Church of the Churchless

Oregon jury finds faith-healers guilty of manslaughter

Justice was served.

It was good to read today that some fundamentalist Christians got what they deserved from an Oregon jury: a second degree manslaughter conviction for letting their newborn son die without seeking medical attention because they believed in faith-healing.

Previously I wrote about how the church midwife in attendance at the birth considered that the baby's death was "God's will." Today's newspaper story told more about the parents' theological belief system.

The church witnesses exhibited "a fatalistic attitude all the way," Fleming said.

Prosecutors said David Hickman's fate was sealed when he took his first breath. The boy -- a great-great grandson of church founder Walter White -- would never have received medical treatment, regardless of his condition. They said he was born into a family bound to the belief that life-and-death decisions were a test of faith. God, not doctors, would determine who survives and who succumbs -- even when an illness is treatable by medicine or a minor medical procedure.

...Shannon Hickman said even if she had wanted to call 9-1-1 she was powerless to act because her church calls for wives to submit to their husband's decisions -- to do otherwise is a sin.

Regardless of her views, jurors said she still had parental responsibility.

A child's unnecessary death is dramatic. It vividly draws our attention to the absurdity of someone following a rigid rule, or the orders of a superior, when a situation obviously demands that something different be done.

But religious dogmatism and hierarchical control can take on all sorts of more subtle forms. Instead of a baby dying, the consequences of obsessive obedience can be the "death" of a true believer's independence, conscience, and personal morality by a thousand theological cuts.

For many years I was part of an India-based spiritual organization whose devotees considered the guru to be God in human form. So not surprisingly, the dictates of this supposedly divine being were taken extremely seriously.

An oft-told tale was of a guru who ordered his disciples to dig deep pits in a field, then fill them up with the just-removed dirt and dig different pits. The "winner" of this absurd exercise in blind obedience was the disciple who kept digging the longest, thereby demonstrating the most faith in his guru's just-have-faith command.

I used to aspire to being such a disciple.

I'd act first and think later (or not at all) when an instruction from the guru was communicated to Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) initiates. If minute amounts of animal rennet suddenly became a dietary no-no, then by God I'd stop eating any cheese that wasn't clearly labeled "vegetarian" rennet.

Now, though, I realize that the difference between that true-believing me and the faith-healing couple who were found guilty of manslaughter was a matter of degree.

And the same was true of many other RSSB disciples-- even more so, since I had a more scientific and rational attitude toward the teachings than the typical initiate. If the guru had given a command to do something truly weird, there's little doubt that a large proportion of his followers would have followed his dictate.

That's what followers do: follow.

So even though I find the Christian baby-killers deeply distasteful, to some degree I understand how they could have believed that it was better to annoint their newborn with oil rather than dialing 911.

Religions lead people to believe in crazy things.

Feeling that you are obeying God's will is a powerful force. This doesn't excuse what the faith-healing parents did. But everyone who believes in a "higher power" shares, to some degree, the blind obedience that caused an Oregon baby to die unnecessarily.

If spirituality is a science, "saints" are irrelevant

Most people take it for granted that religious, mystical, or spiritual discussions usually center around Who Said What.

For example...

What did Jesus mean in such-and-such Bible passage?
When Ramana talks about "I-I," how is this to be interpreted?
Can we trust Deepak Chopra's view of the cosmos?

This emphasis on personal sources of wisdom is more than a little strange, when you think about it. After all, what difference does it make if Joe rather than Jane claims that something is true?

If it's true, it's true. If it isn't, it isn't.

Spirituality often is considered to be a science of sorts, since spiritual truths can be viewed as being more universal than idiosyncratic personal experiences.

Well, if this is so, then why are most religious believers, mystic practitioners, and spiritual devotees obsessed with revelations by saints, masters, gurus, and such? What's the big deal with what Person X says, especially when it is at odds with what Person Y says?

If spirituality is a science, then the focus should be on what's real, not on what's said.

This morning I was reading my way through physicist David Deutsch's fascinating new book, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World." I came across some passages that cast new light on my series of infatuations with certain mystics.

Courses in philosophy place great weight on reading original texts, and commentaries on them, in order to understand the theories that were in the minds of various great philosophers.

This focus on history is odd, and is in marked contrast to all other academic disciplines (except perhaps history itself). For example, in all the physics courses that I took at university, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, I cannot recall a single instance where any orginal papers or books by the great physicists of old were studied or were even on the reading list.

Only when a course touched upon very recent discoveries did we ever read the work of their discoverers. So we learned Einstein's theory of relativity without ever hearing from Einstein; we knew Maxwell, Boltzmann, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and so on only as names. We read their theories in textbooks whose authors were physicists (not historians of physics) who themselves may well never have read the works of those pioneers.

Why? The immediate reason is that the original sources of scientific theories are almost never good sources. How could they be? All subsequent expositions are intended to be improvements on them, and some succeed, and improvements are cumulative.

...When they learn a theory, scientists are interested in what the theory's originator, or anyone else along the chain of communication, believed. When physicists read a textbook on the theory of relativity, their immediate objective is to learn the theory, and not the opinions of Einstein or of the textbook's author.

If that seems strange, imagine, for the sake of argument, that a historian were to discover that Einstein wrote his papers only as a joke, or at gunpoint, and was actually a lifelong believer in Kepler's laws.

This would be a bizarre and important discovery about the history of physics, and all the textbooks about that would have to be rewritten. But our knowledge of physics itself would be unaffected, and physics textbooks would not need any change at all.

Now, if a religious, mystical, or spiritual "theory" (a.k.a. theology) says that if a person does such-and-such, he or she will develop some unusual attributes -- like perfect love or perfect knowledge -- then it makes sense to judge the truth of the theory by an assessment of the theory-purveyor's personal characteristics.

But if the theory/theology is about some universal attribute of the cosmos, such as the existence of heaven or some other higher realm of reality, then the truth or falsehood of this claim doesn't depend upon the person making it.

So a scientific spirituality shouldn't care who says something. What matters is what's  being said. If it's true, there should be evidence of this beyond the mere saying.

Taoism wisdom: life is change, so flow with it

Today my Tai Chi instructor talked about change. That's what life -- and Tai Chi -- is all about. When we stop changing, that's called death.

The yin/yang symbol beautifully embodies this truth. White (yang) flows into black (yin). There's yang in yin, and yin in yang. To exist, lightness and darkness need each other. Where one ends, the other begins.

Taoist philosophy finds a concrete expression in the physical movements of Tai Chi. My instructor likes to emphasize how transitions are central in Tai Chi, as in life. How you move between movements is as important as the movements themselves.

Meaning, there's no wasted space in Tai Chi, as in life. There's no Big Important Movement that you frantically rush to, because every movement is equally important.

In a Tai Chi class, you feel this as the practitioners move together much like a school of fish or a flock of birds do. There's a harmony, but not a lockstep. People are sensitive to how those around them are moving, yet everyone has their own individual style and mannerisms.

Rigidity is a no-no (yet even that rule isn't an absolute). Flexibility, softness, acceptance, blending -- these are key Tai Chi principles.

Life isn't predictable. Neither is the next movement in a Tai Chi form. You might lose your balance. You might forget what you're supposed to do. You might be impeded by the motion of someone else.

It isn't possible to accurately anticipate what hasn't happened yet. All you can do is be aware of what is happening now. And respond to that now as spontaneously, harmoniously, and appropriately as possible.

There are no rules. Yet, there are principles. A rule demands that we do X rather than Y. A principle invites us to look upon X and Y in a certain fashion, then decide which is the preferable way to go.

We can wish that life would flow along in a different fashion than it is, just as I often wish that I wouldn't lose my balance when doing a Tai Chi kick.

I've learned, though, that thinking about a past loss of balance does absolutely nothing to help me stay centered when the next kick comes around. In fact, dwelling on the past distracts me from doing what needs to be done now.

As in Tai Chi, so in life.

Most of us are addicted to our attempts at controlling. We try to control the past by composing stories about what happened to us. These have an appealing plot line, where we're the hero/heroine, or at least the lead character.

We also try to control the future by visualizing what might happen, what should happen, what is expected to happen. Only problem is, neither the past nor the future can be controlled -- not in the rigid fashion we attempt.

So we often miss the only moment when everything freshly happens, the only moment when anything new can be done, the only moment when life reveals itself in all its living glory: this present moment.

It's always changing into another moment.

Reiigions speak of eternity, changelessness, absolute this-or-that, purity with no trace of contamination. But that's just talk. Life is lived in a concrete reality where imagined religious abstractions are just frothy dream-stuff.

I've never met anyone who didn't change. I've never heard of anyone who stood apart from the flow of life. Indeed, who would want this? While we're alive, let's live.

Church midwife in Oregon believes in letting babies die

I'm glad I don't have high blood pressure, because some days reading the newspaper makes me feel like my head (or my heart?) is going to explode.

Today's outrage is nicely encapsulated by the Portland Oregonian headline that caught my eye at the top of the Metro section: "Midwife calls death God's will."

The death was that of David Hickman, who was born two months early and lived a unduly short life of nine hours because his parents were wacko Oregon City Christians who believe in faith healing.

(I've written about previous child sacrifice deaths committed by Followers of Christ church members here, here, and here.)

It's ridiculous how religious belief is used as a justification for letting children die without seeking necessary medical care. If somebody stands by while a child dies without dialing 911, this should be an open-and-shut legal case: guilty.

But while this is the 21st century, some cultural attitudes are still stuck in ancient history because of religion's stultifying influence. Here's a blunt reader comment on the Oregonian story that I liked:

Religion poisons everything it touches. If we stoped teaching our kids about a made-up hell they wouldn't grow up to be brainwashed. PULL YOUR HEADS OUT OF THE BRONZE-AGE PEOPLE!!!!!!

The following quotes from the Oregonian story indicate what good advice that last sentence is. Lavona Keith is the church midwife who helped with the delivery of David Hickman, who should have survived according to a neonatologist.

A church midwife who attended the home birth of David Hickman, who was born two months early and lived only nine hours, said she does not believe the premature baby should have been taken to the hospital.

In unusually candid testimony, Lavona Keith said "it wasn't God's will for David to live."

...Under questioning by prosecutor John Wentworth, Keith said it is for God to decide whether a baby lives or dies.

"Is there anything a doctor can do to change that?" Wentworth asked.

"I don't think so," Keith said.

..."I would anoint" the child with oil but would not call a doctor, Keith said. "I believe in trusting in God."

What would God do, Wentworth asked.

"He would heal my baby," Keith said.

"What lesson was learned from David's death?" Wentworth asked.

"I don't know," Keith replied.

Lavona Keith, you are a fucking idiot.

Plus, every Christian, along with every idiotic true believer of any other faith, who believes that God's will determines whether a baby lives or dies also is a fucking idiot.

Religion rots minds. Religion kills innocent people. These are facts. As is the death of David Hickman, a baby sacrificed to a God who doesn't exist.

Here's more proof that if you seek to be moral, run away as far as you can from religion.

Religion makes Arab-Israeli conflict much tougher to solve

Tonight, during a wine tasting event, I chatted with a guy about the dismal state of national and international politics.

Opposing positions have gotten absurdly extreme. Republicans have almost nothing in common with Democrats. Israelis have almost nothing in common with Palestinians. With such little common ground, there's no room for two parties at odds with each other to negotiate a mutually acceptable deal.

We talked about how both Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians have an absurd belief that the territory Israel occupied in the 1967 war is "holy" or a "promised land." Absurd, because these religious claims are based on Jewish and Muslim dogmas.

So the supposed truth that Jews are entitled to ownership of the "Holy Land" is founded on statements in a Jewish holy book. Ditto with Palestinian claims to their own holy places, though these don't seem as extreme to me as hard line Israeli faith-based political positions.

There seems to be no end to the haggling over whether, or how, Palestinian statehood should be accomplished. Tomorrow it looks like the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, will ask the U.N. General Assembly for recognition.

That request likely won't succeed, partly because the United States has tied itself so tightly to Israel (every president lusts after Jewish votes and political contributions), it isn't possible for this country to forcefully push for the "two state" solution reasonable people recognize as the only fair way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

My wine-tasting companion and I agreed that religion makes the problem much worse. Jews and Christians feel that the "Holy Land" has to stay in the hands of Israel, because this is what the Bible demands, or at least strongly implies.

Where, then, is the wiggle-room for negotiating land swaps with the Palestinian Authority, if fundamentalist Jewish and Christian organizations are convinced that Israel is doing God's will by holding on to land that supposedly is a divine promise to the Jews?

I don't get it when people say, "Religion is a force for good, not for harm."

Just look at Israel and Palestine. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have taken over sixty years, and coiunting, to resolve their conflicts if religious dogma wasn't making both sides feel that their position is divinely inspired.

John Lennon got it right.

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

A mind-blowing fact about infinity

What can you say about infinity? Well, the word has a pretty lengthy Wikipedia page, so clearly the answer is "a lot."

Which makes sense, since if there's one thing we know about infinity, it's this: infinity is freaking big.

Or at least, limitless. I suppose something could be infinitely small -- getting smaller and smaller without limit. But this would mean that it's a freaking big bit of small.

God supposedly is infinite.

Infinitely loving, infinitely knowing, infinitely powerful. Heck, God probably has an infinite number of positive qualities, being so infinite. This is assuming that God exists.

We also have to assume infinity exists.

Reading the "A Window on Infinity" chapter in physicist David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity book, I learned that there's some disagreement about whether infinity is really real, or just conceptually real.

There is a philosophy of mathematics called finitism, the doctrine that only finite abstract entities exist. So, for instance, there are infinitely many natural numbers, but finitists insist that that is just a manner of speaking.

They say that the literal truth is only that there is a finite rule for generating each natural number (or more precisely, each numeral) from the previous one, and nothing literally infinite is involved.

I don't feel qualified to comment on the dispute between finitists and infinitists. The whole notion of infinity blows my mind when I ponder it. So it's tough for me to say anything coherent about a word -- infinity -- which seems utterly divorced from what I experience in everyday life.

Limits. Discrete numbers of things. Boundaries. Horizons.

Still...

I love the notion of infinity. I want the finitists to be wrong. I get a thrill up my psyche's spine when I try to envision something that isn't really a some, nor a thing, having no limit.

I haven't finished reading Deutsch's "A Window on Infinity" chapter. But here's my favorite mind-blowing passage so far.

In mathematics, infinity is studied via infinite sets (meaning sets with infinitely many numbers). The defining property of an infinite set is that some part of it has as many elements as the whole thing.

Whoa. Wow.

Every part of an infinite set is just as infinite'y as the whole thing. As soon as this idea entered my mind, it seemed super significant to me. Problem is, I can't say why. I get a feeling along the lines of "universe in a grain of sand."

However, with infinity seemingly there's no boundary that could define a universe, or a grain. Seemingly. I'm not mathematically astute enough to know if this is true.

Realizing that most readers of his book would be as math-challenged as I am, Deutsch helpfully recounts a thought experiment by mathematician David Hilbert. Here's a sample of what goes on in the experiment.

He [Hilbert] imagined a hotel with infinitely many rooms: Infinity Hotel. The rooms are numbered with natural numbers, starting with 1 and ending with -- what?

The last room number is not infinity. First of all, there is no last room. The idea that any numbered set of rooms has a highest numbered member is the first intuition from everyday life that we have to drop.

Second, in any finite hotel whose rooms are numbered from 1, there would be a room whose number equalled the total number of rooms, and other rooms whose numbers were close to that: if there were ten rooms, one of them would be room number ten, and there would be a room number nine as well.

But in Infinity Hotel, where the number of rooms is infinity, all the rooms have numbers infinitely far below infinity.

Whoa. Wow.

That last sentence seems really, really, really significant to me. Why, it could be the key to understanding everything. Or, nothing. Which doesn't take anything away from the sentence's significance.

After all, nothing is as close to infinity as everything is. I think. Can't be sure. Time to stop blogging and have a glass of wine. That will bring me closer to understanding what infinity is all about.

Of course, that new understanding distance still will be infinitely far below infinity. So I might as well watch TV while drinking the glass of wine.

Reading a holy book. Sitting at the feet of a holy person. Meditating or praying in a holy fashion. Doing any or all of those things would still leave me infinitely far below infinity.

Remember, in the Infinity Hotel all the rooms have numbers infinitely below infinity.

Mystical experiences prove nothing

Whatever I say in this post -- and as a blogger I never know what that is until I say it -- it won't be anywhere near as good as what David Chapman has said in his "Are Mystical Experiences Metaphysical Evidence?"

So the best thing you could do is stop reading what I've written, and read Chapman now. The second best thing would be to click on the links I've given after you peruse this post.

But if you've ever believed that a mystical experience means something beyond the obvious, that someone has had some sort of experience, I strongly urge you to read Chapman's post.

Today, tomorrow, some day. Whenever. Just do it.

His post is that good. Chapman is an excellent writer, thinker, and interpreter of meditational/mystical phenomena, Buddhist or otherwise.

This is how he starts off:

Here is an extraordinary spiritual teaching:

• Mystics, across many different cultures and religions, all describe their insight experiences similarly.
• This couldn’t happen unless their accounts were accurate.
• So we must believe what they say.

What is extraordinary about this teaching is that it [is] so widely accepted, and yet so obviously false. As I’ll explain:

• If mystics all gave similar descriptions of their experiences, it could just mean that they are all mistaken in the same way.
• But, in fact, mystics from different cultures give wildly different descriptions, which generally reflect their cultural background.

This is one of the points I made in my previous post, "Atheism challenges personal spiritual experiences." Chapman says:

What mystics really care about is the metaphysical aspect. That, many claim, is essentially the same in all cultures. Mystics report:

• The discovery that they have no real self; the discovery of their True Self.
• Direct perception of the transcendent reality behind appearances; direct perception of fact that there is no transcendent reality behind appearances.
• Total separation from the world; total unity with the world.
• Finding that they are utterly insignificant in the presence of the glory of God; finding that they are God; finding that God has removed himself from the universe; finding that there never was a God.
• A perfect conceptual understanding of religious doctrine; a perfectly non-conceptual understanding of the reality beyond doctrine.

Uh, wait. It is not obvious that these are all the same…

Yeah, that's putting it mildly. The meaning of mystical experiences is all over the map. No consistent conclusions can be drawn from the widely divergent descriptions of these experiences.

Read all of Chapman's post to learn what meaning he derives from this meaninglessness. And take a look at the comments on his post. They're almost as interesting as what Chapman says.

Atheism challenges personal spiritual experiences

Here's some good news about the newest form of the "new atheism."

It isn't just content to challenge theological propositions and supernatural world views, but also says prove it when religious believers cite personal experience as their reason for having faith in whatever they believe.

At least, this is one of the conclusions I got from an interesting New York Times essay by Gary Gutting, "Beyond 'New Atheism.'"

For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion.

Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.

In the last few years there has emerged another style of atheism that takes such experiences seriously. One of its best exponents is Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia. (For a good introduction to his views, see Kitcher’s essay in “The Joy of Secularism,” perceptively discussed last month by James Wood in The New Yorker.)

Instead of focusing on the scientific inadequacy of theistic arguments, Kitcher critically examines the spiritual experiences underlying religious belief, particularly noting that they depend on specific and contingent social and cultural conditions.

Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning.

Amen to that.

I used to consider that the notion of a spiritual Perennial Philosophy had some basis in fact. Namely, that underlying the obvious significant differences between the world's many religions, mystic teachings, and other forms of spirituality, there was a common denominator, a foundational ground floor if you will -- a solid universal reality upon which cultural conjectures flowered in myriad illusory patterns.

Well, there is little or no evidence of this in religious theologies.

For example, Christianity is poles apart from Hinduism. It's possible to find some common ground, particularly in the realm of ethics, but God is far different from Brahman, as Jesus is far different from Krishna.

So if there's something true about religious belief, it won't be evidenced through theological analysis. Which leaves personal experience. Yet here too, there's little common ground.

The number of Tibetan Buddhist meditators who end up professing a belief in Christianity after having an inner experience of Jesus' divinity must be close to zero, if not precisely that number. (I'm assuming no prior cultural acquaintance with Christianity that could influence the "experiment" of meditation.)

Give Gutting's essay a read. I've focused on the implications of only one of the "newest new atheist" points he makes in his piece. Just about my only quibble with his essay was this statement:

This “cultural relativism” argument is an old one, but Kitcher shows that it is still a serious challenge. (He is also refreshingly aware that he needs to show why a similar argument does not apply to his own position, since atheistic beliefs are themselves often a result of the community in which one lives.)

OK, I can agree that the prevalence of atheism in a society is dependent on cultural factors. But I don't agree that atheism is a "belief" in the sense that religious belief is. Atheism is the absence of belief, not a belief per se.

Conspiracy theories -- another form of blind faith

One person believes that Jesus was resurrected after dying on the cross. Another person believes that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks.

Each belief lacks a foundation of demonstrable evidence. Each belief almost certainly is untrue. Each belief has many adherents who vehemently hold to it, despite how bizarre their blind faith is.

I'm a religious skeptic. I'm also a conspiracy theory skeptic. What seems strange to me is how people who decry fundamentalist religion often cling to fundamentalist conspiracy theories.

But after reading Michael Shermer's new book, "The Believing Brain," I'm better able to see the connections between religiosity and conspiracy theory'osity. Shermer has a chapter, Belief in Conspiracies, which lists some of the active conspiracy theories:

Conspiracy theories are a different breed of animal than conspiracies themselves.

Whether there was or was not a conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK (I contend that there was not), theories of JFK conspiracies abound, as they do for the assassinations of RFK, MLK Jr., and Malcolm X; the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa; and the deaths of Princess Diana and assorted rock stars, not to mention conspiracy theories behind the fluoridation of water supplies, jet contrails depositing chemical and biological agents in the atmosphere (chemtrails), the spread of AIDS and other infectious diseases, the dispersal of cocaine and guns to inner cities, peak oil and related oil company suppression of alternative energy technologies, the moon landing that never happened, UFO landings that did happen, and the nefarious goings-on of the Federal Reserve, the New World Order, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee of 300, Skull and Bones, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the BIlderberg Group, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Learned Elders of Zion and the Zionist Occupation Government, satanists and satanic ritual cults, and the like.

The list is seemingly endless.

For sure.

I'd add "global warming is a hoax," because this conspiracy theory shares one of the characteristics that makes such wild-eyed hypotheses so unlikely to be true: a belief that humans are capable of pulling off a highly complex, wide-ranging fraud which escapes detection even though hundreds or thousands of people are involved with it.

As Shermer puts it:

The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy are elevated to near superhuman power to pull it off. We must always remember how flawed human behavior is, and the natural tendency we all have to make mistakes. Most of the time in most circumstances most people are not nearly as powerful as we think they are.

The more complex the conspiracy, and the more elements involved for it to unfold successfully, the less likely it is to be true.

The more people involved in the conspiracy, the less likely they will all be able to keep silent about their secret goings-on.

So conspiracy theorists have to believe that those responsible for a nefarious act, like faking the moon landing or detonating explosives in the Twin Towers on 9/11, have almost divine powers.

Otherwise, how could they successfully plan, carry out, and keep secret their activities without a single shred of solid evidence leaking out that would unquestionably confirm the conspiracy theory which purports to know the truth about some event?

After discussing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which helped trigger the First World War, Shermer writes:

This is how conspiracies really work -- as messy events that unfold according to real-time contingencies. They often turn on the minutiae of chance and the reality of human error. Our propensity is to think otherwise -- to believe that conspiracies are well-oiled machines of Machiavellian manipulations -- is to fall into the trap of conspirational patternicity and agenticitiy, where the patterns are too well delineated and the agents superhuman in knowledge and power.

Early on in the chapter Shermer talks about how transcendentalism isn't only a factor in religious belief; it also lies at the root of secular conspiracy theories.

Why do people believe in conspiracies? A useful distinction here is between transcendentalists and empiricists.

Transcendentalists tend to believe that everything is interconnected and all events happen for a reason. Empiricists tend to think that randomness and coincidence interact with the causal net of our world and that belief should depend on evidence for each individual claim.

The problem for skepticism is that transcendentalism is intutive; empiricism is not. Our propensity for patternicity and agenticity leads us naturally into the transcendental camp of seeing events in the world as unfolding according to a preplanned logic, whereas the empirical method of being skeptical until a claim is made otherwise requires concerted effort that most of us do not make.

Thus, the psychology of belief first and evidence second is once again borne out. Or as Buffalo Springfield once intoned: Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep...

Over on my other blog I shared an example of how jumping to conclusions often leads to getting mired in unreality. Check out "What I learned from a cut phone line."

Mysticism is as real as fundamentalist religion

Yesterday David Lane left this comment on a recent blog post:

Yes, good point you make here about the epistemology of "knowing" in fundamentalist religion versus mysticism. Here is a link to something I wrote that dovetails with your point:

https://sites.google.com/site/msacmagazinesparttwo/home/POLITICSOFMYSTICISM.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1

Because I always enjoy what David has to say, I clicked away and found an interesting six page PDF-file essay, "The Politics of Mysticism."
Download Politics of Mysticism

Here's some excerpts -- the formatting is a bit screwed up, since I copied text from the PDF file. No big deal, since you really should read the whole thing.

Perhaps  the  most  problematic  issue  confronting   transpersonalists  is  the  veracity of  inner  experiences.  For   many  involved  in  new  religious  groups  mystical  encounters,  like  near-­‐‑death  and  out-­‐‑of-­‐‑body  excursions,  offer  evidence  of their  respective  guru'ʹs  rightful  position  or  succession.   This  has  been  especially acute  in  several  Sant  Mat  related  groups,   particularly  Kirpal  Singh'ʹs  Ruhani Satsang,  where  mastership  disputes   are  often  resolved  by  resorting  to  one'ʹs inner  meditation  experiences.  But   there  is  a  rub  in  all  this  that  for  the  most part  lies  uninspected  by  those   newly  initiated.  

No  doubt  a  religious  devotee  may  use  such  experiences  as  proof  for   the authenticity  of  his/her  guru  or  group,  but  what  he/she  fails  to  realize   is  that  there  are  thousands,  if  not  millions,  of  people  who  also  claim   personal revelations  which  convince  them  of  the  truthfulness  of  their   chosen  path.  Even Elvis  has  hundreds  of  devotees  who  reported  seeing   his  radiant  form  at  the end  of  a  long  dark  tunnel  when  they  underwent  a   near-­‐‑death  experience.  So if  someone  in  Memphis  can  see  Elvis  in  their   meditation,  are  we  then  supposed  to  believe  in  the  spiritual  mastership   of  Elvis?  Don'ʹt  get  me  wrong,  I am  the  first  to  admit  that  the  King  had   some  great  songs  during  his  career, but  just  because  a  crew  of  devoted   fans  have  glimpses  of  him  in  the  alleged after-­life  does  not  constitute   documented  proof  of  his  spiritual  attainment.

...What  is  the  primary  difference  between  a  fundamentalist  Christian   and  a  mystically  inclined  yogi,  especially  when  it  comes  to  evaluating   their  ultimate truth  claims?  Both  think  they  have  uncovered  the  truth.   The  former  by  the revealing  "ʺWord"ʺ  of  the  Bible;  the  latter  by  the   manifesting  inner  "ʺWord"ʺ  of the  higher  regions.  Yet,  in  both  cases,  the   neophyte  is  subject  to  doubt,  to skepticism,  to  deception,  since   revelations  of  truth  (both  inner  and  outer)  are manifold.  The  Muslims   have  their  Koran;  the  Sikhs  have  their  Guru  Granth Sahib;  and  the   Christians  have  their  Bible.  And,  for  the  mystics,  yogis,  and sages  who   turn  inward  what  do  we  find?  The  Hare  Krsnas'ʹ  see  Lord  Krishna; the   Saivites  see  Lord  Shiva;  and  Ruhani  Satsangis  (depending  upon  your   affiliation)  see  Sant  Rajinder  Singh,  or  Sant  Baljit  Singh,  or  Sant  Sadhu   Ram. 

But,  as  the  argument  goes,  the  devoted  mystic  will  say  that  his  or  her   experiences  are  authentic  (because  of  the  utter  certainty  of  the  encounter)   and  the  experiences  of  others,  especially  if  they  belong  to  a  rival  group   which  splintered  off  after  a  succession  dispute,  are  misguided,   secondary,  or illusory.  So  what  we  actually  have  in  effect  here  in  in  terms   of  truth  claims is not  essentially  different  than  that  of  a  fundamentalist.

"The Beginning of Infinity" -- inspiring science

I don't know whether physicist David Deutsch's optimism expressed in his new book, "The 'Beginning of Infinity," is justified. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, so maybe his later chapters imply more of a downer that what I've read so far.

His basic thesis, though, is both inspiring and believable. There are no limits to knowledge. Human life -- individual or collective -- is a never-ending journey on the path to more.

Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the concept was meaningful. They should have known better.

There is indeed an objective difference between a false explanation and a true one, between chronic failure to solve a problem and solving it, and also between wrong and right, ugly and beautiful, suffering and its alleviation -- and thus between stagnation and progress in the fullest sense.

In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.

Though this quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal, cosmic level -- namely that it conforms to universal laws of nature that are indeed good explanations. This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things.

(Note: from what I can tell, when Deutsch says "people" he really means evolved conscious beings, who could be aliens quite different from us.)

For a long time I was so much into supposedly ineffable meditation and mysticism, I rejected the idea that good explanations are the key to understanding reality. But I've changed, and reading Deutsch's book is changing me further.

I mean, think about it: what's the difference between a fundamentalist religious belief in God that can't be challenged because it is faith-based, and someone's claim that "I know what ultimate truth is, but I can't explain it to you"?

The astrophysicist Martin Rees has speculated that somewhere in the universe 'there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.'

But that cannot be so. For if the 'capacity' in question is mere computational speed and amount of memory, then we can understand the aspects in question with the help of computers -- just as we have understood the world for centuries with the help of pencil and paper.

As Einstein remarked, 'My pencil and I are more clever than I.' In terms of computational repertoire, our computers -- and brains -- are already universal.

But if the claim is that we may be qualitatively unable to understand what some other forms of intelligence can -- if our disability cannot be remedied by mere automation -- then this is just another claim that the world is not explicable.

Indeed, it is tantamount to an appeal to the supernatural, with all the arbitrariness that is inherent in such appeals, for if we wanted to incorporate into our world view an imaginary realm explicable only to superhumans, we need never have bothered to abandon the myths of Persephone and her fellow deities.

So human reach is essentially the same as the reach of explanatory knowledge itself.

Without God, there's no morality (and that's good)

Religious fundamentalists often say, "If you don't believe in God, you have no basis for morality." This irritates non-believers like me.

Hey! I'm moral! I know the difference between right and wrong. My morality just isn't based on supernatural dogmas.

But what if those fundamentalists are correct? What if there's no such thing as atheist morality? And -- most importantly -- what if this is no big deal, because morality is as unnecessary to live a good life as believing in God is?

Such is the basic thesis of Joel Marks' "Confessions of an Ex-Moralist." Marks is a philosophy professor, and his essay was published by the New York Times, so in places it's fairly difficult intellectual reading.

He makes good sense, though. Here's some excerpts that resonated with me.

The day I became an atheist was the day I realized I had been a believer.

...But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?

So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.

The dominoes continued to fall.

...The entire set of moral attributions is out the window. Think of this analogy: A tribe of people lives on an isolated island. They have no formal governmental institutions of any kind. In particular they have no legislature. Therefore in that society it would make no sense to say that someone had done something “illegal.” But neither would anything be “legal.” The entire set of legal categories would be inapplicable. In just this way I now view moral categories.

...I now acknowledge that I cannot count on either God or morality to back up my personal preferences or clinch the case in any argument. I am simply no longer in the business of trying to derive an ought from an is. I must accept that other people sometimes have opposed preferences, even when we are agreed on all the relevant facts and are reasoning correctly.

...In the process my own desires are likely to undergo further change as well, in the direction of greater compassion and respect, I would anticipate – and not only for the victims of the attitudes, behaviors and policies I don’t like, but also for their perpetrators. But this won’t be because a god, a supernatural law or even my conscience told me I must, I ought, I have an obligation. Instead I will be moved by my head and my heart. Morality has nothing to do with it.

At the moment my wife and I are trying to convince some people who, along with us, are co-owners of a vacation cabin, that our understanding of a septic system problem is correct.

Like Marks says, there hasn't been any need for us to think in terms of good or bad. I don't feel that I'm better than the co-owners who disagree with us. I just think that my wife and I have a better explanation for what's going on with the septic system.

And I do my best to keep in mind that everybody involved in what sometimes have been heated discussions about septic subjects feels that their viewpoint is just as defensible as I feel mine is.

Yes, I consider that there's a right thing to do. However, I can explain what "right" means without any reference to morality.

I can argue that risking contamination of ground or surface water by the cabin's failing septic system isn't a wise course of action. I can refer to public health experts who have said such-and-such about this-and-that. I can feel motivated to do the right thing without calling the desire that impels me in a certain direction "moral."

It's simply a desire, as Joel Marks says in another essay on the same subject, "An Amoral Manifesto."

There I am, then, honestly discussing particular issues with opponents, and justifying my positions to them by their moral lights. But how do I justify them to myself, since I have no moral lights anymore? For example, on what basis would I myself be a vegetarian? The answer, in a word, is desire. I want animals, human or otherwise, not to suffer or to die prematurely for purposes that I consider trivial, not to mention counterproductive of human happiness.

...But if I were conversing with another amoralist, how would I convince her of the rightness of my desires? Well, of course, I wouldn’t even try, since neither of us believes in right, or wrong. What I could do is take her through the same considerations that have moved me to my position and hope that her heartstrings were tuned in harmony with mine.

...A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil.

Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.

I had to read Marks' New York Times essay twice before I felt like I grasped what he was saying. At first it seemed like giving up morality would be a loss, even for us non-believers in God.

But now I'm inclined to agree with him: secular morality is an oxymoron.

"Morality," as the word is almost always used, isn't necessary for anyone who dismisses the notion that the knowledge of what's right and wrong is handed down from some divine source.

As Marks says, if "sin" is a meaningless term for an atheist, then so is "morality." While this argument initally jolted my psyche, it didn't take long for me to feel comfortable with it.

(Not all that surprising, since three years ago I wrote about "I'm right vs. I like morality," the latter being pretty close to what Marks advocates.)

What boxing up Rumi says about Me

For several decades I've had a series of literary infatuations. I'd fall in love with a mystical/spiritual author or genre and read everything I could on that subject.

I had my Meister Eckhart phase. Along with a Christian mystic phase: St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Pseudo-Dionysius, whoever wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. I devoured writings by and about Plotinus. I was deep into Fritjof Schuon and other Perennialists for a while. And I never stopped being attracted to Buddhist and Taoist books no matter whatever other writings turned me on.

But my biggest love affair was with Rumi. Oh, yeah, he and I hit it off big time.

I ended up with several book shelves dedicated to Rumi. I'd repeatedly wander the Sufi section of Powell's Books, Portland Oregon's amazing literary temple that some say is the largest new and used bookstore in the world, never failing to bring home a new Rumi title. Or two. Or three. Or a half dozen.

About ten days ago I sat at my laptop, picking up books from several boxes and seeing what Amazon's "Sell Your Books" program was offering for them. Many of them were previously-beloved Rumi books.

As I typed in the title of each one to see how much money I could get for it, sometimes I'd feel a mild nostalgia, as if I wasn't completly sure whether I wanted to decisively cut my ties with an old friend. So I'd thumb through a Rumi book, looking at the highlighting I'd made when a passage was especially appealing to me, remembering how much enjoyment I"d once gotten from the book.

Now, though? The thrill was gone. I'd fold the book shut and toss it into either a "ship to Amazon box" or a "donate to Friends of Salem Library" box, if Amazon told me it wasn't salable.

I was not the same Me any longer. Whoever once loved Rumi was not the person who shipped off a bunch of his books to the Amazon buyback program, and was excited to get an email message a few days ago saying that most of the Rumi titles had been purchased.

I'd sold a big chunk of my Rumi soul for about thirty dollars, with more cash coming when I get around to selling or donating my remaining Rumi books.

Not long ago I would have considered my Rumi collection to be priceless, at least in a spiritual sense. I loved reading his words and writings about his teachings so much. For years I felt that Rumi touched me, knew me, spoke to me, in an amazing, wonderful, impossible-to-describe way.

Now, though? He's just a way to get some credits to my Amazon account so I can buy some new books that do appeal to me.

Philosophically-minded neuroscientists often talk about a thought experiment involving the slow but steady replacement of someone else's neurons in a brain. What if, for example -- to take a deeply scary example -- one-time Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's neurons gradually replaced my own?

At first the part of my brain that wasn't Me would be so tiny as to be unnoticeable. Gradually, though, I'd become a mixture of Me and Sarah Palin. The change would be so gradual it'd be difficult to tell at what point I stopped being Me and started becoming someone else.

(But when I incessantly talked about "mama grizzlies," I guess that'd be a pretty good sign I'd gone over the Palin edge.)

This is pretty close to how I feel about my changing spiritual proclivities. Selling my Rumi books brought this home to me. When did I stop being a person who loved Rumi and became a person who loved selling his Rumi books for a few bucks?

I don't know. I can't tell.

I have no idea how, or when, the Me I used to be, Rumi-wise, became the Me I am now. More generally, I guess I'm constantly changing into someone else, yet the alterations are so gradual it takes a while to realize, "Hey, whatever happened to the old Me?"

Maybe that guy never existed, at least not as the substantial person he superficially appeared to be. If so, that says a lot. Perhaps more than all my Rumi books ever said.

We are natural born dualists

There's something strange about people who say "All is One" while believing in an immaterial soul or some other supernatural entity. This is a dualiistic idea that's at odds with oneness.

Materialists actually are the true monists, because they hold that everything in existence is formed of the same substance.

Michael Shermer makes this point nicely in his book, "The Believing Brain."

This process of explaining the mind through the neural activity of the brain makes me a monist. Monists believe that there is just one substance in our head -- brain. Dualists, by contrast, believe that there are two substances -- brain and mind.

This is a very old problem in philosophy dating back to the seventeenth century when the French philosopher Rene Descartes put it on the intellectual landscape, with soul the preferred term of the time (as in "body and soul" instead of "brain and mind").

Broadly speaking, monists assert that body and soul are the same, and that the death of the body -- particularly the disintegraton of DNA and neurons that store the informational patterns of our bodies, our memories, and our personalities -- spells the end of the soul.

Dualists contend that body and soul are separate entities, and that the soul continues beyond the existence of the body. Monism is counterintuitive. Dualism is intuitive. It just seems like there is something else inside of us, and our thoughts really do feel like they are floating around up there in our skulls separate from whatever it is our brains are doing.

Why?

We are natural-born dualists, argued Yale University psychologist in his book, Descartes' Baby. Children and adults alike, for example, speak of "my body" as if "my" and "body" are two different entities.

...The reason dualism is intuitive and monism counterintuitive is that the brain does not perceive the process of binding all the neural networks into one whole self, and so imputes mental activity as a separate source.

Hallucinations of pretenatural beings such as ghosts, gods, angels, and aliens are perceived as real entities; out-of-body and near-death experiences are processed as external events; and the pattern of information that is our memories, personality, and self is sensed as a soul.

Every believer in God also is an atheist

Do you believe in God? If so, you're an atheist. Because you believe in a God, a singular God, a particular God.

If you believed in all possible Gods, then I guess you deserve to be called a genuine theist. But such is rarely, if ever, the case. Religious true believers cleave to one God while rejecting the Gods that other people believe in.

So they're atheists in regard to all Gods but one.

Given the thousands of different religions, this means that the difference between an atheist who rejects all Gods but one, and an atheist who rejects all Gods including that one is very small.

To me this is a great argument against God. It's Proof #28 of the thesis, God is Imaginary. Check it out on a website by that name. The notion is traced to a quote from Stephen F. Roberts:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

 When I was a devoted member of an Eastern faith whose teachings centered on meditation practice conducted under the guidance of a guru who was considered to be God in human form, I used to think that fundamentalist Christians were way deluded.

"How could they believe in such strange stuff," I'd wonder. Jesus being born of a virgin, dying because he took on our sins, coming to life again, returning in a Second Coming. All that is just so freaking weird!

Meanwhile, I was believing that at initiation the guru places an astral copy of himself in the disciple's body, brain, mind, soul, or somewhere (the exact location was vague); he can tell what any of his million or more disciples is doing at any given time if he wants to, and he appears at a disciple's death to guide the initiate to a proper place -- either reincarnation back on Earth or some heavenly realm.

Naturally I felt that what I believed made good sense, while those crazy Christians were off in la-la land.

Well, they had as much reason to reject my beliefs as I had to reject theirs. So we were all atheists regarding God except for the one particular form of God that was embraced for some indefensibly weird reasons.