Church of the Churchless

Some thoughts on divine dying

I've been enjoying the spirited commenting on a recent post, "Attempt to kill the RSSB guru, Gurinder SIngh, fails."

One interesting discussion topic is whether, if the guru indeed is GIHF (God in human form) as the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings proclaim, anyone could succeed in killing a divine being.

Someone pointed out the obvious: that Jesus is viewed as the Son of God by Christians, yet his central reason for living was to die. Michael Parenti talks about this in his book, "God and His Demons" -- which takes a strongly skeptical look at religiosity.

Nothing less than the brutal flogging and murder of the deity's only begotten son by humans allows these same humans to qualify for redemption and eternal life. Had Jesus been left unharmed to finish his ministry in peace, presumably we all would still be denied entrance to paradise.

So we owe his vicious tormentors and murderers a hearty thanks; indeed, we owe the Christ-killers our eternal salvation. It is never explained why God could not have freely granted us redemption and salvation, assuming we were deemed worthy of it, without contriving to have some of us brutalize and murder his son.

Well, religious dogmas aren't supposed to make sense. And indeed, they usually don't. True believers fail to see this as a problem, because God is considered to act in mysterious ways beyond our human understanding.

OK.

But then why do those who consider the RSSB guru to be God's right hand man, if not the highest divinity himself, think they can fathom the meaning of the attempted attack on him?

What if it was God's will, part of some larger scheme of things? Karmic, cosmic, or whatever. Or, if it wasn't part of God's plan, then why did the guru allow it to occur, given that he is believed to have the ability to know what is happening anywhere, anytime, anyhow?

Of course, these might not even be the right questions to ask. Which is my point. All we really know is what is reported to have happened:

Today an attempt on the life of Baba Gurinder Singh, Leader of Radha Soami Beas, was foiled by the Vienna Police in Austria.  Police arrested four persons carrying explosives with them.

Where's the need to go beyond this? Four people apparently attempted to kill another person. That's reprehensible. Adding any supernatural conjecturing to the story merely muddies the factual waters.

Switching topic gears, but sticking with this general theme, a personal story...

As I mentioned in my post about this attack, when I was an active member of RSSB I did "security seva" (seva means volunteer work) at some large gatherings when the current guru, Gurinder Singh, toured the western United States and Canada.

When he went to Vancouver, B.C. in the 1990s, once I was given the job of standing outside his residence in the middle of the night, watching for unwanted goings-on.

My post was just twenty feet or so from the guru's bedroom window. Given how devoted I was at the time, this was a moving experience for me -- especially since three o'clock in the morning is considered to be a "time of elixir" in the RSSB teachings when spiritual currents are particularly strong.

So there I was, standing next to some bushes, alternately glancing at the street and sidewalk, then back to the guru's bedroom window. I looked at my watch, saw it was 3:00 am, and thought "It doesn't get any better than this."

Even with other thoughts going through my mind. Such as, what would I do if a van full of Sikh terrorists armed with submachine guns rolled up and heavily armed men started to storm the residence?

I don't like the idea of dying. Even less, actually dying. But there wasn't much doubt in my mind about what I'd do: attack the attackers, as best I could.

This wasn't a totally selfless decision (is there even such a thing?). Living with the shame of cowardly hiding while the guru was being attacked seemed worse than dying bravely.

I'm telling this story for a couple of reasons.

First, as others have pointed out in comments to my other post, the Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru has been threatened by extremist crazies for a long time. We can only hope that he remains safe and sound.

Second, I regularly get criticized in comments on this blog for not having given the RSSSB teachings and meditation practice a serious try. My two word response, which usually isn't quite this pithily direct: that's bullshit.

For thirty-five years I devoted myself to doing what I was told to do, and promised to do, at the time of my initiation by the previous RSSB guru, Charan Singh, in 1971.

Without going into the details, I can confidently say that my devotion to this spiritual/mystical path was considerably more serious and deep than that of the vast majority of other disciples.

To the above-mentioned critics, I'll ask a question: how many of you have stood outside the guru's window in the middle of the night, prepared to die for him? And how many of you have meditated an average of several hours a day for thirty-five years, prepared to "die" in meditation for your guru?

I have.

And that enables me to speak confidently about what my RSSB experiences taught me, because I've walked this faith's walk, as well as talked the talk.

Wear religious and spiritual beliefs loosely

Ever eager to find profundity in anything connected with my dearly beloved iPhone 4, I took a look at a self-portrait I snapped yesterday -- using my phone's forward-facing camera held at arm's length -- and realized how much it had to say about my preferred approach to religiosity.

My wife detests this shirt, which I recently bought from The Territory Ahead after they enticed me with a Sale! email. As soon as I opened the UPS package, Laurel said "you should return it."

It wasn't her style. I usually trust my wife's taste in clothes, which almost always is better than mine. But after contemplating how the shirt made me feel (like a gaudy parrot, basically), I decided to keep it.

A few days ago I wore it in public for the first time. Given Laurel's reaction to the shirt, I kind of expected that children would run screaming into their parent's arms when I walked into a store, or I'd hear unbelieving gasps of horror from fashionistas.

Neither occurred.

And as the day wore on, with my new shirt and me becoming steadily better acquainted, I realized that it mattered not at all what anyone else thought of my clothes choice.

What counted was how the shirt made me feel. Which is exactly my attitude toward religion, spirituality, mysticism, and philosophy these days: there are no absolutes here, just likes and dislikes.

"Do your own thing."

That was good advice in the '60s, and the spirit lives on today in open-minded circles -- such as the marvelous Oregon Country Fair outside of Eugene which I shared photos of on my other blog.

Walking through the Fair, it doesn't take long for a visitor to see that the only dress-up rule is anything goes. If a guy feels good wearing only a clingy white slip and black cowboy boots, hey, that's great.

Self-expression rules the day/weekend. But when Monday comes, most of the wild and crazy Oregon Country Fairgoers take off their outfits and put on different attire.

The way I see it, expressions of religiosity and spirituality should be much the same: easily worn, and just as easily altered or discarded. Again, we're not talking absolutes here. There's no demonstrable objective truth in the sphere of godliness, divinity, and meaning-of-life'ness, just as there also isn't in the sphere of fashion.

This morning I re-read the final chapter of Owen Flanagan's "The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World," a book I liked a lot and quoted from earlier in the year. What Flanagan says is well worth a re-quote.

What sort of theism can co-exist with the scientific image? What I mean by theism is a set of propositions about the existence and nature of God or gods.

...But theism of the sort that takes certain texts as authoritative, that asserts that certain facts that cannot possibly be known by humans to be true are uncontrovertibly true, is a problem. Assertive theism, but not what I will call expressive theism, is epistematically irresponsible and dangerous to boot.

...But since expressivism is not committed to truth, not even to reasonableness, the story can be as wild and imaginatively rich as one pleases. Forces of good and evil, multiplicities of gods -- a transfinite number of divinities in transfinite universes creating transfinite numbers of new worlds through worm holes between universes enacting the most fantastic battles between forces of good and evil. Whatever you wish that feels compelling, satisfying, rich and deep. We are only talking about stories.

...Because they are untestable, such stories can be said, expressed, even embraced, but they cannot be asserted as worthy of true belief. They are not evaluable in terms of the "true" and the "false." But you can like your story so much that you treat it as true, even if it can't be evaluated as such.

Or at least, something like this might be the best way to describe the self-understanding of the persons who tell a certain story that they conceive mythically: They do not quite believe their story to be true (they can't responsibly do so), but they believe that belief in their story is beneficial.

Again, it's like wearing clothes that appeal to us, and make us feel good. There's no way we can claim that everybody should like those styles, or that they reflect some sort of universal fashion truth.

Yet we enjoy them. They help us express ourselves, communicating something to both us and others about who we are and how we see the world.

Here's another way Flanagan says what he said above:

Asserting is different from stating or saying, in that asserting is governed by epistemic standards of warranted assertability. Stating or saying is epistematically free range. Self-conscious "myth-making" is an elaborate form of saying without asserting.

You can say anything you want, including all manner of false and foolish things. It's a first amendment right.

...Here are some things that ought not to be asserted (nor proposed as reasonable for others to believe true):

You should not assert that any creation story you believe in is true, or even that it is made up of "warranted beliefs."

It follows that it would be irrational to demand, let alone expect, others to believe the same story you do.

Although you can't assert that your creation myth is true, you can assert that belief in its truth benefits certain folk.

Do not give "supernatural forces" genuine causal explanatory force when making assertions of the form "phi explains omega." That is, do not assert that "Allah created the universe" is true.

Attempt to kill the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh, fails

I just got an email message from a friend about an attempt in Vienna, Austria to assassinate Gurinder Singh, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which is headquartered in the Punjab, India.

I was an active member of RSSB for over thirty-five years and volunteered several times for security work at large meetings in the United States and Canada where Gurinder Singh gave talks.

At a Honolulu session in the 1990s I remember getting the job of peering into trash receptacles and such to search for explosive devices. This seemed sort of unnecessary to me at the time.

After reading a translation of the Punjabi newspaper story about the July 28 attempt to kill Gurinder Singh, obviously it wasn't. For quite a while fundamentalist Sikh extremists have been threatening gurus in the Punjab who don't conform to their notions of what "true" Sikhism is.

This is another instance of how dogmatic religiosity leads to people doing crazy things. Here's the story that was sent to me. I've copied in the English translation below.
Download Attempt on Baba Ji's Life in Vienna

English Translation of the Jagg Bani Punjabi Newspaper Article

Assassination attempt on Dera Radha Soami Chief Foiled

Vienna Police arrests four persons; Baba Gurinder Singh Ji is unharmed; continues Satsang program.

Jalandhar, July 28 (Report by Dhawan)

Today an attempt on the life of Baba Gurinder Singh, Leader of Radha Soami Beas, was foiled by the Vienna Police in Austria.  Police arrested four persons carrying explosives with them.

According to news obtained from Vienna, Baba Gurinder Singh was going to hold satsang in a hall.  Vienna Police had been tipped off before the arrival of the extremists and had tightened security around the meeting hall.

It is said that the Police nabbed the four suspects in the parking lot of the hall.  Baba Gurinder Singh is absolutely fine and later he gave satsang to the audience.

Previously some people of Indian origin had fatally shot Sant Rama Nand, the leader of Dera Sachkhand (of Ballan in Punjab) in Vienna and his companion Sant Niranjan Das was injured.  Since that assassination attempt the Vienna Police had been on high alert during all programs of satsangs held by Indian Spiritual Gurus.  Unconfirmed reports say that the Police recovered hand grenades from the suspects. 

Another report says that the suspects were wearing Security Employees’ Uniforms so that they could enter the hall unnoticed.  Baba Gurinder Singh is on foreign trip to meet with his followers.  It is reported that after the arrests of the suspects, a high alert is in place and Baba Gurinder Singh has been provided with extra security during his stay in Europe.

Free will is a fiction (and that's fine)

Over the years I've had many deep, as well as shallow, discussions with friends and acquaintances about free will. It's a fascinating subject, in no small part because substance and process are intimately related.

Meaning, if someone disagrees with me and argues, "I'm free to do what I want," I can always respond with "That's just what I expected you to say."

Reading about all the philosophical hair-splitting in the area of free will can overheat the cerebral cortex quickly. That's why I like to focus on Albert Einstein's simple viewpoint (in part 1 of his credo): 

I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.

Here's another similar Einstein quote:

Honestly I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom?

What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said, "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."…When you mention people who speak of such a thing as free will in nature it is difficult for me to find a suitable reply. The idea is of course preposterous.

Indeed, it is. Yet the fact remains that we feel like we have free will.

For example, at this very moment it seems like I can write whatever I want after I finish this sentence. Yet as someone who has been an avid writer since my pre-teen years (I'm now 61), I frequently have had the feeling that what I'm composing already has been written somewhere within my psyche, and I'm just transcribing it.

I'm not implying that some sort of supernatural, mystical, or fateful power is at work here -- destiny, karma, God's plan, or whatever. Just that whatever I decide to do seems to flow from a source deeper than my conscious volitional awareness.

How all this relates to religiosity and churchlessness is too big a subject to address in any detail right now. Here's my brief take on that question:

Becoming free from "ties that bind" is an important aspect of most religious, spiritual, and mystical teachings, whether they be of the Eastern or Western variety. The soul and/or mind often is considered to be imprisoned by this physical domain of existence. Theologies speak of the necessity to become free of earthly ties/attachments, whether through one's own efforts or with the aid of a savior, master, guru, spiritual guide, or whoever.

Nice idea. Undeniably appealing. A notion that I liked a lot for the thirty-five years or so when I seriously pursued a meditational practice aimed at what often was called the "liberation of the soul."

But now the idea of breaking free from earthly bounds seems both extremely unlikely and distinctly unappealing to me. In his credo, Einstein also said:

Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own.

Interconnectedness. Interdependence. Involvement.

This indeed seems to be what life is all about. Yet the notion of free will implies that we can be lone wolves, unaffected by the "pack" of society, culture, other people, and the natural world.

Yuck! Who would want that? And who could possibly attain that?

According to a persuasive essay by Galen Strawson in the online New York Times, "Your Move: The Maze of Free Will," nobody. Here's the basic argument that Strawson, a philosophy professor, uses to demonstrate that we can't be ultimately morally responsible for what we do.

(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you then are.

(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain mental respects.

(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.

(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

The key move is (3). Why can’t you be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all? In answer, consider an expanded version of the argument.

(a) It’s undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience.

(b) It’s undeniable that these are things for which you can’t be held to be in any way responsible (morally or otherwise).

(c) But you can’t at any later stage of life hope to acquire true or ultimate moral responsibility for the way you are by trying to change the way you already are as a result of genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(d) Why not? Because both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(e) And any further changes that you may become able to bring about after you have brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

Read the entire essay (just three and a half well-written pages) to better understand what Strawson is saying. Which seems pretty darn unarguable to me.

The message I get from this solid bit of philosophizing is... relax. Chill out. We need to stop carrying the weight of the cosmos on our anxiety-ridden, guilt-prone shoulders. Each of us is the result of everyone and everything that has come before us, and is still with us now.

We aren't steering our own separate ship across the ocean of life.

We're being carried by currents far below the surface of our consciousness, influences that transcend our puny awareness of here and now (for example, the atoms we're made of can be traced back many billions of years to the big bang).

Stawson ends his essay with this response to the seemingly solid fact that we are not the causes of ourselves:

Is there any reply? I can’t do better than the novelist Ian McEwan, who wrote to me:

“I see no necessary disjunction between having no free will (those arguments seem watertight) and assuming moral responsibility for myself. The point is ownership. I own my past, my beginnings, my perceptions.

And just as I will make myself responsible if my dog or child bites someone, or my car rolls backwards down a hill and causes damage, so I take on full accountability for the little ship of my being, even if I do not have control of its course. It is this sense of being the possessor of a consciousness that makes us feel responsible for it.”

Striving for perfection is wildly imperfect

Religions would have us strive for perfection. But as this essay points out, that would mean a death of sorts: no progressing, no changing.

None of us is perfect. The question is, why would we want to be? (And a more basic one, how could we ever know what perfection consists of?)

I got to thinking about this after an intuitive Aha! popped into my consciousness recently.

Some undone "to-do's" had been brought to my attention by my wife. She'd reminded me that I hadn't yet attended to some tasks that would benefit other people, yet I kept putting off.

I started to ponder my failure to do what I should have been doing. Then an inner voice interrupted my pondering:

What's right with trying to do everything right all of the time? And what's wrong with doing things other people consider to be wrong? Imperfection needs to be embraced, not shunned.

Right away I felt a lot better, like a weight had been lifted from my psyche that I'd been carrying around for too long.

My wife often says that I don't worry enough. But inside my head, I know that I worry a lot, often about ridiculous things. And this isn't the first time that I've had an insight into what I called "the sweet taste of imperfection" in another blog post.

It takes a while, I guess, to let go of the whole be ye perfect thing -- which was a big part of the spiritual/mystical teachings that I followed for over thirty-five years.

Books would talk about the evils of the "five deadly sins." Lust, anger, greed, attachment, egotism. Well, jeez, take away those qualities and what is left? Not much that is recognizably human, or authentic.

The moment I honestly recognized that sometimes I simply don't care about other people; that often I'd rather put my own needs/desires first; that I can be a selfish, inconsiderate, egotistical S.O.B; and that I'm really not bothered about all this being true, I felt a warm glow of imperfection wash over me.

I'm not sure to what extent religiosity is related to peoples' discomfort with imperfection. I suspect quite a bit. Maybe, a lot.

If we accepted our seeming human failings, quirks, eccentricities, faults, weaknesses, and such as part of what it means to be a normal Homo sapiens, rather than as problems to be solved by some sort of divine Fix-It power, would religions be as attractive?

I say, "no." If you think I'm wrong, an idiot, a fool, and/or a completely misguided philosophical klutz, that's great. Thanks for adding to my warm glow of imperfection.

Nothing wrong with being a churchless "possibilian"

Some time ago I came across the "Killing the Buddha" web site and blog. Naturally I liked the name of the place. And I copied some links to pages that appealed to me at the time.

Such as, "Ways I Have Been a Bad Meditator." And, "The False Science" (concerning a book that I blogged about myself).

Today I revisited Killing the Buddha and saw that "The Struggle for the (Possible) Soul of David Eagleman," by Robert Jensen, was featured. Interesting article. It starts off:

There’s a struggle inside the brain of David Eagleman for the soul of David Eagleman.

That is, there might be such a struggle if Eagleman’s brain believed that Eagleman had a soul, which he is not sure about. In fact, Eagleman’s brain is not completely sure that there is an Eagleman-beyond-Eagleman’s-brain at all—with or without a soul, whatever that term might mean.

Welcome to the world of “possibilian” neuroscientist-writer David Eagleman, to life in the space between what-is and what-if, between the facts we think we know and the fictions that illuminate what we don’t know.

Eagleman-the-scientist would love to rev up his high-tech neuroimaging machines to answer the enduring questions about the brain and the mind, the body and the soul. But Eagleman-the-writer knows that those machines aren’t going to answer those questions.

Eagleman rejects not only conventional religion but also the labels of agnostic and atheist. In their place, he has coined the term possibilian: a word to describe those who “celebrate the vastness of our ignorance, are unwilling to commit to any particular made-up story, and take pleasure in entertaining multiple hypotheses.”

Nice term, possibilian. Count me in.

This doesn't mean embracing via blind faith any sort of wacky religious, mystical, spiritual, New Age, or other sort of notion that we come across. Rather...

Though Eagleman’s scientific and literary lives seem radically different on the surface, they are part of the same creative endeavor: to deepen our understanding of a complex world we can never fully grasp. Since scientists mostly talk about what they know, Eagleman’s emphasis on our ignorance may seem out of character.

Eagleman offers an analogy: The work of science is like building a pier out into the ocean. We excitedly add on to the pier little by little, but then we look around and say, “Wait a minute, I’m at the end of the pier, but there’s a lot more out there.” The ocean of what we don’t know always dwarfs what we do know, he says. “During our lifetimes, we will get further on that pier. We’ll understand more at the end of our lives than we do now, but it ain’t going to cover the ocean.”

...Eagleman makes clear that he is a possibilian, not a mysterian (one who believes that there are things humans can’t understand, problems we can’t solve). Eagleman acknowledges that in his lifetime we won’t come up with the theories to explain everything and that some of science’s stories may turn out to be wrong, but they usually are better than any alternative stories.

Right on.

What if a "guru" is no different from us?

When I was a member of an India-based spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the guru who led the organization frequently would say, "We need teachers in every aspect of life. Mysticism and spirituality are no different."

Here's the problem with that statement: if I can't tell whether a person is more competent at something than I am, why should I accept him/her as a guide, teacher, consultant, handyman, or whatever?

I got to thinking about this today after reading a response to a comment on a blog post about financial dealings of the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh. Tucson, a regular Church of the Churchless visitor, quoted from a previous comment, then shared his own perspective:

Another amazing one:

"What if you were a teacher or professor before you got called to be SatGuru, and you loved it - it was your pride and joy. Wouldn't you be tempted to keep up with what was going on in the world of education? Wouldn't you jump back in there a little if you could? Or if you were a computer geek before being Guru, wouldn't you still want to keep up with the IT world and technology, if you got the chance to? But when Baba Ji [Gurinder Singh] does some business transactions, his old profession, and we are ready to burn him at the stake! We are ready to call him a fake, an infidel, and we want to shun him. This isn't very fair of us, is it? Take care."

--It is amazing how satsangis [RSSB initiates] rationalize inconsistencies in the guru's behavior and what he teaches.

Here we are talking about a Sat Guru who supposedly has access to the highest spiritual region (Sach Khand), the bliss of which makes this world (Pinda) seem like a latrine in comparison. Sawan Singh made that analogy. Also, RSSB teachings say unnecessary involvement with worldly concerns such as intense involvement with business transactions and making lots of money is detrimental to spiritual progress.

Why is a guru who has access to the sublime bliss of Sach Khand (heaven) in need of great amounts of money or the pursuit of wordly interests and hobbies associated with a world that is supposedly, from his perspective, a pit of shit in comparison to the exalted region he has access to?

The person who was quoted argued, in essence, that a spiritual guru won't do anything differently than anyone else. Likewise, it's often said that a guru won't outwardly appear to be any different than us unenlightened beings.

Hmmmm.

If there's no way to tell the difference between a guru who supposedly has realized the ultimate truths of the cosmos, and an average schmuck, why should anyone devote his or her life to following what the guru teaches?

Here's what I said back in 2006 in a post titled, "God-man or Asshole: the guru conundrum."

Ever since I met her, I’m been trying to convince my wife that I’m God. It just seems so obvious: I understand Windows XP and can fix her computer when something goes wrong; back when we used a VCR, I could program it to do whatever we wanted; I know how to hang a picture so it is centered perfectly over a piece of furniture.

Yet my husbandly divinity remains unrecognized. For some reason Laurel focuses more on such things as: my inability to put the kitchen sponge in its holder, rather than on the bottom of the sink; my incapacity to fold t-shirts properly and place them neatly in their designated drawer; my reluctance, after cutting off a slice of bread, to reintroduce the whole wheat loaf back into the bag where it is supposed to stay fresher.

Guess I should start calling myself a guru. Then my human failings could be construed as signs of my godliness.

...it turns out that there is no way to judge whether a guru is merged with God. If the guru acts perfectly divine, this is proof that he is an enlightened being. If the guru acts imperfectly human, this is proof that, in Savarese’s words, “He chooses to play the role of an ordinary man much of the time.” Why? Because, “If he didn’t he would attract all manner of miracle seekers and not the truth seekers he was meant to meet.”

Pretty good gig. Perfection means godliness. Imperfection also means godliness. It’s akin to a band being able to play as many off-key tunes as they wanted, because the audience would believe them when they said “We mean our songs to sound that way; if you are our fans, love the way we play them, not how you want to hear them.”

I'm learning Tai Chi from a guy who is obviously expert in it. My wife and I are taking ballroom dancing lessons from a woman who can clearly demonstrate her skills. Today I took our Toyota Highlander to be serviced at a dealership where the technicians are certified to know what they're doing.

But when it comes to salvation, enlightenment, or God-realization, lots of people are amazingly trusting that a supposed "guru" (the specific title differs in various religions) actually can walk the spiritual walk, and not just talk the spiritual talk.

One of my favorite sayings of the current guru, Gurinder Singh, is "How do you know that I don't just have the gift of gab?" (I'm not sure if he's still using this line in his talks, but he did fairly often in the early/mid 1990's, when I saw him numerous times).

Yes, indeed. How do we know that anyone has special expertise in some field? We can confirm that a mountain climber knows how to scale difficult peaks. We can document that a computer technician is able to get balky machines running smoothly again.

Yet where's the evidence that a guru is any different from you or me when it comes to knowing what, if anything, lies beyond the physical reality that we experience now? How could we tell that a guru is able to get one's mind/soul in good working order?

I like to visualize a "Who's the Guru?" game show, somewhat akin to the 1950s-60s "What's My Line?" The goal would be to pick the satguru ("true guru") out of a bunch of impostors.

How could this be done? What questions would be asked? Of course, the biggest question is whether the game even is possible, since the producers of the show would have to find a genuine true guru themselves.

This isn't a fantasy game. It is being played by millions of people in every corner of the world.

Heck, make that billions if we have a expansive definition of "guru," one that includes ministers, imams, rabbis, priests, yogis, and others who claim some special knowledge of a divine aspect to reality.

Skepticism is called for. The Emperor actually may have no clothes. (For those unfamiliar with this Hans Christian Andersen story, the plot is wonderfully apropos to the theme of this post.)

An Emperor who cares for nothing but his wardrobe hires two weavers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from a fabric invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position or "just hopelessly stupid".

The Emperor cannot see the cloth himself, but pretends that he can for fear of appearing unfit for his position or stupid; his ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they dress him in mime and the Emperor then marches in procession before his subjects.

A child in the crowd calls out that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all and the cry is taken up by others. The Emperor cringes, suspecting the assertion is true, but holds himself up proudly and continues the procession.

Embrace hard truth rather than reassuring faith

When I was an active member of an India-based religious/mystical group, a word that inspired me was sat. It means "truth," and was used in many ways: satsangi (follower of truth), satguru (conveyor of truth), satsang (speaking of truth), and so on.

Eventually I realized that my allegiance really was to truth, not to a particular dogma, philosophy, or practice. If my involvement with the group wasn't leading me closer to truth, the goal I'd set for myself wasn't being realized.

So I set off on a churchless path. I decided to genuinely commit myself to the tenets of the scientific method, rather than merely giving lip service to a "science of the soul" that really wasn't.

Via a tweet by someone I follow on Twitter, yesterday I came across an inspiring You Tube video that combines Carl Sagan's words and a variety of images. Sagan talks about how the universe -- reality -- isn't designed to meet our needs, nor our subjective conceptions.

Here's a transcript of the ending message of "Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made for Us." I like it a lot.

The significance of our lives, and our fragile planet, has been determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for our parents to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes.

But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring faith. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

We humans make our own meanings. Yet many people on Earth wrongly believe that the meaning of their lives is to be found in some supposedly holy scripture or spiritual teaching.

Rather than seek truth that can be tested, verified, and confirmed through rigorous methods in tune with the scientific method, these religious fundamentalists take the easy way out by assuming that some prophet, savior, guru, or other messenger of the divine/God knows what ultimate reality is like, so there's no need to seek out the hard truth Sagan speaks of.

Which may not be pleasant, comforting, ego-gratifying, or capable of producing a warm feeling of "I am a special beloved of God."

Many people who didn't know my mother very well considered her to be an intellectual. That was only partly true. Yes, she was highly intelligent. But her goal wasn't simply to exercise her mind. She was out for truth.

My mother loved science. Though she didn't have much money when I was growing up, I was given subscriptions to a monthly "Things of Science" (if I remember the name correctly). Every month a small box would arrive in the mail with a new experiment that would reveal something hitherto unknown to my child brain.

Carl Sagan's video reminded me of those days, when I sat in my room learning about how the natural world really was -- not how people wanted it to be (that I got from my brief foray into Catholicism, which my mother blessedly let me give up after I physically choked on my first communion and mentally choked on the religious dogma I was expected to learn in order to be "confirmed").

Yes, hard truth is better than reassuring faith. We need to embrace real "sat," not the fake variety.

Religions are wrong about self-realization

There's a lot of talk about self-realization in religious circles, mostly of the Eastern variety. The India-based spiritual group that I was a member of for many years promoted the idea, "self-realization before God-realization."

In the West, self-realization has much more of a secular connotation. Regardless, many people have a simplistic notion of the "self" that supposedly is to be known via meditation, mystic practice, prayer, psychotherapy, or some other means.

Modern neuroscience has demolished the fantasy that the essence of a human being is something open to view under the right circumstances, like a jewel wrapped in layers of cloth that only requires an unveiling to perceive.

Yesterday I came across a fascinating article by Louis Cozolino, Ph.D., a psychology professor and author of "The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy." Title: It's a Jungle in There: Our Brains are Not As Evolved as We Might Think.

Well, since I possess (or am) a male brain, I've known from direct experience that "highly evolved" isn't an apt description of much of my neuroanatomy, as shown below.

But Cozolino's piece contains some fascinating information about how much of the brain in both men and women is a lot more animalistic, and functionally inaccessible to our conscious awareness, than most people realize.

The article is about nine pages long when printed out. It's well worth taking the time to read, though. For those who want a synopsis of the main points, here's some quotes that I found particularly interesting.

The more recently emergent aspects of our brains—which give us astonishing powers of thought, logic, imagination, empathy, and morality—must share skull space with the ancient brain equipment that we've inherited from our mammalian and reptilian forebears over the past several million years. So even today, one of the most basic human challenges is integrating and coordinating the complex and highly specialized systems that comprise our brains.

...That so much neural processing occurs outside of conscious awareness and that executive decisions at multiple levels can oppose one another lay the groundwork for considerable inner conflict.

...In an image suggested by the British cultural philosopher and management consultant Charles Hampden-Turner, the human brain is an anachronistic menagerie, which confronts the psychotherapist with the challenge of treating a human, a horse, and a crocodile attempting to inhabit the same body.

...Our cortex allows us far greater response flexibility than our more primitive cousins have: we can think things through, rather than respond instinctively. But thinking through options takes time, and a speedy, unthinking reflex is sometimes more adaptive, more likely to save us from danger, than the ability to consider all the options. In the interest of survival, we've retained many primitive responses and automatic subcortical processes.

...The brain somehow creates the illusion that we're living in the present moment and are acting with free will based on conscious deliberation, but extensive evidence shows that this isn't the case. So, when we think we're directly experiencing what's going on around us, our conscious awareness is primarily the result of what's already occurred within our brains—fully 90 percent of the input to the cerebral cortex comes from internal neural processing.

...Once our brains have been shaped by fear to perceive, think, and act in specific ways, we tend to remain in cognitive and emotional ruts that are reinforced by what we perceive as our continuing survival needs. In other words, an agoraphobic person functions as if the following were true: "I haven't set foot outside my house in 10 years because of my agoraphobia. I'm still alive, which must be because I haven't set foot outside my house in 10 years." The mind's internal logic is self-perpetuating, making it difficult for us to find answers that differ from the ones we already know. Our chance of changing in positive ways rests on getting input from others, because our brains are shaped by others from birth and continue to be so, but our fear causes us to mistrust people and their differing perceptions.

...We carry within our skulls the entire history of the brain's evolution, from its primitive origins in the fishes, up through the early and later mammals, to the unimaginably complex organ of today's Homo sapiens.

...Perhaps for the first time in history, we can begin to get some sense of the vast, interconnected web that joins every human brain on earth to every other. This is a cause for awe and skepticism—awe at the power and potential of our collective cerebral tapestry, skepticism about what we imagine we know. After all, we're still only animals.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

Well, that's highly doubtful.

Yet even if it were true, every human being who has any sort of experience is accomplishing this via a physical brain that, as noted in a quote above, processes most of what we come to be aware of outside of conscious awareness.

And what's much more likely is that we indeed are "only animals" who have evolved an ability to think of ourselves as having passed beyond our animal nature. This is belied, however, by the neuroscientific understanding of the brain's primitive parts.

Admittedly, the triune brain theory (reptilian, ancient mammalian, modern human) has been superseded by more accurate and sophisticated models. But the fact remains that whatever our "self" may be, it isn't something simple, obvious, supernatural, or transparently evident to awareness.

So this makes traditional religious/spiritual notions of self-realization laughably out of touch with reality. Whatever we are, it isn't what we intuitively consider ourselves to be -- often with ridiculously excessive confidence.

If somebody claims to be self-realized, or says he knows how this can be achieved, ask him to show you a "self." He won't be able to do it, just as no supposedly God-realized person ever has been able to demonstrate the existence of a "God."

Reality is a boat without oars

Yesterday a regular visitor to this blog, tucson, left a comment on a post that deserved more attention than it likely was going to get.

(Irritatingly, TypePad, my blog service, doesn't take a click on a "recent comments" link directly to the comment, only to the post; tucson's comment was on an old post with hundreds of comments on multiple pages, so it was hard to find).

Here's what tucson had to say in response to a previous comment by "Neitzsche" that talked about the guru of an Eastern religious organization (RSSB), Gurinder Singh. I thought tucson's advice to Neitzsche was wise. And I even was able to smile at tucson's dig at Obama.

Nietzsche made a few remarks:

N. said: "I read that a satguru does not have to achieve the highest level possible, that makes sense to me but I've read that only a truth master can initiate so there must be a lie somewhere. If the satguru refers to your inner master that makes sense to me too."

--You repeatedly say you have "read" that so and so is true. I suggest relying more on your personal experience, reason, common sense and not on what you read. Does anything that you read about a satguru make sense to you, i.e. the supposed powers he/she has, etc.? What in your personal experience would lead you to rationally conclude that a satguru can do what you "read" about him/her. Would you believe me if I told you, without any evidence to back it up, that I know beings from the planet Venus and travel there with them regularly? I do, you know. What the master claims is far more implausible, imo.

N. said: "Especially because I've had the following experiences:
1-just after my initiation a friend, who is still very psychic, said looking at the foto of Gurinder, this man has no powers judged from the aura."

--I am a little "psychic" at times and once got the same impression about Gurinder, but don't rely on us. What do YOU feel? That's what is important.

N. said: "2-a paranormal gifted person that I consulted years later said when showed the foto's of Gurinder. He is hiding something and he does not want people to figure him out. He also said that he was not a very high person but seeing the second foto commented that he was learning fast."

--How would a person, such as a psychic, know if someone is "high"? How is "high" established? Perhaps the psychic is not "high" enough to recognize how high the master is or isn't. IMO we are all the same. Nothing higher, nothing lower. Bug, cat, human..all equal manifestations in mind or consciousness. The master is the disciple, the disciple is the master. Snake...Barrack Obama. Same thing. (Sorry, had to get in my political dig.)

N. said: "3-a friend that can very good tell what people feel when holding an object of the person held the foto of Gurinder in his hand and said that the person was grumbling that thins did not go like he wanted them to go. Not a saint at all he said."

--Why presume that a saint can't be in a bad mood sometimes? These presumptions are ideas, concepts that you have accumulated about how a supposed realized person might behave. Consider the possibility these concepts may not have anything to do with the truth of the matter, whatever that may be.

N. said: "Especially the last comment hit close home because all people above did know nothing about santmat but I know that Gurinder tends to send sewadars home now and then when things don't go his way and my own observation is that he is not very patient indeed and I have the ability to judge character if I may say so. I just didn't want to see it."

--Well, I don't think that a "realized" person necessarily must behave perfectly according to a relative set of standards. Why should they? Who knows what such a one would do?... Sing Kumbaya all day? Maybe. Throw bananas at gawkers? Maybe. Who knows?

But here you touch on something significant. YOU sensed that Gurinder's character was not very good, yet you try to deny that which was before your very eyes, your own gut feeling, because of what you were told, or read, or the opinion of others about the ways of a master. People like to say that when their guru behaves badly it is only a reflection of their own inner condition or that it was some kind of spiritual lesson, or some kind of karma had to be cleared. Blind belief in this kind of stuff, this kind of thinking, cult mentality, could get you drinking some poison kool-aid one day.

N. said: "And now? Should I go on that he is only pointing at my higher self? Shouldn't he tell the truth to his followers? Are they better of believing? I am treated as outcast now and then by them :("

--He should tell the truth to his followers but that probably would put him out of business. RSSB is a religious cult, imo. People brainwashed by the cult mindset are going to reject that which does not fit nicely into the cult mindset box...namely you. Congratulations, it appears your escape is immanent as evidenced by your statement below.

I feel that you are a nice person, too nice sometimes, and are maybe a little naive (no offense intended). You give too much of your power to others and rely on them too much...psychics, masters, bibles, heresay, scriptures can be tools but the ultimate tool is with you as this which you are, always present. Stand strong within yourself. Listen to your gut and intuition and see what is really true for you.

N said: "The group pressure from the satsangi's I escaped a long time ago. What is wrong with me or my christian roots? And why shouldn't I feel good about me? Why is it so important to all think alike and to be little slaves? I find the group pressure having much resemblance to a cult."

--There. You have answered for yourself and knew it all along, but maybe as a suggestion you should consider applying the same scrutiny to Christian beliefs as well.

It's a little uncomfortable at first but you may have to stand alone facing the vastness of infinity without a guide, without oars for your boat. But don't worry, infinity is the guide. For me, the truth is... there are no oars and infinity takes care of itself.

After tucson posted his comment, I left one of my own in the same distant reaches of a 2005 blog post. Mine contained links to a So You Think You Can Dance hip-hop performance by Alex and Twitch that, to me, conveys some deep truths about the meaning of life -- or the lack thereof.

Here it is (if you watch the video, keep in mind that Alex is a professional ballet dancer):

tucson, great comment. There's a lot of wisdom in what you said. As for me, about all I feel like adding to your sentiments is...

A link to a post on my other blog about a terrific hip-hop dance message: "Get Out of Your Mind!"
http://bit.ly/cDzjeT

And a link to a video of that performance, which I found strangely compelling. If all psychiatrists acted like this, that'd be way cool. Also, all gurus. (A short ad precedes the video.)
http://bit.ly/a2fwC7

Speaking of comments... I've decided to turn on TypePad's "comment moderation" feature. There's been a summer infestation of trolls whose pathetic life seems to consist in large part of leaving infantile insults on this blog, which I have to delete.

Prevention is better than cure/deletion.

With comment moderation, where I approve non-troll comments periodically during the day, this here Church of the Churchless isn't bothered by jerks yelling comment-wise, "Look at me! Look at me! I know how to talk like a foul-mouthed five year old!"

So until a different fancy strikes me, I'm enjoying having comments published after a relatively short delay. As I said before, I've got no interest in having this blog used as a platform for spewing fundamentalist religious nonsense or inane insults. 

On the positive side, recently I've gotten some emails from people who appreciate the churchless message of my blog posts and visitor comments. Those comments often are the best part of a post, as evidenced by tucson's thoughts above.

Finding our place in a factual cosmos

There's only one thing wrong with religious cosmologies: they aren't true. And that's a pretty damn serious thing. Which is why we shouldn't take erroneous views of the universe seriously.

Yet we humans are meaning-creatures. Bare facts aren't enough for us.

Our highly evolved minds love to construct stories about what life is all about, what's most important for us to do, and other value-laden layerings that provide a increased depth to our existence.

The choice each of us faces is how realistic our "myths" are.

Now, that word, myth, doesn't need to refer to something untrue. There's another way of regarding that term, as described by physicist Joel Primack and philosopher of science Nancy Abrams in their book, "The View From the Center of the Universe: Discovering our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos."

Myth is a way human beings relate to their universe. What exactly is a myth? In his last book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, mythologist Joseph Campbell made the passionate argument that what our society most desperately needs is a new story of reality for all of us -- not just some chosen group. The story must demonstrate humanity's connection to all there is, yet be consistent with what we know scientifically.

...Unlike Campbell, many people use the word myth to mean "the opposite of reality" -- that is, a notion held by other people who are delusional or at best quaint, but this is a very unfortunate understanding of myth that limits our ability to draw on its power and its importance to the human mind. Myths don't just represent a reality people already know about: myths present reality. They define it.

In this book, when we use the word "myth," we mean what Campbell meant: the highest-order explanations, the stories that people of any culture, at any time including today, communally believe and use to explain the larger reality, including their own place in it.

Here's the exciting thing about living in the 21st century: for the first time in human history, we have the ability to construct myths about our place in the universe that are actually true. 

Primack and Abrams demolish an erroneous myth: that science keeps overturning ways of understanding the cosmos, so seemingly valid current scientific theories are just as flimsy as the pre-Copernican concept that the Earth was the center of the universe.

Actually, they correctly point out, what has been happening since the time of Newton is that new theories encompass old theories.

There have been several revolutions in physics since Newton, but none of these has overthrown the previous theory. Revolutionary scientific theories do not have to overthrow their predecessors except at the earliest stage of a science when a scientific theory is replacing earlier ideas that were not well supported by evidence.

Once a field of science undergoes the revolution that creates for it a solid intellectual foundation -- like the one Newtonian mechanics gave physics, or Darwinian evolution gave biology -- that foundational theory can stand forever. Science then progresses by encompassing the foundational theory in a new and larger theory that explains things beyond the ken of the older theory.

So we can have a lot of confidence in what is currently known about the cosmos.

That knowledge is incomplete. It has lots of holes and contradictions (such as the differing perspectives of relativity theory and quantum mechanics). But basically it is almost certainly true. 

Which is why both our personal and collective meaning-myths need to be founded on scientific facts. This still leaves a lot of room for creativity, imagination, and hypothesizing about what lies out there beyond the horizon of our current Knowledge Ocean.

For example, this morning I read the "What is the Universe Made Of?" chapter in The View From the Center of the Universe. Here's a marvelous visual summary that appeared in the chapter of a whole lot of scientific research, and was thankfully shared on the book's web site.

This is a marvelous factual "myth," an easy to understand -- but not easy to genuinely comprehend -- visualization of what reality is composed of.

Visible matter is only 0.5% of the total. The black part of the pyramid represents the invisible: that is, what we do not see but know is there. The top and smallest layer of invisibility is simply non-shining and unlit atomic matter -- matter that is invisible in fact, but not in principle. It is about 4 percent of the total.

Below it lies the far more massive layer of dark matter, which is invisible in principle. It represents about 25 percent of the total. And below that lies the energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe, dark energy. It is 70 percent of the total density of the universe now.

Wow.

Religious people often talk about the mystery of God, which attracts them. Yet there is so much mystery to be found within the bounds of science. Who needs God? Mysterious reality is much more appealing than mysterious fantasy. 

True believers in some faith also enjoy the feeling of being special that their religion offers them. Here again, though, facts of science trump the illusions of dogma. 

Primack and Abrams speak of how rare is that .01% of all matter and energy in the universe comprised of heavier elements than hydrogen and helium. That's us! We conscious beings are literally made of "stardust," since those elements are the result of exploding stars.

Here's a modern myth shared in the early part of the book, which the authors elaborate on in succeeding chapters:

Imagine you have suddenly lost your memory. You see yourself in a mirror, but there is only this moment. You are unaware of any past, even the very moment before this one. You are solid, your cells are real, your heart is pumping, but how you got to the spot on which you stand, you have no idea.

Who are you? There is no answer.

You are not your family background, your personal history, the work you've done, your hopes for the future. These don't exist. You have no family, no associations. You're like a computer with hormones. You have lost your soul. You are listening to the latest music, buying the latest improved products, and believing the latest media interpretations of the world outside your room. This is all you know.

Now instead imagine yourself as a branching history and send your consciousness backward through the branches at lightning speed. Down past your parents and grandparents, down the countless generations before them, through your ancestors roaming from continent to continent, your primate ancestors, down through all the animals that preceded them, back through the earliest life, into a single cell, down into the complex chemicals that made it possible, down into the molten planet and the forming solar system, the birth of your carbon and oxygen and iron in exploding stars far across the galaxy, back through the universal expansion to the creation of your elementary particles in the Big Bang.

This is not fantasy. This is science: you are all this. Who you are is the sum total of your history. How far back you take that history -- how much of your own identity you claim -- is up to you.

This is a blog for the churchless, not the churched

Hey, true believing religiously-minded visitors to this blog, it's time for a reminder, as unnecessary as this should be, given the name at the top of every page: Church of the Churchless.

Get it? Churchless.

That means not belonging to an organized religion, spiritual path, mystic practice, or such. That means thinking for yourself, believing for yourself, finding a life meaning for yourself, seeking out truth for yourself.

Also, it means not accepting ready made answers from a holy book, revered guru, or other source that demands blind faith rather than open-eyed skepticism. Nor does it mean rejecting scientific facts because they don't mesh with some supernatural dogma. 

Frequently I get aggrieved comments and emails from people who are disturbed that I'm not open to their particular brand of fundamentalism. After seeing that someone has missed the point of this blog, I delete the comment or trash the email message.

Look, guys (for some reason, I rarely, if ever, hear from fundamentalist gals), before getting all upset that a churchless blogger isn't interested in your favored religious delusion, you should do some experimenting.

Find your local Harley-Davidson club. Walk into a meeting and loudly say, "I want us to talk about why Japanese scooters are so superior to the American motorcycles you ride." Then, when they ask you to shut the fuck up, keep on demanding that they admit Harley's are pieces of crap.

See how that works for you.

Next, attend a Vegetarian Society get-together. When it comes time to share favorite dishes, start handing out the recipe for the great barbecued ribs you get so many compliments on from your meat-loving friends. 

See how that goes over with the crowd.

My point is that there's something for everybody on the Internet. But not everything is suitable for somebody with a particular agenda or viewpoint. Like, this blog if you've got a religious dogma you want to push.

In that case, adios, amigo.

Up to now sometimes I've been pretty loose about allowing preachy comments on my blog posts to remain up. I've figured that having some examples of delusional fundamentalist thinking offers some tempting targets for us churchless types to shoot down.

That's getting tiresome, though, because I don't like to offer true believers any sort of blogosphere soapbox to spout their faith-based dogmas from. There's plenty of web sites where members of a religion can talk about how right they are, and how wrong everybody else is.

About six years ago I started this blog because I wanted to support those who are searching for "spiritual" truth (using that word loosely, and not in a supernatural sense) outside of the confines of organized faiths.

People who feel like they don't belong anywhere sometimes have a need to associate with fellow free-spirits. So when it came time to come up with a "tag line" for this blog, Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence popped readily into my mind.

And I've never felt like changing it.

I just re-read "Our Creedless Creed" that I wrote back in November 2004. Anyone who wonders whether this blog is for them should read those churchless principles and see if they agree with my central points.

Such as...

There is no objective proof that any religion knows the truth about God. If there were such proof, most people on Earth would have converted to that faith long ago and all scientists would be believers.

Spirituality thus is an individual affair. Proof of any metaphysical realities that exist will be subjective, not demonstrable to others.

Science is the surest means of finding truth. Theory, experiment, analysis of data: such are the tools of science, whether directed toward knowing material or immaterial reality.

Religious teachings are hypotheses to be confirmed through individual research. As such, they must not be taken as gospel truth by adherents of a particular faith.

Religious doubters, skeptics, and heretics should be honored for their efforts to assure that unproven assertions about God are not put forward as solid truth.

Every adherent of a particular religion should say to himself or herself,"I could be wrong." If he or she won't do this, other people can say it for them: "You could be wrong."

I also said:

This creedless creed of the Church of the Churchless also could be wrong. It needs to be reexamined and revised regularly.

So far, though, I don't see any need for revisions. A whole lot of churchless discussions on this blog, and a whole lot of life lessons I've learned over the past six years haven't led me to view things differently.

I'm still deeply skeptical about unscientific faith-based approaches to understanding reality. But I'm not skeptical about religious skepticism. Thus if you're a true believer, this blog isn't for you.

Jon Stewart sucks up to religion, sadly

Oh, Jon, you failed me. My wife and I watch The Daily Show almost every night, and we enjoy your skewering of political, religious, and other varieties of pretentiousness.

But last night your interview with Marilynne Robinson, author of "Absence of Mind," was pathetically weak. PZ Myers, an avid defender of science and attacker of religiosity, also felt let down by you.

The low point came as Stewart tried to justify Robinson's nebulous argument that science and religion need each other, and he offered stock apologetics.

The more you delve into science, the more it relies on faith.

No, it doesn't. The less you delve into science, and the more superficial your understanding of the evidence, the more likely you are to ascribe its more difficult concepts to faith. Faith is the product of ignorance.

When Stewart strained to give an example of faith-based conclusions in science, he came up with one: anti-matter. He's never seen it, so obviously it must not be real, but only the imagined fancy of some egghead physicist somewhere.

Unfortunately for Stewart, anti-matter exists. It's been observed, measured, analyzed. Its existence is not a matter of faith, but of knowledge and experiment.

Marilynne Robinson was no better, of course, just mumbling the usually feeble platitudes and complaining that the atheists represent science poorly, as if she'd know. And at the end, she offered up this little jewel, unchallenged by Stewart.

We need insights from religion.

Name one. Name one insight religion has ever given us that could not have been made by secular philosophers, that was also useful and true.

Actually, I think Stewart was thinking of dark matter when he said "anti-matter," because I recall him mentioning that science doesn't know what most of the universe is made of. (Dark matter is estimated to constitute 80% of the matter in the universe, while regular matter constitutes 20%.)

Regardless, I agree with Myers that Robinson exhibited little understanding of the scientific method, and explained her own competing approach to grasping reality in confusing philosophical verbiage.

Her book apparently argues that science ignores subjectivity and human consciousness. But this obviously isn't true. Modern neuroscience studies both of these areas in considerable depth. What seems to bother Robinson is that the findings of science don't support her personal religious views.

As this review says:

Robinson herself is a student of John Calvin and the American transcendentalists, a woman of deep Christian commitment. In the best sense, she's a religious writer, always returning to the most fundamental human concerns: What does it mean to be alive? What must we do to stay true to our deepest selves? How are we to live and die? 

So it isn't surprising that Robinson is irked by science's inability to find evidence for the existence of God or the soul. Though I haven't read her book, she seems to favor the Subjective Argument for God that I criticized in a recent post. 

Another review of her book contains this quote:

Subjectivity "is the ancient haunt of piety and reverence and long, long thoughts. And the literatures that would dispel such things refuse to acknowledge subjectivity, perhaps because inability has evolved into principle and method."

What the heck is she talking about? What "literatures" refuse to acknowledge subjectivity? I've read every major book by the so-called New Atheists: Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and others.

They don't claim that subjectivity doesn't exist. I've never heard any scientist or philosopher make such a statement. Rather, the scientific method, and rationalism in general, is used to guard against unwarranted subjective conclusions about the nature of objective reality, because the human mind can be fooled.

One of the comments on PZ Myer's post nailed it for me:

I expected better than not even wrong from Stewart. More fool me, I suppose. Just one more otherwise smart person with a huge blindspot when it comes to their chosen sky fairy.

We need insights from religion.

This is like saying we need insights from crack cocaine use. Actually, it is probably worse than that. She [Robinson] is saying that all the oppression, the 'holy' warfare, the torture, the homophobia, the misogyny, the racism, the child-rape - all the horror born of irrational woo is all OK, because she needs her dose of comforting fairy tale to get through the day and help her deal with complicated scientific concepts that hurt her (pea) brain.

Pathetic is not a strong enough word. Religion has nothing to offer science except the corruption of scientific vigour and the debasement of scientific endeavour into a means to extend the stygian, superstitious darkness of the mind propagated by religion beyond the point in our species development when we were so afraid of the unknown that believing in a sky fairy was the only way we knew how to deal with the uncaring, purposeless universe.

We are witnessing a new intellectual dawn for our species, and the fundies are desperately scrabbling to get back into the shadows of ignorance that empower their delusions.

Julian Baggini's review of "Absence of Mind" is more nuanced, but also critical:

So it is not clear what restoring the status of subjective testimony would entail. Surely it cannot mean anything so crass as trusting our gut instincts or intuitions. This typifies a general failing of the book: by focusing on the inadequacies of some attacks on religion and subjective experience, Robinson avoids having to say much positive in favour of them.

They just become varieties of venerable mystery that science has no right to defile. That does not prevent quantum theory and other scientific unknowns being invoked in religion's support, as though the acceptance of corners of mystery in one domain justifies a whole edifice of mystery in another.

God's curious ultimate subjectivity

For almost six years I've been asking true believers of various faiths if they can provide any demonstrable evidence that God exists. (Any "God," personal or impersonal, monistic or dualistic, I'm not particular.)

Not surprisingly -- given the still ongoing vigorous debate concerning this subject after some 10,000 years of recorded human history -- I've never gotten a convincing answer.

But this doesn't stop the religious from believing in God.

Often I hear, "I just know that God exists. Don't ask me for proof. I just know." OK, I'll respond, good for you. But your subjective experience is only true for you, so don't expect me or anyone else to give credence to your belief given that it has such a flimsy basis.

Over on the Philosophy of Religion web site, this argument for the existence of God from subjective experience comes in for some well-deserved criticism. 

It may be that I cannot prove to you that I had a religious experience, or even describe that experience to you, and so that my experience cannot count for you as evidence of God’s existence; for me, though, who knows that the experience is real and who does not need to describe it in order to understand it, my experience may provide a basis for rational belief.

Verifying one’s own religious experiences, however, can be just as problematic as verifying someone else’s. Thomas Hobbes asked what the difference is between saying “God spoke to me in a dream” and saying “I dreamt that God spoke to me.”

The problem is that religious experiences are merely mental events, and there is therefore no logical problem with our having these experiences without the world being as they represent it to be. We could just as readily doubt our own religious experiences, asking “Was I hallucinating?”, “Am I putting my own interpretation onto something mundane?”, “Was it something I ate?”, as anyone else’s. It seems, therefore, that we can never be sure enough of a religious experience to prove anything objective about the world.

However, there's another approach that some true believers like to take in an attempt to get around this obvious lack of demonstrable objective evidence for God. They cast God as the ultimate subject, the "I" behind all other senses of I-ness, the all-pervading consciousness which makes awareness of all sorts possible.

Elizabeth West, a Christian Buddhist, heads in this philosophical direction in her "Emptiness and God." I read her piece quickly, noting approvingly that after she quoted Ken Wilber, West wrote, "This is probably enough of Ken Wilber to digest in one go." Amen to that. That's often how I feel when I read Wilber also.

West uses quotes from Wilber, Ramana, Tillich, and others in an attempt to elucidate the notion of God as Absolute Subjectivity, the "witness" behind our thoughts, perceptions, and other contents of consciousness.

Well, that's an interesting idea.

However, I don't see how it (1) bears any resemblance to the God that billions of religious devotees from all sorts of faiths believe in, or (2) has any practical relevance to anything, being merely an abstract philosophical concept.

After all, let's consider what subjectivity means in everyday life. It's the inner side of us, as contrasted with the outer side that other people recognize.

Sartre and other existentialists speak of how I am an object to my wife, while she is an object to me. I know myself from the inside, but I can only know her from the outside, so to speak. And the same is true for her. We struggle to express our innermost feelings, knowing that what we know subjectively never can be adequately expressed objectively -- in words, actions, expressions, whatever.

Still, for every subject, for each human being, there is a corresponding object: his or her outward physical manifestation. Never is there a disassociated blob of pure subjectivity floating around, an "I" without any objective characteristics.

Each and every subjective experience that I or anyone else has is associated with something objectively real. Even dreams, which are highly subjective, take place in the physical brain, as do so-called "mystical" experiences -- since if the mystic is alive, he or she lives as (or at least through) a human brain.

So what would it mean for God to be Absolute Subjectivity? My short answer: nothing. This is a meaningless notion.

We have no experience of absolute subjectivity. There is no reason to believe that it exists, or is possible to exist. How could anyone experience a state of absolute subjectivity and know that such a state exists? For this to happen there would have to be awareness of a subjective state, which is dualistic, not "absolute."

I've read many books by Buddhist, Vedanta, Zen, and other sorts of practitioners that claim some sort of ultimate "I" exists. Consciousness with no content. Subjectivity without a subject. Awareness absent anyone being aware.

They all ring false, some more than others. For it simply isn't possible to experience a state of Absolute Subjectivity. You'd never know it if it was present, and if you knew it was present, that couldn't be it.

Same applies to God.

If God is Absolute Subjectivity, you'd never know if God was present, and if you knew God was present, that wouldn't be God.

So if there aren't any objective signs of God, and there can't be any signs of a purely subjective God, where does this leave us?

With no God. Or rather, no God that can be known.

Which is pretty darn similar to saying, "with no God." I'm fine with that, because reality is better than fantasy. I'm under no illusion, though, that the true believers of the world are going to give up their illusions.

What's churchlessly cool about Judaism (and, not)

I've never rank-ordered the major world religions on how appealing they are to me. Maybe I'll do that after finishing Stephen Prothero's "God is Not One," a book I've blogged about here and here.

Prothero's clear descriptions of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, et.al. are helping me to better understand what turns me on, and off, about them. There's something to like in every religion, even if only a little (so far, Islam is my least favorite).

This morning I finished the chapter on Judaism. I've always been intrigued by this religion, in large part because, as Prothero points out, Jews are exceedingly brilliant and creative, yet orthodox Judaism has some of the most nonsensical ritual practices.

On the brilliant side:

There are only about 14 million Jews worldwide, not much more than the population of Mumbai, India... Fourteen of Time magazine's one hundred most important people of the twentieth century were Jewish, including film director Steven Spielberg, author Anne Frank, and person of the century Albert Einstein.

Jews have done even better with the Nobel Prize, claiming one quarter of these honors since they were first awarded in 1901. Whenever anyone anywhere puts on a pair of Levi's, sips a cappuccino from Starbucks, spends a night in a Hyatt, powers up a Dell computer, or performs a Google search, they have a Jewish entrepreneur to thank.... Jews, who make us less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, account for the vast majority of America's working comics.

On the nonsensical side:

Jewish law can seem irrational to outsiders, and the way some Jews follow the law can seem obsessive and hypocritical at the same time. For example, though it is not permitted to press an elevator button on the Sabbath (since the button operates an electrical switch and is therefore considered work), some buildings with Jewish residents have Sabbath elevators that stop automatically on every floor.

A more widely publicized example is the eruv. Jewish law forbids carrying objects outside the home on the Sabbath. So it is impermissible to carry an infant to a neighbor's house or to push your wheelchair-bound grandfather there. In order to allow infants and infirm grandparents alike to enjoy the gift of Shabbat, Jews devised a creative solution to this problem: "a magic schlepping circle" called an eruv, which via wires between adjacent homes creates a symbolic fence, turning what had been a public space into a private one.

Since 2007, an eruv has covered most of Manhattan. An "eruvitect" makes sure it remains in good working order, and updates on its status appear regularly online.

Indeed, that's true.

This page of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue web site describes which side of various streets observant Jews can carry objects down on the Sabbath. Fascinating. (I also was fascinated by our oven's Sabbath Feature.)

Now, I hasten to add that in my true believing past I've followed some pretty darn weird ritualistic practices myself. So I can understand why some Jews do strange stuff, as most adherents of any religion do.

And Prothero describes the wide variety of ways Jews follow their faith, from very strict to loosey-goosey. He says, "Judaism has no real creed." More than anything else, Jews love to argue about Judaism. This openness is one of the religion's coolest characteristics.

Most human beings find ambiguity intolerable. Chasing after certainty and running away from contradictions, we squint when testing our eyes, determined to bring what is blurry into focus, as if our determination could make it so. Jews are trained not just to abide ambiguity but to glory in it. If, as Oscar Wilde wrote, "The well-bred contradict other people" while "the wise contradict themselves," the Jewish scriptures are wisdom personified.

I also like the Jewish focus on this life, not a hypothetical afterlife. When I went to India in 1998, on the flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong I was seated next to a Jewish couple who were headed to China to adopt a baby.

Since I was on a pilgrimage of sorts to see the guru of the spiritual group I was involved with at the time, and to work on a volunteer book project about karma and vegetarianism, I was in the mood for some deep metaphysical discussions.

Didn't happen.

When I asked the couple what they thought would happen after death, they said, "We have no idea." Even more, they couldn't care less. What they loved about being Jews were the connections with other people via ritual celebrations: Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and such.

Much of Judaism doesn't make sense to me. But the Jewish approach to living life fully, rather than anticipating an afterlife, does.

Jewish thought has long downplayed the world to come. While many Reform Jews deny the bodily resurrection and many Orthodox Jews affirm it, almost all Jews agree that our focus should be on this life. Even among the Orthodox there is less talk of the world to come than there is among most Muslims and Christians.

A saying in the Mishnah takes jabs at all sorts of theological speculation, concluding with a broadside at speculation about the afterlife: "Whoever reflects upon four things would have been better off had he not been born: what is above, what is below, what is before, and what is beyond."

Good advice.

Why God can't be found

The shortest, simplest, and likely most accurate answer to the question, "Why can't God be found?," is: because God doesn't exist. We also can't find unicorns, leprechauns, or the Tooth Fairy (hope my granddaughter isn't reading this post) for what almost certainly is the same reason.

They don't exist.

But for the sake of argument let's assume that some entity which reasonably could be called "God" does exist. Don't ask me to define that term, "God," because it isn't possible. An understanding of God comes at the end of the search for him/her/it, not before.

And that brings us to the biggest problem in finding God. There's no preferred direction in which to look. If you doubt this, pick up the book that I've been reading, "God is Not One." 

The author, Stephen Prothero, clearly shows how different Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba Religion, Judaism, and Daoism are. These aren't just superficial differences, either.

In each of these major faiths, countless dedicated seekers of truth have labored long and hard to pierce the veils that supposedly separate humans from an ultimate divinity. These saints, mystics, yogis, monks, sages, and wise men/women have meditated, prayed, chanted, mortified themselves, and otherwise engaged in an amazingly wide variety of spiritual practices.

End result: no agreement about the nature of God.

Some faiths say that God (using that term as loosely as possible) is personal; others impersonal. Some faiths say there is only one God; others many Gods. Some faiths say that God is a perfect being; others that God is as flawed as we are. Some faiths say that God is transcendent; others that God is immanent within every atom.

Recently a commenter on this blog said something familiar: "God is to be found within." Well, that tells us absolutely nothing. What isn't to be found within? Name one entity in the cosmos that can be known by a human being outside of that person's consciousness.

Everything is found within our consciousness. The trick in finding something is having some idea where to look. In everyday life, as in science, almost always there are preferred hypotheses that enable us to narrow down the range of search options.

If I can't find my watch, it's unlikely to be in Mongolia if I haven't visited there recently. If our dog won't come when I whistle, my first thought is to check her favorite squirrel stalking locations, not to drive into downtown Salem and look for her at the mall.

When it comes to finding God, though, I've reached the conclusion that there aren't any search techniques which are demonstrably more likely to be effective than any others. I've read countless (almost) descriptions of mystical and spiritual experiences by people from all sorts of religious backgrounds. Also, non-religious.

Everything seems to work for somebody, somewhere, some time. Putting in effort. Utterly relaxing. Eyes open. Eyes shut. Finding God on your own. Trusting a guide/guru. Purifying your body/mind. Embracing drugs, sex, and rock & roll. And so on. And so on.

When people say, "I'm a seeker of God," they aren't really telling the truth. Again, how is it possible to seek something that (1) probably doesn't exist, and (2) if it does exist, leaves no clues where it can be found?

What they actually mean is that they've decided, for no good reason, that God is most likely to be found by following the precepts of a particular religion, spiritual path, mystic practice, or such.

Without any demonstrable evidence that God is to be found on a particular section of the 360 degree Possibly Divine Truth Circle, they confidently head off on a certain "degree heading." Meanwhile, other people all over the world are choosing their own preferred paths.

Underlying what I call my Wu Project is a sense that this is senseless. Now, I can't prove that no one finds God by searching in a certain direction. But in return, no one can prove that this is possible -- so I'm sticking with my null hypothesis:

God can't be found.

Here's the funny thing, though: I'm still open to the possibility that God exists. Yes, I think this is exceedingly unlikely. But unlikely isn't impossible. So every morning I sit down and meditate for a while.

I don't search for God. I'm simply open to the possibility of God. I say "hello," wordlessly. To nobody and nothing in particular. It's the same thing I do when I answer the phone. Except in this case, there's no signal to alert me that God is calling.

Only silence. And, when I have my eyes shut, darkness.

I figure that if God exists, it isn't possible for me to find him/her/it. It's up to God to find me. If that never happens, I won't be surprised, since I think it is extremely unlikely that an entity anything like our human conceptions of "God" exists. I simply enjoy being open to the possibility.

Surprises are fun.

If God ever surprises me with an answer to my "hello," I'll be sure to let you know. You can either reply via a comment on this blog or -- another possibility -- with a visit to the mental institution where they're treating me.

John Burroughs' appealing scientific pantheism

Whenever I take one of those quizzes that tell you what religion/ philosophy melds best with your beliefs, pantheism always ends up close to the top. That makes sense.

I've got a naturalistic view of the universe, but I also have a powerful sense of awe when I contemplate the cosmos -- either in its incomprehensibly vast totality, or the mystery of how a single flower has come to be.

Today I came across a mention of John Burroughs in "The Quotable Atheist," a book I pick up regularly for some churchless inspiration. The Burroughs quotes I liked the most were mostly drawn from this passage in his' "The Scheme of the Universe."

When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there.

I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air.

I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the outstanding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end.

We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can.

Burroughs also said:

"Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it."

"Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe."

"Man’s craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment... The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it."

Beautiful.

Burroughs has been described as a literary naturalist, someone who had a marvelous capacity for describing a relationship with the natural world that almost everyone senses to some degree, but which most of us don't feel as intensely as he did.

I can relate to his mention of getting used to "the cosmic chill."

For most of my life I was seeking the warmth of religious consolation (Eastern mysticism variety). I didn't like the chilling idea of death: that one day little me would return to the nothing that I was before my conception and birth. I wanted a promise of everlasting beingness.

Living onward as me after I die still seems much more appealing than non-existence. But I no longer am able to embrace a religious fantasy of life after death. If that dream comes true, great. If not, I'd rather live life in its chilling reality than cozy up to an imaginary faith-flame.

And Burroughs reminds us that if we identify ourselves as part and parcel of nature, not some disembodied soul, then it is impossible for us to die. It all depends on how we view the "we" that is "us."

This vital Nature out of which we came, out of which father and mother came, out of which all men come, and to which again we all in due time return, why should we fear it or distrust it? It makes our hearts beat and our brains think. When it stops the beating and the thinking, will it not be well also? It looked after us before we were born; it will look after us when we are dead.

Every particle of us will be taken care of; the force of every heart-beat is conserved somewhere, somehow. There is no stoppage and no waste, forever and ever. My consciousness ceases as a flame ceases, but that which made my consciousness does not cease. What comfort is that to the me?

Ah, the me wants to go on and on. But let the me learn that only Nature goes on and on, that the law which makes the me and unmakes it is alone immortal, and that it is best so. Identity is a thought, a concept of our minds, and not a property of our minds.

Good stuff.

I also liked Burroughs "The God of Pantheism," where he points out how much more sense it makes to call the totality of everything nature rather than God -- since we can worship (if we want to use that word) nature by kneeling in our garden and touching the earth, whereas an other-worldly God is, of course, utterly unnatural.

When we call the power back of all God, it smells of creeds and systems, of superstition, intolerance, persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and sky and stars.

I admit that it smells of tornadoes and earthquakes, of disease and death too, but these things make it all the more real to us to conceive of God in terms of universal Nature - a nature God in whom we really live and move and have our being, with whom our relation is as intimate and constant as that of the babe in its mother's womb, or the apple upon the bough.

This is the God that science and reason reveal to us - the God we touch with our hands, see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and from whom there is no escape - a God whom we serve and please by works and not by words, whose worship is deeds, and whose justification is in adjusting ourselves to his laws and availing ourselves of his bounty, a God who is indeed from everlasting to everlasting.