2006 - May and More Philosophy

You can always tell when school is in session and when it is not. The summer months - especially the early ones when I'm revelling in my freedom from grading, I guess I do go a little crazy. But this era we're reading about was especially important, as you've seen. For the previous decade, I had been thinking of myself as a practicing Christian, albeit with heretical beliefs. But I also - though I rarely said it out loud and sometimes did not even say it to myself - had a view of myself as truly being a Hindu who had chosen Christianity as a way of walking the bhakti path.

Now, free at last of the burden of graduate school, with a job secured for the future, I really wanted to recover/reconstruct a spiritual foundation for the rest of my life. I was further being driven by the daily need to find a way to deal with the intense physical pain.

May 7
I want to type up my statement of faith, so that I can send it off with Mom when she leaves. And when I type it, I’ll need to add a preface. I also wanted to make a list of questions for her, to take and think about and formulate her own responses. My motive is to get a different – a faithful Christian's – interpretation of what I see as very difficult issues. The exclusivity implied by much of what Jesus said, along with the pre-destination that accompanies them. Some of the behaviors – like sending the demons into the pigs. And bigger issues – how does she feel/think about the doctrine of original sin? How does she make sense of God’s setting humans up to fail? What then is the purpose of the Creation? Why does an all-powerful God allow an angel dominion over the earth?
I’m not going to be satisfied with the answer that these are mysteries. At some point I think one has to decide if it makes any sense. It seems to make sense to Mom, so I’d like to know how she squares these things with a loving God? I do not mean these questions as personal attacks. I realize some people take them that way . . . they seem to feel that any question or doubt one has is an accusation of them, or maybe it seems like a roundabout way of challenging their intelligence? I don't know. I don't mean it that way. I just want to know what intelligent people of faith actually believe, and how they deal with these things I perceive as inconsistencies.

I spoke to [another Christian friend] briefly about the Judas Gospel, and she was very dismissive. When I asked why, she said that it doesn’t fit with what we know about Jesus from the other gospels. When I pointed out that 1) I think it can be compatible, and 2) the inclusion of those four gospels was a political process, she became very distressed, so I made light of it and dropped the subject. What I want to ask her is, “What if that gospel turns out to be the truth? What would that change about your faith?” Because my personal belief is that one needs to be open to those possibilities – that the church, being human, may have gotten some things wrong.

I said to Mom that I thought it wouldn’t make any difference to the basic tenets of Christianity if Jesus had been married, and she did not seem to care for the idea. But couldn’t explain why on the spot [in her defense, Mom and I have often talked about how uncomfortable she is with verbal debate - which is why I was putting my questions and thoughts in written form]. Just because St. Augustine and others were all hung up about sex doesn’t mean that Jesus was. Why in the world should I accept, without evidence, that Jesus reversed 2000 years of Jewish thinking, that marriage and sex are gifts from God, and changed it to abstinence being holy just because Paul and Jerome and Augustine were misogynists with major sexual hang-ups? While it may be true that it is easier to focus on the things of the spirit when one is not engaged in a sexual relationship – for some people – it also seems true that God gave us bodies and made sex pleasurable for a reason. Why is marriage a sacrament if not because that is true? And why would Jesus be denied that sacrament? He may well have chosen celibacy, but I don’t see how it negates either his divinity or his teachings if he in fact was married. Yet many people apparently utterly reject that. Why?

I just can’t get past the belief that the early church messed a lot of stuff up. And got people thinking in entirely wrong directions on some matters. Well, I guess I’ve written part of what I believe about Jesus.

May 10
I’m feeling a little nervous about having given Mom my statement of belief, or my “ruminations” as I labeled it, when it is still in such an incomplete form. I’m worried that it will distress her unduly. I should at least have put in there somewhere a thought that reassures me, and might reassure her. Jesus said, “Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and the door shall be opened unto you.” I have to believe that this is true. If I seek with all my heart, then I will find. What I find may be slightly different than what she found, or we may interpret it a bit differently, but both will be True. My only caution is that I must be sure I am seeking with all my hear and mind and spirit. I worry that if I don’t end up believing the exact same thing as Mom that she will worry, and I don’t want to cause her any more of that.
[I am still worried about these things]

We talked briefly the other night about how cool it would be to write a book together. It would be a collection of these writings, which are in some ways responses to one another, questions and musings and prayers. We could maybe organize them by topic, and alternate voices. They wouldn’t have to be direct responses, although some of them could be. I think someone would publish it. That wouldn’t come for years, but I do think I’ll begin collecting all of it in one place. So it will be ready in the future if we decide to pursue it. In fact, I ought to talk to her about composing a legal document that would allow me to publish her work after her death, and ask her to start putting aside the things she writes that might be appropriate. I’ll mention it to her and see what she thinks. My Mom is the person I most trust to be able to show me how one can have faith in Christian doctrine. I look so forward to having her thoughts about the things I’m thinking and feeling.

And here was the origin of what became this blog
11:30 – I ought to go through all my old journals and tag every religious section. Then I’d have the record of what I really thought at different times, and we could see the evolution of my spiritual development. And we could maybe also find letters – Mom’s, Dad’s and mine, to flesh out the picture. What a cool idea, eh? Great summer project.

I also want to write out my current thinking about the creation, the Garden of Eden/Original Sin, Predestination, and of course, Jesus. For each, I think I want to write out as many different versions/interpretations as I know of, to help me pin down what it is, exactly, that seems true to me, and consistent with my logic and intuition, my experience. So I have a lot to do.

May 18
I guess I’m not really thinking anything interesting today. Or I’m too lazy to write it out, more likely. I’m getting close to finishing up Peter Hamilton’s Night Dawn trilogy. Have just the last 150 pages of the 6th and final book. So mostly my thoughts are about how cultures and societies develop, and the nature of human nature, and of this universe, and intelligence. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

In Hamiliton’s universe, which is so well-crafted one can easily believe ours is similar, humans meet other species who are so much more advanced than us that they may as well be gods. But there are others to whom our technology makes us seem like gods. Why haven’t any other species contacted us yet? I believe they are there, but any advanced enough to find us probably can see that we aren’t ready for knowledge of them yet. At least, that’s what I hope. It would be nice to think there is a rational, wise Confederation out there that might step in to protect us from total extinction, at least from the threat of hostile species.

I think it was Greg Bear who wrote Footprint, or Footpath – maybe it wasn’t him – but someone wrote a novel about our first encounter with xenocs being terrible. They come to take over our planet and don’t even bother trying to communicate with us. They either don’t recognize or don’t care about our sentience, they just begin “terra”-forming our planet and killing us off. That could happen, too.

When you think of the universe as holding many intelligent species, when humans are just one of thousands or millions or billions of sentient beings, then what kind of God would God be? How could we even conceive of its plans, desires, hopes, its Mind, or Purpose? It again casts doubt on the notion that God takes a personal interest in us as individuals, though with a God that big, it isn’t impossible, of course. But to what end? What does It want?

May 19
I’m near the end of the book. They’ve found the Sleeping God they were looking for. I’d forgotten that Hamilton avoids the larger question. The God – an entity that “sees the entire universe,” has amazing powers, and “exists to assist biological entities,” is an artifact constructed by a sentient species long ago. They created it to help themselves create(?), at least transfer to, a different realm, one in which they would no longer be biological. They used it to transcend, and left it behind to assist others on the same path. They believed in free will, so the artifact does, too. It is aware of other things like itself located in other super clusters and other realms. All of them were created for the same purpose, to assist their creators into a new, non-biological existence.
Still, it does know all that takes place in its part of the universe, as well as in other realms associated with it, and has an opinion (that of its creators) about what it is all for. If I understood properly, this universe is finite, and so subject to entropy. It will decay, collapse, eventually cease to exist. Together, all the beings who have ever existed will decide what is to come next, what new kind of universe they will create, and will, by deciding, create it. Here’s the way he puts it:
“The universe and all it is connected to will come to an end. Entropy carries us towards the inevitable omega point; that is why entropy exists. What is to be born next cannot be known until then. This is the time when the pattern of that which replaces it will be created, a pattern which will emerge out of mind, the collective experience of all who have lived. That is where souls go, their transcendence brings all that they are together into a single act of creation”
(p.726).

So the “beyond,” a realm which human souls experience as purgatory, has no spatial dimension – only time. It is the time between when someone dies and when this universe ends. The only beings who get stuck in it are the people who cling to this life, to what they have known; people who have lived unsatisfactory lives, who lack faith in themselves, who fear the future and difference. Humans have a relatively large number of souls trapped there, because we have such a large number who live miserable lives – poverty, pain and fear dominate human existence. At the point in the book, somewhere around 2800 AD, the only reason so many lives are like that is because humans have not made it a priority to eliminate them. We are at a point in our technological development when we could devote our energy and minds into creating molecular-level replication, like the Kiint have (a superior species), which can supply every individual with any material thing that it wants. An immediate end to hunger, poverty, envy, theft, etc. Since meeting the Kiint, some 200 years before, we knew such a thing was possible, but did not choose to pursue it.

Basically it’s the earth scenario on a larger scale. We’ve been so rich in space and resources that we’ve never had to really deal with our problems. We can always leave them behind by expanding into new areas. If we don’t develop inter-stellar travel, that’ll have to change; we’ll be forced to actually clean up the mess we’ve made of Earth. We’ve not put our energy into ending poverty, hunger and sickness because we haven’t had to. Eventually, Hamilton suggests, we will have to do that. Once those material things are taken care of, we can then turn our attention to preparing souls for the omega point. How? By loving them. When people are truly loved, they learn to love themselves, which gives them the ability to face challenges and the future with confidence in themselves and compassion for their fellows. At that point, we as a species will be able to contribute something wonderful to the consensus that shapes the next reality, the next universe.

Pretty cool idea. It leaves alone, though, the question of whether or not there is a God. One who sees the development of universes and put it all in motion. And what would its purpose be? Who could even guess? Although it seems consistent with what I already believe – God learning about itself by creating something that can become what It is. Where/when did such a God come from? It’s turtles all the way down. Ah well, enough for the moment.


May 21
One thing I’ve been thinking about that could use some discussion here is how I need to get more critical about some of my faults. I don’t mean in a self-flagellating way, as I’ve done plenty of. That kind of hopeless belittling of oneself is a dead end. Or rather a downward spiral of self-hatred, loathing and despair. Not interested in going there. What I would like to do is be back where I was in college, and even through most of my relationship with S. Be self-aware, and scrupulously honest about my feelings, my motivations, and my failings. Again, not so I can berate myself, but so that I can grow. So I can be the person, or more the person, that I want to be.

I’d like to catch all the times I slip into passive-aggression. I want to re-learn how to fight more fairly, to be able to recognize when Jim states a truth about my behavior, acknowledge it, apologize for it, and then get better. If I can do better at owning my own shit, I’ll also do better at not taking on his. I’ve talked about this before in these journals, but I kind of forgot how to fight in that wonderful way where even in anger I avoided being defensive and could admit a mistake when I’d made one.

I want to re-learn how to let go of defensiveness. To be vulnerable and completely honest even in the middle of a fight. Honesty requires always making “I” statements – not “you did” and “you act” because I can’t ever know what someone else meant, and I can’t blame my feelings on anyone elses actions. They do what they do. Its my response that I’m responsible for. It excludes all “nevers” and “always” because neither are ever true.

May 22
. . . [I’m reading] Annie Lamott’s new book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. Read the first few pages last week, and man is she pissed at President Bush! Maybe even more than I am, which is saying a lot! Yesterday there was an article in the paper about the growing size, outrage, and activism in the Christian Left. Its about time! It is heartening news, and I know Lamott has done her part ever since the beginning. Oh wow. I just love her. Have read the first three chapters. I think this is the right book for me to read right now. My inner voice has been prompting me to get more aware and more honest with myself, and she’s such a good role model for that.

May 23
Went to bed around midnight last night, and slept decently. Guess it did take at least an hour for me to fall asleep, and I woke up a couple of times, but it was much better than the night before. I woke up at 8:30 and read Anne Lamott for nearly an hour. Lot’s of great quotes; the last one was this: “Faith is not about how we feel; its about how we live” . . . Here’s a good one to remember – “Gratitude, not understanding, is the secret to you and equanimity” (p.295). “I don’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.”

You know, one of the things she says often is that we need to take care of ourselves. Be kind – not only to others but to our selves. I still don’t do a very good job of that. I’ve committed to getting myself medication, but that’s really just so I can stand to be alive. I do keep this journal, which is just for me and helps me a lot. I read some things that matter to me. But mostly I give myself time to play on the computer, and ice cream and cigarettes. Might there be better ways to be nice to myself? Hey! Ask and you shall receive. Here is what she says in the next paragraph about how to feed our spirit. 1 – find a path and some light to see by. 2. Push up your sleeves and start helping. “Every single spiritual tradition says that you must take care of the poor, or you are so doomed that not even Jesus or the Buddha can help you” (p.307). 3 – anything that helps you get your sense of humor back feeds your spirit. 4 – “Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all.” 5 – Rest, but pay attention. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is stealing your freedom, your personal and civil liberties, and then smirking about it. I’m not going to name names.” (p.309).

That is all very good advice, and I need to take it. I need to help others more, and I need to rest more. Most of the things I do to relax (and distract me from pain) keep me busy. When is the last time I laid down in the grass and watched clouds? Well, I did watch the sky and the ocean in Puerto Rico, but I don’t have to wait until vacation! And I should take walks. We’ll be walking to class this summer, but I also need to walk for pleasure. I’m having a cup of tea, and I need to do that more often, too.

It is kind of subversive, isn’t it? That you can get closer to God and being a good person just by being nice to yourself? I have faint memories of that being true for me in the past. I mean of experiencing that for myself. My most joyful, most close-to-God eras in my life were times I was being gentle with myself, nurturing myself in ways I desperately needed, and had realized no one else was going to do for me. Those were also eras of singleness, and celibacy. But I am never going to be single again, and I cannot expect Jim to nurture me in all the ways I need. He gives me the gifts that are his to give, and they are wonderful and give me a lot of joy and pleasure and happiness. But there are things he cannot give me, like the smell of earth on a rainy day, the breeze in my hair. So I need to give those things to myself. And be kind to me on the inside, too.

Yes, I need to keep pushing myself to do good work, and hard work, and more of it. But I also need to give myself rest, and pats on the back, and kind thoughts about my body, my work, my life. My inner conversations seem usually to end with me berating myself. Come on, would that work if I did it to anyone else? No, we humans respond much better to praise and encouragement. So I’m going to try to be nicer to myself this week. An experiment. I wonder if, in a way, these middle-of-the-night sessions alone are a gift to myself? I used to just lie in bed feeling miserable, yelling at myself to “go to sleep for God’s sake!” This is much better. The cats have settled down, presumably are in bed. And it is 2:40 and I’m just about to try again.

May 24
The biggest project of all is already begun – that of reconnecting with God, re-learning how to pray, especially the listening part, which I’ve never been very good at. My heart is lighter this morning. I don’t know any better what to do, but my heart feels softer, like thawing. So I’ll just keep turning it over to God until an answer comes clear.
I am now re-reading Sophie’s World, by Josten Gaardner. I am where Sophie is just learning about mythological explanations for our existence. Her mysterious letter writer is explaining that before philosophy, all cultures developed myths to explain the central questions of life – why are we here, what happens when we die, where did the universe come from, etc. He uses Norse mythology as an example, but in truth, all mythologies are pretty much the same. In order to explain evil, and all bad things, people come to believe in a battle between forces of order and life vs. those of chaos and death. Humans depend on the gods to help them fight the evil forces, and gods depend on humans to make them strong by giving them offerings. I want to insert this into my ruminations, because this is humanity’s first answer to the big questions. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it is right, or that it is wrong. But it isn’t very sophisticated. And one wonders how much of the battle stuff is just a holdover from that kind of thinking. To hang on to these ideas of battles between good and evil seems kind of like the lazy-man’s way of dealing with the hard questions.

Here’s something important: it was Heraclitus who first used the term “Logos” to refer to the divine. For him, the Logos is the “universal reason” or “universal law,” that guides everything in nature, and causes opposites to co-exist, and who is the catalyst for transformation and change. Heraclitus (540-480 BCE) was a contemporary of Parmenides, who believed that nothing changes, and therefore we can’t trust our perceptions. We must only trust reason. Heraclitus argued the opposite – that everything is always changing, as we perceive. He believed opposites were necessary for the same reason I’ve outlined before – how can we appreciate peace without war, etc. The Logos must exist, to be the matrix in which all these contrasts exist, and to guide their changing.

The problem with both H & P is that they were going on the assumption that there is only one primary substance, and it had to be either air, water, earth or fire. It was Empedocles who pointed out that they were both right, and both wrong. There are, he said, in fact 4 basic elements, that combine and the come apart again. So the components never change, but the things we perceive are always changing. Pretty clever. And there are 2 forces, love and strife, which act on the elements and cause them to change. And this is still how we think, in terms of elements and forces.

It was Democritus (460-370 BC) who took the idea further, and came up with the notion of atoms. By his definition, atoms must be unbreakable and eternal, since “nothing came from nothing.” But he thought atoms were all different from one another, like Lego’s. And he didn’t believe there was any need for a divine force or being. There is no design – things happen mechanically.

Skepticism is the name of the school of philosophy which says we cannot know the answers to the big questions. But we do know that people have to learn to live together. The Sophists were skeptics, and they were the earliest cultural relativists. They were interested in pointing out that societies do things very differently from one another, and they introduced the debate about nature vs. nurture. It was as against them that Socrates developed his philosophy. I really do need to remember not to keep leaving Socrates out of my list of important people. Just because our society has classified him as a philosopher, not a spiritual figure, he had a lot to say that has bearing on faith. And, as Gaardner points out, they had lives which were quite similar. Jesus and Socrates, I mean.

Now on to Plato. He, of course, was searching for the eternal – eternal goodness, truth and beauty. But he didn’t believe atoms were eternal. All material things decay. So what is eternal must be the molds, from which form is made. Thus his notion of immutable, ideal forms, or actually “ideas.” Like the Buddha, he realized that one of our big problems is change. How can we ever understand anything when everything is on its way to being something else? We can only, therefore, truly understand things by using our reason. Reasoning out logically what the idea is behind the particular form that we perceive.

He believed there are two worlds – the sensory, material one, and the realm of ideas. We are bits of both – bodies decidedly material, but our souls are eternal and belong to the world of ideas. When our souls enter our bodies, they forget the idea world from which they come. Life is the process of remembering that world, by reasoning about the things we perceive with our senses. But why? Why would souls ever leave the world of ideas? I don’t think he ever answered that question. But he did see the soul yearning for a return to that place. Like the Buddha and the Hindu saints, we see in Plato a conviction that the material world is tricky, because it is a lesser world, a mere “shadow world,” that deceives us, provides the illusion that it is the real world.

Guess what? Plato was not a misogynist – he believed women had reason equal to men’s!
We are already moving on to Aristotle. Now he, we know, was a misogynist to the degree that even bent his logic and his observations to fit his notion that women ought to be lower beings. But we cannot throw him out just because of that. Here’s an interesting fact – records refer to 170 titles written by Aristotle, but we have only 47. Imagine what might have been lost. Maybe he even reversed his opinion on women.

Where Aristotle was right – was probably in many areas - but first with his refutation of Plato’s notion that “ideas” precede the material form. In other words, the idea of “chicken” existed before any actual, material chickens. All materiality is a falling away from, an imperfect copy of the original idea. Essence before existence. And I guess Jews and Muslims would have to agree, since God presumably had the idea of chickens before he created the real thing. Aristotle figured that the idea of a perfect chicken was a concept humans came up with after having seen a lot of chickens. So, perception wins out over reason. I can’t remember the term he gave this, this ability of humans to create classes of things, to generalize from one or two instances to an order of existence.

“Substance always strives toward achieving an innate form.” All change is a transformation of substance from the potential to the actual, and all things have some specific potentiality. A chicken egg has the potentiality to become a chicken, but not a goose.

Aristotle’s Causality
Material cause – the materials required, say for a statue. The marble must exist materially for there ever to be a marble statue.
Efficient cause – the action – the sculptor uses tools to chip away marble.
Formal cause – the sculptor has an idea of what the form of the statue will be. Without it, he could never accidentally produce a horse, or whatever.
Final cause – the purpose. Why did the sculptor sculpt?

Aristotle believed nature is purposive. The rain falls because (final cause) plants need it to grow. Did Plato believe in God? Aristotle did, at least as the prime mover, the formal cause of the universe.

12:30 am. On to Hellenism. This is a really important time – so much happened in the realm of religion and philosophy, mirroring the massive changes in culture and political economy. Sometimes, when I’m feeling hopeful, I think that the darkness of the time I live in is like this – the birth pangs of a new and better way for humanity to be in the world. Certainly the Hellenists, or many of them, thought “the world has grown old.” And became preoccupied with death. More, with salvation from death.
How funny, a couple of paragraphs down, Gaardner says, “Hellenistic culture could well be compared to the world of today.” People became preoccupied with ethics, how one should live. He details four schools of thought:
Cynics – Diogenes was one. Very eastern. Happiness is not in wealth or physical comfort or prestige. Their message – don’t be dependent on (make one’s treasure) material things.
Stoics – Zeno. Grew out of Cynic movement. Also very Eastern. We are all part of the Logos, by which Zeno meant “common sense.” Each one of us is a microcosmos, and reflects the macrocosmos. They were monists – there is only one reality. No dualism, no separation of individual and universe, or spirit and matter. Cicero was a stoic, influential in encouraging Greek culture in Rome. I think the guys in Ian Pears book were also Stoics. They were also humanists, who believed humans should accept their fate without complaint. Also accept the good things without taking credit. Like the Cynics, and with echoes of Hinduism.
Epicureans – Seek pleasure, avoid pain. Like an immature Hindu. However, Epicurus urged us to be wise in our search, and practice self control and temperance. It wasn’t all about sensual pleasure at all costs.
Neo-Platonists – Plotinus, so this is important. He was from Alexandria, where he was exposed to Eastern philosophy. He brought it to Rome where, says Gaardner, his doctrine of salvation “competed seriously with Christianity.” But we know other neo-Platonists were Christians. Hmm, I really need a book I’ve already packed away.
Dualists – two worlds, material and spiritual, and conflict between man’s body and soul. For Plotinus the world is a span between 2 poles:

The ONE eternal ideas living creations earth stone Absolute Darkness

All that exists is God, but there is a point, far away from the One, where light/being do not reach. Our souls are illuminated by the light, but matter is the darkness that has no real existence. Our souls are “sparks of the fire,” so we are, in fact, pieces of God, or the One. Thus we grow closer to God through our own selves. Sometimes we can experience ourselves as part of that divine mystery. Gaardner here provides a discussion of mysticism which is very good. I like this quote. It says what I keep trying to: “. . . the descriptions of mystical experiences given by mystics show a remarkable similarity across all cultural boundaries. It is in the mystics’ attempt to provide a religious or philosophic interpretation of the mystical experience that his cultural background reveals itself.” (p.137). Westerners experience it as a meeting with a personal god, Easterners as a total merging, or union.

I really do need to learn all I can about Hellenistic culture, philosophy and religion, because it is that context into which Jesus was born, and Christianity took shape. I think it holds one of the important keys to understanding how Western Christianity got its shape, why certain doctrines were developed and adopted. Gaardner is about to discuss some of that.
First he does a great job explaining the history and scope of Indo-European culture, with lots of wonderful linguistic examples to show that the religions and ideas of people from Britain to Russia, Italy to India, are all variants of the same thing. Part of their thinking included the notion that the world is a battleground between good and evil forces, so that is really, really old. Also the descendent cultures place emphasis on seeing – sight is the primary sense. They all saw time as cyclical, and came to emphasize that god is in all things.

We’ve already seen a number of parallels. But I never think about the fact that Greeks and Indians have the same ancestors, but in fact, they did. But the Semites did not. They are way different. They were monotheistic, had a linear view of history – all the stuff I teach in my classes. Ah – something new: hearing is the preeminent sense. “Hear, O Israel.” Proclaim. Recite. How exciting! Especially accompanied by the thunderstorm outside!

Gaardner emphasizes how the Jews used the terms Messiah (as a King), Son of God (which could be applied to the king, as he was God’s representative on earth) and Kingdom of God (which is a nation ruled by a king God has anointed). This sheds light on what Jesus might have meant when he used those terms.

Now this is a conundrum. The Semites did not believe humans had eternal souls. So how could they have believed in heaven or hell? They didn’t, which always shocks my students. There is a remarkable (to us) lack of interest on the part of Jews as to what happens after we die. That’s because they didn’t think anything happened. Dead is dead. You end. So the only thing Jesus could possibly have meant, that would make any sense to the Jews, was that one doesn’t have to die. One’s soul can be made to be eternal. It wasn’t about saving people from hell, as Christians have translated it, but from literal death.

Well, he doesn’t do such a good job with Christianity, I don’t think. He doesn’t explain, even, what God is, or how Jesus could be both God and Man. I mean, he says he was, but doesn’t subject the idea to any questions, as he did other philosophies. And he presents no opposing views. Kind of like Paul showed up in Athens one day and everyone immediately converted and threw philosophy out the window. Ah well, I have other books. In this one we’ll be jumping to Augustine. It’s 2 am, and I ought to be thinking about going back to bed. It is still raining and sounds nice. One more chapter.

The Church closed Plato’s Academy in 529, which “became the symbol for how Christianity put a lid on Greek philosophy.” (p.171), and took over all education, reflection, etc. Oh good, he’s come back to it. He describes all of medieval philosophy as the attempt to reconcile Greek philosophy with the Bible, to see if one can only believe Christianity, or if reason can also serve you. Which is precisely my question, so its going to be difficult to go to bed.

Augustine, 354 – 430. First a Manichean – dualism of light and darkness. Explains his preoccupation with “the problem of evil.” He became a Neo-Platonist and a Christian. And there you go – the Platonic ideas were present in God’s mind before he created the world. He also believed that evil has no existence of its own – it is the absence of God. There is a barrier between God and human souls, we are not “divine sparks.” I guess I’ll have to re-read Augustine. He seems to take a lot of short cuts and force his ideas into shapes that don’t make sense.
On to Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274, who has to grapple with Aristotle’s newly recovered works. He believed we could arrive at Christian truths through faith and reason. But I’m tired and going to bed.

May 25
I think I’ll go back to Sophie and her lesson about Thomas Aquinas. Gaardner just explains how Aquinas was able to justify Aristotle with Christianity by saying that Aristotle was right, but only so far. I.e. Reason tells us God exists, as the Prime Mover, but we need the Bible to tell us who God is. But like Augustine, he seems to be twisting his logic to fit doctrine. In some ways it seems a shame to me that such great minds were limited by that doctrine. Mightn’t they have taken us further if that wasn’t the case? And it is a real shame that Aquinas also adopted Aristotle’s misogyny. St. Augustine was pretty hateful about women, too, if only because he liked us too much. He almost single-handedly turned sex into something dirty and evil, instead of the sacred gift Jews and early Christians believed it to be. Of course, he had Paul to base his opinions on. How can women feel anything but abused and damaged by the actions and stances of the Church? Do you know how painful it is to be a faithful little girl, and meet such hatred and contempt on the part of the great men, the great minds, in one’s tradition? How can people justify that with Jesus’ treatment of women, and his commandments about “the least of these”?

When Gaardner begins discussing the Renaissance, he has to admit it: “Philosophy and science broke away more and more from the Church, thus enabling religious life to attain freer relationships with reasoning.” People began to emphasize that God was unknowable, and the important thing is not to understand, but to submit (p. 197).

As Europeans rediscovered Greek and Roman culture, they also adopted their humanism. Human kind, instead of the evil, depraved being of the Middle Ages, was again esteemed. But it was more than humanism, it was individualism. Hmm – the population of Rome had dwindled to 17,000 by 1417. Down from over a million at the empire’s height. The barrier between God and Man came down. Many Renaissance men were pantheists, believing God is present in all of nature.

Something I’ve been thinking about last week – a lot of the stuff in the Bible, and even more in the doctrine of the Church, only makes sense in the context of belief that Earth is the only planet, ours the only solar system, all other stars being merely decoration for us, and we humans being the only sentient species. No wonder the Church fought so hard and so bitterly against the heliocentric theory, and Newton’s physics, and then, the piece de resistance – Darwin’s theory of evolution. Because it knocks humans right out of the privileged, special position Christianity put us in.

One of the things I need to write is how the central figures of Christian history, who contributed so much to our understanding of God, and who seem right about a number of things, were also flawed people, and products of their own history and culture, and how their flawed thinking got accepted right along with their good ideas. There are Paul’s ideas about women, Augustine’s hang-ups about sex, Luther’s anti-Semitism, and view of humans as utterly depraved, etc. That’s just the beginning. But we are already moving into the Baroque period.

It was an era of conflicting, or opposite extremes. In philosophy there were idealists and materialists. Also determinists. If, as Newton and Hobbes believed, the universe, the earth, and people are mechanistic – we/everything can be described and explained as parts of mechanical systems, then everything is predetermined. So, doesn’t it seem likely that both Luther and Calvin would have been very much influenced by this view? What would pre-destination look like without Newton? Or Descartes?

There is a direct line of descent from Socrates and Plato, through Augustine, to Descartes. The rationalists. After the renaissance, Europeans were in need of a system builder, some one to organize and systematize all the new and old thinking. Descartes was the man. 1596-1650. His concern with the relationship between body and soul makes sense in the context of the materialism and mechanism of his own time. The body was increasingly understood as systems of mechanical processes. Maybe the mind, too. But what about the soul? Surely it isn’t just another machine?

I’m having trouble concentrating on Descartes. Partly it is because I get irritated with him right away. Always have [My first college paper at age 18 was about Descartes and his circular reasoning - I didn't buy it then, either]. If you are going to doubt everything, and require proof of the existence of everything, then you can’t go leaping to conclusions the way he does. He starts off great – it makes sense that he must exist as a thinking thing. But how does he get from there to the notion that because he can think of god, a perfect entity, God must exist? It’s a total leap. Gaardner says the difference between God and other things I can think of but that don’t exist, like unicorns, or world peace, is that existence is inherent in the concept of God. A perfect entity cannot be perfect if it doesn’t exist. I don’t buy it. So it makes it difficult to listen to anything Descartes says.

The other thing that annoys me about him is his dualism. I realize he didn’t have all the info available to him that I do, but it still seems to me he should have seen that mind and body are connected in more fundamental ways than he was willing to concede. Also it seems to me to go against doctrine. God is all-powerful, and perfect, right? And God created us in bodies. He must have had a reason. Why then should we look down on our bodies and feel superior to them? It doesn’t make sense in the Western monotheistic context. Let’s see if Spinoza does any better.

He had the good sense to be Jewish, at any rate. Ah, hurray for him! He argued that the Bible must be read critically, with a historic-cultural eye, bearing in mind the times in which it was written. And he was a pantheist, seeing God in all, or that all is in God. He rejected Descartes' dualism, and said there is only one substance, which includes Descartes “extension.” God – or Nature, as he sometimes referred to it – manifests itself as thought and extension (matter), and maybe in many other ways we are not aware of.

If everything is one, and all things are expressions of God’s in various modes, then my thoughts are God’s thoughts! (pg.252). No wonder he got run out of town and disowned by his family. I am one of God’s fingers. But what does that do to free will?

“Spinoza believed that God – or the laws of nature – are the inner cause of everything that happens. He is not an outer cause, since God speaks through the laws of nature and only through them” (p.252). He has a lot in common with the Stoics. We are ourselves, but we act in accordance with the laws of nature. So where is our free will? At what point do we get it? Exercise it? Spinoza says we don’t have free will. The best we can do is understand and come to peace with the idea of our own nature. Only God is truly free. But we are all a part of God, so if we come to realize the Oneness of things, we can achieve “the perspective of eternity,” which is the only way to find contentment. I like Spinoza. He doesn’t shirk. I’ll need to read more of him.

But we are on to Locke, with whom I have to agree, also, about some things. He responded to Descartes the same way Aristotle responded to Plato. In effect, he’s the “existence precedes essence” guy, although he can’t be called an existentialist. He’s an empiricist, in exactly the same way Aristotle was. Tabular rasa, nothing is in our heads except what get puts there by experience. And the things themselves that we experience have primary qualities (inherent to the thing, measurable, everyone can agree on) and secondary qualities (how an individual perceives them - taste, beauty, etc.). Of course, we do extrapolate from the things we perceive, and do use our reason, our logic and rationality, to create? Apprehend? things that don’t exist objectively or can’t be perceived with the 5 senses. “He believed it is inherent in human reason to be able to know that God exists.” (p.265). The idea of God was born of human reason. But how? Gaardner doesn’t tell us. He just leaves it at that.

Now for Hume. I think Chip is Humist, if that’s a word. He, according to Gaardner, is the most important of the British empiricists. 1711-1776. He ought to be important to human development, because he tried to strip things back to what we experience, which has to begin with infancy and childhood. Man has two types of perceptions – impressions (from senses) and ideas (recollections of impressions). But the mind can then put together 2 ideas, and come up with something of which it never had an impression – like a Pegasus, or a unicorn. The mind never actually invents anything, it just recombines ideas. So he tried to trace everything back to the original impression, in order to get rid of “false” ideas.

Like the Buddha, he had to conclude that there is no “I”: what I call I is a bundle of discrete experiences and impressions. “I” am never all these things at once. There is nothing stable about “me”; I’m always in flux. Bingo – Gaardner says on the next page that the resemblance between Hume and the Buddha in the way they put their arguments is uncanny. I guess now I know why Chip is such a fan. And Democritus is in there, too. So, there can be no enduring, eternal soul. “To prove religious faith by human reason was rationalistic claptrap, he thought” (pg.274). As many wise people have said, we have to get back to seeing the world as it really is – not as we have come by habit to expect it to be.

5pm Back to our British empiricists. Hume also wanted to make sure we don’t jump to conclusions. And don’t confuse reason with sentiment. It is not reasonable nor unreasonable to help someone, thus Hume rebelled against the notion (rationalist) that there is a natural law. “Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others” (pg.208).

6:30 – Good nap! I read the chapter on Berkley in bed. Essentially, he didn’t believe in anything. “Hey Rene,” he might have said, “how do you know its you going around believing things? Maybe you are just a character in a book!” Really, he thought we are all a dream God is dreaming. And he’s right, there isn’t any way to know for sure. All I know is what I perceive – I can’t be sure any of it is materially real. Glad I read it during the day. It kind of creeped me out. The problem he doesn’t bring up is this: how do you square that with a good, just, all-powerful God? Is he in control of the dream? Does he know that the dream people feel pain and suffer? If he isn’t doing it to learn something important about himself, then it seems inexcusable. Yet Berkeley was a Bishop, and a convicted Christian. How did he explain that? I’ll have to find out.

Now for the Enlightenment. Well, maybe not. It’s after midnight and I’m going to try to go to bed like a normal person.
2:30 am. So much for normality. The cat woke me up by puking right next to my head. Had to get up and clean it up, and the pain kept me up . . . And I’d just had a great insight falling asleep and praying. We were having a terrific thunder storm, and because she (my cat) was so afraid, she snuggled up close and didn’t care that I had bare skin. She lay against my back and we both fell asleep. It felt really nice to have her furry body there. And I said thanks to God for it. Then thought/prayed, “It’s too bad she has to be terrified to get close to me like this.” And I realized, duh! That’s how God must feel all of the time.

May 26
[discussion of pain – arthritis and shingles] . . . Shingles are just BAD, and so is PHN [postherpetic neuralgia], and they were caused by a virus. But it does prove Descartes wrong, because the virus only gets a chance to do its dirty work when the mind is over-stressed. And the body. It is difficult for me to sort out the difference between my body experiencing terrible pain as a result of my stress, and it all being my own fault. I can’t help thinking that I ought to be able to control the stress better, so that it can’t hurt me. How does that jibe with being more gentle with myself? If I blame myself it causes more distress, which in turn makes the pain worse. I need to see it as just unfortunate, like if someone was born with a deformed or weak leg, I wouldn’t blame them for not being able to run. If in fact all the pain I’ve experienced in my life is a response to stress, that is just the way my self is constructed. Wouldn’t I be kind to someone with a birth defect? Or who had been broken by life? Of course I would. So I need to be kind with myself, even in my head.

Gaardner just skims over the French enlightenment, which is fine. I’m pretty comfortable with them. Rousseau, anyway. But now we are on to Kant, and I can never remember that much about him or Hegel.

Kant thought both the rationalists (Descartes and Spencer) and the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) were right, but both went too far. He was a synthesizer. We do get all of our info from our senses (I.e. we aren’t born with any knowledge or ideas), but there are certain conditions which influence the way we see the world. Like, we will always perceive things occurring in time and in space. He called them “the forms of intuition.” Those ”ideas” must be innate. Time and space are not “real,” they are forms of perception. How very quantum of him. Things conform to the mind, it isn’t just the mind that conforms to things. The law of causality, which Hume said we couldn’t directly experience, Kant says is actually a human attribute. The law of cause and effect is eternal and absolute, because human reason perceives it to be so. He drew lines between “things in themselves” and “things as they appear to us.” We can never know things in themselves, but that shouldn’t and doesn’t, stop us from talking about things as they appear to us. The way things appear isn’t wholly idiosyncratic, either, so no need to get all pomo yet. There are conditions all we humans are subject to, as aspects of our humanity.

In this way, Kant provides a way for us to go on, whereas the empiricists would have us saying there isn’t any point, since I don’t even know if I am real. Hmmm. I always thought I didn’t like Kant, but he’s kind of hard to argue with, so far.

In terms of the big questions, I.e. Is there a god?, Kant said we cannot have certain knowledge. Either way we answer the question is equally reasonable and unreasonable. Oh, I like him! He says that all attempts to prove God rationally are doomed to fail. Neither of our ways of knowing – sensory perception or reason – can prove there is a God, form any positive knowledge. So – all that can fill the gap is faith. And he nevertheless believed that it is essential for us to believe that God exists; souls are immortal, and we have free will. So, he smuggles God in through the back door, but unlike Descartes, he’s honest about it. He says reason did not bring him there, only faith. Those are his “practical postulates.” Ah, here’s a great Kantian quote: “If the human brain was simple enough to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn’t understand it.” (p.333).

But here may be where I disagree with him. Hume said it is our sentiment, not our reason, that provides our morality. “You can’t draw conclusions from is-sentences to ought-sentences.” Kant didn’t like this, so tried to find a rational basis for reality. Like time, space and causal law, we are also born with moral law. I guess that makes sense – if you are going to give us some innate ideas, then I guess you can give us whatever you want.

[later] I’m going to leave Kant alone and move onto the Romantic period. Really, the history of Western philosophy just flips back and forth between “reason” and “experience” over and over again.
Schelling is someone I should read. He, like Spinoza, saw no distinction between mind and matter. Both are expressions of the Absolute, or “world spirit.” Novales also said, “the path of mystery leads inwards,” as humans bear the whole universe within ourselves. Here’s a historian I ought to know about, named Johann Gottfried von Heider (1744-1803). He was the first to write about/see history as a process, and that each era could have it’s own reason, as could different nations.

May 28
Here’s a quote from Gaardner’s discussion of Freud: “This means nothing less than that everybody has an innate need to give artistic expression to his or her existential situation.” (pg.442) . . . I’m hopelessly behind in writing about my book, but its fine, because after Hegel its all thinkers I know well – teach, in fact: Marx, Darwin, Freud, and now Sartre. I don’t feel a need, really, to write out what Gaardner says. I am anxious to have access to other books re. the conflict/conflation of Greek philosophy and Christianity.

May 29
Well, there is a lot of philosophical stuff floating around in my head. Just read the last few pages of Sophie’s World. Gaardner ends with Sartre, and then the Big Bang. Of course, I’m pretty familiar with big bang theory, and have spent a lot of time pondering the implications. I remember being thrilled when I first heard [my physics prof] say that we are all star dust – every atom in my body was once part of a star, part of a nebula, part of that original stuff from which the Universe was born.

But what I never considered before was this: what if that yearning all humans feel for connection, that sense we all have of Oneness, of having once been all part of one thing, is some kind of “memory” of that time right before the Universe exploded into being? Or right after? When every atom was all packed tightly together. Actually, we weren’t even atoms then, just all the parts that would later bond into atoms when things slowed and cooled down and had created some space. As Jim just said when I mentioned it to him, that would require that atoms, or particles, have some kind of consciousness. Which I agree sounds far-fetched. But on the other hand, quantum physicists keep being astounded at the intentionality that particles and quarks have. Must have, to behave the way they do. Or at least, they behave outside time. Which makes sense, since in a way they create time. I mean, how does a photon “know” where it is going? It has to know beforehand how it is going to be observed, so that it can behave appropriately. The answer is really that it is a wave – each photon is in every possible place at once, until it is observed, and then it collapses down into one tiny point. Like an electron, it is potentially everywhere inside an atom until you “see” it – then it is only in one place. Or really, it was only in one place.

It is still completely mind-boggling. To think that the light from a far away star has been traveling in all directions for thousands of years, until it hits my eyeball, when its energy is transformed – it ceases to exist but is now part of me. How can one not be awed and amazed? What power it gives us! Just the fact that I can observe and be conscious of the universe means I am shaping that universe, making it take a particular form. Wild, no?

And has so many implications, for what we are, and what God is, and what we are for. And that is only the tip of the iceberg. It gets much stranger. But I’m going to have to postpone writing it all out. Its time to get moving. I think all I was intending to say earlier is that the universe is really strange, and that it isn’t that far out to suggest that there might be some sort of remembering going on. Maybe way down at the level of quantum foam. Which, in fact, if it has any awareness, never did experience itself as more than one thing. I mean, at that level, the entire universe is connected, and always has been. So maybe it is some deep awareness of that connection.