As a hyper-theoretical extension of my earlier post, which touched on natural law, Professor Stuart Kauffman (with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy) sounds like he wants a revolution. Now, be careful. What you are about to read is as neopagan as it gets.

We need a place for our spirituality, and a Creator God is one such place. I hold that it is we who have invented God, to serve as our most powerful symbol. It is our choice how wisely to use our own symbol to orient our lives and our civilizations. I believe we can reinvent the sacred. We can invent a global ethic, in a shared space, safe to all of us, with one view of God as the natural creativity in the universe.

He says, in his lengthy essay, “Breaking the Galilean Spell” (as in Galileo, not the Man from Galilee), he says something that premodernists (like some of us) can agree with: “[O]ur secular modern society suffers at least four injuries, which split our humanity down the center.” They are:

1. “[T]he artificial division between science and the humanities.”
2. “[T]he reductionistic scientific worldview.”
3. “[T]hat agnostic and atheist ’secular humanists’ have been quietly taught that spirituality is foolish or, at best, questionable.”
4. “[T]hat all of us, whether we are secular or of faith, lack a global ethic.”

So, we have a very intelligent man, who understands much of the problem, and his solution is way, way, way off.

The month of December is all about Christians and a little about Jews (but mostly about Christians).  We talk about the secularization of culture, blah, blah, blah, and for at least one month, we mostly forget about other religions and philosophies that permeate the U.S.  So, if you’re needing a neopagan fix (just to be reminded that Christians aren’t the only ones considered nuts by the intelligentsia), you might enjoy this entertaining dispatch from the Body, Mind, and Spirit Expo recently held in Oregon.

For some attendees the expo and the new age movement must be nice. I saw several people crying while they received readings. Maybe they thought $40 was a fair exchange for someone to listen to them and touch their hand and pretend like they knew what was going to happen in the future for a while. Generally I try not to be one who gets between people and whatever they think they need to make their lives better. Yet at the end of the expo I felt as knackered as if I had made a pilgrimage not to the local convention center, but to the Ganges, Mecca, or Vatican City, and I wondered why I found the expo so exhausting.

Nothing’s wrong with exhausting, but the article makes it clear that many of the expo-goers were in search of something they probably didn’t find there.