Statue at Fuller Seminary

 I came across this one day while I was walking through Fuller Seminary’s campus.

Found this in the archives, I think this is where it should go:

I have a proposal for how we can manipulate our biological drive to spread our genes to achieve a Rawlsian veil of ignorance in real life.

What do you think of this statement?

“Parents should be able to work hard and provide a better life for their children.”

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Then again, why should someone have advantages just for being born into the right house? Furthermore, this kind of thinking promotes destructive competition. Parents won’t support something for the good of all over something that is good for their own child. If I can pay to get my child a better education, or pay to make the entire educational system slightly better, I’ll advance my child.

We can avoid this with the baby lottery. You have a baby, it gets taken away and replaced with a random baby. Your baby is probably living off a single mother’s minimum wage check. Do you want a living wage now? Your baby probably doesn’t have health insurance, how about some health care reform? Your baby is going to the ghetto school. Still think schools should be funded on property taxes? The baby lottery makes the advancement of society more important than your own shortsighted goals.

There may also be some ideologic advantages. You probably don’t want your baby to go to hell. But what if your baby ends up in a family that isn’t religion X? You have to accept that random chance (almost definitely) condemned your child. Or you have to accept that God probably won’t hold your random starting position in life against you. Then you might really wonder whether it makes a difference if the wine (or grape juice) literally or figuratively turns into blood. You won’t know if your religion requiring you to hate gay people means you are hating your own child. Given the wide range of possibilities of your child’s ideologic starting point, you might start to take John 10:16 seriously: “I have other sheep, which are not of this fold.” (Obviously this is either referring to Jesus’ visit to the native Americans as chronicled in the Book of Mormon, or to aliens, or to good people of other religions. You pick the most likely.)

The worldwide baby lottery would be even better. Are you going to let politicians convince you to send your lottery baby out to war, possibly to kill your biological baby? How does diplomacy sound now? Whenever you see a dead child on CNN you have to ask yourself, was that my baby? Osama would have to ask himself: “Are those infidels I’m trying to destroy my parents?” 

As you can see, the baby lottery solves almost all of the world’s problems (I didn’t mention racism and genocide, but those will obviously be extinct in one generation of baby lottery). So I think I’ll make it my platform. Or we could just forego the baby lottery and start helping those in need, being more tolerant, and being less shortsighted now. Save your babies and vote against republicans (the neo-cons specifically).

Update: I should have googled it first: The baby lottery already exists and in a more awesome form than I envisioned.

“Do the gods of different nations
talk to each other?
Do the gods of Chinese cities
speak to the ancestors of the Japanese?
To the lords of Xibalba?
To Allah? Yahweh? Vishnu?
Is there some annual get-together
where they compare each other’s worshippers?
Mine will bow their faces to the floor
and trace woodgrain lines for me, says one.
Mine will sacrifice animals, says another.
Mine will kill anyone who insults me, says a third.
Here is the question I think of most often:
Are there any who can honestly boast,
My worshippers obey my good laws,
and treat each other kindly,
and live simple generous lives?”
-Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind

Have you ever had that dissociative feeling that your consciousness is slightly outside your body? This wasn’t like that at all. In that case, you feel like a kind of strange, disconnected relationship to your physical body, but you’re very much aware that your body exists.

This (religion-induced, hallucinogen-free) vision was different. My physical body fell away and I was existing on a plane that had a cosmic scale to it. I didn’t feel any locality in this plane, but I definitely felt small in the presence of its grandeur, or maybe that my identity was diluted into something vast. This place communicated with me in a way that didn’t use words. But it was short. It was like a single word that communicated directly with my being. And then I fell back to where I was praying with, well, a very special person who I’ll illuminate later.

It’s hard to connect with the reality of an experience like that. Invariably your memory of the event is shaped by how you proceeded afterwards. At the time, I don’t think I was sure what it meant, but later I was sure that I knew. (to be continued…)

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
-Rilke

As I’m currently transitioning relationships I’ve been thinking a lot about what has been important and what has been missing in previous relationships. Above all, I think an acceptance of the other person as a person, as a solitude, is essential. What makes relationships bad is to think that our borders are under attack. You should never have to defend your border from someone who purports to care about you. But so often, people attack to defend their own borders. (Western) religion is a good example of this. Someone can care about you, but as long as part of their identity is dependent on others sharing their beliefs, there can be no stability, and there can be no peace. Their very identity is an attack, and they can never achieve love in the sense Rilke has described.

But what wondrous things can happen when you can truly let your defenses down around a person. In that case, a person is free to be who they are. Being around someone who makes you feel even more like yourself than usual is a wonderful feeling.

On the other hand, I can remember having a “Christ-based” relationship. We would pray together and read the bible together. We were both searching for answers, and it was a very intense relationship. But that relationship, I guess, could only go on as long as we shared the journey. If I’d left the journey, that would invalidate the other person. In the end, it’s hard for me to rule out the efficacy of a religion-centered relationship assuming you’re both centered in the same place.

“How could they think that about me?”

My girlfriend and I were talking to a couple’s counselor. Of course, the counselor wanted to hear about our pasts, and our relationships with our families. I really didn’t think it would be a big deal.

I started talking about my alienation from my family because of religion. I said that according to their beliefs I was going to hell, and when I started saying “How could they think that about me?” I really totally lost it. Out of nowhere, the flood gates opened and I was really sobbing for the first time in a very long time. I didn’t even know how much it hurt me that I could never be close to them.

If I have one wish for religion it is this: that it always helps people connect to themselves and people around them as who they really are. The problem with salvation theology is that it strips our humanity away to be replaced with a stamp from god. You can never see past that stamp and therefore you can never really connect with anybody.

How to convince an atheist to become a Christian

Given my experience of youth-targeted evangelism, I was happy to see a relatively benign guide to converting atheists. In my experience, evangelists go for the quick conversion by applying, for instance, typical mass persuasion techniques that get emotions running high, then asking for conversion at a person’s most vulnerable point. These conversions are largely meaningless events that are quickly forgotten under cooler circumstances. The other method I know for convincing people to be Christian is for them to be raised and pressured by their community.

What I liked most about this guide was the emphasis on living an excellent life and providing “your secret” to anyone who seems interested. I think this is optimal, it doesn’t attack the other person or their beliefs, it just shows another option. In fact, I’ve wondered about how to convert Christians, specifically the Christians who are as miserable as I was under that regime. I think this is something like the way, to show them how happy I finally was to stop believing in contradictions, to stop quelling doubts, and to stop going through motions that were either without meaning or hypocritical.

This is one of the reasons I don’t discount religion entirely: if it helps someone lead an excellent life, a life they really want, then it’s a valuable tool.

Masturbatheism, n.

The belief that a God who watches you masturbate does not exist.

A clarification should be made here between the two major schools of masturbatheism.

Orthodox masturbatheists strictly believe that it is nonsensical for God to be interested in people’s auto-erotic habits. Since most conceptions of God include divine voyeurism, there is a large overlap between atheists and masturbatheists.

Weak masturbatheists only believe that God isn’t interested in watching them masturbate while they are actually pleasuring themselves. After ejaculating they revert to belief in an omniscient, omnipresent God. This includes most Christian males.

I’ve been hacking through Unqualified Reservations. I’m not sure I want to make any statement about what I think about it, because that’s what that author wants me to do, and the author (UR from now on) has made me paranoid about finding an unimpeachable foothold in the philosophical landscape. It’s possible UR’s flights of fancy and intellectual backflips have no connection with reality, but I appreciate sticking to a theme and examining it from many sides. To the best of my knowledge the theme is:

Ye shall know them by their fruits.

People can say whatever they want about philosophy, belief systems, and labels for them, but we’re all historically situated somehow, and our actions (or beliefs about practical everyday things) can always be traced back to that situation.
Step 1: Recognize this.
Step 2: ???

Atheists may rail against the illogic of god, but does it carry less weight if they believe in a whole bunch of other illogical things?

I say, not really. But I also say that people aren’t atheists because of logic. So maybe I want to join UR’s crusade: I want to know what people really believe and why they really believe it. UR picks philosophical/historical schematizing of beliefs, I pick an introspective phenomenological approach. While UR gets to use awesome words like cryptocalvinism, I’ll get to examine how masturbation affected my faith as an early teen. Both fun approaches, no doubt.