The North West Passage

As of today, my credit card is totally paid off. My personal debt is now half of what it was yesterday. I will be completely debt-free by the middle of December. I can start putting the money that I used to put into debt-repayment into long term savings, retirement funds, and the like; and in about three or four years I will likely be able to buy a house. I have a good job, with excellent benefits. I rent an apartment in a clean and safe building, and the building is in a clean and safe neighbourhood. I’ve never had to accept social assistance, nor go on the dole, but during hard times I had to accept the generosity of some very good friends who housed me in their homes for a few months at a time, for very little rent. I am well fed, in good health, well educated, and financially secure. I can vote, sit on juries, run for political office, and even make attestations in law courts. If I am injured or if I develop a chronic disease, I will be cared for. If I am convicted of a crime and sent to jail, I will not be tortured. While I’m at it, I probably benefit from the invisible privileges of being a heterosexual white male, in ways that I do not see.

In short, I am among the most privileged people on the planet. But from that fact, it simply does not follow that I should not complain about my problems. It does not follow that I should not want to better my position, or that I should not want to better the position of others who have it worse than me.

I don’t know if I am one of the 99%, in the sense that most ‘occupiers’ appear to mean. I might be one of the top 40% in my society. But I do know that I am *not* among the top 1%. Because I make less than $300,000 a year. That’s the estimated threshold of entry to the 1% of the people in my society who own or control the vast majority of the wealth in my country. More than three-quarters of my income goes into my basic survival needs: rent, food, utilities, and hygene products. As a college professor at a provincially funded institution, I am a budget cut or two away from total unemployment again. I was reduced to part time status this fall for that very reason.. I don’t own any major national newspapers, television or radio stations, or popular web sites. I don’t manage a Fortune 500 company. I cannot outsource my workers to China. I do not travel in a private helicopter. If I contribute money to a politician’s campaign, I could never possibly contribute enough to influence that politician’s priorities. If I am ever brought to court and charged with a crime, the winning side would be the side with the best paid lawyers. Around four years ago, I owned a few thousand dollars of stock on the TSX. But my tiny investment could not possibly sway the policies of the companies I invested in. I have almost no influence at all upon the means of production, distribution, transport, and communication, and I personally wield almost no political power in my society.

But when I act in concert with others, it’s possible that I do wield rather a lot of political and economic influence. When I read that there are rather a lot of people in the same position as me, not because they were lazy but because they had their opportunities taken away from them, I cannot help but wonder what would happen if we all got together and demanded change, in a unified voice. It happened in 494 BC when the working classes of Rome staged a general strike against their Patrician masters. It happened in 1981 when something like one-third of the people of Poland joined Solidarity, and replaced the communist system with a democratic one. It happened again in East Germany when the Peaceful Revolution brought the communist system down. It began to happen again more recently, with the Anti-Globalization Movement of the 1990’s, and more recently than that with the Arab Spring of this year. And it’s happening right now, at this very moment, with the ‘occupy’ movement. I am writing these words less than a kilometer from where the occupiers of my city have set up their tents.

We see evidence of the scorn that the 1% hold for the 99% in various places. There’s Leona Helmsley’s famous 1989 claim that “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” We also see it in Carl Henrick-Svanberg’s shockingly patronizing 2010 statement “We care about the small people.”

I know that the people in the 1%, taken individually and personally, are probably not much different than anyone else. They can be as loving, or as hateful, as compassionate, or as callous, as anyone. The two examples of contempt for the poor, cited above, might not characterize all rich people everywhere. But when the rich act as a class, they only ever act in their own class interests, and never in the general public interest. Even when they make charitable endowments to environmental conservation projects or hospitals or the like, they do it for the tax write-off and the free publicity. Think of how many cultural installations, like concert halls, are named for the corporations that donated money to them. There is simply no such thing as a transnational corporation that cares more for the public good than it does for its own private profit.

I’m sure that no corporate executive ever in seriousness asked his fellow board members, “How can we screw the poor today?” But the overwhelming majority of the things that transnational corporations do has exactly that effect, whether in large ways or small. The wealthiest 1% will always work to preserve the status-quo, with themselves on the top of it, whatever that status-quo might be. They will prefer to preserve “stability” even if that stability includes disempowerment, dispossession, wage-slavery, or untimely death for the working classes and the poor.

I also know that the banks in my country did not engage in predatory lending, like the banks in America did. Sub-prime mortgage lending is illegal here, and the stock market is better regulated. The distance between the rich and the poor here is not as wide as it is in other countries. I have, at least twice to my knowledge, shared an elevator ride with a multi-millionaire. And my government is not about to go bankrupt, although it is up to is neck in debt, more than ever before. So I may have less to protest against than people in other countries.

But the disparity between the rich and the poor here is still enough to cause a lot of needless suffering in people’s lives. It leaves too many people hanging by a thread, even relatively comfortable people like myself. We live in an economic system that allows some individuals to keep for themselves, and not to share if they don’t want to, the wealth that could be used to entirely eradicate poverty from the face of the earth, forever. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s a fact. That feature of our system seems to me monstrously unjust. Yet if the wealthiest 1% did share enough of their wealth to eradicate poverty, they wouldn’t be much worse off than they are now. They would still have the wealth and power to buy politicians, bias the media in their favour, commute to the office and back by helicopter, and utter statements of contempt for the poor. Or if they could not do these things, they would be no worse off than me. And my situation, as I described earlier, is really not so bad. So, there’s no outstanding reason that I can see for why the rich refuse to share their wealth more justly, except for one: greed. Naked, plain, unaccountable greed.

So, I don’t know if I am one of the 99%. But I stand with them.

Here’s something I wanted to add to the last post, but I decided it deserves a little space of its own:

If you want to buy a book, don’t wait until you see the author at a festival or event before buying a book that you want. Buy them from bookstores and from online retailers that you trust. Doing so creates a small but measurable “up-tick” in the indicators of popularity that publishers and distributors notice. This goes a long way toward keeping a book in print. Buying a book direct from the author does not necessarily help support the author. When I attend a festival, I have to buy my books from my distributor, and then re-sell them for a small mark-up. If I do not sell enough, perhaps because I over-estimated how many I could sell, then I am left holding the bag for hundreds of dollars. If I am about to be late with the rent that month, that shortfall can really hurt. So, while I might make slightly more money per unit by selling books personally, my long-term interests as a writer are better served by people buying books in shops and through online retailers, or directly from the publisher.

This morning, I was asked to comment on this blog post by Raven Grimassi, concerning the pagan publishing industry.

The problem that Mr. Grimassi describes here, that the pagan book publishing market is flooded with silly, superficial, “101 level” books, has been a problem for over twenty years.

In all that time, the solution that people suggest is almost always the same: “we need more intelligent, serious, and deeper books to be published”. Yet in twenty years, it appears that little has changed: hence Grimassi’s complaint.

Grimassi’s explanation, or part of it anyway, is that some reviewers do not write meaningful reviews. They skim a book quickly and comment without a full understanding of what they have read. Prospective readers thus get turned off. But in my view, this factor is quite minor, compared to the next three:

– Too many publishers are not willing to publish the serious, intellectually rigorous books, because they believe they will not sell. Remember, a publishing company is a business. It is a business with an important place in culture and the intellectual and artistic character of a community, but it is a business nonetheless.

– Too many authors are not willing to write those more serious books because they believe they will not sell, or because they are simply not competent to write such books and, perhaps, do not know that they are not competent. I do not wish to name names nor point fingers here. This isn’t meant to attack anyone. But I’m sure you can think of a few examples. Think of the lead characters from “Dumb and Dumber”.

– And finally, too many readers are not willing to buy them because they find them intimidating, difficult, controversial, insufficiently gratifying, or too expensive.

I think the real solution, then, is somewhere between these factors. Publishers have to be willing to include a few serious and challenging books in their catalogue. But some publishers, such as my own, certainly are so willing. Thus, as far as I am concerned, this problem is now solved.

Writers have to be willing to write better books too – and willing to learn how to write them. But the advanced books do exist, and there are lots of good writers continuing to write them. So I think this problem is also essentially solved.

What remains are the problems related to publicity, marketing, and sales. Perhaps that is where Grimassi’s gripe about incompetent reviewers can come in. But it should also be pointed out that in the non-fiction publishing industry, writers are expected to do almost all of their own marketing. Well for my part, I think I know a thing or two about writing a book, but I certainly know almost nothing about promoting one. Most other writers I know are the same. It is extremely hard, time consuming, expensive, and stressful to promote a book, especially when I would rather be writing the next one. Hence why I run contests, submit review copies everywhere, try to get interviews on prominent podcasts and websites, attend events and do presentations, and the like. I do the best I can, but there is only so much I can do on my own.

Finally, given that we live in a capitalist market, the solution to the problem of the glut of superficial pagan books rests also in the hands of readers with money to spend on books. The market is saturated with superficial pagan books because people are buying them. Readers have to be willing to spend their money on books that will challenge them. If readers are not willing to change their purchasing habits, the problem will persist.

How to recognise a more advanced book:

– It poses serious problems, and asks tougher questions. It is concerned with what is true, what is real, what is right, or what is beautiful. It does not dismiss the seriousness of these themes under a morass of inoffensive relativism. It takes a stand on an issue that matters, and is unafraid of criticism or controversy. As Aristotle wrote, ‘the great soul cares more about the truth than about what people think.’

– It rejects as false the popular dichotomy between theory and practice.

– It is not primarily interested in ritual or spellcraft. There are already thousands of books that speak of nothing but spellcraft and ritual; there are also thousands of blogs and websites. I doubt that we need any more.

– Rather, it is primarily about a problem that matters – and not just to pagans, but to everyone in the author’s whole society, or to every human being on earth. Furthermore it identifies a problem that is a real source of suffering or pain in people’s lives.

– It does not settle for superficial or easy solutions to those problems. It builds arguments, considers counter-arguments, investigates alternatives, and provides answers together with reasons for why the answers are good answers. Further, it provides answers which can stand the test of a reviewer’s critical attention, and which lead to further good questions.

– It appeals to the reader’s intelligence, and does not try to manipulate or subvert the reader’s intelligence. It does not treat the reader like an ignorant child.

– The author makes no promses he or she cannot fulfill; nor does she claim to possess any knowledge or talent or prestige that she does not in fact possess.

– It opens the way for readers to pursue for themselves the evidence in favour of the author’s argument: the reader does not have to take the writer’s word for it. The author’s own experience of something, while relevant and important, is not the only thing that matters. The book asserts nothing on the basis of faith alone.

– Its theme is focused, specific, and timely; it does not try to do too much at once. It is generally better to do one or two things well, than to do seven or eight things poorly.

– Its author cares about ideas and cares about knowledge, cares about the community he or she is addressing, and cares about humanity and about life on earth. He or she cares more about these things than she does about her personal reputation.

– Its authors sees writing as a spiritual calling first; a source of monetary profit second. The publishing gurus who recommend that writers not start a book until they have a contract are simply wrong here. Writers who think of their books as products are living with divided minds. Writers who think of their books as living things that they are compelled by the spirit to create are writers who can captivate and change the world.

How to support an author who writes better books.

– Buy the books.

– Talk about them, review them, criticise them (constructively), practice or experiment with the ideas or practices that the books describe.

– Recommend them to your friends. Spread the word about the books that you think really are of good quality; ignore the rest.

– Start a book club, and read them with your friends.

– Share this blog post. 🙂

Happy Lughnasad to you all!

I have just learned that James Arthur Ray, the new-age motivational trainer who was brought to trial for the deaths of three people in his sweatlodge on Oct. 8, 2009, has been found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide.

Read some more about the verdict here. (With thanks to Jason for drawing my attention to it.)

I think that negligent homicide is the correct verdict in this case. I’m sure Mr. Ray did not intend that anyone should die. But it is clear to me that he did intend to create the physical conditions that caused the three deaths. It’s also clear that he did nothing to alter or alleviate those conditions when participants became violently ill, and he took no responsibility for the consequences of his actions, however unintended they might have been. This is a straightforward example of negligence. You really can do wrong, in law and in morality, by failing to act.

Some people, perhaps the sweatlodge participants themselves (prior to 8th October 2009, of course) might justify Ray’s “heat endurance test” for a reason like this one. Tough spiritual exercises are intended to help people “break out of their comfort zones” and find “their highest good” (phrases that new-age gurus often use), and do something amazing that they thought they could not do. Afterwards they could justifiably feel stronger and more confident, better able to handle other problems in their lives. Let us suppose we took that claim at face value. Is it justifiable to expose someone to potential death as a means to that end? The answer is no. It is simply false, in cases like this one, that the ends justify the means. And there are limits to what you can ask people to do.

As the prosecuting lawyer said, “We don’t quibble with the notion that Mr. Ray used death as a metaphor. But when you deliberately confuse a metaphor with reality, it is no longer a metaphor.”

In addition to the physical environment of the sweatlodge (i.e. the heat), let us look at the social and psychological environment that Mr. Ray created. The prosecuting lawyer’s closing remarks drew attention to this when she said: “Mr. Ray intentionally used heat to cause these extreme altered mental status changes in his participants.” Another way to put this is to say that Mr. Ray’s sweatlodge was a mind control device. Along with the heat, he also used shame, peer pressure, lack of privacy, interruption of normal routines, the nearly $10,000 price tag for the event (because the more money the participants invest, the higher their expectations and level of commitment), and various preparation exercises (such as getting participants to write obituaries for themselves), to secure the participants obedience. Thus he was able to keep people in the tent far longer than was healthy or sane, against what would have been their better judgment, had they been in their right minds.

Now it would be one thing to say that the participants should have known what they were getting into, or that they should not have let Mr. Ray have so much power over them. Some people did attempt to leave the tent (and were chastised my Mr. Ray for doing it). But a charismatic and confident leader really can undercut your reason and lead you to suspend your good sense, and a talented one can do this to you without your conscious awareness and consent. Mr. Ray was, on that day, just such a charismatic and confident leader. I think it would be wrong to say that the participants are at fault for consenting to the situation.

Again, let us ask the moral question: is it possible that a spiritual leader can justifiably undercut someone else’s reason in the service of a goal like spiritual empowerment? Again, the answer is no. It is never in anyone’s “highest good” to take away that person’s free mind, no matter what benefit is offered in return. In fact I shall be bold and say that there is no goal, no cause, and no ‘end’ which justifies the subversion of rationality as a ‘means’ to that end. Remember your Kant: your free rational mind is your most intimate and most important possession. Indeed it is not really a ‘possession’. It is who you are, it is your humanity, it is your very soul. A person whose mind is controlled by another is not empowered. Instead, he or she is effectively enslaved. And it is a slavery so subtle and so insidious that the slaves might believe themselves free.

Pagans should think carefully about the James Arthur Ray trial. For many pagan initiation ceremonies involve trust exercises, and difficult physical ordeals. But there really are limits to what an initiator can ask a postulant to do, both in terms of safety, and in terms of morality. And there really are certain lines that should not be crossed.

I’m aware that this conclusion may seem controversial. Many pagans like to believe that there is no such thing as a universal moral truth, and many recoil at the use of the word ‘should’. James Ray’s sweatlodge puts that kind of relativism to a life-and-death test.

As a final remark, my friends, may I say that you do not need to undergo a heat endurance test to the death in order to know that you are strong in spirit.

(Postscript: My books cost way less than $10,000, and reading them won’t kill you. Just saying.)

I wrote this on the back of a menu in a restaurant in Montreal, for the open-stage night at the Gaia Gathering, a few days ago. Enjoy!

I am the very model of a pagan intellectual
I’ve studied ancient knowledge, theoretical and practical
I wear these little glasses, and a pony-tail to tie my hair,
and also talk a lot of rot both all the time and everywhere.

I am the very model of a pagan intellectual
My workshops at the festival are always billed as magical
And yet when you attend there are no rituals or jewelry
Instead you get a load of stuff so weird it must be mystery

I’ve stayed awake in lectures that a lesser man could not endure
I’ve reconstructed ancient ways, especially the most obscure
In short, in all the matters theoretical and practical
I am the very model of a pagan intellectual!

I am the very model of a pagan intellectual
I talk of topics scientific, also philosophical
I have initiations from a modern university
And always post my essays on the internet for you to see.

I am the very model of a pagan intellectual
And yet you find me with my djembe drumming at the festival
I can raise a cone of magic power with most anyone
And then debate about the finer points until the morning sun

I can quote a thousand myths and legends from the ancient world
I wear a Goddess pendant in the hope it will impress a girl
In short, in all the matters theoretical and practical
I am the very model of a pagan intellectual!

A few days ago, I was going over some things in my notebooks which were originally cut from various past writing projects, to see if any of them can be rewritten, edited, or otherwise salvaged for future projects. Between two of my last three books, and the one I finished writing last month (to be released in 2012), there’s a consistency of interest. I tend to be writing about broadly similar problems and themes: environmental issues, political and social justice issues, the interpretation of mythology and history, the pursuit of a meaningful and worthwhile life. And I began to wonder if perhaps the cluster of ideas that I’ve been laying before the public in my book should be given a name.

Naming something doesn’t have to mean solidifying it into a ‘doctrine’ (in the pejorative sense of that word). But it can make the problems and themes under discussion, and the methods of investigating them, easier to identify. Symbols are helpful for this purpose too.

So while musing openly on FB about naming my work, a commentator (who found names for intellectual schools of thought a little tedious and boring) suggested that it might be better to first try and define it in one sentence.

This makes a lot of sense. A strong, precise, and recognizable one-sentence description may be more helpful than a mere name. The great world religions, for instance, even though they may have thousands of years of history and thousands of books of theology that one can study, certainly can be encapsulated in a single sentence formula. I’ve blogged about that before. Philosophers sometimes produce short, tract-length explanations of their ideas, so that interested people can then go and read the longer, book-length treatments. Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” comes to mind as an example.

So I looked over my books, my blog posts over the years, my song lyrics, some of the social or political causes I’ve supported, and the like, in search of a basic presupposition which, while perhaps not suppressed or unstated, nonetheless goes unquestioned. This is a basic philosophical procedure: in good intellectual work, no proposition is unstated, no presuppositions are left unexamined. Even the procedures of reason itself are subject to the critical scrutiny of reason, which sometimes ties us up in strange knots of apparently self-refuting logic, but there you have it anyway.

The way to do this kind of investigation is to see if there is any proposition which always serves as a starting-place, never as a finishing-place, in an argument about the highest and deepest things. If I hold some idea true because of some other idea also held to be true, then that idea isn’t yet the highest and deepest idea. My political commitments were thus ruled out. For although I’ve been fairly consistently left-wing for many years, I have those commitments because of another commitment, which is more important, more basic, more deeply held. It is the same for my involvement in my spiritual community: that involvement is also not an end-in-itself for me, but rather an enactment of a deeper commitment. And it is the same for my commitment to reason itself, which is more important to me than my political or spiritual commitments, and yet also based on a further, higher and deeper idea. What is that idea?

It is the idea that human life on earth is worthwhile, beautiful, deserving of celebration, and good.

There you have it: a one-sentence description of what my work is about. And yet this sentence is not enough. It prompts other questions: what is the source of that goodness? What is the evidence for it? How can one sustain this commitment even while the world is obviously home to drudgery, lies, bigotry, hatred, ugliness, and oppression? We might call this the problem of evil.

I have often argued in favour of this proposition by way of arguing against the alternative. The only logically consistent response to the alternative proposition, that human life is worthless, ugly, and meaningless, is nihilism, despair, and suicide. But this explains the basic proposition in the negative. We also need something positive.

I go back to my sources; I go back to the root of my mind; I look a little deeper. I find that another, related starting-place in my thinking is the proposition that the beauty and the goodness of life is not simply a truth that the world gives to you, and which you passively receive. It is, rather, a question to be answered, a project to be undertaken, and an achievement to be worked and struggled and adventured for. That question and that problem is placed before you whenever you encounter in your life a natural immensity.

The idea of an immensity haunts nearly every page of my last three books. It means a presence which seems, at least at first, to stand over you, as something inevitable and powerful, and which calls your life into question, yet which also invites a response. The four examples that I study are: the Earth, other people, death, and loneliness. These need not be the only immensities, but they seem the most important ones. There is no way to move through life without encountering these things. And yet while meeting them is a destiny for us all, there is nothing written in the stars about how that meeting must play out, and what its consequences must be.

With that in mind, let me revise the one-sentence description that I gave earlier. The basic proposition is that Human life is good, beautiful, and worthwhile, and that the goodness, beauty, and worth of life emerges when you have the right kind of relationship with the immensities.

This handles the objection raised earlier about the problem of evil. But it prompts new ones, especially: just what is the right kind of relationship with the immensities? Well, that very question is among the questions put before you by the Immensities themselves, and thus it must be answered by each person for herself. But I think I can say something about how to find an answer. An immensity is not a command to be obeyed: it is a presence to be experienced. Thus a relation with an immensity is also not a rule to follow. It is a presence to be revealed by one’s way of being in the world. Thus to find and create a worthwhile life, full of the beauty and goodness of things, one will have to investigate one’s various ways of being in the world. Some ways of being in the world lead to the experience that life is desirable and worthwhile. Some ways of being in the world lead to the experience that life is undesireable and worthless. Shades of grey may also be discerned in between these two poles. Each person must observe, study, and examine herself, to learn what ways of being in the world uplift her, and then adopt them. She must also learn what ways of being in the world oppress her, and then reject them. This is a process of self-discovery, self-transformation, and self-creation. It has personal, social, political, and environmental dimensions. Perhaps some day we shall discover it has cosmic, interstellar dimensions. And it need never be finished: it can carry on throughout one’s life.

This idea is perhaps not only my own. It appeared to me in a series of dreams back in October of 2003, in which I dreamed of a conversation with Herself about these and other matters. But I shall say no more of that right now.

I welcome thoughts, comments, and criticisms.

In our nation’s federal election campaign, I normally look at all the major parties, and give them a chance to reason with me, although I (normally) vote the way I voted last time. This time, when looking over some news related to the Conservative Party, I saw that Harper wants to create an Office of Religious Freedom.

Now, most Canadian politicians don’t talk about religion all that much. Harper himself, although he is an evangelical fundamentalist Christian, who regularly attended the Calgary based Alliance Church, doesn’t talk about religion all that much either.

But because he is an evangelical Christian, it is almost certain that when Stephen Harper thinks of religious minorities, he is thinking only of other Christians. It’s likely that his party members are thinking the same way: for example, our Minister for Science and Technology is a creationist and doesn’t believe in evolution. And Conservative incumbent candidate Brad Trost openly boasted of cutting funds to Planned Parenthood and re-opening the abortion debate in this country. (To be fair, Harper claimed he wouldn’t touch the issue if elected; I have my doubts about that too, but I will leave them aside for now.)

Christian communities in countries like Pakistan, Iran, China, and so on, probably do have a very hard time of things. But Christians are clearly not the only persecuted religious minorities in the world. And I’m skeptical about whether they are persecuted any more or less than other groups.

But given the Christian fundamentalism that dwells in the Reform Party’s agenda (pardon me, the Conservative Party’s agenda), therefore you can bet that this office will almost certainly not be used to help voudouisants in Africa, Tibetan Buddhists in China, Jews in Palestine or Muslims in Israel, or for that matter any religion at all which is not Christian.

The only exceptions, the only non-Christian religions which this office might support in other countries, would be religious communities that are wealthy and well-organized enough in Canada to pressure the government to help their co-religionists in other countries. A lot will depend on a given community’s lobbying power. Scientologists might claim that they are being persecuted in Germany, for instance, and demand the office’s help, and they are wealthy and well organized enough to do much better than other groups. Aboriginal people, for instance, who might want the government to help protect indigenous people in Africa from being burned alive as witches, will probably get no hearing at all.

(In case you don’t believe that it’s happening, here’s a video. Not for the squeamish.)

This notion of Christian persecution is a very old story. Christ himself spoke of it: cf. John 15:20 and Matt 24:9, for example. The work of researcher Elizabeth Castelli charts the “persecution complex” (her words) of modern day American evangelicals. As she describes them, Christians seem to like the idea that the world is against them, even when their communities are large, organized, wealthy, and politically powerful. But I’m a little tired of hearing this persecution story. And I don’t like the way it might creep into our national political culture if Harper wins the election.

I think we may need to ask ourselves if we want our tax money spent that way, and (more to the point) whether we want religious fanatics running our country.

If you agree with me, please:
– Share this blog post with your friends,
– In the comments field, list a religious minority somewhere in the world which you think might genuinely benefit from Harper’s proposed office, but which you think is likely to be overlooked by that office.
– Ask your local Conservative candidate about his religious views.

Hi everyone,
Well, the deadline for the “Loneliness and Revelation” contest was about a week and a half ago. All the contest entries are visible in the photo section of my Facebook “Fan” page.

I have to admit to a little embarrassment here. Yes, I was hoping that the contest would help improve the book’s visibility, and popularity, and also help to get people out of their shells and involved in their communities. But only two people entered the contest so far. The contest doesn’t seem to have worked, really.

So here’s an announcement: since I know a number of people who wanted to enter but haven’t yet because their copy of the book hasn’t arrived yet. So, I have decided to extend the deadline to Saturday, 30th April.

For a while I thought that only two people entered the contest because $100 is not enough incentive, given that the “price” of entry, the purchase of a copy of the book, is around $14 (US). Juniper pointed out to me that one reason people might not have wanted to enter the contest was because they may not have wanted to be photographed in association with a book by a pagan writer (even though the book itself is not really a pagan book). Well, if that’s true, then I suppose I owe just about everybody an apology. It isn’t my purpose to “out” anyone who doesn’t want to be outed.

But yes, I admit the purpose of the contest was also to increase the book’s visibility, popularity, and sales. But it’s not only about the money, for me. Even if the books sold a thousand copies per month, I would not be quitting my day job. It’s about the ideas that make the world go round; it’s about initiating a dialogue about important topics in our friendship circles and communities; it’s about directly addressing the most serious problems in our lives, and figuring out what to do about them. I’d like to help people that way, but to do that I need help too. So, if anyone has suggestions for other ways to promote the books, I’m all ears. 🙂

…

Click here to find out more about “Loneliness and Revelation”, and to purchase your copy today!

This is a very short response to some criticisms directed at my essay “Thinking Shall Replace Killing”, published on Patheos.com back in February.

The first thing I’d like to remind critics of is the appearance of the word “short” in the title. It is neither a comprehensive nor an all-inclusive essay. It is barely an introduction to a complex and important topic. But accomplished some of its purpose, which was to get people to realize that there are alternative ways to think about spirituality and ethics besides divine command.

It may be worth observing that some of the text of this essay came, in part, from a larger and longer manuscript on ethics which will be published by O Books next year. Another recently published essay of mine, entitled “The Sacredness Between Us”, also comes from that manuscript.

I occasionally release portions of manuscripts like this in order to be able to assess reader interest, and also to consider objections and criticisms. Constructive criticism is extremely useful to a philosopher, and I am able to improve the quality of my writing when I receive good quality constructive criticism from well-wishing but critical readers. Indeed I see this as an important part of what it is to be a public intellectual. I participate in the same community as my readers do; I am involved in a conversation with them. When I publish an entire book-length treatment of a topic like this one, it will be of much better quality because of that conversation.

But back to the point. Among all the various criticisms, two stand out in my mind, because they were mentioned by several critics, not just one or two. I’ll address them here.

One had to do with the historical discussion of the moral principle that “thinking shall replace killing”. Some critics called it “absurd at face value”. Some said I was romanticizing history, trying to make warlike pagans look like “love, light, and faery dust kinda folk”. Some questioned whether I had actually studied any history at all. These are not criticisms: they are just statements, and I feel perfectly at ease ignoring them.

But a more substantial criticisms along these lines went like this. Polytheistic societies were very capable of killing, and frequently indulged in killing, when they felt they needed to kill. Even while Pericles was shaping Athens into a centre of culture, so he was also shaping Athens into an imperial power, perfectly capable of conquering and oppressing other cultures. Surely that is contrary to the argument that thinking was replacing killing as a social force.

Now that is what an interesting, substantial, and useful criticism looks like.

In reply, may I suggest the following. My essay is not a political or economic history. It is an intellectual history; it is a very short look at the history of the idea that thinking is ethically better than killing. It is possible that certain critics, not seeing that distinction between intellectual history and political/economic history, concluded that I was making a point about the latter and not the former — a point which, were that the case, would be easily refuted by the facts. But I am, indeed, aware of the facts: they are implied in the essay with statements like this one:

“Athens, in the time of Pericles, became a society in which artistic and intellectual activity became at least as culturally important as military victory”,

and this one:

“In this change, I’m sure that the Celtic people did not cease to be a warrior people. But I think they also began to recognize other values, such as art, justice, and peace.”

None of these statements admit of the hard, fast, and absolute dichotomy between thinking and killing that some critics attribute to me. (Indeed I am reminded of Isaac Bonewits, who might have said that there is a dualism presupposed in the criticism – and isn’t it dualism which causes all the trouble?) The criticism is thus a straw man.

But does not the statement “thinking shall replace killing” read as a dichotomy between thinking and killing? Why use a statement with that dichotomy apparently built right into it, if that is not what was intended? I retained the statement from Deganawidah, as a moral claim (not an historical claim), because I find it artistically appealing as well as ethically profound and correct. Thinking about our problems, talking about them, reasoning about them, disagreeing peacefully, and arriving at solutions via consensus and dialogue, really is ethically better than solving our problems with force majeure. And there really is a logical disjunction between expressing oneself with words, and expressing oneself with murderous violence. I tip my hat to phenomenologists like Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, and Paul Ricoeur. But perhaps this essay of mine was not clear enough to get the point across. My writing, then, will have to improve.

Another criticism had to do with what might be called the essay’s implicit Goddess essentialism. In the second half or so, the essay describes “the culture of the Goddess”, as contrasted against the legalistic culture of the patriarchal monotheist god of the Abrahamic tradition. To which some critics thought: is he just substituting one monotheism for another? Which goddess does he mean there? Well, on one level these criticisms are just expressions of annoyance that I did not follow the polytheist party line. Let me remind everyone, then, that I’m under no obligation to toe anybody’s party line. But on another, more serious level, these criticisms call for more clarity, and that is also an excellent and fair criticism.

When, in that essay, I spoke of “the culture of the goddess”, what I had in mind was this:

“…a society that affords real priority to the goddess, and to her way of presenting the revelation of her divine presence, is likely to be a society where the values are cast not as rules or laws. It is likely to be a society in which the values are cast in the form of character-virtues. I think this is so because her message is not a commandment to be obeyed: her message is a presence to be experienced. Her message tells us who she is, not what to do.”

And this is contrasted with the way God appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam:

“…the presence and the revelation of God, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, establishes a social and political order.”

That statement about the moral difference between the Abrahamic and the Pagan point of view is one of the most important steps in the essay, as I see it. Worrying about the name I assigned to this way of thinking, and what it might imply, seems to me a red herring. All I would have to do to respond to the criticism is change the name of the argument into something that would draw attention to the logic of the argument itself instead of to its superficial packaging.

Well, I probably will change that name, for the sake of clarity. But let’s keep our eyes on the ball. For what is at stake here is something much more than a name. What is at stake is the quality of our lives. Indeed the problem is not really whether a religion is monotheist or polytheist. The problem is not even whether a religion is legalist in nature, as I characterized the Judeo-Christian tradition. The problem, let us remember, is oppression. Legalist religions tend to be much more susceptible to oppress people than other kinds of religion. But whether a given religion is legalist or not, we should reject any part of it that would rather frighten people into submission than reason with them or inspire them. We should declare, as the Sufi mystic Rabi’a al-Adawiya declared:

I want to pour water into hell and set fire to paradise so that these two veils disappear and no one worships God out of fear of hell or in hope of paradise but just for the sake of his own eternal beauty.

Legalist religion tends to be more subject to fear than animism, or theism, or any shade of —ism in between. But we are not necessarily looking to dispense with legalist religion, nor for that matter with religion as such. We are looking for ways to dispel fear, with all of its attendant suffering, and we are looking for ways to create meaningful and worthwhile lives.

Let’s not lose sight of that, please.

Making short promotional videos is fun. 🙂 For this one, instead of using nothing but still photos, I also used some very short clips from various video sources, so it can look a little bit more like a “movie” trailer.

The four statements in the video are the four elementary “movements” of Revelation; they are, as the book describes, the four basic existential moments in which meaningful relationships and worthwhile lives are created.

Most images here refer to ideas described in the text; but for the most part I designed this video to express a little bit of what it felt like to write the book, and what I hope it might feel like to read it.