I’d like to make a distinction between being sad, as a natural and healthy emotional response to certain deplorable events in our lives and feeling hurt, which, assuming no physical contact was involved, refers to our understanding of the event and the motives of the others involved.

Consider the last time you were turned down in some endeavor that was emotionally important to you. Chances are, if you are not some very advanced spirit, you felt sad and hurt.

Now imagine that a month afterwards you watch a movie with a very similar thing happening to the hero. Unless you know the director or script writer personally you would probably feel sad but not hurt. Why would you feel hurt? None of it had anything to do with you personally, right?

It’s easy to make the distinction when it’s about a bunch of people we don’t know. But occasionally people in our lives whom we know very well indeed will also do things that are not related to us in a causal pattern. That is, they behave in a manner that nothing in our being or doing elicited. But even if that is the case our ego which is not content to be the center of our own universe and insists on being the center of everyone else’s as well, often will interpret the behavior as aimed at us and the result will be a feeling of hurt.

I had a very lucid example of the process in my life lately. I started dating a guy. Everything went swell. We like each other and enjoyed each other’s company almost daily for the whole of 2 weeks. Then I mentioned that I told my mom I have a new boyfriend, and followed it with a statement that I hoped our relationship will evolve into something serious.

His reaction was as if I’d announced I was pregnant with a triplet and diagnosed with breast cancer to boot. He disappeared on me for 3 days, and when he re-emerged he claimed that he was unprepared for any commitment, that the pressure of being with me made him feel physically sick, and that it was him and not me.

Instinctively I tried to take the blame, as good girls are taught to do. “It was too early,” I told myself. “I shouldn’t have pressed him.”

My logic (which is the stubbornest part of me) refused to co-operate. “I did not press him,” it replied. “Mentioning ‘mother’ and ’serious’ in the same paragraph does not constitute pressure. Itshould be obvious you were hoping for something serious just from your age. And if he really thought himself a candidate for a zipless fuck then he needs to have his mirror cleaned.”

I knew that the had had a painful relationship in the past, when he lived for 10 years with a woman he did not love, because every time he tried to leave she would make him feel guilty about something. But this had nothing to do with me. I’m not a particularly clingy person and the things I said were not that demanding. He was just living out his own movie, trying to cast me into a role I fit very poorly.

We still had a final talk to do and I drove up to meet him. On the way I examined my emotions on the subject and was surprised to find out that while I was indeed sad at the prospect of losing my boyfriend, I was not feeling hurt. His concept of my actions and desires was so misplaced that his behavior couldn’t have possibly been directed at me. Why he hardly saw me. Not just the hidden inner me, but any aspect of me!

Well we had a nice breakup conversation with lots of tears and hugs, and decided that we should still be friends, and keep on the treatment exchange we started (he is studying NLF and I’m learning Applied Kynesiology, and we both need to practice on someone).

And what do you know? Two days later he is still giving me the cold shoulder, and avoids making appointments with me. A snappy remark typed itself into the cell-phone, and the guy faded from view again.

Oh no! I must have scared him away.

I could almost feel Ego sigh with relief. Yes! Familiar turf at last! Please, Mister Director, I’ve got to have this part! I can do the castrating bitch like nothing you’ve ever seen. I was born to do this!

And with the familiarity in came the hurt. My eyes filled with stinging tears.

However, Logic must have grown tired with the whole thing already.

“Nonesense,” it announced. “Nothing’s changed. The guy had not had enlightenment. He cannot see you a photon better than before. Just because you found a little corner where you can fit in the story he tells himself does not mean that he is aiming at you all of a sudden.”

I had to concede Logic’s point again. With a minor effort of will I turned my point of view around and the hurt was gone.

I can only hope that the insight gained from that incident will serve me in the future, when I meet more compatible storytellers…

Positive thinking has officially become a plague, and not in a good way. Not so long ago, I picked up a guy on Facebook and we started chatting. I said “How are you?” and he said “Amazing!” I said “What’s so amazing?” and he said “Bye” and disconnected. I guess he figured me out right from the start

But other than that, I’m all for positive thinking. It works, too. Even if you are a complete cynic, you have to admit that.

Self confidence work in our benefit on several levels:

The Psychological Level:

1. If you believe you can achieve something, then, like certain little engines, you will be motivated to put all your efforts into it, which, of course, will increase your chances of getting it. Whereas if you believe you’re not good enough, you’ll probably give up, which will probably mean you’re not going to get it.
2. Satisfaction is greatly dependent on your inner appraisal. If you convince yourself that what you got is good, then you’ll be happy with it. If the next guy is unsatisfied with what he got, he’ll be unhappy about it, no matter how much better what he got is, by objective standards. If you doubt that simple truth, take a look at our celebs. They have dream jobs, tons of money, a very wide choice of potential mates and basically anything the simple man would want. But except for a few they always seem haunted. Always on some self-destruction trip, or going in and out of rehab of some sort. So it’s obviously not the objective achievement that we humans are after. So why not satisfy ourselves with what we have now, instead of running after something material, which will then be insufficient, and will necessitate the same process?

The Sociological Level:

1. Most of our communication is non-verbal. Some say 60-70%, others claim (mistakenly) up to 93% of non-verbal. But even if we go for a very conservative 50%, clearly, if you want to make a good impression on a potential employer, investor or mate, you have to broadcast positively in the non-verbal channels. There are two ways to do that: actually believe in the positive information or undergo an expensive and rigorous training by a body language expert. The first method is more enjoyable, I think.
2. Since most people are quite insecure, it is usually enough to state what you want with confidence to have them agree. This is what I call “The Chutzpah Factor”. Chutzpah is also a form of positive thinking that states “I deserve to get good things.” This is a form of positive thinking that should be used with caution, since it can land you in a lot of trouble. But there’s no arguing that it can also get you incredibly beneficial results.

The Biological Level:

• Faith healing is currently a widely established scientific fact. It doesn’t matter if you derisively call it placebo effect, the fact stands that the human body responds by healing to what it believes to be a medicine and by decaying to what it believes to be poison, no matter what are the actual physical qualities of the substance. And the phenomenon is not limited to physical agents. It’s actually quite simple: if you’re relaxed and content, the parasympathetic nervous system is activated. This means that the “rest-and-digest” processes are getting all the energy (opposed to activation of the sympathetic nervous system, with its “fight-or-flight” responses). Part of the rest-and-digest routine is naturally maintenance and repair of the body. Whatever gets you relaxed and content, be it a brand new medication, an ancient Chinese method or a good comedy show, is bound to make your body heal better. An in my clinical experience, the opposite is also true: if a patient responds to “How are you?” with “Everything is terrible”, this is a good sign for a bad prognosis.

All the above are well established facts. So there are only two areas for skepticism: does positive thinking work on the actual physical level, and are positive assertions a good way to achieve positive thinking.

Well, about the second of these, I’ll probably never know. Positive assertions to be uttered daily sound too much like homework, and having successfully avoided doing my homework for 12 years of school, I don’t intend to start now. I suspect it’s not too effective anyway. If it was, we’d all be chanting “everyday in every way I’m getting better and better”. The fact that various positive assertion come and go is a good indication that none of them really do the job.

The first question is trickier. On some level we really are what we think. Certainly negative thinking attracts bad stuff: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me” (Job, 3, 25). I’m sure every one of us knows someone who spent their life being afraid of something that indeed happened eventually. Some of it can be explained rationally, like someone being afraid of cancer because a family member died of it and ends up sick with cancer because of their genetic make-up. But sometimes it is just so. My mom was very afraid of becoming a young widow, because that was what happened to her mother, and she indeed became a widow at 40, after almost 20 years of marriage. There is no rational explanation for this, unless you consider “coincidence” to be an explanation. I’m not saying there are no coincidences. I’m saying that if coincidences start to pile up then a causational factor needs to be sought. Of course, it can be argued that in this case the causation is reverse: the person knows through some form of precognition that this particular thing is going to happen to him and that’s why he’s afraid of it. But I’m not sure that a real skeptic would prefer that explanation.

I think that there is a physical effect to positive thinking, but it’s much less certain than the other effects. Which is why it seems to me an exeptionally bad idea to rely on positive thinking alone as a means to your ends. Positive thinking is swell, if it accompanies positive action. If you just sit in your room all day and don’t interact with the world outside, nothing good is going to come your way, no matter what you think.

When I try to explain my faith, people often respond with “How can you believe in God when in the Bible it says this-and-this piece of bullshit?” (There is plenty of bullshit in the Bible, I don’t want to commit to any particular piece).

So let me state this clearly: faith is not the same as religion. Any religion. There is no “true religion”. They are all false.

It’s inevitable you see. Religion usually starts with an event (or several events) of divine revelation, of enlightenment. The enlightened person feels during the event that he is one with the universe. He (it’s usually a he) emerges with the conviction that he had spoken with angels (like Mohammed), or spoken with God (like Moses) or that he is God (like Krishna). He tries to share his wonderful new knowledge with his fellow man. Soon people flock to him, as they always do to anyone who seems to know all the answers and speaks with authority. He lectures them about the understandings he gained, but invariably, he mixes his old understandings that he grew up with and acquired from his environment.

Eventually the enlightened one dies. No matter how close to God he got, he is still mortal. Whoever takes on the leadership of the flock is usually not enlightened himself. Here the corruption starts: no matter how loyal the new leader is to the old one, he does not share the divine truths, but he does share the environmental truths, so these get emphasized. But those environmental truths are now stamped with the stamp of holiness, so they stay immobile while the environment changes. Pretty soon the leaders begin to notice the discrepancies. The holy book says “an eye for an eye”, but this is no longer acceptable, so they start piling up inventions to compromise between the holy and the contemporary. If the religion survives for a long period of time those invention pile up to the point where they outweigh the original divine truth that was in the founder’s message.

 There is another reason why religions get corrupted. People are divided into two groups. As Annie Lennox puts it: “Some of them want to use you; some of them want to get used by you.” The religious society gives perfect answers to both these needs.

My late friend Mark once explained to me the nature of BDSM relationships. “You see,” he said, “it’s not about the pain, the humiliation or the kinky leatherwear. It’s all about control. One party, the dominant, gains almost total control, and the power trip that goes with it. The other one, the submissive, relinquishes control and gains a guaranty for safety: the Dom/Dome won’t let anything happen to her/him”.

Now I don’t know if this in fact is true of BDSM relationships, but it’s very true of the relationship between the priest and the believer. Because of the power inherited in religious leadership, power hungry characters tend to flock to it. And since they are also the ones who make the rules, the religious rules gravitate in the direction of giving more power to religious leaders.

 Still, religions have their good side. By sanctifying texts they allow us acces to a great corpus of writingmost of which is by wise and intelligent humans. I feel that the correct attitude towards religion is that of critical respect. I consider the religious laws to be recommendations. I try them on and see if they feel good. If so, I keep at them. If not… well, the enlightened one must have gotten something wrong in the divine message. Or maybe he was just too different from me.

 Of course, I must repeat again that this only concerns my relationship with the divine. Relationships with fellow human beigns, though often also incorporated into religion are governed by different principles, and are less subjective to personal whims.

As I said in the previous post we come into this life to learn how to learn and how to love. I expect that the necessity to learn is more controversial than the need to love. Most people will acknowledge the importance of love in human existence, especialy in the wider sence which includes love of family, love of God, love of nature, etc., and not just romantic. Even if we just look at romantic love, I think most people would not be willing to give it up.

Consider the following thought: suppose the devil comes up to you and offers you anything you want, but you will never love or be loved again. How many people you know will take up the offer? I think less than 50%. Some people give up all chance of romantic love willingly, but they usually expect to receive love from other sources: love from their children, love from their spirit-brothers or devine love. What joy is there when you cannot share the experience with a loved one? What importance is material gain when you have no-one to spend it on, that you care about?

Some people do banish love from their lives through their actions. Some just concentrate too much on their careers, becoming cold and uncaring through neglect; others intentionally harden their hearts, becoming cruel in the name of some higher ideal; and still other barricade themselves from love after being hurt by it. This is another way that pain manifests in our lives. No-one can barricade himself away from pain (with the possible exception of sociopaths. I have never met one, so I have no idea). Sometimes, only through the opening that pain breaks through our walls can love come into our inner sanctum. In Anthem, one of my all time favorite songs, Leonard Cohen suggests:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light comes in.
Our existence here is not perfect. The crack of pain runs through everything we do. But sometimes, only through the cracks of pain will the light of love shine in.

For myself, I’m not a very loving person. And I found that only through pain was I able to expamd my capacity for empathy. For example, I could never understand the people (usially of the female variety) wining on the Net about having lost “The One”, because he/she/it dumped them. “If he dumped you,” I’d tell a girl like that, “then he is not The One. QED. Find another One.” Only after being dumped by my first true love (at the age of 31, I might add) was I able to understand the feeling, and treat those poor silly girls with proper empathy. For though the logic still stands, it is simply no consolation at a time of loss. Also I found that I was not capable of containing the pain and suffering of my patients before being put through an extremely excrutiating apprenticeship. So, I’m all for avoiding pain. But when it does come, I think the best approach is to see what we can learn from it and to investigate how it broadens our capacity for love.

After I outlined my thoughts regarding the unreality of life on earth, I was asked by Hilla what was the meaning of having a free will in an imaginary world. If, she said, the reality has no meaning, if it is just a giant game, what meaning can our choices have?

First of all, I have to correct Hilla. I didn’t say our reality has no meaning. Its illusionary nature does not necessitate absence of meaning. Certainly we know that people put A LOT of meaning in imaginary things within our “real” world. People have committed suicide over the death of an imaginary game character. And long before that, people have committed suicide because some guy in some book said they should.  This are, of course, extreme behaviors, but have you never cried in a movie? Or felt like crying over an imaginary character’s fate? Heck, just think of all the emotional turbulence we put ourselves through from imagining things that might happen (no matter how low the probability, or how far removed the prospect) and you’ll realize that unreal things have a lot of meaning.

It’s like that joke about the physics student that comes to the lecturer after the class and asks: “Professor, how long did you say it was before the sun burns out?”

“About 5 billion years,” the professor replies.

The student wipes away the sweat from his brow. “Phew, thank God. I thought you said 5 million.”

So you see, we are experts in getting ourselves all worked up over unreal things.

But that doesn’t tell us what the meaning of life actually is. It just tells us there could be a meaning, even in an illusion. And that’s not very reassuring, unless you are a scientist.

OK, allow me to skip to the end, as Prince Humperdinck once demanded. The meaning of life, as stated by the being of light that awaits victims of Near Death Experiences, is to learn and to love.

I hope there is no question that you can learn from imaginary things. I still owe most of my knowledge on Hindu Pantheon to Zelazny’s Lord Of Light, despite having read a lot of material on the subject, including a forced read of excerpts of the Bhagavad Gita (I remember the Lord of Light, you see, but not the Gita).

More importantly, learning completely imaginary things (assuming that the Hindu pantheon is real in some way) teaches you HOW TO LEARN, a subject sadly missing from most formal education institutes. The reason that avid readers are usually good pupils is not that they have a lot of data available, but the fact that being exposed to a lot of data they have learned to handle new data efficiently!

But Hilla asked “What is the meaning of our choices?”

The meaning of our choices is to learn how to make the right choice. So, does that mean there is a Right choice? Not necessarily. Right and wrong are defined by geography. A person might be using the same mechanism that I’m using to reach a “right choice” and reach a conclusion that is utterly atrocious and hateful to me. Even making the wrong decision is OK, as long as we learn something from it. But there is a catch there. Like that time I was practicing with my friend Martin on some sword technique. “Martin, you’re doing it wrong. It’s not very effective and also dangerous, here’s why.” I showed him. He said “OK,” and went on doing the exact same thing. I told him it was wrong again, and he said OK again and kept doing the same thing. Eventually, Aziz sensei came over to see what the racket was all about.

“Martin,” he said, “that’s not the way to do it. You’re making a mistake.”

“I know it’s a mistake,” Martin replied, “but you learn from mistakes, don’t you?”

Well, no. You don’t learn from mistakes by repeating them over and over again, knowing they are wrong. You learn by acknowledging your mistake and seeking to make a right choice the next time.

Frankly, you don’t learn much by making the same right choice over and over again. But that won’t happen. Many a spiritual advisor (including professional shrinks) will tell you that if you are stuck in the same situation over and over again, then it is a lesson you have to learn. Once you learned to deal with it,  it won’t happen again! Suppose your father used to yell at you. Then a teacher in school would yell at you. Now your boss yells at you. Chances are, if you just quit, you’ll find another job with a new boss that yells at you, or marry a spouse that yells at you. But if you learn to diffuse a yelling situation, yelling people seem to vanish magically from your life. Well, maybe you’ll get an occasional yeller, just for the reminder, but basically the situation will be:

Lesson learned, on to the next chapter!!

I’d like to expand a bit on human suffering and divine morality. As I said (or, rather, as Richard Bach said in Illusions), it makes sense to me that to God our physical existence is a passing episode, like watching a movie is to us: the feelings are real, the lessons are real, but no damage is done. But if so, who directs this movie? Who wrote the script? The traditional religious answer is: God is the creator, therefore he wrote the script. This answer of course totally deprives the human players of free will. Or you could say, God wrote the DND adventure, but the players still have free will. But remember, there are no NPCs and no monsters. Could any GM direct a prewritten adventure if any acting agent had a free will? No, the only possible explanation that allows for free will would be that we write our own scripts by our decisions and interpretations. But then, why do some people have horrible lives, while other have comfy and nice ones? I believe that it is the consequence of the choices that a soul makes before entering a physical body. Just like some people like to watch horror movies, others like tearful dramas and still others only watch comedies. I think I saw a research once that showed that healthy people prefer comedies. Of course, it is usually attributed to the therapeutic effects of laughter, but I wonder if there could be a common cause relationship as well, namely that people who don’t like to suffer in movies don’t like to suffer in their bodies either. So, when a soul enters a body it chooses a set of circumstances that will enable the soul to experience something, to learn a particular lesson. And some souls choose to experience and learn through pain. This may seem contrary to common sense, but the fact is that some people think that pain is very helpful. For example, in my work as a physical therapist I often show people exercises and then give and explicit instruction “do this up until the point of pain. You should not feel any pain during the exercise.” You’d think people would do just that, but many of them deliberately push themselves into pain because “no pain, no gain” or some such. Sometimes I have to stop them physically before the point of pain, and then at the next session they are right back at it. So some people choose pain deliberately, even when they are specifically instructed to the contrary. So why wouldn’t an eternal soul choose pain for what might be considered a brief period? The problem with that logic is that people would say: “Then why should we help our neighbors, feed the hungry or save children from sexual abuse? Their souls chose this for them, we have no right to intervene.” To this I say, we don’t know what the soul acually chose! Maybe it chose to be abused, maybe it chose to be rescued by you! We can never know anything about the desires of souls other than our own, so we cannot base our decisions on this. All we know is that as humans we dislike pain, and therefore, as humans, we should strive to relieve the pain of others who are like us. Actually, most human societies agreed on this basic rule. The only difference lies in where you put the border between “like us” and “not like us”. For the ancient Greeks “like us” was free males. For the Nazi “like Us” was humans with arian descent and proper political views. For nature conservationists “like us” means all mammals (or anything alive, if they’re real hard core). All these are human morals, as opposed to divine ones. We can’t expect God who has infinite knowledge to act on them, but we should not presume to act on divine morals with our limited knowledge. As humans the only rule we can go by is the old Kantian idea: “Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will”. In other words, if you don’t happen to be fluent in German: do onto others as you would like everybody to do in an ideal world.

A lot of atheists throw that question at believers, then smile smugly, thinking they have a new winning argument and stop listening to whatever answer you may try to provide.

Truth is that the argument is not very new. It is just another manifestation of the age old question “Why does God allow suffering in the World?” Many attempts have been made over the years to answer that question. They usually fall under one of the following categories:

1. Suffering is the punishment resulting from the sins of humans, individual or original. God allows it because he wants to respect the free will of humans.

2. Suffering is an educational device allowing God to awaken those who are spiritually asleep or test those who are spiritually awake.

Both these explanations defy any understanding we have about what Good is. A God who thinks suffering is bad, but allows babies to be assaulted, tortured (by other humans or by diseases, or other natural causes) because of a sin committed by some extra-distant ancestor cannot be considered as good. An all knowing God who uses pain to test a good person also can’t be considered good. Our deepest intuitions rebel against it. Surely an omniscient God could find a better arrangement?

They say that allowing evil to go unpunished is necessary for our freedom of choice, but surely, some indication is due? I mean, people are still free to smoke cigarettes or do drugs even though it’s clear these things are bad for them. And we know that some people in fact keep doing them. Why didn’t God make it equally clear that evil is bad for you, if only statistically? Why does he allow in this world natural disasters that have nothing to do with human sins and cause suffering to many? And if indeed he is cruel enough to hurt good people just to test them (although he can just look directly into their heart), why does he test some good people but not others? People offer those excuses to those who question, but I don’t know anyone who is comfortable enough with them to avoid adding in the end that, anyway, God works in mysterious ways and we cannot fathom the depth of his wisdom.

I think the answer is not that mysterious, although it is quite alien to us. God does not consider suffering and death to be bad things. How can this be? Is it not obvious that causing pain to another is evil and delivering them from pain is good? It’s very clear to us from a human point of view, just as it’s clear that people’s safety os more important than the free will of a serial killer. Since by all accounts God considers free will (even of serial killers) is more important than the suffering of other people (even innocents), we must conclude that suffering is not as important in his view as it is in ours. This is a logical outcome if indeed the soul remains intact after the death of the body. If, as Budha saw, after death comes rebirth then all that comes to pass between rebirth and subsequent death is only an illusion. And if it’s only illusion (and God unlike us would know that for sure) then why get excited? Do we feel that a mother is bad if she allows her child to watch Bambi (possibly over and over) even though it makes the child cry? Surely not. We know that no real harm is done. And should a responsible parent get upset if his child plays the robber in a Cops and Robbers game, or even a chaotic-evil orcish priest in a DND game? No, of course not. It only make-believe, harmless exploration of possibilities. Similarly, if this world is just an illusion, no wonder that God values more it’s educational values than any perceived suffering.

We have confirmation for this view from many enlightened (or “enlightened”) persons. They all claim more or less in unison that God is love, and that he loves ALL of us, sinners and righteous alike. Personally, I buy into that wholesale, but if God loves sin then it can’t be all that bad in his eyes, right? The unfortunate result for this view is that God can no longer be used as a figure-head of human values and the protector of human justice. Children should be taught to avoid hurting others and help their fellows because these are human values, not because God may pat them on the head for it in some way.

To quote Westinghouse the Werewolf: “How Depressing…”

P.S. Dawoun says I got it all wrong. The reason God allows evil is that he was offended by the mess we made at his temple and ever since he washes the dishes alone in the dark mumbling: “Well, that’s ok. You don’t have to help. I’ll clean it up myself. I’ll have plenty of time to rest in the grave…”

P.P.S. I have to give credit to a valiant attempt to explain suffering made by the lady who wrote Musings About God . She starts out with a different set of axioms and ends up with a radically different conclusion (God is a victim?? I guess you have to be raised as Christian to appreciate that), but at least she doesn’t go for the easy solution with the “mysterious ways” shtick.

When preparing my post On Faith I was quite surprised to discover that belief in after life is consistently less common than the belief in God.

Worldwide in 1990 it’s 82% for God and 59% for afterlife (according to Religion and Economy, by McCleary and Barro in Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2006). In the USA it’s 95% vs. 82%. And check out the data for European countries in Religion Statistics  (compare with the data I quoted in On Faith, and you’ll realise they are only counting belief in “God” and not “spirit” and the like, so the difference is actually larger).

That is really weird. Belief in afterlife has been around much longer than belief in one transcendental God. People have been burying their dead with useful objects since paleolithic age (over 50,000 years ago) while belief in one god cannot be more than 4000 years old. Also, culturally speaking, afterlife is more common than God: there is not a single human culture that did not develop a belief in afterlife, whereas Chinese and Japanese religions do not include gods at all. And belief in afterlife is just as central to the power-trip of established religions as God. Anyone with half a brain can see that God does not endorse any particular religion, and that in all groups of believers poverty, diseases, accidents and military defeats are equally common. If there is no afterlife ALL world religions immediately lose their pretense to being “the one and only word of God”. So indoctrination and brain washing cannot be the explanation. Furthermore, while near-death experiences can’t be counted as proof to the existence of afterlife, they are nonetheless some sort of indication, which is more than we ever got from God.

Of course, if the belief in God is originally perceptual that would explain this curious fact. But lets look at another explanation. Simply put, the belief in Hell where the souls of sinners are punished eternally is outright ludicrous. Not surprisingly this is the least common of the afterlife notions (check out the data in Religion statistics again). I mean, come on, Suppose a person cheated on their spouse for all of their life together, over 60 years. That’s grave, I agree. But is burning for eternity really a just punishment? An eternity for only 60 years? With our expansion of the times that cosmology may require this trade seems utterly unjust. Maybe when the world was known to exist for 4000 years and expected to end in a 1000 years at the most, and that was the scope of eternity the eternal punishment seemed more reasonable. But nowadays, when we speak unblinkingly of billions and trillions of years in the past and in the future, the span of human sins has become too short to partake in eternity.

Also, it seems that we became too sophisticated for the physicality of the afterlife that was described. To go to heaven to enjoy a hearty meal of Wild Ox and Leviathan on a chair of gold or indulge with 72 virgins seems to us pathetic and laughable.

 Nonetheless, the continuation of some part of the human consciousness after the physical death is a necessary logical derivative from the existence of a good and omniscient God. It is quite obvious that nothing that may be considered as good behavior is consistently rewarded in life on earth as we know it. Good stuff comes to evil men, and horrid disasters come to good people. It is impossible to make sense out of the data without assuming something that happens beyond our limited view. Personally, the idea that makes sense most to me is reincarnation. Specifically multi-level reincarnation, which mean that a soul is born into this world to improve itself in some particular way, and after death it chooses either to return to this earth for a new lesson (or, in a less fortunate case, for the same lesson) or go to another plane of existence to learn higher, or lower, or just completely different lessons.

This sort of reality structure can give meaning to our attempts to do the right thing, to expand our minds and to improve ourselves that would otherwise be meaningless and empty.

And God wouldn’t do that to us, Right?

Science is a method for investigating the physical world around us. Two concepts lie in the heart of science: Observations and Theories.

Observations are data that can be received from the outside world through our senses or recorded through instruments whose operation principles are clear.

Theories are what binds the observations together in a meaningful fashion.

“Science,” Henri Poincaré had noted, “is made of facts like houses are made of bricks, but a pile of brick does not constitute a house.”

Theories turn the piles of facts and observations into useful models of the real world, which are the goal of science.

Personally, I think that science is great. It is a consistent method of improving our understanding of the world around us, including our bodies, our minds and our relationships. Granted, Humanity’s use of science is strongly reminiscent of a child playing with matches, but the solution, I think, is to have the child grow up, not to ban matches.

It is important however to understand the limitations of science. The most important of those is the dependence of scientific knowledge on data coming in from the senses (including data from instruments which eventually reaches us through the senses). René Descartes showed us that logically all information coming in from the senses is in doubt. Then he made a valiant attempt to found the actual existence of the physical world in logic. He only succeeded in proving that the subjective onlooker has to have an actual existence (a principle he neatly summarized as “cogito ergo sum”). His attempt to establish the actuality of the sense data depends on the existence of a Judeo-Christian God, and his proof of the existence of such deity is laughable.

So there you have it: if you are going to believe that science has some kind of truth to it, you have to make a leap of faith. There is nothing guaranteeing that the data we receive through our senses has anything to do with what really is.

It is also important to distinguish between science and mathematics. While science makes extensive use of mathematical tools, its primary emphasis is on consistency with outside data, whereas math only deals with internal consistency, and is not in any way obliged to actual truth. So while math (and logic) are in some ways ‘more true’ than science, as they don’t rely on the possibly false data from the fallible senses, it is also ‘less true’ because it has no presumption to describe any actuality.

We must not make the mistake of claiming science to be the absolute truth. It is simply the best method we have found to make consistent advances in our state of control of the world. That is a lot in itself.

As an expert on leaps of faith, I believe that the world around exists independently, and that science is the best way to approximate the truth of it, and that it obeys mathematical models because math captures an essential ingredient of the way things must be. But none of these statements can be proven any more than the existence of an omnipresent divine consciousness.

To conclude: my goal in this blog is to construct a system of faith-oriented thinking based on the aforementioned axioms and using logical deductions, while conforming to any scientific knowledge available.

As I explained in the previous post, I’m a cynic. I’m also a believer. I believe in God whom I understand to be a good-willing consciousness that is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the very limited sense of being able to induce any state that is within the physical laws of the universe. These two categorizations may seem contradictory to anyone who does not share both so allow me to explain.

First of all, I’d like to direct your attention to the curious fact that belief in God is exceptionally wide spread. It stands on 88% worldwide, with developed countries such as France, UK and Germany displaying approximately 30% of non-believers (33% in France), with the remaining 70% spread in various proportions between “believe in God” and “believe in a spirit or life force” (see Demographics of Atheism in Wiki). Why would any nonreligious person believe in Spirit or life force? Also interesting is the fact that countries that have been under soviet rule (Russia, Ukraine, Romania etc. See data in Adherents.com) do not display a larger proportion of atheism, despite their being subjected to atheistic brain-washing for decades. My explanation is that faith is equivalent to “God sense”. It is an ability to sense the presence of God around us. If you happen to be a nonbeliever, please read the previous sentence as: faith is a God delusion organ that causes one to imagine a divine presence around oneself. The two are equivalent for my purpose. My point is that some people sense God (or spirit or whatever) directly in their lives (rightly or falsely). Such a sensation is equivalent in strength to any information received from the senses. What would it take for you to disbelieve your eyes? Quite a lot. What would it take for you to disbelieve the sensation from the tips of your fingers? A whole damn lot. In the same way a person who has been graced (or cursed) with a God sense believes in it as a top quality data. Drastic information from other senses may cause a person to disbelieve in this sense, such as might have happened to many holocaust survivors. But it is very hard to overcome such sense information by using Ockham’s Razor. For a believer of that kind the atheistic theory is not a simpler theory with equal explaining power, it is a too simple theory that fails to explain a very important part of the data he perceives!

Now, do all those multitudes who profess to believe in God, feel his presence in the world around them and within them? I seriously doubt that. Nevermind the crime rates in strictly religious populations. More important is this: if the majority of humans possessed such inner sense it would seriously hamper our freedom of choice. Consider the case of color blindness. Most people can perceive color. A small minority can not. Have you ever heard of a logical proof to the existence of color? Of course not. The fact that the ability to see color is common is sufficient proof even for those who lack it. On the other hand, those who hear immaterial voices ordering them to do stuff are usually confined or burned at the stake. Clairvoyance is disbelieved by many despite the fact that psychics have many times provided helpful information to police detectives in missing person cases. So, the number of sense-believers needs to be large enough to get slightly beyond contempt but small enough to allow doubt. I’m guessing about 50% give or take a few.

I wish I could find data regarding belief in God/spirit from Japan, where such belief is not bound with any prominent religion or long standing tradition. I feel this would be a very important piece of data.

Assuming that this is indeed the percentage, where are the other 38% come from? I guess from the same place that atheists claim all believers come from: brain-washing from their environment as they were growing up. But such faith is very fragile. Read a couple more books, expose yourself to some new ideas, and voila! An atheist is born. This is not the sort of faith that I have. I’ve read many a book, I’ve been exposed to many secular ideas, in fact I endorse most of them. But my faith remain strong.

This is therefore my second axiom: there is a consciousness embracing the entire universe. This consciousness I refer to as God.