A God of Manageable Size

My philosophical novel, A God of Manageable Size, is now available on Amazon. It looks lovely.  I’ve priced the book such that I will  make $0.00 on each copy sold – but I hope to make up for that in volume 🙂 . Tell all your family and friends and co-workers. Then buy the book – you won’t be making me rich, just happy.

Also, that’s it, I’m done, finished – no more work on The Happiness Dance – unless I change my mind. Read it, enjoy it, share it – or not.

I started on the Happiness project when books on happiness were all the rage and I joined the herd. Not being a professor or researcher in the field I needed something to differentiate The Happiness Dance, so I decided to go with a graphic-based approach rather than straight text. It’s been fun, I’ve done a lot of reading, learned a lot, changed a little, but now, if I never read another blog about happiness or life hacking again, it will be too soon.

Reading about people’s search for happiness simply gets depressing. Enough already. Just get on with life. As Eric Hoffer says, “the search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness“.

Or, as Eric Weiner says is his fun book, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, “Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.”

If you are not convinced and want to read more books, here are some I recommend. In the meantime, I’m done with this book. No, I’m not going to try and get it published – it needs a lot more work for that – and I want to move onto other things.

Religion and Morality

I was reading an article called The New War Between Science and Religion, which starts with:

There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the anti-evolution forces in the 2005 “intelligent design” trial. …. The new war pits those who argue that science and “moderate” forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.

The former group, known as accommodationists…. suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.

I don’t want to address the domains of mind and consciousness because I think that science will eventually give us answers. Morality is much more interesting because there’s no agreement on what is moral and immoral, and certainly religion (at least the Bible) doesn’t seem to provide good answers.

God and Social Darwinism

I just came across an interesting article called Bringing Creationism to Heel Requires Making America Less Socially Darwinistic.  Here are a couple of exerpts. I’ve blogged about this subject before, and you can read the posting here, or read the article here.

Palin’s People

The fascination with Sarah Palin is fascinating. On a superficial level she’s a phycially attractive woman that lots of male voters probably fantatize about having sex with. But on a deeper level the fascinating reality is that a woman so incoherent, so hypocritical, so lacking in knowledge about the world, and so lacking in curiousity to learn more can be a national phenomenon.

Playthings of the Gods

I read Bill Maher’s article about our inability to get anything done. Here’s a quote from it:

That’s the ultimate sign of our lethargy: millions thrown out of their homes, tossed out of work, lost their life savings, retirements postponed – and they just take it. 30% interest on credit cards? It’s a good thing the Supreme Court legalized sodomy a few years ago.

Happy Easter Monday

Here are a couple of Easter comic strips from one of my favorites – Jesus and Mo. Click the image for a larger version.

More about God and Insecurity

I was reading a New Scientist article that ties in neatly with my Feb 7th post, Belief in God and the Struggle For Existence.

If you didn’t read it, the post is basically about the fact that belief in god or gods is related to how insecure people feel in their lives. (Not on an individual level, but on a societal level – the Law of Large Numbers applies).

Belief in God and the Struggle for Existence

One of the things talked about in the Economist article I mentioned in my previous post about Public Acceptance of Evolution is the idea put forth by Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman that “a belief in God is inversely correlated with the level of what might be described as the intensity of the struggle for existence.” I did a search to see what Paul and Zuckerman wrote, and found an interesting article. I’ve included paragraphs from the article below.

Renditioning Religion

Yesterday I mentioned watching the movie Rendition, and the mixed emotions it generated in me. As I said, I hate the way that some people use religion as a reason to kill and maim others. There’s always a justification. God hates infidels and wants us to kill them. God hates gays and wants us to kill them. God hates (fill in the group you hate) and wants us to kill them.

How would I know if I were wrong?

Okay, now that the comic has got your attention, I will tell you that Jerry Coyne has written a long but very interesting article in the New Republic about “The never-ending attempt to reconcile science and religion, and why it is doomed to fail.” As he says in the article, “In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong?”