Vertical and horizontal

In the West, our primordial moral target is known as the Ten Commandments, which were appropriately engraved in stone by God. Nowadays, many secularized folks obviously have difficulty accepting these commandments as anything other than a quaint, antiquated, and somewhat arbitrary list of do’s and don’ts. But in my book, I have a section in which I attempt to demonstrate their vital contemporary relevance, not just in their exterior aspect, but in their inner significance. For not only are the Commandments horizontal rules for governing man-to-man relations. But it so happens that they also have an interior dimension that communicates timeless, state-of-the-art advice on how to achieve spiritual fulfillment.

In that section of the book, I outline the universal applicability of the Ten Commandments for extreme seekers, off-road spiritual aspirants, omsteaders and cosmonauts of whatever vertical path. In other words, we are again dealing with something that partakes of timeless truth. This in itself is a rather profound mystery, because how, in the absence of divine intervention, could a primitive and barbaric tribe of nomads possibly have come up with these timeless truths that would still apply some 2,500 years into the future? You try coming up with something that will still be relevant in a few years, let alone a few thousand, like the Honeymooners or the Andy Griffith show with Don Knotts. It's not easy. In all honesty, the gap between man in his barbaric and pre-civilized state vis-à-vis the sublime moral and psycho-spiritual laws encoded in the Commandments or the Andy Griffith show is essentially infinite and unbridgeable by any mere Darwinian “just so story.” I mean, if you can believe that, what won’t you believe? (As implied in the descryption beneath the title of this blog, I believe in both Darwinian [horizontal] and Darwhiggian [vertical] evolution.)

This all reminds me of when I was frantically trying to finish my book, just over two years ago. The deadline was approaching, and at the last minute I had disassembled the entire last chapter and was in the process of trying to put it back together again. I was trying to come up with a suitable bang-up ending, and I thought to myself, “why not show how the Ten Commandments and the Upanishads, understood esoterically, convey the identical perennial psycho spiritual know-how and be-who to serious seekers--that they represent two independent views of the same transcendent reality? Call them the ten ‘Commanishads’ or ‘Upanishalts.’”

As soon as I thought of it, I knew that it was possible, although don’t ask me how I knew that I knew. However, I needed help. At the time, I happened to be on a plane flying back from New York to L.A, after having visited my brother-in-law and nephew. I was on the right plane, because I needed a rabbi in a hurry, and there is always a rabbi on a flight from New York. Normally I’m not the kind of guy who just walks up to to a total stranger and introduces himself, but something came over me. Being Jewish, I knew that he would have no choice but to be kind to this cosmic stranger. I had seen this fellow enter the plane, and if he wasn’t a rabbi, then he was hardcore Orthodox, and that was good enough for me. Nobody dresses like that on a slightly sweltering plane.

I walked down the aisle to where he was sitting, absently flipping through a magazine, and blurted out, “are you a rabbi?” He seemed a little disconcerted at first, but he could tell at a glance that I wasn't Arab, and I explained to him that this was a spiritual emergency and that I needed some immediate assistance. He didn’t know anything about the Upanishads, but when I mentioned that some people believe that “Abraham” and “Brahman” might be etymologically related, he was intrigued. (I have no idea if that’s true, but at least it got the conversation going.) I knew we were on the same wavelength when he started his discourse by saying that the first five commandments have to do with man’s relationship to God, while the second five govern man’s relationship to man.

“Hey, vertical and horizontal! You 'da mensch!” So to sum it all up, no spiritual progress is possible without the cultivation of virtue, the closing of the gap between us and our highest ideals. "To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." But not arbitrarily. Timeless moral truths are the luster of the eternal target to which our lives are properly aimed. "Affix to the Upanishad, the bow incomparable, the sharp arrow of devotional worship; then, with mind absorbed and heart melted in love, draw the arrow and hit the mark--the imperishable Brahman."

Say, did I mention that Brahman and Abraham are etymologically related? Damn, that’s only the second question. Nine more to go. I don’t mean to be so verbose, but... To tell you the truth, Dr. Freudjungadler, this is one of the reasons why we’re here to see you. Frankly, Petey thinks I talk too much, especially for someone who “knows so little,” as he delicately puts it. He recently alerted me to this new feature on amazon. Can you believe it?

It supposedly shows that only seven percent of the books in the world have more words per sentence than I do, and apparently most of them are written by a guy named Heidegger, which, I must tell you, is a bit of an insult, because I always thought Heidegger was a sort of mystagogic blowhard, not at all like me, whom in all modesty I consider a model of clarity compared to that Teutonic freak who goes on and on and on about the being of being and the nothingness that nothingness nihilates, and how the self creates both the absence it presents and the presentation from which it is absent, and how the self is both nothingness and the source of the nullity it embodies in public space, and how the nothing "nothings" and how only the nothing nothings, and how nothing can’t derive from something, as if by a slow decay of the ding an sich, or whatever you call it. Go ahead, Doc. You tell Petey. I don’t write that way, do I? Do I? Well? posted by Gagdad Bob at 8:21 AM 13 comments Clinical psychologist Robert Godwin is an extreme seeker and off-road spiritual aspirant

Indian civilisation is so rich, complex, and multistranded

Hindu society and culture in 21st Century India and Britain

This is the text of a presentation delivered by Mr Ranjit Sondhi CBE, at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies Board of Governors annual dinner, held in the Oxford Town Hall, on the 23rd June 2004. Mr Sondhi is a member of the BBC Board of Governors as the chairman of the English National Forum. He also serves as a member of the Patrons Council of the OCHS.

Let me make a strategic point at the outset. Perhaps nowhere more than in Hinduism do we experience traditions of thought, religious, and moral values that are so markedly different from the Judeo-Christian and classical traditions of 'western' culture. Hindu societies are in touch with cultures and languages that pre-date the West. The great challenge is to somehow capture the long, highly complex, and refined traditions of Hindu philosophy, art, science, music, and dance within the extraordinarily varied cultural history of the Indian sub-continent, which at this moment are beyond the reach of even the most well educated in all communities. Unless we all have access to these cultural repertoires, to understand and practise them, we will all lack the cultural capital to engage with each other.

Allow me to turn now to Hinduism and Indian civilisation - since the two are inextricably linked. Hinduism projects the great values of social justice, communal harmony, individual freedom, and human well-being. The idea of India, variously called Jambudwipa, Aryavarta, and more frequently Bharat, has exercised the Indian imagination for several millennia. Different writers have asked what defined and distinguished their land and its people, and what their central civilisational values were.

• For Tilak, Aurobindo, Bipan Chandra Pal, Savarkar, and others, it was a unique Hindu achievement, created and nurtured by the Hindus and reflective of the distinct Hindu sensibilities and historical experiences.
• Gokhale, Ranade, Gandhi, Tagore, and others took a different view. Although they disagreed among themselves, they were all convinced that the Indian civilization was spiritual rather than narrowly religious in its nature, open to the influences of others, synthetic rather than Hindu in its content, decentralised and rural in its orientation, and committed to the values of tolerance, self-restraint, and universality.
• The third group of writers, such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Motilal, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the communists, took a very different view of the Indian civilization and its contemporary relevance. In their view it had, after a brilliant start, continued to decline and was no longer a living reality. It was basically sociocentric, apolitical, hierarchical, localised, and unworldly, and wholly at odds with the demands of modern life. The best thing to do was to make a clean break with the past and give India a wholly new and modern self-image.

But although India chose to define itself along modernist lines after independence, the Hindu view still prevails. Hindu civilisation lies at its core, and is enriched by such Hindu-derived currents of thought as Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. However, Indian civilisation is too rich, complex, and multistranded to be reduced to a single and homogeneous formula. Every attempt to abridge and abstract a part of it does it grave injustice. Its values are several and occasionally incompatible.

These include equality and hierarchy, violence and non-violence, active engagement with the world and withdrawal from it, individualism and rationalism, monogamy and polygamy. It is up to us to decide which of these values to adopt and cherish. India certainly needs a common culture, but it cannot be the culture of any particular community. As Nehru, Gandhi, Tagore, and others had argued, Indian culture has drawn on many different sources including Islam and Christianity, and is plural and synthetic in nature. Only such a multiculturally constituted common culture, in which each of our major communities finds its reflection, and which it can therefore enthusiastically accept, can be the basis of Indian unity.

India has over the centuries been a home to many different peoples and cultures and has evolved a synthetic, composite, and multiculturally constituted common culture. The Hindu culture itself is a work of many hands and contains within it a large range of unhomogenisable diversity. It has no single owner, and that is its strength. And since all communities have contributed to it, they can see their own images in it and can happily accept it. It therefore provides an ideal framework within which to find both our commonalities and enjoy our differences.

And it is this desire to strike the right balance between unity and diversity that links us to the state of modern multi-cultural Britain. Let me first turn to the position of Hindus in this country. I want to resist the suggestion that Hindus and Hindu culture, whether on the Indian sub-continent, or in Britain, or elsewhere in the Western world, have somehow been preserved in aspic. There is, and always has been, in all cultures, a tension between tradition and modernity, between continuity and change. In this sense, cultural identities have always been dynamic, fluid, ambiguous, and elusive. At any given historic moment, a particular culture can never wholly be defined completely and accurately.

Nevertheless, there are tacit dimensions in Hindu society that are deep-rooted and resistant to change. These might be obvious to cultural anthropologists but for most of us they work so surreptitiously and unconsciously that we only become aware of them after a rigorous self-analysis. These might involve value systems, religious beliefs, language structures, child-rearing practices, family organisation, aspects of food and dress. Some of these influences go back to our childhood and are largely unknown to us. But they are nonetheless important determinants of our cultural expression and behaviour.

So, in a paradoxical sense, our Hindu culture is both given and constantly reconstituted. We might not like parts of it, and even when we do, we might feel that it needs to be changed to suit new circumstances. All such redefinitions and changes require both a deep historical knowledge of the cultural heritage and a feel for its past. Such redefinitions also require a rigorous and realistic assessment of present circumstances and future aspirations.

Thus in Britain, while traditional cultural practices are maintained and carry respect, the degrees and forms of attachment are fluid and changing - constantly negotiated, producing new, hybrid cultural forms of tremendous vitality and innovation. Such communities are in touch with their differences, without being saturated by tradition. They are actively involved in wider society without being assimilated. They are no longer wholly, or even primarily, defined by difference, by their otherness.

Perhaps it is important to acknowledge that 'Hinduism' in the British context is primarily perceived as an ethnic form. Ethnicity results from the interplay between two different forms of dialogue - the dialogue that an individual has with his/her cultural group, and the dialogue that he/she and her group have with the wider society. Hindus both locate themselves, and are located by others, in a culturally plural society.

Of late, ethnicity is now beginning to carry some other meanings, and to define a new space for identity. It insists on difference - on the fact that every identity is placed, positioned, in a culture, a language, a history. Every ethnic sentiment comes from somewhere, from somebody in particular. But it is no longer grounded in a set of fixed transcendental categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature. It should not be seen as having an essentialist, primordial quality. Rather, as has been said, 'ethnicity is a process of invention which incorporates, adapts, and amplifies pre-existing communal solidarities, cultural attributes and historical memories'. Ethnicity therefore is an arte-fact not nature-fact.

What this brings into play is the instant recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experience of ethnic subjects. That is to say, a recognition that we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being straight-jacketed by the binary oppositions of black and white, male and female, gay and straight. We are all ethnically located, but exist in the knowledge that our boundaries are being constantly crossed and recrossed by the categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

We know they are not forever, not totally universally true, not underpinned by any infinite guarantees. But for the moment, there is always a boundary, no matter how partial, temporary, or arbitrary. Otherwise, we would all flow into one another and there would be no political action, no cut and thrust of ideology, no positioning, no crossing of lines, no change. So there are other identities out there that do matter, that do bear some definite relationship to each other, that have to be dealt with somehow. Accepting the necessarily fictional nature of ethnicity does not stop the ethnic subject from engaging in the politics of difference. But it is an altogether gentler politics, a deeply non-violent encounter, in which ethnicity becomes, not a brutalising but a revitalising force.

When conceived and constructed in this way, ethnicity is transformed into something that is not doomed to survive forever, as Englishness has been, by marginalising, dispossessing, displacing, and forgetting other ethnicities. It becomes an ethnicity that has essentially lost its recruiting power, and is made attractive because of it. But I don't want to give the impression that this new concept of ethnicity as a powerless and perfect system. Like all other forms of identification, there will still be dimensions of power within it. But it isn't quite so framed by the extremities of power and aggression, violence and mobilisation, as the earlier forms of ethnic nationalism. I believe that the values and beliefs associated with Hinduism are implicit in this transformation - a transformation that moves us into a different discourse, a different world of ethnic relations in which diversity and equality are opposite sides of the same coin.

As India assumes a leadership position amongst nations...

Unity in Diversity: Oxford, the Model T and Hinduism come together at last. This is the text of a presentation delivered by Mr Alfred Ford, at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies Board of Governors Annual Dinner, held in the Oxford Town Hall, on the 26th June 2003. Mr Ford is a member of the OCHS Benefactors Council and his wife, Sharmila is a member of the OCHS Board of Governors.

It is a great pleasure to be here tonight and I would like to thank Shaunaka Rishi and the Board of Governors for giving me the opportunity to say a few words. Just to clear up any misunderstandings, yes I am the great grandson of the man who is famous for saying among other things, that "History is more or less bunk!" This is one of the many aphorisms that I do not share with Henry Ford. In addition, I couldn't fix a car if my life depended on it.

My great-grandfather did not have much of a formal education. He did; however, seem to have an extraordinary ability to understand the complex mechanics of machinery. He was able to disassemble and assemble pocket watches at a very early age, and build rudimentary car engines with very little training. He would often contemplate where this ability came from, and this questioning fostered his strong belief in spirituality and reincarnation. he studied whatever he could find about these subjects, and at one point entertained a visiting sadhu from India. He even handed out small pamphlets concerning reincarnation to visitors after they completed the factory tour at ford motor company.

Like my Great Grandfather I accept the philosophy of reincarnation and I also entertain Sadhus in my home and I don't shy away from handing out full volumes of Hindu literature, what to speak of pamphlets. The Bhagavad-Gita Gita refers to knowledge of the soul as Raja-vidya or the King of knowledge. It is knowledge of god, his creation and our humble place in the grander scheme of things. Hindu thought and culture is infused with the concept of the supreme. there is nothing we can touch which has not been identified in Hindu scripture as belonging to God. But Hindu scholars do not study theology so how is this culture to negotiate its interaction with the West and our global culture.

In order to investigate the Hindu science of God and the self at a high academic level, we now have this important presence at Oxford. Oxford University has an impressive reputation for excellent scholarship in the world. There is no better place to display, discuss, dissect and disseminate the vast collection of Hindu literature available, Vaishnava, Shivite and Shakta, among others. Certainly there exists a natural synergy between the king of education and the king of universities.

The world today is in great need of an introduction to and appreciation of the treasures of all cultures. It is not healthy that one perspective, be it economic, political or religious tries to dominate and ignorance has always been the chief weapon of dominance in the world. Although we all fly the flag of multi-everthing-ism we also share great ignorance of the diverse spiritual reality in which we live.

For the Hindu community students armed with a deep scholarly appreciation of the potent message of Vedic culture, will be better equipped to respond to the complex ethical and moral questions posed by modern society. They will have the language to dialogue effectively with other religions and cultures and they will be respected as leaders, Commentators and advisors in their communities.

The main source of inspiration for these studies, the spiritual literature of India needs a place of honour and refuge. Many of these writings are in danger of being lost or forgotten. Certainly by sheer volume, the sacred texts of India rank as the greatest collection in the world. Should not these texts be studied at the same academic level as other great religious traditions? And the OCHS is also taking steps to preserve manuscripts in Indian libraries presently under threat.

As India assumes a leadership position amongst nations in the new millennium, it is incumbent on all of us to do what we can to preserve and enhance India's greatest treasure. This treasure is not the burgeoning technology industry or lucrative markets for over seas manufacturers. it is not tourism, or textiles, or Bollywood. This treasure is one of the oldest religious and spiritual traditions in the world, and the richest treasure trove of sacred scripture. It is an enduring source of enlightenment, which can make a positive contribution in the world today.

I believe Henry ford wanted to make the world a better place. he campaigned for world peace and saw the automobile as a way to liberate people from the drudgery and ignorance of rural life. He was inquisitive about machines, human existence and the nature of the soul. I am the first to admit that some of his efforts have backfired, and have had unforeseen consequences. But he was, I believe, instrumental in making the world a smaller and more unified place. He was concerned about our planet and i think that if he could, he would have liked to peel away the covering of the universe to reveal its inner workings.

The work being done at the OCHS could be considered a part of this revealing process. it is opening a door to knowledge and culture that until recently, was unfamiliar and confidential, separated from the western world by time, society, and distance. My wife and I are privileged to count ourselves as active supporters of this Centre for three important reasons.

• The first is the need we see for Hindu communities to appreciate scholarship in Hindu Studies and to recognise its enormous potential for their future in our global culture. Linked with this is the need for contemporary scholarship to study contemporary Hinduism, its spirituality, literature and perspectives.
• The second is that we feel a need to invest in the future of our communities by facilitating young intellectuals to become a future generation of scholars. This will help preserve and interpret Indic religions for modern times.
• The third reason is more personal. We have two lovely daughters and we hope that they will one day have children of their own. We would like to see our grandchildren, and others have every opportunity to excel in any field of endeavour, including Hindu theology, philosophy and culture. With the OCHS they will have such an option.

I urge you all to do whatever you can to assist in this exceptional and important endeavour. If you are a scholar you hold the keys for a whole culture to engage wholeheartedly with the Western world. Your support is essential; if you are a businessman you can add value to the Centre; if you are a student you can consider a vocation in scholarship in this field. But everyone can offer support and blessings. Thank you HOMEPAGE OCHS NEWS ABOUT OCHS FACULTY &STUDENTS INDIAN STUDIESAT OXFORD RESEARCH PROJECTS PUBLICATIONS EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMES BENEFACTORS & FRIENDS VISITORS TO OCHS CONTACT US

Savor the peace that is within

Delhi, India — Prem Rawat made a guest appearance for a half-hour interview with Rajiv Mehrotra on his weekly talk show called “In Conversations” on Doordarshan TV, the leading national TV station accessible all across India. In a lively conversation, Rajiv Mehrotra asked Prem Rawat, well known to millions of people as Maharaji, about the different perceptions and “realities” that people hold. Prem Rawat responded, “The breath comes into you. Breath comes into me. The reality of a human being … is not what we can believe in … not all our accomplishments and our ideas and our philosophies. All the people on the face of this earth have the same fundamental reality. I talk about the knowledge to get in touch with that fundamental reality that exists inside of us. It’s not a theory.”

Rajiv Mehrotra asked many questions regarding a “journey” or process needed for personal transformation. Prem Rawat emphasized aspiration and replied, “It’s like a person who is thirsty. You can draw him a picture of a well. You can describe water to him. That’s all well and fine, but at some point, that person needs to have that glass of water to be able to quench the thirst. The aspiration, the thirst, has to come from within. You can give a glass of water to anyone, but that person who is thirsty will enjoy it the most.”Prem Rawat, hinting at such a journey, continued, “It begins with the first step of saying, ‘I do feel my thirst.’ Once a person gets thirsty, they find the water.”

Mehrotra then asked, “What is your inner destination?” Prem Rawat said, “My destination I have found within me is to have the access to that peace, to that joy that resides within me. Within you. Within every single human being, regardless of who they are, what religion they follow, what they do. I don’t talk to people about how incomplete they are … but the beauty that has been placed in every single human being.” This is the fourth decade that Prem Rawat has circled the globe bringing a message of peace. More than 10 million people around the world have come to him for inspiration and guidance. “What I offer people is not just talk,” he says, “but a way to go inside and savor the peace that is within.”

For over three decades, Rajiv Mehrotra has been a familiar face on public television, notably as the anchor of this in-depth, one-on-one weekly prime-time talk show called “In Conversations,” where he has interviewed more than 1,000 celebrities and world leaders. Rajiv Mehrotra was educated at the universities of Oxford and Columbia. He has worked extensively in the media on both sides of the camera. As an independent documentary filmmaker, he has won several international awards in addition to three national awards presented by the president of India.

He is managing trustee of The Public Service Broadcasting Trust and secretary/trustee of The Foundation for Universal Responsibility of the Dalai Lama. He is a trustee of the Indian Centre for Philanthropy and The Norbulingka Institute of Tibetan Culture, and has served on the governing councils of the Sri Aurobindo Society and the Film & Television Institute of India. He is also judge of the Templeton Prize for Spirituality, and was nominated a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum at Davos. He has edited a number of books, including The Mind of the Guru: Conversations with Spiritual Masters and Understanding the Dalai Lama and The Essential Dalai Lama. Home

Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables

By CORNELIA DEAN NYTimes.com Homepage: July 25, 2006

In “The Language of God,” Dr. Collins, the geneticist who led the American government’s effort to decipher the human genome, describes his own journey from atheism to committed Christianity, a faith he embraced as a young physician. In “God’s Universe,” Dr. Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy at Harvard, tells how he is “personally persuaded that a superintelligent Creator exists beyond and within the cosmos.”

And in “Evolution and Christian Faith,” Dr. Roughgarden, the child of Episcopal missionaries and now an evolutionary biologist at Stanford, tells of her struggles to fit the individual into the evolutionary picture — an effort complicated in her case by the fact that she is transgender, and therefore has views at odds with some conventional Darwinian thinking about sexual identity.

If his eminence in science were not so unassailable, a fourth author, the biologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard, might also be taking a chance by arguing that religion and science ought to take up arms together to encourage respect for and protection of nature or, as he calls it in his new book, “The Creation.”

Although he writes that he no longer embraces the faith of his childhood — he describes himself as “a secular humanist” — Dr. Wilson shapes his book as a “Letter to a Southern Baptist Pastor,” in hopes that if “religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem would soon be solved.”

Coming as they do from a milieu in which religious belief of any kind is often dismissed as little more than magical thinking, this is bravery indeed. But other new books, taking a different approach, also claim the mantle of bravery. In “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and theorist of cognition at Tufts, refers again and again to the “brave” researchers (including himself) who challenge religion. In “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins, a professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford, once again likens religious faith to a disease and sets as his goal convincing his readers that atheism is “a brave” aspiration.

Of course, just as the professors of faith cannot prove (except to themselves) that God exists, the advocates for atheism acknowledge that they cannot prove (not yet, anyway ) that God does not exist. Instead, Drs. Dawkins and Dennett sound two major themes: a) the theory of evolution is correct, and creationism and its cousin, intelligent design, are wrong; and b) a field of research called evolutionary psychology can explain why religious belief seems to be universal among Homo sapiens. But these sermons, which the authors preach with what can fairly be described as religious fervor, are unsatisfying.

Of course there is no credible scientific challenge to Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. So what? The theory of evolution says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God. People might argue about what sort of supreme being would work her will through such a seemingly haphazard arrangement, but that is not the same as denying that she exists in the first place. In any event, as Dr. Gingerich argues, in simultaneously defending evolution and insisting upon atheism, Dr. Dawkins probably “single-handedly makes more converts to intelligent design than any of the leading intelligent design theorists.”

And evolutionary psychology as a prism through which to view contemporary human behavior is open to many challenges. Some have come from critics who dismiss much of it as little more than “Just-So Stories” designed to explain or justify the status quo. So it seems strange to see its logic cited as a weapon against the story-telling aspects of religion.

All of which leads one to ask, who are these books for? The question is easy to answer when it comes to Drs. Collins, Roughgarden or Gingerich. First would be young people raised in religious families, who as they progress through school suddenly confront scientific reality that challenges Sunday morning dogma.

THE LANGUAGE OF GOD By Francis S. Collins. Free Press, 2006.
THE GOD DELUSION By Richard Dawkins. Houghton Mifflin, 2006
BREAKING THE SPELL: RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON By Daniel C. Dennett. Viking, 2006.
GOD’S UNIVERSE By Owen Gingerich. Harvard University Press, 2006
EVOLUTION AND CHRISTIAN FAITH: REFLECTIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST By Joan Roughgarden.
THE CREATION: A MEETING OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION by E.O. Wilson. W.W. Norton, 2006.
SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF BELIEF By Lewis Wolpert.
Readers’ Opinions Forum: Human Origins

“I have been struck,” Dr. Roughgarden writes, “by how the ‘debate’ over teaching evolution is not about plants and animals but about God and whether science somehow threatens one’s belief in God.” Or as Dr. Collins put it, when religions require belief in “fundamentally flawed claims” about the world, they force curious and intelligent congregants to reject science, “effectively committing intellectual suicide,” a choice he calls “terrible and unnecessary.” But does science require the abandonment of faith? Not necessarily, and certainly not entirely, these authors argue.

Also, people who read these books will realize that it is impossible to tar all scientists with the brush of amorality. The books challenge those who fear that science and ethics may end up at war, a possibility raised by President Bush last week, when he vetoed legislation supporting stem cell research. On the other hand, as the (atheist) physicist Steven Weinberg has famously put it, and as Drs. Dawkins and Dennett remind their readers, good people tend to do good, evil people tend to do evil, but for a good person to do evil — “that takes religion.”

But it is hard to believe that people who reject science on religious grounds will stick with the Dennett and Dawkins books, filled as they are with denunciation not just of their ideas but of themselves. This is unfortunate because, as Dr. Roughgarden points out, it is crucial in our society for people of faith, the vast majority of our population, to understand the issues of contemporary science. “I’d love to discuss the moral issues of biotechnology within a community of faith,” she writes. “But most church congregations and their leaders are not prepared for those discussions.”

Perhaps another book, “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast,” can help bridge that gap. It is by Lewis Wolpert, a biologist at University College London. It has been published in England, and it is to appear in the United States in January. Dr. Wolpert writes about the way people think about cause and effect, citing among other work experiments on how we reason, how we assess risk, and the rules of thumb and biases that guide us when we make decisions. He is looking into what he calls “causal belief” — the idea that events or conditions we experience have a cause, possibly a supernatural cause.

Human reasoning is “beset with logical problems that include overdependence on authority, overemphasis on coincidence, distortion of the evidence, circular reasoning, use of anecdotes, ignorance of science and failures of logic,” he writes. And whatever these traits may say about acceptance of religion, they have a lot to do with public misunderstanding of science. So, he concludes, “We have to both respect, if we can, the beliefs of others, and accept the responsibility to try and change them if the evidence for them is weak or scientifically improbable.”

This is where the scientific method comes in. If scientists are prepared to state their hypotheses, describe how they tested them, lay out their data, explain how they analyze their data and the conclusions they draw from their analyses — then it should not matter if they pray to Zeus, Jehovah, the Tooth Fairy, or nobody. Their work will speak for itself.

Body as a sign in circulation to deny the depths

The Future Citizen in a mock shooting gallery on a spending spree, laden with poisonous telecom and gaming devices strung about body armor woven into brain and spine. Microchip nano-factories deposit adrenalin at biometric checkpoint, seratonin captured in research labs fanned into abyss settlements quaking with sore dust. Body a sign under postmodern regime, sign in circulation to deny the depths, sway to magnet vortex illusion skeleton shape. Stolen body returns as cyborg advert super soldier, global positioning system constraint method. Restricted sponge soaks up the past, historical debris inflates; inverted world's black light hands; the social fate that breaks our knees.

CHANCE REPORT: THE UNEXPECTED SOUND SURREALIST POEMS, COMMENTARY AND REVIEWS by M.K. Shibek and friends THE FUTURE CITIZEN Sunday, 9 April 2006 Improvised lyrics for a song, 4-06 Last Updated: Wednesday, 14 June 2006 11:15 P GMT-08 :: Comments/Trackback (1-0)

Child-rearing: where majority of psychopathology emanates from

Our current war, for example, is not over territory or resources or even ideas, because Islamism, properly understood, is not an idea at all, any more than nazism was an idea. Rather, it is plainly a mental (and spiritual) illness that uses whatever materials are at hand to elaborate itself and metastasize. If it were an idea, you could sit down and have a sensible discussion with them, which is why liberals are so naive. Islamism is a deep pathology that has even deeper roots in cultural and historical pathology. But where does cultural pathology come from? Where could it come from?Here is where my visionary ideas could well be wrong, for the first place I want to look is in their manner of child-rearing, since that is where the vast majority of psychopathology emanates from. Of course, there are more or less purely genetic conditions such as bipolar illness, schizophrenia, and certain depressions, but those diseases afflict individuals, not whole cultures.

But what does one make of a whole culture, say, the ancient Greeks, whose men did not fall in love with women, but with young boys? Women and wives were basically regarded as subhuman nuisances, whereas the love between man and boy was idealized by poets and philosophers. Perhaps I am the one who is naive, but I just can’t understand how historians can look at such craziness and pass over it as if it were of no consequence, no different than their preference for columned architecture.What could possibly cause ancient Greeks to be so psychosexually messed up? Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. For if history is actually a field of insanity sprinkled with little pockets of sanity, we shouldn’t be surprised by this systematic abuse of woman and children. Rather, we should only be surprised when we encounter the opposite--humane and empathic treatment of the weaker members of society.

When we look beyond the beautiful art and timeless philosophy and examine the actual cultural beliefs of Ancient Greece, a disturbing picture emerges. Historians of ideas like to talk about the link between ancient Athenian and modern democracy, but these people were not like us. Well, not like me, anyway. You can speak for yourself. We are naturally appalled at the barbaric way our captured soldiers are treated by the Islamist savages, but this was pretty much the norm in history. For example, the Mycenaean pirates of ancient Crete subjugated the peoples around them, who paid tribute with pre-pubertal boys and girls to be used as human sacrifices to their bull-god (just as Islamists make such sacrifices to their bullshit god).

According to Breiner, author of a book entitled Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse Through the Ages and Today, the women of ancient Greece were essentially slaves. A wife’s function was to “look after the household and produce children--preferably boys.” While courtesans--who were used for pleasure rather than procreation--could be educated, wives were illiterate. Similar to Islamic societies today, the ancient Greeks “viewed men as sane and stable while women were considered mad, hysterical, and possibly dangerous and destructive to men.” Furthermore, “a woman’s freedom was severely restricted” and she was without power. “A man could sell his daughter or sister into concubinage if he wished.” Children of concubines were simply “aborted, killed or sold into slavery.”

At the time of Pericles in the late 5th century BC, a girl could marry only through parental arrangement: “no man married for love.” And once the marriage took place and the Athenian bride went to live with her husband, “she was cut off from her family and became a menial worker in her husband’s home.” Even the children she bore were not her own, but belonged to the husband to dispense with as he saw fit. Out of a population of 400,000, only 14,240 people had full civil rights. The rest were women, children and slaves. Unwanted children were simply exposed on a mountainside to die. “In all the Greek cities except Thebes the father had the right to kill his child at birth without question. In all cities except Athens the father could sell his children to slave dealers.” Female infanticide was the norm. Very few families raised more than one daughter. Even then, girls were given inferior food and no education.

Breiner feels that the revulsion towards women was at the basis of Greek male homosexuality. Can you think of a better explanation? The fashionable modern idea is that homosexuality is “genetic” and not subject to environmental influences. If so, how does one account for the prevalence of Ancient Greek homosexuality? “It was considered quite proper for the young men of Athens to engage sexually with older men, and most did.” “Merchants would import handsome boys to be sold to the highest bidder”; these boys would “be first used as concubines and later as slaves.”

Breiner speculates that “homosexual pederasty was so universal in Greek society” because it was “a means of ‘rescuing’ the male child from the perceived dangers of women...” “Boy brothels flourished in every city and a child prostitute could be rented, even at the height of Athenian culture...A freeborn child might see his father having sexual relations with a child his own age who was a slave.” I don’t even have time to get into the human and animal sacrifice. “Human life was considered so short and cheap that there was little concern about killing. When a town was captured the men were automatically killed or sold into slavery and the women were taken as concubines or slaves.” Traits such as “gentleness, kindness, industry, honesty, and integrity were scorned as effeminate and inferior.” posted by Gagdad Bob at 7:56 AM

The Cultural Creatives

The Cultural Creatives : How 50 Million People Are Changing the World by Paul H. Phd Ray, Sherry Ruth Anderson Reviewer: Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews Amazon.com

This book should be read together with IMAGINE, edited by Marianne Williamson. Taken together, the two books are inspirational while still being practical. Cultural Creatives as a book, and some of the other reviews, tend to over-sell the success of the emergence of an alternative lifestyle to Traditionalists (stereotyped as somewhat red neckish and religious rightists) and Moderns (stereotyped as ravish the earth anything-goes corporate carpetbaggers). The reality is that there are as many "cultural creatives" as there are people with disabilities in the United States--50 million. Not one quarter of the population, as one reviewer claims.

Having said that, by way of somber stage-setting, I cannot say enough good things about this book. It should be required reading for every citizen, every student, and every public official. In a very real sense, this book strikes me as a truly seminal work that could help millions of individuals reframe their personal connection to one another, to their Republic, and to the earth. This is neither a tree-hugger book nor a mantras R us book. This book provides a thoughtful review of how different movements--first the environmental movement, then the human rights movement, and finally the consciousness movement--have come together to define an alternative lifestyle and alternative paradigm for political and economic and social relationships in the larger context of a sustainable "whole" earth.

I found this book motivational and meaningful at both a personal level and a larger national level. At the personal level, its detailed and well-organized description of fifteen very distinct aspects of a "cultural creative" lifestyle helped me understand--as it has helped many others--that there is actually a category of people who have come to grips with and found solutions that enrich their lives--and this explains my great disappointment that the book does not offer a "resources" section at the end. I would have been very glad to discover, for example, a "Cultural Creative" journal or magazine that combined a strong book review section, art and culture, a consumer reports section tailored to the higher standards of the "CCs", new innovations in home restoration and remodeling, vacation options known to be attractive to CCs, etcetera.

At the higher political level, I found the book constructive and just this side of a tipping point. An increasing number of people, all of them generally outside of Washington and not associated with Wall Street, clearly have some strong positive values and a real commitment to achieving reform through "many small actions". What this group has lacked is a means of communicating and orchestrating itself on a scale sufficient to demand respect from politicians and corporation.

The Internet now provides such a vehicle--and as the Internet explodes from 3.5M people worldwide to 3.5B people worldwide, in the next ten years, I am convinced that Cultural Creatives may finally come into their own as a new form of global political party. Cultural Creatives would sign the Kyoto Treaty (and know what it is); Cultural Creatives would demand a 100% increase--from a half-penny a dollar to a full penny a dollar--in America's foreign diplomatic and humanitarian assistance budget--and Cultural Creatives could conceivably give the Republican Party a real beating in the next Congressional elections if President Bush persists in breaking his campaign vow on reducing carbon emissions. A peaceful revolution in our national agenda may truly be a near-term reality.

This is not a book where a summary can do it justice. It needs to be experienced at an individual level and ideally also at a community level, where it could be understood and accepted as a common point of reference for individual choosing to live "in relation" to one another and to the world, at a level much higher and more satisfying than our current arrangements. When this book makes it to the best-seller list, America will have matured and there will be hope for our children's future quality of life.

The common thread that runs through every major religion

Our problem with established religion is often that we cannot find a religion that fits our modern-day lifestyle GOING BACK TO BASICS LOIS GRANT The Times of India Sunday July 2, 2006

Anyone who has invested time, energy and effort into finding their own truth knows that ignorance is not bliss. Understanding the religious environment that we grew up in should be the natural first step towards defining our own belief system. All too often, we grow up getting bits and pieces of religion, but never take the time to look at the bigger picture. It is the bigger picture that enables us, as thinking, feeling human beings, to evaluate both the truth and the doctrine of established religion, and decide for ourselves what fits us in this lifetime and what doesn't, keeping in mind that the doctrine of any given religion may not feel right to us, but the basic truth upon which the religion was built seems very familiar and very right.

Most religions have been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Common sense tells us that a lot of people have made a lot of changes in the teachings of any particular religion, for a lot of reasons. Our job, as spiritual seekers, is to get back to the basics — the basic teachings of the master teacher upon whom the religion was founded. Our problem with established religion is often that we cannot find a religion that fits our modern-day lifestyle. We protest against some of the religious doctrine and practices, believing that they just are not appropriate for living life in today's world. Without looking any further, we say, "That's not right for me," and move on in the hope of finding a different religion that we can be more comfortable with.

In studying the history of religious places, we come to a clearer understanding of why they did things the way they did, when they did them, and hopefully the importance of separating truth from doctrine in our quest for spiritual truth becomes more and more obvious. It does not matter which religion we are looking at; in every case, there are the teachings of the master teacher, and the doctrine (which was established by followers, not by the master himself) that guides us in learning how to express the master's truth in our day-to-day lives. That is not a bad thing; then and now, learning to express our spiritual truth on a day-by-day basis is what finding and following our own path in life is all about.

We turn to present-day spiritual teachers to guide us in expressing our spirituality, all the while resenting the spiritual teachers of yore who did the same for their life students. I have no doubt that generations from now, free-thinkers will criticise the teachers (and teachings) of our time as old-fashion ed and inappropriate to their lifestyle. That is the way it has always been, and that is the way it will always be: established religion gives each soul something to think about — a starting point in deciding what their personal truth will (or will not) be in that lifetime. We run into problems when we want to express our beliefs differently than any particular sect of any particular religion tells us to.

We should stop thinking of established religion as a firm set of rules and regulations that we are expected to follow. If we want to be a spiritual person, we should look at it instead as a historical recap of the ways generations of people have chosen to express the spiritual teachings of a specific master teacher. We can then free ourselves of the emotional rebellion we sometimes experience at being told what we should think and what we should feel. Once we stop feeing defensive and protective, we can begin to explore the truth as the master teacher taught it, without getting lost in the doctrine established by those who came after him. Once we separate the truth from the doctrine, we begin to realise that there really is not much difference in truth at all; the common thread that runs through every major religion in the world is what we, today, call Universal Law.

Every great spiritual master (including the ones upon whose teachings the various religions were founded) taught the same basic principles. Our goal in spiritual seeking should be two-fold: to get back to the basic teachings, and then to decide whether those teachings, as presented by any religion, ring true for us, as individuals, in this lifetime. Too often, we lose our focus and put our emphasis on doctrine (which comes and goes with each change in the socio-economic environment) instead of on the basic truth which the doctrine is striving to express.

Open up a braver, newer and vaster world

The Legacy of Theodore Levitt: His big idea on ‘marketing myopia’ is more relevant to corporates today than ever Saurabh N. Saklani business world 01july 06

On June 28, 2006, Theodore Levitt, a respected author, marketing expert, and former editor of Harvard Business Review ( HBR ), died at the age of 81 after a long illness. A legendary figure in the area of marketing, Levitt authored eight books on marketing, including Innovation in Marketing (1962) and The Marketing Imagination (1983). He is best remembered for his classic article, Marketing Myopia ( HBR , July-August 1960), which sold 850,000 reprints. This article is particularly worth discussing since it is more relevant today than ever given the degree of globalisation, competition, and scramble for success in the business world.

In Marketing Myopia , Levitt had argued that companies often fail or stutter because they define their area of presence too narrowly. He used the example of the railroads and wrote that they "let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business instead of the transportation business." Within this framework, companies discovered new opportunities which they may have missed had they not adopted a broader perspective of their businesses and markets.

Levitt's take on marketing myopia may seem common wisdom today but was a phenomenal insight in 1960. Companies today would do well to revisit this notion while defining where they position themselves or where they intend to compete. For instance, if Coke and Pepsi were to position themselves in the beverage industry, it would lead to an entirely different mindset as compared to a positioning in the soft drinks market. And as is well-known, each positioning leads to wholly different ideas and strategies for growth and success. Given the oil prices today, once can see why oil companies have decided to broaden their business perspective from petroleum to energy.

I believe that Levitt's lesson is easily transferable onto the sphere of personal growth and development. In this case, positioning our own talents in narrow silos leads to limited options and fewer avenues for success. However, by casting our potential, skills and interests in a wider zone of functioning and adaptability, we will automatically open up a braver, newer and vaster world to compete in. Marketing myopia thus provides sound intellectual ground for objectively assessing whether one suffers from “self-potential” myopia. I think that Levitt's invaluable lesson for companies and individuals alike is to expand the mind's eye while engaging in various endeavours. That, more than anything else, is a key step towards attaining a sense of fulfillment in life.

In the quantum world, to be is to be measured

This Quantum World updated June 8th, 2006 my website site

What is quantum mechanics?
The fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics.

Why should I be interested?
Because quantum mechanics is trying to tell us something important about the world and ourselves.

I won’t be able to follow the math.
It takes very little math to get the message of the quantum. Besides, you don’t come to understand the physical meaning of a mathematical formula by writing down another formula.

Then why is quantum mechanics said to be shocking, confusing, incomprehensible, and what have you?
Because we make it so. If we ask questions that Nature doesn’t understand, we shouldn’t be surprised if Nature gives answer that we don’t understand. Wrong assumptions lead to meaningless questions. Here as elsewhere, the challenge is to learn to think in ways that do not lead to meaningless questions.

What are the wrong assumptions, in a nutshell?
As the incomparable Sidney Harris said, any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there. (We are talking philosophy: clarifying the relationship between the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics and the real world is a philosopher’s job.) But if you held a gun to my head, I’d say that it is wrong to assume that What Ultimately Exists is a multitude (of particles, spacetime points, whatever). What is wrong is the bottom-up approach, which has been paradigmatic for something like 25 centuries.

And what is the message of the quantum, in a nutshell?
Since you keep holding that gun to my head, the nub of it is that What Ultimately Exists is one. Quantum mechanics explains the world from the top down. If you ask it about ultimate constituents and how they interact and combine, it does indeed make little sense. But if you ask it how the One Ultimate Existent—or whatever else you want to call it—takes on the aspect of a multitude, and thereby manifests the world, quantum mechanics makes perfect sense.

How does this solve the measurement problem, which by universal consent is the ultimate stumbling block to beating sense into quantum mechanics?
In a nutshell? The first thing you need to know about the so-called measurement problem is that it is largely spurious. There is a genuine problem, but as a rule this gets swept under the rug and spurious problems are tackled instead.

What is the genuine problem?
The quantum formalism is a probability algorithm. You feed it measurement outcomes, and it returns the probabilities of the possible outcomes of other measurements—measurements that may be made in the future, measurements that are made at the same time in a far corner of the universe, or measurements that could have been made in the past. As far as the math is concerned, that’s all there is to quantum mechanics. The problem is that a probability algorithm presupposes events—things to which probabilities can be assigned. How can such an algorithm be complete? How can it encompass the events which it presupposes?

How come the fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics is a probability algorithm?
Have you ever wondered why a stable composite object has spatial extent (it “occupies” space) even though it is “made of” a finite number of objects without spatial extent (they do not “occupy” space)? What “fluffs out” matter is the fuzziness—Heisenberg’s Unschärfe, generally mistranslated as “uncertainty”—of all relative positions and momenta. And what is the proper way of quantifying a fuzzy observable? It is to assign probabilities to the possible outcomes of a measurement of this observable.

And how does your interpretation solve the genuine problem?
Quantum mechanics does not tell us which substructure of its complete theoretical structure (comprising whatever is definable with the help of the mathematical formalism) corresponds to What Exists. The solution consists in making the right choice.

And which is that?
The macroworld. The tricky part is to find a genuine substructure of the theory that agrees with our experience of the macroscopic. This is where the top-down paradigm comes in. The spatial differentiation of the world is incomplete. It doesn’t go all the way down. If in our minds we partition the world into smaller and smaller regions, there comes a point when there isn’t any material object left for which these regions, or the corresponding distinctions, exist. They then exist solely in our heads. This makes it possible to show that macroscopic objects (properly defined) behave in a deterministic manner (properly defined), and this in turn makes it possible to attribute reality to the macroworld.

Can you give an example of the spurious problems that are tackled instead?
The mother of all pseudo-problems—quite literally, since it gives rise to several other spurious problems—is this: why do quantum states have (or appear to have) two modes of evolution, one deterministic and one probabilistic?

Why is this a pseudo-problem?
Because a quantum state is not the kind of thing that evolves. The time dependence of a quantum state is not the time dependence of an evolving instantaneous state but the time dependence of a probability algorithm on the time of the measurement to the possible outcomes of which it serves to assign probabilities. This was clearly seen by Heisenberg, the first to discover quantum mechanics: “There is no description of what happens to the system between the initial observation and the next measurement.”

There is no description of a quantum system between measurements???
Are you surprised? What a physical system does between measurements is by definition speculative. To know what it does, you have to make a measurement. Any story purporting to describe a system between measurements is just that—a story.

Come on, the generally acknowledged fact that a measurement disturbs a quantum system implies that there is something to be disturbed. What can be disturbed can be described in both its disturbed and undisturbed states.
This “generally acknowledged fact” is a myth. A measurement does not disturb the value of an observable—it creates it. There is ample evidence—and I go to some trouble to furnish it—that a property or value is possessed (by a system or an observable) only if, only when, and only to the extent that it is measured. In the quantum world, to be is to be measured.

Do you really believe that the moon exists only when you look at it? (Note: Pascual Jordan recalls Einstein asking him this very question.)
Your question contains two misconceptions. For one, any event or state of affairs from which the truth or falsity of a proposition of the form “system S has property P” can be inferred, counts as a measurement. Contrary to a popular misconception, quantum physics does not involve conscious observers any more than classical physics did. For another, the moon is a part of the macroworld, and this is real per se.

You want me to believe that the properties of the microscopic constituents of the macroworld exist only because they can be inferred from what happens or is the case in the macroworld???
The 25-century old bottom-up paradigm has passed its expiry date. The right questions to ask no longer are, what are the ultimate constituents and how do they interact and combine? The right question to ask is, how does the One Ultimate Existent differentiate itself and thereby manifest the world? Particles and atoms are instrumental in the manifestation of the world rather than its constituent parts or structures. Imagine that you just experienced something the like of which you never experienced before. How are you going to describe it? You are obliged to use words that refer to such experiences as you have had. It is the same with what “happens between” the One Ultimate Existent and its manifestation. Only this time what is missing is not the words but the facts. Even though facts belong to the finished product, the macroworld, we cannot describe its manifestation except in terms of facts, by drawing inferences from property-indicating events and their quantum-mechanical correlations.

This is crazy!
The question (once asked by Niels Bohr) is, is it crazy enough to be true? Quantum mechanics calls for radically new ways of thinking about matter, space, and time. For instance, if you want to think of space as something that exists by itself (in philosophese, a substantial expanse) then it forces you to conceive of it as undifferentiated—it lacks parts. So from where do you get attributable positions? They have to be realized (made real) as properties of macroscopic objects before you can attribute them to what is instrumental in their manifestation. Quantum mechanics helps us understand how attributable positions are realized. If instead you think of space as a storehouse of pre-existent positions, you won’t be able to makes sense of quantum mechanics because you won’t be able to understand what it is trying to explain. Posted in Recommendations, Quantum semantics 4 Comments »

Monotheism and Polytheism

What if Rome's Pagan Religion Had Prevailed? An persuasive book explores the repercussions of Christianity's ascendency in ancient times By Tara Katir, Kapaa, Hawaii Return to Hinduism Today Home Page

God against the gods: the history of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism is the latest from the pen of Jonathan Kirsch, author, journalist and attorney. In this book, Kirsch details the earliest historical conflicts of monotheism and polytheism as they occurred in ancient Europe, North Africa and the Middle East up to the death of Emperor Julian on June 26, 362 ce. His contention is that from its first historical appearance in ancient Egypt, monotheism has been an intolerant belief system. Monotheism's intolerance created conflicts then, and it continues to create conflicts that plague us today. Westerners who take pride in their monotheistic belief's bringing "civilization " to those of polytheistic customs may find Kirsch's analysis sobering and disconcerting.

Over thousands of years, recounts Kirsch, human cultures have worshiped a host of diverse Gods and Goddesses. This polytheistic worship of the Divine, while not totally benign, historically did not create conflict between neighboring peoples. As Symmachus, a pagan governor of the fourth century ce declared, "What does it matter by which wisdom each of us arrives at truth?" (See his entire speech in defense of paganism at http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-10/Npnf2-10-46.htm.) With this flexible posture toward worship of the Divine, little conflict would arise between worshipers of different Gods and Goddesses. Kirsch asserts, "The core value of paganism was religious tolerance--a man or woman was at liberty to offer worship to whatever God or Goddess seemed most likely to grant a prayerful request, with or without the assistance of priests and priestesses." However, in a small geographical area of the Western world an event occurred which presaged a change in humans' personal relationship to the Divine. This development would set in motion what was to become a devastating polarization of enormous proportions--all in the name of divine worship.

In the fourteenth century bce, a young Egyptian pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, through the power of his absolute rule, commanded the Egyptians to worship but one God. This revolutionary move to restrict worship of the Divine to one God would set the stage for what was to become a 3,000 year bloody and acrimonious conflict over how human beings worshiped. "Like Moses [who lived a century later], who is shown in the Christian Bible to condemn the worship of a golden bull and other graven images, Amenhotep rejected all the traditional icons of paganism and chose a simple geometric shape to symbolize the God Aton." Amenhotep repudiated all the Gods and Goddesses in favor of a single God. No idols were fashioned in Aton's image because his was a form that could not be imagined; rather Aton was symbolized by a circle of gold. Amenhotep closed all temples to other deities and had their ritual worship suppressed. Statues were shattered and their names and images literally chiseled off existing monuments. While his radical religious practices were short-lived, the ultraist paradigm shift he initiated would be practiced in the extreme by a legion of believers in this new monotheistic worship.

Monotheism, in its exclusive devotion to the worship of one God, has inspired a ferocity and fanaticism that are mostly absent from polytheism, says Kirsch. He explains, "At the heart of polytheism is an open-minded and easygoing approach to religious belief and practice, a willingness to entertain the idea that there are many Gods and many ways to worship them. At the heart of monotheism, by contrast, is the sure conviction that only a single God exists, a tendency to regard one's own rituals and practices as the only proper way to worship the one true God. The conflict between these two fundamental values is what I call the war of God against the Gods. It is a war that has been fought with heart-shaking cruelty over the last thirty centuries, and is a war that is still being fought today."

In our world today, Islamic tradition is easily targeted as the origin of religious terrorism or religious fanaticism. Kirsch points out, that, to the contrary, "It begins in the pages of the Bible, and the very first examples of holy war and martyrdom are found in Jewish and Christian history. The opening skirmishes in the war of God against the Gods took place in distant biblical antiquity, when Yahweh is shown to decree a holy war against anyone who refuses to acknowledge Him as the one and only God worthy of worship." Biblical myth turned to recorded history with the Maccabeean warfare waged against the pagan Syrian king and later, when the Zealots fought against the pagan emperor of Rome.

Truth Decay and Mental Highgiene

Is it possible for religion to pose anything more than a rearguard action against the inevitable transformation of man from homo religiosus to homo scientificus? In the West, science so dominates our way of looking at the world that perhaps we do not realize the magnitude of spiritual revolution (or devolution) this has entailed. While I endorse science (almost) without reservation, I do worry about its deleterious effect on the human soul when it is elevated to a metaphysic. There are, of course, people who wish to keep science and religion entirely separate, which has the practical effect of elevating the scientific worldview to a state religion. On the other side are people who wish to conflate science and religion, which ends up debasing both.

As I have said before, I am a believer in “intelligent design” for the same reason I am a believer in intelligence period. But this is metaphysics, not science, and should not be taught as such. It is true that there would be no atheists if all men were capable of understanding metaphysics. But they are not, and it doesn’t help matters to reframe metaphysical truth in a debased and watered-down form that appeals to the sensual or vital mind only. As pure truth, metaphysics is aimed at the nous, not the distorted and hypertrophied reasoning mind of the contemporary intellectual. The truth is true despite what may be proved or disproved with mere reason, which is a mechanical form of thought limited to drawing conclusions from premises. It has its place, but one of them is not the realm of primordial Truth per se. It is a banality to point out that the most important truths cannot be proved with reason. That doesn't make them any less true.

Tradition willfully attempts to maintain a purified faith in the teeth of the predations of science. There are certain particularly elevated and/or simple souls for which this will suffice. But that probably represents less than five percent of the population on the high end, and perhaps a quarter of the population on the low end. That leaves at least seventy percent of the population generally spiritually adrift and untouched by religious truth. How to reach them? For whatever reason, they have lost contact with the natural simplicity and nobility of their souls, so religion properly so-called no longer speaks to them. Thus they drift into hedonism or its twin sister, new-age spiritualism, with no grounding in the intrinsic meaning provided by authentic revelation and grace. There is absolutely no contradiction between science and this latter form of religion, for they simply address different levels of reality. Religion easily accommodates science, while the reverse can never be true. Religion accommodates science for the same reason that our minds do. For our minds are designed to know truth, pure and simple, whether it is empirical truth, rational truth, artistic truth, moral truth, or metaphysical truth. Intelligence itself is prior to what it knows, and what it knows is truth (otherwise “knowledge” is a meaningless, even absurd term).

Therefore, intelligence is truth itself implanted within our soul. As much as I respect tradition, I am very concerned about it reducing itself to a simple fideism, or faith, rather than appealing directly to the intellect. Again, there are gifted and simple people for whom this will suffice, but the great middling masses--leftist dominated academia, the creators and purveyors of popular culture, media elites in the MSMistry of Truth--entirely miss the boat in this regard. They are just intelligent enough to reject religion but not intelligent enough to understand it, and they obviously exercise a huge, dominant influence over the culture at large. How to win that battle?The fact of the matter is that modernity has brought with it certain positive and undeniably precious developments, such as the sanctity of the individual and all this implies--liberty, democracy, free markets, etc. But at the same time, a new kind of religion is required for this new kind of person. This religion must be more inward because we are more inward. In other words, cosmic evolution doesn’t just take place outwardly but inwardly.

As a matter of fact, it is this evolution of the interior horizon that has always been the concern of religion, even if and when religion did not realize it.I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit it now, but when I began the task of writing my book, I thought that I was going to have to invent a new religion. In my hubris, I thought, well, times have changed, and we know so much more now than we did when the original revelations were handed down. What if we could design a new religion now, based upon everything we know about the universe?It is actually a measure of God’s grace that my attempt to do this ultimately led me in exactly the opposite direction and saved me from trying to be L. Bob Gagdad. In all humility, I do believe this is because I approached the endeavor in all humility. In other words, I was motivated solely by the humble pursuit of truth, wherever it led me. There were no commercial motivations whatsoever (although it is probably another measure of God's grace that my publisher only later discovered this bitter economic reality).

As a matter of fact--I shouldn’t say this, but here goes--I practiced meditation every day during the course of writing the book, and in so doing prayed for two things only: light, or understanding, and the ability to express it.Now, I’m not nearly grandiose enough to say I succeeded (I won't presume to speak for Petey). Since the process is ongoing, there are a lot of little things I would now change about the book. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. What I am saying is that if you really want to understand religion deeply, you can. That’s what it’s here for. It’s not meant to be opaque, or absurd, or primitive, or outdated. Rather, no matter how smart or sophisticated you think you are, it really does address itself to the deepest part of your being. It expresses truths that cannot be proved, for the simple reason that Truth is its own proof. Ultimately you do not comprehend it. It comprehends you. posted by Gagdad Bob at 7:08 AM 9 comments Saturday, June 10, 2006

Did Kierkegaard offer anything on Muhammad and Islam?

What Would Kierkegaard Do? By CARLIN ROMANO

The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 35 dated May 5, 2006

Northfield, Minn. At 94, Howard Hong knows more about Denmark's most famous philosopher than anyone alive — or at least he has known it longer. Co-founder of the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library here at St. Olaf College, the largest Kierkegaard research library in the world, Hong, over a career of more than 60 years, edited and translated with his wife, Edna, the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), the controversial proto-existentialist who gave us "leap of faith" and other landmarks of individualist Christianity.

Still living with his wife in a wood-and-stone home barely a mile from the campus, the descendant of Norwegian immigrants closely followed how the Danes got themselves in a pickle this year. It happened because they exercised that signature mix of satiric verve, free-spirited laughter, and quizzical skepticism toward organized religion that played such a dynamic role in the life of Kierkegaard himself, a thinker today usually regarded as the father of existentialism. (Kierkegaard would have understood his posthumous elevation to patriarch — he famously observed that while life has to be "lived forward," it "must be understood backward.")

"What comes to my mind," Hong remarks, "is an old definition of a provincial. A provincial is one who can't stand to be laughed at. I mean, the Arabs provided the context for all this. Whoever did these drawings wasn't making up anything. They put some things together." Ask Hong what Kierkegaard would have made of Denmark's flare-up with the Arab world, the attitude of Danes toward Islam, their reaction to seeing Danish consulates and embassies attacked and products boycotted, and he's 30 years old again. Not a know-it-all, but a find-it-out. "Yes, that's good!" he says, intrigued by the idea of Kierkegaard on Islam. "I'm not surehe had a copy of the Koran. Let's see."

Down goes the Phillies cigar he's been puffing, he confides, as a palliative to the downside of life as a nonagenarian survivor in a family bedeviled by ulcers. Up and out of his favorite leather recliner in no time, Hong, still handsome with healthy white pompadour, smartly clad in black shirt and dark tie like some Johnny Cash of philosophical research, is off to another corner of his rambling house. He comes back with the indexes to the 26-volume Princeton edition of Kierkegaard's complete works, and Indiana University Press's seven-volume edition of Kierkegaard's journals and diaries, which he and Edna published from 1967 to 1978.

Did Kierkegaard offer anything on Muhammad and Islam? Hong predicts there won't be much. Osama, if you're reading this, now's the time to turn the page. Kierkegaard, it so happens, refers directly to Muhammad or Muhammadinism multiple times. Some passages are innocuous, as when he writes, "Like Muhammad's tomb, my soul hovers between two magnets." Others suggest a more judgmental stand.

"Muhammad protests with all his might against being regarded as a poet, and the Koran as a poem," Kierkegaard writes elsewhere in the journals and diaries. "He wants to be a prophet. ... I protest with all my might at being regarded as a prophet, and want only to be a poet." A few passages speak for themselves.

"When one views the historical roles of the religions on their journey through the world," Kierkegaard asserts boldly in 1839, "the relationship is as follows: Christianity is the actual proprietor who sits in the carriage; Judaism is the coach-man; Muhammadanism is a groom, who does not sit with the coachman, but behind."

Hong looks up, stunned at the apparent smoking gun, hermeneutically speaking. He agrees the only way to read the passage is, "Sorry, Islam, but you are tertiary, whether you like it or not." Other passages also show Kierkegaard treating Islam as a weaker rival to Christianity. Writing about the notion that Christianity's survival documents its truth, Kierkegaard observes, "The hypothesis may become more probable by lasting 3,000 years, but it does not on that account ever become an eternal truth that can be decisive for a person's eternal happiness. Has not Muhammadanism survived 1,200 years?"

Hong mulls over the findings, surprised given his earlier uncertainty about direct Kierkegaardian commentary on Islam. But it's not a shock in light of the Danish thinker's intense celebration of an inward-seeking Christianity that put believers in direct contemplation of God. What would Kierkegaard do if it were his attempts at satire that had enflamed Islam? "I don't think he would retract it if he were involved," Hong opines. "I'm not sure he'd even apologize."

And yet. "It wasn't that he had great love of journalists," Hong continues. "Kierkegaard said that if he had a son he'd rather have his son become a trapeze artist in the circus than become a journalist, because he regarded journalism as gossip." And that's where the Kierkegaard-Islam duet gets more intriguing. The Corsair, a wry Copenhagen weekly and the Page Six of its time, famously satirized and caricatured Kierkegaard in 1846 after he picked a fight with it. That drove him to even further depths of his profoundly morose personality, on intimate terms with the "sickness unto death" and "the concept of dread." The Corsair stopped at nothing — it mocked his hunched back, even his pants legs, one shorter than the other. Kierkegaard, in turn, blasted The Corsair as "an office of literary garbage collection."

"In no time at all," writes Joakim Garff in his recent massive biography of the philosopher, "Kierkegaard ... became a walking caricature in the city. Now he was no longer seen as the thinker whose very eccentricity managed to compel the respect of the multitude. ... People who had once looked up to him, perhaps without really understanding what it was they were looking up to, now spent lots of time looking down on him."

Hong thinks that even though Kierkegaard himself spun out little drawings, and might have volunteered himself to be one of the 12 cartoonists of Muhammad, he'd be divided in his reactions to the current controversy. "I suspect Kierkegaard would have a good word for the Muslims," Hong muses. "If for nothing else, in admiration of their discipline. ... I don't think he would have thought well of Muhammad taking an army into the city and all of that. ... But the flabbiness of the West, he'd go after that and have a kind of respect for the discipline generally of Muhammadinism, even though it easily becomes a formalism, and then a fanaticism."

Nor would the apostle of Christian individualism be likely to condemn Muslims en masse. "I don't think he would approach them as a group," Hong remarks. "He says most people are really pretty good if you can get them apart, tear them apart from the crowd, the demos." Gordon Marino, professor of philosophy at St. Olaf and current director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library, agrees that Kierkegaard's take on the cartoon controversy would be balanced between his allegiance to Christianity and free expression on the one hand, and his reverence for the seriousness of religious experience.

"His emphasis is on the sacred," notes Marino, who lived in Copenhagen for three years while completing his book, Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Marquette University Press, 2001). "There's nothing sacred anymore in Danish society. It's very secularized, the churches are empty, at least in the city." For that reason, Marino surmises, the Danes remain "kind of perplexed" that others would get so angry about representations of God. Like Hong, he thinks Kierkegaard would not respect Muslims who robotically follow instructions from imams, but he would admire Muslim seriousness, any devotion that arises out of personal relationships with God. And he would remain quite critical of media that "enflame public opinion," like those that attacked him.

"After those cartoons came out," Marino recalls, referring to the caricatures of the philosopher, "Kierkegaard's whole life changed. He was much more isolated. ... He would have thought useful satire has to involve a certain amount of wisdom, that one has to be adept at it. Just to mock someone, just to provoke someone, he would think of that as childish." You might sum up his advice with a twist on an old admonition, consistent with both his general approach to revelation and eye for every empirical detail. Look outward, as well as inward, before you leap. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania. http://chronicle.comSection : The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 35, Page B14

Betraying Spinoza

In a broader context, Spinoza's deconstructionism of identity has interesting parallels with Amartya Sen's recent anti-Huntingtonian thesis, elaborated in his recent books "Identity and Violence" and (to an extent) "The Argumentative Indian." To quote from the former work,

"The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theater lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician," etc.

And unlike Ms. Goldstein, Sen argues that such a world-view - of self as well as of others - is eminently possible and desirable. Posted by Anustup Datta on 05.19.06

The most significant observation of Goldstein is that Spinoza expressed the insight that in order to progress in one's appreciation of the non-physical aspects of the world, one needs to get beyond the constraints imposed by one's personal identity. Although axiomatic in the East it is extremely rare in the West. Another more recent example is Wittgenstein. This insight seems only to come to people in the aftermath of a traumatic experience - in Spinoza's case surely the experience of the excommunication. Because most of our own identity is unconscious it is very difficult to dismantle it without outside help, but it does seem to be the case that a Jewish identity, perhaps because it is so specifically defined in its external aspects, is easier to get beyond than many others.

The other important achievement of Spinoza was to write to Descartes pointing out that Descartes' position did not logically imply dualism. I hope Goldstein brings this out in his book because all the eminent people who write about Descartes/Dualism nowadays seem to be quite unaware of Spinoza's correction. Posted by Euan Hill on 05.19.06

Evolution's Bottom Line

By HOLDEN THORP NYTimes.com Homepage Published: May 12, 2006

THE usefulness of scientific theories, like those on gravity, relativity and evolution, is to make predictions. When theories make practicable foresight possible, they are widely accepted and used to make all of the new things that we enjoy — like global positioning systems, which rely on the theories of relativity, and the satellites that make them possible, which are placed in their orbits thanks to the good old theory of gravity.
Creationists who oppose the teaching of evolution as the predominant theory of biology contend that alternatives should be part of the curriculum because evolution is "just a theory," but they never attack mere theories of gravity and relativity in the same way. The creationists took it on their intelligently designed chins recently from a judge in Pennsylvania who found that teaching alternatives to evolution amounted to the teaching of religion. They prevailed, however, in Kansas, where the school board changed the definition of science to accommodate the teaching of intelligent design.

Both sides say they are fighting for lofty goals and defending the truth. But lost in all this truth-defending are more pragmatic issues that have to do with the young people whose educations are at stake here and this pesky fact: creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does.
Since evolution has been the dominant theory of biology for more than a century, it's a safe statement that all of the wonderful innovations in medicine and agriculture that we derive from biological research stem from the theory of evolution. Recent, exciting examples are humanized antibodies like Remicade for inflammation and Herceptin for breast cancer, both initially made in mice. Without our knowledge of the evolution of mice and humans and their immune systems, we wouldn't have such life-saving and life-improving technologies.
Another specific example is resistant bacterial infections, one of the scariest threats to public health. The ones that are resistant to antibiotics are more reproductively successful than their non-resistant relatives and pass the new resistance genes on to more offspring. Just as Darwin said 150 years ago.
The creationists have devised a tortuous work-around for this phenomenon, which endorses natural selection and survival of the fittest, but says that evolution doesn't explain the original development of species. The problem is, there are hundreds of genes that occur in both bacteria and humans. It's hard to see why a designer would do it that way, since having the same genes in bacteria and humans makes infections harder to treat: drugs that act on bacterial gene products act on the human versions as well, so those drugs could kill both the bacterium and the human host. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So evolution has some pretty exciting applications (like food), and I'm guessing most people would prefer antibiotics developed by someone who knows the evolutionary relationship of humans and bacteria. What does this mean for the young people who go to school in Kansas? Are we going to close them out from working in the life sciences? And what about companies in Kansas that want to attract scientists to work there? Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution?
One Kansas biology teacher, a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers, told Popular Science magazine that students from Kansas now face tougher scrutiny when seeking admission to medical schools. And companies seeking to innovate in the life sciences could perhaps be excused for giving the Sunflower State a miss: one Web site that lists companies looking for workers in biotechnology has more than 600 hiring scientists in California and more than 240 in Massachusetts. Kansas has 11.
In his most recent State of the Union address, President Bush mentioned our problems in science education and promised to focus on "keeping America competitive" by increasing the budget for research and spending money to get more science teachers. I hope he delivers, but we can't keep America competitive if some states teach science that has no commercial utility. Those smart youngsters in India and China whom you keep hearing about are learning secular science, not biblical literalism.

The battle is about more than which truth is truthier, it's about who will be allowed to innovate and where they will do it. Sequestering our scientists in California and Massachusetts makes no sense. We need to allow everyone to participate and increase the chance of finding the innovations to improve society and compete globally.
Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if only she had been taught evolution in high school. Holden Thorp is chairman of the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina.