Cathartic Eruptions and Rabid Rants

Suppose all these Creationists are right (sort of)

2011-10-01T09:59:00.000+01:00

At the looney end of the literalist, creationist spectrum are the mind-numbed souls who insist that the Earth (and for all I know, the whole universe) is just a few thousand years old, and that some supernatural entity made our reality in the course of a few days (despite the logical problem that 'days' hadn't been invented yet).

I guess we've all seen self-important politicians making claims to have set things in motion, when in fact they just happened to be in the right place at the right time but being politicians they understood the advantage of claiming to be author of events rather than an opportunist seizing the moment.

Suppose then that what was created a few thousand years ago was the supernatural entity rather than our reality. There is no good explanation for how consciousness exists in relation to the physical reality of our brain, so perhaps whatever is behind consciousness can give rise to other 'bigger' things. Maybe a few thousand years ago something happened to humans to bring into being this supernatural entity - not just as a useful fiction in stories, but as some sort of thing that is greater than the individual humans it depends on. As this entity became more aware it realized in ever more detail the wonder and complexity of the reality into which it had arisen, and, with child-like arrogance, it assumed that if things existed it must be responsible (or at the very least claim responsibility).

So maybe the creationists are right. 'God' created the world in six days a few thousand years ago - unfortunately that creation was purely in its own mind, and the reality on which we depend had been around (and far more awesome) since time out of mind.

A very small universe

2011-01-30T17:32:00.000Z

I hardly know where to start with this. There are just so many threads to pull on, but one has to start somewhere.

My problem is 'god' (or 'God' if you prefer). Suppose someone were to ask you 'do you believe in god'? Maybe they are expecting a simple 'yes' or 'no'. Maybe they insist on a simple 'yes' or 'no' - after all, you either do or you don't, right? My problem is this: it all depends on what you mean by 'god', or even, put another way, it depends on which 'god' you mean.

Of course in the minds of some people there is only one. Then Christians (most of them at least) insist on there being a trinity and have declared that it is heresy to call the three names of the trinity 'aspects' of a single god. So there is just the one, but one equals three - perfect sense.

However I'd prefer to unwrap this puzzle a bit. Although there are a fair few people who seem to content to claim that they 'know' god, I'd say that the best they can do is interpret such a being through the pin-hole of their own mind. Rather like the bit in 'Dogma' when Metatron explains that it took several goes a creating Adam before they figured out that he couldn't cope with hearing the voice of god, it's hard to imagine that a human mind that struggles to grasp a vast eleven-dimensional super-string universe would fare any better at coming to terms with the mind that created it.

I'd contend that most humans struggling with the notion of god reduce him/her/it to their own dimensions, and the paucity of their own imagination. It is rather like when, through respect for ancient thinkers, Western thought tried to fit the world into four elements rather than the hundred plus (if we include all the transient ones) we know of now. This analogy also conjures up the possibility that all these encounters with 'god' are actually encounters with a whole slew of entities that appear to humans as god-like. The Buddhist and Hindu world views (which are themselves just metaphorical) admit layers upon layers of beings that exist outside the human realm and have different types of interaction with that realm.

Ok - so suppose you force a clarification and insist that 'God' means a single creator-god that came before everything and willed everything into being. Does the existence of such a being exclude the possibility of all other types of 'celestial' (for want of a better word) beings? Obviously not. Within Christianity you have angels and daemons. Within Islam you have Djinn. In other more imaginative world-views the types of strange entities seem only limited by human imagination.

Does power and knowledge guarantee benign intention towards humans? Well, you only have to look at the history of mayhem and slaughter wrought by divine intervention to know that the 'love' of a deity can often be fatally tough love. Perhaps a deity loves a species rather than individuals. Indeed who knows the complexities of the mind of such a being? And does this deity have moods?

The doctrinaire materialists are very little better. Their small world is extremely sad (at least those brought up within a Western Christian culture). It accepts the very narrow battle ground of atheism vs theism (something not even of their own creation) and then fights the battles the 'enemy' sets. It is fatally reactionary and small minded. The tragedy is that they have the window into a much bigger world within them - consciousness - yet they prefer to ignore it's implications. They insist like mediaeval popes that no truth can exist outside their world view.

So, just as if someone had asked me 'are you a pink or a blue' without any explanation of the meaning, I feel forced to say 'I'm a yellow - I reject your dichotomy'. I don't want either of these blind, blinkered views. I want a view that explores beyond the next horizon rather than insisting that the next horizon is the edge of the world.

Catholic Diplomatic Immunity

2010-10-02T22:18:00.000+01:00

Here's an idea.

The Vatican is a state - a very small one, but none the less it is, in international law, a state. And states have diplomats. And diplomats have a special legal immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961).

So how about the Vatican making all it's priests and prelates diplomats - envoys of the Vatican. After all, that is pretty much what they are, the Pope's man in your parish.

And then all the priests who break vows of chastity, especially the ones who both break vows and break law, could really be above the law. Better yet, the host country could save themselves all the difficulty and cost of arresting and trying a priest. They could simply declare the Vatican diplomat to be persona non grata and get them shipped back to the Vatican.

Terminal Delayed Gratification

2010-07-11T12:19:00.000+01:00

'Delayed Gratification' is is the ability to wait in order to obtain something that one wants, and often it is a useful trait. Picking fruit when it is sour isn't nearly so pleasurable as waiting and enjoying it at the peak of its ripeness.

It can also be used as an argument to con people. 'Don't take the profits now, re-invest and get hugely greater returns', so the rhetoric goes. Everything from gambling, through stocks to the tournament economics of pyramid schemes. You are giving up the bird in the hand for the promise or hope or inducement of two or more in the bush. It's the basis of the classic sting: a small but impressive win encourages someone to put everything back into the pot - and never sees the pot or the person holding it again.

How about when it comes to health though. Avoid doing unhealthy things now and your reward will be ... ah, well there's the rub. You have a choice. Do you choose to enjoy life, increase the risk of dying young but quickly and while your are still enjoying things. Alternatively do you choose to avoid those seductive dangerous pleasure, and improve the chances of dying later after adding chronic illness to the wealth of your life experience. The thing is you will die. There isn't a choice about that, and there isn't a certain choice about when unless you, for instance, stick a loaded gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. You choice is about the path to death, not the destination. (And all the religious arguments about living forever in paradise make no difference at all at this point - the fact of worldly death comes to the firmest believer and may come in a form where they don't even have the comfort of their beliefs).

So giving up smoking and eating 'healthily' may simply mean that you are giving up a certain pleasure now, for the opportunity to live long enough to experience more pain or the steady decay of senility. Pain can be managed, but not perfectly. Senility is just a steady decline with little the moderate it's pace. So you are not just giving up the bird in the hand, you are possibly doing it in exchange for a rotting corpse in the bush.

If somebody gives up smoking, chooses to eat in a certain way, and avoids mountain climbing and all other life-threatening activities, that is their choice and fine - it is the choice of the individual which way they want to stack the odds. I do object to government departments putting on the mask of caring to encourage more people on to a path leading to a slow, miserable, degrading and painful end. The end of life is much better quick and if possible painless.

For the love of god

2010-06-27T20:59:00.000+01:00

Let's get past the basics. 'God' is just a word. Lots of people have opinions about what this word refers to - and the ones with the darkest, dimmest, most closed minds generally have the firmest views. I work a lot with software and it has been my repeated experience over years that people can be utterly confused about the meaning of something you can actually point to, see and have direct experience of. I have also worked as a therapist and listened to quite a lot of people inner world. This has convinced me that people generally have very little idea about what is going on in their own heads (and this includes me), and even less of an idea what is going on the heads of those around them except in relation to certain quite specific, concrete events. So the likelihood that people understand the nature of something they can't see, touch or comprehend (aka god) is beyond laughable. And yet they state with certainty what it wants and what it means. Morons.

The power of Catholic prayer

2010-04-04T12:23:00.000+01:00

In the recent furore over paedophile priests I've been struck by the power of prayer.

I'm assuming that several of the priests and victims retained their underlying practices and continued to pray. I'd guess that the victims prayers were heart-felt and the priest's prayers were desperate. And the upshot? The abuse continued for for decades.

Forget the silent conspiracy of church authorities, what about the response of 'the boss'? I don't in this instance mean the Pope, I mean the being whose church is the head of. What can we conclude from this lack of action?

God isn't there?
God doesn't care?
God cares in the same way a social worker does - lots of hand wringing, but what can you do?
It's the best that could be done in the circumstances (Almighty then sounds rather ironic).
It was what he/she/it planned all along.
Let's blame it all on Satan - after all Satan's just a fallen angel and God's just a god, so couldn't possibly do anything to alleviate the suffering of the victims.
The victims were to blame (only a religious mind could come up with that) and what happened was just
In the grand scheme of things what do a few children's feelings matter - they will get their reward in heaven.
Catholic prayers don't count ('Dr' Ian Paisley used to be rather keen on that view)

I'm sure I've not covered all the possibilities. It seems that the lilies of the field are more in the mind of the Creator than the cries of the victims.

Or maybe we should start to grow up and rely on human intervention to cure human ills rather than a celestial tooth fairy.

The health care system in the USA - give it to the churches

2010-01-24T15:58:00.000Z

One impression you get from this side of the Atlantic is that Americans are rather keen on religion - specifically one of the many varieties of the Christian pick-and-mix.

As I understand it mutual support within a the church (i.e. the body of believers rather than the building) is an important value, and there are similar values within Islam (e.g. the duties of brotherhood) and within Buddhism (the third jewel, the Sangha). (I get the impression that Sikhism and Hinduism are also keen on this value).

This gave me an idea about how President Obama could press forward the health care reforms in a way that respected the reservations of the Republicans and was politically almost irresistible: offer certain tax breaks to mutual-support organisations (aka churches) in exchange for an obligation to provide health cover.

The prevents the charge of big-government: health care provision is in the hands of private individuals.
It plays to the religious rhetoric.
It plays to the religious obligations.
It probably reaches a lot of the disadvantaged people (or at the very least has a good chance of reaching them).
It plays to the enormous reach of televised evangelism.

I'm sure there are lots of technical problems to dance around the separation of church and state, but it would be an interesting proposal to try out.

Payment in Kind - bonuses and CDO

2010-01-24T15:43:00.000Z

According to the media one of the fundamental causes of the credit crunch and the ensuing financial problems was the 'collateralised debt obligation' (if I've got the right expansion of the abbreviation CDO) and its even more obscure financial instruments the CDO² and the CDO³. Yes, sub-prime mortgages were a problem but at least people knew what their value was (zero or negative since it was unlikely that they could be repaid). However CDO`s were imponderable, and rather than assuming that the value was unknown it seems to have been taken at face-value.

This is just another instance of a common type of deal on the internet (and in life). You are sold something with promised potential in exchange for something of actual value (i.e. you pay hard cash for a promise). The hard cash you part with can be banked but the promise is ... well, just warm wet air.

So perhaps the larger bonuses could be paid in CDOs. If they are such a good thing and have actual value then they are a valuable bonus. If they are worth less than the ink use by the printer used to list them, then they are a suitable bonus. At the very least it would focus the minds of the people supposedly supervising the banking operation to ensure that what they are buying aren't castles built on clouds.

Things that I like ...

2010-01-16T15:36:00.000Z

Quite a few (maybe all) internet social networking sites ask you to say things that you like. Sometimes they are more specific and split the listing into books, films, TV, interests and so on.

It occurred to me a couple of days ago how we generally censor this list. Everybody relies on breathable air and drinkable water but we take those as universals, so we don't list them as an interest. In fact in developed countries we generally don't have an interest in these things until they are in short supply e.g. water takes on a higher importance when the reservoirs are running low and there are bans on certain uses of water.

But I wondered how many people list sex among their interests. I suspect that quite a lot of the users of social networking sites enjoy sex, take an interest in it (at least sufficient interest to prevent their partner getting sulky) and think about it. Maybe they even think about it in relation to attractive strangers they see. Maybe they read books and magazines that talk about it or describe it. Maybe they watch films and TV programs that feature sexual relations. As the saying goes 'sex sells'. And yet for all this interest, how many people are honest enough to explicitly put sex among their interests. Is it just a given, like water and air, or just something you don't say because you don't want others to think you are at least as interested as they are.

It would be fascinating to see a list of people's real interests - the ones that they spend most time thinking about.

Iris Robinson, the affair and what goes on behind closed doors

2010-01-09T16:45:00.000Z

It seems to me that people get most worked up about the things that touch them in some way.

Perhaps they see a trait in someone else that reminds them of something they hate in the themselves and this leads to intemperate criticism. Or they are dealing with something in their personal life and it brings into sharp focus events in the social arena. I could go on with scenarios but I'm sure you get the idea.

With Iris Robinson you have a series of curious events:

She has an affair (brief by all accounts so far) with a very much younger man. As a very broad generalisation one might guess that this means he was more energetic than subtle as a lover (very masculine one might assume).
She denounces homosexuality in fairly fundamentalist terms in a public broadcast.
She is married to someone with close ties to the Orange Order, a fraternal (i.e. male only) dressing up cult.

I suppose it is possible that she might never have been that stable and she has just completely lost it - a very sad state of affairs. Or it might be that something came to her attention that very much upset her. Could there be things in Peter's closet that need airing?

Saving the world

2010-01-03T11:49:00.000Z

How many articles, new reports and commentaries have you seen this year talking about environmentalism and 'saving the world'.

Let's get this straight. If the human race is wiped out by an asteroid strike it would not be the end of the world. Sure, it would in the more subtle sense of the world being fundamentally changed. The extinction of the dinosaurs was the end of their world and a change in the nature of the whole planet, but Earth with life was there before and Earth remained with life afterwards. Here we are. Take a moment and let that sink in. Here we are. The geological evidence suggests there have been several mass extinction events in Earth's history - and here we are. Even if there has only been one, the fact remains - here we are. If practically everything down to the bacteria is swept away, life continues, the Earth continues and something new comes along. The last time it gave rise to the conditions which ultimately led to us.

So the next time somebody says that all the ecological protests and conferences and political posturing are about 'Saving the world', can you please remind them it isn't. It is about saving humanity. Cockroaches and Ebola virus will be around long after us (though Ebola virus might struggle to evolve to a new host), but it is not for their sake that we want to preserve a certain type of climate on the Earth. It is for our sake. We are not saving the Earth, we are trying to save ourselves.

A healthy body in a healthy mind - well hardly.

2009-12-29T23:01:00.000Z

'The pen is mightier than the sword' - so we are told. Maybe it is true in the long run - we only remember all those famous warriors because a scribbler scribbled. Conversely, the scribblings were only preserved by prowess of warriors. So they live hand in hand. The name of Attila has gone down in history, not the names of the historians.

Already I digress. A sort of parallel debate is whether it is worse to lose the functioning of part of your body or part of your mind. Is it harder to live with a physical limp or a crippling fear? The physical limp (or to give a more extreme example, loss of a limb) is more obvious but the solution is more readily contemplated. It may well be embarrassing to some people to need a crutch (or more) but at least a crutch can be had. Who can make the crutch for the brain (or harder yet, the mind)?

Yet when it comes to corruption of the body and mind we (in the sense of our body politic) treat the body with far more respect than the mind. It is perfectly legal to put all sorts of nonsense into the mind on grounds that an adult has the ability to choose, yet we legislate on what can be put into the body because it can be poisoned and addicted. Certain types of material are deemed beyond the pale (child pornography for instance) but this is often on the grounds of the abuse done to the participant rather than the corruption done to the viewer/listener.

So we have a situation where it is illegal in this country (and many others) to take marijuana (for instance) but it is common practice for magazines and newspapers to print horoscopes. 'Yes but that is just a bit of fun', I suspect is the reply. I also suspect that if it was a comforting tablet taken daily by millions of people it would have been tested and regulated out of existence decades ago. Just because you can't see the damage on the the surface, that doesn't mean the damage isn't there.

What of religion? Philosophy, politics, economics and most other areas of enquiry are subject to scrutiny - not always very rigorous or effective to be sure - but so often religion is given special treatment. Saying things that are critical about the supreme being apparently get certain followers of that supreme being so angry they have to go out and hurt another human being. This seems to demonstrate two things:

The supreme being is not very mature if he/she/it can be so easily upset. (Many humans seem to be less touchy than this supreme being).
Religion can be just as dangerous as narcotics not only to the user but also to those around them. One could draw quite a few parallels between a drug pusher protecting his/her business and the religious type protecting their dogma, but that is for another day.

So I would like to offer a small proposal - one so small it will be universally ignored. The laws pertaining to drugs should be extended to include the possession, handling, production and distribution of mind-altering beliefs.

Clearly the Catholic Church would have a problem if their old dictum is true: give us child before the age of seven and we'll give you a Catholic for life. That must surely be evidence of addictive potential. I don't fancy the chances of Scientology either ... and then there is Feng Sui.

There is a small sticking point - who would be clean enough in their mind to make the judgement. Well I'm sure there are a lot of people who believe they see the objective truth uninfluenced by their education, upbringing and parents - so we could eliminate this delusional bunch straight away.

Time Magazine and the healing power of faith

2009-03-08T17:20:00.003Z

The February 23rd issue of Time had a cover story on the healing power of faith. This week's Inbox (i.e. letters to the editor) has an interesting collecting of responses to that issue of Time, but what I am intrigued by is the utter confusion of the supposedly rational responses to the articles. However it is not so surprising when the original articles are equally confused.

There at least three quite distinct but related constructs at work in this issue. Firstly there is faith - hard to measure but without doubt a human attribute. Faith does not require that the thing in which faith is placed is reliable or even exists - in much the same way that a person can feel love towards a fictional character or a dead person.

Secondly there is religion. This is a human activity and a social construct. Religion and religious activity clearly exist. They don't need to be wholesome. They can be riddled with hypocrisy. However it is a demonstrable fact that religious (not spirtual, sacred, holy or godly) activity exists.

Thirdly there is deism - the belief in a power or powers, generally considered benign and beyond human control.

These are partially inter-related but certainly not born of the same egg.

Maheshkumar Mathilakath I think gives the best summary of the whole issue in his letter from the U.A.E: "Perhaps it is the persevering faith of the patient and not God or the doctor that actually heals."

You can have faith without god or religion. You can have god without religion and without a formalised faith. And you can have religion without faith or god. In much the same way that apples continued to fall to the ground in much the same way after Newton conceived of the force of gravity as they did before his insight, so faith will have its own characteristics (which can be studied in an objective, sound, methodical way) regardless of the interpretation placed on faith from either a religious or a deist point of view. The activities of religion may strengthen faith, and if a diety has the power to influence faith that might also help. But the study of the power of faith should be just that. Don't deny the phenomenon just because you don't like the interpretation and mythologizing that accompanies the phenomenon.

Abuse

2009-02-22T10:21:00.003Z

There are plenty of stories around of children being abused by people (mostly men but not exclusively) from religious communities, but this is not the most shocking aspect of abuse within religion.

Suppose there was a father who regularly hurt, demeaned and undermined his children and then told them that it was their own fault, that they brought the pain and suffering on themselves that they did not love him enough - what would we call such a father. We would (and we do) call such father's physically, emotionally and psychologically abusive. Physical abuse is the easiest to detect and prosecute, but I have long thought that psychological and emotional abuse are by far the most common and least tackled. "I love you so much I'm going to beat the crap out of you" shines a light on the sad and twisted mind of perpetrator. However, just because the perpetrator is a broken human that doesn't lessen the need to keep that person away from other he (or she) can abuse. Abuse is contagious: much of the time it spread through repeated violent physical contact between parent and child.

So why do we not apply the term 'abuser' when it comes to deities, when their abuse is on a scale beyond the abuse of any human perpetrator. A being that claims the power to move worlds, and yet demands the intense prayers of worried humans to add a few days to the life of a suffering child is an abuser. That such a being wants crowds of people to gather regularly and sing praises is an abomination.

And then to make matters worse in the case of Christianity, this being (if you accept the events of the Christian story) brings into being a man who is the son of god and causes him to be tortured to death. "See, this how much worse I can make it for somebody who really matters to me."

Some children in abusive relationships learn what it takes to minimize the suffering and manipulate the abuser (and in the process develop a manipulative approach to relationships generally). Sometimes flattery and fawning are what it takes to retain a small centre of self-respect and to simply survive. Just because someone (or something) is abusive it means it has the power to abuse. Until you've learned how to first control and then escape (if that is possible) you firstly need to learn how to recognize and mitigate.

Don't blindly accept the abuse and conspire with the abuser.

Matthew 19:26

2009-01-18T12:14:00.002Z

"With God all things are possible".

Meaning perhaps that an omnipotent being is not bound by limits of morality, decency and humanity. It can do what it likes and allow the unbelievably inhumane to happen, combined with teasingly giving miraculous gifts in a purely capricious way.

You don't know what it will do next. You the coin might come down to your temporary benefit, or you might vicitim this time.

Evenhandedness

2009-01-11T19:09:00.003Z

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, in other words evenhandedness.

One might see it has compassion, but it has more to do with wisdom.

Firstly, there is the effect of teaching people how to behave. If you act in a certain way, the way in which the action is interpreted teaches (wittingly or unwittingly) others how you expect to be treated. For instance, if in future Palestinians act with as much care towards the lives of non-combatants Israelis as the IDF do towards Palestinian non-combatants in Gaza we can expect to see a lot of blood on the streets of Tel Aviv. Your actions teach people how you expect to be treated (or indeed how you expect people in general to be treated).

However the more fundamental point is about understanding a situation. Lack of evenhandedness means there is bias in interpretation. If it is deliberate bias just in the description and reporting, that is bad enough but if the bias is actually in the perception of a situation then you are lying to yourself as well as others. Deliberate falsification has its consequences but at least you know you are doing it. Unconscious falsification means that you are acting from a basis of delusion.

How many times do you hear an argument (often in the mouth of a politician) being applied to one side of a situation in a way that they would resist being applied to their own side of the situation. I suspect that this is mostly done in a completely knowing way - they know that their own side cannot stand the type of scrutiny they have just applied to the opposition - but with time assumed positions of delusion stick.

I used to read reviews in a certain Buddhist magazine which seemed to brim with 'holier than thou' purity. The nature of the organization which produced the magazine made me think that they were probably written by rather young people with little direct experience, but a lot of fervent idealism. On the whole their criticisms were well founded, but never applied in an even handed way. The irony in this case is that this was a Buddhist organization, and Buddhism very strongly believes in working on your own flaws (everybody has flaws, but you can't work on someone else's and too much energy put into pointing out those of other people detracts from the immediate task of working on one's own).

Another source of articles I read are from a small-government, fairly right wing, conservative organisation. Although I sympathize with much of the logic of their arguments, they often seem to be written after the conclusion has been reached. Rather like Blair and the war in Iraq, they seem to be exercises in trying to find intelligence to support a pre-judged position. Evenhandedness requires more work. It is an approach more like scientific rigour in which a hypothesis must be tested against a control so that you know how the path you would prefer compares against another. It may be that your preference is no more sound and sensible that the path you depricate.

Lawyers are not supposed to be evenhanded (they are paid not to be) - that is why we have judges. Their job is to be as evenhanded as is humanly possible and to balance the evidence rather than the rhetoric and prejudice.

Abusive relationships

2009-01-11T10:23:00.002Z

In a lot of human relationships there is an imbalance of power.

A parent usually has both greater physical and psychological power than their young child. Most parents don't intentionally abuse the disparity, though I suspect most accidentally do. Parents aren't perfect, they make mistakes. Apologies and regrets might be welcomed but they don't actually undo the consequences of the mistakes. Some parents end up in the terrible position of unintentionally causing the death of their own child but the genuine anguish and regret of the parent can't undo the harm.

However there are also parents who intentionally do things which are physically, emotionally or psychologically hurtful and harmful. Sometimes they don't recognize the potential for harm, and sometimes they don't seem to care. Giving birth to a child doesn't make you wise or good, and impregnating someone definitely doesn't. However some people think that they own what they have given birth to and can do pretty much what they want - as often as not because that is how they have been brought up, and have never grown beyond their own childhood.

The same applies in a different way with leaders of countries, people, nations and tribes. They usually have an unequal power relationship with most of the people in the country. Mostly they think they are working for the good of the country (which may or may not include all the people in it). They can do things which accidentally bring great harm, and they can do things which benefit a minority at the expense of the majority - or even at the expense of the vast majority in favour of just their own inner circle or family. They may feel entitled to do this because the country is young and they have made it what it is, or that only they can guide the country to power, recognition ... or whatever.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

So what if you have an entity that believes it has absolute power and the absolute right to make and destroy, an entity that believes it is the ultimate arbiter of what is permitted, an entity that believes it owns everything.

Such a being is often called called god, and treated as the father and king of all. If mythology and scripture is to be believed, such a being likes to be praised and worshipped, is jealous and possessive. Sounds more and more like an abusive parent than an all-knowing and wise supreme being.

Do did man create the notion of god as the ultimate projection of the human abusive parents, or did god create man in order to be an abusive parent? Seems to me that either way round, the 'thing' referred to as god needs a lot of close examination for what it is before any praise is due. Praise (flattery) can be a useful way of surviving when trying to live in the same world (universe) as a powerful psychopath, but you have to know that you are lying in order to survive rather than being taken in by your own lies.

Elephants and Zruwoks - God, god and gods

2008-12-28T11:22:00.003Z

There is a much repeated story about blind men and an elephant credited to Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis and (for all I know) a host of other traditions. The essence of the story is this: a group of blind men (assumed to be unfamiliar with elephants) are put in a room with an elephant and asked to say what the huge thing in the room is. Of course some feel the tail, some the trunk, some the ears, some the legs and some the belly. They then set about vigourously disagreeing with each other about the nature of what they have found, and rather than sharing their knowledge to come to an overall picture they argue and disagree from their partial experiences of the huge beast.

There is a lot of this goes on.

At least all the blind men were in the room with same elephant and all used broadly the same methods to come to their partial insight into the nature of the strange object. Imagine if you had a group of blind people who did even share a method or a vocabulary. Imagine if those same blind men had all been told secretly and separately that a great reward came to them for getting the right answer. Imagine if each of those same blind men had a great host of followers or dependents, also blind, who looked to their blind leader to give them trustworthy guidance. The original arguments among the blind men and the elephant would be completely overshadowed by the utter absurdity of the disputes between the blind men tempted by rewards, relied on by followers and separated by lack of a common language.

So when you have arguments between those who claim to 'know God' and those who claim 'there is no God', you have to wonder if they are really talking the same language. 'God' (as a word, as a concept) is not like an elephant. It is hard enough (nearly impossible) for a person to know themself in a reliable and meaningful way, so much harder to really know another person they share language and culture with, and harder again to know a person from a different language and culture. By 'know' I don't just mean 'acquainted with'. 'Know' here means know like you know your own mind on the clearest, most insightful day of your life - really know.

Suppose you ask 'Do Zruwoks exist?'. I'd guess that most people would reply something along the lines of 'no idea', 'never heard of them', or 'what are they'. The problem with using a familiar word that refers to an intangible (and, some would say, abstract) entity is the difficulty of knowing that you are all talking about the same 'thing'. We have the basic problem of not knowing if the blind men are all in the same room - are some in different rooms, some with elephants, some with bears and some with yaks. It's fairly absurd to be Azruwokist, and vehemently deny the existence of Zruwok(s) if it turns out that this refers to Higgs bosons, or dark matter. It is so tempting to deny the existence of a mysterious intangible when so many of the people insisting on the existence do so in such patently unsupportable ways.

The existence or not of a phenomenon does not support the truth or falsehood of the interpretation of that phenomenon. Clearly if a phenomenon does not actually exist then argument over interpretation is absurd - how can you place interpretation on a nothing? However you have to be very careful to separate phenomenon from interpretation. Is a ghost a phenomenon? No - it is interpretation. Noises with no discernable source is a phenomenon, images appearing to pass through walls is a phenomenon - but attaching the word 'ghost' is interpretation.

Denying the interpretation does not necessarily deny the phenomenon. Healing, prayer and miracles might all be accepted without having to accept the baggage of speculative interpretation that often goes with them. (The leap from phenomenon to religious interpretation is often so vast as to stretch credibility, except for the already true believer).

Tragically, the bulk of religion is mired in the psychological support of people prefering hope to understanding. The myth making of their world view gives hope, regardless of evidence and reason, and justifies its existence simply by doing that. It makes the world bearable. I say 'tragically' because world views don't really live comfortably side by side. They are images, not concepts. They are not (on the whole) capable of compromise - you can't negotiate a compromise without breaking both. A world view has the emotional wrapper 'it is so' - it gives certainty, it gives the foundation to the thought structures on which the rest of life is built. Messing with the foundations is dangerous.

Although it seems like the basic question should be 'does X exist', really you have to address 'what is X' before you can test existence. Suppose it turned out that there is a single mighty, sentient existence that can make and destroy worlds in the blink of an eye with all the moral rectitude of Robert Mugabe - would you praise such an entity as a god? It might be politic to do so - the earth-bound opposition of an earthly dictator will tell you of the dangers of opposing such power. But would you really feel good about yourself, pandering to a supreme dictator just because of the power held unchecked by such a being. Would you feel good about yourself giving limitless obedience and love to such a being?

Existence is no guarantee of goodness.

Benefits and Responsibility

2008-11-01T21:08:00.000Z

In the UK the government provides state benefits of various kinds to people who are unemployed, unable to work etc. It is both a pragmatic and compassionate thing to do. It is compassionate because you never know when you might find yourself in the same position as one of the recipients. It is pragmatic because it means the recipients are still a part of the economic life of society, albeit at a generally low level. It is also politic - for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately there are recipients of benefits who simply see it as a way of life. For instance a certain religious group, who will remain nameless, used to fuel the economy of their 'communities' by housing benefit. They felt entitled because of the 'benefit' they supplied to the world - and regardless of the truth or otherwise of that point of view, the tax and rate paying citizens were not given the choice about supporting their lifestyle.

I wonder why it is unacceptable to see the recipients of benefit as being, in effect, employees of the state. (One reason from the state's point of view is the small matter of minimum wages - but I'll leave that to one side). We, the general public and business activity, actually fund this largesse from the government. So perhaps we should expect that all the people in receipt of benefit should be available for the many tasks which could improve our environment.

I can see how this could distort markets, but I really think that productive activity is one of the great drivers of self-respect. But how could you motivate the feckless to work if they knew they were entitled to the payment regardless of the quality of the work they did?

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No God on a Bendy Bus

2008-10-21T20:41:00.000+01:00

I read on the BBC website that the British Humanist Association is running a splendid advertising campaign on the side of London bendy buses saying: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

Admirable as the slogan is, it seems to have ignored a basic piece of human psychology. Most people (everyone who has not dug down to the roots of their psychological make up) has a 'god' in their head. It is the mark left by a parent (whether biological, social or adopted) on their psyche. It is nothing to do with theology or religion, except in the sense of it being the foundation from which theological notions are projected. Unless you provide practical help to exorcise the ghost of childhood, for no mere effort of will is likely to do that, that rational messages you tell people will crash against the sea wall of (literally) childish superstition buried deep and woven into the fibres of personality.

It is an admirable attempt, but psychologically naive.

Who you are

2008-10-16T21:11:00.000+01:00

A novel I'm reading at the moment has a strong theme of not being able to really know another person, so it's got me thinking about this again.

I don't think you can really know who you are yourself, and yet at the same time you can only think, speak and do from who you are now. That might not be who you would like to be - we might all aspire to be wiser, bolder or kinder - but we are who we are. That person is the place from which we act, but the action we take might change who we are both long term and short term. So we become a new person, a new platform from which actions arise.

There is no point in saying 'if I were ... I would do ...' because you have no idea of how that change would affect the myriad other aspects of your life. If you had recently been (for example) much richer you might feel entitled to guess how you would be now if you still had the recently lost wealth, but in truth the only person you can speak for is the me now.

When you act in the moment you are definitely being yourself. What you do might surprise you, but the choice and action is genuinely you. Speculation about what you might do is just that - hot air and dreams.

If you disappoint yourself by what you do, then you need to use the now-me to do whatever it takes to engage in a transaction with the world to become the future-me, and when you get there find out if you've got where you want to be, and whether (regardless of the first part) you still want to be there.

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Is the Earth threatened by global warming

2008-09-29T21:00:00.000+01:00

Over the last week I've heard a couple of headlines which went something like "the Earth is at risk because of global warming". Now just stop and think about that for a moment.

You may or may not accept that global warming is a fact.

You may or may not believe that human activity contributes to something called global warming.

But is there anyone (except maybe Jehovah's Witnesses forever wedded to any kind rumour of disaster) who seriously believes that the Earth itself is threatened by global warming?

The earth has been far warmer in the past, and support abundant life.

There is life in very, very hot places - in some parts of the ocean life not using sunlight and oxygen to support its existence. There is life in some very acid place, and in some very salty place. There is life inside the surface layers of rocks.

Human civilization might be threatened by global warming. Many of the species that humans cherish might be threatened by global warming. However global warming is not a general threat to life on earth, or to the earth as a living entity in itself. The earth might suffer a bit of a fever and get rid of the infection (that is us), but the ecosystem will adapt to new conditions and produce new forms of life.

Measuring the effort - inputs or outputs

2008-09-12T16:38:00.000+01:00

There was a recent item on the news about the money that had been rather quietly (so the news items claimed) spent on trying to prevent extremism among young Muslim men. At least I think that was the original intent of the scheme. The criticism of the scheme by some (in the Muslim community) was that the money was being spent in a rather random way, and without proper controls on the effectiveness of the schemes on which it was spent. They also interviewed a council official from Bradford who spoke of the pressure that had been put on them to join the scheme, with hints that if they didn't join the scheme they might be seen as 'soft on terror'. They chose not to join because they thought the scheme was mere tokenism and box-ticking.

It got me to thinking about how often government schemes are rated on the inputs rather than the outputs. ('We are spending X million pounds to do ...'). Consider an analogy:

Noting that the more you push down on the accelerator of a car, other things being equal, the faster it goes you decide to measure effort to get to a destination by the overall amount the accelerator is pressed down.
So you faithfully record ever change in the depression of the accelerator, and have somebody keep a careful note of this. You are so careful that you employ somebody specifically for the purpose.
However, since there is no requirement in the recording to switch on the engine or take the car out of neutral, the figures are meaningless. All that pressing on the accelerator has got you precisely nowhere.

This is measuring the input, instead of the output (e.g. actual miles travelled).

It is not always so easy to measure outcomes in social situations, and it is politically much more satisfying to measure inputs (you have control over them). But if the measure you choose is not a valid reflection of progress towards the goal you are aiming for, then the numbers you record - no matter how accurate they are - are simply meaningless.

In a society wanting to create an educated electorate politicians would point this out - loud and clear. Politicians would try to wake people from ignorance and superstition.

However in our society all too often politicians seem to cling to and promote ignorance and superstition. Like monkeys they swing from one branch of self-serving ignorance to another hoping that if they swing fast enough no one will notice that they are monkeys instead of leaders.

Naming to mislead

2008-08-31T11:16:00.000+01:00

I've had a few cold calls from something called the 'Endowment Misselling Office' (or some such name). Since I don't have an endowment mortgage I'm not really interesting in listening to their pitch. After their last call it struck me that by calling themselves '... blah ... Office' it made them sound like something official, like they might be a branch of government. It got me thinking about 'misleading' naming.

The late, unlamented GDR was about as misleadingly named as the Holy Roman Empire. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was more commonly known as East Germany. It scores 1 out of 3, in that it was German - but only by the most bizarre Humpty-Dumpty twisting of meaning could it be counted as Democratic. Was it a Republic - Res Publica? No - it was a party oligarchy, so it wasn't an entity of the people (the whole people).

Is 'New Labour' related to the Labour party which it subverted? Just having the word 'Labour' doesn't mean it has anything to do with the pre-existing socialist party, no more than having the word 'Democratic' in the title of the GDR meant it was democratic.

And on a completely different tack, what of the WBO and FWBO. Just because the Western Buddhist Order uses the word Buddhist in its name, does it really mean that you have any guarantee of finding something genuinely Buddhist? You might well equally ask that question of any number of Buddhist, Christian or Islamic organisations. It isn't the name that matters, it's the actions. 'Going for Refuge' isn't a set of words, an oath, a vow or simply a commitment - it is what you do. If you went into a shop calling itself 'The Fruit Shop' and found that all the fruit was made of wax you might well feel mislead.

Sometimes the naming is intended to mislead, and sometimes its a matter of people no living up to the name. But the hardest of all is when a person or body of people believe it is time to redefine what a word means - to bring it up to date. This is a very hard trick to pull off, because you have know and maintain the continuous thread which makes the thing what it is whilst using that thread to weave a new pattern for a new world.

I don't think most Westerners would think the GDR succeeded in defining democratic. I'm still wondering about the WBO but on the whole I think it well intentioned but misguided - not quite got the thread, and not quite weaving a lasting pattern.

Learning from actions

2008-08-16T00:16:00.000+01:00

The excuse/rationale/justification/cover-story (choose the word to suit your interpretation of the situation) for sending troops into Georgia is that they have a constitutional duty to protect Russian citizens wherever they may be.

Given that the interpretation of this constitutional duty is to send in overwhelming armed force, you'd think that would make having Russian passport holders within your borders something you would want to avoid. In fact might want to start deporting them, so that Russia could better protect them without all the expense of sending in tanks.

I don't know how much truth there is in the image of 'Russian Mafia' in New York and other large cities around the world, but you might think that the actions of Russia in Georgia would be the perfect rationale/pretext/justification for rounding up the Russians you'd prefer not to play host to, and to ship them back to the country that wants to protect them.

Royal Academy Summer exhibition 2008

2008-08-13T20:52:00.000+01:00

This is now my third year of visiting the RA summer exhibition. It is always entertaining the totally philistine way of looking at the price of something that looks too vile to be in anything other than a primary school art exhibition, finding it has a hair raising price and exclaiming 'HOW MUCH?', then usually discovering it's been painted or thrown together by an RA and wearily shrugging at the inevitability.

Overall it did not seem such a good collection this year compared with the previous two years. There just seemed to be more mediocre stuff, but with the highlights being just as impressive. (Though nothing so uninspired as the repeatedly touted pile of teacups from 2006).

For me there were two highlights. One was Ron Arad's piece 'Ping Pong Table'. It is very simple, and breath-takingly beautiful. Photographs really do not do it justice. It is a jewel in mirrored steel. Apart from the minor obstacles of it being 'NFS', well outside the scope of my wallet and me not having a suitable setting to display it, this is supremely tempting object.

The other highlight is Jeff Coons' 'Cracked Egg (Blue)'. I must be just a sucker for shiney objects. However the other themes in common between these pieces are simplicity, imagination and craftsmanship. The craftsman without artistic imagination creates nothing, but the artistist without craftsmanship is just a wannabe.

Which brings us neatly to the Tracey Emin room. Monumentally disappointing, or would be if I hadn't already expected the content to be a ghost of the hype surrounding it. I can't make my mind up if the hype is part of the exhibit - is it a legitimate piece of ephemeral art. It certainly rouses the emotions (twice, if you include the disappointment). I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe it was some kind of Dada-ist statement, but I think really it was just a mixture art-establishment naivity mixed with effective PR.

Georgia Hayes had another waste of wall-space on display. One year being exhibited at the RA I can understand on the grounds of giving space to the range of artistic diversity (regardless of the lack of skill), but 2 years running? I really must be missing something (or maybe I am being cruel to a 5 year old). Simply dire.

Michael Craig-Martin's 'Death' and 'Lust' were imposing and brilliant, 'Death' being the better of the two. (And yet, if I may be so immodest as to say so, the composition of both could both have been improved).

When I first looked at Anselm Kiefer's 'San Loretto' it did nothing for me, and then as I walked around the gallery and kept looking at it, it grew on me. Now, looking at it in the catalogue, I discover I like it even more. This is perhaps one of the marks of true art: it is neither featureless banality, nor is it unapproachable (which can so easily be a disguise for skillless wannabe).

John Holden's 'Castle XXI' probably does have hidden depths, but I enjoy it simply because it makes me feel good to look at it. There is something about the colours and proportions which I find thoroughly uplifting.

David Remfry's 'Turning Burlesque Dancer' is delightful. A series of near life-size studies of a beautiful woman wearing nothing but red shoes, a feather in her hair and tattooes - delightful.

Although the Lecture Room did contain some interesting pieces, it easily gets the 'taking the piss' award (which is quite an achievement since the Emin room had already put in a significant challenge for the award), but 'White Shadow 2005', and 'Ash, 2008' make the room's grip on the award unassailable, to which 'Take me to the water' and 'Diva' can be added for a distinction level award in vacuity.

I find it hard to pick out something of special note from the Architecture room. For me it is the most special room in the whole exhibition. Architecture is always the place where art meets its most serious test, both in terms of difficulty of implementation and size of audience which will see and interact with the end product.

Speed - the Modern Mercury

2008-08-03T12:50:00.000+01:00

As a child I visited Liverpool many times and yet there are huge chunks of the city centre that are completely unfamiliar to me. When I visited as a child most of the visits were shopping trips with my mother (and sometimes also with my grandmother). We either got the bus from Victoria Square and got off at the bottom of Brownlow Hill near to Lewis' store - usually our first destination, or alternatively we got the train to Lime Street Station. Sometimes the trips were not for shopping, but for getting the train to New Brighton or to Hoylake, and sometimes (I think it was when I was very small, we got the ferry - whereas I was travel sick in cars and buses, my mother got travel sick on ferries).

So when I went to see the Klimt exhibition at the Tate I took the opportunity to look more closely at some of the things I'd missed as a child. One of these was the Queens Tunnel Control and ventilation building.

I'm not sure whether it counts as Art Deco or Modernist, but the name does not matter much. It is a wonderful example of the early 1930's vigour and positivity of which there are many example in Liverpool (and which complement the excellent Victorian optimism which is evident in the architecture of that period).

Zimbabwe Dollar - 100,000,000 note

2008-07-12T12:11:00.000+01:00

I decided to buy myself a piece of history - a Zimbabwe 100,000,000 dollar note. When it was issued on 2nd May 2008 it was, according to OandA, worth slightly more than £1725. Today it is worth slightly more than 0.25p. It is literally not worth the paper it is printed on.

When I visited Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s there were white settlers there saying that the place was going to the dogs. By contrast we (myself, my wife and a couple of friends) saw it as a haven of civilization compared with Zambia, which we had just left. Back then the border post still had pictures of Canaan Banana, the then president, in their offices. It just goes to show that if you leave people in charge whose egos far exceed their competence (and this applies to pretty much every walk of life) you can turn success into failure. The difference when it applies to the government of a country is the scale of the misery that stupidity and arrogance can inflict.

Surely Zimbabwe, Myanmar (Burma) and Sudan demonstrate that when it comes to real misery, the UN is next to useless (and I say this with great sadness, since I was a true believer when much younger).

Perhaps the best hope for the people of Zimbabwe is for the Chinese to find a militant Tibetan enclave setting up training camps in the country, or for the people to start growing opium poppies or coca bushes. Become a threat enough for somebody outside to care enough.

Many people have commented on how well Mugabe looks for a man of his age. If the Soviets were happy to keep Brezhnev in place for years after he was dead, I wondered if intelligence services were sure that the man playing the role was actually Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Since it seems to be generally thought that it is thugs around him who really need the Mugabe regime to continue, but they have no popular support nor liberation credentials, perhaps they are keeping the myth alive rather than the man. It's a thought.

Action - Moving forward and staying still

2008-07-06T11:48:00.000+01:00

It has taken me a long time to understand that although I am not a particularly adventurous, active person, action is one of the most important measures in my life. In action and outcome you measure how things really are - not in the all the words, speculation and ritual.

Some people say that you should value a person for who they are not what they can do. I cannot agree with this. What a person is very much is about what they can do. Not necessarily what they can do for you, but what skills and freedoms they have either by fortune of birth or dint of acquisition.

I also think that most people secretly know this. People whose roles in life do not allow much success through action start to proclaim the values of things which cannot be measured. And yet if they have sporting interests, they will value winners, champions, record breakers and those with mastery and skill. Taking part is important in that it shows strength of character - it is not simply the turning up, it is taking part. However I doubt that anyone prefers to be on the losing side.

Even the religious frequently talk in terms of battle between the good and the evil - and want there to be winner. (Though I do wonder if this is simply simplistic speech to address those who can only deal with simplistic speech).

The challenge for me is to deal with situations where the only useful action is to deliberately let things be - to leave well alone - to allow circumstances to change in order for action to be fruitful. This can seem like sitting idly by, but deliberate inaction is also choice and one of the range of actions open to one. This is the point when I recognize that some action is simply an outlet for childish frustration. By doing something it feels like you can channel anger into something that appears to be creative - but it may simply be cathartic rather than useful. It is important to separate catharsis from constructive.

Who is behind the camera

2008-06-24T21:01:00.000+01:00

There was an item on the news this morning about a 'bus spotter' who has been taking photos of buses (in the UK) for years, but is considering giving up his hobby because of suspicion that he is either a paedophile or a terrorist. It has even become so bad that he has been questioned by the police.

It occurred to me that it is not so much the cameras you see, and the people you see taking pictures that are the most immediate threat. It is all the semi hidden CCTV cameras that photograph you dozens of times a day. Actually not the cameras, rather the people who have access to the images.

If you were attracted to children, or wanted endless coverage of sensitive sites in the UK, your best option would surely be that of a person who monitored CCTVs. Of course most of them are never looked at by a human: they are just left on a duty cycle, recording where ever the camera happens to be pointing, and only looked at if evidence is needed. But who monitors the people who have access to the cameras we all, as tax-payers, pay for? I doubt that many monitoring centres have invested in equipment to check just where the eyes are looking on the screen - but they should.

North America - to Let

2008-06-23T22:15:00.000+01:00

The Bush clan have a reputation for using high offices of state as a means to improve their businesses ... but renting out the whole of North America is pretty ambitious.

(Seen in the centre of Manchester).

"The Garden, a Parable" by Geshe Michael Roach

2008-06-11T22:13:00.000+01:00

I have often looked for books which could deliver Buddhist teaching in a more approachable way than traditional Tibetan texts. Stories are just so much more approachable, but many of the Jataka stories seem and sound mythological rather than rooted in everyday life.

So when I saw 'The Garden' advertised I wondered if I'd finally found something that hit the spot. I was instantly disappointed. My first reaction was: this is not a parable. But then I started to wonder if I had too narrow a view of what a parable is. Definitely 'The Garden' is a teaching story, but it is essentially a series of encountered with famous teachers with each one given the chance to explain their contribution to the development of Tibetan Buddhist understanding of the world as it applies to a novice.

I can't make my mind up which of three situations apply:

either I never understood Buddhism until I read this book, I now I do understand it I disagree with it;
or the most profound thinkers of Buddhism were so shallow in their thinking that their arguments fall apart under the mildest of scrutiny;
or the presentation in this book is pitifully poor.

For anyone familiar with 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail' you might remember the famous witch trial scene, in which the most pitiful piece of sophistry accidentally discloses that the accused actually is a witch. There are places in this book where the level of argument reminds me exactly of that scene from Monty Python - except that instead of ducks it is seeds that are used to drive home the conclusion.

I fear that anyone reading this would think that the chain of formative teachers revered by the Gelugpa tradition (and NKT) were no better than their European mediaeval superstitious clerics and drew their conclusions based on dogma rather than evidence. Sadly I'd have to say it is book best avoided.

Random Parliamentary thoughts

2008-06-11T22:03:00.000+01:00

By the oddities of the English language we have a system in which a person stands for Parliament so that they can sit in the house, and then lie before the public.

Recognizing Governments

2008-06-08T11:05:00.000+01:00

I think this has become a bit of a hobby-horse of mine. Maybe this is what happens when you open your eyes to something you had previously taken for granted.

Why do governments around the world, and intergovernmental bodies, continue to recognize the regime of Robert Mugabe as the legitimate goverment of Zimbabwe? Is it just the magic of words - he claims a word ('President') and because it is the same word that is used in the USA (for instance) he and his government claim equal respect? Partly it is power - he has the army on his side.

There are and have been many dictatorships around the world, but has there ever been one so utterly incompetent? The junta in Burma certainly tries its best to match Mugabe in senseless stupidity. It a body claiming to be a government destroys the economy of a country, ruins the lives of the people and shows no capability or will to improve how can the governments of the rest of the world all continue to recognize that body as part of their 'club'? If there is legitimate alternative, and no government in exile, then it is time to say that Zimbabwe is a failed state without a meaningful government. Do might well have to sit down with gang leaders and terrorists to open dialogue, but it doesn't mean you have treat them as heads of state.

Irony - it's lost on them

2008-05-24T12:40:00.000+01:00

I was watching the Channel 4 news last night and there was an item about John McCain's rather embarrassing radical clerics. Not that they used this phrase exactly, since it seems to be reserved exclusively for muslim clerics and these radicals were christian crazies.

Just because Rod Parsley and John Hagee wear suits and spout insanity couched in language stolen from Christianity, it doesn't make them any saner than clerics who spout insanity couched in language stolen from Islam.

But a ultra-conservative Islamic preacher is a 'radical cleric' whereas one dressed up as a christian is simply 'evangelical'.

Corruption is still corruption no matter what language you dress it up in.

China, Myanmar (Burma), democracy and power

2008-05-11T15:27:00.000+01:00

There was a TV interview on Channel 4 news (UK) a couple of nights ago with the Ambassador of PRC government in the UK. I have to say she seemed a very likable person - she was somebody I found very easy to listen to and accept what she said. I guess those are the qualities of a good ambassador of any kind.

One of the things she was asked about was whether the PRC government was putting any pressure on the government of Burma to allow more aid and aid workers in. Her answer was the PRC government was not in the habit of telling other countries what to do. A reasonable answer on the face of it.

But then you have to ask yourself what the conditions are which allow a government (of any kind) to claim to speak for the country or the people.

Most Isreali Palestinians (so it seems) do not feel represented by the government of their country, or fairly represented by it. In their case they are a minority in the country, so you might argue that the welfare of the many supersedes the interests of the few (however that tends to be the way insurgency, civil war, and unrest starts).

Did the slaves in Sparta feel fairly represented by the Spartan citizens? The slaves outnumbered the citizen to such a degree that they were periodically culled. Actually Sparta comes to mind quite a bit when I think of Myanmar. Even the name Myanmar is an imposition of the Junta, so maybe I should really be calling the country Burma - what do the people call their own country in the privacy of their own thoughts?

Did the Highlanders in Scotland feel fairly represented by the aristocracy which owned the land on which they lived and had that land cleared for the benefit of hunting, shooting and fishing? I think probably not. The owners were, it is has to be admitted, not the government but they were people who were much more closesly connected with the government than the people who lived on the land.

So when you speak of 'Burma' as some kind of political entity (or 'China' come to that) is it just arrogant tyranny that a junta claims ownership of the word? Surely Burma is the land and the people (all of the people) and not just the ruling elite. Even China accepts that kind of argument - it is their justification (when it suits their needs) for moving against local autonomous governments they don't like. For them, the people are the land - so it used to be (at least in theory).

This is a very dangerous line of argument for any goverment. If you question the legitimacy of another goverment, the very argument used against that government can be used against yourself. Unless, of course, you have a very, very large army. A loyal army always trumps a reasoned argument in the short term.

Tibet, Israel, Empires and Persecution

2008-05-11T12:05:00.000+01:00

The survival of cultures is an interesting phenomenon.

When Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed in AD70 (though at the time nobody knew it was AD70 since this style of numbering had not been invented yet) and the population dispersed you might have thought that nearly 2000 years later Judaism would be an interesting footnote and the Roman Empire might even still be a force in the world. Maybe with a broader historical perspective you might have noted the remarkable tendency of the Jews to survive as an entity despite being dragged off into slavery, defeated, suppressed and generally suffering at the hands of what appeared to be much larger and more powerful regimes. You can understand why the Romans eventually got bored with the troublesome inhabitants of Palestine - they simply caused more trouble than they were worth. Even centuries later the Byzantine historian Procopius notes at the start of many chapters of his 'Histories' that the Jews were in revolt again. They did it a lot.

However there were special circumstances surrounding the Jews. I guess if you accept the story of being the chosen people of Yahweh, that would be a fairly special circumstance, but I'm thinking of more sociological factors. Christianity became a big thing in the Mediterranean region when it was adopted (and subverted to imperial political ends) by the Emperor Constantine. At the point when Constantine adopted Christianity the 'Bible' did not exist - the thing that the word 'Bible' refers to crystalised out from the various synods about 100 years later. However the writing that did exist and formed the basis of discussions at the synods gave an afterlife to Judaism. The Christians (who originally had been seen simply as another sect of Judaism) saw themselves as the fulfilment of prophesy and the unconvinced Jews were some kind of reactionaries. But their story was to fill the greater part of the collection of writings which would subsequently be called the Bible.

Fortunately for Jewish culture Christian Europe was largely untroubled by the actual teachings of Jesus. I'm guessing that the parable of the good Samaritan was not so popular. So in one form or another (with a few breaks) 'Christians' beseiged (metaphorically speaking) the Jewish diaspora. Jewish culture had great antiquity, respect for learning and integrity - so it became a world apart and survived. It evolved in some very strange ways, but it survived. Repression and persecution helped survival in ways which comfort and cosseting could not.

Perhaps there are parallels for Romanies too.

So when a modern vast empire (PRC), a lover of harmony and the suppression of discord, sweeps into a country with a strong alternative culture, ingrained values and a sense of identity (Tibet) are they recreating the conditions which the Roman Empire created in 70AD? They are certainly trying their best to recreate the conditions by their use of extremist reactionary rhetoric (quite ironic for a state run by a communist party). There is a huge Tibetan diaspora with a distinctive culture. Unfortunately for that culture it is being loved rather than loathed by the world at large. So I suspect it will be absorbed and digested by the amoeba of Western values and thus vanish semi-mythic obscurity - except in Tibet itself where the difficulty of actually being culturally Tibetan will probably guarantee survival.

Cocktail Shakers - they don't come from nowhere

2008-05-04T15:18:00.000+01:00

One of my continuing interests is the origins of things we take for granted. For instance, staples and paper clips. Not only has someone manufactured both of these items ... pretty obvious that they don't just appear in the stores ... but long before that someone has thought about them, designed them, designed the equipment to make them and most likely patented them too.

Being the sad sole that I am did some digging about on the internet about a couple of years ago and found a lot of information relating to paper clips. I guess we mostly think of a thing the shape of the annoying 'helper' on Word when the word 'paperclip' is used, but there have been a lot of other designs over the years (I remember my mother having some odd shaped paperclips that were used in the CID office in St. Helens).

So anyway, back to the cocktail shaker. I was watching a TV ad a couple of night ago and it reminded me how iconic the cocktail shaker was - there are other designs, but there is a classic shape which springs to mind when the word is used. I wondered who had come up with this.

A copy of a patent for sale on ebay informed that Hugh Cooke had patented a design in 1930, but his was simply a development of something that had been in use since the late 1800s. A couple of sites used practically the same wording to say that it had been invented by an innkeeper in the late 1800s, without giving any further information about who the man was who had shaped a design icon.

So if you know (especially if you have citation you can point too), do leave a comment.

Tibet - a little test

2008-04-27T12:06:00.000+01:00

The last time I wrote about Tibet in this blog (reflecting on the similarity of China and USA) I got a couple of comments from someone in Shanghai (well maybe , you actually never know with China because they screw around with the web so much). I got the impression from the comments that they'd actually not read what I'd written, or that it was just machine generated boilerplate to get the Party line into as many overseas blogs as they could.

So I'm going to show some happy pictures from El popula Ĉinio (Esperanto publication from PRC), but mention the word Tibet, and see if I get the same mindless boilerplate. (If your Esperanto is a bit rusty, its saying that these are modern women red guards - and this is before take off. Given that the same issue, from 1976, shows an exhibition of statues highlighting the feudal oppression in Tibet and the struggle of the oppressed masses, probably best not to ask what these happy smiling young pilots were going off to do).

I think the only two officially sanctioned emotions in this publication are happiness and earnestness. Unless, of course, you've heard that the Party has announced Mao is dead and then you are allowed to be inconsolable.

Tibet, China and the American West

2008-04-17T20:55:00.000+01:00

Names are just labels we attach to things, just words. They don't illuminate a situation and often make it harder to see what is going on. They make it harder because all sorts of associations and emotional attachments cling to the label and we think they cling to the thing itself, the situation that the label directs our attention to.

China invaded Tibet. From the Chinese party line, they could not have invaded a country that was already their own. From a Tibetan point of view, Tibet was never a part of China - not linguistically, not culturally, not religiously, not geographically.

White settlers in North America invaded more and more of the lands of the Native Americans. It hardly matters what the US government paid for the lands, for instance in the Louisiana Purchase, the seller had no right to claim title on the land. If someone sells you the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty you might want to check they actually own it in the first place.

Certainly the actions of China are more recent than those of the US (at least in respect of continental America) but are the morally any different? Is China really doing anything fundamentally different than the democratic, god-loving people of the USA did?

Morality, Ethics, Karma and Dharma

2008-04-13T11:11:00.000+01:00

'Morals' comes from the Latin mores meaning 'customs'. It referred to what people usually did. It was, at the time, customary to have household deities, and give divine respect to certain emperors. It was immoral to show divine respect to a foreign rebel leader from a small province who had been executed by the will of his fellow men (renamed by us as Jesus, but not a name he would have been familiar with). 'Ethics' comes from the Greek for 'customs' - again it is referring to customary behaviour, but the Greeks did reflect a little more on what was the right thing to do. In their case it would be true that what Socrates was doing, getting young men to question traditional views, was would definitely be unethical in the sense of contrary to custom.

In Buddhism there is the term Sila which is often translated as 'morals' or 'morality'. In a sense it is about what is customary within a well-run monastic community, because a well-run community is based on the Pattimoksha, the rules of monastic training. Although these are definitely rules within a community they are not Dharma in the sense of universal law. They are guidelines tending towards an understanding of universal law. In the same way that getting together all the gear for a climb isn't the climb itself, it is sound preparation. It is not the only way to approach the climb, but it is a good approach.

Buddhism posits a 'moral order' (kamma niyama) ... for want of a better term. This order of becoming says that actions have desirable and undesirable consequences. These are not just customary (ie not just relativistic and conventional), but part of the fabric of existence. Some actions tend to order and harmony, other actions tend toward disorder and disharmony.

Customary is just that - not good, bad or indifferent - the easy path. Kamma Niyama is about living with consequences, immediate, long-term and almost interminable.

When Adam was a lad

2008-04-06T11:45:00.000+01:00

There is no doubt in some creation myths that the created being are born full grown. They come into being as adults - a fact which makes them different for normal humans. A human being grows into adulthood carrying with him or her the psychological scars and stretch marks of having been a child. There is a learning process akin to the foetal process of going through evolutionary stages of development - a child's mind as much as its body is the caterpillar giving rise to the imago.

But what of the biblical myth? Was Adam (and then Eve) created fully matured? Or is the fruit of the tree the equivalent of puberty and adolescence?

From a Buddhist perspective development doesn't just take a single life-time (but each one of them is important and should not be wasted). The mind-stream rather like the big bang. It doesn't simply inhabit a life, it expands to create that life. It is not simply the playing out of what went before, but equally the new life carries into its being an inheritance of countless existences. So childhood and adulthood are complex.

I guess Eden is a suitable myth for childhood - a protected place where one can walk at peace with an all-knowing and all-capable parent. Until one grows to adulthood and discovers the same types of dangers and mysteries that confound the parent. Then you discover just how wonderful and dangerous the world is beyond the confines of the crib.

Doing the right thing

2008-04-06T11:36:00.000+01:00

It's hard.

Is it right to just abide by 'the rules' - when the rules themselves may have devised by people or in circumstances which were wrong. It all very well for a group of people to agree on a code of conduct, but when that code is handed down to a new generation who had no voice in the choice it makes less sense. The earlier generation may have been no wiser, just honestly self-serving. None of this has anything to do with ethics. Unless a group can actually come to an informed consensus (meaning a decision to all can assent) then it is simply a compromise or the imposed will of a majority (or even the bullying will of a minority).

You never know for sure what the outcome of your actions will be, so you make your best guess and go for it. You probably (and it is no stronger than probably) know what you hold to be right so you can act according to your conscience. But you can still be troubled by doubts, by the internal compromises you make. When faced with an impossible choice and the absolute necessity to choose then there will be a psychological rend - and ultimately a healing, a scar, or a bleeding sore.

Further thoughts on Thomas Covenant

2008-03-16T11:32:00.000Z

I've just started reading Fatal Revenant. The more I read of Thomas Covenant the more I see themes beneath the surface. When I first started reading the stories about 25 years ago I read them for the creativity and endured the writing. Now they make me (or should that be 'help me') think about deeper themes than are present in a surface reading.

Perhaps it should have been obvious to me right from the beginning, but only now am I really seeing the Land as a body. Revelstone seems to be sort of cross between the head, the brain and the mind - not so clearly distinguished, and probably deliberately so since they are so often conflated in the way we think of ourselves. The wight-warrens and the cave-wights seem to relate to the guts. The Haruchai appear to be the immune system, and their steeds, the earth-power infused Ranyhyn, something akin to the bloodstream. Is the Illearth Stone HIV? It seems to be something of that kind - a great ill that can turn the whole body against itself. And then there are mysterious being - Elohim, Viles, Demondim and Vain. They seem to be more to do with the spiritual warp and weft within which mortality exists. Ur-viles and waynhim have taken on mortality, so they bring the spirit and flesh together. Elohim etc are a rather better portrayal of spiritual beings than the sugary angels of western mythology. Elohim are simply beyond human notions of good and bad, for they seem implications far beyond the reach of even the most foresighted human - and to human eyes they can appear good, bad or simply callous. The health-sense is implicit in the haruchai for it is their nature (as an immune system) to distingush healthy from unhealthy and to throw themselves into battling the unhealthy without any concern for their wellbeing - their value is measured by their effectiveness.

Obviously it is possible, in a rather Procrustean way, to treat almost any story as allegorical. (And in Buddhism it is of value to learn the lessons implicit in any story no matter how depraved the material). However it seems to me that the Thomas Covenant stories cry out for an interpretation in term of the inner world of the author, the principal protagonist and the reader.

And the name itself? 'Thomas' is the doubter of bible legend - just as Thomas Covenant is the 'unbeliever'. Covenant is a solemn vow - that which binds by volition - the continuing theme of the whole saga. One could go on: tome - to cut, 'Ridjek Thome' ...

The stories operate on a number of levels, and are worth suffering the writing (particularly the early stuff) to allow the inspiration to infuse ones thinking.

The power of prayer

2008-02-29T19:40:00.000Z

There are those who see prayer as communing with God, even a sort of conversation with God. One special type of prayer is that of intercession - pleading a case for special consideration, seeking favour with the supreme being.

Others see prayer as an aspect of human power. One prayers to a god, a totem, and idol or whatever to focus the in-built power of the mind to act outside the normal material channels. In this view it is not who you pray to, but the intensity of the prayer and the forces ranked against you that make the difference.

In the former view, intercession really does put God's character in a terrible light. You get whole churches praying for a child to get well. They pray out of their human compassion for the distress of the child and its parents. They apparently pray to a supreme being that already knows the suffering. They pray to a supreme being that can create whole universes and bring the dead back to life. And how many of those children survive? If it was a human being that you were begging mercy from, the response would often be considered callous.

In the latter view, that of prayer being an aspect of human power, lack of success simply shows the lack of focus and dedication of the people praying. They are being asked to focus all their attention when their normal attention span is probably not more than a couple of dozen seconds. They are trying to carve the joint without sharpening the knife - not surprisingly success is a bit haphazard. In this view prayer is a fine effort in the face of almost insurmountable odds.

So which do you prefer - human undaunted endeavour or pleading to a cold unpredictable deity?

Respect for life and health

2008-02-24T11:37:00.000Z

At its most extreme there are those who say that the world and all in it is here for man's benefit and all is fair game. This view can come either from a religious point of view or a completely materialist view. At the other extreme there are those who say we should respect all life.

The 'respect all life' view is usually embedded in a rather mediaeval conception of life. Things that are clearly animals (preferably of the warm-blooded, furry variety) definitely fall within the 'life' to be respected. The major plant groups often fall within 'life'. For Buddhists insects count. And for Jains, they will wear veils and strain water to prevent the accidental breathing in or ingestion of small creatures.

However we know, and have known for rather a long time, that there are many forms of life too small to be seen with the naked eye. We also know that quite a few of these live on larger, more complex life forms causing what are illnesses when viewed from a human perspective. Everything from parasite infestations to bacterial infections depend on one form of life living off another. In many of these cases the infection is chronic, so it does not pose any immediate threat to the host but may cause discomfort and disability.

So where does 'respect for life' come into this? Is it permitted for someone who claims to value all life to take a medication which kills, slows down or hurts a form of life living off them? It does not matter how organic, natural, macro-biotic, ayurvedic or herbal the remedy is, the clear intention is to make the host feel better regardless of the effect on the life form causing the discomfort.

It sounds reasonable (in some ways) to put yourself out for the benefit of a giant panda or a bengal tiger. It sounds a lot less reasonable to remain ill in order to accommodate a staph infection.

I doubt that people who claim to 'respect all life' really get their heads around what that really implied. As a Buddhist I used to struggle with how 'non-harm' worked in a world of small insects. Now I know it can't work in a world of invisible life. Just because you don't know specifically what you are harming, it does not change the fact that you know you will be harming something.

Promotion of Democracy

2008-02-17T14:51:00.000Z

There has been a lot on the news recently about democracy:

forthcoming elections in Pakistan;
disputed elections in Kenya;
weird and wonderful elections in the USA;
criticism of China;
slide into cold-war think in Russia;
... and so on.

The USA and UK often (at least in our media) seem to take a lead promoting democracy. There is no one model for democracy, and I'm not sure how easy it is say what passes and what fail the democracy test.

For sure, elections by themselves are no guarantee of democracy.

The essence of the thing seems to be that a country is run for the benefit of the people living in that country, with informed choice by the people of what it is that they want.

A country, like Burma, run by a clique mostly for the benefit of that clique clearly falls outside the bounds. But a government that abandons a country to pull itself apart isn't promoting democracy either - when governance in practice falls into the hands of criminals or self-serving cliques (even though they are not formally part of the government) then there is no democracy. There is only a point in voting for a government if that government has power and defends its right to use power in order to maintain order. An overly strong government is like a country with an autoimmune disease - the very thing which is suppose to defend the body attacks it. On the other hand, a country with very weak government is like a body which is immuno-suppressed - the body is prey to every passing predatory.

So I was wondering if there was an international organisation which only allows membership to democracies, and could be the guardian of the test of democracy. The UN clearly isn't that organization (nor should it be - there needs to be a table at which everyone can sit and talk out issues).

It occurred to me that the Commonwealth is potentially such an organization. One of the tests of membership is the promotion of democracy. However membership is voluntary and, as far as I know, it does not have anything equivalent to a 'supreme Court' to adjudicate on whether the actions of a state are within the bounds of the definition of democracy. This is left to the member states and therefore open to all the political horse-trading which is totally antithetical to ensuring purity of practice.

Although it was never its original role, perhaps the Commonwealth ought to promote itself as the bastion of democracy and seek to draw in more states that wish to put their democracy beyond the judgement of self-serving semi-dictators.

Generosity and industry

2008-02-17T14:28:00.000Z

One of the basic Buddhist practices is that of 'Dana' - giving or generosity. Some might call it a virtue, but really its importance is not as a quality that you have but as a practice that you engage in. Buddhism, as an advocate of the life-as-change view of existence, is more interested in verbs than nouns.

For each individual the practice of open-handed generosity is importance because it counters the tendency to grasp and hold. It is emptiness in action.

On the other hand I live in a country with a wide range of welfare benefits and there are families (not just individuals, but whole families) who appear to believe that society owes them a living. They are capable and healthy yet make their living by accepting state handouts. State handouts are not generosity. The State taxes - it takes - and then uses the wealth so obtained to fund programs it sees fit. You may well approve of the programs but the money from taxes is not an act of generosity. There is no individual engagement in the act. Furthermore there is very, very rarely hypothecation in taxing - tax goes into a treasury pot for the government to spend as it thinks fit.

Is it generosity to encourage people to live by begging? State handouts are worse than begging in some ways because even begging is a kind of work. Dissociation of income from acts which proportionally produce income blinds people to causality, and disguising causality is a fundamental cause of ignorance. Engaging in activity that is valued and being giving rewards reflecting the value of the labour also projects value on the money itself.

In Tibet it used to be common for teachers to insist that something of value (commensurate with the means of the person) was given up in order to receive an important teaching. This was not 'buying' the teaching. This was simply human psychology - people valued things more that they had to give up something to get. Often simply getting to where a teacher was in Tibet involved considerable difficulty and risk - it was commitment in itself.

I don't know where the wise path lies between generosity and responsibility, but I'm sure that when the Buddha was teaching and practically every significant teacher since the Buddha, the society in which they lived did not have the sophisticated welfare system we have. Giving really was giving. I think what we have now is a practice of taking rather than giving.

How do you give purely? Not by destroying the link with causality, of that I am sure.

In search of roots

2008-02-10T10:25:00.000Z

Yesterday my wife and I went on a trip to a few of the villages north of Doncaster in search of the roots of part of my wife's family. Both of her grandmothers came from South Wales, but her grandfathers came originally from Carlisle and Yorkshire. Curiously the two grandfathers, though separated by a great distance, died a little over a month apart in 1950.

So we went off in search of the roots of the Charlesworth roots in Moss, Fenwick, Campsall, Kirk Bramwith, Barnby Dun, Fishlake and Askern. All, according to records have had Charlesworths living there since 1733 (and very likely before, but I have no records further back). They were mostly farm labourers or wives of farm labourers, consequently they left very little mark by their passing other than their offspring. The landed and the moneyed leave buildings, wills and gravestones - the poor live, die and leave little mark.

Moss and Fenwick doesn't have a church any more. It used to have one about mid-way between the two villages and, according to a lady we met, didn't serve either of them terribly well. However it does still have a church yard with burial plots - still in use. However all our prowling round churchyards revealed nothing.

Nonetheless, it was a fine day out. The sun shone, the sky was blue and the places we visited were charming (ok, not Askern - an ex-mining town that was more practical than charming, sitting across a main road, and apparently mostly closed on a Saturday, but if you want a cheap hearty lunch Woody's Cafe is clean and friendly).

I took a few pictures of the various churches we visited and will be posting them on Picasa, Ancestry and a few other places.

Random information: the church at Kirk Bramwith can boast the Queen as its patron, and back in the early 18th Century the rector was one Harrison Ford - so he really is wearing terribly well for a man 300 years old and more.

Dihydrogen Monoxide

2008-01-27T18:09:00.000Z

I was sorting through the pile of papers in the corner of my desk (the pile mostly of things I don't know what to do with) when I came across an email I'd received in September 2004. This was about the freshman at Eagle Rock Junior High who had won the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair prize with a project called "How Gullible are We?" on the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide. We all know that Carbon Monoxide is dangerous, and Hydrogen is inflammable and Hydrogen bombs are dangerous, so surely Dihydrogen Monoxide could easily be lethal.

According to Urban Legends site the student in question was Nathan Zohner and he won his prize in 1997. Not only that a suburb of Orange County in California came within a whisker of officially debating a ban on this substance in 2004 when they became convinced of its dangers:

Can cause excessive sweating and vomiting
Major component in acid rain
Can cause severe burns in its gaseous state
Accidental inhalation can kill you
Contributes to erosion
Decreases the effectiveness of automobile brakes
Found in tumours of terminal cancer patients.

Clearly dangerous! It is, of course, that ubiquitous substance water.

Evening light

2008-01-24T18:05:00.000Z

As I walked home from work just before 6pm this evening I noticed that there was still a little light in the sky. It was just a glimmer in the far North West but it was beautiful to see. The first significant sign of the days growing longer again. Wonderful!

Jacob Epstein

2008-01-06T12:25:00.000Z

I've recently finished reading a biography of Jacob Epstein (Angels and Daemons).

Really fascinating character with a complex life. Much prefer his vision of sculpture to that of Henry Moore (one time student of Epstein). Also wonderful that he worked to the end of his life and died suddenly - it's definitely the way to go.

There is a wonderful bit near to the end of the book when it describes a certain event as a turning point in Epstein's career. At this point Epstein was pushing 70! It had taken more than what most would consider a working lifetime to get his break through. Although he had been an enormously influential and controversial sculptor for decades by then, only at this point did major establishment institutions start to fall over themselves to give him commissions. It was as though they had finally worked out a way to get rid of Epstein - work him to death.

Although exhausting he worked very hard through his 70s to produce a lot of brilliant monumental art.

Putting them all in one bag - theists

2007-12-28T10:41:00.000Z

Religionists (mostly from the Abrahamic faiths) tend to lump all non-believers under the undifferentiated heading of 'atheists'. This is both disrespectful and unhelpful. To see how unhelpful this is, consider reversing the position. Suppose a TV or radio news report deliberately ignored the particular cult or grouping that a religionist adopted and just introduced them as a 'theist'. Regardless of whether they were Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Sikh or whatever, they were all lumped and simply referred to as theists. After all, they all claim to be supporters of the same single creative force in the universe, so what is the problem?

Who cares that they happen to follow this ritual, that rite or some other dietary code? The essential thing surely is that they are all theists, right?

By contrast the Brights, Universists, Materialists etc all have distinctive philosophies which can be directly examined. They are distinctive, separate and worthy of separation.

So, don't tackle the debate on the chosen ground of the theists - they are the ones who need to prove they are worthy of being distinguished one from another. So Tony Blair converted from being a theist to being a theist - is that news? It is plain and obvious that non-theistic philosophies are distinctive and cannot be lumped together under a common heading.

They are all just theists!

If you happen to be a theist and find that being stripped of the label of your religion, sect or cult a little painful and possibly offensive then apply that insight to the adherents of other teachings.

Suffering and Temptation

2007-12-23T19:08:00.000Z

I have (and always have had) a problem with certain aspects of Buddhism. One of the aspects of his doctrine that the Buddha made clear was that it was 'come and see' i.e. it is something you experience for yourself. You don't take it on faith. You might provisionally accept something, but until you know it for yourself, you don't really know it. The Buddha was critical of teachings and systems of thought that came down from an ancient source and which no contemporary person could verify, let alone each individual could verify for themselves.

So I must be able to verify for myself the ubiquitous existence of dukkha (suffering). The first problem is getting a handle on what the word means. It means far more than immediate physical pain. I prefer the term unsatisfactoriness. Anything with an aspect of dukkha is incapable of providing satisfaction (of a lasting kind). Dukkha is anything you want to bring to end or get away from. So pain is clearly dukkha, but so is loss, separation, anxiety, disquiet ... and so on. Buddhism teaches that all conditioned things have, as one of their root aspects, dukkha. Dukkha is one of the three basic marks of being of conditioned things.

The problem is that many things lead to pleasure also. I have no argument with the clear fact that all conditioned things lead ultimately to dukkha, since conditioned things are necessarily transient and so cannot be a basis for lasting satisfaction. However I do find it hard to 'see' (in an immediate sense, rather than a calculated conceptual way) the suffering inherent in many things, or at the very least to see that the potential for suffering is greater than the potential for pleasure (on the sort of timescales I can operate on).

If I could simply see the suffering inherent in tempting activities it would be easy to step away from them. However the problem with temptation is just that. You don't let go because you don't want to let go. You have attachement to the source of temptation - love even.

There but for the grace of god ...

2007-12-18T20:21:00.000Z

When you think about the apparently minor chance circumstances that have brought about the misfortune of others and ones own good fortune, it certainly makes you (well me actually) think how things could have turned out very differently.

We try (sometimes) to manage the events in our lives. We try to put ourselves in the way of good fortune - but not always, because we take risks and undertake adventures for pleasure. However, beyond that are things that just happen. I recall reading in a local newspaper the story of two people walking down a country lane after a pleasant evening at a pub. A driver came down the lane, lost control of his car and hit one of the two people. The one who was hit was killed, the other wasn't touched or physically injured by the car at all. Just the slightest change in circumstances, a difference in timing, a decision to walk to the right a person rather than to the left - all these could have changed the outcome. One person lived, and one died.

I have been in a couple of car accidents and been fortunate to not even get a scratch from either of them, but they were both capable of leaving me injured, scarred, crippled or dead. Perhaps there was a small element of skill involved in my fortunate outcome, but there was a lot of good fortune completely outside my control. And there are all the times travelling on motorways when nothing has happened - but so easily could.

So when I see people who lives I would not want to swap with my own I remember the good fortune I have had, as well as the limited good management of my life.

In Buddhism there is a fascinating tension between the emphasis placed on managing oneself and gaining further self-discipline and mastery, and then applying that to the welfare of all beings. In the everyday, mundane existence most of us inhabit it is only the self-world which is really within some degree of our control. However in the absolute-world of the dharma 'self' is one of the binding falsehoods to which we cling (at levels well beyond superficial consciousness - it is not a concept but a construct, the the sense of Kelly's personal construct theory). So one uses the self to overcome the self. Rather like digging a mine, you need the shaft but you don't dig it for its own sake, and when the ore is gone you abandon the shaft.

Actions and consequences

2007-12-12T22:55:00.000Z

Suppose one country sends an army into another country, destroying food and livelihood. That would usually be seen as an act of aggression, an act of war. It would be condemned by the international community and in certain circumstances various treaties would be invoked and allies would come to the aid of the country so attacked.

Suppose one country damns a major river and diverts the water supply which a neighbouring country relies on. That would usually be seen as an act of aggression and might even be seen as tantamount to war. It would probably be condemned by the international community, and it might be that sanctions would be invoked against the perpetrator of this theft.

Now suppose one country behaves in such a way as to destroy food, livelihood and water supply not just of its neighbours but of countries near and far, but does so in an underhand way and denies responsibility for the consequences of its actions. Would that be considered an act of aggression deserving of concerted reprisals by the international community? You might think so. So I wonder when the US government's lack of action over climate change is going to be seen for the global act of aggression it really is. Perhaps it might be said that the US government is simply being honest - they are unwilling to act but are willing to say as much, whereas other countries simply pay lip service to climate change issues.

Saddam Hussein was condemned for killing people by the use of chemical weapons. He had the intention to kill. US policy will kill people by drought, starvation and storm (including their own people) but they probably don't have the explicit intention to kill (and probably regret the deaths as unfortunate). Nonetheless, the people will be just as dead.

Conspiracy Theories

2007-12-09T17:01:00.000Z

Although I mostly subscribe to the 'cock up' theory of history (i.e. most of what goes wrong is down to stupidity and incompetence rather than deliberate scheming), the conspiracy theory view is far more entertaining. It also makes for good stories.

It occurred to me that the surprise re-appearance of the Sunderland canoeist did the government something of a favour. I guess he could have reappeared a bit sooner to save the government some embarrassment in their proxy donation scandal, he has managed to knock the story out of the headlines a bit.

It would make a good story to assume that the security services knew where John Darwin was all along. Of course, it would do them no good to reveal that until his discovery was of value. And then, just when you think that the (New) Labour Party is actively trying to dig their own tomb, out pops an apparently long dead canoeist to capture the attention of the media.

Makes you wonder. But if you really put your paranoid hat on, you have to ask if any of these people are real? A bit like the plot of 'Tomorrow Never Dies' in which the Media Tycoon and Megalomaniac Elliot Carver creates news and then reports on it, do we know how much of the story is true, which characters are for real? (I really must stop reading about James Angleton - paranoia really is infectious).

Teddy Bears and Insults

2007-11-29T13:25:00.000Z

Suppose you had someone who had never heard of religion and you asked them this:

"Which is the greater insult to a person's name and memory: to name a teddy bear after that person, or to commit murder in their name?"

What would they say? I know what my guess is ... and it isn't naming a teddy bear.

How often do we hear denunciation of suicide bombers, terrorists and other murders who either share the name of the Prophet or claim to be acting in the name of Islam? Let his memory be blessed by denouncing those who really sully it through their actions.

Names and Words

2007-11-25T17:09:00.000Z

English is a fascinating language full of almost useless words, which add vastly to the richness of the language and allow for great extravagance of poetry.

Why, for instance would you need the word 'Pangrammatist' (one who contrives verses or sentences containing all the letters of the alphabet). True, it is much briefer to say pangrammatist than what it means, but how often are you called up on to express such a concept.

One of the things I enjoy coming across are words that have an absolutely established etymology, because it is known who made up the word and when. One class of these is the collection of words derived from people's name. For example the Volt, coming from the name of Volta (the picture being the temple to Volta in Como, Italy). There is also the far more unusual and obscure Pantaleon, a large dulcimer named after Pantaleon Hebenstreit.

Another class of these words are those simply made up by a specific person in a specific situation. For instance the probang, actually a corruption of the origal provang (1650-1660) as made up by Walter Rumsey, Welsh Judge and inventor of this instrument for pushing obstructions down the oesophagus. It does make you wonder how often this had to be done for it to fill the mind of a Welsh Judge to invent it. (A man of sufficient obscurity to not yet feature on Wikipedia).

Although slightly different in origin, Quaker is similar type of word created in 1651, said to have been applied to members of the Religious Society of Friends in 1650 by Justice Bennett at Derby, from George Fox's admonition to his followers to "quake at the Word of the Lord." However there is some doubt that this was the first usage.

Finally a mention of a truly splendid word, which should be, if it is not already, a book title: "Pantopragmatic" - a universal busybody (or can be used as an adjective, of the activity of such a person).

Bardo, horizons and the bigger picture

2007-11-22T19:59:00.000Z

From the perspective of a human life (and that is the only perspective most of us can really get our head round) events like birth and death seem pretty important. From the perspective of a species they are simply events in the bigger picture. Too small a birth rate in relation to the death rate and the species itself is dying, but individual births and deaths are all just part of the circle of life.

Buddhism teaches both the importance and the unimportance of death. It is important because it marks a great hiatus in the mind-stream. Each life is valuable and not to be wasted. A human life endowed with certain beneficial qualities is particularly valuable because of the potential it offers. However in another sense death is unimportant (on a grander scale) because it is simply another, albeit very important, event in the totality of existence. It is an end on a small scale, and just a transition on a larger scale. Rather like coming to the coast of an island, you have definitely got to the end of the island, but you are still on the planet. So it is with life and death.

The Tibetan bardo teachings make this image of existence more explicit. A 'bardo' is an intermediate state. All states of existence are really intermediate, but some are more obviously so - they are unstable and rapidly changing. (To draw another analogy, we speak loosely of a person dying meaning that they are rapidly approaching death - but there is another sense in which we are all dying, moving inexorably towards death. The former is a much more unstable process than the later).

And changing the whole scale on its head, every moment is a death. Leaving behind an old you and becoming a new you. The scale of life and death depends on the horizon you are looking at.

Medicine on the Shelf

2007-11-20T18:25:00.000Z

Before a Tibetan Buddhist teacher starts to teach, especially with a new group of people, he will tend to spend a lot of time just talking about how to listen properly, how to be receptive, and how to approach the material. They don't see the teaching like a package just being delivered, they see it more like a seed being planted. It is best to prepare the ground before planting a seed.

One piece of preparation I heard over and over was that of the simile of the doctor, the medicine and the patient. The doctor visits the patient, diagnoses and then leaves some medicine. The foolish patient put the medicine on a high shelf and worships it as the cure. The wise patient takes the medicine.

So it is with Buddhist teaching - it only does any good if it actually used.

At the moment I feel like I've not just left it on a shelf, I've actually locked it in the medicine cabinet.

Beowulf

2007-11-19T00:00:00.000Z

Just been to see the new Beowulf film. A disappointment.

Not enough story telling.

Less faithful to the letter but much closer to the spirit of the original is 'The 13th Warrior'.

The masks we wear

2007-11-15T23:13:00.000Z

Some at work today asked if I ever get angry. She said she could imagine me losing my temper.

By contrast I think anger is one of the daemons I fight hardest with - in Buddhist psychology I am somewhere between a hate-type and a delusion-type.

What masks we wear that hide our inner daemons.

Perspective - horizons large and small

2007-11-11T16:56:00.000Z

When I was a kid (about 16) I wrote a book (unpublished but still on my study shelf) about theories of the origin of solar systems and of life. My interest was really in exo-biology, life beyond the earth. Researching the material for the book was highly educational. I learned about ideas - both main stream and extreme - that I had never encountered before. One of the most enduring effects it had on me was to see the universe as much bigger and more complex than I had previously imagined, and in conjunction with that it introduced me to censorship, fear and dogma which tried to suppress 'big' ideas.

Although I had had a brief encounter with Buddhism before writing my exo-biology book it was not until my early 20s when I started to read more and understand a little of what Buddhism was about. One of the things that really struck me was its quite incredible breadth of vision. It dealt in the scope of view that was big enough to make a start at holding the universe. And whenever it seemed to be settling down into complacency, it would introduce something else to shake up thinking and stretch the mind. It tried to find a language which could cope with the mind-blowing enormity of the universe. Long before anyone in the West was talking of galaxies and unimaginable durations of time, Buddhism had words to world systems, universes and measureless ages (and even measureless collections of measureless ages).

There is, from a spiritual point of view, a great danger in this. It can all become so cosmic as to lose contact with people. The ultimate trick is to hold onto the minute whilst expanding into the cosmic - and it is a trick that has rarely been achieved. Grandeur and simplicity find it hard to live together. So I simply accept that I am (most of the time) drawn to and inspired by the grandeur more than the human simplicity.

Today I was working my way through a pile of ironing and random thoughts were popping into my mind. Among them was this - why, who knows? In an ordered, compassionate universe with a loving supreme being, why did the dinosaurs have to exist and then become extinct? If they existed before there were sentient beings with souls (to adopt the Christian world view), what purpose did it serve to have them come into being and then have them destroyed by some vast cataclysm. Was it really just to supply fuel for the 20th Century? Or were there sentient non-human beings? Or is the whole thing meaningless? Or was their fate just there to provide a lesson in existence and humility to current humans?

It is a puzzling question: not how did the dinosaurs vanish, but why? Which begs the question, why did they exist in the first place? The biological explanation is simple: there was a time when they were the best fit to a certain ecological niche, and they ceased to be because the environment changed (apparently dramatically and catastrophically). However if you believe there is another level to existence, the question of 'why' is not answered by the biological explanation. (Applying Occam's razor you would first have to provide sufficient evidence of the supposed 'other level' - otherwise you are seeking to add to an already sufficient explanation.)

Kashmir and Ladakh - the sequel

2007-11-08T21:16:00.000Z

Now put captions on them all - good job I put labels on them when I could still remember who the people where, and what the places were.

Kashmir and Ladakh

2007-11-04T10:50:00.000Z

Finally scanned in my slides (all 175 of them) from trekking holiday way back in 1985:

Kashmir & Ladakh

Of course, I've still to put captions on them ... next job.

Distractions

2007-11-02T23:55:00.000Z

Can I be the only man who finds its distracting when their female boss bends down in front of them such that my eye line goes straight down their (fairly low cut) top and to their bra?

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm gradually becoming a fan of modest dress around the office.

What a difference an 'S' makes

2007-10-31T00:14:00.000Z

What a world of difference there is between:

'The possessions of John Smith'

and

'The possession of John Smith'

One letter, vast change.

Abortion, guilt and the hand of God

2007-10-28T10:53:00.000Z

There has been a lot on the news recently about the UK abortion act and the pressure to reform it.

Naturally the spokesmen (and they are all men) from the Catholic Church are absolutely against abortion - life starts at conception and killing (especially of an innocent) is a sin, so their position is clear and logical.

However it seems to me that they don't follow their logic to its end. The creation of a new life is not, from the point of view of their theology, simply the consequence of copulation and nature taking its course. A new being, a soul, has been brought into being so the new life has involved two people and God. Every conception, no matter how unwanted (after a rape for instance), no matter how life threatening to the mother, has been deliberately brought about not by the copulation but the infusing of a soul into the womb. I guess even Catholic theologians have to accept that copulation increases the likelihood of pregnancy but from their perspective this really only ploughs the field, and it is God that plants the seed - a soul.

So every unplanned, unwanted, dangerous pregnancy is a direct act of God. Abortion would simply not come into the question if God didn't get women pregnant!

Alternatively you could just call this model of the situation about as daft as the trial of Galileo.

Buddhists also (largely) disapprove of abortion. A man and women create, through copulation, the right circumstances for a mind-stream to manifest in a body. Quite when the mind attaches to the fetus I think is more a matter of custom than direct knowledge (although it is knowable in principle and I suspect that there is some Tibetan text which deals with the subject) but it is widely accepted to be long before birth. The man and the woman will generally suffer because of the choice they make to take away that which is not given up. The man may be completely unaware of the situation and free from all conscious involvement in the act. The child has been deprived of the opportunity of a human existence, and possibly deprived of life when its capacity to prepare and deal with what was happening (the bardo journey) is very limited.

Personally I go along with the Buddha's phrase: 'now is the time to do as you think fit'. You counsel people but in the end they must choose and live with the consequence.

The great tragedy in the UK is the very high level of abortions. It is clear from the abortion rate in the rest of Europe that we are doing something wrong. Abortion is a dangerous form of birth control.

Free Agent or Tool

2007-10-26T21:00:00.000+01:00

"It's hard to explain. I guess the question is, are you a person - with volition and maybe some stubbornness and at least the capacity if not the actual determination to do something surprising - or are you a tool? A tool just serves its user. It's only as good as the skill of its user, and it's not good for anything else. So if you want to accomplish something special - something more than you can do for yourself - you can't use a tool. You have to use a person and hope the surprises will work in your favour."
The One Tree. by Stephen Donaldson

These are the author's ideas put into the mouth of the character Thomas Covenant. A similar theme is worked on by Tolkien in the Silmarillion and the story of the creation of the Dwarves - created to be Golem with no will of their own, but liberated to be people with their own volition.

As I read this it occurred to me that the picture is not so clear. A tool, a thing with no creative capacity, can embody the creative capacity of its designer. Computer systems (and robotic systems) have no creative capacity, but they embody both some of the intelligence of their designers and (in more sophisticated cases) intelligence that they learn from their own experience. They are neither utterly free, nor utterly bound. Every made object, every tool embodies some of the thought, skill, design and mind of its maker. So when a person uses a tool they transcend themselves and they transcend the tool. Some tools have very limited capacity to embody their maker, but some are very subtle and can do things which, while not genuinely creative, are beyond the expectations of both maker and user.

So a person with a tool is greater than the sum of its parts.

Doing and Being

2007-10-26T18:05:00.000+01:00

Is there a 'being' apart from the 'doing'? The Buddhist answer (at least in fundamental truth) is 'no'. Karma emphasises this point of view. The person is 'measured' by their actions of thought, speech and mind. (I put 'measured' in quotes, because they are not externally judged. A nail does not judge the power of the hammer, but its response is a measure of the power of the hammer).

What you do is who you are.

But there is another meaning and level of this distinction. There is the difference between isolated actions and totality of a person's actions. So when somebody says they want/like/love another person for who they are, not what they can do, the distinction is being made between the totality of the person and the things they can do taken in isolation.

For instance liking a person because they have a nice sports car and you feel good being seen in that car would be liking a person for what they can do for you. However if that car reflected the owner's personality, and their choice of car was a reflection of who they were then your liking of them might be based on something deeper. It might show a similarity of attitude and interest. ... But it might just show that you want to be hanging around someone who looks like a good bet (until a better bet comes along).

Three Shire Heads

2007-10-23T23:19:00.000+01:00

Another fine, cool day and another beautiful walk. Three Shire Heads is near Flash, rather hidden in deep valleys and absolutely magical - though a bit chilly for bathing today.

Politicians' diaries, blogs and private thoughts

2007-10-23T23:04:00.000+01:00

A blog is a strange thing. People use them for all sorts of things. For instance I used one to record change control on a website, and then used a second blog for announcements on the website. Very different uses, and requiring different layout - but both very effective uses of blogging software.

I could make my blog private and just use it as a record of my thoughts for myself. Indeed it is really quite strange to have this window into ones inner world open for all the world (in principle) to see. It is rather like a politician's diary - their private thoughts written always with the thought of how they will play with the public. There are certainly things I don't write here simply because I don't know who will read them, and I've not gone to any effort to conceal my identity, so I could cause pain or embarrassment to those around me by what I write.

There have been short spates in my life when I have kept a diary, but never had much to say in it. A blog is more like a cross between a journal and a common-place book - neither of which I've kept. There was a lengthy period when I was keeping a meditation diary, and that was more in the nature of a journal with lengthy entries on meditation experiences and reflections. But even that, which was on the whole rather safe - but deeply personal - I did not share.

I guess this blog is rather like writing a journal but leaving it in a public place. There are very few people I have invited to read the content, but almost anyone is welcome to (except I've limited it to people with blogger accounts, just to avoid advertising trash in the comments box).

Maybe I should start a private blog for recording the thoughts I really want to be private - and maybe invite just special friends to join me in that inner sanctum.

Bakestonedale Moor - another fantastic walk

2007-10-21T20:27:00.000+01:00

Yesterday the weather was fine but a little cold. If the sun slipped behind a cloud for a short while you could feel the chill in the air. It was perfect day for walking on the hills near where I live.

I've posted a few pictures of the views from Bakestonedale Moor in a Picasa Web Album:

Bakestonedale Moor

Formby beach - what a splendid place

2007-10-21T20:01:00.000+01:00

Last Tuesday I went to Formby. I've put a few pictures from the trip in a Picasa Web Album:

Formby

Splendid day. Miles of unspoiled beach, great views of Liverpool and the Wirral (and North Wales), red squirrels and magically beautiful birch woods.

Experimental Theology

2007-10-21T18:00:00.000+01:00

Astronomy is a very different kind of science from chemistry. Although it is possible to set up experiments in astronomy to test out hypotheses, it is more a case of looking for test cases or waiting for the right conditions (such as the use of Mercury to test predictions from relativity) rather than being able to create experimental conditions.

Theology seems to be one step further removed from experimental verification, and seems to be, on the whole, a realm entirely devoted to speculation and literary analysis. However there does seem to be some scope for experimental verification - or at the least investigation.

For instance, are mortality and morbitity rates different among believers as opposed to non-believers. Most theistic faiths claim (I think) that their god or gods looks after the faithful. Some such faiths make belief in and confidence in the deity the chief religious practice, with little or no weight placed on the 'works' (ie action) of the believer. So you'd think there would be a detectable difference between the fortunes of the faithful and the faithless. It could be quite tricky to get matching samples, but surely a worthwhile attempt at experimental verification.

Is it better to have loved and lost?

2007-10-21T11:07:00.000+01:00

There is a saying: 'It is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all'.

I guess this is talking about passionate love and not religion's anaemic fraudsters which pose as 'love' (stealing the clothes but often lacking the soul - duty is good but it's not ablaze).

Passionate love is a form of insanity in itself, so it is better to have been insane and then be cured than to have never suffered the mental instability in the first place? Maybe in the interests of breadth of experience it is better, but in every other respect it is plainly foolish to want to suffer a disease just to have the pleasure of recovering. Even if the symptoms of that disease are euphoric rather than painful, it is nonetheless a dangerous force.

It is rather like saying that it is better to be a recovering alcoholic rather than to have led a sober life.

Romantic love is a disease and the world would be a more contented place if were treated like smallpox and rabies. But it would grey and drab. It is hard to get excited about the work and professional life of an accountant or auditor (count the number of TV dramas) - rational, reasonable and balanced.

So for all us 'mad people' (from a Buddhist perspective everyone who has not achieved a degree of liberation is delusional i.e. mad) mundane passion is the leaven of life, until the true passion of liberation comes into view.

The Burma Petition at Avaaz

2007-10-02T20:03:00.000+01:00

Avaaz has organized an online petition to ask China and the UN to put pressure on the Military leaders in Burma/Myanmar. If you want to add your voice, click on the link below and sign up.

Click here to visit the petition site.

Do I think it will do any good? Probably not.
Do I think it is better than nothing? Probably so.

It is a small thing to sign the petition, but if done with compassion in the heart towards all the people of Burma (including the military government) it is the honourable thing to do. Put yourself in the place of just one of the citizens of Burma and ask yourself if you would want to be ruled over by what is almost an internal army of occupation.

More thoughts on Burma, Power and Goverments

2007-09-29T11:41:00.000+01:00

What is it that entitles ruling army or other power to be called a government?

Why are certain entities which call themselves 'the government' or 'the authority' recognized? Partly it must be pragmatics. If an entity has control of the levers of power (army, police, banking system etc) then who else would a foreign government deal with? But there are countries where power and control is partial or non-existent. Rather like negotiating with a labour union that has no control over its membership, negotiating with a government that governs in name only is a pointless exercise.

So why do Western democracies recognize such internal armies of occupation as occur in Burma? By Western standards there is no legitimacy to the process by which they came into power. In much the same way that the USA treats Cuba, should not Western governments treat other 'rogue' power groups (Zimbabwe is clearly a candidate for this treatment).

I guess acknowledging other groups as having power could be a recipe for chaos. The government of any country would not want to open this can of worms - of having other countries choose whether to recognize them as legitimate or some other body within the country. Suppose for just a moment that China suddenly decided it was going to treat Queen as the legimate government of the UK rather than the Government, and to insist that only Queen or a member of the Royal Household could negotiate on behalf of the UK - there would be such puffed up windbags declaring the presumption of the Chinese outrageous. So I guess no government wants to rock the boat of presumed authority and power.

Burma, Myanmar, Monks and Protest

2007-09-29T11:31:00.000+01:00

News from Burma is grim - nothing new in that.

I find it unsettling that the 'monks' are getting involved in protest. Whether it is Burma, Tibet or anywhere else it is not part of the Buddhist bhikkhu's role to get caught up in such activities. But monks are men too. They have families. They have a country. Monks are men on a path and like any of the rest of us they can step from that path. They are individuals who make a choice. In terms of their development in the dharma I think their choice is unskillful, but as Burmese men I don't know that I would do anything different.

It is curious that BBC radio 4 should choose to invite Vishvapani from the Western Buddhist Order to speak on thought for the day. I have a slight acquaintance with Vishvapani in that I have been on retreat with him (many years ago, shortly after his ordination). I thought his talk was good and very much to the point of Buddhist teaching. However I am uncomfortable that the BBC should choose a speaker from the WBO, an organisation the roots of which are mired in corruption, rather than a speaker from a more clearly pure Buddhist tradition.

Lieutenant William Calley

2007-09-23T11:41:00.000+01:00

My son was clearing out some of his GCSE history books and I started browsing through one of them.

Although I was growing up during the time of the Vietnam War and remember the TV pictures, I'm fairly vague when it comesto the detail. However among the iconic names fixed in my mind is the Mylai (or My Lai) massacre. As with most war crimes by the US, it was followed with clockwork regularity by the My Lai coverup by the US army.

It seems (and I'm only going from secondary sources I read yesterday) that although William Calley certainly had his hands deep in the blood of the events, he had the honour of being the US Army scapegoat. Of all the people in the chain of command, he was on the only one who was found guilty and sentence. Subsequent events suggest there was a deal struck long before the trial came to a conclusion. How does a man who is found guilty of 22 murders (and if there were any justice he would have been tried for war crimes, rather than just murder) and is sentence to life with hard labour, end up serving just three years of house arrest and then working until his retirement as the manager of jewelry store?

If those 22 people (not to mention the far larger number who were found in mass graves at My Lai) had been US citizents, would William Calley have been given such leniency? Would a single scapegoat have been a sufficient sacrifice? (Probably yes in the later case - prosecuting the symptom is much easier than prosecuting the cause).

In the list of Massacres on Wikipedia, My Lai is middling - certainly well short of some of the extreme events of relatively recent history. However it does show that there is no moral superiority of the US Army. Just like any other army, under the right circumstances, young inexperiences (and frankly stupid) soldiers will do inhuman acts and their superiors will move mountains to hide what has happened.

If the right sentence for William Calley was to manage a jewelry store for the rest of his life, why does the US government seek more extreme sentences for others?

Random Thoughts

2007-09-18T23:43:00.000+01:00

Life mostly is about enjoying the journey, not the destination. In fact, there are no destinations. There are just starting points for the next journey.

Marriage and Magic

2007-09-16T11:42:00.000+01:00

Unlike the claim in the song lyrics, love and marriage don't necessarily go together. There is a fairly modern romantic fantasy that the two are inseparable but a quick look at the experience of ones own life and of historical precedent show that is hardly more than a fantasy.

People do have strong feelings towards people they are not married to. They may not do anything with those feelings and may remain completely physically faithful in their marriage, but the feelings remain a fact. Denying the existence of the feeling does not change the fact of their existence.

Equally people get married for all sorts of reasons that have little or nothing to do with the feelings they have for their marriage partner. Historically this has often had to do with property rights, with family ties or with pregnancy.

However there is now a widespread myth that 'love' (whatever that is, to use Prince Charles' famous phrase) should be a pre-requisite to marriage and that the end of love somehow signals a failure of the marriage. There is an almost equally widespread myth that unrequited love is a loss of some kind.

Marriage can simply act as a magic charm to ward off the dire consquences of random love. You never know when you are going to be hit by strong feelings towards someone. Cupid's arrow is both random and mischievous. Feelings are just feelings though and do not have to lead to action, rash or otherwise. Rather they do lead to action but one of the actions is simply to sit with the feelings and learn from them. Just like a socerer casting a spell of warding, so marriage is a spell that can be use as protection against the charm of love. (The same is true of other vows that restrain behaviour). Marriage is, in this respect, superior to simply co-habiting. Unless there is a ritual element to the partnership it does not have the 'magical' protection of marriage. By 'marriage' I don't necessarily mean something in a church/temple, but it has got to have an element of solemn vow. It has to be a rite of passage. There has to be magic and something which defies casual breakdown.

Lust passes like a stormy wind, but love is like a climate that one must learn to endure. They are both difficult passions to handle but love is much the more insidious.

A vow is something you consciously and intentionally enter into. Love is something over which you have little control. A vow is the ship on the ocean of emotion.

Sunday morning thoughts on the six perfections

2007-09-09T10:38:00.000+01:00

Anyone with just more than a passing knowledge of Buddhism will be aware that it is fond of lists. The three of this, the four of that and the 64 of the other. The reason for this is simple. It was, like most of the world's great teachings, originally a largely oral tradition. People did not rely on written words but rather on committing things to memory. Even now there are people who know the whole of the Buddhist Tipitaka (the Theravada Cannon) - a feat the enormity of which makes learning the Bible by heart seem like child's play.

I am and always have been very poor at learning things by rote. But the three of..., four of ... etc method is there to help. It might not help you remember all the elements of the list, but it certainly lets you know that you've missed something out. (Interestingly, early computer communications protocols used a similar method, involving telling the receiving end how much information they should receive in the next chunk of message prior to sending the message, and if the receiving end could not get these to match up it would ask for a repeat of the transmission).

Along with the three signs of existence, the four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Noble path there is a list called the Six Perfections - the Paramitas. As with all Buddhist lists (and all Buddhist teachings) there are mostly there as instruction manuals. They might well uplift, confound, or challenge but their primary goal is to instruct in method - how to walk the path.

Just about anyone who walks a path of spiritual training does it badly most of the time. It is hard and it has many potential downfalls. So guilt at failings is pointless. Like falling off the horse, the only thing to do is get back on and try again. Of course you have to know that you've fallen off the horse! And this is where the Paramitas come in. If you are working each day to develop the Perfections then you are on the horse - otherwise you are slipping off.

The Perfections are:

Dana - generosity (liberality)
Sila - moral discipline
Kshanti - patience
Virya - Perseverence (effort)
Dhyana - Concentration (meditation - Zen)
Prajna - Discriminative Awareness (Wisdom)

I don't think I'm much good at any of them, and am probably more akin to someone chasing a Shetland Pony round a field rather than riding the horse. What is worse, I do tend to use them as stick to beat myself rather than their correct use as developmental instruction.

Because they are practices, it is not so much the understanding of them that matters, but rather their internalisation. The backseat driver is always remarkably wise about driving, but it is the person with their hands on the wheel of the car who is actually doing the job of driving. So it is with Buddhism. The Buddha often finished a conversation with someone who had asked him for instruction with the words: 'Now it is time for you to do as you think fit'. These seem to me to be some of the best instruction I have ever come across - the perfect mix of instruction and free choice.

Also, because they work on the whole person they are listed as separate but actually interact at every level. You cannot develop concentration without patience and effort. Without concentration discriminative wisdom would be transient, and without moral discipline it would be distorted.

What of Dana (Liberality)? This isn't just giving to good causes to feel good and alleviate poverty. From a Buddhist perspective we stand like mad men in a hurricane trying to grab at the dust flying by. Liberality leads to a subconscious willingness to let go, and it is only by a predisposition to let go that we can accept the nature of things as they are (transient, impermanent, and without essence). So the perfection of liberality leads to wisdom. And the perfection of wisdom leads to liberality. No surprise - all the perfections in their perfected state lead to the same.

Now I must think about getting back on that horse.

Bardo Thodol on IMDB

2007-09-07T19:35:00.000+01:00

I was doing a search for an online Bardo Thodol (commonly known as the 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead' but more accurately 'The Great Liberation') and, to my great surprise, one of the hits was for IMDB. I'm a frequent visitor to the Internet Movie Database since I like to read background on film casts and get some amusement from the reviews people post.

But I didn't expect to find a film in Serbo-Croat on the Bardo Thodol. Life does have its little surprises.

September

2007-09-07T00:48:00.000+01:00

The weather is beautiful. It is as sunny and warm as it has been much of the summer. Yet, despite all this September gives me a funny feeling. I guess it comes from the association of September with returning to school after the summer break. Although it is an association from long ago, I think it lingers. Back then, when I was child, the summer holiday lasted so long (in fact each week lasted much longer than they do now) and the transition from August to September signalled the return to uniforms, discipline and homework.

It also, despite the prevailing weather, marked the start of the steady decline into winter. I will know I have achieve progress on the road to equanimity when I greet the winter with the same enthusiasm as the summer. However I must admit that at present I love the sun and warmth, and find that each year the prospect of winter starts to depress me.

It is also another marker of the tail end of the year without much (any really) progress on my next novel, or my much contemplated book on Buddhism and mathematics.

Idle Musings

2007-09-01T02:16:00.000+01:00

Are married couples who are separated but not divorced supposed to remain faithful to each other if they are Christians?

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - the great Buddhist novel

2007-08-31T01:33:00.000+01:00

The problem is that when I read just about any novel it seems like a Buddhist novel, however I think Thomas Covenant is particularly apt.

The rather unwilling hero, Thomas Covenant, finds himself thrust into a strange world called The Land. He is convinced that the whole thing is just a dream and is thus unreal. However, no amount of telling himself that the events are unreal allows him to act as though they were unreal. The Land feels real. The people in it are (with very few exceptions) heroically open in the generosity and emotions. Covenant is a tortured soul: in the 'real' world he is a leper, shunned by his neighbours and abandonned by his wife.

In one of the most famous Tibetan Buddhist texts, which deals with the experiences during the death process, the dying person is reminded that all the images of gods and daemons are simply creations of the mind. This does not make them unreal, because the person seeing them is affected by them as though they were real. Indeed the content of the mind is in many ways the primary reality. It is a similar situation for Thomas Covenant, but he refuses to accept that what he is seeing is any sort of reality - except maybe a metaphorical one.

What is even more interesting from both a Buddhist and a psychological point of view is the interpretation of the Land and its people as the contents of Covenant's own mind and thus of the mind of Stephen Donaldson who wrote the stories. What parts of Covenant's body and mind are represented by the many characters who come into his adventures.

One of the fascinating and admirable aspects of the stories is Donaldson's willingness to kill off characters. Not just the minor ones, but also characters you think are going to be there to the bitter end (in a 'lived happily ever after' sort of way).

Travellers Rest, Talybont-on-Usk, South Wales

2007-08-27T20:17:00.000+01:00

I've just returned from a few days in South Wales. My wife and I went there mainly to visit an elderly relative of hers but we also took in a some sight-seeing and relaxing.

We stayed in the Travellers Rest in Talybont-on-Usk, near Brecon. We'd not stayed there before, and just booked the place on the basis of their website. It really was as good as the website suggested. The Inn is right by the canal with the historic tramway just 5 minutes walk away (if you are into industrial history). We were fortunate enough to be upgraded so we had a very spacious studio apartment. The shower was a bit quirky but otherwise the room was really excellent.

The food was superb.

And as you can see from the last picture below, the views in a morning were absolutely splendid. If you are looking for boring corporate style hotel accommodation, this is not for you. However, if you are looking for a friendly, small Inn with a very chef then the Travellers Rest is a good choice.

Time Traveller in Brecon

2007-08-27T18:02:00.000+01:00

Niloc Semaj (alias Colin James) - excellent spoof blue historial plaque on the wall of house (I'm assuming is his) in Brecon, South Wales

Favourite Taoist Story

2007-08-23T20:36:00.000+01:00

This is one of my favourite Taoist stories. I read it several years ago and then forgot where I'd read it. Now I've rediscovered it in 'Tales from the Tao' (ISBN 1-84293-130-x).

There was once an old man who had one son and one horse, both of whom he valued very highly. One day the horse ran away and his neighbors came over to console him 'Oh what great isfortune,' they said, 'your horse is gone! How will you ever afford to get another?'

The old man sat and smoked his pipe and only said , 'We shall see.'

Then, a few days later, the horse came back, accompanied by several wild horses, tripling his herd. Again the neighbors visited, this time to congratulate the old man on his great luck. AGains he merely sat and smoked and said, 'We shall see.'

A short time later, his son was thrown from on of the wild horses and broke his leg in several places. The neighbors all arrived, calling out, 'Ah great misfortune, you sone will never walk again!' But again the old man merely sat quietly in front of his house and, between puffs of his pipe, said, 'We shall see.'

Some time after that, the army came through the village, rounding up all the young men to press them into service and send them to the battlefront far away in the frozen north. But with his crippled leg the old man's son was left behind. Though crippled, he managed to care for his old father until his death many years later.

Sex, family life and religion

2007-08-19T11:52:00.000+01:00

I was chatting with a friend recently and in the course of a wide ranging conversation she said, "Sex should be fun." This seems to me blindingly obvious, but not universally true and not even universally accepted as a truism.

It got me thinking. How can you accept guidance on sex from anyone who has not experienced it. Thinking about it, turning it into words, symbolizing it, idolising it - none of these are what happens between two people.

Siddharta Gautama (before he became the Buddha) was married and had a son. For him (and for Buddhism) sex isn't 'good' or 'bad' - but it is a major distraction. For a monk engaging in sex is a 'defeat'. It is a fetter so strong that serious measures must be taken to recover. However as householder it is not something to feel guilt and anguish over. If you engage in sex you should enjoy it, but see that it is not the whole of existence. However it is addictive and a difficult thing to see beyond.

The Patriarchs of Israel were family men. They lived earthy lives. Sex was a private activity but not a shameful one.

I guess for many people who would like to see themselves as sophisticated and in control sex is a wake-up call. You might like to separate the everyday 'you' from the passionate 'you' that luxuriates in the forces that drive you when an orgasm rips through, but they are one and the same person. Different aspects to be sure, but joined at the hip.

Sex is a problem for anyone on a spiritual path. However it is not a problem because it is inherently 'bad' - as though sex had been invented by Satan (or whatever way you want to personify deception and corruption). It is a problem because the solution is so hard to come by.
One of the images in Buddhism that works for me is that of the aspirant being the charioteer of horses to be tamed. The horses of sex are very strong and wild, and few charioteers are up to the task of taming them. So a lot of practise and progress is needed to incorporate the wild power of sexual energy into it without that energy burning the practitioner to smouldering ash. The Buddha advised a monk who had returned to have sex with his erstwhile wife that he would have been better advised to stick his member into a pit of burning coals rather than into his wife. The monk had suffered a major defeat on the spiritual path.

However if sex is part of your path in life, then it really should be fun.

Thoughts and Feelings

2007-08-17T00:43:00.000+01:00

Getting a gut feel for what someone is feeling is so important.

I don't mean translating it into words. If I can borrow the word 'empathise', that is what I mean. Really feeling what the other person feels ... knowing how they are being drawn, pulled and dragged. And yet you are able to step back and THEN put it into words.

But before you can genuinely do if for someone else, you got to be able to do it for yourself. Know what you feel, what is pulling you out of balance, out of shape and step back.

It's the stepping back that is the hardest part.

The gravitational attraction of feelings.

2007-08-15T18:33:00.000+01:00

One very influential view of gravity is that it best seen as a curvature of space-time. In effect gravity warps the shape of space - or rather it IS the warping of the shape of space.

On a smaller scale (and in a far less precise way) strong feelings seem to warp psychological space.

Strong feelings change the ease with which one can move ones attention around. A strongly desired person seems to consume attention, and a strongly hated person also seems to consume attention.

It is so very hard for the rational mind to struggle with these 'gravitational' effects coming from more powerful subterranean parts of the mind. The struggle is harder generally because you don't even want to struggle. You think rationally (or at least consciously) about the effects of actions and what would be sensible to do, but the gravity of feelings makes that course hard to hold to.

Knowing another person

2007-08-10T20:10:00.000+01:00

Knowing is a strange thing.

Suppose you say that you know a place - a town or a village, say - it could mean a lot of things. It could mean that you have visited and have a mental image of the place. It could be that the mental image is restricted to one main street. I'd definitely claim that I know the town I grew up in. I lived there for many years, and walked many of its streets. Yet there is a lot I don't know - there are chunks of my mental map that could just as well have 'here be dragons' on them for all I know of what is there. And that is without any mention of the secret underworld of cities, towns and villages - the culverts, drains, pipes, conduits and civil defence bunkers.

You can see where I'm going with this. Knowing is many layered. There is knowing and then there is KNOWING, and even then there is more to know.

Now what about knowing another person. "Do you know Jim Smith?" Yes, you reply - you recognize him, you know something about him, and you might even have an idea of his character.

And then there is the whole different level of knowing when you live with someone for a while, and discover some of their idiosyncracies and foibles.

Then maybe you live with someone as a lover, and discover a whole new layer of intimate secrets. You join in a private world.

Even then there are many ways in which the other person is hidden from you, partly by simple lack of knowledge, partly by lack of understanding, and partly by the unconscious corruption imposed by you own mind on what is presented to you to learn.

Can you ever really know someone who is fundamentally deeper than you are? What they are is beyond your power to grasp and encode. Only when you become as deep as they are do you have the power to really grasp who they are .... and by then they may have continued their own journey of development.

You can't store a reservoir in a puddle.

Coach on stilts - not something you see every day

2007-08-07T20:44:00.000+01:00

That is not something you come across every day.

I rounded the bend into Chipping in the Trough of Bowland and did a double take. There was a man standing underneath a coach.

Overpackaging

2007-08-05T17:07:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I watched a TV programme that was largely about one man's mission to cut back on over packaging - the tendency of shops to put layer upon layer of paper and card on products, all of which is just thrown away.

So when I got my security card reader from the RBS I was amused by the perfect example of overpackaging they had had sent me.

Starting at the outside:

First there was the plastic transparent envelope ....
then there was the white cardboard box - this seems to have been used so that an A4 letter could be folded exactly in three to fit on the box ....
then there was the plastic tray inside the box ....
to hold the blue cardboard box ...
with the bubble wrap envelope inside ...
with the plastic bag ...
which finally had the security device inside.

Not Things, Not Entities - Constructs?

2007-08-04T11:00:00.000+01:00

Are Dawkin's 'memes' the sociological extension of Kelly's 'constructs'?

Evolution and Government

2007-08-02T19:34:00.000+01:00

I guess we mostly associate the idea of Darwinian evolution with biology and life (and annoying creationists). However the Darwinian paradigm has much greater application.

The iconic phrase 'survival of the fittest' is very widely misinterpreted these days, taking the world 'fittest' to mean fit like an athlete (or, fairly appropriately, fit like potential sexual partner). However this is not the correct meaning. Whilst physical fitness might come into play for a predator, it is hard to imagine it applying to a slow-moving, somnolent sloth.

What 'fitness' means in the context of evolution is fitness for purpose. Each member of a species is like a key, and the environment is its lock. How well does the key fit the lock? How well can that member of the species (and the species as a whole) 'solve' the problem of its environment? The bulk of life on Earth is bacteria. They each fit their environments very well, and many species can adapt at phenomenal rates to keep pace with changes in the environment. They aren't necessarily stronger, more agile, or more predatory than their neighbours - but they are simply better at the job they do of surviving and multiplying in the places they live. They fit.

It all much more complicated than simply fitting into a fixed environment. All species affect the environment in which they live, simply by virtue of being there. Maybe migratory birds do this least by virtue of the nature of air, and the rapid transit of their flight - but even they have an effect in terms of spreading plant seeds etc. So the process of fit between living being and environment is a complex dance, but the absolute essential is that the resulting interplay must enable a new generation of the species to be born and to prosper so that they in turn give birth to the next generation.

As a paradigm this picture applies to an endless array of systems, not least of which is politics and government.

In a particular social environment, a certain type of leadership/government will arise. This seems to be universal human nature whether it is a council of tribal elders or a parliament full of pomp and ceremony.

From an evolutionary point of view the best government is the one that maintains its environment, and allows itself to prosper. The environment in this case is the society - the complex web of people and social structures. In some countries a system which calls itself democracy prospers, but it does so because it is the key that fits into the lock of that society. For democracy to work the society must be conducive for the needs of democracy. Democracy will not flourish simply by a divine right to be accepted. It will only survive once conditions are right. A forest fire can start from a spark and spread at an alarming rate, under the right conditions. However that same spark could be extinguished at its inception by an inopportune shower.

The most fitting government in a particular society might not be anything like democracy, and might be something we strongly disapprove of (and would not choose to live under if we had the choice). However 'cuteness' without humans will not help an animal's survival, and 'ethical cuteness' will not enable a system of government to survive without a population that cherishes it.

I enjoy the freedoms of a liberal democracy, but I see them as contingent and not necessarily the best way to run a country (or even a viable way to run a country) if the circumstances are different. Taking a model of democracy and attempt to plant it in foreign soil is less likely to succeed than taking a temperate, water-loving plant and attempting to grow it in a tropical desert.

Polity must fit its environment, not the dreams of idealists.

The last page of Harry Potter.

2007-07-31T20:40:00.000+01:00

On the news this morning there was a report of a head teacher reading the last page of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to the school assembly.

Maybe she was just a mean spirited soul. Maybe she wanted to stop the children reading books - perhaps it was getting in the way of literacy targets.

For me the worst part of this is encouraging children to believe that getting to the last page is all that matters. Surely what matters about a novel is the journey not the last page. Equating the book with the last page is like equating love making with ejaculation (very possibly premature in this case). It's how you get there that really makes the difference.

Perhaps in today's target driven education environment this head teacher has lost the educational plot and really does believe that education is simply the passing of exams. So it is only the last page that matters.

How sad.