Get real! we sometimes tell friends when they start going off into some fantasy world or describing something that really is so much b___ sh__. Well, apparently someone told that to Marc Perkel and it inspired his creation of The Church of Reality (abbreviated here as CoR) which appears to be a legitimate organization recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt charitable organization (but NOT a church because churches don't ask the IRS for a tax exemption - they just assume it). The CoR doesn’t appear to be actively seeking conversions although it does accept donations. And it does appear to encourage is individual thinking and intelligent discussions.
Several months ago, when I first found the CoR on the Web it appeared to be the work of a single individual - Marc Perkel. But in the past few months it has grown to the point of having a board of directors (the Council of Realists) and some rudimentary organization. Also associated with the site is an active forum that is starting to reflect significant discussion about the beliefs of the CoR. I find it interesting that even when you restrict your beliefs to reality, there is still plenty to argue about. And on the web site itself there is so much satire and serious philosophical statements that it’s hard to tell sometimes where the serious ends and the satire begins.
Here are some quotes from the CoR web site I especially liked:
If it's real - we believe in it. The Church of Reality is a Personal Commitment to the Truth. We believe in real reality, not the way we want reality to be, not our personal reality, but real objective reality the way it really is.
We have no "holy book" or "holy web site" that contains any list of things that you are expected to believe in. You are not required to accept anything on "faith." The Church of Reality is a Doubt-Based Religion. We believe in the Principle of Bullshit, that bullshit is bullshit, no matter how many people believe it.
This is an alternative to other religions for some people. It is not an alternative for everyone. If you're happy with your beliefs then we're happy for you. The world would be boring if everyone believed the same thing. This religion fills a gap to serve those who are into reality. Reality isn't for everyone.
We don't look down our noses at the rest of the world. This planet is but a speck of dust in a galaxy of billions of stars in a universe of billions of galaxies. We exist for an instant of time. How important can we be? We are not morally superior to you, and you are not morally superior to us.
We don't worship anything - If you want to worship something it's up to you. But this church is about reality, not about God. We are not theists. However, if God comes out of hiding and shows himself in objective reality then we will believe in it.
If you want to get saved, go to a church that offers that service. In the Church of Reality "being saved" means having a good backup of your computer data.
We don't believe in the supernatural. There are things we can't explain because we don't know all the answers. But we do believe that explanations do exist and our purpose is to use science and figure it out. If something is outside of reality, then it's not real.
For 10 minutes or 2 hours of thought provoking entertainment, I recommend the Church of Reality.
Sunstone had an interesting article about the nature of reality and whether even such things as science were truly "objectively real" or only so within its own determined context.
ReplyDeleteI would perhaps be more skeptical about suching musings on the real meaning of real, except that I did once spend 5 days in Montreal at a conference that was mostly about what parts of space time are real. Namely, which of the past the present and the future are real. It seems like just mindless philosophy, but when you throw in Special Relativity's assertion that the definition of the present is observer dependent, suddenly this has a very real scientific dimension. Wierd stuff.
Have you seen the movie, "What the Bleep do we know?"? I understand it is a New Age interpretation of quantum physics which takes such weird stuff that you listened to in Montreal and uses it to prop up their (New Age) "reality".
ReplyDeleteI think for the rest of us, reality is the rock we stub our toes on NOT the probability function that defines whether our toes and the rock can occupy the same space/time coordinate.
I haven't seen what the bleep yet, though it has been recommended to me for over a year.
ReplyDeleteOf course my trip to Montreal was extreme, but the point is that as much as we would like to believe only in real things the very notion of reality is more subjective than we realize.
I'll accept that reality might not always be what it appears to be on the surface. We see that in matter that looks completely solid but is 99% empty space. But what every day experiences are so subjective that you see one thing and I would see another if I were to stand in the same place? Isn't science built on the idea of being able to replicate an observation. That doesn't leave much room for subjectivity.
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