Science and Religion Come Together

Nirvana is at long last attainable.  You’ll just have to first suffer a brain hemorrage, or become a Tibetan Buddhist monk or a Franciscan nun.

Neurotheology attempts to bridge the divide between science and religion.  Two books serve as building blocks in this bridge; Andrew Newberg’s, “Why God Won’t Go Away”, and Jill Bolte Taylor’s, “My Stroke of Insight”.

At age 37, Taylor, a brain scientist, almost died from a severe stroke.  Remarkably, as her left cerebral cortex was exploding, Taylor found refuge in the right side of her brain.  As Taylor describes it, she could retreat into the right side of her brain - to a peaceful, blissful place where the energy matter of her own body melded into the surrounding energy of the universe.  There was no me in this place and no past or future, just the present.  It was, Nirvana.   However, the damn left side of her brain kept interfering with this euphoria.  Taylor’s damaged left cerebral cortex pestered her with brain chatter.  What was happening?  Who should she call for help?  How was her life going to be forever altered?  What had to be the next step of her recovery? The thoughts coming from the left side of her brain were only concerned with her as an individual.  This part of her psyche forced her to separate from the rest of the universe and focus on her own life.  For 8 years Taylor struggled to recover.  Each day, she was confronted with staying within the “heaven” of her right brain, or leaving this safe, peaceful place, to enter the world of her left brain - a world that existed for the painful struggle to relearn how to speak, write, and think.  Only by forcing herself into her left brain was Taylor able to restore her place in the world.

Andrew Newberg studies the effects of religious experiences on the brain.   Using a SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) camera, Newberg can follow injected radioactive particles in a person’s blood stream and analyze how their brain is functioning.  Newberg’s findings from studying the mystical experiences of Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns at prayer, show that in both cases there was unusual activity in the right rear part of the brain called the posterior superior parietal lobe.  This is the area of the brain associated with orienting us in relation to our surroundings.  The mystical, euphoric, out-of-body, feelings experienced by the meditators and nuns, closely resemble those of Taylor’s retreat into the right side of her brain.  But why would the spiritual experiences of Tibetan Buddhist meditators and Christian nuns, map out so similarly in their brains?  Could there truly be some scientific common ground for practitioners of the world’s religions?  Could peoples from around the world tolerate other diverse concepts of God, simply through an understanding that, at a bare minimum, we all experience God in similar ways?

Neurobiology may yet provide us with the missing link to finding God?  Dots are being connected.  Dostoevsky’s belief that he “touched God” during some of his eptileptic seizures is not so far from Carl Jung’s believe in the “collective unconscious”, or the mystical experiences of nuns and monks.  I for one suspect that science will bring us closer to God, not further away.

Show me the Blood

If you’re not familiar with the TED Conferences and their website, you should be.  Many of humanity’s greatest endeavors are revealed there.  A few weeks ago, Bill Gates gave a talk on malaria.  Malaria needlessly kills 1 million people every year and at any given time 200 million more are suffering from its debilitating effects.  Gates lamented the fact that more money is spent on developing drugs for baldness than for malaria.  He stated that, “there is no reason that only poor people should have the experience” of being exposed to malaria transmitting mosquitoes and to reinforce this, Gates released a number of mosquitoes from a jar into the audience.  The point hit home - we have to be exposed to the reality of malaria (or anything else) before we act.

Today, we have the ability to access truth and reality as never before.   I don’t want a sanitized version of the events of our day, especially when the policies of elected governments are in question.  Show me the blood and guts arising out of military mistakes in Afghanistan; let me see the real suffering of mothers and babies dying of AIDS; lay out the consequences of my indifference when it comes to extreme poverty or injustice.  Why should we let news networks, editors, or government bureacracies, filter the news we receive?  The life and death issues of our time demand that our senses be exposed to their reality - no matter how painful.  Only then will we be compelled to act.

Why can’t more commercial’s use this type of creativity?

Mr. W

Albert Einstein

Hate pervades our culture.  Anne Coulter’s book, Guilty, is on the New York Times best seller list; Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glen Beck reap high viewership ratings on the Fox News Channel; Michelle Malkin is a popular blogger; Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh do well on radio, and TMZ brings its mean-spirited tabloid journalism to television and the internet.  When tempted to confront, return in kind, or “sit and stew” over this hate, I turn to a quote by the 17th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

Baruch Spinoza

Einstein, when asked if he believed in God, replied, “I believe in Spinoza’s God”.  But Spinoza was a rationalist whose philosophy planted him firmly in the camp of the atheists, so just who was the God of Spinoza and Einstein?

Spinoza took the view that “God is nature”.  Not that God was in everything, and everything was of God, like a pantheist might believe, but rather that the universe played out according to the laws of nature.  Spinoza’s God was not a “personal God”, and he did not believe in the supernatural aspects of religion.  To Spinoza, the “passions and emotions” that played out in Christianity and Judaism, did not provide an individual with true freedom.  Real freedom came from revealing and understanding the laws of nature, and removing the hopes and fears associated with being a slave to the belief in an omnipotent and judgmental God.  To Spinoza, knowledge not only unlocked the mysteries of the universe, but it served to guide one’s morality.  Virtue was something a person desired, not so much as a prerequisite for a blissful hereafter, but to ensure that life here on earth was enhanced through the mutual respect of men.

Baruch Spinoza

I love the way Spinoza argues against traditional religion while leaving the door open to the possibility that the Bible and religion do hold some truths.  While this diplomacy didn’t seem serve him very well during his lifetime, as he was excommunicated by his synagog and ostracized by his community, it does serve as an example as to how we can tolerate and learn from different opinions and actions.  I can embrace parts of Spinoza’s thinking without feeling like my entire belief system is under attack.

Unfortunately this tolerance of ideas is missing in much of  the world today.  Rather, ideas are treated as George W. Bush saw the larger world; “You are either with us, or against us”.  Ideas falling outside of our narrow belief systems are treated as something that must be destroyed.  Hate is the result.  We can choose to understand it like Spinoza, or we can let it seep into our psyche and allow it to diminish us.

Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.

Baruch Spinoza

My Dad, Joe

Nestled beside Betty, his beloved wife of 63 years, Joe passed peacefully into the arms of God.  Here is the tribute I gave at his prayer service.

Tribute to Joe/Dad/Grandpa/Great-Grandpa

Hello everyone, my name is René Bol and on behalf of my mom and our entire family, I would like to sincerely thank you for being here tonight.

I’d first like to tell you a little bit about my father’s life. My father grew up poor during the Depression of the 1930’s, and he often entertained us with really funny stories about his childhood. He joked about the many hardships he had to endure, and while we always laughed with him, we couldn’t help but sense the sadness of a boy who was burdened by the realization he wasn’t going to be given much opportunity in life.

In the summers my Dad was sent off to work on the farms of his two uncles in Trochu, Alberta.  During the week, he and the other children would toil long hours working in the fields together, but when Sunday rolled around and the rest of the family packed up and went on their weekly summer picnic, my Dad was left behind to weed the garden, alone. It was pretty harsh treatment, and my Dad was pretty upset. But as my Dad tells the story, he was able to exact a small degree of revenge.  With a wink and a nod, he confessed to us that, “many a perfectly good carrot was also “accidently” yanked up and thrown away along with those miserable weeds.”

One summer, Dad was needed on the farms for a late harvest, so his uncles did not return him to Calgary in time for his schooling.  So for weeks he would have to drive the other children to their school in a horse and wagon, drop them off, go back to work on the farm all day, and then return to pick up the school children in his dirty, grimy, work clothes. You can just imagine the scene of a bunch of poor farm children making fun of their exceedingly more unfortunate, city-boy relative.  When the harshness of the winter set in, Dad’s uncles put him on the back of a flat-deck truck and returned him to Calgary.  Dad got back to the city, frozen, disheveled, and cloaked in dust and snow.   Stepping through his front door, his father took one look at him and then took him by the hand to buy him a brand new winter coat.  A coat both of them knew they couldn’t afford.
Recently, I asked my father how he ended up quitting school, just before his grade 9 exams. In a rare moment of seriousness he told me that his schoolmates had been teasing him, relentlessly, about his tattered shoes and clothes, and that he just couldn’t take it any longer.   So my father went down to Harry’s News and Tobacco to see if he could get a job. They offered him one, but only on the condition that he was able to first get a bicycle by Monday morning.   That wasn’t going to be an easy task.  But my Dad went to his father, who was working long hours, six days a week, struggling to feed a family of 9, and my Dad sheepishly asked for his help.   Instead of encouraging my father to stay in school, like you might expect from most parents, his father simply sighed, and told him that he would do his best to get him a bicycle - on credit.   He did, and my father never went back to school.

Later on when my father returned home from the war, the other veterans had their university educations paid for by the government but my father never qualified for the grant because he didn’t have his high school diploma.

When Dad was just a teenager, his father died young.   The family was understandably desperate, and jobs were scarce, so my father volunteered to go into the army, not so much out of a sense of duty to his country, but because the military promised to send his small monthly paycheck back home to his saintly, widowed mother. The war was to have a profound effect on Dad.  He saw evil, and death, and the worst of humanity up close, but he also saw bravery, and sacrifice and the bond between soldiers that would die for their country and for each other. Dad was to have a connection with the military for the rest of his life and in the last 15 or 20 years my Dad and Mom, and many of us here in the family, attended yearly reunions with his South Alberta Regiment.

I’m giving you a little bit of history about my father, not so much for posterity’s sake, but to give you some insight into what may have shaped my father’s character. He easily could have been an angry, mean-spirited, and selfish man.  But my Dad was the farthest thing possible from this.  He had an innate ability to transcend life’s challenges and injustices. He never dwelt on the bad side of anything and he always looked for something positive in everything.  We might think he had a rough childhood, but he saw it simply, as a fun-filled, testing ground that built independence, self-reliance, confidence and fortitude.  We might think his parents were sometimes neglectful, but he simply adored his mom and dad.   My Dad always had the wisdom to look past his own misfortune and understand the bigger picture.   For him, a brief special moment with his mom or dad would completely wipe out any thoughts of not being as fortunate as the other children. For him, his parents did their best in tough circumstances, and he loved them dearly for it.

My Dad never expected anything from anyone.   No sense of entitlement, no self-pity, no ego, no vanity, no complaining and never for a single moment in his life did he ever think he was better than anyone else.

From my Dad’s greatest struggle, he took his greatest prize.   Regrettably my Dad may have lost a small piece of his soul in the Second World War, but he returned from Europe with a beautiful Scottish war bride who gave him endless streams of happiness until his very last breath.

As I look back upon my father’s life, he appears to have been somewhat of a contradiction.
He had a great intellect but pursued little formal education.
He had a zest for adventure but became somewhat of a homebody.
He had a thirst for knowledge but rarely seemed to utilize this outside of helping his friends and family build or fix things.
He seemed to love the thrill of his own business and yet he settled for a long career, working loyally for someone else’s construction company.
He prospered over poverty and yet placed absolutely no value on material possessions.

My father, in fact, seemed to have the ability to do anything or become anything he wanted, but he let most of his worldly ambitions fade away.
A walking contradiction? Maybe so. But if you look closely enough at these contradictions, they share a common thread.  My Dad traded in the things he suspected would take him away from his loved ones, and he replaced them with things that would buy him more time. More time for building the deep, meaningful relationships he wanted with his wife, his family, his God and his friends.   My Dad understood something that most of us never do until it’s too late.  That we are all allotted only so much time here on earth, and that the time we spend with our loved ones will be our most precious.  My father chose to spend his time with us, and for that we are all eternally grateful.

Each and every one of us, have a uniquely intimate connection with my father and a long list of cherished memories with him. For us, this is our measure of how great of a man he was.  We thank God for his commitment to our lives, for his laughter, for his tenderness, for his generosity and compassion, for the mischievous sparkle in his eyes, and for his everlasting love.

Goodbye Dad.  Until we’re all together again.   One sweet day!

My nephew, Henry, also delivered a beautiful tribute for my father.  I’m publishing it without his permission - so sue me Henry!

There is a cottage that overlooks Ganges Harbour on Saltspring Island. The cottage is delicately nestled amongst giant cedar trees. It is a short walk to Ganges beach where, if you know which ones to turn over, you can flip over rocks and watch crabs scuttle for shelter. You would be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful location anywhere in the world. But even two decades ago, the cabin was a little rough around the edges. There were definitely mice, if not, possibly, rats. There was no dishwasher; and the basement had the sickly sweet smell of standing water on wood.

The most pressing problem to me, when we visited the Saltspring cabin when I was six years old, was that there wasn’t a television. But I was not worried about this problem for long. I knew that Grandpa Joe and Grandma Betty were coming out to visit. Grandpa had built model railroads, tree-houses, and toys of all description. Surely, I thought, Grandpa Joe would be able to build a television.

Even twenty years later I maintain that, given the chance and the right tools, Grandpa Joe could have built a television.

The word “hero” is a pretty strong word. It’s the sort of word you don’t use lightly. The Oxford dictionary defines “hero” as:

[A] person…who is admired for their courage or outstanding achievements

A hero could be a young man who enlists in the Canadian Infantry in the 1940s to fight against an army that had easily conquered the great powers of continental Europe. He would find himself sitting in the gunner’s seat of a Sherman tank; a tank that was a Ford-manufactured underdog, fighting Mercedes produced German machines.

Or a hero could be a man who returned to Canada, a veteran injured during combat, armed only with his determination, work ethic, and Betty (also lovingly known as “The War Department”). Grandpa Joe would build his first house from the ground up. And when he finally had to move, he would be able to do it easily; needing only “two trips in a wheelbarrow.”

A hero could also be a man who raised four compassionate, hard working, and good-humored children, all of whom would go on to be exceptional parents in their own right–Which is not to say that they didn’t present Grandpa Joe and Grandma Betty with challenges from time to time while they were growing up.

Of course, anyone who knows Grandpa Joe would know that he would be nothing short of mortally embarrassed if he found out he was being called a “hero”. And I like to think that he’s watching and listening down on us now, so, sorry Grandpa, you have to be embarrassed.

I think that the most heroic thing about Grandpa Joe was his quiet strength. How else can you explain spending hours and hours crafting a model railroad, complete with built from scratch wood structures, plaster mountains, and intricate wiring-and then letting your Grandchildren, and Great-Grandchildren, play with it.

It’s that quiet strength that made Grandpa’s passing all the more surprising. He seemed like he was just a little too determined in the way he lived his life to let death get a good grip on him.

In the summer of 2000, I remember working with Uncle Greg and Grandpa Joe building a fence and a shed. My dad told me that that I had better “not let Grandpa do too much of the hard work, because if you let him he’ll do it all.” Years later, when Uncle Joe and Uncle Greg were building their own houses, the problem was the same. Grandpa was incorrigible; he just couldn’t help himself, he had to contribute when there was work to be done.

I don’t know very much about hard work, sacrifice, determination, or power tools. But I think that a lot of what I do know about those things, I learned from Grandpa Joe. I feel incredibly lucky to have had him as a Grandfather. Grandpa Joe was a man whose example I attempt to follow in my own life.

And I do not think it is too bold for me to suggest that the world would be a significantly better place if there were more people like Grandpa Joe in it. I think we all know that there would be a lot more laughter, sincerity, kind heartedness, rum and cokes, and moral strength.

Grandpa Joe was one of the most beautiful people I have ever known. And I will remember him when I see great beauty; be it someone volunteering their time and effort for a noble cause, children learning and growing, or watching the sun set over Ganges harbor.

The Starry Night

MoMA’s art exhibit, “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night”, has left New York City for Amsterdam.  The artist died in 1890 at the age of 37,  two days after shooting himself in the chest with a revolver.  His last words - “La tristesse durera toujours” (the sadness will last forever).  His brief life offers up some lessons.

1.  Don’t drink (especially absinthe) and play with guns.

2.  Find your passion. Van Gogh failed at being a missionary, a pastor, and an art dealer before committing himself to becoming an artist.  Although his paintings and sketches were created over a 10 year career, most of his great works came in the last 2 years of his life.

3.  What goes around comes around. In a night of fury on December 23, 1888 Van Gogh attacked his friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin with a razor.  Gauguin was not harmed but Van Gogh forever lost the lobe of his left ear and a long time friend.

4.  Write for posterity’s sake.  The popularity of Van Gogh’s work is tied to knowing so much about the life of the artist.  Van Gogh wrote hundreds of letters, 600 to his brother Theo alone, and because these survived the artist, we know the details of his life and the world around him.

Dr. Gachet

5.  Be empathetic to the physically and mentally ill. It is now believed Van Gogh suffered from epilepsy and possibly bipolar disorder.  The suffering he endured from his illnesses came as much from the ignorance and meanness of the people around him as the maladies themselves.

6.  Make the best of a bad situation. Arguably Van Gogh’s greatest work, The Starry Night, was painted in the last year of his life as he looked out of the window of a mental institution.  An institution he was confined to.

7.  Nature is a force in our universe and we should connect to it and appreciate its power.

8.  Good deeds will be returned. Joachin Pissaro is one of the curators of the current exhibit.  He is the great-grandson of the painter, Camille Pissaro, who had personally known Van Gogh and had recommended Dr. Paul Gachet to Theo, in an effort to help Vincent.  A portrait painting of the good doctor recently sold at auction for over $82 million dollars.

The Lady of Justice

Is there a link between the record number of suicides in the U.S. Army, Bush war crimes, and the new secret weapon Bob Woodward touts as being at the heart of the military’s success in “the surge” in Iraq?

That it’s like any war. There’s always something - there’s a game-changer, a new development. In the early 20th century, it was the tank or the airplane. World War II, the Manhattan Project and the development of the Atomic Bomb. These [new] operations and techniques are not something where you’re going to see an explosion like an Atomic Bomb but they are incredibly effective. They are something that - as Pres. Bush said to people that I quote in the book, “We are killing them all. We are killing all of the people who are the leaders.” Now, it’s not literally “all,” but they are killing hundreds and hundreds of key people on the other side in this conflict.

Speculation on the weapon has ranged from a ultramagnetic lightening bolt that zaps targets into baby-sized molten masses to a new CTTL (Continuous Clandestine Tagging, Tracking, and Locating) technology.  Given the history of Bush’s violations against detainees, one has to wonder if the new weapon is resulting in “unwarranted civilian deaths” that could also be considered war crimes.

As always, soldiers pay the price for following the orders of their military commanders and civilian leadership.  While the scope of possible war crimes committed by the Bush Administration has been downplayed by the MSM, Eric Holder (Obama’s Attorney General) has to enforce the “rule of law” and let the course of his actions be dictated by the facts.  Justice demands this.  Cheney admitted to authorizing waterboarding, and while the Bush Administration did its best to avoid being prosecuted for offenses against the U.S. War Crimes Act, the evidence against them is overwhelming.  The scale of the crimes should not be underestimated.  While Obama sets forth a plan to close GITMO, there remains 15,000 illegally detained prisoners in Iraq and hundreds of others held in “black site” overseas prisons.  Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor at George Washington University, is adamant that the Bush Administration should be charged for war crimes in its treatment of prisoners. He argues that to move forward without having the fortitude to bring justice to recent crimes, condemns us to repeat these crimes.

The spectacle of having war crimes charges brought to the likes of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney by their own government would be unsettling to most Americans.  These men, after all, were primarily motivated by the desire to protect Americans at all costs.  So what should be done?

The author of one of the most cited human rights poems may provide the answer.  Pastor Martin Niemöller, wrote these words:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me.

However, Niemöller himself was guilty of anti-Semitism and of being complaisant during the rise of Nazism in Germany.  He expressed his guilt and remorse by signing The Stuttgard Declaration of Guilt with other Protestant Church leaders in 1945.  By doing this, the Protestant Churches in Germany were able to make a new beginning.

Similarly, evidence of war crimes should be presented against members of the Bush Administration.  Confronted with the real possibility of trials, convictions, and imprisonments, the defendants could be offered a Presidential pardon in return for signing a “Declaration of Guilt”. In this way, the Obama Administration could honor its stated commitment to “the rule of law” and restore America’s credibility in the world.