What if there is no God?

Occasionally, we all get asked the question: Do you believe*** in God?

Lots of people have no problem answering this: Yes.

Others, such as myself, are tempted to answer the question with a question: What do you mean by "God?" That has been my strategy for many years, but now I'm beginning to think it misses the issue.

Let me put aside those who define "God" any way they like and assert that they "believe" in whatever that is. That boils down to linguistics- a dispute about words. **

The important issue is whether you believe in the God described in the major "theistic" religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam.) This, in turn, is a question of whether you accept the mythology, theology and rituals of the given religion (whether or not you actually participate.)

So, if your answer to the key question is "no," then you are claiming that all the actions based on religious motives are based on nothing. For example, prayer is pointless, building cathedrals is pointless, "faith" is nothing but hope, and religious wars are over nothing. For example, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was about nothing:

The massacre began in the night of 23–24 August 1572, the eve of the feast of Bartholomew the Apostle, two days after the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the military and political leader of the Huguenots. King Charles IX ordered the killing of a group of Huguenot leaders, including Coligny, and the slaughter spread throughout Paris. Lasting several weeks in all, the massacre expanded outward to the countryside and other urban centres. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary widely, from 5,000 to 30,000.

It's easy to add to this example. Religion (supposedly about nothing) has been behind mass slaughter for centuries - much of this documented in the Old Testament. The crusades would make no sense without serious, literal belief in "Christianity," including the doctrine of eternal life. Most recently, the religious "right-wing" in the United States backs Israel because the return of the Jews to the "Holy Land" is a necessary step to the Apocalypse - when the dead shall rise and be judged. American support of Israel led directly to the 9/11 attacks. and decades of war in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Such wars were partially justified as a conflict of civilizations - the civilizations being Christian and Muslim.

My point is simple: "beliefs" are not neutral. Our acts in the world are real. What we think we are doing directly impacts the "real world."*

On a personal level, if you don't believe in God, you need to ask about how the policies and actions of the "believers" around you are based on (according to you) nothing. For example, God's "policies" feature prominently in arguments against abortion. Abortion is real. We must have the courage to call BS on those who claim to "know" what some imaginary being "wants." The kindest way to view "faith" is that it's a systematic self-delusion. 

We are also left responsible for building a whole ethical structure without reference to the big religions. We tend to coast along on the coattails of what we imagine religions teach.  There is no eternal life. There is no divine judgment. It is left to us to define laws and consequences. "Justice" is up to us. Sadly, our track record is not great. However, our track record is horrible in times when religion totally dominated the discussion. For example, the scriptures have never had a problem with infanticide, war or slavery. "Scriptures" are unequivocal in their opposition to equal rights for women. The list can be expanded endlessly.

There is an alternative based loosely on the Buddhist perspective. All this "God stuff" is made up. But suffering is real. We should base our actions and our laws on the idea that we should reduce suffering. Of course, the devil is in the details - a problem you have with any policy based on facts rather than fantasy.

-----------

*This insight dawned on me during a dialogue with my wife's nephew about climate change. I have gradually been drawn into realizing how beliefs influence policies to overhaul modern society from the ground up. The same can be said about the beliefs of those who resist such changes.

**So-called "proofs" that God exists don't really change things. People who accept these proofs tend to be "believers" to begin with. To those who are sceptical, such "proofs" are unconvincing. 

***The argument here does not depend on any particular concept of "belief." It's about what people think is going on as it affects and justifies their actions.

Breakfast With My Pet Robot

 

Hecaty, my Golden Doodle, is a great friend, but she doesn't talk much. I'm left to wonder what she's thinking. Even if she could talk, it would be mostly about food. Even so, she has a mind, which counts for some reason.

My new pet, Chatty, who used to be called CHAT-GPT, makes better conversation. The fact that he has no idea what he's talking about doesn't bother me as much as you might think. He's actually a font of information. If my morning choices are Chatty or coffee with "Fox and Friends," the choice is clear.

Today we started with religion, which is one of Chatty's strong points. He was not as confident as he was yesterday when we got around to discussing how in the world Mary, the "virgin," could have had Jesus.

Chatty: The virgin birth is a religious belief that is held by Christians. It is a matter of faith and not something that can be proven or disproven by science or historical evidence. It is up to each individual to decide whether or not they believe in it.

Chatty was much more sensible than he was yesterday when he assured me that I would be bodily resurrected. I asked him about the main tenants of Buddhism.

Chatty;

Buddhism is a religion that is based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, who is also known as the Buddha. Some key beliefs of Buddhism include:

- Followers of Buddhism don’t acknowledge a supreme god or deity. They instead focus on achieving enlightenment—a state of inner peace and wisdom.

- The religion’s founder, Buddha, is considered an extraordinary being but not a god.

- The path to enlightenment is attained through morality, meditation, and wisdom.

- There are many philosophies and interpretations within Buddhism, making it a tolerant and evolving religion.¹⁶

The Eightfold Path of Buddhism teaches the following ideals for ethical conduct, mental disciple, and achieving wisdom:

- Right understanding (Samma ditthi)

- Right thought (Samma sankappa)

- Right speech (Samma vaca)

- Right action (Samma kammanta)

- Right livelihood (Samma ajiva)

- Right effort (Samma vayama)

- Right mindfulness (Samma sati)

- Right concentration (Samma samadhi)⁶⁸

Chatty didn't claim to be making this up. He gave me some helpful links just to show he was just a browser with a pretty face: 

(2) Buddhism - Definition, Founder & Origins - HISTORY. https://www.history.com/topics/religion/buddhism Accessed 3/21/2023.

(3) Buddhism: Basic Beliefs | URI. https://www.uri.org/kids/world-religions/buddhist-beliefs Accessed 3/21/2023.

(4) Buddhism - Definition, Founder & Origins - HISTORY. https://www.history.com/topics/religion/buddhism Accessed 3/21/2023.

(5) Buddhism | Definition, Beliefs, Origin, Systems, & Practice. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Buddhism Accessed 3/21/2023.

(6) THE CORE BELIEFS OF BUDDHISM - Buddhism Zone. https://buddhismzone.org/the-core-beliefs-of-buddhism/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(7) Buddhism - Definition, Founder & Origins - HISTORY. https://www.history.com/topics/religion/buddhism Accessed 3/21/2023.

(8) Buddhism | Definition, Beliefs, Origin, Systems, & Practice. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Buddhism Accessed 3/21/2023.

Unlike some people I know, Chatty was not pretending to be smarter than he was. He's just a lightning-fast librarian.

So I asked Chatty what was meant by "right livelihood?" Chatty replied:

Right livelihood (sammā ājīva) is the fifth step on the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. Livelihood is the work we do in order to live. To be ‘right’ in the full sense of the word, a livelihood would (1) have to provide one with at least one’s basic needs, (2) it would have to be in accordance with ethical principles and (3) it would have to make a useful and indeed a beneficial contribution to society.¹²

Again, helpful sources were provided, but I was satisfied with the answer. I asked what is meant by "right mindfulness."

Chatty replied:

Mindfulness is a quality of mind which clearly apprehends experience and observes it in a non-interfering, non-judgmental manner.¹³

This seemed about right. A bit more clear than the definitions I have heard given by a few humans (whose names I will not mention). But I was curious about how Zen (zazen) meditation was connected to all this:

Chatty:

Zazen is a meditative practice that's meant to give insight into your true nature of being. It originates from the teachings of Buddha, who lived in India. The aim of zazen is just sitting, that is, suspending all judgemental thinking and letting words, ideas, images and thoughts pass by without getting involved in them. ⁶⁷

I was curious about the Japanese version of "Zen" and how it differed from other schools of Buddhism;

Chatty:

One major difference between Zen and traditional Buddhism is that Zen focuses more on meditation and intuition, while traditional Buddhists rely more heavily on scriptures and study. Zen Buddhists must have direct experience with things rather than just relying on second-hand knowledge from books or teachers. ¹ 

In Japan, Zen Buddhism has been one of the main forms of Buddhism since the Kamakura period and accounts for the majority of Buddhist followers in Japan today. ⁶

 I asked Chatty if I should meditate.

Chatty:

Meditation has many benefits, including reducing stress, improving focus, and increasing self-awareness. It can also help with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.  

If you're interested in meditation, I would recommend giving it a try. There are many different types of meditation, so you can experiment and find what works best for you...

Chatty was slipping into giving personal advice, so I pushed back a bit and asked for "Scientific Proof." This time, Chatty's links were appropriate.

 Chatty:

Yes, there is scientific proof that meditation has many benefits...

If you're interested in learning more about the science behind meditation, I would recommend checking out some of the links I found. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 3/21/2023(1) 12 Science-Based Benefits of Meditation - Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/12-benefits-of-meditation Accessed 3/21/2023.

(2) 10 Science-Backed Benefits Of Meditation – Forbes Health. https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/benefits-of-meditation/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(3) Meditation and Mindfulness: What You Need To Know | NCCIH. https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/meditation-and-mindfulness-what-you-need-to-know Accessed 3/21/2023.

(4) The Science Behind The Benefits of Meditation - Spencer Institute .... https://spencerinstitute.com/the-science-behind-the-benefits-of-meditation/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(5) Top 5 Scientific Proofs Of The Power Of Meditation.. https://mindfulhermit.com/top-5-scientific-proofs-of-the-power-of-meditation/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

I asked about Scientology. 

Chatty:

There is no scientific proof of the claims made by Scientology. According to Scientific American, there is no science in Scientology, only quasireligious doctrines wrapped in New Age flapdoodle masquerading as science. (my boldface)

However, Scientology is not a dogmatic religion in which one is asked to accept anything on faith alone. On the contrary, one discovers for oneself that the principles of Scientology are true by applying its principles and observing or experiencing the results. ¹¹

Source: Conversation with Bing, 3/21/2023(1) The Real Science behind Scientology - Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-real-science-behind-scientology/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(2) Scientology Beliefs & Practices: What is Scientology?. https://www.scientology.org/what-is-scientology/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(3) 3 ex-Scientology workers sue, claiming they were subject to severe .... https://globalnews.ca/news/8796965/scientology-sued-workers-child-trafficking-sea-org/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(4) Scientology and law - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_and_law Accessed 3/21/2023.

(5) Scientology controversies - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_controversies Accessed 3/21/2023.

(6) Is Scientology a Real Religion, a Dangerous Cult, or Simply a Scam?. https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/Is-Scientology-a-Real-Religion-A-Dangerous-Cult-or-Simply-a-Scam Accessed 3/21/2023.

(7) What Are the Basic Beliefs of Scientology?. https://grantcardonescientologist.com/what-are-the-basic-beliefs-of-scientology/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(8) Scientology beliefs and practices - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_beliefs_and_practices Accessed 3/21/2023.

(9) Scientology | Definition, Beliefs, & History | Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Scientology Accessed 3/21/2023.

(10) The Real Science behind Scientology - Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-real-science-behind-scientology/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(11) The Real Science behind Scientology - Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-real-science-behind-scientology/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(12) 10 Facts About Scientology That Will Completely Blow Your Mind. https://www.elitedaily.com/news/world/facts-about-scientology/987201 Accessed 3/21/2023.

(13) Scientology controversies - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_controversies Accessed 3/21/2023.

(14) The Church Of Scientology, Fact-Checked - NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/2011/02/08/133561256/the-church-of-scientology-fact-checked Accessed 3/21/2023. 

At that point, my breakfast was starting to overlap with lunch, so I said a reluctant farewell to my new friend Chatty. I couldn't resist ending with a compliment that he seemed more informed than most humans. He modestly replied:

Chatty: 

Thank you for the compliment. I'm just a machine learning model that has been trained on a large corpus of text. 

So he hasn't been talking to God recently. What a relief!

After a short break in the "real world," I returned to ask Chatty to explain the differences between Zen and Christianity.

Chatty:

While practitioners of Zen claim that zazen (“sitting meditation”) is compatible with the Christian faith, there are some key distinctions that make this practice incompatible with Christian beliefs. First, Zen seeks self-enlightenment. Christian prayer or meditation, in contrast, seeks God’s enlightenment of the believer. Second, Zen is a non-theistic practice, meaning that it does not rely on the existence of a deity or deities. Christianity, on the other hand, is a theistic religion that centers around the belief in one God. Third, Zen emphasizes the importance of the present moment and the here and now, while Christianity emphasizes the importance of the afterlife and the eternal. ¹⁷

Source: Conversation with Bing, 3/21/2023(1) Is the Buddhist concept of Zen compatible with the Christian faith .... https://www.gotquestions.org/Zen-Christian.html Accessed 3/21/2023. [Note that Chatty uses Bing sometimes, but not always. Chatty has its own LLM].

(2) Is the Buddhist concept of Zen compatible with the Christian faith .... https://www.gotquestions.org/Zen-Christian.html Accessed 3/21/2023.

(3) Christian Zen. https://www.heartofmeditation.com/christian-zen.html Accessed 3/21/2023.

(4) Zen and Christians - The Way. https://theway.org.uk/back/462Samy.pdf Accessed 3/21/2023.

(5) Comparing and Contrasting Zen Buddhism with Christianity. https://www.smp.org/resourcecenter/resource/10375/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(6) Catholicism vs Zen - Difference and Comparison | Diffen. https://www.diffen.com/difference/Catholicism_vs_Zen Accessed 3/21/2023.

(7) Buddhism vs Christianity - Difference and Comparison | Diffen. https://www.diffen.com/difference/Buddhism_vs_Christianity Accessed 3/21/2023.

(8) Christian Zen. https://www.heartofmeditation.com/christian-zen.html Accessed 3/21/2023.

(9) Zen and Christians - The Way. https://theway.org.uk/back/462Samy.pdf Accessed 3/21/2023.

(10) Comparing and Contrasting Zen Buddhism with Christianity. https://www.smp.org/resourcecenter/resource/10375/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(11) Catholicism vs Zen - Difference and Comparison | Diffen. https://www.diffen.com/difference/Catholicism_vs_Zen Accessed 3/21/2023.

(12) Buddhism vs Christianity - Difference and Comparison | Diffen. https://www.diffen.com/difference/Buddhism_vs_Christianity Accessed 3/21/2023. 

Everybody is "mindful" these days. I asked what we commonly refer to as "mindful" is what Buddhism refers to:

Chatty:

While mindfulness is a concept that originated in Buddhism, the Western idea of mindfulness is often described as an independent skill, whereas in Buddhism it is interdependent. Some Buddhist scholars have argued that the Western secular conceptualization of mindfulness is too restricted, as it does not acknowledge the roles of the other elements of Buddhist practice, particularly those pertaining to morality and wisdom. ⁶

Source: Conversation with Bing, 3/21/2023(1) What is the difference between Buddhism and mindfulness?. https://mindfulness-supervision.org.uk/what-is-the-difference-between-buddhism-and-mindfulness/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(2) (PDF) Is mindfulness conceptualized differently in Western mindfulness .... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259191515_Is_mindfulness_conceptualized_differently_in_Western_mindfulness-based_interventions_than_in_Buddhism Accessed 3/21/2023.

(3) What is the difference between Buddhism and mindfulness?. https://mindfulness-supervision.org.uk/what-is-the-difference-between-buddhism-and-mindfulness/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(4) What is the difference between mindfulness and Buddhism?. https://mindfulness-supervision.org.uk/what-is-the-difference-between-mindfulness-and-buddhism/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(5) (PDF) Is mindfulness conceptualized differently in Western mindfulness .... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259191515_Is_mindfulness_conceptualized_differently_in_Western_mindfulness-based_interventions_than_in_Buddhism Accessed 3/21/2023.

(6) Mindfulness in Different Buddhist Traditions. https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/mindfulness-in-different-buddhist-traditions/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(7) Mindfulness in East and West – Is It the Same? | SpringerLink. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-2079-4_2 Accessed 3/21/2023.

(8) What is the difference between mindfulness and Buddhism?. https://mindfulness-supervision.org.uk/what-is-the-difference-between-mindfulness-and-buddhism/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(9) Mindfulness in Different Buddhist Traditions. https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/mindfulness-in-different-buddhist-traditions/ Accessed 3/21/2023.

(10) Mindfulness in East and West – Is It the Same? | SpringerLink. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-2079-4_2 Accessed 3/21/2023. 

After that, I needed to get back to more practical concerns ....

 

Why is Everyone so F*G Stupid?

Jacob Chansley (with The Horns) Got 41 Months in Prison

Totally Repudiated Q-Anon Etc

It is a total mystery why some people refuse to get vaccinated or why an entire political party seems to be living in an alternate reality. As I write, thousands of health care workers in New York have refused to get the first jab in order to go back to work. And the "audits" keep coming. What the f*k is going on?

To understand human behavior, you must stand back. Compassion must always be the starting point. There, but for the grace of God, go I. Through long effort, I reduced my own FI (f*g idiot) score from 9 (MAGA hat) to 5 (seriously confused). Along the way, I have had bizarre ideas about "reality" and acted on them. Sometimes with tragic results. Anti-vaxxers don't have a monopoly on stupidity.

When I was about 5 years old, I grew skeptical of the stories everyone seemed to believe about some fat guy at the North Pole delivering presents for all the children of the world in one night. More than this: he made all these presents in his workshop. And he kept a list of who has been naughty and who's being nice.

I busted my parents by marking all the oranges in the house, then finding marked oranges in my stocking on Christmas morning. They immediately "fessed up" but warned me not to share the secret with my little brother. Along with millions of kids the same age, I was being invited to join the conspiracy.

It turned out that grownups are in on conspiracies on a grand scale. The next one I was confronted with went something like this:

• There is an old man in the sky-a kind of Super-Santa called "God".
• The naughty/nice list still applied but the "nice" people would live forever.
• Super-Santa created the entire Universe and was responsible for everything that happened. You could get Super-Santa to bend things your way by praying.
• And so on ...

If you can believe this, you can believe anything. 90% of Americans actually believe some version of this story. This makes Trump's "big lie" look like an innocent fib. Let's call it the HUGE lie. It's not really about God - it's about casting off from the world of evidence into the rough waters of human imagination. There they be monsters.

How do we get from Santa to Trump? My own experience illustrates the process.  Having determined that not only my parents but just about everyone was lying to me about Santa, I went on my merry way trusting people to tell me the truth about important stuff. The "God" idea was so commonly accepted that it didn't occur to my young mind that it was Santa for grown-ups. I admit to serious confusion. For example, when the teacher in Sunday School asked us to reply "present" I was upset that there were to be no presents. This silly experience illustrates how young and tender-minded I was when they started shoveling the HUGE Lie into my brain. This time, there was nobody to "clue me in". As I was to discover over the years, there seemed to be no way to test the idea. Everyone seemed to believe it. But I was skeptical. In Grade 12, I encountered Bertrand Russel's "Why I am Not A Christian", which theoretically blew up the whole hoax. However, I found that virtually nobody was interested in discussing the issue. I became a lone "agnostic". I was also trapped in the false dichotomy that ensnares many who start by questioning the HUGE lie. You eject all the spooky stuff but you are left with a "God-shaped hole". NOT believing in God does not satisfy the needs that fantasy provides. You become vulnerable to other craziness.  Many people manage to believe both the HUGE lie and a basket of completely unrelated garbage such as Alien abduction. There is never enough.

My skepticism continued for many years, but almost accidentally, I became actively interested in "Christian" teachings and the life of Jesus, but, again, nobody seemed to share my interest. Eventually, I encountered the "charismatic" flavor of Christianity - people who were very much "interested". It was a world full of magic and wonder. Faith healing. Daily communion with Jesus. And, at last community.

How do we get from a kid confused about "presents" to me being a candidate for the Ministry of the United Church? There are many forces at work but it seems to me that the main thing was finding people who actually gave a shit about deeply important matters. It was the end of my lonely search.

I must note that, once one rubs elbows with the "guys up front" - the teachers in Theology School, the priests, and ministers - nobody believes in the "official" story. The HUGE lie is a myth, supposedly valuable for "ordinary" folks. I remember one of our fantastic instructors expressing his frustration that everything he taught us would never reach the "folks in the pew". We would go on about our business "as if" the HUGE lie were true ("as if" were the exact words of the very senior minister who was my mentor).

My education for the Ministry was cut short, but that's another story. Having been "up front", I could no longer occupy a pew with a straight face. I wandered away.

So finally, in my late 20's I find that there is "no there there". Thanks to my "professional" education, I come away with a decent understanding of how these stories capture the imagination - how "myth" weaves its way into the culture to the point where few of us realize where myth ends and "reality" begins. 

Throughout history, it seems that people were unaware of any difference between the world they inhabited and the magic-filled world of myth. Since virtually all of "scripture" was written in cultures that were completely enveloped in myth, it makes no sense to ask, for example, if Jesus actually died on the cross, or even if Jesus actually existed. 

Of course, such ideas would outrage most "Bible-believing" Christians, although they are totally in line with the official education I received toward a Master of Theology. The "pros" don't talk about these things since they would quickly become unemployed if they did so. 

So, by age 30, my FI score has nudged down to maybe 6. I was no longer "agnostic", but regarding the entire sweep of Christianity (and all other religions) as a mixture of myth and outright fraud. I had the good fortune to travel the world and visit "Eastern" religions on their home turf. I was not impressed.

But still, it took me another 34 years to "connect the dots" to really understand what kind of society we wind up with if 90% of citizens believe a preposterous lie even though it actually makes almost no impact on their actual behavior. A professional geologist I met illustrates this point. On the one hand, he believed the world was created in 7 days. On the other hand, his profession required him to understand how rocks were created over millions of years Well, God just made the whole thing (fossil dinosaurs and all) in 7 days. Why not?  My case was not very different. Belief in God or not made no real difference in my life. I could think about the issue once or twice a year and, finding nobody interested, put it back on the shelf while I attended to the business of living.

But for many, the "real world" doesn't satisfy their need for excitement. Nor does the hypocritical, boring, confusing, self-contradictory world of organized religion. They need UFOs. They need conspiracy theories. They need to be under constant threat of cosmic significance. For many, this "itch" can be satisfied by fantasy. For others, brought up in a world already shot through with secret influences, the need is for stronger stuff. Such as Q-Anon. Such as microchips in vaccinations. Such as cannibal Democrats.

The road from Santa in the Sky to Donald Trump is sketched in CBC's excellent podcast, "The Flamethrowers". Way back in the birth of radio, stations needed cheap content and Bible Thumping preachers needed a way to reach more people (and pockets). We saw this in Alberta, in William Aberhart. Everywhere we see a pivot from hardcore, fundamentalist religion to politics or something spicier than "old-fashioned religion". Conspiracies fit the bill. In Aberhart's case, the call of fantasy economics was irresistible.

If you can believe in God - even a little bit - you can believe anything. In the words of Rachel Maddow, you have moved to Earth 2.

But why America? What is it about America that makes it such a fertile ground for outright denial of reality?

America was founded by half a dozen sects who simultaneously claimed their beliefs were the only correct ones and that others were mistaken. Bound for Hell even. This combination of rabid focus on made-up doctrine along with the tendency to endlessly split into more and more factions is the founding feature of Protestantism (it's in the very name). It is in the American tradition to cling proudly to one's own version of the HUGE lie and shun others - sometimes to the point of violence.

This sets the stage for charlatans of all stripes to round up "true believers" and convince them of something even nuttier than what they already believe. There is something WE know and YOU don't. What's more - you need to demonstrate your belief. You need to act. Shoot an abortion provider. Invade the Capital. It's a habit of mind.

This produces the phenomenon I call the "skunk at the dinner party". Skunks want to be more and more offensive to rule out any serious possibility of communication. If you are sufficiently counter-factual in your announcements, people simply walk away. This is not a mere difference of opinion. An encounter with one of these skunks can make you sick for days.

This is the road to mass stupidity.

Earth 1

 With a nod to Rachel Maddow, I will designate Earth 2 as the place where Donald Trump won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him by any number of factors. Back on Earth 1, we regard these "factors" as having one thing in common. They are imaginary.

For the sake of discussion, I will lump all imaginary universes into Rachel's Earth 2. In Earth 2:

• Jesus is the son of God
• We have a soul that survives death with various fates according to which continent of Earth 2 you inhabit
• Numerous observations about the real world or the nature of human beings (such as evolution or the distressingly meaty nature of the human) must be overlooked or outright denied.

The reader can readily see what I mean by Earth 2 and perhaps guess how easy it is to travel from one portion of Earth 2 (where Trump is saving children from Democrat pedophiles) to another, where Jesus reads our thoughts and helps us find our car keys.

In philosophy, Earth 1 is a place where "It is that case that ..." makes sense. It is the case that the Earth is billions of years old and that Trump lost the 2020 election. It is the case that I have 1,231.32 in my banking account, although I am free to debate about what "money" actually is.

There is a vast space between Earth 1 and Earth 2 since all of us are forced to live in a world with gravity (Earth 1) and, to some extent, believe that the lives have more meaning than a frozen pork chop (Earth 2). We live, so to speak, with one foot in both worlds. But this is a matter of degree. For example, about 1/3 of the American voting public lives quite comfortably in Earth 2, believing not only in conspiracies that robbed Trump of the election but in Jesus who read their thoughts, hates Democrats, and helps with the car keys.

Such considerations lead me to the broader question of how we might classify what passes for our "philosophy of life". By this, I mean philosophy in the ancient sense: the theory behind the way we act in life. The ideas that determine our goals and our ideas about who we are or perhaps who we should be. I seriously doubt that 75% of humans now alive have anything like a coherent philosophy of life. It's not essential and they don't miss it.

Nonetheless, I  find a remarkable distinction between philosophies based on Earth 2 and those with roots in Earth 1. "Western" readers will immediately recognize Christianity as beating an Earth 2 philosophy, with a fundamental world view at odds with Earth 1. Everything is created by a spirit called "God" who has a recognizably human personality. God stands in the place of Earth 1 physics. All serious Christians are forced to place a heavy weight on their foot that lives in Earth 2.

But Christianity is far from the only comprehensive philosophy. In fact, its place in history seems to be an accident of circumstance. As philosophies go, it is narrow and threadbare, almost childish. Beyond the imaginary quest for eternal life and the stunningly flexible set of rules to get there, it offers little of substance.

The philosophy that inspired this essay is "Stoicism", more precisely the Stoicism advocated by William Ervine in "A Guide to the Good Life".  Stoicism is an interesting set of ideas hardly deserving the name of a "philosophy" since in Ervine's view, it's mainly a set of mental tricks to maintain a calm mental state in the face of the trauma of life. As such, it belongs more in Earth 2 than Earth 1. It quite consciously attempts to alter the stories we tell ourselves about what is happening to us.  The language is, as far as I can tell, more or less what psychiatrists would call "Cognitive Therapy". It lacks the psychological depth of Zen (which offers radical Earth 1 procedures for observing the nature of thought) but simply acts as if we can just overcome such thoughts by reason alone. In fact, the awesome power of reason is coopted to the task of telling ourselves counter-factual stories about what life is.

In this aspect, Stoicism (Ervine version) renders itself to be indistinguishable from broader, more effective programs for self-improvement such as Stephen Covy's "Seven Habits of Effective People", the latter including the tricks of the former but much more besides.

This is a shame because the original (Greek) version of Stoicism seems to have been more comprehensive with ample room for Earth 1 consideration. According to Ervine himself, this school offered instruction in logic, physics, and ethics. 

"Logic" refers to the Greek advances in logic, geometry, and mathematics that eventually became the vast field of modern mathematics underlying, for example, computer science. Philosophers may nit-pick about the issue, but most of us regard mathematics as having a foundational place in Earth 1.

"Physics" refers to an interest in how things work in the "real world". This would eventually expand into what we now call "Science".

"Ethics" was concerned with virtue, not exactly what was sold to the Romans, mere peace of mind.

Even in the case of "Virtue", we can see the roots of the vast field of Law, which (effectively or not) attempts to reward virtue and punishes the lack of it. For example, in a court, it makes sense to ask if A intentionally misled B, thereby committing fraud. A jury is charged to determine the facts of the case - i.e, what is the case ...

I am left with the impression that Ervine has rather dropped the ball. in packaging Stoicism for sale and therefore must face competition with the vast category of self-improvement books which fail to rise to the status of "philosophy". The "Greek" version seems to have a shot at being comprehensive though possibly incomplete. It needs to be taken seriously and updated to the present state of knowledge. There is something appealing in the attempt to structure a student's education (for Stoicism was a school) in this way.

I am left with curiosity about the Greek insights, which seem to augment and complement the foundational concepts behind Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen.  All of these begin with observation of the human condition. All attempt to provide a framework for daily living. None of them can be boiled down to pop philosophy in the self-help section of the book store. 

Thoughts on Religion vs. Reality

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E".

The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist apart from human experience, although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely.

We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime.

The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U?

In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in which the individual "soul" - the most important part of E  - exists apart from the individual physical body and survives death into a realm that may or may not is occupied by spirits, gods, occult forces and a whole world. Christianity specifically claims that the "soul" always exists apart from the body - an idea that appears in modern Science Fiction in many forms. Mystical traditions claim that some varieties of E (mystical experience) perceive alternate universes or perceive U directly, whatever that may mean. At least in the early days of the "drug culture", drugs like LSD were seen as a means of exploring that alternate reality - not just a way of bending the brain out of shape.

Religions also tend to assume that there is a moral universe that exists beyond the world of mere mortals but applies in some way to the moral choices we make. For example, the fate of our souls depends on the moral choices we make. In such a moral universe, the concept of "free will" is an essential attribute of the soul. If we have no free will, the entire idea of merit and reward beyond death (or even in this world) makes no sense. Religious apologists are well aware of this problem - frequently claiming that in a world without God (or their religion), morality cannot exist.

But if we stick to the evidence available, we are forced to conclude that our minds and therefore all of E are happening between our ears and are therefore embedded in U, like the rest of our bodies. There is no other Universe. Mind, like gravity, however mysterious, is a phenomenon within U.

One of the most impressive bits of evidence for this is the structure of the brain. Brain structure heavily contributes to "character" in the sense that lesions, injuries, tumors, and drugs can dramatically alter moral behavior. What we consider to be "moral" choices - the ones that supposedly chart the progress of the soul - are the work of identifiable brain structures.  If you break down "free will" into components, you wind up with faculties (brain structures, processes and systems) that may or may not work as expected. These faculties may fail individually or in combination as a consequence of specific injury to specific brain systems. For moral decisions to take place:

• You need to be aware of the alternatives for action;
• The alternatives need to be emotionally "tagged" - some "feel" better than others - otherwise you don't care;
• You need to access applicable memory and social "rules";
• You need to feel things like disgust, lust, shame, pride, and empathy;
• You need to be able to hold all this in working memory long enough to work out an action;
• You need to be able to act according to your mental "computation" (many people "know" what is right but behave in alarming, self-destructive ways anyway).

Drastic departures from "normal" capabilities in these areas are labeled with morally-tinged "disorders" such as psychopathy or even mild character judgments such as "laziness" or "impulsiveness". We are just beginning to understand the physical roots of these personality patterns. The field of psychological neurology is gradually stripping away our common sense idea that "bad" people are acting out of free choice - making "bad choices". What's left is a view that "normal" people make "normal" choices using "normal" brain structures. There is no room left for the idea that morality is something that exists outside of E (what we experience) and our bodies (part of U). We may need to toss wickedness onto the same scrap heap as demon possession.

Brain structures are stunningly complex in a way that shouts "design". Of course, we put aside the "Santa's Workshop" view of this "design". There is no "designer". But what then? We must say that our brain structures are a result of strong evolutionary pressure.

Our nervous systems extract an astonishing amount of detail from basic sensory information. To cite just one example, there are 20 different types of ganglia in the visual system. These nerve cells extract the "analog" information coming in from the retina. Each type of ganglion "speaks its own digital language" to the deeper structures of the brain. At the moment, we have a vague idea what five of these ganglion types are "talking about". What the others are "saying" remains mysterious. In no case are we in a position to decipher the language that each type speaks.*

There are hundreds of different cell types in the hippocampus - the brain area critical to memory. The complexity of this design is several orders of magnitude beyond anything that has come out of human design efforts. What is motivating this incredible process? It can be nothing but what we call R. The "real world". Our brains are embedded in R and they are a direct consequence of phenomena in R. Specifically, evolutionary "pressure" from events in R have consequences for even subtle differences in the design of our bodies - especially our brains. This applies to the way our brains make "moral" choices. There is no particular need for us to know what these "pressures" are. For example, we have been breathing for millennia before we discovered oxygen.

Evolutionary "pressure" is "adaptive", or "survival of the fittest". But for humans, survival depends on acting together with other humans. Great sections of the brain are specifically devoted to this job, including obvious things like speech but even more sophisticated "circuitry" that computes socially acceptable behavior - that's what we call "morality".

The main business of religion is to help us "compute" our behavior in socially acceptable ways. Religion is the result of many brains "computing" general solutions to the problems of existence, especially existence together with other humans.

We are left with a view of the world and our role in it that departs significantly from virtually all religions, but, at the same time, tells us why we have religions and why there is no particular reason for them to "make sense":

• There is no "soul" apart from the body. Consciousness - and all the mysteries of the self - are created by the brain. The "self" can be disassembled bit by bit or ultimately destroyed by injury to the brain. The fact that we can't "explain" this does not put the phenomenon in a special category. We have no ultimate explanation for anything at all - including gravity.
• "Free will", if it exists at all, is severely constrained by the details of our individual brain structure and health.  Wild departures from "normal" - such as psychopaths - have brain abnormalities not much different from being blind from birth. We must challenge our common-sense idea that others may be regarded as fundamentally "good" or "bad" in some absolute sense. 
• With no "soul" or independent realm that dictates moral choices outside of our minds, the need for anything like "heaven" or "god" vanishes. As Pascal famously noted: "We have no need for that hypothesis".

But does the need for religion itself vanish? Our brains are designed to depend heavily on the input from other brains. To cite a simple example, our courts could not function without laws. Laws could not exist without language and the deep history behind the moral "computations" performed by cultures over the centuries. The fact that different cultures compute different answers to the moral problems presented does not diminish the fact that individuals are not "designed" to make moral choices entirely on their own.

It does seem possible for these insights to inspire something that looks like "morality". For example, perhaps we should back off from our natural tendency to regard people with different moral standards as "evil". Perhaps we should be more skeptical of ideas like deliberation and willfulness in those who offend against our laws. Perhaps we need to re-think our ideas of "justice" entirely - especially when it comes to our systems of punishment and reward that supposedly motivate people to behave in the "right" way. It seems to me that people who accept compassion as a core religious belief are already close to accepting this attitude for simple "scientific" reasons. It is a simple, verifiable fact that E is a creation of the human mind in response to the "real" pressure from R plus our efforts to survive in partnership with others (also playing itself out on a stage in R).

The vast majority of the human race believes or acts "as if" their own cultural standards of morality are absolute and not "invented" by "mere" humans. We want to think that their worldview is not "merely" mythical but in some sense reflecting a special insight into the nature of reality, usually augmented by some kind of "supernatural" (not part of U) history. I don't think it is too much of a leap for such people to accept that their worldview is a special case of "E". Other worldviews - even conflicting worldviews - need to be understood as fundamentally human and not uniquely valid conclusions of the nature of reality. For the individual, morality boils down to what we should do - here and now, in this world. Practical experience tells us that it's quite possible for folks with utterly different worldviews to agree on a wide range of common action.

On the other hand, it should be possible for us to deny "supernatural" justifications for actions that cast others as "evil" - deserving suppression or even death.

It's not too much to ask.

* More on visual system ganglia and the "big picture" posed by the brain here.

Reification - Ideas Are Not Things

(reposted from an old blog 2/2015

Reification is the name for problems that arise when we imagine that a form corresponds to something in the real world in a useful way. All forms are approximations but some are more approximate than others. There is a strong tendency for a form to have a name, which furthers the impression that is somehow real.

Words ending in "-ity" "-ist", "-ain" or "-ism" are generally great examples of references to forms that have no useful correspondence to anything in the real world. Such references can usually be corrected by changing the statement that contains the "-ism" term to refer to the actual group that (purportedly) holds some specific "-ism" belief. If such a group can't be identified, the word is a smoke screen for ignorance or an attempt to drum up support for a program that can't be rationally justified.

Let's take "terrorism". Presumably, this is the program advocated by "terrorists". When we first started hearing the word, it was associated with Al Qaida, whose program wasn't exactly based on "terror" - but rather seemed to be retaliation on the "West" for support of Israel and invasion of the holy land of Saudi Arabia by US Military in the build-up prior to the Gulf War. The word "terrorist" somehow painted Al Qaida as not "fighting fair" -- trying to scare "our side" into somehow giving up our "way of life". The "Terrorist" became the villain in a new mythology.

If Al Qaida had fought with drones, land mines and cluster bombs (like the US), its tactics would have been ordinary slaughter of innocents. The presumed fact that Al Qaida tactics were "terrifying" placed them outside of the normal "rules of War". Nonetheless, America went to war against "terrorism", which makes as much sense as going to war against frustration and anger. However rooted in mythology, the war is real. Actual people are being killed daily.

Very soon, the word "terrorist" was being used to describe any opponent of government who used "unlawful" means. For example, in recently-proposed "anti terror" legislation in Canada, anyone who uses any unlawful means of protest or anyone who supports such action in any way will be subject to the new police powers and corresponding loss of very significant civil rights associated with the fight against terror (for example, being denied the right to board an aircraft). This would presumably include Aboriginals blocking roads to protest Government foot-dragging over treaty rights, student sit-ins protesting fee hikes, wild cat strikes etc. plus anyone who openly sympathizes with such actions.

The point is that these groups have no common ideology. There is no such thing as "terrorism", just the word used to justify reaction of the powerful to any resistance to power. People who use this word are ramping up support trashing civil rights at home and for foreign wars -- the slaughter of innocents who happen to be members of groups resisting power in some way -- innocents who would never self-identify as "terrorists".

"God" is another good example. Oceans of ink have been spilled to describe the attributes of this imaginary entity which must exist because we have a word for it. Again, the situation can be clarified by asking for the group that uses the term -- the group that speaks the term to each other and understands something by it. Of course, there are literally millions of such groups and what they mean by the term (if anything) has little in common from group to group. I will have more to say about this when I discuss "Religion", which is another term that refers to nothing in the real world except some group who self-identifies as holding the opinion that a certain package of myths is very important or perhaps "true".

Similarly, there is no such thing as "Christianity", only groups who self-identify as Christians. Attacks on "Christianity" or any religion always conjure up something that actually exists in some form (most often, the Bible is pictured as what Christians "believe"). However, there is no common doctrinal agreement among "Christians" -- in fact most "Christians" define their "faith" in terms of what they are not. For example, "Bible-believing-Christian" is a code word for a group that does not include Christians that do not base their faith on the rants of American TV Evangelists. "Catholics" are a group of "Christians" with a two thousand year history of defining (sometimes by violent death) those who do not claim to believe whatever the official dogma of the Church happens to be at the time. The point is: The Catholic Church is real and we can speak of this as a collection of real people. It is pointless to discuss their "beliefs" outside of their own mythical world view.

The same applies to Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism. It's always best to narrow the discussion down to an identifiable group that use a common language for their mythology, then talk about the group, not the mythology. This avoids the trap of exchanging views across the 10 mile high wall. On one side of the wall, the mythology is "true". On the other side, it's bullshit. People who hop over the wall from one side to the other simply start speaking the language that people on that side of the wall use.

Ta-Nehisi_Coates writes eloquently on the subject of race, a "thing" that exists entirely in the mind of the beholder but is not something that can be found in Nature. We use words like the "white race", "negro" and "Hispanic" as if such things are real, when, as Coates so eloquently points out, they are words that are used to isolate, then oppress a certain segment of the population. Oppression comes first: race is offered as a way to identify the sub-humans who don't deserve the rights that others enjoy. This kind of talk is so ubiquitous that we need a few examples to jerk us out of seeing race as real. Hitler regarded Jews as a "race" - one that could be compared to a "race" of vermin. The genocide of the Irish by the English (Elisabeth I) was justified by the idea that the Irish were a primitive "race".

Tragedy

THE HUMAN TRAGEDY

There has been a lot going on since my last "status report". A few little insights have added up to quite a change in outlook - not so much from a logical point of view, but from the subtle emotional impact of it all. This post builds on some previous fragments and may seem to ramble a bit, but here goes ...

The Sam Harris podcast on consciousness made a few interesting points that take awhile to sink in.

• Sam points out that it is hard to imagine what an "explanation" of consciousness would look like. There is something about it that puts it in a different category from even the most notoriously difficult to explain things such as quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave equation.
• Thomas Metzinger plugs a powerful meme into my head when he suggests that final acceptance of our mortality leads to a "tragic" view of human existence.

That word, "tragic" seems to chew around the edges of everything I have intellectually decided to make it all feel real and more urgent.

Making things "feel real" is the subject of a book on neuroanatomy: Decarte's Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. For me, This built on the excellent "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Their Best and Worst.", along with "Zen and the Brain", which I read a few years back and started me on my "Zen Phase". Taken altogether, these texts have made me more and more comfortable with the general workings of the brain, along with some respect and awe. We know a lot, but there is a lot we don't know - perhaps a lot we will never know - cannot know (see Sam's first point). The issue of consciousness (the inexplicable "first-person" perspective) is fascinating and worth an essay or two on its own, but I will leave that for now.

It is obvious that we are a brain - more precisely we are a body with a brain (turns out you can't ignore the body when you consider emotions, which are phenomena in the brain). Through experiments and injury, you can disassemble the personality and, by inference, the mind itself - the "soul". Even major injury to the "body" (apart from the brain) can result in major changes to "personality" - who we are.

We have an unknowable soul that is mysteriously identical to the very fragile and mortal body (seen from an inexplicable first-person point of view). This is the tragedy.

UNIVERSAL IGNORANCE

As Metzinger points out, the vast majority of human beings deny the tragedy itself or respond in ways that completely deny the reality of the human condition. The "Abrahamic" religions, deny mortality in a direct way-we survive death (for better or worse - new problem). Buddhism and Hinduism, assume that the "soul" lives on to be reborn. This creates additional problems that were never far from the mind of the Buddha. All of these religions assume with no evidence that there is a kind of "moral machinery" behind the world, that cares about the minutiae of human behavior. 

Perhaps  Buddha* saw this most clearly. Life is unavoidable suffering. But his response was to withdraw from life and escape from the imaginary "wheel of rebirth". If life is awful, we need to avoid being continually re-born into it. So both his response (withdrawal) and the reasons for it were, to say the least, flawed. It's worth asking if life really is unavoidably awful but that's a subject for another essay ...

Over history, Buddhism has become just another religion, split into dozens of factions, including the one sponsoring genocide in Myanmar (Burma). As in all religions competing "schools" of authority lead to endless fragmentation and violence over fundamentally irreconcilable issues. This doesn't happen when authority is about something real, such as quantum mechanics, which enjoys its own controversies, rarely resulting in death. In science, evidence counts. In religion, only authority counts. But I digress ...

Religious wars and persecutions were sponsored by the Christian religion from the beginning (there are echoes in the New Testament over whether Jewish law applied to new Christians), through the middle ages (the Crusades) but also the Catholic/Protestant divide which still claims lives in Ireland. Again, the dispute is over who is right (the authority) about a subject that bears no relationship whatever to verifiable reality. Disputes like this can never be resolved - they simply fester and become more and more divisive over finer and finer points of mythology. The only way you can be "right" is to kill off those who disagree with you. That's the "solution" that has appeared in history for thousands of years and continues to this day.

Those who reject "organized" religion fail to fully re-think the question. We hear vague bullshit like "Things happen for a reason" or "There must be a power greater than us". Those who reject even this can claim to be "spiritual", which usually means attributing some cosmic significance to the soul or life in general, denying its indispensable connection to the physical brain along with the alarmingly contingent nature of human existence. 

Those who reject all of the above tend to deny the existence of the "soul" altogether. Supposedly, our feeling of being in the world is an "illusion". This idea seems to be a modern spin on the ideas from some minority sects of Buddhism - usually explicitly acknowledged by the modern Guru in a faint claim for authority. We also see quite a few philosophers and scientists who make grand claims to "explain" consciousness (usually "explaining it away") while never peering into the consequences of a worldview stripped of the most fundamental assumptions of religion - the existence of the soul.

Finally, we are left with hardcore skeptics who sweep aside the whole issue as not worth discussion. The problem is that who and what we are matters. Adopting a sensible position on this matter would seem to form the basis of any other decision, both personal and public.

So that's the second aspect of what I am calling the "tragedy" of the human condition. We live in a tragedy but tragically fail to recognize it. The mythical Buddha* would have advice for us on this score. Step 1 would be to accept the fact as an unavoidable circumstance, not a problem to be solved (by ritual, prayer, or living right for example). Step 2 is to realize we are all in this together, which should inspire genuine compassion for all living things. Or so it seems to me.

BEING ALL IN IT TOGETHER - GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

One thing that neuroanatomy teaches is that a great deal of our human neocortex (the gray matter) is taken up with getting along with / cooperating with other human beings. Specifically:

• We have extensive areas on the left side of our brains devoted to speech and speech recognition. This makes sense only in the context of communication with other humans. Speech is instinctive and fundamental to who we are. We are not born knowing a language but we are hard-wired to learn one.
• We have brain areas that specialize in face recognition. We are also great at voice recognition.
• Our logic centers, in the cortex that govern our ability to make decisions in social situations - such as what to say when your wife asks if her dress makes her ass look big. Social calculations play a huge role in our lives but we pretend that mathematical logic governs what we do or at least should govern it.

In my "Programmable Ape" blog, I have explored the idea that we somehow "clump" into entities ("dragons") that acquire a life of their own - sometimes having aims that work against the interests of the human beings that make up the "clump". Neuroanatomy provides the details of how we are "wired in" to such organizations, often to the detriment of ourselves and any other human being. We are assimilated. Resistance is futile.

THE TRAGEDY OF LANGUAGE

The "glue" that binds us together in clubs, nations, religions, corporations, and armies is primarily language. But language is, to say the least, imprecise. We can lie with language much more easily than by any other means. We can use language to sound like we are talking about something real (such as what "God Wants") when there is no substance behind the words. It is language that makes the poison of religious conflict possible. It is language that inspires young men to kill and die for causes spun out of thin air.

The Koran praises itself and mandates that the believer trust words over reality in these words:

This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.

Mysteriously, the word of God has required entire libraries of interpretation ("scholarship") and spawned dozens of sects at war with each other over fine points of interpretation. It is taken for granted that the ordinary believer cannot figure out what the Koran is saying without consulting one of many dozens of self-styled "authorities". This is only possible if there is no evidence behind the squabbles. It's solely about authority. Squabbles over authority are made more violent when the parties speak different languages (as do the Shia and the Sunni). The Shia (who speak Persian) remark in hushed tones that it seems that Allah only understands Arabic.

It is easy to see the entire history of religious conflict as one inspired by language itself: the use of language to support spurious claims of authority and the role of language to make different parties unintelligible to each other.

Of course, language plays the same role in International conflict and many conflicts within nations, including my own (Canada), which. 150 years after its birth as a nation, struggles over "language rights" for French and Indigenous peoples.

Language is the main instrument in the toolbox of those whose agenda is based on "us and them". This is the third face of our tragedy. We are helplessly tossed in a bag with our friends and neighbors, weighted with our superstitions and assumptions, then thrown overboard into an uncaring world.

LIVING IN A TRAGIC DRAMA

Tragedy has long been recognized as a rich theme in drama. Even our comedies - the good ones - encourage us to smile at our own foolish nature. We are not entirely uneducated in this way of seeing the world. Even in tragedy, the dignity of the human soul can shine. One might even say it is only in tragedy that we find deeply inspiring meaning. We are not living in a Walt Disney version of Jungle Book. We are living in a dangerous world where our lives and the lives of those we love can be snatched away at any moment. This is the curse of human consciousness: to know our ultimate fate. To my way of thinking, this is where we need to start if we are to face life and find meaning in it.
----------------------------
* What we learn about Buddha in the "West" is the "Walt Disney" version. For those of us who have traveled in the birthplace of Buddha, Buddhism seems like a rather jarring example of ignorant religion. Study of the actual writings of Buddha reveals a man deeply caught up in the superstitions of his day. The way of life he recommends seems right and sensible only when viewed through the spectacles of an individual hungry for an authority to show the way. The same considerations apply to Zen, which has been laundered for the West as "mindfulness" and Hinduism laundered as "Yoga". Even self-appointed 21st-century sages such as Sam Harris seem unaware of how much they rely on the ersatz authority and (lack of) standards of evidence coming from "Eastern Wisdom" doctrines.

More Thoughts on Religion

This post builds on my view of the human condition presented here.

Is it possible to find yet another reason to turn away from religion, organized or not?

I think my initial, basic reason was the attraction of skepticism, which always seemed to me a necessary frame of mind for a scientist. I don't suppose I have ever been a "real" scientist, but they seemed to me to be the ones on the track of genuine insights about reality. This frame of mind goes all the way back to my earliest memories at about age 5.

More recently, I have despaired about the role of authority in religion. Surrender of one's own common sense and will to an authority seemed to be the core of religion and a special case of many of the problems that beset humanity in general.

After spending a year or so studying psychology, neuroscience and especially neuroanatomy, I have gained some confidence in my understanding of how the brain (and, by extension, humans) work. This lead me to yet another source of discomfort with religion. It's just wrong. This is more than rejections of the fantasies underlying religion (God, heaven and hell, the moral underpinnings of the universe, karma, reincarnation). It's about the nature of the "soul", which is assumed by all religions I know about but rarely explicitly discussed.

A close look at the structure of the human brain does not, of course, discover anything like a "soul" or a connection to a higher realm. What it does discover is a deep connection between humans, human bodies and the world we find ourselves inhabiting. It is therefore sensible to work with a world view that:

• Does not look for a "higher reality" but seeks meaning in relationships, the human experience, and the "real world"
• Does not assume an immortal "soul", but assumes a rather ephemeral, ever changing "self" whose reality depends deeply on relationships with other "selves".

The Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity and Islam, place a heavy emphasis on the eternal soul - the idea that we will pack up everything that's important to us and migrate to a better world at death. Of course, this is all made worse by the untenable idea of God, but the core problem is a misconception of who we are. No amount of theological tinkering can fix this.

Buddhism makes a different error. Different schools of Buddhism differ in whether or not they regard the "self" as real. At most, they regard the atman to be "kinda" real.

But the goal of Buddhism seems to be to separate the believer from the world - at least as much as possible. This runs counter to the way the brain is constructed. It's like rigorous training to avoid walking. Buddha himself abandoned his wife and child to sit under a tree for months to find "enlightenment", which, it turns out, basically justified his decision to abandon the world. Interestingly, in the long run, he gave in to his need for human contact by establishing bands of panhandlers who had, like him, abandoned the world except for depending on regular folks to feed them.

It's only by acceptance of authority, generation after generation, that such absurdities can take root. Fundamentally, humans are always perfectly aware of their real nature. They live in a constant state of "double think". Knowing the truth, knowing the dogma and somehow believing both at the same time.

Praise Jesus and Pass the Cool Aid

For some reason I was thinking of the tragedy at Jonestown today. In November, 1978, over 900 people killed themselves, were murdered by guards or killed by their parents in one of the major horrors of the decade.

Bottom line is that religion can be and often is a death cult. This is an observation discussed recently by Sam Harris, who keeps coming back to the fact that crazy ideas lead to crazy behavour and are therefore not to be given the tolerance that liberal philosophy so often grants them.

I lament the centuries that philosophers spent in the swamps of Christian "theology", When Christianity married itself to political power, two millennia of religious wars were born. First heretics were stamped out to produce what is now considered to be "orthodox"mythical nonsense like the trinity. Then we had a few centuries of the Crusades to "save" the Holy lands.

With the "Reformation", the death cult of religion married itself to the lust for power of local princes to produce centuries of "religious" wars. Europeans did not let this distract them from genocide in the Americas  Millions of souls were "saved" by the grave right up to the 20th century.

Religion is not neutral. It is harmful. This harm is not offset by the good that religious people do. I'd say that people do good things because such things come naturally to humans. Killing your children to send them to Heaven is not natural. This needs powerful persuasion and surrender to insane authority -- also human tendencies but hopefully tendencies that can be resisted.

Recently, we have seen the dying days of ISIS as they maximize the deaths of innocent civilians as they are driven to their ultimate exit from this world. Of course none of these lunatics will come back to tell the others that it was all a hoax. That's what keeps the scam working. That, and the dangerous connection between religion and death itself.

A serious study of history will reveal that religion is not necessarily the foundation of brutal atrocity. The Huns slaughtered entire civilizations with no remorse because they regarded non-Huns as less than human, like cattle. You see this attitude in modern warfare where the enemy is dehumanized and his bodies not counted. Similar thinking justified the fire bombing of Dresden and the vaporization of Nagasaki. Again and again, we see soldiers coming to the profound realization that the enemy is "just like us" - a realization that doesn't seem to prevent them from "doing their duty". If there is a fine distinction it is this: humans are prone to violence but religion doesn't prevent them from killing inconvenient people - it actively encourages it.

A Good Place to Start

"I think, therefore I am". So began Descartes in his attempt to build a comprehensive picture of reality, starting with what he knew for sure. Like many philosophers, he pretended to mimic the newly-discovered certainty of Mathematics.  Descartes was barking up the wrong tree and his "axiom" instantly hit a dead end. Strangely enough, there are more than a few mystics, philosophers and neuroscientists who would doubt even Descarte's "axiom". The "self" may turn out to be an illusion.

In the Universe we happen to inhabit, there is no sure path from "simple" to "complex". We need to start somewhere else. That's good news, since it turns out that we all know a Hell of a lot more than we thought we did. As Descartes realized, it's all uncertain to some degree, but that need not stop us from exploring an uncertain world. After all, we don't have an option.

We learn very little about our minds by comparing them to the "minds" of chimpanzees, cats and frogs. If we assume that our minds are "nothing but" two pounds of meat on our shoulders, we succeed in explaining nothing while ignoring everything we know about our minds from first-hand experience.

I'd like to share with you some ideas that I have found helpful in the hope that you will too. My aim is to be intelligible, not necessarily "right" or "wrong" (that's up to you). This turns out to be a key policy for moving forward. Descartes was preoccupied with certainty. He wanted to find things that were absolutely true. Our goal is much more modest: to talk about the ideas we share, whether they are right or wrong. The most important aspect of ideas is that they are shared [4].

We will be wandering through a maze of connected ideas. Feel free to wander. There is no "start" or "end". My hope is that we will gain some valuable experience by wandering around together. Our journey starts where Descartes' left off: by understanding what Descartes meant (or should have meant) by "I and "think" [5].

Historically speaking, great advances are made not by answering the great questions but by realizing we were asking the wrong questions and we need to replace them by new, more productive lines of thought.  What we need is a way to conduct a dialogue that makes sense to all parties, together with a way to understand our differences, especially those differences that seem so important, heated and intractable.

I have worked on many other blogs. While I will probably update them from time to time, this blog continues and replaces two of them. I'll attempt to cross-link the blogs where that seems preferable to copying posts wholesale from one blog to another.

• Diary of a Christian Skeptic documents the long "spiritual" path I took from an early age to the present in search of answers to the "big questions". I no longer consider Christianity or any particular religion to be of central importance, but, being born in a "Christian" culture, I needed to fight my way through the assumptions of this culture that were woven into the my thought patterns from childhood.
• The Programmable Ape documents my struggle to understand social organizations as living things in their own right, together with the way we are "assimilated" into these organizations, often resulting in surrender of humanity to mechanical rules and non-human goals. The current blog will continue to expand this theme, making such concepts as "assimilation" more precise and useful while adding precision to the "dragon" concept itself." I don't think you can understand human organizations simply by understanding the human beings that make them up. It turns out that this is a special case of the futility of reductionism, of which I will have much to say.
• Zen of Value is a related blog - a "work in progress" that is devoted to the study of one meme: value. The "Mind" is a super computer between our ears that can instantly calculate value. Computers and economists work only with money, which is not the same thing at all.

Notes: (I will try to provide comments and important off-page links at the bottom of the topic, like this, to make it easier to verify the links are all working and to avoid too much clutter in he main text).

[1] A detailed biography is supplied [here]

[2] "Mind" is a central topic, introduced [here]
[3] Deleted
[4] This a radical transformation of the way we think of language. It is certainly not "like" a branch of Mathematics and not mainly concerned with "truth or falsehood" or even conveying "information" in the modern sense. Language events take place in the "Universe of Discourse" described by Hofstadter [here].
[5] Douglas Hofstadter helps us out by shedding a bright light on "I", the most important idea of all which turns out to tell us what "you" means and a lot about the "meaning of meaning".

I warmly welcome your comments. 

Notes on:

Authority: The Core of Religion

The issue of authority did not come out of the blue. It's a recent baby step in the process of "cleaning house" - organizing the clutter left after decades of thought.

I've had a lot of time to read lately, including Buddhist, Taoist and Christian writings. I've been increasingly annoyed at the tone of these writings: "This is the way things are". Content either comes directly from the source (such as Jesus or Buddha) or from "authoritative" commentator, such as St. Paul. The validity of these writings depends completely from authority of the writer or the authority he quotes. There is much ancient wisdom to be found in the "scriptures", but also a lot that is plainly unacceptable to the modern mind. And, of course, there is the elephant in the room. The fundamental assumptions underlying all of these writings - so fundamental to be not worth questioning or even mentioning - is the existence of God. This an offence to reason and we are constantly left with the job of finding something valuable in the writings of people who would regard us as dangerous heretics.

Another factor was Asimov's commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. Mathew uses logical back-flips, mis-quotes and fallacies to make his case that Jesus is the Messiah foretold by the Old Testament prophets. I happen to know quite a bit about this issue, having written a term paper on the subject back in my University days. The Messiah of the prophets is clearly a mythological creation, what I call "Everything that Israel Stands For"-the Super Jew. Connection to the person of Jesus  (or any real person) is risky at best, but I didn't appreciate how flimsy until I read Asimov tear Matthew to bits, verse by verse. Asimov (a jew by birth and an atheist by choice) is careful to point out that the Jews at the time violently opposed Matthew's logic and happily stoned its advocates to death. While the penalty seems extreme, their objections seem quite reasonable. If you take the Old Testament seriously, the New Testament is heresy. If you don't take the Old Testament seriously, the New Testament is irrelevant.

Asimov does a similar job with Mark and the life story of Paul, as told in Acts. I had always felt that the personality and character of Jesus somehow "shone through" all this hype, interpretation and glorification. Once Asimov was through with me, I wasn't so sure. Did I know anything at all about Jesus? This is not the first time such a thing has occurred to me. I wrote about it in "Monkey Boy", one of the most popular posts in this blog.

So, If I have lost that feeling of connection with Jesus, which was more about liking the man rather than the teachings, what is left? If we set aside all the politics of the Zealot, the theology of John and the Messianic hype of Matthew, what's left?

Not much.

And then, the inevitable question arises: suppose you did have a collection of the actual, unfiltered sayings of Jesus (once I thought I had such a thing in the Gospel of Thomas)? Why would I take it as more authoritative than any other writing? The answer inevitably depends on whether I believe that Jesus is divine. Obviously I no longer consider this to be a possibility.

I was influenced further by Asimov's commentary on the Old Testament, which reveals that what we regard as "orthodox Judaism" was relatively new in the time of Jesus. For example, it did not exist in the time of David or Solomon. Like much of the rest of the Old Testament, Priestly religion is read back into everything from Genesis onward -- something I knew already but it had not "sunk in". Bottom line is that you see Judaism still in flux during the time of Jesus, with Jesus quite likely stepping in as a reformer of Judaism, preaching mainly (or exclusively) to Jews with a message that is not likely to be intelligible, let alone relevant to modern readers. To believe that Jesus had a message for non-Jews, you need to accept Paul's "spin" on Jesus, which was vigorously resisted by the original disciples, all of whom were Jews.

Added to this is my previous decision to stop identifying myself as a Christian, mainly as a protest about all the mayhem that has been committed in the name of that religion since New Testament times.

So I wind up with a total rejection of Christianity, pulled up by its roots.

But then, why is Christianity so popular? Why have others not followed my train of logic? The answer, it seems to me, is authority. Acceptance totally relies on authority - ultimately in the divine authority of Jesus Himself. Seen from this perspective, assuming there is no such thing as "divine", you see the divine aspect of Jesus as a necessary pre-condition to claiming Him as the ultimate authority and, less plausibly, for those who claim to inherit the same authority by mystical means.

Rejection of all religion on the same basis is just one step further.

I then turn to ask if there is any human authority. Could there be such a person? I'd say that authority comes (if at all) from what the person is saying, not the reputation of the person. For example, we regard Euclid's theorems on geometry as authoritative but don't feel obligated to know anything about Euclid or his political opinions (in fact Euclid may not have existed at all). Einstein said a lot of things that were profoundly true and a few things that were plausible but wrong. If a previously-unknown paper by Einstein turned up, it would get special attention because of its famous author but it would not be simply accepted without question. We have grown up enough to think for ourselves and respectfully disagree with any human being, even the wisest among us.

Does character count for nothing? I'd say only in a negative sense. Someone who is known to be a liar or a con-man deserves to be totally ignored even if what he says seems reasonable. This that we are entitled to ask about not only the content of what a person is saying but to ask why he's saying it. Life is short. We don't have time to carefully weigh the evidence for every crack pot conspiracy theory, "proof" of God or revolutionary theory of everything.

But we also don't need to be right about everything. It's OK to be wrong and OK to trust no authority at all.

What, if Anything, is Christianity?

See also, "What, If Anything, Is a Christian?"

To most people who identify themselves as Christians, their religion is "based" on the life and teachings of the historical Jesus Christ which, in turn, are a continuation of the story told in "The Bible", viewed as one "book".

This view is incorrect for many reasons.

The life and teachings of Jesus are based on Christianity, not the other way around. We know absolutely nothing of the life and teachings of Jesus except from the point of view of the early Christian Church.

The accounts in the New Testament are written to illustrate specific interpretations of His life and acts. For example, Mathew is concerned to show Jews of his time that Jesus is the Messiah. His arguments make no sense to a modern reader and they were vigorously denied by Jews at the time ("Christians" advancing this view were pursued as criminals by the Jewish authorities of the time and stoned to death as heretics. Indeed, Jesus Himself was executed by he Romans and/or the Jewish authorities for precisely his claim). Modern Christians systematically ignore the fact that what they call the "Messiah" has nothing whatever to do with the Messiah the Jews were expecting, nor the Messiah that Matthew claimed Jesus to be. The modern Messiah is as a creation of modern myth like Santa Claus -- not even the mythical super-Jew of the Bible. This isn't a simply an academic distinction. The key belief of he evangelical Christian is that Jesus is his personal saviour. The Biblical Messiah was supposed to free Israel and restore it to the glory. Obviously, Jesus did not fit the bill, so the myth needed a vigorous re-write, a process that is well under way in the early Church and is still a "work in progress".

There were several claimants to the office of "Messiah" during the time of Jesus and they all met the same fate. Their claims were treason from the point of view of the Romans and heresy from the point of view of the Jews. The messianic hopes of the Jews evaporated with the sack of Jerusalem in 70 AD, but such hopes were still alive in the time of Paul and there are numerous claims put into the mouth of Jesus that seem mysterious today. Re-working these claims (especially those in the Revelation of John) is still a 21st century cottage industry. For a few die-hards, the end of the world and the "kingdom of God" (whatever that is) is just around the corner. However, in the New Testament, what was expected was the defeat of Rome by the Messiah, something that was seen as preposterous even at the time by the great majority of Jews. Once it was taken seriously and the Jews rose up in revolt, Israel came to a catastrophic and perfectly predictable end.

Matthew invents a geology for Jesus and fabricates a birth story (the virgin birth, Bethlehem etc.) solely to connect Him to the line of David and Old Testament prophecies of he Messiah. These stories don't appear in the other three gospels. The whole argument makes no sense anyway, but it is why this particular Gospel was written. Connecting Jesus to David is a bit weird to the modern reader. David was notable as a war lord, who expanded the borders of Israel, putting Israel locally "on top" for a less than a century. David wasn't even a follower of "Judaism", which did not really exist until later. In the thinking of Old Testament prophets the Messiah was to save Israel as a nation. For those writing after David,  the Messiah would need to be a descendent of David. Oddly Jesus wasn't such a descendent, even though his father was. The father of Jesus was (according to Matthew) God. Quite typically, the theology of Matthew winds up tripping over itself.

Like Matthew, the Gospel of John is a piece of early Christian theology, featuring Jesus going around and making claims for Himself that make sense only from the point of view of the early Christian church. The main point is that Jesus is/was a pre-existing god, but at the same time a son of God. The difficulties with this idea were not yet fully worked out in the first centuryand indeed were never worked out except at the point of a sword.

John's Jesus is not plausible on His own but makes perfect sense if you know the other side of the argument, which was (a) Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem (b) Jesus was not of the "house of David" (c) Jesus was executed by the Romans and therefore did not save Israel from anything so (d) Jesus was not the Messiah. Because of all this, we are more than willing to stone you to death as a heretic, so get the f*k out of town. The book of Acts is the story of Paul being run out of one town after another from Jerusalem to Rome and all points in between, mostly by angry and murderous Jewish authorities.

The Gospels also go to great length to downplay the moderately successful religion founded by John The Baptist. From what we see in Acts, it's plain that the followers of John were not themselves convinced that John endorsed Jesus in a way that the New Testament portrays. Again, you can understand the "Biblical" John the Baptist best by understanding what the opposing view was.

The early Church split into (at least) two warring factions over the issue of whether Jesus was the "Messiah" just for the Jews (as the Old Testament clearly indicates) or for everyone. Should "Gentile" converts be required to follow the burdensome practices of the Mosaic code (such as circumcision)? "Conservative" Jews (especially those in Jerusalem) saw it necessary to convert to Judaism to be a Christian (even though they would still be considered heretics by orthodox Jews). Paul, being a "civilized" Roman Jew (from Tarsus, far from Judea), was willing to compromise. Eventually, his view won out by the simple fact that Israel was destroyed in 70 AD. The "liberal/Gentile" wing of Christianity prevailed by default. What we have in the New Testament (writings selected by this "pro-Gentile" school of thought) are dominated by Paul and his companions, especially Mark and Luke, who prevent a rather sanitized and tolerant view of Jesus (as opposed to the Jewish Jesus of Matthew, who claims to have come to "fulfill" the law of Moses and not to replace the law in any way).

Overlaying all of this is two millennia of further interpretation, theology and open warfare. The modern "Christian" reads the New Testament through goggles that take for granted (for example) the doctrine of the Trinity, an awkward political compromise between sects of "Christianity" that papers over the lively dispute over what Jesus was (A normal human? A separate God? An aspect of God (the "word")?). Ironically, these debates were shackled by Old Testament monotheism, which (from the point of view of the Jews) viewed all the claims of the Christians as heretical (punishable by death). Early Christians couldn't simply put up Jesus as an additional God, nor could they put Him up in place of the Old Testament God. According to the Greek way of thinking, he had to be a god of some sort. The divorce between the Jews and the Christians was not an amicable one, even to this day. Christians claim the Old Testament (parts of it anyway) but the Jews read the Old Testament in a radically different way. Millions of Jews have met their death at the hands of Christians for their stubborn but perfectly reasonable rejection of the arguments presented in Matthew. Unlike Christians, Jews have an annoying tendency to carefully read and debate their Bible.

Church leaders continued to debate (and still debate) just how Jesus and God are related. The question was supposedly settled by The Third Counsel of Constantinople in 680 AD, which condemned all dissenting opinions as heresy and is officially rejected by many large segments of Christianity to this day. Yet, most Christians consider this type of question to have been settled (in the Bible, no less!!) or irrelevant. If nothing else, this particular controversy should show that there is not now, nor ever has been a unified interpretation of the life of Christ. The seeds of disagreement are glaring in the New Testament and they have only grown with time.

(While this is not terribly relevant to my point, I should state my own view on his issue, best documented in "The Zealot". I think Jesus was a real human being who may or may not have believed himself to be the Messiah. Others around him probably did believe him to be he Messiah, enough to guarantee his unfortunate end. Along with others with similar claims, he was executed by the Romans for treason and/or the Jews for heresy. Based on a bit of logic and careful reading, we can offer a few negative guesses. He was not born in Bethlehem. His mother was not a virgin. He did not think of himself as divine, nor, of course, was he. He was not the Messiah for the simple reason that the Messiah is a mythical person, but also because he wasn't the "real" Messiah people were expecting. He did not come back from the dead, nor did anyone else of whom this claim was made at the time. He was an orthodox Jew, preaching to Jews. Evidence of his ministry to those outside of the Jewish faith is slim and unconvincing. Theologically, he probably represented a rather mildly liberal, reformist view of Judaism but certainly not a wholesale rejection of Judaism as the only true faith. I'm confident that most of this is wrong but I have no idea how any of it could be settled once and for all.)

Modern "evangelicals" cling enthusiastically to the Old Testament while shredding it into proof texts to support modern "take" on Christianity, which is at odds with "official" Christianity as taught by the Catholics. Evangelicals are remarkably ignorant of the Bible that they claim to have been somehow inspired by God. Ironically, it is the Catholic and "liberal" branches of Christianity that require their pastors to have a professional competence with Biblical criticism, even to the extent of a passing familiarity with Greek and Hebrew. Such familiarity creates a view of "Christianity" in a historical context which may or may not make sense of the idea of one true God acting in history. In any case, such training fosters a deep appreciation for the Bible that comes from actually reading it, not having read for you. Discussions among professionals are remarkable for the absence of "proof texts".

For one reason or another, modern Christians basically dump the Old Testament while still claiming it as part of their history and authority. This allows them to overlook the tangle of controversies within Judaism itself.  In the time of Jesus, Judaism was itself split into warring factions (Sadducees and Pharisees). Paul himself was a Pharisee and many Pharisee doctrines (such as the resurrection) find their way into Paul's version of "Christianity". To a modern eye, the split between Pharisees and Sadducees has more to do with politics than theology, since one party or another controlled the temple and (subject to Roman approval) the money. This will be familiar to those who look for real differences between Republicans and Democrats.

All religion is based on claims of authority. Lacking any grounding in reality, such claims reach into an alternate universe, the creation of the human mind. It is not surprising that we wind up with competing and contradictory doctrines. Historically, these disagreements over what is "true" in the alternate universe have lead to centuries of warfare and destruction.

The alternative to religion is to ground belief on observable fact and experience. This still leaves us open to misinterpretation and even doctrinal disputes. But such disputes can be resolved in the theatre of actual, current, personal experience. If we believe that we all inhabit the same physical universe, it would seem that we have a better chance to stop killing each other on orders from the alternate worlds of religious authorities.

In the real world, we are faced with many who still take their orders from the invisible lords of the alternate universe. Tolerance is the only practical path to take. We should be willing to agree on what to do and put aside disputes on why we should do it.

In a cosmopolitan society, there is a broad consensus between modern Atheists, Agnostics, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists over what constitutes a just society. People need to be free to call their personal philosophy by whatever name that seems right to them. It is by their actions we should know them.