Speaking of dreams

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

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

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"?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Personal revelation

I like days when I learn something. Today I learned something by googling “personal revelation”. I expected to see a list of sites dominated by evangelicals warning how straying from the Bible turns everyone into Jim Jones and David Koresh, as I’ve heard on Christian radio and occasionally in person for years. Maybe there would be a few New Age sites trying to justify whatever wacko revelations someone has had there.

That’s not the list that came up. First off in the real list was a very serious Mormon teaching about obtaining personal revelation. It quotes Joseph Smith as writing, “No man is a minister of Jesus Christ without being a Prophet. No man can be a minister of Jesus Christ except he has a testimony of Jesus; and this is the spirit of prophecy.” Hmmm, that’s like what Paul wrote in Romans 8:9, a statement that so many Christians ignore in favor of statements that make salvation less demanding.

It’s too bad Joseph Smith was nuts. I’m sure Paul was nuts, too, though that’s harder to document. If it’s not apparent from men like that, the article on personal revelation in Wikipedia gives more examples, at least some of whom anyone would think are nuts. Many religions started this way, if not all of them.

I would shrug my shoulders at all this except for my own spiritual experiences. They’re nuts, too, of course. Most people would say so. I’ve written about those experiences before here, about my road-to-Damascus experience almost 18 years ago and lesser appreciations of the presence of God ever since, in recent years continuously. They’re surely nuts. Certain neuroscientists even speculate what sort of disturbance in the brain causes one to experience God, whether that’s a projection, a misinterpretation of oneself, or a signal that there’s something important going on when our ordinary sensations show nothing of importance. Yes, get back to me on that when you have any physiological data at all to go with speculation that invalidates such a large chunk of human history, something more than a patient who experiences God after a seizure.

I have plenty of reasons never to have said anything about experiencing God. Yet I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and maybe it was inevitable that eventually I would just give up and write openly about His constant presence as I have lately. I don’t know how many times God interrupted something I was writing, as I was writing, and said something, before I said, “Fine, I’ll put down that You just now corrected what I just wrote. Does that make You happy?” As a matter of fact it did.

I’ve longed to do well describing an experience even as simple as that, where the presence of God asserts itself after being quiet for a couple of pages of words I’ve written, to say these last words I wrote are wrong. I can describe the sensation of hearing God’s words, knowing that’s His voice, not mine. I can try to explain that it’s not just words, but feeling His presence, both tactilely and as something filling up part of my personal space. Where it really gets hard is that I know this presence. We’ve been round and round for 18 years, working out that He’s God, and I’m not, at least in the simplest way of seeing that. I think that’s the truly deficient part of describing this. I know this is God. No one else does.

I can imagine the circumstances that allowed other people in history to pass their own revelations on to others. Arabs needed a leader when Mohammed had his experiences of Gabriel teaching him the Quran. Jews and Christians have had their needs, too. So have others. So the hopper of religious beliefs is so full, it’s hard to believe I couldn’t find something in there that works for me. Yet I couldn’t. I am still a liberal Christian, but those Bible-believing Christians who deny that I am a Christian do have a point.

Some would say that's why I created my own God. If atheists are right about everything, then I suppose that’s what I did, but I certainly didn’t set out to do that. I surely would have had certain features of God be different if it were my choice and definitely have Him or Her just tell me one straight story that covers everything instead of all these bits and pieces I get from living in the Spirit and having the Spirit live in me. People fight so strenuously over whose truth is correct, from atheism to a just-so story like evangelical Christianity to something with a lot unknown, yet human beings are in no position to know the ultimate truth about anything, unless some spirit that knows tells us. Right now, God tells me something He has told me before, that no one knows the ultimate truth, even Him, unless there’s some Most High God He doesn’t know who hasn’t told Him. So why are people so arrogant about what they think?

I know, it is human nature to be arrogant in spite of our ignorance. So that includes me, right? I agree with that. God doesn’t. He’s right here. Ask Him if you don’t believe me.

I’ve been trying to pass this off to Him for years, telling anyone I speak to about this that the main reason I share any of this is to encourage others to seek God directly. I don’t want anyone to waste time having to learn that all religions are indeed false, and only God matters. I know people have to waste some time learning that, but I would like to make it less.

I don’t know that I’ll ever have any success in that. So I have another reason why I write about this. I’m compelled to. Something in me has to be expressed, or it just sits in me as a lump. Is it like delivering a baby? Is it like eliminating waste? If describing the presence of God is not as involuntary as those processes, it is almost as compelling.

Almost as compelling might be the part where I say anyone can experience God like this. I’m sure part of that is my egalitarian liberalism. Part of it is because I’m not about to have followers, so the only way anyone can experience what I have, or even part of it, is to approach God. Maybe the biggest part goes back to God being God, not me. He’s the one who is trustworthy, not me. So explore God yourself.

That’s what I’ve always said. Yet my appreciation that this is a lie has grown. I don’t want to claim a special relationship with God, because I know how crazy that is as much as anyone does. People who insult me by saying that I’m just talking about an imaginary friend named God have no idea how well I know that perspective that this is all nuts or that during the entire 18 years that I’ve watched the presence of God evolve around me and in me, first with a bang, then in subtle ways, I’ve known how nuts it is. I’ve been professionally trained to know it’s nuts. Yet I watch and fight with the experience until the experience shows me that it’s just not natural. It’s not me. It’s God, whoever and whatever God is. This is God, the same God everyone has ever experienced, only I experience Him with the benefit of what I know, and we evolve together. God does change. He and She both say so.

I don’t suppose everyone can experience that, despite that sometimes my words say they can. Even people who hear from God, it’s more from them than from God. I don’t know what that means. God tries to tell me, and quite frankly, I’m not going to repeat what God says on this point. It’s been said by others in other ways. It’s not important for people to understand better, except people could back off from making so much of their lives about following religion or resisting religion. It’s God that matters, not religion. I don’t know how to tell people that more than I have.

It’s not a revelation. It’s a relationship with God. It’s not an idea. It’s a way to live. It’ a way to live that even after thousands of years of hearing about it people don’t understand. People want rules they can follow. People want to be in charge of their lives, to be free apart from whatever rules they have to keep out of trouble. Yet we are connected to things larger than us by biology, culture and Spirit. We cannot be free of that. The conflicts between our desires and reality will be worked out eventually. My confidence in that is both through reason and revelation. It’s a powerful thing when those agree.

Preaching to the choir

I was over at the Daily Kos this afternoon. Among those railing against war and corporations was someone who had put in a lot of work on a presentation about why she opposes the death penalty. It referenced cases. It had tables. It was a lot of work. Eventually I got past that observation to get to another one - this is preaching to the choir! No one supporting the death penalty is reading this.

In fact opinions about the death penalty are well researched. There are studies going back to at least 1990 (Justice Quarterly 7:175, 1990) saying that if you sit down a proponent of the death penalty and hit him or her with all the data saying their reasons are no good, such as data saying there is no deterrence from the death penalty, it doesn't change anyone's mind. They just shift to some other reason. People speak of their support for the death penalty in terms of reasons, just as with almost any other opinion, but underneath their reasons is whatever sense of justice or vengeance or conformity or whatever else that is the real basis for their opinion. So is the real basis for many opinions hidden.

Now I thought about saying some of this in response to this piece this afternoon, but then I couldn't see any good it would do. I've been seeing this throughout the 8 years I've been online, and it never has helped to point this out. Lots of people preach to the choir. All sorts of religious arguments are preached that way, conservative, liberal, atheist, with all sorts of subdivisions within those that argue in a way that only those who already agree with that person will agree this time. All sorts of political sites fulfill the same purpose. Like the Daily Kos they are easily ruffled by people who see an issue differently, even by seeing different means to the same ends.

Somehow it didn't used to dawn on me the way it does now. People want to preach to the choir. They want to make their case with no understanding why other people don't see it that way. They want to just pile up words and sometimes numbers and graphs, as if those who believe otherwise will just capitulate to that. Sometimes two people with opposite views will both be preaching to the choir, in the process talking past each other, swapping argument for argument, but with no understanding and no synthesis. I used to just see this as combativeness, but maybe this is how much people want to preach to the choir. They'll even preach to the choir when some other person is not part of their choir.

This is nothing new. Christians have been evangelizing this way for a long time. Some taylor a message to their listeners, but some don't.

I have to think that someday those who are big on arguments will figure out the pointlessness of them. Creationists will understand eventually they'll never dent evolution, won't they? Political extremists from both sides will notice the country isn't flocking to them, won't they? Maybe the only way a lifetime of opinions stops is when someone dies. I'm familiar with that phenomenon already.

I'm sure there's a lot to say about that. For me it suffices to know that people want to preach to the choir, people throughout the political or religious spectrum, even any other sort of people I suppose. I've seen it again and again, and no one thanks me if I point that out to them. I don't point it out to them just to be smart. Preaching to the choir isn't the best preaching, unless someone joins the choir. Even then, it's wasting a lot of time. It's not that I want to keep anyone from wasting time. I want people who agree with me to be effective. There's nothing I can do about that. For anyone who reads this, there are millions who are too busy preaching to the choir.

It's what people want to do. Who am I to stand in their way?

I've already been drifting toward the idea that cultural evolution has a mind of its own, that people don't know what they're doing enough to change society. This is another point about that. All these websites that fight with trolls and think the answer is to get rid of conflicts so everyone can write and read in peace become temples to conformity, like churches and other institutions have been. It's not just conservatives. It's not just the religious. Conformity is everywhere, unless you choose to walk away from it.

Limitations

I wish I could do whatever I want to do, eat whatever I want to eat, and still be healthy. Biology says no.

I wish I could write out half a page of words that would be efficient, convincing and pleasing to read so that no one in the world need waste their time with counterproductive thoughts and actions any more. Culture says no. People have too much junk in their minds to be replaced so easily. New words image are not so easily formed. People’s attention is not easily seized, not productively anyway.

I notice that other things I desire and can’t have don’t seem so oppressive. It would be nice to fly like Superman, but I never feel a moment’s frustration about that. Do I understand it better when physics says no? I doubt that’s it. I think the difference is in my desire, not in what limits my desire.

Why do I desire anything? It’s one of those fundamental truths that behavioral scientists rarely bother with. If we didn’t desire safety, food, sex and such things, there wouldn’t be life to live through and study. So there must be such desires in us somewhere. Where? Oh, how about the hypothalamus where at least some thermostats and chemostats reside in us? Maybe it’s some set point like these that pulls us toward it for any desire we feel.

OK, so there’s some set point for freedom of action, I guess. And there’s some set point that as I look around wants everyone I see to be happy, maybe just so I can be happy, maybe something selfless. Only such set points haven’t been as successful as the ones that just kept the species going. They’re not as adapted to reality as my breathing is to the Earth’s atmosphere.

So evolution will take care of it, right? If not biological evolution, there’s cultural evolution. If not cultural evolution, maybe there’s such a thing as spiritual evolution. Of course, that may be a long time to wait, but maybe not at this time. In 2006 cultural evolution has caused there to be a revolution in genetics and biochemistry that can help bypass how slowly biological evolution adapts. It may not happen in my lifetime, but soon there will be treatments that will let people eat whatever they want and not digest it, more acceptably than when Romans threw up their food, or treatments that will reduce our hunger to a healthier level, better than amphetamines do. I think I’d take the latter treatment, if they both work. It would at least save on the cost of food.

The prospects of an exercise pill are not so clear, but I’m sure technology will help something with that, with monitoring how much exercise is enough, with preventing boredom in the process. Cultural evolution hasn’t always complemented biology. Sometimes it has made our biological cruelty and destructiveness worse, but it has promise.

What about the limits of cultural evolution, though? Like biology, culture only adapts as fast as it can. Biology has to wait for useful mutations to happen along and to be selected for through a number of life cycles. Culture has to use ideas and techniques that have found a place in the current culture. It’s been 10,000 years, and we’re still trying to figure out how to live with each other when there’s wealth to be had, first from agricultural surplus, now from all kinds of poorly distributed surpluses. Oh, another 10,000 years, and it will all work out, right?

Remember the movie Back to the Future? When Marty first comes to Doc Brown’s door in 1955, Doc is wearing a mind-reading machine. It fails miserably to help Doc know what Marty wants. So Doc asks Marty, “Do you know what this means?” and answers his own question, “It means that this damn thing doesn’t work at all!” Few elements of culture don’t work at all, but so many don’t do what it’s claimed they do. From traditional religion to atheism to all sorts of liberal religion, I just wanted something that fit my life, and none of them work. I would say they don’t work at all, but that would be typical human exaggeration. They work some for people who need an answer instead of uncertainty, who need fellowship and don’t mind if that fellowship requires lies or other dishonest conformity.

Around the world, many people who fight or threaten to fight do so for nothing. The real Allah does not bless them for trying to retake Jerusalem. The powerful weapons people develop for their governments will benefit no one. So many religious rituals, doctrines and leaders are nothing more than idols. Many of my fellow liberals would be kinder and say it all has meaning, but I believe just the opposite. There is very little meaning in most of religion, just the barest shreds of truth that there is something greater than any one of us, even greater than what we can conceive.

All religion is part of cultural evolution, but almost all of it is a dead end. Seeing that is part of cultural evolution, too, a backlash, one not strong enough to undo the tribal forces that brought about so many religions and cause religions to still be used to further themselves, even in the US, even in post-modern Europe, even among atheists who reassure each other that atheism is the only way that makes sense.

It was pondering how “this damn thing doesn’t work at all” that I found God 17 years ago. There’s no way to advance any wisdom from that effectively. There’s no way to make it easier for someone else. The culture doesn’t allow it any more than biology or culture allow me to do whatever I feel like. I wish God were just the opposite of such limitations, but while I find no barrier between God and me about what we both want, there is a considerable barrier to communication. Maybe it’s just biology. Maybe it’s more than that. I hear from God in words, but not as long narratives or images as in the Bible or the Quran. The process has convinced me that God is nothing like the omnipotence and omniscience of tradition. He is merely God, whoever and whatever God is, a nonphysical helper whom I encountered in praying for God’s help. His is the direction, strength and comfort that I have come to appreciate is available to anyone who asks, but few actually ask. Many believe they already have the help they need from their theology, and never wait for confirmation from God that such theology is true, if they even ask God about that.

I’ve yet to find words to get across the essence of what I would say about the cultures of our world. All religions are false in some respect, including atheism. There is a way that I can’t reproduce with words, because it consists of being led by the one true God, living in the Spirit, allowing the Spirit to live within me. Paul described the same way, but the church that venerates Paul doesn’t teach people to live by those words. The church cannot live in the Spirit, only human beings can, and then they carry the baggage of their culture with them, as Paul did, stuck with a culture that believed everything was either clean or unclean, either redeemed or judged.

There is spiritual evolution. Any one person can feel that changing him or her, but what happens within just one person does nothing to the culture. Must culture be changed or does the Spirit pop up in another person that much stronger for having lived in another? God tells me that not only is it the latter, but that the Spirit grows even beyond Her time in individual humans. Traditionalists don’t believe in spiritual imperfection or change, but there is no way to make sense of this world without them. The limitations aren’t just in us.

There are some things I want to do that I will never do. I make my own routines so I can live as best I can despite that. When I need to try my hardest to keep my weight down, I record the fats, carbs, fiber and proteins of everything I eat, and know what limits I have to stick to, even if my body wants more.

There are only so many hours in a day that I can try to say some different than I already have. It may only be useful for self-expression. Our culture is so much against the real God. Then again so is biology and maybe spirituality, too. It takes determination to pray, “God help me!” and discern a response that doesn’t just come from within me. I gave up on everything else. It may have been like Menelaus holding Proteus by the throat for a while, despite whatever form the god took, until God surrendered.

Numbers in my computer overcome biology well enough for me, but I can’t do that with culture on my own. With culture I can speak with God anytime I turn my attention to Him. No one believes it, but that’s what I do. God has told me for years that anyone can do the same if they wish. It takes a commitment and a willingness to hear Him and not the fantasies that New Agers or evangelicals publish as words coming from God. It wasn’t easy. It meant realizing how much I still wanted God to be like the God of the Bible, when He is not. It’s meant learning to let God be who and what He is, not what would sell books. It’s frustrating, but there’s one part that I know is as trustworthy as the numbers on my computer are for my diet. If I close my eyes, He comes. If I need direction, strength, or comfort, that’s what I get. God loves me, and I love God. If no one else wants to do what I’ve done, if it’s too crazy or time-consuming for someone else, they won’t get past the culture that says God is beyond knowing. They won’t get past the culture or the biology that says that what someone else says can’t be trusted. It can’t, of course, yet we have to trust someone. I trust God. It works for me.

I’m left uncertain what my limitations really are. They are certainly physics, biology, culture, but what else? And how many ways around them are there? For that one can only explore.

It's my birthday!

I found a picture that says how life has changed in my lifetime as well as any one thing does.

It’s easy to think of the entire 20th century as continuous with the 21st for as long as I can picture the new century. People remain the same biologically, so far, which is important not only physically but behaviorally. I suppose most houses built in 1954 remain occupied. There were cars in 1954. I heard as a child we had a black 1955 Chevrolet with red wheels when I was born. There are cars now. They’re better now. They’re air conditioned, form-fitted, personally musical, computer managed with accessories activated by a pushbutton instead of muscles. There are interstate highways to drive them on. So road trips are longer and faster with fewer stops, but not all that much different. Still can you imagine driving between LA and San Diego all the way on the Pacific Coast Highway, a two-lane road with stop signs?

Other things are like night and day. The n-word has become the word most likely to destroy a career or an excuse to set O.J. Simpson free instead of being an everyday label. Many used it to describe Elvis Presley’s music in 1954. White folks were supposed to use more disciplined rhythms, ones less likely to stir the blood. Somehow babies were made anyway.

Race in society has changed like night and day, despite those who still see racism everywhere. If it is still everywhere, it’s different than it was.

Sex as recreation was more secret in 1954 than today. USC cheerleaders kept the sexual imagery of their sweaters as cheerleaders were transformed into the hip thrusting sex fantasies of today, but much is different. There actually were cheerleaders leading cheers at a football game in the fifties instead of dancing girls on the field and honey shots on TV. Part of me says that’s progress.

It’s not that sexual repression dominated the past and easing of that repression has only happened recently. Flappers in the twenties didn’t hide their legs. Prostitution has always worked about the same way, no matter how many images or how few a society provided a man to whet his appetite. Sex was not discovered in the sixties to accompany drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, even if oral contraceptives made sex a little more carefree. Sex will not go away unless we manage to become much more totalitarian than we ever have before.

Yet I look at the picture above and know that something has changed forever during my lifetime, more than just my knowledge of life. Black and white photos and movies were the height of technology in the fifties. Now one can fake life in still images or animation and only someone who knows life well can tell the images are faked either in form or meaning or both. I can write something in my study, and my words are suddenly available not only to those I would send them to deliberately, but anyone else who stumbles on them. It’s information overload for some. It’s a business opportunity for spamming scum or more responsible advertisers. But those are not the important developments.

No one buys a car without air-conditioning now the way they did in the fifties. One can drive without it, but why choose that when it’s almost free? When it comes to choosing for one’s entire life, the choice is not as simple, but the idea is the same. What’s available? What’s the benefit? What’s the cost? The number of ways to answer those questions has exploded. At one time, the most important way to be would have been to do the same thing that everyone I know does. I suppose the fifties were still like that. It’s not the only option now. Now my life is full of possibilities, everywhere I go, because everywhere I go I carry an information revolution with me, partly in my mind, partly in my microchips.

It’s no accident that some people look to ancient ideas about religion, whether conservative Christians, Jews and Muslims or liberals repackaging eastern religions as intellectual or New Age, and see perfection. People want perfection, not the murky world of the information revolution, filled with possibilities, good and bad. It’s like wanting the simplicity of a car without air-conditioning. It works, right? This new world of possibilities is a lot more than air-conditioning. How can that work?

It works because the Earth continues to go around the sun, because life is resilient, and because if there is God, He is even more resilient. He is also unlikely to be captured by visions of our world thousands of years old.

There is no resistance in me to the idea that God is whoever and whatever God is, not what anyone says about Him. I look at how most people insist they are right in their beliefs, political or religious, conservative, liberal or atheist, and know that time will prove them wrong, in their lifetime or later. Our past was not so special as to be the only way to live. Everyone who thinks it was will die. And if there is an afterlife, they will find it is much different than they predicted. Then what?

Few think about that. Most people seem content in their beliefs. It’s not reasonable. It’s rational that their beliefs are the best that they can come up with in their own minds, but look at the world, both the internet and the real world it mirrors. Why should anyone have picked the one true way in all that? People believe in such miracles. We are big on fantasy. But because it is fantasy that an ancient belief is perfect, they will die in that belief and pay whatever consequences there are for that belief. People can ridicule the other guy all they want in that, but it is they themselves who are ridiculous.

I would not want to go back to the styles of 1954. At least part of me likes the dancing girls at football games today, even if another part of me wonders how this integrates with the rest of our society and its gender roles. I’m sure that will be worked out eventually. Today is a time of great transition in our world. There are many choices for our future, but I doubt we’re the ones making them. Our nature is what it is, genetic, cultural, and spiritual. It matters whether there is a God or no God. A lot of things matter. Such things shape our future. Most of us are just along for the ride.

Stabbed in the back

It was either the late seventies or the eighties when I saw Barry Goldwater on TV. He was sitting on a stage with several other men. They were discussing Vietnam. I have a vivid memory of Goldwater saying, “We could have won that war.” I’m sure it’s such a strong memory because of my emotional reaction to that, having paid so much attention to things in the sixties and seventies, something like, “What, is he insane?”

I still read an occasional piece arguing as Goldwater did. They argue that if Lyndon Johnson had let the air war in the sixties proceed without restraints, maybe with invasion of North Vietnam, maybe even with the use of nuclear weapons as some advocated in the Korean War, we would have won. How do they know? All they really know is we could have been more aggressive. What would have been the cost? At what point would Chinese and Soviet forces have fought back just as freely?

In the end it was still up to local people to secure some part of the country as a regime friendly to us. Was it just because we didn’t kill more Vietnamese in the North that prevented that?

It’s hard to know what caution in Korea or Vietnam was justified, but we can know exactly what the immediate response would have been if US generals hadn’t been restrained in 1962 in Cuba. The Pentagon was set to invade Cuba until John Kennedy decided on blockade instead. Unknown to them, there were tactical nuclear weapons fully operational in Cuba. Our invasion would have been hit by nuclear weapons. Where would we have responded, just Cuba or the Soviet Union? Which American cities would have been destroyed in response to that?

We made it out of the Cold War without an exchange of nuclear weapons. We were lucky. Conservatives never mention that. They speak as if we could have done whatever we wanted, and everything would have turned out just fine. As lucky as we were, I wouldn’t bet on replaying the Cold War differently. But some think we should have won even more. Some think the only way they can lose is if someone stabbed them in the back, like Lyndon Johnson in mismanaging the war in Vietnam or the anti-war movement for forcing an end to it.

I’m sure that someday, after the greater mission in Iraq fails and our troops come home, someone will be saying, “We could have won that war.” I’m not the first one to realize that or to say it will be presented as true Americans being stabbed in the back. This same link brings up the greatest recent example of such propaganda, which was Germans blaming defeat in World War I on being stabbed in the back. This wasn’t just Nazi propaganda. Even Hindenburg said this was the case. Sometimes people forget about so much context behind how vicious the Nazis were to the Jews in the thirties. The Jews were as entrenched as among those who “stabbed us in the back” for World War I as Jane Fonda is for Vietnam. Conservatives are still auditioning who they are going to blame the most for stabbing us in the back for Iraq. I’m sure they’ll come to a consensus eventually.

The human need for scapegoats is very old. Nero needed a scapegoat for a disastrous fire he may or may not have been at fault for. The perception against Nero was there, whether true or not, so he made torches of Christians to emphasize they were the bad ones. How many believed that? It’s hard to say, but apparently Nero’s voice was the one that counted.

Today there are many voices. I would like to believe that no one again will be as fooled as Germans were in making scapegoats of Jews, but maybe I’m overly optimistic. I’ve always thought it was silly to compare George Bush with Hitler, but what if Mr. Bush’s lies were more effective? How bad could he be? His lies that Democrats are the enemy didn’t win him the last election. What if it had? What if conservative politicians or conservative Christians could do whatever they wanted to the rest of us? I expect whatever repression that would result wouldn’t change my life at this point, but where would that movement go? How would it be different than those throughout history who saw others as stabbing them in the back?

That’s not just about war. Bill O’Reilly thinks anyone who says, “Happy Holidays” has stabbed Christmas in the back. Traditional Christians say anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe has stabbed God in the back. Anti-abortionists see abortion as murder in part to express how abortion in the last 40 years has broken from the tradition of it being illegal. Abortion was legalized, but if you call it murder, you can say what a betrayal that is just that easily.

For anyone who believes the world is making progress, there’s someone who believes that tradition is being stabbed in the back, whether that’s Christianity or Islam, whether that’s about gender roles or about less passive attitudes toward prolonging death. I see the world as going through a great transition because of the Enlightenment and revolution in science and technology. It’s not just that some people want the world to be unchanged by this while others want everything changed. It’s that those who want their traditions are so determined that their ways are the only good ways, while progressives say that traditionalists are merely unenlightened. Both are simplistic, as human beings are naturally. If God indeed knows more than I do, then He certainly knows that such simplistic ideas are wrong.

Then on top of such strong feelings about whether change is good or bad comes something truly evil, like the Nazis, the evils of hatred, indifference toward others and lies. You can see that with or without the phrase, “stabbed in the back”. There’s so much clever rhetoric to supplement that. Rush Limbaugh was on the radio today calling the Iran Study Group the “Iraq Surrender Group”. Frank Gaffney used that insult a couple of days ago, before the report was public. Who has time to read a 160-page report? It’s much more effective to craft a short insult, because for many the only strategy to war is to do everything you can think of, for as long as possible. After all it’s not such propagandists who build a corps of volunteers to go and do the fighting. As long as you favor extreme measures, no one can accuse you of stabbing the troops in the back.

That’s not a rational choice to pretend to be the toughest guy on the block. That’s evil, evil that hates those with different beliefs, that is indifferent to the costs of being extreme, and lies that anyone has done a complete analysis that says the extreme way is the best way. I find it easiest to see this with rhetoric about war, but all of politics and religion is similar. People are people. I think culture will force us to adapt to a new world eventually. No one who actually fights wants to keep it up forever. But in the meantime there are so many people who insist they are right, so much so that if events go against them, someone must have stabbed them in the back. It’s evil. I can’t beat it, but I’m at least going to try to avoid being anyone’s human torch.

The unseen force that drives me and sustains my life

It is a challenge to see the world as ancient people saw it. It’s been a windy weekend in southern California. I was out watching the trees being blown by the wind when it dawned on me how differently I see this scene than someone must have seen it thousands of years ago.

I know what pushing the trees besides wind. It’s air – 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, some water vapor, with small amounts of many other molecules dissolved in the more plentiful gases. I don’t visualize little balls of gas knocking tree limbs aside, but I realize I know they are the culprit as I watch that limb, not anything mysterious. I can visualize the little balls if I need to focus more on them, but even without that, I know that’s what air is, and it’s nothing mysterious. It’s just too thin to be visible. It’s the same air I learned about in science classes. Some of it moves in convection currents. Some gets caught up in huge circular movements related to storms. I was never much of a meteorologist to explain every kind of wind, but I remember those maps of winds over the globe, different at different altitudes, with the prevailing winds over North America such that it’s quicker to fly from LA to New York than the other way around. For the same reason, weather systems in the US move from west to east.

Today the wind here is coming from the east. There’s a high over the Rockies to the north. There’s a storm in Mexico. The winds go counterclockwise around the storm and/or clockwise around the high, so here they are. Actually it’s a little north of due east. At one point on my walk today I realized the trees were being blown directly from the north, but there were hills to the west. I suppose the wind was being deflected.

I suppose some ancient people got out enough to understand how wind is deflected by mountains, but I bet it wasn’t many. Did ancient people see wind as a fluid bouncing off rock to turn into another direction? Did they care? Did it matter that much to them what the wind was doing except right where they were?

Ancient people reported wind. They knew wind from one direction might mean rain, but not a different direction. They didn’t always have maps to correlate that with where the nearest ocean was. They just had their experience. Their ships couldn’t fight the wind the way even sailing ships can fight it now. The wind was just this unseen force from God.

Now it’s not except for those who have a very traditional way of looking at things, who think God does what He wants, and meteorologists just happen to notice God’s unvarying pattern, which just happens to be perfectly explained by physics, even if weather is not completely predictable by knowing the physics that makes it work. Most people who look at the wind moving things now take the simple view that they are seeing something completely physical, as I do.

Simplicity wasn’t always that way. What is wind if you have no idea what air is? People always knew what air was good for. I’m sure every generation had plenty of people who explored holding their breath. People knew breathing air was essential. Water was no substitute for that, not for us. But why?

Why because we need air. There’s something of life in it. Smother us and we die. No one who’s dead needs to breathe. Something called a spirit needs to breathe and leaves us with our last breath. Otherwise the spirit would keep us alive. Even God has a Spirit, a life, something animate. So there is wind, and “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) Many plays on words were possible based on the Greek word “pneuma” meaning both “wind” and “spirit”, as did the Hebrew word “ruach”.

I read these words attributed to Jesus by the author of John, and I know they’re wrong. I’m not the best at describing where the wind comes from and where it goes, but some are very good at it and have accurate maps and predictions to prove it. Or am I being too literal?

It is strange. I suspect ancient people were very literal about the connection between spirit, wind, air, and life. They knew there was something beyond understanding in that, mysteries God alone understood. So it was beyond understanding to detail how a person was transformed by being reborn of the Spirit.

But now both wind and biological life are very well understood. The movement of air is much like the movement of water. Life needs oxygen to burn food. God needn’t do anything about that. If I hadn’t thought of how different knowledge is today from ancient times, I wouldn’t have thought of God in the wind at all today. I would think of God as I do everyday, as a nonphysical being that communicates with me, cares for me, and loves me. I do so because there’s been a long tradition of there being such a God, so I looked for Him, found Him, and live in Him to my benefit, maybe for His benefit as well. Yet I don’t see Him in the physical world at all. The physical world has so many mechanisms that can be known in incredible detail, and none of them care if I pray or that I love the God of my understanding.

Ancient people were ignorant of physics. Does that make it more likely or less likely that they were knowledgeable of the real God? Anyone can decide that for oneself. I might believe the latter as strongly as my fellow scientists who are atheists, seeing no reason to consider God as real at all, but God showed up for me when I started praying in my thirties. He was not wind. He was not indisputably in the physical world at all, but He was indisputably in my mind. How did He get there? What a softball question for anyone who wants to deny God or anyone who wants to insist that tradition has it right about God. In contrast to such people, God tells me He filled a need in me. I’ve gone with Him down a string of questions and answers like that. God assures me that He exists beyond me. He is even grateful that I don’t need to see Him in the wind or some other idol in order just to know that He exists. To pin God down to any form like that is to guarantee that you cannot know the full range of God or that it is far less than the idols of omnipotence, omniscience or other perfection that traditions try to force on God.

God is not a bad name for Him, coming from an Indo-European root meaning to invoke, as it does. Those who call on God and mean it do not inherit the wind. Someday all these ancient beliefs that people proudly proclaim will die. It might take 500 years. It might take more. Then it won’t be such an intriguing thing to wonder why people still believe them, why they believe God would punish this place with a hurricane, but not that place, so many problems with tradition like that. People probably won’t walk along in that very different future as I do knowing how there was once so much confusion between God and the wind.

God drives me, but from within, not through an atmospheric disturbance. God enhances my life, but not biologically. I don’t suppose there ever will be maps showing what God is up to. Traditional religion has failed to produce those. God tells me directly that His third greatest priority is that I be happy. The first two may be finished before 500 hundred years. Then maybe happiness will be the priority for everyone. I’m sure even human beings can tell the difference between that and the wind.