If you've read the sidebar before today, you've noticed a ghost. The ghost is Anne Riske.
Anne and I began this blog together as partners. Yet, she's only posted a couple times in the few months we've had the blog. That's because she has wisely focused on her education, rather than on writing for this blog. So, with her consent, I have reluctantly removed her name from the sidebar. May she graduate college with honors!
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.
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.
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
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 Anne,
Over at the By Virtue Of Release Blog, Mark McDermott has written a brief but beautiful post on dealing with negative thoughts and feelings about people. To quote part of it:
I remembered the other day that part of Zen practice is "taking the step back." Being very human I have negative, unskilful reactions to things that other people do and say. The unskillful way to have such a reaction is to go with it and be caught up in it like a net that drags me along to further negative consequences - anger, jealousy, irritation - you know.
The skillful way is to take a step back and see the reaction for just what it is - my emotions living their life with no regard for my wholeness. Part of the stepping back is to make no judgement of the reaction, not judging it as negative or positive; and not judging me for having it in the first place.
Dear Anne,
Over at The Worst Horse, Rod Meade Sperry has written an article on Buddhism and Britney Spears that seems to conclude on the commonplace note we should all treat Britney as a fellow human. Halfway through the article, though, he drops this gem about the alleged Culture War going on in this country:
There's a lot of talk in America that we're living in the main arena of a Culture War: conservatives vs. liberals, traditionalists vs. progressives, the heartland vs. the coasts, the old fuddyduddies vs. the Youth Gone Wild. The way things should be vs. the way they are. On some level that's one bullshit notion, isn't it? Liberty means diversity, harmony. If we're all in this together, then let's all be in this together.
My dear, darling Anne,
What do you make of this:
Dear Anne,
I've been thinking about what your poem Ranger Hall might mean about you as a poet and writter.
I think someday you will write as beautiful prose and poetry as you want to write. You have more talent, I think, than I had at your age. In fact, if we were the same age, we would not be equals --- you would be the better poet. I could never have written Ranger Hall at 18, which was your age when you wrote it. Nor could I have at that age written prose as well as you do.
I don't say those things to flatter you, but only to let you know why I believe in you.
I suspect you have real genius in you. But all sorts of things can go wrong with genius --- genius is only a first step. So, please allow yourself to be fair to yourself, and honestly recognize your talent and skills. It won't hurt you to do so, so long as you deeply realize that genius is but a first step.
Paul
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