Green Oasis

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor gave a wonderful talk called “My stroke of insight” at TED about her experiences having a stroke. What she has to say hits all the major points of what I’m about right now, which is somewhat reflected in my posts here. Her experience struck cords of naturalism, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, mystical awakening, and human compassion which is rooted in our commonality.

(via kottke.org)

Black-and-white thinking prevents us from expressing our native compassion.

Yet such thinking is comforting. We quell our childhood fears of being lost in the dark and dreary wilderness of the world by holding to the iron rod of the word of God (1 Nephi 8:19–23). Making choices can be exhausting and frightening. Limiting our choices helps us cope with the complexity of life. We feel mastery over our world by dividing the grey, chaotic unknown into black and white, good and bad, right and wrong as Adam showed his dominion over the beasts of the field by naming them (Genesis 2:19). Having categorized the world, we feel justified in demanding who is on the Lord’s side? (Exodus 32:26)

Our efforts at rationalizing the complex world are vanity. Chaotic Tiamat bides her captivity until she can triumphally raze our flimsy black-and-white walls and introduce us to the full, riotous spectrum of true human experience. We do ourselves harm in putting our trust in the strength of the arms of our own flesh, putting off until it may be everlastingly too late the day when our defenses against the confusing world will be broken. (Jeremiah 17:5).

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman is a case in point. Publishers refused to print it in complete form until almost thirty years after its first edition due to its sexual imagery. Whitman’s poetry was too much for the public sensibility in the era of the Comstock laws.

The great 19^th century orator Robert Ingersoll chose to eulogize Whitman with a line drawn from To A Common Prostitute, oft-censored by black-and-white thinkers who object to any mention of prostitution.

BE composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal
     and lusty as Nature,
Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle
     for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.…

The Christian defenders of common decency missed the harmony between this poem and the teachings of their messiah. The Jesus of the Bible reveled in defying the black-and-white thinking of his era, just as Walt Whitman did. He chastened the Pharisees for their harsh judgments of the prostitute who bathed his feet with tears (Luke 7:36–50). He preached in the Sermon on the Mount that we should give our love to all, like God causes the sun to rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain to the just and unjust (Matthew 5:45).

I can’t say that Whitman had these biblical passages in mind as he wrote his poem, but the parallels in imagery and sentiment are striking. Whitman, a freethinking, freeloving pantheist, challenged the black-and-white, uncompassionate thinking of his Christian readers. His readers failed to recognize that Whitman and Jesus were kindred spirits.

The line that Ingersoll, the greatest orator of his time, said was “great enough to do honor to the greatest genius that has ever lived” calls us to cast aside our judgments of who is good and who is evil and embrace all in love:

“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,…”

Daylight Atheism has an excellent post on the deficiencies of the moral teachings of Jesus along the same lines (but better than) my post Lithium for Jesus. In short, not only is Jesus not the best moral teacher in history, on average we are now more compassionate than Jesus.

Dale McGowan, editor of Parenting Beyond Belief, wrote about the definition of humanism that he gave to his six-year-old.

A humanist is somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and that even if there is a heaven or a god, we should spend our time making this life and this world better.

I’m not there yet, but every day sees me care a little bit less about metaphysics except for this one question that crops up whenever someone makes a metaphysical assertion: How do you know that? In other words, I’m becoming a strident apatheistic agnostic.

I hope that I will rewrite my character as the kind of humanist Dale described. I want my attitude to become “I can’t know and you can’t know, so why pretend it matters? Let’s sit down and reason together. When we’re done, let’s be kind to each other and try to remake the world the way we both want it to be. At the end of the day, that must be enough because we can’t do any better.”

I just watched The People vs. Larry Flynt. I don’t have a lengthy review. I just wanted to express my happiness that I can watch and enjoy a film like this.

A couple years ago I would never have watched this movie, at least not while anyone was looking. If I had watched it, I would have been fixated on its sexual content and felt overcome with guilt for having given in to my carnal appetites. I would have agreed that Larry Flynt worked for Satan to entrap the souls of mankind. Now, I can watch it and find goodness in the life of Larry Flynt. I have removed the barriers between me and the beauty inside other people. Ironically, I’m a better follower of Jesus now that I don’t believe in him. I’m willing to lovingly embrace those who are judged the sinners of society. For that, I am grateful.