As dawn breaks over the Pencil Pit, my barn sanctuary where imagination and reality often intertwine, I find myself reflecting on the essence of Project 55. This entirely imagined writing assignment from my past – a task to describe Thanksgiving Day at age 69, as envisioned by my 14-year-old self – has become a canvas for creativity and reflection.
Yesterday, I continued this journey through Project 55 during my Morning Pages. Walking across the creek to the ‘back 40’, a place rich in familial history, I was deeply immersed in this fictional narrative. Each step seemed to bridge the gap between my teenage imagination and my current reality, blending the echoes of my great grandfather’s legacy with the whimsical projections of a young mind.
Later in the day, the task of building a new raised bed for the garden with Jon anchored me back to the tangible present. Or did it? The lines began to blur. Was this activity too part of the imagined world of Project 55, or was it a concrete part of my day? This interplay between doing and imagining led me to ponder the nature of our experiences. In what ways do our imaginative projections and our real-life actions intersect and influence each other?
In Project 55, my younger self’s task of predicting the future, particularly imagining marital life, reflects the boundless possibilities of imagination. Fast forward to the present, and the act of constructing a garden bed, seemingly real and practical, might also be tinted with the hues of imagination – a future harvest, a vision of lush growth.
This morning, as I sit pencil in hand, I am struck by how our lives are a constant dance between the tangible and the imagined. Each action, each decision, is layered with both the weight of reality and the lightness of imagined possibilities. The building of the garden bed, whether real or imagined, is not just a physical act but also a symbol of planting seeds for future growth, much like the imagined narratives of Project 55.
So, what do these reflections reveal about life? They underscore the power of our imagination to shape our reality. Even as we engage in the routine tasks of our daily lives, there’s a part of us that is always dreaming, always creating. Our imagined futures and pasts are not just idle fantasies; they are integral to our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
In the Pencil Pit, surrounded by the tangible remnants of my past and the limitless possibilities of my imagination, I find a profound beauty in this interplay. It’s a reminder that life is not just lived but also imagined, and in this imagination lies the true richness of our existence.
"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.
Quick summary: atheism is easier than religious faith, and people are lazy, so why does anybody bother with the hard option? Why don’t human brains seek a kind of lowest-energy state, by analogy with dynamical systems that tend to run downhill? This post explores, rather speculatively, whether the human brain on faith gets stuck in a kind of higher-energy state, and becomes unable to get to the bottom, similar to what many dynamical systems actually do.
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Faith is not merely a belief for many persons of faith, but also a practice. Faith appears to be something that most people have to work at. Regular church attendance, participation in group ritual, being dazzled by professional religious stagecraft and affected styles of preaching, prayer, bible reading (of the devotional, rather than the critical variety), basking in the social proof from a crowd of fellow believers – these are familiar activities for the devoted Christian. They’re considered reliable markers of Christians who mean business. These activities might even be necessary for the believer – stop doing them, and faith slowly atrophies, like an unused muscle. The vast amount of money that believers spend on regularly topping up their faith tanks does not seem to be an accident.
It also casts doubt on the so-called sensus divinitatis. If believers really possessed an innate ability to sense God, they shouldn’t need expensive churches to activate it nor professional orators to explain it to them. For comparison, if you have working eyeballs, they function as soon as you open your eyelids every day, and keep working until you close them. You don’t have to do anything fancy to get them to work. Usually, you don’t need someone else to tell you what you’re seeing. And nobody can charge you money by letting you use the eyes you already have. Churches look to me like a strong argument that the sensus divinitatis either doesn’t exist at all outside of the churchy environment of psychological suggestion, or it doesn’t extend far beyond a small percentage of “adepts“. Some of whom might be on a psychosis spectrum.
To the extent that a believer’s faith results from religious practice, there’s no straightforward way to package that practice into arguments. Thus when an atheist, who approaches claims from the standpoint of reason, argues with a theist, who arrives at beliefs from practice, their arguments may go right past each other. The difficulty is compounded by the believer carrying on as if his or her faith exists in the argument space. This might be an instance of confabulation, a psychological phenomenon whereby the speaking part of a person’s brain acts as an unreliable narrator, concocting explanations for what the other parts of the brain are doing independently of the speaking part, and without letting the speaking part know. Even though the religious believer goes to church at least weekly to have his or her beliefs instilled and reinforced, the believer might honestly think he or she came by the beliefs via a process of reasoning, and so can explain them in terms of reasons. (William Lane Craig elevates this charade to high art, even labeling it with the oxymoron “Reasonable Faith”. If faith is “reasonable” i.e. derived from reasons, then it doesn’t require practice. If faith cannot survive without practice, then it does not derive from reasons.) For the believer to really “explain” his or her beliefs, the believer needs to take the atheist to church, and hope that the atheist will have the same emotional reaction to the goings-on as the believer has.
Occasionally someone is honest about how this works. I recall a political discussion in which a Trump supporter basically admitted that he couldn’t adequately explain his views in terms of reasons, but rather he said you need to go to a Trump rally! It’s like getting your medical advice from an old-timey medicine show rather than from those boring peer-reviewed medical studies. The studies are boring by design: they’re trying to remove emotion from the belief-formation game to the degree possible. The medicine show, in contrast, relies on emotion where facts are lacking, which is early and often.
The religious believer’s need for constant faith replenishment is in sharp contrast to the atheist, especially the atheist of a scientific bent. The atheist doesn’t have to keep going back to school every week to be re-persuaded to accept, for example, the Periodic Table of the Elements. Once a person understands the scientific world view, after that it’s automatically self-reinforcing. You don’t need group rituals, professional stagecraft, or billions of dollars in church infrastructure to keep you believing in science. The whole universe keeps you believing in science. As does the constant parade of ever-improving technologies made possible by science. Unlike prayer, which never produces results distinguishable from random chance, never mind improving over time, your smartphone does tend to work, routinely doing things that would have gobsmacked the folks who wrote the bible. And every few years when you shop for a new one, you find they’ve improved again. While Moore’s law (the name for this improving trend of digital electronics) appears to have slowed of late, it may still have considerable room to run.
Modern science has been around for about 400 years, with Galileo’s career often taken to mark its start. In that time, scientists have performed millions of experiments and observations, with ever-increasing power and sensitivity, and they keep finding no evidence of any gods doing anything anywhere. They also find that no religion guessed correctly about the nature of things – what matter is, where the Earth came from, how we got here, where the Sun goes at night, and the realities that lie beyond the power of our natural senses (from the microbial to the astronomical). No religion had anything to say about massively important phenomena such as viruses and radioactivity. Until just a few decades ago, nobody had an inkling that we inhabit a world shot through with them. In some parts of the ocean, there can be roughly as many virus particles (called virions) in a liter of seawater as there are humans on the planet. Fortunately for us, almost all of those viruses attack other forms of life. But plenty of viruses do attack humans, sometimes moving in permanently. Some geneticists estimate that up to 8% of our DNA consists of endogenous retroviruses. For some reason, neither of the contradictory creation accounts in the Book of Genesis mention God putting all that viral DNA into us.
For the atheist there’s no Problem of Pain, either, beyond the discomfort of experiencing it. There’s nothing scientists can detect about the universe that would lead anyone to suspect it is even aware of humans, let alone benevolent toward us, and forget about omni-benevolence. We live in a galaxy having from 100 billion to 400 billion stars, each one following a random unplanned orbit around the galactic barycenter. Stellar collisions are rare, but possible. Near misses are still rare, but more likely than collisions. At any time, a wandering star could swing by our Solar System and perturb the orbits of our familiar planets. Earth could be shoved too close to the Sun, and boil, or too far away, and freeze. Earth could be ejected from the Solar System altogether and drift through interstellar space as a dark frozen rogue planet. We know from geological evidence on Earth that a perturbation of this severity hasn’t happened to our Solar System in over 4 billion years, but there’s nothing to prevent it. Astronomers can look through telescopes and see galaxies exploding (technically, galaxies having active nuclei emitting “significant” amounts of radiation, and sometimes plasma jets shooting out for thousands of light-years). Bard doesn’t know whether life can evolve in such a boisterous galaxy, but if any has, it might be less likely to dream up a god who loves it.
If faith is so much work, and getting steadily harder as science continues to outstrip religion, why would anyone bother? Perhaps faith shares features (even if just by analogy) with metastable systems in physics and chemistry. Per the English Wikipedia:
“… metastability denotes an intermediate energetic state within a dynamical system other than the system’s state of least energy. A ball resting in a hollow on a slope is a simple example of metastability. If the ball is only slightly pushed, it will settle back into its hollow, but a stronger push may start the ball rolling down the slope. Bowling pins show similar metastability by either merely wobbling for a moment or tipping over completely. A common example of metastability in science is isomerisation. Higher energy isomers are long lived because they are prevented from rearranging to their preferred ground state by (possibly large) barriers in the potential energy.”
Glass, both man-made and volcanic, is another example of metastability. Glass may form from some molten minerals that cool rapidly, such as when magma from a volcano emerges underwater to form volcanic glass (obsidian). As J. A. Zalasiewicz explains in Rocks: A Very Short Introduction (2016), obsidian is metastable: its atoms were trapped in a higher-energy state by cooling so rapidly that they couldn’t reach the lower-energy state of forming crystals. But even after the glass has cooled, the atoms in the glass are still being bounced by thermal energy. Occasionally an atom bounces enough to escape its energy “well” and migrate to a position of lower energy by linking up with the growing surface of a crystal. Over time – sometimes millions of years – this causes the volcanic glass to devitrify and become cloudy.
At the risk of straining this analogy beyond all recognition, I can’t help but notice how volcanic glass forms by cooling rapidly. Why, it’s a lot like the religious believer who believes the first lie they’re told, before properly investigating all the competing religious lies, much less what the voices of reason have to say.
There is a kind of metastability in the brain studied by computational neuroscientists. I see that it’s been applied to a theory of social coordination dynamics, and religion in practice is inherently social. But here I’m just thinking about a rough analogy between the actual metastability of dynamical systems and a kind of figurative metastability of religious belief. Instead of seeking the easiest and most stable belief, which would be materialism, the basis of science, the religious brain insists on remaining higher on the slope, where things are harder. More evidence has to be ignored, more discrepancies need to be explained away, and if you can think logically at all, you have to waste your time on the endless sophistry of apologetics. At no point can you ever verify your beliefs with a test. That is, your belief can never attain the status of fact, such that you might meet a scientific or legal standard of proof.
For the religious brain to remain high on that slope, it must be blocked by walls from rolling farther down. These consist of strategies to prevent the believer from grasping the obvious – that the absence of evidence for any god is the same as the absence of evidence for rocks that think. Few sane people would ever suspect rocks of thinking, not because we can actively prove that rocks don’t think, but because we can observe lots of things that do think (e.g. people, and many animals). Things that think are unable to imitate rocks for very long, and no rock has ever imitated anything that thinks. Everything that thinks has a physical brain, and perhaps in the near future things with electronic brains will behave much as if they are thinking. But rocks lack the internal complexity, and an energy source, that are common to everything that demonstrably thinks. Thinking is a metabolically expensive activity, so anything which can think is going to justify the expenditure by doing it. We are familiar with things that think, and how they behave, and rocks are nothing like them. Thus no sane person offers the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” argument for thinking rocks. Minds are even less likely to come from empty space, because there is nothing about empty space that begins to resemble things we know that think. There is no evidence for thinking rocks, or for thinking empty space, beyond someone’s loud insistence that invisible, undetectable minds are really there.
So what good is this metastability model? Well, it might tell us something about how rocks that are stuck high on a slope might roll down the slope. In the physical system of balls on a slope, you might free a trapped ball by chipping away at the wall that traps it. Or you might impart energy to the ball, or wait for something like an earthquake to shake the entire slope. If the ball starts rattling around in its well, it might roll high enough to get over the wall, and roll down to the real bottom.
Factors that can chip away at the wall might include new facts that assail it. Darwin’s theory of evolution by mutation and natural selection seems to have done the trick for many. It changed the whole landscape, as it were. Before Darwin, there was no satisfying natural explanation for biodiversity. Back then, the landscape may have been tilted, with the religious “well” being actually lower than the atheist “well.” And indeed, atheism didn’t have much of a history before Darwin. Even though pre-Darwinian skeptics recognized the crazy train that religion is, they had a hard time imagining a world that God didn’t create. So they compromised with Deism – the belief that God set everything in motion, and then had no more to do with his creation. Either he left, or he died.
After Darwin tilted the slope, the position of religion became more precarious.
Factors that can impart energy to the ball include anything that triggers a “crisis of faith” such as a personal tragedy, or a tragedy affecting others that is hard to ignore. The fact that felt tragedies often trigger crises of faith suggests that the faithful somehow got the idea that their faith makes them immune to such things. When tragedies happen anyway, the resulting shattered expectations give rise to cognitive dissonance. That’s the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it.
Both history and the present day are full of tragedies, but most people don’t really care about most of it. A million people could die on the other side of the world tomorrow, as happened in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths), and most people not directly affected would probably just go about their business. This kind of studied indifference doesn’t seem right for the Christian, who should view all of God’s children equally. But in practice, Christians are about as indifferent to strangers as anybody else is. A tragedy usually has to hit close to home to grab the Christian’s attention and start rattling that ball.
For example, Seth Andrews’ deconversion memoir (Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason) mentions the tragic death of Rich Mullins in 1997 as having triggered his own crisis of faith, which proved decisive. Mullins died shortly after the Rwandan genocide, but there’s no mention of the vastly larger and more distant tragedy in the book. Insofar as dislodging faith is concerned, often the tragedy has to hit the believer or someone they’re close to.
Occasionally an atheist bounces back up the hill to faith. Admittedly that’s a difficulty for my conceptual model. Evidently the slope and shape of the hill aren’t the same for everybody. While I myself noticed a considerable removal of burden once I abandoned superstition for reason, perhaps for some people the entire slope tips the opposite way. They continue to have a deep need for what religion has to offer them, which certainly isn’t evidence. Some people don’t seem to find facts as inherently satisfying as I do. They need reality to be something other than what it is, and getting back on the religion treadmill gives that to them. Not an actually different reality, but the external reinforcement necessary to pretend.
As always, the less a person knows about science, or scholarship generally, the easier it is to stay up in the religion well. Fewer inconvenient facts will intrude to disturb the faith and chip at the wall. Thus a religious person who leaves faith as a result of personal tragedy, and learns nothing else, may be prone to bounce back into faith. That’s why I think it’s important for the atheist to learn the other reasons for atheism besides the first one that convinced him or her. That one reason on its own may or may not prove to be durable. Many deconversion memoirs mention how the newly minted atheist undertook a program of book-reading, to catch up on what he or she wasn’t allowed to read before.
Here in the Pencil Pit, my fingers warmed by the steady movement of pencil on paper, I find myself unraveling the layered tapestry of yesterday’s experiences. Project 55 and my routine bike ride, both, in their unique ways, brought to the fore the concept of layers – in imagination, in preparation, in life.
Continuing with Project 55 during my Morning Pages, I realized that I had strayed from Mrs. Stamps’ original assignment. Instead of focusing solely on Thanksgiving Day in 2023, I had been oscillating between 1968 and 2023. This realization prompted me to create a more structured outline, strictly adhering to the 2023 scenario. Yet, as imagination would have it, the narrative took a whimsical turn. In a fictional reminisce during the Thanksgiving gathering, I imagined bringing up Project 55, revealing a playful twist where my younger self envisioned marrying Susan, Joanie’s cousin, instead of Joanie – both figments of my imagination, yet humorously at odds with each other. The power of fiction indeed! It’s intriguing how Project 55, initially an assignment from the past, is evolving, taking on a life of its own in the present.
Parallel to this unfolding of layered imagination was my 16-mile bike ride. Unlike the previous day, there was no rain, but the biting cold at 38 degrees was a stark reminder of my need for proper biking attire. It’s funny, isn’t it, how life often mirrors our internal states? Just as I needed to layer my clothing to adapt to the changing weather, my Project 55 required a layering of imagination – a stacking of stories, scenarios, and possibilities, one over the other, to create a coherent narrative.
Sitting here this morning, I’m struck by how these seemingly unrelated events connect. Both are about being prepared – in writing, to adhere to the constraints of an assignment while allowing creativity to flourish; in biking, to equip myself against the elements. They are also about the depth and complexity that layers bring, whether it’s in a story or in shielding oneself against the cold.
In life, we often find ourselves layering – experiences, memories, knowledge. Each layer adds depth, context, and richness to our existence. They protect us, much like clothing against the cold, and they allow us to delve deeper into the realms of imagination, much like a well-crafted narrative.
As I ponder these connections, I realize that life, in many ways, is about finding the right balance in these layers. Too few, and we might find ourselves unprepared or lacking depth. Too many, and we risk losing clarity or becoming burdened.
In the quiet of the barn, surrounded by the remnants of yesterday’s thoughts and today’s revelations, I appreciate this dance of layering. It’s a delicate balance, a continuous adjustment, much like the art of living itself.
Seated in the Pencil Pit, my sanctuary of creativity and contemplation, I find myself reflecting on the parallels between two seemingly disparate experiences from yesterday – the continuation of Project 55 and a challenging bike ride.
Project 55, a dive into my past, has me revisiting an assignment from Mrs. Stamps, my 9th grade English teacher. Tasked in 1968 with envisioning my life 55 years in the future, I remember how my 14-year-old self struggled to project a life at age 69. Marriage seemed like a distant, foggy concept. I chose a girl from church to be my future wife, not out of affection or foresight, but more as a placeholder, a way to complete the assignment. It was an exercise in uncertainty, a young boy’s attempt to make sense of a future too far to comprehend.
Contrast this with yesterday’s bike ride – a 16-mile journey under a cold, relentless rain. I found myself woefully underprepared, lacking the right clothing for the weather. The struggle wasn’t just physical; it was a mental grappling with my own lack of foresight.
Connecting these two moments, I see a thread of unpreparedness weaving through. As a teenager, I couldn’t prepare for a future I couldn’t envision. As an adult, I sometimes find myself in situations, like the bike ride, where I’m caught off guard, underprepared for the immediate challenges.
Yet, there’s a deeper connection here, one that transcends the mere act of being unprepared. It’s about the inherent unpredictability of life. At 14, how could I have known whom I would marry, or the myriad turns my life would take? Similarly, even with experience and age, can we ever be truly prepared for all that life throws our way?
These reflections lead me to consider the nature of preparation itself. Maybe it’s not always about having all the answers or the right gear. Perhaps it’s more about the ability to adapt, to make the best of what we have in the moment. In Project 55, my young self did just that – I adapted to the task with the limited understanding I had. And on the bike ride, despite being cold and wet, I adapted and persevered through the miles.
As I write this, pencil in hand, in the early light of the barn, I realize that life is a constant balancing act between preparation and adaptation. We plan, we foresee, but often we find ourselves in situations that our preparations didn’t account for. It’s in these moments that our resilience is tested, and our ability to adapt becomes our greatest asset.
So, as I ponder the connection between a school assignment from decades ago and a rainy bike ride, I’m reminded that being unprepared isn’t always a failure; sometimes, it’s just a part of the human experience. And perhaps, in recognizing this, we find a way to be better prepared for the unpredictable journey of life.
"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.
Those who have been assured since childhood that God is Love—and
have been coached to pray to their loving father well into adulthood—seem immune to many Bible texts that contradict this idea, for example, these pieces of Jesus-script:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law,and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” (Matthew 10:34-36)
Luke’s version of this text is prefaced with, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” (Luke 12:49)
In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul taught that “wrath and fury” awaited people who were disobedient to god. (Romans 2:8)
The Genesis Flood Story is all about god killing as many people as possible, in fact everyone on earth except for one family. Yet Bible books for children focus on the rainbow ending, ignoring the genocide. Ken Ham decided to celebrate the genocide with a family-fun theme park. How in the world can he live with himself?
Devout folks are persuaded that the horrendous suffering in the world can’t be blamed on god, but is the result of free will, or god’s mysterious ways, or a supposed bigger plan unknown to us. This is what I have called “easy acceptance of the very terrible,” an outlook/attitude that is given a boost by a deep ignorance of history, i.e., unawareness of how much suffering there has been.
On 1 November 1755, Lisbon was destroyed by earthquake, tsunami and fire. Many of the 12,000 who died were killed when churches collapsed on them as they praised god on All-Saints-Day. In the 14th century, at least a quarter of the human population between India and England died of the plague—and the suffering was grotesque. The church was sure that this was god’s “wrath and fury” in action, and penitents wandered Europe flagellating themselves hoping to appease god’s anger. But how can that possibly make sense—how can it be squared with belief in a loving god? The Holocaust during World War II—six million people intentionally murdered—is totally inexplicable if a good, caring deity is paying attention. Indeed, Holocaust-denialism is one way of salvaging faith. Such denial is totally inexplicable since the Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented crimes in history.
Honest theology would admit that killing people seems to be a big item on angry god’s to-do list.
But then there was another Holocaust that has not attracted as much attention. It is appropriate here to include paragraphs from the opening of David E. Stannard’s book, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.
“In the darkness of an early July morning in 1945, on a desolate spot in the New Mexico desert named after a John Donne sonnet celebrating the Holy Trinity, the first atomic bomb was exploded. J. Robert Oppenheimer later remembered that the immense flash of light, followed by the thunderous roar, caused a few observers to laugh and others to cry. But most, he said, were silent. Oppenheimer himself recalled at that instant a line from the Bhagavad-Gita:
I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.
“There is no reason to think that anyone on board the Niña, the Pinta, or the Santa María, on an equally dark early morning four and a half centuries earlier, thought of those ominous lines from the ancient Sanskrit poem when the crews of the Spanish ships spied a flicker of light on the windward side of the island they would name after the Holy Savior. But the intuition, had it occurred, would have been as appropriate then as it was when that first nuclear blast rocked the New Mexico desert sands.
“In both instances—at the Trinity test site in 1945 and at San Salvador in 1492—those moments of achievement crowned years of intense personal struggle and adventure for their protagonists and were culminating points of ingenious technological achievement for their countries.
“But both instances also were prelude to orgies of human destructiveness that, each in its own way, attained a scale of devastation not previously witnessed in the entire history of the world. Just twenty-one days after the first atomic test in the desert, the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima was leveled by nuclear blast; never before had so many people—at least 130,000, probably many more—died from a single explosion. Just twenty-one years after Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair. It took a little longer, about the span of a single human generation, but what happened on Hispaniola was the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas.”
And: “The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.”
How does God-Is-Love theology survive when we become fully aware of such horrendous suffering? “He’s got the whole world in his hands” fails to have any meaning at all. The New Testament especially makes the point that its god is aware of every human, i.e., everything we say, and even think—which is how prayer is supposed to work—is known to god.
And how can the god who runs the cosmos not be aware of the Big Picture?
He had to know very well that Europeans were sailing west to find a way to China, but that a massive land mass was in the way—a land mass that was home to many millions of people who had been settled in north, central, and south American for thousands of years. Moreover, this god must have known that these residents of the Americas would have no immunity whatever to the many diseases that the European explorers brought with them. These diseases proved to be primary cause of death—wiping out millions of people: a super version of the 14th century’s Black Plague.
Yet, god just watched it all happen? How can this not be an enormous problem for Christian theology? An all-powerful god just sitting on his hands? It makes no sense whatever.
Stannard devotes considerable space in his book to descriptions of the societies that the Spanish found as they ventured deeper into South America. He quotes from letters and diaries that explorers wrote, in which they marveled at the wonders they encountered: examples of advanced architecture and well-ordered, well-run communities.
But the Spanish were not tourists. They were money motivated, on the hunt for gold, silver for the Spanish monarchy—and for slaves. Columbus was the trail-blazer—and a malicious one at that; he was a man
“…with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culture had wrought. As such, the fact that he launched a campaign of horrific violence against the natives of Hispaniola is not something that should surprise anyone. Indeed, it would be surprising if he had not inaugurated such carnage.” (pp. 199-200, Kindle, Stannard, emphasis added)
Later, heroes of the United States shared similar ideas.
“George Washington, in 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack the Iroquois and ‘lay waste all the settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed,’ urging the general not to “listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.”” (p. 119, Kindle)
Thomas Jefferson, “…in 1807 instructed his Secretary of War that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their lands must be met with ‘the hatchet.’ ‘And . . . if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,’ he wrote, ‘we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi,’ continuing: ‘in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.’” (p. 120, Kindle)
And: “…the man who became America’s first truly twentieth century President, Theodore Roosevelt, added his opinion that the extermination of the American Indians and the expropriation of their lands ‘was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable.’” (p. 245, Kindle)
So many of the devout do their very best not to think about these evils: easy acceptance of the very terrible is an easy way out. Well, maybe not so easy—if they’re honest with themselves—but they adopt it anyway to shelter their beliefs from close examination.
This is actually cowardice. Serious threats to the faith should be addressed head-on. One helpful tool for this is John Loftus’ hefty (more than 500 pages) 2021 anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering.
The existence of a good, loving, all-powerful, competent god does not withstand careful, critical, skeptical analysis. The Christian god who allowed the American Holocaust is the same one who does nothing to irradicate thousands of genetic diseases, mental illnesses—and cancers that are rampant in the world. He’s “got the whole world in his hands” is such a pathetic misunderstanding of reality. And how is it that a god who supposedly “inspired” humans—that is, manipulated their minds—to write a 1000-page holy book, couldn’t have changed thousands of minds in the direction of improving basic human decency? That is, cleansed our brains of racism. Is that too much to expect?
One of Stannard’s final observations: “…there is little doubt that the dominant sixteenth-and seventeenth-century ecclesiastical, literary, and popular opinion in Spain and Britain and Europe’s American colonies regarding the native peoples of North and South America was that they were a racially degraded and inferior lot—borderline humans as far as most whites were concerned.” (p. 278, Kindle, emphasis added)
Humanity would be a lot better off if the Christian god had much greater tutorial skills.
As I sit in the Pencil Pit, my barn-turned-writing room, the morning light filters through, casting a warm glow over my thoughts. My mind is a blend of past and present, memories and recent experiences weaving together in a curious tapestry.
Yesterday, I embarked on “Project 55” during my Morning Pages routine. It’s a journey back to 1968 when Mrs. Stamps, my 9th-grade English teacher, set us a unique assignment: to describe our Thanksgiving Day 55 years in the future. That future is now, Thanksgiving 2023. As I scribbled down my thoughts, pencil in hand, I couldn’t help but marvel at how time has flown and how the vivid imagination of a 14-year-old now contrasts with the reality of a 69-year-old man’s life.
Later in the day, a different kind of marvel unfolded – the Alabama-Auburn game. The climax of the match was nothing short of what some would call a miracle. Alabama, trailing 20-24, faced a seemingly impossible fourth and goal at the 31-yard line. Yet, in an extraordinary turn of events, quarterback Jalen Milroe connected with Isaiah Bond for a touchdown. It was a moment that defied the odds, a testament to the unpredictability and thrill of sports.
Reflecting on these two disparate moments, I find a peculiar connection. Project 55, spanning over half a century, was an exercise in forecasting the future, in predicting the unpredictable. Similarly, the game’s final play was about defying the odds, about something highly improbable becoming reality. Both instances, in their essence, are about the unforeseen twists of life.
Yet, the touchdown, as miraculous as it seemed, was also a reminder of the natural order of things. In the countless games of football played, moments like these are bound to occur. They are statistical probabilities in the grand scheme of things. This realization grounds the ‘miracle’ in reality, in the realm of possibility where the natural world operates. It’s a reminder that even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, there’s always a chance, however slim, for a different outcome.
Project 55 and the touchdown – both are about the passage of time, the dance of chance and probability, and the human penchant for looking ahead, for imagining and striving. As I write in the Pencil Pit, surrounded by the echoes of my past and the presence of my present, I am reminded of the beauty and uncertainty of life. It’s a journey of expectations and surprises, of predictions and outcomes that sometimes align and often don’t.
In these early hours, I ponder over the intersecting lines of time and chance, of memories and present moments, all converging in the quiet of my writing haven. Life, much like football, is unpredictable, and yet, within its unpredictability lies its most profound beauty and excitement.
In the stillness of the Pencil Pit, my sanctuary nestled within the barn, I find myself reflecting on the curious blend of dreams and realities that have filled my recent nights and days. The quiet here is a stark contrast to the vibrant, sometimes puzzling narratives that my mind weaves in sleep, and the tangible, earthy tasks of the waking hours.
Last night, the world of dreams took an unexpected turn. I found myself wandering the aisles of Walmart, a mundane setting transformed by the appearance of an old friend who passed away from Covid. There he was, as real as the memories we shared, yet distant, a part of a world I could no longer reach. I awoke before I could ask him about his experience, left only with the echo of his presence and a lingering sense of unfinished conversation. It’s curious how dreams can resurrect the past, blurring the lines between what was and what could have been.
This encounter with a ghost of sorts was in stark contrast to yesterday’s activities. Jon and I tackled the old pine tree that had been lying in the backyard for months. It was the same one that fell mid-summer across our gravel road, which we had to pull with the tractor for half a mile. Cutting it up, piece by piece, felt like dismantling a monument to nature’s unexpected turns. Each slice of the chainsaw through the wood was a reminder of the resilience and impermanence of life.
The day’s work didn’t end there. With our trusty 1975 John Deere tractor, Jon and I reclaimed a 16-foot hog panel, once entangled in vines, from the woods. This panel–with a 4×4 attached lengthwise–which we used to drag behind the disc harrow for garden prep in spring, was a relic of past labors and seasons. Wrestling it from the grasp of nature, which had claimed it as its own, was a testament to the ongoing dance between human endeavor and the wildness of the land.
In these morning hours, as I write, the threads of dreams and the day’s work intertwine. They speak of loss and recovery, of the past re-emerging in unexpected ways, and of the relentless cycle of nature and time. The fallen tree, the reclaimed hog panel, and the dream of my departed friend – each tells a story of change, resilience, and the enduring connections that shape our lives.
Here, in the Pencil Pit, surrounded by the tools of my craft and the quiet of the early day, I find a space to ponder these experiences. It’s a place where dreams can be unraveled, and the day’s work can be understood as part of a larger, ever-unfolding story. As the light filters through the barn windows, casting shadows that dance across the floor, I’m reminded that our lives are a tapestry of the tangible and the ethereal, the physical and the remembered, each strand woven by the hands of time.
I sat in the Pencil Pit, staring at the blank page. The early morning light filtered in through the barn window, illuminating specks of dust floating gently in the air. It was quiet except for the scratching of chickens outside.
Writer’s block had firmly planted itself between me and the page again. I knew I needed to write my regular Morning Mental Meanderings blog post, but no words came. I reread the quote by Charles Bukowski that I had scribbled down last night – “writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all.”
With a sigh, I picked up my favorite #2 pencil and began:
I gazed at the empty page, willing words to flow but finding none. Bukowski’s advice rattled around in my head…maybe writing about the block itself would help dislodge it. My mind felt stuffed with cotton, mute and tangled. I longed for the relief that came with a free flowing stretch of typing on my old typewriter, when the words tumble out almost faster than my arthritic fingers can catch them.
But for now, there was only the oppressive blankness glaring back at me. The vast whiteness seemed to mock me. You call yourself a writer? After decades as a small town lawyer, you thought retirement would make you an author overnight? What a joke. I shook my graying head and shifted in the creaky wooden chair. The morning sunlight felt harsh now instead of comforting. The chickens’ cackling sounded more smug by the minute.
With a deep breath, I lowered my eyes to the hateful blank page again. Bukowski was right – just acknowledging the block was better than ignoring it and giving up completely. The words would come again, eventually. I just had to sit with the discomfort and not lose hope.
Dipping my #2 pencil once more, I began drafting a description of the fickle muse’s abandonment. Might as well make use of the empty time by writing ABOUT not writing…
In the quiet sanctuary of the Pencil Pit this morning, warmed by a new heater, my mind wanders back to the contrasting experiences of confinement that I encountered yesterday. The solitude of this barn, my chosen place of reflection, starkly contrasts with the stories of enforced and tragic confinements I absorbed.
An article I read yesterday from The New York Times about the crisis in Gaza lingered in my thoughts. Children like Khaled Joudeh, trapped not only in the physical rubble of a war-torn region but also in a situation far beyond their control or understanding. The image of Khaled, grieving beside his family, encapsulates a confinement of the most harrowing kind – trapped in a cycle of violence and loss, a life dictated by forces outside one’s control.
As I drove to Lowe’s yesterday, the narrative of confinement continued, this time through the podcast recounting Amanda Knox’s ordeal. Her story – one of wrongful accusation and years spent in an Italian jail – is a different kind of confinement. It’s a mental and physical imprisonment, compounded by the weight of injustice and misunderstanding. Knox’s voice, recounting her experiences, was a stark reminder of how freedom, something we often take for granted, can be so fragile.
These stories of confinement, both physical and metaphorical, make me reflect on the nature of freedom. In my barn, the Pencil Pit, I find a liberating solitude, a space where my thoughts and words are free to roam. This freedom, however, is a privilege, one that many, like the children in Gaza or Knox in her cell, are brutally denied.
It leads me to ponder the resilience of the human spirit in the face of such trials. There’s a certain strength, an indomitable will, that both Khaled and Knox exhibit – a refusal to be completely subdued by their circumstances. Yet, the unfairness of their situations, the pain of being confined and constrained by external forces, is deeply troubling.
As I sit here, my thoughts are a mix of gratitude for my own freedom and a deep empathy for those who are unjustly confined. These reflections are not just idle musings; they are a call to awareness and action. They remind me that while some of us have the luxury to build our sanctuaries, others are fighting battles for their basic freedoms.
Today’s mental meandering is a somber journey through the extremes of human experience. It is a recognition of the spaces we occupy – some chosen, some imposed – and the profound impact they have on our lives. In the Pencil Pit, surrounded by the early morning tranquility, I’m reminded that every word I write, every thought I explore, is a testament to the freedom that I have, and a tribute to those who are unjustly deprived of theirs.
In the early hours of dawn, as I sit in the Pencil Pit, my barn transformed into a haven of thought and reflection, I ponder a quote by Nabokov that I stumbled upon: “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.” These words, piquant and profound, resonate within the walls of this rustic retreat, where curiosity is not just welcomed but revered.
Yesterday’s experiences seemed to dance around this very theme. My 16-mile bike ride, a ritualistic embrace of nature and endurance, was unusually challenged by rain. Clad in a cheap rainsuit, ostensibly a shield against the elements, I found myself battling not just the external downpour but an internal one too. Drenched in sweat, every pedal stroke became a rebellion against discomfort, against the urge to seek shelter. It was as if the very act of pushing through the rain was an insubordination against the body’s natural inclination for comfort and dryness.
This physical challenge oddly mirrored my mental explorations later in the day, lounging in my bedroom chair, diving deep into Sam Harris’ Waking Up app. The episode titled ‘Beginning Again’ offered a contemplative journey into mindfulness and the power of resetting one’s thoughts. It struck me then how curiosity – the kind that propels us to question, explore, and even defy our comfort zones – is a form of beginning again. Each time we allow our minds to wander into uncharted territories, question ingrained beliefs, or challenge the status quo, we are, in essence, starting anew. We are shedding the old skin of complacency and conformity.
Curiosity, in its relentless pursuit of ‘what if’ and ‘why not,’ is indeed an act of insubordination against the mundane, the accepted, and the unchallenged. It’s a rebellion against the intellectual lethargy that often seeps into our lives unnoticed. Whether it’s questioning the mechanics of a rainsuit during a deluge or contemplating philosophical insights about mindfulness, curiosity propels us into a state of perpetual growth and learning.
In the Pencil Pit, surrounded by the tools of my trade – books, notes, and, of course, pencils – I realize that this space is a physical manifestation of curiosity. It’s where thoughts are not just born but also nurtured and challenged. It’s where the insubordination of curiosity isn’t just an act of defiance but a celebration of the human spirit’s unquenchable thirst for understanding.
As I embark on today’s journey, both in the Pencil Pit and beyond, I carry with me Nabokov’s words as a reminder of the transformative power of curiosity. It is, after all, in the questioning, the exploring, and the rebelling that we truly begin again, continuously redefining ourselves and our understanding of the world around us.
“… metastability denotes an intermediate energetic state within a dynamical system other than the system’s state of least energy. A ball resting in a hollow on a slope is a simple example of metastability. If the ball is only slightly pushed, it will settle back into its hollow, but a stronger push may start the ball rolling down the slope. Bowling pins show similar metastability by either merely wobbling for a moment or tipping over completely. A common example of metastability in science is isomerisation. Higher energy isomers are long lived because they are prevented from rearranging to their preferred ground state by (possibly large) barriers in the potential energy.”
The Pencil-Driven Life 