The Good News, is, I didn’t lose at Credit Card Roulette today. The bad news is, I do have to type up some summary of what we talked about, because Erik picked me. It was not a very punk conversation (though I did manage to pull Daniel back into that topic on our morning coffee run). Instead, we found ourselves talking about the main navigational issue Jason is in town to help us tackle – how to get around the 5 profile pages on the 5 sites we run.
This, of course, turned into a religious discussion. Before long, we were speaking in terms of the godhead as a similar sort of each individually and the whole greater than the parts sort of thing. Turns out, by the way, that our table had 3 atheists, 3 believers, and 1 agnostic. I asked the non-believers if they had ever had a religious experience, and they all had (well Ivan’s might not have been religious, but it sounded, well, awesome at least). Yet they didn’t make the leap to seeing this as something indicative of a larger realm of human experience than anything we might know simply through science, or something brought on by taking drugs.
Of course, much chatter about quantum physics, sun dresses, peeping tom behavior, and movies ensued. I think we all agreed that we have our own beliefs, which matter, even if they are not beliefs about belief, and only matter.
At the end of lunch, Argentina and the Netherlands were still tied 0 – 0, with about 20 minutes to go in regulation time.
I liked what you said about the answer to “Is there a God?” being “The short answer is no, and the long answer is yes”. I bet most of us would agree with this nonsensical answer. Religion obviously isn’t the only way to have an appreciation for the wacky nature of the universe. There are not really that many differences between religion, science, drugs, dreams, stories, and ruby on rails.