Church of the Churchless

Discussion group

The Church of the Churchless discussion group has been languishing since I started it off with a question about a question in December 2004. I said, “If you had the chance to ask one question of ultimate reality and could get a clear answer in English, what would you ask?” I got a few responses and would enjoy reading more.

Laura, bless her, recently woke up the discussion group from its slumber and asked another good question: “Why is there injustice in the world, what purpose does it serve?” If you have an answer—or a comment about the question—head on over to Google Groups and post away. Laura raised some other issues that you might want to share your views on.

I don’t have any grand expectations for the Church of the Churchless discussion group. My original idea was that it could be a way for some of the churchless to connect with others who don’t feel comfortable belonging to a conventional religion or spiritual path. I remember a line from a movie, “Shadowlands,” about C.S. Lewis: “We read to know that we are not alone.”

Books still serve that purpose, but now reading on the Internet does too. Search engines like Google make it possible to find online communities of people, or just a single person, interested in every conceivable subject, idea, passion, problem, or whatever.

It always makes me feel good when someone writes and says, “I thought I was the only one who felt this way. Now I know I’m not.” It’s natural to doubt yourself when you’re feeling like a spiritual lone wolf. Humans are, by nature, herd animals. We need other people to survive, both physically and psychologically.

Kermit the Frog famously said, “It’s not that easy being green.” It’s not that easy being churchless either. You feel different. Because you are different. Most people are happy believing what they’ve been taught to believe, even if it doesn’t make any sense. If breezes of doubt start to blow in under the tent of faith that believers erect around themselves, the walls are tied down more firmly.

It can be comforting and warm inside a shared set of beliefs. But when those beliefs don’t conform to the greater reality that lies outside, the coziness is illusory. To me the churched are huddling around a flickering theological candle that barely illuminates the darkness of the windowless room where they huddle for security. They don’t know that the sun is shining brightly outside the confines of their shuttered minds.

It takes guts to stand tall and walk away from your companions into the dark. That’s where the door to the light is, though—hidden in the shadows that the scriptural candlelight of the churched can’t penetrate. The churchless lone wolves are moving in the right direction. Without encouragement, though, the temptation to turn back and rejoin the herd is strong.

I’m determined to keep heading toward the light of reality. I don’t like the shadows where I am now, but I detest the imagined illumination that used to be my spiritual support. I’d rather honestly stumble around in the dark, looking for the door, than falsely believe that my barely-lit candle of faith really amounted to genuine enlightenment.

Sometimes we spiritual stumblers in the dark need to call, “Is anyone else out there?” Hearing a response from a kindred soul can help us remember that though the Way has to be traveled alone, the traveling doesn’t have to be lonely.

Calling out and responding, those are the twin voices of the Church of the Churchless discussion group. If you feel like it, speak.

Western religions holding back stem cell research

Watching “Nightline” a few days ago, I was pleased to find an expert supporting my contention that religion is at the root of the reason why the United States is falling behind other nations in crucial health care research.

In my “God must be a Buddhist” post I argued that the Western monotheistic religions have more of a problem with absorbing scientific facts into their worldviews than do Eastern faiths such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism.

Thus recent breakthroughs in embryonic therapeutic cloning occurred in South Korea, not the United States, because irrational tenets of fundamentalist Christianity have resulted in limits being placed on federal funding of stem cell research.

On the May 24 Nightline program, Ted Koppel interviewed Lee Silver, described as a “genetics professor at Princeton University” (Silver’s official status is Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Affairs). Silver said that the way to make sure U.S. stem cell research has ethical limits is to have research funded by the federal government, with accompanying federal regulations.

He went on to say that the two most important advances in therapeutic cloning have come out of South Korea, though the United States spends far more on research. One reason is that the U.S. has put restrictions on this research, which is leading to private funding and stem cell researchers going to other countries.

Silver said, “Then the research will be conducted basically in Asia, where people don’t have as many problems with this research as Westerners tend to have.”

Koppel interjected: “You were just about to say, and I could see you catching yourself, whether they don’t have the same ethical considerations. You weren’t really going to say that, were you?”

“No, no,” Silver responded. “I don’t think that is correct. I think that we’re seeing different senses of spirituality or ethics in the United States and in Asia because we have very different religious traditions. And I think the research in Asia will be done ethically, but they don’t see human embryos in the same light as we do in America or Europe.”

Fundamentalist Christians in this country are disturbingly ignorant of alternative faiths such as Buddhism. Americans, who are overwhelmingly Christian, tend to think that they have a corner on the market of moral values. So Bush can stand at his presidential podium and spout nonsense about vetoing proposed legislation that would loosen federal restrictions on embryonic stem cell research because he is “pro-life.”

No, he isn’t. The Buddhist stem cell researcher in South Korea, Hwang Woo-suk, is pro-life, because he is working to cure diseases that shorten life and reduce the quality of life. Bush is pro-cells in a Petri dish, not pro-life.

Koppel said to Silver that his mind jumps from the term “embryo” to “tiny little creature, soon to become a baby.” Silver set him straight: “We have to understand that when you have an embryo in a Petri dish it cannot possibly become a fetus or a baby. That can only happen if the embryo is placed in a woman’s womb.” And if we don’t want this to occur, he added, we need transparent research funded by the federal government.

In a Korea Times article, “Stem Cell and Buddhism,” I learned that Hwang used to be an atheist until he became a Buddhist about twenty years ago. Hwang says, “I am not versed in the creeds of Buddhism. But when I carry out research, I always check whether they square with the sublime spirit of the Buddha. If I am not sure, I will be unable to continue my work.”

In Buddhism, an early-stage embryo isn’t classified as “life” until it is implanted on the uterine wall. Supposedly this is part of the Buddha’s teachings, which I have suspicions about. Regardless, it makes sense. Much more sense than Bush’s notion that a few cells lying in a Petri dish have more of a claim to life than real live people suffering from diseases that potentially could be cured with therapeutic cloning.

Koppel told Silver that some say umbilical and adult stem cells are as good as embryonic stem cells. “I disagree with that,” Silver said. “An embryonic stem cell has the ability to become every tissue or organ in the body if you can figure out what factors to give it.” Other stem cells don’t have that potential.

Hwang has figured out how to create an embryo’s cells from a patient’s own cells. So when the stem cells are put back into the patient, the patient’s body sees those cells as part of itself and won’t reject them.

That’s beautiful. It’s spiritual. It’s godly. You just need a compassionate sensibility and open mind to recognize that therapeutic cloning is a scientific advance to be embraced, not a sin to be rejected. Fundamentalist Western religions create a divide between humanity and nature that is well, unnatural. Also unreal and unbelievable. These religions posit ethical problems where none exist, and ignore evident affronts to life—such as the diseases that could be cured through advances in embryonic stem cell research.

Silver has written a soon-to-be-published book, “Biotechnology in a Spiritual World.” In a lecture based on the book he notes that Western religions embrace a tight one-to-one linkage between body and soul. This can lead to the view that research on a embryo in a Petri dish is murder. However, “In Eastern cultures, biotechnology is not viewed as a challenge to a master God because no such master is thought to be in charge. Furthermore, Eastern spirits are much more loosely attached to bodies and beyond the reach of any scientist.”

I’m not certain which worldview is correct, but my leanings are strongly in the Eastern direction. It is more scientific and sensible. Western religions make conceptual divisions where none exist in reality. For example, Silver notes that Christianity doesn’t believe plants and animals have souls, though they evidently are alive.

Why is an alive human considered to be completely different spiritually from an alive animal? Why is it all right to genetically modify and clone plants, but not people? Questions like these twist Christian theology into irrational knots, while Buddhism presents more compelling answers.

In the afore-linked Korea Times article, Hwang is quoted as saying: “Cloning is a different way of thinking about the cycle of life and re-birth. It is a Buddhist way of thinking.” The article’s author comments, “He was referring to the developmental plasticity of cells, and their genomic and genetic possibilities can be understood in the context of reincarnation, a central concept in Buddhism.”

Whether or not reincarnation after death is true, there is no doubt that life is continually transforming itself in our bodies at every moment. Therapeutic cloning simply builds on natural processes of renewal and rebirth.

This is easy for a Buddhist to see. I only wish that President Bush and the other Christian fundamentalists had such a clear spiritual vision.

Take a stand, don't go to church tomorrow

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

Touching the Void

I didn’t expect that a mountain climbing movie would move me spiritually. Yet “Touching the Void” did. Roger Ebert’s highly laudatory review focused on how harrowing and gripping the movie was. Yes, I shared his can’t-take-my-eyes-off-the-screen experience, though it was a television in my case.

But this Commonweal review by Rand Richards Cooper better describes the deeper dimensions of “Touching the Void.” I won’t bother to summarize the story in any detail—you can read the reviews if you’re not familiar with the film. It is about two British climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who attempted an ascent of a hitherto unconquered face of a mountain in the Peruvian Andes.

They succeed. On the way down, though, Joe breaks his leg and ends up in a deep crevasse. Simon thinks he is dead. For some reason that isn’t clearly explained (maybe there isn’t any), Simon heads back to their base camp without checking out the crevasse and confirming Joe’s condition.

Joe is deserted. He’s at the end of his rope, literally and figuratively. Joe is exhausted, freezing, and seriously injured. He assumes that Simon must have fallen also, and this is the reason why Joe’s pleadings for help have gone unanswered. He figures that Simon’s dead body is on the other end of the rope that connected them.

Joe pulls on the rope, expecting that he’ll soon feel Simon’s dead weight. The end cascades down from the top of the crevasse, falling into his lap. Joe sees that it has been cut. Simon had to let Joe go in order to save his own life. Joe begins to realize that he is on his own.

Morning comes. And the real-life Joe narrates the scene being reenacted by the actor stuck in the crevasse:

“By ten [o’clock] I was totally convinced that I was on my own, that no one was coming to get me. I was brought up as a devout Catholic. I had long since stopped believing in God. I always wondered, if things really hit the fan, whether I would, under pressure, turn around and say a few Hail Mary’s, and say ‘You get me out of here.’ It never occurred to me. If I had even thought that was a way out, or some way of solace—it was time to meet my maker and go to paradise—I would have stopped still, and I would have died.”

Joe experienced in reality what I conjectured in my last post: What would I do if I was in a seemingly hopeless situation, expecting that death’s door was about to open and let me in? Would I start to have faith in something, someone, some power that had no meaning for me before? Or would I act as Joe did, relying on his own strength, determination, and courage?

One of my best childhood friends, Todd Wells, once told me about advice he’d gotten from his father. Todd lived on a ranch, where unexpected problems frequently cropped up. His father said, “Look around you. Right around you. You’ll find what you need to deal with the problem.”

Todd told me that he thought of that when he was in his basement working on his heating system. An oil line broke. He didn’t panic. He scanned his immediate surroundings and saw a rag within reach. It served as a temporary plug for the leak. If he’d thrown up his hands and rushed around in a panic, the spill would have been much worse.

Similarly, Joe says, “You’ve got to keep making decisions. If you stop making decisions, you’re stuffed.” He doesn’t wait for a sign from God. He decides that the only possible way out is to go deeper into the crevasse, since he can’t climb up.

From here on, “Touching the Void” is virtually a non-stop spiritual metaphor. If you want a dark night of the soul, then break your leg, be abandoned by your climbing partner, escape from an incredibly deep crevasse, and then make your way down a glacier and moraine, one painful step (and fall) at a time, not knowing if anyone will be waiting for you.

Watching the movie, I kept thinking of the first sentence of my book, “Return to the One.” I labored on that sentence a lot. I wanted it to encompass the message of the whole 350 pages that followed. Heck, someone might give up reading after one sentence. They shouldn’t go away empty-minded.

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

I love that sentence. And not because I wrote it. Because it is so true.

Joe survived because he found what he needed to get out of the crevasse and down the mountain right at hand. He didn’t wait to be rescued. He didn’t expect a miraculous intervention. He didn’t pray for guidance.

What he did was respond, moment by moment, to the situation he found himself in. He never gave up. He kept moving. First to the light, then to his base.

I’m touching my own void. Aren’t we all, whether we recognize it or not? It isn’t far away. I see it whenever I shut my eyes. Lying in bed at night, waiting to go to sleep, I’m touching the void of that unfathomable darkness where I speak my thoughts. I talk to myself. I chatter away to nobody. I pull on mental ropes that aren’t attached to anything. I don’t hear a response from the void that isn’t the echo of my own voice.

Do I go deeper into the darkness, the mystery? Or do I wait for death to propel me into the place where I’m afraid to descend on my own? I think of Joe. I realize that my thinking is part of my clinging to where I am, rather than where I need to go. Still, the thoughts are bringing me closer to the edge of letting go.

Joe had forsaken his Catholic faith. St. John of the Cross never did. Yet the two men are cut from the same cloth. Here’s an excerpt from “John of the Cross: Selected Writings” (Paulist Press):

“John was locked up in a small room [by the Church], six feet wide by ten feet long, that for a window had only a tiny opening, two inches wide, high up in the wall. There, for about nine months, he suffered in darkness and alone, with little to eat and hardly a change of clothing. In the midst of this severe deprivation, he attempted to find some relief by composing poems in his mind…These verses reveal that in that cramped and barren prison, deprived of all earthly comfort, in the dark night of the soul, John received some rays of light and was divinely touched by glory in the substance of his being.

“Here, too, in his stark experience of emptiness, a spiritual synthesis began to take shape in his mind, in which the way to union moved directly up a path he later designated by the word nada, meaning ‘nothing.’ ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing, and even on the Mountain nothing.’”

Joe was sustained by that nothing also. And so, I’m confident, would each of us. It is right at hand. The difficulty doesn’t lie in finding it. It is in not hiding it from ourselves.

What’s wrong with faith?

I’m often asked, generally by myself, “What’s wrong with faith? Doesn’t faith help us get through tough times and feel positive about the future?” Here’s how I answer, generally to myself: “Faith is fine when it points toward objective reality. But when faith keeps us revolving in the merry-go-round of subjective conceptions, it’s dangerous and should be discarded."

Never passing up an opportunity to quote myself, this is how I discussed the issue in my book, “Return to the One”:

The scientific method, by and large, is founded on the first assumption [“I’ll believe it when I see it”]: what we experience is an objective reality that is independent of human beliefs or cognition. If observation, either perceptual or mathematical, proves the scientist wrong, then his beliefs change to match the actual observational experience.

Observations, of course, are not made in a conceptual vacuum, so there is a continual interplay between believing and observing in both everyday life and scientific inquiry. At the most basic level, a belief that there is something real to be observed lies at the root of every act of observation. Physicist Shimon Malin suggests this is one implication of Einstein’s statement ‘it is the theory which decides what we can observe.’

But this is a far cry from the more extreme position that theories, or beliefs, actually bring into being the object of observation. If I’m on a sinking ship, my belief that there may be lifejackets aboard will lead me to look for one in the storage locker. However, that belief won’t produce a life jacket if none are on the ship. When I open the locker, what I see doesn’t depend on what I subjectively believe is inside; it depends on what is objectively there.

By contrast, most religions assume a person comes to be saved spiritually after believing in salvation. Thus, to experience salvation one has to have a firm faith in the possibility of salvation. This is the flip side of a null hypothesis, which helps explain why science and religion are so frequently at odds. Science sees religion blindly accepting unproven beliefs as true whereas religion sees science as shutting its eyes to truths proven only to those who believe.

Now, if salvation could occur during a person’s earthly life, we would not have such a great conflict between science and religion. For even if salvation was a personal affair, unobservable (and hence unconfirmable) by others, at least the person who had been saved would have convincing proof, the goal of science, that the theological tenets of his or her chosen religion were true. The problem, though, is that religions traditionally teach salvation occurs only after physical death, not before. [Return to the One, pp. 17-18]

So, on an individual level faith is dangerous when it lulls us into a complacent attitude of “everything is going to work out fine.” The ship is sinking but I have faith that I’ll be rescued, so I don’t need to look for a life jacket. I’m going to die one day but I have faith that I’ll be saved, so I don’t need to seek a direct experience of non-bodily life. In either case, I’m putting my hope in something that may happen in the future rather than taking action to solve my problem now.

But what if a situation is hopeless? The ship is sinking and there are no life jackets on board. Standing at the rail, watching the ocean grow nearer, won’t believing in a miraculous rescue make my last moments more bearable? Or similarly, my body is dying and there is no possibility of recovery. Laying in bed, aware of death coming closer, won’t believing in a miraculous salvation make my last moments more bearable?

I’m sympathetic with those who emphatically answer “Yes!” to these questions. For I used to feel the same way. And if I found myself at death’s door in the next moment, I might rapidly convert to faith in…whatever. Jesus’ saving grace, Buddha’s boundless compassion, Guru’s mystic power, Tao’s natural way—if I could cling to a hope that something would support me when everything else was gone, you might see me undergoing a proverbial deathbed conversion.

Hope, though, is a flimsy raft. Faced with a flood of monstrous proportions, I’d rather find the sturdy ship Reality at my beck and call. And who knows? Perhaps it is, right here, right now. More than that: Almost certainly it is, right here, right now. Reality, by definition, isn’t distant, insubstantial, untrustworthy, shaky. If I’m not in touch with what is real, the fault doesn’t lie with reality, but with my ability to embrace it.

Thus there is indeed a problem with having too much faith in faith: our trust should rest in reality, not in beliefs, hypotheses, or conjectures about reality. Alan Watts puts it nicely in “The Way of Zen”: Our problem is that the power of thought enables us to construct symbols of things apart from the things themselves. This includes the ability to make a symbol, an idea of ourselves apart from ourselves. Because the idea is so much more comprehensible than the reality, the symbol so much more stable than the fact, we learn to identify ourselves with our idea of ourselves.

And, to identify many other things with our idea of those things, instead of with the reality of what they are in themselves. God. Soul. Death. Heaven. Hell. Salvation. Damnation. These are just words. The realities they point to—assuming the pointing is anywhere near the right direction—are entirely different from the words. Watts shares this anecdote:

“Professor Irving Lee, of Northwestern University, used to hold up a matchbox before his class, asking ‘What’s this?’ The students would usually drop squarely into the trap and say, ‘A matchbox!’ At this Professor Lee would say, ‘No, no! It’s this-’ throwing the matchbox at the class, and adding, ‘Matchbox is a noise. Is this a noise?”

I’m tired of noises. I want the real thing. I like to think that if I’ve got any chance of trading faith in a concept for contact with substantial reality, I’ll take the deal. Even right up to my last breath. If I’m clutching onto an idea of something with all my might, I don’t see how I can grasp the thing itself. So long as I sit here staring at the computer screen, saying to myself, “You know you can type!”, I’m not typing. My faith that I can type has to dissolve so I can actually move my fingers and make letters appear.

This is the way of science: moving from what might be to what actually is. The goal is to move from uncertain faith to more certain knowledge. I have to say “more certain” because knowledge always is provisional in science. A conviction that absolute truth has been reached freezes the truth-seeker in place, forestalling the possibility of discovering more reality over the horizon.

I’ve focused on the individual in this post, but will close with the observation that excessive faith is dangerous for the collective pursuit of reality also. Elevating subjective beliefs over objective observations causes religious fanatics to deny evident facts. I’ve got no problem with them pursuing their own personal delusions, but when fundamentalists try to twist scientific findings to mesh with preconceived articles of faith, they have to be vigorously fought on the societal level.

For example, I recently wrote about how the discovery of feathered dinosaur fossils confirms evolutionary theory. Yet Christian creationists, amazingly, have no problem saying, “Scripture teaches us that birds had a separate origin from other animals. We are on firmer ground if we build our scientific hypotheses on biblical revelation rather than ‘shoe-horning’ the data to fit evolution.” This is insane. Solid factual data are to be cast aside in favor of words from a holy book.

Of course, it isn’t only Christians who do this. I’ve spoken approvingly about the theory of evolution to members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a group with which I’ve been associated for many years, and have been told “No, evolution can’t be true. Haven’t you read what Master Charan Singh said about creation?”

Well, yes, I have. In a book called “The Master Answers” this twentieth-century Indian guru was asked, “Does all human life start in lower forms and evolve upwards? I mean, in animal forms, or even lower?” And Charan Singh replied, “When He [God] created the whole thing, He just created. The creation did not just develop slowly from one thing…The whole world and everything in it was just created at once.”

Now, clearly this conception is wrong. Science knows that the universe is fourteen billion years old and that life gradually evolved on earth over the course of several billion years. I have much more confidence that science is right about this than that the words of Charan Singh represent reality. Yet just as fundamentalist Christians are willing to elevate a Biblical passage over scientific facts, so are fundamentalist followers of Radha Soami Satsang Beas willing to do the same with this quotation. Bizarre.

And again, dangerous. For this mentality allows evident threats to humankind to be interpreted as the divine will. Read Glenn Scherer’s excellent article, “The Godly Must Be Crazy,” to learn how Christian right views are swaying politicians and threatening the environment.

Knowledge, belief, and feathered dinosaurs

Let’s say you believe in creationism or “intelligent design,” as creationists now like to call their addled explanation of how living beings came to be. You don’t accept evolution. Everything was created all at once by a supreme being that knew exactly what he/she/it wanted to do and did it just right the first time around.

Then you are confronted with solid evidence of feathered dinosaurs—a fossil dinosaur covered head to tail with downy fluff and primitive feathers. Evolutionary theory predicted that birds evolved from dinosaurs and, ta-da!, the hypothesis has been confirmed. As paleontologist Mark Norell says, “Dinosaurs are not extinct—we just call them birds now.”

So what are you going to do, Mr. or Ms. Creationist, now that another log of fact has been added to the already monstrous bonfire of scientific knowledge that has been incinerating your cherished beliefs? Are you going to give up your beliefs and accept the facts? Or are you going to ignore the facts and hold onto your beliefs?

I’ve never liked how the distinction between “science” and “religion” usually is presented. Often science and religion are portrayed as two alternative ways of knowing reality. But this doesn’t make sense. There is valid knowledge about reality. Period. Invalid knowledge is belief. Period.

Paul Kurtz says,

In the last analysis, religion and science are different forms of human behavior and have different functions. We may analogically ask, What is the relationship between science and sports, or science and music? These are different forms of experience, and they play different roles in human behavior. Surely neither sports nor music compete in the range of truth claims. In this sense, religion should not be taken as true or false, but as evocative, expressive, uplifting, performatory, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, socially unifying or disruptive. Historically, the claims of religion were taken as true, but this was a prescientific posture drawing upon myth and metaphor, metaphysics and speculation, not testable claims. Thus "religious truth" cannot be appealed to in order to contest the verified findings of the sciences.

Yes. A few days ago I saw a Lou Dobbs interview with Mark Norell on CNN. Norell talked about his new book, “Unearthing the Dragon: The Great Feathered Dinosaur Discovery.” He said that it would take a while for the fact of feathered dinosaurs to enter the mainstream of public awareness. When it does, creationism is going to appear even more nonsensical to anyone with an open mind.

Dobbs asked Norell what he thought about the relationship between science and religion. Norell responded as scientists generally do. He said that they exist in different spheres: “Science deals with knowledge. Religion deals with belief.”

Yet what is a scientific hypothesis? Isn’t this a belief? Sort of. A hypothesis is a tentative belief, a possible fact, a hint of knowledge. Science doesn’t cling to beliefs like religion does. It doesn’t embrace unfounded assumptions about the nature of reality and make this into a virtue called “faith.” Instead, science is ready and willing to discard beliefs when they don’t conform to facts: hard evidence attained through rigorous experiments, observations, analyses.

The director of the American Museum of Natural History says “What we thought we knew about dinosaurs is now history.” That’s so refreshing. I’d love to hear the Vatican say, “What we thought we knew about Jesus is now history.” Religious individuals often change their minds about old beliefs in the light of new evidence, but religious institutions rarely do.

Thus science advances collectively. Religions don’t. Any advance in spiritual knowledge has to occur on an individual level, which is why the Church of the Churchless preaches the gospel of spiritual independence. I do believe in the possibility of gaining knowledge about non-material reality. But obviously any such knowledge can’t be proven to other people, for it doesn’t pertain to physical existence.

Feathered dinosaur fossils can be examined by other researchers. Spiritual experiences can’t. Yet those experiences may be as real as the fossils. There can be valid knowledge about both physical and metaphysical reality. Knowledge is knowledge, no matter of what domain. However, there is no such thing as a valid belief. Belief is belief, no matter of what domain.

If you’re religious and want to call your unfounded beliefs “faith,” great. Just don’t ask me, or anyone else, to accept them as knowledge. Especially, don’t expect that scientific knowledge such as the theory of evolution should be discarded or downplayed in favor of your religious beliefs. If you want to prove that science is wrong about something, cart out your evidence and be prepared to defend your hypothesis.

On television I heard one of the members of the Kansas Board of Education, which is considering altering the science standards to allow teaching of creationism/intelligent design, say “I haven’t read the new standards.” Yet she was going to vote for them anyway because she was a good Christian and knows that creationism is true.

No she doesn’t. She believes that it is true. Between knowledge and belief is a gap that can’t be filled by any amount of rationalizing, explaining, or prevaricating.

Only reality can bridge that gap. Not faith. “Faith” is a synonym for belief. It is on the opposite side of the truth-chasm from knowledge. Clinging to faith means embracing unreality.

Spiritual investing takes nothing

Here’s some further thoughts about spiritual investing, a subject that I’ve enjoyed pondering since writing my post of a week ago. I advised that, just as it makes great financial sense to invest in index funds that mirror an entire market, a person’s spiritual endeavors should be similarly widely diversified.

However, there’s a difference between worldly and other-worldly markets that I neglected to address sufficiently before. When you buy a monetary index fund such as the Total U.S. Stock Market, you end up owning a piece of every single company stock in the United States. Thus diversification is accomplished in a manner that is easy to understand: own a little bit of everything.

But to invest one’s soul in the Total Cosmic Spirit Market means taking an exactly opposite approach: owning nothing. You diversify widely into the One by not clinging to any part of the Many—anything that can be demarcated by name or form.

“God,” after all, isn’t part of this world. Whatever or whoever God is, the unknown ultimate reality that is given this utterly meaningless name (which is why I like to put it in quotation marks) obviously isn’t something that we can point to and say, “There it is! And this is what it is like!” If knowing God were that easy, there wouldn’t be any divine mystery to unravel.

Companies listed on stock markets are easy to identify. They exist in the physical world of time and space. You can buy shares in them. God is hidden, beyond the reality we know now. If you think that anything you can grasp with your body or mind is divine, you’re mistaken. You’ve bought into maya, illusion.

Such is the teaching of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as the message of mystics outside these traditions—who use terms other than maya to mean the same non-ultimate reality.

Alan Watts, in “The Way of Zen,” explains that maya is “derived from the Sanskrit word matr-, ‘to measure, form, build, or lay out a plan,’ the root from which we obtain such Greco-Latin words as meter, matrix, material, and matter. The fundamental process of measurement is division…Definition, setting bounds, delineation—these are always acts of division and thus of duality, for as soon as a boundary is defined it has two sides.”

So, he says, you can’t grasp the really real world “in the mind’s net of words and concepts….It is precisely the realization of the total elusiveness of the world which lies at the root of Buddhism.” And, I’d say, of every other genuine mystical path that claims to lead to a direct experience of God—not just a conceptual description of what God might be like.

Total elusiveness. No exceptions.

Most religious believers like to think that the mystery of God is elusive except for the special revelation to which they, and they alone, are privy. Not true. There are no exceptions to maya. If you can give it a name or a form, nama or rupa, it’s part of maya. A revelation, by definition, is something revealed. That means you can point to it, describe it, define it, delineate it.

Thus the Bible is maya, illusion. All of it, New and Old Testament alike. Ditto the Talmud, Koran, Dhammapada, Tao Te Ching, Upanishads, Adi Granth, Course of Miracles, Conversations with God, and, naturally, the Church of the Churchless. Everything I’ve written on this weblog is part and parcel of maya, including that last sentence.

There’s only one way out of maya: nothing. You get out of an enclosure by finding the empty space—a door. The door is useful because it is empty. It isn’t composed of the same substance as the walls, floor, and ceiling. If it were, then it too would be part of the enclosure.

Something empty and hidden connects everything that can be sensed or conceived of. That something we don’t know is what we really want, not all the things and ideas we do know. It alone will satisfy, because only it is permanent, real, substantial. It goes by lots of names: Spirit, Tao, Buddha Nature, countless others.

By all accounts—the testimony of mystics who seem to know what they’re talking about, since they claim to have experienced this Something—it’s main distinguishing feature is that it isn’t akin to anything of this world. How could it be? It is what supports this world, what keeps it going, what gives it order, what unites its separate pieces. If it were part of this world, it couldn’t do all those things.

So I’m convinced that spirituality is, purely and simply, the embrace of Nothing. Nothing, that is, of the world of illusion. Which means everything of the world of reality.

It’s a damn good deal: Nothing for Everything. The only trick, and it’s damn difficult to figure it out, is how to acquire that spiritual investment capital, Nothing. Seemingly you should be able to find it anywhere just by letting everything else go. Sounds easy enough.

But I’ve been looking for Nothing inside my head during more than thirty years of daily meditation. I always end up with something. The search continues. I’ll keep you posted.

Pray for me, I need a Mini Cooper

Happy National Day of Prayer. In honor of this day I invite everyone to pray for a worthy cause: me. To make things easy for you I’ve written out the prayer, complete with annotations:

“Almighty _______ [fill in name of your chosen higher power], I beseech you to grant the unselfish desire of Brian Hines, who lives on Lake Drive in Salem, Oregon [this is needed to direct the prayer away from the other undeserving Brian Hines’ in the world, and also to make sure my desire is delivered to the right place].

“Please place a supercharged Mini Cooper, racing green with the sunroof, in his driveway as he has been beseeching you for so long [well, just a bit over two years, but the prayer has more pathos with ‘for so long’].

“Brian’s desire is unselfish because this car will bring him so much joy, it [joy, if the higher power asks what this admittedly grammatically imprecise pronoun refers to] will flow out behind his speeding wheels everywhere he journeys, raising the spirits of all who glimpse the Mini Cooper blur. I thank you in advance for your grace and remain your humble servant,_______ [fill in your name if you want to be sure the higher power knows who is praying].”

Given my evident self-interest in the question, “Does prayer really work?,” I’m hoping that the answer is a hardy “Yes!” However, it appears the evidence is mixed, at best. Hector Avalos has written a thoughtful article, “Can Science Prove That Prayer Works?,” which makes me skeptical that the Mini Cooper is going to show up.

The tone at what purports to be “the annual National Day of Prayer official website” is, not surprisingly, a lot more upbeat. I browsed around for some reassurance that the Almighty answers prayers for supercharged Mini Coopers, but couldn’t find any. Disturbingly, the suggested areas for prayer today have nothing to do with my primary prayerful interests. Namely, my own happiness (in general) and the car that will make me happy (in particular).

Instead, people are asked to (1) Pray for the President, (2) Pray for journalists to be fair and balanced in their reporting, (3) Pray for students as they get ready for summer vacations, (4) Pray for churches and their support of their communities, and (5) Pray for families seeking to raise their children well.

At first glance this is a rather strange conglomeration of things to pray for, but a closer reading of the suggested prayers page reveals a unifying dogmatic Christian right philosophy. For example, in the Education area, it isn’t really a nice summer vacation that is the goal of prayer.

Rather, the problem is that “Many of our schools and universities are minimizing traditional subjects such as history and math, and are instead promoting a radical social agenda. Condom distribution, the promotion of homosexuality and a refusal to acknowledge God have become commonplace in our institutions of learning today.”

OK. This is a free country (for now, at least). Pray away for whatever you want to (though remember that a Mini Cooper for Brian Hines is the highest and greatest object of prayer). The big question, though, is who or what is on the other end of the prayer line.

Assuming such a connection even exists. I’ve got an open mind, since evidence for what physicists term “non-locality” is indisputable on the quantum level. Somehow the universe is one while also being many. Though no one knows the mechanism by which prayer might have an effect on objects or people, there may be a universal power underlying thoughts that awaits discovery by science.

Harold Koenig, a physician who, like Larry Dossey. studies the effects of spirituality on health and well-being, says that “the question is whether human intentions, within or outside meditation, have any effect on another person. Do good or bad intentions have non-local effects?” (see two interesting essays about prayer experiments by he and Dossey here).

Koenig goes on to say:

So, I think it would be a lot clearer—from both scientific and theological point—if we simply call such studies experiments of human intention, and not confuse things by calling them “intercessory” prayer. Intercessory prayer suggests that you are interceding before someone else on behalf of another person, and the Western concept of God (on which interceding before a personal God has meaning) does not hold up well under such controlled experiments. Thus, to keep things clean, I think we ought to focus on whether human intention or Eastern meditative prayer has any non-local effects, and just leave a personal God out of it.

Good advice. It’s interesting that, by and large, Eastern thought considers that human intention or desire is the problem, not the solution. For karma is the result of action, and actions flow from intentions. Karma is what keeps us bound to illusion, a lower domain of physical existence.

Who knows? Western prayer researchers may end up finding that their experiments confirm the reality of the law of karma, not a personal Judeo-Christian God who responds to prayers. Intentions expressed in prayers might have the same non-local effect as any other sort of thoughts or actions: a karmic connection. Whereas the thoughts of a single individual may have minimal effects indiscernible via a controlled experiment, perhaps the prayers of many people can affect the course of events—health-wise or otherwise.

I’m much more inclined to entertain the hypothesis that a universal karmic law is operating in the cosmos than is the whim of a personal divine being. If such is the case, then intercessionary prayer will turn out to be one of the countless means by which we members of Homo sapiens are kept ignorant of ultimate reality. For so long as we egotistically act as if we’re the center of the universe around which all else revolves, we won’t be such in humble reality.

That said, it won’t hurt you to add a little bit more karma to the massive pile of intentions you’ve already produced. So go ahead and recite the Mini Cooper prayer at the beginning of this post. Recite it frequently and passionately. Recite it with the force of all your heart and mind as if my happiness depends on it, for so it does.

I’ll be watching my driveway.

Spiritual diversification, a sound salvation strategy

In financial investing, it’s well accepted that attempting to beat the market is a fool’s game. This is why index funds are so popular (and lucrative). You don’t bet on particular stocks or bonds. Instead, you put your money in the entire universe of investments represented by an index fund, such as the U.S. Total Stock Market or the U.S. Total Bond Market.

Wise financial professionals advise that if you want to save money for retirement, it’s best to invest in index funds. Increasingly, people do. But when it comes to saving their souls for eternity, most of those same people will put all of their spiritual nest egg into one basket—a single religion that they expect will support them both here and hereafter.

We here at the Church of the Churchless say, “that’s foolish.” Spiritual diversification makes as much sense as financial diversification. No, even more sense. For sometimes savvy (or lucky) investors do beat the market by buying stock in a single company. And they can prove it by having their CPAs work up a statement of net worth.

But no such proof exists in the sphere of spirituality. No religious figure can show you how his or her investment in a particular spiritual practice has paid off in terms of salvation. The claims made in supposedly holy scriptures such as the Bible, Koran, Talmud, Dhammapada, Adi Granth, Vedas, and so on are just that, claims. Unsubstantiated, unproven, unbelievable.

They are no different in kind from the mailings I get almost every day which claim that if I subscribe to such-and-such financial newsletter I’ll be privy to special investment wisdom that will make my portfolio soar. Yeah, right. There’s lots of evidence that the only people who consistently make money from financial newsletters are those who write them and get suckers to pay for their over-priced useless advice.

There was a time when I believed that I was smarter than the average investor and could beat the market. I subscribed to newsletters, read the Wall Street Journal, and even devised my own investment schemes. But then I began reading about index fund investing and all the research supporting the proposition that, over the long haul, it is next to impossible to choose particular stocks and bonds that will outperform the entire universe of stocks and bonds.

My spiritual investing strategy has moved in the same direction: toward diversification. I no longer believe that I am among the blessed few who know the truth about God and will reap the corresponding spiritual rewards. I came to embrace a “nothing special” philosophy. I don’t consider that my spiritual practice is anything special, just as I don’t consider that my index fund investment practice is anything special.

Yet, I’m confident that both work. I know that I haven’t lost any money by giving up trying to beat the market. Instead, I’ve watched our index funds outperform most actively managed funds. It’s more difficult to assess my soulful net worth, but my self-assessment is that I haven’t lost any spirituality by giving up my previous faith in a path that claimed to occupy a special exalted position among all of the world’s religions.

In short, I’ve become spiritually diversified. I try not to set rigid boundaries around what I believe and what I do. I try to look for inspiration in lots of different places, people, and writings. I try to become aware of all that is real about both physical existence and whatever metaphysical realities exist beyond the world I know now. I try to be content with what the cosmos brings me rather than considering that I’m entitled to unique dispensations.

Here’s the interesting thing: my faith is stronger now. As I’ve lost faith in particular religious approaches, my faith in a universal spirituality has become stronger. Again, this is akin to how my financial philosophy has changed: I’ve lost faith in the value of choosing individual stocks and bonds, but I’ve gained faith in the wisdom of investing in the entire universe of equity and debt investment possibilities.

Of course, seemingly it’s much easier to invest your money in the entire financial spectrum (just go to Vanguard, Dimensional Fund Advisors, or other purveyors of index funds) than to invest your consciousness in the entire spiritual spectrum. Where do you go to find a universal approach to salvation or God-realization? Or, to use a less religiously-charged term, to knowing ultimate reality?

I’ve tried to answer this question before here in the Church of the Churchless, and I’ll keep on trying. My hypothesis is that the word “seemingly” in the paragraph above needs to be carefully considered. Is it really so difficult to practice a universal spirituality? Or have we become so deafened by the cacophony of competing religious claims—“Here is the truth about God!” “No, this is!”—we fail to hear the clear, calm, unified divine voice that speaks within us?

Perhaps even closer than within. That voice, many mystics say, is us.

It may well be that I don’t need to look anywhere outside of myself for all of the spiritual wealth that I hope to acquire. My spiritual diversification, paradoxically, will result from my becoming one—purely and simply the “I” that I really am.

[Here's a follow-up post on the same subject: "Spritual investing takes nothing"]