Superstition

I have at times lamented that while far too many songs vainly repeat the theological conditioning of their originating cultures, precious few recount any sort of freethought -- and of those, fewer still which could be deemed downright funky. True, John Lennon enabled us to "Imagine" no religion, and Rush invited us to exercise Free Will. But it was not until I entered the lyrics catalog of Stevie Wonder that I discovered the perfect freethinkers song sitting there all along under my nose -- and it is a funkalicious song, and it has an awesome message.

The inspiration:

It all began in 1972, with the then-22 year old musician seeking to step out of the shadow of Ray Charles, whom he had been cast by the music industry as a younger version of, partly for his sound and undeniable talent as both a pianist and a singer, but mostly for his coincidental blindness. In a jam session with Jeff Beck for the production of what would eventually be Stevie's starmaking album, Talking Book, Beck came out with a novel drumbeat, immediately inspiring Stevie's writing of a bass part, to be played on his "funky, dirty, stinky, nasty instrument" -- the clavinet. Other musical elements followed, the rise and fall of the trumpets trumpeting notes, sometimes stairstepping, sometimes flowing close to free jazz until all come winding together in a chaotically, beautifully layered ending.

The Execution:

Here is an original studio-recording version:



And here's a later, faster version:



The song launches itself with what has become one of the most iconic bass lines known to music, a variation of a conventional run up and down the pentatonic scale made wild by the interspersing of ghost notes between the scale notes. This is shortly joined by a small but potent section of brass instruments. And then Stevie starts singing, tearing into lyrics, "Very supersititous, writing's on the wall," which give the song meaning above and beyond the greatness of the music itself. Now, Stevie could've taken this masterfully funkalicious tune and turned out a song with lyrics on most any subject, for example those most ubiquitous themes of the genre, love, sex, and just plain partying. But he instead chose superstition as the theme, excoriating by name irrational belief in such fanciful flights as bad luck from walking under a ladder ('ladder's 'bout to fall'), triskadekaphobia ('thirteen month old baby'), and breaking of mirrors ('broke the looking glass'), the last event being followed by 'seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past'.

This overall sentimentation is then most powerfully reflected in the repeated refrain:

When you believe in things
That you dont understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition aint the way

An almost primal singing scream is arced by double-tracking over the words, 'then you suffer,' almost a lamentation of suffering on its own. In the next verse, he interestingly includes 'wash your face and hands,' though not typically a superstition, certainly something done to a superstitious degree by some, especially germaphobes and the OCD-stricken. This line may be read to suggest a biblical reference as well, as does the earlier line 'the writing's on the wall. After another refrain comes something else which seems telling about the song as a whole; mixed in amongst all the other beliefs dismissed for their harmful nonsensically, in the spot where the falling ladder stood in the first verse, is the comment, 'devil's on his way'-- the inescapable implication being, the devil is simply yet another silly superstition, a falsity as with all the rest.

The Contemplation:

In an interview on the release of the album, Stevie waxed lyrical in speaking of the superstition decried in the lyrics: "The worst thing is, the more you believe in it, the more bad things happen to you. You're so afraid that something terrible is going to come up, that you are much more vulnerable."

Superstition is the funkiest song on the album, indeed the only one which aims for funkaliciousness. It took a while for the ambition of the song to sink into the music market, with the song reaching the Pop and R&B number one spots some three months after its release. And it is the only song directed toward a seemingly antireligious theme. Now, I won't pretend to have any inkling of Stevie being anything but a traditional theist. He had earlier recorded gospel numbers as well, and has had no dearth of references to theistic beliefs in later songs. And it may well be that Stevie was excluding his own beliefs from the condemned categorization, possibly even considering the superstitions addressed as counterclaims to his religion.But whether he intended or not, this song tells a good part of the story for those who have broken the bounds of theism altogether and leapt into the sea of other possibilities.

It may be that other listeners don't get this out of the song, we humans being adept at reading the validation of our own desires into the things we see and hear and feel. And, most assuredly, it is the music as a whole, rather than the message, which made this song the hit which it was and is. But even as the song contains one of the funkiest baseline/horn combos ever belted out, it unquestionably conveys one message vital to the philosophy of freethought: the irrational belief in superstitious leads to suffering of the funkiest kind.

Evolutionary biology as reflected by analogy in Hindu scripture

Efforts to narrow the rift apparent between, on the one hand, science, and on the other, religion (or, most especially, revelation-based theistic faiths) often run through the territory of creative interpretation of one discipline or the other. There are, naturally, two directions in which this prescription flows: one, the assertion that the scriptural account is literally accurate, and that science is accurate only insofar as it may be read to support the scriptural narrative; and two, the assertion that scientific accounts alone are accurate and that whatever is reported in scripture is an allegory of the scientifically discoverable occurrence, or is otherwise subject to a scientific explanation. For example, as to the first method, geographic markers usually taken to indicate slow and sporadic flooding events may be proposed by scriptural literalists as evidence of a single world-wide flood, an event remarked upon in religious traditions from many parts of the world. As to the second method, certain of those same signs might be staked as logical explanations as to why the scripture-writers believed a localized flood to be worldwide, or were given to a metaphor of such a flood (then argued to have never been intended for literal interpretation) thus preserving some measure of validity to that scripture.

Falling within the latter vein,of late, are particular series of parables in Hindu scripture which tell of Vishnu--the ultimate expression of the divine essence, the meta entity within which our whole Universe is wrapped--revealing himself to man in particular forms, known as avataras, arriving in a particular progression. Those forms, it is noted by followers, were those particularly appropriate to the situation in which he appeared (appearing, for example, as a fish to warn of the coming flood, and as a turtle to assist in salvaging what remained after the flood). But more than that, it is posited, a remarkable correlation is to be found between the mythical recounting of the progression of those forms and what is now understood by scientific examination to be the order through which evolution by natural selection has brought to pass the variety of life on Earth.

The ten incarnations accepted by most authorities on the Hindu scripture are:
. Matsya . -- which begins as a very tiny fish, but grows to be a great fish, filling the ocean
.. Kurma .. -- a tortoise
... Varaha ... -- a boar
.... Narsimha .... -- a "hybrid" half-man and half-lion
..... Vamana ...... -- a Dwarf
...... Parasurama ...... -- Rama, the hero with an axe
....... Rama ....... -- the princely hero of the Ramayana epic
........ Krishna ........ -- the divine teacher of the Gita
......... Buddha ......... -- the enlightened founder of Buddhism
.......... Kalki .......... -- which is yet to come....

We begin, then, with Matsya. Matsya comes to warn the faithful Dravidian king Manu that a flood is coming which will drown all life on Earth. When he first appears, he is the tiniest of minnows, whom Manu is able to fit in a jar; but soon Matsya outgrows the jar, and then the tub in which he is next placed, and then even the river, and finally the whole ocean. Then the fish reveals itself to be Vishnu, and instructs the king of the coming flood, and of the need to save all manner of medicinal herbs and other valuable seeds. It is noteworthy that the flood thus described is not claimed to have come from Matsya (or Vishnu), and not to be a punishment directed against man; it is simply a natural occurrence which man is being warned of. Representations of Matsya tend to depict a four-armed upper torso of a man protruding from the mouth of a great fish, but the myth makes it clear that Matsya was the fish itself. And in support of the evolutionary biological argument, it is claimed that Matsya's piscine nature represents the oceanic origin of all life on Earth.

Kurma, the huge tortoise, is the form Vishnu takes after the flood has passed, in some accounts it arrives right afterwards to assist in the rebuilding of civilization, but in most it comes in a different era to deal with a different ocean; as an amphibious animal it is capable of retrieving the gods' elixir of immortality which had been carried by the flood to the ocean's deepest reaches. Restoring it to the demigods of the day, it enables them to defeat various evil demons who had stripped them of their powers. Kurma is claimed, then, to represent the transition from fish to reptiles (though a true amphibian in between would have been a better tell of this). Not long after, the demon Hiranyaksha appears, steals the Vedas, and plunges the Earth itself to the depths of the 'cosmic ocean.' Vishnu reappears in his third avatara, Varaha, the giant Boar. After a thousand-year battle, Vahara prevails and carries the Earth up from the depths between his tusks, in order to return it to its rightful place in our Universe. The boar, then, is claimed to represent the next transition, from reptile to mammal.

Narsimha, the "half-man, half-lion," to my mind, brings forth the image of an animal with some feature which would make one think of a man, and some which would make one think of a lion: the baboon. There are many species of baboon, and amongst them, the Guinea Baboon is known in particular for the lion-like mane of the adult male. It is observed to walk at times on all fours, and other times to stand and take a few steps on its hind legs, and to manipulate things in a markedly human-like fashion with its dexterous primate hands. This is, it must be confessed, a bit of a stretch to accommodate the scriptural narrative into an evolutionary narrative, but at the same time there is no actual half-man half-lion in existence to work into it scientifically. In the myth, Vishnu appears in this 'half-man, half-lion' form to defeat Hiranyakashipu, a demon who had been granted immunity from enemies when indoors and out, when on the ground or in the sky, during the day and in the night, and from both manufactured weapons and living hands. Narimha defeated Hiranyakashipu by seizing him in a doorway (neither inside nor out), at twilight (neither day nor night), holding him on his thigh (not on the ground, nor in the sky), and disemboweling him with his lion-like nails (neither living hands, nor man-made weapons).

That last beast is the last 'beast,' all the rest of Vishnu's incarnations being recognizably human. As to Vamana, the "dwarf," this raises the image of "Lucy," the famously diminutive specimen of species Australopithecus afarensis, a short-statured link in the chain of human evolution. The remainder of the incarnations are human, though arguably representative of progressive stages of human evolution, or, alternately, of the evolution of human civilizations, if not both. Parasurama, Rama, and Krishna are most easily analogized as simply being humans advancing across different levels of civilization and enlightenment. Parasurama, notably, is 'Rama with an ax,' and is oft depicted as swarthed in a beardly beard, conceivably, then, a hairier 'primitive man' version of Rama. And though the inclusion of the Buddha amongst these incarnations is claimed by some as cynically indicating some co-option of religious symbolism by the Hindu majority, it confesses at the same time a universality of recognition of the Buddha as a force for goodness and instruction toward right conduct. But observe as well that in a smaller number of traditions, a brother of Krishna named Balarama, described as well as an enlightened teacher, is included in place of Buddha; this view is most often criticized from the view that Krishna and Balarama lived at the same time, while all other avatara live in distinct and nonoverlapping eras.

And at last there is Kalki, riding a white horse, bringing with him the immolation of our Universe entire, in a blinding white light -- stepping out of the evolutionary fold, this is claimed by some to presage the physics dictating the end of our Universe itself, either by a Big Crunch (possibly leading to a new cycle), or heat death, or some comparably cataclysmic coming.

And through all this it must be remembered that there are precious few 'fundamentalist' or 'literalist' Hindus, who would claim all the tales told above to be literal truths instead of symbolic depictions, making it more palatable to assume that stages of evolution by natural selection were indeed being showcases here. Indeed, some nineteenth century Hindu thinkers thought Charles Darwin had himself taken an unacknowledged cue from Hinduism, an error fueled by J. B. S. Haldane, an English scientist of the same field, who connected the ideas after the fact. But that claim would have been inestimably strengthened by more and more explicitly intermediary incarnations invoking animals which would fill fossil record gaps. Perhaps if Vishnu had earlier appeared as a great crustacean? Or an improbably large bacterium? But still, were one looking for a revelational theistic faith whose scripture was most immediately analogisable to the scientific evidence available, the evolutionary progression of the avatara of Vishu offers as qualified a candidate as any.

The Legacy of Antony Flew

The death of Antony Flew in April of 2010 set off a firestorm of debate over his legacy and who, in the end, he was, philosophically. Biographically, there's no question that he was a mid-1920s London-born son of a Methodist minister who began to drift from Christianity as a teenager -- he was at one point, while a student at Oxford, in a Christian group led by noted apologist C. S. Lewis, but though he thought Lewis to be the most effective apologist, he ultimately found the position as a whole unconvincing.

And so Flew grew to be a leading philosopher of the school of evidentialism, endlessly strictly demanding that belief ought to follow the evidence, and ruthlessly weeding out claims of faith which were not founded on insurmountable logic (which, for the most part, discounted all forms of faith for him). Flew's primary position was that atheism ought to be presupposed until testable, empirical evidence of a God (or comparable metaphysical entity) should arise -- he rejected out of hand the notion of any God which could or would make itself untestable, characterizing such propositions as simply meaningless. Likely his most famous contribution to philosophical dialogue was the no true Scotsman fallacy, a proposition that focused some light on the problem of dissenting voices within a group being characterised by their opponents as simply not being members of the group.

But late in life, Flew's discernment of where the evidence led caused him to undertake a rejection of atheism itself, in favor of the position of Deism. An elderly Flew wrote -- with the assistance of another philosopher, Roy Abraham Varghese -- a book confrontationally titled There Is A God. The clincher for Flew was the plethora of fortuitous circumstances in our Universe, from constants of physics to the peculiar dual dance of DNA and RNA which Flew saw as a form of code requiring, at least obliquely, a code-writer. Flew's death not long after caused 'followers' in three camps to advocate for specific aspects of his work.

Atheists who had long rallied behind Flew's actively and eloquently antitheistic writings insisted that Flew's late-life conversion had been brought about by confusion and deception as to what science could answer about the origin of life; it was hinted without subtlety that senility had played a role (and, indeed, this argument was made even while Flew still lived). Some proposed that Flew had experienced something of a death-bed conversion brought about by fear of afterlife consequences, a proposition Flew flatly scotched with the assurance that despite coming to believe in a designer, he continued steadfastly rejecting the notion of an afterlife. But most of all, the atheists sought to dismiss Flew's late-life deistic turn as an anomalous period in the life of a tried-and-true atheist whose great bulk of work was uncompromisingly atheistic. The work, they contended, spoke for itself, and itself overpowered the arguments upon which Flew later came to rest.

Theists, on the opposite tack, sought to extend Flew's views into territory which Flew himself expressly continued rejecting, begging the possibility that Flew's ascent to Deism placed him on the path to accepting some brand of Theism, much as a man who walks up from a valley to the top of a mountain before dying might afterwards be described as having been on a path to walk right on up to the moon. To read obituaries produced by some theistic publications would be to conclude that Flew had indeed approached becoming a deity-worshiping believer in literal theistic scripture, replete with an angry, jealous, haphazardly intervening Creator, and stone-age creation myth. Such representations optimistically ignored that Flew's views had actually become even more hardened against theistic contentions as he entered into the realm of deistic thought. To Flew, the very possibility of a noninterfering deistic God rendered unnecessary and absurd the claims of the bother of a theistic tinkerer-deity. In 2006 an evangelical university had given Flew an award for his freedom of thought (presumably for shifting from atheism to Deism), though Flew himself had not wavered from what he'd announced in a 2004 interview:

I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins.

Flew, rather, compared his Deism to the position of Thomas Jefferson, declaring:

While reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.

And, at last, there were the deists (including pandeists), the small but enduring group of adherents to the position to which Flew ultimately did hew, declaring himself to be "quite happy to believe in an inoffensive inactive god." As followers of precisely this view, they defended Flew's final writings on the contention that these ought to be taken for the value of what they set forth, without consideration of the author's life external to his work. The deist, then, was tasked with combating barbs hurled both from the side of the atheists who dismissed Flew's post-atheistic writings on the grounds of deceived and diminished faculties; and from the theists who misrepresented Flew's end-of-life philosophical evolution as endorsing their view. In a sense, deists were tasked still with countering Flew himself, for though his potent antitheistic arguments were most squarely directed against theistic beliefs, elements of them could be read as antideistic and antipandeistic as well. There are indeed legitimate questions raised as to whether Flew did truly fully grasp the science of genetics which played a large part in his late conversion, and indeed it is hardly an article of faith amongst deists that the code of life requires a direct author at all, if a Universe might be designed which authors such things incidentally. But further back from that, the notion of authorship may not be withdrawn, for Deism fathoms the ability of a Universe itself to give rise to such a complex code as evidence of a complex design.

But whatever else may come from the late-life conversion of Antony Flew, it surely succeeded in drawing new attention both to his antitheistic life's work, and to the deistic ideas which were his final ideological resting place.

Pandeism versus the wars and violence of Theism and Atheism

All music is an original creation of the YouTube PanDeism Channel, and may be reused for any purpose of the YouTube PanDeism Channel is rightly given credit. All images are public domain or self-made.

One need not venture deeply into the realm of theological discourse to discover atheists and all kinds of theists arguing endlessly over which faith is responsible for the most wars, oppression, violence, and deaths.

Christians:

The Crusades, the Inquisition, European wars from the Dark Ages right up through the Twentieth Century, including the English Civil Wars, Napoleanic Wars, the Pogroms, the Holocaust, Witch burnings, Genocide against Balkan Muslims, and the new Twenty-First Century Crusades.

Muslims:

Wars of conquest, the Armenian Genocide, invasions against Israel, Islamofascist regimes, Terrorism, 9/11, 7/7, theologically based execution of gays, and virtually enslaving women through denial of rights....

Jews and Palestinians:

Generations lost to unending oppression, strife, and recalcitrance in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank

Hindus and Muslims:

Unending strife between India and Pakistan; many wars and acts of terror....

Shintoism:

Religion of Japan, authors of Nazi-allied World War II aggression

Even Buddhism:

Religion of the Vietnamese, both North and South, who used brutal tactics in Vietnam's Wars.

And too many tribal and folk religions to count having blood, murder, and war on their hands as well....

Atheists:

The deadly regimes of Stalin and Mao and their totalitarian successors, including persecution of those wishing to exercise religion.

Arguments fly back and forth over which despots and killers were of what faith and how much every one amongst them was motivated by religious beliefs.

But then we come to Pandeism

No nation has ever been stirred to war by Pandeists. No government has ever sought to justify oppression or tyranny with Pandeism. No pandeist has ever sought to force another person to change his practices or beliefs through threats and torture.

And why not?

Perhaps because violence and oppression are the means left to those not having the whole of the truth on their side. But, as well, because pandeists believe that we are ALL part of our Creator, and so to do harm or injustice to another person is to inflict the same harm or injustice upon our Creator; and, ultimately, upon ourselves!!

Pandeism: A Philosophy of Peace!!

May 21, 2011: Pandeism saves the world!!

How is it, you ask, that Pandeism saved the world today? We ("we" being your neighbourly planetwide community of pandeists) had been keeping a vigilant eye on this whole Rapture situation for some months now, and sure enough it was on this day that Yahweh made his move against the people of Earth. His plan was simple and straightforward: use the power of his followers' faith to fuel his destruction of the planet. You see, like all of what men call "gods," Yahweh is an egrigore, a psychic phenomenon brought into existence by belief in it. And, like any egrigore, it takes on the personality characteristics which its followers tend to attribute to it in practice, even if not in their literature; and so a "Love" goddess (and aren't they always goddesses) will swiftly devolve from a nurturer of romantic attachment to something like the opposite, a sex-starved seductress who cares for no love but her own; and a "War" god goes from giving noble assistance to those who show bravery in battle, to becoming a fomenter of conflict for the sake of conflict to fuel what has become a lust for war, reflective of that which lies in the spirits of its followers.

So it was with Yahweh; though described over and over as a loving deity, so many of its followers projected into it the hatred in their hearts, hatred against people who were different in ethnicity or sexuality (not simply by orientation, but in the practice of it altogether) or belief, even other followers of Yahweh whose beliefs differed in some triviality; verily the fervency with which some believed their god to be the kind which would end the world, rescuing only the most toadying handful of its followers and inflicting horrible suffering on the confused masses remaining -- first for some years on Earth, and then to please its nostrils with the odor of burning flesh, for all eternity.

And so, the desire for such a beast to exist was powerful enough to instill in the collected psychic expression an intention to destroy the world, to torment and murder all mankind; and since every group of followers was thought by many other to be unworthy of salvation, none would have been "saved".... it was torture, then death, then more torture still, for every living thing inhabiting the Earth.

But then the pandeists stepped up; for no matter how fervently held a belief, no matter how it may empower the spirit which it has established, it can not overcome the power of reality. Thousands of years of people believing the Earth to be flat and the Sun to orbit it could not make these things so. And so, as Yahweh planned his devastating holocaust against humanity, the pandeists as a one, with all of the will of our minds, focused our thoughts on logic and reason and the factual nonexistence of illogical entities. We intently disbelieved in the ability of Yahweh to inflict itself upon the world. And despite the draw of millions of believers willing the death of their neighbours in their hope and fear, the few thousand pandeists employed mathematics and maturity, physics and philosophy, science and conscience, and rendered impotent the bugbear, pulling the teeth from Yahweh's attack.

The world will little note nor long remember the mental defense erected against the eradication of the human race on this day, May 21, 2011. Verily, it will soon be forgot that anyone had forecast "the Rapture" to happen on this date at all. But we amongst the pandeists of Earth will never forget the glory of the exercise of logic, reason, and rationality.

Donkey Cocks and the Judeo-Christian Bible

Oholah and Oholibah, revisited -- and illustrated!!

Strings and Things

What is it that you suppose you and I and everyone else is made of, physically? I mean, at the ultimate level, beneath the cells and DNA and molecules and atoms, beneath the subatomic particles and quarks and even subquarks? What is it that sustains the energy which presents itself as the particles which manifest as us? What it is which underlies even the sub-subquarks.... would it surprise you if I told you that our most compelling mathematical models now suggest that the thing which underlies all matter and energy appears to be.... nothing? But indeed that's what String Theory suggests, that the subtlest underlying force is Planck-length strings, not of matter, not of energy, but of empty space itself, twisted up and vibrating (btw, the Planck length is the shortest distance across which physical reactions may be conceived to occur).... those strings of nothingness are unfathomably countless, there would be hundreds of billions of them in the tiniest living cell. Now it follows that if these strings are twisted and vibrating, something's got to be keeping them coiled and humming, some pure and unbound force must be sustaining them, and that, I believe, is where God is, that force, that twist, that vibration, IS "God"....

And what does that mean for us? Well every part of us and our world and our minds and thoughts, every arc of electricity, every gleam of a photon, every moment of gravity and magnetism and the nuclear forces -- all of these things are at bottom made of these strings; and so we are all part of God (and, as Duke University physicist Robert G. Brown has proposed with his Pandeist Theorem, everything is indeed necessarily part of God if God may properly be described as omniscient)....

Now, here's something else really interesting about the strings envisioned by the mathematical models of String Theory. Every single one of their uncountable multitude is perpetually in contact with and affecting every single other one!! Which means that we, being made of these strings, have a connection with everything else in our Universe which is bigger than what we can even imagine. And it is this connection which may logically be supposed to provide for all our experiences, physical and metaphysical -- so, the exciting thing to consider is that we are all part of our Creator, and whether or not it may be that our Creator "enjoys" this relationship, can there be any closer relationship between man and our Creator then to be made of the substance of our Creator?