A TOPIC ON PANTHEISM WEBSITE

A discussion thread had to do with why we pantheists call ourselves pantheists. My reply follows:

The consciousness that rides along within and is generated by the activities of the brain that calls itself I, since it is the slave of biology and physiology, interacts strangely with these attempts or any institution's attempts to use the language of consciousness to define what consciousness, carried along by the body's activities, finds itself being and thinking from day to day.

I call myself pantheist because the brain that calls itself I and that carries the I of me along with it is deeply enmeshed in the biology and physiology of the airy reality into which it found itself swimming (existing). The collective brains who make up the category "scientist" have physically interacted with the Cosmos in such a way as to give other brains, through the senses of their eyes (reading) and ears (hearing), a new kind of information about that reality. The brain that calls itself I has learned from this set of scientific brains (who form opinions, expressed mathematically, only after by materially testing the physical Universe) that it is not enough to trust language, the creator of consciousness, and, thus, does not accept any reality that exists solely within the language and which is not physically present (so as to be sensed) in the material Cosmos. Thus concepts like "god" which exist only in the realm of the untrustworthy consciousness and which can't be smelt, touched, sensed by the physical body are foreign to it (the brain that calls itself I). The brain that calls itself I and finds itself afloat in air like a fish in water knows itself as a part of the physical Universe and not part of the conscious Cosmos.

If "MY" speechless physical body has any relationship with the physical Universe, it is much like a zygote to a mother's body than it is a consciousness to a higher consciousness which language has made up totally and completely. Since it is my speechless body that exists in the Cosmos and "I" am the language it is hearing as thought, it/I am completely and totally dependent on the physical Cosmos for my continued existence. And since a speechless zygote can't worship it's source, so my body can't worship the Cosmos, except through hearing itself in the thoughts that are generated within its synaptic patterns by its daily efforts to procreate, win friends, have sex with the opposite sex, surround itself with comfort and surplus, et cetera.

Sometimes the body that experiences its own self in consciousness as I will sense itself so safe for a moment in the Cosmos that a wonderful feeling of well-being (i.e. flood of dopamine or other chemical) fills it and that feeling will generate a thought to explain to itself what it's feeling and that thought is "worship".

The previous philosophical notations have made me understand something very interesting to me—the human robot (i.e. animal) through consciousness (the naming with words of the outer reality) has been returning from the naming of the outer world back to the naming of itself, to its physical reality as a robot that is experiencing and responding to the physical Cosmos. The namer is discovering the silent source of its naming function and, perhaps, someday the namer and the named will become as one.

Anyway, that's why I (or the brain that names itself I) name myself "pantheist" for this moment in time. It's purely an emotional thing, separate from all the conscious quibbling that goes on in the insubstantial world of consciousness where disagreements about naming are common.

ANOTHER OF MY LONG PHILOSOPHICAL JAUNTS ON THE PANTHEISM WEBSITE! I KINDA LIKE IT:

Well, here I am, awake later than I want to be because of a dissatisfaction with the way something is coming down in my life, so what better time to spout off a little? When I tune in on discussions anywhere, about any "spiritual" path, I'm always impressed by the effort and time that some of your reflections show in pursing the knowledge about if not actually setting out on the path of various religious or philosophical programs. So much effort, so much accumulated knowledge, shows how much unhappiness there is in the world, for one would not be searching the world for a better philosophy if the philosophy that one has is working as one expected it to work out.

Frankly, Buddhism or not, no religion starts out with an accurate picture of the human condition and without an accurate view of reality, how can anyone expect to build a philosophy/religion that can lead to any good? Right up front, I don't expect any formal way of structuring the chaos of existence with a goal to happiness will ever work out for anybody. The human psyche is not set up to experience happiness on a continuous basis. The brain is a computational device evolved to solve millions of small computational problems, from separating a vertical line and a horizontal line, to identifying a predator or other threats, from deciphering another human's behavior with a goal of deciding whether or not to trust that person to calculating what behaviors will best serve in seducing the woman it's attracted to. These continuously running calculations are always operating in the now and without a sense of time and mostly outside of consciousness. The emotions inform this give and take between the brain and its environment, and they make the decisions for us. If it were not for negative emotions, we wouldn't know what behaviors to avoid, and we'd run out in front of cars without a hint of danger.

For me, the sciences of neuroscience or evolutionary psychology provide the best description of how the brain creates reality and functions in view of that reality. The difference between those sciences and Buddhism is that they provide a description of reality not a panacea for it. When I began to understand how accurately they explained all the dilemmas of my life, past and present, I was drawn to them like a thirsty man to a Heinekens. All my struggles with identity, masculinity, the opposite sex, social relations with both sexes and family, peer pressures, courtship, work relations and finances are being answered to my satisfaction by these sciences, but they don't, and neither do any religions or philosophies, give me any special comfort in view human behavior, my own or yours.

I guess, if I have a philosophy it's a psychological one; it would be based on a rough and ready understanding of my own behavior and how they have affected people in the past who loved me or whom I loved and a handful of mental tricks to try and soothe the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Those slings and arrows are going to keep coming, and I can't stop them and I must feel them because the sciences I trust have told me that that's my fate as a member of the human species.

But all is not for naught. Living has taught me some valuable lessons and science shows me just what pieces of human nature I was dealing with while making wrong and painful decisions. For example, for awhile in my life I was a "take this job and shove it" sort of guy. Hey, if it's good enough for a country western singer, it's good enough for me! But I'd do that "take job shove it" routine when my problem was poverty and its accompanying complications, and I was smarting at the unfairness of some job situation. Somehow, leaving a job never solved the basic poverty I was dealing with. I'm specially sensitive about money issues and can be trusted to overreact when someone other than me is spending our surplus. (Thus, I am awake tonight, see?) So I go someplace, like an AA meeting, and I tell on myself. I identify the behavior, admit to it, laugh at myself, and then return home and apologize... if needed.

What I find interesting is that you can go to almost any religion and find someone who'll share the same insight about behavior, owning it and making amends. Sometimes the words change. It's so universal that you begin to see that it comes with the human animal territory; it's a morality (a behavior pattern) that transcends religion. Monkey see, monkey do. And what amuses me is that all the superstructure of religions, their holy ones, their seventh heavens and nine portals and twelve gates, their dogmas and creeds and learning them tit for tat has nothing to do with how one actually deals with the constant barrage of emotions and reactions caused by them which one must feel if one is to be alive. I can see some practices like meditation and chanting or even prayer (if not the desperate sort) can be helpful. Chanting creates breathing patterns that can release stress and meditation can calm down brain waves, but these aren't religious practices, are they? They're physiological practices like running which also reduces stress.

Let me restate so I can understand myself. Religions are collections of concepts. Learning them are useless, specially if they're founded on unscientific assumptions. What one needs is a way of accepting his emotional life just as it is, allowing them into his life, allowing them to inform his decisions, and finding ways to reduce their negative influences. These helpful lessons come with living and are mental (psychological) lessons and practices, not religious ones. Almost all people who suffer the most are the ones trying desperately not to suffer. They are people who always go to the happy movie because they tell you that "life is bad enough and one has to escape". Now me, I've always liked unhappy movies. They rub my nose in my escapism and force me to confront my silly wish to escape, escape, escape. When I was young, those movies scared the hell out of me, but nowadays, I don't find my "life" to be that bad at all, and I revel in a good story with real and complex characters.

Well, am I sleepy yet? I guess I'll find out.

AVATAR, SCIENCE FICTION AND REALITY

The following is a ramble I entered on the World Pantheism Movement website in a discussion of the film Avatar which, I'm proud to say, I didn't run off to see:

This rambles, but at root, it's a critique of Avatar from many angles. When I was in the Navy in the 50s, I was in the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club so, at one time, I was a fan of that genre, and I got to know it fairly well. I still think Fahrenheit 451 is an excellent film. I found and bought a beat up tape in a library sale that I still own. And the film Gattaca far surpasses any of the Star Wars films. I like Gattaca for its cinematic artistry, its style and the staging and sets. Simple and beautiful and based in character. What always sets most science fiction apart from serious art is that science fiction is nearly always idea driven rather than character based. That's okay and I'll go see a science fiction film, but I'm hyper critical. Matrix is just one single idea stretched over three films. Good guy versus bad matrix. A waste of time and effort. One was enough. The recent Star Trek movie could only appeal to Trekkies. Lines repeated from the TV show to titillate the infant mind. Why do I say that? Think... at what age are children delighted to have the same phrase or fairy tale repeated again and again? It arises at a specific emotional and intellectual stage of development! I don't know how many times I winced when TV Captain Picard uttered the tiresome phrase, "Make it so!" Right out of WW II just like Lucas's air battles. Bradbury wrote a few good books in which character predominates. I admit that I no longer dabble in science fiction literature, and I've heard that in the literary arts some writers are working on some interesting concepts. I suppose it might benefit me to find and read a few good science fiction books.

Two recent films that use scientific research in fascinating ways are Momento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and they are outstanding because character predominates over their scientific ideas. Here's an interesting detail. I think it was Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens) who wrote that someone in Hollywood called him at one time to ask if it would be possible to erase the memory of a bad love affair. Though Damasio didn't name names, I'd swear that someone involved in Eternal Sunshine must have been his caller.

Finally, I think Fellini's "8 1/2" is a fantasy neuro-scientific film that broke down the barriers between memory, hallucination, fantasy and dream life and reality about as well as anyone could. I may have been simple-minded when I first saw that film, but, let me tell you, it really challenged me, and I didn't understand it for the longest time. I didn't understand his technique or what he was about, but when it finally hit home that he was giving us a stream of consciousness presentation of life through the dreams, imagination, memory and life of a single individual without attempting to frame the shifts for us to understand, that taught me more than any Avatar could ever teach me about humanity's imaginative life or future.

I'll admit that taste is an opinion and everyone is truly an expert on his own tastes, so who am I to quibble? I only quibble because I'm afraid that the sort of films that entertain me might not be made anymore, and I don't like the thought of that one bit. Nor do I like special effects films like Avatar which aren't up to my standards but which will make films ever more expensive, and I'm not even entertained by them, no matter how much they cost nor what gimcrackery they employ.

O, I just thought of The Truman Show, another excellent film that opened my brain up anew. That far surpasses any recent science fiction yarn that I can think of made in the last decade, Avatar, I Robot or not.

This is an addition to my ramble on the Avatar thread. I also, at a very young age, was a fan of Asimov's Foundation novels. F A S C I N A T E D! I think I read them all in high school.

O NO... AMERICA'S GROWING WEIGHTIER!

Was your mommy a fatty? What does that mean for you? What does it mean for the US? Of course who cares what a mom weighs as long as she loves us even if it dumb us down a little bit?

"Omega-3 fatty acids are a limiting factor in building brains, and are stored in a woman's hips and thighs. New evidence shows a relationship between a woman's stores of these essential fatty acids and her cognitive ability and that of her offspring...
Waist-Hip Ratio and Cognitive Ability: Is Gluteofemoral Fat a Privileged Store of Neurodevelopmental Resources? by William Lassek & Steven J.C. Gaulin, In Evolution and Human Behavior 29, 26-34 (2008). Click here for more"

AN POWERFUL LETTER BY A PERSON OF INTEGRITY

Dear Catholic Church: Excommunicate Me - An Open Letter

by Paul Constant
Apr 6, 2010

Bishop Richard Malone
c/o Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland
510 Ocean Avenue, P.O. 11559
Portland, Maine 04104


I am addressing this letter to you because my entire life as a Catholic took
place in Maine. I was baptized into the Catholic Church at St. Matthew in
Limerick a few weeks after my birth in 1976. And I was confirmed 16 years
later at St. Anne's in Gorham.

Even though I have never believed in God or the afterlife or anything else
that Catholics profess, I did get confirmed in the church of my own free
will, and though every baptized human being is supposedly a "full Catholic"
at the moment of baptism, the consensual sacrament of confirmation*
supposedly, in the words of the church, "renders the bond with the church
more perfect."

My father, Joseph Constant, worked his whole life, adored his wife for 45
years, and loved us no matter what. And I decided when I was 16 that as long
as I was living under his roof, I would continue to be a full member of his
church. He wanted to meet us again one day in heaven, and he believed that
there was only one way to do that: by believing in the One Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church. My confirmation was a tribute to him, but it only went so
far: After I struck out on my own, I lived as an atheist.

But I suppose that, technically at least, I'm a Catholic, one of the
millions of Catholics whom American bishops profess to lead and, when the
church inserts itself into our political process, claim to speak for.

Today, Bishop Malone, I am demanding that you excommunicate me. I cannot in
good conscience belong to your church anymore; I do not want to be counted
with the 200,000 Catholics in Maine, or the 68,115,001 Catholics in the
United States of America, or the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world.

I have been watching the events of the last few weeks with horror. The pope
(an ex-Hitler Youth whom your fellow bishops used to refer to, lovingly, as
"God's rottweiler") whined during a Palm Sunday homily about what he called
"petty gossip." That "petty gossip" is a tsunami of reports of child rape
perpetrated by Catholic priests across the globe and attempts by bishops,
archbishops, cardinals, and the pope himself to cover up that child rape by
moving ordained rapists to new parishes where they could, and did, rape
again. That "petty gossip" includes one case in which the pope halted an
internal investigation of a Catholic priest in Wisconsin who is alleged to
have raped more than 200 deaf boys.

And then, on March 30, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and
Civil Rights placed an ad in the New York Times dismissively accusing the
Times of "looking for dirt" that "occurred a half-century ago" and saying
that the church's "pedophilia crisis" has "all along" been a "homosexual
crisis." He accused the Times of flogging this story to further a
progressive agenda that includes "abortion, gay marriage, and women's
ordination."

I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are
second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your
missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries
that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important
thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic
situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has
become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is
unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the
planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or
the concealment of child rape.

You might ask, Bishop Malone, what my father will think of all this. Joseph
Constant died on August 20, 2009, after a long battle with acute pulmonary
fibrosis. The sacrament for the sick gave him great comfort at the end, and
I thanked the priest for administering it. But then, at a mass that was
dedicated in Joseph's name in September, instead of a homily about how
Joseph lived the kind of life that other Catholics should emulate-generous,
faithful, good, true-the priest showed a video. You came on the screen that
had been set up on the altar (as you did in all the other Catholic churches
across Maine that weekend), and my family was forced to watch as you gave a
hate-filled lecture about why Maine's pending gay marriage law must not be
allowed to come into force, and then you had every church under your control
pass the collection plate a second time solely to collect funds to fight
marriage equality. (Thanks in large part to the Catholic Church's
efforts-efforts that included threats to remove charitable Catholic
organizations from the state if the law was approved-gay marriage remains
illegal in Maine. You must be so proud.) You took an occasion intended to
celebrate my father's life and spoiled it with hate speech.

And so it is with deep personal satisfaction, sir, that I say-and I'll put
it so you can understand it-to hell with you, Bishop Malone. To hell with
your church. To hell with the pope, especially. If you think the Catholic
God actually smiles down on you from heaven for your hatefulness, then to
hell with that God, too. I renounce your church, your God, and your
traditions. I will not be a part of any organization that welcomes and
comforts hatemongers, child rapists, or you.

I demand that you excommunicate me immediately and that you send me
confirmation as soon as possible that you have expunged me from the roster
of the Catholic Church.

Paul Constant
c/o The Stranger
1535 11th Avenue, Third Floor
Seattle, Washington 98122

PASSING OF A FRIEND

Geoff Hays died December 19th, 2009 of cancer. Not from smoking. The first time I met him in 1976, he was exiting a woods south of Cheney, Washington where he'd spent the night sleeping between two matresses among the trees. Like several of us in that Cheney crowd, he got sober after that with AA and continued sober most of his life save for a very early slip whose date I can't recall. From that time on, he remained free of alcohol. Though his life never achieved the financial rewards his intelligence ought to have given him, he was the kindest of men. In his later years, he always seemed able to turn any character defect that I said I was struggling with into a positive character trait. He was that kind and that considerate. A physically big man, he was a gentle giant, and I could always count on his compassion and caring. I miss him and love him—a comrade of many years.

RAISING THE LEVEL OF DISCOURSE

Here's another comment on the Columbian newspaper website which I recently entered.

Darel,

I hear you and I understand, but your thinking ought to be broadened. As long as we keep our discussions well within the premises of Darwinian evolution and our appeal is to bottom line of survival and self-interest, all of us will continue to argue and debate and scream at one another like monkeys not long out of the tree.

In the history of humankind, the average worker, be he/she hunter-gatherer fresh out of Africa, carpenter in Nazareth, vassal on a knight's domain, Russian peasant under the Czars, factory worker in 19th Century England or mine worker in early 20th Century America has rarely, if ever, made enough to take care of his daily needs and, simultaneously, put enough away to fare well [welfare] in old age. Unlike monkeys and most mammalian cultures which have rigid dominance hierarchies like ours, conscious humans speak out when they feel unjustly treated. Out of this conscious knowledge of economic unfairness and from Acts in the Bible, the idea of Communism arose as a possible solution to the problem of basic animal genetic inequality. Communism failed because it didn't allow for the selfishness factor that remained even though it was supposed to alleviate Darwinian selfishness. People with the genetic qualities to transcend rose to the top of Communist societies too, but, in those cultures, the democratic ideal was not strong enough and dictatorships arose. Not only that, it's true that some people tried to milk the culture and so didn't work hard and rode along on the labor of people who did believe in communism and worked hard at it.

Capitalism's design seems pretty close to the right economic system to allow for good distribution of goods and services, but it was designed when more than 90% of the people lived and worked on farms and most humans lived in small caring (as long as you conformed) communities . Communism arose in closely clustered human industrial societies where the JOB had become critical to survival because, now, items necessary to survival had to be purchased with wages.

It seems that no matter what economic system humans invent, those with the most aggressive genetic qualities rise to the top (then try to maintain power) while the passive ride along for free and the person in the middle works his behind off and, at the end of life, has to depend on his children to support him. Or he/she depends on charity near life's end.

I'll conclude by saying America's system seems fair enough as long as those with the most favorable genetic inheritance realize, like FDR, that no economic system will allow most of us to retire with dignity unless we all agree that those with the most must contribute, through taxes, to keep the bottom from desolate poverty and to support comfortable old age for anybody who has worked throughout her life at low wage jobs necessary to society.

In any event, our discussions about economics must rise above Darwinian shouting at one another.

THE SOURCES OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN LANGUAGE

Here's another entry of mine on the website World Panthiesm:

Antony wrote: "the authors speculated that language probably arose for situations like hunters going out for the hunt, and coming back and telling the young or inexperienced the story of the hunt."

Antony, I like to take that discussion back further... to where language participated in the evolution of consciousness. I think language (thus consciousness) did evolve from two human functions—sex and work sounds, both vital to survival.

Years ago, when I was a teaching assistant, I came across the idea (50 years ago—don't remember from which book) that the sounds made by working people turned into language when the sound was associated with the work. Imagine that different sounds were forced from the men (and women) doing work—grunts and whooshes of various kinds. Eventually one more conscious member of the human species would summon another male to the kind of work that was associated with that grunt, wheeze or whoosh. The more facile the user of sounds the more he could use others to aid him. By being able to do that, his chances of survival would increase, consciousness be selected for and passed on. Another theory was that the imitation of animal sounds summoned others to the hunt for whatever sound he was imitating. Thus, a sound becomes associated with a specific animal and language facilitates the evolution of consciousness.

One idea about language I found for myself, but others, I'm sure, also know this... at some point during my days of the mutual seduction between the sexes that goes on and ends in the bedroom, I began to realize that it was not so much what I said as how I said it that ended up with coupling. The sound of my voice would change, soften and deepen, become less tense and more relaxed. So I tied that idea to the one I'd already heard about work. Soothing, comforting sounds led to sex and, eventually, one sound more than another, came to mean "let's do that sound, let's fuck!" Thus the four letter word came into existence and helped procreation and thus helped consciousness survive. I also know that perhaps humans listened to other species have sex and imitated those sounds to indicate a desire for sex.

Ain't love and work grand!? It may be no accident that Freud believed that if a person had love and work, that person was functioning okay.

By the way, this supports my idea that the so-called mysterious mind is just the brain listening to itself use words and rewatching images in a recursive fashion. I don't think the mind is as mysterious as some would have us believe.

THERE AIN'T NO SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

The following is a response to a discussion I'm part of on the World Pantheism website:

I think we confuse emotions and spiritual feelings because they are both the same thing. One enters a cathedral, constructed in the medieval period to put the peasants in awe, and one has a "feeling" as one enters that space. Another person enters a rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula and entering that space a similar "feeling" of awe is created. Both situations pluck the same emotional instrument in the human nervous system which evolution has constructed to help an individual make decisions (a physical emotional process ultimately) by which to thrive and procreate. The physical world plays our emotional nervous systems like a guitarist plucks a guitar. 

I challenge people to try and describe a "spiritual" experience without eventually having to refer to the emotions or using  emotional terminology. A spiritual experience is an emotional response experienced by the physical body as it responds to the physicality of the natural world. Emotion is not experiencing anything beyond the physicality of the natural world, but when I understand myself as a feeling species responding to its environment with exactly the same sort of emotional apparatus as a tadpole in its environment or a bee in its, or beaver in its, then I'm really in awe of what the human animal has evolved into. I'm no different than a slug, just a little more complicated bit of machinery. The added fact that I can cogitate upon my reductionist architecture is the real ace in the hole.  

Beowulf is a poem where I got an image of how the monkish religious people projected their fears into the primal forests where monsters and all sorts of dangers lurked. I could see the good religious folk linking their fears onto old pagan tales that they found when they entered the Germanic territories. Another idea that taught me about how fears got religion is a comment in a history book about travel in the Dark Ages when only a handful of people would dare to travel even to the next town because of the dangers in the forest. I got this picture of these tiny isolated communities, surrounded by nearly trackless wilderness with people frozen by fear into immobility. Pedlars were the courageous explorers of that era. Extend that back to hunter gatherers who were constantly moving about in efforts to find game and "collectibles". These folk had no idea about human anatomy and the nervous system. They just had feelings about unknown versus known situations. The known was safer than the unknown, but the known might be a depleted berry patch or a fire-burned emptiness, so they had to experience that feeling of facing the unknown and go to an unknown place with fear and trepidation—that fear of the unknown they must go into was god to them, was awe to them, was a religious (i.e. spiritual) experience to them, but all they were experiencing was their emotional apparatus being triggered by their imaginative (images based on what their eyes had experienced heretofore) contemplation of the unknown. I thrill just describing the physicality of the world in which I find myself placed by an unbroken chain of successful adaptations that go back to my first single-celled ancestors. 

the following two brief essays are comments in the comment section of the Columbian newspaper about an article on cell phone use, texting and accidents:

EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY AND CELL PHONES

A modern human's lack of fear about texting while driving is a perfect example of the things that evolutionary psychology (a branch of neuroscience) is discovering about human behavior. Most of the human species is still uneasy about deep water, snakes, spiders and et cetera but has evolved no instinctive fear of more modern dangers. This is because the modern brain evolved about 40000 to 100000 years ago (when cave painting began). Left over in our brains are adaptations for (or instinctive fears of) those kinds of dangers that caused death in prehistoric times. If your brain (you) didn't have a strong fear of those dangers, your genes weren't still around. Thus with texting... those who don't fear it while driving will have more deaths and their genes will slowly (I mean real slowly) cease to exist. Those who by genetic accident or normal attrition have higher fears of texting while driving will slowly become more numerous. After millions of years that fear will be strong and automatic enough to be called instinctive.

It takes forever for change in species to evolve. Goodness knows how many millennia it will take before we learn to fear texting. Perhaps autos will be extinct before the human species adapts for those dangers. OR more interesting yet, maybe the human species will be extinct before that adaptation becomes fully realized. People who still like to get away from the rest of us and live in mountains and rural regions probably are more afraid of urban living. Will that really be a better survival adaptation than clustering together for safety? My children are drinking bottled water. They've got a fear of tap water. I still drink tap water. Right now, our differences are purely cultural and informational differences. Millions of years later, one or the other might be instinctive... maybe....

Probably the reason some people don't or can't fear global warming is that it is just way too large for our individual alarm system to comprehend. How can I personally fear an ice cap melting at the poles? Picture information makes it more real than my ancestors two-hundred years ago could realize it. I don't fear global warming myself (not like I feared death by atom bomb when I was young), but I think the possibility that we are contributing to it is probably real, so the current cash crop of humans owes it to the next generation to mitigate the situation. Besides, it's a win win situation if we can avoid future wars over natural resources. But those dangers are way too far in the future for less highly evolved brains to see.

CAUTIONARY EVALUATIONS OF CELL PHONE USE

Maybe another study will cast doubt on the first study, but for right now, all we've got is the statistics to prove the danger of cell phone use while driving. It's a good thing that someone goes to the trouble of doing the studies. Without them, all we'd have are anecdotes to yell at each other and appeals to common sense. And those two items are notoriously wrong however effective. And common sense is made up of the common thoughts of each of us, so common sense on the individual basis is nothing but personal opinion.

The most interesting thoughts to me were dropbury's ruminations because he takes into account the relativity of what each of us fears or doesn't fear and how far an individual might go to protect himself from accident. All life's decisions result from chemical imbalances in the brain between fear and pleasure and which way they tilt the human animal from moment to moment. The most cautious of us will, by a statistically slim number, be better survivors that those with minimal psychological alarm mechanisms. Evolution will be the final arbiter of winners and losers.

Sadly, young people are more prone to accidental death than older human primates, and the more adventurous (ie testosterone laced) the youth is, the more likely (by a small statistical amount) he is to risk death and to die in accidents. Cell phone use isn't going to go away. Change is inevitable. We can only hope careless cell phone users will kill only themselves and NOT ME!

TODAY'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE COLUMBIAN

I notice shouted questions flying about... like "are you against" or "are you for" as if many of the complex issues America faces can be solved by a knee-jerk huge emotional yell. YES! NO!

I remember old men who used to come into bars where I drank (way back when in the East) missing limbs and fingers and hands or eyes. They were mine workers from the coal mines of West Virginia. These men worked those mines before any federal agency cared to look into mine conditions. My own hearing is nearly gone because when I was young and stupid, nobody required or offered me hearing protection in noisy shipyards, factories and job shops. Also young and stupid, I smoked until I was 41, but, finally, the information got through because federal agencies got a loud enough public voice to cut through the day in and day out cigarette adverts that filled the airwaves and blocked my hearing.

Knowing my own youthful sense of immortality, I'd be an idiot to give a straight out shout: YES! NO! about many federal programs or regulatory agencies. Not one of those agencies would be in existence if somewhere out there in the great free enterprise system some conscienceless schemer hadn't endangered others public safety through some thoughtless plan to get rich. Federal agencies aren't invented out of whole cloth over nothing, though there are some who would like us to believe that all government is bad government.

Always, in every case, men and women of good will need to go over these matters and make wise decisions about reducing, increasing, eliminating or creating wise policies and institutions for the good of the whole. Doubtless, many bad things could be improved. That's what we elect our representatives to D.C. and Olympia to do, not sit on their hands and draw their pay. Of course... I agree with those who say that the good of the whole is usually some measure of good individual sense, magnified through a resonate ballot box, but I little trust men and women who think that only the selfish whims of the most powerful Americans should be honored and who completely distrust their fellow men. After all, we can tell much about our trust of ourselves by how much we trust others. We can only know another human's capacity for ill doing, by knowing our own capacity for it. Our measure of others is made of the ruler that we hold against ourselves.