Church of the Churchless

"How are you?" stimulates a blog post reply

It's dangerous to ask a blogger a simple question. Four words, "How are you, Brian?," can lead to a much longer reply. Not only can: they are. A few days ago Suzanne ended her comment on a post with:

How are you, Brian? It's lovely to see you continue to blog so enthusiastically! Apparently, you are thriving.

Suzanne (and anyone else who cares), you're right. I am indeed thriving.

Each and every day I prove to myself that believing in God or any other form of religiosity is absolutely unnecessary for living a happy, meaningful, satisfying, and productive life.

I realize that many true believers feel that without their religion, life would be empty.

All I can say is, maybe for you, but not for everybody. Living in the here and now is, after all, the only sort of living that's possible. Churchless folks like me simply are honest and truthful about this fact.

We don't pretend to be somewhere or somebody that we're not.

The most fervent believer in spending eternity with Jesus in heaven actually stands shoulder to shoulder with the most committed atheist. Where? Here in the physical world. When? Now, 2011.

Having become enlightened to this ever-so-obvious yet easily ignored truth, I now spend my days much more connected to reality than I was back in my airy-fairy longing-for-spirit phase.

I don't split my attention between where I am and where I believe I should be, as I did before. Whatever comes along in life is what I deal with, and do my best to embrace with as much yes, yes, yes as possible.

I find it amusing when somebody who doesn't like this blog leaves a comment along the lines of, "Brian, you're obsessed with religion-bashing. Your skepticism has become a new faith for you, the focus of your existence."

No way.

Usually I write a Church of the Churchless post every other day. It takes me 1-2 hours, typically. The rest of the time, I'm doing other stuff -- enjoying life in lots of different ways. Which brings me to a more typical answer to "How are you, Brian?"

Just fine, Suzanne.

In half an hour I'll leave the downtown Salem coffeehouse where I am now and head to a Salsa class my wife and I are taking. I think this is the eighth in an intermediate Salsa series that's challenging, but not beyond us. It's cool to learn some fancier face loops and other moves that we've watched from afar, but never knew how to do until now.

Last weekend we went to a pro-union rally at the state capitol here in Salem. I took a bunch of photos (one of which my wife wishes I hadn't, but I told her that nobody looks gorgeous bundled up on a cold day). It was energizing to be with a thousand or so people who were committed to political ideals that resonate with me.

Before the rally I auditioned for a part in a video series -- "Salemia"-- that plans to take a comedic look at Salem, the overly boring city where I live. I've been trying to get in touch with my Inner Actor. A question on the audition info form asked what acting experience I had.

I said, "Back in high school, I was in our junior class play. And every day now I try to act like a normal person." Which got me thinking that I need to lessen my trying.

Like most of us, I present a different face to the world than the visage I feel myself to be. To some extent this is necessary, since if I blurted or acted out everything that passes through my brain, my life would get too interesting real fast.

On the whole, though, I've found that it's better to be real than fake. Keeping a lid on who we really are makes us tense, worried, lethargic, nervous, and stiff. Taking chances with self-revealing helps me realize that relaxed openness beats rigid restrictiveness.

My favorite question at the audition came from the screenwriter: "Would you be willing to wear a red Speedo?" Unhesitatingly, I said "Sure!"

So, yes, Suzanne, I'm thriving. Maybe someday I'll be able to show you how I'm do it in a red Speedo.

Prayer is Republican plan for deficit reduction

Call me skeptical -- "You're skeptical, Brian!" (thanks) -- but somehow I doubt that praying is going to reduce the federal deficit.

Better come up with a better plan, Republicans.

The national debt is a “moral threat” to the United States, House Speaker John Boehner said Sunday, an impending peril about which some people are realizing they “better start praying."

Be your own sunlight, not a religious reflection

Thanks to an email from Alex, a regular Church of the Churchless visitor, I learned about Don Cupitt's book, "Above Us Only Sky." It's short and inspiring, a paean to finding meaning through "solar" living of our everyday life.

By solar, Cupitt means...

We accept and we joyfully affirm life and its limits, traditionally described as Time, Chance, and Death. We no longer wish to veil the truth about life, nor do we dream of somehow being able to transcend its limits. Instead, our religion is now our joyful and immediate engagement with life, just as it is.

Right on.

For a long time, during my true believing days, I felt that my goal should be to attune myself with some hypothesized Sun of Ultimate Reality -- to find a way to bask in its warmth and be absorbed into its gravitational attraction.

Now, I'm comfortable with being my own source of meaning. In other words, I'm much more concerned with what is radiating from me, rather than what is being beamed into me.

This is an active, not passive, approach to living. It doesn't deny that other people and the physical world exist, but accepts that how we relate to reality is our subjective responsibility -- not an objective given to be imposed from outside.

Here's how Cupitt describes solar living in more detail.

Solar living, then, precisely reverses the traditional Western account of the religious life. It is living by continual self-outing, or expression -- which explains why modern people attach so much importance to coming out with it, declaring  themselves, and generally feeling uninhibitedly to be themselves in public without concealment.

But since the Middle Ages in the West the individual's religious life has commonly moved in the opposite direction, being described as a second 'interior' or 'spiritual' life, a life of hidden inwardness in which the soul related itself to the invisible God who was its Ground and its End.

The language used implied rather sharp distinctions between body and soul, and between outer appearance and inner reality. Everyone was an amphibian, living simultaneously in two worlds or at two levels, like an actor or a spy.

Your apparent, outward or bodily life was a life of social relations with other people in this visible world, but at the same time you were also withholding part of yourself in order to live a second, inward life in which you continually referred everything to the eternal God.

To do religion you sought solitude and stillness, sat still, shut your eyes, recollected yourself, and turned into your own interior mental space.

I reject this traditional Western [and also, I'd say, Eastern] picture utterly, insisting that there is no interior core-self with a hotline to Eternity. We just are our own outer lives in time, and our public life of self-expression just is our religious life. There is only the outward, passing show of things.

Our language is a single, outsideless, human continuum, and the world that our language gives us is also a single outsideless continuum. There is only one world, and only one self.

We are not dual, amphibian creatures, and religion is not concerned with any other world than the everyday world. Religion is simply our own activity in trying to get ourselves into the most affirmative and productive relation to life that is attainable.

That is not easy, however: we will not get it right until we have learnt to look head-on at the insubstantiality, chanciness, and transience of everything -- including ourselves -- and have found the courage and the faith to say Yes to life in the face of all that. All of which, I warn you, is going to be very tough.

If the universe is infinite, we're immortal (sort of)

Wow, I got some great news after reading only two chapters in physicist Brian Greene's new book, "The Hidden Reality." I'm immortal!

Only catch is, the "me" who exists forever isn't really the same me who is typing out these words. Though maybe it is.

Just depends on how I look upon myself: (1) as a being with a unique essence peculiar to myself (I don't mean a smell, but a non-physical identity), or (2) as a configuration of atoms which could be almost exactly duplicated in another corner of the cosmos.

I've read Greene's previous books, enjoying them, but finding them a bit overly technical. He's used a different style in "The Hidden Reality," jumping directly into the scientific good stuff without feeling like he needs to go over the basics of quantum theory, cosmology, and such.

So, bingo, by pages 4-5 Greene has introduced the mind-boggling premise of his book: reality could well be a hell of a lot bigger and stranger than it appears from our earthly vantage point.

A striking fact (it's in part what propelled me to write this book) is that many of the major developments in fundamental theoretical physics -- relativistic physics, quantum physics, cosmological physics, unified physics, computational physics -- have led us to consider one or another variety of parallel universe.

Indeed, the chapters that follow trace a narrative through nine variations on the multiverse theme. Each envisions our universe as part of an unexpectedly larger whole, but the complexion of that whole and the nature of the member universes differ sharply among them.

In some, the parallel universes are separated from us by enormous stretches of space or time; in others, they're hovering millimeters away; in others still, the very notion of their location proves parochial, devoid of meaning. A similar range of possibility is manifest in the laws governing the parallel universes.

In some, the laws are the same as ours; in others, they appear different but have a shared heritage; in others still, the laws are of a form and structure unlike anything we've ever encountered. It's at once humbling and stirring to imagine just how expansive reality may be.

There's no better indication of how my current churchlessness differs from my prior true-believing self than what I read before my morning meditation (a habit for over forty years).

I still read some philosophy, usually of the Taoist/Buddhist mindfulness sort, but science books -- mostly neuroscience and physics -- are an equally common target for my yellow highlighter. Often I feel more inspired and energetic after learning a new scientific fact, than being exposed to some fresh philosophical wisdom.

Greene's discussion of infinity in his Endless Doppelgängers chapter had that sort of Wow! So cool! effect on me.

I had a sensation of being released from my usual preoccupation with myself and what is right around me -- which, of course, is a big reason why people are attracted to religions. Science, though, is even more effective at taking us out of ourselves, of putting our ego in its place, because it is real, while religiosity is fantasy.

Also, science is humble. Greene makes clear what modern science is confident about, and what is merely a hypothesis.

Our universe could be finite, like a spherical ball (except in this case, there is nothing the ball is resting in or on, so it is almost impossible to visualize the shape of the universe, as we have no familiarity with anything that isn't a separate "thing").

However, more likely the universe is infinite, for reasons I won't go into, but which have to do with the average amount of matter/energy in each cubic meter of the universe.

If this is true, infinity, not surprisingly, leads to some vastly interesting conclusions. One is that the big bang didn't result in the universe starting off in a teeny-tiny state, as I've visualized. Rather:

If space is truly infinite in size, then it always has been and always will be. When it shrinks, its contents are squeezed ever closer together, making the density of matter ever larger. But its overall extent remains infinite. After all, shrink an infinite tabletop by a factor of 2 and what do you get? Half of infinity, which is still infinite.

Religions speak of God as being infinitely this and that. Powerful. Knowing. Present. Loving. Yet there's no need to posit an other-worldly infinity; science finds evidence for infinity much closer to home. Right here, the universe where we live and breathe.

Which brings me to the most intriguing aha! in Greene's Endless Doppelgängers chapter. If the universe is infinite, then there are countless (maybe infinite) numbers of universes just like ours. Since that last sentence may sound weird, here's why a single universe could contain an infinite number of universes.

What we call the "universe" isn't all that there is.

Our knowledge of the universe is bounded by the speed of light, since information can't travel faster than this. Thus the maximum distance we can see is 41 billion light years -- more than the 13.7 billion year age of the universe, because space has been expanding since the big bang at faster than the speed of light. So distant galaxies are now much farther away than they were when light first left them.

Thus what we call the "universe" likely is just one patch of an infinite universe. Even though a patch with a radius of 41 billion light years is unimaginably huge, in an infinite universe there will be an infinite number of patches that size.

I won't go through all the arguments that Greene uses to reach his next conclusion. But trust me, they make good scientific sense. His most mind-boggling hypothesis is that in an infinite universe, each arrangement of particles in a particular "patch" of it will be repeated many times.

Since you and I are a particular arrangement of particles, this means that exact copies of us abound in other parts of the universe.

This means that if the universe is infinite in extent, you are not alone in whatever reaction you are now having to this view of reality. There are many perfect copies of you out there in the cosmos, feeling exactly the same way. And there's no way to say which is really you. All versions are physically and hence mentally identical.

Far out. In more ways than one. I'm blown away by this notion of countless me's existing elsewhere in the cosmos. And not just precise copies, but also variations on the Theme of Me.

Because not only will there be arrangements of particles that exactly mirror everything that's happened in my life, but there also will be universes where I did other things -- typed "stuff" rather than "things," for example. So it seems that in an infinite universe, everything that can happen, does happen.

Which can be interpreted to mean, "I'm immortal," since the arrangement of particles that I call "me" will be repeated countless times. However, note that Greene said "there's no way to say which is really you." Thus the whole idea of "me" as a unique individual falls away.

I find this possibility both disconcerting and appealing.

It's sort of like worrying that you've lost your car keys, then realizing that you don't have a car. Yes, it'd be nice to possess a car, but it's also pleasant to be relieved of the worries that come with having one.

Likewise, sometime I think that it'd be great if I had an immortal soul. However, if I had one, I'd worry about what was going to become of it after I die. No soul, no worries.

Brian Greene, sharp guy that he is, recognizes that his whole doppelgängers thing is founded on the assumption that we humans are arrangements of physical matter/energy, nothing more. If there is some unique something else (soul, spirit) that makes us who we are, then exact copies of you or me couldn't exist.

In interpreting the implications of this statement [that arrangements of particles in patches of the universe must be duplicated an infinite number of times], I should declare my bias. I believe that a physical system is completely determined by the arrangement of its particles.

Tell me how the particles making up the earth, the sun, the galaxy, and everything else are arranged, and you've fully articulated reality. This reductionist view is common among physicists, but there are certainly people who think otherwise.

Especially when it comes to life, some believe that an essential nonphysical aspect (spirit, soul, life force, chi, and so on) is required to animate the physical. Although I remain open to the possibility, I've never encountered any evidence to support it.

The position that makes the most sense to me is that one's physical and mental characteristics are nothing but a manifestation of how the particles in one's body are arranged. Specify the particle arrangement and you've specified everything.

Hard to disagree with. Bad news: we aren't special. Good news: we aren't special, so in an infinite universe the arrangement of particles I call "me' lives on... and on... and on.

 

Does "Being" exist?

I suspect that churchless skeptics who are drawn to question traditional belief systems also enjoy the feeling of an elevator suddenly descending, when it seems like the floor has fallen away from under your feet.

At least, this is a sensation I frequently have now that I've stopped being a True Believer.

It isn't disconcerting, because after an initial jolt of finding that one more unquestioned assumption needs to be closely examined, it feels good to have discarded an additional piece of conceptual junk which doesn't deserve the prominent positioning it used to have in my Philosophical Display Case.

For example...

This morning I made my way through another chapter, The Pre-Socratics, in the challenging yet stimulating "Philosophy in the Flesh." Authors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss how the notion of Being came to be.

I've always liked that word, Being. It's sort of like the classic definition of pornography offered by a Supreme Court justice: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

Meaning, I have no idea what Being might be, but I've always assumed that it must be something, and I had a chance of recognizing it. After all, if Being (or Existence, which seems more or less synonymous) didn't exist, how could anything else?

Lakoff and Johnson point out that theological interpretations consider God as Ultimate Being. Science doesn't see a need to ascribe divinity to Being. However, in their search for a Theory of Everything, scientists also assume that there is some root essence to the cosmos.

The main point of "Philosophy in the Flesh" is that humans habitually use metaphors derived from our bodily experiences to understand supposedly abstract or higher-level facets of reality.

Rarely, though, do we try to understand where those understandings come from. We take certain assumptions for granted, then run off with them as we proclaim, "This is how the way things are!"

Well, maybe. But maybe not.

Take Being, for example. Lakfoff and Johnson say that this notion is founded on four folk theories that all the pre-Socratics shared, and which have been passed down to us moderns.

(1) The Folk Theory of the Intelligibility of the World
The world makes systematic sense, and we can gain knowledge of it.

(2) The Folk Theory of General Kinds
Every particular thing is a kind of thing.

(3) The Folk Theory of Essences
Every entity has an "essence" or "nature," that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and is the causal source of its natural behavior.

(4) The Folk Theory of the All-Inclusive Category
There is a category of all things that exist.

Here's how #4 is explained:

From the Folk Theory of Essences, it follows that this all-inclusive category has an essence, and from the Folk Theory of Intelligibility, it follows that we can at least in principle gain knowledge of that essence. This all-inclusive category is called Being, and its essence is called the Essence of Being.

...As we will see below, there is a profound problem that arises from this ultimate metaphysical impulse, as defined by these four commonplace folk theories. They lead us to ask a set of questions that may not be meaningful. And they give us a view of the world and of knowledge that may be misleading.

...Someone who believes all those folk theories will, of course, assume that the Realm of Being is real and that the problems of metaphysics (concerning the nature of Being) are real problems.

This is pretty damn Zen'ish, though intellectually spoken.

Remember that Being/God are essentially the same, notwithstanding the secular/religious connotations associated with these words. "Being" and "God" are considered to be ultimate reality, the essence of the cosmos, the infinite ocean of no-thing within which all discrete things float.

Well, who says? Us embodied human beings, who come up with theories about how the world works based on our human experiences.

So billions of people believe that a holy book or enlightened person can be trusted when a claim is made: "Being/God is ___________ (fill in the blank)"

Love. Consciousness. Energy. Grace. Whatever.

What's more important than the words used to describe Being/God is the fact that (1) this all-inclusive entity is believed to exist, and (2) it has an essence that can be known, even if imperfectly, by humans.

Again: Maybe. Maybe not.

This whole notion of Being may not be valid. "Being" could be a concept with zero substance. Or even if substantially real, there could be no essence associated with the substance -- no what to go with it's is.

So to ask "What is Being?" or "What is God?" could be meaningless questions. These are metaphorical concepts that spring from assumptions which usually go unexamined. We assume the existence of an ultimate entity, then struggle to figure out what Being or God is like.

I just lifted my cup and had a sip of coffee. It tasted pretty damn real.

Much more real than any airy-fairy idea of Being or God. Each to his own, but I'm inclined to focus my attention on stuff that can be demonstrated to actually exist -- not abstractions conjured up by human minds.

Somali pirates kill couple distributing Bibles

It's a tragedy when four Americans on a yacht are killed by Somali pirates.

But when I heard about them being taken hostage, I thought, "Who would be crazy enough to sail by themselves into such a dangerous area, given all the other well-publicized hijackings in that part of the Indian Ocean?"

Then I learned that one of the couples had been distributing Bibles around the world. My suspicion is that they felt they were under God's protection.

Mistaken feeling, obviously.

However, I've little doubt that countless Christians are now saying, "It was God's will that they were killed." I also have little doubt that if they'd managed to survive, countless Christians would have said, "It was God's will that they were saved."

This is the nice thing about religious belief: it can't be proven wrong, because it's a belief. True believers can make reality into whatever they want it to be.

Finding enlightenment through a colonoscopy (and propofol)

I want to get as much philosophical mileage as possible out of the colonoscopy I had a few days ago.

After all, I had to sacrifice eating solid food for almost two days. That isn't exactly a major ascetic accomplishment -- certainly not Gandhi'an -- but since I'm a vegetarian habituated to frequent food browsing, the colonoscopy prep period was a shock to my culinary system.

This wasn't the most interesting part of the procedure, though.

Just as with the colonoscopy I had two years ago (a benign polyp was found, and the prep wasn't perfect, so the doctor wanted me to have a repeat colonoscopy fairly soon), I found the effects of the sedative intriguing and thought-provoking.

After I came back to normal consciousness, of course. During the colonoscopy itself, I was pretty much dead to the world. Which raises the First Big Question.

If, as so many people believe, our core reality is spiritual rather than physical; if the essence of "me" is soul rather than body; if consciousness is separable from the brain and can function without it -- then why the heck did an intravenous drip of propofol almost instantly have a major effect on me?

Those avid meditators who think they are adept at mind control should test their supposed skill against propofol, or a similar psychoactive substance. Then they'll realize that the brain is what rules the consciousness roost, not our relatively puny willpower.

As I was getting prepped for the colonoscopy, a nurse told me they were using propofol now. I could expect a much quicker recovery time, with few if any side effects. Once the propofol drip is stopped, the patient wakes up almost instantly.

The name of the drug sounded sort of familiar.

It should have, because this was one of the drugs that was being used by Michael Jackson when he died. It's white appearance leads it to be called "milk of amnesia" (for the benefit of some foreign blog readers, milk of magnesia is an over-the-counter drug commonly used in this country).

Which brings up my Second Big Question.

What is real? OK, that's probably too big a question to address in a single blog post. So I'll narrow it a bit: if we can't trust our brains to clue us in to what truly exists, is it valid for humans to claim that it's possible to know "objective reality"?

I engaged in some minimal pre-colonoscopy philosophizing with the nurse after she told me that with the propofol, I wouldn't remember anything after the procedure was over.

"Yes, I understand that," I told her. "Here's what concerns me, though: I'm happy that I won't remember a potentially painful procedure, but I'd be even happier to know that during the colonoscopy I won't be feeling any pain. Meaning, does the propofol simply erase the memory of what happened, which might have been painful, or does it also eliminate pain during the actual procedure?"

The nurse didn't directly answer me.

Maybe she didn't know the answer to that question. Heck, maybe nobody does. It's sort of like the classic "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

I'm not sure if I can explain why this question is so fascinating to me.

There's something profound and important here, but it's difficult to put a philosophical finger on it, because the issue is so elusive, so mysterious, so entwined with subtleties of awareness, consciousness, objectivity, subjectivity -- all sorts of deep stuff that people have been trying to get a grip on for millennia.

After being wheeled across a hall into the endoscopy room, I was positioned on my side so I was facing a large monitor that soon would be showing my innards. The doctor would be looking at it as he performed the colonoscopy.

Some pleasantries were exchanged with the doctor and the nurses. Then the nurse anesthesiologist said she was starting to inject the propofol. For about fifteen seconds I felt completely normal. I was mildly concerned that the sedative wasn't working.

Next thing I knew, the nurse was telling me "We're all done."

My instant intuitive reaction was disappointment. I was disturbed to be back in everyday reality. It had been a lot more pleasant wherever I'd been, consciousness wise. I sort of felt like I'd jumped into ice water after basking on a warm beach.

Doing some Googling on propofol before writing this post, I learned this sort of reaction is why the drug is illicitly used non-medically.

There are reports of self-administration of propofol for recreational purposes. Short-term effects include mild euphoria, hallucinations, and disinhibition. Long-term use has been reported to result in addiction.  

I felt completely alert and awake. The only side effect, so far as I could tell, was that feeling of I wish I could have stayed in that pleasant propofol place longer. My first words to the nurse were, "I had some nice dreams. Mostly of having a colonoscopy, but with absolutely no pain, as if it was happening to someone else."

Later, after some reflection, I realized that calling what I experienced a "dream" wasn't entirely accurate.

Yes, it seemed like a dream at the time. But what are the chances that my brain would choose to dream about a colonoscopy, complete with thoughts of the endoscope wending its way here and there through my colon, while I was actually having an colonoscopy?

More likely is that I was minimally aware of what was going on, but the propofol created a feeling that it wasn't really happening to me.

However, seemingly there is another possibility. I could have been maximally aware of what was happening during the colonoscopy, including the discomfort of it, but the propofol took away virtually all of the memories I could have had of the procedure. Indeed, I found a clinical website that says:

Propofol has good amnesic, but only minimal analgesic, properties and is often combined with an analgesic.

In my case, I don't think it was. Which gets back to my pre-procedure question to the nurse. Will propofol make me forget what happened during the colonoscopy, or does it make the procedure painless?

I still don't know the answer. And the fact that I don't really care if I know the answer to that question is deeply interesting to me. I'm happy that the colonoscopy went so pleasantly for me. Like I said, I felt great while under the effect of propofol.

Well, more accurately, I felt great after I was awake and aware, aside from that fairly brief feeling of liking being asleep/sedated more than everyday reality. Who knows what I was feeling during the time I can't remember?

And who cares? Because apparently I wasn't there to know what I can't remember.

Again, there's something here that I can't really pin down. I have an intuition that propofol points to what enlightenment might be all about, assuming that this is an attainable state of consciousness -- which I'm skeptical of.

The experience of not being sure what I experienced during the colonoscopy is what I'm left with. Is this, though, so different from life in general? Can we ever be sure that what we remember is what actually happened? Or even that what seemingly is happening, really is?

So many questions. So few answers.

That's what makes life so fascinating: the mystery of it. My colonoscopy simply added to my habitual feeling of WTF? that permeates my everyday life. And it made me wonder: if I could largely put out of my mind what just happened, like propofol's amnesiac qualities did after the colonoscopy, would I be happier, by and large?

I tend to say, "yes." But tomorrow, who knows? I might have forgotten what I just said.

The "self" is culturally determined

We in the West (not the wild west, but Western culture) are obsessed with ourselves.

"I've got to find my true self," people say. Self-development is a big industry, featuring countless workshops, books, lectures, and such. We're big on autonomy, independence, finding our own way in life, not marching to the beat of someone else's drummer.

Other cultures, such as those in East Asia, are quite different. To a much greater degree than self-absorbed Americans and Europeans, they view the self as including family, community, and societal relationships.

Such is the message of an interesting Philosophy Talk podcast that I finished listening to this afternoon. "Different Cultures, Different Selves" featured Hazel Marcus, a cultural psychologist.

(Wikipedia has a short overview if, like me, you aren't sure what cultural psychology is all about.)

Since I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization for many years, and so got quite a bit of exposure to Indian culture, the podcast helped me better understand some of the differences between "Western" and "Eastern" members of the group that I observed.

I put those terms in quotation marks because, as I noted in my book about Plotinus, in this context West and East are states of mind, not geographic locations. In a "Wisdom for a Western mind" section, I wrote:

I'm quite sure that I have a predominantly Western mind. But since Western ways of thinking and relating to the world are so intimately intertwined in my consciousness, I primarily notice my Western-ness when I associate with people thoroughly imbued with an Eastern mentality -- who may or may not be Indian, Chinese, Japanese, or such, because "Western" and "Eastern" are internal attitudes, not external attributes.

In our increasingly borderless world marked by free-flowing education, information, and technology, an Indian computer scientist may have a Western mind, while her American tai chi instructor may have an Eastern mentality.

I don't have an ironclad definition of the Western and Eastern minds (which implies that my own may not indisputably be of the Occidental variety). But here are a few lighthearted ways to distinguish them experientially.

If you attend a talk on some spiritual subject -- a lecture, sermon, discourse -- and the people around you are reaching for handkerchiefs to dab their tears of love and devotion, while you are pulling out a notebook and pen to jot down critical questions to ask the speaker, you have a Western mind.

If passages in your Bible or other holy book are highlighted in various colors, you have a Western mind (give yourself extra points if objections are penciled in the margin bext to pronouncements you disagree with.)

I don't mean to imply that the Western mind is entirely detached, rational, skeptical, independent, and analytical. Even those with a strong prediliction toward a Western mentality are capable of manifesting the opposite characteristics as well: intimacy, intuition, faithfulness, interdependency, holism.

This is because each of us is a mixture of what we might call "masculine" and "feminine" qualities. The challenge, psychologically, spiritually, even societally, is to find the proper blend of masculine and feminine, Western and Eastern, yang and yin, respectively.

I quoted myself at length both because I like to do this (hey, I said I've got a self-centered Western mind), but also because the general thrust of what I wrote fits quite well with the cultural psychology musings I heard on the Philosophy Talk podcast.

I've got a certain way of looking at the world. Other people, from different cultures, see the same world differently. Religions and spiritual beliefs mirror these varying ways of understanding how "self" and "other" connect, interrelate, mesh with each other.

On the podcast Hazel Marcus kept making the same point in various ways: our perspective isn't the only perspective. Here in the West, we tend to see our highly individual-centered culture as the model for how the rest of the world should be, and become.

One of the Philosophy Talk hosts said that he views autonomy as a highly important cultural value, maybe the most important. So to him, a culture which subordinates individual decision-making to familial, societal, and other relationships is flawed.

Marcus tried, semi-successfully, to get the guy to understand that this very assumption -- individual autonomy is #1 -- is a cultural assumption, not an objective fact about human nature.

Along this line, recently I read about a man who for decades has driven three hours each way to his job in Tokyo, because he can't imagine leaving the neighborhood where his family has lived for many generations, and where he is intimately connected with many relatives.

That is, his sense of self is so intertwined with these other people, and his obligations to them (along with their obligations to him), that the American attitude of "Dude, you've got to start living for your own self!" wouldn't make any sense to him.

All this relates to comment discussions we have here on the Church of the Churchless, where some with an "Eastern" devotional mentality, as in just have faith, are at odds with those who espouse a "Western" skeptical attitude, as in prove it.

Since I've walked on both sides of this street, so to speak, I can understand the appeal of each. But appeal isn't really the right word, because I don't think we willfully choose how we relate to the world in the same way as someone is drawn to prefer vanilla or chocolate ice cream.

According to Wikipedia, cultural psychology says that "culture and mind are inseparable, thus there are no universal laws for how the mind works and that psychological theories grounded in one culture are likely to be limited in applicability when applied to a different culture."

Makes sense to me.

Eastern religions work for people who have a predominantly Eastern mind. Western religions work for people who have a predominantly Western mind. And whatever sort of mind a person has, living without religion, yet within one's culture, is a fine option also.

As I've grown fonder of Taoism and Tai Chi, I find that my sense of self has been altering in compatible ways. This is one of the benefits of the increasingly borderless world alluded to above.

No matter where we live, and what sort of culture we're surrounded by, we have more options than before. We can try out different ways of viewing our "self," seeing whether an indvidualistic or interrelated perspective is more pleasing.

(For the academically inclined who want to delve into this subject more, I came across a journal article by Hazel Marcus that describes a study aimed at comparing how North Americans and Indians choose consumer products.

I didn't read all of it, but could get the drift: individual preference isn't as important to Indians, whose choices are more influenced by other people and cultural factors. See:
Download 2008PreferenceGuide )

Will Kurzweil's "singularity" let us become immortal?

Shit!

Along with a lot of other baby boomers, I bet, that was my instant reaction to the TIME magazine cover that shouted out "2045 The Year Man Becomes Immortal" at me when I opened the mailbox a few days ago.

Those of us who were born a few years after the end of World War II would be pushing 100 by the time immortality could be ours.

Even before I read the cover story, I figured that (1) almost certainly I'll be dead by 2045, and (2) even if I wasn't, living forever in a worn out body/brain wouldn't be very appealing.

But last night I read about futurist Raymond Kurzweil's prediction of the coming Singularity, and what he's forecasting is quite different from our usual conception of immortality. The story, by Lev Grossman, starts with a definition of "singularity."

The moment when technological change becomes so rapid and profound, it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.

Well, that sounds interesting. I'd like to be around for it. And in a way, all of us already are -- the beginning stages at least.

Because Kurzweil is looking toward the day when computers develop artificial intelligences that dwarf ours, a trend that seems inevitable considering the rapidity of technological change.

Here's what the exponential curves told him. We successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity -- never say he's not conservative -- at 2045.

In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.

Facebook. Twitter. Google. iPhones.

These and so much more are early signs of ever-more powerful artificial intelligences that at first will merely be an adjunct to our own, yet eventually could become conscious beings in their own right.

When the big questions get answered, a lot of the action will happen where no one can see it, deep inside the black silicon brains of the computers, which will either bloom bit by bit into conscious minds or just continue in ever more brilliant and powerful iterations of nonsentience.

This is what I found most interesting about the "singularity" story -- whether the super smart computers that are around the technological bend are going to become as human as we are, minus our bodies, of course.

The Big Question being: what makes us who we are?

Though difficult to imagine how this could happen given our current state of neuroscientific knowledge, Singularitarians (yes, that's a word, and yes, there are many of them) enjoy envisioning a future where the amazingly complex human brain has been mapped, neuron by neuron, connection by connection, into an artificial intelligence.

If each and every aspect of my brain were to be perfectly mirrored by a computer, what difference would there be between that machine "consciousness" and my own consciousness?

If the answer is none, then the quotation marks I put around the first "consciousness" wouldn't be needed, because the mental states of the machine and me would be identical.

Hence, I could achieve immortality by transplanting the contents of my psyche into a robot, computer, or other form of artificial intelligence. Which, seemingly, wouldn't appear to be any different from my current consciousness, leaving aside the not so minor detail of "me" existing within a mechanical, rather than biological, form.

Whether this sounds creepy or appealing to you probably reveals a lot about your philosophical and spiritual inclinations. Those who consider that people have a soul which constitutes their essence won't accept that a human could be transmuted into a machine.

The TIME story addresses such questions.

Suppose we did create a computer that talked and acted in a way that was indistinguishable from a human being... Would that mean that the computer was sentient, the way a human being is? Or would it just be an extremely sophisticated but essentially mechanical automaton without the mysterious spark of consciousness -- a machine with no ghost in it? And how would we know?

Even if you grant that the Singularity is plausible, you're still staring at a thicket of unanswerable questions. If I can scan my consciousness into a computer, am I still me? What are the geopolitics and the socio-economics of the Singularity? Who decides who gets to be immortal? Who draws the line between sentient and nonsentient?

And as we approach immortality, omniscience and omnipotence, will our lives still have meaning? By beating death, will we have lost our essential humanity?

Singularitarians are confident that fairly soon these questions will be more than academic. However, my favorite godless science blogger, P.Z. Myers, is deeply skeptical that Kurzweil's vision of the future is going to become reality.

A few days ago Myers ridiculed the TIME story here. Last year he poked fun at the whole notion of the Singularity here, quoting John Pavlus, another skeptic.

How to make a Singularity
Step 1: “I wonder if brains are just like computers?”
Step 2: Add peta-thingies/giga-whatzits; say “Moore’s Law!” a lot at conferences
Step 3: ??????
Step 4: SINGULARITY!!!11!one

Since Myers is a biologist, I respect his view of how the human brain works, which isn't at all how a computer works.

He's [Kurzweil] guilty of a very weird form of reductionism that considers a human life can be reduced to patterns in a computer. I have no stock in spiritualism or dualism, but we are very much a product of our crude and messy biology — we perceive the world through imprecise chemical reactions, our brains send signals by shuffling ions in salt water, our attitudes and reactions are shaped by chemicals secreted by glands in our guts. Replicating the lightning while ignoring the clouds and rain and pressure changes will not give you a copy of the storm. It will give you something different, which would be interesting still, but it's not the same.

Well, time will tell. I just hope that if Kurzweil is correct, the Singularity happens sooner than expected, rather than later. Since I no longer believe that I have an immortal soul, I'll take immortality in any other fashion that presents itself.

Option 2: embrace bad spelling. I liked comment #12 on Myers' blog post.

I'm already immortal.
wait... that's a 't'?
Immoral, that's what I am.

A religious or spiritual path is a metaphor -- not reality

Metaphors are fun to play around with. Over on my other blog, I recently called the Oregon city where I live "a blandburger sandwiched between spicy Portland and Eugene."

But Salem isn't really food.

It's what it is: people, places, buildings, roads, parks, culture (and the lack thereof), plus so much else immediately cognizable stuff. Metaphors are a big step removed from the sort of reality that doesn't depend upon mentally connecting this, such as Salem, with that, such as the innards of a sandwich.

I'm plugging away on reading a big thick book, "Philosophy in the Flesh," that I've previously blogged about here, here, and here. It's fairly dense, being more of a textbook than a title aimed at a general readership.

Yet fascinating.

The main point of the authors, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, is that concepts derived from bodily metaphors provide much, if not most, of the foundation for how we view the world.

Consider the notion of a spiritual or moral "path." Or a "way." This is a notion that is rooted in how our bodies move along from place to place. When this becomes a well-travelled route, it's called a path.

Yet in the context of a religious, spiritual, mystical, or philosophical practice -- a way of life -- the metaphor of being on a path can be seen for what it is: an abstraction removed from here-and-now reality.

Meaning, our bodies do indeed move along physical paths. However, our psyches only metaphorically engage in practices that the human mind views as akin to bodily movement.

In their chapter on Morality, Lakoff and Johnson talk about this in a fashion that applies equally to the metaphor of spiritual progress being along a "path."

There is nothing inherently metaphoric about such claims of basic experiential morality as "Health is good," "It is better to be cared for than uncared for," "Everyone ought to be protected from physical harm," and "It is good to be loved."

However, as soon as we develop such claims into a full-fledged human morallity, we find that virtually all of our abstract moral concepts -- justice, rights, empathy, nurturance, strength, uprightness, and so forth -- are defined by metaphors.

That is why there is no ethical system that is not metaphorical. We understand our experience via these conceptual metaphors, we reason according to their metaphorical logic, and we make judgments on the basis of the metaphors. This is what we mean when we say that morality is metaphoric.

...There is no set of pure moral concepts that could be understood "in themselves" or "on their own terms." Instead, we understand morality via mappings of structures from other aspects and domains of our experience: wealth, balance, order, boundaries, light/dark, beauty, strength, and so on.

If our moral concepts are metaphorical, then their structure and logic come primarily from the source domains that ground those metaphors...and we have seen how these source domains are tied up with our basic bodily well-being.

Same with religion, spirituality, and mysticism. These areas of human culture supposedly deal with experiential domains beyond the physical, or at least on the ethereal side of materiality.

Yet the ways people think about "other-worldly" subjects are decidedly bodily. For example:

-- On the HBO series, "Big Love," which is about a polygamist Mormon family, the main characters are always talking what Holy Father wants them to do, and what pleases Holy Father.

This is an example of how religions metaphorically map familiar family relationships onto how people supposedly are supposed to relate with God. Likewise, Jesus is considered to be the loving and loyal Son of God, and the Virgin Mary is a nurturing mother figure.

-- Fairly frequently I've been asked by members of the India-based spiritual organization to which I used to belong, "Have you left the Path?" I'm never sure how to respond to that question.

What path? Point to it.

I no longer believe in the metaphorical concept of a path back to God or ultimate reality. That's an abstraction, a human idea. There's no evidence that such a path actually exists between two places, one worldly and one spiritual.

Many people simply have gotten accustomed to conceiving of life as a journey along a well-defined route that can be discerned by reading holy books, having faith in the guidance of gurus, and other means.

-- Similarly, true believers speak of a "fall." A fall from grace. A fallen soul. Falling off the path. But where is the real-world topography which, outside of metaphor, would cause a person to lose his or her balance and descend from a higher to a lower state?

I could offer more examples, but hopefully you've gotten the point.

If we carefully attend to how we speak about religion, spirituality, and mysticism, the conclusions Lakoff and Johnson perusasively lay out in "Philosophy in the Flesh" will become clear.

Because we are physical beings and all of our experience is processed by the physical brain, humans naturally use bodily metaphors to conceptualize more abstract subjects. Viewing God as our father and spirituality as a path are two ways, among many, that this occurs.

Metaphors can be useful. However, they need to be seen for what they are: mappings of one realm of reality onto another realm. Maps aren't the actual territory. Almost certainly there isn't a father God, nor is there a spiritual path.

How "Nothing" is the key to a meaningful life

I've never watched an episode of Seinfeld, but the theme of the show -- "nothing" -- appeals to me. In one way or another, this is what attracted me to my Wu Project, which is still bubbling along in its nothing-much fashion.

Here's the thing, though: "nothing" still is something, when this notion is viewed as something special, something to be attained, something waiting around a meaning-of-life corner.

Zen folks have a lot to say, via words or silently, on this subject.

But I don't think there's any unique understanding of "nothing" here either, since Zen (and Buddhism in general) still sees it as something that needs effort, even of the effortless variety, to grok.

Recently I came to one of my Big Dog Walk Insights shortly after setting off with the family pet on our usual two-mile loop.

With nothing to do but take one step after another, leash in hand, my dog walk time leads me to be more aware than I usually am of what passes through my mind when my brain doesn't need to do any cognitively complex stuff.

Observing thoughts arising of this or that, sometimes I feel like I should shut them up through a mantra, or mindfulness of the external sights and sounds that surround me. Hearing myself talk to the dog, as pet owners often do, sometimes I feel like I should commune with her wordlessly, which is how members of her species interact.

Starting once again to engage in this habitual self-referential, self-questioning drama, suddenly a starkly simple intuition popped into my psyche:

It doesn't matter. Do whatever you want. Think or don't think. Talk or don't talk. Whatever. It's all the same.

Naturally, I then pondered this intuition as dog and man walked on.

My primary sensation was lightness. I felt like a weight had been lifted from my meaning-of-life shoulders. The need to conform with some standard, even as non-religious'y as "thou shalt be mindful," had faded away. I was left with a pleasing feeling that whatever came along, inside or outside of my head, was just fine.

Now, I realize that what I'm talking about might sound to you like one of those unfunny stories where the teller of the tale, seeing a quizzical look on the face of his listener, says "I guess you had to be there."

Of course. Agreed.

Heck, I was there, since I was the one who had this Big Dog Walk Insight, and I still have some difficulty in appreciating the aha! of that nothing-to-do moment. What I've written admittedly seems worthy of a "so what?" given its obviousness.

Life is what it is. There's got to be a bumper sticker with that platitude. Is this worth a second's thought, much less a blog post?

Well sure. After all, that was the essence of my Big Insight.

There are no rules (which is on a t-shirt I have, not a bumper sticker). Most people, certainly including me for most of my life, are addicted to searching for the right way to live -- as if this was a thing, an object, a Platonic form, that exists as some sort of objective reality somewhere or other outside of our current awareness/ understanding/ state of enlightenment.

This leads us to feel that something is missing from our lives. We assume that there is an optimum way of being, and we're only firing on a few meaning-of-life cylinders. We want a tune-up!

So we turn to religions, self-improvement programs, counselors, psychotherapists, spiritual advisors, holy books, gurus, etc. etc. etc. We figure that however we're acting now, however we're feeling now, however we're thinking now -- there must be better alternatives. Thus we keep on keeping on, running in the hamster cage of "must improve!" without ever getting to the promised land.

If this is what we feel like doing, great. But there may come a time when another possibility presents itself: Nothing. Which, more accurately, is the absence of possibilities, because it is the presence of what is here and now.

What I've just said may sound like gibberish to you. It might not make any sense at all. OK, that's what it is. For you. Nothing more to do; you've got it.

Spirituality mixes with politics at Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Whenever I read newspaper stories like this one, I wonder how Indian mystics of old, such as Kabir, would have looked upon such mixing of politics and spirituality.

Near-death experiences are physical, as is meditation

I've finished reading Kevin Nelson's intriguing book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience." His focus is on near-death experiences. (I've previously blogged about the book here, here, and here.)

The bottom line is that Nelson cites lots of research, which he combines with his extensive knowledge of how the brain works, to come up with a compelling explanation for the seemingly spiritual nature of what often happens to people on the edge of death.

It's all physical. Natural. Brain-based. As is meditation. As is everything, so long as we are alive in a human body. Repeat: as is everything.

I realize that this stark statement will rub many people the wrong way, since it goes against the grain of the almost universal sensation (which appears early on in childhood, and continues into adult life) that our mental sense of "I" somehow is distinct from the material goings-on inside the brain.

Young children believe that when a mouse dies, it is still alive somewhere even though its body is dead. This shows that supernaturalism, the foundation of religiosity, basically is hard-wired into the human brain -- which goes a long way toward explaining why most people believe in God or some other immaterial ultimate reality.

Nelson's book helped me understand more clearly than before how our conscious awareness is just the tip of a neurological iceberg that we're clueless about.

Necessarily, because if our distant ancestors were privy to every complex detail of how their brains were processing the sight of a saber-toothed tiger stalking them, they wouldn't be able to act with sufficient speed and alacrity to escape the danger.

Neurological research now is able to reveal how hitherto mysterious brain processes are the likely cause of "spiritual" phenomena like out-of-body sensations and feelings of becoming one with the universe. Nelson says this recognition doesn't negate the meaning given to such experiences by those who have them.

But it brings spirituality down to earth, so to speak.

We have placed fragmented consciousness at the heart of many of our spiritual experiences and stripped away the illusion of the seamlessly integrated self. Odd as it may seem, we have shown that primal brainstem reactions seem to be at the root of experiences that we think of as spiritual and that make us most human. This concept of "knee-jerk spirituality" deals a strong blow to the idea that free will is necessary to connect with whatever we feel is sacred.

At the neurologist's command, a flicker of electrical current to the brain makes it seem that our consciousness has been lifted from our body and is floating freely in space. The brain pathways used during "natural" spiritual experiences are the same pathways used by spiritual drugs, indistinguishable from otherwise genuine religious conversions, transforming lives long after the drug is flushed clear from the body.

Clinical neurology tells us that these are the same pathways distorted by some diseases of the brain that produce disorders fitting criteria for religious experience. Are spontaneous and authentic spiritual experiences nothing more than "experiments of nature" telling us how the brain works?

We have strong indications that much of our spirituality arises from arousal, limbic, and reward systems that evolved long before structures made the brain capable of language and reasoning. Neurologically, mystical feelings may not be so much beyond language as before language.

Given that we share many of the structures and systems in our brains with other creatures, we may not be the only primate with spiritual feelings. Great apes mourned their dead, and evidence suggests that Neanderthals believed in an afterlife. In fact, I strongly suspect that mystical feelings could exist in many other mammals that are endowed with a limbic system that is very much like our own. And why can't dogs have out-of-body experiences?

No reason, so far as I can tell from watching our dog dream on her pad next to the television set, her paws scrabbling as if she's in hot pursuit of that squirrel which always manages to elude her.

I can easily picture her dreaming of leaving her canine form and soaring up to the tree branch where the squirrel chatters away at our Serena.

Who, you have to admit, looks divine. So, yes, I'm ready to accept that other mammals share our so-called "spiritual" experiences.

"Jesus Potter, Harry Christ" relates Hogwarts and Heaven

Who comes to mind when you think...?

Magic father, human mother
Miraculous birth, foretold by prophecy
Threatened by an evil ruler, had to go into hiding as a baby
Power over animals, time, and matter
Symbolized by a lion, enemy symbolized by a snake
Descended into the underworld
Broke seven magical seals
Went willingly to his death
Suffered and died (or appeared to die) willingly, was mourned
Came back to life
Defeated his enemy in a glorious final battle

I'm no Biblical scholar. And I've never read the Harry Potter series.

But I believe Derek Murphy when he says, early on in his book "Jesus Potter, Harry Christ," that there isn't a whole lot of difference between Christianity's savior and J.K. Rowling's literary creation.

Can this list really be applied to both Jesus Christ and Harry Potter equally? If so,   where do the apparent similarities come from? More importantly, why do some   Christian groups deem Harry Potter satanic, while Jesus Christ is revered as the Son of God? What key differences allow Christians to make the distinction between them?

In order to answer these questions, this chapter will trace the raging controversy over the Harry Potter series, examine the Christian responses to J.K. Rowling's character, and then explore the potential similarities themselves.

I will conclude by arguing that the key variance between the two is that Harry Potter is obviously a fictional character, while Jesus Christ is almost universally accepted as a historical figure.

Murphy is a fellow Oregonian who shares my irreligious perspective. After finding my blog through a fortuitous Googling, and realizing that I'd likely resonate with his book, he sent me a link that led me to a downloadable review copy.

I'm impressed. A lot.

l figured that "Jesus Potter, Harry Christ" would focus on the commonalities between Jesus Christ and Harry Potter, but Murphy's aims are a lot more ambitious. And interesting.

In a highly readable yet semi-scholarly style, he sets out to examine the origins and evolution of Christianity, seeking evidence for a historical Jesus who is akin to the mythical figure revered by believers today.

(Spoiler alert: there is very little. Evidence.)

This book is not meant as an attack on religion, on faith, on belief, or on God. It is simply an attempt to tell, perhaps for the first time ever, the actual history of the Christian Church -- a history that is clearly discernible even after a millennium of   misdirection and wishful thinking; a history that really happened, in one specific,   concrete way, and can be reconstructed based on reliable evidence and testimony.

Although some of the ideas in this book have been raised before, much of the   evidence and arguments in this book are new.

Moreover, Jesus Potter, Harry Christ provides answers that no other book on the subject has been able to provide: exactly how this transformation from myth to history occurred, why anyone would want to combine Judaism and pagan mythology, how followers of Jesus could believe so fervently in his existence to become martyrs, and how a movement as powerful and long-­lasting as Christianity could have begun around a myth.

Yes, a myth.

Just as the character of Harry Potter is imagined, so is that of Jesus Christ. Thus this narrows drastically, and perhaps even eliminates, the variance mentioned above: the supposed historicity of Jesus, as contrasted with the obvious fictional nature of Harry.

The two are seen to be even more alike when each is recognized as being a reflection of our human longing to find meaning in the midst of death, pain, suffering, and malevolent forces.

While unreal in an objective sense, Murphy demonstrates that the myths told in the New Testament and the Harry Potter series can point to personal truths that offer comfort, solace, and courage to anyone (which, really, is everyone) seeking to live life more fully, happily, and boldly.

There is nothing wrong with religion -- so long as faith isn't taken as the Way Things Really Are. We all need a shoulder to lean on, and visions of Heaven can help support us, just as tales of Hogwarts can.

"Jesus Potter, Harry Christ" demolishes part of the foundation of Christianity, Jesus' purported uniqueness and godly heritage, but leaves the most important part: our capacity as humans to become more and better than we are now.

Jesus Christ could still serve as our higher selves, our voice of reason and guidance, our intuition and goodness. This conception of Jesus would truly be eternal and universal: it has many names, and the expression of its faith are as diverse as the world's many distinct cultures.

Have a visit to the "Jesus Potter, Harry Christ" birthplace and mothership, Holy Blasphemy. I enjoyed the churchless atmosphere on this well-crafted web site. For some entertaining FAQ's, head here.

Religion is the biggest joke -- but with no punchline

What if you spent quite a bit of time doing something that was very serious and important to you? And then you came to understand it was a joke and useless. How would that make you feel?

Probably, disturbed that you'd wasted so much effort on something so laughable. Yet also happy that you reached your realization before frittering away more of your life on a big bit of nothing.

This is how I see religions now. As jokes, but without a punchline.

Often a joke isn't funny until the very end. That's when we see the humor in the tale. For example:

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says: ''Ugh, that's the ugliest baby I've ever seen!'' The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her: ''The driver just insulted me!'' The man says: ''You go up there and tell him off. Go on, I'll hold your monkey for you.''

But the reason so many people take their religion so seriously is that they never get to the punchline -- the absence of an afterlife. So they pray, meditate, go on pilgrimages, attend church, worship, and do their oh-so-serious rituals, visualizing that in the end, life won't be The End.

Now, do I know for certain there isn't an afterlife? No.

However, I'm 100% confident that everybody who is born, dies. And there is zero demonstrable evidence that any person has continued to exist as a conscious entity after his or her death.

So that's why I get the joke about religion, while billions of my fellow mortal humans look upon their chosen faith with solemn eyes and a serious mien.

What's funny -- and also dreadfully sad -- is the spectacle of so many people sleepwalking through life in a religious daze, anticipating that they'll wake up in a marvelous supernatural reality after they die.

If they're wrong, if each of us has only one chance of experiencing existence, then it is incredibly misguided to look past the living that is here and now in an effort to prepare for a fantasy afterlife there and then.

In Kevin Nelson's book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain," which persuasively argues that near-death experiences are entirely physical, a passage from Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" is used to show how the brain distorts the passage of time in a stressful situation.

These are the final thoughts of Prince Myshkin, a condemned man:

He had only five minutes more to live. He told me that those five minutes seemed to him an infinite time, a vast wealth; he felt that he had so many lives left to live in those five minutes that there was no need yet to think of the last moment, so much so that he divided his time up.

He set aside time to take leave of his comrades, two minutes for that; then he kept another two minutes to think for the last time; and then a minute to look about him for the last time. He remembered very well having divided his time like that.

He was dying at twenty-seven, strong and healthy. As he took leave of his comrades, he remembered asking one of them a somewhat irrelevant question and being particularly interested in the answer. Then when he had said good-bye, the two minutes came that he had set apart for thinking to himself.

He knew beforehand what he would think about. He wanted to realize as quickly and clearly as possible how it could be that now he existed and was living and in three minutes he would be something -- someone or something. But what? Where? He meant to decide all that in those two minutes!

Not far off there was a church, and the gilt roof was glittering in the bright sunshine. He remembered that he stared very persistently at that roof and the light flashing from it; he could not tear himself away from the light. It seemed to him that those rays were his new nature and that in three minutes he would somehow melt into them.

Well, almost certainly not.

But in this tale Prince Myshkin is only going to spend three minutes before his least breath contemplating an imagined afterlife. If that makes him feel better, so be it. I wouldn't want to take away comforting thoughts from a man about to die.

What this story brought to mind, though, is that each of our lives, in its entirety, is nothing more than five minutes (or a lot less; I haven't done the math) when compared to the 14 billion years since the big bang brought the universe into existence.

We don't have much time to live, compared to how much living the cosmos has done, and will continue doing after our deaths.

We shouldn't waste it on imaginary things, imaginary pursuits, imaginary fantasies. We shouldn't waste it on religion.

"All Things Shining" is a luminous philosophical read

If you're looking for a book that (1) discusses Western classics like Moby Dick and the Odyssey in a fresh and creative fashion, (2) points the way to a philosophy of life that navigates between the danger zones of religiosity and nihilism, and (3) was featured on a recent episode of The Colbert Report, there's only one choice:

"All Things Shining," by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, two heavy-duty philosophers (Kelly is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, but looks too young and clean-cut for this; where's the beard and pipe?)

I'm not literary enough to be able to critique these guys' interpretation of the classics. A New York Times review of their book finds some flaws, but hey, what else would you expect from a NYT reviewer? She ends with:

Perhaps Dreyfus and Kelly’s greatest service is to provoke such questions, spurring readers to think for themselves. Kant called this the task of enlightenment; it is certainly the mark of real philosophy.

Absolutely. And that's what I'm enjoying most about "All Things Shining," which I haven't quite finished yet. It's making me look at life, and myself, in new ways.

The book also is affirming some churchless leanings which I've felt were genuine and true; it's nice, though, to have some philosophers as talented and wise as the authors explain why I'm justified in looking at life the way I do now.

Not as having meaning ready-made, given to me by God or some other external power. Nor as being empty of meaning, requiring me to fashion my own meaning through my own force of will.

Instead, there's what I call a Taoist middle way -- though Dreyfus and Kelly restrict themselves to Western philosophy and ways of looking at the world, so don't make mention of Eastern meaning-of-life notions.

In their first chapter, the authors relate the tale of Wesley Autrey, a fifty year old construction worker who was standing on a subway platform when Cameron Hollopeter was overcome by convulsions and fell backward onto the tracks below. Autrey's two young daughters were with him on the platform.

When the headlights of the southbound No. 1 train appeared, however, he did not hesitate. Leaping onto the tracks he pressed his body down on top of Mr. Hollopeter, pushing him into a trough that was about a foot deep. The train's brakes shrieked before them, but the train was unable to stop: five cars screeched over the top of the two men, missing them only by inches, before the train finally came to a halt.

...The newspapers dubbed Wesley Autrey the "Subway Hero," and he enjoyed a well-deserved spate of popular press...But throughout it all, Mr. Autrey himself insisted that he was no hero, had done nothing out of the ordinary. "I don't feel like I did something spectacular," Mr. Autrey said. "I just saw someone who needed help."

His heroism was a shining moment. But Dreyfus and Kelly correctly point out that almost any moment can be shining, when we are in the proper relation to it, when the light of reality is seen as illuminating it.

The main message I've gotten from "All Things Shining" so far is this: we struggle too much. We wrestle with moral dilemmas. We fight to decide the correct course of action. We labor over existential choices.

An unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and most of us could admit to finding ourselves at least occasionally wavering. Far from being certain and unhesitating, our lives can at the extreme seem shot through with hesitation and indecision, culminating in choices finally made on the basis of nothing at all.

Or, too much of something. The New York Times reviewer correctly observes that Dreyfus and Kelly over-emphasize the extent to which a secular nihilism permeates the psyches of monotheism-bereft humans.

Maybe this is true at Harvard and U.C. Berkeley (where the authors teach), but religious true believers are plentiful elsewhere in the United States, even here in less churchy Oregon.

So while some people surely are drifting aimlessly in a boundless ocean of godless choices, many others believe that they're being propelled along a straight and narrow sea lane with the Supreme Being guiding their course.

I'm familiar with both nautical analogies, which were very real to me when I held fast to them. In college I was an enthusiastic existentialist, devouring Sartre, Camus, and all that existence precedes essence stuff; meaning was to be made by me. Then I embraced an Indian guru; I had faith that my karma and the Master's grace jointly determined everything that happened to me.

Now, I resonate with how "All Things Shining" views a vibrant way of living. After discounting excessive self-confidence as a foundation for one's existence, the authors say:

In contrast with this, a genuine confidence of the sort that seems to have directed Mr. Autrey's actions is driven not by some internal set of thoughts or desires, nor by a calculated set of plans or principles.

Indeed, as in the case of Mr. Autrey, it is experienced as confidence drawn forth by something outside of oneself. It is grounded in the way things actually are, not in the confident person's perhaps self-serving characterization of them. The genuinely confident agent does not manufacture confidence, but receives it from the circumstances.

Dreyfus and Kelly then relate how Bill Bradley was able to perform amazing feats on the basketball court, both as a college player and pro, such as when he played against the top-ranked team in the nation at Madison Square Garden, scoring forty-one points.

Greatness of this sort is nearly mystical to apprehend. It is characterized by the kind of sustained responsiveness to the situation that the Subway Hero embodied when he leapt onto the tracks.

It is unflinching, unhesitating, and unwavering, and it has these certain qualities precisely because the activity flows not from the agent but through him. As a spectator of heroic activity one has the sense of watching something nearly inevitable, as though it is ordained by some force beyond the mere whim of human self-assertion.

Such moments are at the extreme of shining. But there is an entire spectrum of luminosity available to us. We just have to stop looking for something other than what is right in front of our eyes.

In the course of discussing "Moby Dick," the authors say:

This ability to live at the surface, to take the events of daily life with the meanings they present rather than to seek their hidden purpose, to find happiness and joy in what there already is, finds its easiest expression in a pre-Christian age. Indeed, not just a pre-Christian age, but a pre-Buddhist, pre-Platonic, pre-Hinduist, and pre-Confucian one as well.

 

 

No, Randi Rhodes, I can't tolerate blind faith

This afternoon, all it took was a few minutes of listening to Randi Rhodes on Portland's progressive talk station (KPOJ) to get irritated by what she was saying.

Usually it takes a bit longer, but eventually I always find Rhodes to be almost as difficult for me to listen to as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage -- her ideological opposites.

(See here, here, and here for my previous anti-Randi rants.)

Today I tuned into her show as she was talking with an atheist caller. He said that he couldn't believe in any religion, or God, because there was no solid evidence of a supernatural divinity, and religions have had two thousand years (or more) to come up with such proof.

Rhodes said, "How do you know?" For a moment both I and the caller were confused. There was a silence on the airwaves, and I also tried to figure out what she meant. After all, the guy had just said that he didn't believe in God. What was there to know?

She then elucidated the question: "How do you know there isn't a God?" Which stimulated my churchless psyche to inwardly scream, Unholy jesus fucking christ, Randi, that's an idiotic thing to say.

Almost always, you can't prove something doesn't exist. Nobody can prove that the Tooth Fairy isn't real. Or Santa Claus. Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. All we can do is ask for evidence that they do exist as something more than myths.

This isn't much different from Randi asking, "How do you know the moon isn't made of green cheese?"

Well, because there's plenty of evidence that the moon is made of other stuff. Likewise, science and everyday experience tell us that things in the world can be explained by the laws of nature; no "green cheese" sort of extraordinary supernatural explanation is necessary.

So I was disappointed, but not all that surprised (because Randi Rhodes isn't an exemplar of logical thinking) when she went on to tell her caller:

You should be tolerant of people who have faith in things there is no evidence for. Your atheism is just like a religion to you.

I yelled at the radio, "No, I don't!" and "No, it isn't!" to those two sentences. And switched to another station.

Not believing isn't a belief system. I demolished that misconception in "Atheism isn't a religion, Thom Hartmann," where I took another KPOJ talk radio host to task -- with the aid of an excellent piece called If atheism is religion, 'albino' is a suntan.

If you are a Christian, do you believe Ganesh does not exist? Why, then you must be a devout follower of the "No Ganesh" faith!

...If me not believing in your God is a faith, then you not believing in other Gods is an equal faith. How many Christians do you know who would say they do not believe in other Gods as a matter of faith?

If my atheism with respect to your deity is a religion, then your atheism with respect to other deities is also a religion.

Further, I don't have to be tolerant of people who expect me to believe stuff without solid demonstrable evidence. As I often say on this blog, I've got no trouble with weird notions, so long as they aren't forced on me.

Take your subjectivity to the limits; feel (and be) free. But when it comes time to act on, or reach consensus about the nature of, objective reality, you need to give me something more than a "have faith."

If religious believers kept their unfounded beliefs to themselves, I'd have no problem with religion. However, they don't. And that's why I'm intolerant of claims for which there is no evidence.

For example, I'm intolerant of fundamentalists who say there's no need to worry about global warming because God has a plan for the Earth, according to Genesis. That crazy notion comes from a Congressman whose wacko religious beliefs are influencing his votes on energy policy and climate change legislation.

So Randi Rhodes, don't tell me to be tolerant of religious beliefs. The 9/11 attackers had blind faith in Allah and their conception of the Koran. Do you want people to be tolerant of angry, militant Islam?

I doubt it. But as soon as we tolerate one unproven religious belief, the door is open to toleration of all of them.