God is here now, ready to help us -- a reason for Hope!

As a Scientist I believe in GOD, and a GOD who is right here ready to help us all if we simply turn and tune in and ask for help.   There, I said it, and put my career in Science on the line.

But, I put the word GOD in all capitals because I'm using that word in an uncommon sense, and need to keep reminding my readers that I am doing that.   In today's language,  I am talking about God-2.0,  a new version of God, like a new, improved version of a video game or App.   And there, I said it, so now I have also offended and outraged most Religious communities.

I'm losing friends and "Likes" and followers pretty fast here.    But I press onward, undaunted.

I want to address this post to the people who made it this far in reading it -- those who are willing to believe that our context, our universe on Earth,   is alive, awake, aware of us,  and at least partially responsive to our behaviors, actions, and words.   Maybe it's not Jupiter, or Thor, or some old white guy with a long beard on a throne in the sky, but there is definitely something going on here that rises above simply nature or even a larger term "Nature". 

And this is important because whatever is going on here, I believe,  interacts with us heavily in everything we do and to ignore it is to completely misunderstand why some things we do fail and why others succeed,  and to miss out on opportunities to succeed with way less effort and much greater impact in our daily lives.     We are immersed in and swimming in a sea of "tough love" -- it is not our servant to tap into and order about like some Genie in a bottle or some mystical loving parent, though it can "come through for us" and give us things that we would never achieve unaided.  It also is "tough" because there are some facts, rules, guidelines, restrictions on what sort of things we can get assistance on. 

We have to live by its rules, not expect it to live by ours.  This is no different from learning to live with the Law of Gravity -- it just is a fact we can like, hate, believe in, deny it, but regardless it will "rule" our lives all the same.    We all understand Gravity.   There is no "magic" involved,  just higher mathematics which, fortunately, we can be content to let other people understand.  This is just the way things are.   It is no big deal.    We can adjust to it and live with it.

So we all accept that there are things-like-Gravity,   part of the structural design of the world we live in, that we just have to live with.   A good question, and one that we never really articulate and ask out loud in school is

"How many more things like Gravity are there that we need to know about?"

Very much like the "Artificial Life" that I described in my last post here,  the definition of the term keeps changing as we learn more and more,  as it should.  After all we started with a very weak notion of what Artificial Life could be, and it truly needed updating over time.

Sadly,  just suggesting that we raise the question of whether we have this concept,  the meaning of the word "God" as correct and nuanced as possible, and as helpfully defined as possible,  raises a firestorm of heated outrage from all sides - Science, Religion,  and Atheism!   It is discouraging and I must digress for a moment to reflect upon why that is.

In fact, this digression takes up the rest of this post and I have to defer what I was actually trying to point to to my next post in order to keep this reasonably short and coherent.

Over the last 5000 years, as society has evolved, we learned more about the world around us. We added new concepts to our thinking, and refined old ones.   That is a normal and natural process,  which continues at a dizzying pace today, and we need more of it. 

It seems there are three distinct kinds of "facts" that behave quite differently when we try to update them in our minds and in society.  

There are neutral facts that no one cares if we change;  there are socially-connected facts that rock the boat somewhat if changed, but in a tolerable way;  and there are deeply-rooted-beliefs that set the boat on fire and overturn it if changed, and which trigger violent response, even death,  if even challenged, let alone changed.

No one ever seems to mention this or teach it, but it's a very useful distinction to learn.

So long as Scientists retreated from society and focused on neutral facts, like "momentum" they could play happily and no one really noticed or cared, unless maybe a cool documentary on the Discovery Channel came along to share.  Most of the so-called STEM subjects are in this category, and it is also termed "hard science" ,  a misnomer if there ever was one.

Socially-connected-facts are things like Psychology or Sociology or Economics or, surprise,  Geology and Astronomy.    Groups of people have set up camp around certain exact meanings of these facts,  and become agitated if someone rocks the boat.   The camps take on shape and names and become things like the "Chicago School of Economics".    Groups argue often heatedly about who has the better understanding and meaning of the same words.  But in general no one actually dies.

Deeply-rooted-beliefs, as I mentioned above, set the boat on fire and capsize it if challenged or changed.   Not just small camps, but entire nations or cultures argue heatedly over who is right and often are quite willing to go to war, killing or being killed in great numbers, to protect their own understanding of certain words and concepts.    Protestants go to war with Catholics in Ireland.  Sunni Muslims go to war with Shiites in most of the Middle East.   Christian Crusaders invade and attack all of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages.    Scientists like Galileo, suggesting the Earth is not in fact the center of the solar system,  risked death if they did not recant.

But these deeply-rooted-beliefs are not just about religion, or culture, or the role of women in society, or differences between races and racial identity.    So called Scientists also become emotionally attached to and even ardent defenders of certain understandings.    Revolutions and changes in "paradigms" such as Quantum Mechanics,  Plate Tectonics, or the nature of "disease" ( invisible tiny organisms living inside us? Really?!!!) were fiercely denounced and resisted and proponents of new ideas excluded from funding or mocked and shunned.

Heck, even the guy Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that women were dying in childbirth in the hospital because surgeons were not washing their hands, and tried to tell them that,  was driven out of practice and put in a mental institution where he quickly died. 

There are things that some people do not want to hear.

Anyway,  where all this was going is that the subject of the nature of GOD is one of those live-wire, hot-button topics that typically causes much heat and no light to emerge from a discussion or attempt to study and grasp the kernel of truth out of the shell of attached meanings of old.

I've spent most of my life believing that there is, indeed, something, some kernel of Truth that matters to me,   buried in and tangled up inside this bundle of meanings attached to the word GOD.  Yes, most of the simplistic meanings are just laughable and can be dismissed out of hand.  There is no dude in a white robe sitting on a throne running or ruining our lives.

But on the other hand, there are some aspects of reality that are as important as the Law of Gravity,  but equally invisible, that still change the outcome of what we try to do as surely as they change the trajectory of a ball we throw upwards.

It is just plain wrong not to try to investigate, in a clear-headed, skeptical but curious manner,  what those structural laws and design features of the world around us might be.  In my book, that is precisely what Science is all about and we should not be deterred by skulls on stakes and big signs that say "Forbidden territory -- all hope abandon ye who enter here!"

Heck with that.  Let's go see what is over there on the other side of the police tape.

To be continued in my next post!

On a prayer

"Love God, then do what's obvious." I think it was St. Augustine who gave that advice when asked how to deal with hard moral choices. Seen from the right angle, the answer is obvious.

Physicists use the same technique to crack very hard problems, but call it something different. "Reframing" is what my last two posts called it, or context-shifting. Whatever it's called, it works.

Today I'll consider that as one type of "prayer" and look at how it can help us get through the day.

I'm drawing heavily as well on my 1965 dog-eared copy of "A Teacher's Manual - Ten Basic Steps Toward Christian Maturity" from Campus Crusade for Christ, Bill Bright, ed., but this is not a technique that can't be used by Jews or Moslems or atheists.

Summing it all up is a quote in Ten Steps from Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran church, which I recall as this:

"Work, work, work! From early morning to late at night. Some days I have so much to do I have to spend the first three hours in prayer!"

I'll put that next to a quote I probably mis-remember the words of as well from President Abraham Lincoln, a former logger. "If I had ten minutes to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first five sharpening my axe."

And finally, my quote from Charles Schultz's cartoon dog Snoopy: " Did you ever notice, that if you think about something at 2 AM, and then again at noon the next day, you get two different answers?"

Why's this work? Well, humans have a very limited mental capacity, given the problems we're trying to solve. If there are, say, 10 factors involved, and they interact, we have about 100 direct interactions, each of which has 10 more second order interactions, each of which has 10 more third-order interactions, etc. The mind boggles. Mathematicians might make a 10 x 10 grid or array of numbers, a "matrix", where the number in the ith-row and the j'th column tries to capture how those two items interact.

There is a trick, however. If the problem is "rotated" to a new set of coordinates, a new reference frame, these numbers all change. For many problems there is a "best" set of cordinates, a best way to look at them, for which all the numbers off the diagonal "go away". All the complexity vanishes. The problem reduces to 10 items that don't interact, and can be solved easily. The answer is obvious. There's not quiz, but for completeness for those who want to follow this trail, the coordinates are called "eigenvectors" and the numbers are "eigenvalues".

So, one way a physicist cracks a hard problem is to describe it in any convenient reference frame, then mathematically rotate that frame around to this best frame, and only then actually doing what most people think of "solving", that is, plugging in the numbers, which at that point looks "easy" because, at that point, it is!

There are many kinds and many purposes of prayer, but one kind is this kind - an activity like that used by Martin Luther, to effectively rotate the problem, or the viewpoint, or the viewer, around to where it's obvious how to proceed. I use this technique every day. I don't know how I ever got along without it.

It does require "thinking globally and acting locally." You have to let go of the "accidental reference frame" you are immersed in, with your local issues and concerns, and seek to realign yourself with the Big Picture, God's reference frame, and that set of values. If you can do this "letting go" and "dying to self", you can re-pent, that is re-think, that is "turn and be healed." Not too surprisingly, it's hard to "rotate" something if part of it is stuck, even a tiny part. You have to truly "let go" or sigh and "submit" to God's will, not your own. Then it works ... sometimes. But when it works, wow, does it work! Amazing solutions you'd have never thought of come popping into your head -- most of which involve having to rely on or trust or forgive other people, which is the thing your own ego was hoping to avoid.

Some solutions allow everyone to win. Let me rephrase that. Some solutions require that everyone win, and won't work if you try to "win" at the "expense" of others. Some egos have a hard time with that and walk sadly away, muttering that such an outcome isn't "winning" in their mind.

Well, as I said, there's only one lifeboat Earth, with several hundred holes in the bottom, and it really is no solution at all to just "fix my end of the boat" so that "I'm floating higher than them now!" Tis a short-lived victory dance. Worse if your solution involved speeding the rate at which "they" are sinking. That reminds me of the current mortgage / credit disaster, where some people thought they'd get rich by defrauding poor people and the world's bankers -- then discovered that "things are connected" on a larger scale than they were paying attention to.

Following up on my last several posts, note that this solution technique doesn't involve anything that's on your desk, or in your workspace -- it involves changing the invisible but profoundly important context in which you are operating to one that works better.

For Christians, this often involves reading the Bible, or reflecting on memorized passages of Scripture, but I have to stress that this is not an analytic activity in the sense people usually mean. This doesn't involve classic logic, of finding one verse that says "A implies B", and another verse that says "B implies C" and then computing that this means A implies C, or any sort of detailed symbol or word processing activity. The big step here is not "content processing" that science and reason is so good at, it is "context processing" that science tends to forget exists.

Nothing in this approach depends on whether it was "7 days" or "7 billion years" it took to create the Earth. Those details wash out, and are not worth fighting over, in my mind. Attacks by Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists don't matter. What matters is aligning your own spirit and "getting with the program."

As with Snoopy, once this is done, the very same effort to tackle the very same problem that didn't work before, suddenly works. In fact, it works so well that the answer is "obvious" and doesn't require any further computational struggling at all, once you "see" what is involved and going on.

Done in a group, this is a key component, I think, in what the Baha'is call "consultation", which is an effort to apply rational thought after first establishing a spiritual framework and keeping that in place. Like filling the area with water, formerly "heavy" logs, too heavy to lift, suddenly become buoyant and can be moved by a child. That's the desired outcome of the process.

Similarly, when Baha'is talk about "spiritual solutions to economic problems" I think immediately of this kind of effect. We are blinded to perfectly good, immediately available solutions by our attachment to accidental local frames of thinking, and constraints involving "competition" and "winning" or "exposing weakness" or "exposing helplessness." It's an advanced social version of the urban legend tendency, taken too lightly, of men who prefer to drive all day, lost, rather than stop and ask for directions.

In fact, let me wrap this up with an equally sexist joke, about a very serious problem we have that has to be addressed. Three travelers, two men and an woman, come to a raging river.
One man looks, and says "No problem, I'm strong!" , ties his belongings in his shirt, revealing his muscular arms, and tries to swim heroically across, but is swept away. The second man says, "I can beat that with technology!", grabs a local rowboat and tries to row heroically across, but is swept away. The woman watches them being carried downstream and says "Oh, for God's sake!" and walks across the bridge.


I think we're being swept away, as a society, surrounded by help we refuse to see.

(credits - "If prayer doesn't work,there is always satellite" by Carol Mitchell
"Teamwork" photo from "Ollieda" )

Feeling the power of the Lord

There is an external supply of organizational power and coping "energy" available to us, every day, that is way more than we come into the day with. I think too many people today are trying to drive on their starter engines, and running down their batteries, aside from not having much power for hills.

A standard "gasoline powered" car has two entirely different engine systems. One uses gasoline to store energy and has pistons and spark-plugs and can produce more power than 100 horses, sometimes much more. It can move the car 400 miles or more, and then needs to be "refilled" (at $3 a gallon).




The other engine system uses a "battery" to store energy, has a small electric motor, and can produce enough power to "turn over" the big engine and power the spark plugs and run the fuel pump long enough that the BIG engine "starts", at least on warm days when we didn't leave the interior lights on all night.

Then, a side job of the big engine, as it is running, is to recharge the small engine's battery for "next time."

Even jet planes that can cross the ocean generally use some guy with a small engine to come up and plug in to start up their huge turbine engines, that you can hear revving up to speed on electricity and then finally "catching" with a roar as the jet fuel takes over the job.

It actually is possible, at least on a car with manual transmission, to "drive on the starter engine", although it is really hard on that engine. If you're stuck on the railroad tracks in such a car, and you have time, you could put the car in first gear and just turn the key and the starter engine would move the car 30 feet or so before it would run out of power. Don't try it because it will probably require you get a new starter engine, and getting out of the car and running is usually faster and much safer, although it requires getting a new car.

Here's the problem, though. As a metaphor, today, people seem to have forgotten that there is a BIG engine in their cars, and everyone is trying to "drive on the starter engine" all day. Science, unhelpfully, teaches that you don't need a BIG engine to explain why a car can move. (It doesn't address whether such motion explains everything in society, and kind of punts on that question for now, until there is way more computing power)

But, we do see people running out of energy half way through their day. Call it "depression" or "Yuppie flu" or "chronic fatigue syndrome", and "treat" it with ever larger amounts of prescription drugs and caffeine, but it seems to be getting worse, nationally, at an alarming rate. It takes more an more people to "run" an organization, or nation, which produces less and less, even if it runs the people to exhaustion and discards them and gets a constant stream of new people as a business model.

That's what you get if you drive on the starter engine, or try to run you life on your own brain and body and mind. Some motion, then it runs out, and it's really hard on the car.

The alternative is captured in the slogan to the orphanage Boys Town, namely,

He's not heavy father, he's my brother!

There is an alternative power supply here, provided free, fully wireless, available to anyone who subscribes to it. There is a BIG engine you can tap into. That engine does not get tired before the end of the day. Even listening to the song of the same name boosts your energy.

The metaphysical religion model says, in my words, that the purpose of our own energy and free will is to be good starter engines, and every day get ourselves realigned with God and "plug into" the power of God's love to motivate, guide, and empower our actions all day.

The result, if done correctly, is to end up the day tired in some ways, but flush with overflowing success and filled with more energy than at the start of the day.

We're leaves of the tree, and our energy needs to be used to twist and turn ourselves in prayer until we capture the external sunlight fully, which will cause things to happen, energy to appear as if it came "out of the light", recharging us and powering the tree, as well as the flow systems the tree has to make us bigger and healthier and stronger.

If we notice we are running low on energy, the wrong thing to do is to curl into a tight roll and try to "conserve" what we have. That will never work.

Yet those who wait for the LORD Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.
(NAS Bible, Isaiah 40:31).

The tragedy of our day is that science is so busy trying to prove that God doesn't exist that it has few resources left over that can be turned to looking at why some people manage to get plugged into this power source and spend their days inspired, and how the rest of us can tap into that.

I think their problem is that they are looking for "the power within" and, well, it's not inside the box, it's outside the box. And, it's not there all the time, but requires a rather nuanced alignment and entrainment action on the part of our "receiver" so we pick up the energy beam and respond to it in a phase-lock loop. It's kind of like the submarine communication systems that starts with a low-power broad beam laser looking for a satellite, and when it finds it suddenly focuses the laser on an intense pulse mode exactly at the target so none is lose to the sides.

If you take it into the lab, there is no wire, no loop, no energy being transferred, nothing to see here. The problem is the "taking it into the lab" step. But if you go out and look at some people in action, inspired by the Spirit, you can only gasp in awe.

What we need help with is the alignment step, this "prayer" thing and "submission" thing doesn't always work very well, and we "fall off" the wagon.

I replaced the starter engine of my car today
Uploaded by Michiel2005 on Flickr.
Small Block (Engine) Originally uploaded by Lost America
Battery by by Planet Tyler
Jumpstart by by Old Shoe Woman
Worn out by by Avid Maxfan
Leaves by Shakespearesmonkey
Friendly Friday (bird) Uploaded by Ollie_girl
Little help from my friends uploaded by frankie.farkle