A Quiet Watercourse

I’ve been getting a little further into Cosmos, and I’m reading about Johannes Kepler and his theories of the solar system.  It’s interesting to read, as we hear of these things, but never really put them in historical context.

Once again I’m left with the strong impression that the Catholic Church seems to have been responsible for the suppression of a lot of knowledge and scientific progress.  I think this is one of the things that should worry us all about the rise of so-called “Creation Science” and the resistance to the teaching of Evolution in the classroom.  Do we really want another lost millennium?  Do we really want the scientific investigation of the universe to be modulated and limited by the unverified and adulterated writings of a bunch of near stone age priests?

When Galileo said that the Earth moved around the sun, Martin Luther said:

“An upstart astrologer …. This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of Astronomy.  But Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth” [1][2]

Some years ago, someone tried to tell me that it was the other way around, that the Catholic church had said the Earth orbited the Sun and Galileo that it did not.  To this day, I still shake my head now as I think of that incident.  My response to anyone who thinks that is to read the words of the Pope John Paul II on the issue:

“Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture….”

Remember this was followed by a formal apology in 2000 for a lot of things in the Catholic Church’s history, including what happened to Galileo.
—
[1] Cosmos, Carl Sagan, page 69. ISBN 0-349-10703-3
[2] Refer to New International Version Bible.  Joshua 10: 12:13.

I was keeping an eye on the IT news the other day, I saw an interesting article about the way we are being forced into conformity by the corporations we work for.   The author mentioned a recent case, where a person who is very passionate about climate change was allegedly sacked because he disagreed with his company on the matter, his company disagree and all this is pending the attentions of the legal system, so it is all rather up in the air at the minute but does make interesting food for speculation.

The author of the article pointed out that, through “Codes of Conduct” and other methods, various organisations can work to exclude people whose views and lifestyles are not the strict majority norm.  A couple of examples he gives are a teacher who got into considerable difficulty for being a pagan and another teacher who posed topless a few years before being a teacher getting into trouble for that.

It’s a question I’ve pondered before with regard to the rows about Anglican clergy, for example, why should a priest’s gender matter?  What matters more is their ability to do the job, though fundamentalists would without a doubt disagree with me, as is their right. So when looking at teaching (which did seem to get singled out a little more in the article), surely what matters is that we have a good teacher, someone who can get the lessons across?  Who gives a damn if they’re pagan?  If you can do the job, the standard of the work’s good and you keep your professional life reasonably seperate from your personal life where’s the problem?  That question, forces us to confront our prejudices and frankly it’s needed.

All of this raises questions about how far employers should be allowed to go in these dictates, at what point do we turn and say “That’s none of your business”? Human Rights legislation is improving in this area in Europe, but it does seem to me as though in some instances employers are (without realising, I hope) working to undermine the human rights of their employees. This is a trend we need to fight and I notice Britain is very slow on the uptake (we have opt outs) with human rights and employment laws.  It is to be hoped we come to our senses.

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 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 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.

On my spiritual journey, I’ve been through a few places.  I’ve investigated Paganism, Atheism, Taoism and Buddhism.  Of course, when I started on this journey, I started as an Anglican.

Now, I’ve looked in depth to a lot of places, but not given Anglicanism the same viewing.  When I saw the Anglican Church apologise to Darwin, I felt that said a great deal that they could do that.  On closer inspection, it seems Darwin was Anglican himself and that Anglican community was (on the whole) quite quick to accept evolution.

So I plan to take a closer look at my home team (if you’ll pardon the football/soccer analogy) and see what I can find there.

The Anglican church is on the whole a very liberal one, not fire and brimstone, so I feel much safer doing this exploration there than with a bible thumping literalist organisation.  But as I’m sure my regular readers know, I have no time for scriptural literalness and consider it to be getting lost.  I have a couple of great little metaphors for that which I’ll save for my next post.

I’m also going to try a change in tack.  When I philosophise about something I’ll write an article rather than trying to spread things over multiple shortish posts.

So I have a book on the origin of the Gospels, and it also examines their writing style.  It’s already given me ideas for further reading and material of my own to develop, watch this space!

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.

Well, I had an interesting experience in Secondlife last night, at a sim called “The Buddha Center” they showed a BBC video on the life of the Buddha.  As aide from the odd technical hiccup it was an enjoyable experience and when I found the video on YouTube, I thought I’d share it with everybody!

It’s 50 minutes in length, so be sure you have a cup of Tea when you click play, and the DVD purchase notice will vanish after the first 30 seconds or so.