Church of the Churchless

How to talk about spiritual experiences

Talking is good. Face to face, or otherwise. One of those other ways is through what I like to call "comment conversations." 

These frequently happen on this blog -- where people exchange a series of comments on some blog post subject. A recent post, "Modern mystics, why should anyone believe your 'vision'?", elicited some comments from me and others that got me thinking.

Also a good thing. 

Below I'll share my comment that is a less organized form of what follows in this post. Which is, a schema that describes how I've come to view the more desirable and less desirable ways of talking about personal spiritual experiences.

Here's the schema as it currently stands.

(1) Simply describing a personal spiritual experience or insight. This is utterly fine, in my view. It is almost exactly akin to talking about a movie someone has seen, or a dream that they had. I experienced such-and-such. This is what went through my mind. I have zero problem with people doing this. It's natural to want to share something interesting that happened to us.

(2) Expecting that someone else should have the same personal spiritual experience or insight. This is much more problematic. It's like me saying, "I really liked the movie Boyhood. You should see it, because you'll enjoy the movie just as much as I did." Or, "Riding a motorcycle is super fun. Everybody should get one." 

People are different. Each of us likes different things. We react in various ways to the same experience. One person screams with joy on a roller-coaster, wanting the ride to go on and on. Another screams in terror, wanting the ride to be over as soon as possible.

Further, it likely is impossible for two people to have exactly the same experience of anything. At the least, there is no way of knowing that my experience of tasting a strawberry, say, is the same as anyone else's. And if this is true of objects in the physical realm, it is even more true of mental objects: concepts, feelings, ideas, thoughts, and such.

So even though I might consider that standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or seeing the Pope preside over mass at the Vatican, was a life-changing experience for me (actually, neither is true), I have little or no reason to believe that anyone else will feel the same way.

(3) Considering that a personal spiritual experience or insight points to an objective truth about reality. I really have a problem with someone doing this. Shared reality, objective reality, whatever you want to call it -- this is common ground belonging to everyone.

No one has a right to define what reality is based merely on a subjective personal experience.

If someone has an inner vision of Jesus, of heaven, or of God, that's great. I'll be pleased to listen to them talk about what they experienced, so long as they speak in line with (1) above, simply describing what they experienced.

Often (2) and (3) seem to go together.

Meaning, I get the feeling that when someone urges other people to try to have the same personal spiritual experience or insight that they had, he or she believes that what was experienced reflected a supernatural, divine, or transcendent realm of reality that possesses objective existence.

For example, not only was a vision of Jesus, God, angels, or whatever experienced, this entity is considered to actually exist outside of the person's own mind. This is a giant claim about reality that deserves giant proof to be believable. 

Skepticism, questioning, demands for evidence -- these are entirely appropriate if someone tries to convert a description of a personal subjective experience, (1) above, into a statement about how the cosmos truly is in a objective way.

Here's my blog post comment, which covers similar ground, albeit not in a 1,2,3 fashion. I fixed a few grammatical errors.

tucson, here's how I see things...

I feel that most of us, me included sometimes, fall into the Other People Experience Things Like I Do delusion.

This applies to physical experiences, of course. Even more so to mental experiences (which are physical at heart, I'd say, but have an inward feel to them).

Example: my wife goes with me to see the current Radha Soami Satsang Beas guru, Gurinder Singh. She gets to sit in the front row, really close to him. Devotees tell her, "You're going to have an amazing experience."

Actually, she didn't feel like the guru was anything other than a normal human being. The experience was nothing special.

Likewise, and even more so, I think we all have the feeling that if other people could share our inward experiences regarding the Meaning of the Universe, they would see things the way we do.

However, if other people felt inwardly the same way we do, they would be us. Since they obviously are themselves, not us, we can't expect other people to experience things the same way.

So when you speak of "realizing" some truth, this isn't the same as seeing some physical object. Yes, everyone in the room with normal eyesight saw the guru sitting on a stage, but everybody in the room had a different experience of this encounter.

Like I said, this applies even more so when the "object" is mental, like an experience of the non duality of the cosmos. I really don't think we can expect that anyone else will have the same experience. Or if they do have a similar experience, that it will have the same meaning for them.

Another down to earth example: I get lots of comments and questions when people see me riding my bright yellow StreetStrider outdoor elliptical bike around. I always say, "It's so much fun!" But what I really mean is, "It's so much fun for me."

So far I don't believe anyone, out of the dozens I've talked to, has decided to get their own StreetStrider.

Reason: they are them, and I am me. My enjoyment of my own experience isn't diminished by other people failing to understand it, or not wanting to share it. I realize that my experience is subjective, and other people might not find any enjoyment in doing what I do.

Thus this is where I think spirituality and religion go awry. Believers assume that what they have experienced can, and should, be experienced by everybody. They make something objective out of something subjective. 

Modern mystics, why should anyone believe your "vision"?

After more than ten years of blogging on this here Church of the Churchless -- 2,410,012 page views; 2,036 posts; 29,750 comments -- I'm still asking this question.

Why should the claims of "modern mystics," who claim to have personally experienced God, spirit, heaven, or some other manifestation of divinity, be taken more seriously than the countless similar claims that have been made by innumerable others throughout recorded history?

I keep on asking this question in various ways, both in blog posts and replies to comments, because it seems to me that those alive today who would have us believe in their supposed brush with the divine shouldn't be given any more credence than those who are dead and gone.

Among the well-known major figures, Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses, along with less familiar Christian, Islamic, and Judaic mystics, saints, seers, and such. 

On my book shelves also sit books filled with stories of other Eastern mystics and yogis such as Yogananda, each of whom spoke about encounters with supernatural phenomena. Largely, those stories contradict each other, while being in conflict with one or more of the major religions.

The divine is personal. Or impersonal. It is part and parcel of creation. Or detached from it. It takes great effort and/or grace to realize. Or simply opening one's awareness.

Broadening beyond supernaturalism, Zen, non-religious Buddhism, and Taoism teach that what is most real about the cosmos is entirely natural, capable of being found in the most commonplace things. Even "shit and piss," according to Chuang Tzu.

It's clear that after thousands of years of searching for the Divine Meaning of It All, many humans have claimed to have discovered signs of it.

Problem is, those signs don't match up.

And there is no demonstrable evidence of it. If some sort of non-physical, possibly timeless, higher dimensional realm of reality exists, it sure lacks any way (or desire) to make itself known with even a minimal degree of certainty.

Yet people today -- as tomorrow, and the next day, and the next -- keep on claiming that they have experienced what can't be proven to exist outside of their own minds.

Comments from them regularly appear on my blog posts. I occasionally get emails from them. Whenever I do, my question arises again:

Why should the claims of "modern mystics," who claim to have personally experienced God, spirit, heaven, or some other manifestation of divinity, be taken more seriously than the countless similar claims that have been made by innumerable others throughout recorded history?

If anyone can enlighten me on this, I'm open to the illumination.

"It is what it is" actually is a profound scientific statement

As irritating as it can be to hear it is what it is uttered so often by athletes after a loss, I find this phrase appealing. 

I described why in a blog post a few years back, "The profundity -- or not -- of 'it is what it is'."

Me, I like the phrase's meaninglessness. Zenlike, it points to the this'ness of is'ness (a truth'ness that will make a lot more sense to you if you're stoned or drunk, which is the best state of mind to read Church of the Churchless blog posts like this).

...The author of the Slate piece decries this sort of talk as not adding anything to what we already know about a situation. That's true. Which to me isn't a drawback; it's what makes It is what it is such a marvelously profound commentary on the human condition.

Almost always people try to make more out of something than is obviously evident.

Offhand comments supposedly have a deeper meaning. A beautiful sunset is thought to be a reflection of what life is all about. Chance meetings are considered to be part of one's destiny.

Religiosity is a prime example of humankind's propensity to prefer it isn't what it is.

For example, Jesus wasn't simply another man of his time who was crucified on a cross for running afoul of the authorities. This is the apparent physical fact, but Christians ladle a big heaping mound of blind belief on top of it, making an is into an isn't.

Given my admiration for it is what it is, I was super-thrilled to see this saying repeatedly featured in a super-intellectual book I'm reading, "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy."

(First blog post about the book is here.)

Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin are the co-authors, a philosopher and physicist, respectively. I'm a bit over halfway through Unger's part of the book, which runs for about 350 pages. 

One of his central points is similar to what I said in my it is what it is post. In Unger's view, the main thrust of modern physics and cosmology adds on metaphysical assumptions to the plain facts science has discovered about the universe.

For example, the laws of nature are considered to be unchanging; time came into being at the moment of the big bang; a singularity of infinite matter/energy was the "source" (if this word fits with timelessness) of the big bang.

To correct what Unger calls a "gloss" on scientific facts, he repeatedly speaks about the facticity of the universe. Which is pretty much a fancy way of saying, it is what it is.

Here's some Unger quotes on this subject:

That the world is temporal, and justifies a temporal naturalism in our understanding of it, is an aspect of its being, factitiously, what it is, rather than something else.

...We cannot infer the temporal character of nature from supposed constraints on what can or must be, in obedience to the deliverances of metaphysics or of mathematics. All that we can do is to recognize the real as temporal, according to the lyrics of the country-music song: it is what it is, till it ain't anymore.

...The result is to rob the world of what, for science as well as for art, represents its most important attribute: that in all its present, past, and future particularity, it is what it is, or has been, or will be, given its all-decisive history. The real world is what is, not something else.

...Grant me that the most important fact about the universe is that it is what it is rather than something else; that the distinction between stipulated initial conditions and timeless laws, which defines the Newtonian paradigm, lacks legitimate cosmological application, and that we cannot infer the truths of nature from metaphysical preconception or mathematical abstraction.

Sure, I will provisionally grant you that, Mr. Unger. Though I want to finish your book before strongly signing on to that sentiment.

What comes to mind, of course, is that if modern science can be faulted for introducing metaphysical preconceptions and mathematical abstractions into the study of really real reality, religions are vastly more at fault.

Religious true believers don't even have demonstrable evidence to support their preconceptions and abstractions, whereas science does. Unger persuasively argues that this scientific support is insufficient, but at least it exists to a substantial extent.

Religiosity, on the other hand, simply makes blatant unsupported claims that what is, actually isn't all there is. It would have us believe in divine beings and realms that can't be shown to exist, while denying evident truths such as evolution.

So even though "it is what it is" can be used in a shallow fashion, this phrase can be a profound guide to inquiring into the nature of reality. Dude. 

(Here's another sort-of-related blog post, "What if reality is completely different from how you think it is?")

No U.S. President should attend prayer breakfasts

A few weeks ago I said that I agreed with Obama's statement at a prayer breakfast regarding wrongs being committed by adherents of all religious faiths.

But a Salon article argues for a broader conclusion: no President should be attending prayer breakfasts, since this supports the ridiculousness of religion. 

Check out "Faith-fueled forces of hatred: Obama's religion speech was troubling -- but not for the reasons the right alleges."

What, some might ask, could be wrong with prayer? By common definition, prayer entails someone sitting for a quiet moment and beseeching his or her Lord for intervention in matters of grave import – that it rain on the crops or souls be saved, that gays be “healed” or atheists “see the light,” and so on.

In objective terms, however, the supplicant is demanding improbable favors from an imaginary despot, and most likely doing so with lowered head and genuflections and other toadying gestures of obeisance — behavior that without faith’s halo would be classified as symptoms of mental derangement. (And all the more so if the petitioner claims to receive answers to the muttered incantations.)

This debasing ritual, fruitless and foolish though it may be, is at least usually peaceful, but in some cases (notably in certain corners of the Middle East), rioting and rampaging follow, especially on Friday afternoons, when imams may deliver sermons exciting crowds to fury and frenzy. What’s not to like?

...The best first step toward a future of light and love would be for rationalists to freely espouse their nonbelief and object to locutions that further irrationality. We might start, for example, by stating that we are not “children of God” but of the fact of evolution. (Ask any biologist if evolution is “just a theory.”)

Poverty and hunger have generally been the concomitants of the God creeds that have done so much to retard human progress. Realizing the “dignity and value of every woman, and man, and child” is impossible while cringing, cowering and murmuring superstitious gobbledygook in the hope that an invisible — let’s just say forthrightly, inexistent — being will take pity on us and toss us a scrap.

President Obama, your faith is your business. You have every right to practice it, talk of it and advocate it.

But please understand: Speaking as you did at the National Prayer Breakfast, with the eyes of the country and the world upon you, does nothing more than lend credence to faith-fueled forces of reaction, both at home and abroad. With ISIS on the rampage in Iraq and Syria, Islamist violence striking the heart of Europe, and, of course, evangelicals funding much of your political opposition in the United States, the secular, Enlightenment-era civilization from which we all, believers and nonbelievers, benefit, is under threat.

We’re on a slippery slope. To get off it, we can start by doing one thing: telling the truth.

But on the positive side, "College Students are Abandoning Religion in Record Numbers." 

America’s Class of 2018 cares less about religious identity than any other group of college freshman in the last 40 years, newly released research shows.

An annual survey of college freshman found that students across the U.S. are continuing to distance themselves from religion in record numbers. “The American Freshman” study—which also tracks new students’ political leanings and attitudes, as well as their alcohol and tobacco use—shows that nearly 28 percent of those who began college in the fall of 2014 say they do not identify with any particular faith, bringing religious affiliation on campus to an all-time low.

Here's a science book with a radical view of reality

Oh, man. I'm so glad I got pulled in by the Book Magnet. 

That's how I explained my purchase of two thick, serious books to the cashier at the Book Bin in downtown Salem, Oregon. I'd parked my car in front of the bookstore, gone to my Tai Chi class, and was all set to drive home until, poised to unlock the car door...

Go inside and check out the new books, the everpresent voice inside my head told me. Must obey, I happily told myself.

"The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time" stared me in the face almost right away. After just a bit of thumbing through the 532 page book, I knew we'd hit it off. 

What's weird -- and a strong argument for physical bookstores -- is that I'm pretty sure I'd looked at the Amazon listing for this book. I seem to remember deciding not to buy it because some reviewers thought the authors were way off-base in their criticisms of modern science, mostly physics and cosmology.

But when I read a few paragraphs in the bookstore, I was blown away by the clear writing about some very dense subjects. Having now gotten all the way to page 65, I'm liking the book even more than I thought I would.

The first 350 pages or so are written by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, described on the cover as "a philosopher, social and legal theorist, and politician." The rest of the book is written by Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist.

Unger is clearly a hugely brilliant guy with a very attractive writing style. I have to read "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time" slowly, but not because the writing is bad. Rather, it's very good. It's Unger's subject matter that requires careful, deliberative, often mind-blowing cognitive digestion.

The book's subtitle is A Proposal in Natural Philosophy.

Meaning, the authors have returned to a mindset of the old days when philosophers tried to come up with ways to look at the entire universe, as contrasted with specific philosophical problems.

Yet their concern is with the very new days -- cutting-edge cosmology and physics. Which they view, persuasively so far in my reading, as having inappropriately gone off a scientific deep-end into waters that don't offer any solid footing.

A first paragraph sums up the book.

This book develops three connected ideas about the nature of the universe and of our relation to it. The first idea is that there is only one universe at a time. The second idea is that time is real and inclusive. Nothing, including the laws of nature, stands outside time. The third idea is that mathematics has this one real, time-drenched world as its subject matter, from a vantage point abstracting from both time and phenomenal particularity.

This puts Unger and Smolin at odds with the majority of physicists and cosmologists. Also, I'd say, with those who use certain precepts of modern science as a subtle (or not so subtle) justification for various religious concepts.

First, the "one universe at a time" idea. This seems like common sense, since we're only aware of this one universe Earth is a part of.

However, notions of a multiverse consisting of countless universes, perhaps an infinity of them, have taken hold in the scientific community -- in large part because of an infatuation with the mathematics of string theory. 

Here we see an example of the connections between the book's ideas. String theory can't explain why this universe we inhabit is how it is.

But since the mathematics of string theory posit a near-infinity of possible universes, this solves the problem of explaining our universe by dissolving the problem: life has evolved in this particular universe because its conditions are peculiarly suitable for life, whereas the conditions in most other universes of the multiverse aren't.

Unger considers this bad science. Science, he says, should deal with what actually is known to exist.

Mathematical reality shouldn't be viewed as more real than the physical universe. Rather, as noted above, mathematics should be used to describe how things work in this universe, and not used to justify mathematically possible, but unobservable, theoretical alternate universes in a multiverse.

So in the part of the book I've read Unger criticizes attempts to explain our universe in structural terms. Meaning, theorizing that this universe is just a minuscule drop in an ocean of other universes that will forever remain unknown to us.

Rather, he and Smolin favor a historical emphasis for cosmology. Look at what science can tell us about how the universe has changed since the big bang. Don't throw in theoretical mathematical hypotheses concerning a multiverse, or whatever. 

And don't assume that time began at the big bang. Time, for Unger and Smolin, is the only thing that doesn't change. Time rules. There is no timeless realm. Everything changes with time. Including the laws of nature. 

For me, this is one of the most interesting subjects in the book. I've always wondered, "Where are the laws of nature?" Most physicists and mathematicians view them as existing in some sort of unchanging Platonic realm outside or beyond the physical universe.

Meaning, the laws of nature (like most conceptions of God) are assumed to be distinct from all the stuff in this universe that obeys those laws. This allows scientists to picture our universe banging into being via some currently unknown mechanism that was guided by some currently unknown law, or meta-law, of nature.

Intriguingly, Unger says:

The laws and symmetries by which we explain events in natural history manifest themselves together with the phenomena whose workings we use them to explain... The phenomena change, and so, together with them, does the way in which they change: that is to say, their laws. That is the principle of the co-evolution of phenomena and laws.

What this leads to is a very different view of the universe than modern physics normally posits. There aren't Laws of Nature floating around somewhere in a realm separate from physical reality. Instead, these laws come into existence along with the phenomena that are guided by them.

Unger says, "Change changes."

When DNA appeared in multi-celled organisms, this introduced a whole new way of how life changes. Thus Unger considers that biology, geology, and even history have a lot to teach physics and cosmology, since the supposedly less-foundational sciences are primarily concerned with studying how things change, rather than looking for unchanging laws describing why things change.

Well, if what I've written here doesn't make sense to you, join the club. I'll be trying to better understand the message of Unger and Smolin as I read the rest of their book. 

Here's some reviews and commentary I've found that relate to "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time."

A review in The Guardian
An interview with Lee Smolin
A blog post by science writer Bryan Appleyard

Oregon should eliminate non-medical reasons for not vaccinating

People who irrationally fear vaccines shouldn't be allowed to opt out of vaccination laws for either philosophical or religious reasons.

After all, a lot of scientific research shows that vaccines are safe and effective. Sure, there are some risks. But there are risks in everything, including wearing seat belts.

Once in a while you hear of someone dying after being trapped in a burning car by his or her seatbelt. Seat belts save many more lives, though.

Same is true about vaccines. There are occasional mostly minor side effects, yet clearly the benefits both to the individual and to society vastly outweigh the drawbacks.  

Until now my state, Oregon, allowed parents to opt out of vaccinating their children for medical, religious, and philosophical reasons.

• 2 states, West Virginia and Mississippi, allow only medical exemptions.
• 29 states allow medical and religious exemptions.
• 19 states, including Oregon and Washington, allow medical, religious or philosophical exemptions.

The result? Oregon has the highest rate of non-medical vaccine exemptions. This is crazily stupid for several reasons.

One is that the distinction between "philosophical" and "religious" is spurious.

Both reasons for not accepting the science on vaccinations are based on personal belief rather than objective facts. What makes a blind religious belief any different from a blind philosophical belief? Each is founded on a subjective view of reality that is at odds with scientific facts.

Yet religions get unjustified special treatment in this country. Just by calling your head-in-the-sand irrationality about vaccines "religious" entitles you to a non-medical vaccination exemption in 29 states.

Given Oregonians' comparatively low rate of religious belief, I guess legislators in this state wanted to put philosophical objections to vaccines on the same legal level as religious objections.

Again, though, each reason is groundless in the face of the scientific evidence, which supports mandatory vaccinations for public health reasons.

So I was pleased to read in today's newspaper that legislation is being proposed which would eliminate non-medical reasons for not vaccinating children.
Download Senator seeks to toughen Oregon's vaccine exemption law

The Senate Health Care Committee on Wednesday is scheduled to hear testimony on a bill that would eliminate the option for parents to claim nonmedical exemptions from school shots. The sponsor of Senate Bill 442, Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, a Portland Democrat and family physician, said she has lost confidence that staunchly anti-vaccine parents will change their minds, making her bill necessary.

In 2013, the Legislature passed a policy requiring parents who intend to claim a nonmedical exemption to demonstrate that they've been educated about the risks of denying vaccines through a consultation with a medical provider or videos produced by the Oregon Health Authority.

...Steiner Hayward's original intent was to introduce a "technical fix" into how OHA enforces exemptions, but she plans to propose amendments that would get rid of nonmedical exemptions altogether. Based on anecdotes from school-based health centers and fellow physicians, she said, it's already clear the new policy isn't working.

Parents who were set on refusing vaccines weren't taking the OHA educational videos seriously, multitasking as the videos played and then printing out the certificate to satisfy the requirements for a nonmedical exemption, Steiner Hayward said. Few, if any, were budging on their anti-vaccine stance.

"I'm past the point of being patient about this," Steiner Hayward said.

If the bill passes, parents will only be able to claim medical exemptions to school shots.

Well, I'm not surprised that people who hold faith-based beliefs are highly resistant to information which undermines those beliefs. 

During the ten years I've had this Church of the Churchless blog, countless examples of people avidly defending their indefensible beliefs have arisen. As I often say here, this is fine when holding a personal belief doesn't have detrimental effects on others.

If you believe that rap music is the best genre to listen to, and I don't, fine. We'll each happily enjoy different sorts of tunes. 

However, your belief that vaccinations are harmful for your children can have a big effect on the health of other children. 

A complicating aspect of the debate about immunizations is that they're a combined medical and public health measure. The vaccines not only protect the person receiving them; they also protect the community at large from the spread of disease.

This herd immunity — maintaining a certain level of immunization in the community to prevent disease outbreaks — is especially important for infants who are too young to be fully immunized, pregnant women and people who have conditions, such as cancer, that suppress their immune systems.

"You're part of our society," said Dr. Jim Lace, a Salem pediatrician. "You live here. And you have to be socially responsible. You cannot be selfish. You're part of the whole society that we live in. You can't separate yourself. You don't live on the moon."

Ultimately, Steiner Hayward said, the fear should be of the disease the vaccines protect against, not the vaccines themselves.

"Look, are vaccines perfect? Of course they aren't. I don't know any medical treatment that is," she said. "There is no vaccine that's perfect. Either it's not 100 percent effective — but no medication is 100 percent effective — or it has adverse effects. Every medication has some small percentage. But the rate of adverse effects from the vaccines are dramatically lower — orders of magnitude lower — than the rate of bad effects from any of these diseases."

Nice quote from Dr. Lace. "You cannot be selfish. You're part of the whole society that we live in. You can't separate yourself. You don't live on the moon."

Sadly, that's what irrational faith-based beliefs do which affect other people, whether they are religious or philosophical. They separate us from a shared reality, while often harming our fellow humans. 

I recognize that everybody, myself included, is subject to holding indefensible, unscientific beliefs about the world. These won't go away just because laws are passed. Still, society has to do what it can to prevent those beliefs from hurting others.

If the Oregon legislature eliminates non-medical vaccination exemptions, this will be a step in the right direction.

Ten modern atheist non-commandments

A few months ago I wrote about Lex Bayer's and John Figdor's atheist manifesto in "Halfway through 'Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart,' I love this book."

Having finished it, here's their full list of ten non-commandments (I'd only gotten to six at the time of my first blog post).

1.  The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.

2.  We can perceive the world only through our human senses.

3.  We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.

4.  All truth is proportional to the evidence.

5.  There is no God.

6.  We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.

7. There is no universal moral truth. Our experiences and preferences shape our sense of how to behave.

8. We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy.

9. We benefit from living in, and supporting, an ethical society.

10. All our beliefs are subject to change in the face of new evidence, including these.  

Well done, Bayer and Figdor. I agreed with just about everything in Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-first Century.

The provisional, changeable, debatable non-commandment that gave me the most food for thought was #8, "We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy."

On the whole, this makes sense to me. But only with some caveats.

Yes, I realize that #8 is a worthy addendum to #6, "We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not."

The obvious problem with these statements is that a murderer, rapist, or child molester might get a lot of happiness from causing other people to suffer. So to avoid an undesirable moral relativism, a version of the Golden Rule is brought into play.

Bayer and Figdor write:

Cooperative action can be a way for someone to maximize his or her own self-interest... It turns out that individuals often fare better in a community of interdependent people than in one in which it's every man for himself.

...A person can be said to act in a moral manner if he or she derives a great deal of self-happiness from other people's happiness. A person acts immorally if he or she derives little self-happiness from the happiness of others or, worse still, derives happiness from the pain of others.

With that definition, we remove the requirement of selflessness from morality and focus our attention on what really matters -- identification with others and wanting good for them. Giving to charity or helping strangers can still be entirely moral even if you derive happiness from those acts. 

OK. That resonates with me. However, seemingly this leaves out a lot of my everyday life.

Today I had a good time riding on my outdoor elliptical bike on an unusually sunny and warm mid-February Oregon day. In a few minutes I'll be enjoying a glass of red wine while I read the Sunday newspapers in our bathtub.

Are these actions moral?

They make me happy, but they are pretty much indifferent as regards the happiness of others. Sure, buying a bottle of wine makes the vintner happy to some extent. And often people smile when they see me riding along on my StreetStrider. 

Yet much of life seems neither moral nor immoral according to Bayer's and Figor's non-commandments. It just is what it is (to not coin a phrase). Indeed, they write:

The conclusion we have reached is a little different because we haven't said that pursuing one's life-happiness is inherently moral. Instead, we've concluded that acting out of rational self-interest and identifying with others often leads to moral behaviors.

We follow our life-happiness preferences not out of some moral imperative but because that's how we inherently behave. It's not overcoming our nature -- it is our nature. Subjective ethics frees us from the trap of believing that our own happiness is moral or immoral.

Instead, our own happiness is amoral and a natural part of the human condition.

Nicely said.

Morality seemingly only comes into play when what we do markedly affects someone else. If we feel happy when something we do increases another person's (or other living being's) happiness, thats a moral act. 

Still, I don't quite understand why doing something that makes another person happy, while leaving us unchanged, isn't also a moral act. What if I give $100 to a food bank not because the happiness of others makes me happy, but because an accountant advised increasing my charitable deductions this year?

I guess this wouldn't count as a moral act according to the ten non-commandments. Yet the person who gets free food as a result of my donation would be happier due to my action, even if I'm not.

Well, these non-commandments are provisional, not set in stone. They are meant to be pondered as possible guides to living in the world without the encumbrances of religion. If one or more doesn't make sense, it can be discarded.

To me, it might be better to ditch the notion of "moral" entirely. Seemingly something along these lines would be a worthy substitute for "We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy."

Whenever possible, act to further the happiness of others. Hopefully doing this will make us happier also.

Dissolve life's imaginary problems. Don't try to solve them.

The best way to resolve a problem is to realize that it doesn't really exist.

Poof! Gone. Problem isn't solved; it is dissolved. 

More and more, I'm concluding that this is a big drawback with religions. They want us to believe in problems that aren't evident to a non-believer.

Like:

(1) How does one come to know God? (If God doesn't exist, this isn't a problem)
(2) How can our sins be forgiven? (If sins are imaginary, this isn't a problem)
(3) How can we be sure of going to heaven after we die? (If there is no heaven, or life after death, this isn't a problem)

I've talked about this in a couple of other blog posts.
Religions make a Big Problem out of life's little problems
When did humans start making life itself into a problem?

Today, in my Tai Chi class, our instructor talked about dissolving in a different context. Someone pushes you. Instead of resisting, you melt away, flowing with the push, emptying yourself. 

He likened it, sort of weirdly, to the old Alka Seltzer commercial: "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz." Meaning, the solidity of the capsule dissolves into water, offering relief.

Sure, you could fight back, resisting with your own strength. But it's a lot easier to avoid the problem of being pushed by simply relaxing and not engaging with it.

This is how I feel about most of religion's Big Problems. They are no longer a problem for me, because I don't see any need to engage with them.

I also don't worry about being attacked by mean gnomes in our garden, since I don't see any evidence that they exist.

Recently I came across an interesting 1996 essay by Patricia Churchland that takes a somewhat similar approach to a supposed Big Problem in consciousness research, the so-called "hard problem." Her essay is called The Hornswoggle Problem.

I found it pretty damn brilliant. In another post I'll talk about it in more depth. For now, here's some excerpts. It's well worth a read.

Beginning with Thomas Nagel, various philosophers have proposed setting conscious experience apart from all other problems of the mind as "the most difficult problem." When critically examined, the basis for this proposal reveals itself to be unconvincing and counter-productive.

Use of our current ignorance as a premise to determine what we can never discover is one common logical flaw. Use of "I-cannot-imagine" arguments is a related flaw. When not much is known about a domain of phenomena, our inability to imagine a mechanism is a rather uninteresting psychological fact about us, not an interesting metaphysical fact about the world.

Rather than worrying too much about the meta-problem of whether or not consciousness is uniquely hard, I propose we get on with the task of seeing how far we get when we address neurobiologically the problems of mental phenomena.

...One danger inherent in embracing the distinction [between Easy and Hard] as a principled empirical distinction is that it provokes the intuition that only a real humdinger of a solution will suit The Hard Problem. Thus the idea seems to go as follows: the answer, if it comes at all, is going to have to come from somewhere Really Deep -- like quantum mechanics, or -- Wow -- perhaps it requires a whole new physics.

As the lone enigma, consciousness surely cannot be just a matter of a complex dynamical system doing its thing.

Yes, there are emergent properties from nervous systems such as co-ordinated movement as when an owl catches a mouse, but consciousness must be an emergent property like unto no other. After all, it is The Hard Problem! Consequently, it will require a very deep, very radical solution. That much is evident sheerly from the hardness of The Hard Problem.

...Moreover, the mysteriousness of a problem is not a fact about the problem, it is not a metaphysical feature of the universe -- it is an epistemological fact about us. It is about where we are in current science, it is about what we can and cannot understand, it is about what, given the rest of our understanding, we can and cannot imagine. It is not a property of the problem itself. 

It is sometimes assumed that there can be a valid transition from "we cannot now explain" to "we can never explain", so long as we have the help of a subsidiary premise, namely, "I cannot imagine how we could ever explain..." . But it does not help, and this transition remains a straight-up application of argument from ignorance.

Adding "I cannot imagine explaining P" merely adds a psychological fact about the speaker, from which again, nothing significant follows about the nature of the phenomenon in question.

Whether we can or cannot imagine a phenomenon being explained in a certain way is a psychological fact about us, not an objective fact about the nature of the phenomenon itself. To repeat, it is an epistemological fact -- about what, given our current knowledge, we can and cannot understand. It is not a metaphysical fact about the nature of the reality of the universe.

"Boyhood" and big bang stir thoughts of religious ridiculousness

Last night I experienced an interesting juxtaposition of two disparate events: watching "Boyhood", via a Netflix DVD, and reading an article in the most recent issue of New Scientist, "Big bang discovery crumbles to dust."

Both made me think about the ridiculousness of religion.

In Boyhood -- a great movie, by the way -- there's a scene of a Christian minister doing his thing at a church service. He's preaching about the part in the Bible where Jesus asks Thomas to touch him after his resurrection.

(This is where the term "doubting Thomas" comes from.)

The preacher says that when Thomas stuck his fingers into Jesus' side, as described in John 20:27, he knew that the story of Jesus being resurrected was true. But this isn't possible for people living today. We need to have faith in Jesus' resurrection, his congregation was told.

I'm no expert in Christian theology, for sure. But since the minister had a Protestant vibe to him, I assume what he's talking about is the notion of Sola fide, the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 

No need to do anything. Just sincerely believe in the divinity of Jesus and, voila!, salvation is yours.

Naturally I don't believe in the Bible.

But I can imagine that the story of doubting Thomas losing his doubt is true. Hey, if I saw someone die, then they came to life a few days later, asking me to touch them so I could confirm that I wasn't hallucinating, I'd find it easy to accept the truth of their miraculous return to life.

If this was the basis of Christianity, though -- belief in Jesus via direct experience of his bodily resurrection -- the only Christians would have been very few. Just those who were present when he ascended to his heavenly Father.

Instead, as the minister preached, Christians are supposed to accept on faith what can't be proven empirically. In the movie the minister says that he has felt the spirit of Jesus, and he hopes most of the people in his congregation have also.

Which made me wonder, what the heck does the spirit of Jesus feel like? 

How would someone know that they're feeling the actuality of this, as contrasted with a thought, emotion, or whatever produced by the mind of the Christian believer? How could anyone tell the difference between a 100% authentic Spirit of Jesus and an entirely imaginary emanation of one's own brain?

Well, since faith is the touchstone of Christian belief, this question isn't really germane in Christianity. If one has faith in the divinity of Jesus, faith in the veracity of what one feels to be Jesus' spirit comes along for the ride.

This sort of circular logic, where blind belief is the rationale for more blind belief, isn't limited to Christian religiosity. It is found in virtually every religion, whether of West or East. 

Devotees of modern gurus, for example, are told to have faith in the ability of this person to reveal divine truths. If these revelations don't come to pass after years of meditation, say, the response often is "You didn't have enough faith."

Huh?

How is it that faith is needed to follow religions that are diametrically opposed to each other? I've never understood how a faithful Christian is going to learn that the Christian God is ultimate reality, while a faithful Hindu is going to learn that Brahman is. 

There has to be some way of distinguishing what is really real, from what is only apparently real.

Otherwise everything can be called really real, and most people are unwilling to accept that a mere thought of something possesses the same epistemic substance as something that actually exists outside a thinking mind.

Which gets me to the New Scientist article. 

It dealt with the seeming discovery last March of gravitational waves in space-time that cosmologists theorized could be proof that the big bang was marked by an "epic growth spurt of inflation." This was huge news, but...

A series of studies soon suggested that dust within our galaxy may have muddied the picture. Observations at other wavelengths were needed to clear up the confusion, as dust shines more brightly at certain wavelengths than at others.

Now the discovery of gravitational waves appears less likely. This was the passage in the article that really caught my eye.

"To claim a detection of a primordial signal [of gravitational waves], one has to exclude the possibility, to the fullest extent possible, that something else hasn't generated the signal," says William Jones of Princeton University, who leads a balloon-borne mission called SPIDER that is expected to release its observations in a year or so.

Beautiful. This is why I love science.

Religious believers assume that what they want to believe is true, really is. Scientists, on the other hand, won't accept that a finding is true unless spurious explanations have been ruled out "to the fullest extent possible."

Skepticism is a hallmark of science. Faith is a hallmark of religion. 

Which goes a long way toward explaining why scientific knowledge of reality continually expands, while religious beliefs are pretty much the same now as they were hundreds or even thousands of years ago.

Faith has no mechanism for distinguishing between truth and falsehood. Skepticism, though, serves as a means for subjecting possible truths to the rigorous tests that could lead to them being accepted as verified truths.

The spirit of Jesus never will be verified. Gravitational waves might. And if they aren't, science will use that disconfirmation to move onward.

Like I said, this is why I love science. It progresses toward truth, whereas religion doesn't.

Obama is right: religious believers of all faiths commit wrongs

Yesterday President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast. Here's some of what he said -- the part that deeply irritated dogmatic Christians in this country.

Now, over the last few months, we’ve seen a number of challenges -- certainly over the last six years.  But part of what I want to touch on today is the degree to which we've seen professions of faith used both as an instrument of great good, but also twisted and misused in the name of evil. 

...We see sectarian war in Syria, the murder of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, religious war in the Central African Republic, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and hate crimes in Europe, so often perpetrated in the name of religion.

So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities -- the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends? 

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. 

In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.  Michelle and I returned from India -- an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity -- but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs -- acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who helped to liberate that nation. 

So this is not unique to one group or one religion.  There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.

This seems unarguable to me. Not the "sinful" reference, because I don't believe in sin. At least, not in any religious, supernatural, or godly sense.

But anyone who believes that Muslim fundamentalists are the only religious extremists who commit violence in the world, he or she hasn't been paying attention to what's been going on.

Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs -- members of these and many other religions have, and are now, killed, maimed, and threatened in the name of their faith. This is different from defending one's nation, or loved ones.

The offense that supposedly needs avenging is someone else's refusal to accept the tenets of a faith on, well, faith. 

Such rarely happens in other cultural areas.

Avid baseball fans will differ in their belief about who the greatest shortstop of all time is, but they won't go to blows over this. Musical tastes vary widely, but fans of different genres don't engage in warfare when hip-hop afficonados, say, argue with lovers of country-western music.

As I talk about a lot on this blog, religious faith differs from other sorts of faith in this crucial way: Defenders of the Faith who are concerned with a divine variety of unsupported belief often consider that their unsupported subjective belief actually points to an objective truth about the cosmos.

Whereas few, if any, baseball fans would argue that somewhere in the Great Beyond lies the immutable truth about who the greatest shortstop was.

Thus an unwarranted belief that a personal religious feeling, magnified by its being held by many millions or even billions of one's fellow human beings, is objectively true -- that is what makes religion so dangerous.

Such wouldn't be the case if religions didn't teach that defending the faith is what is required of the faithful. After all, most baseball fans and music lovers just quietly enjoy their past-time. They don't feel compelled to proselytize or argue vociferously that others should embrace what they like. 

Of course, wrongs also are committed by non-religious people. But this wasn't Obama's point. He was directing our attention to the absurdity of religious fundamentalism, which rejects the notion of "don't know."

I don't agree with the entirety of this additional excerpt from his talk. I do like his mention of doubt. 

And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt -- not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth. 

Yes, and let's go further. Let's also doubt that God exists, that God speaks to us, that God cares about us. There is no evidence this is true, other than personal subjective feelings that it is.

Doubt goes a long way toward demolishing the foundation of religious violence: blind faith.

If everyone could understand the difference between truths for which there is persuasive demonstrable evidence, and beliefs for which there isn't -- the world would be a lot better off. 

Humanism is way better than religion. Yet mystery remains.

On the whole, I'm pleased to call myself a humanist. As noted in this post about a humanist book, someone called me this during my sophomore year in college --  before I even knew what humanism was.

This is one of the points made in an interesting You Tube video a regular Church of the Churchless visitor told me about today: "Christian man says humanists are debauched. Andrew Copson explains what Humanism is really all about." 

 

If you're like me, you'll find the preachy Christian guy who speaks at the start of the video to be irritating. But here's the thing: his basic worldview isn't at all unusual. In fact, it's the norm for religious believers.

This man says, with complete confidence, that God instituted marriage, bringing Adam and Eve together.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. There's absolutely zero demonstrable evidence that God exists, and thus less than a zero chance (if such is possible) that God decreed marriage should be between one man and one woman.

Yet he can sit there in an audience of intelligent people, spouting his dogmatic absurdist crap, and his listeners absorb what he is saying (albeit often with bemused expressions on their faces). 

Religions have such a hold on most of humanity that statements which would be viewed as indefensible craziness in a different context are tolerated, because cultures have come to accept collective craziness in the name of religion as being socially acceptable. 

When individuals claim that they're getting instructions about what to do from invisible beings no one else can see, there's a good chance they are having a psychotic episode, not a religious revelation.

The man who responds to the dogmatic religious guy does a good job explaining humanism. He observes that while many people subscribe to a humanist philosophy, only a few percent self-identify as "humanists."

(Just like me, when I was in college.)

Well, I wonder why there is a need for the term "humanism." Why not just call this way of looking at the world, natural? Or maybe, normal. 

This seems to be along the line of John Nagel's criticism of humanism that I quoted in another post on this subject. Nagel wrote a book review where he said:

John Gray’s “Silence of Animals” is an attack on humanism. He condemns this widely accepted secular faith as a form of delusional self-flattery.

“In the most general terms,” he tells us, “humanism is the idea that the human animal is the site of some kind of unique value in the world.” “A related aspect of humanism is the idea that the human mind reflects the order of the cosmos.” “A third aspect of humanism is the idea that history is a story of human advance, with rationality increasing over time.”

Gray rejects all three of these beliefs, along with the pretension of humanism to offer a scientifically respectable replacement for religion: “In a strictly naturalistic view — one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm — there is no hierarchy of value with humans somewhere near the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with its own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science.”

There might be some truth to this. I don't know enough about humanism to be sure. Probably humanists come in all varieties, just as people of every sort do.

I can say with confidence, though, that dogs playing in a dog park don't subscribe to either religion or humanism, and they do just fine -- usually getting along with each other, and having a good time. In fact, often the biggest problems at a dog park are between other people, not between the canines.

Still, being humans, we have no choice but to look upon the world in a human way. So in this sense we are all humanists, just as all dogs are canineists. 

Given this fact, absolutism of any sort in regards to the "true" nature of the cosmos is unwarranted, a point made in my post, "Beyond humanism and absolutism... mystery."

Science deals in what can be talked about. Not everything. And even the something that can be talked about necessarily is described in human terms. To believe otherwise is to fall into an unwarranted scientific absolutism.

However, religion, mysticism, and other forms of spirituality also suffer from their own variety of absolutism: the claim that it is not only possible for us humans to know ultimate reality, but that this reality can be described by holy people.

And that, to use an apt non-philosophical term, is bullshit. 

...Cooper reminds us that true humility is saying "I don't know" when faced with the question of what lies at the heart of the awesome mystery of the cosmos. 

I agree with him that there is some heart independent of human consciousness. But what it is... no one knows.