It makes a lot of sense that an ant man like Wilson would see evolution from a cooperative model. I must have learned evolution from free market capitalists or something because I sure remember the emphasis being on competition. His Holiness the DL must have got the same lesson plan that I got.

olrlox, thanks for the Tennyson.

I have not read the Dalai Lama’s book but it sounds off to me that he would criticize Darwinian Evolution for leaving out cooperation and altruism when in fact it does not. I don’t think it’s correct to characterize DE as “tooth and claw” alone.

I went to the source( Darwin) where you will find that he talks about cooperation amongst ants as well as primates. He even speaks of interspecies cooperation, though instinctive, such as between ants and aphids.

In “The Decent of Man” Darwin addresses man as social….“selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherences nothing can be effected. A tribe possessing the above qualities in a high degree would spread and be victorious over other tribes; but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, bein it’s turn overcome by some other and still more highly endowed tribe. Thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world.”

But that is Darwin. Darwinian Evolution, if I am not mistaken, encompasses more than what Darwin wrote and much work has been done on altruism and cooperation.

E.O. Wilson in his preface to Darwin’s Origin of Species : “If groups of cooperating individuals are better than solitary animals at obtaining food, building shelters, repelling enemies or ( red tooth and claw, I grant) exploiting others, then the species will evolve toward the formation of social groups. Such has been the case, for example, in coral ants and human beings”

Of course, survival of the fittest means most appropriate to the environment, not neccessarily the most vicious. It is a popular and widespread misunderstanding, but not one active in the scientific community:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056.html

In the Dalai Lama’s book, The Universe in a Single Atom, he makes what I think is an interesting critique of Darwinian Evolution by pointing out that besides the tooth & claw survival of the fittest model of evolution many species suvival relies on their ability to cooperate both umong their own species as well as with other species. Thus he suggests altruism can be as important to survival as success in battle. Looking at the human race and our weapons of mass destruction one might even consider altruism the most critical characteristic to develope for survival.

For my own sake, I have listened. Four hours of Garry Wills, Dawkins and the Bishop of Oxford and countless hours of Hitchens taking on all comers. I’ve replayed the original show times four times, specifically to make sure that I have parsed Glaude’s argumentation and listened to AKMA/ Callahan twice. I’ve read Dyson, Lazare, Eagleton, Gottlieb, Angier, Midgley, (I know I am missing some…) reviewed Kant and Spinoza and any number of wiki entries. And, of course, 300+ comments of knowledgeable ROS listeners and Nick’s Blog. The Dalai Lama is on my library list, right after Angier’s Canon. I’ve even dug out my Shambhala texts and started a re-read of “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” W.W.W.J.D?

All of it, for my sake. Most of it challenges the framework of my belief system. I suppose if I was sensitive about my belief system and didn’t want it challenged, I would have been wise to skip these threads.

Allison worried about all this early in the thread when she asked: “Why are we so afraid that what we believe might be false? What’s at stake? This fear is at the heart of a lot of conflict. Why do we prioritize our belief systems over living creatively with others?”

My answer: Because the universe will crush you if you’re wrong. It is important, ultimately, because we have to act. We find ourselves locked in the flow of time in a place of immanent danger. We must do something, so we have to decide something is true.

In that context, I have little doubt that I would chose Lydon as friend over Hitchens. Not because I think that pre-existing spiritual postures make for guaranteed success or failure. Rather, because Hitchens invites me to attend a lecture while Lydon invites me to a conversation.

However, if, in the course of that conversation, I am told to just shut up, then it may well be that there is no difference at all.

When a rival wins over the object of our affection, we tend to obsess more over the rival than the person we coveted…it had to be some kind of trickery or deception employed by the rival…otherwise a reasonable person would have made the right choice. As we squint through the prism of self-interest, we lose sight of the fact that by choosing our rival, that person might have made the best choice for themselves.

I am flabbergasted that so many of you, with a strait face, can purport to know a deeper understanding of life than Isaac Newton (who was religious) or MLK, or JFK! Yes…I grant you…you may have gained a deeper understanding of your life, but…

It’s one thing to challenge someone on a specific belief, like abortion, it’s quite another to question the whole freak’n framework of a person’s belief system! Because that is ultimately what we are talking about here…people…individual people…with an elaborate collection of disparate beliefs…built up over a life.

The real child’s play is to cleverly cavort in the la la land of generalizations…it’s easy for Christopher Hitchens to cast a wide net and revel in a masturbation of wordplay…but I guarantee you…in the grind of life on the ground…Christopher Hitchen’s is no more ahead of the game than Christopher Lydon.

And that’s what I want you to answer for me…if it’s so important for you to convince us that religion is bad, than tell me once and for all, how that math works out here, in our face – Christopher Hitchen vs. Christopher Lydon?

If ROS does goes away (and I could tear up right now thinking about it) I only hope we will all move on without taking our intellectual-selves too seriously…otherwise we stand a real chance of deducing ourselves into a spiraling stupor.

I’ve been blogging on ROS for a couple of years now, and it’s been a deep enriching experience, but the evolution of my mind has been simply that…my mind.

If there has been any overriding theme to my writing during this time, and one overall reason I took to blogging here, it’s that categories don’t mean shit. If you ever read anything I’ve written and liked it, did you care whether I was woman, guy, white, black, tall, gay, short, American, Ivy league, Corporate, bartender, deaf, middle class, atheist, or Christian…I assume you could give a flying f*ck what my category was, as long as I had something to say…and I can only hope (whether ROS survives or not) that that is a lesson we all take from the “Open Source” experience.

“The road of life is rocky and you may stumble too,
So while you point your fingers someone else is judging you”
-Bob Marley

But I do have to agree that science has largely neglected a coherant response to the ‘human condition’.

Sidewalker: Why not be a peace with uncertainty? All my life I have been working on it..

BTW I happened to turn the TV on at a low point in my life a number of years ago and there was Deepak Chopra ( in full “hucksterism”). So there he was lecturing about how our thoughts are only our thoughts, thoughts about the past, memories, fears, desires, about the future. Let go of those, he said, and you will be in a place of pure potential; the pure potential of the moment. Forever grateful………….

After that I learned meditatation, yoga…

I’m sure that’s why the Dalai Lama is so interested in neurology. The study of science can deepen a person’s spiritual life, it doesn’t have to be so antagonistic.

But I wouldn’t say I don’t understand. I have practiced Shambhala mindfulness and tai chi chuan under some heavyweight teachers. I have taken communion and read far too many volumes into Castaneda. I’ve taken the short cuts and the long roads. Much like other stories in these threads.

Still, I bristle at the shroud of mysticism applied by the salesmen-priests. I know the power of meditation and singing in public. Mama didn’t raise no fool. But the purveyors’ ‘truth claims’ that attach their meanings to our fleeting moments of interconnectedness are just pretty baubles.

The true beauty of mystery is that it is pregnant with discovery, knowledge and understanding. Claims of the unknowable, or already Revealed, stop inquiry dead. Stick the mystery in a cage and start selling tickets.

Carl Sagan’s raw assertion that we are all made of star stuff is more baldly awe-inspiring than someone dying millennia ago for sins I have yet to commit. It is a permanent sense of connectedness arising from material fact, more sustaining than any sitting.

We live at a time when the sum of human knowledge is doubling in the space of a very few years. The lines between disciplines are blurring and the contours of a theory of everything are beginning to take shape. Beware that the space between thoughts isn’t more beautifully explained by the genetic evolutionary development of neurons, even to someone who has experienced it.

But we do, indeed, differ on the idea of transcendence. I just accept that we cannot know before or after, except through the traces we leave. So I would agree that the love you mentioned can pass on after the lives of the mother and child, but not because the love is eternal as a spiritual essence but because the acts of love can find new expression in the grandchildren. Does this make it any less magical or meaningful, not at all.

Or in the interpretation of the viewer? Probably all three, which means there is always room for alternative perception and understanding and that we are to some extent always making. This is of course not as easy in a social environment that promotes dominant interpretations and passive or forced acceptance.

Now there’s an interesting question. (Where? What question? I don’t see a question!)

I’m also an avid photographer (and a Miles fan) but my photography switches between science and nature subjects and studio work – mostly dance and the nude. (see http://www.pnart.com). I became interested in studio work after taking a workshop with Lois Greenfield who taught us that in the studio you don’t TAKE a photo, “you MAKE a photo”.

I think that’s connected to this subject. We need to know when we are MAKING the religious or spiritual experience. Is the emotional impact and indeed the “meaning” to be found in the subject or the photographer and his work and composition?

And I do agree as well that the Pope is a liar and female circumcision is an absolute evil.

You could try Art and Physics: Parallel Visions In Space, Time & Light by Leonard Shlain, The Vocation of the Artist by Dr. Deborah Haynes or The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama. While the Dalai Lama’s book is the one that deals most specifically with neurology the other two books tie art to science and art to theology respectivly.

But please, Just because you do not understand something does not automatically make it “nonsensical”.

I’m an avid landscape photographer, think “Bitches Brew” is adjective-insertingly good and I prefer yogic meditation to Zen (which, though it has a different type of psychological effect is something that I cannot do). At the same time, I’m a skeptic and have a degree in philosophy – my rolls of film, my Miles album and my occasional yogic breathing exercises are all quite evident and require no mystery-mongering.

One can appreciate the beauty of life, the human mind, art and so on without having to fall in to the trap of believing it or silencing the question that should make humans want to get up every day and discover – the question of ‘is it true?’.

“Tom, from you writing above I take it that your ideal world would be free from “illusions.” (which strikes me as the ultimate illusion)”

nother: I’m not sure I want a world free from illusions, but I want a world where people acknowledge that illusions are illusions, and don’t try and use those illusions for purposes which they were never intended. Illusions are wonderful things. I think after the scientists and doctors, high on my list of the best professions are the magicians and illusionists. I absolutely adore the mentalism of Derren Brown or the violent realism of Penn and Teller. This is not the illusion I meant in my comment. The difference between the Pope and Penn is that the latter will tell you he is lying.

I do think that we are better off – in both a material/comfort sense of ‘better’ and an emotional/”spiritual” sense if we do not delude ourselves. What both postmodernism and even moderate religion is doing is devaluing truth, saying it is not important – and that what one ‘wishes’ to be true has tremendous value. Take some of the comments made by Rev. Callaghan on this programme (or Prof. Glaude from Monday night) – and apply them to politics. The actual truth of what happened to oppressed people is important – it’s not simply a ‘perspective’ that blacks were enslaved, nor is it a ‘perspective’ that in many Western nations (including Britain), we used to chemically castrate homosexuals (even as late as the 1960s), it is not just another ‘perspective’ that the Nazis killed nine million people in the concentration camps. Live organ extractions of innocent Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese government, the death of over 200,000 people in Darfur – these merely ‘narratives’ that can be easily supplanted with other narratives? We need to stop thinking wishfully and, as Bertrand Russell said, step outside in to the cold night and face reality.

I even think that maybe we can salvage ‘mysticism’ as an idea, even perhaps ’spirituality’ (although that word is so attached to hucksterism of the Deepak Chopra sort that I am far less interested in salvaging it than I am mysticism), but we have to acknowledge that what we are doing is undoing those things from their traditional attachments. We must see the value in reality.

We have – thanks to the sort of postmodernist attitude practiced by the modern-day theologians – gotten to what one writer called “Terminal 4 ethics” (as in the international terminal at London Heathrow) – whereby a female circumcision in Boston, Frankfurt, Paris, Toronto or London is a shocking human rights abuse, but the same female circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa is culturally justified, even empowering for the victim (sorry, ‘participant’). To demand an end to such a practice would be to show our culturally imperialist underbelly. Two million women every year are butchered because woolly theologians, postmodernists and cultural studies types have told us that we cannot be so imperialist as to judge this barbaric practice as the profoundly immoral act that it so evidently is. Our morality ends as the jumbo jet rumbles down the runway – once our passports are flashed and we are outside of North America or the EU, all is permitted so long as there’s a man with a funny hat and an array of intriguing superstitions who says it is so.

There is a time to sit down and engage in deep breathing exercises, to envelope ourselves inside the beauties of nature, even to engage in lyrical mysticism and language games. Now is not that time. Now is the time to get angry, to start throwing things, to stop excusing willed ignorance and to “do truth”.

“‘Dispel, O Lord of all creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance.’ And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination.”

Emerson had a little something to say about illusions. He writes about entering a cave with a group of friends: (I took the liberty of italicizing one sentence).

“The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs to all natural objects, and which shames the fine things to which we foppishly compare them. I remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with which Nature, on new instruments, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic day, and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then took notice, and still chiefly remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer was an illusion. On arriving at what is called the “Star-Chamber,” our lamps were taken from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song, “The stars are in the quiet sky,” &c., and I sat down on the rocky floor to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect.”

However, I must confess some apprehension with respect to this gracious invitation. I am concerned that such inter-diction may disturb my intra-diction and provoke in me an elaborate folly of contradiction and in the process publicly expose me as nothing more than an engrossingly swollen, myopic and rather randy Richard (thus proving the cause of substantial and avoidable violence to my persona).

Therefore, in lieu, I purpose we meet on some old shore and build sand castles between the tides. (you pick it, any beach in the known or inhabited world) At the end of our allotted time, we can join together in deeming the most inspiring and beautiful and more desirable to inhabit. If it be mine, you may “buy it” for a mustard seed. If it be yours, then I should like to acquire it from you, however I require that you name your cost and currency in advance of our adventure.

After culminating our transaction, I suggest we retreat a safe measure up the beach and engage in a dialogue concerning the reasons the oracle at Delphi considered Socrates the greatest of the Greeks, or (if you prefer) what a Hobgoblin ensnared in a foolish consistency may wish to do about it or how the Mayans accurately determined the age of the universe so many years ago.

What do you say, you and me, mano y mano, by the sea?

Again, I plead for a program on neurology to make understandable the connection between theology and art without resorting to nonsensicals.

If you are sincere…

Soften your gaze. Think of it more like looking at those 3D pictures where you have to relax your eyes to see the image. Then watch your thoughts and let them go. Thoughts (as useful as they are) are also the vehicles of illusion. Give them some room. The space between thoughts is where truth is. Loosen your grip on your definition of reality and let what actually is real come through.

But don’t take my word for it. Take a class in Zen meditation. Or learn to paint or play the harmonica.
Don’t let the left side of your brain bully your entire consciousness.

The complimentary discipline to Theology is Art.

The dialogue on Open Source was explicitly racial and identity-based, it dealt with the use of religion in “the community”. “The community” is the phrase of the moment, used by a variety of obscuritanists to avoid having to pin responsibility on anybody. And, so, when a small group of men (primarily) in the East End of London get ratty about Monica Ali’s portrayal of the Bangladeshis in and around Brick Lane and Whitechapel, it becomes a “community” response. When the play Bezhti was shut down in Britain following angry, violent protests by Sikhs, each promised a “community” behind them. The word ‘community’, usually prepended by a religious identity has become the latest weasel word. A ‘community leader’ is just anyone who pops up and says they are. And the journalists just lap it up. Never mind that women in some of these “faith communities” are treated like second class citizens. Never mind that acquaintances have been threatened by their families for having the audacity to doubt the faith passed on to them by their family.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore”, and we’re not in Afghanistan either. The ‘community’ scam is going on in modern day, secular Europe – in London, where Muslims protest in the street with signs saying “Death to those who think Islam is a violent religion”, in Birmingham, where the Bezhti play was closed by brick-hurling mobs of young Sikh men and, of course, in Amsterdam, where film-makers critical of the Religion of Peace are stabbed while riding around the city on their bicycles. ‘Community’, ‘identity’, ‘culture’? No. It is religion we are talking about! These weasel words are a distracton from the issue.

As are theologians, to be frank. The Christianity of the theological respondents to Dawkins, Hitchens et al. are falling apart at the rhetorical seams. The key point they never address is “is it true?”. Theologians have special names for people like myself who demand clear language and statements on the truth of matters of religion – they call us “naïve realists”. Theologians revel in mystery – the feeling of it, the constant evocation of how all these questions are such a divine mystery. Well, in fact, no they are not. Either existence is a predicate or it’s not. If it is not, the ontological argument fails. Either the leap from ‘this looks designed’ to ‘there’s a designer’, or not. Either God or not.

It pains me to say it, but if Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu and Gandhi believed in unicorns, that would not be a good reason to believe it. The statements on the show were reverse argumentum ad hominems – these people are good, and that is proof for religion’s truth. I wish it were as simple as finding the nice people in the world and looking to them for truth and finding the nasty people in the world and avoiding their life for it’s falsity. Truth does not equal goodness, goodness does not equal truth.

The practical politics of trying to prevent the religious lunatics from seeing us all end up in wooden boxes is different from the truth value. Whether it is a better strategy for non-believers to go on the radio and write polemical tracts telling everybody how silly they are being or for them to quietly try and arrange for the Irshad Manji and Richard Holloway types of the world to gain prominence within their own faiths over the Osama bin Laden and Pat Robertson types is another matter indeed. If all that non-theists had to do to get rid of Muslim extremism was to keep quiet for a few years, I’m sure most of us would probably do so.

I was at a debate in London last year. The point of discussion was something along the lines of “The Christian faith is historically and intellectually defensible”. The ‘nay’ side consisted of a female newspaper journalist and a man from one of the secularist organisations – on the ‘yea’ side were to churchmen from the ‘Alpha Course’, an evangelical Christian conversion course for adults. The debate consisted of the ‘nays’ giving a wide variety of arguments for the historical blips and oversights in the New Testament and other arguments in the intellectual plane. The ‘yea’ side gave a short and arbitrary rebuttal, and then spent the rest of the time talking about how belief in Jesus helps people – and they called up from the audience a man who had been a divorcee, unemployed, an addict to drink and drugs and a convicted criminal who had been in jail, who had turned his life around having found the Gospel. Good for him, but that does not answer the question of the truth of the matter. He now worked with other people in prisons and outreach. Again, this does not speak to the truth of the matter.

Can you imagine this in any other sphere of life? “Well, Martin Luther King believed in the theory of gravity, and it turned his life around!” “People who want Paris to win the next Olympic bid also do lots of charity work, they must have something right!” It’s the biggest irrelevance, an enormous emotional plea. It is more befitting a public relations consultant or a seedy lawyer than it is an academician. What purpose, again, does theology have in our universities? What truth has it illuminated? I keep trying to find any, but it disappears whenever I try and look closely. I see a lot of fancy names and impressive looking books, but I have no idea what actual benefit to truth or humanity theology has ever served. It seems to have spent it’s life preserving illusions, while scientists, historians, philosophers and the like have been throwing out illusion after illusion after illusion.

I guess when illusions go, so does the treasured mystery of the theologians. Away with all that – it makes my poor head feel rotten and sour. Give me reason for your beliefs, just as we would ask in any other field. We would not argue that the historical theory that Shakespeare was a Japanese transvestite has value because it helps oppressed people feel better about themselves – because it’s value lies in whether it is true or not.

There are people who believe that if you can’t measure something or hit it with a stick it can’t possibly exist. Who want only to count the evil done in religion’s name and negate any positive reasons for people to congregate in the spirirt. I have experienced answered prayer and I believe I was visited in a dream by my dead father. Can I prove these things? No. Of course not. But I leave my mind and heart open to recieve grace should it come my way. Those with their hands over their ears and their minds shut tight against recieving grace are not likly to experience it.