Decades ago when I was still a stalwart Unitarian Universalist clergyperson, I was invited to preach at the Tri-Cities congregation near Hanford, Washington, the nuclear reaction research station. I took along an early version of my "cosmic" thinking based on the metaphor of the snake constantly swallowing itself and always renewed by rebirth via eggs and skin-shedding. I was fiercely challenged as having a very weak understanding of science.
"Where did you get this material?" accused one older man. "You can't talk about life in the Pre-Cambrian era because there WAS no life." But as time went on, it turns out that there WAS life then. "Hanford reactivity will never reach populated areas", they said, but the evidence begins that the storage leaks into the Columbia River and some day Portland may glow in the dark. Scientific knowledge was once defined by the idea that it never changed, that it was rock-bottom truth. But all knowledge is process, not eternal material fact.
An older female member of this congregation knew this and liked the metaphor. She was a maker of art books and suggested that we collaborate on a limited edition of books shaped like a serpent, made from special papers, one of which looked just like a shed snakeskin! It was a great idea, but her daughter had a baby and that was more fun. I kept the paper samples, just in case. They're beautiful.
All the while that we are now confronting a scary barrage of books about our compromised reptilian government, there is another accumulation of disconcerting books about the nature of existence and the cosmos. I cannot keep up with them or even afford them. But the political books are time-limited and -- though the ones about the nature of the universe are also doomed by time -- their shelf-life is a lot longer. So I tweet about the first and blog about the second.
At the end of this post I'll list some books that I haven't read but that are discussed in a link from Nature.com, which is why they tend to be English. The general outlook is a continuation of "transcendentalism" though some thinkers still stick to the priority of humans and other kinds of life. The concepts will filter out to everyone through PBS, National Geographic, and other replacements for mainstream religion.
The stable, thoughtful middle-class followers of ancient Mediterranean religious ideas, filtered and rationalized by conventional science, just don't sit in pews much anymore. They stay home and hit the computer keyboard -- not even television. This understanding is a "leaping tiger, morphing dragon" kind of subject. It moves so quickly that one needs to follow in essays more sophisticated than Ted Talks or even Aeon, though that second is in print that will download, which for a person like me helps, as long as the cats don't run off the the highlighter. (Something in the ink, or warm from my hand?)
I'm told there are actual congregations gathered around these ideas of awe and wonder, but I can never find names and addresses. The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine is probably big and inclusive enough to include those people, no matter where they came from, if only to hear Paul Winter.
When I was at U of Chicago Div School ('78-'82), the dean had just left, considered too critical of the idea of supernatural beings, he was stigmatized as a "phenomenologist." What I was asked to read was almost all Christian apologetics, but when figured out how to I look for comparative study of religions, what I was seeking was there. It was simply a matter of point of view. Rev. Ken Patton, UU, had a mural of the Great Nebula in Andromeda on the back wall of his sanctuary. The Buddhists were compatible with the quantum mechanics thinkers.
At one point I spent a lot of time trying to understand what to say that was Sacred to a little cluster of young men who had been invaded, abandoned, smashed and torn apart by Christian assumptions about patriarchs and stigma. What kind of truth can be told to people held together by hatred and scepticism? Or terror and loneliness? These new ideas were what I went to and tried to make understandable. Maybe it worked with some. The effort changed me.
Too much so-called religion is what the English call "wet." "British English informal: someone who is wet does not have a strong character, or is not willing to do something that you think they should do – a term used to show disapproval." The pious pew-sitters don't walk the talk. The feral young men I met had nothing but contempt and pity for them and their pretence of respectability. Or sentimentality, talking of love and meaning lust, or maybe just convenience. Or money.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00356-2?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=4108dcea5a-briefing-dy-20200211_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-4108dcea5a-44122505
"Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" Brian Greene, Penguin (2020)
"The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos" Brian Greene Knopf/Allen Lane: 2011.
"Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine" Alan Lightman Pantheon (2018)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04159-4
2015 "Kabbalah: A Neurocognitive Approach to Mystical Experiences" by neurologist Shahar Arzy and scholar of Jewish thought Moshe Idel. Mystical experiences are also eerily similar to those reported by people having ecstatic epileptic seizures, including feelings of time dilation and ‘oneness’, the neural underpinnings of which are under study (M. Gschwind and F. Picard Front. Behav. Neurosci. 10, 21; 2016).
"The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know about the All-There-Is" by Roberto Trotta. Basic Books: 2014.
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