p13opt Sleepers Awake

Why go through it all?

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 06, 19 Sultan, 164 BE

Our kids have always been late sleepers, and I had just finished my long obligatory prayer last night when Marie called me in to put Tomaso to sleep. My technique for sending him to the land of Nod is to either read straight from the longer sections of Baha'u'llah's Prayers and Meditations, or when the light is already out to do just what I do for you dear readers, that is, drone on and on about God and Baha'u'llah and whatever comes into my head. Last night Tomaso was unusually alert. When I had just got into a summary of ideas about the proofs of God, out of the dark came a small, still voice, posing a stumper:

If God created heaven and knows what is going to happen to us already, why does He not just send us there directly? Why do we have to go through all that we must experience in this world?

We arrived at an answer together, but today I want to give the best answer I can for an adult audience, at least insofar as it relates to my overall writing goals, and then to the overarching theme of this Gregorian Calendar year, the proofs of deity.

First of all, I want to correct my little joke about droning on about God and Baha'u'llah. I go on tangents, it is true, but I have a serious purpose, indeed, a goal towards which all my writing points. Plato put it better than I can:

"... I would wish you and Cleinias to consider whether my words have not also a bearing on legislation; for I am not discoursing only for the pleasure of talking, but for the argument's sake." (Laws)

My argument is for a new direction more consonant with the spirit of the age. A divine order is about to replace our present secular compromise, and our goal, the goal of the human race, is first to meet the God of planning, and from Him to learn how to plan. Only then will we be prepared in mind and heart to lay out a planned world order. My argument is that as soon as we learn to plan on a world level there will be an immediate need for concurrent local planning. Local structures must be improved, containerized and universalized. We will have to agree upon standard and then plan out new designs for homes and other buildings to fit us into the natural world optimally, naturally and harmoniously. I have been working out a sketch based upon a world standard cityscape that I call Mound Architecture.

Because Mound Architecture requires such a basic revision of property and other social arrangements, I am starting with basics, in other words, God. The present argument with anti-theists is a first step up a long stairway. But as I mount the steps I must never let go of the hand railing, and that is our current climate crisis. The cry goes out: remember the deluge! In order to keep me from letting go of the railing, I return periodically to one of the series of Youtube videos put out by my favorite activist director, Wondering Mind. Here is an index of his video series "How it all ends,"

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2oCYW4ScUnw

These short amateur films argue for climate-based planning on the grassroots level. They were put out by a science teacher concerned only for our collective survival. Like about half of all scientific types, he is not at all religious. So when I came upon this index of his arguments, naturally the first video I chose was this one, called "God's Will."

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjCcL1PN_Y

Here Wondering Mind tells how he encountered a Christian at his dentist's office and his mind wondered what she thinks about climate change. Her response was that it seems to be God's Will that such bad things should happen. He offers a tight little argument for planning and acting rather than passively sitting and labeling everything as the Will of God. I do not want to get into what he says, but I must say that his question is surely what future generations are going to have in mind as they read the record of our thought today, including our religious thought. They will be tracing the origins of the Supreme Being that I call the Planning God. For if we survive the climate crisis, it will be by planning, and by nothing else. And I must say, for the most part religious people could not plan their way out of a wet paper bag. In two hundred years of increasingly close contact, world religions have come together for what? Four Parliaments of Religion?

So, finally back to Tomaso's question, why does God not just give us a free ticket to heaven? Why do we have to suffer through this bung-hole of a life on earth? God knows about heaven, why even conceive of hell?

God seems to be really concerned that we do things for ourselves, that we plan our way to heaven. Yes, He could send us there directly, but He wants us to work out a path for ourselves, both alone and together. And when you think about it, the ability to see and act is what defines a rational being. The more you think, will and plan, the more God-like you become. God, who planned and sustains this gorgeous universe, wants us to make ourselves into His image.

I look at many of the protests that anti-theists make against religion and find myself agreeing more often than I am comfortable with. For example, they say that all the time that religionists spend praying, going on pilgrimages, performing devotions, reading scripture and jawboning about God, that is time we could more productively spend improving the world, saving us from climate destabilization.

I think that this is a point that even God in Holy Writ supports to a certain extent.

For example, there is the hadith that says, "An hour's reflection is worth 70 years (i.e. a working lifetime) of pious worship." Worship, like anything else, has a purpose, a limit to its usefulness. Only God is an End in Himself. Yes, God created us to worship Him, but worship, like "making love," has a far broader than the narrow sense of the word. This is true of knowing Him as well as worshiping Him. Think of the Bab's saying that a verse chanted with joy is far better than listlessly plodding through the entire body of the Writings -- and his followers proved this by in many cases reading a single line and then joyously giving their lives for its Author, thus trumping the most learned scholars who will ever study them.

Sayings like that seem to be telling us that devotions are useful only insofar as they condition reflection, and that reflection is what invigorates and gives value to our mission in this world. And what is our mission? It is surely to knead love and knowledge together into one, into the transcendent form of oneness called justice. In a prayer, Baha'u'llah explains exactly how it works:

"I testify, O my God, that Thou hast, from eternity, sent down upon Thy servants naught else except that which can cause them to soar up and be drawn near unto Thee, and to ascend into the heaven of Thy transcendent oneness." (Prayers and Meditations, 298)

This is the principle that Leibniz calls optimism, or the ameliorative principle. God creates the optimum amount, and one who is God-like is an optimist. God sends down upon us nothing but what is for our best good, if only we take the effort, if only we work out the justice, to make something optimum out of it. This world, then, is only apparently imperfect; from a God's-eye point-of-view, it the best of all possible worlds. Anything less or more than what it is would fall short of the best that can be. This passage continues,

"Thou hast established Thy bounds among them, and ordained them to stand among Thy creatures as evidences of Thy justice and as signs of Thy mercy, and to be the stronghold of Thy protection amongst Thy people, that no man may in Thy realm transgress against his neighbor."

This is the principle of optimal justice. The goal is zero injustice, just as God has been totally just to us. This starts off with each individual curbing and domesticating his or her desires and passions.

"How great is the blessedness of him who, for love of Thy beauty and for the sake of Thy pleasure, hath curbed the desires of a corrupt inclination and observed the precepts laid down by Thy most exalted Pen! He, in truth, is to be numbered with them that have attained unto all good, and followed the way of guidance."

p13 Rationality of Religion

Keith Ward on Worldviewology

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 06, 19 Sultan, 164 BE

Preparations for school were getting behind this morning and Silvie seeing the clock shouted:

"Would you all just stop not panicking!"

I will try to take her advice with regard to the talk that Peter and I are giving next Wednesday, the 13th of February at Mrs. Javid's. If you have any friends who happen to be heathen, infidels, unbelievers, atheists, lapsed believers -- we are ready for them, so bring them along.

Or, maybe not. Maybe I should stop not panicking. The talk is already a week away and I have hardly begun to absorb the basic materials for the promised subject, the distinctively Baha'i proofs of deity.

In order to give me time to gather my pile of accumulated research materials, today I will pass things over to British theologian and philosophy teacher Keith Ward. His answer to the new atheists taught me at least one thing: that there is such a thing as a worldview. In fact, according to him there are many possible worldviews, none of which is absolutely certain or totally based on evidence. But let him explain it in his own words. Here are the major headings he uses to answer the big question begged by the new atheists: are religious beliefs irrational?

Three worldviews

The contestability of worldviews

The legend of the leap of faith

What makes worldviews reasonable?

from: Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous?

(some beliefs) ... are so basic that there are no other beliefs on which they could be based, or from which they could be inferred. We do not get them by observation. Perhaps we could just say these are beliefs that are conditions of the possibility of living and acting in the world as we do. They provide our basic perspective on existence. If they have reasons, those reasons lie in the coherence and integration they bring to all the varied sorts of experience and knowledge that we have.

Three worldviews

Everybody has some basic worldview, even if they would not give their beliefs such a grand title. A worldview is a set of concepts for interpreting experience. It is possible to have a common sense worldview. This would just say that things are as they appear to us. We live in a world of coloured solid objects and we find out what is real by seeing, touching, smelling or tasting things. This is a pretty naive view, and it collapses as soon as we know about the scientific finding that colour and solidity are how objects appear to our senses, while the underlying reality is very different. It could be atoms or sub-atomic particles. It could be something even stranger, like superstrings in eleven dimensions. Whatever it is, reality is not what it seems to the senses, and we do not find out what is real just by seeing and touching things at all.

A different worldview that owes more to modern science is the materialist worldview. For this view, reality is what science, especially physics, says it is. We discover what is real by experiment, certainly, but we would not even be able to devise and understand experiments in quantum physics unless we had a great deal of mathematical ability and a great deal of theory, which we accept basically because of its elegance and predictive power. Materialism is the view that reality is whatever science says it is, and our means of access to it is by highly sophisticated abstract theories, by means of theorising, and not just, as in common sense, by means of the senses.

The appeal of materialism is that it is a fairly simple theory,  reducing reality to just one sort of stuff - matter, energy or superstrings, perhaps. It fits well with the fact that scientific theorising works, and produces amazingly acute predictions. And if we think that human existence seems unplanned, accidental, even cruel and pointless, it provides a theory that confirms those thoughts, and tells us there is no purpose or plan in human existence. There is just the inexorable rule of law, and the blind and purposeless circulation of sub-atomic particles, sometimes giving rise to an illusory appearance of design or intelligence.

However, there are also major problems with materialism.

The most obvious is that quantum physics seems to dissolve the idea of matter entirely. Whatever the strange hidden basis of quantum theory is, it is not hard lumps of solid stuff. Electrons become probability waves in Hilbert space, matter is just one form of energy, and we do not know all the other forms there may be.

There are basic problems with theories in modern physics.

It is, for instance, very difficult to make quantum theory consistent with relativity theory, and the well-established quantum property of non-locality does not seem to fit with relativity physics as we know it. It looks as though we do not have a very good grasp of the basis even of physical reality.

In addition, consciousness and the contents of consciousness - especially mathematics, logic, feelings and intentions - resist translation into purely physical terms. To most of us it is obvious that we need to explain many aspects of human life in terms of intentions, goals and evaluations. But all such things simply disappear in materialism. The simplicity that materialism offers may be bought at the cost of overlooking the real complexity that is part of reality. And of course if we believe that there is a spiritual dimension to reality, that in seeking truth, beauty and goodness we are seeking things that really exist, and that it is possible to apprehend a transcendent personal reality of more than human value and power, then materialism will not match our experience at all.

So a third main worldview is that of idealism. This view states that the fundamental character of reality is that of consciousness or mind. The whole material world is an appearance of what is fundamentally a complex mental reality. Consciousness is not just a by-product of the material brain, as materialists think. On the contrary, the brain and body are appearances, material forms, of an underlying mental reality. The material world exists in order to let finite forms of mind grow, relate to one another as objects in a common world, and develop their own attitudes and personalities from the store of potentialities and capacities that their material environment provides.

Idealism, too, has the virtue of simplicity, of finding one unitary type of reality as the basis of all the complexity we see around us. It is able to take full account of the existence and importance of human awareness, feelings and uniquely personal experiences. And it encourages us to see purpose and wisdom in the existence of the natural world, providing a basis for spiritual experiences and beliefs, without reducing them to illusions.

These are just three worldviews that exist and are very widely held in our world. There are many others. Christian theism is one of those others, since it agrees with idealism that one personal conscious reality - God is primary, and is the basis of all material reality. But it agrees with materialism that the material world has its own proper reality, though it is ultimately dependent on God.

The contestability of worldviews

In general, what we call religious views tend towards idealism. There are hardly any materialist or purely common sense religions. But there are many interpretations of idealism, and many ways in which it may be qualified. So Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and the Abrahamic faiths all take rather different interpretations of idealism. But they all hold that the spiritual dimension of human existence is the truly important dimension, and that the goal of religion is to make people aware of that dimension and enrich their lives by such awareness.

 Many attacks on religion are based on the belief that idealism is false. There is no spiritual dimension to reality. The religious goal is unobtainable, based on a false view of reality, and illusory. It is therefore intellectual dishonesty to teach religious views as if they were true.

Fashions come and go in philosophy, of course. In the first decades of the twentieth century, idealism was almost taken for granted among English-speaking philosophers. That was basically because they took as their start human conscious experience, and never dreamt of denying its very existence.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, some of the very best professional philosophers opted for materialism. But most of them would concede that their view is provocative, and that there are deep and unresolved puzzles arising from quantum physics, from the existence of consciousness, and from the apparent irreducibility of historical, ethical, political and personal explanations to purely physical forms of explanation. Materialism is a bold and counterintuitive worldview - but that makes it all the more attractive to good philosophers.

I have taught philosophy professionally in British universities for at least twenty years and am on the committee of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Looking around at my philosopher colleagues in Britain, virtually all of whom I know at least from their published work, I would say that very few of them are materialists. Some - a minority probably - are idealists. A good number are theists. And most seem to be generally sceptical or agnostic about all worldviews, preferring to deal with specific tricky problems case by case, and to eschew general theories, materialism and idealism alike.

The point is that religious views are underpinned by highly sophisticated philosophical arguments. They are not blind leaps in the dark, and they are not based on unthinking acceptance of the assertions of some holy book. All such views are highly contested. None of them is universally accepted, or can even claim an overwhelming majority among philosophers. Systems of idealism cannot be strictly 'proved' to everyone's satisfaction. But neither can systems of materialism. These are ultimate, highly reasoned choices, none of which is obviously false or obviously true either.

The legend of the leap of faith

There is a particular view of the history of European philosophy that has almost become standard, but which is a misleading myth. That is that everybody used to accept that there were 'proofs of God'. The first cause argument (the universe must have a first cause) and the argument from design (design in the universe shows that there must be a designer) were supposed to prove that there must be a God. But then along came Immanuel Kant, who disproved all these proofs. After that, belief in God had no rational basis and had to become a rationally unjustifiable leap of faith (where 'faith' means belief without any evidence).

This view of the history of philosophy is skewed in a number of ways. First of all, it was never generally thought that, by starting only with the observable facts of the physical world, anyone could demonstrate that there has to be an intelligent first cause outside the universe. That would make God little more than an inference from observed facts, an absentee creator who was never actually present or experienced.

As a matter of historical fact, the main philosophical arguments derived largely from Plato and Aristotle, whose concern was not with some sort of inference from observed reality to something else. It was with the question of what the nature and character of observed reality was.

 In Plato's case, his arguments (or many of them) were intended to show that the observed world can be seen by reflective enquiry to be a world of appearances. The underlying reality can be known by the mind, by intellectual investigation, and ultimately by a vision of the Good, as the true reality of which the material world is an appearance.

Philosophical argument was basically 'dialectic' - the presentation and representation of limited perspectives on the world that might lead to distinguishing reality from appearance, and discerning that the inner character of reality is mental or  spiritual. Plato does not ask us to infer an unseen designer. He tries to get us, through intense reflective argument, to see the world as the appearance, the manifestation, of a deeper spiritual reality that is akin to human consciousness, but of purer and more perfect goodness and beauty.

When Immanuel Kant came along, he did set out to undermine a specific set of rationalist arguments propounded by the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff. He did say that he set out to undermine knowledge in order to make room for 'faith'. But his whole critical philosophy was written as an attempt to set faith on a firm intellectual foundation, not to offer it as an alternative to intellectual thought.

A central part of Kant's philosophy was the attempt to show that reason leads to unavoidable contradictions when it tries to take observed reality as the true reality, as reality-in-itself. Only when you have, in this way, pushed reason to its limits can you see that reality must be something more than the empirical and observable, more than the world of Newtonian physics.

Faith, for Kant, was practical commitment made in areas where theoretical knowledge is impossible, but where there is still a pressure to make a rational choice. To make his case, he had to show that reason has its limits, and that it is necessary to make reasonable decisions in areas that go beyond those limits. For him, faith - faith in God, in moral freedom, and in the possibility of moral fulfilment ('happiness in accordance with virtue') - is supremely reasonable. It is not a leap in the dark. It is the use of reason beyond the limits of empirical verification.

Kant was, in fact, not so far from Plato. Kant did not speak of a vision of the Good because he was very suspicious, unduly suspicious perhaps, of claims to personal experience of God. But Kant did say that it was not optional but absolutely necessary to posit a rational and moral basis of the world, to posit the existence of the Supreme Good.

For Kant, all ultimate worldviews (all systems of transcendent metaphysics, as he would have said) are unverifiable. Yet it is supremely reasonable to have one, for we must base our practical life-commitments on something, on the best we can manage as human beings. That best, for Kant, was the postulate of a supremely good and wise God, on whom the rationality of the world and of human thought, and the reasonableness and obligatoriness of morality, could be founded. We have to go beyond the evidence, for reason itself compels us to do so.

 You might say that it is deeply rational to have an ultimate worldview, but the fundamental beliefs of such a view cannot be based on any more basic evidence, for there is nothing more basic. How then can we choose? For Kant, we must choose the view that best supports our basic belief in the importance of reason, truth, and objective standards of beauty and goodness. This is a reasonable faith, but it is founded on a serious moral commitment that it is logically possible to reject.

So the history of European philosophy is not really a story of moving from proofs of God to irrational faith. It is rather a story of a clarification of the methods and limits of science (which Plato was unclear about, and Aristotle was partly wrong about), and of the basis of our most general worldviews in the sorts of practical commitment, the ways of life and moral orientation, that make possible distinctive human activities like science, morality and religion.

Whatever all this is, it is not the ending of rational thought by blind acceptance of some absolute authority. When Kant spoke of faith, he was absolutely not thinking of blind acceptance of authority. He called that 'heteronomy', subjecting your will to the will of another. In its place he called for 'autonomy' - daring to think for yourself, even about matters said to be revealed by God. Faith was in human reason and goodness, seen as founded on an ultimate reason and goodness, rooted in the nature of things.

Kant did not have much time for special revelation. But if you think the universe is founded on a supreme wisdom, beauty and goodness, it is very natural to suppose that at some specific points the character of that goodness and of the purposes it may have for the cosmos may become clearer. It is very reasonable to suppose that a being of supreme goodness would not leave humans completely in the dark about what they are meant to be and do, and about the nature of the Supreme Good itself. In a word, it is very reasonable to expect some sort of revelation of the character and purposes of God.

It is for this reason that it is wholly reasonable to think that some revelation of God has occurred in human history. That revelation will not overturn or contradict reason (except where reason is being misused). It will take human knowledge of God beyond what reason alone can establish. For most religious believers, God is not just a postulate of reason, as God was for Kant. God is one who makes the divine reality known in history and experience.

Reason and morality must still operate here, in asking what sort of revelations are reasonable and good, and which are truly irrational and morally flawed. But the interaction of reason and revelation is a two-way process - or better, a sort of spiralling from one pole (reason) to the other (revelation) and back again, seeking the balance of reasonable revelation. So in the history of Christianity there have been many Christians who have claimed special revelations from God, in dreams or visionary experiences. We have to ask whether such revelations are consistent with what we already believe of God, and with the sort of goodness we believe God has. If they contradict belief in the love of God revealed in Jesus - if, for example, they call us to kill other people - we should reject claims to revelation. But if they can be seen as developments from prior beliefs - new insights, perhaps, into the way in which slavery is in tension with love of your neighbour as yourself, or insights into the place and role of women - we may say that revelation has brought us to revise our existing moral beliefs.

So in prayer and in the experience of the church there can be new revelations of God's will. But they must be tested by their consonance with what is believed to be a definitive revelation of God, and by their coherence with the knowledge we have of the world from other sources. Revelation can expand the insights of reason, but reason must always test claims to revelation. That is why revelation is never static. It is always developing, though the limits of such development are set down by the original paradigm, in the case of Christianity, of Jesus and the Bible, the witness to his life and work.

Religion, then, is based on a world view at least as reasonable as any other. Such worldviews cannot be based on evidence, for they determine what is going to count as evidence, and how evidence is going to be interpreted.

What makes worldviews reasonable?

There are fairly clear criteria for what makes acceptance of a worldview reasonable. There are rational procedures for setting out and defending a worldview. These procedures fall into three main groups:

 First, it is desirable to aim at clarity and precision in stating the beliefs that are involved in a worldview. Such beliefs should ideally be arranged in order of logical dependence, so that one can tell which are the truly basic beliefs, how they relate to one another, and how other beliefs are derived from them.

Second, at each stage, alternatives to proposed beliefs should be identified and considered. Comparison with other worldviews is vital to forming a considered assessment of the weak and strong points of a worldview.

Third, it is necessary to test the adequacy of the worldview to the widest range of data, whether they are experiences or other beliefs. The beliefs must be consistent with one another. The scheme should be as simple as possible though it is obvious that the criteria of adequacy and simplicity may often contrast with one another, and a choice will have to be made between them in many cases. It would be unreasonable to adopt a very simple scheme that did not adequately cover all the various sorts of data that are available. The scheme should be coherent with all other knowledge. It should integrate data in an elegant, or patterned, way, so that the parts fit harmoniously into a convincing overall interpretation. Finally, the scheme should have creative power, generating new insights, approaches or paradigms, enabling data to be organised in new and more illuminating ways.

In applying these criteria, there is an important and ineliminable element of personal judgment involved. They are not rules to be applied separately and automatically. They are criteria to be balanced against each other and woven into a convincing narrative. As in all historical, legal and political judgments, rationality consists in assembling the largest array of relevant data, organising them in a clarifying manner, and in a way that is fruitful for suggesting further advances in knowledge.

In the end, all reason can do is require that these procedures are followed. It cannot dictate one agreed result, for that will depend on differing emphases laid on differing data, different organising paradigms that seem to illuminate the complexity of experience, and differing practical commitments that express basic judgments about what is important in life.

Religious worldviews are not rational because they produce overwhelming arguments that 'prove' the truth of the worldview to all competent people. They are rational because they are structured and elaborated in a critical and reflective way, using rational criteria for judgment that are always open to diverse interpretations.

In a sense, each worldview embodies a large element of judgment and faith, and there is no way of avoiding that. Religious worldviews can therefore be, and often are, as reasonable as non-religious views. Secular thinking can be as filled with prejudice, partiality and neglect of relevant data, and as intolerant of and impatient with opposition as the most narrow religious view. There is just no reasonable case for arguing that religious belief is as such irrational or unthinking. Any such view is plainly false. It is, in fact, a prime instance of irrational thinking.

(Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous?, pp. 86-98)

In defense of Agape

Our Debt to Daniel

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 03, 16 Sultan, 164 BE

Having concentrated for over a month on the theism debate, my backlog of other reading has been piling up. Finally I caved in and started auditing an audio book that I purchased a while ago from Audible.com, Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food." I do not want to review the whole book here, but suffice to say it is a devastating critique of what we should laughingly call "food science." He describes how food lobbyists corrupted first government, then science itself, until now instead of the disinterested advice that you would expect in an age where there are more scientists alive than all other past ages combined, we get an incessant flow of quasi-scientific mumbo-jumbo about carbohydrates, nutrients, fatty acids, vitamins, lipids, you name it, instead of what worked for thousands of generations, actual food.

We are trained by advertising and government to pay attention only to ingredients and talk about impressive weasel words, rather than focus on what is known indisputably to make a difference to human health: eat less, have a varied diet of mostly veggies, exercise more and -- most important -- eat meals communally to reinforce social and spiritual bonds. Although that has been known for a long time, and in spite of billions spent on improving our diet, we are getting fatter and sicker. Instead of an improved diet we get what is now being called nutritionism, a full blown ideology like communism, fascism or capitalism. Like any ideology, a mental shortcut turns into a substitute for independent thinking, which greases the works of mass manipulation.

This ideology was born when our leaders-for-hire discovered that a diet report that mentioned an actual food product, or, worse, a law that required makers of artificial foods to call their products what they are, adulterants and artificial substitutes, very influential producers got upset. They dumped every politician who dared flout them. As long as politicians depend upon anybody other than the public to finance their re-election campaigns, this will always be easy to do.

So, the Karl Marx of nutritionism is the breed of corruption that I call "gun-to-my-head democracy." Under gun-to-my-head rule, the people sell elections to the highest bidder. The winner gets to pull the trigger of the gun that we are holding to our own head. So instead of food, we got ingredients, nutrients, verbal red herrings. The Das Kapital of nutritionism decreed: never mention foods. Just talk about ingredients. Never mention health. Just talk scientistic dubieties built on dubieties, buzzwords like cholesterol, lipids, vitamins, carbohydrates and so forth.

In the 1970's that subtle but crucial ideological twist, from food to obfuscation, gave manufacturers Carte Blanche to discard long-standing restrictions and regulations designed to protect the public from additives and artificial substitutes. Formerly the Hippocratic Oath applied to food adulterants: first of all, do no harm. Now the motto is: if you can throw it in, why not go for it? It takes ten years for problems to turn up after something new is introduced, ten more years, if ever, to prove that it was responsible and another ten years for to pass laws banning it. So if you have a big enough budget you can follow the example of the cigarette and booze makers and postpone the process indefinitely.

At the same time, study after meta-study proved that any traditional diet whatever, no matter how seemingly ridiculous -- that is, the blubber-filled Inuit diet or the almost one-hundred-percent fat meals of inhabitants of the mountainous regions of Turkey -- were all far more healthful than anything that ever came out of a factory or was advertised in the media. Traditional diets do so well because they are based not on ingredients but food, whole foods, combined with a low-stress, stable lifestyle, a rural setting, lots of exercise and fresh air, strong family and social bonds, plus the synergistic spiritual benefits that come from combining all of these.

From the point of view of real evidence, any and all culturally produced foods, set in their cultural contexts, are far better than artificial substitutes, concoctions brewed by a factory or fast-food restaurant. What traditional diets had in their favor was food -- I say "had" because healthful food-based diets are being abandoned around the world in favor of the proven-unreliable industrial Western diet. The stark fact, borne out by many studies, is that those deluded by nutritionist bafflegab not only get sick more often and die sooner from what they eat; worse, they are distracted from positive measures that really would protect their health.

I cannot help but relate this to the theism controversy. Anti-theists love to point to the bloodthirsty parts of the Bible, notably the notorious passage known as "the ban," and argue that the entire holy book is obsolete and worthy only of a recycling bin.

But the fact is that the first chapter of Daniel describes a fully controlled dietary experiment that puts to shame almost all that is being done by "nutritional science" studies today. Daniel's experiment compared the expensive, high-status but essentially garbage diet, meat and wine, of Chaldean royalty with a peasant meal based on bread combined with another simple food, legumes or pulses. Pulse was a stew of lentils and other seeds, and was the staple meal of all Jews, from peasant to king. And, as any Baha'i who has attended a pot luck supplied by our Persian brothers and sisters knows, lentils remain, along with rice, the staple of the traditional Persian diet to this day.

Anyway, the Bible tells how Daniel came to the king of Babylon saying:

"Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat, and water to drink. Then let our countenances be looked upon before thee, and the countenance of the children that eat of the portion of the king's meat: and as thou seest, deal with thy servants. So he consented to them in this matter, and proved them ten days. And at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king's meat." (Dan 1:12-15)

Compare that to today.

Just as in the recent film "Supersize Me," the difference in the two diets was so spectacular that visible results were apparent within weeks. Except more so, since the modern experimental subject of "Supersize Me," Morgan Spurlock, was monitored by doctors with far more sophisticated indicators than simply looking at his face. Yet these far more sophisticated doctors look on helplessly as a worse diet than meat and wine is foisted not upon one nation or region but the entire human race.

The big difference between then and now is the development of gun-to-my-head democracy. In Daniel's experiment the producers did not finance the science, nor did they tell the shah what to think or do. So all the king had to do was observe how much healthier the pulse eaters were and mandate that diet for his entire court.

Simple.

So which is the scientific society, the traditional or the Western? Remember, today we are blessed with vastly greater numbers of scientists than then; and each of our scientists is far better schooled in more advanced scientific knowledge than the nutritionally ignorant Persians of 605 BCE ever dreamed existed. Daniel himself, we can be sure, had never heard of vitamins or cholesterol. But now special interests trump facts. As Pollan's book documents, our collective diet is far worse than in Biblical times, worse than the worst traditional diet of today.

How could this happen? After all, Daniel was a prophet, not a scientist. Yet as far as is known, he was the inventor of the controlled experiment. Not just of the controlled dietary study, but he invented the entire methodology of the double blind, controlled experiment, which of course is the heart and soul of the scientific method. Yet ironically his invention is uncredited and rarely mentioned. Here is one of the few references I found on the web:

<http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/trial_records/bc/daniel/daniel_commentary.html>

Our persistent, willful ignorance is very strange. Why is there no mention of this anywhere in our education? Even advanced history of science courses, even religious studies courses ignore the fact that the inventor of science was a prophet of God! Surely this should be taught as early as Grade Two and emphasized throughout our education. It is basic scientific and religious training, but as you can see at the following site, a married couple, one a nurse, the other a sociology professor, both highly educated, deeply devout Christians who are already committed to advocating creationism, came upon Daniel's experiment as if it were a new discovery:

<http://www.icr.org/article/327/>

This essay, "Daniel and the Classic Experimental Design," written by the husband, James William Treece, Jr., tells how he found out that Roger Bacon is credited with the invention of the controlled experiment (this of course ignores its common use by Muslim scientists for hundreds of years before that, much less by the Indians and Chinese -- but that is a prejudice for another day). Treece writes,

"Roger Bacon is considered the father of modern science. He helped to develop the methodologies for confirming or refuting hypotheses by an ethical system of gathering empirical data through systematic observations. When he published his "Opus Majus," in 1266 A.D., he described the controlled experiment as a means of acquiring scientific knowledge."

"Daniel used the classical experimental design in Nebuchadnezzar's reign, in 605 B.C., 871 years before Bacon conceived the idea... It is interesting to speculate whether Bacon may have developed the experimental method from reading Scripture. Personally, there is little doubt in my own mind that he really did discover the experimental method from reading Daniel. He was emphatic in his belief that all wisdom comes from God and personally believed that Scripture was a means of increasing faith, not a source for refuting theological arguments. `For all wisdom is from the Lord God, as the authority of the Scripture holds....'"

So, the controlled experiment came not from a university-trained scientist but a religious prophet. Are scientists grateful for their debt to religion? No, they are too busy chasing the tobacco and alcohol lobbies for funding for their latest experiment. And then the anti-theists hold up the Bible for mockery as impossibly anachronistic!

This raises many historical questions: could it be that "traditional" and "primitive" are not synonyms? Could it be that a people who have survived for more than a few hundred years on a given diet had something going for them? May they not have been improving their menus all those years, without the benefit of professional scientists? Could it be that the great faceless ones of history, women, accomplished such a thing? After all, they are the ones who cook the traditional meal. Were they innovating all those years, doing what Daniel did, watching the faces of those they fed and adjusting their diet accordingly? Is it possible that amateurs can succeed where university trained scientists and nutritionist nomenklatura are failing miserably?

And -- most to the point from a theist's point of view -- could it be that we in our scientific age might have something to learn from traditional religion as well as traditional diet? Could women have been making quiet, undocumented advances in religion over the centuries too? Could amateurs have been refining such traditional religious values as chastity, modesty, "family values", the Golden Rule, and so forth, have greater survival value for a culture than the atheism presently rampant among academics?

I have been watching on videotape a nonfiction series produced for PBS's "Frontline" called "From Jesus to Christ." It is about the early history of Christianity. While it taught me a lot, an inadequacy became evident when at one point the narrator says something like: "There were many sympathizers who were attracted to Judaism, though its strict dietary laws kept them from joining the religion. This occurred throughout the Empire because at the time there was nothing in Greek or Roman religion to compare with mealtime at a Jewish synagogue. Later, when Paul took the Christian version of this feast, known among them as the Agape, or love feast, beyond the Diaspora to new areas, the new Faith caught on rapidly." In other words, there was a need and Christianity filled it.

But hold on a minute! There was nothing like a collective meal in the religion of the time? Surely the student of history should pay careful attention to that.

How could it be that there was nothing like a coming together over a good meal happening among the supposedly tolerant polytheists of Greece and Rome? Could the anti-theists be wrong? Could religion progress over time, using an undocumented but valid version of the scientific method? Does the eventual triumph of Christianity over polytheism mean that they had something new and positive to contribute to religious thought and ways of associating? Is that --the ability to bring people of diverse classes and backgrounds together over a single meal table -- an inherent advantage of one God over many? After all, the Baha'i principle says it all; we all eat the same food, breathe the same air, and love the same God... And is not food and mealtime the perfect occasion to blend the worlds of the public and the private? If so, the earlier polytheist religions were either/or, either worship was private to a given god, or it was public piety, forced worship of the state god, but it was never both at once.

So, like traditional diets, could group innovation in the Agape love feasts of the early Christians have been kept anonymous, faceless, invisible and unrecognized even today?

The love feast remains the cornerstone of the Badi' calendar. As Abdu'l-Baha points out here, the 19 Day Feast is rooted in the Lord's Supper, which Jesus held just before offering Himself as final sacrifice on the cross,

"... make of the Feasts occasions of joy and fellowship reminiscent of the feasts that our forebears used to hold in connection with their commemoration of the Lord's Supper..." (Compilation of Compilations, vol. I, p. 428)

I do not think Baha'is are unique in this. A classic joke among Jews is that their faith is not so much a way of living as a way of eating. The ancient Zoroastrians came together to eat on calendrical feast days, as do Hindus and virtually ever faith that has grown beyond one locality and one language and culture.

 What is missing is an appreciation by educators of the crying need to teach at all levels those aspects of religion that are universal, including communal meals and feasts. An interview in the latest World Order Magazine talks about a course sponsored by the Maryland Baha'i Chair that, it seems to me, should be the model for every curriculum in the world.

"Dr. Suheil Bushrui, the first person to hold the Baha'i Chair, gave (a) key course ... on the common spiritual heritage of the human race. (It) represents the first generation of what the Chair brings that is different from most university communities. If you go to most universities and take a course on a religion, the closest you will come to an ecumenical course is comparative religion -- how is Hinduism different from Judaism?, and so on. But Dr. Bushrui does not explore how religions are different; rather, he looks below the veneer to see how they are similar, how they are all part of a common spiritual quest and a fundamental and enduring need." (John Grayzel, in World Order, 2006, Vol. 38, No. 1, p. 19)

As long as schools continue to ignore the fact that religion is part of the common spiritual heritage of the human race the ignorant will continue to chop up, misunderstand, misrepresent and calumniate religion, and believers will fail to take pride in the best aspects of their faith. To give a current example of the bloopers making it into print, the most recent anti-theist bestseller, Hitchins' "God is not Great" (I take refuge in God for repeating such a title), says that religion,

"comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species ... it is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs. Today, the least educated of my children knows much, much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion."

Of course this is the reverse of the facts, as "In Defense of Food" and the Book of Daniel both demonstrate. The founders of religion understood human dietary and spiritual needs far better than all our best scientists with their vaunted lexicon of nutritionist terms combined. And what is worse, it is unlikely that science will make any more progress unless and until it openly acknowledges its debt to religion, to God and his prophet Daniel by humbly swallowing their pride, like the Prodigal Son, and going back to start where Daniel left off.

p13 Dawkins

Wondering Mind: Has Dawkins Never Read Any Philosophy?

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 02, 15 Sultan, 164 BE

A friend sent me yesterday the following argument for positive action in response to climate destabilization on YouTube:

<http://ca.youtube.com/wonderingmind42>

I agree that everybody should watch this presentation. It was made by a science teacher using the handle "Wonderingmind" who argues that addressing climate change is the most urgent issue in the world today. Wonderingmind's video I had seen before and shown to the kids, but it was good to see it again now that I am immersed in the arguments for and against the existence of Deity. Wonderingmind makes his points at a lightning pace, but if you pay careful attention you will see flash by a reference to giant space hamsters attacking the earth. In other words, you can come up with an infinite number of dangers, real or imagined, so why pick out climate change? Why not prepare for attacks by giant space hamsters? Why not meteors wiping out all life on the planet, as has almost happened several times in earth's geological record?

The counter-argument that Wonderingmind gives in this video is long and elaborate, and in form is identical to the arguments theists make for the existence of God. First of all, let us look at the giant space hamsters that atheists use to try to nullify the grounds for believing in God. Clarence Darrow, for example, said:

"I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose."

This is an attempted Reductio Ad Absurdam, a reduction to absurdity, a riposte which in some contexts is a clear refutation. Other doubters put forward other examples, each more absurd than the one before, including Greek gods like Zeus and Apollo, the tooth fairy, Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and so forth. So effective is this tack that a group of atheists sarcastically invented and put forward a god of their own to worship, the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster. The theology is mockingly self-proving: Every time non-believers in the Spaghetti Monster think that they have disproved the existence of this monster, it sends down one of its noodly appendages and changes the books of the world to allow for it to exist. Atheist novelist Douglas Adams even proposed a "worship robot" with a deluxe version that would, for an extra fee, believe the most absurd and contradictory falsities imaginable.

 This is all based on a discovery made by David Hume in the 18th Century about the power of skepticism. Everything can be doubted; proving a negative is absolutely impossible. You cannot disprove the existence of anything, because a counter-example may turn up at any time proving that it really does exist.

 To use one example that a YouTube atheist uses, scientists believe that the dodo bird is extinct, but it is easy to doubt them, no matter how conclusive the evidence they put forward. Have you checked behind this bush for dodos? Have you checked behind every bush in the world? Have you checked the earth's core, or on other planets? There may be thriving colonies of dodos there. Until we have complete, universal knowledge, we will never know for sure that the dodo is extinct. Thus, he admits that he will never be able to prove that God does not exist. God may well be out there somewhere, no matter how flimsy the evidence may be. But, he adds, how do atheists know that there are not two gods? Or three? Or four? Or an infinity of gods? A theist cannot disprove any of them either. No theist can prove that there is not another god, that there are not any number of gods other than God, unless and until they have checked behind every bush in the universe. Somewhere a second god may be hiding behind one such book, sitting quietly, and maybe even playing cards with the last dodo bird.

 The author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, uses this ploy with great effectiveness. In this book he tells with hand-wringing glee of his encounter with theologians at a conference designed to bring scientists and believers together. The theologians ask him why is there something rather than nothing? He replies that this is to argue from improbability; the first cause may have been the basis of a self-bootstrapping crane that raised existence, but what caused that crane to come into existence? Something had to have caused that, and it must have been much more complex and difficult to explain than the thing that it caused.

 To introduce God as first cause is to build a sky hook or sky crane that is more unbelievable than the thing it tries to explain.

 Yet, Dawkins argues, there are physical explanations of the universe that do not introduce such unbelievable elements, including string theory, and Dawkins even mentions here the theist-inspired anthropic principle, which may one day be proven by actual evidence. In biology, his area of expertise, there is instead of a big sky crane a gradualistic crane that explains huge leaps called evolution. A mountain may seem to have a huge cliff, but was possible for life to scale it without a sky crane by going around to other sides of the mountain and walking up in places where the slope is easy and gradual. To suggest, Dawkins says, that the first cause, the great unknown, which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery. (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 155)

 Dawkins then gloatingly declares himself the victor, while stooping low enough towards humility to acknowledge the source of his superior argumentation,

 "I left the conference stimulated and invigorated, and reinforced in my conviction that the argument from improbability ... is a very serious argument against the existence of God, and one to which I have yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so. Dan Dennet rightly describes it as `an unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier.' A skyhook would at best simply postpone the solution to the problem, but Hume could not think of any cranes, so he caved in. Darwin, of course, supplied the vital crane. How Hume would have loved it." (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 157)

 The fact that anyone in this day and age would be persuaded by this argument -- irrefutable as it may seem at first blush -- is testament to a failure in basic training, and not just of religious understanding but most especially our philosophical education.

 The problem with extreme skepticism is that everything can be doubted, including your own existence. This was the discovery of David Hume that Dawkins does not mention. I think that I exist, and it seems very real to me, but I may not. I may really be a dream that some caterpillar on the other side of the earth is having (to use an example from Chinese philosophy that may well be what inspired Hume in this direction). If I do not take probabilities into account, any number of other explanations could take the place of my belief that I exist. In terms of Adams' novels, I could buy a doubting robot rather than a believing one, and if I buy the deluxe model I can even use it to doubt that everything, life, the universe, everything, exists in the first place. Even causation and reason themselves are quickly annihilated under its powerfully destructive killer-laser beam.

 I want to cite the refutation of Kieth Ward at length here. As both a theologian and a philosopher he is in a position to say things about his area of expertise that I, an amateur philosopher, cannot. His big question is: Has Dawkins read any philosophy at all? We have seen that Dawkins has read at least some of David Hume, but I suppose what Ward means is, "Has Dawkins read a substantial portion of Hume and reflected upon it?" Anyway, this is Ward's answer:

 "To make matters worse, thinkers like Richard Dawkins hold that, while materialism is based on painstaking research and rational thought, religious views are based on 'blind faith', some sort of leap in the dark, and so are plainly irrational and unthinking. Since ignorance is morally reprehensible, religious belief is not only based on falsehood and deceit, it is morally wrong.
 "What are we to say about this? Has Dawkins never read any philosophy? Is he not aware of the weaknesses of materialism? Is he not aware that the philosophy of common sense espoused by his favourite philosopher, David Hume, has been pretty comprehensively undermined by science? Or that Hume himself could never reconcile his commitment to sceptical reasoning, which undermined belief in causal laws and other persons as well as God, with his common sense beliefs? Does he really think that Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel were all unthinking simpletons? I believe that any reasonable person, faced with all the wide array of philosophical arguments throughout history and today, would be forced to admit that no worldview (no system of metaphysics) has gained universal consent among the informed peer group of professional philosophers." (Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous?, p. 90)

 Here we see Ward offering the same diagnosis that 'Abdu'l-Baha did of Western atheism. What atheists are propounding is a form of materialism, the belief that matter suffices to explain the material world, not to mention many other non-material things, including the accomplishments of science itself. To put it in Dawkins' terms, there is no need for a "sky crane." Only scientific evidence based on matter can be admitted as reasonable, and only the reasonable is a valid basis of belief. Ward uses its own logic to demolish materialism in three short sentences,

 "If only scientifically testable statements are reasonable, then this statement (that 'only scientifically testable statements are reasonable') is not reasonable. Conversely, if this statement is reasonable, then some statements are reasonable that are not scientifically testable. So the statement is either unreasonable or false." (Is Religion Dangerous? p. 86)

 This statement, that `only scientifically testable statements are reasonable,' is not only either unreasonable or false, but it also contradicts itself, since much of science, notably mathematics, is entirely rooted in the imagination and will ever be utterly un-testable save by aesthetic judgments. Yet mathematics infuses modern science more pervasively than the idea of Spirit infuses monotheism. Worse, from the anti-theist point of view, Twentieth Century science made one discovery after another of one bound of uncertainty after the next, proofs that evidence not only does not suffice, but never can, and never will suffice, ever.

 "As good basically Humean empiricists, they thought that all proper human knowledge had to be based on confined to objects of sense -- experience. This rules out God, and spiritual reality, by definition. Many of us think that it rules of mathematics, quantum physics, objective moral truths, and a great deal else too -- perhaps an even rules out other people, as subjects of consciousness. Anyway, these investigators, not because of science, but because of their basic philosophical outlook, regarded religion as based on an illusion, as a fantasy." (Ward, Is religion dangerous?, 16)

 Yet such has been the failure of modern religions to cooperate that in spite of this vast body of evidence against it, materialists continue to trounce theologians, as Dawkins recounts in his "God Delusion." By some estimates atheism is the fastest growing "religion" in the world; in the United States alone it has gone from 8 to 15 percent of the population in the past decade alone. Materialism does not progress by evidence, by its own merits, but by the failure of believers to make anything substantial or valuable out of their own collective convictions. As long as theists cling to infighting and exclusivism, their god will continue to lose out to the Giant Spaghetti Monster, for there will be nothing to choose between them.

 "Many of the most important beliefs we have in life are not scientifically testable, but we still live our whole lives by them. I have beliefs, about what happened in history, about whether my partner loves me or not, about what sorts of acts are morally right, about what sorts of music are of the greatest worth, about what political policies we should adopt, about whether I can trust my friends. There are thousands of things I believe that are not scientifically testable. Quite a lot of them, I hope, are reasonable - though some may be based on ignorance or prejudice.
 "I cannot think of any general rule that would tell me just what makes a belief reasonable, or such that I can justifiably hold it. But I know that some of my beliefs are so basic to my life that they are the keystones of my whole outlook on life. If they collapsed, I would be a different person. I have no real evidence for them, but they are foundational to how I think and act. Examples would be: there is some explanation, whether scientific or not, for every event that happens (things do not happen for no reason). Human beings are basically good and well-meaning, but they are also subject to terrible corruptions of greed, hatred and ignorance. People ought to consider the welfare of others, and ideally of all other sentient beings, at least to some extent. And I would add: it is appropriate to feel awe and reverence at the beauty and complexity of nature, to feel gratitude for the fact of existence, and to sense the presence of some sort of transcendent power and value in moments of understanding truth, appreciating beauty and enjoying friendship. These are unevidenced basic beliefs, beliefs by which we live." (Is Religion Dangerous?, p. 86)

 Ultimately, the real test of value in matters of faith, that is, what makes the One True God more worthy of belief in the eyes of “other minds” than, say, the Giant Spaghetti Monster, is indirect, but it is scientific nonetheless. It is what Hatcher called the science of religion, the ability of one group's God to prove more effective for the common good than that of another. The argument, then, is the same as that for addressing climate destabilization: which of several uncertainties is the least uncertain? As long as theologians cannot point to a world parliament of religions where people of faith agree upon common grounds for religious progress, the anti-theists will continue to trounce them.

 

tpm Moon

In Which I Discover the Moon

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 01, 12 Sultan, 164 BE

Our almost-daily children's classes have been blessed by a new addition, a book on the obligatory prayers called "Discovering the Moon, by Jacqueline Mehrabi, just sent to us by the BDS. On the back cover it quotes Baha'u'llah,

"Verily, the religion of God is like unto heaven; fasting is its sun, and obligatory prayer is its moon."

The blurbs implied that it is a good book for pre-youth about to come of age at fifteen, when the "moon" becomes obligatory. I had thought of getting the book as a present for Silvie on her fifteenth birthday, but I am glad I ordered it now, a year and a half beforehand. Both Silvie and eight-year-old Tomaso are enjoying it. Silvie is becoming a skilled comic book artist, and draws several panels while I read the two chapters per session. Thomas tends to be more tangential in his vision. My favorite picture of his shows a massive electro-magnet (the world) and a Baha'i being drawn towards it by an inexorable magnetic force. Behind him is Abdu'l-Baha running another machine that is projecting a force field before the Baha'i, protecting him from being sucked in.

I plan to collect the illustrations they have made for the novel and make them available to you on the Web somehow. Anyway, I am learning a lot about the Long Obligatory prayer from this book; I had no idea of the power Baha'u'llah promised that it will unleash. It is an especially good time to read this now that I am in dialog with anti-theists, for I am coming to realize how necessary it is to demonstrate more than dry theory to these people. I feel that I must do the long obligatory prayer to make my arguments count for more than words on top of words.

Long ago I gained an aversion to saying the Long Obligatory Prayer, probably because holding your head down can provoke a migraine in those susceptible, when weather conditions are wrong. But reading Discovering the Moon encouraged me to try again. There was no question of my saying it every day, so I tried every other day.

I do not know what bounties and fresh release of spiritual power I was expecting, but I found that on the days when I did say it, things were tougher than the alternate days I did not. Little things conspired to make them especially hard, tough choices, unpleasant moral dilemmas, tiny goads that I cannot put a finger on or tell you about. I was taken aback, then thought, why not? I am praying for tests, tests are a healing medicine, so let me persist.

"The companions of all who adore Thee are the tears they shed, and the comforters of such as seek Thee are the groans they utter, and the food of them who haste to meet Thee is the fragments of their broken hearts." (Prayers and Meditations, 155)

 And besides, the Taylor motto is: "A Taylor never quits," so you are not going to see me quitting when things get unpleasant. Then, with yesterday's long oblig day, the release of spiritual power jacked itself up to a whole new level.

 The kids have been sick with some virus. Thomas has been normal, except that periodically he vomits. Silvie was dragged down by an enervating condition and has been able to attend school only one day this week. One result is that our sleep schedules are messed up. I woke very early and then at 6:30 AM I went back to bed and woke again an hour later with a vivid dream, almost a vision. I dreamed that I was working on two computers, one a normal one and the other a long, lathe-like machine that I had converted into a computer too.

 I looked over at the first computer and saw that its fan was knocking. Then it banged, and finally flew apart and exploded, with parts flying in every direction. I thought, "I hope the computer knows enough to shut down before it overheats." It did, but then out of the fan floated a sort of transparent orb.

 It seemed like a ghost, and not a nice one. It went over to the second computer, floated, and then sank into the guts of the machine. Then it turned it on and took it over, like a computer virus. Turning the on/off switch did not help, but there was a big black power switch and I hit it. This did shut it off and the orb immediately floated out and began floating in my general direction. I wondered what would happen if the ghost went inside me. I put my face up against it and it passed into me, down my gullet and into my innards. I woke up amazed.

 Then I remembered my long obligatory prayer. I said it and worked on scanning all morning, hoping to get something written in the afternoon. At exactly ten to one, the aching bones of a flu hit. I was worse every minute, miserable all day. Marie was working that evening, so I had the kids on my hands. Silvie was on her second week of a martial arts course (based on a system invented by the actor Bruce Lee) that she is taking Thursday evenings at the Youth Center -- to my surprise, Thomas was not interested. I got them there and back, and had to go to straight to bed. I turned on the DVD player and, long story short, had an awful night of fever and vomiting. No Baha'i class that evening.

I can hardly wait till tomorrow to find out how much further the bounties can be ramped up. God will find a way.