Category Archives: Religion / Spirituality

I’ve said many times on this blog that self-deception is essential to living The Good Life.

In his review of the hot new book Stumbling on Happiness (one of a few books on happiness I will read soon…even though it’s only one of 168 books in my Amazon wishlist), Scott Sossell says:

For instance, healthy people can be deluded into greater happiness when granted the mere illusion of control over their environment; the clinically depressed recognize the illusion for what it is. All in all, it’s yet more evidence that unhappy people have the more accurate view of reality — and that learning how to kid ourselves may be a key to mental health.

My close friend Tim Taylor is starting a series on his blog called Table for Three, where he will make believe he goes to lunch with two other people and construct a likely dialogue. His first installment is up — him, Jesus, and Mary. Other candidates:

• Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary
• Adolph Hitler and George W. Bush
• Michael Jackson and Prince
• Jose Canseco and Fidel Castro
• Madonna and Eva Perron
• Paul Haggis (writer of Crash) and David Duke

These are sure to be entertaining and packed with subtle nuggets.

It reminds me of that common high school/college application question: if you could meet one person, alive or dead, who would it be? I’ve never had a quick answer to this. If I could wave a wand, I would host a series of dinners with people who vehemently disagree with each other and also bring in the world’s most skilled facilitators, and see what happens. Disagreement always makes for the most interesting conversation.

With a teacher at school I’m taking the MIT course Problems of Philosophy through their OpenCourseWare system. It’s fun and interesting stuff. We hop around to different philosophical problems and I am starting to develop a basic vocabulary for talking about the utterly abstract.

In our primary text, Reason & Responsibility, I read an essay by William James which among all the ones on God I’ve read was among the most concise and compelling (especially when compared to the ontological argument that the existence of the concept and word God means it must exist).

Say you believe in God in faith and need no evidence to prove its existence. Best case: eternal beatitude. Worst case: you were duped. Most atheists could not stand the thought of being duped by diluting the core of their entire intellectual worldview which stresses reason and rationality. James, a believer, seems to say, "Why not suspend that critical faculty for faith in God and afterlife? If you’re wrong, swallow your pride, and boy, if you’re right…."

The problem in this, for we questioning atheists, is the effect on the present by adopting such a stance. To live a most virtuosic life we must uphold an intellectual standard that does not bend issue-by-issue. If we suspend the faculty of reason in this instance, we may have started down a slippery slope.

I went over to the SF Zen Center this morning to get a tour of the facility and receive free formal meditation instruction. It was great — beautiful day, good location, and nice instructor. They taught one tradition of meditation — the zen kind — which involves a certain posture and mindset. I will probably tweak it a bit, but it was great to learn from a pro.

If you’re interested in meditation head to the SF Zen Center Saturday mornings for free instruction…and tranquility.

An interesting op/ed in today’s NYT about the role of psychotherapy in a world celebrating "hard sciences" and exact measurements. Money quote:

Religion has historically been the language for people to talk about the things that mattered most to them, aided and abetted by the arts. Science has become the language that has helped people to know what they wanted to know, and get what they wanted to get. Psychotherapy has to occupy the difficult middle ground between them, but without taking sides. Since it is narrow-mindedness that we most often suffer from, we need our therapists to resist the allure of the fashionable certainties.