Church of the Churchless

Stephen Colbert’s Ecu-Menace sermon

Today I’m going to let one of my favorite Wise Men, Stephen Colbert, do the speaking on the Church of the Churchless. Below you’ll find a transcription of the “Word” segment on Tuesday’s The Colbert Report.

I enjoyed it so much, this afternoon I hauled my laptop up to a TV table and diligently playbacked my way through Colbert’s profoundly humorous religious observations. I even managed to spell Manuel Paleologus correctly. I hope.

If you’d prefer to see and hear Colbert rather than read him, broadband your way over to the Comedy Central MotherLoad site (have patience, the clip takes a while to load). That way you’ll be able to appreciate the non-verbal aspects of Colbert’s Bill O’Reilly-ish “Word” monologue.

Since religion is so laughable, it’s fitting for a comedian to point out its absurdities with such admirable dry wit. I give you…Stephen Colbert:
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…which brings us to tonight’s word: Ecu-Menace.

The ecumenical movement seeks to bring people of different faiths together on the common ground that all religions yearn for answers to the same eternal questions. Now, the Pope’s visit is designed to bridge the gap between Christians and Muslims.

The Muslims for now are still a tad miffed…all right, homicidally enraged…that this summer the Pope gave a speech in which Islam was described as evil and inhuman. They didn’t realize he was just quoting the 14th century Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologus.

But the damage unfortunately was done, and the Pope is trying to make amends. That is a big mistake. Let me be clear. Islam is a great world religion, started by the prophet Muhammad, praise and blessings be upon him. I have the utmost respect for it.

It just happens to be wrong.

Hear me out. I’m a Roman Catholic, the one true faith. And I know Roman Catholicism is the one true faith because Roman Catholicism tells me it is the one true faith, and if you remember from earlier in this sentence, “Roman Catholicism is the one true faith,” so how can it be mistaken?

I’m sorry, Islam. Inherent in my belief is your wrongness. I mean, you’d better be wrong. I’d hate to think that all those people in the Spanish Inquisition were tortured for nothing.

Now, the seventy-two virgin huggers out there are going to say, “But the Muslims do believe in Jesus.” Yeah, they believe that Jesus was just God’s friend. Hey, I hate to break it to you but anybody can be God’s friend.

You know why? God’s a friendly guy. He’s what you’d call a people person. The truth is, Jesus is the only son of God.

“God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”

Now what I just said is either the complete truth or the Muslims are right and I’m an infidel, what they call a kafir. And I’ll tell you one thing I respect about fundamentalist Muslims: at least they have the balls to say I’m wrong, even though they believe Muhammad ascended to heaven on a horse.

Which is ridiculous. Horses can’t fly. Jesus flies. He flew up to heaven.

Now, when Christians try to be ecumenical, we just look weak in our faith. If different religions have to agree, let’s agree on the one thing we both believe: that the other guy is going to hell.

So, sorry. Sorry, Pope Benedict, I know you’re infallible but on this one you’re wrong. Even worse, you’re an ecu-menace. And that’s the Word.

Flowing vs. forcing: why religion strips my screw

A few days ago, after much procrastinating, I finally put up a new towel rack in our upstairs bathroom. The screws were going into wood, not drywall. The pilot hole I drilled was a tad too small. Once I screwed the screw halfway, I felt a lot of resistance.

I’ve stripped enough screw heads in my day to have learned a lesson: don’t force the situation. Yes, it may seem like it’d save time to try to muscle the screw the rest of the way in. But once you’ve screwed up a screw, it usually is a lot more work to fix the problem than to start over and proceed flowingly.

So I took the screw out. Drilled a slightly larger pilot hole. And soon had the towel rack up. I just wish my philosophy of life could be assembled and made functional as easily. Well, perhaps it can. Especially if I flow rather than force.

This morning I read the December 2006 “Western U.S.A. Newsletter” of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the religious group that I joined back in 1971. I still get the newsletter even though I’ve become a RSSB heretic.

For much the same reason I listen to conservative talk radio, I enjoy being exposed to ideas I disagree with. Sensing a yuck! reaction in my mind tells me that if I flip the stimulus around, I’ll likely end up with a yum! Here’s a quote from Vincent Savarese that struck me as yucky:

To remember the Master and Lord at all times and to trust in that Will requires constant vigilance, dedication, love and devotion…in short, tremendous effort and exertion of personal will.

Another quote from a RSSB guru, Jagat Singh, also was a turnoff:

Listen, good people, fight with your mind! Bring an enemy under control and he becomes a friend. If you grab hold of him, knock him down and get on top, only then will he beg for mercy.

Way too much force is being called for here. It’s no wonder so many spiritual aspirants get themselves stripped by a dogmatic, demanding religious practice. Where’s the love, compassion, composure, and relaxation?

Everyday life teaches us that exertion and fighting only get us so far—a little ways—especially when the entity we’re striving to combat is our own self. There’s not much sense in me waging a war against me. Yet this is what dualistic religions ask us to do: battle against our sins and shortcomings as if they were external enemies.

Another of my husbandly handyman chores is cleaning the gutters. I use a backpack blower. It works great. Walking along the edge of the roof, I enjoy seeing the leaves, needles, and other debris cascading out of the gutter.

I also enjoy sensing the silence in my mind, especially when I get to the two-story sides of our house. My attention becomes effortlessly focused on the job at hand. I’m fully aware of every step I take, of how my shoes are adhering to the shingled roof, of where my center of gravity is, of how much I need to lean in order to properly position the blower’s nozzle.

There’s no thought of God. Nor of a guru, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Tao, or an angel. There’s no room for any of that in my gutter-cleaning consciousness. If I took Savarese’s advice “to remember the Master and Lord at all times” I’d be at much greater risk of falling off the roof.

As Howard said in a recent post, B.S. means Belief System. Beliefs require force. Force requires energy. We only have so much psychic energy, or attention, at our disposal. When that is diverted into B.S., less is left for our important work: living and learning in the real world.

If a master or god had been up there on the roof with me, of necessity I would have taken them into consideration (don’t want to trip over another being when it’s a long ways to the ground). But I didn’t see such. So I flowed with the task at hand and didn’t force reality to be anything more than what it was.

Over on the Radhasoami Studies discussion group, triestestudent shared an interesting excerpt from Krishnamurti's writings about “The Attentive Mind.” I’m looking forward to reading its continuation. Here’s a sample:

The attention which is generally advocated, practiced or indulged in is a narrowing-down of the mind to a point, which is a process of exclusion. When you make an effort to pay attention, you are really resisting something - the desire to look out of the window, to see who is coming in, and so on. Part of your energy has already gone in resistance.

You build a wall around your mind to make it concentrate completely on a particular thing, and you call this the disciplining of the mind to pay attention. You try to exclude from the mind every thought but the one on which you want it to be wholly concentrated. That is what most people mean by paying attention.

But I think there is a different kind of attention, a state of mind which is not exclusive, which does not shut out anything; and because there is no resistance, the mind is capable of much greater attention. But attention without resistance does not mean the attention of absorption.

The kind of attention which I would like to discuss is entirely different from what we usually mean by attention, and it has immense possibilities because it is not exclusive.

When you concentrate on a subject, on a talk, on a conversation, consciously or unconsciously you build a wall of resistance against the intrusion of other thoughts, and so your mind is not wholly there; it is only partially there, however much attention you pay because part of your mind is resisting any intrusion, any deviation or distraction.

Let us begin the other way around. Do you know what distraction is? You want to pay attention to what you are reading, but your mind is distracted by some noise outside and you look out of the window. When you want to concentrate on something and your mind wanders off, the wandering off is called distraction; then part of your mind resists the so-called distraction and there is a waste of energy in that resistance.

Whereas, if you are aware of every moment of the mind from moment to moment then there is no such thing as distraction at any time and the energy of the mind is not wasted in resisting something. So it is important to find out what attention really is.

Yes, absolutely. It’s ridiculous, B.S., to believe that you’re paying attention to God or some other supposed divinity when you have no idea of what “attention” truly consists of (leaving aside the secondary problem of how one attends to something that isn’t in attendance).

When awareness flows freely without being dammed up or diverted by forced egotistical demands, it’s like turning a screw almost effortlessly. When religion gets into the game, forcing square pegs into round holes, it’s like stripping the head and getting stuck (excuse the mixed metaphors).

Churchless doesn’t mean anti-church

It’s so easy to firmly embrace black or white, right or wrong, belief or unbelief, progressive or conservative. The human mind seems to be naturally attracted to dualities. In my “Reality is shades of gray” post I quoted Diane Ackerman, who is addressing the question of whether nature or nurture explains our personalities.

Even to ask that question implies a dichotomy nature doesn’t pose. Only we pose it. It’s easier for our brain to handle alternatives, to divide every issue into extremes, which requires less brainwork to fathom and less time to evaluate…life rarely offers clear alternatives. Most of life sprawls on a continuum of possibilities, compromises, extenuating circumstances…most of anything falls between opposite poles, every idea or feeling includes gradations.

Consider the reaction to my previous post, “Another RSSB initiate sees the light.” I liked what Howard had to say. He commented on both negative and positive sides of his chosen “religion” (Radha Soami Satsang Beas). He’s still involved with RSSB, whereas I’m not, but we look upon this organization similarly: grayly.

Over on the Radha Soami Studies discussion group, black and white was much more in evidence. Browsing the group’s messages, as I do most days, my eye lit upon the appealing title of the first reaction to my post: “Brian Hines hits one out of the park—must read!”

However, the very next commenter to that home run message said that the post made him ill. He urged that Gurinder Singh, the current leader of RSSB, should pull the plug on his guruship and, indeed, the entire organization. I haven’t read all of the other comments but they seem to be in the same vein: strikeout.

One person even said, “nausea was rising as I began to read the post. Skimming it a little further I had to quit.” Gosh, Howard and I seem to be health risks. Maybe I need to put an upfront warning on this blog: “Caution: reading these posts may cause illness or nausea.”

Nah. I’m not going to do that. I’d rather say: “Suggestion: read these posts with an open mind.” In my experience, it’s reading with a rigid preconceived point of view that causes mental indigestion. You barf on stuff that doesn’t mesh neatly with what’s already in your cranium.

Gray!!?? Waiter, I thought you only served black or white here. Take this back to the kitchen and bring me something that’s either “this” or “that.” My stomach is churning just looking at this mish-mash.

About seventeen years ago my first wife and I got divorced. It was difficult for us. Most divorces are. For quite a while all I could focus on was the bad feelings we had toward each other at the end of our eighteen year marriage.

Those who get divorced from a church or spiritual group after a longstanding marriage understandably tend to have the same reaction: there’s nothing good about that S.O.B. But eventually, especially after I got married again, I could look back on my first marriage with a clearer perspective.

We loved each other for many years. We had a daughter together. We supported each other through good times and bad times. Each of us struggled to keep the marriage together. We couldn’t, though. So we split up. Now each of us has found another partner and is happier than when we were married to each other.

In short (and in cliché), we moved on.

When you can’t see anything positive about an ex-spouse or an ex-church, you haven’t moved on. You’re not seeing that person or that organization clearly. Your negative feelings toward any positive mention of them/it—“illness,” “nausea”—are a symptom of excessive attachment to an entity that you claim to have detached from.

Yet you haven’t. You’re still mentally joined at the hip with your ex if you can’t read something partially positive about them without being emotionally jerked around. After being churched, there’s no necessity to be totally anti-church. You can pick and choose what you still like and dislike about the faith that you no longer have total faith in.

Lastly, I continue to be surprised by how nastily negative many disillusioned RSSB initiates are toward the group’s guru, Gurinder Singh. Howard seems to view him more positively than I do, yet I still have no trouble finding quite a few good things to say about Gurinder.

Maybe this is the difference between me and the guru-bashers: I don’t expect as much from him. Some RSSB devotees view the guru as God in human form, a perfect being. I never did, not really, though I tried to for a while. I certainly don’t see Gurinder as perfection personified now.

It wouldn’t surprise me if a driving instructor has a traffic accident. Or if a dance teacher trips and breaks a leg. Stuff happens. Nobody is perfect, even those with special expertise. I can accept that a guru doesn’t act spiritual all of the time. Gurinder Singh is a human, not a god.

Now, if the ads for a driving instructor said, “He’s the absolute best in the world! Never makes a mistake!” and he turned out to be at fault for rear-ending another car, I’d think, “Well, guess he isn’t perfect after all.” I’d still feel comfortable learning from him. I just wouldn’t ascribe qualities to him that evidently he doesn’t have.

So the strange thing is, those who criticize a guru (or other religious leader) for not living up to some standard of perfection often still expect him to act almost perfectly. For example, many in the Radha Soami Studies discussion group want Gurinder Singh to eat humble pie and admit openly that he isn’t the divine being that many disciples make him out to be.

Well, it never hurts to ask. Myself, I’d like George Bush to admit that he misled us about the supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Saddam’s ties to Al Qaeda. But I’m not going to hold my breath while I wait for him to do that. Bush is an imperfect president (to put it mildly).

And the way I see it, every guru, imam, pope, rabbi, priest, or whatever is similarly imperfect. To expect them to do the absolute right thing is to ascribe to them qualities that only a divine being would possess. It’s one thing to claim that the emperor has no clothes, yet quite another to demand a kingly proclamation: “I’m naked.”

I’m increasingly content with gray. Works for me. Yet if you are attracted to black or white, be my guest. I’m simply suggesting that you’re missing out on some interesting shades of reality.
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Next day update: this morning I read the chapter on "Hatred" in Matthieu Ricard's Happiness, a Buddhist perspective on life. Here are some quotes that fit with the theme of this post:

Hatred exaggerates the faults of its object and ignores its good qualities...Our perception of being wronged or threatened leads us to focus exclusively on the negative aspects of a person or group. We fail to see people and events in the context of a much vaster web of interrelated causes and conditions.

...What can we do when we hate our brother, our colleague, or our ex-husband? They obsess us. We brood over their faces, their habits, and their quirks until they make us sick; our obsession relentlessly converts mundane aversion into persecution. I knew a man who turned red with anger at the slightest mention of the wife who had left him twenty years earlier.

Another RSSB initiate sees the light

Howard and I are kindred souls. We’re of a similar well-aged Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) vintage, each of us having been initiated into this mystical meditation-based spiritual path over a third of a century ago.

We’ve also both come to view RSSB in a manner that seems heretical to true believers, but which seems eminently sensible to Howard and me.

Howard, who lives in Berkeley, and I have been carrying on an email conversation the past few days. He said it’d be fine if I shared his thoughts on the Church of the Churchless. I’ve mildly edited them, taking out only a few extraneous personal references and correcting some typos.

The two of us are alike in another way, as Howard pointed out:

Maybe you can use some of the things I have written to good use. Don't worry about editing it in any way you like. I am like you. I just write things out to get them clear in my own head.

While most readers of this blog aren’t associated with RSSB, many are. So I decided to share almost all of what Howard had to say in his email messages, even though it's lengthy.

I realize that his thoughts will be of most interest to fellow RSSB initiates, but his evolving take on spirituality and religious authority has its universal side as well.

The first part of Howard’s message is below. To read the rest, click on the post extension link. I've added some explanations of RSSB-specific terms in [brackets].
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Funny finding you here [at the Church of the Churchless blog]. I’m a satsangi [RSSB initiate] of thirty-five years and just now beginning to see I have been deceiving myself for most of them.

I was at the Dera [headquarters of RSSB in India] two years ago and someone at my table said "Brian Hines [me, the blogger] is having difficulty on the path right now." I always want to talk to such people because I figure they are at least being real. I have had it with fundamentalist satsangis. Really, I just can't listen to them anymore, kind of makes me want to gag.

Looks to me like you are just starting to understand the path. I still am quite fond of Gurinder [Singh, current RSSB guru], but primarily because the last time he came to Petaluma [RSSB center in California] and spoke I came to the conclusion that if a tape of his satsang [spiritual talk] had been sent to the satsang reviewing panel he would never be invited back again.

He is not a party liner, even though everyone tries to make him into one. Very few are willing to accept that most of what they hold on to is a fragile belief system that does not give them what they need. Gurinder calls them on this and it is refreshing. Not that anyone does anything about it, but at least it appears he is doing his job.

There definitely has been a shift to 2.0 Sant Mat. I can tell you about a personal exchange I had with Gurinder that you may like.

A few years ago at Dera I got up and said "I just don't believe any of it anymore. None of it makes any sense to me. It used to feel so good when I knew all the answers and I could just look in my Sant Mat Recipes for Life book whenever I needed an answer. Now if someone asks me a question about the path I tell them to go talk to a seeker [someone interested in RSSB but not yet initiated]. They seem to have it all figured out while I have no idea!"

He told me that was real progress. That the people who seem to have it all together and look like they know what is going on are all faking it. He further said being in this state allows you to be open minded like a child. He said this is very important in order to be open to God. He also said that as soon as we adopt a rigid belief system we are cutting ourselves off from the spiritual world because now we can only see what our belief system filters and validates.

He also said spirituality has nothing to do with your beliefs but that it was more a matter of the heart and sincerity. He said it is the sincerity that counts and not the belief system. It does not really matter what you believe because beliefs are ultimately meaningless. God does not look at your beliefs. At the end he joked and said "When you meet someone like that who has all the answers, you really don't know if you should be happy for him or feel sorry for him!"

For me it showed Gurinder as being more like a Socrates than a God-man. He also put responsibility for our spiritual growth on us rather than on a flimsy belief system. I also asked him about the four lifetime guarantee [that an initiate will only be reincarnated for a maximum of four more times before reaching God permanently].

He said there is no four lifetime guarantee and just to forget about that. Kind of blew a much comforting thought we all had right out of the water. He said this, I was at the microphone, he said it directly to me. He also said we need to take responsibility for our spiritual life in this lifetime because as far we know this is the only life we have.

Who should I thank on Thanksgiving?

For a churchless guy like myself, figuring out who deserves my thanks tomorrow requires some careful thought. That’s because I’m philosophical in addition to churchless.

Sure, I could blurt out simple thanksgivings directed at the usual suspects—wife, dog, makers of the tasty Now & Zen unturkey that we’ll be eating—but that goes against my nature.

I want to get down to the core of this giving thanks business. Follow the trail of thankfulness back to the source. Take care of every possible “thank you” recipient at one primal swoop.

When I began my mulling this morning, my mother and father came to mind. Obviously they’re responsible for my being here at all. I wouldn’t be doing any thanking if they hadn’t engaged in some wintry Massachusetts coitus around the beginning of January 1948.

(Don’t know why, but until today I’d never backed up my birthday nine months. I just realized that I could be the product of some New Year’s Eve sexual celebrating. Way to go, Mom and Dad!).

So at first I concluded that my primal thanks are owed to Carolyn and John Hines, since without them there would be no “I” named Brian who now is capable of doing all kinds of things—such as being thankful.

Yet it didn’t take long for me to realize that without their parents, my mother and father wouldn’t have been born. Hence, not me either. And obviously the thankfulness story doesn’t stop there.

My branching family tree is unimaginably vast. It necessarily is unbroken, since I’m here now. Back and back in time it goes, all the way to the common ancestor from whom all humans are descended. Ah, seemingly there’s the person to whom I should be most thankful.

Except…humans are the product of evolution from other species. Thus my ancestors are chimpanzees, fish, flatworms, single celled organisms, and much more. All of which sprang from a single source of earthly life billions of years ago.

Well, you see where we’re heading. Way back. For the heavy elements that make life on Earth possible came from exploding supernovae, and those stars formed from gases early in the universe’s history, and the universe itself—it burst into being via a big bang.

Thank you, big bang! Finally, a thankfulness stopping place.

Except…big bangs don’t bang into being unless there is a place for them to exist. Which is, existence. In the beginning there had to be existence. Also, I suspect, in the end.

Well, I’ve finally reached my Primal Thank You recipient. Existence, you’re the man! And the woman. And everything else that ever was, is, or will be. God is a piker compared to existence. If God exists, it’s due to existence.

If this doesn’t make sense, read my “Existence exists. Amazing!” That post probably won’t make sense to you either, but at least you’ll see some consistency in my nonsensicality.

This is difficult stuff to talk about. Yet beyond words, there’s an ease to it. Right now I’m aware. I’m alive. I’m conscious. In short, I am.

That is so incredibly amazing, so inconceivably precious, the awareness blows me away. More frequently, the older I get. I gripe, moan, and complain about countless things. However, I’m 100% thankful and grateful about one thing: that I’m able to exist.

I have no idea who or what, if anyone or anything, is responsible for my being able to think “I have no idea….” Still, I can’t help saying, from the depth of my unknowing, thank you.

Happy Thanksgiving. There’s a lot to be thankful for. I am. You are. Wow!

Being a blockhead has its pluses

I’ve been thinking about becoming more of a blockhead. Now, the fact that I’m doing this, thinking, shows that I have a ways to go before achieving Blockhead Extraordinaire status.

That honor, of course, belongs to Charlie Brown. Thanks to Lucy he’s been a blockhead ever since June 1958. I was nine at the time. I probably was a blockhead in training even back then, but I didn’t have a Lucy to tell me so.

Forty-nine years later I’ve learned that life is my Lucy. It’s pulled the football away from me enough times to make me realize that whatever else I may be, “blockhead” is an apt personal description.

And this isn’t at all a bad thing, even though being a blockhead is a negative to most people.

Thumbing through one of my favorite spiritual books yesterday, I read a quotation from Tai-hui in The Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment:

"The main thing is to shut off all your sense organs and make your consciousness like a block of wood. When this block of wood suddenly starts up and makes a noise, that is the moment you feel like a lion roaming about freely with nobody disturbing him, or like an elephant that crosses a stream not minding its swift current."

Encouraging. According to Zen, it seems that my problem isn’t that I’m too much of a blockhead, but that I’m too little of one. I’d like to be that lion or elephant. But first, it seems, I’ve got to be a block of wood.

Easier said than done. My many years of daily meditation testify to that. The urge is strong to do something else, anything, rather than that one thing.

I’m coming to look upon my mantra and my meditation as casket-building. A rehearsal of sorts for death. Mystics are always saying, “Die to live.” I don’t really know what that means, but it has a ring of truth.

Nail down the wooden lid. Lie still in the darkness. Not much room to move. Claustrophobic. Creepy. Yet also: exhilarating. Now we’re down to where the religious rubber hits the road. Becoming a genuine blockhead. Dead to the known; not yet alive to the unknown.

What stirs? Can the block of wood really start up and make a noise? Or does it just remain a useless clump of cellulose?

Not that uselessness is a bad thing either. In “The Tao of Paris Hilton” I mused about the virtues of not being a good for nothing. Chuang Tzu speaks of a long-lived, greatly-venerated tree that appears to Master Shih in a dream and explains why it has never been cut down like other trees:

"Because they are useful, they suffer, and they are unable to live out the years Heaven has given them. They have only their usefulness to blame for this destruction wrought by the people. It is the same with all things. I have spent a long time studying to be useless, though on a couple of occasions I was nearly destroyed. However, now I have perfected the art of uselessness, and this is very useful, to me! If I had been of use, could I have grown so vast?"

Charlie Brown, you are a Taoist sage.

Recommended spiritual reading lists

What books turn you on spiritually? I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours—your list. Heck, I’ll even expose myself first.

But before I do, I’ve got to thank Ron Gardner. He emailed me last month, saying:

I'm a long-time serious student of the Perennial Philosophy, and I want to commend you on "Return to the One." I derived both intellectual enjoyment and spiritual inspiration from reading it, and I plan on placing the book on the Recommended Spiritual Reading List that I'm in the process of putting together.

Well, that intrigued me. Both the praise of my book and Ron’s reading list. I asked him to send it to me when he was finished with it. Of course, a recommended reading list could never be finished by an avid reader, not until the final title was pried from his or her dead hands.

There’s always one more book.

So here’s Ron’s Recommended Spiritual Reading List as it stood in October.
Download spiritual_reading_list.doc

I came up with my own list by asking myself a simple question: what books do I frequently turn to for inspiration? Not for information. Or intellectual stimulation. Or entertainment.

Rather, for uplift when I feel down. For getting centered again when I’m off kilter. For that burst of “Oh, yeah! Right on!” when I hear in someone else’s words what I should be speaking to myself, but am too lazy or irresolute to attend to my own inner voice.

Here’s my list. Bowing to tradition, I came up with ten books. That’s how many fingers are about to type out the titles. Seems fitting. They’re in the order I thought of them.
[Next day update: Must have grown another finger overnight. Had to add a D.T. Suzuki book to the end of the list.]

The Supreme Doctrine, by Hubert Benoit
Open Mind, Open Heart, by Thomas Keating
The Cloud of Unknowing, by Anonymous
Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings, trans. by Oliver Davies
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, by Erich Fromm, D.T. Suzuki, Richard DeMartino
Talks With Ramana Maharshi, by Ramana
The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts
The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. by Martin Palmer
Taoist Meditation, by Thomas Cleary
The Tao of Zen, by Ray Grigg
The Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment, by D.T. Suzuki

If anyone wants to share his or her own favorite spiritual books, comment away. I’m always eager to help keep Amazon afloat. And I know others would be interested in your recommendations also.

Watch out! The Discourager of Hesitancy is behind you

Thanks to Edward, a regular Church of the Churchless commenter, I learned about the Discourager of Hesitancy today. He’s a fearsome dude. I can feel him standing behind me right now, razor sharp weapon at the ready.

He doesn’t like excessive deliberation. I feel the pressure to type what I want to say without undue cogitation. I’ve gotten more than a little attached to having my head and body, well, attached.

“The Discourager of Hesitancy” is a short story by Frank Stockton, he of “The Lady and the Tiger” fame. If you went to high school in the United States, you’ve probably read the latter fable. I’m sure that I was under its unconscious influence when I wrote about choosing between reality and belief in my Two Doors post (under which Edward shared his comment).

Bartleby informs me that “he who hesitates is lost” means that a person who spends too much time deliberating about what to do loses the chance to act altogether. Right on. That’s why we need the Discourager of Hesitancy.

He reminds us that rewards go to those who choose, even though the choosing be uncertain, fraught with danger, under duress. Not to choose is to choose, especially when the Discourager of Hesitancy is by your side. As he is. Right now. And at every moment.

Last night I wrote about Tango on my other weblog. Men lead, women follow. Yet what they both have to do is decide decisively. In a lesson we were told, “The man has to lead a move with bold confidence; the woman has to follow that lead with equal lack of hesitation—what she intuitively feels, she should do.”

I’m a Libra. Who doesn’t believe in astrology. Regardless, I’m well acquainted with weighing two sides of an argument. I’m fully familiar with balancing the options before me. Nothing wrong with this.

But if you read “The Discourager of Hesitancy” (where you’ll find a few typos in this source of the story) the downside of deliberation will become evident. I’m thankful that now I have another goad to keep me on the Just Do It road.

By and large I’m more regretful of the times in my life when I didn’t seize the moment than when I did, and wished I could let go.

Whether churchless or churched, atheist or believer, at every instant each of us is being called to decide. Answer the phone. Now. Say what’s on your mind. Do what you feel like doing.

Then hang up. And answer the next call. Immediately. For sure, before the Discourager of Hesitancy yells, “Too late!”

Reality or belief: which are you seeking?

Here’s a thought experiment that, if you conduct it honestly, will tell you a lot about yourself. What you’re looking for in life. How you comfort yourself when the wild things howl. Whether you tilt toward science or religion.

I first wrote about the Two Doors two years ago this month, back when the Church of the Churchless had just laid its cornerstone. I still often think about my thought experiment. I also try to put it into practice.

So here, extracted from my November 2004 “Just have faith” post, is a re-run of the Two Doors.

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered.

Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

In short, my churchless friends, nut up.

Life is tough. Religion offers comfort. The comfort of blind faith and unproven belief. “Everything will be fine after death. God will take care of you. There is a reason you’re going through your present troubles. God has a plan for you. Rejoice.”

This morning I finished the last chapter of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. He speaks of the consolation that religion brings people. Yet, he adds:

Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God’s existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst—none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true.

…Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren and empty, but this unfortunately doesn’t stop her from being dead. There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and purpose.

…The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as well and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.

Nicely put. I also like Betty Fanek’s “Where Do Atheists Find Comfort in Times of Danger?” She points out the difference between false comfort and genuine comfort, the latter being distinguished by actually solving a problem. Or at least seeing it for what it is, not as how we’d like it to be.

Fanek quotes George Bernard Shaw:

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

Reality or belief? At every moment, we stand before two doors. In every thought and action, we approach one or the other.

Humility is being in touch with reality

I don’t trust displays of humility. This folding of the hands with a bowed head, this uttering of “God (or guru) is everything; I am nothing,” this confession of sins, failings, and weaknesses—it’s all too contrived, too artificial, too calculated.

This morning I re-read the chapter “On Humility” in Hubert Benoit’s The Supreme Doctrine: Psychological Studies in Zen Thought As noted in my “The Supreme Doctrine, thirty-six years overdue” post, this is the only library book that I’ve kept permanently. When I first read it back in college, I couldn’t bear to let it out of my hands.

Where it still often is found. Benoit is a marvelously astute observer of the human condition. As noted on a Supreme Doctrine-centered web site, Benoit was severely wounded during World War II and spent years in a hospital bed. Then he went into psychiatry.

So when Benoit talks about reality being the best teacher of humility, he has the credentials to make that statement. He ends his chapter with:

Let us recall that the ‘nature of things’ is for us the best, the most affectionate, and the most humiliating of masters; it surrounds us with its vigilant assistance. The only task incumbent upon us is to understand reality and to let ourselves be transformed by it.

Benoit says that our efforts to rise up spiritually are doomed to failure. As are our efforts to sink down. Any effort at all is counter-productive, though we have no choice but to attempt such futility until the light of satori dawns.

What we should seek is equality, not higher or lower. But that’s too damn scary for an ego that depends upon separateness in order to keep feeling that “I” am something distinct. “I am humble; I am nothing” and “I am proud; I am everything” are both preferable to the equitable obliteration of “I am, along with everything else.”

I believe that I am separated from my own ‘being’ and I am looking for it in order to reunite myself with it. Only knowing myself as a distinct individual, I seek for the Absolute in an individual manner, I wish to affirm myself absolutely as a distinct being. This effort creates and maintains in me my divine fiction, my fundamental pretension that I am all-powerful as an individual, on the plane of phenomena.

…I train myself never to recognise the equality between the outside world and myself; I affirm myself to be different from the outside world, on a different level, above whenever I can, below when I cannot….I see myself as conditioning the outer world, or I see myself as not succeeding in conditioning it, but never can I recognise myself as conditioned by it on a footing of equality.

We’ve got a small pond with a pump that gets clogged with debris from time to time. The pump sits in a plastic enclosure with a gate that lets the pond water flow in when it’s open. To clean the pump, I shut the gate and let the pump run until the enclosure is almost empty of water and I hear the pump sucking air.

That’s the enclosure’s state of humility. I reach down and scoop out the remaining water, making it even humbler. Then I sponge up snail shells, pine needles, and other debris before cleaning the pump itself.

Throughout this process a trickle of water is flowing into the enclosure. The gate, though shut, isn’t completely water tight. Emptiness, like enforced humility, is difficult to maintain.

No matter. When both the pump and enclosure are free of debris, it’s time to open the gate and let the pond water flow back in. I do this gingerly. If the water rushes in too fast it brings with it more pond crud—like the algae that grows despite our best efforts to keep it under control.

Whoosh! The water flows into the enclosure, that plastic representation of our separate egos. Higher and higher rises the water until—I always get a little thrill when this happens—the level inside the enclosure equals the level in the pond.

I’ve been holding onto the gate to keep the water from gurgling in too strongly. Then, the gate relaxes against my hand. Inner and outer are equalized, at peace, on the same level. Nothing needs to be done now. There’s no pressure for the lower to be filled by the higher, nor for the lower to empty itself.

Similarly, Hubert Benoit speaks of what brings about genuine humility:

In our desire to escape from distress at last, we search for doctrines of salvation, we search for ‘gurus.’ But the true guru is not far away, he is before our eyes and unceasingly offers us his teaching; he is reality as it is, he is our daily life.

The evidence of salvation is beneath our eyes, evidence of our non-omnipotence, that our pretension is radically absurd, impossible, and so illusory, inexistent; evidence that there is nothing to fear for hopes that have no reality; that I am and always have been on the ground, so that no kind of fall is possible, so that no vertigo has any reason to exist.

…I feel myself nearer to the ground, to the ‘beneath,’ to real humility (humility which is not acceptance of inferiority, but abandonment of the vertical conception in which I saw myself always above or below).

…From the moment I succeed in no longer moving in my humiliated state, I discover with surprise that there is the ‘asylum of rest,’ the unique harbor of safety, the only place in the world in which I can find perfect security.

Reality. As it is. Not as religions would have us imagine it to be.

Pumps get clogged. So do arteries. And kitchen drains. Minds too. That’s real.

To pretend that something is what it is not—crazy. To see ourselves as higher or lower—unwarranted.

Where is the benchmark against which our humility is considered to rise or fall? How do I gauge the progress of my spiritual ascent or descent when the mountain I’m supposedly climbing isn’t apparent?

Benoit should have the last word. Not because I’m humble; he’s just got better words.

The impossibility in which I find myself today of being in possession of my own nature, of my Buddha-nature, as universal man and not as distinct individual, obliges me unceasingly to invent a representation of my situation in the Universe that is radically untrue.

Instead of seeing myself as equal with the outside world, I see myself either as above it or below, either on high, or beneath. In this perspective, in which the ‘on high’ is Being and the ‘beneath’ is Nullity, I am obliged to urge myself always towards Being. All my efforts necessarily tend, in a direct or a roundabout manner, to raise me up, whether materially, subtly, or, as one says, ‘spiritually.’

…To cure distress is to be freed from all possibility of humiliation. Whence comes my humiliation? From seeing myself powerless. No, that it is not enough. It comes from the fact that I try in vain not to see my real powerlessness.

It is not powerlessness itself that causes humiliation, but the shock experienced by my pretension to omnipotence when it comes up against the reality of things.

…The veritable cause of my distress is never in the outside world, it is only in the claim that I throw out and which is broken against the wall of reality. I deceive myself when I claim that the wall has hurled itself against me and has wounded me; it is I that have injured myself against it, my own action which has caused my suffering.

When I no longer pretend, nothing will injure me ever again.

God vs. Science: guess who wins?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another example of Collins’ empty arguments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Struggling to comprehend the Christian mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He replied:

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

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

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

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

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

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

And (bad news for me)…

--God is offended by being called a false name

This explains why, even though I’ve been praying to God for a convertible Mini Cooper S (unselfishly, because I’d occasionally offer joyful rides in it to other people), one hasn’t appeared in my driveway.

Phillip said that my cover-the-bases prayer to God/ Allah/ Jehovah/ Tao/ Buddha-nature/ One isn’t going to win me points with the jealous Christian God, a.k.a. The Only True God. God apparently wants to be called “God,” (in English I assume, not Aramaic) and nothing else.

You pray, "whoever might be out there, here I am. Show me." [either yourself or the Mini, I’m easy] But your prayer is an absolute affront to God. You call Him by many false names. It's like you want to talk to me, but you can't remember my name. So, you call out, "George, Pete, Sam, whoever you are." And I don't answer. Are you surprised that I don't answer? You shouldn't be. Generally speaking, when you don't call people by name, they neither listen nor respond.

Hmmmm. About four hours ago my Tai Chi instructor, Warren, told a story about calling a phone company repairman “Ron” about twenty times before he said, “Actually, my name is John.” Yet John successfully collaborated with Warren on finding and fixing a broken wire on the roof of the Tai Chi studio, even though he kept being called “Ron.”

I guess John beats God in the humility department. As do I. If a neighbor’s house was on fire and they saw me passing by, I’d still run to assist them even if they mistakenly yelled “Help, Brad!” Apparently God wouldn’t do the same if you got his moniker wrong.

Nevertheless, during my meditation time this morning I spent a whole five minutes calling out to God. And only God. That was about as long as I could concentrate on talking to God before returning to mentally contemplating the oh so sweet election results.

I just checked our driveway. Twelve hours have passed. Still no Mini Cooper. This proves to me there is no God.

Phillip should approve of my conclusion. After all, he wrote in one of his comments that the only incontrovertible proof for the existence (and, I extrapolate, non-existence) of God is our own life—his, mine, yours. On that we agree.

Phillip finds that God exists. I find no evidence of that. He says tomahto. I say tomato. Each to his own. There’s nothing wrong with faith in God, nor with skepticism toward God. so long as believers admit that their belief is purely personal and improvable.

Phillip, you wrote, “I am just saying that the need for proof regarding God is resolved by meeting Him.”

Tell me: have you met Him? I assume so, or you wouldn’t know so much about him. Could you ask him why he has such a thing about being called the right name? Also, find out what name, in which language, he likes the most.

Send that info along to me. Then I’ll try my prayer again. Maybe he favors German and I should have been saying, “Gott, bring me a Mini Cooper.”

Hope springs eternal.

Texas governor says non-Christians are going to hell

On this election day eve, let us remind ourselves why it is so important to send a message to the Christian Taliban in this country: we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!

What aren’t we going to take? Intolerance. Sanctimoniousness. Attempts to turn the United States into a hateful Christian nation.

When the Republican governor of Texas agrees with a sermon where the pastor said that non-Christians are “going straight to hell with a non-stop ticket,” it’s long past time to scream bullshit.

Governor Rick Perry’s weird religious beliefs are his own business. But he needs to keep them to himself when he’s acting in his role as a political leader. He was among 60 mostly Republican candidates for tomorrow’s election when the pastor made his remarks.

Perry should have said something like, “I represent all Texans, Christians and non-Christians alike. Theology is one thing, democracy is another. I’m not going to comment on a matter of personal religious belief.”

How would Perry feel if he were a Christian living in Saudi Arabia and heard that nation’s leader say, “Every follower of Jesus will be judged harshly by Allah”? (This doesn’t require much of a stretch of the imagination.)

Could he be confident that justice would be applied equally to him and to Muslims? I doubt it. So how does he think Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, and other non-Christian Texans feel about his own intolerant remarks?

Independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman said, “He doesn’t think very differently from the Taliban, does he?” No, he doesn’t.

Unfortunately, Perry has lots of Christian company. Check out these quotations from the American Taliban.

I often hear it said, “Oh, these sorts of hateful people aren’t real Christians. The Bible teaches us to love, not hate.” Sorry, but that’s also bullshit.

The Bible is full of hatred. The haters of sodomy and homosexuality at godhatesfags.com say that they are merely preaching the Gospel. And, judging by the scripture they cite, they are.

These members of the Westboro Baptist Church have put together a persuasive PDF document: “God Loves Everyone.” The Greatest Lie Ever Told. 701 Passages Proving God’s Hate & Wrath for Most of Mankind.

It turns out that the Bible does say that non-Christians are going to hell. The Christian God isn’t full of love, as the document points out.

Have you ever wondered how many times “God loves everyone” is found in the Bible – 20, 50, 100, 200? Have you ever wondered if it appears in the New Testament or Old Testament or both? Have you ever wondered who said these words or who they are attributable to? Have you ever wondered how many times Jesus said “God loves everyone?”

As a matter of uncontroverted fact the phrase “God loves everyone” never appears in the Bible. You can search from Genesis to Revelation, including looking in all 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,173 verses and 774,746 words and you will never find this phrase. Period. In other words, the most famous Christian notion of God that is repeated without measure or limit in this evil and adulterous generation is never found in the Bible.

And that’s one reason I’m not a Christian. And why I urge you to vote Democratic tomorrow. The Dems are by no means perfect. But at least they haven’t been hijacked by the American Taliban like the Republicans have.

I’m accused of being God

Today I got an email from Michael in response to my “Morality comes from nature, not God” post. I was intrigued by what he had to say. Particularly the part where he suggests that I am God.

I like that hypothesis. A lot. I just wish there was more evidence for it than I’ve been able to dredge up.

Michael wrote me a thoughtful message. I don’t agree with most of what he said, but I appreciate the sharing. Here’s my paragraph by paragraph response to his email. (Michael’s words are in italics, mine in regular type).

An interesting though not new approach to discussing the question of God. Your whole premise is an avoidance of getting to the bottom of the question.

Gosh, that’s news to me. I’m 58. I’ve spent the past forty years trying to dive into the depths of “Does God exist?” Plus, “What’s the meaning of it all?” and “What the heck is ‘it’ anyway?” More than forty if you count listening to a lot of Bob Dylan from age sixteen to eighteen.

If the question is… Does God exist? or From whence does morality come?

As above, yes, #1 of yours is my main question. #2 has been a subsidiary query. I’ve never considered that “God” and “morality” necessarily had much to do with each other. Buddhists are highly moral but don’t believe in God. Ditto with Taoists.

Still, I’m certainly interested in from whence morality comes. As I am in from whence the whole universe comes—a more interesting question.

Then the honest questioner must not be satisfied with a half answer. Ex. Morality comes from nature. OK Where does nature come from? (This is what I mean by a half answer.)

Yes, absolutely. The Big Bang banged the nature of everything into existence. What lies beyond, or beneath, or before the Big Bang? Great question. Scientists are working on it like crazy. They’ve made good progress.

Then lets assume you take a popular answer… Nature occurred accidentally… Big Bang or billions of years of accumulated accidents that resulted in life (The necessary increasing complexity occurring accidentally is not demonstrated ANYWHERE in scientific study over long periods of time.)

What science books have you been reading? I’ve read dozens of them. None from the Creation Science Institute though. That probably explains why we’re coming from different understandings of modern science.

“Accident” isn’t a scientific way of explaining things. “Randomness” sometimes is used, but even here it’s agreed that randomness and order are two sides of the same coin. Random quantum fluctuations at the moment of the Big Bang are theorized to be the seed material, so to speak, that led to the large scale structure of the cosmos.

Quantum mechanics is anything but accidental, though. It’s predictable to a fault. Quantum theory makes possible modern technology, including the computer you used to write “Nature occurred accidentally.” You may believe that. Science doesn’t.

Evolution, to give another example, is utterly non-accidental. Nature selects for the most adaptive characteristics of living beings. Those aren’t “accumulated accidents” as you said, but accumulated selections.

Evolutionary theory is exceedingly well proven. The mistake you make is saying that science hasn’t found evidence of increasing complexity occurring “accidentally.” Of course it hasn’t. Science looks for (and finds) order in the universe, not accidents. Even chaos is hidden order.

You are demonstrating faith against all reason. That’s different than faith in something that is based on reason… although to be faith it must be believing / trusting in something bigger than us and beyond our full understanding.

Not sure what you’re saying here. I’ve just talked quite reasonably, in my eminently reasonable opinion. I do have faith in science. And, to a lesser degree, in mysticism—insofar as it is looked upon as the study of the subtleties of consciousness.

Both science and mysticism accept that there is more to know about the cosmos than what we know now. That seems obvious. Concerning the big cosmic questions of life, we’re clueless. Me, you, whoever else is reading this. All of us.

Quantum physics is beyond our full ability to see and directly know. We can however predict and imagine it. However, we don’t trust in it as a living “god” like being to direct our lives and so it falls short of religious faith.

Yes. I agree. We’ve found some common ground!

So all I am saying is that you are throwing out God because of personal reasons (anger / frustration with God and the life you have, or with religious people who don’t demonstrate the good qualities God is supposed to have, or etc.). You are not however really answering your own question. You are avoiding it by providing a half answer… Nature is the source of morality (meaning and direction for life).

Well, I guess you’re right: I am indeed throwing out God for personal reasons. What other reasons could I have? There is no demonstrable evidence that God exists, and there is no absolute, 100%, irrefutable, ironclad evidence that God doesn’t exist. So each of us has to decide on our own how we feel about the big question, “Does God exist?”

Here’s the thing though (which I’ve borrowed from Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” book). A reasonable person, like me and Dawkins, considers probabilities in the absence of certainties. What is the probability of nature being the source of morality vs. God being the source?

We can sense nature. We know a lot about nature. We can delve into the inner workings of nature. God, on the other hand, is a mystery. If He/She/It exists, this ultimate reality works in mysterious ways. So mysterious, there are no signs of those ways.

Thus until God shows up as an evident force in the physical universe, I’ll place my bet on natural causes as the source of what surrounds us. And, is us.

Lastly, I don’t think I’m angry or frustrated with God and the life I have. I’m a positive person, by and large. It pisses me off sometimes that I haven’t made more progress in figuring out the big questions of life we’ve been talking about. But I have a lot of company. Again, at heart we’re all clueless.

It is a very convenient statement. It really says YOU are GOD. Because nature is up to interpretation and YOU are the interpreter. So, whether you realize it or not, YOU are your own self proclaimed god. You are afraid to trust in any other god / God.

Hey, I’d love to be God. I tried it for a while, but thirty-four years of marriage have driven my divinity out of me. I’ve learned that Wife is God.

But seriously…(hope my wife doesn’t read those two words) I’m not proclaiming myself to be God. No way. This whole Church of the Churchless blog rests on the premise that I don’t know who God is, or more basically, if God is. Do you?

Seriously, tell me. Do you know that God exists? For sure?

Thankfully you are not My God. Because, I have a suspicion that you would judge me harshly and not graciously and the terms of your judgments would probably change like a tide based on your emotions and needs and etc. Wow! What a terrible God that would be to serve!

I don’t think I’d judge you harshly. Again, I’m basically a positive person. Except when I hear about the idiocies of the Bush Administration. If you’re not a Republican who holds higher office I can embrace you whole-heartedly. (But, um, not in the way that the nation’s recently dethroned evangelical leader would.)

I hope you don’t remain satisfied with your answer and continue searching for a real God, not a manufactured self-made god who is almost certainly a harsh and unreliable judge, not just of others but of yourself also.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m certainly searching for a real God. That’s why I’m so sour on religion. We agree that self-made gods are way inferior to the genuine item (again, assuming that it exists). Where we differ is on the question of who is making up beliefs that aren’t real.

I say religious believers. You say me. I say, I’ve got the facts on my side.

Tell me: where is your evidence for a God who isn’t manufactured out of human cognition, intellection, emotion, or imagination? I’m a vegetarian, but where’s the beef?

Lastly, I’m not the one who has made up a god who is a harsh and unreliable judge. I think you’re confusing me with the Old Testament.

Thanks for the article. Best of luck!

You’re welcome. I look forward to receiving your gift of luck. Much appreciated.

Morality comes from nature, not God

Why do people do good things rather than bad things? One of the worst answers to this question is, “Because God has told us what is right and wrong.” A much better answer is, “Because nature has evolved us to be this way.”

Such is the hypothesis of those like Marc Hauser, a Harvard biologist, who propose that Darwinism is a better route to understanding human morality than theology.

Thanks to a comment by benandante on a recent post of mine I learned about Hauser’s book, “Moral Minds” (this New York Times review probably requires registration, but if you haven’t signed up yet for the NYT website, you need to evolve your cyberspace tastes).

I haven’t read this book. However, in Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” he refers to it in a “The Roots of Morality: Why are we Good?” chapter. Dawkins says that Hauser’s message, in his own words, is:

Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness.

So as the NYT book review says, there can be many different moral codes—just as there are many different languages. Yet the core of both morality and language is hard-wired into us genetically.

This means that God is needed to explain how human morality came to be just as much as God is needed to explain how the human body came to be. Namely, not at all. Darwinian natural selection does just fine as an explanatory mechanism in both cases.

In his book Dawkins frequently reminds the reader that evolution is by no means “chancy.” It’s just the opposite. There’s always a reason why some traits persist and are passed on to future generations while other traits fall by the genetic wayside. Nature knows what it is doing.

And nature does it naturally. Thus to my mind one implication of Hauser’s and Dawkin’s evolutionary perspective is that it usually isn’t necessary to consciously agonize over moral choices.

For it seems that morality is like sex: we have an inbred natural urge to do what needs to be done. In short, trust yourself. Which should lead to our getting along with other members of our “tribe,” for this has lots of advantages, whether we’re living in six million years B.C. or the twenty-first century A.D.

Further, even though it seems that there wouldn’t be any evolutionary reason to identify positively with those outside of our immediate kin group, Dawkins argues that some of our Good Samaritan urges “are misfirings, analogous to the misfiring of a reed warbler’s parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo.”

He says:

Sexual desire is sexual desire and its force, in an individual’s psychology, is independent of the ultimate Darwinian pressure that drove it. It is a strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale [reproduction].

I am suggesting that the same is true of the urge to kindness—to altruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity...We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise able to reproduce.)

There’s no need for the traditional Ten Commandments and other moral codes that supposedly were communicated from on high. Yet studies have shown that people around the world do generally agree about what is right and wrong. Evolution has caused us to be this way.

Dawkins suggests that a New Ten Commandments is called for. He offers up this example that he found on an atheist website. It makes a lot more sense to me than the Old Ten Commandments.

(1) Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.

(2) In all things, strive to cause no harm.

(3) Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.

(4) Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.

(5) Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

(6) Always seek to be learning something new.

(7) Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.

(8) Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.

(9) Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.

(10) Question everything.