Altered Goals

I thought I would be posting a lot this month with an in-depth discussion about my goals for 2014.  As I've struggled to get almost anything done this moth I've realized that I need to make my goals very, very limited.

Things that are important to me include a lot of things, but I just can't do everything.  In fact, I can't really do very much since I am pretty slow in developing skills / learning and reading.  I also do not have very much time to myself.

I'm interested in (in no particular order):

• Archaeology
• Anthropology
• Sports (watching)
• Hockey
• Rugby
• Football
• Sports (participating)
• Swimming
• In-line skating
• Rugby
• Hockey (wish I could)
• Joining some sort of team
• Sailing
• Short fiction writing
• Horror
• Fantasy
• Mystery
• Sci-Fi
• Comedy
• Audio Drama
• Novel writing (same genres as my short fiction)
• Bike commuting
• Podcasting
• Old Time Radio
• Pets
• Getting another Bearded Dragon
• Getting a dog
• Pond fish
• Gardening
• Camping
• Boy Scouts, specifically Commissioning
• Girl Scouting
• Deism
• Forestry
• Staying healthy and doing things that will help me prolong my life
• Romance
• Family
• Music
• Ukulele
• Bass (wish I could play)
• Sax
• Wish I could join a band
• History
• Military in general
• WWII era
• Chicago
• Greece
• Astronomy and star gazing
• Greek and Greece
• Family vacation
• Reading

So you can see that there are a lot of things.  A lot of these things have additional expansions below them.  A lot either need a huge investment of time, money or both.  Some of these things are very personal, some are charitable and some are involved with others in a mutual nature.

Even when I start to narrow down the list or prioritize it so that I can develop goals I end up adding more and more.

Previously I listed five areas for goals:

1. Greek
2. Archaeology
3. Writing
4. New Job
5. Commissioning

I left off a health oriented goal, but two weeks ago I weighed myself and clearly I need to exercise on a regular basis.  You can see that the goals keep getting scope creep. If I want to change these six to areas of importance rather than goals it might help, but I'm not completely convinced.

I think I need to tighten this very much, man up and focus.

My will make just two goals:

1. Learn Greek
2. Get published

However I will measure everything I do against 7 priority levels:

1. Staying healthy
2. Learning Greek
3. Staying employed
4. Family support (things my family needs me to do)
5. Commissioning
6. Getting published
7. Archaeology

I'm going to talk about my priorities more on Flowers of Mundelein.  I'll track my Greek goal on Flowers and my publishing goals here.

P90X eX-Xvi

Going to take up cycling around Miami?

I have completed week V of my P90X work.  I completed week IV but that was a cake walk because it was the resting week.  Week V started Phase II with some new routines and a slightly different pattern.  It was a bit tough because of scheduling.  I had to skip Tuesday and I didn't get to Friday or Saturday until after 10:00pm (2200).  It is done now though and in the books, now to continue with Phase II.

If you are wondering about all the roman numerals it is because I found out this morning that today they confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI is going to retire at the end of the month.  RETIRE?  I didn't know they could do that.  Wikipedia says the last time a Pope retired was in 1415 (that's before there WAS an America (the continents I mean, not just the country (and by this I'm sure you know my tongue is firmly plastered to my cheek)))!  I wonder what the deal is exactly and when the College of Cardinals will meet up to elect a new one.  I'll have to keep an eye on it.

I'll let you know right now that although I consider myself a Secular Catholic and a Deist, if I'm elected, I WILL serve.  It has always been my contention that if the College of Cardinals sends up the white smoke and comes out with MY name then the hand of God must be in there somewhere.  Who am I to question the will of God?

My Girl Scout goal is to get Outdoor Training.  I have yet to reschedule, but I do have new emphasis and reason to get off my thinking place and do so.  Our troop is planning a camping trip in April and next month is March, when I have to get my training.

On a Chicago Lincoln Avenue Trail note.  As you know my goal is to develop and write a fortnightly podcast of Chicago History to reinforce and compliment the CLAT work we're doing.  This afternoon I'm meeting with part of the steering committee to do a little steering.  We are going to work on writing a proposal for prospective Eagle Scout candidates so that the project to work on the CLAT with us is within the guidelines of the requirements for the Eagle Scout project.

Lord's Day Cthulhu

So, I was in church yesterday. There was a Sunday School open house for my youngest. I sat in while they did some studying and then played a game of answering questions. My brilliant daughter stole some answers from the other team, knowing, among other things, the name of the censor (the thing they burn incense in and bless the congregation).

In honor of that I put this image.

Interesting that Acts 16 talks about what happened when
Paul went to Athens. He was invited to debate in the Socratic style. Predominately he was laughed at and ignored.

The church makes this point to show how special Dionysus was to accept the Word and become the Bishop of Athens.

I don't remember hearing this story before, but if I did I never realized that even back then, when you apply logic and reason to the Bible, it falls flat. Now that I'm thinking Deistically I see that as the real point of the story. I think our responsibility as sentient creatures is to use our God-given brains to the best of our ability, not to turn them off and follow blindly.

Anyway, it has nothing to do with this month, but Cthulhu is fun.

Building a Bridge of Faith

I realized that I have actually always been a deist, and always will be a deist.

This is important because I have been in a crisis of faith for almost a year now. In July of 2008 I really started doubting the existence of God. In fact, I was pretty sure that there could be no God. The part of my model of the universe that was held up by faith had been blown away.

My model had always been predominantly built on scientific facts. Most of my "path" was on solid ground. There was a very small gap that faith had to span, but the banks of that chasm had shifted and the span had collapsed.

I had to rebuild, but the material I had once used was not strong enough anymore (a modified Catholic catechism with no Hell, no Devil, the bible as allegory, sin and evil as shortages of goodness, God the creator, the Holy Spirit as the spirit of God with us, Jesus Christ as a physical manifestation of God, heaven for those who mold their souls into something compatible with it, the universe and mankind as creations with a purpose, the supremacy of Love, the authority of the church handed down from Christ, the ability of God to perform miracles, and the ability to communicate with God through prayer). I searched and am still searching frantically for material for which to build my bridge of faith. I may use some of the old material yet.

What I have realized as I searched for material to build my bridge is that deism is not material from which the bridge is built. Deism is the tools, knowledge and skill with which I have always, and will always build my bridge, or bridges.

This goes hand in hand with thinking skeptically (or free-thinking), but where skepticism is negative, deism is positive. Skepticism helps sort out the bad material, but deism helps build good material into something useful.

This is very comforting. There is a storm raging in my soul, but no matter how bad things get, I will always be able to build that bridge because I will always have my deist tools.

Well, that's one less thing that I have to worry about.

God, Faith and the Science Fiction Method

I think I can say now that I am a skeptic. I've been growing into that role since last July, but now I think I can say that I am and it's what is driving my Crisis in Faith.

I have always been a critical thinker. I prefer that and that term better because "skeptic" is more a lifestyle and critical thinking is more a process. Skeptic comes with a bag of preconceived notions (both internal and external) while critical thinking doesn't. Critical thinking is perceived as assertive to skepticism's aggressiveness. You ARE a skeptic, but you DO critical thinking.

This gets right into how I developed a Crisis in Faith.

When you write fiction you have something called a "Suspension of Disbelief."

For instance, look at any Muppet show you KNOW that it is all just people's hands inside of Styrofoam, but you suspend your disbelief because you want it to be a pig, a frog, a rat; you want the pig and the frog to be in love; you want the animals and things to all be able to talk; you want there to be legs below the waists; you want to partake of the story.

I use movie examples because they are so illustrative.

Another example would be the Blues Brothers. You know that Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi are not brothers, or orphans, or even Blues musicians. You know that the bluesmobile can't jump that bridge, or jump the Nazi car backwards, but you want to enjoy the movie.

Dan Ackroyd had originally written a big explanation as to how the bluesmobile could do such miraculous things, but the director, John Landis told him, you don't need that, the car does what it does because we say it does. There is suspension of disbelief, Ackroyd didn't think it was strong enough to not lose the audience when the car did strange things, but Landis knew it was.

You see, suspension of disbelief can be spoiled. You see this most often when an expert watches a movie in their field or reads a book in their field. They point out that hand grenades don't work that way, or the Sergeant wouldn't tell the Lieutenant what to do, or cops don't talk that way, or it doesn't look like that in a fire. The experts have lost their suspension of disbelief.

Belief in God is like this to a skeptic or critical thinker. Critical thinking and skepticism require you to ask for scientific evidence for things. There is none and can be none when dealing with an omnipotent, omniscient being. Those skeptics that are not atheists keep their belief of God compartmentalized. They know there can be no proof so they don't ask for it in this one particular case. They have suspended their disbelief so that they can participate in their belief of God.

That's the way I feel, or at least that was the way I felt. I don't think I had examined my own belief system this critically before, but now looking back I realize that this is how I looked at Faith. Now it seems that I have learned too much and it has spoiled the suspension of disbelief.

There is a thing in Science Fiction thing that takes suspension of disbelief one step further. In hard Sci Fi you cannot break any existing Laws or Theories. You may present new ones in the space between the old ones, but you cannot break the existing ones.

For example, the speed of light is immutable. You cannot travel faster than the speed of light, nothing can. So, how do you do star travel within a human lifetime? It happens all the time. There is nothing in science that says for certain that there is no "hyperspace." Current scientific theories suggest many different dimensions, some of which may touch every point in our universe, but are themselves vastly much smaller than our universe. If you could go to that universe; travel within it and then return to our universe you could be taking a shortcut. Science cannot show that this is impossible; therefore you can use this in your stories.

You cannot have people travel faster than light just by going faster or building a bigger engine. You cannot have people defy the laws of gravity, or thermodynamics etc. You cannot have insects grow bigger than people and still have them walk around.

Similarly, if there is a scientific law or theory that is broken by Faith in God, it doesn't work. Belief in God cannot go against what we already know; God must be beyond our current knowledge.

For instance, I have absolutely no belief that Noah took two of every animal aboard the ark. Could an omnipotent God have put those animals in a boat so big that they could have held them? Sure, omnipotence makes everything possible, but I don’t know anyone (outside a few fervent fundamentalist Christians who believe that the Bible is literal and absolutely correct) who believes that to be a literal story.

If you break a scientific law or theory you automatically ruin suspension of disbelief in Science Fiction. If miracles break scientific laws then they could not have happened. If the existence of God breaks scientific laws then God cannot exist. At least that is what would spoil your Belief if you were a skeptic.

Right now I'm sitting on my couch with my wife. We are watching a movie and something happens to ruin my suspension of disbelief. I complain to my wife that the movie is ruined. She says, "don't analyze it so much, just enjoy the movie."

I want to enjoy the "Movie." How do I get that back? Is it like the splotches of ink that if you look at them a certain way become a drawing of a face? Can you make it look like splotches of ink after you see the face? I hope so.

Remember Pearl Harbor Day

This post is about my thoughts from last Sunday, December 7th, 2008. I would say "Happy" Pearl Harbor Day, but that just doesn't sound right.

I'm writing this because I think I'm more coherent when I write than when I speak extemporaneously. If I were to script out what I'm going to say I might as well just type the article and post it.

The Orthodox gospel reading today was from Luke 13:10-17 (BTW, the Orthodox readings tend to be shorter than the Roman Catholic readings for some reason). The story is about how Jesus healed a woman and was chastised for it because it was working on the Sabbath. Jesus responded, not with a swift, "Shut up, it wasn't work, it was a miracle for crying out loud." He said that the guy who criticized him untied his donkey to let it have a drink on the Sabbath.

I wonder what the situation was that surrounded this. To me, the miracle of healing someone right before their eyes should have been staggering. I don't know how any one could have questioned that. Were they performing "healing miracles" all the time? Did they think that Jesus was doing the same type of, "trick" they were doing? Weren't they impressed? Why wasn't Jesus outraged, why did he play word game with them? Why didn't he just tell them to be quiet?

You must understand that I never believed in miracles, not even before my Crisis in Faith (which started in July 08). I always felt that GOD didn't set up a beautiful, well functioning universe jut to break the rules that G made for it. Miracles are things that work on the mind, not physics or reality. Now, I'm not even so sure of that.

Let me get into the other thoughts I had when I was standing there in church (in the Orthodox service you mostly stand). I stand in the Narthex or the back of the church (more on that later) when my daughters are in Sunday school.

What's the purpose of church? What's the purpose of prayer? Let me suggest that they are useful even if you don't believe in GOD or are shaky about your faith. The reason is that it gives you time to think, time devoted only to thoughts about GOD, the universe, our place in it and our relationships with each other. I think this time is very useful.

I was thinking that I personally use church time and prayer to my own advantage. I listened to a podcast called Skeptoid. The podcaster in that show is an atheist and he suggested that our moral centers are the same for all humans, regardless if you believe in GOD or not. That our morals grow from a basic human cultural community, guided by GOD or not. With that in mind, I think that church could be the way to strengthen that moral center. If you believe in GOD you are there with other believers. If you don't believe then you could put the very same teachings (love your neighbor, etc.) to work to strengthen your moral character, just take out the GOD driven part.

When I was in Afghanistan I led prayer services when there was no priest available. Do I feel hypocritical about that? No, because I was just there to facilitate others prayers even if I didn't pray myself (I did at that time though, but my argument still stands). They used GOD as the source of their morals and strength, I used the community. When I'm with a group of Catholics I feel at home. I know what they know and I know a lot of what they believe. If they are good Catholics I should have nothing to fear, IF they follow the morals prescribed in their religion.

I wonder if you can pray to the community. My prayers for years have been the type of prayers for strength and guidance. The types of prayers for the strength and intelligence to use what I have been given. I could just as easily meditate and try to use the strength of the community around me.

There is a book by Stu Kaufman called Reinventing the Sacred. I haven't read it yet, but I've read a review and in it he talks about the fact that people need a "sacred" and there is sacred right here in the world around us. The beauty of nature and the human community at its best are awesome and worthy of respect and perhaps veneration themselves

In an article I read recently called "Religion for Skeptics" by L. Karl Branting. It was very heartening. In it he said that GOD performs two essential functions for humans, transcendence and morality.

I've written about morality already, but this transcendence is something I find very dear. This is the part where I say I WANT there to be a GOD. I NEED the transcendence. My Scout law tells me to be reverent, but doesn't mandate to whom or what to be reverent.

Branting says that the community is a kind of meta-being (my word) that we are beholden to. It provides the morality. It provides the thing that is bigger than all of us (as individuals). It provides the immortality we all want.

This immortality is not only in the memory of us (which we all know and which seems hollow to me), but in the way we shape others and the world around us, just by being here. Every one of us, no matter how small, petty or reclusive adds to the human "inertia."

This is the community that I'm referring to when I say, "pray" to the community.

There is one small problem. Human communities are flawed because of what they are made of. GOD, if G exists is not, because G isn't made of the same stuff. This is a stronger base for most. It is just that I can't use that base anymore. I have to hope that the human community and it's evolution are moving in the right direction, and maybe I can help it. This is called Cultural Evolution and I think I'm going to have to believe in it to keep up this idea of a community based morality and transcendence.

I have to explain why I stand in the narthex. I do because I don't feel comfortable in the actual church and I think I might make others uncomfortable (what with my note taking and all). That puts me OUTSIDE the community. That doesn't help at all. I need my wife and children to act as my chaperones or proxies.

On the other hand, what my Father said is becoming stronger in my mind. He said that basically Boy Scouts is his religion. I think this may be closer to the truth than he imagines.

In church they talked about leaps of faith. On another episode of Skeptoid the host said that to use science to find evidence for GOD was going against religion, even though it is being done to supposedly help reinforce faith.

This is similar to Douglas Adams' argument that if you have proof of GOD then GOD ceases to exist because GOD is dependent on faith alone. When you have proof you don't need faith, and you actually can't have faith, by definition.

The problem with this argument is painfully obvious, but what I want to point out is the problem of seeing no need to try to find evidence for GOD. The reason I see for looking for evidence of GOD, or for using logic to figure out GOD, or just the logical questioning of GOD is this, you will always need to make a leap of faith in order to believe in GOD (who, by definition is outside, beyond our direct observations and proofs), but just like an actual leap, the more narrow the gap, the easier the leap. Some people can leap very far, some can't go much more than a long step. Personally I always needed a very narrow gap between GOD and our reality.

GOD is in the leaping, not either side. Right now I feel like the space has closed up and there is no room to leap at all.

Maybe the perfect human community in the distance (cultural evolution) is an effort worth working for, and maybe eventually leaping for.

Memorial Services, Ceremonies and Faith

I went to church yesterday and had a lot to think about. They were having a memorial service for several former parishioners and for departed veterans in honor of Veterans' Day.

First of all the bulletin had a short essay about how the gospels are "written icons." I thought, "Are you kidding me?" In my opinion, icons are strange looking, not beautiful or lovely. I'm also of the opinion that icons, statues and stained glass are there to help educate and guide the illiterate. To say that the gospels are an imitation of what amounts to picture books is to belittle the written and even spoken word. I find it suspect.

In John's gospel, chapter one he says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was fully God." Hmm, did he say, God was the picture? When you put icons ahead of the actual words of the bible then you are basically dumbing-down the thing and that irks me.

Okay, enough of that. That is PURELY religion and will lead to trouble if I go down that road.

An eFriend of mine (Sadie who commented on my Obama post) said that she would pray for me. In my crisis in faith that may sound hollow, but I do find value in prayer and in attending church. I appreciated her offer.

When I was in Afghanistan I went to mass every Sunday. My faith was stronger then, but whenever I have been away on military missions I always make time for prayer and church services. Why? It gives me time to meditate and reflect. It gives me the time I need to get my head right. It give me a small space of time when I don't have to, in fact I'm not supposed to think about mundane things, but the bigger picture. I think that is important.

Another thing I've noticed since I've been looking at religion and faith with a more skeptical eye is that there is a sort of need for ceremonies. I think human beings need ceremonies; we have them all the time. Some are religious of course and the thinking is that God has to be treated in a special, not an ordinary way. But, we also have purely secular ceremonies and they can have just as poignant and traditional meaning and place in our lives.

A good example is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Even if you do not believe in any sort of god and you don't believe that we have any life beyond the one we now know; you would still show reverence to the memory of the men and women who served our country and gave the ultimate sacrifice.

I think that prayer and church attendance falls within that greater umbrella of ceremony, but that Ceremony is a much bigger thing. It is also a thing that I think we must have. I think that Ceremony helps cement the morals of our culture. Whether there is a god or not, we as humans need Ceremony.

One of the things about ceremonies is that sometimes your mind follows what your body is doing. I mean, if you get dressed and go to church you will naturally be thinking churchy thoughts. If you get dressed and go to the gym you will find yourself motivated to exercise. If you get dressed and go to work, you are likely to actually do your job. Maybe we have a kind of mental inertia that sometimes must be overcome.

On the other hand, sometimes we do something (go through the motions, if you will) but hold a different thing in our mind. That's something I could never understand about atheists who file lawsuits. You often hear about an atheist who filed a lawsuit because they had to say, blah blah blah with god in it, or blah blah blah to god. Why don't they just say it, but (to them) know it isn't true? Is it hurting them? If they really want the thing that is surrounding that god reference then why can't they put up with that word?

I'm jumping topics a bit here. When I was in Afghanistan, as I said I went to mass every Sunday. Some Sundays we had no priest, so I led the service. When it was available I administered communion, when it wasn't, I led the liturgy service. Even then I felt a pang of guilt at this because I felt like, I'm not worthy. Who was I to lead a church service? I wasn't holier than anyone else there.

What I found within myself was that I was not leading the service because I was better than anyone; I was leading the service as a service to others. I was doing what I could to facilitate their faith and religion. They were the ones who were holier than me, and I was helping them to be so. I want Sadie and anyone who wants to partake in a discussion about these topics to feel that way too. Even if you don't restore my faith, I hope I can, through our discussions, help to facilitate your faith.

The Roman Catholic gospel reading for this Sunday was very interesting to me. In the story Jesus says that there were three employees who were each given an amount of money. The first two invested the money and gave back more than they had gotten to their employer. The third buried the money and gave exactly back what he had given. The employer was mad that he hadn't even thought to put it in a bank to at least earn interest. The employer praised the other two and even gave the third man's money to the first man so that he could make more.

Given the market lately it would be easy to see this parable as a story about money. Alternately, you could also think of money as representing grace or faith and the employer as God. Immediately, for me, the money stood for the word. I saw it as another version of the parable about the sower and the seeds. That's interesting that I feel that in a way I hope I'm helping strengthen people's faith, just like investing money.

An Escape In More Ways Than One

I'll bet you all thought I was eaten by the Great Cthulhu or at least locked up for losing my sanity, but I wasn't, I escaped Cthulhu month with my sanity.

We had a costume contest and a cubicle decorating contest at work. I lost both, but here are some pics.

I went as a Man in Charcoal from Area 51 7/22. I have included a photo of myself and Max Brazel.

The other escape of which I speak is my escape from a dreaded virus (I suppose it was a virus and not a spore from Yuggoth) that kept me sick all weekend and even made me miss Church on Sunday and work on Monday. If things are as I figure they are with the whole "God Thing" then missing church doesn't really matter.

I am doing NaNoWriMo again this year. I'll post my synopsis in a later post and keep you all abreast of my meanderings.

Oh, and someone voted on the poll that they were going to dance naked in the woods for Halloween. It was warm enough, but you didn't invite me!

Religion and Timeliness

Last week we went to see my Dad, who is getting chemo for Pancreatic Cancer.

I had gone to the Marytown giftshop and told the lady there (I think she is a nun, but you can't tell these days) that my Dad had cancer. She started running around and loading my arms with things, "I needed" some of them, "right away." I got him a Perpetual Mass (they say his name for people to pray for him in every mass at the chapel there, I told my Dad, "they'll be reading your name in the mass..." in homage to The Quiet Man), a couple of candles, a scapular, two prayer cards, and a bottle of holy water from Lourdes.

With my own flagging faith I didn't know if this would do any good, but I figured I didn't want to be like the man in the joke that by passed a 4x4, a boat and a helicopter because he was waiting for the Lord to save him from the flood, never realizing that the Lord sent all those things. My situation is the other way around, but if God was going to save him by Holy water or chemo, I wasn't going to ignor anything.

I also didn't know if my Dad would appreciate the gifts. He and my Mom are donating their bodies to science and neither of them care what happens to their bodies, "when they're done with them." My Mom is a vocal atheist (I don't know if that's the right term, since I think she is mad because God isn't running things the way she thinks they should be run and therefore she refuses to believe in him), so I didn't know if they would just roll their eyes at me. In fact, my Dad said that only my Mom felt that way about God and he was willing to take any and everything. I guess he agreed with my opinion about the man in the joke.

The timeliness I speak of is this, it seems strange that in order for me to really think clearly about the existance of God I need the latest books and articles. Because science is advancing rapidly on the origins of the universe, the presumed territory of religion, in order to counter the very latest arguements against God's existence, I need the very latest information.

I've found two books that might help me in this, both published in 2008. The first is Spiritual Evolution by George E. Vaillant and the second is The Big Questions in Science and Religion by Keith Ward. I haven't gotten very deep into either, but they seem to be acknowledging science and the advances being made and not dealing with the entire issue in strictly a spiritual sense.

I've been reading and listening to the "Skeptic Newsletter" and Skepticality. I know that the usual defense of faith by those skeptics who are still believers is that faith has NO basis in science and is not testable. It is therefore NOT subject to skeptisism. You can choose to believe or not believe, there can be no proof of it either way.

Douglas Adams confronted such an arguement in the first Hitchhikers' book. His result was God responding, "I never thought of that" and disappearing in a puff of logic.

I've never agreed with Adams, but I do need a better logical arguement, and more. I need a way to view God for what God means to us.

I'll let you know how the books turn out later.

Source of Morality and Other Thoughts

I didn't have time last Sunday to write this, but I took notes at church.

How come people look at you strange when you take notes in church? It's not like I wasn't paying attention, in fact I was probably paying more attention than they were. After all, while I was paying attention and processing the sermon enough to write notes, they were watching me.

The sermon was given by the Metropolis of Denver (Greek Orthodox Bishop of Denver). He said some interesting things that fell right into what I'm struggling with right now.

Where do morals come from, what are their bases if there is no God? The bishop maintained that if there is no God then there are no morals. He said that if you don't have God you have no higher authority to answer to.

I disagree. Secularly you have the legal authorities to answer to. That's enough for some. Otherwise you have your community or the good of all humanity to guide you on the moral path.

Maybe there is such a thing as True Good. If there is, and there is no GOD, is there also True Evil?

I think that if there is a GOD, and G is Love and Good; and G created everything from Gself then everything is basically good and there can be no evil. In this theory I maintain that evil is only an illusion, there so we can have the Free Will to have something to choose from. In the end all will be good, made right.

The Bishop held a similar view that everything will be all right in the end, but he said that God allows evil because He'll make everything all right in the end. He was far too flippant about it.

I also came up with what I think may be a truly original concept / analogy. Newtonian physics is to Einsteinian physics as human experience is to divine experience. Newtonian physics is fine for every day, but at the extreme end of things it falls apart and you need something else, something more. This is something that's completely different, almost unrecognizable from the point of view of the former.

I don't know where that leaves me.

I'll keep thinking and meditating on it.

Skeptical Cthulhu

Seems they missed one, or maybe Cthulhu is outside the realm that this depicts.

Anyway I couldn't decide which to put on the tree so I posted both.

I've been listening to the podcast called Scepticality. They've got some very good points and it made me think about the Darwin fish and this Cthulhu fish.

The funny thing is, the Skeptics say that they aren't specifically against religion, but only because religion does not rely on evidence at all and is therefore untestable. I'm sure any evidence anyone ever offered for religion or god would be fodder for investigation.

The previous religious post I put up said that maybe we can look at God as ourselves outside of this dream that we call life. If that is so it fits exactly into what the skeptics are saying.

Whatever scientific experiments you conduct in a dream are only valid within the dream logic and reality. If God is outside that then God is untestable, but not unknowable.

Can't you tell something about a person by examining his dreams?

I dreamt of unknown Kadath last night, what does that mean?

BTW, FSM is Flying Spaghetti Monster for those of you who didn't talk like a pirate on 19 Sep.

Religion and Faith: Introducing Lucidment

I mentioned before that my faith had become untethered. I had read an article in the July Scientific American and it shook my faith badly enough to set it adrift.

I had been thinking, "What if Life is the worst it gets?" What if this life that we are living right now is as bad as it is going to get and that Heaven is going to be better. I already said that I don't believe in Hell so that made sense, but I never looked at it that way. If it were true then all the pain and injustice in life is just because this is our lesser existence. It isn't a trial, it just is bad. Some times life isn't too bad, but if it is then don't worry because Heaven is better.

That doesn't address the fundamental problems I was having with my faith, mainly that there is no way that God can be both omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent; and revealed. Science is revealing a universe too complex and random from a participants view to be knowable in the whole.

I had been thinking that God was like a clockmaker and that he had set the rules of the universe and let it run itself. This may have been the reason that increased knowledge in the physical laws made the existence of God less tenable. What if that isn't the nature of God, but then what would account for all that science tells us and still leave room for God?

I recently listened to most of a podcast by the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD). In podcast 8, the speaker was Tim Freke. He said something that really rang true to me. It also addressed the problem I was having. He said that life as we know it is a dream. Everything and everyone in the dream is really us. This is very similar to the Buddhist view and I had heard it before, but I never looked at it this way.

He said basically that enlightenment is like having a lucid dream. If you are enlightened, you are like a dreamer that knows he's dreaming. When we are not enlightened you are like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming and you think your life is real.

I am going to call this state of knowing that you are "dreaming" as "Lucidment." This will help me understand enlightenment better and help me think of it in terms of "the dream."

This world view means several things to me right off:

1. God is not separate from us.

2. Life can be good or bad but it doesn't REALLY affect us.

3. There are no alternatives (Hell vs. Heaven) to waking.

4. Life can be beautiful. We can enjoy it and we can make it more beautiful.

5. The universe is the dream and it obeys different "dream" logic and rules. All our scientific knowledge is based on "dream" logic and laws. This means that everything science is telling us is about the "Dream" and has nothing to do with God or the "Waking State."

6. "God" doesn't have to be omniscient or omnipotent. We don't know everything in our dreams, but the dreams are us, everything in the dream is us really, although it seems like different people and things happening to us, they are really things we are thinking about and "doing" to ourselves.


This also immediately begs many questions to me, but the questions don't diminish my hope for a renewed faith:

1. Who is the dreamer?

2. What is the nature of the dreamer?

3. If the dreamer is me then am I everyone or am I only me and everyone else is no one?

4. Do we lose ourselves when we wake?

5. What is the goal of life?

6. Do we want to be a remembered dream?

7. Is life outside the dream good or bad?

8. Is the dreamer good or bad or something else?

9. Is there good and evil?

10. Can you make moral decisions (for instance, in dreams you can commit crimes, but you can't be prosecuted for them)?

I will want to address these questions in later posts. Also, because church is a perfect time to reflect on faith, I think that Sunday would be a perfect time to record here my thoughts on religion and faith.

Other issues I thought of today that I want to cover eventually:
- What is religion?
- What is prayer, what is it good for, what is it not?
- Why should you attend church?
- What do you do with Bible readings?
- What about preset prayers, the Creed and the Our Father?
- Why are we not in communion with God?
- If there are no miracles then there can be no transubstantiation, what does this mean?

A Faith Adrift

As I said, this is a webLOG and this post is the first in what I think will be the log part of my blog.

This will probably change as I go along. I may edit this post, or I may just add more posts.

I put in my PDA some of the things I was thinking about God, faith and religion.

Here it is straight out of the handheld:

"A religion that venerates god, but does not appeal to god for intercession? I never thought god would step in and "fix" everything. Miracles are how you choose to view or experience events AND/OR how they Affect YOU.


09/27/08 more added 29Sep08

I believe:
1. Something or someone started the universe
2. There are powers greater than us
3. Free will
4. Evolution
5. If there is a god who is involved with us then he is good and loves us
6. There are other intelligent races in the universe other than human that are on a similar (IE not godlike) level
7. The universe is nearly infinitely complex and unknowable in the whole (analogy: you can know how bricks work and how to make and lay them, but not have knowledge of all of the Great Walls in China or even all the walls in all the houses in England).
8. Religion was created by man.
9. Religious people are not stupid
10. Non-religious people are not just people that haven't been enlightened (born again etc.)


I don't believe:
1. God is:
--a. Omnipotent, omniscient, knowable, revealed, AND interventionist (he may be some of these, but not all)
--b. Angry
--c. Predeterministic
--d. A conscious earth or biosphere
2. The universe is completely random
3. Miracles
4. Angels
5. Reincarnation
6. Satan
7. Hell
8. Ghosts
9. UFOs have visited us
10. Prayers can have any physical effect (see miracles)
11. Magic (see miracles)

I hope:
1. There is God
2. There is a heaven"