Church of the Churchless

Thanks, godless heathens, for a good blog year

This probably will be my last Church of the Churchless blog post.

For 2012.

(Oh, I so love to tantalize haters of my irreligosity with first sentences like that, who fail to realize that every profane, insulting comment or email they send my way makes me really happy -- because it encourages me to keep on doing what I'm doing: stand up for truth, openness, and reality against religious fundamentalists who hate those things.)

It's been a good year.

As has been every churchless year since November 2004, when I started this blog. I really appreciate the steady stream of visitors, especially those who leave on-topic comments. Spammers, not so much. Discussing and conversing via comments adds a lot to my posts.

TypePad, my blog service, indicates that the Church of the Churchless gets about 1200 page views a day. Makes me feel good.

Religious people have a ready-made community of believers they can engage with. Us skeptics, atheists, agnostics, don't know's, unsure's, pagans, heathens, Flying Spaghetti Monster worshippers, and otherwise marchers to our own life-drummer have a lot more trouble making contact with each other.

Maybe we need a secret sign. Or a tattoo on our foreheads. (No, scratch that idea; it was the caffeine talking.)

I'm not sure if there's been any discernible change to my churchless trajectory over the past twelve months. Probably regular readers of this blog would be more aware of this than I am, since I just sit down every other day and write about whatever is on my mind, not keeping close track of what was there before.

On the whole, which is a good place to be, I feel like I'm becoming more physical and practical in my "spiritual" pursuit. I'm coming to find this an increasingly meaningless term, spiritual, so I like to put it in ironic quotation marks the first time I use it.

Along this line, I just got a used copy of "Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan," by Hajime Nakamura. Apparently its a classic of sorts. 

Instead of reading it straight through, I'm starting off by jumping back and forth between the India and China chapters. The contrast between Indian and Chinese ways of thinking seems to reflect a universal difference that transcends those specific cultures. 

India loves abstraction. China loves concretness. 

Indian people are inclined to consider the universal seriously in expressing their ideas of things. This can be easily seen in the fact of their verbal usage in which they have so great an inclination to use abstract nouns... the Sanskrit expresses the individual only as one of the instances belonging to the abstract universal.

...Chinese concepts are expressed in highly concrete form. Nearly all words express particular ideas -- forms of existing things perceived in a particular state... The use of concrete imagery is common not only to Buddhism but to Chinese philosophical writing in general.

I'm becoming more Chinese'y.

Could partly be a result of quite a few years of immersion in Tai Chi and Taoist this-and-that. Or just an innate leaning that is blossoming. Back in my early teens I was fascinated by Chinese art. In my room I had scrolls that I'd bought in San Francisco's Chinatown of tiny figures wandering in a vast natural mountainous landscape.

Abstract ideas can lead us anywhere. Closer to, or further away from, reality.

Also, happiness, meaning, satisfaction. Only concrete demonstrable evidence allows us to tell the difference between mental bullshit and something authentically grounded in the world outside our head.

I still believe in the value of meditation. But I'm an even stronger believer in simply living life naturally. Not worrying much whether there is more to the cosmos than what we're aware of here and now. Endless searching for More is a guaranteed ticket to the Land of Unfulfilled Desire.

Perhaps you have moments when you feel, if I died right now, it'd be all right. I do. I felt that today, when I went longboard land paddling on a cold, sunny, clear Oregon day in a several hundred acre park near the Willamette River.

I broke my own world record for time and distance: 7.2 miles in a bit less than an hour and a half. But it was those virtually indescribable moments which were so satisfying. They existed both inside and outside of space and time. 

What I love to do, what gives meaning to my life, what makes me go Wow!, what makes me feel happily connected with the cosmos -- this won't be the same for you. Each of us has to find our own way on the infinitely branching paths of life. Or allow the way to find us.

If that path includes a lot of religious scenery, great. Go for it. Whatever works for you. All I'm trying to do on this blog is encourage people to scan their horizon as broadly as possible, getting in touch with what they really want, how they really feel.

Reality is wonderful. The only thing which really supports us. May we all have as much of it as we want in 2013. 

Give up religious certainty. Embrace antifragile chaos.

Antifragile. It's my new favorite word. It's the title of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book.

I'm only a few chapters into it, but already love the notion that what sustains nature, life, economies, just about everything, isn't rigid robustness. Stresses that leave us the same aren't growthful. What we want is to be able to thrive on unpredictability, not-knowing, random stresses.

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind... The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.

How?

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

...I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.

Beautiful. 

Imagine how wonderful it would feel to no longer need to chase after illusory answers, like those offered by religions. We'd be happy not knowing what will happen after death, after this year, after this day, after this moment.

We wouldn't worry about making mistakes, sinning, screwing up, falling down. Every experience would teach us something valuable. We'd understand that since life is unpredictably chaotically random, it isn't possible to know exactly where we're going to go.

Detours and deadends not only are inevitable; they're joyous surprises on the road of life.

...If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock -- in other words, if you are alive -- something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder. There is a titillating feeling associated with randomness.

...If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

...When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible -- for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility.

When you want deviations, and you don't care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful, you are antifragile.

...If every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution -- so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.

...He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors -- though never the same error more than once -- is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Taleb arouses varying opinions, because he's highly opinionated. I like his style, and most of his core ideas. Here's a rather detailed summary of Taleb's book; looks good, though I didn't read the whole thing. 

And here's a video interview of Taleb talking about his book.

 

No, Virginia, there isn't a Santa Claus

My wife and I aren't super-grinches around Christmas.

We're pleased to let religiously minded people engage in their fantasies about virgin births, humans who are sons of God, and other miraculous supernatural stuff.

But I've got problems with encouraging a belief in Santa Claus as a real entity. 

Looking upon Santa Claus as akin to the Easter Bunny is preferable. I doubt many kids believe in the literal reality of the Easter Bunny as intensely as they believe in Santa Claus. And giving up a belief in the Easter Bunny seemingly comes earlier and easier than a belief in Santa.

Every year on Christmas Day both of the newspapers we get, the Salem Statesman Journal and Portland Oregonian, run the annoying "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" piece. Supposedly it's the world's most reprinted newspaper editorial.

I wish it were the least reprinted.

For a long time I've ignored this attempt to support an anti-scientific faith-based view of the world. I'd forgotten what it specifically said, being content to glance at the headline and move on to more useful newpaper reading, like the comic pages.

Yesterday, though, I forced myself to read the unsigned editorial in the September 21, 1897, New York Sun. I was reminded of how much there is not to like here.

I am, of course, influenced by my own personal experience with the myth of Santa Claus.

My mother helped me learn to read at an early age. She loved to tell the story of how I gained admittance to a preschool by reading the front page of the newspaper to the person in charge. One of my clearest earliest memories is of reading the fine print on a toy I'd gotten for Christmas when I was four or five.

"Made in Japan." I asked my mother how Santa Claus could have brought a toy supposedly made by him when the gift actually was built in Japan. Unhesitatingly she said, "There is no Santa Claus."

Thank you, mother. Thank you for that honesty.

Likewise, she had me go to catechism class for a brief period because she thought an exposure to Catholicism would be good for me. But when I resisted learning more religious crap, my mother made no attempt to continue my indoctrination.

Truth meant a lot to her. Not, however, to the anonymous author of "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

The editorial starts off by reassuring Virginia that her child companions who say there is no Santa Claus are mistaken.

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.

This is a very strange statement. How else do we humans know about something, except through our minds/brains? Has anyone in the history of the world ever known anything without using his or her mind? But this much is true: there's a difference between what exists, and what is known to exist.

Beyond the boundaries of what is known about the cosmos always will lie unknown mysteries.

My problem with the editorial is that the author believes that only he, and apparently selected others, have a special relationship with the unknown side of reality that those dreaded skeptics lack. He can know about things for which there is no demonstrable evidence.

This entire paragraph in the editorial is a terrible throwback to a pre-scientific religious faith-based age. Maybe it was appropriate in the Dark Ages, but not today.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

Huh? 

Sure, nobody can conceive or imagine everything that doesn't exist outside of fantasizing human minds. Conceptions and imaginations are limitless. Knowledge of reality is bounded. We should know the difference between the two.

The editorial conflates them. It claims that the most real things in the world can't be seen. Indeed, they are unseeable. Like God. Taken on faith. Which is a dishonest way to live, and shouldn't be encouraged in children.

Sentiments expressed in "Yes, Virginia..." are superficially appealing. However, on closer inspection they are confused and confusing. The author takes Santa skeptics to task for denying the reality of certain things that actually no one denies.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight.

Again...huh?

Love, generosity, and devotion are all observable, albeit difficult or impossible to measure. It is eminently possible to point to loving, generous, and devoted people who perform loving, generous, and devoted actions and feel loving, generous, and devoted emotions.

On the other hand, it isn't possible to point to Santa Claus delivering presents to billions of homes, pulled in the sky by a team of reindeer. 

I'd have no problem with this editorial if it had simply said that Santa Claus is the spirit of loving, giving kindness -- reflected in a myth that personifies universal qualities which exist in varying measure within every human being, and almost certainly many animals.

But Virginia is being encouraged to engage in a form of dualism which disparages the natural world and praises a "supernal" realm divorced from what can be sensed, known, understood, communally shared.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. 

This Platonic sort of philosophy, which fits with Christian and other monothesitic theologies positing heavenly realms far superior to this world, is at odds with a humble naturalistic scientific way of being.

"Santa Claus" becomes a symbol for mythical supernatural entities which should be the object of our devotion, not real people, real objects, real living beings, this whole real physical world.

I'm not attracted to that sort of fantastical living.

There's no harm in looking upon Santa Claus as a human-created cultural custom, like Zeus, the Cookie Monster, and Donald Duck. But to follow the advice of this editorial and make him into a unseen object of faith, like God -- ridiculous. 

 

 

Our Christmas letter shows unbelievers are -- shock! -- normal people

Every year it's my non-sacred duty to compose a Holiday, a.k.a. Christmas, Letter.

I use "Holiday" on the letter itself, because sometimes my wife and I don't get around to mailing them until after December 25, and this gives us sort of an excuse.

Hey, you're getting it before New Year's, which is the last end of year holiday. 

Have a look if you want to get a glimpse into the Real World of the Church of the Churchless' unpastor. And gaze upon a photo of his amazingly adorable granddaughter.
Download 2012 Christmas Letter PDF

I capitalized "Real World" to make a point: this blog is a sideline for me, by no means the most important part of my life, just something I enjoy putting an hour or two into every other day.

I'm sure it's even less important for visitors to this web site. Which is as it should be.

Sharing ideas about spirituality, religion, and the meaning of life should take a backseat to living life in a much more direct fashion.

Judging from comments on my blog posts, it's clear that some Church of the Churchless visitors have an impression that I'm obsessed with trashing religion and finding fresh ways to promote skepticism, the scientific method, and truthfulness concerning the nature of reality.

Not true.

Read our Christmas letter to learn what's really important to my wife and me. I'm hugely more obsessed with my granddaughter, dogs, dancing, and longboard land paddling than putting down unfounded religious belief. 

Us unbelievers are normal people, just like believers are -- an important point to keep in mind. This is obvious when interactions between the faithless and faithful happen in everyday life, face to face. 

It's clear that real live human beings, with lives extending way beyond the bounds of ideology or theology, simply look upon one aspect of reality in different ways. Some people intimately embrace the possibility of the supernatural; others leave it at that, an unproven possibility.

The Internet doesn't allow for this sort of understanding. Interactions are faceless, often even nameless (since fake identities are used by many people). 

Arguments about ideas can become much more intense than in "real" life. Courtesies almost always observed in face to face communications get thrown aside. Profanities and personal insults abound. This bothers me, as someone who has managed two blogs for eight years.

I'm not immune myself to righteous indignation that can get overly righteous and indignant.

However, I try to remember that behind the words of a comment, blog post, web article, or something else on the Internet I disagree with is a human being a lot like me, doing his or her best to live life in a pleasant meaningful fashion, just like I am.

Our 2012 Christmas letter is a more accurate reflection of the life actually lived by my wife and me than this blog is. A good reminder that as valuable as the Internet is, cyberspace is much less real than physical space.

How to challenge ghosts who seem real

I came across a great story in one of my non-holy inspirational books, "Complete Idiot's Guide to Zen Living." 

Here's a simple way to prove whether a seemingly supernatural vision, thought, presence, or whatever really is other-worldly, or just an emanation of your own mind. 

Adapt the proof as desired. There's lots of ways to do what this Zen master advised.

An old Zen story tells of a man whose wife, on her deathbed, begged him never to go to another woman. A few months after her death, the man fell in love and became engaged.

Immediately, he was haunted by the first wife's ghost. Every evening she chided him for disloyalty, describing gifts the man had given his fiancee and repeating details from their conversations. She must be real!

At last the man visited an old Zen master, who suggested, "Take a handful of soybeans and demand this ghost tell you how many beans you hold." 

That night, when confronted with the question, the ghost disappeared without answering and never returned. The ghost didn't know the answer because the man didn't know the answer. She was an illusion!

We, too, can become similarly convinced of the reality of things we have created in our minds, when they really are only ghosts of our attachments, guilt, and desires.

Who the heck is inside my head, talking to "me"?

Last night my wife and I spent a pleasant couple of hours at a holiday gathering hosted by a Tai Chi friend. Meeting some new people, we enjoyed stimulating conversation on a variety of subjects.

Including meditation, spirituality, that sort of stuff.

At one point, I said something like:

A few days ago I had a realization that seemed fresh to me, even after more than forty years of daily meditation. Why do I so often feel at odds with myself? After all, who is there inside my head in addition to me?

What's up with my worrying about whether I'm thinking the right thoughts, feeling the right emotions, doing the right actions? Our dogs don't seem to be split up into more than one entity.

Further, I don't even consider there is a single "me" inside my head. Neuroscience, along with Buddhism, sure seems to support the notion that Self is an illusion. 

So if even a single Self is illusion, that voice inside my head which talks to my illusory Self must be even more of an illusion.

The guy sitting next to me turned out to be a member of a Zen meditation group. He made some cogent comments about death, selflessness, and other subjects that I've forgotten. Wish I could remember more of what he said.

Anyway, it's a fascinating subject: who, if anybody, we're talking to with that inner voice which babbles on inside our heads so frequently. 

A 2011 blog post, "The self as illusion," went into this.

Pope acts like an bigot in denouncing gay marriage

How could anybody believe the Pope is a spiritual person worthy of emulation?

Clearly the Pope is a narrow-minded bigot who is woefully ignorant about both modern science and the basics of human compassion.

Here's proof: "Pope says future of mankind at stake over gay marriage." 

The defence of the family, the Pope said, "is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears."

On Monday, the Vatican's newspaper described laws on gay marriage as an attempt at a communist-like "utopia", a day after tens of thousands of demonstrators turned out in France to support legalising both marriages and adoption for gay couples.

Truthfully -- a word the Pope and other religious leaders have no use for -- homosexuality isn't a conscious choice, as the Pope believes. As many gay people have pointed out, who the hell would choose a sexual orientation that is so much more difficult to live than heterosexuality?

And there is essentially (if not exactly) zero evidence that gay marriage is bad for children, or weakens traditional marriage. I live about 75 miles from Washington state, where gay marriage was legalized recently.

I can testify that my marriage, which happens to involve a man and a woman, hasn't been affected at all. The Pope is just spouting nonsense, all too easy for religious fundamentalists to do.

There is, though, some good news in the story.

France's parliament is to debate the government-backed "marriage for all" bill early next year.

With President Francois Hollande's Socialists enjoying a strong majority, the bill is expected to pass despite vehement opposition from the right and religious groups.

How atheists comfort children about death

Interesting story in the Washington Post: "Atheist parents comfort children about death without talk of God or heaven."

As so many millions of Americans turn to clergy and prayers to help their children sort out the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, parents like Drizin do not. They don’t agonize over interpreting God’s will or message in the event. They don’t seek to explain what kind of God allows suffering, and they don’t fudge it when children ask what happens to people who die, be they Grandma or the young victims of Newtown.

It's kind of weird, of course, that non-religious explanations of death and suffering seem out-of-the-ordinary.

In many countries this wouldn't be the case. But in this super-religious country, where every presidential address seems to end with "God bless the United States of America," behaving naturalistically isn't the norm.

I think we'd be much better off without all the talk of "she's in a better place," "he's with the angels now," "God took them for a purpose," and such. To me, it demeans life to deny death.

Maybe this is one reason why common sense gun control, like banning military style assault weapons, is so difficult to do in the United States.

Most people here don't believe that when you die, you're really dead. You've just gone to heaven earlier than expected. This cheapens life. It makes it easier to ignore efforts to reduce the number of needless deaths. 

If everything is in God's hand, and dying is merely a gateway to a better life, death and suffering aren't such a big deal. Atheist parents are pleasingly honest, respecting truth rather than blind belief.

Atheist parents describe talking about death with their children in a straightforward way, without anxiety.

“We are a science-based family. When we don’t know the answer, we say, ‘We don’t know.’ We don’t say ‘Jesus did it,’” said Jamila Bey, a 36-year-old D.C. radio host who attended Catholic churches and schools through college. Her son is 4.

...I had to explain, ‘Honey, life is very long, but sometimes bad things happen. Not often and they hurt.’

“I said, ‘When people die, it’s just like before they were ever born. They’re not scared, they’re not hungry, they’re not cold. But the people left behind miss them.’ I didn’t fill him with ideas of celestial kingdoms where you get wings and [expletive].”

Spiritual hallucinations provide illusory certainty

Synchronicity. I don't believe in it as something supernatural or miraculous. Just as an interesting phenomenon which has a natural explanation. Still...

I enjoyed the connection between a book I started reading this morning, and a new video from David Lane, a.k.a. neuralsurfer, I came across a few minutes later via a Lane Facebook post. Common theme: brain-produced hallucinations which can seem absolutely real to the person hallucinating.

The book is Oliver Sacks' "Hallucinations." Sacks is a professor of neurology who writes books about ways the brain produces unusual experiences. 

Here's some of what I learned in the first few pages:

It is not always easy to discern where the boundary lies between hallucinations, misperception, and illusion. But generally, hallucinations are defined as percepts arising in the absence of any external reality -- seeing things or hearing things that are not there.

Perceptions are, to some degree, shareable -- you and I can agree that there is a tree; but if I say, "I see a tree there," and you see nothing of the sort, you will regard my "tree" as a hallucination, something concocted by my brain, or mind, and imperceptible to you or anyone else. 

To the hallucinator, though, hallucinations seem very real; they can mimic perception in every respect, starting with the way they are projected into the external world. 

...Hallucinations have always had an important place in our mental lives and in our culture. Indeed, one must wonder to what extent hallucinatory experiences have given rise to our art, folklore, and even religion.

...Do "ecstatic" seizures, such as Dostoevsky had, play a part in generating our sense of the divine? Do out-of-body experiences allow the feeling that one can be disembodied? Does the substanceless of hallucinations encourage a belief in ghosts and spirits?

After putting down the book I watched Lane's "The Illusion of Certainty," a short 5:38 video about Faqir Chand. He was an Indian guru who realized how devotees' miraculous visions were produced by themselves, projections of their own desires and expectations.

 

Well-done, David Lane. I like the title.

Certainty is a subject I've blogged about a lot. Evolution/natural selection favors those who aren't paralyzed with indecision when confronted with, say, a tiger about to leap on them. Bursting into action by feeling certain about what to do, even if the decision isn't optimal, is better than remaining actionless.

And soon after, killed.

But it also is necessary to be in touch with reality. Hallucinating things that aren't there, or failing to see things that are there, also isn't conducive to staying alive. Or living productively.

However, hallucinations of supposed supernatural phenomena often can co-exist with someone living a more or less outwardly normal life. If someone's vision of a guru, heaven, angels, God, Jesus, or some other spiritual entity doesn't interfere with necessary practical actions and thoughts, then he/she can believe wrongly that reality has been augmented, rather than diminished.

The video makes a strong neuroscientific point: expectations and prior experiences have a big influence on perceptions.

My wife and I hate the brownish California ground squirrels which have migrated north and made Oregon their home. They dig destructive tunnels and can kill plantings with their chewing. But we like the native gray squirrels. Sometimes they can be hard to tell apart.

If we've been having problems with ground squirrels, often I'll look out the window and think "Damn! A ground squirrel is sitting on that rock!" However, a closer look reveals the truth: it's a lighter colored gray squirrel with its tail hidden (tails of the two species are quite different).

What I see is affected by my past experience and current expectations. Same goes for visions, hallucinations, illusions. If a religious devotee desperately wants to see God, guru, or whoever, his or her mind may oblige with a subjective perception that feels absolutely real.

Feeling certain about the objective reality of an experience is by no means a guarantee that what was experienced exists outside an individual's mind/brain. This is why demonstrable evidence or confirmation by other sources is so important to truth-seekers.

Religious arguments I respect, and those I don't

Having served as the un-pastor of this here Church of the Churchless for over eight years, I've heard just about every argument for the existence of God, soul, spirit, heaven, miracles, life after death, and other supernatural stuff.

Naturally -- given my current skeptical, scientific nature -- I don't resonate much with religiosity. Been there, done that.

But I can understand why other people do embrace religion.

And I respect their viewpoints when they're presented in a reasonable, open-minded fashion. TypePad, my blog service, tells me that there have been 24,143 comments on the 1,637 posts I've written.

Like I said, I've heard it all, comment-wise.

Here's how I've come to look upon the various ways religious believers try to justify their belief, ordered from most respect-worthy to least respect-worthy. I'll use "God" as a generic term for belief in the supernatural.

MOST RESPECT-WORTHY

I don't know if God exists. I hope so. But I don't expect you to feel like I do.

I have faith that God exists. I don't have good reasons to support my faith. So I don't expect anyone else to believe as I do.

I have faith that God exists. My faith comes from God. This can't be proven, but it is real. So you should have the same faith as I do.

I feel like I've experienced God. But I'm not sure that what I experienced was real. I could be wrong about God.

I've experienced God. That experience was genuine. I can't prove it to anyone else, though. So I don't expect you to believe me.

I've experienced God. I can describe in detail why I think that experience was genuine. You should believe me. But if you have skeptical questions, I'll be happy to discuss my God-experience.

I know that God exists. For sure. However, my reasons for saying this can't be communicated. This knowledge is my own. Take it or leave it.

I know that God exists. I've experienced God directly. You would be a fool not to believe what I'm telling you. Hell awaits you if you don't.

LEAST RESPECT-WORTHY

Now, I haven't given these summary justifications a large amount of thought. They're just intuitive rough reflections of a belief spectrum that is difficult to put into words. 

As I often note in my blog posts, I've got no problem with people feeling something subjectively, personally, privately. How could I? This is a big part of being human.

Heck, it might be the entire part, since one person's experience can't be directly shared with anyone else.

So saying "I feel..." usually is unarguable. I believe you. No reason not to. By the same token, you need to accept that I also can say "I feel..." And that feeling almost certainly will be different from yours.

Live and let live when it comes to feelings.

If people with religious sentiments held to that adage, that'd be great. Unfortunately, many religious believers expect others to believe as they do: on faith, without evidence.

Now we have a problem. At least, I have a problem with that. That's why the least respect-worthy justifications for belief in the list above are more dogmatic and demanding. 

It's akin to the difference between saying, "I love to eat green peppers!" and "You should love to eat green peppers as much as I do!" (I hate green peppers, so this example came easily to mind.)

Believe in God all you want. Just don't expect anyone else to feel like you do absent excellent demonstrable evidence for the existence of God.

Creative Zen idea: Our individuality makes universality possible

During most of my spirituality-seeking life, which spans about forty five years, I've considered individuality to be at odds with universality -- feeling one with the universe.

The mystical philosophies that I embraced taught that ego, a sense of "I-ness," is what keeps us humans from becoming one with the One which supposedly is ultimate reality. 

Not so, according to Zen Buddhism. So explains Kosho Uchiyama in "Opening the Hand of Thought," a book I blogged about recently. 

That's a relief.

Uchiyama has a take on this whole individuality/universality thing that makes a lot of sense to me. When I re-read the Living Wide Awake chapter I was blown away by how simple and persuasive his viewpoint is.

First, he recognizes what modern neuroscience also knows: our conscious awareness of the world is highly personal, individualized, idiosyncratic. There's no way we can know whether how we perceive reality is how other people do.

We assume that we are all living together in one commonly shared world. However, this is not true from the perspective of the reality of our actual life-experience, which we learn about through letting go of our thoughts in zazen [meditation].

For example, when you and I look at a cup, we usually assume that we are looking at the very same cup, but this isn't so in terms of true, raw life-experience. I am looking from my angle and with my power of vision and you are looking from your angle and your power of vision. There is absolutely no way we can exchange nor understand each other's experience.

... The world in which we actually live and experience life in its vivid freshness is a world that is mine alone and yours alone. This holds true even more for our thoughts.

...In terms of raw life-experience everyone lives in a different world and lives out his or her own world of self that is only self.

Second, while this state of affairs may seem limiting and constrictive, actually it is what makes possible a feeling of compassionate universality. Since reality is only what appears to us as our individual awareness, we are the entire world.

This is a brilliant insight that Uchiyama explains better than anyone else I've come across.

If we take a fresh look through our zazen and practice living out the reality of fresh and immediate life, then it will be clear to anyone that whatever happens, there is nothing outside of living our self that is only self. This is what is called magnanimous mind, the attitude that never discriminates.

Without discriminating in terms of "I like that, I don't like this, I want that, I don't want that," since everything I encounter lies within my life-exoerience, I look at everything equally as my life. My life is not limited to the physical pulsation of my heart.

My life is in every experience -- that is, everywhere life functions. Every way I encounter life manifesting as life, that is my life-experience. That is why in Buddhism "self settling on itself" is the same as the universe settling on itself!

The magnanimous mind of a bodhisattva sees the self as one with the universe, and since everything we encounter is our life, we seek to manifest that life regardless of what is or what happens, without discrimination. 

With this magnanimous mind, which throws out the thoughts of the small self and ceases to discriminate, it becomes clear that my whole world appears before me as my present circumstances, the scenery of my life, the content of my own self that is also the whole self. This is exactly the same as in zazen, where all the thoughts that come and go are the scenery of zazen.

Third, all we need to do to experience this universality that also is our universality is... live now.

In terms of raw life-experience we are always living out the present that is only the present, the now that is only now.

So what in the world does it mean to live and work as universal self? Clearly, it is living and working in the now that is only now, as the self that is only self, no matter what happens. Whatever we are now faced with is what lives and functions as our life.

With this attitude toward life there is no past, future, or other person before the eyes of our self, there is only living out the reality of ever-present life.

In Zen Buddhism, meditation replaces God

I've got a lot of books about Zen. Back in college I liked "The Supreme Doctrine" so much I couldn't bear returning it to the San Jose Public Library, so I kept it. 

My attitude toward Zen Buddhism is decidedly mixed, though. I resonate with the philosophical aspects, but when Zen gets too religious and supernatural, that turns me off.

Which is why I'm enjoying a re-reading of Kosho Uchiyama's "Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice" so much.

On the back cover there's a quote from the book which pretty much sums it up:

When we let go of our conceptions, there is no other possible reality than what is right now. This undeniable reality is the reality of life fundamentally connected to everything in the universe. Right now is all-important. Dwelling here and now, in this reality, letting go of all the accidental things that arise in our minds, is what I mean by "opening the hand of thought."

Pretty simple and self-explanatory. Except, maybe, for the word accidental.

Basically Uchiyama is saying that mostly, happenings in our lives could have occurred otherwise. So let's not take them so seriously, clinging on to ideas about this-and-that so zealously. 

l don't claim to understand the subtleties of this notion of accidental. Yet the gist of it makes sense to me. Uchiyama contrasts "accidental" with "inevitable/undeniable" (the fourth undeniable reality is the one I have the most problem with accepting).

The first undeniable reality is that every living thing dies, and the second undeniable reality is that we suffer throughout our lives because we don't understand death. The truth derived from these two points is the importance of clarifying the matter of birth and death.

The third undeniable reality is that all of the thoughts and feelings that arise in my head simply arise haphazardly, by chance. And the conclusion we can derive from that is not to hold on to all that comes up in our head. That is what we are doing when we sit zazen.

What we call "I" or "ego" arises by chance or accident, so we just let go instead of grasping thoughts and "I." When we let go of all our notions about things, everything becomes really true. This is the fourth undeniable reality, complete tranquility. It is also described as "all things are as they are." 

Therefore, when we let go of everything, we do not create artificial attachments and connections. Everything is as it is. Everything exists in one accidental way or another. This is the present reality of life. It is the reality of that which cannot be grasped, the reality about which nothing can be said. This very ungraspability is what is absolutely real about things. 

...As far as human thought is concerned, anything is thinkable. But you have to have some stability, and think when all these things come up: Is this true or false? Is this best for me or not? You have to reflect upon yourself, and you see yourself as relative, as accidental, you can't help but conclude that your thoughts must be accidents, too. 

"Anything is thinkable." For sure.

We humans think about God, soul, spirit, heaven, hell, life after death, death after life, aliens on distant star systems, Big Foot, angels, all kinds of stuff that isn't part of what Uchiyama calls the "present reality of life."

So Zen Buddhism, along with Buddhism in general, doesn't have a need for God. (Unfortunately, religious Buddhism does have a need for rebirth and other unproven supernatural concepts, which is why I prefer Zen or Buddhism stripped of superstition.)

Uchiyama's book has helped me better understand how Zen looks upon zazen, meditation. Most people who meditate, and this described me during the bulk of my forty-two year meditation career, are seeking some benefit from their meditation.

Relaxation. Enlightenment. God-realization. Health. Concentration. Brain development. Mystical experience. 5trrggAll kinds of things. 

But recall Uchiyama's words above: everything is as it is. Pretty damn simple. Utterly natural. What are you experiencing now? That's it! Everything as it is. 

Ultimately, all we can say is that the reality of life is as it is. ...But is there any other way to live besides living life as it is? Of course not. Whatever our way of life may be, that is the reality of life, so there is no possibility of living outside the reality of life. 

Nevertheless, it is all too possible to live losing sight of that reality, and because of that, to suffer and agonize about our lives.

Buddhists say that all beings have buddha nature.

I used to think this was some special state that needed to be attained, the result of enlightenment. Not true. Buddha nature really means, what is. So of course every being in existence already has Buddha nature. 

They are.

The zazen taught in Zen Buddhism is the actualization of the Middle Way that is at the very quick of life; it is life as life -- that is, life as interdependence. Zazen enables life to be life by letting it be.

One might well ask: Whether we exert ourselves or not, aren't we always living life as it is? Isn't it nonsense to speak of living apart from life? This is indeed so, and it is the basis for the Buddhist teaching that all beings have buddha nature. That is, actualizing life is our very nature.

Nevertheless, it is also true that we aren't always living fully, we aren't always actualizing our life. This is because unlike the flowers in the fields, human beings bear the burden of thought. Thought has a dual nature: thought springs from life, and yet it has the ability to think of things totally ungrounded and detached from the fact of life. This is delusion, and it leads to strange consequences.

To just sit. And experience. What is actually here. Now. Breath. Sitting on cushion. Thoughts coming and going. Bodily sensations. Sounds. That's buddha nature. That's zazen. That's meditation. 

There's nothing to achieve. Life isn't an achievement. Life is living. Here. Now. Stuff happens. Things come and go. Such are the "accidents" of life Uchiyama referred to.

Life could have been otherwise for me. For you. For everybody.

Genes, parents, upbringing, education, culture, family, friends, encounters of all sorts. These everchanging "causes and conditions," as Buddhism puts it, have made us what we are, and will continue to do so.

What doesn't change is life living life. That's what the aim of Zen is: what always is. Until it isn't.

The attitude of the practitioner in practicing Zazen as a Mahayana Buddhist teaching never means to attempt to artificially create some new self by means of practice. Nor should it be aimed at decreasing delusion and finally eliminating it altogether. 

We practice zazen, neither aiming at having a special mystical experience nor trying to gain greater enlightenment. Zazen as true Mahayana teaching is always the whole self just truly being the whole self, life truly being life.

No God involved. Imaginary ideas distract us from what is true, real, grounded in here and now.

Buddhism does not raise the question of God. ...In contrast to a posture of bowing down before the God of Christianity or some god of another religion, the fundamental posture of Buddhism is the true self settling on the true self. 

...In Buddhism as religion, zazen -- in which we let go of all these human thoughts and feelings -- is the foundation of our lives. It is zazen that protects, guides, and gives strength to our daily actions, as well as to our lives as a whole, and in turn to the society in which we live.

Therefore we can say that zazen is for the Buddhist much as God is for the Christian. ...Zazen, which is letting go and opening the hand of thought, is the only true teacher. 

"Spiritual" hallucinations are brain-based

The human brain is amazing. Though it is entirely physical, the brain can produce sensations that seem spiritual, soulful, supernatural. 

Oliver Sacks, M.D., a professor of neurology, describes how the brain does this in a fascinating Atlantic article, "Seeing God in the Third Millenium: How the brain creates out-of-body experiences and religious epiphanies."

Here's some excerpts that I found particularly interesting. Below Sacks explains why people are so convinced that what they hallucinate is objectively real, not a product of their own brain -- which it is.

But the fundamental reason that hallucinations -- whatever their cause or modality -- seem so real is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do. When one hallucinates voices, the auditory pathways are activated; when one hallucinates a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the environment, is stimulated.

In OBEs [out of body experiences], subjects feel that they have left their bodies -- they seem to be floating in midair, or in a corner of the room, looking down on their vacated bodies from a distance. The experience may be felt as blissful, terrifying, or neutral. But its extraordinary nature -- the apparent separation of "spirit" from body, imprints it indelibly on the mind and may be taken by some people as evidence of an immaterial soul -- proof that consciousness, personality, and identity can exist independently of the body and even survive bodily death.

Neurologically, OBEs are a form of bodily illusion arising from a temporary dissociation of visual and proprioceptive representations -- normally these are coordinated, so that one views the world, including one's body, from the perspective of one's own eyes, one's head. OBEs, as Henrik Ehrsson and his fellow researchers in Stockholm have elegantly shown, can be produced experimentally, by using simple equipment -- video goggles, mannequins, rubber arms, etc. -- to confuse one's visual input and one's proprioceptive input and create an uncanny sense of disembodiedness.

And here Sacks debunks the supposed experience of heaven while comatose that Eben Alexander has parlayed into a best-selling book, slick web site, and such. In a previous blog post I also talked about why Alexander's tale shouldn't be taken seriously. Sacks says:

Alexander makes much of his experience as a neurosurgeon and an expert on the workings of the brain. He provides an appendix to his book detailing "Neuroscientific Hypotheses I considered to explain my experience" -- but all of these he dismisses as inapplicable in his own case because, he insists, his cerebral cortex was completely shut down during the coma, precluding the possibility of any conscious experience.

Yet his NDE was rich in visual and auditory detail, as many such hallucinations are. He is puzzled by this, since such sensory details are normally produced by the cortex. Nonetheless, his consciousness had journeyed into the blissful, ineffable realm of the afterlife--a journey which he felt lasted for most of the time he lay in coma. Thus, he proposes, his essential self, his "soul," did not need a cerebral cortex, or indeed any material basis whatever.

It is not so easy, however, to dismiss neurological processes. Dr. Alexander presents himself as emerging from his coma suddenly: "My eyes opened ... my brain ... had just kicked back to life." But one almost always emerges gradually from coma; there are intermediate stages of consciousness. It is in these transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully lucid consciousness, that NDEs tend to occur.

Alexander insists that his journey, which subjectively lasted for days, could not have occurred except while he was deep in coma. But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others, that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in 20 or 30 seconds, even though it seems to last much longer.

Subjectively, during such a crisis, the very concept of time may seem variable or meaningless. The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander's case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.

To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific -- it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.

Deeply wanting to experience the presence of God, a person's brain can produce the experience that is wanted. Nothing supernatural involved. So says Sacks:

Some religious people come to experience their proof of heaven by another route -- the route of prayer, as the anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann has explored in her bookWhen God Talks Back. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. Luhrmann wondered how, in the face of this lack of evidence, God becomes a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith.

She joined an evangelical community as a participant-observer, immersing herself in particular in their disciplines of prayer and visualization -- imagining in ever-richer, more concrete detail the figures and events depicted in the Bible. Congregants, she writes:

Practice seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching in the mind's eye. They give these imagined experiences the sensory vividness associated with the memories of real events. What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.

Sooner or later, with this intensive practice, for some of the congregants, the mind may leap from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God, feels God walking beside them. These yearned-for voices and visions have the reality of perception, and this is because they activate the perceptual systems of the brain, as all hallucinations do. These visions, voices, and feelings of "presence" are accompanied by intense emotion -- emotions of joy, peace, awe, revelation.

Some evangelicals may have many such experiences; others only a single one -- but even a single experience of God, imbued with the overwhelming force of actual perception, can be enough to sustain a lifetime of faith. (For those who are not religiously inclined, such experiences may occur with meditation or intense concentration on an artistic or intellectual or emotional plane, whether this is falling in love or listening to Bach, observing the intricacies of a fern, or cracking a scientific problem.)

Sacks concludes with, not surprisingly, a cogent conclusion:

...Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. This is not to say that they cannot play a part in the spiritual life, or have great meaning for an individual. Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, hallucinations cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain's power to create them.

Believing in miracles is an insult to God

In tune with the Christmas season, which is full of talk about unproven religious miracles, yesterday "G" left a comment on my "Where have all the miracles gone?" post. 

Sorry Peaceseeker, if you want proof of the RSSB miracles all you have to do is do a Google search, it's funny how there is positive news about RSSB on Google but Brian doesn't incorporate it on here. But when there is false news about RSSB he's quick along with the other bloggers to incorporate it here.

My response made a lot more sense.

G, please share the proof of RSSB miracles. Gosh, if there was demonstrable proof of ANY miracles in the world -- Christian, Buddhist, RSSB, whatever -- you'd think this would be front page news.

But this hasn't happened. So let us know about this proof, which somehow has gone unnoticed by everybody but you. Enlighten us.

Remember what I noted in last night's post: anecdotal evidence isn't persuasive proof. People can say anything about anything. Doesn't mean it is true.

The human brain is capable of massive feats of self-deception. That's why objective evidence is needed: to protect against self-delusion, tricks of the mind.

What I said is so obvious, it doesn't seem like it needs to be said.

However, actually it does, because religiosity blinds people to what they would be able to see clearly, if they didn't have a wall of dogma standing between them and reality. I know, because I used to be one of those who stare at a mental wall and believe there is nothing on the other side.

Truth should be our goal, not blind belief.

Believing in miracles, or God, or any other supernatural phenomenon without good reason/evidence means that we're more interested in the subjective products of our own mind than in the Big Wide World of objective reality that exists beyond our personal notions about it.

This is the beauty of science and the scientific method: it is the best way to become egoless. We can't get away with merely self-centeredly saying "I know...." A scientific way of looking at the world challenges us to say "This is the way things are, because...." 

In other words, we are pushed to see reality as it is, not as how we want it to be, or prefer it to be.

Since God usually is considered by religious people to be the highest truth in the cosmos, blind belief in miracles is insulting to any God which might actually exist. Assuming something to be true without excellent evidence to back the assumption up means we aren't really interested in truth.

We're interested in embracing our own beloved unproven assumption, not reality, not the highest truth. We've deified an emanation of our own mind, a desire to believe in something, rather than what truly exists.

Sacrilege! Which is why skeptics are the true devotees of a God that they doubt exists, not those who embrace blind faith.

Skeptics love truth more than the comfort of a reassuring feeling. "Jesus rose from the dead, just as I will." "The guru is all powerful, capable of saving my soul." Ideas such as these comfort believers. But science knows that reality exists beyond the bounds of what we humans find comfortable.

Big claims demand big evidence, big proof.

Miracles are a big claim. So is God. To accept miniscule evidence as proof of a big claim is demeaning to it, an insult. We should respect objective truth more, and our personal ideas less.

(For more along this line, check out my previous post about the burden of proof.) 

Great video! "The Burden of Proof." Claims demand evidence.

I just watched a terrific eleven minute You Tube video, "The Burden of Proof," that should be required viewing for everyone who believes in God, miracles, psychic powers, or anything else in the supernatural realm. 

Also for those who challenge them. I highly recommend the video.

This is the sort of clear thinking that cuts through religious bullshit like a razor sharp blade. It's no different from the prove it! and demonstrable evidence, please! pleas that I regularly utter to true believing commenters on this blog.

The video just does a great job of demolishing the ridiculous notion that it isn't up to someone who makes a claim to prove it, but rather the responsibility of someone who is skeptical of the claim to disprove it.

Wrong. Lack of belief is not a belief. Not believing in God isn't a claim that needs defending. Those who claim that God exists are the ones who need to step up and put forward their evidence. 

Have a watch. Thanks to the Secular Buddhist Association for having a link to the video on its home page, where I noticed it while browsing around.

 

An atheist meditation that pleases God

I'm a believer. Not in God. But in "covering my bases." (For those unfamiliar with American English, this means being thoroughly prepared for something.)

I don't believe in God. But I believe in the possibility that God exists. Heck, I believe in the possibility that anything imaginable exists. Along with what can't be imagined, just to cover my bases.

That's because I'm scientifically minded. Contrary to how many religious people view science, actually it is science that is most open to reality in any form, any guise, any way of being.

Material. Energetic. Non-physical. Mathematical. Ethereal. Conscious. Unconscious. Higher dimensional. Lower dimensional. Personal. Impersonal. Whatever. 

All science needs to move from the possibility of something existing to a conclusion that it probably actually does exist, is evidence. And also contrary to misguided religiosity, scientists embrace subjective as well as objective evidence.

Just not to the same degree. 

Subjective evidence is akin to "anecdotal evidence." It's better than no evidence at all; case studies in medicine, for example, might lead to research which definitively confirms a hypothesis. 

I'm not interested in proving the objective existence of God, though.

Since nobody has been able to do this in the ten thousand years or so of relatively modern human history, there's virtually zero chance that I, or anybody else alive today, will be able to provide persuasive demonstrable evidence of God or any other divinity.

I just want to be as sure as possible that I'm not missing out on experiencing God, or whatever, if something/someone pleasingly supernatural does exist. 

If unpleasingly supernatural, like a demon or hell, I'm not interested in experiencing it, just knowing about it from a safe distance -- though I'm sure plenty of fundamentalists are convinced that I'll be heading in some hellish direction after I die.

So I've evolved a cover-my-bases approach to meditation, and indeed life as a whole. It's summed up in words which come naturally to me when I begin to meditate each morning, usually for about twenty minutes. 

(For many years I meditated much longer, between 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours. Those days have passed.)

What I say is: I open myself to reality, however it may appear.

Though I don't believe in God, just the possibility of God, I like to picture God smiling when she/he/it hears this. If I were God, that's exactly the sort of "prayer" which would please me. I wouldn't want people to guess about the sort of God I am, which is what religions do.

I'd want people to say "Great Dude God, whatever you're like, whatever you're all about, we're cool with that. Just show us your stuff and we'll go Yeah... nice!"

No egocentric guessamatic expectations. Reality welcomed, godly or otherwise, in whatever form is, well, real.

My nine word atheist prayer that is so marvelously appealing to God doesn't need much explaining. I'll add just a few thoughts to the key notions.

I open myself... It's all about me, "I." Which would be you, another "I," if you said this prayer. As noted before, this isn't a scientific investigation of objective reality. It's a personal opening-up to what might exist apart from what I know about now. Embracing my feminine side, in a sense, because I'm not out to actively penetrate some barrier to truth. I'm inviting, not demanding. I'm listening, not talking. I'm following, not leading.

to reality... l'm not looking for imagination, fantasy, fairy tales, wishful thinking, or any other self-creation of my psyche. I'm opening myself to something substantial which exists on its own, not merely as a product of human thought, dogma, theology, myth, or such.

however it may appear... Not for me to say how an aspect of reality I know nothing about will manifest. Again, no expectations. Surprise me. Lots of possibilities. External perception. Internal vision. Thought. Intuition. Bodily. Soulful. Material. Spiritual. Down to earth. Transcendent. Exciting. Calming. Reassuring. Disturbing. 

Seems appropriate to end with a wonderful quote from Robert Persig.

It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth.’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.

Religion at root of opposition to gay marriage

Today is a happy moment for lots of gay people in Washington state, Oregon's neighbor to the north.

Last month Washingtonians ratified the legislature's legalization of gay marriage. They also legalized marijuana -- which means that, as painful as it is for me to say this, I have to give Washington the edge over Oregon on "coolness" (cultural, not meteorological).

Same sex people in Washington became eligible to get marriage licenses today. Their mood was celebratory, according to the Portland Oregonian. Who can blame them?

As a harpist played in the lobby, excited couples converged on the Clark County auditor's office Thursday to receive licenses allowing them to tie the knot under Washington's new same-sex marriage law. 

About two dozen couples received licenses within the first hour after the office opened at 9 a.m. to the applause of gay-marriage supporters and a swarm of news photographers. 

"Neither one of us ever thought we would have the ability to get married and be able to stand up in front of people and say, 'This is my wife,'" said Kim Hyder, 41, of Vancouver, as Samantha Petshow, 43, her partner of 15 years, stood in line next to her. "It's beyond words; it's like winning the lottery." 

Well, unfortunately many Americans do blame gays for getting married. Usually not for good reasons. After all, homosexuality almost always isn't a choice; it is a condition people are born with, just like being heterosexual is. 

And it is increasingly clear that gays are as devoted and loving to their partners as heterosexuals. Gays also usually are good parents, just as most heterosexual people are. So logically it is tough to justify discriminating against gays when it comes to marriage, adoption, or anything else.

Religions, though, don't care about logic. They don't care about facts. They don't care about reasonable reasons. Religions are the source of most discrimination against gays.

So says a Gallup poll.

Americans who oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage, 46% of the adult population, are most likely to explain their position on the basis of religious beliefs and/or interpretation of biblical passages dealing with same-sex relations.

...Seven in 10 weekly church attenders are opposed to same-sex marriage, while seven in 10 of those who seldom or never attend church are in favor. This dramatic difference in position on same-sex marriage based on religiosity underscores the power of the relationship between religion and attitudes toward moral and values issues in America today. 

Yes, religion makes people immoral.

Religion makes them dislike homosexuals. Religion makes them feel superior to those who don't share their faith, to the point of abusing or even killing them (holy wars have been around for as long as religion has). Religion sacrifices human rights and dignity in the name of an imaginary god. 

Steven Weinberg said it truly:

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion. 

Seeing red. Much more to this than meets the eye.

I love pondering Big Questions About the Cosmos. The stark existence of, well, existence is one of them, though I'm not sure if this is really a question. Maybe just a brute fact about which nothing more can be said. 

(Along this line, recently I read a letter to the editor in New Scientist magazine arguing that circular reasoning, sort of like "existence exists," has to be the nature of a final truth. Otherwise there's always another truth along another link in a chain of causes/effects or reasoned explanations, and we never get to the end.)

Sometimes, though, little questions lead to the big ones.

I've started to read Nicholas Humprey's "Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness."  I was drawn to the book because Humphrey starts off by simply asking what it means to see a red screen in a lecture hall.

And draws increasingly large conclusions about the purpose and nature of human consciousness from there. Interestingly, earlier today Mike Williams left a comment on one of my blog posts which read in part:

An interesting meditation is to imagine the color yellow. Then track it back to its source. See what happens when you try to consciously visualize yellow in meditation.

In a subsequent comment, Mike said (also in part):

Is there anything in the world which can be personalised ?
Without mistaken personalisation of thought, can a self even exist ?
Can thought ever be personalised ?
Is there a WHO in your machine ?

Here's some excerpts from the beginning of Humprey's short book about the simple act of seeing red. I'll blog again about the book after I read more of it.

The screen, in short, is colored red. This, we can say, is an objective fact, which could be confirmed by a physical measuring instrument such as a photometer. It is also an impersonal fact. It does not depend on any person's interest or involvement with it. Indeed, this fact about the screen would be the same if we all left the room.

...S is here, looking at the screen. And because S is here, there is now an interesting fact about him. S is doing whatever it amounts to for a person to "see red" -- doing it, presumably, somewhere in his brain. This fact about S is also an objective fact. There is every reason to suppose it too could be confirmed by a physical measuring instrument -- if not with present technology, then soon enough.

...However, this fact about S is a personal fact, because it does of course depend on his being here, with his eyes open. It is his seeing red. But being personal is only the beginning of what makes this fact remarkable. Far more important is that this fact belongs, among all the facts of the world, to a very special class: namely the class of objective facts that are also subjective facts.

...When S looks at the screen, he does something truly remarkable (in fact so remarkable that, if he were not so breezily familiar with it, he might rub his eyes in disbelief every time it happens): he generates that particular state of consciousness he will call having a red sensation. This sensation is clearly something he creates.

...having a red sensation has something of the character of a bodily action, perhaps an expression. At any rate, it is an active first-person response to being stimulated with red light. And, to bring this out, let's give a special active name to what S is doing here: redding.

This sensation, this redding, is the centerpiece of what it's like to be S at this moment. As its author, S experiences it immediately, in the making -- or so it seems. And yet, even though S is doing it, just what it is he is doing will be more than he can fully say. Indeed, as he tries to think about it, he will find the redding arrives in consciousness before he can even begin to put his mind to it and extends deeper than he can put his mind to (even given all the time in the world).

...Still, one thing that is obvious immediately is that the sensation is by no means a simple copy of the retinal image as a physical fact. For it is strikingly obvious to the subject that the sensation, the redding, has a quality and a valency -- subjective psychical properties -- which the image as such could hardly have.  

The sensation represents not just the red light at his eyes but his interaction with this stimulus. And because of this, S will feel the sensation matters to him; he will mind about it.

...It's important to note that these aesthetic attitudes to color are primarily attitudes to the quality of the sensation that colored light induces in the subject, not to the fact that some thing has the colored surface it does. That's to say, when S finds red light exciting, for example, it is his own phenomenal experience, the redding, that he judges exciting, and not the fact that the screen is colored red. 

...In doing all this, S gets to experience himself as an experiencer. The logician Gottlob Frege (following on from Kant much earlier) nicely stated the general principle that lies behind this: that wherever there is subjective experience there has to be a subject. "It seems absurd to us that a pain, a mood, a wish should rove abut the world without a bearer, independently. An experience is impossible without an experient. The inner world presupposes the person whose inner world it is."

...That's to say, it is our experience of our inner world that confirms the existence of the person.

So in just eleven paragraphs we've gotten from a red screen to examining the nature of "self." It's a universe in a grain of sand sort of thing. The smallest perception contains the essence of what it means to be a conscious human being.

I'm looking forward to finishing Humphrey's book. His view of consciousness is controversial, but from what I've learned so far, he makes a lot of sense.

Words are irrelevant to the cosmos

I'm walking along on a path to the lake, talking to one of our dogs. A habit of mine. Maybe inherited from my mother, since she also liked to talk to herself.

Except when I talk to our dogs, I don't feel like I'm talking to myself. After all, there's a sentient being with large ears right next to me.

Tonight, though, a marvelous intuition suddenly flashed into my consciousness.

Virtually everything in the universe doesn't relate to words; apart from other people the cosmos doesn't give a crap about what we say.

I'd never thought of speech in this way. I felt good. Who says you can't teach an old dog brain new tricks? My mind had just popped up with a fresh insight that dominated my attention for the rest of the dog walk.

Pretty much wordlessly.

Because I'd been struck by the uselessness of blabbering in the words that usually course inwardly through our heads, and outwardly through our mouths, even when we aren't needing to converse with other people.

I've watched enough episodes of The Dog Whisperer to know that Cesar Milan is fond of saying to owners of problem dogs, "When you talk to your dog, all it hears is blah, blah, blah... mere noise." True. Dog communication happens in other ways.

Ditto with everything else in the cosmos aside from the infinitesimally small speck of humanness residing on our planet. 

Nothing else on Earth understands human speech or thought. Rocks don't. Chairs don't. Dolphins don't. Flowers don't. Mountains don't. Likewise, so far as we know nothing at all off of Earth comprehends our words or ideas.

Stars don't. Planets don't. Intergalactic voids don't. Meteors don't. Black holes don't. Aside from members of the species Homo sapiens, the cosmos is wordless.

As I walked with our dogs, no longer speaking to Serena and Zu Zu in words, I realized how much closer I felt to them. Along with the rest of nature. Trees, hills, the lake, fallen leaves -- it all was just there. Uncaring of what I said or thought.

Yet not separate from me.

Small rocks on top of the earth dam that formed the lake spoke as my shoes crunched them together. Rain falling on my hat communicated its presence through sounds and sensations. Frogs woken into liveliness by a 50 degree-plus December day croaked a wordless "I'm here" as I passed.

We humans spend so much time and energy trying to explain to ourselves and others what the world is all about.

Yet the world, the universe, the cosmos -- it doesn't relate to words. It resonates on a different wavelength of consciousness, an alternate frequency from the blah, blah, blah of human speech and thought. So isn't it more than a little strange how much effort we put into talking about the way things are, and listening for a response from those things which are?

Only people will speak to us in words. I realize this assertion strikes at the heart of religiosity. Holy books supposedly come from the Mouth of God. Holy men and women supposedly channel divinity. Holy thoughts supposedly are inspired by a supernatural power.

I don't believe this.

Today's dog walk intuition is much more likely: human cognition is an irrelevant rounding error in the trillionth trillionth decimal place of an unfathomable cosmic equation.

The words, thoughts, and ideas of which we are so proud, and which we labor to make into a more accurate reflection of universal truth, are of no relevance to a reality that is almost entirely wordless, thoughtless, and idealess.

Which means... nothing.

What I've just said are a bunch of words, thoughts, ideas. During my mostly wordless dog walk I feel like I was in closer communion with the cosmos than I am now, writing this blog post. But, hey, that's what we humans do.

Wax and wane. Expand and contract. Live and die. Remember and forget. Open and shut. Approach and flee. We get so close... then lose the scent.

Words are the way, and also what get us lost.

Ideas and concepts, whether religious or otherwise, point to truth without being able to touch it. The greatest scientist, the greatest guru, the greatest artist -- their insights about what reality is all about amount to the same nothing as mine.

Because when you stack specks of human understanding against the inhuman cosmos, they become as irrelevant as words thrown in front of a tidal wave.

Extra-terrestrial meets an open-minded human

A regular blog commenter, "cc," sent me these thoughts recently. I enjoy writing like this: something I can read several times, and not exhaust the thoughtfulness contained therein.

Reminds me a bit of Chuang Tzu's useless tree. 

When the extra-terrestrial alights on Earth it says to the first human it encounters, "Take me to your leader", because it sees immediately that the human is not intelligent enough to live an unauthorized existence. 

It is obvious to the extra-terrestrial that the human's slavish dependency on its knowledge renders it ignorant of the need for an open mind; that because it can't allow for what it doesn't recognize and can't comprehend, it can't think or act "outside the box", as the earthlings say.

Eventually, however, the extra-terrestrial does encounter an open-minded human.

But what it sees is that this human is the most useless, powerless human on the planet because, having no leader and no followers, it is virtually alienated from its fellow human beings. Ironically, the extra-terrestrial and the open-minded human are more closely related than most humans are to each other.

A cup of coffee is more real than God. Drink up!

There's so much to like about reality. It's got real stuff in it. Way cool. This is what makes living so satisfying. And so frustrating. Yet always interesting.

We bump into real stuff that isn't us. 

Maybe that bump is with an attractive sexual partner. Maybe it is with a mountain whose steep slopes challenge our climbing skills. Maybe it is with sitting still on a meditation cushion, aware of air going in and out of our nose. Maybe it is with cancer cells that have invaded our body.

There's no end to the variety of encounters with physical reality. Which to my churchless mind, we might as well simply call reality.

Perhaps you disagree, believing that concepts like "God," "soul," "spirit," "heaven," "angels," "Brahman," "Allah," or whatever refer to something real yet non-physical. I understand why you hold to that belief, having done so myself for many years.

Now I've come to the conclusion that giving up imaginary ideas is the way to go.

I've spent enough time talking to imaginary friends: a God I imagined could hear my prayers, a guru I imagined was aware of everything I did, deceased loved ones I imagined being able to listen to my one-sided conversation with them.

My imagining made me feel good, or I wouldn't have done this for so long. But not nearly as good as reality makes me feel. 

Concepts that aren't grounded in the world that isn't us lack substance. We can fool ourselves for a while -- or even a lifetime -- but imagination always fails to authentically satisfy our hunger for real contact with stuff in the real world.

Yesterday I went land paddling again, a favorite activity of mine since I discovered it last summer. My senior citizen self jumps on a five foot bamboo longboard/skateboard, which I then push around using a stick on multi-use trails in a rural'ish park for about an hour, going 4.5 miles or so.

The words I most often use after a land paddling excursion are "That was real."

I've never used those words when talking to God, guru, or a dead relative inside my head. Or in connection with any other supposed "spiritual" experience that wasn't demonstrably physical.

At one point in my longboarding an approaching Oregon storm unleashed a brief frenzy of wind and rain. Boarding along a part of the trail I knew was mildly downhill, I could barely move, the wind was so strong. I had to exert a lot more strength than usual to push myself along.

I felt great. Wet, tired, and... real. 

I don't deny the possibility of reality extending beyond the bounds of the physical. But if such exists, it needs to be experienced with the same sort of undeniable reality as I felt land paddling on those Minto Brown Island Park trails.

If our experience of the divine is merely us communing with ourselves, this will be as satisfying as masturbation is compared to sex with another person: pleasant, yet lacking the authentic wildness of an encounter with someone or something other than ourselves.

Our own minds are tame territory. We create the concept zoos within which our mental creatures live. Then we observe them in their enclosures, feeding them with more thoughts, more imaginings, more beliefs.

This interior realm is within our control. That's what makes it so appealing. And also so lacking. 

What we really crave is to bump into what is not us. This is why sensory deprivation soon becomes torture. Circling within the claustrophobic confines of our own mind, there is no exit to a reality not of our own making. 

Therein lies the sadness of religion. Though smiles may rest on the faces of believers, this is a mask hiding the emptiness of supernatural imagination. Only reality can truly satisfy.

Drinking a cup of coffee will teach you more about what is real than the loftiest thoughts about God. Guaranteed. (And I've gotten no kickbacks from Starbucks for saying that -- though I'd like to.)

Blog praise and nonduality criticism I agree with

Whenever I get an email from someone about this blog that has a first line with "love it," I'm inclined to agree with the rest of whatever is said. In this case, I have good reasons.

Nicely said, dude. Just enough profanity to emphasize your points. Here's the guy's message, mildly edited to correct some spelling.

I was just snooping around your site and gotta say..LOVE IT...I did manage to stumble across it a few years ago, but managed to turn a blind eye cause i couldnt have anyone fucking with my nonduality delusions..he he he..all these spiritual traditions are just escapes man!

Escapes from the havoc we wreck with our own minds or the bs instilled in us from other minds..lol..advaita is just as stupid as any fundamentalist religion and i should know being that i was a part of both at one time or another! People dont want the truth they want denial!

Those nondual teachings are worthless and all those fucks sound the same just like mormons and born agains do! Please... they live in concepts and deny their minds and bodies as if they're something different..oops sorry pussys, better to just take it like a man..everytime i hear someone say the world is an illusion i wanna slap em and ask em "is that really so"!

Or everytime they say that they are not a body not a mind is when a good kick to the nuts may be in order..fucking charlatans..though i gotta give em points for hustling money from people's superstitions and fears. Anyhow keep doing what you doing...