Let’s Talk about Faith, not Religion; God is the Great Whatever

God is the Great Whatever. God is “un-getable” — we just can’t “get” the idea of God like we get algebra or something. Yeah.

I like this lady’s use of words. And yeah also to her plan to talk about our partnerships with God, not argue about what we have decided He/She/It is like. Her new discussion sounds worth joining. — +Katia

CAN WE TALK ABOUT FAITH, NOT RELIGION?

By Martha Woodroof
Washington Post
April 30, 2010

I am a person of faith who is not religious. By this I mean that while I live in partnership with God, the great Whatever, I claim no knowledge of God’s relatives, nature and modus operandi. I believe that everything about God beyond the simple fact of Its existence and availability is beyond my understanding and so beyond the scope of my words. I make no claim to wisdom of any kind about God, only to experience with God.

That’s why I decided to start Faith Unboxed , which I hope will be an unconventional online conversation about living one’s faith rather than practicing (or preaching) one’s religion. I’d much rather talk about how we experience God than argue about what we have decided about God, wouldn’t you?

As I’m not a pundit, a preacher, or a scholar, deciding to host such a faith-centric conversation about the great Whatever leaves me wide open to charges of uppityness. What’s the deal here, lady? You think you get God and the rest of us don’t? Not exactly: What I think is that a) God is intrinsically un-getable; and b) most of our current conversation about God and God’s doings ignores this, conflating practicing one’s religion and living one’s faith.

God, the great Whatever, is ubiquitous in American thinking, society, politics, literature, architecture, conversation — even, through quarterback Tim Tebow’s facial paint in college football. I would wager heavily that none of us escapes growing up without a kissing concept of the great Whatever–some idea implanted in our brains by our elders about what we’re supposed to believe or not believe about God’s presence, doings, relatives, etc. As adults, we may decide to accept those ideas, modify them, rebel against them, or turn our backs on the whole confusing mishmash. But we have all most likely decided something about God.

What we don’t often do as adults — whether because we lack inclination or courage or imagination — is to acknowledge that God, in order to be God, exists completely detached from any human conception of God. The great Whatever is only what the great Whatever is, not what our parents, pundits, preachers or priests say It is. Or for that matter, what they say It isn’t.

So . . . with all due respect, it seems to me desperately wasteful, arrogant and cowardly for us humans to argue so much about religion — i.e. our human-sized conceptions of God’s aforementioned relatives, nature and modus operandi. Missing from most of these battles is any recognition that if God is, God is also beyond our comprehension. We can never know about God in the same way we know about chickens or algebra or documented history; elaborate and compelling religious stories explaining God and God’s family are still stories. Insisting that these stories are true, or even integral parts of our relationship with God, seems to me to confuse the value of accepting what humans have said about God with the value of living in partnership with God.

Arguing about God is, of course, much less troublesome and anxiety-provoking than taking on the demands and responsibilities of a partnership with the Almighty. Indeed, the challenges of any organized religion (or those other God-in-a-box concepts, atheism and agnosticism) begin to seem like effortless glides on greased grooves when compared to the challenges of living one’s faith. Perhaps that’s why there’s been a great deal of public wrangling about the fine points of religion and very little useful public exploration of what it means to live and work together — in this world at this time — as persons of faith.

I hope this online conversation starts such an exploration. I challenge you to join me in thinking beyond everything we’ve come to accept about the great Whatever through habit, upbringing, learned ritual and doctrine. I challenge us, instead, to explore afresh the meaning and responsibilities of faith, of living in active partnership with God, both as an individual and in community. And I challenge us to do this exploration fearlessly, with uncensored curiosity and open-mindedness.

To give our conversation structure, over the next 12 months, I’ll post a dozen questions (one each month) along with my own short (for the most part) answers. My hope is that you will post your own answers and then respond to each others’ posts. Civility and respect are the only criteria for participation. This means no talk of burning in hell or scholarly howls of derision.

Join me here at On Faith the first Sunday of each month for a look at the question. Join me every day at Faith Unboxed for the discussion. Is it possible to have an open, useful and civil online conversation about faith, not religion? We shall see.

………..

Martha Woodroof freelances for NPR and writes, reports, and blogs for public radio station WMRA in Virginia.

God-Goddess in Sacred Balance yet Absolute beyond gender

Being able to honor both genders in Deity, yet also realizing the beyond-gender nature of the Everlasting/Source may seem like a contradiction to some, but hey, it is possible to believe both.
+Katia

———-
Author Jennifer Reif wrote to our GoddessChristians Discussion Forum

God-Goddess, and the Sacred Balance

Hi All,
Every once in a while I go out on a limb, and here I go again. I do love Goddess-God, and view the Eternal through many wonderful myths that include gender-identified deity. At the same time I also see ‘That Which Created Us’ as without gender.

There are some who believe that “Feminine Consciousness” will save the world, but I think it’s individual caring and love that heals the woes of the world, person by person. The idea that only one gender, or the other, is will “save the world,” may not be the most helpful idea. It’s all of us, everyone who chooses to act with love and compassion, that can lend their blessings to what is a troubled world. Yes, we need to bring the Goddess back to Western Religion, and we have been doing that joyful work, but I think we need both Goddess and God, in balance, are needed together as iconic religious models.

We know that the Sacred Feminine was alive and present in ancient cultures: Celtic, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and so on. In fact those of us who love the Goddess draw from these cultures. They had the Sacred Feminine, but this didn’t create the kind of justice that we seek today. It didn’t create a classless system, or eradicate poverty, or help the plight of the down-trodden. Her inclusion was wonderful, but it didn’t “save” the ancient world.

I think what saves the world is person-to-person compassion; acts of love, acts of charity, acts of kindness. Compassion is just an idea, unless good men and good women, apply it to everyday life. For me, God-Goddess, particularly Mary Magdalene and Jesus, most fully represent our humanity, our ability to act wisely with love and compassion. For me they are Goddess-God in Sacred Balance.

Love, Jen
Jennifer Reif
The Holy Book of Mary Magdalene: The Path of the Grail Steward

The ‘Future of God’ Debate – and the Problem of Evil

This article below by famed female philosopher mythologist anthropologist Jean Houston, deals with the Problem of Evil indirectly as it ponders whether God exists or not; and deals with that ol’ Problem very directly, not to mention dramatically, at the very end of the article…

And here also is a video of Jean Houston talking to Deepak Chopra about the existence of Deity/Consciousness/God. Just like in the article below, in this video Jean also ends dramatically — this time with the remark, “I think suffering is Infinity playing with itself.”

+Katia

THE ‘FUTURE OF GOD’ DEBATE
Dr. Jean Houston
March 15, 2010

Here are a few of the points I made or intended to make at this remarkably
rousing debate between the atheists and skeptics — Michael Shermer and Sam
Harris on one side and Deepak Chopra and myself on the other. The debate was
mostly focused on the scientific aspects for the existence or non existence
of God. My role was to provide a somewhat different perspective.

1. The world has been rearranged, the reset button of history has been hit.
Many are called to take initiatives that before would have seemed unlikely,
if not downright impossible, including the rethinking of the reality of the
Intelligence that underlies the universe. My perspective joins that of the
poet Christopher Fry: “Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to meet
us everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men
ever took.” In this, we are present at the birth of an opportunity that
exceeds our imagination — the 13.7 billion year experiment that could
result in our lives coming to end within the century.

2. There is a radical need for a new natural philosophy based on our new
knowledge of the cosmos, the world, the cross-cultural mix of knowledge and
understanding, potential evolutionary directions, and our own emerging
realities. We have been shackled for too long by philosophies, however
noble, that have been limited by much narrower views of the world. And what
is worse, too many of us have been patterned and prepared in the alembic of
these limited views, however out of date they may be, and we find ourselves
to have been marinated in the medieval soup of the mind. Today, many feel
the need to release inadequate ideas of God so that we can all move forward.
To become atheistic and skeptical at a time of so much opportunity is one
way to respond to our dilemma, but then we forget that religion and
spirituality are also about the quest for meaning, transcendence, seeing the
interrelatedness between things, compassion, goodness, laughter, and the
great Pattern that connects all things with each other as well as ways to
live kindly with the suffering that is an inescapable part of the human
condition. Thus, faith will never go away and, in the words of Karen
Armstrong, ” To identify religion with its worst manifestations, claim that
they represent the whole, and then demolish the straw dog thus set up does
not seem a rational or useful way of conducting this important debate.”

3. In spite of the fact that there appears to be a decline in attendance in
traditional organized religions, the search for spiritual experience has
rarely been greater. In America alone, in the last 30 years, the number of
religious groups has doubled. We take new names, sit zazen, become Sufis,
Taoists, neo-pagans, devotees of Kali and Vedanta. Buddhism in all its
varieties is the fastest growing American faith. There is an eruption of
spiritual polyphony, that some might caustically see as “the Divine Deli” or
“cafeteria religion.” What this points to recalls the original Greek meaning
of enthusiasm: entheosiasmos, “being filled with the god.” As one Catholic
Brother told me, “These other traditions do not contradict my own. Rather,
they open the wells of the Waters of Life. When I meditate with His Holiness
[the Dalai Lama], I feel as if the deep rivers of our respective traditions
are meeting and becoming a mighty flood of spirit and renewal.”

4. The complexity of the present world is shattering expectations in every
arena, most especially, in the geography of the soul. Lost as we all are, we
can understand why some retreat into fundamentalisms that provide archaic
certainties, holding houses of containment before the onrush of new
realities. Others wander in a spiritual void, overwhelmed by the loss of all
pattern, looking to material accomplishments to replace the loss of essence.
Still others flee into “replacement strategies”– psychotherapy, drugs, sex,
growth seminars, travel. In each case, mind and body are at the end of their
tether, swung out into vertigo over the abyss of Being. And yet the yearning
for personal experience of the divine reality has never been greater.

5. As Martin Buber taught us, “I” attends to “Thou” much more than “I”
attends to itself. When you get beneath the surface crust of everyday
consciousness, and past the sensory, psychological and even mythic and
symbolic levels of the ecology of inner space, you discover the depths
beyond depths, and, with it, peace, serenity joy — no separations, but also
a transcendent grace and even high creativity. It is not just the mystics,
but the high creatives (some of whom are scientists) who report that in the
throes of creative experience, feel themselves aligned, guided, allied by a
power that is beyond or deep within themselves. This power is felt as
spiritual reality, a vision, an inward voice, an invisible life’s companion,
and became a formidable motivation for a quest for truth and discovery. One
cannot just reduce these experiences to brain secretions and happy neural
chemistries. There is more to us than that. We inhabit the Universe, but the
Universe, with its vast domain of intelligence and inspiration also inhabits
us! In certain states of consciousness and explorations we tap into its
myriad resources.

6. The issue of where this is all coming from has ancient roots. St. Francis
in the 13th century defined the issue of consciousness, the brain and God
when he said “What we are looking for is Who is looking.” Meister Eckhart, a
little later, took it further when he said “The eye by which I see God is
the same eye by which God sees me.” He got into a lot of trouble with the
Pope over that one.

My own take on this is that we are the players in a great game called
Paradox. And what is the paradox? It is that we are both Infinite and finite
beings: As finite beings we are Godstuff incorporated in space and time; as
Infinite being, we are the Living Universe in an eternal yet spirited form
of itself. As this Infinite self expressing aspects of God, and as a form of
the Living Universe, we find ourselves capable of creating and sustaining an
individual finite self. That is you — the human being that is the microcosm
or, if you will, the fractal of the Infinite self. The human Selfing game
may be what Infinity does for fun. Not realizing this, we live in a state of
galloping ambiguity, caught in a limited time vehicle
and yearning for our greater self. Then when we make the rare excursion into
our Greater being, becoming our cosmic selves, we suddenly yearn like
Dorothy in Oz to get back home to the farm in Kansas. Why is this? To
continue the metaphor, to live in Kansas however joyous and rewarding it is
to chronically confront our limitations of body, mind and the others.
Whereas to enter into infinite life is rather difficult to navigate and
transcends all understanding.

I believe that to live in a state of both/and is to become who and what we
were patterned to be. We cannot contract the infinite to fit into the
finite, because if we do so we just end up with a fundamentalist God.
However, we can extend — through conscious work on ourselves — the
capacity to expand and thus to enter into partnership with the infinite.
Then, and this may be the goal of the Paradox game, we do indeed discover
that we are an infinity of selves creating and sustaining our individual
human self. Do you see the stupendous import of this statement? To me, it is
a mind cracking, soul buffeting, life enlargening realization. Once
understood and internalized, it adds tremendous power to our freedom to be,
our enormous capacity to grow, evolve and recreate ourselves, and our
ability to live simultaneously as finite and infinite beings. The Infinite
self has some part in directing the development and unfolding of the finite
self, and the finite self offering joy, entertainment and knowledge to the
Infinite self. This is the Paradox of partnership resolved. The game is to
overcome the illusion of separation.

Now we know that many of the great spiritual traditions, Buddhist, Hindu,
Taoist, the Christian mystical tradition declare that the finite and the
infinite are on a continuum with each other. Even recent scientific
speculation is saying the same. Modern physics of the quantum variety as
Deepak Chopra so brilliantly illustrates, increasingly extends into the
paradoxical and mystical in is pursuit of a unified theory of the
fundamental forces of the living universe.

Finally, we are that crossroads between biology and cosmology. We are called
to explore the mystery itself as an interface between engagement with
external realities and embrace of the inner journey. This brings us to a
place of contemplative practice, and the vital synergy between inner and
outer realities necessary to transform self, institutions, paths of
possibility, as well as visionary endeavors. And in so doing, unleash the
human spirit of those who compose the institution or endeavor and of those
who are served by this. It is an activity of extraordinary balance, a
tension in repose. It is about a zone in which paradox occurs. It is a space
where the sacred emerges and the local self disappears. It is a space of
exquisite silence and of extraordinary service. It is a space wherein there
is a fusing and blending of silence and service. In such a state one has
access to the creative, world making place where one’s unique entelechy (the
essential self) meets the Entelechy of a potential new time, one that gives
the details of an evolution in person and society.

There is a wonderful Sufi story of a man broken hearted by all the suffering
and sorrow he saw in the world. He sat by the roadside and began to beat the
earth. He looks up and yells at God. “Look at this mess. Look at all this
pain. Look at all this killing and hatred. God, Oh God, why don’t you DO
something!?”

And God said, “I did do something. I sent you.”

————

Priest Makes Updated (and Slanted) Version of 10 Commandments

You can read the reworded 10 Commandments below.

Notice the priest adds to the thou shalt not kill commandment making it,  “Thou shalt not kill any one for any reason”. Very firm, no wiggle room. No exceptions in “for any reason”.  So, soldiers fighting in war, police taking out a sniper or school shooter, a woman shooting a man who is kidnapping/raping her (or her child), is breaking that commandment.

But yet look how for the priest made the adultery commandment way more lenient.  “Don’t fool around with anyone you’re not married to.”  How about making that commandment, the only sex commandment, more firm with less wiggle room also? Why not word it as “Don’t have sex with anyone you’re not married to, nor anyone that is underage”. What is this vague “fool around with” language? Kids say that all the time when answering this question, “What are you doing?”  “Nothin. Just foolin’ around, Ma.”  Fooling around is such a weak term for the only commandment about sex.

I think he’s making a subtle political statement about war when he says “for any reason” regarding killing. He seems to view inappropriate sexual urges and wrongful sexual acts, something that not only breaks up families and causes children to lose a parent (as in the case of adultery), but also can get women and children (and sometimes men) raped and killed just to satisfy that inappropriate sexual urge — the priest demotes that commandment to mere concern over “fooling around.”  Weird.

Maybe he shouldn’t be putting words in God’s mouth in the first place.

But then again that’s what the “official” Church has been doing for centuries. It’s how they set their agenda and con us into buying it. <sigh>

In this case he does it so skillfully, so convincingly as though God is talking to us in our day. It’s an attractive “translation” here that Father John Behnke made — and I usually like his work. This is too politically correct, however, in my (humble!) opinion.

How could we re-word some of these 10 commandments below to make them a little more politically INcorrect?

+Katia

PRIEST OFFERS UPDATED VERSION OF THE COMMANDMENTS

By Bob Zyskowski
The Catholic Spirit
March 2, 2010

http://thecatholicspirit.com

Ever think about the Ten Commandments in modern conversational English?

Paulist Father John Behnke, former chaplain at St. Lawrence Church and Newman Center, offers a re-write of the biblical language in a new book whose target audience is younger people.

In “Lent and Easter for the Younger Crowd” (Paulist Press), he offers this take on Exodus 20:1-7, better known as the Ten Commandments:

“One day God said to his people, ‘Here are some rules I want you to always follow:

1. Pray only to me because I’m the one who made you and saved you.

2. I don’t want to hear any of you swearing.

3. I want one day out of the week to be a special day for you. Don’t do too much work that day so you can relax and spend some time praying to me.

4. I want you to listen to your parents (even when you grow up) because they have lived longer and know more about life than you.

5. Don’t kill anyone for any reason.

6. Don’t fool around with someone you’re not married to.

7. Don’t take anything that isn’t yours.

8. Don’t lie about anybody.

9. Don’t always be wanting things that belong to other people.

All I’m really asking is that you ‘love me and keep my rules.’

Meister Eckhart, Medieval heretic who taught Zen & influenced Tolle

MeisterEckhartTreeThe Now-moment in which God made the first man and the Now-moment in which the last man will disappear, and the Now-moment in which I am speaking are all one in God, in whom there is only one Now. Look! The person who lives in the light of God is conscious neither of time past nor of time to come but only of one eternity….Therefore he gets nothing new out of future events, nor from chance, for he lives in the Now-moment that is, unfailingly, “in verdure newly clad.” — MEISTER ECKHART 1260-1328

Now we know why Tolle changed his first name from Ulrich to Eckhart. He says he greatly admired and identified with the work of Meister Eckhart, the famous Christian mystic (tried by the Inquisition as a heretic). Meister Eckhart is a voice from the past speaking to us today, or now. And Tolle rocks.

Wow, the now. …  awesome and ancient.

Found the Meister Eckhart quote above in an old book written during the World War II London Blitz by the not-yet-famous still-quite-young Anglican-priest-turned Zen writer, Alan Watts. (Link below). Tolle says he read Alan Watts and Joel Goldsmith, two sort of Zen Christians. The harmony between Zen, the Gospel of Thomas, their work and Tolle’s is cool.

BEHOLD THE SPIRIT, by Alan Watts

Click on “See Inside This Book” and you can see the other quotes Watts scribed in the front cover along with the Meister Eckhart quote about the Now-moment.

In college we studied Medieval Philosophy where Meister Eckhart got much attention. We pondered over his Now-moment and had no idea how Zen it was. And what’s his most famous quote of all…oh yeah, here it is: “the eye that I see God with, is the same eye that God sees me with..” or something like that. Yeah, he’s dangerous dontcha know, might wake up some people. The “authorities” had to drag him before the Pope, put him on trial and brand him heretic. I think Eckhart died mysteriously before the verdict was reached. They never even found his body. But his disciples carried on his teachings, though very quietly and carefully. Here’s to them and…

Here’s to the NOW,

+Katia

Asherah, Baal, Asherah Poles, Yahweh having a wife?

AsherahPoleBeingChoppedDownI received the following email from an author named Frank Verderber. He read the Asherah material on our website, and I think viewed my God Has a Wife! presentation. He responded as follows (and I wonder how I should respond back to him — he’s obviously not a “believer” in a Feminine God alongside the Masculine God…).

Frank Verderber writes:
Some of what you printed is true concerning Asherah, but most is not.
You quote the Bible as reference concerning her, and that’s fine, except
you make a wholly unfounded statement [ a belief statement, not
corroborated] that she was a consort of Yahweh. The Israeli God Yahweh
had no consort, and was referred to as also as EL, Adoni, Ja or Jah as
general descriptions of Divine character. Yahweh is his personal name
and means “was, is, and always” which in the Greek would be rendered
“Alpha and Omega.” The idea that there was a redaction of the Hebrew
Scriptures around 500 BC is spurious conjecture based on “Documentary
Hypothesis”, and has been refuted eloquently and abundantly. However,
this idea of a consort was conjuncture – that came from a few 19th
Century Epigraphers, that mistakenly confused Baal ceremonies with those
of the Israeli’s ceremonies of Yahweh. IF you are interseted in
understanding the role of Asherah the Sea goddess, you need to read the
a few anthologies Akkadian and Urgaritic myths [See: The Ancient Near
East, Volumes I & II, by James B. Pitchard] In them Baal is furious
that he has no princedom but he has the high honor of serving El.
Puissant Baal makes a great amount of tumult and so enters Asherah as a
“sister” who then requests that a princedom [house] be made for Baal.
El orders a “house” be made for him down by the Sea [Mediterranean] And
so it is the geographic location of Canaan or the Gaza strip that holds
the House of Baal or if you can interpolate: the “House of Lucifer.”
That is why there are so many epics regarding the hyper human-angelic
populous called the Nephilim or the Anakites. That is why there is so
much trouble in that region of the world. However, Asherah is the later
name of the original goddess In-nanna who was the daughter of Nanna at
the time of the River People, Apsu [before the Chaldees, Ur, the Sea
people] Nanna is the Moon god whose symbol is the crescent moon, and a
flame, while In-nanna is the Star. Shamoush was In-nanna’s sibling and
his symbol was the Sun. If you follow the development of Asherah, you
will find that she is no more than one of the following goddesses whose
name changed within geographic regions [ In-nanna = Astarte = Asherah =
Venus = Cybele = Artemus = and today = Fatima. Interestingly, Fatima
from Spain, is the name given to the town in Spain before the Europeans
took it from the Islamic leaders. But note that Mohammad’s sister was
named Fatima. Can you now see the Middle-eastern genesis of the goddess?

I hope this was constructive.

* * * * * *
Frank continues: Concerning Asherah poles:

Asherah is the Hebrew word translated to English as “groves” in the OT. It relates to the Babylonian (Astarte)-Canaanite (Ashtoroth or Ashtoreth depending on which area) goddess of fortune, fertility and happiness, the supposed consort of Baal. It also implies the sacred trees or poles set up near an altar for “her” worship.

When Moses went back up Sinai to receive the replacement tablets–regarding the Canaanites (and others), God told him…

Ex 34:13 But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves:

Baal is always associated with gardens and trees. One can see the later use by the Celts concerning “May Poles” and still in use today. Asherah or Astarte or Venus were understood as Warrior goddesses, who could destroy an enemy encampment by seducing the enemies of her devotes. The idea is sexual in nature and translates to the use of the modern idea of feminine aura or power. This idea has always been around – found esecially in the wiccan cults. But Asherah is more at a cluster or many, such as in the ancient Qualmish gods of the Kaaba in Mecca.

Frank J. Verderber BSGS ASCT
Author
Blandford, Ma
* * * * * * * * *

So. Any ideas what to say to him in response? Don’t think he’s very open to our point of view, but at least he is very polite and not overly condescending.

Here is my (Katia’s) God Has a Wife! presentation which I think the gentleman must have viewed because it’s there I talk about Asherah and Asherah poles.
*

Satan to Pat Robertson: You’re Doing Great Work, but…

Lucifer 16 from MuellerIllustrations dot com
Lucifer 16 from MuellerIllustrations dot com

Oh wow, this letter from Satan to Pat Robertson (below) is really a hoot.  I was just reading (in Myth and Ritual of Christianity by Alan Watts) about the arena Lucifer aka Satan really works in. According to Watts, Satan doesn’t even engage in lesser forms of evil like violence and war, he is far too clever and subtle for that and commits the purest forms of evil. Lucifer-Satan is extraordinarily gifted as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an expert on human nature, and moves with the light-workers, the peace-makers, the smiling do-gooders.  Satan moves and works among the beautiful ones, fooling everyone, says famous author Alan Watts (back in the late 60s when he wrote this book).

Anyway, here’s the Screwtape Letters style note to Pat Robertson after Pat said the Haiti earthquake was caused by a deal Haiti made with the Devil.

SATAN TO PAT ROBERTSON: YOU’RE DOING GREAT WORK, PAT, BUT…

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/letters/81595442.html

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the

shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when

they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has

made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but

I’m no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and

impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with

people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent,

wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I

mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen

“Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d

be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that

kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing

against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.

You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just,

come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep

blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need

to renegotiate your own contract.

Best,

Satan

— Lily Coyle, Minneapolis – via the Star Tribune

Woo Woo is a Step Ahead of Bad Science

Rah, rah, Deepak Choprah, “King of Woo Woo” for taking on Skeptic Michael Shermer (former fundamentalist Christian) now the “King of Pooh Pooh”. Here’s the very latest volley in the ongoing war between religion and science…(a useless war since they actually coexist and overlap, ya know!)
WOO WOO IS A STEP AHEAD OF (BAD) SCIENCE
 By Deepak Chopra
BeliefNet
Sunday December 27, 2009

It used to annoy me to be called the king of woo woo. For those who aren’t
familiar with the term, “woo woo” is a derogatory reference to almost any
form of unconventional thinking, aimed by professional skeptics who are
self-appointed vigilantes dedicated to the suppression of curiosity. I get
labeled much worse things as regularly as clockwork whenever I disagree with
big fry like Richard Dawkins or smaller fry like Michael Shermer, the
Scientific American columnist and editor of Skeptic magazine. The latest
barrage of name-calling occurred after the two of us had a spirited exchange
on Larry King Live last week <http://bit.ly/5AlD31>. Maybe you saw it. I was
the one rolling my eyes as Shermer spoke. Sorry about that, a spontaneous
reflex of the involuntary nervous system.

Afterwards, however, I had an unpredictable reaction. I realized that I
would much rather expound woo woo than the kind of bad science Shermer
stands behind. He has made skepticism his personal brand, more or less,
sitting by the side of the road to denigrate “those people who believe in
spirituality, ghosts, and so on,” as he says on a YouTube video. No matter
that this broad brush would tar not just the Pope, Mahatma Gandhi, St.
Teresa of Avila, Buddha, and countless scientists who happen to recognize a
reality that transcends space and time. All are deemed irrational by the
skeptical crowd. You would think that skeptics as a class have made
significant contributions to science or the quality of life in their own
right. Uh oh. No, they haven’t. Their principal job is to reinforce the
great ideas of yesterday while suppressing the great ideas of tomorrow.

Let me clear the slate with Shermer and forget the several times he has
wiggled out of a public debate he was supposedly eager to have with me. I
will ignore his recent blog in which his rebuttal of my position was
relegated to a long letter from someone who obviously didn’t possess English
as a first language (would Shermer like to write a defense of his position
in Hindi? It would read just as ludicrously if Hindi isn’t his first
language).

With the slate clear, I’d like to see if Shermer will accept the offer to
debate me at length on such profound questions as the following:

  • Is there evidence for creativity and intelligence in the cosmos?
  • What is consciousness?
  • Do we have a core identity beyond our biology, mind, and ego?
  • Is there life after death? Does this identity outlive the molecules through which it expresses itself?

The rules will be simple. He can argue from any basis he chooses, and I will
confine myself entirely to science. For we have reached the state where
Shermer’s tired, out-of-date, utterly mediocre science is far in arrears of
the best, most open scientific thinkers — actually, we reached that point
sixty years ago when eminent physicists like Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli,
Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger applied quantum theory to deep
spiritual questions. The arrogance of skeptics is both high-handed and
rusty. It is high-handed because they lump brilliant speculative thinkers
into one black box known as woo woo. It is rusty because Shermer doesn’t
even bother to keep up with the latest findings in neuroscience, medicine,
genetics, physics, and evolutionary biology. All of these fields have opened
fascinating new ground for speculation and imagination. But the king of
pooh-pooh is too busy chasing down imaginary woo woo.

Skeptics feel that they have won to the high ground in matters concerning
consciousness, mind, the origins of life, evolutionary theory, and brain
science. This is far from the case. What they cling to is nineteenth-
century materialism, packaged with a screeching hysteria about God and
religion that is so passé it has become quaint. To suggest that Darwinian
theory is incomplete and full of unproven hypotheses, causes Shermer, who
takes Darwin as purely as a fundamentalist takes scripture, to see God
everywhere in the enemy camp.

How silly. Shermer is a former Christian fundamentalist who is now a
fundamentalist about materialism; fundamentalists must have an absolute to
believe in. Thus he forces himself into a corner, declaring that all
spirituality is bogus, that the sense of self is an illusion, that the soul
is ipso facto a fraud, that mind has no existence except in the brain, that
intelligence emerged only when evolution, guided by random mutations,
developed the cerebral cortex, that nothing invisible can be real compared
to solid objects, and that any thought which ventures beyond the five senses
for evidence must be dismissed without question.

I won’t go into detail about the absurdity of such rigid thinking. However,
the impulse behind dogmatic materialism seems intended to flatten one’s
opponents so thoroughly that through scorn and arrogance they must admit
defeat, conceding that science is the complete refutation of all preceding
religion, spirituality, psychology, myth, and philosophy — in other words,
any mode of gaining knowledge that arch materialism doesn’t countenance.

I’ve baited this post with a few barbs to see if Shermer can be goaded into
an actual public debate. I have avoided his and his follower’s underhanded
methods, whereby an opponent is attacked ad hominem as an idiot, moron, and
other choice epithets that in his world are the mainstays of rational
argument. And the point of such a debate? To further public knowledge about
the actual frontiers of science, which has always depended on wonder, awe,
imagination, and speculation. Petty science of the Shermer brand scorns such
things, but the greatest discoveries have been anchored on them.

If you are tempted to think that I have taken the weaker side and that
materialism long ago won this debate, let me end with a piece of utterly
nonsensical woo woo:

“Nobody understands how decisions are made or how imagination is set free.
What consciousness consists of, or how it should be defined, is equally
puzzling. Despite the marvelous success of neuroscience in the past century,
we seem as far from understanding cognitive processes as we were a century
ago.”

That isn’t a quote from “one of those people who believe in spirituality,
ghosts, and so on.” It’s from Sir John Maddox, former editor-in-chief of the
renowned scientific journal Nature, writing in 1999. I can’t wait for
Shermer to call him an idiot and a moron. Don’t worry, he won’t. He’ll find
an artful way of slithering to higher ground where all the other skeptics
are huddled.

*

Futurist Kurzweil Predicts How Technology Will Change Humanity by 2020

This is really intriguing stuff — in ten years we will not stare at glowing screens on our computers or iPods or whatever  because special glasses will beam the information/screen/images directly onto our retinas. It’ll be just like Star Trek where you see holographic worlds and it feels like you’re really living it.  In just ten years! And then by 2030 they’ll be able to reprogram our genes like we reprogram our computers! No more fat cells, even cancer cells might be on their way out. — +Katia

TOP FUTURIST, RAY KURZWEIL, PREDICTS HOW TECHNOLOGY WILL CHANGE HUMANITY BY 2020

By Ray Kurzweil
New York Daily News
December 13, 2009

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/12/13/2009-12-13_top_futurist_ray_kurzweil_predicts_how_technology_will_change_humanity_by_2020.html

As we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, let’s consider what life will be like a decade hence. Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. The telephone took 50 years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population. Search engines, social networks and blogs have done that in just a few years time. Consider that Facebook started as a way for Harvard students to meet each other just six years ago; it now has 350 million users and counting.

Between now and 2020, the trend will continue, spreading cutting-edge technologies to every corner of the country and beginning to make innovations once consigned to the realm of science fiction real for millions of Americans. Specifically what can we expect? Solar power on steroids, longer lives, the chance to get rid of obesity once and for all, and portable computing devices that start becoming part of your body rather than being held in your hand.

What will drive all this accelerating change is precisely what has driven it this past half-century: the exponential growth in the power of information technology, which approximately doubles for the same cost every year. When I was an MIT undergraduate in 1965, we all shared a computer that took up half a building and cost tens of millions of dollars. The computer in my pocket today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in the amount of computation per dollar since I was a student.

That incredible force — information technology that moves faster, then faster, then faster still — will power changes in every imaginable realm over the next decade.

Start with the basics. You’ve no doubt noticed that electronic gadgets are getting smaller and smaller; the iPod Shuffle holds 1,000 songs and weighs 0.38 ounces. Your phone is smaller than it was a few years ago and can do much more. By 2020, memory devices will be integrated into our clothing. And the very idea of a “smart phone” will begin to change. Rather than looking at a tiny screen, our glasses will beam images directly to our retinas, creating a high resolution virtual display that hovers in air.

That virtual display will be able to take over our entire visual field of view, putting us in a three-dimensional full immersion virtual reality environment. We’ll watch movies virtually and read virtual books. A lot of our personal and business meetings will take place in these 3D virtual worlds. The design of new virtual environments will be an art form. We’ll even have ways to touch one another virtually.

There are already beginning to be apps available for your iPhone or Android phone that allow you to look at a building and have the display superimpose what stores are inside it; Google Goggles, released last week, is the first free, widely-available version of such software. By 2020 we’ll routinely have pop ups in our visual field of view that give us background about the people and places that we’re looking at.

In other words, your memory will be constantly, instantaneously aided by the information available on the Internet. The two will begin to become indistinguishable.

How about energy? That doesn’t sound like an information technology. Fossil fuels, after all, are an early first industrial revolution, 19th century technology. But we are now applying nanotechnology — the science of essentially reprogramming matter at the level of molecules to create new materials and devices — to the design of renewable energy technologies such as solar energy. As a result, the cost per watt of solar energy is coming down rapidly and the total amount of solar energy is growing exponentially.

It has in fact been doubling every two years for the past  20 years and is now only eight doublings away from meeting all of the world’s energy needs.

When I shared this fact with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a few weeks ago, he asked, “but is there enough sunlight to double solar energy eight more times?” I responded that we have 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to do this. The prime minister announced an Israeli energy initiative the next day at the Israeli Presidential Conference based on our conversation, setting a 10-year goal to create the technologies to completely replace fossil fuels.

It’s not just the gadgets we carry around and the power we use to fuel our lives that are subject to what I call “the law of accelerating returns.”

Health and medicine, which used to be a hit or miss process, has now become an information technology.

We now have the software of life (our genes) and the means of upgrading that software. How long do you go without updating the software on your cell phone? Not long: it does it itself every few days or weeks. Yet we are walking around with obsolete software in our bodies that evolved thousands of years ago. Within 10 years, that will change.

Already today, there are over a thousand projects to change our genes away from disease and toward health, not just in newborns but in mature individuals. The Human Genome Project, which has catalogued our genetic material, was itself a very good example of the law of accelerating returns; the amount of genetic data that is sequenced has doubled every year and the cost has come down by half every year. We can now design health interventions on computers and test them out on biological simulators. These technologies are doubling in power every year and will be a thousand times more powerful in a decade.

By 2020, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging, and toward significant advances in our ability to treat major diseases such as heart disease and cancer — an approach that will be fully mature by 2030.

We won’t just be able to lengthen our lives; we’ll be able to improve our lifestyles. By 2020, we will be testing drugs that will turn off the fat insulin receptor gene that tells our fat cells to hold on to every calorie.

Holding on to every calorie was a good idea thousands of years ago when our genes evolved in the first place. Today it underlies an epidemic of obesity.

By 2030, we will have made major strides in our ability to remain alive and healthy — and young — for very long periods of time. At that time, we’ll be adding more than a year every year to our remaining life expectancy, so the sands of time will start running in instead of running out.

No, it’s not going to be an entirely brave new world. Some things will look pretty similar in 2020. We’ll still drive cars — although they will have the intelligence to avoid many accidents and self-driving cars will at least be experimented with. All-electric cars will be popular. And in cities, don’t expect subways or buses to go away.

But in more and more ways big and small, hang in there and we’ll all get to see the remarkable century ahead.

………….

Kurzweil is former recipient of the MIT-Lemelson prize, the world’s largest for innovation, and in 1999 was awarded the National Medal of Technology. He is the author of the books “The Singularity is Near” and “The Age of Spiritual Machines.”

…………

NHNE Singularity Resource Page:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/488/Default.aspx

Singularity University:
http://singularityu.org/

NHNE Ray Kurzweil Resource Page:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/498/Default.aspx

Kurzweil New Book: “Transcend: Nine Steps To Living Well Forever”
http://bit.ly/b8mFP

Transcendent Man (movie):
http://transcendentman.com/

The Singularity Is Near (movie):
http://singularity.com/themovie/

————

Margaret Starbird ponders Friday the 13th, Esther, Templar Ships

ship.jpg
Author Margaret Starbird writes:

The infamous arrest of the Knights Templar was carried out on Friday the 13th of October, 1307. The day lives in the memory of Westerners, though they may not know why it is so “dangerous.” It actually goes back to the Hebrew Bible, the book of Esther, when the evil Haman persuaded Esther’s husband, the King of Babylon, to arrest and execute her people, the Jews, en masse. Ultimately, I think scholars will agree that the faith of the Templars was based on ancient “Ebionite” or “Judaic-Christian” roots that included the full humanity of Jesus (including marriage and parenthood).

I’ve just finished reading two very interesting books, following up on the recent airing of a documentary on the History Channel called “The Grail in America.” The basic text supporting the film was Scott Wolter’s “The Hooked X,” while the novel, Cabal of the Westford Knight by David S. Brody, is a very informative follow up. Both books fully support the idea that the “great secret” described in my Tarot Trumps and the Holy Grail was the survival of descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus.– It’s interesting that artifacts on the east coast of the US (New England) and Canada have surfaced and support the claims that heirs of Templar traditions (engineering and sacred geometry, among others) attempted to settle in the “New World” a century before Columbus. Assertions have been made for decades that some Templars survived and fled by ship to Scotland (which was under interdict at the time of their arrest). Perhaps their descendants were eager to find a place that was beyond reach of the Vatican and the Inquisition… why not sail west?

Interesting lore….

peace and well-being,
Margaret
“The Woman with the Alabaster Jar”
www.margaretstarbird.net