Paul’s Philosophical Poo

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What follows is philosophical gobledygook which may or may not cause you grief, misery or other discomfort.


Since the only link to this page is at the end of a disclaimer, and there’s one just above… you’ve been warned….




Philosophical Mumbo-Jumbo

   Well, I guess that’s about it for bulleted lists… What’s Paul all about, you may ask… Well, the truth is, I don’t even know for sure. Everything’s changing all the time. Lately, I’ve been spending a great deal of time considering the “Human Condition” and how we fit into the natural Universe. Over the last six-or-so months I’ve found myself drawn into Taoism as a foundation for undertanding. The more I read about the Tao, the more I recognize philosophical notions I’ve held dear for years. It appears that I’ve been a Taoist for a very long time and just didn’t know it. How about that! The whole philosophical mess started many years ago… I was about 8… and I started questioning what my Sunday School teachers were telling me. After a while, the notion of the existance of a “god,” at least as described in the Bible, seemed unpalatable to me. It became clear to me that the notion of a “god” was inconsitent with reality as I knew it, and “god” wasn’t making any obvious overtures to convince me otherwise. So atheism seemed the logical choice. Still does. Atheism does a fine job of dispelling the “Is there or isn’t there a god” question, but it does nothing directly to service the “Why are we here” question. Of course, once you remove the possibility of a “god” from the equation, the “Meaning of Life” issue becomes pretty black and white… By that, I mean that for “life” to have “meaning” there has to be intent behind it. To say that there is intent, implies the existance of an intelligence driving the whole thing which brings you back to the question of whether or not there is a “god”. Since the existence of a “god” is (as far as I can tell) incongruent with observable reality, it then seems to follow that there is no “Meaning” to life. Life simply is. To many, this is an unsettling proposition. If there is no “god”, does that mean there is no “heaven”? If there is no “heaven”, is there an afterlife? Well… from what I’ve been able to observe… no. So if there’s no “heaven” and no afterlife, what’s the point? Why go on? That’s where Taoism comes into the picture.


Since there is, as far as I can tell, no intrinsic meaning to life, the only meaning my life can have is the meaning I assign to it. About the most profound thing I can come up with on the spur of the moment is: Use the tools and talents I have available to me to leave behind a legacy which is lasting and positive and which promotes balance and understanding. There. That’s my purpose. …and it makes a dandy mission statement, too… Why, it’s vague enough to be left open to interpretation. I’m not tied down to acheiving any specific task, yet it can be applied to practically everything I do…. Heck, “Lasting” could mean 15 minutes or 15 centuries… yeah, I think That’s a keeper!!


Other than that, I show up at work and pull on my oar for ten-or-so hours, and try to find time to yield to the winds of my creative and philosophical drives.


Creative and Philosophical Drives… What a bunch of hooey!

Not so fast! Since organized religion is not a part of my life, I don’t go to church. That means I don’t have other people directing my attitudes and personal life. I have creative drives… the need to create… I play musical instruments (with varying degrees of success), I write prose, songs and comedic plays and monologues, I dabble in computer programming…. the list goes on. Some days or weeks I feel like a drummer so I drum. Some times I feel like a writer, so I write. The directions of the drives shift from time to time. No biggie. The same goes for my philosophical drives, although my core motivation doesn’t waver very much. Today, I might feel like teaching, tomorrow I may feel like trying to restore some semblance of balance to my little pocket of the universe. The next day, It might be my turn to be the student, and make an effort to learn something. It changes like the wind… keeps things interesting.        —October 2001


So, What’s all this gobledygook about bears?!


As you may be able to tell by my domain name (www.ursuspacificus.net) I have some sort of a thing for bears. Well… What can I say? For a long time… ten or so years… I’ve felt a connection with many of the… non-mystical aspects of Native American spirituality…. The connection with nature and the appreciation for a simple, uncomplicated life.


Around Summer, 2000, I began reading up on various philosophical and religious views, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Neo-Paganism and Wicca, and Native American stuff… well.. the Native american stuff is a little hard to locate…. there is no real central “Authority”, or “Church” or “Scripture”. There is a verbal tradition, and there are transcriptions of what has survived of that tradition… but the members of those cultures (I say that in plural because the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere actually comprised a multitude of Tribal nations each with its own cultural ideosyncracies) who are still actively preserving those traditions generally guard them carefully. What I have been able to find has shown me a spirit worthy of admiration; a spirit I can relate to… The Bear. The Bear is curious, wise, powerful and gentle but will not hesitate to muster all its resources in defense of itself, its family or its territory.

I don’t worship. I don’t pray. I don’t dance. I don’t have “visions”. Those are “mystical” things that I just don’t buy into…. I see The Bear as a sort of big brother, or a mentor… an old friend with things to teach me. It’s a friendship, of which, I’m proud. I’ve learned and grown and found peace and confidence. My “adoption” of The Bear was my first step toward a new appreciation for nature, natural order, natural law and natural logic. My exploration of Taoism is a fitting and, if you’ll pardon the redundant use of the word, natural progression.


….And as if all that wasn’t enough… I do present a rather bearish… uh… apearance… often more “big, cuddly teddy bear-ish” than “big, scary Grizzly bear-ish”… but I’ve been likened to bears by others over the years… and It just feels right.


“Truth, Justice and The American Way” versus “Fact, Natural Selection and Natural Law”


OK… So I’m an atheist… that’s no secret. Being in the vast minority, it’s hard to go about one’s business without being bombarded by the prevalent majority view. The majority of Americans is Christian, in one form or another, and Christians preach and teach The Bible. One thing that I often see assiciated with The Bible is “truth”. I got to thinking about truth, and what it really is. I mean, we have two distinct words: “truth” and “fact”.

Fact, to me, seems to be what happens, or what is. A fact, to me, seems to be an event or condition as it exists in its raw, unrefined, uninterpreted state. A fact does not change from one observer to the next, nor from differing vantage points. Truth, on the other hand, is subjective. For example, consider the following: Two witnesses observe an event. One of the witnesses “sees” a rape, the other “sees” no such thing… perhaps a romantic, if somewhat deviant, sexual encounter between two consenting adults. When asked to report the truth, each witness will likely tell what they “saw” rather than what happened.

Truth, to me, is the bastard byproduct of the comingling of perception and preconception. Frequently, neither of the progenitors, nor the byproduct itself, is a faithful representation of the facts of a situation. Emotion, morality, religious dogma, personal baggage, and various other sources of interference muddle what an individual takes away from an experience.

I often aproach the idea of the difference between truth and fact like this: Truth is a purely humanistic endeavour, for if man were to vanish from the Earth tomorrow, preadtors would continue to stalk their prey and the prey would keep running; the fish would still swim and the birds would still fly; The wind would continue to blow and trees would return to grow. Although the varieties of life we’ve driven to extinction would never come back, the void would soon be filled; not in days or weeks or years, but in, when measured in geologic time, an aparent heartbeat. Our absence would be felt by the Earth, the Moon and the Sun no more than the absence of the Dodo.

This humbling, and, perhaps unsettling view is the closest thing to fact I can report.        —January 17, 2002


Something “Real” to believe in


Often, I hear it said that Atheists don’t believe in anything. In fact, on a website I generally regard as a purveyor of right-minded propaganda, I saw a bumpersticker for sale which said “Atheists are beyond belief”. Many moons ago, I came to the conclusion that even Atheists have to beleive in something, because, just as there is no reliable direct objective evidence that a “god” or “gods” exist, there is likewise no reliable direct objective evidence that a “god” or “gods” does not exist. As such, in order to say that there is no “god”, is to make a statement backed, ultimately, by faith. I have even heard it argued, surprisingly enough, by some Christians, that Athiests have the strongest faith of all, because they fully believe that the other 95% of the world is nuts. While I would not personally have chosen “nuts” to describe the theistic populous of the world, I would say “miseducated” and “deceived”. Religion is, and has always been (as far as I can tell) a tool of one elite group or another used to maintain control over “the masses” of the society in question.


It is with this in mind that I first cast off the church, for every church proclaims itself to be the one true church, to the detrement of all others. If they each exclude all others and none of them can produce any objective evidence to support their positions, then they must all be wrong. If all the churches are wrong, then one should follow none, because without divine backing, they all serve some Earthly master or another. Who are their greatest benefactors? What agendae do they serve?

Once I had shrugged the weight of the church from my shoulders, I considered god, one on one. I thought about the god described by the Catholic church, as that is the one, to which I was most exposed as a youngster. I thought that if God actually backed the Catholic church, then all the followers of all the protestant sects were damned. This through no fault of their own, having been raised protestant by well-meaning, decent families generations old in the protestant churches. How could this be? How could God make his will so plain to some and so obscure to others? How could it be that God, who, through his “only begotten son” had preached unity and faith and brotherhood, was promoting divisive sectarianism? And, as if this wasn’t troubling enough (from a Catholic perspective), how does one reconcile Buddhism, Hunduism, Judaism,Islam and a hundred other faiths?


The Catholic dogma soon fell from me, and I was left with a faceless, nebulous god; a god who had only to prove its existence. I asked and nothing happened. I begged and still nothing happened. I ignored the god and nothing happened. I proclaimed the god a fallacy and still nothing happened. It was at this time that it occurred to me… not in these words, but conceptually, “If a god cannot be known within the confines of reality, then it can only be imagined, and therefore, is imaginary.” Still, yet, nothing happened. It was then that I knew I’d found something in which to believe.


If there is a god, it must be so remote, so distant, so far removed from our reality that it is ineffectual in it. So, it seem that either there is no god, or if there is a god it is so disinvolved that there might as well be no god.


If you can agree with all that, then the one thing that is believable is what I call “Commonly Observable Reality”, or “C.O.R.”. C.O.R. is a concept in line with the scientific method. It describes a set of generally knowable ideas; notions which can be demonstrated freely and repeatably without ritual or specially blessed artifacts. C.O.R. is the foundation for the premise that the natural world is full of answers; what one must do is formulate questions which put those answers in a meaningful context. If you want to believe something, believe your eyes. Nevermind the TV or what the Preacher has to say. Look at the world around you. What could be more credible than reality?

       —January 21, 2002


Tattoos and tattooing


People get tattoos for all sorts of reasons. Some do it as part of a military, fraternal or gang initiation. Some do it for religious reasons. In some countries, military service members are tattooed with the information US service members have on their dog tags. In different cultures, they mean different things. For whatever reason people get tattooed, and by whatever method, there are some inescapable facts about tattoos.

  • Tattoos are, for practical purposes, permanent. While there are methods for removing or minimizing tattoos, they are generally very costly, very time-consuming and substantially more painful than the application of the tattoo in the first place.
  • Tattoos are often misunderstood. Generally, when mainstream Americans think of tattooed people, they think of the stereotypical Biker, Soldier/Sailor or Gang Member. People often jump to conclusions about others based simply on the fact that they have tattoos, and not based on why they got the tattoos or what it is that they are intended to mean.
  • The application of a tattoo is not a pain-free endeavour. Having had two tattoos applied, one on my chest and one on my calf, I feel fairly confident in this being a fairly universal thing. The pain of tattoo application varies by method, certainly, and by what part of the body is being tattooed, but generally, the pain is transient; present only while the needles are active on one’s skin. After my first tattoo, I described the pain this way, “It is not a discomfort I would choose to endure without cause, but I would not shy away from enduring it again with cause.”
  • Tattooing is, in fact, an art form. This means that it is not xerography or photography. There is a layer of interpretation between the “flash” or reference artwork and what actually goes on the skin. There is an art to utilizing and blending color. There is a definite challenge to drawing and coloring on a pliant medium like skin. Tattooing has more in common with comic-book art than with oil-painting, but it is still art.




“So, Why,” you may well ask, “did you get yours, Paul?”



Well… I’d been considering the idea of getting a tattoo for about 10 years. One thing that was holding me back was my wife’s attitude toward tattoos. Another thing that was holding me back was that I really didn’t have anything that I wanted to wear on my skin for the rest of my life. Then… a few big things happened… I started down the whole soul-searching/sef-discovery path, and three things really stood out to me as being seriously instrumental to my acheiving the greater understanding I now enjoy. They were The Bear Spirit, Linux and Tao. The Bear Spirit was fundamental in allowing me to to find strength and confidence within myself, Linux provided a logical framework for understanding and a sandbox for testing ideas and learning about the Tao helped to ground me in reality. I do not foresee the importance of this trinity in my life fading any time soon. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea to keep a reminder of where I was and how I improved myself with me at all times. This, it occurred to me, was the ideal subject matter for tattoos.

My Tattoos:


The Bear Paw The Bear Paw is located just to ny left of the center of my chest, and is tilted slightly with its top toward my breastbone. The image is intended to represent the mark of a bear (The Bear Spirit) having “touched” my heart. There is also the notion that the image can be viewed as The Bear Spirit reaching out in defense.


Tux, the Linux Penguin This is the “Generic” original Larry Ewing “Tux”. It is, in a manner of speaking, graffitti; a “Kilroy was here”. Tux is on the outside of my right calf, about mid-way down. I decided on Tux, partly because he is the closest thing to universally-recognized symbol for Linux in general, and partly because he is innocuous and non-threatening. I chose the location because my learning Linux has given me a new sort of intellectual mobility. Mobility… leg… get it?


September 11 And The Preservation Of Freedom




Recently, I had an opportunity to do some air travel. Departing from Los Angeles International Airport, I was bound for Providence. Since September 11, there have been quite a few changes in the nation’s airports. All of these changes have been made in the name of security. Now everyone seems to ramped up on this rabid patriotism kick, just begging to be stripped of their constitutional rights in the name of security and the preservation of freedom. Am I the only one who sees this as a bit silly?



I always thought America was about taking risks and living free, defiantly in the face of opression and tyranny. Terrorism, as perpetrated on September 11 (if, in fact, the presumed perpetrators are in fact guilty, and if, in fact they were motivated by what the government and media say) is merely feeble, cowardly attempts to redirect the national goals of the United States. While I really think the United States has no business dealing with the nations of the Middle East on any plane, because of their inability to respect eachothers’ borders and cultures and religions and just play nice…. we especially have no business putting puppet governments in place and assassinating foreign leaders. If the United States is truly meant to be the last bastion of Justice, Liberty and Government For, By and Of The People, then we must lead by example. If we disagree with the policies of a nation or a government, then we are completely entitled to deny that nation or government the benefit of American business. If we are truly a nation of moral people, then we will not deal with countries like Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and others with oppressive or otherwise disagreeable governments irrespective of how much oil the nation is floating on, or how enormous and cheap its labor pool may be. Oil, cheap labor and loose environmental regulations make big businesses, those with the mulitnational conglomerate clout to exploit these non-renewable resources, salivate at the chance to widen their profit margins on the backs of underpaid, overworked brown people half a world away.



One other thing that has come from the events of September 11 is the epidemic rash of “God Bless America” bumper-stickers and other pro-Christian rhetoric. I thought Jesus was about loving thy neighbor as thy self, and turning the other cheek. I though the Christian ethic involved standing one’s ground in peaceful defiance. Carpet-bombing millions of acres of Afghani outback, looking for one man upon whom to exact revenge does not seem terribly Christ-like. It also seems a bit strange that our government’s (as well as the “Major Media”’s) interest in the awful treatment of females in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan only seemed to be piqued after the Twin Towers had been felled. After 9/11, we heard of awful things happening in the soccer stadiums, women being stoned to death or beheaded for accidentally showing skin in public. If our motivation was the protection and liberation of of the oppreseed people of Afghanistan, and conditions there had gotten so bad that we could no longer sit back and passively impose economic sanctions, then we should have acted a long time ago. Clearly, this was not our true motivation (at least not that of the Federal Government.) More likely, the motivation for strafing Afghanistan was monitary. It is probable that Afghanistan has something to offer some enormous company or another.. oil, iron, cheap labor, corrupt leaders. This does not seem awfully Christian. Perhaps “God Bless America” is meant more as a humble request for forgiveness. That would seem fitting.



If the story of September 11 that the American Major Media told is the real, factual story, the the United States Government brought the attacks on by its own flawed foreign policy. Airport security, cameras in malls and at intersections do nothing to promote liberty. If we were truly living with the American spirit, we would go on living, as though nothing had happened. These knee-jerk efforts to “make us safe” hinder liberty. Liberty is not something to be kept under glass or in a jar of formaldehyde, preserved and unused so that future generations may know what it looked like, but never understand it by first-hand experience. If this is how Freedom in America is to be preserved, then we as Americans should just roll over and accept the death of This Great Experiment. If this is what we call Liberty, we are sadly mistaken. If we were truly proud to be Americans, we would board airplanes and live out our lives without fear, and without “security”. Many times more people have died in air crashes caused by pilot error and mechanical failure than in all the combined casualties of September 11. You stand a much better chance of dying in a car wreck on the way to the airport than you do of dying on the plane, whether by terrorist attack or otherwise.



       —July 29, 2002


Of Science and Fundamentalism





I occasionally hear religious people takling about science, as if science is to blame for all our societal woes. Science makes pollution, and science makes disease and science… blah, blah, blah. The word “science” is used as a catch-all to point the finger of blame at those few practitioners of science who, most often at the will of their corporate or governmental employers, suffer a sort of ethical lapse. It is greed, more than anything else that is to blame for the woes attributed to science. Greed for money and greed for power. Greed has nothing to do with the honest practice of science.


For the moment, let us disregard the more controversial notions that the practice of science has revealed, such as evolution, natural selection, “the Big Bang”, nuclear power and nuclear weapons and so on. Let us temporarily suspend concern for our high technology, such as our vehicles, our computers, our fancy buildings and our exotic materials. Let us, in stead, concern our selves with our human condition and the way we live today. Let us ponder what we learn, what we teach and what we know.


What if, just suppose, the practice of science did not exist. How would we live today? Almost certainly, no one would have crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Europe in the 15th century… probably not ever, because it was the practice of science which yielded the tools of navigation, and even more importantly, showed conclusively that the Earth is round. In fact, it was science, although most likely primitive science, and, at the time, unrecognized as such, which brought about boats, oars, sails, the wheel and even the mastery of fire. Even writing and mathematics are owed to primitive science.


Much of what was really important about the rennaisance would never have happened. Da Vinci, Gallilei and Copernicus would all be ordinary people and we would not know their names today. No, we humans would still be, most of us anyway, trapped in feudal agrarian culture, with the threat of plague, pox and famine looming overhead at all times. The few Alphas among us would live high on the fruits of the labor of the rest of us.

It is the questions, investigations and skepticism of science (social science, but science nonetheless) which gave rise to the ideals of the United States of America. It is the practice of science which allows us to invalidate the “divine rights of kings”, and to discover that all peoples are roughly equal; there is no master race. This is a disquieting idea to many people. The United States it still chock full of racists of all colors; some more expressive than others, but make no mistake: ours is not a colorblind society.


We talk a great deal about the importance of education in our society, yet we downplay the importance of science. Nearly everything taught in schools owes either its existance or its credibility to scientific investigation and skepticism. Even modern history requires corroborating evidence, research and investigation. Certainly, almost everything we know about ancient times can be attributed to scientific exploration. How can we feed our children the results of work in science, but not give them the tools to do science, and expect them to grow, prosper and advance?


The benifits of modern medicine are heralded every day on the news. Limb and organ transplants, in vitro fertilization, myriad cures and treatments for countless conditions are commonplace, and we take them for granted. We happily pop pills of every conceivable color and description for things as trivial as a sniffle. We treat medicine so trivially that we engage in cosmetic surgery, to alter our appearance and boost our already inflated egos. Did all this understanding just fall from the sky? No. Scientific investigation of the cause of disease and the machinery of life have allowed all these wonders to exist.


The results of the practice of science are all around us, not just in our medicine and high technology, but in our art and our beauty. The tools of music are completely scientific in origin. Tonality, pitch, choice of materials are all derived from scientific investigations. Our modern muscial scale has a definite mathematical pattern to it, and it is mathematically repeatable. The spacings of frets on a guitar or the holes on a flute are all determined through mathematics and science. And what of visual arts? Painting requires paint, and paint doesn’t just fall from the sky. Drawing requires pencils or pens or crayons or charcoal, all of which have been developed throught the employment of science. Sculpture requires a blank of material, tools and a technique, which is tailored to the material and the tools at hand. The tools, the technique and the choice of material are all owed to scientific investigations. Finally, let us not forget make-up. We paint our faces to hide blemishes or give the appearance of higher cheekbones or fuller lips. Where did the makeup come from, and how has it improved since the tribal war paints of old? Did these improvements just occur? No. Once again, science has allowed us to do this to ourselves.


Whether any of these individual achievements is good or bad is up to each person to decide on his or her own terms. Individually, each of the products of scientific investigation is neutral, inert. It is through our employment of these products that they seem good or bad. The practice of science is neither wholly good, nor wholly bad. It is up to us as the employers of science, and we all employ science whether we like it or not, to make the moral choice; to choose to use it for the betterment of mankind as a species and the Earth as a whole or to use science to further subjugate ourselves to a fuedal, dogmatic leadership and destroy the Earth, not only for ourselves, but for everything else that lives here. The choice is ours.


      — 1/19/2003

Paul Sounds Angry

A friend of mine recently remarked that I seemed angry in my writing.

I think I would lean more toward frustrated and irritated. The last seven-or-so years have been kinda hard on me intellectually and philosophically. I mean I never really had a great deal of hope for the idea that individual humans would, en masse, shrug off the yoke of medieval dogmatic repression (be it socio-politcal or “spiritual”) and finally, once and for all, awaken and advance, but it seems that people seem more willing than ever to surrender their minds and their lives for the perpetuation of pointless, primitive and fundamentally retarding traditions and ideals. I’m more frightened of the mix of belligerent, fear-mongering totalitarians and spineless whores running our government than I am of Osama bin Laden. I’m horrified that, in this country, there is actually a serious debate taking place about whether bible stories should be taught as science in public schools. I’m deeply concerned that the human population has increased by 50% in my life time, and there’s no evidence I’ve seen to suggest people are considering cutting back on the rutting. Humanity has a problem, but can’t see it.

Everybody is so terrified of offending anyone else’s “sensibilities” that no one in a position of authority has the cajones to come out and say, “Most Americans are self-absorbed, self-loathing, wilfully igrnorant, bigoted, sheep-minded, group-thinking consumers. I want all of us to shake off the burdon of these primitive tendencies and move forward, together, and in peace. I’m promoting an agenda of understanding. Not understanding in the sense of modern social tolerance, but in the sense of a real intellectual grasp and a passion to attain it.” If such a person did exist, I wouldn’t be surprised if he or she was stoned to death on the spot.

All this talk about bio-deisel and ethanol is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. People in this country get all bent out of shape about paying $4 a gallon for gas, but have no problem blowing $314,000,000 a day in Iraq. You could launch two space shuttles every three days for that kind of money! If we were throwing that kind of money at resolving our dependency on fossil fuels, we’d have it worked out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. If it meant you could guarantee the feeding, clothing, sheltering, education and healthcare of every last “poor” person in this country, would you pay an extra $365 a year in taxes? I would.

The situation in this country is just plain disgusting. Politicians talk about some initiative to spend $20,000,000 a year on development of some alternative energy thing, like it’s big money. I mean, if I had $20,000,000 it would be big money to me, but in the context of the Federal budget, or what Americans spend on gasoline alone, it’s virtually nothing. The citizenry has no concept of proportionality.

All the while, we have throngs of morbidly obese and unhealthily thin young adults being graduated from high school who can’t form a complete sentence, read above the 5th grade level, do simple arithmetic or tell you what science is (let alone think scientifically). There is a movement afoot to slowly eviscerate Roe v. Wade, demolish the wall of separation between church and state, and re-imagine The United States as a Protestant Christian theocracy.

Am I angry? Maybe. If I am, I’m not convinced that I’m wrong to be.

— May 9, 2008