Starting the Discussion

We need to understand the words we use if we are to understand what we want to discuss. I just opened a new blanket for Margaret. It is stamped: Single. It is huge for the daybed. I just now looked at the sheet that I bought a couple of weeks ago: Twin. Our king sized sleep number bed is composed of two twin beds. The day bed is a twin, not a single! But only one single person can sleep on it.

[One day later: The blanket is stamped Twin!!!! I had “single” in mind and therefore saw Single. I have had this problem for years. I must always edit, sometimes several times, what I write and listen to what I am saying.]

The above mix-up occurred in two days. This discussion will cover over just the last 2,000 years of a biological history that extends over millions of years. Yet each day was, at one time, today. Our physical environment has been changing. Our bodies have been changing. It is valid to view the same thing differently at different times.

There is a common set of relationships, over time, in what, how, and when we choose to believe:

Follow or Copy Belief	Choose to Believe	Modify Belief
Growing Up or Learning in Stable Environment		Changing Environment

There is also a common practice to limit a belief for the benefit of the person or person’s in charge. The cell phone with camera and the Internet are removing these old limits. Are whites, blacks, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, uneducated, educated, rich, poor, illegal aliens or Native Americans the “enemy” or is the “enemy” mainly a mutual ignorance of life in general and the lack of will to provide for the common good of all groups? Schooling must be more than job training.

The meditation class at Provision Living provides an insight into how to actually do this. Chair yoga and tai chi provide additional connections between physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions. Fitness classes provide a new useful awareness of body including strength and balance.

I now know when I am sitting up correctly. I can now be at the center of the world (almost pain free) without needing to be in-pain, stressed, and in charge.

A recent example for all of this is the answer to the question, “What is a modern day (today in 2017) Jew? This maligned group of people can no longer be defined as a race by blood (because of intermarriage and conversion), as a single belief in God (about half in Israel are secular), or as mostly living in a nation. The realities of history no longer fit them into classical European nations with defined boarders.

The Unites States of America is no longer a nation of classical European nation immigrants. Margaret and I found San Antonio, Texas, a bit puzzling. Several groups of Mexican descent live there: Recent wealth from Mexico was building in the Northwest; poor lived in the Southeast, old families and new arrivals.

In summary, it is very difficult to say anything about religion, economics, and politics that covers more than a small specific situation. Each strongly influences the other. With this in mind, I will start working on a meaningful discussion (for me) on the foundation of current practice and understanding of religious beliefs.

I continue to accept the idea that a God does exist: acts of God. These remain things we insure against that we do not understand or understand but have little if any control over. We understand hurricanes, tornadoes, flood plains, and seat belts. We are only beginning to understand addiction: drugs (including tobacco).

I continue to accept that one should be thankful for being alive. Without a belief in the immortality of the sole our life after death is the same as before we were conceived: a monarch butterfly or a milkweed plant.

I continue to accept that the process by which God created the current state of affairs will continue for millenniums. The more we learn, the more miraculous it becomes. This also applies to the human brain and to God talking to man.

There was a time before God spoke to man. The human brain developed two lobes, that function much alike, on top of the ancient brain of “lower” mammals. The two lobes communicated with connective fibers. This is still more the case with women than men.

Then the right lobe started taking a new function. Speech and writing remained in the left lobe. This, it is posited, made space in the right lobe to develop the process of making useful the sensory inputs that did not have be to conscious.

We are not conscious of most mental activity. The right lobe became a command center. It used words to alert the left lobe to do something.

Commands heard from the group leader were acted upon before introspection was possible. In time, the right lobe became the source of commands. External commands were replaced by internal commands.

There was no questioning of these commands: external or internal. Now God spoke through these internal commands.

With further development of the brain and the ability to be introspective, the voice of God receded. Only prophets and then oracles were receptive. Then silence.

The brain as we know it now has been created by a God, over a million years, that various religions populate with a myriad of powers and intentions.

The founding fathers of the United States of America believed in a God that created the universe and everything in it, but did not micromanage things. They were adamant that church be separated from state. Theocrats had no privilege in standing or ability to run a nation over other citizens.

I can agree with this, after visiting our granddaughter attending the University of Virginia. I learned that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were classified as Deists: “God gave us reason, not religion.” They believed in the moral teachings of Jesus but not his divinity. George Washington is reported to be a mix of Deism and Christian beliefs. I can agree with that.

How can I agree? Because what we choose to believe, is what is, on faith alone. Hypnotism is now believed to be mostly a matter of faith in the hypnotist. The same goes for the illusionist. Margaret and I watched elephants vanish before our eyes in Los Vegas. Suicide also narrows vision and concern to a minute point weakly connected to reality.

Belief can overpower reason, knowledge, understanding and pain. When my back pain again started to increase last month, just a bit each day, I then stopped all activity the past couple of weeks related to pain and worked only on fitness exercises that made me feel good. Once again, I feel good on leaving each class, I believe in part, because I want to feel good rather than to respond to (paint out) pain. [Painting out pain was a great idea but it did not last.]

Christ asked for complete faith, as a child. Trust me. I am the only way. He has not returned in 2000 years. As a child I believed, as my parents, friends and acquaintances did.

Margaret and I were approached by a man as we left a grocery store. He had a $2000 check that he needed to cash. If we would give him $500 for expenses, he would cash the check and split with us. He wanted to give us something so we could trust he would return. We did not believe, as we knew something about banking, and we had two boxes of butter pecan ice cream melting in the cart.

Christ asked for our trust on faith alone. No other conditions. The conman felt the need to bribe us.

The church sold indulgences in the Middle Ages to finance building the cathedrals in Europe. Time off purgatory can now also be earned on the Internet.

What the common folk believe, and the brain needed for that belief, still needs to be isolated and described. I do know it will not be a one-size-fits-all answer.

I hope to find it in (or generate it from) the mix of views from the books I have been reading mentioned earlier: brain anatomy, development, and function; feeling and emotion; two origins of consciousness; and Judeo-Christian holy books.

What We Believe

Yesterday the Internet streaming from The Crossing church service included, “What is your favorite Bible verse?” There are many Bible verses to pick from.

The first that came to me is, “I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, he who believes in Me has eternal life.” John 6:47

Another is, “Truly I say to you, whoever does not accept and receive and welcome the kingdom of God like a little child shall not in any way enter it. Luke 18:17

And another is, “Jesus answered him. I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, unless a person is born again he cannot ever see the kingdom of God.” John 3:3

Some 2000 years have passed since that was written. It is as valid today as it was when written, but we know a lot more about God’s ever developing playground: earth, and the creatures living there, and their manners of writing that now replace oral traditions. 

Powerful computer analyses now help set dates and facts in the Old Testament that can be confirmed by archeological digs. See, The Minds of the Bible Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness by Rabbi James Cohn, 2014, in ebook locations 542-566. [My first ebook!]

One of the first things I did, when teaching the new campus computer system to do useful things for me, was to teach it to help score sets of 120 single page biology class essays. On pass one, it chewed each essay into a pile of single word phrases. It now knew the vocabulary.

On the next set of passes it collected phrases containing more than 3-5 words in each essay. It now knew relationships (the very very beginning of understanding). It now has 120 sets of relationship phrases. 

The computer next compared the vocabulary and relationships from the first essay, with the remaining 119 essays. This almost exceeded the capacity of the computer.

The computer then read the essays and printed a ranking, created from the sum of common phrases, at the end of each sentence. The first essay was compared to the other 119 essays. The second essay was compared with the remaining 118, and so on. 

I then read the essays with the duplicates flagged. The same long phrase found in only two of the 120 essays indicates a lack of originality.

Students were puzzled by how their scrambling of sentences and of paragraphs  was still detected as duplicates. The computer had no sense of a time line or place, just a pile of phrases from each essay;it was not limited by time or place. Computer analyses of the Old Testament do include time and archeological space.

My work ended when students discovered they only needed to include about three misspelled words to set each essay apart from the others. Spell check had not been invented.

But the program became very useful in summarizing Margaret’s advanced degree in education questionnaires. It told us what nurses were thinking about and the relationship between their concerns and staff positions. Preadaptive evolution is for a structure coming into being for one purpose (that may or may not continue) that then goes on to serve another.

My own analysis of the Bible started when I was about 10 years old. It took most of one summer to read. The Old Testament is very blood thirsty. The New Testament puzzled me in that what is written and how people acted seemed at odds.

Our little Methodist church split over a scandal that I no longer remember (if I ever knew) shortly after a very clear memory of batting another child over the head with a sand box screener. My parents did not belong to the group that held on to the building.

Little kids do not understand but do pick up on feelings. My mom commented one day to the effect that the churchwomen doing the bizarre thought nothing of asking her to furnish a number of dressed chickens ready for baking. Besides the birds were free since we raised them and did not have to buy them at the meat market.

My amateur missionary work in the Air Force came to an end when my leader wanted to save all the Japanese he could, but since they killed his brother, he wanted them to burn in hell, a bit anyway. Nor was I into speaking in tongues. Our off base Methodist minister was dismissed because he opposed one-arm bandits being newly installed in open storefronts.

Visits to churches, temples and shrines in Japan, Philippines, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and India ended my calling to the ministry when my enlistment was up, at the age of 24. I enrolled in two summer courses at MU: psychology and chemistry in 1955. Chemistry won out.

I wanted an education and a job. How do we explain, understand, the world we live in? Margaret and I met at the First Baptist Church where she was in charge of the college age group and I was a church mouse the last two years before graduating and marrying.

It is with this background that I now try to make sense out of the past by combining several different views from within and outside traditional groups of believers. If I have learned one thing, "leading" theologians and prophets, in general, are associated with people with sufficient wealth (time and money) to live isolated lives. [They are not the unknown and forgotten millions who only leave behind "folk traditions" and children.]

I can say the same thing about my 30 years associated with NWMSU. I was in the middle of things that had important consequences that I was mostly unaware of. Time, monarch butterflies, and friends at Provision Living are now changing that.

Who We Are

Margaret and I are facing the final question of who we are. We know a lot about who we have been in the erratic passage of time.  The future will soon be different.

I have been reading comparative histories of religion, and the origin of consciousness, as well as, attending a Tuesday morning university extension Osher Lifelong Learning Institute class on Faith in the Face of Tyranny by Larry Brown with another resident this semester. These make my understanding of theology and of believing very out of date.

Believing without knowledge and understanding limits us to the past when we, and our families, need to be preparing for the future. We analyze the past as a good basis for living now and in the future.

Fortunately we experienced the large community non-denominational praise singing churches in San Antonio and Chicago with our kid’s families. Martin Luther liberated congregations by translating the New Testament into German.

Community churches remove denominational flavors and hymns in what appears to be a way of returning to Old Testament music and praises. [Hymns have a very long life; hundreds of years. Praises go out of date in a couple of years; have a much higher market value.]

Who we are has very practical applications in justifying how we treat people with dementia, hospice, and the timing of selected end of life events.

[The son of a resident in the next apartment just stopped by as I am writing. He too is concerned where to put his mother on leaving the hospital after a second fall and second broken hip operation.]

The Axial Age, between 900 to 200 BCE (or about 600 BCE) sets the scene for the creation of the major religions. This is history. These faiths have been edited with every major crisis. They all profess love, peace, and helping the unfortunate.

The cultures into which we were born and raised were Methodist and Southern Baptist. Just about 15 years ago Southern Baptist split off the traditional faith into the Cooperative Baptist when the Southern Baptist demanded a signed creed oath. Theology maintains the church property. Spirituality follows theology. The believers practice the faith. Understand, know, and believe.

“Spirituality helped us survive. However, belief in a supernatural being wasn’t necessary and thus religion has taken many forms around the world ...” in An Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman, 2004, p. 62.

Trade networks in the Middle East gave rise to wealth that was not distributed and evenly shared as in nomadic tribes and early agriculture. As an example, this gave rise to Islam in an attempt to end endless warring, to take resources, rather than to share resources. 

It has been some 2000 years later that Europe came to this idea with the common euro currency now used in 19 nations. “The ultimate effect of the introduction of coinage was … an ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other religion.” In Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, 2011, p. 249.

“”Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God” developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.”” In A History of God by Karen Armstrong, 1993, p. 27. Also see The Great Transformation, 2006, 365 pages.

This is history, as it is currently known. It does not supply the biology behind the Axial Age. How did we get from first man, traveling in groups of a dozen or two with a strong leader and who left their dead behind, to rational man living in cities of millions of residents who care for their dead?

The Origin of Consciousness in the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind by Juian Jaynes, 1990, 2nd Edition, 491 pages, presents a novel idea based on the current understanding of ancient texts (including the Old Testament) and changes in the biology of the human brain during the Axial Age. The introspective brain (questioning) replaced the bicameral brain (doing) now only 2,500 years ago.

Conditions needed to develop both outside and inside our bodies for man to be able to hear God's words and then to no longer hear God’s words. The age of prophets is now closed in New Testament times. Rich oral tradition has been replaced by anemic written word. (See The Minds of the Bible Speculations on the Cultural Evolution of Human Consciousness by Rabbi James Cohn, 2014.) 

Chapter 11, Two Origins of Consciousness by Bill Rowe in Gods, Voices and the Bicameral Mind edited by Marcel Kuijsten, 2016, p 153-174, compares evolution and education. The brain had to evolve, in general, but each person develops a brain related to the environment and to how the brain is used: just copy (memorize) or introspective. 

This looks surprisingly like the change seen in underprepared college students after three experiences with knowledge and judgment scoring of multiple-choice tests. 

Expected           More than half mark and are mostly right.
Misconception  More than half mark and are mostly wrong.
Discriminating  Less than half mark and are mostly right.
Guessing           Less than half mark and are mostly wrong

Strong beliefs lead to misconceptions that are difficult to manage: Ice is more dense than water; ice is hard. Yet, every grade school student knows that ice floats on water. It takes an introspective mind to be discriminating and to know what you have yet to learn. 

Anyone can mark each question. Traditional multiple-choice requires it and thus promotes lower levels of thinking. Luck on test day even spikes the score with 25% right marks on four-option questions, on average.

Practiced self-judgment produces active, introspective, self-correcting scholars from passive pupils. Learning for your self by questioning and answering is a lot more fun than rote memorizing nonsense for a multiple-choice test.

As I study these thousands of pages, I am getting the impression that the chicken does not replace the egg. We need them both. Creation is not finished. Today we need both praises and hymns. I will post again as I learn more to understand what I know and what I just believe.

League of Black Collegians Workday

A figure of speech is a word or phrase that has a meaning other than the literal meaning. It can be a metaphor or simile. “My heart is beating.” is literal, an observable fact: 60 beats per minute.

A word or phrase used in a non-literal sense for rhetorical or vivid effect. “My heart is beating for you.” Is an expression of affection or support that does not have to have any knowledge of beats per minute. It sounds nice and can have a variety of effects related to real and imaginary situations. Metaphors are tricky.

Saturday our building manager volunteered to spike the 50 holes for milkweed with a large iron bar. I said, “If you hit a large rock, just move over a ways from the flag placed by the city conservationist. The flag does not represent the exact location for the hole.”

But the ground now has a number of large rocks on the surface. He did move over a ways. He put the bar at the edge of each offending rock and rolled it out rather than find a spot without a large rock. The rocks add something to the otherwise monotonous landscape. We thought we understood one another, but we did not. “Move over a ways” (1) to dig the hole and (2) to dig through rock, produce different results when accomplishing the same task.

Sunday I had this in mind when 30 members of the League of Black Collegians (LBC), MU, where here to plant the 50 milkweeds on the Provision Living Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary. I never labeled a team member with a shovel as the digger.

Several members had their music playing. I asked one, “Is that from the Internet or stored on your phone?” “On my phone.”

There is then more to metaphor than a term or phrase that changes meaning over time within a culture. Meaning also is related to who is the speaker and who is the listener, and the immediate situation, along with what is known of the history of usage (Jaynes, 1990). We both heard the same words.

Time and knowledge are constantly evolving new cultures (and leaving others behind). Without a common language being taught in schools (a fad, not too distant in the past, was for some schools to teach with the jargon used in the community) and common experiences growing up, a nation can only hope for the best, that people will strive to optimize their perceived needs in the short term, that promote the long term general welfare (LBC).

The Multicultural Mizzou Timeline from creation of the University in 1839 until now points out that new people from different cultures do not disappear into one look-alike and act-alike group. These students cannot be exactly like me nor can I be exactly like them. We speak different (English) languages and use different metaphors or the same metaphors with different meanings stretched out over 60 years.

We can learn to be friends and help each to succeed. The volunteer workday was a success in several ways. I was shocked to finally realize that the first black student to enter MU was the year I enlisted in the air force in 1950.

That GI Bill got me a PhD. The CBL is also promoting education, as the way out of poverty, and the ability to control one’s own affairs.

CBL October 15 photos.

Jaynes, Julian, 1990. The Origin of Consciousness in the Break Down of the Bicameral Mind, 2^nd Ed. 491 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York.