This is basically how I felt in Minneapolis every time I tried to get on the lightrail with my bike before a Twins game.

Hell is other people’s religious icons / sporting events.

nsomn:

Sartre was onto something when he said “Hell is other people”, but he just wasn’t specific enough. Hell is one million catholic teenagers descending like a swarm of locusts to trash your city and make life unbearable. Jaime actually elbowed a kid in the face last night so that the crowd would move and let us out of the train.  I was so angry when we finally got up to street level that I was shaking and swearing at everyone in sight. I’ve never been so angry in public before! I don’t even want to venture out of the house today, because if I get pushed off the sidewalk one more time by a solid wall of young pissants singing hymns and waving a giant flag, I will… I don’t know what I’ll do. Just thinking about it gives me a rage blackout.

I don’t give two farts about the pope, but I plead that next time he comes it’s for a World Middle-Aged Housewives Day.

I’m into Simone Weil lately, currently reading her biography by Francine du Plessix Gray. Her journey from leftist labor politics to Catholic mysticism is a fascinating one.

Ed. Note: Interested readers may wish to click through to see a comment from the author’s mom.

speakingoffaith:

Prayer, Attention, and Will
Andy Dayton, associate web producer

As I was listening to last week’s program, one part that stood out to me was Krista’s question to Stephen Mitchell about the last line in his book, The Enlightened Mind, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” A quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil, Mitchell responded:

Well, that’s a marvelous definition. I love that. I think that could be as close as someone can get to a wonderful definition of prayer. In that sense, prayer has nothing religious about it. A mathematician working at a problem or a little kid trying to pick out scales on the piano is a person at prayer.

Weil has come up before at SOF, as a potential candidate in another run of programs about historical figures (we just finished the first series with our program about Sitting Bull). Intrigued, I did a bit of searching an found the quote in an essay by Weil titled “Attention and Will,” from Gravity and Grace, the first collection of her essays to be published in book form. Here’s the same quote with a bit more context:

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them. To beg for them is to believe that we have a Father in heaven. Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem.  Attention is something quite different.

Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud man. It is the result of a mistake.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

"… Buddhism considers itself as an empirical approach of the functioning of the mind, the mechanism of happiness and suffering. And so, empirical means, you know, we can certainly work with scientist without any risk of feeling threatened by that because if something is false, it’s false. What’s the problem with that?"

Matthieu Ricard

Dr. Feynman’s Father
Andy Dayton, Associate Web Producer

Right now I’m reading (or listening to, rather — in audio book form) The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of physicist Richard P. Feynman’s short works. Feynman was a unique and fascinating figure — not only was he a genius (he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965), but he was also a skilled explainer, storyteller, prankster, and bongo player (among other things).

The video above is from a 1981 BBC interview with Feynman, and includes some of his thoughts on religion, doubt, and uncertainty. Watching this, I couldn’t help thinking of our program “A History of Doubt.” His enthusiasm lies in the act of questioning rather than in belief: “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”

This same interview is also excerpted in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, and one thing that stood out to me was how much Feynman referenced his father’s teaching. I’m excited by Feynman’s ideas, but in some ways I’m even more fascinated to hear him trace those ideas back to his father. With “The Spirituality of Parenting” broadcasting this week, it seemed fitting to share a few of these stories — to catch a glimpse of how Feynman acquired his faith in doubting, as he tells it in the following video:

(written for SOF Observed)

"The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after engineers build the first computer with greater-than-human intelligence. That achievement will trigger a series of cycles in which superintelligent machines beget even smarter machine progeny, going from generation to generation in weeks or days rather than decades or years. The availability of all that cheap, mass-­produced brilliance will spark explosive economic growth, an unending, hypersonic, tech­no­industrial rampage that by comparison will make the Industrial Revolution look like a bingo game."

IEEE Spectrum: Waiting for the Rapture