Church of the Churchless

Without the Adam and Eve myth, there's no basis for believing in Jesus

I don't feel like I'm any sort of expert about Christianity, since I've never been very interested in this religion. No religion appeals to me now, but in the past I've been drawn more to Eastern mystical varieties than Western theistic types.

Still, reading evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne's new book, "Faith Versus Fact," today, I was surprised by how ignorant I've been of a basic Christian fact:

Without the Adam and Eve myth, there's no basis for believing in Jesus

Since the whole notion of Adam and Eve is impossible to accept, this means the same is true of the core theological foundation of Christianity -- that Jesus died for our sins.

Coyne explains:

The central lesson of Christianity is that sin was brought into the world by the transgression of Adam and Eve, the primal couple, and expiated by the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, whose acceptance as savior removes the taint of sin. You can hardly call yourself a Christian without accepting these claims.

Which means, Christianity is at odds with some central truths of modern science.

Our genome testifies to literally hundreds of "Adams and Eves" who lived at different times -- a result of the fact that different parts of our DNA were inherited differently based on the vagaries of reproduction and the random division of genes when sperm and eggs are formed.

The observations that different parts of our genomes have different ages, some going back millions of years, and that they come from different ancestors, completely dispel the biblical date of human origins and the idea that all of our DNA was bequeathed by a Primal Couple.

This, Coyne says, puts Christians in a tight spot.

If there were no Adam and Eve, then whence the original sin? And if there was no original sin transmitted to Adam's descendants, then Jesus's Crucifixion and Resurrection expiated nothing: it was a solution without a problem. In other words, Jesus died for a metaphor.

...If "sin" is merely our evolved tendency to be greedy, aggressive, and xenophobic, then God, who either foresaw or directed evolution [according to many Christians] becomes responsible for sin. That's unpalatable to theists who believe that sin results from free choice.

Coyne sites several Christian theologians who say the same thing. Here's a quote from a conservative Southern Baptist, Albert Mohler.

The denial of an historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel. If we do not know how the story of the Gospel begins, then we do not know what that story means. Make no mistake: a false start to the story produces a false grasp of the Gospel.

So I now have one more reason to not believe in Christianity.

But the notion of original sin isn't limited to this religion. The Eastern idea of karma isn't too far removed from it. For example, supposedly a guru can remove a disciple's karma.

Although it is said that the guru takes the karma of the disciple, this means that the guru takes it away by engaging the disciple in sadhana bhakti and blessing him or her. Hearing and chanting about Krishna under the guidance of sri guru combined with the guru’s grace destroys one’s karma.

Of the two, effort in sadhana and the grace of the guru, the latter is more important, linga bhuyastvat tad hi baliyah tad api (Vs. 3.3.45). Thus the guru must have the power to bless the student and engage him or her in sadhana bhakti. Such a qualified guru does not have to experience the karma of the students in a Christ-like fashion.

Well, the good news is that there is no such thing as sin, original or otherwise, and there is no such thing as supernatural-based karma that transfers from life to life. Cause and effect is real, but not this sort of karma.

Religious fundamentalists kill bloggers and other secular activists

There are plenty of reasons to reject religion. A big one is that fundamentalism makes people so crazy, they not only want to kill people who criticize religiosity, sometimes they actually do kill them. 

Below is a piece by Sanal Edamaruku that I came across in New Scientist.

Ananta Bijoy Das likely was killed by Muslim extremists. Edamaruku also writes about other secular activists who were killed by Hindu extremists. He himself was threatened by Christian extremists. 

It isn't just one religion that produces murderous true believers. They all do. Lesson: stay away from religion. 

Here's the opinion piece by Edamaruku.

Free speech's front line

After the murder of yet another rationalist blogger, exiled author Sanal Edamaruku calls on governments to defend the free speech of those who stand for science

MASKED men with machetes killed Ananta Bijoy Das last week in Bangladesh. He was murdered for his honesty and integrity, for standing up for rational, sceptical thought and scientific reasoning in the face of religious bigotry.

The 30-year-old edited the journal Jukti (Reason), blogged vigorously and had written a book on Charles Darwin. He felt religion was opposed to human dignity.

He is not the first brilliant young rationalist in Bangladesh to die in a pool of blood. On 26 February, Avijit Roy, moderator of the internationally renowned rationalist portal Mukto-Mona (Free Mind), was murdered. And Washiqur Rahman, who criticised the attack, was killed on 30 March.

The deaths of my Bangladeshi colleagues are shocking. I was in regular contact with Avijit, who used to reproduce my articles in Mukto-Mona. And Ananta was to be my guest in Finland after he told me that he had been invited to Stockholm by free speech group Swedish PEN. He never made it; Swedish officials in Dhaka refused to grant him a visa.

Rationalist blood has also been shed in my former homeland, India. Narendra Dabholkar, who criticised oppressive Hindu superstitions, was murdered in 2013 in Pune. Govind Pansare, a rationalist who criticised Hindu radical groups, was killed in February this year.

My own life was threatened three years ago, after I identified the source of the "miracle" of a dripping Jesus statue in a Mumbai Catholic church as a blocked drain. Agitators were employed to attack me. I escaped. But then came blasphemy complaints, arrest threats and the cardinal's demand for my apology. I refused, and extremist Catholic groups discussed my assassination. I left for Europe and have not returned.

The enemies of reason are afraid of word, pen and keyboard. They try to stop the flow of free thought with guns and cleavers. But rationalists are not so easily stopped. More and more writers and bloggers are emerging to join those challenging such bigotry.

Governments must defend free speech for those who stand for science and progress. If a rational point of view can't be expressed freely, much that we value about civilisation will be at stake.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Free speech's front line"

Sanal Edamaruku is an Indian author who lives in exile in Finland. He is the president of Rationalist International

Dilbert comic hits close to home

I'm both ashamed and proud of how closely this Dilbert comic in last Sunday's paper reminded me of me. Not totally so, but pretty damn close.

(click to enlarge)

Five criteria for a "God theory" that religions fail

Science rocks. Religion sucks. 

I'm only a few chapters into a new book by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, "Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible." But it's pretty darn clear that those four words are a good summary of his thesis.

Which I totally agree with. 

Coyne has no patience for accommodationists who believe that science and religion are somehow complementary, offering up different ways of understanding the cosmos that, when combined, produce more knowledge than either science can alone.

In a summary of what the book is about, Coyne writes:

I also take up the notion of "other ways of knowing": the contention that science isn't the only way of ferreting out nature's truths. I'll argue that in fact science is the only way to find such truths -- if you construe "science" broadly.

...I will have achieved my aim if, by the end of the book, you demand that people produce good reasons for what they believe -- not only in religion, but in any area in which evidence can be brought to bear. I'll have achieved my aim when people devote as much effort to choosing a system of belief as they do to choosing their doctor.

I'll have achieved my aim if the public stops awarding special authority about the universe and the human condition to preachers, imams, and clerics simply because they are religious figures. And above all, I'll have achieved my aim if, when you hear someone described as a "person of faith," you see it as criticism rather than praise.

There's a great passage in the book that Coyne introduces in this fashion:

...Religions make explicit claims about reality -- about what exists and happens in the universe. These claims involve the existence of gods, the number of such gods (polytheism or monotheism), their character and behavior (usually loving and beneficent, but, in the case of Hindu and ancient Greek gods, sometimes mischievous or malevolent), how they interact with the world, whether or not there are souls or life after death, and, above all, how the deities wish us to behave -- their moral code.

These are empirical claims, and although some may be hard to test, they must, like all claims about reality, be defended with a combination of evidence and reason. If we find no credible evidence, no good reasons to believe, then those claims should be disregarded, just as most of us ignore claims about ESP, astrology, and alien abduction.

After all, beliefs important enough to affect you for eternity surely deserve the closest scrutiny. Christopher Hitchens was fond of saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." His inevitable corollary was that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." The philosopher L.R. Hamelin describes what happens when we apply science to the existence of God, stipulating five criteria for the "God theory."

Here's the Hamelin passage. I think it's wonderfully brilliant and persuasive. Deal with these criteria, God-believers. You can't, but your failure will demonstrate why it makes no sense to believe in God.

First, we hypothesize that God is real, with real properties. Second, we create a theory about what a real God and HIs properties means. A God doesn't just sit there; what does He do? Third, we make this theory testable: we must be able to determine whether it is true or false. Fourth, we must test the theory by observation or experiment. Finally, we ensure the theory is parsimonious: that is, if we took out God, the theory wouldn't explain as much.

Once we have followed all these steps, we have a scientific theory that includes God, which we can test against what we actually observe.

But constructing this kind of theory of God puts believers on the horns of a dilemma. Centuries of scientific investigation show that the best scientific theories, testable by observation, include nothing like a personal God. We find only a universe of blind, mechanical laws, including natural selection, with no foresight or ultimate purpose.

Alternatively, a believer could reject one or more of the criteria for a God theory, but doing that has profound implications.

If she admits that God is not real, she's already an atheist. If she says God doesn't do anything, who cares? If her theory cannot be tested at all, then there's no way of telling if it's true or false. If her theory can be tested only by private revelation, not by observations available to everyone, she unjustifiably claims private knowledge. And if her theory is observationally identical to a theory that does not include God, then she's again an atheist, for a God who makes no difference is no God at all.

The only remaining question is whether some people would find this analysis useful, and I know many people who, applying this analysis, have abandoned their religion.

Agnosticism: knowledge comes via experience and evidence

I came across the Spiritual Naturalism web site a few years ago, then blogged about it in "Spiritual Naturalism appeals to my churchless non-soul."

Their definitions of "naturalism" and "spirituality" rang true to me.

Naturalism is a view of the world that includes those things which we can observe or directly conclude from observations. Naturalists’ conception of reality consists of the natural world as outlined by the latest scientific understanding. 

As for claims for which we have no evidence, we do not hold any beliefs in these and do not make any other claims about them. It is quite possible, even likely, that many things exist which we cannot detect, but we believe in a humble approach to knowledge. With humility, we can recognize that human beings are imperfect in their ability to know all things. 

Therefore, we are careful to limit our claims about reality to what we can experience and measure, as well as reproduce and show to others. On all else, we are content to admit “we don’t know”.

Spirituality is the other word in Spiritual Naturalism. For many, the word ‘spirituality’ has an association with the supernatural. However, we mean the term in its more general and original sense. 

The Latin root word spiritus meant ‘wind’ or ‘breath’, or the essence of something. As we might speak of the ‘spirit of the law’ or ‘school spirit’, the spiritual is that which is concerned with the essence of life – or the essential things in life. 

Thus, a person with no sense of spirituality would be a person that lives on the surface, always dealing only with the shallow or the mundane; perhaps even a materialistic person. But to have spirituality is to be concerned with the larger, deeper, and essential matters of life and to apply ourselves consciously toward them in a committed practice or ‘walk’. 

This includes, as Socrates put it, the ‘examined life’, and this is what we mean by spirituality.

Recently the Spiritual Naturalism folks contacted me, wondering if they could republish one of my blog posts. Naturally I said, "sure." 

That led to a discussion about whether I'd like to write regularly for them. Again, I said, "sure."

So now, whoopee, I'm on the Contributing Writers page. I haven't contributed any original writing yet, but will do so in a few days.

Wanting to get a feel for what sorts of essays appear on the Spiritual Naturalism site, I did some clicking around.

A piece by the executive director, DT Strain, caught my eye. "Agnosticism or naturalism?" describes a fresh (to me, at least) way of looking at agnosticism.

Read the whole essay. It's well-written and thought-provoking. Here's an excerpt:

In common usage, the word agnostic is misused – at least compared to it’s technical meaning. Many people imagine agnosticism to (a) be about, or mainly about, God; and (b) to be some kind of intermediary on the spectrum between theism and atheism. It could be that people associating naturalism with atheism is why they then wonder if it is compatible with agnosticism. However, this is not an accurate understanding of agnosticism.

Agnosticism is not necessarily about belief in God, but about all beliefs in general. It is one’s approach to knowledge.

Gnosticism is the claim that knowledge can be inherent or come to us through means other than experience and evidence. Agnosticism is in opposition to this – it is the claim that knowledge can come only through experience and evidence. And, that without such evidence, we simply cannot know something.

So, if I am an agnostic, I will not claim to know how many coins are in your pocket, unless I have some prior evidence to give me an indication of that. Agnosticism is not a position on any given fact (gods or otherwise) but an approach or method for deciding when and how we know things (anything).

Agnosticism is also not on any kind of spectrum or position between atheism and theism.

To be clear, let’s begin with the root term – theism. Theism is not the belief that God is possible, or even very likely. Theism is the belief that God is real and exists. If one puts God in the same category as dogs, clouds, the sun, and cheeseburgers – all things that are a true part of reality – then they are a theist.

If one does not hold that belief, for any reason or for no reason, then they “lack theism” and are “a-thesitic” or an atheist. It doesn’t really matter if they hold some belief similar to or ‘almost’ like theism (such as ‘God is very possible’). If they don’t hold the belief that god/s exist, then they are not a theist and those who lack theism are atheists. 

Praise no-God: Andrew Cohen has been revealed as a fraud

It's always a pleasure to see a "guru" revealed as a flawed human being. This has finally happened to Andrew Cohen, who for a long time played pretend-guru along with Ken Wilber. 

David Lane has written an interesting piece about Cohen's much-deserved downfall, "The Liberation of Andrew Cohen: How Devoted Disciples Can Enlighten Their Guru."

(By enlighten, Lane means "bringing to light," as noted in a comment.)

Andrew Cohen didn’t resign on his own terms, nor did he come to the realization that he was a lousy master who created more harm than good. More remarkably, it was Cohen’s devoted inner circle that forced him to quit. Andrew Cohen had caused so much damage in his spiritual community that his own following realized that it was time for him to give up the game.

As Cohen explains, “My closest and most devoted senior students were beginning to see through my façade, could see that I was out of control, and see that I didn’t even know it. What made matters much worse is that I ignored the evidence; I ignored their respectful pleas for me to slow down and listen to them.”

I've written some uncomplimentary posts about Cohen.
Andrew Cohen -- an abusive American guru
Integral egos gone wild: Wilber and Cohen relish worship
Andrew Cohen is a tyrant, not a guru

It seemed obvious to me that this guy was a jerk. But gurus often are jerks, and still prosper. Sadly, some people think that being abused can be a means of spiritual progress.

I made an attempt at reading Cohen's May 12, 2015 "An open letter to all my former students upon return from my sabbatical." But the letter is so full of crap, I got disgusted just a little way into it and gave up. I then quickly scanned through the B.S.

That word "sabbatical" is scary. Cohen actually seems to believe that he just took a leave of absence from his gurudom and will be back in business after he does some further soul-searching.

I have to give credit to Cohen for this: he is able to shamelessly brandish New Age spiritual cliches with the best of them. And that isn't a compliment. Here's a few samples from his letter:

Over the previous 15 years I had become an evolutionary through and through. I had experienced a profound awakening to a process perspective and to be honest, have now understood that in that light, I had come to see my students as means to an end, hopefully a higher end, but not as ends in themselves. I gradually lost sight of people’s humanity, including my own, and only saw all of us as the living Self Aware consciousness that, in an evolutionary context, was going somewhere.

...Most often when I would teach, I would experience the grace of my Guru, the gift of enlightened awareness, which would engulf my being in the most glorious way. The amazing part of it all is that in the midst of the growing problems I have been describing, I was simultaneously continuing to evolve and develop as a teacher and as a thinker. I was moving and was still often creative in finding ever-new ways to express the inexpressible.

...I justified my at times ruthless attacks on my students’ egos as being akin to the revered Tibetan Master Marpa’s ruthless treatment of his famous disciple Milarepa. And at times this indeed was the case. There were times when with individuals or groups of individuals my arrow of discriminating wisdom hit the bulls eye and magic happened…dramatic and meaningful Liberating Clarity and Love Beyond Description emerged…and new potentials and miraculous possibilities that had been previously unimaginable and unseen were collectively experienced.

...Slowly over time I have come to see the parts of myself that were broken, that I have been in such ferocious denial of. In that denial I became at times untrustworthy. I see that now. So many of you trusted me with your souls and I proved myself at certain pivotal moments unworthy of that trust. Again I am sorry.

...Eros is the VERTICAL manifestation of the Absolute principle. Agape is the HORIZONTAL manifestation the Absolute principle. To say I neglected Agape is an understatement to be sure. Eros and Agape BOTH are essential ingredients of a truly Evolutionary Dharma. They BALANCE each other. They hold each other in a dynamic embrace of loving, creative and Integral tension. My over-emphasis on Eros with little respect for Agape created the circumstance where a collapse was inevitable. And that’s why it happened so fast…and for this I am to blame.

In my 2010 post about Cohen and Wilber, I ended it this way. 

In another article in the same EnlightenNext issue, Cohen talks about how important it is for students to submit to the teacher's authority, since hierarchy is the nature of the cosmos according to Integral philosophy.

The real question to pose to students is, "Are you capable of humbling yourself enough so that Spirit will be able to move through you as it moves through me?"

...You love them so much that you actually don't care about their ego at all.

...So a truly enlightened teacher sees all individuals who come to them as potential vehicles for Spirit and doesn't really care so much about the personal, psychological, emotional predicaments of the particular individuals and the predicaments of their egos.

That's just what wife-beaters say, along with would-be gurus like Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber: I'm hurting you for your own good; you deserve it.

Well, I say: bullshit to that. 

Run, don't walk, from Cohen and Wilber, EnlightenNext, and any attempt to entice you into a religious cult masquerading as Integral enlightenment.

What they're pushing is old-fashioned religion in a New Age guise. Cohen and Wilber are the high priests, and they're looking for submissive acolytes who will worship them and submit to their authority.

It's great to see that the submissive acolytes rose up and said, We're not going to take this crap any more. Hopefully there will come a day when gurus run out of people willing to embrace their fake godly status.

Yah, man! I'm featured in the Jamaica Gleaner

A couple of firsts for me today: first time I've used Yah, man in a blog post, and first time I've read a piece about me in the Jamaica Gleaner. 

Thank you, Glenville Ashby for making both possible. 

Dr. Ashby is a columnist for the Gleaner who came across my Church of the Churchless blog somehow or other (i've forgotten the how that he told me). 

He got in touch with me by email. Then, a few weeks ago, we talked by phone about my religious past and non-religious present. 

Here's a link to the Gleaner story, "Church of the Churchless: A Home for Former Believers," that was sent to me by Dr. Ashby. 

Nicely done, Glenville. Our phone connection was OK, but not great. And I enthusiastically jabbered on about all kinds of stuff, which must have made it difficult to take notes. 

An excerpt from the piece:

We are well aware that many are repulsed and disillusioned by religion because of the violence and death that surround it.

But many have also abandoned their faith because of the unfulfilled promises found in sacred literature, many of which are delivered as truth by religious leaders.

Brian Hines' story is one such example. Hines is an author, scholar, and a man worn by his indefatigable search for spiritual truth.

His quest, spanning nearly four decades is not unfamiliar. He recalls his youthful, college days in the 1960s, when the counter culture of sex, rock and roll, and psychedelic drugs held sway. It was a period that welcomed the 'God is dead' philosophy.

"Experiencing a drug-free high was my goal, the Oregon resident said. I remember being initiated by a Greek yoga master who practiced an eclectic blend of Christianity and Eastern philosophy." A theological disagreement led to his departure from that yoga master, but his thirst for knowledge never abated.

Hines was introduced to an Eastern-based mystical organisation called Surat Shabd Yoga, translated, 'Union with the Essence of the Absolute Being.'

Like most mystical philosophies, it promised direct experience with the divine. Soul travel demanded a disciplined, near ascetic life. "I used a mantra (a sacred word that is repeated mentally), that was given to me when I was initiated by Sri Charan Singh. I meditated on a daily basis, sometimes up to two hours on a given sitting," Hines confided. He also went to India on spiritual retreats.

But the much-touted inner experiences: the sounds and lights of God eluded him.

"Losing faith in any spiritual group does not happen instantaneously. It's a process," he continued. "When my breaking point was near, I remember asking my guru to show me a sign, something tangible to convince me that I was on the true path. But it never happened, at least not in a dramatic sense. I may have had subtle experiences, but how do I know if it's authentic or just the brain or my mind at work?"

Given size of the universe, is creation really all about us?

Religious belief involves lots of absurdities. For me, one of the biggest ones is the assumption that humans are the Big Deal of the universe. 

Whether it be Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or some other major religion, theologies differ about how people are special in the eye of God, Brahman, or whatever, but they agree that members of a recently evolved species on Earth, Homo sapiens, occupy a central place in the cosmic scheme of things.

This is really difficult for me to accept for various reasons. One is our modern understanding of the size of the universe. Consider...

(1) Light travels 5.88 trillion miles in a year. That's 5,880,000,000,000 miles. Impossible to imagine, right? I mean, the Earth is about 25,000 miles in circumference. That's a long way to go. Traveling almost 6 trillion miles in a year: mind-blowing. 

(2) The Milky Way galaxy, where we are, is about 100,000 light years across. So to get from one end to the other, you'd need to travel 6 trillion miles every year for 100,000 years. Even more mind-blowing.

(3) There are lots more galaxies in the universe. Best estimate is 100 billion to 200 billion. This means that in the entire universe, there's around 70 billion trillion stars. Our Sun is one of those. One. Of 70 billion trillion.

(4) Even though the universe is 13.8 billion years old, the size of the observable universe is much larger than 13.8 billion light years, since space expands faster than the speed of light. So the distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 46 billion light years.

(5) As noted before, light travels about 6 trillion miles a year. So the number of miles to the edge of the observable universe is 6 trillion times 46 billion. Too far to walk, for sure. Even at the speed of light.

I can't begin to visualize how large the universe is. The human mind isn't used to such scales.

Religions, though, come from a pre-scientific era when the size of the universe was considered to be little more than the Earth, sun, and a few nearby astronomical objects.

(HInduism is sort of an exception, in that it posits a cosmos that is vastly old and vastly large, coming much closer to the scale of what modern science tells us is true, while being wrong about many other scientific things.)

So how can all this -- the incredible vastness of the physical universe -- be all about us? I've never seen a cogent explanation from a religious perspective. 

Even if one assumes that God or some other conscious creative power exists, and it cares about humans in some special way, why go to the trouble of fashioning such an immense universe if the purpose of creation has something to do with us, Homo sapiens? 

Abandon all hope... and be more active

It's rare to view hope as something to be discarded rather than embraced. Don't we need hope? Isn't hope what keeps us going through tough times, with its power to present a vision of a better future?

Maybe not. I found Derrick Jensen's Orion column, "Beyond Hope," to be beautifully written and quite persuasive. 

Though his main focus is on the benefits of environmental activists giving up hope in favor of action, his piece has considerable general relevance.

For example, most religions put a lot of emphasis on hope, which is almost synonymous with faith. Supposedly we should trust that someone or something -- God, angels, Jesus, a guru, Brahman, Zeus -- will make everything all right in the end.

This weakens our own capacity to make life better for ourselves now. We imagine that the power to produce positive change lies somewhere else, not in our own hands. 

Here's some excerpts from Jensen's Beyond Hope. The entire piece is well worth reading.

Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ’50s and ’60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.

...But it isn’t only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we continue if we do not have hope?

We’ve all been taught that hope in some future condition — like hope in some future heaven — is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I’m sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope.

Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe — or maybe you would — how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. 

Check out "You might be a Taoist"

Of all the "ism's" in the world, I consider Taoism (or Daoism) to be one of the most appealing. Partly this is because I've studied Tai Chi for about eleven years, which can be viewed as Taoism in motion.

Not the religious sort of Taoism. The philosophical sort. 

Back in 2013 I mentioned the You Might Be a Taoist site in a blog post comment. Today I saw that another commenter left a link to that site, which got me to looking at it again.

The "you might be a Taoist if..." statements are pretty accurate, in my view (the only one i have, obviously).

I do consider myself a philosophical Taoist, and almost completely agree with most of those statements. Such as:

If you have a hard time reconciling proven historic and scientific facts with contradictory stories passed down by uneducated superstitious desert dwellers, edited and re-edited by generations of religious and government leaders for their own benefit, constantly quoted out of context by followers with their own agendas, about a god who's described as jealous, petty, indecisive, and ruthless, having murdered millions, including admittedly innocent victims... you might be a Taoist.

Oh, no! Claiming Taoist enlightenment, I'm asked to define it

Damn!

Somebody has made an entirely reasonable request of me -- to define the naturalistic Taoist/Daoist enlightenment that I talked about in "Daoist enlightenment: much ado about nothing," and indirectly claimed to be attaining in "How our non-easy-care yard enlightens me."

In a comment on the first-linked post, Appreciative Reader said:

What exactly is Daoist enlightenment, Brian? It may be no more than just a wild story with no basis in fact, but what exactly is the story?

Daoism is something I know little enough about. Mostly what I’ve read in your blog here.

I do know by now, I think, what enlightenment is supposed to be, per most major traditions. At least the outline of it. Also the means by which one seeks such enlightenment per these traditions. At least the outline of such means. (And I’m just talking about the “narratives” that those traditions follow, without going right now into the validity of such narratives.)

You’ve studied Daoism and written about it extensively enough, but as far as I remember you’ve never actually spelt this part of it clearly. Could you tell us now? (a) What exactly (in concrete terms) is Daoist enlightenment? (b) How exactly does one attain to it? And (c) What is the point of it, why do it?

You know, like Catholic Christian salvation is getting awoken after a long sleep by Jesus and his friends, and taken up to his palace in the skies, there to have the mother of all holidays. In perpetuity. And how you do this is by believing in Jesus, through “works” (like the Jesuits, for example), by kowtowing to the Church and its clergy, by paying a tenth of your income to fund the Pope’s palace, et cetera.

And why you do it, is because lolling on a cloud in heaven and listening to angels playing the lute is in every way preferable to the alternative, which is being roasted by the devil and being subjected to other similar torture. Like Theravadin Buddhist Nirvana is total cessation : and such cessation does not happen automatically on death, but is to be consciously sought by the eight-fold path and by methodically removing all desire and all identification with the self through a fairly structured process of meditation, et cetera.

And why you do it, is because this is the only way to escape suffering that otherwise has no end. Even Zen, vague though it is, shares that definition of Nirvana, and that basic rationale, and also does have a fairly structured means (non-processes/non-practices like Zazen and Koans, as well as the occasional blow to the head, et cetera) of approaching it.

What about Taoism?

Yikes. I have no idea what Taoist enlightenment is.

Like I said, I just really enjoy the notion that I'm enlightened, or at least well on the road to this state of being. It seems like a cool thing to be able to put on my bio. Achieved enlightenment at the age of 66. 

Which, of course, happens to be my current age. So if I want my bio to have any credibility, I need to be able to defend my claim of impending, if not actual, Taoist enlightenment.

Fortunately, in the course of re-reading Raymond M. Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent," I came across some passages that indicate both what Taoist enlightenment is, thereby answering the commenter's question, and some pretty damn persuasive proof that I am Taoistically enlightened. 

Also, that you might well be. Along with countless other people. Here's some of what Smullyan had to say on the subject.

As I see it, the completely unenlightened man believes there is such a thing as death and that death is tragic. The slightly more enlightened man believes there is an afterlife. The still more enlightened man believes there is no afterlife, but that death is not tragic.

The man more enlightened yet does not believe in death at all (except, of course, in the trivial biological sense), not does he necessarily believe in an afterlife. The next stage of enlightenment is to realize that life and death are both purely illusory; they have existence in the phenomenal but not in the noumenal world.

At a still higher stage, one realizes that all talk of life and death totally misses the mark.

...Thus, as I have said, at a certain high stage of enlightenment, one realizes that all thoughts of life and death are futile. Finally, the completely enlightened man even transcends the above realization, and simply ceases to think about life and death at all.

Therefore I say that the truly enlightened man hearing the tolling of a bell would simply enjoy the experience for what it is, and have no such foolish and "arty" thoughts about its connection with life and death.

In this respect he is like my dogs who, upon hearing a bell, would not in a million years have any such ridiculous idea as that it is "tolling their lives away." My attitude is very much like that of the poet Basho when he wrote:

Admirable is he, who when he
see lightning, does not say
"Life goes by like a flash"

I've seen a lot of lightning in my life. I'm pretty sure that I've never thought Life goes by like a flash after seeing a lightning strike. Ergo, I am enlightened.

Case closed! Enlightenment diploma, please!

Great Taoist view of free will and determinism

Free will fascinates me. I don't believe it exists. Yet it sure seems like I have it.

Of course, if the cosmos has determined that I shall believe in free will, even though it is an illusion, I have no choice but to feel like I have free will.

(Type "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar to find my many blog posts on this subject that I couldn't help but write.)

Today I was re-reading a chapter in one of my favorite books, Raymond Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent."

Below are some excerpts from Is God a Taoist? Smullyan's take on free will and determinism from a Taoist perspective is pretty damn brilliant.

Reminds me of Alan Watts. But Smullyan is a mathematical logician (so says the back of his book), so he has a unique way of writing about this stuff.

HIs chapter consists of a dialogue between God and a Mortal.

MORTAL: Anyway, it is reassuring to know that my natural intuition about having free will is correct. Sometimes I have been worried that determinists are correct.

GOD: They are correct.

MORTAL: Wait a minute, now, do I have free will or don't I?

GOD: I already told you you do. But that does not mean determinism is incorrect.

MORTAL: Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature, or aren't they?

GOD: The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies.

Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.

...MORTAL: So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?

GOD: It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear.

Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you."

Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin?

Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish.

If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial. 

How our non-easy-care yard enlightens me

I don't really believe in enlightenment. But I'd still like to be enlightened.

Just seems like a cool state to be in. Akin to stoned, I suppose (a state of being I'm much more familiar with), but without having to imbibe psychoactive substances. 

So I like to think that our yard is enlightening me, chore by chore. After 25 years of taking care of our non-easy-care property in rural south Salem, Oregon, I've had plenty of time to ponder the Meaning Of It All.

For a long time I envisioned that what I was doing with all my mowing, fertilizing, weeding, planting, chopping, trimming, and such was keeping our yard in a condition that we could sit back and enjoy after all the work was done.

Yeah, I know. That sounds stupid, doesn't it? I can't believe that I actually believed this for so long, because it never came to pass. 

OK, not so much never, as rarely.

During that quarter century the moments we've sat on our deck and adoringly gazed at our landscaping have been far exceeded by the moments my wife and I have been busting our butts taking care of the damn yard.

Damn yard.

That's how I've viewed it much of the time, sort of akin to a high-maintenance lover that you can't bear to part with because she's so seductively attractive, but damn, it sure would be nice if she didn't need so much attention.

Today, as I was watering, mowing, and edging, I was struck more than ever by a truism whose truth I continually keep remembering and forgetting, remembering and forgetting, remembering and forgetting.

(Maybe enlightenment is doing neither?)

As soon as I make a distinction between what I'm doing, and the hoped-for enjoyment produced by what I'm doing, I'm screwed. Then I'm on the Hamster Wheel of Happiness where, I imagine, just one more freaking movement of my paws will result in me getting to a blessed state of rest. 

Problem is, I never get there. The big wheel of my life just keeps on turning, exactly as Tina Turner said way back when.

Doing my yard maintenance thing this afternoon, I felt more of my someday illusions falling away.

All of the enjoyment I'm ever going to get from our yard, every bit of it, is part and parcel of me wrestling the mower around tight corners, edging the grass with dry dust and bark flying up and hitting me in the face, carrying heavy bags of fertilizer around, digging holes for new plants in rocky hard clay soil. 

If I'm not enjoying our yard while I'm out working in it, then when am I?

In that mythical moment when nothing else is on my mind except Yard Enjoyment? In that fantasized time when I'm calm, relaxed, peaceful, at ease with the world, gazing upon our yard with serene satisfaction? 

Yeah, right. Not going to happen.

Waiting for a time to arrive that isn't this time is me jumping back on the Hamster Wheel of Happiness. After sixty-six years of scurrying along on my little paws, you'd think I'd have realized by now that the motion of the wheel is identical to the flow of my enjoyment.

Which reminds me of our waterfall and bubbler. Doesn't look like much in this photo, does it? That's because the water in the real thing is constantly flowing, making pleasant water-sounds. Freezing reality in a photo captures some of it, but leaves out the most important part.

Movement. Life. Energy. 

Paying attention seems to be the main lesson our yard is teaching me.

Awareness. Mindfulness. Whatever meaningless bullshit word I come up with that doesn't begin to describe the Zen'ish hit-me-with-a-stick enlightenment moments I keep on having, and keep on forgetting, while doing yard work.

When I'm simply doing whatever it is I'm doing, enjoyment freely flows out of my hamster wheel of doing.

When I'm bitching and complaining and feeling sorry for myself and looking forward to getting these goddamn chores done because I'm too old for all this yard-care crap and when the hell am I going to be able to sit back and be that relaxed retired guy I thought I'd be -- that's when our yard turns into the insufferable high-maintenance bitch I wish would get out of my life.

I learned this lesson back in college, 1968 I think it was, when I spent a summer working in a San Jose cannery. But like I keep saying, I'm good at forgetting stuff that needs remembering.

Then, benzedrine, "bennies," was my teacher.

Working the night shift, assigned the shittiest jobs because I was new, I'd find myself stooping under the conveyor belts, wearing rain gear, holding a high pressure hose, my job being to keep fruit pulp from accumulating on the concrete floor. 

For half the night, until my "lunch" break at 3 am, or thereabouts, I hated that job. Hated it with a passion.  All it took was a single benzedrine with my meal to change my outlook completely. 

Then I loved my hosing.

With complete attention to what I was doing, no thought of anything else, because my mind was zeroed in like a laser on the One Thing to be done, I washed the pulp down drains with exquisite artistic grace.

Yes, neurotransmitters in my brain had been altered by the benzedrine. So arguably I was in an unnatural state of consciousness. I just don't feel like making that argument. The dividing line between "natural" and "unnatural" is so fuzzy, it might as well be nonexistent. 

I felt sort of similar this afternoon.

During most of the time I worked in our yard I was enjoying what I was doing because I wasn't resisting it. I wasn't wishing that I was doing something else. I wasn't looking upon the chores as being a prerequisite to a higher state of yard-happiness.

I was simply doing what I was doing. 

Which, writing those eight words just now, seems like a marvelously inane thing to say. Well, so be it. I'm losing my ability to tell the difference between inane and wise, meaningless and meaningful, shallow and profound.

This is part of an area in our yard that I started working on last winter. We'd let it go, in part because it lies under some large fir and oak trees that drop copious leaves, branches, needles, and such. 

Over the years all sort of brushy plants had taken root in the area. It looked natural, but not in a pleasing way. So I took it upon myself to remove all of the vegetation aside from the native Oregon Grape. This required a lot of cutting, hauling, and burning.

Along with painstaking care, sorting out the strands of Oregon Grape from all of the other woody stuff that had taken root in the area. After that was done, I bought containers of Oregon Grape from a nursery, along with native Bearberry ground cover.

Planting that stuff was, um, a bear. 

A gardener guy who helps us out did some of the planting, but I did most of it. The man who owned our house before us had a cement mixer next to that area. The top of it, and the slope, is filled with gravel and small rocks. 

Was it worth all the time and effort I put into it? 

I don't like that question. Not any more. Not in my mildly-enlightened state of mind our yard has helped me achieve after twenty-five years of living here. 

Worth implies there is a difference between that word and time and effort. I've enjoyed all the work I've put into this part of our yard. Today I enjoyed watering the recently-planted Oregon Grape and Bearberry. Maybe it will die. Maybe it won't grow very well. Maybe it won't look very good.

So be it. 

More and more, I'm letting go of expectations for our yard. It is what it is. Here. Now. 

I can't say that I'm totally absorbed in my own yard-care consciousness, though. Everything my wife and I do seems to revolve around a higher power we bow down to with abject devotion.