“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.”
Jonathan Dudley is the author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics
“…creationism has failed to provide an alternative explanation for the vast majority of evidence explained by evolution.
It has failed to explain why birds still carry genes to make teeth, whales to make legs, and humans to make tails.
It has failed to explain why the fossil record proposed by modern scientists can be used to make precise and accurate predictions about the location of transition fossils.
It has failed to explain why the fossil record demonstrates a precise order, with simple organisms in the deepest rocks and more complex ones toward the surface.
It has failed to explain why today’s animals live in the same geographical area as fossils of similar species.
It has failed to explain why, if carnivorous dinosaurs lived at the same time as modern animals, we don’t find the fossils of modern animals in the stomachs of fossilized dinosaurs.
It has failed to explain the broken genes that litter the DNA of humans and apes but are functional in lower vertebrates.
It has failed to explain how the genetic diversity we observe among humans could have arisen in a few thousand years from two biological ancestors.
“…the belief that scientists can discover truth, and that, once sufficiently debated, challenged and modified, it should be accepted even if it creates tensions for familiar belief systems, has an obvious impact on decisions that are made everyday. And it is that belief Christians reject when they reject evolution.
In doing so, they’ve not only led America astray on questions ranging from the value of stem cell research to the etiology of homosexuality to the causes of global warming. They’ve also abandoned a central commitment of orthodox Christianity.”
I finished the novel Muhammad yesterday and have been pondering what to say about it. I found the story interesting and well-told. I’ve read a number of other books by Deepak Chopra and like the way he writes.
I think I’ll let smarter, more knowledgable folks review the book. No shortage there. So, what can I say about the novel?
If you were a kid, or have a kid, or you’ve been to a kid’s party, you’ve seen those guys that make balloon animals. Before blowing up those long skinny balloons they twist and shape into giraffes and stuff, they usually stretch the balloon. And as they inflate the balloon, they sometimes bend and turn it.
That’s what much of my reading has been like in the last few years. My thinking gets stetched and expanded, often to the breaking point.
One guy makes a hat, the next a horse. I enjoy them all and try to remember it’s all the same air inside the different colored balloons.
I knew almost nothing about the Prophet Muhammad. Now I know more. And maybe a little about the people who follow his teachings.
I fear many of those who would discuss this with me a) haven’t read the book and b) would be intent on explaining why Islam is wrong. (In their world, there is only one balloon and it’s blue and round.)
For that reason, I’ll limit comments to those who have read the book. So be prepared with a specific page reference.
Last week I read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman. I’ve been sorting out my thoughts about the book but I’m not there yet. I think it’s going to take a while. But I want to get something down here while the story (and my impressions) are still fresh in my mind. So, this will be one of those stream-of-consciousness posts (not a real review of the book).
GMJ&TSC is fiction. It is the story (a story) about the life and death of Jesus and his twin brother Christ (hardly a spoiler since it’s the title).
I found the style of the book very different from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The book read very quickly. The chapters are very short with little or no character development.
To me it felt as though Pullman was trying to condense the stories most Christians grew up with to the bare “facts” (The Childhood of Jesus, Jesus Scandalises the Scribes, The Death of John, etc). Now that I think about it, each chapter read like a Cliffs Note.
Here’s how Pullman describes the book on the back of the dust cover:
“The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”
TRUTH and HISTORY –and the relationship between the two– is a common theme throughout GMJ&TSC:
“If the way to the Kingdom of God is to be opened, we who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.” (pg 99)
Deeply “religious” people are often offended when someone takes liberties with their story. (Jesus Christ Superstar, the Dutch cartoonist’s depiction of Mohammed, etc) And if you happen to believe that every word of the King James Bible is literally true and an exact account of the life and death of Jesus, you probably won’t find this book a good read.
If on the other hand, you aren’t ready to stop thinking about such things, you might. I know that I did. Here are some questions it raised for me:
I’ve always wondered how deeply religious people could be so certain their “faith” was the real deal and everyone else’s was bogus. Brian Hines wonders, too:
“People will reject unsubstantiated claims in holy books… except the book they believe in. People will reject miracle stories… except miracles related by their own faith. People will reject the divinity of living prophets or messengers of God… except the person they accept as a genuine spiritual teacher.
Every religious believer, aside from the few who are genuinely open-minded, considers that he or she has found the One True Faith among the 4,199 or so false faiths. Yet how is this possible, logically or realistically?
It’s like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average.
There are good reasons for belonging to a religious, spiritual, or mystical group. But having a lock on cosmic truth isn’t one of them. Nobody knows what lies at the heart of reality, or even if there is such a thing: a heart, a core, a central truth.
So the only honest attitude is “I don’t know.” Along with, “You don’t know either.” This leaves us all on the same unknowing level.”
“Religions are like different maps whose routes all lead to the collective good of society. Some maps take their followers over rugged terrain. Other maps have easier paths. Some of the travelers of each route will be assigned the job of being the protectors and interpreters of the map. They will teach the young to respect it and be suspicious of other maps.
“Okay,” I said, “but who made the maps in the first place?”
“The maps were made by the people who went first and didn’t die. The maps that survive are the ones that work,” he said.
At last, he had presented a target for me to attack. “Are you saying that all the religions work? What about all the people who have been killed in religious wars?”
“You can’t judge the value of a thing by looking only at costs. In many countries, more people die from hospital errors than religious wars, but no one accuses hospitals of being evil. Religious people are happier, they live longer, have fewer accidents, and stay out of trouble compared to nonreligious people. From society’s viewpoint, religion works.”
— From God’s Debris by Scott Adams
Brian Hines finds it strange “that religiosity is so often associated with humility, selflessness, and lack of ego. Actually, the religious impulse is highly egotistical.”
How would religious belief be affected if it was known that our sensations of being connected with, of under the care of, a higher power were entirely contained within our own personal mind/brain?
The mystical and spiritual experiences would feel the same. But no longer would we believe that we were contacting a transcendent divinity. We couldn’t claim a special relationship with some supernatural being, because that “higher power” would be us.
An expanded us, to be sure. An us that encompassed normally untapped areas of the mind/brain. An us that wasn’t as split, searching, anxious, uncertain, and self-doubting as we are now.
This would eliminate a lot of unnecessary religious egotism. No one would be a member of a chosen people, or a special beloved of God. We’d all just be human beings, having human experiences, making the best use possible of our human psyches.
I’m grateful we live in a country where it’s still okay wonder and write about such things. And yet, any candidate fo higher office who dared make such a connection between religion and ego would be toast.
“Well, usually it’s because some important religious event took place there.”
“What does it mean to say that something took place in a particular location when we know that the earth is constantly in motion, rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun? And we’re in a moving galaxy that is part of an expanding universe. Even it you had a spaceship and could fly anywhere, you can never return to the location of a past event. There would be no equivalent of the past location because location depends on your distance from other objects, and all objects in the universe would have moved considerably by then.”
“I see your point, but on Earth the holy places keep their relationship to other things on Earth, and those things don’t move much,” I said.
“Let’s say you dug up all the dirt and rocks and vegetation of a holy place and moved it someplace else, leaving nothing but a hole that is one mile deep in the original location. Would the holy land now be the new location where you put the dirt and rocks and vegetation, or the old location with the hole?”
“I think both would be considered holy,” I said, hedging my bets.
“Suppose you took only the very top layer of soil and and vegetation from holy place, the newer stuff that blew in or grew after the religious event occurred thousands of years ago. Would the place you dumped the topsoil and vegetation be holy?”
“That’s a little trickier,” I said. “I’ll say the new location isn’t holy because the topsoil that you moved there isn’t itself holy, it was only in contact with holy land. If holy land could turn anything that touched it into more holy land, then the whole planet would be holy.”
The old man smiled. “The concept of location is a useful delusion when applied to real estate ownership, or when giving someone directions to the store. But when it is viewed through the eyes of an omnipotent God, the concept of location is absurd.
“While we speak, nations are arming themselves to fight for control of lands they consider holy. They are trapped in the delusion that locations are real things, not just fictions of the mind. Many will die.”
— From Scott Adams’ God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment
I just finished listening to the audio version of Scott Adams’ first non-Dilbert, non-humor book (2004): God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment. In the introduction, Mr. Adams identifies the target audience as “people who enjoy having their brains spun around inside their skulls.
I’ve read this small book (132 pages) twice before checking out the audio version. And I know I will read this book many more times, trying to wrap my mind around ideas the human brain probably will never grasp. Like religion.
“Imagine that a group of curious bees lands on the outside of a church window. Each bee gazes upon he interior through a different stained glass pane. To one bee, the church interior is all red. To one bee, it is all yellow, and so on. The bees cannot experience the inside of the church directly; they can only see it. They can never touch the interior or smell it or interact with it in any way. If bees could talk they might argue over the color of the interior. Each bee would stick to his version, not capable of understanding that the other bees were looking through different pieces of stained glass. Nor would they understand the purpose of the church or how it got there or anything about it. The brain of a bee is not capable of such things.
“But these are curious bees. When they don’t understand something, they become unsettled and unhappy. In the long run the bees would have to choose between permanent curiosity—an uncomfortable mental state—and delusion. The bees don’t like those choices. They would prefer to know the true color of the church’s interior and its purpose, but bee brains are not designed for that level of understanding. They must choose from what is possible, either discomfort or self-deception. The bees that choose discomfort will be unpleasant to be around and they will be ostracized. The bees that choose self-deception will band together to reinforce their vision of a red-based interior or yellow-based interior and so on.”
“So you’re saying we’re like dumb bees?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Worse. We are curious.”