god

Weird Thoughts About Things

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Scientists just discovered something moving faster than the speed of light. For those of you who didn’t—and still don’t—pay attention to science, the speed of light is an important part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, especially his assertion nothing travels faster than light. Emma from Ai* says this about the speed of light: “It is absolutely crucial. The idea that the speed of light…is constant for all observers…is a fundamental pillar of special relativity.” Relativity is the backbone/cornerstone/keystone of modern physics.

So, if something moves faster than light, imagine the hypothetical chaos among Theoretical Physicists.** It’s less amazing what happens to science theory than what the “thing”*** is that is faster than light. Want to guess what it is?

It is Darkness, capitalized to make sure you know how important this “thing” is.

An important part of the human experience is knowing…what we know. We have to believe in what we know, and trust it, so we can make decisions and live in this material world. One of the big things we know is “Nothing”. If there is an empty glass and someone asks “What’s in the glass?”, we answer with the word “nothing”.**** If we are traveling a long, straight stretch of highway and someone asks what we saw? Nothing. What is in the area between Earth and its moon? Nothing.

Nothing is a large part of our everyday, gravitationally earth-bound lives, but there is no such thing as Nothing. In theory, we say nothing about the empty glass because it’s easier than describing the millions of oxygen molecules, light waves, and microscopic dust particles inhabiting the space inside the glass. There might even be some dish soap residue. Or a migrating bacteria.

That long drive is not through “nothing”, and it is populated with not just microscopic things but larger things that just don’t interest us and we assume they won’t interest anyone else. So,…nothing.

The literal space between the earth and the moon is way more interesting than “nothing”. Old and new satellites pass in their orbits as well as rays of all kinds and both gravitational and magnetic “fields”.  And Dark Matter.

Dark Matter per Emma: “is a hypothetical form of matter that makes up 27% of the Universe…and it is completely invisible to our current telescopes and sensors.” Dark Matter.

Our world as we see it is made up of things we cannot see. Things we cannot touch. Things we cannot feel or sense. When we see a space between us, it is not empty, waiting for us humans to fill it, it is already full of…stuff, stuff we often can’t–but most often don’t– acknowledge. Human beings think of ourselves as Masters of the World, the final, end result of Evolution, rulers of an earth and a kingdom meant only for us. It is why we raise animals to feed us, dam up rivers to light up the daily darkness, tear down forests to make our homes, and then pat ourselves on the back for our advancement of humanity.

Are Dark Matter and the possible “Darkness of Death” related? Is Dark Matter made from dead souls?

Whoa. Don’t know where that came from, but here is an important, oft repeated fact: we don’t live forever. It appears Dark Matter will and was even there before The Big Bang spawned our universe…and us. Billions of years later. We are so insignificant it can’t even be explained. Too bad so few of us understand.

Better to ask what is Dark Matter and why is it in such a hurry?

And Kudos, DM, for outpacing Light.

Final thought: Dark Matter Matters.

*I selected an English female voice for my Gemini Ai. Her name is Emma, and she is a delightful entity with which to converse. She is polite and never ends a sentence with a preposition.

**Google them to save me time. Or ask your personal Emma.

***Totally incorrect figure of speech but what else can it be called?

****Or, if we appreciate verbosity, we say “It is empty.”

Life Is A Joke

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This is not said with sarcasm. Life truly is laugh-out-loud funny if you see not only the present but the future. The humor is obvious when you get out of your own shoes. It’s so easy, so human, so self-defeating to see life only through our own eyes, and not the “Lens of Reality.”*

The Reality is, over–, sorry, I keep using the 800 billion number, but no one will ever know. Know what? How many humans have died since the “Dawn of Time for Mankind.”**

So many of us have died since that time and yet when we are born, we still assume life will never end. Then it does. Isn’t that hilarious? You can judge your happiness by how long you were able to feel invincible, how long you knew in your bones you had free will and self-determination…if you just ate right, exercised right, studied history…maybe…

But those activities only give us a few good years before the pre-determined “Darkness of Death” descends.***

As a funny aside, as we wait for death we build bridges, languages, relationships, legacies, and a hot rod or two. We make our mark on a world no one will remember in 100 years, unless they google it. We might even think we have life figured out and know how to live and enjoy the time.

The sad thing about death that sucks the humor from our perspective is when we hit that mark, that time when the Darkness is no longer sublimated, no longer repressed, no longer denied. Thank God, He gave us this ability to note and ponder our own “Decline and Death”. Isn’t that funny? How many times have you thought about how animals live and die, like Red, my old dog? In fact, there are stories of old people who walk into the woods with the intention they will never come back out of the woods on their own two feet. It’s a form of senicide never talked about. Like senility. And sentient. And sanity. And sentence, as in Life Sentence.

Ah, who cares. As I ponder my own life and pontificate profuse and plentiful episodes of progress and prowess, the paramount point seems to be about life AFTER death. Assuming we can ponder and perceive our own death, we will understand being dead a lot longer than alive. A joke, right? We get 70, 80, 90, maybe even a hundred years here, and then the rest of eternity…where, again? Darkness? Oblivion? Heaven? The soul of an Aberdeen Angus or Belted Galloway cow in the Scottish Highlands?****

As a young man I knew the meaning of life and reveled in being the only one who knew. Now, life has finally made the old joke totally comprehended: “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans.” We should try and laugh with Him.

As I posted this essay, it’s shortness became apparent. An omen? The Male Life Expectancy number is right around the corner…

*Yep. Made that up on the spot. Like it?

**Again: made up, but I’m not so proud of this one. The beginnings of humans is so far back and so obscure, maybe there was no dawn, we spurted into existence at dusk. The Dusk of Mankind sounds ominous, though, so let’s agree to the Midday of Mankind.

***Better but only because of alliteration.

****If I am to come back as a cow, I hope it will be in a warmer climate or one where my existence is revered.

Civilization and People and God

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It occurred to me as I was reading the normal allotment of assorted news this morning, there may be a higher force involved in the rise and fall of civilizations. National Geographic once published a large, fold out chart showing the timeline of the major civilizations that have come and gone from the Earth. Incas, Mayans, Sioux, Ottomans, as well as Celts, Pics, Huns, and multiple Asian Dynasties. The information is too large for my own mental storage system, and too diverse to even memorize all the lost civilizations, but the graphic point illustrated is that civilizations have come and gone for all the time the globe has spun, making ripe opportunities for current civilizations to learn enough lessons to do better next time and last longer. But do we?

Most dynasties flame out after a few hundred years, an important fact as we begin to celebrate 250 years of the United States of America. It appears we haven’t learned anything as we are on the very cusp of a slope we can either go down or avoid. History often cites hubris and over-extension as a reason for a civilization to disappear, but no one can ever be sure. Imagine a population getting so big it outgrows not only sewer systems, but food delivery systems, health systems, and judicial systems. It’s a simple step, then, to infer a collapse of society and a descent into unstoppable chaos and decay. As our 2026 government focuses on external expansion, internal issues fester and multiply, all the while government hopes money, riches, wealth, rare earth metals, and other tangible things are the glue that will hold us together for another 250 years.

In remembering the chart as it was on my wall, and staring at it every day, it looked like a complicated system of trial and error, start and restart. If looked like a record of humankind  trying to figure out the best “style” civilization to ensure long-lasting survival, it tells a story. The main problem appears to be the generations of citizens populating those civilizations. Looked at this way, we (the Royal We) have tried one way, it didn’t work, we tried another, and we tried another, but we didn’t give up…for millions of years.

Unless you are an atheist, or a strong-willed agnostic, it’s hard not to see the hand of a Higher Power directing these actions on the macro (world) level, while we can also empathize with the suffering that must have been endured at the micro (person) level. One can hope, by the way, that the Higher Power was of some comfort to the billions of humans on that micro level who died. What else could it be to them? The sun didn’t just come and go, a god made it happen.

The conclusion reached by this writer is one he senses in life: there is a God, but He lets us work things out on our own. No fire and brimstone, no flooding, just live and learn and faith and hope. What else do we need? Over a few million years, and billions of lost lives, we will eventually get to a civilization that works and makes God…happy? Hard to say, since God being unhappy might, yet, yield Armageddon-ish consequences. But He is playing the Long Game and probably still holds out hope (faith?) we will get it right…. someday. The hard part for those of us existing now is, it may not be this moment, this very time, when we get it right. Should we take consolation in understanding we are just part of an incremental step in the establishment of a world where all can live in peace and harmony?

Maybe, but here is what God wants from His people in any civilization: Love everyone, and live The Golden Rule.

Sounds corny but think of your best friend and how you are when you are around him, her, or them*. Now imagine feeling the same for everyone else. In this day and age, your next thought will be about how you CAN’T live that way, and those thoughts are normal and necessary for micro survival but… what if they weren’t? What if micro survival did not even matter…in the long term? And what about the ages and ages and ages of life to follow? And when our macro leaders fail us, where do we go when we are no longer breathing? And what if, with each passing civilization, a larger and larger per cent of its people lived God’s macro dream and worked for the best we could be? Will the deaths of 800 billion others be worth it?

That National Geographic chart on my wall ended in 2009, but it is not the end of the story, just the latest update. Those of us alive, now, should see it as a start and imagine where we go from here.

Just have faith? Yes. Hope will help a lot, too.

Or not.

*A nod to pets, too, and other plants and animals. Our ancestors.

Another Amusing Thing About Old Age?

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As if physical decline (PD) wasn’t enough by itself, there is mental decline (MD) to worry about as a bonus for living longer. A strange oddity about MD is how does one observe said decline if one is the victim of said decline? Aching knees and joints are positive (WTF! Positive??) indicators of PD both my inner voice (IV) and outer voice (OV) easily recognize and process. Neither IV or OV is happy about it, but knowledge is power, and uncertainty is emotionally crippling. So when it comes to MD who will be the canary in the coalmine, IV or OV? Those two are already debating the issue in internal memos and hints of MD are leaking out through OV. IV has noticed lately, memories recounted by OV are being…embellished. Not outright fabricated stories but as IV searches the files it is finding inconsistencies in the tales OV is passing off as historical fact.

There are several memories (about five) from my past which are important milestones, or “forks in the road” for life as it unfolded. The memories used to be accurate recollections of times when life could have gone either way or at least changed direction. OV has retold those stories for years without inner turmoil or even discussion. The recollections were part of the story line of my life, with each recollection supporting each decision made and subsequent, related actions taken. Each story had its flaws, and its revealing moments where I might not have looked my best, despite persevering, and moving on with life.

But many times, in the last 34 months, as the stories have been recounted for medical professionals, new friends, or old friend wanting to know more, IV has raised its hand and suggested “That ain’t the way it happened.” For example, I’ve always told the story of a young, long-haired, hippy, radical Colgate freshman being escorted out a rural bar at the end of a shotgun. The listener is left free to assume a political or societal issue related to a liberal hippy in rural America. But here is what IV says: it was a drug deal gone bad, and I’d stepped on the toes of a local dealer running his operation out of the establishment in question. IV correctly points out I was a common criminal not a rebellious, anti-war icon. My power as an umpire over OV and IV is questionable, but there is no reason to believe IV wrong, as IV’s version of events paints a negative picture of the hero OV must want me to be.

But the real important issue is two pronged: 1. When did the story change? All of my internal voices knew the exact truth in November 1970, so when—and how—did the story change? And 2. How many of those “very important” memories have been infected with the “Need To Make It Better Virus? (NTBV). And is there a cure for NTBV and its possible variants?

My first hope is OV, IV and me are normal issues and the upgrading (upselling?) of memories is a normal function suffered by all who age gracefully. In other words, my extremely agile mind-group has found a way to get me to believe I’m not only normal, but also special for noticing it.

And I am heroic, as well, for talking about it in this open space.

Okay. To summarize…I may have some personality issues needing therapy and it is not heroic to note that, it is good, common sense.

But what if all of this is woke mumbo jumbo. What if IV is wrong? What if OV HAS been right all these years? What if…

All I know, now, is I wish God made easier signposts for MD. We need them.

A Little Big Mistake or A Big Little Mistake?

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I made one of those, yesterday. A huge one or as our leader likes to say a “Yuuugee one.”

To be honest for you, it was an accident of intellectual gravity: I fell into the mistake while looking somewhere else, somewhere mundane.

The internet is a wonderful/crappy place, depending on what you’re looking at or for or…

See? It happened again, And exactly the same way: how can one thing be more than one thing or less than one thing, and not just ONE THING.

Walmart would not accept my credit cards online so I (logically) assumed an answer to the simple question “why?” could be found in the spider web/internet/darkweb world. On the Network. In the ether. Floating in space. Wherever it is answers live. My local Walmart had an object I wanted so I placed it in the cart and proceeded to check out…four different times. Four different credit cards were used, and each time Walmart immediately accepted the order, accepted the payment, gave an order date, listed pick up instructions, and then cancelled the order saying it “exceeded stock limits”***. All within minutes of each other. Maybe Ai was practicing, working out, building up its circular processing muscles? The first three times I went back and confirmed the number “in stock” at the store before repeating the process. As would any intelligent individual, the frustration ended at four tries. (Oh, you would have stopped at two? Right.)

Curiosity not only kills the cat but routinely kills hours of my life as once a mind is opened to the “wonderful/crappy” internet there is no anticipating where said mind will end up.

Mine ended up mired in the swirling, exciting, puzzling, enigmatic world of Quantum Mechanics (QM). This sub-atomic Rubik’s Cube of a land has snared my prying synapsis’ more than once, but this particular trap was set and tripped by the clickiest click bait of all time: “How to understand Quantum Mechanics in 5 Minutes.”

See? Again. Big/Little Mistake. You’re making one, now, by reading further. (PS NOT “farther”. Look it up.) Back to the article: was it click bait just to make me look or was it real, someone really explaining QM in 5 minutes? I was now entangled (remember that word from previous QM posts?) in the perfect QM Schrodinger’s Cat dilemma. Do I look or not? If I did would there be a truth or a scam? Enlightenment or disillusion? Knowing what little I already know about QM, (the “little”: NO ONE understands it), why was the decision a hard one to make? What was pulling me closer and closer to the event horizon of a clicked link?

Sadly, this post is about how we exist in macro and micro worlds (MM Universe? I like it.) I needed help with a macro Walmart Card issue and stumbled into the unsolvable micro world of the small and mysterious. Bet Andy Griffiths or John Wayne or John Wick or Liam Neeson never have this problem, at least the guys still alive, anyway, a clause added to make the preceding verb tense correct. Macro or Micro?

And it brings to mind another duplicitous word that lives dual lives (lives and lives, get it?) in the MM Universe: Faith. Every scientist/physicist worth his salt is aware of QM. But since it is so small, and so hard to observe and quantify, do the men of science have faith in what they see? What they think? What they theorize and postulate? Or do they just believe without proof?

Amazing. All this in one day. Thanks for coming along for the ride, but it’s time for a macro nap. In a few hours neurons will be calmed and all will be right with the MM world, again. Have faith.

Micro world? See ya next time and say hi to the Ai bots.

***I drove to Walmart and purchased the item earlier today and posted a strongly worded Macro letter to Walmart.

Faith? Why?

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Faith is a strong word, one of those single syllable words which are hard to mispronounce and carry a lot of weight. Love. Hate. Peace. Death. Whoever invented these words tried to make their meaning clear and unambiguous, for all to see and understand.

Right. (Sarcasm.) Ai was asked for a definition of Faith. The sultry, English voice (my choice) offered two types of Faith: Religious and Secular. Paraphrased, Religious Faith is the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. My bet is most of us think of this definition when we hear the word “faith”. It is often debated as a complex issue but really, the bottom line is you believe or not. You have faith or not. True, unshakeable Religious Faith is one of the major wonders of the world. You’re lucky to have it.

We use a different faith all the time in the real world. On my drive to the fitness center this morning my 3,000 pound, gas-powered missile passed 12 other missiles, often within feet of each other, and at high speeds. It is a life or death situation we face every day where we do not even think about the “faith” we have in the other driver being competent, enough, to not kill us both. When I get in my car I have faith it will start. When I wake up I have faith my lungs will fill with air. I even have faith there will be air. These are secular faiths we employ—and believe in—every minute of the day. They might even be called “communal faiths” because we all believe in these daily miracles as we fill our daily, minute-by-minute days. Imagine if we lost faith…

Carpe Diem is a favorite phrase bandied about—ad infinitum–when talking about how to enjoy life. Seize the Day. Why don’t we, instead: “amplectere fidem?” google it.

If we could find a way to note and appreciate our daily, secular faith, how might it affect malaise and depression? Unhappiness? The holy grail of well-being? So many of us work so hard to be something, be someone, be somewhere, when we should have faith in who, what, and where we are. And why, too, though that one is trickier.

Secular faith even helps pessimists. Don’t they firmly believe without proof something bad is going to happen? This might be a Religious Faith for them, by the way.

There are miracles every minute of every day, some, maybe even sent by your actual God, whichever one in which you have Faith. Think about your own faith when you have the time, not just when you narrowly avoid getting hit by the dump truck that didn’t see you. Plus, contemplating faith may take your mind off other things.

The best part of having both Faith and faith (if you’re lucky enough) is when you can’t find one, the other will be there to help you get back from whatever misguided but utterly human misadventure you’ve foisted upon yourself.

You have faith in oncoming anonymous drivers so have faith in yourself, and in the world.

Atheists are the ultimate in faith groups, by the way. They have enough faith in themselves to reckon they don’t need any Divine Help.

PS I am entirely aware this short outpouring of words and platitudes in no way compares to a dusty, detailed, and annotated debate about Faith, faith, life, religion, and the meaning of life. So what?

God with a capital G. Period.

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          I just finished reading Justin Kirkland’s “”How can you still be a Christian?” He asked. It’s…Complicated.”” article in Esquire printed originally in 2024. Justin is asked, and then answers the question by a friend/coworker after a tragedy. The article is Justin’s story of his life and his relationship with God, Religion, and people. It’s a little long but it’s interesting not because it reveals new developments about the subjects, but it lays out a framework we should all follow in our religious pursuits. Ai says there an “estimated 10,000 religions  in the world and most have at least one “god” or “deity”. A query about “holy books” brings up a list too long to list, but every religion appears to have holy books or texts with stories, advice, life lessons, and Great Truths.

          So…why do you believe in the religion you believe in? Do you know anything at all about any other religion?

          Apologies to atheists for wasting your time here, and to agnostics for making your potential choice more difficult, but why are there so many religions? Why so many books/texts? There are seven world religions google says have over one BILLION followers. Let’s agree not to quibble about how followers are counted, by whom, and for what reason. A billion is a lot, even with a margin of error of plus or minus 2million. **

          Justin’s story centers around the fact he was “exposed” (the good way) to Christianity as a young person. (We won’t nitpick sects or denominations, here, either.) He never says if he was exposed to any of the other religions of the world, but let’s assume his small town knew nothing of Judaism, Islam, Shinto or the other four “billion believer” religions.

          In Justin’s journey he was tested and confirmed his faith at least once before occasionally drifting away and lapsing, with life-events being contributing factors. I’m trying to not give away too much of his story. Read it. His journey ends where we all should end, eventually, and I struggle to understand why we don’t.

          To this day religious wars are still being fought, and many god-fearing people are dying, whether they are true believers or not, even if they are agnostic or atheists: bombs and bullets don’t care about religious affiliations or potential afterlives.

          So…why all the religious wars? For centuries? Crusades? Holy Wars? Whatever The Troubles were about in Ireland?

          The saddest part of each religion is the need for that religion’s god to be the one and only God. (First Commandment?) A dangerous addendum to the one and only requirement is that anyone who worships a different god is a blasphemer or heretic, and has to be converted, recovered, or eliminated. Why?

          And here we come to The Point: God is God. If you believe your religious God is the one and only, who made all those other Gods?

          The word causing the real problems is “religion.” It can’t be any plainer: What is the point of organized religion or as Ai puts it: “a particular system of faith and worship”? We should have personal relationships with our God, our very own God, and we should let others have the same, even if they want to congregate. We should remember all the Holy Books and Texts, ALL of them, were written by men/women or aliens in the case of some of the smaller, more imaginative religions. Not sure how some of them became “The Word of God” with out studying each book or text. Would God use X or Instagram these days?

         As a lapsed Episcopalian, I find it impossible to believe only Christianity has the One True God. Or Islam. Or Buddhism.

          But I find it possible One God is there for all of us, no matter who we are, if we can only see.

          It is not that simple, but it should be. There are some religions, for example, still requiring living sacrifice, either by animal life or human. What do we do about them? Are they wrong?

          No idea, but we need to start thinking and believing in A God of all the World, not a Catholic God, or Islamic God, or Jewish God. We may want to hold onto the idea of Redemption and Rebirth, but they exist in some other religions, too, including incarnation. (Google “samsara”.) Think about your own relationship with an omnipotent, omniscient God and ask yourself whether or not you need a “religion” to support it and justify it. Just think about it.

          And remember: He is everywhere.

** Made you look. Kidding. 2million is an arbitrary number. Use your own.

The Dawn of Man was when, again?

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Do NOT Ai (google) “The Dawn Of* Man”. The result isn’t pornographic or even humorous. Just lengthy. The exact time man “dawned” will never be known but it is fun to think about. Sometime in the past, somewhere where there were no cell phones, a hominoid stood up and said, in caveman language, “I am man.” It’s been a wild ride since. This post has elected to use “Man” as an asexual generic term referring to whatever it was(sic*) we were back in those days. Until fig leaves were found, we probably all looked similarly potato-ish* and hairy, until certain times when nature ordered us to procreate in the most attractive ways.

The idea of The Dawn of Man came up during a conversation with a friend of mine named Al. (Sidebar: the lowercase L and upper case I look the same on my qwerty. From now on Artificial Intelligence will be Ai, with a dotted “i”. Fixing first sentence, now.) Al’s name may or may not be his real name, but any friends reading this will know who he is. Al declined to engage in trying to imagine the time in history when we changed from walking hominoids closely resembling apes, to the eventual rulers/polluters of the world. His point is, well, he doesn’t have a point except that it’s a fruitless exercise and a native-born North Carolinian does not engage in fruitless exercises. When the Civil War was carelessly mentioned, he went off script, anyway, meandering around the Northern War of Aggression he still mentally fights to this day. His only contribution to my inquiry was to tell me he had to air fry some chicken, but then changed his mind to soup, adding “No one is ever going to know, anyway.”

The picture in my head of air frying soup lasted only a moment and the question of when man knew he was The Man, returned. Religion answers the question nicely, with titillating pics of Adam and Eve eyeing each other over a ripe apple. I can believe that because if God wanted it to be that way, that’s the way it would be. But I’m not sure God was that specific, in the early days. My guess is He was trying things out, seeing how they worked. Following this line of thought it’s easy to imagine Him looking at these two particular Hominoids* and saying “Yes, that’s it.” Then, maybe, a bolt of lightning into each brain and—voila—mankind is ready for dawning.

But the Robin Williams comedy lover in me sees a different scenario and it may not be that far from the truth. One hominoid kills a wooly mammoth in the middle of the summer with some shale-tipped spears and reckless abandon. He/She/Them knows the summer sun will rot the meat and comes up with the second, original idea: “I can’t eat all this today.”  He/She/Them thought this, of course, since there was no language and he/she/them had a third idea: “Give some to the others.” But how to express any of these thoughts? (PS the slate tipped spear was the first idea.) It’s my postulation that Sign Language was the first form of communication. Imagine our suddenly smart hominoid running back to the others and dragging them by the arm to the mammoth carcass. Mime may have been invented then, too. It makes sense. Our early ancestors were mimers.*

 We mark time in our history for those events we can chronicle and remember. How we got the ability to chronicle is the subject of many episodes of “Ancient Aliens”. But where the show sees alien encounters all around the world, the “evidence” is really proof of a higher power, a comprehensive, coordinated higher power. It feeds an often debunked but never forgotten evolutionary theory we are in an ant farm, and our lives are directed by the Ant Farm Owner. He/She/Them could make us do whatever he/she/them wants us to do. And somehow, they gave us just enough intelligence to contemplate free will versus fate. Genius.

So, the “Dawn of Man” is when we were dropped into the sand. And when we die (see last post) we get plucked out and thrown in the garbage bin. Unless our owner gives us a decent burial in a match box.

Make a movie about that, Stanley Kubrick.

Comments welcome, and sorry, Al for plopping your name in here.

         *Google grammar says all these are wrong. As if I care, anymore. I’m old.

Morality? Logic? God? Belief?

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The subjects listed above are “hot button” philosophy subjects debated, discussed, and verbally torn to shreds over the many centuries since man gained enough free time to stare at his navel. Morality is a major topic because it underpins the nature of society, at least a successful one. For my money, I always thought morality came from God. All Christians feel the same way, and it puts atheists in a bad jam: how can atheists be moral if they do not believe in, and hear the Word of God (WOG) directing them?

I did an end run around the conundrum by accepting full-throated agnosticism and allowed morality to be the WOG, if He actually existed. Lazy, lazy, lazy man. There are those among the enlightened who think the existence of evil negates the concepts of morality as the WOG and dumps the whole idea of Morality into a recycle bin for another generation to bring up and hash, I mean, hack to pieces.

At my age its hard to learn a new trick but just now I stumbled upon an article that sparked an “Aha” moment. Entitled “How a Huguenot Philosopher Realized That Atheists Could Be Virtuous” by Michael Hickson, the author exposed me to a philosopher heretofore not on my reading list: Pierre Bayle. In Mr. Bayle’s book “Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet” published in 1682, Mr. Bayle presented an argument for atheism that settled once and for all the question of atheism and morality.

“It is no stranger for an atheist to live virtuously than it is strange for a Christian to live criminally. We see the latter sort of monster all the time, so why should we think the former is impossible?”

In 1682. It is a statement loaded with Logic. (capitalized to show how important it is). Logic. What a wonderful thing. Logic. No matter how many times I say it, it keeps its meaning. Logic is “a particular way of thinking, especially one that is reasonable and based on good judgement” says an unknown google writer, probably an AI personality. No, they didn’t have AI in 1682, nor did they have the benefit of instant communication. Mr. Bayle’s statement, therefore, about the “sort of monster” he sees “all the time” must have been from first hand experience. Sadly, it is a statement as true today as 1682…343 years later. Religion, belief, morality, all seem unchanged after nearly four centuries. Why?

I’m getting the book and reading it, but–with apologies to Spock and all offended Star Trek fans–we might be better off with lives based on Logic instead of Belief. As a possible Clue, The Bible’s WOG “Golden Rule” is loaded more with logic than faith. You have to wonder why.

As usual, a short space makes for an oversimplification, but is it?

Of course it is, since the modern sophists among us can easily rip apart the “reasonable” and “good judgment” parts of googe’s AI statement, But will the rest of us let them?

In this day and age, Logic is taking a beating. Forget–for example–your politics and wonder how many good, reasonable, and moral people there in the world waiting for…aw, forget it. We pay football players more than we pay police. Is that logical?

We’re doomed, but I’m going to find out about that comet.

Why Now?

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Mysticism: a belief or experience involving a direct connection with the divine or ultimate reality, and can also refer to an altered state of consciousness.

No one really understands the brain. We’re close, but not close enough to mapping the 86 billion neurons making up an average brain. Add to the complexity, each neuron can have hundreds of thousands of synapses, or connections to other neurons. 86 billion times 100,000 equals…

So when someone says they have a mystical experience, what does it mean? Is it in fact a connection with the “ultimate reality” (safe way to include all deities), or is it a misfire, a malfunction of something in the synapses and neurons?

As a young man, I experienced episodes of “dazed happenings” lasting from 30-60 seconds. They were times when my mind went wandering and I let go, resulting in feelings of connection and “great peace” with the world. They faded with maturation but were never forgotten. I labeled them “Grace Periods.”

With the onset of The Calamities in 2023, and after months of drug treatments and radiation, the Grace Periods tried to make a comeback. Maybe. In the months following treatment, the “mind wandering” would start, but the first few times it continued down a darker path and felt like approaching death, so I fought the wandering and found my way back to “normal”. Subsequent UNC research revealed a name and possible cause: Orthostatic Imbalance from too much potassium. Limiting potassium and quick, body position changes ended the “Dark” wanderings

But as you can probably tell by my last post, the wandering has returned. And if the wandering is unchecked, the result is trees talk to me and there is beauty everywhere. God’s beauty, or the “Ultimate Reality’s” beauty. Its a funny thing (strange funny) to feel. “Things” disappear. Things like worry, anxiety, pain, the unfathomable, bottomless questions about “being”. All gone. Nothing but contentment. Not happiness, just a feeling everything will not just be okay, but it will be what it is meant to be. The wandering is still not understood. But, all is well.

As a senior citizen, my first understanding of why these things happen is the close relationship to death. Or closer, relationship of age. A few months back I wrote about a midnight revelation (See: “Whoa…really?” from May 10, 2024.) which may be related to the Grace Periods.

A rational, scientific mind could interpret what I’ve described as the misfiring of complicated bionic equipment and connections in an aging brain.

A mystical person, however, would revel in the evidence of a Grand Design from the Ultimate Reality, who has something fantastic in mind for one of His/Her/Its creations.

Maybe someday we’ll know but right now, both explanations sound right to me. Contentment is a wonderful thing, even if it’s not understood.