Church of the Churchless

Telling a story from my dark side felt like church. Without the religion.

Last night I was one of eight speakers who took part in the second Stories From the Dark Side event here in Salem, Oregon.

I enjoyed myself.

The organizers kindly provided a bottle of Jack Daniels and a couple of shot glasses in the Grand Theatre's "green room." Plus, Santiam Brewing Company had some dark stout on tap in the lobby. I managed to get myself in a great story-telling frame of mind via a balanced blend of coffee, beer, and whiskey.

I talked about my one hour with my father. That is one of my favorite blog posts, mostly because I wrote it in a burst of from-the-heart honesty. I ended it with:

When the door shut behind me and I started walking down the corridor to my rented car, I was so happy. Not happy that I had finally gotten to meet my father—happy that I would never have to see my father again.

Which I never did.

Moral to this story? If there is one, it’s that fantasies aren’t reality and what you get in life often is better than what you want in life. Growing up, I wanted my father. When I was grown up, that one hour with him taught me that I was hugely better off fatherless. I’m already too much like him. If I had grown up with him, I might have become him.

That’s too scary to think about. Time for a mind-cleansing nap, hopefully with fatherless dreams.

The whole Stories from the Dark Side experience reminded me a lot of church. After intermission (I was the second speaker, so was done for the evening) I sat in the audience with my wife, enjoying the captivating stories from other people.

There was a strong feeling of communion -- not the wafer kind, the connection kind -- between everybody in the Grand Theatre. The emotions being shared were feelings we all have had. Sure, not exactly as related by the speakers. But really similar.

Isn't this what religions are supposed to bring us?

A sense of being connected with the cosmos; a realization that we are not alone; a knowing that whatever we are going through, a helping hand and shoulder to lean on are available. I sure felt all that last night.

I barely knew the organizers and only had met one of the other speakers prior to the event. But a bond instantly was formed between us. Also with the audience, many of whom I talked with at some point during the evening.

Here's a backstage photo of most of the speakers. (Ego-centered observation: I was wearing a loose untucked shirt, so my lean, mean senior citizen body couldn't reveal its muscled contours; or, if you prefer a darker spin on my appearance, my "six-pack" has lost a few over the years.)

Dixie, Danielle, Meghan, Brian, Adam

I've been to lots of church services, albeit mostly of the eastern religion "satsang" variety. 

I felt just as warmly inspired last night as at any of the churchly meetings I've been to in my 65 years of living. And no, it wasn't the glass of beer and shot of whiskey that made me feel that way. It was the refreshing honesty of everybody in the room.

Which often is sorely lacking in religious sorts of gatherings. Platitudes are spouted rather than truth-telling. I didn't hear one false word from any of the Stories from the Dark Side speakers. It was all raw this is the way it was. 

And is. I alluded to that fact at the end of my ten minute or so talk.

Up until that one hour I spent with my father when I in my early thirties, I'd longed to know what my missing parent was like. Not having a father in the home deeply bothered me when I was a child. Later I was much more accepting of his absence from my life.

However, I still had a sense that, as I said last night, I was missing out on a parental ice cream cone -- since I only was able to partake of the "meat and potatoes" of what my mother was able to offer me. It sustained me as a kid, but I was jealous of how other children were able to enjoy the extras a father had to offer.

After meeting my father, though, that feeling went away. In the words of last night's Stories from the Dark Side theme, gone for good. 

But not really. Because I've come to this realization:

In a very real way, the father I wanted to know always has been intimately connected with me. After all, he supplied half of my genetic heritage. I am him, along with my mother. And along with each of their relatives going all the way back to the first stirrings of life on earth.

I, and all of us, are multitudes. (To not coin a phrase.)

My father lives within, and as, me. Naturally I don't experience life as he did. Likely, though, my feelings, emotions, thoughts, and ways of looking at the world bear more than a little resemblance to his. This insight hit me more deeply than it ever had before as I was preparing for last night's Dark Side story.

About half the time I ran through what I wanted to say, I'd start to cry. Not out of sadness; out of something deeper. Hard to explain. It was like I had come closer to a truth that always had been part of me, but which I'd failed to recognize.

Pretty similar to how I look at religiosity these days. Religions would have us believe that we are missing something only they can provide. 

Well, I much prefer the implicit philosophy of Stories from the Dark Side. Nothing is lacking in us. We just need to embrace every side of ourselves, and of life. Darkness as well as light. Sorrow as well as joy. There is no such thing as a coin with only one side.

Update: Today I came across a passage in Barbara Brown Taylor's "Learning to Walk in the Dark" that nicely expresses this:

What such people stand to discover, Greenspan says, is the close relationship between "individual heartbreak and the brokenheartedness of the world." While those who are frightened by the primal energy of dark emotions try to avoid them, becoming more and more cut off from the world at large, those who are willing to wrestle with angels break out of their isolation by dirtying their hands with the emotions that rattle them most.

A video from the Dark Side folks conveys the same message. 

 

We'll die the way we have lived

I don't like to think about death. Especially my own. When my wife and I went to get our wills made, I asked the attorney to say "gerbiled" rather "died" whenever she needed to refer to my death.

Yeah, it sounded sort of ridiculous when the attorney told us, "So upon Brian's gerbiling, his estate will pass to..." But I was fine with ridiculousness so long as I could lessen the probability that I'd have to seriously envision my, um, eventual gerbiling.

No, I can say it now: eventual death.

I still don't enjoy pondering my demise. However, for some reason or other (passing age 60 and getting closer to the grim reaper?) I'm able to more closely embrace the notion of death and dying than when I was younger.

This allowed me to enjoy a TEDx talk by Keith Seckel filmed at last year's event here in Salem, Oregon: "Life and Death Matters." He's a good speaker with a wise message.

Those who die a good death are who they've always wanted to be.
Choose to live life fully.
We'll die the way we have lived.
Every moment counts.
Who do you want to be?
What will you choose today, in order to become that person just a little bit more than you were this morning?

True cliche: live every moment as if it were your last

One of the benefits of growing older -- I'm 65 -- is that you acquire some Zennish enlightenment without having to meditate on hard cushions, figure out koans, or do any other of the Official Zen stuff.

Just seeing people you know about your age or younger die naturally leads to a realization that, as I said in another blog post on this subject three and a half years ago, This is it.

We live. And eventually we die.

What I knew on the dog walk, and still know, is that this moment, whatever it consists of, never will come again.

Standing on the road, leash in hand, I knew that so deeply I was almost afraid to embrace the realization wholeheartedly, because it seemed that if I ever fully fathomed the depths of what I can only call IT, I'd run the risk of never coming to the surface of my everyday life again.

Which could be a good thing. OK, it probably would be a good thing. I just didn't feel like a dog walk was the right time to dive deeper into IT -- the experience that arguably underlies all other experiences.

Namely, the existential in-your-gut realization of life's finitude, ephemeralness, and above all, preciousness.

Never again will I experience what I am right now. This moment will never come again. (A cliche, but cliches can be absolutely true.)

Today I had a similar, yet different, feeling. 

It was more a realization that, no matter what I am doing, one day there will be a last time that I do it. Problem is (and maybe this isn't a problem, but a good thing) likely I won't know which is the last time.

I was in an upstairs workout room at our athletic club. I go up there to do some Yoga and Tai Chi. Per usual, nobody but me was using the room. It's got a nice wood floor; floor to ceiling windows; a view of the south Salem hills covered with fir trees. 

Usually I only do one Tai Chi form, Liuhebafa, as it was taught to me by my instructor, who was taught it by his Chinese instructor, who was taught it... and so it goes. 

It's also called "water boxing." The form is long. Super long, compared to other Tai Chi forms, including even the Yang Long Form. It took me several years to learn it all. Now I'm hooked on it. Not saying I do it correctly or well, but I've got the basic moves down.

This afternoon I was looking at the window, about to begin the form, when a thought popped into my mind. "What if I knew this was the last time I'd ever do the form before I died? How would I feel doing it? How carefully and attentively would I perform the moves, knowing this is the last time I'd do them?"

It was more than a thought, of course. More like a whole body, whole mind Wow! sensation. It felt real because I knew this was absolutely true: there will come a time when I do Liuhebafa for the last time.

And this could be it.

Unlikely. But then, every time I do the form it will seem unlikely that this is the last time. Even if I'm gravely ill, barely able to move, my optimistic mind probably will think, "Tomorrow is another day." 

One day I'll be wrong. There won't be another day. For me. 

Today was one of my most enjoyable Liuhebafa playing of the form. (Tai Chi folks often speak of "playing" a form; fits with the light-hearted, unserious, flow-with-it Tai Chi philosophy.) It felt different, because I felt different -- having begun with that This could be the last time thought.

Uh, oh. I'm getting a junior year in high school flashback.

 

 

Halfway through "10% Happier." I feel 5% better now.

I'm glad my Amazon guilt led me to buy Dan Harris' "10% Happier" in the charming Paulina Springs Bookstore in Sisters, Oregon. 

Whenever I visit the bookstore, usually once a month in spring and summer, I do my best to buy something. This assuages the guilt I feel from buying books via Amazon the rest of the time. So when I saw a copy of "10% Happier" last Sunday, I ended up purchasing it after thumbing through the book.

Previously I'd read reviews of Harris' book that made me wary of adding one more meditation/ mindfulness title to my extensive collection. I've been meditating every day since 1970, so to me most books in this genre have a "been there, done that" quality to them.

Harris, though, has a refreshing take on the taming the monkey mind thing.

He's a television journalist with ABC News. Not surprisingly, he's an excellent writer. Honest. Direct. Humorous. Best of all, he doesn't have a fawning attitude toward the spiritual "gurus" he comes across after deciding that his anxiety-prone mind (his father is a Jewish worrier) could benefit from some mindfulness training.

I'm about halfway through the book. Harris called it what he did because he doesn't believe meditation can completely change a person. He figures that if it makes him 10% happier, meditation is worth pursuing. 

Sounds about right to me. 

During the 35 years or so I was heavy into a guru-centered form of Eastern meditation, I never met anyone who struck me as enlightened -- whatever that word means. There was a lot of talk about "perfect masters" and "God-realization." But nobody, including the guru, manifested what supposedly was possible.

One of the first self-help teachers Harris comes across is Eckhart Tolle, the power of now guy. His reaction to Tolle fits with my impression of him.

The real mindfuck, though, was this: almost as soon as he [Tolle] said something brilliant, he would say something else that was totally ridiculous. The man was toggling seamlessly between compelling and confusing, incisive and insane.

Later Harris gets interested in Buddhism and links up with a fellow Jubu (Jewish Buddhist), Mark Epstein. Epstein wrote "Thoughts Without a Thinker." I blogged about the book in "No-Self" isn't a spiritual goal -- it's what we already are.

Like Harris, I also find the non-religious, non-supernatural side of Buddhism to be appealing. Here's some excerpts from his "The Jew-Bu" chapter.

As best I could understand it, the Buddha's main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won't last.

...The Buddha embraced an often overlooked truism: nothing lasts -- including us. We and everyone we love will die. Fame fizzles, beauty fades, continents shift.

...We may know this intellectually, but on an emotional level we seem to be hardwired for denial. We comport ourselves as if we had solid ground beneath our feet, as if we had control.

...Unlike many of the faiths I'd come across as a religion reporter, the Buddha wasn't promoting salvation in the form of some death-denying dogma, bur rather through the embrace of the very stuff that will destroy us.

...Waking up to the reality of our situation allows you to, as the Buddhists say, "let go," to drop your "attachments." As one Buddhist writer put it, the key is to recognize the "wisdom of insecurity."

Well, Harris must be referring to Alan Watts. I love his book by that name.

Expressed that love in a blog post last year. I'd say that Watts is as much a Taoist as a Buddhist though, not that there is a lot of difference between Taoism and Buddhism when the religious'y aspects of each are stripped out.

Harris correctly calls out Eckhart Tolle as having taken a lot from Buddhism without admitting his quasi-plagiarism.

Very quickly it became blazingly clear. The best parts of Tolle were largely unattributed Buddhism.

Tolle had not, as I'd assumed when I'd first read A New Earth, made up his insights out of whole cloth. Apparently  he'd appropriated them, and then effected a sort of intellectual elephantitis, exaggerating their features in the most profitable of ways.

Two and a half millennia before Eckhart Tolle started cashing his royalty checks, it was the Buddha who originally came up with that brilliant diagnosis of the way the mind works.

l'm sure I'll have more to say about "10% Happier" once I've finished the book. So far I seem to be on track, feeling about 5% happier.

No, Ben Sasse, religious beliefs don't allow someone to ignore laws

Some defenders of religion argue that religious belief is a harmless personal exercise. "What's the problem with people believing whatever they want? How does this hurt anyone?"

Well, read Nebraska Senate Nominee Says Religious Beliefs Can Justify Breaking Any Law. This article presents excellent reasons why elevating unsubstantiated, nonfactual religious beliefs over other sorts of unsubstantiated, nonfactual personal beliefs is dangerous.

Sasse, however, apparently believes that this law does not go far enough, even if the Court gives Hobby Lobby everything it is asking for. His proposed rule — that government cannot require someone to act counter to their religious beliefs “under any circumstances” — would mean that literally any law could be ignored by someone who held a religious belief counter to that law.

According to National Geographic, for example, “[h]undreds, if not thousands, of women are murdered by their families each year in the name of family ‘honor,’” and while this practice “goes across cultures and across religions,” some of the perpetrators of honor killings are motivated by their religious faith. Under Sasse’s formulation of religious liberty, a person who killed his own sister because he believed he was under a religious obligation to do so would be immune from prosecution for murder.

Similarly, religious beliefs have been used to justify discrimination against racial minorities, women, and LGBT Americans at different points in American history. In an opinion upholding Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage, a state judge wrote that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Former Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett offered a similar view in 1960, claiming that “the good Lord was the original segregationist.” The conservative Bob Jones University drew a similar connection between religion and racism to justify excluding African Americans entirely until the early 1970s, and then to justify a ban on interracial dating and marriage among its students.

Many other examples of unlawful and unethical religious beliefs are cited in the ThinkProgress piece.

Should people get a free pass to break whatever laws they want under the banner of religion? What prevents someone from forming the Church of Drunk Driving whose holy sacrament is tossing down a six-pack and then jumping in a car?

As already noted, "Religion" is just a name for a collection of unsubstantiated, nonfactual personal beliefs that are held by enough people to give them some sort of social acceptance.

If you hear an outside voice in your head telling you to do something, you'll be considered crazy. Unless you say that the voice is God --then you'll be revered as a religious devotee. 

I don't see why religious beliefs should be treated any differently under the law as any other subjective individual belief. If we start allowing people to ignore laws they don't believe in, there will be no end to the law-breaking.

This is a theme I've addressed in previous posts. 

Contraception coverage dispute shows absurdity of religious belief
Beliefs are not equal under the law. At least, not in the United States. Religious beliefs have an edge over non-religious beliefs, even when the believer holds the same belief. 

Which is absurd. By their nature, beliefs are a matter of opinion. Otherwise we'd call them "facts." Gravity is a fact. God is a belief. 

Favoring insurance coverage for contraceptives (birth control pills and other means of preventing pregnancy) is a belief. It can be founded on facts as well as ethical principles. But in the end, it is a belief.

Scalia says religious groups have to follow the law
Amazing. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia agrees with President Obama and other progressives about something: that religious organizations which enter into commercial activity have to follow the same laws everybody else does.

Contraception should be covered by religious organizations
A "religious conscience exemption" argument usually is a load of crap. Religious believers shouldn't be able to avoid laws just because they have a strongly held personal belief. Hey! We all have strongly held personal beliefs.

I haven't had a single bite of meat or fish since I became a vegetarian in 1970, forty-one years ago. I strongly believe in both the morality of not killing animals for food, and in the health benefits of vegetarianism.

But if a bunch of other vegetarians and me started a college which espoused our dietary beliefs, yet enrolled meat-eaters also, would it be fair if we required that anyone who got a student loan from the federal government couldn't buy a hamburger -- or any other animal flesh -- while they were associated with our college?

Most people would think that'd be ridiculous. But it's no more ridiculous than a Catholic hospital saying "We shouldn't have to provide our employees with birth control coverage under their health insurance plan."

Letting children die isn't a valid religious belief
Phil, interesting legal theory you set forth -- which, thankfully, isn't accepted in cases of child abuse, spouse abuse, and such. My wife was a psychotherapist in private practice for many years.

She encountered quite a few men, usually Christian, who believed that it was fine to beat their wife or children because, gosh, God has decreed that the man is the head of the family, and whatever he feels Jesus/God wants him to do, that's the best for everyone.

So I assume that if someone is a meth addict, and believes it is OK to not take their child to the doctor when seriously ill, because there's just no point and doctors don't know shit anyway, you feel this is a reason to absolve them of legal guilt?

What's the difference, as an Oregonian columnist pointed out, between someone high on deluded religious beliefs and someone high on a pharmaceutical?

Embrace the dark. You need it as much as light.

I first heard about Barbara Brown Taylor's "Learning to Walk in the Dark" in a TIME magazine piece. Part of it is here.

She used to be a minister, but gave that up -- partly because the church put too much emphasis on being all bright and light rather than dim and dark.

Like Taylor, I've become much more appreciative of darkness. Physical. Mental. Spiritual.

(Though I really don't know what spiritual means; it's an empty word to me; however, since so many people use it, I sort of feel like I have to also.)

I'm fine with not-knowing.

Like, what will happen after I die. Or how the universe came into being. I used to feel like I had to fill up that knowledge void with religious beliefs. Now, genuine mystery is more appealing to me than fake explanations. 

I've only read one chapter in Taylor's book. I was worried it would be too Christian'y for me. So far, not at all. I don't mind a few Biblical references. I look upon the Bible as a work of literature, not a guide to reality.

Here's some excerpts from the beginning of Taylor's "Learning to Walk in the Dark" that I like.

...but when I look around the world today, it seems clear that eliminating darkness is pretty high on the human agenda -- not just physical darkness but also metaphysical darkness, which includes psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual darkness.

...For now, it is enough to say that "darkness" is shorthand for anything that scares me -- that I want no part of -- either because I am sure that I do not have the resources to survive it or because I do not want to find out. 

The absence of God is there, along with the fear of dementia and the loss of those nearest and dearest to me. So is the melting of polar ice caps, the suffering of children, and the nagging question of what it will be like to die.

...Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.

...Plus, Christianity has never had anything nice to say about darkness. From earliest times, Christians have used "darkness" as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness and death.

...To embrace that teaching and others like it at face value can result in a kind of spirituality that deals with darkness by denying its existence or at least depriving it of any meaningful attention. I call it "full solar spirituality," since it focuses on staying in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith. 

...The more they win out over the world of the flesh, the better. The more they beat back the powers of darkness, the closer they get to God. The ultimate goal is to live with that God forever, in a bright heaven where the bottom half of every earthly equation has finally returned to dust.

After years of using this language to pray, teach, preach, and celebrate the sacraments, I fell out of love with it -- not just the words themselves but also the vision of reality they represent.

...If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at the same time shame over my inability to speak of God without a thousand qualifiers, doubt about the health of my soul, and barely suppressed contempt for those who have no such qualms. These are the areas of my proficiency. 

"Yes, yes, yes" is an appealing philosophy of life

I have a regular column in my town's bi-weekly alternative newspaper, the peculiarly named Salem Weekly, whose web site is called WillametteLive for some peculiar reason. 

(Hey, it's an alternative paper; my column is called Strange Up Salem; peculiar is good.)

In the issue that hit the streets today I wrote about yes, yes, yes. The column is philosophical enough to merit sharing in this here Church of the Churchless. 

Plus, a bit of Googling of my own websites (you can do it yourself via the search box in the right sidebar) turned up a 2007 post on a similar theme: "Beyond religion's No to Yes, Yes, Yes."

Here's my column. If you aren't familiar with the Oregon Country Fair, I've shared photos of this one-of-a-kind event here, here, here, and here. (But most of those on Flickr are way better.)

Say yes to all of life

“Yes, Yes, Yes.” I enjoy seeing these words colorfully emblazoned on banners at the marvelous Oregon Country Fair in Veneta (a must-go July experience for lovers of alternative reality).

This is the heart of strangeness, the vitalizing power that makes life into passionate ooh’s and ah’s rather than listless oh yeah’s and so what’s. 

Yes. This is. We are. It barely matters what the “is” and “are” consist of. 

Opening ourselves to it, embracing it, saying yes to it, glorying in the mystery of how this particular slice of external and internal reality came to be after 14 billion years of big bang evolving — such is living life with eyes positively wide open. 

I don’t mean to sound Pollyannaish, excessively optimistic. Life can suck. It can be painful, depressing, disappointing, tragic. 

But saying yes to all that is a lot better than denying it. Kudos to the folks in Salem who organized the Stories from the Dark Side series at the Grand Theatre (last Thursday, May and June). Great idea, inviting people to share tales from the darker side of themselves.

Recently I came across one of those wise Twitter epigrams that say so much in 140 characters or less: “Self hate lives in the gap of what you think you should be and what you actually are.”

Yes. This is what you are. This is what I am. Yet also more, because of Yes, and Yes, and Yes… without end.

Back in the 1960’s us Vietnam War-era protesters often heard the words, “Love it or leave it.” Meaning, the United States. It was a stupid saying. But changing one word puts it in accord with my Yes philosophy of life 

Love it and leave it. Love what is true right now inside and outside of us. And leave that behind as we open ourselves to the fresh reality of what is possible in the next ever-changing moments. 

There always is another Yes. Until there isn’t. There’s no No, existentially speaking. So long as we live, we always are living positively, even in our deepest negativity.

Salem, like everywhere else, thrives when people are open to anything and anyone. Dogmatism, certainty, fixedness, rigidity: these confine the creativity of Yes. 

Sure, not everything that is, is what we want. However, making desirable changes first requires seeing things as they are. Then the avenue to what should be opens up with the next “…and Yes.”

I meditate every morning. Today I repeated Yes, Yes, Yes as sort of a mantra. After a few minutes I felt the pleasure that often comes from hearing or saying “yes.” 

(OK, not if you ask your boss if you’re being fired, but otherwise.)

Meditating did spur an uncomfortable yes-memory. When I proposed to my wife, the words came out so botched Laurel had to say, “Are you asking me to marry you?” Yes, I said.

Such is the power of yes. It transforms a bad beginning into a happy ending.

----------------------------------
Strange Up Salem seeks to lift our city’s Blah Curse. Give us a Facebook like. Brian Hines blogs at hinesblog.com

Sunday summary of last week's news about God, soul, and spirit

Here's my report concerning news of all things godly during the past week.

Based on my reading of two daily newspapers, TIME, New Scientist, The New Yorker, online New York Times, and many perusals of blogs, web sites, and other Internet offerings...

Nothing. 

A lot has been happening in material reality. Nothing seems to be going on in supernatural reality. No miracles. No appearances by God. No divine revelations. No anything. Zilch.

It's been this way every week for as long as I can remember. Which is the vast majority of my 65 years of living. Same old, same old. 

Gets boring. Because it is boring. The only news about what religious believers consider to be a much more real reality than this physical one comes from fantasies conjured up by their own brains. 

As many others before me have noted, it's more than a little strange that the supposedly greatest entity in existence is an absolutely Hidden God.

Well, I was able to read the comic pages in the Portland Oregonian today. That showed me some truth. Pearls Before Swine possesses a lot more wisdom than any religion.

Churchless challenge: What supernatural fact are you sure about?

Today, here at the Church of the Churchless, we've got a short and simple question for believers in some extra-physical reality:

What supernatural fact are you sure about?

I was tempted to say 100% sure, or absolutely sure.

But I'm an admirer of science, and science isn't 100% sure about anything (every seeming fact about physical reality might be falsified one day, though the chances are miniscule for extensively verified facts).

So let's just leave it at "sure."

Meaning, the supernatural fact you're sure about isn't just a matter of belief, hope, faith, or tentative conclusion that it is true. Rather, you know that the supernatural fact is true. You're sure of it. 

Leave a description of this fact in a comment on this post, along with an explanation of why you are sure it is true. 

In a 2006 post I wrote about how a "Million dollars says there is no evidence of the supernatural."

Sorry, there's no cash prize for the most believable purported supernatural fact. But if you have a way of demonstrating that it is true, check out the Randi Paranormal Challenge. That million bucks could be yours.

Welcome to the age of apatheism -- not caring about God

That's a great word, apatheism. I hadn't come across it until I read a recent New Scientist article, "Losing Our Religion." (On the magazine's web site it is called "God not-botherers: Religious apathy reigns.")

Of course, New Scientist is a British publication. The article says, "The UK is one of the least religious countries in the world, with around half of the population saying they don't belong to any religion." 

However, there is good news for my country, which is a lot more religious.

Even in the US -- a deeply Christian country -- the number of people expressing "no religious affiliation" has risen from 5 per cent in 1972 to 20 per cent today; among people under 30, that number is closer to a third.

It seems that rather than people becoming more anti-religious, atheistic, they just don't care about religion. Hence the clever term, apatheism. Yawn... apathy reigns. Who cares whether God exists? I've got a life to live. 

Wikipedia clues us in to what the word means. 

Apatheism (/ˌæpəˈθiːɪzəm/ a portmanteau of apathy and theism/atheism), also known as pragmatic atheism or (critically) as practical atheism, is acting with apathy, disregard, or lack of interest towards belief or disbelief in a deity. Apatheism describes the manner of acting towards a belief or lack of a belief in a deity, so it applies to both theism and atheism. An apatheist is also someone who is not interested in accepting or denying any claims that gods exist or do not exist. In other words, an apatheist is someone who considers the question of the existence of gods as neither meaningful nor relevant to their life.

I think I'm heading in the apatheistic direction. Might even have already arrived there. I've pretty much lost interest in reading books about the virtues of atheism and agnosticism, or the downside of believing in some religion.

Instead, before my morning meditation time I mainly read something scientific or related to urban design. Currently "Walkable City" and "Snakes, Sunrises, and Shakespeare" are what I'm reading in these genres. 

It just makes less and less sense to me to waste time pondering why people believe in religious fantasies. Sure, this is important in the same way we need to understand why people deny the reality of global warming: believing in something that isn't true, and then acting on that belief, has real-world consequences.

So I'm very much in favor of trying to de-convert religious believers. However, I'm becoming rather apatheistic about this myself, figuring I can both do more good for the world, and be happier myself, by devoting myself to other forms of social activism.

(Like, researching and writing my tell-all report about how five large, healthy, beautiful trees in my home town, Salem, Oregon, were cut down for no good reason.)

Between theism and atheism... apatheism. Or maybe not between -- off to one side. Sort of like the third option between avidly debating the existence or non-existence of the Tooth Fairy: How about, who cares?

Supreme Court says prayer is OK at town meetings. Ugh!

Today the United States Supreme Court said it was just fine to have prayers from a "chaplain of the month" open a town's public meetings. 

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that divided the court’s more conservative members from its liberal ones, said the prayers were merely ceremonial. They were neither unduly sectarian nor likely to make members of other faiths feel unwelcome.

“Ceremonial prayer,” he wrote, “is but a recognition that, since this nation was founded and until the present day, many Americans deem that their own existence must be understood by precepts far beyond that authority of government to alter or define.”

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the town’s practices could not be reconciled “with the First Amendment’s promise that every citizen, irrespective of her religion, owns an equal share of her government.”

Well, it wasn't just a conservative vs. liberal divide among the judges who voted 5-4 to allow the prayers. All five of the judges in favor of praying are practicing Catholics. The four who were opposed to praying at public meetings were Jewish (three) and a non-churchgoing Catholic (one).

This is one more bad Supreme Court decision. As the above-linked LA TImes story said:

Justice Elena Kagan faulted the majority for approving an official policy of "religious favoritism." In her dissent, she said the majority might view the matter differently had a "mostly Muslim town" opened its session with Muslim prayers or if a Jewish community invited a rabbi every month.

True.

More difficult to imagine, but possible, is a mostly-atheist community starting public meetings with a paean to the scientific method and a godless way of life. I'd enjoy being able to serve as a "non-chaplain of the month" who gets to non-pray something like this:

We come together in praise of facts, sound reasoning, and devotion to scientific ways of looking at the world. We affirm our commitment to shun unfounded religious beliefs, faith-based decision-making, and supernaturalism of all kinds.

There is no evidence of God, just reality. We pledge to do our best to make this world a better place, ignoring those who would substitute fantasies of heavenly realms and life after death for what is demonstrably real here and now.

 

No need for "making" in a mathematical universe. It just "is."

I've finished Max Tegmark's fascinating "Our Mathematical Universe," a book I blogged about before here. The final chapter was a bit of a letdown. Tegmark ambled off into extraneous subjects, like how Earth might come to its demise and whether other conscious entities exist in the universe.

Surprisingly, Tegmark thinks we humans probably are the most intelligent life-form in the universe. If true, and I doubt that it is, that's depressing. Geez, 14 billion years have passed since the Big Bang, and Homo sapiens are the most sapient entities the cosmos could come up with?

But I still enjoyed the book.

I'm fascinated by the notion that existence exists, though I readily admit that if the opposite was true -- if existence didn't exist -- nobody would be around to know it. So I've come to feel that the pertinent question isn't "Why is there something rather than nothing?" but a statement: "There is something rather than nothing."

Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, MUH, is compatible with this way of looking at existence. Here's some excerpts from his book:

The MUH says that a mathematical structure is our external physical reality, rather than being merely a description thereof. This equivalence between physical and mathematical existence means that if a mathematical structure contains a self-aware substructure, it will perceive itself as existing in a physically real universe, just as you and I do (albeit generically a universe with different properties from ours).

Stephen Hawking famously asked, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" 

In the context of the MUH, there's thus no fire-breathing required, since the point isn't that a mathematical structure describes a universe, but that it is a universe. Moreover, there's no making required either. You can't make a mathematical structure -- it simply exists. It doesn't exist in space and time -- space and time may exist in it.

In other words, all structures that exist mathematically have the same ontological status, and the most interesting question isn't which ones exist physically (they all do), but which ones contain life -- and perhaps us.

Many mathematical structures -- the dodecahedron, for example -- lack the complexity to support any kind of self-aware substructures, so it's likely that the Level IV multiverse resembles a vast and mostly uninhabitable desert, with life confined to rare oases, bio-friendly mathematical structures such as the one we inhabit.

...When talking about parallel universes, we distinguished between four different levels: Level I (other such regions far away in space where the apparent laws of physics are the same, but where history played out differently because things started out differently), Level II (regions of space where even the apparent laws of physics are different), Level III (parallel worlds elsewhere in Hilbert space where quantum reality plays out) and Level 4 (totally disconnected realities governed by different mathematical equations).

Far-out ideas. And this barely scratches the surface of the strangeness, all supported by theories of modern physics, that Tegmark describes in his book.

I have no idea if what he says is true.

However, at least Tegmark backs up his hypotheses with scientific reasoning and facts. So if someone is attracted to mind-blowing cosmic possibilities, which I am, he or she is a lot better off embracing far-out physics than far-out religiosity.