Tag Archives: science and spirituality
The last two weeks have been (by my lazy easy-going retirement standards) unusually productive. Two big and long-standing items off my TODO list — a huge relief. As a good friend said, getting stuff done feels so good you have to wonder why we let things go so long.
For me, a lot of it is sheer laziness. Often, something needs to break through to Urgent Level before I’ll get around to dealing with it. (I’d rather read and doing stuff cuts into my reading time.) There is also the subliminal fear things won’t go well, or will be a pain or, as has often been the case, a disappointment.
But regardless, time for another edition of Friday Notes.
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7 Comments | tags: awe, Enterprise Car Rental, Ford Fusion, plumbing, science and spirituality, trees | posted in Friday Notes
When I started this blog back in 2011, it was always my intention to write about the Yin and Yang of our physical reality and a putative metaphysical one. Call it programming if you wish, but I have a life-long commitment to the perceived reality of the latter. I have a faith, deliberately irrational though it be.
I also have a life-long commitment to science and the physical world, and I’ve never had much trouble reconciling the two. That’s the thing I’ve been wanting to write about; how a spiritual life is not contrary or exclusive to a scientific one.
In fact, I believe they are the Yin-Yang of a complete person.
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9 Comments | tags: God, science and spirituality, science fiction, spirituality | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
“Space is big. Really big.”
When I started blogging here, one of the first bloggers I followed was Robin, of Witless Dating After Fifty. Over the years, she’s several times mentioned a great question her dad often posed when discussing religion with someone: “How big is your god?”
Last week my buddy and I were having our weekly beer- and gab-fest and our (typically very meandering) conversation came to touch on the problems with young Earth creationism — the Christian fundamentalist idea that the universe is only thousands of years old.
In fact, there’s a pair of real whopper problems involved!
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46 Comments | tags: atheism, creationism, deism, galaxy, God, science and spirituality, solar system, spirituality, stars, Sun, theism, universe, young Earth creationism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
Despite the title, this post isn’t as strongly related to the previous three as the naming convention suggests. I don’t really have much to say about religious predestination. If anything, my views on spirituality are key to a belief in free will and choice. The religion I was raised in seems (at least to my eye) quite clear that we are allowed to choose our actions.
The connection to those other posts lies in picking up the thread of physical determinism — normally a necessarily atheist point of view — and doing a riff on religion, spirituality and atheism. This is the post I started to write last Sunday when my mind took off in a completely different direction.
This time I’m going to try sticking to the subject!
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66 Comments | tags: atheism, atheists, beliefs, Dawkins Scale, deism, Dogma (movie), God, Grand Canyon (movie), ideas and beliefs, materialism, physicalism, science and spirituality, Spinoza, spirituality, theism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
A while ago, a popular mass-produced beer had some commercials that revolved around the line, “Why ask why?” While most beer commercials seem on the stupid side to me anyway (one brand’s only selling point seems to be “coldness”), those especially bugged me. Actually, as I recall, the commercials were pretty cute; it was the idea that asking Why? is pointless that bugged me.
I believe that asking Why? is a uniquely human trait. Animals accept existence; humans question it. And while there is a certain important Zen-like quality to accepting existence, I believe the questions are also important.
Science is really nothing more than the process of asking Why?
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12 Comments | tags: Carl Perkins, communication, dumb mistakes, dumb questions, Frankenstein, questions, science and spirituality, spirituality, Terry Pratchett, why, why ask why | posted in Science
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