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I have a pen fetish. I’m irrationally in love with the Pilot G-2 gel ink pen. By some quirky office ordering mistake, we ended up with a batch of them in our supply cabinet at work. Hey, what the heck, I thought, I always like to try a new pen. As for my Sanford Uniball Micros — well, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

Well, it was love at first write. One scribble and I was in trouble. I had to have more! I scurried back to the supply cabinet — I mean if the order was a fluke, surely they wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. These pens were much too nice for this place. They might never pass this way again! I HAD TO HAVE MORE OF THOSE PENS!

Yes, I’m a total pen jerk. Unlike with most of my cool office supply discoveries, I did not rush to share with my friends. This was my little secret. And my Uniball Micros were yesterday’s news. I dumped them; I didn’t return their calls, heartlessly stuffing them in a drawer. I’m a pen floozy, I guess. But dammit I can’t help it — that smooth rollerball and gel ink! That cushy finger grip! Those attractive curves and that substantial heft! If loving the Pilot G-2 Gel is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Do I need a life or what?

From the Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame, guess what? More trends

More trends for my research: Trends in U.S. Roman Catholic attitudes, beliefs, behavior

The busy Christian’s guide to Catholic social teaching. The title says it all.

Now, some Catholic Trends.

30 Small Business Trends

How many of us Catholics know about, much less support this? The NCCB official Legislative Program is a wide-ranging program of public policy positions that all Catholics should at least read and consider. Noone forces us to toe the line (few of us would anyway), they just ask us to understand where the Church is coming from. I give them that much. Actually, I agree with just about everything there anyway, especially the social justice agenda. Problem is in setting the priorities — Which of these issues do we tackle first? Most people go for the Pro-Life stuff (which I admit is important) but I tend to favor the social justice as a first priority. The proplems addressed by social justice solutions are usually a major root cause to many of the social ills Pro-Lifers fight against. Think Maslow’s needs and that pyramid hierarchy — we need to provide the bottom of the pyramid first.

But that may just be me.

Here is an excellent review of some work by Wendell Berry, one of my favorite poets and philosophers. Good stuff.

Some writing from the past I have done on religion and God. I wanted to put it here so I didn’t let it go to the bit bucket. Kinda sums up my current state of belief (tho from several posts so it reads kinda choppily.)

I’ll probably look back on this in a few years and wonder at what an idiot I was. But it sounds good to me now:

“”I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind.” —
Physicist Freeman Dyson

I pretty much agree with my boy Freeman here. Whatever God is is an epistemological concept way beyond our human ability to apprehend. To me “truth”, “proof”, and “existence” have specific meanings in the realm of logic, science, and mathematics. When you take those terms out of their limited scope they become fuzzy to the point of being meaningless. Christians (and other
religious types) waste much time and energy trying to assert “proof” and claim “truth”. Personally I think it’s a sign of spiritual insecurity.

A fetus has simply no way of comprehending her mother and especially no way to anticipate the type of existence she is soon to be pushed into, literally
kicking and screaming. Nor does she claim to “know” his mother or “prove” her existence, she just simply lives and develops in the (hopefully) loving care of the womb. Mother is substance, context, creator — the fetus’ entire world. We have a lot to learn from a fetus, at least as spirituality goes.

Yet I “believe” that God “exists”. I do so much that I envision, were God not to be present, that I would fall into a pile of subatomic detritus instantly. I agree with Freeman Dyson above in that God is part of reality on every scale — the subatomic to the macrocosmic. We with our logic and scientific method are so puffed up with our own “truth” that we fail to let our jaws fall suffciently agape at the sheer incomprehensibility and wonder of it all.

That’s where the Eastern religions have it all over us. All religions are not the same, but they are at some level all equally absurd.

Now, how I can say all that and be a dedicated Catholic is at least a three beer conversation….

…I never said to abandon rational thought. But we need to quit clinging to it for dear life. It will not hold us up.

For the first, lessee, 22 years of my life I was what you’d call an agnostic. Learning to loosen my demands that everything be “proven” before being believed
opened the door to faith for me.

For many years reason was my “God” tho I didn’t know it. Nowadays it’s more like a wise old uncle who never married — someone who knows alot about some things, but cannot speak with authority on many of the very important things of life.

And a disclaimer: I feel no need to convince you of my point of view. I do not care if my religion is “right”. I figure God does not need me to defend his “truth”. In fact, I usually just try to bait someone into offering to buy me three beers to get my God theory out of me….

…I suggest that the measure of a religion or a belief system is its Human reality and not it’s amount of “truthfulness”. Jesus essentially said that loving God and loving others were the same thing. That’s where many of the worlds religions have their commonality — reducing suffering, caring for others, and promoting peace are, despite the behavior of a few radical factions, the main worldly missions of most religions.

Approaching religions in this way provides a observable, verifiable measure of their worth. And it gives us an area of common purpose with many of the
non-religious folks out there. And heck, we can always come back to squabbling over doctrinal differences once all the poor have been fed, nations are at peace, and people everywhere love and understand one another…

…For me, belief systems are like mathematical systems in that a certain well-chosen set of assumptions (axioms) give rise to a consistent and complete set of theories which model some part of reality. The worth of a particular math system depends on its usefulness. No one would care if 2+2=4 if it didn’t tell us something about the behavior of quantities in the real world.
(You could construct an arithemetic system where 2+2=7 if you wanted, but what good would that be?)

A well-constructed math systems has the right number of axioms — assume too much (too many axioms) and your system is not strong enough to be useful, assume too little (not enough axioms) and your system is too limited to be useful.

I’d say the same goes for belief systems. Don’t assume too much, but you have to have at least some well-chosen “axioms” to base your beliefs on. Evaluate your axioms, and thus your belief system, based on its utility and whether it is consistent with the observed reality around you.

Everybody, including atheists and agnostics, has a belief system. Everyone has a set of operating answers to the Big Questions Of Life, even if it’s the pat
answer that “those questions aren’t relevant to me.”

At some point I realized that what I believed (or disbelieved) was defined by solely by desire to not be like some pushy religious folks I knew. Hardly a
basis for constructing a belief system. I realized from my study of meta mathematics that any good system starts with a consciously chosen set of axioms
and postulates. Then the fun began…..

…Does it really matter whether God “exists” at all? I’d say it doesn’t and that all efforts to argue the “existence” of God are wasted energy that could be put to better use.

I believe in lots of things that do not “exist”. I don’t think something has to exist to be real. I believe in love, freedom, human dignity, the brotherhood of man, democracy, and my momma. (okay that last one almost definitely exists.)

I also believe in a unifying consciousness which contains and is contained by me, through which I am spiritually and morally connected to all other
individuals. I don’t believe that “exists”. But I do believe it’s real.

So flippin’ what if God is “just an idea,” a product of evolutionary psychology or whatever the latest skeptics’ theories are? Physicists are coming closer and closer every year to the conclusion that *everything* is basically information anyway. What if everything is “just an idea”? Who cares?

What I care about is my personal relationships, my community, reducing the suffering of poverty, and preserving the dignity of life, stuff like that. And
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that that’s what God cares about most as well.”

I don’t really care for Maureen Dowd=, but in this column she hits it right on.