In Memory

Memorial to the slaughter of the Cathars at Montsegur

In memory of the Cathars of Montsegur
who were murdered for opposing evil,
tyranny and hypocrisy

It's 1206, the High Middle Ages.

The place: Languedoc, in what is now Southern France. At this time however, Languedoc is not under the authority of the French king but is under the control of various nobles. It is an area of high culture, a melting pot of travellers from other places and their ideas. The troubadours and their tales of courtly love originated from here.

The various independent nobles who occupy this region are very resistant to interference from the nobles of Northern France under the French king, and just as resistant to interference from the Pope. There is good reason for this: in Languedoc, the majority religion is no longer Catholicism. The Cathars, a Christian sect with dualist and gnostic tendencies, are rapidly gaining popularity in the face of Church hypocrisy and corruption.

The Cathar elite, the Perfecti, did not believe in violence, not even to animals. They didn't eat meat. They did not believe in war or capital punishment. They didn't believe in hell or purgatory. They did believe in reincarnation. They believed in the equality of the sexes. For every one of the Perfecti, there were dozens of lay people who looked up to them, but who did not have to live to as high a standard.

To the Catholic Church, it is no exaggeration to say that these were the most dangerous men (and women) alive. The Cathars were not only a heresy, they were a heresy supported by the local nobles. They were not only a heresy, they were spreading rapidly. They were the largest heretical sect since the first centuries of the modern era. The Church called them by some of the names of their old enemies: Paulicians, gnostics, Manichaeans, Bogomils, Albigensians.

When Pope Innocent III (highly ironic name, that) ascended to the throne of St. Peter, he was determined to rein in this heresy. At first, he took the path of peaceful conversion. He sent priests into the Languedoc to debate the Cathars and try to bring them back to Rome. Some independent monks tried to do the same thing, such as St. Dominic. What all of them say, is that the Cathars were highly resistant to being converted. One cleric appeared before the Cathars, dressed in all his wealth and finery, and started preaching to them. Whereupon they laughed him to derision, telling him that he needed to either "give up his wealth or give up his sermon." This was in an era when the wealth of priests and monks could be conspicuous, and when they made crucifixes of Jesus on the cross with a money bag at his hip, symbolizing that it was okay for clerics to handle large sums of money. Monasteries at this time were like major multinational banking corporations today: repositories for vast amounts of capital.

The Pope responded to this failure by removing the local bishops or stripping them of some of their authority. The local bishops were tolerant of the Cathars and intolerant of papal interference. The Pope sent papal legates to act directly for him. One such legate, Pierre de Castelnau, tried to bully the powerful Raymond IV of Toulouse into cooperating by threatening excommunication and even military intervention. Raymond sent him packing and was excommunicated, and the next day Castelnau was murdered, presumably by Raymond's men.

Thus begins the 20-year-long Albigensian Crusade, a crusade not against foreigners but of Christians killing other people who also called themselves Christians.

The Pope, who was not able to raise an army just for the "glory of God", wound up appealing to rather baser motivations. He told the nobles in Northern France that they could seize the properties of the nobles in Southern France if they were willing to fight in this crusade. Of course, nothing appeals to a nobleman like stealing property.

In 1209, the "crusaders" took the city of Beziers, utterly annihilating its population. The estimates of the dead vary between 15 and 60 thousand.

The city of Carcassonne fell without much of a fight, and the crusaders magnanimously allowed the population to leave.... wearing their underwear only. All their property was seized.

Several towns after this fell without a fight.

In June 1210, the heavily fortified town of Minerve fell. Everyone was given the opportunity to recant, but 140 persons refused and were burned alive.

After a universally successful first year for the Pope, the crusade stumbled a bit but the native population didn't do a whole lot better. Pope Innocent (lol) died, and the crusaders were briefly in disarray.

Finally the King of France, who had been more or less sitting on the fence this whole time, got involved. He raised a tax and raised an army to go conquer the Languedoc and defeat the Cathars. One by one, the fortresses fell. Finally the crusaders turned to the remote and well-defended stronghold of Montsegur. After a siege of 9 months, Montsegur surrendered. Approximately 220 Cathars refused offers to convert and were burned alive. There were so many of them, they had to build an enclosure, stack firewood in it, put the Cathars in it and burn them all at once. The Cathars were gone. Wiped out. Exterminated. The last recorded Cathar in the Languedoc was Guillaume Bélibaste, who was executed in 1321

People who believed in peace, were systematically exterminated by a Catholic Church which believed in war, by way of mercenaries which believed in money. It must have seemed like the devil himself was waging war on them.

Which probably wasn't that far wrong.


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c l e a r

"God is not a man, so he does not lie. God is not a person, he does not change."

-Numbers 23:19



"Before He gave any shape to the world, before He produced any form,
He was alone, without form and without resemblance to anything else."

-The Zohar, a text of Jewish mysticism (kabbalah)



"Any name of God which is found in the Bible can not be applied to the Deity prior to His self-manifestation in the Creation, because the letters of those names were produced only after the emanation. . . . Moreover, a name implies a limitation in its bearer; and this is impossible..."

-Judah Ḥayyaṭ



On its surface it is opaque,
In its depths it is clear,
A continuous thread beyond description...
Its form, formless,
Its image, imageless,
Its name, silence

-Dao De Jing, chapter 14

For unknown millennia, human beings have been making their gods to be like them. Deities such as the Greek gods (the dysfunctional family on Mount Olympus) and other gods of the ancient world, are easy to see as human analogues, made to play out human dramas. While almost anyone would accept this as true for some ancient religions, not everyone is prepared to point that critique closer to home.

Some would have us believe that God not only condones but commands war crimes and genocide, as in the military campaigns of Moses and Joshua. Some would have us believe that God is wrathful. Some would have us believe that God issues irrevocable condemnations, to send people to hell. Some would have us believe that God would torture a person to satisfy a bet with Satan (Book of Job). It is human beings who do such things.

It is human beings, who commit war crimes, atrocity and genocide. It is human beings who torture. It is human beings who condemn other human beings, and who say that they will burn in hell. It is human beings who will torture someone out of curiosity (Dr. Mengele for instance). The only intelligent entities with a proven ability to do these things, are human beings. We are that malign intelligence.

It is not possible to ascribe any negative human attributes whatsoever to God. God is stainless. GOD CANNOT DO EVIL.

Moreover, positive human attributes such as mercy, compassion, hope, forgiveness, love, are not positive enough to attribute to God. These names all refer to human attributes, and every human attribute is mixed and changeable. Even a mother's love of her child, often considered the highest form of love, is mixed with human neurosis, possessiveness, self-interest and inadequacy. Even a friend's love of a friend, is mixed with this. Romantic love even more so.
Pure love is beyond a human being's ability to emulate, and in some sense beyond a human being's ability to understand.

God is like a great light concealed in a dark shroud. It is hidden, in the words of a 14th Century Christian mystic, behind a cloud of unknowing. Present here and now, every day, and yet beyond words. Beyond sight, beyond sound, beyond touch. It is not possible to speak for God, those words cannot be spoken by a human mouth. We can speak of God, to those who are ready to hear of God, but the words themselves are just gestures, containers of something and nothing. Containers both of knowledge and ignorance. Emanations of God, perhaps, but only temporary rafts which fulfill their function when they are no longer needed.

"They should recall that in teaching spiritual truths the Buddha
always uses these concepts and ideas in the way that a raft is used
to cross a river. Once the river has been crossed over, the raft is
of no more use."

-Diamond Sutra chapter 6

Does this mean we should all remain silent about things that are more humanly accessible? Absolutely not! Things that are at the intersection of the human and the divine should be spoken of and discussed. They should be discussed more. That is altogether a different thing than delivering an "authorized" biography of God, complete with a white paper on exactly what it is that God thinks.

No one, including the human writers of the Bible or the Quran, should do that. They especially shouldn't attribute the worst of human failings to the only holy and eternal God.

God is clean of human evil. He is completely clear, too clear for us to see.

The Unconscious Alarm Clock

"The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable."

-Italo Calvino

This post is not about anything particularly philosophical. In fact, it is about something that millions of people experience all the time. Science has not spent a lot of time trying to understand it, or even proving or disproving its existence, although it is a common phenomenon.

After dinner on Monday night, I had a chore I had to finish that night, but I was extremely tired. Much too tired to do it. So I went to bed to take a nap, and as I often do, I mentally set a time for me to wake up. In this case, I was planning to nap for one hour, then get up and do my chore. I didn't set an alarm clock, I just depended on my mind to wake me up at the correct time.

I learned to do this decades ago, and at first I would mentally repeat the time I needed to wake up over and over again. Nowadays I just tell my mind a couple times, and in the majority of cases that is enough. This was not the particularly interesting bit, I do that all the time.

What was interesting was what happened when I did in fact wake up. I had been so tired when I went to bed, that I fell asleep more or less instantaneously. When I woke up, I was still asleep. My conscious mind did not have a clue in this world why it had woken up. All it knew is that one minute it was having lunch with Abraham Lincoln and a pair of talking zebras, the next minute it was staring into the dark, not sure where or even who it was. For at least a couple minutes, I was still dreaming - even though I was sitting up with my eyes open. I didn't even know at first why I was awake. All I knew is that some force, a force that was very much in control at that moment, had compelled me to be awake and was giving me an imperative command to get on my feet.

Some part of my mind, some part of me, was ticking off the minutes all that time. While myself as I know me was off sipping consomme with Abe and the talking zebras, myself as I don't know me was waiting, awake, on guard. Ready for the clock to run out, so it can take over my body, sit me up and get me conscious enough to function.

I think if you had asked me while I was dreaming whether I wanted to get up and do the dishes, I think the answer would be an emphatic no. "No thank you, I am chillin with my homeboy Abe and the zebras. Go away." But I, the playing, dreaming, conscious self, was not in control. I, the bearer of my pre-sleep instructions, was. I say that the conscious mind was dreaming, I think that when we dream our conscious minds are not so much absent as unfocused. It no longer has to engage reality, it is free-associating. Playing, in other words. That also explains the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, when we are aware of dreaming while we are dreaming. It is the conscious mind that dreams, IMO. When I woke up, I was conscious but still dreaming, and it was that mind that was so confused by what was going on. My unconscious mind was the one that had it all under control. My dreaming conscious mind on the other hand, never got the memo that said we were supposed to be waking up now. It was surprised to be waking up.

The unconscious mind, according to Freud, was the playground of the Id, the primitive unrestrained drives and impulses. The Id has no sense of responsibility at all. If that is true, my unconscious mind is seriously messed up or something. In this case, it was my unconscious mind, not my conscious mind, that was being responsible. My conscious mind was off playing games.



In the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet, alien technology allows an isolated scientist to unleash all the monsters of the Id, the hidden demons of the unconscious, in material form. His unconscious mind creates real physical monsters that kill. I guess my unconscious mind then would be puttering around like a housewife, waking everyone up and reminding them to floss between teeth. ;)

Carl Jung thought that underneath the normal unconscious mind was the collective unconscious of all living things. I don't have any reason to believe that this is true, but if it were, it would not surprise me either. My unconscious mind acted like a good conscientious guardian while my conscious mind was off partying brains with dead Presidents. I guess what I take away from this is, we are more than the mind we think we are. And that our unconscious mind is no more the primitive unthinking ape than our conscious minds are. Sometimes less so.

Yi Peng Lanna Festival

I am just posting this because I like it so much. This is the Yi Peng Festival in Thailand. Thousands of "sky lanterns", mini hot air balloons, are released into the sky. Fire hazards notwithstanding, I think this is really beautiful. Really evocative of many things.

Levels of Communication

Levels of Communication

"Enough now with teaching what only with difficulty I reached.
This Dhamma is not easily realized by those overcome
with aversion & passion.

What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see,
going against the flow --
those delighting in passion,
cloaked in the mass of darkness,
won't see."

-Ayacana Sutra

The problem with any form of mysticism is that you wind up wanting to talk about something that you cannot talk about. A longstanding solution to this problem is very simple: don't try. Write some poetry maybe, like the Sufi saints, and just leave it at that.

As related in the Ayacana Sutra, Gautama Siddhartha hit this problem like immediately after the experience he described as his enlightenment. Basically, he thought that what he had discovered was far too difficult to even attempt to teach, so he was about to just blow it off. So, no Buddhism, just one Buddha enlightened all on his lonesome. The End. Brahma Sahampati managed to talk him out of taking that course of action, telling him that some would listen, even if most would not.

Adding to the inherent difficulty of the whole enterprise, is that mysticism pretty well excludes being too wrapped up in worldly priorities. There is the classic story of Mary and Martha, a story that is at the very core of Christian mysticism. The anonymous 14th Century monk who authored The Cloud of Unknowing makes mention of this story early on. For anyone unfamiliar with the tale in Luke, here it is:

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

-Luke 10:38-42

Basically, Mary has chosen to focus on God, whereas Martha is more concerned with feeding her guests. The implication is, it is more or less impossible to do both things at once. The Cloud author says that while even Martha is doing her part, as worldly people in general play a needed role, obviously it is preferable to be Mary.

The problem with this scenario is a fundamental inequity of the two roles. To take an example from the 14th Century when the Cloud author was alive: ordinary people paid lots of money to the church to support monks like the Cloud author, who was afforded the opportunity to bliss out on God and write books. ;) It's a pretty nice gig for the 14th Century, but definitely not equal. The mass of ordinary people would never have read his books, even if they could read. They weren't in contact with him, he was in a monastery. He wasn't doing any evident benefit to them, except for giving them a warm fuzzy for supporting holy men.

It is easy to see that Mary needs Martha. Without Martha, Mary doesn't get dinner. What is less easy to see is that Martha needs Mary. In the parable, it is also clear that Martha herself doesn't see any benefit. In her mind she is pulling all the weight, getting the real work done, while Mary is lying around, spacing out on Jesus. ;)

The problem with not talking to Martha is, the World needs the Sacred. Without it, everything begins to fall apart. Practical knowledge is not enough. Practical people need the Sacred, even if they themselves do not always think so. One example of this need is the practice of many hospitals to hire medical ethicists: people whose job it is to think about ethics. They realize that normal medicine is not equipped to handle these issues, which are both more numerous and more difficult than many people ever have to think about. Ethics sort of stands in between the purely sacred and purely mundane: it isn't mysticism, but there are more than simply practical matters involved.

In ethics, the environment, human and animal rights, living and working conditions and many other issues, Martha needs Mary, but Mary has kinda fallen down on the job. In many circles, talking about spiritual matters is considered to be in bad taste, or even casts doubt on your general character as a human being. And when you ask whose fault that is, a big part of the answer is "our fault". It is Mary's fault. For starters, the recognized spiritual traditions we already have are pretty moribund or even diseased. The stuff that is going on these days in many organized religions makes you want to projectile-puke. The would-be Marys there have dropped the ball, if they ever in fact had it. Between the failure of organized religion to actually be spiritual, and the incessant unavoidable onslaught of materialist values, the path for Mary is very difficult and full of potential wrong turns. Meanwhile Martha sinks further and further into consumerism, and doubts more and more that there actually is anything else.

So, while we cannot talk about everything to everyone, the spiritual things we can talk about we ought to talk about. Things like ethics (the way we treat humans, animals and the world) are reasonably accessible to the thinking process of almost everyone. Even for those things that perhaps only Mary knows, and perhaps only Mary cares about, we have to assert a claim to their importance. These things too have their place in the overall order too, every bit as much as the practical work of practical people does.

Mary can't fall down on the job, and can't opt out of engaging Martha. If Mary fails, eventually Martha will fail.

The Existence Loop

"Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission,
and for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.

It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I'd never want another."

-Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now

Anyone who has not read the Preface to this post should go ahead and read that first.

In programming terminology there is a wonderful little thing called a conditional loop. I remember loops of various kinds vividly from my BASIC programming days, they were essential to any kind of structured programming. I remember back in like the Eighties when I was first exploring the wonderful world of computers, I didn't know initially that there was such a thing as a conditional loop. As a result, my primitive little programs were full of GOTO statements, resulting in code that was almost impossible to read, even for me. It was what the programmers call "Spaghetti Code", unstructured code. Can you tell I am a geek from way back? ;)

Anyway, getting back on point, a conditional loop is a block of instructions nested inside a conditional statement. In generic terms, while a certain condition remains true, the instructions are repeated. At such time as the conditions no longer remain true, the program drops out of the loop, and potentially continues on to other parts of the larger program.

The relevance of this programming structure to our topic today might seem a little obscure, but bear with me.

What happens to people after they die? Of course many people would say, there is no after. You die, you become worm food, that's it. That's all well and good, but I am not addressing those people. See the Preface.

Some people, such as Christians and I guess Jews and Muslims too, believe that you get one lifetime and after that you go to heaven or hell. I think that most people who belong to one of the Abrahamic religions are okay with that outcome for a couple reasons. First, they think they will be one of the ones to go to heaven. Secondly, they may think that only really bad people go to hell, and the majority of people go to heaven. For Christians, that latter point of view is clearly doctrinally untenable, please reference Matthew 7:13-14. Jesus clearly thought that heaven as a final destination after this life was the exception to the rule. What then is the rule? What happens to the majority?

This question was brought home to me by my Dad's recent brush with death (he's okay now). During all this time I am thinking, "what happens to him?" He is absolutely not a spiritual person in any way, so probably we can rule out heaven. I don't think he would even like heaven. It would just totally not be his thing. Does he then deserve hell? I didn't think that, either. What, then?

Another major branch of world religion derives from India: Buddhism and Hinduism. Unfortunately, talking about what Buddhists and Hindus believe is a little like talking about what red-haired people believe, they are very diverse religions. For the purposes of this blog post, I will mostly restrain myself to Buddhism, and only to the form of Buddhism (Theravada) that is frequently considered to be closest to Gautama Siddhartha's original teaching. *
(*Mahayana Buddhists obviously deny this, but in terms of documentation, the scripts from the Theravada school are the oldest)

In both Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism, we are condemned to repeat this life as a result of karma: more bad deeds, and you may be reborn as a mudskipper or a marketing exec or something. Be nice, and your next incarnation may bring you to being born in a palace with nice things and lots of pleasurable activities. The mechanism here is essentially negative and external: be bad, and this impartial external karma will poop on your parade. It is not actually very different from the Abrahamic idea of God's punishment, except that it is recurring and proportional instead of final and absolute. The idea of a final heaven, just like the idea of a final hell, is not really a part of Hindu thinking. Your afterlife is here, in other words. The Hindu afterlife in structure is not like a conditional loop, but more like a program with a lot of GOTO statements. Do bad, and you might get reincarnated as a shrubbery. Do good, and you start slowly heading towards all the good stuff; successful career, vacation home, good looks, nice teeth, or whatever.

Here, Buddhism and Hinduism go their separate ways. In Buddhism, any human being no matter how low on the Karma totem pole they are, can become enlightened and hence leave this world. So for Buddhists, Karma governs rebirth but not escape. If Adolf Hitler gets reborn as a human being, he could bail out of this rebirth scheme even if his karma is atrocious. So in Buddhism we begin to see the makings of a conditional loop structure (apologies for my sketchy BASIC):

Dim enlightenment As Integer = 0
Dim karma As Integer = 100,000,000,000,000
Dim goodness As Integer = 0

Do
GOSUB incarnate(karma)
' Live your life, the pleasantness of which is
' dictated by the karma of your previous life.
If goodness=1, ' Were you good?
Then karma = karma - 1 ' Less bad karma for you
Else karma = karma + 1 ' more bad karma for you
End If
If karma < 1 ' Minimum bad karma level is 1
Then karma = 1
End If
Loop While enlightenment < 1 
' If you aren't enlightened, you have to do it again

karma = 0 ' Enlightenment trumps karma
GOTO NIRVANA 

Now, when you ask who exactly it is that goes to Nirvana, and who exactly it is who is going through all these incarnations to begin with, you run into all sorts of problems since according to Gautama there is no self or soul to get reincarnated or to go to Nirvana to begin with, and not really any Nirvana either, but I digress.*
(* the reality or non-reality that the concept Nirvana refers to, is not considered to be capable of being expressed in concepts. One can consider the Buddhist idea of Nirvana to be sort of like training wheels on a bicycle.)

The Buddhists for all their advanced thinking still inherited Hindu ideas of karma, even though they thought it didn't have the last say anymore. Karma is still functionally equivalent to divine punishment for misbehavior. Even if there is no deity in charge of that punishment, it has the same effect as an angry god except that unlike the Abrahamic God, that punishment is only for the next turn of the reincarnation merry-go-round, not forever.

Getting back to the Abrahamic religions particularly Christianity (because I know more about that one), the problem with hell is that it seems a bit disproportional to its cause. It is hard to see how any merely human badness, however bad, could be justly punished by eternal torture. In Christianity in particular, not only is hell vastly disproportionate as punishment for any human evil, but you don't even have to be outstandingly bad to go there. (referencing Matthew 7:13-14 again). On the other hand though, there seems no reason to think that the majority of people who are not particularly good either, should go to heaven. That is a disproportionate reward just as hell is a disproportionate punishment.

And, frankly, while everyone hates the idea of going to Hell, not everyone is terribly keen to go to Heaven. A common expression of that is people who will say something like: "What do you mean, there's no {sex/beer/cars/porn/cheeseburgers/television/barbecue/rock-and-roll} in heaven?? To heck with that!" ;)

Some people have tried to approach hell as a sort of structural issue with heaven - that it is not so much that God wants to torture all these folks, but that hell is implicit in the nature of heaven or God, or even that the damned ARE in heaven but it feels like hell to them. Sounds like bad planning on God's part if that were true, IMHO. "Oops guys, I am real sorry, but we had sort of a logistics issue while building heaven, so you have to spend eternity in agony. Sorry!" ;)

Let's suppose God has delegated the design of the afterlife to us. What should we look for in a well-designed afterlife?

1. It should be consistent with the mercy of God. (That rules out hell.)

2. It should not send to heaven (or to more spiritually illuminated realms) people who have never expressed any real interest in spiritual things. Heaven might indeed be hell to certain people.

3. The person's afterlife should ideally reflect what they in fact desired in life: in other words, there should be a 1=1 symmetry between what was in that person's heart and their next life. You can argue with karma, but you can't argue with what you yourself wanted.

#3 coincides very well with a recent mantra of mine, which is limited as all such things are, but I think it is very appropriate here:

EVERYONE GETS WHAT THEY REALLY ACTUALLY WANT

What they want means, what they truly want, not what they said they wanted. What comes out of your mouth is not important, what is in your heart is what is important.

In terms of what we have been discussing here, if you want earthly things, maybe you reincarnate back here. If your heart's desire is hot babes, cheeseburgers and corvettes, you are going to find those things on Earth. Not that you will necessarily get them or that you will keep them if you have them, because a transitory nature is part of this realm of existence, but you are free at least to pursue those things. If you want spiritual things, maybe you leave this realm of existence for a more spiritual one. So, from a next-life standpoint, you really do get what you really want. Want to stay here in this world or one like it? Stay! Want to get out? Is that truly your heart's desire, not just what you say? Pack your bags!

So using the conditional loop as a simile, the block of code is this type of existence. Existence on this Earth or somewhere like it. The conditional question is, "Do you want what this world has to offer?" If the answer is yes, you go back and do it all over again, and you keep on doing it all over again until you see through the world, see through its basic principles, and you answer "no". "No", I don't want to stay here. With all my heart, I want to leave this place and go to a place that is closer to God."

Now, someone might say that there isn't really any punishment for evildoers in this scheme. They would be right to say that, in a sense. Vengeance is a human desire. God does not wreak vengeance on the evil, the evil do that themselves. If your heart loves evil, you are already in hell.

Lets do a thought experiment right quick. Suppose we have Joe, a homocidal psychopath, and Jane, who is a college girl. Joe tortures Jane in unspeakable ways and then kills her.

Now Jane, in her life and in lives before, had an option as we all do: she could set her heart on material and worldly things, or on divine things. If she set her heart on divine things this time around, she will leave this world and everything in it behind her, to go to a better world. If she does not do that, she chooses to come back to this world with all that this implies. Including the risk of being murdered again at some point. Either way, she doesn't really have a lot of room for complaints. She is doing what she wants.

Now what about Joe? Well he is a homocidal psychopath, and he may choose to return to being a homocidal psychopath. That is actually not such a kindly fate. And when his turn comes, he too will return to where he really wants to be, so he really cannot complain. Everyone gets what he really wants, and we don't have to attribute the very human quality of vengeance to God.

So the conditional loop is, do you really want to stay here?

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I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels bless'd; but even from angelhood
I must pass on


-Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī), Sufi poet

The Existence Loop: Preface

Before I get into my main topic, I need a brief preface. I vowed to myself that I would steer clear in this blog of setting a critical or negative tone at any point, if at all possible. This is not such a situation though. I am being critical but the point is not to tear an alternate point of view down. I am not in the business of telling people what to think. These posts are for those who want them, not for those who don't.

(Concerning my "avoid being negative" rule: There are very often unpleasant truths that need saying. Sometimes the understanding of these truths are imperative, even morally imperative. However, I think that a person presented with too many harsh truths or statements at once tends to shut down and refuse to process any further. To an extent, everyone has to deal with unpleasant realities at the time they are ready. The best way to write of such truths, is often not dwell on them, but to sort of point to them in passing and let people decide themselves whether to probe further.)

Everything in my blog follows from the precept that there is a real spiritual reality and that this life is not the end. This is not a belief that I am interested in proving to anyone, as if I could. Everyone is, in the end, as they wish to be: and I could not and don't wish to change what anyone wishes to be. You will follow what is in your heart to follow: no one can change that but you.

That said, I need to spend a few minutes talking about the alternative. What if I am dead wrong? What if there is no spiritual reality at all?

Atheism is an evaluation that removes any pretext for valuation. For a logically consistent atheist, morality is in the end, only an opinion; truth only a means to an end; life only a mindless instinct to survive. An atheist is condemned to putting Self as the center and measure of all things - a terrible fate in truth, though he may not see it that way. As will unfold in further blog posts, I think that Self is both the characteristic mechanism of our existence here and also a potential obstacle to our leaving this realm of existence for somewhere better. So it is logical that a point of view that denies the spiritual would essentially have to put the Self in it's place by default.

I may well be dead wrong about there being a God, but in that case it wouldn't matter, because then nothing whatsoever would matter. Any assertion as to meaning would merely be an opinion. To a consistent atheist (of which there are few), the only measure of meaning would be the desires of that particular self.

Even though atheists often take the rhetorical position of positing a lack of belief rather than a belief, they are wrong about that. A negation only has meaning in the context of that which negates it. A disbelief in God only makes sense in context of an alternate position. And that position, functionally, is a subset of nihilism. If Man is the measure of all things, then there is no real measure. Fortunately perhaps, most atheists I think don't worry too much about how all that works out, not unlike many people of religious persuasions who don't look too closely at what their founders actually said. And doubt is only natural and to an extent even healthy. Every sane person doubts some of the time.

At this point some well-meaning person will say that their best friend is an atheist, that they know atheists of impeccable ethics and humanitarianism, none of which I necessarily doubt, nor do I even care. Those same persons will no doubt mention religious persons who are evil, hypocritical, intolerant and lacking in mercy, which I do not doubt in the slightest. In fact I could point some out myself. That is not the point. It is a poor debater who regresses from talking about ideas to talking about the people who have them. There is a logical fallacy called Ad Hominem, which attempts to link the truth of a position to the character of the person who holds it. That is an equally erroneous way of thinking, regardless of whether you are trying to disprove a position by defaming its advocate, or whether you are trying to promote a position by lauding the virtues of a person who holds it. I honestly don't care one whit how many honorable atheist friends you have. May they live long and prosper, they are not the issue.

The point of my critique of atheism is not to change anyone's mind about it. I assume most atheists won't spend their time reading this blog, nor should they. It is not written for them. The point is to set the groundwork as it were; to stake out the positions. Every chessboard has two sides, light and dark, and to an extent we can only see one or the other by way of contrast.

All that aside, the things I am about to discuss in the next post are to some degree speculative. To me, what I am about to discuss follows logically from the assumption that there is a God, that there is a continuation after death, and that such a God is not arbitrary, senseless or wrathful. No one should consider this authoritative, I don't even consider it that. Based on those assumptions however, I have not found any other conclusions to be as convincing.

Next up: The Loop