On Obama’s political promise and compromise, Kripalu’s spiritual economics, and a country’s declared intent.

“The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.”

- Sir Winston Churchill

The New York Times editorial board today criticizes Barack Obama, saying that he’s already slipped from his bold promises to eschew big money contributions and stand up to special interest groups. The editorial board’s concerns seem to be valid in some respects, but not in others: Yes, Obama has allowed himself to be persuaded that it’s OK to take lots of donor money. Yes, Obama has reversed his earlier position on telecom company immunity re wire-tapping for no good reason. And yes, Obama has begun pandering to religious groups in an alarming way by promising further erosion of the separation of church and state.

But the editorial board also criticizes Obama for his right of center positions on gun control and the death penalty. I can understand the board not liking these of Obama’s positions, but they reflect a consistency in his opinion rather than a divergence. Obama seems a bit of a social conservative when it comes to certain issues. Here’s what he says in The Audacity of Hope: “While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes — mass murder, the rape and murder of a child — so heinous…that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.”

While this opinion on the death penalty reflects a moral weakness that disturbs me (outrage is enough of a reason to kill people?) Obama can’t be said to have conveniently changed his mind.

Even the boldest and strongest politician (and it’s yet to be seen whether Obama is one of them) feels the tug of interdependence. How crucial is it to hold onto one’s views and beliefs if they seem sure to hurt your chances of election? Of what use is a politician without office?

“What are the needs of the market, and what are the needs of society?  What we’re looking at is what will someone pay to take a vacation to do.” So says Ila Sarley, president of Kripalu Center for Yoga And Health. The description of the Kripalu back office sounds every bit as spiritual as the booking office for Ringlings. But despite and within the commercial mundanity that the center’s bureaucracy has become, there still exists, I imagine some room to kindle the kind of healing work that started the whole thing. The instructors come. The students come. The classes happen. And spirits are lifted, muscles stretched, minds opened.

To reach more people, the independent acts of teaching and growing become dependent on the commerce of marketing, sales and management.

The original “fair copy” of the Declaration of Independence, the one present on July 4 when it was passed, hasn’t been seen since. But there are a couple of dozen printed copies (containing slight variations) still at hand. And then there’s the ‘official’ copy that sits in the National Archives behind bulletproof glass. But this is a later copy that was post-dated.

Even something as fixed and seemingly concrete as a manuscript can’t alwats be genuine. So what hope the intent, inspiration and concept of such a manuscript?

As we enter the twilight years of the American domination of global commerce, which brought with it a political domination backed up by an insurmountably powerful military, we begin to see how fleeting and frail the concept of independence can be. Once wielding a big stick when it came to oil prices, for instance, the US now doesn’t have much say, and we’re left suffering at the pump. As China and India forge ahead, we’ll soon be just another alsoran, looking to find ways to leverage where we can.

This isn’t necessarily a failure, nor a position to lament. Independence is always in tension with interdependence. We exist in a universe in which all things fundamentally result from different arrangements and forms of energy bound together in a single universal instance of space and time.

What matters is that we’re aware of this tension, that we don’t try to deny it or defeat it. Not that Obama should shed his convictions for reasons of political expediency, but if he does shed some along the way, let’s hope he does it with full awareness of the sacrifice he’s making. Likewise those trade-offs faced in every life and pursuit, from Kripalu retreats to the trajectory of nations.

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After writing a post on mindfulness recently (Mind Power in Physical and Mental Therapies), I had some correspondence with my former life coach Serge Prengel. Serge shared with me something he’d written about mindfulness in response to the same news report, which I thought I would share here, republished with gratitude to Serge.

Mindfulness Coaching & Therapy

By Serge Prengel“>Serge Prengel

What is mindfulness, and what does it have to do with therapy or coaching?

1. Is it mystical?
First, I’d like to dispel some of the esoteric, mystical associations that many people have with the word “mindfulness’. For many people, “mindfulness” still has the connotation of something magical, endowed with mysterious powers. In fact, mindfulness is very much a part of the human experience. While some people do develop their ability to reach “higher” states of consciousness, everybody has the ability to be mindful and to increase that ability.

Helping clients practice mindfulness has long been a part of many traditional, talk-based psychotherapies, even though it has not necessarily been conceptualized as “mindfulness” within the theories underlying these therapies. For instance, many therapists help clients grow from self-consciousness into self awareness, without necessarily thinking of this as mindfulness training. Another example is how therapists help clients develop the “observing self”: In addition to noticing your mood, you become aware that there also is an “observing self” that notices how you feel, but doesn’t drown in this feeling.

2. The practitioner’s mindfulness

Having a personal experience of mindfulness has profoundly influenced the way many therapists and coaches experience what they do, and changed the way we do our work.
By this, I do not mean that we “prescribe” meditation to our clients. In fact, many of us do not specifically refer to either “mindfulness” or “meditation” during the work we do with our clients. But the profound change is that it influences how we are, and what we do, during our sessions. The practice of mindfulness helps us look for a different quality of listening - - a deeper way of paying attention to what clients say and mean.

By the way, the experience of mindfulness doesn’t just come from the practice of traditional meditation techniques. Standard “lotus” meditation is not the only way to mindfulness. Many Buddhist traditions include such practices as “walking meditation”. Some traditions go further, considering that any activity can be an opportunity to practice a mindful attitude (e.g. the injunction to “chop wood, carry water” as a way to spiritual development). Other gateways include “Focusing”, which was developed by Gene Gendlin as he analyzed the process of therapy to understand what happened in successful therapies.

3. Transmitting an experience

As a therapist/coach, you have the possibility of shaping the experience of what happens in sessions in order to help your clients “get it”. You are not teaching a whole class to try to impart them some general knowledge of what mindfulness might be. You see one client at a time, and this gives you the opportunity to tailor each session to help each client get a direct, personal experience of mindfulness.

This experience starts with what I was describing in the previous paragraph: How a mindful therapist can give a client the experience of being listened to and heard in a profound way. This continues into a creative process that is based on the very specific circumstances of this very specific client, and the nature of the interaction between this very specific client and this very specific therapist.

Over time, clients come to internalize this mixture of mindfulness, receptivity and creativity. Neural pathways adapt so that the client knows how to get back to that state of mindfulness/receptivity/creativity without thinking about it, without having to remember a procedure (much the way “procedural memory” helps us remember how to use a bike).

4. Self-regulation

As the findings of neuroscience make more inroads into the psychotherapy world, there is a growing interest in “bottom up” processes as opposed to “top down” processes. In a nutshell, “top-down” approaches focus on how our “higher” functions, such as the intellect or the will, influence what we do. “Bottom up” approaches focus on how what happens at a sensorimotor level affects what we do and who we are. Far from seeing the brain as just the organ of cognition, we tend to see it more as the place that receives input both from the outside world and from inside ourselves, and that regulates our functioning “from the bottom up”.

So there is a growing interest in how mindfulness can help us enhance the natural processes of self-regulation. This is not done in a mechanical way – i.e. saying “meditate 15 minutes a day” the way you would say “take two aspirins”. Regulating a complex mechanism is a complex thing, as everybody knows from the experience of how difficult it is to relax by just thinking “I should relax”.

Several contemporary therapies have developed ways to help people achieve more self-regulation in dealing with difficult or overwhelming circumstances. The process of doing that involves moment-by-moment attention to fleeting experiences, including body senses. This is facilitated by of the ability of the therapist to be attuned to the client, and to have the ability to be mindful during this process. This creates a learning experience where the client experiences mindfulness and develops skills to increase the ability to be mindful. While this has a lot of similarity with the skills fostered by meditation, it is not meditation per se - - and it goes further than most people can hope to achieve individually through meditation.

Serge Prengel

On what we choose to do and how those choices define us.

This is the best picture, make that the only picture I could find of George Bush’s White House reception yesterday for Major League Soccer’s league champions the Houston Dynamos. Although apparently Bush “brought the entire roster into the Oval Office and took individual pictures with each player.” Bush was also present a few weeks ago at the team’s ring ceremony.

But then the Dynamos are a Texas team, no matter that Bush is in the White House, and no matter that while he was receiving the Dynamos Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the accused and self-claimed architect of the September 11 attacks, five years after his capture appeared before a military court in Guantanamo bay. And no matter that a Senate panel after five years of investigation finally released its findings in which it accused President Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others of deceiving or misleading the American public in various ways about the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and about Iraq’s threat to the region and the world.

So I’ve been sitting here wondering what made Khalid Mohammad choose to plot and execute such acts of terror, even assuming that he’s taking credit for more than he should. And wondering too what would make the Bush administration take matters of such dire significance into their own hands, acting with such careless, callous and criminal imperiousness. The war has destabilized the region, killed thousands of innocents, and perhaps put us at greater risk of future terrorist attacks.

If, as it seems possible, what underlies both motives is a lack of perspective, a lack of humanity (Khalid Mohammad sees America as unholy, unworthy of compassion, Bush’s crowd sees the Islamic world the same way) why do we feel strongly that there is a difference?

(When I start to equate the two too directly I remind myself that Bush feted his home state Dynamos, Saddam’s son tortured Iraq’s soccer team.)

Khalid Shaikh Mohammad wasn’t born a terrorist. So when and how did it happen? After leaving his native Kuwait as a teenager he moved to North Carolina and studied engineering. At some point as a young adult he made a series of choices about what he believed which culminated in a single-minded dedication to acts of violence against the West in the name of his religion. If we summon up a picture of him in a sleepy North Carolina suburb, a newly minted engineer, picking up the newspaper and perusing the job listings, one can imagine him having made a different set of choices, perhaps ending up living a more or less peaceful life.

But he made a choice to believe in something bigger than himself, bigger than any act of terror he could dream up. His choice was so powerful and freeing that he seems never to have looked back, never to have doubted whether it was right.

As a young man George Bush was a screw up. He excelled only at failure as far as we can tell. But Bush too made a series of choices. He chose to sober up. He chose to go into politics. And he chose to commit himself to religious faith as an influence and guide, something bigger than himself.

The similarity then, the reason we deplore the terrorism of Khalid Mohammad and the duplicity and bloody recklessness of the Bush administration is that both have chosen to forgo personal responsibility in favor of ideological responsibility.

If ever we were to go seeking a definition of evil, this might be it — to choose to set aside one’s personal conscience, to deliberately let it go, so that one can experience the freedom of living by a creed.

Clinton (Hillary), Polanski (Roman), Young Earth (In Texas), and red wine.

The Times reports that ‘Hillary Rosen, one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent women supporters, wrote on the Huffington Post Web site. “I am sure I was not alone in privately urging the campaign over the last two weeks to use the moment to take her due, pass the torch and cement her grace.”’

Ah, yes, the cementing of one’s grace; the trowel’s slap against the wet lime. For Clinton, one can imagine, this is the sound of the bricks being laid for her mausoleum. To let go of this campaign, once an inevitable victory, and to accept its loss, her oblivion. How long must it have been since Clinton defined herself in anything but political terms?

Roman Polanski has suffered tragedy (the murder of his family) and inflicted harm and misery (by having sex with a thirteen year-old girl). He’s also imbued the world with grace through his artistic endeavors. His victim, 30 years on, expresses her desire to let go of his crime. That crime has defined him these past thirty years, but has also defined her, to some extent, as its victim. If she can let go, she will be free of that definition. Whereas oddly, and rightly one feels, he will remain attached to his.

Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist in Central Texas, chairs the state’s education board. As the Times reports, Dr. McLeroy believes that ‘Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion. “I believe a lot of incredible things,” he said, “The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.”’

‘“I just don’t think [evolution is] true or it’s ever happened” … when he considers the case for evolution, Dr. McLeroy said, “it’s just not there.”’

I feel the same way about dentists. After all, before a dentist looks in your mouth, your teeth are fine, they’ve been getting along quite well. But as soon as a dentist pokes around in there all of a sudden you’ve got all of these problems that have been lurking for years.

And, come to think of it, I feel that way about Texas, too. The idea that such a state exists is just so preposterous. Sure, you can make a compelling case for Austin, but what about the rest? Naah. It’s just some left wing conspiracy to scare the rest of us into voting Democrat.

But if the Texas state education board succeeds in having schools teach the weaknesses of evolutionary theory, as it is dangerously close to doing, I may have to let go of the conviction that Texas and its dentists don’t exist.

Which brings me to today’s philosophic conundrum:

Should I drown my days of sorrow in red wine if it will only serve to extend them?

Monkeys controlling robotics make the headlines (again) and the new, old practice of meditation gets some focus.

Back in January I wrote about monkeys who had used their minds to make robots walk on a treadmill. The article pointed out that the scientists involved had had monkeys control robotic limbs with their minds back in 2003. Along the same lines, in what The NY Times calls “the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology” Nature has published results of experiments in which monkeys controlled prosthetic limbs to feed themselves. (Their own arms were gently restrained.) The results hold great promise for a new generation of advanced prosthetics. (Unfortunately, I can imagine that the Pentagon will be interested, too.)

And in the world of mind over melancholy the Times reports on the growing trend in using mindfulness meditation to help people combat such things as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Generally an optimistic report, citing considerable enthusiasm and some degree of success, it also points out, a little ruefully, that some in the field don’t share this enthusiasm and question the success, even warning that for some the mindfulness meditation seems to make things worse. The concept: In a calm, peaceful, centered state, the subject allows himself to experience the emotions that underlie his symptoms, learning to explore them and diffusing their power.

He didn’t call it mindfulness meditation (he didn’t call it anything) but this sounds a lot like much of the work I did with my life coach / therapist over the course of the last few years. So, from personal experience, I’d add that the skills of the therapist would be critical to determining success. Anyone can play the piano, but only a pianist can make the instrument produce reliably pleasant sounds. Or, perhaps a more apt analogy, you wouldn’t trust a podiatrist with your by-pass surgery.

Serge, in my experience, was an incredibly skilled and sophisticated practitioner, and with him I achieved regular breakthroughs that have stayed with me and changed my life. But I can easily imagine that the same techniques applied without supreme care, patience and respect could well make matters worse. The therapy subject places his or her most delicate feelings in the hands of the therapist, and the interaction between them is critical. (As a case in point, the article talks about therapies that last eight weeks, clearly not enough time for the therapist to win the trust of his or her patient.)

All of which brings me to thinking, curiously, about Scott McClellan, the ousted Bush press secretary, who casts various aspersions on the current administration’s delusions, deceptions and duplicity in his new book. Not surprisingly, the White House “responds negatively” as the Times puts it. And Bush, true to form, says he won’t read it — he’s too busy deciding what to meddle in next.

In the book, McClellan describes Bush as a president who could convince himself of anything (hmmm), claims that both he and Bush were duped about the Plame leak, and describes Bush in tears as he sympathizes with his old friend just after he’s given him the boot. As I think about this it summons up a mental image of Rove and Cheney controlling Bush as deftly as a pair of monkeys reaching for grapes with prosthetic limbs, simultaneous with an image of Bush engaging in some kind of distorted mindfulness therapy with his old buddy McClellan, wallowing in memories of the good old days as the tears roll down his cheeks. Well the therapy clearly didn’t leave McClellan feeling warm and fuzzy, I wonder what it did for Bush…

On a stroke victim’s experience of nirvana, Supreme Court justices’ rendering surprising decisions, and a father’s $45K investment in his son’s self-motivation.

I watched The Simpsons movie over the weekend, which uses the twin drays of pollution and global warming to help drive its plot. I thought it must have been during the Simpsons movie that I heard a witticism about an endangered species being one simply less able to survive, but my daughter corrected me; David Letterman cracked the joke about the great blue heron when he hosted the Piedmont bird impersonators on a recent show.

Which is a long way around (what do you expect?) to introducing the subject of my curiosity today — exceptions. An endangered species might be considered an exception in that it is one of a minority of the species on the planet doomed to imminent extinction, but maybe another way of looking at this is that every species is endangered, we’re just each on our own time-lines.

Other exceptions:

A stroke victim experienced an informed nirvana after her stroke disabled the egotism and analytical dominance of her left brain. Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor, now recovered but having learned a new skill, can still tap into the peaceful, euphoric oneness that her stroke foisted upon her. Unusual in her pragmatic perspective on the sensation, Dr. Taylor describes her experience as a sudden understanding the relative and all-connected reality of her existence. But since we’d need a stroke, and a lucky stroke, to get to the same euphoric sensation, what use is Dr. Taylor’s unique affliction?

The Supreme Court rendered two surprisingly non-conservative decisions today in favor of workers versus employers. The particular details are less pertinent to this post than their out-of-wackness.

And lastly, I’ve written variously before on the value of education as an end in itself. I was just talking about this yesterday to my wife’s aunt’s mother (such are family gatherings) who made the pertinent point that the value of an education is to teach one how to learn. But today I read the compelling story of a man who bribed his son to apply himself in school by promising him a Shelby 427 Cobra. (Those kids who’ve been duped into performing for $50, read no further…)

Alright, so what gives? We like evolution, survival of the fittest, but we love the endangered species. We pride ourselves on our mastery of language, on our analytical heft, but our jaws drop as we think about freedom from ego and stress. We hate the conservatism of the court with such vehemence that we try to read conservative subplots into its more liberal decisions. And we don’t believe in the value of financial incentives in encouraging our children to learn, but we wonder how we’re going to pay for the Shelby Cobra…

Exceptions.

Does an exception tell us that the rule is wrong?

Not necessarily. I think they perhaps give us a new overarching rule that we should be careful of absolutism. We love to categorize. Categorizing has been such useful skill for the conscious mind that it has become a ready defense against uncertainty. In some cases perhaps too ready.

Dr. Taylor’s experience tells us that we may have a very different perception of reality if we could find ways to counter the less helpful strategies of the left brain.

The Supreme Court justices remind us that we can’t necessarily judge people by their past actions and ideas.

And the father who bought his son a Shelby Cobra for making the honor role thumbs his nose at those of us who hove to the higher ground of learning for the sake of learning…

On George Bush in Israel, video game workouts, and predictions of neural Buddhism.

In a bold and boldly quirky opinion, David Brooks predicts that current research into the workings of the mind will lead toward more widespread acceptance of the spiritual concepts of Buddhism, and away from adherence to the textual “patina of different religions.”

This research has shown, says Brooks, that the mind “does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.”

I can’t help but quote his pivotal paragraph whole:

“First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.”

I think that Brooks may have gone a little loopy. Not because what he’s saying is nutty, but he’s saying it without any seeming objectivity or pause for reflection.

To parse and unpack adequate individual responses to each of Brooks statements in his opinion would take many posts. So I’ll focus on the aspect of his opinion that represents a common thread: Conviction. Brooks writes as if he is convinced of his opinion. He writes as if others will be convinced of the research findings. And he writes as if a person who has a sense of the interrelated self, or inherent morality, or the sacred, or God, will necessarily have a belief in those same things in spite of or despite a more nuanced understanding or wherefrom and why those senses derive.

Sure, we operate less like machines than people once thought, but that doesn’t mean that life in all its rich emotion and subjectivity is inevitably mysterious and unknowable, sacred and spiritual. Just because life has evolved to include psychological and physiological responses that evoke transcendent sensory experiences, doesn’t prove that our perception of those transcendent experiences is evidence of something inexplicable.

Video games provide a case in point. Nintendo’s Wii and Wii Fitness take new steps into the realm of virtual reality. As reviewed, Wii Fitness does a good enough job of simulating a fitness regime that people found it winningly good at doing what it set out to do. The human mind nimbly assimilates virtual or perceived realities into its overall perception of the real world. This isn’t surprising. The mind needs to be able to do this in order for us to imagine different scenarios, to predict and plan.

George Bush, still president, still persisting in his perception of himself as a leader, and a leader of some weight, has said this week in Israel that talking to Iran and Syria would be like talking to Hitler.

Again, I feel I should quote him in full:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

I was left wondering on what level Bush believes this. Surely he can’t believe that anyone who would seek to talk to hostile and dangerous leaders would expect to convince them they were wrong with some “ingenious argument.” Does he believe that’s what they would try to do? Surely not. No. Not even someone as apparently ignorant and deluded as Bush.

(One would of course expect to try to convince them that they have more to gain by peaceable coexistence than by continued hostility. This is not ingenious, it’s just common sense.)

Bush’s difficulties in perceiving accurate versions of reality reveal something about what makes the human mind successful or unsuccessful in guiding us through our lives. As we’ve discussed, we need to be able to use our imagination to conceive of different versions of current and future reality, to assess possibilities and outcomes. But we also need to be able to accept as more concrete the versions that carry more rational weight. This won’t always yield truth, but it will more often than not yield truth.

Bush seems to be able to conjure up a version of reality and attach his belief to it, regardless of evidence to the contrary. This is perhaps his greatest deficiency. He wanted to believe in the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein so badly that he ignored all the signs that it was a fiction. He wanted to believe in rapid and easy success in Iraq so passionately that he failed to plan for the more likely scenario that it would be a long, hard, bloody war. He wanted to believe that Hurricane Katrina was a local disaster and required a local response, despite evidence to the contrary, with deadly and horrific results.

Bush is not alone; many leaders delude themselves, as do many of us less prominent citizens. The trouble is that Bush has deluded many others, too, and continues to do just that.

Footnote: As has been noted elsewhere, Bush’s reference to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the words of an American Senator (attributed by some to William Borah) are hardly new material. Rumsfeld was spouting the same fear-mongering rhetoric back in 2006.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the separate worlds of science and religion.

For what reads like a fluff piece, Cornelia Dean’s portrait of evolutionary biologist and author Francisco J. Ayala manages to press some pertinent buttons. Specifically:

1. The title “Roving Defender of Evolution, And Room for God” might mislead. It seems to imply that Ayala speaks not just as a scientist but as a believer. But the piece closes as follows: “Dr. Ayala will not say whether he remains a religious believer. ‘I don’t want to be tagged,’ he said. ‘By one side or the other.’”

2. Ayala makes some curious statements about evolution and evil. As Dean reports “If God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, [Ayala] said, ‘then he is a sadist…’” And quoted Ayala from his book: “Evolution ‘provided the ‘missing link’ in the explanation of evil in the world.’”

3. And, in passing, Dean inserts this dramatic and non-trivial opinion: “‘Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge,’ [Ayala] writes in the new book. ‘It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.’”

The NY Times exhibits poor editorial judgment in publishing the piece under the chosen title. I don’t know whether the Times is diluting its editorial expertise in the move to become an up-to-date on-line news resource. And I don’t have an assiduous record of the editorial quality of the paper. But it’s my passing impression that the mismatch between titles and content is happening somewhat frequently on-line. I don’t ever recall it happening in the printed paper. The piece itself is less focused and on-point than one would expect from a top notch news source. In an Internet world overflowing with dubious content, these things matter enormously.

I’m fascinated by Ayala’s equating of evolution with an explanation for evil. Given the sketchy coverage of Ayala’s views and opinions, I’m guessing that he has much more to say on the subject. But from the little we have to work with Ayala seems to be saying that evolution lets God off the hook for being the source of evil.

This brings us to the third point. If science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge then on what basis can we cross-reference evolution and evil?

Here are my specific responses:

a. Religion is not a realm of knowledge, it is a realm of belief. In furthering human understanding and combating intolerance, we must resist the confusion of scientific and rational knowledge (which is grounded in a common and reproducible perception of the world we live in) from religious belief (which is not).

b. Evil is a human construct related to belief and doesn’t “exist” other than as a concept. To casually conjoin the concept of evolution with the concept of evil overlaps science and religion in exactly the way that Ayala seems to decry.

c. I agree that denouncing religion in the name of science isn’t particularly helpful. But neither is it helpful for a renowned scientist to use his scientific credentials to explicitly “make room” for religion while being coy about his own beliefs.

As a side note, moral concepts arise out of our experience of the world around us. Morality is our way of making sense of the way that life seems to operate. If we explore the origin of the concept of morality we find that it has its fundamental grounds in the principles of space and time. Working rationally we can define a moral framework that relies only on logic and promotes ideas about goodness that reflect life as it is not life as we’ve been told it should be. — I describe this approach in detail in my book - LIFE!

Related posts from around the web…

Evolution and the Problem of Evil - It does add force to the atheist’s argument from evil, but it’s just one point in a larger picture, and the problem as a whole would remain even if evolution were to fall. A person who accepts evolution and still believes in God can do …

Science Vs Religion: Intellectual Sloth As The Main Problem - Likewise, atheism is not about “over dogmatism” (a cheap characterization in my opinion), but about the rule of rationality and abandonement of superstition (ie leaving the primitive mind behind and embracing the enlightened, …

Good, Evil, Morality, and Ethics - I don’t claim to understand all the forces that govern the evolution of ethics, but it is plain to see that our ethical systems have evolved. Slavery was once accepted and considered ethical by many; now it is not accepted. …

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Well, I’d written a good part of a post about seasons, gas prices, and global warming before I pressed the wrong button combination and lost it.

It started with some reflection on the cost of getting around in the city: I take my son to pre-school on the subway in preference to driving him, because we like the train and because I like the idea that I’m not contributing to global warming and pollution. But this morning as I walked in the Spring sunshine I realized that it costs me $4 for a round trip on the subway, while the cost of driving him to school would only be about 54 cents. That sucks. Shouldn’t we make public transportation more economically attractive than driving to encourage people to use it?

I then lamented the defeat of mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan. I then got into the ineffectiveness of government in dealing with problems like global warming. President Bush is an extreme example. After eight years the best he could do was to make some feel good statements encouraging a voluntary reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. But governments in general seem to be ill-matched to the situation.

Part of the problem seems to be that we’re not really very good at dealing with long term threats. Evolution has wired us to focus on the here and now in a very vivid and immediate way. We can conceptualize and prepare for what may happen today or tomorrow, but the further out the problems get, the less able we are to act in ways that recognize them and respond to them effectively.

I then had started to write about the changing seasons and the way that this affects our conceptual view of the world. I was thinking about referencing lyrics from a record I was just listening to (The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely, on which a track begins with the words “Autumn came around like a drifter to an on ramp…”). It was as I was trying to develop this idea that I pressed the fatal combination of buttons and erased the post.

But now I feel engaged by the idea of ‘the lost blog,’ or, more generally, the lost anything.

The idea of ‘no longer being’ can be juxtaposed with the idea of constant renewal. The changing cycle of the seasons reinforces our concept of the world as a place where things come around again. In the Fall the trees shed their leaves as we enter the long dead winter, but in Spring the natural world appears to be reborn. We integrate this and similar ideas of regeneration into our conceptual view of the world. (The cycle of day and night, of waking and sleeping reinforces this concept.)

It is no surprise then that many cultures and religions have conceptualized life and death as a cycle. Reincarnation, life after death. Renewal of life reflects our regular impression of the world, and it salves the pain of total loss.

But things do get lost. My original post is gone. Even if I were able to recall it word for word and write it out again, it would be something subtly different from the original post.

In reality, existence never repeats itself. The present moment is unique and new. The earth never quite rotates about the same sun, which is ever so slowly burning away and cooling. The child born today is born into a world different from the world his or her parents were born into.

This is not true of the conceptual world, in which concepts remain firm and fast and reproducible over and over, where the concept of a square remains always the concept of a square, where a logical analysis remains always logical.

As we become more sophisticated in our understanding of the world, more aware of our effect on the environment, more cognizant of the way we can improve the long term lot of humankind and a whole host of other species, we face the challenge of shedding our concept of reality and existence as something that forever renews, of life as a short term that will be repeated in the long term.

We have both the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this new conceptual world-view and the capabilities to act on it for the good of the world and for the good of humanity.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

The Democratic candidates’ remarks on religion.

William Kristol, in a disdainful, patronizing opinion, accuses Barack Obama of making disdainful, patronizing remarks about small-town America in his speech to a wealthy audience in San Francisco. “I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s,” Kristol begins… How much more elitist can you get than that? Kristol seizes on Obama’s words, and, despite presenting counter-examples, claims that Obama has let slip his mask. Sadly, Kristol is working too hard to find a reason for Obama’s somewhat pandering comments. If there’s one thing we’ve had reinforced for us during this intensely observed political odyssey it is that politicians say things to attract as many to their cause as possible, while alienating as few people as possible.

For me, Clinton and Obama speaking on faith at the Compassion Forum at Messiah College in Pennsylvania has produced the worst of it yet.

Clinton: “You know, I have, ever since I’ve been a little girl, felt the presence of God in my life,” she said. “And it has been a gift of grace that has, for me, been incredibly sustaining.”

Obama: “I try as best I can to be an instrument of his work … to act in accordance with what I think are the precepts of my faith.”

Here we have the Democratic candidates touting their faith and its guidance as a means to votes. Whether we take their statements at face value or not (although they seem so carefully extruded that taking them at face value requires more faith than I, for one, possess) the trotting out of religious belief as a piece of voter fly-paper goes further than similar sticky sentiments on standard political, economic and social issues.

How far astray are these politicians, these Democrats, from the likes of Thomas Jefferson? Jefferson, in his time, when criticized for being faithless, didn’t even bother to rebut the intended insult. Jefferson also wrote the following:

“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”

I’m not condemning Clinton and Obama for having faith, but condemning them for using faith as an implied qualification for office.

From a philosophical perspective, politics is the art and science of determining and implementing the operation of a society. Politicians take office by demonstrating an aptitude for sustaining, protecting and improving society. One could argue that the religious beliefs of American citizens play an important role in our society. And I suppose that would be a difficult argument to negate. But one wants leaders and administrators who can separate religious belief from the practical and pragmatic needs of society. We don’t elect presidents as spiritual guides. And we shouldn’t have to elect someone to the highest office who won’t say things just to win votes.

But back to Kristol for a moment. (Kristol, who hasn’t read much Marx since the early 1908s.) I looked up the preceding context of the Marx quote Kristol gives. It’s this: “[Religion] is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.”

It is clear from this insight that Marx was a true philosopher. According to Kristol, it’s all very well for a German thinker to speak of such things, but not for a presidential candidate. But oh, for a leader who could think like this.