Sometimes either-or is all you're left with

There is a tension between science and religion, which is, as we saw last time, more imaginary than real.

As most of you know, I'm not a big fan of religion per sé; that is, how those institutions that declare to represent a particular faith go about their business. By the same token, I've made it clear from time to time that I'm no big fan of science either, whereby I mean "science" in the same sense as "religion": how it is practiced by whomever declares themselves representatives of this non-spiritual form of faith.

Fundamentalism -- the most negative and least useful form of belief -- is not restricted to religions, as we commonly understand the term, rather it applies to any way of thinking that insists on belief in spite of facts and which restricts all methods and means of interpretation to those which they are willing to accept or sanction. We have religious fundamentalists that all of us more or less recognize and agree upon, but we have scientistic fundamentalists as well. Most often they make themselves known as militant atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, or revered figures of science who are taken to speak with authority on issues of which they know nothing and are eminently unqualified to pass judgement upon, like Stephen Hawking. Don't get me wrong: I think that both Dawkins and Hawking (who are merely examples, not personifications in any way) are very bright and intelligent people, but being bright is hardly qualification for anything.

There are a lot of bright people in the world. And I would bet that we all know someone every bit as bright or intelligent as Mr. Dawkins or Mr. Hawking, but for some reason, we don't accredit them with much authority at all, which is how it should be. Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, or the Dali Lama, for example, are both exceedingly bright and intelligent individuals. Both of them are capable of communicating deep insights into matters of a spiritual nature. But I don't know anyone who would go to either of them to find out whether reality may be a matter of wave-function collapse or for thoughts on whether there is validity to the multiple-universes hypothesis. And rightfully so. What doesn't make sense to me is why individuals like Dawkins and Hawking are allowed to make extra-subject-matter pronouncements that should be taken seriously while individuals like Sacks and the Dali Lama are not (though oddly enough, they don't, for they recognize limits to their own "authority), boils down to a simple fact: at the moment, there is a dominant belief system, and if you don't subscribe to it, you siply have nothing important to say.

Science-as-we-know-it assumes that matter is primary and everything else that we know to be the universe, or any part of it, derives from this basic starting points; this is the fundamental premise of materialism. Anyone coming from the religious or spiritual side of things assumes that G-d or something spiritual/non-physical is primary and everything else that we know to be the universe, or any part of it, derives from this basic starting point. And, the real issue involved is this: both are assumptions; neither can be proved; there is no way that we can know for sure which assumption is true.

In other words, when it comes right down to it ... literally ... we're left with an either-or situation: you can either believe the route to where we are and where we find ourselves is from matter-to-spirit, or you can believe it is from spirit-to-matter. At the moment, we're not aware of a third possibility (whereby, I, personally, don't believe we'll find a third one either).

At first glance, it may appear not to matter what we believe, but it does. Every action we perform, every statement we make, every decision we make can be traced back to this most fundamental distinction. More importantly, what we think, do or say all has unavoidable consequences for all our futures, and for that reason alone, we should get clear with our own selves, just where we're coming from.

Just what happened 2,000 years ago?

Although it's not generally treated as such, this is one of the biggest and most significant days for Christianity. Today marks the day that one "Jesus of Nazareth" (or whatever it is you decide he should be called) was crucified. OK, we don't know for sure if it was him, in particular, but it this day that we set aside to remember whoever it was that was crucified around this time who, by all indications, changed the course of world history.

I'm not making light of the fact that we don't know historically for sure what happened oh, so long ago. I mean, in the end, what difference does it make? Normally, none, but we have the reality that more than 2,000 years later, the whole world, not just some obscure Jewish sect, arranges its calendars around this particular and specific event. I don't care who you are, you have to wonder about that. And, I don't care who you are, playing it off as nothing does no more for us than claiming that this is the be-all-and-end-all of human existence.

Me? Well, I have a very pragmatic streak: we all celebrate Easter (which was initiated by today, Good Friday) and I really have to ask myself what it means that more than 2,000 years after the alleged event, we're not only remembering it, but we're marking our time in relation to it. For sure: why is it 2016 and not some other year? And more significantly: why is it 2016 and not the-year-in-the-reign-of-so-and-so? Not only is it not insignificant ... it is downright defining of who we think we are as a culture (and, in the meantime, the world). Take a moment and let that sink in -- be you devoutly "Christian" (whatever that means) or an "atheist" (whatever that means as well).

I'm sorry: any way you take it, something happened. It might have been meaningful or it might have been a delusion, but something happened, and it doesn't really matter if that "something" was institutionalized "at the time" or some time later. Whatever it was, it changed the way we perceive and understand the world we encounter.

Even though I'm not necessarily so, I have to take the direct route this time: we don't know. I've got a lot of fundamentalistically inclined friends, and they have a lot of emotion and lot of themselves invested in believing that what happened then is a particular fact. I have a lot of other friends who are just as adamant about the fact that nothing -- and I mean absolutely nothing -- happened. The former have the burden of proof; the latter have the burden of explanation. Neither of them come close to shouldering their burdens.

So, here's my own, personal, take on the matter:

It doesn't matter. Neither of these extreme positions explains or accounts for anything.

I'm not saying that nothing happened. It is as plain as the nose on any of our faces that something did in fact happen, something so significant that we decided to change how we count the years. Oh sure, you can maintain that after the fact the dominant group imposed its way of counting on the masses, but that dominant group has changed identities as often as most people change their underwear and we're still counting in the "new" way. If I'm wrong, let me know. You may be able to rationalize or explain away the "event", but you're going to have trouble explaining away the consequences.

What I love most about today is that neither the die-hard believers nor the die-hard disbelivers can offer up reasonable evidence to support their case. In these days of scientific understanding, neither the totally-for nor the totally-against can make any kind of convincing argument to "prove" their position. I love that. We just don't know, and we have to live with it.

The big day is here

OK, I'll admit it: I'm absoluetly gob-smacked that today is just another holiday. It's Good Friday, fer Chrissake (with a tip o' the hat to Salinger), and while we're all happy that we have the day off (that is, for those who work for companies that recognize today as a holiday: some do, some don't, some only half-way), most people I know have no idea why we should care (be aware of the fact) at all.

OK, I have to insert a personal comment here: in the US (my other "home"), Good Friday really wasn't a holiday. I never got the day off; here in Germany, it has the status of an almost-official holiday, and most people get the day off with pay). This fact, in and of itself, is worth reflecting upon. In a country that prides itself of its "Christian values", the day is, at best, a half-day-not-having-to-work-day, while the world's export leader still has it enshrined as a full-fledged day-off-work-with-pay day, go figure.

But this brings us directly to the point:

A culture's values are reflected in it so-called holidays; that is, those days on which its commercial interests are willing to spend money even though they get nothing in return.

Let's face it: a truly modern-capitalistic organization can't be in favor of any holidays; that is, working days with pay. How could they be? Profits are generated through work, not through non-work or the absence of work or not working, or whatever. Holidays; that is, days without work, are unjustifiable. How is it possible, why should one pay wages for a day in which nothing constructive is done? Oh, I understand the logic, but at the same time I have to ask whether the logic is reasonable in the first place.

This is no pseudo-issue. It's real. Money may "work" 24/7. Profits may be generated 24/7. But, human beings don't function 24/7. I don't know about you, but every once in a while, I need to sleep.

And so, here we are with this "pseudo-holiday" that "business" would like to eliminate, but which, people be damned, it just can't do. And why? Well, it turns out that the answer lies neither in the holiday itself nor in the weakening cultural framework that imposes it.

For all the materialistic, money-talks-nobody-walks mentality that we like to propagate, the truth of the matter is that we have to accommodate and deal with people anyhow. For all the blustering about growth and ROI and stability in the future, we're all still dependent upon the fragile, unknowing, fallible human beings who do our bidding, to the best of their ability.

We've set up a system in which it appears that the "knowers" know what they are doing, but this is increasingly showing itself to be a facade. We like to think that this is how things have always been, but we're increasingly coming to realize that this is just the way we've made things for now. We want to believe that those who say they know actually know, but we're seeing day in and day out that the "experts" sleight-of-hand can't possibly be the way forward.

According to the "'myth' of the day", someone called power's bluff. Why is it that we still think that power has the winning hand?

RE: Brussels. It happened again, and we're still surprised

My heart aches every time innocent people are ripped out of life because evildoers do what they do. I weep for every family who suffers because someone, some group, some ideology thinks they can get what they want by harming others. How perverse can you get.

But, perverse is also thinking that we -- you and me -- are guiltless. We're not, no matter how much we want to be. Why? Because we allow those who have every interest at heart but our own to decide what is right and what is wrong.

What just happened in Brussels is a tragedy, no doubt about it. What it preventable? No. Could we have done something about it? No. Can we do anything in the future to prevent such tragedies? No, but we can do a lot to reduce the likelihood that we are victims of terror.

Terror is terror because it comes unexpectedly, violently, without warning, overwhelmingly. It shocks us to our core. Otherwise, it wouldn't be terror, would it?

The media love to tell us how terrible it all is. Politicians are the first to rant and rave and rail against the pain. But, in the end, those who cause it should be the last to condemn it.

A little story, a blast from the past: when I decided to stay in Germany after my tour of duty, the country was firmly in the grip of terrorists; that is, zealots who would stop at nothing to get what they wanted, regardless of what it cost. In those days (the 70s), the hounds of Hell were domestic, home-grown; our own (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Army Faction) ... their color was different, to be sure, but their rhetoric and their love of violence was the same as we find today with Daesh. Change the colors, change the words, but you can't change the message, and you can't change the mindlessness. While I was studying at a near-by German university, every week a bomb exploded, a car blew up, sometimes with casualties sometimes not, but with wanton disregard for innocent life. And what did we do? Nothing. Because it was the right thing to do.

People were dying, violence was being wrought, but no one, and I mean no one ... neither the populace at large not the politicians in power ... thought of curtailing rights, instituting massive surrveilance, or creating extra-judicial gray zones to fight against the insanity. All of those are standard fare today. Why? Because we've lost sight of the goal: a free and open society which embraces values that are worth standing up, and even dying for. No, today, we've become cowards and victims of our own making.

It doesn't matter whether terror strikes in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, London, Athens, or anywhere else. Terrorists can only terrorize if we allow ourselves to succumb to fear. When we do, they win. It is that simple. In that moment in which we allow the power that be to curtail our rights, restrict our freedoms, impose their own will, we have lost the struggle for humanity. It is that simple.

It's not about safety or security or surveillance or anything like that at all. Either we have values we believe in and are willing to die for or we can merely choose whom we would like to be our masters and enslavers.

I find it particularly interesting that those who profess to have the strongest faith -- evangelicals and fundamentalists -- who are the first to call for more restrictions, more protection, more repression, more whatever, to save or protect their already petty lives. If you cannot live in the face of death -- the fate of every single living organism on earth -- you haven't really lived and chances are you never will.

So don't make life miserable for the rest of us. We live and we die; everything that lives, eventually dies. Just because your own belief makes small of this fact is no reason to cry for the protection of another because you personally are afraid.

I choose freedom. I choose life. I choose a world that allows me to be me and you to be you. I choose being over fear. I choose going down with my head up rather than cowering with my head down.

You can choose more police, more military, more violence, more killing, more aggression ... that's your choice, but do know that I will fight you every step of the way. I am willing to die knowing that I lived, in freedom, rather than dying never knowing that I lived.