The Frog

Brace yourselves, everybody, this one's gonna be random.

So if you have a frog and drop him in really cold water, he immediately goes "OI WOT" and jumps immediately back out, as he finds the freezing water to be most disagreeable. Replace the cold water with some near boiling, and he will issue the same proclamation and leap out almost instantly. In either of these extreme situations, the frog is instinctively aware that, if he remains, the water will kill him.

People are like this too; we have a highly-evolved intuitive sense for danger. That's the human advantage in evolution, and the key to why our seemingly physically underwhelming species has lasted so long. We may not outrun the lion, but we're aware of the signs that lions are near, and to a certain extent we have an extra, inexplicable sense for danger. To call it the sixth sense is inaccurate (we have far more than five senses), but the term serves to describe the phenomenon. I don't need to give you examples of this because everyone has experienced the sensation; nothing is outwardly wrong, but you just get a feeling.

In this way, humans share an animal's sense for painful situations, as well as an anticipatory ability to avoid them based on their precursory signs. That's fine. Consider, however, a different scenario.

If you drop the same intrepid little amphibian into a pleasantly warm pot of water, he won't react to it at all, and think something like "ah yiss, dis is niiiiice." That's his natural temperature, after all, and even we mighty humans can relate to the enjoyment of mucking about in warm water. So, he (and we) will swim around aimlessly and enjoy the experience.

Here's the problem: what if you turn the temperature up? Not a lot all at once, mind, but incrementally, a little at a time.

This is a strange paradox. Once the frog gets used to the starting temperature of the water, a little additional heat just feels like the pleasant warmth from earlier. He adjusts again, more heat feels nice again. This can continue for a while, until the temperature gets to the point of fatality, at which point the frog will again think "ahh, pleasant warmth" and, as they say, croak, having never realized how hot it was getting.

"What a foolhardy amphibian, to not notice he's being boiled!" we mighty humans proclaim. "I would surely get out of the water."

Well, that's the issue, isn't it? We humans are even more adaptable than frogs as far as temperature is concerned, having our own internal mechanisms to adjust our bodily function rather than being totally subject to the whim of the environment as cold-blooded creatures are.

Getting used to a temperature is easy, and you can motor along through life at basically any temperature. Spikes in temperature (dangerous situations) are obvious and can be managed; we're smart, generally, and we have fair bit of knowledge about how to not die. Consider, however, the frog who never notices the temperature slowly rising around him because he's so acclimated to it. When you suddenly feel something boiling up inside you and the temperature is spiking, stop and ask yourself:

"What temperature have I been at?"

TL;DR Being used to something =/= it being a healthy state.

P.S. I came to this realization after burning myself in the shower. Just in case someone thought I was being insightful or something :P

Fundamentalism vs. Fanaticism

It's time for another Semantic Distinctions that Irritate Me for No Reason At All post!

In these last few years we've heard the word "fundamentalist" thrown around in the news a lot, especially (let's be real) with regard to Islam and Muslims. It was an understandable reaction in 2001, and I don't think I need to remind anybody why. Religious extremism was, and is, a very scary thing, to say the least.

At this point, I think it's important to delineate the difference between a fundamentalist and a fanatic. Firstly, "fundamentalism" as a word was originally coined to refer to a specific set of Christian doctrine, specifically in opposition to so-called Modernist Theology. The differences between those two aren't the topic of this post (or something I especially care about, to put it crassly), but there's the word origin. Fundamentalism, in its very least refined form, could be put as "sticking to the basics." It pertains to a political movement as well, also known as being "conservative" (although God knows that word gets a bad rap now too). "Fundamental," the root word, refers to something "forming a necessary base or core; of central importance."

As an interesting side note, if the word was stripped of its connotations, I could be labeled a fundamentalist Christian. It's that part about believing in things "of central importance;" the details of doctrine are essentially unimportant when measured up against underlying core concepts. That, unfortunately, is not what the word refers to, and is also off topic. I return.

The word "fundamentalist," deprived of its Christian context, structurally goes like this: strict adherence to the written tenets of a religion. You could think of it as similar to what Constitutional strict constructionists believe, modified for religion; use what is written and do not modify it, essentially. That segues with comical slickness into my next point.

The people responsible for the World Trade Center attacks were not fundamentalists. If I was being properly fiery, I might even say they weren't genuine Muslims at all, drinking the warping poison of al-Qaeda as they were. A "fundamentalist" Muslim, reading the Qur'an through the lens of a strict interpretation, could never have conceived of anything like the motives behind the attacks, let alone actually carrying the bloody things out.

I'm going to digress briefly to give you some quick facts about Islam and simultaneously explain why the media have got it completely bass-ackwards, as they say. First of all, Allah and God are the same entity. I saw a news report attempting to explain "Allah vs. God" to the American public, and I just about gave up completely. Yes, one of these names is used by a religion that originated in the Middle East, and the other is used in a religion that originated in... oh.

The errata: Moses is mentioned more than any other person in the Qur'an. Mary is mentioned more times in the Qur'an than in the New Testament. Other little details in the Qur'an include lots of people like John the Baptist, Solomon, David, Noah, Adam, and Job, and so on ad infinitum. The one I want to bring to your attention is a minor character named Jesus.

That's right, everybody; Jesus is mentioned as an ordained prophet in the Qur'an. So no, I don't think it's valid to try and explain all the ways in which Islam and Christianity are different or how one is the enemy.

This, obviously, begs the question: if they weren't fundamentalist Muslims, what were they?

Fanatics. We didn't kill a Muslim when the S.E.A.L.s (er, excuse me, DEVGRU) executed bin Laden; we killed a fanatic. And fanatics everywhere, no matter the color of their skin, or the beliefs they claim to represent, or where they were born, or how they act out their fanaticism, are the same.

TL;DR "Islamist" is not a word. I could keep elaborating, but you're smart and you undoubtedly caught on.

East vs. West Fight Night II

I did a thing about the differences between Japan (that is, anime) and the United States (that is, poorly-executed action movies) a while ago, and I've been thinking a lot more about the differences between the "East" and the "West" recently. I've already talked about our differing perceptions of the snake in another post too.

I think it's fair to say that East and West have been pretty different right from the get-go. Here's where the broad brush comes out; I'm grossly over-generalizing, but stick with me. Western society tends to focus on individualism and devotes a lot of attention to those who deviate, or strike out against convention to be their own person. Eastern societies, on the other hand, often have a greater emphasis on social duty, to the family on the small scale and to the overall community at the larger scales.

Religions from the two regions are superficially very different as well. Western religions (those that survive, anyway) are generally monotheistic. Eastern religions tend to be polytheistic (at the surface level; more on this later). Western religion also generally holds humanity to be fallen and morally corrupt in some way, casting humanity as undergoing a struggle to overcome its wicked nature and reunite with divinity. Eastern traditions also hold that humanity has its flaws to overcome, but tend to emphasize a much more positive view of nature, both human nature and nature in general.

The differences continue endlessly, but that's a good baseplate for what I want to talk about: the underlying reason all these cultures sometimes seem incompatible across the imaginary East-West "line."

The main division is one, simply, of world view. I mentioned that the two regions' religions were respectively mono- and polytheistic, and I may have been a little disingenuous; that isn't actually the problem. Many of the superficially "polytheistic" religions are merely paying homage to many avatars and aspects of one essential divine entity, when you consider them more deeply. So if that's not it, what is?

My opinion, anyway, is that the fundamental difference is how the divine entity is positioned in our mind, as opposed to an issue of its single or multiple nature. Western religions as a whole hold the divine being to be a sort of great originating point, a single Fact that was, and from which all other things and energies emanate. Take, for example, the Jewish title Ehyeh, sometimes translated as "I AM," or Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, confusingly "I am to continue to be" (essentially equivalent to the Christian "was, is, and is to come"). Christianity speaks extensively of God the Creator, the single primary entity that always has been and looked out into nothing to create everything.

The East has a different and somewhat more complicated view of the whole matter. All the gods of Hinduism, for example, are manifestations or representations of an ongoing and consistent energy flowing through all things. Well, wait, isn't that the same as in the West? Ah, tricky. No, the East has gods that represent aspects of an all-powerful energy, and the West generally has one single deity that is the energy's source.

So, put shortly: the West thinks God is the starting point from which all other things proceed, and the East thinks God is also present in the procession of things. In the West, God is the source of all energy, and in the East God is closer to being the energy itself.

This is a post mostly intended to a) express my opinion regardin the starting point of the fundamental differences between the East and West and b) inform the reader. I know I don't propose any solutions here, but I thought this would be something useful to think about while understanding various cultures and how they interact.

Also, to be clear: difference does not imply a hierarchy. No, I do not think Western religions are evil because of the Crusades, nor do I think India is full of heathens praying to false idols, or whatever. It's impossible, in my opinion, to study religions and come up with many really negative thoughts, if you're doing it right.

The History of Creativity

Creativity is something people usually associate with painting a picture or writing a story or something like that, but I think its broader definition is important to remember. "Creativity," says the almighty Wikipedia, "is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is created." "Something new" is a seemingly mundane phrase that I think has much more meaning than we give it credit for; what it really means is "there is now something where before there was no such thing."

Creativity isn't strictly human, either, though we seem to be the only beings truly capable of relating to it and performing it. For instance, at the very beginning of things, all the universe existed in a hyper-concentrated blob, wherein temperatures must have been so high that we can't accurately apply our modern rules of physics to it. At some point, the blob underwent a cataclysm of indescribably huge proportions, resulting in the blob un-blobbing. As it expanded, the blob also cooled.

At one point during the Great Un-Blobbing, atoms formed. It's easy to read that sentence very casually, "oh, atoms, those things that are really small and make up stuff," but I want to stress exactly how remarkable that event actually was. In our studies, we've found atoms to be the essential building blocks of us and everything around us, and they've existed for huge amounts of time, so a human perspective can very easily turn "an unthinkably long time" into "forever." But think about it: at this point in the Big Bang, there weren't any atoms, and then all of a sudden there were.

Skip forward an unthinkably long time, and we have stars forming out of those atoms through gravitational runaway. At this point, pretty much everything is hydrogen, and if it isn't hydrogen it's helium resulting from hydrogen being fused. Everything's cooking along nicely, until suddenly, oh no! Some stars run out of hydrogen to fuse. Stars rely partially on the energy of fusion to hold their structure, and when they run out of fuel they start to collapse.

This has never happened before either; stars have been for a long time, but never has there been a collapsing star. Again, all creation was totally uncertain as to what would happen when these crumbling suns passed their breaking point. What knew? It might have been the end of everything; there was no precedent for this solar tomfoolery.

But it wasn't the end of everything. The endgame of any star can result in a display of godlike destructive power, but out of this cataclysm came something new. Fusion of new elements happened. Where there had previously been hydrogen and its helium cousins, suddenly carbon and other elements were splattered out into the cosmos. Now this was interesting.

So, we skip another indescribably long and important period of time, and our little planet has collapsed together from swirling dust and gravel. Theia has come by and nearly destroyed it, ultimately forming the moon-Earth complex. The surface of the planet resembles how most people today would draw hell; meteors slam down into the surface with unpleasant regularity, the air is mostly ammonia, methane, and carbon dioxide, the surface is still so hot as to be liquid in many places, and so on. It's called the Hadean Eon, to give you an idea.

Let me be clear: nothing is alive on this version of Earth. Nothing swims in the hot baths of acid, nothing crawls over the burning rocks. Nothing flies. Hell, there's barely enough of an atmosphere for flight to even theoretically work. "Inhospitable" isn't the word.

And yet, suddenly, at some point, something was. We still struggle to figure out when, and how, and what exactly, but something happened. A crude sort of membrane developed, the first example of something with an inside and outside, and in that little chamber tiny molecules collided to form bigger molecules and then suddenly it lived.

We'll ignore how breathtaking that is in the interest of speeding along as we follow our brave little post-Hadean hero. It, and its friends, soon discovered that the only way to continue being was to drink in the energy of the sun and use it to assemble other compounds, so they invented photosynthesis. This was great. Life was actually doing pretty well as the Earth began to relax and hell subsided. Great colonies of these old bacteria spread all over, replicating freely.

They, unfortunately, had made a crippling oversight in their development; they made oxygen through photosynthesis, and there was only so much oxygen the earth's iron and oceans could absorb. When the oxygen level in the atmosphere passed that point, it was discovered that oxygen is poisonous to the things that were making it.

Uh. Damn!

So, yet another change was necessary. Through yet another incredibly complex, time-consuming, poorly-understood process, the tiny organisms learned to live in groups and specialize, ultimately forming single larger masses that we currently know as eukaryotes, or, with a little extrapolation, us.

At all these junctures, something arose, or happened, or was invented that had never been so before. These were not modifications of things, mind you, but entirely new things arising out of nothingness, at times when the universe could only be personified as shuffling its feet in uncertainty.

So the point I'm getting to is this: when you're uncertain in life, it's pretty normal. It was 14 billion years of uncertainty that created you, after all. Uncertainty is our natural state. The best things, the most lasting things, always arise out of turbulence of some kind, whether that means the boiling surface of the young Earth or the whirling, distracted realm of your mind.

Don't worry about being uncertain. It's a stressful sensation in itself, obviously, but what I mean is don't worry over the fact that you're worrying. "But I don't have all the data!" Nothing, and no one, ever has. Creativity is just the act of applying energy to uncertainty until something amazing is created.

TL;DR You are the latest in iterations beyond counting of uncertain things. There are infinitely varied and equally uncertain futures available to you, and all of them are the right one.

Restlessness

I hear lots of people (myself really included) complain of a feeling of restlessness or a sense of non-direction. They do many things, from class to games to drugs to advocacy, but nothing seems to quite put us at ease, and it's annoying in the extreme.

This is the sort of uneasiness targeted by professionally-crafted advertisements, whether we openly acknowledge that or not. A lot of advertisements, boiled down and deprived of all their bright colors, come down to "Feeling unsatisfied? This is what you are missing, and I will sell it to you, for money!" Consumerism and some materialist philosophy is actuated on this principle; the uneasiness I feel is because I perceive the things I have as insufficient, and wish to acquire more things, of one form or another.

Only humans (as far as we're aware) experience this sensation, the strange tension that comes when we're not tense. Every other animal fights to survive and looks for the basics of life (food, shelter, and so on), but we have these pretty well in hand and aren't satisfied. Having figured out how to systematically grow and ranch our food and become a globally dominant species, effectively stabilizing and guaranteeing our ability to fulfill the basic drives of life (for now), we still find ourselves not content.

So what's wrong with us, then? Are we just forever doomed to wander out our short existence, sitting on a hollow throne as we master the earth and find it wanting? Is something just fundamentally and totally inaccessible to us? Do we feel the echo of humanity's fall from grace, of our separation from divinity as many other traditions hold it?

No, sir or madame, this restlessness is no curse to blight the walkers of the earth. This, rather, is the evidence of humanity's single greatest gift. What is it, this buzzing that stirs in all our minds, the voice that nags you when you sit down exhausted after an odious task, demanding you do something else? Why do you wake up at God-awful hours of the night and morning, wondering why exactly a burrito is neither the tortilla nor the things inside, but some greater combination of the two?

The answer is simple. That restlessness is creativity.

People are constantly uncertain about the future, and it causes us a lot of stress. That's obviously not the best thing, but I think there's a silver lining to how "always in motion the future is" with the dark side's clouds and all. The thing about it is that creativity loves ambiguity. Can you imagine how dull your life would be if you were simply handed a script at the beginning and told "welp, here's what we're all doing, go for it?"

No, we feel this strange uneasiness and uncertainty for a reason. We humans, in "natural" terms, are really nothing special. There's no one thing in nature we're good at; we don't run especially quickly, we're not insanely strong, we can't breathe water, nothing. And yet we survived to the present day by creating our way out of whatever mess we found ourselves in. Natural selection acted on our species in a strange way. Given nothing else to work with, evolution simply emphasized our ability to reason and innovate in order to compensate for our physical shortcomings.

Us, and only us, out of all the myriad species of life, countless in their legions and endless in their diversity. Only we see a door and wonder abstractly where the key is, who has it, how they got it.

If ever you're tense without knowing why, consider the possibility that your fundamental essence wants you to be creating something, and I don't mean making a macaroni wreath or anything physical like that. It's totally possible to have a creative experience without doing anything. Just sitting and mentally wandering as you listen to music or the sounds outside can be extremely creative.

We're set up to do this sort of thing, and to not do it goes against our nature. That's why I'm always so concerned when schools start dismissing their art programs or their music departments, and when people write off humanities majors as easy or too "ethereal" or whatever. It's not that more quantitative fields inherently stifle creativity so much as our approach to them does, but that's another point.

There's a spark burning constantly in the back of all our minds, telling us to go and solve that math problem, or showing us a pretty cloudscape in our minds, or figuring out how a type of food is made, or whatever. It's annoying, to be totally honest; it never goes out, and it certainly isn't easy to control (imagine all the times you've suddenly become convinced your desk decidedly needs cleaning when you have a test the next morning). This little spark is a mercurial and fickle fairy, and causes us a great deal of tension by not always being on our side or not being accessible on command, but it's the most beautiful part of every single person.

I think that's what the Bible meant when it said we were made in God's image, not this silly material matter of iconography. We have hands, and eyes, and brains. Other animals can use tools and solve puzzles, but we can make things, inspired by a force we have no words to describe. I think it's easy to forget how wondrous and, yes, divine that power is, the drive and splendor of that little divine fire in your soul.

I'm getting distracted and lyrical, so let me just leave you with an awesome quote. The anthropologist A.L. Kroeber said that the best things can happen at "the highest degree of tension that can be creatively borne," and I think that's really awesome to consider. So, there's that.

TL;DR You're not bored because there's anything wrong with you.

P.S. Imma do a history of creativity tomorrow or the next day, depending on many things. Come back! It'll be fun, and there will be scones.

Value

It's a Hearthstone concept, and it's applicable to real life! Isn't that awful?!

Hearthstone is a digital representation of one of THOSE card games, the ones that have cards with lots of text and numbers and are only ever played by the three people at your local game store. In this game and games like it, each card has a different effect or set of effects, in addition to a cost associated with it. As you might assume in a game with standardized card text like this, it stands to reason that cards will fit into categories, and will inevitably draw comparisons. As such, certain cards will simply be categorically better than others, and figuring out the best cards is actually a major part of the game.

This is a concept called value. Some cards are extremely effective for their cost, some require a massive investment of resources to get rid of, and so on. I won't go into actual game mechanics (because that's not the point for this post), but the essential idea is that if one of your cards takes two of your opponent's, it was valuable, and so on. Hearthstone's a complicated card game, but boiled down, as long as your pluses ad up to a greater number than your minuses, you're on track to win.

The same principle can be applied to a lot of things in real life. You're a person, with all the potential and limits that implies. You have a significant (but finite) amount of resources available to you inherently, and it's up to you to decide how they're going to be distributed.

Consider the concept of Hearthstone's trading, modified to fit real life. Both my opponent and I have a set of cards, none of which are known to the other player. My opponent plays a card, and I have to make an assessment about what I want to do; do I use one of my own cards to eliminate it, effectively resetting the board? If so, which? Do I let it persist and draw more cards to have more options later, taking the risk of it becoming part of a combination?

The whole idea of this is, basically: how bad is the situation? That established, how much of my hand do I want to invest in order to resolve it? Also, which solution do I want to use?

For real life, I think it would be a gross understatement to say the math is a little more complex than a "do I want to use my whole turn to kill that" sort of scenario. For one thing, your hand is not composed of clearly labeled cards, and your own resources might be substantially greater or lesser than you initially think. Also, you don't usually have a single opponent, and sometimes it seems like everything is your opponent. The principle, however, is valid. Take careful stock of your resources at any given juncture and consciously decide how you want to allocate them.

Say, for instance, you're a member of a club that's having an event on Saturday. You also have a midterm on Monday, and all the other usual necessaries of life in addition to these two. Now, if you're like me, you go promptly to mental pieces thinking about everything at once and manage to do full justice to absolutely nothing in your scatter-plot. Effectively, I focus on everything at once and wind up focusing on nothing at all.

A healthier response, in my opinion, is the exact reverse. Focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else. It doesn't even matter which one, just pick something off the list of things and do it. Do nothing else during this time. Food in the microwave? It's not going anywhere, certainly not after you've cooked it. Boys blowin' up yo phone? Don't worry, they'll still be walking around in the same daze in ten minutes. Whichever thing you choose to do, do only that. Listening to music? Rock out for a while. Studying? Permit no other thoughts. Cleaning your desk? Cleanse it with fire.

The short version goes like this: pick a single opponent, observe its play, and play one of your cards in response. Go turn by turn until it's done. With a little practice at this, I think you'll discover the wonderful arithmetic of everyday life. Taken out of their overwhelming number and dealt with fully and singly, each problem is never as bad as it was with all its friends. That's the thing about life trying to swamp you with cards to deal with; all the opponents have to try and overwhelm you with numbers, because one-on-one your cards are incredibly overpowered.

TL;DR Your hand rocks; just take situations one at a time and try to go plus in each one.

Binaries

Binaries are a common thing, and nearly everyone hears about them at least once nearly every day. They're usually not called binaries, but they exist. The "he" vs. "she" binary is a familiar one, as is "good" vs. "bad." A lot of parables and mythologies are heavily binary in structure as well, a familiar example being heaven vs. hell. Sun and Moon are often set as opposites as well. You get the idea.

For a long time in human history, nobody really thought of this universal duality from a detached standpoint. "Us" vs. "them" wasn't a construct of any particular cultural context, it was simply a fact of existence. You had your loved ones, and then there was everyone outside that group, and that was that. You didn't think of it as a psychoexistential complex of negative value, because you wouldn't a) have the word "psychoexistential" yet or b) care.

In more recent times, having moved into (arguably) a broader awareness of the world and of each other, people have also taken a step back to observe the things created by our cultures without our awareness. There are endless volumes of articles and entire books on this, but I'll give you a synopsis: humans think in terms of absolute binary duality.

With awareness of this, many people are involved in efforts to solve the issues inherent in a binary system of thought. The field of ethnicity is a prime example. For many centuries race was a starkly binary issue; you were either white, or you were from a group white people were stepping you in some way. Colonialism, in my opinion, represents the modern symptom of a truly ancient human ailment, our inability to easily think in more than two terms. The relationship of master to servant is binary, as is that of any leader to his/her subjects.

Another hotly-contended example of recent times is the gender binary. Debates rage about gender identity, what constitutes a gender, how many genders there are, and so on. I won't delve into it; there is much anger. One thing I do find very interesting, though, is the concept of a "non-binary transgender" person. This type of person identifies with neither gender, and so are said to be non-binary, which might seem to break down our ordinary binary way of thinking (as there are now options outside the two-term mental diagram). I think it should be noted, however, that these individuals simply occupy a binary different from that of the "normal;" where the normative, purely biological binary is man and woman, a "non-binary" transgender person is simply positioned as the second part of a binary where the first term is that original binary itself.

That all got rather tangled, and I could continue to tangle it further, but the (belabored) point is this: humans think in binaries. Man and woman, day and night, right and wrong, earth and sky, left and right, whatever, we think in twos. In a way, evolution and biology contribute to this. We are bilaterally symmetrical creatures, with a left and a right half, and left and right sections to our brain, so two is one of the most primal and accessible numbers to us.

It makes sense, then, that we try to label the transcendent in terms of a binary. In nearly every doctrine, the benevolent deity is opposed by some malefic agent. In Christianity, God and the legions of angels are opposed by his fallen angel Lucifer and his fellow traitors. Zoroastrianism, I think, is the best example of the binary transcendent. In this faith Ahura Mazda, the "Wise Lord," is constantly at odds with Ahriman, the "Destructive Principle." Some traditions have the binary as our transcendent soul against our crude body. Obviously, there are many more examples and they are all more complex than this "greatest hits" approach can do justice to, but the point is made that we ascribe the binary nature of our own thought to the divine.

I'm pretty sure we're wrong.

The problem I have is that binaries are, for the most part, an essentially human construct, a product of the way we think and experience. I mentioned a "psychoexistential complex of negative value"above, and what I mean is this: the way each of us defines his/her self is as not all these other things. Language works the same way. The word for tree refers to a tree; more specifically, it does not refer to all the things that are not a tree.

Binaries are a thought pattern, and sometimes a physical reality. The issue is that I don't believe the divine operates on human terms like these. It doesn't work on any terms, really, because terms are things we tiny mortals create and comprehend. Divinity as I hold it wasn't created, and it defies any attempt we might make to comprehend it. It's us trying to put something incomprehensible and indescribable into some form we can work with, not the thing itself. I really doubt there was any such thing as a literal "War in Heaven;" war is something we do, and beings of transcendent, omnipotent power would have no need to fight one in any way we'd understand. The War that Christians believe in is a human metaphor describing the banishment of Satan and friends from heaven for their (variously interpreted) crimes.

It is, however, purely a human metaphor, because the reality of the divine is this: God, with a little or a big G, and whatever it opposes, whether it's Satan or Ahriman or the titans, are not at all separate. We separate and name things because we are human, and we categorize in order to survive. As far as the divine itself goes, however, all things are merely... aspects of the same, I suppose I would say.

TL;DR We're thinking in two, and we've forgotten everything is really one.

Light

Light is a funny thing in our universe, and I think it represents a funny thing pertaining to our universe as well.

Light is funny in the sense that it is a wave and a particle. Not in the sense that it behaves like both a wave and a particle, mind you; it exists in these two normally mutually exclusive states at exactly the same time. The nature of light as we perceive it depends entirely on how we detect it, with some instrumentation showing that light is a particle and other instruments showing it as a wave.

It could be said, then, that light is either inherently dualistic in nature, or has no nature at all until we apply one to it.

Clearly, this post is now about religion and the nature of the divine!

Light, in my estimation, is a very good way to try and grapple with the issue of the transcendent. It could be said that light is the closest thing in the material universe to transcendent matter. What I mean by this is that light, as much as we try to group and explain everything scientifically, light appears to inhabit a category by itself.

As far as we're aware, light is alone in the universe. Nothing, or nothing we're yet able to observe, moves as quickly as light does. Light (and some other very small things) progresses through spacetime as we do and yet experiences no effect of aging as we would understand it. Light is everywhere and nowhere to our ordinary perception; we experience a vibrant world filled with shape and color, but we have no sensation of receiving the light responsible. Small wonder there are cultures that worship(ped) the Sun; aside from being a thing of great physical majesty and the driving sustenance of most life we are familiar with, I think the cultures in question intuitively tapped into something about the nature of light with their inclination to pay homage to the source of light.

I may have been a little disingenuous when I said light is a good way to try and imagine the transcendent, the divine, or whatever you want to call it. In fact, it doesn't matter what you want to call it, because you can't call it anything. Even my use of the ambiguous word "it" is invalid when referring to divinity, because "it" denotes a "thing" or a "concept," and divinity simply does not work in terms such as those.

The atheists, or the secular humanists, and that field of people, maintain that God does not exist, or that divinity does not exist, or whichever phrasing. This is a huge catching point for debate between believers in such things and the atheist movements, as we all know. I'm going to be frank here; this debate strikes me as incredibly stupid.

On the one side, we have the atheists and secular materialists, who posit that God does not exist, and never did. To most of them, God is a concept created and perpetuated by human authors, for purposes that are too many and varied to discuss here. This may surprise you given that I have previously professed to be Christian, but it is my belief that the atheists are absolutely right.

On the other side are the theist camps, who maintain both that a) God exists and b) they, in various ways, know and can quantify what God is. Again, perhaps surprisingly, I claim that the theists are absolutely wrong.

To explain: the atheists are right that God does not exist. This is because existing is a physical and mental state. God, or whatever handle you call him/her/it by, is held to be beyond space and time. I struggle to even write this, because there is no expression in English to say that something "does not be." It's nonsense, it's gibberish, and it's the best way I can come up with to try and describe how divinity must be.

The theists, in my estimation, are wrong in maintaining that God is something identifiable and quantifiable. Another long-standing debate is about how we represent God, whether it's a racist and hegemonic act to represent him with a fatherly old white man, or where the line between appropriate statuary and sacrilegious idolatry lies. I have long been flabbergasted, since I gave the matter serious thought, by the human assumption that God is something we can represent accurately in any terms at all. There are no terms.

The thing people cite frequently is that God "made humans in His image," and so we represent God as a human form. Consider, however, a photographic portrait of a person. This thing was made in that person's image, and can have depth and implication, and all the things described when we discuss art. It is, however, both a separate thing in and of itself and at best a pale, fragmentary imitation of the original subject.

Another feature of debates about God is the inevitable human binary system. This one gets me every single time. The debate is to whether God is good or bad, or masculine or feminine, and so on. The binary is evident in an old Christian issue, as to the nature of Jesus; whether Jesus was man, God, half-man and half-God, part of God, fully God, fully man and fully God, a creation of God, and so on is a major deal. (Relatedly, read about the Arian heresy, because it's interesting.)

In my opinion, the binary way of thinking about the divine is incredibly narrow-minded. Binaries are material, and crucially they are human; we perceive things as different or separate based on opposing them in a binary with all others. I will say no more about it, other than to reiterate that binaries are a human invention, and I do not think it is valid to hold such an earthly lens up to the indescribable.

I'm going to cut myself off here, because I could write books and volumes about this topic (and probably contradict myself on several different tangents) and I feel I'm getting off topic or too complex. It comes down to an old saying: "The best things are impossible to describe, transcendental of language. The second-best things refer to that which cannot be named directly. The third best are what everyone talks about."

Instead of a TL;DR as normal, I would like to throw a plea at your feet, dear reader. Please consider what I've written, and feel free to form an opinion as to whether I'm wrong. Tell me that opinion or keep it private as you wish, but consider. Feel free to show this to your friends or family if you think it's worthy, or tell me if it isn't, or paint a picture of a unicorn, or whatever. Thank you.

P.S. I will probably post more about this, elaborating on the various subsections of what I talked about briefly here and making my muddy thoughts more clear, so if you liked it, huzzah! If you didn't, uh... apologies in advance, but I have been struck with an inspiration. My daimon is talking, as Socrates might have said.

P.P.S. I realize these haven't been particularly about UC Berkeley lately. Apologies. We are all about deviating from established guidelines here, is the lame-duck justification I'll throw out. :P