SO OLD IT’S ALMOST NEW

Commenting on the Enlightenment, E. O. Wilson notes, “Most [figures of the Enlightenment] engaged from time to time in absurd digressions and speculations, such as looking for hidden codes in the Bible or for the anatomical seat of the soul.”

What to make of Bushites trying to decide when the ensoulment of the individual occurs or how ‘bout that fundamentalist who recently claimed to have found yet another code in the Bible? The distance these men and women are out of touch with reality amazes me to no end.


CHRISTIAN ADOPTERS, SHOW UP!

An AP report last month reveals that “More than 100,000 children who have been abused or neglected by their biological parents are languishing in foster care, waiting to be adopted.”

That doesn’t seem like a lot of children in a nation the size of the United States, so the pro-life Christians just need to get busy and adopt. You want ‘em, you got ‘em!


RELIGION? ISN’T IT DREAMY?

According to E. O. Wilson and others, “Natural sleep and drug induced dreams have long been viewed in Western civilization as a portal to the divine.... Joseph’s [dream] witness established one of the two essential pillars of Christian belief, the other being the disciples’ account of the Resurrection, also dreamlike.” (CONSILIENCE, p. 73)

Dreams are currently explained by the activation-synthesis theory which runs as follows:

“The... more modern hypothesis of the basic nature of dreaming is the activation-synthesis model of biology. As created during the past two decades by J. Allan Hobson of Harvard Medical School and other researchers, it pieces together our deepening knowledge of the actual cellular and molecular events that occur in the brain during dreaming.

“In brief, dreaming is a kind of insanity, a rush of visions, largely unconnected to reality, emotion-charged and symbol-drenched, arbitrary in content, and potentially infinite in variety. Dreaming is very likely a side effect of the reorganization and editing of information in the memory banks of the brain. It is not, as Freud envisioned, the result of savage emotions and hidden memories that slip past the brain’s censor.

“The facts behind the activation-synthesis hypothesis can be interpreted as follows. During sleep, when almost all sensory input ceases, the conscious brain is activated internally by impulses originating in the brain stem. It scrambles to perform its usual function, which is to create images that move through coherent narratives. But lacking moment-by-moment input of sensory information, including stimuli generated by body motion, it remains unconnected to external reality. Therefore, it does the best it can: It creates fantasy. The conscious brain, regaining control upon awakening, and with all its sensory and motor inputs restored, reviews the fantasy and tries to give it a rational explanation. The explanation fails, and as a result dream interpretation itself becomes a kind of fantasy. That is the reason psychoanalytic theories relating to dreaming, as well as parallel supernatural interpretations arising in myth and religion, are at one and the same time emotionally convincing and factually incorrect.” (CONSILIENCE, p. 75)

“In dreams we are insane. We wander across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen,” Wilson summarizes. So... if Christianity’s major pillars are dream induced, and if dreaming is a form of madness, does that mean that Christianity is the dreamy religion of madmen? Or the madness of dreamy religionists? Or the religious dreams of madmen?

You get the picture.
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"There are days when it takes all you've got just to keep up with the losers." —Robert Orben