Church of the Churchless

"God" isn't the best name for God

God. Just three letters in this word. But they sure pack a punch.

Countless people have died in the name of "God." Countless good works have been performed. Countless arguments have ensued over what this word signifies.

Dahlia Lithwick dives into this fascinating linguistic tangle in a Newsweek article, "Jesus vs. Allah -- the fight over God's secular title."

Pop quiz: which of the following names represents a non-sectarian, universal deity? Allah, Dios, Gott, Dieu, Elohim, Gud, or Jesus?

If you answered "none of the above," you are right as a matter of fact but not law. If you answered "Allah," you are right as a matter of law but not fact. And if you answered "Jesus," you might have been trying to filibuster David Hamilton, Barack Obama's first judicial nominee.

Hamilton ruled that prayer in the Indiana House of Representatives shouldn't use Christ's name because it favored a particular religion instead of being nonsectarian.

(For those, like me, who get confused about the difference between secular and sectarian: "secular" means worldly rather spiritual, "sectarian" means relating to a sect. So nonsectarian refers to a generalized religiosity, while secular is non-religious.)

It's hard to see how anyone could disagree with Hamilton's point: that "Jesus" is less universal than "God" or "Allah."

But Hamilton's ruling got him into a lot of trouble with fundamentalist Christians, even though he pointed out that the Arabic word "Allah" is used for "God" in Arabic translations of Jewish and Christian scriptures.

I face sort of a similar problem frequently on this blog. How do I refer to whatever (if anything) lies at the heart of the mystery of existence? "God" often sounds just fine to me.

However, the meaning I have in mind when I use this word is fairly close to how Spinoza and Einstein saw "God" -- as the sum total of the laws of nature, not a personal being who intervenes in the world from time to time.

Given this confusion between the various ways "God" can be used, the "One" is a word that has pluses to it. My favorite Greek philosopher, Plotinus, favored it. Along with "the Good." In his Enneads, he wrote:

But if the One -- name and reality expressed -- was to be taken positively it would be less clear than if we did not give it a name at all... Therefore, when you have said "The Good" do not add anything to it in your mind, for if you add anything, you will make it deficient by whatever you have added.

Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian mystic, had much the same attitude. He preferred "Godhead" to "God," being a word that points to universality rather particularity.

God has many names in Scripture. But I say that if someone perceives something in God and gives it a name, then that is not God. God is above names and nature. We read of a good man who turned to God in his prayer and wished to give him a name. Then a brother said to him, "Be silent! You are dishonoring God!" There is no name we can devise for God.

For sure, since It seems that nothing is a lot closer to "God" than something.

Existence...what is it? Can't be something that exists within existence. Can't be the creator of stuff that exists. Existence is the root, existent things the branches.

That's why I like "the One" as a description of ultimacy. "Emptiness" is a pretty good word also, notwithstanding its Buddhist connotations. Also, "Wu." These terms are not only nonsectarian, they're also arguably secular. So, about as universal as you can get.

There are no signs of God. So why believe?

You'd think that an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and/or omnibenevolent being would leave some evident trace, given all this omni'ness.

Yet God, whether considered from an impersonal Eastern perspective or a personal Western viewpoint, has left no demonstrable signs of his/her/it's existence.

Why?

A theologian would answer, "It isn't possible to know the mind of God, or comprehend the essence of divinity." Well, OK.

But if this is the case, let's do away with religions, mystic paths, spiritual philosophies, and the like, and simply admit that if God is real, this is a mysterious ultimate reality never to be known.

Since true believers won't go for this, I won't accept no answer to Why? Yet I haven't come across a convincing one in my sixty-one years.

The India-based meditation system I belonged to for a long time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, taught that the ruler of the lower realms of creation, including the physical universe ("Kal") got his job by standing on one leg for countless eons, demonstrating to
God ("Akal") that he had the right stuff to be a ruler.

Part of the deal with God involved a promise from the Big Guy Upstairs that god-realized gurus couldn't perform miracles to attract disciples who, after being initiated, would be able to learn how to leave Kal's domain and return to God, thereby depleting Kal of some souls.

(Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. I never bought into this particular bit of theology, though. Plus, it really isn't any crazier than the notion that God sent his only Son to die on the cross and absolve the sins of humanity.)

Other religions come up with equally unbelievable explanations for why God hasn't left any supernatural traces in the natural world, don't even attempt an answer to the "Why no trace?" question, or consider that God did leave evidence of a divine presence in the past, as related in scripture.

Carl Sagan addresses this issue in his book, "The Varieties of Scientific Experience." 

You have to ask, "What is the evidence?" And it's insufficient to say, "Well, there is this extremely charismatic person who said that he had a conversion experience." Not enough.

There are lots of charismatic people who have all sorts of mutually exclusive conversion experiences. They can't all be right. Some of them have to be wrong. Many of them have to be wrong. It's even possible that all of them are wrong. We cannot depend entirely on what people say. We have to look at what the evidence is.

And that's lacking. Sagan notes that people will say, "God is love, and I feel this love, so I know God exists."

Well, atheists feel love also. So do adherents of every religion, many of which have extremely different conceptions of God -- Hindus vs. Christians, for example.

Sagan wonders, as have I, why God hasn't left some indisputable sign of divinity lying around the creation for us to marvel at. Why no giant cross orbiting the Earth? Or an immense Islamic crescent on the moon if Allah is the real deal?

Then there's the puzzling reality that none of the supposed prophets of God or God-realized sages have told humanity any hitherto unknown fact about the physical universe.

If these people are in touch with a supernatural consciousness, why don't they know something no one else does? Carl Sagan says:

Imagine that there is a set of holy books in all cultures in which there are a few enigmatic phrases that God of the gods tell our ancestors are to be passed on to the future with no change.

Very important to get it exactly right. Now, so far that's not very different from the actual circumstances of alleged holy books. But suppose that the phrases in question were phrases that we would recognize today that could not have been recognized then.

The Sun is a star. Now, nobody knew that, let's say, in the sixth century B.C., when the Jews were in the Babylonian exile and picked up the Babylonian cosmology from the principal astronomers of the time. Ancient Babylonian science is the cosmology that is still enshrined in the book of Genesis.

Suppose instead the story was "Don't forget, the Sun is a star." Or "Don't forget, Mars is a rusty place with volcanoes. Mars, you know, that red star. That's a world. It has volcanoes, it's rusty, there are clouds, there used to be rivers. There aren't anymore. You'll understand this later. Trust me. Right now, don't forget."

This never happened, though. Sages, prophets, mystics, gurus -- all of them have known no more about the universe than the scientists of their time (and usually a lot less).

Thus God not only doesn't leave traces of divinity in the physical creation, God also doesn't leave any demonstrable evidence of divine knowledge in the minds of those who supposedly have come in contact with him/her/it.

"The Evolution of God" falls flat at the end

My prophesy turned out to be correct: I didn't agree with the final chapters of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," just as I anticipated.

But there wasn't anything miraculous in my ability to see into the future, just as a transcendent divinity isn't needed to explain how religions change over the course of history -- embracing, by and large, a more inclusive, tolerant, and universal moral code.

Mostly, this is what Wright says in his book.

This book’s account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account. We’ve explained the expansion of the moral imagination as an outgrowth of expanding social organization, which is itself an outgrowth of technological evolution, which itself grows naturally out of the human brain, which itself grew naturally out of the primordial ooze via biological evolution. There’s no mystical force that has to enter the system to explain this, and there’s no need to look for one.

However, in some final observations that seem to be designed to make the book more appealing to religious believers (since they conflict with what Wright says above), "God" comes across as an intelligent designer who fashioned evolution to arrive at a moral endpoint.

Maybe the growth of "God" signifies the existence of God. That is: if history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral truth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, than maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe--conceivably--the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.

Jerry Coyne, a professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, blasted all these "maybe's" in a largely critical review: "Creationism for Liberals."

Wright wants to give true believers a reason to keep on believing in God despite all the reasons not to. So he ends up arguing -- weakly -- that just as scientists haven't seen electrons, but know they exist by their effects, "God" can be viewed as the source of religions' moral evolution even though divinity isn't apparent.

Huh?

Particle physics is extremely precise in its predictions. So is quantum mechanics. Yet physicists recognize that any sort of description of electrons in terms of everyday existence (such as "tiny planets orbiting the nucleus") is decidedly inaccurate.

Religions operate entirely oppositely.

Their dogmas are unable to form any reliable explanations of the natural world beyond those known to science, but the source of these supposed truths, God, is described in considerable detail.

Coyne, appropriately, bashes Wright on his attempt to equate electrons and God.

Does Wright really not grasp that science, unlike religion, posits testable explanations for the world, explanations that are discarded if they fail to comport with the facts? Is he unaware that, unlike religious explanations, scientific explanations are validated by public agreement among people from every faith and culture?

On one hand we have Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and the whole panoply of faiths with their irresolvably conflicting claims, and on the other hand we have science, and only one brand of science. Independent scientific observers can decide whether electrons are real, but there is no way to decide whether Jesus was the Son of God or Muhammad was the Prophet.

In a response to Coyne's criticisms on "The Evolution of God" website, Wright claims that when the supposed misrepresentations of his book are corrected, Coyne's critique collapses.

Well, not completely.

Wright does point out some passages that clarify his position on certain issues. But he still bears responsibility for leading the reader in the direction that Coyne criticizes. I also finished the final chapters feeling that Wright sees a directionality or design in human evolution that supports the notion of a monotheistic God.

I enjoyed "The Evolution of God," which -- on the whole -- is pleasingly churchless. However, Wright's puzzling change of tone in his final chapters left me with an unpleasant literary aftertaste.

I like Coyne's ending of his review more than Wright's conclusion to his book.

Except for his claim that theology is malleable to social forces, which is hardly novel but never mind, there is nothing in Wright's argument that withstands close inspection--nothing in his understanding of theology, of morality and its history, of evolution, of science. There is absolutely no evidence, beyond wishful thinking, that God, if there is a God, had anything to do with setting up biological evolution or directing its operation, much less driving history toward goodness.

God doesn't exist, but is improving

I'm expecting to disagree with the final chapters of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," as I prophesied a few months ago.

So I wanted to write a positive blog post about this book, which I'm almost finished with, before I turn more negative. As a New York Times review says, there's a good news/bad news joke for religious believers here:

Wright makes it clear that he is tracking people’s conception of the divine, not the divine itself. He describes this as “a good news/bad news joke for traditionalist Christians, Muslims and Jews.” The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn’t really exist.

This is what Wright means by the evolution of God: religious conceptions of divinity have, on the whole, been changing in the direction of more tolerance, inclusiveness, and interconnectedness.

For example, he argues that at first Judaic and early Christian teachings about loving others were limited by tribal, cultural, and nationalistic barriers. Only later was the brotherhood and sisterhood of man extended to include everyone on Earth.

One of Wright's central theses is that non-zero-sum relationships lead to more evolved moral codes.

If two cultures are in a win-win situation where cooperation benefits both, each is going to look more favorably upon the other than if they're engaged in a win-lose battle. Thus as humanity becomes more interrelated (economically and otherwise), people are going to have more of an accepting attitude toward those who aren't like them.

We have some more God-evolving to do, obviously, as Wright points out:

So if the God of the Abrahamic faiths is to keep doing what he has often managed to do before -- evolve in a way that fosters positive-sum outcomes of non-zero-sum games -- he has some growing to do. His character has to develop in a way that permits, for starters, Muslims, Christians, and Jews to get along as globalization keeps pushing them closer together.

Amen to that.

Earth has plenty of problems that require close cooperation between people scattered all over the world: global climate change, famine, epidemics, nuclear weapons proliferation, and such.

The last thing we need is more religion-caused divisiveness.

Nationalism already stands in the way of communal global action, as various countries each consider that their view of the world obviously is correct, so other misguided nations should fall in line.

Wright has a chapter near the end of his book called "Well, Aren't We Special?" Every religion believes that it has a uniquely correct connection with God, or divinity. The false messages of deluded faiths are viewed skeptically, if not scornfully.

Not a very loving or godlike attitude.

So Wright wonders if the next evolution in Godliness will be a diminution, and possibly even a rejection, of religious specialness.

What if the Abrahamic religions really did relax their sense of specialness -- with respect to one another and even, eventually, with respect to non-Abrahamic faiths? No doubt it would feel to many Christians, Jews, and Muslims like an injury to their faith. Yet it would amount to a kind of vindication.

At the core of each faith is the conviction that there is a moral order, and for the Abrahamic conception of God to grow in this fashion would be yet more evidence that such an order exists.

For Jews, Christians, or Muslims to cling to claims of special validity could make their faiths seem, and perhaps be, less valid. As Ashoka [a 3rd century Buddhist emperor] put it in a different context: "If a man extols his own faith and disparages another because of devotion to his own and because he wants to glorify it, he seriously injures his own faith."

Is it crazy to imagine a day when the Abrahamic faiths renounce not only their specific claims to specialness, but even the claim to specialness of the whole Abrahamic enterprise? Are such radical changes in God's character imaginable? Changes this radical have already happened, again and again. Another transformation would be nothing new.

Sounds good, but I'm dubious it'll happen anytime soon.

Religious believers are too fond of feeling that they, and they alone, are the special sons and daughters of God. Humility is cherished in principle, yet not when it means giving up the notion that my way is the best way, or even the only way.

God offers up whatever religions think will sell

God is a human invention. Notions about God evolve with the times, changing with cultural and societal circumstances.

These are some central themes of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God," a fascinating book that I've about two-thirds through. He further illuminates a lot of misgivings I've had about religion.

Like, how religious leaders -- whether of East or West, a guru or the Pope -- basically are selling salvation. Not for money, usually, but in exchange for buying into a belief system.

For example, in his section on Christianity Wright talks about how the earliest descriptions of Jesus' teachings didn't say anything about Christians going to heaven.

The idea of followers of Jesus getting to join him in heaven upon dying probably didn't take shape until about a half century after he died. To be sure, his followers believed from early on that the faithful would be admitted to the "kingdom of heaven," as the New Testament calls it. But "kingdom of heaven" is just Matthew's term for what Mark had called the "kingdom of God" -- and, as we've seen, the kingdom of God was going to be on earth.

Problem was, years and decades passed with no earthly kingdom of God in evidence. What to do? Christianity was starting to look like a bait-and-switch con job. Jesus supposedly said that the kingdom of God was "at hand," but it never showed up.

So heaven had to wait.

People still wanted salvation. Happiness, bliss, eternal life -- all that good stuff. It wasn't appearing the way Christians orginally thought. No problem. Just change the thinking.

As the decades rolled by and the kingdom of God failed to materialize, there was growing concern among Jesus's followers over the state of the not-yet-resurrected dead....But by the time of Luke, more than a decade after Paul's death, that expectation was no longer operative.

Now the attentive Christian was concerned not just about whether dead friends and relatives would eventually be resurrected but about what death would feel like until resurrection, since it increasingly looked as if the Christian in question would join his or her friends and relatives in that state before Christ returned.

...Now the payoff from salvation wouldn't be expected within a person's lifetime, but it could come right after death -- the next best thing. Had Christian doctrine not made this turn, it would have lost credibility as the kingdom of God failed to show up on earth -- as generations and generations of Christians were seen to have died without getting their reward.

But now, with the kingdom of God relocated from earth to heaven, generations of Christians had presumably gotten their reward, and you could, too, if you accepted Christ as your savior.

It's no wonder religions are so successful at recruiting members. They've got the advantage of a sales pitch for salvation that would be illegal (or at least highly unethical) if used to market any other product.

Buy now and you'll see great results after you die! Guaranteed!

Of course, actually there's no guarantee, since the dead can't return and provide evidence that they didn't really die and are now happily hanging around with Jesus.

No matter. Since death is scary, gullible people will buy into a belief system that promises eternal life. Tell folks what they want to hear, and not surprisingly what you say will appeal to them.

After God, a richer life awaits

So what's to be done after giving up a belief in God? (Or any other metaphysics founded on blind faith rather than demonstrable evidence.)

First, pat yourself on the back -- or any other place that feels good -- and offer up some congratulations from you to you.

"Great job, me. I've made the right choice: to embrace honesty rather than deception."

But just as smokers often need a nicotine patch to help them break an unhealthy habit, going cold turkey off of God can be tough. After all, believing in the Big Guy Upstairs has been fulfilling, perhaps for a long time.

How to replace that source of pleasure, meaning, and support? What's going to warm a true believer when the cold winds of reality start blowing around in his or her psyche?

In his wonderful book, "After God," Don Cupitt offers up some suggestions.

The theme of my previous post about this book was how much fun it can be to shake up our worldview. However, after the shaking, many escapees from the confines of a religion want to settle into another means of diving into the depths of what life is all about.

That includes me, for sure. This blog is called Church of the Churchless for a reason.

If I simply wanted to be churchless, I'd go do something completely unrelated from spirituality, philosophizing, and pondering ultimate cosmic questions. Instead, my goal is the same as before: to live life wisely and well. I'm just going about this in a different fashion. Hence, this "Church."

Cupitt says that we don't have to give up every trace of religiosity after we've realized that dogmatism isn't for us. Religion can be used as a toolkit from which we pick up practices that continue to seem appealing.

Now, though, we use them in the context of a non-realistic view of God. Cupitt uses Donald Duck as an example of what this means:

"Yes: but what then was the god? It is a mistake to suppose that the god was something over and above the image of wood or stone that was venerated in worship...Each and every Donald Duck image published by the Disney Studios really is Donald Duck himself; there is no superior original. Donald Duck is a vivid character to millions, maybe billions, but he simply doesn't need to have any existence outside his own iconography."

So each of us is free to create our own conception of what "God" means for us, using that word in the sense of what we feel life is all about -- our ultimate aspirations.

Cupitt suggests that three themes can be productively salvaged from the old outmoded way of religious believing.

We should learn to pursue our own personal growth by exploring and flipping among several different forms of selfhood and views of life. There is no One Great Truth anymore, and there never will be again. It is now better to maintain a small personal repertoire of different truths, paths, and goals, to be utilized ad lib.

The Eye of God

A Christian nonrealist like me may often find himself dropping back into the old type of God consciousness, praying or worshiping because he wants to or because it helps. And why not? I actually think I love God more now that I know God is voluntary. I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists.

...The old way of living coram Deo (as if before the face of God) was valuably consciousness-raising and morally stabilizing, and one may usefully continue to pray to God just as one may find oneself often talking to and thinking of a dead person.

The Blissful Void

Not only in Buddhism but also in other religious traditions, the final goal of meditation and contemplative prayer is a state in which all imagery, difference, and form have disappeared, and the subject too is emptied out into void bliss.

...I am suggesting that we should use the Discipline of the Void, meditation upon the underlying universal emptiness and nothingness, as a background against which to set and to see the flux of our life. The Blissful Void, sunyata, thus replaces the old metaphysical God, and gives -- to us Westerners in particular -- a new and much-needed way of getting our life in perspective.

Solar Living

It follows that we ourselves are the only makers of meaning and value. Such meaning and value as we can descry in our life must be value that we have ourselves ascribed to it and projected into it. All the colors and "feels" of things are our own feelings, projected out. Ethics therefore must be solar.

We no longer have any metaphysical reason or excuse for withholding ourselves. We should pour ourselves out as the sun does, identifying ourselves completely with the outpouring flux of all existence.

...Life can't be possessed or clutched at: we should pour ourselves out and pass on, without hesitation or regret. We can get ourselves together only by leaving ourselves behind. This is solarity -- to live by dying all the time, heedless, like the sun and in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. 

...We are no longer fearful about dying, or afraid to give ourselves away. we pour ourselves out recklessly into symbolic expression and then pass on, pass on, and pass away, without regret.

Shake up your unexamined worldview -- it's fun!

I used to cling to a quasi-fundamentalist view of the cosmos. Now, I don't.

I've come to enjoy a deliciously exciting sensation of feeling rigidly settled ways of looking at the world transform into a more naturally fluid vision of reality.

"Naturally," because if there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that we can't be sure we know everything about anything. So I love someone who comes along with a Paradigm Shaker which busts up worldviews that are widely accepted without good reason.

Don Cupitt, for example. I read his book "After God" a few years ago. I liked it then. Taking another look at it the past few days, I like it even more now.

It's tough to encapsulate Cupitt's take on religion and God briefly. He was a minister in the Church of England who lost faith in a "realist" view of God. (Non-realism basically says, "our understanding of the world helps produce the way it is." You can listen to Cupitt discussing this in an interview.)

This Library Journal review of his book that I found on Amazon does a pretty good job of summing it up.

Cupitt (philosophy, Emmanuel Coll., Cambridge) redefines what it means to believe in God while accepting that God does not exist. He argues that there is indeed an unseen intelligible, or spirit world, among us. But this world is made up of words and symbols. The world of religion is a mythical representation of the world of language.

Cupitt's is a postmodern religion that sees God not as a transcendent reality but as a reflection of human selfhood. According to Cupitt, this conception of religion frees one from the belief in absolutes, which, he says, spells the death of religion. Human beings themselves are the only source of meaning and value. Belief in God, Cupitt holds, is a valuable and interesting form of consciousness. While Cupitt's analysis will not be accepted by many, his book offers a well-wrought argument.

Below is part of his argument: a wonderful description of how most people, overtly religious or not, perceive reality. Largely, it's taken for granted as being the way things really are.

But when it comes to reality, taking things for granted isn't justified.

When you read the following excerpt from "After God," consider how easily someone -- perhaps you -- could agree with these propositions. And also how easily they could be refuted.

As I read each of the twenty-two brief assumptions, I experienced a increasingly pleasant sensation of vertigo, of falling from a belief-perch that previously seemed solid, but used to, and in some ways still was, preventing me from floating freely in the warm waters of reality.

Cupitt says that he came up with this schema after a senior Fellow in his college died. His successor said, "Well, he knows now, doesn't he?"

Those words are a window. I thought about them for a few days, analyzing them backward, and came up with this:

Life

1.  Truth is not manufactured by us; it is discovered by us, or dis-covers (the Latin vela, "veil," gives us the word re-veals or un-veils) itself to us.

2.  The answers to all properly framed questions, both questions of fact and questions of value, preexist out there, objectively.

3.  There is a great and final Answer to the mystery of our existence, out there, awaiting us.

4.  All these truths and answers (2, 3) are, so to say, tailored to our faculties and our requirements. They are in principle accessible and intelligible to us, so that we may reasonably hope and expect to discover them, or have them reveal themselves to us.

5.  There is then something quite dazzling, namely a preestablished harmony between thought and being, language and reality; between the questions we want to ask and the Answer that the nature of things is waiting to give us. (Notice that this most astonishing doctrine is also the one most profoundly taken for granted.)

6.  The final Answer will be revealed to us in or through death.

7.  Our life is a pilgrimage toward death, the moment of truth, the moment of absolute knowledge.

8.  Our life is a journey, then, from

(a) the relative to the absolute; from
(b) time to eternity; from
(c) the changing, sensuous world of becoming to the realm of pure timeless intelligible Being; from
(d) the particular to the universal; and from
(e) the mediated, discursive, through-a-glass-darkly sort of knowledge, to pure face-to-face unmistakable vision.

9.  Each person's life is a story scripted beforehand, and there is a great Story of Everything whose plot has been revealed to us in a Book.

The Binary Contrasts

10. The binary contrasts (in #8 a-e), and a number of other related contrasts, are all analogously asymmetrical.

11. In each of the cases cited, the second of the pair:

(a) is prior;
(b) is superior (that is, greater in both value and reality, and therefore standard-setting); and
(c) in some way governs or produces or brings about the first.

12. Thus the spiritual world above is in every way better and greater than this material world below.

Being and Value

13. There are degrees of reality, and of value.

14. The scale of degrees of being is also a scale of degrees of value, or goodness, or perfection.

15. The Most Real is therefore the Most Good, and vice versa: for the Highest Good is -- has to be -- the Supreme Reality.

16. To gain the highest knowledge, we must purify our souls and perfect ourselves; and one should, in particular, prepare for death.

Causality

17. Ex nihilo nihil fit ("Out of nothing, nothing comes to be").

18. Every change has a cause; or, every thing that is has a cause of its being.

19. The cause is prior to the effect; the cause is responsible for, or accounts for, the effect. 

20. The cause is superior in reality to the effect.

21. The qualities that are found in the effect preexist in a higher degree in the cause.

22. Our last end is the absolute knowledge of what is greatest, most real, and most perfect; a knowledge in which we shall enjoy perfect happiness.

This is brilliant stuff. Cupitt nailed me!

He managed to set down the core principles that used to prop up my worldview. And still does, in some respects, or I wouldn't have felt the previously-mentioned vertigo as I realized, "I've been holding tightly on to assumptions that are best grasped lightly."

But enough about me. How about you?

I bet most people who visit this blog, even many of the devoutly churchless, would still agree with a large share of the propositions Cupitt lists above.

Even more than agree, in this sense: these propositions tend to be unexamined and taken for granted, being part of a worldview that is so obviously true, few people stop to ponder how questionably true it is.

in my next post I'll talk about what Cupitt advises for an "After God" way of living happily and meaningfully.

Metaphors can't prove God is real

Religious people are fond of metaphors. Which isn't surprising. A metaphor compares or describes one thing in terms of something else.

"God's love is like that of a mother for her child."

OK, nice sentiment. But this is a different type of logical statement from the example Wikipedia cites for a metaphor, Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage..."

We know the world exists. We also know what a stage is. We also know about mothers and children. "God's love," though, where the heck is it?

Non-existent, at least in terms of any sort of objective reality supported by demonstrable evidence. So something unreal is being described in terms of something real.

Religion can't be blamed for this. What else can it do? If true believers couldn't use metaphors, they'd be severely limited in what they could say about their beliefs.

"Her lips are as red as cherries, and twice as sweet."

If a man was accused of wild hyperbole, he could take a color photo of his lover's lips. Or invite skeptics to meet the woman. Even kiss her for themselves. All this would connect the two parts of the metaphor.

With metaphysical matters, obviously this isn't possible. Religious metaphors pertaining to an unseen divinity straddle the known and unknown.

So while they may be wonderfully poetic -- "Jesus is the lamb of God" -- we've got to remember that poetry isn't reality. (In this case, only lamb is clearly existent; Jesus and God are hypotheticals.)

Religiosity specializes in "irreducible metaphors." I'm not crystal clear about what an irreducible metaphor is, but it seems to refer to the fact that religious metaphors can't  be reduced to literal statements.

A woman's lips may be called "as red as cherries." Or, just red lips. You can wend your way from the symbolism of the metaphor to something really existent.

If the wending comes to a halt at the metaphor, this is a sign that flowery language is being used to disguise the non-reality of what's being metaphorized.

In a recent post I referred to a related sort of dubious concept comparison use by true believers.

Likewise, this blog often gets comments from devotees of a guru who argue that a teacher is needed in the "science" of spirituality, just as one is needed to learn physics or chemistry. This is another abuse of analogy.

Worldly science has a vast amount of demonstrable evidence backing it up. Spirituality and religion don't. The precepts of worldly science can be tested for truth or falsity. Almost always, spiritual or religious dogmas can't. Worldly science is founded on open debate and discussion, plus a healthy dose of skepticism. Spiritual "science" isn't.

Analogies and metaphors are the refuge of those who don't have a firm footing in reality.

When a god or guru has to be likened to something known to be true, that "liken" testifies to how flimsy the evidence is for a purported metaphysical truth.  A rose is a rose is a rose. But almost always religion is about something that isn't an obvious "is."

Another take on the inappropriate use of metaphors can be found in "Metaphors on Trial." This article discusses how creationists and intelligent design advocates misuse metaphors in attempts to discredit the theory of evolution.

Arguments by analogy or metaphor, when used correctly, are both valid and illuminating. For example, a crucial argument made by Charles Darwin in support of evolution was the analogy between 'artificial selection' by breeders and 'natural selection' by the environment. But such arguments must be internally valid and consistent, as well as carefully crafted so that the analogy truly corresponds to the points purportedly being made.

Bottom line: religious metaphors can be admired as creative uses of language. But as pointers toward reality, they are decidedly lacking.

Confirmed: God is gay

Makes sense to me:

In nature, homosexuality, bisexuality, and omni-sexuality are ubiquitous.
God created nature, and is reflected in nature.

Thus, as Mark Morford demonstrates, God is gay. Somewhat, at least.

And gayness is entirely natural -- as is every other form of sexuality. Check off another instance where religions are wrong.

Who cares if God exists?

Over on my "Nature is real, religion is illusion" post, today Phil asked a good question in a comment:

Ending on a question note, would anyone on this blog significantly change the way they lived their lives, if it became proven, without shadow of doubt, that God existed? (or for that matter, proven without shadow of doubt that a God of any form did NOT exist?)

I've been pondering along some similar lines recently, so was primed to offer up some answers. But first, the question needs quite a bit of work -- as others already have noted in their own comment responses.

"God" is a meaningless word without a lot of elaboration.

To Spinoza, nature is God. To Plotinus, oneness is God. To Christians, God is a person (or people). To Hindus, God is universal consciousness (maybe...it's tough to pin down Hinduism).

So any proof that God existed would need to be highly specific if it was going to change the way I live my life.

I'd want to know such things as whether God was formless or had a form, whether God was conscious of us humans or unaware of our existence, whether God had any power to affect the universe or left everything alone, whether God has any relationship with us after we die or if death is the end of our existence -- to name but a few "what is God like?" queries.

Once I knew these things, I'd be able to decide whether God should have any effect on how I live.

This is an important point: it's up to us what meaning, if any, God would have (assuming we've gotten the persuasive proof of God's existence that Phil spoke about).

After all, there are plenty of important things that exist right here on Earth that don't have any impact on the meaning I ascribe to my life. Or at least, very little impact.

For example, I'm aware that Mt. Everest exists. But I have zero interest in climbing it. I know that Paris is a city in France. But I don't really care if I ever visit it. Other people, though, are deeply interested in climbing Mt. Everest and/or visiting Paris.

Meaning doesn't reside in an object or person, but in our reaction to, or relationship with, that entity.

Thus depending on what sort of God divinity turned out to be, I might be attracted, repelled, or indifferent to him/her/it. He/she/it might make a big difference in how I live my life, a small difference, or no difference at all.

Since I have more than a minor interest in what, if anything, will happen to me after I die (nothing being the most likely answer, since that is what I'll likely be myself), if I knew that God would reward or punish me in an afterlife based on what I did in this life, for sure I could be persuaded to act in different ways depending on what was in it for me.

Ideally, of course, I'd get proof that God just adores people who are devoted to inquiring into the nature of existence via a churchless blog, and will reward them (namely, ME) with hot sex, pleasurable drugs, fawning acolytes, an endless supply of high tech gadgets, and flawless health/good looks.

Getting all that after death would be cool. Getting it now also, even better (God, are you listening?).

However, the chances are slim that anyone, including me, ever will have proof (1) that God exists, or (2) what God is like or might want of us. Thus Phil's question isn't one that needs to be taken very seriously.

Regarding the second part of his query, what difference would it make if we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God did not exist, I have even more trouble coming to grips with this possibility.

Because it doesn't seem to be possible.

As I'm fond of saying, and am about to say again, there's no way to prove that something doesn't exist. (Including, of course, irrefutable proof that what I just said is correct). It could always show up unexpectedly, appear out of the blue, manifest in a surprising fashion.

So I have zero expectation of getting proof of God's non-existence. And next-to-zero expectation of getting proof of God's existence.

All told, then, God has extremely little potential effect on my life.

Which is as it should be. Because my meaning comes from me, not God, just as your meaning comes from you.

People talk to God like a friend

Thumbing through a recent issue of New Scientist, I came upon an intriguingly titled short article: "Praying to God is like talking to a friend."

(I'll include the article in a continuation to this post, in case the link above becomes inactive.)

A brain scanner was used to see what happens when people improvised personal prayers before making requests to Santa Claus.

Improvised prayers triggered patterns that match those seen when people communicate with each other, and activated circuitry that is linked with the theory of mind -- an awareness that other individuals have their own independent motivations and intentions.

...The prefrontal cortex is key to theory of mind. Crucially, this area was inactive during the Santa Claus task, suggesting volunteers viewed Santa Claus as fictitious but God as a real individual.

Of course, this study doesn't prove anything about the existence of God. It just shows that when people pray, they believe they're communicating with an animate being.

Which helps explain why religions are so appealing to people -- particularly those that promise a personal relationship with some divine entity.

Who wouldn't want to have a best friend always available? Especially one who's omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent?

I used to believe that the guru who initiated me into a mystical meditation practice was part and parcel of my consciousness. Disciples were encouraged to think often about the guru during the day, and visualize his presence in their lives.

Doing that, I'd feel a warm glow of conviviality with my imaginary friend. "Imaginary," because I never actually sensed the presence of a separate non-physical being, nor were my mental conversations anything but one-sided.

I'd talk away inside my head to my guru, feeling good that I had someone who'd listen to whatever I had to say, and was totally accepting of whatever thoughts or emotions passed through my mind.

Hook me up to an MRI machine back then, and my scan results probably would have been the same of the praying people in this study.

Now, I suspect my guru talk would register more along the Santa Claus lines, because I've stopped believing in an unseen friend who hears me but doesn't speak to me.

When the phone rings in our house, I pick it up and say "Hello." Usually I hear a voice respond almost immediately. If all I hear is silence, I'll repeat my hello a few more times.

Then I hang up. It'd be crazy to keep on talking when there isn't anyone on the line. But this is just what I did for many years. And what religious believers do whenever they pray.

To keep up a one-sided conversation with someone unseen or unheard, you have to believe (1) that the other person is there, but (2) chooses to be a 100% listener rather than a talker.

For a long time I could embrace this belief. Not totally, but to a sufficient extent that I didn't feel foolish when I chatted away to my guru in thought-words. Eventually, though, I began to feel that I was merely talking to myself.

Now, each morning I begin my meditation with silently spoken words along this line:

If there's anyone out there, or in here, or wherever, who is aware of me, hi! Stop on by my consciousness. Let's get to know each other. Assuming you're nice. If you're a demon or some other nasty being, I'd just as soon that you keep to yourself.

And that's about it. I've stopped jabbering to hypothesized metaphysical beings who never respond to me. If an entity wants to strike up a conversation within my consciousness, I'm all ears.

But I'm not interested any more in being all tongue. Like the people in the study, I've done my share of talking to a divinity who I believed was really listening.

Now it's my turn to listen for a response. Which is a fine traditional way to meditate: doing one's best to empty the mind of thought talk and observing what remains, or happens next.

What I've found when I do this is that I lose a conversation with an imaginary friend. But I gain a sense of being in greater touch with reality. And that's a good trade-off.

Here's the full article:

What's good about God?

This morning, while I was meditating, a thought popped into my mind: What's good about God? After a bit of reflection, an answer came: Nothing.

If you're an atheist or agnostic, that answer won't surprise you. But I hope to convince religious believers that they too should consider that God is good for nothing. In fact, I don't see how someone could come to any other conclusion.

Follow my reasoning...

God isn't evident. People are. Religions are founded by people who supposedly know something about God.

For example, Jesus, Mohammad, Moses.

In addition to these historical figures, there are modern day gurus, masters, sages, and prophets who are believed to have some sort of direct connection with God.

And countless members of the world's religious, spiritual, metaphysical, mystical, and religious faiths consider that God has touched, loved, changed, saved, or otherwise influenced them.

Yet let's imagine a game show: "Who Has Been Made Better by God?"

A dozen people sit in chairs on stage. The contestant -- let's say it's you -- has to figure out which of the individuals, if any, has an intimate relationship with God, and which are godless.

How would you tell? What questions would you ask?

Given the opportunity to conduct background research on these people, what evidence could you gather that would allow you to say, "Person X is better because of God"?

None. If gathering such evidence were possible, it would have been done by now.

And likely the existence of that evidence would have greatly diminished all the debating, wrangling, and arguing about whether God exists, and if so, which religion has the direct line to Him, Her, or It.

In fact, there's no way to tell if a person who claims to have a relationship with God really does. It's all a matter of blind faith.

Does God make someone moral, ethical, upstanding, virtuous, loving? No. There are plenty of good people who are religious believers. There also are plenty of good people who are atheists or agnostics.

Does God make someone wise, intelligent, a knower of things no one else knows? No. There is no verifiable evidence of anyone being privy to knowledge that could only have come from God.

Does God make someone capable of super-human powers, such as ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance, invisibility, or such? No. There is no documented record of anyone possessing capabilities that aren't part of the normal skill set of Homo sapiens.

I could go on in the vein, but three examples are enough to make my point.

Ardent believers in God, in a God-realized human being, or in their own relationship with God, like to claim that contact with divinity has marvelous effects. Yet when they are asked, "What effects?", the answers are underwhelming.

As noted above, everything that supposedly is good about God also can be had without God. Meaning, a godly person looks no different from an ungodly person.

There's no way to tell them apart.

If you show me a religious believer who is so generous and loving he would surrender his life for another person, I can show you an atheist with the same quality.

If you show me a religious believer who is so wise, personable, and charismatic he elevates the spirits of almost everyone who comes in contact with him, I can show you an atheist with the same quality. 

If you show me a religious believer who is willing to undergo arduous disciplines and sacrifices in order to achieve his life's ambition, I can show you an atheist with the same quality.

So I repeat my question: What's good about God? Along with my answer: Nothing. 

I welcome comments to this post that attempt to show how it would be possible to win the "Who Has Been Made Better by God?" game. Take a stab at it. Describe how you would distinguish between a godly person, and a non-godly person.

I'm confident you'll find that there's no way to tell the difference. 

And that's really good news. Because everything we call "good" is available to us here and now as normal human beings -- no special delivery from God needed. 

Looking outside of ourselves for the qualities we want to embody is senseless, since there is no evidence that believing in a divinity adds anything desirable to the human experience.

So rejoice in the thought, "There is nothing good about God." This means that all the good we could ever want or enjoy is ours for the having -- as earthly beings.

Why we believe in God

Thanks to Pharyngula, I've got a better understanding of the neurological and psychological reasons people believe in gods. (And it isn't because God is real, that's for sure.)

The preceding link will lead you to a 54 minute You Tube video by Andy Thompson, a psychiatrist who is knowledgeable about how our evolutionary origins are reflected in modern psyches.

I'll also embed the video at the end of this post. I watched/listened to it in pieces over the past few days, turning the volume up on my laptop as I made a meal in the kitchen. Here's a couple of my favorite lines (probably not quoted exactly):

We are risen apes, not fallen angels.
Secular morality means doing what's right regardless of what we've been told; religious morality means doing what we've been told regardless of whether it's right.

Thompson PowerPoints his way through some fascinating research, which I won't try to describe in any detail. His basic notion, which is well supported by facts, is that religious belief is a byproduct of evolutionary adaptations.

This makes more sense than the theory that humans somehow are "hard-wired" to believe in God, in the same sense that we have an inherent desire for fats, sugars, and such -- which are needed for survival (and as Thompson notes, now makes people lust for a Big Mac rather than lean game meat).

Instead, adaptations that offered up an evolutionary advantage naturally predispose people to believe in metaphysical beings. For example, the capacity to know that other humans have intentions, just as we do.

This allows us to think, "If I do this, probably Joe will do that." We don't need to be in direct contact with Joe to have a sense of him, including his willfulness.

It's then not much of a leap to imagine that a being we've imagined, God, also has desires, intentions, and such -- just like us. Thompson says that God's humanness is evident in the dogmas of every theistic religion, which attribute the mental states of Homo sapiens to divinity.

For this reason, and others described in the video, religious belief is the default human condition. It is cognitively harder to reach a state of disbelief, which explains why most people embrace some form of religion.

In a Q and A session, Thompson was asked why some -- including the people who were drawn to attend his presentation -- are able to avoid falling into the default "I believe in God" mode.

His answer will please the churchless: the more educated and intelligent someone is, the more likely it is that he or she will be able to overcome the cognitive biases that most people take for granted.

Makes sense.

I've always wondered why religions so often say that "simple folks" are more attuned to God. What this really means is that uneducated gullible people are more likely to accept dogmas uncritically than question them.

I blogged so much about a book I liked a lot, "The Ego Tunnel," because it also showed how science is casting new light on how the human mind creates its own realities -- including a belief in God.

Thompson said that we are on the threshold of a comprehensive neuroscience of religion. He feels that this will deepen the conflict between science and religion.

That's fine. Reality has got to win out in the end.

Truth is more powerful than fiction, even though the Dark Ages -- along with much else in human history -- showed that religious belief is capable of holding back progress in our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos.

What's exciting now is how much we're learning about how the brain learns, including our inherent tendencies to believe in unrealities. Like, a personal God who is us writ large.

God demands heresy. I obey, devoutly.

Fairly frequently I hear from true believers who ask me, in so many words, "Brian, how could you?" Almost always my reply is "There's no way I couldn't."

Meaning, my nearly lifelong search for the way things really are necessitates leaving aside the way things aren't.

The fancy philosophical term for this is Via Negativa, the negative way.

In negative theology, it is accepted that the Divine is ineffable, an abstract experience that can only be recognized—that is, human beings cannot describe the essence of God, and therefore all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided.

Religions love to blab on about how God, or ultimate reality, is this or that, and demands that we do such and such to show our devotion to him, her, or it.

Mystics, poets, lovers of mystery, and others who bow down before the altar of "Who knows?" reject the notion that the beating heart of the cosmos can be hooked up to a concept machine and have its nature explained.

Intuition, sometimes sparked by walks under a full moon, tells me that religious dogmas can't begin to encompass the wordless wonder of the universe.

Which, naturally, includes us.

There's no way I can describe who I am. Nor can you. So what monstrous act of egotism allows anyone to claim that he or she is able to talk about God?

Logic accords with my intuition.

Religions explain the cosmos as God's creation. OK, now we have to ask, "Who or what created God?" If the reply is "No one; God is eternal" (which is the only way to avoid a never-ending series of creation questions), then this answers nothing.

Why not simply say that no one created the cosmos, as it is eternal? Either way, one ends up with an insoluble mystery: that the world exists.

A sense of this mysterious "thatness" is, in my quasi-humble opinion, the most genuine Godly feeling it is possible to have (using "God" as synonymous with the Big Question Mark).

It took me quite a few years to come to this realization. Old habits die hard.

For a long time I enjoyed an illusory (in retrospect) belief that the holy books I read, and the holy person I revered, were able to describe the nature of what lies at the farthest reaches of reality.

I believed this, even though the teachings I followed spoke of the need to go beyond form so the formless could be embraced. So does Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and the mystical side of the monotheistic religions, including Christianity.

Thus my answer to those who question how I could become a heretic: an honest search for God demands heresy.

Luther Askeland says it well in his wonderful "Ways in Mystery" (one of my favorite books): 

We can define the negative way as a twofold process. First, the mystic tries to become consciously aware of the various ways in which the intellect presumes to approach God: all the statements, concepts, words, and images that may be thought to enable one to know something about God. We note the logic of this enterprise as well as the enormity of the task.

Let us also observe that the logic of the negative way inevitably leads the mystic toward a denial of the most fundamental teachings and concepts of the very tradition to which the mystic belongs. In fact, it is precisely these teachings and concepts that form the heart of the mystic's particular "misconception" of God: They are the subtlest and also the most deceptive layer of the blindfold.

For this reason, DIonysius and Eckhart single out the most orthodox conceptions of God -- God's existence, unity, wisdom, and goodness -- for the most explicit and vehement denial.

Become a heretic: a lover of God.

Why EnlightenNext is so irritating

Dear God, deliver me from New Agey, Ken Wilber'ish, pseudo-evolutionary, integral philosophy B.S. like what just popped into my email inbox, courtesy of Andrew Cohen and his EnlightenNext crew.

I just said that I had mixed feelings about Ken Wilber. Cohen's YouTube video adds quite a bit of weight to the absurd side of my attitude.

If you've got eight minutes you want to waste, take a look. I can see why Cohen changed the name of his magazine from "What is Enlightenment?"

Because talk like I heard on the video sure would earn a big fat "Not this!" from any reasonable person.

So much blather about how God thinks and what God wants, as if Cohen or anyone else has a clue. And as if God exists at all.

Just goes to show that you don't need to go to a church, temple, or mosque to hear ridiculous dogma. You can also attend an Andrew Cohen or Ken Wilber seminar.

Is the economic crisis God’s will?

I've been spending a lot of time recently staring at computer or television screens that show the current depressing state of the United States stock market, which reflects a global financial crisis.

I'm not a masochist.

I just find this whole meltdown fascinating on all sorts of levels: personal, societal, philosophical. My core emotional reaction to the 40% decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average this year has mirrored my descent into churchlessness.

At first, I felt uncomfortable.

But now I'm feeling a sort of strange bliss that's akin to the sensation of being strapped into a roller coaster. All you can do is hang on for the ride and hope that after a bunch of wild ups and downs, you'll step out onto the platform in one piece.

The first day the stock market dropped precipitously I was anxious. After that, I realized there was nothing I could do about it – and nobody else could either.

Not the Treasury Secretary. Not the Federal Reserve chairman. Not the presidential candidates. Not Congress. And especially not George Bush. Nobody was in control.

Pretty much like the way life always is.

We just like to pretend, when things are fairly stable, that we know what's going on and can chart a desired course. This illusion dissolves when calamity strikes, as it inevitably must (death, for individuals; recessions/depressions, for countries).

Actually, I find this comforting. If somebody's in control, me or anyone else, I'm prone to worry about where they're heading. But when stuff just happens I can relax and say whatever… .

I decided to fire up Google and see if anyone thinks the economic crisis is God's will (not counting the God of Chaos). I like to think that it is, since the monetary meltdown has done wonders for Barack Obama's presidential campaign and it'd be nice if God was on Obama's side.

I found that Neale Donald Walsch had been pondering this question last month as part of his regular, and highly profitable, conversations with God.

There are those who say we are on the verge of a major, major economic collapse in this country and around the world. Today's events with one-time financial giant Lehman Brothers declaring bankruptcy, together with last month's government bailout of Fanny and Freddy, make it clear that the world is teetering at the edge of such a collapse.

And so once more we have to ask, as we did on Friday with regard to Hurricane Ike….Is this the will of God?

His answer, which came in another blog post, was deliciously ambiguous. Or to put it more cynically, typical Walschian blather. It seems that both God and humanity are in charge of the crisis, since God has willed that we do God's will.

Is all of this God's Will?

I believe not. Not in the classic sense that people understand the use of that term "God's Will." In the larger sense of the term, it IS God's Will...because God's Will is our will -- that is, the will of humanity, expressed collectively and individually through all of our thoughts, words, and actions.

I believe that there is no separation between Divinity and Humanity; that God and we are One. I believe that we are all Divine, and that some of us do not know it, do not experience it, do not believe it, do not accept it.

Well, if we are God, then there's no need for talk about two entities. Why not leave "God" out of the picture if what's happening in the world is entirely our own creation?

(First answer that comes to mind: because then it'd be a lot tougher to sell books purporting to describe conversations with God.)

Best reason for why God doesn’t exist

Big topic: why God doesn't exist. And an uncomfortable one, for most people. So I'll ease into it, before doing my best to burst some believing bubbles.

I experienced a quasi-miracle this morning. "Quasi," because it really wasn't one. But to someone religious what happened to me would be nothing short of miraculous. Aside from the fact that the miracle pointed to no-God.

A few days ago I wrote about multiple universes and my newly founded Church of Holy Fuck! Because that's what I say when I ponder the notion of many me's (and you's) populating the infinite cosmos.

I don't come across mentions of multiple universes very often. My reading usually goes off in different directions. Such as "Why I Became an Atheist: a former preacher rejects Christianity," by John Loftus.

So there I was this morning, making my way through the "Does God Exist?" chapter, and I came across…

What is the possibility of our particular universe having arisen out of an infinite VOID where there may be up to an infinite number of universes each arising out of the VOID, and where there may be no ordered laws prohibiting something coming from nothing, or something existing without beginning? Who knows?

Not me, surely. No one, really.

But I did know at that moment, or rather, feel, that something was sending a message to me. After all, what is the chance that I'd read the same sentiment about multiple universes just a few days apart, in two widely dissimilar books, when in my whole life I'd only been exposed to these thoughts a handful of times?

Well, obviously the chance is 100%, because it happened to me. Anything that happens, in fact, is absolutely certain to occur – since it did.

Religious types like to emphasize how unlikely it is that our universe could have come into being in the life-compatible fashion that it did, with gravity and other forces of nature supposedly fine-tuned to allow the formation of stars and such, which allows enough time for planets (and eventually humans) to evolve.

But Loftus points out:

Stating the odds as intelligent design (ID) theorists do is highly misleading since they presume that life must have turned out exactly as it has. All we are left with is rarity. But "rarity by itself shouldn't necessarily be evidence of anything. When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion. Still it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable." [quote from John Allen Paulos, "Innumeracy"]

So here's the best reason for concluding that God doesn't exist: there's no need for God.

At least, not as an explanation for why the universe is what it is. God may fulfill various human needs (sense of meaning, relief from fear of death, and so on), but there's no reason the cosmos needs a reason for existing.

Bertrand Russell observed in an interesting radio debate on the existence of God, " I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all. " Of course, he still had a lot else to say. Russell was a philosopher, after all.

This makes increasing sense to me. The more I read scientific, religious, metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical speculation about the origin of the universe, the more ludicrous all this seems.

Russell said in the interview that "the concept of cause is not applicable to the total." Similarly, Loftus writes:

Whenever it comes to unexplainable "brute facts," we reach an impasse. We all must begin with something that exists as a "brute fact." Since this is the case, agnosticism is the default intellectual position. When leaving the default position, Christians must have reasons for struggling up the ladder to a full-blown Christianity, past pantheism, deism, Judaism, and Islam. Me? It's just easier to move in the direction agnosticism already pushes me toward, atheism.

In his book Loftus discusses (and demolishes) the classic arguments for God's existence. Everyone has their favorite reasons for believing or not believing. To me, the best reason for disbelief is that no reason for the universe is necessary.

When you ask a religious believer "Who or what created God?" likely they'll answer, "God simply is. Always has been, always will be."

OK, fine answer. Seemingly there has to be a point where rationality ends, where chains of cause and effect come to an end, where human consciousness runs up against a blank wall of primal Mystery.

However, there's no need for God to be that point. The universe serves just as well. So we can just as well say, "The cosmos simply is. Always has been, always will be."

Now, this doesn't mean for certain that there is no God. It simply means that there is no need to hypothesize that God exists. Which pretty much comes to the same thing, given the lack of evidence for God's existence.

Every religion, spiritual path, or mystic teaching that I'm aware of involves a belief that the essence of God or ultimate reality is a mystery. Why, then, look far afield in a speculative transcendent realm for the Great Unknown?

The edges of the physical universe are just as mysterious. What, if anything, lies beyond the time and space we experience now? Nobody knows.

Bow down before the mystery close at hand. There's no need to believe in any other.

If God is one, there’s no place to go

Like most people, I've got an affinity for one. It just seems so much more, well, together than two. Plus, nobody chants "We're #2! We're #2!" Or intones, "May we all realize our twoness."

Back when I was researching and writing a book about Plotinus, a Greek mystic philosopher, I spent a couple of years immersed in thoughts about oneness . After all, the title of the book is "Return to the One."

So some new comments on a well-commented older post caught my eye today. Adam said:

Tuscon,
you wrongly write:
"Philosophies like Sant Mat...are dualistic."

Sant Mat states that the reality is that God is oneness...and that duality is the illusion. The master and disciple play their parts in the play of illusion for the disciple to merge into oneness. Right?

tAo and Tucson disagreed. I did the same last year in "Is Sant Mat a non-dual spiritual practice?" It seems to me that anything can be made into one if you ignore enough parts. But is that really intrinsic oneness, especially when we're talking about ultimate reality?

If there's fifty puzzle pieces on a table top, and you ignore forty-nine of them, then you can speak of one. (Not very honestly, though.)

This seems to be Adam's argument, which is fairly common among religious believers who are attracted to unity but are members of a belief system that views God in a dualistic fashion.

They say, "Such and such, plus this and that, isn't really the foundation of our faith. These are just add-ons that obscure the simple truth that God is one."

Well, perhaps. In my previous post, though, I said:

If the overtly ritualistic and religious aspects of Sant Mat are discarded, you're left with a spiritual practice that could indeed be viewed as falling into the non-dual camp. Of course, this could be said of anything: if you take away the fluff, you're left with the essence.

What I wonder is, "Why not dive right into the essence, rather than spending time and energy wading through the fluff?" 

The older I get, the more I wonder this. Guess the next step would be to jump completely off the Wonder diving board.

Which, logically (and mystically) would land me right where I am: no movement at all.

Just about every mystic "path" has a story that runs along this line. Somebody is looking for something. He or she is frantic to find it. They run here and there, searching. And it turns out to be…right under their feet.

(For example, the In Baghdad Dreaming of Cairo tale.)

These stories resonate with me. They have a ring of truth. Especially after you've spent many years seeking in various directions.

The one place we usually fail to look for the meaning of life is right where we are. And even when a religion or spiritual path mouths the words, "Here and now," the faith's rites, rituals, and practices belie that message.

Discard all that, and where does that leave you? Probably, the place you want to be.

Anti-Pascal’s wager bets on life

Pascal's Wager frequently is held up as a reason to believe in God. As I noted in a previous post ("You're religious, but are you right?"), Pascal argued that it's best to gamble on belief.

There are four possible outcomes to the wager: (1) You believe in God and God exists, (2) You believe in God and God doesn't exist, (3) You don't believe in God and God exists, (4) You don't believe in God and God doesn't exist. Pascal held that the best and worst outcomes are (1) and (3) in which God exists. Then, a belief in God leads to eternal salvation, while disbelief leads to eternal damnation.

Even if God doesn't exist, Pascal argued that you should believe in God because this offers consolation and peace of mind while you're living—though no benefit after death. All in all, then, the benefits of believing seem to markedly exceed the benefits of not believing.

Well, not really. It's easy to refute Pascal's Wager in various ways (see here and here).

One refutation is that even if God exists, we have no idea what God's nature is. So how is it possible to believe in an entity about which, or whom, nothing is known? The belief would have to be without content – an acceptance of raw existence without attributes.

In line with this, who can say that God wants us to believe? This is the position of Clifford Pickover, which I quoted in my earlier post. He says:

I think it's even possible that God could be unhappy with those who are not rational, who believe in all sorts of things without being logical about it…I even think that such a God might punish believers for their credulity and reward clear thinkers that don't succumb to peer pressure and so forth. Of all the creatures on Earth, humans are the only ones that God gave the most intelligence, so obviously God wants us to use our intellect and to be freethinkers. So when we die, God will reward freethinkers. He won't be happy with people who tossed their reason away in favor of ignorance.

That's an appealing hypothesis for the churchless. But it's still just conjecture. The anti-Pascal Wager, however, has a lot more foundation in clear and present reality: the life we're living now. Richard Dawkins put it this way:

Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc.

Undeniably, there's a lot to like about religion. Believers meet nice people. They do good works. They feel part of a community. They have a way of looking at the world that gives meaning to their lives.

Question is: does any of this good stuff require a belief in God? In other words, can you get all of the benefits of religion, without the nasty side effects, from an agnostic, atheistic, or non-deistic (such as a Buddhist or Taoist) stance?

I say, "sure."

A big benefit of living life without religion is that it commits you to living in the here and now, rather than the there and then. You don't have one mental foot in an imaginary after life, which causes believers to be unbalanced in earthly reality.

Interestingly, the anti-Pascal wager ends up being in line with many deeply mystical teachings. Meister Eckhart, for example, said that it is necessary to give up "God" in order to know the Godhead.

That is, our conceptions of divinity prevent us from realizing the wordless mystery of ultimate reality. We believe we know truths that we're actually ignorant of. So sincere not-knowing turns out to be a more spiritual course of action than fraudulent believing.

Pascal's Wager is founded on a belief that we can know God's payoff. The anti-Wager is a more honest bet: nobody knows what will occur in the next life, so we need to make the most of this one.

Why God loves the churchless so much

When I'm not being grandiose and am feeling my normal humble self, I like to imagine how God sees things.

This isn't difficult for me to do – it's easy really – because after almost forty years of daily meditation my ego loss is so nearly complete, I'm in touch with the highest realms of reality.

(Just don't ask my wife to confirm this. Unfortunately, she still denies my divinity. But isn't there some sort of saying about a prophet not being recognized in his own land? Or…home?)

Anyway, I've been pondering why God would love me and other churchless souls so much more than fundamentalist believers. My ponders feel like they're coming directly from God, as do the answers. Thus I'm confident that what I'm about to say is the god-given truth.

If you don't agree, well, clearly Satan has got you terribly confused. I'm sorry, but that's the only explanation. Because following up on my previous undeniable metaphysical truths, here's some additional really real reality.

I begin by assuming that God, if such exists, is either going to have a personal or an impersonal nature. I suppose there could be other possibilities, but it's tough to envision them. (A God-machine, for example, would be impersonal).

A couple of years ago the true name of God was revealed to me through the grace of some extra-strong coffee. It is: Galobet

The first three letters of God's name reflect a personal nature: G-God; A-Allah; L-Lord. The fourth, O-One, is more impersonal, but early on Christianity absorbed the Neoplatonic "One" into a monotheistic worldview. The last three letters are decidedly impersonal: B-Brahman; E-Emptiness (Buddhist); T-Tao.

Now, if God's nature is impersonal, the question of love really doesn't arise. At least, not in any humanly recognizable sense. In Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism the ultimate doesn't love us like a good friend, spouse, close relative, or other loved one would.

Rather, love is more like an integral aspect of the cosmos, an aspect of unity – if not identical with it. Something that is One can be said to love itself, since there's nothing other than it.

So I've got the impersonal bases covered, given my fondness for this philosophical position. Heck, I even wrote a book about it, "Return to the One."

What if God is personal, though? Well, then the question becomes, "What sort of person is God?" There's no agreement among the world's religions.

The Christian personal God is much different from the Islamic personal God, as is the Judaic personal God. Then we've got all kinds of other personal Gods, such as that described by the Bahai faith, by Sant Mat, and by other mystico-spiritual faiths of both the East and West.

Most people make a guess about what sort of person God is, and leave it at that. Meaning, they either accept the religion they were born into, or they grab onto a monotheistic belief system that makes the most sense to them.

The way I see it, this is a bad bet. If God is the sort of person who wants to be known and loved as he/she/it is, rather than how humans imagine God to be, then blind faith isn't going to be pleasing to the ultimate divinity.

It's as if someone you had never seen in person said, "I'll meet you at Starbucks," and before confirming that you had come across the right individual you started hugging the first guy or girl you saw in the coffee house and forgot about finding who you were really supposed to meet.

My churchless way of looking at the world is aimed at not making such a mistake. I'm no longer willing to make a leap of faith into the arms of whatever personal God (in my case, that of Sant Mat) appeals to my whim.

Now, a leap like that strikes me as being disparaging, or even insulting, to a personal God. I figure that if God exists, then God will appreciate my waiting to embrace him/her/it until divinity truly makes an appearance. I don't want to be distracted by a poseur or fake when the Real Thing is still to be found.

Thus I'm open to however God wants to make an appearance. I'm here, Ultimate Dude or Dudette. Stop by and say hello whenever you've got a moment. Or, eternity.

Hope you love my attitude. If not, I've got an interesting afterlife awaiting. (As will also be the case "if so".)

No problem with God not being perfect

Perfection and God are two words that go hand in hand. Most people feel that an imperfect God would be no God at all.

Some of the qualities usually associated with divinity are omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence.

Well, if a being was all-powerful, all-knowing, present everywhere, and had love for everyone and everything, I can see why this entity would be deserving of being called perfect.

But why does "God," which I use as a synonym for ultimate reality, have to be perfect? What's perfect about perfection?

I got thinking about this when I came to the first page (p. 276) in Richard Carrier's "Sense and Goodness Without God" where I was impelled to pencil in (actually, highlighter in) some marginal question marks. Carrier says:

For example, it is obvious that a perfect being, by any definition, could not and would not create an imperfect universe, yet the universe is imperfect, therefore God cannot be perfect. This does not prove there is no God, but it does prove that given the way the universe plainly is, if any God exists, he is imperfect.

My first reaction to this was, "Who the heck can say what perfect is?" I sure can't. Wouldn't you have to be the essence of perfection yourself in order to perfectly recognize perfection?

Assuming that such a creature, perfection, even exists. Intuitively, I suspect this is a human conception, not an inherent quality of the cosmos. It makes a lot more sense to me that the universe simply is what it is. If someone wants to call that "perfection," I could agree with that.

But to posit some hypothetical state that is completely different from what can be experienced in our earthly state of existence – what purpose is there in that?

To make his argument, Carrier assumes, along with religious believers, that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being wouldn't have created us or the universe as we are.

Why death, suffering, disease, injustice...all the stuff that makes for a bad day (or life). Shouldn't all this negative crap have been eliminated from the creation by a perfect Creator?

Even a heartless deity would at least make his creation less messy and chaotic, unless mess and chaos were the very things he wanted.

Ah. Now there's a notion that resonates with my Taoist soul. Chaos is embraced by Taoist philosophy.

Hun-tun, that is Chaos, is not to be confused with the chaos as typically seen in the western world as in "chaotic." It is the supreme ideal of Taoism. Chaos is wholeness, oneness and Nature. Chaos represents the natural state of the world. Digging holes on the head of Chaos means destroying the natural state of the cosmos. Therefore, to the ancient Chinese chaos not only has the meaning of disorder but also presents a respectable aesthetic state. This idea of chaos may be very different from its western counterpart.

Recently I got a decidedly imperfect coffee cup. I love it. It's perfect for me.

So is an imperfect God. Which, for me, is better called Nature. I understand why people like the notion that somewhere or sometime perfection will make an appearance.

But I'd rather grasp imperfection in my hand than continually be running after a perfect will of the wisp.

Desiring God isn’t a proof of God

Oh, my God! I'm absolutely loving "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality." So much so, this morning I finished it, fueled by a strong cup of pre-meditation coffee and the joy of reading good writing.

As I said before, Andre Comte-Sponville has a wonderful approach to spirituality.

I started to say "in spite of the fact that he's a philosophy professor," but there's no spite involved here. Comte-Sponville's book springs as much from his life experience as his philosophical experience (assuming there's a difference between life and philosophy, which, really, there isn't – living includes everything).

There's so much that I like in these 206 pages, it's hard to know what to choose as a blog subject. Here's a rundown on a subchapter that made me go Oh, yeah, so true: "Desire and Illusion."

First, some personal sharing, because it relates to what Comte-Sponville is getting at. My parents divorced when I was just a few years old. I had no contact with my father until my mid-30s. No phone conversations. No letters. No visits.

Just a Christmas card, most years, with a small check and a single word: "John." Not, "love, John," or anything else. Just his first name.

So my father was a lot like God to me as I was growing up: unseen and unknown.

I believed he existed, because my mother told me a few things about him (not much, though). And I wanted to know him, because I felt that I was missing something – a lot, actually – by not having a father, like the rest of my friends did (divorce was much rarer in the 50's and 60's).

I'd lie in bed as a kid, talking to God, asking why I didn't have a father and requesting that one be sent to me, ASAP. But no response. From God, or my father. Until events led to me seeing my father for one hour.

Here's what I said at the end of that post:

When the door shut behind me and I started walking down the corridor to my rented car, I was so happy. Not happy that I had finally gotten to meet my father—happy that I would never have to see my father again.

Which I never did.

Moral to this story? If there is one, it's that fantasies aren't reality and what you get in life often is better than what you want in life. Growing up, I wanted my father. When I was grown up, that one hour with him taught me that I was hugely better off fatherless.

Now, we could psychoanalyze the relationship between my physical-father and Godly-father desires. But, let's not. Believe me, I've done a lot of that over my 59 years, and it doesn't lead to much. Everybody's childhood was screwed up somehow.

That's the nature of life, of reality, of existence. Imperfection. Suffering. Desires, some fulfilled, some unfulfilled.

Here's the beginning of Comte-Sponville's "Desire and Illusion" section:

Yes, I desperately wish that God existed, and I see this as a particularly convincing argument not to believe he does. This is only apparently contradictory. To be an atheist is not necessarily to be against God. Why would I be against what does not exist? Personally, I would go even further and admit that I would definitely prefer that there be a god. This is just why, in my eyes, all religions are suspicious.

Isn't it amazing, a remarkable stroke of luck, the good news that every religion brings us: fulfillment of our deepest human desires is precisely how the cosmos has been fashioned, if we follow the tenets of a particular faith.

Now, what does religion tell us – and the Christian religion in particular? That we shall not die, or not really; that we shall rise from the dead and thus be reunited with the loved ones we have lost; that justice and peace will prevail in the end; and, finally, that we are already the object of an infinite love. Who could ask for more? No one, of course! This is what makes religion so very suspicious. As the saying goes, it is too good to be true!

If there's anything I've learned in my nearly six decades of life experience, it's that life doesn't always (or even usually) give me what I want. Hmmmm. I recall hearing that sentiment before.

Yet religions tell me that this evident fact actually is an illusion. I can have what I want; I just need to belly up to a particular religious bar and be served a divine drink that, Wow!, takes all my troubles away. Price: submission, faith, obedience.

What a deal! Like Comte-Sponville says, it seems too good to be true. For a good reason: almost certainly it isn't true.

I threw in "almost." I have to, just as Comte-Sponville does. Nobody knows whether God exists, what happens after death, if some religion really does have a corner on the Ultimate Truth market. We're simply talking about the preponderance of evidence here.

And that points to a different way of looking at life.

What I care about is not my own advantage, but truth – and nothing can guarantee that the two go hand in hand. Indeed, it is rather unlikely that they should, given the particular nature of my advantage and the universal nature of truth.

…Given an alleged reality that nothing attests but which corresponds to our most powerful wishes, we have every reason to suspect it of being the expression of those very wishes, and indeed (as Freud says) directly derived from them – to suspect it, in other words, of having the structure of an illusion.

…An illusion [quoting Freud] is "a belief derived from human wishes" – a desiring credo, you might call it, or a credulous desire.

…Thus illusion is not a particular sort of error; it is a particular sort of belief. To be deluded is to believe that something is true because one wants it to be true. Humanly speaking, nothing could be more comprehensible. Philosophically speaking, nothing could be more dubious.

Anything is possible.

My father could have turned out to be a sterling example of male humanity, simply one who, for some mysterious reason, chose to distance himself from me for some thirty years and engage in seemingly uncaring behavior (like never paying child support to my mother).

Likewise, God could turn out to be real, a being who loves us and will take care of us in every respect after we die, assuming we win his favor beforehand. Maybe God has his own reasons for not fulfilling our desires now. Maybe the cosmos really has been designed for our eternal, but not temporal, satisfaction.

Maybe. But it's doubtful.

"We are inclined by nature to find it easy to believe what we hope for, and hard to believe what we fear," Spinoza wrote in his Ethics. "Whence," he added, "the superstitions by which men are everywhere dominated." All the more reason to be wary of our beliefs, when they start resembling our hopes too closely!

Are you God? Take the test.

Lots of people believe that God can manifest in a human form.

So, why not yours or mine? Speaking for myself (though if I'm God, I'm really speaking for everybody), I'm hugely attracted to the notion that I'm worthy of worship.

Unfortunately, other people aren't as attuned to my potential divinity. Notably, my wife. For eighteen years I've been trying to convince her that the way I load the dishwasher is The Way It Should Be, by divine decree.

For some reason she can't recognize my husbandly perfection. So today I was excited to see a post on the Radhasoami Studies forum, "How to Tell Whether You Are God," anticipating that it could convince my wife that I am.

Big letdown. I scored zero. Here's the test.

Some individuals on this forum may have difficulty discerning whether
or not they are God in Human Form. The following easy test should
help you determine this.

1. Can you fly through the air, without an aircraft? Tornadoes don't
count. If you feel you can do this, try flying from home to New York
City to Los Angeles and back home, to confirm your capability in this
regard.

2. Can you dematerialize and rematerialize at any location, at will,
instantly? Try hopping to Istanbul, Belfast, Moscow, Toronto,
Auckland, Delhi and Ulan Bator.

3. Are you omniscient? Get the closing prices for all stocks on the
major US exchanges for the coming week, and post them on an
investment web site, in advance. Ask the readers to see whether you
are God in Human Form.

4. Can you resurrect the dead? Try resurrecting 14 famous people who
have died in the past year, and while you're at it, cure the medical
conditions (including old age) that caused their death. Then hold a
press conference in which you present them. Make sure to have a
medical doctor present to take DNA samples to confirm their identity.

5. Can you post to the Internet without using a computer? Try it.

6. Can you time-travel? Bring back some extinct species for the
perusal of scientists.

7. Can you materialize objects at will? Go to a homeless shelter, and
materialize one million dollars in $20 bills for each resident.

8. Are you perfect in mind and body? Take an IQ test and see whether
you get the highest possible score. Time how long it takes for you to
run a mile.

9. Are you invulnerable, like Superman? Try going through a wood
chipper.

Scoring: If you pass all the tests, if you are not God, at least you
are a contender. If you missed any questions, sorry!

Though this test is humorous, it's got a serious side. There really are people walking around today who believe that they are God. Many others revere a living human being who is considered to be an incarnation of God.

Yet godly characteristics or abilities are nowhere to be found. That's why I enjoyed this post by ratnagarrao. If God has come down to our level, shouldn't there be something miraculous in the air?

Of course, we can redefine "God" so that the meaning is equivalent to the qualities of whoever claims this title. I've been taking this approach when I tell my wife that how I load the dishwasher is the ideal way it should be loaded.

Then, after I see her shake her head, I step back and let her rearrange the plates, cups, and wine glasses.

Jellyfish and God, the differences

Main difference: jellyfish are real.

I'm so certain of this, today I sat for two hours on Maui's Napili Beach, watching terrific large boogie boardable waves from the sand, passing them by because of jellyfish warning signs that had been posted.

Having just invested a lot of time in pondering jellyfish, much more than I've ever done before, I've been trying to fathom what cosmic significance this dangerous sea creature (whose sting toxin supposedly is seventy-five percent as powerful as cobra venom) has for my spiritual development.

Assuming it has any at all. But it's no fun to go the nada route, so I'll assume my frustrating perch on the beach contains some sort of message for me.

What struck me, watching the waves crash into Napili Bay, is how virtually every beachgoer respected the warning signs – and, likely, word of mouth "jellyfish" messages.

Big waves usually bring out big wave players. Boogie boarders. Surfers. Bobbers. But today there were very few; none out where the waves were breaking; some close to shore. A big difference from other large wave days.

Lots of people consider science to be an unreliable way of knowing truth, compared with religion. However, when it comes to assessing the risk of venturing into water where jellyfish warnings have been posted, almost everybody uses the scientific method.

Including me. Sitting on the beach, desperately wanting to paddle out and catch some waves, I ran through the costs and benefits of taking a chance on the warning being spurious.

I pondered what little I knew about jellyfish. I talked the situation over with another man whose boogie board was sitting high and dry.

I remembered the Hawaiian adage, "If you don't see locals playing in the waves, usually there's a good reason why; don't be the first person out surfing or boogie boarding unless you're sure you know what the conditions in the water are."

In the physical world, by and large there are good reasons to go with the factual crowd. Studies have shown that group assessments of a situation are more accurate than the average person's (this is why the stock market is a decent predictor of the economic outlook).

So there I was, someone with a blog whose tagline is "Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence," sitting on the sand – going with the jellyfish warning-believing crowd.

Because material isn't spiritual.

When I know something is dangerous, and I've been told that this something has been sighted nearby, it makes sense to avoid it. If I see almost everyone else around me doing just that – staying away from it – my concern tends to be confirmed.

On the other hand, belief in God or other supernatural beings is a lot different. The beach could be plastered with "Warning: Devil in the water" signs, and I'd laugh right by them on my way into the ocean.

Yet the strange thing is, so many people believe them. Like, the Bible. Whereas they'll use logic, reason, and common sense when it comes to deciding whether to venture into a Maui bay, when it comes to religion blind faith rules.

Why don't believers go in the water even though a jellyfish warning is posted? Won't Jesus protect them? Supposedly he's going to save their souls after they die. Can't he save them from a jellyfish sting while they're alive?

Seeking answers to these questions, I checked out www.God.com this evening. I was curious to see which of the world's religions had the rights to this primo domain name. As I could have guessed, it was Christian evangelicals.

There's only six Q and A's on the web site, way less than the questions in my mind. One was germane to my jellyfish situation, though.

I am going through countless problems in my life. It seems to be one thing after the other. I pray every day that God will help me, but He doesn't seem to listen or do anything. Why doesn't God answer my prayers?

My problem precisely. Why the hell did God combine beautiful waves in Napili Bay with a jellyfish warning, when I've been praying for another day of good boogie boarding all week?

The answer started off in an discouraging fashion.

Sometimes when you pick up the telephone receiver to call someone, you find the line is dead. If you ignore this and just talk into the telephone anyway, will the person at the other end hear you and respond?

No, they won't. Because the line is dead and I'm talking to myself. If the God.com web site had ended its answer on this note, that would have been cool – a verification of my churchless leanings.

But it went on to explain why we don't get a response.

It is not that God cannot hear your prayers or that He does not want to listen; the problem lies in the individual: "Your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you."

Well, I'd consider this possibility if someone could show me God's face so I'd know what I'm separated from.

When I got back to our room I turned on my laptop, fired up Google, and found lots of images of jellyfish. Shouldn't God be at least as well-known as the Portuguese Man of War?

I found an earlier jellyfish warning that blamed the West Maui problem on southerly winds, which is the meteorological situation today. That's a reasonable explanation for why I was separated from the waves.

However, God.com didn't do nearly as well in explaining what I have to do to get together with God. Supposedly He won't listen to me until the barrier of my sins is broken down. Until that happens, my prayers are useless.

I need a relationship with God. Then He will pay attention to me. And how do I get our relating going?

To establish that relationship, you must first believe without any doubt that God exists.

Oh, come on, dude! The Bible says you created jellyfish, but I know way more about their existence than yours. That's crazy. How about showing me some skin (or whatever form you have)? Then I'll start believing in you.

At least a little bit.

The Mystical Mind of God

Last week I got a present: an email from someone who attached a wonderfully written essay, "The Mystical Mind of God."

I asked for permission to share it. Whatever you wish, came the reply, though please, if you do decide to do something, leave no footprints to my door.

So the author is anonymous. Here's the piece in Word and PDF formats. It's thoughtful and well worth reading.

Download the_mystical_mind_of_god.doc
Download the_mystical_mind_of_god.pdf

I enjoyed…

--the emphasis on Western mystics and thinkers, who tend to get short shrift in mystically-inclined writings

--how the author weaves together insights from theology, philosophy, psychology, and science

--the nicely fashioned prose, reflecting a pleasing blend of seriousness and "lightness of being"

--the observation that The Cloud of Unknowing was "written anonymously by a late fourteenth century monk (anonymous because his skin wasn't fireproof)."

--that the path to God begins and ends at an accessible point: now

Regarding the last point, I don't know if it's true. But it sure seems more plausible to me than all the religious teachings that would have us wend our way to God through time and space.

What do you think?

Skepticism is genuine faith

Fairly frequently people question, Why this Church of the Churchless blog? I've got an email in my "to reply" file that asks just this.

Why be critical of religion? Why discuss the believability of theological tenets, including those of the group to which I belonged for thirty years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas? Why place articles of faith under the looking glass of reality?

Because truth is worthy of veneration.

Now, some people consider that there is no such thing as objective truth, that reality is whatever we consider it to be. There's, well, some truth to this.

But you see – I've just made my point. Even the statement "there's no objective truth" has some truth content, or why say it?

For me it comes down to where my allegiance lies. I'm a semi-serious sports fan, paying special attention to the Oregon Ducks and Oregon State Beavers, two colleges within fifty miles of my home.

Depending on how well a U. of O. or OSU team is doing, I'll identify with it for a while. When the team wins, I feel good, because I've won also in some crazy sense. Losing, not so pleasant, for the same reason.

However, my genuine commitment is to the game, not teams. I enjoy the physical and psychological drama of sports, the ebb and flow of an event, how games are won and lost in such entertaining and interesting ways.

Other people are attached much more to a particular team, just as a religion attracts adherents for whom certain dogmas are the be-all and end-all of spirituality.

They aren't committed to the game of finding truth, but to identifying with a group that claims without justification to be the winner.

I say "without justification" because there's no proof that any religion or spiritual path is more in tune with a metaphysical reality than its competitors.

That's why four years ago I said on my other blog, "Heresy is heretical."

Usually we think of heretics in the realm of religion, not of science. Someone who disagrees with a well-accepted scientific "truth" (using this word advisably, since all scientific truth is open to refutation) usually is considered to be wrong, not heretical. And if a truth, or law of nature, isn't well-accepted because it hasn't been scientifically proven, then heresy is unthinkable; when there is no orthodoxy, there can be no heresy.

I've been enjoying the comment discussion on my "Playing fair with words" post. Some has dealt with the issue of believers feeling superior to non-believers, because they've been chosen for God's team.

In the case of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, people attending a gathering were classed as either "seekers" or "satsangis," depending on whether they'd been initiated into the fold or not. The obvious implication was that once you became a satsangi, you'd found.

Problem is, there was precious little evidence that anything uniquely godly, spiritual, or mystical had indeed been found by the chosen initiates – who supposedly were destined to join the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization because eons ago they'd been "marked" by God in some mysterious fashion.

I don't believe in that proposition anymore, even though I'm supposed to be one of the blessed chosen souls. But I've got faith. Faith in truth.

Faith that somewhere, somehow, someday – and that "where," "how," and "day" is here and now, as well as there and then – humankind will come closer to the truth about ultimate reality.

How do we get there? By questioning, being skeptical about hypothesized truths until there's reason to embrace them

I quoted this passage from A.H. Armstrong, a classics scholar, in my earlier post. It resonates with me as much now as it did then.

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.

Nicely said. Deifying a human opinion indeed is blasphemy, if God exists. Blessed are the skeptics, for they shall inherit genuine truth.

No, Virginia, Santa Claus is just as unreal as God

I've managed to only read the dreadful "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" piece a few times in my 59 years. It pops up each Christmas day in every newspaper that I've subscribed to. I notice it, but rush on to more important stuff – like the comics and sports page.

Today I decided to see if I could read this response to an eight year old girl, first published in the New York Sun in 1897, without getting sick to my churchless stomach.

I suspected that this syrupy drivel wouldn't go down so well now that I've become much more of a religious skeptic. I was right. My granddaughter is just nine months old, but I'm going to warn her parents now: Don't ever let her read this crap!

Understand, I've got nothing against Christmas. Except everything about it that has to do with Christ.

If people would just leave out the whole ridiculous fantasy thing about a guy being born of a virgin and forced by his father in heaven to die miserably on a cross because some chick ate an apple a long time ago which pissed God off so much he had to sacrifice his only son to make things right, then we could celebrate the holidays in a fine fashion, just as the pagans intended before Christians and Big Business messed things up.

Here are my comments, in red italics, on Francis Church's attempt to keep Virginia O'Hanlon believing in both Santa Claus and God.

-----------------------------------

"Dear Editor: I am 8 years old.
A good age to start learning about reality.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
They're catching on to truth. Good for them.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
We've come a long way from this blind belief in media reporting. Thank god. Except if there really was a good god, Fox News wouldn't exist.
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
The truth. This is what Virginia wants. But she gets bullshit.

"Virginia O'Hanlon.
"115 West Ninety-Fifth Street."

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. Otherwise known as "The Enlightenment" and the "Age of Science." They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. Compared to what? In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. Ah, the B.S. begins. Could this "intelligence" be, perhaps, just maybe, God? Methinks that's what Francis is getting at.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Horrible reasoning. What logical connection is there between a fat man in a red suit who slides down chimneys and love? Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. Highly debatable. I sort of suspect that if all the children in the world vanished, that'd have just a bit more effect on things than if belief in an imaginary man went away. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. So tell me, Francis, how much enjoyment would you have with no senses and no sight? That's called a coma, basically. Doesn't sound like much fun to me.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! Well, gosh, I don't! And probably Virginia doesn't either. Do children have to believe in everything imaginary to get a glimpse of your fabulous "eternal light"? You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. So how does anybody know about them? Oh, right. They imagine them. But how does this make them real? Dude, get real. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. Well, if anybody can, I'd bet on you, Francis. But I don't want you infecting children with a belief that the unseen and unseeable is more important than the seen and seeable. That way lies fundamentalist religious madness.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. You lived before "atom smashers" (particle accelerators) Francis, so I'll give you a bit of a pass on this falsity. Still, even back then you knew that science was revealing all sorts of previously unseen wonders. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. Faith. Finally, the word comes in after Francis has softened Virginia up. Accept an unseen Santa Claus and it isn't much of a leap to embrace…

No Santa Claus! Thank God! Oh, yeah, now we're getting down to it! God! And what do people say about God? he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood. Hard to tell who the "he" is now. Santa Claus, or God. Francis tries to merge the two, knowing that if children give up a belief in one imaginary unseen entity, there's no telling what other blind faiths will bite the dust next.

-----------------------------------

Today I also read a wonderful essay posted at The Daily Kos, "A Dog at Christmas." This is a tale I'd much rather have my granddaughter hear. It's mostly about how dogs – and wise humans – don't pay attention to the fantastical aspects of Christmas, just what they can sense and see.

A sample:

This of course all makes perfect sense, as my dog is not Saved, and would therefore have no reason to suspect Christmas was anything more than another day. Dogs have yet to have anyone die for their sins, and are therefore, according to most theologians, banned from heaven along with all other animals, plants, rocks, and the vast majority of human beings. I have never tried to explain heaven to my dog, and am not sure I could if I tried: aside from the language problem, I have my doubts that my dog would even accept the basic premise. Dogs tend to be literal creatures, not prone to belief in anything they cannot smell, hear, see, or bite.

You can explain the concept of cow or skunk or deer or snake all you want, but the dog will not understand any of it until it suddenly happens upon one or the other of them in a field. Ah ha!, the dog will say. This is something new! And then the dog will classify it according to the very simple and entirely sufficient rules passed down by dogs from generation to generation. They will file it away in the parts of their brains that organize things into bigger than me or smaller than me, dangerous or not dangerous, delicious or not delicious, and so on, and then get on with their lives.

So I am not sure that a dog would understand the central concept of heaven, which is that God is so magnificent, magnanimous, and kind that He created an entire universe for us, surrounding a planet of immeasurable nuance and beauty, with more hidden meadows and grand vistas and deep, river-carved canyons than any one of us could explore in a hundred lifetimes, and He gave us existence itself, and that he is furthermore so magnificent, magnanimous and kind that He then devised a plan to save some of us from this selfsame miserable rathole of a universe he created and put us somewhere else, upon our death -- a place of brilliant light, and fluffy clouds, and absolutely no pain, or frustrations, or sadness, or embarrassment, or surprises, or explorations, or consequences.

Lastly, here's another cynical take on "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

Intelligence analysts assess the evidence for God

I wish this would happen – competent, professional, skilled intelligence analysts sitting around a table, sifting through factual evidence for the existence of God, in the same fashion as was done recently with the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concerning Iran's nuclear weapons program.

I'd love to be able to listen to the discussion. And see what evidence would be considered worthy of supporting a "Yes, God exists" assessment.

It'd be slim to non-existent, for sure.

Just as the evidence for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction was. Yet the United States intelligence community got that wrong. So why should anybody trust their current conclusion that Iran halted a covert nuclear weapons program in 2003?

Or that God doesn't/does exist?

Well, today I heard Rand Beers of the National Security Network interviewed on talk radio. Beers has extensive national security experience and spoke knowledgeably about how the sixteen U.S. spy agencies did things differently this time.

Basically, they thought things through a lot more independently and critically. Beers said that alternative explanations for intelligence findings were actively explored, rather than trying to fit those findings into prior interpretative frameworks.

Sounds like good advice for anyone assessing the evidence for and against God's existence.

Yes, many have claimed to have received a divine revelation. That's a fact. But there are lots of ways of interpreting it.

I considered a few in my "Who is the guru?" post. By guru I meant anyone who is considered to be God in human form, or at least a conduit for God's messages, which naturally includes Jesus. I noted that Bart Ehrman, a Biblical scholar, says there are four options for considering who Jesus was.

Liar, lunatic, the Lord, or a legend. I added a fourth possibility for gurus: loyalist. Meaning, someone who doesn't speak the truth about what they know (or don't know) about God because it would threaten tradition and an organizational heritage.

Here's what Agence France-Presse (AFP) said in a story about the Iran National Intelligence Estimate:

Senior US intelligence officials said this week they were responding to new information, subjected to more rigorous analysis than in the past, in declaring with "high confidence" that Iran halted a covert nuclear weapons program in 2003.

… And unlike 2002, when US intelligence officials complained of administration pressure to "cherry-pick" intelligence that supported going to war, the intelligence community this time has asserted its independence.

"This is ours," a senior intelligence official said this week, telling reporters that policymakers had no input in the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate, as the assessment is called.

The AFP story says that an expert had reached the same conclusion as the NIE two years earlier – that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons program so it could play by the rules while still maintaining a nuclear "breakout" option.

US intelligence failed to see it [the new Iran strategy] sooner, he said, because it was intent on finding evidence to support the assumption that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.

"But if you don't take that assumption and you look for an alternative explanation, it's relatively easy to find."

Exploring alternatives. Open-mindedness. Critical thinking. This is how truth is arrived at, whether worldly or godly. If a policy pronouncement or dogma is taken on faith, reality gets short shrift.

A bit over two years ago I was fired as a speaker by my spiritual organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas. The reason: my writings on this blog were making people uncomfortable.

In my opinion, that's a good thing. The person who is made most uncomfortable by me is, clearly, me. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm an inveterate questioner and experimenter. I'm my mother's child, as I wrote about here and here. She loved to debate, to learn, to explore new territory in the boundless World of Knowledge.

She died not knowing whether God exists, or not. Just as we all will. The difference is that most people uncritically accept the religious dogma they've been given rather than challenging it. My mother didn't. She never stopped searching for truth that could be counted on, not merely believed.

This is just what intelligence analysts do. The competent ones, at least.

Question, question, question. That's the only way answers will be found.

Embracing God in my brain

I'm still trying to get my head around the main message of a book that I'm reading: God is in the brain.

And not just "God," whatever this famously fuzzy word means, but also every form of religious, spiritual, or mystical experience.

This shouldn't be a big surprise, to me or anybody else. Yet the more I dig into The Mystical Mind, by Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg, the more I'm having to re-examine some deeply held and largely unconscious beliefs.

Like, the notion that when I'm meditating, something marvelously mysterious is going on. Or, at least, could go on if I were able to turn the key that unlocks the door separating Me from It – really real reality that is out there somewhere, though I'm completely clueless about "where" and "there."

Most meditators and spiritual aspirants feel this way. But you'd think (or rather, I'd think) that with my decidedly churchless attitude toward spirituality, my attitude would be firmly in line with d'Aquili and Newberg's.

Echoing a quotation I included in my last post, they say:

The implication is that the brain and the mind either generate mystical states or allow us to experience mystical states. Differentiating whether the brain and mind actually cause mystical phenomena or are merely the necessary occasion for them is most difficult.

The former implies that mystical phenomena are completely caused and contained within the functions of the brain and mind. The latter requires that mystical phenomena exist "out there" in the external world, which can then be experienced by human beings through the brain and mind.

We have argued in the past that the most problematic aspect of this issue is that the only way in which to solve this problem is somehow to get out of the function of our brain and mind, since, so far as we know, everything about the world, both internal and external, comes to us through the brain.

Thus, it is difficult to form an epistemological perspective to determine the true reality of any phenomenon, whether it be mystical or ordinary in nature.

That's for sure. The kitchen stool I'm sitting on feels hard at the moment. But "hard," obviously, is my feeling. I just said as much. To someone else with a differently sensitized posterior, another adjective would apply. So what's the true reality of the situation? Tough to say.

Similarly, even a powerful mystical experience like the one James Austin described at the start of this story is happening inside a human brain. A physical lump of matter. A concoction of chemical and electrical impulses. A piece of flesh.

The Mystical Mind is full of sentences like these, which are describing what happens in passive meditation, often called the via negativa.

The partial deafferentation of the right orientation association area likely results in stimulation of the right hippocampus by means of the very rich interconnections between the orientation association area and the hippocampus.

If, in addition, there is a simultaneous direct stimulation of the right hippocampus from the right attention association area, then the right hippocampus ultimately stimulates the quiescent centers of the right amygdala.

Oh, now I know what I've been doing wrong in my meditation. Got to do a better job of stimulating my right amygdala. Whatever the heck it is.

But seriously…I'm beginning to settle comfortably into an obvious truth that hadn't really dawned on me until this book hammered it home. Every experience that I have, whether meditative or otherwise, comes to me via my brain.

More, my brain and my experience aren't two separate entities. We're one and the same. Brain/Brian.

Naturally this isn't true just for me. It's true for everyone.

There's little (or no) doubt that if you stuck Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Buddha, Lao Tzu, or anyone else in a brain scanner while they were communing with God or ultimate reality, their mystical experience would be reflected in a particular pattern of brain activity.

I find this to be a comforting thought, one which brings me closer to myself. And, my thoughts. Along with all the other experiences that my mind and brain generate through their fantastically complex neuronal goings-on.

There may indeed be a spiritual "out there." But as d'Aquili and Newberg said, there's no way to tell whether a mystical or religious experience is solely the internal product of a brain, or whether it reflects an independently existing external reality.

All we know for sure is that the brain is where it's at – what's happening.

And that's marvelously close to home, for all of us. There's nothing nearer to me than my brain. It's what just typed out those words, and came up with the thought, "It's what just typed out those words."

The idea of "nearer, my God, to thee" is appealing to many. Me too.

Yet it could well be that the "God" being sought for is a lot nearer than we could ever imagine. As near as the brain that imagines, in fact.

Fifty proofs that God is imaginary

Ah, it feels great to have my faithlessness freshened.

Thanks to God is Imaginary, I've been able to browse through cleansing pools of skepticism – proofs (some more persuasive than others) that the Big Guy Upstairs is a figment of religious imagination.

The ones I looked at resonated with me. Proof #11 -Notice that there is no scientific evidence is something I've pondered a lot. It goes along with Proof #43 - Realize that a "hidden God" is impossible.

Impossible for a Christian-sort of religion that posits a personal divinity who's interested in us, at least. For if God wants to be known via miracles, incarnations, and whatnot, then it sure seems like there should be substantive signs of this being's interactions with the world.

In fact, there aren't any.

Prayers come in for especially strong mocking, earning the primo position: Proof #1 - Try praying. Over on a companion web site, Why Won't God Heal Amputees?, I perused the executive summary and noticed "the best optical delusion in the world!."

Yeah, it's good all right. And I've fallen for it myself more than once.

Nice site. I appreciated the Resources for Rational People – a fine compendium of web sites, blogs, books, videos, forums, and such. A cornucopia of non-dogmatism.

Spinoza’s God is Einstein’s God. And, mine.

I'm a long ways – a very long ways – from sharing Albert Einstein's understanding of the universe. But when it comes to Einstein's religious bent, we're almost soul brothers. Just as, I suspect, many other churchless people are.

As described in a TIME article, "Einstein and Faith," in 1930 Einstein wrote a credo called "What I Believe." It ended with this oft-quoted passage about what he meant when he called himself religious.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

However, many people still wanted a simple answer to the question of whether he believed in God. Rabbi Goldstein, an Orthodox Jewish leader, sent a telegram to Einstein: "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words." Einstein used about half of his allotment.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

So what is Spinoza's God? Basically, nature. Spinoza, a seventeenth century heretical Jewish philosopher, didn't want anything to do with a transcendent God who sits up in the heavens and guides the goings-on down here on Earth. His God is immanent in everything that exists.

I'm reading Matthew Stewart's "The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World." Stewart says:

In Spinoza's view, to put it simply, God and Nature are not and never will be in conflict for the simple reason that God is Nature…The "Nature" in question here is not of the blooming and buzzing kind (though it would include that, too). It is closer to the "nature" in "the nature of light" or "the nature of man" —that is, the "nature" that is the subject of rational inquiry.

However, it's easier to point to what Spinoza's God isn't, than to what it is, because the philosopher leaves us guessing about some of God's subtler qualities. However, Stewart says, this much is clear:

Spinoza's God is not the God of Sunday school and Bible readings. It is not the kind of supernatural being who wakes up one morning, decides to create a world, and then stands back at the end of the week to admire his achievement. In fact, God has no "personality" at all: it isn't male or female; it has no hair, likes or dislikes, is not right- or left- handed; it does not sleep, dream, love, hate, decide, or judge; it has no "will" or "intellect" in the way we understand those terms.

Well, if God is Nature, where's the need to add something abstract called "God" to the concrete reality of the natural world? I find myself asking this question quite often, generally to myself. For I'm fond of using "God" to mean the totality of everything in existence.

When I type out or speak that word, "God," increasingly it seems unnecessary to me. Why don't I simply say "reality," "existence," or "cosmos"? It's as if I've broken up with someone once dear to me and I can't bring myself to take her photo off of the bedside table.

If we no longer have a relationship, why am I still relating?

Once in a while I also find myself talking to the guru who I used to believe was part and parcel of my innermost being. Now I don't. Yet out of habit I sometimes have a (one-sided) conversation with him.

Of course, now and then I do that with my mother, who also is dead, and I have almost zero confidence that she's capable of hearing me.

So I'm having to face some contradictions in myself. Which is a good thing. More and more I catch myself when I start to fall back into old anthropomorphic religious habits, such as looking upon really real reality as being something transcendent and apart, rather than right here and now.

Stewart asks:

According to Spinoza, God or Nature causes the things of the world in the same way that the nature of a coffee, for example, causes it to be black. But we do not usually say that the nature of coffee is divine, so why should we say that Nature is God?

In the Ethics [Spinoza's main writing], as a matter of fact, one can substitute the word "Nature" (or "Substance," or even simply an X) for God throughout, and the logic of the argument changes little, if at all. So why use the term "God" at all?

Looking over Einstein's thoughts about God, religion, and theology, I strongly suspect that he too mostly used the word out of habit and respect for social convention. "God" is a flimsy abstract conception that pales in comparison to the power and glory of nature. Which, naturally, includes us and indeed is us.

Einstein:

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

… A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Some Radhasoami UK Facebook excerpts

There have been some interesting recent comments from Osho Robbins, plus equally interesting comments on his comments.

One of which was mine, where I put up some links to a UK Facebook group that Osho Robbins posts on frequently. (See my June 9 comment on this post.)

I just realized that you have to sign up for Facebook before you can browse around the Radhasoami group. Since that is a bit of a pain, and some won't be willing to do it, I'll copy in one of Osho Robbins' posts (see continuation below) on "The Nature of God--Oneness or Nothingness."

I agree that whatever "God" or ultimate reality is, this supremely supreme whatever seemingly is beyond each and every concept about it.

However, I can't help but wonder whether those concepts include the content of Osho Robbin's post, what I'm writing now, and everything else we can say about what can't be said.

That said, I agree with some of Osho Robbins' take on enlightenment that I found on his web site.

But can you learn the secret of true happiness and living a fulfilled life from Osho Robbins via an intensive two-day workshop? Well, if you go let me know.

Atheists crush Christians at “Does God Exist?” debate

Naturally, it was no contest. There's no way a couple of fundamentalist Christians were going to best the Rational Response Squad on an ABC Nightline face-off over scientific evidence for the existence of God.

(These are the guys who talked me into condemning myself to hell for a free DVD.)

I haven't watched all of the video of the debate, You Tube'd versions of which are available at BSAlert.com. But I've seen enough to agree with the proposition that "the match was a slaughter and Ray and…Kirk [the Christians]...were left bleeding and wounded."

Ray and Kirk weren't supposed to use the Bible to prove that the Bible is true. They claimed they'd provide scientific evidence for the existence of God (the Christian God, I assume).

So I watch the (privately filmed) video of the debate on the Rational Responder web site. And I see one of the true believers, Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, holding up a image of the "Mona Lisa," claiming that wherever there is a painting there must be a painter.

Huh? That's the proof? Dude, that's so lame.

Like Sapient, one of the Rational Responders, said, with a painting you can see the canvas, the paints, the brush strokes. You can also meet painters of paintings, take photographs of them at work, talk with them about their artistry.

The universe exists. Existence exists. This doesn't mean that there was a creator of creation. Or that this Master Painter is a personalized being, rather than a universal power.

Sapient asked what the creator of God is. Good question. If an answer were to be attempted, a follow-up would be forthcoming: What created the creator of God?

I've little doubt that a few decades, or centuries, or millennia from now (sooner the better), debates like this one will be viewed as curious relics from pre-scientific times when humans held exceedingly curious notions about the cosmos.

As Christopher Hitchens puts it in his book, "God is Not Great":

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on.

It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs).

Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think – though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one – that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

Until people see the light of reality, instead of the darkness of religion, it's incumbent that those of us on the less shadowy side of the divide challenge those who would keep us mired in superstition, irrationality, and addiction to blind faith.

Courtesy of BSAlert, this YouTube video shows a woman confronting the fundamentalist Christians at the Nightline debate (which was held in a Manhattan Baptist church, not exactly neutral ground).

I love how she refuses to let the believers get away with not answering her question. She notes that they'd just praised how God so wonderfully created the human eye, nose, mouth and such. The woman asks, "What about cancer? How is this part of a perfect creation?"

Excellent question. Which the Christians are utterly unable to answer, except by meandering into some blather about suffering being part of God's plan, and how the Bible tells us that we started off perfect and then fell from grace.

She shakes her head, looks understandably irked, then rises to interrupt the blather and ask her question again. Beautiful. I sorely wish she could be at every press conference President Bush holds. They'd sure be a lot more interesting (and informative) if she was there.

Is God real?

It warmed my agnostic heart to see that this week's issue of Newsweek had "Is God Real?" on the cover. Usually news magazines run religion-friendly puff pieces around Easter and Christmas.

Kudos to Newsweek for asking the tough question. Which, of course, can't be answered.

However, this won't stop hundreds of millions of Christians from going to church tomorrow and glorying in the resurrection of someone who may or may not have actually existed, and is considered to be the son of a God who may or may not be real.

That's too many "may's" for me to take the occasion seriously. Indeed, it's almost comic that after more than two thousand years of fervent believing and God, show us a sign, there hasn't been a definitive one.

So the Newsweek article can quote Rabbi Jacob Heschel as saying:

[God] did not make it easy for us to have faith in him, to remain faithful to him. This is our tragedy: the insecurity of faith, the unbearable burden of our commitments. The facts that deny the divine are mighty, indeed; the arguments of agnosticism are eloquent, the events that defy him are spectacular…Our faith is fragile, never immune to error, distortion, or deception. There are no final proofs for the existence of God, Father and Creator of all.

Jon Meacham, the article's author, concludes: "No final proofs—there it is, the ultimate caveat. Doubt and faith are not at war; they are parts of the same whole."

Astute observation, Jon. The only difference between a believer and an agnostic is that the former isn't willing to admit that he doesn't know whether God is real, while the latter honestly testifies to his own unknowing. This makes the agnostic more honest and humble than the believer.

And possibly truer to God, if such a being exists.

For since no one knows what God is like—surmises and guesses being the currency of every religion—it's just as reasonable to assume that the Almighty is most pleased with the questioning spirit of agnostics who make good use of their God-given rational intelligence rather than naively latching onto nonsensical superstitions.

Meacham writes:

To base one's behavior on a blind acceptance of words put down long ago, however revered those words are, is an abdication of reason and responsibility—and reason and responsibility are, for many believers, gifts from God. Does a Christian in our time really think that, as Saint Paul argued, slavery is divinely ordained?

Every Christian, no matter how devout he or she may be, picks and chooses what to believe in the Bible. An agnostic like me does the same. I simply choose not to believe in the passages that tell me I have to believe in them. That's like going to a used car lot and having the salesman tell you, "Every automobile here is in great running order, trust me on that."

I'd rather kick the tires myself, thank you. Self-substantiating claims such as "We know Jesus died for our sins because the Bible tells us so" have a truth value of precisely zero for me.

There's also a debate between pastor Rick Warren and atheist Sam Harris in the Newsweek issue. Harris runs argumentative circles around Warren, in my utterly personal opinion.

For example, Warren notes that when Jesus says "I am the only way to God. I am the way to the Father," he is either lying or he's not. Well, of course he is. So what? Harris points out that "many, many other prophets and gurus have said that," which is absolutely true. Jesus has a lot of company when it comes to claiming to be the only way.

Warren also fell back onto the frequently heard "atheists are just as dogmatic as believers." No, they're not, Rick.

Atheists and agnostics are firm in their commitment to not accepting a theological proposition as being true unless there's some solid evidence for it. This is entirely different from having faith in dogma that lacks any experiential, observational, or even logical support.

No one knows whether God is real. Atheists and agnostics know that they don't know. Believers pretend they do. Like Socrates in Plato's Apology, this gives the sincere not-knowers a leg up on the pretenders. Socrates speaks of a man who had an undeserved reputation for wisdom:

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

More than slightly, I'd say. A lot more.

God-shaped hole is as big as our beliefs

It's a poetic notion: there's a God-shaped hole at the heart of my being. That's why I'm always restless, continually looking for something more, ceaselessly trying to find the very thing that will fill my cup of happiness to the brim.

Catholic theologian John F. Haught speaks about this supposed urge for the infinite in a What is Enlightenment? interview (January-March 2007 issue).

Sometimes people ask, "What is the evidence that the infinite exists?" For Augustine and for many religious people throughout the ages, the best evidence is the utter restlessness of the human heart. You could extend that also to the restlessness of the intellect itself.

We all realize that no matter how much we know, there is yet more to be known; we all realize that no matter how much we get in life, how much we have, how much we possess, we are never fully filled up by it. So there is, in a sense, a God-shaped hole at the heart of our being. That's what Augustine was saying—our hearts are restless until we rest in the infinite.

No, that's an unjustified assumption. It's truer to say, "Our hearts are restless until they are at rest."

I know this, because I frequently experience short-lived restlessness reliefs. When I take the first sip of a vanilla latte. When I start watching a new episode of "24." When I pause to look at the full moon over Spring Lake during a nighttime dog walk.

I don't feel like I'm being filled with the infinite in these moments. Quite the contrary. I've immersed myself in the concrete here and now. Resting on that firm foundation, I feel at peace.

For a while. Haught correctly points to the evanescence of my Ah, so good states of being. As soon as the closing credits of a "24" episode flash across the screen, I'm wishing that it were already the next Monday night.

The root of my restlessness is, of course, my belief that in seven days "24" will resume its progress as scheduled through Jack Bauer's terrorist-fighting day. I anticipate a projected future and want it to happen now. Since the future comes in its own sweet time, a "24" shaped hole forms in the heart of my being, where it stays until 9:00 pm on another Monday rolls around and I'm once again contentedly sitting in front of the TV.

Add together all of my unfulfilled desires, and to the religiously minded that's a "God-shaped hole." However, to its credit this Christian web site notes that Pascal (one of the original sources of this concept) speaks of the universal seeking for happiness, not God.

Many people, including Pascal, believe that only God can permanently fulfill the yearning of a restless heart. Since our desires are limitless, only infinity is capable of filling the happiness void that always seems to be either right with us or just around the corner.

Well, here's another way of looking at the situation: when we assume that God is the missing piece to the puzzle of our lives, we're just adding one more unfulfilled desire to an already lengthy Want List. High-definition television, remodeled bathroom, ten pound weight loss, satisfying romantic relationship…knowing God.

A happiness hole is formed when what I want and what I have don't coincide. Making coffee in the morning, I think "Got to get the newspaper." But I haven't finished with the coffee yet. So I feel a tinge of restless anxiety: I'm already behind on the day's to-do list!

However, that restlessness is my own creation. It isn't a God-shaped hole. It's a Brian-shaped hole. When I focus on simply measuring out the organic ground coffee and filling the carafe with reverse osmosis-purified water, I don't feel a lack in my life.

After all, my life is always being fully lived. There's never a void in my life that needs to be filled with living. If there were, I'd be dead. Which is a void of a whole other nature.

So whenever there is a difference between what is actually happening, and what I believe should happen, a restlessness born of unmet expectation begins to whirl away in my psyche. The motion forms an is-should gap that I interpret as something wrong, a problem to be solved, a flaw needing fixing.

When the should side includes "be filled with God," that gap widens. Instead of simply lacking a newspaper, or the next "24" episode, I've got a seriously sinking feeling that I'm missing the most important thing in existence. Even worse, I lack any reliable knowledge about where to get my God infusion.

So the God-shaped hole at the heart of my being is as big as my unsubstantiated beliefs about God. It'd be crazy for me to believe that I'm missing out on a television program named "Happiest Show on Earth" when such doesn't exist. I could spend all day fruitlessly looking through the TV Guide, worrying that I'm missing out on some great entertainment.

Or I could watch what is actually on the air. And enjoy Robert Bly's versions of Kabir poetry. (Some people hate Bly's tinkering with Kabir, just as Coleman Barks' freestyling of Rumi ticks others off; I like this poem, no matter the source).

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or resting?

There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no towrope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!

And there is no body, and no mind!
Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don't go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.

Does God exist? Science says no.

Proving (sort of) that no-god has a plan for my life, on Friday the mailman delivered two ungodly packages that I’d been anticipating for quite a while: Victor Stenger’s new book, “God: The Failed Hypothesis,” and the free DVD, “The God Who Wasn’t There,” I got for sending myself to hell via the blasphemy challenge.

Back in August I wrote about an advance description of Stenger’s book that led me to pre-order it. Good decision. I’m several chapters into “God: The Failed Hypothesis” and am enjoying a physicist’s scientific demolishing of the God hypothesis.

Stenger’s central thesis is that if God exists, there should be evident signs in the material world.

My analysis will be based on the contention that God should be detectable by scientific means simply by virtue of the fact that he is supposed to play such a central role in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans.

I’ll write more about the lack of evidence for God after I’ve finished the book. From what I’ve already read, though, it’s clear that Stenger has his evidentiary ducks in a row and succeeds in knocking down God’s presence in the physical universe.

But who is the God being debunked? For Stenger it is the Judeo-Christan-Islamic God, which gets a capital “G” in the book to differentiate this hypothesized divinity from other possible gods.

Here’s Stenger's listing of the attributes of the God that there is no scientific evidence for:

1. God is the creator and preserver of the universe.
2. God is the architect of the structure of the universe and the author of the laws of nature.
3. God steps in whenever he wishes to change the course of events, which may include violating his own laws as, for example, in response to human entreaties.
4. God is the creator and preserver of life and humanity, where human beings are special in relation to other life-forms.
5. God has endowed humans with immaterial, eternal souls that exist independent of their bodies and carry the essence of a person’s character and selfhood.
6. God is the source of morality and other human values such as freedom, justice, and democracy.
7. God has revealed truths in scriptures and by communicating directly to select individuals throughout history.
8. God does not deliberately hide from any human being who is open to finding evidence for his presence.

When I reached page 41 and read these attributes of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God (which sounded pretty accurate to me), I thought, “Hmmmm. This sure sounds like the God of Sant Mat also.”

Sant Mat (which means “teachings of the saints”) is usually thought of as an Eastern religion, since its roots are in Sikhism and Hinduism. The branch of Sant Mat that I joined in 1971, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is headquartered in India, where most initiates live.

Yet the eight attributes of God listed by Stenger describe the divinity worshipped by Sant Mat almost as well as they depict the Christian God.

This reflects the fact that some Eastern religious practices assume a personal dualistic God who stands apart from the cosmos, while some Western mystics (such as Meister Eckhart and Plotinus) wholeheartedly embrace a monistic godhead, the One.

When I signed on with Sant Mat, I was attracted to what I thought was an alternative to the anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian-Islamic God who looks down upon the world and chooses to intervene in human affairs when he feels like it, saving some souls and condemning others.

Eventually, however, I saw the similarities between this seemingly “Eastern” mystic path and the traditional monotheistic religions. RSSB was big on pointing out that the guru who led the organization was the living counterpart of dead and gone Jesus, a messenger from God who serves as a link between fallen humanity and the highest divinity.

Well, as I frequently say: maybe. But now I lean toward Stenger, who writes:

The scientific argument against the existence of God will be a modified form of the lack-of-evidence argument:

1. Hypothesize a God who plays an important role in the universe.
2. Assume that God has specific attributes that should provide objective evidence for his existence.
3. Look for such evidence with an open mind.
4. If such evidence is found, conclude that God may exist.
5. If such objective evidence is not found, conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that a God with these properties does not exist.

There are different god models, though. The personal dualistic God hypothesized by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sant Mat is one divine option; the universal non-duality of Buddhism, Taoism, and Neoplatonism is another possibility—one that fits much more comfortably with a scientific worldview.

In my book about Plotinus, a Greek mystic philosopher, this passage had a ring of truth for me as soon as I wrote it. It still does.

Some people believe that they have a personal relationship with God. Thinking like Plotinus, we might ask them: “Does this mean that God is a person? Or does it mean that you are a person?” Perhaps it is possible for my relationship with the One to be markedly different from the One’s relationship with me, because I am a minute part of creation and the One is the whole of creation.

Eliminate the middleman between you and God

It’s usually advisable to eliminate the middleman. He won’t like it. But if there’s no reason to keep him around, dump the guy. He adds extra overhead.

Especially if he’s standing between you and God. Or more accurately, if you believe he is. For given that the evidence of God’s existence is extremely scanty, it figures that a belief in the need for a middleman or mediator between humanity and divinity rests on even shakier ground.

Like, quicksand.

I used to buy cars the old-fashioned way. And hated it. You know the routine. Find a car you like. Talk to a salesman. Tell him how much you want to pay. Then cool your heels while he supposedly goes off to try and talk his boss into accepting the deal.

You never see the boss. All you see is the salesman dejectedly walking back into his office, telling you “Man, I’m sorry. I argued for you, but my boss says the dealership would be losing money if he accepted your offer. So this is what he’s willing to sell the car for…”

And so it’d go. Of course, the salesman wasn’t really on my side. Nor, I suspect, did he ever talk with his boss. He probably had a cup of coffee and joked around with his buddies for ten minutes, then plastered on a fake dejected look before he tried to suck more money out of me.

But at least I knew the car I wanted was real, even if the middleman game was fakey. With “God” (a placeholder term, the way I use it, for ultimate reality), I neither know that my envisioned object of desire exists, nor that a mediator between me and God serves any purpose.

I don’t need a mediator to connect me with unicorns, fairies, or leprechauns. I can imagine them all on my own, thank you. No assistance required. Yet for some reason there’s a strong demand for a mediator between people and God, even though the middleman never delivers the goods.

Nice work if you can get it. It’s no wonder there’s never been a lack of prophets, gurus, priests, shamans, and all the other members of the God-human mediator class. If I could make a living by serving as a middleman between people and a being who I never had to prove even existed, much less actually show face to face, that’d be sweet.

I could even keep on with my go-betweening after I died. That’s what happened with Jesus. Countless Christians still consider that he’s striking a bargain for them with God: Jesus died for their sins. Since Christian theology says that you never get to talk about the deal with the Boss directly, believers have to take the word of the Salesman on faith.

My biggest problem with the God-human mediator business is this: the whole notion is founded on duality—separation. Jesus is considered to be the mediator between two estranged parties, God and humankind. Similarly, in Sikhism (and offshoots such as Sant Mat) the guru reunites separated ones with God.

However, a central thrust of modern science is that unity lies at the heart of reality. Physics speaks of the space-time continuum and quantum connectedness. It seeks the Theory of Everything, not Theories.

So it’s difficult for me to believe that the spiritual realm, if it exists, is more disconnected than the foundation of material existence. But this is what religions would have us believe.

Somehow we’ve supposedly gotten way out of touch with a distant God, and there’s no getting us back together without the aid of a middleman who says, “Listen, have I got a deal for you…”

In his book “Grassroots Spirituality,” Robert Forman says that wholeness is one of the hallmarks of a spiritual (as contrasted with religious) way of relating with the world. Speaking of the fresh ways of communing with the cosmos that are sweeping the world, he writes:

In short, the traditional western “transcendent” model of God is no longer operative in the Grassroots Spirituality Movement. Its Ultimate is reminiscent of the omnipresent, immanent yet infinitely extended vacuum state of quantum physics, more like an “It” than a “He” or “She.” In “It” “we live and move and have our being.”

…This sense of an “indwelling” One has an implication for our religious structures. If we each are gifted with an indwelling spark of the One, then we have no need for some mediating figure like a priest or a minister. For “It” is already available to each of us.

Nor do we need an intercessor, for it’s available to us by merely letting go of our attachments. If we’re each connected to the All through some deep inner wellspring, then no one of us is more connected to “It” than is any other.

Make your own deal with God. Eliminate the middleman. In the end, there might not even be two ends to ultimate reality. With One, there’s no middle. Nor a middleman.

But if you still want a guru (and have a broadband connection), I have a recommendation for you.

When nothing is something: God

In my last post, I focused on a plagiarized passage that I found in a book published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas. What’s more interesting and significant than the plagiarism, though, is what this misquoted quotation from W.T. Stace points toward:

Nothing. Which he, along with many other mystics and mystically inclined writers, equates with God.

Even the plagiarist, J.R. Puri, seems to agree. For after he steals Stace’s words to speak of a state of pure consciousness that has no empirical content other than itself, consciousness aware of consciousness, Puri says:

And this self-realization is often eventually spoken of as God-realization.

In “Mysticism and Philosophy” Stace himself says this after the passage that I quoted previously:

Since the experience has no content, it is often spoken of by the mystics as the Void or as nothingness; but also as the One, and as the Infinite. That there are in it no particular existences is the same as saying that there are no distinctions in it, or that it is an undifferentiated unity. Since there is no multiplicity in it, it is the One. And that there are no distinctions in it or outside it means that there are no boundary lines in it between anything and anything. It is therefore the boundless or the infinite.

The paradox is that there should be a positive experience which has no positive content — an experience which is both something and nothing.

In Robert K.C. Forman’s book about Meister Eckhart that contains the plagiarized passage, Forman says that for Eckhart the birth of God’s “son” within the soul is a Birth of emptiness within. Eckhart says:

The soul should give Birth to nothing inside herself, if she wishes to be the child of God in whom God’s Son shall be born—in her nothing should be born.

More Eckhart on the same theme:

It appeared to a man as in a dream—it was a waking dream—that he became pregnant with Nothing like a woman with child, and in that Nothing God was born, He was the fruit of nothing. God was born in the Nothing. Therefore he says: “He arose from the ground with open eyes, seeing nothing.”

Below Forman summarizes Eckhart’s core mystic thesis that nothing needs to be done to realize God; what is needful is to undo one’s preoccupation with things and thoughts.

As we have seen, for Eckhart God shares a ground with the soul’s ground, and He has so shared it since man’s preexistence. But in “ordinary” experience, in which man is attached to various cognitive objects, the soul attends to the powers and through them to the external world.

As a result, his thoughts bubble incessantly, and what he perceives as “his” needs enthrall his attention. Activities cover over this place “like a mist over the sun.” By looking in the wrong direction, outward instead of within, the religious “overlooks” this “place” within himself, and hence attends not to God but to the creaturely.

…God is the nothing, is in the nothing, and it is God who is “born” when one is “pregnant” with nothing.

Pretty darn simple. And scientific, the way I look at it. The great mysteries that science has not yet been able to fathom are existence, life, and consciousness. The roots and nature of each are hidden in the depths of…who knows? For we human would-be mystery-unravelers are conscious, existent, and alive.

We’re trying to unravel what we are, a snake swallowing its own tail proposition.

So, as I mentioned before, for many years I’ve enjoyed the plagiarized passage in Puri’s book because it points to the ultimate mystery: me. And you. Each of us is a bit of the grand cosmic Mystery that we’re trying to understand.

It makes sense that we start with what we’re already in direct contact with, existent living consciousness, rather than some distant God. And if unity is at the root of it all, then “us” is going to be the same as “cosmos” anyway.

What bothers me about J.R. Puri, apart from his plagiarizing, is that he shies away from the implications of Stace’s statement that consciousness empty of empirical content is identical with the One—God.

His devotion to the RSSB teachings, which emphasize the necessity of a guru for god-realization, causes him to say a few pages later:

The real object of human love must be the Perfect, the Absolute. And it is through such love that salvation can be attained… But—and it is a crucial but—the all-pervasive, formless entity of God cannot be the object on which our feelings can be fixed or attached.

And what cannot be within the range of “feeling” cannot be within the scope of love. Indeed, for such an entity we cannot be sure even of His existence, let alone His love or worship.

…The master [guru] is the manifest form of the Lord, and it is the manifest form that can be the object of love. And if God can only be realized through love, the master is an indispensable link for God-realization.

Huh? On page 59 Puri said that the self-realization of pure consciousness is equivalent to God-realization. That is, the ultimate reality often called “God” is realized by achieving a state of inner emptiness in which nothing is present but the ground of being—the One.

Yet on page 90 he says that emotional attachment to a particular form of God, the guru, is essential. Actually, Eckhart and many other introvertive mystics (such as Plotinus) taught that attachment to material or mental forms is not only inessential for higher understanding, but an insurmountable hurdle.

A main reason I’ve soured on the RSSB approach to meditation is that it takes such a roundabout route. The meditator’s goal is to unite his or her consciousness with the formless One. But getting there supposedly is facilitated by filling one’s mind with thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and imaginings of the guru’s physical form.

That never made much sense to me. Now it makes no sense at all. I’m too old to take roundabout detours. I very much want to know ultimate reality (assuming it is knowable). The shortest and quickest likely way—that’s for me.

I often think about the very first sentence in my book about Plotinus, “Return to the One.” This line flowed easily from my typing fingertips. Maybe I should have stopped right there and not written another word.

If something has been lost and you’re not sure where to look for it, there’s good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield.

Puri would have us look for our self in the guru’s mind and body. I’m with Stace, Eckhart, Forman, and Plotinus: the One will be realized by becoming the one we truly are, not someone else.

Prayer can be criticized

For me prayer represents what is both wrong and right about religion.

Wrong, because prayer is the epitome of blind faith, religion’s hallmark. Believers imagine they’re communicating with someone they’ve never seen and for whom there’s no evidence of his/her/its existence.

Right, because prayer is a natural human response to feeling powerless, uncertain, afraid, alone, loveless, or some other emotion flowing from an unmet need demanding satisfaction.

Spinoza said that God’s will is “the asylum of ignorance.” When we don’t understand why something happened in the past, or what the future will bring, the anxiety of not knowing or not being able to do anything is relieved by believing that God is in control.

I understand why people pray. I also understand why people get addicted to crack cocaine. But just because there’s a good reason for something doesn’t mean it can’t be criticized or questioned.

To me, prayer is irreverent. It isn’t for lots of other people, such as the relatives of three climbers who are lost on Mt. Hood (the beautiful and treacherous Oregon mountain that isn’t far from where I live).

Yesterday I asked on my other blog, “What’s God got to do with lost climbers?” This is the sort of question I feel comfortable asking in Oregon, the most unchurched state in the nation.

I think some of the commenters to that post live in the Bible Belt, though. Tina said, “This country was founded on God so people who don't like to hear his name mentioned need to leave!”

I responded, “I hope your comment was in jest. Or ironic. If not, you've made my point for me: religion makes people say ridiculous things.”

However, I have to thank Tina for making me feel young again. I haven’t been told to love ____ or leave the United States since the late 1960s. Flashback!

God vs. Science: guess who wins?

Science kicked ass in TIME magazine’s “God vs. Science” cover story debate. Atheist biologist Richard Dawkins pretty much blew Christian geneticist Francis Collins out of the theological water.

The article points out that Dawkins is riding the quest of an atheist/agnostic literary wave, each of which I’ve read, or am reading. And can heartily recommend. Cited are Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Dawkin’s The God Delusion, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

Some other titles mentioned, each of which provides support to the religious skeptic, are Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, Lewis Wolpert’s Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, and Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis.

Reading the debate between Dawkins and Collins, it’s easy to see why authors have no trouble poking religiosity full of holes. Whenever Collins was backed into a corner, all he could do was stammer out some platitude that had nothing behind it but blind faith. For example:

Many of us think these qualities [of altruism] may come from God—especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

Well, it’s nice that many of you think that way. Many of you also believe the Earth was created a few thousand years ago and that fossils were planted by the Devil to throw people off the scent of God.

It’s also nice to observe such a marvelous example of circular thinking. Believers posit a God who has some positive anthropomorphic moral qualities. Then when people manifest those human qualities, this is taken as evidence that they come from God.

Such faulty reasoning would be laughable if it weren’t practiced by billions of believers. Some of whom fly airplanes full of other people into buildings because of their deluded faith. That makes religious belief unfunny.

Another example of Collins’ empty arguments:

Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.

Good try, Dr. Collins. Problem is, once you add revelation to reason, you no longer have reason. Those who believe that the Bible or Koran is the revealed word of God shut off their rational faculties.

Dawkins tells the story of the American geologist Kurt Wise who earned two advanced degrees in geology and paleontology at Harvard. Then he found that he couldn’t stand the conflict between his religion and his science.

He took a bible and went right through it, literally cutting out every verse that would have to go if the scientific world-view were true.

There was little left. Wise decided that he would accept the Bible and throw out his dreams and hopes in science. Dawkins says that he finds this terribly sad. So do I. This statement by Wise is pathetic:

Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.

On exceedingly shaky ground, Dr. Wise. Along with Francis Collins and everyone else who elevates faith above facts.

Reality has a way of winning out in the end. Richard Dawkins won the TIME magazine debate, but religion will bounce back on other fronts.

Temporarily. A thousand years from now, I’m quite sure, our 21st century belief in imaginary gods will seem as quaint as the Greek’s embrace of their own divine pantheon. Zeus in various guises will remain alive and kicking until reality finally knocks him dead.

[Note: I originally said "Ten thousand years from now" above. Someone on a Yahoo discussion group said that I was 90% off on my time line estimate and I agree with them. Let's be optimistic and hope that religion as we know it will be dead and gone by 3006, not 13,006.]

Struggling to comprehend the Christian mind

I’ve been enjoying the Christian/non-believer dialogue being carried on via comments to my “Morality comes from nature, not God” post. Pastor Phillip Ross has stimulated some interesting cyber-conversation between himself and Church of the Churchless regulars, me included.

Today I’m in a pretty mellow mood. Last night’s election results filled me with hope that the divisions plaguing the United States can be bridged by moderates who realize that left and right can’t exist without a center.

I was in that spirit when I perused the latest comments from Phillip and others today. Rather than reflexively thinking, “Geez, that’s ridiculous” after reading some assertion of Christian theology, I did my best to comprehend Phillip’s frame of mind.

That is, rather than criticize his statements from my own perspective, I tried to get a feel for what it might be like to believe in God and Jesus as a devout Christian does (however, Phillip’s web site, Pilgrim Platform, is devoted to pointing out fallacies of the contemporary church—which points to the fact that these days it isn’t a simple matter to figure out what Christianity is and isn’t).

I’d like to be able to report that I succeeded in my empathic quest. But I can’t.

I was a political conservative in my deluded youth, so I feel that I understand how a right-wing Republican thinks.Likewise, I was a religious true believer for many years, even though at the time I wouldn’t have called my fidelity to the teachings of Sant Mat and Radha Soami Satsang Beas as such, so I feel I understand how a person of faith thinks.

Even so, a Christian mind such as Phillip’s is damnably tough for me to grok. I don’t say this critically. It’s just the way it is. There’s a gap between a fundamentalist Christian way of looking at the cosmos and my own perspective that is so wide, I end up gazing across the divide at a distant shadowy figure who is waving his hands and yelling faintly, “Do you get what I mean?”

No, I don’t. I’m sure this doesn’t dismay Christians like Phillip, because to them faith in Jesus is something you either have or you don’t. Sort of like a Zen satori. It isn’t explainable, defensible, comprehensible, rational, or explicable. Some get it, some don’t.

Why is this? In his November 7 comment, Phillip said that the main part of his religious outlook breaks into two halves, sin and forgiveness.

First, all have sinned. That's you and me and every biped. And the first evidence of sin is it's denial. Second, forgiveness comes through Christ alone. When we deny the first half, God denies the second half.

Well, I’m befuddled. The notion of original sin makes no sense to me. So not surprisingly, the notion that God had to send his son to suffer on our behalf for non-sensical sins also escapes me.

As do a lot of mystical precepts. The Buddhist “emptiness is form and form is emptiness” is absent from my store of adages that I feel I can explain. Yet Phillip, like most Christians, rejects a mystic approach to God. I’d mentioned to him that I had read widely in Christian mystical literature: Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Cloud of Unknowing, and such.

He replied:

We have a thorough reading of Christian mysticism in common. I, too, spent many years looking there. But God is not there. The God of the Christian mystics is "mystery, darkness, not-knowing, ineffability." You're right about that. But that is not the God of the Bible. That is the false God of Gnosticism.

What is the true God, then? And how would we recognize this divinity? Can’t rely on a direct mystical experience. That’s a Gnostic no-no. And you also can’t rely on reason, according to Phillip. That’s a Platonic no-no.

The effort to prove God is an exercise of Greek categories of thought trying to make sense of the biblical God. But, alas, they cannot. Paul speaks to this in Acts 17 and in First Corinthians, where he identifies Greek philosophy as foolishness, that is, lacking in discernment and good judgment.

What’s left? The Bible? But Phillip says, “The Bible offers no proof of God's existence.” So it seems that we can’t rely on the Bible to point us toward the true God, since it can’t even demonstrate the existence of any God.

For some reason, though, in his comments Phillip quotes passages from the Bible to support his argument. Somehow the same Bible that contains no proof of God’s existence can be relied upon to tell us what God is like and what he expects of us. I learned from Phillip that…

--God is a person
--God is jealous
--God does not answer all prayer
--God invades human history

And (bad news for me)…

--God is offended by being called a false name

This explains why, even though I’ve been praying to God for a convertible Mini Cooper S (unselfishly, because I’d occasionally offer joyful rides in it to other people), one hasn’t appeared in my driveway.

Phillip said that my cover-the-bases prayer to God/ Allah/ Jehovah/ Tao/ Buddha-nature/ One isn’t going to win me points with the jealous Christian God, a.k.a. The Only True God. God apparently wants to be called “God,” (in English I assume, not Aramaic) and nothing else.

You pray, "whoever might be out there, here I am. Show me." [either yourself or the Mini, I’m easy] But your prayer is an absolute affront to God. You call Him by many false names. It's like you want to talk to me, but you can't remember my name. So, you call out, "George, Pete, Sam, whoever you are." And I don't answer. Are you surprised that I don't answer? You shouldn't be. Generally speaking, when you don't call people by name, they neither listen nor respond.

Hmmmm. About four hours ago my Tai Chi instructor, Warren, told a story about calling a phone company repairman “Ron” about twenty times before he said, “Actually, my name is John.” Yet John successfully collaborated with Warren on finding and fixing a broken wire on the roof of the Tai Chi studio, even though he kept being called “Ron.”

I guess John beats God in the humility department. As do I. If a neighbor’s house was on fire and they saw me passing by, I’d still run to assist them even if they mistakenly yelled “Help, Brad!” Apparently God wouldn’t do the same if you got his moniker wrong.

Nevertheless, during my meditation time this morning I spent a whole five minutes calling out to God. And only God. That was about as long as I could concentrate on talking to God before returning to mentally contemplating the oh so sweet election results.

I just checked our driveway. Twelve hours have passed. Still no Mini Cooper. This proves to me there is no God.

Phillip should approve of my conclusion. After all, he wrote in one of his comments that the only incontrovertible proof for the existence (and, I extrapolate, non-existence) of God is our own life—his, mine, yours. On that we agree.

Phillip finds that God exists. I find no evidence of that. He says tomahto. I say tomato. Each to his own. There’s nothing wrong with faith in God, nor with skepticism toward God. so long as believers admit that their belief is purely personal and improvable.

Phillip, you wrote, “I am just saying that the need for proof regarding God is resolved by meeting Him.”

Tell me: have you met Him? I assume so, or you wouldn’t know so much about him. Could you ask him why he has such a thing about being called the right name? Also, find out what name, in which language, he likes the most.

Send that info along to me. Then I’ll try my prayer again. Maybe he favors German and I should have been saying, “Gott, bring me a Mini Cooper.”

Hope springs eternal.

I’m accused of being God

Today I got an email from Michael in response to my “Morality comes from nature, not God” post. I was intrigued by what he had to say. Particularly the part where he suggests that I am God.

I like that hypothesis. A lot. I just wish there was more evidence for it than I’ve been able to dredge up.

Michael wrote me a thoughtful message. I don’t agree with most of what he said, but I appreciate the sharing. Here’s my paragraph by paragraph response to his email. (Michael’s words are in italics, mine in regular type).

An interesting though not new approach to discussing the question of God. Your whole premise is an avoidance of getting to the bottom of the question.

Gosh, that’s news to me. I’m 58. I’ve spent the past forty years trying to dive into the depths of “Does God exist?” Plus, “What’s the meaning of it all?” and “What the heck is ‘it’ anyway?” More than forty if you count listening to a lot of Bob Dylan from age sixteen to eighteen.

If the question is… Does God exist? or From whence does morality come?

As above, yes, #1 of yours is my main question. #2 has been a subsidiary query. I’ve never considered that “God” and “morality” necessarily had much to do with each other. Buddhists are highly moral but don’t believe in God. Ditto with Taoists.

Still, I’m certainly interested in from whence morality comes. As I am in from whence the whole universe comes—a more interesting question.

Then the honest questioner must not be satisfied with a half answer. Ex. Morality comes from nature. OK Where does nature come from? (This is what I mean by a half answer.)

Yes, absolutely. The Big Bang banged the nature of everything into existence. What lies beyond, or beneath, or before the Big Bang? Great question. Scientists are working on it like crazy. They’ve made good progress.

Then lets assume you take a popular answer… Nature occurred accidentally… Big Bang or billions of years of accumulated accidents that resulted in life (The necessary increasing complexity occurring accidentally is not demonstrated ANYWHERE in scientific study over long periods of time.)

What science books have you been reading? I’ve read dozens of them. None from the Creation Science Institute though. That probably explains why we’re coming from different understandings of modern science.

“Accident” isn’t a scientific way of explaining things. “Randomness” sometimes is used, but even here it’s agreed that randomness and order are two sides of the same coin. Random quantum fluctuations at the moment of the Big Bang are theorized to be the seed material, so to speak, that led to the large scale structure of the cosmos.

Quantum mechanics is anything but accidental, though. It’s predictable to a fault. Quantum theory makes possible modern technology, including the computer you used to write “Nature occurred accidentally.” You may believe that. Science doesn’t.

Evolution, to give another example, is utterly non-accidental. Nature selects for the most adaptive characteristics of living beings. Those aren’t “accumulated accidents” as you said, but accumulated selections.

Evolutionary theory is exceedingly well proven. The mistake you make is saying that science hasn’t found evidence of increasing complexity occurring “accidentally.” Of course it hasn’t. Science looks for (and finds) order in the universe, not accidents. Even chaos is hidden order.

You are demonstrating faith against all reason. That’s different than faith in something that is based on reason… although to be faith it must be believing / trusting in something bigger than us and beyond our full understanding.

Not sure what you’re saying here. I’ve just talked quite reasonably, in my eminently reasonable opinion. I do have faith in science. And, to a lesser degree, in mysticism—insofar as it is looked upon as the study of the subtleties of consciousness.

Both science and mysticism accept that there is more to know about the cosmos than what we know now. That seems obvious. Concerning the big cosmic questions of life, we’re clueless. Me, you, whoever else is reading this. All of us.

Quantum physics is beyond our full ability to see and directly know. We can however predict and imagine it. However, we don’t trust in it as a living “god” like being to direct our lives and so it falls short of religious faith.

Yes. I agree. We’ve found some common ground!

So all I am saying is that you are throwing out God because of personal reasons (anger / frustration with God and the life you have, or with religious people who don’t demonstrate the good qualities God is supposed to have, or etc.). You are not however really answering your own question. You are avoiding it by providing a half answer… Nature is the source of morality (meaning and direction for life).

Well, I guess you’re right: I am indeed throwing out God for personal reasons. What other reasons could I have? There is no demonstrable evidence that God exists, and there is no absolute, 100%, irrefutable, ironclad evidence that God doesn’t exist. So each of us has to decide on our own how we feel about the big question, “Does God exist?”

Here’s the thing though (which I’ve borrowed from Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” book). A reasonable person, like me and Dawkins, considers probabilities in the absence of certainties. What is the probability of nature being the source of morality vs. God being the source?

We can sense nature. We know a lot about nature. We can delve into the inner workings of nature. God, on the other hand, is a mystery. If He/She/It exists, this ultimate reality works in mysterious ways. So mysterious, there are no signs of those ways.

Thus until God shows up as an evident force in the physical universe, I’ll place my bet on natural causes as the source of what surrounds us. And, is us.

Lastly, I don’t think I’m angry or frustrated with God and the life I have. I’m a positive person, by and large. It pisses me off sometimes that I haven’t made more progress in figuring out the big questions of life we’ve been talking about. But I have a lot of company. Again, at heart we’re all clueless.

It is a very convenient statement. It really says YOU are GOD. Because nature is up to interpretation and YOU are the interpreter. So, whether you realize it or not, YOU are your own self proclaimed god. You are afraid to trust in any other god / God.

Hey, I’d love to be God. I tried it for a while, but thirty-four years of marriage have driven my divinity out of me. I’ve learned that Wife is God.

But seriously…(hope my wife doesn’t read those two words) I’m not proclaiming myself to be God. No way. This whole Church of the Churchless blog rests on the premise that I don’t know who God is, or more basically, if God is. Do you?

Seriously, tell me. Do you know that God exists? For sure?

Thankfully you are not My God. Because, I have a suspicion that you would judge me harshly and not graciously and the terms of your judgments would probably change like a tide based on your emotions and needs and etc. Wow! What a terrible God that would be to serve!

I don’t think I’d judge you harshly. Again, I’m basically a positive person. Except when I hear about the idiocies of the Bush Administration. If you’re not a Republican who holds higher office I can embrace you whole-heartedly. (But, um, not in the way that the nation’s recently dethroned evangelical leader would.)

I hope you don’t remain satisfied with your answer and continue searching for a real God, not a manufactured self-made god who is almost certainly a harsh and unreliable judge, not just of others but of yourself also.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m certainly searching for a real God. That’s why I’m so sour on religion. We agree that self-made gods are way inferior to the genuine item (again, assuming that it exists). Where we differ is on the question of who is making up beliefs that aren’t real.

I say religious believers. You say me. I say, I’ve got the facts on my side.

Tell me: where is your evidence for a God who isn’t manufactured out of human cognition, intellection, emotion, or imagination? I’m a vegetarian, but where’s the beef?

Lastly, I’m not the one who has made up a god who is a harsh and unreliable judge. I think you’re confusing me with the Old Testament.

Thanks for the article. Best of luck!

You’re welcome. I look forward to receiving your gift of luck. Much appreciated.

When the gods stopped speaking to us

About three thousand years ago the divine voices shut up.

Until then, says Julian Jaynes, humans habitually heard messages from the gods. However, those communications merely were being transmitted from one side of the brain to the other and were mistakenly construed as coming from an outside source.

Religion as we know it arose as a reaction to the silence. After the breakdown of the bicameral mind, people became consciously aware of the interior mental space that previously was the province of the gods. A replacement was needed. Jaynes says:

This breakdown resulted in many practices we would now call religious which were efforts to return to the lost voices of the gods, e.g., prayer, religious worship, and particularly the many types of divination I have described, which are new ways of making decisions by supposedly returning to the directions of gods by simple analogy.

Jaynes’ book, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” isn’t the easiest reading—as you can surmise from the wonderfully elusive title. My dentist is a big fan of the book. He talked me into buying it during a one-sided dental chair conversation in which my end of the dialogue was necessarily guttural.

I’d started reading Origin but had given it up as being too mystifying for even my mystiferious mind until my previous post about our inner ventriloquists impelled me to pull it from the bookshelf again.

Now I was more motivated to dig into it, as I thought it might shed some light on the voices that I hear in my own head. Which, I know, come from me. But it didn’t seem to be much of a stretch to imagine what it would be like to sense that the thoughts that I speak to myself were coming from an external source.

This, Jaynes argues semi-convincingly, still occurs with schizophrenics. And also with normal people from time to time. I remember being awakened from a nap by a “Brian!” that sure sounded like it came from someone standing by the bed. Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist who died in 1997, gives many other examples of what he calls vestiges of the bicameral mind in the modern world.

Could be. His theory is controversial. It continues to be promulgated through the Julian Jaynes Society. They have links to many articles related to the theory by Jaynes and others (which only are available to society members, however).

What I like most about the book is how it reminds us that what we’re aware of is a small fraction of our mental landscape. (When Jaynes speaks of “consciousness” he usually seems to be referring to what I’d call “self-awareness.”)

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it.

The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.

Absolutely. My afternoon started with two frustrating phone calls to IBM/Lenovo tech support. The new ThinkPad that I’d gotten to replace my wife’s out-of-date Emachines laptop wouldn’t display the correct resolution (1280 X 800) no matter what I did.

During my first all-too-conscious call I was instructed step by step in how to download and install proper video card and BIOS software that, for some inexplicable reason, was missing from the ThinkPad. Holding the phone in one hand, typing with one finger of the other, doing my best to not screw up the computer more than it was already—I was uncomfortably self-aware.

After engaging in additional recommended unsuccessful efforts to get the screen to look like it should, via a follow-up call I succeeded in getting IBM to send a technician out tomorrow morning to either fix the damn computer or give me a new one (my purchase of an extended service contract now looks like a wise decision).

I then was eager to embrace an alternative aspect of reality.

Cleaning the gutters. We’ve had a dry Oregon fall but several inches of rain are forecast over the coming week. I strapped on my Stihl backpack blower, clambered up a ladder, and proceeded to blow out half a year’s worth of oak leaves, pine needles, and other debris.

This involved getting as close as I could to the edge of the roof and directing the tip of the blower tube along the open gutter. It was fun. A lot more fun, at least, than talking to tech support. Even when I got to the two-story parts of our house.

Charlie, the voice that ventriloquismistically speaks inside my head much of the time, was pleasingly silent. My attention was focused on not falling off the roof and getting the gutters squeaky clean. Charlie was nowhere to be found. Nor, in a sense, was I.

I was simply doing what I was doing, not thinking “this is what I need to do” while I was doing it. That would have been duplicative. And distracting. Occasionally I caught myself ruminating about something or other. Like, how later I might write on this blog about not ruminating while cleaning the gutters.

Oops! That’s what I was just doing, I’d say to myself. Charlie was down, but not out.

Jaynes reminds us that those voices we hear inside our heads—who are us—aren’t necessary much (or most) of the time. They’re doppelgangers, extraneous hangers on. Just as the religious voices outside of our heads are. Which, if Jaynes’ theory holds water, are the same as the inner voices.

Here’s how Jaynes describes the condition of the ancients prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind:

In driving a car, I am not sitting like a back-seat driver directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little consciousness. In fact my consciousness will usually be involved in something else, in a conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking about the origin of consciousness perhaps.

My hand, foot, and head behavior, however, are almost in a different world. In touching something, I am touched; in turning my head, the world turns to me; in seeing, I am related to a world I immediately obey in the sense of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk.

And I am not conscious of any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if you will, in a total interacting reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threatening or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is still off on other topics.

Now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like. The world would happen to him and his action would be an inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever.

And now let some brand-new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked road, a flat tire, a stalled engine, and behold, our bicameral man would not do what you or I would do, that is, quickly and efficiently swivel our consciousness over to the matter and narratize out what to do.

He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored-up admonitory wisdom of his life would tell him nonconsciously what to do.

Interesting. The bicameral man sounds a lot like Lao Tzu’s Taoist sage.

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,
And is therefore good.
A foolish man tries to be good,
And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,
Yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish man is always doing,
Yet much remains to be done.

Letting go of God. And Uncle Fred.

Julia Sweeney, former Saturday Night Live actress, has let go of God. She’s content, though she says that for her God was like a friendly uncle who lived in your head and always was willing to hear what you had to say.

“Now there’s nobody to listen to my thoughts but myself,” I heard her tell Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air show last night. Since I tuned in on the car radio shortly before arriving home, I found the NPR archive and listened to the entire interview today.

Sweeney is entertaining (not surprising, given her background). Also, fair and balanced, unlike Fox News. She doesn’t bash religion, though she’s become a non-believer after being dedicated to Catholicism.

She started off the interview with a story about how the breakup of a long-term relationship that she thought was going to lead to marriage left her depressed. Sweeney mouthed the words “heal me.” The room filled with light. God embraced her. She felt connected to the universe.

Later, Gross asked her what she made of the comforting experience now. “Firing of the right temporal lobe,” Sweeney said. She considers that she’d been coached by her Catholic upbringing to have those sorts of experiences.

“I look at it scientifically now. Now I have a skeptical way of looking at the world, and I mean that in a positive way. I see things rationally. My life is much better now.”

She feels free. I could relate to what Sweeney said about enjoying the new-found privacy in her brain. During her religious phase she’d not like someone, then hear an internalized proscriptive voice in her brain saying “You should like them.” Now she follows her own heart without a meddling middleman.

Who, of course, was herself all along. But before she believed that God was watching what she thought and did, taking an interest in her daily life, offering up advice. Like, “Be a good person.”

Gross said that some people consider that you can’t be a good person without religion. Absent a religious moral code, your baser instincts will take over and you’ll do god knows what. Sweeney disagreed.

She pointed out that whole societies like Norway and Sweden are decidedly non-religious, yet have much lower crime rates than the hyper-religious United States. She said, “I feel that I’ve become a more moral person.” We’re social animals, she noted, and instinctually want to get along with our fellows.

Sweeney spoke about her brother’s difficult death from cancer. Looking back, she feels that religion kept her family from being in touch with reality. At the time she believed that God deals a hand of destiny cards and watches to see how you handle what you’ve been given.

Now, she rejects the notion that events are preordained. Her brother’s dying is simply what occurred. Bad things happen. That’s part of life. To her, this is “beautiful and comforting.”

Her “Letting Go of God” CD is available next month. Some excerpts can be heard here. I listened to the Deepak bit. Sweeney has read many of Deepak Chopra’s books and has educated herself about the reality of quantum mechanics—which is a lot different from Chopra’s New Agey simplistic “we create our own reality” interpretation.

She concludes that Deepak Chopra is full of shit. On the whole, I agree.

Sweeney also has a blog. I was impressed that her blog archives go back to November 2003. As a writer, and also as a seeker of truth, she seems to be for real.

Proofs that God exists

Well, it’s hard to argue with over three hundred proofs of God’s existence. Guess I’m going to have to become a believer.

Oh, darn. By mistake I clicked the next link down on the Atheists of Silicon Valley “Humor” page. Now I know there are about an equal number of disproofs of God’s existence.

Now I’m confused. Got to get my faith back.

I went down the proofs list and found a bunch that made beautiful sense to me. Especially after drinking a bottle of wine and watching Fox News for an hour. Once my incredulity neurons were stupefied, it was clear:

God exists.

Read on and believe.

ARGUMENT FROM MIRACLES
(1) My aunt had cancer.
(2) The doctors gave her all these horrible treatments.
(3) My aunt prayed to God and now she doesn't have cancer.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

MORAL ARGUMENT (II)
(1) In my younger days I was a cursing, drinking, smoking, gambling, child-molesting, thieving, murdering, bed-wetting bastard.
(2) That all changed once I became religious.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM INCOMPLETE DEVASTATION
(1) A plane crashed killing 143 passengers and crew.
(2) But one child survived with only third-degree burns.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM INFINITE REGRESS
(1) Ask Atheists what caused the Big Bang.
(2) Regardless of their answer, ask how they know this.
(3) Continue process until the Atheist admits he doesn't know the answer to one of your questions.
(4) You win!
(5) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM LONELINESS
(1) Christians say that Jesus is their best friend.
(2) I'm lonely, and I want a best friend.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM CREATIVE INTERPRETATION
(1) God is:
(a) The feeling you have when you look at a newborn baby.
(b) The love of a mother for her child.
(c) That little still voice in your heart.
(d) Humankind's potential to overcome their difficulties.
(e) How I feel when I look at a sunset.
(f) The taste of ice cream on a hot day.
(2) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM SUBJECTIVITY
(1) Everything is subjective.
(2) No subjective proof can be superior to any other subjective proof.
(3) Based upon my subjective opinion, your opinion, that if everything is subjective then, perforce, God is subjective, is false.
(4) Therefore, God (objectively) exists.

PROOF BY ANECDOTE
(1) God can be seen by those who believe in Him.
(2) If the God is seen, then He must exist.
(3) I have seen God.
(4) Therefore, God exists.

ARGUMENT FROM LACK OF DISPROOF
(1) You can't prove God doesn't exist!
(2) Therefore, God exists.

God wants to be forsaken

My churchlessness and agnosticism is adored by God. Yes, God looks upon me with more favor than all those worshipful Christians, Muslims, Jews and other religious types.

For God wants to be forsaken. Happy to oblige, my friend. It’s a pleasure to comply with the divine will.

I learned about what God wants from Meister Eckhart, the German theologian and mystic. He’s got some excellent doctrinal credentials, chief among them being accused of heresy by Pope John XXII.

You know that a Catholic is pointing toward the truth when he’s branded a heretic. So we need to take seriously the advice Eckhart proffered in one of his sermons.

Of course, it sounds astonishing to say that the soul should forsake God, but I assert that it is more important for the soul to forsake God to attain perfection than it is for the soul to forsake creatures, or all will be lost.

The soul must exist in a free nothingness. That we should forsake God is altogether what God intends, for as long as the soul has God, knows God, and is aware of God, she is far from God.

Now, it isn’t easy to understand Eckhart. He recognized that himself, concluding another sermon in this fashion.

Whoever has understood this sermon, I wish them well. Had no one been here, I would still have had to preach it to this collecting-box. There are some poor folk who return home and say, “I wish to sit down, to eat my bread and to serve God.” But I say by the eternal truth that these people shall remain in error and can never attain what those others attain who follow God in poverty and in exile. Amen.

D.T. Suzuki, a teacher of Zen, explains that for Eckhart “God” and “Godhead” are “as different as earth is from heaven.” Godhead is empty of everything that can be known, perceived, understood, comprehended. So, says Suzuki, to Eckhart pure nothing “is the highest point at which God can work in us as he pleases.”

With him God is still a something as long as there is any trace of movement or work or of doing something. When we come to the Godhead, we for the first time find that it is the unmoved, a nothing where there is no path to reach. It is absolute nothingness; therefore it is the ground of being from whence all beings come.

If this isn’t unclear enough, here are some additional Meister Eckhart quotations that have the delicious effect of overturning our unduly stable metaphysical apple cart.

But I say that if someone perceives something in God and gives it a name, then that is not God. God is above names and nature.

Taking leave of God for the sake of God is the greatest act of renunciation that someone can make.

Therefore we ask God to free us from “God” so that we may be able to grasp and eternally enjoy truth where the highest angels, the fly and the human soul are all one—in that place where I desired what I was and was what I desired.

Your soul should lose all her mental nature and should be left non-mental, for if you love God as “God,” as “Spirit,” as “Person,” as “Image,” then all this should be abandoned. You must love him as he is a non-God, a non-Spirit, a non-Person, a non-Image.

You are never better placed than when you are in complete darkness and unknowing.

Ah, thank you Meister Eckhart. I’m reassured that my meditation is going just fine.

Hey, God, shut up! No more conversations

Like a good lapsed Catholic, I will begin by confessing that I’ve never read “Conversations with God.” Nor any other of Neale Donald Walsch’s follow-up books (whatever or whoever God is, “wordy” certainly defines the supreme being).

I have, however, perused brief articles such as I found in a New Connexion issue that I’d picked up at a natural food store, needing some reading material to accompany my lunch of whole wheat pizza.

In a “What Does God Really Want?” interview, Walsch clues us in to the meaning of life as revealed by the Big Man Upstairs. Who, to encapsulate Walsch’s core message, is you. And me. And Neale Donald Walsch. Though a few of us get to enjoy million dollar book deals as a result of our identity with God, and most of us don’t, sadly.

Appealingly, I learned that God doesn’t require anything of us. Not meditation, or study, or anything else. Right now each of us is experiencing our own divinity. If we don’t know this, it’s because we aren’t willing to have the experience.

Somewhat paradoxically, however, Walsch says there are tools and techniques with which people can move themselves into the actual experience of God. Conveniently, these will be described in his latest book, “The Holy Experience.”

The article says that sample chapters are available for free on Walsch’s website. I couldn’t find any mention of them, but lots of unfree stuff for sale was easy to locate.

Well, the New Connexions piece told me that the central thought of “What God Wants” ($14 direct from Walsch and Co., $14.95 at Amazon) is “contained in chapter 13, and that chapter is a series of blank pages.” Thus I suggest saving your money. Why pay for nothing when that’s available gratis?

I may sound unduly critical of Walsch. Actually, I think he’s on to something. Fame and fortune, certainly. Yet also more than that. Heck, anyone who raises the righteous ire of true believing Christians earns kudos from me (some criticisms here and here). And positively, the notion that God speaks to each of us equally appeals to my churchless soul.

Yet what intrigues me the most is the question of what happens when God stops yapping away. Walsch whipped out a yellow pad and started scribbling when he began to get inspirations from God. Which, he’d be the first to admit, means from himself. (But calling his book “Conversations with Me” would have put a crimp in his publishing deal, for sure).

In the same vein, I’ve had plenty of conversations with God. I’m having one right now, in fact. I search my consciousness for inspiration, get a flash of insight, and transmit it through my touch-typing fingers to a computer screen, where it soon will be uploaded to this blog so that others may admire my divinity.

We all do this. There’s no reason to believe that Walsch has any special connection with truth that anyone else lacks. He’s a skilled marketer and purveyor of feel-good New Age platitudes. I’ve got a certain talent for communicating my own platitudes. So do we all.

The conversations we have with ourselves are interesting, no doubt. They keep me blogging away most days. But are the words inside my head, the ones that I speak to myself in a recursive blabfest that has lots of entertainment value but previous little wisdom, what I’m really after?

If so, I’ve got it.

If not, I don’t. And that’s a lot closer to how I feel.

God, my good friend whom I’m told is me, you need to learn how to shut the fuck up. Once in a while, at least. Now I know that we’ve been having this conversation for a long time. Ever since I started meditating in 1969, right?

I think it’s time to take our relationship to the next level. By which I mean, you need to take a hike. Adios, amigo. It was nice knowing you. Sayonara. One of us is unnecessary, and since I have a special fondness for me, I’m letting you go. Not that I believe you’ll depart my cranium immediately. This likely will be a gradual goodbye.

Walsch’s philosophy, says one of his critics, basically is monistic. Sounds right to me. There’s only one thing going on in the cosmos. Let’s call this “God.” And take this to a logical conclusion. Conversations require two to verbally tango. So who is talking to who when we’re conversing with God?

Probably Walsch has an answer to this question. But no matter. To my increasingly monistically inclined mind it’s wrong. The whole idea of questions and answers, speakers and listeners, words and silence, seems off-base when it comes to the ultimate.

I can’t prove that assertion. Or even clarify it. It’s just what God told me to say. That son of a gun is still hanging around.

We are all atheists

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

“We are all atheists, some of us just believe in fewer gods than others."

These are two well known quotes from Stephen F. Roberts. On his Without Gods blog, Mitchell Stephens cites a quotation from skeptic par excellence Michael Shermer along the same lines:

Christians today might say, I don't believe in Zeus, that was a silly superstition. Yet for many people that was a real god. So it turns out there are 10,000 gods and yet only one right one. That means we're all atheists on 9,999 gods. The only difference between me and the believers is I'm an atheist on one more god.

When you think about it, monotheism is indeed a pretty crazy idea. To wit, there’s a guy in the sky who is a person like us, but with vastly greater powers. Do what he says, and you’ll enjoy a good life and ever better afterlife. Cross the dude, and there will be hell to pay.

Literally.

James Foley says, “Enough with the ‘One God’ stuff.” His cautionary essay makes good sense. The exclusiveness of monotheism leads to nasty competition between religions, each of which believes that they know what the One True God wants.

Here in the high-tech futuristic 21st century, the punitive, vengeful, sky god is as strong and legitimate as he's been in a long time. Modernity, it turns out, was no cure for monotheism. If anything, it increases extremism, especially -- but never only -- among the dispossessed. And now in the Middle East we have the volatile blend of pissed-off Jews, Muslims, and Christians, each convinced they possess an a iron-clad mandate from their one and only angry god.

But it isn’t only the big three Western religions who preach an exclusive brand of monotheism. Yesterday the October newsletter from Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) came in the mail. I’ve been associated with this India-based group for many years. For a long time I enjoyed feeling that, as a RSSB initiate, I was one of God’s chosen people.

However, now the exclusiveness of the Sant Mat philosophy strikes me as both metaphysically unlikely and psychologically unhealthy. Here’s what Vincent Savarese wrote about spiritual truth in the newsletter:

The Guru who unveils this truth to the world may be a boy, a man, a woman, an aged sage. It is God Himself who decides what messenger to send…After fifteen hundred years later [after the time of Jesus], Guru Nanak Dev spoke of God the Creator as Truth and that Truth is revealed through the grace of the Guru.

Well, maybe. I don’t know. But it is clear to me that if you believe (1) there is only one true God, (2) this God decides who is going to be His messenger, (3) you’ve been taken under this wing of that special mediator between humanity and divinity, then (4) you’re going to feel damn special.

And therein lies the rub of monotheism. Virtually every form of spirituality that I’m aware of advises that an excessively enlarged ego keeps us from feeling connected to the larger reality that surrounds us. Yet each monotheistic religion feeds that sense of separateness by teaching believers, “We’ve got an exclusive connection with God. How special we are!”

Monism, a belief that there is only one fundamental impersonal foundation of reality, avoids most of the problems of monotheism. A monist considers that there is something more to the cosmos than what most of us are aware of now: unity. Yet obviously the One can’t be exclusive.

As Foley points out in his essay, polytheism, a belief in many gods, also is psychologically and societally healthier than monotheism. If there are lots of gods hanging out together, as the Greeks, Roman, Egyptians, and Hindus believed, then these multiple divinities serve as checks and balances on each other. A devotee of Minerva doesn’t consider that she has a monopoly on the truth, like a follower of Jesus does.

So I’ll take my spirituality monotheism-free, thank you. Hold the big guy in the sky and give me an extra helping of humility, openness, and pluralism. I’ll believe in One God when the evidence of his/her/its existence is indisputable.

Until then, I’ll just have to take my chances. And perhaps after too.

What’s up with worship?

Yesterday my wife had a epiphany. Laurel was driving by a church and saw a sign about Sunday Worship. “Suddenly,” she told me, “the whole idea of worshipping God seemed so ridiculous. How do we know that God wants to be worshipped?”

Excellent question. Which presupposes that there is a God at all. So the notion of “worship” is doubly dubious. The good Christians who attend that church believe in a God for whom there is no demonstrable evidence, and they also believe that this God whom they are clueless about loves to be worshipped.

Why? Because the Bible tells them so. And why should they believe the Bible? Because the Bible tells them to. It’s no wonder most scientists eschew religion. Circular reasoning that leads nowhere isn’t their cup of tea.

Nor, mine.

Christianity believes in a personal God who is the absolutely greatest being there could possibly be. This is Anselm’s Ontological Argument. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but regardless, I’ll agree that if God exists, you’d expect that this dude (or dudette) would put pretenders to perfect divinity to shame.

So I picture really good people like the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, or Gandhi being asked, “Is it OK if we worship you?” I’m pretty sure these humble souls would be aghast at the idea. “No, for god’s sake, don’t worship me. Love me, get to know me, be with me—but don’t put me up on a pedestal.”

Yet God does want to be worshipped?

My own adaptation of Anselm’s argument is that if it is possible for you to envision a human being who has higher moral qualities than your conception of God, you’d better rethink that conception.

In his book “Breaking the Spell,” Daniel Dennett addresses the marketability of the two main God hypotheses: God as essence (ground of being, non-anthropomorphic, not in time and space, abstract) or God as conscious supernatural being (who listens to and answers prayers in real time, for instance.) Dennett quotes Rodney Stark:

“There is no more profound religious difference than between faiths involving divine beings and those limited to divine essences,” he [Stark] says, and the latter he judges to be hopeless, because “only divine beings do anything.” Supernatural conscious beings are much better sellers because “the supernatural is the only plausible source of many benefits we greatly desire.”

Ah, now we’ve gotten to the root of worship. It’s an exchange relationship. God asks for praise and devotion; I offer it; God then gives me what I want. Eternal life. A place in heaven. Escape from damnation. Freedom from my sins. Divine wisdom.

Well, I’m with Laurel. The more you ponder the worship game, the more absurd it seems. I’m supposed to kiss God’s ass even though I’ve never seen God. Or his ass. And I don’t even know if this God whom I don’t know likes to have his ass kissed.

For all I know, which I don’t, maybe God hates all this worship stuff and he’s going to kick my ass if I kiss his.

Good luck, faithful worshippers. You might be needing it.

Possible and impossible gods

I’m a firm believer in melding science and spirituality. Any religion or metaphysical system that is clearly at odds with evident scientific facts has no appeal for me.

So the book by Victor Stenger that I wrote about in my previous post, “God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist,” is right up my alley. It hasn’t been published yet, but today I took a look at a sample chapter via Stenger’s web site.

“Possible and Impossible Gods” is thought-provoking. And Judeo - Christian - Islamic religion-demolishing. Stenger argues persuasively that it isn’t possible for the God of the Bible and Koran to co-exist with what is known about the physical universe.

--The universe doesn’t show any expected signs of design. Scratch a Designer God.
--There’s no evidence that humans have an immortal aspect to them. Scratch a God Who Creates and Saves Souls.
--No independent evidence exists of divine interactions with human beings. Scratch a God of Miracles.
--No violations of physical law were necessary to create the universe. Scratch a Creator God.
--No claimed divine communication ever has been confirmed empirically. Scratch a God of Revelation.
--Evidence shows that humans define morals and human values for themselves. Scratch a Law-Giving God.
--Evil evidently exists. Scratch an Omnibenevolent God.

Now, this doesn’t mean that it is impossible for some higher power, a.k.a. “God,” to exist. It just means that the God most Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe in doesn’t exist. The God who communicates and interacts with people, who intervenes in human affairs, who created the universe through supernatural means.

However, it seems to me that philosophical (as contrasted with religious) Buddhism and Taoism are mostly, if not completely, compatible with modern science.

Living in harmony with the Nature both within and without ourselves — scientific. Searching for the essence of consciousness through meditation — scientific. Accepting that what lies beyond physical matter and energy is a profound mystery — scientific.

There’s plenty of room for spirituality in the house of science. Reality doesn’t have to be shoved out of the window. It’s even possible to envision god living on an inaccessible upper floor.

As Stenger puts it:

When I demonstrate that a particular God is rejected by the data, I am not proving that all conceivable gods do not exist. I am simply showing beyond a reasonable doubt that a God with the specific, hypothesized attributes [of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God] does not exist.

All praise to the Possible Gods. And good riddance to the Impossible Gods.