Rick's Blog

My atheism has nothing inherently to do with my answer. What my answer does reflect is the lack of an answer provided by the magic or miracles of religions. My first response to the question “before the Big Bang?” is what does one mean by “before”? There was no before. Everything that we relate to as “time” began at the Big Bang. The “fourth dimension” of time may certainly be independent of our understanding of it (and likely is), but time as the means by which we detect changes of reality, i.e. the cause and effect phenomena, started with the Big Bang. So, in a manner that applies to everything other than theoretical math/physics, there is no “before” the Big Bang, and thus the question is nonsensical. That said, I think the actual question asked is What caused the Big Bang? My two meaningful positions on that question are as follows. First, while much of the math works, there are substantial problems with standard Big Bang theory. Inflation in particular not only makes no rational s...

I am willfully ignorant of the process involved with kidnapping children, murdering people, etc., because I have no interest in those activities. More like anti-interest. That is different than wanting to hear your perspective on say abortion rights because abortion is wrong 100% of the time, end of story, my fingers are in my ears, la-la-la-la I can't hear you, you're wrong. In the latter, the person wants the other opinion to be wrong and so treats it with disdain in order to keep it in the "wrong" box. I would argue that is both willfully ignorant and stupid.

This explains the current political wars of ideology. The non-engaged majority is simply being drowned out by the engaged minority with a bigger megaphone. This is a sign of the virus adapting to the evolutionary pressures of the modern consciousness environment. Yell louder. Dig your heels in firmer. Utilize fear over rationality. Because fear is what the virus is. That is the adapter that the phage engages to pass its code into a cell, just like fear of the unknown is the key to opening the door that unlocks consciousness to accepting the virus into its set of rules that are the basis for judging reality. This fear is the cause for the adherence to the ideologies of "going back to the safer times and ways of the past" and reluctance to adapt to change going forward. That reluctance to accept reality is what leads to rejection of reason and science, rejection of alternative genders, rejection of women having consent of their own bodies, and to embracing the illogical of the ...

Begin again. These might be the two most important words in my life, in the history of my life. Each moment of life is a new beginning, a chance to act, to be, to live. Realizing that moment is an experience of beauty for me, and my meditation practice helps me stay there in that present moment. Through my practice, I have come to a deeper understanding of why I hold that phrase and that concept so dearly. I hate myself. On some deep, fundamental, lizard-brain level, my brain, for whatever reason, is simply wired to make the most perfectly irrational conclusion it is possible to make as a sentient being: hatred of the self. I don't know why, I don't particularly care why. It just is. This self-hatred has played out in so many ways in my life: from not caring about school work to starting smoking to my devout religious days to suicidal thoughts. It spoke to tell me that I couldn't handle the schoolwork if I tried which made me not even start and then criticised me afte...

The things we fret over - our desires and aversions of the past, present and future - in our minds are not real. This is the simplest and most profound truth. But it is the depth to which they are not real that resonates with me the most. In all of the mind-numbingly vastness of space and reality, through everything we understand of the fabric of space-time and everything material and theoretical that exists within it, where physically is the future? If we could draw a map of the entire universe, could you point to a place on that map to locate the past? No. Why not? Because it doesn't exist. Time is nothing more than the measure of change in reality, and "when" is reality? Now. And now, and now. It is never "then". Nothing in the observable universe - no galaxies, no stars, no black holes, no physical entity that we have ever discovered - ever reflects anything more than what it is at the time of observation. Even the oddity of the double-slit experiment which ...

I certainly don't mean to suggest that I am enlightened in any way. I honestly don't think I know or have experienced enough to be qualified to determine if I am enlightened or not or to what degree I may be down the path, and given that fact, any consideration that I may be enlightened seems much closer to arrogance than to acknowledgment of truth. But the truth is I don't particularly care, and I think that is also kind of the point. To seek enlightenment is a desire itself. Enlightenment is not the goal; presence is the goal. Enlightenment is just the label we have applied to the experience of nothingness, no different than "rising"-"falling", "in"-"out", "lifting"-"placing"-"stepping". What I do know is that I am fundamentally different than I was six months ago, even three months ago, and different in an irreversible way. Living behind the waterfall is an appropriate analogy, but I resonate more wit...

The concept of nothingness and emptiness is also something I view as particularly aligned with the scientific method, and my dedication to (and even affection for) the scientific method provided me what seems to me to be an easier springboard for truly understanding - grokking - the concept and embracing it on a deep level. It is a misconception that we discover the truth in science. The reality is actually the exact opposite: we use the scientific method to discover what is  not  true, and then we move forward with those disproven claims and beliefs excluded from our concept of reality. I use the analogy of a pie. If we are given an apple pie and told there is a single cherry somewhere within it, how do we find the cherry? Do we point to some random area and declare Here it is!? No, we cut a slice out of the pie and investigate it, and when we find it does not contain the cherry, we repeat the process; we discover where the cherry, the truth, is not and exclude that slic...

When will we as a society allow people the dignity of ending their own lives when they have a debilitating disease before the disease takes them over? Why not take the opportunity to celebrate someone's life before we send them off on their final journey? It should be a bigger party than even a wedding, because it is a celebration a person's entire life. Think of it: imagine having an "honor event" for someone where the soon-to-be departing is memorialized with speeches and thank-you's and people's meaningful expressions of how he/she/they brought value in their lives. Picture the Kennedy Honors followed by a bar mitveh-like or wedding-level party. And at the end, we fondly send off the departing as we commonly send off the newlyweds as they drive away. Farewell in this new chapter of life. Why should it matter that the chapter of life that stems from the "honor event" is the final chapter? That is the whole reason for the party: to send them off kn...

The only one definition of God that could possibly, in any remote way, allow for God to exist is God is "correct". If God, if Truth, is some objective entity that surpasses all the laws of nature, then it must be perfectly logical, because that is the one quality that God must have in order to have created the universe as we see and experience it. We've proven omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence are all illogical, proven so with the one true "characteristic": logic. God must be compliant with all laws of nature, all laws of morality, all laws of reason, etc., because by God definition is "correct": perfect objective and subjective Truth. And the core of truth IS that it is correct; we know Truth because it is observable, testable, verifiable, because it stands up against the battery of reason and science. I don't mean that Truth is a neo-Platonic entity in some dual reality along with the physical manifestations of numbers. Rather, what ...

One argument for the existence of God is that if his ultimate morality did not exist and we will not suffer judgment for our actions, then ethics don't matter and we'd all be running around killing each other and raping and pillaging. But if you take a step back and just consider the possibility that if God doesn't exist, then humans would have invented our own morality, and the outcome of that morality would be exactly what we would already be doing: it would be exactly what we already see in the real world. In a world with no God, then where we have progressed to in our morality over all these centuries really is the result of humans "just doing it." If there really is no ultimate morality, then yes, we really would be able to just do whatever we want. And "whatever we want" has turned into exactly all of the moral codes of every culture on the planet. Sharing with the needy, caring for the young and elderly and sick, always good. Clubbing and eating ...

When someone suggests to you that creationism should be taught alongside of the theory of evolution because evolution is "just a theory", educate them on what a theory actually is. Whether you build a theory from the bottom up, as science does, or from the top down, as a prosecuting attorney would in a court of law, a theory is the top layer of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are facts: irrefutable, observable truths of nature. The next layer up are laws: consistent and often calculable explanations of those facts. Built on those laws and facts are hypotheses: suggestive and predictive inferences which can be tested and verified or proven to be false. The sum of the verified hypotheses themselves IS the theory. It is precisely because evolution is a theory that creationism cannot be taught alongside it. Creationism provides no facts about reality, provides no laws to describe those facts, and therefore offers no suggestive or predictive hypotheses which can be tes...

It helps them. Science can provide some of the most inspirational religious experiences. Consider the imagery described by Carl Sagan: A still more glorious dawn awaits Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise A morning filled with 400 billion suns The rising of the milky way Imagine the majesty, the inspiration, the "evidence" for the glory of God shining down on us by a magnificent sunrise. Now multiply that by 400 billion. Now multiply that by 1 trillion (estimates place the approximate number of galaxies in the visible universe at 1.4 trillion). And that represents only the subset of the universe that we can see and only that which we can see with our most sophisticated instruments. God, if He exists, is greater than all that. Humans, in our weakness, can be brought to tears by the "majesty" of God evidenced by the dawning of a single star when in reality that vision represents an infinitesimally small portion of God's true glory. The degree to which we experi...