^{Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, 25th Inf. Div. (L) commander, addresses some soldiers in Iraq, before their departure to Mosul, where they will conduct combat operations for the upcoming Iraqi elections (Jan 05).}

If god exists or not is a question I have given up asking. I live my life without a god and, with the possible exception of Sunday morning, the way I live my life doesn’t seem to be any different from the way most Christians do. I do live my life with a sense of Wonder; a sense that there is more to life than what we see and I like to call that Unknowable, the Divine.

I admire people who believe in a god…as long as they hold that belief lightly. I also admire people who do not believe in god and hold that belief lightly. What I do not admire is people who think they know god and know what god wants; people who know how god wants us to have sex or who know that god wants us to fly jets into buildings. But I also don’t admire people who want to blame everything on religion and believe the world would be peachy keen if we all lived like secular Americans with a separation of  church and state  (interestingly enough, it always seems to be somebody else’s belief that is the problem). I don’t admire people who think that life in the United States is the only right way of life and are willing to kill for it. Not kill to defend themselves when attacked like we were in WWII, mind you; but to go out and kill somebody because they don’t have our values of capitalism or the sanctity of life.

These thoughts were rekindled on this bright and sunny Sunday when I was directed to an article in The National Catholic Review through a post in The Dish by Andrew Sullivan & Co. The article said what I have been thinking and I want to pass it on because it says it much better than I can. Here are a couple of tidbits that catch a little of the flavor of the article but the entire article is very much worth reading (if you ever think about these sort of things).

Westerners are fascinated by the nexus of “religion and violence.” War on behalf of nationalism and freedom and oil and other such mundane secular matters hardly counts as violence at all. At the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar in 2007, nearly four years into the U.S. occupation of Iraq, David Satterfield, senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq in the office of the U.S. Secretary of State, gave a speech condemning those in Iraq “who try to achieve their goals through the use of violence.” As the journalist Rami Khouri sardonically commented, “As if the U.S. had not used weapons when invading Iraq!”

What is important for our present purposes is to see how the religious/secular divide functions in our public discourse about violence. It serves to draw our attention toward certain types of practices—Islam, for example—and away from other types of practices, such as nationalism. Religion is the bogeyman for secular society, that against which we define ourselves. We have learned to tame religion, to put it in its proper, private place; they (Muslims, primarily) have not. We live in a publicly secular and therefore rational society; they have not learned to separate secular matters like politics from religion, and so they are prone to irrationality. We hope they will come to their senses and be more like us. In the meantime, we reserve the right periodically to bomb them into being more rational.

Check it out.

Last Thursday, Michele took me to see a talk by the Right Reverend Marc Handley Andrus – the  Eighth Episcopalian Bishop of California – Healer Jill Purce, and  Dr. Rupert Sheldrake at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I really went to see Sheldrake who was the only one of the three that I had heard of. More importantly, I went to see him because Rupert – I think I can call him Rupert because that is how Michele, who met him at Hollyhock a couple off years ago, introduced him to me – is a genius at the same level as Alfred Wegener. Or Charles Darwin, for that matter. I first read Rupert’s Theory of Morphic Resonance a little more than twenty years ago and it has both enriched my life beyond any expectation and come to inform my thinking on almost every subject.

I have never heard or read Rupert describing The Morphic Field as being The Cloud, but I think that is an good description. Conventional Wisdom says that the universe is like a machine: its composition, morphology, and actions are all a result of mechanical processes built into the machine itself. It says we grow into who we become because of the DNA we have at birth. Morphic Resonance says that it is more complicated, it says that information is carried outside of us in a Morphic Field that is both influenced by us and that, in turn, influences us.

The Conventional Wisdom says that there are universal, unchanging, physical laws such as the  gravitational constant – known as the Big G – or the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second). The problem is that, when tested, these constants change. Scientists, like anybody else who holds a strong belief, say that their belief is correct so the measurements must be wrong. But the constants actually do fluctuate and Rupert says that is because they are more like universal Habits that are not locked in. There was no gravity before the Big Bang  because there was nothing to have gravity on. After The Big Bang, a couple of particles were attracted together and they, in turn, influenced another particle to be attracted. Gravity was born, not as an Universal Law, but as a Habit. In other words, as the Universe unfolded, it developed the Habit we call Gravity. This process of the first two particles influencing another particles is what Rupert calls Morphic Resonance and it operates on everything and builds with repetition. The more similar any two anythings are, the more they Resonate.

( The Big Bang was first used by Fred Hoyle to bad mouth what he thought was a ridiculous theory on the life of the universe (the Big Bang is now considered fact, but then Hoyle thought it was ridiculous because it didn’t agree with his, then more widely accepted,  theory of a steady state universe). Last Thursday, I noticed that both Rupert and the Rt. Rev. Andrus referred to the Big Bang as The Great Unfolding so I will too.)

Another example of the Morphic Field influence is the formation of crystals. As crystals are formed by precipitating from a solution, we can tell what material the crystals are by their shape. Quartz, or fluoride, or tourmaline, or any crystal has its own distinctive crystalline pattern; not because of any mathematical or universal law that anybody has been able to fathom. The Habit of that material is to form in that distinctive pattern because, at random, the first time the material precipitated, it formed in that structure and then got in the Habit.

Everything Resonates and is both influenced and influences. We are corporal beings, mammals, and primates and, as such, we resonate with other physical matter – we are influenced by Gravity, for example – with other mammals, and other primates, in our behavior and morphology. Roger Bannister running a four minute mile enables future runners to easier run four minutes miles by changing the Morphic Field.

Conventional wisdom says that the universe – by analogy – is a machine with no purpose but Rupert says that the Universe and all its parts  are better thought of as  Organisms. A machine is non-thinking and can not self-replicate or self organize. An Organism – by definition – does self-replicate and self organizes towards the increasingly complex. Atoms form molecules, molecules form cells, cells form living things, and on and on until – so far – we have sentient beings. The Universe, and everything in it, is self organizing toward complexity, towards us.

Going to see Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, for me, was somewhat of a pilgrimage. What I expected was to go to a lecture in a classroom associated with the actual Grace Cathedral, but, it turned out, we were directed to the Grace Cathedral Choir area making it even more pilgrimage-like.

There were about one hundred of us sitting sitting in the Great Quire listening to, what I am not-sure-to-call, a religious experience, a performance, or a lecture – a little of all three, I guess – and, while that was going to be the point of this post, I think I will continue it in a couple of days and a little more thought.