Published in the LA Times!

I didn't discover it until today, but I was published in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday.

Background
Just before beginning this blog, I briefly entertained the hobby of publishing satirical edits on Conservapedia.org, a wacky alternative to the supposed liberal bias of Wikipedia. Most of them were promptly deleted, but on occasion I managed to get some edits to stick.

So:
On Sunday, the LA Times printed an article on Conservapedia. Contained within that article are several quotations from articles on the website. Included amongst them was a quote pulled from the article on George W. Bush:

"And the state of the economy under President Bush? Much better than the "liberal media" would have you think: "For example, during his term Exxon Mobile has posted the largest profit of any company in a single year, and executive salaries have greatly increased as well."

With fewer than 12,000 entries and typos galore (the misspelling of Mobil above; the mayor of L.A. is referred to as "Anthony Varigoso"), Conservapedia isn't about to supplant Wikipedia — which boasts 1.8 million articles in English alone."

These fingers first wrote that sentance about five months ago, and somehow it survived long enough to be discovered by a Times reporter. How you like them apples, world?

Hog Hell

I try to avoid posting anecdotes from my personal life here, but I feel compelled to share a recent adventure.

Background:
My girlfriend, Katie, and I recently spent about 10 days in Costa Rica visiting our friend Ryan, who has been working at Luna Lodge. Luna is a resort in the beautiful and remote Osa peninsula. While there, we decided to hike into Corcavado National forest, supposedly described by National Geographic as "the most biologically intense place in the universe."

The rest of the story comes from an excerpt of a e-mail I sent out describing my trip:

To tell this story properly, let's back up a moment to Wednesday night. We are discussing the upcoming hike with Lana, Luna's owner, who served as a guide in the park for years before she created Luna. Ryan has led a few short day-trips into the park before, but our three-day foray will be far longer than anything he has previously done. Because of this, Lana wants us to talk to one of the Tico (costa Rican) guides to make sure we're prepared. Katie wonders whether there are any animals that we should be nervous about. Oscar, a guide, says that one should always be careful to watch for snakes, but the larger animals will pretty much leave you alone. That is, except for the peccaries. Two species of these wild pigs live in Corcavado, Oscar says, and one is especially pugnacious. It has developed a defense mechanism of swarming anything that might be a predator and goring it to death with their long tusks. So what should we do if we see any? Run? No, says, Oscar, try to pull yourself into a tree. That's the only safe way to escape.

This warning is somewhat unnerving, and throughout the hike down to the park, Katie theorizes about the possible fates that we might meet at the tusks of a pack of peccaries. Ryan and I attempt to convince her of the unlikeliness of this scenario. Peccaries are, after all, pretty rare. Less than a mile into the park, however (you saw this coming a long time back, didn't you?), we hear rustiling in the dark underbrush to our left. Peering though the trees, we soon determine that the source of the noise is, of course, a pack of peccaries. For the moment, they are rooting around in the ground. Thinking quickly, I did what any dumb tourist would do in such a situation: took a picture. The peccaries, however, did not take kindly to having their images forever immortalized on my computer. They stopped foraging, and some began to stalk closer to us, sizing us up.

Though Ryan thought that they were probably the more-docile of the two kinds of peccary, he was unsure of what to do. He coolly attempted to convey this to us in the most reassuring choice of words possible. "Guys," he said, "I have no idea what to do right now."

It was now clear that there were a lot of peccaries in the bushes, well over a dozen. Being on a trail in the thick rain forest, we had only two avenues of escape: down the trail or up the trail. I suggested that unsheathing the machete might be an appropriate course of action. While Ryan did that, I armed myself with a full Nalgene bottle from Katie's bag. It should be noted, by that way, that there was a distinct scarcity of climbable trees on that particular stretch of path. The peccaries continued to work their way closer, and Ryan whacked his machete on the ground in an attempt to scare them off. This didn't work. The peccaries startled, and immediately began pressing closer. Worse yet, one of the larger pigs had manuvered to outflank us, and was now walking down the path towards us.

I decided to upgrade my weapon from Nalgene to large, rotting stick. With Katie in between us, we continue slowly down the path. We can hear that there are peccaries moving up ahead of us, and decide that we must press on so that we do not find ourselves completely surrounded. We move on and on, and finally find that the peccaries, while still following us, are all behind us. The big pig on the path is studying us from about fifteen feet away. I whack my stick against a tree, and he startles again. We begin walking faster, and soon can hear no more movement behind us. Safe at last.

Where I see God

I've never been a very religous person. In high school I briefly flirted with the idea of joining a church. However, as I mulled the descision I could not supress my misgivings at the fact that these organizations were responsible for centuries of war and persecution, for rationalizations of slavery and sexism, and for repressing such dangerous notions as the belief that the world was round. I found myself disgusted that an organization that was founded on a visionary man's novel idea that maybe we should all try being nice to eachother for a change could pervert his message to that extent. These misgivings, combined with a skepticism that makes it hard to trust the literalism of words written millenia ago, effectively turned me off from organized religion.

Despite this cynicism, I cannot deny the phenomenon of spirituality. I believe that there are two sources of spirituality: first, a humbling recognition of the magnitude and capacity of the universe, and second, the awe inspired by the serene example of another person. The first source of spirituality is the reason that religion was initially created: to explain the wonders of the natural world. The second source is the one which I would like to talk about: the inspiration one derives from the sublime action of another. I think of this type as a social spirituality, derived from our ability to empathize. It is responsible for the foundation of most monotheistic religions--while the other sort of spirituality brought about the polytheistic, nature-worshipping religions, this sort of spirituality breeds the worship of certain special persons. While several people have been a source of this sort of spirituality to me, the most profound by far is His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

My admiration for the Dalai Lama is best summed up by this anecdote:
When asked how he would respond if science were to prove some facet of Buddhism impossible, the Dalai Lama responded: "If science were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
This man is the leader of church that has been around for thousands of years, and is based a set of beliefs that he has dedicated his life to protecting from repression. Despite this, he has the serenity to change his convictions if it is determined that science does not support them (Aside: for an idea of how another major religion might react to such a challenge, check out the reaction to James Cameron's recent excavation of a tomb that may contain Jesus' family).

Bear in mind that this open-mindedness belongs to a man who was born the fifth of nine children to a family of rural Tibetan farmers, who was named the head of a major religion within a year after saying his first word, who was 23 when his country was invaded and its inhabitants brutally repressed by China, who has spent the rest of his life in exile from the land that his countrymen had made their home for millenia and is considered to be the sacred ground of his religion. By all rights, he should be surly and world-weary, not gentle and wise. What's even more amazing to me is that he became the Dalai Lama by correctly picking the previous Dalai Lama's cane and glasses from an assortment of other items when he was two years old.

As you might guess, I'm not the sort of person to believe in superstitions, but the fact remains that a seemingly random process picked perhaps the one man in a million that could emerge through such turmoil and remain the beacon of wisdom that he is. This is a phenomenon that I cannot explain. This sublime coincidence inspires the the first type of spirituality, but that's not what gets me the most about the Dalai Lama. I am awed by the second type of spirituality, by the ability of this man to remain so righteous, so magnanimous even after a lifetime of persecution and hardship. If I were to point to someplace that I see God in the world, this is it.

I believe that religion is the pursuit of this sort of spirituality. People wish to find a way to connect with that feeling, and create a system of rituals that is designed to help them to access it. I am not trying to disparage religion, just to define it. If it is a ritual that allows you to achieve spirituality--believing that you are consuming your deity's blood and body, or prostrating yourself towards an important city, or covering your head to show humility--then more power to you. Where I get lost, and I think that this describes many other people as well, is when the ritual itself supercedes the spirituality it is meant to access. I think that this is a common misinterpretation, prioritizing the form over the function. It seems to be present in all religions, and results in people attempting to force the way that they find spirituality on others. I believe that it is the misunderstanding that it is the spirituality that is the important part, not the vehicle, that leads to the bastardizations of religions that instigate war or justify tyranny.


Update:
I've decided that the best definition for the quality that inspires spirituality in me is a resistance to situational ethics, or people whose ideals remain uncompromised by adversity.

Definitions

Eclexia: a disorder marked by fascination with a wide array of vaired and diveregent information,

or,

Eclexia: the noun-ification of the adjective "eclectic" (and a far better attempt than Webster's "eclecticism", I might add).

In summary: this blog will be all over the place.

I will weigh in on anything that comes to mind, poking my nose where many noses have gone before, beating many a dead horse, mixing more metaphors than previously thought possible.

Expect endless non-sequitors, irrelevant nit-picking, and discussion of the obnoxiously obscure and esoteric.