we're definitely lucky

Anthropocentrism: All of God’s Special Little Snowflakes   (by Amy Peters)

My four-year-old has a book of science activities.  One rainy day not so long ago, my husband and son decided to pull out the book and complete a biology activity on classifying living things.  The objective was to cut out pictures of animals in old magazines and decide how they should be grouped together.  Should they be grouped by the number legs they have?  By whether or not they are plant-eaters or meat-eaters?  Sea or land animals? Daytime or nighttime creatures?

Let’s be honest here.  My boy is only four.  Even with my husband’s help, the project basically turned into playtime with magazine clippings, safety scissors and glue sticks.  By the time they showed off their final product, the animal photos glued on their poster weren’t even close to being classified in the right groups.  Mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles had all been mixed together on his poster board in a beautiful, biologically diverse, gluey mess.  For some reason, amphibians and those spineless invertebrates didn’t make the poster. Maybe we don’t subscribe to the right magazines.

To my rapturous joy, near the top of the poster was a picture of a sleeping Homo sapiens.  That’s right.  My husband had thought to include a picture of a human baby.  It was glued squarely between an ocelot and a rhinoceros (at least they got them in the same phylum and class, right?).  Still, I thought it was quite clever of my husband to use such a simple exercise to demonstrate the characteristics we share with the animals on this planet and, in doing so, show that we are animals too.

Parents expect their children to have short memories, and are thus caught off guard when something we think was overlooked or forgotten ends up being significant.  Several days later, I was pretty sure my son had moved on from the kingdom Animalia to more exciting things like trucks and candy. Out of the blue one day he asked me, “Mommy, are we animals?”  My mind immediately went back to the science activity he’d completed the week before.  “Yes, we are animals,” was my response.
“But, Mommy, we seem… different.”

There it was.  An uncomplicated observation from a very brainy boy.  There was no disputing it. He was right.  We are… different.  So how to help him understand our place in the animal kingdom?  I was taken back to my own childhood where I was raised in a very anthropocentric mindset.  Not only was I taught that human beings were the most significant and special of all god’s creatures, my parents took it even further than that. I was taught that I was god’s special girl, that god knew me before I was even born, and that god knew the number of hairs on my head at all times. Why this hair-counting, voyeuristic god didn’t completely creep me out at the time, I have no idea.  Maybe I wanted very much to hear how special I was and maybe the god myth filled that need.

Yes, humans are different, but are we supreme?  And if we are supreme, was it a god or gods that made us that way? The Bible would lead us to believe so.  Why, it is completely integral to the Genesis story.
Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ Holy Bible, NRSV, Catholic Edition

What does science tell us?  Well, for starters science in no way confirms the Genesis account.  Science tells us that we are very tiny life forms in a very, very big universe.  Compare your mass to the mass of the planet.  Then, compare our planet to our entire galaxy.  Then think about our galaxy in terms of the entire observable universe.  It blows the mind.  We are so tiny compared to all of that, how can one ever begin to feel special or significant?  We are not only tiny in size, but in time as well.  The age of the universe is reckoned at approximately 13.7 billion years. The Earth itself is dated at 4.5 billion years old.  Out of that 4.5 billion years, anatomically modern humans only originated in Africa around 200,000 years ago.  This means that for the majority of the life of the universe and, indeed, our planet humans have not been around. How then can we be supreme, the most significant entities in the universe, as Christianity would have us believe? The answer is that we are not supreme.  We are, collectively, a blip on the radar.  The earth will still be here long after we are gone.

How are we to go about the 80 or so years we have on this planet knowing how tiny and inconsequential we are?  The answer is that we are not insignificant.  We are living things!  You, reader, are the product of millions of years of gradual, inching evolution.  Every cell in your body is a triumph of nature.  You are incredible because you are here and you are alive.  It is not necessary to believe in a deity or that as humans we have something supernatural within us that separates us from other animals.  Our significance is our place in the natural world, and the fact that that place is only temporary.

My little boy is far too young to understand this, so my response was a visit to the new Africa exhibit at the zoo.  My overly-cautious little one looked on as I stood inches away from a chimpanzee, separated only by a pane of glass.  The chimpanzee put his hand up to the glass.  I held mine up to meet his.  His eyes met mine and we considered one another.  In absolute awe (and yes, a little choked up), I looked back at my tiny son as if to say, “See.  Not so different.”

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” – - Richard Dawkins, Unweaving The Rainbow, 1998.

 

religion: the ultimate tyranny

Towards the end of my life in religion, I was more bound up inside emotionally and mentally than at any other time in my life. The lie of freedom was exposed when I realized that I could not think clearly when faced with a life crisis. The emotional trauma that I experienced was more the result of religious concepts gone bad than the actual circumstances that I faced. I had to force myself  to think logically and rationally. It took effort, time, and much exercise to loosen up the cogs.


As humans we are limited. Not every person knows if they are free. I claimed to be free, but was not. I was bound to beliefs that turned out not true. 


This article, Religion: the ultimate tyranny, is a good one. The author, Paula Kirby, states...

"Religion claims to set its followers free, while all the time holding them in thrall and insisting they kiss the hand of their jailer. There can be no true freedom so long as religion still keeps the human mind in shackles."

ignorance, uncertainty, and fooling myself

Here are a couple of quotes I saw recently. The first having to do with the hope for life continuing on the planet and the other about the obstacle we must overcome (our brain) in order to accomplish it.

"It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man."   --  Richard P. Feynman 

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."   --  Richard P. Feynman

We are Lost in Thought

by Dr. Sam Harris, Neuroscientist; Chairman, Project Reason; Author, The Moral Landscape

"I invite you to pay attention to anything — the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair — for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought. This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made.

"I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. Linguistic thought is indispensable to us. It is the basis for planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the substance of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with the flow of thought — that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as transient appearances in consciousness — is a primary source of human suffering and confusion. 

"Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox, in fact. When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill. But we all talk to ourselves continuously — we just have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. Our lives in the present can scarcely be glimpsed through the veil of our discursivity: We tell ourselves what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, and what might yet happen. We ceaselessly reiterate our hopes and fears about the future. Rather than simply exist as ourselves, we seem to presume a relationship with ourselves. It's as though we are having a conversation with an imaginary friend possessed of infinite patience. Who are we talking to?

"While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging "center of narrative gravity" (to use Daniel Dennett's phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.

"Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord's Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.

"The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. 

"Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.

"But we must first realize that we are lost in thought."

doubt the non-doubters

"Doubt is the adult attitude. And only people who refuse to doubt will ask that I doubt my doubts. Doubt is a filter that helps me sift out what to believe from what not to believe. I cannot do away with that filter and remain an adult person who thinks critically."  John W. Loftus

better to be honest rather than delusional

P.Z. Myers can be an acerbic sort of fellow at times, especially to those of faith. His Sunday blog post really hit a sore spot inside me. I used to think life was simple in my former "believer" state of mind. "Pray to Jesus and your problems will be solved." "Surrender to God and He will take care of you." "The 'simplicity of the gospel' is all a person needs to live." "All things work together for good." (This never seemed to work the way I thought it should much to my chagrin over many years of trying. These kinds of platitudes are rampant in the Christian world.)

This thinking is also simplistic, lazy, childish, and an irresponsible way to approach life. It mummifies a person's brain and the synapses that should fire don't fire. Problems that a person should or could be solving go unsolved waiting for their God to do it. How many times did I miss an opportunity to progress while waiting for God to move? How many relationships were harmed because I failed to act on behalf of myself or someone else while waiting for God to do something about the situation?

There will never be a complete set of answers to these questions. Many memories have already been lost by the brain never to be recovered. There are a few, however, that come to mind and those are regrettable, almost unconquerable events. The past is impossible to change. It contains circumstances that will affect me for the rest of my life, leaving a sadness which makes its rounds every once in a while.

I'm not any kind of an expert on these matters. This is just the way it seems to me. We all  need to make sense of our life story in order to continue moving forward. Better to be honest rather than delusional. Figuring out the difference between the two is the difficult task we all face.

any other way seems dangerous

Don't know if this will come as a shock, but I no longer can attribute any of my human experiences to the god that is described in the Christian/Jewish holy books. The process I went through to get to this place is complicated and at the same time quite deliberate. After years of consideration and study, it seems to me that "evil/wickedness/all the atrocious things that happen to people" must be equally attributable to this same god, which in turn makes him/her/it evil also. In my mind this totally undermines the idea of a loving, omniscient, omnipotent Christian God, which in turn shoots the whole thing out of the water.


I see religion as mankind's attempt to make sense of life. Cultural and geographical differences have created the thousands of religions and sects which we see around the world today. Our brain convinces us that our religion is the one true religion. Obviously not everyone can be right. And the idea that I think mine is right and everyone else is wrong leads to selfish, prideful living. So I've decided to live life from a very different place. If a thing can't be known for certain, I will not believe it. In other words, I won't believe because I don't have the evidence. Any other way to live in this causal world seems a dangerous way.