Everyday Wisdom

This is probably ill advised, but 3 things crossed my path last month and I'm going to combine them into one blog post. I finished Cheryl Strayed's "Wild", the story of a woman who walked 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. I usually don't read books like that, but she grew up near here and I wanted to know about this friend of my friends. Throughout, she acknowledges the greatness of ordinary people she meets and ends with "It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred." Then, I saw a great post by Krista Tippet at OnBeing.org about a woman who was recently killed in Syria. A woman doing perfectly normal work who we now see as a hero. Then finally, Sam Harris talked for a brief 25 minutes and covered everything that needs to be covered about how we should listen to all the voices and not distort them.

Maybe I should let Cheryl tell her own story. Here she is at the end of the book, reflecting on the years since her hike and what the hike meant to her.

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn't have to know. That is was enough to trust that what I'd done was true. To understand its meaning without yet being able to say precisely what it was, like all those lines from The Dream of a Common Language that had run through my nights and days. To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”

We know about Cheryl because she wrote a book and an already famous movie star bought the rights. Oh, and Oprah liked it. But at the time of her experience of the hike, she was just another one of us, struggling to find her way. Millions of people we won't know are doing that right now. We probably would not have never heard from Kayla Mueller if she had not been kidnapped then killed while volunteering in Syria. We would not have heard her words that are as profound as any saint or mystic. Words she wrote while imprisoned by terrorists.

I have been shown in darkness, light + have learned that even in prison, one can be free. I am grateful. I have come to see that there is good in every situation, sometimes we just have to look for it.”

Krista tells us more about her and also talks of the three Muslims that were killed by a man in Chapel Hill North Carolina, apparently after arguing over a parking space. These three also were destined to do great things. We may have never heard of them, but people in their communities most certainly would have. See Krista's post for more about them.

But instead of them doing their good works, the person we will eventually hear from is the killer. People are speculating now. They looked at the killers Facebook page and found many posts about atheist writers, and have suggested this was a hate crime. By extension, some journalists have sad those atheist writers have blood on their hands. So we are having that conversation instead. Instead of building the world we want, we are arguing about motivations for violence and trying to assign blame.

Sam Harris, someone who is taking some of that blame, sorts it out better than anyone.

It is obvious that some instances of Muslim violence have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, and I would never dream of assigning blame to the religion of Islam for that behavior. …

What we've built over the past few centuries is a world where we can discuss our beliefs and our aspirations openly. We've built a world where normal everyday people can accomplish amazing things in their spare time. But enough people want to return to a 7^th century world or 1^st century world, that the rest of us have to deal with them. As Sam says,

...there’s nothing about doubting that the universe has a creator, that suggests that violence in certain circumstances is necessary or even acceptable. And all the people who are comparing these murders to Charlie Hebdo – or to ISIS, as insane as that sounds – are really trivializing a kind of violence that threatens to destabilize much of the world.

If you listen to the audio from Sam, he plays the sound of gunfire that came into a meeting in Denmark where people were simply discussing the Charlie Hebdo murders. A woman is speaking about peace and free speech, then several shots are fired, chairs and desks can be heard scuffling across the floor and something like a pipe falling. It's disturbing, and I'm not easily disturbed. It's probably because it is real and it is in the present. Sam follows that with, "is this the world we want?"

Earlier in the talk, he talks of the differences in the types of violence we are seeing today and how we must be able to distinguish them and to speak out against the types that are dangerous. "The thing that very few people seem able to distinguish, and the distinction that Greenwald and Aslan obfuscate at every opportunity, is the difference between criticizing ideas and their results in the world, and hating people as people because they belong to a certain group, or because they have a certain skin color, or because they came from a certain country. There is no connection between those two orientations. The latter is of course bigotry and I would condemn it as harshly as anyone would hope."

We need to be able to criticize bad ideas and to recognize people quietly doing great things and not be afraid that pointing out either of those will somehow upset someone or lead them to violence.

Cheryl ends her book with a vision of hope for everyone, Sam ends his talk with a call to reasonableness, and Krista ends her blog post with an invitation to challenge ourselves. I'll quote her here:

I will look at their faces, and read their words, and ponder the world they are asking me to help them make. I invite you to ponder with me. How can we — and I use this “we” lavishly and presumptuously, challenging myself as much as you — now be present and supportive of all the beautiful lives which have not been extinguished, as a way of honoring those we have lost and found at the same time?

Can Coke be a "true" craft soda

Coca-cola seems to be trying to move in on the market of small batch, specialty sodas. This one is paradoxical mix of pure cane sugar and stevia. Stevia is a natural sugar substitute. The cane sugar is a throwback to a few decades ago when all soda used it. It's easy to find Mountain Dew and others putting out batches made with pure cane sugar. It's a little better. You can decide for yourself what kind of sweetener is better for you.

As for Coke Life, it tastes kinda like you would expect it to. It's sweet, but there is the diet taste there also. It's still Coke, which now tastes like Pepsi anyway. So, if you don't pick one of these up, you're not missing much.

Prayer Breakfast

I don’t usually do current events, but this Prayer Breakfast thing has got my knickers in a knot and I’m not seeing the kind of commentary on it that I think should be out there. There's a link to the video of the speech if you follow the Christian Science Monitor below. I’m not going to comment on anything that came out of “Right Wing Watch” or Breitbart or any other such extreme news sources. I’m mostly disappointed in the response by news sources that are still widely read and are supposed to be neutral. I’m disappointed too in the lack of response by those further left, who have mostly focused on the over the top response of the right, missing the actual message from the nation’s leader.

If you missed this news, here is the line that everyone is talking about. Taken by itself it could be critiqued in many ways. Taken in context, where he spends a few minutes talking about people misusing theology, then goes on to discuss the value of being humble in the face of violence and anger, it makes much more sense:

“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

I think these messages getting misunderstood is a symptom of the misplacement of the religion desk in media in general. It is off to the side, expected to come up with something around Christmas and Easter, but not much else. People who are not well versed on the topic are left to comment on it and we get a lot of bad information. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope they are not purposely giving us misinformation. In a time of war with nations and groups that justify their actions with religion, I think we need reporters who better understand the background.

Case in point, Chuck Todd on Meet the Press lauded Jon Meachem, his guest to start off the subject of the Prayer Breakfast speech. Chuck said if anybody knew this subject, Meachem did. They focused on the words “Crusades” and a little on “slavery”, and missed most of the rest of the speech. Chuck is supposed to talk politics, so I’ll give him a pass, but Meachem, a historian said, “Christianity has reformed itself”. That is inexcusable.

You can read my other blogs on that topic, as well as many others, or you can simply ask when did that happen? Everyone is tripping over themselves to point out the Crusades were 700 years ago, but I don’t remember them ending with a declaration that they were wrong. Nor did the Catholics elect reformists Popes when they had the chance in the years preceding Calvin and Luther. That’s why we call it the PROTESTANT reformation. And those two guys weren’t the most peaceful either.

If you think the reformation was some kind of peaceful transition of power, ask an Anabaptist. Their protests and demands for rights led to 100 years of war. Meanwhile people were heading off to America to escape religious oppression. Their progeny saw the contradiction of escaping persecution but having no problem with slavery in 1688.  It still took 200 more years and a Civil War to get actual legislation and if you think that settled it, read a book.

If you think the bad feelings ended in the 17^th century, ask your grandmother about how big of a deal it was for Catholics to marry non-Catholics and ask yourself if you’d want your sister to marry an atheist. Or look at more recent events. In Vatican II, the church finally made some truly liberal declarations, that was 1963. They’ve done nothing but backtrack since, except a few like Oscar Romero, a priest who spoke for peace against right-wing violence in his country. He was gunned down in 1980. The military groups that did it got funding from the US and the Vatican was conveniently quiet about it until just a couple weeks ago.

Most states in the US had statements about official religions in their original constitutions. People didn’t come here and proclaim they want all faiths to be considered equal, they came here to start local governments with their religion as the basis and they wanted the federal government to stay out of it. The power of Kings to tell people how to worship was taken away from them by the people. Then, in the US, those state constitutional laws were declared invalid by the Supreme Court, and there are people alive today who are still not happy about it. So what does it mean that “Christianity reformed itself”?

But my litany here should not convince anyone. I could easily be missing or ignoring or deliberately hiding some history where religious leaders met and agreed to leave each other’s flocks alone. There could be speeches out there where religious leaders tell politicians not to mention their God in a speech about war. There could be someone other than Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn who said you can do my practices or not, it’s okay with him. There could be books co-authored by Imams and Rabbis discussing their mutual desire for peace and how both of their scriptures support it. Please link to them in the comments.

And please don’t list some obscure quote from Bonheoffer or Chrysostom or Erasmus. These people were oppressed in their time, just like Martin Luther King was in ours. Of course there were always dissenting voices speaking out against the violence and corruption in the church. That’s because there has always been violence and corruption in the church. It was the enacting of laws that tamed religion. Laws against burning people at the stake, the repeal of apostasy laws, laws requiring people to use doctors for their children not just prayer, the whole concept of a nation as opposed to a monarchy ordained by God reformed Christianity, not itself.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, what can we find in the press about this?

One of the few shining examples is PatheosProgressive Secular Humanist blog. It headlined with Obama’s mention of the right of every person to practice no faith at all and also covered the range of his comments. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum Bloomberg.com headlined: “Obama Trolls Prayer Breakfast” They included a full quote from Charles Krauthammer of Fox News, "What’s important is what’s happening now, Christianity no longer goes on Crusades, and it gave up the Inquisition a while ago. The Book of Joshua is knee deep in blood; that story is over too. The story of today, of our generation, is the fact that the overwhelming volume of the violence and the barbarism that we are seeing in the world, from Nigeria, to Paris, all the way to Pakistan, and even to the Philippines, the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, is coming from one source, and that’s from inside Islam."

It also quotes Rick Santorum who claimed Christians led abolition, Civil Rights and charity groups, and then he twists Obama’s words, saying he meant Christians “cannot stand up against” ISIS.

Not only does Krauthammer admit the Bible is violent then immediately dismiss it as irrelevant, he dismisses all the violence done by nations with Protestant leaders in the recent decades as if it has nothing to do with their religious upbringing or nothing to do with the wars and protests we are currently experiencing. Santorum tries to put words in Obama’s mouth and is just as fallacious in his logic.

The New York Times did a short balanced peice, highlighting the call for equality.

WaPo said Obama missed the mark, that the crusades were 700 years ago, and slavery was condemned by Christianity. Another simply lazy, 8^th grade level of analysis of history. The US came late to the game of condemning slavery and Christians were divided on it as any cursory examination of the Civil War will tell you. And there are still people alive who think the South was right.

CNN choose to focus on the comments to the Dalai Lama who was in the audience and the significance of that to our relationship with China.

The IJReview tried to argue that saying Jim Crow laws are supported by the Bible is “tenuous at best”. That’s true in the sense that saying there is any connection from the Bible to any actual law on the books is “tenuous at best”. Other than that it is misleading and simplistic. They also noted the variety of references Obama made to bad theology promoting violence. I’ll give them points for that.

NBC News did a very neutral report, simply providing a range of quotes that summarized the speech well  without much comment. I’ll give them a link.

Christian Science Monitor did a great job. They quoted Limbaugh and others, and even allowed speculation of the “trolling”, but offered as a counter, “But it’s more likely that he was taking the ecumenical setting of the prayer breakfast to try to reiterate something that’s been a US talking point since the Bush administration: America is not at war with Islam. It is fighting individuals who use distorted versions of faith as a weapon.” They continue to follow the context and flow of the logic, “Then he tries to make clear that it is people who are doing the twisting and misusing here. It is not inherent in religion itself.”

I don’t completely agree with the idea that Islam or any religion doesn’t have some powerful messages about violence, but the way Obama said it is exactly what I want my President to say. Regardless of cultural influences, in a country that is founded on freedom, it is most important that we allow people the freedom to state that their culture does not define them, that their choice of church doesn’t define them. We’re the ones who are supposed to be promoting universal principles. If you want to claim those principles agree with your religion, you’re welcome to, and the rest of us welcome you. If you want to claim your God disagrees with freedom, fairness and compassion, I defend your right to say that, but expect you to respect my right to say you are wrong.

Craft Soda is a thing

I thought it would be fun to start talking about the great micro-sodas I’m discovering lately. It appears this is a thing.

I mentioned the “Craft” root beer on facebook, but I didn’t think to get a picture of it. It was fantastic, but hard to google for it, given the name. They don’t seem to have a website either, I’ve only found other bloggers talking about it. It’s made in Illinois and has a person’s face on the label. This root beer brought back memories of A&W when they made it on site with real sugar. I would swear it was actually better but that was a long time ago, so that’s not really a blind taste test.

I also came across one that had the flavor of a mojito when I was in the Florida Keys recently. Again, no picture since I hadn’t thought of starting this soda blog yet.  There probably aren’t too many like that, so if you see it, and you like mojitos, grab it. No rum of course, but a hint of mint and a smooth creamy texture. A nice thirst quencher on a sunny day at the beach.

Today, I had a Squamscot Cherry Cola. It was a disappointment. I found it at a mall Liqour store in Cloquet, which maybe should have been a clue. It didn’t go fizt when I popped the top and it’s possible it hadn’t been bottled correctly, it was definitely a bit flat. Even if the fizz had been better, I don’t think that would have made it worth $1.95. The cherry and cola flavors were there, but they were not impressive. It was the real cola flavor, but there just wasn’t enough of it.

How to end any argument

Unfortunately not all arguments end well. I’ll get to ending them well by end of this, but I need to go over how they usually end first.

Children figure out how to derail a discussion pretty quickly. They just keep asking why. Some people never get over this, they become philosophers. “Why” is one of the most important questions in philosophy. They delve into the “ultimate why”. Most people don’t concern themselves with this on a daily basis. Some people find it annoying.

There are adult ways of presenting that why question without sounding like you are pontificating or being childish. Some people will suggest we’re in the matrix, or we are brains in a vat, or everyone else is a zombie. This is more of a sophomoric version, one you might hear in a dorm room. But it comes from a slightly more sophisticated tradition. Descartes’ first meditation, sometimes called “the evil demon”, suggests if we doubt all of our perceptions, we don’t know who we really are and could be under the control of an evil demon.

There are even more modern versions of this, maybe you’ve heard a few;

you’re completely misinformed, you’re mind has been controlled by advertising and bad schooling, you are privileged, you’ve been tricked (there is a facebook page for this, they call you sheeple), you are trying to trick me, you are a shill for a corporation, you were home schooled, you were born in Flint, MI.

That last one really happened. I was talking about Michael Moore and I told someone I was born there. You should have seen the look. It was as if being born in the same town as Michael Moore was as bad as being a child of Osama bin Laden.

All of these are nothing but prejudice. You might as well be using ethnic slurs. Granted each one has facts that lead to them being used in the first place. Our schools do have problems, we are products of our environment. That’s why racial slurs hurt. Regardless of those facts of social science, these are almost always distortions.

If, “you had bad schooling” is not followed by some legitimate help in educating the person, in providing them with the information they need to make an informed decision, then it is just an insult. It is usually a judgment made before gathering facts, before even inquiring into just what schooling the person had. This leads to the argument ending with, “You don’t even know me.”

There are also more positive sounding versions, such as;

there is a higher purpose that you are unaware of, it’s in the interest of national security, it’s nature’s way, it’s part of our great leaders vision, it’s just the way things are.

These aren’t necessarily aimed at anyone, but they are equally useless. They propose that no more facts are available, that further discussion is pointless.

All of these come from artifacts left over from the philosophers of the Middle Ages. Descartes, in his second meditation said, “I think therefore I am” and profoundly changed how we see ourselves. Too bad he was wrong. Rather than explain that last sentence, I’d rather stick to why it’s a problem today. The problem is we don’t talk about the context of how he came to it or the improvements that have been made on it since.

Descartes third meditation is sometimes called “the existence of God”. He posits that what we can conceive must exist so if we can conceive of perfection it must exist. It’s more complicated than that, but I’m not going to analyze it. I only point it out because it is probably the reason why Descartes is not covered in any detail in public school. Meditations 4 and 5 are about God too. They are his solution to the problem he created by doubting his senses in the 1^st meditation.

So we’re stuck here, on an island as Simon Blackburn calls it, where we verify our own existence based on our own experience. Even if we are in the matrix we can still have the thought that we are in the matrix, so the machines controlling us have not taken that last piece of our self away. If we are so deluded that even that is not our self thinking, then none of this matters anyway. We can’t know ourselves and we can’t know that we can’t know ourselves.

But why do we need this hyperbolic doubt in the first place that then requires a solution? As I’ve shown above, it is used to confuse, to bring a logical discussion of valid choices down in to a spiraling pit of meaningless. To end an argument by destroying the other persons confidence in their argument. I say we don’t need it. The way to interrupt it is by saying, “I exist and I have value”, or if the argument is not about you, say you are arguing for feeding starving children, “they exist and they have value.”

David Hume later stated the problem of understanding ourselves is a problem of matching what we sense to reality. If we doubt everything our senses tell us, then anything could be true. We know our senses can fail us but we also know they serve us pretty well. We can look at other animals and see that those with better senses do better. But all that still relies on our self to make that judgment.

So you can still bring any argument to a halt without any evil demons, simply by pointing out the flawed nature of our senses. Usually this is done by someone questioning only the other persons senses or the superiority of their own. As in claiming to have a degree or having read a book or seen a documentary, something that mere senses can’t trump. This is still a complete foul. Unless you are willing to actually explain the facts you have, it’s just mean. Even if it is true.

A non-mean, fair way of employing this simple truth is agreeing that no one really knows anything. That we are perceiving any degree of reality is an act of faith. Whether you call that pure skepticism or pure belief in powers we can’t perceive, you arrive at it with similar logic.

For me, this is where all arguments should begin, that nobody knows for sure. From there we can only build towards greater probability of being accurate, of matching our perception to reality. We can share our perceptions with each other. We can create languages that describe things we can’t perceive directly. We can predict and test our predictions. We can challenge each other to be more accurate in our descriptions, more honest. We can be aware of our limitations and we can grow beyond them by working together.

We know there is a coherent consistent world that is available to us when we are awake and clear. We have built on that foundation for so long that it is now impossible for one person to obtain all the knowledge available. That knowledge is being refined every day. If everyone in a some field of knowledge said one person knew everything they knew, that could still change the next day with a new discovery. So everyone knows that they don’t know everything.

The criteria for certification of having the higher levels of knowledge are constantly reviewed and updated. Having that certification doesn’t mean you know everything in that field, and very few people are certified in more than one field.  Certification is still important, I have very few other tools for evaluating if my doctor knows what he is doing. But the idea of “authority” has limits. That’s a foundational principle of the modern world where we say we value the opinions of everyone, not just the King and the royal family.

The only adult, fair, sane way to end an argument is to not approach differences as arguments in the first place. You can have convictions, you can stand up for what you believe, you could also be wrong. As I have ended more than one of my blogs, all we really have is each other.

A Year Without Atheism

Ryan Bell just completed an amazing year “trying” to live without God. No small challenge for a pastor. Inspired by that, I thought I’d try a year without atheism. It should be a lot easier since I’m not really giving up anything or trying anything on. To be a non-atheist is not a simple matter of applying math like logic and cancelling the double negative to end up with theist. It means not identifying myself as not being something else. In other words, it’s like being most other people.

I know some atheists can get pretty touchy about the definition of that word, and you either have some degree of belief in god or you don’t, or you’re still thinking about it, but anyway, the key word here is “identify”. I think if you ask most people to say who they are, they’ll start with a familial relation like “mother” or maybe with a career, next might be geographical like their hometown or country, then a few might start mentioning religion. Of course if you ask them about religion they might go on all night, but the key here is identity. For me, I’ve been saying I’m an atheist because I want it to be clear that there is no theology out there that is believable. For this year, I’m saying I just don’t care.

I heard a story that when rabbis were asked “what is the Torah” they answered that “it is the interpretation of Torah”. In other words, the stories are there to be told and also to be discussed. They are not flat or literal or unchanging or prescriptive. Their meaning should be discovered by each generation. That’s nice. Unfortunately it’s not how many people approach scripture, but for me, what it really misses, is that Torah is one of many books exploring how human beings have come to know who they are and why they’re here. For me, the answer to “what is the Torah” is “it is reading and listening to how others experience life”. Scripture is often a rare glimpse into the thoughts of regular people dealing with larger world events . 

I’m not “spiritual but not religious”, I’m not non-spiritual either. I don’t know what the word “spiritual” means and I’m a little burnt out by people using the word even though they don’t know what it means either. I’m looking forward to year of not thinking about it, not attempting to better construct or defend a worldview.

Ryan started out his year reading up on philosophy. I won’t be starting by reading up on theology. I won’t be looking for ways to challenge myself or my thought process any more than anyone normally should. I’ve been doing that for 4 years. I’m sure some will be relieved to know that I won’t be pointing out to others how some political action or world event is related to theism.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be listening for hidden agendas in the words of elected officials. That doesn’t mean I won’t be celebrating as the rest of the United States and who knows who else embraces same-sex marriage. It doesn’t mean my ideas about the cause of terrorism will change. Those are normal things that we all should do. Atheism never informed my values so my values won’t change. Atheism didn’t tell me to use the scientific method, I’ll still use it.

It will be more like the answer to this joke: How many atheists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Just one, they just unscrew the old one and put in a new one.

Good cops

When I was little, somewhere around 4, because I barely remember it, I followed a neighbor girl as her mother walked with her to the grocery store. They were way ahead and didn’t notice me. I stopped when they crossed a busy street. I don’t know how long I wandered around, but a policeman came by and picked me up and drove until I recognized my house.

It all seemed perfectly natural to me. Including that my mother was not happy I’d walked off but at the same time happy I was home. At the time I lived in the bubble where all policemen are good. They are selected by a magical process that sees the goodness in their heart and knows they will do the right thing with a little boy wandering around aimlessly.

Later, I was taught that authorities sanctioned, directed, or sometimes looked the other way as people who were acting peacefully and exercising their right to free speech were beaten, gassed, bloodied and even killed. The magic bubble shrank a bit, but those were just the “bad police”, the ones from the south, from decades ago.

No one tells you when the bubble is gone. You look in the rear view mirror one day and you wonder which kind of officer that is. You realize the badge tells you nothing about the person. Where you are and what you are doing there have much more to do with how things will go than any uniform.

“Good” and “bad” are completely independent of “police officer”, “American” , “clean”, “White”, “Christian”, “educated”. Statistically, you can say a lot about a group of people and be accurate. Most cops are good. Education leads to a healthier society. Americans are leaders in many fields. Christians have contributed to a better world. But individually, that means nothing. There are more than a few clean, white, educated, Christian American police officers in jail.

You can replace any one of those words with anything you like and it changes nothing about this post. Substitute “police officer” with “protestor”, “Christian” with “Muslim”, “white” with “yellow”. None of that tells you anything about good and bad. Comments from Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki and Bill Bratton show an intense misunderstanding of this.