14 Years Ago Next Week: Monday Musings

I took this photo in the gardens
of the Rodin Museum in Paris
on April 27, 2016

By Moristotle

[Originally published on January 29, 2007, without an image.]

The other day I had occasion to share with someone something that I have thought for many years:

God [if God exists] can communicate with us any damn way God pleases [that is, through the Bible, the Quran..., the angelic kindness of a stranger...]

Not followed by "followers"

Okay, I admit it. I'd love to have hundreds of followers indicated in the sidebar. But, alas, I don't, so I'll rationalize:
    Since I fancy myself a free-thinker, Moristotle naturally appeals to other free-thinkers. And free-thinkers are, one can reasonably assume, not generally disposed to follow anybody or anything (or to want to be known to do so).
    But of course I can't prove that I have many followers of either the sort who declare it or the sort who don't. I may need to think of a better rationalization.

Anyway, I'm grateful for the four people who have signed up to be known as "Moristotle's Followers," even if three of the four are my two children and an esteemed old friend! The fourth is a stranger. Thank you "all"; I appreciate you.

It's embarrassing, though, that at the moment I myself am listed as another of Moristotle's followers!
    But I can explain. I wanted to email the stranger, so I clicked on his icon. I was told that to send him a message I'd have to join the "friendconnect" network that would be used to convey my message to him. So, I clicked "sign in or join" and, voilà, I was shocked to learn that I had just become another of my followers. But by doing that I also became able to send the stranger a message.
    Something screwy there, obviously. If you know how to un-follow yourself, please let me know.
    It would seem that a blog's followers are able to email each other through the friendconnect network, sort of like Facebook, I guess.
    I'm not sure why an old profile photo is being used for my follower icon¹. Maybe it's because, after inadvertently joining the friendconnect network, I saw that my profile for it has that photo and also my old quote ("I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?" —Emily Dickinson). I don't know why my current photo and quote aren't used.
    Vast and mysterious is the universe of Google.
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1. The next day I figured out how to edit the profile that provided that photo, and I updated it. But don't ask me to tell you how I did it. I just played "trial and error" and finally succeeded. Apparently, when you enter the Google universe, you acquire more than one profile.

Celebrating my blog's new tag line

Until a few moments ago, the tag line on my blog masthead was "A Journal of Dissent." As I told my friend Keith this morning:

"A Journal of Dissent" doesn't satisfy me, but I haven't figured out a better tag yet. You seemed to take "dissent" as political, but that's not what I had in mind. Not exclusively, anyway. My posts on Mitt Romney, for example, were of course political in that he's running for political office. But I intended my comments to be more on religion than on politics, on how in America people seem to assume that you have to be religious. Romney's rhetoric, for example, simply doesn't recognize non-religion (or nontheism, as the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts it) as being acceptable here; he even implies that people without faith in god aren't legitimate U.S. citizens. I'm particularly disgusted at the way he and others distort the views of the freethinkers among our founding fathers and co-opt them for partisan purposes.

I'm also unhappy with "dissent" because it is negative rather than affirmative....

Well, as usual, merely setting myself a problem (in words) quickly led to a solution (while I was outside clearing some drains). Hence the new tag line:

Celebrating our constitutional freedom from religion (while we still have it¹)

My text, of course, is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Let's celebrate!
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1. Several hours later: Rather than "while we still have it," my original parenthetical was for a few hours "and other popular delusions." While I savored its ambiguity (is religion the delusion, or the assumption that we are constitutionally free from it?), two things bothered me. First, I don't think the First Amendment can be interpreted to guarantee freedom from delusions generally, however extraordinary they are or how mad they make crowds². Second, and more important, a lot of my friends and relatives are religious. I offend some of them enough already without implying in my masthead that religion is a delusion.
2. In 1841, Charles Mackay published a book titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

At the suggestion of a friend, I have also changed my profile photo.

Monday Musings

The other day I had occasion to share with someone something that I have thought for many years:

God [if God exists] can communicate with us any damn way God pleases [that is, through the Bible, the Quran..., the angelic kindness of a stranger...]

This morning as I was about to enter the allergy clinic for my bimonthly antigen injection, a vibrant, dark-skinned young nurse called out to me from down the hall, "Hi! What's your name?"

"[Moristotle]...What's yours?"

Open Letter to Maliha on Agnosticism

Dear Maliha, thank you for coming to my blog and providing a Muslim perspective on religion. But thank you even more for your provocative questions, which I am trying to use to better travel my "journey of self-discovery through self-exploration." At about 8:40 this morning you commented, for example:

I don't understand agnosticism, because it seems so uncommitted to anything.

And then how would you derive meaning to our existence? What's the point? Is there a point? Are we just a comical abberation of a universe gone wild?

I am really interested in the thought process, because as I have struggled in determining whether Islam is "the" path (and now I am settling for its [being] "a" path), I never questioned the existence of God...it just seems like everything would be too mundane for such a beautiful world.

I must have read that not long after you submitted it, for at 10:01 I commented back to you:

I'[ll think] on these things...But know that I can't tell you when my muse is likely to strike with something like insight. She comes in her own time, but always faithfully responsive to my sincere desire for answers.

Well, within about one hour my muse was already starting to whisper to me, urgently, while I was driving home after doing an errand. Already, while driving out of my yard to go do the errand, I had been thinking that if an agnostic is not committed to anything, then the term hardly seems to apply to me. I feel committed. I am passionate about responding impeccably to life, to "the human condition." I have never been a couch potato, a spectator, a blindly following dogmatist. I have tried to engage life, to have passed this way not in vain.

In other words, your comments were affecting me powerfully and I'm sure they strengthened my desire to hear from my muse. And this, in turn, prompted her to aid me as quickly as possible.

At any rate, because I was driving when she started to whisper to me, I pulled off the road and took notes:

Free thinkers, free from received opinions about faith and science, pre-fabricated thought structures, and, perhaps most of all, other people's revelations, unless they accord with my own experience and the light of my own reason. Descartes tried to practice methodical doubt. In my own way, I have lately been trying to practice constructive skepticism.

Maybe I'm not agnostic as to whether God is or is not, but rather as to what God is (beyond the I AM THAT I AM). For I do believe in...Something. Maybe it's just that I'm unwilling to say I know what it is (because I don't think I do).

[Added on Monday: More whisperings followed, with some guidance on what God is.]