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In academic prose and especially college text books, there’s often the statement “the proof is left as an exercise to the reader.”

This blog entry was inspired by a Huffington Post article by Deepak Chopra. I hope it inspires thought and some mental exercise.

Richard Dawkins has written a number of influential books. He invented the term “meme”. Now he’s been taking on God as his adversary, or more accurately the God concept. It is certainly an ambitious project. Deepak Chopra and Richard Dawkins are both bloggers on the Huffington Post, and thus the battleground is set. But I found the opening salvo of this post to be very interesting.

Ultimately, Richard Dawkins can fight with religion all he wants and it will be only a sideshow. He is a color commentator sitting in the bleachers, not a player in the game. Skepticism offers critiques, not discoveries. Ironically, this is a shared fate with religion, which has ceased to play a progressive and vital role in modern society. [...] The two are locked in a sterile embrace.[...]

This quote was read to me, and it was on my to-do list to blog about it for some time. But peering at the logged comments, I was amazed at the amount of passionate vituperative responses that Dr. Chopra’s entries had inspired in the comments section of several of his entries. Dare I step into the crossfire?

Sterile Science and Sterile Religion are apparently at war, and non-sterile passionate lively boisterous humans are picking up the ammunition and philosophical hand-grenades to toss at one another. But maybe dialog is really what we need?

In any case, I don’t have much sympathy for the ideas of a “God Delusion”. It represents a deeply uninformed view that Deepak rightly protests. It is a viewpoint that holds many of our best and brightest human beings in bondage. Science hit a wall some time ago in it’s grand project to create a theory-for-everything. But the wall was hit in the deepest philosophical underpinnings of science in ways that did not spread to the rank and file researchers. It is why there are so many books about Quantum Physics these days. The greatest physical Scientists of our times have always also been great Mystics. Einstein. Newton. For they were delving in to the mysteries themselves to find answers.

But what of our Spiritual Scientists? Like Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed? Perhaps the Spiritual truths are much more fundamental and dangerous than the physical truths. We think we can hold physical truth in our hands. But what is matter? What is time? What is energy? If we skip those questions, and say, well, look, you know what matter is. It’s, like, you know. That bit of dirt. And this bowling ball.

True, we do share a physical experience. At least it seems to be the case. But as far as we can tell, we also share an internal experience. A “subjective” experience. For the mystic, for the one experiencing the divine or the sublime, the question of whether there is a God or not is an empty question. Like Deepak says, the people engaging in such debates are really like the people in the bleachers.

An observer of a dance might debate the value of dancing. They might fight. But it’s much more interesting to be dancing than to talk about it. Where are you in the dance? The answer is left as an exercise to the reader.

Dan Pink’s excellent book, “A Whole New Mind,” was a wonderful bit of neon holiday reading. It worked great on the airplane to add a splash of color with the huge title and bright orange cover. Seriously now, the book helped recognize some important trends that make certain skills much more valuable and critical in the new economic environment. Specifically, abundance, Asia, and automation are making the previously lucrative analytic and left brain skills less of a competitive advantage. And it makes right brain abilities like design, empathy, and narrative, much more important. There’s a lot of material in Dan’s book for blogging, but I’ll stick to narrative for this one.

The picture to the left is a photo from my mother’s school newspaper when she was growing up in Hawaii. Dan Pink’s book helped me to see that photo, as a result of following his advice and looking up StoryCorps as a way to develop my narrative skills. I found the link before I arrived at the place of my spawning in New York City, and after reading the link I was encouraged to interview my mom on video tape again. I’ve videotaped interviews of other peoples parents, but the interview process never clicked for me before – despite a deep desire to record and remember the stories and heritage from my parents, relatives, as well as friends and even strangers. The idea of taking my camera to new people and asking interesting questions has appealed for many years. The StoryCorps site helped me generate a set of questions that led to some amazing discoveries when I interviewed my mother on the kitchen table. I never knew she had won several competitions, including airplane trips to other islands, and was chosen as a 4H club beauty queen. She pulled out a scrap book and I saw her many photos in old newspaper articles, one of which was the national 4H club magazine.

If you want to set up your own interviews, check out the StoryCorps online question generator program, get a tape recorder and ask away. Just a little bit of preparation and planning makes a big difference for a good interview. With that I learned some new stories and some old stories, and hearing those stories made the world richer for me, maybe it can for you too.