Do you believe in zero?

If you believe in zero, then what proof do have of it's existence? How seriously would you take someone who claimed that, given a lack of proof, zero must not exist and that those who continue to use it are suffering from the “zero delusion.” Or that believers in zero must be under a spell that should be broken because of how prolifically it was used in the systematic oppression of minorities of all kinds throughout most of recorded history especially by the Nazis and other genocidal maniacs.

Personally, I do not believe in the literal existence of zero. Zero is a concept we humans developed through our imaginative capacities to logically deal with gaps in our understanding. I am happy to use the concept, in spite of it's immoral use by others, because zero is an indispensable placeholder that signifies an absence of information. It is indispensable because it allows me to imply that information is absent and still proceed with extremely useful mental processes that require some form of information.

God is the same kind of concept. If you go back to the beginning of this piece and substitute the word 'god' for the word 'zero' in those first two paragraphs then nothing logically changes, though, of course, the connotations do.

Consider that Albert Einstien, when he wanted to concentrate his mental capabilities on the physical forces that comprised his expertise, had to ignore other forces in the world, such as political forces, in order to gain productive insights. There are always an unknown number of forces at work in reality at all times and it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that we can, like Albert Einstein may have done, productively encapsulate the forces we do not want to consider at one moment in a placeholder concept signified by the term 'god.'

Given this understanding of the concept, then the question of belief does not properly apply and questions of existence are also non-starters. Zero is not a faith proposition, and I suggest to you, that god is not a faith proposition either. God is a concept we created as a necessary placeholder for our ignorance of the fullness of reality. Use of the term, by definition, admits of ignorance. Therefore, invocation of god when considering causal forces necessarily implies an unwillingness to probe further into the actual causes of the phenomena under consideration. Invoking god in the course of a causal conversation is a resignation that the forces are unknown and/or unknowable.

This is where politics steps in. When power is cultivated upon ignorance, then those who wield that power have a vested interest in maintaining the ignorance upon which their power is based. And the denial of god is also a political move. Denial of god is the arrogant claim that reality is entirely known, or at least knowable. There is no basis for this claim other than speculation based on establishing or expanding a position of power for those who claim special access to knowing reality. Claims of special access to either god or reality are necessarily born of arrogance and/or maneuvering for power.

The point-by-point sketch of an argument that follows was started with the intent of curing allergies to the word 'god' and it's many synonyms. When all positions that invoke god (by that term or a synonym) are automatically considered to be dangerously delusional (ala Richard Dawkins book title), or at least foolishly mistaken, then there is a clear lack of mutual respect. I suspect that this ironically self-righteous position unnecessarily alienates too many people with perfectly reasonable views.

If the argument could be accepted as a reasonable view on both sides of the chasm centered on the use of the term 'god' then perhaps more inclusive and productive public dialogue on the nature and valid applications of religious thought and practice can happen. If we can agree on the specific form of ignorance asserted in this argument, then labeling positions that use the term 'god' as delusions, mistakes, or spells to be broken is fundamentally disrespectful and inappropriate in civil dialogue.

Even if agreement cannot be reached then those who accept this argument should still be able to circumscribe the role of causal belief within the doctrinal dimension of religious life, then deal with all the other aspects of the doctrinal dimension plus the other six dimensions of religion (mythic, social, ritual, experiential, ethical and material) as issues separate from the use of the term 'god,' and it's synonyms. My hope is that preventing allergic reactions to the word 'god' in this way would encourage more respectful public dialogue.

The argument is built on materialist assumptions, so some people may not be comfortable with its premises. But, if this argument is true, then using the term 'god,' or one of it's many synonyms, is effectively an admission of a specific form of causal ignorance that should, in principle, be acceptable to everyone who is honestly interested in respectful public dialogue to address abuses of science, religion, and our planet.

Sketching The Argument

1. All human symbolic communication is mediated by some form of mapping, even if the realms mapped have no basis in reality.
   
   1. The only complete map of anything is the thing itself.
      
   2. No practical map can ever be complete.
      
   3. Practical maps serve a purpose and the map can be either adequate or inadequate to the purpose.
   
   
2. Animals, including humans, construct biologically encoded maps of reality.
   
   1. Biologically encoded maps must be incomplete since they are inherently required to be a practical guide to the preservation of the individual animal and/or it's genes.
      
   2. The biologically encoded maps within humans are capable of representing a lack of information, as is the case with the concept of zero.
      
   3. In some instances, like zero, humans accomplish the feat of cognitively handling a lack of information by creating a placeholder that enables the system to act as if there is information when there is not, in fact.
   
   
3. When individual humans who are highly responsive to the contingencies in their environment (thus they are both sane and reasonably intelligent) contemplate the complexities of reality they conclude that some of the forces at work are beyond their knowledge.
   
   1. Given the conclusion of their ignorance of some of the forces that influence their reality, many humans will assign a placeholder, like the term 'god' and it's synonyms, to some sub-set of the forces that influence their reality in order to sustain productive cognitive mapping of a different sub-set of influences that may be within their grasp. (For instance, Albert Einstein, in his role as a physicist, had to ignore some forces acting in the world, like psychological or social/political forces, in order to work productively on his technical understanding of the physical forces that were his primary interest.)
      
   2. Placeholders for a systematic lack of information beyond the individual level may be necessary for human cognitive maps to be adequate for the purpose of developing accurate cultural maps of reality.
   
   
4. Humans tend to assign human or human-like traits to entities that appear to have the properties of a) independent movement, b) the ability to respond to environmental contingencies, and c) exert substantial influence on the environment.
   
   1. Given that the placeholder 'god' and its synonyms are by definition representations of complex but unknown forces that may exert substantial influences over the course of human lives, many humans would naturally assign them human or human-like traits.
      
   2. The assigned characteristics of the placeholder 'god' and its synonyms should reflect a logical combination of the possible aspects of human vs non-human traits and material vs. “immaterial” influences. Like so:
   
   

Logical categories for concepts of god and it's synonyms.*		Traits
		Human	Non-Human
Influences	Material (e.g. animals & tsunamis)	Theism	Naturalism
	“Immaterial” (e.g. minds & magnetism)	Mysticism	Humanism

* Inspired by Rev. Bruce Bode's sermon series “Four Faiths in the Modern World” which was based on Rev. Fred Campbell's religious education curriculum “Religious Integrity for Everyone: Functional Theology for Secular Society.”

Conclusion

I conclude that god is real since there are clearly forces at work in reality that I don't understand. Those forces include both material forces such as animals, volcanoes and tsunamis and “immaterial” forces such as other minds and electromagnetism. I also conclude that god is correctly conceived in multiple logically-incompatible ways (which includes a diversity of terminology) due to the cognitive structures that are necessary for dealing with a lack of information and the tendency of human animals to assign traits to certain kinds of phenomena.

Logically and morally I assert that all conceptions of god that admit to our underlying ignorance of forces that influence our lives are appropriate, and conversely conceptions of god that deny our inherent underlying ignorance are inappropriate. Inappropriate uses are likely embedded in situations of power inequalities that are advantageous to some individual or group that benefits from the assertion of exclusive access to certain, or complete, knowledge. Further, this political caution regarding the assertion of exclusive access to certain, or complete, knowledge applies equally to denials of god.

Believing What We Want and Trusting in Self-Discipline

Doug Muder is one of my favorite UU writers and his latest perspective on the accusation/confession that UU's can believe whatever we want is right on:

For years, people have been telling me that Unitarian Universalists can believe whatever we want. And I find that notion intriguing, because for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to believe that I can fly.

I want to believe a lot of things about myself. I want to believe that I don't really need to sleep. I want to believe that if the plan depends on me being in two places at the same time, I can do that.

I want to believe things about the world, too. Those problems that you hear so much about -- climate change, poverty, war -- I want to believe that they're not really that bad. I want to believe that it will all be OK. And most of all, I want to believe that none of it is my fault, so no one has a right to expect me to do anything about it.

That's what I want to believe.

I'm sure there are many things that you want to believe too. ... (click on the link below to read the rest of this post)

Doug's Blog is Free And Responsible Search

The point is that we UU's trust in each other's self-discipline and the consistent impinging of reality on our beliefs to provide correctives.

Stretching the bounds of empathy

Are you willing to imagine what it's like on the receiving end of US military power? Here's an opportunity to find out guided by Sam Richards a Sociologist:

The UU Elevator Speech Quandry

Here's UU blogger Doug Muder's take on the UU elevator speech challenge, as summed up by commenter Kay Slama:

Unitarian Universalism is an evolving, democratic religion based on experiences and actions in this life and a focus on both goodness and happiness. We respect all people and all of existence, and we use both reason and loving emotion in our spirituality. See our 7 principles on uua.org.

Muder on Spirituality (responding to humanist concerns)

Here's what Doug Muder considers to be spirituality:

So here's my best shot: Spirituality is an awareness of the gap between what you can experience and what you can describe.

This is the best definition I've ever heard. If it does not make immediate sense to you then I suggest you read his post which goes into detail on his thought process and the context in which that process was engaged.

Unitarian Universalism, All Soul's Church in D.C.

Here's a good interview with the ministers of All Soul's Church in Washington, D.C.

I BELIEVE - Program 112 - Unitarian Universalism
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

End Faith, But Hold on to Violence?

Responding to Sam Harris' Book The End of Faith

Through all but the next to last chapter of this book I could generally concede his main points about the necessity for a broad cultural movement to counter the absurd claims in religious doctrine about how the world works. I found that he framed some of his arguments in unpleasantly divisive ways, but the essential points were good.

In regard to the framing of his arguments he made the same basic error as his anti-religion compatriots, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, they focus exclusively on objecting to the doctrinal/ creedal dimension of religion (referring to Ninian Smart's seven dimensions of religion) and ignore and/or minimize the value of the mythic, social, ritual, experiential, ethical and material dimensions of religion. I consider this error as equivalent to how the anti-evolutionists conveniently ignore the nuances of evolutionary science and pick exclusively on the most stereotypical misrepresentations.

But that's par for the course, what really got my britches in a tangle was his treatment of violence. In chapter 6, entitled A Science of Good and Evil, Harris presents his argument for the moral necessity of violence in general and torture in particular. He contends that we have no practical alternatives by showing how war is a moral necessity and since that is the case then effectively torture is no different, morally, from collateral damage (the wartime killing, maiming, and terrorizing of innocents). If war is morally acceptable, then so is torture, if we are consistent in our beliefs. The premise of his argument about the moral equivalence of collateral damage and torture is necessarily based on the lack of an effective, that is morally acceptable, alternative means to achieve the same ends. So he takes pains to show that the pacifist alternative to war is not reasonable and appears to be ignorant of alternative interrogation techniques.

His refutation of the moral credentials of pacifism relies on an absurd caricature of pacifists who would ignore their personal safety in the presence of a mass murderer and then takes an isolated quote from Gandhi (suggesting that the Jews should have committed mass suicide in opposition to the Holocaust) to dismiss pacifism as patently absurd.

He also recounts how he intervened to prevent further violence against a Czech woman who was being forced into a car. He discounts his act as cowardly and morally worthless because he interprets his actions as failing to deliver a message to the perpetrators of the violence. As someone who formerly trained in martial arts for several years I found his creative engagement in the situation to be a very excellent example of using the most effective tools at hand to preserve the health and safety of another person. He discounts the moral value of his actions because he was not Super Hero enough to deliver a “lesson” to the thugs he thwarted. There are several problems with this view. First of all, he is delusional about the efficacy of one intervention, no one learns that kind of “lesson” from one isolated incident. Second of all, I have no way to imagine what he could have done to “teach” the “lesson” he expects. In my understanding of human beings and how they learn, when you do violence to them they will be focused on the violence you did to them, not whatever they happened to have done before you came into the situation with your violence. Here's an ex-cop who not only attests to the accuracy of this view of how humans behave, but teaches people to do deliberately what Harris did instinctively. Thus, in my estimation his account of this incident is a perfect example of how non-violence successfully thwarted violence and ultimately undermines his argument against pacifism. Here's a video that illustrates verbal judo from the movie Fort Apache: The Bronx:


To refute his premise in regards to torture, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been using effective and efficient non-violent means of interrogation since World War Two. According to a scholar who has studied the modern history of torture in the form of the psychological techniques made famous by the Abu Ghraib scandal, the FBI's methods are a viable alternative. My blog post entitled Psychological Dark Side provides access to some of the key videos that have informed my opinion on this matter.

As for his portrayal of pacifists, his claim that pacifists would refuse to act in self-defense against a lone murderer is absurd. Pacifism as I understand it is specifically an opposition to the use of state power to wage war. Pacifists are clear that there are crucial differences between the moral situations when one person kills another 1) for immediate self-defense, 2) for personal gain, and 3) for the purposes of a state that authorizes the killing. Just like everyone else they accept the moral necessity of the first, and abhor the second. Where they differ from many other people is consciously rejecting the third.

I reject Harris' arguments about the acceptability of violence and the necessity of torture. My opposition to both violence, in general, and torture in particular are based on my belief that morally acceptable alternatives are available and that they are also practical and effective. The real problem is that, as a society, we just haven't gotten out of the knee-jerk habit of reacting with violence. If we take Harris advice of grounding our religions in empirically valid spiritual practices that are aimed at accurately characterizing the facts of consciousness then we will make progress towards the true aim of religion which is to bind people together for mutual nurturance, not drive them apart. The trick is to get Religion to forsake it's claims to authority over matters better addressed by other institutions and focus what it is best suited to address. Unitarian-Universalism is leading the way as the only non-creedal religion (that I am aware of.)

Wrestling with Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

In this month's UUWorld I read Barbara Merritt's article about her process of coming to understand the song. Since I went through a struggle with it myself I thought I would share:

I was baffled by this song for a long time, to the point that I became so frustrated that I refused to listen to it for many months. Then I saw the movie Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. In that movie he talks about his zen practice and how it informed his life and perspective. This is crucial to the understanding of this song.

The thing that got me was the opening:

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

That line, "...you don't really care for music, do you?" was the one that stuck in my craw. Whose talking to whom? David, Cohen, me, God, a generic everyman? Given my default protestant christian cultural perspective I couldn't make sense of it. But when I got the fact that zen was involved it became immediately clear.

This is a conversation within himself trying to grapple with God. This song does not make sense to me if the personal God of typical christian belief is being addressed. But it does make very clear sense as a celebration (and sometimes lament) of our embodiment.

God, in the sense of a true transcendence, does not have human qualities. By definition a truly transcendent God is beyond human qualities, therefore to assign a human quality such as 'caring' makes no sense. Thus the whole piece is about the fact that we are embodied and the incredible contradictions that arise from that fact. The 'Lord' he's referring to is the very king doing the composing. It is in the nature of being an embodied being that WE are pleased with music, not that transcendence that we call God.

The song is an extended meditation on the consequences of embodiment and how we react to it, wrestle with it, and in some moments surrender fully to it. The beauty of it is the struggle with being at the mercy of our bodies, but also finding a transcendent grace in that imprisonment.

Here's some performances on YouTube:
Jeff Buckley
K.D. Lang
Rufus Wainwright

God as Cognitive Metaphor

The following post started off as an e-mail then begged to become a blog post, so I relented and here it is:

Greetings Professor Haidt,

I have read several articles about your approach to Moral Psychology and really appreciate your broadening the scope of my understanding. I am also a fan of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Owen Flanagan in the area of understanding morality.

I found your article for the Edge by way of Michael Shermer's response on Skeptic.org. In that piece you reserve judgment on the existence of God with a parenthetical expression of doubt.

I would like to propose an atheist friendly way of honestly professing a belief in God. What I mean by "atheist friendly" is that this profession of belief does not require any supernatural explanations nor literalist interpretations of texts. It is, in fact, based on empirically testable assertions about God. ( I realize I am popping into your reality without any relational context, so I understand if you don't have time or the inclination to read through this, but I hope I have tantalized you to read further, nonetheless.)

There are two key steps in this argument. First, understanding the relationship between man's symbols and the reality in which man exists. Then coming to an appropriate understanding of how the concept of God is used in human cognition.

We humans live in a complex reality. We are the descendants of 3-4 billions years of evolutionary history. In the course of that history, life evolved into many varied forms, including forms such as us, who are far more complex than our ancient ancestors. In the course of our increasing complexity we made several major transitions that have consequences for how we view the world. The important transitions for my purpose right now are first our becoming individuals with a drive for self preservation, second our becoming social animals with a sense of the Other, and third becoming human animals with the ability to create abstract concepts that can be applied independent of the concrete experiential content from which they were originally derived.

These three events must have occurred in that order, although for my point it is only crucial that the third event occurred after the previous two. Thus our sense of self and Other preceded our ability to manipulate symbols. The point being that we had both a mind and a functional theory of mind before we had the ability to apply symbolic thought to minds.

According to Lakoff and Johnson in their book Philosophy in the Flesh (chapter 12) the concept of mind has a literal core with a number of metaphoric extensions. The literal core of the concept is so utterly skeletal that any useful thinking and reasoning about mind requires the use of metaphoric conceptions and some of those metaphoric extensions are mutually exclusive from each other in their logical implications. The literal core of the concept of mind is that which "thinks, perceives, believes, reasons, imagines and wills."

Now consider the situation of the timing of our emergence as a symbol manipulating species. We start off with minds and theories of the minds of others that enable us to better attain well-being for ourselves and our kin. This includes all the moral sensibilities that you have brought to our attention. So we are living in clans or tribes of bands, then our species reaches some threshold of complexity and viola we start doing the symbol manipulation bit. In particular we are now driven to use those symbols to understand the past and predict the future. We suddenly have a new tool that requires us to balance the requirements of the present moment with amazing abilities to reconstruct the past and project into the future.

So the key ingredients, so far, are self-aware social minds and an ability to symbolize. So one of the things we have to suddenly deal with, that we have never even conceived of before, is the parts of reality that we do not know about nor have any understanding of. Specifically, in the mode of manipulating symbols that are abstracted from concrete literal content a man can cognitively arrive at a sense of what's coming logically, but not have the ability to put meaningful content back into the concepts that enabled him to see that possible future. He's got a hunch, but can't explain it. In nature red in tooth and claw the prize of survival is most likely to go to the man who has good hunches and has built up a loyal and committed following (perhaps via moral concepts) who trusts his hunches as much as he does, without waiting for explanations.

This leader is glad to survive but also wants to offer his people more than just his hunches. If he can come up with good stories to explain his hunches then he strengthens his peoples bonds of trust in him and can mange their own insecurities and doubts during hard times by recalling the stories he has told them about why his hunches keep turning out for the good.

Now the leader has a problem. He has direct experience of many things and he knows many things. But in a complex reality like the one we humans have always lived in, there are always things that we do not know. As a storyteller he has to make the story work, so in order to account for the things he does not know about he considers the most familiar experiences he has. He considers how he makes things, how he has seen his people live their lives by providing for each other, and how something beyond them all seems to play a significant part in the whole process, too. He cannot explain it, but he knows that something beyond all the people and the animals and everything must be thinking, perceiving, believing, reasoning, imagining and willing in their favor, at least sometimes. So he decides that their is a mind beyond all minds that must be responsible for everything in exactly the same way that I am responsible for my own actions.

In another clan in someplace far away from that leader is another leader facing the same problem of how to tell a good story to explain the world and how things work out but she sees that the things in the world are al utterly different than her. She decides that everything must have a unique kind of mind that is not like hers at all, although when someone relates to them very intimately they can sometimes learn to have qualities like them. So she solves the same problem in a slightly different way.

In yet another clan in a place far from both of the other two there is someone else with the same problem of dealing with the gap in their knowledge and understanding. He observes that the world of our direct waking senses has certain qualities, but under some particular circumstances he gains access to insights that seems to be entirely different from the everyday waking world. He resolves his storytelling challenge by referring to that mysterious realm that seems to be hidden under normal circumstances. There is a mind at work but it is mysteriously removed from the normal world and exists in a different hidden or parallel world.

Finally, there is one more leader with the same challenge. Only he seems to come along much later in the history of humankind, after the development of Western reductionist scientific traditions. This leader resolves the challenge of the gap in his knowledge by making two assertions. First, everything is potentially knowable, even if not known right now, therefore the Mystery is just a mystery until we solve it. Thus, projecting human qualities or positing a hidden realm to deal with the mystery is just foolishness. Second, there simply is no other mind (and even our own mind is probably an illusion to begin with.) Or even if there is another mind it has no human qualities and does not act in any observable way in our universe, so it's just foolish to posit the existence of something that is beyond proof of it's own existence.

So how I understand the human situation: we are social storytellers. We live in a reality that is beyond our understanding, yet we are built to try to understand it, so, we have turned our symbol manipulation tool to the task of understanding, even when we don't understand. The symbols are our creation, they are our best attempts at recounting the past and projecting into the future. I have taken the position that all our concepts are entirely derived from some literal core experiences although some concepts are stripped of their literal, concrete experiential content to become abstractions. One of the abstractions we need in order to have a complete understanding of our world must include a concept of that which is unknown or unknowable. That is what I propose is the skeletal core of the concept of God.

The atheist/humanist position is that the qualities of the unknown and unknowable are best dealt with as temporary inconveniences that should not be assigned any human qualities nor given any special status as if they represent a hidden spiritual realm.

But, of course, like the concept of mind, the core of the concept of God is so paltry and inadequate to the cognitive tasks required of the concept that we have to include metaphorical extensions of the concept in order to enable people to do real cognitive work. The different choices of metaphor as I have described them here fall into four categories from choosing whether or not the unknown and unknowable forces that affect our lives either have human qualities or occur in our everyday world. When we choose to think about the unknown and unknowable forces that affect our lives in terms of human qualities that occur in our everyday lives, then we are using a Theistic metaphoric conception. When we choose to think about those forces in terms of non-human qualities that occur in our everyday lives we are using a Naturalistic metaphoric conception. When we choose to think about those forces in terms of human qualities that occur outside our everyday lives we are using a Mystical metaphoric conception. Finally, when we think about those forces as non-human and outside of our everyday lives, then we are using a Humanistic metaphoric conception. The truth is that we have to deal with the unknown and unknowable and in order to do that effectively we have to choose what qualities to assign. The category is inherently abstract (like time, see Philosophy in the Flesh chapter 10) and no matter what we do we have to choose to assign some qualities in order to even think about it. I would argue that there are basic cognitive functions that are perfectly well served by every one of the four different choices that are now commonly made. The Atheist/Humanist position is just one of four valid sets of characteristics that can be assigned in the process of dealing with that particular category of experience.

The significance of the timing of our development of symbol manipulation behaviors (and literacy, more specifically) is significant because humans had to create explanations out of ambiguous experiential data. We did that in spades and when literacy developed the only references we had to work with were oral traditions that could only interpret the experience of a few generations of people. Thus, what got written down is a sense of our coming into existence within a small number of generations of the development of writing. In our recent history we have suddenly developed a method of examining the evidence of the past in ways that transcend the written accounts that we have inherited from our ancestors. The explanations of our origins and how the world works used concepts of God as an unconscious placeholder for the unknown and unknowable powers in the world that affect our lives. The diversity of stories is attributable to the basic variety of characteristics that can be assigned to those powers and to the variety of local conditions in which those stories arose.

So I hope that I have made my case in, as promised, an atheist friendly way that can be empirically validated and does not require any supernatural beliefs. Of course, I have pre-supposed an atheist who is using, as you describe in your article, a scientific perspective rather than an everyday moralistic perspective.

I believe in God. I also believe that in order to deal effectively with the core meaning of God, as the unknown and unknowable aspects of the world that affect our lives, that the atheist view is equally valid and valuable. In fact, I believe in all four views of God and mix and match them at will (though most often completely unconsciously according to the situation in which that concept arises. And I also suspect that everyone does the same, though taking a position to the exclusion of others is better for selling books and getting attention.) Further, I believe that God is an indisputable fact of human existence and that the extreme Objectivist position, that all things are knowable and that the existence of some unknowns is only a temporary situation, is false. The reality in which we exist is far too complex to ever fully comprehend and our symbol systems, even scientific symbol systems, will forever be inadequate to achieve total understanding because they are entirely derived from our limited human experiences.

Thank you for your time, I welcome your thoughts and reactions.

Religious Education, War, And Sitting On Ski Slopes

In this month’s print issue of UU World (Spring 2008) there are two in-depth articles placed back-to-back, Prophetic Nonviolence by Paul Rasor and Home Grown Unitarian Universalism by William J. Doherty. This direct juxtaposition of how we are integrating our denominational responses to war and deepening our denominational vision for religious education struck me very powerfully.

In Rasor’s article about how we could integrate the “just war” and “pacifist” approaches to expressing our core value of peacemaking he observes that these two ideals have traditionally been seen as opposing positions that divide us and the debate has tended to effectively exclude some people from the process of coming to a denominational position. He proposes that we can overcome this traditional divisiveness by emphasizing the common ground we have in our core principles and in the power of including everyone in the dialogue.

In Doherty’s article about how our religious education systems can work better he makes light of the short-comings of the “traditional church-centered programs” that rely heavily on “service-providing or educational approaches” because they reinforce the mainstream me-first consumer culture that we, as a religious community, more generally reject. He is calling for new methods of engaging families in direct participation in the creation of religious rituals in the home that will enable children and youth to know more fully what it means to be a UU.

On the surface they appear to be about widely disparate topics, but I see a unifying theme. The power of the juxtaposition is a result of how I see our place in human history today. But, to fully appreciate the unifying theme and the power of the juxtaposition, I need to explain why as a 14-year-old I was prone to sitting down in my bright red insulated bib overalls halfway down the ski slopes at Kirkwood Resort in the last week of December in 1982. In case you are not familiar with the behavior of teenage boys on ski slopes sitting around halfway down a run is not normal.

Sitting On The Slopes

During the summer of 1982 I experienced occasional pain in my right knee. At a family reunion at the end of that summer a large group of us went hiking on Casper Mountain in Wyoming where the pain in my knee became a major problem. Back home in California I was finally taken to a doctor and during surgery on the Friday before school started the doctors found that I had torn cartilage. We still don’t really know what caused the damage to my knee, except that it must have happened at some unknown time long before our trip to Wyoming and the hike that finally prompted a visit to the doctor.

The surgery also eventually prompted my parents to let the cat out of the bag about a Christmastime surprise they had been planning. They wanted to send me to Kirkwood Ski Resort to learn downhill skiing, but the surgery looked like a serious wrench in the works. My orthopedic surgeon in consultation with my physical therapist, however, reassured us all. He reasoned that since I was young and had already made good healing progress, if I could continue healing and regaining my strength at a rigorous pace then I could probably be in adequate shape for learning to ski. Which I did. After having surgery in September I learned to ski in December. But there’s more to my odd behavior on the ski slopes than just the fact that I was recovering from surgery.

Fortunately, I have (like we all do) a magnificent body system that communicates it’s needs. The key message I learned to pay attention to as my knee was recovering from surgery was fatigue. Fatigue became an intimate companion. In physical therapy the goal was to push back against fatigue to continuously increase stamina, to be able to go just a little further each time. But out on the ski slopes I was challenged not just to push against my limits but to dance with fatigue. In order to get the most out of a whole day on the slopes I had to push and be pulled by fatigue to both spend and strategically recover my energy. I learned to pay close attention to the signals that my body was so elegantly designed to provide.

The result was odd behavior for a teenage boy on the ski slopes. There I was in my brand new bright red insulated bib overalls; on rented skis, boots and poles. Whenever I felt the pull of fatigue I would not only stop on the slope but would also sit down on the snow to rest my knee. Nearly every single time I sat on the slopes someone would stop and ask if I was injured. Attracting that much attention made it clear to me that my behavior was not normal.

Here are the three points you need to remember about my sitting on the slopes story:
1. I had surgery to correct damage that occurred at some unknown time in the past.
2. I was inspired by the thrills of downhill skiing.
3. In order to mitigate the risk of destroying my hard-won healing progress I had to pay extraordinary attention to the feedback I normally ignored in the course of youthful exuberance and enthusiasm for a challenging new adventure.

Menders Are Emerging From Our Breaker Society

I subscribe to a historical perspective of humanity developed by writers such as Daniel Quinn, Riane Eisler, Sharif Abdullah, David Korten, and Michael Dowd. This perspective puts us squarely in the midst of the magnificent adventure of life. Humanity is just one of a vast multitude of life forms that has succeeded in surviving and continuing the grand tradition of occupying the dynamic zone between an ocean of chaos and the stable shore of order. Straying too far into either order or chaos is a death sentence because we are built to balance in between.

The human story reaches back hundreds of thousand of years and throughout most of that time we lived as Keepers of the Sacred Hoop. We accepted the fact that there are cycles of power and influence in the universe that are beyond our comprehension and those powers and influences were accorded sacred status out of a combination of awe and humble respect. We left our fate in the hands of the gods.

Then at some unknown time in the past our ancestors were suffering greatly in a dire struggle to survive amidst scarcity and discovered a different way to live. We broke the sacred hoop and took our destiny into our own hands. We discovered that we could be powerful and influential in subtle ways that seemed miraculous. The gods were transformed into one God and that male God went far away (and even ceased to exist for some people) leaving us to take responsibility for our own fate. Eventually, some Breakers asserted that there is no power or influence in the universe that cannot be known, even though we might not know it yet. And other Breakers simply asserted that their God is the ultimate God, therefore their messiah and/or his duly authorized and anointed “servants” have special privileged access to the Mysteries of Life, The Universe and Everything. Either way the sacred hoop was irreparably broken when the Mysteries cease to exist with the arrival of some special elite person or class of people who have unique privileged access to knowing the universe through either scientific or religious “enlightenment.”

Regardless of your theological position it is safe to say that our Breaker society is based on taking responsibility for our own fate. And, the Breakers of the Sacred Hoop are clearly the dominant society on the planet since the aboriginal Keepers of the Sacred Hoop are nearly extinct.

But there is a new way of living that is emerging within our Breaker society. Many of us have realized that something has gone terribly wrong and we have resolved to become the Menders of the Sacred Hoop. I understand our need within Unitarian Universalism to address the issues of war and family life as mutually interrelated expressions of the necessity of mending the sacred hoop.

Our fate is not exclusively in the hands of the gods (or a God) nor is it exclusively in our own hands. Our fate will be the outcome of our intimate communion with the sacred. The outcome of that conversation will depend on how we honor our interdependence with all of life. Our destiny is determined by our participation in the larger processes of living.

The Breakers assumptions are wrong; there are significant and enduring powers and influences in the universe that are beyond our understanding and always will be. We will never resolve all Mysteries. And no one has privileged access to the Mysteries. The sacred hoop is mended by supporting everyone to participate in the conversation with life and death to negotiate the terms of our existence.

So let me restate my understanding of our situation more concisely:

Our society has an injury that occurred at some undetermined point in the past (the breaking of the sacred hoop), but the necessary surgery was done to survive (the inception of the Menders) and now we are well along the road to recovery. But we have also recently discovered some very thrilling ways of living (modern technological consumerism) and we are severely challenged to maintain a healthy balance between our thrilling new lifestyle options and continuing to support our healing process.

My confidence in our healing progress so far is based primarily on Steven Pinker’s TED conference presentation and essay entitled “A Short History of Violence” and Hans Rosling’s TED conference presentation entitled “Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen” and his web site Gapminder.org. Pinker’s presentation suggests that our surgical intervention probably occurred four or five hundred years ago when there was a shift in our ideas about governance and the first inklings of democratic forms of governance began to take shape. Rosling’s presentation shows that globally we have made great progress despite the fact that we are largely unaware of it.

So here we are, on the path of healing, yet we are also flirting with disaster by taking advantage of the thrilling lifestyles we have recently discovered. The question is whether we are going to be able to pay close enough attention to the feedback signals we are getting.

How do we get the feedback we need to navigate into the future safely? How do we dance with fatigue as a society? If we simply act like a normal technological consumerist society we will surely cause more harm and could do permanent damage despite our progress so far.

Religious Education and War

This brings me back to the articles about how our denomination should integrate our thoughts and feelings about war and how our denomination can best support families with the task of faith formation in our children. Despite the apparent disparity of these two issues, I see the fundamental problems and solutions as the same; exclusion is the problem and participation is the solution.

Recall that Doherty is calling for new methods of engaging families in direct participation in the creation of religious rituals in the home that will enable children and youth to know more fully what it means to be a UU. And, Rasor proposes that we can overcome the traditional divisiveness of the “just war” and “pacifist” approaches to peacemaking by emphasizing the common ground we have in our core principles and in the power of including everyone in the dialogue.

In both cases we have inadvertently perpetuated subtle forms of exclusion and the answer is to renew our commitment to supporting others to be included in the process of participating. The point, as I see it, is not the precise position to be taken against war nor the precise rituals that families enact, the point is that everyone has the opportunity to participate and a system of support is in place that welcomes everyone into the discussion such that they are encouraged to contribute. It’s the very process of soliciting, gathering, organizing, sifting, sorting, and then deciding on positions and rituals (that we only accept as the best we can do for now) that mends the sacred hoop.

Exclusion Is Violence

Violence has 6 orders of magnitude based on the degree of exclusion that results:
1. Literal death which is the ultimate exclusion.
2. Bodily incapacitation as in physical injury which results in a lower level of literal exclusion.
3. Mental incapacitation as in emotional and cognitive damage which is exclusion of a subtle, perhaps abstract, kind.
4. Organizational incapacitation as in the disruption of relationships and disabling a group from meeting it’s members needs. This is a collective form of subtle exclusion.
5. Social incapacitation as in disabling a group from meeting it’s collective needs. This is also a subtle collective form of exclusion.
6. Ecological incapacitation as in interrupting the ecological and infrastructural services that a group relies upon for it’s well-being and continued survival. This is exclusion that can be obvious in the forms of human attacks on infrastructure. But it can be subtler when it takes the form of disease, pollution or global warming.

War is the most comprehensive expression of violence since it tends to achieve violence at all six orders of magnitude, simultaneously.

But violence, when understood in this way, is still a common, everyday fact of life for many people everywhere in the world. Although it may only happen at one or two of the subtle intermediate levels at a time instead of the most obvious levels of literal death, physical injury, and infrastructure disruption.

Violence in my understanding is the kind of evil that is always possible because we forget to pay attention to how insidiously it slips into our habits of thinking and acting without our awareness. Violence is the evil that occurs when we forget to pay attention to the corporate collective feedback that results from the inclusive participation that is designed into our democratic bodies. We run the risk of doing violence whenever we forget to, or sometimes never learned how to, pay attention to the feedback we have available.

Doherty and Roser are both pointing out how we UU’s have in the past fallen short of our ideals; we have enacted subtle forms of violence and we have the opportunity to get back on our healing path if we can listen and respond effectively to the feedback before real damage is done.

The insight that really made the juxtaposition of these two articles powerful for me is the insight that participation is the opposite of violence.

Inclusive Participation Is Peacemaking

Participation, or the lack thereof, is evident in three ways:
1. In the power structures in which we control our own and other people’s behavior for the common good;
2. In the exchange processes in which we trade material, financial, informational, and temporal resources with each other to meet our needs; and
3. In the patterns of consciousness that result from being embedded in those structures and processes.

The various forms of violence achieve the exclusion of some people from power structures, from exchange processes, and/or from being able to connect their patterns of consciousness (for both good and ill) with the power structures and exchange processes that caused those patterns.

The challenge of promoting participation as an antidote to violence is in figuring out how we still engage in subtle forms of violence without realizing it and encouraging people to discover how they can participate in reshaping the power structures and exchange processes to prevent the negative patterns of consciousness that contribute to the tragedies in the world. Doherty and Roser both help us uncover subtle manifestations of violence in our denomination.

The ultimate antidote to war begins in the family, it needs to continue into the school, and should also be integrated into the workplace, but will only be fully realized when participation is expected and supported in every nook and cranny of our communities. This means enabling democratic forms of participation in every possible kind of organization that exists in society; religious, political, economic and social.

If we can achieve a comprehensive system for welcoming everyone into the discussion of decisions that affect their lives and support them to effectively participate in the implementation of those decisions, then we will be living up to our principles. The feedback we need as a society is only available when we encourage and enable everyone to participate to the fullest extent they can manage.

We have a choice to make. Focus on paying attention to the feedback that is available or ignoring it. I accept that we have, as a society, already arrived at the top of the ski slope. There is no way to avoid the risks anymore. I prefer to dance with the feedback rather than try to live up to the expectations of “normal” behavior as a technological consumer society in an exuberant show of youthful bravado.

The UUA is ideally suited to the task of mending the sacred hoop if we can get clear about the Breaker habits of thought and action that we have grown up with. Doherty and Rasor’s articles remind us that the subtlest manifestations of violence are insidious and we are never immune.

But on the other hand, we also know exactly what to do about it. Pay attention, participate in the process, seek the truth to the best of our ability, and encourage everyone else to do the same. It is by illuminating our principles and holding each other in the light of those principles that we shall mend the sacred hoop.

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Links to the good news about the healing progress we’ve made:

Steven Pinker’s History of Violence:
Video: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/163
Article: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

Hans Rosling’s Debunking Third World Myths With The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen:
Video: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
Site: http://gapminder.org/

The books regarding our place in human history:

Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael books; If you haven’t read them at all I recommend My Ishmael since it is the most recent and reflects his revisions and clarifications. The books are not a series and the basic ideas are presented each time in varying ways. He presents human cultures as either Leavers or Takers (the Keepers, Breakers and Menders is from Sharif Abdullah’s book Creating A World That Works For All, more information below).

Riane Eisler’s Chalice and the Blade and The Partnership Way: Eisler’s work is largely academic but presents the basic thesis that prehistoric cultures were predominantly matriarchal in contrast to the patriarchal power structures that have dominated the historical period of human history. She advocates a rebalancing of the gender roles.

Sharif Abdullah’s Creating A World The Works for All: Abdullah’s work is derived from lifelong activism and advocates for inclusivity, a philosophy that honors the sacred in all it’s forms. He has effectively applied his work in Sri Lanka through the Ghandian peace organization Sarvodaya.

David Korten’s The Great Turning: Korten’s work is derived from his background in international economic development. In the Great Turning he synthesizes a variety of work into an over arching vision of a mender movement that can weave together a broad variety of seemingly diverse issues.

Michael Dowd’s Thank God For Evolution: Dowd’s work is derived from his background as a minister and ecological activist. He also weaves together a variety of ideas to arrive at a spirituality that transcends the divisiveness of the recent debates about evolution. He refers to the history of our universe as the Great Story and makes the case for an integration of scientific and religious storytelling.

Statistics in Support of Our Recent Progress:

“By 1950, only 22 of the 80 sovereign political systems in the world (28 percent) were democratic. When the third wave of global democratization began in 1974, there were 39 democracies, but the percentage of democracies in the world was about the same (27 percent). Yet by January 2000, Freedom House counted 120 democracies, the highest number and the greatest percentage (63) in the history of [Breaker society]” http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3491911.html
Note: The quote above originally ended with the phrase ‘history of the world’ but that implies that Keeper society was undemocratic and if the surviving Keeper cultures are indicative then that assumption is probably inaccurate. Keepers probably did not have formal electoral structures but their decision making processes seem to be intensely participatory which I interpret as essentially democratic.

“The Stockholm-based ‘International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance,’ for example, lists only 78 elections across the entire decade of the 1940s, barely more than the total for 2004 alone.”
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=108&subsecID=900003&contentID=252984

A Report on the Power of Participation:

“How Freedom Is Won” A report From Freedom House on the effectiveness of nonviolent civil disobedience as a means to achieving more political and social freedoms from data collected from 1973-2005. http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/29.pdf

Is There a God? TED Theme, Take Two

My previous post on this theme was not successful in communicating my position, so I am going to make another effort. In a private conversation with a respected atheist I think I may have found a better way to get my point across.

This time around I shall start by considering the proposed question as a statement: “There is a god.” How do we determine the truth of this statement?

Let’s consider a less controversial statement (borrowing from Lakoff and Johnson’s book Philosophy in the Flesh p.104-5) analyze it for it’s truth value, and then apply the insights to the original statement about god:

“Grass is green.” How do we determine the truth of this statement?

The most obvious answer is to look at grass and if it looks green then we conclude that the statement is true.

But the problem is when scientists have looked closely there is no greenness in the grass. What we perceive as the greenness of the grass under normal conditions does NOT look green under other conditions and scientists looking at the neural basis of color perception and cognitive scientists who have carefully examined exactly what we mean by the statement have concluded that, technically, the statement is false.

These two perspectives are from different levels of experience. The normal everyday perspective (called the phenomenological level) and the technical scientific level. The biggest problem for our consideration right now is that the contradiction is created by the assumption that there is a single objective Truth that can be definitively determined and expressed once and for all.

Maintaining this assumption means that we are forced to make a decision about which perspective to “believe.” If you “believe” in phenomenology then you take the statement “Grass is green.” to be self-evidently true. If, on the other hand, you “believe” in science, then you have to take the same statement to be false. Rejecting either one and promoting the other is an unsatisfactory approach as far as I am concerned.

The solution that Lakoff and Johnson arrived at was to abandon the assumption, not the facts. The facts are that we humans have long established conceptual mechanisms in our brains that generate the phenomenological level of the greenness of grass and a more recently established social mechanism, in the form of science, to generate the technical level that allows us to make useful predictions and improve the world. We are fully committed to the continued existence of both of these robust systems of understanding, so how do we reconcile the contradictory truths they generate?

We accept that when we examine phenomena we have to be precise about exactly what level of understanding we are operating from, then, also accept that when we talk about a different level then different criteria for truth may need to be applied.

To the topic at hand; “There is a god.”
1) given the discrepancy between levels of truth,
a) at the level of everyday conceptual use it may be a true statement
b) while it is untrue at the level of objective scientific proof that the metaphorical conceptions in common everyday use have correlates in the world,
2) therefore I propose that the concept be studied to find out if it has
a) a literal core phenomenological meaning that is true and
b) a discreet set of metaphoric extensions that have varying degrees of truth depending on how they are used in different contexts and at different levels of analysis.

In my review of Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell I introduced my proposal for studying this. My proposal regarding the study of god is based on making a parallel argument to Lakoff and Johnson’s argument in Philosophy in the Flesh about “mind.” If you take the common definitions of mind seriously in the same way most people take common definitions of god seriously, then you have to conclude, scientifically, that there is no such thing as a mind. According to Lakoff and Johnson, cognitive linguists analyzed the way people actually use the concept of mind and found it has a literal core meaning (“The mind is that which thinks, perceives, believes, reasons, imagines, and wills.” Philosophy in the Flesh p.266) and a variety of metaphoric extensions from that core. The literal core meaning is so skeletal and impoverished that it is severely limited in it’s use as a way of thinking and reasoning about minds. The metaphoric extensions, on the other hand, provide a great variety of rich understandings and have allowed many people to arrive at useful insights. Some of those metaphoric extensions are mutually exclusive of each other and that is where the action is in terms of deciding what is really true about minds, beyond the literal core meaning.

What I would like to see is a similar examination of the concept of “God” to test the hypothesis that there is an impoverished literal core (the unknown and unknowable) and a small set of metaphorical extensions (via assignment of two types of characteristics; personal vs impersonal and immanence vs transcendence) that explain the variety of concepts of “God” that exist.

The value in this approach is that it acknowledges the truth value of the concept of God if a given use maintains appropriate reference to the literal core conceptual domain of the forces and/or agencies that are beyond our individual and/or collective ken (assuming that this is proven to be the literal core through cognitive linguistic analysis.) When metaphorical conceptions of God are used in reference to particular circumstances in the world, then an appropriate analysis of what is known or understood to be true scientifically can be brought to bear as a way of critiquing whether the particular metaphor is apt as a broad popular conceptualization of that situation or whether a different metaphor is more appropriate. Where there is simply no scientific knowledge to be brought out, then that can be acknowledged and we can move on.

This puts an equal analytical burden on both theists and atheists to show that their metaphorical conceptions of the unknown and unknowable are appropriate to particular situations. Where there is knowledge of the causes of a particular situation that make the invocation of god inappropriate then there is a burden on those in the know to educate others to make the knowledge more widely known. Those in the know would be responsible for presenting appropriate metaphors for understanding the situation in terms that take popular misunderstanding and misconceptions into account and redirects the popular imagination in appropriate directions.

If I am right about the metaphorical categories then atheists have simply filled in a logically possible but historically absent conceptual category and brought it into public awareness. This approach might give atheists a firmer foundation for legitimacy as an equally valid approach to the same conceptual domain since they are simply assigning characteristics that are impersonal and beyond the universe.

In any case, I think having an analytical framework for debates about the proper application of “God” concepts would be a more productive avenue of public discourse than persisting in a fruitless debate about whose level of truth trumps the other.

Is There a God? TED Theme

I responded to this theme at TED.com:

The question is ridiculous to me because that is like asking "Is There a Gravity?"

What can you possibly mean by "a gravity"? It just doesn't make any sense.

If you are asking about experiencing things falling down when they are not supported, then there is absolutely no question about the undeniable universally human reality of that phenomena.

If you are asking about different theories of gravitation and how I evaluate their claims of validity then I can't even answer the question because I have no frame of reference to judge them effectively (since I lack appropriate training in both mathematics and physics).

If you are asking about the variety of ways the we use the term "gravity" to talk about and explain the world on an everyday basis, then I think there may be some interesting discussion to be had.

So here's how I translate this line of thought to the discussion theme:

What can you possibly mean by "a God"? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

If you are asking about experiencing things in our lives that we cannot explain nor understand then there is absolutely no question about the undeniable universally human reality of that phenomena. No matter who you are or what your beliefs there are unknown and unknowable factors in the world that affect your life and you will come up with strategies for cognitively dealing with them, one of the most popular strategies is the concept of “God.”

If you are asking about different theories of how we explain particular aspects of our world, then I can't even answer the question because you have not specified what it is we are trying to explain. It is rather a slippery slope to try to talk about explaining the unknown and unknowable as if it is a single discreet phenomena (as religious communities have found out.)

If you are asking about the variety of ways that we use the term “God” to talk about and explain the world on an everyday basis, then I think there may be some interesting discussion to be had.

First of all, on an everyday basis, functionality requires that we dispense with the formalities. Human beings are not equipped to be strictly logical and coldly rational despite certain opinions to the contrary.

On an everyday basis the concept of “God” is useful. In this emergent creative universe in which we are embedded “God” is a convenient way to refer to the levels of reality that are both above and below our awareness. When I thank God for a parking spot, for my health, for the opportunity to be educated and well off I am not positing theological truths, I am simply acknowledging that I am not the only agency with a say in how my life works. And I don’t need to know all the details of why and how it does work. I am just expressing my sense of gratitude for what is.

Here is why the posited theme is silly to me. The existence of God is not in question because no one denies that there are aspects of life that are unknown and unknowable to them and no one denies that there are agencies that affect our lives that are beyond our control. The debates are about describing and naming the characteristics of these aspects and forces in our lives. Existence is not the issue.

Whenever we have the opportunity to reflect on all that we do not know nor understand then we are reflecting on an abstract concept that is very tricky to grasp. Therefore, it is very understandable to attribute to that concept more concrete characteristics that make it easier to think about. I have come to suspect that there are two key characteristics that we humans typically attribute to God in order to grasp the unknown and unknowable more easily; personality and presence. And I suspect that when they are combined in a simple array then the resulting set of four categories of concepts of God may be a fine explanation of the diversity of beliefs about both God and the lack of one.

You can read about this in more detail in my review of Dennett’s book, Breaking the Spell .

A Reply to Not My Father's Religion

In Doug Muder’s portrait of the class issue in UU churches (Not My Father’s Religion, UUWorld Fall 2007) he paints a picture of opposition between the “working-class” values of self-control for one chance at redemption in a harsh world-maze and “professional” values of inspired living through indulgent forgiveness from a bird’s eye view of the world-maze. I suspect that this portrait condemns us to failure before we even start by emphasizing the false idea that we have an inherently superior perspective over people of “lower” classes and conservative theology.

It is fundamental to our faith that no one has a privileged view of the ultimate playing field, although everyone’s views of it are different. The vertical metaphor of “higher” and “lower” classes is one of the fundamental foundations of the problem and by repeating this metaphor that implies class advantages are inherent we will continue to entrench the problem.

We all travel the same world-maze making decisions about how to fulfill our moral responsibilities to our selves, our families and our communities. Self-control is a key to success no matter what your situation.

What distinguishes the moral visions of conservative and liberal religion is emphasis on either fearfully conserving the status quo or positively progressing towards improving ourselves and the world.

Conservative religion seems to value stopping negative forces, controlling vices, and confronting evil. The conservative moral challenge is having enough self-control to control or eliminate their evil impulses and the evil in the world, even if that sometimes means becoming indifferent to pain and suffering in themselves or others.

Liberal religion is concerned with enhancing positive forces, encouraging virtues and creatively expressing goodness, truth, beauty, joy and unity. Our liberal moral challenge is having enough self-control to keep ourselves open to the suffering and pain of the world even as we work in the world to alleviate and prevent it.

The moral question for our faith is whether we have truly heard the concerns of those who do not respond to our invitations to join us. The answer is to regain our moral grounding in empathy and compassion for their experience of the world. Then, help them see how their suffering is not merely a personal journey to, or through, hell, but can become a strategic approach to helping others gracefully navigate the maze. Let’s call them to the possibilities that we can honor their suffering and help them contribute to eliminating the systemic need to force some people into it in the future. That is what Muder’s dad accomplished by living true to his moral values, persistently fending off immanent moral disaster by working at the factory, and taking the time to nurture his son by playing ball. The abundant opportunities his son has obviously had are ample testaments to his ultimate success.

Review of Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Powell’s Book Store is not what most people think of as exciting entertainment for kids. I was recently at the Unitarian-Universalist Association’s Annual General Meeting in Portland, Oregon, and volunteered three mornings during the week with the Young Fun Camp for 8-14 year olds. On my first morning as I helped get the early registrants settled in I inquired about what activities were being planned and the director mentioned a variety of things including that she had brought up Powell’s Bookstore as a possibility. Apparently the counselors did not think the kids would be interested, so it was not on the list. So, I mentioned that my friend Rachel, an 8 year old who was going to be attending, loves Powell’s and that they should include it. The director put it back on the schedule because it was something she was personally interested in, as well.

It turned out to be the single most popular activity of all! With the enthusiasm of the kids generating three separate trips to accommodate the demand (and Rachel, who did not sign-up in time to make it into either of the first two trips that I went on, may have even missed out.)

At Powell’s there was only one book that really caught my attention, probably because I was paying more attention to kids than to books: Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin, 2006) . I had taken a boy to the bathroom then after doing my business was waiting for him outside where it just so happens that the philosophy and atheism sections are located. I saw Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion, but do not have much respect for his public image as an anti-religion fanatic and radical iconoclast of fundamentalist scientism. Daniel Dennett, on the other hand, is a first rate philosopher in my experience, which means that while he may be taking an obvious position in regards to the issue he will make a worthy exploration of the conceptual territory as he leads you along the path to his opinion. While I first saw the book on Friday with the first group, I bought the book on Saturday when I was with the second group, and found it such a compelling read that I finished the book by Monday evening. It helped that I had lots of time on Sunday in Portland and spent nearly all of Monday on the train, a ferry and several busses. I found the philosophical journey of Dennett’s exploration of religion to be very engaging and worthwhile. Although I do have two key critical remarks, the overall approach and Dennett’s style of consideration made it a compelling read.

Dennett does a fantastic job of laying a solid groundwork for treating religion as a valid topic for scientific inquiry. His exploration of and critical insights into the strengths and weaknesses of relevant scientific studies is very valuable. What is even more valuable for the over-all enterprise he is proposing is how he has posed key questions that need to be answered in order for real progress to be achieved. My critical remarks stem from differences in my way of understanding how the different concepts of God relate to each other and what constitutes religion (obviously influenced by my Unitarian-Universalist faith). Thus, my remarks are directed more to the premises that he built his arguments upon, rather than the arguments themselves. Although I don’t think my shift in premises alters his arguments or conclusions very much, I believe if my points are true then the results will provide a much stronger foundation for broader understanding.

First of all, I understand all ideas of God as human ways of comprehending and dealing with the unknown and the unknowable. Since there are always forces and effects in the world that we suspect but cannot verify, cannot directly experience or in some cases can not experience at all, then we have a problem. The problem is that these are categories that we have concepts about but cannot deal with in any concrete literal sense. I am drawing on my understading of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and It’s Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999) to assert that these categories are inevitable parts of all human experience due to the grounding of all our shared understanding in language and the inherent limitations of language. The unknowable is all possible experiences or phenomena that cannot be expressed in language, thus they cannot in any way be shared and, more importantly, cannot be verified. The unknown are all experiences and phenomena which may be expressed in language but have not yet been explored or accepted as relevant by the person or people who are thinking and reasoning about a situation. If we take God as a convenient label for these bizarre categories then this means that the exact boundaries of God are different for different people at different times depending on their life history and the history of their groups, but they are all dealing with essentially the same conceptual category, the unknown-and-unknowable. Since, there is no way around the fact that we cannot deal concretely and specifically with what we do not know and cannot know, then asking religious people, or anyone else, to define God in any more precise terms than this is a fools errand.

I am sure Dennett is not entirely averse to what I have suggested so far based on this quote:

In religion … the experts are not exaggerating for effect when they say they don’t understand what they are talking about. The fundamental incomprehensibility of God is insisted upon as a central tenet of faith, and the propositions in question are themselves declared to be systematically elusive to everybody. Although we can go along with the experts when they advise us which sentences to say we believe, they also insist that they themselves cannot use their expertise to prove—even to one another—that they know what they are talking about. These matters are mysterious to everybody, experts and laypeople alike.
[p. 220, italics in original]

On the other hand, critics of religion, such as Dennett, are right to criticize those who abuse the roles of social authority that have developed to help people to deal with the unknown-and-unknowable. This puts religion in a distinctly different category of endeavor than science. Religion will always be the appropriate institution to deal with the inevitability of mortality, what is the ultimate cause of all that is, and all the other true Mysteries of existence. Science deals with what we can know and is the best method for discerning what is verifiably true in human experience.

Given this view of the categorical distinction between science and religion then they should work hand in hand to provide people with appropriate information and experiences to assist in the process of living and dying gracefully. Religion is the keeper of the Mysteries; responsible for taking best advantage of the human proclivities revealed by science in order to keep the Mysteries in moral perspective for living according to the dictates of Goodness, Truth, Beauty, Joy and Unity. Religion is the proper place to deal with ineffable experiences that cannot be truly shared. Science is the keeper of knowledge and investigator of mysteries; responsible for informing Religion of the most effective methods of doing their job and helping to assess how successfully we facilitate the well-being of individuals, groups, societies and ecologies.

It is important to distinguish the concepts of God that are used in everyday thinking and reasoning about the unknown-and-unknowable from the social concepts and institutions that we use to mutually support our moral choices of action.

The concepts we use to think and reason individually on an everyday basis about the unknown-and-unknowable naturally fall into a simple matrix of 4 distinct conceptual modes. As we think and reason we have to remember or assign qualities to anything that we wish to consider. If we are considering a child’s building block, a literal physical object, we simply recall our perceptions of it’s hardness, color, texture, and other qualities and then based on our understanding of those experiences we think accordingly. If we are attempting to deal with the unknown-and-unknowable then we obviously have to assign qualities and then reason using the qualities assigned in the hopes that we have assigned particular qualities that are sufficiently accurate that the actions we choose then result in the achievement of our goals.

In regards to the unknown-and-unknowable there are two key assumptions that lead to distinct and useful categories:

1. Does it have qualities that are human-like, or not; is God personal or impersonal?
2. Is it a force in the world or beyond the world; is God immanent or transcendent?

Based on assigning these qualities we can easily and usefully classify a number of theological concepts. When the unknown-and-unknowable is assumed to have human qualities and is a force in the world then the resulting concepts are Theistic. When you assume that the unknown-and-unknowable is impersonal and beyond the world then your concept is Humanistic. The combination of human qualities that are beyond this world gives us Naturalism and the opposite gives us Mysticism. (This framework is based on Rev. Bruce Bode’s Four Faiths in the Modern World sermon series from August 2006 .)

Dennett is a Humanist attacking Theists for immoral activities that they justify based on their theology rather than actual concrete benefits to the well-being of society. Dennett mostly skirts around the Mystics and the Naturalists though his ideas of folk religion and spirituality may be close.

I believe Dennett’s exploration would benefit from taking on this framework as a premise because it is immanently testable and would provide him with a useful continuum for putting his own views in perspective with the other views that he may not agree with, but concedes are likely to be benign if not beneficial.

The challenge that he ultimately poses, which is at the heart of all human activities not just religious ones, is the morality of the actions we choose. He proposes that everyone of a particular religious faith should take responsibility for the actions of those who profess that faith. Thus, he believes that all Christians are effectively responsible for the actions of the radical elements of Christianity that bomb abortion clinics and that all Muslims are effectively responsible for the radical elements of Islam that encourage suicide bombers. This is problematic because of these faiths are not singular monolithic organizations that can be controlled or held accountable, they are a vast pluralism of different organizations.

Morality is fundamentally about creating and maintaining well-being for us. The variations in moral values are based on having different ideas of who is “us” and how we should go about achieving well-being for our group. There is no question that everyone is trying to behave morally, but there is wide divergence about what constitutes the proper moral assessment of the success of our various actions, especially in the actions we take as a group via agents who are supposed to act on our behalf.

So the question is, How do we make a proper assessment of our own and others actions with regard to well-being? There are two primary approaches that I am familiar with, literal application of explicit rules and the imaginative application of principles. The literal application of explicit rules has been generally assumed to be correct. The Ten Commandments, as a iconic example, are most often taken to be literal rules for living. However, as anyone who puts more than a passing effort into moral philosophy finds out, there is an immense amount of difficulty that quickly arises.

More recently in the cognitive sciences, according to Lakoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh, they have found that human brains are simply not wired to make effective use of the literal application of explicit rules. The way we are wired to think is more consistent with the imaginative application of broad principles. This is known as virtues ethics and we can take the same set of Commandments and treat them as principles to be applied according to our good judgment of the details of each situation. (See Mark Johnson’s Moral Imagination, The University of Chicago Press, 1993) Beyond the moral deliberation of individuals in their own minds the key to morality in society is participating in moral discussions to discern how principles are best applied under changing circumstances.

Here’s what Dennett has to say about participating in the moral discussion (although he was talking more specifically about the immorality of unquestioning acceptance of the proscriptions of religious leaders):

… adopt[ing] the moral teachings of one’s own religion without question, because—to put it simply—it is the word of God (as interpreted, always, by the specialists to whom one has delegated authority) … should be seen to be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously, excusing them from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not conscientiously maintained and deserve no further consideration.
[p. 295-6 italics in original]

Dennett has drawn a clear moral distinction between those who are willing to engage in the moral discussion and those who are not. He is clear that our moral views must be “conscientiously maintained” not just settled once and for all. Regardless of the morality of the resulting action, if you are not willing to enter into the moral discussion then you have abdicated your moral responsibility. He continues:

The argument for this is straightforward. Suppose I have a friend, Fred, who is (in my carefully considered opinion) always right. If I tell you I’m against stem-cell research because “my friend Fred says it’s wrong and that’s all there is to it,” you will just look at me as if I was missing the point of the discussion. This is supposed to be a consideration of reasons, and I have not given you a reason that I in good faith could expect you to appreciate. Suppose you believe that stem-cell research wrong because that is what God has told you. Even if you are right—that is, even if God does indeed exist and has, personally, told you that stem-cell research is wrong—you cannot reasonably expect others who do not share your faith or experience to accept this as a reason. You are being unreasonable in taking your stand. The fact that your faith is so strong that you cannot do otherwise just shows (if you really can’t) that you are disabled for moral persuasion, a sort of robotic slave to a meme that you are unable to evaluate. And if you reply that you can but you won’t consider reasons for and against your conviction (because it is God’s word, and it would be sacrilegious even to consider whether it might be in error), you avow your willful refusal to abide be the minimal conditions of rational discussion. Either way, your declaration of your deeply held views are posturings that are out of place, part of the problem, not part of the solution, and we others will just have to work around you as best we can.

Notice that this stand involves no disrespect and no prejudging of the possibility that God has told you. If God has told you, then part of your problem is convincing others, to whom God has not (yet) spoken, that this is what we ought to believe. If you refuse or are unable to attempt this, you are actually letting your God down, in the guise of demonstrating your helpless love. You can withdraw from the discussion if you must—that is your right—but then don’t expect us to give your view any particular weight that we cannot discover by other means—and don’t blame us if we don’t “get it.”
[p. 296-7 italics in original]

This brings me to a key question that I have been asking lately, how do we assist people to understand that participation is the key to moral behavior? Where do they get to practice the process of moral discussion?

What I find in the UU faith is a place to participate in moral discussions. The Uncommon Denomination, as we are becoming known as, is the place where we are pioneering the participatory methods of democratic religion. Ours is a participatory religion that facilitates the discussion in which we all have the opportunity to participate rather than writing a script to be performed on command. We do not have a common creed, we have common principles and a multitude of sources that we draw upon to make our decisions to act in the world. What I found at the General Assembly of the Unitarian-Universalist Association was a forum for moral discussions in which we are holding ourselves accountable for not just inviting all people to participate, but trying to discover how to make participation welcoming and enjoyable as well. We are taking the lead on creating a world that works for all beings, not just some. We identify ourselves with all of creation, not just the parts we like.

By coincidence I found Daniel Dennett’s book in the midst of this particular event. The fact is that there were a confluence of circumstances that lead to this coincidence, but I will not pretend to know or understand how those circumstances occurred. It does not matter how I attribute the action of the unknown and unknowable forces at work in this one instance, I will simply take this series of moments as a blessing from God. There is no doubt that the events occurred and that if we exerted enough effort we could explain it all. But, that would be a waste of time and energy so it is easier to invoke a simple term like God to enable us to turn our attention to more important matters that have far greater moral import. In this way God is a very useful concept and, while it is not a scientifically valid approach to explaining the situation, it is a morally valid approach.

Naïveté and Expertise

When I read Enrst Mayr’s book “What Is Evolution?” I found that he had very helpful synthesis of the philosophical, and therefore conceptual, problems with the creationist position with regard to explaining the unified yet diverse nature of living things. To summarize, I think that he is saying that essentially the creationist questions are aiming in the wrong direction for studying biology, therefore the answers are correspondingly off target.

The strength of the scientific community is the ability to progressively transform not only the answers they give to questions but to also progressively transform the questions that are asked. In the example of evolution the naïve question is, “How can individual organisms of one type beget organisms of a different type some generations later?” The question itself is pointing us in the direction of looking for clues to the mystery of species diversity in an individual or in the type of individual that we have chosen to put under consideration.

The conceptual mapping of the question itself has implied the scope and nature of the answers that would be relevant, but the genius of more current evolutionary theories is framing the question in terms of the populations, not individuals and dispensing with the notion of types by acknowledging that all “types” are arbitrary constructs within our minds not in the world. This is a completely underwhelming observation to those of us who are naïve about populations and the problems of types because we will automatically conceive of the population as a meta-individual with the same kinds of properties and qualities that we expect of a single individual and types as natural qualities of the world. The problem is the difficulty of breaking the habit of conceiving of something in our usual default way. Even if you understood what I just said, there is no reason to believe that you can actually change how you think from only one isolated explanation, therefore your naïve concepts will continue to mislead you. Thus we arrive at the central problem of being an expert versus being naïve.

The evolutionary idea may be conceptually great for biology, but it is next to useless for those who do not have the ability to shift their conceptual tools for understanding at will. In fact, I have fallen into a naïve trap in the last sentence by referring to an singular “evolutionary idea” when the reality is that what I am considering as “an idea” is the complex emergent result of a cacophony of contributions by a diverse population rather than a singular monolithic item. While I will continue to refer to it in the singular for convenience, I also know that in reality there is no such thing. The same is true of referring to a generic idea of “creationism,” there is no singular idea, only a dynamic plurality of ideas that are complex and difficult to comprehend entirely.

An expert perceives accurately, thinks clearly and makes appropriate decisions based on their chosen purpose, meaning that they are consistently good decision makers. The naïve person tends to fail at one or more of these tasks. I say “tends to” because of what most people refer to as beginner’s luck. Sometimes, despite their own limitations, a novice will turn in a performance that seems utterly brilliant. The difference is in their consistency, the expert is consistently able to make good decisions, whereas the beginner is just lucky.

For example, if you want to understand biology you have to be able to see the difference between the naïve view of a divine creation metaphor and the more expert view of an evolutionary metaphor for explaining biological phenomena. It is not necessary for me to posit the truth of either of these views because that is irrelevant here. They are both metaphoric conceptual structures that have varying degrees of useful application within the phenomenal world of biology. Creationism does not contribute to biological understanding or meaningful predictions of biological phenomena plus it is a view that children easily comprehend, therefore it is naïve. The evolutionary view is in the expert category because this view has made the most substantial contribution to the ability of biologists to make meaningful predictions and continue to conduct substantial inquiries that contribute to the improvement of our understanding of the phenomena of life and the reality of how living things exist.

Creationism and evolution are both true to some degree, but the question is whether each is useful under a particular set of circumstances. For parents explaining the forms of plants and animals to young children it is perfectly true to say, “God made them that way.” For a biologist to say that to her colleagues is absurd but is still perfectly useful even to the biologist who is also a parent. Of course, the biologist parent should also share some appropriate level enthusiasm for the scientific style of inquiry that helps to discern how God continues to achieve such magnificent artistry.

Which brings us to the question of expertise and naïveté in education: I believe that defining education as the delivery of knowledge, skills, and information is naïve. The biologist parent would be wasting time if she simply delivered accepted biological dogma to her child. The creationist parent is equally wasting time if they simply deliver the accepted creationist dogma. Both parents would be negligent of they did not also delve into the reasons why their particular view helps them to be a better person, either a better biologist or a better follower of the creationist religion. The delivery of the information will be useless data until there is some context of meaningful relationships into which the data can be inserted in order to become useful.

I propose cognitive cartography as a more useful metaphor for developing expert understanding of education. The biologist parent has highly developed methods of relating to the world through the field of biology. The field provides a way of relating to certain kinds of experiences in order to make predictions and extend the stories of explanation about the phenomena that the field takes into consideration. In each person who has some expertise in biology is a conceptual structure in their mind that helps them to navigate both the phenomenal world of living things and the field of biological inquiry itself. What makes biology both useful and intellectually satisfying are the rich relationships that it helps to develop. The data of biological studies are merely the most obvious manifestations of those complex relationships and it is relationships that are useful and provide satisfaction, not the data alone. What would be educational for the biologist’s child is experiencing the passionate relationship the parent has to the biological stories that make sense of the wondrous phenomena that the child experiences. It is only within a rich set of physical, emotional and spiritual experiences that the mental data from biology can become useful. It is how the field enriches the life of the whole person that is important to convey to the child, not just the obvious data that it generates.

The same educational point is true for a creationist parent. It is not the data contained in religious texts and ideas that make it a useful pursuit. It is how the religious community enriches the whole person that makes it useful and highly valued. (It is just a crying shame that the religious community and the field of biology are so misguided about how they each interpret data differently to believe that there is a conflict between them. They are simply expressing different and inconsistent values about how to relate to apparently similar data.)

Both cognitive cartography and the delivery of knowledge, skills and information are metaphoric conceptions, but I believe the former has much richer possibilities for developing meaningful predictions and conducting more substantial inquiries into appropriate educational practice.