Wrestling with Religion

  Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel, The City and the Stars, describes city a billion years in the future where the inhabitants are minds downloaded into artificial bodies from files stored in a central computer. They live a thousand years in each body, after which their minds are stored as computer files--there are more uploaded minds than there is space for host bodies--for eventual future downloading. Less than sixty years after Clarke's book, in 2013, a New York conference sponsored by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov promised that something like this would become reality by 2045. Martine Rothblatt, a tech company CEO, predicted the imminent development of "mindclones" run on "mindware" that would be genuinely alive and conscious. Though arguably only computer simulations of their originals, such electronic mind-copies could, in theory, be replicated indefinitely. Uploaded into any suitable host machine, a person could live, if not forever, far beyond ...

  There's an important distinction between natural suffering and suffering caused by human actions. Natural suffering is inevitable however careful we are. Diseases, accidents, and aging happen. I could blame God for not making a pain-free world, but I don't see what good that would do. With any luck, though, I can minimize the suffering my actions cause to others. It isn't easy. Like everyone else, I tend to understand the world as a movie in which I am the star--to see everything, including suffering, as less important as it recedes farther from me in time and space. It takes imagination and grace to escape this ego-centric illusion and to recognize the collective social assumptions (in Marxist terms, the ideologies)  that pass for laws of nature and whitewash much of the suffering we humans cause. Karl Marx is a curious case, a family man who lived in poverty and died in exile. Born to financial privilege, he renounced it out of a passion to better the lives of the poo...

  Jeremy Bentham Six decades ago over coffee in Athey's Cafe, a long-defunct college hangout, Frank Orr explained Utilitarian ethics: the best society provides "the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers." I understood these to be powerful words but wondered how they worked in practice. How can we quantify happiness? Besides, the slogan could seem to justify abusing a minority to pleasure the majority. This apparently wasn't what Jeremy Bentham--a pioneering supporter of women's equality, public education, and gay rights--had in mind when he devised the slogan. Frank proposed a thought experiment that has stuck with me over the years. Suppose, Frank suggested, that you could be born into the society of your choice. The catch is that you'll be assigned an identity at random. You can't choose to be a medieval knight even if armor turns you on. If you select 13th-century France, you'll have a greater chance of being a female serf. You can't kn...

  It's called philosophical anthropology , the effort to construct a unified description of human nature, and I've already wrestled with Max Scheler's scheme. One of Scheler's traditional but counter-intuitive elements (given modern connotations of the word soul ) is his using the term ( Seele  in German) for the life-sustaining impulse in anima ls, an instinctual core that is one of three tiers of normal human experience. But his scheme omits a fourth tier that is the goal of mystics. I'll describe the four tiers from the bottom up. Body. This is about my experience of being flesh, not about the body seen by others or weighed by a bathroom scale. It's about everything that would be missing from my awareness if I were a brain in a vat or a spirit in a cloud. It includes the five senses and more, a range of inputs including pain, tension, flushing, itching, bloating, friction, warmth, cold, movement, depression, anger, fear, and elation--all facts of the flesh...

  The 2020 surge in suicides was overshadowed by Covid-19, millions of pandemic deaths masking the thousands who killed themselves for no apparent reason. The trend has been blamed on pandemic isolation, but I propose another cause. Last summer, when travel was restricted and friends were using Zoom to reconnect, I had the good fortune to record a June 28 meeting. Good because otherwise the only evidence would be my memory. Below is an exact account of that meeting. . . . . . Brad was in his ad hoc office, an Austin coffee shop that stayed open in the height of the pandemic. I was home as usual, quarantined by the Virginia governor and my own choice. Unlike Brad, I didn't feel immortal. Laura was just back from Trader Joe's in Nashville, Zooming from her studio. At sixteen minutes into the chat, Brad smiled through a silence and changed the subject. "I should tell y'all I've written a book. It was easiest and hardest thing I've ever done. I've been writ...

           It was about 2000, that I first noticed the triad body-mind-spirit in a feature story in the Bowling Green Daily News. A man had kicked bad habits. Now he was "taking care" of his "body, mind, and spirit." This caught my attention because it seemed to be presented as common-sense language, but I didn't get it. Isn't spirit a function of mind ? Doesn't mind include all cognitive activity? Of course, some idioms do imply a narrower sense, like reading to improve the mind .  If body-mind-spirit meant something obvious to the reporter and his subject, my best guess was that "taking care of" them is something like (1) exercising and eating right, (2) reading and learning, and (3) worshipping and praying. I envisioned body, mind, and spirit as places where people are variously nurtured, centered on (but not limited to) gym, library, and church. This may indeed be many people's understanding, but, searching the Internet, I found ...