October 2008

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/30/dole.ad/index.html

CNN reports on a really shitty ad put out by Elizabeth Dole, whose North Carolina Senate seat is being threatened by Kay Hagan, in which she calls Hagan “godless”.  Kinda reminds me of McCarthy’s witch hunt in the 50s.  We were afraid of the communists so everyone he didn’t like was a communist.  Now we’re afraid of Muslims (and the end of days), so everyone we don’t like is now godless or (perhaps worse) Muslim.

In the 30-second ad, a narrator says that a leader of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee recently held a “secret fundraiser” for Hagan.

The ad then shows members of the group, which promotes rights for atheists and the separation of church and state, declaring that neither God nor Jesus exists.

“Godless Americans and Kay Hagan,” the ad continues. “She hid from cameras. Took ‘Godless’ money. What did Kay Hagan promise in return?”

The ad ends with a picture of Hagan and a voice that sounds like hers declaring, “There is no God.”

Kinda reminds me of the time when I was told by a bunch of blue haired old ladies that I was unfit to be my nephew’s Godfather because I currently didn’t attend church.  Although they were fine with the drug addicts and welfare recipients who were around the table with me…because they lied and said that they went to church every week.

So it’s ok to fuck up your life and the lives of others every day, but as long as you go to church on Sunday (or at least pretend like you do), then you are a better person than someone who leads a good life but wants to explore the meaning of life and a relationship with God on their own.

It’s funny.  It feels as if, somehow, we’re slipping into the dark ages.

The problem, to me, isn’t that people are religious.  God bless em.  Seriously.  But its so arbitrary.  I mean, Christian God is different that Allah which is different (maybe) from YHWY.  I mean, why can’t we all be right?  Why can’t we all be expressing the same longing for order and meaning?  Aren’t we all looking for the ultimate truth.

If people disagree, then how in the hell can it be “ultimate”?  Truth is truth.

I really, really hope that we move away from this era of me against you into an era of us.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/10/23/churchabuse.garden/index.html

Thanks. You stole my innocence, ravaged my faith in God, and essentially ruined my life. A garden seems appropriate.

By the way, I wasn’t sexually abused…but I am deeply offended by the hypocracy of the Catholic church…well most churches to be honest.  Pharisses and Levites.

I just read an interesting but, to me, profoundly flawed article in Scientific American (wow, did I actually say that). The article Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death, by Jesse Bering talks about how it is impossible to rationalize inexistance because we can never actually experience inexistance while existant. In other words, when we die, there is nothing. And since we can never experience nothing while we are conscious then we’ve evolved these myths of an afterlife of some sort.

The problems, however, start in the first paragraph where Bering assumes

After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?

The assertion that the mind is what the brain does is wildly assumptive. I’m not trying to break all flaky, but isn’t it possible that the brain is how the mind does rather that what the mind does? Rick Strassman’s work on DMT, Ervin Laszlo (and others) thinking around the Akashic Field, and others put forth interesting thinking around this.

The bottom line though is that it is borderline irresponsible, in my view, to put forth such an overarching assumption - and that is what it is - in a supposed scientific forum.

Realistically, there is not data to support this…so on either side of the coin, we’re taking about faith.

One might think that based on my blog, that I’m a Godless Secular Humanist. I’m actually not. I just have a broader vision of what God is and my relationship to it. I tend to believe in, based on a hell of alot of observable patterns in nature, that cycles and patterns are one of the most, if not the most, fundamental aspect of the universe. Also, I tend to believe that universe is a closed system…in that ultimately we’re talking about infinity…and doesn’t infinity include everything. Everything to me is a closed system. How can you be outside of infinity? (If someone can educate me, I seriously would like to know. Frreal.)

Thus, if we live in a closed system and the first law of thermodynamics (the law of conservation of energy) is valid…

the law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another or transferred from one body to another, but the total amount of energy remains constant (the same)

…then one must conclude that death is not an end per se…but a transition. Where this transition leads is clearly a matter of faith. Hopefully, one day science will allow us to understand this.

The bottom line though is that I have a problem with basic idea of an “end”. By the way, new thinking in quantum gravity asserts that the unierse did not come from stasis (i.e. the big bang)…that it seems more like an oscillation (i.e. the big bounce). That sounds like the cycling of a closed system to me.

There aren’t many things that I am sure of in life…I just don’t think that any person of reasonable intellect can be…but I feel pretty good about this idea of transition and connection in an afterlife. How?

It all goes back to the absolutely most profound experience of my life. It wasn’t at church. It wasn’t on top of a mountain. It wasn’t in a sweat lodge. It was in my bed about 5 years ago.

I was sleeping peacefully when I started dreaming. This dream was unlike anything that I’ve ever experienced. It’s funny, because I don’t remember the details…but I do remember the jist of it…and I do remember my deeply and profoundly visceral reaction to it.

Somehow, I was looking into this house where a woman seemed to be abducted and abused. She looked pretty bleak. It was her birthday. Not sure how, but I saw a cake on the table near her that had “Happy Birthday — Pet Name”. I don’t remember the pet name. And I don’t know how a captive could get a cake. But I do remember that it was what I had called this woman either before my death or in another life. I saw her look at the cake and begin to smile and cry at the same time. Somehow, at the very moment, I KNEW deeply and thoroughly that I was connected to this person. Uh, what?

Again, this isn’t logical…but I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel real.  As real as anything that I’ve ever experienced.  I’m serious.

Anyway, the point is that in that moment, for the first time ever, I felt that I had been “told something”. I had been given some sort of insight that truly leads me to believe that consciousness or life or whatever goes on. That we can be outside of or transcend time.

During this, I think that I was in sleep paralysis yet I was crazy lucid. As lucid as I had ever been. And when I was finally able to open my eyes, I was crying. Not sad crying. But crying. Frickin’ wierd. And all that I could do was reach over, kiss my wife, and hold her hand as she slept. Somehow, I knew that we were connected. More than now. That we’re all connected.

This experience is what drives my leaps of faith.

And its why I became open to ideas of consciousness and spirituality that are outside of the mainstream.

That shit was real son.

My friend and colleague posted an except from Bob Baer’s ‘The Devil We Know: Dealing With The New Iranian Superpower”. The prologue provides an interesting, and frankly a little scary, overview of the rise of Iran. Here is a little piece that kinda wierded me out.

Scratch away the veneer of Islam, and what you find in an Iranian is old-fashioned nationalism-a deep, abiding defiance of colonialism. Keep scratching and what you find at the bottom of Iran’s soul is a newfound taste for empire. It runs through Iranian society, even among more secular Iranians. But Iran isn’t a new Rome, intent on naked conquest, cultural diffusion, settlements, and religious conversion.

What drives Iran to empire is something different. Call it destiny, entitlement, or even manifest destiny: what’s critical to understand is that Iran today has an unshakable belief in its right to empire. It means to achieve this through proxy warfare and control over oil supplies.

It’s not hard to understand where Iran got the confidence, misplaced or not, that it can beat the West. In Lebanon, from 1982 to 2000, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah beat the Israelis on the field of battle, the first time Israel’s army had lost since the country’s founding in 1948. Israel claims it wasn’t defeated militarily in the conflict, that they lost only the will to fight and not the war. But in the 34-day Lebanon war in 2006, the Israeli army was in fact beaten. It retreated from Lebanon with heavy losses and without obtaining a single objective.

Iran’s star is rising. And now with a friendly Shia government in Baghdad, it will rise a lot faster. On the other hand, the old Sunni order-the foundation of American interests in the Middle East-is edging toward collapse. How long can Pakistan and Saudi Arabia hold on? For the first time in the history of Islam, Shia domination of Mecca is not unthinkable. Nor is an Iranian empire in the Middle East. Was Khomeini right after all, that Iran would ultimately defeat America, the Great Satan?

It definitely makes me believe that Obama’s concept of engaging Iran rather than alienating them makes more sense…or we’ll find ourselves deeper and deeper in the quagmire of the Middle East.

I’ve kinda believed this for a while…but Scientific American has published a quick little article describing a paper in Brain and Cognition which confirms it. The found that musicians were more creative…as defined by being able to find alternative uses for household objects. On average, they came up with 14 more uses than nonmusicians could.

I’ve always believed that music was a fundamental abstraction of patterns and pattern recognition. And to me, thats kinda what creativity and intelligence are…the ability to understand and exploit underlying patterns.

Today on Reason Magazine, Michael Flynn writes an interesting and straightforward description of how Wall Street has gotten itself into this mess. We all know the basics:

• Cheap Money
• Sub Prime Mortgage
• Mortgage Default
• Undercapitalization
• Bankruptcy / Freakout

But what I didn’t realize is that the most important part of this mess isn’t neccessarily the undercapitalization, but its the uncertainty of the value of those damned Mortgage Backed Securities. It seems that since no one knows what they are worth…banks are forced to write them down to zero.

But they actually aren’t worth zero. Merrill Lynch recent unloaded some of that crap for 22 cents on the dollar…which does to show that, although everyone fucked up on Wall Street, that the sky may not be falling…it might be that we’re just coming down to earth.

Problem is that all of this panic might just make the sky fall…rather than vice versa.