Are we there yet?
Christmas is an interesting time of year. It’s hard to describe the American-ness of it all, but Christmas brings out everything a red-blooded American could want. Jesus, consumerism, good-will, charitable work, vacation. Personally, it makes me more sensitive to God speak and media frenzies. It makes me want to read CS Lewis and philosophize over the meaning of spirituality. Let me pretext the following information by saying that I am Mormon. The only reason this needs mentioning is that I’ll be using some Mormon eschatology/beliefs in here and I didn’t want this stuff to come out of left field for those that don’t know. On that same token I’m not exactly a “typical” Mormon. Typical ones tend to appear as far-far right wing evangelicals (discounting the obvious tensions between evangelicals and Mormons), though this is changing. Now that we have the pretext down, let’s dive right in.
Richard Dawkins recently penned a book called The God Delusion. Essentially, it’s a book on modern philosophy backed with evidence related to his early work on genetic Darwinism. He wrote The Selfish Gene quite a few years ago, and its text is based on the idea that human action has, at its core, the driving motivator of genetic propagation. This does not mean the propagation of the organism as a whole but the individual genes that map out the characteristics of a person are, in and of themselves, trying to perpetuate their “offspring”. Many laud Dawkins as a scientist. He himself admits that he is jumping down the path of philosophy with the majority of his work. He relies on the scientific work that went before him to build up his philosophical structure. I have no problem with this, as any philosophical idea tends to produce discussion and thought. What I do find silly is the dogged religious zealots trying to defend their idea of faith against logic. Faith is not logical, not only that but true faith cannot be anything but personal. For it to be true faith it must be built on a simple system of cause and effect. No amount of spiritual storytelling will ever beget faith. It is by this, and only this token that I base my faith and spirituality. Call it sixth sense, the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, the third eye, collective subconscious, call it whatever you want, but spirituality can only be manifest in ourselves, and thus proven to ourselves, by experiencing communication with that which has no physical explanation.
Communication is the key. This is where we run into a problem. We experience things as humans. We feel the binding nature of our dimension every second of every day. The breaths we take, our hearts beating inside of us, sight, sound, smell, taste, we are completely involved in our senses. In this same respect we can only visualize things within the confines of our reality. We imagine the afterlife to “look” a certain way. We expect to perceive God as we perceive him now. Most Mormons also expect God to perceive things as we perceive them. We expect to exist in a version of the world we know now. These are all silly notions. I’ll make this example easy by using someone we are all familiar with, Superman.
Anyone who knows Superman knows his powers: X-ray vision, invulnerability, super-speed, super-strength, super-hearing, heat-vision, super-intelligence. When we read about them in a comic book they are always constrained to our world. Imagine being Superman. Imagine first having super-vision. Right now you perceive light as wavelengths that are translated to color. Superman’s vision extends beyond our own. He can see throughout the spectrum of light. Now let me ask, can you not see a color? Can you will yourself to no longer perceive green in the spectrum? Blue? Red? Sure, you can close your eyes and block out most light, but you cannot choose what to see when your eyes are open. Superman would see everything all the time. Super-hearing? Same thing. This is actually easier to imagine. Superman’s dynamic range is just much larger than our own. He can hear clouds scraping together on the opposite side of the world as well as tolerate the pressure in the center of a star. He is also able to hear outside of our own hearing range, including hearing and decoding frequencies in the radio transmission spectrum. Ole supes can probably hear quasars pulsing.
Now you’re probably wondering what I meant by super-intelligence. Some writers have written Superman as somewhat of a dimwit. The man can read a book in under a second, and decode and modulate radio frequencies and translate them to their equivalent signals. He also has super-speed. How fast can you read a book? How fast can you react, and churn out the moves necessary to stay alive in a video-game? Can you speed up your own time? Why would Superman be able to shift his perspective? Every moment must plod. He must waste the equivalent of our own days, even years, just taking a human speed step. How many thoughts does he have in that time? Not only that but he should be intelligent, even for his own people. His father was a scientist. A scientist so smart that he was able to build an escape capsule and send his son hurtling light years away to another galaxy completely unharmed. No one else on Krypton was intelligent enough to do this. The best part is this is only an exercise in perception.
Now we arrive back where we started. What makes us think that if there is anything after this life, that it is comprehensible in any way to our minds right now. Our human consciousness is a limited shell that can only limit our perception. Even Joseph Smith (the guy who founded Mormonism) stated that he could not see God without spiritual eyes. Let’s think about that for a moment. He never claimed to see God with physical eyes; he only offered his best description of his perception of God during an intense spiritual encounter. Whether quickened or spiritually perceiving, what he claimed happened was not a human experience. Children still try to hear God with their ears, and see God with their eyes. The best thing we can do for our children is allow them the opportunity to feel what we call the Spirit. The true communication of what our limited perception would call ethereal or spiritual. If there is a God then it is only through this communication that we could have evidence.
There has never been a time in my life that this needed defending. It shapes who I am and how I think. It needs no proof but its own, and it need not rely on the word of others. Science coexists with this, for in no way does our physical understandings of our world encroach on the perceptions of the spiritual. Science should never use God as an explanation for how something happened.
Richard Dawkins recently penned a book called The God Delusion. Essentially, it’s a book on modern philosophy backed with evidence related to his early work on genetic Darwinism. He wrote The Selfish Gene quite a few years ago, and its text is based on the idea that human action has, at its core, the driving motivator of genetic propagation. This does not mean the propagation of the organism as a whole but the individual genes that map out the characteristics of a person are, in and of themselves, trying to perpetuate their “offspring”. Many laud Dawkins as a scientist. He himself admits that he is jumping down the path of philosophy with the majority of his work. He relies on the scientific work that went before him to build up his philosophical structure. I have no problem with this, as any philosophical idea tends to produce discussion and thought. What I do find silly is the dogged religious zealots trying to defend their idea of faith against logic. Faith is not logical, not only that but true faith cannot be anything but personal. For it to be true faith it must be built on a simple system of cause and effect. No amount of spiritual storytelling will ever beget faith. It is by this, and only this token that I base my faith and spirituality. Call it sixth sense, the Holy Ghost, the Spirit, the third eye, collective subconscious, call it whatever you want, but spirituality can only be manifest in ourselves, and thus proven to ourselves, by experiencing communication with that which has no physical explanation.
Communication is the key. This is where we run into a problem. We experience things as humans. We feel the binding nature of our dimension every second of every day. The breaths we take, our hearts beating inside of us, sight, sound, smell, taste, we are completely involved in our senses. In this same respect we can only visualize things within the confines of our reality. We imagine the afterlife to “look” a certain way. We expect to perceive God as we perceive him now. Most Mormons also expect God to perceive things as we perceive them. We expect to exist in a version of the world we know now. These are all silly notions. I’ll make this example easy by using someone we are all familiar with, Superman.
Anyone who knows Superman knows his powers: X-ray vision, invulnerability, super-speed, super-strength, super-hearing, heat-vision, super-intelligence. When we read about them in a comic book they are always constrained to our world. Imagine being Superman. Imagine first having super-vision. Right now you perceive light as wavelengths that are translated to color. Superman’s vision extends beyond our own. He can see throughout the spectrum of light. Now let me ask, can you not see a color? Can you will yourself to no longer perceive green in the spectrum? Blue? Red? Sure, you can close your eyes and block out most light, but you cannot choose what to see when your eyes are open. Superman would see everything all the time. Super-hearing? Same thing. This is actually easier to imagine. Superman’s dynamic range is just much larger than our own. He can hear clouds scraping together on the opposite side of the world as well as tolerate the pressure in the center of a star. He is also able to hear outside of our own hearing range, including hearing and decoding frequencies in the radio transmission spectrum. Ole supes can probably hear quasars pulsing.
Now you’re probably wondering what I meant by super-intelligence. Some writers have written Superman as somewhat of a dimwit. The man can read a book in under a second, and decode and modulate radio frequencies and translate them to their equivalent signals. He also has super-speed. How fast can you read a book? How fast can you react, and churn out the moves necessary to stay alive in a video-game? Can you speed up your own time? Why would Superman be able to shift his perspective? Every moment must plod. He must waste the equivalent of our own days, even years, just taking a human speed step. How many thoughts does he have in that time? Not only that but he should be intelligent, even for his own people. His father was a scientist. A scientist so smart that he was able to build an escape capsule and send his son hurtling light years away to another galaxy completely unharmed. No one else on Krypton was intelligent enough to do this. The best part is this is only an exercise in perception.
Now we arrive back where we started. What makes us think that if there is anything after this life, that it is comprehensible in any way to our minds right now. Our human consciousness is a limited shell that can only limit our perception. Even Joseph Smith (the guy who founded Mormonism) stated that he could not see God without spiritual eyes. Let’s think about that for a moment. He never claimed to see God with physical eyes; he only offered his best description of his perception of God during an intense spiritual encounter. Whether quickened or spiritually perceiving, what he claimed happened was not a human experience. Children still try to hear God with their ears, and see God with their eyes. The best thing we can do for our children is allow them the opportunity to feel what we call the Spirit. The true communication of what our limited perception would call ethereal or spiritual. If there is a God then it is only through this communication that we could have evidence.
There has never been a time in my life that this needed defending. It shapes who I am and how I think. It needs no proof but its own, and it need not rely on the word of others. Science coexists with this, for in no way does our physical understandings of our world encroach on the perceptions of the spiritual. Science should never use God as an explanation for how something happened.
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