RELIGION ALL IN THE MIND, SUGGESTS STEVEN PINKER

According to Steven Pinker, there are several emotional reasons for projecting a spiritual dimension into the world (he lists them in a lecture given before a meeting of the Freedom From Religion Foundation), but, he says, “… there also are cognitive predispositions, ways in which we intellectually analyze the world, which have been very skillfully explored by the anthropologists Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, and Scott Atrans. Anyone who is interested in the evolutionary psychology of religion would enjoy Pascal Boyer's RELIGION EXPLAINED and Scott Atran's IN GODS WE TRUST. Hamer's THE GOD GENE is also good, but I am more sympathetic to Boyer and Atran.

“The starting point is a faculty of human reason that psychologists call intuitive psychology or the ‘theory of mind module’—‘theory’ here not referring to a theory of the scientist but rather to the intuitive theory that people unconsciously deploy in making sense of other people's behavior. When I try to figure out what someone is going to do, I don't treat them as just a robot or a wind-up doll responding to physical stimuli in the world. Rather, I impute minds to those people.

“I can't literally know what someone else is thinking or feeling, but I assume that they're thinking or feeling something, that they have a mind, and I explain their behavior in terms of their beliefs and their desires. That's intuitive psychology. There is evidence that intuitive psychology is a distinct part of our psychological makeup. It seems to be knocked out in a condition called autism: autistic people can be prodigious in mathematics, art, language, and music, but they have a terrible time attributing minds to other people. They really do treat other people as if they were wind-up dolls. There's also a concerted effort underway to see where intuitive psychology is computed in the brain. Part of it seems to be concentrated in the ventromedial and orbital frontal cortex, the parts of the brain that kind of sit above the eyeballs, as well as the superior temporal sulcus farther back.

“Perhaps the ubiquitous belief in spirits, souls, gods, angels, and so on consists of our intuitive psychology running amok. If you are prone to attributing an invisible entity called "the mind'' to other people's bodies, it's a short step to imagining minds that exist independently of bodies. After all, it's not as it you could reach out and touch someone else's mind; you are always making an inferential leap. It's just one extra inferential step to say that a mind is not invariably housed in a body.” (From a Pinker speech recorded in the Jan/Feb 2005 issue of FREETHOUGHT TODAY newspaper, page 8)


MORALITY—A GAME OF ONE-UPS-MAN-SHIP, ANOTHER HOUSE OF CARDS???

So if the spiritual world is nothing more than a trick of intuition, perhaps morals might be nothing more than another psychological mechanism for keeping the pecking order in play in the supposedly rational herd of humankind. My reading in Dawes’s HOUSE OF CARDS (p. 208) brought me across the idea of “spatial paralogic” which is the habit of the human mind to make abstract hierarchies within the mind out of non-material values and concepts. People speak of improving themselves, getting better (according to what concrete standard, we should ask?). People speak of growing mentally and spiritually. What concrete yardstick are they putting themselves up against to measure their spiritual growth? That’s “spatial paralogic” in action—to imagine a hierarchy of value in the mind for abstract qualities that don’t have physical dimensions.

The human mind seems prone to create these hierarchies of values and life qualities in order to judge or evaluate itself and others. This, of course, enmeshes the self in the life of the culture against which one tests himself and his friends and acquaintances. I see evolution in this, our biological nature expressed as we try to find our place in the cultural hierarchy so that we can make allies and find mates. Values, judging and self-judging, and the resulting status in our minds and the minds of our acquaintances, are a human’s way of placing himself in relation to others. Thus we can’t help judging one another and ourselves because we are animals seeking a higher place among our fellows. We scramble among ourselves, pretending to be better than the other monkeys in the group, testing our moral strengths against one another. Let me try another way of saying it: spatial paralogic is a human psychological mechanism for seeking our and other’s values (i.e. “ranking) in the pecking order of the human herd.
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"If the shoe fits, you're not allowing for growth." —Robert N. Coons

Americans United for Separation of Church and State—AU.org

[Brochure]
Is America A 'Christian Nation'?

Religion, Government And Individual Freedom

Is the United States a "Christian nation"? Some Americans think so. Religious Right activists and right-wing television preachers often claim that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Even some politicians agree. If the people who make this assertion are merely saying that most Americans are Christians, they might have a point. But those who argue that America is a Christian nation usually mean something more, insisting that the country should be officially Christian. The very character of our country is at stake in the outcome of this debate.

Religious Right groups and their allies insist that the United States was designed to be officially Christian and that our laws should enforce the doctrines of (their version of) Christianity. Is this viewpoint accurate? Is there anything in the Constitution that gives special treatment or preference to Christianity? Did the founders of our government believe this or intend to create a government that gave special recognition to Christianity?

The answer to all of these questions is no. The U.S. Constitution is a wholly secular document. It contains no mention of Christianity or Jesus Christ. In fact, the Constitution refers to religion only twice in the First Amendment, which bars laws "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," and in Article VI, which prohibits "religious tests" for public office. Both of these provisions are evidence that the country was not founded as officially Christian.

The Founding Fathers did not create a secular government because they disliked religion. Many were believers themselves. Yet they were well aware of the dangers of church-state union. They had studied and even seen first-hand the difficulties that church-state partnerships spawned in Europe. During the American colonial period, alliances between religion and government produced oppression and tyranny on our own shores.

Many colonies, for example, had provisions limiting public office to "Trinitarian Protestants" and other types of laws designed to prop up the religious sentiments of the politically powerful. Some colonies had officially established churches and taxed all citizens to support them, whether they were members or not. Dissenters faced imprisonment, torture and even death.

These arrangements led to bitterness and sectarian division. Many people began agitating for an end to "religious tests" for public office, tax subsidies for churches and other forms of state endorsement of religion. Those who led this charge were not anti-religion. Indeed, many were members of the clergy and people of deep piety. They argued that true faith did not need or want the support of government.

Respect for religious pluralism gradually became the norm. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, for example, he spoke of "unalienable rights endowed by our Creator." He used generic religious language that all religious groups of the day would respond to, not narrowly Christian language traditionally employed by nations with state churches.

While some of the country's founders believed that the government should espouse Christianity, that viewpoint soon became a losing proposition. In Virginia, Patrick Henry argued in favor of tax support for Christian churches. But Henry and his cohorts were in the minority and lost that battle. Jefferson, James Madison and their allies among the state's religious groups ended Virginia's established church and helped pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, a 1786 law guaranteeing religious freedom to all.

Jefferson and Madison's viewpoint also carried the day when the Constitution, and later, the Bill of Rights, were written. Had an officially Christian nation been the goal of the founders, that concept would appear in the Constitution. It does not. Instead, our nation's governing document ensures religious freedom for everyone.

Maryland representative Luther Martin said that a handful of delegates to the Constitutional Convention argued for formal recognition of Christianity in the Constitution, insisting that such language was necessary in order to "hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism." But that view was not adopted, and the Constitution gave government no authority over religion. Article VI, which allows persons of all religious viewpoints to hold public office, was adopted by a unanimous vote. Through ratification of the First Amendment, observed Jefferson, the American people built a "wall of separation between church and state."

Some pastors who favored church-state union were outraged and delivered sermons asserting that the United States would not be a successful nation because its Constitution did not give special treatment to Christianity. But many others welcomed the new dawn of freedom and praised the Constitution and the First Amendment as true protectors of liberty.

Early national leaders understood that separation of church and state would be good for all faiths including Christianity. Jefferson rejoiced that Virginia had passed his religious freedom law, noting that it would ensure religious freedom for "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, the infidel of every denomination."

Other early U.S. leaders echoed that view. President George Washington, in a famous 1790 letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., celebrated the fact that Jews had full freedom of worship in America. Noted Washington, "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship."

Washington's administration even negotiated a treaty with the Muslim rulers of north Africa that stated explicitly that the United States was not founded on Christianity. The pact, known as the Treaty with Tripoli, was approved unanimously by the Senate in 1797, under the administration of John Adams. Article 11 of the treaty states, "[T]he government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…."

Admittedly, the U.S. government has not always lived up to its constitutional principles. In the late 19th century especially, officials often promoted a de facto form of Protestantism. Even the U.S. Supreme Court fell victim to this mentality in 1892, with Justice David Brewer declaring in Holy Trinity v. United States that America is "a Christian nation."

The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion….

- U.S. Treaty with Tripoli, 1797

It should be noted, however, that the Holy Trinity decision is a legal anomaly. It has rarely been cited by other courts, and the "Christian nation" declaration appeared in dicta a legal term meaning writing that reflects a judge's personal opinion, not a mandate of the law. Also, it is unclear exactly what Brewer meant. In a book he wrote in 1905, Brewer pointed out that the United States is Christian in a cultural sense, not a legal one.

A more accurate judicial view of the relationship between religion and government is described by Justice John Paul Stevens in his 1985 Wallace v. Jaffree ruling. Commenting on the constitutional right of all Americans to choose their own religious belief, Stevens wrote, "At one time it was thought that this right merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Mohammedism or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all."

A determined faction of Christians has fought against this wise and time-tested policy throughout our history. In the mid 19th century, several efforts were made to add specific references to Christianity to the Constitution. One group, the National Reform Association (NRA), pushed a "Christian nation" amendment in Congress in 1864. NRA members believed that the Civil War was divine punishment for failing to mention God in the Constitution and saw the amendment as a way to atone for that omission.

The NRA amendment called for "humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, [and] His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government." Ten years later, the House Judiciary Committee voted against its adoption. The committee noted "the dangers which the union between church and state had imposed upon so many nations of the Old World" and said in light of that it was felt "inexpedient to put anything into the Constitution which might be construed to be a reference to any religious creed or doctrine."

Similar theocratic proposals resurfaced in Congress sporadically over the years. As late as 1950, a proposal was introduced in the Senate that would have added language to the Constitution that "devoutly recognizes the Authority and Law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of liberty." This amendment was never voted out of committee. Efforts to revive it in the early 1960s were unsuccessful.

Today, America's religious demographics are changing, and diversity has greatly expanded since our nation's founding. The number of Jews has increased, and more Muslims are living in America than ever before. Other religions now represented in America include Hinduism, Buddhism and a myriad others. In addition, many Americans say they have no religious faith or identify themselves as atheists, agnostics or Humanists. According to some scholars, over 2,000 distinct religious groups and denominations exist in the United States.

Also, even though most Americans identify as Christian, this does not mean they would back official government recognition of the Christian faith. Christian denominations disagree on points of doctrine, church structure and stands on social issues. Many Christians take a moderate or liberal perspective on church-state relations and oppose efforts to impose religion by government action.

Americans should be proud that we live in a democracy that welcomes persons of many faiths and none. Around the globe, millions of people still dwell under oppressive regimes where religion and government are harshly commingled. (Iran and the former Taliban regime of Afghanistan are just two examples.) Many residents of those countries look to the United States as beacon of hope and a model for what their own nations might someday become.

When the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.

- Justice John Paul Stevens

Only the principle of church-state separation can protect America's incredible degree of religious freedom. The individual rights and diversity we enjoy cannot be maintained if the government promotes Christianity or if our government takes on the trappings of a "faith-based" state.

The United States, in short, was not founded to be an officially Christian nation or to espouse any official religion. Our government is neutral on religious matters, leaving such decisions to individuals. This democratic and pluralistic system has allowed a broad array of religious groups to grow and flourish and guarantees every individual American the right to determine his or her own spiritual path or to reject religion entirely. As a result of this policy, Americans enjoy more religious freedom than any people in world history. We should be proud of this accomplishment and work to preserve the constitutional principle that made it possible separation of church and state.

If you would like to learn more about this issue, please contact Americans United for Separation of Church and State at our national headquarters in Washington, D.C. We have a wide range of books, fact sheets and other literature about church-state separation. We welcome your comments and your support.

THE ARTIST

Today I’m glad I stored my trusty laptop in the trunk of the Rio. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write today, but my reading, only a few more pages of Vidal’s The GOLDEN AGE to go, wasn’t keeping me concentrated. Too much post nasal drip clogged my throat and my eyes felt sandy, scratchy. But writing called to me so out to the cold trunk to get my Mactop and, so, to writing.

I’ve taken a few classes in drawing in my life, at the senior center and at Spokane Art School. I haven’t started a drawing in well over a year, but every once in awhile, something will catch my eye, like yesterday at Hammer’s coffee shop in downtown Spokane, and I’ll imagine starting a project.

I was eyeing two, chubby (not fat) young women at the coffee counter over the top edge of Vidal’s book when a vision came to me with my lightly stirred libido providing the impetuous. These young women were chubby in a Rubenesque, delightful sort of way. They were there for some time after buying their lattes, sitting at a table chatting as women do, friendly with one another and smiling. One, more than once, glanced toward my ancient visage. Did I remind her of a doting grandfather? Was she so nearsighted she couldn’t tell how old I was?

Though heavy, they still had small waistlines but larger than life breasts. Their flesh was firm and smooth rather than droopy and creased like mine. Their faces were pretty and one had short black hair while the other’s locks were sandy, medium long and curly.

Suddenly, in my vision, they were naked, on their knees and left hands, facing one another with the right hand in a clawed position. They were as two cats hissing at one another, playfully I imagined, two bosom buddies in imaginary cat fight. I realized I would take snapshots of the two posed that way and work from photos. With tripod, I saw myself beginning toward the rear of one the young ladies, a bit to the side though so that the face of the other would be in the picture and working in a half circle to the rear of that other face.

My imagining stirred me up quite a bit. I could see the beginning photo of the series of shots quite clearly. The round buttocks of the one woman with the round cherubic face of the other to the left of those globes of delight. I felt a delightful, friendly humor in the whole thing, the three of us enjoying our project in the intimacy of my imaginary studio.

I have had the experience of sketching a nude while taking a drawing course. My feeling was erotic as I contemplated my subject but not lustful. She was not a beautiful young woman at all, but an older, fleshy, mottled woman of considerable experience in France. The feeling I had was love, respect and awe for her. Drawing my nude, I felt intimately connected to her, as if we were two alone, sharing an experience, even though in the presence of other art students. It was now the same with these two young women—erotic, stimulating with intimations of intercourse unfulfilled.

I repeatedly imagined approaching them to ask them to be a part of my project and reviewed the project in my mind several times, wandering if I took up drawing in a serious way, would I really be able to ask strangers to pose for me?

Then, suddenly, my two posers were facing away from each other, sitting back on their heels with hands on knees and faces jauntily turned up, nose proud of their youthful nudity. They were bookends with a large book squeezed between their fulsome buttocks. What would the book be? The first book I saw would be proportionately large to match the size of its bookends.

Then, suddenly, my imagination quickened, and the book became a small, real size book squashed between huge real life buttocks. The slender volume was almost lost in the flesh. Very funny indeed! At first, it was only a nameless book, confronting the realities of flesh, then a book about sex, then a book about men which these proud women to the core of their bottomly life disdained. The book grew large and shrank again as I looked for interesting images.

Now my women faced each other again in their original pose and between them stood a very skinny woman, an anorexic dying woman with hand on hip. Now my posers weren’t so disdainful. They wanted to be slender like this self-destructive woman. Then the object between my fleshy women became the headless, skinny mannequin which I’d seen that morning while passing through Nordstrom’s. Everything and nothing to be read into that headless part!

Next my two fleshy, nude women became four women, and the object they surrounded became a 70 to 80 year old woman, knowledgeable and aloof in her nude droopiness and lined, dry skin, as if she had a secret these younger women could only guess at, then a coy, middle-aged religious woman protecting her crotch appeared to me. Soon I imagined a whole series of these drawings or paintings in which different objects or persons were surrounded by my youthful, nude, heavy women by twos and fours.

Each imagined image drew from me a different reaction, but mostly it was a lighthearted series, poking fun at so many of our cultural pretensions and hidden reactions to what confronts the women among us. Then the two women left the coffee shop and I returned to Vidal’s homosexual rapier, none the worse for wear, having mounted my imagination and given it a good gallop over fertile fields.
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“The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life.” —Glenda Jackson

A GOD FOR ALL SEASONS

Here is another most interesting thing about the gods of the Christians—whether we mean father god or his son, Jesus, or the ghost that runs around with lots of power too. For the purpose of this discussion, we'll just mash together all three Christian gods into one god.

Bush says he's doing god's will when he removed Saddam from power. But didn't god put Saddam in power? Maybe god meant Saddam to be in power, maybe god was punishing the Iraqi's for some sin they committed against god and Bush overstepped his bounds in overturning god's plan. Maybe Bush isn't doing god's will at all. How can we know?

But then the Christians can fire back that if god didn't mean for Saddam to be removed from power then Saddam would still be in power. Okay—that's interesting, because that sort of says that whatever happens is god's will. Okay, if everything that happens is god's will, then god's real purposes in human activity can't be discerned in any of history because nothing god does can be picked out in history. His will is everywhere, therefore, it's invisible; it's just whatever is. That means that whatever happens is god's will and that whatever is is god. That makes god pantheistic. It also means that any act by any person is god's will so no person can be blamed for his actions since he's doing god's will which is everything that happens.

If your head is spinning in circles, never mind. So is the holy ghost's.

LET YOUR PSYCHE SOAR!

“Today, as we all know, such thoughts and forms are of a crumbling past and the civilizations dependent on them in disarray and dissolution. Not only are societies no longer attuned to the courses of the planets; sociology and physics, politics and astronomy are no longer understood to be departments of a single science. Nor is the individual interpreted (in the democratic West, at least) as an inseparable subordinate part of the organism of a state. What we know today, if we know anything at all, is that every individual is unique and that the laws of his life will not be those of any other on this earth. We also know that if divinity is to be found anywhere, it will not be ‘out there,’ among or beyond the planets. Galileo showed that the same physical laws that govern the movements of bodies on earth apply aloft, to the celestial spheres; and our astronauts, as we have all now seen, have been transported by those earthly laws to the moon. They will soon be on Mars and beyond. Furthermore, we know that the mathematics of those outermost spaces will already have been computed here on earth by human minds. There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds. So what happens now to those childhood images of the ascent of Elijah, Assumption of the Virgin, Ascen-sion of Christ—all bodily—into heaven?” (MYTHS TO LIVE BY, p. 251 of Joe Campbell’s 1972, Bantam Book edition)

There are times when I read Joe Campbell’s work which are like reading Carl Sagan or S. J. Gould, when something he says makes me grateful to have shared a fragment of my life span with a fragment of his. His thoughts serve as a springboard to my imagination, and I realize just what humankind is capable of or will be capable of when the dead superstitions of the past finally do really die and the new mythologies set in. The passage above was just such a moment as I sat in Hammer’s coffee shop downtown and read it, and I was so glad to be a human and to able to appreciate what I was reading and so grateful not to have been born in the 17th or any past century!!! Then, again, even in those days, if one was looking to be attuned to the myth of his day, he could soar in those days too, so I take this last sentence back.

Certain local blogs have been full of the screaming rage of religious people who are unable to accept that the face of Terri Schiavo is only a representation of the face of nature in all its brutal reality. Because they are stuck in the old mythologies which they really no longer believe in, they can’t seem to transcend the moment and navigate to the larger vision. I don’t find anything about the Schiavo case to be pleasant, but I am not fixated on it like so many religious persons who do not seem to remember that Terri’s going to a better place according to their mythologies. In fact, that’s how we know that their mythologies no longer work—they’re fighting to keep her alive rather than accepting their supposed reality of death and heaven. No—divinity is not “out there” and they know it in the deepest realms of their psyches. They know there is no heaven and their desperation proves it.
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“[Fox TV News editors] are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.” —Adlai Stevenson [I do know that Fox News wasn’t around when Adlai was! Allow me a little poetic license here.]

THIS IS THE JOY OF SCIENCE

Reports of experiments like the one below, I love to copy out and read and to follow step by step as they are unfolded to me. Then to share them with others like yourselves. This is the joy of the scientific method, to see something revealed so clearly that, it's truth is clear to all. Nothing is more pleasurable to my sensibilities, I assure you. Sometimes, of course, more information reveals a even deeper truth here and there but nothing can match reading about and following in one's own mind the clear, incontrovertible moments of truth as the following two experiments demonstrate.

"The demand to “show me” can also be quite subtle. In the late] 1840s for example, Dr. Ignaz Phillipp Semmelweis noted that the rate of death from “childbed fever” among mothers who had given birth in a ward serviced by physicians was almost four times as high as mothers in a ward in the same hospital serviced by midwives. The deaths tended to occur in women in the same rows of beds. Semmelweis wondered whether the reason was that they were attended by the same doctor. The doctors didn’t clean their hands, even after returning from dissecting a cadaver in the morgue, because such practice was considered to be unmanly. Or perhaps the effect was psychological, since after a priest administered last rites to a dying patient, he went down the line of beds ringing the “death bell.” At Semmelweis’s request, the priest stopped ringing the death bell in the hospital, but the mothers continued to die in rows. Semmelweis then demanded that his colleagues and assistants wash their hands in solution of chlorine of lime before they examined a woman or delivered a baby. Over the next fifteen months, the death rate fell from 12 percent to 1.2 percent. After participating in a republican street demonstration in 1848, however, Semmelweis was fired from his hospital post. His successor stopped the silly requirement of hand washing, and the death rate rose to 15 percent. We would be more certain that the changes in death rate were due to hand washing if he had required the doctors to wash their hands in some randomly picked rows but not in others. Semmelweis happened nevertheless to be correct, and he tested it in a way that allowed him to present evidence to a person who demanded “show me.” Unfortunately, the medical people at the time were not as impressed as we believe in retrospect that they should have been. The old practices were retained until the 1880s, when Dr. Joseph Lister [ah, the wonders of Listerine] understood the importance of Semmelweis’s experiments. In the meantime, Semmelweis had lost his sanity, begun accosting people on the streets to warn them to stay away from doctors who didn't clean their hands, and died in a mental institution in 1865." (HOUSE OF CARDS, by Robyn Dawes, pp. 77-78)

[And right after his commitment the Civil War in America started. Could his commitment to an asylum have caused the Civil War? Within this set of brackets lies religious logic? Which will you trust?]

Another joy is to watch a scientific mind sort through the problems in developing ways to arrive at experiments and valid results. I once worked with a physicist in an experiment about gravity and to watch him work was a revelation and a joy. You can't escape a wonderful optimism in watching the process of arriving at truth with scientific methods just because scientific methods allow us to arrive at the only certainty in the world which has any verifiability by others. Everything else is mere subjective palaver, even my own palaver.

"How does a clinical judge integrate a positive test result in a medical test or an unusual response to a Rorschach Ink Blot Test with knowledge that a disease indicated by such results is extremely rare?

"Such integration cannot be done on an intuitive basis. Instead clinical judgment is often based on a number of cognitive “heuristics” rules of thumb. The first heuristic is to search one’s memory (including memory of one’s training) for instances similar to the one at hand. This heuristic is termed availability. Unfortunately, availability can be quite biased by selective exposure, selective recall, vividness of the instance or category recalled, and so on. A second heuristic is to match the cues or characteristics with a stereotype or a set of other characteristics associated with a category—a heuristic termed representativeness. The degree to which something matches a category, however, does not indicate how probable it is. For example, our stereotype of someone addicted to intravenous drugs is that such a person smokes marijuana; hence, marijuana-smoking is a characteristic that matches our stereotype of an intravenous drug addict—even though people who smoke marijuana are far more likely not to use intravenous drugs than to use them, let alone be addicted to them.

"Availability and representativeness are the heuristics that most commonly lead us to make poor judgments, but they are not the only ones." (H.O.C. p. 100)
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"Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed." —I. F. Stone [Well—that's a bit harsh. If we all believed that sentiment all the time, we'd have anarchy. But in times like these when neocons have adopted and polished the practice of public lying to such a fine art, we should, at least, for the time being make Stone's warning our American watchword.]

BUSH’S NOSE GETS LONGER AND LONGER BUT
HIS FOLLOWERS WILL NEVER SEE IT BECAUSE
THEY’RE BLINDED BY THE LIGHT—OR IS THAT “RIGHT”?

Bush’s people being mainly religiomaniacs and, therefore, unable to tell the truth from a lie (because they’ve been lied to in the Bible and lied to by their parents and religious leaders all their lives) are unable to determine when they’re being lied to. As you know, if you keep up on the science of evolutionary psychology, there’s an arms race going on between liars and those who can detect liars. Each evolutionary leap increases the ability of the dominant group, each going one up on the other until the next leap deposes the latter.

The best liar, of course, is the liar who believes his own lies. Religious lies are, therefore, harder to see through, and religious people are the most duped of all human groups because they believe a huge, nose popping, piegod in the sky lie. But, anyhow, here anyhow is a laundry list of Bush lies exposed in his budget:

[Open quote.]

Almost no aspect of his [Bush’s] budget squares with reality, John Farmer says.


Bush's credibility gap growing rapidly

John Farmer
Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger
February 14, 2005

Bad as they are, the budget gap and the trade gap are not the worst gaps facing the federal government. That honor belongs to the fastest growing of them all – the credibility gap.

It wasn't always that way. In the years of greatest national crisis, the Great Depression and World War II, Americans of almost every political persuasion (except maybe Communists and the looniest of the lefties) believed what their government told them and generally identified with Washington and its priorities.

Beginning with the Vietnam War and escalating with Watergate, that faith began to fade. Both parties bear the blame – Democrats for the lies of the Johnson administration during Vietnam, Republicans for the criminal mischief of the Nixon years and Watergate.

Today, thanks to the almost daily deceptions practiced by the Bush administration and its refusal under any conditions to admit any mistake, the credibility gap is deeper than ever.

The president's latest plunge into the gap involves his $2.5 trillion budget. If a literary entry, it would be a real contender for the fiction prize. Almost no aspect of the Bush budget squares with reality, beginning with its total-spending claims.

The cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, currently a not-insignificant $6 billion a month, is not included, if you can believe it. Everyone knows the money will have to be raised and spent, so why omit it from the budget? One reason is that its inclusion would make it more difficult for Bush to meet his promise (surely just as bogus) to cut the $420 billion-plus annual deficit in half in four years. (Even that deficit estimate is a sham; it would be far worse but for the inclusion of Social Security taxes.)

An even larger cost item missing from the budget is the amount required to finance Bush's plan to take money from Social Security to finance his privatization plan. It's a glaring omission – a sum ranging from almost $800 billion to between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on which estimate of potential offsets one accepts. One wonders, how did he overlook it?

As if that wasn't enough, the president also fails to include the cost of making his now-notorious tax cuts permanent, a $1 trillion-plus drain on the treasury of the next decade. Hardly chump change.

But it's not merely costs that the Bush budget omits. It sins on the other side of the ledger by anticipating revenue it either has little chance of getting its hands on or never plans to collect.

The former involves revenue Bush counts on from opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil exploration. Fat chance. Unless Congress has a radical change of heart, the reserve in Alaska will remain off-limits to the oil industry. The second dodge involves the cash income Bush anticipates from the Alternative Minimum Tax while at the same time he proposes it be eliminated.

The budget duplicity comes on the heels of Bush's Social Security shell game. His much-heralded privatization scheme, the administration now concedes, will have no effect on closing the fund's anticipated shortfall. Surprise, surprise! But what's worse is the way the administration has employed conflicting estimates of economic growth to peddle privatization.

It's needed, the Bushies argue, because the aging of the population will, over time, slow economic growth and thus not produce enough payroll tax revenue to meet annual Social Security benefit costs. In the next breath, however, they insist that robust economic growth will be a bonanza for those who opt to privatize part of their Social Security account. Well, which is it?

Perhaps the worst thing about Bush's voodoo economic policies is how they have ensnared honorable men in the Republican leadership – House Speaker Dennis Hastert, for one. He's out there defending the plans when (at least one hopes) he knows better. Ultimately, Hastert's own credibility and that of the others who go along with the administration will be at stake come the 2006 congressional elections.

To his credit, Bush has been incredibly successful at keeping his party in Congress in line considering how far he has strayed from small-government conservative orthodoxy. As conservative economist Bruce Bartlett put it in a National Public Radio interview, Bush "has spent like a drunken sailor," creating the biggest federal government in history. Indeed, he has. If they had a Betty Ford clinic for big spenders, Bush would be a prime candidate.

He's on the wagon now, Bush claims. Whether Republicans who control Congress will continue to stick with him and follow him into the credibility gap will be the real test of this Congress and Bush's ultimate success or failure.
[Close quote.]
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“Boozer’s revision: A bird in the hand is dead.” from THE OFFICIAL RULES

PLAYING HARD

Again I hear a coach talk about his team’s need to “play hard”. Think about it? Really, playing hard has anything to do with winning? I can watch lots of teams play hard and lose, see it every day. Can you see a high school team playing hard and win against the Seattle Supersonics? No, there’s something more to winning than playing hard. You need talent for one thing, then you need skilled coaching, then you need well-designed plays, then you need a desire to win, then you need… ah… let me see… yes, lots of steroids. Steroids—that's the stuff that makes muscles hard and big so that a team can play “hard”. See, the athletes have been getting the message all along. No need to tell them to play hard.


THE VOW OF CHASTITY

A few European filmmakers have recently tried to create a stringent aesthetic for the creation of movies. Many films are coming out which try to practice these tough rules. I'm sure, though I don't see any credit on the DVD package, that the film I watched this week, "The Son", tried to stick to Dogme standards. I am passing on these rules so that, if you're a true movie buff you'll try identify Dogme films when you see them.

[Open quote.]
I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGME 95:

1. ShootIng must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).

2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene Is being shot).

3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand Is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).

4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).

5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.

6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)

7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)

8. Genre movies are net acceptable.

9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm.

10. The director must not be credited.

Furthermore I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work”, as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal Is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY.”

Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995
On behalf of DOGME 95

Lars von Trier & Thomas Vinterberg
[Close quote.]


TEMPERAMENT SORTER TEST
Recently I took a little on line test to see what my temperament has become from what it may have once been. I don’t blame you if you ignore this exercise in narcissism. The results follow:

“February 22, 2005 Free report for: George Thomas

“Rationals, are the problem solving temperament, particularly if the problem has to do with the many complex systems that make up the world around us. Rationals might tackle problems in organic systems such as plants and animals, or in mechanical systems such as railroads and computers, or in social systems such as families and companies and governments. But whatever systems fire their curiosity, Rationals will analyze them to understand how they work, so they can figure out how to make them work better. In working with problems, Rationals try to find solutions that have application in the real world, but they are even more interested in the abstract concepts involved, the fundamental principles or natural laws that underlie the particular case. And they are completely pragmatic about their ways and means of achieving their ends. Rationals don't care about being politically correct. They are interested in the most efficient solutions possible, and will listen to anyone who has something useful to teach them, while disregarding any authority or customary procedure that wastes time and resources. Rationals have an insatiable hunger to accomplish their goals and will work tirelessly on any project they have set their mind to. They are rigorously logical and fiercely independent in their thinking--are indeed skeptical of all ideas, even their own--and they believe they can overcome any obstacle with their will power. Often they are seen as cold and distant, but this is really the absorbed concentration they give to whatever problem they're working on. Whether designing a skyscraper or an experiment, developing a theory or a prototype technology, building an aircraft, a corporation, or a strategic alliance, Rationals value intelligence, in themselves and others, and they pride themselves on the ingenuity they bring to their problem solving. Rationals are very scarce, comprising as little as 5 to 10 percent of the population. But because of their drive to unlock the secrets of nature, and to develop new technologies, they have done much to shape our world.”
___________________________________________________________________

“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” —Salvador Dali

I FORESEE A DAY WHEN THIS BLOG WILL SHRINK TO THREE DAYS A WEEK

Monday, Wednesday and Friday...


LET’S START WITH A RELIGIOUS JOKE TODAY

A character in the Shaw play “Man and Superman” says to another, “An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.”

How many uncomfortable believers do you think inhabit this globe who just can’t put down their uncomfortable feelings? I know that the more I judge (the angrier I am) the more harshly I judge others. It’s as if every judgment we make on one another in this global prison becomes just another bar in our own cages.


RELIGION BACKWARD, HATEFUL, DIVISIVE AND OUT OF IT BY
ABOUT TWO MILLENNIA

“LONDON (AP) - Anglican primates agreed Thursday that the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada would withdraw from a key body of the global Anglican Communion after failing to overcome internal church disagreements about the election of a gay bishop in the United States and the blessing of same-sex unions there and in Canada.”

What can a sane man say? Religion is outdated if not dead and beyond recall. Religion has no relevance for the modern world and modern people. It increases problems, pain and psychological suffering everywhere it appears. Who but a failed modern being, one who cannot govern his own being, would require such backward teachings as modern religion offers?

Read the whole stinking story here.


A MEMBER OF THE "INLAND NORTHWEST FREETHOUGHT SOCIETY" BROUGHT THIS IN

Darwin probably has it right:

“I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion” —Charles Darwin

When I think of all the religious debates around the worldly world and my own shadowy history and all the battles over religion, it seems that humankind has grown considerably more intelligent and comfortable despite our efforts to destroy and otherwise regress ourselves back to sticks and stones. The chief improving forces are always science and technology, not that those two engines of progress don't bring along problems of their own. Still those two marvelous rouges just silently and subtly keep spinning our change while the argumentative among us are busy swinging fists of debate, often over glasses of intoxicating beverages. One day we wake up from the knockout punch our interlocutor hit us with in the bar last night, and there's the wheel, next morning penicillin, then rocket travel, computer chips and, now, the Internet. Busy, busy, the good brothers of change in our knock down drag out world. We are in the ring while they are in the Universe.


STILL I GOTTA KEEP PULLING THE MONGREL'S TAIL

James Madison believed that "religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise [sic]."


LET GORE VIDAL HAVE THE LAST WORD THIS POSTING

In the last paragraph of THE GOLDEN AGE, Gore writes of evolution and eternity: "As for the human case, the generations of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—is not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope." —GORE VIDAL
___________________________________________________________

“If god lived on earth, people would break his windows!” —a Jewish joke. Seriously!

LETTERS TO DAVE


PART THREE: SEEING MORALITY THROUGH A MICROSCOPE

Dear Dave,

In AA’s principles the tenth step says, “We continued to take a daily inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.” In step four, that inventory is described as a “moral” inventory. So that’s what I began to do on a regular basis after I got sober, for nine years or so, constantly taking a “moral inventory” and making apologies day to day as they became necessary. It’s what I was doing when I discovered my terrible lies about poor innocent Pete, and I wouldn’t blame you, Dave, if you pointed out that I might be slipping in my tenth step work in my dealings with the SR or you. Anyhow... you can immediately see where Bush, without AA, and I, with it, part company. It’s in the concept of promptly admitting it when we’re wrong. Bush is the original man for not wanting to admit a mistake. For sure, he could never be a Catholic. Imagine George in the confessional: “Forgive me, father, but god has sinned in putting that Saddam fellow in power in Iraq, I’ve corrected god’s mistake.”

But I don’t want to take Bush’s moral inventory any further in this third and last part; I mean to understand and write down my own slow march of consciousness from a religious/moral stance to a scientific stance with which to understand reality and improve my own character. And that brings me to the next and last tale of woe in this narrative.

Ten years into sobriety, my third divorce came to pass. Lo, did it come to pass, and I discovered that being sober and moral was just not enough to make marriages work. In fact, being judgmental was one of my problems all along, and my third divorce brought that home to me with another crash. Till then, there were only one right way and one wrong way. George’s way was the right way and others’ ways were the wrong ways. Recall—though that last sentence may sound like I’m trashing George Bush’s current way of life again, which I’ve said I wouldn’t do in this section, I’m really describing my own behavior. I was being a fundamentalist, Old Testament sort of guy. Even though I wasn’t a Christian, I was being what I didn’t want to be. I was being dishonest with myself; I was being my own worst enemy.

So—away flies wife number three and in flies a depression, suicidal in intensity. I could barely get to sleep most nights. I couldn’t go into the bedroom of my small apartment; I slept on the couch. I watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus every night at twelve and went to sleep with the TV on so that I wouldn’t have to face the silence. I awoke to the static of an empty screen. They were miserable times as my wife soon was dating the man who would become her husband. She rushed to divorce, and we fought over everything.

Eventually, from that early suicidal despair, I entered a period of painful growth, which, in retrospect, was the best thing to happen to me in my life. Swearing never to feel such pain again, I determined on a course of recovery which I hoped would make me a new person altogether.

I retreated to a ratty, barren farmhouse six miles outside of Cheney where I wintered two winters and enjoyed two summers in monkly splendor with coyotes as comrades while reading spiritual literature for two to four hours every morning (the Bible, the Psalms, Thomas Merton and etcetera), joined the Lutheran Church in Cheney with lessons and the tap of a rose, got into counseling, began to read and listen to the tapes of John Bradshaw, jogged the dirt roads thereabouts, associated myself with a small band of Catholic evangelicals in their Wednesday night conclave in the basement of St. Rose of Lima’s church in Cheney where we quietly prayed, talked and sang, took up training for and then a job as a Certified Nurse’s Aide at the Cheney Care Center where I humbly wiped withered butts and spoon-fed those who couldn’t feed themselves.

I went to every self-help workshop I could find and afford on CNA pay. Eventually I entered into five years of celibacy to see what that would bring while dating every woman who attracted my fancy. I discovered that many of the women I most wanted to fuck, bored me to tears when we conversed. And all the while, in AA meeting after AA meeting, and in 12 step meetings of Alanon, Sex and Love Addicts, Incest Survivors (who knew? maybe that too?), Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Codependents Anonymous, day in and day out, I confessed my sins, I took my “moral inventory” until I was tired of hearing it. I became acutely aware of the processes that led to self-flagellation.

During this period of recovery, I broke down many times into a sobbing heap of tears so intense I could barely catch my breath. One time I Iost it in the basement evangelical meeting. They were singing a hymn that was something about being brought to the water, about being naked and afraid, defenseless and poor, and, boy, that was certainly me. I couldn’t defend myself against that song and image. They tore into me. One of the songs I’d sung all my adult life, discovered in the folk tradition that came alive in the hippy daze, was “Motherless Child”. I knew that feeling backwards and forwards. Suddenly I was bent over in my church chair and sobbing helplessly. Snot dangled from my nose to the floor.

To make the story brief: the evangelicals gathered around to lay hands on and pray over me. They prayed and they prayed, then, as my tears stopped and my snot grew manageable, they withdrew to their chairs, and the leader of the group asked me if I was ready “... to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.” I recalled Joanne Woodward in the movie, “Rachel, Rachel” and told him, tremulously, “No.” At this point he suggested they get up again and pray some more, but a good friend among them said, “No, Charlie”, and Charlie was saved the embarrassment of another futile try.

I was just not about to be moved by emotional extremity into the Christian camp it seems. Dave, if that breakdown didn’t do it, when I was surrounded by hosts of praying Christians, then no breakdown could do it, could make me accept some invisible presence to be my aide and comforter. I couldn’t have been more defenseless against Christian attacks than at that moment in the church basement. Many give up on themselves during those breakdowns and find Jesus, that mythological authority outside themselves to become their father, ruler and secret playmate, but I think I knew their tricks too well.

From the days of our earliest awareness, America’s Christianized culture beats at you, trying to wear you down, and shames the psyche until, eventually, in your unprotected youth, in fear and trembling, you give your self up and your freedom away, and you slink back into blind obedience under the pitiless gaze of an angry god. Then they give you Jesus to replace your authentic self so your shamed obedience doesn’t seem so bad when compared to his mindless self-sacrifice, but the frightening part is that no one can become so abject without retaining a powerful potion of hatred for anyone outside the Christian camp who reminds them that they are no longer free. Terrible things have been done to anyone who reminds them of the freedom they gave away in their fear.

Actually, though I couldn’t see it at the time, all my breakdowns were helping me immensely. I just didn’t understand the natural power of grieving one’s losses. I was, unknown to myself, gaining confidence in the process I was embarked upon and learning that if you don’t die of grief, then, eventually, grieving builds up an inner strength one can rely on. One doesn’t have to surrender their autonomy to a being outside themselves to find strength. The tricky part is that loss feels just like real death and is scary as hell. You cry out for someone to help you. You look to others and they shun you if you’ve gone too mad, but—here’s the secret—grief never does kill you even though you fear it will as you enter into its grip of terror and pain before your tears buy relief from it. Eventually, I learned to trust the process. This was the lesson I was learning unawares in my secret limbic system of limbic systems about gods and morality and about human frailty and the pain and suffering the human animal is heir to. Then one last experience diverted me into a science-based answer to my human travails.

I was in a noon twelve step meeting, and, as usual, I was doing a great job of taking my own inventory. The program says that the drunk must be tough on himself and gentle on the other. The drunk must assume that when he’s having a problem with another human being, it’s his fault. He must somehow adjust his vision to accept the problem that is confronting him. He must ruthlessly take his own inventory! Can there be anything more moral and right than that? Many religious people can’t even do that, but I was doing a good job of it.

I finished my little monologue after a lengthy process of tearing myself down and admitting to everyone that the divorce was all my fault. I told them in no uncertain terms what a lousy son-of-bitch husband I was. I was a “... no good, lousy, manipulative, controlling asshole type of male, incapable of being kind and gentle to anyone in the whole world”. Yep—I was just plain no good and rotten to the core, I informed the group. They’d heard it many times before.

When I finished, I felt terrible. What a shock. Usually, such a rant gave me some temporary relief from my pain. This time it didn’t. Something was hanging on. I’d confessed my sins to the group but something still was not right. The meeting went on around me. I sank into myself and my pain. I heard no one else speak. I was off in a world of my own, scrunched around my pain, like a gargoyle around a bright, rich jewel hoard and suffering terribly. Then the final, awful truth bore in upon me. O, shit, it hurt. It was obvious that I could no longer hide the truth from myself. Indeed... I really was a lousy, selfish son-of-a-bitch. No hiding from it. (I laugh, now, aloud, in the coffee shop as I admit it once more in my narrative. It’s a fresh truth always and forever, how we fool ourselves with our imagined innocence.) I was selfish, selfish, selfish.... I couldn’t escape the truth! There it was. I… was… selfish.

My guilty pain was horrible. You see, like the lie about Pete, there are many forms and levels of truth. There’s the telling of the truth, the words that can be said repeatedly, then there’s the accepting of the truth and the final seeing through the lie! What I didn’t realize just quite then, but which had to follow upon my discovery, was that I was going to have to take full responsibility for my path out of this pain. I’d already, in that basement debacle, shed forever the chance to put my suffering off on someone else’s bloody, disjointed shoulders. Now what the hell would I do? What a quandary was upon me! Then a scientific moment came upon me, though, even here, I would not fully realize for some years that it was a scientific moment.

I heard myself ask, “Okay, admit it, you are selfish. So, if you really are selfish, how did you come to be this way? Why are you selfish? What made you this way?”

That’s actually quite a scientific question, but most people think it’s a moral question, and they try to answer it with ineffective moral replies. Thousands of years of philosophers and moralizers, millions of theologians keep asking the “selfishness” question about humans as if it’s a moral problem, when, actually, it’s a scientific question with a scientific answer.

I did get an immediate answer, however, and the answer for some time appeared to be a moral answer because I was able to shift blame for a while. My answer was a lie, but a necessary lie along the path to mental health. It gave me some breathing room from the Jesus people who, I feared, like all cults, wanted to use my human frailty and guilt and shame to enslave me in their religion.

I suddenly understood why I was selfish. It was a matter of survival. I was doing what I had been doing all my life in order to survive my less than satisfactory childhood. I saw that I was a product of my childhood. I was being who I had to be, not feeling what I had to not feel, and doing what I had to do in order to survive. Another piece of my puzzle was in place. I saw myself as both abuser and abused, victim and victimizer. At last, I could see both sides of the coin: I had been controlling, fearful, manipulative, mean at times and loving at times, whatever it took to get my way, because that’s how children survive. I could see it clear as hell. Love and cruelty were both tools in getting what I needed from others. If one doesn’t work, try the other. Whimper, plead, scream and threaten, whatever works. I could see that I was completely selfish and living at the level of a damaged four year old, throwing tantrums and offering hugs to control others. At the same time, I would love no one because they could hurt me if I did. No wonder marriage didn’t work with me.

Great benefits immediately flowed from my new insight. Not only did the pain I was feeling in the meeting go away, I could see my dilemma with unflinching clarity, Soon, quite naturally, I no longer blamed myself so harshly for all my shortcomings that my daily inventories constantly rubbed in my face. I really saw that I made mistakes and could let myself make mistakes. Before that, I could say the concept of human equality, but I couldn’t feel it in the bones of my understanding. Now I could try to let others make mistakes without piling on, but not all the time.

Once I started to take it easy on myself, I found I could take it easier on others. Love and liking for myself metamorphosed into liking and love for others. In fact, I have a principle now which I should always pay attention to but don’t. When I’m being miserable and picking on someone else, when the world seems lousy and dangerous, when I’m being badly argumentative, that’s a sign I’ve started to beat up on myself again, to be moralistic rather than naturalistic and logical. Pain and anguish are signs to slow down and smell the roses.

Still… I’m not perfect, and I keep slipping in and out of conscious mindfulness about those inner realities. Even with that leveling insight that showed me that I was just like my fellow man, I still must feel superior from time to time because I continue to let morality dominate my view of human behavior, and I get distressed that people continue to hurt one another. Me too. I still want to blame humans for everything they do. I just don’t want to let go of being judgmental, I guess. There must be some safety in judging my fellow humans that I don’t quite understand.

However, finally, more of the puzzle fell into place in my 60s when I began to read in the science of evolutionary psychology and socio-biology and to read about the development of consciousness and, through them, to think more clearly about the human animal and its evolutionary past as revealed in it’s developing consciousness. Science shows me that selfishness is just the way the human animal constructed itself to survive. Selfishness is necessary for survival. One who is completely selfless will not survive the sharks out there. At last, through science, I’m moving from, I hope, “came to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity” (the third principle of AA) to “came to believe that science can restore me to sanity.” Science gives perfectly adequate answers to most of my more troubling concerns. I don’t need to look outside myself or beyond the realm of the material to perfectly understand what’s going on with the human race, and, you know, if I’m honest with myself, I’m not all that concerned with afterlives and imaginary worlds. Let others have what they need as long as they leave me alone to my own meditations.

I can’t make much of a big deal out of this final part of my story. It’s all intellectual and unemotional, all about the expansion of my rational capacities as I learn more from my studies of biology and consciousness. I am reading and enjoying, learning to meditate. Slowly and surely, I hope my studies will help take me out of myself and into the intellectual world where I can see why everything in the world is exactly as it has to be. There’s no magic here, nothing transcendental or mythical. Science can answer so many things right now and more soon. We are as we are because we are still animals. We hurt one another, squabble like monkeys, show affection and fuck just like animals, so why deny the truth still? Once you start seeing the world that way, it’s amazing the things you see.

The other day, I watched a mother and daughter cross a parking lot outside the Starbuck’s I was feeding in. The genetic similarities were obvious, the way their hips moved and the way they held their backs and shoulders. Yes, unconsciously they were accenting their breasts too, like two proud animals unawares of their animalism. I knew I was observing two animals in our modern jungle cross a dangerous place warily on the look out for the danger of autos that surrounded them. They were so much animals that a joy filled me as I saw myself in those other beings so much like myself in the thick of the material world.

THE END

LETTERS TO DAVE


PART TWO: THE LIE MULTIPLIED

Dear Dave,

I’ve just gone away from my computer to attend a 12 step, non-AA, every-Saturday meeting and to lunch with people of both sexes from that group. More insight poured into my head over the course of the last three hours as I listened to their stories from the week, their struggles with self and others.

One thing I realized as I pulled into my driveway is that I write nowadays not so much for the benefit of others but to clarify who I am. It’s a far different task for me than the writing task is for you, Dave, who writes and reports news. Even your column must take into account the presence of others whereas I write purely for fun, the titillation of the exercise of imagination and the discovery of self. Pure pleasure! Which is basically what this exercise has become for me—a current snapshot to myself as to the steps that led me to be the current person I am. Very informative to me, but if, at any time this bores you, I know you’ll stop reading and go on to better things. I will still be blissfully unawares, writing away in the vasteness of my small room like the compulsive writer that I am until I complete Part Three, The End. (Hey—you could let Rebecca read this. I’ll bet she’d like it. It’s her cup of tea, I believe.)

Anyhow… I thought some about what I meant in the very last line in the closing of Part One about wanting to get “status” with your “clan of writers”. It occurs to me that I’m trying to force a writer’s or writing relationship with the unwilling editors of the Spokesman and that my exchange with them is full of conflicts because I’m still in conflict with relationships from my past, especially with people who dismissed and discounted me. It is, of course, a relationship all in my own head, which would amuse them, I’m sure, if they fully understood it. Or, maybe they have thought about men and women like me who badger them from afar, and they do understand the psychological dynamics. It’s funny to see myself as a potential flake in their eyes and, yet, to know I’m not a flake in my own eyes.

For Doug F. and Steve S., I’ve become too much (as you noted), and they don’t really want to hear from me again (your situation with John H.), which is a bad situation for I have the goal to get at least one really, atheist guest column on the opinion page of the SR. Unfortunately, by your having responded kindly to many of my comments and to our having met, you have fallen into a psuedo-relationship with me, for good or ill, in our imaginations, for which I thank you. At least I’m not totally unreal in the collective mind of the SR. I at least exist somewhere there in one mind. For your trouble, you get to receive this longish, three part, personal memoir.

In my belief system, imagination is all any of us have, and we are constantly writing our own stories in our own heads from the least sophisticated among us to the most. The only difference between me or you and an undereducated, redneck oyster farmer on the Louisiana coast is that I’m fully aware of our state of affairs.

Anyhow… my situation with your top editors parallels my lifelong existentialist situation with the entire American culture. Existentialism would be unbearable if I wasn’t so damn proud of it. It’s the kind of strained relationship that led the ex-patriots of the 1920s—Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein and etcetera—to abandon America for Paris. I love the Twenties! If I weren’t so old, I’d consider living in Canada or France, but now it might be silly, and, perhaps, my wife couldn’t go along with it. I can hear one of your senior editors say, “Let me tell you, George, you are no Hemingway.” I know that, but well… but… I am a sober Kerouac, or more ambitiously, an F. Scott Fitzgerald in my own head....

Now... hurrying to the present from that Cheney of the past and into present day sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: in the Pete incident, with my AA tools, I caught myself in my own mental lies and deceptions, and I got insight about human consciousness which bears even more fruit, now, with further scientific information. In recent years I’ve discovered a lot about lying. It appears that dissimulation, lying, or protective “mental” coloration (a form of hiding away) are all part of the human animal’s biological baggage for survival. Even chimps, our nearest relatives, can be observed deceiving one another. Two conclusions are obvious in the research. One: we are selfish and must survive. Two, we are herd animals and must get along with others in order to survive. We need to exchange information about water holes, plants, crops, spear points, camouflage colors and where the game is while competing with our collaborators for mates and goods. (A lot of what I’m saying is found in Pinker’s and other’s work.) So our very survival means that we must learn to lie and to detect liars and to hide our true motives while getting along. Some researchers find that our sophisticated human consciousness evolved from this need to deceive and to detect deceivers. After all, survival in the wild for earlier human forms depended to some extent on who could hide and who could detect hiders best.

We know others lie because we know we lie, thus there’s a sort of arms race of liars and lie detectors. The best detectors survive and procreate better than the least effective ones. That means the best liars are better survivors while the more honest have troubles. And—here’s a scary one—the best liars are those who believe their own lies themselves. That’s right—the best liar doesn’t even know he’s lying because he believes he’s telling the truth. Which knowledge will bear more fruit in later paragraphs.

I think after the total naiveté of my childhood, which was considerable and painful for me, I went on to become one of the more devious liars in the world, which is why I think I can detect a liar at fifty paces. So... when I listen to most TV evangelists, my consciousness almost universally screams out, liar! But it’s difficult to tell. Some of those religious liars believe their own lies, thus they’re perfect at it, and only a master liar like myself can detect them. Poor simple, mostly honest folk are at the mercy of good liars.

Now we have come, as promised in the first line of this very abbreviated memoir, to the subjects of alcoholism, George Bush and lying and to the exposing of the big lie which George Bush is telling himself. Bush and I are both alcoholics. Alcoholism is a disease as far as statistical research goes. You can’t prove the connection conclusively, but when you look at the statistics that show the rates of alcoholism in the children of alcoholics, you do get a strong correlation.

Further, in AA’s view, since it’s a disease, once an alcoholic always an alcoholic. You never get over it. Now Bush openly says he was once an alcoholic. He proclaims that Graham saved him from “alcoholism” though, according to Kitty Kelley, Bush was actually saved in a coffee shop discussion with a very wild, evangelical racist down in Texas. The story of Graham was later added to normalize and glamorize the moment and give Bush a connection with other presidents who were close to Graham.

Many in AA would condemn me for these portions of my memoir because in AA we are to keep AA out of any political situations: AA, as an organization, has no political opinions; we avoid political and religious debate because everybody is welcome and can find help in AA, no matter what their religious and political beliefs. Bush, however, is not in AA and so I think I can take him to task, using some of the principles I’ve learned in AA. If he were humble enough to be in AA, I could not write what I shall.

So we can all agree that Bush is a self-proclaimed alcoholic which gives me leave, as a member of AA, to say a few things about his non-AA recovery, though I am not claiming that I can speak for AA as a whole. There is one thing that AA really insists on when the subject is drunks. For a powerless alcoholic to recover who has “no effective defense against that first drink” (that first drink is always the drink which always gets him drunk, not the last one), the drunk must find for himself some power, a spiritual power, to help him when the urge to drink comes over him. As William James, a premier American psychologist and brother to novelist Henry, says, “The only cure I’ve ever found for dipsomania [alcoholism] is religiomania.” For many in America that spiritual force is found, naturally enough, in a “god of their understanding”.

Well… Bush had his moment of truth and I found mine too, both of us at about 40 years of age, but I’ve never heard that Bush’s was as powerful as mine, which is strange since he now walks so closely with god. I had a complete and satisfying “born again” experience in which I was thoroughly lifted up and turned around, my pockets shaken out, before I was set down again. I believe I was a little outside of reality for a time. For nine days (I don’t know why that magic number stays that way) I literally believed that everyone around me were truly but souls trapped in physical bodies. I saw souls when I looked into eyes. Life, as we said, (and some still do) in AA, is a soul in a body having a human experience.

Though I did not become a Christian in my conversion, mine was a very profound and a deeply moving, psychic experience, and it kept me sober for many long years and gave me a useful tool for handling all the guilt and shame I had to deal with and all the problems which came my way along the way. There was a god-like power, I thought, but it wasn’t Jesus, though Jesus seemed one of many fine models to copy a life from. Nowadays, my higher power is AA itself and the wonders of the cause and effect, natural Universe, and my church of the “what’s happening now” in the 12 step meetings I attend.

Now... what about Bush’s sobriety, you ask?

In AA, we’re told to watch out for the god stuff. It’s a heady and dangerous concept for alcoholics new to the god idea. Almost without exception, people who have been profligates and ne’er-do-wells all their adult lives who suddenly find the god concept become suddenly crazy fuckers. Some even seem to be “drunk with the Lord!” which is how many Christians describe the born again times. As alcoholics in our drinking years, we were filled with dreams of vainglory and were puffed up with “grandiose” notions, and we don’t get rid of those tendencies very easily or quickly. We struggle with grandiosity all our lives. Newly sober alcoholics imagine and do all sorts of wild things, thinking all the while they’re doing god’s will. If our advisers don’t restrain us, we wildly run amuck, doing harm and damage on every hand. In order to counter that tendency to headstrong action, we are told to get human advisers to advise us when we go off half-cocked on god power. They mustn’t be “yes” men; they ought to be humble advisers and offer the advice of restraint and caution.

Bush, as I understand it, no more then got sober, and he set off to be governor of Texas, with more to follow, and rather than finding good direction and help in AA with down to earth, sober advisers, he found coattail men around him, people like Carl V. Rove who wanted to make him emperor… well, at least president of something or other…. So, need I say this, after all I’ve written in these last few paragraphs? Isn’t my point clear? All I need ask is, “Who is going off half-cocked around the world to make war, imagining he’s hearing the voice of god telling him to do this and to do that. Who has grandiose dreams of his own self-importance, who postures in a vainglorious manner? Who is a really convincing liar because he believes his own lies?”

If Bush were a friend of mine in AA, I’d sit him down and tell him in the most loving manner possible, with respect and charity, “Hey, ol’ buddy, I fear you’re off on a dry drunk. Time to sit down, be still, listen to your Jesus, and get off the power trip.” Unfortunately, none of the people near him would or will tell him that. They don’t have the AA experience. They don’t know how dangerous a recovering drunk can be when he first gets the god tool in his power mad hands. They’re on power trips too, using him and riding his coattails for all he’s worth. Consequence world chaos.

Herein lies the end of Part Two. Only one more part to go, Dave, my imaginary relationship inside the SR. Part three and last section will tell how I went from a moral, judgmental point of view of reality (Bush’s way) to a scientific view, but that’s a tale for tomorrow.

LETTERS TO DAVE: AN ATHEIST’S PROGRESS

What will follow for the next three days is the odyssey of a rake from a time not too long past his third divorce, caused by too much moral thinking, and his arrival upon the shores of atheism some ten years later where he finds himself a changed and more honorable man through adopting selfishness as his code.

My treatise is in the form of three letters to a certain Dave fellow, almost a stranger that our man picks on to reveal himself. Some have called this a sign of boundary problems, to be too open too soon and with too much candor. Others might see this as the sign of a conscience which no longer has need to hide.


Dear Dave,

Here’s a true story about morality, lies, god, me, George Bush, alcoholism and sociobiology.


PART ONE: THE BIG LIE

Back in the late 70’s or early 80’s during Rodeo week in Cheney, for two years in a row someone raped a girl in the Eastern dormitories. I was sober by that time, living on campus in the Vets’ dorm called Sutton Hall. I knew a guy named Pete from my drinking days in Cheney, and he had lived in Sutton Hall for a couple of years too, and that second year, I happened to notice that he flipped out just about the time of the rape.

Pete began walking around town in shorts alone, barefoot, claiming that his house had burned down. He also climbed into his best friend’s house through a window a couple of times to sleep on his couch even though Pete’s house had actually not burned down. I grew suspicious. Gossiping around, I learned that Pete had once slugged a woman in the face with a beer mug down at Goofy’s, the local hippy bar in Cheney. He was a reputed party animal too and well known among the hard-drinking veterans, and I noticed that, for all his partying, he never had a girlfriend.

Putting all my evidence together, I came up with the conclusion that Pete was the rapist. By straightforwardly gossiping my suspicion around town in my usual devious manner, eventually, my suspicion drifted into the campus cops’ ears, and they showed up at Sutton Hall looking for me.

“Why do you think Pete is the rapist?” they asked.

“Unh….” Then, when I realized I had nothing to go on except a few wild hairs up my ass, I turned beet red, lamely mentioned my evidence, and that, as they say, was the end of that.

One of reasons I thought Pete might be a rapist was the fact he couldn’t seem to get a girlfriend and that “… men without girlfriends are likely to be rapists because they are women haters”, I lectured, looking down into the face of a little person, literally, who was a cop on the Cheney campus police department at the time, realizing as I said this that I thought he probably couldn’t get a girlfriend either. Boy, was I eating my words!

An aside—years later when that midget campus cop left Cheney, he happened to pull up in a huge Cadillac to say goodbye to a mutual acquaintance who I was chatting with beside the street. In the passenger seat beside the little guy was his very attractive, nicely built, full size wife.

Well, anyway, back to the rape case. That afternoon, after being completely humiliated, I was driving into Spokane to go to work. I worked evenings. I felt very uncomfortable, guilty about my unfounded suspicions, embarrassed by the whole interrogation process and being forced to face my own stupidity.

Now at this time in my early sobriety AA was trying to teach me that I had to question my motives in all matters to find the truth of my situation or bad feelings like these could lead a man back to drinking. So I was asking myself why I had jumped to my conclusion… “why, out of all the damn people in Cheney and the Rodeo visitors and cowboys, why did I single out this one poor bastard to lay my suspicion on.”

Didn’t take me long to build the case against myself once I got serious about looking into myself. The guy had once sold me a faulty camera, and I was too shamed to ask for my money back. He was a popular party animal, so I imagined, and I was a recovering drunk who felt very unpopular about himself a good deal of the time. He was a wise guy who once questioned me as to why I would do such of stupid thing as to get sober in AA. And finally, my girlfriend, who was breaking up with me, once said a complimentary thing about Pete’s partying ways which made me feel small and once attended a party he was attending so, of course, she must have slept with him at that time or was soon going to sleep with him in the future.

All this driving self-evaluation was very uncomfortable. I was inside the Spokane city limits and didn’t even know how I got there. Then I learned another thing about lying and the frail nature of human reality: I now knew how I had used all these bad motives to make a decision about another human being, but then, I realized, with a powerful jolt, an even deeper truth, that not only did I think he was guilty, I also wanted him to be guilty! Quite a jolt!

Ever since that day, I don’t listen with the same ear to anything that anybody tells me about themselves, about others, about anything! I don’t care if the man’s the president of the United States, he’s as human as I am and as capable of self-delusion as I am, of lying to himself and others without blinking an eye, and basically, we can lie so easily because we are all frequently capable of lying to ourselves first and for devious reasons. It makes the world a very relativistic place to live in—to realize that all people are just like me, with those capacities for self-deception, even the men who write the things which are in a book, no matter how holy they think they are.

More asides—turns out that Pete may have been the rapist because he soon left town and no more rapes occurred. Also he ended up in prison because he later stabbed his father in the back with a broken beer bottle. Final irony—as I was looking the midget detective in the eye with my silly claims, he was looking back at me as one of the men on his list of suspects. What I didn’t know until years later was that all men who lived on campus and who owned a denim jacket were on the list of suspects. I owned such a jacket.

And… Pete did sleep with my ex-girlfriend.

[This very last detail I only guess at because of a few comments Pete made to me when he returned to Cheney years later, ex-con and all, and I put it in because of the wonderful irony and fitting conclusion that it brings to this first part of my essay.]

Even as I argue with you and the editors of the Spokesman, I fall in and out of anger and kindness, of self-justification and lies, false accusations and true, true revelations and deceptions, honest moments and false…. And I know that you all have the same flaws because you are human animals too, just like me, just like George Bush, with similar psychological mechanisms for interpreting the evidence pouring into your senses. You can’t escape your human biology no matter what you do, because we all live in such fictions and each of us makes up the world we live in as the moments flit by and we go on. In fact some evidence suggests that none of us are in the least bit in touch with the reality outside our ears. Which brings me to sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, more about alcoholism, and the world of reality outside the average, value-based reality we are all trapped in. That will be in the next section in my next email to you. Please stay tuned… please… for my animal ego with its need for status among the writer clan (the evidence shows that all animals have that need) craves it.

THE DRUNK AIN’T PRETTY

He’s peeing blood and his teeth are yellow/brown. Some of them are missing. He’s fallen down recently, he doesn’t recall when, and through his thin, curly gray hair, a nasty scabbed over gash shows. He tells you he shit his pants a few days back and that the fire department came once to fish him out of a snow bank where he was waiting to die. People have had to bring him home from the bar from time to time because he’s so drunk he can’t walk or drive home. When he’s not laughing, he’s crying. He transitions from tears to laughter rapidly.

He won’t go into detox where people trained to recognize seizures and impending heart attacks can watch him because, “It’s dirty down there. Sheets full of blood, piss, shit and I don’t know what. No. No. I won’t go down there.” He takes your hand and squeezes it, fond of you, loving you, accepting your love because that’s all he thinks he has in the world. He doesn’t know all the love out there for the taking because he doesn’t feel he’s worth it, that he’s earned it.

In the drunk’s world, all love is earned or achieved. You gotta earn it. No one loves you for nothing. You get what you pay for and nothing more nor less. It’s a dog eat dog world out there, and he’s failed somehow miserably to measure up, and he feels like a school boy who long ago missed school one day when the teacher gave out the secret to life. He keeps failing the tests of life. He’s been lost ever since, all his life long in fact. Can’t you see that, damn it!

Out there, beyond the drunk, someplace, he fear’s there really is a secret to life, and now he’s too old to get it, to ever escape the constant sense of failure and doom he feels. The pain is unbearable, and no one has ever hurt like he hurts. So why don’t you just shut the fuck up and quit trying to help him? Helping him, caring about what happens to him, only makes him feel even more shamed, miserable and futile. He’d rather die, but he doesn’t have the courage even for that. He’d make a mess of that too. So just leave him alone, let him die slowly, one drink at a time. It ain’t pretty, and I don’t know many who can make there way out of that hole, even if they wanted to.


A KYRS RADIO SHOW POR MOIS?

Recently I listened to a talk by Lupito Flores who was instrumental in getting KYRS, our local, low power radio station, up and running. Spokane is the biggest city with a low power station anywhere in the U.S. I went so far as to imagine and speak to Flores about a radio show called, “Recovery”. I imagined taking my AA program and its twelve steps and enlarging their recovery goals to take in all kinds of recovery, recovery from religions and from faulty thinking of all kinds. I imagined pushing for Jung’s “individuation” as an enlightened goal for all. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a tremendous ego it takes to imagine that I could come up with a one size fits all solution to human biological engineering.

I also listened to religious shows, self-help gurus and infomercials with a new ear and knew that I would be little more than one more voice selling in the wilderness, a bazaar hawker promoting his intellectual wares to a naive public. Of course I have an answer for myself. It works fine for me for the most part, but will it work for others? I’d just end up fighting with the intellectual hawkers in the booths next to mine. What good would that do?

Actually, I believe in a very simple formula. I believe each of us must find a safe enough mental reality in which each of us would be so comfortable, so comfortable in our individual myths, that we don’t need to hawk it to other people in order to pick up numbers of believers to bolster our own weakly held mythologies. That’s hard to do, and I’m a long way from achieving my own goal. In fact, I’ll probably disappear from the face of the earth with little progress toward my goal, but for the most part I’m okay with my current condition.

A radio show could be conceived of which just encourages people sharing but not arguing over their belief stories. A discussion in which each speaker shares their own thoughts and perhaps uses other’s thoughts to spring from to their own thoughts, a mutually encouraging series of enlightened sharing (call in?). However, to show you one of my fears, I imagined immediately that such a show would be hijacked by fundamentalist callers. That’s right and I couldn‘t sit still and let them share their own feelings about their paths because I’m afraid of proselytizers who want to make their beliefs my beliefs and who are not happy just sitting in their own visions peacefully.

Eventually, I heard myself say to me in my imagination, “I have nothing to offer the world that it doesn’t already know if it would be but honest with itself.”

[PS: However, in finally typing this up, I did see that if I made “individuation” as a human goal, religious people who believe in a great god who directs their every action would not qualify as individuated persons. Therefore, my goal could be accommodated under the rubric of recovery while discouraging fundamentalists from dominating the radio conversation.]


A FRIGHTENING THOUGHT FROM FLORES’S TALK

Rupert Murdock’s media empire reaches 80% of the people in the world now, and he doesn’t in the least believe in economic and political justice for anyone other than himself and his rich buddies. He’s a dark international force for the freedom of the powerful to dominate the existence of the poor.
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“Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.” —Rex Stout

NANOBOTS AND GODLESS IMMORTALITY

Recently, I’ve come across several anecdotal reports that Christians are saying more frequently that they’re ready to face the afterlife which they anticipate will soon be upon the human race when the rapture comes. They happily anticipate it. That’s all well and good, but I see a complicating factor ahead for their rosy anticipation.

A real test is coming. Scientists predict that soon science may be able to loose nanobots to run around in human bodies and repair damage and destroy disease. If aging is only a disease, then science can begin to use the word “immortal” in connection with living human beings.

What will Christians and other religious (with afterlives in their mythologies) do when faced with a choice of living eternally on earth with the rest of us skeptics or going to see their makers? Will they accept eternal life without god or will they suddenly discover the sacrament of suicide in their holy books?

HEARTS AND MINDS INSEPARABLE

Now America’s trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi’s. Many years back, we tried to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese. In both cases our heartfelt attempts to win other’s hearts and minds were accompanied by weapons of mass destruction leveled by our troops against their troops and civilians too.

However, to the skeptic the best recent result in winning hearts and minds that he’s aware of is the worldwide craze for the Beetles and other bug groups back in the 60s and 70s. In that case, the Soviet hearts and minds who smuggled in Beetle records (with their freedom, joy and peace-oriented spirit) and other voices and ideas of the 60s were so won over that when their turn came to rule their nation, they brought in glasnost and the end of yet another dictatorship. That Ronald Reagan's devotees want to give him credit for ending the USSR is a travesty of justice and a bad misreading of history. Peace and love brought peace and love to the USSR, not the guns of capitalism.

Let’s hope that American neocons don’t make the world so inhospitable for peace and love that Gorbachev becomes a bad word in the Russian language. He and other young people in the Soviet Union were the hidden hippies in Russia who loved freedom and peace so much that they almost peacefully ended a dictatorship. If America continues to be a nation for empire, led by religious and political fools, many in Russia may rue that they chose peace and freedom and put down their guard. Like North Korea, they may again build up their weapons of mass destruction to defend against the American neocon’s aim of world domination.

But let me throw another curve in here while speaking of peace and love. According to studies in consciousness, the hearts and minds to be won are not separated in the human body, and we all certainly know that the heart muscle is not the seat of emotions no more than the brain is exactly the entire cause of thinking. One is the other and vice-versa. Feeling and thought lie on a continuum of synaptical firings out of which emerge the sensations we call thought and emotion. The process by which one experiences an emotion is similar to the process which produces a thought. Each is little more than a chemical electrical phenomena.

Understanding these distinctions, these bodily biological processes, will do more for world peace than all the wars and propaganda in the world meant to win “hearts and minds”. When a science educated humankind begins to see that all its fondest causes and purposes are barely more than animal mechanical processes, the humility we gain from that knowledge alone should undermine the most dedicated terrorist whose high religious purposes will be reduced to little more than animal urges in a world which understands the mechanisms of human behavior.

In future, terrorists and all rigid idealists whose fear drenched thinking drives them to violence will be laughed at by those in the know rather than encouraged in their follies. Skeptics already laugh at the high-minded follies of the disillusioned idealists of the world. They stand on the lip of an imaginary hill, awaiting the rest of mankind to lift up its eyes from their evolutionary roots in struggle and mistrust and come join them where vision is cleared by rational thinking. The superstitious religious have certainly had their millenniums and have failed to produce peace. Now is a time to let skepticism have a century or two.
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"Which is it, is man one of god's blunders or is god one of man's" —Friederich N. (1844-1900)

IN A FEW DAYS, PREPARE FOR A THREE PART POSTING. . .

Stay tuned. Another long and personal memoir is soon coming, in which I reveal a big lie from my past, why Bush is such an effective liar, and how I moved from looking at reality through a pair of cloudy moral glasses and put on a more realistic pair of science glasses. Three parts and three postings. Two are already done, but I won't start until I know I have all three ready.


AGAIN, RELEASE IS IN SUFFERING WITH COMPASSION

One trouble I have with Joseph as he presents his myths. Sometimes, I think he's a little too much enamored of suffering, and I'm still not sure how much suffering is necessary for the human animal. Do other animals suffer except the necessity of suffering physical pain and death or moments of mortal terror when attacked by predators? Ain't that enough suffering for anybody? But, then, a recent post mentioned how immature it is for us to set our sights on "happiness" as a human goal. Now is it really immature to seek happiness? Why? Just as long as we're prepared to accept that the best laid plans of mice and men "aft gang awry" and accept the ups with downs and Epson Downs.

From MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joseph Campbell, pp. 159-160:

[Open quote.]
The most widely revered Oriental personification of such a world-affirming attitude, transcending opposites, is that figure of boundless compassion already discussed at considerable length, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, known to China and Japan as Kuan Yin, Kwannon (supra, pp. 138—140). For, in contrast to the Buddha, who at the conclusion of his lifetime of teaching passed away, never to return, this infinitely compassionate one, V who renounced for himself eternal release to remain forever in this vortex of rebirths, represents through all time the mystery of a knowledge of eternal release while living. The liberation thus taught is, paradoxically, not of escape from the vortex, but of full participation voluntarily in its sorrows—moved by compassion; for indeed, through selflessness one is released from self, and with release from self there is release—from desire and fear. And as the Bodhisattva is thus released, so too are we, according to the measure of our experience of the perfection of compassion.

It is said that ambrosia pours from the Bodhisattva’s fingertips even to the deepest pits of Hell, giving comfort there to the souls still locked in the torture chambers of their passions. We are told, furthermore, that in all our dealings with each other we are his agents, whether knowingly or not. Nor is it the aim of the Bodhisattva to change—or, as we like to say, to “improve”—this temporal world. Conflict, tension, defeats, and victories are inherent in the nature of things, and what the Bodhisattva is doing is participating in the nature of things. He is benevolence without purpose. And since all life is sorrowful, and necessarily so, the answer cannot lie in turning—or “progressing”—from one form of life to another, but only in dissolving the organ of suffering itself, which—as we have seen—is the idea of an ego to be preserved, committed to its own compelling concepts of what is good and what is evil, true and false, right and wrong; which dichotomies—as we have likewise seen—are dissolved in the metaphysical impulse of compassion.
[Close quote.]

What am I to make of this? I grew tired of suffering, yet I can see that when I was blindly suffering, drinking and struggling, I was also feeling compassion for the plight of others from time to time. How often did I say between gritted teeth that, "As long as there is one poor person in the world, I don't want any money!" Man, that was painful!

Such a statement sounds silly to me, now, in my recovering days. Pompous, grandiose! Yet I did suffer my suffering till I could suffer no longer. I embraced my suffering with a stupefying willingness that I now find incomprehensible. But in all this suffering the Buddha speaks of, I don't see anywhere that the sufferer has to be mindful and fully aware of suffering's purpose in order that his suffering may be worthy of enlightenment. In the telling of it, which comes out of the enlightenment that some suffering can force on one, then suffering seems to have a purpose, but when one is in the arms of his sadistic lover, suffering seems eternal and pointless. Suffering can be just blind, stupid and still be worthy. Mixed in with all self-pitying suffering, there is usually concomitantly, a real sorrow for the suffering of others in the world about us. Maybe at certain times during the suffering process one's own suffering and his compassion for others are not extricable because no enlightenment has yet come to the sufferer. So how can he know the purpose of his suffering until the suffering is done?

Still, let me interject here, I've had all the suffering I need. I can no longer see anything holy or enlightening in it. Those who are wise enough not to suffer needlessly are the ones to seek out for wisdom. Second, those who had to suffer but who truly wished to escape and made some effort toward that end also have something to say. Those who still hate life and who still clutch their suffering to them like a robe of many colors should be shunned as one shuns the embrace of an open flame.
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[Speaking of which.]: "The happiest time in any man's life is just after the first divorce." —John Kenneth Galbraith [Well... that depends on if.... See below.]

"I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep a house." —Zsa Zsa Gabor