The Walls that Divide

Someone in a Facebook group I follow recently said that a family member posted this quote on their wall:

This person was wondering how to respond. I replied as follows:

I've rarely seen a more perfect example of how people's worldview filters can make it extremely difficult to communicate. In the Believer's worldview, 'faith' is a word that has only positive connotations. It is the epitome of goodness, righteousness, and what to strive for. 'Doubt', as the opposite of faith and its destroyer, is naturally vilified.

In the Skeptic's or the Non-believer's worldview, 'faith' is the epitome of all that is wrong with the world and 'doubt', as expressed in Robert Weston's famous poem quoted above, is a cherished virtue.

With this in mind, one can easily see how Elder Holland's quote is a perfect illustration of how clashing worldviews can present an obstacle to communication. When believers read this message, they see it as an affirmation of what is good and right. When non-believers read it, they see it as the worst sort of demagoguery.

So, my advice is to consider the source. The bigger person will respond to the intention behind the message and not to the message itself. I think this message might have had a positive intent before being encrypted by the sender's 'believing worldview' key. Then when you received the message and decrypted it with your 'non-believer worldview' key, the message came out garbled and its original good intent was obscured. To put it another way, passive-aggressive is often only in the eye of the beholder. To put it yet another way, "never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's razor).

With all that said, the bigger person can easily wind up being the doormat. The key to avoiding this is for all participants to transcend their respective worldviews and realize that a worldview is not the world. Giving the benefit of the doubt can help this. Putting yourself in the other's shoes can help also. But these are things only you can do. You can't force the other person to do this, especially if they're convinced they're right and you're wrong.

Sometimes it's possible to find a way to help the other person be more 'meta'. That is to say, help them realize that (1) a worldview is not the world, (2) they're stuck in their own worldview, (3) you have a different worldview, and (4) communication will go more smoothly if you both can rise up from behind the walls of your respective worldviews and converse directly. This is so much easier said than done, but sometimes it is enough to point out the existence the worldview walls to make the other person see them for the trap that they are.

 

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The Really Big Picture

This fascinating video about galactic superclusters recently came to my attention and the person who posted the link said it made him more than ever convinced that intelligent design must be involved in the organization of the universe.

I had to respond thus:

Everywhere I look with my mind and imagination, from the subatomic to the cosmic supercluster of galaxies, I perceive the incomparable power of the interaction of physical laws, each operating blindly, relentlessly, and with unerring precision in its sphere of influence. The end result is an impossibly grand yet mind-bogglingly intricate self-organizing dance of Newtonian cause and effect, Heisenbergian uncertainty, and Einsteinian relativity (among any number of other things I'm sure I'm not aware of).

In the infancy of our species, we conjured up an unending menagerie of omnipowerful beings in an effort to explain what we had not yet developed the tools to understand. This need to understand and to find the reasons things happen, part of our genetic endowment, conferred an important survival advantage and was part of how and why we evolved consciousness. It explains why we invented endless different gods. Now, thanks to hundreds of transformative inventions like the scientific method, books, microscopes, and telescopes, we are able to understand more things, more thoroughly than we ever have. In case after case -- every case, actually -- things we had long thought were the result of supernatural power were really only the result of the mundane interaction of discoverable, testable laws that arise naturally from the fundamental properties of energy/matter and space/time.

Now we understand that our world, that seems so big in comparison with us, is just one of a hundred billion, being pulled along by gravity around the center of our average-sized galaxy, also just one of the hundred billion of its sibling galaxies whose light has had time to reach us. We have no way of knowing how many others lie outside our light cone. We are as tiny to the universe as hydrogen atoms are tiny to us.

It is now time for us to let go of the insecurity and immaturity that keeps us from understanding and accepting our true place in the cosmos. Inventing deities no longer becomes us. They ceased to serve a valid purpose many centuries ago and now the mindset that created them has become the greatest impediment to our physical, moral, and ethical development as a species. When we impose the narrow limits of our minds, our customs, our imperfect notions of justice and mercy and morality on the cosmos through the intermediary of deities we invent, we only hamper and do ourselves a grave disservice. The sooner we see this, the better off we will be.

For the first four and a half decades of my life, Mormon theology did indeed shape my understanding of many things, cosmology included. I have outgrown that theology and now the cosmos has become incomparably more beautiful, more interesting, and more awe-inspiring since I stopped imagining I held a privileged place in it. To lose that terrible misconception was the greatest awakening and the premier transformative event of my life.

 

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If Any Limb Offend Thee

With regard to excommunication, I don't think anyone necessarily disputes the church's right to exclude people from among its ranks for publicly questioning it. Mostly, I think, people are just lamenting the fact that it has become a place that finds it necessary to do so. It used not to be this way. The church has altered significantly since the 70s when I grew up. It has gone, metaphorically, from an "employee owned and operated" enterprise to a strictly hierarchical command-and-control model that, it appears, brooks no insubordination.

Also, we obscure much when we say "the church does this" or "the church does that". Churches are not animate objects that "do" things. What this type of speaking obscures is the fact that WE are the church. If there's any doing of deeds, it is people who are doing them. In this case, what it boils down to is that some people in the church are deciding to kick other people out of the church.

The people ordering or doing the kicking out consider themselves authorized and justified in do so. Perhaps they are. We all understand how the church is set up. "Mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord." And in this house of order, power and authority flow, in one direction only, from the person at the top of the org chart, through various intermediate layers, and finally down to the worker bees.

It is generally assumed that the source of that power and authority is divine. Perhaps it is. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that the source of power is really people's *belief* that it is divine -- a subtle but important difference.

Either way, the hierarchical nature of the church makes it impossible to tell the difference between what is actually the Lord's will and the personal agenda of someone authorized to act in the name of The Lord. Of course we always have the option to ask The Lord directly for a testimony that a church leader is acting properly, but note that it is never, ever acceptable for the answer to be "no". And so, there is no way for people lower down the hierarchy to discover and remove corruption from a location higher up. Such an action, if it ever comes, could only come from above in the hierarchy.

However, we have learned as a people, through hard experience, the immutable law that any governing structure really derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. In the case of the church, this takes the form of belief on the members' part that The Lord is in control. Regardless of whether that's true, if the members suddenly ceased to believe it, the orderly hierarchy of control would cease to function.

And belief, it turns out, is a precarious thing to maintain in these days of Information. So the hierarchy, in order to maintain its legitimacy feels compelled to act when threatened by the prospect of unbelief. That is why public disagreement becomes an excommunicable offense.

The problem is that the sword of excommunication, which at one time could be wielded with impunity, is no longer the tool it used to be. The people in the hierarchy of control now run the terrible risk of appearing to be a self-serving organization interested only in maintaining their position of power. If a critical mass of the church members were to place such an interpretation on this event, who knows what the consequences would be?

In any case, "the church" is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The legitimacy of the strict hierarchy of the church is increasingly imperiled by the free flow of information. But to decentralize is also not without significant risks. Since the church -- any church -- largely exists because of the willing belief of its members, it must tread lightly lest in its efforts to maintain order it cut off too many valiant members who also happen to be independent thinkers and/or can't fit into the sanctioned gender molds.

Far better in the long run, I think, to expand the tent even at the risk of offending its hard-core base. Of course it is precisely that base that is in firm control right now, so that will not happen easily. But we have seen what pressure can be brought to bear by people voting with their feet. I hope things turn out for the best.

 

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Just imagine what you'll know tomorrow

As a "computer guy", I have frequently had people ask me to help them with their hardware or software problems. Many of the people I have helped have made statements like this: "this computer doesn't like me" or "this stupid thing is cursed" or "sometimes it just does that for no reason".

These are all statements of faith or belief, not statements of fact. Every time I have looked deeply into their claims of seemingly inexplicable behavior, I have invariably found the root cause to be a mundane one: user behavior, environmental factors, software defects, etc.

In this context, people's statements of belief are the result of ignorance, lack of expertise, or just being too lazy or not caring enough to get to the bottom of the problem.

I think that in the case of religious belief there is a similar but not identical phenomenon at work. People who believe that God exists start with the idea in their head that inexplicable things may sometimes be accounted for by the Will of God. They are willing, even anxious, to discover the hand of a benevolent deity at work in their lives. The very fact of this belief is sufficient to stop them from looking more deeply into the reasons why things around them happen. Someone overcomes an addiction? It's God's hand at work. But if you look deeply, I absolutely guarantee that you'll find it's really something like a change in neural wiring or brain chemistry that did the trick.

Ever since the introduction of conscious cognition in our genome, we humans have been trying to figure out why things are the way they are. Before we discovered the existence of the invisible world of microorganisms, we were perplexed and baffled by the appearance of illness and disease. Why did people get sick and die all the time? Our indomitable drive to identify cause and effect led us to conclude the existence of evil spirits, arbitrary deities, or other supernatural hypotheses to try to account for the seeming randomness of life because we simply could find no other explanation.

When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, first looked through a lens and discovered the first hints of existence of this unseen world, it forever altered our perception of illness and disease. From that point onward, we were in possession of knowledge that would forever banish the need to resort to supernatural explanations about illness and disease. As of that moment it officially became a cop-out to say "God did it" in reference to bodily sickness.

That pattern of the natural displacing the supernatural has continued consistently over the centuries. Whenever we have bothered to get to the root of any problem or previously unexplained occurrence, we have always, Always, ALWAYS found that the root cause could be explained by the regular action of discoverable, testable laws that arise naturally as an inevitable consequence of the fundamental properties of matter/energy/space/time. Not once, not one single time, have we ever been forced to conclude that something has been the result of an arbitrarily powerful deity.

So when I hear people testify that they "know" this or that thing that God has done, I am deeply cognizant of how that type of non-fact-based thinking is inherently impermanent and unreliable. To quote the great line from the movie, Men in Black: "Just imagine what you'll 'know' tomorrow."

 

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Standing on Your Own Two Feet

On a Facebook group that I read, a young man posted the following:

So... I'm kind of struggling right now, and I want to reach out to try to receive some support from those who have been where I am now. 

Friends, it's like every morning I'm waking up feeling more and more depressed. When I first started questioning, I felt hopeful because I still had a commitment to many of my old standards... but now, as I have questioned and deconstructed more, it feels as if my moral compass is shattering. It's as if I no longer know what things are healthy for me and for society, and I am scared of giving in to only my baser desires now that I have lost whatever used to counteract them. 

Has anyone been here? How did you cope? Is there a place beyond this in which I can hope to recover healthy restraints for myself, ones that are authentic for me and in which I believe?

Here is my response:

This is the nihilistic phase. If you have grown up in the church, you were like a vine growing on a trellis. Suddenly the trellis is removed and you feel the loss of both the support and the protection it gave. I can best explain with an analogy.

When you were a boy, perhaps you learned to ride a bike with the help of training wheels. If you did, you might remember how you felt when those training wheels were removed: a sense of exhilarating freedom, a release from the constraint of those wheels. But that sense of freedom was probably not unmixed with fear and a little vertigo. With those training wheels off, you could ride anywhere as fast and freely as you wanted. You could fly like a bird, but you could also crash and injure yourself. With that freedom came a scary but wonderful sense that you were now wholly responsible for keeping yourself alive and safe.

When the religious framework on which you had built your life to this point dissolved from underneath you, you initially experienced the exhilaration of sudden freedom. You are now experiencing the great and terrible realization that you alone are responsible for your actions and your life. You miss the certainty of relying on the idea of absolute truth and you are scared that you will make a terrible decision and ruin your life or wreak havoc around you. 

But there is reason for confidence and hope. You are no longer a frail, thin shoot that collapses to the ground if the stake holding it up is removed. You are a grown man with a strong, substantial stem that can support itself.

You have a lifetime of experiences to draw upon to show you how to be a good man. Look around you and find the examples of good people living vibrant lives of honesty and integrity. Also look around you to see examples of the results of bad choices and dissolution.

You know inside you what it is to be a person of worth. Your inner voice is still there and will guide you if you listen to it. You just need to dig down inside and feel that sudden rush of realization that you are a free and independent person and you can take charge of your destiny and succeed!

Once this happens, you will no longer live in fear that you will offend God. Do you want to do something that the church forbade you. Fine! You are free to do it! You are free to jump in and experience that sensation. But also remember you are responsible -- only you -- for the consequences. Think first. Think of yourself. Think of those around you. Ask yourself if the action you are contemplating is consistent with being a man of integrity. Ask yourself if that action will bring harm to yourself or another. If the benefits outweigh the risks and the costs, then you are right to pursue that course of action. If your inner voice advises you to steer clear, then give it a miss. 

The church teaches some good and right things. That is why you loved it. The church also teaches some indifferent or dubious things. That is why you doubted it. The church also teaches some wrong and bad things. And that is why you left it, at least in some sense. Keep the good. Discard the indifferent. Eschew and decry the bad.

Several years ago, I left religion and have since entirely discarded all belief in the supernatural. What I used to call the influence of the Holy Ghost I now simply refer to as my inner voice. It still speaks to me as strongly and consistently as it always has, perhaps even more. I have a clear and strong sense of right and wrong. That which increases the total happiness in the world is right, that which decreases it is wrong. I know that if an action brings me some benefit, but only at the expense of another or at the expense of my own integrity, it is wrong and I will eventually regret it. That is the only measuring stick you need to carry around with you to live a good life, free from the unnatural constraints of religion.

My dear young person, take a lesson from someone a little further down the path: if you can increase the amount of light in your life and be a beacon, reflecting that light in the lives of those around you, you will have a happy and fulfilled life. Seek out the good with an unprejudiced heart and an open mind. Discard the bad and banish it from your mind and your life. Peace, Love, and Music.

The Cosmos and I

I no longer entertain any belief in religious doctrines or deities, but I am nevertheless sympathetic to the impulse to invent an explanation that helps us forget our intolerable nothingness relative to the majesty and grandeur of the cosmos.

It also makes me dizzy to contemplate the atoms of my body relative to my whole body so many orders of magnitude larger. We stand, as it were, midway between the inconceivably small and the incomprehensibly vast; and, as quantum physics has shown, we cannot really understand or relate to either extreme.

Ever since the emergence in our genome of the apparatus to support consciousness, memory and language, we have made discoveries about ourselves and our world that we couldn't account for. So we have made up stories to explain the unexplainable.

As our capacity for Reason has grown and our technology has expanded our ability to perceive and understand the inner workings of things very small, very large and very far away, we have been able to discover that the stories we invented in the infancy of our species were just whistling in the dark.

The time has now come when to continue to rely on the supernatural is to deny the real font of every blessing: Reason, Science, Ethics, Technology, and our own ingenuity and drive to understand and improve ourselves and everything around us.

We are in the habit of associating ethical behavior with religion, but that association is nothing more than a happenstance of history. We can learn and teach ethics better and more effectively without the divisiveness that religions invariably impose on their followers.

I do not know whether the thing that thinks my thoughts will continue to exist after my body ceases to function, and frankly I don't really care, not deeply anyway. If I do continue to exist in some form, I hope it will be an agreeable existence. If I don't, I won't be around to be bothered by it.

But whatever state follows this one, if any, my stunningly improbable little spark of consciousness, my brief flicker of existence in the cosmos, though just a ripple in an inconceivably vast ocean of matter/energy, is nevertheless glorious to me.

 

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Sculpting Species

Today on Facebook, someone posted the comment: "nothing evolution designs is rational." This got me to thinking along the following lines. I'm not so sure that statement is true. I don't mean to turn this into a word game by twisting definitions to suit my purpose, but let me try to recast that phrase for purposes of discussion: "because none of the adaptations that have resulted in an increased chance of survival is the result of ???" The result of what? Conscious deliberation? Is that the only thing that can possibly qualify as logical or rational. What about suitability for a particular purpose? Is it a rational or logical outcome if something is repurposed to fill a role that suits its particular nature?

Take feathers, which first appeared on the evolutionary stage as an insulator, a role they're well suited for. But when they chanced to also confer an increased survival advantage by enabling the organism to briefly take to the air, were not their particular properties really being put to a use even more striking than insulation? I think one could argue that it is a rational use of the feather to enlist it in the task of flying.

To design is a deliberate act. It is natural and easy to speak of evolutionary processes in terms that suggest the exercise of a conscious will because organisms so often display such an elegant commingling of form and function. But it is a misleading metaphor and one that contributes to peoples' reluctance to acknowledge its role in speciation. 

I think sculpting is perhaps a more apt analogy for how evolution actually works. We've all seen examples of a block of stone turned into a beautiful statue. No one doubts that these works of art are deliberately created by human artists. But beautiful works of art and magnificent creations can also be created by nothing more than the constant movement of water or air on rock. 

The exigencies of survival exert a similar influence on species of living organisms over time. A tiny random change gives a slight survival advantage to an organism and the genetic code that produced that change is passed on. Later, another tiny random change results in another improvement and is likewise introduced into the species' genome. Other random changes occur that are neutral or harmful to the organism and thus do not confer a survival advantage. Over a very long time and many, many generations, these tiny random changes that pass through the sieve of natural selection gradually accumulate. In invisibly tiny increments they refine the contours of the species, outfitting it ever more perfectly to make a living in its particular ecological niche. 

The reason we know this works is because we have used the principle of exerting selective pressure of our own manufacture, exploiting the gradual accumulation of random mutations to create countless varieties of dogs. All it takes is time and enough genetic variability to give us options.

So to circle back to the original point: I think there is a type of inevitability to evolution. Given a particular set of ecological conditions, species will gradually acquire traits that make them increasingly fit to occupy a particular niche in that ecology. For me, there is a beautiful, but perhaps unconventional rationality in that process.