Pain and Suffering

A few days ago I watched this:



It is an excellent breakdown of the fallacy of monotheism and religious intolerance. Obviously, I don't agree with this point of view, so let me address some of the points that Dr. Sam Harris has made within the context of my spirituality.

The pain and suffering of innocent or good people is caused by other people or themselves. The realm we live in was created as a safe haven for our souls to inhabit by the gods. It was created to provide our souls a place to grow and learn. My gods are mysterious and I have no idea how they think. However, they have no covenant with me to provide salvation or succor. I am here on my own and I can only rely on those other people who will help me. And that's the point of being here: To help each other through the experiences of life to become better people. If my gods interceded every time I fell down, I'd never learn anything.

Your culture or beliefs don't threaten me. We're all stuck here and we need to make the best of it. Telling one group of people that they are going to suffer in the afterlife creates an irreparable divide between us during life. Think about that. What kind of working relationship is designed by intolerance for the higher being you worship? I certainly have a hard time working with people who are outspokenly intolerant of my beliefs.

Lets go back a step. Your culture or beliefs don't threaten me. The kind of person who issues statements like, "You're going to hell for your beliefs!" is a person full of fear. They are so intimidated and fearful of different beliefs than their own that they are convinced their god will destroy those people in the after life. What kind of god would do that? Not one of the gods I worship would destroy or even damn a human soul -- no matter what their beliefs.

Carl Sagan made it easy to be an atheist

I am still working on my piece on fasting. As it turns out, how you consume calories can have implications for many, many other parts of your life. I'm very excited about eventually telling you all about it.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about Carl Sagan a lot lately. If you've never read his book, The Demon-Haunted World, I would highly recommend it. In one part of the book, he explored the etymology of the word "spirit." The word comes to us via Latin, but it seems to be even older than that, and it basically means "breath." And at this point Sagan got very poetic about the lightness and mobility of our breath, saying that our "spirit" was our desire to be uplifted - to find wonder in our universe and in ourselves.

I hope you can all appreciate what a wonderful moment that was. Here was a man who didn't necessarily believe in gods, or even spirits, acknowledging that people have a "spiritual" side. That's something I was struggling with at the time, so I personally found it very uplifting and comforting. I miss you, Carl Sagan! I don't know for sure if there's an afterlife (you'll notice that while I have many feelings about the spiritual dimension to our existence, I don't claim to know squat about it!), but if there is I hope you're enjoying the heck out of it. And if there isn't, I'm sad you're dead but happy that you made the world so much richer a place while you were alive.

Next post: Friday, November 9

You Only Live Once?

Lets talk about YOLO for a moment. In the immortal words of "South Park's" Chef, "There's a time and a place for everything . . . its called college." I'm all for experimentation and exploration. Life should be lived to it's fullest. There are so many enjoyable, exhilarating and exciting things to do that it can be overwhelming. It is so very tempting to do all the drugs and have sex with all the people and do what you will as you please.

This is where I have a Cleansing of the Temple moment. Personal freedom and free will are the most glorious gifts that we have and they SHALL NOT BE USED TO HINDER OR HARM ANY BEING OR CREATURE! 

DO NO HARM

We are incarnated to this realm with free will  Nothing can take it away, but it can be harmed. This is the greatest violation to another being we can commit during our existence on Earth. Any being that causes another being to do something they don't want to do has violated this precept. There is much more to this discourse (such as the necessity of killing to survive), but I've digressed.

Let us say that you do only live once, which is to say that for the moment I will assume that we are born here, live, then die, and there is nothing else to existence. In that case, do we not have a duty and obligation to make each other's lives as pleasant and peaceful as possible?!

On the other hand, let us assume that, as I believe, we are spiritual beings who briefly incarnate in this realm time and again. How is our previously mentioned obligation lessened? Indeed, it is increased for we have no reprieve in death. Death brings review. Will invoking YOLO balance your deeds against the feather of Maat?! Only if YOLO means you did all that you can to bring peace and comfort to those you lived with because you live this one existence for all eternity.

The game of "let's see what happens next"

When I was much younger, I frequently entertained suicidal thoughts. This might be an over-generalization, but I have a suspicion that anyone who has never contemplated suicide has never fully acknowledged that they have choices in their life. Feel free to correct me on that if you disagree. So there I was, a young person who had confronted the fact that I didn't have to keep living. I was also confronting the fact that in many ways, life sucks. How I got through those moments might seem rather counterintuitive at first glance: I reminded myself that the option to kill myself would always be there for me, whenever I felt I needed to take it.

That realization was surprisingly liberating. While the option to die would always be there, the option to live this life would not. Once it was gone, it was gone. Even if you believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, this life we're living right now is only here for a moment. So I started thinking - why not hang around and see what happens next? If life gets really really bad, I don't have to keep going. If it gets better, won't I be glad I stuck it out? Well, it got better, and here I am, living a pretty decent life if I do say so myself.

I'm using that technique again now. No, I'm not feeling suicidal again, but thank you for the concern. What I have been doing is getting started in the lab where I'm going to be working on my Ph.D. after a a semester and a half of "research lab speed dating," i.e. research rotations. It's a great big period of adjustment and a lot of hard work. Sometimes I get discouraged and start questioning whether I'm cut out for grad school. I was getting really stressed out about it, when I realized I could use the same strategy. I realized that if I'm truly not cut out for grad school, the option to quit will always be there. The option to take advantage of this opportunity, not so much. So it has become my plan to treat every day in grad school as a little experiment in itself: let's just go to the lab and see what happens.

It was just as liberating this time around, too. I encourage you all to try it.

They all hurt, the final kills

Time. It is the harbinger of Death. It is omnipresent, unrelenting yet silent. We know it's always there, but sometimes we can forget; for just a while, we can forget its presence.

There's so much that can be said of time. It's such a passive thing. It doesn't do anything. Only recently have we given it a dimension, but unlike the other three that we can touch, it just washes over us. It is a curious thing. And for everything, the more time experienced, the closer to ceasing to exist it is.

Endings are something dear to me. Most of the time they suck. Breaking up with a friend, losing a parent, dropping a glass, wrecking a car, they suck. Often, endings signal the potential for something to change. Sometimes the change is good. Sometimes it's bad. But, always, change is an adventure. A new experience. Something to learn from -- even if that lesson is fear.

I like change. I fear change. As with most of reality, I have a complex relationship with change. And what is the biggest change of all? Death. Death fascinates me to no end. I ponder it quite regularly.

I'm sure you must be imagining me as some kind of morbid uber-goth surrounded by dozens of black candles. Quite the contrary. I'm an ostensibly normal guy. I just like death. It's finality is paradoxical. Everything else in existence has a certain measure of permanence. While a building will crumble or a star will collapse, the component parts of those structures will continue to exist and go on to become something else. When something dies, it goes away. Well, something stops being there. What once could exert its will upon reality is no longer capable.

Perhaps I'm being arrogant or presumptuous. Maybe, what I'm seeing as an immutable consciousness is only the outward result of a complex series of chemical reactions not unlike the way photons are a product of the thermonuclear reactions in a star. When the fuel is depleted, the spark fades.

Obviously, I don't accept that. I experience faith. Intuitively, at least to me, I know that there no finality to death. The consciousness goes on. Death isn't grim; he's just really busy getting everyone to where they need to be next.

This was how I pondered some of my earliest feeling about reality that eventually led me to paganism.