In real life I haven’t seen a hundred dollar bill in years, but I saw one in my last dream. I had taken a taxi. All I had in my wallet was this worn, older style hundred, and the driver didn’t have change. But as fortune would have it, there was a Bank of America right there, and I could get 5 twenties for my hundred just like that. I was a little embarrassed that this meant just a dollar tip for the driver, but not all that embarrassed. He hadn’t done anything close to deserving a 21 dollar tip. That’s the breaks.
My dream self is not as clever as my waking self. Now that I’m awake, I know what I would have done in real life, where I’m always thinking ahead toward something like having the perfect change for a tip. I would have gotten different change at the bank to allow for a better tip. I didn’t think of that in my dream. Things just happen in dreamland, even if I’m the one doing them. There’s not much thought involved.
I suppose my dream self doesn’t have the extensive consciousness my waking self has in order to be so clever. I wonder if whole sections of my brain are walled off in REM sleep, cognitive areas no doubt, just as brainstem mechanisms paralyze our muscles during REM sleep to keep us out of trouble. Dreams might work best if we can’t question them as much as some of us do real life. I think I have to be close to waking up to say or think in a dream, “Wait a minute, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
That’s not my biggest neuroscientific observation from this dream, though. What impresses me even more is that I’ve seen that hundred dollar bill before, in a dream an earlier night. There is memory during dreams that I can’t fully access when I’m awake. I remember the part of the dream that’s fresh when I wake up. Before that it’s hazy, even though I can remember some. The dream itself remembers, however. This taxi dream started an earlier night, maybe over more nights than just these two. There were several stops in the trip, which I would guess went up the peninsula to San Francisco, all of which are obscured to me now. But I remember the hundred. It was an earlier night. The hundred in my wallet looked familiar in the dream I last had, where I had the explicit memory from an earlier night. Now I just remember that I remembered during the dream not having any other currency. It’s not the same memory during wakefulness. If there weren’t some overlap I wouldn’t remember my dreams at all, as many people don’t.
Others have written about the state of consciousness in dreams being different than wakefulness. Anyone who wants to explore that can look up what’s written under “state-dependent learning”. When that was the rage, people would have cassette tapes read to them at night hoping they would learn while they were asleep. It’s not that easy.
But there is a memory within dreams that is separate from wakefulness. Maybe if I could suddenly have the sensations of dreamland, the appropriate memories would return with those external cues, but I bet it’s more than that. Psychoanalysts were comfortable calling dreamland “the unconscious”, but I’m not. Where is the unconscious? In Freud’s day there was so much uncharted brain, one could stick the unconscious all sorts of places. That’s not true today. Maybe the unconscious exists as imagination exists, alongside the conscious brain, in parallel. All visions occur in the visual cortex, in theory, in greatest detail when there are sensations from the outside world supporting what we see, but also when we remember, imagine, or dream. When it comes to perception, memory and imagination, we do all of that at once while we’re awake. It’s how we make sense of what we see. Only dreaming is so different, where there is a world that is detailed far beyond our ability either to remember or to imagine. Does dreamland just lie dormant in our cerebral cortex, waiting for REM sleep to return? Is dreamland waiting with its separate memories, separate desires and separate physics?
Whatever the truth is, it’s silly to say that dreams are just a dumping of useless information. They are so much more structured than that, meaningful if only in the symbols that they stir up. My guess is that the parallel world of dreams is more than just giving symbols to our waking self. There are differences that puzzle me. God who has been my constant companion during wakefulness for years is not there in my dreams. He’s not needed. It’s always peaceful in my dreams. I’m never stuck as to what to do in my dreams. Maybe She doesn’t like me, as simple as I am in my dreams. Maybe God just doesn’t reach there. Maybe God is too big to fit there, cut off from everything outside as dreamland is.
There’s also very little sexuality in my dreams. In real life it always hits me viscerally how attractive the prettiest woman in the room is. In dreams that never occurs to me. Dreams are about reliving moments, like all these dreams I have that are nostalgic for medicine, though at the same time there are many strange symbols within them. Dreams are about going places and doing things, if not literally with this taxi ride, then cognitively, like the implications of universal salad dressing. That’s what I dream about. I suppose if I were a sexually repressed 19th-century woman in Vienna, it might be different, but it still wouldn’t be trivial.
Maybe dreams are just an escape from real life, with their own memory and own rules because the brain creates those things easily. Perhaps it’s the brain that holds dreamland and the real world separately, making dreams a playland where even God stays out, but not intentionally, just because the brain can. If it’s something else that is trying to communicate to me beyond what reaches me when I’m awake, I don’t get it. If the message is just live and notice the odd things, I’ve been doing that for some time.
Dreams are what they are. As with God, many people have strong opinions saying they know everything about it. Then where did my hundred dollar bill come from, and where did it go? If it was just flotsam pulled from my memory, why did it stay a while and not just float away?
In the 21st century, we can answer some questions with considerable detail and precision. For others, people just make up answers, as many do about dreams and God. In my real life, I’m very clever about telling the difference. In dreamland, I don’t need to be. Troublemakers don’t get into my dreams somehow, so I don’t need to be clever. I’m glad it’s not up to me to choose one over the other, but it is interesting to see the possibilities.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Universal salad dressing
I had another memorable dream last night. There was a case of industrial espionage at Kraft Foods. Someone stole research Kraft was doing on the perfect salad dressing – low fat, low carbs, great taste, great texture. My dream was about all these people involved after the event talking about the implications of the theft and what should be done. It was like the TV crime shows, but no technology was on display and no one went anywhere to interview anyone. It was just like one of these plays where people stand around and talk, not something that would get a big audience on the big screen or TV.
It’s amazing how novel these dream people are, while at the same time conforming to every expectation I would have of such a scene on TV. Almost all of them are inventions of wherever dreams come from – brain/mind/wherever my extended consciousness reaches at night/whatever reaches into me. Occasionally recognizable celebrities or people I know from real life show up in my dreams, but mostly dream people are unique to whatever dream they populate, yet with unsurprising features. They don’t distract from the themes of the dream either by being strange or by being too familiar. They’re perfectly cast in their roles. Who does this?
It’s not hard for me to recognize themes in my dreams. This certainly is a time to dream about food. Crime shows are the rage. People talking are always the rage. Most intriguing to me is this theme of universality. It’s not just regarding strife at the dinner table with someone liking one food and hating another. It’s about all strife, and the perfect world to end all strife.
That won’t start with salad dressing, but it’s a symbol, you know. I know it is with me. I was not big on diversity as a kid. I was for unity, unity to fix my fractured family, unity to let me fit in with the other kids despite how different I was from them, unity like Malcolm X said Islam promised for him and me. I suppose Malcolm didn’t understand to whom he was talking on that one, nor was that his first mistake about which religion was best, but just because Islam isn’t the perfect religion doesn’t negate the attraction of whatever universal is the perfect religion.
Even as a kid I knew my attraction to there being one way to anything, one truth, one right way, was that then there would be a way for me. So I could imagine one politics and one religion in a utopian way instead of how totalitarian movements actually turn out. In real life, when someone says there’s one way, it’s always the wrong way. I suppose as a kid I hoped to find an exception to that, but I never have.
In all the politics, religions and ways to live I’ve seen, there is none I would follow exactly. There is a God I follow, one that Jesus led me to, but not in the same way as most who call themselves Christian. I’ve wondered about the fundamental truth of this. Is there one God for the universe? Are there many right ways to see that God or just many ways to see Him incorrectly, some worse than others? Perhaps there’s a different God for everyone, a testimony to our individual journeys leaving footprints on some generic Spirit.
In recent years, I quickly get an answer to such wondering. God says to me that while spirituality is a cooperative effort between individuals and Spirit, there is one universe and one God, like it or not. As with visions I’ve described before, the universe God means is much more than the 4-dimensional physical one we see either directly or through machines. The same God who helps me with the most mundane things exists far beyond everything I know, and I know a lot. God says so.
That’s where my dream went, from talk of universal salad dressing that would work for everyone to thoughts of greater universal things. My dreams are always so peaceful on these points while the world is so contentious. God tells me He can’t fix this. People will give up when they feel like it, when the Rapture never comes, when the Messiah never comes, when the 12th Iman never emerges, when the perfect religion finally becomes popular. I think it’s perfect to say that God is whoever and whatever God is, not who people say He is or isn’t, but there’s no enthusiasm for that beyond my attraction to that phrase.
People want power, more power than they can get in an individual life. They will settle for knowledge, love and goodness. Maybe they just want their own salad dressing, but I suspect it’s worse than that. People really believe in their opinions. I understand how often it’s a matter that everyone they trust believes as they do. Nothing inventive will change such people.
People need something real. They will settle for rituals and other things that pretend to be real, but will die when the last believer in them dies. The power that the real God gives is much weaker than what people have fantasized and requires a much longer time to master. So it is for God’s knowledge, love and goodness as well. But God’s things endure while fantasy dies with us. I guess that in 500 years we will understand this better. A better salad dressing will come sooner than that. Foods that counter the obesity epidemic will come. Technology and invention will fix the weaknesses that technology and invention unmasked about our nature.
There is one God, not someone who created a perfect world except for some rebellion, but someone who tells me that He is not the creator at all. He is the Helper, the one who can fill that God-shaped void in our brain with the power, knowledge, love and goodness it craves, but we also can fill it with all kinds of junk if we don’t care to wait for Him.
That is the universality I know works compared to all these that don’t. I remembered this much by the end of my dream, but everyone else was still doing what they do in real life. They stand around and talk. Then I woke up.
It’s amazing how novel these dream people are, while at the same time conforming to every expectation I would have of such a scene on TV. Almost all of them are inventions of wherever dreams come from – brain/mind/wherever my extended consciousness reaches at night/whatever reaches into me. Occasionally recognizable celebrities or people I know from real life show up in my dreams, but mostly dream people are unique to whatever dream they populate, yet with unsurprising features. They don’t distract from the themes of the dream either by being strange or by being too familiar. They’re perfectly cast in their roles. Who does this?
It’s not hard for me to recognize themes in my dreams. This certainly is a time to dream about food. Crime shows are the rage. People talking are always the rage. Most intriguing to me is this theme of universality. It’s not just regarding strife at the dinner table with someone liking one food and hating another. It’s about all strife, and the perfect world to end all strife.
That won’t start with salad dressing, but it’s a symbol, you know. I know it is with me. I was not big on diversity as a kid. I was for unity, unity to fix my fractured family, unity to let me fit in with the other kids despite how different I was from them, unity like Malcolm X said Islam promised for him and me. I suppose Malcolm didn’t understand to whom he was talking on that one, nor was that his first mistake about which religion was best, but just because Islam isn’t the perfect religion doesn’t negate the attraction of whatever universal is the perfect religion.
Even as a kid I knew my attraction to there being one way to anything, one truth, one right way, was that then there would be a way for me. So I could imagine one politics and one religion in a utopian way instead of how totalitarian movements actually turn out. In real life, when someone says there’s one way, it’s always the wrong way. I suppose as a kid I hoped to find an exception to that, but I never have.
In all the politics, religions and ways to live I’ve seen, there is none I would follow exactly. There is a God I follow, one that Jesus led me to, but not in the same way as most who call themselves Christian. I’ve wondered about the fundamental truth of this. Is there one God for the universe? Are there many right ways to see that God or just many ways to see Him incorrectly, some worse than others? Perhaps there’s a different God for everyone, a testimony to our individual journeys leaving footprints on some generic Spirit.
In recent years, I quickly get an answer to such wondering. God says to me that while spirituality is a cooperative effort between individuals and Spirit, there is one universe and one God, like it or not. As with visions I’ve described before, the universe God means is much more than the 4-dimensional physical one we see either directly or through machines. The same God who helps me with the most mundane things exists far beyond everything I know, and I know a lot. God says so.
That’s where my dream went, from talk of universal salad dressing that would work for everyone to thoughts of greater universal things. My dreams are always so peaceful on these points while the world is so contentious. God tells me He can’t fix this. People will give up when they feel like it, when the Rapture never comes, when the Messiah never comes, when the 12th Iman never emerges, when the perfect religion finally becomes popular. I think it’s perfect to say that God is whoever and whatever God is, not who people say He is or isn’t, but there’s no enthusiasm for that beyond my attraction to that phrase.
People want power, more power than they can get in an individual life. They will settle for knowledge, love and goodness. Maybe they just want their own salad dressing, but I suspect it’s worse than that. People really believe in their opinions. I understand how often it’s a matter that everyone they trust believes as they do. Nothing inventive will change such people.
People need something real. They will settle for rituals and other things that pretend to be real, but will die when the last believer in them dies. The power that the real God gives is much weaker than what people have fantasized and requires a much longer time to master. So it is for God’s knowledge, love and goodness as well. But God’s things endure while fantasy dies with us. I guess that in 500 years we will understand this better. A better salad dressing will come sooner than that. Foods that counter the obesity epidemic will come. Technology and invention will fix the weaknesses that technology and invention unmasked about our nature.
There is one God, not someone who created a perfect world except for some rebellion, but someone who tells me that He is not the creator at all. He is the Helper, the one who can fill that God-shaped void in our brain with the power, knowledge, love and goodness it craves, but we also can fill it with all kinds of junk if we don’t care to wait for Him.
That is the universality I know works compared to all these that don’t. I remembered this much by the end of my dream, but everyone else was still doing what they do in real life. They stand around and talk. Then I woke up.
Friday, November 24, 2006
Lies are the worst
George Will wrote a column about Pilgrims this week. In it he accepts the conclusions of an English author Godfrey Hodgson that there was no turkey at the first Thanksgiving in 1621. An article by an actual reporter was not as gullible, instead reviewing the back and forth of where such “debunking” came from.
Some look at the only two primary sources about this feast in 1621 and see plenty of evidence for turkeys. In his letter of December 11, 1621, Edward Winslow described hunting fowl for the feast. In his later memoir, Of Plimouth Plantation, Governor William Bradford writes of the great store of wild turkeys. Hodgson, among other “debunkers”, read the latter as not specifically linking turkeys to the feast with the Indians, while the former doesn’t say “turkey”, so of course, it can only mean ducks and geese.
On such wishful thinking people declare much about Thanksgiving to be a myth. Some put it absolutely that nothing but myth connects 1621 with modern celebrations of Thanksgiving. At the same time Texas nationalists proclaim the actual first Thanksgiving to have occurred in May, 1541 in the Texas panhandle, as Coronado found food along the way of his failure to find fortune in the Rocky Mountains and Plains. What a strange definition of “Thanksgiving” it takes to proclaim that.
People are that strange. I regularly write about the lies that fill politics, religion and life in general, so I have sympathy for debunking, yet so often debunking is just more lies, either out of carelessness or maliciousness. Those who proclaim loyalty only to the TRUTH are liable to launch into foolishness about how evolution is just an atheistic conspiracy or about whoever disagrees with them is wrong. It’s not about TRUTH. It’s about opinions dishonestly presented as reliable. It’s about lies.
I can’t prove absolutely that there was turkey at the first Thanksgiving any more than I can prove there is a God, but to dismiss everything over the years that points to either one as mere myth is certainly a lie. People want the truth to be what they want it to be, whether that’s no God or God being what one’s church says God is. Yet God is neither of those. God is whoever and whatever God is. So is history. So is reality. It’s a challenge for people to face that.
Hatred is not purely evil. Our anger can be protective. It can give us determination. Indifference is likewise not always evil. It might be best for something or someone to work out their problems without me sometimes. I don’t find a silver lining like that for lies. I want to say what I have to say without having to fit it to whatever lies have gone before. That’s one reason to embrace the truth. But I can’t embrace the truth by telling more lies, just substituting my lies for popular lies.
It’s so easy in science. Scientists tell lies all the time, even social scientists about Thanksgiving, but the way to undo that is clear. What is the claim? What is the data? How good is the data? Why conflict of interest might be skewing the process? It works. It doesn’t necessarily work at any one time by majority vote, but the lies will die off if the evidence shows the opposite.
I have great hope from my experience in science. It may not matter in the long run that people are such naturally born liars. For now, though, our culture is full of lies alongside what’s true. I don’t think anything is as oppressive as that.
Two things were obstacles to my becoming Christian in my twenties. One was that creationists said such silly things about science. The other was the problem of evil. Why does God allow all this hatred, indifference and falseness? I became convinced God isn’t responsible for any of that. He knows the truth of science. He didn’t create these evils of human nature. We choose them everyday. Some call that a lie, proof supposedly that there can be no concept of God that works.
It can be a subtle thing which is the lie and which is the truth. Encountering a God who always tells the truth makes that easier. The thing is I might have to admit my mistake in hearing God in a certain way. Words are ambiguous. Even concepts are. That makes liars of us all, as is our nature, but there is something bigger than that nature. That’s where so much of religion seems stuck now to me. People won’t give up their flawed ideas about God to reach for a better God, a real God. Atheists are dead set against that as a solution to their objections. Traditionalists deny any problem. Everyone lies about it. That’s where we are.
Thank God for biology that drives us forward as a species whether we know what we’re doing or not. Thank God for cultural evolution that comes up with things like the scientific method because they work. Someday we will be pulled out of the muck of our own nature. In the meantime we will lie left and right and for what? For our petty partisanships and for our egos. They will all die with us.
What lives is harder to see, but it is what God is made of.
Some look at the only two primary sources about this feast in 1621 and see plenty of evidence for turkeys. In his letter of December 11, 1621, Edward Winslow described hunting fowl for the feast. In his later memoir, Of Plimouth Plantation, Governor William Bradford writes of the great store of wild turkeys. Hodgson, among other “debunkers”, read the latter as not specifically linking turkeys to the feast with the Indians, while the former doesn’t say “turkey”, so of course, it can only mean ducks and geese.
On such wishful thinking people declare much about Thanksgiving to be a myth. Some put it absolutely that nothing but myth connects 1621 with modern celebrations of Thanksgiving. At the same time Texas nationalists proclaim the actual first Thanksgiving to have occurred in May, 1541 in the Texas panhandle, as Coronado found food along the way of his failure to find fortune in the Rocky Mountains and Plains. What a strange definition of “Thanksgiving” it takes to proclaim that.
People are that strange. I regularly write about the lies that fill politics, religion and life in general, so I have sympathy for debunking, yet so often debunking is just more lies, either out of carelessness or maliciousness. Those who proclaim loyalty only to the TRUTH are liable to launch into foolishness about how evolution is just an atheistic conspiracy or about whoever disagrees with them is wrong. It’s not about TRUTH. It’s about opinions dishonestly presented as reliable. It’s about lies.
I can’t prove absolutely that there was turkey at the first Thanksgiving any more than I can prove there is a God, but to dismiss everything over the years that points to either one as mere myth is certainly a lie. People want the truth to be what they want it to be, whether that’s no God or God being what one’s church says God is. Yet God is neither of those. God is whoever and whatever God is. So is history. So is reality. It’s a challenge for people to face that.
Hatred is not purely evil. Our anger can be protective. It can give us determination. Indifference is likewise not always evil. It might be best for something or someone to work out their problems without me sometimes. I don’t find a silver lining like that for lies. I want to say what I have to say without having to fit it to whatever lies have gone before. That’s one reason to embrace the truth. But I can’t embrace the truth by telling more lies, just substituting my lies for popular lies.
It’s so easy in science. Scientists tell lies all the time, even social scientists about Thanksgiving, but the way to undo that is clear. What is the claim? What is the data? How good is the data? Why conflict of interest might be skewing the process? It works. It doesn’t necessarily work at any one time by majority vote, but the lies will die off if the evidence shows the opposite.
I have great hope from my experience in science. It may not matter in the long run that people are such naturally born liars. For now, though, our culture is full of lies alongside what’s true. I don’t think anything is as oppressive as that.
Two things were obstacles to my becoming Christian in my twenties. One was that creationists said such silly things about science. The other was the problem of evil. Why does God allow all this hatred, indifference and falseness? I became convinced God isn’t responsible for any of that. He knows the truth of science. He didn’t create these evils of human nature. We choose them everyday. Some call that a lie, proof supposedly that there can be no concept of God that works.
It can be a subtle thing which is the lie and which is the truth. Encountering a God who always tells the truth makes that easier. The thing is I might have to admit my mistake in hearing God in a certain way. Words are ambiguous. Even concepts are. That makes liars of us all, as is our nature, but there is something bigger than that nature. That’s where so much of religion seems stuck now to me. People won’t give up their flawed ideas about God to reach for a better God, a real God. Atheists are dead set against that as a solution to their objections. Traditionalists deny any problem. Everyone lies about it. That’s where we are.
Thank God for biology that drives us forward as a species whether we know what we’re doing or not. Thank God for cultural evolution that comes up with things like the scientific method because they work. Someday we will be pulled out of the muck of our own nature. In the meantime we will lie left and right and for what? For our petty partisanships and for our egos. They will all die with us.
What lives is harder to see, but it is what God is made of.
Monday, November 13, 2006
The answer to "God help me!"
It’s hard for me to tell if people have learned much from pieces I’ve written since I went online in 1998. I have learned things. Sometimes I stumbled into phrases and metaphors that give me a much better handle on expressing what I know, and having a better handle helps not only express what I already appreciated, but also helps take ideas farther than I could before.
When I first started writing about my spiritual experiences, I doubt that I had a succinct definition for “God”. Like many liberals I paid more attention to “God is love” than God as Creator, but I’m sure neither of those simplicities captured the essence of God for me. Then at some point there came this idea that did do that. I like a definition that God is the answer that I get when I pray, “God help me!”
For me that definition is much more concrete than most definitions of God, even God as creator. The universe is massive. There are many different aspects to creation, from the overall structure of the universe to all the little details. What can I know about God from that, especially when science tells me that if God is the Creator, He is outside all the things explained perfectly well by science? But that God helps me when I ask is almost tangible. It isn’t to those who don’t perceive an answer to their prayers. It depends what prayers someone prays. One can pray for the protection of a family member. If nothing happens, was that God or the natural course of things? It’s similar for praying for someone’s healing in most cases. It can be hard to tell that God did anything.
But the definition I like isn’t about just any prayer. It’s a helpless prayer. It’s a nonspecific prayer. It’s a prayer where I don’t even know what to ask for, regardless of the exact words that come to me to express that. And God answers such a prayer. How many people know that? I don’t know. How many people ever pray such a prayer? How many people wait for God to do something in response? How many people are ready to say that it was God who responded, not circumstances that would have happened anyway?
I’m sure some people shy away from this approach because they see no proof that anything that follows a prayer is from God. Of course there’s no proof. If there were proof, everyone would find the real God and not the contradictory, distant, oversimplified being that traditions force on people. I have never found proof of God in theological and philosophical claims of ways to prove God. I found God as a presence that built up as my prayer life evolved, not in the response to one prayer, but in a pattern, a pattern in which I asked for direction, strength and comfort from God, and got direction, strength and comfort.
I admit that when I started hearing from God in words it was easier to look back and say, “Yes, this is the same God I’ve always known, the Helper, the God who is love, though not the indiscriminating love some of my fellow liberals believe in.” God would guide me through looking at that. Yet to define God as a voice in me that says, “I am God” is not right. I wouldn’t trust such a voice if He hadn’t already proven Himself as the answer to my prayer.
If I pray prayers like, “God help me!” repeatedly and only hear from the same demon over and over again, then what hope is there? What sort of universe would make that a reality, even just for me? A universe where I’ve already lost, that’s what sort. It’s not worth worrying about beyond that.
Is that what people worry about in defining God in terms of personal experience, that it might be wrong? What if it’s right? How extraordinarily liberating would that be? And people don’t worry about defining God in abstract terms that don’t necessarily connect to reality at all, but create a straightjacket for us? How puzzling.
As with all of religion, I think the biggest problem is that people don’t question tradition enough. Traditional Christians accept their traditional view of God. Traditional Muslims accept the Muslim view. Those who see God as existing in everything and everyone draw from Eastern religion and recent New Age traditions to feel secure in their beliefs. What a house of cards, all of them.
God is whoever and whatever God is, another phrase I stumbled on to express a problem with so many religions. Anyone who says he or she knows exactly who God is lies, whether that belief is by revelation, by reasoning or by intuition. So says God to me. No one can prove otherwise. Anyone can believe otherwise, for all sorts of reasons. So how are those beliefs working for you?
I suspect most people would say their beliefs are working just fine for them, or they would change their beliefs. Yet an outsider can see what someone’s beliefs cost them, how what someone thinks is a meaningful ritual or valuable idea is just a waste of time. God can see how many lives are wasted in false faith. Someday what is true will emerge from the discontent with what is false. It’s not easy. It’s much easier for human beings to reject one thing and embrace its opposite, as atheists do. It’s easier to go from one false belief to a different false belief than to find the one belief that’s true. Many of my fellow liberals hate that idea, preferring that there is no truth, so everyone can be equal. That’s not my experience.
God is the answer to, “God help me!” I believe that’s true, but I know that more fundamental is that God is whoever and whatever God is, not what someone says He is.
People don’t jump on that bandwagon. Is that because I haven’t explained it well enough? Are people not ready? Is that because they are so comfortable in their currents beliefs or lack thereof? Is that because people are too comfortable in their lives to ask for God’s help, the real God, not the fantasy that fixes anything by going poof?
To any such questions, God tells me the answer doesn’t matter. God is available to whoever asks. He knows His threshold for helping someone. It’s not the same for everyone. Different people have different needs. Those who think their traditions substitute for the real God may be beyond doing anything with them in this life. It’s not as though God communicates with us so easily that He can do anything about that anyway. I don’t know what God’s limits are. I don’t think He knows either. God has no mirror. But it’s quite clear He could do more for us. We would have to let Him. There are many reasons why we don’t. But anyone who wants to see what happens when he or she sincerely prays, “God help me!” can get a handle on the real God. They don’t need to know anything I think about that. So I can let go. Biological, cultural, and spiritual evolution will change what I can’t change, and I can just pay attention to the answer I received.
When I first started writing about my spiritual experiences, I doubt that I had a succinct definition for “God”. Like many liberals I paid more attention to “God is love” than God as Creator, but I’m sure neither of those simplicities captured the essence of God for me. Then at some point there came this idea that did do that. I like a definition that God is the answer that I get when I pray, “God help me!”
For me that definition is much more concrete than most definitions of God, even God as creator. The universe is massive. There are many different aspects to creation, from the overall structure of the universe to all the little details. What can I know about God from that, especially when science tells me that if God is the Creator, He is outside all the things explained perfectly well by science? But that God helps me when I ask is almost tangible. It isn’t to those who don’t perceive an answer to their prayers. It depends what prayers someone prays. One can pray for the protection of a family member. If nothing happens, was that God or the natural course of things? It’s similar for praying for someone’s healing in most cases. It can be hard to tell that God did anything.
But the definition I like isn’t about just any prayer. It’s a helpless prayer. It’s a nonspecific prayer. It’s a prayer where I don’t even know what to ask for, regardless of the exact words that come to me to express that. And God answers such a prayer. How many people know that? I don’t know. How many people ever pray such a prayer? How many people wait for God to do something in response? How many people are ready to say that it was God who responded, not circumstances that would have happened anyway?
I’m sure some people shy away from this approach because they see no proof that anything that follows a prayer is from God. Of course there’s no proof. If there were proof, everyone would find the real God and not the contradictory, distant, oversimplified being that traditions force on people. I have never found proof of God in theological and philosophical claims of ways to prove God. I found God as a presence that built up as my prayer life evolved, not in the response to one prayer, but in a pattern, a pattern in which I asked for direction, strength and comfort from God, and got direction, strength and comfort.
I admit that when I started hearing from God in words it was easier to look back and say, “Yes, this is the same God I’ve always known, the Helper, the God who is love, though not the indiscriminating love some of my fellow liberals believe in.” God would guide me through looking at that. Yet to define God as a voice in me that says, “I am God” is not right. I wouldn’t trust such a voice if He hadn’t already proven Himself as the answer to my prayer.
If I pray prayers like, “God help me!” repeatedly and only hear from the same demon over and over again, then what hope is there? What sort of universe would make that a reality, even just for me? A universe where I’ve already lost, that’s what sort. It’s not worth worrying about beyond that.
Is that what people worry about in defining God in terms of personal experience, that it might be wrong? What if it’s right? How extraordinarily liberating would that be? And people don’t worry about defining God in abstract terms that don’t necessarily connect to reality at all, but create a straightjacket for us? How puzzling.
As with all of religion, I think the biggest problem is that people don’t question tradition enough. Traditional Christians accept their traditional view of God. Traditional Muslims accept the Muslim view. Those who see God as existing in everything and everyone draw from Eastern religion and recent New Age traditions to feel secure in their beliefs. What a house of cards, all of them.
God is whoever and whatever God is, another phrase I stumbled on to express a problem with so many religions. Anyone who says he or she knows exactly who God is lies, whether that belief is by revelation, by reasoning or by intuition. So says God to me. No one can prove otherwise. Anyone can believe otherwise, for all sorts of reasons. So how are those beliefs working for you?
I suspect most people would say their beliefs are working just fine for them, or they would change their beliefs. Yet an outsider can see what someone’s beliefs cost them, how what someone thinks is a meaningful ritual or valuable idea is just a waste of time. God can see how many lives are wasted in false faith. Someday what is true will emerge from the discontent with what is false. It’s not easy. It’s much easier for human beings to reject one thing and embrace its opposite, as atheists do. It’s easier to go from one false belief to a different false belief than to find the one belief that’s true. Many of my fellow liberals hate that idea, preferring that there is no truth, so everyone can be equal. That’s not my experience.
God is the answer to, “God help me!” I believe that’s true, but I know that more fundamental is that God is whoever and whatever God is, not what someone says He is.
People don’t jump on that bandwagon. Is that because I haven’t explained it well enough? Are people not ready? Is that because they are so comfortable in their currents beliefs or lack thereof? Is that because people are too comfortable in their lives to ask for God’s help, the real God, not the fantasy that fixes anything by going poof?
To any such questions, God tells me the answer doesn’t matter. God is available to whoever asks. He knows His threshold for helping someone. It’s not the same for everyone. Different people have different needs. Those who think their traditions substitute for the real God may be beyond doing anything with them in this life. It’s not as though God communicates with us so easily that He can do anything about that anyway. I don’t know what God’s limits are. I don’t think He knows either. God has no mirror. But it’s quite clear He could do more for us. We would have to let Him. There are many reasons why we don’t. But anyone who wants to see what happens when he or she sincerely prays, “God help me!” can get a handle on the real God. They don’t need to know anything I think about that. So I can let go. Biological, cultural, and spiritual evolution will change what I can’t change, and I can just pay attention to the answer I received.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Ridculing others about sexuality
This weekend I’ve run into a couple of perspectives about one group judging another over different approaches to sex. One is in an interview with Mike Jones, the male prostitute who blew the whistle on Ted Haggard’s hypocrisy. Mr. Jones is surprised to have received only silence from gay rights groups. Apparently gay pride doesn’t extend to whores. It is hard to judge silence, of course, but Mr. Jones contrasts the silence to the multiple thanks he’s gotten from members of Mr. Haggard’s congregation for forcing Mr. Haggard to get the help he needs.
There is a quite verbal judgment of others on display at Feministing, where a link led me to see a sexual purity ball: http://feministing.com/archives/006031.html
I thought about adding my comment to all those calling this incestuous, psychologically damaging, and so forth, but I suppose that would be pointless. I've never had good luck telling anyone that their ridicule of something is off base. Still I wish there were a way to let people who are so resentful about fathers standing in for God to let go of that anger. Teachers are in loco parentis. Someone has to stand in for God the same way. Parents are the obvious choice, and many cultures have chosen the father as the more obvious of the two parents. When girls pledge their sexual purity to their father, they are not promising incest with their father until they marry someone else. They are making a pledge of abstinence, one that they would make to God if God had a visual presence. I'm sure a pledge to their mothers would work equally as well, except mothers don't stand in for God in conservative religion. How vicious to call it incest.
At the same time I know of no study saying there is more psychopathology in girls who have given a pledge to sexual purity. Puberty is a tough time for everyone. Who knows what the best way is?
I've argued before with conservatives who said God's plan for everyone is no sex before marriage. Biology certainly didn't listen if God ever said that. Beyond that I have my own experience to say that God's plan may be more flexible. Circumstances were such that there was no chance for me to remain a virgin for very long when I started college in 1971. There were co-ed dorms. There were movies where everyone had sex on the screen, so why not later among the audience? There were drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Of course there was sex, too.
So I learned in college that I’m the kind of person who gets very attached to any woman I have sex with. To lose her is like having an arm ripped out. Some would call that immaturity or even pathology, yet it never went away. I’ve loved every woman I ever had sex with, even though maybe 70% of them proved they weren’t for me eventually. When I was in medical school, I even loved a woman I dated for a while who didn’t feel ready for sex again after the last time led to an abortion. I would go back in time and try again with her, not for sex, but for love.
I learned more about love before marriage because sex was so prevalent in the seventies. Was it helpful? Or would I have learned that just as well after marriage? I don’t know. My children taught me more about love, from the love they evoked from me, than anything that had gone before. So did I need to learn the intimacy that sex taught me before marriage, what I wouldn’t have learned if my subculture believed in no sex before marriage? Did the skill at intimacy help make me a good physician instead of a researcher? I don’t know.
It is amazing that there should be uncertainty about such a central part of life as sex despite so many thousands of years of experience with it. Yet it’s clear what the conflict is. Sexual desire is incredibly powerful, yet the way of just giving in to it is constantly tested with familiar results: abandonment, disease, untimely pregnancy, becoming stuck with a partner who’s not good for you. Of course these can happen to some degree after marriage, but aren’t these consequences a big part of why culture has tried to resist biology with respect to sex rather than it all being a patriarchy trying to control everyone else?
God’s plan for me didn’t involve my trying to run from my culture as much as it would have taken for my virginity to survive my freshman year of college. God's love hasn’t revolved around sex any more than it’s revolved around eating or around recreational drugs. Maybe a sexual purity ball is an overblown ritual. Maybe it is indeed what God wants for those involved. My daughters can say if my hands-off approach was better or worse for them. They might be wrong. How much do we know about what’s the best way for us? Is it really sensible to educate kids about sex and expect them to decide when they’re ready for sex? It may be the most realistic way of doing it, but that’s not a reason to refrain from asking questions.
Those who say God’s plan is no sex before marriage, for everyone, do not allow questions. It’s certainly an overblown claim. Those who say the best way is whatever feels good do not allow questions. That’s certainly just as wrong as it is just as oversimplified. The things I’m sure of on the subject of when best to become sexual is that puberty is overwhelming and that any aspect of culture meant to delay sex after puberty will be imperfect, yet there are good reasons to delay sex. And that’s just the start of where one can ask questions.
Some people would rather make judgments. It’s human nature. I wonder what our culture can do about that. Judgments may even cause more turmoil than sex does, and the good that comes from sex seems much more than anything good that comes from judgments. Since few take Matthew 7:1 seriously, how about rings to symbolize a commitment to withhold judgment, for everyone?
There is a quite verbal judgment of others on display at Feministing, where a link led me to see a sexual purity ball: http://feministing.com/archives/006031.html
I thought about adding my comment to all those calling this incestuous, psychologically damaging, and so forth, but I suppose that would be pointless. I've never had good luck telling anyone that their ridicule of something is off base. Still I wish there were a way to let people who are so resentful about fathers standing in for God to let go of that anger. Teachers are in loco parentis. Someone has to stand in for God the same way. Parents are the obvious choice, and many cultures have chosen the father as the more obvious of the two parents. When girls pledge their sexual purity to their father, they are not promising incest with their father until they marry someone else. They are making a pledge of abstinence, one that they would make to God if God had a visual presence. I'm sure a pledge to their mothers would work equally as well, except mothers don't stand in for God in conservative religion. How vicious to call it incest.
At the same time I know of no study saying there is more psychopathology in girls who have given a pledge to sexual purity. Puberty is a tough time for everyone. Who knows what the best way is?
I've argued before with conservatives who said God's plan for everyone is no sex before marriage. Biology certainly didn't listen if God ever said that. Beyond that I have my own experience to say that God's plan may be more flexible. Circumstances were such that there was no chance for me to remain a virgin for very long when I started college in 1971. There were co-ed dorms. There were movies where everyone had sex on the screen, so why not later among the audience? There were drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Of course there was sex, too.
So I learned in college that I’m the kind of person who gets very attached to any woman I have sex with. To lose her is like having an arm ripped out. Some would call that immaturity or even pathology, yet it never went away. I’ve loved every woman I ever had sex with, even though maybe 70% of them proved they weren’t for me eventually. When I was in medical school, I even loved a woman I dated for a while who didn’t feel ready for sex again after the last time led to an abortion. I would go back in time and try again with her, not for sex, but for love.
I learned more about love before marriage because sex was so prevalent in the seventies. Was it helpful? Or would I have learned that just as well after marriage? I don’t know. My children taught me more about love, from the love they evoked from me, than anything that had gone before. So did I need to learn the intimacy that sex taught me before marriage, what I wouldn’t have learned if my subculture believed in no sex before marriage? Did the skill at intimacy help make me a good physician instead of a researcher? I don’t know.
It is amazing that there should be uncertainty about such a central part of life as sex despite so many thousands of years of experience with it. Yet it’s clear what the conflict is. Sexual desire is incredibly powerful, yet the way of just giving in to it is constantly tested with familiar results: abandonment, disease, untimely pregnancy, becoming stuck with a partner who’s not good for you. Of course these can happen to some degree after marriage, but aren’t these consequences a big part of why culture has tried to resist biology with respect to sex rather than it all being a patriarchy trying to control everyone else?
God’s plan for me didn’t involve my trying to run from my culture as much as it would have taken for my virginity to survive my freshman year of college. God's love hasn’t revolved around sex any more than it’s revolved around eating or around recreational drugs. Maybe a sexual purity ball is an overblown ritual. Maybe it is indeed what God wants for those involved. My daughters can say if my hands-off approach was better or worse for them. They might be wrong. How much do we know about what’s the best way for us? Is it really sensible to educate kids about sex and expect them to decide when they’re ready for sex? It may be the most realistic way of doing it, but that’s not a reason to refrain from asking questions.
Those who say God’s plan is no sex before marriage, for everyone, do not allow questions. It’s certainly an overblown claim. Those who say the best way is whatever feels good do not allow questions. That’s certainly just as wrong as it is just as oversimplified. The things I’m sure of on the subject of when best to become sexual is that puberty is overwhelming and that any aspect of culture meant to delay sex after puberty will be imperfect, yet there are good reasons to delay sex. And that’s just the start of where one can ask questions.
Some people would rather make judgments. It’s human nature. I wonder what our culture can do about that. Judgments may even cause more turmoil than sex does, and the good that comes from sex seems much more than anything good that comes from judgments. Since few take Matthew 7:1 seriously, how about rings to symbolize a commitment to withhold judgment, for everyone?
Saturday, November 11, 2006
What thanks has God earned?
Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy has had a difficult year following the suicide of his son on December 22, 2005. He missed only one game as coach, but it certainly affected him and the team for some time after that. In a rambling post-game comment after the Colts lost to the Steelers the next month in the playoffs, Dungy spoke of how proud he was of his team, how God had helped them through this difficulty. In part Dungy said, “I really thought the Lord’s hand was on this team.”
Some used this quote out of context as if Dungy had said he thought God would give them victory, but didn’t. In context that’s clearly not what Dungy thought. Dungy thought God’s hand was on his team for emotional support, to get through trials. Scoring points was up to the players. UCC minister Dwight Hein added a complete fantasy to the above quote, saying that Dungy was, “in total disbelief that they lost”. No, that’s not true. I watched the comment at the time on TV. It’s also clearly not the case from the longer quote. People are so primed to believe their prejudice over reality.
I can try to understand why people are so primed to believe that someone is claiming God controls victory or defeat in sports. Receivers thank God for touchdowns. Baseball players point to the sky on crossing the plate with a home run. What does it mean to thank God when I’m happy about something that’s happened?
Sometimes God tells me that I’m thanking Him for something He didn’t do. He’s always right. I do often thank God where I know it’s doubtful that He did anything. A light stays green. Something I need is on sale. I quickly find which of 917 hiding places I used the night before for my glasses when I don’t have time to search many of them. God tells me He’s not responsible if I just get lucky.
He doesn’t say that when I’m sure it was God, when I ask for His direction, strength or comfort and get exactly that. I do feel some guilt that while I’m grateful for God’s help in these ways, and I’m sure there’s no way I could create these mental miracles without God, I wish there were more. I also wish reality were sufficient. Yet I understand the peaceful fatalism that comes from believing God controls everything. So even if a family member dies, some will say God must know what He is doing. Tony Dungy was speaking like that this past summer about his son James’ death.
Only there’s no way God even allowed James to commit suicide, much less controlled it. I asked God again about that. He says there is rarely anything but tragedy in suicide. He would stop almost all of them if He could.
There is a choice to be made in theology. Did God make us free? Did nature make us free? Could the latter be true even to a degree that it frustrates God?
It depends how one defines God. If one defines God as being in control of everything or at least responsible in the sense of having created everything, then of course God made us free, directly or indirectly. It makes sense to direct every “thank you” about that freedom to Him. But what if God is something else? I know God best as the one who answers if I pray, “God help me!” It may be very complicated who and what God is, even as simple as theologians and philosophers pretend they know God to be.
I am satisfied that I cannot penetrate the depths of who and what God is, nor can any other human being. I can know what comes to me, including that I want to thank God, even to excess sometimes. I know what God tells me about His desires. He freed me from some of the tyranny of our culture, where almost all rhetoric is false, be it politics, religion, or even sports. I didn’t need Him for freedom that comes naturally to most of us, to walk, to talk, even if I have thanked Him for both of those more than once.
God would reign in much of the freedom we have to hurt each other. He would do it today, with an armada of His spaceships, if He had any. Only He doesn’t. So our cultural evolution and spiritual evolution proceed quite slowly. People say many foolish things. Some are because they don’t care about the context of a quote. They just want to use the quote to push a pre-existing agenda. They have the freedom to do so, not from God, but from nature. Both liberals and conservatives can thank nature and a liberal democracy for being able to say whatever they damn well please. God would use lightning bolts to criticize such speech if He could. He can’t.
He says there’s no need to thank Him for things He can’t do, like hit a home run. If people want to, He doesn’t mind. It puts them in a better frame of mind to reach for things He can do that people generally don’t let Him do, to guide them, to strengthen them, to comfort them. James Dungy couldn’t figure out how to get enough of these from God for his life to look better than suicide. God tells me He doesn’t know why. God wonders if it was His fault, if He should have tried something else on James, but at the same time God knows the suicide wasn’t His choice. He can accept Tony Dungy finding comfort in believing the opposite, but some of us need to know the truth, for God’s sake.
God could do much more for us than He does, but it is a cooperative effort. People didn’t find their ultimate way to God thousands of years ago. They don’t know what they’re doing today. It’s not that God will be different in 500 years. It’s that people will discover how hollow old ways are. That drives many people into new fantasies, but among all this that is false, there is a real God, a God who can be approached from any direction. It takes patience, honesty, open-mindedness and willingness to hear Him, but He is there and can give us things for which He earns our gratitude. He is there whether anyone believes my words about Him or not.
Some used this quote out of context as if Dungy had said he thought God would give them victory, but didn’t. In context that’s clearly not what Dungy thought. Dungy thought God’s hand was on his team for emotional support, to get through trials. Scoring points was up to the players. UCC minister Dwight Hein added a complete fantasy to the above quote, saying that Dungy was, “in total disbelief that they lost”. No, that’s not true. I watched the comment at the time on TV. It’s also clearly not the case from the longer quote. People are so primed to believe their prejudice over reality.
I can try to understand why people are so primed to believe that someone is claiming God controls victory or defeat in sports. Receivers thank God for touchdowns. Baseball players point to the sky on crossing the plate with a home run. What does it mean to thank God when I’m happy about something that’s happened?
Sometimes God tells me that I’m thanking Him for something He didn’t do. He’s always right. I do often thank God where I know it’s doubtful that He did anything. A light stays green. Something I need is on sale. I quickly find which of 917 hiding places I used the night before for my glasses when I don’t have time to search many of them. God tells me He’s not responsible if I just get lucky.
He doesn’t say that when I’m sure it was God, when I ask for His direction, strength or comfort and get exactly that. I do feel some guilt that while I’m grateful for God’s help in these ways, and I’m sure there’s no way I could create these mental miracles without God, I wish there were more. I also wish reality were sufficient. Yet I understand the peaceful fatalism that comes from believing God controls everything. So even if a family member dies, some will say God must know what He is doing. Tony Dungy was speaking like that this past summer about his son James’ death.
Only there’s no way God even allowed James to commit suicide, much less controlled it. I asked God again about that. He says there is rarely anything but tragedy in suicide. He would stop almost all of them if He could.
There is a choice to be made in theology. Did God make us free? Did nature make us free? Could the latter be true even to a degree that it frustrates God?
It depends how one defines God. If one defines God as being in control of everything or at least responsible in the sense of having created everything, then of course God made us free, directly or indirectly. It makes sense to direct every “thank you” about that freedom to Him. But what if God is something else? I know God best as the one who answers if I pray, “God help me!” It may be very complicated who and what God is, even as simple as theologians and philosophers pretend they know God to be.
I am satisfied that I cannot penetrate the depths of who and what God is, nor can any other human being. I can know what comes to me, including that I want to thank God, even to excess sometimes. I know what God tells me about His desires. He freed me from some of the tyranny of our culture, where almost all rhetoric is false, be it politics, religion, or even sports. I didn’t need Him for freedom that comes naturally to most of us, to walk, to talk, even if I have thanked Him for both of those more than once.
God would reign in much of the freedom we have to hurt each other. He would do it today, with an armada of His spaceships, if He had any. Only He doesn’t. So our cultural evolution and spiritual evolution proceed quite slowly. People say many foolish things. Some are because they don’t care about the context of a quote. They just want to use the quote to push a pre-existing agenda. They have the freedom to do so, not from God, but from nature. Both liberals and conservatives can thank nature and a liberal democracy for being able to say whatever they damn well please. God would use lightning bolts to criticize such speech if He could. He can’t.
He says there’s no need to thank Him for things He can’t do, like hit a home run. If people want to, He doesn’t mind. It puts them in a better frame of mind to reach for things He can do that people generally don’t let Him do, to guide them, to strengthen them, to comfort them. James Dungy couldn’t figure out how to get enough of these from God for his life to look better than suicide. God tells me He doesn’t know why. God wonders if it was His fault, if He should have tried something else on James, but at the same time God knows the suicide wasn’t His choice. He can accept Tony Dungy finding comfort in believing the opposite, but some of us need to know the truth, for God’s sake.
God could do much more for us than He does, but it is a cooperative effort. People didn’t find their ultimate way to God thousands of years ago. They don’t know what they’re doing today. It’s not that God will be different in 500 years. It’s that people will discover how hollow old ways are. That drives many people into new fantasies, but among all this that is false, there is a real God, a God who can be approached from any direction. It takes patience, honesty, open-mindedness and willingness to hear Him, but He is there and can give us things for which He earns our gratitude. He is there whether anyone believes my words about Him or not.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Only a little crow for lunch
Presidential counselor Dan Bartlett told CBS that "a little bit of crow" was on the menu for Mr. Bush's lunch with Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Hoyer today. Well, it's good to get one of my recent questions answered.
At the same time, it's so hard to trust finicky eaters. Thanksgiving is coming up. Turkeys can wait. There's been a big increase in the crow population in US metropolitan areas, crows being so compatible with our lifestyle, like rats and cockroaches, so let's start a new tradition. Everyone who's been shooting his or her mouth off erroneously gets a whole crow, not just some little taste of crow. It could be to humility what Yom Kippur is to atonement. Or make the day before Thanksgiving for crow, and Thursday for turkey. How about a presidential proclamation for that, Mr. Bush? That's a statement that would be remembered past 2050.
Oh well, politics is so much about half-measures.
At the same time, it's so hard to trust finicky eaters. Thanksgiving is coming up. Turkeys can wait. There's been a big increase in the crow population in US metropolitan areas, crows being so compatible with our lifestyle, like rats and cockroaches, so let's start a new tradition. Everyone who's been shooting his or her mouth off erroneously gets a whole crow, not just some little taste of crow. It could be to humility what Yom Kippur is to atonement. Or make the day before Thanksgiving for crow, and Thursday for turkey. How about a presidential proclamation for that, Mr. Bush? That's a statement that would be remembered past 2050.
Oh well, politics is so much about half-measures.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Waiting for the other shoe to drop
I think many of us who reached adulthood in the sixties and seventies expected society to have changed much more than it has by now. Tastes changed so quickly and so easily then, for music, for clothes. Habits changed regarding sex and drugs, though maybe a lot of this was that such things became more open. Racial rights, women’s rights and gay rights all broke through obstacles in a stunning way. There was War on Poverty. There was a peace movement that made a difference. Even Jesus was preached in a more free and youthful way in the seventies.
Yet as my children grew up, it was remarkable how some things hadn’t changed further. At one point my daughters’ favorite group was the Beatles, even Simon and Garfunkel. Wait a minute. Those guys are older than I am. I started hearing “cool” from my children, another fashion that preceded me. There’s this stability for what was trendy when I was young, not all of it, but I guess the best of it. It’s fine with me that “groovy” was left in the past for the most part. Of course there are some new variations in music, but it’s all like blues or rock and roll. There hasn’t been another revolution. Weren’t we going to have continuous revolution?
I guess not. It’s seems to be more like an earthquake or volcano erupting. Some tension builds up. It finally breaks through. Then it takes some time to adjust to that and move ahead again. How much time? I look at that list I wrote in the first paragraph, and maybe there won’t be much movement in such things for another 30 years.
Many people speak of how tolerant the newest generation is of homosexuality. Maybe in thirty years that will have translated into some change. Then again maybe not. It took almost 100 years for the Civil War amendments to the Constitution to be enforced. Things do take time.
I know there are a lot of people who want to force change, by publicity, by trying to craft persuasive arguments, even by more aggressive actions. Do you notice how such force generates reactions? I look at a political season like this one, and all I see are two sides each saying their way is right, whether change or don’t change. I would bet they’re both wrong. I bet the final solution our society or the world comes to is different from either side’s vision. I’m sure someday there will be a stability to gender roles that accounts for both biology and our new abilities to be free from biology. I don’t think it will involve women covering up as Muslims want. I don’t think it will be an utterly unisex society. I don’t know where gender roles will wind up between those extremes, though, and I don’t trust those who say they do. There are a lot of social issues like that. Time will fix them, and we don’t know what a stable solution looks like to push our society quickly in that direction.
The anti-abortion crowd finds many things about the genetic revolution to fight. I’m sure they don’t know the future on this issue. I’m sure they don’t know God’s mind. Still they push hard for what they want, using morally charged language. No matter how much they succeed, it’s a drop in the bucket. It’s sand on a highway. The genetic revolution will proceed worldwide. I suspect it will pass a point that is currently considered unethical, to make genetic enhancements to normal function rather than just cure disease. If that’s our destiny because people find such technology works well, nothing people do today will make any difference, even if people all agreed with the Pope. The Pope will die and so will everyone else with our old-fashioned notions. We may wind up like the Borg. What if everyone in the future decides they want that once they have enough information to know that? Who will order that tide to stop?
We are living in a great time of transition, from the Enlightenment, from the scientific revolution. We hadn’t even finished adapting to the Agricultural Revolution that began 10,000 years ago with its subsequent economic competition and war. People who think we are going to find stability in these transitions with the next election cycle, regardless of the results, are living a fantasy. But so many are living a fantasy, as though their opinions matter in the long run, as though they can control the tide.
Our opinions do matter some for the present. I have opinions about what’s best just like anyone else, but I know how small my opinions are compared to cultural evolution.
For me the most tragic opinions are the ones that pretend to know God when I’m sure they don’t. Everyone alive today will die, except God. All He has to do is wait. When our ways fail, He still will be available. I’ve talked to God a lot about this. I understand if no one cares about what God has said to me in response. No one voted me Pope. But is it so hard to imagine the possibility of being wrong about what God wants from people?
The Christian vision of the afterlife includes a judgment where we will be confronted with everything we’ve done wrong. So many people claim to be Christians, but don’t seem concerned over how badly that may go, because of how hateful or indifferent they have been or how false. They think they have a get-out-of-jail-free card, even to get out of hideous torture for eternity, in case God’s vengeance for all this suffering we cause really is that strong. Their clergy have taught them this. What if their clergy are wrong?
The older I get the more I realize that this other shoe I’ve been waiting to see drop since the sixties and seventies, to fulfill the promises of those times, to complete a transition that is over 10,000 years old is huge. It’s bigger than politics. It’s bigger than religion. It’s both cultural and spiritual evolution that few people try to understand, instead being satisfied with slogans. I don’t expect it to fall in my remaining lifetime, but it will fall and nothing of the pettiness in either politics or religion will make any difference.
This is what God tells me. I believe Him.
Yet as my children grew up, it was remarkable how some things hadn’t changed further. At one point my daughters’ favorite group was the Beatles, even Simon and Garfunkel. Wait a minute. Those guys are older than I am. I started hearing “cool” from my children, another fashion that preceded me. There’s this stability for what was trendy when I was young, not all of it, but I guess the best of it. It’s fine with me that “groovy” was left in the past for the most part. Of course there are some new variations in music, but it’s all like blues or rock and roll. There hasn’t been another revolution. Weren’t we going to have continuous revolution?
I guess not. It’s seems to be more like an earthquake or volcano erupting. Some tension builds up. It finally breaks through. Then it takes some time to adjust to that and move ahead again. How much time? I look at that list I wrote in the first paragraph, and maybe there won’t be much movement in such things for another 30 years.
Many people speak of how tolerant the newest generation is of homosexuality. Maybe in thirty years that will have translated into some change. Then again maybe not. It took almost 100 years for the Civil War amendments to the Constitution to be enforced. Things do take time.
I know there are a lot of people who want to force change, by publicity, by trying to craft persuasive arguments, even by more aggressive actions. Do you notice how such force generates reactions? I look at a political season like this one, and all I see are two sides each saying their way is right, whether change or don’t change. I would bet they’re both wrong. I bet the final solution our society or the world comes to is different from either side’s vision. I’m sure someday there will be a stability to gender roles that accounts for both biology and our new abilities to be free from biology. I don’t think it will involve women covering up as Muslims want. I don’t think it will be an utterly unisex society. I don’t know where gender roles will wind up between those extremes, though, and I don’t trust those who say they do. There are a lot of social issues like that. Time will fix them, and we don’t know what a stable solution looks like to push our society quickly in that direction.
The anti-abortion crowd finds many things about the genetic revolution to fight. I’m sure they don’t know the future on this issue. I’m sure they don’t know God’s mind. Still they push hard for what they want, using morally charged language. No matter how much they succeed, it’s a drop in the bucket. It’s sand on a highway. The genetic revolution will proceed worldwide. I suspect it will pass a point that is currently considered unethical, to make genetic enhancements to normal function rather than just cure disease. If that’s our destiny because people find such technology works well, nothing people do today will make any difference, even if people all agreed with the Pope. The Pope will die and so will everyone else with our old-fashioned notions. We may wind up like the Borg. What if everyone in the future decides they want that once they have enough information to know that? Who will order that tide to stop?
We are living in a great time of transition, from the Enlightenment, from the scientific revolution. We hadn’t even finished adapting to the Agricultural Revolution that began 10,000 years ago with its subsequent economic competition and war. People who think we are going to find stability in these transitions with the next election cycle, regardless of the results, are living a fantasy. But so many are living a fantasy, as though their opinions matter in the long run, as though they can control the tide.
Our opinions do matter some for the present. I have opinions about what’s best just like anyone else, but I know how small my opinions are compared to cultural evolution.
For me the most tragic opinions are the ones that pretend to know God when I’m sure they don’t. Everyone alive today will die, except God. All He has to do is wait. When our ways fail, He still will be available. I’ve talked to God a lot about this. I understand if no one cares about what God has said to me in response. No one voted me Pope. But is it so hard to imagine the possibility of being wrong about what God wants from people?
The Christian vision of the afterlife includes a judgment where we will be confronted with everything we’ve done wrong. So many people claim to be Christians, but don’t seem concerned over how badly that may go, because of how hateful or indifferent they have been or how false. They think they have a get-out-of-jail-free card, even to get out of hideous torture for eternity, in case God’s vengeance for all this suffering we cause really is that strong. Their clergy have taught them this. What if their clergy are wrong?
The older I get the more I realize that this other shoe I’ve been waiting to see drop since the sixties and seventies, to fulfill the promises of those times, to complete a transition that is over 10,000 years old is huge. It’s bigger than politics. It’s bigger than religion. It’s both cultural and spiritual evolution that few people try to understand, instead being satisfied with slogans. I don’t expect it to fall in my remaining lifetime, but it will fall and nothing of the pettiness in either politics or religion will make any difference.
This is what God tells me. I believe Him.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
The God of war
I came across a report of Seymour Hersch speaking at McGill University about US forces causing civilian casualties in Iraq: http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=5450
At times in 2003 I wondered about how many civilians were being killed. We kept trying to kill Iraqi leaders with "surgical" attacks, but killed many civilians in the process without killing the leaders. I wondered if we would continue with such attacks anyway. We did for a time. I have heard an ex-CIA employee say we don't care about who gets in the way of an assassination. That would make us even more ruthless than the Mafia.
Then as we entered Baghdad, there was footage of how our troops fired on any vehicle moving toward them, causing many civilian casualties. The issue has continued in the form of arguing over estimates of total civilian casualties in Iraq and how many are caused by US troops. I haven't heard politicians say our tactics cause excessive casualties as Hersch argues. I don't suppose there are many votes in making that accusation.
In looking at blogs that mentioned Hersch's remarks, I found http://www.redstate.com The response there was to call Hersch names and wonder which level of hell is his. One comment said that only 1/3 of Iraqi deaths are from US troops. So why not 1/10? I didn't find one word that it was even possible that Hersch was at all right in saying some civilians were killed when they didn't have to be. I suppose the only people who deserve to live are US troops and Republicans, right?
It especially interests me how those who are proud of the war in Iraq think God is right there with them. Why of course Seymour Hersch should be in hell as a traitor. If he opposes the war, he must oppose God.
I don't know that God. The God I know tells me He never has favored a war. Many wars are in self-defense, such as World War II. God tells me He has not tried to prevent such a war or even tell people that war should be a last resort. He just never has started a war, even those the Old Testament claims were following God's orders.
Those who believe God started those wars might think God still starts wars, no matter who gets hurt. It's a logical inference. I can't condemn thinking that. I just think it's wrong. It's not the God I know. Human beings are the gods of war, not the God who is love. It's not a simple issue. God knows that. But those who are sure God is with them in their war don't know that. There are plenty of clues to teach them otherwise. Any kind of people dying for no good reason is a clue.
At times in 2003 I wondered about how many civilians were being killed. We kept trying to kill Iraqi leaders with "surgical" attacks, but killed many civilians in the process without killing the leaders. I wondered if we would continue with such attacks anyway. We did for a time. I have heard an ex-CIA employee say we don't care about who gets in the way of an assassination. That would make us even more ruthless than the Mafia.
Then as we entered Baghdad, there was footage of how our troops fired on any vehicle moving toward them, causing many civilian casualties. The issue has continued in the form of arguing over estimates of total civilian casualties in Iraq and how many are caused by US troops. I haven't heard politicians say our tactics cause excessive casualties as Hersch argues. I don't suppose there are many votes in making that accusation.
In looking at blogs that mentioned Hersch's remarks, I found http://www.redstate.com The response there was to call Hersch names and wonder which level of hell is his. One comment said that only 1/3 of Iraqi deaths are from US troops. So why not 1/10? I didn't find one word that it was even possible that Hersch was at all right in saying some civilians were killed when they didn't have to be. I suppose the only people who deserve to live are US troops and Republicans, right?
It especially interests me how those who are proud of the war in Iraq think God is right there with them. Why of course Seymour Hersch should be in hell as a traitor. If he opposes the war, he must oppose God.
I don't know that God. The God I know tells me He never has favored a war. Many wars are in self-defense, such as World War II. God tells me He has not tried to prevent such a war or even tell people that war should be a last resort. He just never has started a war, even those the Old Testament claims were following God's orders.
Those who believe God started those wars might think God still starts wars, no matter who gets hurt. It's a logical inference. I can't condemn thinking that. I just think it's wrong. It's not the God I know. Human beings are the gods of war, not the God who is love. It's not a simple issue. God knows that. But those who are sure God is with them in their war don't know that. There are plenty of clues to teach them otherwise. Any kind of people dying for no good reason is a clue.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The gift that keeps on taking
That’s how Michael J. Fox describes his Parkinson’s Disease. He’s not just making a joke. He sees his disease as a direction that gives meaning to his life, to be an advocate for a cure by giving publicity to the disease no one else ever could. Muhammad Ali got people’s attention, but he didn’t respond to medication enough to talk about it, his Parkinsonian symptoms being from head trauma rather than Parkinson’s disease.
I’ve heard Fox use this line before this year. Then I heard him say it again in a recent interview about this silliness Rush Limbaugh started. This time Mr. Fox could barely get the joke out because he was so symptomatic. He used to tell it better.
As a neurologist it’s been easy for me to recognize Mr. Fox’s states on TV. Once I saw a reporter catch up with him on the way in to speak. Fox was shuffling with a hand tremor typical of Parkinson’s. When speaking he always has the opposite symptoms, the dyskinesias that are side effects of medications that loosen up the Parkinsonian symptoms. It would be typical of patients to take their medications minutes before they need to walk or talk. Apparently that’s what Fox does. For that he’s being attacked?
Several days after saying Fox was putting on an act, Rush Limbaugh said on his show he had received many messages telling him that he had it wrong, that Fox’s symptoms were from too much medicine, not too little. But Limbaugh couldn’t just say he was wrong. Instead he then spoke as if Fox had been manipulating the audience by taking too much medicine. No, Fox does what patients with Parkinson’s have to do to function. They suffer the side effects of medication that allows them to move rather than the Parkinson’s that keeps them rigid.
Some conservative bloggers and commentators are parroting Limbaugh’s recent position. Some are still stuck on Limbaugh’s initial contention that Fox was faking or like Sean Hannity pretending that putting on “an act” is different from “faking”. What power Rush has over Republicans to follow him in ignorance and arrogance.
Then Laura Bush chimes in about manipulating people’s feelings. Strange she wasn’t criticizing her husband’s party for that.
Many politicians are scum when it comes to lying about people. My own observations are that Republicans are worse than Democrats at this, but how can such a thing be quantified? I’m sure it’s a human capacity for arrogance and ignorance, for partisanship and denial that drives this, whoever is the most under that spell. I understand that better than I understand why more people don’t see this. If they did, negative ads would kill a candidate rather than boost a candidate despite some negative backlash as it seems to be now. People either don’t mind the partisanship or they really believe the attacks on others, such as when Republicans imply that voting for Democrats will get you killed or when Democrats suggests all Republicans are scumbags. That’s what I don’t understand. Why is this OK with people? Why do people listen to Rush? Why do they find simplistic and fantastic bombast worth their time?
I was heartened to see a CNN poll that only 26% of Americans approve of Rush. Unfortunately that many on the right and a similar number on the left make a majority that want to see their enemies ridiculed, who values someone’s skill at that over love and knowledge that philosophers say are the ultimate good things in life.
I’m tempted toward the traditional hope that everything evens out in the end. That’s one aspect of traditional Christianity I always liked. But the closer I move toward God, the more I believe that’s not God’s way. There’s no way to make it all fair. Those of us who try to be good despite the burdens that come our way face difficulties in that. There is no magic tote board that awards points for that. Nor is there one for everyone who insists on being bad boys and girls, to be hurtful and liars in the name of some cause or just for their selfishness. Such people will keep disturbing the peace and using up resources for nothing for as long as I live. They just add to how nature does the same thing, such as it does to Michael J. Fox with his Parkinson’s Disease.
There is suffering that nature causes. There is suffering people cause. I would fight both, but either one is bigger than I am. So I turn to God. He tells me they’re all dead already, the virtuous and the scum. The former have a better chance to live on in Him than the latter. It’s not to make it fair. It’s because that’s what God wants. People don’t change that much. Most don’t improve at all on the life given to them. Then they die. To try to do better than that is not an act. God knows this. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t. I’ll take God.
I’ve heard Fox use this line before this year. Then I heard him say it again in a recent interview about this silliness Rush Limbaugh started. This time Mr. Fox could barely get the joke out because he was so symptomatic. He used to tell it better.
As a neurologist it’s been easy for me to recognize Mr. Fox’s states on TV. Once I saw a reporter catch up with him on the way in to speak. Fox was shuffling with a hand tremor typical of Parkinson’s. When speaking he always has the opposite symptoms, the dyskinesias that are side effects of medications that loosen up the Parkinsonian symptoms. It would be typical of patients to take their medications minutes before they need to walk or talk. Apparently that’s what Fox does. For that he’s being attacked?
Several days after saying Fox was putting on an act, Rush Limbaugh said on his show he had received many messages telling him that he had it wrong, that Fox’s symptoms were from too much medicine, not too little. But Limbaugh couldn’t just say he was wrong. Instead he then spoke as if Fox had been manipulating the audience by taking too much medicine. No, Fox does what patients with Parkinson’s have to do to function. They suffer the side effects of medication that allows them to move rather than the Parkinson’s that keeps them rigid.
Some conservative bloggers and commentators are parroting Limbaugh’s recent position. Some are still stuck on Limbaugh’s initial contention that Fox was faking or like Sean Hannity pretending that putting on “an act” is different from “faking”. What power Rush has over Republicans to follow him in ignorance and arrogance.
Then Laura Bush chimes in about manipulating people’s feelings. Strange she wasn’t criticizing her husband’s party for that.
Many politicians are scum when it comes to lying about people. My own observations are that Republicans are worse than Democrats at this, but how can such a thing be quantified? I’m sure it’s a human capacity for arrogance and ignorance, for partisanship and denial that drives this, whoever is the most under that spell. I understand that better than I understand why more people don’t see this. If they did, negative ads would kill a candidate rather than boost a candidate despite some negative backlash as it seems to be now. People either don’t mind the partisanship or they really believe the attacks on others, such as when Republicans imply that voting for Democrats will get you killed or when Democrats suggests all Republicans are scumbags. That’s what I don’t understand. Why is this OK with people? Why do people listen to Rush? Why do they find simplistic and fantastic bombast worth their time?
I was heartened to see a CNN poll that only 26% of Americans approve of Rush. Unfortunately that many on the right and a similar number on the left make a majority that want to see their enemies ridiculed, who values someone’s skill at that over love and knowledge that philosophers say are the ultimate good things in life.
I’m tempted toward the traditional hope that everything evens out in the end. That’s one aspect of traditional Christianity I always liked. But the closer I move toward God, the more I believe that’s not God’s way. There’s no way to make it all fair. Those of us who try to be good despite the burdens that come our way face difficulties in that. There is no magic tote board that awards points for that. Nor is there one for everyone who insists on being bad boys and girls, to be hurtful and liars in the name of some cause or just for their selfishness. Such people will keep disturbing the peace and using up resources for nothing for as long as I live. They just add to how nature does the same thing, such as it does to Michael J. Fox with his Parkinson’s Disease.
There is suffering that nature causes. There is suffering people cause. I would fight both, but either one is bigger than I am. So I turn to God. He tells me they’re all dead already, the virtuous and the scum. The former have a better chance to live on in Him than the latter. It’s not to make it fair. It’s because that’s what God wants. People don’t change that much. Most don’t improve at all on the life given to them. Then they die. To try to do better than that is not an act. God knows this. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t. I’ll take God.
Friday, October 27, 2006
When is crow on the menu?
I’ve been reading a lot of political blogs lately. So many words written in such places are silly, but I like the numbers. I guess it’s like how some men read the articles in Playboy and some just look at the pictures. I just look at the pictures. I just look at numbers. I know I’m not the only man like that.
So lately the numbers for Democrats in Congress have been the best they’ve been since the last of boll-weevil Democrats became Republicans. An average prediction has Democrats picking up 20 seats in the House of Representatives, up to 40 if a wave of change hits on Election Day. There’s about a 50:50 chance of Democrats taking over the Senate. Of course some Republicans scoff and say the Republican get out the vote effort will have them beating the polls again.
Still it’s interesting to me. I ask myself why. A couple of blogs this week pointed me to a USA Today poll done last weekend regarding how voters saw Democratic issues. The poll listed 11 steps Democrats might take if elected. One thing that struck me about the items on this list is that not one of them affects me personally. Some affect my clients a little, especially if Democrats could manage to pass universal health care. Increasing the minimum wage would help my clients a little, but only some of them. It wouldn’t do anything for my clients on disability or who are unemployed. It wouldn’t do much for the most painful problem my clients have, which is their anxiety about what they should do to get out of their neediness. Maybe if Congress could double their income, some of them could calm down, but a small change is still going to leave almost all of my clients on the wrong side of having discretionary income.
There never will be doubt how I’ll vote. I’ll never be a swing voter. In fact I already mailed my votes in for this election. In talking about that, I could pretend that it is critically important who wins the election like everyone does on their blogs, but I don’t think it matters much. So what do the numbers mean to me?
They mean that I’d like to see Republicans humbled. They take their governing for granted, however that happened. They shouldn’t. At the same time I know that, though, I also know that conservative Republicans have had this condescending attitude ever since I first remember seeing one in 1964. My Dad thought Ronald Reagan was wonderful that year as he spoke for Barry Goldwater, so noble in such a lost cause. I naturally paid attention. So did others, most of whom were old enough to vote, which made Reagan governor of California in 1966.
I know conservatives had a history before then. They wanted Taft in the fifties instead of Eisenhower. Men like William F. Buckley were around then. I don’t know anyone who dropped out of the limelight before 1964, but it certainly impressed me how much conservatives were alike after that, all egotistical about their intellect, even though they believed in simplistic ideas like everything being the best if people are given the greatest freedom, except for sexuality. Yes a well-regulated free market is a good thing, but isn’t it interesting how one needs both freedom and regulation to manage that? Such a balancing act is too complicated for these Einsteins. Fantasy makes for simpler and better slogans.
Even at their politically weakest, conservatives were insufferable. At least they were polite about it then. With power the conservative attitude has gotten so much worse. So I root for them to lose power even beyond my partisanship, though not with the life or death grip that some attach to each election.
Only if I think about it, no one’s going to be humbled by this election. Politics never ends. Whatever the outcome, both sides will try to spin the results into some sort of victory for them, setting the stage for an even greater victory in 2008. Both sides will claim that is their future. Only neither future comes. The battle just continues, 2010, 2012, 2014, …
Republicans have had most of the power since 1980. What is the result? Government spending is worse than ever. The Cold War ended, but other protracted international conflicts evolve. They haven’t overturned Roe v. Wade yet. Maybe they will soon. Of course that won’t change things in my state, California. Ah, it’s a reason to continue to ask for campaign contributions.
I’ve looked through the Republican agenda before. As with the Democrats, if the whole thing came to pass it wouldn’t change my life. It would change lives I know, but not mine. Yet both sides engage in rhetoric that choosing them is vital.
I have a feeling that this attitude will just go on. Maybe it will take economic or ecological catastrophe to change it. So I’ve started to prepare myself to be disappointed no matter what the result of the elections. No one will be humbled. No one will eat crow.
I wonder if crow is on the menu in the afterlife.
So lately the numbers for Democrats in Congress have been the best they’ve been since the last of boll-weevil Democrats became Republicans. An average prediction has Democrats picking up 20 seats in the House of Representatives, up to 40 if a wave of change hits on Election Day. There’s about a 50:50 chance of Democrats taking over the Senate. Of course some Republicans scoff and say the Republican get out the vote effort will have them beating the polls again.
Still it’s interesting to me. I ask myself why. A couple of blogs this week pointed me to a USA Today poll done last weekend regarding how voters saw Democratic issues. The poll listed 11 steps Democrats might take if elected. One thing that struck me about the items on this list is that not one of them affects me personally. Some affect my clients a little, especially if Democrats could manage to pass universal health care. Increasing the minimum wage would help my clients a little, but only some of them. It wouldn’t do anything for my clients on disability or who are unemployed. It wouldn’t do much for the most painful problem my clients have, which is their anxiety about what they should do to get out of their neediness. Maybe if Congress could double their income, some of them could calm down, but a small change is still going to leave almost all of my clients on the wrong side of having discretionary income.
There never will be doubt how I’ll vote. I’ll never be a swing voter. In fact I already mailed my votes in for this election. In talking about that, I could pretend that it is critically important who wins the election like everyone does on their blogs, but I don’t think it matters much. So what do the numbers mean to me?
They mean that I’d like to see Republicans humbled. They take their governing for granted, however that happened. They shouldn’t. At the same time I know that, though, I also know that conservative Republicans have had this condescending attitude ever since I first remember seeing one in 1964. My Dad thought Ronald Reagan was wonderful that year as he spoke for Barry Goldwater, so noble in such a lost cause. I naturally paid attention. So did others, most of whom were old enough to vote, which made Reagan governor of California in 1966.
I know conservatives had a history before then. They wanted Taft in the fifties instead of Eisenhower. Men like William F. Buckley were around then. I don’t know anyone who dropped out of the limelight before 1964, but it certainly impressed me how much conservatives were alike after that, all egotistical about their intellect, even though they believed in simplistic ideas like everything being the best if people are given the greatest freedom, except for sexuality. Yes a well-regulated free market is a good thing, but isn’t it interesting how one needs both freedom and regulation to manage that? Such a balancing act is too complicated for these Einsteins. Fantasy makes for simpler and better slogans.
Even at their politically weakest, conservatives were insufferable. At least they were polite about it then. With power the conservative attitude has gotten so much worse. So I root for them to lose power even beyond my partisanship, though not with the life or death grip that some attach to each election.
Only if I think about it, no one’s going to be humbled by this election. Politics never ends. Whatever the outcome, both sides will try to spin the results into some sort of victory for them, setting the stage for an even greater victory in 2008. Both sides will claim that is their future. Only neither future comes. The battle just continues, 2010, 2012, 2014, …
Republicans have had most of the power since 1980. What is the result? Government spending is worse than ever. The Cold War ended, but other protracted international conflicts evolve. They haven’t overturned Roe v. Wade yet. Maybe they will soon. Of course that won’t change things in my state, California. Ah, it’s a reason to continue to ask for campaign contributions.
I’ve looked through the Republican agenda before. As with the Democrats, if the whole thing came to pass it wouldn’t change my life. It would change lives I know, but not mine. Yet both sides engage in rhetoric that choosing them is vital.
I have a feeling that this attitude will just go on. Maybe it will take economic or ecological catastrophe to change it. So I’ve started to prepare myself to be disappointed no matter what the result of the elections. No one will be humbled. No one will eat crow.
I wonder if crow is on the menu in the afterlife.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
God overrides my budget, but just for $12
I had a long morning with clients yesterday. I was tired. I’ve been trying to get back in the habit of walking over the noon hour, but often I’ve been too tired or hungry to do that. Sometimes God has wanted to talk to me in a way that requires more intimacy than if we talk as I walk. So I haven’t re-established my ideal routine yet, maybe in November.
I’ve also felt guilty because I haven’t gotten around to getting the smog check on my car, due by the end of the month so I can register it. If I were perfect, I would have done that by now. So should I do that after work yesterday or give in to feeling tired? Something familiar said, “Let’s go,” with my mind picturing the gas station where I had the smog check done two years ago. OK. Then the competency came welling up in me to ask when the master of my car’s fate could fit me in. Hey, not a bad answer, he could do mine after he does the one he’s about to start. $51, eh? Why, I remember when it was $12.
So, where to eat in the meantime? God said if we were going to splurge on the car, why not spend a few extra bucks on the salad bar? I needed the veggies. OK.
I think about how to describe for someone else how this is God doing this, helping me, as has been God’s place in my life for 17 years. There is a presence. There is a voice. It is more than just words, but also a change in my cognition to include God and several aspects of what He’s trying to tell me. Both my body and my mind respond with sudden energy and confidence. What’s the problem with calling this God? Is it that someone thinks I don’t deserve God’s attention if he or she doesn’t get the same attention from God? If I could imagine such a thing, I would do so all the time. I can’t. It’s something beyond me, something with which I cooperate, but can’t control.
My nature is perfectionism. I guess I was taught that at home, in school and in the workplace. It’s a trap many get into naturally because it works. There are bound to be benefits if I’m perfect, so it’s natural to become dependent on that. It’s a hard master. God has always been someone who breaks me out of that. If I had been perfect with this smog check, I could have paid less. I know there was one ad for $29.95. Maybe there was another for less. God helps me not care so much about that, so I can just get it done. Besides over lunch I realized that with the cost of the certificate for the DMV and a couple of other charges hidden from ad prices, but included in the $51, I was only spending $8 more getting it done at this more convenient place. That and $4 more for something healthier than a fast food lunch, wasn’t it worth it? Yes, Lord, it was, You’re right again. I’ve lost track of how many times in a row that is for Him. It’s a lot.
People can say this God is just a better part of me. They may even be right, but God tells me they’re not right. We do many other things to help each other. This is just something unusually concrete and one where I understand my need for God well. I want to be perfect. When I’m sane spending $12 more to just get done what I need to do makes sense, but that’s not where my nature takes me. On my own I drift into traps like perfectionism. God frees me from them. Sometimes in the last 17 years I’ve said, “What took You so long?” and He’s asked why I didn’t ask sooner, but we’ve gotten steadily better at this.
Yet either an atheist or a traditionalist might wave a hand and say it’s ridiculous to call that God. No, it’s not. God says so, too. People don’t like it. They want God to be who they say He is or isn’t. Why should they be right? God is whoever and whatever God is, not who anyone says He is. Everyday something happens that proves that to me. Some things are easier to describe than others.
I’ve also felt guilty because I haven’t gotten around to getting the smog check on my car, due by the end of the month so I can register it. If I were perfect, I would have done that by now. So should I do that after work yesterday or give in to feeling tired? Something familiar said, “Let’s go,” with my mind picturing the gas station where I had the smog check done two years ago. OK. Then the competency came welling up in me to ask when the master of my car’s fate could fit me in. Hey, not a bad answer, he could do mine after he does the one he’s about to start. $51, eh? Why, I remember when it was $12.
So, where to eat in the meantime? God said if we were going to splurge on the car, why not spend a few extra bucks on the salad bar? I needed the veggies. OK.
I think about how to describe for someone else how this is God doing this, helping me, as has been God’s place in my life for 17 years. There is a presence. There is a voice. It is more than just words, but also a change in my cognition to include God and several aspects of what He’s trying to tell me. Both my body and my mind respond with sudden energy and confidence. What’s the problem with calling this God? Is it that someone thinks I don’t deserve God’s attention if he or she doesn’t get the same attention from God? If I could imagine such a thing, I would do so all the time. I can’t. It’s something beyond me, something with which I cooperate, but can’t control.
My nature is perfectionism. I guess I was taught that at home, in school and in the workplace. It’s a trap many get into naturally because it works. There are bound to be benefits if I’m perfect, so it’s natural to become dependent on that. It’s a hard master. God has always been someone who breaks me out of that. If I had been perfect with this smog check, I could have paid less. I know there was one ad for $29.95. Maybe there was another for less. God helps me not care so much about that, so I can just get it done. Besides over lunch I realized that with the cost of the certificate for the DMV and a couple of other charges hidden from ad prices, but included in the $51, I was only spending $8 more getting it done at this more convenient place. That and $4 more for something healthier than a fast food lunch, wasn’t it worth it? Yes, Lord, it was, You’re right again. I’ve lost track of how many times in a row that is for Him. It’s a lot.
People can say this God is just a better part of me. They may even be right, but God tells me they’re not right. We do many other things to help each other. This is just something unusually concrete and one where I understand my need for God well. I want to be perfect. When I’m sane spending $12 more to just get done what I need to do makes sense, but that’s not where my nature takes me. On my own I drift into traps like perfectionism. God frees me from them. Sometimes in the last 17 years I’ve said, “What took You so long?” and He’s asked why I didn’t ask sooner, but we’ve gotten steadily better at this.
Yet either an atheist or a traditionalist might wave a hand and say it’s ridiculous to call that God. No, it’s not. God says so, too. People don’t like it. They want God to be who they say He is or isn’t. Why should they be right? God is whoever and whatever God is, not who anyone says He is. Everyday something happens that proves that to me. Some things are easier to describe than others.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Troublemakers always defend themselves
For over a month the blogosphere has been disturbed by criticism of how the young woman is standing in front of Bill Clinton in the above picture. Have you felt it? I didn't. Then I came across a parody of this substituting George Bush and some young men. I didn't get it. Then I followed the links and oh, now I get it. Still the original story is much more interesting. A Wisconsin law professor, Ann Althouse, saw the above picture. She first decided the choice of who decided to stand where must not have been random, and then went on to speculate about exactly what was wrong with those involved to produce this picture. Where would a real feminist stand, if one even would be in the same room as Mr. Clinton? A summary appeared recently in The Huffington Post.
One commentator concluded that Bill Clinton's pink face must be a sign of sexual arousal related to the young woman in question. I can think of other possible explanations. This comes up so often on the internet, so often in political and religious propaganda anywhere that whatever possibility the speaker thinks of must be true. No, there are many possibilities to be considered if one is to make sense of anything.
Also familiar was that Ann Althouse took no heed of those who commented on her blog to warn her that she was making a fool of herself. I didn't read through that many comments like this, but the ones I saw were expertly turned aside by Althouse. She attacked the person making the comment. She attacked the substance of the comment. I'm sure she is well trained to do that. Unfortunately that's not the same sort of training that insures that someone can look at a picture such as the one above and give a good answer to, "Is anything wrong here?" Only troublemakers would answer "Yes" in this case.
I used to feel discouraged that I didn't have the right words to defeat people who said silly things on the internet about science being wrong, mostly regarding evolution but on other issues as well. Then I came to realize that it didn't matter what words I used. Just disagreeing with people triggers personal attacks against me and my reasoning ability. No matter how much substance there is to something I say, someone who doesn't like it will deny it. If I throw in a lot of substantive comments, those in denial will just pick out whichever one they can deny the best. Troublemakers are often skilled at making themselves sound reasonable, be they fundamentalists attacking science, atheists attacking God, or political partisans attacking everything their opponents stand for. Ann Althouse is my latest example of someone who defends herself in this very well, yet is dead wrong in doing so.
Look at the picture again. Then read Althouse's attacks. Apart from a few fellow travelers, it's easy to see that Althouse has made a fool of herself. If her beliefs lead her to say this picture is an outrage, then her beliefs are worthless. They led her astray. Of course maybe her words are all a way to indirectly express some anger. Fine. Let her apologize and give an improved understanding of where her words came from. I won't hold my breath for anything so insightful. Such insight is so rare.
In the meantime this is what public discourse is like. So many people are so angry about so many things, and defend everything they say about that, no matter how silly, especially if there's any kind of group to support them in their attacks on certain people or aspects of society. I'm glad that reality goes on despite how people speak about it. I'm convinced that God is more in the reality of life than in any words. Maybe someday it will be common knowledge that the people and things that troublemakers attack are rarely the complete story of what's wrong.
What's wrong with that picture? Nothing, the disturbance was really all about something else.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Defacing reality
Among the newspaper racks outside my local drug store is one for Signs of the Times, a monthly Seventh Day Adventist publication. Last year the July issue caught my eye with large letters “ASSURED” and the picture of a woman in her thirties who simultaneously looked like someone very assured and a grown up version of a girl I knew in elementary school. That was sufficient to hook me into reading their version of why it’s a good thing to have the assurance of being Christian.
I picked it up again recently. The cover really does look like my childhood friend. My actual friend is probably much older than this model by now, but I was curious and the inside cover lists a credit for the picture, so I wondered what I could find about this on the internet. That was easy. The picture is right here: http://creative.gettyimages.com (The site won't let me link to the image directly, but its number is 200164133-001)
The picture was altered for the cover. It was cropped horizontally at the level of the left cuff of her sweater, which I suppose makes her look even more assured, as it emphasizes her face more. I notice that it also hides that she’s wearing blue jeans, though. More clearly deliberate is that her earring is gone on the cover. Hey, if you don’t like reality, just change it.
I had wondered when I first picked up this magazine if the model on the cover was a Seventh Day Adventist. Did they just get someone who worked in the office to strike an assured pose? No, they didn’t. There is a series of pictures with this model at Getty Images. Some are wholesome and maternal. Some aren’t, even beyond just an earring. I’m pretty sure she’s not Seventh Day Adventist. She’s also not my childhood friend, since the resemblance disappears with other poses, and the date of the pictures is 2001. My friend was definitely older then. So my questions were answered.
Then there was this additional information. They took away her earring? Oh what liars. He I thought this woman was a paragon of virtue, as my friend was, and it turns out she’s a whore. Isn’t that what they’re saying an earring means?
I’m sure I would lie a little in service of a greater truth. I’m also glad I had the opportunity to find all the pictures from this series. There are some interesting themes there. I wouldn’t have had that if the cover had to have been of a woman who in fact wasn’t wearing an earring. Maybe they would have just gotten someone from their church then instead of a professional. It’s a little thing.
Yet for me it’s so symbolic for a big thing. Human beings hate reality. They love spin. They love deception to make something look more like they want it to be. It’s not just religion, but politics, entertainment, anything where perception can substitute for reality. Give me reality any day, the earring, the blue jeans, even things much worse. I think someday people will learn to face reality better, not by throwing away God, but by coming to understand who God really is. She tells me She likes wearing tasteful earrings and blue jeans, sometimes.
I picked it up again recently. The cover really does look like my childhood friend. My actual friend is probably much older than this model by now, but I was curious and the inside cover lists a credit for the picture, so I wondered what I could find about this on the internet. That was easy. The picture is right here: http://creative.gettyimages.com (The site won't let me link to the image directly, but its number is 200164133-001)
The picture was altered for the cover. It was cropped horizontally at the level of the left cuff of her sweater, which I suppose makes her look even more assured, as it emphasizes her face more. I notice that it also hides that she’s wearing blue jeans, though. More clearly deliberate is that her earring is gone on the cover. Hey, if you don’t like reality, just change it.
I had wondered when I first picked up this magazine if the model on the cover was a Seventh Day Adventist. Did they just get someone who worked in the office to strike an assured pose? No, they didn’t. There is a series of pictures with this model at Getty Images. Some are wholesome and maternal. Some aren’t, even beyond just an earring. I’m pretty sure she’s not Seventh Day Adventist. She’s also not my childhood friend, since the resemblance disappears with other poses, and the date of the pictures is 2001. My friend was definitely older then. So my questions were answered.
Then there was this additional information. They took away her earring? Oh what liars. He I thought this woman was a paragon of virtue, as my friend was, and it turns out she’s a whore. Isn’t that what they’re saying an earring means?
I’m sure I would lie a little in service of a greater truth. I’m also glad I had the opportunity to find all the pictures from this series. There are some interesting themes there. I wouldn’t have had that if the cover had to have been of a woman who in fact wasn’t wearing an earring. Maybe they would have just gotten someone from their church then instead of a professional. It’s a little thing.
Yet for me it’s so symbolic for a big thing. Human beings hate reality. They love spin. They love deception to make something look more like they want it to be. It’s not just religion, but politics, entertainment, anything where perception can substitute for reality. Give me reality any day, the earring, the blue jeans, even things much worse. I think someday people will learn to face reality better, not by throwing away God, but by coming to understand who God really is. She tells me She likes wearing tasteful earrings and blue jeans, sometimes.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Partisan science
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) gave a long speech recently on the Senate floor to support his claim that global warming is a hoax. He had a little data, but mostly he presented one-sided arguments why he’s right and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong, mostly attacking media and Al Gore rather than getting to the data of any specific point the way a scientist would. Scientists say recent global warming has been measured. Inhofe says so was warming 1000 years ago. Yes, but the current warming is more, and the reasons for the warming then don’t seem to be the cause now. Inhofe doesn’t mention any of that. He always stops when he’s ahead. Fitting that pattern he also doesn’t mention how one can be sure that increased carbon dioxide levels lately are from burning fossils fuels, due to a lack of carbon 13 that would be present in volcanic gases or other natural sources. Good scientists look at all the data. Partisans don’t.
Then partisans accuse scientists of being selective if they try to narrow their data to what’s reliable. Inhofe attacked Naomi Oreskes of UC San Diego for publishing her study of 928 papers on global warming in Science in 2004. Oreskes found none of these rejected the idea that there is currently global warming due to human activity. Claims that there are indeed papers that reject this point to editorials and trade publications, not research articles, but OK, so it’s an overwhelming consensus, not a unanimous one. Does Inhofe address this? No, he just takes his shot at Oreskes and runs away.
It takes very little effort to do a search on any of Inhofe’s claims and see that reality is very different from what Inhofe claims. I always wonder about such a speech, whether the content is bad science, bad history, bad foreign policy, or bad theology. Is this just partisanship, or is it outright lying? I’m sure some people that just repeat the arguments of other don’t know anything of how distorted such arguments are. They don’t know the primary sources. So some blogs applauded Inhofe, saying how devastating this will be to their opponents. Not if it’s a pack of lies, guys.
Scientific illiteracy in the US is striking. Many people don’t think about the difference between good data and useless data. Many don’t understand the difference between data and argument, the former being a fact, the latter possibly being complete fantasy. Yet what strikes me more is that this is not mostly about science. It’s mostly about partisanship. People sound about the same saying their theology is right as Inhofe was here. I’m tempted to say that’s a difference between Republicans and Democrats, but I’m sure it’s not. Republicans are currently more successful at this, but I’m sure Democrats can be partisan, too. Maybe Republicans are telling bigger lies, the kind that supposedly makes for better propaganda. Maybe they’re more incisive and disciplined about it, maybe more confident.
One thing I’m sure of is that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. In addition, science will continue. Just as this is a pretty crazy time to be opposing evolution with so much more data from molecular genetics on the way, it’s pretty crazy to be calling global warming a hoax when there is already data showing warming and increased carbon dioxide from human activity. How much that will matter is uncertain, but it’s certainly not a hoax.
The real story will take more than one or two election cycles to play out, as the real story about aging baby boomers and the national debt will as well. Republicans don’t care how harshly history will treat them beyond that. Neither would Democrats. Political animals adapt to changing conditions even faster than biology does, so maybe a Republican President in 30 years will be repudiating the prejudices of current Republicans, appealing to a new generation of voters who don’t feel lied to by current lies. I’m pretty sure the future I would choose where everyone rejects partisanship is not where we’re going.
Then partisans accuse scientists of being selective if they try to narrow their data to what’s reliable. Inhofe attacked Naomi Oreskes of UC San Diego for publishing her study of 928 papers on global warming in Science in 2004. Oreskes found none of these rejected the idea that there is currently global warming due to human activity. Claims that there are indeed papers that reject this point to editorials and trade publications, not research articles, but OK, so it’s an overwhelming consensus, not a unanimous one. Does Inhofe address this? No, he just takes his shot at Oreskes and runs away.
It takes very little effort to do a search on any of Inhofe’s claims and see that reality is very different from what Inhofe claims. I always wonder about such a speech, whether the content is bad science, bad history, bad foreign policy, or bad theology. Is this just partisanship, or is it outright lying? I’m sure some people that just repeat the arguments of other don’t know anything of how distorted such arguments are. They don’t know the primary sources. So some blogs applauded Inhofe, saying how devastating this will be to their opponents. Not if it’s a pack of lies, guys.
Scientific illiteracy in the US is striking. Many people don’t think about the difference between good data and useless data. Many don’t understand the difference between data and argument, the former being a fact, the latter possibly being complete fantasy. Yet what strikes me more is that this is not mostly about science. It’s mostly about partisanship. People sound about the same saying their theology is right as Inhofe was here. I’m tempted to say that’s a difference between Republicans and Democrats, but I’m sure it’s not. Republicans are currently more successful at this, but I’m sure Democrats can be partisan, too. Maybe Republicans are telling bigger lies, the kind that supposedly makes for better propaganda. Maybe they’re more incisive and disciplined about it, maybe more confident.
One thing I’m sure of is that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. In addition, science will continue. Just as this is a pretty crazy time to be opposing evolution with so much more data from molecular genetics on the way, it’s pretty crazy to be calling global warming a hoax when there is already data showing warming and increased carbon dioxide from human activity. How much that will matter is uncertain, but it’s certainly not a hoax.
The real story will take more than one or two election cycles to play out, as the real story about aging baby boomers and the national debt will as well. Republicans don’t care how harshly history will treat them beyond that. Neither would Democrats. Political animals adapt to changing conditions even faster than biology does, so maybe a Republican President in 30 years will be repudiating the prejudices of current Republicans, appealing to a new generation of voters who don’t feel lied to by current lies. I’m pretty sure the future I would choose where everyone rejects partisanship is not where we’re going.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Backwards chest x-rays and other things I know are wrong
There is something on TV that regularly reminds me that it's fake. Look, guys, people's hearts are on the lower left. Is that so hard to remember? I suppose the problem is that TV people don't know the outline of a heart on a chest x-ray. Otherwise maybe they would stop putting up chest x-rays backwards on view screens. Occasionally they'll even put one up upside down, but apparently enough people can recognize that as wrong that it doesn't happen often.
Getting it backwards happens often. From casual observation, I'd even bet that TV people get it backwards more often than they get it right somehow. It seems that way. Even on my favorite Law & Order episodes where the pathologist is revealing some juicy, hypertechnical finding that is crucial to the case, there's a backwards chest x-ray in the background. Suddenly I'm brought back to reality that this is just an actress mouthing words from a script. What fun is that?
Of course I've always thought shows like Law & Order must drive some attorneys crazy in a similar way over all the improper questions and other poor procedure used in the courtroom scenes. Reality is not only boring, it's lengthy, too. While televised trials have shown there's some audience for reality, is that only because the news anchors on channels showing TV trials are so opinionated? Would unadulterated reality ever make it on TV?
I don't think about that last question much. TV will be whatever TV people make it. Instead I think about just how much of our society is obviously fake. The fakes are not obvious to everyone. Rarely are they as objective as a backwards chest x-ray, yet fake ideas, fake history, and fake science are all daily experiences unless I keep very much to myself.
So I came to something I said last time. I never have found a role model about whom I would say, "This person has it exactly right." There's no one like that in politics or religion, no one regarding how to live life or have interpersonal relationships. Even scientists become fake when they talk beyond their expertise. Reality and experience are the teachers. Science confirmed that for me in many ways. Yet I am not atheist or agnostic. I know God. If no one else believes that, I still know God. God has never put up a chest x-ray backwards or anything like that to make me question that He is God. But He has told me things that say He is not the God traditionalists believe in. He does not have unlimited power. He does not have unlimited knowledge. As a matter of fact, He has no database at all to feed me any fact I don't already know. He's never told me there's some bag of money hidden in some bushes for me. What He does do is take my concerns and order them in ways that amaze me, giving me a clear direction in some area where I felt confused on my own. He's answered my prayers in other ways, taking away some negative emotions, reinforcing others, giving me strength and comfort as I need it, often without my asking.
That is the God I came to know after that road-to-Damascus experience 17 years ago. I look at our culture, and almost everyone is talking about some other God, both theists and atheists, getting so many parts of what I know backwards. I try to do the same thing as when I see a backwards chest x-ray on TV, just shrug and realize that I'm listening to fantasy. But so much of our culture is backwards. Many of my fellow liberals like the idea that all religions are true. Yet I find greater truth in saying all religions are false in some way or all dogma is false, as I wrote recently.
Most of life is not as objectively wrong as a backwards chest x-ray, but it is just as backwards. People tend to say their enemies are wrong, but not them, oh no. People like to think they know what they're doing. It doesn't look that way. It looks like life is bigger than almost everyone.
Maybe nature will help us out through cultural evolution being driven by our nature, working on our institutions that have been building since the agriculture revolution. Hopefully when we finish adpting to that and to the scientific revolution, we'll be smarter, humbler and kinder, because the alternatives are so deadly. Maybe God will help with this. Maybe He'd rather see what happens naturally, for the most part. No matter how ugly the present looks to me, I can find hope.
But I can also find ugly and mistakes. I can decide what to do besides yell at the TV that the chest x-ray is backwards. It's not much. God confirms that for me, that there's not much I can do. I can live my life with Him and see how much better that is than without Him, but to tell that to anyone raises such impossible questions, from those who say there is no God to those who are certain they already know Him.
The heart is on the lower left. It's too bad all of life doesn't come with such clear directions. At the same time, I'm forever reminded at how badly people do with even those simple directions.
Getting it backwards happens often. From casual observation, I'd even bet that TV people get it backwards more often than they get it right somehow. It seems that way. Even on my favorite Law & Order episodes where the pathologist is revealing some juicy, hypertechnical finding that is crucial to the case, there's a backwards chest x-ray in the background. Suddenly I'm brought back to reality that this is just an actress mouthing words from a script. What fun is that?
Of course I've always thought shows like Law & Order must drive some attorneys crazy in a similar way over all the improper questions and other poor procedure used in the courtroom scenes. Reality is not only boring, it's lengthy, too. While televised trials have shown there's some audience for reality, is that only because the news anchors on channels showing TV trials are so opinionated? Would unadulterated reality ever make it on TV?
I don't think about that last question much. TV will be whatever TV people make it. Instead I think about just how much of our society is obviously fake. The fakes are not obvious to everyone. Rarely are they as objective as a backwards chest x-ray, yet fake ideas, fake history, and fake science are all daily experiences unless I keep very much to myself.
So I came to something I said last time. I never have found a role model about whom I would say, "This person has it exactly right." There's no one like that in politics or religion, no one regarding how to live life or have interpersonal relationships. Even scientists become fake when they talk beyond their expertise. Reality and experience are the teachers. Science confirmed that for me in many ways. Yet I am not atheist or agnostic. I know God. If no one else believes that, I still know God. God has never put up a chest x-ray backwards or anything like that to make me question that He is God. But He has told me things that say He is not the God traditionalists believe in. He does not have unlimited power. He does not have unlimited knowledge. As a matter of fact, He has no database at all to feed me any fact I don't already know. He's never told me there's some bag of money hidden in some bushes for me. What He does do is take my concerns and order them in ways that amaze me, giving me a clear direction in some area where I felt confused on my own. He's answered my prayers in other ways, taking away some negative emotions, reinforcing others, giving me strength and comfort as I need it, often without my asking.
That is the God I came to know after that road-to-Damascus experience 17 years ago. I look at our culture, and almost everyone is talking about some other God, both theists and atheists, getting so many parts of what I know backwards. I try to do the same thing as when I see a backwards chest x-ray on TV, just shrug and realize that I'm listening to fantasy. But so much of our culture is backwards. Many of my fellow liberals like the idea that all religions are true. Yet I find greater truth in saying all religions are false in some way or all dogma is false, as I wrote recently.
Most of life is not as objectively wrong as a backwards chest x-ray, but it is just as backwards. People tend to say their enemies are wrong, but not them, oh no. People like to think they know what they're doing. It doesn't look that way. It looks like life is bigger than almost everyone.
Maybe nature will help us out through cultural evolution being driven by our nature, working on our institutions that have been building since the agriculture revolution. Hopefully when we finish adpting to that and to the scientific revolution, we'll be smarter, humbler and kinder, because the alternatives are so deadly. Maybe God will help with this. Maybe He'd rather see what happens naturally, for the most part. No matter how ugly the present looks to me, I can find hope.
But I can also find ugly and mistakes. I can decide what to do besides yell at the TV that the chest x-ray is backwards. It's not much. God confirms that for me, that there's not much I can do. I can live my life with Him and see how much better that is than without Him, but to tell that to anyone raises such impossible questions, from those who say there is no God to those who are certain they already know Him.
The heart is on the lower left. It's too bad all of life doesn't come with such clear directions. At the same time, I'm forever reminded at how badly people do with even those simple directions.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
The wisdom of those who disagree with me
Over on slate.com are some interviews Robert Wright did with various wise men a few years ago. I was most interested in the interviews with Huston Smith. It reminded me of watching Joseph Campbell on PBS, understandably as both men are gentle speakers who see value in everyone's beliefs, even those who don't believe. I came closer to believing that at one time, as a good liberal does, than I did Christian fundamentalism, yet looking at it now, what comes to mind is the slew of objections I have to either sort of simplicity.
To a fundamentalist I would point out all the objections some atheists have compiled about the Bible. They say their apologetics is enough to answer those objections, to which I say "nonsense". We can go to any specific objection for the details of that. No one sits down and line by line attacks a book about the perennial philosophy favored by Huston Smith the same way. Huston Smith isn't the same power to be resisted so strongly as fundamentalism. So I am satisfied with an occasional academic saying Huston Smith is wrong, like Steven Katz, but then there are many things about which I think Steven Katz is wrong.
My inability to ever find someone about whom I could say, "This man has it exactly right," has shaped my beliefs, just as Huston Smith says in the interview on faith and reason that he was impressed by the beliefs of other people. I've been impressed by how everyone is wrong in important ways. Huston Smith admits the errors, but says that the rest of religion is unsurpassed in human understanding, for the big picture. Nonsense, the errors make everything else a fantasy.
God is not The Infinite as Huston Smith calls Him. Ask God. He'll tell you, once you've learned to listen. Understanding God is not just a matter of integrating all human experience. Some experience is indeed more illuminating than others, more productive, more likely to lead people to a better life, for themselves and for others. But there is not value in all beliefs. Even as negative examples, there are many more negatives than are required to learn another way.
Yet even though I am convinced that in the big picture, almost every theologian and philosopher is wrong, they can say wise things. In the interview here on faith and reason, Huston Smith speaks wisely about spiritual experiences, how they open someone's eyes as they opened Job's, even though Job is a fictional character. Smith spoke about that well. Other things he said were not so good. Many objections come to mind.
So can I build up a big picture from such wisdom, that I call wisdom because I find no fault with it immediately? I'm glad that's not my only option. Instead I have a relationship with God, if only God and I believe that I do. I can ask God if my eccentricities are because I took a wrong turn or fell through a hidden door. I get an answer. It's hasn't always been what I want to hear, but it has helped me.
I know God is not The Infinite. Huston Smith doesn't. He believes others who say God is The Infinite. Lots of people do. Who is there to tell them otherwise? I would. I would quote God on the subject, but for many that would prove to them that I don't know God because for them God is The Infinite, so they wouldn't listen to me even if I found a way to speak louder than I do. Why should they? They don't listen to God. Of course that's even harder than listening to the words of a human being.
Yet these are wise people. They know some things. Add them all up, and they know a lot of things. They know about surrender. They know about being dependent. They know about selfless love. They know words and concepts. They just don't know God.
Might they know God a little? God says to me that those who only know God intellectually don't know Him at all. He says that those who only know some experience of Him don't know Him at all. He must come to live in a person's mind. Then they will know Him, His imperfections, that He does change. They will know His power is limited, His knowledge is limited, His love is limited, and His goodness is limited, not just because only a little bit of The Infinite can live in the finite, but because God is not The Infinite.
Many very wise people would disagree with that or say that some intermediate stage toward having God live in us is a good thing. No, it's not, too many people settle for some rumor about God rather than coming to God in everything they are. Such wise people are indeed wise. I can hear it in how they talk about some point better than I can. Yet they don't know God. I can hear that as well. Maybe it's just my God they don't know. Only whenever I try to give someone the benefit of doubt that way, God immediately says no, He is the only God, and He is as I understand Him to be.
People can avoid this God, and He will leave them alone, as He leaves alone all animals who lack the capacity to understand Him, but some really should know better, not many, but enough that God is irritated by the subject. Wisdom is a two-edged sword. It can cut through the thorns on the way toward God, but it can cut one off from God as well. God help me.
To a fundamentalist I would point out all the objections some atheists have compiled about the Bible. They say their apologetics is enough to answer those objections, to which I say "nonsense". We can go to any specific objection for the details of that. No one sits down and line by line attacks a book about the perennial philosophy favored by Huston Smith the same way. Huston Smith isn't the same power to be resisted so strongly as fundamentalism. So I am satisfied with an occasional academic saying Huston Smith is wrong, like Steven Katz, but then there are many things about which I think Steven Katz is wrong.
My inability to ever find someone about whom I could say, "This man has it exactly right," has shaped my beliefs, just as Huston Smith says in the interview on faith and reason that he was impressed by the beliefs of other people. I've been impressed by how everyone is wrong in important ways. Huston Smith admits the errors, but says that the rest of religion is unsurpassed in human understanding, for the big picture. Nonsense, the errors make everything else a fantasy.
God is not The Infinite as Huston Smith calls Him. Ask God. He'll tell you, once you've learned to listen. Understanding God is not just a matter of integrating all human experience. Some experience is indeed more illuminating than others, more productive, more likely to lead people to a better life, for themselves and for others. But there is not value in all beliefs. Even as negative examples, there are many more negatives than are required to learn another way.
Yet even though I am convinced that in the big picture, almost every theologian and philosopher is wrong, they can say wise things. In the interview here on faith and reason, Huston Smith speaks wisely about spiritual experiences, how they open someone's eyes as they opened Job's, even though Job is a fictional character. Smith spoke about that well. Other things he said were not so good. Many objections come to mind.
So can I build up a big picture from such wisdom, that I call wisdom because I find no fault with it immediately? I'm glad that's not my only option. Instead I have a relationship with God, if only God and I believe that I do. I can ask God if my eccentricities are because I took a wrong turn or fell through a hidden door. I get an answer. It's hasn't always been what I want to hear, but it has helped me.
I know God is not The Infinite. Huston Smith doesn't. He believes others who say God is The Infinite. Lots of people do. Who is there to tell them otherwise? I would. I would quote God on the subject, but for many that would prove to them that I don't know God because for them God is The Infinite, so they wouldn't listen to me even if I found a way to speak louder than I do. Why should they? They don't listen to God. Of course that's even harder than listening to the words of a human being.
Yet these are wise people. They know some things. Add them all up, and they know a lot of things. They know about surrender. They know about being dependent. They know about selfless love. They know words and concepts. They just don't know God.
Might they know God a little? God says to me that those who only know God intellectually don't know Him at all. He says that those who only know some experience of Him don't know Him at all. He must come to live in a person's mind. Then they will know Him, His imperfections, that He does change. They will know His power is limited, His knowledge is limited, His love is limited, and His goodness is limited, not just because only a little bit of The Infinite can live in the finite, but because God is not The Infinite.
Many very wise people would disagree with that or say that some intermediate stage toward having God live in us is a good thing. No, it's not, too many people settle for some rumor about God rather than coming to God in everything they are. Such wise people are indeed wise. I can hear it in how they talk about some point better than I can. Yet they don't know God. I can hear that as well. Maybe it's just my God they don't know. Only whenever I try to give someone the benefit of doubt that way, God immediately says no, He is the only God, and He is as I understand Him to be.
People can avoid this God, and He will leave them alone, as He leaves alone all animals who lack the capacity to understand Him, but some really should know better, not many, but enough that God is irritated by the subject. Wisdom is a two-edged sword. It can cut through the thorns on the way toward God, but it can cut one off from God as well. God help me.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Gullible Christians
I visited a message board yesterday that mostly was about Christian music, but with the recent campaign to say that Democrats dropped the ball on terrorism, someone posted a story that Oliver North warned of Osama bin Laden during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987. As I read this the thought hit me - 1987? bin Laden wasn't a terrorist until after fighting Russians in Afghanistan; this doesn't make sense.
No, it doesn't make sense. I wasn't surprised that I easily could find more than a dozen sites that debunk this plus the later refinements to this story that blame Al Gore for being part of these hearings, which he wasn't, and blame the Clinton administration for releasing Muhammad Atta from an Israeli prison, also false, that lie building on a different Atta being extradited from the US to Israel, not the other way around. It did surprise me that all of this was so well known in 2001 that even Oliver North issued a denial of the story in November 2001. Something this thoroughly debunked is still making the rounds? Of course I hadn't heard it before, so there is a fresh audience for it, but what still propagates it?
One thing that keeps it going is that not enough people question the story. About a dozen comments on this message board hadn't questioned it, but instead welcomed how this adds to other reasons why anyone outside the right wing is stupid. Granted this was a music site, not someplace where people invest their ego in knowing something about bin Laden, which makes this falsehood obvious. But it strikes me how similar this is to what has always bothered me about traditional Christians.
From the time that I knew anything about science in school, it's been clear how untroubled traditional Christians are in making conclusions about science despite knowing little of what they speak. Some Christians know things about science, but still have blind spots large enough to swallow whatever apologetics say evolution is wrong or other mainstream science is wrong. Even those Christians far out of step with the secular mainstream in some very technical area of science have complete confidence they are right.
Similarly with theology, most traditional Christians have complete confidence in gospels written 40 years or more after events. Why are they any different from the sort of story that was on this message board? Doesn't God ensure the truth now the way He would have had to then to make the gospels accurate?
One cannot be for the truth and be careless about lies. Christians strongly resist that they tell lies. All people do. Yet most people I come across tell lies. They repeat rumors. They tell one-sided versions of science, history, and spirituality. It is human nature. It seems we have to learn to be skeptical. Maybe it's good for gullible Christians that life was gentle enough to them for them not to learn skepticism, but now that there are so many resources to debunk anything, learning skepticism doesn't have to be as unfocused as it once was.
If it were just a matter of experience, though, I expect this wouldn't be such a problem. I've shared many times about what's wrong about some argument only to watch the other person shift to another argument, if they even give up saying that their original argument is just fine. When an argument is just ammunition, not a building tool, then what is the point? If someone is not chastened when caught telling a lie, even innocently, that's something other than just being gullible. That's an allegience that's hard for me to label, but how can it be anything but idolatry? How would God lead people to be so single-minded? I don't think He does. I think our nature gets us stuck on some way of seeing things regardless of facts. I think God frees us from that, to be able to accept whoever and whatever He is, as well as whatever everything else is.
Faith does not make us gullible. Faith frees us to accept whatever is true. Those are two very different things, even though they both emphasize acceptance. The gullible can be stuck with having taken in beliefs they can't drop without dropping everything they believe. The faithful have faith regardless of beliefs. I wish I had some good, brief arguments to prove that. Instead my proof is like it is with many things. Look around, how else can you explain everything?
No, it doesn't make sense. I wasn't surprised that I easily could find more than a dozen sites that debunk this plus the later refinements to this story that blame Al Gore for being part of these hearings, which he wasn't, and blame the Clinton administration for releasing Muhammad Atta from an Israeli prison, also false, that lie building on a different Atta being extradited from the US to Israel, not the other way around. It did surprise me that all of this was so well known in 2001 that even Oliver North issued a denial of the story in November 2001. Something this thoroughly debunked is still making the rounds? Of course I hadn't heard it before, so there is a fresh audience for it, but what still propagates it?
One thing that keeps it going is that not enough people question the story. About a dozen comments on this message board hadn't questioned it, but instead welcomed how this adds to other reasons why anyone outside the right wing is stupid. Granted this was a music site, not someplace where people invest their ego in knowing something about bin Laden, which makes this falsehood obvious. But it strikes me how similar this is to what has always bothered me about traditional Christians.
From the time that I knew anything about science in school, it's been clear how untroubled traditional Christians are in making conclusions about science despite knowing little of what they speak. Some Christians know things about science, but still have blind spots large enough to swallow whatever apologetics say evolution is wrong or other mainstream science is wrong. Even those Christians far out of step with the secular mainstream in some very technical area of science have complete confidence they are right.
Similarly with theology, most traditional Christians have complete confidence in gospels written 40 years or more after events. Why are they any different from the sort of story that was on this message board? Doesn't God ensure the truth now the way He would have had to then to make the gospels accurate?
One cannot be for the truth and be careless about lies. Christians strongly resist that they tell lies. All people do. Yet most people I come across tell lies. They repeat rumors. They tell one-sided versions of science, history, and spirituality. It is human nature. It seems we have to learn to be skeptical. Maybe it's good for gullible Christians that life was gentle enough to them for them not to learn skepticism, but now that there are so many resources to debunk anything, learning skepticism doesn't have to be as unfocused as it once was.
If it were just a matter of experience, though, I expect this wouldn't be such a problem. I've shared many times about what's wrong about some argument only to watch the other person shift to another argument, if they even give up saying that their original argument is just fine. When an argument is just ammunition, not a building tool, then what is the point? If someone is not chastened when caught telling a lie, even innocently, that's something other than just being gullible. That's an allegience that's hard for me to label, but how can it be anything but idolatry? How would God lead people to be so single-minded? I don't think He does. I think our nature gets us stuck on some way of seeing things regardless of facts. I think God frees us from that, to be able to accept whoever and whatever He is, as well as whatever everything else is.
Faith does not make us gullible. Faith frees us to accept whatever is true. Those are two very different things, even though they both emphasize acceptance. The gullible can be stuck with having taken in beliefs they can't drop without dropping everything they believe. The faithful have faith regardless of beliefs. I wish I had some good, brief arguments to prove that. Instead my proof is like it is with many things. Look around, how else can you explain everything?
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
More fundamental than Christian fundamentalism
I had some affection for Islam when I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X as a teenager. Anything that converted that angry man to seeing brotherhood beyond his race must have some substance. It is a brotherhood of submission, though, not of love, and the submission is to Islam, not to whoever and whatever God is. I forget if there was any one moment when I decided Islam was not for me. I had an Iranian roommate the summer before college. I didn’t see meaning in his prayers, just repetition. I suppose I had similar observations here and there on encountering something from Islam.
I was willing to be any sort of fundamentalist, if that had been God’s way, but something always turned out to be false in that whenever I looked. Now God tells me that He is very different from what either Christian or Islamic fundamentalists say He is. God is love, through His dependency, through His change, in many ways that fundamentalists reject. Islam may be even more dogmatic about their God than fundamentalist Christians. See this list of attributes from http://www.islamfortoday.com/shia.htm
THE POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES OF ALLÁH
1) Qadím: Alláh is eternal. He has neither a beginning nor an end.
2) Qadir: Alláh is omnipotent. He has power over all things.
3) 'Alim: Alláh is omniscient. He is all-knowing.
4) Hai: Alláh is living. He is alive and will remain alive forever.
5) Muríd: Alláh has his own discretion is all affairs. He does not do anything out of compulsion.
6) Mudrik: Alláh is all-perceiving. He is all-hearing, all-seeing, and is omnipresent. Alláh sees and hears everything though he has neither eyes nor ears.
7) Mutakalim: Alláh is the Lord of the Worlds. He can create speech in anything: the burning bush for Musa and the curtain of light for Muhammad.
8) Sadiq: Alláh is truthful. His words and promises are true.
THE NEGATIVE ATTRIBUTES OF ALLÁH
1) Sharík: Alláh has no partners.
2) Murakab: Alláh is neither made, nor composed, of any material.
3) Makán: Alláh is not confined to any place and has no body.
4) Hulúl: Alláh does not incarnate into anything or anybody.
5) Mahale hawadith: Alláh is not subject to changes. Alláh cannot change.
6) Marí: Alláh is not visible. He has not been seen, is not seen, and will never be seen, because he has no form or body.
7) Ihtiyaj: Alláh is not dependant. Alláh is not deficient, so he does not have any needs.
8) Sifate zayed: Alláh does not have added qualifications. The attributes of Alláh are not separate from His being.
It is everything that Christianity fantasizes about God and more. How can people look at the imperfect world around them and believe in such a God? It's not just people in one part of the world who do. It's not just religion for the victors who claim God authored their victory, but for the vanquished who say God is punishing them, testing them or strengthening them. Human beings have quite a capacity this way. We can make up a story for anything. Testing those stories is something we have had to learn.
Many people have sought God. Some have had powerful experiences and written at length to both describe and amplify their experiences. I can’t imagine where lists like the above came from except such experiences. God tells me He didn’t dictate such ideas, even when He inspired them. These are not His words. He doesn’t use words. We use words, each in our own language, and often we look away from God thereby to our wordy idols. God is whoever and whatever God is. Those who are too fundamentalist to accept that there is more to God than they understand have only idols.
I was willing to be any sort of fundamentalist, if that had been God’s way, but something always turned out to be false in that whenever I looked. Now God tells me that He is very different from what either Christian or Islamic fundamentalists say He is. God is love, through His dependency, through His change, in many ways that fundamentalists reject. Islam may be even more dogmatic about their God than fundamentalist Christians. See this list of attributes from http://www.islamfortoday.com/shia.htm
THE POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES OF ALLÁH
1) Qadím: Alláh is eternal. He has neither a beginning nor an end.
2) Qadir: Alláh is omnipotent. He has power over all things.
3) 'Alim: Alláh is omniscient. He is all-knowing.
4) Hai: Alláh is living. He is alive and will remain alive forever.
5) Muríd: Alláh has his own discretion is all affairs. He does not do anything out of compulsion.
6) Mudrik: Alláh is all-perceiving. He is all-hearing, all-seeing, and is omnipresent. Alláh sees and hears everything though he has neither eyes nor ears.
7) Mutakalim: Alláh is the Lord of the Worlds. He can create speech in anything: the burning bush for Musa and the curtain of light for Muhammad.
8) Sadiq: Alláh is truthful. His words and promises are true.
THE NEGATIVE ATTRIBUTES OF ALLÁH
1) Sharík: Alláh has no partners.
2) Murakab: Alláh is neither made, nor composed, of any material.
3) Makán: Alláh is not confined to any place and has no body.
4) Hulúl: Alláh does not incarnate into anything or anybody.
5) Mahale hawadith: Alláh is not subject to changes. Alláh cannot change.
6) Marí: Alláh is not visible. He has not been seen, is not seen, and will never be seen, because he has no form or body.
7) Ihtiyaj: Alláh is not dependant. Alláh is not deficient, so he does not have any needs.
8) Sifate zayed: Alláh does not have added qualifications. The attributes of Alláh are not separate from His being.
It is everything that Christianity fantasizes about God and more. How can people look at the imperfect world around them and believe in such a God? It's not just people in one part of the world who do. It's not just religion for the victors who claim God authored their victory, but for the vanquished who say God is punishing them, testing them or strengthening them. Human beings have quite a capacity this way. We can make up a story for anything. Testing those stories is something we have had to learn.
Many people have sought God. Some have had powerful experiences and written at length to both describe and amplify their experiences. I can’t imagine where lists like the above came from except such experiences. God tells me He didn’t dictate such ideas, even when He inspired them. These are not His words. He doesn’t use words. We use words, each in our own language, and often we look away from God thereby to our wordy idols. God is whoever and whatever God is. Those who are too fundamentalist to accept that there is more to God than they understand have only idols.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
300,000 views!
Oh, there's no accounting for taste. Like many others I saw lonelygirl15 on youtube. Unlike all those who realized the lighting and professionalism of the editing couldn't possibly be that of an amateur, I just bought the whole thing and wondered what religion she possibly could be talking about. Now I know - it was a Hollywood fantasy about religion. Ah, that I understand.
And now I found a video that puts it all in perspective for me. It was all a large, elaborate monkey PR stunt, so says the purple monkey. For anyone who thinks this video starts slowly, just wait until after the first minute. When he started explaining how Bree and Daniel are really puppets full of purple monkeys, I started laughing that uncontrollable laugh that I wish I could find on purpose. The height of my laughter was at 1:40 when the purple monkey was explaining that Daniel was always lying down or sitting because it took fewer monkeys to run him that way. It's still pretty funny after that, but not quite the same.
I guess not everyone laughed. It only got 3 stars out of 5. It gets 5 from me and this link. Isn't it a strange world?
And now I found a video that puts it all in perspective for me. It was all a large, elaborate monkey PR stunt, so says the purple monkey. For anyone who thinks this video starts slowly, just wait until after the first minute. When he started explaining how Bree and Daniel are really puppets full of purple monkeys, I started laughing that uncontrollable laugh that I wish I could find on purpose. The height of my laughter was at 1:40 when the purple monkey was explaining that Daniel was always lying down or sitting because it took fewer monkeys to run him that way. It's still pretty funny after that, but not quite the same.
I guess not everyone laughed. It only got 3 stars out of 5. It gets 5 from me and this link. Isn't it a strange world?
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