Dancing with (the) Plaos...

Economic Life Support

2011-12-10T11:18:00.001-05:00

"A politician and a naturalist were discussing the future of Thjórsárver. Thjórsárver is a world heritage site. The river Thjórsá flows from the glacier and runs through a dip in the highlands, creating a unique area of mountain wetlands, a sudden oasis of green in the bleak black desert of central Iceland. These wetlands are the most important nesting site in the world for the pink-footed goose. There were plans to build a dam and submerge a large part of the area to generate electricity for a new aluminium plant in Hvalfjörđur.
"The naturalist was saying how important this area was for Iceland, and for the world, and for the future of one of the world's most attractive species of geese. To which the politician countered with the 'need to ensure economic growth'. The naturalist tried to enter an objection: '...but do we absolutely need economic growth?' And with that his case was lost, and the politician smiled avuncularly. The politician was being 'realistic': his views were founded on logic and broad perspective. The naturalist was being 'unrealistic', blinded by romanticism and the narrow self-interest of his particular field.

-- Andri Snœr Magnason, Dreamland, 2006, p71.

Economic growth.

The economy in the world today is based on growth. The globalized capitalist system relies on economic growth to continue. Trade, progress, markets, industry, mining, politics, consumption, cities, food—everything today relies upon it. When economic growth slows we get a recession. When it stagnates we get a depression, "with all the desperation and hardship that these words imply". (Naomi Klein, "Capitalism vs. the Climate", The Nation, Nov 2011)

The fear of a depression is crippling to society. On hearing that word, people retreat from the things they most care about, in order to focus on the 'more important' problem. After all, who wants to be against job creation in times of unemployment? Who is for spiralling debt, whether personal or national?

We've seen the effect of this. In 2007 'being green' was in the news, 'eco' was hip, and global action was seen to be urgently needed. Celebrities attending the Academy Awards arrived in hybrids and even politicians dared to engage green issues. But that all changed. With the economic collapse of 2008, all focus was lost. The environment has barely been in the news since, except to cover the failure of Copenhagen in 2009. People aren't interested any more. The coverage of climate change in the media is barely 20% of what it was.

Instead, we are daily bombarded by financial news. The markets have taken the focus from every other issue. And it's not surprising. The markets have unprecedented power in the world, and they are in massive trouble. Their foundational ideology is being questioned as they collide with a sharp rocks of reality. And the reality is, economics based on continual growth doesn't work—the world is finite, and it won't indefinitely supply new markets to expand into.

The idea of economic growth is a metaphor, taken from the living world around us. Trees grow. People grow. Plants, insects and animals grow. They all start small, add to their size by consuming nutrients and resources found in the world around them, and hopefully, they eventually become healthy, adult living beings. But then they do something that our economy refuses to do:

Stop growing.

Once a living creature reaches adulthood, its size doesn't increase. It's growth period is over, and the majority of its life is still ahead of it. At this point, it's reached a relatively-sustainable size. If trees continue to grow past a certain point, they might receive more sunlight for a short period of time, but when the storms come, it will be these over-sized trees that crack in the wind, unable to support their own weight. It's the biggest trees that come crashing down.

Our economic system is more than a tree—it's an entire forest. Nearly everything that can be exploited for growth has been exploited. There are no more significant resources in the world that will be found to keep it growing. And those that are left—agricultural land, oceanic life, biodiversity, and a stable climate—are quickly being used up, breaking down, and reaching their limits.

The economic system has reached the point that it is being artificially kept alive. The massive bailouts of public money that have been donated to private coffers are nothing more than economic life support. They're the last steroid that we can give, the final stimulus that can be used to keep the aged cell walls from collapsing. The era of economic growth is over. It is time for this economic paradigm to pass away, and for a new economic paradigm to take its place.

So where does that leave us? Not communism—that system has already repeatedly failed, and its exploitation of the natural world was at times worse than capitalism. And not libertarianism, civilizational collapse, or anarchy—these just leave the rich and powerful free to prey on the weak.

Instead, we need a new set of policies, laws, methods of economic calculation, and governmental systems that take account of, and respect, nature. We need, as Naomi Klein argues, "an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy." "The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty."

This kind of change of worldview is not easy, but it's also not impossible. We live in an emergent world, a world where the present is an ongoing process, and where history is crafted by the choices we make—when combined with our visions of the future.

So what do we need to achieve this? The problem may seem insurmountable, but when broken down into parts, it starts to fit inside our collective imaginations, and so allow us to move away from the grim future promised by deregulated capitalism.

For example, we need to take the money out of politics. We need to re-regulate the markets, and make the markets work for the public good. We need more planning. We need more accountability in governments, and we need to give governments more power. We need to not only increase taxes on the rich (globally, so they have no tax-havens to run to), we also need to make it clear that those billionaires who hold the capital will be the ones who pay for many of the changes that need to be made. We'll allow them to become philanthropists.

But these changes won't just happen—quite the contrary; they'll be strongly opposed (violently at times) by many in the 1%—and those in the 99% they've convinced to do their work for them. The necessary changes require action from you. They'll need you to start writing to your local elected officials—at least twice monthly. They'll need you to switch your bank accounts (and your company's if you have the chance) away from the worst offenders—Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, etc. They will require social movements like Occupy Wall St—and at times they'll need you to leave your day job to go down and join them. And if you really feel incapable of doing nothing else at the moment, at least sign up to several clicktivist sites: Avaaz, 38degrees, 350.org, change.org (but know that clicktivism is only a start—it'll never be enough).

Our future doesn't need to be the grim future of economic and planetary death promised by capitalism. Indeed, de-regulated capitalism is on its death-bed, and the obituary of business-as-usual will soon be written. It's up to you to start preparing for the economics of decline, and to start moving towards a future of interdependence and sustainability. Begin today!

Your device is temporary

2011-11-10T19:19:00.001-05:00

Electronics are temporary. The device you're using to read this blog is a short-term passenger that has joined you for a few years (at best) on your journey through life. It will not last. It will soon die.

Look at your life. How many of the electronics in your life are less than a year old? How many of those replaced previous versions of similar electronics? And how many electronics do you own that are older than five years? Ten years? Probably not many.

I suspect your fridge might be over ten years old. And maybe your electric cooker. But other than that? You computer is almost certainly under ten years, and probably under five (an exception being my father, whose '92 Amiga is almost 20). The lightbulbs in your house will be less than ten, unless you're lucky enough to have gotten energy-saving bulbs early. Then, there's just a chance they'll be ten - but they'll be dying soon. If you have a ten-year-old TV in the house, it's probably in the attic. The TV(s) in use are flat-screen, bought in the last three years. If you're like many Torontonians, you put your old CRT out on the street, a piece of worthless junk. And your phone is probably under two years old. A four-year-old phone is almost a museum piece!

All this demonstrates the temporary nature of electronics. Humans have been around for 2 million years. Homo sapians for 200,000. Agricultural society has been around for 10,000 years, and writing has existed for around 5,000. Electricity has been generated by human-made machines for 150 years. Assuming environmental degradation doesn't wipe out humanity in the next few centuries, humanity could well survive for many more years - maybe millions, possibly hundreds of millions. But how long will our electronics last?

Most of our modern-day electronic gadgets require a multitude of rare elements. Although not all that rare, they are still limited. Natural reserves will run out. But when? According to the Guardian, global demand is around 200,000 tonnes/year, and we have 100 million tonnes economically viable and accessible on the planet. That would mean we have 500 years of supply left (if we foolishly assume demand is steady). I've been unable to determine how much of this is economically viable to extract.

However, things don't stop when the total supply is spent. Some things become impossible when the first few critical elements becomes unavailable. That could be by the end of the decade, as Hafnium, Indium and Gallium run out. Furthermore, things will run into problems when China stops exporting. It's likely to do so in 2012, and it currently controls 97% of the worlds rare earth mining (a lot comes from Mongolia - sometimes called Minegolia!). We could see a major price hike in electronics in the next couple of years.

Aside from disappointing human greed, this may not be a bad thing. It will hopefully encourage people to look for longer-lasting electronics, and will encourage increased recycling of electronics. E-waste sites are responsible for polluting large areas of land, and expose the poorest humans to life-destroying toxins. We must press our officials for recycling and waste regulations that take the health of people and the environment into account. Once some of the larger deposits of rare earths are stripped, it is likely to become more economically viable (not to mention more efficient) to create an almost-closed recycling loop. However, this will require laws that force products to be made with recycling in mind. Not impossible, but certainly something that will require widespread public support.

But the biggest problem involved in the temporary nature of electronics is the mining that supports their existence. Mining today is probably the best example of a closed and uncaring mentality that rips apart some of the most valuable parts of the planet. To 'mine' is to 'use up' the planet. Earth is seen to be disposable. The local people, a nuisance. Ecosystems, inconvenient.

Mines are nearly all operated by large multinational companies. Many of these corporations have proven track records of environmental and human-rights abuses. Rio Tinto, DeBeers and AngloGold (to name a few) have all be nominated as the most evil corporations in the world. They repeatedly strip areas of their resources, and in doing so they destroy the local environment, dig up ancient sacred sites, wipe of local peoples and native culture, support and conduct genocide, walk over worker's rights, practice slavery (including child slavery), heavily contribute to climate emissions, poison rivers, steal water, cause species to become extinct, finance violent factions, bribe officials, encourage political instability, and murder activists who try to oppose them. I'd link them all, but you can google each of them pretty easily.

Mining is a major problem in the world today. It is barely regulated, and where it is, the regulations are frequently ignored. It's a problem that isn't going away. You should expect to see the abuses of the mining corporations for the rest of your life. You should look into strategies to stop them. You should get involved whenever you can to stop these corporations from conducting mining, both locally and abroad.

Of course, an important way to reduce the abuses of mining will be to reduce the need for it. The next time you're thinking about buying an electronic product, reconsider. Do you need it? Will it last? Is it worth it? Because every electronic product you buy is almost certainly, in some way, tied to many of the abuses mentioned above. Can you really justify the purchase? And if you can, look for electronics that will last. Look into their production. Look into the supply-chain that brought them in front of you. Be informed, and purchase as ethically as you can.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Hopefully it won't be long before we have fair trade electronics.

Occupy the Future!

2011-10-23T12:49:00.001-05:00

Those who confuse the Arab Spring with the Occupation movement are making a big mistake.

The Arab Spring is a collection of revolts against dictators and totalitarian regimes that have been exploiting and abusing their citizens for many decades. As I write this, the people of Tunisia are voting for their first time. Ever.

The so-called American Fall is a very different thing. It is not the continuance of the same kind of revolutions we've seen in the Arab Spring. It's a different kind of movement. It's not a revolution. It's bigger: it's the brewing of many revolutions to come.

For a long time, the majority of people on this planet have been living in poverty. The vast majority of the people on this planet are in the lower economic class. They have been for a long time. They're use to being exploited. They're used to being bullied by multi-national corporations, and they used to the devastation caused by economic hitmen. In short, they're used to being plundered.

The Occupations are the beginnings of the coming middle class revolution. It is not the revolution. It's only in the past decade that the elite became so desperate that theyreally started plundering the middle class. Now that the middle class are being stolen from, they're starting to get annoyed. We (in the West) are not ready to go to war. Most of us still have too much to lose. A small minority might be ready, but not the majority. Certainly not the 99%. Not even the 9%.

But that number is growing. The flaws in the system that created the economic crash of 2008 haven't been fixed. Indeed, things have just gotten worse. The risks have simply been transferred from financial institutions to sovereign states. And the financial institutions have merged together to create gigantic monoliths - not only are they Too Big to Fail, companies like Morgan Stanley are now Too Big to Save. They can't be saved. Next time they collapse, major Western economies will crash with them. And we're not talking Greece or Iceland. We're talking Germany, Canada and/or the US.

The Occupy movement isn't going to utterly destroy the system, but it is the brewing of larger changes to come. And it is important. The Occupy movement is massive. According to the Guardian, the movement has had around 1.7 million participants worldwide. It's proudly boasting the involvement of people in 83 countries and 1500 cities. The tent city in Toronto has over-doubled in size in a week, and the protest at City Hall we saw yesterday was bigger than the week before.

Furthermore, the Occupation is a much-needed creative breeding ground. Like-minded people are coming together, networking, debating, and coming up with new ideas. It's a long time since Toronto has seen daily protest marches, and the number of NGO's and other social-advocacy groups getting involved is growing. They're also reviving some of the ideas from previous social revolutions. The Suffragettes. The Civil Rights movement. I suspect we are going to be seeing some big successes, resulting in some amazing changes.

However, very few of us want to collapse into either anarchy or primitivism. We value society. But not only that, there's great fear about the results that would come if society did collapse. And that fear is well grounded. Freedom is a double-edged sword. When there's too much freedom, the strong are free to prey on the weak. Sovereign States are meant to protect us from those kinds of predators (Ignatieff may not be a good politician, but he is a good political commentator). And given the abundance of multinational, predatory corporations, we need protection. Governments should be protecting us against this kind of self-bankruptcy, because individuals simply can't compete with (or keep up with) the economic attacks of the financial sector. It is the job of government to protects us from that, and yet most sovereign states have failed to do so. There's safety in numbers. But only if the numbers are aware of the attacks, and so able to defend against them.

Timing the Revolution

A big question I've been confronted with recently has been the timing of the coming collapses that we can expect. There's so many ways our current civilisation will collapse. Environmental degradation and massive climate change will be the biggest of these, and will result in the death of billions of people, drastically reducing human population from 9bn+ down to around 2bn or less. It will also result in the permanent extinction (extinction is always permanent) of over 75% of the species on the planet. Climate change scientists predict this will take place in 40-90 years, although to-date many effects of climate change have been occurring faster than the most pessimistic predictions

Fresh-water shortages will be felt more and more. There's already been conflicts in some parts of the world over water, and water has caused many previous civilizations to become extinct. The effects of this will simply increase with time. In Canada, we'll feel the effects of this once the US march across the border and take our water from us. I suspect that won't happen for another 20+ years.

Another major source of collapse will be oil shortage. Western society is built on cheap oil. The suburbs exist because of it. Our agri-business-based food production rely on it. Transportation depends on it. Given the ex-President of Shell has predicted the gas will be US$5/gallon by the end of 2012, the end of the age of cheap oil could be very close. Once oil is that expensive, a lot of our society will crumble. Mega-cities won't be able to cope with, among other things, the pressures of suburb migration. Plastic will largely stop being produced. Rail- and water-based transit will come back as the main way to travel. We'll need a lot of farmers, quickly - yet farming takes years to learn.

Edit: My math was wrong. $5/gallon is not that bad. I was thinking it was saying $5/litre. $5/litre would have massive society consequences.

However, people have also been predicting the end of cheap oil since the 1970's. We may still have 20-30 years left of it. Furthermore, we'll likely subsidize oil before it's $5/litre - i.e. we'll permanently lose societal capital (to the 1%) to pay for it. Many addicts bankrupt themselves to get another hit. This is an example of something the Occupation could stop.

But one of the other effects of expensive oil is the transfer of capital from the consumers to the drillers. This will exacerbate the economic crisis. The suburbs are so addicted to oil that they will keep paying for it as long as they can - meaning until they lose their homes (foreclosure takes 1-2 years), and until they're increasingly struggling to buy food (again, another 1-2 harvests). At that point, the Occupation will gain major support from the suburbs. But that will be too late to save many victims.

However, I have recently been around a lot of people who are expecting imminent collapse and revolution. I know that this biases my view. I also know there are a lot of people out there who are dedicated to keeping the current system going. More than 1%. Maybe as many as 20% of people in Western societies. These are people who own their house, and people who feel they are still increasing their capital (they just need to feel it to support the status quo). And those might be enough to keep the system going for longer. What do you think? How long do you give it? Is the Mayan calendar a correct (if self-fulfilling) prophecy?

Or am I just hoping for a non-existent apocalypse?

Please comment on my blog, not on facebook (though you're welcome to Like it there ;).

The Age of Fantasy

2010-11-16T16:56:00.004-05:00

Almost a decade ago when I was attending the extremist Moody Bible Institute, Tim Sigler mentioned how the Age of Enlightenment would have been better named the Age of Endarkenment. At the time I wondered how he could say such a thing about the rise of systematic empiricism and reason, but now I'm coming to see that his position is increasingly common. Not only are the fundamentalist Christians giving up on reality, it is becoming increasingly obvious that humanity globally is entering the Age of Fantasy.

On of the ways humanity is giving up on reality is the increasing abandonment of faith in academia. Even intelligent people looking into subjects outside their speciality are often only able to find a terrain of conflicting 'expert opinions'. This leads people into a chaos of confusion, not knowing who they can trust about some of the most basic facts of life. Very quickly the falsities pile up, leading to frequent arguments based on ignorance (I'm sure you've encountered some). Only the very best of our kind will stop an argument to agree that neither of them know enough, and so return to research more.

George Monbiot recently posited the question: "Why does a crazy set of beliefs in one field seem to migrate into unrelated subjects?" He concludes his thought with the following:

To dismiss an entire canon of science on the basis of either no evidence or evidence that has already been debunked is to evince an astonishing level of self-belief. It suggests that, by instinct or by birth, you know more about this subject (even if you show no sign of ever having studied it) than the thousands of intelligent people who have spent their lives working on it. Once you have have taken that leap of self-belief, once you have arrogated to yourself the authority otherwise vested in science, any faith is then possible. Your own views (and those of the small coterie who share them) become your sole reference points, and are therefore unchallengeable and immutable.

Indeed, it is this leap into self-belief that so many have now taken. Adrift in the postmodern Sea of Uncertainty, people increasing settle for escapism and don't even try to find reality. And our world certainly does offer an array of fantastic escape routes - supernatural or virtual, temporary or ongoing. "Anything is possible in Second Life" claims the popular online game. Primitivist John Zerzan writes, "Immersive and interactive, [virtual reality] provides the space so unlike the reality its customers reject. ... It is 'less lonely and less predictable' than the life we have now. This inversion of reality is the consolation of the supernatural of many religions, and serves a similar substitutive function." As humanity looks to the extremes of religion and technology, the world around us gradually loses its existence.

John Dominic Crossan claims, "since the Age of Enlightenment has been replaced by the Age of Entertainment, the future clash would not be between science and religion but between both of them and fantasy." He continues, "In 1999 I never imagined, even as prophetic nightmare, the speed with which faith-based thinking would morph into fantasy-based dreaming to infiltrate medicine, education, domestic program, foreign policy, and even news reporting." That was in 2007. The shift to the fantastic has hardly slowed down since.

We're in a newly emerging age. This is an Age where fantasy seeps into every area of our lives. This is an Age in which every US Republican Senator denies human-caused climate change. This is an Age where people prefer to escape reality than face it. This is an Age of increasing confusion, increasing blindness, increasing non-existence. This is the Age of Fantasy.

GM Salmon Poisons our Future

2010-09-26T09:51:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately the FDA is considering approving Genetically Modified Salmon. They're almost there, and if they approve it we could see GM salmon on supermarket shelves in 3 years. In many countries of the world (including the US and Canada), GM products are not required to be labelled, so the GM fish will stealth their way onto your table without you knowing. But there are significant dangers associated with GM technologies.

For example, the herbicide used on most GM crops (typically rice, soy and corn), RoundUp, causes birth defects if mothers are exposed to it during pregnancy, and the 'safe' levels are often found to be exceeded 10 times over. And that's just one well-documented example. GM life has been linked to cancer and other life-threatening diseases. But that's just the risks to you.

GM crops have never significantly improved yield (as promised), have not reduced the use of chemicals (as promised), have enslaved farmers economically and dramatically increased farmer suicide rates, have given rise to superweeds that are immune to common/safe herbicides, and have spread into the wild to pollute and damage natural habitats.

GM producers have narrow vision. They have repeatedly proven that profit is their God, and they will stop at nothing (including intimidation and even murder) to make money. They encourage mono-cropping (decreasing biodiversity and increasing habitat fragility) and deforestation, and their 'recommended' farming practices lead to desertification. They are destroying the fertility of the soils, and so are reducing the worlds' potential agricultural yields.

GM animals and fish will fall down in all the same areas. They are bad for humanity, bad for the planet, bad for life, bad for everything. Unfortunately the FDA is run/controlled by pro-GM lobbyists. They have no concern for the environment or human health. If GM salmon is allowed, we all get one step sicker.

The FDA don't even have a suitable process to determining the GM salmon's safety. They are using the animal drug safety procedure to approve this fish - now doesn't that make you feel safe!

One final warning: The approval of GM salmon will open the flood gates for more GM animals. We are witnessing the destruction of agriculture itself, and with it, the possibility of sustainable food production on this planet.

Moderation, not Freedom

2010-03-12T12:50:00.003-05:00

"Freedom without limit ends up enslaving, because the strong are free to prey on the weak."

But surely you can't limit freedom, otherwise the freedom isn't real? Not true. Freedom is not an all-or-nothing, but you can discern levels of freedom spread throughout human experience. And when we cheer for total freedom, we end up moving towards totalitarianism, because the strong will abuse their freedom in order to enslave.

The cry of the Left today has to be for moderation, not freedom, because all too easily the cries for Total Freedom can lure us towards dictatorship, giving us a similar fascism to the political and social result of the Right.

We do need freedom, and freedom should be encouraged, but it should be encouraged at the communal and (carefully) the individual level. But freedom should be restricted, and at times quite heavily restricted, at the corporate the governmental level. Just as we should not allow our government to fall into fascism, we also must stop abuses of power that the biggest corporations and most influential people now wield. We must stop our enslavement through advertisements and (parts of) the media. We must restrict their freedom, so that we have the freedom to live meaningful, healthy and free lives.

This excellent lecture (mp3) by Andrew Simms at LSE details changes we need to make to the global economic system and ways that we could make them. It is well worth the 90min listen (although a little slow to get started, but don't be put off) - highly recommended!

Red Wine Carpet Stains

2010-01-09T08:49:00.007-05:00

George Monbiot recently declared "We're losing." He was talking about those who are concerned for life on planet earth, and we are losing to those who wish to continue with the status-quo, regardless of cost. He also recently wrote,

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battlelines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments, and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands. (my emphasis)

This split, combined with the fact that we're losing, paints a truly daunting picture of the future. It's not that those concerned with life on earth will eventually win, and that we're just getting there slowly; it's that our arguments and policy proposals are failing, pollution is opened up more than it is being restricted, countries (even formerly nice countries like Canada) are breaking rules without feeling any consequences, bad infrastructure is increasingly built (like coal-fired power station), and wherever you look, we are losing ground.

Not only that, but we're losing time too - climate change is only going to speed up as Greenland's trapped carbon is released, along with other 'tippers' around the globe. We're not going to avoid a 2C rise. I doubt we'll avoid a 4C rise. There's too much power held by the expanders, too much momentum in their favour, too many ways to make profit from climate change.

For our future is one of violence and death. As fertile land turns to desert, whether through drought, vast temperature increases, GM crops or lack of healthy agriculture (e.g. soil being killed by reliance on petro-chemical fertilisers), the healthy land will increasingly struggle to support the (still) increasing human population. And starvation will ensue. But not only starvation. With starvation comes desperation. And desperation in a world with industrial military power (where there's lots of profit to be made) leads to war.

Of course, war will also come because the expanders want to gain increasing control over dwindling world resources - capital that can be mined and used once, and is then gone forever. But the expanders don't care - as long as they profit.

The human population is climbing close to 7 billion people. It is predicted to increase to 9bn. But the world cannot sustain us - it can't even sustain the current 7bn for long, and the rate at which we are expending and destroying global environmental capital (non-renewable resource use, soil-health decrease, fresh-water supply depletion, etc.) means that in the future we will be able to support even less. And by the future, we're talking the next 50 years.

My prediction, based upon all the evidence (from climate scientists, sociologists, global politics, even from seeing the (increasing) power of the climate sceptics), is that 7 billion humans will die by 2060. That could well be within my lifetime, and quite possibly be within yours. Of course, we may be some of the 7bn that die, and so never see it all, but that won't stop so many from dying.

The horror of our future is only starting to be realised, but horror it truly is. Now is the time to lay to rest your belief in an always-improving society, to challenge people's belief in the 'stability' of status-quo, and to start preparing for the worst of it. Now is the time to realise that red stains in the carpet are really not that important, and that although the future may contain wine (for there's always money to be made from alcohol/ism), carpets will become rare and expensive - a valued resource that you can't afford to replace. And so you will need to know that removing red wine from a carpet is really quite easy: dampen the carpet with a wet cloth, pour salt onto it, leave for a few minutes, rinse and repeat.

If you survive the future you won't be able to afford replacements. Reduce, Re-use, Repair, Recycle, Replace Make do!

Genetic engineering: The world's greatest scam?

2009-09-20T13:50:00.002-05:00

Get informed!

World Government

2009-09-02T15:24:00.004-05:00

Chances are, you oppose world government. After all, world government would provide a centralized structure that would allow those who would abuse such power to focus their attack in one location. Indeed, centralizing power in a world government could produce truly horrendous results when that power is abused. And history has certainly taught us that power will be abused, and that concentrating power only allows for greater abuse and more tragic results.

And so you sit content, knowing that there is no world government (yet) and although people have talked about it here and there, it most definitely seems a long way off - something to worry about a few decades from now, or even further in the future.

However, I propose that a world government is already in place. This is not a democracy, a republic, a monarchy, reptilian overlords, or even a plutocracy. The world government that is currently in place is best described as a corporatocracy (or corpocracy). And this is not a conspiracy theory. It is well documented by one of their own, John Perkins, in his book Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

Multinational corporations and banks have far more power today than governments (indeed, they control some of them). Governments have lost control of their reigns, and the corporations are running free. Their lobbyists exert more influence over the politicians than do the voters, so even democracy is trumped. And when there is danger that some of the largest of these will fail, governments scramble to globally hand over £trillions to stop their demise. They have worked for decades to put themselves in positions of power so that governments depend on them, meaning they can stop government imposed restrictions they dislike, and pressure governments into passing laws that benefit them.

Have you noticed that as people in the world generally seem to want to go to the left politically, much of the world is being steered to the right. Even left-wing politicians are abandoning their positions and becoming right-wing. So who is steering the world this way? Certainly not the voters. What other answer can we give than those who have most to gain from it: the multinational corporations and banks!

Just to spell it out: This is a bad thing. The Corporatocracy has repeatedly demonstrated that it is predatory in nature, and will prey on the poor, the helpless, and the uneducated. And when it comes to their methods, we're all uneducated (or probably innocent). They murder activists, they starve populations, they ferment wars, they steal water, they destroy the planet. They must be stopped!

Worst Events Travelling in Europe Last Winter

2009-08-20T11:16:00.010-05:00

The pictures can be better viewed here.

Staying in the yurt in Wales. It rained every day, and the yurt leaked. Everywhere. Including on us as we slept. Oh, and there were plenty of big slugs – we lined the inside of the yurt with salt to avoid them crawling on us in our sleep. It looked like a weird, demonic summoning circle.

Breakfast in Newport, UK. Greasey, tasteless, crap food, and expensive for what we got. Ick!

Our day trip from Edinburgh to Innerleithen. We paid over £20 for the bus, and then realised we’d been sold the wrong ticket, meaning we couldn’t get on and off the bus as we wanted to, even though the correct ticket would have only costs us £0.42 more. There was an icy wind that day, and the temperature was around -15C. We bought an ice-cream anyway (Innerleithen ice-cream is famous), walked a little, froze, and miserably returned home. And the bus conductors weren’t at all helpful or nice. We really ended up paying £30 for ice-creams and a miserable bus ride. Oh, and we’d been saving up our money for the trip out that day, hoping for a nice day out. Oh well.

Hitching from Toulouse to Tabby’s. And hitting our all-time-low: going McDick’s out of desperation. See the “Unfortunate Events” post.

Laura’s allergic reaction. See the “Unfortunate Events” post.

Laura’s root canal surgery and general dental problems (we went the dentist 5 times in 3 months for the same tooth). It sucked. And it’s still hurting. (The pictures is of the snow we had to dig our way out of in order to get to the dentists, up a steep icy slope!)

Zamora. Getting dropped off at 3am, finding a crappy and not-so-cheap hostel, walking for miles the next morning, only to find a bad hitching point and waiting ages. And finally giving up and taking a bus. Hitching in W Spain sucks.

Andy, our English host in Santa Ana La Real, Spain. He was a complete dick. We worked 7hrs/day for two weeks and only got 1 day off. And he still complained that we weren’t working hard enough, even though we consistently did extra work.

The caravan at Carrapateira – cramped, dirty, there was a broken window so it was cold, and we had to sleep separately. Also, the caravan in Santa Ana La Real wasn’t much better.

The tasteless soup at Carrapateira that was recooked and served for 5 consecutive meals (the pics are of the time I 'fell' into the river, and the huge waves by the local cliffs. Nothing to do with soup really, but good pics!).

Laura also managed to eat a slug that was in the salad at Carrapateira (the picture is of another bug there, not the slug).

Hitching in the Barcelona suburbs on my way home to Britain (alone). It was at a motorway-motorway junction, cars were fast, people were snobby, and there was nowhere else to go. It was hot, and I was low on water. I eventually made a sign that said “Socorro”, apparently Spanish for “Help.”

Random Fun Poetry

2009-08-01T09:19:00.003-05:00

I was randomly invited into a creative writing group in Manchester a few days ago. We did a few words games, were introduced to Ranga, and several of us wrote poems. Here's the poem I wrote (for which I was given the first two words of each line as a framework), along with a few interesting Q&A from the 'icebreaker':

The earth is our only home,
The earth is atomically fractalic.
The sea brings life and death,
The sea - relentless chaos.
The air flutters around us, yet
The air, our air, is polluted by them.
The stars are hidden from cities, so
The stars withdraw into nostalgic mystery.
The sun, in response, grows hotter year by year.
The sun - symbol of patriarchy, symbol of death.

The dreams, they die a scorched death,
The dreams, our dreams, are even now alive.
Wake up, sense this planet is your home.
Step up, step up, make your dreams live.

The following questions and answers were written separately as lists of each (some true, some untrue). They were then put together randomly, giving some rather interesting results. Some may require a little thought:

What is the experience of a cat?
Truth is a process within linguistic subjectivity.

Why does the universe favour the creation of diversity?
There is a colourful bus outside.

What doesn't ever evolve?
There are absolute truths that are relevant.

Will you leave the room please?
Theology is a process that must continue.

Furthermore, is there truth at all?
I breathe a lot more each day than a rock does.

We're Just Animals

2009-07-29T12:22:00.003-05:00

We’re just animals like all the others;
diverse, yes,
and different from them, but still, one of them,
one of them bound to this planet, this earth, this soil and rock and
growing plants,and so tied to its fate, to the pollution we
make, to the way it changes.
Changes in a way that will probably kill us, and we’ll see it in our lifetimes,
our children dying around us in a starving and dying world.

And so much will go, even if we entertain the idea that humans will survive these climate changes,
so much will be lost,
so many species will become extinct,
so much diversity will die,
so many things that will cease to be
in a will-never-happen-again way
in an always-impoverished way.

And the rich won’t escape,
because they still need people and power to move all these people around
and all these goods around
for them.
They may prolong their life,
but that will just mean they see more death around them
and so have an impoverished life
full of death!

Weirdest 12 Events in Europe This Winter

2009-07-08T09:37:00.013-05:00

Going “Fairy Dancing” in Pembrokshire, Wales. That involved doing strange circle dances on the side of a wet hill, with bare feet, treading in sheep shit, to the music of the harp, accordion, flute, and sheep horn.

The drunk trucker who picked us up E of Paris. Drunk, and still drinking. And coming down off cocaine. And high. And convinced that he could drive at the same time as looking at a map and explaining where he would drop us off. And swerving wildly. I guess it was more scary than weird.

Laura spent her time at Isidore’s farm massaging the arses of cows. OK, it was really their backs, just above their arses. But she had to stand behind them in wellies, hardly able to walk because of the shit on the floor and rub them, “so they would get used to humans touching them.”

Playing “Sport” with Isidore’s daughter in Rupt Devant St. Mihiel. This involved jumping over an elastic cord, and then hooking the cord around your nose, stretching it, and jumping free from it. Truly weird. Sadly Isidore himself died in an accident after we left. RIP, you were a great man.

Travelling to and arriving at Tabby’s. See the “Unfortunate Events” post.

The New Years Eve party in France – getting lost on the way (while other people who were lost were following us!), the weird rave tent (with children running between everyone’s legs), the old man who tried to kiss and molest the girls, and the pyro/firework dancer.

Night of the wigs. Again, at Tabby's. With Jean-Baptiste!

The little goat at Tabby’s. I’m pretty sure it was tripping on something, the way it jumped and frolicked, tried to head butt the ground with its horns, and kept falling into the narrow trench we were digging. Weird Animal.

The devil with right-handed cramp. Rennes-les-Château.

The day trip to Andorra. This was meant to be a nice day out to visit and explore the country. Instead, we broke down and overheated the car, packed the engine with snow and ice to cool it, stopped quickly to buy tobacco in Andorra, and then rushed home to meet the new WWOOFer, Geoffrey. Again, with Tabby.

Being taken to Portugal, while hitching, by someone who went out his way for us, took us out for coffee, and yet didn’t understand a word we were saying. And we didn’t understand a word he spoke either (except “Café”, which when we heard it, we were so relieved to hear a word we understood we responded “yes, yes (si, si),” even though we didn’t really have time to stop). We did make it to our destination that night though, so all’s good.

Being picked up hitching by a family of Romanian gypsies. 10 of us packed into the vehicle, with two of the teens on the bed in the back and the baby on a lap. The teens tried to get money and weed out of us to pay for the lift, while the father/driver insisted the lift was free and nothing was asked of us. They were very kind though, and fed us crisps and sweets, dropping us in the South suburbs of Sevilla. Close to midnight in the rain. Which sucked!

On the Mystery: Quotations from the Prologue

2009-06-16T11:13:00.002-05:00

These quotations are taken from Catherine Keller's 2008 book On the Mystery.

"Theists and atheists more often than not share the same smug concept of God. For example, they presume that what we call God is omnipotent and good, that He proved his love by sending His only Son to die for us...
Can we stop right there?
Do you see how loaded with presuppositions just that little sentence is: it presumes that love and dominance work smoothly together, and that nothing that happens to us, however horrible, happens apart from the will of God. It presumes that divinity should be addressed as 'He'. It presumes a Christian monopoly on the truth. Moreover, most folk will assume that these presuppositions are simple 'biblical'. Yet there is, for example, no biblical term for 'omnipotence'. The closest notion, 'the Almighty', is actually a mistranslation of El Shaddai, 'God of the Mountain' - literally in Hebrew 'the Breasted One'!"

"Revelation is not the dictation of some unquestionable piece of knowledge. Rather, it resists knowledge in that sense, the top-down knowledge that masters its objects, that confers power on those who possess it: what the cultural critic Michel Foucault calls 'knowledge/power'. How ironic that Christian theology would become the ideology of the rules. Even now."

"Theology is not better or truer than other disciplines of thought. Indeed, it has over its complex and conflictual history legitimated more violence than any other -ology.
Those who involve themselves in theological questions seek wisdom only as we relinquish any pretense of innocence. Wisdom has always already outgrown innocence. The biblical prototype - the divine Sophia - precedes all creation, after all (Prov. 8:22-23)."

"Often what is called 'mystery' (as in 'Don't ask questions, it is a holy mystery') is mere mystification, used to camouflage the power drives of those who don't want to be questioned."

"Process... means becoming: it signifies the intuition that the universe itself is not most fundamentally a static being or the product of a static Being - but an immeasurable becoming. Indeed the word genesis in Greek means 'becoming'."

"The traditional unchangeables of God may prove to be points of theological fixation rather than fixities of a divine nature. They may be the false fronts of our cultural immobilities: 'God as Unchangeable Absolute' functions as 'Sanctioner of the Status Quo' - even if that status quo is unjust and unsustainable."

"Putting theology in process means freeing it from a deadly mirror game I will call the binary of the absolute and the dissolute. In this polarization, the desire for absolute certainty reacts against the fear of a nihilistic dissolution, a relativism indifferent to meaning and morality."

"This book proposes a way for theology to avoid the garish neon light of absolute truth-claims, which wash out our vital differences. Yet this way will just as firmly elude the opaque darkness of the casual nihilism that pervades our culture - the 'whatever' of indifference."

"Mystery is not a stagnant pool but a flowing infinity."

And that's just the prologue! This book is truly an ocean of treasures!

Our series of (Un)fortunate Events

2009-05-19T13:46:00.002-05:00

We last heard from Tabby by email when we were at Rue Haute. She’d found someone to pick us up from Carcassone, we’d found a train down on the 29th. She was hoping to leave on the evening of the 29th or early on the 30th, so we’d have New Years alone on the farm. When we looked again the train was too expensive.
Then there was silence. In Paris we became increasingly worried about the silence. No response from email, no one answered the phone, and no one called us back from the messages we left. But Céline was coming home on the 28th and wanted us to leave that day or the next. So we set off early on the 28th hitching, not knowing if there was anyone to meet us.
Hitching went fairly well. It was a freezing wind that day, so although we were cold (and quite miserable and depressed at times), we managed to find someone who was going to Toulouse, just an hour from our destination. As a side note, hitching is fun in summer, when it’s warm and dry, and when you speak the language of the driver. Without the possibility of good conversation it becomes a fairly tedious awkward silence.
But anyway, our driver said she’d drop us off on a good road towards Carcassone/Limoux. However, it was getting dark, we didn’t know about our destination, and didn’t want to get stuck in an expensive hotel in Limoux (and Laura refused to camp when it was that cold (I didn’t tell her at the time, but the newspapers that day were reporting ice-age conditions in parts of France)), so we opted to stay in a cheapish hotel on the outskirts of Toulouse.
Unfortunately, outskirts means suburbs, which means awful hitching territory. We got cold, frustrated, bored, wet, lost hope, had hopes dashed, had people who had stopped drive off when they found out that we didn’t speak French, and generally had a hard time. A one hour drive took us 7 miserable hours. At one point we were so miserable we actually, to our shame, ate in McDonalds. We also met someone hitching (his first time) who had been at a péage (toll booths) for 5 hours without luck. That’s always depressing. So we left him walking to find a better spot, and someone quite quickly picked us up in an already packed-full car. I lay across the back seat with a table leg at my throat, desperately hoping there would be no accident. Fortunately there wasn’t, and our driver took us to Limoux, very close to where Google maps had told us to go. However, when we got there we found a barn, and as we continued up that road we found increasingly expensive houses as the road ascended the side of a hill. I checked every mail box and none said anything like “Tabitha Combe”. I even asked a few people and they’d never heard the name. So I knocked at a house, stutteringly explained I was lost, and the man and his daughter found a map and showed me where I actually wanted to go – a village 15km away. My trust in Google maps dwindled. But my trust in humanity increased, as he let me try the phone (still no answer) and then decided to very kindly take us there himself.
As we arrived in the village of St. Couat de Razés, we didn’t know where to go until Laura pointed out the farm was called ‘Domaine de St Jaennot’, and there was a small signpost in the village saying ‘St Jeannot’. So we followed that, which took us away from the village up a steep hillside several kilometres until the sign pointed off down a dirt track. Our driver looked nervous for his clean, new car, but took us down it about 1km anyway, until we saw a house. We went around the back and saw a car, and a woman with her daughter answered the door, nodded about knowing ‘Tabitha’, and so our driver left.
Unfortunately, Delphine did not speak English and her 11 year old daughter Foostine had only studied it for 1 year in school. Nevertheless, we established that Tabby lived in the big house next door and they were renting the cottage, about to move in properly by January 8th (currently living in Limoux and moving their possessions in day by day in their small car). They hadn’t heard from Tabby and had no idea where she was, except that she went to Spain before Xmas. She let us stay on the couches, burn her wood for warmth (her house in Limoux had no heat so we couldn’t stay there), eat the food that was there, and wait at least until ‘demain’ (tommorrow) when they would be back (we forgot to ask what time).
After they left we decided to make a hearty meal for ourselves with a big can of beans, sausage and pork that was in the house. Laura had thought she had an infection for the past couple of days so took some antibiotics (a kind she’s taken before) and we settled down to a game of crib.
After a while, Laura lay down on the couch, a little cold, and not feeling very well. Then it escalated. She said she felt itchy, as if she was having an allergic reaction (was it the canned Cassoulet or the antibiotics?). She took Benadryl and we decided to wait and see what happens. It got worse. The itching covered her entire body and she started muttering sentences like “I feel like I’m going to die,” and “I’m trying to scratch my skin off to make it stop.” But what to do? We were at least 4km from the closest, sleepy, tiny village (it was past midnight by now) and had no access by telecommunications with the outside world.
No wait. We did.
Next door in Tabby’s large house was a phone. I took the torch and went over to see if I could break in. It was pretty disappointing. The windows had big metal bars covering them, built into the old stone. The main doors were thick, metal-studded wood that didn’t budge an inch as I pressed against them and kicked them. It gave the impression of a fastle – an old farm/castle that had been built to stand against barbarian raiders and pillaging hordes. My only hope was the side door – made of small panes of glass with thick wood surrounding them. However, the exciting thing was that the lower part of the door had a wooden board that looked as if it may just be nailed on. The thick wood also was broken at this level and looked like the barbarians had had a go at it with their axes (I lated found out that one of the large dogs from the village had chewed through it in order to get to the female dog inside, Sweetie, that was on heat). Not only was there a board on the door, but I could also see the cordless phone inside on a shelf just a couple of metres away.
Before I broke in, I decided to go back and check on Laura. She was still in agony. So I grabbed the extendible shower curtain rail, went back outside, and prepared to pillage and burn. OK, not burn, just pillage.
Kicking the board off the door turned out to be quiet a task in itself, and I was glad for my previous martial arts training. But eventually it came off and I reached inside. Of course, there was no key in the lock. I later learned that to repel invasions the door was triple locked with metal bars anyway. So I gave up the idea of getting in and reached for the shower curtain rail. Knocking the phone off its perch was the easy part. Getting it to the door with wires, an easel and various painting utensils in the way was much harder, and I was glad for my previous training in the thieves guild and phone-fishing academy.
Picking up the phone I realised I didn’t know the French emergency services number. I tried 999 and 911 but neither seemed to work. So I went back to check on Laura and see if she knew. Fortunately, she was feeling considerably better (pillaging can take a surprisingly long time) and we decided not to keep trying for the ambulance. She took more Benadryl and we settled down to sleep and await the next day.
The 30th past slowly, although not much happened. We explored the grounds, met the goats and chicked, fed them, explored the weedy garden and falling-down mini poly-tunnel (noting them as likely work if Tabby did turn up) and waited for Delphine to return. In the afternoon we found a French Monopoly board outside so we played that to kill a few hours (is ‘killing’ time the ultimate sin?). And we pondered what to do. Should we walk down to the village for supplies (assuming there was a shop, which seemed unlikely)? Or should we pack and leave, maybe to hitch to our next farm in Spain a week early? But hitching on New Year’s Eve can’t be good! Could we even have the 4km walk to the village to hitch with our heavy packs, in the cold, with so much uncertainly about the future and so little money? Or would we just wait and stay here, spending New Year’s alone, hoping for Tabby to turn up? As the day dragged by without a visit from Delphine we decided to do the lazy thing – wait to see what the following day would bring.
Waking up, we soon heard a car around the front of the large house. We went around and met a girl who I assumed was Jura, the person Delphine told us was meant to be looking after the house and feeding the animals. In broken French I tried to ask her, and only after a few sentences were exchanged did we realise that this was Tabby and that, being Scottish, she spoke English perfectly! What a relief! We could talk, we could eat, we wouldn’t have to leave, and we wouldn’t have to spend New Years’ alone. Phew!
Tabby had also brought one of her sister’s friends back from Spain. Matt was a DJ and had been the reason for Tabby’s delayed return home. He was running away from various problems in his life, hoping a retreat in the countryside would be good for him. He’d also run low on money, and so instead of keeping his apartment, he was moving out of it, and it was the moving of 30,000 CDs and 40,000 vinyls to a friends house that had caused the delay. But he was excited to be in the countryside, determined to work hard, and it meant extra company for the New Year’s celebrations.
In fact, after Tabby prepared a New Year’s Eve mini-feast (prawns, Spanish ham, escargot, various sweets, and plenty of wine, we headed off towards a party she had heard about. We drove to a village close by, hoping to meet with some of her friends who knew the way to the party, but they had already left. So we tried finding our own way there, Tabby saying she knew the way. As the time got closer to midnight, we started to wonder whether we would even make it in time, or whether we would have to pull over and drink Champagne by the side of the road. We met another carful of people headed to the same party, also lost, and told them to follow us. Then we went completely the wrong way, driving 15minutes out of the way. Driving back (and seeing wild boar by the side of the road), we found the correct turning, but (not surprisingly) the other car decided not to follow us this time. We arrived at the party at 11:50, met with the friends, and all was going well.
At midnight, the party didn’t bother to stop the music (heavy and loud lyricless dance) for midnight, so it was 12:03 before we realised it was already the New Year, and drank our champagne a little late anyway. Then the car full of people who had followed us turned up, late and looking angry. In fact, they had the look of people who would kill people who merely insulted them, and making them late for a party may well count as that kind of punishable-by-death offence. However, our attention was soon diverted away from them as a drunk old man tried repeatedly to kiss the girls in the group, and the guys had the job of, quite forcibly, keeping him away. After half an hour of stopping his lunges towards the girls, we escape the dance tent to stand outside where it was quiet enough to have a conversation. It was, apparently, also quiet enough to pass out and snore loudly, as one guy had chosen to do. After a little fire- and firework-dancing, we decided to head home.
We later learned that at another local New Year’s party (one that we almost went to and decided not to bother), someone had died from taking bad drugs. Unfortunate for them, but since we decided to stay away, perhaps fortune was smiling on us after all!

Best 15 Events in Europe This Winter

2009-05-12T12:27:00.008-05:00

For more pictures, view the album.

Llandudno beach by the Great Orme – wind, rain, hail, blown sand, sunset, and Laura.
Finding out how cool Céline is while staying with her in Paris, especially because we first arrived to find a party. And then being invited back to spend Xmas in her apartment.
Montmartre, Paris.

Paris - baguettes, stinky cheese, parks, and Christmas.
New Years Eve – Tabby arriving at her farm, speaking proper English again, hanging out, and having a fantastic dinner – escargot, shrimp, Spanish ham, and plenty of other delicacies.
Playing with Tabby’s goats.

Making the garden at Tabby’s place – working as a team, weeding, building the boxed gardens, smashing up crates, spreading compost. Oh, and building the goat shanty-town!
Getting picked up while hitching in Spain, being taken back to the guy’s house (where his wife and newborn were), drinking coffee, and being given bread, homemade chorizo, homemade cheese, beers, and homegrown weed.
Aracena - our one day off in Western Spain. Part of what was great about it was the contrast with the rest of our time there.

Eating dinner with Laura, Lucas and Ashley in Carrapateira after eating crap for 2 weeks.
Building balanced rock towers and sand art on Amado beach, Portugal.

Walking along the cliffs and down to Praia de Amália beach near Brejão, Portugal.
Carnival in Odeceixe, Portugal.

Laura's birthday dinner!
Finding 5€ while miserable and hitchhiking in Sevilla suburbs.

For more pictures, view the album.

The rest of our lives...

2009-04-28T09:51:00.001-05:00

A striking realisation hit me yesterday: For the rest of my life, I will be living in a world that is dying around me.

Everyone agrees that climate change is happening (even the climate sceptics have stopped disputing that). And everyone knows that evolution takes a long time, i.e. millions of years. Life on earth takes a long time to adapt to its surroundings, and when there are sudden changes (over decades, or less), lots of things can't cope with it and die. Indeed, entire ecosystems collapse, having ripple effects all over the place, which upset other ecosystems, causing more systemic failures (i.e. more mass death).

So for the rest of my life, I will be watching life around me struggling (and failing) to adapt to the changing climate. It will be hotter, and it will rain less. There will be drought, and the grass will never again be quite so green, quite so lush. Indeed, soil will dry up and crack up, grass will wither, and green fields will turn brown. The bacteria in the soil, the bacteria that makes the soil fertile and life-giving, will be dehydrated and die. It will stop the break down of other organic matter, stop putting usable nutrition in the soil, and so everything that grows from the soil will suffer.

Trees will produce less leaves, less flowers, less seeds, less fruit. Vegetables will be smaller, the cost of irrigation will increase (as fresh water becomes scarcer), and so the cost of food will increase. My personal projects to grow my own food will become harder to succeed in, and I will see yields decrease.

And of course, I'm not simply worried about the cost of food increasing (although millions of humans will suffer and die because of it). As the world dies around us, we, being part of that dying world, will be dying slowly too. It is well-researched that when people are often around death they are not happy. When everyone is around death a lot, none of us will be happy. Oh, we'll find happiness amongst it all, but we'll be less happy than if we'd been alive in a world that was gaining in life, not losing it.

Depressing? Yes. I sometime have depressing thoughts. But at least we can try to get the message out, try to make things die slower, and try to help as many things as possible survive. In short, we need to try stop the madness that is destroying our world.

We are carpet moths!

2008-08-16T08:18:00.000-05:00

The edges of the carpets I my house were becoming thin. I wondered why, only to discover that carpet moths were eating away the wool in the carpet, leaving the edge bear. Not knowing what too do, I resorted to google, as always! Most of the sites (except the ones selling carpet-moth pesticide) said that pesticide wasn’t necessary, and that merely disturbing them with the vacuum was good enough to get rid of them. After all, they only live at the edges of carpets, never in the middle where people walk and the floor is constantly disturbed.

Humans are also just like this. If we are not disturbed then we flourish. If the political system is stable, then we flourish. If the economy is stable, we flourish. With stability comes accurate planning, careful consideration, and long-term fruitfulness. Politicians know this, and so to win votes, they try to create a stable system, especially economically. Or at least, a system that appears and feels stable. To do this, they will (and do) do anything they can get away with, like lying about statistics (unemployment, inflation), and so use the media to try to present stability. But of course, they only try to achieve the illusion, the feeling of stability. Only good politicians try to actually create stability, and because of unrealistic expectations of the populace (fuelled by the media and ignorance) and the pressure of corporations, there is no room in the world today for good politicians, except at possibly the local level, the level where they have minimal impact (so is not worth it for corporations to work to change the situation).

But the same is also true: humans don’t flourish in times of instability. The US policy in the Middle East for the pasts few decades is to ensure there is instability. Only if there is instability can the greatest looting of resources (oil) in history continue. Only when people in their day to day lives have to worry about food and shelter, will they not have the energy to concern themselves with political injustice, to come together and organise, to throw off the oppressor and thief that the US and Britain are.

This is nothing new. This knowledge has been known by politicians for generations. It is, by now, official policy: cause chaos to steal resources and power, cause stability to get a happy population and thereby win votes.

This is the way we work. It is the way life woks. Abusing this is the speciality of politicians, corporations and economic theorists. And it is up to you, the person, to be aware of this policy and not let yourself become subject to it: to work to stop it happening to you. I hope that by publishing this I am contributing to people protecting themselves from this evil. I hope those who read it do not use this knowledge for abuse.

He who abuses this is evil. He is a rapist. He is cruel and revels in torture. And sadly, he is rich and powerful.

Life by Word, Life by Image

2008-08-05T17:49:00.002-05:00

Just a short post to link to pictures of my travels. Click to view them!

picasaweb.google.com/thugsb

ICS Essays

2008-06-19T12:36:00.003-05:00

These are all the essays I wrote for classes at ICS. The syllabus for most of the classes can be viewed here.
If you find any of them helpful, please leave a comment. And if you use them at all, please let me know!
They all received between a B+ and A grade, the thesis itself receiving an A.
Apologies for any formatting issues - if you would like a OpenOffice, Word or PDF version, please ask and I'll be happy to send them.

Fall 2005
John's Word - Biblical Foundations
Evil Sins - A Critique of Herman Dooyeweerd's Concept of Evil - Reformational Philosophy
Evil Relations - An Experience of the Trinity - The Divine (at) Risk
Evil Times - An Ecological Critique of the Doctrines of Individual Salvation, Dispensationalism, Creationism and Obliterationism - Christianity and the Ecological Crisis

Spring 2006
Reforming the Bible -Postmodern Canonicity - Inter-Disciplinary Seminar: Dialogue and Difference
Opening My Other Eye - Postmodernism and the Diversity of Religion - Postmodernity
CreatorCreation - Boundary and Distinction - GodSexWordFlesh & Postmodern Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis

Fall 2006
Why The Tortoise Can Fly - Knowledge as Mythology in Allen, Ansell, Moltmann and Swimme - Inter-Disciplinary Seminar: Art, Knowledge and Life
From Ground to Ocean - (Ful)filling the Abyss - The Ground of Be(com)ing / The Horizon of Hope: Creation, Time & Eschatology

Spring 2007
Jesus Divines/d (God) - Christological Godding - God Inc.: Christology/Humanity/Incarnation
The Big B's - Guided Reading

Fall 2008
From Ground to Ocean - Robinson and Keller at the Beginnings of Divinity - MA Thesis
If you wish to receive a copy of my thesis, I am more than happy to send it to you. Please leave a comment with your email address and I will send you a copy (you can immediately delete your comment if you are afraid of spammers - I receive a copy of the comment by email as soon as it is posted).

These essays are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Just a thought...

2008-06-16T19:42:00.001-05:00

Dissolving the Ego is great. It is the direction of love, of the Divine, of connection with the world and with others. But those with power in the world seem to have over-developed egos (enabling them to separate themselves from others, the earth, even their own bodies), and since they make the laws (and bombs) it may be necessary to have an ego and not dissolve it. Necessary for our own (cultural and artistic) survival. Sad, but (maybe) true.

Fractalic Time of Life

2008-04-27T15:09:00.005-05:00

We are fractals. Generation to generation. We are self-similar, yet never self-same. We are a repeating cycle, in time, of the generational continuation. My fathers and my mother’s life is like my life - coming to know parents, growing up in a home, growing into an adult, going through various life experiences, death of parents, etc. Those two parts of the fractal coalesce, with tinges and influences of other's (spirals), and as the fractals goes (zooms in), you seem a similar pattern just down the line of spirals. That's us. Who we interactive with, what part of the fractal they are on, gives a huge amount of influence into us. And our job is to create ourselves in a way that is beautiful, in a dance with those around us. To survive, don't just physically be a fractal (as the fern and the shell), but be a fractal in time, mutating enough in every generation to be so significantly self-different (yet self-similar), that you can learn and adapt to survive. That's what every male-female species has learnt, including plants, animals, birds, etc. And at this scale of fractal, everything is more varied, diversity flourishes. But so do diseases, like war - as the ability to kill has increased in influence of the spirals, it has so increased in the influence and scope of its clutches. We must find a cure for that affliction. Somehow, the healthy spirals must find a way to love, to nurture, to cure this disease that afflicts us. It is our ability to exercise complete freedom in each moment, to create the spiral as we live (not think) we should. That freedom, based on previous experiences and influences, to create something new.

Stuese and Engl-ish

2008-04-20T13:04:00.003-05:00

We all speak different languages. What I speak, and what language this blog is written in, is generally called 'English' because I speak the language called 'Engl' - ish. Most of the time, what we (Engl-ish speakers) mean is pretty similar, and so communication happens. But sometimes we can say the same words yet mean completely different things by it. Let's take an example.

If I think of the word 'potato', I immediately think of a brown, lumpy food. As I start to think further, I realise that it is a root vegetable (it was the root of a plant, and it fits into my category of it being a vegetable). The word 'blight' also comes into my head, because of the discussions I've had over the past few weeks with people who farm potatoes (and blight has been a problem for them). This also makes me think of tomatoes, because they are in the same 'family' and also suffer from potato blight (an interesting, memorable and surprising fact as far as I was concerned).

If I ask you to think of the word 'potato', then undoubtedly you'll think different thoughts. You'll also probably start off by thinking about the brown lumpy thing. But then maybe you'll remember that you have just run out of potatoes and need to go buy some (and you'll also remember you need to buy a light bulb, for example). And then your thoughts may drift to the time someone threw a potato at you, and your resentment towards them. Michael (or whoever it was, if it even happened) always was an asshole.

So the word potato started off by giving us very similar thoughts, but quite quickly (in this example) our thoughts diverged and the word had many different and varied connotations for us.

If I write the word 'Helvirid', you probably won't recognise it. As it is, it bears very little meaning for you. If I now tell you that helvirid refers to the kind of sunset you sometimes see where the sky goes through shades of purple, red, yellow, blue and even includes tinges of green (specifically), then that word will take on a little more meaning for you. Indeed, next time you see that special kind of sunset you'll probably think of this word (or try to remember what it was). You see, words in themselves have no (or very little) meaning. It is only when they are given a context and related to other words, feelings or experiences that it can begin to make sense.

(Helvirid is actually a completely new word that I have just invented and decided would be a good addition to Stuese – my own language. (Sunsets need more words to describe their beauty anyway.) It is not found in Engl(ish), yet you may accept it into your own language if you think it is good enough – that is still an open question. It derives from Helios (Greek, meaing the sun) and viridis (Latin, from which we get 'verdant', green). But the point would still apply if I used the word 'Hesperian', which does indeed appear in the Engl-ish dictionary. I'm guessing that before reading this you had not encountered the word (no offence if you had), and so that word was previously not a part of your language (even though it was in English).

Here's an example from my own life. In 2003, when a person would say 'guitarist', most Engl-ish speakers would think of musicians who played the guitar. They may even have some positive feelings towards the word, as they liked guitar music, knew a guitarist, were a guitarist, or wanted to be. For me, however, at that time in my life, the word 'guitarist' had entirely negative connotations. A few times, it even caused me to shudder with disgust. For that word had two meanings to me: a) The self-promoting, proud singer at the front of my church (and many churches) was a guitarist, and that person (and many like him) was just there to gain glory for themselves, which seemed to me to be completely contrary to Christianity, and therefore should not be in church; and b) It referred to the idiots at Moody Bible Institute who would go and play the guitar in the public plaza/square, because (as they said) they just loved to praise God – those super-spiritual bastards were just there to win over the girls, and for some fucked up reason, a huge number of girls fell for them (and being single, that was just irritating – can't the girls see they're assholes?). So here we have a case where a fairly 'normal' and 'neutral' word had massively different connotations between the common Engl-ish speaker, and me, the speaker of Stuese.

Words with multiple, complex and deep meanings to them (like love, friendship, happiness, sex, truth, reality, God, etc.) will always be a little bit misunderstood, because we all bring significantly different connotations and experiences to those words. So when talking about those areas, they will always involve complex conversations and probably a frequent amount of misunderstanding. However, as you talk with a person more and get used to their particular language and connotations, and as you come to understand them more, your language will become closer to theirs, and so the frequency and depth of misunderstandings will decrease.

When it comes to talking philosophically (or linguistically, theologically, etc.), similar problems arise. In my Moody degree (if you can call it that), I memorised and regurgitated facts – the information that I learnt changed me very little. But at ICS, I wanted to be changed, and it was a very healthy environment that promoted that kind of life change. But the life change occurred largely through linguistic changes. I spent 2.5 years learning different meanings and different connotations to words, and then I used those words myself. They became a part of me. I didn't forget (most of) the other connotations I knew previously (and so I can still speak Engl-ish), but Stuese changed a great deal because so many words gained new connotations, and those new connotations have changed my life. Indeed, a great many philosophical books written recently focus on the meanings of just one or two words (e.g. Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (I and Thou/I and You (depending on translation), Erich Fromm’s To Have or To Be, Sigmund Freud’s Das Ich Und Das Es (meaning The I and The It, although it is commonly translated The Ego and The Id, etc.).

But is there a point to changing out language? I think so. I have learnt these other connotations, and I am now convinced I am a better person for it. I am convinced that many of the previous (more conventional) ways of speaking that I used were doing damage, or were not very healthy.

We can see that the society around us is messed up and pretty sick. I am convinced that part of the sickness is in the language used, and part of the cure is to change our language. I want to spread philosoph-ish, because I think it will lead to healthier lives, both for individuals, and for society. I think that many connotations in philosoph-ish are pretty good remedies for society, if only people would learn to change their language.

PS. This entire blog post was written in Stuese. I hope that you have the necessary tools to translate it into something you can understand, but if you don't, post a comment, and I'll try to explain it again. Unfortunately I will always be limited to writing in Stuese, but I'll do my best.

Creatio Ex Omnia

2008-03-26T13:18:00.001-05:00

We are created out of everything. Our actions, our thoughts, our lives – all of this is created in the continuous and Eternal Now (The idea of the Eternal Now mentioned here primarily emerges from Martin Buber’s I and Thou and John Robinson’s Thou Who Art.), created from everything. The Now is created from all-that-was-just-before-now-and-is-no-more-(except-as-memory). Our decisions, made in the freedom of Now, are also decided within the limitations of omnia, of all. All-that-is-no-more is preserved in the Now, which is the collective memory of omnia, of all. Our ability to decide is based upon the pre-existing conditions, as the context for our decision.
I cannot decide to be in Canada now (except by linguistically changing my categories – which doesn’t help me get closer to my girlfriend), because I am in Scotland – that is the context, and the context limits my ability to decide. My Now, sitting on a bed in Scotland (when I wrote this), is created out of everything-that-just-was. The molecules, electrons and photons are (somewhat) limited by their manifestations-just-before-this-Now. And yet, even they have freedom (and since freedom depends on some level of conscious awareness of the surroundnigs, even they are conscious).
If you wish to create something, then you must work towards creating the situation where its creation is a possible decision. To create guitar music, you must have a guitar (at least present, regardless of economic/social ownership). To play good guitar music, you must have a guitar and be a good guitarist, so set up that situation by practising. To create a new song that can be repeated, you need a guitar, the ability to remember what you played (recording it in human memory or e.g. magnetic tape memory), and you need to create the situation of being inspired (whether that means going into the woods, playing/singing about experiences you remember, or whatever). New guitar music that is good do not just emerge into reality – they are created by decisions made in ‘friendly’ situations.
We are created by everything. And so everything has had a part in creating us. If you’re a good person, you’re not a good person because you happen to be a good person. You’re a good person because you have repeatedly made good decisions, and yet those good decisions have only been made possible because the situations were created (by omnia, by everything) for you to make them in – the context deserves a lot of the credit or the blame for the decision (that’s why we have Acknowledgements). For the decider is just a small part of the all, the omnia that is creating.
That which has made me/is making me is not me – it is omnia, the one-that-is-all-(and-includes-me). This One is still creating.
I, the universe, create myself in the eternal Now. I, Stuart, am defining and creating myself in the Now through the decisions I make.

Food for Fought: The Real Problem With GM

2008-02-20T16:03:00.003-05:00

The real problem with GM is not necessarily the genetic modification itself. OK, we don't know whether the GM crops are more or less health, and we don't know whether GM food is detrimental to the health in the long term, because it largely hasn't been tested. But humans have been doing genetic modification for a long time - not in the lab manipulating the molecules, but in the field, manipulating the healthier, bigger grains or fruits to grow more. For example, in pre-industrial, agricultural Peru, there are 2000 potato varieties, with as many as 50 varieties per village - all of which stem from genetic modification by peasant farmers. (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 1977 [1996], 177)

No, the real problem with GM is human freedom. Large agribusiness companies, like Monsanto, are the developers of GM seed, and they patent that seed so that it belongs to them. Farmers then have to pay Monsanto to use their seed. This doesn't seem like much of a problem, at this stage. But we have to look deeper.

Monsanto, et al, have developed terminator seed - that is, seed that will produce fruit one year, but the fruit it produces is infertile, meaning that farmers then have to re-buy seed the following year, and cannot re-plant what they have just grown. This traps farmers into buying seed yearly. Pretty bad, but again, not the end of the world, especially if their net profits are still up.

The next stage is that Monsanto sues farmers who don't use their seed if some of it happened to land (and grow) on the farmer's land. This happened in Canada, where a farmer was sued after seed, probably from a passing truck (although it may have been purposely planted by Monsanto), landed in a farmer's field - Monsanto then trespassed on his property, collected samples of the crop, and successfully sued him for not paying for their seed when he was growing (just a tiny bit of) their crop. This farmer then had to burn all the rest of his seed (generations of carefully grown and carefully improved seed), because of fear of continued sueing. They destroyed the farmer's life, destroyed the farmer's life work of seed-improvement. This is not unique, and not even unusual - hundred of farmers have reported threat-letters from Monsanto, and have reached settlements that they are not allowed to discuss.

The next stage, once farmers give in and buy Monsanto's seed, is for Monsanto to spread disease that their seed is protected against - any farmer with Monsanto's seed gets a good crop, any without is blighted and yields little or no harvest - forcing them to get Monsanto's seed. This, to the public knowledge, has not yet happened, although it is well within the companies ability and moral structure - it is likely, if not to have already happened, that it will happen soon.

At this point, Monsanto have a virtual monopoly on almost the entire world's food production. As we require food to live, Monsanto also have vast control over our life - if a nation disobeys them, they take away the (terminator) seed, spread blight, removing the food, and so the nation dies.

What is at issue in GM debates is the very freedom of human life. What Monsanto will tell you is that they're just trying to end world poverty. Don't believe them. They're on the path to the domination of human life, and they know it. And they want it. And they are willing to destroy lives to get it. This, if anything, is a cause worth fighting.

Some may say that the activists who destroy fields of GM crops are terrorists. They are not. They are activists, fighting for human freedom where government and society is failing. The real terrorists are the GM companies in their quest for global control. Stop them, and fight to make them illegal - fight to make them stop.

For more info, watch the documentary film The Future of Food (trailer, torrent download, torrent 2). Or go to GMWatch.eu.

DVD, CD and mp3 Morality

2008-02-18T13:58:00.003-05:00

It has now come to the point where it is immoral to buy music or movies.

When an artist creates something, it seems fair that they should be the ones who benefit financially from their creation. This idea is why so many people are for the artist's protection via copyright law (copyright is better called Usemonopoly, for that is both a truer name, and reflects the attitudes of the intellectual property lawyers and discussion).

Musicians have ceased to gain real money from the sales of recorded music. If you wish to help an artist out, go to their concert or performance. For the recorded music industry have succeeded in taking away the money from the musicians, meaning that when you buy music (either online or on a CD) you are not giving money to the art, but to the corporation who reproduced their art. You are fueling the pockets of CEO's and contributing to the growth of already-oversized corporations. It is these rich CEO's and these large corporations who are fueling our desire for more, who are brainwashing us into consumerism, and so who are destroying the earth. It is immoral to contribute to this trend, and so it is immoral to buy music.

The same goes for movies. Of course, if the band/movie is a very small deal, and if the CD/DVD cases look homemade, or if the music is sold directly from the artist's website, then they probably get most of that money. This would again be moral, and it’s not immoral to invest your money in those artists.

At the cinema you'll often see an advert showing a thief steal a hangbag, and comparing that to steal movies. But is this a fair comparison? No. The crucial difference is that after stealing a handbag, the owner of the handbag is left without it. After downloading music or movies, the owner still has it.

Therefore, because it is moral to download media, and generally immoral to buy it, I recommend thepiratebay, isohunt, and these websites (for streaming TV and movies) to get you started. Of course, you'll need a torrent program to download this, for which I recommend the open-source Azeurus (if you have a fast computer), or old versions of uTorrent (for the low-resources option - my personal choice).

Sadly the law has not yet caught up to the morality of the situation. If you vote for the Pirate Party, then it may eventually do so. But law moves slowly, and so for a long time you'll be choosing to either be legal and immoral, or illegal and moral. For the sake of the earth, the poor, and the artists, choose to be moral!

Also see this excellent Harper's article (for a fuller, better essay regarding some of these issues).

Civilisation of Snitches

2007-12-31T20:39:00.002-05:00

The larger, more successful websites on the internet have many things disturbing in common. One of these is the ability to flag 'inappropriate' material.

This is actually snitching, and this snitching is anonymous. At least to the person who posted the flagged material (the websites themselves know who you are, that you're a snitch, that they can't sell certain ('inappropriate') material to you). But the rest of us lose out. The rest of us are snitched upon. The rest of us get censored, with very little effort on the corporation's part, and very little evidence that it ever occurred. And there's nothing we can do about it, except re-post the 'inappropriate' material.

For example, the video "Censoring Cunt" is a piece of art that shows some of the art that has been censored over the years. It was originally posted on youtube, but ironically it was censored and removed. It is now hosted on google video (owned by the same company), and hasn't yet been censored.

So stop snitching, stop censoring, stop flagging.

A Narrative of Three

2007-11-21T16:31:00.001-05:00

There are three things.

There is the tehom, the chaotic, oceanic pool of potential.
There is the Go()ds, the pluri-singular call to go()dness.
And there is the creation, the universe that is creating itself.

In the beginning was potential. Here, in this undifferentiated nothing is the potential for everything. I'm not sure if time was, or time came to be (in time?). But from this potential, flecks of froth emerged and then dissolved back into potentiality. Each fleck was an actualised potential, a creation, a moment of creativity, a decision of this and not everything.

One of these cosmic decision was to remain. Creativity flared forth in moments, and most of this again dissolved as the matter collided with its correlative anti-matter and again entered the pool of potential. But not all. A cosmic imbalance was born. The decision for this imbalance (more matter than anti-matter, something that mattered) was made. Its agency (who/what made the decision) can be mythologised as The Creator.

Was it here that the Call that is Go()ds was established, or was the call always there, always calling? I don't know. But with that decision, the call changed, for the call was able to call out to (something that) matter(ed).

Difference multiplies difference. As matter continued, it differentiated itself, first as elementary particles, then atoms, nebulous clouds, distinct galaxies, molecules, shining stars, evocative supernova, varied planets, complex organisms, inter-species dependencies, communities, societies, civilisations, everything that is now. And all of it mattered.

The tehom is neither go()ds nor evils, but is the active potentiality for both. In creation, both go()ds and evils exist. The call of Go()ds is go()ds. That is the imbalance. Yet Go()ds is also the balance that allows for matter, allows the creation to matter.

The tehom is freedom. "All creativity entails the risk that the creature will turn malignant, indeed will turn against its creator. Even our own writings, loves, technologies, might turn against our intentions." (Catherine Keller)

Creation is the cutting off of possibilities. I will create this and not that. As a painter paints a line here and not there. However, creation also always creates new possibilities - creation makes possible things that were previously impossible. And so, of these countless created possibilities, some of these will be chosen to be created, and some will forever be cut off from possibility. And some may even remain possible, sinking and rising in the tehom, waiting to crest the wave of existence, waiting to matter.

The moment defines creation. What is now is that which has just been created, and isn't merely potential.

Go()dness comes in many forms. It is one call, yet the calls are multiple. I am called to ecological awareness, to help relieve the suffering(s) of the earth. If I help the poor I am responding to (one of) the call of Go()d. If I enrich a life, I am also responding. Hopefully, in writing this, I will influence my readers toward the Go()ds, and so this creation of writing is a response to the call.

Evil is rejecting the call to Go()ds. Exploitation is evil. Abuse is evil. Rape is evil. Being rich while others aren't is evil. To decide upon inaction when sufferers cry out for you to respond to the call of Go()ds is evil. To waste (time, resources, life, possibilities for Go()ds) is evil.

There are three things.

We, the creation (1), are called to create the imbalance of Go()dness (2) from the fluid potentials of tehom (3).

Note: This was originally called "An Ontology of Three", but narrative is more accurate. It is a way to tell the story of life, not an intention to define 'the way things are'. I advocate narrative plurality.

Subverting upness

2007-11-14T11:36:00.000-05:00

Prioritizing upness is often seen to be patriarchal (see James Nelson's The Intimate Connection), as it is the erection that points up and the male monotheistic deity is often up (amongst other things). But upness is also something that is very hard to not privilege. Historically, power has been associated with language. He who speaks is the one who currently holds the power. And when there are large groups of people, in order to be heard, the speaker is often raised up on a stage or dais. So power is closely connected with those who are raised up, who are higher than those around them.

It has been said that height it so connected with power that it cannot be separated. We can't crouch down in order to be heard in a crowd, and when a voice is muffled by crouching, the voice will lose its power to someone else.

However, there is a story of Jesus subverting this up-privileging. Jesus got in a boat and went out on the lake so that he may be heard. Jesus went horizontally, not vertically. And he still managed to achieve a place from which he could be heard, still retained the power of speech, yet did so in a sideways manner.

So maybe there is hope for those who wish to escape this patriarchal privileging of the erection.

I have never seen a bookcase in a car

2007-11-09T23:35:00.000-05:00

We adore books. Great big bookcases, filled with words, have a special place in the house. There's excitement there, and awesome life-changing power, and beauty, and art, and knowledge (which is art).

Writing is one of the most prized parts of civilisation, maybe even the key to its existence. Writing has been treasured as holy, given authority to direct our lives, seen to portray God's voice, seen to subvert/disprove God's being, and valued as describing the universe. Writing has been dear to human hearts for millennia, it has been the sign of decency, the sign of education, the sign of humanity, indeed, as valued as humanity. It has been said, "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." - Heinrich Heine.

I've seen TV's in a car. I've seen CD racks. But I have never seen a bookcase in a car.

Is this an added benefit to the oil/car companies: a book-free zone for our de-education (deaducation?).

Cars are where books aren't welcome.

God as Freconscwareience

2007-10-17T20:00:00.000-05:00

I'm sick of God being thought of as a being. Even people who no longer think that God is a big person in the sky still use personal, anthropocentric language of God. "God does this, God is that, God listens to prayer," and on, and on. And it strikes me that while the mystics generally claim that God is a word that points to the --- that cannot be spoken about or named, this --- is so difficult to talk about that 'God' quite quickly re-enters the stage, and, at least in the popular realm, God is again brought back into the 'big person' model.

Most recent theology has headed towards panentheism - all is in God. But this isn't always explained, so I'm going to have a go, starting from human experience.

We often assume that God has a consciousness, just as we do. But why? This is (human)consciousness-centric, and human-style consciousness is surely just a recent thing on the evolutionary stage, something that can be seen in homo sapians and not much else. If God is to be seen to be something existing prior to humans, then surely God should not be primarily modelled off of human experience so directly (can we really escape this completely?).

How does a rabbit think? Or a dog? Certainly animals don't think as humans do (although some may assume they do). They have a different consciousness, a consciousness that isn't (as) self-aware. If a dog were to have a God, then the dog's God certainly wouldn't be assumed to have a human-style consciousness. But if humans have free will, then it also seems that the animals would. Indeed, fruit flies do.

What about a plant? It experiences life, and is somewhat aware of its surroundings. It 'knows' when light is shining on it. It is somehow aware of where water is, and where to send its roots. It probably even experiences the pain of the loss of its parts as something eats it or cuts it down.

And so to the pebble. Now you're probably thinking that it's ridiculous to suggest that a pebble experiences its surroundings. But it most certainly does. It experiences the pull of the earth that we have named gravity. It is aware of the rocks below it that holds it in place.

But lets go more basic, to the electron. Is an electron conscious? Yes. In a way. It is conscious that there is a proton nearby, and that it holds an attraction for this proton, and so feels temporarily attracted to it. It feels the other electrons in orbit around the common nucleus. It experiences the close encounter with another atom that approaches, and develops a relationship with it so it shares its time between nuclei. (And as it jumps in and out of existence, maybe even the electron makes decisions and exercises a limited amount of free will?) So even very small things have a certain kind of consciousness, although that word is probably inappropriate for it. But we lack words to describe an electron's experience.

Now lets get big. The earth has been seen more and more in recent times as a single organism. It has long been worshipped as a goddess, mother earth, and it has recently been called Gaia. The earth can be seen to be a single, complex organism, with an incredible variety and quantity of internal and external relationships. And the earth, Gaia, is often seen to be conscious. She is reacting against the industrial pollution of her atmosphere, getting angry and sending storms. But in that last sentence, I personified the earth, making it a her, and using her as the subject of my sentence, the one doing the acting. As a subject, I granted her agency, and to have agency indicates freedom.

And now the universe. By universe, I'm talking about the biggest 'all' that is. As far as I know, that means I'm talking about something that is about 13 billion years old, and probably almost as many light years across. Brian Swimme in The Universe is a Green Dragon pictures the universe as, well, a green dragon. And here (0:11:25), he talks about the universe as having a purpose, in some ways, consciously choosing to head towards greater richness.

But I don't want to talk about the universe's consciousness. That sounds too anthropocentric to me. So I'm going to compile 4 words into one, in order to try to talk about this. Freedom, consciousness, awareness, and experience. Fre-consc-ware-ience. This is my proposed word that allows us to talk about God in a panentheistic schema, so that God can still be talked about, and yet is not done so in an overly anthropocentric/consciousness-centric way. God is the freconscwareience of the universe.

Something to take from this is that God decides the overall purpose of existence. And God, the freconscwareience of the universe, seems to generally choose to go down paths of greater complexity and greater diversity. I've not worked out much more, but complexity and diversity seem to be favoured. Not always. But often. And so, if I am to work alongside God (and not against the universe's freconscwareience), I should also work towards greater complexity and diversity. In this, I find a great deal of guidance.

This plays out in many ways. I encourage religious diversity, and work on the side of causes that try to protect the diversity of species on earth (opposing extinction). I work to protect freedom of expression, and immerse myself in diverse arts. I appreciate different languages, different cultures, and different customs, and hope that they do not become assimilated into my own, losing their uniqueness and identity. I try to have deep, complex relationships with my friends (although they are sometimes exhausting and so I also seek simplicity). I reject simple schemas, quick-fix promises, and paths that overly limit options. I reject stereotypes, and always try to work out how someone could hold the beliefs that they do, only dismissing someone after a great deal of exploration into their world (if ever). I am suspicious of simple answers, and dislike one-size-fits-all solutions. Cookie-cut houses, offices and shops are not my thing. Findings in science are exciting, and quantum physics often helps to show the complexity of life. But science has also gone beyond a suitable level of complexity: we should stop experiments that could create a black hole (we'd all die), we should stop experiments into robotic-free-will (read most sci-fi to see the tyranny of robot-rule (Asimov, Dune, Battlestar Galatica, etc.)), we should slow down research on genetics, and we should greatly reduce neuroscience research, as the possibilities of mind-reading (removal of privacy) and mind-manipulation (removal of free-will) are too scary. But we shouldn't stop all scientific research (I don't think), as complexity is good. It's just that sometimes we're not ready for it. I encourage people to read more, and to write more - create stories, create theories, invent words. Grappling with ideas and thinking about philosophical and psychological issues tends towards complexity. I encourage people to learn about soil, the most complex and diverse substance on planet earth, and as a bonus it will make you happy.

But in all this, I am merely trying to work in the same direction as God, the universe's freconscwareience.

Two thought-webs

2007-09-25T10:12:00.000-05:00

I believe there are two kinds of people in the world: those who assume everyone thinks more-or-less like them, and those who acknowledge that everyone and everything thinks infinitely and sublimely differently. I don't often make claims like this, categorising all humanity into two groups, but I believe this is a somewhat useful distinction to make. I have been both of those people, moving from the first to the second. I believe the acknowledgement of the second type requires a kind of deeper-consciousness. Or at least, it did for me. My world is opened up in variety, complexity and beauty because of it. Let me explain these in order.

The first one I experienced most when I was in fundie-college. At that point, everyone thought alike. It was a simple world, a world in which everyone could say the same thing (e.g. a statement of faith) and mean the same thing (unless you really thought about it, and that was discouraged). Religion could quite easily be based off the idea that people could believe exactly the same thing (although the increasingly-exclusive Fundamentalists at the start of the 20th century seemed to indicate otherwise). And since your friends all thought the same way as you did, you could easily establish relations with them that didn't require much depth to develop 'true' communication. Indeed, it confused me that miscommunication happened at all.

In fact, life was quite confusing. But it wasn't a confusion you worried about, and tried to understand. It was a confusion you tried to fix. For example, I could not understand how it is possible for a man to love a man. It was so far out of my experience that I was quite frankly confused by it. Why would anyone want to live that way? How is it possible? On the other hand, it was easier for me to imagine a woman loving a woman, because I loved women. For a woman to love a woman meant that the woman was like me, which made sense. Of course, it made sense also that women would love men, because I love 'the other sex', and so it was just mirroring that. This resulted in a weird quadruple-standard. 1. Men loving women was normal. 2. Women loving men was simply a reflection of that. 3. Women loving women was understandable, probably wrong, but when I admitted it, somewhat exciting (lesbianism is OK if men get to watch - as long as men gain pleasure). 4. Men loving men was completely wrong. But not just wrong. It was incomprehensible, unnatural, inconceivable, detestable. Because for a man to love a man meant that they must think completely differently from me, and that just wasn't a possible part of how I believed existence to be. They didn't fit within the understandable world, and so they needed to be brought into my world, they needed to be 'fixed'.

My acknowledgement that everyone thinks infinitely sublimely differently emerged over time and involved many sources. As well as discussions with friends, inspiration came from philosophical books that discuss how animals think and experience the world (such as Berry and Swimme's The Universe Story, Barry Allen's Knowledge and Civilization and Langer's Philosophy in a New Key), Keller's book on relationship called From a Broken Web, along with literature like Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These books opened up the thoughts of others to me in two ways: 1. The way something thinks and experiences the world is intimately tied to its brain/consciousness, and 2. Every moment brings with it the complex web of previous experiences, through memory, and everyone's life experiences are amazingly varied and different.

The first of these may be brought out by asking how the first, single-cell organisms 'thought' (see The Universe Story for a more detailed examination). This first life provided the universe with an amazing accomplishment: memory. These first cells had the memory to know how they were created, and so could replicate themselves. They knew how to bring together groups of molecules in such a way that they could form them together to be chemical-copies of themselves. These tiny creatures worked at the molecular level, taking amino acids and changing them, giving them the spark of lightning-life that they themselves were 'born' from. How did they feel? How do they experience the world? Certainly not in a empirical or rational scientific way (these being recent human creations). Without nerve endings, they didn't experience touch in the same way that I do. Maybe scent gets closer, sniffing out the suitable amino acids, and knittings them together so they may pass the spark of life on. But it certainly isn't scent in the same way that I smell. Indeed, their experience of life is amazingly different from my experience, and that difference comes out in their experience of other lives, other life-forms, other sensations and sense, and other ways of appreciating time. A lead-on and provocative question that stems from this might be, How does a photon experience existence and time?

The second opening up of my experience comes from the recognition that everyone brings a great deal of 'baggage' to every experience, through memory. In this sense, baggage is not necessarily bad (or good), but it is always limiting - baggage means I experience the world in this way, and not your way, not that way, not any other way. The baggage I refer to are the relationships and associations I draw between the present experience and the past experiences that I relate to the present. If someone says 'snake', every person present will immediately connect it with multiple associations and think of completely different, highly nuanced things. One person may think of the time when they were bitten by a snake, connect that experience to the biblical serpent in Genesis, relate that to temptation and evil (through the teachings they have heard (through language)), and before they can say anything they shudder with disgust. At the same time, another person may immediately think of their pet snake. This sends them off into thinking about the religious symbolism of snakes from a different tradition, where the shedding of skin symbolises new life and the shedding of old habits, which the person then relates to escape from oppressive conservativism, and so they're response comes out in a smile and a sentence, "I love snakes, they're so beautiful." With just a single word, two very different responses are evoked.

The possible difference in experience between humans is of an amazing magnitude of diversity. This can especially come out in the experience of time. Where one person sees time as a succession of 'now's, so that "one, two, three" occurred in different times and places (my experience when at fundie-college), another person can view time as a single, monistic, and eternal 'now' (more like my experience now, through the influence of Robinson's Thou Who Art, Buber's I and Thou, and a great deal of (Christian) liberation and aboriginal writing). In this eternal Now, freedom is in the decisions I make, yet they would always disappear into non-existence, except for memory. Memory preserves the no-longer by making it re-membered in the Now, and so re-membering is a very active, creative decision, allowing the otherwise-no-longer to affect the Now and so to have a continued existence (although in that existence it is ever changing as its re-membering fluctuates in the fractalic complexity of universe). Yet I also believe that these are just two ways to experience time that I have had, and that not only are there other ways, but that everyone's and everythings ways are different.

However, I won't leave this blog with the fundie-college in too bad of a light (see, light can be bad, again - also see Mollenkott's chapter, Godding in the Dark). For it's not just fundie-college that goes with the first assumption. It is also the common liberal stance. You've heard it: "Christian fundamentalists are just deceitful, they know that they're preaching is a lie." But that isn't the case. Speaking as a recovering one, I know I was not lying when I spoke - I believed it, it was true. I thought differently from 'liberals', and so would have been put into the same 'inconceivable' category that I then put gays in. The typical liberal cannot understand fundamentalists in a very similar way that fundamentalists cannot understand gays, because the assumption of both liberals and fundies is that everyone thinks just like me.

Maybe the fact that I separate humanity into two categories (rather than allowing for the 6 billion categories I really need), undermines my claim that I acknowledge that everyone thinks differently. But I advance this idea as a heuristic tool, as a way to help people think, so that they may better understand the world from their own, unique, and infinitely complex perspective. Don't dismiss someone because they're in the first group - their experience is more nuanced than anyone could ever define.

Unbearable Shitlessness

2007-09-17T13:12:00.001-05:00

'Shitlessness' is the forgotten definition of kitsch. Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being includes a section that details this. To put it another way, Kitsch is a world without shit. Kitsch isn't just those idyllic pictures of landscapes with cottages in the snow, kitsch is the political speech made to win you over - the world of the political ideal, where the shit of life does not exist. In those speeches, shit is reduced to nothing so that man can build his foundation of a good society.

But we must not be fooled, for shit is essential. Shit, decay and death are parts of life that will always be. Any political vision of the future worth listening to will talk about shit. For shit does not just means the sewage system, that we would sooner forget about than remember, shit connotes the 'shit' parts of life. There is shit in all our relationships, our food, our economy, our thoughts, our health.

In the SCA, I heard the following statement: "we're recreating the past 'as it should have been', no pests, no disease, and no prejudice." This is one of the clearest examples of shitlessness, or kitsch. Re-enactment groups will inevitably make kitsch. The worlds they build will be kitsch, for the shit takes place in the rest of the year when they are not '(re-en)acting'. This is the principal reason why these people (of whom I am currently one) do not attempt to live in this enjoyable way in the rest of their lives. They know it to be impossible, for it does not take account of the shit.

I'm now going to quote a part of Kundera's book that is important to me, if unrelated to the above:

[An] image comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around the horse's neck and burst into tears.
That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes [who held that animals had no soul and were machinae animatae]. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.
And that is the Nietzsche I love.... [I see him] stepping down from the road along which mankind, 'the master and proprietor of nature', marches onward.

I want to become like Nietzsche. I also suggest that you read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. If you've read it, read it again.

Rich Fundamentalists as Evil Personified

2007-09-12T12:21:00.000-05:00

I've read a few articles of Naomi Klein's new book (read and watch), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It's pretty scary, and I believe she is hitting the nail on the head. Be warned, for you will soon be picking up scraps in war-torn ghettos. You and your children. Unless you are some of the richest few on earth, who have the money to buy the mercenary security to build walls around their homes. And if you are rich, YOU ARE EVIL. That's something I've come realise. I've tried to argue against it, but I have had to finally admit this. To become rich you had to exploit people, to remain rich you have to despise (poorer) people, as you are rich your riches will make you dependent on them, and to hold on to your riches you'll have to be prepared to (hire someone to) kill people - starving people, people fighting for justice, for life, for family, for love, for the destruction of evil. We, the poor, will be fighting the rich because they are/will be the living embodiments of evil. If you are rich, stop being evil - give away your riches and cease your source of income (don't just quit your job, work it out so that your job no longer exists). Heck, I'm just repeating what Jesus said.

The other thing I have gained from these articles (and that's even without reading the book!), is that the whole debate between science and religion is a ruse. It's stupid, and it's fake. The problem is not religion, or lack of, the problem is fundamentalism. But fundamentalism doesn't just come in religious guise. It comes in scientific, it comes in political, it comes in economic. Indeed, economic fundamentalism is what is causing and fuelling Disaster Capitalism. The sphere of life isn't important - fundamentalism can mutilate life and planets through any of them. Fundamentalism is the problem, not religion or science or whatever else. And fundamentalism doesn't care which area of life it hitches a ride on, but it also will steer you and everything around you to hell.

Oh, and high taxes are good. They allow structures to be built for everyone, not just the rich.

Parallel is boring

2007-09-05T15:02:00.000-05:00

We live in a time when so much is parallel. Look at your computer screen and count the number of parallel lines. Look at your desk, your window, your room. See how much of your life is parallel.

It's become boring. We talk about a person being square, but I think we should talk about things being parallel in a similar way. A parallel line just imitates the other line it's running parallel to. How boring is that! Accept no imitations!

I strikes me that far too much of this civilisation is based on being parallel. It'd be nice if parallel was exciting, that a steady hand had carefully drawn or crafted the few parallel things I saw. But I see to much. You don't find parallel much in nature. Instead, you find fractal. That's infinitely more interesting!

Parallel is boring.

I am not a hero

2007-08-20T19:05:00.000-05:00

Ancient mythology, from the 'heroic era' (3000-1500BCE), deeply influences society today. We play out these same patriarchal myths through so much of our society. Books like Wild at Heart exemplify this. Our concept of heroism, of self, and of what it means to be a (hu)man all depend upon these myths: Heroes only become heroes by killing a she-monster and winning their prize of a female-object.

I have played Dungeons and Dragons since I was 16. I am only now asking myself, can I still play? For DnD is a purposeful reiteration of these myths. My character goes out to kill and to rescue. So I decided to build a character that would no longer kill the monsters that are killed by patriarchy.

However, when I tried to do this, I realised the character was not feasible. Aside from Tiamat, there are a great deal of other 'creatures' in DnD that occur in patriarchy-perpetuating myths. These include Medusa, gorgons, hags, mermaids, dragons, most sea-monsters, snakes, spiders (think of the ultimate evil of the drow with their matriarchal Lolth-worship), harpies, and chimeras. In fact, it goes deeper. The 'types' that DnD assigns to these creatures also stop my sword, for how can I kill such repressed creatures as 'outsiders', 'beasts' (from whose perspective are they beasts anyway?), 'aberrations', and 'monstrous humanoids'?

Indeed, I must consider what 'monster' means, for all these creatures are listed in the 'Monster Manual'. Aristotle wrote, "Whatever does not resemble its parents is already in a way a monster, for in these cases nature has... deviated from the generic type. The first beginning of this deviation is when a female is produced..." (Genesis of Animals). So the female is the start of the monster category, and everything else is lumped in with that, except for the 'generic' man. Interestingly enough, 'human' is not in the Monster Manual, and so may be the only thing the character could kill. Let's reduce that further, to say that men may be all the character could kill.

So it seems that a feminist character is impossible in this game. Squeezed out into obsolescence, a party member that would be worse than useless. For within a patriarchal world, the female has no place. Catherine Keller writes, "'The characteristics most highly developed in women and perhaps most essential to human beings are the very characteristics that are specifically dysfunctional for success in the world as it is' (Miller). And creation of new worlds presupposes, dangerously, some sort of success in the world-as-it-already-is on the part of the would-be creators." (From a Broken Web, 22).

I have already taken issue with playing DnD because of its political and religious naivety (with its anti-pagan witch-burnings, its elitism, and its focus on power-over), and because of the greed of its producers. However, I believe this is the 'killing blow' to the game, from my perspective. For if by playing I am forced into perpetuating a damaging, patriarchal mythology, then I will not play. Playing would go against what I am trying to work towards (and away from) in my life, so I will no longer do so. Edit: (Through the comments I received about this post, I changed my mind and will still play.)

This is my own opinion and my own decision. I do not expect any of my DnD-playing friends to follow me, nor do I wish them to feel guilty because of me. But I'm curious what they think of this post. :)

War on Science, 3

2007-06-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

Reading eco/liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff, I am inspired to make my War on Science a trilogy.

The first article, Weather: The Hour of Reckoning, is a summary of an article by Waldemar. It starts by saying, "Some say, especially in the wealthiest countries, which create the most pollution, that technology will solve the problem of global warming. That way, they will be able to continue spending and living with abandon, as did the ungodly people of the times of Noah." Clearly, technology won't save us. He goes on, "Others, more sensible, talk of attitude changes and worry about the poor countries that are, to begin with, the most vulnerable. The solution could be to reduce growth in the wealthy countries, and to stimulate the development of the poor, to reach a common point of sustainability. But, who believes in that? Is it not easier that a camel pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich to enter the kingdom of reason?" Despite efforts, the rich-poor divide is increasing, and we seem unable to stop it. And further, the rich are building more and more defences, to make sure that they retain their wealth, even though this will take more and more human sacrifice (and we thought the collapsing Mayan's were ignorant, when their priests increased human sacrifice!). And his conclusion? "Could it be that climate change is the whip of God, who will reestablish justice, if only temporarily? What could not be done through reason and love, will be done, with great suffering for all, through the great and eternal laws of nature." Could it be that civilisation collapse is Gaia's/God's will, and ecological disaster is the tool? And that those who are working to change and keep the civilisation are working against God, prolonging and perpetuating the evil that Gaia hates?

The second article is Nanotechnology: ¿the «Little Brother»?. In this article we are told about the potential threat of nanotechnology. "But hold on," I hear people say, "Isn't nanotechnology one of the richest sources of potential medical healing? Can't nanotechnology be used to cure diseases that nothing else can?" Maybe. But it's clear from those questions that people believe what they're told about it, and forget to think further. For example, history also tells us that advances in technology are also/first employed by military powers. The potential damage that nanotechnology could be used to do is not, and never will be, worth the medical benefits. Never. Boff writes, "Nanosensors that now control all the processes of the so-called «intelligent agriculture» could be used to control persons and populations. It could be the enthronement of the «Little Brother», performing the functions of G. Orwell's «Big Brother.» Since they are invisible and microscopic devices there is no defense against them."

We must end technological development, and we must assist the collapse of the civilisation.

Two Quotations

2007-06-11T10:27:00.002-05:00

When the oppressors came to us, they came with their tool, which was, they were defining everything for us. They had to define our culture as being savage. They defined everything that we did as backward. They defined our source of healing as witchcraft, you understand, meaning what they had, they had the power to define.

-- by Makhi, from the trailer to the movie Masizakhe (let us build together)

It is a fact of technology that it is easier to fly to the moon than to reconstruct a broken egg. Something organic has been destroyed. Something new must be built.

-- Organic, by Elite Terrorist from the album 'Mission Control Presents: Prehistoric Sounds'.

Boycott Wikipedia

2007-05-29T09:15:00.000-05:00

Sadly, I've recognised another promising website to be something I can no longer support. Wikipedia started with the concept of it being the voice of the people. Now, it has been run over by wikipolice.

The first thing that helped me to realise this was that my own work was removed. I edited the page on Rousas Rushdoony as such. After this, for a time, the page had a flag indicating it's neutrality was disputed, and there was some discussion as to the sentence and link that I added. However, the page is no longer disputed, and all mention (including the discussion) is gone. There is no trace of the discussion at all. Now, I wouldn't mind my work being removed too much, but I object to the discuss being erased.

Another instance is that someone tried to add the wikipedia entry, Plaosmos, using many quotations from this blog. I accept that I may well be one of 10 people in the world who know and use the word, and that most of them may not even like it. But why remove it? This is what remains. Plaosmos is considered nonsense. So I clicked the link about nonsense, and the reason they gave for removing the page is: "Content that, while apparently meaningful after a fashion, is so completely and irredeemably confused that no intelligent person can be expected to make any sense of it whatsoever" (my emphasis). But why? I've made (at least some) sense of it. Am I not an 'intelligent person'? Am I just a person? Or a deranged one? Or not a person?

And then it struck me. The problem is that wikipedia is based off a myth, and one I cannot support or invest in. Wikipedia wants everything from a 'neutral' viewpoint, but there is no neutral viewpoint. What it ends up getting is everything from a mainstream, majority viewpoint. That is, mainstream of internet users, who are composed of the richer 6th of the world. And wikipedia carries quite a lot of authority, at least for the lay users, meaning that it will (passively) attempt to impose this myth of neutrality onto those who read it. As more and more communities get online, they will be met with this monstrous myth, which comes down to the modernist myth of objectivity. Objectivity, as we have seen, is a deeply oppressive myth that is part of the climate change and poverty problems in the world (at least legitimating many of them, if not more).

The wiki idea is good, the problem is with its size. I'm seeing more and more that big is bad. Small community wiki's can be wonderful, but as soon as a global wiki comes in, it will impose itself on other communities, posing as the (only) one community (have a look at the authors page to see this).

I'm not suggesting, as this site does, that wikipedia has a conscious agenda of oppression. It's agenda isn't conscious, it's not-thought-through and naïve. I'm instead noting the tendency toward homogenisation and problematic mythology, and hopefully, sowing the seed of distrust-for-liberation yet again. Here's a discussion about neutrality, to which I added a comment.

It is with sadness that I realise this tendency and decide to boycott wikipedia. I am starting to think that it should be renamed WERMpedia, because it is the pedia of the Western, English-speaking (even other languages are often the English translated), Rich (computer-literate, educated), predominantly-Males. It was so promising, but I now find its promises to be lies. Sadly, even the Urban Dictionary is policed and I'm beginning to wonder what good on the internet remains.

War on Science, 2

2007-05-25T12:34:00.000-05:00

I'd still like comments on my previous post (Divining), but I'll post this anyway. I found a flyer on a table in Kensington Market, Toronto. Of course, it's ironic that I'm posting this online using software that is in continual development. Anyway, here's what it says:

Advancing Technology Causes
Scarcity, Poverty and Environmental Damage

We are now seeing the negative economic consequences of environmental damage and resources running dry. The result is that people are falling towards and into poverty. Advanced technology has become unproductive and is creating this condition of economic decline.
Technology uses resources and as more technology is used, more resources are used. Actual economic output declines as a larger proportion of resources go into keeping the technology going rather than into actual usable output from the economy. This is going on while the total available resources are fixed or declining. It is no surprise that the expansion and progress of technology is making us poorer.
The economic effects of technological progress:

10% of electricity is now used to run computers.
The energy of .9 kg of coal is used to generate and transmit 10 megabytes of data.
The use of computers is doubling every 8 years.
The use of computers is growing at such a rate because computers are increasingly becoming able to do any type of job.
Productivity stopped increasing in 1976 and has now started to decline.
Decreasing incomes, in particular low paying jobs, are becoming the norm.

Natural resources are the basis of all economic activity and wealth generation. An ever growing use of increasingly powerful computers means that the depletion of resources is accelerating.
The current situation in which we are now getting poorer instead of richer as time goes on, is the result of the greater growth of resource use by technology in recent times. Unlike previous technologies, which could only do a limited number of things and which could expand to only a limited extent, computers can keep on replacing more and more human activities and the growth of resource use is accelerating. This creates increasing poverty.
The impact has reached the point that economic output per person is now shrinking. It should be remembered that the amount of economic output is overstated by the commonly quoted Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is greater than the actual economic output because it does not subtract the amount of equipment that is continually being worn out and/or replaced. The actual amount of economic output is the Net Domestic Product (NDP) which is GDP minus Capital Consumption. NDP per person has been decreasing at the same time as GDP per person has been increasing. In fact, GDP overstates the size of the economy by about 15%. The decline in economic conditions and standard of living is clearly shown by the decline in economic output, once the correct measure of economic output, Net Domestic Product, is used.

Technological progress means much greater problems in the near future.
Until recently, we have not faced a condition of long-term economic decline. Since this is a new thing, we should realize how much worse it could get.
Automation is different from other technological changes because it is not limited to shifting some fraction of resources from one use to another, but will continuously absorb ever increasing fractions of available resources and reduce the well being of people on an ongoing basis. This would cause much greater poverty than previous economic declines and the poverty would be for everyone.
Of the greatest concern to environmentalists and people concerned about economic conditions and poverty, should be the expansion of technology that results from advances in computers, as opposed to the unintelligent technologies of the past.

A sustainable economy will stop the economic decline
A sustainable economy, which means a stable economy, is an improvement over the declining economy we have now and are expecting in the future. An economy in which output is not shrinking is the solution to current and even greater future poverty.
Less use of technology and less development of new technology will be a major component of a stable, non-shrinking economy and an environment which is not endangered.

Solutions are low tech
Environmental solutions that are low tech will be preferable. Environmentalists should attempt to create a sense of achieving a condition in which there are not increasing technological impacts on nature and on the economy.

Support the natural world and propose environmental solutions that do not involve high tech.
Criticize the diversion of resources into research and development of technology.
Some of the most advanced developments in technology, especially further advances in computer technology, should be seen as very negative for people and the environment.

Please make use of the low tech approach in your activities, and you can contact us as follows to get more involved:

Coalition Against Technological Development
Contact: Stuart, and if you want the details I'll give them out if I trust you.

Divining

2007-05-14T19:46:00.000-05:00

My thesis: God is a verb (to divine), and should not be a noun. (This may well be my next paper, so comments are appreciated.)

This is something that has increasingly come out my readings of Catherine Keller and John Robinson, although neither of them say it as such. The premise is that we just don't think any more of a God in a theistic sense; that we think of this as being not only silly and naïve, but also dangerous and oppressive (see much liberation theology or eco-feminist work as to why), and yet, that there is something more than flat and dead, mechanical, secular humanism (to use Robinson's description).

There's several ways that I've come to this. Thinking about the Trinity, and interpreting it in a narrative (rather than an ontological) sense, we have the time of the 'Father' (theism), then the time of the 'Son' (Jesus), and then those who follow Jesus as radical, political liberator (in the 'Spirit'). Jesus, then, "dared to accept the role of sonship, of standing in God's stead.” (The Human Face of God, 217-8) “Put the other way round, henceforth 'God' is to be represented no longer simply as a personified being over man's head, but in and by man and his responsibility.” (218) “'God' now means, for us... that by which he is represented, his surrogate – the power of a love that lives and suffers for others.” (218-9) In short, Jesus showed that God isn't an 'other', a being, but God is only ever perceived (and therefore, is only) in action.

In Exploration into God, Robinson writes, "[the Bible] describes reality much more readily in terms of verbs than substantives." (p.35 ...and if God is 'ultimate reality' as Paul Tillich claims...) Robinson goes on, "The reality [of God... is seen] in action, in suffering, rather than in words." (55, my emphasis) He pulls from Thomas Aquinas (of all people) and writes, "there are common nouns and proper nouns - and 'God' seems to fall into neither category," (58) - so is God not a noun?

Here's a paragraph from my recent paper From Ground to Ocean: (Ful)filling the Abyss. (The 'tehom' refers to the Hebrew word in Genesis 1, which Keller associates with 'deep' and 'ocean of infinite possibility'.)

But we must remember our question: Is the tehom God? And how does the creature/creator, the divine/cosmic, relate to tehom? The short answer to the second of these questions is 'creativity'. In the bottomless tehom, the infinite potential, there is nothing and everything. 'God' is the differentiating, the distinguishing of these potentials. “'[E]verything' in a state of potentiality is no thing,” (Face of the Deep, 180) and so this 'chaotic buzz' needs a decision to be made, a decision which eliminates some possibilities while selecting others to be created. To help describe this Keller uses 'divine' as a verb: “[A] primal Other not separate from but within God – différance in precisely the sense of the originary non-origin... this radical genesis divines the potentiality of the tehom. Its creativity does not create by itself. By itself it makes no difference... The great cosmic decision has been traditionally, with justice, named the creation; its agency, the creator.” (180) The tehom by itself, the potential everything, is no thing – it makes no difference because within it no difference is determined, or rather, divined. God, then, is the process of actualising/ realising/ differentiating/ choosing/ divining the tehom, in an interconnectivity where God is nothing without the potential to be (the tehom), and the tehom is no thing when it is merely potentially everything – without the divine, without being divined. “If the godhead, or rather the godness, 'in' whom unfolds the universe can be theologised as Tehom, the ocean of divinity, the divinity who unfolds 'in' the all is called by such biblical names as Elohim, Sophia, Logos, Christ. ... [T]he names Tehom and Elohim may henceforth designate, if not 'persons', two capacities of an infinite becoming.” (219) Is Tehom divine? Yes, but not by itself, for Tehom as mere (only/oceanic) potential is no thing without Elohim. And is Tehom God? No. For while “Tehom has taken on the names and aura of a certain godness, [it] has never been identified with 'God', nor with the All; it 'is' not pan or theos. It signifies rather their relation... The relations, the waves of our possibility, comprise the real potentiality from which we emerge. So tehom, metonym of the divine womb, remains neither God nor not-God but the depth of 'God'.” (227) Finally we reach a place where we can divine the highly nuanced difference between Tillich and Keller.

War on science

2007-04-26T07:40:00.000-05:00

"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

2007-04-15T12:52:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-13T20:09:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-06T09:22:00.000-05:00

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:

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.
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).
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

2007-04-03T20:25:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-04-02T11:50:00.000-05:00

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).

Stuarting

2007-03-27T19:39:00.000-05:00

Just a quick and kinda weird post. In all the philosophy and theology I've been encountering, we've talked about how we are in a state a becoming, rather than that we are beings. The self has been deconstructed and dispersed in postmodern philosophy and psychology, so that there is not a essence to me, the 'real me' that lies behind what I do.

So maybe, instead of thinking of myself as 'Stuart', as a solid identity, I should think of myself as 'Stuarting', as living out what it means (for me) to be Stuart in each moment of becoming. Maybe. (Note: this post hasn't been written carefully, so I've probably been sloppy throwing around language of 'myself' and stuff. Just ignore it. Or whatever.)

The Sacred Body-count

2007-03-21T12:07:00.000-05:00

3223 US soldiers have died in Iraq so far!

Terrible! Shocking! That's over three thousand families that are mourning a direct relative, and many more mourning those losses. And that's a good reason not to go to war, and a good reason to get out and end the war. But we need to get past that. Maybe as a non-American I don't care about US troops as much as Americans might. But the reason to stop war cannot be because of the deaths of US soldiers alone.

Much more important is the deaths of over, as a recent estimate said, 2 million Iraqi people. That includes men, women and children. That's a lot more devastated families, and a lot of families that have been completely annihilated. This is a much bigger reason to stop war. The total death count tells much more about the war. And given the Iraq war, and indeed all recent wars, are just the games of the rich, selfish and greedy 'elite', that's a lot of innocent people who have been sacrificed to them, a lot of blood on their hands. The Bush Management (I refuse to call them an 'administration' - those involved are corporation heads who are masquerading as politicians and are working solely for the good of themselves and their corporations) has so far played a game that has killed over 2 million people, and they have played this game in a similar manner to how one might play a game of chess - sacrificing as many pawns as necessary in order to protect (and secure) the king (fuck the queen, she's replaceable).

But the move from counting US deaths to counting total human deaths is becoming more and more important. In a recent article in Harpers magasine, the 'Coming Robot Army' was discussed. The result of robot warfare is that it ceases to be warfare at all and merely becomes 'target practice'. In the world of robot warfare, there will be even less US deaths, and even more potential for killing, even more mistakes. The 3000 vs. 2000000 will become more like 100 vs. 6000000. Or worse. And the traditional cry of "Bring home our troops" will not be heard, partly because so few are dying, and partly because most of them will be home playing the computer 'game' of target practice. Oh, and by the way, they are not ever 'our' troops. They are the troops who belong to the unaccountable multinational corporations by proxy of the a government that sees them as a renewable 'resource', something they can use and exploit to boost their own power and (so-called) riches.

But we also have to go further. Moving on from 'me' and 'my side' centredness, by look at the total death count we have only managed to get to an anthropocentricity. The '2 million deaths' are merely '2 million human deaths'. We also need to count the death and mutilation of animals, of plants, of soil and of land, of the psychology of the survivors (human and none), of beauty (in the landscape and elsewhere), and of future generations (of all living things). We need to count the death of knowledge, of what is forgotten. We need to count the death of genealogies and of habitats. We need to count the death of innocence, and we need to count the death of a healthy society (even if it wasn't healthy before, it was healthier), both in the 'target-practice-zone' and in the rest of the world. We need to count the desertification, the permanent annihilation of fertility and fertile farmland. We need to count the pollution, of land, sea and sky. We need to observe the tears shed by Gaia. And we need to lament.

My sermon for Wine Before Breakfast

2007-03-06T13:07:00.000-05:00

I will be reading a letter which was found shredded in a garbage dump. It's dated March 6th, 2048.

Dear Paul,
I write this to you to inspire you with hope. I am near the end of my life and I remember when life was much different, when we had considerably more freedom, and when global devastation seemed so far off. But you are young and may have many years ahead of you, so let me now pass on to you some of the history of the past few decades.

I am one of the more conservative of our community, although I do not always allow these colours to show. Times change, and so do words. Things that were once wonderful and life-giving can become stifling and deadly. There are days when I wish this wasn't the case, but I know there can be no other way. Those who will try to keep life alive must allow their treasured and prized words to die. You will not remember this, but I remember when the word 'Christian' was a good thing, something that you could be proud of. I also remember when the Ancient Bible was seen to have a revolutionary message, although I know this will be hard for you to grasp. But maybe I can win you over a little before the end of this letter.

I know you're used to seeing the Bible in the hands of the powerful, hovering above their proud heads as they give speeches, held in their fat hands as they make solemn promises which are only lies. I know you are forced to see countless ads with Bible verses legitimating the products they are commanding you to consume. I know you know the verses from Romans 13 about obeying the elites as you obey God, and I know you have heard that Jesus is the only way to salvation. The Department of Hellfire is reserved for those who don't believe this, and I myself will likely find myself dragged there shortly, to be forced to confess Jesus as my Lord before I too burn, as so many in our community already have. You probably even know the verses about stoning gays, and about how you should sell all you have for the pearl of great price - that is, salvation granted by the Consecrated and Holy Global Consumerist Church. You know all about tithing. You know all about Jesus taking away your sins, all about the legitimating of war and evil that occurs because of this. You know that as humans we are called to dominate the earth, to put it as our footstool to serve us. You know of so many atrocities committed because of that book.

But if you can find an Ancient Bible, turn to Romans 14. It says, "Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this - not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother's way. I know and am convinced in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but to him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean." Yes, these verses are saying not to judge. They are talking about the relativity of the world. You may be surprised that the Bible corporations have allowed this to stay in, but they keep everything in the Bible because they know that nothing in the Bible has the power to harm them. The bad publicity they'd get if they started taking verses out of God's Most Holy and Revealed Truth is not worth it for them. They know that the Bible itself, in all its verses, is complicit in the system that they depend upon.

But look again. Our communities' distrust and dislike of the Bible stems from the Bible itself: "To him who thinks anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean." The community decided, after much debate, that the writer of this passage, who btw, you yourself are named after, and who was indeed a political and religious revolutionary himself, this writer would want us to discard his work and move on, developing our own writings and expressions that were useful for our community. St Paul, we decided, would want us to leave behind this book which causes so much pain, and has so much baggage. To us, the Bible is unclean. We decided it, we declared it.

Of course, not everyone wanted to discard the Bible. Many of those formed other communities, some of which have been subverted back to the Consumerist Church, some who have been sort out and killed, and some who still struggle to survive, like our own. But they are few, and history seems to be showing that those who discarded the book have been better able to move on and survive.

While we may be branded Christ-killers and demon-worshippers by the Consumerist Church and media, we also consider the word 'Christian' to be unclean. Indeed, the word 'Christian' has returned to it's original usage: as an insult. However, the roles have been reversed. Originally the word was forced upon a struggling radical community by those who upheld the empire. Today, the word is spoken with disgust by us, a struggling, persecuted, illegal radical community, and the word is spoken about the imperialist regime that holds the world in chains.

The deepest chant of the Consumerist Churches religion, "Everything has a price" is silently repeated daily. I can't find this in the Bible, but those who chant this don't need it. They repeat "Thou shall not kill", then enact the death penalty and seek out war. As they claim "Love of money is the root of all evil", they use money to perpetrate their system of oppression and elitism. Those who speak against it are either undermined as their movement becomes fashionable, and so enters the world of consumerism, or those who speak against it are bought out. If the founders of a movement cannot be bribed (and millions will be silently offered) or threatened into silence (with or without death), any movement which gains enough members, enough momentum, will eventually gain people who do sell out, who aren't as careful, and so can be shown to be hypocrites, thereby showing the entire movement (through the corporate-controlled mass media) to be yet another social group of hypocrites. The chant is repeated, the chant holds true: "Everything has a price."

I don't tell you this in order to depress you, but in order to warn you. All this century and for some of the 20th, people have been trying to warn about the impending global destruction because of climate change being caused by humans. But as history has shown us, we refuse to listen. The system depends upon ecological rape, and is legitimated by its religion. This does not mean religion is bad, but shows again that the excesses brought about because of religion are bad. Exclusion, copyrighted salvation, distrust and hatred for those who are not like you, and who you do not understand: these are the tell-tale signs of religious excess.

I do not know whether you will ever become old as I am. I do not know if the earth will tolerate human life that long. The global civilisation that we are forced to live within refuses to acknowledge that it will be ultimately taught that everything has a price. The price humanity will pay will be the ultimate sacrifice: the sacrifice of all of her children to slow death by pollution. The civilisation does not want to change, it is addicted to its consumption. And because of this, the earth will lose one of its greatest gifts, that of sentient life. But it is a necessary sacrifice, one which I hope the earth can recover from after all her tears are spent.

Paul, I don't want to leave you on a sad note, but I know of no other way. I don't want to demonise the past, but perhaps if I and the Christian communities at the turn of the century hadn't been so passive, our lives now would be very different. Perhaps if those Christians had refused to allow their Bible to become complicit in the system, perhaps if those Christians would have stood up and used their voices, perhaps if those Christians would have changed the way they lived, perhaps if those Christians would have refused to obey the system, perhaps if those Christians would have been ecologically alert and sensitive, changing the way they thought about and worshiped nature. Perhaps if those Christians had used their holy huddles to enact change in the powerful, perhaps then the earth would not have to make this sacrifice, this ultimate, deadly sacrifice. But perhaps those Christians felt as helpless as we do now, perhaps even then the system was too powerful for their religion, too ingrained in their thoughts to allow them to rebel? Perhaps even then they just didn't care enough?

Dearest Paul, I must leave you now as they are coming for me. I have made it to 65, a ripe old age. I hope that this note arrives. I hope that it inspires you to a life of charity, that you enjoy every moment, and live for the future generations, even if their existence is unsure. I hope that Romans 14 may inspire you to "pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another."

Henry

Big/Whole

2007-02-22T14:12:00.000-05:00

Pantheism/Panentheism. A quick thought.

(Crude/ancient) pantheism said that everything, the universe, is God. This means that the bigger something is, the more of God there is. Hence, worship a mountain instead of a pebble, because it's bigger. Pantheism seems to divinise Big-ness.

Panentheism on the other hand says that God is the universe, but that the whole is more than the parts that make it up. So the chemicals of my body may be worth less than $10, and if I sold my organs off individually I'd get around $250,000, but as a whole, I'm worth more than that. Panentheism seems to divinise Whole-ness.

Theism is another kettle of fish, which probably divinises self(ishness) or fear-of-the-other or something. But I won't get into that here. I'm more interested into what people think about the first two - am I onto something, is it a ridiculous over-simplification, or it is unfair?

Visiting DC

2007-02-19T17:03:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I went to Crystal City, just outside of Washington DC. I went for a DnD convention and to see friends from Chicago, but while I was there I also took a few hours to see some of the sights in downtown DC. Here are my thoughts.

The metro was efficient, clean, curvy and ... concrete. Every station (of the ~10 I saw) looked alike and quickly became monotonous. There was no art, no creativity. At the Pentagon stop, there was a poster advertising "Unrestricted Warfare Symposium: Be a Part of the Solution." This worried me until I looked it up and discovered that it was actually anti-war (at least, anti-unrestricted war). However, the reason I assumed it was pro-war was that in every station there were posters advertising the US military and war-related jobs. Even the adverts for skin-care had war-related themes. The entire area was tainted with war. I was appalled.

Emerging from the subway I made my way across several of the sites, seeing the capitol building (from a distance), the Washington Monument, the White House (from a distance), the WWII memorial, the Vietnam (SE Asia) memorial and the Lincoln memorial. Out of these, the Vietnam memorial was the odd one out. All the others stood up, reaching for the sky. The Washington Monument was the epitome of this, being an enormous phallus that reached Babel-like into the heavens - I am hoping that someone will one day carve it into a shape that more closely resembles a penis so the blatant (white) male power-trip will be shown more obviously for what it symbolises.

The WWII memorial was a glorification of war. It was a celebration of victory, an excuse to 'show-them' that we won. It again reached up into the sky, although its shape also made it slightly less Babelesque and slightly more receptive to the heavens. There were quotations from several famous people carved into it, all of them glorifying war. I threw a snowball at one of them that made me mad. There was one that was trying to acknowledge women's contribution to the war, although this was carved in an unsymmetrical place, which made it appear to be an afterthought and less important. I was pleased it was there though.

The Lincoln memorial, or rather, Lincoln 'Temple' (as it calls itself) was, as I had been warned, repulsive. Although Lincoln himself said (and as was carved on the side of the temple), God doesn't take sides. However, clearly the American people who planned and built this 'temple' believed otherwise, as they built an enormous idol who clearly was there to be worshiped. The temple tried to impress you with its size, although it reminded me of Lord Farquaad - compensating.

The Vietnam Memorial was a completely different story. This did not stand up, reaching for the heavens - it was a scar, cut down into the landscape. This did not gleam with white marble, bathing in the light of the gods - it absorbed light into its black granite. This did not glorify war, it lamented the loss of the people whose names were carved into it. This was a wonder. It brought forth tears, rather than attempting to inspire awe. It rang of humility, of pain, of mistakes. It was beautiful in its simplicity. It is the only memorial I know of that tries to remember the dead, rather than trying to glorify the war.

Lose Faith

2007-02-18T18:38:00.000-05:00

Lose faith in government
- the elite aristocracy despise the people.
Lose faith in corporations,
- whom greed is good.
Lose faith in advertising, marketing and sales
- what they promise won't help.
Lose faith in military machines
- they sacrifice life for profit.
Lose faith in (mass) media
- the lies they've decided to entertain you with will entrap you.
Lose faith in universals,
- no one has the perspective from which to claim them.
Lose faith in one-size-fits-all
- it won't.
Lose faith in humanity,
- it consistently chooses extinction and is choosing its own.
Lose faith in God
- He is man's puppet.
Lose faith in the/a future
- it is not set, it is not determined, it is not sure, it might not...

-- Inspired during my visit to Washington DC this past weekend.

Short Thoughts

2007-02-11T21:33:00.000-05:00

In a week where I don't have much time, here's just a quick thought that's occurred to me, as well an unrelated quotation from Jimmy Carter.

It seems evolutionary scientists (Michael Ruse, Richard Dawkins) are still trying to set up an ontology - the way the universe really is. What they're missing is that the universe isn't an ontology (which Barry Allen gets). To say that God stepped into history to move evolution forward, or to say that the blind uncaring watchmaker (Dawkins) was the cause, is not the question. Those who advocate blind selection are missing out on the mystery, creativity and joy of the universe. Those who say God did it are setting up a mythology, because the mythology has a purpose, allowing for better living in the present and for the future. It's poetry, not machinery that is being emphasised. Creativity, not fate. Although the evolutionists will not believe in pre-destination, every possibility has been set in the past, and the train track of the future is determined by what has been (although we may be creating it as we go). There's no room for change, for radical difference from what evolution/DNA(/psychology) determines that I/we will do. Determinism is the end of ontology in science, just as it is in theology.

"First of all, it would be a commitment to the principles that Christ espoused. We worship Him as the Prince of Peace, not the Prince of Pre-emptive War. And I have noticed how many leading Christians - I presume many of them call themselves evangelicals - have been among the most militant and warlike members of our society. Even before President Bush decided to invade Iraq, he had strong public support from a number of more conservative Christians.
The second things is justice - that is, the commitment of individual beings and their governments to utilise the power, the strength, the riches, the influence of a government to alleviate suffering among those who are mist in need - to give them food, shelter, water."
-- Jimmy Carter, from Idea magasine in discussing how the (evangelical) church could get back on track. Sadly the Evangelical Alliance responded negatively.

Software I recommend

2007-02-04T19:29:00.001-05:00

Here's some software I've come across that I find useful. I try to avoid using large corporations wherever possible (microsoft, adobe), and prefer to use open source, GNU/GPL, or independent programming when I can find it. All software listed is free and freely downloadable, but I will also include what license it holds to. I will update this slowly as I test and use new software. Please leave suggestions of useful software you have found, and any alternatives you have found to the corporately-owned software I am currently using.

Of course, I am a hypocrite because I am using Windozes, the ultimate corporate evil of computer software. But at least I'm not using Vista - if you are, unplug you computer from the internet, format your hard drive and install an operating system that doesn't spy on you and take all your rights and power away. Really, if you're using Vista you're stupid. Really stupid.

Web Browsing:
Firefox, and see the bottom of the page for the addons I use. If you are using IE then stop everything and download firefox now. It'll save you time, disk space, annoyance, pop-ups and even some virus/spyware. Mozilla and other open source software licenses.

Office:
OpenOffice (very nice full office suite) GPL
Google Docs (simple text editor that you can collaborate with others to write documents, lacks footnotes) Warning: Corporately owned
MS Office 2003 (better than later versions, but don't pay for it) Warning: Corporately owned

Media (Music and Video):
VLC (The best media player out there) GPL
Media Player Classic (with Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative) GPL
musikCube partially open source
Others various
Democracy (looks attractive for podcasts and internet TV but I haven't used it) GPL
FLV open source
Audacity (Audio recording and editing) GPL
CDex (Ripper and ogg/mp3 encoder - I've not used it but it has been recommended to me) GPL

Pictures:
GIMP GPL
Irfanview free for non-commercial use (make the corporations pay!)
Pix Resizer (also see Alarm from the same person) free/independent
PrintScreen (I use it because my print screen button is broken) Warning: Corporately owned

PDF:
Sumatra (Very simple, not good at handling high magnification) open source
PDF Download (Fantastic Firefox Addon) free/independent
Foxit Reader (It's less evil than Adobe, and smaller/faster than Acrobat) Warning: Corporately owned

Downloading:
µTorrent (The best torrent downloader, but get 1.6 or before, because the later versions collect information on you) Warning: Corporately owned (by BitTorrent Inc.)
eMule (Peer-to-peer downloading, decent but often flooded with malware/unwanted porn) GPL
Soulseek(tm) (A peer-to-peer (music) downloader with lots of small musicians) Corporate/inpedendent?

Communications:
GAIM (Multiple instant messaging clients in one) GPL
Skype (Cheap/free internet phone) Warning: Corporately owned

General Smooth Running:
7-zip (File zipper, with it's own superior 7z compression format) GPL
Ad-Aware (Remove spy/malware) Warning: Corporately owned (but well worth it)
ClamWin (Free Virus Scanner) GPL
CDBurner XP Pro (CD Burner that's significantly better than the Windows built-in) Independent donation-based

I love skiing!

2007-02-03T18:31:00.000-05:00

It's true, I love skiing. Flying down sides of mountains at out-of-control speeds, or working your way between dense trees trying not to crash. It's a fantastic experience every time, the best time I've had being in Utah Winter '03/04, when I repeatedly failed to land after attempting a small jump.

But this post is really inspired by Susan Bauer. She writes about the moral slippery slopes that find ourselves irrecoverably going down, out of control and helpless to resist. In the article she tells of how she has been accused (by US evangelicals) of going down the slippery slope, that once one accepts feminism as being a good thing, one is on a slippery slope to accepting homosexuals too.

Bauer points out that the slippery slope idea that is being invoked against her is a logical fallacy from Aristotle. She also points out that if you look back up the slippery slope that she is on, you see the liberation of slaves. In fact, the slope seems to be (in the US): liberate slaves, liberate women, liberate blacks, liberate homosexuals. What I want to suggest in this post is that slippery slopes are not necessarily bad.

Slippery is often seen to be bad, as it suggests that one is forced to do something against their will. And a slope is often seen to be bad, because it's going down (to the pit), further and further away from God (who we all know if up 'high' in/above the sky). But in (down-hill) skiing, a slippery slope is a good (necessary) thing. Take away the slippery and you fall over and stop, take away the slope and you don't move. Either way, you go nowhere. You need a slippery slope.

In the 'moral' slippery slope, you stagnate into a deadly conservativism if you're not on the slippery slope. Those so-called liberals who accept to a certain point and say "this far and no further" are following in the same deadly conservative vein. They go down the hill until they find a nice place to stop, whether that's accepting women, homosexuals, the polyamorous, or pagans. But each time if there is the cry of 'No further', the skiing stops, the fun ends, the exhilaration of life is lost. Conservativism kills another.

What we need to do is to keep skiing. It should be a joy to find another oppressed group that we can welcome into our community. We should uncontrollably accept people, loving them first. We should stay on the slippery slope, leaving the barren mountaintops far behind and keep skiing towards the fertile valleys, where communities live in harmony, peace and love (and other hippie-values).

The Words Are Dying - Omnipotence Part 1

2007-01-23T19:00:00.000-05:00

This post is named in honour of Hope, although it has very little to do with her. Click here/here for part 2.

There are two things I wish to address about omnipotence:
Post 1. Why I won't be trying to re-define the word 'omnipotence', and
Post 2. Why I dislike it.

1. There are some in my community who wish to hold on to the word 'omnipotence' and claim that God is omnipotent, and yet wish to re-define the word so that it doesn't mean a form of problematic power-over. My professor Nik Ansell is one who wants it to mean "all power is God's," as in, there is no power apart from God, all 'use' of power is within God, etc. At least, that's how I understand what he was saying in class in December 2006.

The problem I have with this is that this seems to be a pantheism of power. I'm not opposed to pantheism, but Nik is generally panentheistic (altho he sometimes sidesteps that category too), so I'm pointing out a possible contradiction. Here's my thought: if power is not qualitatively different from other concepts in the universe (such as love, purple, work, dancing), and if all power is in God, then surely you can also apply this in-ness to other things, so all love is also in God, and all purple is in God. If this is what omnipotence is, then God is also omni-loving and omni-purple. In fact, God really just gets back to being omni-omni, the same as the evangelical pastor was quoted in my blog saying 2 posts ago. Omni-omni seems achieve a crude pantheism that would negate the very use of 'omnipotent'.

The other reason I don't wish to keep omnipotence is that I believe death can be a good thing. Death gets rid of many evil people in the world. Death allows for evolution and variety. Death provides the way for the new/next generation. So we should be more than willing to allow a word to die - to recognise that 'omnipotence' has been used previously, and has been useful previously, but is no longer useful and should be allowed to die. Omnipotence describes a view of God that fits within a deistic or theistic framework, but that does not fit within a relational pan(en)theistic framework. We don't need to re-define it and try to keep with the previous language of the faith. This will stop new words appearing, hinder creativity, and blur the meaning of the word in a way that just doesn't seem necessary.

As a sidenote, I'd also say the word 'God' is another word we should leave behind, but Christians will be generally less willing to do that. They may be more willing to allow the trinity to die, as very few find it helpful, and those who do are obscure theologians who are incoherently kidding themselves about its usefulness anyway. It seems to me that the only way the trinity should have been conceived is as it was in early church history: as historical narrative, telling of Yhwh, Jesus the revealer of Yhwh, and the spirit of Jesus' liberation of the oppressed. Any form of ontology seems to go against the Biblical narrative and the creeds.

Anyway, on to part 2.

Nihilifying the (m)other - Omnipotence Part 2

2007-01-23T17:57:00.000-05:00

2. Why I dislike omnipotence. I recommend that you read Part 1 here/here first.

'Omnipotence', as traditionally held, posits an all-powerful God who is over-against the world. This is a big problem. Any person/God who knew about the German/Jewish Holocaust and was able to stop it sooner and didn't is complicit in those crimes, is evil, and frankly does not deserve my worship. (I don't want to diminish other evils and genocides in the world - of which there are too many - I'm just using this as an example.) So assuming some form of omnipresence (one of the omni's I like) and at least some basic awareness (to be able to interact meaningfully with humanity), a good God must have been aware of the holocaust, and so cannot be omnipotent.

However, I am also going to add to this a much rarer (new?) argument that I came across through the work of Catherine Keller in The Face of the Deep. In this book she argues for a creation from chaos, and on page 57 writes,

"Athanasius characterises 'weakness' as the demiurge's inability to 'produce anything He makes without the material, just as it is without doubt a weakness of the carpenter not to be able to make anything required without his timber.' The argument is circular, already presupposing that the standard of excellence - power - is this ability to make something from nothing. Yet the strength of any craftsperson is measured by the ability to work with what is available."

Later on page 94 she quotes Karl Barth and writes,

"'The existence of the cosmos is [effected] by the will and deed of a God who disposes and acts without any presuppositions.' Without conditions - from outside. Any maternity of spirit... would relativise God's omnipotence."

Finally, in Forgetting of Air Luce Irigaray writes, "Man provides a foundation for himself on the basis of reducing to nothingness that from which the foundation proceeds." So this is what I'm thinking: Barth is following the general patriarchal (and omnipotence-affirming) tendency to "nihilify the (m)other." (page 44) The drive to escape presuppositions is a similar drive as the problematic/impossible modernist drive to gain objectivity. This is the desire to escape ones birth, to distance oneself from reliance on the (m)other. It is the desire to declare oneself immortal, un-relational, autonomous, necessary.

In other words, the claim 'God can act without presuppositions' is made because humans (men) are unwilling to admit their own dependence and mortality. Omnipotence can be closely tied to this because a God who relies on presuppositions is often seen to be weak. "As for most theists still: God is either omnipotent or He is impotent." (Keller, 94) I'd like to think a relational third space is possible.

Letter to the President

2007-01-18T17:13:00.000-05:00

Here is a letter I wrote to the president of ICS today. I've taken out two sentences that were intended for him personally, but otherwise reveals my current thinking about ICS. It was written in response to the Strategic Plan Draft for 2017.

Dear John,

There were a few good things I liked about the SPD, such as the fields mentioned to expand into in the "Academic A.2" section. There were a few other good points too, but I unfortunately lost my marked up copy of the draft and so will have to write from memory. The parts I didn't like are more general, and so I can remember them more easily. However, this email is written because I care about ICS and wish to see good things in its future.

The first point is that the words 'Faculty' and 'Students' are used throughout. These should universally be replaced by 'Senior Members' and 'Junior Members', as this is a purposeful and radical language change that ICS uses and should continue to use. To 'revert' to the other words would be a step backwards and be a symptom of ICS becoming something that its philosophy opposes (overly institutionalised, non-communal, top-down hierarchy, etc.)

Another thing is that the environment is not mentioned at all. This is drastic. We are about to wipe out life on earth by not actively doing positive things for the environment that we all live in. I'm using rhetoric, but many in the world believe this, some even more extreme. As such, we NEED to have an ecological mindset, where everything (EVERYTHING!) is thought through from the perspective of ecology and the improvement of life on earth. Without this, we may as well close our doors. Ecological thinking requires us to completely re-think many of the ways things work. I believe that it should either be an additional category, or an additional column. Or both. It is vital. Our very lives may well depend on it, and so does God's. I cannot stress its importance enough.

I also seems that there is a general lack of mention of community. Emphasising evening, distance and summer school will always draw focus away from the daytime community that ICS has for the majority of the year. ICS already has problems addressing gender issues, so now should be the time when we are focusing on community, not drawing attention away from it.

Connected with this, and with the 'JM/SM' issue is that in the 'Responsibility' column nearly all, if not all, the responsibility is given to non-junior members. I believe some should be, because this will give emphasis to community and mean that all involved at ICS invest in it and so care about it.

Finally (and this may not be all the issues, just the ones I can remember), I believe the wording of 'Outreach' should be changed. This word has too many connotations with aggressive proselytizing and exclusionary Christianity. I know that there are some non-Christians at ICS, and I consider myself a Christian-Pagan, no longer being about to consider myself merely Christian because of attitude/wording like this. My impression is that the founders of ICS would also not like this word being used. My suggestion would be to change it to something like 'External Contacts'. However, the precise wording would need to be thought through.

Please remember that these comments are made because I care about ICS and want the best for it and for the earth. My education at ICS has taught me to focus on community and the environment, and this is all I'm hoping to pass on to you.

Yours sincerely,
Stuart Basden

The Magic of Baby Jesus

2007-01-09T22:38:00.000-05:00

Today in Wine Before Breakfast (the Wycliffe College Anglican service ran by Brian Walsh) the sermon talked about the Magi that came to visit Jesus. Like so often happens when Christians talk about the Magi, we were warned away from astrology and magic. But why?

This is something that has confused me since early childhood: Why do we discount the religion of the first people who came to see Jesus without being told to. Mary had to be visited by an angel, as did Joseph. The shepherds had a whole chorus, and Simeon had been told by the Holy Spirit (and Jesus was brought to him, he did not go to Jesus). Later in Jesus' life it's Jesus that generally takes the initiative in calling out people to follow him and be his disciples. But not so for the Magi.

These Persian Zoroastrian Astrologer Pagans (or something like that) came to Jesus. They followed a star. They didn't need to be told by an angel. They didn't need the Holy Spirit to guide them. Instead, they came hundreds of miles to visit Jesus because of a star. Because of astrology. Because of evil pagan magical practice that we (as Christians) must be warned away from.

So why?

Why are we so afraid of astrology? Isn't this the ultimate hypocrisy: to wall off our saviour from those who first recognised him! Surely if astrology can find the messiah (the heavens declare the glory of God) then we should be involved in astrology? If the divine can be found through magic, then practice magic!

Or at least stop excluding those who practice magic, maybe opening up an area for Christian magic?

Omni omni

2006-12-27T13:41:00.000-05:00

Pastor: God is omni...
All: Everything!
Pastor: We are omni...
All: Nothing.

This was the chant of the people in the church that I attended on Christmas Eve in Berwyn, IL. It was not something I liked, as you may have guessed from my general dislike of omni's. In my opinion, this pastor may have just said that God is omni omni (all all), and have admitted that he was just trying to worship 'a bigger God than anyone else'. This also seems to be moving away from traditional orthodoxy, which isn't too surprising given the neglect of proper historic scholarship and teaching in the evangelical church in the US. At least, the attempt to find out how it was, rather than just trying to prove that what the church holds to now has always been held in the same way. Their view of their own theology, much like Plato's god, is an unmoved mover.

As a sidenote, I think that claiming that God is omni omni could also be linked to pantheism, but I'm sure that wasn't the (conscious) intention of that pastor.

However, there are a couple of omni's that I may like. One for God, one for us. They arise from my reading in quantum physics and cosmology respectively. Looking at the small to see the big, and the big to see the small.

First, God's omni: Omnipresent.
Cup your hands, and imagine what you are holding. Not a vacuum. Instead, there are trillions upon trillions of atoms. Remove these. Vacuum? Not yet. There's trillions of tiny 'particles' like neutrinos and invisible photons (from many sources, including the background radiation of the universe itself). Remove these. Vacuum? Almost. However, "careful investigation of this vacuum reveals the strange appearance of elementary particles in this emptiness. Even where there are no atoms, and no elementary particles, and no protons, and no photons, suddenly elementary particles will emerge. The particles simply foam into existence."
"Particles emerge from the 'vacuum'. They do not sneak in from some hiding place when we are not looking. Nor are they bits of light energy that have transformed into protons. These elementary particles crop up out of the vacuum itself - that is the simply and awesome discovery. I am asking you to contemplate a universe where, somehow, being itself arises out of a field of 'fecund emptiness'... This radical emergence takes place throughout the entire universe... The ground of the universe then is an empty fullness, a fecund nothingness." (Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos)
This fecundity, creativity, abundance, giftedness, this is God. This is how I can imagine God being omnipresent - even in the void, God is there. At the darkest depths, and the wildest places, God is bubbling forth, an over-abundance.

Now our omni: Omnicentric.
This one is too complicated for me to explain here fully. This one emerges out of Hubble's discovery of the motion of the galaxies. If we start at the earth, and move bigger in scale, we get the Solar System, the Milky Way galaxy, the Local Group (of galaxies), the Virgo Supercluster, the universe. The discovery that Hubble made is that all the other superclusters are moving away from our own, the further the faster. This puts us at the centre of the universe However, because of the theories of relativity (thanks to Einstein), it turns out that wherever you are in the universe, you are at the centre.
"For we have discovered an omnicentric evolutionary universe, a developing reality which from the beginning is centered upon itself at each place of its existence. In this universe of ours to be in existence is to be at the cosmic centre of the complexifying whole.
"If there are Hubble-like beings in the Hercules Cluster of galaxies, seven hundred million light-years away, and such creatures are pondering the universe from that perspective, they will also discover that the galaxies in the universe are moving away from them. They will thus conclude on the basis of this evidence that they are at the centre of the universe's expansion, and they will be correct." (Swimme)

What an incredible universe!

As an additional note, I prefer to use the words 'the universe' instead of 'God'. Not as an inert space where things happen, but as the active gifting and promise of all, of redemption. Universe. Uni-verse. One verse. One song. How beautiful! (See Tolkien's creation story in the Silmarillion for an incredible myth of creation-song)

Feast of the Bear

2006-12-19T19:21:00.000-05:00

Here's a few pictures from Feast of the Bear, the annual SCA event held at Casa Loma each November. First, Grum & I in garb. He's Norse. I'm meant to be, but haven't got appropriate garb yet.
And here's Darci & I at the feast in the evening. You can probably tell from the cider (what a cool tankard!) and the smile on my face that I'm pretty merry at this point.

The Poison of Gift Cards

2006-12-18T19:45:00.000-05:00

Americans annually spend close to $50 billion on gift cards. During the 'holiday' season alone, they are likely to spend around $20 billion. Similar nations have comparable statistics. Last year, $1 billion of gift cards were never redeemed. That means the American people charitably donate $1 billion to its largest corporations - to those who seek to entrap us in consumerism. To the worship of Mammon that our culture is so driven to.

Not only that, gift cards are effectively an interest-free loan for these corporations. They're earning large amounts of interest off that little plastic card. They're also encouraging people to go out and shop more, encouraging consumerism, and forcing people to buy things they don't really need. Really, don't we all already have enough of those things?

If you must give gifts (because I'm sure none of your friends really need them), and if you don't have the creativity to make a gift, at least have the imagination to buy a real gift for them. Show your friends that you've thought about them and have taken the risk to buy something for them that they may or may not like.

Suffice it to say, I will not be accepting any gift cards from people this year. If you give me one, I will return it. Not because I'm ungrateful, but because I refuse to participate in your worship of Mammon. Enough children have already been sacrificed.

Read more: "The best insult money can buy"

Ev(il?)angelism

2006-12-17T15:37:00.000-05:00

I could never evangelise. Growing up I decided it couldn't be my spiritual gift, at fundamentalist Bible college (where I was 'forced' to do it for two semesters) I could never bring myself to do so, and today I would consider myself to be wasting my life and maybe even doing wrong if I were to try to convert someone to my religion (or at least to my belief system).

However, I've come to realise that I am evangelising. No, I'm not trying to convince anyone to become a Christian-Pagan, or to subscribe to a particular belief system. Instead, I'm trying to win people over to a 'me-like' way of looking at the world, -- ecological mindedness, concern for the poor and for justice, and being politically conscious and active. This realisation has come about mainly because of an email conversation I've been having for a few years with one of my Moody friends (Maureen).

However, I think that here I have failed: in one of her recent email conversations she wrote, "You're entitled to your opinion, and I'd rather not get drawn into a serious debate, especially when the opinions on either side are not going to change anytime soon." i.e. "I don't want to talk about this because I'm not going to change (and neither are you)."

Like the annoying street preacher who is constantly promising hell (see Bright Eyes, video), am I being offensive? Should I also be set fire to, because I'm doing that which my culture despises? Or is this kind of evangelism OK? Or even 'right'? I obviously think it's right because I'm doing it. Maybe I'll stop in Maureen's case, but that certainly doesn't mean I'll stop everywhere. I can't remain silent. Am I not called to speak for justice, to cry out for those who are given no voice?

Is this still evangelism? Should I stop despising those who yell 'hell' at me because I am guilty of the same evil? Am I trying to convert people to a religion of 'eco-political-justice thinking', which is just the same as trying to convert people to 'naïve-world-destroying fundamentalism'? Or is my evangelism different? Is it still-wrong-but-forgivable? Or is it what I should be doing, what I am called to do?

Becoming Evil

2006-12-12T14:00:00.000-05:00

It seems so much theologising today is about escaping ontology. The world (in Western civilisation) has for so long been seen as a concrete, set thing, the 'way it is', or a creational structure. Now, theology is trying to escape these attempts, because we've discovered it doesn't work (or that we don't like where it leads). Theology now is concerned with be(com)ing. But as we build up this new way of thinking, talking, perceiving, we keep finding there are parts of our theory that are left as ontology.

Process theology has allowed the universe to be in a state of becoming, along with God. I've not yet found a theory of the trinity that is in a state of becoming, so that may be a future project (for someone else?). But this post is triggered by reading Jürgen Moltmann and somewhat Barry Allen (the philosopher, not the superhero).

Moltmann ontologises evil. He puts is there at the 'start', as an original part of the cosmos (almost prior to creation itself!) So my attempt now will be trying to put evil in a state of becoming.

There are many types of evil in the world, many manifestations of it. Before technological civilisation, there were less manifestations. Before humans, with their artifacts, there were less still. Before animal consciousness, there were less again. Manifestations of evil, by how I'm describing them, are to do with failing to respond to our calling, with the shirking of responsibility, with the exploitation of something that should not be exploited.

For example, it was only possible for a human to kill 100 people in a minute once explosives or machine guns were invented. It has only become possible to wipe out life on earth since the nuclear bomb. It has only become possible in the last few years to make money on such a large scale from videoing the rape of girls (through the internet). It is not yet possible (as far as I know) for humans to create a temporary black hole on the surface of the planet to completely annihilate an enemy (or whatever).

"With great power comes great responsibility." With only a little power, there's only a little. I can't be too angry at a rock in my front garden for the war in Iraq (at least, it would be unjust if I were). So, taking a somewhat big-bang-type theory, I can say that there was only a little responsibility that those initial photons were called to (I believe God's call is for all of creation). Therefore, there were not many, or at least not big, manifestations of evil. Those have increased with increased complexity.

The universe is learning what it does not like. In a similar way that humans find things they do not like (slavery, murder, rape, etc.), the universe is discovering those things too. Moving towards an eschatology, the new creation will be when the universe has got rid of those things.

Of course, there are problems with this, and I can think of a few immediately.
1) Does the universe need to discover every kind of evil before the new creation? As if there's a finite list? Because I don't want to make evil infinite, but I think I might be.
2) Have I just ontologised vulnerability, by making this the initial origin, the starting point for the universe?
3) Have I equated 'Evil' with 'Manifestations of Evil', and can this be done?

That'll do for now. Thanks for reading, I know it was rather long.

Existence!

2006-12-02T19:38:00.000-05:00

Google has found me! It's proven: The plaosmos exists!

De-finite-ions

2006-12-02T15:01:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post about some ideas I've been playing with (coming from my IDS class). Presented as quotable quotes - the first is the basis for the second and third.

"The problem with trying to define something is that what you are trying to define is constantly changing, and so is not finite. Describe instead. And for God's sake, use poetry!"

"Artists will always try to escape any confining definition of art. So stop arguing over the question of what is art!"

"Any definition of what it is to be human will always exclude some, unless you use a circular definition: what is human is human."

Praying to, er, God

2006-11-30T11:32:00.000-05:00

"How then should we pray?" A question every Christian I know struggles with. I no longer pray. I don't know how. I don't know why I should. I've given up trying. Almost.

My view of God has changed. I don't even like the word 'God' any more as it has so many implications that I don't like. I've not settled on any other word and probably won't, but for now I'll use 'the divine.' But here's my question: If our view of God (the divine) has changed (theism to panentheism), should not our talk about the divine, including prayers and prayer-language, change also?

The divine I believe in is not omniscient, not omnipotent, not a being, and not masculine (at least not by traditional categories.) But all the prayer language I know is. The divine needs to be re-imagined, and all our language used to describe the divine needs changing.

So I'll start with the masculine. Catherine Keller states, "We will have to leave feminist Sunday School: getting rid of 'Him' only puts God in drag." Simply claiming that the divine is non-gendered, or that the divine 'transcends' gender is not enough. The very view of the divine that we have is of a masculine God - his power, his strength, his view of the world, etc. We need to change the way we think about the divine, but I'm not sure how to change the prayer language. So I'll move on to being.

A problem here is the first word of our prayers. "Dear God..." "Oh Christ..." "Lord..." Each of these address a being. They are words of address, intended to be used in the same way that I may address my neighbour. But the divine isn't a being. If the divine is in me, then in some way I am the divine. And so is my desk. And that tree. So maybe the entire concept of praying 'to' something is wrong.

If this is the case, then we have a problem with language itself. Language is designed for communication, for two beings to transfer ideas, meanings, thoughts. Or something like that. But if this is the case, then perhaps language is not the best (or even a possible) medium to use for prayer. But what's an alternative? Music? Physical art? Bringing to mind (as in some forms of meditation)? Glossolalia? Susanne Langer claims the word 'Hallelujah' is not language because it is not intended to transfer meaning. This is very similar to the babbling of glossolalia, and she talks about how there seems to be an innate joy humans find in making sounds with their mouth, babbling. So maybe there's something to glossolalia, something that no one else (including the divine) can understand?

An alternative to this desire (not to pray 'to' anything) would be to (somewhat) arbitrarily, temporarily divinise something, and pray to that. Hence nature worship. Hence worshipping your partner (see the Book of Common Prayer). For God is in all, and so all can be deserving of worship. Problems may come when something is divinised that shouldn't be, or when something is divinised for too long a period of time. I think the civilisation I'm in has divinised money (Christian are sometimes especially to blame here), but that's another story.

That's enough for now. Maybe I'll address omnipotence soon. And maybe I'll come to a conclusion at some point. And maybe one day I'll be able to pray again.

Why plaosmos...

2006-11-24T14:49:00.000-05:00

So I guess I should start by explaining the name. It's obviously important to me (or I wouldn't have chosen it), and I feel it runs deep.

First, how the word came to be. I'm a theology student. I'm in a class called "The Ground of Being/The Horizon of Hope: Creation, Time and Eschatology." Kind of a long title, but if you knew my prof (Nik Ansell), you'd understand. He has a certain fascination with titles. Oh, I should probably say that I'm a full time Master's student at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto. Just in case anyone who doesn't know me ever reads this.

In this class (TGoB/THoH:CTaE) we're reading a book called The Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming by Catherine Keller (Routledge, 2003). So far in the book, Keller is basically saying that there is/was a chaos that is pre-existent, that was never created. God didn't create it, but formed it. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (which I have not read) apparently coins the word 'chaosmos', putting together 'chaos' and 'cosmos'. I liked this. It's playing with language, in much the same way as Lewis Carroll does. I also like the idea of an uncreated chaos, but that's a story for another day.

So why not stick with 'chaosmos'? I could well have, but there were some in the class (esp. Jeff H.) who didn't like it - chaos is impersonal, neutral, completely non-ordered. Any forming out of chaos must be the ending of it, the death of it, the domination of it so that it becomes order. Good critiques, and I agree. So I had to move on. The chaos had to lose its neutrality and vulnerability. I couldn't go about my entire life seeing the forming of order to be (completely) destructive. It just didn't right true.

Which is how I came up with 'plaosmos'. This combination (of 'play' and 'chaos' and 'cosmos') takes away the neutrality. It introduces play. I'm a big fan of play. Play is infused with joy, with creativity, and with exploration. Hopefully, this blog will contain these and inspire these in others.

Another thing I joyously note is that Google comes up with no results for 'plaosmos'. And since google can't find it, it can't exist - you heard it here first! Just as proof:

I hope you enjoy reading this blog. I hope I continue to enjoy posting on it. And please, feel free to leave your comments.