The state of wonder.

 This is very old writing of mine. I thought it might be time to put it up here....

At Hogsback in VT, photo by R. Nethercott

The story of MANY and ONE

3 states of being, 2 properties of the cosmos

Old but mischievous children had gathered to hear this old one’s tale. They whispered to each other. Each had a different hat and a different face and different way of speaking. They laughed and drew pictures in the dirt with sticks because they were merry children though they were not young. Each had traveled many years to hear the particular words of this tale.

The ancient sat cross-legged on a log. The fire light lit the grey eyes and translucent skin and the white hair. A faint smile flickered also.

“Many and One, whose other name is ALL greets you and is you,” the old one began. The whispers stopped. The fire hissed and danced. Her voice was neither young nor old, neither sharp nor soft.

“Before the path of ALL was ONE,” she said.

“And ONE was at peace, without dimension or division or dissension or delusion. And that is the first state and the best. The undifferentiated state of one..”

One. One. ONE. The name of ONE burst in whispers down rows of attentive children. Some sat forward on logs or stones, some crouched, some leaned against trees. A few reclined in the grass.

“And after ONE sat silent, being and containing Unity, containing the matrix of the ONE endless formless self for many millennia, the ONE became curious. And that is the second state and is also the best: The state of curiosity.”

Curious. Curious. Curious. The word rippled among the children like wind through meadow grasses.

“And what the ONE was curious about was what might happen if the ONE mind concentrated all its thought on only one intersection at the center of the matrix of the One formless self.  And it was so.

“And from the thought of the One, matter sprang into being, expanding into the formless, endless self of the ONE> And it was entirely the thought of the One, and it was also the energy of the One and it was, itself, the One.

“Yet is was various -- so the One became Many and One, whose other name is ALL.

ALL. ALL. ALL. The children set to whispering again.

“And from that first property of All - Unity, came the second simultaneous property of All - which is Variety.  And from those two great properties of Many and one, come our unity and variety.

 And even so, we ourselves are many and one and all life and all that is and is not: all is many and one - Unity and Variety

And all that is, and all that is not -  All is the thought of the One, and energy of the one, and is, itself, One - Many and One whose other name is All.

And after Many and One became and sent matter and energy spinning and expanding into the undulation of time; the one mind marveled at the Variety, and at the Unity, and at the expanding bubble. And Many and One, All was filled with Wonder and delight. And that is the third state, which is also the best: the state of Wonder.”

A country in free fall

"We are in free fall off a cliff here. I don't know where we land......The kind of authority that this administration has claimed for itself and exercised -- over Congress, the Supreme Court, the States, the American People, citizens, immigrants, and aliens alike -- is without precedent in American History - the end."

 -- American Political Historian/author Jill Lepore

Selecting a worry list for the Zombie Apocalypse

Interstitial Connections, oil on canvas board

Never. That's when I thought I'd see the unfolding of events as they are tumbling into chaotic existence this year. And look it's only July. And I fear much is unfolding unseen.  I don’t know what to worry about anymore - there are so MANY choices!! 

All the countries that used to be our friends and allies, but have stopped calling. 

And all the people who’ve died because certain international agencies that dispensed food and medical aid have suddenly turned on a dime and disappeared - absorbed by the so-called state department.

Will we ever have vaccine recommendations we can trust again? (Hmmm try the AMA  - they still believe in science.) What happens during the next pandemic when research funding has been axed?

Will NOAA be trustable after all the climate experts have been banished? What will happen to the coast as things melt on - will AMOC stop?  Will we bake in the oven of our folly?  Or will a new ice age suddenly arise and make Popsicles of us all?

So many floods,  epic rain and wind events in recent years! And Think of all those campers and RV-ers  swept away in the night as they slept - heartbreaking. They are still searching, many finding the sudden darkness of grief....

 

What about all the forest fires creating swaths of charcoal out of  the animate and inanimate alike?  Will 47 have everyone sweeping the forest floor, and pull all the national guard fire details to help ICE?  Speaking of ICE what happens to all those folks snatched and deported leaving families and jobs dumped in countries they’ve never been to  or incarcerated incognito?  What of Due Process? Rule of Law?  Will Miller reduce the US population by jailing half of us in various Alligator Alcatraz iterations? 

And if there is a "Big One" along the Cascadia Subduction Zone - how will we recover?  I don't think we will really. California is the engine for a large chunk of our national economy. By then, FEMA may be a memory, missed more and more as the months pass. As stodgy and rule bound as they were - they helped many.

And what of democracy? Of Technocrats, cryptologists and accelerationists trying to  burn down the world.....

Speaking of technocrats - think of  all the various AI iterations preparing to take our jobs, hallucinate new law cases and other nonfacts, run and analyze all those surveillance cams and drone-swarms, acquire human targets for.... ummm, never mind. 

The only thing I can think to do is turn off Siri and never ask ChatGPT. MetaAI, Claude or Gemini etc any questions. Those other iterations, many with industrial or military purpose or having secret code names --- are too frightening to contemplate.  And Grok - why don’t people realize Grok is named for a sci-fi verb “to grok” which means 'communing with your dead friends by eating them'?

             Zombie apocalypse indeed.

Afterlife

 

AFTERLIFE

I’m just a sullen moth
flinging myself at the porch light,
always speculating,
splitting hairs,
asking myself why.
Is it the light?
Or the warmth?
Or the stillness of the
dried bugs inside the fixture
with that almighty bulb….
very still, but not "one" with the light
as their papery wings become dust….

            --- Mad Mar Walker (Mistryel)

#poem #mortality #metaphor

The apple's proximity to the tree

The apple and the tree: seeds planted by parental example....

The Parent As A Child

Planted pinks on the parent’s graves last week. Both died in May, 30 plus years apart.  Usually I go with geraniums. Couldn't find any. Too early, or out of fashion, I guess.  

This post is about Mom, who died just shy of 87 years old. She was a life long Republican, but oddly, something of a social liberal who leaned left as she aged, who admired Hillary Clinton.

For 25 years Mom worked as what they now call an "admin" at a state police troop and then when they moved that troop out of town, she worked for a few years at a second one that was closer. She was a discrete and loyal an employee as they could hope, never spoke about work things at home. There was a little hint once.  

While working at the barracks she got a call for jury duty, Years afterwards she said the case involved a motorcycle accident and she relayed a few of the jury selection questions. Had she ever ridden a motorcycle or knew anyone who had? Why yes, her husband. Before they married they rode around on an old Indian machine until they were hit by a car.  Hmm. Because of her job, they asked another question.  Would she always take the word of a police officer over anyone else's?  That would depend, Mom said, on which police officer.  She was dismissed, not sure which side objected.

 Mom had a regular New Years Day Open house and invited relatives, friends and associates from work to stop by. Among the annual attendees was a police dispatcher named Minnie who was usually the only black face in the crowd. Minnie commented on this each year, and she was pretty comedic about it.  To help us see it from her point of view, Minnie invited Mom to a summer barbecue at her house in Bridgeport where Mom would be the only white face in the crowd. Mom agreed to go and asked me to drive.  We were indeed a minority of two. And we were treated  as all Minnie's friends and kin were treated: with mint ice tea and welcoming smiles.  We stayed all afternoon and went away slightly changed.  

It wasn't the first time Mom surprised me. Years before there had been a gay member of the police auxiliary who invited folks from the barracks over to his house for lunch. This was many years ago, another time really and not one of the officers  agreed to go, so the boss asked Mom and the troops only police woman to go. On the day, even the police woman backed out. Unwilling to be so rude, Mom went to his luncheon by herself. 

I was in my early 20s maybe - and I'm afraid I didn't even know what gay was at the time..  She explained without fuss or judgement, very matter-of-factly that it was when certain men liked other men instead of girls, that this man lived with a male friend, and it was like they were married.  She said he was a lovely man, lunch was very nice and she was sad for her host that no one else went. 

There was another thing as well - Mom never voluntarily went to church unless there was a wedding or funeral involved.

I asked her about this several times over the years. She always told me she didn't know what she believed. In later years I pressed her and she said she didn't know if she could know if there were a god or not. Maybe there was maybe there wasn't.  Yet she told me didn't want to fight about it or even think much about it. If someone said 'pray for me,'  she would nod sympathetically.  She would never tell them. And now that she is gone, none of them really believe me. Oh well.

Art: where the broken wings fly after all

Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.

Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.

Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.

Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.

Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal,  but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.

It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.

- Mar  Walker

Cumulative power of tiny specks....

We always doubt the power of the small, the contained. We doubt our single, individual lives, wonder if we can matter at all.

The power of a bit of dust lies in juxtaposition with other unnoticed specks. It's in the whole where a speck has its best effect. One star in a sky of stars. One life in a history of lives.

  This is my favorite picture from the current Clark Art Institute exhibition. It's called Landscape at Saint-Charles, near Gisors, Sunset  by Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903. The application of color is in spots and specks. The effect is cumulative and it almost glows on the canvas.  

Specks, little dots or points of paint are featured in a technique called pointillism pioneered by Charles Seurat. In this picture the museum notes, Pissarro was experimenting with that technique.  We could experiment too, try to see ourselves in the context of our country, our continent, our planet, our solar system, universe, multiverse.  As we zoom out, our speck-ness seems more and more natural, comfortable. We are in place, as it were. Right here. Right now.

Happy Openly Secular Day!

The work below is a recent SpinArt mandala. I like its bright colors and eccentric sort-of symmetry.

However, Nothing magical is involved in the mandala. Here on earth, as in the fictional realm of OZ - there is often a human "behind the curtain" of change, a human who is imagining things could be a bit different and manipulating, enhancing or wreaking havoc to make it so. Even so with the architectural beauties of a cathedral, a work of sacred music or art - behind the curtain is human imagining.
I believe in wonder which is really a form of imagination. Take a long look at trees waving their gorgeous limbs, clouds ever-changing, the sky or a puddle or stream or the ocean or the cat, or a work of art or some human being, smiling at the wild, random universe.. Those are the natural views that transport me, with nothing supernatural in the picture at all.

And so I am posting this picture and wishing you a happy day.

Remembering our terrible human flaws

Well well. Seems everything comes back into relevance. 

Yes this post was for a particular Remembrance Day - a remembrance of the murder of six million Jews and millions of others at the hands of the Nazi Party who controlled the Third Reich, who mechanized the dehumanization, suffering, and deaths of people it did not value.

This past day of remembering in particular, commemorated the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by Allied Forces during World War II when the horror of starving and gassing and cremating millions of people first began to be known.

When thinking about  this day, perhaps now more than ever, we can rightly consider our peculiar human blindness that leads a people of any persuasion, ethnicity or belief, to take power and crush others that are different without mercy almost as a privilege born of their belief in or assertion of their own "special" place in history, their so called destiny - by dehumanizing and blaming the other, stripping them of their homes, goods, social rituals, food, neighbors, stealing their labor also, and finally cramming them into cattle cars, express to the "showers" a euphemism for communal gas chambers, and subsequently incinerating the evidence leaving only piles of shoes and eyeglasses - so many that the sight is heartbreaking to look at, as if the starving skeletal bodies of the few survivors were not enough..

And we say #neveragain and over and over it happens with other groups, over and over, in and out of the light, seen and unseen, large scale and small scale. Sometimes the abused and the abuser (assuming there are survivors) might switch roles over a generation, over a governmental coup.

Don't kid yourself that we as a nation are above this. Consider who this land belonged to only a few hundred years ago.  Consider your favorite political or spiritual enemy who you think is ruining or threatening this country, the economy, the world. How easily each of us could be led away into the dark and disappeared by men in black masks, never to be heard from again.. How easily we could turn a blind eye while someone else is led..

And don't you dare say say oh that was a group of Nazi monsters that has nothing to do with us. According to one of the Smithsonian's web pages, the genetic difference between human beings is around %.01. That is, one hundredth of one percent. In other words, we share 99.99% of common DNA with Hitler, Goebbels, Mengele... If you are too young to know those names, try Google. 

If the circumstances are right, we can embody brave compassion, casual cruelty, callous indifference....  And apparently it can happen here.

-- note:  this post previously published on this blog 1/27/2015 and possibly before as i tend to repost things several times with a few pertinent changes...

Books: My objections to objectivism - on Ayn Rand's the Virtue of Selfishness

this is an essay in response to the book The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand, Originally I wrote this essay as a book response paper for a graduate school class. Later I posted it to the Metaphoratorium in 1997 where it was indexed by an Objectivist website. It existed at several incarnations of my website, and on the my blogs Puzzled Dragon and ArtsAttic.  Though I admire Rand's novels, and her atheist philosophy, there are a few major points I find problematic.

The foundation of Objectivism as argued in The Virtue of Selfishness, is Ayn Rand’s assessment of “Human” nature. She argues that the essential human quality is logic and that it is this ability which separates us from “the brutes.” Further she argues that human beings must fly solo as individuals and to blend one’s self-interest with that of a group is a self-destructive enterprise tantamount to the abnegation of the self and to death.These foundation premises seem to me to be the most vulnerable part of Ayn Rand's philosophy. If the essence of man is not logic, if for instance, man is a essentially a part of nature, a complicated social animal who reasons when it's convenient, then the parapets of Objectivism tumble. If overlapping our self-interest with that of a group is a part of our essential nature as human beings - then it is the isolated existence which is akin to death - no matter how logical. Can it be coincidental that some researchers cite isolation as a risk factor for heart disease and other ailments?

Altruism - illogical and anti-life?

Rand says ethics must be based on rational self-interest. Values must be chosen by logic alone. Human exchange should not involve self-sacrifice but logic-based value-for-value trading. As a general rule of thumb in life, few would argue with the idea of value-to-value exchange. But Rand decrees it - all or nothing! Any degree self-sacrifice or altruism is condemned repeatedly as anti-life. After waving this red flag and handily setting up her philosophy as uncompromisingly controversial - she later argues that some sacrifice is okay if it is a logical choice. It’s permitted for a man to risk his life to save his wife for she is important to his happiness. It’s okay to give money to a friend for food instead of buying some inconsequential gadget for one’s self. But a man is not permitted an instinctive response nor the luxury of sloppy compassion - this must be a logical decision arrived at by weighing relative values.When it’s suits her, Rand borrows analogies from nature - saying that in nature individuals must provide for themselves as a condition of life. She uses this as an argument why altruism is anti-life. She conveniently fails to note that in nature, groups of individuals sometimes work together and in some species a single breeding pair is tended by the entire group. Such behavior isn’t necessarily in their individual self-interest - but it is in their genes.

Rand steps carefully around the topic of parenthood - particularly motherhood. She makes no reference to the effort necessary to nurture and raise human offspring - an activity that generates lots of self-sacrifice. Judging by this book, a society ruled circumspectly by Rand’s logic would die out in a single generation. Why not just skip kids so nobody’s rational self-interest will be interrupted? In practice, biology and logic wrestle. Just try putting a lonely, logical, Objectivist guy-scientist into a room of desirable, intelligent girl-scientists. “Say, have you read David King’s writings on Objectivism?’’ he might say awkwardly wiping clammy palms on twill. Quite often biology finds in logic a handy tool for its own purposes.

Mysticism - a sign of mental illness? Maybe....

Rand regards the mystic as a most dangerous individual. Mystics act on faith and commit themselves to beliefs for which they have no sensory evidence nor rational proof  I have to admit she has a point here. The danger she finds in mysticism is as an implicit threat to the overall function of the consciousness as the preceptor and integrator of an individual’s reality. Since human consciousness processes sense impressions and integrates them with past experience - inserting a non-sequitor on mere faith might upset the apple cart, Rand says.  This assumes though, that scientists and skeptics are universally logical and operate 100% of the time,in a logical way.  However all human beings have unconscious motives, and inconvenient emotions from  the slippery rat brain.  It's what you do with your brain states, mystical and otherwise, that counts, not just having the odd fit of diffuse warm fuzzes.

Perhaps physicists  felt a little queasy when one of their number announced the existence of the photon == and light’s contradictory existence as both a wave of energy and as a particle of matter. In the long run, tolerating the ambiguity meant a new understanding of matter’s existence as energy. By the same token, religion sheds light on society (not a god light, just a human light). What ever we think of a particular religion, its structure can usually provide a valuable metaphor for understanding its adherents' society - even if ultimately the entire construction is  just another incredible act of human imagination.

Mysticism and altruism seem to have a wide variety of interpretations and applications in the general understanding, but it struck me in reading this book just how much of an “ism” Objectivism is. According to Rand, Objectivism and egoism are not subject to partial practice - it’s all or nothing. She views altruism and mysticism as all-or-nothing propositions as well. However, individual Objectivists do seem to put a high value on freedom, so naturally the on-line content available on the subject seems to indicate there is an orthodox version and several heretical strains. It’s also interesting to note that Rand or her admirers capitalize “Objectivism” much as one might capitalize Catholicism or Buddhism.

The Individual: Man’s Rights

In advocating a free society “its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights,” and Capitalism (also capitalized), is the only system that can uphold Individual rights Rand says. The source of these rights she finds not in god or society but in man’s nature - which she sees as specifically as rational rather than emotional, hedonistic, altruistic or mystical. Rights are the link between the moral code of man and the legal code of society. “Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law,” Rand says. In her world, moral law is to be deduced according to “human” AKA “logical” values.

The foremost rights that Rand ascribes to man are: the right to his own life, the right to own property, (if he earns it ), and the right to free trade. She see no “right” to a job, a roof, a fair wage, a fair price, an education, milk , shoes, etc., and no special rights for the old the young or the unborn. “Those who favor laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.” “Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”

Rand also argues that the rights of rational men would never clash, never incite conflict insoluble by rational means. This of course presupposes that men in general are essentially rational and function rationally in a conflict. This implies that logic always arrives at the same conclusion given the same set of facts. However, as Rand notes, facts are perceived and integrated with past experiences by the consciousness which ascribes connotative weight to each scrap of knowledge based on its past relevance to that individual. This integrative function is a personal spin-doctor for incoming sense impressions and information - a pattern -matching survival routine which checks current conditions against past conditions of danger or benefit.

Varied public reaction to the possibility of a racist police conspiracy during the O.J.Simpson trial is a perfect example of conflict that can not be resolved with logic. Because the facts were integrated with experience, the conclusions differed. Even without the connotative properties of language, the integrative functions of consciousness and the linear presentation of facts within a time context insure that no set of facts is ever communicated or percieved in an entirely objective manner.

Society: Collectivized Rights and the Role of Government
“A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area,’’ Rand says. Coercion is the sole province of the state and is reserved for criminals. In an ideal world government would be financed by voluntary contributions. (Of course in an ideal world, where all men were rational men and never had conflict they couldn’t reason out, government wouldn’t be needed at all.) Rand concedes that isn’t workable now.

“The use of physical force - even its retaliatory use - can not be left to individual citizens,” she writes. However according to Rand the doctrine of collective rights rests on mysticism and harks back to “the divine right of kings.” The rights of the group in a free society must be derived by contractual agreement, she says. Just as men can evade reality so can society, Rand says. She views any requirements of society as a whole as a “switch of the concept of the rights from the individual to the collective - which means: the replacement of the Rights of Man by the Rights of the Mob.” She feels that any notion of collectivized rights implies “that some men have the right to dispose of others in any manner please., and that the criterion for such privileged condition consists of numerical superiority.”

One notion, (which sounds quite palatable to me), is that individual rights must be placed outside the reach of public authorities so that “the lives and property of minorities or dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others .” I hope that means that Objectivists can’t round up practitioners of illogic and force them to read Rand’s rants.

Violence, logic and the violence of logic
Though she repeatedly decrys violence, Rand holds that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes are outlaw nations which free nations have every right to invade! She says liberals stand in the way of this by conveniently advocating the idea of national sovereignty or national self determination when just as often they want to dissolve national boundaries and make “one world.” By advocating “national rights,” Rand rants that liberals are helping to spread dictatorships “like a skin disease, over the whole surface of the globe.” “Observe the double standard: while, in the civilized countries of the West the Liberals are still advocating internationalism and global self-sacrifice - the savage tribes of Asia and Africa are granted the sovereign ‘right’ to slaughter one another in racial warfare,” she says.

In the future of nations, as thronging numbers and faster communication shrink the globe until it pinches - I wonder, to what degree will groups be free to do violence to each other on principle? Or will violence be encouraged as population control by default?

Now, if two neighbors each had a Doberman and bloody conflicts ensued along the property line, separating the dogs would be an option - but allowing them to fight to the death would not. We’d consider it cruel. We’d consider the dogs too valuable to waste. Yet if the animals were not owned, if they were free and wild no one would step in to separate them. So are we domestic or wild animals when we fight? What if each side believes it is acting it its own rational self-interest, responding to the previous use of force by the other side?

Since Rand thinks it’s okay to invade - maybe we could just slip something into the water instead. Should it be a logic supplement or a just extra seratonin?

More numerous indeed...

Just stopping by with a brief post, and tipping my metaphorical hat to this blog that I have been ignoring for a while now....    In the last year I have found many near at a hand who are closet unbelievers... May we all raise our hands and be counted....

Seeing beauty in the universe

This is a video I particularly liked from YouTube, though as a naturalist I might quibble with the term spirituality. I take that to mean that feeling of being in the moment, a part of,  feeling in unison with what is around you. If you click through and watch this on YouTube itself, you can read the text the videographer has put up alongside it.

Tabernacle of Bees

Have you been a true believer at one time but not so sure anymore? Think the idea of hell is pretty revolting? Ever wondered that religions contradict each other? About all the wars committed in the name of religion?  Ever read up on the sordid back-histories of various religious movements, reformations, new age fuzzies or even the papacy? Do you enjoy poetry?  Tabernacle of Bees might be of interest.

 I originally announced this book in October of 2009. But  conflicting edits proposed by a writing group I belong to, followed by several computer deaths and some other odds and ends, frooze me into a state of indecision about how to proceed. However, recent developments have cause me to act. So finally two years later, in November of 2011, I'd like to annouce TABERNACLE OF BEES, a small book of poems which represent a journey from dogma to doubt and beyond, is now available from Puzzled Dragon Press. It's a short book, just 14 poems, but offers a lot to ponder.

Pale Blue Dot: Carl Sagan Day

I'm posting the video below for Carl Sagan Day,( a day late but posting it nonetheless) It's courtesy of MadArtLab.com and http://youtube.com/RogerCreations where I ran across it.  In it you can hear Carl Sagan's own voice on of his most famous statements about the earth. The photo to the right is a Voyager photo on which the statement s based - where the tiny speck inside the circle is the earth, and us, and all we have ever known.

Painting: Anyone

This is my 501th post on this blog. Woohoo!

Humans hold many kinds of commonality - via inheritance as well as history. We are connected over centuries by the tranmission of handed down culture as well as hand me down genes. We have a common animal nature and energy that expresses itself in countless individual ways. We are many and one. Any one.

The materials here are watercolor pencil and gesso on paper.

Rifkin: Human nature, the fate of civilization

There are ideas here that will challenge you, challenge us all. If you are a thinking person, and have a little time, watch this video.

Walking away from religious belief - my story

I grew up as a quasi- Episcopalian, sang in the junior choir. When I was 14, I was invited by a classmate to a baptist vacation bible school where I got “SAVED” i.e. born again as they say. I was an over-imaginative and socially alienated teen, happy to hear somebody loved me.... And when I say over imaginative, I was the sort, who as a child of three or four years old, had conversations with an imaginary species of “pookiebell,” a sort of small fairy creature that tended the ferns. It wasn't so much delusion as a strong creative streak that needed guidance.

In my teenage loneliness I conjured a deep emotional connection to Jesus and to god as I imagined their love for me. And this was the attraction.  I started going to a baptist church, and felt accepted there, and began writing christian folk songs. This belief conveniently kept me from having to make the usual teenage decisions about sex and drugs, gave me a ready-made group of people who were supposed to care about me and another far more  authoritative imaginary presence to talk to. After high school, I went to Philadelphia College of Bible as a music student. (Subsequent name changes include Philadelphia Biblical University. and now Cairn University)

The first chink in the old armor came one day when I was out passing out "Jesus Saves" booklets in Rittenhouse Square. I met a Hindu man and we spent some three and a half hours trying to convert each other.. My mind churned. We couldn't both be right, one of us had to be wrong, I thought. But he was every bit as sincere and devout as I was, knew his own holy books just as well...

The summer I got a job as a camp counselor at a religious “ranch” I was brought up short again when a fellow counselor told all the children that their mommies and daddies would burn in hell unless they came to believe. The terrible anguish of these children, who assumed the words of that counselor to be literal, immediate truth - starkly framed the barbarism inherent in the concept of hell.  It was the beginning of the end of fundamental evangelical Christianity for me. I no longer could believe in this version of god. Despite this, I returned to college in the fall - I needed to figure out what to do instead, how to change direction.

After one more year (three total) at bible collage, going through the motions, trying to understand - I dropped out and became an avid non-christian, interested in whatever I could read about religion(s). For many years I told the census takers I was a pantheist, a pagan, a  heathen. For a short while I I was into a sort of new age mumbo-jumboism & reincarnation,  and then dabbled in home-styled American buddhism & insight meditation. My religious opinions were further fleshed out by six years working for churches as a mezzo-soprano, including four years working for a Roman catholic church. I was a non-christian, quasi-atheist at the time, and my immediate musical bosses knew it.

Over the years I have done a lot of thinking about religion and it's creator - the human mind. At the core of each religion, there is always a set of people called mystics. When you read about their experiences they are remarkably similar even in religions that call each other heretics and infidels. I think the similarity is because a “mystical experience” is a brain-state that can happen to anyone who's brain chemistry gets bent in a particular way. It is a state accessible through mediation practice BUT it is a physical phenomenon, not a revelation of a god or gods and not a product of any supernatural process. Religious states of communion, thankfulness or “oneness” that often accompany prayer or meditation are also brain-based and beautiful even apart the common religious labels applied to them. They are natural states of the human brain.

Apparently, I have a atheistic and naturalistic view which excludes divinities as well as the supernatural.. Naturalists see no evidence for the supernatural, and no need for it either as all things, both interior and exterior, arise from the natural physical world. I am also a secular humanist. Secular humanists think that human beings should, without a god or a religion, try to live the best life they can using the power of reason to realize their unique abilities and thereby contribute to the good of society, mankind in general and to the life and history of the planet.

- Mar Walker

Live with Reason and Sympathy!

Live with Reason & Sympathy

Look. Investigate. Appreciate. Share who you are. Help when you can. Value people over dogma. Celebrate this brief beautiful life

It's no surprise that most people find aspects of nature beautiful and inspiring since we are a part of nature and its amazing menagerie of life. We are a part of the earth, subject to the machinations of its atmosphere, oceans and crust. We are part of the cosmos with its billions of stars. This universe is beautiful, astonishing, and we are alive for now - so celebrate, appreciate, explore, invent, create, achieve, care for each other and for our home, the earth! Nature, the earth, the cosmos are a part of 'space-time', a gestalt, a matrix of all, and they are what they are, without intention towards us, whether we understand them or not, and without regard to our various conflicting cultural stories about them. What they are, objectively, can be shown, overtime, though reason and scientific method, which assembles an amendable approximation  of how things work - amendable by future knowledge gained through replicable experiment. This sits opposite so called "revelation"  or story-telling. The writers of ancient texts, "inspired" preachers, story-tellers, alledged psychics, channelers and shamans reveal their own thoughts which may contain purely human metaphor and which may  metaphorically reflect the culture in which they live. Their thoughts may become codified into a dogma or religion  by which some are content to judge themselves and others -- by which sometimes armed groups judge others, waging bloody wars to enforce their beliefs. Everything, (both inside of us and outside of us, including codified belief) arises from the natural physical world. What most folks refer to as the soul is the best part of the self as found in the intricate human brain. The logical end of this thought is this: when we die, the matter and energy that we contain will be recycled and reused, but our unique life will be gone, except in memory, in history, in genetic code. So cherish this one life that you are privileged to possess. Never, never throw it away..

You only get this one life, so live it well.

-- MM Walker

Human Being on Planet Earth,

Looking down

One day, quite a few years back, I was walking down the street minding my own neurotic business, when a foreign-looking woman, in a long skirt, grabbed me by the arm . 

She pointedly pushed her face into mine, grinning, her  eyes full of light and amusement.

''Are you looking for money?'' she said. This is an inexplicable question since mine is a  low-budget, shop-at-Goodwill world. I didn't know what to say. I just stared blankly at her in reply.

"If you are not looking for money, then why are you looking at the ground?'' she asked. She grinned and pushed me away as she released my arm. I swayed around on the curb, pondering.

Perhaps to this lady's way of thinking, I should be looking ahead, looking around at this beautiful fierce world. And she was right. Looking down is great if you are in a high place, a place that offers a view. If' you're down in the nitty gritty of everyday, take in the scene. Look at the beauty and the ugliness, the rise and fall of the land, look back at the smiling or scowling faces of your fellow humans, and other breathing creatures. Be here. Look. At least that's what I got out of that encounter....

The eye picture is one of my digital things. It was a color, and slant adjustment on another eye pic I made in MS Paint years ago when I was a PC user.

Tom Flynn of Free Inquiry Magazine spoke on statistics of unbelief

When someone rattles off statistics 
ask about source and method

Information - on the demography of unbelief -was exactly what Tom Flynn (shown in my rather blurry picture) was sharing at a meeting of The Humanist Association of Connecticut this past Monday evening. Flynn is editor of Free Inquiry magazine, and executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism. Flynn is a lively speaker and gave a very interesting talk with lots of laugh lines as well as some terrific insights into the meaning of statistics. He looked at multiple sources, and also looked into their methods.

I came away with two things: 1) the number of unbelievers is indeed growing and 2) comparative statistics don't mean anything unless the methodology by which they were created is objective and consistant. This brings to mind a story I've heard from a administrative assistant for a statewide organization whose representatives were sometimes called on to speak before local civic groups. After typing up a speech for one - this admin asked where his statistics came from. "Oh I just make them up - people don't question...."  he said adding he'd never been challenged. The lesson is when someone, even someone who should know, rattles off statistics:  ask about their source and its method.  People are free to say whatever they like - that does't make it true.

Thanks to Tom Flynn and to HAC for the opportunity to hear him speak.   Flynn is author of a number of books, among them a debunking of modern Christmas traditions called The Trouble with Christmas and two science fiction sagas: Nothing Sacred and Galatic Rapture. He is also editor of the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief.