Church of the Churchless

How much smarter are atheists than religious believers?

A video about religion from The Idiot's Guide to Smart People series makes fun of religious believers -- which isn't difficult, of course.

But I also enjoyed the take on adamant atheists.

They're much smarter than religious people, since they don't accept myths, fantasies, and wishful thinking. (At least, not of the godly variety.)

Yet how smart is it to waste a lot of time debating people who do believe in this theological crap?

I don't have a good answer.

I wouldn't have seen the godless light without having my beliefs challenged by friends, family, and a bunch of books by reality-minded scientists, philosophers, and others. 

These days, though, my churchless proselytizing zeal is at a low point.

I find myself spending almost all of my time simply living life without religiosity. Thinking, "I don't like religion" strikes me as akin to thinking "I don't like chocolate ice cream" while enjoying a dish of vanilla.

Useless.

Back in 2006, when I wrote The best one-sentence metaphysics ever written, I had much the same attitude as I do now. So maybe I've hit upon a non-religious sweet zone.

Anyway, here's the video.

 

We have a conventional self, but not a soul-self

For good reasons I don't believe in a human "self." Or a non-human self either. But this doesn't mean that I deny people exist. 

This notion of no-self can be confusing.

To some, no-self implies oneness. Yet it is obvious that I am me and you are you. We have different bodies and different brains. There are connections between us, but we are distinct entities.

I've found it difficult to explain both to others and myself how the non-existence of a self is compatible with the existence of individual human beings.

Re-reading part of "Living As a River" today, I found that the author, Bodhipaksa (born Graeme Stephen), did a good job delineating the difference between a conventional self, and the sort of soulful entity that generally is viewed as our "self," especially by religious believers.

When we're talking about a conventional self, then, we mean one where the individual recognizes him or herself as an individual and acts in accordance with that recognition. In other words there is some degree of reflexive recognition and reflexive action.

...Our assumptions about our selves, however, transcend mere self-recognition. The understanding of the self against which the Buddha argued vigorously, and which many contemporary scientists and philosophers also dispute, is the notion of a self which is unchanging and separate.

We assume those qualities belong to the self, not so much as part of a thought-out philosophical standpoint arrived at after careful deliberation, but as an instinctual response. This response is at least partly based on the fear of acknowledging our existential situation as fragile and transitory creatures, but also based on a number of perceptual distortions that we'll examine shortly.

...If we identify certain attributes of the self as "essential," then it stands to reason that the core self must be something unchanging. After all, if something is essential, it must be permanent. Although this kind of thinking predominated at the time of the Buddha, he disagreed that there was an unchanging core to the self. Instead he saw the self as composed of a number of ever-changing processes.

...So in effect we own nothing, and therefore nothing that constitutes us can be seen as constituting a self.  So this is the kind of self I do not believe in. I do believe I have a conventional self, which right now is busy typing words on a keyboard. I see my body and recognize it as me rather than you. I experience a flow of experience that is unique to me.

But what of anything beyond that? I do not believe that I -- or you, for that matter -- have a self that is permanent and separate. And when I talk about belief and non-belief I am not talking about "blind faith." I mean to say that my experience is that I do not have a self of this sort.

This also is the experience of neuroscientists who fail to find anything permanent about human consciousness/personality, whether we call this "soul" or any other word, that is separate and distinct from the goings-on of the brain. 

Thus the self is, basically, the mind and body in action. The self is an ever-changing process, not a static thing. I wrote a blog post about Bodhipaksa's book called "Live as a river -- fluid, dynamic, interconnected." Here's some Bodhipaska quotes from that post.

...The self is, in a simile I'll return to frequently, like an eddy in a stream. It has the appearance of being a separate thing and of having permanence, but in what sense can an eddy be permanent? There's no borderline we can say for sure marks where the eddy stops and the river begins.

...We are not separate from the world around us; we instead exist as the sum total of our relationships with a vast web of interconnected processes.

...Consciousness is not an entity that sits within us, awaiting contact with the outside world; rather it's a series of activities that arise in dependence upon contact with the world.

...I will not be suggesting to you that you do not have a self. I will simply try to demonstrate that the self is not what you take it to be, and that it's our idea of having a definable self we must let go of.

...I'll suggest that we cease clinging to the idea of having a self so we can embrace a life that is spontaneous and flowing, like an athlete "in the zone," with a mind clear, focused, and non-grasping.

This morning, during my re-reading of Living as a River, I came across a passage that reminded me of a video I shared recently on my other blog. Bodhipaksa said:

Instead we find ourselves living attentively, spontaneously, and joyfully. Creativity wells up in us without conscious intervention. We know what to do and what to say without even knowing how we know. And we weave around life's obstacles joyfully, with, in the words of Montaigne, minds that are "universal, open, and ready for all things."

Oh, yeah.

That's how I felt land paddling on my longboard at the Venice Beach (California) boardwalk last Saturday. I had to weave around a lot of obstacles -- people, bikes, medical marijuana salesmen, all kinds of things.

As noted above, mostly I didn't have time to consciously think about what direction I was heading or how fast I should go. I just flowed with my experience of the boardwalk.

Fun time. Life goes better with no-self. I only ran gently into one person, my wife, though I had some close calls -- as the video shows.

 

 

For relatives of MH370 passengers, hope is like religious faith

If someone I loved had been at the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, MH370, probably I'd be acting like the actual grieving relatives.

Many, if not most, are clinging to hope that, against all odds, the plane landed safely somewhere. The passengers are being held hostage. For some reason, the hijackers haven't made any ransom demands yet.

None of this makes sense. It is so improbable as to be virtually impossible. Believing in what I just said requires leaps of logic across vast gaps of implausibility. 

Yet on radio and TV I keep hearing the relatives speak that way. 

One man I heard interviewed today said that at first he held out a 20% chance of the plane having landed safely. Now he feels this is a 5% chance. He still holds out hope, though. As did another relative who said that even if there is the barest chance the passengers are still alive, he will believe they are.

Reminds me of religion. 

In fact, the psychological dynamics seem almost identical. With belief in the existence of God, there also is essentially zero evidence that this is reality rather than wishful thinking. Nonetheless, billions of people cling to hope that after they die, they will land safely in heaven or some other supernatural realm.

Just as with the relatives of MH370 passengers, I understand why religious believers embrace their hopes. It feels good to envision a happy ending to a sad story, whether this be a plane that has disappeared or the end of one's precious life.

An article, "Missing MH370: Too soon to give up, only hope remains," examines the roots of such irrationality.

Of all the rivers of words written and spoken of the missing plane, for the waiting families one is primary. Hope. Their sentences are littered with it: Hope they are alive. Hope they will come back. Sometimes it is all that is left, this thread, slim and frayed, which humanity hangs on to.

Hope is powerful yet tenuous, there is proof from the past that it is worth hoping, yet it is also an emotion that doesn't always lend itself to logic or reason.

Five years after SilkAir Flight 185 crashed into the Musi River in Indonesia in 1997, a woman still clung to the hope that her husband was alive. She believed he had lost his memory and was wandering somewhere in Indonesia but would eventually find his way back home.

Dr Tan Chue Tin, who tells this story, is a psychiatrist in private practice in Singapore who has worked with people who have lost people they love in plane crashes and the Hotel New World collapse in 1986.

"When you don't see the body," he explains, "there is no closure. This prolongs the grief process and adds to the denial they experience. The hope that their loved ones are still alive is magnified in such instances and this hope brings them comfort."

...Alongside hope always sits grief and, in a world beset by accidents, grief can't be compared for loss has no measurement. There is no set scale for tragedy, no degree for sadness, but this much is true of this plane: it is the ambiguity - how it disappeared, where it disappeared - which is crippling for families.

...As Dr Tan said: "The mind conjures up all kinds of scenarios when you have nothing concrete. The mind just needs to find an explanation to relieve the pain and anxiety. Right now, the relatives would believe anything that suggests that their loved ones are still alive."

How can corporations have religious beliefs?

The Hobby Lobby case that was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court today shows why religious beliefs can be dangerous to your health.

In this instance, if you work for a company run by owners who want to impose their religious dogma on their employees. 

To me, it's a no-brainer: corporations should have to follow the law, just like everybody else. I don't see why there should be exemptions for any sort of religious belief. After all, who is to say what is "religious" and what isn't?

Meaning, what difference is there between (1) the owners of Hobby Lobby who are members of an organized religion (Baptist, I believe), and (2) anyone else who has beliefs founded in some sort of personal faith?

If the Supreme Court allows the Hobby Lobby corporation to get away with not providing certain forms of contraceptive insurance coverage because the owners object to providing those services, then why can't a vegetarian business owner with ethical objections to eating animals refuse to pay for any insurance benefit that involves the slightest bit of animal product?

Gelatin capsules, for instance. 

That way lies societal craziness. Yet I heard one of Hobby Lobby's attorneys say in a radio interview that what insurance benefits religiously inclined owners could deny their employees would depend on the individual beliefs of the owners.

In other words, it wouldn't matter that the Baptist Church, Catholic Church, or whatever other religion the owners belonged to had no objection to a certain health care service. If the religious owners of a corporation said they had a moral objection to X or Y, those services could be denied to their employees. 

Such as, one must assume, organ transplants. Or blood transfusions. Again, this is crazy.

Salon has a good story about this issue, "4 Really Important Things You Should Know about the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS Case." This part echoes what another attorney said on the radio show I was listening to.

3. The business community isn’t rooting for Hobby Lobby to win this one. 

If the Supreme Court sides with Hobby Lobby and agrees that corporations are people with religious convictions, the ruling would basically destroy what’s known as the corporate veil (which means to treat a corporation as a distinct entity from its owners or shareholders) — a precedent that would have far-ranging consequences.

Which may explain why corporate America has been unusually quiet about the case. As David H. Gans recently noted at Slate, “Not one Fortune 500 company filed a brief in the case. Apart from a few isolated briefs from companies just like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, the U.S. business community offered no support for the claim that secular, for-profit corporations are persons that can exercise religion.”

The Chamber of Commerce and other groups — which were falling over themselves to file amicus briefs in support of Citizens United — likely recognize that a ruling for the corporate right to the free exercise of religion would cause complete chaos, both in terms of corporate governance and market stability. By treating corporations as the same thing as their owners, a ruling in support of Hobby Lobby wouldn’t just pierce the corporate veil, it would effectively shred it and light it on fire.

Hard to see how owners of corporations can have it both ways. They incorporate to avoid personal liability for business actions. A corporation can go bankrupt without bankrupting the owners of the business. It is a legal entity separate from the people who founded it.

Yet here are the owners of Hobby Lobby, demanding that the actions of their corporation in regard to providing health insurance be able to reflect their personal religious views. As noted above, it sure seems like this could have far-reaching legal effects.

My view of this issue, though, is based on something much simpler: an assumption that personal beliefs are just that, personal. Doesn't matter if they are called "religious." They're just personal beliefs. Your belief doesn't have any more importance or validity than mine does, or vice versa.

You can believe what you want; I can believe what I want. No problem.

Problems arise when a business or corporation forces employees or customers to adhere to the personal beliefs of its owners. This is what Hobby Lobby is trying to do. And that's wrong. Allowing this to happen would open the door to all kinds of discriminatory policies.

A Christian owner might believe that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, and he doesn't want to have them as customers. Or someone might have a personal religion centered around the supposed inferiority of non-whites. Should he be able to discriminate against them?

I hope the Supreme Court does the right thing and rules against Hobby Lobby. But I'm afraid they will give at least a partial victory to the Hobby Lobby owners, given the makeup of the court.

A humanist explains how to be happy

Take three minutes and watch this video. It does a great job of explaining why, if you want to be happy, shunning religious dogma and embracing your own experience is the way to go.

 

Who should be praised for Disneyland?

My daughter, following in her father's churchlesss footsteps, doesn't believe in God. Or other religious fantasies. 

So it surprised her when my granddaughter, who is almost seven, popped up with this back-seat observation when they approached Disneyland recently. (They live in southern California.)

"Praise God for Disneyland."

"What do you mean?" my daughter replied. "I'm the one who is driving you to Disneyland. So praise your mother for taking you."

My granddaughter thought for a while. "OK, then let's praise Walt Disney for Disneyland."

That makes much more sense than praising God. But I can understand why my granddaughter said what she did. She goes to an independent Episcopal school that, though embracing children of all faiths and no-faith, still has daily prayers, a chapel, and such.

I reassured my daughter that children go through all sorts of phases.

I wouldn't be surprised if my granddaughter has one or more religious upswings where she tries out believing in some form of supernatural God. I certainly did, though my daughter has never swerved from her unbelieving attitude.

On the plus side, my wife and I just attended a "Grandparent's Day" at the school. I was much impressed with the school's commitment to science and scientific thinking. 

With the help of a parent, my granddaughter and a first grade classmate carried out a pretty sophisticated study of bacteria levels at various locations around her school. They cultured swabs, displaying the results as part of other experiments on review at the Grandparent's Day event.

Hypothesis: boys have more germs than girls. Their conclusion was, yes, based on swabs taken at locations frequented by boy students (can't remember where; might have been handles of boy's restrooms).

The great thing about this is what my granddaughter is learning about reality at such an early age: the truth is out there; it can be known by observing the physical world in certain ways that separate truth from untruth.

My daughter helped teach her this lesson when she challenged my granddaughter's unfounded hypothesis that God is responsible for the existence of Disneyland.

There is no demonstrable evidence that this is true. "Praise God for [whatever]" is just a manner oif speaking, a religious utterance that points to nothing real in the world. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that Walt Disney created the park that bears his name.

Walking through the room that housed the student science experiments, I couldn't help thinking that these elementary students had managed to learn more about the universe in a few weeks than religions have learned in all of recorded history.

Some aspects of reality likely always will remain mysterious.

But this doesn't mean that we can't learn about the many aspects that can be understood by humans. Including the fact that Walt Disney came up with the concept for Disneyland and supervised its construction. 

Sure, one could then trace the existence of Walt Disney back, and back, and back, and back until the first stirrings of life on Earth, and even farther -- back to the big bang that brought the universe into existence.

Nowhere, though, will God be found. At least, not any God which isn't just another name for the laws of nature. People can choose to believe in religious dogma; this doesn't make it true, even if billions accept the same untruths. 

Regarding whether boys have more germs than girls... this is a question that can't be resolved by a simple first grade science experiment. A bit of Googling revealed some evidence that my granddaughter is right. Also, that she is wrong. 

At least scientific questions have answers that can be either right or wrong. With religion, the phrase "not even wrong" holds sway.  

Experiences versus explanations

It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg question: which is primary, experiences or explanations? 

Each of us is actively engaged in both realms. We directly experience reality; we also seek explanations of what is being experienced.

Sometimes to an excessive degree. 

I have reached explanatory overload with the current incessant speculating about what happened to a Malaysia Airlines plane that disappeared on a flight to China. Radio and television news outlets are barely talking about anything else.

[Update: Today NBC's Chuck Todd criticized CNN for relentlessly characterizing finding NOTHING as being "breaking news" about the plane's disappearance. This reminds me of the daily religious non-news, which also is all about the non-finding of any evidence for God's existence or supernatural realities.]

There’s no doubt about what has been experienced: knowledge about the disappearance of a large airplane. However, an explanation for the event is lacking as I write this. So lots of people are speculating about what might have happened.

This is a great example of the human drive for explanations. 

“Why?” early on becomes a favorite word of Homo sapiens young. Mysteries nag at us. Not-knowing why’s and wherefore’s becomes an itch that demands scratching. Any explanation, even if based on exceedingly flimsy evidence or arguments, feels more satisfying than no explanation at all.

Religions thrive on our lust for knowing why. Why does the universe exist? Why is there evil in the world? Why can’t we live forever? Why do good things happen to bad people, and bad things to good people?

There’s nothing wrong with seeking answers to such questions. But believable explanations need to be founded on something more than mere belief. 

So we come back to experience. In fact, we always do. Without experience, there are no explanations. It takes someone who is experiencing life to put forth an explanation of what is being experienced 

The older I get, the more I’m OK with experiences that lack explanations. 

Or at least, explanations requiring a minimal amount of conjecture. For example, I used to look upon seemingly chance events as having some hidden meaning. Why did I run into this long-forgotten person, at this time, at this place?

Was God or the universe sending me some message? Or was this simply an experience requiring no explanation? 

Whichever (though I’m much more inclined now to the second option), experience is the first — and often also last —  link in the chain of experience and explanation. 

Yet as the proponents of mindfulness remind us, often we are so distracted by the why? and what next? voices in our head we aren’t really experiencing the present moment that supposedly requires all that explaining.

Like most everything else in life, the key is balance. 

Experiences without explanations would make us akin to non-human animals. Explanations without experiences would make us akin to an advanced computer lacking consciousness.

We need to honor both sides of our complex Homo sapiens psyches. Nobody can tell any individual what the proper balance is between his/her need for direct, intuitive, private, unthinking experience, and his/her need for derivative, reasoned, public, thoughtful explanations.  

I’d suggest, though, that unnecessary, unbelievable explanations should be avoided as much as possible. Which means, avoid religion. And similar ways of misunderstanding and misexperiencing reality.

There’s nothing wrong, and much that is right, with simply experiencing life as it is. 

Mysterious. Unpredictable. Mystifying. Confusing. Surprising. Awe-inspiring. Ever-changing.

There’s also nothing wrong, and much that is right, with seeking explanations for experiences. Such is the goal of the scientific method, whether applied in a formal way or as common sense.

By and large, I’d say that most people, including me, are over-explainers and under-experiencers. We need to get more in touch with the raw sensual experience of life’s sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations.

That way, I’ve found, leads to a feeling of being grounded that is lacking when excessive explanations crowd our mind.  

"Miracles" happen all the time. Mathematics demands them.

Here's an amazing sign of the supernatural that happened to me recently. Except, it wasn't really amazing. Or, supernatural. Just seemed like it could be.

Four days before I'd contacted the yard maintenance company that episodically helps us out with chores we need to do in our non-easy care garden. When I didn't hear back from them after a few days, I phoned again. 

The woman who answered my call said she'd send another email to the maintenance supervisor, Chris. But two days later I still hadn't been contacted by Chris.

So I looked up his email address on the company's web site. I'd just started composing a message to him. All I'd done so far was put "Chris" in the address line. Then the phone rang. Instantly I thought, "I bet that's Chris."

Amazingly, it was. He phoned me at almost exactly the same moment I'd decided to email him.

Most, if not all, people have had experiences like this. Thinking of someone just before they phone, text, email, or whatever. Visualizing something happening, and then it does. Running into someone you know from your home town half a world away.

David J. Hand, a statistician, explains this stuff away in his fascinating book, "The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day." 

Here's the Amazon description:

In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.

But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of “miracle” is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.

Together, these constitute Hand’s groundbreaking Improbability Principle. And together, they explain why we should not be so surprised to bump into a friend in a foreign country, or to come across the same unfamiliar word four times in one day.

Hand wrestles with seemingly less explicable questions as well: what the Bible and Shakespeare have in common, why financial crashes are par for the course, and why lightning does strike the same place (and the same person) twice. Along the way, he teaches us how to use the Improbability Principle in our own lives—including how to cash in at a casino and how to recognize when a medicine is truly effective.

An irresistible adventure into the laws behind “chance” moments and a trusty guide for understanding the world and universe we live in, The Improbability Principle will transform how you think about serendipity and luck, whether it’s in the world of business and finance or you’re merely sitting in your backyard, tossing a ball into the air and wondering where it will land.

In my case, it didn't really require great mathematical insights to understand why my email message to Chris and his phone call to me coincided so precisely.

This happened on Friday morning. I'd been thinking that I wanted to get the garden maintenance issue settled before the weekend. Chris likely had the same idea. He may have been going through his list of unanswered emails at about the same time I was pondering my day's to-do list.

Yes, it felt strange to pick up the phone and hear "Hi, this is Chris" after I'd just started to write an email message to him. However, since I'd been reading The Improbability Principle, this didn't strike me as anything miraculous or other-worldly.

Hand points out that countless combinations of this and that are experienced by each person every day. Most of these events don't grab our attention. For example, every time someone unexpectedly phones or sends an email message.

it is only when we have a thought of that person just before a communication arrives that we have a sense of Wow! This is miraculous!

Many supposed miracles, of course, are outright frauds. But the rest are the result of what Hand calls the Improbability Principle. A key part of this principle is the law of truly large numbers, explained by Hand here.

One of the key strands of the principle is the law of truly large numbers. This law says that given enough opportunities, we should expect a specified event to happen, no matter how unlikely it may be at each opportunity.

Sometimes, though, when there are really many opportunities, it can look as if there are only relatively few. This misperception leads us to grossly underestimate the probability of an event: we think something is incredibly unlikely, when it's actually very likely, perhaps almost certain.

How can a huge number of opportunities occur without people realizing they are there? The law of combinations, a related strand of the Improbability Principle, points the way. It says: the number of combinations of interacting elements increases exponentially with the number of elements. The “birthday problem” is a well-known example.

The birthday problem poses the following question: How many people must be in a room to make it more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday?

The answer is just 23. If there are 23 or more people in the room, then it's more likely than not that two will have the same birthday.

Hand goes on to explain why. This relates to a tragic story in my home town, Salem, Oregon. 

In West Salem five young people were diagnosed with the same rare form of cancer. Understandably, there was an outcry for public health authorities to look for environmental factors that could have caused this seeming cluster of cases.

But the testing revealed nothing unusual. A story in today's newspaper discussed the study results, including this quote from a state representative:
Download Cancer analysis wont be made public OHA says

Greenlick, D-Portland, said the lack of a known cause for the cases shouldn’t stall the investigation.

“They’ve just sort of thrown up their hands because of that. I would like them to continue trying to puzzle this thing out,” Greenlick said. “I just don’t think that cluster could have happened by chance.”

Well, it could have. Just like so many purported miracles and other supposedly inexplicable events. We mistake improbable for impossible. Further, we fail to understand how our conceptions about probability are also mistaken.

Below I'll share a comment that I left on the above-mentioned newspaper story.

 

Relax. Everything is equally important.

Periodically my brain comes up with Profound Cosmic Observations. This weekend it is... (drum roll please)...

Everything is equally important.

Meaning, whatever we experience at any given moment possesses the same existential value. This applies both to me and other people. 

In other words, whatever I'm doing, it's equally worthy of my awareness and attention. Ditto for what anyone else is doing. The experience of an Indian rickshaw driver is equal to that of a Wall Street options trader.

I got to pondering this oh-so-ponderable notion yesterday as I was putting together some replacement bar stools for our kitchen counter.

Now, it hadn't occurred to me that we even needed new bar stools. But my wife is far more knowledgeable in the home decorating arena than I am. So almost always I bow to her judgement in such matters. Which led to me sitting on the living room rug, surrounded by pieces of two bar stools that Laurel had ordered from Cost Plus World Market, and I'd picked up.

When the World Market guy was loading the large box into our SUV, I told him, "Is it OK if I phone you at midnight with a question about how the hell these stools go together? They don't come with IKEA-like instructions, do they?"

He laughted and replied, "Call my boss. She's in charge of things like that. You shouldn't have any trouble assembling them, though."

Sort of true. 

However, the instructions were in Chinese English. Pretty clear, though with a few puzzling aspects. Such as the fact that the instructions referred to four long bolts and four short bolts. Yet each stool came with eight long bolts.

Which ended up fitting. After a bunch of fiddling. 

My theory is that underpaid and overworked Chinese workers who make furniture express frustration with their working conditions by drilling some holes just a tiny bit off-center. Not enough to attract attention. Just enough to give the eventual buyer fits when he or she tries to get the last bolt holding a chair leg on to thread properly.

Midway through the bar stool assembling process, after I'd spent ten minutes or so working on a recalcitrant bolt, I began to think, Is this how I should be spending my precious time in what almost surely is my one and only precious life?

Sitting on a rug. Allen wrench in hand. Fiddling with bolts on bar stools that, until recently, I didn't even know were needed to replace the stools that I'd been satisfactorially sitting on for many years. 

But then I realized that whatever I could have been doing instead wouldn't be any different. After all, every moment I'm alive and conscious, I'm experiencing something. If I started to divide these moments into worthy and unworthy, important and unimportant, significant and non-significant -- that way lies madness.

So to speak. Not clinical madness. Just the illogical frustration of believing that what I am doing now isn't what I should be doing.

That the present moment has gone awry; an existential error has occurred; I have been cast into a life experience that shouldn't be happening, and a more desirable one has been lost in an alternative potential reality.

The absurdity of this manner of thinking became obvious to me even as I continued to assemble the bar stools. 

It is natural to look some experiences as more pleasant than others. Or as more satisfying than others. I can't equate getting a root canal with lying on a warm tropical beach. However, each is equally important in the cosmic scheme of things.

Each is an experience that, um, I am experiencing. Each is part of what exists in a space-time continuum. Each is what I am aware of during a limited lifetime that has only so many awarenesses.

At the end of the day I felt good seeing the bar stools all assembled. I guess I could have worked on a novel, composed a symphony, sought a cure for cancer, or tutored low-income children. Instead, I put together two bar stools. 

There's a peace of mind that comes with accepting whatever happens as what is happening. And accepting that whatever happens to other people, this is what is happening to them. 

I've talked about this before in some other blog posts. Such as, "Meaning of life: one damn thing after another" and "How 'nothing' is the key to a meaningful life."

I don't know if what I've said here is more or less significant than what I've said before. It's just another of those damn things that happen, one after the other. All equally meaningful.

If nothing is truly alive, maybe everything is

I'm not sure how I feel about Ferris Babr's opinion piece in the New York Times, "Why Nothing is Truly Alive."  On the whole, I think I like the idea.

Why so much ambivalence? Why is it so difficult for scientists to cleanly separate the living and nonliving and make a final decision about ambiguously animate viruses? Because they have been trying to define something that never existed in the first place.

Here is my conclusion: Life is a concept, not a reality.

To better understand this argument, it’s helpful to distinguish between mental models and pure concepts. Sometimes the brain creates a representation of a thing: light bounces off a pine tree and into our eyes; molecules waft from its needles and ping neurons in our nose; the brain instantly weaves together these sensations with our memories to create a mental model of that tree.

Other times the brain develops a pure concept based on observations — a useful way of thinking about the world.

Our idealized notion of “a tree” is a pure concept. There is no such thing as “a tree” in the world outside the mind. Rather, there are billions of individual plants we have collectively named trees. You might think botanists have a precise unfailing definition of a tree — they don’t. Sometimes it’s really difficult to say whether a plant is a tree or shrub because “tree” and “shrub” are not properties intrinsic to plants — they are ideas we impinged on them.

Likewise, “life” is an idea. We find it useful to think of some things as alive and others as inanimate, but this division exists only in our heads.

This is a jarring notion. I'm used to perceiving myself as someone who is alive. And, one day, won't be.

Yet what if my nature is no different from how everything in the universe is? Everything including, of course, both what we humans consider to be alive, and what isn't alive. When a rock erodes, or a star explodes as a supernova, we don't mourn its passing or view the dissolution of the entity as the loss of something special.

Part of the universe just changed form. The rock became dirt, in which plants can grow. The star was transformed into heavy elements, which enable Earth to be what it is, and us to be what we are.

Consciousness does seem to be a characteristic of some forms of life that acts to differentiate "living" from "not-living." I know that I am what I am. Seemingly a rock or a star doesn't. 

But the presence of consciousness can be fitted into Babr's nothing is truly alive perspective. Clearly, consciousness is a continuum. Some entities are more conscious than others. Say, an ant compared to a human.

Our self-consciousness appears to give us a special edge in the What is Alive? sweepstakes. However, so far as we know, the human brain that generates consciousness is made up of atoms and chemical elements guided by the forces of nature.

Like everything else in the universe is. 

So Babr may be right: "life" is just a concept, a product of the Homo sapiens brain. It is a way of organizing reality into conceptual boxes, yet arguably not a reflection of how the universe really is. (Assuming "really" has any more meaing than "life.")

Here's the beginning of "Why Nothing is Truly Alive." 

On a windy day in Ypenburg, the Netherlands, you can sometimes see sculptures the size of buses scuttling across a sandy hill. Made mostly from intricately conjoined plastic tubes, wood and sails, the many-legged skeletons move so fluidly and autonomously that it’s tempting to think of them as alive.

Their maker, the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, certainly does. “Since 1990, I have been occupied creating new forms of life,” he says on his website. He calls them Strandbeest. “Eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.”

Poetic, most would say, but Strandbeest are not alive. They are just machines — elaborate, beautiful ones, but inanimate contraptions nonetheless.

A few months ago I would have agreed with this reasoning. But that was before I had a remarkable insight about the nature of life. Now, I would argue that Strandbeest are no more or less alive than animals, fungi and plants. In fact, nothing is truly alive.

Together my wife and I watched a video of the Strandbeest cavorting. After seeing these amazing creatures do their thing, I said to her, "It almost looks as if they are conscious. But they aren't deciding how to move. The wind blows them."

Laurel replied, "How do we know that humans are any more in control of their actions? We might be just as subject to deterministic causes and effects."

Have a look. Maybe you will agree with Babr that the Strandbeest are just as alive as we are. And that "life" is a word that doesn't point to anything truly real.

 

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey -- great 44 minute science sermon

I don't go to church any more. But last Sunday I experienced an inspiring sermon... about the cosmic wonders discovered by science. 

Here's the best thing about the new series featuring Neil Degrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist: "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" is all about reality. Not religious fantasy. 

(First uplifting episode can be viewed online.)

The computer graphics are excellent. Sure, these are simulations of how the universe appears beyond Earth's immediate surroundings. But given the immensity of the cosmos, there's no other way to describe expanses of space and time far beyond everyday understanding.

I was deeply moved. Particularly, by the part where Tyson starts from Earth and then shows the scale of the universe: solar system, Milky Way galaxy, local cluster of galaxies, supercluster of clusters, entire universe. 

I felt really, really small. Which is reality. To say that Earth is a speck in the cosmic scheme of things gives our planet too prominent a place in the cosmos. (See my post, "Scale of the universe.")

One of the arguments against a Judeo-Christian-Islamic personal creator God is that the universe is way too large if it was created just for us humans. Often religious believers of both a western and eastern persuasion talk about the Homo sapiens species as being the top of creation.

Well, after watching the first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey I find that exceedingly hard to believe. Even if we're just talking about physical reality. 

The universe is so vast, almost certainly it contains beings and civilizations that would boggle our human minds if we were able to know about them. Tyson said that if the age of the universe, about 14 billion years, were compressed to a single year, all of human recorded history would fit into the last 14 seconds.

Amazingly, though, modern science has learned a tremendous amount about the universe in a fraction of the last second of that cosmic year. 

Pre-scientific myths have been revealed to be false. Like, the Earth being the center of everything. Tyson spent quite a bit of time explaining how the Church freaked out when Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo spoke the truth about the Earth revolving around the Sun.

Bruno was burned at the stake because he dared to challenge religious dogmatism.

He correctly surmised that the universe was filled with countless worlds other than our own. However, it appears that Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey failed to point out that Bruno's heresies went considerably beyond cosmological ones. 

See: What 'Cosmos' Got Wrong About Giordano Bruno, the Heretic Scientist.

But the truth is that Bruno's scientific theories weren't what got him killed. Sure, his refusal to recant his belief in a plurality of worlds contributed to his sentence. But it's important to note that the Catholic Church didn't even have an official position on the heliocentric universe in 1600, and support for it was not considered heresy during Bruno's trial.

On top of that, his support for Copernican cosmology was the least heretical position he propagated. His opinions on theology were far more pyrotechnic. For example, Bruno had the balls to suggest that Satan was destined to be saved and redeemed by God.

He didn't think Jesus was the son of God, but rather “an unusually skilled magician.” He even publicly disputed Mary's virginity. The Church could let astronomical theories slide, but calling the Mother of God out on her sex life? There's no doubt that these were the ideas that landed Bruno on the stake.

I liked how blunt Neal Degrasse Tyson was about religion. It's a crappy way of learning about reality. Truth seekers need to embrace the scientific method, which is the only way of sorting out true from false when it comes to the world outside our subjective psyches.

In an interview with Brian Stelter, Tyson talked about how scientific facts can't be cherry-picked:

Stelter showed a clip of President Obama’s climate speech last year, in which he decried climate deniers by saying the country didn’t have time for a “meeting of the flat Earth society.” Tyson said the president’s reference was a good example of how the idea of “balance” in scientific stories doesn’t make sense.

“In the clip you showed of the president — you don’t talk about the spherical Earth with NASA, and then say ‘now let’s give equal time to the flat Earthers,” he said. “Plus, science is not there for you to cherry pick…You can decide whether or not to believe in it but that doesn’t change the reality of an emergent scientific truth.”

...Tyson also said he hopes Cosmos, which premiered March 9, can help Americans learn how to decipher scientific facts from political spin and that it can help Americans become better stewards of the Earth.

“The goal is to convey why science matters to the person, to our society, to us as shepherds of this planet,” he said. “It involves presenting science in ways that connect to you, so Cosmos can influence you not only intellectually but emotionally, with a celebration of wonder and awe.”

Absolutely. There's no need to go to church to worship the Creator. Here and now, wherever you are and whatever you're doing, what the Big Bang has wrought is what you are experiencing. 

Further, science reveals mysteries of the cosmos beyond our capacity to know with unaided senses. But when we appreciate how amazing the universe is, every bit of it, whether near or far, can seem filled with the wonder and awe Tyson speaks of.

There's no need to call that a spiritual sensibility.

To me, it is simply a natural response to understanding reality. However, if you want to be "spiritual," whatever that word means, embracing science is the way to go.

Why I like Don Miguel Ruiz's "The Voice of Knowledge"

I feel like I need to defend my churchless cred. Yeah, a few days ago I put up a post that praised what the front cover says is A Toltec Wisdom Book, "The Voice of Knowledge." 

Can't be sure, but I seem to recall reading one of Don Miguel Ruiz's earlier books. Maybe it was "The Four Agreements." There's a lot of Four Agreement stuff in The Voice of Knowledge. For whatever reason, Ruiz's message was more appealing to me this time around.

Now, I readily admit that Ruiz engages in quite a bit of God-talk. Also, prayer talk (particularly in the very end of the book I just read). 

But my impression is that he uses these terms because they are familiar to most of his reader-audience. Namely, Christians. Or ex-Christians. However, there are very few references to anything akin to the Father in the Sky God of Christianity.

Mostly Ruiz talks about life as being equivalent to God. For example:

The fruit of the Tree of Life is the message that comes directly from life or from God. Life is the only truth; it is the force that is creating all of the time. When you see that force in yourself, and when you put your faith in that force, you are truly alive. 

...You are the king in your own reality; you are responsible for your own dream of life.

...We create our own heaven. Heaven is a story; it is a dream that we, as life, can create. But for life to create heaven, the main character of the story needs to surrender to life, and allow life to manifest without the lies.

We, each one of us, are the main character in our own stories. Ruiz is absolutely right about that. It is unarguable that everyone views reality in their own unique fashion. No one else shares our consciousness. Someone might tell me, "I know what you mean," but he or she can't be sure about that.

If we could jump into someone else's head for even a moment, directly experiencing how they see the world, and then jump out again with a memory of what we saw, I bet the reaction would be, "Holy #$%!&, that person is freaking weird!"

Of course, to them our way of looking at the world would be.

Which means that each of us is a marvelous story-teller, the central tenet of Ruiz's message. Our stories aren't true in any objective sense. Yet they are all we have, or are. Our stories are how we make sense of life in general, and our own life in particular.

Nothing wrong with that. Absent our stories, we wouldn't be human. There's good scientific reason to argue that what differentiates Homo sapiens from other apes is our story-telling ability. 

We humans can conceptualize, assign words to things and ideas, communicate those notions to our fellow humans, pass on our learning and culture. So far, so good.

Until these evolutionary capacities show their dark side. Worry. Conflict. Anxiety. Rigidity. Abstraction that loses touch with the concreteness of life. Imagination run wild. Just because modern humans have developed certain abilities doesn't mean these are conducive to happiness and well-being.

Evolution rewards surviving long enough to pass on one's genes through reproduction. Contentment is a by-product. When it happens. 

So I think Ruiz is on the right track when he urges us to take a look at our own thinking. After all, we aren't called members of the Homo sapiens species for no reason. Every human does a lot of sapien'ing. Often or mostly, way too much. 

Our stories can drive us crazy. Or at least confine us in ways that aren't productive.

Here's a personal anecdote in line with Ruiz's admonition, Don't believe yourself, and don't believe anybody else. I'm sure you can supply similar stories from your own life experiences.

In high school I was a semi-nerd. Second in my graduating class, GPA-wise. Got better test scores than almost everybody else. A tennis player. Popular, but not in the Top Jock sense. I wore glasses. I didn't play football like most of my friends did. I didn't see myself as very athletic, though I was 6'1" and 165 pounds.

My tennis coach also was an assistant football coach. One day, in my junior year I think it was, he had us run wind sprints for conditioning. A star running back on the football team also played tennis. We were paired up. And ended up running neck and neck. 

Damn!, I thought. I'm as fast as he is. The coach told me, "You have a powerful running style. You look like a football player." 

Some time after that a P.E. instructor timed a bunch of us students in the 100 yard dash. I had the same time as the football team's quarterback, a very athletic Hispanic guy. The quarterback couldn't believe it. We had a side by side 100 yard runoff.

Again, ended up neck and neck. After that I was asked to be part of the track team. Never did it, though. In large part because of my self-image, the story about myself that I and others told about me.

It wasn't true.

I was brainy, but I also was quite brawny and athletic. That side of me didn't really come out for a long time, though. I continued to play competitive tennis into my 30s. Had quite a bit of success. However, it wasn't until my 40s, after I got divorced and remarried, which shook up how I viewed myself, that I belatedly took up martial arts.

And loved it. Still do. Have moved from hard style to Tai Chi. 

This taught me that Ruiz is correct: the stories we tell ourselves can be horribly limiting. We can be fooled into not seeing capabilities that we actually have, while believing we are better at some things than we really are. 

Near the end of his book, Ruiz engages in some talk that sounds suspiciously supernatural, but to me, isn't. It is about how to live life here and now.

The gates of heaven are open, and heaven is waiting for you. But if you don't enter heaven, it's because you believe that you are not worthy of heaven. You believe that you are not worthy of living in a place of truth, joy, and love. This is a lie, but if you believe it, that lie controls your story, and you cannot pass through the gates of heaven.

Don't believe yourself, and don't believe anybody else

I'm an easily-pleased book buyer. If there is just one memorable sentence in a book I've bought, a line that sticks with me, I consider my money well-spent. 

Don Miguel Ruiz' "The Voice of Knowledge" has that sentence.

If you want to know the truth, if you are ready to take your faith out of the lies, then remember: Don't believe yourself, and don't believe anybody else.

I really like that advice. Sure, it sounds shocking. But Ruiz does a good job explaining why it makes sense. Here's some excerpts from the book.

...Now we know what is going on in our head. The storyteller is there; it is that voice in our head. That voice is talking and talking and talking, and we are listening and listening and believing every word.

...All humans create their story with their own unique point of view. Why try to impose your story on other people when for them your story is not true? When you understand that, you no longer have the need to defend what you believe. It's not important to be right or to make others wrong. Instead, you see everybody as an artist, a storyteller. You know that whatever they believe is just their point of view. It has nothing to do with you.

...It's so difficult to be what we are not, to pretend to be what we are not. I used to pretend that I was very happy and very strong and very important. Wow! Living that way is truly a deep hell. It's a set-up, it's a no-win situation. You can never be what you are not, and that is the main point. You can only be you, and that's it. And you are you right now, and it's effortless.

...As little children, we are authentic. When we are hungry we only want to eat. When we are tired, we just want to rest. Only the present time is real for us; we don't care about the past and we aren't worried about the future. We enjoy life; we want to explore and have fun. Nobody teaches us to be that way; we are born that way.

...You live in the story that you create, and I live in the story that I create. Your story is your reality -- a virtual reality that is only true for you, the one who creates it. 

Long ago somebody said, "Every head is a world," and it's true. You live in your own world, and that world is so private. Nobody knows what you have in your world. Only you know, and sometimes even you don't know. Your world is your creation, and it's a masterpiece of art.

...I continued to study the story of my life, and what I discovered is that everything in my story is about me. Of course, it has to be that way because I am the center of my perception, and the story is from my point of view. The main character who lives in my story is based on someone who really exists -- that is true. But what I believe about me is not true -- it's a story. 

I create the character of "Miguel," and it's just an image based on what I agree to believe about myself. I project my image to other people in society, and other people perceive that projection, modify it, and react to me according to their stories.

...The truth is that we only know what we know, and the only thing we really know is our story. But how many times have you heard people say, "I know my children very well; they would never do something like that!" Do you think that you really know your children? Do you think that you really know your partner? Well, you are probably certain that your partner doesn't know you! You may be certain that nobody really knows you, but do you really know yourself? Do you really know anybody?

...Only my mother knows what she is, and surely she doesn't know either. 

...You are the only one who can change your story, and you do this by changing your relationship with yourself. 

...When we reach this level of awareness, it is easier not to take what other people say personally. We know that every human around us is a storyteller, and that everyone distorts the truth. What we share with one another is just our perception; it is just our point of view. And it's completely normal because the only thing we have is our point of view. This is how we describe whatever we witness.

...As artists, with our own style, we have the right to distort our story, and that is the best we can do anyway. That distortion is our point of view, and for us it has meanings. 

...When we experience something we like, we want to tell everybody about it. That's why we talk so much to one another. Even when we are by ourselves, we have the need to share our story, and we share it with ourselves. We see a beautiful sunset and we say, "Oh, what a beautiful sunset!" Nobody is listening except us, but we talk to ourselves anyway.

...The voice of knowledge is telling you what you are and what you are not. It's always trying to make sense out of everything. I call it the voice of knowledge because it's telling you everything you know. It's telling you your point of view in a conversation that never ends. For many people it's even worse because that voice is not just talking nonsense; the voice is judging and criticizing. It's constantly gossiping in your head about you and the people around you. 

That voice is usually lying because it's the voice of what you have learned, and you have learned so many lies, mainly about yourself. You cannot see the liar, but you can hear the voice.

...How many times has the voice made you say yes when you really wanted to say no? Or the opposite -- the voice made you say no when you really wanted to say yes? How many times has the voice made you doubt what you feel in your heart? How many times have you missed opportunities to do what you really want to do in your life because of fear -- fear that was a reaction to believing the voice in your head?

...If you have to talk to yourself, then why not be friendly? Why not tell yourself how beautiful and wonderful you are? Then at least you have someone to talk to when you're alone. But if the voice in your head is nasty and abusive, then it's no fun at all.

...Long ago I stopped listening to the voice of knowledge. I remember that I used to go outside and tell myself, "Oh, look at the beautiful clouds, the flowers, mmm, they smell so good" -- as if I didn't know that! I no longer make up stories for myself. I know what I know. Why tell myself what I already know? Does that make sense? It's just a habit.

...You don't need internal dialogue; you can know without thinking. The value of cultivating a silent mind has been known for thousands of years. In India, people use meditation and the chanting of mantras to stop the internal dialogue. To have peace in your head is incredible. 

Imagine being in an environment where there is a constant sound -- bzzzz, bzzzz, bzzzz. The moment comes when you don't even notice the noise. You know something is bothering you, but you no longer notice what it is. The moment the noise stops, you notice the silence and feel the relief, "Ahhhh..."

When the voice in your head finally stops talking, it feels something like that. I call it inner peace.

Consciousness is like a performance with no audience

The illusion of a separate self or soul dies hard.

It's just so convincing, because this is how it feels to each of us: that someone, an "I," is looking both outward to the world and inward to our own consciousness from some privileged lofty place.

Much, if not most, of religion, spirituality, and mysticism is founded on this belief.

Supposedly our true self is distinct from the brain's goings-on. It survives bodily death. It stands apart from our physical nature in some sense (even though a baseball bat to the head belies this assumption).

I wish it were true. I'd rather be a "me" that isn't limited to a single human lifespan. I'd like to look forward to an other-worldly existence after I die. 

But I also am a lover of science, of truth, of reality as it is, not as how I'd like it to be. So I regularly read neursoscience books that describe what researchers have learned about the human brain and consciousness. 

Like, Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts." I blogged about the book previously here. 

Today I read a chapter that echoed the conclusion of many other neuroscientists and psychologists: the brain is us; there is no separate "I" inside our head. Like I said, this seeming fact is at odds with how our consciousness appears to us. 

However, appearances can be deceiving. It appears that the Earth is flat. It appears that the Sun goes around the Earth. It appears that stars are tiny points of light.

And it appears that we are the audience in a theatre of consciousness, watching the show put on by our brains. The truth, says Dehaene, is quite different. 

The philosopher Daniel Dennett reminds us that we must be wary of the theatre allegory, for it can lead to a great sin: the "homunculus fallacy." If consciousness is a stage, who is the audience? Do "they" too have little brains, with a ministage and all? And who, in turn, watches it?

One must constantly resist the absurd Disney-like fantasy of a homunculus standing in our brains, peering at our screens and commanding our acts. 

There is no "I" who looks inside us. The stage itself is the "I."

There is nothing wrong with the stage metaphor provided that we eliminate the intelligence of the audience and replace it with explicit operations of an algorithmic nature. As Dennett whimsically states, "One discharges fancy homunculi from one's scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work."

...Consciousness is not an outsider added to the nervous system but a full in-house participant.

This, of course, is entirely compatible with a Buddhism or Taoism stripped of its supernatural elements. Reality is interrelationships. Dynamism. Flows of energy, materials, and information. Everything is interdependent. No entity is an island, complete unto itself.

After many years of pondering this modern scientific worldview -- which has ancient philosophical overtones -- I find it more and more appealing.

I resisted it at first.

Even though I no longer was explicitly religious, I found it difficult to give up a belief in a separate "I" distinct from the physical brain. Damn it, I wanted to be Me beyond my last breath! I deserved to be more than my timebound bodily self!

Now, though, I find a lot of beauty in the thought expressed above: The stage itself is the "I."

Those 100 billion neurons inside my cranium, all interconnected in marvelously complex ways, churning up the awarenesses that comprise my consciousness, in a fashion that gives the lie to a separate and distinct "me" even though habits of language lead me to keep on using that word (as I just did) -- there is something mysteriously and marvelously appealing about this vision of reality.

It's difficult to say more. Perhaps you feel somewhat the same way. Perhaps you don't. Regardless, the truth as provisionally known to neursoscience is what it is.

And I'm more than OK with that. 

Matthew McConaughey thanks God for his Oscar (sad, but true)

I felt betrayed when Matthew McConaughey launched into a praise God! acceptance speech after he won the Oscar for Best Actor last night. 

Guess I mistook his excellent acting on HBO's True Detective, where he plays an appealingly cynical existential atheist, with how McConaughey actually feels about religion. Which is, in his words:

"First off I want to thank God, because that's who I look up to. He's graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or any other human hand," the 44-year-old Texas native said. "He has shown me that it's a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates. In the words of the late (British actor) Charlie Laughton, who said, 'When you got God you got a friend and that friend is you.'"

McConaughey then went on to show his appreciation for his wife, children, mother and late father.

"To my father, I know he's up there right now with a big pot of gumbo, he's got a lemon meringue pie, he's probably up there in his underwear, he's got a cold can of Miller lite and he's dancing right now," he continued.

Hmmmm. There are two references to know in McConaughey's quoted remarks.

Supposedly he knows that the opportunites in his life are the result of God's grace. And he knows that his deceased father is in heaven with a pot of gumbo and a lemon meringue pie. Plus, his dead father is drinking beer and dancing (in celebration of his son's Oscar, I assume).

Of course McConaughey actually doesn't know either of these things. He believes they are true; he wishes them to be true; he hopes they are true. But he doesn't know they are true.

I would have responded more favorably to his acceptance speech if he'd been heavier on the honesty and lighter on the dogmatism.

There would have been nothing wrong with saying, "It makes me feel good to imagine that my father is in heaven right now, celebrating with a beer and some gumbo." After all, this is the truth. McConaughey, like other religious people, enjoys believing that death isn't the end of his connection with deceased relatives.

They're still alive on another plane of existence. One day they will be reunited with the living through God's love and grace.

It's a nice story. I completely understand why Christians like McConaughey embrace it. I just wish that atheism was as socially acceptable in the United States as religious belief. (Among the Hollywood Oscar audience, it probably is, but not many places elsewhere.)

Here's my view of a refreshingly honest acceptance speech:

I want to thank my father for everything he did for me. I still love my dad, even though he is dead and gone. Since he no longer exists, my father can't hear these words. I wish he could, but my father taught me the difference between fiction and fact. So when I point my finger to the sky and say, "thank you, dad," I'm pointing to my memory of a man who helped me face reality as it is, not as how I'd like it to be. Because of him, I'm a better actor, and a better person. Godless, and better for it. 

God said, "Open up a pot shop." (I'm a believer now.)

As churchless as I am, after reading this TIME story I'm more open now to the possibility that God exists. Or at least, that I could worship God.

The idea for merging marijuana and ministry came through prayer, the couple said during testimony. They had been exposed to medical marijuana when a doctor recommended Lanette Davies’ daughter use it to alleviate symptoms from a bone disease and it “made her life livable,” she said.

Bryan Davies became a convert after finding it helped ease an arthritic condition that affects his spine. Trying to live on Social Security benefits and short on cash, Davies says he asked God for guidance. “I got on my knees, and I prayed to the Lord,” he told the court. “And God said … ‘Open up a pot shop.’”

Amen, brother. 

I've been praying that Oregon will be one of the next states to legalize recreational marijuana. (We already have medical marijuana, along with dispensaries.) The New York Times says that Oregon and Alaska are the most likely states to do so this year. 

It's nice to know that God is on the side of potheads. The Christian "Ganjapreneur" who is the subject of the TIME story offers up some perusasive theology is support of this.

The Davies’ use the Bible to reconcile selling marijuana with their faith, believing that cannabis was among the “seed-bearing plants” the book of Genesis says God gave man on the sixth day. “You’ve got to remember who created it,” Bryan said recently, shortly after the dispensary employees finished their daily 6 p.m. prayer.