War on science

"WAR on SCIENCE" declared the poster stuck to the street lamp. Yes, I thought, finally. I looked closer. It's a film showing at the Brunswick theatre, a place that I know shows good films and interesting documentaries. So I looked it up. And was sorely disappointed. For this BBC film is yet another in the "Evolution vs. Intelligent Design" debate, featuring Richard Dawkins. It's not the war I hoped for. It's a war by pseudo-scientists on pseudo-scientists.

But the war on science needs to happen. Not by intelligent designers, or other fundamentalist groups with horrific political agendas. It needs to be a war of liberation.

The past few centuries have seen the increase in the power of science. It has, in many ways, been a fantastic force in the liberation from oppressive religious power structures, and through science many good things have been accomplished. Because of this, more and more people have knelt before its authority, hoping that it will explain all the mysteries of the cosmos better than theism did. And it does. But it's become an idol, and it's been subverted by exploitative capitalism.

People trust science. People trust scientists. People trust those who speak for scientists, in language that they can understand. People trust far too much.

The movie The Future of Food impressed on me how bad this has gotten. The movie shows how rich, heartless, US corporations have turn America into a genetically modified wasteland, for the sole purpose of profit. GM crops are no better for the consumer, and don't solve the worlds food shortage. They are simply there to protect profits.

Intellectual property is the same way. Those companies are trying to patent the worlds seeds, which word give them omnipotent control over food production, allowing them to decide who lives and who starves. After hearing from Harpers that "The United States Department of Agriculture gave preliminary approval for the large-scale cultivation in Kansas of a strain of genetically modified rice that contains human genes," (Findings, May 2007) it seems that those corporations (along with many other medical corporations) are now in the business of patenting human genes, and so it doesn't seem far off that a person born is already corporately owned. Will we then need to pay dues to live? To work as slaves?

And talking of medical, I just read another Harpers article, Manufacturing Depression: A journey into the economy of melancholy, which is written by a therapist/writer who agrees to undergo drug testing for depression. The article is superbly written and shows the blatant lies the drug corporations use. Towards the end of the article he writes, "I am already deflated when I arrive for my last interview. Of course, there's no place in the HAM-D to express this, to talk about the immeasurable loss that I think we all suffer as science turns to scientism, as bright and ambitious people devote their lives to erasing selfhood in order to cure it of its discontents." "[The doctor's] chippy now, like she's trying to convince me that I ought to take my improvement and go home happy, another satisfied customer. And really, it doesn't matter. Because the point here is not to teach me anything about myself, or for them to learn anything from me. It's not even to prove whether or not omega-3s work. It's to strengthen the idea that this is what we are: machines fueled by neurotransmitters at the mercy of our own renegade molecules."

Similar things can be said in the world of electronics (where corporations receive their yearly taxes as we 'upgrade'), in munitions, and in any other place where science can be used to exploit. Science is no longer that wonderful thing we worship as science. Science is corporate-controlled ideology, designed to entrap and exploit. We need to lose faith in science, and go to war against its priests.

The result of mixing Irigaray, caffeine and magic

From whence, here one comes, as flailing,
flying, falling down.
He bites. Bites the air.
And, as landing, springs as hero, as superman-
ing. Swirling, he misses. The doves scream. Trees
cry. crying. cries.
The void. There, the shadow, the blackness
ceases to distinguish the three. Fire remains, the
only one to illume. No wonder we loved it.
But we unrealised (fail to) that we are the
three. The three are in us. Are us. The fourth, our/are
rest. Rest,...rest.
They two, they realised the three, embodied
it for all of us. They sing of it. They are the
bards, the song itself. They teach the way,
but still we seek fire.

Sinking
The flame, our desire, is extinguished. We must see
it go out. Pray for its death. For the
onset of decay.
It burns as we start to feel the earth,
the second. It wells within, pounding on high.
And the first flows. For air is third. In the flow,
the her, we find ourself, as she shows who we are.
In relation. Why .we are.

The-enpanism

I'm curious if my last post was bad/boring or if people were to busy to comment. So I'll try something shorter.

I've talked a lot about pantheism (all is God) and panentheism (all is in God) before, but Chris mentioned to me that N.T.Wright talks about the-en-panism (God is in all). I think I like it, but I'd like to hear what people think. What does it mean? What connotations does it have? Where does it put God and us? What is 'all'?

My a(nti)theism

Reading John Robinson's The Human Face of God, I came to the interpretation that Jesus attempted to abolish theism. Paraphrased, "No longer do you see God as a being in the sky who steps in to do things, you see God manifest in the actions around you when a person helps the poor and sides with the oppressed. The only way God is present is when you make God present through your actions."

I like it, for I see theism manifesting itself as an exploiter and oppressor. Theism (which I'm taking to loosely mean "belief in a transcendent being/consciousness") seems to be made manifest in three ways:

1. Deism: God created, then has stepped back to let it happened. This makes God an irresponsible jerk who seems to take pleasure in watching his (sic) creation squirm and cry out in pain.
2. Total order: God, being omnipotent, controls everything. However, this not only legitimates oppressive power structures (who model themselves off God), it also makes God responsible oppressing the poor and favouring the rich. If God controls everything, it's his (sic) fault and I have no responsibility (as I am merely a puppet).
3. Semi-deism: God occasionally steps in, and will make it all OK in the end. This is the worst of both. God is responsible for oppression and is evil because he stands back when he could and should act (he didn't stop the Holocaust sooner, even though he could have). He (sic) is also an excuse for non-action and takes away human responsibility and agency as there is a 'promise' that it'll all work out in the end regardless of what I do now. This eventually results in omnipotence and total order, as per number 2.
   

I called attention to the male language because I think theism cannot escape being patriarchal (which is another problem). I also want to clarify that I am not an atheist in the sense of Richard Dawkins, et al, because 1) I'm trying not to be a dick, and 2) I prefer the idea of mythological panentheism.

Quebec City Visit

I've realised that I didn't post anything about my trip to Quebec City, the last weekend in February, 23-26th. It was a fantastic time. Here's some pictures.

Infinite Ecology?

Catherine Keller, probably my favourite theologian at the moment, builds up a mythology/ontology which is very much in line with Process Philosophy. In her book, Face of the Deep, she argues for creatio ex profundis (creation out of the depths), instead of the traditional (Christian) creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). She talks about the depths as the infinite potential from which everything (be)comes. What I want to pick up on here is the use, and maybe the need for, the infinite.

Wendell Berry, a wonderful, ecological, Christian, agrarian writer/poet/novelist/farmer, also writes about infinite. In The Art of the Commonplace, he discusses how people have often seen a huge resource and called it infinite. For example, the vast forests of North American were considered infinite, until they were cut down. The oil 'reserves' have been described as infinite, but now we are (probably) past peak oil. Fish in the sea were considered infinite, but now some of the most abundant are on the soon-to-be-extinct- (or even the extinct-) list. For the problem humanity has made has been to equate (currently) un-countable with infinite. "Just because I cannot measure how much oil there is currently, I am free to assume there is an infinite supply." This is obviously naive, as Berry points out, on par with assuming the Earth is flat because it looks like it is from where I am standing.

My question in this post: Is the category of the infinite a category that will always be destructive to ecology? The earth (and even the universe) is limited, so is talk of the unlimited, the infinite, something that will necessarily be alien and dangerous to the earth (and to the universe)?

Keller wants to be able to account for the New, for the ability for continual liberation from whatever tries to ensnare, for creativity to never be exhausted, for our options to never be merely A. or B., with no possibility of a C. or D. or E. (ad infinitum). To achieve this, she senses that she needs to make the potential in the chaos to be infinite. Is this the case? The ocean (to which she compares the pool-of-potential) is limited (being part of planet Earth), but it is also a continuous source of creativity and newness (new species emerge continuously in the depths). Is it's creative potential infinite? Or unlimited? Or limitless? Or unaccountable? Or un-countable? Can we keep potential being non-exhaustible without making it infinite? Or is the category of the infinite not as much to blame for eco-disaster as I (and Berry) make it out to be?

One further point worth making is that Brian Swimme (a mythological cosmologist) points out that the universe can lose creativity (I forget whether this was in The Universe is a Green Dragon, or The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos). Spiral galaxies are the only galaxies in which new stars are born (from nebula). However, the universe is no longer producing new spiral galaxies, and seems unable to. In fact, the number of spiral galaxies is decreasing, because when spiral galaxies collide they generally form elliptical (egg-shaped) galaxies, where new stars are no longer born. The universe seems to have lost the potential to create spiral galaxies (star breeding-grounds). Is this an example that demonstrates non-infinite potential? Or is this just that other 'options' were 'chosen', so that although spiral-galaxy-creation may no longer be an option, creativity is still infinite in other ways. I.e. just because I chose to eat banana bread for breakfast, and not an omelet, does not necessitate that potential is now decreased or limited, that is, ∞÷2=∞ (infinite/2=infinite).