New Hosting for My Blog

Dear subscribers,

Please continue your subscription at my new WordPress blog, hosted at www.bunea.ca

Thank you,

Raresh

OBNUBILAREA

"Obnubilarea simțului pentru proximitate este corelativul morbid al oricărei metafizici zenitale" - Andrei Pleșu

Unul din visele mele secrete a fost, până acum, să îl distrug pe Andrei Pleșu într-o dezbatere despre supranatural și știință. Și despre dumnezeu. Și despre nocivitatea ortodoxismului. Apropos de citatul de mai sus din cartea despre îngeri. Răsfoiam acum "Note, stări, zile" - aceași frecție la piciorul de lemn al limbii, fără nici o valoare reală. Și acest om rămâne "etalon de cultură" în România.

Why God Never Had a PHD

WHY GOD NEVER HAD A PHD

He had only one major publication. 

It was in Hebrew. 

It had no references. 

It wasn't published in a refereed journal.
Some even doubt he wrote it by himself.
It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then? 

His cooperative efforts have been quite limited. 

The scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results. 

He never applied to the ethics board for permission to use human subjects. 

When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it by drowning his subjects. 

When subjects didn't behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample. 

He rarely came to class, just told students to read the book. 

Some say he had his son teach the class. 

He expelled his first two students for learning. 

Although there were only 10 requirements, most of his students failed his tests.

His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountain top. 

No record of working well with colleagues.

Source: unknown.

Candid rejection letter from an editor

While I'm still searching for a publisher for my novel "Womb Town", I remember that it wasn't easy for the greats either. Gertrude Stein had her own (see photo).

“Now, whether you as a free, beautiful and fun loving person actually get published is another question. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. Getting published is, as my grandfather once said, like taking your chances at the craps table. If that's true, then ...maybe what a budding author needs is a pair of loaded dice.” (Ernest Hemingway)


And this is the letter.

Dear Raresh,

First, please accept my sincere apologies for the terribly long time it's taken us to get to your manuscript. We've been swamped with submissions.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read Womb Town. You have a prodigious imagination, which I very much appreciate -- the story is inventive and unusual, and it was very compelling to read. Congratulations on a fine accomplishment!

I'm sorry to say, however, that we're not able to offer to take it on at CHB. We can publish only four or five fiction titles per year, and we're inundated with exceptional manuscripts. I did like Womb Town, but I'm afraid I can't offer it a space on our list.

I'm terribly sorry, both for the delay and the answer. I wish you all the best in finding a good home for it.

Sincerely,

A.

--
A W
Editorial Director
CHB

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There is a bug in Blogger. I had to add this profound classic text. See the frame with the URL error below. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Do you have an idea how to get rid off it? Donec in libero ac sem euismod interdum et non sapien. Donec vestibulum libero eget urna lacinia vel tincidunt tellus lobortis. Nam vitae velit nec lectus adipiscing fringilla in vel arcu. Integer dignissim luctus dolor vel condimentum. In eu ante urna, non luctus dui. Nullam euismod sodales nisi, nec condimentum ante eleifend id. Nullam diam urna, cursus porttitor faucibus ut, accumsan eget augue. Phasellus sit amet risus in velit molestie rhoncus ac nec ligula.

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Sed consectetur molestie mollis. Etiam sit amet semper dui. Cras mi felis, cursus vitae pharetra ut, congue ac lacus. Integer vel metus mattis elit lobortis elementum in sit amet justo. Vivamus blandit nulla sed nisi mattis tincidunt. Phasellus tristique fringilla lectus, a aliquet odio auctor quis. Integer ornare sapien eget felis sollicitudin vitae interdum nulla rhoncus. Cras semper nulla et ipsum euismod at aliquet libero tristique. Fusce sit amet odio eu ipsum lacinia pellentesque in sed nulla. Quisque rhoncus neque nec magna condimentum porttitor. Sed facilisis felis est, ac facilisis tellus. Pellentesque sed metus at mi tempus fringilla. Fusce placerat mi nec dui scelerisque at ultrices nisi varius.

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Nunc ornare neque in lacus sodales suscipit. Curabitur in nunc est. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Integer ac magna quam, ac cursus elit. Etiam placerat sollicitudin turpis eu lacinia. Integer pellentesque scelerisque metus, tincidunt ullamcorper purus mattis et. Integer consectetur lacus eget nisi fermentum varius. Sed porttitor semper risus, sit amet tristique nibh volutpat in. Vestibulum gravida tristique erat eu rhoncus. Donec pulvinar dui nec velit luctus ullamcorper. Morbi lacinia, tortor vel pretium bibendum, tortor justo egestas justo, quis eleifend orci ipsum eget leo. Proin in mi eget dui condimentum rutrum ut et nisl. Maecenas nec auctor nunc.

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Nulla fermentum ultricies sem et dictum. In consectetur, elit vitae fringilla suscipit, turpis sem consequat leo, nec condimentum ligula nulla ac eros. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Duis pulvinar luctus ornare. In vitae diam augue. Pellentesque vitae arcu justo, nec elementum nunc. Duis est nibh, porttitor vel rutrum ac, feugiat quis urna. Ut sed orci at purus pulvinar lacinia at eget orci. Aliquam ac purus vel sapien viverra mollis. Curabitur viverra, nisi vel varius semper, odio mauris vulputate erat, non posuere orci libero placerat orci. Sed varius sapien at tellus congue sit amet tincidunt urna sagittis. Cras placerat, arcu sit amet dictum iaculis, nulla massa feugiat massa, sit amet ornare nulla turpis non tortor. Maecenas fermentum lacus et nisl blandit vitae varius urna fermentum. Praesent sit amet magna vitae eros consectetur accumsan vitae in lectus. Pellentesque nec risus magna.

Foundations: This Is Your Brain

This lecture introduces students to two broad theories of how the mind relates to the body. Dualism is the ubiquitous and intuitive feeling that our conscious mind is separate from our physical bodies, whereas Materialism is the idea that all of our mental states are caused by physical states of the brain. This lecture reviews arguments explaining why materialism has become the predominant theory of mind in psychology. This discussion is followed by a basic overview of the neurophysiology of the brain

http://youtu.be/vg01Q1BI4WM

The quest for imperfection

Their world was perfect.

She was a bird with red feathers. He was a bird with blue feathers. They were of the same species. She was a singer. He was a piano salesman. She travelled to the most beautiful places in the world. He travelled to the most beautiful places in the world. She thought the next place she will visit is the most interesting. He thought the next piano he will sell is the best. She entered his piano store. He watched her playing. She thought she was playing the best piano ever. He thought she was the best pianist he has ever met. She remembered she didn't have that many friends. He remembered that he lived alone. They talked about music and felt they couldn't stop talking. They talked about their perfect lives. They needed something more. They talked about the flight of two perfect birds.

The red and blue birds flew together.

~*~ 

More super short stories

Womb Town, a novel by R.V. Bunea

A massive flood of biblical proportion hits an isolated community already tormented by violent conflicts between Muslims, Jews and Christians. The flood not only destroys everything but also corrupts faith and morality.

Tim, a teenage agnostic boy, is caught in the middle of this religious conflict. But Tim has his own problems. 10 years ago he watched his father being murdered and was never able to come to terms with this.

Tim’s antagonist is Gregoire, a former mercenary, the epitome of pure evil: ruthless, greedy, cold-blooded. He wants only one thing: money. Gregoire viciously exploits the religious community. But no matter what he does, Tim gets in his way, and needs to be crushed like a bug.

While Tim attempts to mitigate the religious conflict threatening to destroy the town, he discovers he is closer to his father’s murderer than he thinks.

Chapter 1 Incredibly fast and painfully real

Chapter 18 Cause, caucus and pointed cactuses

Chapter 74 Always look at the bride side of wife

Why we don't care

(photo by bizzara on deviantart.com)

to care

verb intransitive

1. To be concerned or interested: Once inside, we didn't care whether it rained with ash or not.

2. To provide needed assistance or watchful supervision: cared for the wounded; caring for an aged relative at home.

3. To object or mind: If no one cares, I'll smoke.

4a. To have a liking or attachment, or have a special preference (usually used in negative constructions): I didn't care for the movie.

4b. To have a wish; be inclined; have an inclination, liking, fondness, or affection: Would you care for another helping? I don't care for him very much.

5. To make provision or look out (usually followed by for): Will you care for the children while I am away?

verb transitive

6. To wish; desire; like: Would you care to dance?

7. To be concerned to the degree of: I don't care a bit what critics think.

8. To feel concern about: He doesn't care what others say.

(Source: tfd.com and dictionary.com)

We don't care because we are not concerned that the planet is heating up. Seriously, we are not. If we were, we would not buy enormous quantities of plastic bottles filled with tap water, we would recycle everything properly, we would not let corporations burn everything that they can get their hands on. We are not concerned that we waste hours watching subpar, skin-deep, insulting television programs. We are not concerned that we consume like lab rats what we’re subliminally told, that we don’t think for ourselves and let experts pretend to think and decide for us. We are not concerned that our attention span has decreased to seconds, that we don’t know what truly matters in the world, that we live without making a difference for anyone.

We don't care because we are not interested that people die of malnutrition in Somalia, as political prisoners in North Korea, stoned to death in Iran or Afghanistan. We are not interested because it's so far away and it does not affect our freedoms. We are free to think, to choose what we are interested in, to say what we want, to default on our debt, to want more and more, better and better. We cannot stop from being interested in only what's within arm’s reach.

We don't care because we don't provide needed assistance or watchful supervision. An old man sleeps in a cardboard box on the street. Why doesn't he go to a shelter? He can get food there, he can sleep there, we say. Then we say, he cannot abide by the rules, that's why he doesn't go there. In our minds we make this his choice. It's his choice to sleep in a cardboard box on the street. And because it’s his choice we don’t care. How can we interfere with someone else’s choice? We don’t care because we think there’s always somebody else who provides assistance. There must be somebody else, with skills and experience. But not me. I’m not “qualified” to care.

We don’t care because we don’t object, we don’t mind. We don’t object when the richer are getting richer and the poorer are getting poorer. Some write about it on blogs but who really does something about it. We don’t object when bullies treat us with bigotry and tell us that truth means their  truth. We don’t object when dogma is injected in our children’s brains and they grow up to hate each other.

We don’t care because we don’t have likings, attachments and genuine preferences. We follow trends and guidelines and recommendations but we forget to employ critical thinking. We buy and sell trust like a commodity. Morality has been shelved, it had become optional. We like what flashes in front of our eyes, we attach ourselves to whatever does not require too much effort, too much compromise. We prefer what’s easy, immediate and quick. We don’t care because it’s inconvenient.

We don’t care because our affections are numbed by fear, our minds are weakened and misoriented. We don’t care because we don’t know how to choose. We lost the ability to see value. Our weaknesses have defeated us. We forgot that culture, education and science have a purpose. To help us know ourselves better. We cannot feel properly because our hearts are ignorant and illiterate. And we don’t care.

We don’t care because we do not look out enough for each other. We dismiss each other too easily. We think we’ll be fine if we have all the things we need. But what about all the ideas we need? What about the warm and just words about truth? Not the truth that we feel, but the truth that it’s unquestionably out there: the measurable suffering of millions, the obnoxious and retrograde beliefs, the violence, the lightness with which we apply labels on others, the power we waste on fleeting satisfaction?

We don’t care because we don’t like to care. We lost the will to care like we lost a memory.

We don’t care because we are immune to what is relevant. We confuse opinion with directive, directive with criticism, criticism with insult, insult with authority, authority with expertise, expertise with amateurism, amateurism with creativity, creativity with intelligence, intelligence with arrogance, arrogance with violence, violence with frustration, frustration with inability, inability with handicap, handicap with illness, illness with randomness, randomness with freewill, freewill with self-awareness, self-awareness with reason, reason with opinion. We don’t care because we are confused.

We cry that we are alone and nobody cares about us. We think life is all tit-for-tat.

Life should not be about rewarding competence with wealth. Life should be about enhancing general well-being. We all live on the same small planet. For our sake!

Our sanity and evolution depends on looking at the world and engaging without expecting any rewards. The true rewards are you.

It is never late to care.

~*~

Who bit my apple?

I know now who bit my apple. It was Steve Jobs.

My name is Adam. I am the first human being created by god. I lived naked and ignorant my whole life. Until one day I walked to the apple tree. God told me not to eat the apple because he will banish me from my habitat. There was one big apple left on the apple tree. I looked at it. It was already bitten. Someone has taken a big bite from it.

I looked around. I saw Eve, naked, combing her hair and talking to a talking snake. Nothing new. Then across the river I saw Steve Jobs. He was waving at me. "Adam, do you want to work with me? We can have so many apples. Forget the tree."

So I crossed the river and joined Steve. He told me that what we saw it was all a scheme. I was not the first human. He was. There was no god. God's voice were just large wireless speakers installed on zeppelins.

We planted a new apple tree, and another. Now there are millions of orchards. People bite from apples every day. They couldn't care less about god and snakes. It makes them happy because they feel that they can know more.

~*~

Who is Amanda Knox?

(photo by DJVue on deviantart.com)

In the past few days we've been swamped with news of Amanda Knox's release. A girl wrongly accused of murder along with her then Italian boyfriend. As of this second cnn.com, bbc.co.uk and countless other media outlets still have a reference to her.

Who is Amanda Knox, aside from an American girl, trapped in the Italian judiciary system? Why is her case so grievously important that we must see her for days on all channels?

One should not be naive not to know what media is promoting with this case. That injustice has happened. That it was committed by the Italian authorities. That two young individuals have suffered for four years while being innocent. That the truth of the few can conquer the lies and deceit of the many. This is all valid, unquestionably true.

But why don't we still speak of hunger in Somalia? Of the pain of millions in North Korea? Why is the case of two individuals so poignantly important that they cast a shadow over many other stories that involve millions? 

We forget too easily the necessity of living with the right proportion of attention. We inflame our minds over puny stories of one individual and we remain silently cold, like lizards, over the suffering of the many.

Yes, we must acknowledge the suffering of every individual. Yes, we should be empathetic towards injustice. But the attention the media shows in this case is grossly disproportionate. Yes, stories need a face and symbols. But they should never come at the expense of distorting the weight of the truth.

We should not be surprised if this actually reflected the spirit of the day: that we can recognize ourselves easily in the loud pain of one random man but not the silent suffering of millions.

~*~

Awakening 5. Age 26 to age 31. Rediscovery of science and creativity.

My journey from mysticism to atheism

Let’s get to the bottom of things. Immigration is not an easy business. To decide to leave your country of birth and to settle in a new territory requires certain determination. Either your needs are not fulfilled by your country of birth, either you are seeking something that you cannot find where you were born. Or that you are starving and you hadn’t had a drop of water in days and Al Qaeda-inspired Al Shabab does not allow aid to reach you. Fortunately I did not suffer the latter shortcomings.

One thing I quickly discovered in Toronto, aside from lots of jobs on commission and expensive rent, was the Toronto Public Library. TPL is the best thing Toronto has. It’s free, it has 99 branches, and you can find almost anything. I had little time to complain about: discrimination against newcomers, so called Canadian experience, credit history, taxes, fees, the bizarre Quebecois accent etc. I found the new world at TPL. 

I perused a few Canadian authors then by choice I moved to science related subjects. My computer science education was demanding its food for thought. I read Stephen Hawking’s books. I started to think about reality. Them I found in no particular order Brian Greene, Leonard Susskind, Roger Penrose, Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg. Their books and lectures.

A major brain shattering awakening happened when I read Jose Saramago’s Gospel according to Jesus Christ. Saramago’s novel retells Jesus’s life, depicting him as a regular person, with anxieties and lust, flawed, forgetful and lonely. The book immediately reminded me of Michael Moorcock’s novella Behold the man, about a man who travels from 1970 to 28 AD, where he hopes to meet the historical Jesus, but becomes the prisoner of circumstances and wishful thinking and assumes the role of Jesus himself.

Saramago brought the theme of the transcendent from the dungeons of my subconscious to light. Subsequently I quickly wrote two screenplays that used allegorical images of the ineffable. One screenplay was a pseudo autobiographical story about an immigrant who has strong ties to imaginary friends. The imaginary friends were: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and Johann Sebastian Bach. The second screenplay was called Dreamocracy. It was about a guy who invents a machine that could project dreams as images on the screen, and a team of mad scientists who try to highjack his brainwaves.

I was still frustrated with the spiritual side of reality. I needed more than popular science books. Remembering my readings of history of religions, especially Mircea Eliade’s books, I resurfaced a superficial interest in Buddhism. From TPL I borrowed a few Dalai Lama books and some translations of old gurus Shantideva, Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti. As a certitude, I wasn’t seeking enlightment but merely resources to fill gaps of curiosity and a relentlessness to ask the right questions before I could move on and have a feeling of growth. Sadly to say, the books about the way of the bodhisattva did not help me ask the right questions.

The right questions started to surface early 2009 when for no apparent reason I began writing a novel, inspired by a dream of a boy trapped by psychosis in an imaginary world. I did not plan the novel to be a commentary about religion, God or the transcendent. As I was writing and the story grew with many characters, surreal happenings, high density of metaphors and almost Saramago-like fluidity of the prose, I realized that the little dream from the begging has transformed into a gargantuan monster that embodied a whole town that lived in my head.

The novel suffered many working titles. In the end I settled for Womb Town. It is the best name for the giant world of the small town, called Town. I finished the first draft of Womb Town in the fall of 2010. While I was surgically applying corrections, nervously editing and extirpating entire chapters, I realized that the book was exactly about what I wanted to know. The most important questions that give the most important answers. Can we live without the divine? Does morality need to be inspired by the transcendent? What is beyond life, body and brain?

In the womb of my brain I felt tremendous tumult while writing Womb Town. I was pinpointing the questions, the right questions that I was searching. Not just the hordes of Jews and Muslims were fighting idiotically in Town but in my head the dormant agnostic was being cleansed off inconsistencies in definitions. The next mini-awakening happened soon after finishing the novel when I decided it was time to finally read the New Atheists: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet. I had known about them for a long time but their books were simply not on my agenda.

I started with Dawkins’s God Delusion. I devoured it quickly. At first I was almost surprised by the obvious. Wait a minute, was the first reaction. I thought I was an agnostic, but the agnostic I thought I was, was not the agnostic that believed that we cannot know the nature of the supranatural, and that there is something beyond the material. I was very much the God Delusion-type of atheist under a different self-label. Good, we got that straight. Having had my position correctly labeled, in Dawkins’s terms I proceeded with the more incisive Hitchens who simply pointed to the odious deeds of the religious establishment. The examples, well known, resurfaced my aversion towards religion and the ineffable transcendent. Religion does poison everything! I realized passivity is not one of the answers I was searching. God is not great. Adding to Hitchens’s title not only God is not great but he (?) is so improbable that I can surely say I can totally dismiss the whole business of the transcendent, to set the record straight and to be able to concentrate on things that really matter.

I think it was essential to find the proper definitions. Atheist, agnostic, antitheist. There were days when I looked very suspicious at these words. Necessarily atheism I used to associate with communism, to which, needless to say, I have an organic aversion.

I’m living the final awakening. Being fully aware of my atheism, I cannot hide a specific comfort and exhilarating satisfaction that I found my semantic denomination. It is the most powerful enlightenment one can have, is that that of the rise of reason. When one accepts that logic and critical thinking is the only path to truth and that science offers the correct methodologies. Religion and belief in the transcendent God, the world beyond, the immaterial consciousness is incompatible with science and inconsistence with evidence and reality. This is the realization that we all must accept eventual if we want the human race to survive.

~*~