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Much has been written about inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. And there have been many scholarly attempts to untangle the most authoritative historical accounts from those that were invented to serve the political objectives of evangelists. But I doubt any of them begin with the hypothesis that Jesus was an anti-theist who foresaw the terrible consequences of combining the philosophy of Jewish monotheism with the power of Rome. I think he was indifferent to Holy Law and the creator God that legitimized them. And I think he was also indifferent to Rome's ambitions of Empire which collected duties and took slaves but otherwise left local cultures intact. Both were attempts at social engineering that most individuals were free to accept or disregard. But a Rome under a single God was a dangerous collusion of power which could, through its necessarily-enforced campaigns of re-education and indoctrination, reduce humanity to the status ...

A good essay, like a good poem, is a complete thought. Books, I think, are food for thought but rarely constitute one themselves. The worst books are those that unnecessarily expand a thought that could have been fully expressed in a page or two. They are neither cogent nor nourishing. They are merely a distraction to occupy the mind when it is too tired to pay attention and too nervous to sleep. A complete thought isn't what we're taught in grade school. It isn't story elucidating a moral lesson. It isn't a symbol for something ineffable. It isn't a puzzle resolved by logic. It isn't an equation, a proof, a synthesis, or a paradox. A complete thought can't be reduced to anything more fundamental, and its parts have no meaning and no reality other than the continuous tension of the whole that runs through them. Science is obsessed with synthesizing thought, of separating thought from the source and observing it as an object. This obsession was, perhaps,...

There's been a lot of new slogans to help us cope with Trump's assault on smug and superior liberalism. One is attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts," which has been reduced to the slogan, "Facts matter. " We who are educated use facts to win arguments and have grown accustomed to shaming enemies simply by citing some authoritative source. But it's a strategy not so very different from religious orthodoxies citing scripture. Scientific facts and academic consensus are perhaps even less self-evident than religious dogma, and it should come as no surprise that the un-initiated at the margins of our cities and college campuses would one day simply refuse to accept our facts as valid and authoritative. But what really irritates the court and its educated courtiers is their refusal to play by the rules, to engage the Inquisition in the rational arguments designed to render the oppo...

Environing Need Organizing Environment Conceptualizing Organism Modeling Conception Subsequent experience informs the simple litany I came up with in my early twenties. I knew then but I know better now how the process repeats and persists at every level and at every step of evolution and transformation. The words will differ, and the details of its calculations will change, but the theme is constant, and includes consciousness as easily as it includes the organism and the nucleated cell, the biosphere and the prokaryotes, mass and gravity, charge and electromagnetic radiation, self and culture. It was unnecessary for civilization to dominate culture. I really don't think of God as a natural consequence of our self-awareness. God has always been an imposition on our common sense, and God's truth has never been self-evident. Truth that can only be known through indoctrination is quite naturally challenged by imaginations nurtured by personal experience. Science and religio...

Personal experience and common sense is all we have. But common sense can be manipulated and personal experience can include manufactured illusions. They're all the same in the metaphysical mind space we call consciousness, and most of us don't even try to distinguish between the two. We are, generally, made to regard our unregulated experience as self-indulgent, and the general principles derived from it as suspect. We've learned to filter and refute experience that contradicts belief, and to defend our orderly world view from disorderly reality. Over the centuries our common sense has been trained to defend the ideal against the real using a diverse and inconsistent arsenal of excuses, but from the very beginning we learned to accept hierarchies as a natural and necessary organizing principle, with the pyramid or ziggurat as the tangible metaphor by which it was assimilated. Age possesses wisdom derived from experience. When the dead began to speak we built altars t...

Civilization claims as its own all that culture has produced. Culture, as I'm beginning to conceive it, is all that a single person can hold in their minds and carry with them. Culture is language, it is all the deep metaphors, named things, organizing principles, and conceptual models that make us uniquely human. Culture is science, which in its pure and uncorrupted state, is conceptual; that is, all of its complexity can be derived from conceptual models and relationships any human mind can comprehend. Civilization is intentionally incomprehensible. It is an unnecessarily complex and inefficient collection of estranged parts that must be choreographed through a hierarchy of authority. It is designed to elicit awe and to make the individual feel powerless. Its perceived power is achieved through the tactics common to all ideologies: the disintegration of culture through expertise, classification, categorization, division, and compartmentalization. I, like most people who ha...

We know the difference between animals and humans, but fail whenever we attempt to say what it is. The difference, as simply and as honestly as I can state it, is that we are a fiction and the animal is a fact. The fact of our physical identity is confounded by the fiction of our metaphysical identity. The physical animal is neglected, like a dog with a distracted owner, like the health and hygiene of a junkie. We are obsessed with our imaginary worlds and metaphysical selves, and we fixate all our energies on their maintenance and improvement, like an old man with a model railroad, like Disney with his Magic Kingdom, like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Gene Roddenberry, or J.K. Roweling. Our world, the one we call real, and ourselves, those we call authentic, are no more physical and present than Gandalf or Harry Potter. Our lives are narratives with parts played by characters we invent. We are merely the sorcerer who conjures them as surrogates for the warm and real facts from which conscious...

We're alert, I suppose, but that has a narrow connotation, implying a readiness to react to something that would upset our otherwise equanimity. One can be alert without paying attention, and often the two are at odds with one another. Also, we attend to the matter at hand by disregarding and deliberately ignoring things an outsider might regard as relevant. We dutifully complete tasks by disciplining ourselves not to be distracted by details. We believe that by dismissing irrelevancies we discern the general principle, the truth obscured by specificity. The world is filled with baubles, we say, and only the weak allow themselves to be enchanted by such random and meaningless detail as the way light refracts from water cascading over a waterfall, the ephemera of its cool mist, the color of twilight on arid rock, the low growl of well-fed bear. But it's those who spend their days preening their principles and cataloging abstractions that are silly in my estimation. Their th...

"My daddy taught to never do anything without a purpose." I've met people like that, though none quite so honest or self-aware. Your daddy was right, so far or it goes, but the purpose should never interfere with the opportunities for discovery, and the plan should never preempt spontaneity. Purposes get you out of the house and plans keep you moving when you're stuck. But the goal can blind you to the journey, and the plan can make you deaf to good fortune and hostile to coincidence. In the 60's and 70's, I rarely saw anyone in the mountains who wasn't clearly stating their purpose for being there. There'd be a fishing rod or rifle prominently displayed outside their backpack, and they'd always ask about their prospects for success up trail. The worst were the mountaineers. They'd pass silently with only a disdainful glance at my gear. I once almost bought an ice ax, just to deflect their derision. The first question that occurs to most A...

The Whole Earth Catalog, which anticipated the internet, took as its inspiration Bucky Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" and the first real photograph of the whole earth, taken from Apollo 8 by the first astronauts to orbit the Moon. We did great things then and assumed ourselves virtuous. But Fuller rode through those ambitions and prolific decades like a precocious child who asked too many questions. And though his intent was to accelerate progress, he made us stop. And think. His impatience was our conscience; his ambitions were our inhibitions; his "comprehensive anticipatory design science" was our resistance to its opposite: the realization of the ideal; the exclusive, apprehensive, prescriptive, and domesticating ideologies of power. Though Fuller wasn't an idealist, he invoked the concept of God and even prayed in a manner he associated with the purpose of prayer. He didn't believe in a God independent of and outside the universe, but he did accept ...

The question is always ahead of the answer, because the question presupposes the fact. Answers tell us nothing but what the question had already anticipated. The inquisitor is to be blamed if a negative answer leads them nowhere. Every question should anticipate every answer, which is to say that no answer should ever be dismissed. The question might not be understood, by either the interrogator or by the interrogated. If so, refine the question, expand, explain. To articulate a relevant question requires that the scholar first be educated by the curious. There are rote answers to rote questions, and there is curiosity that disturbs the serenity of ideologues. The latter requires careful diplomacy and, especially, compassion. We all were once confirmed to one state or another, and we all owe ourselves to the compassion of an inquisitor, the sympathy of an interrogator. Ask and receive. It was never know and get. It's all in the asking, the humble inquisitiveness, curiosity without...

It's the 50th anniversary of one of the great coming-of-age songs: "Sitting on the dock of the Bay watching my time slip away." But for me, it was Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits, and the line, "No one speaks English and everything's broken, and my Stacy's are soaking wet." If I was a few years older I might have separated myself from my feelings like Bob Dylan when he asked, "How does it feel to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?" There was also Cat Stevens: "I keep on wondering if sleep too long, will I always wake up the same, or so? And if I make it to the waterside, will I even find me a boat, or so?" There was Catcher in the Rye before popular music got serious. And there was Danny Boy before literature acknowledged that generations were coming of age in America, and we were all doing it alone. For most of us, there was no apprenticeship, no ceremony, no mentors. There was onl...

I wrote a nice sentence this morning. The rest of the essay wasn't blog-worthy, but I think the sentence stands alone: "We, this nexus of conceit, conceive and create the universe with every breath, every egocentric blink."

The books in Wuthering Heights (Joseph's and those in the Linton's library) represent the civilized world, and civilization is defined by the perverse piety of Joseph, and the meek, feckless morality of the Lintons. Joseph, in his stubborn dissatisfaction with the world, is the distillation of the Earnshaws' morality, the family that took in an orphan (Heathcliff) that the civilized world (represented by the Lintons) had abandoned. Nelly, the housekeeper (not a nursemaid) who would oversee the last days of both families, was aligned with neither of them. She both loved and despised everyone equally. Her meddling was the meddling of an author with her characters, and her aim was to celebrate their willfulness, encourage and to chastise it, and, finally, to to see it stilled in the calm of surrender and the finality of death. Lockwood immersed himself in her story, and even fancied himself its hero. In the end, he slipped away through the back door rather than risk being dis...

There will be long term effects. His tear ducts will stop working. The lens of his left eye will develop cataracts. The hair on the top of his head will turn gray. And the cancer (which my dog, Clarence, has been diagnosed with) will likely return. This is the age of bear skins and stone knives, and medicine is a branch of the military. We preserve and protect life with shields and weapons because we observe nature as a battleground and evolution as an arms race. We see what our metaphors enable us to see, and what we see is fear. Fear made the turtle's shell and the snake's venom. Fear made fins and wings, teeth and claws, and fear made rage as well as the reactions to it: flight, submissiveness, and group identity. When we look at nature, we see ourselves, because that is how we see. We know the world only as well as we know ourselves, and today we know ourselves as selfish genes in a war which will be won by the most fit. Some of us are asking what the victors of this ...

Leaders are whomever we follow, deliberately or unconsciously, but never slavishly. Those we follow into war are less leaders than they are representatives of an idea their followers believe in. They are objects of our infatuation and are therefore whatever our fantasy, ideology, or worldview requires them to be. The ideology is akin to the video game, and we are all its players. The real leader is the programmer, the architect of the worldview into which we each have assumed a role. The visible leader is as much a puppet as the rest of us. In a reality we know to be artificial, the difference between the leader of the dream and the dream leader is obvious. But when the dream is the assumed reality, the distinction becomes less clear. The point at which a worldview becomes "true", is the point at which its leader becomes its prophet, and their dream becomes an inevitability. I would, therefore, prefer not to call Arthur C Clarke a prophet, but I think he wanted to be recog...