Café Philos: an internet café

“The claims of mystics are neurologically quite astute. No human being has ever experienced an objective world, or even a world at all. You are, at this moment, having a visionary experience. The world that you see and hear is nothing more than a modification of your consciousness…. This is not to say that sensory experience offers us no indication of reality at large; it is merely that, as a matter of experience, nothing arises in consciousness that has not first been structured, edited, or amplified by the nervous system.”

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith

"I have known few homosexuals who did not practice their tendencies. Such people are sinning against God and will lead to the ultimate destruction of the family and our nation. I am unalterably opposed to such things, and will do everything I can to restrict the freedom of these people to spread their contagious infection to the youth of this nation."

- Pat Robertson

I myself count four lies in the above quote. Contra Pat:

1) Homosexuality will not lead to the destruction of the family.

2) Homosexuality will not lead to the destruction of the nation.

3) Homosexuality is not a contagious infection.

4) Homosexuals are not spreading homosexuality to youth.

Do you get the same count?

On his excellent blog, "In a Dark Time...The Eye Begins to See", Loren has posted two powerful and thought provoking poems by Robinson Jeffers. The first poem, "Faith", begins:


Ants or wise bees, or a gang of wolves,
Work together by instinct, but man needs lies,
Man his admired and more complex mind
Needs lies to bind the body of his people together,
Make peace in the state and maintain power.


Lately, I've been thinking a great deal about how and why our species lies, so it's a coincidence that Loren has posted "Faith" at precisely this time. Is Jeffers right that we actually need lies to cooperate with each other? It certainly seems that politicians, pundits, and preachers behave as if they think lies are necessary. But are they necessary?

The second poem by Jeffers, "The Answer", is equally thought provoking. Loren makes some good points in his commentary about the poems, and I think you will be pleased to check out his post.

(Thanks to my friend Don for passing this along.)

Earlier this year, I listened to a bimbo talk show host tell his audience that worker's incomes in America had risen during the prior year by four percent.

What he didn't mention is that most of that raise went to the very top percentage of workers. He also failed to mention that in the U.S., folks like Bill Gates are counted as "workers" because they run their own companies.

This morning, The New York Times published an analysis of the Internal Revenue Service's income data for 2005 -- the most recent year for which there is complete data. From the Times article:

Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.

The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.

While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.

The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.

The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.

So, there you have it. Once again, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

Until Tuesday, former Senator Fred Thompson was feeling out his chances of gaining the Republican nomination for president.

That was before Pope James excommunicated him from Christianity, thus considerably diminishing the conservative Thompson's chances of being nominated.

Pope James -- who was known by the name of James Dobson before ascending to the Evangelical Papacy at the behest of God -- excommunicated Thompson in an unsolicited phone call to U.S. News senior editor Dan Gilgoff, rather than through a formal papal bull, thus demonstrating how confidently he takes his new powers as pope of the evangelicals.

According to Gilgoff's article on the excommunication, Pope James said during the phone call:

"Everyone knows he's conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for," Dobson said of Thompson. "[But] I don't think he's a Christian; at least that's my impression," Dobson added, saying that such an impression would make it difficult for Thompson to connect with the Republican Party's conservative Christian base and win the GOP nomination.

This didn't sit well with Thompson, whose spokesman, Mark Corallo, took issue with the Pope's excommunication of the former Senator: "Thompson is indeed a Christian," he said. "He was baptized into the Church of Christ."

Nevertheless, Pope James is sticking with the excommunication for now.

In a follow up phone call to his Vatican (Formerly known as the "Focus on the Family" headquarters), Pope James' spokesman, Gary Schneeberger, said to senior editor Gilgoff, "...that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless 'has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith.' "

Schneeberger then added, "We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians".

Pope James' actions raise the question of whether he now intends to excommunicate all non-evangelical Christians from the Christian faith, or just those non-evangelicals who run for high public office. Whatever the case, the Pope's actions should make wary any non-evangelicals who still feel they have a natural ally in the new Pope.

Experience matters more than belief to both the mystic and the scientist, but to the priest -- he thinks he's accomplished something when he believes in God.

Over at Sea Blue Green, Patty has left an awesome post on the value of words in describing "the unknowable".

We believe we are bored with someone when in truth we are only bored with our thoughts of them.

Sometimes you find much the same idea occurs to people in both the West and the East. Consider first Heaney's poem, "Lovers On Aran":


The Timeless waves, bright shifting, broken glass,
Came dazling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To possess Aran. Or did Aran rush
To throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves collision,
Sea broke on land to full identity.


(- Seamus Heaney, Poems 1965-1975)


Now, compare Heaney to Lao-Tzu:


Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.


(Tao Te Ching, from Chapter 2, Stephen Mitchell trans.)


In Heaney's poem, we find much the same idea that contrasting things define each other as we do in Lao-Tzu.

Yet, perhaps there is this remarkable difference between Lao-Tzu and Heaney, between East and West: While Lao-Tzu implies that contrasting things are ultimately aspects of a single, undiferentiated, and ultimate reality, the Tao -- Heaney implies that it is love, rather than the Tao, which unites things.

After all, don't we in the West in many ways prefer to think of love as ultimate reality, rather than the impersonal Way?

Some people play a cunning game with those they love. The game is called, “I am only saying this because I love you”, and then they damn the person with their criticism of him or her.

“I am only saying this because I love you: You should not read thick books because boys don’t like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don’t you?”

“I am only saying this because I love you: You must accept Jesus as your savior or you will go to hell.”

“I am only saying this because I love you: You shouldn’t spend time playing basketball. Basketball is for wimps. Football is for men.”

Almost all of us know someone who plays the game of, “I am only saying this because I love you.” We might even play the game ourselves because we were taught to play it by our parents, our siblings, our spouse, or someone else. It is very difficult to break a habit, isn’t it? Especially when those around you have the same habit.

Whether we play that game or not, most of know – deeply know – that it’s not real love speaking when someone plays that game. The person who is playing that game might kid themselves, but even they usually know on some level that they are not being authentic when they say, “I am only telling you this because I love you.”

What do you do if someone plays that game with you?

You try to put as much distance between them and you as you can, don’t you? But what if that’s not possible? What if they’re your parent? Or, your spouse? What do you do if you cannot physically avoid someone who plays that game? When we cannot physically distance ourselves from someone, most of us will try to psychologically distance ourselves from that person, and we have many ways of doing that.

I am not concerned here with most of those ways. I want to focus on just one of them. Last night I came across an interesting blog on which someone was discussing this very problem of love and criticism. Something they said reminded me of one way many of us psychologically distance ourselves. They defined love as, “I understand you without judgment”.

That’s an interesting statement. If we look closely at it, we see it is a direct and forceful contradiction of the “I am only saying this because I love you” game. By insisting that love is understanding someone without judging them we knock the wind out of that game, don’t we? We expose it for what it is. We show how it lacks real love.

Yet, is it completely true that love is understanding someone without judging them? You’ll notice I asked if it were completely true. For there is a great deal of truth in the statement, and my only quibble with it is that it might not be the complete truth. So, to put the question a bit differently, is it at all possible to criticize someone out of love?

If we are serious about answering that question, then perhaps we should begin by asking ourselves what love is. Specifically, is love just a feeling, an emotion? Or, is it more than an emotion?

I think genuine love is more than an emotion. It is as much a way of looking, a perspective, a way of seeing, as it is a feeling. When we love someone, we see them very differently than when we don’t love that person. Sometimes we say we see their soul, or their spirit; their inner self or their true nature. Whatever we call it, love has a tendency to reveal to us what is authentic in another person. Or, to slightly paraphrase Iris Murdock, love is the difficult recognition that someone besides our self is real.

Yet, love is more than that, isn’t it? It is also the unconditional acceptance of the real in another person. That is of their real, authentic self.

So, is it at all possible to criticize someone while at the same time unconditionally accepting them?

At the least, that would seem paradoxical. But let’s quickly resolve the paradox. When we unconditionally accept and love what is authentic in another person, we can still criticize what is inauthentic without thereby in any way changing the fact that we unconditionally accept and love what is authentic in them.

To put it differently, we might decently criticize them for not being true to themselves. For instance, if a girl put aside her love of reading because she was afraid that boys would not like her if she read thick books, we might point out the folly of that decision to her and encourage her to continue reading. Again, if a friend ignored her normally sound reason in order to believe in God out of fear of hell, we might point out how that was a betrayal of herself and encourage her to return to her senses. Or, again, if a boy gave up the sport he loved and excelled at in order to please his father we might point out to him how lame that was, and encourage him to pursue his excellence. In short, our criticisms would be encouragements to be true to oneself.

If I am right about this, then loving someone certainly does not preclude us from at times criticizing them when they fail to be true to themselves. If I’m wrong about this, then I shall fetch myself another cup of coffee and re-think the whole thing, for it’s early in the morning as I write this, and it seems quite possible to me that I am not yet awake enough to write knowingly about such things.

Legend has it that before Ted Turner opened the doors of CNN some many years ago, he first did something that was unprecedented for a news organization: market research. That is, until Turner came along, no news organization in history had thought to ask people what kind of news they wanted to see.

Instead, the traditional news organizations had relied on the judgment of their professional news staff to determine what was newsworthy and what was not. But Turner changed all that with the success of CNN. We largely owe to him the fact that a major news organization nowadays will break away from a White House press briefing to report a car chase. It’s the market these days, and not the news staff, that for the most part decides what is newsworthy.

That’s the legend. No doubt the truth is more complex, more nuanced. There are probably several factors that play a role in what becomes news. Yet, no one living in the 21st Century can any longer doubt the news is heavily influenced by what the market wants to hear. And in an ideal world, that would be a good thing.

Consider what has happened to most consumer products over the years largely due to the attention that corporations now pay to market demand. Products overall have improved in quality and features, while coming down in price. Anyone could give examples of that. In a competitive market driven economy, the consumer is king and queen. The corporation doesn’t decide what’s good enough for you. Not if it wants a successful brand. You have choices. If one corporation won’t produce a higher quality brand with more features at a lower price, another one will. That’s the case in most industries nowadays, but is it the case in the news industry?

In an ideal world, a competitive consumer driven news industry would translate into more news, higher quality news, and all of that at a lower price to the consumer. In some ways, that’s exactly what has happened.

News is far more available today than it was thirty years ago when most people had their choices limited to three TV networks, one or two local newspapers, a handful of national newspapers, and several magazines. Today, we are flooded with news outlets. The price of most newspapers and magazines has dropped too, at least in terms of percent of income. That leaves us with quality. Has it gone up?

Of course, that depends on what you mean by quality. The news industry is no different than any other industry: Quality is what the consumers think of as quality. Quality has indeed gone up – in the minds of most consumers. And therein lies the problem.

What the market thinks of as quality news is problematic for anyone concerned with truth, for truth is not what the market thinks of as quality. If that’s the case, then what does the market think of as quality?

So far as I know, no one has yet come up with an exact term for what the market thinks of as quality when it comes to the news. The best I can do is a phrase: “comfortably entertaining”. That phrase covers the two things people most demand these days when it comes to what they will consider quality news. The word “entertaining” is self-explanatory. So, let’s deal with “comfort”.

People want their news to be comfortable in the sense they want it to confirm their existing view of the world. They certainly don’t want it to throw them to the wolves of doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Unfortunately, the truth can do that at times. And when that happens, the truth – increasingly – gets thrown overboard to make room for what the market really wants, and what it really considers high quality news: comfortable entertainment.

None of this is going to change. On the contrary, it will almost certainly accelerate. As the news industry becomes increasingly more sophisticated in gathering data on what the market wants, we will see the most popular news brands become increasingly divorced from truth. To be sure, they will retain the semblance of truth in their reports, but the substance will be largely purged. In the end, it will only be news outlets that cater to limited niche markets that accurately and honestly report the news. Those “high-end” outlets will have nowhere near the demand for them as the mainstream outlets. At best, those high-end outlets will be just as respected for quality – and just as unpopular with the majority of consumers – as is Mercedes Benz in automobiles.

In order to attract more female readers to this blog, I have decided that on Fridays I shall post in the Buff. That is, entirely nude.

Here at Café Philos, we go the extra mile for our clients!

Cindy is a warm-hearted woman, and this morning I got another email from her.

Nowadays, that's about all I really know about Cindy. She's warm-hearted and emails me.

Some long time ago, I knew her as well as any child can know another child. We met in kindergarten, grew up together in our small town, and graduated from high school together before going our separate ways.

More than 30 years later, she contacted me. That was two months ago.

We don't know each other nowadays, but that doesn't matter to either of us. We not only grew up in the same school grade, but in the same cinder-block classrooms. For years we were a presence in each others life. During my impressionable years, she partly shaped my notion of what a girl should be like. Although she doesn't know it, there were times when she listenned to me during adolescence that I really needed someone to listen -- and Cindy was there for me.

When you grow up like that together, it gives you rights to each other that are something like the rights of kin. You can look each other up even after a separation of decades and expect to be welcomed like a long lost second cousin.

So, I've been wondering who she is today. I suspect the two of us have very different interests from each other and I wonder if we will enjoy it should we meet again. The issue has come up because Cindy wants us to meet.

Maybe we will. And then what? Do we spend our time reminding each other of things long gone? Or do we use the opportunity to get to know the people we've become? I myself am not much interested in the past except as it contains lessons that might bear on the present. But I suspect Cindy is interested in the past, and so I also suspect that's what we would discuss if we met again. Do I want that?

How does one deal with the past when one is alive only in the impermanent present?

Well, if it were up to me, the two of us would meet for sex. That would be living in the present, it would be life affirming, and it would tell each of us more about the people we've become than any sentimental recollections of what we did in second grade could possibly tell us.

Somehow, though, I just don't think my idea of a class reunion will fly with the yearbook committee. Should I have been born in France?

Life is in the details. We ask big questions about the meaning of life, but can any answer we give to those questions make us happier than a good walk?

I have a close friend who refuses to take phone calls from people -- even her own family -- unless she genuinely feels like hearing from them.

More over, she makes no excuses for her behavior. She will tell you right up front when she does take your call that she saw your number on her caller ID the other evening, but didn't take your call then because she wasn't feeling like talking with you.

If I ever needed reasons to love her (and I don't need reasons), that would be one of the reasons I'd love her.

When I call her I know, if she takes the call, that she actually wants to speak with me. I don't know that with some people.

It's astonishing how many of us are willing to put up with calls we don't feel like taking at the moment. That is, we're willing to take the calls, but then all too often we resent the caller for having called us when we didn't want to speak with them. With my friend, I know that never happens.

I can't remember the source, but somewhere out there in this big wide world is a Zen poem that goes something like this:

I eat when I'm hungry
I sleep when I'm tired
How wonderful!

My friend reminds me of that poem. Not just in the intelligent way she takes phone calls, but in the intelligent way she leads her life. That is, her policy on phone calls is part and parcel of her policy on nearly everything in her life. As much as can be done in this often insane world, she "eats when she's hungry, sleeps when she's tired". She has worked very hard, and made some sacrifices, to make her life one that can be lived as close to spontaneously as possible.

Over on Religious Forums is a very intelligent young man from Saudi Arabia who goes by the username, "The Truth".

Not so long ago, The Truth started a discussion thread in which he asked whether all morality was ultimately derived from religion. From the responses the thread's been getting, it seems some people do in fact believe morality is derived from religion. But is that always true? And, if morality is not always derived from religion, then where exactly does it come from?

Not everyone asks those questions. But it might be a good idea if more of us did, especially in America, where the Religious Right for decades has been hammering folks with the peculiar notion that, unless they tightly cling to conservative Judeo-Christian values, they will set themselves -- and perhaps the entire nation -- adrift in a decadent sea of moral relativism.

In a very limited way, I actually find myself agreeing with the Religious Right. Surely, pure moral relativism is a foundation too weak to build much on. By "moral relativism", I mean the notion that anything goes; anything is alright so long as you or someone else thinks it's alright. That's really moral anarchy, and both I and the Religious Right agree that it would suck for society to widely adopt it.

About everything else, we disagree. Usually, the Religious Right would have us believe we have only two choices: Biblical morality or moral relativism. Yet, that's false.

In the first place, humans have invented many moral codes over the years. The Biblical moral code is only one of many codes that humans have invented, and certainly not the best of them. Therefore, we are not limited in our choice of moralities to just two inane choices: Biblical morality or moral relativism. Instead, we have many options, a whole treasury of options.

In the second place, there is surprising new evidence that at least some moral principles are hardwired into our very nature. That is, we need look no further than human nature to find a basis for some of our morals.

Writing in The New York Times, the Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert makes the point rather eloquently:

Research suggests that we are hard-wired with a strong and intuitive moral impulse — an urge to help others that is every bit as basic as the selfish urges that get all the press. Infants as young as 18 months will spontaneously comfort those who appear distressed and help those who are having difficulty retrieving or balancing objects. Chimpanzees will do the same, though not so reliably, which has led scientists to speculate about the precise point in our evolutionary history at which we became the “hypercooperative” species that out-nices the rest.

Gilbert's remarks remind me of primatologist Alison Jolly's observation in her book, Lucy's Legacy, that humans are almost the most cooperative species known to science. Only the social insects, and a couple species of lower mammals, in some ways out do us.

Yet, our natural moral foundation seems to go far beyond a built in propensity for hypercooperation. Joshua Greene, another Harvard professor, has discovered that in some circumstances, most people will agree on what is right and what is wrong.

Greene studies how people respond to a set of imaginary dilemmas. For instance, in one dilemma:

...you are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if it continues on its current track. The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley on to a side track, where it will kill only one person.

What do you do?

"When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say you should divert the trolley on to the side track, thus saving a net four lives. [italics mine]" That is, there is a majority consensus among people that a right course of action exists. So far as I know, nothing in the Bible suggests that saving a net four lives by sacrificing one life is the moral thing to do -- yet in those specific circumstances, that's what most people think is moral.

In fact, Greene's colleague, Marc Hauser, has discovered that people of different societies and cultures will largely respond the same way to the same set of circumstances. What an American likely thinks is right in certain circumstances is precisely what a Chinese person likely thinks is right in the same circumstances.

All of the above suggests that at least some morality is derived directly from human nature, and not necessarily from either religion or God. Shocking?

It really should be shocking. Almost all of us have been saturated with the view that religion and God are the foundations of morality. After hearing all that propaganda, the news that science is discovering a basis for morality in human nature should at least cause us wonder.

I predict it will be quite a while before it is widely known and accepted in the West that morality is -- at least to some extent -- derived not from holy scripture, but from human nature. In the meantime, many religious leaders will still promote the notion that their religions have a monopoly on morality.

Yes, it has become necessary for Café Philos to break the law.

The law made by The Thinking Blog, that is. Specifically, their law that we are only to tag five other blogs for the Thinking Blog Award. That law must now be broken, smashed, trampled on, because Ali Eteraz is back in town.

Within hours of naming five blogs that provoke even me to thought, I discovered that Ali has started blogging again. As of yesterday, March 25, 2007.

Mark the date: Ali is not only a blogger but a mover and shaker. He is one of the internet's leading proponents of reforming Islam. He accomplishes more in a single year than most such reformers and activists accomplish in three years. And when this man can no longer make even me think, I will have passed on to the Great Weirdness.

Last November, Ali shut down his blog, Unwilling Self-Negation, in order to devote his time to launching Eteraz.Org: States of Islam. (Eteraz.Org is a strange combination of blog, forum and political organization that might, in some ways, represent the future of the internet -- or, at least one of its futures.) Yesterday, Ali restarted his old blog and so it has become absolutely necessary to tag him with the Thinking Blog Award, even though in doing so I become the sort of outlaw who would willingly violate an honor system. Oh well. I shall somehow survive the shame of it.

Do you like to think? Do you like to read blogs? If "yes" seems to you the natural answer to both questions, then the Thinking Blog Award might appeal to you.

Last week, Mystic Wing suddenly honored Anne and I by tagging this blog with the Award. No doubt he was suffering from a momentary lapse of sanity when he did so, but we'll happily accept the Award anyway.

So, what's the Award? Well, The Thinking Blog Award has been making its way around the internet since February 11th, when it was begun by none other than The Thinking Blog. The idea is simple: If someone tags you as a blog that makes them think, then you respond by tagging five other blogs that make you think.

I've discovered that while the idea is simple, executing the idea is not so easy as it sounds. There are so many quality blogs out there that make me think. So I've have some difficulty narrowing my list down to just five blogs.

One thing that helped to narrow the list is that many of my favorite blogs have already been tagged. For instance, Mystic Wing tagged Brendan's Off the Beaten Path at the same time as he tagged Cafe Philos, so that's one down. Again, most of the science blogs I like to read have already been tagged, so that's a whole category all but eliminated. Yet, there are still gobs and gobs of blogs that I would like to tag if I were not confined by the rules to just five.

Having said all that, I shall now present my list in alphabetical order.

Baghdad Burning is by all accounts one of the best and most widely recognized blogs on the net today. It is written in beautiful English by an anonymous Iraqi woman living in Baghdad whose perspective on the war is, to say the least, not that of George Bush, Tony Blair and Al Maliki. She revealingly contrasts the daily lives of herself and her family and friends with the almost obscene spin of the politicians who caused the war. Her writing transcends the immediate conflict in Iraq. It is perhaps some of the best war writing from a civilian point of view of all time. You would be doing yourself a disservice if you missed reading some of the archives too.

Burning Silo, by Bev Wigney, is both a nature and a photography blog. The photos alone provoke thought, but the detailed, professionally executed writing is immensely stimulating as well. When I read Burning Silo, I find myself wanting to get up out of my chair and set off to explore nature -- even if that means exploring only the nature in my back yard. The blog does more than make us think: It restores to us a sense of wonder too.

Church of the Churchless is Brian Hines' wonderful blog for those of us who have, or who want to have, a spiritual life apart from organized religion. Brian is heavily influenced by Taoism and good sense. I don't always agree with him, perhaps because of my notable lack of good sense, but I am always stimulated both by the questions he raises and his responses to those questions. He has another, equally good and thoughtful blog called Hines Sight.

High Plains Buddhist is, more often than not, an account of Todd Epp's insightful application of Buddhist principles to his own life. That tends to make those principles fascinatingly concrete and fresh. We get to see the Buddhist way in action through Todd's eyes, and the result is great food for thought.

Think Buddha is Will Buckingham's profound blog that covers nearly every strain of Buddhist thought, rather than focusing on only one or two traditions. Will writes beautifully, making even some very difficult ideas and principles comprehensible. This blog goes beyond thought-provoking. It's educational, too. Well worth a bookmark, I think.

So, there you have it. My list of five blogs that rise to the challenge of provoking even me to thought. I haven't really done any of them justice here in my brief descriptions, I'm afraid, but perhaps at another time I can give each the detailed review it deserves. I would like to thank Mystic Wing for honoring Anne and I with his tag. It was more fun than I at first thought it would be to make the above list. And perhaps Anne, if she gets the time (she's been very busy lately) will offer her own list of five blogs that make her think.

UPDATE: I've been tagged two more times for this same meme, and post my response to the tags here.

"Carrying guilt around in our minds is like hiking up a mountain and picking up every rock we stub our toe upon and throwing it in our backpack. That is unskillful. It is unnecessary suffering and it stems from a belief in a separate self. That somehow we are so important that we should suffer more than anyone else. It is also the belief that we are so powerful that we can actually revisit these past unskillful actions and somehow in reliving them change the result."

- James Ure, The Buddhist Blog


Jiddu Krishnamurti used to liken guilt to the appendix, calling it just as useless. And, as James points out, it is not only useless, but causes unnecessary suffering to boot. But what do you think of guilt? Does it serve any purpose? Should we abandon it?

Thus spring begins: old
stupidities repeated,
new errs invented

- Issa


I wonder how old Issa was when he wrote those lines? Generally, one must be old to say such things without bitterness or cynicism. Was Issa without bitterness or cynicism when he wrote those lines?

I wonder.

Sometimes with age comes acceptance of the world as it is. But bitterness and cynicism are not acceptance. Instead, they are rejections of the world as it is. So, which do you think is better? Acceptance or bitterness and cynicism? Which is wiser? Which sees more clearly? Which is more life affirming? And which is more conducive to happiness?


My thanks to Whisky River for the quote.

Some long time ago
You lived up in Manitou among mountains
In the apartment you liked,
In the apartment whose walls
Were not trued to a square.

That was before you left town
With your books and your bed,
And your beauty, for the Southern light.


I remember you,
The clear-eyed woman who came to me,
When her grandmother died
And sat by my feet to talk of her life.

You said you fear to fuck any man you love
For lovers cause hurt if they leave.

Said your grandmother had passions,
But somehow you not.


I have wondered of you
How you chose to live among mountains,
In an apartment unsquared,
With such petty loves?

Were you like a seed in winter with enough life
To await an inevitable spring?
Or someone of talent condemned forever
To mediocrity?

For all I learned of you is merely this before you left:
You seldom did your best,
But you got by.




I have often wondered why so many of us do not live up to our capacity for loving? Do you have any ideas about that?

There's a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
"Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.
You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He's uniformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas.
Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you.


- Robert Bly, Morning Poems


How often do we run across that ancient little boy today?

I'm not just thinking about hearing him in our own thoughts. But what about when folks irrationally deny evolution or global warming, or, for that matter, irrationally promote abstinence-only sex education? Isn't that the same ancient little boy repeating his bad ideas to us?

Anyone who still fails to realize humans have an intrinsic irrational side to their nature hasn't been paying enough attention to the news of the last two centuries. Science has pretty much settled that question now.

It's a very old idea that irrationality is merely a mistake in reasoning, but it's a wrong idea. As Bly points out, irrationality is actually built into us. It's part of our very nature.

Why else would otherwise reasonable people --- people who can be rational about their jobs or their marriages or their children --- think the science on global warming is a conspiracy of liberal minded scientists? "Eat only elk. Avoid elevators. Don't believe in global warming."

We shouldn't hate that ancient little boy. He's part of us, and to hate him would be to hate part of ourselves. Yet, we should understand he's there and what that means.

"Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: He did not die of it but degenerated --- into a vice."

Nietzsche

The image to the left comes from Eolake Stobblehouse's "adult" website, DOMAI. I put "adult" in quotes because I have never found an image on Eolake's site that it wouldn't be appropriate for a healthy 14 year old boy to look at.

Eolake never publishes photos that degrade his models -- unless you are deeply buried in the American psyche and warily suspect nudity itself is degrading. But Eolake is Danish and his models have actual personalities that go way beyond the playmate's plastic smile. He does not turn his models into copycat bimbos.

If I had a 14 year old boy --- or a 14 year old girl interested in girls --- I'd comfortably give him or her the link to DOMAI..

In the first place, nearly every 14 year old in the country now has access to porn --- real porn. The kind you would prefer they didn't have access to. My thinking is to guide them to something better.

Second, I like the articles on Eolake's site. You should know upfront there are no articles of general interest, no interviews with famous people who are not erotic photographers, nor updates on men's fall fashions. Instead, most of the articles are in one way or another on erotic beauty and our responses to it. The ones I've read were healthy, authentic and inspiring. Any 14 year old could do with a dose of those articles to inoculate him or her against all the bullshit that gets dumped on 14 year olds these days with regards to their sexuality.

Last, I'd be comfortable giving the DOMAI link to my 14 year old because, as I mentioned above, the models are not degraded, have dignity, and come across as real people.

If I have any qualms about Eolake's site, they come from a conversation I had with Anne a while back. She pointed out the site pretty much represents only one standard of feminine beauty and that it tends to idealize that standard. I agree with her, and it's a serious criticism. But given the site's pluses, I'd take that minus and still give my 14 year old the link.

I've been using "14 year old" here just to illustrate. But when you get right down to it, Eolake's wonderful site is suitable to any person of any age who is interested in beautiful nudes.

So there you have it. My proposal for corrupting today's youth in a nutshell. Underlying my whole dastardly scheme is the notion it is far better to guide a horny teenager to good erotica than it is to sit back and hope s/he doesn't find worse stuff on his or her own.

After all, it is foolish to tell teens sex is evil and hope that lie keeps them from corruption. And it is just as foolish to throw them to the wolves by giving them no guidance at all. So, I think my approach is actually the more reasonable and practical one. What do you think? Am I right about that?

UPDATE: There is a correction to this article here.

Two little boys, ages 8 and 10, were excessively mischievous. They were always getting into trouble and, since it was a small town and everyone gossipped, their parents knew all about it. If any mischief occurred in their town, the two boys were probably involved.

One day, the boys' mother heard that a preacher in town had been successful in disciplining children, so in desperation she asked if he would speak with her boys.

The preacher agreed, but he asked to see them individually. So the mother sent the 8 year old first, in the morning, with the older boy to see the preacher in the afternoon.

The preacher, a huge man with a booming voice, sat the younger boy down and asked him sternly, "Do you know where God is, son?" The boy's mouth dropped open, but he made no response, sitting there wide-eyed with his mouth hanging open.

So the preacher repeated the question in an even sterner tone, "Where is God?!" Again, the boy made no attempt to answer.

The preacher raised his voice even more and shook his finger in the boy's face and bellowed, "Where is God?!" The boy screamed & bolted from the room, ran directly home & dove into his closet, slamming the door behind him.

When his older brother found him in the closet, he asked, "What happened?" The younger brother, gasping for breath, replied, "We are in BIG trouble this time. GOD is missing, and they think we did it!"




My thanks to my friend Don for passing this along to me.

About a decade ago, two sociologists studied the Illinois town I grew up in. They looked at their data, then pronounced the community one of the 50 most stable small towns in America.

Stable.

Growing up, I hated that stability. It meant only the seasons changed. Everything else stayed the same.

In that town, you had to put change under a microscope to see it. Folks would talk about a new car --- their own or someone else's new car --- for weeks on end. There was no point in talking about anything else, because nothing else had changed.

By the time I left my home town for college, I had come to hate even the very word "stable".

Perhaps the worse thing to never change in a small community can neither be seen, nor heard, nor smelled, nor touched. That's your reputation.

You get a reputation early on in life before you even know you have one. It's spread by gossip, and the gossip proceeds you. Even when someone in the town doesn't know you, the odds are excellent they know of you.

Some will say reputations can and do change in a small town, but that's not entirely true. The fact is, they can be added to, but not subtracted from. Once a thing is known about you, it sticks to you.

It is sheer irony reputations are intangible. Ironic, because a reputation has a discernable, almost physical, impact on how people treat you. Many folks can stand face to face with you, yet look right beyond you and see only your reputation. Maybe you're being nice to them, but if they've heard you're sarcastic at times with others, they will be on the look out for a twist in every word you say --- then they think they hear clearly what you didn't mean at all.

Because reputations are almost tangible in a small town, so are memories. Even if you've forgotten something about yourself, others won't have. There's always someone who remembers what you said in second grade, and someone else who remembers who you played with in third, so that, were you to gather together 50 people from the town, you could fairly well reconstruct a man's whole life in the town.

A wise man once said, "We have so many memories to forget before we can know who we really are." In some ways, it is almost impossible in a small town to know who you really are. That's because it is almost impossible to think of yourself apart from the town's memories of you. You become confused, and think your memories of you are you. When you try to think of yourself, you so often end up merely comparing yourself to your reputation and pointlessly arguing with it. "Am I really who Sue thinks I am?"

I couldn't stand the memories of myself. Neither my own nor anyone else's memories of me. Instead, I wanted to become myself, so I left town.

Late last night I was messing around with my new toy (i.e. this blog) when I noticed that Kathryn Petro-Harper had linked her blog to mine. Perhaps you can imagine my delight: For a brand new blogger, every link is a vote of confidence and encouragement. So, I headed over to Kathryn's blog, A Mindful Life, feeling very happy with this amazingly generous world, all who live in it, and especially Kathryn, who I admire anyway.

When I got there, I was not prepared to have my heart wrenched, but that's exactly what happened: My heart got wrenched.

Maybe I felt the wrenching so acutely because it was late at night and I was tired. When we're tired, we are usually more open to emotional shocks than when we're rested. But whatever the case, on Kathryn's blog I immediately came across a saddening, troubling story from her life that struck me poignantly.

I should caution you that it might not strike you quite as poignantly as it did me. A little while back, Kathryn posted her spiritual biography. I read it. Found some life similarities between us, and to some extent I can now empathize with her. Besides which, she strikes me as artistic, intelligent, spiritual and compassionate: Really, all useless qualities in today's world, but nonetheless charming. So, I wasn't prepared late last night when I showed up on her blog to read of how she had been violated and abused in an admittedly common -- but still outrageous -- way.

To really understand some kinds of common, trivial ways people are abused, we must step back and forget our familiarity with them. Familiarity can kill insight. So can the thought the abuse doesn't matter because it's so trivial. Life is more often about the trivial than the grand, and unless we understand the trivial, we cannot hope to understand life.

What happened to Kathryn was pretty simple. You can read about it here. A year ago she joined, in initial good faith, a poetry forum on which it turned out her work was continually subjected to hyper-criticism from other forum members and even from moderators.

Unfortunately for Kathryn, she seems to have made the mistake of respecting the expertise of those people, and of trying very hard to learn from them. Predictably, she could never satisfy the bastards --- for they were playing bastard games with her --- but her good faith effort to learn from them made her vulnerable to internalizing their hyper-critical view of her work.

If you have ever yourself written much poetry, you know what happened next. In Kathryn's own words, "When I write a poem now, I choke. I hear the critic before I even capture an image and taste the words. I can’t hear the music in them now." This comes from a very strong woman who has endured much and survived much in her life.

Poetry is something most of us write a bit of as teenagers and then give up when we become too self-conscious of what we're writing. The words and music have to flow from "the muses". The best poetry never comes from consciousness alone. Everyone knows that. The people who abused Kathryn knew it too. They were not playing their bastard games with her in deep ignorance of the harm they were causing by making her self-conscious and hyper-critical of her own gift. They knew, on some level, they were stifling her. And they didn't care.

Perhaps the saddest part of this story is that most of us know it's commonplace for petty people to "show their superiority" by vigorously criticizing others, but we don't always see such abusive behavior for the evil it is. It is too familiar to us. So familiar it has almost lost the power to offend, and so we are not outraged by the outrageous behavior of the petty bastards among us.

Yet, abuse is abuse is abuse. All abuse is at heart the same: An unnecessary oppression of someone. If we are going to fight abuse --- including much worse abuse than Kathryn suffered --- then we cannot allow ourselves to see any abuse of people as acceptable. For us to say that some abuse is acceptable because it is so common, or because it is so trivial, or because it only stifles the creation of a few poems here and there is akin to saying we should tolerate a sewer backing up into our living room so long as it doesn't get more than an inch deep.

Those were my thoughts and feelings late last night when I ran across Kathryn's post on her blog. Yet, there happens to be a twist to this story --- and it's a very good one.

Happily, the very next post I read on her blog last night was a beautiful poem. That is to say, Kathryn has risen above the petty jerks at the poetry forum and has started writing again (You can't keep a good woman down). She went to the beach yesterday and wrote the following, which is called, "A Visit With Mother", and I hope she doesn't mind my reproducing it in full here:

The ocean is a high contact sport. Expect to wrestle a wave.
Expect to be tackled, lifted up, tossed aside.
Waves sprint and jockey each other to the shore.
Cresting, they swap twelve-foot high fives.

Boys play tag with icy waves. Their cries of surprise
compete with seagulls. A toddler in pink totters toward
starlings holding their convention on the sand.
Her face beams as she waves to each bird.

You scuffle across dry sand and it pedicures your toes.
The wind is a penetrating caress.
It scrubs your face as its chill bleaches your mind.
Your eyes sting and weep in the salt air.

You do not come to the beach for tranquility and silence.
You do not come here for shelter.
You come to absorb ancient energy.
You come to feel the rhythm of waves in your blood.

You come to swing on the tidal pendulum.
You come to submit to the scrutiny of the baldly shining sun.
You come to gaze at the horizon melting into thousands
of miles of nothingness and possibility.

You come to release your illusions.

Anyone who can write verse like that has my admiration. I hope she continues to create beautiful poems.

The thought occurs to me --- a bit late --- that I don't actually know Kathryn, except from her blog, and that she might think me presumptuous to write so much about her. I certainly hope that is not the case if and when she reads this, but if it is, I shall willingly apologize and then delete this entry. So, if you read this one day and then find it gone the next, you'll know what happened and that it's my fault for having been intrusive.

If you have not heard of the latest jaw-dropping buffoonery from the Old Guard of the Religious Right, you surely will want to check out Brendan's article on it here, which he's published on his blog, Off the Beaten Path.

As usual, Brendan not only reports on what's going on with the Old Guard, but provides an exceptional commentary on what it implies about them, along with a factual and damning criticism.

I'm thankful that I don't always agree with Brendan. If I always agreed with him, it would be less pleasurable to read him. But this time around, I am compelled to agree that the Old Guard of the Religious Right is morally sick. I think Brendan does a very good job substantiating that claim in his article.

The moral sickness of the Old Guard should concern us all. There are millions of evangelicals in this country and many of them follow the Old Guard. Evangelicals are not going to disappear from America any time soon. So, it behooves us to take an interest in their moral health. We are, after all, all in this society together, and such a large faction of society cannot be morally ill without it in some ways affecting us all.

"Americans are the worst, both at having affairs and dealing with the aftermath. Adultery crises in America last longer, cost more, and seem to inflict more emotional torture than they do anyplace I visited."

So says Pamela Druckerman, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who for several years travelled the world to chart international patterns of infidelity. Her findings will be published next month in her book, Lust in Translation. Given that Druckerman believes other cultures and societies handle infidelity significantly better than Americans, her book promises either to be controversial or largely ignored.

Whatever the case, the book should be interesting to those of us who ponder the incomprehensible sexual dysfunction of Americans, or the always-just-seething-below-the-surface sexual hysteria that accompanies it. We Americans can put a man on the moon -- a feat we are rightfully proud of -- but we cannot quite shake ourselves of our dysfunctional sexual culture.

As recently as 2000, we led the Western world in nearly every category of sexual problem, from teen pregnancy through domestic violence and on to rape and incest, according to the World Health Organization. Since then, I haven't seen any studies that suggest much has changed about our leadership role. America basically ranks as a third world nation when it comes to sexuality.

There will never in this country be the brilliant equivalent of a science based moon program to deal with our sexual problems. Americans simply are not that serious about solving their sexual problems. If we were serious, passionately serious, we would solve them. We have the resources to do it. We lack only the will.

"If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it."

Isadora Duncan

Don Iannone has published on his blog, Conscious Living Poetry, an anti-war poem that includes these thoughtful lines:


So many young soldiers--ours and theirs
--hiding behind their uniforms, and their guns
that separate them
from the people they kill.


Does anyone still believe the 27 reasons the Administration gave us for going to war in Iraq were any of them the reasons the Administration itself had for going to war? Iannone doesn't buy the public reasons either:


War means just one thing:
Justification to kill
for reasons that will always
be buried in the small print--
the very smallest print possible, which
nobody can read, even in their native language.


Iannone goes on to condemn participation in any war, not just this latest one. While I can understand the idealism behind that sentiment, I also know unilateral pacificism simply doesn't work. For what happens when only one side shows up with weapons and prepared to fight? You get the Holocaust.


Quotes from Iraq, by Don Iannone.

"Sex is sacred", so she said.
Well dammit maybe so.
She spoke instead of giving head,
So how am I to know?

"You're not romantic", she said on.
Well dammit maybe so.
Seems sex is great theology
But then it's time to go.

"You're too horny", more she said.
And dammit maybe so.
Could it be I'm underfed?
But how am I to know?

She wants to tell me all these things:
It's her form of oral satisfaction.
I just want to tongue her clit
And make a little action.

Yet, dammit all I love her,
Though I'm feeling a bit used up:
Our sex life's full of meaning now
But we've forgotten how to fuck!

For the last five days, some folks have been hotly debating the nature and merits of "spirituality" over at PZ Meyers' blog, Pharyngula.

Meyers started the fist fight when he posted an entry titled, "Spirituality"? Another Word For Lies and Empty Noise. The ruckus has now reached 230 comment posts and still counting.

I gather from what I read of the debate that almost as many definitions of "spirituality"are in play as there are people debating the merits and nature of "spirituality". Everyone seems to have their own pet definition for the word, and is sticking with it. Consequently, the participants are in most cases talking pass each other.

Despite that, it's a good debate with a lot of sharp insights on both sides.

Most common words have more than one meaning and "spirituality" is no exception. Depending on who you are talking with, the word can be used to mean anything from a belief in ghosts and spirits --- to an emotional high --- and beyond that to a sense, feeling, or perception of connectedness to all things.

It is folly to insist that any one usage is somehow more correct than all the others, but we should be clear about what meaning we ourselves are using for the word.

Recently, Sam Harris has offered a new definition of the word in his book, The End of Faith. Harris uses to word to refer to anything having to do with the sort of awareness that comes about after a sudden end to subject/object perception occurs while the continuum of experience yet remains.

Whether one would personally use Harris' definition of "spirituality" or not, the man should get a medal for being the first in the long history of the word to give it a more or less operational meaning. Yet, Harris goes even further: He wants to put the study of spirituality (along with mysticism --- another confusing word) on a scientific footing.

Perhaps only an American can believe humans will someday fly, travel to the moon, or study spirituality scientifically. But that latter thing is exactly what Harris hopes to do.

More power to him. If Harris succeeds, then some fist fights over the nature and merits of spirituality might become a thing of the past.

More over, this is the 21st Century, and many people who have had spiritual experiences of the sort Harris describes feel it is high time for biologists like PZ Meyers (along with many other scientists and non-scientists alike) to recognize there is more to human nature than is dreamt of in their philosophies.

Can Harris succeed in placing the study of spirituality and mysticism on a scientific footing? What do you think?

My Darling Anne,

In response to my post on the origin of God(s), you propose that humans created God(s) because we seek purpose in things, and the God(s) we create have a way of validating the human search for purpose and meaning in life.

I think that might be one part of it. But what strikes me most about the issue is there are so many ways to look at it --- and so many various factors that obviously play a role in the creation of deity. As I mentioned in my first post, the human tendency to ascribe personality to things plays a role. And as you mentioned, the human tendency to seek purpose plays a role. But so do many other things too.

Recently, The New York Times published an exceptional article on the scientific research that is being done on this issue. Brian Hines gives an excellent summary of the article on his blog, The Church of the Churchless, and -- quite thoughtfully -- makes the original article available for download. I highly recommend that you pause from your busy undergraduate schedule of whoring around, and read the article -- it is absolutely exciting.

Having said all that, I'll mention even before you read the article that I take what is called a "byproduct" view of why humans created deities. That is, I believe (and believed it even before I read of it from others) that both the propensity of humans to create deities, and the propensity of humans to be religious, is simply a byproduct of various traits which evolved in us, and which had nothing else to do with religiosity. We are religious by accident.

So, do yourself the immense favor of making the time to read Brian's summary --- and if possible the Times article itself --- and then let us continue this conversation about the origins of deity. You will be so glad you did that you will surely name your first illegitimate child after me.

Paul

"Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview."


Stephen Jay Gould

"I am who I am." I wonder what one has to pay
To say that. I couldn't do it. For years
I thought, "You are who you are." But maybe
You weren't. Maybe you were someone else.

Sam's friend, who loved poetry, played football
In school even though he didn't want to.
He got hit. Later he said to me, "I write poems.
I am who I am...but my neck hurts."

How many times I have begun a poem
Before I knew what the main sounds
Would be. We find out. Toward the end
The poem is just beginning to be who it is.

That's all right, but there's another way as well.
One picks the rhyme words, and so the main
Sounds, before one begins. I wonder what
Yeats had to pay in order to do that.


Robert Bly, Morning Poems



As you might know, writing an honest, authentic poem is largely a matter of being true to yourself --- to your experience, to your insight, to your feel for word and beauty. So, perhaps it is unsurprising that, when Bly writes about writing poetry, he writes about being yourself, and even about betraying yourself.

"In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations."

Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution Of Physics


When I first heard such ideas as an undergraduate, I could not make sense of them. A long time and a lot of work passed before I had a more or less clear understanding of what folks like Einstein and Infeld were talking about.

The basic idea is still a strange one: Reality is inaccessible to us. In the language of Einstein and Infeld, we cannot open the closed watch to peer inside. The best we can do is make models of what we think is inside the watch. All of these models will be wrong, but some of them might be more useful than the others. What we call "truth" is no more --- and no less --- than the most useful model we have of any particular reality. Yet, we cannot be certain that the reality even exists, let alone that we have correctly described it in our model.

It is here that many artists and scientists are in fundamental agreement. Neither the astute artist, not the astute scientist thinks even for a second that he or she has created the only possible interpretation of reality. Both recognize they have created only one of what might be many possible interpretations of the reality. Neither thinks of truth as an absolute. Both think of truth as conditional.

That irks a lot of people.

The astute artist and scientist are playing the game of "What Is Reality" on the pro-level, but a lot of people play that same game more or less on the level of a bright high school freshman. Until an artist, scientist, or someone else comes along to inform them that reality is inaccessible, they are not even dimly aware of the fact. Can you blame them for being uncomfortable with such a strange idea? I certainly don't. I remember too well the hard work it took me to grasp somewhat clearly that strange idea.

Some years ago I was happily browsing the Free Books Bin at a used bookstore --- searching among the rejects the store couldn't sell --- when I came across something as good as an overlooked gem: James Dobson's Love For A Lifetime. I almost yelped with delight.

If you are not familiar with James Dobson, he is one of America's most powerful evangelical leaders, a man with whom the White House conference calls every Monday, and an activist on every aspect of family life. Dobson is highly controversial for his views on the family, and while I would not spend to buy a book of his, I can certainly delight in making off with a free copy of one of his works. Who wouldn't grab a free book by such a controversial figure?

Love For A Lifetime represents itself as a serious book of sound advice for folks who are about to get married.

That's odd, because to all the world it is no more than a slick little book designed from the foundations up to live on coffee tables. It's glossy pages are lavished with pastel pink and blue borders; the writing is far too easy to browse; and the tone is flippantly inspirational. Not the sort of design that tells you you're in for some real how-to advice.

Yet, the book is striking in at least one respect: It's tone is almost wholly negative, even fearful. If you pick this book up from a coffee table and browse it for nuts and bolts suggestions on how to make a good marriage, you will be disappointed there are very few nuts and bolts in the book. On the other hand, if you want a dire sermon full of warnings about all the things, real and imagined, that can go wrong in marriages, then this book is your godsend. It even has a call to save yourself from the traps and pitfalls of marriages by turning to Jesus.

For the longest time after reading this book, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was so profoundly wrong about it. Then, it came to me one day while I was out walking that the book almost entirely lacks any notion of overcoming challenges, surmounting obstacles, or healing from mistakes. Everything the book mentions that can go wrong in a marriage it casts in the light of catastrophe. For instance: Dobson believes in sexual abstinence until marriage, and in his eyes there is no reasonably sure way to overcome the problems he believes are caused by being a non-virgin before your wedding night. Your lack of virginity, if that's the case, has undermined your marriage, and that's all there is to it. No hope, no solution, not even any advice on how to lessen the damage.

All of which makes me think about Dobson the man. Is he really that fearful? Does he really see the downside of everything in such extraordinarily sharper focus than the upside? Is he really at such a loss to solve problems?

I suppose to some extent he really is all those things. I say that not just because the book, Love For A Lifetime, cannot have been written by an optimist, but also because of other things I know about Dobson. e.g. his belief that allowing homosexuals to marry will result in the destruction of the "traditional" family. Anyone who believes that certainly does not believe in the resilience of the family. No, anyone who believes that sees nearly every challenge, no matter how slight, as a potential catastrophe.

In Love For A Lifetime, James Dobson creates an ideology and a mythology of marriage based on fear. The book is a "depravity and hellfire" sermon that fails to mention even in passing the remarkable ability of humans to solve problems, adapt to circumstances, or heal from wounds. It has a bleak, dark soul.


By the way, anyone who is interested in my poetry might want to know that the book was part of the inspiration for the poem you find here.

Dear Anne,

As an undergraduate, your life currently revolves around words --- listening to words, writing words, speaking words, thinking in words. Have you ever considered what it would be like to go a couple of hours without even thinking in words, let alone speaking, reading or writing them?

That's exactly what Mystic Wing did the other day, and he writes beautifully about the experience here.

It might seem somewhat ironic to you, Anne, that a person would first experience a period of wordlessness and then compose such beautiful language to describe that experience, but then life is mostly ironic to begin with, isn't it?

Paul

Sweet Anne,

Over at The Buddhist Blog, James has been reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and has begun a series of posts about the book. His first post has prompted a lively and insightful conversation. You can read it all here. Do take a moment from your busy life of an undergraduate and check it out! Both James' post and the comments on it are quite fascinating.

Paul

My Darling Anne,

This morning, I woke up thinking about an experiment done in some grad schools to illustrate to students an astonishing fact about human perception.

I don't know how many people besides myself have woken up thinking about that particular experiment, but I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one, because the experiment overturns many common ideas we might have about our relationship to each other and to truth.

The experiment itself is simple enough. A large jar full of marbles is placed on a table in clear view of all the students. Each student is then asked to write on a slip of paper his or her guess about how many marbles are in the jar. The slips of paper are collected and each student's guess is recorded. Then the guesses are averaged for the class as a whole. The results of this simple experiment imply something astonishing about human nature.

Here's what happens -- always happens. The average for the class is always closer to the number of marbles in the jar than any individual guess of any student in the class. Typically, the closest anyone by themselves comes to accurately guessing the number of marbles is within 5% percent of the truth. But the closest the class as a whole comes to guessing the actual number is almost always within 3% of the truth. When you're dealing with a large number of marbles, that's a significant difference. Especially because only a very few students are within 5% of the total and most are off by as much as 30%. In short, the group guess is always significantly closer to the truth than the guess of each individual.

To see why those results should astonish us, let's step back a bit.

The society we live in prizes individualism. One of our many myths about individualism is that the strong individual is self-sufficient. And while we normally think of self-sufficiency as economic and emotional self-sufficiency, we also to some extent think that strong individuals are self-sufficient when it comes to seeing the truth of things. Put differently, we are quite comfortable with the notion that truth is routinely discovered by strong and talented individuals: The scientist working alone in his or her laboratory, the sage meditating alone on his or her mountain top, the philosopher alone in his ivy tower, the artist alone in his studio. All of this is part of our common mythology.

Yet, the experiment overturns that mythology -- at least it does so as truth. In the experiment, the group is always closer to the truth than any individual, no matter how smart, strong and resourceful that individual is.

Humans are a social species. It's obvious that we are adapted to live in groups, to cooperate with each other, and so forth. The experiment -- along with many other lines of evidence -- suggests that we are also adapted to best reach the truth through a group effort. I plan to write more on this at a later time, especially if I continue to dream about that particular experiment.

What do you think Anne? Should I continue to wake up thinking about that experiment and its implications, or am I so off the mark here that I would be better off with visions of dancing girls running through my morning thoughts?

Paul

Dear Paul,

Let me first extend my deepest apologies for the lateness of my response, as mid-semester is providing me with a considerable load of work. You asked me what I made of your assesment that human beings like to give human personalities to non-human things; I think I would have to agree with your assesment overall.

I'm sure we've all come across people who can describe the "personality" of each of their pets or, as you pointed out, name their cars. As you have pointed out that a personality is a predictive model of behavior, it makes sense that humans may find "comfort" in ascribing human personality to non-human things.

I think human beings are driven to look for a purpose in things, even where there really isn't one. Since we are human and, therefore, understand human traits the best, we look for these traits in other things an, thus, work to personify them. Of course, this is not the best way to go about things because while bearing teeth may be a smile indicating happiness in humans, a dog that is bearing its teeth is likely none too happy.

When certain events happen, we often want to think they are part of some larger plan. That's why we see so many religious baffoons blaming terrorist attacks or hurricaines on "decaying morality." We want to think things happen for a reason.

I think human beings want comfort and predictableness along with purpose. In a world where so much is uncertain, people will try to find meaning. Therefore, I think it only "natural" that humankind developed a concept of God/s (possessing a predictable personality) and religion (typically aimed at serving the purpose of God/s). What do you make of this? Is human creation of God and religion a way to address the human need for purpose? Or do I have it all wrong?

I came across some old notebooks while housecleaning today, and in one of the notebooks there was mention of an ancient penis.

According to my notes of a few years ago, David Siveter of the University of Leicester had recently (back then) discovered a fossil ostrocod, or water flea, that was 425 million years old and had a penis. Now, at the time of Siveter's discovery, that particular water flea possessed the world's oldest known penis, and, for all I know, it is still the world's oldest known penis. But even if an older penis has been discovered since Siveter's pioneering work, the sheer fact that the penis is at least 425 million years old should make us think.

Among other things, it should make us understand just how conservative nature is. Once a useful thing such as a penis has evolved, nature tends to conserve it. Aerobic respiration, for instance, has been around for far longer than even the penis. One could give example after example of things that evolved long ago and which nature has conserved and repeated in one species after another with various modifications.

When we think about evolution, we most often think of change. Of course, there is reason for that. But we should also think of conservation --- the conservation of penises, eyes, jaws, aerobic respiration and nearly countless other things --- for speaking strictly in a material sense, all life is connected to all other life through that conservation of things.

According to the ancient Sumerians, the world's first city was Eridu. A photograph of it's ruins is to the left.

Looking at the photograph, it is difficult to imagine that the land around Eridu was once fertile. Yet, Eridu at one time was surrounded by lush farmlands. What happened?

Ecologically unsubstainable irrigation practices turned the farmlands into the barren desert you see today. So ended the first city.

The ancients had no science to alert them to the danger of the ecological collapse they were creating for themselves by their faulty irrigation methods. That's not the case today, when science can and does alert us to the dangers we are creating for ourselves. But will we pay heed to the science in time?

My very beautiful friend, Becky, has sent me these lyrics to the song, Like A Wave (Surfing Zen):

Nothing that was will be again
The way it once was
Everything passes, everything will always pass
Life comes in waves like the sea
In a timeless to-and-fro

Everthing that we see is not
The same as what we saw a second ago
Everything moves every moment in the world
Pointless to escape or lie
To ourselves
Right now, there is so much life out there
In here, forever
Like a wave on the sea.



Lyrics by Lulu Santos and Nelson Motta for music written by Caetano Veloso.


There is a poem about Becky here.

Do you wonder why this blog is called "Café Philos"?

The reason is not complicated at all. In ancient Greek, the word "Philos" meant "love". Specifically, it meant certain kinds of love, such as the love of someone for their spouse, the love of a craftsman for his or her craft, the love one might have for horses, the love of brothers for each other, and so forth. When deciding on a name for this blog, the thought occurred to me that I might try writing as much as possible in the spirit of love, regardless of what I was discussing. Hence, the philos in the name.

Why a "café"? Well, because the range of topics for this blog is so broad as to resemble the range of topics one might expect to hear in a coffeehouse or café. That is, just about anything and everything having to do with life, the arts and sciences is fair game.

And that, in sum, is why the name, "Café Philos".

From The Independent:

Sir Elton John's appearance at a jazz festival on Tobago next month is expected to attract tourists from across the Caribbean, the US and Europe to the island.

But one man not looking forward to the performance is the Archdeacon of Trinidad and Tobago, the Venerable Philip Isaac.

The Archdeacon has suggested the singer and anti-Aids activist should be banned from the Plymouth Jazz Festival, because his presence may tempt islanders into homosexuality.

In what is believed to be the first campaign to stop the singer performing because of his sexuality, the Archdeacon said Sir Elton's lifestyle did not conform the biblical teaching that a "man should not lie with a man".

"The artiste is one of God's children and while his lifestyle is questionable he needs to be ministered unto. His visit to the island can open the country to be tempted towards pursuing his lifestyle," the Archdeacon told the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper

According to the island's immigration law, self-confessed prostitutes and homosexuals can be barred from entering the country. But it is thought that no one has ever been turned away at immigration.

It is truly fortunate for the youth and citizens of Tobago that the Archdeacon is on the ball. If John slips into the country, one can only imagine the horrors that will follow. At the very least one can expect rampant homosexual acts occuring on the streets, and the utter collapse of the traditional family in Tobago.

Mouth frothing homosexual activists, such as Anne, are likely to point out there is no science to support the notion homosexuality can be transmitted by buying tickets to an Elton John concert, but simpler minds have long known science is highly unreliable on such issues as homosexuality, evolution, and anything else that might in some way contradict the Bible.


.

So, why is it that women say they "share" something about themselves, but men only say they "talk" about themselves?

[Certain] questions require illusions because they have no discernible answers.

Brendan McBride, Off the Beaten Path



Brendan is referring to at least some "meaning of life" questions, such as "what is death and where will it take me?" Many professional philosophers regard such questions as empty or meaningless since there is no sound method or procedure for answering them. That does not, however, stop us from asking them. In his article, Uncomfortable Questions, Brendan develops at length an hypothesis as to why we nevertheless seem compelled to ask such questions, despite their lack of meaning.

It can be quite interesting how the findings of science differ from commonsense. But what, after all, is commonsense? Isn’t much of commonsense, as Einstein said, merely those prejudices we develop before we reach the age of 18? If so, why shouldn’t we expect many – perhaps even most – of those prejudices to be overturned by the rigorous methods and scrutiny of science?

A case in point is the commonsense notion that we can rid ourselves of any anger we feel by “venting” it – as if we were steam engines in need of letting off our excess steam. Jeffrey M. Lohr and his team decided to check the truth of that notion by wading through all the scientific research on anger and anger management that’s been done over the previous 50 or so years. What they found might surprise you:

While it is a common assumption that an angry person needs to blow off steam or risk going through the roof, research in psychology shows just the opposite. According to University of Arkansas psychologist Jeffrey M. Lohr, research has consistently showed that venting anger is at best ineffective and in some cases is even harmful.

“In study after study, the conclusion was the same: Expressing anger does not reduce aggressive tendencies and likely makes it worse,” Lohr and colleagues wrote.

“If venting really does get anger ‘out of your system,’ then venting should result in a reduction of both anger and aggression. Unfortunately for catharsis theory, the results showed precisely the opposite effect,” Lohr and colleagues wrote.

In study after study, subjects who vented anger against inanimate objects, who vented directly against the person who induced their anger, who vented hostility by playing football or who vented verbally about an employer – all showed more resentment than those who had not vented. In some experiments, venting led to aggression against innocent bystanders. Even those who firmly believed in the value of venting ended up more hostile and aggressive after thumping pillows or engaging in other expressions of anger.

“What people fail to realize is that the anger would have dissipated had they not vented. Moreover, it would have dissipated more quickly had they not vented and tried to control their anger instead,” the researchers wrote.

In contrast to the venting experiments, other studies have shown that anger dissipates faster when people take deep breaths, relax or take a time out. Any action that “makes it impossible to sustain the angry state” can help defuse anger.

So, there you have it. The science on this issue seems pretty conclusive: It's simply not a good idea to vent anger if you want to be rid of it. But will the science on this change people's attitudes towards venting, or will people still believe the commonsense thing to do is to vent?

I think it will take considerable time for the notion that venting is not good to catch on. After all, it is not only sanctified as commonsense that venting is good for you, but it is also taught by some "therapists" that you should vent your anger. Primal scream, anyone?




The full article from which the quotes above were taken is here.

Dear Anne,

One reason I don't do nude photography is because the internet is full of great nude photography -- why reinvent the wheel?

The best nudes make us want to contemplate them. They provoke in us an almost meditative state. Why is that?

I think it might have something to do with the way the best nudes ask us to see the human body in new ways. To see something in a new way is best done through contemplation, if not actual meditation. We must cease to judge it, and just see with an almost childlike simplicity of gaze.

Then again, the contours of the nude you see above are somewhat reminiscent of a Western landscape. Someone --- I'm sure he was French --- once said the body contains every curve to be found in nature. That is very true, and the best nude photography tends to illustrate the truth of his statement.

When I look at the nude above, I feel once again that the human form is both mysterious and inextractably a part of nature.

Paul

The above work comes from FigureArt.net