Church of the Churchless

Why I removed the previous post

Wanted to let readers of this blog know that I removed the previous post about the Sabnanis at the request of a person who provided me with the information that I shared in the post. If I'm able to share why they asked me to do this, I will. If not, it's because I respect the wishes of people who send me sensitive information about their experiences with religious leaders. Often it's difficult for someone to decide whether they want to reveal a disturbing or painful experience. Occasionally they change their mind about going public after telling me their story. 

Got some good and bad news: I'm going to die on December 7, 2039

If you can't stand this heretical, ungodly, religion-bashing blog, I've got some good news for you. The Death Clock app says I'm going to die in December 2039. (I don't expect to be writing blog posts after I die, unless an atheist miracle happens.) 

The bad news is that this is about 14 1/2 years from now. So you're going to have to put up with many more blog posts that you dislike.

The Death Clock app calls their when-you're-going-to-die prediction "Save the Date." Church of the Churchless haters might want to start making plans for a Yay He's Finally Gone party, though I doubt restaurants accept reservations over 14 years in advance.

Yesterday I wrote about my experience with the Death Watch app in a post on my HinesSight blog.

Thanks to a story in the Washington Post, "How many years do I have left? An app gave me helpful insights," today I learned how long I have to live -- based on the answers I gave to 29 questions. The story gave some examples of the questions.

Although the specific date of death is obviously not intended to be accurate — the app’s disclaimer says it’s “for fun only” — it does tie your personal habits to your likelihood of living into old age and tells you what lifestyle changes might buy you more time. Thus Death Clock AI’s motto: “Know your date. Change your fate.”

After responding to 29 questions — including how much of the day I spend sitting, whether I get at least seven hours of sleep a night and whether I get all my recommended cancer screenings — I had my answer. A darkly humorous “Save the Date” card suggested I plan my end-of-life celebration for April 17, 2042, but I also learned the most likely ways I would die: sleep disorders, cardiovascular disease or cancer, in that order. Of course, cancer and heart disease are the two big killers in the United States. But I was surprised by how harmful sleep issues are.

As I said in the post, I decided to cancel my three-day free trial of Death Clock after getting my Save the Date results because the difference in longevity between my current habits and better habits was small, only about six months.

That's what happens when a slim, fit, vegetarian, non-drinker, non-smoker, frequent exerciser who gets regular medical screening and eats healthy with few sweets answers the 29 questions. However, I noted in the post:

The estimate is that 84% of my life is complete. Guess I need to make the most of the remaining 16%, though given the uncertainty of life and death, it could be that actually my life is 99.99% complete and I'll have a sudden heart attack before I finish this blog post. (Got to type faster...)

For most of my adult life I've been afraid of death, which includes talking about my death. So I consider it to be progress that I enjoyed my experience with the Death Clock app -- though I admit that I would have been less positive about it if I'd gotten a prediction that I'd die in two years rather than fourteen years.

Growing old seems to bring with it a natural lessening of fear about death, which I've expressed as a primal fear of non-existence. Obviously all I've ever known is existing. Non-existence is difficult to fathom, since nobody has ever known what it is like to not exist, and nobody ever will know this, because knowing requires existence.

The dream for us old folks, or at least this old folk, is to gradually accumulate enough annoying aches, pains, and other medical problems that ends up with a feeling, "I'm looking forward to the release of death." Then, ideally, death soon follows -- not too soon and not too late.

Unfortunately, this dream often is a fantasy. Many people die quite a while before they are ready to take their last breath, while many other people die quite a while after they've come to feel that life is no longer worth living. The sweet spot of dying at just the right time is, sadly, often not what happens to us.

I enjoyed what the Death Clock predicted for me because as I said yesterday in my post about the app, "Ninety-one seems like a pretty good age for me to die. Pleasingly older than I am now (I'm 76) yet not excessively old, which 100 seems to be."

I also appreciated the opportunity offered by Death Clock to face my inevitable demise head-on. Like I said, for most of my life I've avoided talking about death because I enjoy life and don't like the prospect of not living. 

Sure, intellectually I understand that death is inevitable. It comes to every person, as well as to every living thing. Emotionally, though, it's difficult to envision everything that we care about -- relatives, friends, nature, the universe -- no longer existing for us, since we lack the consciousness of existence.

It's no wonder that religions promising life after death in some heavenly realm are so popular. The fear of death is a powerful motivation to embrace a faith that promises our last breath marks the beginning of a glorious new life with God.

Or, a not-so-glorious new life here on Earth, for those who believe in reincarnation. Either way, religions  view the date of one's death as marking the opening chapter in a fresh story about life, rather than a page saying The End.

I deeply doubt that optimistic story is true. There's a slight possibility that it is, but until I experience life after death I'm sticking with the Death Clock and its prediction that one day each of us will be no more... almost certainly forever.

How Amit Sood escaped his Asian Indian spiritual traditions

Once in a while I enjoy picking up Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century, by Amit Sood, M.D. to remind myself why I liked the book so much when I first read it in 2019. Here's the blog posts I wrote about Sood's book back then.

Mindfulness Redesigned for the Twenty-First Century -- my new favorite book
Dalai Lama isn't big on single-pointed attention
Don't look within for inner peace. Look without.

This morning I re-read the "Guilty and Back" chapter where Sood describes how the traditions he grew up with in India held him back from coming up with the modern approach to meditation and mindfulness that he espouses in his book. 

Here's his story. I shared it in my first post about the book, but if it was worth re-reading for me, I figure that it will be worth re-reading for anyone else who visits this blog.

Feeling Guilty

Challenging an age-old practice was extremely difficult for me. If you understand my background, it will make sense to you.

Meditation practices and teachers are highly respected in Asian Indian families. Many teachers are revered as spiritual leaders of the society. Their images are placed in each room. In daily prayer, people bow to the images, decorate them with flowers, and light incense sticks in front of them. People see their teachers in dreams to solve personal problems. In families with a faith-based practice, these teachers are considered conduits to God. Annoying or disbelieving them or their instructions could be considered worse than heresy.

I have met several teachers who indeed deserve a high pedestal, but some do not. Nevertheless, if a teacher is caught committing nefarious practices, as has happened numerous times, instead of lowering the pedestal, the unsuspecting students often reframe by saying that the teacher is testing their spiritual resolve by creating this drama.

With this cultural perspective etched within me, my guilt, conflict, and anxiety grew along with the doubts I shared in the previous chapter. I felt vulnerable. Will these doubts bring bad luck, illness, or curse to my family? I thought. The scientist in me conflicted with myths and rituals I had learned as a child. A master of overthinking, I did what I do best with such conflicts. I stopped thinking about it and tabled the idea.

Overcoming guilt

I didn't stay put with the idea for very long. My return journey started when I heard about people with no meditation experience who were perceiving the deepest samadhi states as a result of acute stroke. I read about brain tumors and seizures causing sacred visions and spiritual experiences.

Could these states and visions just be a product of our brain's electrical activity? I asked myself. If that is the case, will it be worthwhile to spend my entire life seeking such experiences?

Some neurological disorders can provide "deeply spiritual"
experiences without much "spiritual effort".

Then I read about swamis who had obtained these experiences but were doing very bad things. I heard stories about self-styled gurus who claimed to be adept at awakening people's kundalini (and many of their followers felt their "energy" and saw the "light" with their help) but were nothing but greedy, immoral charlatans. They were illegally usurping money and property, abusing women and children, and committing other unspeakable crimes.

I saw a few of them getting caught, was amazed at how low they could go in trying to defend themselves, and could clearly see the selfish psychopath beneath the long hair and saffron color. My uninformed faith in some of these traditions began to crack. That worked wonders on my guilt. (I should mention that not all swamis are fake. I have personally met several masters of meditation who I deeply respect, who are humble, selfless, and kind, and are truly living each day to help the world.)

Looking deeper

With my blind faith unblinded, the more I studied, the deeper I looked and the more learners I worked with, the more convinced I became that most mindfulness programs in their current form need editing  before they can optimally help twenty-first-century brains.

In our effort to make mindfulness simpler, despite our good intentions we have misrepresented some of its constructs. 

Further, some of the language and philosophy is 2,500 years old. It simply needs to be refreshed. What is old and practiced for thousands of years doesn't always have to be perfect or even right.

After all they anointed cow dung on umbilical cords that caused tetanus, didn't believe in pasteurization, practiced child labor, and bad-mouthed any woman who stepped outside the house to join the workforce. (Unfortunately all of these are still happening in some parts of the world.)

The result of my deeper search was freedom. While I still revere the timeless wisdom of many scriptures, I have largely escaped my childhood blinders, partly because I feel confident in the new tool we now have to study the truth: science.

Using the scientific method polished with common sense I came up with a few key ideas for how to better align our understanding of mindfulness with twenty-first-century challenges so it can better serve resilience.

Few ideas

Here is what I thought was needed:

-- Integrate twenty-first-century neuroscience to help better understand the human condition. Philosophy alone isn't enough.
-- Offer skills that emphasize uplifting emotions and not just attention training.
-- Have more explicit focus on compassion, gratitude and forgiveness.
-- Abbreviate the training time.
-- Offer practices that are shorter and more relevant to people's lives.
-- Enhance focus on relationships to decrease perceived loneliness.
-- Integrate hope, inspiration, and courage in the program.

In addition to above, I felt adding humor to the program (and life) was vital. Fun and laughter are great sources of bonding and inspiration, and if we keep the training and the skills dry, they will remain inaccessible, particularly to the younger generation.

I debated and doubted these thoughts for months but couldn't negate any one of them. As a next step, I considered a three-part solution:

(1) Educate people about their brains, emphasizing how our neural traps generate negative emotions and hurt our attention.
(2) Offer different (briefer and deeper) attention practices that are easier to practice and adopt, that provide uplifting emotions, and that center on relationships.
(3) Return mindfulness to its ecosystem in the company of compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, relationships, hope, inspiration, and courage.

I strongly believed I was moving in the right direction, but received pushback from some old colleagues in the field. Pushbacks often demoralize me and they worked their magic this time also. But each time I saw someone struggling whom I couldn't optimally help, the thoughts creeped up again.

I needed one final push. Then His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to my rescue.

This is a great scene in Netflix's The Four Seasons about emotions and reality

Sometimes I get more meaning and wisdom from a short television scene than from a long book. That was the case last night when my wife and I finished watching The Four Seasons on Netflix, a streaming series (not to be confused with the 1981 romantic comedy with the same name).

I can't avoid giving away an important happening in the final episode, so consider this a spoiler alert.

It really isn't necessary to understand what The Four Seasons is all about to appreciate the dialogue in a scene that I thought was really well written and thought-provoking. But here's the trailer if you want to spend two minutes getting up to speed on the series.

The scene features one of the three couples in The Four Seasons. Danny (on the left below) is married to Claude (on the right). Danny is down to earth while Claude is much more sensitive and effusive. 

Danny and Claude are each trying to cope in their own way with the sudden unexpected death of their friend Nick in a traffic accident. Claude had a dream that Nick has become a butterfly. He spoke about this at Nick's funeral service after Nick's ex-wife, Anne, requested that he speak. Danny thought that the whole butterfly thing was ridiculous.

Here's a transcript of a scene that led me to tell my wife, "Wow, that was really well done."

Claude: Don't be mad at me. Anne asked me to speak. I... Just because you don't believe that Nick's a butterfly, that --

Danny: No, I don't. And I kept telling you that, but you kept saying it anyway. Claude, you never give me space to feel what I'm feeling.

Claude: Of course I want you to feel. That's all I ever want.

Danny: No, no, no, no. You want me to feel good. And happy. And when I don't, you say some stupid bullshit about our friend being a bug.

Claude: It's not bullshit. It's beautiful.

Danny: What if I had died? Would you go around telling everybody I was a fucking bird? I feel like you're off in Nonsense World, and I'm facing all of this completely alone! A horrible thing happened to our friend, and it was random and meaningless, so stop trying to make meaning out of it. I don't want to hear "no, it's okay, he's not really gone," because he is. He's not a butterfly. He's dead. And it's not beautiful or part of a greater plan. It's just sad! So just let me feel sad.

Claude: Maybe he's not a butterfly.

Danny: No. Maybe he is. Let's just walk. 

Here's what made me like this scene so much.

First, I related to Danny's desire to face the reality of Nick's tragic death (he's played by Steve Carell) without the crutch of wishful thinking that he isn't really dead, but has taken on another form -- a butterfly. 

Second, Danny is justified in wanting Claude to just let him feel sad. While Claude enjoys looking on the bright side, even when the death of a friend has occurred, Danny is fine with feeling the dark side of sorrow.

Third, because Danny and Claude love each other, this scene ends in a pleasing fashion. After hearing how strongly Danny feels about facing Nick's death head-on, Claude admits that maybe Nick isn't a butterfly. To which Danny says, no, maybe he is.

Danny and Claude end up giving each other some room to engage in their own style of grieving. They can't embrace their spouse's way of dealing with Nick's death, but they recognize that each of them cares deeply about Nick. 

Such is love. One person may not be able to understand why their lover feels a certain way, yet they can express their differences while remaining united in their commitment to each other.

Quantum theory is still largely unexplained, but that's how science works

Quantum theory (or quantum mechanics) is the foundation of our modern world. Without it, we wouldn't have computers, the Internet, GPS, and so many other inventions that we've come to take for granted. 

I'm fascinated by quantum theory.

Though it is generally associated with goings-on at the atomic and subatomic level, not at the level of everyday life, since everything is made up of particles and energy, obviously the existence of we humans and all that surrounds us is dependent on quantum processes.

This is where much of the mystery of quantum theory resides: how is it that the uncertain, shape-shifting, probabilistic realm of quantum mechanics becomes the certain, dependable, deterministic realm of the world we inhabit?

The April 19, 2025 issue of New Scientist features a cover story, "The Idea That Shook Reality," in honor of 100 years of quantum physics. Two of the articles about quantum physics particularly appealed to me. 

Physicist Carlo Rovelli tackled the history of quantum mechanics and how a misunderstanding of one of the pioneers in this field affects how we look upon quantum physics today. Here's a PDF file of his article, along with an excerpt that talks about how Rovelli views quantum phenomena.
Download Carlo Rovelli on what we get wrong about the origins of quantum theory | New Scientist

What quantum phenomena tell us about reality is still debated (see “What does quantum theory really tell us about the nature of reality?”). There are various interpretations. I think that Schrödinger’s waves are only a mathematical representation of the information that a physical system has about another. This reading of quantum phenomena is called “relational”, because it emphasises that we can only describe how systems affect one another, not how they are in isolation. In other interpretations, such as “QBism“, quantum states only code our own knowledge of a system.

In light of these ideas, it is clear to me that Schrödinger’s waves obscured, rather than clarified, the theory developed by Göttingen’s wizards and Dirac. It misled the community into viewing quantum theory as a revelation about mysterious waves (or mysterious “quantum states”), instead of reading it in the straightforward Göttingen way: a theory of the probabilities of the manifestations of a system to any other system.

I think what quantum phenomena tell us is that the world is genuinely probabilistic and granular at the scale fixed by the Planck constant, and that reality is constituted by manifestations of physical systems to one another. This is captured in the words of Niels Bohr: “In quantum physics the interaction with the measuring apparatus is an inseparable part of the phenomenon. The unambiguous description of a quantum phenomenon is required in principle to include a description of all the relevant aspects of the experimental arrangement.”

Little about this idea needs to be changed, a century later: all that is required is to replace “the measuring apparatus” with “any other physical system” the object is interacting with. The world is the ensemble of ways that physical systems affect one another. This is what quantum physics seems to me to be about. That is quantum mechanics as Max Born, the scientist who named it, had conceived it.

I like Rovelli's perspective. It downplays the view of some physicists that the measurement or observation of some quantum phenomenon by a conscious being is what converts the probabilistic "could be this, could be that" quantum realm into the certain "it is this, not that" nature of everyday reality.

When mangled by New Age types who have a very shallow knowledge of quantum mechanics, that view becomes "we create our own reality" -- which isn't at all what quantum theory says. As Rovelli noted, it is likely that any physical system that a quantum object is interacting with results in the so-called collapse of the wave function.

That collapse manifests in a shift from a probability that a quantum phenomenon will take on some value, to a certainty that it has that value. This is why quantum computing is so difficult. In order to preserve the quantum nature of computing, which is highly powerful in some unusual ways, the workings of a quantum computer have to be isolated from the outside world or the quantum phenomena  go away.

A curious thing about quantum mechanics is that while the mathematics are well known and highly effective, the meaning behind all that math is hotly debated. Some physicists take the "shut up and calculate" attitude in which the search for meaning is downplayed in favor of practical applications.

Daniel Cossins takes on the question of meaning in his New Scientist article. It's fairly long, so here's a PDF file. Since I like the notion of objective collapse, which seems to be Rovelli's position, I'll share some of what Cossins says about this subject.
Download What does quantum theory really tell us about the nature of reality? | New Scientist

But there is also objective collapse, a suite of models proposing that quantum mechanics is incomplete and that something else has to be tacked onto the Schrödinger equation to explain wave function collapse. “The [key] difference with the standard interpretation is that the collapse of the wave function is not something that occurs by magic at the end of the measurement process,” says Angelo Bassi, a theorist at the University of Trieste in Italy. “It’s just part of the dynamics.”

Collapse models have garnered more attention than most in recent years, partly because they offer a plausible explanation of how classical reality emerges without reference to human observers. We don’t see large objects like picture frames and paint brushes in a superposition, it says, because the collapse process works in such a way that the more interacting particles there are, the more readily collapse occurs.

What triggers this continuous collapsing isn’t entirely clear. Some models don’t say, others posit that it is just gravity. But Bassi says there may ultimately be no good answer – it may just be a property of nature. “That’s why I like collapse models, because they try to open the door to a new world which we don’t understand at the moment – something beyond quantum mechanics that we are not grasping.”

What really sets collapse models apart, however, is that they can be put to the test. Uniquely, they make explicit observational predictions that differ from what standard quantum mechanics predicts. The idea is that this constant process of spontaneous collapse should cause quantum objects such as particles to constantly jiggle around, which, in turn, means they emit excess energy that should be detectable, even if the signal is extremely faint.

The bottom line is that physicists don't agree about the meaning of quantum theory -- what it tells us about the nature of reality. This is the way of science: disagreement, debate, theorizing, experimentation, uncertainty, open doors, blind alleys, progress, setbacks. 

Anyone who believes that they know what the meaning of quantum theory is doesn't really understand quantum theory. I speak from experience here. I read a lot of books about quantum mechanics when I was researching my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, which is about the relation of modern physics and ancient mysticism. 

I was quite accurate in discussing the basics of quantum theory. Where I went astray was trying to make the meaning of quantum theory fit with the teachings of the religious group I belonged to at the time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas. In other words, I embraced a view of quantum physics that matched my personal philosophical view of reality rather than taking a more objective and dispassionate perspective.

Live and learn. That's a good scientific motto. Also a good motto for everyone else, certainly including me.

You can feel better by giving yourself the advice you'd give someone else

Subjectivity is what separates us from other people. Meaning, each of us knows our self as a subject, a person we know from the inside, while we know someone else as an object, a person we know from the outside. 

I recall that Sartre discussed this at some length in Being and Nothingness, a book that I devoured as a college student during my existentialism phase, but which, when I looked at it fairly recently, gave me more of a headache than inspiration.

Still, Sartre was on the right track when he spoke about being the Other to a friend who enters a coffeehouse where they agreed to meet. The gaze of the friend is toward Sartre as an object, while Sartre, in gesturing to the friend, views him as the object. 

Mostly we want to be viewed as having the rich inner life that we experience directly through our subjectivity. If someone doesn't do this, we might say, "Hey, don't treat me like an object!" 

However, in his book Shift: Managing Emotions So They Don't Manage You, Ethan Kross says that treating ourselves as an object, doing our own self-objectifying, can be a useful means of dealing with difficult emotions and situations.

Here he's speaking about tennis player Novak Djokavic using a bathroom break as an opportunity to give himself a talk after he'd lost two sets to a younger player.

To me, the most remarkable thing about this story isn't the incredible comeback. It's not even the fact that Djokovic gave himself a pep talk. It's the pronoun usage. He doesn't say, "I can do it." He says, "You can do it."

This small, seemingly insignificant change in language is consequential. Why? As you've no doubt experienced, and as I wrote about in Chatter, it's much easier for us to give advice to other people than it is to give ourselves advice.

The name for this phenomenon is Solomon's paradox, eponymously named after the Old Testament's King Solomon, who was famously adept at doling out wisdom to others but often stumbled when it came to his own life (he got involved in several extramarital affairs that ultimately led to his downfall).

Using the word "you" to silently refer to yourself is called distanced self-talk, and it works like this:

"You" is a word we almost exclusively use to think about and refer to other people. So, when you use that word to refer to yourself, as Djokovic did, it gives you distance and shifts your perspective. It gets you to think about yourself the way you would think about someone else. 

This slightly weird, seemingly tiny linguistic shift is consequential because the difference between "I am stressed out" and "You are stressed out" is big. If I'm stressed out, I might feel panic, a racing heart, and a looping anxiety.

If someone else is stressed out, I might feel compassion, empathy, and a desire to soothe their nerves. By talking to myself using the word "you," I am casting myself in the role of "someone else." I'm able to see and to feel my situation from a different perspective.

Using your own name (instead of "I") or even the third person "he" or "she" also works as a linguistic shifter in much the same way that "you" does. Come on, Ethan, you can finish writing this chapter!

This makes a lot of sense. I've used this technique myself frequently, talking to myself as if I was someone else when I'm stressed or facing a tough situation. It's a valuable way to gain some distance from painful emotions while still keeping in touch with what's happening in a realistic fashion.

If you've been looking for God's Chosen One, his name is Donald

I'm aware that many people who visit this blog, notwithstanding its churchless nature, are either believers in God or are searching for a sign of God's presence in the world.

Well, I've got some good news for you. There's no need to journey to India, no need to pray deeply, no need to meditate assiduously. For I learned today that God's Chosen One isn't hiding from view but is readily apparent.

Way too readily apparent for my liking. But I'm biased, since I neither believe in God nor in God's Chosen One. So I'm pleased to share the name of the Chosen One for those who have a stronger belief muscle than I do.

Donald. As in Donald Trump. 

This may be difficult for some to accept. However, my source is reputable: a Politico story, "Does Trump actually think he's God?" Short answer is probably not, but Trump does believe he has been chosen by God to do great things. 

For those skeptics who doubt his Trumpian divinity, which definitely includes me, the number of links in the opening paragraph of the Poltico story is indeed impressive. After all, how many links are in the New Testament? Zero, yet hundreds of millions of people accept the divinity of Jesus.

“I’m supposed to be dead,” Donald Trump said, the day after he got shot at his rally last summer in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said four days after that. “But something very special happened. Let’s face it. Something happened,” he said two days after that. “It’s … an act of God,” he said the month after that. “God spared my life for a reason,” he said in his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago in November. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said in his inaugural address at the Capitol in January. “It changed something in me,” he said in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in February. “I feel even stronger.”

...“I think he does believe he was saved to do great things as president,” Stephen Mansfield, the author of the 2018 book Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him, told me. “I think he does believe that he is a tool of God.”

I found interesting the mentions of how Trump went from being a strict determinist, which seems to me to be an entirely defensible philosophical position, to being a believer in God choosing certain people, namely himself, to carry out the divine will.

Some say Trump believes nothing. That’s not true. He believes, for instance, in tariffs, and always has. He believes in the importance of genes and always has. He believes in the power of positive thinking, and he believes in the power of negative publicity. And Trump, at best an intermittently observant Christian who reportedly has mocked those more devout, nonetheless believes, and has for a long, long time, in … something like predestination.

“I’m a great fatalist,” he told a reporter from New York’s Newsday in 1991.

“What scares you the most?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Whatever happens, happens — and you just have to go along with it.”

But that was the old Trump. The new Trump embraces his godly chosenness. 

“I think,” Robert Jeffress, the Trump-supporting pastor from Dallas, said last month, “he came to the conclusion — the right conclusion — that God has a purpose for him.”

Christian believers believe, of course, that God has a purpose for them, and for all of them — that they’re all potential tools of his will, and beneficiaries of his grace. Most of them don’t, though, think of themselves as the literal second coming of Christ. And the extent to which Trump might think that of himself, and that his supporters might agree, speaks to the unprecedented expansion of power he has asserted and that many in the country seem content to grant.

“No previous president in American history has claimed that he was saved by God to enact his political agenda,” Mercieca, the rhetoric expert, recently wrote. Asking God to watch over the nation? Yes. Claiming to have been saved specifically by God to enable the enactment of political priorities? No. “Invoking the power of the unified people and God gives Trump an awesome and unquestionable power — whoever defies Trump is at risk of defying the people and God. It’s impossible to argue against Trump when he claims the power of God …”

Not really true. It is indeed possible to argue against Trump claiming the power of God.

Other scholars and observers say he’s an opportunist who also is a narcissist who also recognizes considerable political utility in wrapping himself in such a divine mantle.

“The authoritarian leader presents himself as a divine or messianic figure who is uniquely able to vanquish the forces of evil and make the world safe for the faithful. As God incarnate, the leader is by definition omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent,” David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England, wrote before Trump won for the second time. “Sacred leaders are messianic figures, who promise salvation for true believers. When a movement is headed by a sacred leader, it resembles a religion,” he wrote after. “Trump is a sacred leader. His evangelical followers often refer to him as a ‘savior’ or ‘anointed one’ chosen by God …”

“Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual,” Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina and an expert on the intersection of religion, culture and politics, wrote in her book Spellboundthat came out just this week. “He’s a nihilist for whom the only source of meaning is the amassing of personal power, turning his will into personal, political, financial and territorial domination, and that’s totally compatible with a messiah complex,” Worthen told me. “I don’t see the recent turn in his language as a deviation from past patterns, but the fuller realization of those patterns.”

"Original Sin" book about Biden's decline also has lessons about religious zealotry

When I first heard about the book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, I wondered why that title was selected. Not the subtitle, the main title, Original Sin.

I bought the book recently and have read a bit less than a quarter of it. That's enough to tell me why it's called Original Sin. Since the title has religious implications, I figured sharing some excerpts from the first seven chapters would be an interesting exercise in how politics and religion often have quite a bit in common.

After all, I frequently refer to the Cult of Trump in blog posts. 

Stock market drop shows peril of following a cult leader, Trump
Insurrection at Capitol today caused by the Cult of Trump
Inside the cult of Trump, his rallies are church and he is the Gospel
Cult of Trump shows how delusion is linked to blind devotion 
Trump acts like a cult leader in his coronavirus briefings
Cult of Trump shows danger of blind faith

So as you can read below, while Tapper and Thompson view Biden's inner circle as being akin to uncritical followers of the Church of Biden, the same can be said of Trump's acolytes -- if not more so.

An Author's Note at the beginning of the book has a message that applies both in politics and religion.

The lessons from this book go beyond one man and one political party. They speak to more universal questions about cognitive dissonance, groupthink, courage, cowardice, and patriotism. 

George Orwell once wrote that "we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

He was writing about World War II, but he could have been writing about any time, any era. "The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye," Orwell went on. "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Here is what was in front of our noses.

These passages relate more directly to Biden.

The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden's decision to run for reelection -- followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.

...To grasp how Joe Biden could have decided to run for reelection at his historically advanced age, one must understand Biden's own mythology. Even before one gets to his belief that he, and only he, was capable of defeating Donald Trump, consider the legend of Joe Biden and its grounding in exceeding expectations, defying odds, and surviving.

"Get up!" he wrote in his first memoir, Promises to Keep. "To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the feet of any wise man. Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down."

...So to think that aging or ailment would make Biden reconsider his run is to not understand Joe Biden and the true believers with whom he surrounded himself. Fate had spent the better part of the last half century throwing everything it could at him, the worst tragedies imaginable. 

And every goddamn time, he got up. Every. Goddamn. Time.

To family and close aides, the mythology became almost a theology, a near-religious faith in Biden's ability to rise again. And as with any theology, skepticism was forbidden.

...The president was fond of using the formal family motto, of giving "my word as a Biden," but they had another, more private saying: "Never call a fat person fat." It wasn't just about politesse; it was about ignoring ugly facts.

"Don't say mean truths" is how someone close to the family put it.

"The Bidens' greatest strength is living in their own reality," this person told us. "And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau isn't going to die. Hunter's sobriety is stable. Joe always tells the truth. Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition. They stick to the narrative and repeat it."

From 2020 until 2024, all of this resulted in an almost spiritual refusal to admit that Biden was declining.

There were some aides who appreciated the president but did not share their colleague's religious zeal. The Bidens' closest aides, they told us, essentially hid his deterioration from the public and from others in the administration.

...The significance of Bernal and Tomasini is the degree to which their rise in the Biden White House signaled the success of people whose allegiance was to the Biden family -- not to the presidency, not to the American people, not to the country, but to the Biden theology. They were the Bidens' eyes and ears, the keepers of the flame, the protectors of the myth. That included casting out potential heretics. Bernal, in particular, took on this role.

...During one of the low points of Biden's campaign, Axelrod attended a New Hampshire town hall. Biden's remarks were not particularly stirring, but a line of voters formed afterward. Each one wanted to talk to him, most with sad stories, seeking a kind ear. And Biden stood and greeted every single one of them

Like the pilgrimages to Lourdes, Axelrod later said.

...Other Democrats knew that the White House watched closely for any signs of dissent. They kept quiet and went along. 

We humans are good at making illusory magic

Almost everybody enjoys a good magic show. I sure do. But hardly anyone actually believes in magic. We understand that when a magician does something that appears to violate everyday laws of nature, that trick is based on illusory magic, not genuine magic.

An article in the April 12, 2025 issue of New Scientist, "Magicology," talks about how psychologists are looking to magic tricks to better understand how our brains make sense of the world around us. I found this example fascinating.

A classic deception known as the “vanishing ball illusion” – already well-known when Binet discussed it in 1894 – provides an ideal example. In this trick, a magician repeatedly tosses and catches a ball. At one point, they make the same movement, but, having concealed the ball in a pocket or with their hands, they don’t throw it. Quite remarkably, most spectators report seeing the ball fly up into the air before it vanishes into nothing.

The effect can be startling. “It produces a distinct feeling that’s more than just basic surprise,” says Geoff Cole, a psychology researcher at the University of Essex, UK. “It really does look like it’s disappeared.”

The illusion is thought to work because of “predictive processing”, a theory of consciousness that is gaining ground among cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists and others. This framework suggests that the brain is constantly making predictions about the world around us to inform complex simulations that help it make sense of the imperfect data gathered by our sensory organs. Our experience of reality is dictated by these mental models.

Most of the time, they match what is occurring in the real world – but they can sometimes make incorrect predictions, producing a sense of something that isn’t there. In this case, the expectation that the ball will rise out of the magician’s hand creates a split-second impression that it is rising in front of us. When the data from our eyes catches up with the brain’s simulations and corrects them, the perception of the ball vanishes while it is in mid-air.

“We don’t have a picture of the world as it is,” says Cyril Thomas, a cognitive psychologist at the Marie and Louis Pasteur University in Besançon, France. “We add a little bit of anticipation.”

Tricks like the vanishing ball illusion demonstrate just how easy it is to prime the brain’s simulations. Kuhn, for instance, found that around a third of people will experience the illusion with a single fake throw, for instance, without any of the usual ball-tossing beforehand.

This is an important point: "We don't have a picture of the world as it is." Sure, as the passage above says, usually our mental models make use of predictive processing in a fashion that gives us a mostly accurate view of the world.

But sometimes we are fooled. A good magician can do this so skillfully we're unaware of how we've been deceived. All we know is that something which ordinarily seems impossible appears as if it actually happened -- as when a ball thrown into the air suddenly disappears. 

A magic show advertises that unusual events will be observed by the audience. We pay the price of admission because we want to be fooled by the magician.

And often we do something similar with a religious, spiritual, or mystic leader. We willingly put ourselves under the spell of their "magic" because we long to have a miraculous experience that seems to violate the ordinary laws of nature.

When I spent two weeks in India back in 1977, I wanted to do this because I'd never seen in person the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) guru who initiated me in 1971. So I traveled to the RSSB headquarters in the Punjab, the Dera, to get myself some up close and personal time with Charan Singh.

A short way I've used to describe those two weeks is It was magical. That was true for me when I was still an active member of RSSB and it's still true for me now that I've left the organization and become a proud atheist. 

My memory of that time at the Dera isn't affected by how I currently view Charan Singh -- not as God in Human Form, which is what I thought in 1977, but as a warm, gentle, kind person. I realize now that the magical feeling I experienced during my visit to India was produced by the expectations I brought with me, not by the guru or the surroundings of the Dera.

I expected to have a magical experience. I did have a magical experience. The expectation was the primary reason.

Just about every encounter I had at the Dera was suffused with a difficult-to-describe "specialness." Not because it was outwardly special, but because I'd looked forward to my India trip so intensely, I imbued the experiences I had there with an overlay of what can only be described as magic.

So what I did was similar to the people watching a magician toss a ball into the air that disappears in a magical fashion. There isn't any actual magic going on with that trick, just as there wasn't any actual magic in the words and actions of Charan Singh. 

But since my mind was expecting to have a magical experience in the guru's presence, I did have such an experience. And the good news is, since magic comes from within, not without, each of us is capable of fashioning our own unique personal individualized magical moments. Just expect magic to happen and, who knows, maybe it will.

No need for magic to be attached to special experiences. Ordinary experiences will do just fine. After all, Zen reminds us that all we need to do is chop wood and carry water, or otherwise engage in our everyday actions. Magic is in the ordinary just as much as in the extraordinary. 

My Oregon softball obsession shows the pluses and minuses of attachment

For 35 years I belonged to an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that was an offshoot of the broader Sant Mat movement. As I wrote about in 2013, RSSB had a decided renunciative focus, as contrasted with a life-affirming focus.

For about 35 years I was a member of an India-based organization headed up by a guru whose teachings were definitely in the renunciative camp.

The goal was to leave this physical world behind and find a better one in higher realms of reality. To do that, it was necessary to beware of the Five Deadly Foes, lust, anger, greed, attachment, egotism. So really serious stuff. Vows were taken of no sex outside of marriage, no use of alcohol or recreational drugs, no meat, fish, or eggs. 

Nothing wrong with all that if that's what you want in life. But I observed many instances of fellow initiates becoming rigid, moralistic, judgmental, holier-than-thou, and generally not pleasant to be around. Stifle normal urges and emotions and you've got a textbook renunciative theology.

Those Five Deadly Foes are basically the same as the six enemies of the mind in Hindu theology, which adds jealousy.

Moha, attachment, is described as want/desire, which definitely is my attitude when I watch the University of Oregon women's softball team compete in the current NCAA tournament that culminates in the Women's College World Series.

I wrote about the Oregon Ducks victory in the regional competition last weekend in "Oregon softball team was inspiring in winning regional over Stanford." (My granddaughter, who graduates from high school at the end of this month, will be attending the University of Oregon next fall, so this gives my Oregon sports obsession an extra burst.)

Now Oregon is hosting a super-regional. Their opponent is Liberty.

Yesterday Oregon beat Liberty in extra innings in an exciting fashion, the second game in a row that one of their players got a hit that earned them a "walkoff" win -- which means the team walked off the field with a victory after the hit because it led to their team leading and winning at the bottom of a final inning, either the 7th in a regular softball game or an extra inning if the game was tied after regulation.

I get really nervous when Oregon falls behind, especially when an error or bad play by the Ducks leads to runs being scored by the other team. I also get really happy when Oregon scores, and super happy when the team wins. Make that super duper happy if the win is dramatic, as it was last Sunday when Oregon trailed Stanford the entire game until a three-run walkoff home run gave them the victory.

I pump my fist in the air. I yell "Yes!" out loud if I'm by myself, silently inside my head if my wife is home (she's utterly uninterested in sports). For hours afterward, extending into the following day, I feel buoyant and optimistic. Everything may not be right with the world, but it definitely is in the little corner of the world that's my Oregon softball team obsession. 

Of course, the opposite is pretty much true if Oregon loses. A blowout doesn't disturb me as much as a narrow loss, because it is possible to think "If only..." with a one or two run victory by the other team. Thankfully, those losses don't bring me down emotionally to the same extent as the wins raise me up.

But there's no doubt that my attachment to having Oregon win affects my mood both positively and negatively. Which raises the question of whether I'd be better off not watching the Oregon softball team play at all. That way I'd avoid both the pleasure of victory and the agony of defeat. 

Well, my answer to that question is No way! I'd rather feel those ups and downs than not feel anything at all. And for me this is a general answer to the question of attachment. My attachment to my wife, better termed love, leads me to hurt when she hurts and to feel happy when she's happy. There's no way I'd prefer to be in some sort of permanent detached mental state where I didn't feel those emotions.

After starting to write this post earlier today, I just finished watching Oregon demolish Liberty 13-1 in the second game of the super regional. This wasn't a tense game for me, given the final score. Liberty did lead 1-0 after the first inning, but after that it was all Oregon. Watching the players celebrate made me feel happy also.

Without attachments and desire, life would barely be worth living. Sure, there are more important things than softball to be the object of desire, but I'll take my joys however they may appear. Now it's on to the Women's College World Series. I'll be glued to my television, feeling good when Oregon wins and bad when Oregon loses.

This might not be in accord with the teachings of RSSB and Hinduism. So what? Lust, anger, greed, attachment, egotism, and jealousy are natural aspects of being human. Godliness is an abstraction. I prefer concrete reality.