So happy blogging from my phone.

I like to write shorter blog blurbish things, so I installed the blogger app on my android phone and now I can blog much more easily. When I got around to it previously it was after setting up my notebook, usually for a different purpose. Now it can be more when the thought strikes me, which is better.

I have tomorrow off and it will be a music day, all day. I've put some new ideas down and it's great.

The other night something unusual happened. I was thinking about religion, like this: a good religion is actually designed to make you think. Religion and God are two different things, this should be clear. The backlash against religion comes from the practitioners of the religion being nuisances and seeming like they are dumb. I recalled all of the bothersome people who irritated me about their religion, and also other people who were plainly hypocritical to me but did not seem to recognize that. "Theosophy" was a response to the "lemming-ness" of religion, in their assertion that there is no religion greater than Truth, that if a god is God then Truth must be a subset of that god and wholly consistent with that Truth.

The best religious thoughts are like Kilgore Trout sci fi stories.  The way Vonnegut inserted them in his larger books, summarizing them succinctly and getting to the point of what was meant, even though the stories themselves were supposedly novellas-.you never needed to actually read a Kilgore Trout novella to "get it".

Now, however, once someone starts fleshing out these more succinct thoughts, they get tedious and tangled in details and contradictions can arise and sects sprout out of different interpretations and so on. The Theosophy movement got just as complicated and sect-ridden as any mainstream religion. But, it is a perfectly great statement to say if God is God, Truth can't be greater than God: God has to be at least as great as Truth.

I used to think that one followed a religion either because one was intellectually weak, so one needed a sort of mythology to explain things, or because one benefitted from belonging to a religious "club", so they paid lip service to whatever was required. This is maybe true in some cases, but if you get into it more you see that it can be a very rich intellectual exercise. The main thing is to avoid explaining things away, it all has at least some meaning.