At a beginning

An unlikely exemplar for a commencement address

By Kyle Garza

[Editor’s Note: Kyle is a past columnist here, and we are grateful that he has shared this witty, serious piece of writing with us. It is the text of a speech he delivered last June at the commencement of the graduating class of Calvary Christian School, Oxnard, California.]

Thank you kindly, Dan, for those words that I may or may not have written myself. I can proudly attest to the truth of one of those points: today actually does mark the 1,095th day, or 3-year-anniversary, of my marriage to McKenzie, which means we’ve outlasted the average Hollywood marriage span by about three years now.

What's spirituality? [What, and whose, is it?]

Despite my excitement eight days ago upon "[realizing] that spirituality might be all (or at any rate mainly) about keeping oneself in good spirits," I soon saw that that was crap. There are lots of ways we humans try to keep ourselves in good spirits, and most of them aren't spiritual. For example, there's drinking, having sex, partying, watching feel-good movies....Often our motive seems to be to keep from thinking about weightier matters. And some of those weightier matters are precisely the ones we need to deal with in order to tend to our spirituality.
    An easy and revealing research project is to google on "what is spirituality" and read a few answers¹ to be found on the Internet. They vary all over the lot. Some mention transcendence and divinity; others do not. Most seem to address the question, Who am I? or Why am I here? We can think of these as the Gauguin questions; his perhaps most famous painting was titled "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"

    Wikipedia conveniently lays out spirituality's traditional dimensions:

Spirituality can refer to an ultimate reality or transcendent dimension of the world; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his or her being, or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.”
    ...Spirituality is often experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life. It can encompass belief in immaterial realities and/or experiences of the immanent or transcendent nature of the world.

The Wikipedia article also lists some spiritual practices:

Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop an individual's inner life; such practices often lead to an experience of connectedness with a larger reality>: a more comprehensive self; other individuals or the human community; nature or the cosmos; and/or the divine realm.

A cogent statement of spirituality has to address the transcendence/divinity question, if only to deny it as based on a delusion (or to restate transcendence in terms of the evolved human desire for more). Three months ago, I defined "God" as the main true thing. To me then and now, the main true thing is that our marvelous consciousness is a product of billions of years of the blind play of material forces that on Earth developed into Mother Nature. For me, that is, the traditional "God" doesn't exist.
    My answers to the Gauguin questions would have to reflect that life revolves around God-emptiness and address how in that situation we can keep our spirits up and remain reverent for life, compassionate toward other humans and critters generally, morally good, and so on. My "good spirits" post of last week was hardly more than an affirmation that I am not cast down at being the product of blind natural forces, but am yet moral, compassionate, and grateful, though still seeking a story by which to exult in this reality as others have exulted in such dreams as that they were specially chosen creatures in some divine drama.
    Like profoundly devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims, I tend to think sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, or from the perspective of the eternal. In fact, that perspective seems to be implicit in spirituality. What are we, in the most comprehensive sense?

March 11. Apropos the new story I am seeking by which to exult in the reality revealed to us by Charles Darwin, I was reminded today (by Daniel Dennett in his book that I'm reading) of something the physicist Richard Feynman wrote (and published in his 1988 memoir, What Do YOU Care What Other People Think?):

Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
    Perhaps one of the reasons for this silence is that you have to know how to read the music. For instance, the scientific article may say, "The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one-half in a period of two weeks." Now, what does that mean?
    It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.
    So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced.
    To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday. [p. 244, quoted by Dennett on p. 360 of Darwin's Dangerous Idea]

    A story by which to exult is precisely a dance!
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1. For example:
   What is spirituality?
   What is spirituality (II)
   Five (no so) easy steps to happiness
   Spiritual awareness

Movie "Religulous" demands new rating category

Since I began posting a rating for each movie I watch (about two years ago), I've twice had to create a new category to accommodate the latest movie. First there was UBOO, for the Unwatchably Bad or Otherwise Offputting movie "Bordertown," then EO for the ExtraOrdinary movie "Lars and the Real Girl." Now, for Bill Maher's 2008 documentary, "Religulous" (directed by Larry Charles), I've had to create MS, or Must See. "Religulous" is, in my opinion, a movie you must see. MS is paired with one of the other, more traditionally "quality" ratings—E (for Excellent) in the case of "Religulous."
    The obvious reason for the MS rating is the film's urgent call to grow up and abandon religion in order that humans might have a better chance of avoiding self-destuction. In this, "Religulous" adds Maher's voice to that of the writer Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Religion and Letter to a Christian Nation, whom Maher interviewed recently. (In that interview, Harris, perhaps jokingly, admitted that he'd probably stolen a few lines from Maher.)
    The movie viewers and book readers who most need to see the movie and read the book of course won't do so, even if ideally they would watch and read and consequently throw off religion. These include primarily (for Maher, I'd say) Muslims, whose militancy and the militancy of their book, the Qur'an, are emphasized in the movie, but also Christians, Mormons, religious (as opposed to merely ethnic) Jews, and, of course, the odd assortment of religious kooks of one sort or another whom Maher encountered for shockingly entertaining effect: self-styled messiahs, hallucinogenized nirvanans, and recipients of messages from gods or extraterrestrials.
    But at least the indifferently irreligious might be willing to watch "Religulous" and (one hopes) become less indifferent to, if not actively critical of religion.
    And everyone already in the know about religion will enjoy Maher, the collage of clips from old movies about the Israelites or the Crucifixion or warring Mohometans, the visit to the Crucifixion theme park in Orlando, and especially his nearly incredible interview subjects. (However, Maher's interview of Francis Collins, famous Christian scientist and President Obama's chosen director of the National Institutes of Health, seemed perfunctory and inconsequential.)
    "Religulous" is funny, informative, and alarming. A Must See movie. Because of the reason for that rating, it is most appropriate that I watched the movie on the eighth anniversary of the Muslim attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and (unsuccessfully) the Capitol or the White House.

Another striking feature of "Religulous," especially for those who have seen Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" and "Brüno" (both also directed by Larry Charles; I haven't seen the latter yet but am familiar with it), is the way Maher engages his subjects, so unlike Cohen's. Maher presents himself as himself, skeptical, courteously (if assertively) good-natured, and surprisingly respectful for the most part. Cohen submerges himself in outrageous roles and manipulates his subjects mercilessly.

To see the list of my recently viewed movies (temporarily expanded to the last fifty or so) here's a direct link to the spot on my sidebar.

Case dismissed!

An old friend has brought to my attention that:

In Florida, an atheist created a case against the upcoming Easter and Passover holy days. He hired an attorney to bring a discrimination case against Christians, Jews, and observances of their holy days. The argument was that it was unfair that atheists had no such recognized days.
    The case was brought before a judge. After listening to the passionate presentation by the lawyer, the judge banged his gavel declaring,"Case dismissed!"
    The lawyer immediately stood and objected to the ruling, saying, "Your honor, how can you possibly dismiss this case? The Christians have Christmas, Easter, and other holidays, and the Jews have Passover, Yom Kippur, and Hanukkah. Yet my client and all other atheists have no such holidays."
    The judge leaned forward in his chair saying, "But you do. Your client, counsel, is woefully ignorant."
    The lawyer said, "Your Honor, we are unaware of any special observance or holiday for atheists."
    The judge said, "The calendar says April 1st is April Fools Day. Psalm 14:1 states, 'The fool says in his heart, there is no God.' Thus, it is the opinion of this court, that if your client says there is no God, then he is a fool. Therefore, April 1st is his day. Court is adjourned."

Moristotle comments

The judge in the case was just continuing to believe the superstitions he learned from his parents. But the lawyer's client was indeed a fool, and the client's lawyer greedy for a fee and ignorant of the fact that atheists already "have" many more days than "Christians" and "Jews" have. Count the number of non-holy days and compare it to the number of holidays.

January 17

By the way, I forgot to point out yesterday that the way the word "Jews" was used in the anecdote seemed to imply that all Jews are religious. In fact, not even all people called "Christians" are religious. Apparently even a number of ordained priests are atheists. Like Father Bernard in David Lodge's novel Paradise News.