Complete Rationality

"Rationality is the willingness, not necessarily actually doing it but the willingness to hold any idea open to question."

I've never actually met anyone who could do that. It's easy to think you can, because the ideas that you are least willing to question are so familiar to you that you don't notice them. Perhaps a horribly abused person who can no longer trust being near another human being could claim to have no unquestionable faith. Maybe.

But there really is more to faith than just accepting ideas without questioning them. (In my experience I haven't even seen questioning and faith to be incompatible, but that's another issue). There is also an inescapable element of humility. You cannot be proud of believing that the Earth was created in 6 days, or that Jesus could make a man see by spitting on his eyes. But you can believe it. And you don't even have to be stubborn about it. It requires humility.

Everyone could be humbled just by looking at the world around them. But it's too familiar, too expected. I used to think of the miracles in the gospels as simply a communication device used to represent Jesus's unique relationship with God. But now I think they serve another role. They ask the reader to believe or consider things that are unnatural and absurd, to brake their mind out of things too common to notice so they can actually see what's there.

Religion Without God

Just from the title this sounds like a very tired idea: most religious questions have been debated hundreds of times already. In fact it probably is a very tired idea, but I would like to present it in I think a meaningful way.

I am reading Faith and Practice, and am noticing how superfluous most references to God are. Here is an example:

"The impetus for service is often a concern, which, as Friends use the word, is a quickening sense of the need to do something or to demonstrate sympathetic interest in an individual or group, as a result of what is felt to be a direct intimation of God's will. A concern as an impetus to action arises out of Friends' belief that the realm of God can be realized here and now, not just in another place or time"
-- Faith and Practice, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, revised 1997

I very much like the spirit of this passage. It claims that good things can happen, good changes can happen, humans are not powerless to improve their own condition. However the introduction of God to this idea is puzzling. The 'realm of God' is being used to stand for something good. This is a very reasonable thing for the realm of god to stand for, but isn't 'good' a broader sense? Atheists have a sense of good. You could say the good in an atheist still comes from a God in which they do not believe, but aren't we overcomplicating things?

Essentially, I think the overall intent of the passage is hardly enhanced by the reference to God, and the cost is taking a very universal idea - that the human condition can be improved - and restricting it to a religious one. The cost is losing the very real connection that an atheist, or a polytheist, should feel with this passage.

The passage could easily be rewritten:
The impetus for service is often a concern, which, as Friends use the word, is a quickening sense of the need to do something or to demonstrate sympathetic interest in an individual or group. A concern as an impetus to action arises out of Friends' belief that good things can be realized here and now, not just in another place or time.

This problem presented itself to me a few months ago as I was discussing Quakerism with a friend. He was going to attend a meeting for worship with me, and I was explaining how you know whether you should share your thoughts with the meeting during worship. I explained that you speak if you are led by the spirit, light, etc to do so. He naturally asked how he, as an atheist, could apply this. I believe that the thoughts experienced by a Christian and an atheist during silent worship are fundamentally similar - the real impetus to speak is not so narrow as coming from God. By using monotheistic language we cloud a universal understanding. There is much potential for unity and inspiration that is being ignored here.

I think that this is an opportunity for all faiths. The vast majority of religious understanding has a strong universal element. It is the universal element that makes religion appealing. Religious language no doubt has added an aesthetic quality to these ideas. However, if we are willing to give a little on aesthetics, there is great benefit to be gained in restating, reinterpreting, perhaps even rethinking religious ideas through secular language.

I have heard it argued that the beauty of religion is just what I have criticized; it is a powerful language for expressing a broad range of ideas. Indeed there is something inspiring about tying our mortal feelings to a timeless, universal entity such as God. I am not asking for God to be dissected and extracted from religion. Rather I am asking people to consider and be cautious of the extent to which God is not universal. God is not universally loved or respected by the world's population.

Every Thought begins as intimately personal, and then must be carefully collected, shaped, and made less personal as it is communicated. So must be done with God. For the most part, God stands for something personal and internal.

This is not the case with all references to God. In the following from Katrina Clap by Mos Def, I believe the use of the word God serves a fairly universal purpose:

Lord have mercy,
Lord God God save our souls,
A-God save our souls, A-God,
A-God save our souls,
Lord God God save our souls,
A-God save our soul soul soul,
Soul Survivor,

The appeal to a divine being represents desperation, lack of faith in existing leaders, and the sense that the injustice played out in New Orleans runs far deeper than appears on the surface. This passage is not really about God; the appeal to God is a way of saying that there is nothing else to appeal to.

Forgiveness

I haven't had the mind or the thought to post in so long... but I was thinking about Michael Gallaugher recently, since he introduced me to so many new ideas, and I thought I really shouldn't let what I learned from him go to waste, and so I will post. (The topic is not related to Michael Ghallaugher. He has done nothing that I need to forgive).

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Of all virtues, people follow none so curiously poorly as forgiveness. We like to think ourselves strong enough to hold our head above the wrongs done to us and not to seek revenge, but again and again we are too weak. They hit me, they told me things I didn't want to hear, can't I hit them back?

I know I am too weak still to carry out revenge, but forgiveness is so much more. It is not enough to stay your hand before striking back. I know when someone is mean to me I will be at least a little unpleasant to them. And when things are very bad...

Forgiveness really means something so... unreachable? It means not judging a person by their actions. I have to look at you, and see what bad things you have done, and say honestly that it does not diminish my view of you. I must know that you have made others suffer without once thinking that you ought to suffer.

But look, it is harder still. The most forgiving of people will always find something, some perfect crime that they cannot come to terms with. You cannot win an argument for forgiveness because there is always a crime that speaks louder. Forgiveness begs that a murderer is worth as much of a person as you or I.

I want to forgive everyone everything. I want to never forget that no one deserves to suffer. I know I cannot do this because I have already failed many times. But I want to try it anyway.

Why Nothing Hapens

People possess a very remarkable power: they can act, in the many numbers that there are, to solve a problem. There are many severe, immediate, and very present problems, and people do react to them. They can reacte in very strange or dangerous ways, and cause much destruction, but they can also make things far better.

The effect diminishes with the failing force of the evil. The small problems that face the world are not met with the force of the whole human race. However, the appearance and existence of evil are very different things. Some of the worst of the worlds problems are simply too distant to be seen. Then there are those that are clouded by the very experiences of those who face them.

This would not be such a damaging effect if not for the very slow moving spirit of the human race. It is one very large entity, too large to adjust quickly. An individual may change quickly, but the whole of the human race is unmoving except but slowly. And so in the absence of a direct threat, people do not respond.

One possible solution to this would be to conjure up a direct threat and motive people to action. Another would be to draw upon people's sense of loyalty and patriotism. But such insentives can be horribly misdirected. They would more appropriately remain no more than part of the human race that is, and not the part that wills or does.

There is another hope, and that is in the tendency of people to immitate eachother. If people can be accostomed to acting at the persistent instead of the threatening problems, it may be possible, if not to change human nature, to change the context in which it lies.

Ellbur Wiki

A blog is limitting is some ways. To accomodate things that will not fit this environment I have made a wiki:
Ellbur Wiki. It is in a very primitive stage, but it is possible to edit and add pages.
I will still post to this blog.

A Thought

I have decided something, but I am no quite sure what it is. I have made one change to represent it: I now believe I have a purpose in life, I just don't know what it is. This shaded decision still reveals something about itself:

The purpose is above myself. I know this without a doubt. Its existence does not depend on mine. It is also a change from something. Specifically, the change is still unknown to me. But it is not, as I said of the Meaning of Life, placed carefully beyond my reach.

Because it is above me, it is something that could be a purpose of all people. It does not wish to depend on perception; it is not reletive to any manifestation of the senses. There are many people in the world, most have never seen eachother, and yet somehow there is an emergent motion of human actions. There are components of the convergence that we cannot control, but there may be components that are collective and cumulative.

Mathematical Reality

With the universe increasingly becoming broken down into laws of numbers, it becomes relevant to ask,
What distinguishes the real world from science's descriptions of the real world?

As I sit here thinking how to resolve the dilemma, I am part of a system that is conforming to these rules, and I seem to observe their effects.
However, the rules we know exist are so only so far as we may measure and observe them. This may hold an important key. Although it may be theoretically possible to make a still frame of the world and extract from it the future, it is not possible to take a still frame of the world. It is therefore not possible to predict the future in this way.

This same should apply whever the knowledge that would be needed is so conveniently restricted. With this prohibition, or perhaps freedom from the knowledge, we are liberated from the prison of a pure mathematical reality.