saturn return to sender

Sorta apropos … mostly funny. (via del.icio.us)

Was reading the introduction to an edition of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics while sitting outside a café. (It’s for a class; not for pleasure, though I appreciate being told to read it.)

At the table next to me two fellows were talking and it quickly became obvious that they were evangelical Christians. They were discussing their faith and reading passages from the Bible, trading anecdotes of flaws in the fossil record, and generally musing on the virtues of Jesus and God.

I rubbernecked shamelessly. Not watching them, but I couldn’t stop myself from eavesdropping. I wondered why I treated their conversation like a car wreck, and realized that my reaction would be pretty offensive. Images of Bill Oreilly and America’s purported War on Christianity and so on … yup, er, I guess that’s me?

What I came up with in response was that it was the cult-like quality of their beliefs. It’s not that they ground their worldview in any particular set of beliefs, but that they ground it exclusively in a set of beliefs. To the absolute exclusion of everything else. At one point I overheard something to like “Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism … I mean, I’m sure they can be helpful to people. But I feel better knowing that I’m worshipping the one who is really responsible for all of this.”

Not so compelling as a rational justification for Christianity, but of course emotional validations don’t need to be logical. Granted, of course, his was a magnificently tolerant position compared to what’s possible when religion and herdism join forces.

Anyway, it was sort of funny, sitting between the two parallel but very different lines of inquiry: what is moral? what is just? what is the highest good? asks Aristotle. “Worshipping God and Jesus in fellowship,” answers the guys at the next table. The main difference between Aristotle and evangelical Christianity seems to be that Aristotle and non-religious lines of inquiry in general ask questions. Religion, in the extreme, gives answers.

As I’ve said here before, I think truth and certainty are sort of like space and time, or alternatively, like silly putty: squash one direction and it expands to compensate in some other direction. There’s some fundamental constant that is preserved. The closer you get to certainty, the further you are perforce from truth in some sense. And vice versa.

As I was listening to these gentlemen, I started to understand the seduction of their certainty. “They were so confident and happy …” I overheard one of them say about, I think, members of a particular church. Well, that does sound nice, doesn’t it? I wondered what it would be like to be so absolutely certain of something. It would be so easy, I felt, to accept the answers given by God to men, the strength of knowing beyond doubt that you are in the right, that there is a comprehensible order to the world and that you understand it and have taken your place in it.

A woman leaving the café sneezed loudly, twice. Embarrassed, she smiled at an old man who sits motionless outside in the sun everyday for hours, eyes closed, brow wrinkled. I’d never seen him smile. His wrinkled leather face broke into a grin for the woman and it was sort of beautiful. Thought dropped away and I wondered if maybe neither truth nor certainty matter, that both the seduction of security and the nobility of questioning are illusions, because—perhaps, as the contemplative traditions say—nothing exists but the moment anyway. Thought dropped away and it seemed like both Aristotle and these folks’ version of Christianity are flailing attempts to placate the mind and the emotions, both bound to be fruitless because the mind and emotions are fleeting and impermanent when compared to the moment, which is always present.

Hmm. Anyway. Whatever …

Reading this (and while mostly understanding the words not having the faintest competence to evaluate what it’s saying), I can’t help but think that science is like a centuries-old debug wrestling match, where it’s not that you’re debugging the universe because it’s broken (recent cultural and political regressivism aside), but you are nonetheless trying to figure out why the heck this thing is behaving the way it is.

That I think such a thing is probably not unrelated to my (at least) months-old debug wrestling match with 3Trace. Within this week I seem to have quaternions working for me as a representation of angular velocity and such, which is cool, but right when I feel like I can start to make some real progress, some completely aberrant behavior comes out of left field.

Currently I’ve somehow fiddled my project bits such that the app launches and runs and gets events, but someone isn’t getting told about it because the app icon does not show up in the dock and bringing the app’s window to the front does not switch out the menu bar. Er. Ooookay. No errors in any logs I’ve found, either. Yay.

I suppose you could say that science is debugging outward while mysticism is debugging inward. To truly debug, one must see that you and the bug are not-two.

Yeahhhhh I need to do something else for a little while.

No, really: I seriously cannot figure this whole time thing out.

There was a little sandwich shop a block down the street from work in Daly City. I’d go there a lot. Get a breakfast bagel in the morning, sometimes a sandwich at lunch. That was 4-5 years ago. I might go back there someday if it still exists, but that 4-5 years ago time? It’s gone. I will never again be that same person in that same sandwich shop, with the same other people, watching the same news while waiting for my breakfast. It’s gone. Forever.

I just suddenly find this very startling. I have no particular attachment to the sandwich shop. The breakfast bagels were pretty greasy, to be honest. It … it just seems so weird that those random moments and the me that experienced them are irretrievable. I think, “Wait, that can’t be right … can it?”

Well. Happy new year, everyone.

swirling in the gravity storm of margarita pitchers, two separate drunken conversations orbited the idea of asking the world for what you want, of being true to your heart, seeking your bliss. if you visualize it and believe it and pursue it, the world will respond. the interconnectedness of all things. is there a subtle benevolence pervading all the meaninglessness? and so on. i am left of center on the issue, ultimately an optimist and romantic, but i feel unsteady without tension in my line to skepticism. or maybe that was the tequila.
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