Retaking Christianity

The Dalai Lama told me he doesn't want to convert me, though I think that Buddhism is a fine faith. No, he says, I should become a better example of a practitioner of the faith I was born into. Well, that faith is exclusionary, or non-syncretic, which means that it doesn't acknowledge the validity of any other faith. "There is no way to the Father but through me"

So when a student asked me, "Are you a christian?" I hear, "Are you (what I concieve to be) a christian?" I said I wasn't a Nicenean Christian, which is a term I made up on the spot. What I meant was that, yeah, I'm a Christian, but I have issues with the faith that was given me. Several year ago I discovered that there were about 100 Gospels at one time and the Church Fathers of early Christianity excluded all but 4. I wanted to know what they wanted to hide. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, has Jesus sounding more like a Buddhist or a Taoist. "Go into the abyss [the bottom of the ocean], and you find me there; split open the log, and there you will find the Kingdom of God."

Fundamentalist Christianity, will meet its end in the coming decades. If our culture is to survive, it must more closely align itself with the True, which is also close to God. It is time to re-examine the Lost Gospels and question the motives of early Church Fathers.

My criminal record

Ha ha! I'm not going to tell you. You have to pay someone $39.95 to let you know which laws I've broken. But you'd better act quickly, because my record will soon go away. The things there are so old, so minor, or I am so rehabilitated, that they're letting me delete everything!

If you ask me in person, I will tell you, but out of earshot of your son or daughter. I am trying really hard to be a stable, respectable, and productive member of society and I don't want to give anyone any ideas...

something new to worry about

I would have never occurred to me, but professional worriers have come up with the idea that our whole collective existence is a simulation going on in some imaginable computer which may, at any moment, be shut off by bored experimenters. The solution to this danger? Be as interesting as possible.

how I'm surviving the recession

We have to get credit moving so more people can borrow money? I don't buy this. Debt is slavery. I ruined my credit years ago and I realized that for seven years I could no longer put myself in chains. What's the downside?

Our economy is geared to necessitating 40 hour work weeks throughout the prime of their lives. Upon taking several bags of barely worn clothes to the GoodWill, I had an epiphany: Why not fight for a 30 hour work week? We work less, there will be more employment, and we will have less.

Let the banks fail. Let the economy go to hell, forgive all debt and start over with simpler lives. I have lived in a tent before and I swear, I was just as happy as I am now. You will be too.

Rather than having one employer I have ten. I invest in the future of human knowledge and I am a slave only insofar as my future taxes will pay off the nation's debt.

space travel and the future

In the opening paragraph of a high school science textbook, the author tried to inspire youth toward the future. He stated how humankind going into the future was like a baby coming forth from the womb. I agree with this and it was inspiring.

He then went on to describe his view of the future: humans leave their womb, Earth, and head out among the stars as miners or colonists of some kind. I find this to be unimaginitive and close to wrong.

It's close to wrong because we will have significantly less freedom in space and survival there will be much more claustrophobic. It is unimaginitive because life in space is not in itself any different than life on earth. After the novelty fades our colonists will rarely think "this is another day on Mars" but just "this is another day".

Space exploration will be best handled by robots and this will be true for a long time. But don't think of this as an unambitious outlook. We have barely begun to understand our potentials, not just for being better humans, but also for transcending humanity itself. Such transcencion might be heaven or it might be hell and my bet is that it will be a little of both. My point is that the walls of our womb are not physical boundaries in space and that our liberation will come from within.

rabbit's razor

I will not believe something because I hope it to be true;
I will not refuse to believe something because I fear it to be true.

That's it.

The Paradise We Build

In Dante's "Divine Comedy" there are descriptions of hell, purgatory, and heaven. I was struck by how interesting was the inferno and how boring was the paradise. In the inner rings of heaven you find God in the center surrounded by cocentric circles of saints, all facing God and basking in his glory forever. I see this as "the eternal orgasm" model of heaven, but we should note that such an experience is more than sexual. It is the climax of all "chakras" or modes of feeling. It is the sublime thought, the quenched thirst, the perfect meal, et cetera.

But is such a heaven viable? Can we have perpetual climax? I don't think it's possible because we sense things in relation to the past and the future. I.e. "I felt normal before, but compared to that I feel great right now, and compared to that I have this to worry about tomorrow".

With our limited resources throughout history, we might've said that the idea is to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering and frustration. Now that we are approaching great power and malleability, I think we should examine hard what heaven is like. Please, atheists, examine this question as well, for even if heaven does not yet exist, can you argue that it will never be?

I see heaven as the optimization of pleasure and frustration. There is truth in the cliched idea that our suffering makes our happiness possible.