Church of the Churchless

Anthony de Mello -- a heretic Catholic spiritual rebel

Recently I was driving around, channel surfing on satellite radio, and heard someone talk about Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest, who was chastised by the Catholic Church in 1998 for his belief in a "formless God."

I hadn't thought about de Mello for quite a few years. 

In 2006 I devoured (OK, not literally) several of his books, liking them a lot. Here's the de Mello-related blog posts that popped up when I asked the Great God Google in the right sidebar to point me to them.

Be a spiritual rebel
Meditation isn't dog training
Revel in your selfishness
The greatest heretic of all
Jesus says, "Beware of religion"
Mine disaster shows absurdity of prayer
Spiritual ego worse than worldly ego

Give some or all a read. De Mello was an engaging guy. Here's how I started off my first post about him.

Here are some inspirational quotations about spiritual independence from Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest who was born in India and wonderfully melded the best of East and West. 

In 1998, after his death, his writings were condemned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope.

To me that’s a high recommendation of de Mello. If you’re condemned by the Catholic Church, you must be doing something right spiritually.

On the Vatican web site, there's a page from the infamous Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith folks containing: Notification Concerning the Writings of Father Anthony de Mello, SJ

i just read it. It's pretty impressive. In a weird way.

Meaning, the description of de Mello's writings, particularly his later ones, where he became particularly rebellious toward religion, seems quite fair. Whoever wrote it does a good job describing de Mello's positions, making them sound appealing -- to my churchless mind, at least.

Then, after laying out this description that makes me feel warmly toward de Mello, the Catholic hammer hits.

Consistent with what has been presented, one can understand how, according to the author, any belief or profession of faith whether in God or in Christ cannot but impede one's personal access to truth. The Church, making the word of God in Holy Scripture into an idol, has ended up banishing God from the temple. She has consequently lost the authority to teach in the name of Christ.

With the present Notification, in order to protect the good of the Christian faithful, this Congregation declares that the above-mentioned positions are incompatible with the Catholic faith and can cause grave harm.

The National Catholic Register, not one of my regular reads, has a 1998 piece called "Indian Jesuits Offer Insights Into Vatican's Censure of de Mello." 

Complying with a Vatican directive, a Jesuit publishing house has discontinued sales of the work of the late Jesuit Father Anthony de Mello.

...The CDF notification acknowledged the popularity of the Jesuit author, describing him as “well-known due to his numerous publications … widely circulated in many countries.” Yet, the notification pointed out that “according to the author, any belief or profession of faith whether in God or in Christ cannot but impede one's personal access to truth.

The Church, making the word of God in Holy Scripture into an idol, has ended up banishing God from the temple. She has consequently lost the authority to teach in the name of Christ.” In order to “protect the good of the Christian faithful,” the notification stated that some of Father de Mello's positions are “incompatible with the Catholic faith and can cause grave harm.”

...“He followed the dialectic style of raking up controversy to awaken people. There is a certain irony and sarcasm in his stories. If you take them literally, you are likely to be scandalized,” acknowledged Father Sauch, who once attended an 30-day retreat conducted by Father de Mello

My kind of guy!

With the physical, we can't fool ourselves about the "spiritual"

So I was rolling along this afternoon in my Tai Chi class as we were doing the Yang Long Form, feeling good that I was in the flow, having left behind the garden chores and civic activism emailing that had occupied me for most of the day previously.

"I'm really in the moment," I thought to myself. 

At which point, unsurprisingly, I left the physical reality of the Long Form moment and entered a mental moment where I was praising myself for being in the moment. The effect wasn't horrible. Barely noticeable to others, in fact.

Instead of doing the next movement in the lengthy form, which I know well, I jumped into a movement from another similar form.

Noticing almost immediately that I had departed from the school of fish feeling where everybody in the class is in sync, moving in harmony, I quickly adjusted. Later in the form, though, pretty much the same thing happened again. 

Tai Chi often is called "meditation in motion."

I've done a lot of meditating not-in-motion. For thirty-five years, every morning I sat quietly in a darkened small room or closet for an hour or two, repeating a mantra for a while, then doing nothing except being aware of what was within my consciousness when I wasn't doing anything.

Or at least, not much of anything. 

It's easy to fool yourself when you're within your own mind. There's no external guideposts to gauge where you are, or what exactly is happening. You can think, "I'm communing with the Holy Spirit," and who will argue with you?

Likely not yourself, since you're pleased with your supposed spiritual experiencing. This is one reason I enjoy Tai Chi and other movement arts, such as ballroom dancing, so much. It's much more difficult to fool yourself.

Sure, I can imagine that I'm a better Tai Chi practitioner or dancer than I really am.

But then... there's the mirrors.

And the sight of other people doing the same form or dance, but looking better doing it. Plus, of course, the glitches such as what happened to me today -- the physical missteps or stumbles which are difficult to ignore, or interpret as some sort of positive progress.

I still enjoy my quiet morning meditation time, which now lasts only 20 minutes or so. However, I feel like I learn more about myself and how my mind works when I'm out and about doing something outwardly physical rather than inwardly mental. 

No fooling. That's a big benefit of "moving meditation," which can be experienced in many ways.

Daoist enlightenment: much ado about nothing

One of the things I like most about my Tai Chi practice is Wu Chi (or Wuji). Basically, it means doing nothing. It's the ready, relaxed stance you're in before you do something. 

Tai Chi, being Daoism (or Taoism) expressed in motion, reflects the more cosmic principles of Daoist philosophy. I wrote about Wu Chi in a 2005 "Wu chi, empty fullness" post about a year after I'd started practicing Tai Chi.

I’ve become a big fan of wu chi, a Taoist term for the emptiness from which fullness flows. It is the source of all that exists. Not being anything particular, wu chi is able to become everything. We could call it the One, but it is better not to name it at all.

...I first heard the term, wu chi, used by my martial arts instructor. Warren said that he had told his own Tai Chi teacher that, after several decades of training, he had finally realized that there is only one move in Tai Chi. “Oh, very interesting,” the teacher said. “What is it?” “Whatever flows from wu chi [the empty state of rest in Tai Chi].” “Ah, I think you’re on to something,” said Warren’s teacher.

There’s nothing quite like wu chi in Western philosophy or religion. By and large we in the West adore positivity. We want to be filled, not emptied. We want to acquire, not divest. We want to become more, not less. We want to be raised up, not driven down.

...Wu grammatically is a negative in Chinese, yet experientially it is a positive. It is said, “Wu and Tao are equally the mother of all things.” Wu wei in Taoism literally means “not doing.” But wu wei is how nature does everything: effortlessly and harmoniously. Nature isn’t filled with a sense itself; it is itself. One, not two.

Daoism certainly has its religious side, which I don't identify with. But there's something appealing to me about the naturalistic way Daoism and Tai Chi approach the subject of enlightenment. 

Here's some quotes from Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming's book, "Taijiquan Theory." 

Wuji is a state of emptiness or simply a single point in space. There is no discrimination and there are no polarities (or poles). According to Yi Jing (i.e. Book of Change), originally the universe was in a Wuji state. Later, due to the pivotal action of Taiji, Two Polarities (Liang Yi) (i.e. Yin and Yang) were discriminated.

...Taijiquan is an internal style of martial arts that was created in the Daoist monastery of the Wudang mountain, Hubei Province. Taijiquan's creation was based on the above philosophies of Taiji and Yin-Yang. It is believed that from understanding the theory of Taiji and Yin-Yang, we will be able to trace back the origin of our lives.

...Since Daoists are monks, the final goal of their spiritual cultivation is to reunite with the natural spirit (Tian Ren He Yi) (i.e. the state of Wuji).

...The Wuji state exists inside each of us. It is the state from which all creative impulses grow.

...Lao Zi states that the way of returning to the origin of our lives involves keeping our minds in the state of extreme emptiness and calmness.

...Those who would like to obtain health and longevity should learn Embryonic Breathing. For those who wish to reach the final goal of enlightenment, Embryonic Breathing is a necessary practice.

...In order to reach this stage, your mind must be in the center of your physical body (i.e. Real Dan Tian), which is located in the physical center of gravity. Since this physical center is also the residence of our original Qi, this is the state of Wuji. 

Sure, I realize all this may sound like spiritual gibberish. And maybe it is.

But after practicing Tai Chi for over ten years, I can assure you that as a physical embodiment of Daoist philosophy, Tai Chi works -- both as a marital art, and as "meditation in motion."

If we're going to talk about enlightenment at all, I must prefer a philosophy that looks upon enlightenment being aided by a calm focus on one's breathing, and not upon anything supernatural.

Religious belief and factual belief -- different creatures

After more than ten years of blogging away at this here Church of the Churchless, I've ceased being surprised at how strongly religious believers hold onto their beliefs. 

Partly because I understand the attraction of faith-based believing, since I was into this myself for thirty-five years. It feels good to consider that you are part of a special group that's especially beloved by God, and are privy to cosmic secrets unknown to others.

And partly because I've seen so many examples of religious believers discounting good arguments, solid facts, and other reasonable evidence that should, one would think, cause them to question whether what they believe is actually true.

A piece by T.M. Luhrmann in the New York Times, "Faith vs. Facts," helped me to better understand why religious beliefs are so resistant to change, even in the face of persuasive arguments to the contrary.

Basically, Luhrmann says, faith is connected to a whole different set of psychological features than facts. Which makes sense, since God, spirit, soul, angels, heaven, Jesus, miracles, and the like aren't observable things, but thoughts related to feelings and moral sentiments.

Most of us find it mind-boggling that some people seem willing to ignore the facts — on climate change, on vaccines, on health care — if the facts conflict with their sense of what someone like them believes. “But those are the facts,” you want to say. “It seems weird to deny them.”

And yet a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set. Even what they count as evidence is different. And they are motivated differently, based on what they conclude. On what grounds do scholars make such claims?

First of all, they have noticed that the very language people use changes when they talk about religious beings, and the changes mean that they think about their realness differently.

You do not say, “I believe that my dog is alive.” The fact is so obvious it is not worth stating. You simply talk in ways that presume the dog’s aliveness — you say she’s adorable or hungry or in need of a walk. But to say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is alive” signals that you know that other people might not think so. It also asserts reverence and piety. We seem to regard religious beliefs and factual beliefs with what the philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen calls different “cognitive attitudes.”

Second, these scholars have remarked that when people consider the truth of a religious belief, what the belief does for their lives matters more than, well, the facts.

We evaluate factual beliefs often with perceptual evidence. If I believe that the dog is in the study but I find her in the kitchen, I change my belief. We evaluate religious beliefs more with our sense of destiny, purpose and the way we think the world should be. One study found that over 70 percent of people who left a religious cult did so because of a conflict of values. They did not complain that the leader’s views were mistaken. They believed that he was a bad person.

Interesting. This seems roughly right, the 70 percent figure. In my experience, true or false usually isn't as important to a religious believer as good or bad. 

A skeptic can point out all the reasons why their religious beliefs are almost certainly wrong, and the believer's faith will remain firm. Whereas, as Luhrmann says, they would readily change their mind about a factual issue that they were wrong about-- such as where their dog is at the moment.

Religious beliefs meet different sorts of needs than factual understandings. One's religion can be eminently satisfying even if it is completely wrong.

Feeling part of a close-knit religious community; being told that a divine being is taking care of you; having an assurance that death isn't the end, but the beginning of a new form of existence; not having to worry about making moral decisions, because the religion makes many of them for you -- these are strong motivations to keep on believing even when the facts argue otherwise. 

Luhrmann writes:

Finally, scholars have determined that people don’t use rational, instrumental reasoning when they deal with religious beliefs. The anthropologist Scott Atran and his colleagues have shown that sacred values are immune to the normal cost-benefit trade-offs that govern other dimensions of our lives.

Sacred values are insensitive to quantity (one cartoon can be a profound insult).They don’t respond to material incentives (if you offer people money to give up something that represents their sacred value, and they often become more intractable in their refusal). Sacred values may even have different neural signatures in the brain.

...People aren’t dumb in not recognizing the facts. They are using a reasoning process that responds to moral arguments more than scientific ones, and we should understand that when we engage.

Values end up being justified by nothing

Having finished Todd May's book, "A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe," I left an Amazon reader review titled Best "Meaning of Life" book I've ever read. 

That's high praise, since I've read a lot of them. Philosophical, spiritual, psychological, mystical, religious, scientific, political, environmental. 

May's book has resonated with me more than any other.

Maybe it is because "A Significant Life" is the most recent one I've read. But I don't think that's the reason. Rather, May delves into issues that have always fascinated me, explicating them in a fresh and appealing manner.

For example...

Whether we're speaking of meaning, values, morality, or any other concept of this sort, the age-old question is what grounds our belief that this is good or true, and that is bad or false?

Some people regard God or another transcendent cosmic being as the source of objective answers to questions of right/wrong, good/bad, true/false, and so on. Others consider that The Universe (whatever this means) speaks to us. As in, the universe is sending a message to me.

However, May correctly dismisses these attempts to ground what I'll call values, for lack of a better word, in an objective foundation.

(Sorry, religious believers, but there is no evidence that any god/divine being exists, much less the particular god/divine being that you worship.)

Turning completely in the other direction, toward subjectivity, other people feel that values are entirely in the eye, or mind, of whoever holds them. Whatever is their byword. No one can say that murdering millions of people is better or worse than finding a cure for cancer. 

Whatever. We live in a meaningless world. Any attempt to ground meaning or morality in anything other than individual whim is doomed to failure. 

May's book strikes a middle ground, which makes sense to me. Intuitively, I'm not attracted either to religious absolutism or existential nihilism. And it seems that most reasonable people I know feel the same way. 

We just find it difficult to express what that middle ground might be. Which is understandable.

May, a professional philosopher, takes an entire book to do this, and I suspect his conclusions are based on a heck of a lot of personal pondering and interpersonal discussions with friends, colleagues, and many others.

In this post, and likely a few succeeding ones, I'll share my understanding of May's view that a meaningful life is one where "subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness." It is pretty easy to grasp the subjective part; the trick is how objective attractiveness is possible without positing a god or cosmic force that grounds this.

Basically, May says that there is "a general web of beliefs that we share," and "a set of values that lend meaningfulness to a life."

The beliefs and values arise from a community of human beings. Where else could they come from, if the universe is silent and there is no god? May then asks a great question:

But here someone might ask, what justifies the web itself? If we accept or reject certain values based on the web of beliefs a community holds, how do we know the web itself is right? It may be that values aren't arbitrary because they must be justified within the network of other values and practices. But couldn't the entire thing be arbitrary? And if it is, doesn't that, by extension, make each of the values in it arbitrary?

The worry here is that our web of values, founded in our practices, is somehow floating in space. It is unmoored. Without beliefs being anchored somewhere, it could be floating anywhere: that is the arbitrariness of it. If the web is what anchors the values, but the web is unattached, then each of the values still floats free -- not from the web, but along with it.

I loved May's next sentence.

The short response to this worry is this: nothing justifies the web. 

Along with what he said after that. 

We have arrived at the point where justification comes to an end. In fact, we have arrived at the point where justification must come to an end. We cannot justify the web, the whole, itself. The reason for this is that all justification, all giving of reasons for what one believes, happens inside the web. This is true not only for values but for all of our beliefs.

...The attempt to step outside our current web of beliefs, values, and the practices in which they arise in order to justify the whole is an impossible task. After all, what would even count as a justification for an empirical claim or a value if we need to lay aside everything else we believe? In a case like that, it would be the claim or value itself that would be floating free, unanchored to anything else.

This is freaking brilliant philosophizing. Clear, logical, persuasive. Unless, I guess, one is either a dogmatic religious believer or a whatever nihilist. 

Soon after, May quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'"

May's next words are my favorite in the entire book. I can't resist quoting them in their entirety.

The image is a striking one, and it is famous in contemporary philosophy. My only quibble with it is that the reference to bedrock suggests that there is hard ground beneath the soil of our practices.

But there isn't, as the last line of the citation reminds us. The reason we cannot dig any deeper is that there is no more soil left. This is not because we have hit something sturdy that resists our spade. It is only because we have run out of soil. What is left is not granite or marble; it is nothing.

This is simply what we do.

The web of values and beliefs and the practices in which they arise are all we have to ground objectivity. Any one of us could be wrong, and we could all be wrong -- although we cannot say why this might be, since that would refer us back to our own practices, beliefs, and justifications.

It is perhaps possible that far in the future a generation of posthuman types will look back upon us and ask, "What were they thinking" Of course, they will do that from their own lights, as we do from ours. And, of course, we cannot imagine what it would be like to be those posthuman types, since we would have to do it from our perspective. 

All we can say is that we cannot in advance rule out the possibility of it happening.

Our web of practices, with their beliefs and values, does not rest on a ground assured by the universe. As with meaningfulness, the universe is silent on this matter. But neither do the beliefs and values in that web arise simply according to individual or collective whim.

When we seek to justify our narrative values (or anything else) to ourselves, we are in a realm which is neither arbitrary nor ultimately assured, but somewhere in between. 

For some, this might not be enough. And to them, as I have said, I have nothing to offer by way of consolation. But for the rest of us, although this may not be all the objectivity we would like, perhaps it is all the objectivity we need.

What do we want? Happiness, experiences, or meaning?

About all it took for me to order Todd May's book was the title: "A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe." 

How could I resist?

Hey, I want a significant life. Filled with meaning. And I totally agree we live in a silent universe. That is, one which doesn't have a God or some other cosmic entity whispering in our ears, Here is what makes life meaningful...

I've got a few chapters left to read. Ordinarily getting this far into a philosophical book would make me confident that I know what the final conclusions will be. But May, a philosopher, does his profession proud.

He isn't into academic, word-splitting, intellectual philosophizing. He writes clearly, informally, and passionately about issues that everybody is deeply concerned about, such as the relationships between happiness, experiences, and meaning. 

What I like most about May's style is how he honestly considers arguments that are contrary to his own. Before stating his conclusion about something, he works through alternative ways of looking at that thing.

May does this so skillfully, several times I found myself saying to myself "Yes, that's so true!" to one of his counter-arguments, before changing my mind and saying "Yes, that's even more true!" to the thesis he ends up preferring. 

If all philosophers could write and think this way, modern philosophy would have a much better reputation than it does.

May makes it into a very practical way of assessing what makes for "a good life" -- one of those terms that gets thrown around all the time, yet rarely pondered as anything other than a shallow platitude. For example, early on in his book May considers what we're really looking for.

Happiness seems like a fine answer. After all, he points out, the founders of the United States, who were well versed in philosophy, said that we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But what is happiness? Seemingly it has a lot to do with pleasure. When we're happy, we feel pleasure; when we are unhappy, we don't. So if we could feel pleasure all of the time, wouldn't that make for a good life?

At first I thought that it would. Until May put forward a thought experiment about having electrodes implanted in my brain that activate a pleasure center.

You would be given food and water, so you wouldn't starve. You would get adequate sleep. So you would live a life of complete pleasure. You would have pleasure at every moment. Also, because you would be sustained through proper nourishment, you would live to a ripe old age. 

But here's the catch. You wouldn't be able to do anything except sit there and be stimulated by the pleasure machine. You would experience continuous pleasure, but you wouldn't be able to do anything. Would you take the offer?

May said that he wouldn't. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't either. I like the notion of continuous pleasure, but not at the expense of living a normal human life. 

The reason, May says, is that what really gives us satisfaction are life projects.

He says, "When we ask what we would like of our living, almost all of us think of our family and friends, our work or our outside hobbies, the plans we have for the future, as central to it. A life without projects would be less than a life, or at least less than a life any of us is likely to choose."

So this leads May to propose another thought experiment. The pleasure machine is redesigned. "Suppose that, instead of offering us pleasure, the machine offered us experiences." It would give us whatever experiences we desired.

The machine creates a virtual reality for its user, like that headgear one can don in order to have the visual experience of alternative worlds. The only difference is that the virtual reality created by the machine is not only visual. It is a complete experience. While immersed in it, one does not even know that it is only an experience. It would feel real. 

This seemed much more appealing to me. I've had dreams that were so enjoyable, I didn't want them to end. They felt real, but weren't. So what? If an experience has the same taste as really real reality, why not grab onto it?

A few pages on, however, May had convinced me that actually I wouldn't want to sign up for the Experience Machine. He writes:

I can't imagine for a moment that I would take that deal. The experience machine is no more tempting than the pleasure machine. It might be neat to try for a couple of hours, but so might the pleasure machine. To look upon a lifetime of unreal experience is a repulsive prospect.

While it might not seem like torture if I were already in it, it certainly seems so now. And as with the pleasure machine, hardly anyone I've asked has ever been drawn to it.

The reason, May says, is that happiness is a type of engagement with the world, not a solitary subjective exercise. "Happiness, rather than being an experience or a passing feeling, is an emotional relation to how one's life is going. It is deeper than experiences or feelings, deeper and more sustained."

Which gets us to meaningfulness. I feel like I need to finish the book before I can explain May's conclusions about what gives life meaning. Here's how he generally looks at the situation, though.

For a human life to be meaningful, it must be one in which I am not a spectator but a real participant, and a participant in something that matters to me. That something can be any number of engagements: relationships, social change, work, athletics, or some combination of these.

I have previously used the word projects to refer to them. For my life to be meaningful, those projects have to feel like my projects; not in the sense that I own them, but more in the sense that they own me, that they have captured my focus.

...It is important to distinguish a meaningful life from a good one. A person can live a perfectly good life -- one that contributes to society or is loyal to friends and family or accomplishes an important feat -- without feeling absorbed by what he or she does.

...But to be a good person who has lived a good life is not the same as having a meaningful life. 

"A God That Could Be Real" doesn't seem very real

After spending half an hour or so perusing articles about, and reviews of, a book called "A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet," I've pretty much concluded that...

This God doesn't strike me as potentially real enough to buy what Nancy Abrams wrote.

But I'll give her credit for this: creativity, thought-provoking'ness, poetic prose, and a semi-gallant attempt to explain a God that is compatible with modern science.

Since I don't understand how her God is any different from the collective imagination of humanity, I don't feel like I can explain Abrams' conception of a divinity that doesn't exist as an objective reality, yet supposedly is real enough to be prayed to.

So I'll just point to what I found interesting and intriguing, though not quite enough to buy the book. (I might change my mind, though.) 

I started out reading a Salon piece by Abrams, "You're praying to the wrong God: What organized religion gets wrong about prayer."

We have learned from the evangelicals in Luhrmann’s study that if we are motivated enough, it’s possible to train our minds to experience whatever we believe is real. What if we directed toward the real universe and the emerging God even a fraction of the effort that millions of religious people make every day to experience the presence of their image of God?

Then I checked out the book's Amazon listing, focusing on the reader reviews. Here's part of a negative one.

This is embarrassingly bad. I had hoped that this might deserve an in-depth critique, but such aspiration vanished in the first 40 pages. PZ Myers has sliced and diced this pretty effectively over at his blog (Pharyngula), so I'll be brief. I skipped a bit, so I apologize for any errors.

The author -- an atheist, or at least an apatheist -- suffers from an eating disorder, and is impressed by the fact that in a self-help group that she joins, the people who put their trust in a "higher power" seem to do well. Rather than wondering about the psychosocial aspects of this observation, she feels compelled to find out if there's any natural phenomenon which would fit that description. She hypothesizes that perhaps there is some entity that is "emergent" from human consciousness, and opines that such an entity might be "worthy" of the term "god".

Now she provides no evidence for the existence of such an entity, nor does she attempt to explain what "emergence" might involve. She seems to view emergence as a mysterious process that requires no explanation -- a bit like the Gaia hypothesis, or some of Deepak Chopra's quantum nonsense.

Naturally I then had to read how PZ Myers "sliced and diced" A God That Could Be Real.

A song that could be silent. An ocean that could be dry. How about a book that could be nothing but deepities? That last one exists: it’s called A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet by Nancy Ellen Abrams, and it’s one of the more empty-headed collections of glib clap-trap I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s also really hard to describe, because the contents are so slippery.

...In other words, she recognizes that there is no good reason and no respectable evidence for believing in any of the existing religions, but she really, really wants to keep believing, so she’s going to go looking for a hook to hang the label “God” on. I could have spared her the effort of writing a whole book on this nonsense: get a sharpie and a piece of cardboard, write GOD on it, and then tape it on some random object that will then become the focus of your reverence. It’s easy, and just as useful.

I looked for a cogent review of the book, but couldn't find one. A Publisher's Weekly piece was more descriptive than review'y. 

Abrams, a lawyer and coauthor of books on cosmology (The New Universe and the Human Future), had long-standing disdain for organized religion and oversimplified approaches to faith and God. But a personal crisis with an eating disorder prompted her to deeply rethink her views about God and religion.

She came to understand God as something consistent with what is real in the universe. “God persists and always will because it’s a fundamental characteristic of the connection between ourselves and the universe,” Abrams writes.

She argues that God emerges in the world through the human mind and that humans have the responsibility to create a better world for themselves and future generations. She urges readers to pay close attention to climate change and the destruction of the planet.

Prayers are answered, she maintains, and yet no one is there to hear them. Much is possible for the planet and its people, she concludes, and she “want(s) to conserve this divine explosion of possibilities.” This book will appeal to scientifically minded readers and those intrigued by process theology.

A question about "God's creation" for religious believers

I have a question for religious people: most religions believe that God or some other divine being created the universe. Which, naturally, includes Earth.

I read a lot of science books. I'm not expert in the details of cosmology and evolution, but I'm familiar with the broad outlines of these fields. I know how much solid evidence supports certain basic facts.

Such as...

The universe started off in a big bang some 13.8 billion years ago. Stars and galaxies eventually came into being, along with our sun and the solar system. 

Chance, in the form of countless unpredictable chaotic deterministic events, led to the formation of Earth. The orbits of planets in our solar system have been much different in the past than they are now, and those orbits are continuing to change.

Earth was hit by a very large object fairly early on in its history, which caused the Moon to be formed. Other objects have impacted Earth over billions of years, leading to mass extinctions of the life forms existing at the time.

All life existing now on Earth has a common ancestor. Almost certainly this is a single-celled organism, such as a bacteria. The relatedness of humans to other species is evident in our DNA. Our ancestors include not only bacteria, but fish, birds, and mammals.

Before Homo sapiens came to be the only Homo species, quite a few other species closely related to us (such as Neanderthals) existed. Human DNA reveals that our Homo sapiens ancestors interbred with some of these species, leaving genetic traces that are evident in our cells today.

At one point the number of Homo sapiens dwindled from thousands down to a few hundred. If these early humans hadn't survived, our species wouldn't exist now. Neanderthals or some other Homo species would.

I could go on in this vein, but I've described enough to ask my question of religious believers.

Given all of this scientific knowledge about how the universe, Earth, and humans came to be, how is it possible for you to believe that God or some other divine being created all of this?

What plausible story do you have for creation that incorporates what I've broadly outlined above? What sort of God or other supernatural entity would utilize natural mechanisms for bringing about the supposed creation of everything that has existed, and does exist, in the cosmos?

It sure seems to me like religions either have to ignore scientific facts (which many do), or twist "divine will" into an exceedingly bizarre shape. Meaning, if divine will is equated with the evident laws of nature that have led to the world we have now, why bring God into an act of creation at all? 

I've never come across an answer to my question that even begins to make sense to me. Maybe some reader of this blog will be able to share one. I'm waiting...

Religious ridiculousness: men refusing to sit next to women on planes

Rather than the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act, legislatures in the United States should get busy passing Freedom from Religion bills.

After all, to me (and many others) religiosity is a relationship between an individual and his/her imagined divinity. It's a matter of personal belief, which I have no problem with. Believe whatever you want, so long as you don't interfere with the right of other people to believe as they want. 

Unfortunately, all too often religion becomes a matter of outward action, rather than inner belief. And not private actions, but public ones that affect other people.

Case in point: ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who refuse to sit next to women on airplanes. This absurdity is described in a New York Times story, "When a Plane Seat Next to a Woman is Against Orthodox Faith."

It is not an entirely new issue; some ultra-Orthodox travelers have tried to avoid mixed-sex seating for years. But now the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population is growing rapidly because of high birthrates. Ultra-Orthodox men and their families now make up a larger share of airline travelers to Israel and other locations, giving them more economic clout with airlines,  and they are making their views more widely known in response to what they see as the sexualization of society.

The issues on airplanes echo controversies over efforts to separate men and women on buses and streets, as well as to remove women from some news photographs.

Well, I have my own deeply held moral beliefs. Vegetarianism, for example.

I haven't eaten a bite of meat or fish for forty-five years, having become a vegetarian when I was twenty-one because I didn't want to be responsible for killing animals unnecessarily. I've sat next to countless meat-eaters who were eating food that once had a face.

I've never changed my seat. I've never made a big deal out of having to be close to people who were doing something I think is wrong. That's because I regard my personal beliefs as just that: personal. I don't expect other people to believe in vegetarianism as I do, nor do I demand that they accommodate my beliefs. 

When an airline doesn't have a vegetarian meal available, I shove the meat to one side and eat the rest. Or I bring a veggie sandwich along in my carry-on bag. 

So why is it that so many religious believers feel that other people should accommodate their personal beliefs? Like giving up their seat for a Jewish man who refuses to sit next to women.

Francesca Hogi, 40, had settled into her aisle seat for the flight from New York to London when the man assigned to the adjoining window seat arrived and refused to sit down. He said his religion prevented him from sitting beside a woman who was not his wife. Irritated but eager to get underway, she eventually agreed to move.

I've believed in some strange stuff before I saw the light and became an atheist.

However, I never felt that people needed to either share my beliefs, or go out of their way just because I held them. Sure, I'd ask friends and family to serve something vegetarian if I ate at their home, but I wouldn't think of demanding this of someone I didn't know well.

I guess many "people of faith" have a very different view of religion that I did when I was religious. For me, it was a personal, private relationship with a divinity that I believed to exist. It had very little to do with behaving in a certain way out in public, or demanding that other people act in a certain way.

Live and let live. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

These two proverbs make a lot of sense to me. If religious believers don't want people telling them what to do or what to believe, they shouldn't be imposing their actions and beliefs on others. 

Religion is just one of many stories humans have imagined

Often religious people will say, "Science is just another sort of religion." This is wrong. Science is science. Religion is religion. 

Yet that saying also is right in a way. Neither science nor religion exists in the same fashion as stars, rocks, water, and flowers do. 

Those things existed before modern humans, Homo sapiens, came along. They also exist now. And if we humans disappear from Earth, almost certainly all of those things will remain.

As Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, says in his fascinating book, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind," certain entities exist only in the minds of people. Like, science and religion; quantum theory and God; the periodic table and angels.

All of these things spring from human imagination. If we didn't exist, neither would they. The natural world would keep on doing its thing, but there wouldn't be anyone using terms like quantum theory, God, periodic table, angels.

Understand: I'm not claiming that science and religion are equally valid imagined stories. Science deals with entities that actually do exist outside of the human mind, whereas God, angels, and other imagined supernatural entities don't. 

But I found Harari's discussion of the stories we tell ourselves to be one of the best explanations of this sort that I've ever read. I've included some fairly lengthy excerpts from his book below. 

These stories, notably including those told by religions, bind us Homo sapiens together. We're the only species that speaks about things that don't exist. While this might seem to put us at an evolutionary disadvantage, actually it is a big reason for the dominance of our species.

So even though God is produced by human imagination, there is tremendous power in the belief that God does exist as an objectively real entity. Harari points out that the same is true of money: it only is as real as the human belief in it, yet money also has enormous power.

Here's the Harari quotations.

Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, "Careful! A lion!." Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, "The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe." This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

It's relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don't really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren't you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting, and fornicating?

But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states.

Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That's why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

...Any large-scale human cooperation -- whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe -- is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination. Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.

States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag. Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights -- and the money paid out in fees.

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

...Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or churches, or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees, and lions.

...Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. Within this network, fictions such as Peugeot not only exist, but also accumulate immense power. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as "fictions," "social constructs," or "imagined realities." An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. 

...Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.

The sculptor from the Stadel Cave may sincerely have believed in the existence of the lion-man guardian spirit. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights. No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imagination.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

"Spiritual" and "Science" -- two words that belong together

Carl Sagan didn't see any conflict between spirituality and science. Neither do I. They get along very nicely, so long as we remember that "spirit" has nothing to do with God, divinity, or the supernatural.

It's just a word that points to how we look upon reality, rather than focusing on the what of existence. As in, for example, "With what sort of spirit are you going to view the situation?"

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, I put up a post yesterday -- A secular Easter thought: "spiritual" isn't supernatural or religious. Give it a read.

The post is based on some writings by Tim Urban. Be sure to take a look at his "How Religion Got in the Way." His cartoon summary of how religion went one way, and science another, is both entertaining and right-on. And I liked his Carl Sagan quotation.

Here's an Urban quote that I included in my post.

Ever since the human species began opening its eyes into consciousness, it has been an aggressively curious child, hungry to figure it all out. What was this world it was living in, and what did it all mean?

The first part of that question—What was this world?—became the job of science. The second part—What does it all mean?—is the job of spirituality.

Science is what we know, and spirituality is how we coexist philosophically, psychologically and emotionally with that knowledge. Science gives us the information; spirituality helps us wrap our heads around it.

The two lead us as a tag team, each taking care of their critical halves of the “figuring it all out” puzzle—when science tells us something shocking, like “The Earth is revolving around the sun and not vice versa!” we turn, wide-eyed, to spirituality and ask, “How does that change things? How does that transform the way we should think about ourselves, about the world, and about life?”

Under this definition, spirituality is a secular concept, and the idea that spirituality and science are diametrically opposed to each other is incorrect—they’re two halves of the same quest.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on religion vs. objective truth

The headline on this Daily Beast piece is a bit misleading: "Neil deGrasse Tyson Defends Scientology -- and the Bush Administration's Science Record." 

Sure, both statements are true. But only in a certain context. Here's some of what astrophysicist Tyson says about Scientology.

So, you have people who are certain that a man in a robe transforms a cracker into the literal body of Jesus saying that what goes on in Scientology is crazy?

...But why aren’t they a religion? What is it that makes them a religion and others are religions? If you attend a Seder, there’s an empty chair sitting right there and the door is unlocked because Elijah might walk in.

OK. These are educated people who do this. Now, some will say it’s ritual, some will say it could literally happen. But religions, if you analyze them, who is to say that one religion is rational and another isn’t? It looks like the older those thoughts have been around, the likelier it is to be declared a religion.

If you’ve been around 1,000 years you’re a religion, and if you’ve been around 100 years, you’re a cult. That’s how people want to divide the kingdom. Religions have edited themselves over the years to fit the times, so I’m not going to sit here and say Scientology is an illegitimate religion and other religions are legitimate religions. They’re all based on belief systems.

Look at Mormonism! There are ideas that are as space-exotic within Mormonism as there are within Scientology, and it’s more accepted because it’s a little older than Scientology is, so are we just more accepting of something that’s older?

Great points. It reminds me of the saying that an atheist is someone who tells believers, "I just deny one more God than you do."

Meaning, every major religion (and maybe also every minor one) teaches that it knows who/what the True God(s) is or are. Beliefs, rituals, and such based on that supposed knowledge make great good sense to the religion's followers, while the practices of other religions are looked upon as misguided, if not bizarre.

Next Sunday countless Christians will worship on Easter, which celebrates the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

That is really a very weird belief. Sure, to Christians it isn't, but that's because they take it to be true. To them the idea that the angel Gabriel verbally revealed the Quran to Muhammed over about 23 years, though... that is clearly absurd. 

Well, in religion one person's ridiculous absurdity is another person's blessed faith. Thus there are lots of different religions, each appealing to different groups of people. Which seemingly is a lot like music -- there are many different genres, classical, rock, hip hop, rap, blues, jazz, etc. etc. -- except it really isn't.

Because few people who like a certain type of music also claim that this type is objectively better than other sorts of music, whereas religions typically make objective truth claims. 

Religions are popular because they make people feel better. So does listening to music. But people don't get into actual music wars, with killing and such. Nor do they try to justify social policies and laws based on their music preferences.

Religious believers do, though. Why?

Because in order to feel good about their religion, most devotees need to believe that its teachings are true, even without any demonstrable evidence for this. After all, how comforting would the notion of heaven be, if it was viewed as a fictional place rather than as an actual afterlife destination?

This objectification of a subjective belief, Tyson points out, causes problems.

Now, where the rubber hits the road is, since we are a free country where belief systems are constitutionally protected—provided they don’t infringe on the rights of others—then how do you have governance over “all” when you have belief systems for the “some”?

It seems to me that the way you govern people is you base governance on things that are objectively true; that are true regardless of your belief system, or no matter what the tenets are of your holy documents. And then they should base it on objective truths that apply to everyone.

So the issue comes about not that there are religious people in the world that have one view over another, it’s if you have one view or another based on faith and you want to legislate that in a way that affects everyone. That’s no longer a free democracy. That’s a country where the few who have a belief system that’s not based in objective reality want to control the behavior of everyone else.

...But the point here is that if you’re religious, and your religion tells you that being gay is bad, then don’t be gay. But you have to remind yourself that that’s your belief system, and there are other belief systems that don’t agree with that, so you should not be in the position to make legislation that affects other people. 

Absolutely. Nicely said, Dr. Tyson.

However, I did have to pause and ponder the statement, "It seems to me that the way you govern people is you base governance on things that are objectively true." At first this seemed far distant from how legislators in this country actually govern, even when they govern well.

But the more I thought about it, it does seem that objective reality is indeed the basis for all legislation and executive action.

Laws and policies are intended to make a difference in the real world. So even though it isn't always obvious how "objectively true" is the touchstone for governing, it does seem to be, deep down.

For example, a few months ago the Oregon legislature considered a bill that would eliminate non-medical reasons for not immunizing children. I thought this was a good idea. Extensive research has show that immunizations are generally safe and effective, bringing many more health benefits than problems.

It shouldn't matter what people believe about immunizations; what counts are the objective facts about immunizations. These can be argued about and debated, but the goal is to learn what is objectively true.

Sure, personal values play a role in political discussions. These should be subservient to generally held facts, though. This was the theme of one of my first Church of the Churchless blog posts, "Religious values have no place in politics."

But I can’t think of any examples of opinions about political issues that are incapable of being founded on either proven or provable factual premises. Consider abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage—three issues that are commonly considered to comprise the core of “values-based” voting in the last election. 

Opinions about each of these issues can, and should, be founded on objective facts derived from social science and medical science research. There are costs and benefits to various individuals and society as a whole from the presence or absence of abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage. These costs and benefits can be determined. They can be communicated. They can be discussed. They can be the basis for informed political decisions. 

But you can’t determine, communicate, discuss, or decide anything on a religious or what-God-wants basis. The moral tenets of every religion are unproven and unprovable, using Volokh’s words. However, the moral tenets that flow out of political decisions founded on accurate real-world information can be proven, because the real world is provable. 

For example, fetuses either feel pain or they don’t. If they do, then it should be possible to determine how much pain is experienced during an abortion. People could use this information to help decide when an abortion is justified and when it isn’t. Intelligent debates about the pros and cons of abortion could replace the frenzied moralistic “I’m right and you’re wrong!” screeching that now passes for political discourse in this country. 

You can’t debate with someone who doesn’t have a defensible reason for why they believe what they do. You can’t debate with someone who responds to a reasoned argument with “Because the Bible says so” or “Jesus condemns sinners.”

Let's add a new L-word to "Who is the guru?" possibilities

Back in 2006 I pondered the question, Who is the guru? 

By "guru," I meant someone who is (1) alive today, and (2) considered by his/her devotees to be, if not actually God in human form, darn close to this exalted level of divinity.

This is, obviously, a different sort of religious personage than, say, a Christian minister. Or even the Pope. It is easy to visualize them sincerely believing that they are God's representatives on Earth, while recognizing that they are entirely human.

In some Eastern religions, though, the distinction between God and guru is minimal. Even nonexistent.

The Indian guru I was initiated by in 1971, Charan Singh, was considered to have attained a state of God-realization by his followers. 

No longer believing this, my "Who is the guru?" post was an attempt to make sense of the fact that Charan Singh, along with his successor Gurinder Singh, could sit on a podium in front of tens of thousands of adoring disciples who looked upon them as not only godly, but as God.

I’ve been thinking about the four options concerning who Jesus was, according to biblical scholar Bart Ehrman: a liar, a lunatic, the Lord, or a legend. When it comes to a long-dead historical figure like Jesus, these options make sense. But what about a modern-day guru who is similarly proclaimed to be God in human form?

I was initiated by such a guru, Charan Singh Grewal. I sat at his feet, literally. I had two personal interviews with him. I heard him speak many times. I saw him worshipped by tens of thousands of devotees as a divine incarnation. 

And yet, I still don’t know what to make of him. Or his successor, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. Who is the guru? A philosophically-inclined friend of mine likes to say, “There’s only one question to ask a guru who is supposedly God in human form: Are you who people claim you are?”

But given Ehrman’s four options, the answer wouldn’t be all that revealing. If the guru was a liar, you couldn’t believe what he said. Ditto if he was a lunatic. And even if he truly was the Lord, and said as much, what reason would there be to believe him? Plus, one could argue that a God-man would be so humble, you’d never hear a claim to divinity pass his lips.

With living gurus the legend option doesn’t come into play. They’re alive and kicking, not legendary. Quite a few men (and a few women) of recent vintage are considered by the faithful to be manifestations of God. For example, Meher Baba, Ramakrishna, and Lokenath. 

So I muse over my recollections of Charan Singh and Gurinder Singh, trying to decide whether they’re best described as liars, lunatics, or the Lord.

I ended up preferring a fourth option, loyalist.

Is there another L-word that better fills the bill? One springs to mind: loyalist. Perhaps when a successor is appointed to fill the shoes of a highly-regarded guru, loyalty both to his predecessor and to the surrounding organization prevents the newcomer from crying out, “Hey, I’m not God! I’m just a man filling the role of a guru.”

This theory got support in a video David Lane made about Charan Singh, as described in a 2013 post, "Charan Singh was a loyal guru." 

But a essay by Michael Shermer in his Scientific American "Skeptic" column suggests another possibility. In "Lies We Tell Ourselves: How Deception Leads to Self-Deception," Shermer says:

Trivers’s theory adds an evolutionary explanation to my own operant conditioning model to explain why psychics, mediums, cult leaders, and the like probably start off aware that a modicum of deception is involved in their craft (justified in the name of a higher cause). But as their followers positively reinforce their message, they come to believe their shtick (“maybe I really can read minds, tell the future, save humanity”).

Click on the link above to read the full piece by Shermer. I'll also include it as a continuation to this post. 

Desperate to find an L-word to add to the liar, lunatic, Lord, or loyalist possibilities, the best I could come up with after a brief look at some online thesauruses was to substitute "legerdemain" for self-deception. 

It seems to fit, as rarely used as the word is.

1. sleight of hand.

2. trickery; deception.

3. any artful trick.

So let's add a likely option that answers the question, "Who is the guru?" Legerdemainist. Which actually is a word.

The guru tricks himself into believing that he (or she) is God. Or God in human form, after being viewed as divine by fawning followers. This act of self-deception further bolsters his standing among devotees, as Shermer explains.

As Abraham Lincoln well advised, “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Unless self-deception is involved. If you believe the lie, you are less likely to give off the normal cues of lying that others might perceive: deception and deception detection create self-deception.

Interesting. Read on to peruse Shermer's entire essay.