Church of the Churchless

The astounding egotism of believing in an afterlife

Religious believers like to claim that they're more humble than us atheists. Their devotion to God supposedly is a reflection of a selflessness lacking in spiritual skeptics. 

Actually, the reverse is true.

It's taken me a while to realize this, in no small part because I brainwashed myself into believing otherwise during my 30+ years of religiosity. For a long time I was deeply proud of my humility. Now I understand how deluded I was. (See here and here.)

The most astounding display of religious egotism is belief in an afterlife. 

Think about it: it is obvious that all living beings are born, then die. Chickens, elephants, dogs, goldfish, spiders, pigeons -- they are all part of a natural cycle which begins with birth and ends with death. 

Atoms exist forever, so far as we know.

Everything in existence can be traced back to the big bang that marked the formation of our universe. This is a scientific truth: we are made of star stuff, since the heavier elements that comprise us were created by exploding stars billions of years ago.

But things composed of those atoms are subject to the laws of nature, such as entropy. Order inexorably turns into disorder, notably including our own bodies. We wear down. We fall apart. We die.

Every other life form on Earth accepts this, because they have no other option.

I have closely studied our dog for any sign that she is anxious about her eventual demise, or puts her canine brain cells to work pondering what will happen after she takes her last breath. But humans, as I blogged about recently, have evolved to possess a mental "strange loop" that allows us not only to be aware, but to be aware of our awareness.

(Some other animals appear to possess a form of self-awareness, yet not nearly to the degree that we Homo sapiens have.)

Understand: it is totally understandable that people want to cling to life. The members of every species do. If living and dying were viewed as equally desirable by a certain type of creature, almost certainly it wouldn't exist for very long. Thus we have a natural predilection to remain alive for as long as possible.

But the human capacity for abstraction has allowed us to come up with concepts that don't point to anything in the natural world. Like, "God," "soul," "heaven," and "afterlife." Probably our unique animal ability to foresee our own death is a major reason these religious concepts have taken root so solidly in almost every culture.

When the first humans were able to think, "One day I will be dead and gone forever," likely it didn't take long before this sort of reassuring thought followed: "Unless... God saves me." 

This also is totally understandable. It isn't true, though.

Modern science, including neuroscience, has progressed to the point that we can say with near certainty: (1) When the brain dies, we die, and (2) Further, whatever "we" are, it isn't anything separate and distinct from the workings of the brain.

Which was another point in my recent post, where I quoted Douglas Hofstadter:

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems -- vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like "I" is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be.

Religious believers, though, reject this modern scientific understanding.

They cling to an archaic assumption that people have an eternal soul-consciousness which lives on after the physical body dies. This is as false as the long-discredited belief that the Sun revolves the Earth, yet is much more difficult to dislodge -- because it is so reassuring to creatures fearful of their impending death.

Belief in an ego, a "I-ness" separate and distinct from the atoms that comprise our brain, along with everything else in the universe, this is common to almost everybody.

However, religious believers supercharge this intuitive, yet mistaken, perception with the high octane fuel of holy books, dogmatism, prayer, rituals, and devotion to an imaginary God who will embrace their supernatural soul after death. 

I reject this extreme egotism, though I admit that sometimes it still seems tempting. Having once been addicted to religion, I'm akin to a recovering alcoholic who walks by a liquor store and still feels a desire to partake -- as in the good old drunken days. 

Except... I know now that those days when I was inebriated on religious superstitions weren't so good. The pleasant feelings were founded on lies. My sense of being a humble servant of the Lord flowed from extreme egotism. 

I'll end by quoting myself (yeah, I'm still egotistical, but at least now I admit it).

Virtually every religion and spiritual path considers that its adherents have a special relationship with God or whatever other supernatural entity they believe in. 

There are so many chosen people on Earth, they vastly outnumber the unchosen, the non-special group I'm pleased to be a part of.

I understand that feeling special has its own delights.

In my case, I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization which taught that those approved for initiation by the guru had been "marked" to return to God/heaven after a karma-cleansing meditation process.

Cool!

For about 35 years I embraced the enjoyable belief that, out of all the billions of people on this planet, I was one of a relative few who were the special beloveds of the supreme being. 

Of course, devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims feel the same way, along with countless believers in other theological belief systems. 

Eventually I started to realize that all the talk I was hearing about being "humble servants of the Lord and the guru" was, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit. Genuine humility wasn't much to be seen among devotees of my spiritual organization.

Not surprising.

Since members of this group were told over and over that they've been singled out by a higher power to learn cosmic truths and experience realms of reality not available to other human beings, naturally a pervading sense of "tribal" pride was evident throughout the organization.

We were the cool kids in the spiritual lunch room. Other faiths were inferior, since they didn't have the direct connection to God we did. 

I'm happy that this form of egotism has been discarded.

Sure, I've still got lots of other self-centered tendencies rattling around in my psyche, as we all do. But to get rid of The Big One, a belief that God had chosen me to be his best buddy for eternity, whereas my infidel wife wasn't going to get the same afterlife prize -- this increased my humility quotient by a lot.

Now I don't expect that I'm going to have any different sort of afterlife anyone else does. Namely, I strongly suspect, none at all. 

I also don't expect that there is any power guiding my life which isn't also directing the lives of every other entity on Earth. 

 

"I Am a Strange Loop" -- a book that beautifully explains consciousness, soul, and I-ness

When I decluttered some bookshelves recently, and gave a bunch of books away, one of the titles in the Absolutely Must Keep pile was Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop." 

This is one of my favorite books.

It does a marvelous job of explaining the nature of mind, soul, consciousness, I-ness, and such. Hofstadter's approach is based on modern neuroscience, but he doesn't focus on brain minutia. Rather, he takes a broad perspective that ties together science, philosophy, and everyday experience in a highly convincing fashion.

I've blogged about "I Am a Strange Loop" before:

If I'm not an "I," what am I?
You're a strange loop (and that's OK)
If there's no "me," I don't have any problems
What we are: a strange loop in an ego tunnel

After picking up the book in the course of my bookshelves decluttering, I've re-read a couple of key chapters. Once again, I'm blown away by how clearly and entertainingly Hofstadter makes his case for embracing material monism rather than spiritual dualism. 

Meaning, for him (and for me), there's just one thing going on: the laws of nature operating in this physical world.

I used to believe otherwise during the more than three decades I pursued a path of daily meditation aimed at releasing my soul from the cage of my body, and materiality in general. But now I realize that I was on the wrong track.

What led me astray is a feeling that everybody in the world shares: the sensation of being a conscious living "I" that's qualitatively distinct from lifeless matter. It just seems so obvious that my consciousness inhabits a body -- rather than being part and parcel of my physical being.

Hofstadter says that he also senses this illusion. But he refuses to fall prey to it. He does, though, understand the appeal of dualism. In his Epilogue, Hofstadter says:

In Chapter 22, I discussed dualism -- the idea that over and above physical entities governed by physical law, there is a Capitalized Essence called "Consciousness," which is an invisible, unmeasurable, undetectable aspect of the universe possessed by certain entities and not others. This notion, very close to the traditional western religious notion of "soul," is appealing because it conforms with our everyday experience that the world is divided into two kinds of things -- animate and inanimate -- and it also gives some kind of explanation for the fact that we experience our own interiority or inner light, something of which we are so intimately aware that to deny its existence would seem absurd if not impossible.

...Furthermore, the idea that each of us is intrinsically defined by a unique incorporeal essence suggests that we have immortal souls; belief in dualism may thus remove some of the fear of death. It is not very hard for someone who grows up drenched in the pictorial and verbal imagery of western religion [also eastern, I have to add] to imagine a wispy, ethereal aura being released from the body of someone who has just died, and sailing up, up, up into some kind of invisible celestial realm, where it will survive eternally.

However, this view, no matter how appealing it may be, almost certainly is wrong. Most of Hofstadter's book is devoted to demolishing the arguments in favor of dualism. He does this convincingly, perhaps better than anyone else, in my decidedly personal opinion.

In the Epilogue, Hofstadter sums up his central argument: that we humans are "strange loops." Our brains have evolved the capacity to not only be aware, but to be aware of our awareness. We can abstract our experience into increasingly sophisticated concepts. This is the end result, as I quoted Hofstadter in a previous post:

That extremely slight doubt flies in the face of what we all take for granted ever since our earliest childhood, which is that "I"'s do exist—and in most people, the latter belief simply wins out, hands down. The battle is never even engaged, in most people's minds. On the other hand, for a few people the battle starts to rage: physics versus "I."

…My proposal for a truce to end this battle is to see the "I" as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the "I" as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Even though I've read all of "I Am a Strange Loop" (parts of it several times), I still have trouble understanding that last sentence. Partly this is because the "I" that feels like me seems so damn real. 

Here's how Hofstadter talks about this in the Epilogue:

A nondualistic view of the world can thus include animate entities perfectly easily, as long as different levels of description are recognized as valid. Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern, which inevitably starts to take form if a system with the inherent capacity of perceptually filtering the world into discrete categories vigorously expands its repertoire of categories ever more towards the abstract.

This pattern reaches full bloom when there comes to be a deeply entrenched self-representation -- a story told by the entity to itself -- in which the entity's "I" plays the starring role, as a unitary causal agent driven by a set of desires.

More precisely, an entity is animate to the degree that such a loopy "I" pattern comes into existence, since this pattern's presence is by no means an all-or-nothing affair. Thus to the extent that there is an "I" pattern in a given substrate, there is animacy, and where there is no such pattern, the entity is inanimate. 

OK. I realize those paragraphs aren't going to mean a whole lot to many people. So I'll end with a few more passages from the final pages of Hofstadter's book that offer a somewhat different perspective on his worldview.

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception -- the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops come into play, then "which" eventually turns into "who." What would once have been brusquely labeled "mechanical" and reflexively discarded as a candidate for consciousness has to be reconsidered.

We human beings are macroscopic creatures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.

The "I" we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behavior that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate. But this "I" notion is just a shorthand for a vast mass of seething and churning of which we are necessarily unaware.

...In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we're not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems -- vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like "I" is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be.

Secret of happiness revealed (but my wife disagrees)

In the course of de-cluttering my office yesterday, I came across a long-forgotten piece I'd written for RS Greetings, a spiritual magazine published by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, back in the days when I was a member of this India-based guru-led organization.

As I said in a 2004 post about the article, "Sadly, ego-loss didn't arrive in the mail," I'd argued with the editor of the magazine about their policy of not including the author's name. 

So I told the editor that their Anonymous policy prevented readers from offering valuable feedback, and from authors learning from those readers. That’s the way of science, open discussion and review of purported findings. The magazine powers-that-be apparently felt, however, that not publishing authors’ names was spiritually healthy. I guess not being recognized for a charitable article contribution earns more karmic Humble Points than having your name attached to it.

Naturally the first thing I did after getting a copy of the piece twelve years ago was write in my name in thick black ink. The second thing was curse at whoever failed to notice that the title of the essay misspelled "enlightenment."

Leaving that aside, when I finished re-reading "My Mini Enlightenment" after so many years I thought, Man, that's some damn fine writing, if I say so myself, about myself. 

Here's the piece, which in addition to its humor makes some semi-serious observations about what leads to happiness. Interestingly, I ended up buying a Mini Cooper S in 2011. I still have it.

I predicted at the time, "My 2011 Mini Cooper S should bring perfect happiness." I was almost right. Every time I drive it, the car makes me happy. Not perfectly happy, but happier than I am when I drive any other car. 

Often you hear the adage, material things don't bring happiness, positive experiences are what make us happy. But I don't get this. What if you need a certain material thing to have a positive experience? Anyway, read on...

My Mini Enlightenment
by Brian Hines

It was a great day when my consciousness attained a state of pristine clarity that I had never experienced before. Finally, after more than thirty years of daily meditation and deep study of the world’s most profound religious and philosophical writings, I finally knew in my heart of hearts what would bring me genuine happiness.

A Mini Cooper.

More precisely, a Mini Cooper S, racing green with a black top, navigation system, Xenon headlights, sunroof, and premium sound. I didn’t doubt that having this car in my garage would be the missing link in my spiritual evolution, because such was the evident message coming from God.

How else would you explain this miraculous series of events?

One Saturday I opened the newspaper to the weekly Auto section and found a glowing review of the new Mini Cooper. Until that day I had seen only a single Mini Cooper on the streets of my city. Then, walking to a downtown class later that morning, I espied a yellow Mini with a white top tooling down the street.

I ogle it. I go to my class. After class, I head back to my boring Volvo station wagon.

And there, at the very intersection where I had seen it two hours before, drives by the same yellow Mini with a white top. At that moment I knew that God does not speak more clearly than this to His beloved sheep, namely me, whom He wishes to make happy by generously bestowing the glorious gifts of His creation, in this case a supercharged Mini Cooper.

However, when I got home and enthusiastically shared my divine revelation with my wife, Laurel said, “How do you know it is God sending the message?” Well, the nerve! Who else could it be? “Doesn’t God want us to lessen our worldly desires rather than add to them?” she asked irritatingly. Then, as Laurel turned back to the stack of women’s clothing catalogs she was drooling over, she added, “Plus, I hate how Mini Coopers look.”

A distressing jolt of theological truth shook my psyche: man proposes, God disposes, and then the wife has the final say.

After thirty-one years of marriage I should have known that a Higher Power controls my destiny, and her name is Woman. Further proof of this came a few months later when Laurel prominently displayed a page from an issue of TIME magazine so I wouldn’t miss the article called “No Price Tag on Happiness.”

To make sure I got the point, she crossed out “Porsche” and wrote in “Mini Cooper” on the first sentence: “Think that Porsche and boat and beach house you have been dreaming of would make you happy? Think again.” The article went on to say that Richard Easterlin, an economist, had found that “while healthy people are generally happier than unhealthy ones and married people are happier than unmarrieds, increases in wealth and material possessions improve happiness only briefly.”

Well, since I’m healthy and married this was good news as regards my happiness potential.

But since I had been counting on being even happier once I was healthy, married, and a Mini Cooper owner, this also was bad news. So I chucked the magazine in the recycling bin and looked forward to forgetting all about this happiness research, memories of which were taking up brain cells that I needed for more fantasies about my dream car.

Unfortunately, soon I couldn’t help noticing another article on the New York Times web site about the same subject. This article had an even blunter title: “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness.” It went on in this vein for seven pages. After I had finished reading it I could see my Mini Cooper dreams being crushed in the harsh wrecking yard of psychological research reality.

The gist of the article was that people aren’t very accurate in predicting what effect an event will have on their happiness. “On average,” I read, “bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.”

So according to researcher Daniel Gilbert, “Things that happen to you or that you buy and own—as much as you think they make a difference to your happiness, you’re wrong by a certain amount. You’re overestimating how much of a difference they make. None of them make the difference you think. And that’s true of positive and negative events.”

It seems that each of us has a happiness set point that we have a strong tendency to return to, no matter what we do or what happens to us.

Like sine waves, we cycle up and we cycle down, but overall we don’t stray very far from the straight line that is our inherent level of happiness. We imagine that this or that will make us much more happy or much more unhappy, but we aren’t good at predicting our level of future happiness once this or that happens.

Not that it matters much. Because whether our happiness trends up or down in the short-term, most events in our lives don’t have a lasting effect on our basic sense of well-being. And this is where happiness research seems to have some profound spiritual implications.

If we can’t tell what will make us happy, and if our happiness tends to revert to a base level, then we shouldn’t worry nearly as much as we do about seeking out supposed good things and avoiding supposed bad things. For we can’t predict what is “good” or “bad.” And even if we could, so what? For soon our happiness level will come down from the good that made it rise, or will bounce back from the bad that made it fall.

The implication is that it is more important to raise our whole happiness set point to a higher base level. This is one of the effects of enlightenment, spiritual illumination, satori, psychological breakthrough, whatever you want to call it. Not relying on outer events or other people to make us happy is the true key to happiness. Since happiness is within, that’s where we’ll find it, not outside.

Marcus Aurelius, the philosophical second-century Roman emperor, wrote in his Meditations, “Happiness, by derivation, means ‘a good god within.’” Such is the meaning of eudaimonia, the Greek word for happiness. Thus happiness and spirituality go hand in hand.

I know this. I really do. Still, I can’t forget a conversation I had with a Mini Cooper S owner, Bill, in which we managed to arrive at a wonderfully supportive pseudo-Taoist foundation for our autoholic tendencies.

We reasoned that to be attached to non-attachment is itself an attachment.

So if it doesn’t matter whether things are this way or that, whether one owns a Mini Cooper or not, then why not have a Mini Cooper? So the Mini Cooperist sage detaches from non-attachment, and attaches himself to an automotive attachment, so that he stays centered close to the divine still point between detachment and attachment.

Now, since I’d like to aid Bill’s further spiritual progress, I figure that what he needs to do at this point is detach himself from his present attachment and sell his Mini Cooper to me for a song. Research predicts the car won’t make me happy for long, but since I feel that God wants me to test that hypothesis, who can stand in the way of sacred science?

Two people, unfortunately: Bill, and my wife.

Empty bookshelves reflect my religious deconversion

I love books. I learn a lot from books that I've bought. 

But yesterday I also learned a lot from deciding which books to give away (to the Friends of Salem Library, who sell them to support the library).

Two large bookshelves and a small bookshelf no longer fit our living room's decor. So my home decorating guru, a.k.a. My Wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed, let it be known that it was time to move the bookshelves into my office.

Which meant, I had to remove all of the books. Then decide which ones I wanted to keep. Most of the books fell into a Meaning of Life category: religious, spiritual, mystical, philosophical, scientific. 

Since I'd accumulated them over a long time -- some dated from my college years, 1966-71 -- they spanned many changes in how I viewed the nature of the cosmos. So picking each one up, glancing at the title and back cover, thumbing through the pages, looking at notes and highlighting I'd left, trying to remember how I felt after reading the book, all this forced me to consider whether a book I was holding was compatible with my current outlook on life, reality, and the universe.

I'd bought and partially read Marie Kondo's book, "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing." Having found that her adage, does an item spark joy?, worked well in deciding what t-shirts I should get rid of, this was the main question I had in my mind as I pondered the keepability of my living room books.

A majority weren't keepers. These books await boxing up and transporting to the Friends of Salem Library folks.

I found that I no longer felt any spark of joy for many books that once enthralled me. I used to devour every English translation of Meister Eckhart and Rumi that I could find, along with some Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross. Now, though, the mystical books seemed empty of meaning, fantasies about spiritual realms that existed only in the worshipful mind of the beholder.

Many books that tried to bridge the divide between spirituality and science also didn't make it into the Keep pile. These weren't so easy to discard, but I realized that I just was no longer into attempts to interpret scientific discoveries as reflecting a supernatural reality. 

(Even though I'd written such a book myself.)

Less than half of the books I'd once cherished made it onto the bookshelves that now resided in my office/meditation area. Before, all ten shelves had been filled with books. Now, less than five contained the Meaning of Life books that once graced our living room.

It felt good to do the decluttering thing. To make what was on the bookshelves match much more closely with the leanings of my mind -- that struck me as a wonderfully harmonious thing to do. After it was done.

The process of deciding which books to keep, and which to give away, wasn't all that easy. At one time I'd been friends with most of the books. We related with each other. We had a lot in common. Sometimes it was painful to put a book in the Give Away pile after viewing all the highlighting and notes I'd left in the pages. 

But, hey, change happens. Some subjects that once brought delight to my reading eyes aren't of interest to me anymore. Others still are.

I'm keeping my stack of  Religious Skeptic books by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and others. A few mystic writings stay on a shelf for old times sake: some Rumi, Ramana, Eckhart. 

My Taoism and Buddhism collections were culled to some degree, but not a whole lot. They still fit in pretty comfortably with my current worldview. As do the many physics, cosmology, and neuroscience books I keep on accumulating. I kept the newer ones, and discarded most of the older ones, because science moves on.

It probably won't take long for the empty spaces on the bookshelves to be filled in. For now, though, I enjoy looking at the blankness. This reminds me how much more we humans always have to learn, compared to what we know now.

Which is a big reason why I've come to reject the false knowing of religions. They wrongly believe in supernatural stuff that almost certainly isn't true, while rejecting scientific knowledge that almost certainly is true. 

Donald Trump's "spirituality" makes a mockery of that word

I used to think that I knew what it meant to be "spiritual." Now, I don't. (See here and here.) 

But whatever the word means, I'm pretty damn sure that Donald Trump doesn't have any sort of genuine spirituality -- unless we twist the definition of that term to include incessant lying, habitual displays of egotism, and insults directed at minorities, women, political opponents, and anybody else who incurs the Wrath of Trump.

So when I came across a story in TIME magazine, "Meet the Pastor Who Prays With Donald Trump," I was curious to learn more about Trump's personal brand of religiosity/spirituality. 

First, I was surprised that he even has a relationship with a pastor, Paula White.

I'd figured that he started talking about the Bible only after he decided to run for President, realizing that in these excessively religious United States, people are more likely to vote for a Muslim than an atheist. 

However, Elizabeth Dias reported otherwise.

The spiritual life of the Republican nominee has been something of a mystery this election season. Trump describes himself as a Presbyterian, a “Sunday church person,” and he has been known to bring his childhood Bible to rallies. But his religious expressions have often been uncertain. He publicly doubted whether he deserves evangelicals’ support, claimed he has never sought forgiveness from a higher power, and muffed a Bible citation, quoting “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians.”

But Trump’s relationship with White isn’t an overnight conversion; it’s born of a longer courtship. The two friends met in 2002, after he watched White deliver a televised sermon on the value of vision. A longtime fan of televangelists David Jeremiah, Jimmy Swaggart, and Billy Graham, he cold-called White to introduce himself. Later he asked if she would attend the first season finale of his reality show, The Apprentice. Before the live taping, she prayed for the cast and crew.

OK, naturally I don't believe that prayer does anything, since almost certainly there is no God or other higher power able to hear prayers. But Pastor White's conception of prayer is even weirder than than of most Christians. 

Eric Trump is not the only member of his family who has come to rely on White, 50, a popular televangelist who believes that intercessory prayer can have an immediate impact on shaping events. After she saw Eric, she went to her room in the Trump campaign’s Cleveland hotel, where she spent the next four hours praying for Donald Trump as he prepared for his prime-time convention address. Then at the candidate’s invitation, she met the Republican nominee, his wife Melania and 10-year old son Barron for another circle of prayer in their room.

“I do remember asking God to give him his words and his mind, and to use him—that it would not be his words but God’s words, that he would just really be sensitive to the Holy Spirit,” White recalled in an interview with TIME weeks later. “I probably [interceded] against any plot or plan or weapon of the enemy to interfere with the plan or the will of God.” That evening, White rode in Trump’s car with his family to the arena.

Plot or plan or weapon of the enemy? What the #@$%? White must be referring to THE DEVIL. Unless she means Hillary Clinton, who many Republicans view as one and the same.

Paula White

Wondering what causes Trump to be so attracted to Pastor White (aside from the obvious), I had the bright idea of Googling "Pastor Paula White prosperity gospel." 

And yes indeed'y, up popped a bunch of references to her peculiar take on Christianity. Like a Washington Post story, "How the prosperity gospel explains Donald Trump's popularity with Christian voters."

The key bulwark of faith-based Trumpism is the prosperity gospel — a movement rooted in Pentecostal preaching that holds that God directly dispenses divine favor in the capitalist marketplace to his steadfast believers. Trump assiduously courted the leading lights of the prosperity faith well before his presidential run got serious enough for him to make the obligatory rounds at hard-line evangelical gatherings, such as last month’s Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference.

Last year, he hosted a conclave of three dozen leading prosperity preachers at Trump Tower, and his effort promptly netted him the vocal support of prosperity televangelist Paula White. Indeed, White is reputed to have presided over Trump’s born-again conversion.

So like everything else in Trump's wacko view of reality, it all comes down to money. If you're rich, this shows how much God favors you.

It's no wonder Trump embraces Pastor White. Her bizarre theology fits right in with Trump's greed.