Dog ritual, science as religion

This morning when I took my dog for a walk his friend Chauncey was out in the yard, barking to greet him. We crossed the road so that the dogs could say hi and to my surprise, after wagging tails and sniffing both ends through the gate, my dog peed on the gatepost. I was just about to reprimand him for what looked to me like bad dog etiquette, when Chauncey proceeded to do exactly the same thing. They both stood there, taking turns peeing in each other's general direction on opposite sides of the same gatepost. It must have been a ritual they developed together, away from the broader dog culture. My dog almost thinks he is a cat anyway. He adores our cat, who regularly joins us on our evening stroll. The dog tries to make friends with other cats and is at best indifferent towards other dogs, a mixture of frantic fear and aggression signaled by loud barks and fur bristling along his spine.

Taking turns peeing in one another's general direction from opposite sides of the same gatepost. I wondered sadly if this what many human interactions have become as we immerse ourselves in increasingly unnatural environments.

Somebody asked me what I thought about the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, so I watched it. My view is that science as religion is no more harmful than any other religion. Analysing the movie, we seem to have replaced God with the Quantum Universe (both out there and within ourselves), Bad or Evil with Addiction (chemical addiction and, slightly more troublingly, addiction to emotions) and Good with Self-Evolution, Awareness, Knowledge, Creation/Creativity and/or nonattachment. Genuine scientists as well as chiropractors and spiritual leaders served as the priests and prophets of this new religion. If badly spun metaphors of quantum theory and neurobiology are what gives you those tingles down the spine associated with spiritual feeling, then karma to you. I vaguely remember experiencing that when as a 17 year-old physics student I finally understood Dirac's matrices. Sadly the moment was fleeting as it took a great deal of mental effort to follow the math. My one qualm about all this is that if Jesus were nonattached, why would he have bothered? The same goes for Moses or Maimonedes, who was among other things a great physician. Show me someone who did some great thing for the benefit of humanity who was not emotionally attached to the world and the creatures on it. Oh, and what about the imagination? If all these other things are Good, then why not also Imagination?

What are the rituals of this new religion? The two ritual actions depicted in the move show the deaf protagonist (illustrating the limitations of our senses) tattooing herself with hearts using an eyeliner and then immersing herself in a hot bath. Later, she tosses away her anti-anxiety pills. Perhaps watching the movie is a ritual in itself in some circles. What the Bleep do I know?