Coming Home
Weekly reflections on existence, meaning, and exploring the experience of coming home
Everything is an interesting word
Hi Reader, Everything is an interesting word. I love that sentence. I don't know many sentences that can be interpreted two drastically different ways like this. (Send me your candidates, though.) In this case, the different interpretations are themselves interesting. Let's look closer, with a little help from some punctuational expressiveness. "Everything" is an interesting word. This is clearly referring to the interestingness of the word "everything." And it IS an interesting word! In...
Hunger implies food
Hi Reader, You'll recall last week I proved the existence of God. Ok, haha. Very funny, Michael. I can be more precise: I explored the idea that we can, at least in part, define God in such a way that God is more or less likely to exist, and with a sufficiently broad definition, God is inevitable and essential. (That definition being something like God is simultaneously everything and the source of everything.) I ended by saying that yes, I do think God exists. And I mean that actually, not...
Does God exist?
Hi Reader, If we're going to explore this question, we need to talk about something I prefer to avoid: definitions. Definitions are boring. But as a professional writer par excellence, surely I can make this interesting. Let's consider it by way of a parallel example: Do islands exist? You're thinking... "yes." (Right?) Next question, then: do outcars exist? You're thinking... "what's an outcar?" (Right?) Ok, I'll tell you. An outcar is whatever part of a car is sticking out of a garage. If...
Science's inexorable encroachment on religion
Hi Reader, When I was younger, as I was "losing my religion" (so to speak), I was quite taken with the idea that science was steadily "taking ground" from religion. An example that probably won't be contentious is Galileo, who was accused of heresy by the church when he advocated the idea of a heliocentric solar system. The thought was that "God's Truths" were being discredited again and again by the scientific method, so eventually the whole structure would fall down. That makes a kind of...
Spirituality is about self-determination
Hi Reader, Spiritual is the opposite of empirical. In other words, there's measurable stuff (empirical) and stuff that must be interpreted (spiritual). Broadly speaking, I'm dividing reality into the physical world we can measure and the spiritual world that occurs inside each of our individual experiences of being. When we look at the world from this perspective, we get a few valuable outcomes. First, we get that my experience is mine alone (and yours is yours), because you can't experience...
What I mean when I use the word "spiritual"
Hi Reader, If you're just re-joining us, welcome back! I'm done with the email portion of my white paper project and am returning to weekly newsletters on my usual topics of existence, meaning, and coming home. Time is very dear right now and I'm still not done with the final edit and visual design of the white paper. I would seriously love to be finished with it, but it still needs some unknown amount of hours and I've scarcely managed to put even fifteen minutes into it this week. So I...
Your regularly-scheduled program
Hi Reader, I'm continuing to work on editing and designing the white paper. Meanwhile, here's a teaser of the stuff I've been noodling on for when thing get back to my normal around here (which I hope is soon): What do I mean when I say spirituality? Does God exist? Who or what is SE? And why did I make up such a silly-looking (and sounding) word? Anything else you comment on or ask me about in the meantime.
The bottom two boxes
Hi Reader, (Assuming you're not reading this until after the holiday, I hope you had a blessed one! I wish you all the best as we close out 2024!) Some things are easy to teach because you can point to them. Here's two apples, see? One here, and one here. One plus one makes two. Some things are hard to teach because they exist only inside you. Or maybe not at all. Maybe you misinterpreted your hunger pangs as anger at that person who happens to be nearby. (Apropos, research has shown judges...
Teaching the top two boxes
Hi Reader, (If you're just joining me—welcome—and want to catch yourself up, here's a link to all my past newsletters. The first one in this series was called "A brief project(ed detour)") One of the perks of being a parent of young kids is getting to see a lot of learning happening firsthand. That's a challenge sometimes, but it's been helpful when reflecting on this batch of newsletters. Some things are easy to teach because you can point to them or touch them or otherwise easily have...
Starting to bring it all together
Hi Reader, So I was considering those two charts from last week's newsletter (I shrunk 'em a bit since they aren't important right now, just reminders): ...and I realized they answered a question I pointed to back in the first newsletter in this series: "what do we do when we don't know what to do?" (I also implied this knowledge/skill is an essential part of tech support's job.) The short answer is, "go deeper." The middlingly longer answer requires that we take a closer look at that stacked...
Weekly reflections on existence, meaning, and exploring the experience of coming home