Colombo has a perahera (elephant, fire and awesome parade). Well everywhere has a perahera, but Gangarama Temple in the city has a boss one. Briefly interrupted by war, the colorful Podi Hamduruwo has brought it back in style. I attended for the first time and it was pretty awesome, and well organized. The Kandy Perahera is a bit of an endurance event, but this one was more modern.

Richard Dawkins argues that religion is essentially ridiculous. As Alain de Botton says “I think it’s too easy to dismiss the whole of religion that way.” I think he proposes a new, respectful and ultimately more convincing atheism. “I think there is an alternative, being both very respectful and completely impious, of stealing from religion.” The video is worth a watch.

Richard Dawkins (scientist and popular writer) spoke at the Galle Literary Festival. His talk covered evolution, alien life, Buddhism and – of course – organized religion. I think that religion is part of human evolution, like any other trait, not something opposed to it. But anyways, here are a few videos and tweeted quotes from Dawkins presentation before we get into it. He’s damn interesting and the crowd was electric and packed.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone. It was yesterday but I spent most of the weekend eating or sleeping on the floor so only getting around to writing this now. What is Christmas in Colombo like? The shopping is there, and the dinners. Perhaps one difference is the fireworks, going on late into the night. This holiday seemed more lively than before. Hope it was nice for you as well.

I’ve been reading a book by Robert Bellah which defines religion as something of a virtual reality machine, enabling us to connect to and create alternate realities. In that sense, it’s a symbol system. A tree or a pyramid or Stonehenge is like a rudimentary printf statement for God. All as ahead of their time as Babbage’s Difference Engine was ahead of the computer, but I think the concept is sound.

I started this book, Religion In Human Evolution, which has a lot of ideas per page. Here’s one, that history is older than texts, thus older than 5,000 years and mixed with evolutionary biology. This I believe most sincerely to be true, but it’s still a rejection of an established view. Indeed, the time before text is often called pre-history, and many people are happy to let it dwell in mystery or myth.

In this video, Andrew Sullivan (a gay, HIV positive, conservative Catholic blogger) talks about why he started meditating. In his case, it was precipitated by Internet overload and rather scattered thought. For me, each time I restart meditation it’s much the same thing. Not the Internet so much, but if you sit and just listen, there’s a huge amount of cacophony and noise in your head. In mine at least. If you listen long enough, it kinda fades away and you’re left with a stillness. As they say in Eat, Pray, Love, if you leave a vacuum, God can rush in.

Contrary to popular belief, the Buddha did not visit Sri Lanka, was not Sinhalese and would not recognize what we call the Buddhist flag. He was an Indian, sorta, except at that time India didn’t exist. More than anything he was a human being. While Sri Lanka has done yeoman service in preserving Theravada Buddhism, a simple and practical form, it’s important to remember that Buddhism is a practice open to anyone.

What strikes me about old school prophets was how inquisitive and iconoclastic they were. If we had a prophet today I’m sure she would not reject science but fold that reality into something greater, and no not like Scientology. People talk of science destroying wonder or somehow sterilizing what’s natural, and I think nothing could be further from the truth. Science is awesome and inspires awe. For example, outer space.

At about my age, the Buddha left his family to seek enlightenment. One blogger is saying this makes him a bad father, which I guess is true in an immediate sense. The thing about Buddhism is that it’s full of seeming opposites like this. People say that Buddhism is about doing nothing, but that appearance of nothing is actually complete awareness. Everything in a sense, but more accurately a point where those dualistic measures don’t apply. In the same way, the Buddha had to actually leave his family to help them.