Science & Magic

Every other year I teach a class that focuses on spiritual rhetoric. One of the central concepts we explore in the class is "the God problem" or the general bias in academics toward explicitly observable, and readily knowable, phenomena. As scholars, how does one study communication between a God/Goddess/Flying Spaghetti Monster and followers? People claim that they communication with a divine presence on a regular basis, but studying these interactions is generally off limits to academics. Can you imagine the reaction I would receive if I went to a conference and tried to present a paper on my conversations with God, voices present in the natural world, or the living universe? I could no doubt present something on how people communicate about those experiences, but the experiences themselves would be a difficult sell. Or maybe I'm being too hard on my academic colleagues.

During the course of class discussions and reading, we usually run across the work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.* Sheldrake, a biochemist published in traditional scientific journals until he started to ask questions that fell outside the traditional boundaries of science. Although his work as been labeled as pseudoscience, I wonder if Sheldrake might be exploring a phenomenon--morphic fields--that is so foreign, so far outside of human scientific experience, that there isn't a way to talk about these ideas presently? Could it be, as Sheldrake asserts, that there are many ways of communicating that have yet to acknowledged (e.g. intuition, telepathy)? If so, how does one go about bringing legitimacy to the study of these phenomena?

*Hat tip to the Alabama Hick--he introduced me to Rupert Sheldrake long before I started teaching this course.

Bingo

An assessment of the recent "bipartisan" behavior of Senate Republicans.

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

Spot on. Haven't I been saying the same thing on this blog for years?