Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

A Mission Statement, Of Sorts

Who are you? -- The Vorlons' Question
What do you want? -- The Shadows' Question
-- Babylon 5

I move through the day in the rhythms that I've known.
I've got this crazy dream of stripping down to truth and bone.
-- Heather Nova

When trying to write honestly about one's personal views on science, politics, religion, philosophy - but especially those last two - it is hard to avoid offending people. I have insulted a friend in the last week and that hurts. Another friend asked me in some bafflement 'you write about a lot of different things, but where are you going with it; how does it all tie together?' I was also baffled, since to me it's perfectly obvious: I write about who I am and what is going through my mind, and if what is in my mind doesn't eventually fit together, then I will explode or go insane; this weblog is my attempt to document part of the long process of slowly crawling toward sanity. And I try to avoid offending people, but I'm not always sure how to do that.

It's probably time that I tried to explain what I'm trying to do on this weblog, at least the general theme of my interests. There is a point to what I write about, of sorts. Less of a point perhaps, and more of a gently tapered ellipsoid curve. A kind of rounded blob you can wave in an overall direction.

There are several categories of posts here. Ones which begin with 'Dreamlog:' are probably the most confusing. They are exactly what they seem, which is documentation of actual dreams I have, or at least the fragments I can recall. Mostly verbatim, sometimes edited for PG rating. I write them for two reasons, one as a sort of vague spiritual discipline, two because it seems like good practice for creative writing and I've been in a creative writing block for about seven years, and three, because dreams amuse me and Slow Wave is one of my favourite webcomics. Possibly they don't really belong on the front page, but so far I haven't hacked Wordpress to do anything else.

Some posts are marked 'Poem:' - these are original poems, generally ones I have written previously and have had up on the web elsewhere. I'm slowly migrating them over to Wordpress, and when I do I tend to backdate them to a (usually fictitious) date in the year in which they were written, so they don't spam the front page.

One of my narrow interests is Interactive Fiction, a retro-hobbyist gaming genre with roots in the old-school days of 1970s Artificial Intelligence research. It's an interest increasingly honoured in the breach rather than the observance, but a frightening amount of my social life revolves around friendship with fans of this genre, and of board and videogame designed in general.

For the rest, they are generally responses to media or materials I have been reading lately, or to current incidents. I read insane amounts of the Web; I play video games; I watch movies and very occasionally TV; often things jump out of pop culture at me. These posts may be serious or unserious. I don't always make that much distinction.

I also read books of a spiritual or philosophical character, following my own personal reading track which mostly consists of following up ideas that jump up and wave at me saying RESEARCH THIS. I try to write reasonably serious posts about these, because what I am trying to piece together in this research feels something like a spiritual/philosophical archeology project: tracing the course of a cluster of interesting ideas which have emerged over about the last 150 years, and which center (for me) around a version of Christianity that I find appealing.

But although I say Christianity - and I consider myself to be a Christian of a fairly orthodox stripe - I am finding overlap with some of these core ideas in various religions, sciences, and political streams of thought. I very explicitly don't make a distinction between groups or disciplines: I believe fragmentation and the building of artificial walls between disciplines and organisations to be a curse, and I don't believe any human being needs any kind of formal theological or academic licence to practice study and free thinking. I go where I see the ideas going, or I try to. Sometimes I get scared and have to back off for a bit. Sometimes I don't have the academic skills to follow the path of an idea completely. But I'm trying for an overall, birds-eye, gonzo-philosophy approach here. I feel sometimes like I'm jumping from idea to idea like a frog across lilypads; if I stop too long I'll bog down. The important part is to get an outline of connections where they seem to have been hidden, and try to get what I think are maybe-useful insights down in text before I forget them.

If you want some words to describe my main themes, I could give you these: truth, peace, unity, love, Christ.

The search for truth is always important to me. I am possibly a little on the Aspergers spectrum there. I want to know and speak the true idea more than anything; sometimes this means I don't bite my lip when I should, and people get hurt. I don't always notice this.

The search for peace started in 2001. I got involved in the peace movement; it was the most fractious bunch of misfits ever in one room together; we just barely avoided fistfights. I loved it, and it nearly killed me. And I realised I had to seriously reexamine all my ideas, political and spiritual and scientific, to get a grasp on what I wanted to do with my life.

Unity is a true idea (possibly the One True Idea) which I have fought for a long time, but find myself drawn towards again and again. All things are connected. It is scary to me because a large part of my personal and religious identity has been invested in the idea of separation, holiness-through-withdrawal. But I looked for peace, and peace led me to unity, and unity is leading me to some fairly radical philosophical ideas in domains I had closed off as unscientific and occult. I'm opening those boxes and letting whatever is in, jump out. I'm trusting that everything will eventually fit together, even the bits that don't.

Love is a nice word that has scary consequences - at least for me. In the Christian tradition - or at least in some of the more fundamentalist sects - love is deeply associated with suffering. I'm not sure that that's intentional, but whenever I hear that word I have imagery of crosses, graves, violent death by torture. It is perhaps no concidence that I am single. I want to try to get past this deep fear of the kind of unconditional love described by the Christian faith - but the fact remains that an innocent guy who'd die staked out on Death Row and still love his enemies - and who says 'do what I do' - is deeply, deeply troubling, and if this doesn't bug you, it should.

Christ is a word burned into my brain from my childhood. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. Not all of these people can stand to live on the same planet as each other, let alone enter the same room without wearing explosives. Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Buddhists, we've all heard of Jesus, and some of us (maybe not the Buddhists) are willing to kill each other over that name. But what do the formulas and rituals of the Christian faith actually mean? Is this Christ person... entity... force... thing... something real? If He is, what does that do to science, to religion, to politics?

(I've probably offended a dozen people just in that paragraph alone. See what I mean?)

Why do I call this blog 'Life in the Cultlane'?

Well, for one it's an anagram. For another: I grew up in a church that by most rational standards was a cult. Now I'm opening the doors to exploring philosophies which are also associated with groups which could be called cults. It's where I am, it's my patch, I'm claiming it. The word 'cult' means 'group of worshippers'. It's not irrational to worship, the important thing is what you worship and how well it matches reality. Not all cults are necessarily wrong; not all wrong things are necessarily called cults. We need to investigate with our eyes, our minds and our hearts, find the bits that fit, discard the rest.

Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Of course. So can a whole lot of bogus messiahs. But that doesn't mean we don't go looking.

Comments are welcomed, though I would prefer that they are on-topic to the post at hand. You will almost certainly disagree with me on a number of subjects. I'm okay with that. If I contradict what you say, I'm not mad at you. I'd like it if you agreed, obviously. But I'm almost certainly wrong on some things and I reserve the right to make my own way to truth.

I generally won't delete comments, though I will point out if I think you're not on-topic. If you post comment spam however - by which I mean obviously automated content-free 'visit my site' messages - you *will* be deleted, rapidly and with extreme prejudice.