I've been pretty depressed about this huge furor over building a mosque two blocks north of ground zero. I guess I wouldn't have minded so much if the sum total of the issue was confined to those residents in Manhattan and some minor mention of it in some of our national newspapers. But for it to dominate the national conversation is depressing. It reminds me a bit of what happened with the Terry Schiavo case. Our politics has become a game of simply winning political points and not a serious endeavor to improve our country.
Anyway, with that said, this National Review article makes a case that opposing the mosque construction is simply not conservative.
"Second, the proposed mosque would not be located 'at' Ground Zero, but two blocks north of it. So, any federal overlay that restricts development would have to cover not just Ground Zero but an area around it. Again, it is hard to come up with a policy rationale: this area is part of one of America’s busiest office districts, characterized by over a century of high-rise development and redevelopment, which we hope to see continue.
It’s hard to see a justification for 'preservation' other than as a pretext to interfere with the mosque. But the use of allegedly broad zoning restrictions to prevent a single project is inconsistent with the rule of law. (Besides which, when zoning or similar restrictions are used as a pretext to block a religious institution, that violates the First Amendment.)"
"As an aside, I think that some of the concern over this mosque, especially among people who do not live in New York City, is based on a misunderstanding of the geography of Lower Manhattan. This is an area that had significant high-rise development before New York imposed setback requirements and floor-area ratio maximums (limits on how many square feet of building you can put on a lot). As a result, the area is denser and more canyon-like than Midtown.
This means you can be two blocks away from something without any sense that you’re near it. City Hall is four blocks from Ground Zero, but you’d never stand there and think 'I’m right near Ground Zero.' There is even a strip club three blocks south of Ground Zero, but nobody seems to have noticed that it is sullying the memory of the place."
and finally this:
"Furthermore, since Islam has 1.2 billion adherents and is not going away, it is important to set reasonable guidelines that promote harmony with Western society—such as, it’s okay to build a mosque in the Financial District, and it’s not okay to blow up buildings in the Financial District. A general policy of exclusion is unworkable."
But, unfortunately, our country is anything but reasonable right now... sadly.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Religious Faith Quandaries
Probably my favorite show on any media is one that can be listened to on NPR Saturday afternoons at 2:00pm, or for me podcasted and listened to at my convenience, This American Life . The radio show is organized each week around a theme, having multiple stories around that theme, about usually ordinary people in America, but usually, these ordinary people are having very extra-ordinary experiences, very different from my own. So, I usually thoroughly enjoy these glimpses into other people's lives. A few episodes ago, they did a show entitled Nobody's Family is Going to Change. The title they took from this book. Each story revolves around the idea that it is sometimes pointless to get someone else to change.
One of these stories documents the relationship between a brother and a sister: the brother a recent charismatic born-again convert, the sister, a lesbian. And it is this conflict, between religious certainty and more of a rational skepticism, and a general tolerance of each other's point of view, that I want to spend some time discussing. Because at some level I can really relate to this conflict, having my own personal experiences with it.
But first, let me give you a summary of the show. The story is narrated by the sister, and she describes how while they were growing up, before he left home for college, the two were extremely close. However, in his freshman year in college, as a result of some major emotional struggles, culminating in an intensely personal, spiritual, emotionally charged experience, the brother converts to Christianity and joins a charismatic church. As a result of this conversion, he completely embraces his faith to the degree that he drops out of school and moves to a farm in Alaska owned by this church to live a communal lifestyle with other believers, abandoning his family in the process. Meanwhile, his sister embraces lesbianism, and moves to Europe with her girlfriend. In time, she finally makes a visit to the farm to visit her brother, trying to figure out what happened to him, to make an attempt to reconnect their once close relationship, and to convince him to accept her choices as much as she hopes to accept his. She even made a movie about this trip.
It was fascinating to hear their conversations in real-time as she attempts to get him to accept her as she is, which is impossible for him to do. In fact, earlier, he made a trip to visit her in Europe, shortly after his conversion. Needless to say, he was judgmental of her situation. What's also fascinating is how she describes the differences each took in dealing with their problems, her time spent working through problems with a therapist, his consultation with the Bible to find answers.
This whole dynamic is interesting. According to the narrator, before his conversion, he was very non-homophoboic, very accepting, and they were very close. However, as she makes the attempts to visit him and talk with him, she discovers the details of his conversion. How his freshman year was unusually difficult; how he was struggling with depressive thoughts; how he has this religious, very spiritual experience; how through this experience, he felt in a very direct and undeniable way, God's love for him; how through additional experiences he was led to this charismatic church; and how through a relationship from this woman who kind of mentors him, he decides to move to the farm.
You see, what is fascinating here is that he becomes a Christian because of an emotionally-charged spiritual experience. I am not sure the extent of the intellectual process involved, it seemed obvious that he studied the Bible pretty intently thereafter, but it seems definitely secondary for him. Nonetheless, he seamlessly adopts all of the doctrines of the church almost without question.
And that's what is interesting to me, that when you experience spiritual conversion to a faith, to a church, and establish both an emotional and a spiritual connection to a particular sect, the intellectual conversion just sort of follows. So, of course he would come down hard on his sister's lifestyle, because it's in the Bible plain as day and I'm sure his pastor preached a sermon on it one Sunday, and it all made sense, and of course it must be true because God led him on this path.
I must confess I don't know these people, I only heard a brief summary on a radio show, so I'm extrapolating here, but stuff like this has happened to me and I bet it has happened to you. In fact, in many ways, I can relate to this phenomenon more so than most because of the religious faith I belong to. Growing up in a non-Mormon town where I had a lot of non-Mormon friends, and being the sort of combative know-it-all kid I was, I got into plenty of religious debates, and I always felt like I was at the disadvantage. You see, the Mormon faith makes some pretty big claims on divine revelation, prophets, priesthood, and being the only true and living church. It's in the first section of the Doctrine Covenants, our church being "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased, speaking unto the church collectively and not individually—". So, in a debate on church doctrine, all one of my detractors had to do was find one example where my church was wrong, and the major premise of my church falls apart as well.
In contrast, the Protestants have it easy. Most of them simply say that as long as you believe in Jesus Christ (and since most people in Yuma, AZ do), you have nothing to worry about. That churches here on earth are a man-made invention, flawed to be sure, mere tools to help us mingle together, strengthen one-another, but the truth lies only in the Bible and in our relationship with God. We largely agree on this point, but it's just our church takes the additional rather significant step that God in His wisdom and mercy talked to one fourteen year old boy back in the early 1800's and through him started a divinely directed church.
And our church, through revelation to prophets does have a lot of complex doctrines, not completely understood by anyone I know, which is exciting to have room to grow and expand in an organization. But it's tricky. Despite all of the doctrinal complexities inherent in the church, mainly members of the church are directed to keep it simple, rooted in simple expressions of faith, rooted in emotional and spiritual experiences. In our monthly testimony meetings, we are asked to keep our messages short and focused on simple expressions of faith in God, Jesus Christ, and in the Divine mission of the church on the earth. As missionaries teaching prospective converts, we stick to six simple discussions, based solely on core principles of faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, scriptures, prophets, and revelation. We ask the person to pray, and as directed by their own convictions make the choice to act on the emotions and feelings they experience as they search. That's it.
But what's interesting to me, in the context of this essay, is what we don't do. A convert is never asked if they are comfortable with the church's polygamous history, or what they think of the historical controversies surrounding the Mountain Meadows massacre. Many times, a prospective convert will hear about this or other issues from a friend or pastor either before or soon after the conversion at which time they are forced to deal with it, but the missionaries never bring it up. And it's probably a good thing too because these issues are difficult to explain and basically get in the way of what's important, a person's personal journey to establish a relationship with Deity.
But contrast that with someone like myself who grew up in the church or someone who has been a member for many years. I have heard so many explanations of polygamy from these people and even have come up with a few of my own, none of them, to my knowledge, are officially church endorsed. But because the person has an emotional connection to the faith, they feel compelled to close the loop intellectually as well, and then talk themselves into some pretty crazy mental gymnastics in their attempts to do so.
I am only using the example of my faith because it is my faith, but we all have examples. Let's take politics. Isn't it strange to you that as soon as you declare yourself to be a liberal (for example), you almost always automatically become pro choice on abortion, anti-death penalty, pro progressive tax code, pro strict environmental laws, pro-increase the minimum wage, etc., etc., etc. Somewhere along the line, you probably had some sort of emotional conversion to the Democratic party, maybe a particular political leader was particularly inspiring, maybe the group of friends you associate with were influential, maybe your parents were Democrats and were raised you that way. But because of something more emotional than intellectual, you find yourself compelled to close the loop 100% of the way, and basically adopt the complete party line, hook, line and sinker. And your voting record bears it out.
This is not meant to be a criticism, it's incredibly easy thing to do. In fact, I have been a registered Republican most of my life and in those years I had a pretty consistent Republican-oriented voting record. I really can't remember ever voting for a Democrat until around 2004 or so. It was then that I registered independent, and have tried to vote that way. More recently, almost entirely because of Barack Obama, I registered Democrat, and found myself sympathizing more and more uniformly with the democratic side of the argument on so many issues. I have to keep reminding myself to stay independent in my thinking.
But there is another political component to my point. One of my first blog posts, I entitled it, "Are Democrats Smarter than Republicans", consisting of my personal political history. Well, one of the points I never really got to there and I'm getting to here, is that the Republican party has largely become the party of faith, while the Democratic party has become the party of intellectual reasoning.
The clash between the brother and sister of This American Life happens all the time in Congress, on Fox News, and in our communities. You are un-American if you don't wear an American lapel on your jacket and attend a church pastored by Jeremiah Wright. John Kerry was pillared in the 2004 debates for bringing up the idea of using a "global test" before we invade another country. And Bush's invasion into Iraq, as ill-thought out as it was, and this medieval like Crusades aspect to it.
Even the economic debates has this religious versus secular feel to it. The Republicans view always boils down to keeping the government out of the market and this almost religious faith that the free-market model will solve all of problems of poverty, family, and country. And the Republicans have been largely effective in labeling Democrats as elitist socialist, who want to grow government at the expense of our liberty.
In fact, most of the Democratic arguments I read are much more moderate. Most support the free market, but see its limitations in certain areas, so they support regulation, and government constraint, and to help "smooth over the rough edges" of the free market.
Now I'm not saying the Republican point of view is necessarily wrong and the Democratic view is right. I definitely see the religious point of view healthy and necessary in the political sphere, and I largely disagree with some attempts to eliminate religion from the public conversation. And sometimes, the more simple, religious approach is also the right approach.
To wrap up, I want to talk a little more about something personal to me that really fits into this theme, the issue of homosexuality. This issue has so many elements of religion and secularism and it rips the two right down the middle, motivating politicians to amend constitutions, and religious groups to push legislation. To many religious groups, including my own, this is a clear cut case of taking a morale stand against something that is morally wrong. But if you take the religious argument out of the equation and look at it with only your secular eyes, the Democratic argument makes more sense. There does seem to be rather strong evidence that points to strong gay feelings in certain people at early ages. And to suppress those feelings seems to lead to a lifetime of heartache. Admittedly, I'm completely naive on this issue.
The Mormon church has made some pretty emphatically clear statements on gender and sexuality. In fact, just a short time ago, it published The Proclamation on the Family where it says in no uncertain terms:
"Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose."
and
"We further declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife."
and
"The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity."
Pretty clear stuff. And I do feel a religious, spiritual, and emotional connection to the doctrine behind these statements. But I do know people that I highly respect that have close gay friends, and largely because of those friendships believe in their heart of hearts that their sexuality is an intrinsic part of their identity. In fact, I have met some of them, and would agree these people seem to be good in every possible sense of the word.
And also consider this story about transgendered six year olds. How, I want to know do you square this example with the statements in The Proclamation of the Family?
I guess my point is you just don't. In a recent Paul Graham essay entitled Lies We Tell Kids, he says, "Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't."
That's all he says about that, and he moves on to the next thought. That idea is fascinating to me because it rings so true. It reminds me of this poem from a book written by the recent American poet laureate, Ted Kooser, on pornography, entitled a Deck of Pornographic Playing Cards, and it goes like this:
We were ten or eleven, my friend and I,
when we found them under a bridge,
on top of a beam where pigeons were resting.
Someone had carefully hidden them there.
On each was a black-and-white photo,
no two cards alike. We grew quiet and older,
young men on our haunches, staring at
what we feared might be the future.
The pigeons flapped back to their roosts,
rustling and cooing. The river gurgled
as it slipped from the bridge's cool shadow.
There were women with big muzzled dogs,
women with bottles and broom handles.
Stallions stood over the bodies of others.
The women smiled and licked their lips
with tongues like thorns. We grew old.
We were two old men with stiff legs
and sad hearts. We had wanted to laugh
but we couldn't. We had thought we were boys,
come there to throw stones at the pigeons,
but we were already dying inside.
The image of these boys growing old in that moment of accidental knowledge is pretty startling for me, and I think that is the point maybe. That maybe it is important to understand some things, but better not to understand many other things. That it's more important to feel love, to feel spirituality and emotional connections with heaven, than it is to get caught up in debates that have no answers.
What makes the Proclamation on the Family so powerful for me is that it emphasizes strong families that are lasting and enduring. I just don't think it's especially helpful to use it as hammer to pound an anti-gay argument down someone's throat. We all make very personal decisions on these issues, and it can be very difficult to make sense of why one person chooses a lifestyle completely different from our own.
So, I think in day to day living, in our association with our friends and peers, it's pretty clear that we should follow principles of compassion, empathy, and love. In matters of public policy I wish there was more room for politicians to simply say, "you know this is a tough issue and I'm just not sure what the right answer is".
Really, truly, what is the best way to deal with abortion or gay marriage. The answer is probably to error on the side of compassion and tolerance, not being afraid to compromise to get stuff done, to admit that we live in a wonderful country filled with incredible people having all sorts of religious, spiritual, and intellectual points of view and it's our opportunity to understand one another in the spirit of friendship and humility.
One of these stories documents the relationship between a brother and a sister: the brother a recent charismatic born-again convert, the sister, a lesbian. And it is this conflict, between religious certainty and more of a rational skepticism, and a general tolerance of each other's point of view, that I want to spend some time discussing. Because at some level I can really relate to this conflict, having my own personal experiences with it.
But first, let me give you a summary of the show. The story is narrated by the sister, and she describes how while they were growing up, before he left home for college, the two were extremely close. However, in his freshman year in college, as a result of some major emotional struggles, culminating in an intensely personal, spiritual, emotionally charged experience, the brother converts to Christianity and joins a charismatic church. As a result of this conversion, he completely embraces his faith to the degree that he drops out of school and moves to a farm in Alaska owned by this church to live a communal lifestyle with other believers, abandoning his family in the process. Meanwhile, his sister embraces lesbianism, and moves to Europe with her girlfriend. In time, she finally makes a visit to the farm to visit her brother, trying to figure out what happened to him, to make an attempt to reconnect their once close relationship, and to convince him to accept her choices as much as she hopes to accept his. She even made a movie about this trip.
It was fascinating to hear their conversations in real-time as she attempts to get him to accept her as she is, which is impossible for him to do. In fact, earlier, he made a trip to visit her in Europe, shortly after his conversion. Needless to say, he was judgmental of her situation. What's also fascinating is how she describes the differences each took in dealing with their problems, her time spent working through problems with a therapist, his consultation with the Bible to find answers.
This whole dynamic is interesting. According to the narrator, before his conversion, he was very non-homophoboic, very accepting, and they were very close. However, as she makes the attempts to visit him and talk with him, she discovers the details of his conversion. How his freshman year was unusually difficult; how he was struggling with depressive thoughts; how he has this religious, very spiritual experience; how through this experience, he felt in a very direct and undeniable way, God's love for him; how through additional experiences he was led to this charismatic church; and how through a relationship from this woman who kind of mentors him, he decides to move to the farm.
You see, what is fascinating here is that he becomes a Christian because of an emotionally-charged spiritual experience. I am not sure the extent of the intellectual process involved, it seemed obvious that he studied the Bible pretty intently thereafter, but it seems definitely secondary for him. Nonetheless, he seamlessly adopts all of the doctrines of the church almost without question.
And that's what is interesting to me, that when you experience spiritual conversion to a faith, to a church, and establish both an emotional and a spiritual connection to a particular sect, the intellectual conversion just sort of follows. So, of course he would come down hard on his sister's lifestyle, because it's in the Bible plain as day and I'm sure his pastor preached a sermon on it one Sunday, and it all made sense, and of course it must be true because God led him on this path.
I must confess I don't know these people, I only heard a brief summary on a radio show, so I'm extrapolating here, but stuff like this has happened to me and I bet it has happened to you. In fact, in many ways, I can relate to this phenomenon more so than most because of the religious faith I belong to. Growing up in a non-Mormon town where I had a lot of non-Mormon friends, and being the sort of combative know-it-all kid I was, I got into plenty of religious debates, and I always felt like I was at the disadvantage. You see, the Mormon faith makes some pretty big claims on divine revelation, prophets, priesthood, and being the only true and living church. It's in the first section of the Doctrine Covenants, our church being "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth, with which I, the Lord, am well pleased, speaking unto the church collectively and not individually—". So, in a debate on church doctrine, all one of my detractors had to do was find one example where my church was wrong, and the major premise of my church falls apart as well.
In contrast, the Protestants have it easy. Most of them simply say that as long as you believe in Jesus Christ (and since most people in Yuma, AZ do), you have nothing to worry about. That churches here on earth are a man-made invention, flawed to be sure, mere tools to help us mingle together, strengthen one-another, but the truth lies only in the Bible and in our relationship with God. We largely agree on this point, but it's just our church takes the additional rather significant step that God in His wisdom and mercy talked to one fourteen year old boy back in the early 1800's and through him started a divinely directed church.
And our church, through revelation to prophets does have a lot of complex doctrines, not completely understood by anyone I know, which is exciting to have room to grow and expand in an organization. But it's tricky. Despite all of the doctrinal complexities inherent in the church, mainly members of the church are directed to keep it simple, rooted in simple expressions of faith, rooted in emotional and spiritual experiences. In our monthly testimony meetings, we are asked to keep our messages short and focused on simple expressions of faith in God, Jesus Christ, and in the Divine mission of the church on the earth. As missionaries teaching prospective converts, we stick to six simple discussions, based solely on core principles of faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, scriptures, prophets, and revelation. We ask the person to pray, and as directed by their own convictions make the choice to act on the emotions and feelings they experience as they search. That's it.
But what's interesting to me, in the context of this essay, is what we don't do. A convert is never asked if they are comfortable with the church's polygamous history, or what they think of the historical controversies surrounding the Mountain Meadows massacre. Many times, a prospective convert will hear about this or other issues from a friend or pastor either before or soon after the conversion at which time they are forced to deal with it, but the missionaries never bring it up. And it's probably a good thing too because these issues are difficult to explain and basically get in the way of what's important, a person's personal journey to establish a relationship with Deity.
But contrast that with someone like myself who grew up in the church or someone who has been a member for many years. I have heard so many explanations of polygamy from these people and even have come up with a few of my own, none of them, to my knowledge, are officially church endorsed. But because the person has an emotional connection to the faith, they feel compelled to close the loop intellectually as well, and then talk themselves into some pretty crazy mental gymnastics in their attempts to do so.
I am only using the example of my faith because it is my faith, but we all have examples. Let's take politics. Isn't it strange to you that as soon as you declare yourself to be a liberal (for example), you almost always automatically become pro choice on abortion, anti-death penalty, pro progressive tax code, pro strict environmental laws, pro-increase the minimum wage, etc., etc., etc. Somewhere along the line, you probably had some sort of emotional conversion to the Democratic party, maybe a particular political leader was particularly inspiring, maybe the group of friends you associate with were influential, maybe your parents were Democrats and were raised you that way. But because of something more emotional than intellectual, you find yourself compelled to close the loop 100% of the way, and basically adopt the complete party line, hook, line and sinker. And your voting record bears it out.
This is not meant to be a criticism, it's incredibly easy thing to do. In fact, I have been a registered Republican most of my life and in those years I had a pretty consistent Republican-oriented voting record. I really can't remember ever voting for a Democrat until around 2004 or so. It was then that I registered independent, and have tried to vote that way. More recently, almost entirely because of Barack Obama, I registered Democrat, and found myself sympathizing more and more uniformly with the democratic side of the argument on so many issues. I have to keep reminding myself to stay independent in my thinking.
But there is another political component to my point. One of my first blog posts, I entitled it, "Are Democrats Smarter than Republicans", consisting of my personal political history. Well, one of the points I never really got to there and I'm getting to here, is that the Republican party has largely become the party of faith, while the Democratic party has become the party of intellectual reasoning.
The clash between the brother and sister of This American Life happens all the time in Congress, on Fox News, and in our communities. You are un-American if you don't wear an American lapel on your jacket and attend a church pastored by Jeremiah Wright. John Kerry was pillared in the 2004 debates for bringing up the idea of using a "global test" before we invade another country. And Bush's invasion into Iraq, as ill-thought out as it was, and this medieval like Crusades aspect to it.
Even the economic debates has this religious versus secular feel to it. The Republicans view always boils down to keeping the government out of the market and this almost religious faith that the free-market model will solve all of problems of poverty, family, and country. And the Republicans have been largely effective in labeling Democrats as elitist socialist, who want to grow government at the expense of our liberty.
In fact, most of the Democratic arguments I read are much more moderate. Most support the free market, but see its limitations in certain areas, so they support regulation, and government constraint, and to help "smooth over the rough edges" of the free market.
Now I'm not saying the Republican point of view is necessarily wrong and the Democratic view is right. I definitely see the religious point of view healthy and necessary in the political sphere, and I largely disagree with some attempts to eliminate religion from the public conversation. And sometimes, the more simple, religious approach is also the right approach.
To wrap up, I want to talk a little more about something personal to me that really fits into this theme, the issue of homosexuality. This issue has so many elements of religion and secularism and it rips the two right down the middle, motivating politicians to amend constitutions, and religious groups to push legislation. To many religious groups, including my own, this is a clear cut case of taking a morale stand against something that is morally wrong. But if you take the religious argument out of the equation and look at it with only your secular eyes, the Democratic argument makes more sense. There does seem to be rather strong evidence that points to strong gay feelings in certain people at early ages. And to suppress those feelings seems to lead to a lifetime of heartache. Admittedly, I'm completely naive on this issue.
The Mormon church has made some pretty emphatically clear statements on gender and sexuality. In fact, just a short time ago, it published The Proclamation on the Family where it says in no uncertain terms:
"Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose."
and
"We further declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife."
and
"The family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity."
Pretty clear stuff. And I do feel a religious, spiritual, and emotional connection to the doctrine behind these statements. But I do know people that I highly respect that have close gay friends, and largely because of those friendships believe in their heart of hearts that their sexuality is an intrinsic part of their identity. In fact, I have met some of them, and would agree these people seem to be good in every possible sense of the word.
And also consider this story about transgendered six year olds. How, I want to know do you square this example with the statements in The Proclamation of the Family?
I guess my point is you just don't. In a recent Paul Graham essay entitled Lies We Tell Kids, he says, "Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't."
That's all he says about that, and he moves on to the next thought. That idea is fascinating to me because it rings so true. It reminds me of this poem from a book written by the recent American poet laureate, Ted Kooser, on pornography, entitled a Deck of Pornographic Playing Cards, and it goes like this:
We were ten or eleven, my friend and I,
when we found them under a bridge,
on top of a beam where pigeons were resting.
Someone had carefully hidden them there.
On each was a black-and-white photo,
no two cards alike. We grew quiet and older,
young men on our haunches, staring at
what we feared might be the future.
The pigeons flapped back to their roosts,
rustling and cooing. The river gurgled
as it slipped from the bridge's cool shadow.
There were women with big muzzled dogs,
women with bottles and broom handles.
Stallions stood over the bodies of others.
The women smiled and licked their lips
with tongues like thorns. We grew old.
We were two old men with stiff legs
and sad hearts. We had wanted to laugh
but we couldn't. We had thought we were boys,
come there to throw stones at the pigeons,
but we were already dying inside.
The image of these boys growing old in that moment of accidental knowledge is pretty startling for me, and I think that is the point maybe. That maybe it is important to understand some things, but better not to understand many other things. That it's more important to feel love, to feel spirituality and emotional connections with heaven, than it is to get caught up in debates that have no answers.
What makes the Proclamation on the Family so powerful for me is that it emphasizes strong families that are lasting and enduring. I just don't think it's especially helpful to use it as hammer to pound an anti-gay argument down someone's throat. We all make very personal decisions on these issues, and it can be very difficult to make sense of why one person chooses a lifestyle completely different from our own.
So, I think in day to day living, in our association with our friends and peers, it's pretty clear that we should follow principles of compassion, empathy, and love. In matters of public policy I wish there was more room for politicians to simply say, "you know this is a tough issue and I'm just not sure what the right answer is".
Really, truly, what is the best way to deal with abortion or gay marriage. The answer is probably to error on the side of compassion and tolerance, not being afraid to compromise to get stuff done, to admit that we live in a wonderful country filled with incredible people having all sorts of religious, spiritual, and intellectual points of view and it's our opportunity to understand one another in the spirit of friendship and humility.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Art, Science, and Religion
The other day I listened with interest to this podcast of an interview with Dick Gabriel, a big-time computer scientists who is a Lisp guru. Lisp is language of choice back in the 1980's when artificial intelligence was a big deal and Dick Gabriel was one of the main guys. Lisp is would be a typical kind of thing for me to spend time learning (my goal is to spend a little time each night trying to get up to speed on it). One, learning Lisp has very little direct practical relevance. Lisp programming experts are few, and jobs are fewer. But it has a certain academic appeal to me, it offers a whole new way of viewing the world.
I don't know much about Lisp, but what I do know is fascinating. It is purely a functional language and in essence essentially stateless. A function's job is to take input and produce output. The language consists of basically linking functions together to process data in primarily the list data structure. The artificial intelligence comes in because you can dynamically add new functions, a kind of dynamic learning. Ok, there's more to it than that, and if I can accomplish my goal to learn this language, I will fill you in.
But here's another interesting fact about Dick Gabriel, he took three years off in the early part of the 1990's to pursue a MFA in poetry. Can you just jump into any Master's degree of your choice like that? Well, he apparently did and now he's been writing a poem a day for the past eight years. The website documenting this project is here. I like how he says, "after 8 years of writing this way, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not really a very good poet."
In the interview, after a bunch of historically interesting, but technically confusing details about the Lisp programming language, he talks about how artists and scientists should really collaborate and learn from each other more. I really do not have a lot of life experience that validates this kind of idea, but every time I hear it, the thought excites the daylights out of me.
In fact, this interdisciplinary cooperation is became quite fashionable at least from what I have heard. Again, I haven't experienced it first hand, but I would love to. Know any opportunities out there? I would be interested.
The first Friday's of every month, downtown Phoenix opens up all of their art galleries, restaurants open up, and street vendors converge. The streets are crowded and for one night at least, you feel like your in New York City. I went one night by myself. My wife and kids were in Utah for their yearly escape from the heat, and I wandered through the streets just absorbing all of the energy, really just soaking it all in. I really had this strong desire to jump into this scene somehow...
Another time I heard this idea of interdisciplinary collaboration was several years ago, I had this opportunity to attend an Embedded Systems conference in San Fransisco. The keynote speaker was Murray Gell-Mann. He wrote a book called the Quark and the Jaguar which was all about the idea of complexity and patterns all around us, and the idea of complexity was the topic of his keynote address. He is most famous for winning the Nobel prize in Physics for his discovery of the Quark. He is currently working in Santa Fe, New Mexico working with people from a variety of disciplines to come up with a comprehensive theory of everything.
This endeavor to understand and make sense of the world though is an endeavor common to a wide variety of disciplines. A poet attempts to document her view of the world through language and metaphor, trying to describe the indescribable. A philosopher, much more directly, is trying to do the same thing. The theologian and the scientist both are trying to understand the universe, but the scientist is just using more precise tools.
What about those more practical fields like business. Well, in his book "Mind Your Own Business" by Sidney Harman, consider this quote:
"Business and the business schools have for too long lionized the specialist, the person who has learned how to do one thing and do it well, but who, as a consequence, has almost no idea how the whole enterprise works. Time and again, in small companies and large, I have encountered senior executives who live lives of silent terror. They do their jobs, and they believe that they do them effectively, but they do not have a clue about how the whole enterprise works. It seems to them that the company has a life and motion of its own, and they live in fear that they will somehow be found out. That kind of departmentalized thinking - the specialist in the silo - produces paralysis and an absence of innovation and creativity. Coupled with top-down autocratic command, it is the essence of what I think of as old analog management. It can bring the company's growth to a full stop.
I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are the original system thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world turns. Poets, those unheralded system thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders."
That quote reminds me of a software architect book I read back in school where the author said that writing software is one of the hardest things to do because you are in essence building a universe. You are really. You have a language. Your only constraint is that language, and it constrains you some, but you are forced to build, often from scratch something that is not well understood up front. Is it no wonder that software projects are often times over schedule and over budget.
It's these kind of ideas that make me relish my current job in a dot com. Did you know that coming to an interview at PayPal (or Amazon or Google) in a suit would be the wrong thing to do, in fact that mistake alone could cost you the job. Amazon tells you up front not to wear suits. By the way, another cool thing at Amazon, all of their desks are made from recycled doors, and its obviously so when you take a look. Quirky and cool.
But to really innovate in a way that will win in the business world, especially the internet business world requires creativity, boldness, and system thinking. This requires an ability to analyze the world, see how you can make it better, and deliver.
So, in the end, how can are art, science, and religion work together? There's a really cool quote from a Bob Dylan song that often rings in my head. It's from the song, Absolutely Sweet Marie it goes like this: "But to live outside the law, you must be honest". Honesty I think is the common ingredient. Honesty and authenticity.
Good art is honest. Good science is honest. Obviously, honesty is the tenant of religion. A sincere pursuit of more. A sincere expression of yourself.
I heard a quote listening to a podcast about craftsmanship. You're a laborer if you do something with your hands, a craftsman if you do it with your head, an artist if you do it with your heart. Really that's the sum of it.
But how do you translate all of these cool sounding ideas into the real world? This sort of stuff works really well with intellectuals in their ivory towers, or the hack wantabe talking around a campfire. But does it translate into a business model? I say yes.
Several years ago I read an article about one of the best Steinway salespersons in the world, someone who could sense a pianist's style (she was herself a classically trained pianist) and artistry and could match the person with the exact piano that fit the customer's style and in essence make the pianist fall in love with the piano. There was no trickery in this salesmanship. The art of it was to quickly get a sense of the consumer. Figure out what the person in her heart wanted, and through an educational process show how the purchase of a product can fulfill an honest and sincere desire.
This ability to see the world as it is, establish a deep connection with it, and seek out ways to make it better, then convince others that your contribution is worth their time, not through manipulation, but through an honest educational process.
This sort of thing does not happen enough. Too often, companies try to shortcut the process through manipulation, or by offering a counterfeit product that promises one thing but delivers something else. The fast food industry is like this. It produces food incredibly cheap, and hypes it up with artificial flavors. We like the taste at first, but it makes us sick soon after. There's no nuance in its flavor. But the business model has worked. You hire unskilled labor on the cheap, you spend the money on marketing to manipulate the consumer to come in, and you offer a product that has no value but a quick and cheap thrill. And we all get fat and dumb in the process.
Compare this with the business model where you hire the best and brightest. The artists of the profession and you go about innovating products that will appeal to the best of what's in us. You market your product, but the marketing is honest, because the product really is superior. You might use sophisticated techniques to convince someone of it, but when you turn him on it, you have won a loyal customer for a long time.
Google is the most obvious example. Read much more about why here. But basically, they pay and treat their employees extremely well, and they flat out get the best. And they innovate like crazy. Music has a ton of examples. My personal favorite being Bob Dylan. I read somewhere that recording companies love him, not because his albums are the top selling when they are released but because his albums sustain. People continue to buy them for a long time. People still buy Bob Dylan albums that are over forty years old. The music is honest, good, transcends its time, but Dylan was also able to market himself in a truly honest way that resonated with people and drew people to him.
Life is interesting really. There are so many components to it. At the most basic, we worry about our day to day survival: food, clothing, and shelter. But part of our advancement as a society is to get beyond just survival. Our potential is to create and innovate, and each of us desires to do that. Almost every person I have worked with wants to design or to lead or to create and not just to work.
To get there, we need to become more savvy consumers, more savvy workers, more savvy entertainment seekers, more savvy producers. At our core, we are all scientists, artists, businessmen and businesswomen, and prophets.
I don't know much about Lisp, but what I do know is fascinating. It is purely a functional language and in essence essentially stateless. A function's job is to take input and produce output. The language consists of basically linking functions together to process data in primarily the list data structure. The artificial intelligence comes in because you can dynamically add new functions, a kind of dynamic learning. Ok, there's more to it than that, and if I can accomplish my goal to learn this language, I will fill you in.
But here's another interesting fact about Dick Gabriel, he took three years off in the early part of the 1990's to pursue a MFA in poetry. Can you just jump into any Master's degree of your choice like that? Well, he apparently did and now he's been writing a poem a day for the past eight years. The website documenting this project is here. I like how he says, "after 8 years of writing this way, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not really a very good poet."
In the interview, after a bunch of historically interesting, but technically confusing details about the Lisp programming language, he talks about how artists and scientists should really collaborate and learn from each other more. I really do not have a lot of life experience that validates this kind of idea, but every time I hear it, the thought excites the daylights out of me.
In fact, this interdisciplinary cooperation is became quite fashionable at least from what I have heard. Again, I haven't experienced it first hand, but I would love to. Know any opportunities out there? I would be interested.
The first Friday's of every month, downtown Phoenix opens up all of their art galleries, restaurants open up, and street vendors converge. The streets are crowded and for one night at least, you feel like your in New York City. I went one night by myself. My wife and kids were in Utah for their yearly escape from the heat, and I wandered through the streets just absorbing all of the energy, really just soaking it all in. I really had this strong desire to jump into this scene somehow...
Another time I heard this idea of interdisciplinary collaboration was several years ago, I had this opportunity to attend an Embedded Systems conference in San Fransisco. The keynote speaker was Murray Gell-Mann. He wrote a book called the Quark and the Jaguar which was all about the idea of complexity and patterns all around us, and the idea of complexity was the topic of his keynote address. He is most famous for winning the Nobel prize in Physics for his discovery of the Quark. He is currently working in Santa Fe, New Mexico working with people from a variety of disciplines to come up with a comprehensive theory of everything.
This endeavor to understand and make sense of the world though is an endeavor common to a wide variety of disciplines. A poet attempts to document her view of the world through language and metaphor, trying to describe the indescribable. A philosopher, much more directly, is trying to do the same thing. The theologian and the scientist both are trying to understand the universe, but the scientist is just using more precise tools.
What about those more practical fields like business. Well, in his book "Mind Your Own Business" by Sidney Harman, consider this quote:
"Business and the business schools have for too long lionized the specialist, the person who has learned how to do one thing and do it well, but who, as a consequence, has almost no idea how the whole enterprise works. Time and again, in small companies and large, I have encountered senior executives who live lives of silent terror. They do their jobs, and they believe that they do them effectively, but they do not have a clue about how the whole enterprise works. It seems to them that the company has a life and motion of its own, and they live in fear that they will somehow be found out. That kind of departmentalized thinking - the specialist in the silo - produces paralysis and an absence of innovation and creativity. Coupled with top-down autocratic command, it is the essence of what I think of as old analog management. It can bring the company's growth to a full stop.
I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are the original system thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world turns. Poets, those unheralded system thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders."
That quote reminds me of a software architect book I read back in school where the author said that writing software is one of the hardest things to do because you are in essence building a universe. You are really. You have a language. Your only constraint is that language, and it constrains you some, but you are forced to build, often from scratch something that is not well understood up front. Is it no wonder that software projects are often times over schedule and over budget.
It's these kind of ideas that make me relish my current job in a dot com. Did you know that coming to an interview at PayPal (or Amazon or Google) in a suit would be the wrong thing to do, in fact that mistake alone could cost you the job. Amazon tells you up front not to wear suits. By the way, another cool thing at Amazon, all of their desks are made from recycled doors, and its obviously so when you take a look. Quirky and cool.
But to really innovate in a way that will win in the business world, especially the internet business world requires creativity, boldness, and system thinking. This requires an ability to analyze the world, see how you can make it better, and deliver.
So, in the end, how can are art, science, and religion work together? There's a really cool quote from a Bob Dylan song that often rings in my head. It's from the song, Absolutely Sweet Marie it goes like this: "But to live outside the law, you must be honest". Honesty I think is the common ingredient. Honesty and authenticity.
Good art is honest. Good science is honest. Obviously, honesty is the tenant of religion. A sincere pursuit of more. A sincere expression of yourself.
I heard a quote listening to a podcast about craftsmanship. You're a laborer if you do something with your hands, a craftsman if you do it with your head, an artist if you do it with your heart. Really that's the sum of it.
But how do you translate all of these cool sounding ideas into the real world? This sort of stuff works really well with intellectuals in their ivory towers, or the hack wantabe talking around a campfire. But does it translate into a business model? I say yes.
Several years ago I read an article about one of the best Steinway salespersons in the world, someone who could sense a pianist's style (she was herself a classically trained pianist) and artistry and could match the person with the exact piano that fit the customer's style and in essence make the pianist fall in love with the piano. There was no trickery in this salesmanship. The art of it was to quickly get a sense of the consumer. Figure out what the person in her heart wanted, and through an educational process show how the purchase of a product can fulfill an honest and sincere desire.
This ability to see the world as it is, establish a deep connection with it, and seek out ways to make it better, then convince others that your contribution is worth their time, not through manipulation, but through an honest educational process.
This sort of thing does not happen enough. Too often, companies try to shortcut the process through manipulation, or by offering a counterfeit product that promises one thing but delivers something else. The fast food industry is like this. It produces food incredibly cheap, and hypes it up with artificial flavors. We like the taste at first, but it makes us sick soon after. There's no nuance in its flavor. But the business model has worked. You hire unskilled labor on the cheap, you spend the money on marketing to manipulate the consumer to come in, and you offer a product that has no value but a quick and cheap thrill. And we all get fat and dumb in the process.
Compare this with the business model where you hire the best and brightest. The artists of the profession and you go about innovating products that will appeal to the best of what's in us. You market your product, but the marketing is honest, because the product really is superior. You might use sophisticated techniques to convince someone of it, but when you turn him on it, you have won a loyal customer for a long time.
Google is the most obvious example. Read much more about why here. But basically, they pay and treat their employees extremely well, and they flat out get the best. And they innovate like crazy. Music has a ton of examples. My personal favorite being Bob Dylan. I read somewhere that recording companies love him, not because his albums are the top selling when they are released but because his albums sustain. People continue to buy them for a long time. People still buy Bob Dylan albums that are over forty years old. The music is honest, good, transcends its time, but Dylan was also able to market himself in a truly honest way that resonated with people and drew people to him.
Life is interesting really. There are so many components to it. At the most basic, we worry about our day to day survival: food, clothing, and shelter. But part of our advancement as a society is to get beyond just survival. Our potential is to create and innovate, and each of us desires to do that. Almost every person I have worked with wants to design or to lead or to create and not just to work.
To get there, we need to become more savvy consumers, more savvy workers, more savvy entertainment seekers, more savvy producers. At our core, we are all scientists, artists, businessmen and businesswomen, and prophets.
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