Church of the Churchless

Satan exists...but only in deluded minds

Recently ABC's "Nightline" featured a face-off on the question, "Does Satan Exist?" Watching the recorded show last night, my wife and I were amazed that this is a subject for debate in the 21st century.

It's an example of how many religious people haven't progressed from exceedingly primitive beliefs. Astoundingly, more Americans believe in the devil (59%) than in the theory of evolution (47%).

Scary.

Which also describes the mindset of Pastor Mark Driscoll and former prostitute Annie Lobert (founder of "Hookers for Jesus"), who handled the arguments in favor of Satan's existence.

Opposing them, and getting frequent cheers from me, were Deepak Chopra and Bishop Carlton Pearson.

When I condemned myself to hell for a free DVD I talked about Pearson in a blog post, since he had a revelation from God that hell is a place in life, not after death. That made me feel better about selling my soul for a DVD.

He's still making good sense. In the debate Pearson correctly pointed out that the Bible was written by men, not by God, so it can't be taken literally. (Clips of the Nightline faceoff can be viewed here.)

Most interesting to me was a theme that keeps coming up on the Church of the Churchless: the difference between subjective and objective experience.

If something is evident only to me, it's subjective. If I can show that thing, or demonstrate that it exists, to other people, then it's objective. (Objectivity and subjectivity have other facets, of course, but my definition is good enough for a blog post.)

Lobert said that she's convinced Satan exists because she saw him in the eyes of her prostitution clients. I wish Chopra or Pearson had asked her if she was able to get any of these guys to go to an optometrist for a checkup.

If an eye doctor looked in their eyes and also saw Satan, that'd be pretty convincing -- especially if a camera could photograph the devil sitting on the retina.

Chopra said that Satan is in peoples' minds, not anywhere outside. Likely Lobert's emerging guilt and shame about the profession she was practicing caused her to project those feelings onto her clients.

Another instructive moment came when a female audience member chided Chopra for thinking that electromagnetism, gravity, and other scientific facts were more real than her personal experience of God.

Chopra could have come up with a better response, but he did fairly well. He said that he didn't deny her experience. Yet he felt his approach was more consistent with the laws of nature.

Thus he was pointing to the difference between a subjective experience, the truth of which can't be questioned by other people, and an assertion about shared experiences in objective reality, which damn well can be questioned for its truthfulness.

The woman proclaimed (pointing around the audience):

I'm saying that Jesus is your savior, and his savior, and their savior. I'm saying Jesus is true for everyone, and if you don't believe in him, you don't get to be with him.

I liked Chopra's response.

In that case, I feel really sorry for you. I want you to be saved.

Saved from fundamentalism, closed-mindedness, fanciful beliefs, misguided thought processes, being trapped in a constricted world view.

But it isn't only Christians who need to be saved. We all do, to some degree. It's easy to mistake personal experiences for universal ones, and demand that others embrace our subjectivity as their own.

We've got no right to do that. The day I started this blog I had to come up with a tagline to put under the name at the top of the web page.

"Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence" came quickly to mind. In over four years I haven't been impelled to back away from those words.

Watching fundamentalists fumble with the question, Does Satan Exist?, sure didn't change my mind.

Tips on talking to a fundamentalist

While this blog is for churchless folks, we get some fundamentalist visitors also. I enjoy having comment conversations with them, even though I can get frustrated with preachiness and closed-mindedness.

Soon after I started the Church of the Churchless I wrote "How to talk to a fundamentalist." With more than four years of additional experience in this area, it's time for an update.

Fundamentalism is defined in various ways. I like this Wikipedia definition: "clinging to a stubborn, entrenched position that defies reasoned argument or contradictory evidence."

If someone is certain they're right, it's tough to have a productive conversation with them.

So it's good to learn early on whether you're dealing with a fundamentalist, since most of us have better things to do than try to open up a mind that is nailed shut. A simple question, if answered honestly, is a helpful aid:

Do you consider that you could be wrong?

When you hear a "yes," that's an indication of openness. It turns the conversation in the direction of offering reasons for a religious, spiritual, metaphysical, philosophical, or mystical belief.

Because if there's a possibility of being wrong, no one else should be expected to accept an assertion on blind faith. And if you are told, "no," I'd look elsewhere for conversational companionship (unless you're a glutton for dogmatism).

Fundamentalists aren't always honest in answering this question, though. They might feign broad-mindedness just to get a foot in your psychological door. Or they might not be aware of how rigidly attached they are to unfounded beliefs.

Thus often it's necessary to diagnose a fundamentalist attitude in the absence of an outright admission. "The Guru Papers" has some useful observations.

Fundamentalism is essentially about controlling people. It can only operate in authoritarian hierarchies because unchallengeability can only be passed down and enforced in this way. ...Fundamentalists all share the same viewpoint that what must be returned to are the unchallengeable and unchanging dictates of a higher power.

...The great psychological appeal of fundamentalism is that it offers certainty. Certainty can feel better than doubt and confusion. It can eliminate internal conflict, or at least suppress and bring relief from it.

...Certainty must be able to withstand challenges and counter-evidence -- anything that brings doubt. No combination of reason and experience can give the necessary kind of certainty, especially about the future. So faith is the key to religious certainty.

...A simple universe with a simple good (those who follow the rules), and a simple evil (those who do not), and simple explanations that can never be disproven are necessary for certainty.

It only takes reading through some active comment conversations, such as the one on this post, to see how valid these points are.

Fundamentalists, who can follow an Eastern guru as easily as a Western god, aren't used to being challenged. They don't like it.

They're accustomed to nodding their heads during talks or sermons where everyone agrees (or feigns agreement) about the tenets of their shared faith. Thus when they preach dogma in a forum like this blog where questioning and skepticism are valued, a culture clash quickly becomes evident.

What's particularly interesting is how the fundamentalist's need for hierarchy and authoritarianism gets projected onto those who disagree with them.

It amazes me (and regular visitors to this blog, I'm sure) when someone speaks of my followers or acolytes. I only wish.

I can't tell you how many times I've written a post that struck me as astoundingly wise, inspiring, and reflective of reality, then waited for my well-deserved praise to arrive through cyberspace.

And waited... and waited... and waited.

Which is pretty much what I do when I throw a ball for our willful dog, whose accommodating Lab side unfortunately is overruled by her willful German Shepherd side when it comes to retrieving.

Or when I try to convince my equally assertive wife that she should accede to one of my philosophical positions, which she's managed to resist during our nineteen years of marriage.

What's going on here, it seems, is that fundamentalist visitors to this blog can't understand how people can simultaneously (1) be deeply committed to understanding what life, spirituality, and meditation is all about, and (2) be deeply uncommitted to accepting on faith someone else's understanding. Including mine.

This accounts for all the talk in the above-mentioned comment conversation about me, and others by implication, giving up on seeking the truth merely because we're looking for it in a non-fundamentalist fashion.

That's ridiculous. But ridicule is one of the tools used by fundamentalists. In "The Guru Papers" this is one of the six strong indications of belonging to an authoritarian group:

No deviation from the party line is allowed. Anyone who has thoughts or feelings contrary to the accepted perspective is made to feel wrong or bad for having them.

So when a shaming tactic is used by a fundamentalist, throw it back at them: "Shame on you! For trying to shame me! Keep your guilt to yourself!"

Fortunately, I've found that most religious people consider their personal faith to be just that... personal.

A guy used to come to my Tai Chi classes who was a devout Christian. I enjoyed him a lot. He'd call me "Brother Brian" and bless me. He was so sincere, so humble, and so accepting of my own beliefs, we got along great.

It isn't differences in beliefs that is the problem.

It's holding onto a belief with such rigidity and certainty that alternative views are rejected out of hand, and any questioning by a skeptic is rejected as the devil's handiwork. 

That's when it becomes next to impossible to talk to a fundamentalist.

“God’s Christian Warriors” shows crazy side of religion

Anyone who thinks that Christianity is a warm, fuzzy, loving religion needs to watch, or read, God's Christian Warriors – part of a CNN special series on Muslim, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalism.

The whole idea of a religious warrior is crazy, of course. That's what made the two hours my wife and I finished watching last night especially weird.

When someone fights for something real, that's understandable even if you don't agree with their cause. But when you see people all passionately fired up to defend something imaginary, that's bizarre. It'd be diagnosed as insane if it weren't for the pervasiveness of religious mental illness in so many cultures around the world.

Now, I'm all for a decent dose of craziness, because it makes life much more interesting. Unadulterated sanity is boring. However, the caveat is that crazy people can't mess up the lives of others. Then they have to be dealt with.

Unfortunately, it's tough to medicate the 53% of Americans who, according to CNN's Christiane Amanpour (host of the series), believe that evolution is wrong and creationism is right.

Nor to treat the delusions of the now deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell while he was alive, when he responded to Ms. Amanpour's question about whether he still believed that this nation's abortion policies caused us to be attacked on 9/11.

If we in fact change all the rules on which this Judeo-Christian nation was built, we cannot expect the Lord to put his shield of protection around us as He has in the past.

Yeah, that shield sure was working well during the Civil War, when millions of Americans died. And go figure: the Supreme Court hadn't legalized abortion yet. Must have been some other national depravity that caused the Lord to lower his protective shield back then.

This way of thinking is utterly strange. Yet it was repeated over and over again during God's Christian Warriors. Most of the time by angry white men who are absolutely, completely, 100% convinced that they know what's right and how the world should behave.

If the loving touch of Jesus has made them humbler, gentler, and kinder, I can only wonder how off-the-wall they were before Christianity transformed their souls.

Jimmy Carter, a Christian president who seems to understand a more genuine message of Jesus, said:

It's impossible for a fundamentalist to admit he is ever wrong, because he would be admitting that God was wrong.

Well, that's only the case if you consider that you know all about God. Which Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists do, because the Bible and Koran tell them so (leaving aside the not-so-small problem of the many contradictions between Old Testament, New Testament, and Koranic revelations).

It's when religious zealotry merges with political policy-making that things really get crazily scary. Pastor John Hagee is a fervent Christian Zionist. Israel can do no wrong in his eyes, which only see the world through Biblical blinders.

Amanpour asked him whether God really has a foreign policy. Indeed He does, Hagee said. In line with a "Supporting Israel" page on his web site, Hagee referred to Genesis 12:3 and told her:

Concerning the Jewish people, that's His [God's] foreign policy statement.

If you don't have that Old Testament passage memorized (and I hope to God you don't), here it is.

And I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all nations of the earth be blessed.

Dear lord. Hagee, along with millions of other true Christian and Jewish believers, wants the 21^st century foreign policy of the United States to be guided by a vague Biblical verse written thousands of years ago. That'd be comical if it wasn't so serious in a nuclear age.

Fortunately for my teeth grinding (which otherwise would have been nearly continuous throughout God's Christian Warriors), there were a few Christians scattered throughout the program who embodied a more appealing form of Christianity.

Jimmy Carter was one. Richard Cizik, a prominent environmentalist evangelical, was another. (He says that polluters will have to answer to God, not just government.)

My favorite non-crazy Christian was pastor Greg Boyd. I've got to like an evangelical who's considered a heretic by fundamentalists. He talked about seeing a Fourth of July service at another church.

And there was patriotic music playing and a flag waving in the background. It showed a silhouette of three crosses. And four fighter jets came down over the crosses and split, with a flag waving in the background.

And there were some people who stood up. They were ecstatic. And I started crying, because I -- I wondered, how is it possible that we went from being a movement of people who follow the messiah, who taught us to love our enemies, to being a movement that celebrates fighter jets, that fuses Jesus' death on the cross with killing machines?

And that was, I guess, a -- a wakeup call to me about how serious this problem is among evangelicals in America.

The problem of unfounded righteousness always is going to be with us so long as Christians fail to recognize that they're fallible human beings, just like the rest of us.

It's fine to have personal opinions about what's right and wrong. It isn't fine to try to impose them on everybody else, using blind faith in an unknown God as your battle cry.

That happens to be the name of Ron Luce's movement: Battlecry. Luce, a forty-six year old, is out to save the youth of America. From what, I'm not sure. But whatever it is, it's dangerous. Amanpour asked him why he's declared war on the American lifestyle.

We call them terrorists, virtue terrorists, that are destroying our kids. They're raping teenage America on the sidewalk. And everybody's walking by as if it is OK, and it isn't OK.

Hmmmm. I guess Luce is upset because teenagers are having sex, smoking pot, drinking and doing other stuff that teenagers have always done.

If Luce was a decade or so older he'd have a memory of the '60s, like I do, and realize that a better term for "virtue terrorists" is "having a good time." (In fact, he admitted that he did these things himself when he was younger).

My parting piece of advice to any Christian warriors who read this post is this: it's all right to be who you really are, and allow other people the same freedom.

Observe the case of Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who came into the news today after pleading guilty to a bathroom stall incident. If you turn to Craig's senatorial web site, on his personal philosophy page you can read that one goal of his is to:

Defend and strengthen the traditional values of the American family.

That's great. And personally I've got nothing against Craig's bathroom stall behavior, so long as it is consensual. Here's what is reported to have happened after Craig went into a public rest room that was already occupied by a plain clothes police officer.

According to Roll Call, the arresting officer alleged that Craig lingered outside a rest room stall where the officer was sitting, then entered the stall next door and blocked the door with his luggage.

According to the arrest report cited by Roll Call, Craig tapped his right foot, which the officer said he recognized "as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct."

The report alleges Craig then touched the officer's foot with his foot and the senator "proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times," according to Roll Call.

At that point, the officer said he put his police identification down by the floor so Craig could see it and informed the senator that he was under arrest, before any sexual contact took place.

One more Christian warrior, who was rated 100% by the Christian coalition, bites the hypocritical dust. May many more follow in his footsteps until honest this-is-who-I-am-ness rules the land.

Senator Craig, it's OK if you're gay. Just be who you are. Michael Vick, just tell us that you're sorry for your dog fighting – saying you've found Jesus doesn't make your apology any more believable.

Religion’s dangerous certainty

Yesterday I chatted with a guy who is deeply Christian, yet also moderately scientific. For at least twenty years he's come over when we needed some repair work done on our security system.

Standing around, watching him do his circuit testing thing, we eventually get around to our usual philosophical conversation dance. I know he's a true believing Christian; he knows I'm decidedly something else.

The Taoist art hanging around the house and bookshelves filled with titles like "The End of Faith" and "God is Not Good" probably is a giveaway. I'm also not shy about expressing my skepticism to his certainty.

That's what I notice the most when I talk with Tom (not his real name). His certainty. About certain things, at least.

When he's diagnosing a problem with our security system, he's open to all possibilities. He eliminates them one by one until he's found the reason for our maintenance call.

But when our conversation turns in a metaphysical direction, Tom is darn sure of where he stands. Whereas I'm not. So we don't usually argue. Instead, he'll express his firm opinion and I'll respond, "Well, that's interesting. But I don't know how we'd ever know it for sure."

A topic yesterday was how God, or by inference any unseen non-physical being, would affect goings-on here on Earth. Tom opined that all it would take would be the subtlest tilting of a material or mental action in one direction or another.

Like when you can't decide whether to accept a job offer. You ponder the pros and cons, finding them almost equally balanced, then end up saying "Yes" or "No" on an intuitive feeling of This is the right thing to do.

Tom thought this is the way God intervenes in human affairs, with imperceptible nudges. I said, "OK, that's a possibility. Chaos theory tells us that small actions can have big effects. But it doesn't seem like there'd be any way to prove that God was responsible, since in this case the action is undetectable."

From there we went on to other subjects. Tom considered that he knew something about God. I didn't. I couldn't prove Tom was wrong. I didn't feel like I had to. I also couldn't prove that fairies don't exist. Or unicorns.

And I also don't feel like trying to change anyone's religious mind. Especially if they're not open to the possibility of changing.

When the topic of global warming came up, however, I was seriously tempted to do some arguing. Fundamentalism is only tolerable to me when it doesn't affect anyone else. In this case, it does. Like, every living thing on the planet.

Tom is as sure that humans aren't causing global warming as he is sure about how God acts in the world. The difference between the sureties is that his climate change convictions are demonstrably wrong, given the current scientific consensus, whereas his religious convictions simply can't be demonstrated to be right.

I needed to get to my Tai Chi class, so I didn't have time to tell Tom that (1) It isn't true that all the other planets are warming just like Earth, and (2) It also isn't true that increased output from the Sun is sufficient to explain recent global warming.

Those were just a few of the certainties that my conversational companion should have been a lot more uncertain about.

However, fundamentalism in one sphere usually carries over into others. It's rare to find a religious fundamentalist who is open to accepting scientific truths. That's because science demands a basic (dare I say "fundamental"?) attitude of uncertainty.

And that's certainly unacceptable to a fundamentalist.

In the August 4 issue of New Scientist there's an article, "Can we learn to love uncertainty?," by David Malone. Some excerpts:

You might think that no one could argue with the value of certainty. It has the air of one of those indisputably good things, like world peace or motherhood. But I would argue that the pursuit of certainty has become a dangerous addiction. Like alcohol, it makes us feel safe, but it is also making us stupid and belligerent.

Few notions have become as deeply embedded in our culture as the belief that there is a perfect certainty to be had – and the desire to have it. It has survived virtually intact the transition from religion to rationalism as the touchstone of our society. Even as science squeezed out belief in God and scriptural certainties, a perfect law-governed creation remained; it was just under new management. Science has become, in the minds of many, the new guarantor that there is certainty and that we can attain it.

Well, I don't know what Malone means by "many." In the United States it's definitely nowhere near a majority. Many more Americans are convinced that religion offers certitudes than that science does.

Still, Malone correctly points out that if people are looking for certainty in science, they'll be disappointed.

We need to reach an accommodation with uncertainty. Not only is the universe uncertain, but so too is human knowledge. Science as a process should never have fostered any illusions about this: it was always about provisional truths, and knew it. Perhaps it's time for us to finally accept that we shouldn't believe in science because we think it's certain, but precisely because it's not.

Certainty is totalitarian. It forecloses further thinking. Not one of the theories devised by Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Planck is certain and perfect. Powerful and beautiful they undoubtedly are, but they are still partial and incomplete approximations of truth.

…The profound discoveries of modern mathematics and science show that life and thinking flourish only in the luminal and fertile land that lies between too much certainty and too much doubt. The art of scientific inquiry is to tack back and forth between the two.

The art of philosophical and spiritual inquiry also.

But if I'm going to make a navigational error, let it be in the open seas direction of doubt, because certainty is a reef that stops the good ship Inquiry in its tracks.

Swarm theory supports spiritual independence

What makes a bee hive, an ant colony, a school of fish, or the stock market so adaptive? These swarms of individuals manage to do the right thing most of the time, yet they're leaderless.

There's a lesson here. Independence leads to wiser collective decisions. Top-down control, the modus operandi of almost every religious organization, is maladaptive.

A fascinating National Geographic article, "Swarm Theory," says:

Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.

It's interesting that selflessness, losing the ego, being a part of something bigger than yourself, becoming a drop in the spiritual ocean, is an almost universal religious theme.

Devotees often dress alike, think alike, act alike, feel alike. They engage in seemingly ant-like behavior, as I wrote about in "Sand, servitude, and satguru." The usual belief is that submission to a higher authority is the way to become a part of the whole (or Whole) rather than just a part.

Yet living entities that are truly part of a collective, a swarm, don't act that way at all. Independent individual decisions each contribute to adaptive group behavior.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize.

Thomas Seeley is a biologist at Cornell University who studies bee decision-making. These "dumb" creatures turn out to be smarter than a lot of human organizations. The bee rules are: (1) Seek a diversity of options, (2) Encourage a free competition among ideas, and (3) Use an effective mechanism to narrow choices.

This is pretty much the scientific method. It's also much closer to how effective businesses are managed today than the traditional "I'm the boss" approach.

Even when I was a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) true believer, my scientific outlook on spirituality led me to question some central tenets of this mystic-religious faith.

One of which was: Spiritual experiences can't ever be disclosed. This supposedly was to prevent the ego-expansion that would occur if a disciple were to let out "I saw God today" and started being revered by other disciples.

However, it also had the convenient effect (for the organization) of preventing disciples from comparing notes and arriving at a collective decision about whether the meditative and other practices enjoined by RSSB produced the desired results.

An ant colony or bee hive couldn't last for very long under this sort of injunction. If all the bees believed, "I just found some juicy flowers, but I can't tell anyone," the hive's food supply would rapidly dwindle. It's by each foraging bee independently communicating what's been found that a collective intelligence forms.

This goes a long way toward explaining the rigidity of fundamentalist religious organizations. Their top-down decision making, in which all of the authority is vested in the top levels of a hierarchy, who themselves are guided by strict dogma and hidebound holy texts, prevents the group from evolving to be in more of an accord with reality.

Religions are good at doing the same old thing. Preaching to the faithful, proselytizing, maintaining firm boundaries between Us and Them. Mechanical production lines are similarly good at churning out the same product.

But if situations change, or if the product turns out to need improving, that's when independence becomes a huge asset.

In fact, almost any group that follows the bees' rules will make itself smarter, says James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. "The analogy is really quite powerful. The bees are predicting which nest site will be best, and humans can do the same thing, even in the face of exceptionally complex decisions."

Investors in the stock market, scientists on a research project, even kids at a county fair guessing the number of beans in a jar can be smart groups, he says, if their members are diverse, independent minded, and use a mechanism such as voting, auctioning, or averaging to reach a collective decision.

Not surprisingly, the article touts the Internet as a key way in which people can behave more like bees. Open information sharing leads to more intelligence.

This humble blog is an attempt to contribute to more informed choices in the religious arena. People's comments on my posts, and the comments on those comments, are very much like the waggling and dancing that bees do when they return to the hive.

"I experienced this. I went there. This is what I found." As truly-told information from many individuals is aggregated and spread among the hive, wiser decisions are made.

So every time someone honestly shares their take on some subject under discussion here, they're helping to produce a swarm intelligence.

That's how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do…no leadership is required.

…Think about a honeybee as she walks around inside the hive. If a cold wind hits the hive, she'll shiver to generate heat and, in the process, help to warm the nearby brood. She has no idea that hundreds of workers in other parts of the hive are doing the same thing at the same time to the benefit of the next generation.

"A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert.

…If you're looking for a role model in a world of complexity, you could do worse than to imitate a bee.

My oven’s “Sabbath Feature” shows idiocy of keeping kosher

Before making fun of keeping kosher, I want to assure any observant Jew who comes across this blog post that I'm an equal opportunity religion-basher.

So you're not being singled out because you're Jewish. It's your religious fundamentalism, which comes in many denominational varieties, that's deserving of some ridicule today.

Which happens to be July 10. The temperature has hit an unusual 100 degrees here in Oregon. So there's good reason to keep the oven off today.

However, not turning our Frigidaire electric wall oven on during the Jewish Sabbath (basically, Friday night to Saturday night) – that's kosher nonsense.

When we bought the oven in the course of kitchen remodeling, I noted that the manual referred to a Sabbath Feature "for use on the Jewish Sabbath & Holidays." Intrigued, I headed over to a URL mentioned in the manual, http://www.star-k.org/. There I entered the weird and wacky world of keeping kosher, something I knew very little about.

I still don't. Not surprising, since a few minutes of browsing around this web site doesn't begin to unravel the intricate details of one of the most bizarre forms of religious ritualism.

Jewish law prohibits all sorts of activities on the Sabbath. Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article that pertains to our oven's Sabbath Feature:

Another example is the prohibition (according to Orthodox and some Conservative rabbinic authorities) against turning electric devices on or off, which is derived from one of the "39 categories of work (melachot)". However, the authorities are not in agreement about exactly which category (or categories) this would fall under.

One view is that tiny sparks are created in a switch when the circuit is closed, and this would constitute "lighting a fire" (category 37). If the appliance is one whose purpose is for light or heat (such as an incandescent lightbulb or electric oven) then the lighting or heating elements may be considered as a type of fire; if so, then turning them on constitutes both "lighting a fire" (category 37) and "cooking" (a form of baking, category 11), and turning them off would be "extinguishing a fire" (category 36).

Another view is that a device which is plugged into an electrical outlet of a wall becomes part of the building, but is nonfunctional while the switch is off; turning it on would then constitute "building" and turning it off would be "demolishing" (categories 35 and 34).

Some schools of thought consider the use of electricity to be forbidden only by rabbinic injunction, rather than because it violates of one of the original categories. A common solution to the problem of electricity involves pre-set timers for electric appliances, to turn them on and off automatically, with no human intervention on Shabbat itself.

Good god! I've believed in some strange spiritual stuff, but not this strange.

A fellow blogger, John, has pretty much the same attitude toward not turning an oven on during the Sabbath as I do. And he offers some insights into the rationale for keeping kosher.

Which basically is that there isn't any reasonable reason for the injunctions. It's a matter of fundamentalist obedience to religious doctrines that make no sense.

You probably have to be a rabbi to fully understand an oven's Sabbath Mode. I did my best to warm up to the Star-K Online discussion on this subject, but my brain got fried pretty quickly.

Apparently it's OK to start cooking before the Sabbath, and it's also OK to open the oven door and take food out on the Sabbath, but it's not OK if an oven light goes on when the door is opened, so make sure it's unscrewed (on our oven, the light stays on the whole time the Sabbath feature is active; that keeps kosher, but also contributes a mite to global warming, so you're going to incur the wrath of Al Gore).

Reading some other pages on the web site, including Kosher 101, I kept having to remind myself that this wasn't a satire. I mean, who comes up with this stuff?

1. Equipment used to manufacture products containing non-kosher ingredients may acquire non-kosher status. Thus, production that takes place after non-kosher production is completed can be rendered non-kosher by virtue of the equipment used, even if the ingredients are kosher.

2. Non-kosher equipment can be restored to a kosher mode by a variety of ways, usually depending upon the way in which the non-kosher product was produced. This process is referred to as Kosherization. Usage of a non-kosher product in conjunction with liquid, e.g. a non-kosher soup, requires treating the kettle with boiling water to restore its kosher status. Non-kosher products that were produced where there is no liquid cooking medium, i.e. an oven band, require a different technique. This equipment must be treated by high heat in order to restore its kosher status.

Kosherization seems to be a way of dealing with Jewish cooties. Like "real" cooties, they're unseen but highly contagious. I remember getting them all the time in elementary school, mostly when a girl touched me (ugh!).

But come on, observant Jews of the world. There comes a time to grow up and lose the fear of cooties. Live dangerously. Try using your oven on Saturday without the aid of its Sabbath Feature.

There are, though, a few fundamentalist Jewish rules that I could get behind. Like the encouragement to have sex on Shabbat, particularly on Friday night.

Now we're making sense.

Not seeing is believing

Andrew Sullivan offers up another alternative to “I’ll believe it when I see it” and “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

In his TIME essay, “When Not Seeing is Believing,” Sullivan points toward “I’ll believe it when I don’t see it” as the preferred theology for the 21st century. Or any century in which fundamentalism threatens to rend the fabric of secular civilization.

How, after all, can you engage in a rational dialogue with a man like [Iranian president] Ahmadinejad, who believes that Armageddon is near and that it is his duty to accelerate it? How can Israel negotiate with people who are certain their instructions come from heaven and so decree that Israel must not exist in Muslim lands?

Equally, of course, how can one negotiate with fundamentalist Jews who claim that the West Bank is theirs forever by biblical mandate? Or with Fundamentalist Christians who believe that Israel's expansion is a biblical necessity rather than a strategic judgment?

There is, however, a way out. And it will come from the only place it can come from--the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians.

The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.

I like Sullivan’s embrace of spiritual doubt. He says, “If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding…There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren’t, it would not be God.”

However, I feel that Sullivan goes further than is justified in claiming that God can be partially comprehended via Scripture, reason, religious authority, and our own experiences of the divine.

He doesn’t explain why, if this is so, religions are all over the theological map. It’s difficult to discern much agreement between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism on what It is all about.

So I wish that Sullivan had left off the last two words of, “If God is beyond our categories, then God can’t be captured for certain.” Give fundamentalism a dogmatic inch, and it’ll take an undoubting mile.

The tent of “I don’t know” can comfortably hold every person on Earth. But allow differing species of certainty to creep in under the flap and pretty soon the screeching and hollering will begin.

Infidel! Evil-doer! Pagan! Apostate! Devil-worshipper! Unbeliever!

It’s difficult to envision what a genuinely uncertain belief in God would look like, though. If doubt is the mainstay of a spiritual practice, what separates believers from the faithless?

Well, seemingly nothing. Which brings us all under the tent of unknowing, a nice place to hang out together.

Intelligent design believers settle for second-rate God

If I’m going to believe in God, I want to put my faith in a top-notch creative power. The very best. A1. That’s why the God of evolution is so much more appealing than the God of so-called “intelligent design.”

Which doesn’t seem to be a very intelligent divinity. I mean, what kind of half-baked god creates human beings then, according to intelligent design dogma, slaps himself on the head and says, “Oy! I forgot to make eyes that work! Better get going on some redesigning.”

Creationism, after all, has been discarded (publicly, at least) by Christian fundamentalists. Their new Godly poster child, intelligent design, often is considered to co-exist with Darwinian evolution. Up to a point.

That point is reached when random mutations and natural selection are insufficient mechanisms to produce some highly complex feature, such as the human eye. The intelligent designer then supposedly steps in and makes things right.

I’d always thought that this notion showed a lack of faith in God. But it took a letter to the editor in the July 9, 2005 issue of “New Scientist” (which I just got around to reading) to convince me that such is the case.

Vasudev Godbole (how I hope this is his real name!) of Seevetal, Germany writes:

You report that the Smithsonian has cancelled the screening of a film that “ponders ‘purpose within cosmic evolution’”—the idea that has become known as “intelligent design”. One interesting question that no one seems to ask is why people feel a need to adopt this viewpoint.

An engineer who builds a plane that travels from London to New York without a pilot is more intelligent than an engineer whose plane needs a pilot. Yet passengers may feel better in the second type of plane.

Similarly a God who creates evolution, which needs no further intervention, is more intelligent than a God whose creation needs constant supervision and directives. Perhaps some people feel better and more cared for by the second type of God, and then out of gratitude declare this to be the more intelligent.

This psychological problem is at the root of a lot of the hostility shown by advocates of intelligent design (ID) towards those who argue for evolution. This gratitude can become so compulsive, vehement, “holier-than-thou” and even neurotic that the ID-ists start vilifying those who reject ID.

When the evolutionists refuse to buckle under, the ID-ists become even more angry and hate-filled, and wish to take over the state and enforce this “gratitudinal” behaviour and related “holiness” by means of laws or other threats. “How dare you deny or be ungrateful to a caring God?”—that is their bitter-angry question.

They are 110 per cent sure that a God who intervenes every half an hour is more caring than a God who intervenes only at infinity. In the depth of their psychology this is what motivates the ID-ists and drives them to ridicule or demonise the evolutionists.

Much nuisance has emanated from those who wish to enforce gratitude towards their God.

Yes, indeed. This relates to the drive to seek God’s approval that I talked about in my last post. The truly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God of evolution (and of the Taoists, and the Buddhists) doesn’t need our recognition or respect.

The semi-intelligent, shaky, mistake-prone, insecure, devotion-starved God of fundamentalist Christianity does.

So which God should you put your faith in? It’s clear to me: the God of evolution.

“God Laughs and Plays” but doesn’t go to church

I figured that I’d enjoy a book subtitled “Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.” And I did.

“God Laughs and Plays” is David James Duncan’s paean to fly-fishing rather than pew-sitting, to practicing Christian love rather than judgmental hatred, to finding inspiration in God’s natural creation rather than the artificial human dogma found in misnamed “holy” books.

A talented writer like Duncan best speaks for himself. So I’ll shut up and let him do the saying. Here’s some passages that I especially liked:

Intense spiritual feelings were frequent visitors during my boyhood, but they did not come from churchgoing or from bargaining with God through prayer. The connection I felt to the Creator came, unmediated, from Creation itself.

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Following intuition and love with all the sincerity and attentiveness I could muster, I consciously chose a life spent in the company of rivers, wilderness, Wisdom literature, like-minded friends, and quiet contemplation. And as it’s turned out, this life—though dirt-poor in church pews—has enriched me with a sense of the holy, and left me far more grateful than I can say.

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God is Unlimited. Thought and language are limited.

God is the fathomless but beautiful Mystery Who creates the universe and you and me, and sustains it and us every instant, and always shall. The instant we define this fathomless Mystery It is no longer fathomless. To define is to limit. The greater a person’s confidence in their definition of God, the more sure I feel that their worship of “Him” has become the worship of their own definition. I don’t point this out to insult the fundamentalists’ or anyone else’s God. I point it out to honor the fathomless Mystery.

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If you’ve got yourself a little faith community and feel some love and mercy bubbling up in it, why mess with that? Why “structure” it? Why “enchurch” it? Why not just live it and be thankful?

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To judge by the conservation voting records of those the Christian Right supports in Congress, however, the majority of fundamentalists see Mother Earth as a trampoline upon which we must stomp, the harder we stomp the more proud of us God will be, for Earth is fleeting, and only here to launch us toward heaven, so why not blow mountains up and dump them as rubble on top of streams, and why not support, from the pulpits of our so-called houses of God, so-called conservative candidates who conserve nothing but corporate profits reaped through our Armageddon-aimed Earth-stomping agenda?

We nonfundamentalist students of the Bible can think of many reasons not to practice such a “faith”—the words, example, and Person of Jesus chief among them.

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Needing church—which I have to admit I define as “two or less gathered in His Name”…

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A second thing that attracted me to Jesus at age seven: His father was allegedly God; and God had made the world and trees and rivers and stars and mountains and birds and clouds and sunlight and raspberries and animals and snowflakes and wildflowers and wilderness; and even though nobody could prove any of this like, scientifically, I loved the world God had allegedly made so much that it seemed like a good idea to love God, too.

Trouble was, I didn’t. Loving Creation made sense to me the same way that loving, say, Peanut M & M’s made sense. You tossed a handful of Peanut M & M’s in your mouth, crunched down, your tastebuds fired off, and without even trying, Yum! Love! Gratitude! Piece o’ cake. Loving the Invisible God Who’d created Creation, on the other hand, felt more like trying to love the unknown and invisible people who worked at the Peanut M & M’s factory.

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As for my having left institutional religion behind without bitterness: how in the Name of the Lover of field lilies, the poor, the prostituted, and His own murderers, could I be bitter about having traded self-righteousness, pharisaism, judgmentalism, and church pews for sunlit river banks and rising fish and moonrises over Rocky Mountain ridges and the path of intuition and salmon runs and great literature and world Wisdom traditions and abiding friendships and the incessant following of the sweet scent of love?

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I consider the infinite wilds to be the divine manuscript. I hold these wilds to be the only unbowdlerized copy we have of the Book that gives and sustains life.

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The word “mysticism” still means little to me as an experiencer, since everything I experience continues to simply be what it is. But as the beneficiary of certain inner experiences that have guided my life, and as a writer in love with a world in which much of what is visible is abused and much of what is life-giving is unseen, my respect for the word “mysticism” grows if only because, by definition, it shepherds us toward realms in which “what is” is much more than physical.

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If we are ever to rise to new levels of consciousness or to the Beauty that is Truth, we’ve got to describe our perceptions as consciousness truly perceives them. I therefore confess my lifelong love for a wilderness found outside myself, till once in a while I encounter it within.

It’s a wilderness entered, it seems, through agendaless alertness at work, rest, or play in the presence of language, rivers, mountains, music, plants, creatures, rocks, moon, sun, dust, pollen grains, dots, spheres, galaxies, grains of sand, stars, every sort of athletic ball, cells, DNA, molecules, atomic particles, and immaterial forces.

It’s a wilderness that occasionally “inside-outs” me, leading to a Teilhardinian burning and Leopoldian harmony that leave my mind wondrous happy but far, far behind. It’s a wilderness my trusty dog, Reason, will never succeed in sniffing out or chomping up, yet a wilderness I’ve been so long and grandly assailed by that I’ve lost all but comic interest in the dog’s endless hounding and suspect that even he begins to enjoy himself when the wilderness flips us inside itself.

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If I stake my life on one field, one wild force, one sentence issuing from Sinai it is this one: There is no goal beyond love.

One last quote. Concerning the title. From Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic theologian whose teachings were so truthful he was accused of heresy by the Pope.

Truly! Truly! By God! By God! Be as sure of it as you are that God lives: at the least good deed done here in this world, the least bit of good will, the least good desire, all the saints in heaven and on earth rejoice, and together with the angels their joy is such that all the joy in this world can’t be compared. But the joy of them all together amounts to as little as a bean when compared to the joy of God over good deeds. For truly, God laughs and plays.

Mel Gibson’s passion of drunken anti-Semitism

Ah, more evidence of how fervent Christian fundamentalism converts people into jerks. First we hear that Mel Gibson, he of “The Passion of the Christ” fame, has been arrested for drunken driving.

“Well,” I think, “that shows Gibson has human failings like everyone else. Hopefully this will knock him off his holier-than-thou religious horse.”

But then a review of the arresting officer’s report finds that Gibson went on an anti-Semitic tirade when he was arrested. According to TMZ.com:

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League, among many others, had serious concerns about anti-Semitism that seemed to be evident in “The Passion of the Christ.” Diane Sawyer asked Mel Gibson about these accusations in a 2004 interview.

Sawyer asks, “Are you anti-Semitic?” Gibson says, “No, of course not...For me, it goes against the tenets of my faith…To be anti-Semitic is to be un-Christian, and I’m not.”

Right, Mel, you’re not. A true Christian, that is. Like lots of fundamentalists, Gibson talks the spiritual game a hell of a lot better than he plays it. Here is the mug shot of Hypocrisy.

Listening to conservative talk radio this evening, I was surprised to hear little sympathy for Gibson. Not many were buying the theory that his anti-Semitic rantings were caused by his drunkenness.

I agree. I haven’t been drunk since my high school days. But I remember that guys who were jerks before they got drunk turned into bigger jerks after downing a six-pack. Angry guys got angrier. Funny guys got funnier. Alcohol brought out what was inside them.

So I find it hard to believe that a devout loving Christian with no anti-Semitic leanings would, upon being arrested for drunken driving, yell “F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

“F***** cops!” I could believe. Not “F***** Jews.”

Let’s raise a glass, then, to one more in a long line of crusading moralistic fundamentalists whose Christianity is loudly evident on their lips but sadly absent from their hearts.

Mel Gibson has entered a recovery program. I wish him the best of luck in getting free of dependence on alcohol. And also, dependence on Catholicism. Neither are doing him any good.

[Next day update: today Gibson admitted to making anti-Semitic remarks but denies that he is an anti-Semite. Interesting. Does this mean that he now will admit that he made a pro-Christian movie, but will deny that he is a Christian? The Jewish Anti-Defamation League finds Gibson's protestations of "I said it but I didn't mean it" unconvincing. I agree.]

Eastern fundamentalism

Last night someone said to me, “So you were part of an Eastern form of fundamentalism.” For a moment I was taken aback. Me, a fundamentalist?

On this weblog I like to foam at the mouth about the dangers of fundamentalist religious attitudes. (By the way, did you hear the one about a man who walks into a bar and sits down between an alligator and a born-again Christian woman?)

Fundamentalism takes many forms, and is defined in various ways. Scott Bidstrup says:

In my view, a fundamentalist religion is a religion, any religion, that when confronted with a conflict between love, compassion and caring, and conformity to doctrine, will almost invariably choose the latter regardless of the effect it has on its followers or on the society of which it is a part.

Somewhat similarly, Bruce Lawrence says that fundamentalism is “the affirmation of religious authority as holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction.”

Focusing on the root of the word, my take is that fundamentalists mistakenly assume that they have attained something fundamental, and cling to it with all their might no matter what. Even when evidence points to that supposedly fundamental thing as being contingent, subjective, shallow, or derivative.

Yesterday, during a meeting of our Salem churchless discussion group, I was talking about how someone had emailed me and asked if I was an initiate (a.k.a. “satsangi”) of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian-based spiritual organization). If so, she wanted to know “are you still in it or found another way?” I replied:

I am indeed a RSSB initiate—from way back in 1971. Last Sunday I was asked by a friend, “Do you still call yourself a satsangi?” Good question. I said, “I don’t know what to call myself now. The word ‘satsangi’ doesn’t mean much to me anymore. It’s just a word. I am still avidly interested in knowing who I am, and what the nature of ultimate reality or God is. That’s the important thing, not what I call myself.”

Have I found another way? Another good question. I don’t follow the RSSB vows with the same diligence I used to. I meditate for about an hour a day, not 2 ½ hours. I have an occasional glass of red wine. I experiment with alternative mantras.

Maybe I’m doomed. But I figure that if God is so picky and demanding that He/She/It will send me to hell, or deprive me of salvation, because of these seemingly small things, then maybe this isn’t a God that I want to be saved by. My wife forgives me for my faults (except when I forget to re-seal the whole wheat bread loaf in its plastic bag with a twisty tie—that’s unforgivable!). Won’t God?

My way now, whatever it is, is more open than it used to be. I’m less sure of myself. I’m more receptive to other people’s ideas and beliefs, so long as they aren’t dogmatic about them. I don’t believe that RSSB possesses the whole truth about the cosmos, though it might. I just don’t know.

It was after I told the group my “sins” against the RSSB commandments—less time spent meditating, some wine now and then, repeating a different mantra than I was taught—that the Eastern fundamentalism comment was made. Interesting. I’d always thought of these more as rigid rules rather than as manifestations of fundamentalism.

But I readily admitted that Eastern religions are as prone to fundamentalism as are Western religions. In the case of RSSB, or Sant Mat, the rigidity doesn’t come so much from dogmatic adherence to scripture as from a belief that the guru who heads the organization is a God-man.

When God speaks, you’d better jump! However, the problem with purported scriptural or personal God talk is that it’s impossible to know from what source the words really spring. Divine or human? Can’t tell.

So the reasonable thing to do is to keep an open mind. God talk always comes to us through a human writing or voice. Thus it is most likely that “God” actually is a member of Homo sapiens who honestly but erroneously believes that God is speaking through him, or is deceiving us about the source of his all-too-human revelation.

Like I said, though, you just don’t know. And that “don’t know” is what separates fundamentalism from genuine spirituality. Fundamentalists deny their not-knowing. Genuinely spiritual people humbly admit to it.

For several decades I was a true believer. I didn’t meditate for two and a half hours a day, using the mantra I was given by the guru, eschewing even a drop of alcohol, because I was experiencing a greater degree of spiritual realization via these disciplines. No, I was doing these things because I never thought of questioning them.

I was a fundamentalist. Obedient, dogmatic, unscientific. I liked to say that I was a spiritual scientist conducting the experiment of meditation. But I didn’t question why the results I was getting weren’t what was hypothesized. Nor was I open to altering the experiment based on those results, as any genuine scientist would have done.

My eyes are open now. Of course, a RSSB fundamentalist would say that I’ve been blinded by my ego, or maya, or mental machinations, or bad karma. Maybe. I don’t know.

All I know is that mystery has come to seem fundamental to me, not particular rules, commandments, dogmas, or theologies.

Amazing! I agree with William Bennett.

Over on my HinesSight blog I’ve shared the astounding news that right-wing moral pundit William Bennett and I agree about something: the Muhammad cartoons that are freaking out the Muslim world.

In my post, “State Dept. wrong about Muhammad cartoons,” I agree with Bennett that when terrorists use Islam to justify their actions, then that religion becomes fair game. For cartoonists, lampooners, comics, politicians, ranters and ravers, editorialists, whoever. (Oh, I almost forgot: bloggers too.)

Actually, religion should be fair game under any circumstances. There’s nothing special about religious belief that makes the First Amendment inapplicable to it. Freedom of expression applies to speaking about religion as much as anything else.

If you haven’t seen the blasphemous cartoons yet, I found a site that has more readable versions of them (compared to the image I posted previously). Take a look here.

Cartoons of Muhammad create huge uproar

If you’re a devout Muslim, read no further. For below you’ll see drawings of Muhammad, as published in a Danish newspaper, that have caused true Islamic believers to cry “Blasphemy!”

(click on image to enlarge the blasphemy)
And more. There have been boycotts of Danish products, ambassadors recalled, bomb threats, and demonstrations. Today, as the BBC reported, the “Muhammad cartoon row intensifies.”

Newspapers across Europe reprinted the cartoons that were originally published last September in Jyllands-Posten as part of an article about self-censorship and freedom of speech. I’m pleased to support this effort to keep fundamentalism from infecting the health of secular democracies.

Muslims, relax. Do you really think that Muhammad or Allah is going to be disturbed by the publication of a few cartoons depicting how the artist visualizes the founder of Islam? Given that a disturbingly large number of Americans consider that most Muslims are fanatical crazies, you aren’t doing your religion any good by acting in accord with that stereotype.

Wikipedia has an excellent detailed rundown of this controversy (including descriptions of each drawing). This is a classic example of how rigid religious dogmatists can make a mountain of aggrieved righteous indignation out of a molehill of free speech expression. Here are some excerpts from the Seattle PI story:

Demonstrations and condemnations across the Muslim world continued. The Supreme Council of Moroccan religious leaders denounced the drawings on Wednesday. "Muslim beliefs cannot tolerate such an attack, however small it may be," the statement said.

…Mohammed Bechari, president of the National Federation of the Muslims of France, said his group would start legal proceedings against France Soir [one of the newspapers that reprinted the drawings] because of "these pictures that have disturbed us, and that are still hurting the feelings of 1.2 billion Muslims."

Earth to the Muslim world: People get disturbed by lots of things every day. People get their feelings hurt in lots of ways every day. Almost always these things and these ways aren’t illegal or immoral. They’re just part of life in a society where people can freely express themselves.

Most of humanity, I’m confident, doesn’t want to live in a repressive culture where every action is judged against the dictates of a holy book. Those who do want to live that way, go ahead. Just don’t impose your beliefs on the rest of us.

Update: a day later, the controversy intensifies. A 2/2 news story says:

Defending its decision to publish the cartoons, France Soir wrote: "Imagine a society that added up all the prohibitions of different religions. What would remain of the freedom to think, to speak and even to come and go?

"We know societies like that all too well. The Iran of the mullahs, for example. But yesterday, it was the France of the Inquisitions, the burning stakes and the Saint Bartholomew's Day [massacre of Protestants]."

Yes, imagine. Then, spread these cartoons far and wide until Muslims--and every fundamentalist--realizes that genuine spirituality is worlds apart from blind adherence to dogmatic dictates.

Christians say God punished New Orleans

The Universist movement has found that a disturbingly large number of sermons on Sunday, September 4, preached that Hurricane Katrina was the will of God. New Orleans supposedly incurred God’s wrath because it was sinful and decadent.

"If there's ever been a city that's needed to be swept clean of the sin and the wickedness it's New Orleans," said Chris Hodges, Church of the Highlands, Birmingham, Alabama.

Breaking new ground in meteorological science, Tim Bourgeois of the Tree of Life Christian Church in Canoga Park, California revealed that:

When there are storm winds, they don't just meet because a low pressure area happens to meet with a high pressure area in the upper atmosphere and suddenly this wind just randomly, naturally occurs, and waters randomly fall along with it. This is God's word at work in the midst of his creation.

Now, I’m sure that these are minority views. Most Christians, like most Americans, have been wonderfully generous and non-judgmental in responding to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Nonetheless, the Universists have a point:

This is 2005, but Christianity's various denominations were unified this week in thought circa 1205…The world has moved on since the dawn of Christianity and its heights in the Dark Ages.

Reading the ridiculous stone-casting sermons got me thinking about the root of such magical thinking. In my opinion it is a feeling of specialness.

Meaning, some people (in this case, fundamentalist Christians) believe that they enjoy a special relationship with God. This enables them to know God’s will, his likes and dislikes, and what is sinful. That special position at the right hand of God enables these faithful to interpret earthly events through their unique divine understanding.

Which is garbage, I’m highly confident. However, I then considered how I’ve held similar—though less extreme—beliefs about my own specialness. For in 1971 I was initiated into the mystical-spiritual path of Sant Mat, also known as the Path of the Saints or the Science of the Soul.

There are various branches of Sant Mat. Theological differences abound. Not all agree with the teaching of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the branch I’ve been associated with, that there are “marked souls” who have a special relationship with God. Supposedly I’m one of those souls, since I’ve been initiated into the RSSB fold.

My wife isn’t. She’s unmarked, I guess. I’ve never been able to recognize my mark, but apparently it is visible to those with eyes to see. Here’s how this highly questionable theological hypothesis is described in “The Journey of the Soul,” a RSSB children’s book:

After a while God willed the creation. He sent forth a wondrous luminous wave of Sound and Light from his own Being and made the entire creation from it. He made skies, planets, suns, moons, and stars. He made mountains, valleys and deserts, oceans, lakes, rivers and streams. The creation was majestic and beautiful…but there were no living things in it to enjoy it.

So God decided to put on a play, using his souls as actors, and his new creation was the theatre! God was the Director, and He named his play, “Life.” Almost all of the souls wanted to be in his show, so God told them they could leave their Home in the Ocean of Light and journey down to be performers in the theater of creation.

But there were a very few of the little souls that did not want to go at all. They wanted to stay home with their Lord. But He told even these to go and enjoy being in his play, too. Then he put a mark on each one of the souls that wanted to stay with Him, and promised them that one day He would send for them and have them brought back to their Real Home with Him.

He told all the other souls that if they ever decided they wanted to come back Home again, He would mark them too. One day, through God’s boundless Grace, He would help them come Home, too.

Thus if you’re not one of the original marked souls—like marvelously fortunate me!—you’ve still got a chance to jump on a later soul train headed Home. You just won’t get there as soon as I will.

I have come to reject my specialness. I don’t consider myself better than anyone else, especially not my wife, who is a more compassionate and caring human being than I am.

Every religion wants to be special. As I’ve observed before, religious faiths are like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.

The Christians who consider themselves morally superior to the homosexual, whoring, gambling sinfulness of New Orleans (which, of course, is why people loved to go there, including George Bush in his younger days) aren’t so different, really, from the members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas who consider themselves to be “marked souls.”

Feelings of specialness are feelings of specialness. They’re all repugnant to me, though some manifestations of “I’m special!” are more repugnant than others.

Isn’t spirituality supposed to be about humility and not feeling superior? I’ve always thought so, but maybe I missed a memo from God.

Take a stand, don't go to church tomorrow

I could have written this for the Church of the Churchless, but I just finished a rant--I mean, a passionate well-reasoned essay--called "God must be a Buddhist" on my HinesSight weblog. I concluded that not going to church tomorrow would be taking a stand against the demons.

Unitarian Jihad needs to get rolling

Just a day after Laurel and I joined the Unitarian Jihad, Senate majority leader Bill Frist demonstrates why this campaign against religious extremism is needed so badly.

The New York Times reports that Frist, my least favorite U.S. senator (especially after he outrageously dared to “diagnose” Terri Schiavo’s condition from videotapes and medical records) “has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as ‘against people of faith’ for blocking President Bush's nominees.”

Senator Frist, I have some news for you: there are lots of “people of faith” who are pleased that the Democrats are preventing a few unqualified nominees from getting lifetime appointments to a federal judgeship.

I am one of those people. It isn’t necessary to be a Christian to be a person of faith. There are many varieties of faith. Some don’t even have a name, not being associated with an organized religion. These might well be the truest faiths.

It’s a strange conception, this notion of Christian right’ies that only people who have a belief in God exactly like theirs have high moral and ethical standards. The New York Times article says that Christian conservatives consider that the battle over the nominees is part of a 30-year culture war.

I don’t understand what culture and religion have in common. I’ve always thought that the eternal God and all things divine were far above ephemeral cultural comings and goings. But if the Christian right wants a culture war, we of the Unitarian Jihad are prepared to fight for truth, justice, and the universal way.

Universal. Not Christian, not Islamic, not Jewish, not Buddhist, not Taoist, not anything with an “ian,” “ic,” “ish,” or “ist” attached to it. The American government represents everybody. Christians are part of that everybody, but just a part. No part should be able to run rough-shod over the whole, even if it is a majority part.

I have no problem with politicians who have strong religious beliefs. I do have a problem with politicians who don’t recognize the relativity and subjectivity of those beliefs, mistaking them for absolute commandments From On High. No, they’re just beliefs. And they have to be rationally defended in the court of public debate just like any other beliefs.

The most annoying characteristic of religious fundamentalists like Frist and his Christian allies is their sense of entitlement. “Because I believe it, it must be so.” No, it doesn’t. Again, your beliefs are just beliefs. You may believe that Terri Schiavo should have had her feeding tube reinserted, abortion is a sin, and gays shouldn’t marry. Fine. Just remember that other people have valid reasons for believing differently. Argue about your differences, but don’t claim that you have a direct line to God.

The first communiqué of the Unitarian Jihad says it nicely:

Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

Sounds good to me. Bring on the Jihad.

Flee from the fear of God

Yesterday John, a commenter on my “Reality is the best religion” post, gave me some advice: “If you desire to become more wise than [sic] consider that wisdom begins with the fear of god.”

I must be a real dumb-ass, because I’ve never been able to muster up much of a fear of God. I’m afraid of a lot of things—death, disease, Bush appointing a Supreme Court justice, missing the final episode of “Survivor”—because I have either directly observed these fears or can reasonably imagine their occurrence.

But I’ve never seen God. And I bet John hasn’t either. So how does he know that it’s wise to fear God? Maybe God doesn’t even exist, in which case fearing God would make as much sense as fearing the boogeyman. I can understand why an impressionable child would believe that something unseen lives under his or her bed and threatens to get them. I can’t understand why a mature adult would believe in an unseen God who is similarly deserving of fear.

Strangely, John also said, “In this world there is nothing so real like the love of Jesus Christ.” Since Jesus is purported to be the son of God, this implies that God also is real. How could a son be more real than his father? I suppose a son’s love could be more real than his father’s love. Yet it seems to me that if God exists, it is much more likely that God’s love would surpass Jesus’ love rather than fall short of it.

Trying to understand why I should fear the loving Christian God, I perused scripture on a “Why Fear God?” web page. It didn’t make much sense. First I read that "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16 NIV). Ah, eternal life: that sounds good. Sign me up.

A bit further down the page, though, I came to "The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread.” (Isaiah 8:13 NIV), and also, “But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Luke 12:5). Oh, hell: that isn’t appealing. Cancel my application.

The Christian God described in the Old and New Testaments isn’t somebody I want to spend any time with. Certainly not eternity. He’s a father who only loves children who fear him: As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. (Psalms 103:13)

I also read, “To find balance between love and fear look to your childhood. As children, we all loved our earthly fathers, but we feared the times of discipline (which was for our own good). ‘The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the LORD are sure and altogether righteous.’ (Psalms 19:9 NIV)"

Well, I grew up without a father. And my mother believed in maternal love, not fearful discipline. So I guess I didn’t experience the child abuse that apparently is needed to appreciate why I now need the fear of the Lord.

My wife is a psychotherapist. Frequently she counsels people who are being, or have been, harmed by a “good Christian” man who thinks that his woman and children should fear him just as God teaches that He should be feared.

If you find yourself in such a situation, flee it. Do something about it. Fight it. Don’t put up with it. Life is too short and too precious to be lived in fear. Don’t be afraid of a human father, and don’t be afraid of a heavenly father. All too often people put up with fear because they are more afraid of losing the security that an authoritarian father-figure provides.

Mussolini made the trains run on time and Saddam Hussein kept the electricity on. Well, I’d rather wait for a train and eat in the dark than live under a dictator. In the same fashion, I’d rather deal with the consequences of having an open mind than live confined in the dogmatism of a fundamentalist theology.

This page, “Reality versus God and the human illusion of fear” from Escape from Watchtower.com nicely encapsulates the choice between being (in the author’s words) a Mr./Ms. Fundamental, Theist, Formula, Religion person or a Mr./Ms. Mystic, Poet-Thinker, Existentialist, Agnostic, Nontheist person. The author added “science” in the first category, but I question whether it belongs there. For a religion based on fear, such as fundamentalist Christianity, is rooted in a primitive pre-scientific misunderstanding of how the world works.

Science knows that the cosmos is lawful, not arbitrary. The universe shows no evidence of a Zeus-like God who capriciously throws sinners into hell and elevates the faithful into heaven. Yet the religious faithful believe in old texts from a bygone age which were written by people who viewed the world in an unscientific fashion. Those people didn’t know any better; we do. So it is time—actually, long-past time—to embrace spiritual beliefs that are in tune with how reality is, rather than how it isn’t.

Buddhism isn’t immune from rituals and religiosity, but the core of this spiritual philosophy reflects a modern mindset. My Christian correspondent told me that wisdom begins with the fear of God. This excerpt from the second page of an essay called “Why Buddhism?” makes a lot more sense to me:

From the Buddhist point of view, wisdom is based on right understanding and right thought, the realisation of universal law and the development of insight. Insight means not only to see the truth, but to perceive the way of complete liberation from the state of unsatisfactoriness in life.

Therefore, real wisdom cannot be found in academic institutions or in the laboratories of scientific research, nor even in a place of religious worship where people go and pray or perform rites and rituals. Wisdom is within the mind itself. When experience, understanding, realisation and purification are complete, this wisdom, comprising of the highest perfection, will arise and be seen. The aim of life is the attainment of this wisdom. Instead of searching into outer space, man should make the effort to explore the space within. Then he could reach his final goal.

Buddhism advocates right action, or morality, but not out of a fear of God. Rather, “Evil is to be avoided for the welfare of all living beings, not for fear of god or his punishment.” I’ve been a vegetarian for over thirty-five years. The main reason I don’t kill animals for food is because it would seriously bother me to know that I’ve made them suffer. I also consider that karma and reincarnation are part of the fabric of reality, so I also don’t want to incur the consequences of unnecessary killing (which is immediately evident in the form of diseases related to meat-eating).

Believing in universal laws of natural consequences, causes and effects, is much different from believing in a whimsical personal authoritarian God who punishes sinners and rewards the faithful.

This choice of beliefs can be simply encapsulated in a T-shirt slogan.

Which is most appealing to you: this or this?

I’ll take “No Fear,” please.

Religion should unite, not divide

Laurel, my wife, was moved to write a meaningful short essay yesterday: “Religion Should Unite, Not Divide.” Like me, she’s been disturbed by all the fundamentalist-inspired divisiveness evident of late. Well, also evident of early, for as long as there has been religion, there has been religious intolerance and inhumanity.

We both believe that the only way to be spiritual is to be non-religious. Religion is mostly about belief; spirituality is mostly about experience. A disturbingly large percentage of purportedly religious people don’t practice what they preach. They claim to aspire to unconditional love, then vote to discriminate against homosexuals. They claim to renounce unjustified killing, then proudly support the slaughter of innocent people in Iraq.

Laurel says in her piece that if the unity of God truly is the goal to which religious believers aspire, then churches and other places of worship should be an earthly reflection of this oneness: “If this were the role of religion, the only valid religious teachings would be those which teach love, acceptance, and unity with all people.”

Well said. As much as I like the meetings of the spiritual group I attend most Sunday mornings, I cringe inwardly every time I hear a speaker say, “We are so fortunate to be among the chosen few who have been blessed to return to God.” Laurel, entirely appropriately, frequently teases me about this divisive attitude.

Putting on her best Saturday Night Live “Church Lady” voice, she will say to me: “You’re saved, but Satan has doomed me to hell!” “Yes, you’re right,” I’ll reply with tongue firmly in my cheek, “But I’ll try to put in a good word for you when I see God.”

We joke about how almost every religious or spiritual group, including Radha Soami Satsang Beas (Science of the Soul), which I’ve been a longtime member of, considers that its followers, and they alone, are the “chosen people.” If you add up all the supposedly chosen people in the world—Christians, Jews, Muslims, and members of other exclusive sects—the unchosen such as Laurel are in the minority. (I recently wrote about this “all believers are above average” strangeness in “You’re religious, but are you right?”

Here is Laurel’s essay, which she has submitted to our local Salem Monthly alternative publication. As she says at the end of the piece, we’re thinking about forming a Church of the Churchless group here in Salem which would meet in physical reality instead of the blogosphere. If you’re interested in being part of such a group, send us an email.

How to talk to a fundamentalist

This is both an important question, and the working title of a book that a bunch of us are hoping to get Bill Long, a recovered evangelical Christian, to write. Bill understands the fundamentalist mindset much better than I do, so I’m looking forward to reading his thoughts on this subject. Here are a few of my own, stimulated by watching a few minutes of a recent Larry King show.

King was interviewing Rick Warren, a minister and author of “The Purpose Driven Life.” This is a best-seller that Warren’s web site says will help “readers understand God’s incredible plan for their lives. Warren enables them to see the big picture of what life is all about and begin to live the life God created them to live.” Well, that’s fine. I’ve got no problem with a Christian advising other Christians about how to best live a godly life.

What bothered me was Warren’s answer to a question about whether Jews or other non-Christians could meet God after death. “No, Larry, I’m afraid not,” I recall Warren saying. “In the Bible Jesus clearly says, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”

King followed up with, “What about if a Jew has lived a good life, and a Christian has lived a bad life?” He got the same answer from Warren: if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re not going to heaven.

Well, that’s not fine. I was disappointed that King merely frowned and went on to have Warren answer phone calls from viewers. I don’t think this is the way an intelligent, rational, open-minded person should talk to a fundamentalist. I realize that King didn’t want to antagonize Warren and his many Christian fans, but the truth should trump ratings.

This is how I see the situation: if a pre-schooler says to me, “There are fairies living in our garden; they make the flowers bloom,” I’d smile and say “How wonderful!” The child is young, a belief in fairies at that age is almost certainly harmless, and he or she will grow out of the fantasy before long.

However, if an adult said the same thing to me and didn’t seem to be joking, I’d start worrying about the person’s mental health. I’d first want to make sure that they weren’t putting me on, and then would let them know that their ideas are nonsensical. “There’s no evidence that fairies are real, you know. And scientists don’t need fairies to explain how flowers blossom.”

Fundamentalists like Warren need to be treated in the same fashion if they put forth unprovable religious propositions as, well, the gospel truth. I wouldn’t mind if Warren had said, “I believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, but I’m not absolutely sure of this.” Or, “I hope that….” That would be like him saying, “It sure would be nice if fairies existed.” Yes, it would. They’d make gardens so much more interesting.

The problem is, there’s absolutely no proof of fairies, just as there is absolutely no proof that Jesus Saves. Fundamentalists should be reminded of this at every opportunity for their own good and, more importantly, for the good of those who are marginalized by their closed-minded, irrational, faith-based view of the world.

A private belief shouldn’t be open to public challenge, just as I don’t mind if you step on your own toes. However, if you purposely step on my toes, that’s a different matter. Now I have the right to tell you, “Get off my foot.”

Fundamentalists, especially those of the Christian and Muslim faiths, have a bad habit of wanting to force other people to live in accord with their beliefs. Another bad habit is making dogmatic statements unsupported by objective facts, and then feeling offended when someone challenges their dogma. Bad habits like these should be discouraged, not encouraged.

A classics scholar, A.H. Armstrong, has some apt advice about how to talk to fundamentalists:

When claims to possess an exclusive revelation of God or to speak his word are made by human beings (and it is always human beings who make them), they must be examined particularly fiercely and hypercritically for the honor of God, to avoid the blasphemy and sacrilege of deifying a human opinion.

Or, to put it less ferociously, the Hellenic (and, as it seems to me, still proper) answer to “Thus saith the Lord” is “Does he?,” asked in a distinctly skeptical tone, followed by a courteous but drastic “testing to destruction” of the claims and credentials of the person or persons making this enormous statement.

So the next time someone says to me, “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life,” I’ll reply: “Oh, really? How do you know? What makes you think that statement is true? I’m all ears, all highly skeptical ears.”