Occam’s Razor

Destiny’s Unseen Hands

Cosmic forces are pushing me. Yeah, I know it sounds nuts, but it is true. All I know is that something is out there. It is messing with me, hopefully for the good. I do not know how I know, but somehow I know that I was sent on this journey called life, and I know that I have a mission. While I do not know what my mission is, I can infer much of it. If I stray too far from my apparently programmed path, unseen forces will quickly align me back toward the same path.

And it is not just me. I think that it is all of us. I am starting to question just how much free will I really have. I believe that I was meant to come into this life and tackle certain issues. I do not know if I was meant to actually solve them in this life, but I think I am expected to keep earnestly plugging away at them. The means by which to solve them seem largely elusive, which makes the whole process feel very frustrating. Nor can I fully articulate what the issues are. What I perceive my “issues” to be are I think symptoms of some higher issues whose names I cannot identify. The meaning of my life is like a partially constructed jigsaw puzzle. If I can snap a piece or two into the puzzle then I have a better understanding of what the puzzle in time may reveal.

Here is what I have learned in my own situation. You can run, but you cannot hide from your mission. Whatever “it” is, you must work on it. For example, let us suppose that you are unhappy in your marriage. You subsequently divorce, thinking that your spouse’s behavior was the problem. As a divorcee, you are likely to find that there is some underlying issue related to the marriage that still gnaws at you, and it was not your ex-wife. Rather your ex-wife merely brought to the surface some issues inside yourself so you could grapple with them. Perhaps you will ache in loneliness in a degree commensurate with the misery you experienced in the marriage. Perhaps you will seek out someone who you think has different characteristics, only to find that when you remarry that you are facing the same issues all over again. You may even find yourself ping ponging from one relationship to the next looking for the perfect relationship minus the detritus of the last one. Ultimately, you are likely to find that you have issues, your partner has issues, and sanctuary simply does not exist.

Taking overt actions to address specific symptoms do not necessarily solve these hidden issues and agendas that lie within ourselves. At best, actions that address symptoms act like an aspirin and dull the pain. Sometimes they make things much worse. However, the underlying issue remains. The wound remains open.

The baffling parts are figuring out what the real issues are. If you can articulate the underlying issues then you have the challenge of creating a way to address them. Perhaps with a very good therapist you can in time figure out what your problems truly are. However, that does not necessarily mean that you can solve them. No therapist can inhabit your body. At best, they can view your internal life through a translucent pane of glass. They depend on you to faithfully articulate your feelings. If you are equally baffled then it is unlikely that they will be of much lasting help.

So you may feel like I do: that I am grasping at straws. While the status quo may at times feel very painful, it seems like outside forces want you to inhabit this zone. For it seems that we can only learn our most valuable lessons through pain. Progress, when it is made at all, seems to come from embracing the pain rather than avoiding it. This is difficult for most of us to do because it feels so counterintuitive.

One of my issues is control. I like things ordered and predictable. I do not like surprises. I do not like ambiguity. I like to think my life is in reasonable control. I take satisfaction at the end of the month paying all my bills and seeing my net worth slowly creeping up. I want to extend this control into all aspects of my life. Yet it is ultimately futile. For control is really an illusion. Moreover, I cannot really control anything other than myself. I cannot control my wife, daughter or cat. While I like the illusion of having control over myself, in reality even control over myself is an illusion. For I am not just me. I am many beings and aspects at once. Most of the time the logical side is dominant, but sometimes the emotional side takes control. My brain, like yours, is like a massive parallel processor where multiple threads compete for control over my mind and body. Therefore, I think one of my meta-issue is not control, but learning how to give up control. For me death is so disturbing not necessarily because it means the loss of my self. It is disturbing because it exists in a domain beyond my control yet through which I must pass. Perhaps it is this knowledge that is at the root of religion’s popularity.

On rare occasion a puzzle piece does fall into place. For much of my life I felt intellectually intimidated. While I was above average intellectually, I was no mental giant. I perceived myself as less smart than those around me, particularly many of my siblings. I wanted to have a job that was more intellectually challenging and where I got to work on larger issues that had a broader impact. I had a few brushes with failure that suggested this was my natural state. For example, I lost my job in 1988. A few years earlier, I had tried to take a computer course in college and failed. Working in the information systems field without a related degree made me feel vulnerable. Eventually I determined that I had to work up my courage and succeed by earning a graduate degree. I knew it would have to be done while keeping a full time job, caring for my elementary school daughter and keeping my marriage together. Yet I had to do it to achieve balance within myself.

I eventually achieved my goal, much to my relief. The degree did help me achieve a more rewarding career. However, what it really did was give me some confidence in my own abilities to solve a very difficult personal issue. This particular feeling of angst that had permeated about twenty years of my life wholly disappeared. Nevertheless, clearly many other underlying issues remain to be tackled.

I need to figure out what these remaining issues really are. One thing I do know from much experience: I cannot walk away from them for they will continue to shadow me throughout life unless I somehow resolve them. So although I usually don’t know how to tackle them, I must keep making rather fumbling attempts to do so. If I choose to do nothing, I know that destiny will intervene.

January 15th, 2006 at 04:17pm Posted by Mark | Metaphysics | 3 comments

The Pope Wears Prada for Christmas

It may be time for Pope Benedict XVI to go to confession. Greed after all is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas warned Christians about the mortal sin of greed. “It is a sin directly against one’s neighbor, since one man cannot over-abound in external riches, without another man lacking them… it is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, inasmuch as man contemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things.”

I realize of course that a somewhat higher spiritual authority, Jesus himself, told us not to judge others. However, I am not a Christian, at least not in the traditional sense. I shall not lob a stone Pope Benedict’s way, but I will send a raised eyebrow. For if not a sin, this new sign of covetousness by the Pope is disturbing.

For as you may have read in the paper, the Pope has a fashion sense. Pope John Paul II did not. John Paul believed in off-white and skullcaps. It was pretty much the same vestments every day. Benedict must have tried on the off-white robes and found them not quite to his liking. He seems to want something dressier. His shiny red Prada shoes seem to be making a statement: there is a new pope in town and he’s not a John Paul II clone. This new pope will not join the voluminous list of popes who only stood out in a crowd because their off white was surrounded by so much cardinal red.

If it were just the shiny red shoes perhaps he might be forgiven. Alas, last week Pope Benedict also showed up in St. Peter’s Square in a fur-trimmed stocking cap. Moreover, he has been seen wearing designer Gucci sunglasses. In addition, in a recent visit to the statue of the Madonna in Spain he appeared in a bright red cape trimmed in ermine. Avarice, that’s what it is. Greed, covetousness and avarice: he appears to be guilty of all of them.

Benedict sees himself as a classical pope. In those nostalgic days before Protestantism the pope was not just the spiritual leader of all Christianity, he was also seen as something of a defacto uber-king. It was okay for a pope to be opulent. Indeed, popes were not just opulent; many were also corrupt to the core. Others had wives, mistresses, extended families and bastards. The custom of priestly celibacy did not evolve until the Middle Ages. With such power and influence there was little point for a pope to spend his life pretending to be miserable.

While it is unlikely that Benedict will diverge with his predecessors’ inclinations toward priestly celibacy, he does appear to be taking the first few tentative steps toward emulating a richer sort of personal life. This fisher of men seems to be appealing to a higher-class clientele. Perhaps there is some logic to his approach. While the poor will be always, it seems like most of the poor that can be converted to Catholicism are already members. Europeans seem to have moved on beyond organized religion. That churches survive in Europe today at all is largely due to governments refusing to let them die. Yes, countries such as Germany prop up their churches with direct subsidies.

Even so, Christianity has lost much of its appeal in Western Europe. In today’s Washington Post, for example, we learn that the Church of England has closed 1,700 churches since 1970. While 24 million Britain citizens were baptized into the Church of England, only 5 million can be found in the pews on a given Sunday. In England, churches are being rented out for rock climbing and acrobatic exhibitions. For many Catholics in Western Europe, the only time they are likely to see the inside of a church is when they attend a marriage or a funeral. Otherwise, they simply cannot be bothered. Religion is no longer trendy; it is so Old World.

Perhaps that is why the Pope is wearing Prada. Maybe he realizes he must make some tiny compromise with the 21st Century. After all, it is hard to bring in churchgoers if they cannot identify with you. Many ordinary Western Europeans and Americans are now rich beyond Jesus’ wildest dreams. Moreover, it seems they like their material comforts just fine and do not feel too disturbed by their apparent lack of spirituality. What was that advice that Jesus gave them? Give away all their possessions to the poor, live with no thought of tomorrow and follow Jesus? I don’t think so! They will part with their Land Rovers, Pilates classes and Caramel Chocolate Frappuccino Blended Crème coffees when Hell freezes over. But hey, if the Pope can wear Prada and nifty Gucci sunglasses, maybe he is not as uncool as they thought. Perhaps they will give him a listen.

So perhaps there is marketing acumen with Pope Benedict’s recent fashion statements. I have to wonder if one of his first actions as pope was to call in a Madison Avenue public relations firm. If he had then doubtless they would have recommended an image makeover. Perhaps ermine lined capes and fashion sunglasses were their top recommendations.

Still, you have to wonder what the late Pope John Paul II would have thought of his fashion statements. I get the feeling he would be giving him a jaundiced eye. As Pope John Paul II saw it, the truth never changes. Consistency has been the Catholic Church’s main selling point for two thousand years. For if Pope Benedict is to give in to marketing pressure what is next? Loosening of celibacy requirements for priests? Women priests? A pragmatic stand toward birth control? The devout Catholic mind reels.

While I am sure a pope never has to do more than raise their hand before a lackey attends to his every need, the Church has invested too much in the marketing of a pope as a spiritual creature wholly indifferent to the earthly desires. Were I a Catholic perhaps I would advise Pope Benedict to consider the message that he is sending.

December 25th, 2005 at 09:12pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

A Modest Proposal: Bye Bye Vatican

Warning: people of sound mind who can separate fantasy from reality may read the following entry. The rest of you: out of here now!

I am not an evil person but I do have occasional evil thoughts. As I noted the pictures of black smoke rising from the Vatican today, indicating that it may take a while for the College of Cardinals to elect a new pope, the evil thought struck me: They’re all together in one place. If there is an ideal time to kill the Catholic Church once and for all, now is the time.

Yes it’s an evil thought. Just thinking it probably means I am doomed to spend eternity in Hell. But for some of us, particularly estranged ex-Catholics with axes to grind, the idea has a certain appeal. Those who suffered from the pedophilia problem in the church probably have no love for the institution and would just as soon have it banished from the planet. And then there are people like me who after years of psychotherapy should have forgiven the Church, but really haven’t. We should be able to forgive the heaping doses of guilt, the corporal punishment we witnessed in its parochial schools, the shame we felt when we wacked off reading Playboy magazines, the humiliation seemingly sanctioned by the Holy Father himself, or just the incredible over the top mysticism of the institution. For some reason life threw us into the toxic Catholic zone. If not exactly Hell on earth, it was a particularly miserable part of purgatory that we inhabited.

What if we could just do away with it? What if in one act of retribution we could finally get even? Clearly now we have a unique opportunity. Papal conclaves don’t happen every day. But they’re all there! All 115 voting cardinals in one place: Vatican City. There they are pondering which one of them, all pretty much handpicked by John Paul II for their conservative and bizarre otherworldly tendencies, gets to be the next one to wear the white uniform, the funky white hat and the cool ring. It’s not like they are likely to come to their senses; they long ago surrendered their minds to mysticism. Smelling salts won’t knock any common sense into them either. The cardinals will doubtless elect someone a lot like John Paul II: completely out of touch with the real world but with a passion to move the Catholic Universe back into the primordial ooze. First up on the next pope’s agenda: repealing that little concession that the world was round after all.

Perhaps rabid secularists surrounding the Vatican hundreds deep and refusing to let the Cardinals out until they elect a Pope with some lick of common sense could do it. But that’s really that’s wistful thinking. As Bill Frist considers using the nuclear option in the U.S. Senate, perhaps it’s time for the legions of disgruntled ex-Catholics to consider our own nuclear option. We need one neutron bomb in a hurry. Why a neutron bomb? Because we want to kill the Cardinals, not damage Michelangelo’s glorious paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and all the other precious art work. We appreciate good religious art. We’re not freaking Taliban.

Okay, a neutron bomb might be a bit much. A couple frescos might get damaged. So perhaps we need to hire the Russian Government. Their clever strategy in dealing with a Chechnyan terrorist attack was to gas the terrorists hoping to immobilize them. They caused lots of innocent hostages to die, but they were able to kill all the terrorists. But still this seems a bit inhumane. While we’d like to send all the Cardinals to live on an island somewhere, someone might discover them inadvertently. So perhaps the best solution is just to use gas to knock them out. Then of course would come the lethal injections. Yes, there would be a 115 or so dead men in red robes when we were done. But they would be with Jesus.

The upside would be that the Catholic Church could be gone for good. Or am I being optimistic? Perhaps the cardinals who were not allowed to participate because they were too old would select one of themselves to be pope. I don’t think there is anything in the latest Vatican coda that would make it legal, but it is a possibility. So perhaps the institution would survive anyhow. But maybe, just maybe, whatever church emerged would be a grounded in reality.

Okay, enough fantasizing. Very likely the Catholic Church will continue to hang around. Like an unwanted guest at a party, it just won’t leave. But it appears that it’s been a pretty rude guest and lots of others are leaving the party. We can see it in statistics that, here in America at least, only 25% of Catholics bother to go to weekly Mass. Or in places like Mexico and Brazil, long bastions of Catholicism, which are losing parishioners every day to up and coming evangelical churches. While electing another out of touch pope won’t kill the Church, the church is slowly killing itself. Not much blood is being let with all those self-inflicted cuts to its body (probably being done in memory of Jesus’ passion: cue Mel Gibson) but collectively it’s got one major psychosis. And just as most of these teenagers don’t usually die from their behavior, the Catholic Church is unlikely to either. But we can expect it will continue to move toward deeper dysfunction in the decades ahead.

I’m no longer a Catholic and I don’t pray, but if I were a praying Catholic I’d be praying that God would knock some common sense into those 115 cardinals. I’d pray for a miracle.

April 18th, 2005 at 10:03pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | 2 comments

The Game of Generations

Most of what happens in any generation is just noise. Events that seem monumental in our time, such as September 11, 2001 will be but a few sentences in our history books in just a couple hundred years. We’ll have moved on. You will be dead. Your children will be dead. Your great great great grandchildren will be grappling with their own problems, small and large. The players will have changed but human drama will continue in its macro and micro levels as long as our species survives.

What endures? What truly survives from generation to generation? After all for the most part we are an impatient race. Tearing down and rebuilding is something we do almost by default. If life doesn’t seem to suit us then we will reconfigure it until it does suit us.

Our myopia on the present makes it difficult to predict what will matter about the past to future generations. But we understand innately that the values we teach the next generation probably has the most enduring effect on future generations. After all, ideas and knowledge will change but guiding principles in life successfully handed down from generation to generation have a sense of true immortality. So for many of us the ultimate meaning in life simply comes down to successfully transmitting our values to the next generation.

As I pointed out elsewhere, it is unlikely that billions of people would choose a particular religion of their own free will. It is comparatively simple to instill our values and faith in our children. As proselytizers discover, it is much harder job of selling beliefs to those outside the faith. That’s a lot trickier, since the supply of people who are open to a change in belief today is pretty small. Given the reality that when the current supply of savages is so low, market share is gained by religions that emphasize the virtue of larger families. Since both Catholics and Mormons have no qualms about large families it is reasonable to expect that they will gain more influence and mind share in the future. Most likely religions like mine (Unitarian Universalism) will continue to be marginal. (I’m not sure I am acquainted with any UU family where there are more than two children in the family.) So beliefs like Christianity and Islam will pick up steam while those with little traction like Zorasterism disappear altogether. The Shakers believe sexual intercourse is sinful. Not surprisingly their religion is almost extinct.

So the game is about faith, but really it’s about faith minus the mysticism: values. In reality faith is irrelevant. This may be news to many of the devout. There may or may not be an afterlife, but the true purpose of a faith is not to prepare people for the hereafter, but to instill guiding principles in the current generation that make life endurable at worse, and inspiring at best. Values are these guiding principles. Values are the energy that does the work of controlling human behavior at macro level.

That is why values discussions permeate our politics. While even the most conservative Christian in Congress would love it if all Americans shared his religious beliefs, what matters more is that they share his values. So he affiliates with people with similar but not identical values. Over time these values are manifest in what we call political parties. And inside each political party are subfactions that agree on the larger goals but are anxious to promote their particular values inside a receptive community. And sometimes it works. Twenty years ago libertarian principles were almost unknown in the Republican Party. Today we have a Republican president promoting libertarian values like private social security accounts.

So in a sense modern politics has become tribalism at the macro level: it’s my sets of beliefs against your sets of beliefs. Every generation in every country fights the battle on many levels. It takes many generations to see who the winner is. At least in America we don’t usually resort to violence to get others to agree with us. The current war in Iraq is, of course, the obvious current and dangerous exception.

What I find interesting is that the process of transmitting the values really says nothing about the correctness of the underlying beliefs and values. Instead the process only demonstrates the efficacy of the process itself: how well it moves a set of values from generation to generation. If a hundred years from now America is the neo-conservative paradise people like Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz are promoting, all it really says is that their sales strategy worked better than the others. Their values may not be empirically correct but they are correct in the sense that they have thrived while others have withered. Value Darwinism succeeded. (One way to possibly get values to thrive is to force them on people through law. Not surprisingly that’s why issues like abortion rights become flashpoints.)

The game continues like a game of tennis where each set lasts a generation. Most people don’t even see it happening at all because it generally happens only a glacial generational pace. Occasionally though monumental changes can happen very rapidly. Communism is an example of such a radical change. The old rules of the social order (serf vs. nobility, worker vs. capitalist) broke down rather abruptly and the serfs took command. Social structures that facilitated the old system, like the Russian Greek Orthodox Church, disappeared, or at least seem to disappear. As the Communists learned, religion is a meme that, if it can be erased at all, requires many generations. After all we all have the same sense of foreboding that is inherent in our mortality. Religion provides a natural solace to the angst of death.

Perhaps then it is our mortality and the certainty of death that makes the promotion of values so terribly important for each generation. Knowing that, as the Catholics say at the Sacrament of Confirmation, “You are made of dust and to dust we shall return”, it behooves us to get off the dime and actively push our values. So we tend to respect those who are forceful in pushing their beliefs, even if we don’t always like the beliefs they are promoting. While some of us might like to have had parents that emphasized the value of kicking back and living a life of leisure, it doesn’t feel a natural fit. Because we are mortal we feel life as fleeting and precious. The older we get the more fleeting it feels and the more important values become to us. While I don’t consider myself old at 48, I have heard from many people far my senior that leaving a legacy becomes a driving goal as they age. Otherwise our lives often feel meaningless.

So we are all caught in a whirlwind of values that I believe have their roots in our inherent mortality and the impermanence of all things in general. But perhaps if we were wiser we’d take the time to examine our own values and determine if they truly ennoble our species. Do our values offer a true solution, or are they simply a response to the angst that comes from our mortality? Perhaps instead of growing up as a species, value transmission becomes a form of societal thumb sucking that is passed from generation to generation. If so will we ever grow up?

March 18th, 2005 at 09:17pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | no comments

Religion a la carte

I would think after thousands of years this might not be a radical idea. But it’s time to say that a lot of religious theology is bogus, wrong and hurtful. Oh yes, I know, it’s in your Bible, or other significant holy text. Therefore it is true. Besides, your faith informs you that the nonsensical and unworkable is somehow correct and true.

Bullshit. As the late Ann Landers would say, “It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee”.

If you are unwise enough to think that the Bible is the complete and consistent word of God then, my friend, you are in for a dysfunctional life if you take the time to actually read the Bible. I’m not stupid enough to say there is not a lot of wisdom in the Bible. There is. But there is also a lot of trash. There are also a lot of ideas that made sense two or three thousand years ago but make no sense today. It seems we try to read too much into the Bible and our other holy books. We project our needs and inadequacies into them and hope they will provide solution and solace to all life’s persistent questions. We would probably be a lot better off and happier if we were reading pop psychology books like Getting The Love You Want by Harville Hendrix. Oh, and we’re doing that too. That’s one reason that pop psychology books are flying off the shelves of bookstores. Because apparently our holy books and ministers can’t give the answers to all of life’s persistent and complex questions.

Just suppose we chose restaurants the way we choose religions. What would it mean if we would only dine at a McDonalds or a Wendy’s? Even if we upscaled our dining choice to say, Applebees, would it be good for us to eat off the same menu all the time? But that’s what many of us do with our spiritual life. We find (or more typically we are born into) a religion. Often it finds a way to grab us for life as children: through parental reinforcement, through Sunday school, and through the favorite method of many mainstream religions: reinforced communal guilt allegedly sanctioned by God. The result? Many of us enter adulthood with wacky and skewed ways of looking at the world. It’s hard to see things clearly because we have not walked far out of our communal tribe on religious matters. Because we eat only McDonalds of course their French fries are the best, and only a moron or apostate would consume a Whopper when a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder with Cheese completely satisfies the appetite. And besides God, through our clergy and holy books, tell us it’s true.

Oh I know, how abhorrent and secular of me to compare lofty religions with fast food chains. If this alone doesn’t condemn me to Hell then I can at least count on a few eons in purgatory for such Voltarian thoughts. But I’m not saying that religions are necessarily bad or evil. I’m saying large parts of it are often BS. It’s time to say so out loud, and noisily, particularly to our religious leaders. And it’s time for us to stop shopping inside our insular religious communities and to check out other faiths to see if they ring truer. But why stop there? It is likely that no one faith can really speak to us. So I propose we build our religions piecemeal.

Yes, I know. We in the laity are spiritual morons. We need our so-called religious leaders to discern God’s truth for us. They after all went to seminary and we didn’t. And so we get shining examples like Pope John Paul II who, while he clearly has some excellent ideas about living in brotherly love, is also busy peddling shop worn and dangerous ideas that, if practiced conscientiously would doom our race to extinction. A couple examples: contraception in any form is sinful. It is better to transmit HIV by not using a condom than to sin by using a condom and likely prevent its transmission. This is not to pick on the Catholics since pretty much every religion has some of these dangerous ideas. But with John Paul’s health very much in the news and with my roots in Catholicism these jumped to mind.

Perhaps those of us who claim to be Christian could start with the Jefferson Bible. It’s a heavily pruned Bible consisting of just the words and story of Jesus and leaving out the rest. Of course it still takes a leap of faith to assume these “words” were actually spoken by Jesus. Men who had never personally met Jesus wrote the gospels. But at least this way the Christian doesn’t have to get messed up trying to integrate the Old and New Testaments. Because many preachers do not we get a lot of cognitive dissonance: we must love all our neighbors and turn the other cheek, but it’s okay to persecute and condemn homosexuals for their alleged sinfulness.

I took my pruning sheers to the Bible long ago. Out went Leviticus and Deuteronomy. I kept in the Psalms. They are good stuff. Much of what was written by the Apostle Paul: snipped. He never met Jesus. Paul seemed all about establishing rules. Jesus was much more a big picture sort of prophet. And of course Revelations had to go. It reads more like some lunatic’s ravings than something inspired.

Oh the apostasy, but the same thing could be done with the Quran, the Book of Mormon and pretty much any holy book out there. Whenever an idea is raised that clearly has been proven not to work let’s take it out, or at least footnote it that practicing this idea has been proven not to work. When it is a value that has demonstrated relevance and helped mankind as a whole, leave it in. So by all means, highlight the Sermon on the Mount.

We do ourselves and the rest of the religious world a disfavor by not speaking out against those aspects of modern faith that are hurtful and destructive. Where possible members should try to change the course of the denomination. We see these today in efforts by the Episcopalian Church to be more inclusive of homosexuals in its ministries and congregations. (Too bad the Anglican Community has effectively sent the Episcopalians to the woodshed, basically telling them, “Don’t show up at our decision making meetings for the next three years.”) Where not possible, and the Catholic Church definitely comes to mind, members need to be brave and walk out. For example many Catholics find the idea of requiring priests to be only men, single and celibate ridiculous, unworkable and outdated. They would be much more at home with the Episcopalians. Aside from the gender of their priests I couldn’t tell the difference between Catholic and Episcopal services anyhow.

It may take generations but eventually we might get the religions that are viable, workable and effective. But it also requires nerve from many of us. If we hold a value in our heart to be true then we must not be afraid to express it and to live our lives consistent with those values. When we manifest them in actions they will take on meaning.

February 27th, 2005 at 12:07pm Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | 2 comments

What Spirituality Means to Me

This was the topic of my covenant group meeting last night. It seemed an odd topic to spend ninety minutes or so discussing in a church basement.

Being Unitarian Universalists we all had different ideas of what spirituality meant. Many UUs are spiritually vacant. This is after all a denomination that attracts the unchurched and the left-brain dominant types. A typical UU congregation might be a quarter to half full of atheists, agnostics or people with no particular belief in God. So asking a UU what is spirituality might be like asking someone blind from birth to describe colors.

Nonetheless many UUs are spiritual in their own way. Upon reflection I realized I probably was a spiritual creature, just not in the traditional sense of the world. For me spirituality has almost nothing to do with religion. But for most Americans I suspect it is impossible to not talk about spirituality without mentioning religion.

When I am spiritual I generally feel a sense of utter peace, an absence of worry and contentment. I am intimately plugged in to a larger reality that I can neither name nor describe but which is still absolutely real. The cares of the physical world seem to leave me. I feel not just at peace, but I often feel a subtle or even overt joy. I often feel a sense of wonder, and sometimes I sense the fantastic. I hesitate to call this God. To me it is simply that which is normally not perceived.

I have occasionally had spiritual feelings in churches. But it hasn’t happened in any service that I have ever attended. Yet I have felt moments of it inside cathedrals. Some years ago when I took a group of religious education students to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception here in Washington DC I felt spiritual. Cathedrals are radically altered spaces designed to skew reality and suggest the supernatural. Their gothic arches, their spires, their stained glass, their darkness, their votive candles, their people whispering their prayers, their polished floors and their intricate statues had the effect of making me feel spiritual. I am sure they are designed that way. There is a certain majesty to a cathedral that is difficult to match elsewhere. It is hard for me to feel the real world when in every direction the effect is surreal, ornate and majestic.

As marvelous as cathedrals are they are not nearly as spiritual to me as nature in her finest. Once or twice a year I arrive home to see a spectacular sunset displayed in all its finery with my house as the foreground. It awes me that such exquisite beauty can be a result of such complete randomness. In my travels the beauty of Hawaii is so far unsurpassed. But I have felt similar feelings in other places I’ve visited. Some examples: the Canyon de Chelley in Arizona and watching a plethora of stars arranged against an obsidian background from the back of a cruise ship far out in the Atlantic. But I have also felt spiritual at certain moments during a long and sustained bike ride, with the wind whistling in my ears and coursing through my nostrils. I feel almost attached to the nature around me.

The most spiritual moment of my life so far came from witnessing my daughter’s birth. She was delivered Caesarian section in a cold operating room and pulled out feet first from my wife’s steaming womb. I was humbled. I was awed. I was scared. I was joyful. I was crying. And I loved her with an intensity I have never felt before or since and we didn’t even know each other.

But was this spiritual or just a wash of emotions? For me her birth brought home to me the miracle of life and reproduction. I hesitate to say I experienced God, but I can say it was brought home to me what an amazing place our universe it.

I find spirituality in strange places sometimes. I find it in my cat, who sits now contentedly on my lap and purrs. He too is a miracle. Through him I realize that other species see and react to the world in their own unique ways. When I pet him I realize that not only does it feel good, but also that we truly love each other. We have a mutually supportive relationship.

I often feel like we are seeing at most .001% of reality. We have senses but they are extremely limiting. We cannot see infrared or ultraviolet rays but they are real enough. Most of us are only dully aware of the other life around us, or how utterly pervasive life is on all levels. My backyard is in many ways a botanical wonder, not because I have a huge and diverse garden but because it is such a complex system of its own. On one level it is just a lawn. But on another level there a thousands of species, plants, insects and animals living back there, all mutually dependent on each other for survival. Occasionally I may roll in the grass. But what a different perspective the universe must be to a centipede crawling through my lawn. I wonder what the grub experiences pushing its way through my soil. I wonder what it must be like to be the blacktop on my driveway when the rain falls on it. To get through life we generally tune out such thoughts and think them nonsensical or pointless.

To some extent I think even the rocks in my soil are alive. I just see them living on vast cosmic timescales. Over millennium they too move. I wonder what it is to be a rock under the ground, and to feel the moisture of the soil and the rain permeate it or move around it. I wonder just what life is anyhow. I think it exists on so many different levels but it is only the prison of our own existence that makes it hard to see.

I feel this connectedness of all things. I think on some level we all do. I feel a universe that is alive and multidimensional across space and time. When this connectedness permeates me as a presence, when I feel in touch with its harmony and vibration that’s when I feel spiritual.

That’s what spirituality means to me.

November 16th, 2004 at 09:21pm Posted by Mark | Metaphysics | no comments

Why do proselytizers think I am a moron?

As you may know I spent a week at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Since it’s in the middle of nowhere I never went off campus during my six days there. Let’s face it the nightlife in Shepherdstown left something to be desired. So my car sat there collecting dust and pollen. When I finally checked out on Friday morning I found a little brochure “Have you heard of the FOUR SPIRITUAL LAWS?” on my windshield. I thought for a moment maybe it was left by the same lady who wanted me to emigrate. But then I realized it couldn’t be her, because this brochure was inviting me to the Calvary Road Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. And that’s in the United States.

So this time it wasn’t the anti-Bush bumper sticker that got someone’s attention, it was my Unitarian Universalist bumper sticker instead. And this zealot must have been wise enough to grasp the obvious: I was (gasp) unsaved!

This was an accurate assumption. Where this proselytizer went wrong is that, like most of them, he or she assumed I was a moron. Apparently he or she assumed I had gone through 47 years of living and had not heard the “good news” about Jesus Christ. I must have been living in a cave somewhere all this time practicing Zorasterism or something. I flipped through their publication against my better judgment. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Jesus apparently was the one and only way I was ever going to get to heaven. Without the big J guy I was apparently hell bound.

As someone who was born and raised Catholic this was not news to me. In fact you would have to be either a very recent immigrant from some very remote country or have suffered a recent bout of amnesia to not possibly know that Christians believe Jesus is the only way to get into heaven. And yet this very obvious bit of knowledge doesn’t seem to penetrate the minds of these people. They assume those of us unsaved are unwashed and ignorant heathen.

But they must have been clever enough to know that I might be a skeptic and might need proof in their assertion that Jesus is the only way to get into heaven. Thankfully by page 7 of the brochure there it was: John 14:6. “Jesus saith unto him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me.’”

Case closed! Hey, it’s in the Bible! There is of course the wee little problem that first you have to believe in the Bible before you will accept it as the word of God. And that’s the problem with this little brochure. If it is trying to convince me it is doing a damned poor job. So I would like to say to this member of the Calvary Road Baptist Church: If I knocked on your door and showed you a passage from the Koran that only through obedience to Allah’s will can you gain eternal life would this convince you to abandon Christianity?

Somehow I think not. Then why on earth would you think this sort of logic would convince me?

And before you leave brochures everywhere, how about learning a little about comparative religions first? Would it hurt to learn more about Unitarian Universalism other than “they’re not really Christians”? If you took a few minutes to explore the UUA web site you’d realize we’re not spiritual morons. We’re complex creatures comfortable with ambiguity. We celebrate religious pluralism and your right to practice your version of Christianity. In fact in my own way I have already been proselytizing. Yes, I took a class of Unitarian Universalists children to a few Christian churches as part of our yearlong religious education class. We also took our students to a Jewish temple, discussed paganism, went through the beliefs of Muslims and even practiced praying to Mecca six times a day. In short we encourage our youth to explore all aspects of religion and spirituality. We don’t claim Unitarian Universalism is the right religion for anyone. One of our few principles is never to proselytize. So don’t worry, we won’t be leaving brochures on your windshield telling you your only way to true happiness is by coming to a UU service and drinking too much coffee after the service at our long winded social hours. We respect you too much as a human being to shove our beliefs in your face.

Yes, I know you have to do it. Your faith informs you that you have to bring the good news of salvation to us heathens. Well news flash: your tactics suck. I don’t know how many people you actually get to come to Jesus from all these silly brochures. But I have to think that any that you do get must be morons, and if so I guess you and Jesus are welcome to them.

As for the rest of us, we’ve been around the block. We know about Jesus. We know about The Buddha. We know about Allah. We know about atheists, wiccans and the 50% of Americans who are “religious” or “spiritual” but can’t be bothered to go to church on Sundays. If you expect to win our respect you got to do it the old fashioned way. You have to earn it. You have to treat us like adults and respect our opinions. You have to behave in a way that is consistent with the deity you claim to emulate. And here’s another news flash: most Christians are about as Christ-like as Attila the Hun. Instead of praying in their closets they act like the moneychangers at the temple. Instead of turning the other cheek they cheer on President Bush when he unilaterally wages war on sovereign countries. If you want to earn my respect, don’t proselytize and act a lot more like Jimmy Carter. Let me see your faith manifest in good works. Let me feel I am your peer, not some unenlightened and ignorant fool. Then perhaps we can have a meaningful conversation and I can learn where you are truly coming from. And perhaps your mind would open just a crack to appreciate my perspective too.

Maybe we would both grow a little as a result. I think Jesus would approve. Meanwhile insulting brochures like yours only make me gag. Rest assured I won’t go anywhere near the Calvary Road Baptist Church. If you treat me like a moron you earn only my contempt.

September 1st, 2004 at 09:37pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | one comment

Texas: Unitarian Universalism isn’t a Religion

It seems that the state of Texas (or at least its comptroller) think that a religion is not really a religion if it “does not have one system of belief.” Therefore, we Unitarian Universalists are not really a religion, and we should be taxed liked any other entity in Texas.

Oh really? This is news to the hundreds of thousands of us who are UUs in America. I imagine presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, Unitarians of their age, are rolling in their graves.

Here’s what the UUs believe: each person has the right to decide for himself or herself what they believe. We don’t claim to have the answers. We don’t feel people need to be coerced or persuaded. We are one of a very few number of religions that does not require the profession of a creed as a condition of membership. We celebrate all religions and think there is some meaning and value in all of them. But above all we believe in the individual right of conscience. We welcome all. You can believe in God or not. You can believe in multiple gods. You can be agnostic or pantheistic. A lot of UUs are multireligious. For example we have wiccans in our church who practice regularly in a sacred circle they created out in the woods on our church property. They also attend services. We usually celebrate Christmas, and not just because our roots are in Christianity. We also celebrate major Jewish, Hindu and Muslim holidays. We have been known to do Buddhist meditations from time to time too.

I taught a “Neighboring Faiths” religious education program at my church one year. We taught emerging teens about the various faiths in the world. But we did more than just study them. We sought them out. The places of religious worship we visited included a Jewish temple and the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (Catholic) here in Washington. We attended a predominantly African American Pentecostal Church. (It was an amazing experience to witness a service of continuous, almost rapturous song and heartfelt emotion.) And we watched a Mormon church service. We even had frank discussions with their children in religious education after the service. We are not a xenophobic religion. Ours is a religion of free association. We realize that not all people are comfortable with our approach, but it is our approach. It’s what we’ve been doing for as long as we’ve been Unitarians and Universalists.

Each UU church arranges their services as they like. But most Christians would feel at home in a UU church. At our church we sing songs from hymnals. We sometimes even sing about God in our hymns. (Sometimes we may sing about the Goddess.) We have sermons. We light a flaming chalice at the start of each service, symbolizing our belief in independent thought. We even pass around the collection plate.

Newsflash to Texas: there is a lot more to religion than having one system of beliefs. You would think the Texas comptroller would at least bother to look up the definition of the word “religion” in the dictionary before painting with so broad a brush. There are other definitions for religion including “A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.” UUs have no institutionalized system of beliefs. Another definition includes “A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.” We don’t specify beliefs, but we do have values we espouse in our Principles and Purposes. We don’t have a founding father or mother figure but we do have some people of whom we are very proud. In addition to ex presidents we can include Charles Darwin (who articulated the theory of evolution) and Clara Barton (founder of the American Red Cross) among distinguished Unitarian Universalists.

The good news for UUs is that at the moment the courts are on our side. The bad news is that for some bizarre reason (probably because in Texas, as is so often the case, the normal rules of thought don’t seem to apply) the current Texas comptroller is refusing to give up.

Oh what an odious message it will send if Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn ultimately succeeds. She likely won’t if it ever reaches our U.S. Supreme Court. But if she succeeds it would render our freedom of religion pretty meaningless in this country.

If ignorance is not a sin, it should be.

May 19th, 2004 at 08:11pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | no comments

Unsaved

Merry Christmas to you! Are you saved? If you are saved then praise be to Jesus Christ, Amen! If you aren’t saved and haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Savior ™ — well then it’s time to get on the stick and get saved as soon as you can. Armageddon is almost here.

How do we know this? Why because of all the “Swept Away” books cluttering bookshelves and supermarket aisles, you doofus! The day of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is bound to happen any day now. You, the unsaved, may be under the impression that God and Jesus are all about unconditional love. If so you are wrong. God only lets into the afterlife those who worship him utterly. So if you don’t worship the One and Only True Christian God ™ and don’t find God through his personal emissary Jesus Christ ™, sorry, but you’re damned. That goes for all you Muslims too, and yes, of course you misguided “chosen people”, not to mention you vile Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, pagans, Wiccans and most contemptible of all, you Unitarian Universalists. Yes, on that Final Judgment Day ™ you along with all the other damned get to begin an eternity of torment. So says your just and loving One True Christian God.

But you won’t be going straight to Hell, no! Before you are sent down the chute to Satan’s minions, first you must be shown the error of your ways. We, The Saved ™ will be watching you from the peanut gallery in St. Peter’s Heavenly Coliseum. God will be the matador, you will be the bull and in this game God always wins. In will go the knife of justice into your flawed and perturbed soul. You will realize what a stupid and contemptible piece of filth you were for all that whoring or practicing dangerous secular humanism. You should have been attending Bible study class instead, brother! A tiny tear of sadness may escape from us elect watching you bemoan your fate. You will despair that you had so many chances to come to Jesus Christ ™ but didn’t. We will be sad that you chose eternity in torment. But we will also glad that the likes of you aren’t fouling up the serene peace of the Heaven. It’s an exclusive neighborhood you see, and the covenants are real strict. Out forthwith, you heathens, to your perpetual ghetto! We, the saved, will be so rapturous being in heaven and all, and hanging around God, JC and the Holy Spirit ™ will be such a high that we will soon forget about you. Because we were saved! Saved! Yippee! And there’s nothing that gives us more pleasure than to spend eternity telling the God Trio ™ what great guys they are. The afterlife will be all Bible Study and harp playing all the time and it will never get dull, brother! Alleluia!

Okay, I know I said in this entry that I didn’t really care what your religion is. And really I don’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t find religions that say you either accept my religion or you’ll end up in Hell very contemptible. By inference then perhaps I feel that all the adherents who believe in this to be contemptible too. That’s not true. But if there is a Hell, then perhaps God will reserve some small part of it for these sanctimonious authors raking in millions in royalties for these novels. Elmer Gantry and the Landover Baptist Church would be proud.

As a Unitarian Universalist I am clearly on the damned path. We have a history of engaging in dangerous secular humanism. In fact we have the audacity to call the place we congregate a “Church” even though there is no requirement of anyone to accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior or even be a Christian! If you can imagine, we don’t care what anyone believes or doesn’t believe. Our mission is simply to help each other discover what it is they believe. Along the way we get involved in vile social action projects like feeding and sheltering the homeless, standing up for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised, encouraging democracy and protecting civil rights. We even welcome (Warning: sit down now!) gays, lesbians and the transgender community. And we don’t even try to convert them! Yup, on judgment day we UUs will doubtless be the first ones dispatched into Hell, post haste. Imagine the confusion of people when we, the heathen and unsaved, try to make the world a better place instead of telling others about God and Jesus. What a waste of our time and money!

I am, it appears, unsaved and perhaps irredeemable at this point. Because I’m afraid the missionaries could be lined up at my door stretching to the moon and not one of them will get me to buy into this saved stuff. My mind appears to be shut to them. While I am not sure what I truly believe about spirituality, what I tend to believe changes over time as I learn and experience more of life. This Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior stuff just makes me shake my head. Pity me, those of you among The Saved ™. I actually believe the Universalist notion. It states that if Jesus really did come down to earth to save us from our sins, he did so for everyone, for all time, with no strings attached. Because, you see, this to me is the highest expression of love. I can’t imagine any entity claiming to come from God, the source of unconditional love saying in effect “I’ve saved you all, but first you have to sign and adhere to this contract.”

So while I am skeptical about the afterlife in general I don’t give it too much concern because I figure I’m already saved. If I have a philosophy of life, I like the one expressed by J.R.R. Tolkien though his character Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings”: “All you have to do is decide what to do with the time given to you.” For that I will let my heart and my conscience be my guide.

For those of you convinced that the only way to salvation is through Jesus, peace to you. But know this: I know in my heart that if God exists, he is not a jealous god, or a god that sets preconditions. Many Christians see Jesus the way fat people see diet doctors. Whether it’s Atkins or Pritikin, when you diet the goal is weight loss, not the means. If the afterlife or spiritual growth is the goal then the messenger doesn’t matter. If reading your Bible and attending services is your way to spirituality I think that’s great. Jesus is your means of getting there. But try to open your heart and your head to the notion that there are many ways to God. The ways of the Buddhist or the Muslim way may be just as valid as your way. Don’t confuse the medium (Jesus, the Bible) with the result (becoming a more spiritual person). Every human is unique. If there is a God it is clear that God designed us this way — we need only examine our own DNA for proof. I believe there is no one size fits all suit to spirituality. There are infinite suits to try on, and infinite paths. We are all spiritual creatures on our own unique spiritual journeys. Jesus hinted as much, by suggesting praying in your closet might work out better than in a house of worship. Try it for a year or so and let me know how it goes. And try this one for size: we the Unsaved deserve the dignity and respect for making our own choices on this matter, not your pity because we don’t share your particular brand of spirituality. You can start by not buying any more of those contemptible “Swept Away” books.

December 27th, 2003 at 11:23am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Philosophy | 5 comments

Are our lives random chance or by design?

What’s it all about? Why are we here? Is what we call our life and our consciousness just an accident of nature?

The answers to these questions are likely unknowable in any scientific sense, but I am thinking about them more and more as my parents age. My mother in particular is having a tough time with heart disease right now. She has a hole in her heart that should be repaired. Open-heart surgery will require 4-6 weeks of recuperation, but the real problem is that pain medicine doesn’t work for her, so enduring all that agony for something that may not really extend her life makes doing nothing look like a viable alternative, even if the alternative is an earlier death. There is a chance that a more benign form of surgery might do the job. She will be evaluated for that within a few weeks. In any event she is 83 and the mortality statistics don’t favor her. She is the oldest surviving sibling in her family. Death is now a real possibility for her and I know it is very tough on her to face it. It is unnatural not to fear death, no matter how devout we call ourselves in the religion of our choice. I know she does.

I know I don’t want to think about my death either but here I am at mid life and I spend a lot more time than I would like obsessing over my eventual demise rather than enjoying the time I do have. Death is truly unavoidable so it makes all the sense in the world to suck the marrow of life out of each day given to us and to ignore our mortality. But most of us with IQs cannot do this. Our prefrontal cortex is too large. Some part of our consciousness is always seeing the clock ticking and fears the approach of death, which becomes less remote and more tangible as we age.

I would like to be like a devout Buddhist and always embrace the moment. When dealing with mortality, this is really the only philosophy that makes sense to me. I would like to embrace my mortality as some sort of gift, but so far I cannot find a way to feel that way.

I can understand that being immortal is probably not all it is cracked up to be. If nothing else a defined lifespan provides an appreciation for the temporal nature of everything we do and experience. I had such a moment last week at Yellowstone National Park when we stopped beside a pristine stream and put our naked, aching feet into the cool spring water. And yet as special as that was, on the hundredth, or thousandth repetition it would no longer be special, no matter how pure the stream nor how spectacular the scenery.

The argument that our life is accidental is a powerful one and one that I cannot dismiss. I want to believe I am here on this planet, in my body, on some sort of defined mission, but I don’t really have an inkling about what my mission is. The only thing I do know is that because my lifespan is limited I have an impetus to get up, move, and do the things I need or want to do. I can’t stay calm for long. Like a caged cheetah my life must continuously be in motion.

My aunt says that there is nothing to fear from death since it is painless. The only real pain associated with death is the fear that our consciousness is gone, i.e. we become extinct. If we knew for a fact that who we are would survive death, then death would be less a cause for acute anxiety and grief. But just as importantly it might change that which is within us that makes us change agents and forces us to evolve mentally.

The finiteness of life, therefore, is an evolutionary advantage to the species. In addition, if we are immortal creatures with souls, then it is a means by which we can evolve as spiritual creatures.

These are a lot of big ifs. If we truly have one life to live and there is no such thing as an afterlife then logically it makes sense to live a life of rampant selfishness. I have to wonder if this is what Hugh Hefner believes, because this is the lifestyle he chooses to lead. Most of the rest of us seem to get through life with the expectation that, even though many of us claim to be atheists, there just might well be something more after death for us.

I notice that my beliefs are changing with age. As a child growing up Catholic I had no reason to disbelieve what the Church and my parents taught me about sin, heaven and hell. As a rebellious teenager agnosticism offered a simple philosophical alternative: I sure didn’t know! Agnosticism wasn’t so much an answer as it was a shrugging of the shoulders and an admission that I viewed life as a scientist might: show me the proof! If you can’t show me the proof then I will dismiss your notions as fanciful at worst, and one possibility out of trillions at best.

In my thirties my outlook gradually changed, perhaps because I was aging, or perhaps because I was just doing a lot more reading. Books like “Life After Life” made me realize that the similarity in near death experiences was more than coincidental. At some point it became ridiculous to say, “Well, nearly everyone who undergoes oxygen starvation of the brain will see a bright tunnel and hear voices calling from the other side because it’s a genetically wired hallucination!” It failed the Occam’s Razor test. Now granted Occam’s Razor simply states that when given a number of solutions and none of them are provable, the simplest is the most likely to be correct. Occam’s Razor is in essence a philosophy saying you favor the simplest explanations when science fails. It could well be all our brains are hardwired that way. But this just doesn’t seem plausible to me since Occam’s Razor works so well in most circumstances. It’s a great general rule, but it is a general rule, not an absolute rule.

In my forties I lost a dear lady friend. As part of the grieving process I noticed a change in me. I knew she was dead and would not be coming back to life but I could not conceive of her personality vanishing altogether never to return. After a long time I started thinking about the laws of thermodynamics: we are told that matter and energy are essentially interchangeable and neither can ever really be destroyed, only changed. Was it really that implausible that the spirit of my friend still existed in some form somewhere? Was it ridiculous to assert that when I die my spirit will live on as a form of energy? Is death really nothing more than a transition of personality from one form of energy to another?

Water transforms into water vapor, which cannot be seen directly, yet is tangible enough. And what is a brain anyhow? It is not just brain matter, it is also the energy contained in the brain matter that is significant. A brain is a container, but for what? Who are we really? As a computer person, I already know the answer. We are really a complex form of software. That is not to say that we are programmed. The same input A will not always produce output B. But what is software? It is wholly virtual. It occupies no space and contains no matter. Yes, it resides somewhere, usually on magnetic medium. There is no difference in weight between a floppy disk that is unformatted and one with a program on it. And yet the latter is far more useful than the former. In both cases though to be useful this “software” must have a media on which to run. In reality software executes on a brain called a CPU, which through a nervous system we call a “bus” directs the feet, legs and hands of my computer, i.e. the display, the mouse, the keyboard, the modem, etc. Turn off the computer and the software is still there (in most cases) stored on magnetic media such as a hard disk. When electricity surges through the computer again the software becomes “alive” again too. In the medium of the human brain (our CPU) we become alive, at least to the extent that we can manipulate and control a human body. Our life might be the computer equivalent of telling the modem to send a message. Death might be nothing more than our CPU sending a different message to a different sort of entity.

Near death experiences suggest to me that it is more likely than not that our personalities survive death. I know this goes against conventional scientific reasoning and seems absurd, because the dead do not talk back to us. But perhaps the limitation is not the dead person’s, but the person who is still alive, who lacks the capacity to hear the departed on a new wavelength. (There are of course psychics who claim to have this ability. I haven’t had enough experience with them to have an opinion whether their abilities are genuine or snake oil.)

Our eyes can see only a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Through mechanical means we can detect other forms of energy and utilize them to our advantage. Our minds by themselves are likely not very pliable and don’t seem to be able to pick up other forms of intelligence that fall outside the spectrum of our mind. It may well be that those intelligences that cannot be discerned by scientific means are what we call “spirits”.

A caveman is unlikely to understand a newspaper. We may be much like the caveman. We may not yet have the right stuff to see or appreciate the complexity of our universe in all its myriad details. Most likely our understanding of the way things are is extremely rudimentary. We most likely have the same understanding of the universe as an ant has of a human being.

It strikes me that it is not unreasonable to be skeptical of our own skepticism. We make vast leaps of faith to assume that science, as we know it today can provide a solid foundation for truly extrapolating that which we cannot know. As we continue to learn more about our universe, our understanding of it will continue to grow. Meanwhile, I have only my gut to go on. I cannot conceive of my dear friend not existing in any form. Maybe I am wearing a mental security blanket, maybe I am delusional, or maybe I am freeing myself from overly rigid science. The scientific method has its place but it is not a theology, it is a means to understand the physical world. That is the extent of its domain. She is out there. I often feel her presence from time to time in subtle ways. She is immortal. And I believe in some sense I am immortal too.

August 25th, 2003 at 10:54pm Posted by Mark | Philosophy | one comment