First, a couple items of business.

The sucktastic part of a blog is the writer knows he’s going to spend X number of weeks or months writing for absolutely no one. I’ve been to this rodeo a time-or-two. It takes a long time to seed a steady readership. Given how out-of-practice I was at shitting out a daily column, that was not necessarily a bad thing. It took me a while to get my writing rhythms back. I’m still boning out clunkers every week when I sit down to write without necessarily having something to say.

Blog Rule #1: Have something to say.

I have hedged on Blog Rule #1 a few times in service of Blog Rule #2.

Blog Rule #2: If you are going to blog five days a week, then BLOG FIVE DAYS A WEEK.

To that end, I know there are about twenty-five different steady readers of this blog. I don’t know who you are, because I’m too cheap to pay for those analytical metrics. But I can intuit from the raw stats that there is a base readership of about twenty-five people, and then another ten-to-forty readers who may drop in on a post, depending on the provocativeness of the headline or the smutty magnetism of the teaser photo.

So… Thank you. I don’t know who you are, but thank you. Just knowing that I have a core readership keeps me honest and motivates me to open a document and start thinking with my fingers. I live and die by whatever falls out of my brain on a given day. I don’t redact old blogs, even though I often think, ”Why did I write that?” If I said it, then I own it. Good or bad.

The blog will be going mostly dark for a week-and-change as we take to the interstate system to blow the fur off our Labrachow. I’m not sure how much internet access I’ll be able to score on the way to Florida. I’m not going to try and post from an iPhone keyboard. Granted, my head is shaved, but I can visualize the follicles sproink-ing out of my scalp as my fat fingers fight the onscreen keyboard and autocorrect.

I return you now to your regularly-scheduled More-evolved Thursday, already in progress.

Blathering bullshit follows. You have been warned.

Scientists have quantified where imagination happens in the brain. Here’s the article. Don’t click the link. Let me spare you some wasted time with a quick recap. See, scientists used to think imagination was a collaborative effort from all areas of the brain, but they fired up the neuron scope and discovered that it’s actually a collaborative effort from all areas of the brain.

Yawn.

The fact that the featured picture of the hot girl is – in size and composition – the most compelling part of that article says something.

I believe in God, but not your God. Humans love to anthropomorphize. I don’t begrudge you anthropomorphizing God into a benevolent father figure. Really. I used to do it too, but then I guess I just finally sniggered at one too many LOLcats. Anthropomorphism isn’t wrong. It’s just a way to mentally deal with something that has yet to be quantified. It’s a stepping stone.

In school they taught us that electrons and protons circled the neutrons in an orbit. Little planets. Little mini-magnets. Little Toms chasing Little Jerrys in infinite futility.

Nope. Not so much. Those electrons and protons are in proximity to the neutron, sure, but they are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. They are not orbiting. They are not spinning. They just are. There. Not there. Then there. Not there.

But we would never have understood the illogical reality of sub-molecular structure, if we first hadn’t loaded in the metaphor of the orbits. We had to be absolutely right about being wrong before we could load-in the Right 2.0. You can’t have Windows XP without Windows 3.11.

The more we learn and unlearn about quantum physics, the more I see my God. Everything in our universe has such a precision of order until we get down to the sub-atomic level. Then it all goes to shit.

 

We knew everything. Then we didn’t know fucking anything. Go figure.

There is a faction of “Science as a religion” people who haves decided that traditional religions are their enemy. This absolutely baffles me. Just baffles me. How can you believe in string theory and mock people for believing in an invisible man in the sky? String theory requires there to be either eleven or twenty-one dimensions.

1. X axis.
2. Y axis
3. Z axis
4. Time.
5. Temperature (generally now accepted to be the fifth dimension)

And?

And? C’mon, Science-as-a-religion people. You’ve got either six or seventeen more dimensions you believe in. What are they? C’mon. How can you believe there’s a force in the universe acting upon you if you can’t even see it or conceive what it is?

Science-as-a-religion people believe that organized religion is holding back science.

Bunk. Religious value systems have allowed us to live in a post-evolutionary world where science can flourish. From an evolutionary perspective, the thinkers would never have been able to thrive in a warrior’s world without the self-regulating crowd control of religious value systems.  Religious value systems are precisely what transitioned us from evolutionary to post-evolutionary.

Religion is merely a series of franchised value systems. Some franchises are more successful than others.

1. The notion that — because you opt out of organized religion — you also opt out of having any value system is fallacious.

2. You should be giving mad props to the value systems that successfully paved the way for you to do your thing.

I propose a new name for “Science-as-a-religion” people: Dicks. These are the people who should be most tuned into the reality that behind every fer-sure lurks  another what-the-fuck? And yet, these tend to be the most smug, the most cocksure, and the least accommodating thinkers I’ve met.

People think that empathy is innate to the human condition and prejudice is learned. Bah. Just the opposite. What happened fifty thousand years ago when the first dude with a bone through his nose stepped through a jungle clearing and saw the  first guy with a bone through his ear?

“Oh wow! That’s cool! I totally need to try to wear by bone piercing that way!”

Nope. One of them killed the other. Values are evolutionary. Cultural propagation is evolutionary. What we call “prejudice” is actually the conflict between cultural evolutionary propagations. Prejudice is evolutionary. Prejudice is  innate.

And empathy? Remember that the Parable of the Good Samaritan was actually radical thinking a mere two millennia ago. In 2013 we say, “Well no shit. You help a brother out.”  Two thousand years ago the Sadducees heard the parable of the Good Samaritan and said, “What? You’ve got to be shitting me! Traveling is dangerous. You stop to help out some beggar on the road and you’re going to get jumped and killed, dumbass!” The Parable of the Good Samaritan was subversive in it’s day.

Religious value systems gave empathy a foothold. Empathy is not innate to our humanity. Empathy is post-evolutionary behavior.

I wish the Science-as-religion people would just stop being pompous dicks and just answer the questions.

How the hell do you explain the ridiculous life cycle of the lancet fluke?

Once a slide cover is dropped on a microscope slide, the bacteria on the slide immediately begin conserving food, eating slower. This means that single-celled organisms have a consciousness. How the fuck does that happen?

Fine, it’s not an anthropomorphic watchmaker in the sky. On that we agree. But what is the force behind the wackiness of quantum physics? How is the watch assembled?

RELIGION: A bunch of fallible human beings with political agendas seeking to quantify life’s mysteries in a manner that secures a steady stream of funding.

SCIENCE: A bunch of fallible human beings with political agendas seeking to quantify life’s mysteries in a manner that secures a steady stream of funding.

Ergo, get over yourself. Everybody, get over yourself.

Here’s the essential litmus test for quantifying faith vs. atheism. You can boil it down to a single question:

How many coincidences can you string together consecutively before they aren’t coincidences any more?

Creationist: “I dunno. Two?”

Atheist: “I know. An infinite amount.  Besides, there are no coincidences. There is nothing that is impossible!”

And the rest of us have a number that falls in between two and infinity. Me, I’m 5.5. String together four related coincidences in a row and I’m weirded out. Add number five and my skin is on fire. It hasn’t happened to me but twice in my lifetime. My rational mind cracked both times.

“An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare!”

1. This is a creeping bastardization of the Infinite Monkey Theorum, which started out calculating the probability of the monkeys typing the word “Banana,” and then morphed into them typing Hamlet, and has since jumped the shark completely.

2. Even the Infinite Monkey guys have called bullshit on Hamlet.

3. I shouldn’t have to say this to a rational person, but “Bullshit.” No they won’t. This is a mischaracterization of the power of entropy.  Entropy has it’s limits and human imagination has blown past those spiked speed strips a long time ago.

Religious value systems predicate on faith. I have faith that there is something powering the carousel and the watch didn’t assemble itself. The imagination of Shakespeare was not a bingo ball spinner of chemical-electric neural sparks.

I self identify as a Christian because I believe there was a Jewish carpenter who took on the Roman Empire. Lost. And then succeeded in reordering the Western world away from might-makes-right into something empathetic and post-evolutionary that I really dig. I don’t need the “Magic Tricks and Miracles” Jesus. I’m good with the “Hey, that sounds like a reasonable value system. Forgiveness? Empathy? Sure, sign me up for that!” Jesus.

There’s a receptor in faith that can go places in my brain chemistry and produce reactions that no other man-made drug can accomplish. That’s real. The things faith can do for the downtrodden and bereft are real. They are scientifically measurable. The concept of transition vs. oblivion is heady. If you’ve looked down into a casket and wondered what happened to the freight train of energy that used to by your parent or your friend, then you know what I’m talking about. Sure, it’s probably oblivion, but… I’ve got my fingers crossed, hoping it’s a transition of a known energy into something as-yet unknown.

Until we quantify that which defies quantification, I’m just going to keep an open mind and assume I don’t know everything. I’m going to leave room for the possibility that there is something more.

I leave room for the possibility that I don’t know everything; the possibility that there’s a whole class of quantum machinery in those eleven-to-seventeen dimensions that our imaginations haven’t yet conceived.

And I leave room for the possibility that the quantum machinery could possibly be a sentient entity who understands more about the way the neurons in my brain dance out a maypole of creative energy than I understand about him. Or her. Or it. Or them. Or that.

/blather

 

Be well, all. I’ll see you in a week and three days.