Among these philosophers, Socrates seems to have been a singularly charismatic and powerful personality: committed to truth yet witty, open-minded yet uncompromising, wise yet without pretension, and above-all unconcerned with the regard of others. Yet he never wrote a thing as far as we know. It’s as though his personality—the living out of an unfettered soul—was fulfillment enough for him. His life was his work of art.

We know about Socrates mainly through the writings of one of his admirers and pupils, Plato. After Socrates’ inspirational death, refusing to compromise his character, Plato did feel the need to write, but he presented his philosophy in an interesting way: in the form of dialogues—plays almost—usually between Socrates and others. This means that it’s hard to disentangle where Socrates ends and Plato begins. 2500 years later, we can only experience Socrates through the prism of Plato. What Plato seems to have done is to attempt a “grand theory” that he either believed Socrates would have agreed with or that he believed was a fitting extension of Socrates’ ideas.

There’s an interesting parallel here with another powerful personality in the Western psyche. Like Socrates, Christ never wrote a thing. We know of him only through the writings of others, who probably wrote between 60 and 100 years after Christ died. Those others were, of course Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, the authors of the “official” Gospels. These authors, though, mainly sought to record Christ’s acts and words, not to interpret or make sense of the ramifications of Christ’s teachings. The man who took on the role of codifier and explainer of Christ’s message was Paul.

Just as Plato presented Socrates to the world, Paul presented Christ. However, in Paul’s case, we may have a better idea of just what he added or subtracted from the original, for we can compare Paul’s ideas—which he of course believed Christ would agree with—with the Jesus presented in the four Gospels. Regardless of how well his ideas actually do match the original spirit of Christ the man, Paul was the principal authority in the earliest establishment of Christian churches, and his ideas have had a powerful influence on subsequent Christian thought.

So neither of the two most luminous figures in Western civilization felt the need to record his ideas or “make sense of them.” (Neither did Buddha, the single most powerful figure in Eastern thought, but I will here focus only on the West.) Both Socrates and Christ were powerful personalities who seemed to have accessed a fundamental truth but who never felt the need to organize or make rules concerning this truth. That’s because this truth cannot be codified and imposed on others. That task fell to dedicated yet “lesser” personalities—the Platos and Pauls of the world. The real truth— what Socrates and Christ knew—was more shadowy, more subtle. The real truth could only be lived, displayed, experienced. It could only be approached indirectly through parables and Socratic conversation. It was, above all, alive.

The world is full of Platos and Pauls, with varying degrees of integrity, energy and inspiration: they include dogmatic philosophers and religious authorities, political leaders and lawmakers, and any others who attempt to impose upon the incandescent life force of each unprecedented individual. Most people look to an outside authority or set of rules for guidance and mistrust themselves. What we miss is the authority of our own personality. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light that flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.” The truth that Socrates and Christ knew was the truth of their own divinity. Their capacity to personify, in their unique human form, a universal divine energy was what made them so charismatic, such powerful examples and teachers. There was no truth to write down—both figures were the truth.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized personal drug use. Instead of prosecuting people found with no more then a ten-day supply of coke, pot, heroin or anything else, Portugal requires that they appear before a three-person panel, typically a lawyer or judge, a doctor, and a psychologist or social worker. The panel can choose between imposing a small fine, recommending treatment or doing nothing. (Dealing drugs, as opposed to possession, is still illegal.)
Before decriminalization, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with one percent of the population addicted to heroin and the highest rate of drugs-related AIDS deaths in the EU. The usual approach–harsher sentencing and more money for prosecutions–only saw matters grow worse. Since decriminalization, Specter writes, “the law seems to have worked: serious drug use is down significantly, particularly among young people; the burden on the criminal-justice system has eased; the number of people seeking treatment has grown; and the rates of drug-related deaths and cases of infectious diseases have fallen.”

This is startling and very good news. Portugal’s experiment suggests decriminalization is a cheaper and more effective approach than the US’s own failed drug war, now in it’s forty-first year. We could potentially save billions of dollars and help millions of people. Instead of jumping up and down with eagerness to try a similar approach, however, we ignore the evidence. Why?

When people  see the world through a certain set of beliefs, they ignore evidence contrary to those beliefs. The war on drugs is a case in point. With regard to the drug problem in the US, the first belief we insist on in is that drugs and drug-users are evil or at least immoral. The second belief is that war is the correct, strong and moral response. Anything less, in our collective mind, is coddling or condoning the evil behavior. Armed with these two beliefs, it doesn’t matter if some other approach actually works to reduce the problem.  It doesn’t matter that decriminalization in Portugal significantly lowered serious drug use while also saving money. This result didn’t happen through treating drug users as immoral and going to war on them; therefore the result are invisible.  Seen from this perspective, it makes perfect sense that we ignore what works.

We use a word to designate a fanatical crusade against peceived evil: jihad. Given our fixation, dressed up as “morality,” on attacking and punishing those of whom we disapprove, it is no surprise that we’re also fixated on an enemy with a similar, if more extreme, mindset. For we attract and become obsessed by those that reflect our own, often hidden, nature. When Muslim terrorists, however, declare war in the name of religion, we easily spot the hypocrisy. In our enemy’s acts, we see the destruction and not the morality. In our own acts, we see the morality and not the destruction. Our enemies wear the very same blinders. And so it goes.

The Beatles were actually a string of miracles. The first was John Lennon, the second McCartney, and the third that they met. There were two people in the world, it would turn out, who could rival Lennon as a singer and songwriter in popular music. One of them, Bob Dylan, lived in Minnesota. The other happened to live a mile and a half away.

Lennon and McCartney’s cooperative as well as competitive songwriting partnership, spurring each to ever greater heights, has been widely recognized by commentators, biographers and Lennon and McCartney themselves. But there was something more poignant going on that hasn’t been adequately acknowledged:  John and Paul saved each other. Each made the others’ life what it turned out to be, something beyond anything they—or the world—could have imagined.

To understand what I mean, you have to know a bit about John and Paul.  When John met Paul, he was an angry, self-destructive sixteen-year-old. His father permanently away at sea, his mother deemed too irresponsible and preoccupied with her new partner, John was raised by his strict and puritanical Aunt Mimi. He found comforting adult companionship in the form of Mimi’s more easygoing husband, George, whom John loved.

When John was fourteen, however, George suddenly died. Not long after, John began to reconnect with his mother, largely through their shared love for and taste in music. In what must have felt like the cruelest of jokes to young John, however, she too died shortly thereafter, struck by a car. It was more than he could bear. Already prone to rebellion and disenchantment with the options society offered an imaginative English school kid, he went over the edge. Unable to get into a university due to poor grades, he was sent as a last ditch effort to art school. There he fared no better. Caring only about rock and roll, he did practically no work (fellow students would loan him theirs so he had something to show his instructors). Instead he played the class clown while getting drunk and picking fights in his free time, aided in these pastimes by his sharp wit and predilection for cruel mockery.

Before he met Paul, John could only sense his brilliance in flashes amid the chaos of his soul. Paul, though, was a like a mirror in which Lennon could see a stable image of this inner self. As such, Paul was a lifeline towards a future for John. Since high school, John had kept a band going with rotating personnel but they weren’t going anywhere. It was only Paul’s incandescent talent along with his ambition, discipline, charm and diplomacy that allowed The Beatles to march doggedly forward and corral John’s feral genius . Perhaps crucially for their connection as well—another synchronicity in the dazzling array that blessed The Beatles’ career—Paul had also lost his mother, to cancer, at about the same age as John. (Much has been made of this parallel in both musicians’ early lives.)

After they met, it was clear to everyone around them that they were the nucleus of something—and things began happening for the group. Skilled and dedicated themselves, they began tolerating less amateurism in other group members. A new determination and sense of purpose took form. It was Paul who suggested George become a member. It was Paul too who sparked John’s songwriting. To an English kid in the early sixties, songwriting seemed unreachable, the province of “experts.” No groups in Liverpool wrote their own songs, and before meeting Paul, John too was content to sing the rock and roll hits of his day. But Paul, with his own brand of boldness, had written a few songs, which he played for Lennon.

If McCartney likely saved Lennon from an early death, Lennon saved McCartney from an early life. For without John, Paul would likely have eased unnoticed into Liverpudlian adulthood to lead a comfortable existence as a school teacher who played music on the side, just like his dad. Unlike John, Paul had options. He was self-possessed, canny, successful in school and surrounded by loving parents and other relatives. Though, like John, he had been robbed of his mother at an early age, his upbringing allowed him to absorb the blow with less world-negating despair.

True, McCartney loved rock and roll. But he also loved music hall tunes and much of the other tamer fare of the kind his piano-playing father exposed him to. On his own, McCartney lacked the drive or desperation to form a rock and roll band. He was not actively seeking a band when he met John, nor had he ever formed one of his own. To fork in the direction of the trail-blazing pop-star he became, he needed John’s go-for-broke energy. John’s middle finger to society’s boredom was a rallying flag for the secretly irreverent, Little-Richard-loving rocker in Paul, who would  emerge over the course of the sixties as a musical genius with a mind-boggling array of talents.

In McCartney’s touching 1985 song about Lennon, “Here Today,” he wrote that, through everything , John was “always there with a smile.” That smile is what roused Paul in the first place. It said, “Life is supposed to be fun!” It’s the smile the two of them spread across the world.

to the desk lamp:

even from 93 million

miles away

I can still

kick your ass

If faith is belief in what cannot be proven, then all human endeavor rests on faith. This is as true for science, mathematics, and every aspect of our personal lives as it is for philosophies and religions. Schools of thought, bodies of knowledge and everything we do from the moment we get up and brush our teeth in the morning, all rise up from and depend upon an assembly of beliefs accepted on faith. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, Hindu or atheist, faith is the bedrock of your reality.

It’s easy to see that religions are based on a set of beliefs subject to question by those who do not believe. Indeed, one of the admirable aspects of religions is their honesty about the role of faith as a foundation for everything they claim. We also accept that people have philosophical beliefs upon which they may base their actions or entire lives. We don’t see as clearly, however, that mathematics, science and our daily existence are all likewise based on unprovable beliefs. This has been widely affirmed over the centuries by wisdom traditions of all stripes. It’s a central principle of Buddhism, in Christ’s message, in Socrates’s probing approach to philosophy and in what quantum physicists have discovered about the nature of reality on a fundamental level. We would be better served were we daily more mindful of the ground of belief upon which we walk, and through which we experience what we call reality.

Take mathematics, a field we think of—when we are forced to think of it all—as logically airtight and having no truck with faith whatsoever. For mathematics is based on proofs. A mathematician only accepts into the canon of his field a “truth” that can be proven, at which point this truth becomes a “theorem.” But what are used to prove theorems? Other theorems! Clearly, though, this can’t go on forever. Eventually the most fundamental theorems have to come from somewhere else. Eventually something has to provide a foundation for the theorems. And so it is. Mathematicians call these “somethings” axioms. But we can call them beliefs.

Why? Because axioms aren’t proven. An axiom (also known as a “postulate”) is a statement taken at face value. It’s a statement mathematicians—who are human beings, I hasten to add (despite common misconception)—have agreed to accept as obvious.  An example of an axiom in geometry is “the unique line assumption,” which says that through any two points there can be drawn exactly one line. Part of the wikipedia definition of an axiom is that its “truth is taken for granted, and serves as a starting point for deducing and inferring other truths.”So it seems that, just as is the case for religion, the foundation for mathematics are also truths that are “taken for granted.”

Now you are doubtless thinking, “Hold on, brother. If the ‘unique line assumption’ is anything to go by, these mathematical beliefs are a lot more obvious than religious beliefs. Surely mathematical axioms are no-brainers—only a crazy person would doubt their truth.” Indeed, this seems true, but as I’ll later explore in more detail, many things once thought self-evident have turned out to be false. For now, let’s move on to see how science is also based on unprovable beliefs.

How does science rest on faith in the same way that religion and mathematics do? You could say that the business of science is to explain phenomena. To explain something, we depend on the concept of cause and effect: “A causes B and B causes C” and so on. However, as the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out around 1740, the very concept of cause and effect is actually a belief. There may be no such thing.

Think about it. When a pool stick hits a billiard ball and it rolls, there is no way to prove that the stick caused the ball to roll. All you can say is that in every case up till now, when someone has hit a billiard ball with a pool stick, the billiard ball has rolled. The past being all we have to go on, you can only say that in the past we have always observed the two activities occurring together in sequence. The concept that the stick caused the ball to roll is a belief we impose on the events. Perhaps in the future one might push a billiard ball and the ball might not move, or might roll up the stick, or jump around and whistle dixie. One cannot prove otherwise. As Hume put it in his Treatise on Human Nature: “[cause and effect]… are… qualities of perceptions, not of objects… felt by the soul and not perceived externally in bodies.” We believe in cause and effect. It’s not a fact.

Now let’s address the objection that the truths taken for granted in math and science are a lot more obvious and universally accepted than those taken for granted by religions—that one would have to be practically insane not to believe them, whereas religious beliefs are clearly open to question. The belief that two points determine exactly one line is a far cry from the belief that Jesus Christ was the only son of God. True enough. But they are beliefs nonetheless. And even beliefs considered obvious are not necessarily true.  The earth certainly seemed flat until we discovered the truth. Indeed, the greatest breakthroughs in human progress have occurred when some genius—or is that “insane person?”—questioned widely-accepted beliefs.

Take our concept of time. Before Einstein, it seemed apparent that time marches at a steady rate for everyone everywhere. In 1905, though, Einstein contended that time moves at different speeds depending on how fast we’re traveling and on the force of gravity. Even more than a hundred years later this idea seems at the very least bizarre if not downright crazy. And yet it has been borne out by experiments. Given this capsizing of accepted wisdom with regard to the nature of time, it is not completely bonkers to imagine a similar assault on the concept of cause and effect. Actually, this assault has already begun, as observations in the tiny world of quantum physics appear to challenge our notions of cause and effect (one example being that Newton’s third law of physics—”for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”—doesn’t always seem to apply down there).

Just as our notion of cause and effect is suspect, so too may be the “common sense” belief in the separation between matter and “spirit,” which we could also call energy. Since the Enlightenment, science has operated on the assumption that matter is “dead,” in other words there is no animating spirit or consciousness in matter. We tend to think this way in our everyday lives: there are forces on the one hand and stuff that gets pushed around by these forces on the other. But this belief has been challenged by quantum physics ever since 1905 when Einstein sprung his famous equation E = mc² on the world. E stands for energy, m for matter. The equation states mathematically that energy equals matter (after the amount of matter is multiplied by the speed of light squared). They’re actually the same thing! As such, they can theoretically be converted back and forth. We don’t know how to turn any matter into energy but physicists have since shown that energy can “pop out of nowhere” as a particle, and a particle can “disappear” into pure energy. Matter is only inert in our minds.

You might agree that scientific ideas are always open to challenge and revision, but surely our mathematical axioms are completely obvious and safe from attack? Well, maybe. But it turns out that at least in the world of geometry there are theoretically infinite different sets of axioms upon which different systems of geometry could be based. Each set of axioms leads to a different geometrical system that is internally consistent and therefore “logical” on its own terms. The type of geometry we learned in high school was Euclidean. It’s quite handy for flat situations like paper. You could say “it believes in flatness,” for it rests on a foundation of assumed flatness. But another thing Einstein showed is that space itself is not Euclidean but curved. Therefore a different geometry, based on “curvedness” and using different axioms is needed for calculations involving curved space.

The beliefs most fundamental to a way of thinking become second nature. Through long habit, they are ingrained, taken for granted and unquestioned. But a fresh, active mind explores beliefs. It probes and tests them and is willing to discard dry, cob-webbed beliefs in favor of those more vital, supple or nuanced. This is called being re-born. This is called life in the most vigorous and broad meaning of that word. This is what Socrates meant by “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and why he, and Christ, walked around questioning the accepted wisdom of their day.

Our most fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world are like a pair of colored glasses we wear all the time. If they are yellow glasses, all we ever see are yellow things. Most never realize they can take the glasses off and try another pair. Most never realize the profundity of the bumper sticker that reads “Don’t trust everything you think.” Most never realize that they can be the Einsteins of their own lives.

In “Jesus Weren’t  No Christian” I wrote that “Christians” do not stand for much that’s in the spirit of Christ as he’s depicted in the New Testament. In other words, there’s a huge gulf between Christianity and what it claims to originate from. Christians tend to be straight-laced conservatives who emphasize clean, traditional living, whereas Christ was a radical who lived a rootless lifestyle, consorted with outcasts, broke rules, and upset conventional expectations.

Similarly, there is a gulf between those who profess a scientific outlook on reality and the foundation this scientific outlook rests on.

I realize there are all stripes of scientists with different ideas about reality and God. And I’m not arguing that logic has no place in our outlook or that science hasn’t been a powerful and beneficial force through human history. I’m arguing that you can’t explain the universe with logic. And if you try to, using science as your authority, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.

Scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, argue against the supernatural, spiritual or scientifically unprovable. They explain our attraction to religion or spirituality in terms of psychology and brain chemistry and, stopping here, think they have arrived at the ultimate cause for our urge to “believe.” But they haven’t gone back far enough. They’ve chosen to stop at brain chemistry because that fits their logical, “scientific” outlook. This is exactly like a Christian who believes in original sin and then looks back to Tertullian (an early Christian writer who invented original sin) as a justification for that belief, without looking back further to Christ who seemed if anything to believe the opposite.

In both cases, the belief was chosen first and then an inaccurate label was attached to it to confer authority to that belief. The belief is the starting point, a justification is found, and then the justification is touted as proof. The Christian chose the belief in original sin and then attached the inaccurate word “Christian” to it. The scientific atheist chose the belief in logic and then attached the word “scientific” to it. Neither went back far enough–to their sources.

In Christianity, the source is Christ. What is the source when it comes to science? Let’s start with physicists’ current theory of how the universe began. In the beginning, there was nothing. No space, no time, no matter, nothing. Gee, that’s easy to picture. Then a “singularity” appeared–an infinitesimally small speck of infinite density–and this expanded out at blinding speed into the universe we know and love. Picture the earth squeezed down to the size of the period at the end of this sentence. That’s already impossible to imagine. But the singularity was smaller than that and contained billions and billions of times more matter, namely all the matter in the universe (that’s billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars). None of this is logical in the everyday sense of that word. In fact, it’s mind-boggling. It’s beyond anything any mythology or religion has ever dished up. Yet, this is what cold, hard-headed, logical science believes.

Extrapolating logically back in time, then, physicists have arrived at a mind-blowing scenario. Similarly, when they have examined matter at tinier and tinier levels, they again discovered utter weirdness. First of all, it turns out, matter is made up of particles called atoms. Atoms are made up of a nucleus–protons and neutrons–with electrons orbiting it. When you change the number of protons, you change how something looks and acts. For example, atoms of lead have 80 protons but atoms of gold have 79 protons. All protons are identical, but take away one from a lead atom and you get gold. That’s weird. But nowhere near as weird as it gets.

It also turns out that these atoms are mostly empty space. That’s because there is so much distance between the electrons and the nucleus (protons plus neutrons). To picture the relative sizes, imagine if you enlarged a nucleus to the size of a pea and put the pea in the middle of a football stadium. The electrons would be as far away as the outer walls of the stadium. The rest is space. So every solid thing you see around you is mostly empty space. (The reason you can’t put your hand through a table is not because your matter is actually making contact with the table’s matter; rather the negative charge of your electrons are pushed away by the negative charges of the table’s electrons. This means we never really touch anything—we just experience something’s electric field!) But it gets even weirder.

It turns out electrons, like light, sometimes act as though they’re particles and sometimes as though they are waves (all matter is energy in “solidified” form). Also, in accordance with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the more precisely you know where an electron is, the less precisely you can predict where it will be, and vice versa. In fact, the principle of causality breaks down completely as one enters the tiniest “quantum” world. In this world, the observer affects the behavior of the observed. For example, a particle of light, known as a photon, has a certain probability of showing up in different places. Once someone observes it, the photon “decides” to appear at a particular location. In other words, the photon of light wasn’t at any particular spot until someone observed it. In addition to all these shenanigans, many quantum physicists believe there are almost infinite parallel universes, constantly branching off from existing universes, playing out all possible outcomes and choices at each instant in time. Their logical science has led them to this and many other bizarre proposals too numerous to mention.

So it looks like when scientists have pursued cause and effect back in time or down to the tiniest levels they can, they’ve been led into the realm of what may be fairly described as the miraculous. And for this fundamental miracle, they can offer no explanation.

Avoid the abstract, prize the invisible.

There is nothing in this world or the next that does not long for something.

The most pervasive falsehoods are the hardest to see.

Christianity is like that.

Just look at how far the public face of “Christianity” in America has strayed from the person of Christ as he is portrayed in the Gospels (the only sources we have to go by). If we grant that people talk about what matters most to them, then what matters most to today’s high profile “Christians” has no connection to what mattered to Christ, for they each talk about completely different things.

Broadly speaking, Christians in our country are associated with the “conservative” values of tradition and family. But Christ flouted many traditional conventions, such as keeping the Sabbath, and took issue with the established religious officials of his day, the Pharisees and Sadducees. He also defied conventional expectations about how a person should behave, including dining with low-lifes and praising the woman who adoringly sat at his feet while her more responsible sister served the food. Aside from all this, Christ’s whole way of life was in no way traditional, wandering about as he did, performing alarming miracles and eating whatever he found from day to day.

And what of family? Well, he asked two of his apostles to follow him and leave their father in the middle of helping the old man work. When told that his mother and family had come to see him, he responded that those people gathered around him were his true family. In addition, we are told, he did few miracles in his hometown because the people there, those closest to him, saw him as merely the carpenter’s son they had grown up with—i.e. nothing special.

What did Christ talk about? Well, too many things to chronicle here, and anyone can read the Gospels and see for themselves (remembering that they were written a minimum of 60 or so years after Christ by those with their own agendas and biases). In an attempt at an overview, though, we can say he talked a lot about the kingdom of god. He said things like “whoever does not accept the kingdom of god like a little child shall not enter it,” and “the kingdom of god is within you.” He also told parables about paying equal wages to those who worked for an hour and those who worked all day, and about a father who forgives his profligate son for no good reason. He advised his disciples not to worry about tomorrow. In other words, Christ was startling, unconventional, and spontaneous and he preached irresponsibility in the commonly accepted sense of that word. I don’t hear any of this in the Christian message today.

But then, official Christianity has always been this way. It started with Paul, running around the Mediterranean telling early church members how to run their churches. Where Christ said nothing, Paul did his best to fill in the gaps. From that time on, as those with power attempted to organize, expand and explain Christ’s message, that message became increasingly beside the point, crowded out by the ideas and biases of those delivering the message. Tertullian is a powerful example of this. An influential writer whom some have called the founder of Western theology, he decided sometime around 200 AD that a person’s soul is stamped by human sin from birth. Never mind that there is no evidence Christ was at all concerned with this question, Tertullian decided it was Christian and added it to the church’s doctrines.  Original sin, then, is not Christian but Tertullianist. Since then, of course, councils of church officials met periodically to decide what and whom they would deem Christian. Add to this official doctrine the informal mass of ideas and prejudices Christians have dreamed up, and you get a religious stew that tastes nothing like Christ’s original recipe.

Over the centuries, the practice continued: those who claimed to be followers of Christ have been largely preoccupied by issues that didn’t matter to Christ; they have nonetheless labeled the issues “Christian” and gone about their merry–and sometimes deadly–way. What we now call Christianity, then, is an unwieldy series of these accretions: layers and layers of attitudes and doctrine that have nothing to do with Christ.

This is not to say that a few figures imposed their views on the masses from on high. Influential ideas need to be accepted by the masses or they are not influential. Whether due to masochism or laziness, for example, people have to varying degrees believed in original sin. The idea took hold and got associated with Christianity and therefore with Christ.

This is also not to say that all these post-Christian ideas are bad. Many of them are, but that’s a different essay. My argument here is that it misleads the public and does Christ a disservice to associate these ideas with Christ. What we call things matters. It clarifies our thinking. I have no problem with people starting a church based on original sin. But call it Tertullianist, not Christian.