Church of the Churchless

Human cognition is amazingly slow, about 10 bits per second

I came across a fascinating article in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, "Brains produce thoughts surprisingly slowly." (Online title: "The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace.") You can read the article via this PDF file.
Download The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace | Scientific American

Often you hear that the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe with its 80 billion or so neurons tied together with trillions of interconnections. That may be, but this impressive product of evolution works much slower than the smart phones most of us carry around. The article starts off with:

The brain is sometimes called the most complex machine in the known universe. But the thoughts that it outputs putter along at a trifling 10 bits per second, the pace of a conversation

People often feel that their inner thoughts and feelings are much richer than what they are capable of expressing in real time. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is so bothered by what he calls this “bandwidth problem,” in fact, that one of his long-term goals is to create an interface that lets the human brain communicate directly with a comp­uter, unencumbered by the slow speed of speaking or writing.

If Musk succeeded, he would probably be disappointed. According to recent research published in Neuron, human beings remember, make decisions and imagine things at a fixed, excruciatingly slow speed of about 10 bits per second. In contrast, human sensory systems gather data at about one billion bits per second.

This biological paradox, highlighted in the new study, probably contributes to the false feeling that our mind can engage in seemingly infinite thoughts simultaneously—a phenomenon the researchers deem “the Musk illusion.” Study co-author Markus Meister, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, says that “the human brain is much less impressive than we might think. It’s incredibly slow when it comes to making decisions, and it’s ridiculously slower than any of the devices we interact with.”

Of course, this doesn't diminish the importance of what we humans have been able to create and accomplish: cathedrals, air travel, quantum physics, art of all kinds, novels, movies, microwave ovens, the scientific method, and so much more. 

In fact, those accomplishments seem even more impressive now that the researchers have been able to accurately estimate the processing speed of the human brain.

Meister and Zheng collated data from research across different fields, including psychology, neuroscience, technology and human performance. They used this information—from the processing speed of single neurons to the cognitive prowess of memory champions—to run many of their own calculations so they could make comparisons between studies.

From research spanning nearly a century, they found that human cognition has repeatedly been measured as functioning at between about five and 20 bits per second, with a ballpark average of around 10 bits per second. “This was a very surprising number,” Zheng says. Based on this finding, she adds, she and Meister also calculated that the total amount of information a person can learn across their lifetime could comfortably fit on a small thumb drive.

Human sensory systems such as sight, smell and sound, in contrast, operate much faster, the authors found—at about 100,000,000 times the rate of cognition. “When you put these numbers together, you realize there’s this huge gap,” Meister says. “From that paradox comes interesting new opportunities for science to organize research differently.”

The rich information relayed by our senses also contributes to a false notion that we register the massive amount of detail and contrast all around us. But that’s “demonstrably not true,” Meister says. When people are asked to describe what they see outside the center of their gaze, they “barely make out anything,” he adds.

Because our eyes have the capability to focus on any detail, he continues, “our mind gives us the illusion that these things are present simultaneously all the time,” even though in actuality we must focus on specific visual features to register them. A similar phenomenon occurs with mental ability. “In principle, we could be having lots of different thoughts and direct our cognition in lots of different ways,” Meister says. “But in practice, we can have only one thought at a time.”

For me, that was the key takeaway of this article -- that my brain, your brain, and everybody's brain can only do one conscious thing at a time. So when people claim that they can multitask, such as watch television and also send text messages, actually they are switching between the two activities, not doing both at the same time. 

Meister and his co-author Jieyu Zheng, a doctoral candidate in neurobiology at Caltech, also highlight in their paper that our brain can do only one thing—slowly—at a time. Even if Musk managed to hook his brain up to a computer, Meister says, he still wouldn’t be able to communicate with it any faster than he could if he used a telephone.

...Another important unanswered question, Meister says, is why the human brain can do only one thing at a time. “If we could have 1,000 thoughts in parallel, each at 10 bits per second, the discrepancy wouldn’t be as big as it is,” he says. Why humans are incapable of such mental multitasking is “a deep mystery that almost nothing is known about.”

Since I'm a big fan of mindfulness, I already was doing my best to do one thing at a time. Now I know that not only is this feasible, it's the only way my brain operates. But the illusion of multitasking remains, such as when I think that I can jot something down on the pad of paper I carry around in my car, while simultaneously being able to drive safely.

After reading this article, now I'll be more inclined to just do one thing at a time, even if I feel like I'm capable of doing several things. However, the article doesn't speak about whether physical actions and mental cognition obey the One Thing at a Time rule.

For example, typically I read a magazine while I'm brushing with an electric toothbrush. I can read at the same time I'm brushing my teeth. But I wouldn't be able to add numbers together while reading. It might well be that physical actions, which I'm aware of via perceptions, are easy to do while thinking of something else because our sensory systems are hugely faster than our cognition. 

Theory of mental modules made me feel better about my many failings

I love it when after reading something in a nonfiction book, it doesn't just make sense to me intellectually, but deeply touches me emotionally. 

That's how I felt after reading a chapter in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True book, "How Thoughts Think Themselves." Before describing the wonderful feeling I had, I'll share some of the intellectual side of Wright's message -- which is based on a blend of Buddhist teachings, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. 

He says this about the theory of mental modules in relation to mind wandering:

Though the trains of thought that carry you away from direct experience can take you to lots of different places, pretty much all of those places seem to lie within the province of one of the sort of mental modules I've already described.

Which is to say, modules that make perfect sense in evolutionary terms: modules that deal with attracting mates, keeping them, enhancing your status (which means denigrating rivals), taking care of kin, tending to your friendships (which includes making sure that they're reciprocal and that you're not getting exploited), and so on.

...When your mind is wandering, it may feel like, well, like your mind is wandering -- like it's strolling along the landscape of modules and sampling them, indulging one module for a while, then eventually moving on to another one.

But another way to describe it is to say that, actually, the different modules are competing for your attention, and when the mind "wanders" from one module to another, what's actually happening is that the second module has acquired enough strength to wrestle control of your consciousness away from the first module.

Far be it from me to insist that you accept one of the other of these ways of looking at mind wandering. For now I'd just make two points: (1) Psychologists who adhere to the modular model of the mind tend toward the second view -- the idea that the conscious you isn't choosing modules so much as being commandeered by modules that have prevailed over competing modules and thus, as Gazzaniga put in in chapter 6, "won the prize of conscious recognition."

(2) If you do go on a Vipassana meditation retreat and slowly, haltingly, get better at focusing on your breath, you will probably lean increasingly toward the second hypothesis: it will seem more and more like your mind isn't wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders.

Wright describes a conversation he had with noted Buddhist meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein. Wright says about Goldstein:

He seemed to be saying that thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self. This, in turn, seemed consistent with the idea that modules generate thoughts outside of consciousness and sometimes inject them into consciousness.

Wright speaks with Goldstein about viewing thoughts as akin to going to a movie theater and getting absorbed in what's happening on the screen, quoting Goldstein: 

And then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected on a screen. Everything we thought is happening is not really happening. It's the same with our thoughts. We get caught up in the story, in the drama of them, forgetting their essentially insubstantial nature.

This passage was key to the emotional insight I had:

Escaping this drama -- seeing your thoughts as passing before you rather than emanating from you -- can carry you closer to the not-self experience, to that moment when you "see" that there is no "you" in there doing the thinking or doing anything else, that moment when what seems like a metaphysical truth is unveiled.

But, as we saw in chapter 5, some people say that the Buddha's original not-self teaching is best seen not as a metaphysical truth but as a pragmatic strategy: regardless of whether a self exists, by jettisoning parts of what you think of as your self, you clarify your view of the world and become a better and happier person. And this pragmatic strategy of not-self, no less than the metaphysical discovery of not-self, would seem to be furthered by the kind of perspective Goldstein was describing.

What happened to me was, suddenly I realized -- not intellectually, but intuitively and emotionally -- that I am not the person who has made so many mistakes, had so many failures, caused pain to so many people that I disappointed or let down. 

UPDATE: Below I struggled to explain the feeling I had. Here's a one-sentence version: As my mind conjured up thoughts about the past and future that were filled with images of deserved praise and blame, in a flash it struck me that there was no one within my skull who deserved applause or boos, just the happenings of an impersonal modular mind. 

I'm not that person because I'm not really a person at all, at least in the sense of being a person who is a solid self, who is a single entity no matter my age: 5, 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, 75. Or 76, my current age. I've always looked back on my life and thought, "How was I capable of doing so many negative things?" Which has an inescapable mirror image, "How was I capable of doing so many positive things?"

Suddenly I felt that the answer to those questions is simple, and wonderfully reassuring. Because I am not a solid self or single entity. Just as my body is made up of many physical organs, my mind is made up of many mental modules akin to how Wright describes them in Why Buddhism is True.

When my mind has either led me astray, or put me on a positive path, a self named Brian wasn't responsible. Unconscious inclinations leading in different directions -- positive/negative, loving/hateful, productive/unproductive -- battled it out beneath the surface of my awareness. Eventually one module (not a great term, but I'll stick with Wright's language) won out in that subterranean conflict and placed thoughts in my conscious mind that led to actions.

This realization was deeply moving. I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my psyche. I no longer looked upon my successes and failures as emanating from me, because there really isn't such a singular Me. There have been many Me's, and there will be many more. 

Whenever I've gotten super angry, or super loving, or super resentful, or super grateful, that's a new temporary Me coming into being. Right now a writer Me has risen to the fore. Soon a hot-bath-loving Me will take over. I'm composed of multitudes that bubble up from unconscious depths to become conscious story-tellers and actors for a while.

Yes, there is a certain continuity to my existence, because I remember some of what this mind and body have experienced over the years, and many of my attributes don't change drastically with every new manifestation of Me. 

It just felt really good, and still does, to realize that, as Wright says in his book, the thoughts and resulting actions that either have made me feel proud or ashamed actually have not been produced by a conscious Me, but were directed from unconscious depths toward whatever sort of Me was ascendent at any particular time.

I realize this probably doesn't make a lot of sense. I wish I could describe it better. But a hot bath awaits.

For Buddhism, taking the "red pill" means more than just mindfulness

It's been quite a while since I've watched The Matrix. You know, the movie where really real reality is very different from how things appear to those trapped in illusion -- which in this case is being confined in a pod, hallucinating that what you're dreaming is actually true.

Robert Wright starts off his Why Buddhism is True book by using the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix as a metaphor for what Buddhism seeks: the truth about life.

The prison is called the Matrix, but there's no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The only way to get the whole picture, says Morpheus, is "to see it for yourself." He offers Neo two pills, a red pill and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break through the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.

That's a pretty stark choice: a life of delusion and bondage or a life of insight and freedom. In fact, it's a choice that's so dramatic that you'd think a Hollywood movie is exactly where it belongs -- that the choices we really get to make about how to live our lives are less momentous than this, more pedestrian. Yet when that movie came out, a number of people saw it as mirroring a choice they had actually made.

The people I'm thinking about are what you might call Western Buddhists, people in the United States and other Western countries who, for the most part, didn't grow up Buddhist but at some point adopted Buddhism.

At least they adopted a version of Buddhism, a version that had been stripped of some supernatural elements typically found in Asian Buddhism, such as a belief in reincarnation and in various deities. This Western Buddhism centers on a part of Buddhist practice that in Asia is more common among monks than among laypeople: meditation, along with immersion in Buddhist philosophy.

(Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism -- that it's atheistic and that it revolves around meditation -- are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don't meditate.)

Interesting. I'm definitely attracted to the Western form of Buddhism, since I like this philosophy (in Asia it is a religion) because it fits with my attraction toward atheism and meditation. This reminds me of a difference I observed between American and Indian members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a spiritual organization headquartered in India and led by a guru that I belonged to for 35 years.

On the whole we Americans were more interested in the fine points of the RSSB teachings and the meditation practice we'd been taught than the members of RSSB with an Indian background -- who seemed more devoted to the person of the guru and often meditated little if at all, being more concerned about seva, or volunteer service on behalf of RSSB and the guru.

There's no right or wrong here, just different ways of approaching spirituality. For Wright, a Western Buddhist, this gets at the question of how deeply committed someone is to truly upending their current view of reality versus merely improving our life without such a drastic change of perception. He notes:

Using meditation this way, as a purely therapeutic device that doesn't deeply change your view of reality, is a perfectly fine thing to do. It's good for you, and it will probably be good for the world.

But Wright goes on to say:

Still, using meditation this way isn't, by itself, taking the red pill. Taking the red pill means asking basic questions about the relationship of the perceiver to the perceived and examining the underpinnings of our normal view of reality. If you're thinking seriously about taking the red pill, you'll be curious as to whether the Buddhist view of the world "works" not just in a therapeutic sense but in a more philosophical sense.

So what is it that distinguishes a "red pill" approach to Buddhism? Not an easy question to answer. Wright offers up some hints in this passage.

The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives from the Theravada lineage. It is within the Mahayana lineage (to which Quang Due belonged) that you find the most radically based conception of illusion.

Some Mahayana Buddhists even subscribe to a "mind only" doctrine that, in its most extreme incarnation, dismisses the things we "perceive" via consciousness as, pretty literally, figments of our imagination. This strand of Buddhist thought -- the strand that most obviously resonates with the movie The Matrix -- isn't dominant within Mahayana Buddhism, much less within Buddhism at large.

But even mainstream Buddhist thinkers accept some version of the concept of emptiness, a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds, at a minimum, that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have.

And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self -- you know, your self, my self -- is an illusion. In this view, the "you" that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn't really exist. 

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together -- the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness -- you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

Evolution doesn't care if feelings are true, just that they are good for us

In a recent post, "No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality," I noted that evolution doesn't care about truth, just about whether genes are passed on to the next generation. Of course, this is just a manner of speaking, since evolution isn't about caring or not-caring.

This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves.

After writing that, I came across a mention of Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, in another book that I was reading. That spurred me to pull Wright's book off of the Buddhism shelf in my office bookcase and start re-re-reading it. 

(Often I can tell how many times I've read a book by the different highlighting colors in it, as I used to bounce back and forth between various colors; now I favor yellow almost exclusively.)

Heraclitus famously said “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” For me this applies to re-reading books. They seem fresh every time I do this, because while the book has stayed the same, unlike a river, I've changed.

Now that my daily meditation consists of guided meditations from Zen master Henry Shukman via his The Way app on my iPhone, I figured that I should remind myself why Buddhism is true, according to Wright. 

Early on in his book, page 6 to be precise, Wright -- who has written a book about evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal -- talks about why pleasure always fades (a basic tenet of Buddhism) from the perspective of evolution.

Here's the basic logic. We were "designed" by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation -- things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. I put "designed" in quotation marks because, again, natural selection isn't a conscious, intelligent designer but an unconscious process.

Still, natural selection does create organisms that look as if they're the product of a conscious designer, a designer who kept fiddling with them to make them effective gene propagators.

So, as a kind of thought experiment, it's legitimate to think of natural selection as a "designer" and put yourself in its shoes and ask: If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? 

In other words, granted that eating, having sex, impressing peers, and besting rivals helped our ancestors spread their genes, how exactly would you design their brains to get them to pursue these goals? I submit that at least three basic principles of design would make sense.

1. 1. Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
   2. The pleasure shouldn't last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn't subside, we'd never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That's no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!
   3. The animal's brain should focus more on (1) the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you'll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you'll be full of ennui and wishing you'd majored in philosophy.

If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.

Natural selection doesn't "want" us to be happy, after all, it just "wants" us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

In another chapter, "When Are Feelings Illusions?," Wright provides useful advice about how to tell when a feeling is productive in a broader sense than how natural selection views productive -- basically as doing things that keep us alive long enough to pass on our genes to the next generation.

I certainly could relate to his examples.

Like getting angry at a driver who is following me too closely, even though it is unlikely that I'm in any danger from him (such drivers are usually men, in my experience). I'm reacting as natural selection intended when someone threatens my life. Except in modern times, our lives rarely are truly threatened by other people. They just irritate us.

So my feeling of anger is an illusion of sorts. It isn't a reflection of how the world truly is, but as how my feelings believe it is, since evolution favors feelings that aided in survival more than feelings that reflected truth.

Of course, Wright points out that some feelings do indeed reflect the truth about reality. If I jump at the sight of a large snake, that's a good thing, as some snakes are poisonous. (I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California where rattlesnakes were common and jumping at the sound of a rattle was a very good thing.)

Obviously, this chapter hasn't been a blanket indictment of human feelings. Some, maybe most, of our feelings serve us reasonably well; they don't much distort our view of reality, and they help keep us alive and flourishing.

My attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades and scaling skyscrapers -- all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation -- inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don't, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don't.

And I hope you can see why this is difficult. It's in the nature of feelings to make it hard to tell the valuable ones from the harmful ones, the reliable from the misleading. One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally "designed" to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.

Here's a thoughtful critique of Radha Soami Satsang Beas -- well worth reading

I've received a critique of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization headquartered in India and led by a guru, from someone who wants to be anonymous, preferring to be called "LGG." Here's the PDF file.
Download Critique of RSSB

The critique is thoughtful and well-researched. Below I've shared the first six pages of the 53-page document. There's plenty of white space in the document, which I've minimized in my copy and paste below, so it doesn't take long to read the document. 

Even if you aren't familiar with RSSB, but especially if you are, I'm confident that you'll enjoy this critique. It's a great example of using reason and evidence to evaluate spiritual/religious teachings, and the organization behind those teachings. 

Here's the initial pages to whet your appetite to read the whole critique. This sample includes a summary of the critique. 

Why am I writing this?

I am writing this to organize and explain my ideas. I want to get this down on paper and out of my head because it’s probably the best way to organize my thoughts, address inconsistencies, and find a consensus on the real teachings and criticism.

This writing will mostly consist of facts with a few personal experiences, but I’ll make that well known when addressing it.

This will be an evolving document so I will continue to add and change it with any new information I find. There will also be writing where I miss ideas and thoughts because of a lack of information or understanding of the tenets or principles, so please don’t go too hard on me :).

I will try my best to remain unbiased while addressing concerns and teachings behind RSSB, but I will tackle ideas that seem counter to the teachings of RSSB.

Another abstract idea that I might want to add later is whether we believe something because we’re born into it, sharing the values and ideas from our family and relatives, or if we believe something because we truly understand it, resonate with it, and can back it up with enough evidence to be reasonable.

TLDR (Summarizing the 50+ pages); [stands for Too Long, Didn't Read, so a synopsis]

1. The Foundation of RSSB Relies on Karma – But Is Karma Real?

RSSB’s core doctrine is that karma binds souls to a cycle of birth and rebirth, and the only escape is through the guidance of a Perfect Living Master. But does karma actually exist in the way RSSB claims?

• Other religions reject reincarnation – Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) teach that we live once, and judgment happens after death. RSSB cherry-picks from different traditions without clear justification.

• If karma isn’t real, RSSB collapses – Without karma, there’s no need for meditation, no need for a guru, and no necessity for this specific path.

2. The Guru’s Role: A Contradictory Doctrine

RSSB teaches that a Perfect Living Master is required for spiritual liberation. However, its own history contradicts this idea.

• Shiv Dayal Singh (founder of RSSB) had no guru – If a guru is required for spiritual progress, how did he become a master without one?

• Circular logic in guru validation – The current guru picks his successor, and followers are told they can’t question his legitimacy unless they are enlightened themselves. How is this different from blind faith?

• The last three gurus are from the same family – This looks more like nepotism than divine selection.

3. The Fraud Scandal: Can a ‘God in Human Form’ Be Involved in Financial Corruption?

The current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has been implicated in a multi-billion-dollar fraud case linked to the Singh brothers (Religare). Court documents suggest financial mismanagement and hidden transactions involving RSSB leadership.

• Would a true spiritual master engage in this?

• Why didn’t he foresee this if he’s enlightened?

Sources:

• Bloomberg: The Billionaires and the Guru

• Business Today: Delhi HC Orders RSSB Chief to Repay Debt

4. Misinterpretation of Religious Texts

RSSB frequently reinterprets religious scriptures —particularly from Christianity and Islam— to fit its theology.

• Example: Jesus and karma – RSSB claims Jesus took on karma like their masters do, but this is not found in Christian doctrine.

• No historical or theological backing – Many of these claims lack scholarly support and seem more like selective reinterpretation.

Final Thoughts: Why I No Longer Follow RSSB

After years of reflection, I’ve realized that RSSB requires faith in authority rather than evidence-based belief. My biggest takeaways:

1. You can’t confirm the guru is divine unless you’re divine yourself – an impossible requirement.

2. Religious contradictions abound – Why do major religions differ so much if they are all supposed to point to the same truth? Moreover, does RSSB continually try to make sure every religion fits its ideas?

3. Spiritual leaders must be held accountable – If a guru is truly enlightened, their actions should reflect divine wisdom, not nepotism and financial scandals.

I remain grateful for some of RSSB’s teachings—such as discipline and a vegetarian lifestyle — but I can no longer accept it as truth.

What Do You Think?

I invite RSSB followers, ex-followers, and spiritual seekers to share their perspectives. If you believe my reasoning is flawed, I welcome a discussion. Let’s seek the truth together.

Download Critique of RSSB

Note: after reading the entire critique of RSSB, consider sharing your thoughts in a comment on this post. That will enable the author of this critique, "LGG," to consider your ideas and possibly respond via their own comment.

No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality

It isn't surprising that, as an atheist, I find a lot not to like in Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. However, what does surprise me is how weak Douthat's arguments are. 

For while I admire his clear writing style, as befits a New York Times opinion columnist, often he simply tosses off glib statements about the marvelousness of religious belief without backing them up with either solid facts or persuasive reasoning.

Here's an example from the book's "Big Faiths and Big Questions" chapter, which argues that the world's major religions are a better bet than minor religions for someone wanting to dip their spiritual toe into religious waters -- or if they're gung-ho, their entire being.

I think the process whereby we moved from localized religion to the world religions was in fact a movement toward greater understanding and wisdom, while the (partial, incomplete) abandonment of those religions has been the late-modern world's great mistake.

Rather than just being a way station on an unstoppable march from pervasive supernaturalism to disenchanted secularism, the great religions represented -- and still represent! -- a balancing that comes much closer than either modern materialism or primeval religions to capturing the full story of the world.

So if you are a seeker on the threshold of religion, a browser in the Bookstore of All Religions, it's entirely reasonable to let yourself be drawn toward a major world religion rather than fretting that religious truth might be hiding from you in some minor Californian sect or exotic mystery cult.

These religions spread around the world for a reason, they're available to you for a reason, they triumphed over primeval belief systems for a reason, they have moral and metaphysical commonalities for a reason -- and that reason is that they represented an advancement, a convergence, toward a truer picture of reality.

I'm far from being an expert in the history of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism (I don't consider Buddhism a religion, though Douthat does). But I'm pretty sure that the reason these became major religions wasn't because they were so great at describing a truer picture of reality than other religions consigned to minor status.

For example, Christianity prospered when emperors made it the Roman Empire's state religion in the 4th century. And Islam prospered through early Muslim conquests. Yet Douthat would have us believe that the major religions attracted followers through some sort of Darwinian Survival of the Truthiest. 

This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves.

Similarly, a religion does well when it meets the needs of people who encounter it. If being in touch with truths about reality was the greatest need of people, then science would be hugely more popular than religion. 

But this isn't the case. Many more people are devoutly religious than are devoted to science. The reason is that religions meet needs other than conveying truth. In fact, religions prosper by denying certain key truths, such as:

-- Everyone dies, and there is no persuasive evidence for life after death.
-- There also is no persuasive evidence of the supernatural.
-- Since something must always have existed, this is more likely to be nature than God.

Religions appeal to people because they offer an alternative to the sometimes bleak truths of secularism and science. We are born, we live, we die. There is no God looking after us. In the grand scheme of things, we matter very little.

A religion typically brings like-minded people together in a communal fashion. It feels good to be a part of something greater than yourself, to worship with others in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. I don't deny all that, having experienced these benefits during the 35 years I was a member of an Eastern religion (a minor one). 

However, now I still feel I'm part of something greater than myself: reality. I still have a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood: friends, family, acquaintances. Religions don't offer anything that can't be obtained from other sources. 

Heck, even if what you desire is unreality, a lack of truth, the far corners of the Internet beckon. There's no need to join a religion to unmoor yourself from reality, if that's what you want. Just seek out your favorite conspiracy theory.

Academy Awards speech about Palestinian suffering shows power of compassion

Having just spent much of my evening watching the Academy Awards (thankfully, I recorded the show, so could skip the commercials and boring parts, as it ran for three hours and forty-five minutes), I had been planning to write something short on a different subject for this blog.

That plan changed when I saw the acceptance speech for Best Documentary, which went to "No Other Land," a film about the destruction of a Palestinian village in the West Bank by the Israeli military.

The men who gave the acceptance speech were Palestinian co-director Basel Adra and Israeli co-director  Yuval Abraham. I'm assuming that Adra is Muslim and Abraham is Jewish, though I could be wrong about this.

Regardless, this shows the power of moving beyond narrow confines of religion to something much more universal: compassion for the suffering of our fellow human beings. This has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with opening our hearts and minds to the plight of other people less fortunate than ourselves.

After listening to so many traditional acceptance speeches tonight where an Oscar winner thanks their spouse, parents, agent, others who worked on a film, blah, blah, blah, it was refreshing to hear Adra and Abraham talk about those who are suffering grave injustice under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which was acquired by Israel after a brief war in 1967.

Here's a video of the acceptance speech and a transcript of those remarks that was in an email I got from Zeteo, an independent American news organization founded by ex-MSNBC broadcaster Mehdi Hasan.

BASEL ADRA

“Thank you to the Academy for the award. It’s such a big honor for the four of us and everybody who supported us for this documentary. About two months ago, I became a father, and my hope to my daughter is that she will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing violence, home demolitions, forced displacement that my community, Masafer Yatta, is facing every day. ‘No Other Land’ reflects the harsh reality we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”

YUVAL ABRAHAM

“We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger. We see each other. The atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end; the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of Oct. 7, which must be freed. When I look at Basel, I see my brother. But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws, that destroy lives, that he cannot control. There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. And I have to say, as I am here, the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path. Why? Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe? There is another way. It’s not too late for life, for the living.”

Zelensky's meeting with Trump shows danger of cults, political or religious

As I've noted before and surely will again, because it's the truth, the slavish devotion of almost all Republicans to Donald Trump mirrors the slavish devotion of cult members to their own Dear Leader who, in their eyes, can do no wrong.

Further proof of this was on plain display today after the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, met with Trump at the White House to sign a deal they'd negotiated regarding the mining of mineral deposits in Ukraine, along with discussing how to end Ukraine's war with Russia.

That meeting started off fine (a full video is here), but degenerated at the end into a shouting match in which Zelensky bravely attempted to speak the truth about the Russian dictator, Putin, and Ukraine's valid concerns about making a bad deal with Putin.

But in what appeared to be a pre-planned effort by Vice-President Vance and President Trump to undermine Zelensky and promote Putin, the last part of the meeting featured Vance and Trump acting like the cowardly dictator-lovers that they are, talking over Zelensky in a bizarre attempt to prevent him from speaking the proverbial truth to power. 

This video shows Trump and Vance acting like mafia bosses, threatening Zelensky with the loss of his country if he doesn't express enough fawning appreciation to Trump.

Zelensky is a real man, a warrior who has been fighting on behalf of his people for the past three years after Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Trump, on the other hand, is a weak cry-baby who has so little confidence in himself, he looks upon any criticism as a vicious attack rather than as something to be discussed and coherently responded to.

That's why Trump abruptly ended his meeting with Zelensky. The Ukrainians wanted to stay, have lunch, and then proceed with what had been planned for the rest of the day. However, Trump kicked Zelensky out because he can't tolerate anyone correcting his lies -- which in this case were plentiful. PolitiFact highlighted three of them. 

How this meeting ended was disturbing enough. Almost as disturbing was the virtually universal support Trump got for his outrageous behavior from his fellow Republican politicians. Senator Lindsey Graham has been a strong supporter of Ukraine. A few weeks ago he lavishly praised Zelensky at a European security conference.

But since he belongs to the Cult of Trump, Graham issued a statement condemning Zelensky. That's what Republican politicians have to do these days: kiss Trump's fat ass out of a fear that if they don't, Trump and his billionaire buddy, Elon Musk, will fund a primary challenge to them next time they run for re-election.

This is the political equivalent of followers of a religious cult leader keeping their mouths shut about the immoral and illegal things they know the leader is doing, but can't talk about because they're afraid of what will happen to them if they do. Being ostracized, for sure. Facing physical danger, a real possibility. 

Cult leaders get their power from the subservience of their followers. Whether it be Trump's authoritarianism or a religious cult leader's dominance over helpless followers (often women abused by the leader, which Trump also has done), the key to their success is creating a climate where criticism of the leader is a thought-crime and praise of the leader keeps a follower out of trouble.

To which I say, to hell with that. I'll never be silenced, nor will the majority of Americans who disapprove of the horrible way Trump is acting as president. European leaders were quick to support Zelensky, a great sign. Hopefully now they will be even more inclined to give aid to Ukraine, which already surpasses the value of American aid (Trump lied about that).

Thomas Friedman, a New York Times opinion writer, had a great short piece today about the meeting between Zelensky and Trump, "This Never Happened With an American President Before." Here's the whole essay.

What happened in the Oval Office on Friday — the obviously planned ambush of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance — was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.

You want an analogy? Imagine if, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel came to the White House this month, Trump and Vance told him that the war with Hamas had gone on too long, too many lives had been lost and it was costing America too much money, so it was time for Bibi and the Israeli people to do a deal with the Hamas aggressor.

Because Russia did to Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, what Hamas did to Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — a surprise invasion, murder and the ensuing sexual violence to wreak destruction on another nation and its society. Trump took Bibi’s side 110 percent against Hamas, and now he is taking Putin’s side 110 percent against Zelensky and Ukraine.

It is hard to express what a break this is in American foreign policy. We stood on the side of liberty and those fighting for it around the world. There are times the isolationist forces in our population have held us back and had to be persuaded. There have been times when — in support of the larger cause of liberty — against dangerous foes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we had to align ourselves temporarily with dictators.

But I can’t think of a single time when an American president declared that the democratically elected leader of a country preserving liberty was a “dictator” who started the war with his neighbor — when it was the vicious neighboring dictator who actually started the war.

If you listen to Trump, everything we have done for Ukraine is pure altruism. We have no actual interests at stake ourselves in its fate or the triumph of liberty there. We have no actual interest in the fact that Ukraine is protecting the European Union — a giant, pro-American alliance of free markets and free people. It doesn’t matter a whit to Trump what happens to the E.U. or Ukraine. All that matters is that Zelensky says “thank you” louder for our altruism and that, in the middle of his war of survival, sign over a generation of Ukraine’s mineral wealth to us.

This is a total perversion of U.S. foreign policy practiced by every president since World War I. My fellow Americans, we are in completely uncharted waters, led by a president, who — well, I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV.​

---------------------
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. 

If humans are the top of creation, what about Neanderthals?

The February 2025 issue of National Geographic features a fascinating story by Brook Larmer, "The Hunt for the  Other Humans." This got me to thinking about the common religious teaching that humans are the top of creation.

For example, the Bible says in Genesis:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,^[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

And an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which I know a lot about because I was a member of the organization for 35 years, similarly taught that humans are the top of creation -- and that it is only possible to return to God if one has a human form (the group believes in reincarnation). Further, supposedly there always is at least one human who is God in Human Form, and who is responsible for taking "marked souls" back to the highest supernatural realm of creation.

Since I love to delve into weird theological questions, even though I no longer believe in God or the supernatural, a couple of way-cool graphic depictions of human origins in the National Geographic story got me pondering some pertinent issues about the whole "top of creation" thing.

Here's photographs of the graphic depictions. I've made them as large as possible.

The top graphic says: 

Homo sapiens are the only humans left on Earth today, but at one point we shared the planet with other species of ancestral humans, collectively known as hominins. As climates and ecological opportunities shifted, hominins migrated out of Africa, reconnecting and interbreeding with the descendants of their relatives who had made similar journeys thousands of years before.

So do all of the hominin species count as being the "top of creation," or only our species, Homo sapiens? The bottom graphic shows that hominins have been around for over four million years. If they count as ancestral humans, then the RSSB philosophy implies that Gods in Human Form have been on our planet for that length of time.

But let's assume that only species in the genus Homo count as humans. That graphic says:

Homo sapiens are the only remaining humans. Our genus, Homo, features relatively larger brains, full bipedalism, and the ability to make tools. 

The right side of the graphic shows that there have been about ten species in the genus Homo. Seemingly they all would count as being the top of creation, being humans. This includes our closest relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans. 

From the graphic, our species diverged from Neanderthals and Denisovans about 800,000 years ago, though the top graphic says that the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil dates from about 300,000 years ago. Thus those who believe in the RSSB teachings have to accept that there were Gods in Human Form at least that long ago, and almost certainly they killed animals and ate meat -- which is against the current RSSB teaching.

Another question is whether Homo sapiens is the species that will forever be the "top of creation." After all, evolution hasn't stopped. There's a good chance our species won't last forever. The National Geographic story says:

The disappearance of the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other groups around 40,000 years ago marked the end of millions of years when multiple groups of hominins walked the Earth. The current epoch is a historical anomaly, and Stringer [a paleoanthropologist] advises us not to be smug in our status as the last ones standing.

Neanderthals and Denisovans survived for half a million years; Homo erectus lasted nearly two million years. At the rate we're going, how successful will we look in 2,000 years, much less a million?

Ross Douthat's five varieties of mystical experience

I'm finding Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, less interesting now that I've gotten past the reasons Douthat offers for being religious, and have started to read how one goes about choosing a religion to believe in.

However, in his "The Myth of Disenchantment" chapter, which is within the why believe section, his description of five varieties of mystical experience struck me as both fairly unique and mostly valid. I'll use Douthat's own words to describe those varieties rather than attempting a paraphrase.

(1) Generic mystical experience. 

The first is what you might call the generic mystical experience -- "generic" not because it is boring or predictable but because it seems to be most commonplace and the most readily accessible through certain kinds of spiritual technique, common to religious traditions in both the East and West.

This is an experience in which the self's relationship to reality undergoes a dramatic transformation, and some deeper pattern of reality is apparently revealed. The revelation may take the form of a sense of oneness with the universe, of dissolving boundaries between the self and the world, of interconnection rather than separation within creation, with the ego and the individual personality seemingly evaporating. 

(2) Encounter with something absolutely other.

The second kind of mystical experience... involves a sense of encounter with something absolute and absolutely other. The first kind of experience can turn into the second kind; the line I'm drawing is hardly a clean one, but you see a definite difference when that transition happens, and the person having the experience is left with no doubt that Something is looking at them or pressing into and through them.

Here is an example...

"All at once I felt the presence of God... as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether... I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God has neither form, color, odor, nor taste... God was present, though invisible, he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him."

(3) The supernatural condenses to a particular being.

...The third category of mystical experience [is] in which the supernatural condenses to a person, a particular being, a face, words. In these cases the sense of otherness doesn't go away; these are still encounters with the numinous, unsettling and eerie or just seemingly impossible in their nature and effects.

But what's experienced is made manifest in a singular figure, a personality or group of personalities, a voice giving instructions, not just a harrowing or joyful experience of divinity or mystery. A vision of Jesus or Krishna would fall into this category; so would the innumerable encounters with gods and saints and angels, departed relatives and the Virgin Mary; so would the external voice speaking to you suddenly at some crucial moment in your life.

(4) The experience involves effects on material reality. 

This brings us to the fourth kind of mystical experience, from the point of view of Official Knowledge the most disreputable of all -- the kind of mystical experience that actually has apparent effects in material reality, whether miraculous, uncanny, or simply really, really weird.

...The most consistently attested example of the mystical interacting with the material is the phenomenon of miraculous healings -- seemingly impossible recovery after intercessory prayer. That attestation takes many different forms, with the simplest being the share of contemporary people who claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing.

It's about a third of Americans, according to survey data, with higher shares in other parts of the world, meaning that hundreds of millions of people around the globe believe that they witnessed a concrete supernatural intervention in their lives.

(5) Encounter with a being or force that has agency.

But the religious worldview assumes that these [miraculous] happenings are, at least in the more dramatic cases, the results of the free decisions of nonhuman persons with whom we can interact through prayer or magic -- God Himself, the gods, angelic or demonic beings, the holy dead, unclassifiable forces.

The most common kinds of mystical experience, the ones that just involve the self's experience of its relationship to the cosmos or to its own mortal flesh, can be reproduced to some degree under laboratory conditions. You can put the meditating monk in the MRI machine, you can get general replications of experiences (the details are another matter) among people going on an ayahuasca-mediated spiritual trip.

But the encounter with something entirely other, in which the other being or force or personality has agency as well, is just not the kind of thing that the scientific method is designed to measure or test, nor is the kind of event to which it makes sense to assign definite probabilities.

...The miracle or the vision of the demonic reaching-in is supposed to be specific to the individual; your own internal conditions play some unmeasurable role; and likewise the external agents can't be subjected to normal scientific forms of scrutiny because they're agents and not just impersonal forces -- and their own purposes and interests, for our good or ill, involve not being subjected to the rules that govern our material existence.

Now, I didn't include Douthat's mention of arguments against the validity of reports of mystical experience. That's a whole other subject, whether it makes sense to believe in any or all of the five varieties.

The probability of 1 through 5 being a genuine reflection of reality clearly seems to be in inverse relationship to their number. Meaning, a sense of being in touch with a deeper dimension of reality seems so commonplace, it's hard to argue that something real isn't going on in the mind of the person having the first kind of mystical experience.

Just standing on the top of a mountain, looking out upon the majesty of nature, often stimulates an experience of unity with everything in existence. I've had that sort of experience. Most people have. 

However, being in touch with a supernatural being that has agency, the ability to act and intervene in the lives of humans, this is much less common -- and also much less likely to be true. Yet its rarity makes such an experience more memorable when it happens to someone.

That's why a book about sitting on a beach feeling one with the cosmos while watching the sun set over the ocean won't be of much interest to people, while a book about meeting Jesus and getting a tour of heaven stands a good chance of being a best seller.