AlmanackPage

At the Winter Solstice, it's 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wing-nuts are screaming from their respective corners about global warming and defending the

baby Jesus. The Almanack takes the calendar seriously, and observes its rituals religiously, and it takes offense when people abuse the symbols involved.

Religious fanatics are out of line when they insist on equal time for their holiday displays. Likewise, scientists are out of line when they pronounce all

religious observance 'delusional'. Both sides of the debate are just plain wrong, but not necessarily in equal measure. The Almanack doesn't plan to get into the game, but maybe just throw a couple of bottles at players of both

sides, from a 50-yardline seat. Taking aim at dogmatic religion: There is no Magic, Black or White. Leaving

aside the aphorism about there being no distinction between magic and any sufficiently advanced technology, the supernatural has no place in any reasoned discourse of the 21st Century. Insofar as any religion proclaims Received

Wisdom, or attempts to refute science by faith alone, it is indeed delusional. Taking a slap at smart-aleck science, there is no emotional comfort in the Big

Bang, nor in the energy return from mass times the speed of light squared. Knowing how things work is reassuring to a scientist who understands it, but it is no solace to a bereaved survivor. Sometimes we just want to be surrounded by

familiar, comforting symbols, and the reassurance that we are loved. Science is notoriously cold in this regard.

Religion was our first effort to police our behavior, order our thoughts, and mount a communal effort to confront a hostile world. The earliest indications of humanness are the artifacts that indicate belief in a 'spirit world'.

Symbolic art expressing dreams and the concept of life and death appear to be pre-requisites of human community. Religion is the product of dreams and symbols.

Because we are mammals, we dream. There are no words or colors in dreams, just images. The images are the detritus of waking thought, and it is necessary for the sanity and working memory of every mammal to re-order the contents of our

synapses during sleep, our 'maintenance period'. Taking out the garbage causes flashes of mental activity, apropos of little if anything, but loosely coupled to things we have seen or imagined.

And Symbols, according to the Almanack:

Because we are human, we use symbols. We are unique in the known universe in needing to invent simple mental placeholders for things we consider important. If other creatures do this at all, then we are at least unique in that we are

able to show other humans a placeholder, and to explain its value without having to use the original thing to define it. This ability is so important that we have created a placeholder for such a placeholder: 'symbol'; and a symbol for

sharing a symbol: 'communication'. When we use symbols to describe other symbols, the process is abstraction; when the symbols are self-referential, it's called recursion.

We use symbols to abstract the mental state of one mind so that another mind can reassemble a similar state. An interesting aspect of sharing an idea is that it

doesn't have to be related to anything physical. Other animals have the means to share information about the physical world, witness pack-hunters and hive-insects, but humans can use symbolic recursion to create art, worthless in

itself, but capable of conveying many levels of abstraction. Through symbols we can share dreams. The images our brains reflexively discard

and re-order seem to leave traces in short-term memory. Perhaps it was an evolutionary device, a kind of last minute to-do list for our early ancestors, to motivate the morning's activity, but when we first awaken, most of us have

some recall of the night's dreaming, dim or vivid. By retro-fitting symbols to the images recalled, we can force a narrative or derive a message from a dream. There is good anthropological evidence that thus we have been inventing a spirit

world for millions of years, and conflating the passage of death with sleep. There are definitely delusions involved in the genesis of religion, pun intended.

Religion has a well-documented history of pushing superstition on people to frighten and coerce them. Things that are inscrutable and unpredictable seem

not to behave by any rules. Before science, with no rules yet discovered, the behavior of nature was entirely unpredictable. Humans, by virtue of memory, imagination, and facility with language, can create legends to explain seasons,

storms, disease, and disasters, to bring comfort and reassurance; they can also invent happenings that defy the rules, which can be thrilling, and very scary. Scare a child, you have a fairytale; scare a grownup, you have a religion.

But when religion isn't scaring people, it inspires them. Most of human history is about humans exceeding their inherent capabilities, confidently taking

enormous risks because of words and visions so abstract as to have no basis in reality. Whole populations rise up at the command of a person invested with the trust that his (usually his, sometimes her) word is 'law'. At best, religious

laws embody ethical and practical standards of behavior, and they can be few or many layers of abstraction, but the purpose is harmonious living. At worst, religion promotes the afterlife above the reality we share, and becomes just a

tool of pack-animal domination, unique to humans only in the use of symbols and its potential for imaginative cruelty.

Along the way, religion founded monasteries and universities, humbled tyrants, and promoted egalitarianism, altruism, acceptance and inclusion. Open-minded tolerance has been typical of all the great religions in their better moments.

The science of the Greeks would have been lost entirely without the religion of the Middle Ages. The Almanack particularly revels in the symbolic abstraction of calendars: Hebrew, Islamic, Persian, and Mayan calendars are all directly

attributable to the religions of their communities; each expresses astounding feats of mathematics, profound respect for nature, and centuries of careful observation, carefully preserved. The modern Western calendar is a wonderful

patchwork of science and politics stretched over 1600 years. Science, as children do, has acquired more knowledge than its parent. This is

to be celebrated, not feared. Religion has already lost its stranglehold on politics, but it still participates in ethics, and it inspires a good deal of art. Religion has wisdom to impart that has nothing to do with the inanimate

bits of the universe, and everything to do with symbols, communication, and the emotions they convey. This is emphatically not a defense of 'non-overlapping magisteria', but a recognition that as the species matures, it needs less of

superstition to explain things, and more understanding of its past, so that it might correct its behavior.

That Religion should be at war with Science is preposterous. Religion spawned politics, ethics, AND science, so it makes no sense to trash it, even when many aspects of it are wrong-headed. And Religion trashing Science is a creature

eating its young. To update the letter from The Sun to Virginia: No, Virginia, there is no Santa

Claus, you don't need an impossibly fat elf to slide down your chimney with all the luxury brands in tow. What you, and all of us need, is songs, parties, decorations, and generosity to lift the wintry spirits of a discouraged

community. How you go about it and what you believe as you do it is up to you. The imperative is:

Have a Merry Christmas. ================================================================================

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