June 15, 2008
Interestingly, this new age of televangelist reminds me of the classic New Age, realize-all-your-dreams-and-desires guru: Impeccably clean and dangerously persuasive, with just a slightly discernible veil of cunning. I wanna spout off about some of the typical American religious chutzpah I'm listening to right now, conveniently on Sunday morning.
June 11, 2008
Rooted in India, Hinduism is one of the older primary religions in our world. Most every major religion has a collection of sacred texts and Hinduism is no exception. Over the centuries, Indian sages formulated a series of teachings and suggestions about life, which were slowly written to insure their preservation. Perhaps the oldest of them, the Brahmanas are a set of rules the priests gave for worship written between 1200 and 1000 bce. Estimated as being written around 800 bce, the Upanishads are a collection of answers from famous Indian teachers concerning questions about life and the universe. The ancient poems and hymns known as the Vedas were composed around 500 bce, and The Great Epics, a series of philosophical and religious poems mainly about legendary heroes and gods, had been passed down verbally for centuries before they were finally written about 100 bce. The Bhagavad-Gita is a short section from one of these epics, and it has become the preferred religious text of India. Its influence has spread to the west as well.
In A Different Way Of Knowing, the author begins with slamming insights about the value of the intuitive-creative processes, arguing persuasively that irrational decision-making processes can be valuable. Love, art and music all reject empiricism and involve listening subjectively to our hearts, feelings and intuitions, and nobody would argue that they lack value just because they aren’t arrived at through empiricism. Conceding that some aspects of life are better left to the intuitive method of gathering information, the author proceeds to argue that "the God hypothesis" is not one of them, and is better evaluated via empiricism and the scientific method. I object to the piece on several grounds, five of which follow.
June 10, 2008
The word cult (Latin colere) means ‘to cultivate’ or ‘to worship,’ and is occasionally mistaken as occult but has nothing to do with it, except that some cults base their rituals and worship around occult ideas. Occult (Latin occulere) means ‘to cover, hide or conceal.’ A cult is a noun and refers to a movement or group of people with a specific agenda; occult is primarily an adjective used to describe any of the various ideas represented by the Old Religions or their modern offshoots.
June 8, 2008
When should we grant or relinquish trust in the various religious statements, leaders and organizations?
Religious statements can address the here-and-now or the forever-after. Part of our answer to the question of which religious beliefs to accept depends on whether our primary concerns are the here-and-now, the forever-after, or both.
June 5, 2008
A white Chevy Silverado careened into my girlfriend’s black Mazda Protégé as she drove to school, ironically about a mile away from home just as the cliché demands.
It was an everyday inner-city traffic occurrence, just another random combination of blind physics and the natural human ability to misjudge. However, as opposed to accepting responsibility for the accident or even making sure the afflicted party was alright for that matter, after making his ill-timed left turn, this rather self-centered driver proceeded to reverse, finish the turn and flee the scene.
I understand that many people abuse public services. Lazy people who could otherwise contribute to society often devise elaborate and persuasive schemes for sucking off the social tit. So in that respect I understand the mindless, morbid, legalistic religiosity most social services are compelled to employ, and I further suspect the screening process disfavors inquisitive intellectuals. After all, a surefire way to ensure that rules are enforced unilaterally is to get blind followers who never question the rules to do the enforcing. The State of California’s EBT Food Assistance program operates exactly like this. If you fail to cross one T or dot even a single I, they’ll expel you from the program and force you to reapply from step one.
June 4, 2008
When I was younger, I had a watch. Not a fancy watch, just your average, run-of-the-mill wristwatch that a kid who didn’t know any better might purchase from a department store for not more than say, twenty dollars. It was comparable to a cheap Swatch knockoff, but nothing like my very favorite watch I ever owned, a low-key G-Shock WaterSport with all sorts of timers and even a legit compass. Either way, I liked the Swatch knockoff, so I was of course ultra-bummed when it stopped one day without warning.
June 3, 2008
I just noticed that I’ve made 212 post to date on my blogs. That makes this the 213th. Why even mention it?
For a long time, this number has haunted me. I can’t explain it in any way I expect you to accept logically, but I’ve seen this arrangement of numbers time and time again over the past three years or so, albeit to a lessening degree of late it seems. I look at my score on Millipede, it ends in 213. Count the money I found in the couch, $2.13. I arrive at some address for some reason, it’s 213 such-and-such boulevard. Not always, but much more often than seems accountable by chance, and FAR more often than occurs with any other arrangement of numbers. I’m not alleging that it means anything, and I’m not alleging that it doesn’t mean anything, but it sure feels like it does. I look at the clock, and it’s 2:13, or 12:13, and it feels more like those numbers somehow saw me, somehow proactively grabbed the attention of my sight. In other words, when I say that I look at the clock and it’s 2:13, it’s not usually an arbitrary glance. It’s like I subconsciously identify the numbers prior to laying eyes upon them, if that makes sense.
I once asked somebody about it, another writer friend of mine named Jeri. Her response was something to the extent of 6 being a number represented by the need for decision, and that if you add 2+1+3 you get 6.
I’m just putting this out there in the event that anybody familiar with numerology or weird fixations on numerical arrangements might have some insight..
June 2, 2008
I never thought I’d in any way, shape, or form be expressing these ideas publicly. They just peg me as your typical right-wing, corn-fed, midwestern Judeo-Christian-dogma-asserting-non-intellectual ignoramus. I’m sorry if the use of that stereotype offends or isolates anybody, but I feel it is a legitimate stereotype and its use represents the exception to my rule against them. But really, for the past few days now, these authentic realizations have forced themselves upon me with a crystal-clear lucidity I just can’t seem to shake.