It's one of those random nights when, all of a sudden out of nowhere, I get a hankering for theological discussion. Read More

Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) kingdom."



They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) kingdom as babies?"



Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when… Read More

I love religious paths, I think they're awesome and fascinating and variously fulfilling. generally, I feel like they don't quite fit with my outlook on things, especially because I feel like I need freedom to believe and not believe at my whim and leisure.



The path that I've felt most personally inclined to is judaism. the depth and richness of the cultural traditions, the beauty of the liturgy, the freedom and trepidation with which jews approach the divine. But judaism is a faith… Read More

-doone for his dogged devotion to the objective scientific worldview, expressed in countless diagrams and articles.

-Jeff H for his open mindedness and willingness to consider alternate frames of reference.

- doug for his passion and unshakable faith, the sheer totality of his surrender to the absurd.



and having said all that, I'm dropping out of the debates on evolution. I just find them infuriating and futile. RG is to me about collectively building frameworks for the… Read More

Jeff has his christian rappers, Sid has his angry atheist rappers...



I have my agnostic folk singers. Carter Family + Bertrand Russel = Iris… Read More

Imagine an instrument so sensitive and resonant that every centimeter of it produced some note when bowed, plucked or struck - a cello crossed with a piano with a bit of harp thrown in. It makes the most rich subtle music, capable of immense diversity of tone, timbre and volume. Its maker, the eminent luthier who built, stringed and tuned the instrument, must be herself a devoted lover of music and beauty, and must regard her creation with an infinite tenderness and satisfaction.



The… Read More

The ancients believed that the fundamental underlying shape of the universe was a cube - occupying three dimensions, with six sides and a central point, and 12 vertices (corresponding to the three "mother letters", seven "double letters" and twelve "simple letters" of the hebrew alphabet.)



In the enlightenment, it was noted that the two dimensional net, or unfolded version of a cube, was a cross. it's six sides corresponded with the five classical elements with an additional sixth… Read More

There has been a war raging for thousands of years around whether human relationships should derive from spontaneous human emotion or social mores and economic practicality. It has been a prolonged and contentious campaigns, with many glorious victories and crushing defeats on both sides, but I am here to tell you now that the fighting itself is wrongheaded, because it has been entirely framed by the Greyfaces of the world, those who tell us who we will marry and why, those who seek to imprison… Read More

(I wrote this a few months ago, weeks before receiving major spinal surgery. I'm much recovered and basically pain free at this point, but when I read it now I feel quiet and humbled at the memories.)



There is a pride needed to say "There is no god", to imagine that you have any kind of certainty regarding the things that lay beyond our perception. There is also in some way, for me, a despair inherent - a nostalgic yearning for the childhood days when faith was simpler, mourning the… Read More

We have spent the winter on our knees, but the sun is returning, the ewes are pregnant with a bright new spring. It's imbolc, the ancient pagan holiday dimly remembered as groundhog's day.



By way of celebration, we are building a massive labyrinth, collaborative land-art, on Seabright beach in midtown santa cruz. At the center of this structure, a cozy pit with a bonfire.



Join us for building the labyrinth during the day (Sunday, February 8th), and/or the night of music,… Read More

I've been thinking alot about what amounts to the two basic philosophical viewpoints on reality, which hold that a) everything is basically of one nature, and b) everything is basically of two natures.



The second, dualism, is intuitive and is widely culturally embedded. Thinking of things in terms of female and male, inner and outer, god and man, spirit and matter, software and hardware...these are all very common and reasonable distinctions to make. The subjective-objective duality… Read More

(I am here stepping into an ophite reality tunnel. I do not "believe" these ideas as such, but I think they are beautiful and useful.)



There is a dichotomy often presented in theology between (as it were) God and god(s). the latter is understood to be personal, often flawed - such as Óðinn or Hera or Indra, while the former is omnipotent, omniscient - if not impersonal then somehow transpersonal. Growing up lutheran, I heard this presented often in a somewhat xenophobic way: "Other… Read More

Neither from itself nor from another, nor from both, nor without a cause does anything whatever anywhere arise.

- the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nagarjuna



Did you know that God's name is Eris, and she is a girl? Good.

- Manual for discordian evangelists, Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst



Say you've got a statement, some arbitrary proposition X. Actually...no. X is too abstract a representation, let's name him Fluffy instead. So, proposition Fluffy can enter into… Read More

Sometime during the 2nd century ce, a prophet came to earth, sent, he said, by the snake god Glycon. He traveled throughout the roman empire, astonishing crowds by miraculously invoking his divine master, through the first recorded use of the sock puppet.



Glycon has few followers today, although Alan Moore has proclaimed himself an ardent believer. Presumably this is a comment on the nature of belief, that the origin of the belief or the objective truth of the claims made is entirely… Read More

imagine you live in a universe where everything is varying shades of green. light green, dark green, bluish green, etc. Green mountains, green stars, green people. In such a world, it is easy to imagine that most thinking people would doubt the existence of the color green, because with no point of comparison, no not-green-thing, there would be no reason to even consider it.



This, I think, is a good model to describe the existence of god. Every cell, quark, and brane is humming with… Read More