Left and Right Together: Reccommendation

I’d like to share what was for me a thought-provoking read, UU minister Doug Muder’s “Left and Right Together”. This is the text of a sermon, available online, and it addresses what the religious right and the religious or spiritual left have in common. Although he uses the word “religious”, the UU take on religion is broad enough that he's also addressing life stances like Humanism. Muder is a humanist himself.

He begins the sermon with readings from someone I would never expect to hear from in a UU fellowship: James Dobson. What we have in common, Muder says, is that we are mutually concerned with the way humanity is shaping up. “Both have loyalties that go beyond self and the convenience of the moment. Both reject the materialism of popular culture. Both seek something more substantial than the momentary satisfaction of desire or the endless striving after status. The committed (liberal) life is a different way to pursue these goals, not a denial of them.”

Muder states that both ways of life are concerned about the unhealthy growth of the same thing, the religion of “Consumer Hedonism”. This is a religion that dominates the culture to the point that it needs no building, names, priests, or anything of the sort: it’s become the very atmosphere we live in. To show this, he lays out what Consumer Hedonism is and elaborates on what values it instills in everyone -- values that are rejected by those who are concerned about bigger things. “Liberals and conservatives alike reject the emptiness of Consumer Hedonism, and nurture values that transcend desire and image: Values like family and friends and community. Compassion for the stranger. A just society. Appreciating the wonder of creation. Building a personal relationship with Beauty and with Knowledge and with Understanding. When those values are part of your experience of every moment, when you have trained yourself to experience them as immediately as you experience your physical desires, you're there. [...] The main difference between religious liberals and religious conservatives is in where they look for those values and how they hope to bring them into the world. Conservatives look to traditional values, a way of life that they believe worked for our ancestors. Typically, a conservative faith has a Golden Age it wants to preserve or restore: Eden, ancient Israel, the Jerusalem of the Apostles, the Medina of Muhammad, or even the small-town America of Norman Rockwell. Conservatives see the deeper values of those communities being replaced by practices that satisfy more superficial desires.

Liberals, on the other hand, attach their vision of deeper values to a future Utopia or to a Platonic ideal. They see themselves not as restoring a Golden Age, but as marching onward and upward towards a world more perfect than has ever existed before. Two centuries ago, a world without slavery was a complete dream. No Golden Age had ever achieved it. But here we are.”

He ends with thoughts on generating a dialogue between the human-concerned left and the religious right. I found the sermon to be very…thought-provoking and more than a little heartening. I’ll own to going weak at the knees for ideas that bring people together, but outside of my own biases I think Muder makes a valid observation. What say you?

Book Response: The Reason for God, pt. 4

This is the fourth in a series of posts responding to Timothy Keller's The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. I originally wrote this off-the-cuff in April, but delayed posting it so this series would not flood my regular posting. The road to hell being paved with good intentions (and my tongue is firmly in cheek) , I fell out of the habit publishing these on Fridays like I'd intended: and so I begin again from where I left off.

Introduction

There Can't Be Just One Religion

How Could a Good God Allow Suffering?

Christianity is a Straitjacket

In this chapter, Keller examines the effects of claims to "Absolute Truth" on human liberty and happiness. He starts out with the claim that communities, to have meaning, must be to some degree exclusive. I suppose I agree: an association of gamers plays games; people who show up at association meetings and demand they go birdwatching are going to unhappy. He then dismisses the idea that Christianity destroys local cultures, making no mention of the philosophies and spiritual movements that have been destroyed by people with Christian motivations -- think of Justinian's closing of the Greek schools of thought, or the various attempts to squelch "heresies" that dared to reform orthodoxy. He asserts that Christianity is more inclusionary of other cultures than any other religion, and dwells on African converts to Christianity to prove his point. Because it allows them to keep supernaturalism, it allows their cultures to stay alive. I'm not sure what's going on with this point -- are we supposed to bewail the loss of any human culture? Why are we putting Culture before human needs?

Keller then makes the point that rules, while confining, are also liberating. Putting stones around a fire prevents it to a large extent from escaping. From a more cynical perspective, rules also forestall having to think about things.

Chapter Four: The Church is Responsible for So Much Injustice

Keller begins this chapter by ceding the point that religion can easily lead to violence and destruction, but then states that "secular, rational" societies lead to even more. He then pulls out the French Revolution, Stalinism, and Maoism. Those states only replaced religious and political dogma from one group of people with their own. What was rational about the Cultural Revolution? Those societies have not "rid themselves" of religion -- in Keller's words -- they have merely created new ones. In the case of the French Revolution, this was the "Cult of the Supreme Being", which was immediately criticized by rationalists as being dogmatic.

He then says that Christianity is not a religion of moral improvement, and this is where he actually -- for the first time -- managed to communicate with me. It took him fifty-seven pages, but I finally understand what a number of moderate Christian friends have been telling me: this is not a religion built around being moral. It's about being submissive and "accepting of grace". The self-loathing that enables this reminds me of a deleted scene from Dogma, in which Azrael -- a demon intending to destroy the universe -- rages against humanity for the construction of Hell.

"Evil is an ABSTRACT! It's a human construction! But true to his irresponsible nature, man won't own up to being its engineer, so he blames his dark deeds on my ilk. But it's not enough to shadow his own existence, no, he turned Hell into a suffering pit. And why? Because it is beyond your abilities to simply make personal recompense for the sins you commit. No, you choose rather to create a psychodrama and dwell on a foundless belief that God could never forgive your grievous offenses."

Rather than accept responsibility for errors, people in their self-hatred choose to torment themselves or to simply give in to learned helplessness and choose to pretend everything is A-OK. I don't understand self-hatred, and I think this is what might forever separate me from being able to understand conservative and moderate Christianity as well as Islam and other religions that built on the idea that humanity is worthless without depending on some deity.

Keller then points out the populism of some of the Hebrew prophets, as well as the seeking of social justice that modern Christians do in Jesus' name. Very well, but just because some of the people in a religious tradition are inspired by their interpretation of it does not mean the tradition itself is true. Islam, for instance, requires the giving of alms to the poor. Does this mean Islam is true? Keller never applies critical theory to his ideas: he only attacks others and patches up holes in his breastwork of dogmatic defense. Not only this, he is wrong when he makes claims to the truth. For instance, he says that Christians were the first people to question the morality of slavery. It was the Stoics who asked, "How can you justify owning a man and treating him as property when you know he has the same Reason as you?"' Further, Keller ignores the fact that the very god who is supposedly against slavery is the one who mandated it from the Hebrews. No sooner did he "set them free" from bondage in Egypt did he tell them to make slaves of their neighbors. The hypocrisy is staggering.

Epicurus at the Painted Porch

I am a student of Greek philosophy in two ways -- I both study the schools of thought academically and practice them in my life, especially with regard to Epicureanism and Stoicism. The two philosophies have been in my experience pitted against once another, painted as competing philosophies. My academic study of the two philosophies is very shallow: I have read from both philosophies’ texts, but I have never emerged myself in an in-depth study of how they were received in the Greek world at the time, so I don’t know how accurate such a portrayal is. On the surface, it would seem to make sense. The Stoics believed that virtue was the only “Good”, and the Epicureans believed that happiness was the only “Good”.

Do they contradict one another? Both begin from absolute statements that on the surface differ from the other, and one philosophy is grounded in divinity while the other is not. Epicurus had little regard for the metaphysical: he believed that happiness in the here and now was what people should focus their attention on. The ancient Stoics believed in cosmic order and saw this Order as the source for all that is good -- like beauty, truth, and virtue. To live in compliance with this Order is to live with virtue and thus be happy. The chief Stoic doctrine is to “live according to Nature”: living within our limits. Epictetus, whose work I enjoy immensely, began his Handbook by stating that happiness can be achieved through the knowledge that there are some things we can control and some things we cannot .[1] To act on this knowledge is to live with virtue. But notice what Epictetus is focusing on: happiness. This is the same then Epicurus was focused on.

This is why I do not think that Stoicism and Epicureanism are actually contradictory. Each seem to begin with the object of human happiness as their goal, they just attempt to reach it through different (but not necessarily opposing) practices. Epicurus advocated the simple life and abstaining from insatiable pleasures: Stoics believed in mental discipline, the cultivation of mindfulness. But what would stop Epicures from using Stoic mindfulness, and what would stop Epictetus from living the simple life? The two philosophies differ only in theoretical beginnings, I think, and for the modern Stoic or Epicurean, that simply doesn’t matter.

I count myself a Stoic, but I do not believe in a living Cosmic Order the way Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus did. Erik Wiegardt commented in his The Stoic Handbook that the difference between an atheistic Stoic and a pantheistic Stoic is that one believes cosmic order is unconscious and the other believes it is conscious. I believe laws govern the universe, but I do not think they are divine. I believe in gravitation and friction and inertia and thermodynamics and all manner of universal laws, but I think they are natural. What lies beyond them -- what caused them -- is not my concern. I can no more be aware of supposed metaphysical realms and gods than can a microbe be aware of a soda can.

If I take Epicurus’ approach that supposed metaphysical worlds are meaningless when it comes to human happiness, on what basis do I call myself a Stoic? I do so because there are certain patterns of behavior that lend themselves toward happiness and unhappiness. If I become addicted to a drug, for instance, I will be on the whole unhappy. This is not divine punishment being meted out by Athena: this is chemistry. If I fret about what someone is thinking of me, I will be unhappy. Again, there are no punitive deities involved: this is psychology. If, however, I becoming addicted to substances and adopt the Stoic practice of giving no attention to things I cannot control, I will find contentment -- and the joy I have for living will not be tainted. “Virtue” is the practice of living sensibly, by following patterns of behavior that create long-term happiness. For me, Epicureanism and Stoicism go well together, because the virtuous life is -- in Epicurus’ own words -- the happy life. [2]

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[1] My immediate source for this is Sharon Lebell’s The Art of Living, but the same sentiment is expressed in the same basic way in more conservative translations of Epictetus' works.

[2] “The Principle Doctrines”, Epicurus

A Humanist Goes to "Church"

Recently I attended the Sunday morning session at my parents' fundamentalist Pentecostal church. I did so to give my father a pleasant surprise on Father's Day, although I arrive purposely late to avoid the song period and the adult Sunday School "lesson". Pentecostal worship services are very...dynamic, and quite loud -- so I avoid them. Their songs are also not the type I would sing -- mainly cowing to a deity that really should be above such things -- and simply sitting there while the racket goes on for forty-five minutes is not a experience that I intend to partake of. So it is that every time I visit my parents' church, I arrive late and enter the auditorium once the screamer-in-chief takes the stage.

I visited here last year for Mother's Day. The screamer-in-chief ranted for over an hour on the evils of secular humanism and secular education taking godly young people out of the Pentecostal church. This screamer-in-chief makes Sunday his "evangelical" service, and he changes his ranting depending on who is in the audience. Since I was there that day, and since the AHA accidentally sent a letter to my parents' house, and given that they rely on him like he's Jim Jones, he knows that I am a Big Bad Humanist. As such, I was his target that day. It proved to be quite amusing, as he kept screaming on how Christian mothers were to "initiate" their children into the church, and said that the UPCI needed to take the stance of the Jesuits, who are quoted as saying "Give us a child for his first seven years and he will be a Catholic forever". He really did use the word initiates, and he said a lot of other fun things that day. When I worked in the soundroom after my departure from this church's insanity, I used to write down choice comments.

This Father's Day session proved to be much less interesting. He screamed on the importance of godly fathers to rule over godly families in spite of President Obama's attacks on the American family. I was not aware of these attacks. I would think he's awfully busy with two wars, two lunatic regimes, one large recession, and an awful lot of crazies who would like to see him dead to go launching an attack against American families, but hey -- he's not to be underestimated. The screamer-in-chief railed against the ineptitude of public education ("How can you say they're gettin' educated when my kids don't even know what the ALAMO is?!") and the importance of parents to squeeze their kids' brains into perfect UPCI cubes, bereft of any creative spark or original thought.

This was a real yawner, in other words. What strikes me about this man and his little chiefdom is not that they are so fundamentalist they defy caricatures of themselves, but of their raging impotence. This is a dying church. When I was a preteen, it had over a hundred members. Now the regular crowd numbers twenty on a good day. They try to prop the numbers up by babysitting kids from poor neighborhoods (with a "bus ministry") but even they know they're being used by those kids' parents. All of my life, this screamer and the man who preceded him have promised great revival to this church, and all they've seen is ever-dwindling and greying numbers. The pastor's family constitutes much of the church's staff. What is the reason for this decay? If you want to be charitable, you can say their success is tied to the town's -- but other churches are growing.

This church is dying and impotent because it honors neither reason nor love. I'm not judging them by humanist standards, but by other Christian churches' standards. This church puts all of its hope for the future in blind faith. They buy a wholly unnecessary sound system, ignoring the advice of their fairly experienced but youthful soundman (me) that would suit a church ten times their size, based on the principle that "If you buy it, they will come". That money could be used to actually help people in town. I think if this church were turned into a homeless shelter, and if its members honored their god by giving to their community, they might actually grow. But they are incapable of it: they are locked in their tradition and blinded by the adoration of wishing-makes-it-so. They come to this place every single Sunday and Wednesday to profess their unworthiness before a brute of a god and are then threated to an hour or move of a brute raging at them when he isn't patronizing them.

I criticize this as a nod to what religion can be in inspiring people to do right by their fellows. This church embodies only the worst of religion, however. I am wholly glad that I escaped it -- and I suspect that one day it will die, its building becoming a tomb marking a place of spiritual desolation, and its fount of hate and ignorance gone forever dry.

God's Problem: Book Response

While perusing library shelves, my eyes happened to see God's Problem. The title struck me as strange, interesting, and perhaps promising. The full title is God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question -- Why We Suffer. Author Bart Ehrman was is a New Testament scholar and was previously a minister before the problem of suffering/evil forced him to evaluate his claims and arrive at agnosticism. In his introduction, he says that the book was the result of a class he taught on Biblical attitudes toward suffering -- why it is, why God allows it -- and indeed the book is on that theme.

To the end of examining Biblical attitudes toward suffering, he goes through the Christian bible and identifies a few basic trends: suffering as punishment for sin, suffering as redemptive ("God works in mysterious ways"), and apocalypticism. His research appears to be fairly thorough: while he identifies suffering-as-punishment as originating with the Hebrew "prophets" -- men like Elijah and Amos, who spoke on God's behalf and typically threatened Israel with all sorts of unpleasantness if they didn't start following God's law -- Ehrman also notes that this classical view dominates the Hebrew scriptures, including its historical narrative -- and he shows why. The first two trends probably do not bear further explanation on my part: I imagine most people have heard them before.

It is in the third explanation that Ehrman really comes through for me: for many years, aspects of the New Testament have confused me -- until this moment. Ehrman believes that they are examples of apocalyptic thinking and his explanation does answer my questions: for instance, why Jews suddenly went from not being aware of a Resurrection in the earlier scriptures to claiming belief in a grand Resurrection of souls at the end of time in the New Testament. To explain what is meant by "apocalyptic thinking", Ehrman goes over four traits of it: dualism, with a Good Being and an Evil Being and that at present, Evil is winning; Pessimism, that humans cannot do anything to change fate; Vindication, that one day God will prove triumphant over evil; and fourth, that this will happen (from the view of Jesus and contemporaries) very soon. Using this view, suffering is seen as a result of evil currently winning the battle between it and good -- between what the Zoroastrians would call the battle between the Lie and the Truth. This view probably became popular after the Babylonian "imprisonment", and Ehrman tries to make the case that the whole of the New Testament is apocalyptic thinking.

Adding to his explanations of what these attempts to explain away evil are are his critiques of them -- his examination of what makes them seem to work, but what ultimately makes them fail. Ehrman ultimately returns to what he sees as a theme in both Job and Ecclesiastes: that suffering can't be explained. He ends on this note:

"I have to admit that at the end of the day, I do have a biblical view of suffering. As it turns out, it is the view put forth in the book of Ecclesiastes. There is a lot that we can't know about this world. A lot of this world doesn't make sense. Sometimes there is no justice. Things don't go as planned or as they should. A lot of bad things happen. But life also brings good things. The solution to life is to enjoy it while we can, because it is fleeting. This world, and everything in it, is temporary, transient, and soon to be over. We won't live forever -- in fact, we won't live long. And so we should enjoy life to the fullest, as much as we can, as long as we can. That's what the author of Ecclesiastes says, and I agree. "

I will share more from that particular section a little later on. Ehrman is not dull, and his material is insightful.I'd give it a go if the subject is one you are interest in.

Who Is This Jesus?

In recent months, I have developed an personal interest in comparative religion and philosophy. Academically, this subject has mildly interested me since taking on freethought, but it has not been until the past year or so that I began to get a sense of what religions mean to people. A growing awareness of my own...prejudices has prompted me to look deeper into religion, beyond tradition and wish fulfillment. The result of this has been a growing sense that behind the established religions and behind spirituality -- folk or otherwise -- is an honest human desire to find happiness on Earth. However compromised the religions have been made by dogma and power, I think humanity is underneath them all -- waiting to be be freed, to breathe.

Despite my waning hostility toward religion (if not my total opposition to dogma and hate), I find myself avoiding the religion of my youth. It was forced on me: it was an imposition. Unlike other "de-converts", I have no memories of reasonable inquiry slowly eroding my ability to believe: for me, discovering freethought was like realizing that the door to my personal hell had sprung open, and I sprinted out of it. I didn't stop running for many months. I had been raised to be a Christian, but Christianity never meant anything to me. I didn't have a relationship with God despite my attempts to reach him. The effect of this was enormous given that I was raised in a particular sect in which "feeling God" is completely ordinary and which even the lowliest of sinners can do. I never felt a thing, despite doing what everyone else was doing and despite attempting to do so sincerely. That's pretty scary. What little meaning I found I found in the Old Testament: there, God was a mean cuss, but he was reliable. He cursed those who disobeyed his laws and blessed those who obeyed them -- save Job, who got to be an object lesson. As a child and teenager, I wanted the protection of an almighty deity. Adding to this was that OT God served as my yearning to see justice done and my awe of the universe.

Jesus, on the other hand, was completely unappealing. His sermon on the mount -- the Beatitudes -- sounded to me like demagoguery. I didn't know that word back then, but when I learned the word I realized it described that sense of discomfort I felt when reading Jesus' words. His miracles did not move me -- what was the point? He preached compassion, but threatened Hellfire. It was Hell I hated most: I hated it because it made me live in fear, and I resented this god-thing preaching love and creating pain in the same breath. I was not moved by his death: people told me it was a sacrifice, but even to my skeptically untrained brain, I saw that he had lost nothing, and that he had accomplished nothing. What was this supposed need for "atonement"? It seemed to me completely arbitrary. If this god-thing was so offended by people, why didn't he just mind his own damn business -- or just forgive them, if he was truly a loving entity? Most damning for me was that in my worldview, all of human suffering seemed to have been consciously brought about for the sole purpose of giving the god-thing sincere worshippers. This was for me an unconscionable horror, and it caused me to denounce religion to myself and to purposely turn my back on it.

After freethought, I began realizing that the New Testament, like the rest of the Bible, was a book written, translated, compiled, and read by people with agendas, and that logically it was quite possible that the depiction in the so-called gospels had not done him justice. In the years since, another Jesus has emerged from my reading of how others perceive him. Their Jesus is a human teacher -- perhaps divine, perhaps human, perhaps only divinely inspired. For their purposes, it doesn't matter. To them, he came teaching the same thing Buddha and various other religious and philosophical teachers taught: love. When he said his way was the only way to Heaven, these people* interpret him as saying love was the only way to be close to God -- not believing in the saviourhood of Jesus. And honestly, I want to believe in this Jesus. His humanity, like Buddha and the Dalai Lama and so many others, appeals to me. I have found the gospel of love -- that you don't have to dislike life or other people, that you can learn to live with them despite their and your perfections, that compassion is the source of soy -- to be utterly...captivating. When I think on love, or practice it, I feel grand. I'd like to think that Jesus is one of many teachers who realized this -- but I cannot embrace this Jesus.

I cannot embrace him because from my perspective, the gospel accounts are not reliable. They were written decades after his death. Even accounts written from firsthand remembered accounts are bound to be compromised: I know full well how tricky memory can be. In telling a story, people embellish the truth: they add to it. There are lots of criticism of the gospels and lots of defenses, but to me it seems impossible to arrive at an objective "This is Jesus" descriptive. People can interpret him freely: they can see in his life many things, and I think they tend to see what they want to see. Realizing this holds me back.

I have come to understand the Jesus people like Shelby Spong and Marcus Borg describe, but I don't understand the other Jesus(es). For instance, I don't understand the Saviour Jesus: I don't get why people find him attractive at all. In the interests of better understanding the people I interact with every day, I want to probe into this and figure out who they're seeing -- to look at various interpretations of this figure. To that end, I will be engaging in a quest of sorts. I will be reading the Gospels, both authorized and not, and reading other people's perceptions of Jesus. I will then reflect on what I'm reading. I don't know how long this will take, or even if I will be able to pursue it persistantly. I may tire of reading about him. In any case, though, I want to begin -- I want to see where this interest takes me. This, therefore, may be the introductory post to a series of "Who is This Jesus?"-related posts. I invite comments as I read.

Tending the Natural: Humanist Spirituality II

"Remember that philosophy requires of you only that which your nature recquires." - Marcus Aurelius

"We're different, and yet all the same -- we all want to be happy." - Anne Frank

"I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we are all seeking something better in life." - the Dalai Lama

Almost two years ago, I posted an essay that I called "All and Enough: Humanist Spirituality". I took the title from the third Humanist Manifesto, which declares that the natural world is "all and enough". There, I tried to explore what spirituality meant to me. Beginning with my center of reason and empathy and a joy for living, I wrote that I thought spirituality consisted of enjoying life and living it well by cultivating our inner essence. This inner essence has been called a soul or a spirit, but if I did so it would only be as a metaphor. My perception of my own essence is wholly naturalistic: For me, "I" am made up of biological drives and the psychological drives that a lifetime of living have given me. I do not pretend to understand the "stuff" of consciousness, but on precedent I accept that it is probably completely natural or based on the natural.

It is on this foundation of naturalism that I build, and this is part of the reason I call myself a Humanist. My joy for living comes from accepting life on its own terms -- not on the terms of the supernatural. I enjoy life -- I revel in it. I cozy under trees, reading good books and letting the grass caress my fingers while I listen to the wind blow through the trees and the birds sing, and the sheer enjoyment of it all can stop my heart and bring tears to my eyes. I believe in just being happy, in "letting the soft animal of [my] body love what it loves."* This means for me living in accordance with nature: nature is both a beginning and a direction. My natural "center" is reason and empathy -- or more broadly, reason and emotion. I think these two attributes are the essence of human nature. We are intelligent creatures who can use reason to ponder philosophical questions and do things with purpose, and we are emotional creatures, evolved to live in social groups. We experience emotions while living life in our communities, and ideally we would use those emotions reasonable to create ways of living that make us happy (or at least help us survive). This is the beginning of law -- indeed, of most every aspect of civilization.

I labor to live according to my nature: I practice freethought or skepticism, and I try to connect to other people in whatever ways I can -- in spending time with friends, or reading literature and connecting to people who have been dead for centuries. "Cultivation" is a word I like to use in reference to spirituality: I see my life as a flower, a bird of paradise perhaps, that must have good soil and a reliable source of sunlight and water if it is to flourish. I need to stimulate my mind and emotions to grow -- and I need to live within their bounds. A flower only needs so much heat or water: too much will scorch it or drown it respectively. This is what I was trying to get at in my first essay: a life lived with empathy and reason, with sunlight and water, leads inevitably to human flourishing, to eudaimonia, to "invincible happiness".

However I might appreciate the need for living as naturally as possible, this approach has a problem: just because something is natural does not mean it is good for me. Anger is natural, for instance, but if I try to revel in anger, I will find myself visiting the pharmacist with a doctor's prescription for blood-pressure pills. My body's chemistry can be modified through my behavior so that it develops a dependency on alcohol: is it then "good" for me to drink all the more? How do I advocate living a natural life when doing what comes natural is not necessarily the best thing for me to do? For a year or so I've pondered this question every so often, but then just a couple of weeks ago the issue resolved itself with a single word: tending. If you have experience working in a garden, you will know that you have to fight weeds and pests to protect your plants. Weeds and destructive insects are a natural part of a garden, but they are not good for my purposes. I must tend the plants -- pull the weeds and get rid of the insects. Feeding and watering the plants is not enough -- I must continually destroy natural but destructive forces that would render my watering pointless.

So it is, I think, with human nature. I first became interested in the idea of humanist spirituality -- natural spirituality -- when I read Doug Muder's "Humanist Spirituality: Oxymoron or Authentic Path to Enlightenment". One of the topics he discusses is mindfulness among the Stoics: being aware of our thoughts and feelings and asking ourselves if these thoughts and feelings are doing us any good. I found this practice to be intriguing, and I took it up. I have found this practice of mindfulness to be quite helpful -- I no longer fixate on the things I used to, and a year of practice has molded me to possess a near-constant sense of peace. I'm not just interested in peace, though -- I want something active, something forceful: I want to keep the fountain of joy inside me that Marcus Aurelius wrote of bubbling up. What I mean by "tending the natural" is mental practices that bring this bubbling about. I'm not the only person who has noted a need for tending, or disciplined attention: I note that many philosophical and religious teachers have advocated mental discipline of some form or another, the Stoics and Buddhists being the most devoted examples. A few modern teachers advocating mental discipline are the Dalai Lama, Rabbi Zelig Pliskin (an Orthox rabbi, interestingly enough), and the late M. Scott Peck. The point of mental discipline is twofold: being mindful helps us "weed" ourselves, allowing us to grow, while active forms of discipline attempt to manipulate growth in the direction of our choice. Both forms have the end of human happiness in mind.

I have noted through the course of my reading a potential common theme in the philosophical, religious, spiritual, and psychological teachings of the past and present -- that of human happiness. Sometimes this is approached from the angle of the divine, using the idea of a deity as source. I used to use ideals for the same purpose, although I seem to be growing less concerned with reaching some outside ideal and more interested in what will develop from my life if I just enjoy it.

Recommended Reading:

• The Art of Living, Sharon Lebell. A modern translation of Epictetus' Handbook and Discourses.
• The Art of Happness and Ethnics for a New Millenium, Tenjin Gyatso (the 14th Dalai Lama).
• Doug Muder's "Humanist Spirituality"

* "Wild Geese", Mary Oliver