Ise Shrine and the Long Now

"This Shinto shrine at Ise named Jingu Shrine is rebuilt every twenty years. Its first incarnation was in 04 C.E. This type of design, which utilises ephemeral materials while capitalizing on the human element, is a great inspiration for The Long Now Foundation. This object has done something which Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids have not; it aided the survival of its institution."

From the Long Now Foundation website:

The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to todays "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

I originally found this organization through its other fascinating endeavor, The Rosetta Project:

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible online archive of ALL documented human languages. Our goal is to create the most broad and complete reference work on the languages of the world to date- a reference work of relevance for academic researchers and educators as well as native communities looking for materials in support of language revitalization work.

We are creating this unprecedented digital library of human language through an open contribution, peer review process and we invite you to participate. All documents and data sets are freely available through this growing online database as well as archived on an extreme longevity micro-etched nickel disk- a contemporary "Rosetta Stone" for the languages of the world.

So, then, what is this website for?

This blog was supposed to be about religion. I'd wanted to argue for it in the context of the modern world and from a rationalist - maybe, rather, pragmatist - point of view.

I'd wanted to say: you can be modern and religious, too. You can be a scientist and go to church. Religion has things that are good for us, and we should not dismiss them out of hand. I'd wanted to make William James' point that religion is a good, a benefit to human life, because it concerns itself with "the more eternal things," and that we should take this to heart and explore it from a modernist point of view.

This is what I still believe. But religion is also a weapon, and it's being used against me right now. So how can I argue any of this any longer?

I can, I suppose, even though I can't subject myself to the abuses any longer. I've learned an important lesson over the years, and that is that a person has always to be open to new thought, new ideas, and the best (the only?) way to keep oneself open is through contradiction. (Imagine that I'm saying that now! From De Caussade, and something I wanted to actually do psychology research in: "God instructs the heart not by means of ideas, but by pains and contradictions.")

Through placing oneself at the edge, at the borders where all the wars are, and going through the pain of the conflict. You do learn this way. And I have learned. Maybe that's what I actually feel now, in fact: that the current endless round-and-round about homosexuality is old news and no longer profitable to me. It is simply a dead end, and it's time for something new. Maybe this pain is the birthing of that, whatever it is.

So I suppose I can still still use this blog, instead of shutting it down. I want to talk, anyway, about science, and mathematics, and research in biology and psychology. Perhaps I'll go back to school and really do that research I mentioned above. I want to still talk about religion as a force, even if I'm not personally involved. (Of course, I have to be involved in spiritual things in some way, even if only in A.A.) I want to talk about "The Theory of Everything," maybe, and I guess I still can. Maybe things will get interesting, in fact. I've been trying to write about my own religious conversion and have found the results stilted and very uneven; maybe there's a reason, and maybe Christianity as it exists right now is simply not right for me, not enough....

Leaving the Church....

I feel so much more relaxed when I consider it. So much more at ease, and much less tense and worried.

The thought of just getting out for good is becoming more and more appealing by the day. I won't have to keep up this silly argument about homosexuality any longer - secularists mostly don't care. I live in one of the most tolerant states in the nation (but of course a person still has to be careful), one that early passed anti-discrimination laws and lately a domestic partnership bill. (I think that the tolerance here is due to the huge immigrant population, and because we have the highest per capita percentage of scientists in the nation. Religion is a diverse affair here, so no one group has the upper hand. And people seem to be reasonable and veyr "live-and-let-live," across the board.) It's easy to be gay here, even in the Church.

But I don't think I want to support the Christian Church any longer. If I convert to Catholicism, I'll just be waiting for the day when I'm eventually denied Communion - which is the main reason I'd convert in the first place. The hierarchy is cracking down, and I'd likely get caught in the crackdown.

The only hope is if the American Church splits. Then, I'd be happy to stay. But I can't tolerate the fighting any longer, and the deafness of the opposition. They are tasting new power now, aligned with the "Global South," and they are in the mood for punishment. We should deny them the opportunity by simply breaking away. They can have the Communion; I don't care at all anymore.

The best move, though, would be to leave entirely. I had God before I came to the Church, and I'll have God when I leave. I will have to go through withdrawal (see "Anglo-Catholic," below, for why), but it will be better in the end.

Anglo-Catholic

I went to The Church of the Resurrection yesterday for solemn high mass. It's a beautiful, beautiful church, and the liturgy is indeed very high there, complete with a reading of "The Last Gospel" (John 1:1-17) after the Benediction and Dismissal, and "The Angelus" at the end of the mass - something I've never seen before. This service was called "Harvest Thanksgiving," and I gather it has something to do with English custom. (Again! The Anglophilia in this church!)

The Mystery Worshipper who reviewed Resurrection described "the delighful, prayer-filled haze of incense" - and so it was. I can still see the layers of smoke drifting through the air by the half-open windows facing the street. I do love incense, at least occasionally; it evokes hugely potent sense memories - and "occasionally" is more wonderful, to me, in fact, than experiencing it every week. (A few weeks ago I went to a dim sum place with a friend for lunch and spent part of our time together sniffing the tea leaves, which had the same strong, dense smell as church incense. I even asked the waiter what kind of tea it was; "flower tea" was the answer, whatever that is. I'll find it sometime, though, of this I am certain; I know I shall not rest until I do.)

In any case, it was the most fussy, nosebleed-high mass I've ever been to - even beating out St. Mary's, and that's really saying something. So much going on! The precise movement and ritual; the wildly colorful vestments, including birettas - over the top, there, IMO, but I can live with it; the many, many genuflexions; the incense. Ah, the incense. The fragrant haze surrounding us all, like the impressionistic fog of a film dream sequence, throughout the whole hour-and-a-half of the service and afterwards. The whole service like a dream, actually - the sweet music, and the murmur of prayers and chants, and the bells: all part of the slow, slow, methodical buildup to the climax of the communion itself. A kind of calm serenity about it all. Then an easy descent back to the world, to rest and pray, to give thanks. And then the last gospel reminded us what the whole thing was all about: that the Word has existed from the very Beginning - that the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That, unbelievably, the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Don't forget.

Then getting slowly up to leave at the end, almost regretfully, to go outside into a beautiful cold sunny morning. All a dream.

(Man! I am really hooked now, and what in the world am I going to do about that? Cold turkey at some point, I guess....)

Superman dead

The story of Christopher Reeve has always unnerved me. Here was a man whose onscreen role was that of the world's strongest human, an invulnerable creature from another planet with "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men." (I just pulled that phrase out of some musty recess in my mind that contains everythings from 1950s and 60s TV. In those days, George Reeves - that name again! - was The Man of Steel. He eventually committed suicide because he was typecast in the role, or so went the story.)

Then Chris Reeve fell off a horse and never walked again. He couldn't breathe without help; he couldn't turn his head or move a muscle; he couldn't eat or even pee by himself. I'm sure he thought about suicide every day of his life since 1995. Yet instead he suffered, publicly and achingly, for the sake of his child and his wife and for future unnamed others he could possibly help on account of his fame. The Passion of Christopher Reeve took 10 years to complete.

Handsome, wealthy, decent, kind, and totally destroyed, in an absurd accident. I felt nothing but relief for him this morning when I heard the news.

Requiem aeternum dona eis Domine.
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

(And how unfair life on your earth is, BTW, Domine. If you don't mind my saying so.)

The God of the Infinitesimal

An inchoate thought is forming in my head now, after having read Psalms 1, 2, and 3 today as part of Morning Prayer. I will have to think it out further, but the basic idea is that the Scriptural point of view - and I mean "point of view" literally in this case - is all wrong for our lives in the 21st Century. It's too much in the large visible world.

Today we know that not sin but bacteria and viruses cause disease. We know about T-cells - lymphocytes which recognize and destroy foreign cells. We know about neurons and synapses; we know about the possible connection between the corpus callosum and autism; we know that the brain scans of schizophrenics look different than those of others. We know what dust mites look like magnified 400X; they look like dragons, in fact, like prehistoric monsters. We even know something about top quarks and spin, and possible curled-up physical dimensions too tiny to ever be seen.

But the Psalmist knows none of this. He (she?) knows about armies and vengeance and cattle and wheat and chaff and sea-monsters and all deeps and multitudes. Scripture is silent about so much of what we know and take for granted. It is gross and crude and, as a result, simplistic. It is a history lesson, instead of being a point of departure into the realm of the mystical.

This is why the voices of Hildegard of Bingen and the other mystics are today growing louder; they speak of this inner world of the unseen:

O Holy Fire which soothes the spirit
life force of all creation
holiness you are in living form
You are a holy ointment
for perilous injuries
You are holy in cleansing
the fetid wound.

O breath of holiness
o fire of loving
o sweet taste in the breast
you fill the heart
with the good aroma of virtues.

The solution is to write more stuff like the above for use in approaching the Mysterium Tremendum of God - which, while still Tremendum, belongs also to the realm of the invisibly tiny.

And let's not forget, while we're at it, that the Psalmist thought heaven was about 100 feet up, and that there were "waters above the heavens" - that is, above God's throne where angels circled Him and sang praises. And that the fact of the still-expanding universe was discovered less than 100 years ago. The Psalmist's world was much, much smaller - and also much larger - than the wolrd we know.

Is approaching immortality immoral?

An article in Reason asks this question.

What if a biomedical researcher discovered that lives were being cut short because every human being was infected in the womb by a disease organism that eventually wears down the human immune system's ability to protect us? Until that discovery, the "natural" average lifespan was the proverbial three score and ten years.

Once the discovery is made, another brilliant researcher devises a "vaccine" that kills off the disease organism. Suddenly the average lifespan doubles to seven score (140 years). In a sense, this is exactly where we find ourselves today. There are no "vaccines" yet to cure the disease of aging. But biomedical researchers understand more with each passing year about the processes that cause the increasing physical and mental debilities that we define as aging. Aging is no more or less "natural" than cholera, smallpox, diabetes, arteriosclerosis, or any disease that cuts short human lives.

Nevertheless, a number of prominent bioethicists and other policy intellectuals are arguing that we should oppose any such life-doubling "vaccine" on the grounds that it would interfere with the "natural" course of human life.

Here are the arguments put forward "against":

Callahan makes three arguments. First, he points out that the "problems of war, poverty, environment, job creation, and social and familial violence" would not "be solved by everyone living a much longer life." Second, he asserts that longer lives will lead mostly to more golf games, not new social energy. "I don't believe that if you give most people longer lives, even in better health, they are going to find new opportunities and new initiatives," Callahan writes.

And thirdly, Callahan is worried about what longer lives would do to child bearing and rearing, Social Security and Medicare. He demands that "each one of the problems I mentioned has to be solved in advance. The dumbest thing for us to do would be to wander into this new world and say, 'We'll deal with the problems as they come along.'"

Am I crazy, or are they leaving out one of the main concerns: that there won't be enough room and/or resources to deal with these expanding lifespans? Human beings are already decimating the world's fisheries, for instance, and a catastrophe looms if something isn't done about this soon. Farming methods are getting better every year, of course, and that may take some of the pressure off. But what happens when lifespans continue to increase? Where do we put all the people? And how do we feed them? What about housing? What if there are tensions between the young and old on this account - as indeed there already are, in terms of Social Security, for instance. As machines take over more and more of the work, where will the jobs come from? And won't people just continue to try to hang on, in whatever way they can, long after their usefulness has come to an end? Will euthanasia become a booming business at that point? Will death become a ritual? Or perhaps the old can fight the wars instead of the young, and we can solve the problem that way. Will childbearing be extended into women's later years - into their 60s, 70s, or 80s?

Isn't this sort of a big ethical issue? Am I missing something here?

How is religion like Madison Avenue?

Simple: it creates a need that didn't exist before, and then offers to fill it.

And it doesn't deliver.

In order to save time

I link here Andrew Sullivan's ancient (10 years old already!) article about homosexuality and the Church. I'm tired of saying the same thing over and over and over again, so when I get into it with somebody on a blogsite or other internet forum, I will simply send them here to read this article.

And, I intend to link other articles to this post in the future, plus a summary of my own argument, so that I will eventually have everything in one place and will no longer have to repeat myself. Ahhhhhh.

Neurosociology

Per Steven R. Quartz, Associate Professor, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology and a member of the Computational and Neural Systems program; also Director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory:

Studies of our biological constitution make it increasingly clear that we are social creatures of meaning, who crave a sense of coherence and purpose. Yet, our modern way of life seems to provide fewer and fewer opportunities to engage in the group life that satisfies these human needs—indeed, many of its structures and institutions stunts these very needs. In addition to these obstacles within the design of modern life, it's my hunch that modernist culture is based on a profoundly mistaken view of human needs. The upshot is a deeply flawed view of human happiness as the private pursuit of self actualization. The implications are profound, and range from an enormous cost in public health terms to more and more social conflicts, terrorism being just one manifestation of these.

As science advisor, I would initiate a program at the intersection of science and culture to investigate what modern brain science reveals about human needs and how such an understanding can be applied to create both ways of living and a culture that better satisfies them—for lack of a better word, I'd call this "neurosociology."

I think we will find that the staggering advances in brain science reveal human needs to be vastly different from the modern view—for example, that we aren't the asocial, consumptive selves Freud thought we were, but instead are deeply social and need not only to belong but to identify with groups and purposes larger than ourselves.

This initiative would attempt to use this new knowledge to design ways of living that provide more opportunity for real meaning and social engagement that the human brain requires—from how we ought to think about the design of communities, the workplace, learning institutions, and entertainment and leisure. This initiative would also have to focus on a deeply troubling problem: although science is the engine of our society, its core values and insights have had only a weak influence on our culture. This is a troubling gap: for science, and therefore, our civilization, to sustain itself, we require a culture that is built on the core values and insights of science itself, one that endows human life with the meaning we all crave. Aligning the design of life and a sustaining culture with the human needs that brain science is beginning to reveal would, I think, have a profound impact on many of the most troubling social dilemmas we face.

To sum it up, I would recommend the creation of a new science of human flourishing and significance, a nascent neurosociology, whose goal would be a happiness worth having.

Fermat, or Perfection is Eternal

From the Fermat's Last Theorem Poetry Challenge page.

(Author: Everett Howe, Hendrik Lenstra, and David Moulton.)

"My butter, garcon, is writ large in!"
a diner was heard to be chargin'.
"I HAD to write there,"
exclaimed waiter Pierre,
"I couldn't find room in the margarine."

What will become of us?

I don't know whether or not I can continue belonging to the Christian church. What's happening in the Anglican Communion is hitting too close to home these days; it's too difficult to invest your heart so deeply in something, and then to watch it all torn to pieces before your eyes.

I've been thinking seriously lately about converting to Catholicism. I want to be able to go to mass every day, and it's difficult to do this in the Episcopal Church. And the never-ending chaos in ECUSA is wearing on a person. I've been thinking, too, for awhile now, that Episcopalians are just too smart for their own good. They don't know how to do the simple thing - to enjoy life, to enjoy God and religious belief, to simply have faith. This is one source of the chaos, and it's why I sometimes feel alienated from the church as well. My experiences in A.A. have made things stark and plain to me: I've put my faith in a Power Greater Than Myself, and that's the end of it. If I want to stay alive, and to stay sane, I simply do this, without question.

But I can't be a Catholic, for reasons that Andrew Sullivan laid out so clearly. And for other reasons as well. I may at some point reconsider this, but for now I just can't go there. I just want to go to church to worship God, to receive the Sacrament, and to find some peace and comfort in this harsh world. I'm a religious person now, and I'm finding that ECUSA is not a strong anchor for me.

So, what, then? What will religion become? I've been writing some stories lately - near-future SF - trying to work out this question. I believe that religion still has a place; that it might, in fact, be more necessary than ever as human life goes more and more techno. But right now, I wonder if Christianity will be able to survive; I mean, if it can't deal with homosexuality - an utterly harmless thing, after all! - how will it cope with Futureworld?

I'm depressed, today, I know. Maybe I will feel differently tomorrow. I will go to St. Thomas this Sunday, or to Resurrection, and enjoy the music and the ritual and the incense and the colors and the prayers. Maybe I shouldn't think any further ahead than this. If I can continue this blog, and my religious life, I will. If not, not. That's how things go.

Right now, I think I'll just post the words to "The Holly and the Ivy," which we are singing later this year. They struck me as perfectly gorgeous, and a wonderful illustration of what Christianity can be, when it's showing its good face. It can make blessed the world, and the ordinary human life; it can shine pure light on them, making them sweet and holy and beautiful. It can show precisely why life is eminently worth living:

The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown
Of all the trees that are in the wood
The holly bears the crown

O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a blossom
As white as lily flower
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To be our sweet Saviour

O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good

O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a prickle
As sharp as any thorn;
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.

O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly bears a bark
As bitter as any gall;
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to redeem us all.

O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir

The holly and the ivy
Now both are full well grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.

O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir