Are science and religion compatible

It is only the extremes on either end-- scientific popularizers and religious fundamentalists, who make the relation of science and religion a fratricidal squabble, The popularizers are more likely than the scientists involved in basic research, to take a superficial view of religion. 

It does not help that, to speak of the most common scenario, Christians do not denounce the fundamentalist wing of Western religion. Thinking about this, though---- it does seem like a pretty unchristian thing to do, toss out the loud-mouth haters. And, who is not guilty of that themselves sometimes-- being a loud-mouthed hater. So if there is anything left of Christian charity in the world, such a perspective would argue against kicking out the extremes. Maybe. 

Being a loud-mouth hater is a hazard with words.  In fact, to stick to a verbal formula may be a definition of loud-mouthed hater. But to pick out as exemplary, such fringe figures ( I am not naming names here, but one of those religious leaders in the recent past labeled me a witch) denotes a certain intellectual superficiality on the side of those who call themselves scientific spokespeople.And that is what the scientistic popularizers like to do -- pick some podium grabber, and treat such a person as the beginning and end of religion.

It doesn't help that scientists are right, not if you assume I have some dog in this fight, though I aim not to. But religion is an outmoded vocabulary. That does not mean there is not a reality to which these words refer. That is the complexity that both science and religion fail to weigh -- that the words must fail, in the end, to encompass the important stuff. Always and forever. About that -- the limitations of words-  historically religion has traditionally been more perceptive. Yet now, religion seems like an outmoded wardrobe.

And science has this argument. Their results are real. Where they fail, is to appreciate that their focus,their domain, is not the world, it is just the external world. Only in the last century would that position be able to keep up a facade of rationality. For how does the knower of such an external world, on the other side of the sensory apparatus, how does such a knower, know, anything, at all? 

Maybe tomorrow we can take up the question of whether western science itself, does not reveal a christian structure. 

Why Didn't Jan Cox get a Nobel Prize?

Why Didn't Jan Cox get a Nobel Prize during his lifetime? Was it because his specialty was not the hard sciences? What he looked to demonstrate though, was the hardest of knowledge, -- how to focus your own attention on the inbetween. I don't know if his goal was really harder than corralling neutrinos, but I suspect it was. 

And some  reader might well say, what kind of comparison is THIS? Something written by someone who obviously idolizes this Jan Cox. How could this writer be objective.

What if the division of objectivity and subjectivity is just the received cant, the herd summary, with no individual investigation of the factors involved in labeling, separating, objective and subjective. What if  -- this problem is insoluble because the question starts AFTER the mind has divided the world into two. Then you have to get inner and outer back together somehow. If my assessment of this situation is correct, it suggests something all the Nobel nominees in history, have not come to grips with.  

Like most of the physical scientists, Jan Cox did not envisage immortality, or theism. The problems he tackled were harder than cracking the atom --- that is, Jan Cox sought to show one person, or more, the nature of personal change. 

Jan Cox did not get a Nobel NOT because what he was doing was not important, was not earth changing, -- he did not get one because the world is necessarily and happily, --- deaf. 

Happy Nobel Week

The difference between the natural sciences and what we, those intent on preserving the meaning of the work of Jan Cox, are about, is a fun question.

Jan addressed it: he said the reason there are not more scientists in the Work is because they get shocks to their yellow circuit in the course of their own pursuits. Which I take to mean, they do not feel the need for TKS.

The natural scientists focus on the external world and that is both why their pursuits are legitimate, and why they will not naturally ever come across TKS. Their legitimate results are based on binary thought. Of course with the external world, this method is the proper tool. 

The success of binary thought dealing with the external world blinds most scientists to the other aspects of reality which are appropriate for mankind to study. That and all the agitprop of the last century, which work to invalidate any OTHER fields of study, besides the external world.

With just the results of the work of contenders for the Nobel Prize mankind will limp along, and the individual may live a happy life, but drugs will be necessary to ease the pain of an amputation felt but which academe unites to trivialize. 

Maybe we should have a post everyday this week to celebrate. We thank scientists for drugs that work, too. But is that the only option available for what Jan called "A Certain Hunger."  Check back here.

If you must read

Part of the vocabulary of modern spiritual paths, and pseudo paths, is the conjunction of "essence and personality." The phrase refers to what a man authentically is, a genetic matter he is born with, and the addition necessary for a civilized man to exist in a social world, an automatic cerebral mask that Gurdjieff, and after him Jan Cox, might label "personality".

This must be a continuum, a balance between these two aspects that varies from person to person, and, civilization to civilization.

None of this is mentioned in a book that caught my attention yesterday. 

The book is a biography of a Japanese man born around 1915. I would recommend this book to anyone: Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain (2008). The author, Martha Sherrill, is not a great writer, but she knows what to include, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. Sherrill has an unusual talent. And Dog Man tells the story of the realization of a certain kind of essence, and the manner of its manifestation in war time Japan. Morie Sawataishi is the human subject. Others are modern life, dogs, and what is important. And possible. Did I mention I like the book.

The headline here is the point

Fantastically Wrong: Europe's Insane History of Putting Animals on Trial and Executing Them

Even so I will link to the article

But my point is really the headline starting off the article and this post.

Because the headline illustrates the total unwillingness to understand the people we were before we became modern science-loving folk. Insane is a term that pushes the topic into the rubbish so we do not need to examine reality to find out about ourselves. How could people do such things? how did such people become modern at all? Why do such acts seem so unthinkable now? The point of the article is we do not need to even ask these questions.

And yet, let me guess something. As strong as the taboo against self-knowledge in our culture is,-- as illustrated by the use of the word insane, above, -- until science includes self-knowledge, at least inspired by the work of great philosophers like Jan Cox, until then, we are not going to have the skill and knowledge, to get off the planet. 

Counters and the counted

When words, -- the coins, counters, playing pieces,  of rational, binary thought, -- cannot even countenance the constant change which is a salient feature of the world we participate in, words are assuming a kind of divinity to themselves. An idolatry, actually, since this change defies linguistic categorization, and yet, includes and carries along, all.

It is not hard to flick over this presumptuous king chess piece. The click it makes falling over is hardly even audible. What is the difference between king and pawn game pieces. How could there be any. Without the game piece in your eye, other vistas are possible.

Most people just do not know how to do it, nor how it might involve a consistent flicking. The game piece, barely even resembling anything it is the name of, does have this advantage -- it can bobble back up. 

Knocking it over again is no more difficult than it was the first time. You have to remember to do it. Thus the religious literature of this planet. 

What all wobbles

Words are wobbly. By that I mean, that they do not fit perfectly upon that to which they refer. Take any flower, just as a point in case  a point is needed. You cannot describe one flower in a meadowful, so as to lead another person TO THAT EXACT FLOWER, by means of your description. 

Words do not know this, because of course words don't know anything. They are part of people's thinking. People though rarely know this,-- that words wobble -- and I have to wonder if this is not a sign of their insecurity, their reluctance to face the limits of their own knowledge. And by people, I mean published, academic, philosopher, and everybody else. 

And why the defensive fencing off of part of reality as irrelevant? At least you might say, well the underlying reality, whatever that means, in the words of Prince Charles, you might say the underlying reality, the flower itself in all its glorious individuality, that does not wobble. 

At least the bloom does not wobble more than you could calculate from a mathematical analysis of the air currents surrounding it. 

You can say that, you can say anything. But you would be wrong if you think the underlying reality does not wobble. You would, let me rephrase this -- you would be wrong not to consider that the underlying reality, words and all they specify and all they cannot specify, all that can be apprehended, and all that maybe cannot even be apprehended, with any talents, -- ALL of that, may be wobbly. At least sometimes wobbly. Some philosophers knew this. Baruch Spinoza, Jan Cox.