Occam’s Razor

Materialism in Perspective

Supposedly, the United States is one of the most religious nations in the world. Surveys tell us this is so. It is hard to traverse even a few blocks without running into a house of worship. Since most of us in this country who are religious claim to be Christian, you might expect we would be busy scrupulously following Jesus’ words and deeds. As I recall Jesus preached that possessions acted as obstacles toward knowing and serving God. Jesus told us that if we have things then we should give them away to the poor. Free of the burden of materialism we could concentrate on what matters: loving each other, improving our souls and spreading the good news of salvation. We should all live our lives like Mother Teresa’s. What good is the obsession with the number of coins in our pockets if in the process our souls are damned? The book of Timothy even tells us that “For the love of money is the root of all evil”.

For an allegedly Christian nation, we seem to have a few wires crossed. As much as recent revelations about Mother Teresa shocked me, at least she felt a genuine calling from God. At least she took the words of Jesus not as just good advice, but as a commandment. As for the rest of us, well it is not as if we do not do our share of tithing and charitable work, but it is for most of us a very part time thing. Ideally, instead of demonstrating our values in actual charitable work, we are rich enough where we can just write checks to charities. These checks are not large enough to empty our bank accounts, but measured doses of monetary kindness that allows us to help the poor a bit while making sure we still have our McMansions, SUVs and Hawaiian vacations.

Perhaps Jesus is looking down on us from heaven and saying to himself, “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Here I was busy dying for their sins and they still don’t get it!” Yet arguably, it is due to our material riches that we can lift any of the poor out of poverty. I suspect though that Jesus was not calling us to make the poor richer, but to relieve their misery. He wanted us to lead them and everyone toward beliefs and values that will enrich their souls, not our pocketbooks. I suspect he is hearing something like this from us instead:

Yo! Jesus! Get off my case, big guy! I am a bit distracted now. I am having way too much fun creating my avatar for Second Life. Spiritual rewards are all fine and everything, but heck, they are intangible buddy! I would much rather get my reward right now, while I am alive. An iPhone will do for starters.

Americans really worship at the Church of Mammon. We love money but if we cannot actually possess lots of money, having lots of stuff will suffice. Why are financial markets roiling all over the world right now? Because the American appetite for having our rewards now appears to be insatiable. If the love of money is the root of all evil, then credit cards must be the must be a beeline straight to Hell’s gates. Americans just love credit because it gives us things we want now even though in many cases we cannot really afford them. Until recently, owning our own home was out of reach for many of us who are financially challenged. This uncomfortable fact of life though could be overcome thanks to the cleverness of American capitalism. The mortgage industry invented no money down home loans and adjustable rate mortgages. This gave us the illusion that the financially challenged could become homeowners too. This worked fine until we discovered we had not read the fine print and we were way overextended. We eventually realized that a home loan was not like a charge card and adjustable rate mortgage payments could go up rather dramatically. Uh oh.

In the 21st century, we Americans measure our happiness not by how spiritual we are on the inside, but on how much we can super-size our lives. A station wagon just will not do anymore. We want a Ford Explorer. A three bedroom, one and a half bath ranch house is so 1950s. We want a McMansion, with a three car garage, with an upgraded kitchen (marble countertops please) and cathedral ceilings in the foyer. We will not be denied, even if we have to drive three hours each way to work to afford our lifestyles.

We deal with the hypocrisy between our espoused values and our actual practices by living lives effused in glorious cognitive dissonance. Rather than play lip service to our house of worship which, if we are reasonably devout we may visit once a week, we pay daily visits to our houses of capitalism. From the cup of java from the local Starbucks we grab on our way to work to the hours we spend traipsing from store to store at our local mall, there are endless ways to acquire newer and shinier stuff. Now we no longer have to be bothered to actually go out and buy many things. We can shop from the convenience of our computers. If we do not actually have enough cash on hand to buy what we want, we can plastic it. What possible virtue can there be in putting off for some nebulous future day what we can have right now?

With every passing generation, our obsession with achieving happiness via materialism becomes ever more myopic. Our spending habits are endlessly analyzed and probed by marketing wizards. Every conceivable variation of product must pondered for its potential profitability. Materialism speaks to an inner angst inside us that whispers that happiness is only a purchase away. It is the collection and variety of things in our lives that are our Feng Shui. We want to live in harmony with the environment, providing it is our environment. Living in harmony with nature is clearly a distant second.

In the end of course we die. Since our stuff does not disappear when we die, it appears we cannot take all this happiness with us after death. At least we will have lived a distracted life. Whether we achieved happiness with all our material stuff or merely received its illusion will perhaps be made clear in the afterlife, assuming there is one. If Hugh Hefner’s hedonism is too scary for us to emulate, we can at least emulate Ayn Rand. Like Ms. Rand, perhaps we should explicitly state that the pursuit of wealth and the outsized freedom it buys is our most cherished value. Perhaps like Ms. Rand we should go to our deathbeds with a dollar sign hanging above on the wall next to us. At least this way we would not by hypocritical.

Capitalism of course gives us the means to stay out of poverty. If you have been there, poverty does not so much purify your soul as give you incentive never to be impoverished again. This should be obvious. It explains why millions of Americans are not sneaking into Mexico. Beyond a certain nebulous point though, materialism appears to become a philosophy of life. In its extreme manifestations, it is tantamount to a religion. Ayn Rand appears to be one of its saints. Her religion of sorts, which she invented, was called Objectivism.

Can one be truly both spiritual and materialistic? As I understand the Christianity as it is presented in the Bible, the answer is a resounding “No!” I am not a Christian, but as I have known poverty and have no desire to experience it again, I also know that I will not give up my fundamental possessions. I see no value to a vagabond life living in boxes under highway overpasses. For me having stuff is not evil. In fact, I think we are programmed to move from misery toward comfort. Although materialism does not seem to truly make many of us happy, at least it is a tangible expression of what we imagine heaven to be: a place of comfort. The real world is a tough place. Our degree of materialism is something of a benchmark that shows us how far we have moved from our inner caveman. Somewhere in our DNA are distant ancestors that lived short, squalid lives wrapped up in fear. Materialism is a balm of sorts. It moves these distant but powerful memories further from our sight. That is its value. It is almost a form of therapy.

Yet materialism does not cure the angst so much as momentarily relieve it. This could explain why, like a junkie getting his next high, or Homer Simpson reaching for his next box of doughnuts, we eventually need a new materialistic fix. To cure it we must look deeper into each other and ourselves. Giving away our stuff, as Jesus recommended, is probably not the real cure. Human connectedness, manifested through mutual expressions of love, is likely the cure manifested by our materialistic angst.

It is my belief that anything taken to excess, be it religion or materialism, is fundamentally unhealthy. Moderation in both our materialistic needs and our spiritual demands may be the key that truly move us toward enlightenment. I suggest using materialism as a means to help you enrich your spirit and to help form mutually enriching connections with all life. When used in this way materialism can be ennobling.

August 30th, 2007 at 11:14pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | one comment
Tags: Christianity, Materialism

Trapped in the portal called life

I had a creative writing teacher in college. He was one of these intense, bearded, Birkenstock types who, doubtlessly parroting someone else, said there are only two seismic mysteries in life: sex and death.

At the time, as I was only 18, I was far more focused on the sex part than the death part. For me the sex part was more about actually having sex. Now, at age 50 sex is no longer a mystery. My bearded professor though did not mean sex as in sexual intercourse, but sex as in procreation. Sexual intercourse (at least until recently) is the event which causes human life to start. The flip side of life is of course, death. I think that was my professor’s point. Death was as equally mysterious as creation. Death was also an inescapable fact of being alive. It came with the territory.

My professor was likely 50-something at the time I sat in his class in 1975. Which means if he still alive he is probably eighty something now. More likely, he is pushing up the daisies. Now it just so happened that I turned 50 not too long ago. Given that sex is no longer quite the consuming mystery it once was (although relationships in general remain baffling and mysterious) it should not be too surprising that I spend a lot more time these days thinking about death.

Just because death is an unfathomable mystery does not mean that I, like most aging humans on the planet, isn’t trying to fathom it anyhow. This angst was doubtless at least partially responsible for my delving into metaphysics the way I did when I was in my forties. It may also explain society’s general fascination with TV shows like Ghost Hunters, not to mention TV psychics like John Edward.

When you are 50-something you tend to have had the experience of witnessing the dying process at least once. As frequent readers know, my mother passed away in 2005. Since she was living close to me at the time, I got the dubious privilege of witnessing the American style of death. In my Mom’s case, dying meant progressively worse congestive heart failure, falling a lot, long stays in ICUs, and finally a parking spot at a very pretty but still dispiriting nursing home. Over five months she was there, I had an intimate look watching the life forces slowly drain out of her. I have many memories of visiting her in the nursing home and finding her parked in the TV room in a wheelchair with a dozen other short timers, none of whom had the least bit of interest in watching TV. Most were asleep. It seemed like their major daily activity consisted of remembering to breathe regularly. My beloved mother eventually died directly of a kidney infection and indirectly of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy while attached to a noisy nonstop machine feeding oxygen through her nostrils and an uncomfortable catheter buried deep in her private parts.

So naturally, those of us who witnessed someone dying like this are hoping that when our time comes things will go better, with less angst and fuss and without having to surrender our dignity. I personally am hoping I am one of the fortunate few that die suddenly and peacefully in their sleep, perhaps in the middle of a dream. Failing that, I would prefer to be unexpectedly run over by a bus, providing I died very quickly. Naturally, I do not want to die at all, but if I must die, I do not want to do it before I have lived a long, fully engaged and quintessential American life.

In some ways, every day that I now wake up in good health I take as a blessing. The older I get though the more surreal it feels. I am waiting for some sure sign that I too am mortal. There are many indirect signs such as age spots and poorer vision. I have yet to have that serious, life threatening traumatic event that will cement my mortality in my forebrain. Something like a coronary bypass would do it. My goal, of course, is to get through life minus such an event. However, I am sure there will be other signs to remind me that my life is finite. Perhaps it will be arthritic joints. All I can really do is hope that with a combination of good genetics, diet and exercise that I can enjoy a fully engaged and relatively pain free life as long as possible. I know in time the bell will toll for me too.

For being 50-something is also a time when you notice that others in your age group are not as fortunate. I know a number of people my age, some former classmates and some friends and coworkers who have gone to their great premature reward. As the ranks of your peers begin to thin, however slowly, it is natural to wonder how much longer you have.

The optimist says that the glass is half-full. The pessimist says it is half-empty. My problem is that I know my glass is no longer even half-full, which may be why my inner pessimist is coming out more. The good news is that I cannot see where the bottom of the glass is exactly. Suspense is a natural byproduct of mystery, and some of us are better at dealing with suspense than others are. Those of us who like our lives planned might almost prefer to know precisely when we will die. Then we would at least know how to spend our remaining time wisely. Perhaps we would then spend more of our time enjoying life rather than engaging in all this necessary but tedious exercise. Because what is the point in living if you are so engaged in prolonging life that it becomes harder to enjoy?

The good part about this stage of my life is that life I feel life more acutely. For example, when I go somewhere like Yellowstone I wonder, will I ever come back here again before I am, well, dead? So you try to revel in that moment when you dip your feet into a wild mountain stream. At the same time, your brain (or at least mine) is also participating in the experience as a dispassionate spectator. I find that the less I frame an experience the better it becomes. Unfortunately, it is hard not to apply the mortal frame to life events when your cup of life is less than half-full.

Perhaps successful living at my time of life comes from suspending disbelief about your own mortality. Perhaps it comes from laughing in the face of death, even though death at age 50 is likely many decades away. Perhaps it comes from thinking less and feeling more. For me I find it helps to stay engaged in tasks. For us older Americans, idleness can be deadly.

The only problem with full engagement is that while you are arguably having a great time the years go by so quickly. I have reached that age where I have a devilish time putting time into its proper perspective. Some months back I wrote a review about the movie made of the hit Broadway musical The Producers. I said I first saw it (likely on TV) some 25 years ago. I had to do the math. 2007-25 would be 1982 or so. That sounds right. However, the first movie of The Producers came out in 1968, which was almost forty years ago. I was too young to see it in the theaters yet still I remember 1968 fairly well, since I was 11 at the time. It is almost as if 1968 happened yesterday, not forty years ago. Memory does this to you. At my age, I have to think hard about the sequence and time between past events. Just when did I graduate from college? How long ago was that? What was the world like in 1978? How can it be 2007 when I feel it is more like 1987?

The world is always changing but my brain does not appear to be changing. It is stuck at a certain mental age, say age 30. I got a sense of this in Denver recently. A group of us went to a Whole Foods store for lunch. We noshed on very tasty, overpriced but organically certified sandwiches. I was overwhelmed by the size of the place. The varieties of choices blew my little 1960s-framed mind. It made my head ache just trying to wrap my brain around the vast supply chain created to bring all this choice to me, all of it wholesome and fresh. The supply chain had evolved in the last forty years, but my brain was still back in the 1960s. Back then, you felt lucky to find a couple dozen kinds of cereal at the local grocer. The closest cereal to being a health food was Kellogg’s All Bran. Whole Foods, rather than feeling all-natural, felt extremely surreal. To a twenty something wandering the store though, it was completely ordinary.

I am beginning to suspect that by a certain age that because of the way the world actually is compared with your frame of it that death can be seen as a blessing. I suspect that by the time old age arrives, you feel like you are living on an alien planet. I felt that way with my poor suffering mother. She could never quite grasp the computer. Superficially, it looked a bit like a typewriter, and she knew how to type, but certain things would not work like with a typewriter and mentally she could not get past them. She could not adopt. She was incapable of not hitting the enter key when she reached the end of a line. She could not comprehend the idea of copying and pasting. She was the sort who wanted to fix mistakes by using whiteout on the monitor.

I suspect as geeky as I am that I will think like this at some point. Maybe I am halfway there already. Like all of us, I am trapped in this portal called life whose beginnings are as mysterious as its ending is certain. The mystery of life is everywhere and pervasive, but as I age the apprehension is often there too. Therefore, like most 50-something Americans I keep engaging, generally happy with where I am in life, but somewhat apprehensive nonetheless. I keep wondering when my inner Energizer battery will slow down. While apprehensive I am still appreciative and more than a little wowed that I still have it all together. A hundred years ago I would likely be dead by now.

For me modern life is slowly becoming more and more surreal. Perhaps when it becomes totally surreal, life ends and, like Neo in The Matrix, you wake in a stupor to find that your entire existence was nothing but a complex simulation.

That is when I want to get hit by the bus.

June 1st, 2007 at 04:03pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | no comments
Tags: Dying, Mortality

Speaking of faith

Well, it has taken a few centuries but it looks like there is a small, tiny hairline fracture in the religious space-time continuum. When atheists and devout Christians can sit down together and learn from each other without dismissing or proselytizing to one another, this is news. Yet somehow, this momentous event was largely overlooked. Yet it is actually happening, albeit in a relatively small way.

Mehta, now an honors graduate in mathematics and biology, has not converted, but the two have become friends. Mehta has started his own blog (friendlyatheist.com) and travels to speak to churches and humanist organizations. He has written a book - “I Sold My Soul on eBay” - that explains why he is an atheist and gives churches advice on what it would take to reach nonbelievers.

This is not to suggest that interfaith dialogs never occur. They do. Even the Pope occasionally catches the ecumenical wave and is seen openly praying with Muslims, Jews and assorted Protestants. The problem with most of these dialogs is that no real understanding occurs. These dialogs serve some other purposes but mutual learning is not one of them.

Nevertheless, when atheists and devout Christians can actually hear what the other is saying and take some actions based on their learning, I begin to feel that there is hope for humanity. It makes me wonder if seemingly intractable problems like global warming can be solved too. In the case of Jim Henderson, a former evangelical pastor, he is learning from atheists what I suggested back in 2004: Christian marketing practices suck. They suck because they are based on the model of the ignorant savage. There are not many of us still running around the bushes. Evangelicals hoping to draw in new adherents had better understand where the modern unchurched are coming from.

As for the “friendly atheist” Hemant Mehta, he is getting an eye opening in contemporary Christianity. If he was inclined to believe that Christians are starry-eyed myopic zealots, his understanding is now clarified through actual experiences. It seems that Christians are not necessarily always studying their Bible on break, or spending their weekends knocking on doors bringing the good news to the unenlightened. It seems that Christianity does not necessarily wholly define the lives of all Christians. Who would have thunk?

If you ask me, both the religious and the non-religious should spend much more time listening to each other. Talking at each other is easy. Listening is hard. When you listen, you have to acknowledge the point of view that you are hearing. When you listen, some part of your mind must see the world through the eyes of the person you are hearing. When you listen, it is hard not to develop empathy with the person talking. The person you are tuned into is no longer objectified as the heathen or the unenlightened. Instead, they become a human being. They become personable and real.

Many issues needlessly divide us from one another, and one of our most polarizing differences is religion. I count here atheism as a religion too. I am sure many atheists will want to harass me on the point, but there are many similarities between the religious and the atheists. Christians and atheists have this in common: certainty. Christians are certain that Jesus is our Savior. Atheists are certain he is not and God is a fiction. Both are dogmatic. Only now, maybe they are a little less so than they used to be.

Here is one of life’s lessons that I fortunately learned quite early after I pulled away from Catholicism: what religion you do or do not practice doesn’t really matter. Religion is the window dressing. Values are the window itself. I am guessing that you think that Christians and atheists do not have many values in common. Guess again. Both likely have a reverence for life. Both likely believe in love, fidelity and family. Both share a passion for the truth and only differ in how the truth should be interpreted. Of course, they also have other values that are not in common. That is okay because we are all unique. We all arrived where we are at via different paths. Consequently, we are not all going to believe the same things. So of course, we are not always going to share the same exact perspectives. We are each like a unique mold of gelatin, but we are all made of same gelatin. Our mold just happens to be our path through life. We are different but simultaneously we are also the same. This is natural for us. This is the way it was meant to be!

We need to never forget this. Truly, far more commonalities tie us together than pulls us apart. Your religion, your lack of it or your complete indifference to it should not matter any more than your eye color. The world would be a less interesting place if we all had brown eyes. The same is true with our many faiths and spiritual practices. Why not embrace our differences, instead of feeling affront if your beliefs are different from mine? If we were all the same then this world would be deathly dull. You can see how exciting the world was when much of it lived under communism. Was it better when everyone lived in the same kind of drab block apartments? How much more interesting life becomes when we celebrate, respect and realize we draw collective strength because of our differences.

My inner theist almost thinks this meeting of minds between religious and irreligious must be divinely inspired. How wholesome it is. How intuitively right it is. Now what is needed is much more of the same. Let us bring many more of the churched and unchurched together. Let us get them talking in measured and respectful ways. We have nothing to fear from open and respectful dialog and everything to gain. We are simply who we are. Yet almost all of us want to be listened to with respect. When we are not heard in a respectful way that is meaningful to us, the extreme cases can end up wreaking their vengeance in horrifying ways.

Look, I know it is not easy to listen. It is as hard for me as it is for you. Nonetheless, we need to make active listening a conscious and regular habit, particularly with people we are most prone to disagree with. Let us listen to each other with a kind and open heart. Let us find common connections with each other. There may or may not be a heaven in the hereafter. However, we can all agree that there is plenty to do in the here and now to make our world much better, kinder and gentler place.

Genuine dialog is the means to achieve this end. So step one is simply this: to listen.

May 14th, 2007 at 10:07pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | no comments
Tags: Christianity, Faith, Religion

The hazards of freedom

While I was washing out my plastic yogurt cup the other day, intending to recycle it, I asked myself why I was doing it. What was the point? I am guessing that only one in ten of us yogurt consumers are anal enough bother to recycle the darn things. Most, like my daughter, just throw them into the trash and forget about them. (I feel compelled to fish them out of the trash when she does this, clean them and recycle them.) If the vast majority of us will simply toss them out, what effect does my tiny effort having on saving the planet? My effort seems so wholly pointless.

After all, they will be likely around in some form long after I am fertilizer. I recently turned 50. The odds are decent that I will live to see 80, but I will probably not live to see 90. I am unlikely to witness the fruits of this peculiar obsession of mine. Nor, unless I can get my fellow neighbors to develop a similar passion for recycling, will it fundamentally change anything. It will not stop global warming. It will not keep humanity from breeding like bunnies. Nor will it stop us from tearing down more forests to support our burgeoning population and insistence on first world lifestyles. For sure, it will not make my family carbon neutral.

Why should I care about the Earth, as it will be a hundred, a thousand or a billion years from now? When I die my association with the Earth is gone. Why should I not treat the Earth the same way I treat a rental car? When I rent a car, my job is to avoid getting scratches on the car and to return it with a full tank of gas. I let someone else wash and vacuum the car. Since my life is finite, am I not simply renting space on this planet? Why not embrace the philosophy, endorsed by so many drivers and smokers, that the Earth is my trashcan? Yet I cannot. During my eighty or so years here on Earth I hope to do things to make this world a better place. Yet being just one among billions I also am sanguine enough to realize my efforts at best they will be marginal. Despite my first world lifestyle, I hope that the fruits of my labors will justify my effect on the environment. This blog is part of how I hope I try to add value to the world. In addition to being an excellent form of therapy, the occasional positive comments I receive indicate that I can touch lives and hearts for the better. In short, unless I develop a chronic case of Catholic guilt as I age, I expect I will have paid my dues as world citizen.

Which gets back to the question of why I cannot throw that used yogurt cup into the trash. Why am I compelled to recycle it? Why do I have the energy saver setting enabled on my dishwasher? Why have compact fluorescent lights all over my house? Why do I drive a hybrid and pay more for it when I could drive a bigger and more muscular car? Nothing I can do by myself will have anything more than the tiniest and most marginal effects on the environment. Why not just let it go? Why not be like Hugh Hefner and will my life full of opulence and beautiful women?

I expect by now you are waiting for my thoughtful answer. Unfortunately, I do not have an answer, at least not one that will satisfy. Nonetheless, I am confident that I will continue to buy cars that are less harmful to the environment. Moreover, I will continue obsessively recycling my yogurt cups, along with all the other recyclables in my house. Maybe it is a compulsion; or maybe it is some sort of neurosis.

On the other hand, maybe something truly spiritual is at work. Maybe something beyond me (my soul perhaps) is speaking powerfully to me. Maybe some part of me realizes that although I will die someday, I will not really be gone. Maybe I innately know that I will reincarnate someday, and I will have to deal with the toxic legacy to the environment that I am leaving behind. Maybe I sense a mission and a purpose to existence with a grander vision than my feeble mind can comprehend. Wherever it comes from, this presence inside me is powerful and I am compelled to honor it. It speaks to something permanent and authentic about me. Although I am far from being a model environmentalist, the actions I do take for the environment are really wholly selfless acts. They are expressions of love to not just my planet, but to the universe.

Perhaps you have heard of the Gaia Theory. Simply stated, this theory says that our world is one gigantic living organism. Just as it is hard for an ant riding on the back of a turtle to detect the turtle, so it is difficult for us to see that the Earth is not just a planet, it is a single organism. This reality is easier to grasp, perhaps, from a distance. One of the most captivating images of all time occurred in 1968 when Apollo 8 relayed pictures of the Earth surrounded by the blackness of space. For the first time we had an outsider’s perspective of the Earth. Until Apollo 8, we could ignore our interconnectedness. After Apollo 8, it was hard to ignore. We could see the Earth as a planet was alive.

Perhaps this is one reason that Unitarian Universalism resonates with me. Among its principles and purposes is this one that is so obvious, but which few religions explicitly address, since they are more concerned about salvation.

Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

I think some part of me realizes that the notion of self is an illusion. While it frames our existence, it is still an illusion, and carried to extremes it can be a delusion. When we fail to acknowledge and respect our interdependence, our behaviors become destructive to ourselves and also to our community. This principle should be self-evident. Any physicist will assert that we really are connected. They will say we are unique expressions of organized energy, matter simply being an instance of energy. In addition to inhaling and exhaling, we radiate to the universe, from infrared rays from our body heat to our brain waves. From the viruses we share to the carbon dioxide we recklessly release from our cars and power plants that is warming our world, our actions affect the world. Everything affects everything else, but mankind’s actions affect it disproportionately.

The sooner we acknowledge this fundamental reality the better. While the United States is premised on the notion of individual freedom as a right and a virtue, in one sense, freedom is bad. It is bad when we freely make choices that degrade our natural ecosystem or deny our human interconnectedness. Having more than two children, in my opinion, is a selfish and unethical choice. For myself I see no way to become carbon neutral, but I recognize it as a goal toward which I and the rest of society needs to strive. I am ethically compelled to do what I can, even when it seems pointless and of marginal utility, as in recycling yogurt cups.

I do not know how as a species we can truly honor the interdependent web, but we must begin in earnest and we must do far more than we are doing. At least I understand this: I am tied to this planet, physically and spiritually. What we are doing to our planet we are also doing to ourselves. We are like teenagers cutting themselves. Our actions are both globally destructive and spiritually toxic. Our relentless focus on unbridled freedom is in some way unhealthy and counterproductive. Like Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead or Number 6’s in The Prisoner, by aggressively asserting our right to free choice without bound we are denying our interconnectedness. Freedom offers the illusion of happiness, but I believe that genuine happiness comes from working with others. Perhaps that is why a recent study says that the most satisfying professions were the most people focused. Being a minister usually does not pay very well, but it is the most rewarding.

I believe that the more we embrace our interconnectedness the happier we will be. For my part, I will keep recycling those yogurt containers. I hope that small actions like these will contribute toward a mindfulness of the preciousness of this organism we call The Earth.

April 24th, 2007 at 09:54pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | 2 comments
Tags: Environment, Happiness

My Inner Catholic

It has been thirty-two years since I last attended Mass as a Roman Catholic. After thirty-two years, you would think that I would have exorcised Catholicism from within me. Theologically, I am about as far from Catholicism as you can get. I have been a practicing Unitarian Universalist for the last ten years. This is a religion so Christian-lite that arguably it is neither a theology nor Christian. Rather than having to profess that I believe in the Trinity, to be a UU I do not have to profess to believe in anything at all, including God.

Yet I believe that if you took a survey of members in any Unitarian Universalist church and asked them what religion they grew up in, at least forty percent would say they were raised Roman Catholic. That was my experience when, some ten years ago, I attended an orientation on Unitarian Universalism. I expected myself to be nearly unique. Instead, I was surrounded by ex-Catholics, many of whom, like me, were still more than a bit traumatized all these years later by the whole weird Catholicism experience. I think it would be hard to find any drug that could mess up a logical mind more completely than Catholicism. (I am sure others would protest that their religion had this effect too.)

Perhaps subconsciously choosing Unitarian Universalism as my religion was an adult act of rebellion. “Take that, pope! Of all the religions out there, I choose the one that is the most unlike the Roman Catholic Church!” There is none of that contemptible original sin dogma in UUism. I do not have to spend my Sundays contemplating whether, after coveting my neighbor’s wife, the sin was mortal or venial.

I am 50 years old and I am free of Catholicism, except I am not. I do not think many of us who were raised Catholic ever fully escape its long tendrils. Deep inside me, like most of us ex-Catholics, there still lurks an inner Catholic. I have determined that no surgery can remove it from me, as much as I would like it to. No amount of therapy will assuage that small, frightened inner Catholic child in me that still thinks, “My soul is stained and I will go to hell.” For better or for worse, who I am is defined by the Catholicism that I experienced in my developing years. If I could remove my inner Catholic, I would be a stranger to myself.

Perhaps I would have happier memories of the Catholic Church had I had parents who went a little less heavy on Catholicism. Alas, I did not. Attending Mass once a week was not just a good idea, my parents demanded it. If I did not attend then I had committed a mortal sin, which meant that God was seriously pissed at me. The first bus that run over me meant that it was straight to Hades for me, for eternity, for missing a frigging Mass. (It was not until later that I learned about Cafeteria Catholics, who somehow got to heaven even though they only attended Mass on Easter and Christmas.) We had to go to confession about once a month too. I was generally too scared to tell the priest my real sins (”I jerked off twice today Father, and I felt guilty about it, but it also felt too good to stop”) and, bizarrely, made up fake sins, which logically further stained my soul. Bless me Father for I have sinned. I lied twice to my parents, even though I didn’t really. I took the Lord’s name in vain once, even though I didn’t swear. These were sins I felt comfortable confessing. After a while, I got the impression that these were the kinds of sins the priests wanted to hear. I was easily absolved with a few Hail Mary’s and Glory Be’s. I would never tell my parents, much less this creepy dark robed creature whispering at me from behind a veiled partition, my real sins.

I had many other issues with Catholicism of course, but it all boiled down to a couple points. As a parochial school student, I witnessed physical abuse by the sisters at the school who, when I think today about what they did so many years ago, still raises my blood pressure. Even as a child, I knew what I witnessed was deeply wrong, but it seemed blessed by the Catholic Church. Of course, at that age I was incapable of reconciling these evils with the absolute faith I had been handed. The second issue were its bizarre creeds that I supposedly subscribed to. Jesus ascended bodily into heaven? Jesus was conceived via Immaculate Conception? God was three entities at the same time: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? I don’t think so. It is unlikely that I will ever be Muslim, but at least they got it right: God does not suffer from multiple personality disorder.

I realize that billions of people believe, or at least profess to believe in these teachings. Moreover, I both respect these people yet cannot fathom how they can actually believe this crap. Catholics, do you really believe a consecrated host is both bread and the actual, living body of Jesus at the same time? If you can believe that, why it is that I cannot sell you swampland on which to build your estate? On the other hand, is your belief just pablum that you cannot acknowledge even to yourself?

Yet Catholicism for all its illogic still intrigues me, and remains a part of me. As readers know last summer, my family went to France. I spent much of my time inside the many Catholic churches, basilicas and cathedrals in and around Paris. For reasons I do not understand, stained glass evokes awe in me, along with statuary depicting long dead and likely wholly legendary saints. Visiting a cathedral like Notre Dame filled me with awe and reverence. While we were at Notre Dame, we watched a mass in progress. A soprano filled the cathedral with her ethereal music. The priest did his best to fill up the vast space with the pungent smell of burning incense. It was not really magical, but some part of me still perceived it was both magical and mystical, because I was viewing it through the prism of a naïve and trusting six year old boy.

While most of the church’s beliefs are just silliness, some of its practices are plain mean-spirited. For example, I think it is contemptible that they deny divorced Catholics access to the sacraments. Priestly celibacy is both unnatural and has proven unworkable. In fact, the male chauvinism of the religion simply reeks. How can any thinking Catholic woman put up with it? The second-class status it affords homosexuals, who are only seen as good Catholics providing they never act on their urges, is loathsome and truly makes me want to vomit.

Still, underlying it all are some kernels that still resonate with me. It is one of a small number of Christian denominations that still believes that all life is truly sacred, that the death penalty is just wrong in all cases, and that it is not enough to just say that you believe in your faith, but to insist that faith must be manifested by deeds. I have enormous respect for institutions like Catholic Charities, which do some of the hardest and most necessary charitable work in the world.

Catholicism thus remains something of a mystery to me, which both resonates at times and resurfaces feelings of loathing. I both admire it and despise it. I cling to those parts of Catholicism that so touched me as a child: the candles lit during a High Mass; the smell of incense; the sound of chimes as the Priest consecrates the host; their numerous saints; the virtuous Mary, Mother of God ™; and those engraved stations of the cross along the sides of the church. They personalized the poor, suffering Jesus who died so I could guiltily sneak peaks at Playboy magazines.

Perhaps what I miss the most about Catholicism is its utter and obnoxious certainty about everything. THE ONE AND ONLY TRUE PATH, from birth to death, was laid out with crystal clarity that was obvious to any true Catholic that stayed awake during CCD classes. All they had to do was walk its path. If there was any question about what the path was, your pastor could unambiguously clarify things for you, or you could thumb through a Baltimore Catechism and get a sonorous answer there. Its promise was not so much God and the hereafter as it was promises that with weekly injections of Catholicism you could get through life unafraid. All it took was utter faithfulness to its creeds, which I translated into the abandonment of reason on all things religious.

Now at age 50, the world is a cold place. Despite the silliness of Catholicism, its unyielding certainty (even when it is so completely wrong) and its proud obliviousness to the way the world actually works, it still holds some allure. I find Unitarian Universalism offers little in the way of comfort, other than the companionship of fellow souls with thoughts and fears similar to mine. I also know that even if I succumbed to the lure of Catholicism again, I would simply be deluding myself. I will never really believe in Immaculate Conception. There would always be some part of me that would say, “This is just utter rubbish.” Still perhaps someday as my life span narrows and my fear of death increases, my insecurities will get the better of me. Perhaps I will find myself engaged again in the adult thumb sucking that, sorry, to me epitomizes Catholicism.

February 13th, 2007 at 08:51pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | one comment
Tags: Catholicism

Love’s End Game

I spent part of my weekend in Boulder, Colorado with my brother and his fiancé. My visit was short but sweet. It included relaxing in a hot tub and snow shoeing for miles in the Rocky Mountains through a gentle snowfall. I felt relaxed and pampered.

My brother, who is in his early forties, is marrying late, but marrying well. My sister in law to be is a wonderful woman. She learned some hard lessons from her first marriage on what not to do in a marriage. My brother will be the fortunate beneficiary of her experience. I suspect my brother learned some things too in his long quest for a spouse. Ms. Right, when she finally appeared, did not come from meeting someone on eHarmony or one of the many Internet dating sites out there, but inadvertently through friends at work.

Of course, neither my brother nor his fiancé want or expect their marriage to fail. She knows the heartache of divorce. My brother knows the difficulty in finding the right person to marry. They inquired into my thoughts on marriage, from the perspective of someone who has been in one for 21 years.

I have written about marriage before, so I will not attempt to repeat myself. I have written a bit about love too. However, this latest conversation helped me clarify in my thoughts on the meaning of love. It made me believe that love’s mission is not what we think.

Love, if you can find it in its modern manifestation, is a wonderful experience. However, the word “love” does make me grit my teeth from time to time. I think it does because the word comes loaded with all sorts of baggage which can turn love from something joyful and freely given from the heart into an albatross around the neck. Keeping love joyful, particularly throughout a long-term relationship like a marriage, is a trick worthy of Houdini.

Like pornography, love is hard to define. Just as you can tell pornography when you see it, you will know love when you feel it. One person’s pornography though is another’s erotica. Similarly, one person’s experience with love will not be the same as another’s. The book, The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to your Mate, and its many variants by Gary Chapman, suggest that most of us feel and broadcast love in different ways. For me I feel most loved when my wife spends quality time with me, and just me, in ways that I find meaningful, such as working on a joint project together. Her way of expressing love might be to buy me gifts, but such expressions of love would largely be lost on me. It would not take too much behavior like this to conclude that she may be trying to love me, but she does not really love me, because if she really loved me she would express love in a way that I would feel as love.

Most couples expect their lovers or spouses to be mind readers. Chapman is one of many marriage therapists out there who suggests this is folly, and divorce statistics would probably bear him out. Nonetheless, after 21 years of marriage I think I have become something of a mind reader. I truly believe that at this point I know my spouse better than she knows herself. Moreover, I am convinced she knows me better than I know myself. This is a bit of a problem because after 21 years neither of us are the idealized creatures we found when we fell in love. Now we see each other’s warts, blemishes and fallibilities, much the way a doctor can focus in on a symptom and ignore an otherwise remarkably healthy body. In addition, what we see in each other has become, not so much an accurate picture of the other, but a darker image of ourselves. It is the phenomenon of projection that has been so well studied by psychologists: we see in our intimates the unacknowledged deficiencies in ourselves.

This is a tough lesson to learn. Now, whenever my wife does something that irritates me, I try to turn it around. What is it about me that makes this aspect of her behavior irritable? That she does X or Y does not mean that she is unlovable, but it does mean that there is something about X or Y that irritates me, and which I need to resolve.

I think in the natural course of events, that love moves from the infatuation stage to the stage where love becomes this mirror that shows you yourself in the form of your spouse. The challenge then becomes to move beyond this phase. It involves being psychologically naked to yourself and your spouse and seeing the warts on yourself and your lover. The real trick is to move past them.

I think love fulfills its mission when you are both stripped naked of all pretenses. Love is not about having all your specific needs expertly met by some other human being. It is about a new stage of growing up. Rather than being an end in itself, love is a means toward another end. The end game of love is understanding that your notion of love was all wrong. Perhaps “love” was just a trap. For I believe that the purpose of love is to give you an intimate encounter with yourself that would not likely occur any other way. It is there to find a way to help you tackle your deepest fears and deficiencies.

For most of us, this becomes too daunting a task. That is when the marriage devolves toward superficiality. We press what we think are our spouses buttons in order to keep them docile, so they do not give us an intimate encounter with ourselves. For it becomes easier to do this than acknowledge our shortcomings. However, marriage by design puts you in a long-term intimate space. Rather than acknowledge and work through our issues because they can no longer be avoided, it becomes convenient to project them onto our spouse instead.

If it becomes too acutely uncomfortable, we will seek someone else. For we will need someone else who will give us the illusion of love, but not its reality. What we really want in a spouse is someone who continually places Band-Aids on our self-inflicted cuts, rather than helps us to the doctor. We want a spouse that can distract us from confronting some fundamental and disagreeable facts about ourselves. It seems that the ideal spouse must lie shamelessly to us. In short, we desire the spouse we want, not the spouse we need. The proper spouse is like eating a glazed donut: it brings us a sugar rush and makes us feel wonderful. Unfortunately, what we really need is a spouse that tastes like a serving of vegetables instead. To get there we must convince ourselves that our spouse makes vegetables taste like glazed donuts. It can be devilishly difficult to maintain perspective when inside a positive romantic relationship.

In fact, the ideal spouse will love us in spite of our faults, and we will honestly love them in spite of their faults too. They will not lie to us. However, they will help us find the courage to acknowledge and tackle tough issues within ourselves. Moreover, they will be there to reassure us that they love us in spite of these flaws. The ideal spouse will be more coach than critic, and do so in a loving, firm but gentle way. In doing so they help us move through our issues into acceptance of who we are as human beings. In the process, we will grow in understanding of ourselves and eventually put these issues behind us. As a spouse it is our mission to do the same.

I wish my brother and his fiancé the very best in their upcoming marriage. Deep, intimate and caring communications seems to me to be means to achieving a long, lasting and healthy marriage. This kind of communications though will be a challenge for any couple. They will probably be moving through a minefield of sorts on a journey of joint self-discovery. If it works out right, I suspect it will be a journey of self-exploration through the lens of someone who will be a partner with them on this most intimate of journeys. I suspect (though I will never know) that marital love will complete neither of them, but instead it will be a conduit: a swiftly flowing journey of the soul into brave, uncharted worlds of self-understanding.

January 22nd, 2007 at 10:46pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | no comments
Tags: Love, Marriage

The Problem with Vengeance

Saddam Hussein has gone to meet his maker. Shortly before dawn this morning, the former Iraqi dictator was hanged. Reputedly, justice was served. Hussein received the same ultimate penalty that he and his henchmen inflicted on reputedly hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shi’ites during his twenty-five years or so as national dictator and despot. Hussein at least had the benefit of having his guilt established in an open trial. One thing is for sure: Saddam Hussein will not be around to inflict further atrocities.

I certainly understand the need for the survivors of Hussein’s tyranny to see Hussein suffer some small measure of the pain that was inflicted on them and their loved ones. Mesopotamia, after all, gave us Hammurabi, the Babylonian king. Nearly four thousand years ago he invented a form of justice that was still evident in Saddam’s hanging today: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Saddam’s hanging of course could not begin to really equal the voluminous misery he inflicted on others. Still, death is the ultimate penalty. Having Saddam spend a couple of years in prison knowing he was going to pay the ultimate penalty was probably a very miserable experience.

The problem is that by hanging Hussein, the justice that was served did nothing to solve the underlying problem. Rather, by hanging Saddam the violence in Baghdad is likely to worsen. Ninety-two people died from violence in Iraq today. A curfew imposed later in the day will hopefully staunch the violence, although most likely the violence will keep recurring until it is fully expressed. Sunnis will feel even more aggrieved by Saddam’s execution. Shi’ites and Kurds will feel even more righteous. If national unification is the goal, it is hard to see how serving this kind of justice, no matter how lawful and fair, will serve Iraq’s national interests.

Real solutions to Iraq’s sectarian problems can only be solved by changing hearts and minds. Saddam’s execution was thus counterproductive toward those ends. All sides will be more inclined to dig in their heels and less inclined to work toward national reconciliation. Imagine if during our Civil War we had captured General Robert E. Lee and had him hung for treason and for ordering the murdering hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers. It is unlikely that the Confederacy would have suddenly felt the desire to sue for peace.

What then does this execution really accomplish? While it does give survivors some feeling of vengeance, I am not persuaded that vengeance as a form of justice will be much of a deterrence. By definition, no sane people would engage in violent crime in the first place. Millenniums pass by and regardless of how lax or strict the execution of our laws is, violence continues at roughly the same levels it always has.

I think that vengeance is like throwing wood onto a fire: it keeps it going. What is needed is something that will douse the fire. What justice for Saddam Hussein would have served both as punishment and have served the interests of the stability of Iraqi society?

In countries like Liberia and South Africa, truth and reconciliation commissions have proved to be effective vehicles for mending societies torn by decades of strife. Such a commission in Iraq could have done much to reduce sectarian tensions by allowing victims to air their grievances. Now that Saddam is dead, those who did not have a chance to formally air those grievances feel in some measure that they were not heard, and consequently justice was not served for them. The Kurds suffered thousands of deaths because of chemical attacks ordered by Saddam Hussein. Their rage, which should have had the opportunity to be expressed in a proper forum, is instead bottled up and unchecked instead. As a result, this rage is likely to cause further destabilization and violence in the future.

I think it would have been better for all parties had Saddam been tried by the International Criminal Court. It was established precisely for these kinds of crimes. By having his crimes adjudicated by an external court, it would have had the pleasant smell of impartiality. Instead, Saddam was tried in an Iraqi court. While the evidence of Saddam’s guilt was clear enough, impartiality was simply not possible. Lacking impartiality, the verdict smelled malodorous. It is true that had the International Criminal Court convicted Saddam Hussein, he would not have been executed. Most likely, he would have lived out the rest of his life in isolation in a prison in some place like The Hague. There, isolated, alone and unempowered, a rough form of justice would have been served in the form of impotence and obscurity.

Too often justice is merely a code word for vengeance. We need to understand that society’s purpose in seeking justice is not to elicit vengeance. Instead, it is to elicit true repentance from the criminal if possible, ensure future behavior does not recur, and to ensure the rest of society is safe from a criminal’s actions. We need justice that does not amount to being Band-Aids on society’s gaping wounds. Instead, we need actions that promote the wound’s healing. Unfortunately, as Saddam’s execution points out, the need for vengeance simply helps ensure that future Saddams will likely reemerge from the toxic environment he left behind. Therefore, the karmic cycle will repeat until someday, perhaps, Iraqis learn the lesson and get it right.

Saint Paul got it right in Romans 12:19-21:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

December 30th, 2006 at 10:21pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | no comments
Tags: Crime, Iraq, Justice, Punishment, Vengeance

The universe through a straw

National Public Radio has been running a series called This I Believe. The series gives ordinary people like you and I the opportunity to tell the world what we believe and why. The series is always insightful and worth your time. Even if you cannot agree with the person’s beliefs, you should be moved by the passion and eloquence by which participants express their beliefs. Since the producers receive thousands of entries, they unfortunately cannot broadcast but a tiny fraction of them. However, there is a This I Believe web site where you can contribute your essay. Perhaps this one will end up there too.

Frequent readers of Occam’s Razor will have little doubt about what I believe. Like all of us, I have many beliefs. I may spend the rest of my life trying to put them all down here on this website. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I do not often say I am certain that my beliefs are accurate. They simply represent the perspective of me: a 49-year-old white middle class man living here in the United States. My beliefs are undoubtedly formed by my life experiences. Since your life was on a different path, I should not be surprised that you would have different beliefs. However, it has only been in the last few years that I have found the time and the energy to organize my thoughts. Here they exist online for your amusement, castigation, insight, or dismissal.

Last night in my covenant group, we discussed our “isms”. Simply saying what your “isms” are gives insight into your own beliefs. To help us out, many of us turned to Beliefnet. On the site is an online survey you can take if you are having a hard time categorizing your beliefs. Since we are a small group of Unitarian Universalists, not one of us was surprised to find out we were categorized highest as UUs. In fact, the survey showed me as 100% Unitarian Universalist, but also 98% Quaker. Perhaps I should not be surprised that I have a brother who is a Quaker.

For many, labeling their beliefs is simple. For me, it is hard to put a label on what I believe. The label probably does not exist. I can say I am a Unitarian Univeralist, but this really does not say what I believe. After all, you can be a UU and believe anything you want. There is no creed you have to profess in order to be a UU. I can say that I subscribe to agnosticism, but that does not say much about my beliefs either. It simply asserts that I cannot find a rational basis to either believe or not believe in God. In some ways, I feel the call of Buddhism. I have acknowledged before that I think karma is a real and natural force. Yet I maintain some skepticism that we go through a series of lives, and each life is an attempt to address our karmic issues from previous lives. Perhaps I align most closely to natural pantheism. Wikipedia says it is “a form of pantheism that holds that the universe, although unconscious and non-sentient as a whole, is a meaningful focus for mystical fulfillment.” However, I am not quite so certain that I can wholly dismiss the notion that some external or omnipresent God did not set our universe in motion. I do believe that our universe is an amazing place.

As human beings trying to understand the universe, I believe we have some serious limitations. First, we are temporal. This gives us perhaps a biased perspective. Our natural fear of death I think drives many of our beliefs, since most seem to offer tailored solutions that address our fear of nonexistence. Since we experience existence through time, we naturally assume time exists for everything. However, arguably time only exists for organisms of sufficient complexity. For example, the physicist Brian Greene asserts that at the subatomic level, time ceases to exist.

Since we are also limited by our senses, it can be excruciatingly hard to relate to things that we cannot directly perceive. We can infer that radio waves exist, even though we know we will never touch, taste or feel a radio wave. We can make similar observations about the limitations of our other senses. For example, there are sounds we cannot perceive but other animals can.

What I infer from all this is that we perceive the universe at best through a gauzy curtain. I believe what we see approximates the universe’s actual complexity. Perhaps you read recent news reports about the indirect proof for the existence of dark matter in the universe. Here again is something that physicists tell us simply must exist in the universe, but which we cannot examine. I think that my analogy that our view of the universe is through a gauzy curtain is too expansive. I believe we see the universe through a straw.

A therapist I am seeing tells me that humans tune out most of the experience that surrounds them. Perhaps there is so much of it that it is impossible for our brains to process all of it. Like a horse with blinders, to survive we focus on what is straight ahead of us. Perhaps this is because we have learned through experience that straight ahead is where it is easiest to make sense of the world. At best, we are only dimly aware of the consequences that our behavior has on not just our intimates, but on everyone who we meet.

If we spent our life looking at the same small part of the sky through a straw, we would clearly not have a very good understanding of our universe. All we could do is describe what we see through the straw. It would be hard to infer the meaning of the things we saw. If a cloud obscured our vision, we could not necessarily infer the entity we call a cloud. We would likely need a wider perspective to detect the cloud. We might pick up some clues. If a bird passed through our line of vision enough times then we might be able to infer the existence of birds, although the concept of flight may be beyond our comprehension. Similarly, it would be hard to imagine trees, or houses, or the ground, or computers, or time, or perhaps even death.

So if I am a natural pantheist, it is because I believe that the universe is far more complex, far more amazing and far richer than what I can comprehend, simply because I am bounded by a finite life and limited senses. Philosophers and scientists must do the best they can by seeing the universe through a straw. However studying the edges of the straw, which is what physicists, philosophers and the devout spend much of their lives doing, likely gives them a very jaundiced and probably inaccurate perspective of the universe as it actually is. Even if we could see all aspects of the universe as it actually is, it is unlikely our brains could comprehend its full complexity and manifestation.

It may be that instead of seeing the universe through a straw, we are seeing it through a drainage pipe. In other words, perhaps we perceive more of the complexity of the universe than I assume. There is no way to know for sure, however. Since there is no way to know, that is where I personally draw the boundaries of my faith.

I do my best not to infer too much about the truth of our universe because I assume my perspective is severely constrained. However, I could just as easily be wrong. It can be fun to speculate on whether God exists, and if it exists whether it is a personal or an absent God. Nevertheless, I believe that when we do so we really arguing about what we see on the edges of the straw. We are using that very limited field of observation to infer much more about the universe than we should. Perhaps that is why I often feel the need to surrender to the mysticism of it all. It is why the Pantheistic Church, if there were one, would probably call me more than Unitarian Universalism. As much as I try, I do not really understand our universe, but I am still in awe of it and under its spell. However, I sense, what the character Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact (and by inference, the late Carl Sagan, who wrote the book) said:

I … had an experience… I can’t prove it, I can’t even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever… A vision of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how… rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater then ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish… I… could share that… I wish, that everybody, if only for one… moment, could feel… that awe, and humility, and hope.

November 14th, 2006 at 09:13pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | 2 comments
Tags: Brian Greene, Karma

Hypocrisy is, after all, only human

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned.”

That is what the Rev. Ted Haggard would be saying in confession today, were he were a Catholic. Alas, he is not a Catholic, just a prominent evangelical minister. You might say that until yesterday he was the nation’s No. 3 evangelical preacher, right after Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Before yesterday, Haggard held the lofty title of the president of the National Association of Evangelicals. Now, as you have likely read, Haggard appears to be the latest casualty among prominent Christian hypocrites. Specifically he is accused of buying methamphetamine and paying for sex once a month over a three years period with a gay Denver masseur. Both are vices far removed from those he has consistently preached.

It should be time for a full confession from Rev. Haggard. What we got today was a qualified confession: while sorely tempted, he never really succumbed. So what he did was okay, sort of, except for the hypocrisy thing and the small fact that buying methamphetamine, even if you never use it, is a serious crime. He is like Bill Clinton claiming that he never had sex with Monica Lewinski because intercourse never occurred.

Needless to say, I do not believe that Haggard passed on either the meth or the gay sex. Jesus spent 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. He too was tormented by the Devil. Reputedly, he succeeded in keeping Lucifer at arm’s length. Haggard may want to emulate his Lord but Jesus did have the tiny advantage of being God. Haggard, however, is not God. He is a human being like the rest of us. Therefore, his assertions are not plausible. They fail the Occam’s Razor test, to say the least.

I am sure the 14,000 members of his New Life Church are very loving and forgiving people. Yet somehow, I doubt many will accept his explanation. Evangelicals may be passionate in their faith, but they still inhabit the real world. Likely, many of them are struggling with their demons too. Their demons may not be gay sex nor getting high. Yet it is clear that they do not go to church because they are saints. They may want to become saints, but, like their minister, they remain fallible human beings. They are searching for a permanent way to act contrary to their innate and fallible humanity. Like their minister, they are likely searching for Godot.

Likely, the full scandalous details of his relationship and drug use will soon come out. Perhaps he can join former Florida congressional representative Mark Foley in rehab. The parishioners of the New Life Church will be left scratching their heads wondering why they had such faith in this charlatan. Maybe the devil led them astray.

Haggard preached against homosexuality, although curiously not as forcefully as other prominent evangelical ministers. It is unlikely he found the masseur Mike Jones by thumbing through the Yellow Pages. Moreover, I doubt he was complaining to his wife about lower back pains before making those many trips to Denver for “massages”. Finding vice is now very convenient. My bet is that he simply used his local web browser and searched through the Denver Craigslist erotic services for men looking for men. To find the meth, perhaps he browsed the Craiglist casual encounters page and looked for homosexual men who wanted to go “skiing”.

There is no question that I do not like hypocrisy. I have railed against it with politicians, and it would be inconsistent of me not to decry preachers who are also charlatans. While we should be used to it by now, we should not be surprised when it happens. For none of us are perfect: we are all human beings.

Yes, we are all sinners, and that includes prominent evangelicals. We are all driven by itches that we need to scratch, but we know we should not. Therefore, while I castigate Haggard for his predictable hypocrisy, I also feel a small sliver of compassion for the man. For I know, like everyone on this planet, I have a few demonic itches lurking inside of me too. While a prominent part of me does not like having these itches, in one sense they give me comfort. They tell me that, thank goodness, I am no saint. I am a human being. Moreover, as a human being, I have free will. I can choose to “sin” if I want to. Having these itches means that I am free. It tells me that I am alive. It tells me that at least someone else cannot control some part of me. Perhaps these sins are tickets to our own personal destruction. Nevertheless, these sins might also be something else: messages asserting that there is an authentic human being inside of us. It is not necessarily God-like, but it is genuine 100% authentic fallible humanity.

Since we are human beings, sinning is in our nature. We can no more purge sin from our lives as we can change our eye color. However, sinning is not the only thing in which we can excel. We can also excel in loving. And in taking pleasure in food. And in drink. And in enjoying a good joke. And in swearing. And in having good, dirty sex. And in the pleasure of hearing an opera. And in feeling some vicarious satisfaction when a hypocrite like Haggard gets his just deserts. By accepting my humanity, I even have the freedom to feel defiled and loathsome about myself if I want to. All this freedom may not bring me happiness, which by its nature is elusive, but it at least it demonstrates that I have free will, and that I am someone entirely unique. I am not just alive, it means I feel alive.

So welcome to the human gene pool, Reverend Haggard. I am sure you genetically were programmed to excel in informing the rest of us on how we are sinners and how we can move from sin toward holiness. Still, you remain a sinner just like me. I take both pleasure and comfort in this fact. I do not want you to be the upright and moral man that, until a few days ago, you appeared to be to your congregation. I want you to be a human being with failings just like me.

I am a human. You are a human. We are sinners. We are brothers too. Perhaps instead of drowning yourself in a predictable orgy of repentance and confession by parroting someone else’s words and ideals, you should say some things that perhaps are authentically you instead. My guess is they would go something like this:

“I am a human being. Like the rest of you, I make mistakes. While I try to learn from my mistakes and become a better person, some part of me will always be a sinner. I accept that this is part of the human experience. It is part of who I am and always will be. I will do my best to live my life by being faithful to the person I really am, rather than the one I want you to perceive. While I have hurt many people, including my family, and myself I have also learned some important things about myself. I have learned what it means to be a human being. In some mysterious way, perhaps God wants me to embrace both my good and my bad sides, and be humbled by the complex, fallible, mysterious but embracing mystery that makes me a human being.”

I wish he would say this. I would chime in “Amen, brother!” That is what I would like him to say. Somehow, I doubt this will be forthcoming.

November 3rd, 2006 at 09:56pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | one comment
Tags: Christianity, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy

Why be happy?

Money cannot buy us love, the Beatles told us. Apparently, it cannot make us happy either. At least that is the conclusion of this article in today’s Washington Post.

A wealth of data in recent decades has shown that once personal wealth exceeds about $12,000 a year, more money produces virtually no increase in life satisfaction. From 1958 to 1987, for example, income in Japan grew fivefold, but researchers could find no corresponding increase in happiness.

I feel like the sirens should be wailing. Adam Smith should be rolling in his grave too. Could it be that our capitalist society is built on a foundation of sand? Wasn’t the whole purpose of gaining wealth for us to be happier? Would most of us really be happier, or at least as happy, grubbing at some minimum wage job and living in austere surroundings than we are in our McMansions with three cars in the driveway?

I am thinking of a man I see regularly where I work. I see him when I go home in the evenings. He is on the ground floor and he is pushing a wide broom across the tile floors. “Have a great evening sir,” he says to me without fail, with a big happy smile on his face. He is utterly sincere and the content sound in his voice is impossible to fake. Just down the hall a bit there is the guard I usually see in the morning as I enter our building. He is always exceedingly pleasant. He could even be described as perky. He is such a morning person. He greets me with a sincere, “How are you doing today, sir?” I always mumble something polite, but I just do not feel as full of life as he does. After he checks my badge, he tells me “Have a wonderful day,” and it is clear that he means it too. I say the same to him, and while I mean it intellectually, I do not feel it in my heart. I have other things on my brain other than how wonderful this guard’s day turns out. I head upstairs to my office to slog through a hundred or so emails. He hangs out in the lobby, checks badges and makes light conversation with the many people coming in and out. I have been admiring him for his contentment and wholeness, characteristics I still lack after 49 years. For this modest security guard also has something of a following among the women in the building. He flirts with them and they flirt back. He walks with a skip in his step. It is not that he is especially handsome; he is middle age like me. I suspect I make at least three times what he makes a year. Am I as happy as he is? I doubt it.

So here I am with my six figure income. Why am I not happier? I have been to Hawaii and enjoyed it immensely. In two days, I fly off to Paris with my family. That will make me even happier, right? I will have experienced more of this world. I do not know what kind of vacation, if any, the broom pusher in the lobby at work will be getting this year. I imagine pushing the broom is just one of two or three jobs that he is shuffling. I have time to exercise after work and even to blog. I hire people to cut my lawn. Maybe his idea of downtime is going to church, or bowling with friends. Yet, I must, I should be happier, right? Ain’t necessarily so.

I often ask myself, is this it? While I will not get into details, I realize we spend a lot of money in my family trying to make ourselves happier. For example, there is mental illness in our family. We do the modern things to improve the situation. Certain unnamed family members may or may not be on antidepressants and may or may not be talking regularly with therapists. Would we have been happier if we had less choice and opportunity than we do? Was our pursuit of prosperity the very thing that led us to having more unhappiness in our lives? Consequently, is this why my family now needs frequent consultations with mental health experts?

I appear to have all the things by which one measures success and happiness. I have a wife and daughter who love me. I have a job I truly enjoy and which fully engages me. I have a comfortably sized house that is well maintained and keeps appreciating in value. My nest egg grows every year and after talking to my financial adviser last week, I know it will grow even faster in the future. I myself earn more than twice the average national household income. Yet what fixates me is not what I enjoy about life, but those things that really should not matter at all. You might say I spent thirty percent of my time obsessing about the five percent of my life that I feel is out of kilter. I cannot be happy unless I am happy all the time. Otherwise, some part of me remains miserable. Otherwise, my life feels cheapened and not optimized somehow.

Perhaps happiness comes from letting that five percent go. Perhaps happiness is simply a state of mind. Perhaps it comes from the willingly suspending disbelief. Instead, I am fixated on what might happen. If someone earns $12,000 a year, he likely does not have any health insurance. Yet according to this article, he is as happy as I am. Yet for some illogical reason I feel I must be happier because I have health insurance and they probably do not. If they get seriously sick, they are in serious financial straights. They can even die. I am more likely to hang around. So I will be alive to do what? I will still probably do what I do now, and keep spending thirty percent of my time obsessing about the five percent of my life that is not optimized for my personal happiness.

The angels are whispering to me, “To be happy, let it go.” Let go of that five percent. It is beginning to dawn on me that the reason I obsess on the missing five percent is that all my life I have been in a Darwinian struggle for survival. Survival of the fittest is hardwired into my brain. I cannot escape from this pattern because it is integrated into my character the same way my irises have always been blue. However, improving the odds of my survival does not necessarily make me happier. It should make me less anxious. It is more likely to make me neurotic. Perhaps that is the reason my family spend so much money on doctors and therapists. Yet improving our odds of surviving will not keep us from dying in time either. However, there may be some illusionary satisfaction from keeping the wolves outside the gate. The happiest people though seem unconcerned that there may be wolves at the gate.

Yes, it was Paul McCartney who crooned, “Money can’t buy me love”. Moreover, didn’t he just turn 64? Didn’t this song suggest that no one could really love him when he turned 64 because at that age he was old and therefore unlovable? Well, maybe Linda would still love him had she survived. Is it just coincidence then that now at age 64 we find in the news that Paul divorced his baby doll wife? Heather Mills now has a reputed ten million pounds from Sir Paul to help her find happiness somewhere and with someone else. Presumably, her happiness no longer takes the form of spending time with a rich senior citizen.

I do know who is happy though. It does not appear to be Sir Paul, and it is not me at least for a significant chunk of my day (although logically I should be very happy). Whom do I know who is happy? I see him many days pushing a broom. Yet for the life of me, I do not know whether such happiness is worthy of aspiration, or delusional. Survival of the fittest may not actually make me all that much happier, but human history suggests that maybe it is a worthier aspiration.

July 3rd, 2006 at 10:00pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | no comments
Tags: Happiness, Love, Money