Shastra

OK – Richard Dawkins has the eugenics agenda back in the foreground with his, by now, infamous Twitters on Down Syndrome; including his advice when asked if a woman who knows she’s about to have a Down Syndrome baby should abort it.  ‘It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.’

The fact is, we don’t know what contributions people can eventually make to society or what kind of life they can have, regardless of their apparent circumstances. ‘Disadvantages’ often become the spring board to great advantages.  Many people who achieve noteworthy contributions to humanity have done so by pushing against disadvantages.    

If you study nature, a strong ecosystem is one where there is a lot of diversity.  For humans, our diversity gives us the strength to adapt and respond well to the pressures to survive.  It gives us unexpected avenues through which to bolster our well being.  The ‘outliers’ of society are our hedges against challenges that may come our way, providing solutions to problems that we do not even imagine might hit us. 

When I was studying biology and psychology, one of my professors used the example of sickle cell anaemia to make exactly the point I’m making today.  She told us, “Sickle cell anaemia runs through much of the black population in North America.  It’s genetically inherited and it's a serious health problem in many black communities.  But in Africa, people with sickle cell anaemia have an advantage.  They are more resistance to malaria.  The disadvantage on one continent becomes the advantage on another."

So, just because we can’t see the advantage, or just because a trait isn’t an advantage under circumstances that we are familiar with, just because we don’t see a use for a trait here and now, does not mean that we should weed it out.  The disadvantage may one day have nested in it the very key we need to survive. 

I like the attitude toward disabilities in the ancient Viking Culture.  You might think the rugged Viking would have no tolerance for apparent weaknesses, but much of the Vikings' strength was in their resourcefulness.  They often saw a use for everything, as this stanza from the Havamal attests:

“The [lame] can ride, the handless can herd, the deaf can fight with spirit.  A blind man is more useful than a corpse on a pyre.  A corpse is of no use to anyone.”

“The universe is trying to kill you.  Outsmart the universe.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

For a planet with the ability to support life, Earth is awfully good at killing things. (Neil deGrasse Tyson paraphrased by Business Insider)

“Every account of a higher power that I’ve seen described, of all religions that I’ve seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

The universe is not trying to kill you.  By that I mean, it’s not bent on killing you.  It’s not out to get you.  It can kill you.  Lions can eat you.  Viruses can infect you.  Tornadoes can whisk you into oblivion.  Yet your mother nursed you.  Nature sprouts food all around us.   The sun nurtures the growth of our food while warming us.  Nature also made us smart.  We can use those smarts to make our lives longer, healthier, ‘better’.  So while we’re ‘outsmarting the universe’, we’re using the very tool the universe gave us to be able to do so. 

Nature is not trying to kill you.  Nature is simply busy creating and recreating.  She just can’t help herself.  You are part of that cycle.  While nature made you, some aspect of nature will also, some day, un-make you.  She’s not trying to kill you.  She’s just in a creative flow and you’re a part of that.

What would happen if you could see the Universe as neither hostile nor intrinsically beneficent.  That it simply is.  It’s in a constant state of flow, which sometimes benefits us and sometimes can harm us.   This is the concept of ‘Benign Reality’.

I’ve learned that concept best from religion; especially from the religions that incorporate a strong relationship to nature in their practices.  Ironically, these are the same types of religions that some people would dismiss as superstitious.  These are the kinds of religions that, in forming a relationship with nature, personify it and even lean on quirky or unscientific explanations for the way the world works.  Some people see only that superstitious surface.  To discard the superstitions, they dismiss the entire package.  What they then miss is the gifts that a religious relationship with nature brings.  Gifts such as a confidence born from knowing that life is not inherently hostile.  Gifts such as understanding yourself as part of a flow.  The gift of knowing that, to the degree that you understand life’s flow, you can benefit from it and be hurt less by it. 

Can you learn these lessons elsewhere?  Certainly.  But earth-based religions have had millennia of practice in this arena and so can offer wisdom to a breadth and depth that is difficult to glean in scattered pieces elsewhere.

In their kind of universe, you can relax.  You can feel empowered by seeing how you fit into a larger mystery.  Life is good, and even peaceful, knowing that the universe is not plotting your demise.  

This is an awesome article by Connor Wood, posted originally, in "Patheos, in their "Science on Religion" section:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceonreligion/2014/08/believing-impossible-stuff-is-dangerous-except-when-its-awesome/#more-1317

In my last article, I dissected the study that went around the Internet claiming that children who have been exposed to religion (like swine flu) can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction. Those findings were less than convincing, as I and others pointed out – because kids who had been to Christian Sunday school were virtually guaranteed to recognize the  “fictional” stories as versions of Bible narratives. So the research actually only showed that religious kids believe religious things – which, duh. Take a step back, though: the hand-wringing commentariat worried that the faithful might be dangers to society, due to their supposed disconnect from reality. But does believing impossible things, in principle, constitute such a terrible threat? Do we even want a world where people can accept only the facts?

In our era of scientific triumph, this seems like a positively sacrilegious question. Scientifically proven facts are the difference, we’re told, between cowering in caves and living comfortably in climate-controlled homes, between endless religious wars and landing on the moon. Of course we want a world where people only believe the facts, right?

Yes, of course, but for one little detail: facts change.

Sounds absurd, right? Facts are supposed to be facts. Incontrovertible truths. The opposite of opinion. Not hearsay. For example, it’s a fact that the atomic weight of elements is a function of the number of protons and neutrons in their nuclei. It’s a fact that airplanes fly due to Newton’s laws of motion and the conservation of energy and momentum.

But not that long ago, the educated consensus was that flight was an impossibility. And we weren’t even sure there were atoms – Einstein only proved the atomic theory of matter using Brownian motion 110ish years ago. What’s more, in Einstein’s early years it was a fact that, if atoms did exist, they were indivisible. (That’s what the Greek root of the word “atom” means.) So when, between 1908 and 1913, the physicist Ernest Rutherford showed that atoms were actually comprised of dense, charged nuclei surrounded by a less-dense shell,* he changed the facts. And when the Wright brothers flew their first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, they changed the facts, too.

Don’t misread me. It wasn’t reality that changed. It was our understanding of reality that did. But facts are never anything but our current, best understanding of reality. When our understanding of the world shifts, we need to be ready to reevaluate what’s true or possible. If we’re too rigid to reconsider our understanding of the facts, we end up with unfortunate phenomena like, say, conservative climate denialism.

Imagination, in other words, is necessary for the progress of knowledge. You have to imagine a new perspective before you can evaluate it or design a crucial experiment. This is why a researcher with a slightly kooky view of reality is a great asset to any scientific team. And why an engineering student whose view of fact and fiction is slightly blurry might be the first one to solve our longstanding energy conundrums. Openness to the impossible – and I mean the really impossible, the opinions that makes your colleagues look at you funny – is a prerequisite for truly radical advancement. Every great step in the march of genius is taken by some damn fool who either refuses to concede to, or is simply ignorant of, what’s impossible.

What’s interesting is that the authors of the religion-and-reality study, led by Boston University researcher Kathleen Corriveau, suggest that religious stories might actually enhance this imaginative faculty. They wonder whether exposure to Biblical miracle stories might foster “greater inclination to imagine circumstances in which an intuitively unlikely event could happen,” and they suggest that

It is possible that religious instruction helps children to engage in such imaginative reflection with respect to impossible events… Thus, it prompts them to think about ways an otherwise impossible event could happen even if their immediate intuition is that it could not.

Imagination is not a luxury good; it’s a necessity. People need imagination to creatively solve the problems of life, and civilization needs imagination to thrive and grow. If Corriveau is onto something above, then the apparent fictions that religions foist on their faithful are a sort of lifelong practice at entertaining impossibility. In fact, she is right – religions are humanity’s oldest tools for exercising the muscles of the imagination. Sure, this can lead to dangerous outcomes. But a world where no one could imagine the impossible – and again, I mean the really impossible, the kind of stuff that makes your friends shake their heads when they talk about you – would be even more dangerous. By far.†

Nevertheless, there is a growing movement to simply banish imagination from the human world. One writer, Rob Brezsny, calls this movement the global “genocide of the imagination,” and I think he’s spot-on. Ostensibly, this war is being waged  because, after 9/11, thinkers like neuroscientist Sam Harris decided that religion and fantastical thinking leads to wars and myopic, illiberal opinions, and must be stopped. But don’t forget (as the Gmork sneered in The Neverending Story)that people with no imaginations are easy to control. A world of people unable to fantasize alternatives – incapable of seriously entertaining apparent impossibilities – would be one with no rebellions, no revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, no history-forging leaders. It would be a world that never changed.

Boy, that sounds like a blast.

Even at the everyday level, the symptoms of a strangled imagination are grave. Our brains are machines for producing  cause-and-effect stories – we input our experiences, and our craniums spit out causal schematics whose purpose is to give us maps of reality. To us, these cause-and-effect stories always seem plausible and logical. In fact, they’re so plausible that if we don’t learn to question them they can easily become all-convincing – see the much-shared image to the right for an example. Lose your pen, and that darn iron chain of cause and effect leads to your inevitable death.

Ridiculous, isn’t it? Except anyone who’s ever experienced serious depression or mental illness knows that this is exactly how our minds work. Our brains trick us into believing absurd, dangerous stories all the time. How about this one: “You’re an idiot. You’ve never been able to do anything right. That’s why people don’t like you. And since people don’t like you, you’ll never have an enjoyable life.”

Notice that every link in the chain of this nasty little story seems to flow logically from the one before it. On its own terms, this story is completely compelling to the person whose brain is telling it. And so the more a person hears a story like this from her own brain, the more that story becomes “fact” – an incontrovertible truth, bound by the laws of cause and effect.

And so, paradoxically, the solution to breaking free from our brains’ death grips is not to be cold-bloodedly loyal to the facts, but to be imaginative enough to question whether the facts are true. It takes a sudden burst of fantasy to break through the stone walls of our minds’ dreary stories. It requires a robust exercise of the imagination to suddenly realize that what seems impossible is, in fact, possible – that we could, for example, do some things right and find friends who care for us. A lot of mental torture is caused not by unrestrained fantasy, but by unexamined and sedentary fact. Imagination is what dissolves these facts – shows us which of them are useful and which of them are simply trying to kill us.

So what happens when we extinguish the imagination – when we teach all children to only accept the plain facts, and to impatiently dismiss all fictions? Well, the facts become tyrants, and what’s accepted as impossible stays that way. Fundamental physics never goes anywhere. There was no Big Bang. And we’ve never put a single bootprint on the moon. Until our understanding changed, it was simply fact that all physical events were fully determined, that the universe was eternal and changeless, that flight and manned space travel were absurd. Anyone contesting these thoughts was thought to be woozy, possibly not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Albert Einstein himself – arguably the greatest physics genius of all time – was especially severe in his criticisms of quantum physics and the idea of the Big Bang. Why? Because the cause-and-effect stories he accepted about the universe were so rich, so well-informed, so complete, that they couldn’t let anything else in – not even new evidence.

If you think that historical scientific mistakes like this were just unfortunate early bloopers in our inevitable climb toward knowledge, but that now we’ve achieved enlightenment, that now everything we lucky 21st-century moderns believe is – finally – the realtruth, then I have some fast-sinking real estate in South Florida I’d like to sell you. It’s not just likely that we’re wrong about some of the things we currently hold to be fact. It’s an absolute certainty. We don’t know which ones. But if we decide to start calling it mental illness or subpar mental performance when anyone entertains a different version of reality than the currently accepted one, we’ll run out of genius pretty quickly. (This might already be happening in the Ivy League, where competitive, under-pressure students are taking fewer creative risks and rocking the boat less and less.)

Common sense says that religious stories are absurd. This is true – they are absurd. But they are not valuable in spite of their absurdity. They’re valuable because of it. In the long phalanx of history, genius always stands right next to foolishness – both refuse to accept that what’s “true” is necessarily what’s real. Both tear unlikely holes in our settled webs of cause and effect. Without the fools, the ones willing to introduce the patently absurd into the collective life of the mind, we’d never learn a thing about the world. There wouldn’t be anyone with enough imagination to ask the outlandish questions. There would be no one to reshape our conception of what’s ludicrous. So it’s not that religion is a panacea for our cultural ills. But with its pointedly fantastical tales and symbols, it might be the frontline defense against the genocide of the imagination.

_____

* Which turned out to be electrons in orbits around the nucleus. Until we realized we were wrong about that, too, and we replaced the electron orbits with nested electron shells, and replaced orbital trajectories with field equations that described electrons’ (probabilistic) locations. Facts, man. They’re slippery things.

So often, “defending God” is done militantly.

Nine year old Seleana sang a beautiful rendition of O Canada at a Canada Day celebration in Dutton, Ontario.  She made one change in the official version.  She sang "Please keep our land, glorious and free..."  instead of "God keep our land..."  Here's the Youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ECBkM9EsyI&feature=youtu.be

She's gotten a lot of reaction to this, from both camps.  Some people are outraged.  Some are cheering her on.  For sure, she didn't get to do it again any time soon because her next gig, at the Cactus, Cattle and Cowboys Festival in Rodney, Ontario, got cancelled because of her re-wording of the anthem.  

Her father says she did that in order to be inclusive.   

Personally, I like the more inclusive version.  Here's some of the internet commentary on her choice.

My newest Hero, Eh!

Amazing voice. I love the change to "please", I would be happy to see that as a legitimate change to our anthem. Thank you for raising your daughter right. :)

This is our Anthem at the moment and anyone who chooses to be given the proud privilege of singing it, should be singing it by the words of which it was written. You don't get to stand there and just change lyrics because you feel like it.

Not cool, the anthem was made for a reason and is disrespectful to change it...

People said that when they changed the flag and got rid of "God Save the Queen" too.  Also are you aware that "O Canada" was written in the 19th century and was originally in French? The French version makes no mention of any god.

Oh my bad, thanks for letting me know.

The tricky part is, that she was invited to sing the National Anthem.  The National Anthem, as it stands now, has the "God" part in it.  The official version was come to after considerable parliamentary debate, with elected representatives of the people coming to a decision about how to word it.  They spent a long time on this exact point.

Do we trust our democratic process?  Do we give the results of it respect?  Then, if we want change, do we use that democratic process to pursue modifications, or do we just do what we like?

On the other hand - change is often pushed forward by people who fly in the face of the established norms.  In doing so, they foster further debate that can spark those transformations.  

Saleana has certainly done just that.

I was on a forum the other day, where two people were locking horns about their positions on religion vs. atheism.  Here’s a card that got played.  (I was waiting for it, because, in these types of discussions, it’s only a matter of time before this card hits the table.)

“I don't believe atheists deserve any respect whatsoever.  They’re heathens and they are at the root of much of the evil in the world.”

(Atheists have heard this one often enough.)

Oh, wait a minute.  I think I’ve quoted that wrong.  The actual quote went like this:

“I don't believe religious beliefs deserve any respect whatsoever. They’re deluded and are at the root of much of the wrong doing in the world.”

Ooops, sorry, I forgot which forum I heard that on.  The actual conversation went like this:

“I don't believe blacks deserve any respect whatsoever.  They cause a lot of the trouble wherever they are.”

Or was I on the feminism forum?

Submitted by Geoff Anandappa, from Blackpool in Britain to laughlab.co.uk

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were going camping. They pitched their tent under the stars and went to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes woke Watson up and said: “Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you see.” Watson replied: “I see millions and millions of stars.” Holmes said: “and what do you deduce from that?” Watson replied: “Well, if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like earth out there. And if there are a few planets like earth out there, there might also be life.” And Holmes said: “Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent.”

A Point of View: The child-like faith in reason

"Science may yet confirm what history so strongly suggests - irrationality is hard-wired in the human animal”

Article from BBC News:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28341562

John Gray presents a discussion on the psychology of belief and reason often using historical examples.

Here's an excerpt:

[For those of you who haven't seen the edit on the original article...]

I have taken down my article on Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Not because of the debate that followed, not because of anyone trouncing on it, (which is fair game when that happens), nor have I become convinced that the article was inherently incorrect.

I’ve removed it because its tone is outside my belief that respect is an essential ingredient in the religion-science debate. 

I’ve been wondering, ‘How did I fall off the respect wagon?’   How did I drift from my commitment to my principles?

When I first watched Tyson on TV and read a couple of his interviews, my first reaction was “Wow!”  But then a friend and I noticed inconsistencies in his public persona, things that put up a red flag.  My friend challenged me, as a journalist, to dig into that.  The discrepancies shouted loudest at the point of whether or not he’s an atheist.  That seemed to be the place to learn more about him.

As I collected 38 pages of links and excerpts, I became increasingly disturbed.  I started to see a man who is angry, who thinks irrationally, is disrespectful to those who oppose his point of view and yet is strongly driven to change public thinking to fully match his own.  That energy can work for us where we agree with him, but I’ve started to see that he’s not being honest about his whole agenda.  And yet he has the charm and presence to sway audiences. 

I’m posting the quotes and links from my article at the bottom of this note, but this retraction is not about swaying your opinion. 

I’m more concerned that, after I was immersed in deGrasse Tyson and his campaigns, I found it harder and harder to maintain respect for him.  I lost my commitment to acknowledge other people for their position and the way their standpoint can help us all forward.   

And that’s the problem with disrespect.  It’s contagious.  I got caught in that net. 

If there is any key to the religion-science debate, its’ learning how to treat each other with consideration while having our own concerns addressed.  Freeman Dyson has taught me, in his example and in what little exchange I’ve had with him, the power of respect.  It’s a hefty tool in resolving conflict.  A moment of true respect, of someone listening to understand you, of someone hearing you to work with you, has an incredible power to heal and to solve discord. 

My article did not do that.  It falls outside my personal goals and the purposes of the Shastra Project.  So I’ve removed it. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The quotes and links from the article.  I include them here not to make an argument but, if you want opportunity to join the previous discussion and make a rebuttal, you should have them. 

From Wikipedia: “.. two days after I appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart I thought, let me add that to my wiki page. I went there, and the link was already up. (The days of anonymity are long gone.) So I’m looking at the page and it says, “Neil deGrasse Tyson, a long-time atheist…” and I thought, where did that come from? I never said that. So I removed it and I put in “agnostic” because I think, based on all the folks who are agnostic historically, I come closer to the behavior of an agnostic than the behavior of an atheist. Three days later it was back to atheist. Then I learned that there are people who want to equate agnosticism with atheism. So I went back in, thinking I needed to be clever about this, and I changed the phrase to: “widely claimed by atheists, he is actually an agnostic.”

 “The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

 “God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

 (http://aattp.org/neil-degrasse-tyson-tells-moyers-no-religion-in-science-classrooms-video/)    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTOzeO-nz2A Beyond Belief Conference, in San Diego in November of 2006: “I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t. That’s really what we’ve got to address here. Otherwise, the public is secondary to this...if you can’t convert our colleagues, why do you have any hope that you’re going to convert the public?”

And perhaps the most important, for tone, belief and agenda is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvOlvwiVmYY

Reference to his proximal development strategy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxff0k_TEzI ) 

My husband has a garage full of tools, power tools, hand tools, a tool for every job.  I have only one – a kitchen knife.  It’s my screwdriver, lever, letter opener, hammer, reach extender, and, oh yah, it cuts things. 

Human beings are incredibly inventive and versatile about tool use.  It’s not just the things in our hands.  How many ways do we have to say “I love you”?  And when we say the actual words “I love you,” we can mean so many things.  

If there’s a tool to solve a problem, we’ll find it.  If there’s a solution that’s been used successfully somewhere, we’ll try it on everything we can. 

We’ll use all things at our disposal to help, to hurt, heal, destroy, to soothe, to anger, whatever is in our nature, whatever is our problem, we bring that problem to the tools at hand.  We bring our human nature to everything we do.  We use all our resourcefulness to work the desires of our minds and hearts. 

This is no different with our institutions:  religion, science, education, medicine, politics, you name it. These are tools.  We bring human nature to these tools as well.  So when we are concerned about violence, oppression, power mongering, these are problems in human beings.  We will turn to the tools at hand to work our will. 

The religion – science debate is often over concerns about human beings' inhumanity toward other humans.  Religion is often blamed for these actions.  Certainly, it can leverage our ability to do wrong toward others.  But it is a tool.  We can also use science to hurt or heal: we can attack with nuclear weapons or we can use nuclear medicine.  A tool multiplies the intention of the hand that wields it.  It’s what we decide to do with it that is the problem. 

If we decide, instead, that any given tool is the problem and take away the tool, then people will simply channel their actions through other tools, or we’ll invent new ones.  Which could make the problem worse.  Sometimes, when I use my kitchen knife for the wrong thing, it’s messy and I can get hurt.  If you take the knife away from me, then I’ll just try using a fork.  You could argue that you just need to give me the right tool for the job.  At this point, the analogy starts to break down, because human beings are very complex, societies are complex, our institutions are intricate parts of an elaborate web.  It’s tricky to decide what tool is best for what job, because the nature of the job and the real nature of the tool are not always obvious, and even then, they’re usually complicated.

From an awesome tumblr blog called:

My tumblr skills still need honing so I'm not sure how to join the conversation except to post dialogue.