A Quiet Watercourse

One of the themes I’ve picked up from re-reading Cosmos is a small feeling for the gradual growth and refinement of our knowledge.  We’ve slowly grown in our knowledge and, while quite often what we’ve thought initially is wrong, science is a self correcting process and we’ve slowly gotten nearer to the truth.

The planets are a prime example, originally we were unable to make out any details and had some very odd ideas due to this lack of hard data.  People imagined cities and civilisations on both Venus and Mars, later observations even showed what seemed to be a network of canals on Mars.  Of course, once we were actually able to visit the planets we found that this wasn’t the case and our knowledge grew massively.  Venus is utterly inhospitable, and the Martian canal network was nowhere is sight.

Our methods are not always direct and once it’s explained how we know the things about planets we haven’t even visited, it makes more sense.  For example, we know about the composition of an object by the radio frequencies it reflects when examing with a Radio Telescope, as different elements absorb different frequencies.

This, for me, underlines the reason I walked away from religious explanations of the world; Science can not only explain that it knows, but can explain in detail how it knows.  Whereas the religious explanation is generally either an argument from authority or circular reasoning.  Furthermore, when they are wrong (and they are wrong more often than they will care to admit), they often are incapable of self correcting.  One exception to this (and there may well be others especially Taoism) is Buddhism, to quote the Dalai Lama:

“If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.”

Of course, given the Buddha’s teaching on change, it really shouldn’t be a surprising thing that Buddhism can do this.

I found quite an interesting read this morning.  An article that shows scientific research that makes the point that the facts we accept are the ones that conform to our cultural conditioning, our view of the world, rather than the facts as they are.

You can find it here.

Now, this kind of thing is exactly what the Buddha was talking about.  He pointed out that the reasons we suffer are that we are unwilling to accept the world as it is and prefer our illusions about it.  Note that I don’t say “unable to accept the world as it is”, to say that would be to admit defeat before we start.

I’ve seen a few versions of climate change arguments, it’s becoming more apparent to me that this is the 21st century religious war, with vested interests on both sides and too much shouting.  I find myself agreeing with the implication that this has become more about peoples cherished worldviews and egos and less about the science.  The Buddha tells us that clinging very strongly to our views can cause trouble,  it seems that we need to be reminded of this wise advice with regard to the subject of Climate Change.

For my part, it’s my understanding that the weather is very complex feedback system which we still don’t fully understand.  We’re introducing changes into this sytem and doing the equivalent of throwing mud in the works, and have been for years.  Let’s stop there; we’re taking a very large powerful and complex system; which we don’t fully understand and messing with it in an unco-ordinated manner.

The changes that we have started in the past will have their effect, some already have (anyone remember acid rain?), some no doubt have yet to become apparent.  This comes close to my understanding of Karma; it’s all about knock on effects in a complex system, sometimes unpredictable ones, coming back to bite you.  Remember the “Butterfly Effect”, the principle that small changes could get magnified quite a lot, this could get quite eventful.

When it’s put like this, does any of this strike you as a particularly wise thing to be doing?

Quite some time ago (in 2006 in fact), I commented on the difference between Spirituality and Religion.  Over time I’ve stuck to my guns, that they are NOT the same thing, and I’ve seen a few comments around the place that have made me want to revisit this old territory for a quick post.

I like to define Spirituality as a sense of that which is common between us, regardless of Religion; that we are not islands in the world and that we are not separate from, but intertwined with the world around us.  It provides a sense of the sacred in the world, that some things go beyond our materialism, and that we should look beyond the daily grind and the “rat race”.

Some of what I just said can be said of what it though of as Religion.  I think that Religion is a set of rites, rituals and customs that sit on top of Spirituality, that provide more of a framework and structure.  To a degree this is needed, I don’t argue that point, but it is not a good thing it it should grow to stifle things.

The comment that spurred me to write this was that if you have Spirituality without Religion you just have a vague feeling of goodwill, in my view, that isn’t accurate and is quite derisive.  I’ve come to realise more and more over time that there’s a lot more to a simple Spirituality then a vague feeling of good will, it seems to be a much more intuitive thing and it also seems more feminine to my sense of it.  As any Taoist or Zen Buddhist will tell you there is a thing that can be dimly sensed that is beyond being articulated in words, that can only be glimpsed intuitively and can’t be grasped by reason as is the case with the scriptures of a by the book religion.  Further to this, you must do the glimpsing yourself, a priest cannot do the work for you, you must work to your own salvation!

To try to bind it in scriptures is (as Alan Watts so brilliantly said) to walk into the restaurant and eat the menu instead of the meal.  My own conclusion that has been spurred by the comment I read, is that Spirituality without religion is quite valid if difficult to grasp and also not so easy to fit into neat categories with names.  It can live without overt Religiousness quite happily.   Religion without Spirituality on the other hand is doomed from the outset.  It would seem to me to be a set of scriptures and rules and rituals that have had the original point somehow lost along the way, if this is the case, then is religion without spirituality a hollow soulless shell?

I have a couple more things to say on the subject of speech and racism, and I’ll start with responsibility for our speech. This is a theme that I’ve covered before and I feel that the time is right to revisit it and write a little more.

We all are very much for freedom of speech and my previous post goes deeper into my thinking on that subject. But it seems that there is a tendency to have our say come hell or high water, and then shrug when the hurt is done, and simply point to freedom of speech. I’ve known people both professionally and personally who are very forthright and simply have their say, get things off their chest and be damned, I personally know of instances of this sort of thing causing harm.

This brings me nearer to my point here, right speech. The Buddha give us this precept to refrain from unskilled (or false) speech, and while is sounds on the surface like “thou shalt not lie”, it goes much deeper than that. One aspect of right speech is that we should be gentle, tactful. By all means be forceful or sharp if the situation warrants it, but we need to consider the wider impact of our words. The act of simply saying what you think and be damned can often cause hurt and pain to others, and to simply throw this out heedlessly of the consequences is not skilful. If we are delivering such views, is not better to measure and moderate our speech to still say what must be said but be mindful and avoid causing unneeded harm?

This draws us into the realm of Karma, that as we all know, speech can cause very real harm. That harm need not be immediate, sharp phrases and barbed comments can ring in our ears for a long time after the words have faded. The effects of these words can be felt for days, or even weeks, or can cause problems for even longer.

So, to bring things home. Well I think we should have our say, our free speech to bottle things up has it’s own Karma, I mentioned this in my previous post. But we must recognise that this freedom to sow the wind comes with the freedom to reap the whirlwind, we should exercise mindfulness and go gently with our words wherever we can.

I was reading a thread on a forum the other day, a guy had commented on the new “Ardipithecus ramidus” fossil find and said “so much for creationism” or words to that effect. The results were quite predictable, and as boring as usual, everyone jumped in and a blazing great argument started.

I have to admit to being something of an agnostic on all of this, I take the view that there is much we don’t know and will possibly never know.  As much as many would like to cling to a holy book and proclaim that this is certainty, it isn’t and I’ll refer the reader to my essays for more on that.  In many ways I can make a similar observation of the scientific orthodoxy, science seems to get a revolution every so often and is quite defined by the unknown.  I’m also not the first to observe that science seems to be gaining it’s share of fundamentalists, and I feel that a fundamentalist attitude does science no justice at all.

I’ll also step aside from the row surrounding the much misunderstood and misrepresented theory of Evolution, other than to observe that it seems to be producing the goods in a very practical sense across a number of fields and that its opponents have produced no science of their own that I’ve seen and seem to do nothing but throw mud.

So I’ll move towards the whole question of a creator prior to the beginning of the universe.  Now this, of course, assumes that there was a discrete beginning and that the whole thing doesn’t move in some kind of cyclical way that would make for a very interesting line of investigation.

Now, for what I can see of it everything we have regarding events prior to the big bang is pure conjecture, nobody really knows. It seems to me that every debate I’ve seen boils down to a “yes it was / no it wasn’t” with nobody willing to budge an inch. Now, this sort of thing is one of the questions that the Buddha described as being a net, I can see why, all it does it cause upset and you can never really settle the argument no matter which side you’re on.

But it makes me realise, that many people are shouting certainty from a position of not really knowing.  My sense of things is that true liberation and real courage is to openly admit that you don’t know and possibly never will.  Then get on with something more relevant.

One of the things I’ve learned on my journey through Taoism and Buddhism is the futility of intellectual striving, I’d realised that it’s often better not to force the mind, but to let it take its own time.

I’m reminded of the idea the we have two parts to our minds, one like a searchlight and one like an illuminating candle.  The searchlight mind is the part of our mind that is calculating and intellectual, logical.  The other, less focussed mind is more intuitive and less logical, in the West I really don’t think we trust this one as much, which is a big mistake in my view.

I’ve relearned this lesson the hard way as a consequence of having spent a few weeks revisiting my old Anglican thought, which led to a re-assessment of why I left.  In short it’s been mentally stressful, and is an experience I’m not eager to repeat.  The problem is that as I’ve said previously it just seems to be one huge argument based on essentially unresolvable questions, in essence a wilderness of opinions.  The Buddha had a series of questions he would not answer, when drawn, he said they were like a net and weren’t really relevant to what he was trying to do.

He compared our situation there to that of a man shot with an arrow, who refuses all treatment till he knows all about the arrow, the bow it was fired from, the character and caste of the archer, etc, etc.  This man will die of his wounds before he gets any answers, and what good does that do him?  Our situation is urgent and lots of speculative arguments do us no service at all in resolving it.

The searchlight part of our mind is the part that runs after answers, often heedlessly.  The less focussed more “illuminating” (and never were quotes more needed) part is our inner Sage or Buddha, who if we will only listen, can save us so much trouble.

Well, if you look back a few posts, you’ll find that I felt compelled to invesitgate my home team; the Anglican Church.  It was a well meaning enough idea, I felt moved to reinvestigate them, to see if I’d missed something and dismissed them too hastily, all those years ago.

So I bought a copy of a NIV bible and a book on the history of the gospels, also a book on the history of the God belief and it’s interpretation[2].  Well, the bible is an interesting read, I found myself pointing out a problem before we’d left the Creation, and as for the flood and the whole Sodom & Gomorrah thing, well others have covered the Noah’s Ark story in more detail than I ever could.  S&G was just mishandled full stop, at least to my mind.

I fast forward to the New Testament and find myself perplexed by the differences in the Gospels, yes I appreciate they were written by different men for differing audiences, but there are problems that go beyond that.  Inconsistent reporting is the most outstanding, but that is something I can’t really overlook in a text that makes the claims this book does.

Then I wander through some sites and find that nobody agrees on the interpretation, some very literalistic (see my essays for my views on that) and some very liberal but nothing that really solves the issues I see.

So I revisited arguments, religious apologetics vs skeptics, I found that things haven’t really changed.  To be honest, I got heartily sick of debates where nobody really manages to resolve anything honestly.  All I saw were arguments full of smokes and mirrors obscuring tactics, which made me ask ‘If you religious apologetics can’t even discuss this on the level, is it even worth bothering with at all?’, I appreciate that everyone does it (even inadvertently) from time to time, but there is so damn much of it in what I was reading that it made me sick to the depths of my mind.

That was what did finally it, I have what I consider legitimate criticisms of organised dogmatic Christianity and couldn’t find a straight externally verifiable (i.e. not circular logic) answer that didn’t shoot at least some of the bottom layer of cards out from under the whole edifice.  All the answers I could come up with that worked left me with a thing that wasn’t much of anything (no omnipotent interventionist creator, no legitimate ancient dogma, etc) and I realise now I was applying the valuable lessons I learned from reading the Kalama Sutta.

Eventually, I realised I was reading the Bible as a Skeptical Buddhist, which kind of resolved things for me.  Things were finally sealed by my learning about the Panadura Debate (or Panadura Controversy) in Sri Lanka.  An exact transcript of this doesn’t exist as far as I know, but I have searched and found a commented summary of it gleaned via an Internet forum.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the growing campaign for the British government to apologise for the treatment of Alan Turing.

I support this campaign, and have already signed the petition linked to above. But it’s not just because I think Turing was treated abysmally badly, but also because I think we still harbour the sort of tendencies that led to Turing’s treatment and that needs to be highlighted.  We need to stop writing people off because of one bad thing, it seems that as soon as we realise that they’re not perfect there’s hell to pay, our treatment of high profile media figures is a perfect example of this.  Lao Tzu, Buddha and Jesus all warn us away from this behaviour, and while I’m not sure what Psychology has to say on the matter I can’t see it being particularly favourable.

What’s been equally interesting is comments I’ve been reading on the story, the feeling that maybe the British should apologise for everything from the Empire onwards.  Of course, if that sort of thing is acceptable, then the old colonial powers (yes, all of them, it wasn’t just us Brits) will be apologising for the next hundred years!

But the point I’d like to make is that the current generation can’t be held responsible for things that were done by past generations, I appreciate that people are hurt or national pride (and I think that this is mostly pride) has been injured, but once reasonable amends have been made (like the symbolic apology above) we need to move on and drop the blame game.

Of course, this failure to forgive grudges is mirrored in the doctrine of original sin.  I’ve been reading about the history of both the middle eastern religious movement and also the Bible, and it’s fascinating to see how the way the people have regarded the text has changed and to be honest, it tells you more about people than it does about God.

As for original sin, there are questions over how literally the story of the Garden of Eden was intended to taken, with the strong possibility that it was never intended (as with much of scripture) to be read literally.  My own feeling is that it is not.

The doctrine was heavily influenced, but not originated, by St Augustine of Hippo, the idea being that Adam’s sin is passed down to all of his descendants.  Now quite aside from the fact that several churches disagree with this doctrine, there is another problem.

Consider that our reasoning powers, the ability to have the kind of awareness we do, are evolved right there into our nature.  This would put that doctrine in the position of condemning a person simply for being Human, so along comes the Church with the cure.  Nice setup isn’t it?  I’ll also point out right here though that not all churches accept original sin, I don’t believe in tarring everyone with the same brush.

But, let’s face it, Evolution does rather torpedo the Eden story and with it original sin.  I prefer another reading of it, which is that the great weight and inertia of human history, culture and society have combined to put us in a position where we often fall short.  This sounds very much like Karma and is also the position of many Orthodox Churches.

To summarise?  We need to stop writing people off for not being perfect and once people and countries have apologised, stop guilt tripping them indefinitely.  Finally we need to realise that the sins of the fathers do not fall onto the shoulders of their sons.  If we’re to have a healthy future, we have to let go of things.

I just posted a new essay I’ve been working on, inspired by the phrase “Cafeteria Chistianity”.

I’ve always believed that we can’t take ancient texts at face value, but must look beyond them using them as signposts to the truth, not literal truth themselves.  To make this mistake is to not see the wood for the trees, or to use a wonderful phrase I picked up from the brilliant Alan Watts, to eat the menu not the meal.

Anyway, without further ado you can find my new essay “Cafeteria religion” in the sidebar, or just click here.

I saw the film “Angels and Demons” last night, it’s a good film and I recommend it.  I’ll not spoil the plot, I hate it when people do that, but something in there got me thinking this morning.  I’ve come to believe that we have a tendency to defend fixed ideas rather then living truths.

In Buddhism we know that the cause of our suffering is that we tend to form crystallised ideas of the world and pretend they’re the reality, then get all hurt and confused when the ever changing world has moved on.

For example, we have people defending the idea that climate change is a fraud based, one look at the seasons and the state of the arctic ice is enough to make you say “hang on a minute…”.  But we tend to take our concepts, our ideas and try to make the world fit them.

In IT circles, we have various Operating System technologies which are considered by some proponents to be superior in all aspects to the others.  They’ll insist blindly that they are right, come what may.  The truth is that the choice of technologies adopted should be driven by the needs in reality, not the ideology in your head.

In religion, we have conflicts between doctrines and never mind the friction between science and religion.  Many people on all sides of the divide are busily defending their doctrine, not looking into what is real.

I was going to query the reasons we defend the ideas, are they the right ones?  Are we defending out of belief in their rightness or terror of the consequences if they’re wrong?

I question whether we should be defending them at all.