Church of the Churchless

David Lane addresses the "guru question"

Wow, nice job, Dave. 

David Lane, a.k.a. the Neural Surfer, responded to a questioning comment on one of my blog posts from "Appreciative Reader" by putting up a one page web site, The Guru Question.

Give it a read.

I found the page most interesting, especially the part where Lane says nice things about me and this blog. For some (obvious) reason I found this particularly persuasive. 

Lane is a bit more positive about the India-based spiritual/religious organization we both have belonged to, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). Which is led by a guru, Gurinder Singh.

We do share skepticism that the guru, or any guru for that matter, has supernatural knowledge or powers. Where we sort of part company is whether the meditation practice taught by RSSB, Surat Shabd Yoga, has anything special about it.

Leaving aside supernatural claims made by RSSB, such as that the guru connects an initiate with a divine energy at the time of initiation, the meditation methods are commonplace. 

Basically, repeating a mantra and then engaging in open awareness of what is present in consciousness after stopping the mantra repetition. Supposedly inner sights and sounds may be seen and heard.

If this were an exercise in marketing, I'm not sure what RSSB's "product differentiation" is, given that many spiritual/religious paths promote the same sort of meditation practice. I find it difficult to understand why the same methods would lead to different results.

Which for me, during 35 years of daily meditation, included a better ability to concentrate, control unwanted thoughts, sit quietly for several hours, and be aware of what remains in consciousness when the outside world and inner mental chatter fade away temporarily. 

As Lane says in The Guru Question:

It seems wise to me, in light of Near-Death Experiences and the plethora of other meditation accounts, to inspect how we see and hear during our inner voyages of light and sound. Then we may be able to understand why such experiences can occur to almost anybody, anywhere, anytime.

...It turns out that almost everybody has the inherent ability to see inner light and hear inner sound. Moreover, almost everybody has the capacity to have an out-of-body experience and behold wondrous inner visions. You don't need to go to an Indian guru to have such experiences indeed, you don't need to go anywhere at all.

Everybody accepts the reality of inner experiences. But not of religion.

"Don't you believe in love?"

Whenever I see a comment like this on one of my blog posts from a religious believer, I'm dumbfounded. it's a ridiculous thing to say.

For one thing, I don't believe in love. I experience love. There's a big difference between believing and experiencing.

Likewise, I don't believe in consciousness; I experience consciousness. Nor do I believe in life; I experience being alive. 

Same is true for everybody. Atheists. Agnostics. Religious people. Scientists. Musicians. Farmers. Young. Old. Men. Women. Everybody. 

The only way any one of us knows anything about reality is through experiencing.

It's important to recognize that arguably every experience is "inner," since it is ours alone, unfathomable to anyone else except through indirect means of communication: written words, speech, gestures, facial expressions.

As Sam Harris says in a video discussion of his "Waking Up" book, any experience, no matter how profound to the person having it, by itself tells us nothing about the nature of the cosmos -- or perhaps even this world. 

After all, even when someone's experience is of the outside world, mistakes commonly happen. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Memories are faulty. Mirages and illusions confound our understanding.

Even more so when the experiences are totally mental, as is the case with dreams, mystical visions, emotions, thoughts, hallucinations, and such. 

Once a relative of mine said to me, "I'm a Christian because I feel the loving presence of Jesus throughout my day." To which I thought, "Well, that's nice. But a loving feeling is just a loving feeling. It doesn't prove that Jesus actually exists outside the minds of those who believe in him."

Likewise, commenters on this blog will say things like, "When I see my guru, I feel overwhelming love for him." Again... that's nice. 

But religious believers need to keep in mind that parents feel the same way about their children, as animal-lovers do about their pets, as nature-lovers do about mountains, trees, and rivers. Like I said, everybody has profound experiences that are clearly known to them, while being ineffable to others.

What makes a personal experience more than subjective is when it relates to something objectively real. "I hear a bird singing in that tree. Can you hear it also?" If the bird is really there, and your friend's ears are working well, he or she will confirm the bird song.

Love, though, like other purely mental experiences, isn't confirmable by others. We have to take someone's word that love is felt by them. Further, we can't know whether their feeling of love is akin to our own. 

So this points to what I feel is a misconception by many religious believers.

They wrongly consider that a personal experience of something supposedly divine proves that divinity actually exists objectively. Then they jump to an additional error: considering that other people should agree about the objective existence of that felt divinity.

It'd be much better if people simply said "I experienced such-and such," rather than "Such-and-such exists because I experienced it." 

Sure, it exists for you. But not necessarily for anyone else. Your love, your dream, your mystical vision, your belief -- they are yours, not mine. 

A mountain, a tree, a river, though -- they are part of the reality we all share. Such is the big difference between experiences of purely mental phenomena, and things that exist in the outside world. 

Religion focuses on the former, science on the latter. Which helps explain why I love science more than religion.

Sam Harris' "Waking Up" video is well worth $4.99

I've read Sam Harris' book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. I've written four blog posts about his book (see here, here, here, and here). 

So when I learned that Harris was offering a $4.99 video -- an hour of him talking about the message of "Waking Up" plus an hour or so of audience Q&A -- I wondered if it was worth five bucks to me.

Turns out, it was. 

I came away with a deeper appreciation for Harris' central theme: the supernatural side of religions is bullshit, but a secular understanding of how human consciousness functions isn't.

Meaning, basically, that we can live a happier and more fulfilling life by being more mindful. Near the start of his talk Harris says this is "a passion for observing what is subjectively real in this moment."

I like that word, subjectively.

This seems key to me, because otherwise mindfulness and meditation can be used to justify religious dogmas that assume it is possible to know the truth about objective reality through higher states of awareness.

Harris doesn't really mean this, though he does say in the video that it is possible to make objective statements about human consciousness. For example, he puts up a photo of Abraham Lincoln and observes that almost certainly nobody in this auditorium was thinking of this man until now.

My overall impression of the video is that Harris does an excellent job explaining important philosophical, scientific, and religious issues in an appealing way.

His extensive experience both as a neuroscientist and long-time student of Buddhist meditation make him well-qualified to tread a middle ground between the extremes of unfounded religious belief and a disregard of the potential to explore what Harris (problematically) calls "spirituality." 

Harris' use of that word was questioned by an audience member in the Q&A portion of the video. Harris acknowledged its limitations, but said he couldn't think of a better one. 

What he means by "spiritual" is a realization of the selflessness of consciousness. It has nothing to do with supernatural realms, psychic phenomena, the soul, God, or such.

In the video a man tells Harris that, as an avid hiker, he experiences a state of selfless awe and connection with the world when he is in the majesty of the high Sierra mountains. Harris responds that what he means by "spiritual" is something deeper than that.

Well, as I said in my final post about Harris' book, I'm not so sure. 

Buddhist meditation -- Harris favors the Dzogchen variety -- surely is a proven way of experiencing more fully the reality of no-self. Simply living life with eyes wide open is another way. I doubt that sitting at the feet of a Dzogchen master is necessary to realize there is no self or soul inside my head.

Harris writes:

We have long known that how things seem in the world can be misleading, and this is no less true of the mind itself. And yet many people have found that through sustained introspection, how things seem can be brought into closer register with how they are.

Well, not only through introspection. Extrospection -- diving into the world -- can do this also. 

Dance. Run. Ski. Surf. Walk. Gaze. Love. 

Harris correctly says, "Subjectively speaking, there is only consciousness and its contents; there is no inner self who is conscious." 

Other audience questions addressed this issue in various ways: if we don't have a separate "self" that is conscious, then why is Harris so big on achieving a mindful state where part of human consciousness is having an experience, and another part is aware of "I'm having this experience."

This was brought out in a Q&A about Harris' movie projector analogy. We can either (1) watch a movie and forget that it is a movie, or (2) be aware of the projector and screen, along with the movie.

In another post I'll talk about another author's knowledgeable perspective on this that makes more sense to me. It's more Taoist than Buddhist, which is Harris' leaning. I prefer to see "immersion" and "detachment" as possibilities open to human consciousness, neither of which being better than the other.

Sometimes it's good to be fully immersed in an experience, forgetting everything else, pretty much. Other times it's good to be aware of what you're aware of, so to speak.

Harris repeatedly says in the video that the sense of "I" is thinking without knowing that you are thinking.

In other words, habitual, scattered, Monkey Mind, rambling thinking. I can resonate with this perspective, since thinking in this way does seem to narrow us into focusing on the content of our own mind, while we lose touch with the outside world. The "I" is enlarged, while everything else is diminished.

However, watching a movie with very minimal awareness that I'm watching a movie -- that seems to me like a great way to watch a movie. Just as dancing without knowing that "I'm dancing" is a great way to dance. 

I'll end this post with a countervailing message from Harris that I did completely agree with. A man asked a question about whether doing what Harris advised would lead to a feeling that life is more meaningful.

Harris responded, "When you're immersed in a deeply satisfying experience, you're not worried about what it means."

So true.

Meaning is a concept. Experience is, well, experience.

A fulfilling sexual experience doesn't require an extra conceptual topping of meaning to be pleasurable. Harris went on to say something like, "Finding an answer to a question about meaning is less interesting than an interesting present moment."

I've got more notes from my watching of Harris' video scribbled on some scraps of paper. I'll probably share some of them later.

Religion is a failed paradigm deserving of ridicule

Even after more than ten years of blogging on this here Church of the Churchless, I continue to be surprised by how often visitors to this site believe that religious belief shouldn't be subject to ridicule.

Um, didn't they notice the word "churchless" in the blog name? Or the tag line, Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence?

Today a comment interchange on a recent post pointed to this inability of true believers to recognize that their worldview lacks a solid foundation. Here's what "x," a religious skeptic, said:

I don't preach anything...I just comment on preachiness...like yours. You think you're right because you believe you know what's right. But I don't believe, so for me, right and wrong have meaning only with regard to realities, not religious fantasies.

This got a response from someone who has a very loose view of reality.

You say you "don't believe" but you certainly do believe in what you call "realities". These realities are according to your own belief system. I won't be exchanging words with you again. There is no point. You "know" everything.

Pretty typical.

When pushed to defend an indefensible world view, religious people often run away, aggrieved and irritated that someone has asked the excellent question, "What proof do you have for a supposed supernatural reality?"

I've got plenty of experience with being asked that question.

In 1990, after a divorce, I married a woman who, though we had a lot else in common, didn't share my spiritual/religious beliefs. She supported me in mine, yet kept asking me what evidence I had for certain assumptions.

Such as, that the Indian guru I followed really was "God in human form," or that only those who practiced a certain form of meditation would be able to achieve God-realization. Which implied, of course, that some entity known as God actually existed.

At the time, my wife's questioning was irritating.

Looking back, I'm thankful for her challenges to my belief system. After several years of not being able to respond with convincing answers -- convincing either to her or myself -- I began to recognize the flaws in the general philosophy of Sant Mat, particularized in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings.

That's one reason I started this blog a decade or so ago: to support people who have started to free themselves from indefensible belief systems, and to challenge the assumptions of religious dogma.

Last Thursday my now-atheist wife (she used to have some New Age'y beliefs of her own) and now-atheist me went to a Salem brew pub's Science Night. A chemistry professor talked about Thomas Kuhn's famous book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."  

His PowerPoint presentation naturally simplified this dense book, making it accessible to his beer-drinking, burger-eating audience. When he finished his entertaining talk, I asked the first question.

Which pertained, without my mentioning it, to my experience on this blog. I said something like:

It bothers me that people will use the notion of a "paradigm shift" in science to justify weird religious ideas at odds with our scientific understanding of reality. Sure, sometimes large changes in understanding supplant previous theories, as quantum mechanics did with Newtonian physics. But doesn't this all take place within science, not outside it?

After all, there never has been a scientific revolution that undermined the foundation of science itself, as seemingly would be the case if solid evidence existed for a God who intervened in worldly goings-on. So it doesn't seem to me that Kuhn's notion of "paradigm shifts" in any way supports those who consider that science is a flawed way of understanding reality.

The speaker agreed with me. Later I went over to his table and talked with him for a while longer. I thanked him for giving me insights into Kuhn's book, which I've never read. 

This diagram from a web site that talks about The Kuhn Cycle looks pretty accurate to me, based on what I've learned about Kuhn's book. If you go to that link, then click on the "live" diagram, you can read descriptions of each part of the cycle.

What's striking is how religious belief, as contrasted with scientific understanding, never goes through the sort of cyclical paradigm changes that occur in science.

(Again, all of science doesn't go through a paradigm change, just part of science. I spoke with the brew-pub speaker about this. For example, when the earth-centered solar system paradigm was overthrown by the sun-centered paradigm, the biology, chemistry, and such of the time remained intact, by and large.)

In The Kuhn Cycle, factual anomalies in a model of understanding accumulate that can't be adequately explained. This creates a crisis where people begin to question the current model. If a new model of understanding is demonstrably better than the old one, a paradigm change/shift occurs -- which then becomes the normal science, and thus subject to model drift/crisis/revolution itself.

When does this occur in religious thought? Never, in my opinion.

Sure, theologies evolve. The Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism of today isn't the same as it was when the religions came to be. But the basic tenets of a religion never are overthrown by anomalies accumulating that can't be explained by the religion's teachings.

The reason is this: Religions aren't concerned with explaining reality. If they were, we'd call them "science." Instead, religious belief is an exercise in making up supernatural stories that will appeal to people. 

Like, we live after we die. God loves us and is looking after us. There is a cosmic purpose to suffering. Etc. etc.

There's no possibility of a religion's belief system being overturned by conflicting evidence, since the system is founded on faith, not facts. Thus whereas scientists welcome intense debate, discussion, questioning, skepticism, and such, religious believers shy away from it.

They just want to keep on repeating what they already believe, being unwilling to consider that they could be wrong. 

As "x" said above, those of us who don't subscribe to a supernatural belief system can't be accused of being dogmatic. We are open to understanding reality as it is, not as how we would like it to be. I'd be overjoyed to learn that God, life after death, heaven, soul, and spirit actually exist.

However, I've gone through my own personal "paradigm change" after having observed how anomalies in the model of reality I used to believe in couldn't be adequately explained. So I overturned that model, choosing a better one. 

Thus even though religions don't go through The Kuhn Cycle like science does, religious believers certainly can. Meaning, deconversions are common. People come to realize how shallow and out of touch with reality previously accepted dogmas are.

My hope is that this blog has helped some people to do this. I'm pretty sure that it has. So let's keep on questioning religious belief systems, even though people who believe in them don't like to be challenged. 

This is the scientific way, the way reality is revealed. 

Why an experience of "pure consciousness" says little about reality

As I said in a previous post, I've dug David Loy's book, "Nonduality," out of a forgotten book bag and have gotten back to reading it after a several-year break. 

A few days ago I read his chapter, The Mind-Space Analogy. Pretty damn brilliant. Of course, this book is based on Loy's philosophy doctoral dissertation, so I guess the brilliance isn't surprising.

Below I've shared Loy's analogy in his own words, albeit condensed. I've left out F and G of his analogy, which are another form of Mahayana Buddhism and Theism. 

As you'll see, what Loy has done is imagine that something akin to "pure consciousness" actually exists.

This is more than an individual consciousness; it is an all-pervasive Mind-space that bears considerable resemblance to how the Absolute is viewed in the Eastern philosophies of Hindu Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism.

Forms of theism, of course, view the Absolute or God as an entity that is distinct from everything in existence. So the inclusive emptiness of Mind-space doesn't fit well with theism (though they can be crammed together with a bit of effort).

What I like most about Loy's analogy is how it points to this: a supposed experience of the Absolute can be interpreted in various ways. Meaning, this experience isn't revelatory of The Way Things Are, though religious true believers imagine that it is.

In my college days, for example, I had numerous psychedelic experiences that gave me a profoundly different view of the world. But I just looked upon these as impossible-to-describe experiences, not a glimpse of an objectively true alternative reality. 

Everybody, repeat, everybody, has ineffable personal experiences. In fact, it can be argued that each and every experience is ineffable, since it is ours alone.

What Loy has done is point out how the same experience of his hypothetical Mind-space can be interpreted in various contradictory ways that correspond to how differing Eastern philosophical/religious perspectives view reality. 

In short, it may indeed be possible for people to have a "non-dual" experience of the world, but this tells us little or nothing about what the world is like.

Here's a shortened version of Loy's Mind-Space analogy.

Comparing the Absolute to empty space is a metaphor that naturally suggests itself when we want to describe "something" which in itself has no characteristics. 

...Thus space seems to be an excellent analogy for "empty nonduality." The analogy breaks down -- that is, we are reminded it is only an analogy -- in that our usual understanding of space conceives of it as an objectively existing medium that things are "in" and as having neither life nor awareness, whereas sunyata for Mahayana, Brahman for Vedanta and the Tao for Taoism are the ground of everything including all consciousness.

Of course, this is nothing other than the two sides of our familiar duality, the commonsense but problematical bifurcation between object (in this case, "material" space) and subject.

But let us use our imagination to eliminate this duality, by supposing that space is conscious. Let us suppose that as a result of some experience I realize that "my" consciousness is not mine at all but is an aspect of space itself.

...this experience of Mind-space seems to reveal "The Way Things Really Are." But if "I," having had this experience, were to be asked what I had realized, how would I answer? The point of this chapter is that this "Mind-space experience" lends itself to very different and contradictory descriptions.

In the following section I imagine some of the responses that might occur during a conversation among people who have had this experience and who have drawn metaphysical conclusions from it.

Speaker A [Sankkya-Yoga]: "There are two very different substances, both of which are uncaused and eternal and omnipresent, although they do not seem to interfere with each other or even interact. One is immutable and attributeless consciousness (Mind-space), which, I now realize, is what my mind always has been. The other is more difficult to characterize. I suppose we can call it an 'energy-stuff' or perhaps a fine 'matter-stuff'... now I realize that immutable consciousness and the constantly changing energy-stuff are quite different from each other and always have been."

Speaker B [Advaita Vedanta]: "Speaker A is mistaken. Only one thing is real: this immutable, attributeless Mind-space, which is what I and everything else really are. The constantly changing forms that arise within and from this Mind-space are simply illusions which delude us about what really is: they have no substance or reality of their own, for they are only phenomena that represent nothing but merely manifest the Mind-space... There is only this Mind-space, which is birthless and deathless and has no characteristics of its own."

Speaker C [Early Buddhism]: "What the others have called 'Mind-space' cannot really be said to exist, because it has no characteristics at all. It is so 'empty' that it is literally nothing, and how can nothing be 'real'? What 'I' have realized is that there is no 'I' and never was. All that does exist are those constantly changing phenomena -- or rather the 'attribute-elements' of which things are composed and which are now experienced clearly... However, it doesn't matter anymore what attributes arise or pass away, now that the sense of 'I' has evaporated and there is the deep peace of emptiness in its place."

Speaker D [Mahayana Buddhism]: "I agree with speaker C that speakers A and B, by referring to mind-space, have made something out of nothing -- that is, they have hypostatized emptiness into a substance. Yet I must also agree with speaker B that phenomena are not real, for they too are empty... Except for speaker A, we all agree that these appearances [of phenomena] do not represent any material substratum, but speaker C still tries to make these attributes into little substances of their own... Phenomena are illusory only if we are deluded into taking them as self-existing: now that we have realized they are empty appearances, we should accept them for what they are and be able to play with them freely. The dance may have no meaning, but there is still the empty dance."

Speaker E [ Taoism]: "I agree with speaker D, but he does not go far enough. He too is still one-sided. We have realized that the world is nondual, but we should not be so infatuated with this new way of experiencing that we become prejudiced against the more usual dualistic mode... Subject-object duality and the plurality of phenomena are also aspects of the world, and we should not dualistically reject one mode in favor of the other. Let us accept that there are these two ways of experiencing, without prejudice against either. Our aim should be to understand fully the relation between these two modes in order to be able to experience both."

Loy summarizes these perspectives by their answers to two questions: 

Is Mind-space real?
Are Phenomena real?

Here's the answers.

A. Sankhya-Yoga: Yes, both Mind-space and Phenomena are real.
B. Advaita Vedanta: Yes, Mind-space is real. No, Phenomena are unreal.
C. Early Buddhism: No, Mind-space is unreal. Yes, Phenomena are real.
D. Mahayana Buddhism: No, both Mind-space and Phenomena are unreal.
E. Taoism: duality and nonduality are both "Real"

So take your pick.

A "mystical" experience of nonduality or cosmic oneness can be interpreted in various ways. We can accept the validity of the experience, yet be no closer to knowing the nature of absoute reality.

Lia Purpura's "Probability" poem

I came across a poem, "Probability," by Lisa Purpura in the January 19, 2015 issue of The New Yorker while reading in bed before I went to sleep.

I read it four times that night. More, since. 

I like it a lot. Not because I understand exactly what Purpura is trying to say. That's not how poetry works. Rather, it made me feel something about myself, and life, that rang true.

Something about how I place myself at The Center of Reality, viewing events from this oh-so-privileged perspective. 

The never-ending series of causes and effects that is this world comes my way, offering up something that makes me go Wow! This happened to ME!

But really, I suspect, it was just a happening. Wasn't about me. Or anyone, really. Just a happening. But I need to see it as "wild and rare." 

Because, as Purpura says, "what if it wasn't?" This would displace my specialness, leaving me as simply me, not ME!

Here's the poem.

Most coincidents are not
miraculous, but way more
common than we think—
it’s the shiver
of noticing being
central in a sequence
of events
that makes so much
seem wild and rare—
because what if it wasn’t?
Astonishment’s nothing
without your consent.

Cutting out the bullshit from "nonduality"

A few days ago I rediscovered a book that I'd starting reading a few years ago, David Loy's "Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy."  

It's one of the few writings on the subject of nonduality that doesn't make me want to barf up the New Age pseudo-mystical crap that almost always infects this book genre.

I talked about this in my first 2013 post about Loy's book, "Pink Panther and Alan Watts on nonduality."

I'm reading a book about nonduality by David Loy that has a pleasingly appropriate title, "Nonduality." Loy is a Zen practitioner and a university professor. 

I like his style. He thinks. He analyzes. He studies the relationship between substance philosophies like Vedanta (Self is real) and flux philosophies like Buddhism (nothing is immutable).

Loy is helping me to realize that nonduality really isn't about oneness. It is about the rather obvious fact that this requires a that. And light requires dark. And self requires non-self. And life requires death. And so on and so on and so on.

Oneness is a bunch of crap. There is no such thing. 

Rather, if there was, no one would know about it. Because if everything was one thing, there wouldn't be (1) a knower of that thing, and (2) that thing. There'd just be a blob of One, clueless about itself, since it couldn't be aware of itself, being all One'y.

So nonduality fanatics who make it into some sort of Oneness thing, while speaking from the perspective of their decidedly dualistic self -- they're irritating. 

I've started reading nonduality books, then gotten nauseated by the bullshit being crapped out. Fodder for Amazon resale. Loy's book is different. He doesn't sound like the annoying nondualist in The Advaita Trap. (I could only watch a few minutes of the video; reminded me of the books I've hated.)

Given the time that has passed since I put "Nonduality" into a bag of books from which it has only recently emerged, I'm finding that while I like this book as much as I did before, I've got a somewhat different reaction to it.

Partly because I've dived into a lot of neuroscience books over the past few years.

Most, if not all, agree that the evidence for a detached Self sitting inside our head looking out upon the world, divorced from the brain's physical goings-on is, essentially, zero. Meaning, the brain/body is us; we are brain/body.

Which is a thoroughly nondualist notion. Yet so far as I can tell from the reading I've done, Loy's analysis of nonduality is entirely philosophical.

He delves deeply into Hindu (Vedanta), Buddhist, and Taoist texts. He also is familiar with more modern Western philosophy. "Nonduality" is based on his doctoral dissertation, so he darn well should be. But I can't help think how a chapter on what neuroscience says about cognitive nonduality would add to his book.

Of course, he wrote it in 1988, with the paperback reprint being published in 1998. This was before philosophically-minded neuroscientists started seriously pondering how research into the brain undermines conventional understanding of the "self."

As Sam Harris and others have pointed out, it's fascinating how pre-scientific Buddhists were able to come up with a philosophy (or in some respects, a religion) that in many ways reflects current scientific understanding about the brain/body and how it relates to the world.

After reading Harris' book, "Waking Up," I forked out $4.99 to watch a video of a one-hour talk by Harris, followed by an hour or so of Q&A with audience members. So far I've watched about half an hour of the video.

Good stuff. Harris does a great job condensing and simplifying a heck of a lot of philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas. His speaking style is pleasingly casual while nicely organized. 

In the teaser to the full-length video, watchable here, Harris talks about our propensity to talk to ourselves inside our head as being trapped in conversation with the most boring person in the world. That inner voice, he says, keeps saying the same thing, over and over.

Harris says that when he walked out on stage, he saw water and a glass perched on a table next to the speaker's stand. "Good," he thought to himself, "they remembered the water." 

Then he added a thought: "But who was I telling this to? I'd already seen the water."

This is an excellent pointer to one of the questions about nonduality. And of everyday living. To what extent is it necessary, and desirable, to divide experience -- such as into (1) someone who sees, (2) what is seen, and (3) the process of seeing?

When Harris saw the water as he walked out on stage, what really was going on? (Assuming there is such a thing as really.)

Like all of us do, part of himself told another part of himself about what another part of himself had just experienced. This leads New Age'y sorts of nondualists to decry conceptual thinking as something unnecessary that obscures the pristine pure awareness of "as it is."

But this strikes me as a bunch of crap, substituting one form of duality for another. Meaning, now we've got a duality between thinking and reality. Yet if the world truly is nondual, everything is encompassed within that mysterious notion. 

Loy does a good job sorting out the philosophical subtleties of how Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Western writings look upon nonduality. His book isn't light reading, but I'm enjoying getting back into it.

Is life absurd? Or maybe asking that question is.

For something completely different... and really well written... and either marvelously meaningful or completely meaningless... yet fun to read, nonetheless...

Check out Rivka Weinberg's New York Times piece, "Why life is absurd." 

I liked it a lot. While understanding it hardly at all. Which could be Weinberg's point. With modern philosophy, often it's hard to tell the difference between satire and seriousness.

Here's a few excerpts to whet your reading appetite.

In a famous 1971 paper, “The Absurd,” Thomas Nagel argues that life’s absurdity has nothing to do with its length.

If a short life is absurd, he says, a longer life would be even more absurd: “Our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts 70 years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity?”

This line of reasoning has a nice ring to it but whether lengthening an absurd thing will relieve it of its absurdity depends on why the thing is absurd and how much you lengthen it. A longer life might be less absurd even if an infinite life would not be. A short poem that is absurd because it is written in gibberish would be even more absurd if it prattled on for longer. But, say I decided to wear a skirt so short it could be mistaken for a belt. On my way to teach my class, a colleague intercepts me:

“Your skirt,” she says, “is absurd.”

“Absurd? Why?” I ask.

“Because it is so short!” she replies.

“If a short skirt is absurd, a longer skirt would be even more absurd,” I retort.

Now who’s being absurd? The skirt is absurd because it is so short. A longer skirt would be less absurd. Why? Because it does not suffer from the feature that makes the short skirt absurd, namely, a ridiculously short length.

The same goes for a one-hour hunger strike. The point of a hunger strike is to show that one feels so strongly about something that one is willing to suffer a lack of nourishment for a long time in order to make a point. If you only “starve” for an hour, you have not made your point.

Your one-hour hunger strike is absurd because it is too short. If you lengthened it to one month or one year, you might be taken more seriously. If life is absurd because it’s short, it might be less absurd if it were suitably longer.

Absurdity occurs when things are so ill-fitting or ill-suited to their purpose or situation as to be ridiculous, like wearing a clown costume to a (non-circus) job interview or demanding that your dog tell you what time it is.

Is the lifespan of a relatively healthy and well-preserved human, say somewhere between 75 and 85, so short as to render it absurd, ill-suited to reasonable human purposes?

...The absurdity of human life poses a challenge to its meaning. Absurdity and meaningfulness don’t go together. This, however, does not mean that if life were not absurd then it would have meaning. Removing the obstacle of absurdity does not entail that meaning rushes in.

But if we cannot remove the obstacle of absurdity then it will be hard to conclude that life has meaning or determine what that meaning might be. The clown suit is standing in our way.

There are lots of comments on the piece. I only looked at a few. This is one that resonated with me.

lindy tucker

Yikes. What a lot of words. I am older, and have discovered for myself, that over-thinking, over-analyzing, trying to ascribe meaning to this brief existence of mine, have done nothing but cause me to not be present and subsequently fuel neurotic behaviors.

Late in life, I am finally learning to curb my need to analyze and now try to only apply that important skill to problems that are solvable. (like how to figure out a stress-free password solution or purchase a used car).

At some point I decided that the experience of being alive was so full of things that engendered a sense of wonder and awe, that I let go of the need to make sense of it all.

Thinking about how the optic nerve works, or how my body sustains itself, watching the play of dolphins in the ocean, for the most part, brings me to a resounding "yes" . In spite of the hardships, the struggles and the mistakes, I am grateful for the trip and do not want to spend a lot of calories anymore deciding whether it is absurd or not.

If a cartoon inflames religious passions, so what?

Over on my other blog today I put up a post, "Statesman Journal should put Mohammed cartoon on opinion page." 

It irritated me that the editorial page editor of our local newspaper, which is part of the Gannett chain, said that he'd probably never publish a cartoon that included a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, because this is offensive to Muslims.

Well, the cartoon above is the cover of the next issue of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine that courageously is going to publish shortly after a dozen staffers were murdered by Islamic fundamentalists. 

The caption at the top says, "All is forgiven." Mohammed is holding a sign that says "I am Charlie." A tear is rolling down Mohammed's cheek. It's an apt image: like the Prophet, all Muslims should come to their senses, get a sense of compassion (plus humor), and stop being so sensitive about their religious tenets.

Today the New York Times is reporting, "Reprisals Feared as Charlie Hebdo Publishes New Muhammad Cartoon."

(I never know whether it should be Muhammad, Mohammed, or some other spelling; also, I really don't care which it is.)

The story starts out:

PARIS — Muslim groups and scholars in France and elsewhere voiced concerns on Tuesday that a satirical newspaper’s first cover since the attack on its journalists last week could ignite dangerous new passions in a debate pitting free speech against religious doctrine.

Egypt’s leading Islamic authority warned that the new cartoon, depicting the Prophet Muhammad, would exacerbate tensions between the secular West and observant Muslims. Death threats circulated online against the surviving staff members of the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo.

My reaction is, there's always going to be tensions between religious true believers and secular people.

As an atheist I feel kind of tense around Easter and Christmas when Christians are insulting my non-belief system by telling me that if I don't believe in Jesus, I'm not going to be saved and will have a hellish afterlife.

But I have no inclination to murder those who fail to think like I do. Neither do, by and large, religious believers of any faith other than fundamentalist Islam. So it isn't up to the rest of us to change; it is the Islamic fundamentalists who should see the light.

Which includes recognizing that no matter how strongly someone may hold a religious belief, they have no right to expect that anyone else should respect that belief. 

If Muslims want to refrain from creating images of the Prophet Mohammed, great. If someone else wants to draw a cartoon of Mohammed, that's also great.

Just as I don't expect people in a restaurant to refrain from eating meat when I walk in because I'm a vegetarian, neither should anyone religious expect that some tenet of their faith be upheld by non-believers.

Rosie DeManno, a columnist for the Toronto Star, wrote a good piece, "Star should have published Charlie Hebdo front cover: This newspaper does not wish to offend. That's the thing. The deeply wrong thing."

I heartily agree with her. Here's excerpts from her column.

If I thought the Star’s position was strictly a matter of security — papers have been firebombed for reproducing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, most recently a Hamburg tabloid set aflame on the weekend — it might be a little easier to accept. But I know this is not the case.

We do not wish to offend. That’s the thing. The deeply wrong thing.

...In Toronto, only the Sun — to my knowledge — published the Charlie Hebdo cover Tuesday. Three million copies of the satirical magazine — usually it has a run of 60,000 which it struggles to sell — were to hit the street in Paris Wednesday. But the magazine revealed its cover in advance: The Prophet, sad, holding a sign that says “Je suis Charlie,” and above the cartoon: “All is forgiven.”

...This cover was probably the least offensive — a word I have come to detest — version of the Prophet that Charlie Hebdo has ever published. It makes the point, though, simply and eloquently.

Still, not compliant enough for the many Muslim leaders who were quick to decry the caricature.

For many Muslims, perhaps most, any depiction of the Prophet is blasphemous. So be it — for them. But not so be it for us, in the mainstream media.

We are a secular profession. We do not make a habit of cowering before any other faith. We do not allow potential ramifications to pre-censor. We do not defer to the hurt.

I care far less about Muslim sensitivities than I do the articles of faith inherent to freedom of expression. It isn’t absolute, of course not, but it should fall far beyond the fault line of any religion’s sacraments. The Charlie Hebdo cover is self-evidently news. But we’re afraid to show it.

Too many “buts” have been attached to the commentary arising from last week’s two-pronged terrorist attacks in France. Oh yes, freedom of expression but. Civil rights yes but. Defiance but.

...The attacks in Paris were ultimately terrorist propaganda. Seventeen dead victims constitute a tiny niche casualty list set against the thousands of deaths tallied by Islamist militants, including the barbarians of Boko Haram who murder hundreds of civilians at a time and tie suicide vests around little girls.

I’m tired of being told this is not Islam. I know this is not Islam. But it is a strain of and a stain on of Islam.

I want Muslim leaders to defend these cartoons, without the pious disclaimers.

I want our paper to publish them.

Because either Nous somme Charlie or vous n’êtes pas Charlie.

There’s no in-between. 

New Church of the Churchless comment policy

Time for an experiment with comments on my blog posts. I'm scientifically minded. I enjoy trying something different and seeing how it works out.

Starting today, I'm going to be less accepting of publishing comments that include a lot of preachy religious dogma.

Some people have been using comments on my "churchless" posts as an opportunity to share their irrelevant (to the post) religious beliefs. 

They might make a passing brief reference to something I said in the post, then launch into a lengthy description of how great this-or-that religious belief system is.

From now on, I'd like those commenters to do the reverse: use your personal critical/logical thinking skills to make some cogent observations about the content of the post, with maybe a brief reference to their religious beliefs.

I mean, it's fine to say "I'm a Christian" or "I'm a follower of Sant Mat."

But this is a freaking churchless blog! I don't want to publish comments filled with Christian or Sant Mat dogma. There's plenty of other blogs and web sites where religious true believers can share that stuff.

Don't get me wrong: comments add a lot to my blog posts. I enjoy reading them, as do other visitors to this Church of the Churchless blog. 

Comments just shouldn't be a mindless repetition of some religious dogma.

Think for yourself. Write about how you feel. I don't mind an irrelevant personal comment nearly as much as an irrelevant comment filled with preachiness.

Best of all, of course, are thoughtful comments related to the subject of a blog post, because most people who read the comments on a post expect this to be the case.

I find it boring, for example, when I see a bunch of comments on a newspaper story that have nothing to do with the story. Some people are just using the ability to comment to blab on about some favorite subject, or gripe. 

Religious bias against gays is wrong, not religious

Like I've said before (quite a few times), and almost certainly will say again (after this time), religious beliefs shouldn't allow people to ignore laws.

Where does this end, if we allow it to begin?

Some Christian religious bigots believe homosexuality is a sin, so they refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple who want one for their wedding. Which, by the way, is completely legal in 36 out of 50 of these United States, where gay marriage is allowed.

Yet as Frank Bruni says in his thoughtful New York Times piece, "Your God and My Dignity," this same perverted interpretation of religious liberty doesn't seem to apply to minority faiths in this country.

What’s more, in a country that’s not supposed to promote any one religion over others, we do precisely that.

Would we be content to let a Muslim store owner who believes that a woman should always cover her hair refuse service to women who do not? Or a Mormon hairdresser who spurns coffee to turn away clients who saunter in with frappuccinos?

I doubt it. So why should a merchant whose version of Christianity condemns homosexuality get to exile gays and lesbians?

A belief is just a belief. Calling it "religious" just puts an adjective before that word. It doesn't change the fact that this is simply someone's personal subjective opinion about something. 

Combining those opinions into an organizational point of view, and then calling it, say, "The tenets of the Catholic Church," doesn't make the belief any less subjective and personal. 

I have to follow the law. Or at least I am supposed to. If I choose to break some law, I understand that there may be consequences. A fine. A ticket. Maybe even jail time.

But religious people have this strange idea that their personal beliefs on certain subjects, such as homosexuality, entitle them to, so to speak, a Get out of jail free card. No, they don't. And shouldn't.

However, because this is a Christian-majority nation, there are powerful pressures to legally elevate religious bigotry onto a moral high ground that is off-limits to people with equally strong, but non-religious, beliefs.

I heartily agree with how Bruni ends his piece.

Baking a cake, arranging roses, running an inn: These aren’t religious acts, certainly not if the establishments aren’t religious enclaves and are doing business with (and even dependent on) the general public.

Their owners are routinely interacting with customers who behave in ways they deem sinful. They don’t get to single out one group of supposed sinners. If they’re allowed to, who’s to say they’ll stop at that group?

I respect people of faith. I salute the extraordinary works of compassion and social justice that many of them and many of their churches do. I acknowledge that we in the news media, because we tend to emphasize conflict and wrongdoing and hypocrisy, sometimes focus more on the shortcomings of religious institutions than on their positive contributions.

And I support the right of people to believe what they do and say what they wish — in their pews, homes and hearts.

But outside of those places? You must put up with me, just as I put up with you.

Charlie Hebdo murders show danger of religious dogmatism

So many people have been saying so much that is right about the atrocious killings by Islamic extremists of staffers at a French satirical magazine, I don't feel that I can add much to the 100% justified outrage.

This is what happens when religiosity goes over the brink.

For me, the big question is: who is responsible for the possibility, indeed obvious likelihood, given the course of history, that religious true believers will act in murderous, violent, oppressive, or other unacceptable ways?

On the whole, my sympathies are with those, like Sam Harris, who argue that "moderate" religion provides the foundation for "extreme" religion.

That is, once we accept that A, B, and C are the must-obey commandments of God, it isn't that much of a leap for true believers to consider that X, Y, and Z also are required actions to curry the favor of the Big Guy Upstairs.

Including killing those who make fun of the Prophet Muhammad by drawing cartoons of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Drawn. 

This is an opportunity to remind people that if you can't take a joke about your religion, or hear criticism of it, you shouldn't be visiting a blog called Church of the Churchless. Or if you do, accept that you're gong to be offended.

And if commenters on a blog post wonder why I usually give the last word to the skeptical faithless in a "you're a jerk; no you're a jerk" series of comment interactions, it's because -- duh -- this is the Church of the Churchless, not the Church of the Churched. 

Making fun of religion always will get priority here over respecting absurd dogma. 

Here's a few commentaries from other people that I resonated with. 

"The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders," in The New Yorker. Excerpt:

A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique. 

Charlie Hebdo had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too—but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism.

For some believers, the violence serves a will to absolute power in the name of God, which is a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics. “Allahu Akbar!” the killers shouted in the street outside Charlie Hebdo. They, at any rate, know what they’re about.

"The Blasphemy We Need," in the New York Times. Excerpt:

In the wake of the vicious murders at the offices of the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo today, let me offer three tentative premises about blasphemy in a free society.

1) The right to blaspheme (and otherwise give offense) is essential to the liberal order.

2) There is no duty to blaspheme, a society’s liberty is not proportional to the quantity of blasphemy it produces, and under many circumstances the choice to give offense (religious and otherwise) can be reasonably criticized as pointlessly antagonizing, needlessly cruel, or simply stupid.

3) The legitimacy and wisdom of criticism directed at offensive speech is generally inversely proportional to the level of mortal danger that the blasphemer brings upon himself.

News flash from God's guru: smoking and medical marijuana are evil

In Christianity, the Ten Commandments are permanent. But in Eastern guru-centered religions, God's emissary on earth (often termed a "perfect living master") substitutes for holy scripture.

So what is supposedly moral and what isn't can shift with the times as one guru succeeds another, or as the same guru decides to issue new edicts to the faithful.

Case in point: some recent comments on a post of mine about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization I was a member of for about thirty-five years, have clued me in to the fact that smoking and medical marijiuana have joined the list of RSSB no-no's.

The first commenter said:

Brian, have you heard that smoking of ANY kind is now banned???? Cigarettes, E-cigs, pipes etc....all tobacco products. What in the hell is up with that? It's now under that second vow which used to just encompass mind altering substances such as narcotics and alcohol. What is up with "amending" the sacred vows??? I don't go to satsang [spiritual meetings] very much but today when I went and someone read an article that mentioned it, I was like....WTF.

Which was followed by:

If I understood it correctly, the non-smoking requirement is for people currently applying for initiation. Us oldies? Well a memo went out from Dera [headquarters in India] many months ago stating that smoking was detrimental to ones health and highly discouraged. But it did not say us addicted oldies were required to quit. Funny, we use to be able to smoke in the guesthouse rooms in the olden days. Here today, hell tomorrow?

And then:

This is from RSSB SPAIN NEWSLETTER of Sept. 2014 which may guide you on the subject:

...POINTS OF INTEREST: New Requisite for Initiation:

As of immediate effect, an applicant for initiation must also have abstained from all tobacco products (including electronic or e-cigarettes) and medical marijuana for a minimum of one year before applying for Initiation, and thereafter permanently.

Initiates who smoke, now know the Master’s position on this matter and should proceed accordingly.

Now, it's scientifically obvious that smoking is bad for people. However, vaporizers of various kinds, including so-called e-cigarettes, reduce the health risk by a lot. Arguably those devices help wean smokers off of the more dangerous regular cigarettes.

And living as I do in a state (Oregon) where medical marijuana is legal -- along with recreational marijuana in a few months -- I'm well aware of its health benefits. Some people with serious medical conditions, including cancer patients on chemotherapy, find that medical marijuana helps them much more than prescription drugs with bad side effects.

So logically this is a curious decree from the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh.

There are plenty of consciousness-altering substances which remain OK for prospective and current RSSB initiates to use, such as: caffeine (coffee, tea, chai), anti-depressant drugs, and anti-anxiety drugs. And if a physician prescribes medical marijuana for a health condition, why should this be prohibited while other psychoactive drugs with powerful adverse side effects are fine to use?

We aren't talking logic here, though. I know this from personal experience.

I was a devoted member of RSSB when Gurinder Singh decided that adhering to a vegetarian diet meant not eating animal rennet, an ingredient in some cheeses. You can't believe (or maybe you can) how this threw RSSB initiates who believed that the guru was God into a rennet-studying frenzy.

Overnight, eating cheese became a Talmudic sort of exercise for many devotees. A huge amount of research went into studying which brands of cheese were "kosher," so to speak, and which weren't.

I not-so-fondly recall sitting with groups of RSSB initiates in restaurants where a hapless waiter would be asked detailed probing questions about what kind of cheese was put on a pizza, say. Sometimes the waiter would be asked to go back into the kitchen to read the label on a cheese container and report back on what sort of rennet was used.

I wasn't nearly as concerned about ingesting minute amounts of an animal product.

To me another RSSB vow was much more important: meditating every day for somewhere close to the proscribed 2 1/2 hours. If my consciousness needed uplifting, acting upon it directly seemed more crucial to my spiritual progress than obsessing over what sort of cheese was put on a pizza.

This sort of rigidity and dogmatism, though, is a hallmark of obsessive religiosity. Capricious human-made rules are taken as the Word of God. Adhering to them is considered to guarantee one's salvation; breaking them is viewed as falling into sin. 

Crazy? Yes. But this is apparent only now that I've achieved some sanity.

Those still in the grip of some form of religious fundamentalism will keep on believing that whatever a holy book, or holy person, says, must be obeyed. (Of course, different holy books and holy people issue contradictory moral edicts.)

Truth about the Bible: no way is it "the word of God"

Here's a terrific Newsweek piece, "BIble: So Misunderstood It's a Sin." Lengthy, and well worth reading. But be warned, Christians. 

You'll never be able to believe in the divine inerrancy, or even historical accuracy, of the Bible after being exposed to Kurt Eichenwald's review of how the Bible -- especially the New Testament -- was cobbled together in distinctly flawed human ways.

Not surprisingly, a quick review of the over 2,000 comments on the online article reveals that fundamentalist Christians refuse to accept the scholarly reality discussed by Eichenwald.

Here's a get real response I liked.

I don't understand all the Christians complaining about this article unless they have never read a book in their life except the bible. 22 years in ministry, degrees in ancient literature, a seminary degree and a law degree and everything in this article was taught at my conservative seminary!

The problem is most pastors realize that if they tell their congregation the truth, their mythology bubble will be burst and they will stop providing money to pay their salary and for that big building they like to preach in.

Most Christians have never examined their faith critically, never dealt with real doubts and never read the bible for what it actually says. To avoid cognitive dissonance Christians, of the fundamentalist variety, tend to bury their heads in the sand rather than deal with the difficult questions.

For me, I have a much stronger faith knowing the truths mentioned in this article, than walking along believing the mythology I was force fed as a child. Grow up fundies and read what your bible actually says!

Here's some passages from the article that will give you a flavor for it. I just wish "BIble: So Misunderstood It's a Sin" was required reading for every Christian who wrongly believes the Bible is the word of God.

But once again, the verses came from a creative scribe long after the Gospel of Mark was written. In fact, the earliest versions of Mark stop at 16:8. It’s an awkward ending, with three women who have gone to the tomb where Jesus was laid after the Crucifixion encountering a man who tells them to let the disciples know that the resurrected Jesus will see them in Galilee. The women flee the tomb, and “neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.”

In early copies of the original Greek writings, that’s it. The 12 verses that follow in modern Bibles—Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and the Disciples and then ascending to Heaven—are not there. A significant moment that would be hard to forget, one would think.

The same is true for other critical portions of the Bible, such as 1 John 5:7 (“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”); Luke 22:20 (“Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you”); and Luke 24:51 (“And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven”).

These first appeared in manuscripts used by the translators who created the King James Bible, but are not in the Greek copies from hundreds of years earlier. 

These are not the only parts of the Bible that appear to have been added much later. There are many, many more—in fact, far more than can be explored without filling up the next several issues of Newsweek.

... By translating the same word different ways, these modern Bibles are adding a bit of linguistic support to the idea that the people who knew Jesus understood him to be God. In other words, with a little translational trickery, a fundamental tenet of Christianity—that Jesus is God—was reinforced in the Bible, even in places where it directly contradicts the rest of the verse.

...Which raises a big issue for Christians: the Trinity—the belief that Jesus and God are the same and, with the Holy Spirit, are a single entity—is a fundamental, yet deeply confusing, tenet. So where does the clear declaration of God and Jesus as part of a triumvirate appear in the Greek manuscripts?

Nowhere. And in that deception lies a story of mass killings.

...Why would God, in conveying his message to the world, speak in whispers and riddles? It seems nonsensical, but the belief that he refused to convey a clear message has led to the slaughter of many thousands of Christians by Christians. In fact, Christians are believed to have massacred more followers of Jesus than any other group or nation.

Those who believed in the Trinity butchered Christians who didn’t. Groups who believed Jesus was two entities—God and man—killed those who thought Jesus was merely flesh and blood. Some felt certain God inspired Old Testament Scriptures, others were convinced they were the product of a different, evil God. Some believed the Crucifixion brought salvation to humankind, others insisted it didn’t, and still others believed Jesus wasn’t crucified. 

Indeed, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, groups adopted radically conflicting writings about the details of his life and the meaning of his ministry, and murdered those who disagreed. For many centuries, Christianity was first a battle of books and then a battle of blood. The reason, in large part, was that there were no universally accepted manuscripts that set out what it meant to be a Christian, so most sects had their own gospels.

...And then, in the early 300s, Emperor Constantine of Rome declared he had become follower of Jesus, ended his empire’s persecution of Christians and set out to reconcile the disputes among the sects.

Constantine was a brutal sociopath who murdered his eldest son, decapitated his brother-in-law and killed his wife by boiling her alive, and that was after he proclaimed that he had converted from worshipping the sun god to being a Christian. Yet he also changed the course of Christian history, ultimately influencing which books made it into the New Testament.

...About 50 years later, in A.D. 381, the Romans held another meeting, this time in Constantinople. There, a new agreement was reached—Jesus wasn’t two, he was now three—Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Nicene Creed was rewritten, and those who refused to sign the statement were banished, and another wholesale slaughter began, this time of those who rejected the Trinity, a concept that is nowhere in the original Greek manuscripts and is often contradicted by it.

...So yes, there is one verse in Romans about homosexuality…and there are eight verses condemning those who criticize the government. In other words, all fundamentalist Christians who decry Obama have sinned as much as they believe gay people have.

It doesn’t end there. In the same section of Romans that is arguably addressing homosexuality, Paul also condemns debating (all of Congress is damned?), being prideful, disobeying parents and deceiving people (yes, all of Congress is damned.) There is no bold print or underlining for the section dealing with homosexuality—Paul treats it as something as sinful as pride or debate.

...But the history, complexities and actual words of the Bible can’t be ignored just to line it up with what people want to believe, based simply on what friends and family and ministers tell them.

Nowhere in the Gospels or Acts of Epistles or Apocalypses does the New Testament say it is the inerrant word of God. It couldn’t—the people who authored each section had no idea they were composing the Christian Bible, and they were long dead before what they wrote was voted by members of political and theological committees to be the New Testament.

The Bible is a very human book. It was written, assembled, copied and translated by people.

That explains the flaws, the contradictions, and the theological disagreements in its pages. Once that is understood, it is possible to find out which parts of the Bible were not in the earliest Greek manuscripts, which are the bad translations, and what one book says in comparison to another, and then try to discern the message for yourself.

And embrace what modern Bible experts know to be the true sections of the New Testament. Jesus said, Don’t judge. He condemned those who pointed out the faults of others while ignoring their own. And he proclaimed, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

That’s a good place to start.