seeker for truth

Since I cannot begin to lay out my full worldview in just a few moments in order to derive how that worldview informs my approach to the environment, I will, instead, simply point out a few defining features of my religious/political/scientific worldview and connect those to my stance on the environment. First of all I reject the mythology of the fall. I reject the idea that man was, in some idealized past, perfect, and that he might again, although through no power of his own, re-achieve that perfection. Instead I believe the version of meta-history that Occam’s Razor would select: We humans are a species who has become sentient. We are infants (or toddlers, or adolescents, if you prefer) who are just figuring out how to come to terms with the fact that this sentience has significantly disconnected us from the processes of biological evolution which produced us. Second, I embrace the concept of free-will. I believe that we are, individually and collectively, self-determining to a very...

I am flabbergasted that it has been almost a year since I began (briefly) to write this blog... after a staggering 4 entries *chuckle* I apparently fell right off the ole' blog-wagon... at any rate, fatherhood is fast approaching (2 weeks until anticipated birthmother due date), house construction is mostly complete... I have decided to abandon my earliest preconceptions about how this blog should work (i.e. dedicated and more or less polished writing with a specific sort of audience/mindset paradigm). Instead, I'm going to attempt to renew this enterprise by utilizing tidbits of writings that I am doing for other purposes, less purpose-built and a much lower threshold for polish. As well as providing simple linkage and commentary on other content that I have already put "out in the 'verse". In that spirit, here is the text of the testimonial that I gave at church ( http://www.austinuu.org ) this morning: Good morning! In my few years as a member of this church ...

Invocation: A wise person once said to me, you get to choose how to live, and there are basically two choices, you can choose to be right or you can choose to be peaceful. The more I have reflected on this the more clear it has become that choosing to be right is about ego, while choosing to be peaceful is about wisdom. Peace be with you. Let us join together in song. Prayer: How can we become more compassionate? It is helpful to think of a generic situation where you are engaged with another person. You perceive their actions, and from this perception you normally confer onto them motives and thoughts. It is by these motives and thoughts, which we have imagined, that we determine how we will react to their action. One form of compassion happens when we are clear and honest about the actions of others, but kind and generous when we infer thought and motive. There is an expression for this in English, it is called ‘giving the benefit of the doubt.’ One way to cultivate our capacity for ...

Interesting site: http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumer_dilemma/ I heard this on NPR this morning and I decided to visit the site. I added a few of my own ideas to their list, we'll see if they publish them and how low they rank the feasibility... Anyway, here are the three ideas I submitted: Education Democracy/Capitalism relies explicitly upon the idea of an informed polity/consumer. Culturally/Institutionally, we fail to meet this requirement. Marketing controls the bulk of political/dollar votes. Through propaganda the political/corporate machines generate buy-in from the masses. Making the education of our future generations a political/economic priority could create a critical/informed polity/consumer capable of using democracy/capitalism to manage this Earth. Global Governance Our global capitalist economic system has outstretched our political system. In a balanced scenario government can be used to check the excesses of powerful corporate interests, to protect...

"As a minister I am quite unnecessary to anyone else's salvation. Surely it is one of the universe's little jokes that I must be a minister in order to make them see this." - Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar Although my personal version of this sentiment probably wouldn't use the word salvation, preferring perhaps a word more similar to enlightenment in the Buddhist sense of the term or self-actualization in Maslow's language, but it would be a mere quibble. Salvation, in the Christian sense, already means the same thing as these other terms. Mythologists might disagree, might try to make an argument about literal salvation as it relates to an afterlife or the development of some specially privileged relationship with God. But I think that Jesus would be quite happy to equate the salvation that he spoke of with these other terms, being quite content that each term (and the many others that remain unmentioned) is a bona fide attempt to att...

I was listening to StoryCorps this morning on NPR, a woman was talking about her experiences with her brother who died of AIDS and the familial controversy over the publicity vs. privacy aspects of telling this story on national radio. The woman, although a self-proclaimed private person, spoke about the profound effect that the broadcast had on her and felt enriched by her participation in the process. Our stories are meant to be shared. It enriches the teller and the listener. It creates bridges of understanding and empathy. When I first conceptualized this blog endeavor, I had planned to make it anonymous. Using the shield/illusion of anonymity to free myself of feeling watched or constrained. However, I think that such anonymity would also serve to reduce the genuineness of the work, the lack of constraint translating into both a weakened level of ownership and a diminished sense of responsibility. So there is no veil here, no mask of persona, only a person with a keyboard ...

"the beginning is a very delicate time..." - David Lynch's Dune there is a sense of threshold in any beginning, a feeling of motion, of change, which brings with it both exhilaration and trepidation... yet perhaps it is overstated... perhaps the biggest danger we face when beginning something new is that we fall back into solipsism, taking ourselves far to seriously... imagining our own centrality "All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, not in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin." - John F. Kennedy this blog is intended as a journal that is primarily concerned with my ongoing struggle/purpose/mission to find/understand/articulate the truths of my/our internal/external nature/reality/spirit/god/the_universe/everything. as the JFK quote above indicates, this journal is not an ends within itself, it is not a work of staggering genius or monu...