Church of the Churchless

Faith healing is child abuse

Religions are dangerous. Nowhere is this more obvious than in cases of child abuse. The Catholic Church is #1 in this area, but to me killing children in the name of faith healing is even more abhorrent.

You can recover from sexual abuse. You can't recover from dying.

Yesterday an Oregon boy died of a urinary tract blockage. A radio news report I heard this afternoon said it's an exceedingly painful way to die. A catheter probably would have saved him.

I hope his Followers of Christ parents rot in hell. I don't believe in hell, but if it exists, parents who kill their children deserve priority admission.

The crazy thing is that Oregon law allows anyone 14 years or older to deny medical treatment. So if the boy had been sufficiently infected with Followers of Christ insanity and refused the catheter, his parents may not be able to be criminally charged.

But they should be, as the parents of a 15 month old girl – members of the same Followers of Christ congregation – have been (also yesterday, coincidentally).

Ava Worthington died March 2 at home from bacterial bronchial pneumonia and infection, according to Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner. He said both conditions could have been prevented or treated with antibiotics.

The child's breathing was further compromised by a benign cyst that had never been medically addressed and could have been removed from her neck, Young said.

That's outrageous. Equally outrageous is how legislators in this country allow ignorant religious loonies to kill their children in the name of their imaginary God.

If people were sacrificing children in the name of an Aztec deity, they'd be punished. But if they do it in the name of Jesus, the law generally looks the other way.

As reported in "A child's death and a crisis of faith," most states give some sort of free pass to religious child abuse.

In all, 45 states offer some legal accommodations in child-protection laws for parents who use spiritual healing, according to the Christian Science church. The laws vary widely, with some states protecting parents or guardians from felony abuse or murder prosecutions, while others exempt prayer practice only in misdemeanor cases, according to Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty Inc., a nonprofit group based in Sioux City, Iowa, that opposes such laws.

Wisconsin has three statutes providing religious healing exceptions: one in the child-abuse laws, one in the laws concerning crimes against children, and one that bars the state from forcing medical care on someone who chooses Christian Science prayer. The state's child-abuse laws were amended in 1987 to say: "A person is not guilty of an offense ... solely because he or she provides a child with treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone for healing." The wording was requested by the local Christian Science government-relations office, according to the Wisconsin Legislative Council, a state agency.

Ridiculous.

Whenever I hear someone say "What's wrong with believing in God?" I think of all the children who have died in the name of faith. Not to mention the countless others who have otherwise suffered at the hands of religious believers.

“How could you stop believing?”

I get asked that question a lot. Not often so explicitly, but implicitly. People wonder how, when I used to believe so strongly in certain religious teachings, now I don't.

The implication is that my "losing faith" was a betrayal of some sort – that I discarded the spiritual system that I once clung to so tightly for no good reason, like a spouse dumping his or her partner on a whim.

Well, what these people don't understand is that we all grow. Or at least, we should. Not in height and, disturbingly, girth, but in spiritual maturity.

Which relates to stages of human development, a subject of a previous post. I shared a diagram of Ken Wilber's compendium of developmental stages.

This is an abbreviated version, ten stages rather than twelve, that I came across today while reading Wilber's "Integral Spirituality." (He uses colors to identify the levels.)

1. Infrared – archaic, sensorimotor
2. Magenta – magical-animistic
3. Red – egocentric, power, magic-mythic
4. Amber – mythic, ethnocentric, traditional
5. Orange – rational, worldcentric, pragmatic, modern
6. Green – pluralistic, multicultural, postmodern
7. Teal – beginning integral, low vision-logic, systemic
8. Turquoise -- global mind, high vision-logic, higher mind
9. Indigo – para-mind, trans-global, illumined mind
10. Violet – meta-mind and overmind

Now, I don't know what all of these levels mean. And this isn't just because I'm unfamiliar with the terminology.

A bigger problem is that you have to actually be at a stage to really know what that level is like. Sort of like describing higher mathematics to a toddler. The child may nod when you explain calculus, but they haven't actually gotten it.

When we move to a higher stage, the same phenomena appear different to us. It isn't so much a question of losing faith in them as it is seeing them from a fresh perspective.

Do you remember what it was like to realize there's no Santa Claus? I do. I learned to read early. I distinctly recall holding a plastic toy and reading "Made in Japan" in small letters at the bottom of it.

I told my mother, "How could this be made in Japan when Santa Claus brought it?" Without hesitation she told me the truth. "There's no Santa Claus."

Wilber says that Santa Claus is a reality at the Magenta level. Above that, Santa Claus doesn't exist in the same fashion. A child has to be above the Magenta level to figure out Santa Claus.

Similarly, religious beliefs take on a different color, so to speak, as we mature and reach higher stages of consciousness. These are distinct from states of consciousness, as noted in the previous post.

You can meditate like crazy and have mystical experiences at any of Wilber's color-coded stages. You'll interpret those experiences in the light of what your consciousness is capable of.

I haven't stopped believing in anything that I experienced during my thirty-five years as a believer. All that's changed is my understanding of what I thought, felt, perceived, and imagined.

I don't know where I am on the 1-10 stage list. But Amber used to describe my spiritual devotion quite well. I bought into religious myths. I accepted the traditions of my chosen faith. I toed the theological line. I didn't question what I was taught. At least, not much.

It's easy for me to remember how I used to be. I know that if I'd met someone like who I am now, back then, I'd have said to him: "My friend, you need to rekindle your lost faith. Your skepticism is blinding you to spiritual truth."

But here I am, doing what the previous me would have found abhorrent. Just as when I believed in Santa Claus, the prospect of having that belief balloon burst would have filled me with tears – if I could even have envisioned it.

Yet when I read, "Made in Japan," it was with a calm sense of Yes, this is the way things are. No disappointment.

Just a sensation of having left a belief behind that didn't belong to who I'd become.

Churchless on the rise in United States

Praise the non-Lord! The faithless are on the march! The ranks of the religiously unaffiliated have risen from 5-8% in the 1980s to 16.1% today.

So says a survey of religious affiliation by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life. This is great news. It shows that the Question Mark God, a.k.a. Who knows?, has a plan for America: ever-increasing uncertainty.

A USA Today story on the Pew Forum report is titled, "Survey: Americans freely change, or drop, their religions." More good news.

A new map of faith in the USA shows a nation constantly shifting amid religious choices, unaware or unconcerned with doctrinal distinctions. Unbelief is on the rise.

The story quotes one of the report's co-authors, John Green.

"Fluidity is the rule today, not the exception. There's greater diversity and greater movement — a quantum leap in the rate of change."

"It will become increasingly difficult to find people who share a love for distinct doctrine," he adds.

"But there are always niches in the marketplace. There will always be a place for religions that are strict. They just may cater to smaller numbers."

We can only hope. Like eventually, zero.

Of course, I'm biased. I've tried the strict thing and found it wanting. Since religiosity is aimed at finding ultimate truth that's currently unknown, I now consider that flexible openness is the hallmark of genuine spiritual inquiry – not clinging rigidly to preconceived dogmas.

Today a friend sent me a Science vs. Faith Flowchart.

You can see that science is about examining evidence to see if it supports an idea. Then getting more evidence and/or changing the idea. It's full of feedback loops that produce changes in direction, homing in on truth.

Faith, on the other hand, is linear. It sticks with what it believes, ignoring discordant evidence.

Fortunately, Americans are coming around to the benefits of a more scientific approach to answering the big questions of life. They're increasingly willing to discard the faith they grew up with for something that makes more sense.

I'm proud to point out that nowhere is this more true than in Oregon, where I live. I perused the maps page on the Pew Forum web site and found that Oregon has the highest proportion of religiously unaffiliated adults, 27%.

We're #1! We're #1! Still, that's 73% remaining to be converted to faithlessness.

Let all of religion fall down. Every bit.

It's such a Byzantine structure, all these notions about God, salvation, life after death, soul, spirit, ultimate meaning. The Grand Temple of Speculation sprawls endlessly, with more building continuously going on.

Floors piled on top of floors, rooms tacked on to rooms, furnishings added and subtracted as dogmatic decorators fine tune how they want things to look.

For most of my life I've enjoyed wandering through the building. I'm familiar with most of the basic architecture – the religious, mystical, spiritual, metaphysical, and philosophical teachings that have blossomed and multiplied from the dawn of recorded history (and likely long before that).

Now I look at the Grand Temple of Speculation from a more detached perspective.

Instead of judging the relative merits of this floor vs. that floor, this room vs. that room, the whole damn building strikes me as worthy of being torn down to bare ground.

This won't happen in reality, of course. Not with billions of people firmly committed to keeping the structure not only intact, but also to strengthening and expanding it.

But I can dream. I visualize huge pieces of the temple crumbling, shattering, falling in chunks with a roar. I don't see any part of it withstanding the explosive charges of reality.

Not a bit.

This goes against other dreams. Almost every believer, whether of the explicitly religious variety or of a more subtle spiritual sort, considers that in the end his or her chosen belief structure will keep on standing while others fade away.

At the Second Coming Jesus will show the doubters what's up. When Allah rends the veil, disbelievers will prostrate themselves before His Glory. Jehovah has some tricks up His sleeve for those who fail to follow the divine law. After death those who failed to find a god-realized guru will be thrown into the whirlpool of reincarnation again.

The details differ, naturally. But the common theme is that when the hurricane of ultimate truth blows by, only one part of the Grand Temple of Speculation will be left standing.

Those who have chosen to place their faith in that particular structure will be seated comfortably on soft lounges, sipping sweet juices while divine Muzak plays. The rest of us will be face down in the muck, clutching at whatever flimsy support our bloodied fingers can grasp, moaning and crying at what's befallen us, wishing we'd chosen a safer place to spend eternity.

Well, as I often say, maybe. But I doubt it.

I feel that this is a lot more likely: whatever ultimate reality is, whatever absolute truth is, it isn't like anything humans have been able to cognize, to describe, to speak of, to write holy books about.

If that whatever-the-heck-it-is were to make an appearance, every single human on Earth would cry out What the fuck! Unbelievable! I had it so goddamn wrong! (in his or her own profanity strewn language, naturally).

Religious believers. Scientists. Philosophers. Ordinary people. Geniuses. Idiots. Everybody. Our notions about reality would crumble before the real thing.

This presumes that there is such a beast – the real thing. But if there isn't, the same crumbling would occur. Because now the appearance would be a non-appearance. A void. A nothingness.

And that would collapse the Grand Temple of Speculation just as surely. Actually, with more force, since nothing is more destructive of beliefs without a foundation than nothing.

Whoosh…down the rabbit hole.

So to me it makes sense to keep our belief structures as simple as possible. A small thatched hut. Bamboo and palm fronds. Open on the sides to fresh air.

If it falls down, no big deal. We haven't settled in to lavish quarters on the ninetieth floor of a religious dogma tower. Best to stay as close to solid ground as possible. You never know when the high wind of reality is going to blow through.

What is religion?

Some people want to be called "religious." To them, this term is a honor. Others don't. They see religions as relics of a pre-scientific superstitious age.

I'm in the call me what you want, so long as it isn't "religious" category. It's difficult, though, to pin down what is, and isn't, a religion.

Wikipedia takes a stab at it. Unsatisfyingly, in my opinion. Too many definitions fit just about any strongly held systematized belief or passion, as when someone says "Golf is my religion."

So when I browsed through the table of contents for Christopher Hitchens' "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever," my eye was caught by an excerpt from one of Daniel Dennett's books titled "A Working Definition of Religion."

Here's what Dennett says:

Tentatively, I propose to define religions as social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. This is, of course, a circuitous way of articulating the idea that a religion without God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone.

Sure, it's possible to quibble with this definition. But intuitively it feels right to me.

And it goes a long way toward explaining why, no matter how often I heard during my devoted Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) days, "this is not a religion," the organization still felt like it was.

For if you're expected to follow vows, commandments, rituals, or forms of worship because a supernatural being (in this case, God and/or the guru) will reward you with spiritual goodies, that sure seems like a religion – no matter the protestations to the contrary.

One of the RSSB books, "Spiritual Letters," contains this quote from one of the early gurus.

Consider that each and every thing in the world – body, mind, and wealth – belong to the Satguru, that you are nothing. Do all of your work knowing it to be thus, and stay within the Satguru's instructions. He will then take you with him [to spiritual regions] when he considers you fit.

Well, maybe. All I know is that for about thirty years I followed the guru's instructions, and I didn't get taken anywhere. Maybe others got a different result.

Regardless, my point is that Radha Soami Satsang Beas, like other religious groups, puts a lot of emphasis on winning the favor of a supernatural being (the guru is considered to be much more than a physical body; God incarnate, in fact).

Similarly, Jesus saves. If you're deserving of salvation.

I like Dennett's definition of religion because it draws a line between belief systems that often are mistakenly lumped together.

Taoism and Buddhism don't belong with Christianity and Islam. The former are world views that don't include an anthropomorphic supreme being who intervenes in human affairs and demands a certain moral code. The latter are religions that do believe in such a god.

I'm with Albert Einstein, who used the term "religious" in a non-theistic sense.

The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe.

It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image – a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being.

For this reason, people of our type see in morality a purely human matter, albeit the most important in the human sphere.

Letter to a Rabbi in Chicago, from "Albert Einstein, the Human Side," pp. 69-70

Religion needs to dance – freely

Mark Morford, a columnist for SF Gate, gets it just right in his "Does your religion dance? Behold, the most dangerous issue facing modern faith: it's inability to evolve, nakedly."

If you've never read Morford, his free-floating stream of consciousness writing style takes some getting used to. But what he says, and how he says it, sound just fine to me in this piece.

We as a culture just might be suffering a slow, painful death by spiritual stagnation, by ideological stasis, by cosmic rigor mortis. It has become painfully, lethally obvious in the age of George W. Bush and authoritarian groupthink that our major religious systems and foundations don't know how to move. They don't learn, adjust, evolve, see things anew. They don't know how to dance. And what's more, this little problem might just be the death of us all.

I hadn't done much dancing until February of last year. That's when my wife and I started taking Argentine Tango lessons.

Since, the Tango/Dance category of my other blog has filled up with quite a few dance-related posts. We've also tried American Tango, Nightclub 2-Step, Waltz, and a dash of Cha-Cha-Cha.

It probably isn't a coincidence that the more churchless I've become, the more I've been attracted to moving freely on a dance floor.

"Freely" is the key word. I've practiced martial arts for about fifteen years. Traditional katas, or forms, are akin to rigid religions: you don't mess with how they're performed.

So I was familiar with moving on a hardwood floor long before I started dancing. But there's a big difference between moving to somebody else's preconceived beat, and your own creative expression.

This is what Morford is calling for: flexible spontaneity in religion and spirituality.

It is through the creative impulse, through imagination and our deep need for mystery, that the gods can truly dance, remain fresh, stay alive and vital and interesting. It is only through our ability to reinvent them and honor them in new and miraculous ways that humanity will keep afloat and vibrant. The gods are, after all, our creation. Why not let our creation tango?

Here's a take on dancing Argentine Tango improvisationally. It's difficult, something I can only aspire to. (Argentine Tango is called the "Ph.D. of social dances" for that reason.) The authors say:

A much greater mastery of tango and more improvisational freedom is found in the ability to break off patterns and switch to others without hesitation. The highest degree of improvisational freedom is found in choosing individual steps without regard to any pre-determined patterns.

Sounds like good advice for dancing with the divine also.

That said, I enjoyed Morford's mention of the "profane masculine" – as contrasted with the "divine feminine." Like him, I'm more a devotee of the former.

Religions’ desperate search for causes

Why? Why? Why? From an early age, we're all obsessed with finding the reason for things. I remember being driven almost crazy by my daughter when she entered her "why" phase.

"Why are you filling up the bathtub?"
"To give you a bath."
"Why?"
"Because you're dirty."
"Why?"
"Because you played outside all day."
"Why?"
"Because your friends came over."
"Why?"
"Because they didn't recognize what an irritating little girl you can be when you keep asking why when someone is trying to wash your hair." (OK, I didn't actually say that; but I'd think it).

Today I got to a chapter about causes in the book that I've been reading, and enjoying a lot: The Mystical Mind. Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg, the authors, talked about the brain's causal operator.

Basically this is the neurological function that makes little girls ask "Why?" It also spurs grown-ups to pursue philosophy, science, and – notably – religion.

We humans have an inherent urge to seek causes for what's happening around us. If the mind can't determine the cause of something from sense data and logical inference, the causal operator keeps on chugging away regardless.

Until it comes up with a satisfying myth or other explanation for what can't be explained. What happens when we die? No one knows for sure. But this nagging question won't go away once a self-aware human brain raises it.

So religions do a booming business in providing mythical answers. They generally don't make much sense. However, our desperate search for why's causes us to cling to just about any answer that's emotionally satisfying.

Why is my life so screwed up?
Don't worry, Jesus has a plan for you.
Oh, thank you. Now I feel better.

Many other words can be substituted for "Jesus." God. Allah. The guru. Destiny. The Tao. Providence. Karma.

Whichever, they all point to a pleasing alternative to chaotic unpredictable unknowingness. Somebody or some force is in charge of things, including what happens to us.

We may not know what's going to pop into or out of our life at any given moment. But the belief that all this popping has a plan behind it is deeply reassuring. Hence, the popularity of religions.

The religion I know best is of the Eastern variety, Sant Mat (in the guise of Radha Soami Satsang Beas).

I was initiated into this mystical-meditational form of spirituality in 1971, after my wild and crazy Flower Power '60s years. Suddenly I went from flowing freely with whatever happened into a worldview where everything had a place, and there was a place for everything.

Morality. Diet. Worship. Theology. I no longer had to struggle to figure out what to do or what to believe. All the answers were in the books, magazines, tapes, and videos that I filled my brain with.

My causal operator was being fed just what it wanted: answers, reasons, causes.

Consider karma. This is a marvelous explanation for everything and anything, though in truth it doesn't explain much at all – about the big questions of life, at least. "Instant karma" is a decent explanation for the course a ball struck on a pool table takes.

That's because you can see the cause and effect. However, saying "that was your karma" when someone has an auto accident really doesn't add to an understanding of the situation.

Still, it can give the person a feeling that life makes sense on another level. Not the level of everyday experience, where the general rule is stuff happens, but on a mythical plane of reality where life's events are being planned just so.

There's nothing wrong with desperately seeking causes. Without that urge, science and philosophy wouldn't exist. However, religion shortcuts the seeking.

And that's bad. We end up satisfied with explanations that really aren't satisfying. But they're available, so we hang on to them for dear life.

Like the song said, sort of, "If you can't be with the cause you love, love the cause you're with."

Well, that's fine, so long as we realize what we're settling for: a second-rate date with religious mythologies.

Religion, watch out for a grizzly bear with an EEG!

Sometimes I'm called a materialistic atheist by commenters on this blog, as if that's something bad. Or at least surprising, given my previous fervent commitment to the metaphysical theology of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

But, hey, I've been talking about a grizzly bear with an EEG machine for a long time. Way back when I used to give satsangs ("sermons") to the faithful at RSSB meetings, this used to be one of my favorite thought experiments regarding the practice of meditation.

An EEG, or electroencephalograph, measures electrical activity in the brain. It's a crude way of testing brain function. Nowadays there are much more sophisticated approaches, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

However, those machines are massive. I can't see a grizzly bear carrying one, no matter how strong the animal is. So I'll continue to have my bear cart around a plain old EEG, with electrodes that get plastered to a person's head.

Here's how I used to tell my tale.

There I am, walking through the woods, enjoying the wilderness. My enjoyment comes to an abrupt end when a grizzly bear appears on the trail ahead of me. Worse, he doesn't look to be in a good mood.

My brain scrambles to remember what the hell you're supposed to do when confronted by an out-of-sorts grizzly bear. "Um, with a cougar you stand your ground and try to look big and unafraid. With grizzly bears though, don't you curl up in a ball and play dead?"

Maybe. I don't know. Regardless, that's how my thought experiment plays out. I collapse to the ground, trying to look as dead as someone very much alive – and wanting to stay that way – is able to appear.

I shut my eyes. Reduce my breathing. Go limp.

I can hear the bear shuffling forward, grunting. It sounds confused. No attack so far. Things are looking up, if you can consider that playing dead while a grizzly bear ponders your eatability is anyway describable as "up."

Then…a click. A metallic click. What the #$%&*! could that be?

For a moment I imagine that it was the sound of a hunter cocking his gun. Then I'm remember that I'm in a wilderness area. No guns here. No hunters either. I'm on my own.

I can't stand it. I dare to half-open one eye. Thankfully the bear is turned away from me. He's occupied – with setting up an EEG machine.

Holy shit! Now I know I'm really, truly, deeply fucked! (I kept my language a bit cleaner when I included this story in one of my satsangs).

Just my luck – I'm playing dead next to a grizzly bear with a goddamn EEG machine! In a minute or two he's going to be putting electrodes on my head and monitoring my brain activity. If I think, "Don't think!" that'll appear as thinking. If I feel that I shouldn't be afraid, that'll appear as emotion.

So I've got to be as dead inside my head as I'm trying to look outwardly. A tough proposition. Real tough. Especially with the grizzly bear working like mad to set up his EEG machine. Not exactly a conducive situation for a super-calm meditation.

Well, that's the gist of my grizzly bear with an EEG tale. You're probably wondering, what's the point? Good question.

I wish I remembered what came next in my sermonizing. Then I'd have my devotional kind of answer. I seem to recall that I went on to talk about how meditation should be approached with the same got-to-do-this-just-right attitude that you'd have if a grizzly bear was about to attach EEG electrodes to your scalp.

You'd either slow down your brain activity pronto, or you'd soon be dead.

Today, though, I like this tale for a different reason. Now the grizzly isn't a bear to me, he's everything.

Nature, the universe, God, cyberspace, cold cereal, television, thinking, feeling, perceiving, not doing anything at all, dancing, blogging about grizzly bears with EEGs, whatever.

Everything that happens to us, everything that we experience, everything that we imagine, everything that we believe, everything that we know – all of that flows through our brains. Even if somehow there's something of us that isn't material, that thing (soul?) is bound to the brain.

Now, maybe you don't believe this. But that belief will show up on a brain scanner, believe me. So will everything else that you do or don't do in an attempt to show a neuroscientist that you aren't really your body, but immaterial "soul."

You'll get eaten alive by the grizzly bear of science. For sure. This doesn't mean that you aren't right. Or rather, that after you die you won't be able to note your still-alive consciousness and realize Yes, I knew it; I wasn't just my body, but something more.

Unfortunately, it'll be too late for you to convince the skeptical scientist who monitored your always-active brain while you were physically alive. Nor could you ever have convinced him or her. Because so long as you live with a brain, you're a material boy or girl, just like Madonna sang about.

Here's how the book I've been reading recently puts it:

We have also suggested that, as far as we can determine, all human experience eventually enters human awareness via the function of the brain. It certainly seems reasonable to reach the conclusion that the brain is the structure that gives all of us our thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

…The question again is how we can show that the brain is what mediates all of our experiences. This is where imaging studies lend a strong degree of empirical support…The conclusion to be drawn from this huge database of studies is that, at least for now, it seems that no matter what happens to us or what we do, there is a part of the brain that becomes activated.

…In approaching theology, it seems that any human religious or ritual experience is necessarily modulated by the brain. In fact, we have already begun studies to show the activity in the brain during profound meditation.

Who's afraid of the big bad bear? Not me. Not anymore.

I've got a brain. I'm alive. I meditate. I seek the truth of what both the cosmos and us are all about. All of that will show up on an EEG or fMRI machine.

Which doesn't bother me at all.

Religion as an art form

I've got no problem with religious mythology. Many children believe in Santa Claus. Lots of adults here in the Pacific Northwest believe in Bigfoot. Belief systems with little or no foundation in objective reality abound.

So what's the harm in using religion as a mythological art form? None. All of us engage in fantasies of one form or another.

When I played tennis seriously I always believed that the next new racquet I bought would eliminate my nasty double-faulting problem. That never happened, but I continued to have faith in the Perfect Racquet – thereby adding to the profitability of Prince and other manufacturers.

In a recent issue of New Scientist, Amanda Gefter reviews "Dawin's Angel: An angelic riposte to the God Delusion," by John Cornwell (note: this link is to Amazon UK, not Amazon US – where the book isn't listed)

She quotes Cornwell:

You think religion is a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. And yet, for most of those who studied religion down the ages, it is as much a product of the imagination as art, poetry, and music.

Well, yes, absolutely. My sentiments exactly. But we admire the works of Rembrandt, T.S. Eliot, and Beethoven – we don't worship them and found our entire outlook on life around a painting, poem, or symphony.

And few of us expect that other people will share our artistic sentiments, or consider that if they don't, they're deluded.

Thus Gefter is right on the mark when she says that while Cornwell aces his contention that religion satisfies a need that can't be met by cold hard scientific facts, he misses the mark in other respects.

But before celebrating a win he must presumably concede that in this version of religion, no particular set of religious beliefs can be taken as superior to any other. He must allow that "belief" is probably not the right word, and consider using "intuition" or "experience."

And that if a sacred text like the Bible is, as he says, not to be taken literally, then its metaphorical and allegorical insights cannot be held in any higher esteem than those of other great works of literature.

This short New Scientist article, which I'll include in its entirety as a continuation to this post, got me thinking about my personal myths and how they could easily become converted into religious dogma if I came to be seen as a great sage or prophet (unlikely, since I can't even get our dog to reliably bring a ball back to me when I throw it).

My mother had several strokes in her final years. After her last serious one, before I was able to fly from Oregon to the California hospital where she'd been admitted, I sat on a large Douglas fir stump outside my Salem home and came as close to praying as my non-monotheistic soul would allow.

I pretty much believed in karma at the time. Back then I also considered that my guru might be able to manipulate karma in a godlike fashion. So on that stump I talked to him: "Master, I want to give my good karma to my mother. Whatever you can do for her, please do, even if it means that my journey to god-realization takes a significant detour."

At the time I knew that I might be talking to myself. Now I'm almost sure of it. Yet I still cling to this myth.

Even today, before I meditate I often recollect standing by my mother's bedside and holding her hand as she, comatose, died after being taken off of life support (her brain was gone, and my sister and I were more than willing to respect my mother's wishes not to be kept alive artificially in such a circumstance).

At the time I silently wished her soul, Godspeed.

And now, I enjoy imagining that by letting go of my own thoughts, emotions, and other attachments in meditation, I'm helping to propel my mother across some sort of cosmic Truth Portal that she has found her way to, but can't enter without a last push of good karma from her son.

I know, this sounds crazy. And it is. I recognize that myself. However, this myth serves a purpose for me in a way I can't even explain to myself, much less to other people. Like everybody's relation to their parents, mine is so deeply personal it's barely communicable.

Yet this deeply personal myth of mine still could become the core of a shared mythology under the right circumstances. Provide me with an eloquent gift of gab plus a gullible audience, and you might see the seed of a new form of ancestor worship begin to sprout.

In short, a religion. One which could come to believe that it actually is possible to affect the afterlife of a deceased relative by bestowing your good karma upon them, and that it's the divine duty of everyone to do just that.

God forbid that such should ever happen. I've no interest in spreading my personal mythologies beyond the interior of my own mind.

I realize that my fantasy is, as Cornwell argues, a subjective art form that has nothing to do with external objective reality – and that the only critic whose opinion counts to me is myself.

(Here's the entire book review)

Krishna Consciousness isn’t churchless

I haven't given much thought to the Hare Krishnas since the '60s and '70s. Then it was hard to miss the saffron-robed devotees' ecstatic chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra at airports, college campuses, and other public places.

Now I'm reminded of them via my perusal of an interesting comment exchange that began September 2 on a Church of the Churchless post. Scrolling down the comments to that date, you'll find one that begins:

Landofpar, Please chant the Hare Krsna ("Hahraay Krishna") mahamantra and be happy.

A moments association with a pure devotee can save one from the greatest danger. That danger is to suffer on the wheel of karma for millions of births in the material world. A.C. Bhaktivedant Swami Prabhupada appeared to deliver a sublime message to us all:

You are not the body. You are spirit-soul. You are part and parcel of Shri Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Krishna is God. He is the all-attractive Supreme Person. Your eternal home is with Him in the spiritual world (Vaikuntha). You have a loving relationship with Krishna. The easiest method for reviving that spiritual love is to chant the names of God:

Hare Krsna, Hare Krsna
Krsna Krsna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama
Rama Rama, Hare Hare

Well, could be. Philosophically speaking my mantra is: "I don't know. I don't know. Don't know. Don't know."

But along with other Church of the Churchless regulars, I was surprised that the person advocating an embrace of Krishna Consciousness was none other than Tao – who has been harshly critical of "churchy" religious organizations, including India-based ones like Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Over on the Yahoo Radha Soami discussion group, where a similar discussion has been taking place, Manjit said:

Hello Tao - are you kidding? Chant Hare Krishna to 'make your life happy and sublime'? For real? I'm flabbergasted!! I've been reading your recent comments, and am totally blown away by what I perceive to be outstanding irony in your praise of the Hare Krishna theology, especially in light of your often vitriolic criticisms & contempt for the RS system.

I've always enjoyed Emerson's "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Being an advocate of spiritual independence, I'll all for individualistic creativity when it comes to fashioning a personal philosophy of life or spiritual faith.

Whatever turns you on. If it feels good, do it. Different strokes for different folks. ('60's ish sentiments that still ring true to me)

That said, I have to agree with Manjit that there are a lot of similarities between the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) and Sant Mat groups such as Radha Soami Satsang Beas. On the ISKCON web site I found a summary of the Hare Krishna philosophy, which says in part:

The Vedic scriptures state that spiritual life begins when one inquires into the nature of the absolute truth, the Supreme Godhead…The ultimate goal of Gaudiya Vaisnavism is to develop a loving relationship with the Supreme Godhead.

…To understand knowledge of self-realisation one must approach a genuine spiritual master, just as one learns the essence of any subject from a perfected practitioner.

…The Vedas describe the [Hare Krishna] mantra as a prayer to the Lord, "Please Lord, engage me in Your service".

Devotees may accept formal initiation into the chanting of the Holy Name vowing to abstain from intoxication, gambling, illicit sexual connections and the eating of meat, fish or eggs.

Though I once was a true believer in a particular path to God, I now can't accept that repeating certain words as a mantra, accepting a particular guru, or following prescribed ethical precepts are keys to unlocking the door that separates us from ultimate reality.

I also find it difficult to resonate with the notion of a personal divinity. Christian mystics repeat the Jesus Prayer as a mantra: "Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me" (or a variant). Hare Krishnas call upon Krishna. RSSB devotees look toward the guru while repeating their own mantra.

Everybody thinks their own way is the way.

Again, I don't know for sure that there are many ways, rather than just one (assuming there is a way at all). Who knows? Maybe there really is a distinct personality at the end of the God road who favors being called by this name rather than that name.

I doubt it, though. When I feel most in touch with the reality of either my own self or the world around me, I don't have much of a need to label, analyze, dissect, or conceptualize. I am as I am, and it is as it is.

Which is why I'll continue to say "I don't know," which amounts to saying "I can't say."

(However, I will say that even though I'm not attracted to Hare Krishna as a religion, I'm on board with its vegetarianism. Got some fond memories of Hare Krishna feasts.)

Scrupulosity, a religious mental illness

Do you know someone who tries to follow every commandment, injunction, rule, and ritual of his or her religion absolutely correctly? Within their faith they probably are considered to be exemplary examples of rectitude.

But there's another way of looking at them, which I learned about today thanks to a blog comment from Sapient. They could be suffering from scrupulosity – a mental disorder.

Religious belief, and membership in a faith community are important factors in the lives of many individuals. In addition to moral and spiritual guidance, they can provide a sense of purpose, structure and community. For certain individuals, religious beliefs become compulsive, joyless behaviors.

The individual may constantly worry that he or she might say or do something blasphemous. He may fear that he has committed sin, forgotten it and then neglected to repent for the sin. He may spend long hours searching his mind to try to ferret out evidence of un-confessed sins. He is unable to feel forgiven.

Specific obsessions and compulsions vary according to the individual's religion. An Orthodox Jew might worry that he did not perform a particular ritual correctly. He might obsess about this for hours. A Roman Catholic might go to confession several times a day. Another individual could believe that anything he does might be sinful. This individual might become so paralyzed with doubt, that he or she becomes afraid to do or say anything at all.

Sapient said that members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based group with which I was associated for many years, are especially prone to scrupulosity, with many taking medication for anxiety problems.

I'm inclined to agree, though I also resonate with one of Roland deVries' (a RSSB official) favorite sayings about initiates: "Satsangis are run of the mill people." Meaning, they're as messed up as everyone else in the world.

I certainly had my own tendencies toward scrupulosity during my deeply devoted decades. RSSB initiates are supposed to meditate two and a half hours a day. I wore a watch with a countdown timer and set it for 150 minutes. I wouldn't let myself go to sleep at night until the timer had counted down to "0:00" and beeped at me.

It was ridiculous, really. There I'd be, sitting in as good an imitation of a meditation posture as I could muster late at night, half-heartedly/ mindedly passing the mantra repetition time until I could say, "Vow fulfilled for another day!"

Other initiates would obsess over the possible presence of eggs or animal rennet in some restaurant food, as if eating a few specks of something not on the official RSSB diet plan would make all the difference to their salvation.

These are symptoms of scrupulosity, for sure. Fear and anxiety replace positive emotions such as love and optimism. The religious experience becomes narrowly focused on not doing anything wrong, rather than on opening up to an expansive confident spirituality.

When I Googled for more information about scrupulosity, I found that the Catholic Church is well aware of its dangers and warns against falling prey to an excessive fear of sinning.

The idea sometimes obtaining, that scrupulosity is in itself a spiritual benefit of some sort, is, of course, a great error. The providence of God permits it and can gather good from it as from other forms of evil. That apart, however, it is a bad habit doing harm, sometimes grievously, to body and soul.

There's online information for Catholics about "Scrupulosity and how to overcome it." Trust in God's love is advised to overcome a painful spiritual disorder.

I particularly enjoyed browsing through some issues of the "Scrupulous Anonymous" newsletter. It's aimed at overly scrupulous Catholics, but contains wisdom for the overly rigid of all faiths.

I liked the message of Rev. Thomas M. Santa, C.Ss.R. in "Dance like no one is watching."

It doesn't matter if you are dancing with the music or dancing in spite of the music. To dance like no one is watching you is to experience the unburdened self.

Now imagine if you can, never being free enough to even give yourself permission to dance, even when no one is watching. Imagine yourself so burdened by guilt, so burdened by a false sense of responsibility, so burdened with a preoccupation of what another person might think or say if they observed you dancing.

To be burdened in such a way that you cannot experience a sense of freedom even when you are alone—what a burden that would be!

I believe that many scrupulous people are so burdened with guilt, fear, and anxiety, and with the preoccupation that they are always being measured and in some way come up short, that they have never experienced freedom. In fact, I believe that some members of our little group are so burdened that they mistrust any feeling of freedom.

It is almost like they have become so accustomed to not being free, that they seem to prefer it, even when an opportunity is presented that might lead to something new.

I believe that there are members of our little group who have never enjoyed the experience of dancing by themselves (and it really doesn't matter if it is dancing, it could be any other experience of pure freedom), and I am saddened by this thought.

I am saddened because I believe that the kingdom of God is a kingdom of freedom, especially freedom from burdens that are unnecessary.

How can a person who does not feel free become free? How can a person lay down the burdens of guilt, fear, and anxiety? It is possible, but it is not easy. Unfortunately, to become free you have to be willing to risk, to take a chance.

To become free, to experience freedom, means you have to be willing to take the chance of being discovered, observed, measured, and be willing to accept the consequences. In a very real sense, it means that you must be willing to step into the unknown, the uncharted, and the seemingly dangerous arena of faith.

In order to experience the freedom of a child of God, you must be willing to experience ordinary and everyday human activity without making the judgement that to be ordinary is somehow displeasing to God. To experience freedom means you must be willing to experience being human, and being human means being less than perfect.

For some people, the thought of not being perfect, or at least not trying to be perfect, is a very paralyzing thought and something that is very difficult to imagine, let alone experience.

Yes. But for RSSB initiates there's another complication. Many believe that the master who initiated them is perfect, a satguru, and also demands perfection of his satsangis.

As Rev. Santa observed, they aren't able to imagine that spirituality can be divorced from perfection. Being ordinarily human is unthinkable.

Well, each to his own. But it's difficult for me to believe in a God who demands such scrupulous attention to every command.

Flowing with the river of life, dancing freely to our own music – I think the oh-so-worshipful Tina gets it right.

What’s wrong with me is wrong with religion

I had one of those oh, yeah! moments yesterday when everything became so clear to me. Now, I've had such moments before. In my "Mini-secret of universe revealed" I described a couple of them. One mescaline-fueled. One clear-headed.

So I'm not claiming that my most recent epiphany is It, the Big One, a foretaste of my impending satori. But hey, it could be.

And it's in line with my other revelations, though you might have to be under the influence of a psychedelic to appreciate my late '60s insight that it's all about a paper bag turned inside out.

I was running around yesterday like I often do. Lots on my to-do list. Feeling like I had more to accomplish than time to do it in. Home chores. Land use appeal chores. Exercising chores. Internet and email chores.

I'd be at the Marion County Planning Division office feeling like I should already be at Kinko's making copies of the documents I was picking up. Standing over a Kinko's copier I'd feel that it was past-time for me to be at the post office, if I was going to get this stuff mailed when it should be.

And so it'd go. Whatever I was doing didn't feel quite right. There was always a raspy buzz of dissatisfaction playing in the background of the music of every moment.

I wasn't unhappy. I never felt that I should have been doing something else. It wasn't my actions that were off kilter, because I was engaged in just what I wanted to do.

So what was creating that annoying buzz? Why wasn't I feeling absolutely fine? Where did that sensation of not-rightness come from?

Suddenly a truth hit me, seemingly obvious but not well recognized until that moment. I'd overlaid the actuality of my day with an imaginary idealized version of it.

Early on in the morning, when I was thinking about what I wanted to accomplish, I'd envisioned how things would ideally go. So much time for this. So much time for that. No wasted effort. Crisp clean efficient doing – exactly unlike how every day previous to that one had gone.

There's always surprises. I always get distracted. I always end up doing something different, or at least differently, than I expected.

Yet I still had a template of expectations that formed the backdrop of my day. When what was actually happening on the stage of my life didn't match up with the script that I'd laid out in my mind, that warning buzz of dissatisfaction would start up.

Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Reality had broken into my conception of what should be, and that was bothersome.

A lengthy back-up at the intersection that I usually flow right through that time of day. A normally reliable copier jamming. A phone call coming just when I was ready to leave. How could reality dare to deviate from the plan that I'd laid out for it!

That thought sounds crazy. And it is, really. Self-absorbed. Egotistical. Delusional. How could I expect that the world would revolve around my intentions for an entire day?

And yet…almost everyone engages in this same sort of insanity. Our myriad worries, anxieties, frettings, and fears almost entirely stem from the same source my buzz of dissatisfaction did: a perceived mismatch between an idealized template we've laid out for the events of life, and what really is happening, has happened, or we expect is going to happen.

Religions market their wares by playing on this same sense of wrongness. Without it, people would have little reason to buy any religious product.

You're sinful, so you need to be forgiven. You're heading for hell, so you need salvation. You're fallen from grace, so you need rising up. You're immersed in ignorance, so you need the truth. Need. A gap between what is and what should be. That's the void religion tries to fill.

But how real is that void? Which is to say, how real was my feeling during much of yesterday that whatever was happening at the moment needed improving upon?

Religions hold out to us the hope that one day – not now but in the future, just have faith and it'll come – all of the wrongness that we feel about life as it's being lived now will turn into a perfect sense of rightness. Bliss. Peace. Nirvana. Love. Oneness.

My big insight, though (and again, this is so obvious that most of us, including me, already know it; we just don't know how to handle our knowing), was that the perception of wrongness is what's wrong. With me, and with religion.

Yes, we should strive. We should try to accomplish things. We should learn more and love more. We should have goals. We should try to make both ourselves better people and the world a better place. All this is absolutely right.

But it's wrong to believe that whatever is happening is wrong, that an error message is flashing on the screen of the cosmos every time reality fails to conform to our expectation for it. That way lies madness. Or at least, anxiety, confusion, and divisiveness as competing groups (including religions) argue over This is the way it should be.

There's only what is. Period.

Admittedly, this includes the sense of wrongness that almost all of us feel much or most of the time. However, I don't believe that this purely human perception is an inherent aspect of really real reality.

It's an unnecessary anthropocentric add-on that creates a lot of grief, both individually and societally. If there's anything wrong with the world, it's that sense of wrongness. Without it, there'd be no need for religion. Or for all the other ways we try to reassure ourselves that one day It'll be all right.

"It" is just fine. It's our perception of It that's wrong.

On getting rid of those little men in your TV set

Douglas Adams – author, humorist, and great admirer of science – was fond of telling a story about how televisions work. Here's how his friend, Richard Dawkins, related it in his "Lament for Douglas Adams" (Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 49).

A man didn't understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained about high-frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, transmitters and receivers, amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen.

The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren't there?"

It's hard to give up religious fantasies. I know. I haven't been able to completely do this myself. I've got a couple of imaginary little men running around inside my psyche, holdovers from the true believer phase of my life when I hosted legions of them.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't worry too much when I find myself talking to a dead relative or deceased guru as if the person could actually hear me. Yet when I read Dawkins' piece today in "A Devil's Chaplain," Adams' story made me think.

When am I going to get rid of all of those little men? Why do I keep them around? Wouldn't there be more room for reality in my life if my imaginary friends weren't taking up valuable psychological real estate?

These are easy questions to ask. It isn't nearly so easy to find honest answers. Or to adjust the way I live my life to be more congruent with what I consider to be true.

I don't believe that little men are inside my TV set. Nor do I believe that their metaphysical equivalent are hard at work maintaining a spiritual side of the cosmos.

Yet when there are gaps in my understanding of what life is all about, including where I came from before birth and where I'm heading after death, it's tempting to fill those not-knowing voids with just a few little men.

A commenter on a Wired Science post about the Republican presidential candidates' take on evolution said this about the attempt of some candidates to meld creationism and evolution:

The problem with these answers, as paraphrased from Douglas Adams: "It's as if you were to show an ancient person a T.V., and they exclaim, 'Look at all the little men in there!', and then you teach them about electricity, photons, cathode ray tubes, etc, and they say 'Oh, alright, I understand how a T.V. works now, really I do... But don't you think there might be just a few little men in there?'"

These half measures between creationism and evolution are displays of ignorance, and are philosophically undefendable. They make less sense than either of the two ideas on their own, and in the case of creationism, that's really saying something.

If you're going to believe in little men inside your TV set, maybe it's better to have the television filled to the brim with them than to have it thinly populated. A little bit of religion could indeed be more ridiculous than a lot.

Religions aren’t alike. I think I know why.

It's (churchless) confession time. I'm getting down on my bloggish knees and admitting to a mea culpa. Not a very juicy one, though. It's philosophical rather than salacious.

For a long time I've been an advocate of the notion that under their dogmatic skins religions share a common skeleton. Aldous Huxley called this the Perennial Philosophy and wrote a book by that name.

But now I've come to agree with Stephen Prothero, chair of Boston University's Department of Religion, who said in Newsweek recently that the proposition "The Major Religions are Essentially Alike" is false.

Religious people do agree that there is something wrong with this world. But they disagree as soon as they start to diagnose the problem, and diverge even more when it comes to prescriptions for the cure. Christians see sin as the human problem and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in this tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem and liberation from suffering (nirvana) as the goal. If practitioners of the world's religions are all climbing a mountain, then they are ascending very different peaks and using very different tools.

On the other hand, I've quoted this passage by Huxley many times. It used to make sense to me. Now it doesn't.

The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being – the thing is immemorial and universal.

Well, those words sound warm and fuzzy. I can almost picture the founders of the world religions sitting around a campfire and singing Kum-Bai-Ya.

But the reality is that once you get beyond the broadest generalizations of which Huxley speaks – there's something more than physical reality, and we can know it – religious beliefs have precious little in common. Prothero urges us to recognize this, rather than paper over the differences.

Coming at the problem of religion from the angle of difference rather than similarity is scary. But the world is what it is. And both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.

I have no problem respecting someone's belief, so long as they admit that this is all it is: a belief, not truth. Where I went wrong in my Perennial Philosophy phase was not recognizing this: accepting that some people have been able to actually know the truth about divine reality and go beyond belief is itself a belief.

Huxley simply takes this as a given. He says that most people who spout off about spirituality and religion are merely echoing what others have written (who in turn probably have done the same thing). Yet he claims that there have been first hand exponents of the Perennial Philosophy who have been given the name of saint, prophet, sage, or enlightened one.

That's true enough – that they've been given those names. But what proof is there that these supposed first-handers aren't also passing on secondhand inspiration that may never have been grounded in any direct perception of a higher reality?

A present day guru, Gurinder Singh, is fond of saying, "How do you know I'm not a fraud? How do you know I just don't have the gift of gab?"

Indeed. How? There's no answer to that question, not in any scientifically demonstrable sense at least. If there was any solid proof that one religion knew the really real truth about divine reality, it would have risen to the top of the religious pyramid – just as scientific theories do.

Instead, what we have, after 10,000 years or more of intense human striving to understand what, if anything, lies beyond the physical, is a confusing mess of conflicting religious claims.

So like I said in my previous post, science turns out to be more spiritual than religion. Science continually converges on a consensus about the nature of reality, while religion never does.

Why is this? The two most likely possibilities are (1) there's no metaphysical reality to be discovered, or (2) there is indeed a non-material side to existence, but it is absolutely ineffable – incapable of being described.

Since I want to live on after I die, naturally I hope the latter is true. But I'd put my bet on (1) as being more likely. Unfortunately, there's no way to win that bet and get a payoff. If I'm right, I won't be around to know it.

What’s the favorite “religion” of the religion-less?

I showed you mine a few days ago. Now you show me yours.

Your favorite "religion." Which, because I put quotation marks around the word, could be:

An honest-to-god (or godless) religion; a philosophy of life; a metaphysical system; a spiritual path; or something describable that's along these lines. What I believe is just a touch vague.

If golf, NASCAR, romance novels, raising gerbils, or watching "24" reruns is your religion, that's nice. But I'd just as soon that you didn't extol it in a comment to this post.

Because I'm sincerely – maybe even seriously – interested in finding out what turns on the religion-less when it comes to "religion."

I guess you could call this a quest to learn the best of the worst—given that I've got a pretty dim opinion of most organized attempts to fathom the unfathomable.

The question also could be phrased as, "Which religion sucks the least?" (suck being a derogatory term, for those blog visitors unfamiliar with American English).

As for me, I said:

Taoism is my favorite non-religious religion. I like it for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it's the only philosophy I know of that comes with a built-in self defense and health promoting exercise system: Tai Chi. When a philosophy can be expressed physically, that shows a pleasing rootedness in reality.

I could have gone on with what I like about Taoism. And if you choose to leave a comment in which you share your favorite, I hope you'll give some reasons for your choice. "Why" is as important as "what," though a book-length comment isn't necessary.

I've been wanting to ask this question of Church of the Churchless visitors for some time. Comments from the regulars leave me with an impression of where they're coming from, but I'd enjoy learning more specifics.

Of course, leaving no comment at all also is an answer in itself. "None" is an entirely acceptable response.

Going beyond “I am a (fill in the faith)”

It was the kickoff to a great coffee house conversation today: "So, Brian, would you say that you're still a satsangi?" Meaning, a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB)—an India-based spiritual organization.

I've had this sort of talk before. It leads to all sorts of interesting spinoff questions that apply to anyone of any faith. What does it take to deserve to be called a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, or any other persuasion?

I started with an obvious answer. "I was initiated into RSSB thirty-six years ago. Guess that means I'm a satsangi." Hans, my philosophical discussion partner, wasn't satisfied with that.

"Lots of people have been baptized Christian, but they aren't really Christians." Agreed. So we delved deeper.

After an hour or so of latte-fueled give and take, I finally began to reach the core of what the question pointed to in me. This came after Hans asked me if I still believed in some central Articles of Faith for RSSB disciples. Such as that a living guru is necessary to make spiritual progress.

"No, I don't really believe that any more," I said. "But I'm not sure whether it's true or false. I'm not sure about much of anything now. Beliefs that used to be important to me now seem like a bunch of empty words, concepts lacking any grounding in direct experience."

I told Hans about my "Believers, I'm even more deluded than you think" blog post. There I wrote that the current guru (Gurinder Singh), like the previous one (Charan Singh), emphasizes actually experiencing spirituality rather than just thinking about religious teachings. However…

Most RSSB initiates fill their heads with thoughts, images, emotions, and imaginings rather than emptying themselves and becoming receptive to unvarnished reality. I used to do this too, so I know whereof I speak.

I'd sit every Sunday in a satsang hall, adorned with photos of the guru, listening to a speaker read from an RSSB book, which taught that after death the Master would meet the disciple and take him or her to Sach Khand and the lap of God.

I'd feel grateful that I wasn't a deluded Christian who at that moment was sitting in a church, adorned with images of Jesus, listening to a preacher read from the Bible, which taught that after death Christ would meet the disciple and take him or her to heaven and the lap of God.

Eventually the absurdity broke through. I was decrying religion founded on blind faith, yet I had embraced a religion founded on blind faith.

Every organized religion or spiritual practice, pretty much, has its less mystical and more mystical sides. Even supposedly mystic philosophies like Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or Sant Mat. "Belief" is on the less side; "Experience" is on the more side.

So if you stay stuck on the fly paper of a belief system, you're not going to do much moving. Toward God, satori, enlightenment, self-understanding, or anywhere else.

In his delightful Buddhism is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom From Beliefs, Steve Hagen says:

Instead of putting faith in what we believe, think, explain, justify, or otherwise construct in our minds, we can learn to put our trust and confidence in immediate, direct experience, before all forms and colors appear.

…This is faith in its purest form: trust in actual experience before we make anything of it—before beliefs, thoughts, signs, explanations, justifications, and other constructions of our minds take form.

Belief can't hold a candle to the bright light of direct experience. But so long as a believer is fixated on the flickering candle flame—got to keep believing, got to keep believing—his or her awareness is going to be distracted from the really real reality that shines with infinitely more luminosity.

My wife and I saw Steve Martin's adapted play, "The Underpants," last night at Salem Repertory Theatre. (Interestingly, two of the actors walked into the coffee shop just as I was about to leave, which led to another interesting conversation with them).

"Religion is a lot like one of the characters in the play," I said to Hans. He lusts after a woman whose underpants fell down while she was watching a parade. It isn't all that difficult to seduce her, since she is married to a rigid, controlling, passionless guy.

Her would-be lover is a would-be poet, in love with words. More than her, it turns out. Before too long she is sighing, "Take me! Take me!" to the poet.

That should have caused a different part of his body than his literary sense to get aroused. But instead he runs into his bedroom to grab a pen and paper, not her. The poet has to capture the moment in words rather than experiencing it in reality.

Believing that you're about to have sex with a woman is a lot less satisfying than actually having sex with her. You've got to give up the belief and take the plunge, so to speak, into the real thing.

Rumi used almost exactly the same analogy as the playwright in "Tales From the Masnavi" (Arberry translation):

A lover, being admitted to sit beside his beloved, thereupon drew out a letter and read it to her. The letter, which was in verse, told over her praises together with much lamentation, misery and supplication.

"If all this is for my sake," said the beloved, "to read this now you are with me is a sheer waste of time. Here I am beside you, and you read a letter! This is certainly not the sign of a true lover."

Hans and I talked about how there's all these stories in the mystic literature about eccentric, crazed, unconventional, rule-breaking ecstatic lovers of the divine.

However, the stories are told in a decidedly settled setting. If someone jumped up and actually started acting like that, they'd be thrown out of the meeting room.

Well, if that's where the Wild Mystics roam, better to be wandering out there than sitting primly in your religious seat. Even if that means losing your identity and the ability to say "I'm a _______."

Viewing life through a narrow bandwidth of ideology

About time to leave Maui. Hawaiian shirts have been bought. Waves have been boogie-boarded. Some tropical photons have managed to make it through SPF 30 and gifted me a take-home tan.

I'll let a Maui resident, James Miner, do much of the speaking today. He wrote an intriguing letter that was published in the Maui News last Saturday—a philosophical cut above the usual letter to the editor fare.

It speaks to me on several levels. Over on my other blog I wrote a few days ago that Maui overdevelopment makes for sad sights. That's part of what Miner is getting at.

But just a part. Almost everywhere the land is being overdeveloped. So are our psyches. Surely there's a connection between the two.

Unnatural buildings going up here, the product of minds divorced from natural ways of being.

I've spent a lot of time in the ocean the past ten days, flowing this way and that. Swimming across Napili Bay I'd feel more or less in control. Boogie-boarding down the face of a large breaking wave—I was in the grip of something much more powerful than myself.

Regardless, the ocean is a great teacher. Even when you can't describe the lessons you've learned. Like Miner says, instinct trumps ideology the closer you are to nature.

Wave. Board. Man. Coming together just so…ahhh.

At such moments, life is marvelously simple and satisfying. Could every moment be such a moment?

Here's Miner's letter:

According to evolutionary theory, at some point in prehistory we were all indigenous peoples. We leveraged our higher intellect to survive and thrive while remaining consciously attuned to our instinctual roots.

We understood the language of nature because we knew we were a part of nature. We interacted creatively with the elemental world, recognizing the intimate relationship between spirit and matter.

At some juncture a division appeared in the indigenous mind between intuition and instinct. Intuition became deified while instinct was demonized. Our intuitive resources gazed heavenward, forsaking our original intimate relationship with earth and nature.

We began to worship ideals and forces disconnected from earth, succumbing to what many anthropologists call "id