Church of the Churchless

If God punishes people with earthquakes, to hell with God

When I heard Christian fundamentalist Pat Robertson say that the Haitians "have been cursed by one thing after another" after they made a pact with the devil (actually voodoo), at first I vowed to ignore his idiocy -- not wanting to give him any publicity even in criticizing him.

But Lisa Miller's recent interesting article in Newsweek, "Why God Hates Haiti: the frustrating theology of suffering" brought me to change my mind.

In his narrow, malicious way, Robertson is making a First Commandment argument: when the God of Israel thunders from his mountaintop that "you shall have no other gods before me," he means it. This God rains down disaster—floods and so forth—on those who disobey.

Miller points out that many modern theologians argue that God's ways are mysterious, so we can't explain this or that as being caused by a divine intervention in the world.

OK, I'm big on embracing mystery myself.

However, if you do this, you'd better reject the Bible, because it's crystal clear about God being vengeful, malicious, and murderous. In "Godless" Dan Barker, an evangelical minister turned atheist, devotes quite a few pages to enumerating the nasty shit God wreaks on people.

A few examples of threats from the "loving God" in Leviticus:

"If you will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments... I will appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it... and ye shall be slain before your enemies."

"I will punish you seven times more... for  your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits... I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle... and I will bring a sword upon you..."

This isn't a God that I want to follow or believe in. So it's hard for me to understand why so many Christians, Jews, and Muslims do -- given that monotheism's personal God who chooses to intervene in the world is such an unappealing character.

Theodicy is the branch of theology and philosophy that tries to deal with the problem of evil. How is it possible to reconcile a loving, just, and forgiving God with all the evident suffering in the world?

Miller writes:

Theodicy remains the most powerful tool in the atheist's kit, however, and many a believer has turned away from God over the suffering of innocents. Ehrman did. After a lifetime as a Christian, "I just got to a point where I couldn't explain how something like this could happen, if there's a powerful and loving God in charge of the world. It's a very old problem, and there are a lot of answers, but I don't think any of them work."

A few days ago Scott Roeder was found guilty of first-degree murder in the shooting of an abortion provider, George TIller. That was great news.

Roeder's defense attorneys argued that Roeder was trying to save lives (of fetuses) by killing Tiller. The judge allowed this argument, but in the end told the jury that they couldn't convict Roeder of a lesser offense, like manslaughter.

So murder it was.

How is it, then, that religious fundamentalists believe that it is fine for God to get away with murder?

Some faiths consider that God causes earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and other natural disasters to happen in his unfathomable "mysterious ways." Other faiths of an Eastern persuasion see the less personal divine force of karma operating in the world, causing some people to suffer horrible early deaths while others prosper into happy old age.

Dan Barker says:

Many Christians claim that the genocide of idolaters is permitted because "God knows best." But every murderer feels some kind of justification for the crime. Why is God special? Why should a deity get away with atrocities that would send you or me straight to prison?

Beats me. That's why, along with Barker, I'm churchless now.

I can't believe that either a personal deity or impersonal karma intervenes in the operation of Earth's plate tectonics to cause an earthquake to happen here, rather than there, now rather than then, with X magnitude rather than Y. 

If such a God does exist, I say "to hell with you."

(I've already condemned myself to hell for a free DVD -- see here and here -- so maybe God and I are going to meet up there if my curse is effective. Should be interesting.)

Gurinder Singh's remarks on Sam Busa's death

Sam Busa, the South African representative of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian spiritual group) for some 55 years died recently. The current guru of the organization, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, sent this message to Busa's family.

Dear ______,
 
I was informed about Sam's passing. Rest assured Sam is in a much better place now, free from all suffering and concerns.  His guidance and help which he gave tirelessly to the sangat in South Africa for so many years will be greatly missed. He lived a full and complete life.  He is once again united with his beloved Master. Though you will all miss his presence, his friends and family should rejoice in the knowledge that his was a life well spent and that he is now enjoying the fruits of his lifetime of devotion and service.
 
With love and affection,
 G S Dhillon

These are nice sentiments. I'm sure Sam Busa's family appreciated them.

What struck me, though, was how similar these thoughts are to a traditional Christian (or other religious) reaction to a true believer's death. He is in a much better place; he is united with his beloved.

Perhaps this is true. I doubt that it is.

Still, what's the difference between these statements from a guru and a minister saying, "He is in heaven now, united with his beloved Jesus"?

Faith is faith.

I can understand why people want to reassure grieving family members that a relative has "passed on" rather than ceased to exist. However, to my mind what's better and more honest is to express one's sympathy and sorrow, and leave it at that.

Float gently on a stream of consciousness

Since I've become churchless -- a convert to no-religion -- one of the more ridiculous things I hear from true believers is: So you've given up on finding the truth.

No! That's entirely untrue.

I've simply realized that the most fundamental questions about life, reality, and what, if anything, lies beyond the physical can't be answered via blind faith, dogma, preconceived ideas, or rigid ritualistic practices.

Here's some questions that I find fascinating:

What is the essence of consciousness?
Does a "soul" exist separate, or separable, from the body?
Are humans part of a larger whole, or just a part?
Is our usual view of reality the truest way of seeing?

Ever since I started studying yoga and meditation with a crazed Greek-Christian-Hindu-whatever teacher in the crazy late '60s (the decade), I've been exploring these sorts of ponderings.

Partly through learning from others through books, talks, discussions, and such. But also through daily meditation almost every morning for more than forty years.

I'm still at it, because it seems clear that consciousness is key to understanding ... well, everything. The world outside of us. The world inside of us. The world neither (or both) inside and outside of us.

If we're not conscious of something, it doesn't exist for us.

Yet as countless mystics, and just as many scientists, have pointed out, our attention almost always is directed toward those some things, not the consciousness which makes possible (some would say, is) our knowledge of phenomenal existence.

Over the years I've written quite a bit about my favorite approach to meditation, Thomas Keating's "Open Mind, Open Heart." Here's some posts where I talk about this book, whose philosophy is based on the medieval classic, The Cloud of Unknowing.

Let go. Then let go of letting go.
Let it go. So simple.
Ceaseless prayer: Christian vs. Sant Mat
Sant Mat's "five holy names" aren't so holy

It may seem sort of strange that I'm so attracted to a book with a subtitle, "The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel." But I simply substitute "reality" or "consciousness" when Keating says "God," and ignore the Jesus references.

Many people are so identified with the ordinary flow of their thoughts and feelings that they are not aware of the source from which these mental objects are emerging. Like boats or debris floating along the surface of a river, our thoughts and feelings must be resting on something.

They are resting on the inner stream of consciousness, which is our participation in God's being. That level is not immediately evident to ordinary consciousness. Since we are not in immediate contact with that level, we have to do something to develop our awareness of it. It is the level of our being that makes us most human.

The values that we find there are more delightful than the values that float along the surface of our psyche. We need to refresh ourselves at this deep level every day. Just as we need exercise, food, rest, and sleep, so also we need moments of interior silence because they bring the deepest kind of refreshment.

Faith is opening and surrendering to God. The spiritual journey does not require going anywhere because God is already with us and in us. It is a question of allowing our ordinary thoughts to recede into the background and to float along the river of consciousness without our noticing them, while we direct our attention toward the river on which they are floating.

We are like someone sitting on the bank of a river and watching the boats go by. If we stay on the bank, with our attention on the river rather than on the boats, the capacity to disregard thoughts as they go by will develop, and a deeper kind of attention will emerge.

A thought in the context of this method is any perception that appears on the inner screen of consciousness. This could be an emotion, an image, a memory, a plan, a noise from outside, a feeling of peace, or even a spiritual communication.

In other words, anything whatsoever that registers on the inner stream of consciousness is a "thought." The method consists of letting go of every thought during the time of prayer, even the most devout thoughts.

Yes, even the most devout thoughts. Most meditation practices speak about emptying our cup of consciousness so it can be filled with a deeper sense of reality, but almost always this is just talk.

Because they assume what the practitioner will eventually be filled with. A vision of X. Merging with Y. Understanding or becoming Z.

When you've got X, Y, and Z floating around in your psyche, you're focused on the boats going by that Keating refers to in the quotation above: forms of religious or spiritual dogma. Instead:

In centering prayer we begin to shift our attention from the boats and objects on the surface to the river itself, to that which sustains all our faculties and is their source. The river in this analogy has no qualities or characteristics. It is spiritual and limitless because it is a participation in God's being.

...You must keep turning your attention from what is on the surface of the river to the river itself, from the particular to the general, from forms to the formless, from images to the imageless.

"Natural Reflections" shows how science is superior

I've finished reading Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Natural Reflections," which I blogged about before on the basis of a New York Times review.

Smith's main thesis is that science and religion are, well, natural reflections of each other. This is a seriously scholarly book and I'm not crystal clear about what she means by this.

But her final two paragraphs summarize her case in an agreeable fashion.

Scientists share cognitive tendencies, achievements, and limits with nonscientists; religious believers share them with nonbelievers. Although each may put the world together and conduct his or her life in ways that are at odds with or opaque to the other, the cosmology and way of life of each deserves minimally respectful acknowledgment from the other. 

Such acknowledgment would not mean accepting ideas one finds fantastic or claims one knows are false. And of course it would not mean approving practices that one knows are confining, maiming, or murderous to oneself or to others. What it would mean is recognizing, as parallel to one's own, the processes by which those cosmologies and ways of life came to be formed.

Not me, says the self-vaunting evangelical atheist. Tu quo-que, -- you, too -- says the defensive, resentful theist. Et ego -- I, too -- says the reflexive, reflective naturalist.

Smith keeps saying, though never in so many words, "Why can't we all get along?" She obviously has a deep respect for both science and religion, though she accurately points out that these words -- science, religion -- don't mean as much as we often think they do.

Her most convincing argument is that all humans share common cognitive capabilities and tendencies. So when atheistic scientists and devout religious believers hammer on each other, they're using the same tools.

Scientists decry the dogmatism and closed-mindedness of true believers. However, the history of science is full of examples where scientists acted the same way. Smith acknowledges, though, that science has certain advantages over religion in how it corrects  errors.

We have observed that scientists studying religion are subject to the same general cognitive dispositions and liabilities that they identify as natural to the human species and as responsible for some of the central features of religion.

As I have emphasized from the beginning, this is not equivalent to saying, nor does it follow logically, that science is "just another belief," like shamanism or Presbyterianism.

The system of methodological commitments that defines Western science, notably naturalism, empiricism, and experimentalism, constitutes an extremely efficient apparatus for generating models of the operations of the phenomenal-physical universe that permit us to predict, control, and intervene in those operations with maximal effectiveness and reliability.

To the extent that shamanism or Presbyterianism seeks such ends, Western science is better at achieving them. Also, many characteristic norms and practices of Western science, such as the detailed description of investigative procedures, the prompt and open publication of findings, and the honoring of fertile theoretical innovation, are especially effective ways to limit the negative consequences of cognitive conservatism and other liabilities of our humanly shared cognitive dispositions.

In other words, both scientists and religious believers are prone to screw-ups, mistakes, erroneous conclusions, blind spots, resistance to having long-held ideas overturned, and other all-too-human weaknesses.

But the scientific method has ways of dealing with these problems, while religions, by and large, are much more devoted to defending established beliefs than to challenging and modifying them.

All in all, I found that Smith's scholarly approach to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of science and religion meshed quite nicely with my own churchless intuitions.

As I frequently say on this blog, it doesn't bother me (much) when a religious believer says "I feel..." It's an "I know..." that isn't backed up with demonstrable evidence or even a good argument that irritates me.

Everybody is trying to make sense of life, to get through the day as happily and harmoniously as possible, to keep the mish-mash of thoughts, memories, emotions, perceptions, and what-not that continually course through our psyches in some sort of manageable order.

We don't know what the hell is going on.

With ourselves. With other people. With the world. With the cosmos. With anything. Not really, though for brief moments we may be able to tell ourselves, "this is the way it is."

Problem is, that "it" and "is" are continually changing, impossible to pin down, without boundaries, ephemeral will-of-the-wisps.

Science is one way we humans have of hanging onto a psychological hand-hold that keeps us from spinning off into a chaotic existential whirlpool. Religion is another way. And there are countless other ways.

(For example, I consider that when I'm able to get my hands on the newly announced Apple iTab, my life will be complete.)

So I agree with Smith: science bests religion when it comes to understanding the phenomenal world and making our way through certain aspects of physical reality.

But art, music, dance, literature, sex, athletics, politics, drugs, cooking, and so much more that constitutes the rich fabric of human culture testify to our need for highly individualistic ways of knowing and being.

The efficacy of scientific methods, norms, and practices in these several aspects, however, does not make the knowledge thereby produced either the only kind of knowledge there is or the only kind worth seeking. Nor does it make the natural sciences the only locus of desirable cognitive self-discipline among humans.

...Each of us keeps constructing our own personal cosmos out of virtually everything that we experience, here including our private dreams and, as may happen, our individual visions or intuitions of the unity, duality, or divinity of the universe.

The spirituality of "Avatar" (the movie)

My wife and I saw "Avatar" last night in all of its 3-D, Dolby Digital glory. I loved the movie. It inspired me politically, but Avatar's spiritual message is even more powerful -- and more universal.

I mean, right-wingers don't like the movie's anti-corporate, pro-environmentalism theme. But who doesn't resonate with the all is one philosophy of the Na'vi, the indigenous people of Pandora whose beautiful earth-like moon is threatened by human invaders seeking a precious mineral, Unobtainium. 

Even a Christian minister could get behind the Na'vi nature-based spirituality.

The Na'vi (per Indigenous tradition) are incredibly spiritual, sharing a connectedness hard to describe. The sehalo bonds they establish with the creatures and the environment on Pandora prove this connectedness--a connectedness that implies interdependence i.e. the rejection of the cup running over due to sinful pride.

It's interdependence that defines our togetherness, our teamwork; our collective contributions to the whole, which is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Well, praise be, brother.

This churchless blogger agrees with you and similarly resonates with the intimate connection the Na'vi have with Pandora -- which is personified (perhaps) as Eywa. 

I threw in the perhaps because it wasn't clear to me whether Eywa is viewed by the Na'vi as (1) a separate being who interpenetrates everything and everyone on Pandora, or (2) as the interconnected totality of everything and everyone on Pandora.

These trivia items on a Eywa wiki site mostly seem to point toward (2), which would make the Na'vi pantheists, "All is God". (The last item is an exception.)

• Eywa is very similar to many of Earth's deities, such as Jörð in Norse mythology who is the personification of the Earth, and is even closer to the Native Americans' religious views of the planet being one living entity.
• The Tree of Souls grants the Na'vi access to the psychic essences of their deceased, which is how the Na'vi communicate with their ancestors. The roots of the trees are capable of extending above the ground and connecting to the nervous system of any living thing, even humans. That's how Jake's consciousness was transferred to his Avatar.
• Eywa has been compared to Gaia (Gaea), Mother Earth, Mother Nature or God by those trying to explain the relationship between Eywa and the Na'vi. The Gaia hypothesis follows on that the entire biosphere acts like a single organism or at least a complex system (soft Gaia), or that the Earth is consciously manipulating the biosphere in order to make conditions more favorable to life (hard Gaia).
• Eywa's embodiment as plant life may be a reference to Yggdrasil, The Tree of Life, a holy embodiment in Norse mythology. Yggdrasil is a tree, said to be the root of all life, sent to keep the natural order of life on Earth.
• Eywa is also similar to the Norse god-king Odin in title. Odin is known as the All-Father, whereas Eywa is known as the All-Mother.

When Jake (a human who has been mind-melded with a Nu'vi body and taught Pandoran ways by the sexiest tall blue creature with a tail in cinematic history, Neytiri) tries to call on Eywa for help in a battle, I recall Neytiri getting irked at him, which implies that Eywa isn't seen as a separate being who responds to "prayers."

This also points toward pantheism, a philosophy favored by scientific types like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, which probably currently is my basic worldview as well since it fits nicely with my Taoist leanings.

However, Jake's petition to Eywa appeared to be answered by some ferocious Pandoran wildlife.

Such could be seen in a personal sense -- an all-encompassing divinity leaps into action after remaining aloof from the fray for a while -- but it also could mean that since Jake's consciousness is part of a seamless Pandoran web of life, his fervent desire to save the planet-like moon helped arouse the other creatures to join the battle.

This review lists various spiritual lessons of the Na'vi. A few point toward Eywa being a personal being, but most do not. Yet a thoughtful piece by Jay Michaelson on "The Meaning of Avatar" comes to a somewhat different conclusion.

Roughly speaking, Avatar's Na'Vi subscribe to a combination of pantheism and theism, a view scholars today call "panentheism." As scholar of religion Gershom Scholem observed, panentheism is usually rooted less in faith, as the New York Times's Ross Douthat said, than in experience.

Like mystics here on Earth, the Na'Vi have an experience of unity of consciousness with other beings, all of which (themselves included) are really just manifestations of one Being, which they call Ai'wa. Unlike Earth-bound mystics, the Na'Vi have a convenient plug, attached to their bodies, which physically unites them to other beings (such as steeds, winged or otherwise) and to Aiwa Herself/Itself.

Well, this is a defensible interpretation of the movie, especially since there are some emotional scenes near the end where throngs of Na'vi are swaying back and forth in unison at the Tree of Souls in what sure looks like a ritual aimed at a divine being.

Michaelson, though, has written a book (which, naturally, he plugs in his piece) called "Everything is God" which promotes a non-dual version of Judaism -- that's a creative idea, Jay.

The book description says, "In this nondual view, everyone and everything manifests God." Thus this seems to be a panentheist perspective: God interpenetrates every part of nature.

Michaelson thus might have a bit of a vested philosophical interest in pushing his interpretation of Na'vi spirituality.

First, the Na'Vi are panentheists, not pantheists. In a crucial moment in the film, our hero Jake Sully prays to Ai'Wa, and She appears to answer, in the form of swarms of birds, dinosaur-like creatures, and other forces of nature who work together to defeat the technologically-advanced human invaders. (The sequence is not unlike the Ents defeating Saruman in The Two Towers or the creatures of Narnia defeating the humans in Prince Caspian.) Strict pantheists like Spinoza would never pray to Being. Indeed, the Na'Vi princess Neytiri scolds Sully for doing so, and I myself clucked my tongue a bit when the Na'Vi started swaying and chanting; it kind of confuses the issue.

But panentheists do pray. They pray all the time. Ramakrishna, the 19th century Hindu sage who, through his disciple Vivekananda, is more responsible than any other individual for the popularization of nonduality - from obscure Vedantic texts to best-sellers by Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra - was both a nondualist sage who believed that All is One, and a devotee of the "Divine Mother" who prayed to Her every day. The Baal Shem Tov and other early Hasidim believed that everything is God, but they also prayed to God as if separate from Him. Rumi and other Sufi poets experienced unity, but also loved yearning for the love of an often-distant Other.

Hmmmm. I still think it's an open question whether the Na'vi are more akin to Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle than Spinoza (god, I hope not).

But heck, Avatar is just a movie.

There's no reason to start a holy war over whether pantheism or panentheism best describes Na'vi'an spirituality. Either word is hugely more appealing to me than the rigid transcendent monotheism of fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

There's no "Perfect living master" or "God man"

Most religions believe that it's possible for a perfect human being to walk the Earth who is intimately connected with divinity, if not identical with it. (Almost always they're male, so this is why I said God man in the title to this post.)

As noted in a previous post, there are numerous candidates for this supremely elevated GIHF (god in human form) position.

As some Vedanta folks point out, there are quite a few historical contenders for a GIHF appellation. Jesus, Buddha, Rama, Krishna, Moses, Muhammad, Chaitanya, Ramakrishna are cited, though some of these names are questionable candidates. (Buddha didn't teach there was a God, and I don't think many Christians recognize Moses as God in human form.)

Problem is, there's no evidence that a perfect living master, which is how guru-based faiths often refer to a God man, has ever existed.

So just as it is reasonable to say "There's no one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater" (remembering this song shows how old I am), it's also reasonable to say "There's no perfect living master or God man."

If anyone disagrees with me, state your reasons in a comment.

Just make them convincing. You're going to need to define "perfect" and "god" for starters, so we can compare the attributes of a GIHF candidate with the characteristics of a supposed ultimate divinity.

As noted in "God-man or Asshole? The guru conundrum," true believers often try to wriggle out of the lack of evidence for human perfection by claiming that imperfection is a sign of it.

Meaning, if God was obviously manifest in a person, everyone would accept his (or her) divinity instantly, no faith or effort required. Since God doesn't want things to be this easy for humanity -- don't ask why -- perfect living masters/God men keep themselves hidden.

Well, it could also be argued that so do one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eaters. Along with fairies, leprechauns, goblins, and angels. And anything else that the human mind can imagine, but doesn't exist in reality.

Ah, another term that needs defining: reality. 

It's often said that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Most people, including me, would agree. I've learned to always say "Oh, so cute!" when someone shows me a baby (or puppy) photo.

That may not be my honest reaction, but I understand that to a new parent or dog owner their precious little bundle of wonderfulness is unalloyed perfection -- at least until the kid starts saying "No!" or the puppy chews up the couch.

So I also understand that devotees of a supposed God man, living or dead, view him as ideal in much (or exactly) the same way a lover says to his beloved, "Honey, you're so perfect for me!"

But this is much different from saying that someone is more than human, possessing transcendent divine qualities that, for one reason or another, aren't obvious.

I've visited this subject before in some blog posts other than those mentioned above:
If a satguru isn't God, what is he?
Who is the guru?
Top ten signs you're a fundamentalist satsangi

I keep returning to it for several reasons.

One is that a belief in someone's divine perfection forms the foundation of rigid religious dogmatism. The Bible, Koran, Adi Granth, or other holy writing can't be challenged because its human source supposedly was error-free.

Another is more personal: for over thirty years I diligently adhered to meditative and other practices enjoined by a "perfect living master," Charan Singh. He set himself forth as possessing extraordinary capabilities, including but not limited to...

-- Existing in various ethereal forms (astral, causal, spiritual) in addition to the physical
-- Placing his "radiant form" within the psyche of each disciple at the time of initiation
-- Being able to know what was happening in the lives of disciples, and even changing their destiny (karma) at times
-- Guiding the disciple through higher regions of reality and communicating with him or her throughout the process

There are many other purported God men who make, or have made, other sorts of claims (see here, here, and here). These are mostly examples from the "Eastern" side of religion and mysticism; the "Western" side has its own GIHF candidates.

If reality has any meaning beyond the utterly subjective ("truth is in the eye of the beholder"), some or all of these guys aren't who they claim to be: God.

I've come to the conclusion that all is the word of choice in the preceding sentence. Again, if someone likes some, argue your case. Explain how it's possible to tell the difference between a "perfect" and "imperfect" master.

And answer a more basic question: What is the demonstrable evidence that any human has achieved perfection or godliness?

Non-dual cartoons point way to enlightenment (or, not)

One of the favorite people crazed cartoon characters I follow on Twitter is MonkMojo. I've learned a lot about non-dualism and Zen from reading his clever tweets.

Saying that, of course, means that I haven't learned a thing. But who gives a shit? A smile is close to enlightenment, which is one of the idiotic cliches that MonkMojo enjoys demolishing.

Here's some sample MonkMojo tweets. (RT means a re-tweet; what follows the || is MonkMojo's add-on).

RT @Yojinbo: wasn't impressed w/ the response I got from Houston Zen Center when I was in prison: no response. || Sounds pretty Zen 2 me ;)

Me to wife: While you're out there doing all your "important" stuff, I'm tweeting the fuckin' answers to life!

RT @TaoTeaKing: @MonkMojo i don`t believe that you got "the point" . Believe me ... :-) || Pretty much sums up my life. ;)

All I want to do is hang on to my stories and die bitter. Is that too much to fuckin' ask?

RT @amoz1939: Being excluded / Agony undergoing / The loss of good friends #haiku || Fuck'em ~#itiswhatitis

RT @ookiee: What's more important: that you believe in God, or believe in yourself?|| Which hot coal should one grasp more tightly? Neither.

Kindness happens, then a me swoops in and kills it with a my.

MonkMojo also has a web site.

Here's how he evolved himself. Not that he has a self, being a non-dual dude.

MonkMojo sums up the human condition.

I've shared this link before, but MonkMojo's "The Ten Cat Herding Pictures of Enlightenment" is well worth a repeat. 

For more non-dual, Zen, and such humor, check out the MonkMojo links page. The #1 blog there is Bob Seal's non-duality cartoons. Here are some of my favorites.

Pretty damn profound. A cartoon definitely is worth a thousand words when it comes to explaining what the fuck? notions.  

There you are. Enlightenment! Sure seems simple. Just need to find the damn eraser.

Nice. Also, not-nice.

The Last Bread: how to find God

A. Mohit emailed me a link to his short essay, "The Last Bread." Nicely said. I agree with most of the "live now and reject religion" sentiment. Mohit has written "One God in You and Me: Freedom from Religion."

Science and religion are so different, they aren't at odds

Who worries about reconciling the deep philosophical meaning of rap music and bird watching? Or professional basketball and quantum physics? Or motorcycle maintenance and ballet dancing?

Maybe science and religion are similar to these examples, because they are so different. Not only that, perhaps all the vigorous debates over the centuries about whether science or religion is closer to ultimate truth misses the point:

There isn't any #1, alpha dog, primo, unsurpassed approach to knowing reality. All we have are various ways of dealing with reality.

This is, more or less, what the central theme of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's recently released book, "Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion," appears to be about.

I said less because I haven't read the book, the Amazon summary is full of scholar jargon, and the publisher's blurb about it isn't much more informative. What the heck does this mean?

Examining these and related efforts from the perspective of a constructivist-pragmatist epistemology, Smith argues that crucial aspects of belief—religious and other—that remain elusive or invisible under dominant rationalist and computational models are illuminated by views of human cognition that stress its dynamic, embodied, and interactive features.

But I feel OK with the more because of Stanley Fish's fascinating (and readable) review of "Natural Reflections" in the New York Times. The title of the review sums up the big question: "Must There Be a Bottom Line?"

The assumption she [Smith] challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry. The desire, she explains, is to sift through the claims of those perspectives and methods that vie for “underneath-it-all status” (a wonderful phrase) and validate one of them so that we can proceed in the confidence that our measures, protocols, techniques and procedures are in harmony with the universe and perhaps with God.

It is within the context of such a desire that science and religion are seen as in conflict, in part because the claims of both are often (but not always) totalizing; they amount to saying, I am the Truth and you shall have no other truths before me. But if religion and science are not thought of as rival candidates for the title “Ultimate Arbiter,” they can be examined, in more or less evolutionary terms, as highly developed, successful and different (though not totally different, as the history of their previous union shows) ways of coping with the situations and challenges human existence presents.

Good stuff.

For a long time I considered that there was some way of understanding what the cosmos was all about. I wasn't sure what it was. I also wasn't sure that anyone knew what it was.

But it simply seemed like out there (or in here) somewhere, sometime, somehow, there was/would be an approach to grasping reality preferable to any other.

I didn't question this assumption. Now, I do.

And Smiths' book, elucidated by Fish's cogent review, helped me realize why it makes sense to look upon science, religion, art, athletics, and other ways of relating to the world as alternatives to be judged by their efficacy, not their epistemology. 

Fish says:

That is to say, we have certain problems, goals and difficulties with respect to the physical world, and of the models available to us for application and elaboration, science more often than not proves to be the most efficacious. Were our purposes otherwise — say, to deal with trauma, political hopes and fears, the project of community building — we might have recourse to other models and ideas from literature or philosophy or religion or even sports.

...Once the shift is made from asking “what is and should be the ultimate ground of our actions?” to asking “what resources are available to us for dealing with these problems and opportunities?,” the question of which model or way of conceptualizing things is true or truer becomes, Smith observes, less urgent and less interesting.

The inability of science to demonstrate its truth by standards not internal to its practices is not something to worry about because science “as a method is not the sort of thing that can be thought either true or false.” Rather, it works (with works being defined by our needs) or it doesn’t: “[L]ike using low-octane fuel or following a low-fat diet, the minimalism and self-restraint that defines it can only be thought more or less appropriate for the purposes at hand.”

Often on this blog I'll respond to someone who leaves a comment expressing skepticism about science with something like, "Then why don't you share your thoughts via ESP rather than by using a computer and the Internet?"

Scientific knowledge (using that term in its broadest sense as reflecting how to get along in the physical world) enables us to do things and understand how this relates to that.

Religious knowledge (meaning other-worldly, metaphysical, transcendental) isn't in the same practical ballpark. It is abstract, conceptual, theoretical, dogmatic, philosophical.

Thus, for example, you may have assented to an argument that calls into question the solidity of facts, but when you’re not doing meta-theory, you will experience facts as solidly as the most committed and polemical of empiricists. In doing so you will not be inconsistent or self-contradictory because the question of a belief in facts arises only in the special precincts of philosophical deliberation.

In everyday life, we neither believe nor disbelieve in facts as a general category; we just encounter particular ones in perfectly ordinary ways; and any challenge to one or more of them will also be perfectly ordinary, a matter of evidentiary adequacy or the force of counter examples or some other humdrum, non-philosophical measure of dis-confirmation. The conclusions we may have come to in the context of fancy epistemological debates (a context few will ever inhabit) will have no necessary force when we step into, and are asked to operate in, other contexts.

So Fish says that Smith says (I'm planning to buy her book to confirm this) it isn't necessary to take only one side in the Science vs. Religion Ultimate Smackdown debate. 

A person isn't obliged to give up ballroom dancing if he or she also enjoys classical literature. A boxer can also be an artist. A geologist can compose haiku.

What this means, among other things, is that the various projects we pursue and engage in may not all cohere in a single intelligible story. We may not be unified beings. In fact, Smith says, “the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting.”

...In short, if you believe this, how can you also believe that? The answer is that the realms of belief supposedly existing in a condition of opposition and conflict are, at least to some extent, discrete. What you believe in one arena of human endeavor may have no spillover into what you believe, and do, in another.

Reading some of the comments on the book review, I came across one that said the best thing about Fish's articles are the comments left by other people.

That's true. Click on the "highlights" section of the review's comment list for the best and brightest. The first one (#61) was well-written and persuasive. Here's how it ended (I've corrected some misspellings):

Ever since humans developed symbolic thought, we have been able to manipulate the world with words. We can say anything. We can think about things that are not in our immediate view, and make stones fall up instead of down, just by thinking about it. We can even convince others that our symbols are true. In this landscape people can rise from the dead, and ethereal paternalistic entities can monitor our thoughts and torture us eternally if we stray from the path. Who is to say otherwise?

Ultimately, truth is demonstrable. At some point you've got to demonstrate your stone that falls up. Science looks at the world, tries to figure out what's going on, and then, in the last crucial step, demonstrates what it finds to the rest of us. Of course, we are all individually free to demonstrate it for ourselves, if we put in a little work and a little study.

Religion makes claims about the world. There are no "separate Magisteria" when people are claimed to fly or walk on water or part seas. The foundation of religion may be symbolically interesting or compelling to some, but you can parse symbols all day long and still you wind up with symbols. When a hundred religions find a hundred different "fundamental truths," then I have my doubts about the truths they're finding.

For all its deep and fundamental claims, I can't see what religion "produces." Some nice architecture perhaps, and some art, and some curious stories. If you like, you can get a priest to bless you to prevent illness. I'll take a flu shot.

Memorial service shows sad side of religion

Recently I attended a memorial service for my sister. She died about a month ago. I was sad the day I learned the news, but had largely come to terms with her death. I didn't expect the service to be a laugh-fest, but its rather gloomy nature surprised me.

Religion seemingly was to blame. My sister wasn't at all religious, but the memorial service was held at a funeral chapel that reeked of religiosity.

Walking in with my wife and brother-in-law, we were met by the black-suited proprietor who gravely, so to speak, said: "I'm so sorry for the pain of your loss" (or words to that effect).

That downer of a greeting struck me as strange.

Not wholly unexpected, or wildly inappropriate, but simply a bit presumptuous. What if we were expecting to celebrate the memory of my sister happily and joyously? -- which is a lot closer to what I was anticipating than dark gloom and sorrow.

I haven't been to many funerals or memorial services. My wife, Laurel, recalled that when her friend Mark died, there was a lot of laughter and smiles at his service. She said, "When I go, I want upbeat music to be played."

Here's what I don't understand about the Christian attitude toward death: signs on the funeral chapel wall had quotes from the Bible about how dying isn't the end of a person's existence, but the beginning of a fresh life with God and Jesus.

If that's the case, then why the doom and gloom? Why the somberness? Why the hushed, formal, depressing atmosphere?

Thankfully, a minister who didn't know my sister (she never belonged to a church, or even attended a service so far as I can recall) put as positive a spin as he could on death in his remarks that kicked off the minimally ceremonious ceremony.

He spoke about there being a time for everything, death included, quoting from the famous passage to that effect in the bible. I can't remember much else he said, as it was mostly platitudinous -- understandable when you don't know the person being memorialized.

The atmosphere improved considerably when he asked if anyone wanted to share some memories of my sister, Carol Ann.

A woman who was an old friend of Carol Ann and her husband rose, walked to the podium, and read prepared remarks into the microphone. She was crying at first, but later regained some composure.

She told some moving stories. Up to that point I wasn't sure whether I wanted to speak myself. I had some scribbled notes in my jacket pocket. Halfway through the woman's talk I grabbed the piece of paper, having decided to say my own piece.

I'd written the notes on a Horizon flight from Portland to Oakland. My wife and I didn't get seats next to each other. When my aisle mate sat down, the woman turned to me and said, "Are you having a good day?"

I didn't feel like explaining why I was traveling so simply replied, "Yes." But then the woman said, "I'm going to a memorial service."

"Small world," I told her. "So am I."

This led to a conversation that continued for almost the entire flight. It turned out that an old friend of hers had died of cancer, and she was going to a service in Walnut Creek, the same town my sister's service was being held in.

We covered a lot of philosophical, personal, and emotional ground in the two hours or so it took to fly from Oregon to California. Talking with her helped me solidify what I wanted to say at the service, if I had the opportunity.

When the minister thanked Carol Ann's friend and asked if anyone else wanted to say something, I raised my hand. He nodded at me. I stood at the podium and started with the small world story of my flight to Oakland.

Then I shared a dream that I had the night before. I was driving on a curvy road with a deep drop-off on the right (no guard rail). I took my eyes off the road for a moment. The rear wheels slipped off the edge of the pavement.

At first I wasn't worried. I figured that I could steer the car back on the road as I continued around the curve. But the rear wheels kept slipping backward. And the chasm kept looking deeper and more ominous.

Finally I knew that the car wasn't going to stay on the road. I thought, "This is the end." Then the dream itself ended. That wasn't the end my psyche had anticipated. It was death.

I told the group that we're all driving on a road -- life -- which is going to end in a precipitous drop-off one day. We don't know when that "crash" will come. And we don't know whether we'll survive it.

Almost certainly we won't, I said, acknowledging that many people believe in life after death (and feeling the religious eyes of the minister, who was sitting behind me, on my back).

"My sister didn't believe in that," I told the memorial service attendees. "Neither do I. So we're here for ourselves, not Carol Ann. She's dead. We're alive. Her death should teach us something about how to live life with more love, joy, and happiness. That's how we honor her -- by focusing on living, not dying."

I talked about regrets, how my sister did a lot and accomplished a lot that enabled her to die mostly regret-free. However, not totally. Her estrangement from her daughter and grandchildren hurt her. I looked at them and hoped they understood my next message.

"What we need to do, to say, to apologize for, to act upon -- that needs to be done today. Or at least as soon as possible. We think there's plenty of time to reconcile with loved ones, or tell those we care about how much they mean to us. But there may not be...time."

After I finished, the minister made some concluding remarks. He thanked me for what I'd said, observing that I'd hit on some key themes that he was planning to speak about. He ended by reading a passage about regrets that almost exactly echoed my thoughts.

It was nice to find common ground between his religiosity and my churchlessness. I shook the minister's hand after the service and told him that I liked his final remarks. Which were, basically, that now is the moment that always should mean the most.

Now is when we heal old wounds, open ourselves to the always-fresh possibilities of the present, perceive the magic of the mystery called life.

Looking into the minister's eyes, thanking him for helping make my sister's memorial service as positive as possible, I saw a human being trying to make sense of dying and living.

So was I. So are we all.

After the service most of the attendees went to a blessedly informal and upbeat gathering at a home of one of my sister's and brother-in-law's boating friends. Boat people like to eat and drink.

So do I. After imbibing some excellent bread, cheese, hummus, pinot noir, and coffee, I was in a considerably better mood.

Lots of people came up to me and said how much they appreciated my remarks. They liked how I captured Carol Ann's personality so well.

I'd observed that she was the sort of person who you'd want to help you return something that you didn't have a receipt for -- but she also could make me cringe when she waved a waiter over and started to complain about some relatively minor flaw with a restaurant meal.

Anyway, I ended my memorial service sharing by recalling one of my early memories of my sister, who was ten years older than me.

When she was 17, I was seven, the bratty little brother who sometimes got taken along in the back seat of a car when Carol Ann and her boyfriend were driving around in El Paso, Texas, where my mother lived for a while.

Back in 1956 I remember hearing a song, Que Sera, Sera ("Whatever will be, will be") coming over the car radio. It must have been played a lot, since the lyrics stuck in my mind all these years.

Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

I told the people at the service that here's something all of us -- religious believers, agnostics, atheists -- can agree on.

Life happens. The present is, well, present. The future isn't. While we're living, we should be vibrantly alive. When we're dead, we'll either cease to exist (most likely) or live on in some fashion.

But we don't know which will happen until it happens. All we can do is live as authentically as possible.

Speaking at the memorial service, and hearing the positive feedback from people who appreciated my honesty, reaffirmed my commitment to open conversation about beliefs and lack of belief.

Deep down, most people know that they don't know the answers to whether God exists, life continues after death, and other Big Questions. Sharing our doubts and unknowing affirms our brother- and sisterhood with fellow humans.

(Here's a photo of Carol Ann and her husband, Bob, that I took when they visited our home in 2005.)

Obeying God is immoral

When we were little children, we had to obey our parents. Conversations like this are common:

Child: "Why do I have to clean my room?"
Parent: "Because! Now go clean your room!"

Religious fundamentalists haven't progressed out of this child-like authoritarian morality. If God or a representative of the Big Man Upstairs (such as a guru, preacher, or whoever) says to do such-and-such, that's the end of the story.

Obedience is valued above ethics. And that's weird, as evangelist turned atheist Dan Barker says in his book, "Godless."

When someone tells you to do something it is natural to ask, "Why?" Why remember the Sabbath? The bible tells us that we should remember the Sabbath "to keep it holy." The word "holy" means "set apart," "sacred," or "clean" and has nothing to do with "good" or "right."

In other words, this commandment does not deal with ethics; it deals with the superiority of God. When true believers say that something is "wrong," it is because it has been decreed wrong by a "holy" deity, not because there is a good ethical reason.

The child asks, "Daddy, why can't I do this?" and Daddy responds, "Because I said so!" If the commandment is violated, it becomes a crime of disobedience -- the authority figure should not be offended.

For over thirty years I didn't drink alcohol because the India-based religious organization I was a member of said that was a no-no. As I've noted before on this blog, one evening I saw a fellow initiate at a gathering with a glass of wine in his hand.

My judgmentalism got fired up at one glance. "Oh my God! He's gone to the dark side! He's disobeying the command of his guru, who is god in human form!"

Now, I drink a glass of red wine myself most evenings.

At first I felt a bit deliciously devilish. Presently I just feel like I'm drinking a glass of red wine. No big deal. I haven't turned into an alcoholic. My meditation is unaffected. But my HDL (good) cholesterol has gone up a few points, likely because of the wine.

For a long time I didn't ponder the pros and cons of drinking alcohol. I just didn't do it because I was obeying an authority figure. When I started to think for myself on this matter, I decided to uncork the bottle -- along with my mind.

Here's some more quotes from Barker, additional food for thought for those who still believe that whatever Daddy says is what has to be done.

To the theist, punishment is administered by the offended Daddy. Whoever "reproacheth the Lord" shall be chastised. To the humanist, however, consequences, not punishment, happen as a natural effect of the behavior itself. This does not mean that a humanist parent will allow a child to run into a busy street; it means that the moral basis for restraint is found in the traffic, not in the "Word of Daddy."

...We don't send jaywalkers to the gas chamber, or hang children for stealing cookies. Unless... unless you argue from authority and the authority figure decrees, for no good reason, that such an action offends Him. People who believe they are living under the thumb of such a vain and petty lord are not guided by ethics; they are guided by fear. The bible turns out to be not a moral code, but a whip.

...Whether or not you assume the bible to be morally acceptable, the important question to believers is whether or not you accept its authority. In the minds of Christians, authority equals morality. God is sovereign.

...Besides being childlike, the morality-as-authority argument is dangerous. People who do not question authority become easy prey to dictators. Cult leaders can manipulate followers who give them blind obedience.

...Suppose a man were to say to his wife, "Prove how much you love me by helping me rob a bank. And if you don't help, I will beat you." We would call such a bully abusive and criminal. Yet this same bankrupt chain-of-command mentality is taught in the bible: God decides what is right and wrong and if you don't play along you are punished in hell.

Speaking for myself, if the biblical heaven and hell exist, I would choose hell. Having to spend eternity pretending to worship a petty tyrant who tortures those who insult his authority would be more hellish than baking in eternal flames. There is no way such a bully can earn my admiration.

Religious craziness is like drunk driving

Daniel Dennett has a nice piece in the Washington Post about not allowing religious believers to be a protected class -- immune from the consequences of their bizarre beliefs.

When I was young, drunk drivers tended to be excused because, after all, they were drunk! Today, happily, we hold them doubly culpable for any misdeeds they commit while under the influence.

I look forward to the day when violence done under the influence of religious passion is considered more dishonorable, more shameful, than crimes of avarice, and is punished accordingly, and religious leaders who incite such acts are regarded with the same contempt that we reserve for bartenders who send dangerously disabled people out onto the highways.

I also liked how Dennett wants pastors who spout unscientific crap from the pulpit to be held accountable for their dishonesty.

(I'm unsure if the Post allows access to the piece for those who haven't registered on their site, so I'll copy it into a continuation to this post.)

The cosmos doesn't have a cause

Often it's said that the biggest, grandest, most profound philosophical question of all time is... (drum roll, please) Why is there something rather than nothing?

I used to be entranced by this question. Now, I'm not. It doesn't make any sense to me. I've got some pretty impressive philosophical company in this regard: Bertrand Russell.

Here's what this agnostic philosopher said in his 1948 debate with Father Frederick C. Copleston (Jesuit Catholic priest).

I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all... I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother -- that's a different logical sphere.

Copleston and Russell discuss this issue for a while, until...

Copleston: But your general point then, Lord Russell, is that it's illegitimate even to ask the question of the cause of the world?

Russell: Yes, that's my position.

Copleston:  Well, if it's a question that for you has no meaning, it's of course very difficult to discuss it, isn't it?

Russell: Yes, it is very difficult. What do you say -- shall we pass on to some other issue?

In the comments on a recent post I had a similar sort of interesting interchange, where I believe my arguments were stronger (of course, I had some inspiration from Bertrand Russell). John said:

Brian,

An attractive force between two bodies exists.

Gravity is the attractive force between two bodies.

Gravity exists.

A cause of the universe existing exists.

God is the cause of the universe existing.

God exists.

Gravity and God are just the names we give to the respective phenomena (a) the attractive force between two bodies and (b) the cause of the universe existing. So, if we agree on what the names denote, then wouldn't the "demonstrable evidence in support of it (our claim)," be the phenomena (a) & (b)?

My response was:

John, what makes you think there is a cause for the universe existing? There is no evidence for this. We need to define our terms.

Do you take "universe" to mean everything in physical existence? If so, "cosmos" is the preferred term used by many/most scientists, since the multi-universe theory has a lot going for it. That is, the "universe" we are a part of may very well not be the only universe in existence.

So let's make your statement "A cause of the cosmos existing exists." Again, why? Couldn't the cosmos simply be, a given? There is a big logical (and reality) problem in assuming that the totality of existence has to behave like things in existence. This is the basic flaw in your argument.

We see that there are causes of things within the cosmos. So our human minds jump to the conclusion, "The cosmos must have a cause." But the cosmos isn't a thing. It is everything. You presume a vantage point from which you can look at the cosmos and say "It had a beginning; there was a cause of it."

Where is that vantage point?

Religious believers say that God is uncaused, eternal, always has been and always will be. But God is unseen and unknown. Why not posit the same qualities of the cosmos? It is uncaused, eternal, always has been and always will be.

If everything has to have a cause, then God also has to have a cause, so invoking God as the cause of the cosmos just shifts the question back up a level. I prefer to keep things as simple as possible. Let's call the cosmos uncaused.

John came back with:

Brian,

I don't know if there need be a cause for everything (and sorry for the loose usage of existence), but I don't believe that lack of knowledge in that regard gives one the grounds to assert an antithesis. That 'something is uncaused' is every bit the affirmative as 'everything has a cause.' Consequently, I could just as easily apply…

"if no such evidence exists, or if you do not yet know what is the proper conclusion which may logically be drawn from that evidence, then the agnostic principle demands that you refrain from adopting any conclusion as being the expression of ultimate truth."

… to: "Let's call the cosmos uncaused."

To which I channeled my inner Bertrand Russell and said:

John, my point was that a cosmic chain of causality has to end somewhere. Theologians like to end it at God, with divinity being the eternal entity that has been, is now, and always will be. A naturalistic scientific perspective ends the chain with what is observable: the cosmos.

So I'll stick with my assertion that the cosmos (defined as "everything in existence") must be uncaused. Otherwise we have to posit a cause of that "everything," which obviously is still part of "everything" since that cause exists.

If that cause had a cause, both causes are still part of "everything." So pretty obviously everything doesn't have a cause. Only things within everything do. This is marvelously clear to me; perhaps it isn't to you. That's fine.

Dan Barker, an evangelical preacher turned atheist, makes a similar point in his book "Godless" (also referring to the debate between Russell and Copleston).

If we even suggest that the universe (cosmos) is a discrete "thing" (not just a concept), we are implying a realm above and beyond the universe within which it is contained, limited and defined. This amounts to assuming transcendence.

Theistic philosophers hope no one will notice that the language they are using effortlessly conjures the existence of a realm beyond nature, portraying "the universe" from a distance as if "it" had an environment. It is easier for nontheists, who are not equipped to mix logical spheres to avoid such question begging.

Copleston, responding to Russell, asked: "But are you going to say that we can't, or we shouldn't, even raise the question of the existence of the whole of this sorry scheme of things -- of the whole universe?"

"Yes," Russell replied. "I don't think there's any meaning in it at all. I think the word 'universe' is a handy word in some connections, but I don't think it stands for anything that has a meaning." (Today, cosmologists would substitute the word "cosmos" for "universe," which is what Russell was talking about: the entirety of existence.)

There's an intriguing parallel between the notions of cosmos and us. Each word refers to an entity that isn't a separable thing, but we usually talk as if it is.

I mean, everything in existence is the cosmos. There's no vantage point where we can sit on high and make pronouncements about how the cosmos appears. We're part and parcel of it.

Likewise, everything that exists within (or as) our mind/brain/psyche is us. There's no vantage point where we can see ourselves from the outside. We are ourselves.

So the answers to "What is the cause of the cosmos?" and "Who am I?" turn out to be essentially identical:

That's a stupid question.

Talking about religion is good, preaching is bad

A friend of mine has a great way of dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on his door, proselytizing pamphlets in hand. He tells them enthusiastically, "Great to see you! Come on in! I want to tell you about how wonderful my religion is. It'll just take a couple of hours."

I don't think he's gotten any takers.

It's funny how religious true believers are really eager to talk about the marvelousness of their own faith, yet usually shy away from learning about other points of view or philosophies of life.

So I think Ross Douhat made some good points in his New York Times opinion piece, "Let's Talk About Faith."

Liberal democracy offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to compel belief. In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you see fit — and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers) in the marketplace of ideas.

That’s the theory. In practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one’s own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home.

Douhat was stimulated to opine on this subject by Brit Hume's blasting of Tiger Wood's Buddhism. (Hume is a Fox News analyst.)

I didn't like how Hume said that Woods should ditch Buddhism and turn to Christianity if he wants redemption and forgiveness after engaging in multiple extra-marital affairs. But there's nothing wrong with debating the pros and cons of various religions.

Debating, though, involves a back-and-forth conversation where two or more people respectfully listen to each other and take turns expressing their opinions.

What bothered me is that Hume made his remarks in a preachy fashion. Fox News gave him a soapbox, whereas he should have had the guts to discuss the supposed superiority of Christianity with an expert on Buddhism.

One such expert responded to Hume in a Washington Post story:

"I think it's ridiculous to make those statements," said Robert Thurman, a professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University. "It is insulting to Buddhism to indicate that Buddhism doesn't take care of its own believers and followers. But I think he will discover that Buddhists are very forgiving about his stupid statements."

Christians, being members of the majority religion in the United States, are comfortable criticizing other faiths. However, when the tables are turned they love to play the I'm offended game.

Jonathan Chait says it like it is, referring to some other commentators who defended Hume's outspoken praise of Christianity.

Why should we maintain an informal social etiquette that discourages people from openly disparaging other people's religions and touting their own as superior? Gee, that seems kind of obvious to me.

I strongly doubt that Wehner and Ponnuru would be happy to see, say, Muslims going on television to blame Mark Sanford's Christianity for his adultery and urge him to convert to Islam. Of course, I can't prove this, because no major television network would ever allow it.

But I'd at least like to hear them say that they'd be happy to see their rule applied to all religions. Otherwise, they need to admit that what they favor is not some wild theological free-for-all in our public discourse, with all religions touting their superiority and disparaging others, but rather a privileged place for Christianity.

I try to be an equal-opportunity ridiculer of religion. Whenever I feel the spirit to point out some irrational, nonsensical, or indefensible dogma, theology, or faith-based belief system, I blog on.

All religions share a common characteristic that makes them wonderful targets for skeptical arrows: they lack demonstrable evidence that their precepts are true.

There's no proof that if Woods became a Christian, he'd be redeemed or forgiven by some supernatural entity -- Jesus, God, whoever. And there's no evidence that the Buddhist belief in karmic consequences carried over via rebirth to another life is true.

So my churchless attitude is that religious debates are great, because they always point out the absurdity of blind faith. Skepticism, rationality, and the scientific method invariably turn out to be the winner.

Agnosticism's profound respect for reality

Thanks to commenter George, who posted a quote from Thomas Huxley about how he came up with the term "agnosticism," I've been able to appreciate more deeply this faithless approach to life.

Here's the quotation:

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last.

The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"–had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.

So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took.

Usually agnosticism is associated with metaphysics. This makes sense, since Huxley simply added a negative, "a," to "gnostic" -- which refers to esoteric knowledge about godly stuff.

But we can be agnostic in regards to anything we don't know about. Why our car won't start. Whether we hold a winning lottery ticket. If our favorite sports team will end up a champion this coming season.

Agnosticism is about honesty, humility, and a profound respect for reality. If we say we know something, there needs to be solid demonstrable evidence backing up that claim. Otherwise, we're not afraid to admit "I don't know."

Agnosis is a wonderful state of being. Open. Receptive. Curious.

Also, when a situation demands it, fiercely skeptical of those who pretend to have a clear vision of reality but are just spouting a blind belief. In one of my first posts on this blog, I quoted classics scholar A.H. Armstrong:

When claims to possess an exclusive revelation of God or to speak his word are made by human beings (and it is always human beings who make them), they must be examined particularly fiercely and hypercritically for the honor of God, to avoid the blasphemy and sacrilege of deifying a human opinion.

Or, to put it less ferociously, the Hellenic (and, as it seems to me, still proper) answer to “Thus saith the Lord” is “Does he?,” asked in a distinctly skeptical tone, followed by a courteous but drastic “testing to destruction” of the claims and credentials of the person or persons making this enormous statement.

The only thing I'd change in this quotation is to make it "honor of reality" rather than "honor of God." But that's my churchlessness speaking.

I do like how Armstrong makes clear that even religious types shouldn't uncritically accept claims about God's nature, since this deifies a human conception rather than divine reality.

If there is a god, or gods, obviously this supernatural side of the cosmos is darn well hidden, since there is no agreement among religions about what divinity consists of. So mystery must appeal to divinity.

Dan Barker used to be a fundamentalist evangelical preacher who saw the light. Now he is an avid atheist and author of a terrific book, "Godless." He demolishes the logic of Pascal's Wager, then offers his own:

I have my own bet: Barker's Wager. Suppose there is a god, but he is only going to reward those people who have enough courage not to believe in him. This god is no less likely than Pascal's. By believing in a god, Christians are risking eternal torture! When they die, they will be very impressed (so will we atheists).

I'm also a big believer in not believing in God. Or any other metaphysical reality for which there isn't demonstrable evidence. If God exists, I figure this will please her (oh, please, let the goddess who I'm pleasing be hot -- and I don't mean in a hellish way).

After all, before we can love somebody, or some thing, we have to know that person or entity. Otherwise we're simply loving our own imagination, concept, thought, emotion, or whatever.

Remaining in a receptive state of agnosticism, knowing that we don't know, honors the unknown. We don't ascribe made-up qualities to the unknown. We don't tell the unknown, "You've got to be like this."

We search. We question. We remain open to evidence. We scan the unknown horizon. Agnostics are eager to drop the "a" and become gnostics, knowers, as discussed by Bill Schultz in "The Essence of Agnosticism."

But like a fine wine, the bottle of agnosticism shouldn't be opened before the right time -- which is when demonstrable evidence blows the skeptical cork off. Schultz:

Even though it took place many years before his announcement of an agnostic principle, Huxley's nearly instantaneous adoption of Darwin's Theory of Evolution from a reading of Darwin's Origin of Species clearly demonstrates that an agnostic can easily abandon either a wrong position, or an indecisive (agnostic) position, when confronted with the proper material in support of what will become the "proper" position.

The true agnostic goes neither farther than the evidence will support, nor ignores the evidence and logic which is supportable by scientific inquiry of the highest quality. This is obvious from the quote of Huxley's epistemological definition of agnosticism given at the top of this piece.

That quotation contains a clear commandment that any agnostic must "follow your reason as far as it can take you without other considerations." No true agnostic will ever ignore that commandment merely to continue asserting an uncertainty when demonstrable evidence and logical reasoning demand a particular position be taken.

It does not matter whether you restrict the concept of agnosticism to merely epistemology, or if you extend that concept into the metaphysical realm, when you see evidence which demands a verdict, you will react by assigning the proper values of truth or falsehood to the conclusion being argued.

However, if no such evidence exists, or if you do not yet know what is the proper conclusion which may logically be drawn from that evidence, then the agnostic principle demands that you refrain from adopting any conclusion as being the expression of ultimate truth. As this concept was so clearly set forth by Huxley, it can unequivocally be found to express the essence of agnosticism.

Saying "there is no God" isn't a religion

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, I wrote a 2008 post that chastised a Portland talk show host: "Atheism isn't a religion, Thom Hartmann."

Usually I agree with Portland's Thom Hartmann, Air America's progressive talk show host. But this morning he kept saying that atheism is a religion – that not believing in God is a belief system.

That's ridiculous. It shows that no matter how smart and articulate Hartmann is, he's got some blind spots. Those logic-obscurers likely stem from his Christianity.

I approvingly quoted from a right on piece cleverly titled "Religion of Atheism: if atheism is religion, 'albino' is a suntan.'" Excerpt:

If someone asked you about unicorns, would you say "I believe there are no unicorns", or would it be more honest to say "I do not believe in unicorns"? These are two different answers. Nobody disbelieves in unicorns purely as a matter of personal faith.

Again, apply the same reasoning to the Gods of other religions. Example : if you are a Christian, do you believe the Hindu God Ganesh does not exist? Or do you not believe in Ganesh?

If you believe that unicorns do not exist, then may I say that you [are] a member of the "No unicorns" religion? Is it a matter of faith that unicorns do not exist? Can I come along to your non-unicorn church with you tomorrow?

This made perfect sense to me. But apparently not to someone who left a comment on the post today.

"If you believe that unicorns do not exist, then may I say that you are a member of the 'No unicorns' religion?"

If and I only if I'm Zealot in my belief of 'No Unicorns'. If I shout at the top of my lungs that there are 'No Unicorns', if I write a book called 'Unicorns are not great', host a radio show called 'Free Unicorn Radio', or start some sort of organization. If I write a blog post called 'Unicorns isn't a religion'.

If I do any of those things, then you can say I'm a member of a religion.

No, that's wrong. As I said in the post:

...there is a huge difference between (1) not believing, and (2) believing, in the existence of something.

To assert otherwise is to engage in a form of sophistry where words don't mean anything. Sure, you can say that for many people "golf is a religion" or "watching Lost is a religion."

But this just means that they regularly engage in those activities. Like atheists frequently thinking, "I don't believe in God."

That said (and now I've said it twice), I'll agree with the commenter in this sense: some people not only don't believe in God, they aren't even interested in the question of whether God exists.

This has been called "nontheism" by Jack Huberman -- finding the notion of God so meaningless, it isn't worthy of not being believed in, which would be atheism or agnosticism. (Nontheism is closely akin to the notion of not even wrong.)

But here's the thing about unicorns, which makes them a lot different from gods: nobody to my knowledge has even flown airplanes into skyscrapers, denied homosexuals the right to marry, cut off funding for embryonic stem cell research, killed a doctor who performs abortions, or tried to stop the teaching of evolution in public schools because of their belief in unicorns.

Religious beliefs in imaginary supernatural entities aren't harmless fantasies. They have real world consequences. Standing up and speaking out against harmful religious dogma is necessary.

And it definitely isn't a religion. As the author of the excellent article said: 

Atheism is neither religion nor faith, but the happy freedom from them. Declaring it to be otherwise, sadly, will not make it so.

Brit Hume blasts Tiger Woods' Buddhism

Ooh, I'm so excited! It's just what we needed to spice up the New Year -- a new front in the religious wars.

Brit Hume of Fox News has dissed the 350 to 500 million Buddhists in the world by saying Tiger Woods needs to ditch Buddhism and embrace Christianity in order to recover from his infidelity scandal and be a great example to the world.

Not surprisingly, this has irked Buddhists, who usually are pretty darn mild-mannered. I'm not sure what a Buddhist "jihad" or "crusade" would be called, but the Progressive Buddhism blog has started one against Brit Hume.

Could Hume get away with saying something like this about Jewish people or Black People or the Muslim Faith? You betcha he couldn't. Why should he be able to skate away scott free when speaking about Buddhists? Because we are only 3 or 4% of the population in the US? Hell NO! Sometimes we do have to speak up, sometimes right speech is getting in someone's face saying, "hey you can't say that about us...you know nothing at all about us!"

Responding to the call to arms, I wasted a few minutes of my life and sent off an email to Fox News expressing my indignation and asking for an apology from Hume -- as if anyone there cares about what agnostic/ atheist/ churchless/ Buddhist types think.

It turns out that Brit Hume isn't apologizing, but rather is repeating and amplifying his praise of Christianity and disdain for Buddhism. 

Tonight, in an interview with WTOP News radio in Washington, D.C., Hume did more than shrug off critics. He ramped up his pitch of the superiority of Christianity, a religion he says is "uniquely and especially about redemption and forgiveness," as the one right choice for Woods.

Hume went on to testify on Christ's sacrificial death and how his "deepest hope" is for Tiger to accept this gift and "be transformed."

Theologically and practically, Hume is skating on thin ice. Christianity clearly is a religion, while Buddhism arguably isn't.

Societies that are the most religious also are the most dysfunctional. So this is one reason Christianity is so big on forgiveness: people in devoutly Christian nations are much more prone to screwing up than people in secular countries.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

If we step back and consider Hume's remarks as an anthropologist would, someone observing the beliefs of a primitive tribe, they're simply freaking weird. 

Devout Christian that Brit Hume is, he thinks that Tiger Woods doesn't need to be forgiven by his wife, but rather by some imaginary being. Woods is being advised to bow down to the gods, who will reward him by absolving his calendar-filling conduct.

Most people would ridicule such notions if they came from ancient Babylonia, but somehow they're accepted as, well, gospel in twenty-first century America, even though they're as ridiculous now as they were back then.

Tiger Woods is an on-again, off-again quasi-Buddhist. He'll go through plenty of changes during the rest of his life, as everyone does. Woods might even decide to embrace Jesus and be "born again."

But he apparently believes he's already on that track, so why take a different route?

Missing from Woods's description of his daily routine is meditation - learnt from his Buddhist mother and one element of a religion that clearly shapes much of his attitude to life.

"I practice meditation -- that is something that I do, that my mum taught me over the years. We also have a thing we do every year, where we go to temple together," he said.

"In the Buddhist religion you have to work for it yourself, internally, in order to achieve anything in life and set up the next life. It is all about what you do and you get out of it what you put into it."

Christians support effort to kill gays in Uganda

This is why blind faith in bullshit religious dogma is so dangerous. Fundamentalist idiocy has real-world consequences. Like, being killed for being homosexual.

"The Quotable Atheist" is well worth quoting

My daughter, a chip off of her dad's churchless block, gave me The Quotable Atheist for Christmas. Organized alphabetically, I'm all the way up to "B." Lots of more great quotes to enjoy.

I could tell I was going to enjoy the book as soon as I started reading the Introduction by Jack Huberman. He's got an engaging "take no prisoners in the war against religion" attitude. Here's some Huberman quotes.

The world (not just America) is deeply divided. The main fault line is where the tectonic plates of religion and of reason/ secularism/ modernity/ science/ Enlightenment meet and grind against each other, making an absolutely unbearable noise. It's sort of like...forget it, I can't describe it.

My aim in compiling The Quotable Atheist was to heal our broken planet, essentially by eliminating the religious part. Not with nuclear weapons or lesser acts of mass murder -- no, that's the religious style, nowadays, in certain quarters -- but through argument, persuasion and most of all (since I know perfectly well that argument is utterly useless against dumb, blind faith, and just wanted to pay it lip service), the steady application of powerfully abrasive ridicule which will slowly but surely erode away the offending continent.

Well, good luck with that, Jack.

I'm with you on this, and have been doing my best on this blog for the past five years to help with the erosion. But there's still a hell of a lot of crazy religious ground to be reclaimed for sanity.

We need to change the cultural climate so as to make supernatural, occult, and faith-based claptrap feel unwelcome and to make adults ashamed of the blithe surrender of their otherwise sound minds to idiocy. We need climate change. Bullshit levels are rising globally, threatening to submerge intellectually low-lying areas. Much of the United States is already inundated. Temperatures are rising: IQs are dropping. Four of the five stupidest years on record have occurred since 2000.

Nice writing that got a right on from me. As did this disturbingly long paragraph.

If a thinking person of a century ago were told that the next hundred years would see a war in which millions of Jews were murdered out of an originally religious hatred; another war, basically over religion, on European soil (the former Yugoslavia); Middle-Eastern countries still under theocratic rule; enormously popular Islamist groups waging a worldwide jihad; millions of Chinese Falun Gong devotees following a self-appointed savior who also claims the ability to levitate and to become invisible; arena-sized churches springing up all across the United States; as few as 28 percent of Americans believing evolution is a fact, and 13 percent or fewer believing it occurred through natural selection, unguided by God; the U.S. government dominated by professed evangelical or born-again Christians [this book came out in 2007]; Christian fundamentalists holding effective veto power over Supreme Court nominations; and the Oval Office occupied by a man [George Bush] who has affirmed the impossibility of a non-Christian entering heaven -- that thinking person might well feel that all the intellectual progress of the previous three or four centuries had been for nought.

Depression and apathy isn't the appropriate response to all this crap, though. Fighting back is.

We must also count false belief as in itself an irreducibly bad thing, and regard respect for truth supported by reason and evidence as a fundamental human obligation. We should view willful ignorance and stupidity as -- I almost said a "sin"; call it an offense against life.

And to my mind, to fail to learn about and feel reverence for what science has discovered -- to refuse to see in the 100-trillion-mile, 100-billion-galaxy extent of the observable universe, the strange-beyond-comprehension subatomic universe, and the possibility of other universes (separate God for each or same one for all?) -- to refuse to recognize there the proper objects of our religious attention, if you will, and instead continue to hold barbaric tribal myths as sacred -- I call that willful ignorance and stupidity.

Here Huberman defines some terms.

I'm using "atheist" as shorthand to indicate any nonbeliever in the existence of a deity or deities. This includes both the agnostic, who thinks there's not enough evidence to decide one way or the other -- and therefore remains a nonbeliever; the atheist proper who goes further and believes the Supreme Being does not exist -- i.e., disbelieves; and the nontheist, who considers the question meaningless and irrelevant (whereas an agnostic may consider the question unanswered but very important).

Reading the following passage, I knew where the guy is coming from. I've come to feel almost exactly the same way. There's no need to embrace religion to worship at the Altar of Mystery. The mysterious is all around us, and indeed is us.

Yet, I confess, I've got a soft spot for "spirituality." Why those quote marks? The trouble with "spiritual" is that, at least according to the diagram in my manual, there aren't two kinds or levels of reality -- a physical world and a second, separate, spiritual one. "The supernatural does not exist." Or, if you prefer (and I rather do), it's all "supernatural." The very fact of existence feels supernatural. At least it cries out for explanation. We are here, apparently, and we don't know why. You can't just call that "natural" and go on your merry way.

And here's Huberman's call to arms. Don't accept religious B.S. any more. Stand up for truth, freedom, open-mindedness, and the genuinely "spiritual" way.

The problem, however, isn't that science, secularism, and Enlightenment ideas have become the modern religion, but rather that they haven't... What's needed is more than just the discrediting and utter humiliation of religion as we know it, but a counter-religion, if you will -- a positive, assertive, science-based secularism that amounts to, and isn't squeamish about being, an alternate way forward "spiritually."

Science, after all, arose out of mysticism and sorcery, with which it shares the thirst for higher knowledge and for mastery over nature. In fact, in many ways science has been growing more mystical again. I believe that, just as certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spinozists envisioned, science is destined to replace, or if you prefer, remerge with, religion. It may need to be called something else. (The First Church of Something Else? Has a nice tax-exempt ring to it.)

Actually, there's nothing wrong even with that word "religion." Put a new engine in it, clean it up, get rid of that smell, and it'll be good as new. All the word means, after all, is "re-tying" -- reconnecting with our cosmic origins, with the LST (Larger Scheme of Things) -- and nothing's wrong with that. LST will open your mind, man.

...Atheism should mean getting, and laughing at, the mother of all jokes: that we're animals -- animated mud -- agglomerations of molecules that have evolved the ability to reproduce themselves and have formed into large colonies that we regard as plants, animals, people (but which our selfish genes "regard" as cities and vehicles) -- colonies whose Weblike web of neural interconnections can even produce an impression of consciousness.

We, the "most evolved" of these colonies, anointed ourselves the center and purpose of the universe, only to discover that we're not, but that the likes of us have apparently been left in charge of a planet in a universe without purpose, center, leader, or moral authority; that we're all, as the Firesign Theatre once put it, "just bozos on this bus." Which suggests we'd better put aside tribal myths, absolutist truths, and obsessional mass neuroses and learn to get along.

How to enjoy the space between thoughts

MonkMojo is so adept at capturing the essence of a meditative approach to life. For men, at least.

New year's enlightenment resolution: nothing

I used to make New Year's resolutions. Now, my attitude is, "what's the point?" If I want to make a change in my life, I will, no matter what part of the year it is. Doesn't have to be January 1.

When I was a religious true believer, I'd often vow to meditate more assiduously, be a better person (details left necessarily vague), or otherwise try harder to close the gap between a conception of my ideal self and who I felt myself to be.

Master Woof thinks this is a stupid thing to do. So do I.

If Master Woof was more substantial than a cartoon character in an entertaining Zen book, "The Upside Down Circle," I'd be worried that he'd hit me with his stick if I backslid into trying to work my way into a state of enlightenment.

(dialogue, since the words are small: "Master Woof, I've been lazy. I want to restart my search for enlightenment." "Why come to me?" "Well, you're a Zen master." "So?" "So tell me, where do I go for enlightenment?" "Nowhere!" "Nowhere?" "Wherever YOU go, enlightenment will be hidden.")

Master Woof isn't big on dogs (people too, I assume) who are searching for what is already present.

Donald Gilbert, the book's Zen Master author and artist, offers up pithy commentaries on the cartoons. Such as...

"One of the biggest problems of so-called 'practices' is that the practice itself becomes a habit. The belief sets in that there is a practicer, someone who is on his way -- a traveler who is going where he is already."

"Woof is saying that the secret of life is revealed when we are living in harmony with the changes and motions of life -- when we are not struggling to change what is."

And the commentary that accompanies the cartoon above...

"In simple terms, enlightenment indicates the absence of the illusion of self and other.

The 'YOU' Master Woof speaks of is an object. This of course implies a subject. Subject and object is the illusion that obscures enlightenment.

Hence Master Woof's statement points out that wherever 'YOU' go, enlightenment will be hidden. He indicates that there must be a wholeness, not the persistence of a dichotomy.

Well, I don't know if there such a thing as enlightenment.

But if there is, it makes sense (assuming enlightenment would make sense) that it entails some sort of resolution of our usual view that objectivity and subjectivity are opposed to each other.

Last night on New Year's Eve, wild party'ers that we are, my wife and I sat around with a few other people at a friend's house, sipped wine, and talked -- often about some pretty deep subjects -- until midnight rolled around.

Several of the conversationalists were heavy into art: music, painting, photography. Two guys had taught art courses at the high school and college levels.

Much of the discussion, which got rather heated at times, centered around whether the value of an artistic expression can be assessed objectively, or if beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

Listening to the opposing arguments, both made sense to me.

Yes, it does seem that what appeals to one person may turn off another. So how is it possible to say that a painting of dogs playing poker is "better" than the Mona Lisa if good art is what someone likes?

On the other hand, I could appreciate the other viewpoint: that some art touches something deep in us, makes us resonate with a different meaning-vibration, is able to elicit fresh appreciations of what life and living are all about.

The conversation ball kept bouncing back and forth between these walls of subjectivity and objectivity.

And I kept having intuitions of some middle ground, but couldn't find a way to put it into words. I still can't, though maybe Master Woof could. Eventually I made an attempt.

I told the "good art is subjective" and "good art is objective" advocates that I agreed with both of them, since their viewpoints flowed from a single source: the human mind.

Art begins and ends in a person's consciousness.

The artist has a subjective notion to create something. Then, he or she uses some medium (images, sounds, movements, words, whatever) to convey that notion objectively. Someone else views the objective form and appreciates it subjectively.

It's impossible to divide the subjective from the objective. These are two different ways of perceiving the same piece of art, I said. (Or tried to say; I'm not sure how I came across last night.)

I suggested that if an artist has the skill to authentically convey what is intuitively and creatively evident to him or her from inside to outside, maybe this is what we'd call good art.

We feel the artist's vision. We're offered a peek inside another person's psyche through what has been created. The more honestly and authentically the subjective (inside) and objective (outside) are related, the more a piece of art moves us.

I tried to make some sense. I semi-succeeded. That's the way of conversation, as of art, as of everything.

For most of us, most of the time, there's a tension between what we mean and what is heard, between what we intend and what is done, between what we perceive and what we understand.

And sometimes there's no tension. We just are. As what we do and know is. 

According to Zen Master Gilbert it isn't possible to find ourselves, because we are ourselves. Sounds good. I'm ready to do less spiritual searching in the New Year. (Unk is the bloodhound who keeps getting whacked by Master Woof when he looks for what is right of front of him.)

Therefore Unk has to awaken from the notion of being Unk. The truth of Unk is not 'thingly.' There is nothing to be found (no thingly thing) nor anyone to find it. The unfindable is what Unk is, and his unfindable is the found. So no matter how assiduously Unk looks within, he can never see the seer.