Why I love her

Why I love her

Sheltering under this opened umbrella
a pituitary parasol of parabolic
colors, emanations of the unifying embrace
of she I loved before I knew her
whose hair strand is the corner of a market stand
in Darfur, a blinked eyelash a family
dinner table of waspish mediocrity.
The inviolability of sufficient for our needs
screams like a stark reminder of the march
of sensory soldiers
unified only by a pole of
consciousness, the arbitrary skin fences
of yours and my stories
mere wisps of ether ,
vortices in her dance.

Mary with her ragged clothes
and unknown violation
in that dark night of the soul
mirrored in her bottomless almond eyes
like the horror of every woman
afraid to show her face beneath her veil,
her intellect beneath her place,
that vast moonlight of divinity reflected
in softest cafe au lait skin
responding to electric touch,
whipping the frenzy of energy itself ,
the male sword plunged against his brother’s breast
for cash, with nary but the gliding of a palm
on a warm sensate field of short dark hairs
standing like soldiers in obeisance of place and duty.

Who whipped her neck around,
like some awkward rubik’s cube?
Someone’s daughter or wife
in a parking lot
beneath the shadow conspired by two streetlights?
Who slit the insides of her thighs like an orange
peeled before a morning breakfast?
What monster did not see
her divinity, her beauty,
her sideways glance
as proof of her eternal beauty,
her testimony to their evil, before
they laid the black tarp of autopsy over her
and laid her to rest out back of the old church?
The monstrosity of the violation
of the goddess of us all,
the breather of life into our every broad armed inhalation,
was obvious to us later in the funeral parade
of silk and ceremony.

It is said by ancient tribes that in this wiling death
she undergoes beneath my stabbing sword at night,
that petit mort
under full moon’s watchful glow,
is a sacrifice of tears.
She is the queen of mercy
mother to a field of daughters laying down under a foreign sword
whose crop of babies are never born to suck and know
the nuzzle of this young girl’s older breast.

Djinn

I dream of genies

Mystic was a magic place,
peppered with old men in roguish caps whose rosy cheeks
stoked by tankards of creamy ale
spilled stories of beautiful ladies
who sometime past
had smashed themselves on ragged seaside cliffs
but still walked wailing under sweeping lighthouse beams
on moonlit nights cast over the rocky beach.
So much better than the serious doctors with their stiff
white coats and so neatly trimmed
gray side-burns who packaged fear in words like leukemia,
alopecia or other obscure latinates, disease
dispensed in measured tones
in crowded rooms of children waiting to hear their fate.
I knew when we went to the local mall to meet
Jeannie that she, with her soft magic,
could heal my wayward cells
and draw them back into motherly line from where she
sat on her red velvet chair in pastel purple robes
to dispense the love and soothing I craved deep
in my broken marrow.
I knew too to stay far away from Captain/Major Tony
on the left,
with his tight blue suit and lapel pin
who would no doubt only pat me on the head
and tell me to be a good boy. I stood
just two children away from a miracle of beauty
at quarter till twelve,
but I suppose that hunger called
requiring a tuna fish sandwich to fill a hole,
a craving in the goddess’ stomach, like death needs
to hungrily claw a child from his parents arms
in his ravenous noon-time need.
So off she went just then
from her throne and I was left
with Captain/Major’s second wife,
a plumpish woman with dimples and tight,
curled blond locks who picked me
up in her cloying fragrant arms of cheap
polyester and efficiency
to tell me to be strong and good
and to listen to my mommy and daddy
and always to not complain or cry too much
as death plucked me from my peaceful
jewel of life and dispensed me
off to the grim reaper’s arms with a quick
and thorough shove,
to process the next
child through this cold and uncaring world,
that following page or flip of a turned leaf.

The Chains that Bind – philosophical doggerel

To break the chains that bind

A bird sings in the morning light
four chirps and a brief silence, a blight
of melody, let us not be tied to hate or like
or black or white
or day or night.
Let the crescent moon ring forth its reflected sunlight
of our working hands or running feet alight.
with the startling quakes that course our body when
pealed thunder strikes.
Unison voices singing together like
school-children
stopping a goal at a soccer match, bright
with red faced determination,
to love, to breathe,
to feel the chill wind race up our backs,
against our futile sleeves
that struggle against the sleep and cold,
against rain and lassitude that odd
determination to believe
in this human face
a young girl’s smile of slight relief
a small boy’s clenched fist
To overthrow that prickly wreath,
that tyranny of thoughtlessness.
The right to force our way
through walls of hate,
that sunrise on a morning hill -the curious belief
no matter how small
that we can overcome the division and strife
between here and there and somehow meet
in this common journey.
That staff pounding on the ground
like an unshaken heartbeat,
a steady knock of reason at the feet
of our those stone human statues, closed hearts walled off
with disbelief
in the magical, the transcendent,the over-
coming of that which cannot be.
That new dawn, the era of every greased
hard-working chin, piped veins pumping
through every flexed arm. The hope that we
can rise above what we are in pieces
in someone’s child’s half-peeled scalp to seek
that golden handshake or stolen kiss.
A tomorrow that shakes without boundaries,
without age , gender, or color.
Unsteady as an aspen tree
or a wave of wind through some new crop of wheat.
A tomorrow that comes with love,
union and belief
that those who do not now dare now share our tongue
might someday speak
tomorrow’s orange glow
of sonorous peace.

New to the Blogroll: Beyond Intractibility

Here’s a great website devoted to encouraging more constructive ways of dealing with difference. I’ll be adding it under “Building a Better World.” I found it looking for a synopsis of Jimmy Carter’s excellent book, Our Endangered Values.

God does Facebook

This is awesome:

A Facebook Haggadah

Self-hood and it’s relation to money, sex and politics

Adapted and mostly quoted from Matthew Allen Fox’s The Accessible Hegel

Hegel introduces desire (or appetite) as the ingredient responsible for switching on our specifically human engagement with the world of objects. In humans, desire is not mere wanting; it is the will both to actively fashion what is external and to assimilate or otherwise appropriate this “other”. Desire also affirms that we are embodied consciousnesses, who are in and of the world; we are anchored there. Moreover, desire, as Hegel speaks of it, contains the energetic impulse to self-hood in its latent, as yet undeveloped form. In Hegel’s scenario, two desiring pre-selves encounter each other. Each strives to dominate its rival, doing violence if necessary to achieve this aim. But a mortal finish will not advance the cause of self-hood because recognition by the other is a crucial ingredient of one’s identity. A lifeless other will not be able to provide the feedback needed to spur self-development onward. There, Hegel posits an outcome of his hypothetical struggle in which one party either becomes subdued by, or submits to, the opposing counterpart. We come here to the famous master/slave relationship that has been appropriated and transformed by so many other writers since his time.

Inasmuch as each side seeks unrestricted self-expression, the resolution of the master-slave relationship embodies instability and tension. This restless element provides the momentum that drives the dialectic of self-hood onward, as we shall see. In this first resolution, the master achieves a style of self-hood that is based on denial (negation) of the slave’s self-hood The slave is the vehicle or instrument of the master’s will and experiences his or her life as being merely the means to another’s ends. But not only is the master/slave relation unstable, but also premised on modes of false consciousness. The master’s self-hood amounts to little more than the negation of another’s desire for self-hood The slave’s existence, on the other hand, assumes the inertness of instrumentality and embodies self-denial. Furthermore, the slave undertakes the task of working on behalf of the master, “mediating,” through physical labor, between nature and the master. The master delegates to the slave the activity of satisfying his or her basic human needs while “living the life of luxury”: and is thereby once removed from contact with the world. But in this configuration, the master becomes alienated from the very source of doing from which all selves derive (the self is a doer and is what it does; the master becomes a non-doer). The slave, then, is oddly enough a step closer to realizing full self-hood – as a being who is also a doer – than is the master. The master, by treating the slave as a mere thing or means, also denies to himself or herself the sort of mutual recognition needed for fuller forms of self-hood.

When it slowly begins to dawn on the slave that it is because of slave labor that the master’s identity is sustained, this is an empowering realization. The slave comes to learn that rebellion (“negation of the negation”) can help to overthrow an oppressive condition of existence.

In this light, consider religion, consider war, consider poverty and debt, consider marriage, consider government, consider employment and consider morality (the battle within). Once the trickle begins, the deluge of self-awareness follows.

Tree of life and spiritual technology

Pan-Consciousness and the Kabbalah

There is an ancient mystery tradition. Elements of the mystery tradition have been maintained in sources such as Greek philosophy, Eastern religion (Buddhism and Shivaism particularly), and in modern mystery traditions. The ultimate goal of such traditions is to understand the interplay between body and consciousness that takes place at the level of emotion. By union with a pan-consciousness, several benefits derive, both in theory and from a practical psychological point of view: 1)Since the person has united with a pan-consciousness not tied to one ego, true empathy and morality may emerge, 2)Because the emotions are derived from the interplay and thought and body, and the top-heavy element of thought is now embraced, one may be filled predominantly with blissful emotions at one’s choosing, like picking a pair of socks, 3)it may be possible to produce scientific but surprising material effects at a distance through neural network control of chaotic physical events.

Consciousness requires concepts. Concepts like Truth and Illusion are very interesting and drive us closer to understanding their mystery. Truth, for example, is the belief that what one thinks or says matches some external reality with a degree of permanence. Illusion is the concept that one’s thoughts or words do not match reality except in a tangential sense relating to momentary desire or mis-perception, a match of reality only in briefest flux. These two, taken together, indicate the need for objectivity and non-ego-oriented perspectives as precursors of true consciousness. Furthermore, there is the fact that living, conscious humans consist of a body and consciousness. Dead humans consist of a body and no consciousness. Yet nothing material has actually left. A process has stopped, and therefore, in a sense, something not visible, not material, and yet in all likelihood, not ghostly either, has left. So do we say consciousness is a process? Fine, but there are many processes in the world, like oxidation in a candle flame, erosion, etc. Are all processes consciousness? Doubtful. Yes consciousness is a process, but since other processes do not share consciousness, there is something special about the process of consciousness.

Such viewpoints leave us considering three realms of reality. The first is an ideal realm, characterized by natural law and consciousness. Just as we can speak of natural law governing the period between expansion and contraction of the universe, where there is nothing in between that is material, and also we speak of sharing the consciousness of a dead writer on a rainy afternoon, we can speak of this ideal realm, but it is still rather mysterious, but clearly primary, and permanent within flux. The material realm of flux, gain and loss, is very obvious by contrast. A third realm, represent by the conscious man, is the interaction between these two. While we refer to consciousness in a permanent sense in the ideal realm, the interactional realm is the world of the garden-variety consciousness of the living human being, the emotional/conscious level. So the three realms may be loosely defined as the ideal, the material and the conscious. This is also identified in Hindu philosophy as the three gunas” sattva (ideal), rajas (action), and tamas (darkness). In a sense, we can look at any property and it’s opposite. There is the material level where contradictory properties are excluded from being at the same moment – a la Aristotle. At the level of universal oneness and abstraction, opposites are identical. The infinitely big and the infinitely small would be indistinguishable, both are extension without limit. Now as this whole conception sees the universe in terms of union and differentiation of opposites with a constant in-breathing or outbreathing between these poles, each of the three realms may be subjugated to the same breaths and differentiation itself. And any subsequent sub-worlds may also experience the same infusion of breath, in fractal-like recursion. However, as in programming, one recursion is enough to recursively call a function until an end-point, so it is common to show the three realms recursively divided into three sub-realms each, when compounded with the totality of human experience, equaling the 10 sephiroth (3×3 + 1).

Each of these sephiroth is associated with a number and several other images from various religions and myths. This is done to pull the body, mind and emotions into a study of the breathing and flux between these worlds. This amounts to a curious science, a sort of atheistic spiritual technology. Atheism is in the sense of seeing this as an experience of the human being as unified and inseparable with the one conscious being that is all that is, therefore, denying a separate personal god apart from his creation as most religions dogmatically profess. As J Smith states in his analytical treatise on atheistic terms, pantheism is atheism, but not positive physical materialist non-skeptical atheism, but a negative (denying something not asserting anything) non-skeptical (not agnostic or denying human ability to understand) atheism. Yet it is spiritual in the sense of using myth and ritual as a technology, like a tv set, to induce personal change. This would probably be the clearest understanding of my beliefs I can deliver at this time, atheistic-pantheistic-pagan-humanistic-spiritual-technology. This is sort of taking prayer and myth and ritual and peeling it off any dogma, treating it as a realm open to scientific explanation and rational exploration just like any other perceivable phenomena. Comparative religion is the tinniest, earliest most immature part of such a study, but one that most are familiar with through J Campbell, Sam Harris, etc.

So the first realm is the Ideal, then Conscious, then Material. All nine subrealms are therefore:

Ideal
1. Ideal of Ideal -i.e. God, Shiva
2. Conscious of Ideal – will of god, creation
3. Material of Ideal – i.e. angels, mystical forces, mediation etc

Conscious
4. Ideal of Conscious – perfected self, boddhisattva, christ
5. Conscious of Conscious – inspiration, creativity
6. Material of Conscious – morality, ethics

Material
7. Ideal of Material – forms, patterns, unconscious
8. Conscious of Material- life, procreation
9. Material of Material- rationality, logic, science

10.Malkuth – the totality, real human experience, phenomenology.

Using associated images, rituals, meditation and prayer, these levels and their interplay may be understood. This replaces mere physical atoms with phenomenological atoms, packets of matter/consciousness/emotion whose assembly and disassembly make the phenomenology of a real human experience, replacing the simplistic and skewed view of material atomism obtained by looking at human life either exclusively subjectively or objectively alone.

Why is this done? Lacan and psychoanalytic theory, not surprisingly conceived by atheistic kabbalistic Jews such as Freud, provides insight into the outcome of the process:

“[The practitioners] realize that, in fact, they had little idea what they were saying, why they were saying it, or even who was speaking when they opened their mouths. The what, why, and who of their utterances has become problematic to them. Everything becomes questionable; what was most certain is no longer at all certain, and they are now open to listening to the unconscious, to hearing the other voice that speaks through them, and to attempting to decipher it. The desire for wisdom has been formed.” Bruce Fink on Lacan

This is not intended to still more pointless debates with two tiresome groups of people, believers in revealed religion and teenage-minded antisocial atheist/anarchists. This does not well represent the agnostic, merely beleaguered and wishing for respite from the fascists and theocrats. It represents a third way. I see classical humanism as a true third way and the progenitor of all culture and knowledge we have. I see the fascist and the theocrat as extremes that meld into the same mentality exclusive of subtlety. Therefore, please do not litter this note with comments if you are from either group. That which is not spoken to you should be ignorable by you if you have attained a modicum of maturity. There is a large group of people, usually oppressed and battered by the grand poles of ignorance, who is interested and involved in this spiritual technology. These are the people with whom I dine, with whom I share hope, and with whom I wish to commune.

Your dead loved ones aren’t coming back!!

Your loved ones aren’t coming back

aka You too are already an atheist probably, you just don’t know.

My uncle died last year. He was a gambler, smoker, and full-of-life Jackie Gleason sort of fellow, very quick-witted. I helped the rest of the family bury him. When in the earth, the casket soon disintegrates, and, so does he, atom drifting from atom in complete lassitude. One day, thousands of years from now, when his dust is scattered all over the earth, will the world suddenly be undone in a heartbeat by a vengeful God? On this zombie day, will my uncle’s atoms fly together, be magically glued together, and will he walk down main street, cigar in mouth? I think the least God could do is give him his cigar back, and his missing leg too, for all those weekends spent in Catholic church! My wife’s dead father, who died of a heart attack nearly 20 years ago, will he and my uncle stroll arm in arm down main street on zombie day? No. No, they won’t. You don’t believe that, and neither do I. Zombie day is the core belief of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There is a complete suspension, according to scripture, of the laws of nature precipitously on zombie day, which allows the mixed dust of all the people that ever lived to be reassembled into walking, talking human beings again to be judged for their beliefs and actions. Now, since, say, some of Alexander the Great’s dust has been recycled into a baby or teenager in Greece no doubt by now, I’m not sure how Alexander the Great, the baby and the teenager can all stand completely whole for justice when they share the same physical body to some degree, magic or no. Do you believe this, or do you believe the sun is a star with a lifespan, and the earth is a planet going around the sun with lifeforms on it? That we are bodies that degrade with age and/or disease to where we no longer function, and simply dissolve, never to be reassembled, except for having small bits of our physical stuff recycled. We can tag an atom in our hippocampus, our memories, our “soul”, and watch after death as it dissolves and is reused in the butt muscle of a rat. This is a factual event, and this is why in all likelihood, you believe the latter. You probably do not really believe in zombie day, though you call yourself a Christian, Jew, or Muslim.

If you are one of the few who do believe in zombie day, really, truly believe you’re going to see my dead uncle walk downtown, kudos to you. You are at least consistent in your madness. You at least can comprehend the content of your scriptures. To those of you who claim to be Muslim, Jew, or Christian, and now protest that zombie day is not essential, you are quite mistaken.

For the Jews: Ezekiel 37: 12 – “I will open your graves, and cause you to come up”, and it is the 13th principle of faith: “I believe with complete (perfect) faith, that there will be techiat hameitim – revival of the dead, whenever it will be God’s, blessed be He, will (desire) to arise and do so. May (God’s) Name be blessed, and may His remembrance arise, forever and ever.”

For the Christians, “…there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust.” (Acts 24:15 KJV), “resurrection at the last day” is mentioned at John 11:24-25, Matthew 12:38-42: “…At judgment time, the citizens of Ninevah will come back to life along with this generation … At judgment time, the queen of the south will be brought back to life along with this generation …”, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and He will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. … And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. (Matthew 25:31-36, 40-43, 45-46 NRSV)

For the Muslims,

Surah 75:20-21 (Part 1)

1. I do call to witness the Resurrection Day;

2. And I do call to witness the self-reproaching Spirit.

3. Does man think that We cannot assemble his bones?

4. Nay, We are able to put together in perfect order, the very tip of his fingers.

5. But man wishes to do wrong (even) in the time in front of him.

6. He questions: “When is the Day of Resurrection?”

7. At length, when the sight is dazed

8. And the moon is buried in darkness

9. And the sun and moon are joined together that Day will Man say;

10. “Where is the refuge?”

11. By no means! No place of safety!”

12. Before the Lord (alone), that Day will be the place of rest.

13. That Day will Man be told (all) that he put forward, and all that he put back.

14. Nay, man will be evidence against himself,

15. Even though he were to make excuses.

and so many others that talk about Al-Qimaya, the Resurrection and Day of Judgment.

So, if you don’t literally believe in the resurrection of the dead, you are not really a Jew, Muslim or Christian, and, in fact, according to these very same traditions you will be punished for your beliefs. So if you use the personality of Jesus or Muhammad as a sort of proof of God and his so-called wise men, yet ignore their very words, this seems rather curious indeed, and self-defeating. If you don’t really believe my uncle is going to walk down the street some day though he be stone, cold dead and dissolved now, the you aren’t really a Christian, Jew or Muslim and are going to burn in hell forever according to the very traditions you uphold as wise and good. This would make such people appear to be hypocrites and fools, slaves to other people’s will alone.

And what about this popular belief of going to a “better place” when you die? If it does not come from the desert prophets of monotheism, where does it come from? This is a very old pagan idea really. The Egyptians and most pagan peoples of the world had gods, a shadowy after-realm. It is a fruit of a pagan tradition. Pagan traditions arise from primitive understanding of man’s relationship to nature, like the cycle of the season. Spring became a metaphor for rebirth, appearing to die every winter. In writings, certainly the apex of pagan thought which also greatly influenced Western and Islamic worlds via translation and study, Plato puts forth the quintessential formulation of heaven. He basically argues that the forces the compose the universe must be symmetrical. This is in line with modern physics too. As such, he concludes that primitive properties must be in balance, hot and cold, long and short, etc. So death and life are in balance, and a loss here is the gain of a soul there. Similarly, there were reincarnation beliefs too, that a birth here was a soul migrating from there. The pain and suffering of this world is balanced by the wisdom and perfection of that world. While the reincarnation ideas crept into Eastern religion and the perfection ideas into Nirvana concepts, the ideal heaven that you go to when you die is what took hold here in the West and somewhat less in the Muslim lands, but occasionally still too. The problem with Plato’s interesting argument is that entropy, which defines the life or death of a complex structure like an organism, is not a simple property. Entropy is not conserved, but actually always increases within any closed system such as the universe, but this was not known to Plato. The “proof” offered by Plato shows what heaven really is, a desire to rail against degradation and loss, a fear of death, the end of being. It is more logical than the bizarre Hollywood magic of the desert prophets with zombies strolling the streets, to think of perhaps an alternate dimension we slip to on death, which human consciousness somehow shares, so that we may live forever, but without pain. As appealing, more placid, and rational as it may appear, heaven is not actually Christian, Jewish or Muslim. It is a pagan belief and a blasphemy. And since I doubt you believe in Zeus, Athena, Apollo, and the rest of the gods, which being the perfected spirits of the other realm are logically derived from the surety of heaven, you don’t really believe in heaven. Again, if you are one of the few who believes in Hades and the gods, under whatever name, and has the consistency to call yourself a pagan, than kudos to you as well. You at least are consistent in your madness too.

The truth is most of you call yourself Jew, Muslim or Christian out of social pressure and fear of individuality. Most of you do not really believe in zombie day because it’s stupid and fantastical. Most of you don’t really believe in heaven, because you are not idol-toting pagans “suckled in a creed outworn”, but really have a vague childish wish to live forever and have all wrongs righted somehow in the end. If there are no gods, there is no heaven. If there is no zombie day, there is no need for refuge in God. God, deprived of zombie day, is just a label for a childish wish to live forever and to never suffer injustice despite being rather insignificant really. The truth is that you are not orthodoxly one of the desert religions, or an orthodox pagan, you are really an atheist in believer’s clothing.

Plato’s theory of forms – modern, dynamic and important

Empathy with Plato’s Theory

Plato was one of the great philosopher’s of all time. His theory of forms held tremendous sway over people’s thinking for quite some time. Traces of Platonic idealism can be found in Christianity, Islam, Hegel’s dialectic, Marxism as well therefore, Kant’s moral imperative, and modern scientific pantheism. Regardless of our taste for the fruit of the branches of Plato, it’s impact on our culture and history, and therefore its influence on our daily lives, cannot be denied. It therefore would at least be prudent to have some understanding of this philosophy. I will be rephrasing Plato’s philosophy in new and sympathetic language. This is in preparation for an in depth study of Plato’s dialogs and the Republic which I am just about to begin. Therefore, this is not an academic study with a great deal of rigor, for that will come later, but instead it is an attempt to paint the most sympathetic portrait of Plato’s reach into the modern mind.

I find the most fruitful place to begin a discussion of the modern relevance of Plato is with the concept of Platonic love. Contrary to popular belief, Platonic love would not necessarily be love without sex, as it can, in fact, be quite passionate and sensual. Rather, let us imagine a little fairy tale . . . A long time ago, in the a misty kingdom of medieval France, there was a young prince deeply in love with a young maid of the stables. They met for passionate stolen embraces in the moonlight by the stables and promised eternal love, till death do them part. Of course, the prince’s father, the king, had no desire for his son’s future to be squandered on a lowly maid, and had slated his son to marry the daughter of a powerful ally. The king had the maid arrested and sent to jail in Spain. He told his son that she had been arrested after stealing money from the church and running away with a male thief who was, no doubt, her lover as well as her accomplice. He did this so that his son would feel that she no longer loved him, and furthermore, that she never did. The maid was told that the prince was the one who had her falsely arrested, so that she could never blackmail him. So she believed then that the prince did not love her, and he never did really. Let us say that on the way to Spain, pirates hijack the maid’s caravan. Upon joining with the pirates she has many high adventures. In both lover’s minds, the love burns strong despite a lack of faith, despite fluctuating circumstances and severe trials. Nonetheless, the maid-now-pirate one day takes a ship with the prince aboard. Somehow or another everything is reconciled, love is apparent again, and the maid becomes queen and they live happily ever after. This sort of love, that persists despite fluctuating circumstance, the appearance of destruction, and false opinion that it is no more or never was, is Platonic love. As you can imagine, the united lovers can have quite passionate sex, and yet the love is still Platonic. The love is seen as eternally true.

Parmenides was a Greek philosopher who believed everything was eternal and change was an illusion. He believed this primarily with the motivation that in order for there to be truth, change and error had to be deceptive. Heraclitus was another Greek who believed that everything was in a constant state of flux, and that there was no truth. Plato very much wanted to believe Parmenides, but he feared Heraclitus was right. His compromise was to believe in truth and eternity outside of the moment of now, ever in flux. This is why Platonic love is true love outside of the influence of the storms of the temporary in our fairy tale above.

Plato often uses science and math to explain his theories. Let us look at natural law. Scientists write equations of motion, or quantum mechanics, or gravity or particle physics. Just looking at Newton’s equations, we can say that the motion of billiard balls on a pool table follows Newton’s laws. And it does to a very close degree. But because of friction from the cloth, and air resistance, and the balls not being completely elastic on collision, the real behavior of the balls will not follow Newton’s laws in the real world. For example, the cue ball when struck will not roll on forever with inertia, but will stop. Nonetheless, we say that Newton’s laws are the true reality, the abstraction that is the pure and true reality. This is the case with every natural law. As Plato pointed out, every mathematical object, whether a circle of geometry or a law of motion, is a bit of an abstraction, an idealized form. In the real world, no circle or wheel is ideally round. Nonetheless, when scientists speak of the formation of our universe, the big bang, they will pull out various equations of physics to explain how something came to be out of nothing. Even if the universe expands and contracts in cycles, natural law is used to explain how something comes to be out of the nothings that are pauses between the in-breaths and the out-breaths. Natural law, the totality of ideal forms, is conceived as preceding being or as constituting a ground or basis of being. When Plato says an apple or a horse is a sort of reflection of the ideal forms, he means that the object before us, the horse say, is a reflection of the constituent ideal forms, the relevant laws of chemistry, physics, and biology, that organize and determine matter. Furthermore, we can determine these ideal forms, natural law, by investigating the world with our intellect and our reason.

Plato would say that the ultimate ideal behind the ideal forms, this magical process of a mind, embedded and arising from matter by a determination of the forms (the guiders of the universe), that can itself perceive a world of kaleidoscopic shadows of being, themselves reflections of the same ideal forms, is the mystery of mystery, the ideal of ideals, or simply, God. God is therefore to be understood by using reason and observing the natural world to ferret out an understanding of the laws that bind up our reality into a cohesive whole. It is the philosopher’s religious practice to use reason and nature to understand the nature of the eternally true, God. Plato would say the part of us, conscious but apart from momentary sense or fluctuating circumstance, the part that can glimpse the eternally true in nature by reason, is, in fact, immortal. This magic of seeing the universal is as immortal as the universal and eternal that it sees in the mind.

Regarding politics, Plato often wondered how to understand the eternally true characteristics of a state. Any state, while it persists, in other words, what is eternally true about a persisting state, is that it is defended well, and not degraded. Furthermore, Plato thought some knowledge of the true and the path of knowledge would have to be known to those who led a state through dark hours. If not, the state would not persist through adversity. He also realized that all states would therefore have some way for the guardians, those who safeguard truth through the straits of momentary confusion of values and mob madness, to control the mass, the forces of erratic decision making, irrational populist wish fulfillment, etc. Even here in America, the compliance with the view of the state against momentary lapses in obedience is enforced with media propaganda, legislation, and physical force. Plato identified the naked factors inherent in any state in the Republic.

I think the above helps give some credence to the need to take Plato’s thought seriously, if nothing else as a departure point. Furthermore, I think it makes clear how modern concepts of truth and scientific inquiry owe their allegiance to Plato and his Pythagorean roots. Also, I think it shows how many movements in modern politics from Marxism to Republican Democracy have their origin in Plato’s thoughts about the state. Lastly, the Muslim and Christian longing for heaven, paradise and God are Platonic ideals in mythological garb.

Religion: Nothing but Emotional Self-Image

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how emotional and irrational our religious and philosophical choices are.  While it’s rather well-known that faith is supposed to be an irrational leap, I intend to show that many rationalist positions are adopted for emotional reasons as well.  I will start by talking about my own thoughts and choices on religion as a way of illustrating the degree to which I am starting to understand how all such choices are very much emotional or psychological in my opinion.

First of all let me say a few words about atheism, pantheism and deism.  Theism is supposed to be the belief in one or more gods.  The problem is what is meant by god.  Most of the time, if people are having some sort of conversation about god, they mean a personal, intelligent god who can intervene meaningfully in human affairs – the traditional Judeo-Christian God.  In this sense, all pantheists, deists and agnostics may be said to be atheists.  A pantheist believes that creation is part of or all of god, and god is force or energy inside creation not outside.  An agnostic believes that human beings cannot know rationally whether or not there is a god, though they may have an irrational leaning or preference one way or the other.  An atheist believes there is no god, but does not specify how this knowledge is reached.

I want to talk a bit about deism.  Deism is basically the belief that god began the process of creation with natural law and then let it be.  The other main reason for deism historically has been to undermine any respect for revealed religion, and as a rebellion against the organized revealed religions.  Revealed religion is when some person, a prophet, reveals a list of sayings supposedly from god more directly than other people who try to intuit god’s will.  Revealed religions create dogma, a priesthood, and the potential for hypocrisy, which is obedience to the sayings for appearances’ sake only.  Deism believed if there were a god, and he were the creator, then any man could look into nature, the creation, and understand god, the creator.  And that man’s scripture lay in the study of the natural world, and that by understanding the laws of nature one could obtain knowledge about the will of god.  Many of the founding fathers of America were deist.  In addition to denying the political power of the church, deism encouraged in the founding fathers a love of science and a belief in natural rights, which became the foundation of modern political liberty.  Unitarians, early freemasonry, and other groups are fairly deistic in approach.

Pantheism is the belief that god is everywhere.  This may go as far as Spinoza to believe that the universe is one large being.  I will point out one or two issues I have with pantheism to show how it’s a little different than deism.  In the sense of seeing the body of nature as the body of god, it is very similar to deism.  It is not too surprising that scientists who weren’t deists (like Newton) were often pantheistic (like Steven Hawking and Einstein).  Either way, peering into nature becomes a religious or sacred activity, like peering into god.  However if you look at early pantheistic formulations like Spinoza, you can start to feel the difference.  Spinoza thought that man had thought because god has thought, and man has the thought of god strewn about his natural body, leading to consciousness, as this god thought was strewn all over the universe, the body of god.  The only problem with this reasoning is that big living stuff, like whales, should be smarter than humans, and crazy hippy arguments aside, that’s just not so.  Brain size and intelligence are related to some degree, but it is really the convoluted cerebrum of man that actually gives rise to consciousness.  In other words, thought is not distributed as a purple thought-goo strewn throughout the universe, but arises in accordance with god’s scripted natural law when certain complex information-structuring processes are present, like a highly wrinkled and organized cerebrum.  However, a good many poets (like Jeffers) and poetic scientists (like Einstein) require the immanence of god in pantheism for aesthetic reasons.  Especially in the case of poets like Jeffers, having the face of god in the mountain, the breath of god in the wind, is more suitable for poetry than having god in the equations of plate tectonics or air dynamics.

I personally find deism the most rational of the god-related beliefs.  In fact, one would be hard pressed to understand much scientific talk without deism.  For example, one can read all the time in a science magazine, “The universe comes from a large explosion called the big bang.  Now we are going to look at a time line from 30 seconds before the big bang, before there was anything, to a point a few minutes into the early universe.  30 seconds before the big bang, quantum physics allows that a particle may appear into a vacuum from nothing, causing an explosion . . . “  It is very interesting to talk about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle about position and momentum before there is any stuff to be in any position or have any momentum.  In this sense, science acts like the laws of physics are eternal before there is anything to have laws.  Pure physical materialism would say this and that happens because that is how the elemental stuff, quarks, muons, etc fit together.  In theory, any physics is possible with the right constituents to the universe.  But science instead states that only certain types of material universes are possible because of these logical necessities (laws of physics) that precede any stuff and limit the potential worlds that can come to be.  That linguistically implies an order to the universe before there is any stuff or physical material.  This is Aristotle’s god, the philosopher’s god, the prime mover, the fixed point on which all that happens is based.

So then what is atheism.  Atheism is the denial that god exists.  If this conversation occurs in the context of the traditional monotheistic god, then deists, pantheists and physical materialists are all atheists.  Agnostics may be undecided, or just maintain that man can’t decide rationally, but nonetheless have made a decision themselves on other grounds, for or against god.  So you can be an agnostic theist, or an agnostic atheist.  Similarly, one can be not-agnostic and an atheist, like Richard Dawkins, and believe that there is no god and that this is a rational and demonstrable conclusion.

Now I would like to deviate for a minute and talk about Islam, which I like very much.  Basically, Islam believes that there is one personal god, who created the universe.  Furthermore, Muslims believe that this god sent messages to prophets over time, Jesus, Moses, etc, but the message to Mohammad was the last and most perfect.  The essence of that message, as in the Quran, is that there is one god, who created the world, and who will one day wrap it up in the day of judgment, resurrecting the dead and rewarding them with eternal paradise or punishing them with eternal hell.  It is very similar as you can see to the Jewish and Christian spiritual time-lines and has the same vision of the aim of human existence.  The difference from the Jews is the focus on belief and resurrection, rather than a detailed set of laws.  The difference from the Christian is the denial that god has any partners, equals or children, and the denial of a need for blood sacrifice for salvation, rather just a submission to god’s will (Islam in fact means submission).  In this way I see Islam as a more logical or stripped down version of the monotheistic religions.  If I were to be religious I would probably be a Muslim.  It would still require that I swallow two large impossibilities for me: 1) an all powerful being who can go outside the laws of nature, that I can relate to outside of nature, and 2) the resurrection of dead for eternal justice.  Now I’ve often wondered why I am attracted to Islam.  If I swallowed those two irrationalities, how could I say the addition of god’s bleeding son be any more of a stumbling block?  What do you get culturally by adding a Jesus?  Well, Western scientific progress and progress in political freedom seems to flow more easily under the non-coercive form of Christianity than the more medieval Islam (though that could be more a result of the relative ages of the religions than anything in their dogmas).  Also, the treatment of women seems better under Christian rule.  But from a logical point of view accepting 3 crazy ideas is no different than accepting 2 or 1.  And why would I prefer the irrationality of Islam to the irrationality of my own Catholic background?  Is it some sort of unconscious intuition of the Arab (Lebanese) blood that makes up a lot of me but was hidden in my family history as an English line Solomon?  Is there a reason for my tendency to sympathize with the Arabs versus the Jews in conflict, or to be curious about polygamy as a social institution when it doesn’t really work for me in fact?  Is it some sort of rebellion against my parents, against their being so normal, that makes me reject Christianity but leaves me free to embrace other irrationalities like Islam or Buddhism?  I know some friends who go through a troubled youth, and then a return to Christianity represents a reconciliation with their parents and an end to immature rebellion.  Well, I can’t see doing this, but it seems to be on the surface a healthy process.

And a word or two more about the imagined benefits of Christianity or Islam regarding political freedom.  The main reason for our political freedom is actually our deist founding fathers.  While they may have been Christian deists, it is the deist part that gives us the love of science and technological progress that made our young country strong.  It is the deism and disbelief of revealed religion that gave us artistic freedom and the separation of church and state.  It is deism and the concept of natural rights that arise out of the conception and observation of human beings as part of a natural human family regardless of borders, creed or color that gave rise to the west’s much lauded human rights.  Since atheism in totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union never gave rise to such ideals or freedoms, it is not logic and reason that brought forth such ideas, or that irrationality or religion has a stranglehold on hampering human progress, but that commitment to human freedom and progress actually required commitment to the more fertile spiritual ground of deism.

I therefore harbor a great love of deism, because I love the freedom I experience.  I have always wanted to be a Freemason because of this love of America and its freedoms, but been held back by the requirement of belief in god.  I believe I also like seeing myself as a hero fighting successfully, triumphing against the odds, against a powerful evil.  I think this is why I like Islam, so I can see myself as a mujahadeen, a warrior perhaps of my Arab self against the Russian side of myself?  I also like to see myself as a founding father.  You can see this emotional tendency based on temperament, myth and allegory to see oneself a certain way revealed in the spectrum of religious and philosophical choices I allow myself, and then see how we all rationalize like hell to make it seem chosen and logical afterwards.  Let’s look at Richard Dawkins.  Here is a man who claims to be rational.  Yet he spent a bunch of time and money recently trying to get atheist posters on London buses.  He also does as many mental gymnastics as any Christian trying to avoid pantheism or a scientific deism to keep true to physical materialism without fatalism.  In a sense, he for reasons rather curious to me, has defined himself emotionally as anti-God-belief and then recruited all his powers of rationalization to bear upon this act.  But there is nothing rational about spending this much time or energy attempting to control people’s emotional fantasies about how they want to be seen by themselves and others.  And the preacher, whether atheist, Christian, or Muslim, is solving the same problem as his congregation while he speaks.

This is what I meant to show in the first place.  The older I get, the more I think religion or life-philosophy is nothing but the images of the self and other by which you live.  This is probably how many deconstructionist critiques get started, when you’re left not believing in reasons or any substance to the language of religion’s debate, you are left only being able to ask psychological and phenomenological questions like, “Where did this belief come from in the believer’s life experience?  How does it affect the behavior of the person to believe this?  And does it work, does it do what such beliefs are supposed to do?”

This has been written because Honestpoet and I have recently begun interacting at a social network where the individual’s profile includes information regarding religious preference. We wanted to be able to put the same thing, and while I’m an atheist, Honestpoet is an agnostic (though with an atheistic or pantheistic bent). After exploring Unitarian-Universalism, we have today found something we can both embrace:

“Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that beliefs should be formed on the basis of reason and logic and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or any other dogma.” Wikipedia

Even this choice betrays its own emotional motive, of course, the desire not to be yoked with dogma, and not to have to eschew logic and reason as a basis for belief. But that’s nothing, really, for which anyone should feel ashamed.