Coming Home

Hi Reader, This newsletter marks the end of this series. Fittingly, it's about the idea that nothing ends. The last few weeks I've written about the spirituality/empiricism distinction, what God is to me, whether God exists, and I even took a crack at naming an empirical God: SE. I've continued to reflect on these things, and the only thing I want to state about them this week is that to me, saying SE exists is little more than saying there's actually something really real out there (or maybe...

Hi Reader, Last week we looked at this word, "everything." It's like Superman ice cream: hard to tell what flavor it is, or even which one it's trying to be, and also it's a bit silly. The plural flavor of everything is the collective: take all the individual stuffs that exist and talk about them all together. The singular flavor of everything refers to the interconnectedness (and interbeing) of all things, including past and maybe future. And I'll even say it refers to all that as expressed...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.