tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50656599384110901132024-03-13T15:00:37.809-05:00Orbital Teapot LaserMusings, thoughts, philosophical speculations on gaming, science, critical thinking, atheism and Buddhism.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-60358468166568540492015-02-24T21:56:00.001-06:002015-02-24T21:56:10.996-06:00Mindfulness and AnhedoniaSo in my meditation class tonight there was a woman who was talking about how she can achieve a certain amount of peace, but then came into work yesterday and was surprised at how irritated she got at a co-worker and how she felt that he took away her peace. She was confused because in the past, it wouldn't have bothered her as much. This raises a good point about what meditation actually does that I felt like sharing.<br />
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Prolonged mindfulness practice involves paying attention to what is actually going on in your mind, it is *not* a way to "bliss out". See, a lot of our everyday experience involves us getting constantly distracted, not really feeling our emotions, and just going on autopilot most of the time. When you start actually paying attention, emotions that you haven't been dealing with can rise up and shock you with their intensity, and at the beginning, it can actually make you feel worse as your usual reactivity to them goes apeshit.<br />
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The reason this happens, at least in my experience, is because you have actually been suppressing them a bit. Now, for the so-called "negative" emotions like anger, fear, anxiety, etc, that doesn't seem like a totally bad thing, but the problem is that you end up doing it with the so-called positive emotions as well, joy, love, happiness. This can lead to my old friend (like Kirk and Khan), anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. And that one sucks. Not because you're miserable all the time, because you're not. It's that you're either miserable, or just "ok". All valleys, no peaks.<br />
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For a short time, anyone can deal with that, but as it persists, the desire to shoot oneself in the face increases, because from one's own experience, there really is nothing much to live for, just suffering relieved by periods of lack of suffering, but no actual happiness. Everything becomes drudgery. Try to imagine every single task in your life feeling like a chore that you need to do to satisfy someone else, and you get absolutely no reward for it. But you have to keep at it when all you want to do is lay in bed. There's no relief aside from the brief periods of not feeling an acute desire to be dead. Some people like to quote the statistics for depressives who kill themselves as an indicator of the seriousness of the problem, and it is, but when I hear those numbers, my immediate reaction is always how low they are. Anhedonia is a motherfucker.<br /><br />Anyway, back to meditation. What you learn in mindfulness is to not fight those "negative" emotions, but to sit with them and fully experience them. You look them right in the face and say "I am feeling this anger right now. I am not going to distract myself with something else, I am going to fully experience this." You pay close attention to every sensation. The increased heart rate, the tensing up of all your muscles, that little metallic taste in the back of your throat (adrenaline), all of those fight or flight chemical reactions going off in your body. It feels fucking horrible, but then something surprising happens. It can't sustain itself.<br /><br />See, normally when these emotions happen, it comes with the internal dialogue constantly running through our body, and we're basically arguing with ourselves because we don't want to feel it. But that act of fighting keeps renewing the flow of fight or flight chemicals, and it prolongs our misery. When you sit down and decide to just experience it without resistance, it wears itself out comparatively quickly. Now, I'm not saying it will do this your first time, although if you're lucky, it might. But the act of embracing the feeling, deciding "OK, I'm going to feel this fully" without fighting lets it work its way through your system and then be done with it. As long as you're not constantly re-charging the batteries of the miserable experience, it will end, and then you can get on with your day.<br /><br />This takes a LOT of practice, and isn't often talked about in most popular treatments of meditation. This is not "a moment of Zen" in the popular sense. This is deciding to sit down and confront your reactions head on, and it's fucking hard to do. At first. As with everything, it gets easier with practice. You just have to decide to actually do it, and not continue with avoidance behavior.<br /><br />There is a popular misconception that the equanimity one seeks via meditation means that you end up in a state of calm all the time, with no peaks and valleys. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's more like you experience all of your emotions even more potently than before. For someone with depression and anxiety like myself, that's pretty daunting at first, and gives one pause. "I've been suicidal, should I really do this?" I won't speak for anyone else, but I decided to go for it. Because in addition to those scary emotions being felt more deeply, you feel the positive ones more deeply as well, so there is a pay off. The difference is that now, as I've come to accept the impermanence of all of this shit, the scary emotions aren't as scary because with the meditation (and CBT) they don't last as long because I'm not constantly fighting with them. Also, the positive feelings are less tainted by the anxiety that they will go away. I recognize that they are fleeting, and I'm grasping after them less, since I'm experiencing them much more fully than I have before. When they go away, it's not fun, but it bothers me less. I know that the scary stuff won't last, and the good stuff will come around sooner or later, so I'm much more able to maintain the state of calm in between the peaks and valleys.<br /><br />And that's why I give a shit about all this, B-)masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-70799257114161274012014-10-09T07:30:00.002-05:002014-10-09T07:30:49.407-05:00Jealousy,Compersion, and Cognitive Behavioral TherapyI used to entertain the fantasy that I didn't get jealous. My ex-wife was an extremely jealous and paranoid person. It wasn't her fault, she had unresolved issues from the way her father left her mother. But it irritated me, because I had never been unfaithful in my life before I met her, and I found out several years into the marriage that while we were dating the first time (there was a breakup, then we got back together, which led to the marriage) she had been cheating on a previous boyfriend when she saw me, which I was not at all cool with. Eventually I was unfaithful, towards the end of the marriage. One night there was a brief drunken but highly satisfactory and affectionate encounter that led directly to me realizing just precisely how miserable I was in the marriage. A couple of months later, we were separated emotionally as well as physically, since the ex had been attending Cornell for several months when I cheated.<br /><br />
Now, all through my occultist period, I'd known lots of polyamorous people, but my ex was monogamous, and therefore I was. But I figured hell, sounds good to me, read <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/The-Ethical-Slut-Relationships-Adventures/dp/1587613379/">The Ethical Slut</a>, and I was sold. I know now that it was largely a reaction to how miserable I'd been in the marriage, but still, it made perfect logical sense to me. Cheating hurts people, those who've been cheated on, and it hurt me, because even though I had no real regrets about the incident, I still felt a bit guilty. So why the hell not make an agreement to be open?<br /><br />I've since now gotten some experience dating poly-style, and it is working for me. There's been blunders, and scheduling can be a big pain in the ass, but it works in general. But then jealousy reared its head in a big way, and I wasn't even dating the person in question.<br />
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I fell hard for a friend of mine that wasn't interested in me. The unrequited love drove me into the worst period of anxiety and depression that I'd ever felt. I wanted to die, every day. It didn't help the fact that I was in constant contact with her and was a major confidant with the troubles she was having with her current boyfriend at the time. But I couldn't be with her, and hearing about the problems would raise false hope in my mind about the future (false because she still wasn't attracted to me, but anxiety brain tortures you with unattainable fantasies as well as the self-criticism that was making me hate myself). She finally broke up with the previous boyfriend. But if anything happened like a hookup, it would be like getting stabbed in the chest, because it wasn't me.<br />
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A few months later, she started seeing her current boyfriend, who is a really awesome guy. But I still wanted to kill him, because it wasn't me. I didn't want to feel bad about it, understand. I love this woman, and I wanted her to be happy no matter what. But my emotions would not let me let go of the fantasy, and so in addition to the unrequited pain itself, I also felt immensely guilty about feeling hurt. This is when the desire to be dead was most acute. I looked death in the face, and I wanted it. Oblivion seemed a much better alternative.<br /><br />Now, while all this melodrama is going on, I've actually been making a lot of positive changes in my life. It started with the divorce, opening the way to finding satisfaction. Then I quit the job that I hated for one that made me much happier, even taking a paycut. At the same time as I was getting the new job, I moved into a house with 3 good friends who were very supportive. I didn't like living alone at the time, and the new place was much closer to where I worked. The most recent change was getting serious about starting to work out and losing weight, which is in process. I had to take a break from exercise while I healed an injury. But the kicker was starting CBT.<br /><br />CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, not the BDSM practice that I keep hearing jokes about, cock and ball torture, ;-) CBT is actually pretty simple in theory. You see, you don't feel bad because of what happens to you. You feel bad because of <i>how you think</i> about what has happened to you. Depression and anxiety put you into a mode of thought where you have developed habits of automatic thoughts that are constantly self-sabotaging you, you tend to always pick the most negative perspective you can about the events in your life, and so you spend your days with distorted perceptions, paranoid that your seeming friends are all actually colloborating in an elaborate ruse that will eventually lead to your humiliation, that all of your seeming successes are just brief, unimportant events that only barely hide the fact that you are a complete failure, fun shit like that.<br /><br />What you learn to do to with CBT is to identify those automatic thoughts, identify the cognitive errors that are in play (there's <a href="http://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/therese-borchard-sanity-break/10-cognitive-distortions/">a list of 10 major ones</a>), and then respond to them with a rational response. For example, if the automatic thought is "I fucked up at work today, I'm a total loser", the error there is all-or-nothing thinking. The rational response to that would be "nobody's perfect, everyone makes mistakes. There are plenty of times when you have excelled at your job". It sounds simple, but it really works. I am currently depression and anxiety free for the first time in 20 years, and it's as if a giant weight has been lifted off of me. I used this technique to get over all of it in a very quick manner.<br /><br />As readers of this blog know, I have been doing mindfulness meditation for a few years now. I have not been doing it nearly as regularly as I would have liked to, but I've done it enough to the point where as I'm trying to focus on my breath or sensations from my body, I've gotten minimally competent at noticing thoughts as they arise and letting them pass by as a cloud, rather than grabbing onto them and engaging with them. As mindfulness goes, I'm still a tyro, but that little bit of skill bootstrapped my engagement with the previously mentioned CBT technique. I basically had to spend no time at all learning how to notice those negative thoughts as they occured, and it was like "A-HA! There you are, you motherfucker!", at which point I could categorize it and come up with a rational response. I found myself not needing to even write them down as recommended in the popular book for CBT, <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-The-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380810336/">Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy</a>, a book I highly recommend for anyone feeling miserable, whether you have been diagnosed with anything or not. Also useful is the followup, <a href="http://smile.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Handbook-David-Burns/dp/0452281326/">The Feeling Good Handbook</a>, which has even more tools on a broader range of topics, and lots more exercises. However, there was one other thing that I had to do first, and that brings me back to jealousy.<br />
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Another technique CBT is good for, one geared specifically towards phobias, is to expose yourself to the phobia, little by little, until the aversion goes away. What cured me of my jealousy was this, although rather than gradually, I did it at the end of a night that I had spent getting completely intoxicated on various substances, wanting to die, and feeling completely miserable. Finally I said to my brain, "Look, you keep torturing me with the fact that she's with someone else, I give up, show me your worst!", at which point my mind started filling my head with images of the two of them together. But it backfired.<br />
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Graphic as those images were, once I gave in to the fear and let it ride, I started to realize that whether I was involved or not, what I was visualizing was two people who had great affection for each other, giving themselves pleasure. I'm not going to say for them that they are in love, that's for them to determine, but what I was seeing was loving, at any rate. Then I remembered that the whole source of this pain was that I myself was in love with my friend. Sure, it wasn't being returned in a physical way, but she has helped me through numerous rough patches with compassion, affection, true sympathy, as I have done for her. If I really loved her, how in the fuck did it make sense for me to feel shitty that she was receiving love?<br /><br />And almost like a shot, all the pain, jealousy, and agony was gone. It took seconds from the realization to the point where I no longer wanted to die. I was shocked by the rapidity of it. I had achieved compersion.<br />
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Compersion, for those who don't know, is a term bandied about a lot in poly circles. It means "a feeling of joy when a loved one invests in and takes pleasure from another romantic or sexual relationship." It's often called the opposite of jealousy. Before this, my poly explorations were interesting, but I hadn't really felt strongly enough about anyone to feel jealousy about their other relationships, even if at certain points I had convinced myself that I might be falling in love. Now, I got it. I truly understand what it's like to love someone genuinely, without any selfish intent. I won't say that I won't ever feel jealous again, but it's gone now, along with the rest of the misery.<br /><br />So anyway, I'm great now. As mentioned, better than I've felt in 20 years. Where I am now is living in the present moment. I'm spending time with several extremely attractive women that I'm becoming good friends with. I'm interested in them romantically, but all of the neediness and desperation that's haunted me for years is gone. I'm just taking things as they come. If something develops, great, if not, no problem. I have no expectations, no fantasies about the future, and absolutely no sense of entitlement. And that goes triple for the friend I love. If it's at all possible, I think I love her even more now. But now it's unconditional. I am happy when she is happy, no matter whether that involves me or not.<br />
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Que sera sera.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-44956130396480858542014-09-19T00:54:00.000-05:002014-09-19T01:02:44.421-05:00Consent, Depression, and Anxiety: A Conversation<div>
This is a transcript of a post-date conversation I had earlier today. It rambles a little bit, but I think preserving the natural back and forth is worthwhile. It covers two subjects that are often on my mind, consent, and depression and anxiety.</div>
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All irrelevancies and identifications of the other participant have been redacted, and I've fixed typos. For the record, all we were doing was relaxing and listening to music together after a nice meal. We weren't entirely sober, but that's all I'm saying about that. Anyway, here it is:</div>
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Her:</div>
"...How much do you recall? My memory is particularly spotty...."<br />
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Me:<br />
"I remember the whole, extremely mellow and pleasant evening.<br />
Was there anything in particular you wanted to recall, or any questions?"</div>
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Her:<br />
"In the event I may make sexual advances I'm going to ask that you exercise control as I have to say under the influence I'm not in my right mind to consent..."</div>
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Me:<br />
"Of course. All that happened physically is that we kissed a bit, quite pleasantly, but I was in doubt about your ability to consent, so I backed off and let you just chill out."</div>
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Her:<br />
"OK, thanks."</div>
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Her:<br />
"But like if we are doing that again and I start begging for stuff.... Just say no."</div>
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Me:<br />
"Of course. Only if you initiate in a sober state of mind. I have too many friends who have been raped, I am strict about consent."</div>
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Me:<br />
"Personally, I do enjoy sexual activities while under the influence of certain substances, but only when it's discussed beforehand sober, and only with people who have a similar level of experience with whatever it is, and that feel totally comfortable with them. You don't qualify, ;-)."<br />
"Just wanted you to know my policy in detail."</div>
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Me (I'm at work):<br />
"Gonna make my rounds now, feel free to ask anything else, there will just be a delay in my replying. But I have no expectations, I just enjoy spending time with you."</div>
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Her:<br />
"Keith, I want to expresses my true gratitude for the safe place to explore new horizons and I value your respect for me and women as a whole."<br />
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Me:<br />
"Caught me on a smoke break. I appreciate it. Look, my romantic history is full of people manipulating me, subjecting me to emotional abuse to the point where torture is not too strong a word for it. Throw in years of rejection in my formative years, all of which triggered my initial depression and anxiety. My ability to gauge when people are actually interested in me is basically non-existent, and it's only very recently that I've been able to trust people, and I've often had the stink of desperation and neediness about me."<br />
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Me:<br />
"I'm fucked up. Most of the last 20 years has been brief periods of respite in an ocean of pain and despair. I'm finally in a place where I'm getting better, but I still have a lot of fear associated with such things."<br />
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"Take all that, and I've never been sexually assaulted." <br />
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"I can't imagine what that does to a person, but with what I have been through, which I wouldn't wish on anyone, and I can only imagine that it's even worse." <br />
"I would never put anyone through what I've been through, let alone anything worse. For fuck's sake, I'm in constant fear of violating boundaries inadvertently." <br />
"As I recover, I still seek companionship, emotionally, physically, and romantically, but I have decided to just take things as they come, because it's the only way I can possibly see to proceed. So that's where I'm coming from."<br />
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Her:<br />
"Thank you for trusting me to share that."<br />
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Me:<br />
"I am tired of living in fear. I need to trust people, so I'm just going to fucking do it. Hell, I'll probably include it in my next blog post. If I've had to go through it, I'm going to share it with the fucking world. If it helps a single person through a rough patch, that's reason enough. Thank you for providing the impetus for me to put it in words."<br />
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Her:</div>
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"Fear is something I've been seeing as a recurring impediment to the happiness of so many people I've recently met. And I was paralyzed by it for too many years to count."<br />
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Me:<br />
"Yep. My diagnosis of anxiety is just a fancy word for it. Ok, I really am going to finish my rounds now. Thank you for listening."<br />
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Her:<br />
"Anytime!"<br />
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Having friends is my favorite thing in the whole world.</div>
masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-46204900319293157672014-05-18T03:50:00.001-05:002014-05-18T03:50:22.818-05:00Love and HonestyLately I've been thinking a lot about how I feel about love. It's one of those big huge emotions that lots of people stress about. I've done my own share of that.<div>
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When I was married, I kind of took it for granted that I was in love, since that's usually the reason one gets married. But for much of that time, I was miserable. I didn't feel desired much at all, let alone appreciated. It felt more like I was someone to be tolerated so that the bills would get paid. Needless to say, I'm much happier now that it's done.</div>
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But now that I'm in a place where I sometimes do feel appreciated and desired, I'm reassessing what I think love is. It's definitely nothing to do with monogamy for me. I used to entertain all kinds of notions about "the one", and now I realize that's just bullshit. People are complicated with all kinds of needs, and it's ridiculous to expect one person to fill them all.</div>
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Now that I'm exploring polyamory and open relationships, I'm realizing just how many cultural assumptions about love simply don't apply to me. I definitely have no desire for exclusivity, and am dating someone with two other ongoing relationships, which doesn't bug me at all. I am rarely possessive, it's never been my thing, and especially after the paranoia and lack of trust that I experienced as a result of my ex-wife's possessiveness, I shy away from that like the plague.</div>
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In the past, sex and love have always been linked for me. I did tend to form emotional bonds quickly with those I've been with, but as my experience post-marriage develops, it's less of an automatic thing. I am quite fond of those I've been with, but there is less pressure in my head now to jump into such things. Being older probably helps this a lot, too.</div>
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Another thing I've noticed lately is that I'm a lot more open to feeling and expressing love to people even if I am not in a relationship with them. There are some people in this category that I'd like to be in a relationship with, but that's not the majority. In the past, I think I had more expectations from those who I declared my love for, like the fact that I experienced a particular emotion made them obliged to me in some way. Now I realize how self-sabotaging that attitude was. My take now is that if I feel love for someone and choose to tell them, whether I'm romantically involved with them or not, it's just me expressing my appreciation for the joy they bring to my life. Somehow, by knowing them, they have made my experience of life better. There is no longer any sense that they are obliged to love me back. It's more of a "credit where credit's due" thing. I want them in my life, definitely, but as a free entity, not as property.</div>
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Letting go of the obligatory actually makes it better in my opinion, because I'd much rather only hear expressions of love from those for whom I have made their life better somehow, I don't want anyone to say it because they feel like they have to. It wouldn't be love then, obviously, and I'm done with pretending. My marriage lasted twice as long as it should have because both of us were too afraid to come right out and deal with our issues, all for the sake of staying married. All it did was prolong our misery. I'm no longer afraid of coming at problems head on. If a problem in a relationship is insurmountable, I'd rather find it out now and make a clean break than torture myself and my partner chasing a delusion.</div>
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I'm living a lot more honestly these days, both with myself and others, and I'm much happier because of it, and experiencing much more joy. I may have more thoughts along these lines in a future post, but this is fine for now.</div>
masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-40092115727881239702013-11-09T11:25:00.001-06:002013-11-09T11:25:23.530-06:00Mindfulness in Practice (for me, anyway)So I've had an irregular mindfulness meditation practice for about a year now. I say irregular because I don't sit down on anything resembling a regular schedule. What I do instead is take moment here and there and go into breath focus or body scanning. However, what I do much more often is sit back and analyze the kinds of thoughts going through my brain and what effect they have on me. It's almost like taking a step back outside of myself and trying to watch without engaging. This started as a way to deal with distracting thoughts while trying to focus on my breath or body, but I've found it to be useful whether I am doing that kind of formal practice or not.<br />
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I've found it particularly useful when it comes to dealing with attachment and the "grasping" one often reads about in Buddhist contexts. For example, I have various people I'm attracted to, some of which I have a better shot with than others. Back in the day, I would get really obsessive when this happened, and I tended to be very over-eager and needy seeming, which would inevitably be counter-productive, making myself less attractive. I still get those impulses, but now with the somewhat detached outside perspective, I have much more control over myself. I can sit there and experience the desire and even anxiety without letting the emotions force me into action. I sit with the feelings, experiencing them fully, to some extent more fully than when I let them take over, and I get a better understanding of the drives that fuel them. Experiencing the emotions and the physical changes that take place in the body when experiencing them is a fascinating process.<br /><br />On the practical side, taking time to do this makes me a lot less nervous when I actually see the people I'm attracted to, which then leads to a better time had for all, since my tics and whatnot aren't getting in the way.<br />
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With all I hear about mindfulness and the importance of regular practice, I'd love to hear more about this kind of approach to it, where it's focused on directly improving one's development. Sometimes I hear about it as a side effect of one's practice, but to me, this more conscious engagement with one's behavior and thinking is the real point. Just my observations, hopefully they are useful to some reading this.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-32138546267008312912013-09-21T01:02:00.001-05:002013-09-21T01:02:14.590-05:00I'm Not an Alcoholic, Alcoholics Go To Meetings<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/nCrlyX6XbTU?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe>Yeah, so, in my last post towards the end, I made a comment about how alcohol helps with social anxiety.<br /><br />What I failed to account for is how it affects the social anxiety of everyone else I am engaged with in social contexts, and that's where I was utterly full of shit. After two separate incidents of people calling me on my bullshit this week, I'm going to stop drinking anywhere that I drive to, completely, to begin with. After avoiding it for a while, I may see about having one or two beers or whatnot, and then stopping. At this point I don't yet know if I'm capable of that, which in itself is frightening, of course.<br /><br />Even when I'm at home and not going anywhere, I'm going to cut back big time, unless I'm simply in a lot of pain. But it's become clear to me that drunk Keith is not as fun as drunk Keith thought, and sober me doesn't like him very much either. So he's going away, for a while at the very least.<br /><br />Always cherish friends who take the risk of telling you truths you don't want to hear, and do them the courtesy of listening. They cared enough to not just write me off, so they deserve the honor of having their concerns addressed.<br /><br />masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-21606176874407556412013-08-11T22:01:00.000-05:002013-08-11T22:28:39.467-05:00A Look Inside My SkullI've been wanting to write about the depression and anxiety I experience constantly for a while now, but of course, the anxiety makes that difficult. But I figure I'll go ahead and put it all down, so hopefully it can help other people experiencing similar things. In this I'm largely inspired by <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/">JT Eberhard</a>, and specifically<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI-YvrHZVvk"> the talk he gave at Skepticon a couple of years ago</a>. Just today I also saw <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/anne-theriault-/living-with-depression_b_3726949.html">this piece</a>, which hit a lot of the bullet points I want to mention, especially #4. But here's how things happen for me, specifically.<br />
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Somewhere around 16-17 years old, I was diagnosed with clinical depression. More recently, the official term I've seen on shrink paperwork is Major Depressive Disorder. I kinda dig that, it sounds more important. Anyway, after an initial month on Zoloft which gave me the shakes, I switched to trazadone, and I've been on that since, and I'm 35 now. (Note: My bad experience with Zoloft doesn't make it a worthless drug, different people have different brain reactions.) The trazadone helps a lot, but not with everything. I'll break it down.<br />
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When I'm not medicated, I have zero control over my emotions. I can go from laughing to screaming in a matter of seconds. Mood swings is too mild a word for what happens. It's not a cyclical thing like manic depression (I guess they call it Bipolar Disorder now?), it's basically an extreme overreaction to emotional stimulus. Where a neurotypical person might get irritated and mouth off to someone pissing them off, I would get into huge screaming bouts, often flinging things across rooms. What the trazadone does is give me a thermostat for the emotions, and on it, I react just like a normal person. I still feel my emotions, but they aren't uncontrollable. This is a good thing. Whenever people tell me, "you don't seem depressed," I tell them that's because my meds work. I know this because there have been times when I've been off them, most notably on a trip out of town for a few days when I left them at home. What happens then is that on the first day, I'm mostly good, but I'm a bit more anxious than normal, tapping my feet, experiencing body temperature fluctuations, that kind of thing. Day 2, all of those symptoms are worse, and I start to get extremely irritable, minor things that I would blow off as unimportant seem like major annoyances. By day 3, I can't really tolerate the presence of other people at all, because <i>everything</i> they do pisses me off. In such states I get irritated by the way people breathe. Oddly enough, cats don't bother me at all, and normal annoying cat behavior is less irritating than when I'm in normal mode. (The same effect might hold with other animals, but I don't have close contact with anything other than cats.)<br />
<br />
So, trazadone is necessary and good. All of the weird and possibly scary behavior above just goes away completely. (This is also why I know that people who like to spout off about how 'the brain is more than just chemistry, man' are complete fucking fools. It's really, really complex chemistry, but it's chemistry all the same.) So, on to the stuff trazadone doesn't cover.<br />
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I don't hear voices, but I may as well. I'm going to use the term "voice" as a metaphor in this a lot, because it's just easier to put things into words that way. There is a constantly running dialogue in my head, and it tells me that I'm a piece of shit. It tells me that all of my friendships are elaborate hoaxes being perpetrated on me, and that one day they will all reveal the joke and have a huge laugh at my expense (I suspect this is based on my first "girlfriend" in 7th grade, who did just this). No one in my family gives a shit about me. I'm adopted, and my parents wish they could get their money back. I am a fraud, putting on a front, afraid to reveal my true self to the world. Nothing I have ever achieved has been of any importance whatsoever to anyone, and any sense of accomplishment or good will I've ever received from anyone was wrapped in contempt. The joke is always on me. Women find me disgusting. I am always awkward, and a huge embarassment. I might as well be dead.<br />
<br />
That's a sampling of the kind of shit that runs through my head in the background, pretty much whenever I'm awake. It's kinda like the news-ticker at the bottom of the screen on some cable news shows. I'm not an idiot, I know that most of that, if not all, is complete bullshit. That is the depression fucking with me. So I've gotten ok at ignoring it for most practical purposes, if you talk to me, you probably can't tell that I'm thinking anything of the sort. Of course, even now, that ticker is screaming, fuck you, they can tell! They know it, you stupid fuck! <i>Everyone</i> knows! Again, I know with most of me that it's bullshit, but when you have those kind of thoughts going constantly, it worms its way in. I'm constantly second-guessing myself in any interaction whatsoever, no matter how inconsequential, because in my mind, there's always some fraction saying, what if the other voice is right? <br />
<br />
'Damn, that's crazy, how do you put up with that?'<br />
<br />
As opposed to what? It's there, I've had to come to terms with it, and even now, there are days where I believe it more than others. It's affected my personality in a number of ways. One of the most irritating is that I have absolutely no reliable sense of whether someone is or isn't interested in me romantically. There are lots of women I'm attracted to, but I have no way to gauge whether it's reciprocal, because that little voice completely fucks up my judgment on such matters. Most of the relationships I have had have been the result of a woman approaching me and declaring their interest. At least then it's easy to ignore the voice. It's not that good, though, because I still end up with trouble interpreting signals. When I was married, if my wife said something was fine, I went with it, because I can't trust my own analysis due to the voice filling my head with paranoid scenarios. When it comes to actually asking someone out, I can barely manage. Simple rejection, that I could handle. What makes it difficult is the voice yelling all of my flaws at me, making me self-conscious as hell, terrified if I'm going to be seen as a creep, etc. I'm already worried about how I go about such a process for rational reasons, not wanting to be some kind of douchebag making assumptions that may or may not be sexist because I'm blind to my own privilege, I don't need this additional shit as well.<br />
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It extends to non-romantic social interactions as well. When I'm pretty sure I've upset someone, I often go overboard with asking them to tell me what's wrong, or I end up apologizing for things that my mind has blown up into major offenses, and the person I'm apologizing to has no idea what the hell it is that I'm supposed to have done to offend them. When I'm having conversations online and I don't have body language to observe, I often tend to end up interpreting what other people say in the most hostile possible manner because that's what my mind is telling me. Even with people I know and trust, I still have to deal with it, see the paragraph up above talking about the big joke. Basically, I'm always multitasking whatever I'm doing, because part of me has to be countering all the self-accusation.<br />
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So far, I've only found one thing that shuts up that fucking voice, and that's alcohol. When I drink, once I start feeling the effects, the voice goes away, and I can actually relax and enjoy myself and the company of others. I am well aware of how dangerous this is, it's a pretty sure path to alcoholism. When I don't drink, I don't have any particular craving for booze, but I always want to shut up the goddamn voice, trying to sabotage me at every turn. I am actively trying out things to help with this, however. I've recently added Wellbutrin to my medication regimen, and it seems to be helping a little bit, but not enough. I'll continue to seek alternatives until I find something that does work as well as intoxication. I'm probably going to send this very piece to my shrink as a diagnostic aid, hopefully that works. I will post follow-ups to this if/when I notice changes in symptoms, so that perhaps if/when it gets better, I can have a further example to show people how getting help actually, y'know, <i>helps</i>.<br />
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I know that this whole piece is a huge pile of too much information for most people. I'm going ahead and putting it up on my blog anyway, because I know that there have to be others out there dealing with their own mental illnesses, and they need to know that they're not alone, there are people who understand what they're going through.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-83969065073939693522013-05-07T21:54:00.001-05:002013-05-28T10:55:50.164-05:00Houserules for my upcoming Swords & Wizardry GameThis is just going to be a list for the convenience of my players, and I will update as new things occur to me. The previous gaming posts were me thinking out loud, what's in this post will be the rules changes I actually use.<br />
<br />
1. No XP percentage bonuses for high stats. Most of the time it's a hassle, but I'm also doing it because:<br />
<br />
2. There will be no level limits for demi-human characters, but humans get a 10% XP bonus to compensate for the advantages the demi-humans enjoy. Infravision, ability to detect secret doors, etc.<br />
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3. Since there are no level limits for demi-humans, I'm also allowing human PCs to multiclass if they do desire. This will be pretty much by the book, as that system seems well put together.<br />
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4. Alignment, as mentioned <a href="http://orbitalteapotlaser.blogspot.com/2013/03/old-school-gaming-stuff.html">here</a>, will be Law, Chaos, Neutral/Balance and unaligned. Casters like clerics and mages will have to pick an alignment, and their casting ability comes from their affiliation. Non-casters default to unaligned. They can choose to pledge their fealty to one of the cosmic forces, this will grant them the ability to call upon such forces for aid from time to time, but there's a quid pro quo, sometimes the PC will be required to do things that serve their alignment's wants and needs.<br />
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5. No Vancian magic, spell slots turn into mana, and a spell costs as much mana to cast as its level. For instance, a 4th level mage can traditionally cast three 1st level spells and two 2nd level spells. Under my rules, that mage gets 7 mana points. Each slot multiplies by the level of the spell. So the three 1st level spells equal 3 mana, and the two 2nd level spells equal 4 mana. No one can cast a spell of a level higher than they would have had access to before, so even if one has enough mana, they're not skilled enough to punch above their level. Yes, there will be a chart for this. <br />
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6. Also, you can also use mana to wear armor. 1 mana point per level of armor, so at 1st level, a mage has 2 mana points and is 9 AC (unarmored). The mage can either use those 2 mana for spells or they can burn one to wear something with 8 AC, and on through the levels. (I'm ripping this off from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Adventure_Role_Playing">HARP</a> since it worked pretty well).<br />
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7. Any 1HD or less intelligent "monster" is available as a PC, provided I get advanced notice that someone wants to play one, so I can slap together a conversion. So kobolds, goblins, not a problem. No, you can't play as Orcus (in this game, anyway).<br />
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8. Classes not listed in <i>S&W Complete</i> or the <a href="http://www.d20swsrd.com/swords-and-wizardry-srd">SRD</a> are also available if I'm given advance notice to prep it for this game, as with the monster thing. I'm already porting over some as mentioned <a href="http://orbitalteapotlaser.blogspot.com/2013/03/more-gaming-thoughts.html">here</a>, so if you can't find it in the SRD or the books, just let me know, and I'll deal with it. Hell, you don't even have to want to play it in particular, but if you want me to get it ready to play, drop me a line, within reason. I'm not going to come up with 30 or so alternate classes that no one's going to use. <br />
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<a href="http://www.brwgames.com/?page_id=11">Adventures Dark & Deep</a> and <a href="http://www.swordsmen-and-sorcerers.com/">Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea</a> in particular have lots of subclasses, and ADD has subraces, too. My rule of thumb here is that anyone can play the standard 4 classes (fighter, cleric, mage, thief) without restriction, but if you want a subclass, you will have to meet the minimum ability requirements given, since those classes tend to have lots of little bonus tricks and such. Also, if you are taking one of the subclasses from ASSH, no multiclassing, because many of them are the equivalents of multiclassed characters anyway, and I don't want the headache.<br />
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While I'm at it, if you do take one of the 4 core classes, all of those get to add their level to a defining attribute:<br />
Mages get it as additional mana.<br />
<br />
Fighters get it as bonus to hit OR damage (pick one).<br />
<br />
Clerics get it as a bonus for turning OR hit points healed (pick one).<br />
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Thieves get it as a to hit bonus and a damage bonus for backstabbing AFTER multipliers are figured, (double, triple, etc, as they level up) OR a +5 bonus to one of their thief abilities. So at level 1 they can add +5 to their Climb Walls, at level 2 they can add another +5 to Climb or they can add it to fine manipulation (for disarming traps and such), etc.<br />
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Subclasses and multiclassed characters don't get to add their level to anything.
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9. I've changed my mind on saving throws, so unless I hear otherwise, I will be using the default single saving throw, rather than the traditional 5 category ones. I'm easy on this, though, it's trivial to switch, as the book gives both (and even includes both on the GM screen).<br />
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10. Descending AC. (Not really a houserule, but since S&W provides both, I'm marking my preference.) Players just tell me what AC they hit with the handy one-line table at the bottom of the character sheet, I'll do the rest. Players don't necessarily need to know the AC of the thing they're fighting, and descending works well that way.<br />
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11. There will be no specific skills (aside from thief abilities), instead, there will be ability checks, where you simply roll under or equal to your stat. If people do want skills, I can port over the system from Dark Dungeons which works fine. It'd be the same, roll under the stat, and skills would be a specialization. For example, if your Dexterity is 15 and you have two points in the Acrobatics skill, you'd roll under 17, rather than 15 when using it. Personally I think ability checks are sufficient, but I'm easy.<br />
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That's it for now, will update further if I need to. I'm also open to suggestions, just comment here on the blog, so I can keep everything together.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-84971879413535107372013-03-26T05:01:00.002-05:002013-03-26T05:01:31.037-05:00More Gaming Thoughts<b>Character Classes</b><br />
<br />
All the basics, of course, Cleric, Fighter, Mage, Thief. But I don't mind some variety. In the <i>DD</i> game, I also had available Monks, Rangers, Assassins (although I don't see myself allowing these much) and Fighter-Mages (since I got rid of the racial classes, this is the same as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Basic_Set">Basic D&D</a> Elf). I just got the pdf of <a href="http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/">Joseph Bloch</a>'s <a href="http://www.adventuresdarkanddeep.com/">Adventures Dark & Deep</a>, his alternate <i>AD&D2E,</i> and I particularly like his version of Gygax's Jester class, a Bard sub-class. So I'll probably port at least both of those over, as well as the Thief-Acrobat and Mountebank, and a few others. The Jester is an acrobatic melee and hand to hand fighter that fits much better into the Western European milieu that most settings assume than the Monk, which I've never been particular fond of. It's not identical, but they seem to me to share a similar niche. (If I was to run a more Eastern setting, Monks obviously wouldn't be a problem, and Fighters and Rangers would be replaced with Samurai and Ninjas, etc.) They get some access to spells, as Bards do, as well as a series of abilities separate from but similar to the way Thief abilities work, juggling, knife throwing, that kind of thing. So initially, the list of available classes would be:<br /><br />Barbarian<br />Cleric<br />
Fighter<br />
Mage<br />
Illusionist<br />
Thief<br />Thief-Acrobat<br />
Assassin<br />
Ranger<br />
Bard<br />
Jester<br />
Barbarian<br />
Mountebank<br />
<br />
Druids and Cavaliers/Paladins are an odd thing to me, I really dig the way <i>DD</i> does them, being alternate classes the Cleric and Fighter can choose later on as they progress in level. I also dig the old <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Rules_Cyclopedia">Rules Cyclopedia</a> division of Avenger/Knight/Paladin depending on alignment, but there's also something to be said for making them classes unto themselves, the way they already are in <i>S&W</i>. I'll figure out what's easiest and do that. <br />
<br />
<b>Races</b><br />
<br />
Along with the standard human, dwarf, elf, halfling, I'm down with gnomes, half-elves, half-orcs, whatever. In fact, a houserule I came up with for the <i>DD</i> game was that any 1HD or less monster race could also be a player character, provided that any special abilities they had weren't much more fancy than that of the standard demi-humans. As I recall, we had a kobold Ranger who was pretty fun. I see no reason to not continue this trend, with GM approval, of course. Since I'm not a fan of level limits for demihumans, I got around the balance issue by giving humans a blanket 5% XP bonus to compensate for their lack of fun stuff like Infravision and such. Since it stacks with the class-based XP bonus for high stats, it seems to work pretty well. I think I stole that trick from <a href="http://www.basicfantasy.org/">Basic Fantasy</a>. <br />
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I also had a schtick where all of the characters were members of an adventurer's guild called the IWW - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ0sW7KOFhU">Itinerant Warriors of the World</a>, which had strict non-discrimination policies towards race and alignment, so "monster" races with union cards could remain unmolested in polite society, at least as long as there was a guild house in town. The IWW was there mostly to amuse myself as a non-current member of the actual IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). None of my players ran with it and tried to recruit dungeon dwellers into the union rather than fighting, but the option would have been there, if they tried. In terms of game play, it also gave them discounts on delving equipment and a labor pool of hirelings and henchmen to choose from, and a reason why such would be available.<br />
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More musings to follow.<br />
<br />
<br />masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-18075932257869392802013-03-26T01:38:00.001-05:002013-03-26T01:50:02.643-05:00Old School Gaming StuffI'm gearing up to run another campaign in a few months, or sooner. I've been reading so many of the various retroclones and other "nostalgia" games out there that I'm having a hard time deciding on which one, or if I may just put my own set together, stealing the best elements from all of them. I still dig <a href="http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/darkdungeons.html">Dark Dungeons</a> (<i>DD</i>), the one I was running <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Keep_on_the_Borderlands">Keep on the Borderlands</a> with, but even with switching to the alternate version, <a href="http://www.gratisgames.webspace.virginmedia.com/extras.html">Darker Dungeons</a>, it's just a little unwieldy, and I feel like switching it up (even if I kept with it, I'll be discarding the weapon mastery next time. It's not bad, I just don't feel like messing with it anymore). This post is mostly for my own benefit, while I think out loud about the elements to put into my next game.<br />
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<b>Alignment:</b><br />
<br />
I've been ambivalent about alignment throughout most of my gaming career, and while the memes are amusing, I've never had much use for the two axis alignment system where you get things like Lawful Evil or Chaotic Neutral. To me, if you're going to codify a character's morality, that's way too simplistic a way of doing it. <br />
<br />
On the other hand, being a fan of Michael Moorcock and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Champion">The Eternal Champion</a> mythos, I do really like the 3 element system of Law, Chaos, and Neutral/Balance. But I keep these separate from notions of morality, to me they are all cosmic forces that one chooses to align oneself with, full of potential plot hooks at later levels (and at low, depending on what happens).<br />
<br />
So for me, I'm going to continue doing what I started with my <i>DD</i> game, and use 4 alignments:<br />
<br />
Unaligned<br />
Law<br />
Chaos<br />
The Balance<br />
<br />
If you're a Cleric, Mage, or any other kind of magic-user, you <i>have</i> to choose an alignment, as the source of your power. My preference is that Mages and Clerics can both choose The Balance, but that Mages can only otherwise pick Chaos, and Clerics only Law, but I might be able to be argued out of that. I like the notion of having the different kinds of magic be aligned that way, but there's also something to be said for having priests of Arioch and the like. <br />
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This does mean that Fighters, Thieves, Rangers, Assassins, etc. default to Unaligned at chargen. They are perfectly free to pledge their loyalty to cosmic forces if they want to, but they won't need to, and they are free to do so later on in the game. I'll probably come up with a mechanic that makes it meaningful (or more likely, steal one from another game), something along the lines of the way Clerics can call upon their gods for favor in <a href="http://www.goodmangames.com/dccrpg.html">Dungeon Crawl Classics</a> (<i>DCC</i>) in exchange for some service further down the line. I can definitely see this as a way for unaligned characters to end up serving forces greater than themselves:<br />
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<i>Ragnar gazed around himself nervously. If Fingers had done his job correctly, he never would have fallen down that sliding chute, only to right himself in the dark, surrounded by glowing eyes, more than he could count. He still had strength in his arms, and his blade was sharp, but he couldn't tell what lay just beyond the shadows, and their numbers were great. If he was going to get out of this, desperate measures were required. He drew his sword, and readied his shield.<br /><br />"Loki! I pledge my fealty to you! Aid my steel!"<br /><br />He thought he heard faint laughter somewhere in the distance, and suddenly there was a sharp pain on his shield arm, as an eight-pointed star branded itself onto his bicep from some unknown source. The star remained glowing red, and he could see that his sword blade was wreathed with flame. His nervousness fell away, and he felt like shouting, laughing, and screaming all at once.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>"Oh, I know I'm going to regret this eventually," he said to himself with a wry grin. He then saluted the shadows with his sword and got to work.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<b>Magic</b><br />
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I've always hated the fire and forget "Vancian" magic system of <i>D&D</i>, but the quick and dirty mana conversion I did for my <i>DD</i> game would be very problematic at high levels. Another thing I'll steal is the alternate system I've seen in <i>DCC</i> and <a href="http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=94105&it=1">Spellcraft and Swordplay</a> (<i>S&S</i>), apparently based on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)">Chainmail</a>, where instead of spells going off automatically and then going away, you roll to successfully cast, gaining either an immediate or delayed effect, or a failure, and the <i>failure</i> does make you lose that spell for the day (and botches get nasty). I like this a lot better. A character will still be limited as to how many spells per level he can prep, or what levels of spell are available, but fire and forget is gone. I haven't decided yet whether to use the Mercurial Magic stuff from <i>DCC</i> yet. While it's fun, I don't know if I want that much randomness. Most likely I'll show it to players and let them decide if they want to use it or not.<br />
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<b>Race and Class</b><br />
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I will most likely keep them separated, <a href="http://www.swordsandwizardry.com/">Swords & Wizardry</a> (<i>S&W</i>) style, albeit without level limits, and without too many restrictions. This was trivial to do with <i>DD</i>, and I don't see it being a problem. Most likely I'm going to use <a href="http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/sword-wizardry.html">S&W Complete</a> as my baseline, and tear things out and bolt things on as needed. <br />
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<b>Saving Throws and AC</b><br />
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I'll definitely be using the more traditional 5 separate saving throws option within, rather than <i>S&W</i>'s single one, just because I prefer it that way. I also prefer descending AC, but since the book provides it and ascending, as does the excellent <a href="http://www.talesofthefroggod.com/monstrosities.html">Monstrosities</a> book, this is trivial.<br />
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That's it for now, when more ideas along these lines occur, I'll post them. There's a vague notion of actually putting this all together into my own game and throwing it up on Lulu, but that's way down the line. First priority is to put it together for my own use and run it for people.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-70475830575172344112013-02-22T03:58:00.000-06:002013-02-22T04:03:10.698-06:00Martyrdom<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>martyrdom</b></span></div>
<br />
Living for others,<br />
so they say,<br />
is one of the highest of goods.<br />
<br />
Dying, even more.<br />
<br />
But while it may be asserted noble to suffer for others,<br />
I'm not buying it.<br />
<br />
We can't avoid all forms of shared misery,<br />
c'est la vie.<br />
<br />
But if you're hanging on the cross for someone else,<br />
it's time to come down, and walk away.<br />
<br />
If you're lucky, someone may come along<br />
take the hammer from you,<br />
and twist it around to show you that the hammer you use to nail yourself up<br />
can also be used to pry out the nails.<br />
<br />
I was so lucky.<br />
<br />
You still have to stop actively hammering yourself into place.<br />
You still have to pry out the nails.<br />
You still have to make your way down<br />
and walk free.<br />
<br />
I know it's hard.<br />
<br />
Pulling them out hurts.<br />
It hurts so much that you want to stop prying,<br />
and just let them be<br />
and settle back against the cross.<br />
<br />
But once they're out,<br />
the pain really does go away.<br />
<br />
Once the pain is gone<br />
it's hard to understand what kept you up there for so long,<br />
and walking away becomes easy.<br />
<br />
I wish I could do this for you,<br />
but all I can do is try to twist the hammer.<br />
<br />
I hope you join me soon.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-4346695939199142622011-12-27T04:17:00.004-06:002011-12-27T06:45:41.305-06:00Debating accomodationism and confrontationalism.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">This is a reply to a thread on a Facebook discussion board, posted here to not clutter it up further. The Stedman article in question is this:</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-stedman/atheist-activism-problems_b_1164399.html">The Problem with "Atheist Activism"</a></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">An article I linked to in reply is this:</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;"><a href="http://www.freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2011/12/22/the-alternatives-to-confrontationalism/">The Alternatives to Confrontationalism</a></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">On to the discussion:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;">Me:<br />
"I happily confront homophobia, racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, etc. Racism is a personal bugbear to me. My wife and I get dirty looks from whites and blacks, she being black, me being a honky. </span><br style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;" /><br style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">I don't single out Christianity, but </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">since it is among the various sources of such intolerances, it goes on the list of things I have no truck with. The difference is that homophobia and the various other forms of hatred and intolerable (and intolerant) behavior needs to be confronted on their own only when they exist independent of other things."</span><br />
<br />
Daryl:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">"Religion is NOT the sourse of intolerances. Specifically racism is caused by oxytoxin (Carsten de Dreu et al) Religion plays the role of providing the justifi<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">cation forthe intolerance, but the intolerance is in the culture. If not religion condoning, then we would use some other mechanism, like a philosophy. "</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">Reply:</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">That's an oversimplification. Oxytocin merely increases biased feelings already present in the subject. "The intolerance is in the culture" is obvious. Religion is a cultural phenomenon, one that has been and can be changed to modify the prevailing cultural values present in the world. Of course there's always going to be some cultural institutions that have a certain degree of intolerance in the value structure they create, but when those crop up, we fight them, too.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
Me:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-size: xx-small;">"Confronting religion itself, when said religion is a source of multiple flavors of intolerance, is not only justified, it is more efficient tactically. Within Christianity specifically, for instance, there are scriptural justifications for a wide variety of different flavors of hate and oppression. Homophobia, yes, but also misogyny, racial hatred, justifications for slavery, intolerance for other faiths, etc."</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">Daryl:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">"Paragraph 3, efficient tactically: Not true, Attacking the religion, not the intolerance, then the intolerance never gets dealt with. Attacking the intolerance you can have allies from within the religion, attack the religion, and all you get is enemies."</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Reply:</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">I fight both. I already said above that I target intolerance. But I favor a systematic approach where you target intolerance, both direct acts of it and the systematic structures that justify it, religion being one of those. Intolerance isn't the only problem with religion, if it were, then you might have a point. But religion engenders other problems like relying on faith rather than reason, encouraging people to ask for intercessory aid from on high rather than enabling them to deal with their problems directly, etc. </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
Me:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">"All of the above are in scripture itself. If you want to add behaviors by religious institutions like the Catholic church, we can add a systematic and well documented conspiracy to conceal, cover up, and ENABLE child rapists to continue to perpetuate their crimes, internationally, and over the course of decades. So as to not single out the Catholics, we can include genital mutilation, practiced primarily on women by Muslim groups, and on males by Jewish groups."</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">Daryl:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">What do the scriptures have to do with christianity? The next time i see some family stoning their drunken son on the outskirts of town, a wife living in the shed during her period, Joel Osteen condeming rich men, or Pator Bill Tvelt renounce his endorsement of Bachman because of the book of Timothy, I will concern myself with what is in the bible. Christians don't, why should we?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">"</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">Reply:</span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">The scriptures are cherry picked, but still believed in. I just gave a few real world examples of harms done with scriptural justification. Stoning still happens in parts of the world. As does the previously mentioned genital mutilation. Things like slavery are gone (or at least not globally accepted institutions) because society has already gone against the things justified by scripture and made them unacceptable. I want to see that process continue.</span></span></div><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
Me:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">"Islam does seem to me to be the worse offender, however, as there exist Muslim states where rape isn't a crime, but a punishment that women can be sentenced to. This is pathological at best, and even right this second I have to damn near physically restrain myself from following such a mention by a long stream of expletives. Even with that said, Islam is an immediate bad instance of what religious ideology leads to, all religious nonsense has to potential to go just as bad, it just needs the right circumstances."</span><br />
<br />
Daryl:</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">So do all muslims condone the actions in the most extreme islamic states? Do you see those kinds of activities in the muslim churches here in america? If we run around painting the whole of a religion with the most extreme actions of the most extreme faction, We end up sounding like the nut jobs.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">"</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">Reply:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">We don't paint the whole of a religion with the most extreme actions of the the most extreme faction, and neither do the bloggers that Stedman cherry-picked quotes from. Stedman continuously makes the error that an attack on the religious doctrine itself is an accusation against every single member of it. I am talking about a harmful set of ideas, not a war against a group of people. It doesn't matter if not every member strictly adheres to the most pathological dictates of their doctrine, their subscription to it is a tacit endorsement of it. The majority of citizens in fascist and Nazi countries in WWII weren't actively rounding up the Jews. Some of them were ignorant of what was happening, and others suspected but took no action. Others did take action. By attacking the doctrines themselves, and pointing out the psychotic content contained within, we are undertaking the job of educating the ignorant about the stuff they should be aware of. This can also encourage them into taking action against those who adhere to the same doctrine in name, but do decide to act on the more harmful aspects of it. That is not just an Islam problem, it's a problem with any ideology, metaphysical, political or otherwise.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
Me:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">"I put the question to you: Should we atheists, and anyone else who object to such behaviors, waste our time targeting each of those crimes, these particular types of hate and intolerance individually? Even when we know that the authority for the existence of the institutions that justify such things are based on logical fallacies that are so obvious that even children can embarrass adult adherents of such faiths with innocent questions that the adults are unable to answer? I say no."</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">Daryl:</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">Answer to your question, Yes we should. Because you can actually accomplish something that way.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">"</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">Reply:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">I agree. I just don't agree that it's impossible to accomplish something the other way, either. People can change when they come to realize that a philosophy they've adhered to is based on nonsense. It's how many people become atheists, or evolve politically from more extreme positions. It happens all the time, I simply encourage open dialogue about said problems. I'm not advocating violent suppression of thoughtcrime, just unfettered and open conversation.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">Me:<br />
"You present me a religion that does not rely on unsupportable appeals to faith, presents a coherent ethical framework, and doesn't have a record of harmful behavior, but does provide a sense of community and collective ritual to honor particular social customs, and I will happily leave that religion alone, although I will probably question why it's called a religion in the first place."</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">Daryl:</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">You can question why it's called a religion all you want. You will be wrong. Shit is shit, even when it doesn't stink.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">"</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">Reply:</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">If a religion or any other ideology is shit, I feel it is so because of the attributes I just described. If it doesn't have those, why is it still shit? I think I gave a fair summation of the parts that are problematic. </span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">Me:<br />
"Unfortunately, even the more benign religions in the real world like Buddhism and Jainism exhibit some of the more harmful behaviors I have previously enumerated, and they have to be at least reformed, if not abolished."</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">Daryl:</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">"So you are sympathetic to Buddism? Following your model, we should oppose buddism because in the 50's in tibet, the Dali Lama endorsed serfdom."</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Reply:</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">I'm sympathetic to some of the philosophy contained in Buddhism, especially early Buddhism, before it had really developed the authoritarian structure of religion that various forms of it developed later. Tibetan Buddhism, and in particular, the Dalai Lama's position as a theocratic head of state is opposed by me. He has endorsed various positions that have led to violence between different schools and factions of Vajrayana Buddhism, murders have occurred, etc. Buddhism as a religious institution has many of the same problems in other countries that I previously identified in relation to Christianity and Islam. Even here in the states there have been Buddhist teachers that used their authority as "enlightened" teachers to take advantage of their students, in sexual and non-sexual ways. <br />
<br />
None of that kind of behavior should be tolerated. As I mentioned in paragraph 9 (included below for completeness), I'm sympathetic to modern, secular redactions of Buddhist thought, with all of the metaphysical nonsense stripped out. I am not at all sympathetic to those parts of Buddhism that exhibit ANY of the behaviors I mentioned above.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">Me:</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-size: xx-small;">"I myself am highly sympathetic to Buddhist thought, being rather fond of Sam Harris's thoughts on the subject, and a fan of Stephen and Martine Batchelor, amongst others in the burgeoning "secular" Buddhist movement, and I do my best to keep up a regular meditative practice and engage in serious contemplation of Buddhism's "Eight Noble Truths" as at least decent philosophical offerings, although I don't cheapen such conjectures with notions of metaphysical holiness."<br />
<br />
Me:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">"Since it will probably be brought up, when I do target Christianity, or any religion, my targets are the bad ideas contained within such ideologies. The rank and file members of Christianity, or any other religion, are generally good and decent people when one takes the time to get to know them. What needs to be confronted is the irrationality of faith itself, which holds members of religion in varying degrees of mental thrall.</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
Religious indoctrination is a willful manipulation, somewhere in the continuum between the parishioner in the pew and the pastoral heads of particular religions (I'm sure that there are some ministers who are true believers, hence why I paint it as a continuum), and boils down to mind control and totalitarian thinking."</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">The members of Christianity, or any other religion, are victims of the authoritarian structure they are enmeshed within, and the whole reason that religious institutions and clerics of said institutions piss me off is that they are parasites on those people. The whole reason to confront religion is to liberate the good people enslaved by false ideologies from the glorified con-artists somewhere in the authoritarian structure of their churches, if not their direct priests, ministers, and imams."</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">Daryl:</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span">"</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">Umm, no dude, that is so wrong. There is no master puppet master</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">, pulling the strings, willfully manipulating people to follow his will. The menbers are not slaves. The leaders of the religion actually believe the stuff they are teaching (watch the HBO documentary, A question of miracles). </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">"</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">Reply:</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">They're not slaves, but they are being manipulated. I did say that there are ministers who believe, and that it was a continuum. It's not a conspiracy theory. If a preacher gets up in church and preaches against gay marriage, for instance, he's going to influence the opinion of a certain proportion of his congregation, and they are going to adjust their behavior towards that issue politically when it comes time to vote. Some ministers are going to do so because they honestly believe in the doctrines in the Bible that they are basing that view on, others are going to be in collusion with political figures to cynically encourage that their parishioners vote a certain way. It doesn't matter whether they believe or not, or to what degree of control is involved, the manipulation occurs because the minister is an authority figure that the congregation is going to accept as delivering received wisdom to various degrees. His authority and the authority of the text are based on demonstrably false information, and I see nothing wrong with pointing that out. The texts contain lies. Point out the lies, and at least some people who hear that will start to question the truthfulness of those doctrines, and they may be on their way out of religion.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 14px;">Me:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">"I disagree completely with your assessment of Zahn's reply. Zahn heard Stedman's anemic complaint quite clearly, she simply rejected it, as she should have."</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">Daryl:</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">Then go back and read it again. Eventually it will sink in.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">"</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">Reply:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">I recommend you do the same. I have. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"> </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">Me:</span></span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">"</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;">Confront religion itself, because if you attack the foundations of unthinking faith that support all the injustices done in the name of various religions, you don't need to attack each particular injustice. Any behaviors that do turn out to be beneficial, and therefore worthy of preservation don't deserve to be sullied with the label of religion, because they are frankly superior."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">Daryl:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">"</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">And finally, paragraph 13, attack the foundations, and you bang your head against a wall. You move nothing, and get a headache.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; line-height: 14px;">"</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">Reply:</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">This is demonstrably false. Questioning the foundation of my own former belief structure is what led me to discard it. There are plenty of others who have done likewise. It's not going to happen quickly or in huge swathes of people, but it does happen everyday. It's a long struggle, but one worth participating in, in my view.</span></span>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-3990584905693995552011-10-16T14:51:00.000-05:002011-10-16T14:51:49.019-05:00The Memetics of Religion: Fundamentalism as a Parasitic Adaptation<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Recently on Google+, I posted some Bible quotes with the caption, “Jesus, on Family Values”:</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” — Luke 14:26</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.”— Matthew 19:29</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” — Matthew 10: 34 – 37"</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One of the replies I got was:</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"You can't even read these passages allegorically. How can these believers BS themselves into believing this crap?"</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As I was replying, it got longer and longer, so I turned it into this essay. While I was quoting from Christianity in my original post, I think that it applies to all religions.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I think part of the problem is that most don't believe this crap. What we have are a bunch of different <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme">memes</a> contending with each other for replication opportunities. </span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The first meme of importance is the moral meme. The bearers of this meme are primarily focused on living a moral life according to standards that are designed to maximize well-being, treating others with kindness and charity, avoiding conflict, enjoying family time, etc. We can shorthand this group of behaviors as “being moral”. All of these behaviors have sound evolutionary reasons for existing, and many of the predecessors are readily observed in our fellow primates. But the moral meme doesn’t usually exist on its own, it often combines with a doctrinal memeplex (large collection of memes) called religion.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The first branch retains much of the motivation of the ethical meme itself, and only partially adopts the religious memeplex. These meme-bearers have vague notions of the myths and stories of their doctrine, but they haven't bothered to sit down and actually examine the doctrines that they purportedly believe in. Being moral, from an outside observer's perspective, is what they actually care about and how they define themselves. The problem is that even though it's apparent that their real focus is on being moral, they call that "being religious", and due to various other factors involved in the structure of the religion memeplex itself, they get "being moral" and "being religious" tied up in their heads so much that the two terms become inextricably intertwined. For the purposes of this essay, we'll call this type of confusion the moderate meme.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then we have the second group. These meme-bearers aren't dedicated to “being moral”, they are actually dedicated to accepting the content of their doctrine as "truth". That is how they define themselves. This “truth” includes the actual moral content of the doctrine, the bits of the doctrine that correspond to a maximization of well-being, but also the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_cosmology">assertions about how the universe functions</a>, the petty prejudices of ages past (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misogyny#Religion">misogyny</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism">racism</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_homosexuality">bigotry towards the sexually adventurous</a>), as well as the literature content, et al. This tendency to accept doctrine as “truth” we can shorthand as "being religious". They also conflate "being moral" and "being religious", but for them, the prime concern is the acceptance, not the maximization of well-being. We can call this type of confusion the fundamentalist meme. </span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So we have two groups of meme-bearers, moderates and fundamentalists, both running around calling their memes by the same terms. Worse, both the moderates and the fundamentalists consider that “being religious” and “being moral” define who they are as people, and they use both terms interchangeably and to refer to different behaviors. But because they are using the same terms, they fool themselves into thinking that they are both working towards the same goals, and there ends up being memetic drift between the two groups. The moderates, who are generally decent people, end up picking up on some of the doctrinal memes (the assertions about reality and petty prejudices) of the fundamentalists and feel obligated to believe in them too, because subscription to doctrine is a part of their "being religious" meme, even though it has a lower priority to them than "being moral". You also get some fundamentalists with a certain amount of tendency towards maximizing well-being, because being moral in actuality is also part of the doctrine, even though it’s of lower priority. Both of these crossover situations can cause cognitive dissonance when the underlying conflicts are pointed out. As a defense against dissonance, there is often a strong reaction in the meme-bearer of either sort against processes that draw attention to the dissonance, like critical thinking procedures or investigative methodologies like scientific empiricism or historical analysis.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Scientific empiricism and historical analysis are memes too, of course, but the difference is that they are investigative memes, not religious memes. Religious memes are about certainty, about knowing “truth”, whether it’s a moral truth or a truth about the way the universe is put together. Investigative memes are about discovery. Some of the products of those discoveries can be elevated to truths, and even turned into doctrines for religions (especially in the past), but the emphasis in the meme-bearer is on discovery, not truth, so as long as they can keep discovering, they don’t mind overturning yesterday’s truths, as long as the new discovery can do so via application of strict standards. These meme-bearers define themselves as investigators, not as truth-possessors. The source of conflict between the different classes of meme-bearers becomes obvious once one identifies the identity issues at stake. The religious meme-bearers have their identities locked into a static “truth” position, and the investigation meme-bearers have their identities locked into a process of challenging static “truths”.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Keep in mind, this isn’t actual different tribes of people who possess only one meme or the other. These memes are in everyone’s minds, influencing our behavior. What does seem likely is that in any given person, certain memes are going to be more dominant in influence at any given time. People in the real world are going to have multiple points of commitment to these memes and others with varying levels of intensity. I’m necessarily simplifying to be illustrative.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fundamentalist memes arise, I suspect, when investigative memes and moral memes combine and replicate. The religions that exist in the world today seem to be a result of this type of interaction. Investigative meme-bearers are today constantly producing models of the world which are then picked up and adopted as doctrines. In the past when technology memes hadn’t progressed to the current level that they exist at today, it took a long time for investigative meme-bearers to produce new models. This exerted a selection pressure that naturally favored fundamentalist memes, as the models had a seeming eternal “truth” aspect, since most meme-bearers of any type didn’t get the opportunity to observe the emergence of a new model. Potential moderate meme-bearers would be fairly invisible in the general population, since there was no pressure to differentiate from fundamentalist meme-bearers. So for centuries, fundamentalism was a decent survival strategy, as it could parasitize the investigative memes, and change happened slowly enough that fundamentalism, which is highly resistant to change, could adapt when necessary.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This all changed with the acceleration of technological know-how, and the gradual process of improvement and refinement that the investigative meme-bearers were always pursuing. Even the old obsolete models were useful data, because it gave them a base to build on and improve. As time goes by, new discoveries are made, and old discoveries that proved valid end up stronger. So the foundations get more and more certain (although never 100%), and provide a wider and wider base to use as a launchpad for new discoveries. The more time goes by, the more information is accumulated, the more the discovery methods improve and the faster new discoveries come in. Unlike with biological genes, memetic evolution is Lamarckian as well as Darwinian, and enjoys an accelerated learning curve.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is a problem for the survival of the fundamentalism meme, because it can no longer get nourishment from the relative stability of the “truths” thrown off by the investigative memes as they go about their work. The selection pressure now favors memes that aren’t tied as strongly to doctrinal issues, since truths change so rapidly. This is what has been allowing the moderate meme to assert its own identity, that of a religious meme focused on “being moral” in practice.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Now that we actually have moderates, things are improving, but it’s not all roses.<span> </span>The problem is that the moderate meme-bearers still conflate “being religious” and “being moral”.<span> </span>This keeps them believing in things that are demonstrably false, even if that belief is shallower than that of the fundamentalists.<span> </span>It also leads them to make excuses for the hateful doctrinal material of the fundamentalists, which can cause dissonance on its own.<span> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Finally, this conflation often leads to prejudice amongst moderates against those who have untangled the semantic confusion of “being moral” and “being religious” by getting rid of the religion meme and retaining the moral meme.<span> </span>This isn’t any one particular group, but a whole category of groups that generally err on the side of secular humanism.<span> </span>It’s like the semantic confusion of “being religious" and "being moral" is an adaptation that the religious memes developed because the confusion does actually help the religious memes hold on longer in people's heads by inculcating the notion that without the doctrinal content of “being religious”, they would descend into immoral chaos. The meme-bearers don't want to be immoral, and the meme fights against the realization that moral and religious can be separated.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
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</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The memetic warfare, therefore, is geared mainly at liberating the moderates from the religious memes.<span> </span>There are many tactics in play at any given time.<span> </span>There’s the frontal assaults on the religious doctrines themselves by the so-called “<a href="http://richarddawkins.net/videos/2025-the-four-horsemen-available-now-on-dvd">Four Horsemen</a>,” <a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004">Dawkins</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Spell-Religion-Natural-Phenomenon/dp/0143038338/">Dennett</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/End-Faith-Religion-Terror-Future/dp/0393327655/">Harris</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446697966/">Hitchens</a>, as well as others that fall under the rubric of the “New Atheists”.<span> </span>There’s the historians like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Doubters-Innovation-Jefferson-Dickinson/dp/0060097728">Jennifer Hecht</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Freethinkers-American-Secularism-Susan-Jacoby/dp/0805077766/">Susan Jacoby</a>, doing valuable work illustrating the long history of philosophical skepticism and doubt about doctrinal hegemony, undercutting the religious memes’ efforts to assume a universality that has never existed.<span> </span>There’s the scientist educators and populizers, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469/">Carl Sagan</a>, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/">NeilDeGrasse Tyson</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo">Lawrence Krauss</a>, out there explaining the fascinating discoveries of science in a more digestible but NOT dumbed down manner, and illustrating the awesomeness of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEBWWycybrs">natural</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mg-Rx5K2DQ">world</a>.<span> </span>The legal strike forces like the FFRF, AUSCS, and Eugenie Scott and the NCSE* in the courts fighting the efforts of fundamentalists to undermine science directly. There’s the artillery division of people like <a href="http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do">Penn & Teller</a> and the <a href="http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/mythbusters/">Mythbusters</a> making skepticism awesome in the popular imagination, one explosion (or bullet catch) at a time.<span> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Most important of all, however, is the infantry of the common everyday atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers. <span> </span>Using the more gentle approach of things like the <a href="http://outcampaign.org/">Atheist Out Campaign</a>, raising consciousness via similar tactics as the gay liberation movement, causing direct cognitive dissonance in the prejudiced by letting the religious meme-bearers know that not only can one be good without god(s), like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_billboard">billboards</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_Bus_Campaign">buses</a> say, but that they already know good moral people who happen to be free of the religious memes, they’ve just been concealing their irreligion because of the intolerance.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I think we need all of these combatants in this memetic war.<span> </span>Some are going to rub people the wrong way, but for others, it’ll be just what they need to hear.<span> I</span>t’s a war on many fronts, and requires many different strategic and tactical approaches, just as the memes we’re combating have their own multifaceted approach.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The good news is that signs seem to indicate that there is real progress being made.<span> </span>Survey after survey is coming out that shows that the fastest growing “religious” group in the country (adjusted for immigration) are those marking “none” as their preference.<span> </span>More and more people raised religious are moderating or leaving their faiths, and becoming more tolerant of those without religion, focusing more on just living good, moral lives.<span> </span>I think that the reason we see so much more craziness from the fundamentalists who are left is that the more morally focused are leaving that kind of religion and leaving behind a precipitate of concentrated doctrinal crazy.<span> </span>These people still need to be fought against on the memetic battleground, and many of those skirmishes are bloody.<span> </span>But while it’s not certain, I think that a case can be made that as with the trend Steven Pinker points out about violence decreasing over time**, I think a case can be made for a similar trend with superstition and toxic religious faith.<span> </span>I think generally those bearing the memes of science, critical thinking, and rationality are winning globally, <a href="" name="_GoBack"></a>and we should remember that when things look grim, while also remaining vigilant in the face of victory.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">*<a href="http://ffrf.org/">FFRF – Freedom From ReligionFoundation</a>, <a href="http://www.au.org/">AUSCS – Americans United for the Separation of Church and State</a>, <a href="http://ncse.com/">NCSE– National Center for Science Education</a><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%;">**<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0670022950">The Better Angels of Our Nature,2011.</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-65738458497592415922011-10-10T07:28:00.000-05:002011-10-10T07:28:42.239-05:00New Houston Secular Buddhist GroupFor anyone in Houston reading my blog and interested in secular buddhism, I just created a networking page on Facebook as my attempt to get something going. Check it out if you're interested:<br />
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Houston-Secular-Buddhists/283809324976193">Houston Secular Buddhists</a>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-39453495780209182112011-10-03T16:46:00.007-05:002011-10-07T15:53:37.298-05:00The Four Noble Truths and the Three Marks of Existence.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; border-collapse: collapse;"></span></span><br />
<div style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; background-color: transparent; border-collapse: separate; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.4015436221379787" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what, after all, does Buddhism actually entail? The philosophical tenets of Buddhism can be summed up with what it calls the 4 noble truths and the three marks of existence. What follows is my own understanding of these “truths”.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. Sapient beings experience dissatisfaction.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. Dissatisfaction arises from craving, be it things, sensations, etc.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">3. Craving ceases when one realizes that everything is impermanent.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">4. One can realize the impermanence of everything by following the Eightfold Path. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have used the word dissatisfaction because it seems to be a more accurate translation of the actual word, dukkha, than the more commonly used "suffering." Suffering has a connotation of pain, and while that is related to dissatisfaction, it's not precise enough. Dissatisfaction itself is pretty obvious, I think, it's a state of not being content with what one has. This is seen most often when one contemplates unpleasant experiences, but it also happens with pleasant ones. It's not that pleasant experiences are an illusion or that they aren’t actually pleasant. It’s that they contain the seeds of dissatisfaction when one forgets that they, like the unpleasant experiences, are impermanent. The good, the bad, there is no eternal. There's nothing actually grim about this, it's just a fact of the universe. It's part of the reality of everything being in flux, as I mentioned in my last post. The fact of impermanence (annica) is neutral, but we humans have a habit of forgetting it, of craving (tanha) for the eternal, of expecting things to last forever. This is what causes our sense of dissatisfaction with the universe we live in, and causes us to seek artificial illusions of permanence in things like religion, politics, superstition, drugs, hedonism, and all kinds of other diversions. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">None of these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves, what’s bad about them is the part of them that feed our self-delusion, the part that tricks us into thinking that they might last forever. We spend so much time craving an eternity that doesn’t exist, and that keeps us from fully enjoying the pleasant experiences when they are going on and also wallowing in the fear of eternal suffering when we are in the midst of an unpleasant experience that will subside sooner or later. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Siddhattha Gotama realized this somewhere around 2500 years ago. “Buddha” is not a name, but a title. It comes from the word bodhi, which is usually translated “enlightenment”, but really means awakened. Buddha means “the awakened one”, someone with awareness, who notices and understands things. He’s not a god, not a wizard, not any kind of supernatural entity, as later traditions portray him. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sid was just a guy who did the hedonistic thing and then spent years after doing the ascetic thing, pursuing spiritual fulfillment and attainment. He finally realized that neither hedonism or asceticism were satisfactory, so he kicked back under a tree for a while until he realized that we humans sure spend a lot of time chasing after bullshit, and we don’t really need to do that. Once he awoke to this realization, he decided he wanted to help others realize it too. But what exactly is it that he realized?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sid realized that we lie to ourselves constantly about the truths of reality, which is made up of the three marks of existence. I’ve already mentioned two of the marks, impermanence and dissatisfaction. The third is not-self (anatta).</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Indian Vedic religion, there is a concept of an unchanging, permanent soul, called atman. It’s kind of like a form, in the Platonic sense. The idea is very similar, for things to exist, there needs to be an ideal in some other realm for it to be a reflection of, otherwise there would be nothing. Sid rejected this notion due to his recognition of impermanence and of applying it to the very concept of self itself, plus the fact that no one can directly observe a form.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This isn’t actually that hard to figure out. As with all things, we change and evolve over time. We gain new knowledge, we forget things, we change deeply held convictions. The me that exists today is very different from the me that existed when I was 7 years old. The me that exists today is different than the me from yesterday in many respects, and the me that exists in 20 years will be more different still. You can’t step in the same river twice, the ship of Theseus, grandfather’s axe, and other similar philosophical notions are related. So there is not a permanent self, there is a continuous process of becoming the new self, which goes on to become a new self, etc, from moment to moment (this process is called punabbhava, or just bhava, often incorrectly translated as rebirth). Now, in the Vedic religion that was dominant in Sid’s time, this was a supernatural notion related to transmigration of souls and reincarnation, and to be fair, Sid didn’t really bother dismissing it as nonsense, he just figured it was unimportant, since the same process goes on within someone’s life, and he was nothing if not focused on trying to help people live better lives. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The reason not-self is an important concept is that the popular notion of the self is made up of 5 aggregate attributes and those are causes of craving, but I will go into those in another post. The point is that Sid developed the eightfold path as a way to help people realize the causes of dissatisfaction, realize the impermanent nature of things, and to help them stop grasping at illusions. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Next post, the eightfold path, and possibly the 5 aggregates.</span></span></div>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-49857369093935355922011-10-02T23:01:00.007-05:002011-10-30T16:30:00.948-05:00Atheism, Naturalism, and Buddhism.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ATHEIST</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The biggest confusion that always crops up in discussion is that atheists believe there is no god. People like to call us intellectually dishonest, because you can't disprove the existence of god. My reply, always, is "Of course you can't disprove god." We don't try to disprove god because that's impossible; we can and do gleefully destroy the logical fallacies and bad arguments for the existence of god, gods, or the supernatural. We show that the specific claims about the attributes of some gods are false. Genesis, for example: science has demonstrated that life emerged through natural processes, as did the universe itself, although we're still working out the finer details. So for someone who believes in the Christian god because they believe the Genesis account, it can be shown to them that that's a bad reason to believe in the God of Genesis. The same goes for pagan gods as the source of natural phenomena like lightning, rain, storms, etc. Those gods, as best we can tell, seem to have been developed in order to explain those things, and when we have a better way to explain the phenomena, their necessity drops away. It doesn't disprove their existence, however. Anyone can come up with all kinds of theories about why gods might exist. Here's one: Gods pop into existence as the result of the collective psychic potential of people believing in them. Occultism is full of notions like that and similar, and I used to justify my own belief in the supernatural that way. It's a nonsense proposal, because the notion that belief can cause something to manifest has no evidence for it either, even though it doesn't assume a supernatural cause for the universe. At best, it's an argument for memetics and their influence on human culture, not for a supernatural realm, and it's still at the mere hypothesis stage, needing confirmation. But the point is that even if one eliminates the explanatory power that the gods used to hold, that doesn't rule out their existence as a point of fact.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To rule out existence entirely, one would have to search all of time and space, which we can't do. On the other hand, proving the existence of a deity is relatively easy, a godlike entity can show up and present evidence of its own existence any time it likes if it does in fact exist (and it can avoid Oolon Colluphid and Babel fish). This is why when people accuse atheists of having faith that there is no god, gods, or the supernatural, I'm always careful to specify myself as an agnostic atheist, and to clarify that when it comes down to it, most atheists are. I admit to an outside possibility that a god might quit screwing around and present itself at some point. But until that happens or any other type of evidence is presented, I have no reason to believe in any of them, hence, I'm an atheist, I have no belief in gods. I have no belief in the existence of other things for which there is no evidence, either, so sometimes I use the word skeptic to be more inclusive, but atheist is usually sufficient. I come into contact with more people who care about the existence of gods specifically than the other stuff. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's so many labels that fit me. Skeptic. Atheist. Humanist. Agnostic. Epicurean. Naturalist. Shit-stirrer (that's nothing new). The newest one that seems to fit, Buddhist, is funny given the others, but I'll get to that in a bit. The problem with atheism is that it's narrow, it focuses only on what I am against, it doesn't say anything about what I'm for. That's the topic of the rest of this article.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of my online friends made an offhand comment the other day: "I don't believe in the supernatural, I think the natural world is super." That pretty much nails it for me. Some people like to disparage those who don't believe in the supernatural, calling them materialists. I am a materialist, but I think people like to conflate that word. There's the economic materialist who views consumption and acquisition of goods as a good thing. Then there's the philosophical notion who views everything as being made of matter. Too many people seem to like to apply the oft-held disdain for the economic materialist to the philosophical materialist. It's a word game. To avoid it, I call myself a naturalist, since that's a better fit anyway. What does a naturalist do? Well, I'll tell you.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I contemplate the vastness of the universe and the scales involved, from the sub-atomic quark level and how much goes on there. I think about the vast distances between objects in our own solar system, the distances between our solar system and our nearest neighbors. I think about the vast amount of systems in our own galaxy and how many galaxies we can see out there, let alone how many exist. I think about the growing possibility that even the immense totality of our own universe may be a single one in an even huger multiverse with whole universes popping into existence here and there every time we indirectly observe a black hole.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I contemplate the scales of time involved for galaxies and systems and stars and planets to form, the geological time scales involved in taking us from pre-organic molecules to complicated organisms, and the fact that it took billions of years even to get to those basic molecules even before life got going. I think about how all of the component parts of everything we see on earth were born in the hearts of exploding supernovae. How millions of years of evolution can take a single species and turn one branch into a T-Rex, and another into a peacock. How thanks to a massive meteor or asteroid impact in the Yucatan 65 million years ago, we ourselves and all the other mammals were able to develop from small rodent like creatures dodging T-Rex footprints into one of the dominant families of organisms on the planet. I think about how environment determines form, such as in the way whales and other cetaceans originally evolved from a wolf like looking creature that originally lived much of its life in water, like hippos do today.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I contemplate all of this and marvel at how it all fits together in so many vast combinations, constantly in flux and impermanent. Everything is constantly adapting and mutating fractally on different time and distance scales. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable, everything flows stochastically from the smallest neutrino to the largest cluster of galaxies and everything else in between. I see all of this and I elate in the fact that I'm here to see it, along with probably countless other species throughout the multiverse. It's unlikely that we'll get to share that experience with them any time soon due to the distances in space and time involved, but it's sheer arrogance and ego to assume that in all of that vastness we would be the only ones to be able to enjoy it. To me, if anything is going to be covered by the notions of "holy" or "sacred", it's this contemplation of reality and all that it entails, and even using that religious language seems insufficient due to the petty and parochial concerns of so much of religion. In the face of all of that, there's an epiphany about how very cosmically insignificant we really are, and I find that incredibly liberating.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Don't get me wrong. Some people might get all morose about this kind of thing, but that kind of nihilistic despair just doesn't bother me at all. There doesn't seem to be anything out there that is disapproving of our ethical decisions, or what kinds of fashion we wear, or people we associate with. Even if there were something like a god, what are the odds it would even bother to notice us or single us out as more deserving of punishment or reward than anything else? All of the pressures that religion likes to try to put on us are irrelevant. We don't need to worry about the external forces, even the natural ones, because they're going to do what they do. What really matters, when one has a full realization of our actual place in the cosmos, is how we treat ourselves and each other here on this pale blue dot.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And this brings me to my recent exploration of Buddhism.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Jennifer Michael Hecht's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Doubt-Doubters-Innovation-Jefferson-Dickinson/dp/0060097957/">Doubt, A History</a>, she talks about various systems that are kind of between a religion and a philosophical school as commonly understood. She calls these "graceful life philosophies." What a GLP is focused on is a philosophical approach to how one should live one's life. They may or may not include propositional beliefs about the world or universe, but they do seem to share the fact that whether they have them or not, they are much more focused on the process of living one's life, not accepting the propositional belief. Hecht uses the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans as some of the western examples, and the earliest forms of Buddhism as an eastern one, along with Confucianism and Taoism, Taoism to a somewhat lesser extent. Over time, the western ones have pretty much died off, and the eastern ones have all pretty much transitioned to full religions, with all the superstition, unfalsifiable beliefs, and authoritarian structures that that implies.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have no use for religion. But I like the idea of the graceful life philosophy (GLP). I think when I went from my initial stage of atheism at an early age to paganism and occultism, what I was really looking for was a GLP. I have some sympathies with Cynicism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism and have for a while. I'm much more Epicurean lately in comparison to my past flirtations with Cynicism and Stoicism, especially when I account for Epicureanism's history as a synonym for atheism. Its long association with Democritus' atomism and its opposition of supernaturalism and focus on ending suffering and its conception of pleasure as the greatest good also helps. Epicureanism is often slandered as hedonism in the materialistic sense, but the early Epicureans focused on moderation in all things, seeking to increase pleasure by increasing their understanding of the natural world and the self, and realized that by limiting the degree to which they allowed their desires to control them, they could maximize the pleasure of existence. Which is a perfect transition to Buddhism.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">How does one get back to Buddhism the graceful life philosophy, rather than what it is in so many places today, Buddhism the religion? Owen Flanagan, author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bodhisattvas-Brain-Buddhism-Naturalized/dp/0262016044/">The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized</a>, has this to say in the introduction of that book:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; border-collapse: collapse; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Imagine Buddhism without rebirth and without a karmic system that guarantees justice ultimately will be served, without nirvana, without bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves, without Buddha worlds, without nonphysical states of mind, without any deities, without heaven and hell realms, without oracles, and without lamas who are reincarnations of lamas. What would be left? My answer is that what would remain would be an interesting and defensible philosophical theory with a metaphysics, a theory about how we come to know and what we can know, and an ethics, a theory about virtue and vice and how best to live. This philosophical theory is worthy of attention by analytical philosophers and scientific naturalists because it is deep. Buddhism naturalized, if there is or can be such a thing, is compatible with the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and with a committment to scientific materialism. Such a total philosophy, again if there is or could be such a thing that could be credibly called "Buddhist" after subtracting what is psychologically and sociologically understandable, but that is epistemically speaking incredible superstition and magical thinking, would be what I call "Buddhism naturalized," or something in its vicinity. Such a theory might shed light on the human predicament, on how finite material beings such as human animals fit into the larger scheme of material being. Because such a theory would speak honestly, without the mind-numbing and wishful hocus pocus that infects much Mahayana Buddhism, but possibly not so much early Theravada Buddhism, Buddhism naturalized, if there is or can be such a thing, delivers what Buddhism possibly uniquely among the world's live spiritual traditions, promised to offer: no false promises, no postive illusions, no delusions. False self-serving belief, moha, is a sin for Buddhists."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's several different types of Buddhism in the world today. Theravada, Mahayana, Tibetan (Tantric), as well as multiple variations within those categories, like Zen. Zen certainly does have less of the mythological accretions that the rest of Mahayana does, though Zen itself is a subset of Mahayana. Zen still does retain a smattering of notions like rebirth<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"> and karma, it just doesn't accentuate them nearly as much. </span></span><br />
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<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; display: inline; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In addition to Flanagan's book, which I am still in the beginning of, I've been listening to a lot of talks by Stephen Batchelor, and reading some of his books. I just finished his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Confession-Buddhist-Atheist-Stephen-Batchelor/dp/0385527063">Confession of a Buddhist Atheist</a>, and have listened to the audiobook version of his <a href="http://www.soundstrue.com/shop/Buddhism-Without-Beliefs/2097.productdetails">Buddhism Without Beliefs</a>, the longer <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Without-Beliefs-Contemporary-Awakening/dp/1573226564/">book</a> version of which is next in my reading queue after Flanagan.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;">Stephen Batchelor's approach is that he takes all of the stuff that pre-existed Buddhism like the supernatural elements and strips them out, keeping only the stuff that Gotama himself taught. Gotama did mention stuff like reincarnation, but it was part of the historical culture that Gotama existed in, and it's not actually necessary to believe in that kind of stuff for the tenets of Buddhist philosophy and practice to make sense or be useful. Basically, it, along with karma and various other things that do exist in the early Buddhist materials are analogous to the few propositional beliefs that Cynicism and Stoicism contain, they're there, but they're not the focus. The difference between Flanagan and Batchelor is that Batchelor is a former monk of the Tibetan and Zen traditions, whereas Flanagan is a neuroscientist and philosopher. Both, however, along with </span>various others, seem to be calling for a form of Buddhism that more fits Hecht's terminology of the GLP, and that's what interests me in particular. The result ends up being very much a form of secular humanism with more emphasis on contemplative practice, and that's right up my alley.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This has been long enough, so I'm going to post it now. I will followup shortly with my understanding of the philosophical tenets of Buddhism.</span>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-63196018082592627832011-09-03T04:00:00.000-05:002011-09-03T04:00:08.242-05:00What a fool this mortal's been: Part 6.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Down the Rabbit Hole and Out Again.</span><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;">Every summer in high school I worked summers at a Boy Scout camp near San Marcos, El Rancho Cima. My third summer there, between Junior and Senior years of high school, I became a pagan.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I know it's kind of an odd place for it to happen, considering how conservative and Christian the BSA is as an institution, but it's full of high school kids, and there's a lot who do not tow the line. I also got drunk and high for the first time while working at camp, but those are different stories.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Anyway, that particular summer I made friends with a guy named Brian H. who hadn't worked there in previous years. He was a Wiccan. As he explained to me, that meant that rather than the kind of church I was used to, his religion was all about nature, with a God and Goddess, which were balanced more than the single father god of Christianity.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">This blew my mind. I asked him about the Greek gods, and he explained to me that the various pagan gods of all cultures were aspects of the God and Goddess, like different masks that they would wear for the benefit of the different needs of different cultures. The gods were distinctive spirits that were different personalities of the cosmic all, the life force that made up the universe, divided into God and Goddess for balance, light and dark, yin and yang, but not good and evil, since both had their good and evil sides, like we humans did. The best part was that he also told me that magic was real, and through ritual we could make things happen, either ourselves, or by asking the gods to intervene for us. They just asked for offerings of juice or food, left out for them. He explained that of course the offerings would be eaten by animals or whatnot, but that was ok, since animals were part of nature, and since the gods were of nature, they'd get it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">To me, this was fantastic. I had been reconciled to the fact that Greek religion was dead, that no one actually worshipped the pagan gods anymore. Now not only did I find out that I could worship the Greek gods if I wanted to, I could worship ALL of the gods. They were all real in some way. He recommended that if I wanted to find out more, there were books I could check out. Well, as established, I didn't need to be told twice.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">That weekend when we went into town, I found <i>Living Wicca: A Further Guide for the Solitary Practitioner </i>by Scott Cunningham at Hastings, so I snatched it up and devoured it. It was a sequel, apparently, but that didn't seem to matter. Apparently I didn't need much, just some candles, incense and some Fruitopia that I saved for a libation. I lit the candles and incense (sandalwood, which I still like) and said a short little prayer dedicating myself to Athena, always my favorite goddess, being both an awesome warrior and a goddess of wisdom. And so it began.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;">I was having a good time. I enjoyed the hell out of ritual, especially on the occasion when it seemed to work, sometimes with disastrous consequences. For instance, I was requested to conduct a ritual to help relieve stress in one of my friends by his wife, and as a result, he quit his job. I was a bit shocked he would do something like that, but he ended up going back to school, and eventually becoming a teacher, so it worked out in the end. Now, of course, I don't see any real significance to the ritual. If he was stressed out enough at work that his wife would request my help, it's not much of a stretch to predict he was on the verge of quitting anyway. There were plenty of other rituals I did that were either for goals so vague that it was impossible to nail down a result, or simply didn't produce anything at all. No one ever said that every ritual worked, however, sometimes the gods just didn't want to help. They were well known to be fickle, so it was easy to shrug off the misses.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I was starting to waver on the whole religion angle, however. Try as I might, and as relatively benign as they were, I just couldn't really believe in the God and Goddess, or the literal existence of any of the other gods. I had good evidence (HA!) that magic itself worked, and frankly I was more interested in that anyway. I had heard rumors amongst the other pagans that I knew of something called ceremonial or high magic which was supposed to be the advanced stuff, and really overly complicated. Most of them shunned it, preferring the relative simplicity and innocence of paganism, but unlike them, I had no real sense of devotion to the gods. I was much more interested in getting things done. In essence, I wanted power, and I also wanted more structure in ritual. Pagan ritual was kinda rough around the edges and while it had its good parts, it didn't have enough in the way of formal robes and other costumes, fancy symbols on the walls or altar, and not enough fancy jewelry. High magic had all that in spades, so deeper down the rabbit hole I went.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I started with <i>Modern Magick</i> by Donald Michael Kraig. His book is a great intro to the subject, kind of a high magic equivalent of the book I replaced Cunningham with, <i>The Complete Book of Witchcraft</i> by Raymond Buckland, otherwise known as Uncle Bucky's Big Blue Book. This was exactly what I needed. It was constructed in 11 lessons, starting out with basic relaxation and visualization exercises, moving on to elemental weapon construction and banishing rituals, up to evoking angels and demons and charging them to accomplish tasks for you via symbols engraved on medallions, looking up the equipment needed for ritual in tables of correspondence to make sure you had the right elemental, planetary, and zodiac colors, incenses, etc.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Ritual magic is a beautiful system of nested heirarchies seemingly specifically designed to keep a certain kind of mind highly entertained while accomplishing absolutely nothing at all. It was my kind of mental masturbation. I went from Kraig's primer to the hard stuff, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn">Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn</a> rituals, on to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley">Aleister Crowley</a>'s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelema">Thelema</a>, all the time the rituals and symbolism getting more sophisticated and complicated and the meaning more and more arcane. Crowley's motto for his publication The Equinox was "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion". For years, I was fooled into thinking that was what I was doing.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">It wasn't all bad, of course. Buried in this pile of Arcana are some genuine pearls of wisdom. I still find Crowley's <a href="http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib77.html">Liber Oz</a> to be one of the most succinct and elegant statements on freedom ever written. Crowley does encourage one on many, many occasions to be skeptical of one's own results, and to document everything one does in one's magical diary so that they have a record of past results to compare present ones to, and to revisit past insights to re-examine assumptions when new info comes in, etc. He even put various traps in his works meant to trip up those who weren't as disciplined in their approach to magick as Crowley would like. Obviously as the founder of a religion and someone who regarded themselves as a Prophet of a New Aeon (the Aeon of Horus, the forerunner of the newager's Age of Aquarius) he was still a bit of a supernaturalist, but he made a greater effort than others I was familiar with, and I have to give credit to Crowley for being one of several sources within occultism itself that put me on the path that eventually led me out of it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Ceremonial magick was all well and good, but as with paganism before it, it was getting tiresome. I still liked the fancy rituals, but my success rate from workings was no better than it had been before, and nothing seemed to do anything to improve it. This is around the time that I found chaos magic.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic">Chaos magic</a> was to ceremonial magick as Black Flag is to Pink Floyd. It's loud, it's brash, it's punk as hell, and it has no use for centuries of tradition, it just wants to get down to business. You don't need all that planetary bollocks, you can make up your own symbol systems on the fly. Chaos magick primarily uses sigils based on the methods of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Osman_Spare">Austin Osman Spare</a>, a former associate of Crowley's who was a celebrated artist at the beginning of his career, and gradually descended into obscurity and poverty. He did fantastic art that prefigured a lot of the surrealists, but he also had his own system of magic. His notion was that one could write out a statement of intent, such as I WISH TO POSSESS THE STRENGTH OF A TIGER, and then craft a sigil out of the letters. Here's an example of some of Spare's sigils:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/Alphabet-of-Desire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="91" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/Alphabet-of-Desire.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">One then takes the sigil, focuses on it while putting oneself into a trance state (called gnosis) and the theory goes that by doing this, one's subconscious is able to get the magic done for the chaos magician without all that pesky awareness and anticipation getting in the way. Chaos magicians often banish by laughing at themselves after engaging in such an act, because it's patently ridiculous to expect to achieve results this way, and taking oneself too seriously is what ceremonial magicians do.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Chaos magicians also engage in a practice called paradigm shifting. What this entails is that you do everything you can to put yourself into a different mindset than your natural one, if you're a Republican, try to think like a Democrat, if you subscribe to Fortean Times, go read the Skeptical Inquirer for a while. The idea is to transcend the idea of the self, and to realize that you are a collection of conditioned reflexes and habits, in all that you do, and paradigm shifting is a way of attempting to hack your own self-illusions and come out the other side a more well-rounded person. I still consider this kind of thing a valuable exercise to engage in periodically, myself. There's no real supernatural bullshit attached to it, it's a good way to broaden one's perspective. So again, while the results of my sigil activities were still stuck at the same success rate as before, little to none, and nothing that couldn't be explained via coincidence or selective attention, I was continuing to become more skeptical, while still practicing magic. But my magical practice was becoming less and less about supernatural forces and entities and more about ways of fucking with my own head, to break myself out of my illusions. For this, even more than chaos magic, I have a huge debt that I owe to Robert Anton Wilson.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Anton_Wilson">Robert Anton Wilson</a> is the guy who wrote the Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea back in the 70s, the greatest conspiracy novel ever written as far as I'm concerned. It's a huge piece of ontological anarchist agitprop that starts out as a crime novel, quickly wraps itself deeply in the lore of various conspiracy theories, and goes on to simultaneously champion and mock pretty much all of the sacred cows of the occult, the new age, the UFO heads, the Kennedy assassination theorists, and every possible fringe group one can think of, and many that one can't. If you haven't ever read it, I highly recommend it, although upon first reading it tends to make one's head spin. It's like a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet made of LSD-25 ricocheted into your perceptions, and was exactly what I needed.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Wilson, both in Illuminatus! and his other works like Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger advocates militant agnosticism about EVERYTHING. Everything we interact with passes through many filters before the signal is eventually interpreted by our brains and then propagated to our conscious awareness. These filters include both the physical organs that transmit the signals themselves and the various cognitive biases that we use to interpret information. So often, we filter out what we don't expect to see, or manufacture things that we do want to or expect to see. Anyone who's undergone this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY">Basketball Test</a> has had this demonstrated to them. Wilson would conduct tests where he had two people come into a room, one would stab the other, and afterwards leave. Wilson would ask how many people saw the knife, usually getting a lot of them to agree, only to have the the "knife" revealed as a banana.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">In Prometheus Rising, Wilson offers an exercise early on in the book. He says that if nothing else, this exercise, done long enough, will pay for the price of the book. As you go about your day, think about quarters. Visualize yourself finding quarters lying on the ground. When you actually do this exercise, as I have, lo and behold, you will find quarters all over the place. The question is, did you make the quarters appear, or did you find them because you had primed yourself to look for them by thinking about them? Wilson's point is that all of us use various webs of expectation and prejudice to deal with the world we live in. He calls these maps, and reminds us not to confuse the map for the territory. Question all assumptions, all assertions, and always remember to question your own maps most of all. Allow for the possibility of all things to be true, because you never know.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">So between chaos magic and Wilson's model agnosticism, I was a lot more skeptical than I had been for a long time, but still, there was a problem. The problem with being agnostic about everything is that it leads to a kind of solipsistic existence, where you're not sure about anything ever. Basically, questioning is good, but you can't really get to a point where you know anything. Wilson shoots himself in the foot in this manner by being too willing to uncritically accept certain types of claims. He ends up justifying some aspects of Christian Science in some places because rather than the placebo effect being what it is, a useful effect to test the effectiveness of real medicine, he confuses it for something that can be relied upon to heal people via mind over matter thinking. Wilson even wrote a whole book on CSICOP called The New Inquisition because of his inability to recognize that agnosticism is only the beginning position of the search for knowledge, not the end point.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Eventually I joined the Temple of Set while still retaining a lot of my agnostic positions. I had a good time, met a lot of great people, and participated in a lot of fun, but again, the actual tangible results of my magical work were negligable. I don't feel the need to go into too much depth about the Temple here, because it's not especially relevant to this tale of my journey from paganism to skepticism. Perhaps in another post sometime. I do mention it, however, because the Temple did provide me with the tool that eventually led to my leaving the organization and having the epiphany that allowed me to finally drop my attachment to the supernatural.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">The Temple of Set has a huge, multi-category reading list full of books on a wide variety of subjects from ancient philosophy to history to political science to psychology and satanism (it being an offshoot of the Church of Satan) and a plethora of other interesting subjects. Buried in that massive list is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469">The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark</a>, by Carl Sagan.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I don't know who got it put on the list, but whoever he or she is, I thank them profusely. I already knew who Carl Sagan was, of course, I'd seen and read Contact, I'd seen bits and pieces of Cosmos, and seen him on tv a lot growing up, talking about science. He was one of the people who when I saw them on a show, I always stopped and watched, because it was going to be good. I may have been a pagan and an occultist, but I never got rid of the love of science I had engendered in me early on, as covered in the early posts in this series. I had never heard of this book, and I dutifully bought it on one of the many shopping trips I made to add to my collection of Temple reading list books. Unfortunately, it ended up sitting on my shelf for years, unread, until I finally got around to it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">A year or so before I left the Temple, my active participation wound down to barely anything, simply due to other people being busy with their own lives and whatnot, and I wasn't doing much magic anymore anyway. I was spending most of my time working and dealing with the back problem (herniated disc) exacerbated by work. At some point, I came across <i>The God Delusion</i> in a bookstore, and I figured I'd check it out. I knew Dawkins from <i>The Selfish Gene</i> which I had bought years ago as a chaos magician because I was interested in memetics. The memetics section was the only part I'd read (I've since read it multiple times, and I'm considering pursuing biology as a result, but that's another story). I'd also seen <i>The Root of All Evil </i>and liked it. Ever since the experiences when I was younger, I either didn't believe in God or I wished he was real so I could kill him, so Dawkins riffing on JHVH and the Christians, Muslims and Jews was just fine with me. So I read <i>The God Delusion</i> happily, got a big kick out of it without really considering it relevant to my own odd perspective on the supernatural, and when I finished, I was looking for something else in that vein. I ended up finding Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and I read and re-read their stuff over and over. Eventually, I decided that since the Temple wasn't doing much for me anymore, it was time to leave, so I emailed them politely that I was resigning. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Curiously, after resigning, I actually felt a brief resurgence of magical enthusiasm, and I started to reengage with a strain of magick I had enjoyed, early hermetics based in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Alexandria specifically, in the early Christian era. As I was researching neo-Platonism again and working up an alternate Greek Qabalistic Tree that I was going to create, I was still engaged with reading the atheist books. I had also been introduced to the Point of Inquiry podcasts shortly before I left the Temple when Don Webb, a former High Priest of the Temple was interviewed, and I was working my way through the backlog of episodes. After hearing Harris and Dawkins interviewed, I picked up and re-read <i>The God Delusion </i>in audiobook, and when I was done, I recalled that Dawkins had quoted from Carl Sagan in the book, and my eye fell upon <i>The Demon-Haunted World. </i>Time to read that.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">This was exactly what I needed. Sagan broke it down, again and again, exactly what I had felt was missing from my Wilsonian agnosticism. I didn't have to be satisfied with my solipsistic illusions. There were ways of finding out the truth. From the Dragon in my Garage to the baloney detection kit and beyond, this was exactly the shot in the brain I needed. I applied the critical thinking skills I got from that book to my own residual superstitions. My conception of deity was indistinguishable from an invisible dragon in the garage. My own seldom effective magick was a mix of cognitive biases, wishful thinking, and placebo effect. I recognized in depth a lot of the same behaviors described within the book in myself and my fellow occultists. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Carl Sagan basically handed me the tools to recognize that I had spent the last 17 years or so telling myself comforting lies and fantasies, and that I didn't have to do it anymore. I was free. Finally, I was free.</div>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-91031233919155935472011-09-03T00:42:00.001-05:002011-09-03T00:44:48.502-05:00What a fool this mortal's been: Part 5.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Priming the Pump.</span><br />
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Sophomore year of high school I fell in love for the first time. Sarah was a girl who had just moved here from Seattle, which I thought was cool as shit, this being the heyday of grunge. I met her in art class, and we began hanging out a lot. Eventually my current best friend at the time got jealous that he wasn't the one monopolizing my time anymore and said some particularly nasty things about her. We got in a fight, I beat him down hard, and impressed the hell out of her for defending her honor. Chivalry's not dead. When I told her that I loved her, she said it back, and thus began the most tumultous and irresponsible relationship of my life. <br />
<br />
Prior to meeting Sarah, I was always a huge geek. I still am, but I never dated, the one girl who ever even got close to getting involved with me was a neighbor in Ohio who said she wanted to date, but really just wanted to laugh at me with her friends. People can be such assholes. <br />
<br />
Sarah, however, was the real deal. She was my first kiss, my first love, my first everything. I was obsessed with her. The fact that it got intimate quickly probably was a huge factor. The problem is, Sarah didn't have issues, she had subscriptions. She was manic-depressive. She was psychic. She was regularly abducted by UFOs. She used to hang out with Kurt Cobain before he died, and knew lots of other grunge stars before they were big. She was 14 years old, I was 15. Looking back I'm amazed that I fell for all this, but what the hell, I was in love and lust. The manic-depression was real, she had the medication for it (albeit the wrong meds, which I found out years later), but the rest of it was probably a result of the disorder.<br />
<br />
I still remember very quickly coming home one day after school, watching tv while lounging on the couch, and kind of half-dozing. At some point, I heard in my head, "KEITH!" very loudly in Sarah's voice. I shot up wide awake, looking around, but there was no one else home yet. I called Sarah up and told her about it. <br />
<br />
After a short pause she said, "Yeah, I thought I had a connection."<br />
<br />
"Don't do that!" I replied. "You scared the shit out of me."<br />
<br />
She promised to give me fair warning next time. Looking back, there was no next time, and I add this to the list of many incidents that in retrospect were examples of her taking advantage of my credulity about the paranormal. There were plenty of others. If we were outside at night, sometimes she would seem to go off into a trance state and attempt to wander off, saying that the visitors were calling to her, and I would have to physically restrain her. Other times she would show me marks on her body, the one I recall the most being a bunch of triangles in a circular pattern of raised, burgundy welts on her thigh. It was probably about 3 inches across, and scared the shit out of me. Years later, I realized she probably fell asleep against the suction intake of her whirlpool or hot tub.<br />
<br />
I don't know how much she was consciously manipulating me, or how much was her mental state riffing off what I fed her. What I do know is that I was in a heavy imprint vulnerability state at the time, losing my virginity, getting justification for my paranormal inclinations and some great sex (any sex is great when it's your first sex) and having a number done on my head. <br />
<br />
It didn't last of course. The whole relationship lasted about 4 months in real time, although it seems like years in my memory. I was basically high on her the entire time, and then she dumped me. Even that had a seeming supernatural component. <br />
<br />
I had just walked her to her class, was trying to kiss her goodbye, and she told me "I don't think we should see each other anymore." As soon as the words left her mouth, I slumped against the wall, rocked back as if I had been physically struck, and then the lights went out, literally.<br />
<br />
On the day that she dumped me (February 11, 1994, Friday before Valentine's Day), we had a power outage at McCullough High School for most of the day. The power went out between 1st and 2nd period and didn't come back on until around 1pm or so. I ended up stuck in my Japanese classroom in the dark for hours, trying to come to terms with the new development, with my friend Tosh commiserating with me over the recent loss of his own girlfriend. I know we were both a nightmare to Mrs. Reade, our Japanese teacher that whole time and the rest of the year. I seem to remember at one time getting up and banging my head against the blackboard over and over again. It was a bad scene.<br />
<br />
The rest of that year was miserable. Eventually it culminated in a major depressive disorder for me, which I was diagnosed with a year or so later. To this day I take medication to control my moods, although I have a much healthier outlook than I used to. I was a bit of a pseudo-stalker to her the rest of that year, not helped by the fact that we were still in art class together, and it was just a bad scene all around.<br />
<br />
Maybe 4 or 5 years after sophomore year, I got in contact with Sarah again, I hadn't seen her for a while, she'd ended up going to another school somewhere during my junior year. I found out that when we were dating, she was in a manic phase, and broke up with me as she was transitioning into a depressive phase. I also discovered that she had been prescribed meds that didn't help her at all when we were dating, and she didn't even take them that often. She was on proper meds now. I showed her some of the stuff I had written that was inspired by the relationship, and she cried about it, etc. She was much stabler, and we were able to forgive each other, me for her treatment of me during the relationship, and her for my treatment of her after it. So I got closure in the end, but the damage was done. By the time of this reconciliation, I was already getting deeper and deeper into the occult by the day.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-71804259299783420462011-09-02T07:25:00.002-05:002011-09-03T00:44:24.276-05:00What a fool this mortal's been: Part 4.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">How I Fell in Love with Gods.</span><br />
<br />
As far back as I can remember, I've been reading voraciously. I read science books, mysteries, horror, fantasy, science fiction, anything I could get my hands on. Very early on, I ended up hooked on books about "real" ghost stories, or monsters like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. I didn't read them to the exclusion of other stuff, but if I found a pseudoscience or supernatural book, I absorbed it. I was already familiar with wizards and what not, both as good guys and bad guys, but this stuff was marginally better because it was real, or so the books said. So I learned about Atlantis, and Yetis, and UFOs and the ghosts of the Tower of London and the Winchester mansion and on and on and on. Hey, they were in the non-fiction section of the library. The librarians wouldn't get that wrong, the were the keepers of the books! Knowledge came from books, they knew where the books were, therefore the librarians were the masters of all knowledge.<br />
<br />
So I absorbed all this stuff and internalized it. It appealed to me in the same way the fiction I was reading did, but it was better because it was real. Sure, other people told me that Bigfoot and UFOs didn't exist, but had they read the books I had? Of course not, so they were easy to ignore.<br />
<br />
Fast forward a few years to sixth grade. In sixth grade I found Edith Hamilton's <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology_(book)">Mythology</a>, </i>and thus was I introduced in earnest to paganism. Now, I didn't believe in these gods yet, I still put them in a class with Jesus, who I didn't agree with, but man, they were so much more entertaining. They had great stories, not the boring stuff like in the Bible. Real heroes, huge monsters, epic wars, and I even found out that some of the heroes I already knew about like Hercules were related to them. Thor was even in there, I thought he was just a comic book character. This was more like it.<br />
<br />
I distinctly remember having a conversation with my dad, who didn't yet know that I had already given up on Catholicism, why we didn't learn about the Greek gods. I was willing to let God-God be in charge, but I was arguing that we should let the Greek gods in too, maybe have them work for God. Their stories were just so much more interesting. He said we couldn't do that because the Greek gods weren't real. This didn't really take, for the obvious reason.<br />
<br />
In the second half of sixth grade we moved to Cincinatti, Ohio for a year and half, returning the summer before eight grade started for me. Ohio was nice because I got to enjoy real winter again, and it wasn't so hot all the time. It was also great because not only did I still have the Edith Hamilton book, which I read and reread until it fell apart, in seventh grade we actually got to study Greek history and mythology in social studies, spending what seems in memory to be about half of the year on it, although I don't trust that. I do know that I got to learn about Sparta and Athens, the Battle of Thermopylae and the war against Persia. I learned about the foundation of direct democracy and that the Greeks were really honest about rulers who didn't let people vote. Even the guy who seized power called himself a tyrant, and wasn't that bad a guy.<br />
<br />
As cool as all that was, the best part, by far, was the mythology, especially the Trojan War. The Odyssey was ok, but the War was the best. I was already familiar with it from Hamilton, but we got to draw pictures and do projects and all kinds of cool stuff. The coolest part about the Trojan War is that the gods and goddesses of the Greeks did not fuck around. Ares strode out onto the battlefield to fight for the Trojans and Athena showed up and called bullshit on him. Hermes was all over the place like a UPS guy on meth. If you pissed off Zeus, he upped and smacked you with a lightning bolt, and did pretty well with the ladies too, which was a good thing, because otherwise where would all the heroes come from?<br />
<br />
The Greek gods didn't pussyfoot around with bullshit like burning bushes or visions, they'd roll up and say hi, although usually as a prelude to messing up your day, although they could also give you a bunch of gifts in exchange for favors, like when Athena hooked up with Perseus to put a hit on Medusa. They were there, they were more like superheroes, and I couldn't find any instances of utter dick moves like when God wanted Abraham to kill his kid. They punished people, sure, but only people who deserved it, and they rewarded loyalty with favors. These gods I could get behind. I didn't believe in them yet, but between my newly discovered love for them and my predilection for pseudoscience and pop myths, the two things would converge in a few years.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-58183787398475268942011-08-31T22:27:00.000-05:002011-08-31T22:27:10.681-05:00Mea CulpaIn a recent discussion, I casually tossed off a reference to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet">God Helmet</a> in reference to one of the ways human beings can be deceived about their experiences. I said something like "you can stick magnets on people's heads and make them see God." I was remembering when I saw it being covered on Nova or some other science show. <br />
<br />
As one can see from reading the Wikipedia page on it, let alone the actual scientific studies, the god helmet effect is not conclusively proved as of yet, and there are some problems in replicating the initial results. It needs a lot more study before one can draw conclusions based on it. <br />
<br />
Now, the God Helmet isn't the only example I used, I also mentioned various forms of chemicals by which I meant DMT psychoactive drugs that seem to have better supported evidence about the kinds of effects they can produce, but the fact remains that I was not using the best reasoning I could. This is an obvious limitation of debate, at least over short term timescales. It's also an example of how even proponents of a standard can fail to live up to them.<br />
<br />
What this says to me is that I need to remember to strive to be more humble when presenting my own claims, especially when criticizing others about theirs. It doesn't make me less of an atheist or a skeptic, it's just a reminder of how sometimes I can be a dick about it.masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-57605486381926966892011-08-20T12:21:00.001-05:002011-08-20T12:31:10.138-05:00A clarification interlude.A few clarifications, directed at some recent discussions:<br />
<br />
One doesn't prove a negative, because obviously, that is impossible. However, if there is no evidence of a thing's existence, there is no good reason to assume that it does exist. See the partial namesake of this blog, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot">Russell's teapot.</a> If I were to say "Russell's teapot doesn't exist," technically I would be incorrect, because I can't know that for certain. However, it would be a huge waste of time to need to spell out that distinction for every single potential thing without evidence for it, so assume that if I do say that if something doesn't exist, I mean that there is no good reason to think that it does. I'm only interested in the existence of things for which there is evidence, either direct observed, or indirect (such as how dark matter is observed indirectly by calculation of the mass that should be there, though it is of course theoretical).<br />
<br />
I was indeed a sincere occultist during the years I spent in pursuing it. I was sincere in my search for truth by pursuing it. I never really had a position of faith, where I believed without evidence, but for a long time my standards of what I considered "good enough" evidence were a lot lower than what they are now. Anyone who assumes that because I have now given up on even that meager subscription to supernaturalism that I therefore never was sincere in my pursuit of it should familiarize themselves with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman">No True Scotsman fallacy</a>. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Science is not a belief system. Nor is critical thinking. Both are methodologies. Neither require one to presume the existence of anything prior to finding evidence of it. When one does that, one is reasoning backwards. What I had realized is that I was presuming the existence of supernatural forces and then went looking for evidence to confirm it, conveniently ignoring contradictory evidence and explanations for my so-called "evidence" of the supernatural. <br />
<br />
As I learned more and more about the basic irrationality of humans, our very flawed perceptual apparatus, our inability to estimate statistical probabilities accurately, our tendency to fill in gaps in what we perceive with things we expect to see, the various chemicals both external and in our brain that can cause us to see what isn't there, and a plethora of other things that show that seeing is not believing at all, and that just because I experienced something, doesn't mean that it has any existence outside of my own head unless I can confirm it with others.<br />
<br />
We'll never fully achieve a sense of objective reality, due to those filters and others, but if we want to talk about things outside of our heads, we're forced to rely on confirmation from others who can reproduce the same results as we have gotten, and those others need to be from outside of our own little ideological circle, so that if we are deluded due to something we really wish is true, we don't rely on confirmation from those who have the same biases, or those who can be coerced into parroting our own beliefs back at us out of social pressure. Still, we can achieve a degree of intersubjective knowledge about the "real" world by putting these things into practice.<br />
<br />
So it wasn't just the lack of evidence in the supernatural that got me to the point where I didn't believe in it anymore, but it was the positive evidence of the many, many different ways that we as a species have tools of perception that can be confused, wrong, and in error about what it is we see. Also the way we form ideas in our heads, and draw faulty conclusions based on prior assumptions, and I can no longer find any justifiable way to believe in supernatural phenomena based on current evidence.<br />
<br />
Some will object that there are aspects of the supernatural that are unfalsifiable, and therefore immune to analysis, and that somehow it's defensible to believe in them without evidence. My response is that for those things that are truly unfalsifiable, existing outside the natural universe and unable to interact with the natural universe, we don't need to even consider them, as they have no way of effecting us. For those things that some claim are unfalsifiable but also claim can exert influence upon the natural universe, via healing, magic spells, etc, each of those assertions are testable in themselves, and therefore falsifiable. So the attempt to try to hold on to supernatural ideas by placing them in a fortress unassailable by science and reason only works to the extent that such ideas have no way of being at all operative in the universe. Supernaturalists who are ok with this, I have no argument with, but if they want their version of the supernatural to be productive, they have no recourse.<br />
<br />
This is not to say that I think that there can never be evidence for the supernatural. I can conceive of many things that would prove the existence of the phenomena itself, randomized symbols and messages sent from one psychic to another under strict laboratory controls, performance of reiki or acupuncture that consistently and reproducibly beats placebos in effectiveness, actual manifestations to visible appearance of summoned demons that can be repeated in a variety of controlled circumstances. These successful results for the claims of the supernatural have yet to occur, and in some cases have been falsified already. I for one encourage the continued research into this area, because if such effects could be demonstrated, I think they'd be damn useful. But until there is evidence to support such claims, I sadly have no reason to give credence to the existence of such phenomena in the credulous way I would have done so a short time ago. I remain open to their possible existence, but no longer open to the uncritical thinking that allowed me to deceive myself for so long.</div>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-80482746230093202822011-08-16T09:14:00.004-05:002011-08-16T09:32:07.841-05:00What a fool this mortal's been: Part 3.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Why Science Kicks Ass, and How I Learned to Hate Jesus.</span><br />
<br />
To pick up where I left off, I never did believe in Jesus again, or any of the other tenets of Christianity, let alone Judaism or Islam (which I only really became aware of at all when <i>Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves</i> came out). That ship had sailed, and it was never coming back. I feel towards Christianity the way Christopher Hitchens feels about it, maybe more so. Atheist isn't a sufficiently strong term for my feelings towards the JHVH meme and it's associated works. Misotheism, "hatred of God" is a good technical term, but really all that can express it accurately is apopleptic swearing. That gradually developed after I'd already stopped believing, just by learning more and more about it, both doctrine and history, and becoming immersed in a much more Christian culture than I was originally exposed to. Becoming a pagan later certainly didn't help me much on that front, but that's what this installment is about.<br />
<br />
I first started to really hate God in the second half of 5th grade, when I was 10 years old. My parents had moved us from New York down here to Texas, and I was attending Wilkerson Elementary in The Woodlands, where we lived. This had already been a miserable experience, because not only was it so damn hot all the time, but the people were really stupid. I kept hearing all kinds of weird stuff about Rebels and no one seemed to be talking about Star Wars, and everybody thought I played baseball, and there's no way they'd let a 10 year old even on the field at Yankee Stadium, let alone play.*<br />
<br />
To add insult to injury, they would never shut up about Jesus, and some of these kids actually seemed to enjoy church! What kind of kid enjoys church? There's monster movies on! In New York, I was forced to go to church, but nobody actually expected me to like it, just to behave, and I didn't have a single friend who thought it was anything more than a chore. These kids were proud to go to church, they acted like Jesus was their best friend, and not only that, they didn't like science.<br />
<br />
I loved science. I loved science since before I can remember being aware that it was science. I watched Mr. Wizard's World all the time on Nickelodeon. Mr. Wizard told me about doppler effect, the speed of sound, electricity, and all kinds of cool stuff. I knew why ice didn't overflow the glass when it melted. I could make a big square aluminum can cave in on itself with a bucket of ice water and a flame, but I wasn't allowed to play with the flame to show how. I could make a balloon stick to my head. Science was awesome.<br />
<br />
I couldn't understand why these kids didn't like science. Hell, the best part of moving here was that I actually got to go to NASA! This is back in the day, when you could tour Johnson Space Center properly. Space Center Houston is a joke. When I went there as a kid, what the hell did I need rides and games for, I had a giant Saturn V rocket right there! I could try on astronaut helmets! They had science stuff, and it was real. Some of it had actually been in space. It was like going to the Natural History museum in NYC, but better in one respect (and only one, as you'll see below), because as cool as the dinosaur fossils were, this stuff was made by scientists like Mr. Spock! (I was 10, dammit.)<br />
<br />
But no, these kids didn't like it. For some reason, they thought they couldn't be friends with Jesus if they liked science. That made no sense to me, but then, I didn't believe in Jesus, either. Some of my friends in New York had had imaginary friends when I was younger, but they grew out of it. I never had one myself, but I assumed that that was what was going on here, except my friends had always had unique imaginary friends that reminded me of how I felt about Johnny, my little brother. I'd never heard of anyone sharing an imaginary friend. The not liking science had something to do with monkeys.<br />
<br />
I don't recall ever being sat down in a science class during elementary school, either in New York or Texas, and being taught about evolution. I may have been and just can't remember. But I knew about it anyway, because I had been to the American Museum of Natural History a lot. A whole lot. I haven't been there in over 20 years, but I'm pretty sure I can still find anything in there in under 30 seconds. Between Cub Scout trips and school trips and just going with my family, I'd been there a ridiculous amount of times. <br />
<br />
When I moved here from New York, I'd never been to the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, or Yankee Stadium (that last one pissed me off, because I was a Yankees fan, and my dad and brother were Mets fans, and I'd been to plenty of Mets games, because they didn't want to let me go to the Bronx). But I knew and loved both the Museum and the Hayden Planetarium, and I never ever wanted to leave. More to the point, even though I'd never been formally taught evolution that I can recall, the museum had the Hall of the Age of Man. I knew Lucy. I knew Peking Man. I knew Austrolopithecus, Homo Erectus, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon, and more importantly, I knew the differences between them, the order they came in, and that WE were modern Cro-Magnons! I can't remember not knowing about evolution, and more importantly, HUMANITY'S evolution, thanks to that museum. I never had to be told that the Flintstones were bullshit, because I knew that humans never lived at the same time as dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were in a totally different part of the museum. Man had to deal with sabertooth tigers, Woolly Mammoths, and all kinds of other stuff, not to mention glaciers and land bridges and all that stuff, but no damn dinosaurs.<br />
<br />
These Jesus kids didn't know any of that! OK, not everyone can have the best museum in the world, that's fine. But how can their parents not tell them this stuff? I said to one of them, "Of course we came from monkeys, but different monkeys, like apes and whatnot, not the little ones. How do you not know that?"<br />
<br />
Not only did he not know, but he was mad. But nothing prepared me for what came next:<br />
<br />
"God created the world in 6 days and humans on the 6th day in the Garden of Eden. We never came from monkeys. Anyone who believes we came from monkeys is going to Hell!"<br />
<br />
Wow. I had never heard anyone say anything so monumentally stupid in all my life. I thought he was retarded (I'd never call anyone that now, but that's what I actually thought at 10 years old). So I switched gears, and started talking more slowly.<br />
<br />
"You do know that the world is billions of years old, right? Fish, dinosaurs, big giant mammals, us, continental drift, all that, right?"<br />
<br />
"Why do you keep lying? There were no dinosaurs! Those were dragons! Billions! The world is 6000 years old!"<br />
<br />
This kid really was an idiot. There were some other kids around, and I looked at them, trying to gain some acknowledgment of the phenomenal idiocy of this poor bastard, but I didn't see looks of pity. They were mad at me!<br />
<br />
"You're a stupid Yankee, Keith. Jesus made us, not a monkey."<br />
<br />
I had to get out of there, so naturally, I headed to the one place they wouldn't be. The library. I had to think.<br />
<br />
Someone made these kids stupid. I mean, I could understand if they thought science was boring. I didn't, but I had known kids who didn't like science much back home. But these kids HATED science. I didn't know how that was possible. The only thing they had in common, aside from being bullies, was Jesus**. So I rapidly came to the conclusion that Jesus was more than just a boring story that ate into my reading time at church. Jesus didn't want kids to like science. I liked science. Therefore Jesus was the enemy.<br />
<br />
To be continued.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*This is probably obvious, but just in case it's not, region plays a huge part in what gets taught in social studies. I could name dozens of historical Native American tribes in the Northeast and give salient details about their relationship to the settlers, both before and after the American Revolution. I could tell you a great deal about Nathan Hale (I'd done a report on him in 4th grade where I got to dress up and act like him) and a wide variety of figures, British and American, from the French and Indian War and the Revolution, but I didn't know a damn thing about the Civil War, because we just hadn't gotten around to it yet when I moved down here.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">**I shouldn't have to mention this, but just in case, I will. Not every kid in this school was an idiotic, Yankee-hating Jesushead. But the ones who gave me shit all had that in common. There were plenty of other kids who I got along with, we played with our GI Joes, Transformers, and Ninja Turtles (mutation and evolution!), read comic books, science fiction, etc, etc. I found other kids who liked science, nerds, like me. But like me, they were in the minority, and like me, they were bullied by the redneck Jesus-bullies, which only fueled my hatred further, because if there's one thing I've always hated more than being bullied, it's when people bully my friends.</span>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-43220484677211973332011-08-16T02:41:00.000-05:002011-08-16T02:41:50.558-05:00Interlude: An apologyI wanted to take a moment to apologize to those I have subtly or obnoxiously influenced in the past to lend credence to supernatural, paranormal, or otherwise unjustifiable beliefs and claims about the way the world works. I know that I have had such discussions with many people over the years and I believed that way myself, so I wasn't consciously deceiving anyone. I was deceiving myself however, and that carried on to others. I have done all of you a great disservice. <br />
<br />
(Not that I think I necessarily am that great an orator or arguer, but for whatever effectiveness in that respect I have had, I feel badly about it.)masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-22123935898037836792011-08-15T03:02:00.004-05:002011-08-16T09:20:45.345-05:00What a fool this mortal's been: Part 2.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">HAIL SANTA!</span><br />
<br />
So I'm free, now what? D'oh!<br />
<br />
Obviously, it's not quite as pat as all that. I had already been a strong critic of the various mainstream religions for a long time. In fact I had been a naive atheist in my younger days when I stopped believing in the Christian God around 7 or 8 years old, around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I have now read so many similar accounts that I can't say for sure whether I'm remembering my own experience or combining it with that of others*, but here's my version: <br />
<br />
When I was 7 or 8, I went downstairs one Christmas eve when I heard motion in the living room late at night. I wanted to see Santa, dammit. What I saw instead was my parents putting presents under the tree. That in itself was no big deal, I always got some presents that were labelled "From: Santa" and some that were labelled "From: Mom and Dad". I figured they were putting their presents for me under the tree before they went to bed. After all, my bedtime was 7pm, right after You Can't Do That on Television and Danger Mouse**, and grown-ups got to stay up later.<br />
<br />
The next morning, I tore ass down the stairs along with my brother Johnny, and my sister Tina came in from her room, and we all went and woke up Mom and Dad because we weren't allowed to open presents without them. That doesn't mean we wait, it means they have to wake the hell up! It's present time! Hail Santa!<br />
<br />
As they groggily shuffled in we all got under the tree and were pulling out presents, sorting them into piles and figuring out who got the bigger pile of loot. (All kids are greedy Republicans, but what the hell, Reagan was in office.) Somehow in my frenzy of paper wrapping I noticed that some of the presents I had seen my parents putting under the tree were labelled "From: Santa." This was strange.<br />
<br />
By the way, this isn't as implausible as it sounds. We were supposed to write thank you notes to our relatives who gave us presents, so along with Santa and Mom and Dad, we had to notice labels from Grandma and Grandpa R. and/or N., aunts, uncles, cousins, great-grandparents, etc. The Santa presents were the ones we didn't have to write notes for, which made them extra special, as they had no chores associated with them. I had figured out that loophole in a previous year, when I pointed out that I didn't need to write a note to Santa, as I had already thanked him by leaving out milk and cookies. No wonder my Mom sometimes says I have the soul of a lawyer.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I can't say that I drew the connection immediately, but as time went by, the incongruity of finding the wrong label puzzled me, until I realized what I had. A mystery! Just like the Hardy Boys, or Encyclopedia Brown. I was gonna solve this. So the first thing I do, I go ask my friends. Of course I can't ask my parents. I wasn't supposed to be downstairs, so I'd get in trouble if I asked them. I'll start with Doug, my best friend. His dad is Lutheran, his mom is Jewish, and his birthday is in December, so he gets presents for Christmas, Hannukah, and his birthday all in December. He's gotta be the expert.<br />
<br />
Doug isn't much help. Rather than getting 3 times as many presents, he gets roughly the same amount as me, he just gets them bundled all together. What a ripoff for him. At least my birthday's in July, so I get biannual loot. But wait! He lives in a basement apartment at his Grandma's house, and his parents have less hiding space, and he tells me that for the last few years, he's found his presents ahead of time, and always found Santa labels. He didn't have anyone to talk to about it before, but he tells me that he thinks his parents are Santa.<br />
<br />
"How can both your parents be Santa!? Your dad is the right shape, but he doesn't have a beard, and that leaves out where your mom fits in!"<br />
<br />
I was a bit slow on the uptake.<br />
<br />
"No," he tells me. "I don't think Santa is real. I think he's just a story. Even if I didn't see the presents beforehand, I don't have a fireplace. How would Santa get in?"<br />
<br />
This was irrefutable logic for me at age 8 or so. Come to think of it, MY house had a chimney, but I didn't have a fireplace either. What's up with that?<br />
<br />
"So, Santa is a lie?" I asked.<br />
"I'm not sure, but I think he must be," Doug confirmed.<br />
<br />
Neither of us had much appreciation of the distinction between a lie and a myth at this point. I can't speak for Doug, but I was too amazed by the revelation that parents can lie. Why do they get to lie? They always tell me that lying is bad, and I'm not supposed to do it. Then I thought it through.<br />
<br />
If Santa's a lie, what about the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy? What about Jesus? For me at 7 or 8, I had much more compelling reasons to believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. They gave me toys, books, candy, and money. I could see them on tv. I had <i>evidence</i>, dammit. Jesus wasn't a big deal, I didn't mind if he was a lie, because he was a major inconvenience to me anyway. More importantly, he didn't give me anything except for a really crappy cracker periodically, and I could live without that. Plus I had to get dressed up in a white suit and memorize a bunch of boring words to even earn the cracker, and that wasn't worth the effort.<br />
<br />
Jesus was just someone that I heard about in church, and the less I had to do with Church, the better. Church made me dress up nice just to go and sit and be bored for an hour, and I couldn't even just sit, they kept making me stand, kneel, and sit, and they kept changing it up. Couldn't we do all the standing and kneeling and sitting one after the other, instead of mixing it up? At this point I was already allowed to bring a book to church to read so that I wouldn't be fidgeting, and all this additional business with the standing and kneeling ate into me finding out what Frank and Joe had discovered in the cave. I knew Christmas was Jesus's birthday, of course, but it was always a bit puzzling to me what he had to do with it, because I'd looked at that Nativity diorama my parents set up every year really closely, and I never did a find a reindeer in that barn thing, just sheep, a cow, and a donkey. So even though I technically had access to a toy set associated with Jesus, it still made no sense as I got yelled at when I tried to have Snake Eyes ride the donkey.<br />
<br />
Back to the point, I now knew that parents could lie, but somehow I wasn't allowed to. That wasn't fair, so I figured I'd lie back, that would show them. I'd keep pretending that I believed in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and I suppose Jesus too, but I wouldn't actually. Jesus didn't matter so much, but as I long as I still lied and said that I believed in the rest, I'd still get books, toys, candy and money. Serves them right, hypocrites (not that I knew that word yet, but I would soon). <br />
<br />
Obviously my knowledge about religion got more sophisticated as I got older, but even after I stopped pretending to believe in Santa and the rest, I still kept going through the motions at the Catholic church services and catechism classes I kept having to go to, all through maybe sophomore year of high school, whenever confirmation happened. At that point, I wasn't even keeping the fact that I believed none of it a secret, but I went through it because the family wanted to be able to celebrate the empty rituals. After confirmation, I put my foot down, though. No more church. <br />
<br />
This has also gone long, although I think funnier, so I think I'll end this here and continue with part 3 later, probably tomorrow.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*Plasticity and self-editing of human memory is yet another flaw with self-reported supernatural experiences, but I'll address that in a future post.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">**I'm pretty sure that those shows didn't air on Christmas Eve, but the airing of those on regular days is how I remembered bedtime. Sue me.</span>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5065659938411090113.post-82375020531728736392011-08-14T07:47:00.000-05:002011-08-14T07:47:30.639-05:00What a fool this mortal's been: Part 1.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">I've recently given up my occult practice after almost 20 years. In that time I went from Wicca to paganism to ceremonial magick to chaos magick to the Temple of Set to whatever I am now. I've been working on how to put the transition and my feelings about it into words for a while now, but it's been rough, because my feelings haven't quite settled down yet, I'm still sorting it all out. Not to say I'm conflicted or anything, or in some kind of “dark night of the soul” nonsense, I actually feel pretty good about my current state of mind. Before my epiphany, for lack of a better term, I was already a model agnostic à la Robert Anton Wilson, agnostic about everything, recognizing that all of our maps were flawed and that there was always another lens to focus our perception through. I didn't make too many assumptions about the underlying reality of my magical work, I just got results as best as I could, and entertained numerous possibilities about the meaning of said results. I know it sounds ridiculously wishy-washy, and it does to me too, now. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">The biggest flaw with this approach is that I had no self-correcting mechanism. The eternal ambiguity of my position also put me in a place where I couldn't distinguish between actual results and self-deception, and while I was happy to be skeptical about my interpretations of said results, I was never questioning my assumption that I was actually obtaining meaningful results, I wasn't seriously considering the possibility that I was just going through particularly elaborate acts of mental masturbation. Not only did my approach lack rigor, but it was incapable of rigor. I had basically philosophized myself into a solipsistic death-spiral.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">I resigned my membership in the Temple of Set a few months ago. Unlike other ex-members I've talked to, I have no complaint with the Temple, I met a lot of really great people during my time as a member, had a lot of fun, experienced interesting things, got some insight into my own values, and all in all, it was the school I needed at the time I joined. I just gradually realized that it was no longer particularly useful to me and my own process of development (Xeper, in Temple jargon), and it hadn't been for a few years. I was basically still in it for the social aspect, and it would've been hypocritical of me to stay in just for that, not to mention anathema to the values the organization itself stood for.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Funnily enough, I got a burst of motivation right after I left, and began a new project of daily ritual practice (a modified Gnostic Pentagram Ritual mostly, for those occultists keeping score), and got it into my head to revisit hermeticism. I had previously had an interest in the <i>Greek Magical Papyri</i> and related texts that originated in Graeco-Roman Alexandria, and so I started re-reading books in my library like <i>Hermetic Magic</i> by Stephen Flowers, got <i>Greek Qabalah</i> by Kieren Barry, along with copies of the <i>Hermetica</i>, the <i>Enneads</i>, and various other neo-Platonic texts. I decided I wanted to re-formulate the Western Esoteric Tradition materials such as can be found in the writings of the Golden Dawn and Crowley, but I was going to rework it from the ground up as an alternate magical history, trying to imagine what it would have been like if the rise of Christianity had never occurred, and if things had proceeded more directly from the learned Alexandrians. It was going to be EPIC.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Then one day, probably a few weeks into this project, I had an epiphany: What the hell was I doing? I had just been a member of an initiatory occult organization for almost 10 years, and what did I really have to show for it? And now I was starting over again with basics for about the fifth or sixth time? With all that effort expended, how had my life actually improved in a significant way? I'm not talking pleasurable and insightful subjective experiences, I'd had plenty of those, made valuable friendships, all that's to the good. But if I was really the capable magician I'd been attempting to be for so long, why was I not wildly successful, financially speaking? Why was I still in such bad physical shape, halfway crippled with recurring back pain? What concrete results could I show for all of my hard work?</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">Nothing. I had nothing to show for it. I gradually realized that I had basically been lying to myself for years, spending lots of money, effort and time on a fantasy power trip that kept me an ineffective deluded fool when I could have been actually doing something worthwhile and productive with my life. I had wasted nearly 20 years on a Quixotic quest for false enlightenment. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">The funny thing is, while I was amazed at the magnitude of the waste I had engaged in, I didn't feel depressed about it. I found it hilarious. I was such an idiot! But more importantly than that, I felt free. I had locked myself into a hamster wheel of nonsense, and I had just remembered that the key was in my pocket the whole time. So I let myself out.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;">This is getting long, so I will make this Part 1, and continue later. </span> </div>masquehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11421644393539292803noreply@blogger.com0