I doubt that I have reached any final conclusions about the "big questions", but I do think I'm at a point to draw some lines under some of the key issues to allow myself to move on. Although I feel I'm making progress, I'm embarrassed to see how little what I have to say here differs from my " progress report ", written in the summer of this year. The difference is mainly in the (final?) decision to off-load a lot of "metaphysics" and get down to the practical business of applying all these great ideas to real life. CHRISTIANITY I think I will stop calling myself a Christian. The issue has little to do with "God", an idea that seems to mean anything at all, so therefore nothing in particular. But if we subtract "God" from the mythology, there is no "son" of God, no "dying for our sins", no "saving us". The entire Christian mythology collapses. Once we lose interest in the Bible and it's ca...

As an ordained minister of the Episcopalian church and a serious theologian, Watts gives a serious and sensitive picture of what is wrong with Christianity. Hw sums up the reasons why we need to move past Christianity as it exists (not what we wish or hope it could be) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTIVrFV3S2c The lecture is long but clear and brilliant. If you care about the issue, I strongly recommend that you give Alan Watts an hour of your time. This is not the usual atheist attack on "Santa Claus for Grownups". It is a call for radical reform and a total re-think of what the message of Jesus really is, which, paradoxically, involves rejection of what most people think of as the central dogmas of the Church, such as those surrounding sin, forgiveness, the nature of God, the person of Jesus and so on. If you accept his arguments, you must stop calling yourself a Christian (if you ever did). It is not enough to say you have a private interpretation of the "real" ...

It has been an eventful summer. Lots of opportunity for reflection. My father died in August and I had a good chance to float my philosophical canoe down some of life's white water. It held out well, but not without a bit of patching and some dramatic moments. Philosophically speaking there are two issues at the bottom of things: What is the world like and what are people like? Then there are the questions of how we relate to the world and each other. It's hard to simplify but there are a few things you can say at the outset -- things that seem far from obvious to most folks I run into. We do know a lot more about the "real world" than the ancient sages did. But, if we are smart, we know that what we know is  a drop in the bucket. The Universe remains mostly a mystery and with everything we learn we discover a host of new questions. While we grow in power and insight, we also become more full of wonder and humility. As far as we can tell, the Universe (out there) is i...

The first serious book I read as a child was Heinlein's " Red Plane t". Looking back to this charming time of my life, I remember thinking that we actually had space stations whizzing about the Earth. Along with an entire generation of "boomer" children, I hatched the dream of travelling to other worlds. Since then, Mars has become a place, a real location. In this excellent lecture, Professor Carolin Crawford tells us what we know about Mars now and how we learned it. video platform video management video solutions video player It is possible that a few people who watch this lecture will actually visit the Red Planet, although Crawford paints a bleak enough picture of the place that we can understand that she is not personally looking for a ticket to the Red Planet. />

The Zealot , very highly recommended. I took "New Testament" and "Church History"  academic subjects during my (ill fated) journey to become an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada. Those who have never approached the Bible as a work of literature or never thought of the Church as having a history may be quite shocked by this work. All I can say is that it's totally conventional in it's methods and conclusions. What is different is the entertaining style. It's a page turner. Aslan makes his case in a straightforward narrative, free of footnotes or side-discussions. For those who want to follow up and find out why  he says what he says (such as, for example, his characterization of Jesus as an illiterate peasant), there are ample notes pushed off into a separate section in the book. There, he defends his conclusions and gives the reader ample information to pursue the issue, pro and con.  If this book isn't required reading in any Universi...

What is a Christian? If somebody presents me with this question on a survey, I'm reluctant to answer in the affirmative. Why is that? Because I think that my beliefs would generally be regarded as so far outside of what is generally regarded as "Christian" that they would not fit the general definition. I'm also reluctant to identify myself with the current crop of child molesters or the criminal "priests" who conducted the genocide against the First Nations of Canada within living memory. These were real "Christians" too and to accept the title is to share in the shameful history attached to it. Yet, privately, though I'm not fond of the name, I consider myself to be a Christian. If somebody comes up to me on the street and asks, Are you a Christian? I'm likely to get a little offended, since people who ask this question tend to regard their own tiny sect of Christianity as the "real" one to the exclusion of all others. In partic...

Jill Bolte's Stroke of Insight  is a bit annoying. Jill had a stroke in her left temporal lobe. That shut down her ability to reason, talk or think in a conventional way. In the talk linked above, she uses this experience (complete with an actual demonstration brain) to bolster her theory that we are too "left brained". I assume that she is not recommending that we all have strokes like hers, but it's hard to see just *what* she's recommending. Her interpretation of her experience sounds pretty much conventionally Buddhist. Her stroke took her straight to Nirvana. This would be more interesting to me if I hadn't heard so many breathless accounts of brain damage resulting from LSD or mental illness. For me, Jill has done a lot to convince me that Zen's project of suppressing left brain activity amounts to little more than an artificial way of inducing a temporal lobe stroke. Zen "philosophy" is very useful I think, but I see no reason to let go of...