Wait, UChi has a humanist advisor?

I received this correspondence moments ago:

Welcome to the University of Chicago!

My name is Josh Oxley, and I am the Humanist Advisor for the University of Chicago. You're receiving this email because you, sometime in the past few months, either self-identified as secular/humanist/atheist/ect, or expressed interest in the Secular Student Alliance.

My job, as part of the Spiritual Life Office at Rockefeller Chapel, is to be a resource for secular students on campus. Often non-believing, freethinking students are ignored by universities. That's a mistake, and one I'm glad the University of Chicago isn't making. We freethinkers have questions of meaning, belonging, identity, and those other aspects of being human, and it's my role to help you in any of those conversations.

If you're wondering about any of these questions, looking for places to plug-in with like-minded people, or have other questions, feel free to send me an email and set up a meeting. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts throughout the year, and I hope to see you around campus.

Get involved, find balance, and enjoy!

Josh Oxley

Humanist Advisor, Spiritual Life Office

The University of Chicago

It's true, I have aligned myself with the Secular Student Alliance. And I do believe that I should be as proud, candid, and transparent about my (non)religious views as anybody. And yet, trepidation... Presumably, if you're here, reading, you know me, want to know me, or prefer candor to obfuscation. My agnostic atheistic non-religious humanistic doctrine ideology philosophy thing is no special revelation. My religious views come up in conversation with some frequency. I think it's important to represent (but never to impose, sermonize, proselytize (except in the regular way which is implicit in all forms of rhetorical communication)).

I digress: Josh Oxley. Humanist Advisor. Awesome! Not for the first time, and hopefully not for the last, I'm proud of my university. For the first time, I feel my perspective and loosely bound cabal is represented, welcomed, and validated. Apparently, this is the first time such a post has existed at this university, and UChi is the fourth university nationally to adopt such a program. We're not talking about a student organization. This is an officially sanctioned staff position. Granted, the Rockefeller Chapel (the Gothic awe-and-fear-inspiring masterwork) makes all other outfits seem amateur, but this is what I call progress: how splendidly legit.

It's nice to know that somebody out there is swinging for you and, it should be noted, all humanity. That is, these people are explicitly interested in aiding those who have "aspects of being human." Succor is available for all.

Of course, humanism is not the exclusive territory of secular ideology. Religious figures are often (or always?) at the forefront of humanist endeavors. Consider the Catholic church's anti-Pinochet ferment during the 1970s, or the progressive and humanistic Christian (principally Catholic, again) involvement in Argentina during the dirty wars and Operation Condor.

Even I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Christian humanist philosophers: theology teachers during middle and high school (Catholic school, y'all) who fostered my intellectual growth disproportionately and with great success. Little did Father Matt Guckin know that, while he idolized Aristotle, I was employing arch Sophistry on all of his papers. Or maybe he did know; perhaps he was proud - he taught it to me. (Thanks also to the Augustinian friars of Malvern and Paul Peterson, especially). Again, there's another side - I'll always lament that blighted year of Christian Morality - which has its own other side, and so on into a strange loop, but I'll not get into that.

For me too much religion was like too much ice-cream: brain-freeze and body-purge inducing.

I digress: It makes sense for there to be a force for secularism on this university campus, to fill breaches, to unite, to do what religious folk do for each other. This rectifies what has long seemed to me to be a dearth in social-secular movements and organization. Word up to my active Secular Student Alliance and Humanist Advisor. Stand strong, find balance, and represent.

No archipelago

I was invited to ponder the influence of a certain period of life on my life. I admit that I struggled somewhat in responding. My answer portrayed every act, incident, thought, etc. as a separate island in an archipelago of events. Furthering the geographical metaphor, we would propose that the girth and depth of each landmass represents its influence, its power. Although appealing, this is a spurious conceptualization. Why?

This is important: Everything is connected. Everything. Acts are not islands, nor are humans*. I have found metaphors to be misleading; no simple pictorial, verbal, or quantifiable function is capable of describing the interconnectedness. A continuous function is approximate, but visual Euclidean geometry unsatisfactory. O, the interminable dimensions! Life is an ocean of intermingled particles and organisms, all mixing, twirling, crashing, seeking to control by personal propulsion, but subject to the omnipotent tide and current. Humans ebb and flow with the rest.

Personal development is continuous. It is progressive and digressive. An influential incident, pattern, or period of life on life causes notable progression or retrogression. Change is inevitable; (reverting to the Euclidean plane example) no human being is a constant function. It is also typically gradual. There are, however, principle periods of flux, the most obviously accelerated one being youth (generally portrayed as developmental). This is the time when we process personal experience into personal knowledge. To the very young, everything is surprising. As we age, we ossify; we choose and invest and define ourselves, we settle into a comfortable reality. We come to know the world or we come to think that we know the world or we come to accept a certain interpretation of the world (Clearly, for this exposition, knowledge = belief). Surprise to common phenomena fades. Only the radical manifestations of nature (including human nature) surprise us.

Surprise is a function of ignorance and close-mindedness. The world as it is is ours and it is comprehensible. Unnatural is a misnomer. Unnatural does not exist. Unnatural is a societal allegation. All that occurs and is capable of occurring is natural; it belongs to our world. What else could it be?

Personal progression, for me, is the development of comprehension of the one world and, necessarily, the position, purpose, and nature of one's self in the world. This is a step beyond the above-proposed accumulation of knowledge/belief. It is the development of what is often called wisdom: Precise knowledge and keen discernment of what is and what "what is" means to oneself and the human species. It is that which leads us to a wise state of being which is personally and progressively influential.

*Remember John Dunne: No man is an island, entire of itself... Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

Brad is thinking

- About delineations and spectra and the middle path that appears to be fundamental.

- About when to speak plain truth and when to deceive, obfuscate, dissimulate, or utter falsifications.

- About enigmas, anomalies, the advancement of thought and science and the consequent and simultaneous waning of ignorance, myth, mysticism, magic, and speculation.

- That there is a lever in the natural construction of the human being which leaves him or her open to outside manipulation, which often induces lamentable illogic, including crowd-rule, wishful-thinking, and fallacious belief.

- Whether or not the hegemony and the progression of the hegemony, of what is fashionably considered science will make humans more or less malleable.

- That Brad knows nothing and nurtures fragile beliefs that may or may not have basis in "reality."

- That memory is fickle and that blatant fiction is as worthy a suitor for our consideration and belief as purported fact.

- That there is but one form to pray to.

- That perceptive skepticism trumps blind faith.

- That there must be an equalization.

- About WWSGD (What Would Siddhartha Guatma Do).

- About what deserves: Respect; approbation; damnation; and, outright eradication.

- That there is a coy, precious quality peculiar to the margins of the day and the night which tends to activate "weird" and pure behavior, ambiguous emotions, and tangential ambitions.

Fewer friend followers than foreseen...

It is OK though, I assure you I am not disheartened. I could dedicate myself to this blog even if I did not have friend followers, though I pray to Krishna that that does not become necessary. I blame this fact on the reality that you cannot be a follower without a blogger.com blog, I think. Also, many people will join us soon, we just have to let the "word of mouth" do its thang. Anyway, I think this is enough for now. Maybe more later. Definitely some tidbit tomorrow (election day!).