Wean ourselves of that spiritual narcissism

new noise

Don Cupitt: "Jesus' sayings have a better chance of being original than his life. About his life, we don't know much, except that he was crucified. He was a wandering Jewish teacher, traveled around Palestine in the first third of the first century for a few years, then he fell foul to the temple authorities in Jerusalem and he got crucified. But otherwise, he's really known for the first 20 years or so after his death simply as a moral teacher. And then, the supernatural beliefs about him began to develop. People began to believe that he was risen from the dead, that he had been the christ or the messiah designate, exalted to Heaven, and so on. Those beliefs developed very rapidly, and they soon hit his moral teaching. I'm thinking that the moral teaching remains very interesting and original, and deserves a look.

"...The original Jesus, oddly enough, never endorses the law of Moses, can't really be described as an orthodox Jew, but can't really be described as teaching any Christian doctrine at all, anyway. He's more like an Eastern sage...Jesus was the first modern radical Humanist.

"...I copied out the 20 passages in the Old Testament where the ancient Jews dreamed about a better world in the future: the kingdom of God on Earth. In all those passages, it's a secular, good society that they're asking for. The sort of good society that Karl Marx, and liberalism were still asking for all those centuries later. So it's a basically secular ethical dream of a society in which human beings really do get on better with each other. And [Jesus] sees the way to it is getting rid of living under an external law and instead learning to live from the heart. Jesus takes from the Jewish prophets the idea that God himself recognizes that the Torah has not worked, it has not made people righteous. Instead, God's spirit would have to be put into people's hearts, or the law would have to be internalized."

Philosophy Bites | Don Cupitt on Jesus as a Philosopher

come on, kitty-kitty-kitty

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

New York TImes | The Case for Working with Your Hands

"What you call the external world is as much you as your own body." – Alan Watts

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
–Carl Sagan

If you're reading this, you're still alive.

One day Solomon decided to humble Benaiah Ben Yehoyada, his most trusted minister. He said to him, "Benaiah, there is a certain ring that I want you to bring to me. I wish to wear it for Sukkot which gives you six months to find it." "If it exists anywhere on earth, your majesty," replied Benaiah, "I will find it and bring it to you, but what makes the ring so special?" "It has magic powers," answered the king. "If a happy man looks at it, he becomes sad, and if a sad man looks at it, he becomes happy." Solomon knew that no such ring existed in the world, but he wished to give his minister a little taste of humility. Spring passed and then summer, and still Benaiah had no idea where he could find the ring. On the night before Sukkot, he decided to take a walk in one of the poorest quarters of Jerusalem. He passed by a merchant who had begun to set out the day's wares on a shabby carpet. "Have you by any chance heard of a magic ring that makes the happy wearer forget his joy and the broken-hearted wearer forget his sorrows?" asked Benaiah. He watched the grandfather take a plain gold ring from his carpet and engrave something on it. When Benaiah read the words on the ring, his face broke out in a wide smile. That night the entire city welcomed in the holiday of Sukkot with great festivity. "Well, my friend," said Solomon, "have you found what I sent you after?" All the ministers laughed and Solomon himself smiled. To everyone's surprise, Benaiah held up a small gold ring and declared, "Here it is, your majesty!" As soon as Solomon read the inscription, the smile vanished from his face. The jeweler had written three Hebrew letters on the gold band: gimel, zayin, yud, which began the words "Gam zeh ya'avor" -- "This too shall pass." At that moment Solomon realized that all his wisdom and fabulous wealth and tremendous power were but fleeting things, for one day he would be nothing but dust.

Wikipedia | This too shall pass

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan

You can watch episodes of Cosmos here.

thoughts unsaid, then forgotten

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface.

WikiSource | Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind | Preface

Image | Dutch/Californian artist Bas Jan Ader was last seen in 1975 when he took off in what would have been the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic. He left behind a small oeuvre, often using gravity as a medium, which more than 30 years after his disappearance at sea is more influential than ever before. | Bas Jan Ader

In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

In addition to the twelve main gods and the innumerable lesser deities, ancient Greeks worshiped a deity they called Agnostos Theos, that is: the Unknown god. In Athens, there was a temple specifically dedicated to that god and very often Athenians would swear "in the name of the Unknown god" (Νή τόν Άγνωστον Ne ton Agnoston). Apollodorus, Philostratus and Pausanias wrote about the Unknown god as well. The Unknown god was not so much a specific deity, but a placeholder, for whatever god or gods actually existed but whose name and nature were not revealed to the Athenians or the Hellenized world at large.

Wikipedia | Unknown God

frens

In A.D. 64 the Stoic philosopher Seneca pondered friendship. The Stoics’ intellectual adversaries, the Epicureans, had claimed that a man sought friends for purely instrumental reasons, “for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains.” But Seneca knew better. A wise man wanted friends “so that he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit, or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands.” Kindness was man’s duty but also his joy: “No one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purposes. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.”

The Believer | The Problem of Other People

Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself

Quote: Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

"Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!" - Alan Watts

In the history of physics, we have learned that there are distinctions that we really should not make, such as between space and time… It could very well be that the distinction we make between information and reality is wrong. This is not saying that everything is just information. But it is saying that we need a new concept that encompasses or includes both.” Zeilinger smiled as he finished: “I throw this out as a challenge to our philosophy friends.

The Reality Test

image: Jan Vormann, "Dispatchwork"

lighting matches and dropping them into a wet glass

"The Cynics emphasized that true happiness is not found in external advantages such as material luxury, political power, or good health. True happiness lies in not being dependent on such random and fleeting things. And because happiness does not consist in benefits of this kind, it is within everyone's reach. Moreover, having once been attained, it can never be lost."

Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World

title: smog

image: phil elvrum