Orcs

Now—before you put this away, either “hurr hurr”ing like an asshole, or feeling vaguely disturbed, I want to ask you a question. That orc—you know, the orc in that room in the dungeon, you open the door, there’s an orc there. He looks up, a bunch of heavily armed human motherfuckers are charging into the room waving weapons.

What’s he supposed to do? Smile broadly and say “Hey, mi casa es su casa, amigos!”? No, he whimpers with fear, pulls out his pigsticker, and prepares to meet his doom. I wanna know about his childhood. Are you telling me he doesn’t have friends who are going to miss him? That he didn’t have hopes and fears and aspirations of his own? That you aren’t a bunch of fucking degraded monsters for wasting him without a second thought? You’re playing a fucking role, okay, you’re supposed to act like a real character in this world. And yet you saunter around, killing intelligent creatures like they’re just another widget, a bunch of pixels to blow away, a mechanism for obtaining experience points and treasure. That isn’t roleplaying. Not as I understand it.

Here’s what I want to do. I want to go into a Quake® deathmatch. And I want to strip down to a loincloth, sit down on the floor with a begging bowl, and call after the lunatics with the plasma guns as they flee past me, saying, “It is all samsara, it is all illusion, my friend”—for truly it is, pixels on a screen.  ”Reject the fleeting temptations here, what profiteth you another kill? There is another path.” And I want him to turn, think twice—and then I will smile benevolently as he tosses a rocket my way, blows me to my reincarnation as my peaceful self—and he runs on, and kills and kills again, quad damage, armor, another clip, heal and heal and blammo to the floor—until finally he turns, lays down his gun, and sits by me, asking me to teach. And then one by one, the players shall gather by me, sitting, assuming the lotus position, touching the ground in the earth-witness gesture, letting their thoughts still, contemplating that strange Quake sky as it streams overhead, peaceful, in unity, transforming this one, small, cyberrealm of unending war and mayhem into harmony.

Sigh.

Right.

I wanna be a shooter bhoddisatva, baby.

Man, I am so full of shit.

And then there’s this, from Over the Edge (2nd Edition), by Jonathan Tweet with Robin D. Laws; page 167, under Alternative Hypothesis:

…Perhaps exposure to tulpas, especially psychic contact, would give a person a brief glimpse of the universe as it really is: an infinite number of immortal spirits donning temporary identities in various “worlds” as they play out their intricate, never-ending games with no true concern other than shared amusement. What would one do with this knowledge?

I’ve been thinking about these quotes for a long time. It started when I had a conversation with a good friend of mine almost three years ago. We spoke about the near-death experience she had on an operating table, after being hit by a truck.

I wrote this in my journal, in February of 2009, a couple of days after the meeting:

…and [she] told me something that I guess she told me before but I didn’t properly understand. She said that death is like taking the blinders off—that when we’re not here, living our limited and individual lives, we are infinite beings, capable of infinite understanding. Of course, in a universe where everybody knows everything, beings get bored, so they invented this amusement park / school called life, where we can limit ourselves and experience everything like it’s new again.

Which ultimately means that nothing can truly hurt you. Nothing is permanent—not even death. The only heavens or hells we need to worry about in life are those of our own making. There’s no such thing as eternal punishment or damnation and ultimately there is nothing to fear, or hate, either in life or in death.

This is a very comforting thought—a great sense of peace comes with it. Life is what you make it, and there’s no need to worry. Everything will be okay.  That’s not to say that bad things don’t happen to good people, for reasons beyond their control. Of course they do. Tragedy happens. Evil happens too. But when these things occur, we have a choice in how we receive them. With a little perspective, it’s easier to not take them quite so personally, and thus deal with them more effectively.

Then, in the fall of 2010, I saw the first episode (“Is There a Creator?”) of Through The Wormhole, with Morgan Freeman. That’s where I first learned that the Simulation Argument is a somewhat respectable thought experiment in modern philosophy, and not “merely” an ancient philosophical idea (not to mention a seed for interesting fiction, like The Matrix, or Dark City).

If you’re not familiar, the Simulation Argument goes something like this: if it’s physically possible to make a near-perfect virtual reality, then chances are (given the age and size of the universe) that some technologically advanced alien culture has already done it. And if that’s the case, then they’re probably running multiple simulations—a multitude, even—including what might be called “ancestor simulations,” to study biological and social evolution, among other things. And if there is a multitude of simulations of the universe running, each of them filled with self-aware virtual beings; then statistically speaking, you and I and everybody we know are probably simulated people living in an artificial reality.

Now, it’s not like these ideas are revolutionary. Pretty much everybody at some point in their lives has heard or thought of the possibility that reality as we know it is an illusion of some kind, or that there might be some greater reality encompassing this one. It’s an ancient idea for a reason. But it really got me thinking.

The simulation argument suggests we may be living in a simulation. And given the state of present-day video games, it’s certainly easy enough to imagine a post-human society with super-advanced video games populated both by living players and simulated intelligences. It’s funny, really, because a lot of people of the transhumanist / singulatarian persuasion wouldn’t bat an eye at such a possibility; and yet will quickly balk at religious notions of a life beyond the one we commonly experience—whether those ideas are coming from a traditional or more New Agey source.

Maybe the Simulation Argument, and religious metaphysics, are just different ways of expressing the same idea—that ultimately, we’re really far more than we believe we are. Maybe in actuality, we’re all part of some vast collective intelligence—whether that’s an omniscient post-singularity hive-mind, or God itself—and maybe the difference doesn’t matter. And maybe, we just individuate ourselves from that totality of being to take on temporary, limited forms in simulated worlds, playing out parts for the education and amusement of ourselves and others.

Jordan Peterson also talks about this in his talk on Virtue as a Necessity. He begins by noting (at 3:47) that Life is Suffering. Life is Suffering because throughout our lives, our goals are thwarted by the arbitrary limitations placed upon us by nature and time. These are limitations like whether or not we’re smart, or good looking, or pre-disposed to certain diseases, and like the fact that one day we’ll die. All of these things are (Transhumanist optimism notwithstanding) beyond our control, and so they limit us. He says (around 6:20) that they are:

“…conditions of existence. Human being is predicated on a kind of fundamental limitation, in that we are what we are, and we’re not other things. And so that means, inevitably, that the awareness of human being comes along with suffering. Life poses the question: How to conduct yourself in the face of suffering. Not only yours, but everyone else’s. And it’s an inescapable question, except that maybe you’re fortunate, and you’ll have periods of time where something absolutely horrible isn’t happening to you…

…And to know this frees you from the false illusion that life can be conducted without suffering. Suffering is an integral part of being. Now, why is that? Well, who knows? It’s a metaphysical question. But I have some ideas about that that have helped me, and they’re things that I’ve read.

I read, for example, an old Jewish commentary about the reason for creation. It’s like a Zen Koan this idea. You take a being with the classical attributes of God: omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience; a totality. And the question is, what does a being with those attributes lack? And the answer is “limitation.” And then you think, well, what’s so important about limitation? Well, if you can be anything, or do anything, at any time whatsoever; there’s no being, because everything is one thing. There’s no differentiation between things. So something that’s absolute and total has no being—it has to be parcelled out into limited being.

And you know this because you all play games. You play video games, you play games with other people. You may play games you don’t even know you’re playing. And when you play those games you put limits on yourself. You play by a set of rules. And the reason you do that is when you limit yourself—arbitrarily, in some ways—whole new worlds of possibility emerge. And so there’s a powerful metaphysical idea that being is not possible without limitation…”

Maybe we’re all role-players, at heart.

Peterson concludes this part of his talk by noting: “So you say, what’s the price you pay for being? The price you pay for being is limitation. And the price you pay for limitation is suffering. So the price you pay for being is suffering.”

Why do we let ourselves suffer if we’re just playing an elaborate game?  Why would any all-knowing entity voluntarily experience pain and loss and uncertainty?  Maybe just so that we take the simulation seriously.

Maybe we’re all role-players, suffering for our art. Maybe we’re just playing characters driven by our passions—suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to educate ourselves, or the universe itself, in all the wonders of a life well worn. Just so we can feel, and be moved.

Maybe Shakespeare was right: The Play’s The Thing.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

—As You Like It, by William Shakespeare; Act 2, scene 7, 139–143

Recently, an atheist friend inquired as to my religious beliefs.  Because I was tired, and because I didn’t want to bore him with all the complicated details of my spirituality, I said I was agnostic.   I regretted it as soon as I said it, because his response was very predictable.

“Oh, I get that,” he said.  “As Richard Dawkins says, you’re just an atheist who hasn’t made up his mind yet.”

I’ve tried not to be annoyed by this because he’s not agnostic, and therefore he doesn’t realize how profoundly ignorant that statement is.  But at the same time: he doesn’t realize how profoundly ignorant that statement is. Like any of Dawkins’ fans, and Dawkins himself, he’s an intelligent guy who has utterly failed to apply his intelligence to the subject at hand.

Agnosticism does not mean sitting on the fence between strong positions of theism and atheism.  It’s not some kind of half-assed, waffling maybe.  It’s a strong position that the entire question of theism versus atheism is a stupid one—that the fence between these poles ought to be torn down (because, despite fears to the contrary, tearing down that fence won’t make those poles identical).  It is the firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs (or non-beliefs, as the case may be).  It is the understanding that the reality of these ideologies, and of the universe, is far more complex and nuanced than this simplistic, either/or debate will allow for.

Many atheists will argue that scientific understanding is impossible unless there’s a clear line separating the world of faith from the world of physical evidence.  But if you follow the evidence, particularly in psychology, it’s clear that:

1. Human rationality is deeply bounded by intractable and inherent limitations in perspective and processing power;
2. Assuming those limitations don’t exist is foolhardy;
3. Spiritual traditions are ultimately just frameworks for dealing with those limitations.

And maybe 4:  Scientific materialism, by itself, is not a viable substitute for such a framework.

Does that mean religions should be followed blindly, or that atheism is an invalid position?  Of course not.  But it does mean that religious traditions have insights to offer if you know where to look, and that a smart person won’t discount religious stories and practices out of hand, simply because he finds them distasteful, or primitive.

So, on the contrary: Agnostics aren’t just atheists who haven’t made up their minds.  They are people who refuse to be limited to a single set of possibilities, or to be told which ideas they can and cannot explore.

I look at people with fixed concepts of God or the lack thereof, and to me they are like people standing in cages arrayed around an open field.  I can move freely around the field and still find my way back home, while they are locked inside prisons of their own making.  They could walk out any time, but they don’t.

So, no thanks.  My intellectual freedom / sovereignty is non-negotiable, and this business of sorting each other into ideological camps and then making war on each other is not for me.

I just learned about Twendr (yes, I’m a tad slow with these things; bit of a Luddite, really). I hate the baby-talk name; but anyway, it tells you about twitter trends as they happen by spotting keywords in people’s posts.  In other words, it just tells you what everybody is talking about in a global sense, in real time.

But think about how this could be applied to utilities like Google Street View and Google Earth and blogs and 4Chan and whatever remains of journalism in the twenty-first century, and every other frigging thing out there.

Think of where this is going. We’ve made maps, representations, of the real world since the beginning. We called them words and ideas and symbols and myths, and sometimes, actual maps. We learned to manipulate these representations. We realized we could use them to highlight certain facts and ignore others, and so could understand the real world better—and alter it to suit our interests.

We’ve had conflicts not only because our interests collide, but often because our representations of the world, our maps, feel more real than the actual world. Or they block out our view of the actual world. Indeed, we tend to bury our faces in our maps and forget to put them down and look where we’re going.

Get out your Hawaiian shirts, folks. Everybody’s a tourist.

But now comes the internet, which, among other things, is like a huge map—not only of physical space, but of cultural space as well. And with things like Twendr and Google Earth, we’re updating that map in nearly real time, with commentary.

I mean, the internet—I can’t say it’s alive, exactly; but it’s certainly some kind of evolving organic system. It’s a cyborg brain with people for neurons and electronics for synapses.

And the thing is: this vast representational network, this colossal meta-map, is becoming more complex every second, like some zygotic panopticon.

We can imagine a day when the map becomes more detailed than the territory. And as this happens, we’re developing biotech and nanotech that will one day give us the power to edit the physical world as easily as we can edit photos and documents.

The map, already approaching 1:1 scale, will bleed off the page and into the world, The word “reality” will have no meaning beyond the conversation about it, shifting with our desires and delusions. The medium will literally be the message. We will truly dwell in a collective hallucination that every saint and sinner, every starred commenter and asshat troll will tug and twist with all available might. Whether that hallucination will be consensual and mutually worthwhile, or if it’ll be a bad trip for some or all—that’s anybody’s guess.

But maybe, if we know we’re all hallucinating, we can choose to make it a good one; because we’ll know that every act, every idea we nurture, will contribute (however minutely) to what the next moment brings.

Maybe we’re already living in a Matrix-like world mediated by digital mapping and manipulation, and thereby shaped by the hopes and fears of the minds contained therein. Maybe the singularity happened a long long time ago, and we just don’t realize it. Maybe we’re gods and mortals by turns… fallen from Olympus with self-imposed amnesia and arbitrary limitations, just so we can experience the whole existence thing with fresh and passionate eyes—even if it means we also suffer, and are occasionally brutal to each other. I mean, it’s the challenge that makes the game worth playing, right?

Or maybe I’m just a lunatic, and you should ignore everything I’ve said here.

Choice is quite a thing, no?

Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, has some very interesting things to say about human emotional health, mythology, and religion. In fact, his ideas are profound enough that they ought to be required viewing for anybody who has ever had a strong opinion on the topic of religion.

His ideas are drawn from diverse sources besides mythology: art, literature, philosophy, history, and all of it grounded in science; specifically experimental and clinical psychology. So, it probably shouldn’t be astonishing that he makes so much sense when he explains, well, basically everything. But really, you have to hear him for yourself. I realize that some of these videos are long (no more than an hour), but they’re really worth it. Make the time.

In this first video, Reality and the Sacred, he explains how we actually ignore most of reality, and only really notice it when it becomes a problem for us—and how that fact is symbolized in stories.

In this next one, The Necessity of Virtue, he talks about the nature of virtue, and the nature of evil through examples from religion, literature, and atrocities like the Nazi Holocaust and the mass murders of the Soviet Regime.

Here he explains the story of Genesis and how it relates to consciousness, suffering, and historical acts of evil such as fascism and the Columbine shootings:

Okay, so I know, I know. Arguing on the Internet is pretty much always a waste of time. Every time I do it, I feel like I just crawled through a sewer pipe, looking for the elusive source of the world’s bullshit. But sometimes you just sorta get sucked in, y’know?

Before I go on, I should point out that atheists are not the problem. If someone chooses to believe in God, Gods, the flying spaghetti monster, the bloody timecube, or nothing at all… well, hey, that’s cool. I respect that decision—follow your experience where it takes you, I say. Be empirical. But those Richard Dawkins wannabe, down-with-spirituality-in-every-form, capital “A,” Atheists—well, I’ve got no time for them, because every one I’ve met is an arrogant asshole.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I had a long discussion with one such individual over the last few days and it went roughly like this: He disliked the very notion of God, all possible definitions of which he felt were nonsensical. When I told him that God can’t be defined, and is ineffible, of course he became quite upset; because that doesn’t fit the basic philosophical assumption of the scientific method—that everything in nature can be grasped by the intellect. The harder I tried to explain to him—referencing scientific examples—that this may not be the case, the more hostile and irrational he got.

It’s my fault, really, for trying to explain God to someone who really doesn’t want to understand it, only hate it.

But this is a common experience I’ve had talking to capital “A” Atheists. They respect science, except where it means questioning their assumptions. They say they respect evidence and precision, but make sweeping generalizations about religion as an evil; and then get nit-picky when examples of atheism gone wrong emerge. They believe they’re open-minded and immune to prejudice; but they think everybody who professes spirituality of any kind is some sort of bible-thumping apocalyptic Jesus freak (indeed, because all religions are hellfire Christianity, apparently).

And believe me when I say that I’m just as concerned about the bible-thumping Jesus freaks as they are; but I also happen to believe, due to direct experience, that there’s more to life than what my limited, mortal brain can intellectually analyze. And I believe people should be able to explore the edges of understanding more or less how they choose, so long as they don’t impose their view on others.

I mean, I agree with a lot of the things the secular scientific community is saying about how mainstream religion has failed. But big-A Atheists, just like crusading religious zealots, see—and create—enemies everywhere they go. Because I believe in God (without even qualifying what sort of God), I supposedly belong in the other camp. They’re turning away potential allies in the task of dealing with failed religion, because they’re far too hateful of religion in general.

I’m pretty sick of being caught in the middle of the culture war, as I think most people are. But to Atheists, I make it possible for religious fundamentalists to get away with inhuman atrocities, and to evangelical Christians I make it possible for those evil sinning atheists to summon the devil. They can both kiss my ever-loving pantheist ass, for all I care.

Not very enlightened, I suppose. *sigh* Okay, may they both find peace; hopefully without killing each other in the process. Or something like that.

There are two major lessons to be learned from this: Crusading Atheists, despite how rational they think they are, are no more immune to prejudice, emotionalism, cognitive biases, and all other forms of hubris, than any other human being. And they certainly don’t like to be reminded of that fact.

The other lesson: don’t argue on the Internet.

I wonder when that one will sink in.

Anyway, a while back I read Chris’ piece on the meaning of life, and he reminded me of something very important. In a Western, post-existentialist context, the meaning of life often does boil down to creating your own meaning—your own religion. This echoes Nishitani, who points out in Religion and Nothingness that it’s pointless to ask the use of religion, because religion is the thing that helps you discover the use (or meaning) of everything else. It is your point of reference in an otherwise changing and confusing world.

So, while it’s true that traditional religions often fail for various reasons, it’s still important to have a religion, a way of making meaning, of some kind.

If you don’t already have one, such as the kind of thing you inherited from your parents, there’s a good chance you won’t think much about the issue of religion or meaning until you encounter a situation where life seems to lose meaning. But at that point, your quest will begin. Your only choice will be to rediscover (or reinvent) some framework for meaning, or succumb to despair.

In other words, you’ll have to create your own religion. There’s a lot of different ways to go about this. For some, it may be as simple as taking some existing religion and tweaking it… learning to understand it in a new way, or taking elements from another faith and incorporating it into what you already have.

For others, the process is more radical, and may involve combing through books on different religions and philosophies, and trying to distill out some commonalities; some collection of truths that makes sense to you.

Personally, I have found the latter path to be more rewarding. I’ve found it to be a lot like Worldbuilding (that is, constructing a fictional world for telling stories). Indeed, apart from language creation I find the creation of fictional religions to be the most enjoyable part of worldbuilding. You look at the way you want your culture, or your protagonist, or whomever follows the faith in question, to be. You want to look at the ways they get along with their faith or don’t, and in general what the religion you’re creating is trying to achieve.

I suppose it’s a little different if you want to develop a system of beliefs that you yourself are going to follow, but a lot is the same. You still want to figure out the ideal life you’re trying to live. Even if your new religion involves some notion of an afterlife, your focus should still be the kind of life you want to live—the person you want to be—while you’re waiting for that afterlife. Only by knowing this can you proceed to develop beliefs that will help get you closer to being the person you want to be.

I’ll give you a quick example of what I mean. I believe in an afterlife, and in reincarnation, and that life on Earth is a learning experience over successive lifetimes. An atheist might find such beliefs to be unfounded, not grounded in evidence. I certainly have no measurable evidence for reincarnation or the education of the soul, or anything like that. I have no evidence against it, either, but you’d still be justified in asking: why do I continue to believe in such things? Because I know that believing it gives me permission to be human. If I believe I get more than one shot at living a good life, I know I can make mistakes and still forgive myself. I’m a happier and more pleasant person because I believe in reincarnation. If I took the atheists’ view, that we’re here for a short time and then it’s over, and that all the major fuck ups of my life (which are numerous), were all for nothing… well, then I’d be miserable. So I don’t believe that.

Certain beliefs I hold simply because of the effect they have on me, not on the basis of either evidence or revealed “Truth.” I mean, for the most part these things can’t be proven one way or the other anyway, so why not believe in things that make me a better person?

It’s as simple as that: find or create beliefs (and practices, and art, and music, and rituals if that’s your thing) that make you and the people around you happy. A very good friend of mine once made a mix-CD for all his friends entitled: “Optimal Songs for Maintaining Awesomeness.” Well, that’s all religion is supposed to be—optimal beliefs (or whatever) for maintaining awesomeness.

Just remember in all of this that one person’s optimal mix isn’t necessarily going to work for somebody else. It’s not about “the one true way.” I mean, my belief in reincarnation works for me. Maybe for an atheist, the belief that he or she only gets one shot at life is an important motivation to get things right the first time. There’s something to be said for that, too.

The important point here is that no matter which way you go, you’re consciously exploring all of these different ideas aobut life, and understanding them for yourself. I think when people get really caught up in dogma and self-importance, it’s often because they have failed to really look at their beliefs objectively, and to look behind the words at the spirit of what is being said—WHY it is being said at all.

So, in my last post I promised homework. Here it is: If you aren’t already doing so, make up your own religion. Heck, make up three or four for kicks. Just because you decide to believe one thing now, doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life. Religion should be flexible, always with an eye toward making people happy and healthy.

This isn’t an excuse to be a moral relativist—we can’t just do whatever we want and damn the consequences; that’s not meaningful or mature (and in the long run won’t make us or anyone else happy). Find good ethics and live by them—just leave yourself room to breathe.

I think I’ve rambled on enough about this. You get the idea.  Religion is something we ought to play with; not something we have to be grim about.

People of Walmart

A friend of mine recently told me about the People of Walmart website, featuring pictures of Walmart shoppers in various states of dress as they go about their business, and occasionally, their vehicles. Some of them are silly, some are disturbing, but most of them are simply a slice of someone’s life, replete with all the assumptions you can make about that life based on a photograph.

But there’s something terribly, tragically human about these photos, and it occurs to me that Dukkha is never more apparent than in a Walmart. Dukkha is a Buddhist word from the Pali language that usually translates to “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the desperation of the human condition as we pass from life to life through the cycle of Samsara.

Dukkha is the sense that no matter what you do, your life is never complete; that we are never quite whole. Dukkha is in all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we overcompensate for our insecurities, and for the endless longing we wish we didn’t feel. Dukkha, the Buddha says, arises because of craving attachment—wanting, or desiring life to fit our ideals when it cannot realistically do so. Dukkha is the siren song that calls to us, compelling us to fill that hole in our souls with money, objects, sex, drugs, and so on, as we attempt, quite unsuccessfully, to address existential concerns with material things.

So there are those people in the Walmart, lost in a desperate struggle to get by, to belong, to figure out who they are… spiritual refugees of a globalized, consumerist world.  They are a mirror for us all.

I’ll leave you with a song: Blood, Milk, and Sky by White Zombie.

The siren sings a lonely song / of all the wants and hungers
The lust of love a brute desire /  the ledge of life goes under
Divide the dream into the flesh / Kaleidoscope and candle eyes
Empty winds scrape on the soul /  but never stop to realize
Animal whisperings / intoxicate the night
Hypnotize the desperate /  slow motion light
Wash away into the rain / Blood, milk, and sky
Hollow moons illuminate / and beauty never dies
Running wild running blind / I breathe the body deep
1,000 years beside my self / I do not sleep
Seduce the world it never screams / dead water lies
Ride the only one who knows / beauty never dies

Songwriters: John Tempesta, Rob Zombie, Jay Noel Yuenger, Shauna Yseult Reynolds

The first is from When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger.  The main character, Marid Audran, is narrating his experience in listening to the rumours in his community, the Budayeen:

“The information I got from one person often contradicted the version I heard from another, so I’d long ago gotten into the habit of trying to hear as many different stories as I could and averaging them all out. The truth was in there somewhere, I knew it; the problem was coaxing it into the open.”

I think that fairly neatly summarizes the holodox notion of Perspective—the way you kind of have to tease out the truth by listening to as many perspectives as possible.  The “Truth” in such a circumstance, is thus always a little bit fluid, and you have to keep up by always questioning what you think you know for certain.

The second quote is from American Gods, by Neil Gaiman; from a young man in the back of a limo:

“…Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality.  Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system…”

Indeed, we do live in a programmed (social) reality.  Every day our economic, political, and legal systems; our culture, really, tells us what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t.  It tells us what we’re supposed to do, and what we’re supposed to want, because we worship gods (or icons / symbols / ideals) of various sorts without even realizing it.

I don’t know if language is a virus, but religion is certainly an operating system.  In fact, you could make that your definition of religion: the cultural operating system underlying your thoughts and behaviour.  It’s something very difficult to escape or even examine, because it embodies everything you take for granted.  Everything you do or say is built on this in layers so deep you can’t even see the foundation.

But religion is also the mystical enterprise: questioning reality—or rather plumbing through these layers to find that foundation and understand it, see it for what it is, and look beyond it to whatever is truly real: the world beyond our beliefs and assumptions.

Well, anyway, it’s an interesting metaphor, well worth contemplating.

Until next time…

I just saw this TED Talk by Karen Armstrong about re-establishing compassion and the golden rule, which exists in all faiths, and many non-faiths, as a central feature of our lives; no matter what country we happen to live in, or what religion or worldview we happen to subscribe to. She calls on us to practice compassion, and to challenge uncompassionate speech wherever it arises.

Some people may feel this is unrealistic, but all I would say to them is that we have to try anyway, and keep trying until we get it… I mean, can you think of a better way to make the world a happier place for all? And what else are you going to do? Keep your head down and hope the forces of intolerance don’t start looking in your direction?

Anyway, the TED Talk led me to http://charterforcompassion.org/, and made me believe there’s still hope for us yet.