I've been purposefully meandering on a spiritual path for several years now. I know there are things that I have left behind maybe for a while, maybe permanently, pieces of religion that confused and debilitated my life. I've come across so many illuminations which have reconfirmed what continues to feel right:  the most important thing is to love. Such a simple sentence of words with such a powerful meaning. Yet this gentle phrase about love has been reduced, nay, actually ATTACKED by many religions which pursue power and domination of the very real soul, and in that pursuit have created empires to hate, ethnocentrism, pride and many more negatives which set human against human. There is a path which moves away from that kind of darkness and I think it is an obvious one. Universalism speaks quietly to my heart. In light of all of these most recent thoughts, I continue to paint and think and mull through colors...

Forgive the dullish lighting as it is still in the stuio and not under a proper light source, but you get the idea! This is in progress, "I don't know you, but we will love forever":

I don't know you, but we will love forever

I don't know you, but we will love forever

"Wounded"

1 comment

The above painting was done during this last bout of illness... sometimes all we desire is a sense of that maternal/spiritual energy around us to help and heal.

I often use terms that seem to really bother people: nothingness, chaos, suffering, meaninglessness, despair, etc. Why do these terms, which are so embedded in my philosophy, bother people so much? Well, most people seem to thing that there is something as opposed to nothing: God created everything with a purpose and a meaning. I, on the other hand, think all we have is nothingness and that everything is intrinsically meaningless. Depressing isn't it? I don't see it as depressing, although I definitely understand how people can see my thoughts as depressing. But, I feel that my thoughts are more in tune with reality: God is dead; the universe could care less about us; reality lies in nothingness and is utterly meaningless.

However, like the Existentialists, I don't see this reality as depressing; instead, I see this reality as quite liberating and empowering: Life is what we make out of it, what we make it to be; Change comes from us; We are responsible for how we act and behave; It is our fundamental job as human beings to create meaning; We are the basis for everything, good and bad; We have one life--live it with a dignified purpose. Often, I am asked how I can be happy if I see life, the world, in such a depressing way.

I know I've been quoting a ton from Comte-Sponville's book, but I think he answers this common question in an eloquent and accurate manner.

What can people hope for who have never believed in God or who have ceased believing in him? Nothing--that is, nothing absolute or eternal, nothing beyond the "darkest reaches of death," as Gide put it--which means that all our hopes for this life, no matter how legitimate (less war, less suffering, less injustice) run up against that ultimate nothingness; it engulfs all, joy and misery alike. That makes one more injustice (the fact that death strikes innocent and guilty alike) and one more misery, or several (one for each period of mourning in a person's lifetime). It condemns us to seeing life as tragic--or, if we seek oblivion, as entertainment. Such is the world of Lucretius, the world of Camus and our own world: Nature is blind; our desires insatiable; only death is immortal. This by no means prevents us from struggling for justice, but it does prevent us from believing in it completely or believing that its triumph can be permanent. In a word, Pascal, Kant and Kierkegaard were right: There is no way for a lucid atheist to avoid despair...

Pascal summed it up brilliantly: "So it is that, instead of living, we hope to live," and that, "forever preparing for happiness, it is inevitable we should not know it." I wanted to break away from that "inevitable" by working out something I called a wisdom of despair. In the Western tradition, such a wisdom would be akin to that of the first Epicurians or the Stoics, and, later, to Spinoza; in the Eastern tradition, it would derive from Buddhism or the Samkhya. ("Only the despairing can be happy," says one of the Samkhya Sutras, "for hope is the greatest torture, and despair the greatest joy.") Once again, this is only superficially contradictory. Wise people wish only for what is or for what depends on them. What good would hope do them? As for foolish people, they wish only for what is not (this is what distinguishes hope from love) and for what does not depend on them (this is what distinguishes hope from will). How can they be happy? They never stop hoping. How can they stop fearing?

"There is no hope without fear," wrote Spinoza, "and no fear without hope." We usually think of serenity as the absence of fear, but it is also the absence of hope; thus, it frees the present moment for action, knowledge and joy! This attitude has nothing to do with passivity, laziness or resignation. To wish only for what depends on us (to want) is to give ourselves the means of making it happen. To wish for what does not depend on us (to hope) is to condemn ourselves to powerlessness and resentment. The path is clear enough. The wise act; the foolish hope and tremble. The wise live in the present, wishing only for what is (acceptance, love) or what they can bring about (will). Such, indeed, is the spirit of Stoicism and of Spinoza. Such is the spirit of all wisdom, no matter what the doctrine. It is not hope that spurs us to action (how many people hope for justice but do nothing in its favor?); it is will. It is not hope that sets us free; it is truth. It is not hope that helps us live; it is love.

Thus, despair can be a bracing, healthy, joyous attitude. (Emphasis added.)  

http://www.alternet.org/rights/90292/?page=entire

Warmongerer and neocon Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Hitchens announced the news like he'd brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. "Believe me," he told a waiting nation, "it's torture." Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it's "extreme interrogation." I thought everybody over the age of 5 knew that, but as usual, I misoverestimated the media. Hitchens' tame little torture session is the biggest S&M video on the web since "9½ Weeks."

Hitchens' video is totally fake -- there's even soft-rock background music playing on the video, better music than you usually get at the dentist's office, and his "interrogators" treat him more like a client getting a mud pack at a spa than a real suspect in Iraq. That makes it even more disgusting that Hitch caved in after only 11 seconds of having water poured over a towel on his face. Eleven seconds! Think about the timeline here: For five long years he supported this stuff when it was happening to other people. Once it happened to him, he needed exactly 11 seconds to see the light.

Of course if Hitchens had been a real Iraqi suspect, they'd never have had to waterboard him at all. They do that to tough suspects, not wimps like him. In a real torture cell, everything would be a lot tougher from the start. For example, Chris wouldn't be in the nice dress shirt and slacks he's wearing on the video. He'd be naked -- a gross image, what a lifetime of booze and lying does to the body, but we have to be hard-nosed here -- because keeping the prisoner naked is basic interrogation strategy, especially with a culture as horrified of gettin' nekkid as Arabs are. You'll recall that in those Abu Ghraib pictures, the prisoners were naked.

So that's fake already, and the video gets faker as it goes. The guys "interrogating" him are fat, middle-aged, mild-mannered dudes. They don't even yell at him. A real suspect in Iraq would be snatched off the street, smacked around until he passes out, stripped and dumped into a cell with a hood over his head. He wouldn't be able to sleep off his misery, either, because sleep deprivation is one of the oldest, most effective tortures. The interrogators would maintain this schedule for hours, days, weeks, depending on how well and how soon the victim breaks down. When they think he's ready -- like, they notice with satisfaction that he screams like a steam whistle every time he hears footsteps in the corridor -- they drag him out of his cell and strap him onto that waterboarding table.

Well, Chris is a busy man and didn't have time for all that background research, so what you see in this video is a guy who hasn't been so much as slapped or yelled at. Who probably just finished a 10-martini lunch at some upscale restaurant. That's ridiculous enough, but the interrogators make it even more ridiculous with their little introduction to the torture session. One guy says, "All right, listen up, I'm going to give you some instructions ..." Then he tells the fat man on the table, "We're going to place metal objects in each of your hands," and if he feels "unbearable stress" at any time, all he has to do is drop the objects and they'll stop.

I've had dentists who did root canals on me without being that nice; they stuck to "this is going to hurt." More to the point here, putting the victim in "unbearable stress" is, uh, the whole point of torture, or "extreme interrogation," or whatever you want to call it. The last thing you'd ever do is give the victim a sense of power, like he can stop the process by dropping a "metal object" on the floor.

That kind of etiquette is what you get from those expensive dominatrixes English dudes like to get whipped by, or those nerf BDSM sites that talk about "consensual power exchanges." What reminded me most of those BDSM sites is the "code word" they tell Hitchens he can use to stop the waterboarding: "That word is red, R-E-D." They ask him if he understands and he says, "Yes, sir." That "sir" only added to the ridiculous porn feel here, like Hitchens was paying a hundred pounds an hour to have Baron Whipsong or Lady Cruella, whichever way he likes it, wear out their riding crop on his eager little bum.

The real thing isn't nearly so nice. After you've been beaten on bruises (which hurt more each time) for a few days, they slam the cell door open, screaming abuse at you, kick you to your feet and take you down the corridor, slamming your head into the walls as often as they feel like it, and strap you down. And all the time they're screaming: "OK, you worthless (Arabic obscenity here) -- We're through with you! We don't even want you any more! Ever drown before, (obscenity)? Ever go swimming head-first, (obscenity)?"

If you remember "The Big Lebowski," you can get a better idea of what waterboarding is like by remembering the scene where the Dude walks into his bungalow, where Jackie Treehorn's yuppie thugs are waiting for him. The blond one grabs the Dude's hair and runs him headfirst into the toilet, screaming, "Where's the money, Lebowski? Where's the money, shithead?" See, the point is to show overwhelming, terrifying power over the suspect, not give him little safety words.

But all that niceness doesn't matter once the torturer's helper takes a plastic milk container full of water and pours it, bit by bit, over a towel covering Hitch's face. The "metal object," whatever it is, drops after 11 seconds. And of course these fake interrogators are all over Hitch, making sure he's OK. That's also totally fake, but why bother listing any more fake features of this nonsense? The truth is that anybody who's been through as much dentistry as I have knows that nobody holds out under torture. It's not just the pain, it's the fear of the pain. I used to try to be a hero like the ones in my war books every time I went to have a root canal from the mean old Armenian who did our dental work. He scrimped on the Novocain, so I had plenty of scope to practice. And I learned the same thing any sane person knows by the time they grow up: Nobody can resist torture. Just like anybody knows what having water poured over a towel on your face is like: It's like drowning. Duh. Anybody who wanted to know that already knew it.

So why does Hitchens make such a big show of just realizing it now, after five years of supporting it? To me, the answer's easy: He's withdrawing from Iraq, making a big Jesus-on-the-cross demonstration, like a public punishment, for supporting the war all this time. By getting himself tortured in this half-assed way, he gives himself a reason to see the light, desert from the Neocon forces before it's too late. Karl Rove won't be happy, though, because the last thing the GOP wants is for people to start realizing what we're actually doing in Iraq. Reminds me of the debate about abolishing flogging with the cat-o'-nine-tails in the British Navy. The first time the bill was introduced, everybody laughed at how ridiculous a notion that was. Then somebody thought of having a real cat-o'-nine-tails introduced to the House of Commons, a bloody old Exhibit A. Nobody said a thing; they just voted unanimously to forbid it.

That's all it takes to change anybody's mind about torture, getting one little 11-second whiff of it, even if it's nowhere close to the real thing. The interesting thing is not that Hitchens changed his mind; it's the strategic thinking that made him decide to do it now. The timing of this little martyr is the key here, and what it tells you is that Hitchens is declaring martyrdom and getting out. He just unilaterally withdrew from Iraq, and in only 11 seconds.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23968711-7583,00.html

"If God does not exist, everything is allowed." Dostoevsky's character, Ivan Karamazov, said this while discussing theology around the dinner table in his father's house. Not surprisingly, Ivan is an atheist. Only an atheist would say this, right? Atheists aren't moral. They can't be moral! God is the foundation for all morality. If one does not believe in God, then how can one moral? How can one believe in morality? What is the incentive to be moral? (Does there even have to be an incentive to be moral?)

Nietzsche infamously claimed the death of God over a century ago; he new his words were cataclysmic, and rightly so. God seems to be the foundation of almost everything. Get rid of God and you get utter chaos. So when Nietzsche claimed the death of God, the very foundation in which morality was based upon crumbled. But God is dead and morality is still practiced widely. Perhaps Nietzsche was wrong? I don't think so. Maybe we can replace "God" with things more powerful: our thoughts, rationale, and love. Most importantly, maybe God isn't the foundation for morality. Perhaps we are.

Nevertheless, some people still maintain that one can only be moral if one is religious. How naive and idiotic of such people to think this. I fully agree with what Andre Comte-Sponville has to say on this topic.

As Kant demonstrated, either morals are autonomous or they do not exist at all. If a person refrains from murdering his neighbor only out of fear of divine retribution, his behavior is dictated not by moral values but by caution, fear of the holy policeman, egoism. And if a person does good only with an eye to salvation, she is not doing good (since her behavior is dictated by self-interest, rather than by duty or by love) and will thus not be saved. This is Kant, the Enlightenment and humanity at their best: A good deed is not good because God commanded me to do it (in which case it would have been good for Abraham to slit his son's throat); on the contrary, it is because an action is good that it is possible to believe God commanded it. Rather than religion being the basis for morals, morals are now the basis for religion. This is the inception of modernity. To have a religion, the Critique of Practical Reason points out, is to "acknowledge all one's duties as sacred commandments." For those who no longer have faith, commandments vanish (or, rather, lose their sacred quality), and all that remains are duties--that is, the commandments we impose upon ourselves.

Alain puts it beautifully in his Letters to Sergio Solmi on the Philosophy of Kant: "Ethics means knowing that we are spirit and thus have certain obligations, for noblesse oblige. Ethics is neither more nor less than a sense of dignity." Should I rob, rape and murder? It would be unworthy of me--unworthy of what humanity has become, unworthy of the education I have been given, unworthy of what I am and wish to be. I therefore refrain from such behavior, and this is what is know as ethics. There is no need to believe in God--one need believe only in one's parents and mentors, one's friends (provided they are well chose) and one's conscience.

As Comte-Sponville, puts it, "'If God does not exist,' says Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, 'everything is allowed.' Not at all, for the simple reason that I will not allow myself everything!"

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein

I recently made a couple of posts about atheist spirituality. At first glance, "atheist spirituality" seems to be quite paradoxical, mostly because we tend to equate spirituality with being religious. Have you ever heard the saying, "I'm not religious; I'm spiritual"? Well, most people--atheists and theists alike--will say that you can't be spiritual without being religious, however, I beg to differ. We first must define "spirituality." Now, I must say that we can define spirituality in an exclusive, theistic way, but, obviously, I think to define spirituality in strictly theistic terms is wrong.

After doing some reading, and talking to a friend of mine, I started to get interested in mysticism. I was very skeptical of mysticism at first, but eventually I became interested in it, mainly because I saw that mysticism, at least the way in which I saw it, didn't interfere with my atheism. So I picked up a book called The Mystic Heart by Wayne Teasdale. I didn't fall in love with mysticism, but a lot of what I read, I found, could be applied to my own life and philosophy. In this book, Teasdale makes a distinction between being religious and being spiritual, which I think deserves to be quoted at length.

Being religious connotes belonging to and practicing a religious tradition. Being spiritual suggests a personal commitment to a process of inner development that engages us in our totality. Religion, of course, is one way many people are spiritual. Often, when authentic faith embodies an individual's spirituality, the religious and the spiritual will coincide. Still, not every religious person is spiritual (although they out to be!), and not every spiritual person is religious.

Spirituality is a way of life that affects and includes every moment of existence. It is at once a contemplative attitude, a disposition to a life of depth, and the search for ultimate meaning, direction, and belonging. The spiritual person is committed to growth as an essential, ongoing life goal. To be spiritual requires us to stand on our own two feet while being nurtured and supported by our tradition, if we are fortunate enough to have one...

Many religious people depend on institutions--their church, synagogue, temple, or mosque--to make their decisions. Rather than looking for inner direction, they shape their spiritual lives through conformity to external piety. They seem to lack the ability and desire to stand on their own two feet. Spirituality draws us into the depths of our being, where we come face to face with ourselves, our weaknesses, and with ultimate mystery. Many understandably prefer to avoid this frightening prospect by sinking into external religiosity and the safe routines of liturgy or ritual. A genuinely spiritual person passionately commits to this inner development. He or she knows that life is a spiritual journey, and that each one of us must take this journey alone, even while surrounded by loved ones.

From this, I see no reason why atheists cannot be spiritual. Shouldn't we be spiritual? Shouldn't we face ourselves and our weakness? Do we not have mystery in our lives? Is life not just some big mystery? Do we not stand on our own two feet? Should we not look at every moment of our existence? I think we should do, and can do, all of these things.  

I haven't been blogging a lot -- we did the tag sale, i am now staying at the house with the dogs, and Jazz in July starts next week.... also, i took a little time with this one, and still i didn't finish it. Sigh.

Jack K2

I was thinking of Jack Kerouac the other day, about whether he was "hip" or not. I came to the conclusion that Kerouac was only hip when he was authentic, when he was acting or writing without introspection or self-analysis. Kerouac was probably the only "beat" in a sub-culture of the "hip," people who cynically wore a persona rather than their hearts on their sleeves for anyone to see.

I guess i have my own definition of what is hip, and what a hipster was and is to this day. Post-WW II America was overexposed to the desert of the real -- they had survived, by whatever means necessary, the Great Depression and total war. There are those who say money is at the root of all that kills, and i agree with Everclear's frontman that these are the same people who have never enjoyed a Welfare Christmas. Most of America in 1946 woulda known exactly what he meant. After deprivations, disillusion, and unbelievable violence, most Americans were ready to settle down, get married, buy their own place, and live with a bit of security for once.

America had come kicking and screaming into modernity -- the agricultural and the frontier myths of America's beginning and expansion never actually died in the American imagination. Such bright promises the Progressive era offered! Science and technology would lead the world into a kind of Capitalist utopia. WW I exploded that myth in Europe, the Great Depression and WW II destroyed it in America. Post WW II America was fascinated with the American West, a mythos that was adopted to interpret who they were, to guide them to be where they wanted to travel.

The modernity of Apollo, the god of reason, linear thinking, of the bright sharp lines and Modernity's patron saint, revealed in the Depression an economy that was not stable nor predictable, that chaos was just below the surface of any "civilized" nation. Apollo had supplied democracy's arsenal, and the nightmare that followed as that arsnal was deployed was a massive shock to civilized sensibilities. Death walked the world in Apollonian light, where American's firebombed entire city populations due to the grim reality of total war, used napalm to clear the Japanese-made caves and bunkers on countless pacific atolls, and created the single most devastating weapon known to man in a science lab. No where was the modern more implicated than in efficiently run factories that produced corpses as their product, run by German men and women in business suits.

The time was ripe for a bacchanalia, for a Dionysian festival of the underground emotions, of the rawness suppressed by civilization -- and those burned most by Apollo's light led the revolution. American veterans returned to the States changed men. Before the war most Americans had traveled from their own home towns only because of economic necessity. These men returned having traveled throughout Europe and Asia, exposed to different cultures, philosophies, and religions. Upon returning, the Beats and then the New Left reflected this new Cosmopolitan outlook, challenging and rejecting the traditional values, regionalism, and the former isolationism of the US.

Americans, being Americans, thought Dionysus was a benign, Rosseauian construct -- in their American idealism they believed nature had been tamed,. but still retained an edge. They wanted a taste of the wildness of nature while depending upon a civilized safety net. The Beats especially were proponents to this way of thinking, making heroes out of petty thieves and criminals (Hunke, anyone?), tapping into the Old West mythos of the gunslinger and the outlaw, believing freedom to be the absence of external constraint -- all the while relying heavily upon a prosperity hitherto unknown in American society. The hipster was the living symbol of an abstraction, a standard to live up to, a persona to act out. Is there anything more inauthentic than an actor? Everything is make believe, they do not even speak their own words, and they make a script, something pre-detemined, come to "life."

Enter Kerouac. Yes, for the most part he was a fake, every bit a psuedo-intellectual elitist as Ginsberg, Corso & Burroughs. Kerouac could play this role as well as any of them, as evidenced at the Six Gallery  reading. Did someone call for a bohemian hedonist? Kerouac could be considered the greatest Beat method actor...

The only time Kerouac (or anyone else for that matter) was hip was when he was authentic. Authenticity is when a person is in the moment, engaged at what they are wicked, uniquely gifted with; when they are existentially true. Let me put it this way -- you can fuck someone one of two ways: you can, in the act of sex, detach yourself and, as it were, stand beside yourself and intellectually evaluate your performance, or you can surrender to the moment in a stream of consciousness. Everything for the Beats, and their heirs the hippies, was calculated, performance art, emphasis on the performance. Kerouac was probably the only true beat out of the lot. Norman Mailer wrote that every hipster feared being beat, and Kerouac was always awkward, always self-conscience, and usually beat down and disappointed, always in retreat as his idealism was exploded time and again. Kerouac was only hip when no one was around, or when he was sweet rather than cloyingly sentimental or melancholy.

The Beats ushered in the Dionysian apocalypse of the 60s, and brought home Ginsberg's Howl in a purely unintended way -- the 60s saw the best minds of their generation destroyed thru hedonism, drugs, selfish ambition, and wild abandon (think of Jim Morrison)  -- Nature was not tamed,  and Dionysus is a dangerous god that demands the consequences of his worship as his sacrifices on the altar. Kerouac death was self-inflicted, and he died bitter and disillusioned...

The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality

Andre Comte-Sponville

Up until my freshman year of college, I had never questioned religion or tradition. All I really did was go with the flow: listen to the preacher, listen to the teacher, listen to my father, etc. I was never very religious, though--I didn't care too much for religion and belief. Nevertheless, after taking a religious studies course in my first year of college, I started to question religion, tradition, and, most important of all, I think, God.

God is no longer a reality to me. But when I first started to question God's meaning, his power, and his reality, I was rather sad. Now the way in which I see the world is false, I thought. Now all that has its foundation in God doesn't work for me. What is the point of being moral? Because God says so? Because you must be a good, moral person in order to get into Heaven? No. There must be some other reason. God is meaningless to me.

So, I became an "atheist." I read Dawkins and Harris and agreed with everything they said. Now that I look back on this time in my life, I was really desperate to find a way to make sense out of the world after having my theistic worldview crushed. But in searching, I became very dogmatic, like the Four Horsemen and most atheists. Once I got out of this intial dogmatic stage--although, I must say I still get back into it from time to time--I was ready to pursue something else, something meaningful and subjective but still in line with my atheistic worldview.

I have found something that works for me--existentialism. But before I discovered existentialism, I found The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by Andre Comte-Sponville. This little book--it is actually little and only 206 pages long--gave me what I was really looking for--a type of atheistic spirituality. If you are an atheist, and are looking for something more than just your typical atheism, I would definitely check out this little book. It is philosophical in nature and very well written. I'm going to post the book's introduction in my next blog post.  

In Washington Post's section On Faith, columnist Susan Jacoby responds to data from the Pew Forum that indicates that 21% of Americans who identify as atheists say that they believe in a God.

Wait... what?

Susan responds with a complaint about the shoddiness of the American vocabulary - that collectively we often don't know what some important words mean. This is clearly the case of someone who says "I'm an atheist, but I believe in God." The term "atheist" does not have a flexible meaning.

My first inclination is to want to see this data. I don't remember reading this in the report, but I could be overlooking it. Frankly, however, I don't have a hard time believing it. If I hear one more freaking person tell me that I believe in an invisible man in the sky, I'm going to start slapping people with slabs of bacon! The stunning  American ignorance about religion - I hate to break it to some of you - is not confined to the religious.

If Stephen Hawking could facepalm....

*snerk* I'm just beginning to imagine some of the fascinating mail that Dawkins and Hitchens must get. Gawd, no wonder Hitch is always boozing.

Sorry to some of my (genuinely) secular neighbors if it seems like I'm giving you a bit of ribbing. This isn't directed at you. But... for crying out loud! How can anyone know enough to use the term "atheist" and yet have no idea what it actually means? Is the lack of belief in a deity really that hard to comprehend?

I'm trying to imagine a conversation with one of these 21 percenters: "Well, yeah, I'm an atheist, but I'm not crazy or anything. I still believe in God."

What?

Society is a dialectic phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer. Society is a product of man. It has no other being except that which is bestowed upon it by human activity and consciousness. There can be no social reality apart from man. Yet it may also be stated that man is a product of society. Every individual biography is an episode within the history of society, which both precedes and survives it. Society was there before the individual was born and it will be there after he has died. What is more, it is within society, and as a result of social processes, that the individual becomes a person, that he attains and holds onto an identity, and that he carries out the various projects that constitute his life. Man cannot exist apart from society. The two statements, that society is the product of man and that man is the product of society are not contradictory. They rather reflect the inherently dialectic character of the societal phenomenon. Only if his character is recognized will society be understood in terms that are adequate to its empirical reality.