even if many of us limit our selflessness to a few select friends and family. Selflessness doesn’t have to be absolute.

I would have acted much differently in my career as a physician if it had been all for me. I’d have spent more time doing the most lucrative thing I did, being an expert for lawyers. I’d even gone on and be something more lucrative, being a whore for lawyers, saying whatever the highest bidder wanted said. Of course there was something selfish in my not doing that to my self-image, but not being a whore left me time and the inclination to be selfless in some ways. Someone has to try quite hard to be nothing but selfish in one’s life.

Only someone with little experience at selflessness would believe our self-preservation or self-sufficiency negates being selfless at the same time. Experience is the only way I learned that I can choose to be selfless for reasons that aren’t entirely selfish. I didn’t start off to be selfless for anyone. I grew up in an angry home where everyone needed to watch what they did and said for their own sake. That doesn’t teach someone to do anything extra. I was going to be a researcher because I loved the orderliness and beauty of science, the way it transformed the world into something more intimate, and because I was good at learning science. I wasn’t good at research, though. I had trouble making equipment work right. I’d wander into some dead end and stayed with it instead of moving on to something productive.

So if I’d stayed in physics, maybe I would have been a theoretician. I got the highest grade in the class in some courses where math was key. But I tired of physics. For one thing there aren’t many women in it. So I already had shifted into biomedical research, then medical school. That gave me a different alternative to not being good at research. I could help people. Unexpectedly I was good at that. In turns out that growing up in an abusive home can train someone to read other people well. People who know they need help are even easier to read than people who lie about themselves in big ways. There is this threshold where people give up being self-sufficient and only tell little lies. They open up, hoping someone will in fact help them, even somewhat magically.

Today when I help needy people, I know the one thing I do that alleviates suffering the most is to act in a way that helps people with their anxiety and shame about being needy. That’s often worse than someone’s material deficiencies. No magic is needed to help anxiety and shame, just knowledge about how there’s almost always something to do that helps someone’s fears and an attitude that there’s nothing real about shame. Everyone fails. How easily someone fails or how deeply that person fails rarely relates to our society’s myths about that, that people who work hard do well, that people who are talented do well, that good people do well. Life has ways of chewing up almost anyone. People are lucky if they avoid unemployment, substance abuse, mental or physical illness, family strife, legal problems, and being a victim of crime or natural disaster, even if they don’t know how lucky they are. Many of my clients today have more than one problem from that list. They all feel some shame. They don’t need to.

I didn’t know that in my twenties. Only a few people feel shame about being ill. People generally don’t believe that disease comes from sin any more. So few people I helped in my twenties had shame. They had anxiety. They needed someone to tell them how they didn’t need to be afraid. So I usually could do that. Why did I? I seemed to be good at it, so that was good for my self-image. But there was always something else. It feels good in me when someone else relaxes. I’ve trusted that feeling a lot more than verbal expressions of gratitude, some of which are not credible. I’m glad that most people express gratitude rather than not, but it’s seeing someone be better from something I did, even just temporarily, that was so seductive in teaching me selflessness.

Now it’s easy to say that’s something selfish in me, that it’s a matter of my pride in being able to do something that helps people. It was at first, but then I knew quite well that I had some talent for this. The next thousand people I helped after that weren’t necessary for me to reassure myself of my talent. So then there is this vicarious joy in seeing someone else feel better. Is that selfish? One might say so. I’d have a lot harder time helping people if it made me feel disgust each time. Yet I could get a similar joy much more easily in other ways. There are so many other experiences where I don’t have to work at all to get a similar joy, such as eating, listening to music, or watching TV. Those truly are selfish. No one else feels anything with my doing those things. I may even feel good in sympathy with a TV character that doesn’t exist. There’s some waste in that.

It’s different to feel joy in sympathy with a real person, even if that person just moves on from one suffering I can help to another where I’m impotent. Now that I’m a volunteer, the selflessness is clearer, not just because I’m not being paid, but because the burden on me is clearer than it once was. The needy are not easy to help. There’s little money in it. If there were there wouldn’t be so many needy. Some with illnesses suffer more than my average client, but there are many resources for someone with the right health insurance. To some degree all my clients on are their own. They can get limited help, but no one cares for them the way a physician is responsible for a patient.

Intellectually I can write for a very long time about the value of helping people, yet that’s not why I do it. That’s an excuse that makes me more comfortable about surrendering to the real reason. It’s like when I read Bertrand Russell in my youth reasoning his way toward saying the ultimate good things are benevolence and knowledge. He would have said “love and truth” like many religions say, but he was emphasizing that love needs to be an active love and truth needs to be practical. I agreed with him. It’s comforting to see someone write what I want to hear.

I want to be doing the right thing, for myself as well as for whatever there is greater than me. I don’t have to do that. I could rebel against my conscience. I can use slogans and theories to excuse myself from my conscience, but in me my conscience is too compelling for me to do that or maybe my self is too weak to resist. My conscience is like my body. It’s something attached to me, but it’s not me. I know it’s some combination of biology, culture and God. Others would make that simpler, but I’ve read what people say about this from many directions, and they’re all narrowed-minded on the subject, trying to be an advocate of atheism or a theism that has God alone doing everything. It’s more than any such oversimplification.

I don’t help people because of the vicarious joy that tells me when I’ve done something to help them, no matter how small or transient that help might be. That’s far too little to keep me at it. I help because I wandered into a life of helping people, and my conscience kept me at that more than I would have without it. I can write about surrendering to my conscience, first little by little, then in a big way. I can write about that as surrendering to God, and it’s the same story. Whoever and whatever God is, it’s the same story, even if God is more than my conscience, as I suspect, and my conscience is more than just God’s creation, as I also suspect.

There are several things about helping people that are giving up part of me. It’s nothing new. Matthew 25: 31-46 is a compelling direction about helping people, even if many Bible-believing Christians ignore it. They ignore God in the process. At the same time to give up to my conscience and/or to God helps me. I wish differing views of religion didn’t obscure that so much. So many people want to say that they run their lives rationally, not some conscience of mysterious origin or our rebellion against that conscience. It’s not true. I’ve yet to see any human being who is purely rational.

So whom do we trust? I’ve trusted myself at times. I don’t think I’m that good at running my life. That’s what drove me to prayer in my thirties. There is something greater than me. I at least have a conscience as an expression of that greatness, maybe some communication that is more spiritual as well. I don’t see how to utilize either fully without selflessness. It’s tricky to learn to give up control of oneself. There are people masquerading as something greater who aren’t that at all. It takes time. For one thing there is an element of reinventing the wheel in this as our cultural role models aren’t very good at balancing selflessness and what I need to be healthy.

There is such a thing as selflessness, and it’s a very good thing. Give me that high school teacher back to be my student for a year, and maybe I could teach him that despite all his cynicism. What an afterlife that would be, but if God wanted me to do that, I’d trust Him. I’ve learned to trust Him for deciding what is worth doing.

The most challenging aspect of mystical experiences

2007-03-19T18:46:00.000-07:00

The 10-year anniversary of the Heaven’s Gate suicides is a few days from now. It’s the sort of thing people think of when they read about someone hearing from God. There are so many cults. There are stories like those of Jim Jones and David Koresh, where there were signs of disaster very early on in their egomania. There are more functional cults like Scientology. Will they be mainstream religion in 100 years? Even with the most established religions, weren’t there plenty of people calling their founders nuts at the time?

Yes, and with good reason. I’m sure many such founders were nuts. Maybe you have to be nuts to found a religion. Otherwise people would see through it. But the successful religions had people to make whatever craziness there was into something that could endure. Cults where everyone kills themselves aren’t going to be able compete in the cultural evolution of religion. Even circumcision was a significant obstacle, one no doubt done away with for Christians both from a sense of what is good marketing and reasoning about why people should be free from rules, sometimes. Someone who can manage that is not entirely crazy.

People who express fear about mystical experiences turning into suicide remind me of people being afraid of someone losing all their money in the stock market, being afraid of a policeman being killed on the job, being afraid of a chute not opening if they go skydiving. Actually I’m afraid of that last one. It may be less than one chance in a million, but since I lack any desire to go skydiving, that’s enough of an excuse for me. I’m afraid of heights as it is.

For all those sorts of fears there’s the same answer. There are rational, prudent things anyone can do to try to avoid the dangers that have been demonstrated through the misfortune of others. I’m not sure why so many people were taken in by Marshall Applewhite claiming to be the new Jesus, but disagreeing with him would not be hard for most of us.

So the fact that many people having mystical experiences are crazy isn’t what I think is a great challenge. It’s not essential for those having mystical experiences to leave their rational side behind. That first big experience of mine I had no skepticism for four hours, but then it came back. It hasn’t gone away again completely. If we’re otherwise healthy, we can integrate experiences of things that aren’t physical into everything else we are, emotion, experience, reason. Some people have trouble with that, but people also have trouble with their semi-rational thought being filled with logical fallacies. That doesn’t negate the fact that there is such a thing as good reasoning. You have to learn how your own experience fits with those of others, whether that’s mystical experience, emotional experience or intellectual experience. Otherwise you start from biology alone, and human beings have not accomplished much that way.

Bad mysticism is like junk science. Someone can beat up on all mysticism because of the former. Someone can beat up on all science because of the latter. Neither means much. It can be difficult to explain the difference to someone who knows nothing of healthy mysticism or the beauty and strength of a large, replicated, randomized, double-blind controlled study, but one can learn from experts about either.

Instead, I see the greatest challenge in mystical experiences as how one can take them seriously when different people meet different Gods through them. There were many experts on Christian mysticism until the scientific revolution came along and questioned who and what God really is, unless there is some strange metaphysics that makes science an illusion. Religion in general has not adapted well to that. Some liberals try to follow a God compatible with science, as I do, but there are almost as many Gods that way as there are liberals. Traditionalists deny the problem. New Age believers create an entirely new set of beliefs that conflict with science, as if it escapes the problem of the scientific revolution to fantasize about where science is headed.

I’ve mentioned Neal Donald Walsch here a few times before. I’ve mentioned other New Age writers, writers of Eastern mysticism and traditional Christians who quote God directly, as well, all of whom describe a God who is not the God I know. Sometimes the God I know knows more about science that theirs knows, knows better than to say there’s only one reason for something, has different priorities than theirs, has needs to be loved that others don’t know about at all. It’s suspicious that this is mostly what I know personally that these other people don’t. Is God just about me?

Consider a being named Kryon that author Lee Carroll channels. Here is a speech Kryon gave at the UN last year – well, actually it was at the library auditorium for a New Age group, but doesn’t it sound like sci-fi where the alien representative comes to the UN to address the people of Earth? I can translate some words that came out of Lee Carroll’s mouth into different words I use. Carroll speaks of “the angelic realm” as other New Age believers do. Since I don’t know there are angels I might say “the spiritual side of reality” or “the non-physical side of reality”, which mean the same to me.

Carroll uses the word “vibration” a few times, which I can’t read as the physical meaning of that word but a metaphor about someone influencing someone else, knowingly or not. I can almost hear a similar metaphor for the way Carroll uses “energy” as many New Age believers do, a word meaning some sort of power sometimes, but virtually meaningless other times.

No matter how much I try to translate Carroll’s words and concepts into mine, though, he says things about God I don’t believe at all. He says God can predict the future. I haven’t found that to be the case, apart from what God plans to do Himself. The future hasn’t happened yet, which Kryon actually agrees with. His prophecies are of a potential future, but still closer to an omniscient God than the God I know.

Yet beyond points like that, this is a simple message that Lee Carroll delivers for his alter ego. It’s simply about hope, about the Illuminati providing money to cure AIDS, about economic growth in Africa similar to that in China, about Hamas acting less like terrorists, and that 2012 will bring an end to war instead of the catastrophe others are predicting.

Is this enough hope to be God? Do the details not matter? God tells me the details do matter. It does matter whether hope is true hope or false hope, even if false hope is better for us than no hope at all, as Karl Menninger believed. But is this the only part of God that can get through to Lee Carroll, some sense of hope that turns into all these New Age ways of saying it? God tells me He doesn’t know. Lee Carroll feels hope because his biology favors hope, his culture favors hope, and/or God favors hope. There’s no meter in our brain or our consciousness to tell the difference.

I am sufficiently rational that I would like to document a reason for my hope better than Lee Carroll does, even it were the God I know that tells me to be hopeful. I’d like to have some reasons that there likely won’t be economic or ecological problems in our future to overturn our gradual progress technologically and growing understanding that people are the same everywhere. I don’t think I can find convincing ones, or I might be writing about that today.

So what does it mean that someone else doesn’t do that? One thing it means is that I’m not convinced by Kryon’s speech. Another thing it means is that human nature is more intuitive than what the culture of science has taught me. And if people say that intuition comes to them from God, does it? I doubt it. The God I know knows science as well as I do and values its reliability.

So is there another arm to God that wants this New Age group to receive hope Kryon’s way? That’s what I don’t know. My God says no, that’s not what He wants. Such hope has no staying power. There is no God that would settle for this.

In the end, there are things I cannot know. I know I have mystical experiences that eventually became God speaking to me in brief responses to issues as in these recent paragraphs. I’ve asked Him for a straight story of everything about the world, about life, and about me, but that’s beyond Him, as it would be for Him to suddenly become flesh. Do I know who and what that is? No I don’t. I just know the God I know is consistent, loving, speaks in my words and concepts, lacks the ability to give me facts I don’t already know, and has a capacity for cutting to the heart of an issue I don’t understand at all. That is just one way I experience the Spirit. She never will want me to commit suicide or do anything risky. If some other voice ever says the opposite, it won’t fool me, not after this much time. She agrees with me about how few human beings can be trusted, spirits, too. Is She just me? Maybe, but the really interesting answer would be if She is not me, not my brain, not my dream, but something yet to be understood.

In the meantime I need to make sure that I do the best I can to integrate my mystical experiences with the rest of me. I would suggest Lee Carroll do the same thing. Why does his God have to ramble so? We humans do that, but shouldn’t God be better? I don’t expect him to listen or anyone else. I listen to myself and to God. It is suspicious that we don’t all get the same message from one God, but it’s still worth exploring.

Simon bar Kokhba

2007-03-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

In my youth I read Jews, God, and History by Max I. Dimont. A section of that book is about Simon bar Kokhba, leader of the second century Jewish revolt against Rome, 132 – 135 CE. Bar Kokhba, meaning “son of a star”, was proclaimed to be Messiah by respected Rabbi Akiva. That led to Akiva being tortured to death by the Romans. A brutal war ended with the defeat and death of bar Kokhba. This being at least the third major revolt in 70 years, the Romans dispersed the Jews from Judea and even changed the name Judea to Syria Palaestina. It has been Palestine to some ever since.

It certainly seemed that bar Kokhba had more support for being Messiah than Jesus did when Jesus was alive. Dimont’s book portrays bar Kokhba as very much the hero. Another side of this man came out when letters were discovered from bar Kokhba to his followers in the sixties. The letters speak to punishment and reproach. They are short, so there’s not much to go on to know exactly what the personality of bar Kokhba was, but you know, he might not have been a nice guy, this Messiah. Histories already had described a harshness to the man, such as this, “Christian author Justin Martyr tells that Simon commanded Christians 'to be lead away to terrible punishment,' unless they denied Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah and cursed the man from Nazareth (First Apology 31.6).”

Was Jesus really a nice guy despite facing the same messianic challenge? The gospels say He was, except when He was angry, which turned His words harsh as in John 8: 44 or turned His actions violent as in turning over tables in the temple. The latter always struck me as enough to get someone crucified. Of course the gospels were written at least 40 years after the fact. How sanitized were they? Who was the real Jesus?

It’s impossible to know. Bar Kokhba was indeed the military leader people expected the Messiah to be. So of course he barked out orders and expected to be obeyed, son of a star and prince of Israel that he was, or the disobedient would be punished. It’s hard for me to picture him as a nice guy even when he wasn’t barking out orders, though. Jesus was a different sort of Messiah. How much different?

It’s always interested me that my fellow liberals mostly accept the same source for who Jesus was as conservative Christians do, the gospels. Some point out how different from this the historical Jesus might have been. I forget which one of John Dominic Crossan’s books I read that lists the very many ways the “real” Jesus has been portrayed, from illiterate to a well-trained Pharisee, from political to apolitical, from humanitarian to someone quite separate from people, from impoverished to middle class. What was His true cultural context, anyway?

Then there’s the issue of how crazy was He? Of course no one would follow a floridly psychotic man, but a lesser degree of lunatic might be just what God needed, to have followers as Jim Jones or David Koresh did, though not with such selfish intent. I would guess Jesus was at least as crazy as bar Kokhba. Something commanding had to well up within Him to attack the temple and get Himself crucified.

This came to me today as a result of Rob Knop’s follow-up post of why he is a Christian. Rob thinks Jesus was a cool dude. Now I suspect no one in first century Judea was a cool dude, but Rob goes on for a few paragraphs to specify his admiration for Jesus, why he has no problem with Jesus as leader of his religion, even God incarnate, whatever that means. Rationally minded people feel the need to give rational reasons.

I might give rational reasons for following Jesus myself in some other setting. I certainly admire things about Jesus. I admire His saying, “Not my will, but Yours” during His last night before His death. Whether that was the real Jesus or the character Jesus, I admire it.

But there are no intellectual reasons sufficient for me to follow Jesus. He might have been just as distasteful to me in person as it seems bar Kokhba would have been. Apart from the Spirit I wouldn’t be a Christian. Apart from that road-to-Damascus experience 18 years ago and its confirmation in many experiences since then, I wouldn’t believe in a personal God. I wouldn’t believe there is very likely a non-physical side to reality, even though I can’t prove that. But I became convinced, and a couple years after my first experience, the Holy Spirit led me to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t crazy either. It was experiential.

Imagine trying to explain that on ScienceBlogs, and how that does not require me to compromise my beliefs in mainstream science. The non-physical side to reality is not about science. I try to be empirical about it, but it is a more personal and subjective empiricism than science is.

I am a liberal Christian. The Bible reads to me as if it was written by men, not by God. While my basic belief is that God is whoever and whatever God is, Jesus as well, I doubt the virgin birth. I think Jesus was biologically like anyone else. I doubt a flesh and bone resurrection. If God had such power over biology for either of those events, I think we’d see Him using it a lot more today, if only in smaller ways.

So I am not traditional, but I am very mystical, and some rationally minded liberals would reject me for that just as much as atheists and fundamentalists would even without being clear on the concept of liberal Christianity.

Everyone has their stories, atheists why they’re atheists, Bible-believing Christians why they rely on the Bible, Rob Knop on why Jesus was a cool dude. For each one I think of how they could be wrong, as I almost always do reading politics or religion. Partisans don’t see the possibility of being wrong. They were blinders in some sense. Their mission is to speak for their cause, not see the weaknesses in it.

This is what people do. It’s full of lies. What if Jesus really was just like Simon bar Kokhba? Then He is still my Lord and Savior as the Spirit has led me. What if the culture said Simon bar Kokhba should be my Lord and my Savior? A visceral revulsion grew in me as I wrote that. So many atheists say that’s a meaningless emotion, that one can only trust reason to make such judgments. Anyone who says that does not have the Spirit within him or her. Spirituality is not mere emotion. It involves the integration of everything we are, both emotions and reason, and even then there seems to be more, more that lets me go into a prayer confused and let God reorder my priorities, very quickly coming to a direction that I can't manage just sitting and thinking. Nonsense, some would say. It’s a free country.

Jesus is my Lord no matter how crazy or harsh He was. Bar Kokhba cannot be because the Spirit that lives in me and I in the Spirit says “no”, in terms that are clear to me. To describe them to others, I’ve tried that several times. I think it’s impossible. People will believe what they want to believe. Then they’ll die. It was amazing how many people didn’t understand that Rob Knop was describing ordinary, rationally minded, liberal Christianity, not invented by him, when that’s an easy faith to understand. There’s so much more than that. Few want to know.

Not a PZ sycophant!

2007-03-15T00:16:00.000-07:00

I discovered the blog of Rob Knop this week, Galactic Interactions, another one at ScienceBlogs who thinks PZ Myers is too harsh on religion. That’s at least 3, and Rob even goes farther than the others to make a target of himself with his liberal Christianity. It is a thing to behold how atheists attack liberal Christianity in just as demeaning a way as any other religion. What did liberals ever do to them?

Rob explains how science means God doesn’t make sense as Creator, which I like better than how Francis Collins sees it. Rob sees God as Sustainer and Redeemer, or in my language, sustainer and redeemer. He wrote a little on why he believes in God as sustainer in his last piece, though only in theory, not as it applies to him personally. He’s going to write another one about God as redeemer. I hope he writes something else before then, because there are a lot of comments from atheists who aren’t following him, mostly asking how he dares claim it reasonable to believe in God.

He does that without referring to a spiritual, non-physical side to reality. I can’t manage that. I can’t see God in a non-dual reality or as artificial unless that artificial quality is just how atheists think our brain makes our consciousness in a completely physical way. So for me God is Spirit. It is a lot easier to be vague about such things in one’s own life than if you start talking with people who believe differently. I’m sure being forced to be specific can be a good thing, though probably not if for the other person only agreeing with him or her is specific enough.

In an earlier piece, Rob pondered how “a PZ sycophant” would respond to what he was writing. It turned out not only sycophants, but PZ Myers himself answered, too many times for me to keep count. PZ didn’t resort to “kook” or “idiot” this time, but he wasn’t gracious either. People on the internet are just so right about everything.

It’s important to me that not everyone who believes in God is a kook or an idiot. It’s somewhat meaningful to me that many support PZ Myers in using that language. I wish they didn’t, but I don’t see a way for me to tell them they’re wrong in that, especially not with so many other harsh putdowns being fair game in politics and religion today.

I know the experiences that have caused me to believe in God as sustainer and redeemer and how those experiences don’t conflict with science. Whether or not consciousness really can be explained in purely material terms affects what God is. It doesn’t affect who God is to me. I would love to get that across to any atheist, as well as the fact that science has not nailed down that consciousness is purely material. I don’t know that any on the internet will listen. It’s a pity. Understanding that might spare a lot of hard feelings, even with God.

Waiting for people to move

2007-03-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

I had a dream where I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. It had the best reading material I’ve ever seen in such a place. While I was waiting I looked through an atlas of the world that it so happened I donated to the room.

I had to wait for all the patients to go in. Then I could rearrange the chairs. There was this empty spot over there that cried out to be filled with a chair. There were three rows packed together, making it hard for patients to climb into the more interior chairs, as on an airplane or at a theater. So I moved those so some were back to back, and some fit elsewhere in the room. There, every chair now has easy access.

I suppose I could have tried to do that before the people went inside. People might have even welcomed the diversion of standing up so I could move their chairs. It’s not as though I would have had to pick up people while they’re still sitting in the chairs. I might not have realized that there were other options to just waiting.

That’s a strange thing about dreams. Dreams are incredibly creative in terms of the look of things, the symbolism of things, the diversity of things, including many things that can’t exist in reality. Yet when it comes to imagining other possible courses of actions in the midst of a dream, it’s like that part of my mind is still asleep. I just do what I do in the dream. I don’t ponder my options until after I wake up.

I know what it’s like to have to wait for people, though. If that were just a matter of minutes, even hours, as at the doctor’s office, it would be easy. But I’m sure the rest of my life is not long enough to wait for some things. I think of all the things my needy clients need, such as health care, a job they can hold, and housing they can afford.

Of those, at least health care is as straightforward as rearranging chairs so none are blocked. Some group has to decide what care is necessary. Some way has to be established for everyone to pay for that care. There haven’t been the votes to do that on a comprehensive scale in the US. Some people here don’t want limits. Some people here don’t want to pay for others. Maybe the US can keep up that attitude toward the poor for centuries. We certainly have kept it up for decades while other countries have decided it’s not OK to leave people without health care. There isn’t a doctor that’s going to call us out of that waiting room of a position.

I don’t dream of frustration, of waiting for things that won’t happen for years, if even during my lifetime. My dreams last minutes. Something has to happen on that time scale to fit them. But it does interest me how quickly I connect a dream to something that’s real once I awake. Maybe that’s why I always remember my last dream of the night so well. It always connects to something.

I can describe the connection to waiting for people to move politically well enough. Now about people moving spiritually, which might be the only way they’ll be much movement politically, that’s harder to describe. What do people have to abandon to move toward the real God? That’s something more than a chair. Will people alive today ever do that? Not many of them will. And the next generation? Probably not many of them will either.

Can you imagine a waiting room where people stay so long that they keep making new generations of people? It makes it much harder to rearrange the chairs. Fortunately there are indeed more possibilities than were in my dream.

Basic dualities

2007-03-13T19:03:00.000-07:00

Between God and me, I’m the one who says I’m not God. That’s just one way I can tell us apart. Some would call even that much delusional, though. Atheists say I’m delusional because there is no God. Post-modernists/Buddhists/New Age believers say I’m delusional because I’m in fact as much God as everyone and everything else is. While the latter is seen as religious and the former isn’t, there is a connection between the two. Both deny a duality between the material universe and something spiritual, meaning only something non-physical, that lies beyond, alongside, and/or within the material universe as a non-physical part of reality.

Atheists say there’s no reason to believe in anything beyond the physical universe as all spiritual experiences that purport to be evidence of such a thing are worthless, mostly because of their subjectivity. Of course it is objective that people have experiences one might label as spiritual experiences, but it is certainly arbitrary where one goes from there in analyzing them. Believers in a non-dual reality say that spirituality is just another side of the same coin as the physical universe. Actually I wish it were often put so concretely, but however someone says it, it is a denial that the material and the spiritual are different things.

There are two reasons why I don’t take the latter seriously. One is that it’s hard for me to see my spiritual experiences as not involving a separate reality. Some insult my intelligence for that, but it’s not just me. It’s the world as well. My spiritual experiences were about love and goodness not to be found in our world. Our world is hateful, indifferent, and false in many ways. One can argue that’s all necessary for our eventual spiritual evolution, but why? I don’t see a satisfactory reason. I see a world that is fundamentally manipulative, dangerous and unloving. My experiences of God are both a different quality from this and come to me not from sacred things in the world or through nature, but as an experience within my consciousness, separate from the world out there.

If my experiences of God are of this physical world, then they are something my brain can do to fill a void in my life. I’ve been willing to see this possibility from the beginning, that atheists might be right. But why believe this about a universe where spirit and material are the same things? What is spiritual then? Answers to that might include the connectedness of the universe or some global consciousness. So why would such connectedness or consciousness lie to me about being separate from me, which is my experience?

There are answers to that, of course, but then comes that second reason I don’t take such non-dualism seriously. Its proponents don’t know science. They have fantasies about quantum physics and neuroscience. Larry King had several guests on his show last week claiming that the Law of Attraction, a New Age fantasy about electromagnetism, is a great secret to life and completely documented scientifically. Right. These are not people who understand the material world well enough for me to listen to them about how everything spiritual is within it. God, who never has let me down as far as telling me the truth, tells me they don’t know spirituality any better than they know science. I believe Him.

There is something else I believe. I believe there is nothing real to the concept of sacredness. Many who believe in a duality between the material and the spiritual believe that the spiritual reaches into the material as sacredness. It is a very old trait for human beings to see the world as a combination of the sacred and the profane. It would seem that this duality led to the Old Testament concept of clean or unclean rather than that being a new idea among the Israelites.

Even most Christians haven’t hung on to everything the Old Testament declares to be clean or unclean. Biology has shown only one kind of flesh. Whatever one might say biologically about circumcision or menstrual blood, it doesn’t point to anything spiritual about them. Yet this idea is what sin is all about, about uncleanliness that eventually destroys one’s body. But the idea that sin causes death hasn’t held up to science. The causes of death strike good people and bad people alike. They can be identified as strictly material processes without any need for some additional spiritual factor.

“Spirit” cannot be the life force that people thought it was, now that we know the completely material processes that determine our life or death. “Sin” cannot be seen the same way either. It can still mean opposing God, but not be about unclean things as it once was. There is healthy or unhealthy in either a material or spiritual context, but there is neither clean nor unclean. There is neither sacred nor profane.

This is what I believe, from living my life, that there is a duality between material and spiritual, but no real duality between sacred and profane, only in people’s minds. Even defining those words is difficult. All I mean by spiritual is that there is something more than the material things known to science. That spirituality doesn’t shine through into sacred objects is just how I experience it. I experience Spirit as Paul described the Spirit living in Him and he in the Spirit, without the difficulties Paul had in linking this to his tradition. God is what God is, and He is not of this world, so He tells me.

Is there some other authority? People speak authoritatively about these dualities, from atheists to fundamentalists. I’ve listened, but as I’ve mentioned objections here to what I’ve heard, there’s always something that people leave out or gloss over.

There is spiritual, but not sacred. That’s my opinion. Some rational liberals are like that, but they tend not to believe in a God as personal as the God I know. I certainly don’t reject mysticism the way rational liberals do. Meanwhile most of religious talk is between those who believe neither in the spiritual nor the sacred and those who believe in both. If they’re both wrong as I believe, how long will it take for many people to see other possibilities? Is it 100 years, 500 years? Maybe it’s never. Maybe the spiritual is only for a few people.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong and either atheists or traditionalists do have the answer for the long run. Only every time I talk to God about it, He says they don’t even have these basic dualities right. What a strange world.

Michael Medved?

2007-03-12T13:44:00.000-07:00

I saw an interesting bumper sticker today for KSDO radio, which I used to listen to many years ago. So I tuned over there, but it’s become a Spanish station, which is of limited value to me. Next up the dial from that used to be a rock station, but it’s changed to talk radio. All these stations that aren’t on my push buttons are unknown to me now.

The talk show host on this second station was unfamiliar to me. First he was talking about the ACLU in Florida going after a monument to the Ten Commandments recently placed on public land. He was speaking as if that’s such a bizarre thing to do. Doesn’t he know that the Supreme Court ruled against the Ten Commandments in Kentucky two years ago? Of course they also ruled for the Ten Commandments in Texas at the same time. The Florida monument sounds like the Texas one, but one reason the Texas one was allowed was that it had been there for 40 years. Will putting up brand new monuments in order to stand tall for God be as acceptable? The courts will decide.

This talk show host said nothing about that. He said this monument is certainly not an establishment of religion. So why not let the courts say that? Well, it’s because the courts might not say that, isn’t it? They might find that this monument is illegal, because it’s being placed for religious purposes, to further religion, which the Supreme Court says is indeed part of establishing religion and therefore prohibited in the United States. Who is a talk show host to say otherwise? He’s most likely just another guy. Isn’t it interesting how in the US the opinion of just another guy can trump any expert on any topic, as long as the listener goes along with that?

So who is this particular talk show host? I still didn’t know. I listened to him go on about how important religion has been to the US. To point out how much better our religion has been to us than others have been he brought up the story of how a Mayan religious leader is going to cleanse a temple in Guatemala after George Bush visits. What a “dysfunctional” society that was, says our host. Well, OK, compare Mayan human sacrifice with torture and burning that European religion carried out. I’m not sure which one I’d choose. I know good things about Christianity. That’s why I’m a liberal Christian. I don’t know what good things there might have been to the Mayan religion or why they feel the need to purify their temple after George Bush. If that’s about a duality between the sacred and the profane, I reject that, but I reject that in Christianity, too.

What is the point here? It sounded like, “How dare they say our President is unclean?” Well, that’s what sacredness is like everywhere people find it important. Doesn’t this guy know anything?

Finally he said his name. This was the Michael Medved Show. Michael Medved? I know Michael Medved. I used to watch him 30 years ago on PBS when he and Jeffrey Lyons replaced Siskel & Ebert on their original show. Medved might have even been the one on that show whose taste in movies was more like mine. I knew he had become a conservative voice in bashing Hollywood from time to time, but I didn’t realize he was making a career out of a full range of conservative propaganda. Yes, he is.

And his qualifications? Why, they’re just like everyone else’s. He is blessed with a pleasant voice. He usually speaks in sentences. And there’s something in him that lets him say conservatives are right and liberals are wrong. Evidence regarding that is barely necessary.

This is politics in the US today. I keep thinking it must have been even worse in the 19th century, that modern political propaganda is a step up from portraying Abe Lincoln as an ape. Then again people are still people.

It’s up to the listeners. It’s like what I see in comments on blogs now. I see some popular blogs where very few comments challenge the star of the blog. It’s not that such challenges accomplish much. I’m sure Michael Medved can explain why he knows more than the Supreme Court on any case, just like any other pinhead on the subject. I don’t think it’s how opinionated the speaker is when it comes to how corrupt political propaganda is. It’s the listeners. If they want to believe that just another guy is smarter than the Supreme Court, then this will sustain that guy acting as if he’s smarter.

That’s not how I listen. A couple of my push buttons on AM are pretty shaky selections. If some radio station wanted to air talk that’s not mere propaganda, they’d have a shot at taking over one of my buttons. Michael Medved is not that. He really makes a living at this?

Some good debunking

2007-03-11T14:03:00.000-07:00

There were a couple of times at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference when something was said that I wish I could package for New Age believers, one about “quantum consciousness” and another about studies promoting prayer. I’ve tried to make these points to some fellow liberals before, without obvious success. I’d rather have someone else say them from here on out, so here are a couple of examples of that.

Stuart Hameroff was speaking about quantum physics in consciousness. Hameroff is the anesthesiologist who is partner with mathematician Roger Penrose in promoting this idea. Hameroff spoke of many things, including how he thought microtubules went through state changes due to “quantum forces” and how “quantum entanglement” provided coherence over the brain.

The quantum force I studied as an undergraduate in physics was the electromagnetic force. Why aren’t people who talk about quantum consciousness specific about that? One could make detailed calculations about how electromagnetism would be affecting a microtubule. Maybe Penrose has done that, but here there’s just hand waving and suspiciously vague talk instead of focusing on the perfectly concrete issue of what force is meditating this phenomenon of consciousness.

There were physicists in the audience. One was Lawrence Krauss. Krauss had a simple comment, “From a physics perspective, everything you say is nonsense, and maybe I’m being too polite.” Among objections Krauss raised was how limited entanglement is as an observed phenomenon.

There is no doubt that there is a connection between what the front of the brain does and what the back of the brain does. One can imagine that the quantum mechanical term “entanglement” relates to this, but using that word is to turn it into metaphor, the same way “energy” is often used in a spiritual context. It’s not the physical meaning of those words that can make sense in the brain the way New Age thinkers use them.

Then Richard Sloan gave a talk about studies of prayer in medicine. He showed how claims of long lists of these whittle down to a small number that are actually studies. Then that number is reduced all the way to four by requiring a good study design. If there is any real benefit in these, it’s small. God is not moving heaven and Earth in response to these prayers for the sick.

My own impression is that there never have been physical miracles. That’s been the result of looking at case histories of purported miraculous healing of individuals and always finding a problem in them, whether a likely mistaken diagnosis, a treatment other than prayer, or some other gap in the story. Nature always has been at work as it is today. I find plenty of reasons to pray from the direction, strength and comfort I have received from God over the years, but those don’t require physical miracles.

Prayer studies have results that match the above much better than the idea that prayer work through nature.

Many people believe otherwise, whether those are conservatives who believe God controls everything, New Age thinkers who believe they could control everything with the right knowledge or atheists who believe prayer does nothing. Some people believe that quantum physics explains consciousness, with benefits that I have trouble exploring because it is such nonsense. It is a difficult thing to keep an open mind. There may not be an atheist on the planet who is interested in how my experiences led me to believe there is a God. I’m sure I would lose most of them with my first sentence on that subject. But I would hope that I could write this story in a way that lets someone understand the possibility that there is a God.

Stories like quantum consciousness and that there are supposedly many positive studies on prayer don’t seem to be told by those who know their subject. They are quickly debunked as pseudoscience by someone who knows mainstream quantum physics or mainstream medical research. The method of that is no different from debunking creationist arguments against evolution. One exposes the botched definitions, the false premises, the analysis which ignores all data that goes the other way, and a pervading bias in even other ways. Yet it’s never enough to reduce the conflict to its essence, that we don’t know that much about consciousness or God. We do know that evolution is a fact. We do know some things, but people find hope in less certain things. I do. I find hope in a God that I’ve experienced.

Sam Harris doesn’t understand why my God is different from Poseidon. I would tell him how Poseidon is a force of nature who cares nothing about me while my God loves me in ways I can detail, but are not objective. It’s not practical for me to try to do that. It’s not practical for me to try to explain why I don’t believe the stories many other people tell, especially when they include points that are objective such as whether consciousness relates to quantum physics or prayer has done great things physically. Everyone deals with such stories one by one. How many get far enough with that?

When I was in grade school I occasionally played chess with a boy who was more serious about it than I was. A few times he played with his huge book of chess openings on his lap. He followed the book until I did something not in the book, because it was a stupid move. Then he’d try to see why it was a stupid move. He always did. Then he’d win.

Maybe the internet can become a better repository of ideas than we have had to date. If someone brings up anything on quantum consciousness, they could get a good refutation of the idea at the same time. That could work for the more objective things. When it comes to hearing the voice of God, this seems less likely to work. God doesn’t speak to me through a computer screen, through another person, in a strange language or even with strange concepts. He speaks through me in a way I understand, in ways that provide me with direction, strength and comfort, as they have for 18 years. It’s not a stupid move to listen to Him. I decided before I took this seriously that either it’s really God or it’s something in my brain that I need to be God. Either way, it works for me. But there are other things out there that are definitely stupid moves. I’m glad some people point those out.

What does God want?

2007-03-09T14:24:00.000-08:00

The Carnival of the Godless #61 is up at Hell’s Handmaiden. There is a specific theme this time, which is, “Things God wants.” Some of the entries aren’t serious, but many are. There are serious entries about faith, the Blasphemy Challenge, a couple of questionable facts about atheists, religious education, religion in politics, pseudoscience, greed, religious diversity, the death penalty, and what James Cameron thinks is Jesus’ DNA, but none of those say their subject is what God wants.

There are two posts about contraception, both provoked by Contraskeptic, who is caught in the vice of believing that both abstinence and contraception are sins. If so, isn’t Natural Family Planning just another method of contraception? I guess that leaves sodomy or having babies, but then you can’t be doing sodomy for contraception, or that’s forbidden, too, if it isn’t already. So God wants nature to take its course in all things? It sounds like a strange definition of God to me.

The God I know doesn’t forbid contraception for the sake of babies any more than He forbids pharmaceuticals for the sake of prayers for healing. I suppose one can confuse what God wants with what a Luddite wants.

So out of all that, some say God wants nature to take its course, to make more babies, to prove the Creator knew what He was doing thousands of years in advance with commandments that never need revision. It’s easy for me to say no, that's not God. Why isn’t it easy for someone else? Contraskeptic mentions the Bible verse to “be fruitful and multiply”. So if God really said that and if He meant that to apply for all time instead of just to his audience at that time, in this case to the first round of humans He made, apparently the same Adam and Eve as introduced in chapter 2 of Genesis, though the Bible isn’t explicit about that, then maybe God really does want to fill the Earth to overflowing with human beings. Should we check back with Him about that maybe? It has been a few thousand years.

Contraskeptic also refers to Psalm 127 which says children are a heritage from God and that a man is happy who has a quiver full of them. He quotes Martin Luther who gave a sermon against coitus interruptus, saying it violates “the order of nature established by God”, and is therefore sodomy. John Calvin said the same thing. So did others. OK, I think it’s clear that if one wants to make a god out of a few Bible verses and tradition, one can say logically that God is in charge of nature, and we should not do anything contrary to that.

Thank God that Christianity has at least adapted to the scientific revolution enough to say we don’t have to let nature take its course, at least for many Christians. We can heal people in non-spiritual ways. We can compensate for disabilities with various devices from wheelchairs to voice synthesizers. We can even perform in vitro fertilization for couples who can’t conceive naturally. And yes, we can let couples avoid pregnancy until they’re ready, maybe even permanently. Why not ask God if He has been behind this rather than assuming it is all against His will? The Bible prescribes prayer and laying on of hands for the sick. So have pharmaceuticals been against God’s will, or are they just as much a blessing from God as anything else?

For those of us who are liberal there are verses in the Bible to justify not being burdened by tradition. Everything Paul wrote in Galatians about circumcision applies to any other burden that some false teacher tries to force on someone who is free through Christ. Luther and Calvin didn’t see that as applying to coitus interruptus. Maybe they were wrong. Who knows what God wants better, Luther or God?

I’ll give this to atheists. It is a legitimate point that many religious people have ridiculous beliefs. This is one way that can happen. Take the Bible, tradition, and reason, and you can get some amazing beliefs, such as God not wanting contraception. On what principle might this make sense? If we needed more people a secular group might decide this, but that’s hard for me to see as God’s desire here. Does God really need billions more people to come up with whatever magic number of people saved He wants? That’s not my impression. I don’t hear anyone saying they’ve heard from God that this is what He wants.

I know I’m impotent to talk to many religious people about this. I’m not going to convince Jehovah’s witnesses that their prohibition against transfusion is equally ungodly. I’m not going to convince fundamentalists that Genesis is all myth. Take some part of the Bible verbatim along with reason, with or without tradition, and you can wind up just about anywhere.

Sometimes experiencing God’s voice directly doesn’t help that. It might only make things worse. I’m just as impotent at convincing atheists that what is missing from all the above folly is God. Yet that’s how this strikes me. It is a fact that not once on Contraskeptic’s blog to date is there any mention of asking God for direction, for understanding. It’s just the Bible, teachers, and reasoning. I haven’t gotten much out of that approach.

I ask God about this and get a very clear answer. This is all idolatry. It’s worshiping the Bible, teachers, reasoning. It’s about garbage in, garbage out. And that’s what passes for religion to any casual observer.

God wants love, to receive it and give it. Is that so hard to believe? People who want Bible verses that support that can find them. Yet if all the resentments atheists express mean anything, they mean God’s love goes astray among those who claim to follow Him.

Leaving God out of the discussion is one way that happens.

Waiting to talk about the real God

2007-03-08T14:07:00.000-08:00

Speaking of atheists being defensive, in my twenties I knew they’re were two reasons why I couldn’t take Christianity seriously. One was how many Christians said ignorant and hateful things about evolution. The other was the problem of evil, which I took as enough of a reason that God doesn’t make sense that I didn’t go further. Having made it through Confirmation, I knew theists made excuses for God’s responsibility for evil, that He somehow has to allow evil in order to allow free will. Strangely I can see something in between our all being finger puppets and the amount of evil we have in the real world. Why can’t God? Likewise any thoughts I had about how God might be compatible with science didn’t go very far. If His own people don’t care about that, why should I?

None of that was on my mind when I started praying again in my thirties. I needed help. Why not sees what happens? I knew I was sincere that if God was listening, I wanted to have Him teach me. Then came this road-to-Damascus experience 18 years ago. Then came this gradually more effective prayer life.

I’m not sure when those two objections of mine fell away, but at some point after experiencing God, I had two easy answers to those objections. Christians who say ignorant and hateful things about evolution aren’t following God, but idolizing the Bible. God isn’t responsible for evil. God would have people live lives of love and truth, not hatred, indifference, and falseness. Then any natural tragedy, like death or hurricanes, has biological and physical reasons, not things over which God has power.

Those seem so natural to me now that I believe in a God who has limitations. I can’t remember my twenties perfectly, but I don’t remember these solutions coming to me then, even for a moment. I always blamed God for creationists. If He wanted to fix them, why didn’t He? For evil, it was even worse. I couldn’t imagine God in His traditional meaning subjecting people to this world, not to build character in people, not because His hands are tied, not at all.

Yet all it took was some experience with God, and I was suddenly saying that everyone has the wrong God, theists and atheists both. I think atheists make powerful arguments, as with the link above. Anyone who thinks the Bible came from God should go to an atheist site that lists all the objections there are to Bible verses and decide for yourself about the Bible. It amazes me that theists try to defend the perfect God of tradition against all objections. Yet apologists argue as well as they can. For many it’s good enough, not for me.

But I’ve experienced God. He’s convinced me that neither the ignorant nor hypocrites are His people. I came to define God as the one who answers when I pray, “God help me!” No serious person likes that. I don’t know why. I like functional definitions. Science taught me it’s not always possible to look past that. But people want to look past that. I’m sure the current battle between atheists and traditionalists will go on a long time. I’m not sure why. No words on this subject will end poverty or end strife. I’m not sure what more words on this subject can do. I was stuck in my twenties, with no role models through whom to believe in a God who made sense. The eventual solutions I found are not clever, yet I couldn’t see them. God is whoever and whatever He is. Seeing it that way solves some problems. It creates more problems for people who want to know God better than that. People haven’t even gotten to that yet. So many can only see atheism or tradition. There is more than that.

The God-shaped void in our brain

2007-03-07T15:33:00.000-08:00

Recently in The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer nicely summarized the two theories of how evolution created our brain in a way that push us toward religion (a nice summary apart from his use of the questionable word “adaptionist”). Non-adaptationists focus on traits that have us looking for God in a way where God has no selective benefit for us. Natural selection presumably has given us the perceptual trait we have of paying inordinate attention to odd things and the possibility of hidden things in our sensory images. That would have benefited us in both our roles of predator and prey. But it also sets us up to look for unseen gods to explain things for which we see no explanation in our senses, something non-adaptationists don’t see as an evolutionary benefit for us.

Adaptationists focus on traits that should have given us evolutionary advantages as a group, such as cooperation and selflessness. We all look for power, knowledge, love, and goodness. They help us, even if the specifics of our models for them aren’t entirely true. Somewhere in there evolution has created a God-shaped void, something that may be filled by God or may be filled by much more ordinary things. Until there are actual genes that are known to do this, it is speculative to say evolution is the cause of this God-shaped void.

Jonah rightly points out that both these theories are likely to be correct.

Judging from the comments on The Frontal Cortex, many atheists would rather not concede that there is even this much of a need for God in them. For them God is simply a lie, told by some people trying to have power over others. Yet if everyone has a God-shaped void in them, everyone fills that void with something, God or no God. So it’s up to the genetics revolution to detail the genes behind the relevant neurophysiology and see if it’s actually fair to summarize this as a God-shaped void. In the meantime, though, I suspect it is and as such, the protests of atheists sound to me like the protests of creationists insisting that none of their people came from apes.

Maybe it is best to fill our God-shaped void with empiricism and nothing else. I think that’s true about physics and biology. But when it comes to how we live our lives, I haven’t found empiricism to tell me enough. So I found God and found Him to be very helpful. Is there something else that works better? Show me the data.

Looking for love through sex

2007-03-04T05:39:00.000-08:00

I lived in Mission Viejo, California from 1984 through 1995. In 1994 a native of Mission Viejo, the porn star Savannah, whose real name was Shannon Michelle Wilsey Longoria, committed suicide at the age of 23. She had just crashed her Corvette into a fence in the Universal City section of Los Angeles, while intoxicated. She and her male friend weren’t far from her home at that point, so they walked the rest of the way. Shannon had facial injuries from the crash and got on the phone to get help with these while she sent her friend to walk her dog. When help arrived she had shot herself in the head. Anyone can speculate what emotions played out this way when she saw her broken face. Adult Video News reported her conversation with her manager Nancy Pera just before Shannon killed herself, the essence of that being that Shannon was distraught that she wouldn’t be able to keep a dancing engagement in New York, where she could make up to $5000 in an evening. She needed the money.

The AVN obituary mentions Shannon’s award for Best New Starlet for 1992 which led to many imitations of “her infamous ‘kiss my ass’ acceptance speech”.

Before she could work legally in the adult entertainment industry, she was a music groupie. She lived with Gregg Allman for two years before she was seventeen and had a miscarriage at one point. Her relationship with Allman reportedly ended due to her cocaine and heroin addictions. Axl Rose was also a notable among many other musicians she had sex with, in part because Shannon’s sexual rating of Rose as a 1 on a scale of 1-10 made a tabloid paper.

How Shannon became a music groupie is less publicized. Stories about her reported a rumor of sexual abuse by her stepfather Joe Longoria. The Longorias divorced when Shannon was 2, but he continued to be her father. In any event, at age 13 Shannon was living with her grandparents in Mission Viejo when she learned that Joe Longoria was not her biological father. Mike Wilsey was. After that she became “wild”. The Wikipedia story mentions that it was often the case that Shannon (who hated that name) was looking for a serious relationship through sex, while most of her partners weren’t.

One story quotes Shannon this way about her father: "Where was he (her father) when I was dating Gregg Allman when he was 25 years older than I was? Where was he when I was on heroin? Where was he when I started doing porno movies?”

I first read this story in a long article in the Los Angeles Times. It was sometime after I started Al-Anon in June 1994. There are things about this one can summarize as being something addicts do: blaming others, making bad choices about whom to trust, staying stuck in the same dysfunctional rut, panicking. Then again, we’re all addicted to something. It’s just that some addictions are more functional than others. One thing that stands out in my memory about the LA Times article was how they made a point of how much porn actresses use cocaine before performing. Is that because porn is that awful that they need to be intoxicated? Is it because cocaine works so well toward performing in a way that makes a woman a well-paid star? Is it because only addicts perform porn, as they’re the ones who feel no additional shame about it? So they use cocaine before doing anything?

It gets complicated, but there is an element of this that’s simple – looking for love through sex. I did that in college and for some years after that. Many of my partners were doing that. My ex-wife was doing that. Sometimes when both my partner and I were looking for love through sex, we still didn’t find it in each other. My ex-wife and I found enough love to get married, but not enough love to stay married when things about her I didn’t like didn’t change and things about me she liked did change. Looking for love through sex is not as doomed to failure as looking for love in a bottle or a needle, but it fails often enough. It also succeeds often. How many of us 6 billion human beings are children of love and how many are children of sex? That’s a difficult statistic to come by, but I bet there are some differences between the two groups.

Al-Anon is about being addicted to another person, even if it’s just the memories of an alcoholic parent that one can’t shake or fill with love from someone else. There is a better way to look for love than many of the ways that come to us biologically or through our culture. There is God. No one is taught to look for love in God that well in our culture. Some are convinced God doesn’t exist. Some are convinced God is some system of rules their church enforces. There are many obstacles. 12 steps is one way around those obstacles, but you have to have something worth getting away from to make the leap to being dependent on God that 12 steps entails.

I would say the human condition alone is enough to run from to leap into God’s arms, but not that many see it that way. Not many even think God has arms to leap into. That is a metaphor, of course. What is the reality? It’s something strange.

I forget if it was before or after my road-to-Damascus experience that I visited the closest strip club to Mission Viejo one evening when I was in a bad mood. It was sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. I had been to at least one strip club before then, The Palomino Club in Las Vegas. That was an overwhelming experience where even the waitresses seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Playboy, not the kind of place for a man on a budget like me.

Close to home the strippers were just ordinarily attractive. It wasn’t entirely nude as in Las Vegas, not quite as provocative. I knew going to this club that I wasn’t going to find love there. I was just looking for intoxication and not from alcohol, which I don’t like. I like the intoxication of arousal, whatever chemicals surge in my brain when I see something sexually provocative. Strippers do more than that for me, though. They are real people doing something I understand. For whatever reasons I find it much more interesting to watch women rather than men, in any circumstance. I don’t know that I’ve had strippers as patients or clients, but I’ve had prostitutes as both, maybe even one who was emotionally healthy. They are interesting people with stories that aren’t all tragedy, but are also about how one copes with tragedy.

Then there’s the beauty of women, especially nearly naked women, that seems to hit me differently than just a chemical arousal. I’m sure my whole brain is heterosexual, my perception, my cognition, who knows in how many ways. However it works, I was sure the experience would treat my mood. Who knows how long it would do that, but if I didn’t stay too long, it was worth the money.

So I was settled in, people watching, mostly the women, when something surprised me. It might seem like nothing to most people, but it has stayed with me more than any other memory of the adult entertainment industry. It was a kiss on my left cheek. I can almost see the woman who did that, one of the more mature women there, with lots of curly hair, red maybe.

Like the other women there she put her top back on after her dance and walked among the audience picking up dollar tips. I may have been somewhat cheap, but I wasn’t going to stiff a woman who goes to that much trouble, unlike a few guys there who were either very cheap or out of dollars. Unlike the other women, this woman gave each man a kiss on the cheek when she picked up her dollar. I barely noticed she was doing that until she came to me. Then there was this kiss that I can still feel on my left cheek whenever I want.

My goodness, what was that? My intellect came up with some things, that it’s the traditional price at a kissing booth, that maybe this is her marketing strategy, not that she gets more money at that moment, but maybe for her next dance or another day. Maybe this is her way of being different from the other women. Maybe it’s a control thing, how she can do this kiss that no man will refuse. Maybe she’s genuinely grateful.

My emotions knew something immediately. I am starved for affection. Is she? It’s hard to say. Does she kiss the men just for fun or even some intimacy for herself, as opposed to those thoughts about her strategy? One can do all of that at once, of course.

That I was starved for affection was the most certain of all this. I’d like to write that this little wake-up call made me realize that my need was for affection more than arousal, so then I went out and got the affection I needed after that. Our culture isn’t like that, though. Arousal is easy to buy. Imitation affection is a little harder, but straightforward, if your budget allows that. Real affection is downright expensive, if you can find it at all.

I’ve been helping people all my life. People appreciate being helped, even to the point of an occasional gift, but their love for me is shallow, and I wouldn’t be able to help them well if my need for affection became part of helping them, so both in my career and in my volunteer work there are explicit rules against getting too involved with those I help, so I don’t.

I get along well with my co-workers. A couple of them are the sort of people I appreciate a lot – women who will almost always laugh at something funny I say. I love predictability and when people complement each other. I get awards for what I do, but do I get a kiss on the cheek? No, I don’t. Maybe I could if I asked for one, but it’s not the kiss. The kiss is a symbol of affection. That’s why I still remember that kiss from a stripper, for its symbolism. There is some pleasure in the kiss by itself, but not much to remember. It’s the feeling of being loved that matters, and I didn’t see my getting more of that from this stripper, as much as I appreciated her gesture.

People get so strict about love, as if love has to be this utterly selfless benevolence, based on knowing someone so thoroughly that the other person has proved worthy of this supposedly unconditional love. Well, good luck waiting for that.

It’s no wonder that so many of us settle for less, for a sexual relationship that might have some love in it, maybe more with time. They often don’t, as Shannon Longoria discovered.

So I remember this kiss because it felt like love and helped me realize how much I wanted love, regardless of why this stripper did that. Could she be expressing love with that? In some sense she might be, sure. The fact that she kissed all the men means it wasn’t anything about me, but about love she was giving everyone, if it wasn’t entirely manipulative. I do that differently in my work, but I do that, even to the extent of being a little manipulative myself sometimes. Still love might not have been part of what she was doing. It’s hard to tell from a single moment.

Not many people will just give you many moments so you can see what they’re about. God will. Among the possibilities I thought of for that stripper’s kiss that night, God using her to wake me up was not one of them. It was only later when that kiss kept recurring in my cheek, and God took the credit for it that I was willing to believe that. If God loves me, why shouldn’t She kiss me on the cheek? I’m not one to argue with that. I’m not sure how to explain it to someone else, but that’s true for so many aspects of how I experience God’s presence. It’s all love, and it comes not only with these imposing “I AM GOD” moments, but in so many little everyday things, too, some of which come through other people.

I know how many people think that’s artificial, that I can’t count on God telling me it’s Her kiss I feel any more than I could have counted that this stripper was handing out any real affection when she kissed me. Hey, I grew up hoping for love from every woman I had sex with. God is a better deal than that, even if atheists are right about Him.

I have other stories to say atheists aren’t right. Knowing those, I trust discovering how much God’s love is not a distant, abstract, cerebral thing. I came to God as I did, not only through the particularity of Jesus, but through many experiences. I don’t see any duality of sacred and profane in that, but rather unity. Jesus is in the needy, to help and be helped.

Following some links on the web reminded me of all this the last week. In late January there was a PETA ad that imitated the State of the Union address with a video where a young woman took off her clothes for some reason, good or bad. I found that through links to those who thought the reason was bad, here, here, and here. Comments on those sites were mixed, some thinking a woman taking off her clothes in that way was no big deal while others thought it was degrading to women.

People get very opinionated about sex. The religions of Abraham say sex outside of marriage is always bad, as is some degree of alluding to sex publicly. Many women and some men think the use of women commercially is degrading and manipulative, even more so when those women take their clothes off. All these people think there is shame in public sexuality, some thinking that’s about the women, some thinking that’s about the men who coerce the women to do that. So there is shame in it, because people put shame in it, rightly or wrongly. So women who take their clothes off for money are often like Shannon Longoria, addicts who already feel so much shame that the shame of performing sex for money doesn’t inhibit her. In fact it gives her benefits such that when she’s faced with losing those benefits, even temporarily, she kills herself.

Even addicts have a hard time understanding shame. No one wants to look at this blackest of emotions. People would rather talk about the things that make them feel merely guilty, something they regret doing, not the feeling that they are worthless scum, unloved, unlovable, and a failure at being able to do much about it on their own. People who feel shame medicate themselves, with substance abuse, with food, with distractions by being intellectual or focusing on other people, with hobbies, with losing themselves in work, or with sex.

Sex is a powerful thing. It’s intoxicating all by itself. So is the romance that can go with it. Then it also might lead to something that actually does lessen shame instead of covering it up, love. We know this instinctively and culturally. We act out our knowledge that sex is about love in some way, about union, about empathy, about babies and whatever love that represents to someone.

It’s another impossible survey, but I wonder how many people do look for love through sex. The percentage could be very high in women, maybe surprisingly high in men, something that’s obvious when someone is “virgin stuck” but present a lot more than that phenomenon. If we were good at loving one another just as we are, maybe we could live happily ever after with whomever our first sex is with. Then again even the woman I lost my virginity to had absolutely no interest in a love relationship. I knew that. Some part of my brain didn’t. I adapted, but not without some shame over that “virgin stuck” label.

So I understand the shame associated with sex. I think it could be a lot less in a healthy society, but the reality of this society means there is a lot of shame with sex. I know that when either feminists or fundamentalists see public sex that they find to be degrading, they feel shame themselves or would if they could feel anything. But whose shame is it? I’m sure sometimes whoever is being seen as the victim does feel shame just as those watching expect. But sometimes they don’t, and that’s not always because they’ve medicated themselves not to feel shame.

I doubt that as many as 50% of those working in the adult entertainment industry have overcome their shame in a healthy way. Healthy means it’s stable, has more benefits than negative consequences, and is what a person would choose at their most rational state. I’m sure one could write a long time on that definition if one could actually measure such a thing. God has been a healthy solution to my shame. I don’t care who disagrees with that. You don’t live in me. How many healthy solutions are there? I don’t know. But I don’t think they preclude a woman taking her clothes off for a living or even a political statement.

I don’t know how healthy that stripper was who kissed me on the cheek. She was charming. Was that fake or real? Who can say? One can say that Shannon Longoria was not healthy. She had gotten off of heroin at the time of her death, but was still using cocaine. Plus nothing mental is bad enough to justify suicide. I’ve helped enough people to be sure of that. There is always a living way out. People rarely understand that, or they would have gotten themselves out of a painful situation already. Still it’s true.

But to save the life of someone else like Shannon, how much of our culture needs to be reformed? Let’s see, there’s porn, drugs, music, Hollywood, families, maybe the Mission Viejo schools … it’s easier and maybe more accurate that all of our culture needs to be reformed to be more a culture of love and truth than just the opposite.

Some of those things are harmful. Some are for self-medication. Some are both at the same time. So what happens when you take away the medication? It might be something like Prohibition, where people ignore the law. You don’t get a culture of love and truth by taking away things people use as substitutes for a lack of love and lack of truth in our seriously flawed culture.

Fundamentalist say their subculture provides everything someone would need instead of looking for love through sex before marriage. When has it done that for everyone? It works for some, at the price of what I find to be a false faith, not truth. And I wonder about the capacity of fundamentalists for real love for lots of people, not just those who are behaving well.

Feminists have their own prescriptions. One comment on the PETA video said it would be fine if society had as many male strippers as female strippers. Hmmm, I could close my eyes with the male strippers and just listen to the music. I could make that work if I had to, only I’ve gone to strip clubs once or twice a decade, so no one is keeping their job on my account. It did work for professional tennis to just impose equality on everyone, but I think sex is more complicated.

Most of all I don’t think many of those with opinions about what is degrading know much about shame. People adapt to their shame. It’s that or die. There is no going back to remove the lack of love or other failure that gives people their shame. What you see in the world is people coping, some better than others, some that I admire while some I feel actual hatred for, even though I try to discipline that hatred into something productive.

I admire women who take their clothes off. I don’t know whether such a woman has overcome her shame in a healthy way or a sick way. But I know that I don’t add to her shame. I love everyone, even the ones who insist on being hateful and lying, ignorant and arrogant. I can help anyone in my professional capacity, even if I wouldn’t turn my back on some of my clients in the parking lot or invite them to my home. Real love is not infinite.

I also know that there’s a chance that a woman who takes her clothes off has overcome her shame in a healthy way. I admire such a woman. So I admire all women who take their clothes off. The ones who aren’t doing it out of freedom are facing some major challenge to do that for a living, so I admire their struggle. I’m sure I’m wrong about some of them. It’s not really my choice that I admire all such women, though. I’m a born optimist. Maybe those of you who would take this away are right, but you can’t show that you are right until you can show where the love will come from to replace all the ways that we cope with the world as it is. And you don’t show love with hate and indifference.

Mike Wilsey said this after the death of the daughter he never knew: "People ask me if pornography is wrong. I say you can judge a tree by its fruit."

But what tree are we talking about, the tree of being human and needing love, the tree of not having a good resource for love or model for love, the tree of doing the best we know how to do, which sometimes isn’t very good at all? Wasn’t Shannon your fruit, Mr. Wilsey? We’re all addicts. Someday this will be common knowledge.

No one deserves ridicule

2007-03-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

People’s principles don’t match how people act in many, many cases. The internet is a constant reminder for some of these.

Morally, what’s the difference between a verbal attack and a physical attack? Practically there are big differences, but morally I don’t see one. I don’t mean criticizing someone’s words harshly, even as in calling those words immoral. Some people get criticism like that and act like they’ve been punched in the nose, but attacking one’s words or intellectual abilities is not the malicious act of a personal attack. Attacking someone with words like “kook” or “idiot” is when one’s words can only be malicious, it seems to me.

Personal attacks are immoral. I’d even say that those who condone such attacks are immoral. That takes in a lot of people. I was first online in 1998, and I haven’t seen any class of people in that time where there aren’t examples of individuals whose hatred is so undisciplined that they regularly launch personal attacks against some other group. Even my fellow liberals who preach tolerance for everyone have some individuals who make judgments against some other group, “Christofascists”, some group like that. And few people tell them it’s wrong unless they say it with obscenities, and then only a few more tell them it’s wrong.

Personal attacks are evil. They’re also juvenile, but more importantly, they’re evil. If no one in the world agrees with me, they’re still evil. Only if I’m the only one in the world who thinks so, it’s probably only worth saying this once.

I’m sure we have some innate, biological morality. Evolutionary psychologists write about why one can believe that. It’s just a matter of time before all of our genes are known well enough to know whether that’s right or wrong. Presumably we have genes that let us make mirror neurons that are involved with empathy. It’s hard to know how extensive an innate morality we have from such a process. Maybe it’s nothing more than evolution giving us a sense that it’s wrong to hurt people who are enough like us. If we violate that we feel guilty. We have an aversion to doing that just as we have biological aversions to a lot of things. Our culture will teach us whether that principle applies to all human beings, even species other than our own, or whether some human beings deserve to be hurt. It’s good for them, lazy swine. It toughens them up. They deserve being hurt. If you deprive them of that, how will they know what pathetic creatures they are?

So I can’t rely on our innate morality to prove that we shouldn’t call people names. After all, there are certainly biological obstacles and cultural obstacles to our innate morality being expressed in anyone, especially when it comes to saying no one deserves ridicule.

So what other standard of morality is there besides our innate morality? There’s reasoning like Bertrand Russell did to say that the ultimate good things are benevolence and knowledge. People are free to opt out of that. There’s God’s morality. People are free to opt out of that, too. Traditionally that freedom is lost in a judgmental afterlife, but at least in this life one is free.

So how dare I say that it’s evil to call people names, that it’s OK to anger someone by challenging him or her, but not to just call that person names. It’s an extension of that innate principle that it’s wrong to hurt people. Evolution says that is a helpful trait apparently. I trust that intellectually. Beyond that is this other component, which is either purely emotional, purely Spirit, or both. My guess is that most people feel less impressed by this last source of what’s moral than anything else. Yet that’s what I’m the most sure of.

I have a conscience, however it is that I do. I believe some of it came from biological evolution, some of it came from cultural evolution and some of it is from my personal experience that is too individual to be either of those. What about spiritual evolution? Some would say that is just mislabeled cultural evolution, the part that applies to the culture of religion. I understand that, but it might not be right.

We haven’t even made it through the genetics revolution yet to know all these genes that have separated our brains from those of apes, genes that must contribute something to our having a conscience. Who can say how cultural evolution adds to that? Maybe when we can be more concrete about the biology of it, we can be more concrete about the part that’s not biology. So did that non-biological part all come from our cultural institutions? There must be something more than that as we all have had individual personal experiences beyond some average cultural inheritance. We are unique. Some of us are more unique than others. Out of that uniqueness come values that our culture doesn’t know about. Maybe they are just us. To someone who insists that there is nothing more than the material universe that’s all they can be. But might there be something that is beyond biology, culture, and me? That’s what I’ve experienced as God, a provider of direction, strength and comfort that I can’t make sense of as any of those first three things. It’s not the traditional God. I started off thinking God should be traditionally powerful and knowledgeable, but year after year I’ve gotten farther away from that. Yet there are things in me, especially in my conscience, that don’t seem like me, biology, or culture. They seem like God. There’s nothing in me that would sound like that.

How much is from me? How much is from God? It doesn’t matter for this world. I don’t see God intervening in the evil that people do, just for those who ask for help.

I’m sure it’s evil to call people names. I think people who do that are immoral, that there is a standard that proclaims that, maybe to a limited degree in our innate morality, but to a more developed degree in God’s morality. So what is God going to do about it? Tradition says God is the great enforcer, but life seems to work differently from that. Everyone gets to decide for themselves what’s moral. Everyone gets to decide if there’s anything they want to do about immoral people beyond staying away from them. It’s not OK to be immoral in order to fight immorality. Immorality rarely requires that kind of urgency. Everyone alive today will be dead soon enough. There will be more generations that hopefully will do better than the present ones. What if that’s the best that can be done? What if both biological and cultural evolution remain beyond our culture to control for now. Lots of people talk about culture as if we can fix it. What if we can’t? What if we’re stuck with so many irrational ways that culture shapes us. I see a lot of emotions and bias at work in people who claim to be intellectual. Maybe we really are free to do whatever we want, because nothing we do will matter in the long run anyway.

Then there’s spiritual evolution. That could be beyond us, too. It might not be a matter of some individual meditating and studying his or her way into some great wisdom, but instead something in which we barely participate at all, like breathing. Whatever the truth is, I know what’s moral for me. That’s OK for a liberal to say. It’s not OK in every sense for me to say someone else is immoral. But in the case of calling people names, I will call that immoral in all competent people, and only God knows whether I have His approval in that. I have to trust how I hear Him on this without knowing for sure. From that I wrote all of this.

How much does it matter? It’s not like there’s a deadline of next Thursday for people to start acting morally, or there will be a rain of lightning bolts. It’s not like God is going to waste His vengeance in the afterlife on every little immorality on Earth. Maybe this generation is actually doing the best they can, all things considered. It would be so easy for people to do better, but it’s also so easy for people to believe they don’t need to do better, regardless of faith or lack thereof. I would rather have everything fixed today. God tells me He would, too, but He can’t. Understand that He’s not the traditional God who should be able to control all the immorality perpetrated by those who claim to follow God. Such immorality is not from God. The history of God is not defined by what people have said about him.

No one deserves ridicule. It's not because of who they are. It's because of how wrong it is to use my mouth for ridicule. Lots of people will prove today by what they say that they disagree. They’re all dead people, waiting to finish dying completely. They speak like dead people. Anyone can think that’s just my opinion. I don’t think it is.

Science, schmience

2007-02-28T11:41:00.000-08:00

Speaking of partisans, I stopped by a place where they have a very different view of science than I do. I was looking up criticisms of Francis Collins as a way of looking at the enemies of the idea that science and faith can be compatible. Those aren’t just atheists who believe that science has squeezed out any place for God. On the other side are those who see science as being arbitrary and therefore untrustworthy. paulhartigan at open source theology states that science is just another language through which human activities are conducted. It changes. At one time Newton’s model of gravity was scientific truth. Now it’s Einstein’s general relativity. Who knows what comes next? He criticized Collins as “inept” because Collins accepts the idea that the scientific revolution has indicated that the universe doesn’t need God. He wants to put these uppity scientists in their place. Collins doesn’t do that.

Newton and Einstein, I’ve heard this before. Whether it’s someone conservative or someone New Age, somehow this contrast is supposed to show that science is arbitrary. Yet the models they pick are two of those most impressive in science. Before Newton it was observation that it was simpler to think the Earth went around the sun, but Newton made it all make sense. Newton’s representation of gravity is still what NASA uses to put a spacecraft on Mars with astounding precision. General relativity is a little better, as has been shown experimentally, but it’s not as if Einstein’s model makes Newton’s model invalid any more than one portrait of a celebrity negates another. Einstein’s is better than Newton’s when it comes to stars bending light, but they both describe something real called gravity very well.

Now philosophically one can imagine that some greater reality might take gravity away tomorrow. Maybe it would be good for scientists to remember that. Yet who makes any decisions based on the universe being so unstable? Many of us believe that there is a fixed reality beyond our individual perceptions of the world. Science is a way of exploring that reality. It is more than a language. It is a method to explore reality that has paid off much better than using mere words to do that.

But it’s true that science proves nothing. The reasons behind my faith in God prove nothing. If one wants a fantasy world that can be absolutely anything, science is not helpful for that, no matter how much people butcher quantum physics to mean that there is no objective reality.

Men like Sam Harris fear religion, fearing that it will indoctrinate people to make bad choices, fearing that religion promotes violence. It’s not just religion. Nationalism is at least as violent. Any group can use words to mean whatever they want them to mean. I don’t fear this that much. People in general look at tangible consequences, not philosophy. Of course if disagreeing with some philosophy would single me out to some state police, I would be quiet about that. We’re a long way from that in the US in 2007.

But subcultures do have their own way of looking at things that lets partisans be so dismissive of any other way. It’s not news, but I think it’s a helpful reminder from time to time that our language and concepts do vary a lot, just not so much that I distrust the reality of science.

In keeping with that, I notice that almost all of the comments at this theology site favor that science can say nothing about God, while almost all the comments at a site saying science has disproved God agree with that. If every clique is wrong about something, who’s going to tell them? It seems beyond me.

The meaning of a moment

2007-02-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

At the Beyond Belief 2006 conference, there was more than one allusion to the conversion of Francis Collins by a frozen waterfall. I’ve read about this many places. Here is a sympathetic interview about it. Here, here, here, here and here are some tough criticisms.

One thing about the critics of Francis Collins is how they all attack this moment by the waterfall. “Why should there be any meaning in this?” they ask. “Why should this be a Christian moment?” Sam Harris asks why the three parts to the waterfall, which Collins associated with the trinity, shouldn’t remind someone of Romulus, Remus and the wolf who saved them. Others mention Greek gods or Zoroaster. Harris says that such symbolism can point to anything.

No, it can’t. It can only point to what’s already inside someone’s head. It’s not the waterfall that points to God. It’s the waterfall combined with what was in Francis Collins’ head that made it point to Christ for him. To talk about the experience otherwise is just being silly. That may sound like the beginning of an atheistic interpretation of conversion experiences. I’ve heard atheists say often enough that I’m only Christian because of my culture. It's only just cultural if there is no God. But I think the important point, and maybe everyone already knows this, is that no experience stands alone. It’s not the frozen waterfall that converted Francis Collins. It’s what was going on within him. And what was going on within him was coming to Christ, not to any other god, not to an atheist worldview. Critics write as if an experience only matters if it converts them on their reading about it. Well, that’s not how it works, is it?

I’ve written before how I see crosses in any tiling of square tiles. I’ve studied this enough to know that I prefer a cross that’s 5 tiles high and 3 tiles wide. In a pinch I can get some pleasure from seeing a cross that’s more cut off than that, if the tiling doesn’t allow the full 5 X 3 image. Taller crosses don’t do as much for me. If I decide to see crosses that are two tiles thick instead of one, it’s not as good. A simple 5 X 3 cross is my cross. It’s not necessary that anyone else can see it. I can see it. Give me enough blank tiles, and I can see many, many crosses.

Did God put them there? Did he convince an architect or workman to put a tiling somewhere just for me? That seems doubtful, but maybe. If God goes through time tweaking things here and there, maybe He planned ahead for me at some point. It’s not necessary, though. I can see crosses in cabinets, other things. I can hear God in love songs. There’s always something to remind me of my one true love, invisible to those who don’t feel that way about God. I doubt that I’d see God in a frozen waterfall – too tall and too cold for me. It’s a matter of personal preference.

Sometimes I think about how that preference came to be. It’s like how I react to pretty women. I’m not sure what age I was before I always, always knew very quickly who the most attractive woman in a room was. Of course there are subcategories for that, ones that I suppose I learned after learning the basic elements of attractiveness. Who’s smiling the right amount? Who’s talking the right amount? Who’s the most approachable for me? Somehow my brain never has been interested in men the same way. Men don’t make me smile the way women do.

It’s easy to see that started with biology, even if science still doesn’t know exactly how. Yet not all of those refinements came from biology. Some came from my culture. Some came from my individual experience. I may have some precise preferences that no one else shares exactly. Some basic preference is biological, such as men in general preferring a woman who’s waist is 2/3 the size of her hips. Others will do, of course.

I suppose I follow my culture in steering away from heavier women. The individual preferences seem most important to enjoying just being in the presence of someone I like, someone who reminds me of someone else I once liked, things like that. I know an element of this is simply trial after trial to refine who I think the perfect woman is and how close to perfect is still attractive enough, not through anything intellectual, but purely by how women make me feel. Then intellect is very useful to keep me from doing anything stupid about those feelings.

Why should the faith I marry be any different? It doesn’t start with the same biology, but it may indeed start with some biology. As I mentioned yesterday, one can read about our needs for power, knowledge, love, and goodness, as well as how we tend to look for hidden things and see the God-shaped void that religion always has filled. Raise someone in a cave and won’t he or she find gods in nature? It’s hard to know, but it’s plausible.

So what’s the best way to fill this void? Some say it’s by being purely intellectual. Right. I’ve read the works of such people. Their premises are those of someone who doesn’t get out in the world enough. Their ideas are selective, often even arbitrarily selective. It’s just as much baloney as it would be for someone to say that what pleases him or her in other people is all determined intellectually. Then such people criticize Francis Collins for an emotional moment.

A cross is a transitional object by which I am in the presence of God, the God I know, the God I first heard 18 years ago tomorrow in a road-to-Damascus experience, but with whom I had some relationship before, maybe all of my life, maybe even before. I am quite sure that no one who went through that experience I had would be unmoved by it. I am not sure it would be possible for anyone actually to reject it, minimize it yes, but not deny it entirely. That’s not true for people who merely hear about it. For them it’s easy to reject. It’s idiocy. It’s insanity. Those two can pretty much cover everything as far as denying reality, not some external reality, but the inner reality that makes us say and do everything we say and do, not the excuses we give for that, but the true processes within us that psychology and neuroscience would love to understand, but are still far away from doing that. Some are sure there’s no God in that. I’m sure there is, if anyone would care to loosen up on their definition of who and what God is.

A conversion experience is a crescendo, but it is not an entire symphony. It’s not even the climax of a relationship with God. It’s a first kiss that opens someone’s eyes, someone who didn’t see the kiss coming. There are so many sexual references to religion, to a wedding between God and humanity. I don’t know if that’s because we are such sexual creatures or because there is this element of joining between God and humanity, maybe both. Maybe it’s the same neurons that reach for God as reach for a parent, a spouse, or a child, out of love, either way or mutually. How often do we make mistakes for any of those categories?

Francis Collins didn’t lose his knowledge of the chemistry of water while looking at a frozen waterfall. He didn’t lose whatever geology he knew relevant to rivers and waterfalls. They weren’t nearly as relevant as that here was this vertical object, reaching from somewhere near heaven to the ground. It made him surrender to something that had been growing inside him. To mock that is to mock many things that make us human, among them how we have relationships with people and things, whether we want to or not. To say that it’s best to be rational about such things is to postulate a purely rational human being who doesn’t exist.

So what is God really? I am content to be unsure. Those who say science has proven there is no God overstate their case. Those who say the scientific revolution is meaningless as far as showing the traditional view of God to be wrong underestimate science. Wordy people of many types forever get lost in their words. But there are experiences that can get the attention of the most wordy people. What they do with those is up to them.

What partisans don't get

2007-02-26T16:00:00.000-08:00

I watched the first morning of the Beyond Belief 2006 conference, held last November near my home. Such smart people, but they don’t know how much they don’t understand. Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a nice talk where he pointed out several great scientists from Ptolemy on who invoked God for things they didn’t understand, but not those things they did understand. On the panel to discuss that talk was Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic and regular columnist for Scientific American. Shermer takes a different approach to things he doesn’t understand. He pretends he understands them as being trivial. In 2003 he wrote in Scientific American that transcranial magnetic stimulation reproduces all spiritual experiences. Really. Well, actually it’s not all of them. It might even be none given how other researchers have failed to reproduce these results. Such work was also doubted by John Horgan, who described his visit to this researcher in his book Rational Mysticism.

One of the themes of this conference is what might replace this tendency to attribute the unknown to God. In the part I watched it didn’t seem to occur to them that people from all parts of the political and religious spectra do the same thing – they pretend to know what they don’t know, whether they put that knowledge into God or into some hypothetical simplicity that lets human beings stay within whatever prejudice one prefers, whether with a self as psychology understands it or a self that is a delusion, whether in a reality that is purely physical or one that has a spiritual side.

So there is this tradition to attribute the unknown to God. Is it so different to attribute the unknown to something trivial instead, so nothing will intrude on the science we think is certain? I hear scientists mocking the former, but not even considering the latter.

It is true what Tyson was saying that even great minds have decided that God knows the rest, whatever they didn’t understand. For a good scientist, that’s not so much about physics or biology any more, but there is still consciousness to wonder about. Some treat consciousness as a trivial expression of the brain. Some like Susan Blackmore can write well about that possibility, but then Blackmore goes off into her training in Asian mysticism elsewhere.

Few scientists are so pluralistic. Watching the Beyond Belief 2006 conference is much like reading atheist blogs. It’s simply assumed over and over that there is no personal God. I had rejoinders every time someone claimed that, but this conference is not about examining possibilities or why someone as devoted to science as I am is also devoted to a personal God, not the traditional God, but the God I understand, who did not plan the universe or life or conflicts with science at all. That’s the only God I could believe in. I don’t know how close my God is to George Coyne, who said that the only people who think there’s a conflict between faith and science either don’t know faith or don’t know science. This conference has problems with both. People here say science means God is impossible. Whatever sense of connection one has with the universe is unrequited, they say. We should deal with that. That’s not science.

Essential to that view is the belief that so many spiritual experiences are meaningless, from conversion experiences, even those that last a lifetime, to prayer and other communications with God, to charismatic gifts, to ordinary daily experiences of following God. It’s one thing to say that all this is no different than believing in the Tooth Fairy, as juvenile-minded atheists of any age do. It’s something else to prove it. So partisans just assume it, just as fundamentalists assume that whoever disagrees with them is wrong.

I shudder to think how many pages it would take to document this trait of atheists and fundamentalists. I know that after I was sure such prejudice was theirs, I became as sure that subsets of liberals have the same problem, whether that be about denying mysticism, putting limits on New Age fantasies, pro or con, or being utterly tolerant toward everything as if all religions really are so true as to make criticism evil. Then there’s politics. I have to think that anyone who wants can see how narrow-minded partisans often are in either politics or religion.

Instead I’ve been thinking about what partisans are missing by being so partisan. I thought about that watch these videos from the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. Partisans certainly miss the intellectual weakness of their positions. I watched many scientists look at how Isaac Newton attributed the stability of movement of so many bodies in the solar system to God, while Laplace had further mathematics to find a physical solution to this problem, but with his own areas of uncertainty in which he looked to God. How is it so different to have faith in further physical solutions as opposed to faith in God? It’s true the former encourages people to look for those solutions, but nowadays I suspect they would anyway.

What is missing? I don’t think what’s missing about the universe is likely to matter so much. If it’s God who really does run the universe through physics, that’s a very strange God. Unless He changes the rules tomorrow, the distinction doesn’t mean much. Likewise with biology. Evolution is a fact. There’s no reason to think God directs weather. If He does He’s very strange about it.

Ultimate realities about the universe don’t seem to be what’s missing from atheistic science the most. What’s missing is about us. There is a God-shaped void in our brain. Evolutionary psychologists write about this, though I haven’t read one who actually uses the term, “God-shaped void”. Yet they describe our need for power, knowledge, love, and goodness, and how likely we are to seek that from hidden places, given how much our brain is biased toward hidden things evolutionary. Of course if such things are indeed the work of evolution, someday the genes responsible will be identified. That would be good, rather than having to talk about this in the abstract. However it turns out, atheists underestimate how easily God can be replaced.

Partisans in general never seem to appreciate the likelihood that their opponents are right. If it were just a matter of which restaurant in town is best, that wouldn’t matter much, but today partisans are fighting over the most fundamental truths of who we are and who the world is, trivializing both from whatever direction their partisanship comes. Religion Explained is a good book about why people are religious, by atheist academic anthropologist Pascal Boyer. I’ve seen it on the reading list at a number of atheist sites, but have the owners of those sites actually read it? Because Boyer attacks many simple reasons atheists give to put down religion, saying that the reason for religion worldwide is much more organic, which he describes atheistically, but nothing says there isn’t a God that fills our God-shaped void.

Whenever we reach the point of knowing the genetics of our God-shaped void explicitly, maybe it will be possible to be scientific about what best fills that void. Now it’s up to individuals. So atheists can claim that reason and being one’s own master is the best way to live, while others claim that God is vital, and there’s no way to really know. That’s one thing partisans don’t get, that there’s no way to know they’re right in their prejudice. They also don’t get that alternatives are just as likely to be as good, maybe better ways.

I don’t remember when it hit me that my basic belief is that God is whoever and whatever God is. I do remember realizing that is what has gotten me to where I am with God. When I first was moving toward God, I wondered if I would change 180 degrees. That’s not what happened. My conversion experience wasn’t like Paul’s. It didn’t tell me to switch sides. It told me I was going the right way, and that now it was time to add more. So how much would I have to compromise my science for this new thing? None, because the God I came to knew does not conflict with science. He doesn’t do physical miracles, but he does do mental ones I’ve experienced again and again.

Partisans don’t want to hear that. They want to mock the God of my understanding as so conveniently being complementary to science, as Isaac Newton’s God was to his science.
On one side partisans don’t understand the value of God. On the other side partisans don’t understand the value of science. Debates of atheism vs. fundamentalism are pure ignorance of something neither one understands, that science and religion really don’t conflict. I’ve given up listening to them, except this one at The Salk Institute last November. It had so many stars, but they don’t get it.

It’s really better for science to stick to science. It seems the courts will deal with intelligent design as that idea deserves. And faith is something many people don’t understand. My faith is not in spite of reason, but for things where reason is useless. It is a leap. It is trust. And if it turns out that trust is for something completely within my brain, the value of such a God is just as great for me in the present. Partisans of many types don’t understand that one.

Partisan blinders

2007-02-24T19:03:00.000-08:00

For a few weeks I’ve been thinking about writing a separate blog about how to think like a scientist. I get frustrated listening to partisans butcher both scientific issues and other issues with natural cognitive distortions like oversimplification, overgeneralization, and black and white thinking. People rarely appreciate being challenged about those, of course. Everyone thinks their own opinions are so correct. It would be so much better if it generally were understood what it means to think well, beyond how so many people can identify ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments, correctly or not.

The thing is that thinking like a scientist is very straightforward:

1) Use good data
2) Use good arguments
3) Consider all possibilities

Is there anything else? I’m not sure there is. It can take a lot of technical expertise to do those few things well, but is there something else? I can’t think of it. That technical expertise is important. One argument that creationists use throws out all techniques that measure the age of things as greater than several thousand years. Such arguments rarely appreciate just how many radioisotope techniques there are, not just carbon dating, or how many less specific indicators there are for the age of things, such as how long it takes for tectonic plates to move or volcanoes to change a landscape as much as they have, on top of even older sedimentary rocks no less.

It takes more than a little stab at a little bit of the data to think like a good scientist. You have to make sense out of all of it. This has been the great Achilles heel of philosophers who worked for thousands of years to be very good at arguments, but were terrible at premises. If you do arguments well, but data poorly, it’s just garbage in, garbage out. The scientific revolution found a way around that. That is its greatness.

So why is so much of society still resistant to the scientific revolution? In some sense science is very natural for us. We believe what we see. Yet we also find ways to believe what we want to believe, and in that, we are not at all natural scientists. People don’t want to consider all data, all arguments, and all possibilities. They only want to look at what helps their beliefs.

I’ve thought of detailing that about global warming. A nice starting point came out recently in the IPCC report on global warming, one that estimates the likelihood of human activity being the cause at over 90%. So how do skeptics attack that? They make ad hominem attacks. If they do get to any specifics, it’s something like Antarctica being less affected than one might think, as the report mentions. OK, but how about the rest of it, that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have gone up almost 40% in recent centuries, that the unvarying turn upward of global temperatures is unprecedented, even though prehistoric temperatures did vary quite a bit? It’s a very simple story, even though it’s uncertain how dangerous or expensive it will be to humanity. What’s so hard about getting the simple story straight, then being stubborn about what to do in response if one wants?

I’m not sure about that. Why do people insist on manipulating facts instead of just sticking to where things really are just a matter of opinion? I don’t know. It’s something about control. The way it relates to thinking like a scientist is easy. People don’t want to look at all possibilities. They want certainty, and not just any certainty. It has to be an acceptable certainty, true or not. That’s it. That’s what people would have to change if they want to think like scientists. They can’t be so certain. They could be certain about some things, but not everything.

It’s a simple way to go to think like a scientist. I fell in love with it as a teenager, looking at all the wonderful things science knew then. Science knows even more now, and is on an unshakeable track to learn more, such as with the genetics revolution. Yet many people prefer to think naturally than think like a scientist, with whatever blinders their partisanship tells them to wear.

It’s a simple problem. Again and again the answer is that people don’t look at all the facts, all the arguments, and all the possibilities. I’ve decided not to do a blog where I just point out example after example of that. Maybe it’s something that’s needed, but I’ll leave that to others. Partly that’s because there’s an example of this that scientists don’t look at much. It’s how atheist scientists go after religion, because they’re so sure religion is all superstition.

PZ Myers is one. Yesterday he went after the staff of a Florida school because they prayed after hours using prayer oil on students’ desks. Ed Brayton did so a few hours earlier. Myers uses the following words: “stupid”, “lunatics”, “deranged” “…you are a disgrace, a confused and deluded kook, and you are screwing up. Get help. Your delusions are affecting your performance and your life,” “because they use the excuse that it is ‘religion’ everyone backs off, gets all deferential, and pretends they aren't dealing with a team of quacks, clowns, and slow-witted, thoughtless incompetents,” “I say fire the lot of them,” and “Jebus. Magic goop. Prancing, chanting shamans. If the kids do poorly on the test, we know the reason: idiots running the classrooms. This is what religion does, it rips up your brain and infuses it with credulity and sloppy thinking.”

Well he did say “if the kids do poorly”. It’s not as though he’s completely prejudiced about the situation. It’s amazing how some people can diagnose others at a distance. The mental health professions should look into this ability.

Brayton is more restrained, calling this attempt at “divine cheating” “perverse” and alluding to someone having a “screw loose”.

How many atheist scientists are there who don’t think that religious people are idiots and insane? I don’t, but I’m not an atheist. Some might say that means I don’t think like a scientist. They might add a fourth feature to thinking like a scientist, which is to have contempt for any notion of a reality beyond the physical universe. Of course, they would make exceptions for believing in parallel universes or other speculation that involves neither spirits nor God.

What is the objective evidence that religious people are idiots and insane? I suppose some are. I suppose some scientists are if one can stretch the definition of “idiot” to mean habitually saying and doing things that don’t make sense. Maybe even PZ Myers would admit he’s not thinking like a scientist with that rant. So why do it?

Now I’ve never used prayer oil. I’ve only rarely said intercessory prayers. I’ve prayed them as they come to me. I don’t know if any ever helped anyone. I don’t know that there ever has been a physical miracle in response to prayer. I do know that some remarkable mental things have happened to me following prayer. Long-standing resentments have gone. I have prayed for direction, strength and hope and gotten exactly that. Who’s to say that God can’t help children in school be less distracted for a test, just because some who believe in Him ask for His help? Myers and Brayton don’t make scientific arguments to the contrary. They just ridicule the idea.

It’s a free country. Those who choose to ridicule whatever possibility they don’t like will continue to do so, from any place in the political and religious spectra. And some people like this will continue to boast how much they believe in truth, science, whatever. It’s a lie. I know how a good scientist thinks. He or she thinks with those three features I wrote down above. If someone has better criteria, it would be interesting for me to read them. Exploring all possibilities has paid off for me before. I know partisans don’t like to do that. I’m not sure what besides partisanship would make people resist looking at all the possibilities. Not even idiocy or insanity explains that.

Abu Ghraib

2007-02-23T01:12:00.000-08:00

HBO premiered a documentary last night about the torture of prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib in 2003. The administration and its fellow travelers dispute the word “torture”, something they have tried to define as causing organ failure or death, not “mere” psychological torture or pain inflicted without persistent damage. Quibbling about words sounds like the tactic of someone with something to hide. Of course at Abu Ghraib there was indeed torture leading to death. No one was punished for such murders, only for embarrassing the Army by taking pictures. The naïve soldiers actually believed the story that a prisoner who died from torture had suffered a routine heart attack. They didn’t realize they were photographing a murder. Without pictures, no one except the Army and the prisoners would have known how bad it was. Even with these pictures, only the Army and prisoners know how much worse the actual interrogations were. Strange how perfect crimes go wrong.

I don’t know how important it is that from the President on down, no one has taken responsibility for the systematic brutality that was captured by the pictures at Abu Ghraib, and for what? I’m sure it’s wrong, as opposed to some other issues about the war in Iraq and fighting terrorism that aren’t as clear to me, yet so many accept this and fight over things that make me shrug. I do know that there was systematic brutality. This documentary establishes that for anyone who hasn’t gotten that from newspapers and other TV already.

Will any politician ever be willing to get to the bottom of this or the top if that’s the more appropriate finding? Many people have been more loyal to the Army or to President Bush at this point than to the principle that it’s wrong to torture people, pretending that with this one exception of approved stress positions gotten carried away at Abu Ghraib, everyone is sticking to the regulations about acceptable torture. Right, I find the sight of Army officers and administration officials staring into the camera saying everything’s fine, our soldiers are stopping just short of real torture, to be more chilling than any of the pictures from Abu Ghraib. And think of all who called CBS traitors for airing these pictures in the first place.

There were plenty of prisoners at Abu Ghraib who were there by mistake, no matter how evil some of them were. I was once taught that America stands for the principle that it’s better for 10 guilty men to go free than one innocent man to be imprisoned. The reality of American justice hasn’t often been that careful, but when did we go to the idea that 10 men would be tortured, innocent, guilty, who cares, so that maybe one man would say a little bit more about something, truth, desperate lie, who cares? Many Republicans have signed on to this shift in what America means. That shouldn’t be forgotten. If Americans want this, their votes will signal that. I for one don’t want America to stand for torture. That’s my vote.

A less hateful world

2007-02-22T19:56:00.000-08:00

Unlike fear, there is no rational basis for hate. Perhaps one can identify people without whom the world would be better off. That’s no reason to hate them. One might say the world would be better off without the uneducated or the selfish. That’s a reason to promote education or institutions that favor selflessness. Maybe that will eliminate the uneducated and the selfish in future generations. Why punish or kill the uneducated or the selfish in this generation if they’ll just come back in the next one? It’s no solution. Yet it is a solution to focus on the future and not worry about expressing vengeance in the present.

Hatred is not so patient. Hatred may not act in the present out of impotence, but it would if it could.

Unlike fear, there is no semi-objective way to look at the world and ask how much hate there should be in a person if he or she could take in the facts of the world without bias. If one can take in all facts objectively, why would there be any hate? There’s only hate when people look at their political, religious, or personal opponents and say, “It’s their fault!”

Anywhere one looks on the internet or in the real world, one does hear other people being criticized for what they say or do. Often that’s a hateful criticism. I would like to get away from that for the above reasons, that there’s no rational basis for hate, that it does no good, even in the intellectualized form of hate one can see where there are no obscenities, but the words are thoroughly biased toward someone else being the bad guy.

One principle that gets away from hate is to understand that our greatest enemy is in the mirror. It’s my own bias that causes me the greatest upset. In the language of Buddhism, my delusions and my attachments cause me the most trouble, more so than the biological and cultural nature of so many people. I like that aspect of Christianity that also says look at myself first, as with Matthew 7: 1-5. So I look at myself.

One way I try to be more objective is to be a scientist toward the hatred, indifference, and falseness that so many people embrace. It is the product of biological evolution and cultural evolution that we are this way. Whether one is polite about one’s evil intent or obnoxious, it is natural and acceptable by one’s subculture, if not the overall culture. People have cognitive distortions in almost every opinion they have. They oversimplify and overgeneralize. They use black and white reasoning. They deny this if challenged. They can’t be mistaken. They start from being right. The words they use to explain that must be defensible.

Even with that much, I’m starting to lose my objectivity. I hate how people butcher reasoning in what they say, how they ignore so many possibilities, how their prejudice is so important to them. I know why this is. This is one reason there is so much strife in politics, religion, and everything else. It adds to all other reasons that make all partisanship corrupt. And I’m sick of partisanship. I don’t have to think about it. As in that link, I’m having a perfectly good day, and then I’m grumpy because I see some excessive display of partisanship. I’d like my clients to escape from not having health insurance, but it’s not going to happen because politicians would rather push their own fantasies and play “gotcha” with the other side.

See, I’m losing my objectivity again. I’d rather just kill all the bad people than sit and watch objectively. I won’t do that because practically I can’t and the consequences of how much killing I could do are unacceptable to me. Some say I’m immoral because of that, that the only way to be moral is to see such killing as wrong. Perhaps that’s right. Yet I am what I am, just like everyone else.

So at some point I admit I can’t be objective. People are evil for how much suffering they cause and for not wanting to diminish that. I’m hurt by that. Others are hurt even more than I am. It helps some to understand how natural this is, but that is also why blaming others and not helping others is so ingrained in people, why hatred persists even when culturally acceptable hatred shifts from physical violence to verbal attacks.

Where is hatred going? I would like to think that as people improve materially, they have less reason to hate other people, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, does it? It does seem that hatred is more verbal and less physically violent than it once was. Why should that ever go away?

I turn to God, and I have a hard time getting a straight answer to how much God hates this world. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, where there was a determination in the 19th century that God has no passions. Does that mean a passionless love? That’s not the God of my experience. And love can mean hatred of things that threaten the object of that love. Maybe if God can see a big enough picture, He doesn’t need to hate, knowing that all this blaming other people is just something people have to get through. Then again maybe even God doesn’t have that wide a view.

Will people ever get away from hate? Atheists seem to think that if everyone gave up on the delusions of religion, there would be much less hate. Fundamentalists seem to think that if everyone joined their cult, there would be much less hate. Perhaps there would be for a while, but intellectualized hate is so subtle, and controlling other people is so much in our nature, I don’t know that hatred will ever leave us. Maybe someday we’ll have implants that will keep us from blaming people the way we do. It’s going to be a while before we get that far.

So maybe fear will decrease, but hate will stay with us. That’s not necessarily a good combination, is it?

A less scary world

2007-02-17T15:31:00.000-08:00

From time to time I realize how things I do are less frightening than life once was. I don’t worry about what I eat being tainted. It’s sealed. It has dates on it. Manufacturers suffer from publicity if they aren’t careful. I don’t need to be superstitious about eating the right things. Science has learned about fats, carbohydrates, protein, fiber, vitamins, and how they relate to health, not perfectly, but enough to feel confident that I know what a healthy diet is. It’s my choice how close to stay to that. It’s not my personality to be completely safe. On occasion I’ll eat at Taco Bell or Jack-in-the-Box and the 6 hours of diarrhea that follow will remind me that’s not the perfect choice. But until I’m in a group that’s more at risk from too much E.coli in my food, it’s not that dangerous.

How different it must have been in the ancient world. No wonder people counted on God to bless their food or strictly stick to dietary laws that some argue were for dietary safety more than a fantasy of holiness. Yet I would bet that some ancient people who followed the diet of their religion felt more secure than some today who feel compelled to buy vitamins and follow individual superstitions about their food. The world is less scary, but people remain spread out along a spectrum from being afraid to being secure.

Has that spectrum shifted? It’s hard to know. The world is less scary, not only with respect to food, but with respect to being the victim of violence, for most of us, with respect to tomorrow’s weather, most of the time, and with respect to the disruptions of war, disease, and economic instability. So my bias is to say people should be less scared. Are they? It’s hard to know. As I cruise the media and the internet there is so much fear. There is fear about conservative Christians making the US into a theocracy. There is fear of what Muslims will do on their way to take over the world. There is conservative fear of what freedom in sexuality and the marginalization of Christianity will do to them. There is atheistic fear about what the irrational beliefs of any religion mean for the future.

Some of that fear is amplified for the purpose of sensationalism. Some of it is overstated for rhetorical purposes. Still it’s clear that people are afraid and sometimes vote their fears. There is something real about fear. How much? That’s such a hard question to answer. As I go about my daily life I don’t have much fear, and that seems realistic. I imagine some extreme fear where I am simultaneously being chewed by a shark and engulfed by flames, and that seems avoidable. It’s safe to bet that my fear of being in a shark tank will never need to reach my consciousness except for a moment of imagination like this.

I desire to live with a realistic amount of fear, not denial, not awash in unrealistic fear. That’s how fear would seem to be the most useful to me. The culture of fear opposes me in this. It preys on me. Media personalities like Glenn Beck would have me fear Muslims more and fear global warming less. Others have their own agenda. I can’t resist them all, especially those fear-mongers who are closer to my own prejudices. One brake on that is that so many fears some push on the public are far away from my daily life. I know how to resist that, to pay attention to my life and not some media rantings. Of course that invites denial, but maybe it’s enough just to be curious about the outside world, to wonder how much there is to this talk of global warming or terrorism and read enough to understand that both are far away from my daily life, not everyone’s, but my daily life. I’d vote against both, but mine is not a swing vote. It won’t make a difference.

How many people want me to be afraid so they can manipulate me? Advertisers do. Politicians do, including so many politicians masquerading as news people. Those in religion want me to afraid so I will take their prescription for my fear. I’m sure some people want me to be afraid just for the existential joy involved in being able to scare me.

If I listened to all those people seriously, maybe the world wouldn’t be a less scary place than it was hundreds or thousands of years of years ago, but I don’t listen to them that much. And I’m convinced that apart from propaganda the world is less scary than it used to be, at least since the risk of global thermonuclear war was greatly diminished. Still it’s up to individuals whether they feel secure enough or need to turn to some system of beliefs or course of action to help them.

I wasn’t that fearful 18 years ago when I turned to praying again. I was just afraid that I didn’t have any good ideas to help my marriage or career, both of which weren’t going to kill me, but weren’t making me happy either. God helped me in ways that I didn’t expect, didn’t understand, and that sometimes made me more afraid. Yet after these new fears passed, my world is even less scary than science has shown it to be. I’m not immune to fear now, but I have a constant companion for anything that happens to me, someone I can consult. I’m still not going in any shark tanks. I’m not stupid. God doesn’t require me to be.

Many atheists ridicule me for that, saying I’m unrealistic and would recognize the dangers of all religion if I weren’t so intoxicated. There’s fear in that, isn’t there? Like any other fear, I listen. I ask if there’s anything there that makes sense or is someone just venting his or her own fear or pushing fear even more than that. Is there any realistic fear of the God of my understanding? I’ve thought about it. It is stimulating to meet God. It is disorienting. It can be frightening. But is it something reasonable to avoid? I don’t think so. Anyone is welcome to suggest some greater fear, but the only suggestions I hear lack any understanding of the God I know. Atheists are busy bashing the traditional God. I understand that. Maybe someday they’ll completely smash Him and realize to their confusion that the real God has always been someplace else, someplace they don’t like any better, as it still implies that atheism is not the pinnacle of realism.

I wish life were color-coded. One could more easily see that this is fear-mongering or that is hate-mongering. I am convinced that science gives us many reasons to be less afraid of this world than people used to be. Maybe someday that actually will let people shed their superstitions. Yet I have also met the God I understand, and in Him there are even more reasons to be less afraid. People resist all of this, sure that they will find something better in their own beliefs and superstitions than what is beyond them. I’m sure that’s natural. It’s also natural that fear-mongers and hate-mongers prey on people, just like bacteria and bears. There is a way out of that for people, to be less sensitive to liars, to trust an empirical way to knowledge that is flawed, but mostly reliable. Some people are too afraid to go that way, better to stick with the fantasy, fear and hatred they know. Maybe the next generation will find it to be less scary.

However it might happen, there is an even less scary world ahead than this world where so many labels on my food make me its master. I understand God is in that world even more than this one.

It matters who God is

2007-02-15T21:04:00.000-08:00

I was following some links today and came across a controversy between PZ Myers of Pharyngula and Vox Day of Vox Popoli. A questioner on the latter blog challenged Christians about whether they would follow God’s order to kill all children in sight under the age of 2, if it were beyond question that this is indeed God’s order. Now this is not a new idea. For centuries Jew and Christians have been discussing the obedience of Abraham when God told him to sacrifice Isaac and the obedience of Israelites when God told them to commit genocide in their conquest of Canaan. I don’t hear theists saying about those examples that they would disobey God. I myself doubt that anything in Genesis is history, so the story of Abraham and Isaac is a parable for me, but not necessarily a parable from God. In part it is a parable contrasting the God of Israel with those gods who did require child sacrifice. In part it is reassurance that one could follow God blindly, and He will make things turn out right. But is that reassurance from people who didn’t know that God exercises no power over the physical world? It is not beyond question that the God of the Bible is not the real God. If the real God can’t save or resurrect Isaac, it makes Abraham’s understanding of the situation more critical.

If the God I know told me to sacrifice my son, I would ask questions why. The God I know never has asked me for blind obedience. If He did, I can see myself saying, “I don’t understand.” I never disobey God, why would I need to, but I am always honest with Him. My experience is that God knows all of my consciousness. That makes it easy to be honest with Him, since I can’t hide anything from Him anyway. So that means if it doesn’t make sense to me, that’s what I’d say to God, even after whatever questions I had about this being an imposter. Maybe that means that I’m not worthy. Maybe instead that means I’m exactly who God wants to talk to. Who was the source of the biblical view that values blind obedience? Was it God? Was it men? God tells me here and now that it was men. This is the God I know, not a God who is only words on a page or the God of a tradition that I see to be corrupt in many ways.

Now if the God I know told me He has been holding back from showing me just how much physical power He has and that it’s His intention to stop some religious strife by killing everyone on one side, and needed my help for some reason, I would help Him. Kill all Muslims, all Hindus, all Christians, all Jews, all atheists, or everyone of a particular ethnicity, whoever His target is, if I understand it, I would help Him. It would be moral because God finds it to be necessary. However many billions, if I understood why and that it’s God without any possible doubt, I would help Him. It would take me more than a minute to understand, and if God would ever do this, I can’t imagine why He hasn’t done it already. This is a big part why I don’t believe in a traditional God, because a traditional God would have ended all this strife long ago. There are good reasons why the real God hasn’t done that with His limitations.

I think about this need for me to understand on more issues than this one. When I first heard from God directly, in that road-to-Damascus experience, I questioned Him. As I wrote before, his response blew away my doubt. It hasn’t been so dramatic since then, but the process has been similar. I need to understand. I need to trust, too, since I can’t understand things perfectly, but God never once has objected to helping me trust Him more. Why should He? Why should blind obedience be a virtue? Isn’t it love to respect each other’s needs? Why should God need blind obedience? Yet my need to understand is obvious. I need to have faith in what I do, or I won’t do it well.

Vox Day takes the approach Abraham took. Of course he would do what God says, with the provision that there is no doubt. Vox believes in the traditional God. That God can be trusted no matter what. Communication from Him can overcome any imperfection I have in hearing Him or understanding His morality. Real communication isn’t so easy. The God of my understanding might turn out to be who atheists say He is, a creation of my imagination. I don’t think that’s true. There are too many aspects of my relationship with God that I think are beyond my imagination. Yet in the end I would do what God says, too, as long as I understand. I doubt I could understand killing babies. I doubt the God I know would have a reason for that. The God I know could convince me if He does.

So it’s close between Vox and me. Vox believes in a different God than I do. I assume we’re not both right, but what do I know? I trust the God I know. He’s explained to me how I’m wrong before.

On the other hand PZ Myers seems to think that killing is immoral even if God says so. I’ve heard atheists say this multiple ways. Some say that if God is immoral, they will not follow Him. I certainly don’t deny that there can be morality without God. I agreed when I read Bertrand Russell reason his way toward saying that the ultimate good things are benevolence and knowledge. These have good consequences. That’s generally true.

I also agree with evolutionary psychologists who argue for evolution having given us an innate morality because of the selective value of cooperation. One might describe the basic message of this morality as it’s wrong to hurt people like oneself. Cultures have worked to extend this natural principle to all people, even beyond human beings, and extend it to helping people in various ways as opposed to just not hurting people, but the basis of all this is just that it’s more competitive for natural selection, even if the cultural extensions of our biological morality might not have a competitive advantage.

So how does that make God immoral if He wants to kill some people? That’s the problem, isn’t it? If we want to make the world better for people, and God decides that’s not good for Him in some way, by what principle is God immoral? Just because we say so?

I suspect that principle is that atheists are sure God is imaginary. So it’s not God deciding people need to die. It’s a kook deciding people need to die. Then one at least could say that the kook is heavily outvoted about what is moral. I didn’t see that in the hundreds of comments on Pharyngula, but I was skimming. PZ Myers’ comments are easier to understand if that’s the case. If the premise is that one can be sure of the supreme being’s orders, and you can’t accept the possibility of that, then of course the whole thing is ridiculous.

Vox Day makes a different attack, “If you are going to debate the legitimacy of a belief system based on the potential danger it presents, secular scientists are vastly more vulnerable than Christians.” With the God I know, there’s certainly more chance of mass killing in the absence of God’s morality than from those following the real God. I think that’s true for any kind of false faith, theist or atheist. People have shown considerable capacity to come up with reasons to kill others, just as people spend a lot of time saying some other group is the bad one, often in a reciprocal way.

Lost in that is who is God? Atheists have a simple answer. There is no God. Those who believe in the God of the Bible have a simple answer, too. I think they’re both wrong, and I’m glad that I can have a relationship with God that doesn’t involve any of them. Neither God nor I have asked each other a question as hypothetical as the one that got all this started. It’s the practicalities that matter. I asked God for help, and I got help. I needed direction, strength, and comfort, and that’s what God gave me. I wanted some physical miracles, and God showed me He doesn’t do that. Instead of learning about all that, some who hear that God speaks to me in words wonder if I’m God’s assassin. Well, I haven’t killed anyone for God yet. I don’t expect to kill anyone. But those who think it’s always wrong to kill someone might better think that through again. I haven’t known God to tell me anything that made me say, “Why didn’t you do that before?” so I doubt God is planning mass killings for the future that He could have ordered today.

It is a strange controversy. If there is a God who is in charge, He doesn’t seem to be raising assassins. If there is no God, then no one has to worry about how they will respond to his orders. It’s really all about the possibility that those who believe they follow God’s orders aren’t. But that’s possible whether there is a real God or not. It’s clear God doesn’t prevent murders falsely made in His name. I would say that’s because He can’t control those who don’t know Him, but however it happens, there have been murders committed in God’s name. So what? Does anything either PZ Myers or Vox Day says make a difference to that?

Atheists want to find some magic words that make God go away. It’s not going to happen.

A day without blogs

2007-02-10T11:41:00.000-08:00

21st Century Press
February 10, 2061

President Maria Conchita Bracamonte today proclaimed every Tuesday as a day without blogs, citing last year’s studies from the University of Wyoming and National Autonomous University of Mexico that Tuesday is the worst day of the week for baseless rumors, building on Monday being the day for the greatest number of new topics. President Bracamonte thanked Congress for the Cooper-Patel Act passed last month, which authorizes the President to take steps such as this in furtherance of the 30th amendment.

The President reiterated her administration’s commitments to the intellectual health, emotional health and physical health of the nation, three of the Eight Ways to the Future that she emphasized in her re-election campaign. Bracamonte suggested using the prohibition against blogging on Tuesday productively by making Tuesdays for exercise, for family and other needs.

Department of Information spokesperson Ousmane Fields explained that the proclamation does not require people to turn off their implants, but only the automatic recording features that post their every thought and image. Recording for one’s own use or future public use is unaffected by the proclamation.

Also today Attorney General Ted Robinson warned members of the opposition who persist in referring to the Department of Information as the “Ministry of Truth” risk prosecution under the provisions of the Cooper-Patel Act to enforce the freedom from lies and freedom from hate guarantees of the 30th amendment, in its modification of the first amendment. General Robinson referred to the “Sense of the People” section of the Cooper-Patel Act that defines lies, excluding satire for one-time rhetorical purposes, but holding that satire becomes a lie when used repeatedly in place of the facts of the matter. Hateful satire, however, is prohibited in all cases. Robinson acknowledged that the 14,000 pages of the “Sense of the People” section on lies and 23,000 pages on hate can be intimidating to read and that it is his intention to give people at least one warning of their being in violation of the Act before prosecution, but people should take that warning seriously.

Similarly Robinson warned that persistent references to the Cooper-Patel Act as “Sinaloan Justice” will also be prosecuted. Sinaloa was the 63rd of the 84 states to ratify the 30th amendment in 2058, making the amendment part of the US Constitution.

All partisanship is corrupt

2007-02-09T14:30:00.000-08:00

I wrote before how I was getting sucked in by politics again. I was expecting that no one would be humbled by the November elections despite how well the Democrats were expected to do. Well, this time the predictions were correct, at least the predictions were that tilted the most toward the Democrats, ignoring this mystical power Karl Rove was expected by some to have on voter turnout. I’ve heard Republicans being sad to lose Rick Santorum and George Allen. I’ve heard plenty of recrimination about how Republicans should have paid more attention to fiscal conservatism and not taking bribes. If no one actually ate crow, maybe some had to smell crow. The actually eating might be for 2008 or maybe it will be the Democrats who find it’s their turn to be humbled again.

This should be healthy, but I wonder. My experience this morning is discouraging. I had a good morning except for one thing. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but some minutes later I realized my mood had changed. I was happy. Then I was grumpy. It was all because of this political cartoon in the San Diego Union-Tribune, depicting Nancy Pelosi as crying for a bigger airplane. Now I spent a lot of time on the internet yesterday. I went by Media Matters, as I often do, where it was pointed out how Tony Snow said that it was a silly story to portray Speaker Pelosi as demanding a larger plane, indifferent to the cost to the public. Still the RNC came out with an attack e-mail at the same time listing many negative comments about Pelosi from obvious partisans. Anyone interested in the facts found out there wasn’t a story here, just Republican partisanship. Yet today here is this cartoon, completely out of touch with reality, purely an attack on an opponent, the San Diego paper being thoroughly Republican. Do facts matter at all?

Satire is an accepted form of expression. One problem with it, though, is there comes a point when the satirical presentation is so different from reality that while the word “satire” may still apply, it’s much more truthful to call it a lie. The San Diego Union-Tribune lies all the time. This cartoonist regularly provokes letters to the editor about how much of a lie his cartoons are. I’ve always shrugged about this. People are what they are. I haven’t had much luck confronting people anywhere along either the political or religious spectrum with how much they lie, how much they’re not looking to the facts of a matter, but where they can beat their opponents or defend their position.

There’s been another firestorm this week involving Republicans blasting Democrats. This time it wasn’t as important that partisans lack credibility in their attacks, as evidenced by the attack on Pelosi, because the facts of the matter were on the websites of the two women John Edwards hired to run his blog. There are so many places to start reading on this one, but wherever one starts the picture emerges that both sides are just blasting away at each other. It starts with Bill Donahue saying that anyone who talks about his Catholics this way should be fired. Then defenders of the bloggers fire back about how vicious Donohue has been in the past, while others support Donohue as being exactly right. Little rhetoric focuses on whether it’s really OK to talk about other people any way you want. Finally Mr. Edwards addressed that. I agree with his statement with one exception. He accepts the bloggers’ word that they didn’t mean to malign anyone’s faith? Oh, come on. Reportedly from his spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri has come the news that no one from the Edwards campaign looked at the offensive bloggings ahead of time and Edwards still hasn’t met either blogger in person. So maybe Mr. Edwards doesn’t really understand what was written or maybe he’s just telling a little lie. I don’t think this successful trial lawyer is dumb enough for the former.

When Amanda Marcotte equates the Holy Spirit with ancient mythology and says so many other contemptuous things that I’ve lost track, in as forceful a language as possible, I can’t imagine the slightest possibility that she didn’t mean to malign anyone’s faith. She certainly maligned mine. So should she be fired? I don’t care. That’s up to her employer. Lots of people malign my faith. I wish they wouldn’t, but if they were all fired or dropped dead, the US economy would grind to a halt. Europe would be almost completely depopulated. It’s not necessary just for me.

What interests me more than the big guns blasting away at both sides are the little lies, like John Edwards lie that his new employees didn’t mean to be bad. Of course they did. He could have accepted that differently, without lying. For some reason he didn’t. I’m sure it’s politics, just as his decision whether to fire anyone had to rest in politics. How amazing it was to read in the DailyKos and similarly leftist blogs how quickly some would abandon Edwards forever if he fired bloggers who were like them or be drawn to him even more if he kept their sisters on. That is indeed politics, not morality, not anything else.

There was a time when I said, “A pox on both your houses,” a few times. Mostly I did that when I gave up finding any common ground with atheists or fundamentalists, but extremist politics is similar. In religion, I paid more attention to liberal religion once I was sure I never was going to find a larger group for fellowship than that. Yet liberal religion is divided into several groups, many with non-negotiable ways of seeing things if not beliefs. The middle ground for politics is similar. I’ve been reading the blog The Moderate Voice regularly. They tell little lies there. It’s not always from the same perspective. Sometimes it’s a little Republican lie, sometimes a little Democratic lie, sometimes a little lie that breaks away from both mainstreams. Anyone can see for himself or herself. It’s all the same politics, pushing an agenda, twisting the facts, denying wrongdoing in oneself, magnifying it in your enemies.

I’m sure it’s done because it works. If the American people demanded civility and scrupulous honesty, we’d have civility and scrupulous honesty. They don’t. In fact they seem to appreciate a good scrap to weed out losers.

Somehow all of that was in this cartoon this morning, not at first, but in me to mix with whatever this cartoon added. It made me grumpy. It didn’t help for me to say that none of this matters. It’s window dressing. It’s the fans misbehaving in the stands, with no bearing on the serious game being played in the field. Well, some of it is. But for any problem in our culture, it’s this sort of silliness and lying that keeps there from being a solution. I know the suffering this causes, the lack of health care, the lack of a secure income, the foreign policy adventures. Lots of people talk about such things, but they talk about them as partisans, and all partisanship is corrupt. Look at that cartoon again. Look at cartoons that attack Bush or other Republicans. There are lies among them, too.

It’s not that fun to watch without the numbers regarding the election. I’m humbled by it if no one else is willing to be.

If it’s just me, it doesn’t matter; if not the problem is huge

2007-02-01T17:27:00.000-08:00

Recently I was led to a site about contemporary Christian music and found this interview of Grammy-award winning Christian singer Rebecca St. James. As much as I admire Rebecca’s music, passion for God and attitude of surrender, which I share, we don’t see God the same way.

“I believe worship is the greatest thing we can do here on earth,” Rebecca says. “It’s our human Christian calling; it’s what we’re created to do. I love worship. There is such a need for it today.”

I’ve heard this before. I’m not sure where. I know Rick Warren said in his book The Purpose Driven Life that God’s 5 purposes for us are for worship, for fellowship, to grow spiritually, to serve others, and for evangelism. Warren wrote, “It’s all for God.” He wrote that God’s only purpose in doing anything is to glorify Himself. I know I’d heard all of that before Rick Warren got many people to read it. It never rang true to me. It’s based on that traditional view of God as omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving and all-good. If that’s true, why isn’t there heaven on Earth right now?

Of course people can argue about that. It’s not an accident that Bible-believing Christians have settled on such a homogeneous view of God. The above view can be defended well enough, given how many people there are in this house of cards all telling each other there’s no problem.

But who’s right about God, regardless of any arguments? Rick Warren and Rebecca St. James could be right about God. Just because I think their God makes no sense alongside the world I experience doesn’t prove anything. Atheists might be right that the concept of God is pure fantasy, no matter how much my experiences have been helpful and beyond me to fake. Any other religion might be right. How can one know?

I’d like to take credit for deciding to trust God and junk everything else, but that’s not my part. I just started praying again in my thirties, and some things happened that I still don’t really understand. I know they don’t fit the simplistic ideas people have, from traditionalists to secularists. That’s what really set me free. Seeing really is believing.

I remember when I realized there were two possibilities. It took me about 6 months after God first spoke to me to see it that simply. One was that whatever I was experiencing about God was wrong, and something else was right, or maybe no one was right. The other possibility is that as metaphorical or otherwise indirect as my experience might be, that’s the real God.

I realized that if I was wrong, I could live with that. I’d explored essentially all religions before that and adapted to the possibilities that one, all, or none were correct. If all that I experience is just me, it doesn’t change that.

But if what I hear is God, He/She is very different than some say. He helps us not like He’s playing with dolls, but out of love. Glory? What’s that? I love God for who God is and what God has done for me. God tells me He/She loves me for who I am and what I’ve done for God. What is talk of glory apart from an attempt to suck up to God as if God were one of those Asian despots who ran things when the Bible was being written? Or sometimes people speak of God’s glory as they pretend He’s on their side, when He’s not, when He’s with those who are detested by those first people.

It would be one thing if worship were just about group prayer or group fellowship with God, but to pretend that we are nothing without God, that God does everything good and something else does everything bad is talking to someone who doesn’t exist. It’s not the God who speaks to me, the God to whom I’m married. That God likes how music and teaching help people, but doing glory to Him? – people don’t have the slightest idea how to do that.

The greatest thing anyone on Earth can do is love, love God, love neighbors, and love enemies. I used to say that a lot, but then it becomes a problem to define love, especially with loving God and loving enemies. It’s hard to get a straight answer from enemies about that, but God tells me what loving Him means to Him. It has nothing to do with worship. If that’s just my fantasy, it doesn’t matter. But if it means there’s a problem with tradition, then it’s a huge problem, and so many people are clueless about it, even people I otherwise like.

Talking people to death

2007-01-29T17:41:00.000-08:00

I listened to Christian radio on the way home today. R.C. Sproul was speaking about eschatology, focusing on Matthew 13: 38-40, Luke 21: 24 and the idea that Gentiles would trample Jerusalem until the end of the age. So are the prophecies that Matthew and Luke put in the mouth of Jesus during His ministry preceding His crucifixion, in part duplicating Mark, in part coming from something else in common, in part from words unique to Matthew or Luke, likely written after the burning of the Temple by the Romans. Sproul goes on from there to wonder if it matters that Gentiles are still trampling Jerusalem some, such as with the mosques on the Temple mount. Maybe the true end times won’t come for thousands of years more because of that, says Sproul, though he also says he doubts that. Sproul doesn’t go so far as to wonder if the end of the age might never come. I do, because I have a basic question that Sproul didn’t address at all.

What if these prophecies are wrong?

It’s not such a clever or original question. I’m sure Sproul has a standard answer prepared for that. Maybe it’s about prophecies in particular. Maybe it’s his general reason for believing the Bible to be God’s authoritative word. I may have even heard him talk about that at some point. I don’t remember, though I do know I’ve heard him quote both Martin Luther and Augustine as saying the Bible is definitely without error. So why believe dead men? Beyond that I know I’ve heard a lot of words about the Bible, and none of them are that great. Any time I want I can go to the first chapter of Genesis and be sure it’s wrong. I can speak with God about it. He says it’s wrong. It would be one thing to say it was the best creation myth people could manage 3000 years ago, just as one could look at any part of the Bible in the context of the culture and people who wrote it.

But what about this business of saying it is God’s authoritative word for all time? You know, if you’re wrong about that, it’s a big mistake, either way. It’s trying to have an open mind about such things that set me up for understanding the power of saying that God is whoever and whatever God is. To do otherwise is to set yourself up for God to be on the other side of the issue than you are. I hardly ever hear either liberals or conservatives worry about that. Is it lack of imagination about how badly one might be wrong? I doubt that. I think it’s pure pride along with how comforted people are by others believing exactly what they believe. I doubt R.C. Sproul will ever look in his mirror and be confronted with that in this life. I don’t know why exactly. I know that such doubt is not to be seen in humans when they talk as he does. Call it faith, but is it true faith or false faith?

Who but God can know?

I decided to embrace that question at one point. It was the only thing that made sense to me, that God is trustworthy, while trusting anyone or anything else is easily attacked. If God’s not trustworthy, what difference does anything make? So why not pray to God and see what happens. It takes patience. It takes a lot of things. It takes a real God, not a character in a book. So I’m not surprised few people emphasize surrendering to God about one’s beliefs. That’s not a traditional choice, unlike reason, tradition, the Bible or experience not necessarily involving God.

It’s worked for me, but as in my last blog, I hear others relying on traditional words, and I know it can’t work in the long run. What would R.C. Sproul do if he knew that all the words he uses only brings everyone he knows one step closer to death? I don’t know. I’d probably still just ask him what if biblical prophecies are wrong. He’s not going to take my word for it that his faith is suspect. His loyalty is to Jesus and to God, as the Bible describes. Those descriptions won’t show him his error, and if that’s because they are just characters in a book that God has no interest in, there are many people following the same wordy way to death.

Live your life to end poverty. Live your life to end strife. Why should God care about you otherwise? Many of my fellow liberals would say God is not so tough, that He loves everyone. How do you know?

God tells me there’s so little I can do individually to end poverty or strife, He wouldn’t push me even to do as much as I do. Still that’s what matters, not words. God matters most of all, and there are no words that speak for Him. What a great truth, and hardly anyone can believe it.

The difference between abstract and real

2007-01-28T18:29:00.000-08:00

Thursday night on HBO, they were showing a documentary about evangelical Christians by Alexandra Pelosi (yes, the Speaker’s daughter). I had mixed feelings about watching it, so I dragged my feet until 10 – 15 minutes into it before turning it on. At that point the subject was indoctrinating kids to be against evolution. Ken Ham, Australian creationist, was speaking to the children in a church audience. I’ve seen him before. He is extremely simplistic in attacks on evolution, saying things such as how Noah’s flood was just as likely to have created all the fossils found by science as the accepted scientific story of geological time. He even had a slide that said: God said it; I believe it; that settles it. It was something like that if not the slide’s exact words. My focus was mostly on the first two parts of that. There are other possibilities about what God said, you know.

Afterward, the film interviewed at least 3 children of elementary school age. They were sold on believing in creation according to the Bible, not evolution. Why? Because the Bible is true. God wrote it. How did they know? No one asked, but I suppose the answer is that everyone in their life told them so. Who’s going to disagree with that?

I was surprised by how much emotion those children brought out in me. I bet it was because they were children. I can see children as innocents as much as anyone, and here they are being used by adults to mirror the fantasies the adults cling to so that they can feel secure about life.

I feel secure from ideas that it took me a long time to see simply. Attacks on evolution are all lies, you know. Evolution is a fact, from comparative anatomy, from fossils, from population biology, from molecular biology. People will argue against that, even some smart people, but only in the way a defense attorney will try to keep a guilty defendant out of prison, with misdirection and suggestion.

Human nature gets so extreme in that. It’s not enough for people to preach that the best way to live is found in the Bible, the Quran, or A Course in Miracles, they have to say that God wrote the book of their choice. God says their way is best. Who can argue for anything else? Only with considerable conflict can someone argue for something else.

This is what the children of religion are raised for. So are the children of atheism, though I suppose without the same degree of indoctrination. People raise their children to carry on a tradition. I’ve watched this, having gone to many different types of churches. Only the children going to charismatic churches are taught it’s OK to speak in tongues. Only the children going to conservative churches are taught that it’s OK to say Jesus is the only way to God. Only the children in liberal churches are taught it’s OK to think the Bible might be wrong in places. Part of that is love, to teach one’s children what one believes to be true, but part of it is giving one’s own burden to one’s children, giving one’s pride and idolatries to them, one’s sins.

I rarely think of that. I think of the future, how children may believe their parents for the time, but someday any house of cards will collapse, even the one that says the secular world is all there is. It’s somewhat abstract to picture some future time when all the lies of the present have collapsed. Then what? That’s even harder to picture.

Yet to watch children right now being told what I’m sure is a lie is not abstract. The children are trusting, but they’re being told lies. In turn they’ll tell their own children lies, until the lies collapse. That’s the generation that suffers the most, when the lies collapse. They’ll know they’ve been lied to. They’ll wonder why. They’ll reach out for something else. Who knows what they’ll get? It won’t be people who love them as parents who’ll be trying to sell them their next belief. My goodness, this is my resentment, isn’t it? Why yes, it is! I can feel it right here. It’s mental, but it’s not abstract. There are so many memories I could connect to it, so many ways to live that I’ve rejected, though to some degree accepted at the same time.

One thing I’ve rejected is the perennial philosophy, that all religions are true. There may be some truth in all religions, but it is very well camouflaged in some. It’s just been 4 or 5 years since I discovered my preference for saying all religions are false, not true, even my own liberal Christianity. I’m not sure exactly what’s false about my own religion, or I’d change it, but there must be something wrong somewhere, about the exact nature of God, the exact nature of the world, the exact nature of life or of me.

That’s abstract. I could work on fleshing it up with examples, things in my life that led me to say, “Yes, that’s it,” about all religions being false. There are such examples, but there not important to me at the present. What’s important me was how different it was to me to be confronted by a real life example that all religions are false. It was harder than I expected it to be. After all, I feel quite confident that all religions are false. So what’s the problem?

One problem is my worldview. If everyone is full of it, what kind of world is that? Fortunately not everyone is full of it about everything. Only a few are that bad, and I suspect even they could talk about something real if they were speaking to me as my patients used to or my clients do now. I’ve always helped people with real things, not fantasies. Sometimes I help people with their fears provoked by some fantasy, but those are real fears, fears that are countered by truth and love, also real things.

Yet I’m not sure I’ve adapted to just how much people are full of it compared to when I hoped to be a more typical liberal who thinks everyone has something worth saying. I focus on the future instead, when all the lies of today have collapsed. Maybe they’ll be new lies, but I have no emotions from those.

Belief that any holy book is God’s instructions to us is already dead. It will just take time to lose any appearance of being alive. Belief in the traditional God, a distant Creator who has made the universe perfect for those who obey Him, a God who is perfect is every way, is dead. Belief in nothing beyond the physical is dead. My intellectual beliefs are broader than that. It’s my intellect that accepts the full range of God being whoever and whatever God is. But there is a narrower part of me that sees all sorts of beliefs as dead. Their proponents can argue all they want, but their arguments are like arguments against evolution. They are contrived and only convince those who already believe in the position, theist or atheist.

That’s abstract. There are people I’ve observed at church or on the internet who I think of as I write things like the above, but they’re just characters, not real people like my family, patients and clients.

And those kids on TV. How were they to know how untrustworthy Ken Ham is? Isn’t anyone who speaks from the front in church close to God? How old does one have to be before realizing the answer to that?

Older than these kids. There’s nothing I can do about it. Even in writing this I don’t intend to spread my ideas. I write because I realize I’m still adapting to just how evil human beings are. Some people think it’s just conservatives. Others think it’s just liberals. Still others have different groupings. It’s everyone. It’s human nature.

Yet not everything about humanity is evil. In fact just guessing, I’d say the world is getting better. So culture and God are improving us, giving us disciplines that keep our lies and selfishness in check some. I’d even say these kids that made me change the channel may have remarkably contented lives thinking traditional Christianity is exactly how they should live. I don’t begrudge them that. Those who will suffer on realizing that their parents lied to them have my sympathy. I don’t have to hate their parents to be sympathetic.

Yet to be utterly serene about all this doesn’t work, either. I wish it did. I think it’s a real problem that so many people are serene about the needs of the poor, but even when it comes to something like evolution, it’s not OK that so many traditionalists waste resources trying to keep the Bible as being the last word. And none talk about even the possibility that God knows that the Bible is not the last word and that evolution is correct.

I’ve tried to say that being on the wrong side like that is not my concern, that it’s up to God whether to be concerned about that. It hasn’t worked to make me serene. I think it’s because God is not serene about this. He may know perfectly well that it won’t matter in 500 years, but today people are lying about nature and about God. It’s a basic issue in one’s religion how God sees such a thing. Is it abominable sin and that’s that, even if the sin’s perpetrators will someday be forgiven? Or is God above all that? Any human being who answers that is just speaking out of his or her beliefs, so I ask God.

God says, “Look at those kids.” It’s not abstract. It’s real. If I could only say this one point well, it would be worth so many words. God has not been abstract to me since He first spoke to me 18 years ago, since He was the one who answered when I prayed, “God help me!” An experience is not abstract. Interpreting an experience is likely to become abstract, but that’s not the only way. One can stick to reality. One can try to find fantastic metaphors that explain something.

It may be fantastic metaphor that I connect everything I experience spiritually to God. Maybe the reality of God is quite different, but there is a reality for me to experience. As Paul wrote, the Spirit lives in me, and I live in the Spirit. It may be metaphor, but it’s about something real.

I think about the abstraction that all religions are false, and I know it’s true. I’ve argued for that before. I can do it again. It is what it is. I remember those kids being suckers for creationists, and it pushes me just a little toward crying. Maybe they will learn the truth. Maybe it will take some number of generations. It is about human nature, and human nature is what it is. But the first is accepting something abstract, and the second is accepting something real, something that is on the wrong side of God. The first is much easier. The second requires knowing the real God in order to appreciate the problem. It’s not a little thing. So many people talk about God as an abstraction, even believers. It gets in the way of knowing the real God. First things first.

3 years later, anti-gay T-shirt is still wrong

2007-01-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

Almost 3 years after the fact, a San Diego federal judge has ruled for the Poway Unified School District in a summary judgment against the family of Tyler Chase Harper, who had sued because his school pulled him out of class when he wore a T-shirt that attacked homosexuality with a reference to the Bible, Romans 1:27. Tyler Harper has since graduated, but the case was continued on behalf of his younger sister, Kelsie Harper.

The judge was John A. Houston, a 2003 Bush appointee, who recently ruled strongly against the Escondido City Council for trying to deny illegal immigrants the right to rent an apartment in Escondido. The City Council gave up before wasting even more money on the issue.

Conservative Christians are not giving up as easily. Kevin Theriot, lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund finds the judge to be incompetent regarding the right to free speech. According to the San Diego Union-Tribune he said, “The court just misapplied the law and doesn’t understand what free speech is all about.” Ah, those liberal Bush appointees. Will we ever get a President Christian enough for the conservatives?

Theriot has other cases about being able to attack homosexuality in schools. He should know that the First Amendment doesn’t let people say whatever they want, wherever they want. So then it’s just a matter of nitpicking, isn’t it? It’s just a matter of deciding exactly where one person’s rights end and another begins. That’s what these cases about what is said about homosexuality in schools are about, not about incompetent judges. Shame on Mr. Theriot for being dishonest about that. I wonder what God says about such lies, nothing good I think. I wonder where I can wear tape on my T-shirt about that.

I learned from the Dover, PA case on intelligent design that actually reading the judge’s ruling is much better than reading anyone’s sound bites. That applies to this case, too. It’s 30 pages and a lot of that consists of boring procedure, but there are some interesting points there. The judge says that being hostile to a religion’s beliefs on homosexuality is not the same as being hostile to a religion. Gee, that didn’t occur to me. I doubt Mr. Theriot liked that conclusion, even though the judge documents everything he says, unlike Mr. Theriot. It’s an interesting read for anyone who has the time.

The voice of God

2007-01-21T16:30:00.000-08:00

Recently I visited a message board where a man gave a testimonial for “A Course in Miracles”. One thing about it that struck me was how he stated Jesus wrote this, as if that’s a fact. Of course Bible-believing Christians speak or write of the Bible this way, referring to a verse or section as something God said or wrote, when surely some man held the pen, and it’s at least debatable how much that man was inspired by God, debatable how much anyone can be controlled by God in that setting. So there is a precedent for people saying God wrote a book. Still I would think that if God could dictate words, the Bible would be much more straightforward, useful, and obviously divine than it is. So would be “A Course in Miracles”. Instead what is obvious is that some disagree with that for one of these books or both, but why?

A secular way of looking at it would say that psychologist Helen Schucman wrote “A Course in Miracles”, that she wasn’t a scribe for Jesus, as she said she was. Meanwhile some Bible-believing Christians might say Satan wrote this book, using Dr. Schucman to do his bidding. Both ways are too simple, I think, as the story of where the book came from is familiar to me and deserves better, even better than an adoring fan saying Jesus wrote it. What Dr. Schucman described was hearing a voice explaining that what she was hearing was a course in miracles. She wrote this down and continued accordingly, taking several years to complete the book. Many have written from their own spiritual experience similarly. There’s no question that those writings differ a great deal.

My biggest problem with “A Course in Miracles” is that it is yet another version of the power of positive thinking, saying that love is everything, that there is no sin, only a deficiency in love, that negative emotions are the enemy. I don’t think emotions are so easily divided between positive and negative. Fear can give us prudence. Anger can give us determination. Love is not necessary devoid of anger. Love can be fiercely protective instead of just being someone who knows only serenity. Sometimes I look at my needy clients and wonder how much they’ve been hurt by those who say things are fine the way they are, that one should simply accept everything.

What emotions God has or would like us to have is a big subject, but I mention this much to point out that no one’s version of how to live is so perfect as to be obviously God’s way. I know I’ve encountered all the major prescriptions for life, many supposedly dictated by God, yet there’s always something wrong with them. Why? If there’s anything to this idea that God can communicate with us, shouldn’t someone get it right?

An atheist can answer that easily saying an experience like Dr. Schucman’s can only be psychosis or imagination, so of course it doesn’t amount to that much. Yet there are other possibilities, but if one is to believe in spiritual experiences, what is the best explanation for how much the voice of God varies?

The two things that are hardest to get across about my experience of hearing the voice of God is just what the experience is like and just how much skepticism and questions of mine have been defeated in the process. I vividly remember my road-to-Damascus experience 18 years ago. I wrote before how this wasn’t a perceptual change of the world around me. My attention was suddenly on that light because what I thought about it had changed drastically, in a startling way. An instant before it had been mere sunlight. An instant later it had become the presence of God. How? Why? Why me when I didn’t believe such a thing was possible? I don’t know exactly. Something happened to me cognitively. My nature pulls at me to describe it in terms I can understand, a brightening of the light, a burning bush, whether to make it easier for me to talk about for myself or for others. But that’s not what the experience is. It is indeed something that people can dismiss as all being in my head.

Yet what are they dismissing? I previously described the cascade of images and words with which God defeated my skepticism, the ones that followed His saying the only words He said to me then, “You’ve always believed in Me.” I like the word “cascade”. It alludes to the sense of my being overwhelmed by “my life passing before my eyes”, as if hit by a waterfall, and to the many metaphorical connections between water and Spirit. But it doesn’t do justice to the memory I have even now of how my mind was flooded with images and words of how I had indeed always believed in God, from childish believing to being confirmed to rejecting tradition for science. At the time I wouldn’t have said this was rejecting religion and embracing God, but that’s what God was telling me now in this instant. I had images and words from my college physics days talking about why God made the universe the way He did. I had images and words from when I was exploring the Unitarians earlier in the eighties. Lastly there was the prayer I had prayed and meant two days before, the Prayer of St. Francis, as I realized that helping people was something I trusted much more than other ways to live. All this happened in a few seconds, at which point there was no skepticism in my head about anything. It’s never been quite like that again, but describing what it has been in later experiences would be just as difficult.

My normal skepticism soon returned but only for things other than the existence of God. That first experience remains proof enough of God for me. It doesn’t prove God exists beyond my brain. Atheists could be right about that, even if I doubt they are right. I was skeptical enough about what I should do about God’s existence that it took a second lesser episode to convince me that whether this was something important to God or just important to me, I should explore it. There were more words the second time, confirming that God is real, that God is love, and some other things. God has become more fluent as I have become less surprised by Him. I’m sure that’s not coincidence.

God’s presence gradually built up for me in prayer, first just as the abstraction to whom my prayers were directed, then more than that. I described this before. One thing that I’m sure is hard to appreciate about that is that as much skepticism as a reader would have reading that, I had at least that much skepticism during the process, only I witnessed it, and my skepticism was dealt with over years, not by some magical sentence or concept, but by having an ongoing relationship with God. I didn’t have to rely on imperfect words to analyze spirituality. I lived it day after day, year after year.

I think of that when I think of how easily someone can dismiss God as my “imaginary friend”, as has been done by someone commenting on this blog. First of all, what exactly is imagination? Where does it come from? Many assume that’s something we do willfully, but is it? Neuroscience doesn’t know anything like that.

That’s the questioning attitude I’ve hit God with again and again. He has no problem with it. He is indeed the God for whom I rejected religion as a teenager and embraced science. He tells me what He knows, which is less than everything, and with time I’ve come to understand more than I once did. Atheists don’t do that for me. Traditionalists don’t do that for me. They just preach their dogma and ridicule anyone who says it doesn’t work. I don’t see how such proud and idolatrous people can know anything about God.

This takes me back to those who quote God in print. How many of them have questioned their understanding of what God says? There is no way the real God can put His pure thoughts in my head, if He even has thoughts, if He even uses words. You might as well believe God can make me breathe water, not in this universe. Just because the Bible portrays the spoken word as so powerful doesn’t make it so. I’ve written about this before. I hear God’s voice in my language, my concepts, with no facts included that I don’t already know, yet what I hear as God makes priorities in what I know that I had no idea were in me. God gives me the direction, strength and comfort I ask for in ways that amaze me. But He has limits, as anyone who follows God will encounter. Will they accept traditional explanations that the limits are a matter of their not having enough faith? That’s not what God tells me. He tells me He has limits, that He is not the traditional God of superlatives and perfection. If He were, this world would be heaven already.

I wrote a lot before about what it means to me to follow the God whose voice I know rather than traditions that can’t answer my questions well enough. I didn’t address the issue much then about the discrepancy between what I hear and what others hear. It still bothers me. How can I be the best listener God’s ever had? Well, I ask a lot of questions, as science taught me, and not a lot of people who hear God’s voice have been trained that way. I stand on the shoulders of many who experienced God as more than an abstraction, like Paul. I suppose many people read Romans 8:9 as something abstract or otherwise separate from reality. From everything I’ve read, Paul experienced the Spirit in an almost tangible way, the Spirit living in him, as he lived in the Spirit. There is so much of reality that Bible-believing Christians reject, either physical reality or spiritual reality, because they take the words of the Bible to mean what they say they mean, even more so the reality of God and Jesus behind the words.

Maybe even more important is I know 12 steps. They taught me to use my faith rather than trusting myself. They taught me the acronym for HOW the program works, through honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness, and experience shows that it’s enough to be willing to be honest and willing to be open. To write that Jesus wrote any book as a statement of fact is dishonest, however much one thinks the ideas of “the real Jesus” are in this book. This is what advocacy does. It twists words into rigid positions that shut people off from God.

I surrendered. God surrendered, too. How many times each of us did that, who did it first, and how the sequence went from then is beyond me. It doesn’t matter. We are where we are. I hear the voice of God, even if no one but God believes that. That voice is inspired by God in a way that my own voice is not, yet it is my language the voice uses, and my language is limited. I’m sure others hear from God as well, as they have for a very long time, but it’s such a difficult thing to talk about in words. It’s easy to make mistakes that human nature tends to make like oversimplification, overgeneralization, and failing to ask questions. So writings that quote God are full of mistakes, whether from thousands of years ago or recently. It is human nature. It is the nature of the physical world in which such writings exists. It makes me that much more sure that words are flawed, ambiguous and human, that words are never God’s words, not now, not ever, even if something behind those words comes from God.

People have thought there is virtue in not questioning sacred words. Yet there is enough experience now to know the opposite is true. There are no sacred words. Not questioning words allows mistakes to go uncorrected, keeps real-life experience from invalidating presumptuous conjecture. It is not faith not to question. It is foolishness. I am utterly devoted to God, and in that faith I want God to be portrayed accurately. So I question every voice of God, including my own. God says to me that this is the way to Him, when it is combined with a desire and willingness to hear Him despite the difficulty, for anyone who wants to know that. It’s not a way to be found in print.

How far can liars go?

2007-01-20T19:48:00.000-08:00

Senator Joseph McCarthy did all right for himself telling lies about how many Communists had infiltrated the US State Department. As soon as he did that in February, 1950, his demand as a speaker skyrocketed. He published a book. It didn’t matter that the Democratic majority in the Senate called him a fraud. Republicans backed him. McCarthy gained a committee chairmanship when Republicans took the majority in 1953.

He thereby had power to have televised hearings if he went after a big enough target, like the Army, which he did. But it wasn’t as popular to attack men in uniform with secret lists of Communists in defense plants as it was to say there were so many nameless bureaucrats who were stabbing us in the back, plus people could now see how much of a bully McCarthy was directly. By the end of 1954, McCarthy was censured by the Senate, and never was a serious factor in politics again. He died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1957, at age 48.

Modern authors, including Ann Coulter, have tried to defend McCarthy. A large part of that is pointing to the Venona project that showed that the Soviets did have spy networks in the US. The thing is that whatever kernel of truth is at the core of McCarthyism, in trying to tell that truth and garner fame for himself, McCarthy told a pack of lies, and when he went too far in that, most people realized it.

Going too far with lies is something that happens regularly. The Salem Witch Trials wouldn’t be as well known as they are, except the accusers went too far. If they had stopped short of overflowing every jail in the region, we wouldn’t know of them now any more than other 17th century trials. And not everyone would know how many innocents were victimized.

It should be comforting that lies are caught like this, but I can’t help but look at stories like these and realize that lies aren’t caught until they become this flagrant. Politics, religion, and other parts of life are full of lies, for the same reasons that McCarthyism was and still is. People like simple stories of good guys and bad guys. People like stories that reinforce their prejudices. Some people like the fame and other rewards they get from telling stories. None of that requires stories to be true.

Consider a story yesterday that I heard in passing through John Gibson on the Fox cable news channel, but discovered from Media Matters was picked up by two radio talk shows as well on the same day. It’s about a story posted two days before on insightmag.com, a site controlled by the same Rev. Sun Myung Moon company that owns The Washington Times and UPI. The story is that Hillary Clinton’s people are pushing a story about Barack Obama having been educated as a Muslim. The article quotes Obama’s books about his years in Indonesia up to the age of 10. It has no other quotes attributed to a person by name. It cites no other place where “Clinton” is pushing this story except for this particular article.

Despite that being everything the article says, each of these right-wing talk shows reported this as fact, not mere rumor, using the opportunity to slam both Clinton and Obama to varying degrees, for her vicious political tactics, for his background in Islam, according to the whim of the commentator. No one even mentioned that the undocumented report that Clinton had anything to do with this might be a lie. This is from right-wingers who are forever saying how smart and responsible they are. Yet for a good lie, they’re willing to be naïve.

It’s not just the political right. This is what people do. At one time it was more understandable. I can see that some stories in the past were just filling in fantasy where there was a big unknown. So it is understandable that the creation myths in the Bible from 3000 years ago were the best people could do then. To say that one God made everything and ran everything was as good a story as any.

It’s not now. Now people have to lie to say, “evolution is a lie”. It might not be fair to call everyone who says that a liar. Some are just repeating what others say, others who should know better, but have their own reasons to say tradition and the Bible are right, and scientists are not to be trusted.

A somewhat different group of people say scientists are lying about global warming. Time will show the truth.

The irony is that scientific skepticism is one solution to how much lying is part of human nature. One alternative to waiting for someone like Joseph McCarthy to self-destruct is to question everything, as I learned to do in science. If that were more of a norm in our culture, right-wingers wouldn’t get away with calling rumors they like “fact”. Nor would left-wingers, theists, or atheists.

I tend to be optimistic about the future, maybe more than is reasonable. I expect us to realize the hope that’s in the genetics revolution, the neuroscience revolution, the internet revolution and other advances in science and technology. But now and again I wonder about the future. Warnings of ecological and economic catastrophes don’t bother me. One has to assume a number of bad things for the future to be that bad and that we won’t be able to adapt as a species when we always have before. But I do wonder about our nature and how it doesn’t necessarily follow someone like Bertrand Russell in his reasons for why love and truth are the ultimate good things. In fact we embrace hatred, indifference, and lies regularly. How limited is the number of people who reject such evil?

I’ve learned to hate lies, to weed them out by questioning everything. Some might find that remarkable in someone who hears God’s voice. You don’t understand how skeptical I was of God if you think that. And I have continued to be very skeptical of what people say, for good reason. People lie a lot, and they only sometimes make that obvious. They also don’t make it obvious that it’s everyone across the spectrum of politics, religion and otherwise who lies. Scientifically questioning everything would be a powerful obstacle to such lying, but will people accept that? Such acceptance has been awfully spotty so far, something people might use only on their opponents. Scientists are only human. They can be partisan, but the technique of questioning everything makes no such distinction. One either follows that technique or lets many lies continue.

So I don’t know what the future is for liars. Will they become extinct? Will lying continue to be profitable? Will there ever come a time when broadcasters who lie are disemboweled on national TV after reporting some number of lies? If it’s a slow week for lies in broadcasting, one could substitute preachers or others who are dogmatic about spirituality.

Would that be a strange future, where lies are not tolerated, but hatred and brutality is? That’s what I wonder about. As much as I agree with Bertrand Russell that a good world would be filled with love and truth, is that where humanity is headed? Time will tell. The repudiation of lying as a way of life would be a hopeful indicator.

The wisdom of South Park

2007-01-11T00:28:00.000-08:00

“Logic and reason aren’t enough. You have to be a dick to everyone who doesn’t agree with you.” -- Attributed to Richard Dawkins by South Park.

I know, the real Richard Dawkins didn’t say that, not that I’ve seen anyway. The boys behind South Park were putting words in his mouth to oversimplify his position, for both clarity and humor. I did see Dawkins’ column on The Huffington Post where he says he’s not demeaning everyone’s God with his book, The God Delusion, just the ones with personal Gods. Abstract Gods like love and other entities are OK with him. Who knows? Maybe he’d even compromise further and say that any God compatible with evolution by natural selection may not be a delusion. That would be sporting of him.

It’s too bad that Richard Dawkins is only human, as so many other dicks are, both theists and atheists, even some women. They only know what they’ve experienced, directly or second-hand. They don’t know what’s beyond what they know, not just in terms of the ultimate origin of the universe or anything in it, but also what might be right here with me as I write this that we don’t understand yet, inside 4-dimensional space-time or outside it, coursing through it, as outside air courses through my lungs. It sure is nice that science completely explains my conscious experience and God’s place in that, only it doesn’t. It does only if one accepts the words of crackpots who say anyone who experiences God is nuts.

Atheists are going to keep this up for the foreseeable future. They will compliment themselves for how smart they are. Traditionalists will compliment themselves for how good they are in sticking to the old ways, how blessed they are or will be. They’re all liars. May there be a pox on both their houses. I’ve been saying that since I gave up finding common ground with atheists through science or with conservatives through Jesus Christ. There is no such ground for a liberal Christian. Even among liberal Christians there are several groups who don’t like those with different beliefs. This is human to make beliefs so important. Can we do any better?

“Who knows? Maybe just believing in God makes God exist.” – The Wise One, just before all the atheist otters kill him, on South Park.

I write a lot of words trying to illustrate the possibilities for God. I like the idea in this quote. Maybe God truly evolves as out beliefs do. Even more fascinating is if believing in God doesn’t just bring God to life in my mind, but beyond me as well, not even just in terms of culture, but something beyond physical existence. Who knows? God tells me He doesn’t mind being like Tinker Bell this way, only He tells me He’s pretty sure He existed before humans did. Still He is changed by us.

Maybe it’s impossible to open most people’s minds to possibilities. They don’t want to know. Then there’s the sticky issue that not everything we dream up is possible. Where is the line between possible and impossible? I’m quite sure it’s not in Richard Dawkins head or any other dick. In the end many possibilities are dead ends. I am who I am. The world is what it is. God is whoever and whatever God is. I know few believe me that I can communicate with all of these. In fact many people shut me out, especially on those subjects they don’t care to hear. The rest have been enough, though, especially God. I never would have guessed. God is not a dick, but is a source of love and truth, the only one I trust to cry on, not an empty closet, but a presence, not self-hypnosis, but things that are completely unexpected, like what God needs from me. People could know more about this. Most would rather not and use labels to emphasize that, like “delusion” or others.

You just can’t trust everything people say. Even they may not understand exactly why they say it.

Speaking of dreams

2007-01-11T00:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve also been having this recurring daydream for a time. I don’t think I’ve had it as an actual dream. I suppose technically it’s a vision. There’s almost no plot. It’s just a vision of half a dozen people hanging around this large fictional house where Dad just brought me, strangely without anyone else from our family. I seem to be somewhere between my teens and twenties. Dad’s been dead for twenty years, so this is far from realistic. It is what it is.

At first I thought about this in terms of the volunteer work I do with the needy, a substantial minority of whom being homeless. The scene does look like the people who hang out around our building, before or after getting services, waiting for rides, whatever they’re doing. In the vision this is clearly a house, though. Somehow I know we don’t own this house. The furniture belongs to the owner. Who knows where she is? I’m not even sure I saw Dad. I just know he brought me here and now has gone off somewhere.

Among those strolling through the yard are two Navy fighter pilots, F-14 pilots, in their flight suits. They say that something happened to their plane. They don’t know where it is now or how they wound up here. They’re just waiting for the Navy to pick them up. “Really, that’s your story? You’re sticking with that?” After that I don’t bother finding out more about the others.

Strangely the pilots look like Kevin McKidd playing Lucius Vorenus in HBO’s Rome and James Purefoy playing Mark Antony. Well, those characters are surely dead by now, whatever happens to Lucius in the rest of that series. Somehow I have the characters before me who are lean and mean, not the happy-go-pillaging Titus Pullo, the power engorged Caesar or the boy Machiavelli Octavian. I like that portrayal of Octavian, even though it seems so extremely precocious. Octavian is usually played nothing like a boy destined to become the great Augustus.

It was clear to my Twilight-Zone-conditioned mind that these pilots are dead, even before I recognized their faces. Dad spent much of his career as a civilian advisor to those who looked after the engines for F-14’s. He’s dead now. I suppose it all means something.

What am I supposed to do? Only one thing occurred to me. Let them sit down. So I invited them in, but as sternly and intimidatingly as I can, which at this point in my life is considerable, told them to be on their best behavior. The owner could come back at anytime, and anyone caught with their feet on the furniture might regret it forever.

That was it. That was my role. I don’t know who needed that, if it was Dad or some military men generally. Maybe no one needed it, and my mind was just playing. Either way, letting them sit down was the thing to do. It’s like it is with my clients. I do what I know to do. I never get the complete story of why my clients have been beaten by life. I get bits and pieces of the story and go with that. The alternative is to do nothing. I find that unacceptable.

So is there life after death? There is as a concept, whether or not it exists in any more real way than that. So it comes up in my mind in various ways, including symbolic images like these. So I approach it as I approach life before death, as best I can.

Some don’t want to do that. They say it’s ridiculous to consider life after death. As I saw someone write in a comment recently, “When you die, you’re just fucking dead!” I used to think that was the only possibility. I’ve never seen a body that looked capable of coming back to life. I used to have no problem with the idea from mainstream neuroscience that the mind is nothing more than the brain. I’ve seen dead brains. There’s nothing going on in them that can support a mind, so of course there’s nothing left of us when we die.

That changes as soon as you allow the possibility that there’s more to the mind than the brain. Working with brain illnesses and injuries, with normal humans, and with experiments in animals shows quite strongly how important the brain is to the mind, but is it everything? Neuroscience explains so little about our will, about just how extensive our memory can be, about dream-like experiences, it’s not a settled issue that everything about the mind can be squeezed within a brain.

It’s a problem to think that way, because where then would the rest of the mind be? One has to postulate an existence beyond the physical universe, and many people don’t want to go there. They want everything about life to be physical. Maybe they’re right. I can’t explain my life purely through physical mechanisms, but maybe I’m missing something. Time will tell.

Until then, arrogant people will insist on an atheistic worldview just as other arrogant people insist on one particular theistic worldview. I’m convinced none of them know of what they speak that well. They all make mistakes. None of them have my experiences.

So many people pretend they know whatever they need to know and decide how to live from that. I don’t believe it. I know a lot, but it’s not enough to tell me how to live. Things come up for me, from other people or from within me, and I don’t understand that much why. I just do what I know to do and speak to God about the rest. It’s not that strange. Some people just think it is.

I don’t think I’ll see this vision again. There is a sense of completeness in me about it. Where in the brain is that? Is it even in the brain? Was it just play? Was everything about Dad gone as soon as the blood stopped going to his brain? Is that true for everyone? Do some people grow spirits in their lives, whatever that means? Did Dad need me to tell him to sit down? Did I need to tell Dad he could sit down, whether or not he exists any more, whether or not it was Dad or just someone close enough?

There are many questions. I need to know there are many answers, that there are many possibilities. For those possibilities I have one response. I do what I know how to do. I do what I know is right. Sometimes events give me reasons to regret not knowing enough, but that doesn’t alter my basic approach. Let them sit down, unless God tells me not to.

Why is that so hard for people?

Suddenly a recurrent dream

2007-01-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

Maybe just in the past week I’m suddenly having this recurrent dream. How strange. I never have recurrent dreams. I have a recurrent theme of nostalgia, but those dreams always vary. This new dream doesn’t, not in the part that wakes me up. I have a feeling that I’m doing some traveling in the dream before that, but that part’s nothing special, just a routine travelogue.

Then comes the part where I arrive at my new home. I didn’t have to memorize which freeway exit to take. The freeway just stops there, narrowing down from about four lanes to one over about 10 feet. Then the one lane road becomes the dirt road leading to my house about as quickly. Then the dirt road becomes a field as I can’t stop before passing my house. Then the field ends as the ground falls away into something that looks like a greener version of the Grand Canyon. I stop before then, before the nick of time, well within the field. No part of the car in hanging over the edge. There was actually some margin for me to have stopped even slower.

I didn’t appreciate that in the dream. In the dream I slam on the brakes as soon as I see everything changing, yet it takes so long to stop. It’s hard to really appreciate how unrealistic something in a dream is during the dream. As I was braking in the dream it didn’t occur to me that my car was braking about as quickly as an ocean liner. I observed that it was, but my mind was on whether it would in fact stop. I didn’t want to get into the sort of cartoon physics that one can have in dreams. Please just stop naturally.

The first time I had that dream, I’m sure I wasn’t thinking much. “OhmiGod! What happened to the road?” That was about it. Then I was glad I stopped. I suppose I shouldn’t go so fast.

Then it happened again and again. My expectation became that I was going to stop eventually, before needing to resort to cartoon physics over the canyon, so I started thinking differently during my braking. I thought about how I really need to pay better attention on the freeway the next time that the road is ending. Why is it I keep missing that anyway?

It’s amazing how we accept everything at face value during a dream. That sudden freeway ending is just the way it is. I have to adapt to that. I have to do better so I can stop the car at my house instead of shooting past and having to back up each time. It never occurred to me that it actually turned out all right hurtling past my house and backing up this way. Maybe that’s what the previous owner had to do. No, dreams are much simpler. This isn’t good. How do I fix it?

On waking, I still wonder what this means about what I should do differently. Am I going too fast, either in driving or more metaphorically? I don’t see how. After a few times of reacting to this dream that way, other possibilities hit me.

What if it’s not about me? It is about me at least in the sense that things are happening I’m not anticipating. Things are happening in my family like that. So one does the best one can and is grateful if that’s enough. If not, one can reassess later. Nothing is going on among those I know where they won’t survive, where they can’t reassess if it goes badly. The car doesn’t go over the cliff, after all.

Now I’m wondering if it’s even less close to me than that. After all, no one close to me planned this freeway to end so abruptly. It’s not as though my actions meant much. I predictably slammed on the brakes and waited. That was it. The rest was up to my car.

OK, so who’s playing the role of my car in my dream? God, do you know?

How do I explain my conversations with God? Both traditionalists and a New Age writer like Neale Donald Walsch always portray God as a fountain of wisdom. He spouts differently for different people, with many more words for Walsch than any of the rest of us, but He always knows what He’s doing, in English no less. God’s the one with a plan. It all ties together in the end. But what if it doesn’t?

If I had known I was going to start hearing from God, I would have constructed a traditional God. It’s not the God I hear from, though. I suppose that relates to my understanding that God doesn’t run the physical universe. Science taught me this. Recently I’ve been making comments elsewhere how I’ve come to believe that there aren’t physical miracles, only mental ones. God to me is not defined as the creator of the universe. My understanding is that the spiritual side of the universe is much larger than the physical side, and I don’t know who created either one, if anyone needed to.

For me God is whoever answered when I first prayed, “God help me!” Fortunately that wasn’t a one-night stand, as it does take years to develop a conversation out of that.

So now I sometimes hear God express things that aren’t traditional at all. God tells me of His regret. She tells me She realizes She’s been projecting something onto me when it really was Hers, apologizing for that, vowing to do better. Tradition would say I’m a vessel like a car, and the Spirit is driving me. The Spirit is the one applying the brakes. Well, it ain’t necessarily so, kids. God is not perfect, even if He won’t listen to someone He doesn’t know on that point.

So what is it that has God speeding to the end, speeding so fast He shoots right past our home?

Have you heard of The Blasphemy Challenge? It’s a contest where some rationally minded people are going to award DVD’s of a movie denying the existence of Jesus to people who make a video in which they deny the Holy Spirit, telling the contestants that if they do that, they are cutting themselves off from God forever, according to Mark 3:29. Gee, doesn’t that sound like fun?

I suppose anyone who does that sees themselves as simply expressing what is within them anyway, that there is no Holy Spirit, no God. Maybe some would allow God in some sense, but not the Holy Spirit of the Bible. I understand that. I don’t find the Bible to be authoritative. I do find that I experience God as the Bible describes the Holy Spirit, as the Helper, but not many people have that experience. I understand those who deny the possibility of it, both theists and atheists. I also understand the existential joy of saying what is within oneself. Perhaps the organizers are mostly hoping to facilitate that same joy in others.

On the other hand, what is the chance that all of this is the work of children of Satan? By Satan, I don’t mean a compact being who has features of a goat. I don’t believe in angels, either fallen ones or ones who kept their place. So Satan can only be a metaphor for me, but it’s such a good one, for rebellion, for pride, for malevolence. I only know of such things existing in human beings. Animals can hurt others through instinct. I’m not sure anyone but humans hurt others in such a calculating way.

But who does atheism hurt? It hurt me. It kept me from God for years. Of course traditional, unbelievable religion kept me from God as well. Maybe it couldn’t be helped. Maybe the falseness of so much of religion has to be completely torn apart before it can be rebuilt in a true way. That’s not the motivation of those behind The Blasphemy Challenge. They just want fellowship, whether that’s in hell or not.

Atheists try so hard, as if the world would be so much better without religion, as if people’s natural hatred, indifference and falseness are better than those qualities when helped along by the pride and idolatries of false religion. People on a mission can wear such blinders, regardless of what sort of mission it is, for religion or against it.

So one could see all such people as simply following their natural ways, but God doesn’t. He’s told me this a lot. He’s not interested in being fair. Those who stumble into the truth are more valuable to Him than those who just as randomly stumble off in another direction. The way traditionalists worship Him as some Asian despot is not true. If it were maybe they wouldn’t be such hypocrites. Yet some people follow tradition to find the real God. I did. Some people follow atheism out of disgust with religion, but then find an emptiness that makes them turn back to God in some form. I did that, too.

Both atheists and traditional theists can dismiss all that, saying they know a simple truth, either from science or the Bible, and that’s what everyone should believe. They are fools, useless to God, ignorant of even the possibility that they’re wrong, even more ignorant to the certainty that they are all wrong in some way. Then they act to cement their foolishness, and God shakes His head.

Human nature can be so petty, so self-centered, so arrogant, and so ignorant. It lets us survive biologically, but it doesn’t take us to be the best we can be. People argue about what the ideal culture is to do that. I came to believe that there is something spiritual that can help me much more than anything cultural. My culture helped me to believe that, but it was my own experience that made me sure of it. Many people refuse even to consider the possibility that’s true. So they push for everyone to be atheists and say some very foolish things in the process.

Anyone can deny the Holy Spirit if they wish, but those who think Mark 3:29 was pure fiction without any reality that triggered the author to write it are very unimaginative people. What is God going to do about it? God tells me He’d like it if everyone who says, “I deny the Holy Spirit”, burst into flames as they did, but He can’t do that. Besides there were enough people consigned to flames for their beliefs in the past. So maybe there won’t be any consequences now, except that God wants to go home and leave such foolish human beings to their nature.

Traditionalists say God is only waiting so He can take some perfect number of believers with Him. God has told me the number. You wouldn’t believe it. Traditionalists most certainly wouldn’t believe it, yet God will do what God will do. Some of us get a brake or some other device to talk to Him about it, but only those who believe in a cartoon God can expect the unbelievable. And those who insist there is no God will be without Him altogether.

“I want to go home.” “Me, too, but not as quickly as You do.” Yes, that’s what the dream has been saying.

Wingnuts fooled me again

2007-01-07T11:18:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t likely to see Steven Spielberg’s Munich in the theater when it first came out. The thought of watching a subject that depressing and disturbing in a dark cave makes me shudder even now. Still any chance of my seeing it then was quashed by the political reviews of it in my local paper. I forget who it was writing that. I thought it was George Will, but I don’t find a column from him on the subject. I see Michael Medved and Dennis Prager wrote harshly about it in columns still on the web. The good reviews from actual movie reviewers didn’t reassure me. Those same reviewers liked JFK, too, despite how ridiculous some of that movie sounds to me. Just the image in my mind of Kevin Costner pushing a conspiracy theory about that makes me glad I didn’t see it. Even on TV I wouldn’t make it past that part. I can watch Ed Begley Jr. insist that 9/11 was a government hoax if I want to scrutinize the craziness of conspiracy theories, how they are such a house of cards built on one improbable interpretation after another, yet some people love them.

So those on the right claimed Munich was as preachy as that, saying that there’s no difference between Israelis killing Arab terrorists and Arab terrorists killing civilians. It’s not that I believed them, but it didn’t make the movie attractive to me.

Then I actually saw Munich last night. Did these critics? I guess they must have from the specificity of some of their comments, but wow. They watched this movie only to grind their axes, only to fill in the words for a reaction they were already going to take. People claimed it’s unrealistic. Yes, it’s unrealistic. So is how medicine and the law are portrayed in the movies and on TV. Real life is much less emotional, at least on the surface. And the detailed workings of real life can be very different than as portrayed in many movies, as with the plot device in Munich where our hero is sent off on his own, not a government employee, having to ally himself with people of questionable loyalty to carry out assassinations, when in fact it doesn’t seem the Mossad saw assassinations as requiring such deniability. So the major theme of disillusionment that comes over the main killer is not realistic, as he journeys from reluctant killer to more cold-blooded to going crazy over the loss of 3 comrades and the fact that his becoming a target also targets his family. It’s over the top. But how over the top is it? Does it dramatize a reality as Saving Private Ryan did for what it was like to hit the beaches on D-Day in 1944? Do espionage heroes have to be like James Bond?

Some of the right-wing commentators called this reaction “guilt”. No, this is not guilt. This is fear, determination, regret over the loss of comrades, regret for the loss of a normal family life, maybe regret for the loss of a normal job. I’m sure with a transcript of the dialog one could pick out phrases that makes it sound as though the hero thinks killing terrorists is wrong, but that’s certainly not the impression the movie leaves me. The movie makes me think our hero would kill anyone who threatened his family if there were no consequences for doing so.

Are right-wingers that afraid of emotion? Does it have to be so absolutely right for them that they feel nothing negative about what they’re doing, as innocent civilians die in the crossfire?

The attacks on Munich are so much like other expressions of opinions, whether it’s creationists attacking evolutionists or the left attacking anyone who doesn’t go as far as they do on immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Narrow point after disputable narrow point is made, all in service to the fundamental opinion that was made before any discussion began, whether that point is the Bible is right, war is wrong, or conservatives are 100% right and others 100% wrong. Debbie Schlussel makes many such points in her attack on Munich from December, 2005. She attacks a portrayal of Golda Meir as indecisive. That’s not how she looked to me in this movie. She writes the movie portrays the Mossad as killing innocent people at whim, when the movie shows the exact opposite. She complains that the movie shows one Arab target of assassination as having a cute, piano-playing daughter, as if it could only be a balanced presentation if families of the murdered Israeli athletes were shown similarly. Oh, please.

Other writers follow this pattern. Look at all these reasons we give. It must be true that we’re right, that this is terrorist propaganda Spielberg has made. Only they’re not right. They’re dead wrong on many facts. They’re dead wrong in not hearing every voice in the movie, which cover an entire spectrum from pro-Arab speeches by terrorists to unapologetic Israeli views.

As far as I can see, it’s this diversity that the wingnuts attack. They much prefer propaganda where there’s only one message, one right, one wrong. That’s not what Munich is, as much as the right wing now has their myth that this is terrorist propaganda. Munich is saying war is hell. It does not say war is wrong, unless someone is determined to find that message there, either from the left or the right.

That was my surprise in actually watching Munich. This is what got such caustic complaints? Yes, from the left and the right, there is such hatred for anything that is not with them. I don’t suppose those addicted to such rhetoric burn out the same way the hero in Munich did. They will fight until they die. Then a new generation may do exactly the same. Cultural evolution is a slow process. But culture does change. How much does it change? Is this “I’m right, you’re wrong” mentality destined to be with human beings for good, with only the exact issues changing or will there come a time when such strife is seen as counterproductive? I don’t know. I won’t live long enough to find out.

For now I know that the world could do with much less poverty and much less strife. Does that mean 90% less or 100% less? I don’t know. I don’t see wingnuts helping in any case, unless it’s the educational benefit of negative examples.

Can God spell "nostalgic"?

2007-01-03T09:01:00.000-08:00

I had a nostalgic dream last night. Not only was I back in medicine. I was all the way back in residency at St. Louis City Hospital, with scores of patients separated by flimsy curtains, patients with limited abilities to talk about their symptoms, something that’s both a positive and a negative.

There was a medicine resident in my dream who never existed in reality. Like so many characters in dreams he was either a composite or an extrapolation from real people. He was annoyed with me because the exam I wrote in the chart of a patient of his differed from his exam. Oh, they always did. There are so many points to an exam that are subjective. Even so, the specialist’s exam trumps the generalist’s ordinarily. If you don’t like that, become a specialist.

Instead I hear this complaint, “Don’t Goldwater me!” What? What language is that? I didn’t figure it out during the dream, but that stuck with me on awakening. Let’s see. The only context I used “Goldwater” recently was about my memory of Barry Goldwater saying about Vietnam, “We could have won that war.” So in my dream “Goldwater” is a synonym for being a revisionist? Yeah, I see that. It’s kind of awkward. Who was this dream character to make that allusion?

Was it me? Was it someone else? Some people have the view that anything going on inside my head, as dreams presumably are, is me. Oh, I don’t think so. There are all kinds of images of women in my head that are definitely not me. The repository for these images, wherever that is, is part of me. The images themselves are not. They are traces of the world in me, processed by me in some way, but still separate, like food that is not absorbed, no matter how long it might get hung up in my gut.

Somehow my dream drew from a lexicon in which Goldwater was a verb meaning to engage in revisionist history. As a neuroscientist I wish I knew where such a lexicon was even more than I do personally. Is it in my head? Was it a potential symbolism that didn’t reach full fruition until my dream character said the word? Was it sitting somewhere waiting to be used by whatever entity floats through my brain? How many entities do live in me anyway, either permanently or passing through, in dreams or otherwise?

It’s become my habit to ask God questions I can’t answer. God says He doesn’t know about these. He assures me He doesn’t make up new words. He assures me He didn’t make up any of them.

This has come up before. How does God speak to me not only in English, but my English? In 18 years, God never has used a word I didn’t know. In 18 years, God never has presented me with a fact I didn’t know. He is amazing at giving me direction. I can be confused about any number of options, and He narrows that down to the one best way very quickly. He gives me strength. He gives me comfort. Yet He’s never given me winning lottery numbers or sports results ahead of time. In fact when I tested Him on the latter, He didn’t do well at all, less then 50% I’d say … hmmm, why not 50%?

So whatever God’s cognitive and precognitive abilities are, it’s clear we’re using my brain a lot in our interactions. We both agree that God can only spell “nostalgic” if I spot Him the “n”, the “o”, the “s”, the “t”, the “a”, the “l”, the “g”, the “i”, and the “c”. What’s wrong with that? I’d do that for anyone. I’ll certainly do that for God.

Spirituality is a cooperative effort. I’d hate to try to sell that either to traditionalists who say God is perfect, and we exist merely on what He drops or to mystics who see themselves as Indiana Jones using their wits to travel their spiritual journey to their own glory. I can’t imagine trying. I only mention it because my dream brings it up today. Somewhere in me or around me there is a machine that makes words out of slightly different words that come in to me. Presumably we all have similar machines like this. So we have languages.

People 3000 years ago did not understand that. I don’t blame them. They had no science. They didn’t understand physical forces. They didn’t understand biology. They didn’t understand neurolinguistics.

So ancient people believed words were something magical. The word “apple” was referring to some perfect apple somewhere. All these real apples fell short of that perfection in shape, color or taste. They were imperfect. Reality was imperfect. Somewhere beyond this reality was a perfect God, who used words to create the world.

No, He didn’t. I suppose it’s still possible God wrote a perfect equation to trigger the Big Bang, but I doubt it. Words definitely aren’t enough. There are no magic words, no matter how many times the witches on Charmed cast spells and people in the TV audience believe that to be real.

Whatever it was that let my dream character say “Goldwater”, I’m sure that process is available to me when I’m awake. I just don’t need any new words beyond what my world has given me. I would like several more pithy phrases, but it seems I have to rely on my brain for that, not the world. The world gets a lot of things wrong.

Then there are my words with God, my words both coming and going, but when they come to me from Him they are ordered in a way I just can’t equal. Some atheists would be apoplectic in their ridicule of that. Those who rely on God being the just-so God of conservative Christianity would be just as dismissive, less agitated, but more vicious in damning me to hell for my weak God. Why? It doesn’t seem out of strength to me.

It’s not that there are understanding people in between. There are a lot of confused people in between. There is an understanding God. He knows love is a cooperative effort. He knows that He changes, that He needs human beings. Needs them for what? Needs them for what they can do that He can’t, like spell, only He doesn’t care about spelling. He cares about ending suffering, whether on a large scale or for an individual. And for that people reject Him or use false images of Him for their own purposes.

Reality is not at all like Indiana Jones.

The reality of morning

2007-01-02T13:42:00.000-08:00

The dawning of a new year is not much different than the dawning of any day, but that each day dawns anew changes everything.

When they were intermittent, my spiritual experiences would tend to come later in the day. My road-to-Damascus experience came about 3 PM. Subsequent times when I forced to say, “this is not natural,” usually started even later in the day. Such unnatural events took time to evolve. They would begin with my facing some issue I had. Ideas would come to me, but during the day I might be too busy to explore them. The ideas would keep tugging at my sleeve. Then finally I’d have time to pay attention to an elaboration of what was in my mind. It might be a few words. It might be some images. It might be that the whole universe suddenly decided to be devoted to my issue, from what is real to how does one best live to why do ideas keep coming to me, instead of everyone having their share. Then I would see answers everywhere, metaphors everywhere. And who rigged the universe this way just for me?

It’s a big topic to go into how these spiritual experiences went, who might have shown up besides God, what they meant to me, why I never decided to make them go away forever. There was something loving and trustworthy in these experiences I didn’t get otherwise, even if they were scary sometimes. In many respects they are no different than a lot of people have experienced and written about in the past three thousand years.

There is one aspect I would notice again and again, though. I would be up late talking with God, or maybe someone impersonating God, or maybe some metaphor for God in some worldly form. I might be feeling frustrated and confused, going to sleep finally because I couldn’t think of anything better to ask God. Then in the morning, the world was clean again. Whatever these parties were, there was no trash to pick up, no leftover food. I remembered my frustration and confusion from the night before. I was no closer to a way past that in the morning, but in the morning such frustration was just a small part of my life, while in the evening it was the key to everything.

You might think that would teach me something. I did. I was determined to keep my spiritual life in perspective. I put up with the side effects of antipsychotic medicine for a time to keep God in just a corner of my life. Wasn’t that the best way? Here was the reality of morning, where the world works by the physics and biology I learned in school, and I am free to live as I choose. Over there is the idea that there is a greater reality, a spiritual side to the universe beyond everything physical, and a God whose agenda isn’t limited to my being free. From that first experience when God assured me that I’d always believed in Him, no matter how much traditionalists would have seen me as inferior to them in that, God moved on little by little to give me the help implied in my questions, helping me with direction, strength and comfort. Then there was more, to understand God’s needs, His dependency on being loved, not as some Asian despot, but more personally.

If you read this as just words, it’s easy to keep it at arm’s length, but imagine if God in as complete a form as anywhere in the Bible teaches it to you Himself, not in a summary as I write it, but through all the ins and outs of how He gives love and receives love. This is not a little thing.

Throughout my spiritual experiences, there are a number of phrases that came to stand for my feelings regarding some aspect of them. “This is not a little thing,” was one such phrase, just as “this is not natural,” was another. People can challenge the validity of how I label such feelings, but they don’t experience what led me to make such conclusions. I can’t describe everything. I can’t remember everything. I’ve been surprised how poor my memory of spiritual experiences is even minutes later. They can be that dreamlike. Yet my spiritual experiences are completely different from what I actually dream.

As much as I would like to share my experiences with others, it’s very limited what I can describe. There was so much happening at times, with no scorecard about who was doing what and what is metaphor or to be taken literally. Yet there are some handles on the experiences, such as how ordinary the world usually seemed in the morning.

Rationally minded people would say aha, it’s the reality of morning that’s real. It’s real that the world is understandable, that there are no invisible characters, that to perceive those is either to revert to a childlike way of seeing or pass over into a paranoid way of imagining possibilities beyond what’s confirmed by our senses. I think I remember seeing the world like that in my twenties. Back then God was just something abstract for me, maybe the embodiment of the laws of physics, and the only thing that happened to me late in the day was I got tired.

Now it’s different. God is with me constantly. He and She use each of my limbs on occasion. I can feel the Spirit living in me in a way I never would have guessed Paul meant in his writing that phrase. God has a tactile presence, a voice, a will, a number of needs, all of which gets along with me, but are separate from me. And all of that is at a minimum first thing on awakening. Even then if I ask God a question, He responds immediately. God says He does not sleep. I sleep. God says He is not withdrawn from me in the morning. I am relatively withdrawn from Him as I sleep. It’s always been that way. So I have always seen morning as more real, because I was raised that real meant the absence of a spirit like God.

So while I don’t wake up that differently from the way I did thirty years ago, the difference that is there is not a little thing. Now I don’t just get dressed with external clothes, but by engaging again with the God whom it not long ago took me all day to find. Now we’re back together before I leave my bedroom. We stay together until I fall asleep. Then it’s off to my dreamland, where either there is no God or God is everything and never expresses Himself as one thing. Then it’s morning again, when I’m closest to feeling twenty, but decide each morning I’d rather be with God.

People decide for themselves which the true reality is, whether it’s the most minimal reality one can believe, the most fantastic or something in between. I believe that last one, not because I’m clever, but because God was persistent with me. He says I was persistent with Him. Some things are relative, after all. Some things aren’t, such as morning being the most minimal time of day. Where’s my coffee? Now do you want your whole day to be like that or not?

The post-evolution God

2006-12-31T08:35:00.000-08:00

I have a belief about creationists. It comes from a lifetime of listening to arguments against evolution that don’t work. It’s even obvious they don’t work if you know the subject well. I used to try to teach creationists what I know about something like thermodynamics, having been a physicist, but it was frustrating. For one, there are all these counterarguments creationists have become used to saying in response to how they misuse thermodynamics or whatever else they claim prohibits evolution. Then if I do make headway, creationists just shift to a different argument, one equally flawed, unless they move all the way to some metaphysics that invalidates science, which no one does. So anyone trying to prove that arguments against evolution don’t work has an immense task to counter every bit of nonsense that has been said against evolution. Yet nonsense it is. It’s obvious, if you know the subject. What is this?

Eventually it hit me. Opposition to evolution is not about the arguments. Those are just ammunition. The real reason people oppose evolution, at least the people I’ve met, is that they want God to micromanage their own lives. They don’t want a God who lets nature take its course, either because He chooses to or because He is powerless to do otherwise.

I understand that. Maybe that was the fundamental desire behind religion, to get help with an uncertain life. So of course God was the master of nature, even its creator, who could change whatever we wanted changed, if we were good enough, if we sacrificed enough, if we were obedient enough, if we knew the right magic. People don’t want to give that up. Even some liberals believe in a God who micromanages the physical world, only in a liberal way. Other liberals believe in God as an impersonal resource for love or magic. Other liberals come close to how atheists see God, as a better part of us, if atheists are feeling charitable about how to put that.

I’m a liberal. I’m also an empiricist. So it’s easy for me to believe that God is whoever and whatever God is, not what anyone says He is. I was resigned that there was no personal God until I started praying out of desperation in my thirties. Then God showed up! I wanted Him to fix things, to turn time back if necessary, if He would, if He could. He can’t. He tells me that now, when I can hear Him more easily. The possibilities were much broader when I was coming to know God better.

How many people ever know God better? Many people work on knowing a theology better, whether that’s something traditional or more modern. But how do you know God? Even now, the atheists could be right and the God of my understanding be something entirely within my mind. There’s no way I made God up. He reflects something real even if He is only in my mind. He is emphatic that that is not the case, though. There is more. There is a spiritual side to the universe, a nonphysical side. I’ve experienced it, the direction, strength, and comfort that come from something not available to me rationally. God says He is the source of this. Who am I to argue?

When God isn’t the God people want, they argue. Even accepting the truth of evolution people can argue that God micromanages evolution, as Francis Collins does. I’m not sure if that’s a trend for the future. I think people eventually do have to face that God doesn’t control nature even a little bit. Then what? Do they give up on God, or do they accept whoever and whatever God is?

It is a very different God who acts through spirit, whatever that is, and one’s mind, rather than through anything physical. It’s not just those who hate evolution who resist a purely spiritual God. Many want God to be everywhere in the physical universe, as much in us as anywhere else. It would save time looking for Him. But if finding God were much easier, I suspect our culture would be much better and loving than it is by now.

God is whoever and whatever God is, but my experiences of God narrow that for me. I write about that all the time, how the God of my understanding is different from what others present as God. I was once loathe to say my God is a different God than the God of the Bible or some other theology. That makes for such an obvious counterattack that I’m not Christian. But I met Christ. I’m not sure if the most efficient way to God is through Christ or around Him. I think I’ve tried both, but maybe it was all the former. God knows. What human beings pretend to know is much less important.

The truth of evolution does cut off a lot of religion from having any meaning. A physics professor I once had used to pile up articles about different theories in his area of physics. Then some experiment would come along and invalidate an entire stack of papers on one theory. So into the garbage they went. People are not so flexible about religion, but that is what is what would be reasonable. God is whoever and whatever God is, but unless I’ve missed something, He has nothing to do with nature, not now, maybe not ever. People would want some confirmation before believing that. So ask God. Few people will. They don’t want to know.

Some people are so disinclined to ask God for direction, they’d rather be atheist if they can’t believe traditional theology. One could say that is a result of evolution being true. I suppose it is. Maybe it will be the largest result. But there is an opportunity for something else. Between the God-shaped void that even evolutionary psychologists find within us and a physical world that needs no God, there is a conflict about how we should live. Just living naturally is one solution. Finding that there is a reliable supernatural is another, one in which I just close my eyes and God is always there. Then there’s a whole lot of fantasy people can live in. So far the post-evolution world is mostly that last one, where even people who have a belief in evolution maintain some fantasy along with that. I don’t think that’s stable. I think that’s a transitional state of culture. Eventually I think people can live naturally or with a God for whom evolution makes sense. Nothing else is real. If so, nothing else is real even now, and all this religious fantasy is just a different way of living naturally than those who live without any semblance of God.

God has to be a God for whom evolution makes sense. About that I have many questions. Was He waiting for intelligent life? Does life give Him something? Does He give something to life? God says His answers are no, yes, and yes. A complete context for answers like that takes more time.

Dreaming of moving along

2006-12-30T10:38:00.000-08:00

I awoke with a dream that combined two themes that have been recurring for me for years. One is stealing cars. One is winding up in buildings where room after room opens into another room, no halls, just rooms.

I described a residential version of the latter before. Last night the scene was a restaurant. I think I was leaving at the end of the meal and turned the wrong way. So I wandered through employee areas, then storage areas, then through doors off the storage areas into rooms where no one had been for decades, then into places that perhaps no one still alive knew existed. At one point I found a garage door that used to connect the restaurant with the outside world, but someone had erected a concrete wall to keep people from entering that way. Darn, so close to getting out.

I followed more doors. Eventually I popped out unexpectedly through an unused door into the dining room. My appearance startled a waitress so that she dropped a customer’s salad on the floor. Sorry, just passing through. And out the main door this time.

It occurs to me how this is a little like going through doors in the sci-fi miniseries The Lost Room that showed on the Sci Fi Channel this month. Of course my dreams about the room through the next door have always been potluck, not where I decided to go, but maybe the theme is not mine alone.

Then in the parking lot I was faced with a dilemma I often face in dreams. My car wasn’t anywhere nearby. I forget if I had gotten a ride to the restaurant or magically came out somewhere far away from my car. Either way my solution was one I’ve frequently used in dreams. I hotwired a car and drove off to wherever my car was.

Of course in real life, I don’t know how to hotwire a car beyond what I have seen in movies. It’s strange how different dreams can be. In dreams I get concerned that someone can trace all these thefts to me through my fingerprints. It doesn’t change my actions. It just occurs to me sometimes that my fingerprints are on file somewhere, having been taken for my medical license and for my volunteer work. That’s actually real. Yet when I’m fully awake I know my fingers never have been anywhere that would cause the police to knock on my door. There is this transition between dreaming and being awake where facts like that suddenly dawn on me – whew! There are a number of reasons I prefer to live in reality than in my dreams.

Such dreams are about discontent with what’s here, about moving along to someplace I’d prefer. It’s about exploring all possibilities, accepting whatever comes. It’s about doing whatever needs to be done, without malice, but without worrying too much how it affects people. And the God who is constantly with me while I’m awake has no presence at all during my dreams. I don’t even remember He exists when I’m dreaming. Somehow I don’t need Him for direction, strength, and comfort in my dreams. So why do I in reality? It’s an interesting question.

In reality I’ve explored about as many possibilities as I ever will. I hardly ever find a door where I don’t know what’s on the other side. In my dreams, my next move always beckons me. I’m never confused about that. One can say my journey through the bowels of the restaurant is just like a man refusing to ask for directions, but that’s not really it. It does hit me I made a wrong turn, but then there are doors I want to explore and do. I can honestly say in my dream, “I meant to do that,” not as a cover-up. There is no issue in my dream of whether something will turn out well or not. There is just the next door.

Real life is not so automatic. There are choices, and I can see beyond to various possible consequences of any choice. There’s uncertainty. There’s confusion. That’s what got me praying to God again in my thirties. And strangely enough, God responded. I never look for God in my dreams that way. Nothing prompts me to do so.

Perhaps God so fills my consciousness that He is the universe in my dreams, when He is not that in reality. Perhaps God would rather life be automatic. Perhaps He’d rather hear “thank you” than “help me”. I find it hard to believe He wants me to steal cars. Maybe if I were more patient, I’d walk. That’s a good possibility for me in reality.

Whatever the nuances, I always find my way out in dreams. It takes persistence. It takes exploring more possibilities, no matter how many dead ends there have been so far. That’s how I found God, unless that’s how He found me.

So what is “out”? Am I there today? Do I have to wait to die when some part of my consciousness will continue outside of the constraints of all these rooms? As in all things I ask God these. Right now He answers, “you need to eat something”. OK, more doors later.

Until they give up, it's pointless

2006-12-27T19:02:00.000-08:00

I read a piece on Church of the Churchless today that is so transparent. The author, Brian Hines, related how it made his day for the check-out clerk to go one more sentence than is the norm to inquire about what made his day nice. So he told her how it was that there was one more Self-Realization Fellowship calendar left that his wife had requested as a Christmas gift. Then he said something about guardian angels looking after procrastinators, something he apparently doesn’t believe. No, it was the conversation he found to be a joy, not that he was lucky or blessed, depending on one’s point of view.

I have no problem with valuing existential joy. I value all sorts of existential joy, from as meaningless as winning at Free Cell on my computer, especially when I have a moment when I need some little thing I can control, to as meaningful as helping people. In between are joys about sex or food some might describe or beauty in nature or the joy of self-expression. There are a lot of things that make life worth living.

But Hines is someone who believes that’s all there is:

“A hypothetical God or ultimate reality doesn’t make for a nice day. Real nice moments make for a nice day. There’s no need to bring God into them. The guardian angels I brought into my check-out line conversation were totally extraneous.”

Oh, that’s not very informed. I find no conflict between finding joy in little things or big things around me and finding joy in the Holy Spirit who is my constant companion. I’m sure many believers don’t feel the Holy Spirit. Maybe they would act better if they did. Maybe atheists are right and what I feel as the Holy Spirit is something very different. It is a joy nevertheless, one that Brian Hines seems to know nothing about. So I would tell him, as I try to tell a lot of people.

How? Now, there’s the problem. I can tell all kinds of stories, as I’ve told on this blog, and most people would still have no idea what it’s like to be me. It’s not that my spiritual experiences are unique. I read something like Roman 8:9, where Paul writes, “But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.” Knowing everything Paul writes about his spiritual experiences, I suspect he is describing an almost tangible presence of God, not something at all hypothetical.

It’s hard to know how many Christians experience that. I guess it’s few or there wouldn’t be so many hypocrites among Christians, but those few do talk about it a lot and talk about the joy of living in the Spirit and having the Spirit within them. I’m not sure I would pick out one such person as perfectly trustworthy, but I have my own experiences that make me think I know what they mean. Is that the only way? Either you feel the joy of the Spirit or you only believe in a hypothetical God or some God that is purely an intellectual construct, as may be the case with most traditionalists?

Beats me, I know my life. I know it’s better than what Brian Hines described. I would tell everyone that, but I bet you can imagine what kind of dust that stirs up.

I asked God, as I always do when I’m lacking direction. God said it was pointless for me to comment on the Church of the Churchless. There’s no way to get across briefly where I’m coming from. Here, there’s plenty of background if anyone cares to know. More importantly all these people who fight over religion, from atheists to traditionalists with everyone in between never will learn anything until they’re ready to give up on the way they live, a way they justify with their words.

I gave up in my thirties, when I admitted defeat in my marriage and career and started praying. That road-to-Damascus experience came quickly with that, but since then it’s been much more slowly how the presence of God has built up, first in my prayers, then sporadically in my life, then constantly, as the Spirit living in me. I don’t know if that can happen to anyone. Maybe there are biological, cultural and spiritual factors that matter. But it’s real, and it’s better than just the existential joy anyone comes across in life, the joy that the Spirit only makes better.

Until they give up, people call me liar or fool. Some even call me a tool of the devil, as the Spirit I experience knows those aren’t His words in the Bible, but the words of men. God is whoever and whatever God is, not what men say God is. That seems inescapable to me, and yet another reason why God needs to be real, not just an idea.

I bet most people would just ignore me until they give up, no matter how vocal I tried to be. People have a choice, right up until they die, and then their body gives up. Is there anything left then that will still resist? I don’t know, but I know that biological, cultural, and spiritual evolution all take many years. Many generations have to go through life before much changes. It’s not magic words that matter. It’s who and what God really is. That Brian Hines finds God to be hypothetical explains why he can’t find more than existential joy to honor. Maybe he’s right. Then I have to find a different name for what I experience. No, I think he’s wrong. So does God. He didn’t want you to think it’s just me, so He said to add that part. What a complex feeling comes with that, joy, awe, and a little something negative anticipating those who can’t believe God said that to me. It is what it is. How it affects people depends on them.

Diagnosing your enemy

2006-12-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

One of the recommended diaries today at the Daily Kos is from a psychiatrist who claims that George Bush has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This is not a new tactic. I very quickly found google able to confirm my memory that this same charge was directed at Al Gore and Bill Clinton. It’s even been directed at liberalism itself. It probably could be directed at most Presidents. It’s not the first time it’s been leveled at George Bush, not even the first time in the last four years.

The thing is that no psychiatrist would use “fantasy” and “lack of empathy” as loosely with a client as it takes to give any leader a diagnosis of a personality disorder. The President of the United States isn’t engaged in fantasy if he sees himself as President. I don’t know any of the above men personally, but I suspect they all have empathy well within the limits of normal among their own family and friends. To say someone doesn’t have empathy because he’s doing things you don’t think are caring enough is loaded with bias. The kind of people who are solidly within the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder do not win political campaigns.

There are two ways to diagnose one’s enemy. One is to think of arguments that “prove” your enemy is evil, insane, and dangerous, the worse the better. Of course your enemy is doing that about you, too, unless he can just ignore you, so I’m not sure what that accomplishes. It’s not like the public is going to decide anything on the basis of your argument. They know you’re as wacko as anyone else.

The other way is to realize that your greatest enemy is in the mirror and go from there. I haven’t found many people willing to acknowledge that. People feel in less danger from themselves than from those terrible people they can’t help but attack. That may be a miscalculation. You have to consider the distance involved. Other people have to cover that distance to get to you. You have to be someone they would target. I’m sure there are a number of steps.

I don’t have to go through any steps at all to hurt my life. I’m right here in me, ready to throw myself under the bus. So what if I waste my time fantasizing about the evils of other people? What do I care about them? They hurt people. They deserve to be hurt, too.

Wait a minute, fantasy, lack of empathy, something here seems familiar. Fortunately once you realize your greatest enemy is in the mirror, you can do something about what you see.