Category Archives: Religion / Spirituality

There’s a super interesting article in the Boston Review about cognitive science’s search for a common morality. It discusses the moral sense test (which I blogged about in April), first, and reveals that the results show there is no way to generalize on gender, race, etc. for how someone would resolve a moral dillema. Then it talks about any genetic/cognitive factors that may teach babies "right" and "wrong" as early as age one. Finally it discusses the hot topic of brain imaging – pictures that show which part of your brain lights up when you think about things.

Overall, a very stimulating piece. Below is an example of a moral dilemma. Read the article for more.

Mike is supposed to be the best man at a friend’s wedding in Maine this afternoon. He is carrying the wedding rings with him in New Hampshire, where he has been                staying on business. One bus a day goes directly to the coast. Mike is on his way to the bus station with 15 minutes to spare when he realizes that his wallet has been stolen, and with it his bus tickets, his credit cards, and all his forms of ID.

At the bus station Mike tries to persuade the officials, and then a couple of fellow travelers, to lend him the money to buy a new ticket, but no one will do it. He’s a stranger, and it’s a significant sum. With five minutes to go before the bus’s departure, he is sitting on a bench trying desperately to think of a plan. Just then, a well-dressed man gets up for a walk, leaving his jacket, with a bus ticket to Maine in the pocket, lying unattended on the bench. In a flash, Mike realizes that the only way he will make it to the wedding on time is if he takes that ticket. The man is clearly well off and could easily buy himself another one.

Should Mike take the ticket?

A fascinating article in the August Harpers (no link) about a paradox in the practices of American Christians. Around 85% of us call ourselves Christian (compared to an Israel that is 77% Jewish). 3/4 of Americans also believe that the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves."

That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor.

The culture of self-obsession has been adopted by Christians, despite the fact that the belief system is constructed to promote just the opposite.

A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch outside Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through latte stand, Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about "how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt." On Sundays children played with churchdistributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. A list of bestsellers compiled monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association illuminates the creed. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now by Joel Osteen-pastor of a church so mega it recently leased a 16,000-seat sports arena in Houston for its services-which even the normally tolerant Publishers Weekly dismissed as "a treatise on how to get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals….

But remember the overwhelming connection between America and Christianity; what Jesus meant is the most deeply potent political, cultural, social question. To ignore it, or leave it to the bullies and the salesmen of the televangelist sects, means to walk away from a central battle over American identity. At the moment, the idea of Jesus has been hijacked by people with a series of causes that do not reflect his teachings. The Bible is a long book, and even the Gospels have plenty in them, some of it seemingly contradictory and hard to puzzle out. But love your neighbor as yourself-not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but love your neighbor as yourself-will suffice as a gloss. There is no disputing the centrality of this message, nor is there any disputing how easy it is to ignore that message. Because it is so counterintuitive, Christians have had to keep repeating it to themselves right from the start. Consider Paul, for instance, instructing the church at Galatea: "For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment," he wrote. ‘"You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’"

Amy Batchelor has a good post on her blog today with an excerpt from Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott. Amy says that she doesn’t like talking about spirituality over dinner with overtly spiritual people; I’m just the opposite. I love talking about spirituality, especially with spiritual people! During conversations like these, I start with this premise: “[Even though] I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few more modest truths: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to comprehend how we got here, and why – which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our creator. And we will no doubt feel that ache, most of us, for as long as we happen to be alive” (Jon Krakauer).

The excerpt from Plan B is:

I asked a friend of mine who practices a spiritual path called Diamond Heart to explain the name, because I instinctively know that both Sam [her son] and I have, or are, diamond hearts. My friend said our hearts are like diamonds because they have the capacity to express divine light, which is love; we not only are portals for this love, but are made of it. She said we are made of light, our hearts faceted and shining, and I believe this, to a point: I disagree with her saying we are beings of light wrapped in bodies that merely seem dense and ponderous, yet actually are made of atoms and molecules, with infinite space and light between them. It must be easy for her to believe this, as she is thin, and does not have children. But I can meet her halfway: I think we are diamond hearts, wrapped in meatballs.

I would call my path Diamond Meatball: people would comfort and uplift one another by saying, “There’s a diamond in there somewhere.”

Still, on better days, I see us as light in containers, like those pierced tin lanterns that always rust, that let the candlelight shine out in beautiful snowflake patterns. (p. 160)

I continue to try to hone my daily information intake. Instead of plowing through three daily papers like I did over the summer, I now only read the NYTimes, local and sports sections of the SF Chronicle, and have given up the Wall Street Journal. Despite my belief that bundled services are headed downhill, the best bundled service in the world remains the Sunday New York Times. Page by page, I get more value out of the Sunday New York Times then most every other information outlet I consume.

Today, there’s an op/ed Keeping the Faith in My Doubt that is packed with a lot of punch and it spoke to me. The writer talks about "Universists" asking the tough question, "Who will fight for the faithless?" Excerpts:

I have no plans to sign up with the Universists or any other areligious group….An organization for freethinkers – one of the Universists’ self-definitions – strikes me as oxymoronic, like an anarchist government. Isn’t the point of being a freethinker eschewing categories like Satanist, Scientologist or Universist?

I’m also disturbed that these areligious groups have exhibited the same sectarian squabbling that they deplore in religious believers. When Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and director of the Skeptics Society, was invited to speak at an atheism convention in Florida last year, some organizers objected because he is agnostic – a mere doubter of God’s existence rather than a denier.

My main objection to all these anti-religion, pro-science groups is that they aren’t addressing our basic problem, which is ideological self-righteousness of any kind. Obviously, not all faithful folk are intolerant bullies seeking to impose their views on others. Moreover, rejection of religion and adherence to a supposedly scientific worldview do not necessarily represent our route to salvation. We should never forget that two of the most vicious regimes in history, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin, were inspired by pseudoscientific ideologies, eugenics and Marxism.

Opposing self-righteousness is easier said than done. How do you denounce dogmatism in others without succumbing to it yourself? No one embodied this pitfall more than the philosopher Karl Popper, who railed against certainty in science, philosophy, religion and politics and yet was notoriously dogmatic. I once asked Popper, who called his stance critical rationalism, about charges that he would not brook criticism of his ideas in his classroom. He replied indignantly that he welcomed students’ criticism; only if they persisted after he pointed out their errors would he banish them from class.

Of course we all feel validated when others see the world as we do. But we should resist the need to insist or even imply that our views – or anti-views – are better than all others. In fact, we should all be more modest in how we talk about our faith or lack thereof.

For me, that isn’t difficult, because I’ve never really viewed my doubt as an asset. Quite the contrary. I often envy religious friends, because I see how their faith comforts them. Sometimes I think of my skepticism as a disorder, like being colorblind or tone-deaf. Perhaps I’m missing what one geneticist has called "the God gene," an innate predilection for faith (although I’m skeptical of that theory, too). But skepticism has its pleasures; I like the feeling of traveling lightly through life, unencumbered by beliefs.

I came across a good March 2003 article in the Atlantic by David Brooks on the "Recovering Secularist" – a six step program. This really got at how I’m feeling now a days, out here in the San Francisco bubble (or as some of my San Franciscans call it, the United States of Canada with the rest of the US "Jesusland"). The first step:

There are six steps in the recovery process. First you have to accept the fact that you are not the norm. Western foundations and universities send out squads of researchers to study and explain religious movements. But as the sociologist Peter Berger has pointed out, the phenomenon that really needs explaining is the habits of the American professoriat: religious groups should be sending out researchers to try to understand why there are pockets of people in the world who do not feel the constant presence of God in their lives, who do not fill their days with rituals and prayers and garments that bring them into contact with the divine, and who do not believe that God’s will should shape their public lives.