A question and request for Sam Harris

Dear Sam Harris,

I write to you with a question, a request and an explanation of an intellectual position and philospohical stance which is difficult to explain. Please bear with me as I attempt to express this matter that I believe has profound implications.

I write to you because I admire your intellectual rigor and hope that this will provide intellectually nourishing food for thought.

The request is that you contemplate spirituality and other matters within the framework of developmental psychology and contribute to the process of differentiating between spirituality and religion. The distinction

I do not know if you are familiar with the works of Ken Wilber, Spiral Dynamics and the likes, but the basics provide a context. While I disagree with many of the details, applications and conclusions of the authorities in these matters, I find the general theory to have merit worth consideration and hope to save the baby from being tossed with the bathwater.

I agree with your position in The Problem With Atheism and would like to suggest that spiritual, but not religious can be an improved framing that may serve us well in teasing out the confusing knot of conflated ideas regarding these matters. Rather than framing religious beliefs as wrong or misguided (although they are often both), it may be more fruitful to position them as immature.

The use of this term is new and still needs significant refinement. While there may be a significant portion of people that identify as SBNR who are relatively intellectually immature, there are others who have more sophisticated and nuanced perspectives. It is my contention that those in the later category can help to shine the light of wisdom and clarity in these otherwise muddied philosophical waters.

In the developmental scheme, rejection of the mythic can only happen after exposure to the mythic. One cannot reject religion in the absence of religion. While Ken Wilber may have realized and described the Pre/Trans Fallacy, he still seems to be missing something significant. Maybe this guy got it right or at least better. It may be true of Steve Taylor too, but geez....so many words...

If there is a mature spirituality that recognizes religion as a relatively narrow and primitive aspect of its greater being, then perhaps religious conflict will become as unnecessary for humanity as an appendix...wouldn't that be nice?

The Delusion of the Middle

A community of peers is necessary to promote understanding and growth within a given field. Peer review is essential to the progress of continued growth whether it is a hard science or soft science.

The softer sciences of politics, philosophy and psychology are now in a state of retarded development due to a delusion of the middle, aperspectival madness and a lack of proper developmental understanding.

As an example of the delusion of the middle is Richard Dawkin's refusal to verify the reality of climate change/global warming when he appeared on Up with Chris Hayes. As a trained scientist, Dawkins should have adequate understanding of the science that is requisite for an informed opinion on the matter of climate change. Greenhouse gases trap energy and humans are creating significant greenhouse gas emissions. The science is simple enough, so why would Dawkins fail to acknowledge such basic scientific consensus? The only reasonable answer is a delusion of the middle which is a misguided intellectual conceit that truth can only be found in the middle of ideological camps. It seems strange that a man with such outspoken atheistic convictions succombs to such folly, but that serves as an example of how pervasive and subtle the delusion of the middle is. Sam Harris argues this same point in his short essay, The Fireplace Delusion.

The delusion is pervasive and harmful to the intellectual growth of culture in similiar manner that religion affects political policy. Congratulations are in order for Stanley Fish for his perception and contribution regarding this subject. A noble but misguided labor to prove impartiality and to rise above the fray is how the high ground is compromised and disconence is created.

Let us form a community of peers to rescue one another from this moral hazard that prevents us from speaking truth and bearing the banner of modern enlightenment. Let us keep rational skepticism and the higher ground.

As a side note: the Bottom Line reminds us to look at corruption, state by state...and let us, or let me review the problem with Atheism...

UP to GPS

I love a Sunday with the talking heads and the internet. I get more information in a couple of hours than our grandparents got....well..

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a guest on GPS with Fareed Zecharia so then I find he delivered a talk on TED about Iran's future...he teaches at NYU and has a site, but doesn't really self promote so it's hard to find info from the man.

In the What in the World section Fareed focuses on India and how they play for neutrality, "narrowly pursuing their self interest"...hmmm....they are a market...

So here's the clergy project. Perhaps I/we could petition them to upgrade to spiritual or SBNR and to frame religion, athiesm and spirituality in developmental terms. Have they fallen from grace or are they falling into grace? We are atheism...

The focus has shifted to The World Bank with James Wolfenson on GPS. What's up with the wolves at the helm of global finances? Remember the fall of the big bad wolf?

Reid Hoffman says we should have more lunches with more innovative people....how's that for a reminder to promote the development of a social networking site that charges nominal fee and donates all the proceeds to charities. Dude is a VP of Pay Pal and helped start Linked In. He says we have to invest in the future because it changes ever faster...talking about his book....a work in progress seems to be his motto..he also asks what should I be asking/thinking/doing...there it is, sort of ....
relationships rule the world....perhaps I should mention the creation of not-for-profit restaurant/bar/bistros..
Paper Promises is the reccomended book of the week...whi
ch you can listen about thanks to NPR and watch a video about thanks to Reuters and....is this a different NPR production? It isn't really about the future of capitalism...

To finish things off I have to note that ABC's This Week has Michele Bachmann in a special one-on -on interview with host George. Really? people really still take that nutcake seriously? Looks like nothing but propagandist infotainment to me. but hey, it reminds me to search out the Fox crap about
The Language of the Left...I'll have to discect that later...but from what I've seen, they compare one man, Bill Mahaer, to ALEC and a whole bunch of legislature around the country...ridiculous...

So here's some sanity, sad, but there is global warming... 

deep water

It looks like we could all be in really deep water. This spring brought record temperatures which ought to alarm humanity into some sane action, but it won't. The deep cold waters flowing around Antarctica are vanishing.  I just hope the man starts getting mean next year.

We have a Crisis of Civilization and you can view the full feature here, but you still won't get the full picture. Jerremy Rifkin thinks we humans may soon become extinct with peak oil per capita...the video is nearly two hours long and may be a painful slap in the face so I hope I can find the empathy that this lecture is titled. Ah, it's about twenty minutes into it and really kicks in to the theme at 24 min. It must be a new book....and at 27 min we see that there is no empathy in heaven....well, he's admitted to being wrong before....

This fits in well with the search for socio- pathology I was looking for earlier. It was inspired by Mitt's complete lack of empathy resulting in the dogs ride on top of the car. The question is, how many of our "leaders" are pathological?

Min 33 brings us religion into the lecture and I'm searching for the science of evil and I'm being pointed to the pathocrats of pathocracy. That old chinese curse at work again...and there it is, like an old friend, ponerology....now we're getting somewhere and I don't think that it's connecting the dots that's making sense of it all
at least I found a clueless philosophy forum...
the daily beast refers to them as a superclass
Myth to theo to ideo to psycho to biosphere consciousness....shaming cultures to guilt cultures?..min 38...40-41 goes into communication technology...distributive, collaborative, open sourced...
We're getting pillars of a new civilization..min 53...great stuff...distributive capitalism...that's what we've been looking for, not post-capitalist...grid IT...one hour in we get the magic of mirrors...does and can technology change consciousness quickly? okay, the picture of the earth from Apollo seemed to change things...out of body experiences, huh? 1:03...

if there was ever an example of an integral consciousness that Ken Wilber and crew tried to point to, it seems to be Rifkin....I miss the old bunch...could the reluminatti bring us back together again.

Biophillia...we're loosing the awesome connection like...assimilation...1:11..check it out...it's the mystery of the freakin universe. We should all be awestruck. It's a sign of the times so let's find the project and give it some love and power talked about 1:13-14 and becomes part two

We need to pay attention because there are too many In Sheeps Clothing and the may be The Sociopath Nextdoor that you're not aware of...perhaps it is just A Myth of Sanity that reminds me that there's a term for being sane in an insane world...yeah, I can't find it now, but there's a whole new world to explore...

and one more reminder to go back and study pathocracy..http://www.hermes-press.com/pathocracy_index.htm

The Hidden Brain

I listened to an NPR interview with the author of The Hidden Brain and found the conclusion to be, well, incorrect. Vedantam fails to make any distinctions between levels of development and lumps everyone together. That little bit seems to have been cut out of the online excerpt.  Sure there may be some cultural differences, but those cultural factors are only part of the story and to pretend that is the difference is as silly as arguing that all behavior is the result of nature or nurture.

The reviews at Amazon are worth the read, the customer reviews in particular.

Developmentalism seems to be the hidden factor. It's why we need a new secret society, a reluminatti, if you will.
If you doubt the need for a progressive secret society, just look at the damage done by those on the right. Yes, much of the damage has been overt, but much has been secretted. It took some time before the Koch brothers were exposed, before ALEC was exposed and I'm waiting for Energy Tomarrow dot org to be exposed. Why does a front group for one of the most profitable industries ever, get nonprofit status?

Meanwhile we have Oils Endless Bid, The Tyranny of Oil and Robert Reich telling us what's really going on.

If the walls could talk, a history of homes looks like a fun book, one my father would like...there's an NPR interview with the author. NPR by the way has an increasing audience. That's some good news.

The author of A world of progress blogspot was on Local Edge radio so now I'm trying to find it, but I'm not sure where it is. This seems outdated and here's the link to the progressive girl.....she's from asheville....then there's this....and on a side note check out the obsolete world with the pretty art.

Good enough for now? It'll have to be

pathos - edit 3-25

  So, how many people are pathological, sociologically or pathologically? eHow estimates 3-5% and has related articles. Senendip has an article that actually has references, cool.

While Senator Inhofe claims that God told him climate change as a great hoax, others are taking a more responsible and moral stance on the issue. I'm not sure what The Great Warming.com is all about, but I will read more.
Contrary to that is Hansen's TED talk which is a must watch. The comments below are worth reading too.
It always brings me back to the great dumb mass. The problem is with 35-40 % of the population who are idiots and another 20%+ who are deluded into believing in some mythical middle.

Don't forget about Global Lessons: The GPS Roadmap for saving Healthcare narrated by Fareed

What would pathos be without ponerology? Here is the site for author Lobaczewski, ponerology.orghttp://ponerology.com/ is about political ponerology. Strange...it's a dot com and the link is weird and here is a companion site, a blog if you'd like more.

Freethinkers can go to NoBeliefs.comhttp://nobeliefs.com/ and find good links to issues of our days. Chris Hayes hosts UP and has a bunch of athiests on his show including; Robin Wright author of The Evolution of God, Susan Jacoby author of Freethinkers and it looks like Richard Dawkins will be on.

Looks like my lucky day finding The Evolution of Morality...and Dawkins has a new book that I sure would like to read...the subtitle says it all...how do we know what is really true. The Magic of Reality...40% of people think the world is 4,000 years old and Dawkins calls them ignorant, good man.
Neuroarcheology, ain't that cute? We also have the evolution list to use.

All of the brainiacs on UP w/ Chris Hayes are debating weather it is appropriate or helpful or etc. to confront religious people who are in politics, but none of them frame the matter in the most appropriate manner - as a lower stage of development - primitive and childish...yet it is part of human nature to be superstitious and prone to magical thinking....it just gets more and more subtle, spiritual evolution..?...

Steven Pinker ( who has writtem lots of cool looking books) was/is one of the guests on UP and Bruce Levine was the guy on NPR.