I just want to be happy. . . .

A phrase we all use - but one that likely has different meanings for each of us.

Can we think ourselves happy? If people think things are getting better, they can be happy in pretty tough circumstances - so, is happiness a state of mind we experience when we THINK things are getting better?

I know that I can be getting on OK in life, but if I don't perceive it to be 'going anywhere', I often won't feel very happy. I'll get bogged down in day-to-day routines and find myself looking around for anything that will give me a boost - alcohol, food, sex, exercise, some new 'self-help' fix, planning a trip. You get the picture. I bet you have your favorites, too. So is being happy just about the level of certain chemical elements in our brain? It's relatively easy to manufacture short term happiness, but its effects die out very soon - little more than a quick high.

Perhaps it's the PURSUIT of happiness that makes us happy. If that's the case, then setting goals toward things we THINK will make us happy - and setting new ones along the way - should keep us all in a state of perpetual happiness. That might render "the pursuit of happiness" even more profound that Thomas Jefferson realized when he wrote "happiness" instead of "property" in the Declaration of Independence. It could even explain the power of religion - with it's promises of eternal life, streets paved with gold, milk and honey, 70 virgins, paradise. . . . . and, of course, eternal happiness.

Resurrection, Witch-hunts and Teddy Bears named Muhammad

The following excerpt is taken from the opening pages of SAM HARRIS' book, THE END OF FAITH "Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason"; Chapter 1 - Reason in Exile. It begins with a young man boarding a bus. Beneath his overcoat he wears a bomb - his pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison.

A BELIEF is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions:

1. You have only two weeks to live.
2. You've just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars.
3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.

These are mere words - until you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations, and subsequent behavior.

There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world: they are leading us, inexorably, to kill one another. A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like "God" and "paradise" and "sin" in the present that will determine our future.

Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of the incompatible claims they accept - rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its reader to adopt a vairety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: "respect" for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes - really believes - that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility the the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.

Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself, is always, and everywhere, exonerated.

The world can no longer afford to exonerate religious faith. Thank you, Sam Harris, for this incredible book on the irrationality of religious faith.

Another Thousand Years of Darkness?

Properly examined, history can tell us what we need to know about human behavior to avoid mistakes of the past. It's relevant and fascinating - so why do our textbooks and teachers make it seem so dry and boring? Are they afraid we'll learn too much?

If you were lucky, you had at least one history teacher who taught you to examine history in the context of our lives today - instead of just teaching you a boring succession of dates and names to memorize as you marched through time, class after class.

THE RISE AND FALL OF ALEXANDRIA, Birthplace of the Modern Mind by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid is an excellent example of the importance of understanding history - and their work breathes life into this ancient story.

Excerpt from jacket cover -

Most of us assume that two cities - Athens and Rome - dominated the classical world and set Western culture on its present course. But there was a third city that, at its height, dwarfed both of these in scientific and artistic achievement: Alexandria of Egypt. While Athens and Rome spread their influence through trade and war, Alexandria sought to conquer the mind.

This lively, accessible saga explores the birth, death, and legacy of this miraculous city. It was here that humankind first:
· Realized that the earth was not flat
· Invented geometry
· Built the steam engine
· Invented latitude and longitude, drawing the first accurate maps of the world

And when the city was destroyed in the seventh century AD, Western civilization regressed a thousand years.

. . .Here the true foundations of the modern world were laid – not in stone, but in ideas.

Yet it is a terrible irony that here too the seeds of religious extremism were sown, seeds that emerged in the form of early Christian and Muslim militant fanaticism, both of which eventually destroyed first the intellectual then the physical fabric of the city itself.

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern Mind by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid

Famed astronomer Carl Sagan understood it.

When speaking of this miraculous city and its great Library he laments, "Imagine how different the world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone". Instead, these discoveries were the guarded possessions of a few powerful men.

Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People of all nations came there to live, to trade, to learn. On any given day, its harbors were thronged with merchants, scholars, and tourists. This was a city where Greeks, Egyptians, Arabs, Syrians, Hebrews, Persians, Nubians, Phoenicians, Italians, Gauls and Iberians exchanged merchandise and ideas. It is probably here that the word cosmopolitan realized its true meaning--citizen, not just of a nation, but of the Cosmos. To be a citizen of the Cosmos...

Here clearly were the seeds of the modern world. What prevented them from taking root and flourishing? Why instead did the West slumber through a thousand years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done in Alexandria? I cannot give you a simple answer. But I do know this: there is no record, in the entire history of the Library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars ever seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not. Science and learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population of the city had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Library. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little. Discoveries in mechanics and steam technology were applied mainly to the perfection of weapons, the encouragement of superstition, the amusement of kings. The scientists never grasped the potential of machines to free people. The great intellectual achievements of antiquity had few immediate practical implications. Science never captured the imagination of the multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to stop them.

From Carl Sagan’s COSMOS
See Alex Petrov's The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

The population was ignorant of discoveries taking place in the Library-
intellectuals at the great Library were unconcerned with the general population -
and rulers guarded knowledge to advance their own wealth and power-
a perfect atmosphere for religious fanaticism to destroy it all.

God on who's side?

• I will shoulder my musket and brandish my sword,
  In defence of this land and the word of the Lord.
  
  Lyrics from the song “Bright Sunny South” recorded by Alison Krauss and Union Station tell of a son of the south off to the Civil War with his parents blessing. He is a child, not yet twelve.
  
  Combining religion with the patriotic defense of homeland has proved a powerful tool for sending boys off to war for as long as men have been motivated by greed and power . . .and throughout the history of man, on all sides, people have gone to war believing God was on their side. . . . . and their cause a just one.
  
  Some have called America’s Civil War a boy’s war. Minimum age for enlistment was 18, but one could enlist at a younger age if a guardian’s consent was given. Avery Brown was mustered into Company C, 31st Ohio Volunteer Infantry, at the age of 8 years, 11 months, and 13 days. Like many enthusiastic young patriots of his day, he lied about his age, claiming to be 12 on his enlistment papers. David Bailey Freeman joined the 6th Georgia Calvary CSA at age 11. Reports indicate, from approximately 2,700,000 who served, more than 2,000,000 Federal soldiers were twenty-one or under and, of those:
• more than 1,000,000 were eighteen or under and, of those,
• about 800,000 were seventeen or under
• about 200,000 were sixteen or under
• about 100,000 were fifteen or under
• three hundred were thirteen or under - most were fifers or drummers, but regularly enrolled, and sometimes fighters
• and, twenty-five were ten or under

John Brown was executed by the state of Virginia with the approval of the national government. It was the national government which, while weakly enforcing the law ending the slave trade, sternly enforced the laws providing for the return of fugitives to slavery. It was the national government that, in Andrew Jackson's administration, collaborated with the South to keep abolitionist literature out of the the mails in the southern states. It was the Supreme Court of the United States that declared in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom because he was not a person, but property.

Such a national government would never accept an end to slavery by rebellion. It would end slavery only under conditions controlled by whites, and only when required by the political and economic needs of the business elite of the North. It was Abraham Lincoln who combined perfectly the needs of business, the policical ambition of the new Republican party, and the rhetoric of humanitarianism. He would keep the abolition of slavery not at the top of his list of priorities, but close enough to the top so it could be pushed there temporarily by abolitionist pressures and by practical political advantage. (Exerpt from Howard Zinn's A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 1492 - Present: Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom)

Why do we keep falling for it over and over? Why can't we learn the lessons of the past? Today war profiteers rake in billions as our men and women sacrifice themselves, their families, and their futures in Iraq and Afghanistan. . .their lives valued in mere pennies compared to the huge profits of the few. Need more evidence? Check out this story posted at RollingStone.com- The Great Iraq Swindle

Nothing that has happened in the United States justified our invasion of Iraq and the bombing and killing of innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq - however unintentional our government claims it to be. The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the defense of our homeland and it certainly doesn't represent the Christian values this country claims to hold so dear.

If God exists, it's hard to imagine he'd be on our side in this one.