My main problem with Christian Science

**Christian Science is a bogus system with lots of money behind it (more in previous eras than now but still substantial), and still some political support. My complaint is that it is so BELOW visibility. Starting to read "Caught in the Pulpit" by Dan Dennet and Linda LaScola: stories of clergy who have lost their faith and yet are trapped in their clerical and pastoral roles. My problem is that I am as legitimately in their field of inquiry but no one knows or cares about about Christian Science anymore. What's so embarrassing and humiliating is that I got snagged in this 19th century relic and wasted over 35 years of my life on it. If I had been a Catholic or Episcopalian priest people would be interested in me and I might even get some speaking gigs, etc. But as it is, it's like being guilty of philately. Not worth anyone's attention. And I feel like the waste of my life should be worth somebody's attention and sympathy. 

Treated like a dog

**Went with my daughter to a veterinary care facility in the Charleston area to pick up my her old, sick dog. Spent about half hour there but came away wondering why the health care facilities I deal with aren't as good. Not that they're horrific. No, they are quite organized, modern looking and well staffed. In my system the docs, nurses and other providers have access to all my medical information. And I have access via email to docs and nurses.

So what's my complaint? I don't feel as cared about as clients of that animal care facility. Maybe it's because of the enormous bureaucratic load imposed on health care providers by insurance companies. I always get the impression that I'm taking up a doctor's time, rather than giving him or her the opportunity to give me attention. I read a survey a few years ago that the average amount of time between when a patient starting to talk and a doctor interrupting is EIGHTEEN SECONDS. I have some who take less and some who take more time. But it's always UNDER A MINUTE.

Knowing this I've taken advantage of my health care system's email access and can write up a thorough description of the issue I'm coming to discuss with the Doc. Did this last week about the screwups involved with dealing with my frozen shoulder. This cut the in-person discussion down to about one minute and it started with an apology from the doc about the way things were handled, and then an agreement with me about the next steps to take in treatment.

I wonder how many older patients would have availed themselves of this tactic. I suspect many or maybe even most people just show up, mumble a few things, get talked to for a few minutes and then get an Rx. I time every one of my visits and the average is about 12 minutes per visit. Maybe that's enough for most people. It certainly is enough when I provide the doc a backgrounder on the issue in advance. Otherwise, I think it's too short, way too short, if it's up to me to provide the doctor with what I feel are the relevant circumstances and facts about the issue. I need time to describe things, to suggest things, to wonder about things. And time is what they get paid for. Not empathy.

But to get back to my main impetus for writing this: the vet people seemed to be genuinely thoughtful and empathetic about the patients entrusted to them. Maybe because they were being paid directly instead of by insurance. In any case, I wish I could be treated more like a dog than as a time sink for an insurance company.

Mother Teresa's "verified" miracles

**I like Pope Francis because he's not such a stickler for church dogma or custom, but seems to be more interested in practicing the essence of Christianity than flexing the Church's dogmatic muscles. He's back in the news again, with some of that old time religion nonsense.

Pope Francis says there is now enough evidence to elevate Mother Teresa into a "saint" of the Catholic church. That evidence comes from a couple of "healings" attributed to her intercession. Aside from the speciousness of the evidence, the promotion of this woman to a semi-supernatural status, means that others will now turn to her in desperate cases of illness, some of them refusing more reliable medical attention.

I wrote several blog entries about her a few years back, that may be of interest now that Mother T is back in the news. A link to one of them is in the "Featured Post" listing at the top right of the home page of this blog. You can also search at upper left "Mother Teresa" to see the other entries.

Review of “Sleep With Me” podcast

** I usually don’t have trouble getting to sleep. The problem is that I tend to wake up three or four hours later and have trouble getting back to sleep. I talked to a sleep doctor about this and he immediately reached for his Rx pad 
and wrote one for Silenor. I asked my pharmacy how much it would cost, with insurance coverage. $65/month. You have to take a pill every night whether you need it or not, and that would cost me $780/year. 

Compare that to the “Sleep With Me” podcast (iTunes, Overcast, etc), 
which is not only FREE, but 100% effective with NO side effects (though it may become delightfully habit-forming) I don’t know how “Dearest Scooter” makes a living doing this day after day, but I know adding advertising would severely limit the effectiveness of his work. Besides, as an advertiser, would I really want to make my pitch in an environment that completely flushes all memory of my message? Sleep usually comes within the first ten to fifteen minutes of the podcast. I sometimes awake at the end, when he’s reading comments from users, and thanking them. (Today he closed by reading from the building codes for Gwinnett county.)

At first, the beginning of the podcast didn’t seem promising for getting the job done because I found myself laughing heartily several times. But that’s about all I can recall. 

As one of the reviewers (moshverhavikk) put it, it’s a form of guided meditation “irreverently executed in a Coach McGuirk-like way.”  He also calls them “disorienting like the second act of a movie that never figured out its ending…It follows the logical rules of syntax and conversation but completely disregards meaningful content. Because of the natural pacing and topical words you are tricked into thinking you are listening to a real story.” Sounds like a plausible explanation.

In my Christian Science days, I'd have Joan read aloud from "Science and Health," and that usually put me out quickly. But you don't have to put someone else through that ordeal when Dearest Scooter does it all for you. Save yourself hundreds of $$$ per year and subscribe to this extremely useful podcast.

"The Reason for the Season"

**True, Dan. Yet, I try to respect people’s religious beliefs insofar as they keep them to themselves, especially at this time of year. And for the most part, most of them do. But silence on the subject shouldn’t be interpreted as acceptance of the premise. The other day I was cautioned to remember "the reason for the season" after I 'd joked about all the frenzied commercialism rampant since Thanksgiving. It's not a direct denigration of religious beliefs to simply point out some of the underlying counter-facts that cause those beliefs to crumble. Several good books have been written, some of them recently, showing that a person named “Jesus” (or one of the many forms of that name) cannot be reliably verified to have existed. More likely the “person” referred to is an agglomeration of characters, real and mythical, that served to symbolize a specific religious movement. This doesn’t diminish, for me, the value of certain “Christian” ideals, even when they’e been imported from other traditions. The “Beatitudes,” the “Golden Rule,” and the like, are plainly good rules for human living. But they don’t require the existence of a particular historical figure to make them credible. They are good ideas unto themselves that do not depend on any kind of deity for their validity. Many rituals and other habitual activities that give comfort have grown up around these myths, and one can attempt to graciously back away from puncturing the bubble of comfort they provide.

Even good religionists participate vigorously in the commercial enterprise known as “Christmas,” which started as an economic incentive many years ago. Gracing it with religious gravity only makes it ludicrous to those who know what is really going on. Yet, even severely religious people eagerly go out and buy so much stuff at this time of year as to make it an essential practice in order to sustain the economy (hence, “Black Friday” and the like).

In short, the “reason for the season” is money. Not the birth of a mythical character, even one identified with good human attitudes.

That doesn't mean that sincere, loving human beings can't hijack the commercial juggernaught of Christmas to extend good wishes, cheer and benevolence to their fellow human beings. And I hereby do.

My music in online stores. Again.

**I used to put all my music on iTunes and several other online stores. But I stopped after two or three years because the distribution service (TuneCore) charged much more than the income from sales would cover. I went over to bandcamp.com, which was free, and put up the entire catalog of music Rick Martinez and I had recorded and produced over five years. We worked under the name of RamonaStGeorge, the streets where we both lived at the time.  Most of it was my stuff, although we had begun to produce other singer/songwriters too. Nothing came of it. Just before Halloween this year, Rick asked me to put on Facebook a song we had recorded a couple of years ago, "Scary Maryann."

I recently heard about another distribution service, DistroKid, that was about half the price of TuneCore and offered a hefty discount for new subscribers. So I decided to put the single and our first album, "Mind Zones," back on the more popular online music stores. Here are the links:

Mind Zones

Amazon  

Spotify  

Google Play  

iTunes  

Tidal  

Scary Maryann

Amazon 

iTunes 

Google Play 

Amazon 

Spotify

When I have time and inclination I'll post the other twenty or so songs we produced. In the meantime they can all be auditioned on our bandcamp site, RamonaStGeorge.com

Lamar Smith: what kind of scientist?

**VOX.COM recently published a troubling article about the current chair of the House science committee, Lamar Smith (R-TX) .

"Are you now or have you ever been a climate scientist?"

The headline proclaimed:

The House science committee is worse than the Benghazi committee

The article claims the committee's "open-ended, Orwellian attempts to intimidate some of the nation's leading scientists and scientific institutions" has more dire consequences for the nation than Gowdy & Co's brazenly partisan attack on just one politician, Hillary Clinton. That's because recently Republicans granted chairman Smith vastly more subpoena powers than previous chairs, which Vox points out has much wider and more devastating implications than the Clinton witch hunt. Think of all the critical issues the science committee can affect – climate, NASA, stem cell research, etc – and think of the damage it can do if its aim is to discredit and halt the work of the scientists and institutions that focus on them.

But it's even worse than that

It would be bad enough for any clueless politician with only a secular ideological agenda to head up such an important committee. But it's even worse when you consider this individual's religious beliefs, which few seem to have noticed. I wrote a response to Vox, and this post is an expansion on it:

Thanks for a well-written article on the abuses of Lamar Smith as chair of the science committee. I think the problem is even worse than you detail when one considers that Smith is a long-time Christian Scientist. No, not a scientist who happens to be a Christian, but a card-carrying believer in the religion of Christian Science. I am a former believer and teacher of Christian Science doctrine and can verify that the ideas that his religion espouses are diametrically opposed to what the rest of the world knows as “science.” And the mission of the House science committee. A fundamental concept of the religion is that “matter,” the stuff that normal science investigates, is “unreal.” Yes, the very substance of science is an illusion, and those who profess to be normal scientists are deluded and therefore erroneous from the get-go. The first premise of Christian Science is that only “spiritual” things are real. His hidden agenda, then, is to destroy or at least weaken the credibility of the whole field of all normal science. Republicans in general tout the idea that it’s good for a government official to let religion influence his or her governance. It’s pretty obvious that Lamar Smith, whom I’ve met, intends to shape government policy by his religious beliefs and agenda. Most Christian denominations are not this radical, and have a long history of opposing Christian Science. Do Republicans think that the religious tenets of this politician are acceptable? 

How many of his colleagues understand the nature of Lamar Smith's religious convictions? Could it be that current Republican reasoning is as simplistic as to conclude that if he's a Christian Scientist, well, that's close enough to head the science committee? It's not really that far-fetched. And as the visibility and influence of Christian Science has waned almost to invisibility, he might even seem innocuous, maybe like Ben Carson's Seventh-day Adventism. But he's not.

I met Smith in 2004 while I was working at the headquarters of the Christian Science church in Boston. We exchanged mere pleasantries at a church event, but his attendance attests his commitment to its teachings. Unless he has become a worse Christian Scientist since then, people need to consider the implications if he still believes what his religion teaches. And fundamental to that teaching is the specious nature of the material world – the same material world that most scientists study and work in. If you personally know some Christian Scientists you probably don't think of them being as crazy as that. And perhaps the reason is that in order to appear less fanatical, Christian Scientists tend to practice an unstated dualism, holding privately to the primacy of absolute spiritual reality while going along with the "seeming reality" of the physical world. This sustains a subtle hypocrisy whereby many, if not most, believers indulge in all sorts of materiality, including medical treatment, rationalizing that they and the rest of the world haven't advanced to the wisdom of their teachings. What suits this dualism is a characteristic velveteen veneer, a terminal niceness that hesitates to get all absolute on people – and having to put up with all that push-back. Smith exhibits this veneer, even while wearing the brass knuckles of his newly amped subpoena powers.

Who am I to criticize?

Though I am hostile, for what this blog chronicles are good reasons, I am not an ignorant sniper at Christian Science, as many of its opponents are. My knowledge is deep and extensive: I was a believer and church member for over thirty-five years; wrote for its publications, lectured about and taught its precepts and practice. For twenty of those years I was a professional practitioner of what I ultimately came to realize is the sham of "Christian Science healing." It eventually didn't seem right taking money from people in order to convince them of the unreality of their problems, especially when there was never any discernible, verifiable physical healing as a result. I even pressed those precepts on a mother who let her child die of diabetes even while he screamed for medical attention. That horrendous event and its legal consequences plus five years snarled in the gears of Christian Science church politics led to the end of my faith.

Playing the religion card?

Let's remember that what Republicans mean when they blow the dog whistle of "religious liberty" is that government officials (like Kim Davis) should be free to institute, change or overrule public laws according to their personal religious beliefs. The world is a lot scarier place when legislators like Lamar Smith have extraordinary legal power to frustrate, harass and squelch real scientists and their work. The whacko fringe of the party (arguably not just a fringe) may have found a velveteen-clad wrecking ball in this mild-mannered "scientist."

Government officials like Smith frequently allow their religious beliefs and power to infiltrate the legal realm to generate religious exemptions* that include practices like Christian Science "healing." Though fortunately many of those exemptions, especially for children, have been overturned in recent years, it would not be surprising that a believer like this newly-superempowered chair of the House science committee would try to influence public policy based on his religious convictions. He is and will be as anti-normal-science as his religion, in its purest form, teaches.

Yes, I'm playing the religion card. But not in the way it was played against Romney, whose religion had little to do with government and more to do with its (and his) weirdness. It's more akin to JFK, whose opponents suggested that as a Catholic president he would be more loyal to the Vatican than to the US. But Kennedy stated publicly and firmly that in a conflict between his religion and his country his loyalties would always be with his country. How likely is it that Lamar Smith will publicly proclaim his allegiance to normal science versus that other kind?

Play mystery for me

**About a month ago we moved into our present home. A couple days later I met our next door neighbors. It was a very brief wave and just a few words from my porch to their driveway. Their names are Scott and Misty.

Yesterday I was putting the recycling on the curb when Scott and Misty passed by walking their son to the bus stop a block away. We exchanged a few more words about the travails of moving, etc.

Early this morning I awoke to the lyrics of the song “Misty” drifting through my consciousness. I have heard the song before. It’s a good song but I don't recall fixating on it as portrayed in the movie “Play Misty for Me.” But the lyrics kept coming to me as though I had deliberately memorized it. Well, I actually had memorized it — without intending to. 

The brain is a mysterious place. Even slight experiences are stored for a long time and can come bubbling up with no conscious intention. That’s just the nature of memory and brain functioning.

It’s also the nature of human consciousness to fabricate rationales for why these things happen. What is the MEANING of this mysterious appearance of lyrics to a song heard long ago? Am I being clairvoyant? Is someone trying to communicate with me mentally? Am I getting premonitions of future events? What about the words themselves, are they trying to tell me something? I barely remember them, but in these episodes they come streaming back as though I’m actually thinking or saying them for some reason.

The brain works in mysterious ways. Some even call those workings “god.”

Harry Cook is a writer I much admire. He’s an Episcopal priest who realizes that much of religious theory is bullshit, and that people foolishly believe and do things based on theology or religion that don’t make sense, or worse. He calls himself an agnostic, and seems critical of avowed atheists. Much as I generally agree with him I take exception to parts of his latest essay: “Invention of the Gods.” He claims that the “god idea” has always been part of human nature,

“It seems to be hard-wired in Homo sapiens,” he says.

He then goes on to assume that there is such a thing as “god” simply because people have always thought of it. Many would argue that it is a natural response to mystery. “Anthropologists try to help us with that kind of inquiry, but I suspect they might have a hard time distinguishing fear and superstition from a human-divine encounter.” The “human-divine ENCOUNTER”? Does he really mean there's something to "encounter" outside the influence of fear and superstition?

A mystery doesn’t prove anything other than its own existence. Not the existence of another world, another dimension or some kind of supreme being. Fear and ignorance go together like … fear and ignorance and religion. It’s easy to want to counter an overwhelming question with an overwhelming answer, i.e. god. But easy isn't the same as true.

And while such delusions offer comfort there’s also no doubt about the brain’s susceptibility to jiggering. Move a few chemicals around and one feels happy. Move them another way and one feels sad. Any emotion that can happen can be induced without an objective stimulus. It’s what brains do. And anything one can imagine can feel real, even to the point of persuading others to believe the same thing. Religions come from that.

We are not complete captives of our brains. We also have the ability to supersede the dramas that brains produce. Science, facts, reality are discernible by our brains, But it takes education, a dedication to reason and a willingness to dispense with some synthetic “convictions.” It took me a long time, and much pain, to finally dispense with the comforts of religious belief. As I’ve said many times, this has not made me happier, Indeed, it has made me more unhappy. It’s the “bone on bone” of the reality that we are alone and without external assistance. We can strive to be humanists, with the hope that progress can be made toward freedom from delusion, and perhaps toward some kind of durable happiness in spite of the facts. 

Arms against the government

**With every mass shooting we learn that the shooters have arsenals of weapons that they acquired under the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment2.html#sthash.0SbjNXB5.dpuf

How anyone could read that amendment and justify the accumulation of many weapons requires such an extensive stretch of interpretation that's it's ludicrous. That justification is often cloaked in the assertion that if ordinary citizens aren't allowed to have guns then the "State" would exert oppressive power and eliminate the freedom of citizens. So granting people the right to bear arms would allow them to band together and form "militias," presumably to engage in military combat against an invader. At first glance, it might seem reasonable, especially considering the times during which those words were drafted into law. "Militias," groups of citizens who banded together for defense, were common, especially during the time of the American Revolution against the occupying British. But the world has changed so radically since then that every concept stated in that amendment is obsolete.

Lawyers and scholars may argue the parsing of that brief statement but what strikes me is that the technology of weaponry has developed so much that the idea of defending against an encroaching government through military force is completely unrealistic. How many guns would it take to keep an army, any modern army, from completely overrunning a "people's militia?" More than could be procured from all the gun shows and stores in the country. Witness the ridiculous show of force in Ferguson,

where a few pieces of surplus military equipment were brought out to intimidate the citizenry. It's clear that if a government wanted to attack any group of citizens, it could do it almost instantly. A citizen "militia" is a fantasy that lives only in the imaginations of paranoid people who use it to rationalize the comfort they receive from their collections of weapons.

We have had misguided amendments in the past, most recently the Eighteenth Amendment, or "Prohibition." Thirteen years after its enactment, when wiser heads prevailed, the Twenty First amendment repealed it. Now it's long past time for the antiquated Second Amendment to be repealed, perhaps with a new amendment that specifies exactly who can possess appropriate weapons for personal self defense if they so choose. However such an amendment is phrased it needs to recognize the speciousness of militias in today's world. Perhaps then meaningful legislation to limit the proliferation of guns will ensue and America will join the rest of the world in reducing and eliminating the plague of mass shootings.

Heres a good statement of the issue: http://crooksandliars.com/2015/10/what-if-second-amendment-didnt-exist

Connect with Sam Harris

**Sam Harris is one of the five writers who eased me across the boundary from religion in general and Christian Science in particular. His early books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation  pushed him into the spotlight of those "New Atheists" eloquently exposing the deception and hazards of religious belief. I recently read his latest book, Waking Up, which deals with the nature of the self and meditation. Can't say I've crossed over into meditation territory but his ideas on consciousness intrigue me.

I also subscribe to his podcast. His latest is an interview with Joshua Oppenheimer who recently released his two films about the genocide in Indonesia in the mid 60s. The films are apparently devastatingly powerful and uniquely produced. Take a listen to this interview. Coming so close upon reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me it adds another splash of cold water to my white privileged life. Though I've been jailed, put on trial, successfully sued for $1 million, all for practicing my religion at the time, I am unscathed by prejudice and ignorance compared with those who have suffered in these ways.

Review of "Between the World and Me"

** Just finished this remarkable book. Here's the review I posted on Amazon of Between the World and Me:

Donald Trump may be a blowhard and a buffoon but he is a saint to the American Dreamers that Ta-Nehisi Coates identifies as the institutionalized oppressors of his people. These Dreamers vote for Trump in polls but will not get to vote for him in an election because, as Al Sharpton observes, he will forever be a Lounge act and not classy enough for the Big Room. There are a few, though, who are crafty enough to hide their racism under a veneer of good-heartedness, and they will get Dreamers' election votes. 

Coates maintains that the stain of racism goes so deep that it cannot be expunged. It must destroy itself as it destroys everything that it feeds on, including black bodies. This brief book, a collection of "letters" to his son is at once a searing indictment and a soaring paean to black struggle. The language is lofty while its gaze is gruesomely gritty. How many white people will read this and acknowledge their own complicity with black oppression?  And how many black people immersed in the Dream will wake up? I doubt there will be many.

And that is the irony of this book. It is an indictment so vast and convincing that prosecution is hardly imaginable. Even so, it is a poem so eloquent that it can't fail to move the reader. It will take its place in the canon of great American writing. 

Recent books read

**I read constantly. Some ideas come from friends and are related to some project or other. Some come from reviews in NYT and NYRB. I love a good long book because it saves me the hassle of finding another book. But sometimes there are several books I'm eager to read but am stuck on a long one (embarrassment of riches). In more or less chronological order, starting with the most recent, this is what I've read (links are for books from 2014 forward):

1. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
2. Speak - Louisa Hall
3. Some Remarks - Neal Stephenson
4. Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
5. Words Without Music - Philip Glass
6. The Sense of Style - Steven Pinker
7. Waking Up - Sam Harris
8. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
9. Bad Faith - Paul Offit, MD
10. Does Altruism Exist? - David Sloan Wilson
11. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
12. Knocking on Heaven's Door - Katy Butler
13. Daemon - Daniel Suarez
14. Freedom - Daniel Suarez
15. The Lost City of Z - David Grann
16. The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time - Unger/Smolin
17. At Home in the Universe:  Stuart Kauffman
18. Triumphs of Experience - George Valiant
19. Satin Island - Tom McCarthy
20. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End - Atul Gawande
21. Let Me be Frank with You - Richard Ford
22. 10:04 - Ben Learner
23. This Changes Everything - Naomi Klein
24. The Children Act - Ian McEwan
25. Odds Against Tomorrow - Nathaniel Rich
26. Colorless Tzukuru Tazaki - Haruki Murakami
27. CyberStorm - Mathew Mather
28. The Martian - Andy Weir
29. The Last Magazine - Michael Hastings
30. No Place to Hide - Glenn Greenwald
31. The Director - David Ignatius
32. Think Like a Freak - Levitt/Dubner
33. Sting of the Drone - Richard Clarke
34. The Word Exchange - Alena Graedon
35. The Innocent - David Baldacci
36. The Target - David Baldacci
37. 10% Happier - Dan Harris
38. Flash Boys - Michael Lewis
39. The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
40. On Such a Full Sea - Chang-Rae Lee
41. Blowback - Valerie Plame
42. The Reason I Jump - Higashida/Mitchell
43. A Working Theory of Love - Scott Hutchins
44. The Facades - Eric Lundgren
45. Inferno - Dan Brown
46. Night Film - Marisha Pessl
47. Zealot - Reza Aslan
48. The Cuckoo's Calling - Galbraith/Rowling
49. The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon
50. Intuition Pumps - Daniel Dennett
51. Immortality - Stephen Cave
52. C Street - Jeff Sharlett
53. A Ship without a Sail - Gary Marmorstein 

Meditation explorations

**A comment came in about an entry I made in 2007 quoting a poem by Wes Nisker:

"Why did you leave out the last line? This poem ends this way: I meditate because I want to discover the fifth Brahma-vihara, the Divine Abode of Aw, and then I'll go down in history as a great spiritual adapt."

Actually I didn't leave out the last line, which is not the one cited above. It is this:

"I meditate because I want to discover the fifth Brahma Vihara, the divine Abode of Ah
And then I’ll go down in history as a great spiritual abbot
I meditate because I am building myself a bigger and better perspective
And occasionally I need to add a new window."

There also appear to be several versions of this poem around the Internet.

I spent a day at a Nisker retreat and even got to say a few words with him. I'm still not able to make the leap to that practice, though I've been reading several books about it, the most recent being Sam Harris's "Waking Up." I've also recently read "10% Happier" and "Training in Compassion." Still not convinced.

"Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind"

**I read many books. Most of them are for enjoyment, or to pass the time during exercise. Some of them change my perspective enough to afford me new directions to explore. Such is Yuval Noah Hariri's "Sapiens." One thing it made realize more deeply is the ability of religious belief to mitigate suffering. I've always contended that religion is a kind of mind-altering drug that induces calm and hope despite external conditions. Hariri shows how this had an evolutionary role. A peasant in the Middle Ages might live a miserable daily life but was probably happier than today's skeptic, cynic or atheist. I know this from personal experience. I wrote a song, Bone on Bone, that suggests the pain of living without the buffer of spiritual illusions. There are plenty of other anesthetics, of course, and I have availed myself of them. Still, I can't say that I'm happier overall. Life is still hard. I came away wanting to look into Sam Harris's work a little more. Harris was one of the first "Four Horsemen" who eased me out of religion and spirituality. He's since developed along different lines from the other Horsemen and he may have something to say to me.

Hariri writes (or is translated) beautifully and I took copious notes as I read on my iPad with the Kindle app. I share below those highlights in hopes they might coax someone else into reading it and sharing ideas about it.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

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Last annotated on June 12, 2015

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.Read more at location 389

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This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.Read more at location 415

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Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.Read more at location 452

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How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.Read more at location 462

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There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.Read more at location 472

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As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.Read more at location 548

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The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.Read more at location 645

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Albert Einstein was far less dexterous with his hands than was an ancient hunter-gatherer. However, our capacity to cooperate with large numbers of strangers has improved dramatically.Read more at location 649

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We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a new house.Read more at location 723

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Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.Read more at location 760

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Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller than that of today’s Cairo.Read more at location 786

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The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2 Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.Read more at location 1273

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One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.Read more at location 1403

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We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.Read more at location 1756

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A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers – far more cheaply and effectively.Read more at location 1776

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Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘Follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths.Read more at location 1829

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in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.Read more at location 1886

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There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.Read more at location 1890

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Hives can be very complex social structures, containing many different kinds of workers, such as harvesters, nurses and cleaners. But so far researchers have failed to locate lawyer bees.Read more at location 1907

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musical notation, are partial scripts.Read more at location 1981

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how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts.Read more at location 2102

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Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.Read more at location 2121

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Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.Read more at location 2331

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But evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago.Read more at location 2337

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Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal.Read more at location 2395

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Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.Read more at location 2540

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From such a vantage point it becomes crystal clear that history is moving relentlessly towards unity.Read more at location 2574

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We begin with the story of the greatest conqueror in history, a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning people into ardent disciples. This conqueror is money.Read more at location 2666

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People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money.Read more at location 2667

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The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion.7 More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers.Read more at location 2754

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everyone always wants money.Read more at location 2761

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The truth is that empire has been the world’s most common form of political organisation for the last 2,500 years.Read more at location 2975

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Much of ancient mythology is in fact a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals – the first chapters of the book of Genesis are a prime example.Read more at location 3269

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But once kingdoms and trade networks expanded, people needed to contact entities whose power and authority encompassed a whole kingdom or an entire trade basin.Read more at location 3275

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Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind.Read more at location 3288

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Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.Read more at location 3316

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it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.1 In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion. The religious wars betweenRead more at location 3329

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religion that recognises the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.Read more at location 3368

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So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.Read more at location 3417

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Revolutions are, by definition, unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts.Read more at location 3713

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history’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans.Read more at location 3728

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There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.Read more at location 3729

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What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future.Read more at location 4756

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This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.Read more at location 4757

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Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest.Read more at location 4900

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The most important economic resource is trust in the future,Read more at location 5101

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Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.Read more at location 5143

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For decades, aluminium was much more expensive than gold. In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III of France commissioned aluminium cutlery to be laid out for his most distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold knives and forks.Read more at location 5284

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If I bake a cake from flour, oil and sugar, all of which have been sitting in my pantry for the past two months, it does not mean that the cake itself is two months old.Read more at location 5653

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The decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state. ThroughoutRead more at location 5708

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Real peace is the implausibility of war.Read more at location 5769

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Never before has peace been so prevalent that people could not even imagine war.Read more at location 5783

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Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.Read more at location 5933

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People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of.Read more at location 5934

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People are made happy by one thing and one thing only – pleasant sensations in their bodies.Read more at location 5999

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If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance, since most historical events have had no impact on our biochemistry.Read more at location 6039

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Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.Read more at location 6058

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As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.Read more at location 6083

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So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes.Read more at location 6091

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What happens to concepts such as the self and gender identity when minds become collective?Read more at location 6354

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Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.Read more at location 6417