Church of the Churchless

In Saudi Arabia, atheists are considered terrorists

Kind of jarring news, given that President Trump (geez, I hate to write those two words) just returned from his visit to Saudi Arabia, all enthused about how great his talks with Saudi officials/royalty were.

So today I come across a 2014 story in the Independent, "Saudi Arabia declares all atheists are terrorists in new law to crack down on political dissidents." 

In a string of royal decrees and an overarching new piece of legislation to deal with terrorism generally, the Saudi King Abdullah has clamped down on all forms of political dissent and protests that could "harm public order".

The new laws have largely been brought in to combat the growing number of Saudis travelling to take part in the civil war in Syria, who have previously returned with newfound training and ideas about overthrowing the monarchy.

To that end, King Abdullah issued Royal Decree 44, which criminalises "participating in hostilities outside the kingdom" with prison sentences of between three and 20 years, Human Rights Watch said.

Yet last month further regulations were issued by the Saudi interior ministry, identifying a broad list of groups which the government considers to be terrorist organisations - including the Muslim Brotherhood.

Article one of the new provisions defines terrorism as "calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based".

Well, I guess I'm a terrorist in Saudi eyes, since I embrace atheist thought and call into question the fundamentals of Islamic religion.

Which doesn't bother me, given that I don't live in Saudi Arabia.

What's disturbing, though, is knowing that quite a few religious zealots here in the United States mistakenly view Christianity as the foundation of our county. They probably wish American atheists could be singled out just as the Saudis have done -- though I doubt they'd go as far as to call us "terrorists." 

The spiritual implications of drink when thirsty, eat when hungry

I'm a firm believer in living naturally. Not unnaturally naturally. Just naturally naturally. 

Meaning, do what is natural. But don't make a fetish out of this, don't strive to do it, because trying too hard to be natural leads to artificiality. 

When it comes to drinking and eating, here's some good advice:

Drink when thirsty. Eat when hungry. 

This sounds very Zen. And it is. But it also makes a lot of scientific sense. For example, check out "Just drink water when you're thirsty like a normal person, study finds."

After much deliberation, a 17-member expert panel representing four countries and nine specialties, including sports medicine, body fluid homeostasis and exercise physiology, have come to the research-based consensus that people should really just, well, drink water when they’re thirsty, you know?

...Yep, after countless blog posts and huge amount of research, the truth is you should really just use your “innate thirst mechanism to guide fluid consumption.” As in, you should just take a sip of water when you want to take a sip of water, rather than loading up on ridiculous amounts of H20 before you go through a limits-testing workout.

Likewise, "Eating when you're hungry versus eating on schedule" says:

Retrain yourself to recognize feelings of hunger and respect them. Eat when you feel them and stop when they stop. Don’t eat when you’re not hungry. This approach starts with eating breakfast, planning snacks, or eating only part of your lunch and saving the rest for a snack later on in the afternoon. Eat regular meals but don’t eat by the clock.

We should trust our natural inclinations. Us humans have been around in our Homo sapiens form for about 250,000 years. For almost all of that time people weren't telling other people how to drink fluids and how to eat food. They just did what came naturally.

Of course, in prehistoric times there were moments when the right thing to do was gorge oneself when scarce food became available, and drink excessively when rarely-found water was discovered.

In these modern times, most of us have a steady supply of food and water. So we can actually live more naturally than our ancestors, since it is easier for us to follow the adage: Drink when thirsty. Eat when hungry. 

This works for me.

Rather than carry a gigantic water bottle around when I work out at an athletic club (as I see many other people doing for no good reason), I take a couple of sips of water from a drinking fountain when I feel thirsty. And I've found that I'm able to keep my weight where I want it to be if I pay attention to whether I'm really hungry, or if I just have the idea of wanting to eat something (out of boredom, habit, or some other non-hunger reason).

Now, thirst and hunger arise from physiological needs. We need water and food to survive. Too little isn't good for us; too much isn't good for us. Following our natural desire to drink and eat usually works out well for us. 

What about the drive to "gorge" on God, though? Where does this come from? 

Obviously a desire to pursue divinity isn't natural in the way seeking food and water is. Lots of people live a deeply fulfilling life without paying any attention to God or some other supernatural entity. There are no discernible ill effects from failing to fill one's mind with thoughts and emotions concerning God.

Further, there are no evident outward signs of God or any other transcendent divinity, in contrast to the obviousness of water and food. How does someone assuage their thirst or hunger for God when there is no demonstrable observable evidence of the entity being sought for?

Short answer: this is impossible. God doesn't exist in any objective fashion. God is only as real as the mental beliefs people have about this hypothesized divinity. 

So I don't see how it is possible to have a natural desire for God.

I can drink when thirsty. I can eat when hungry. However, there is no corresponding natural impulse to embrace God, because God only exists as a concept in human minds. There is no way to assuage a desire for a concept as there is for fulfilling a desire to drink or eat. 

Water and food are real. God isn't.

Again, only the idea of God possesses a limited subjective reality. Thus religious believers are in much the same position as someone who drinks and eats not because they have a natural need to do this, but because they have an artificial idea that it's the right thing to do. 

Understand: there's nothing wrong with ideas. Ideas are wonderful things. So are beliefs, one form ideas come in. We just shouldn't mistake mental creations that exist nowhere outside of  the  human mind for an objectively real entity. 

Like water and food. 

This is why some people spend a lifetime seeking God, and never succeed in their quest. They are pursuing an impossible dream: to quench a thirst for divinity when the object of their desire doesn't exist. 

Having attempted this quest myself for about thirty-five years, I understand how enticing the goal of God-realization can seem. However, I'm grateful that I came to realize how false and unnatural that goal was. 

Drinking when thirsty and eating when hungry make a lot more sense to me now. I can actually do these things. Not just in my own mind, as is the case with every person's attempt to find God. But in really real reality.

Gurinder Singh: the One is the goal, God without attributes

I no longer believe in God. Meaning, a God who is this or that, a God who can be described, who can be known, who can be experienced.

But I'm very much open to the notion that One is at the heart of reality. Heck, I wrote a book called "Return to the One" about the teachings of Plotinus, a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher. 

After all, something has to have always existed, or existence wouldn't exist. So why not call this the "One"? Just don't ascribe any attributes to the One, because the One couldn't have any attributes, being, obviously, One. 

Interestingly, Osho Robbins asked a question of Gurinder Singh, the current guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (the spiritual organization I belonged to for about 35 years), that shows the guru looks upon God in much the same way as Plotinus did.

Which isn't how most RSSB disciples do.

They still think of God as some sort of person, or at least as a being that can be known. Likewise, they consider that heaven, or Sach Khand as RSSB terms it, is some sort of place rather than a quality of being or an essence of existence.

Here's what Osho Robbins sent me as a guest blog post. I'm pleased to share it. "BabaJi" is an Indian term of respect for the guru, Gurinder Singh. 

I asked BabaJi a question at the last Sunday gathering. I asked him to explain about SARGUN and NIRGUN.

His first response was “Are you trying to test me?”

I said “No,”, because I wasn’t – I just wanted him to comment on the subject.

The response he gave was pretty impressive but I somehow think hardly anyone in the congregation understood him.

What he said was that SARGUN is God with attributes – the path we all follow and NIRGUN is the goal – the God without any attributes – the ONE. Sargun is the MEANS and Nirgun is the END or GOAL.

So the Goal is to get to the ONE – where these is no duality.

This is in line with the notion that the Guru cannot come at the time of death because there is only ONE, and there is no place to take the soul.

The idea of the guru coming at death and taking the soul to Sach Khand is as naïve as the notion of Father Christmas.

Sach Khand is not a place – so why is everyone keen to go there? What do they think is awaiting them in Sach Khand?

The true goal of Sant Mat is to DIE. Meaning the EGO (the ‘I’) dies, which means there is no longer a YOU who wants to go to Sach Khand.

That is the real meaning of “die while living”. Eliminate the ego WHILE you are alive – realize there is no YOU – no separate self. Just a deluded little disciple who thinks he is privileged and will go to Sach Khand.

-- Osho Robbins

Experience of conscious will is an illusion

I don't believe in free will. But like most people, I have a feeling that my intention to do something is what causes that thing to happen. 

So we have two things going on:

(1) A scientific world view doesn't support a belief in free will. As I've written about a lot on this blog (type "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar to find the many posts), there is no evidence of an immaterial self/soul that somehow floats free of the material/physical goings-on in the human mind. So there's no entity within us which can function freely of causes and effects or the laws of nature.

(2) Yet we humans have a strong sense that our intentions lead to thoughts, actions, and everything else we're capable of doing. After all, I think type an example of a thought and the next thing I do is type "I need to finish writing this paragraph." Who the heck is controlling what I'm doing right now if it isn't my conscious intention?

Well, study carefully this photo I took of a fascinating figure in Daniel Wegner's book, "The Illusion of Conscious Will," and you'll get a very interesting explanation of why the experience of conscious will is indeed an illusion.

Note that there is an "actual" and "apparent" causal path leading to an action. 

The actual causal path flows from an unconscious cause of the action. Meaning, the human brain is doing things below the surface of awareness that cause us to do something.

At the same time, there also is an unconscious cause of thought. This takes an actual causal path in the brain that leads to a thought. 

So the brain is unconsciously causing both an action and a thought.

These two things are actually happening. However, our experience of conscious will -- the feeling that our thought or intention is what causes an action to occur -- is an illusion. This is shown in the "Apparent Causal Path" arrow leading from thought to action. 

Here's a few passages from Wegner's book that explain what is going on here. (Wegner is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.)

The experience of will, then, is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation. Because we have thoughts of what we will do, we can develop causal theories relating those thoughts to our actions on the basis of priority, consistency, and exclusivity.

We come to think of these prior thoughts as intentions, and we develop the sense that the intentions have causal force even though they are actually just previews of what we may do. 

Yet in an important sense, it must be the case that something in our minds plays a causal role in making our actions occur. That something is, in the theory of apparent mental causation, a set of unconscious mental processes that cause the action. At the same time, that something is very much like the thoughts we have prior to the action.

...We must remember that this analysis suggests that the real causal mechanisms underlying behavior are never present in consciousness. Rather, the engines of causation operate without revealing themselves to us and so may be unconscious mechanisms of mind.

...The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview your actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. 

In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of the action.

So while our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves.

This is brilliant. I'm only read about 1/4 of "The Illusion of Conscious Will," but I'm far enough into the book to have gotten a good feel for Wegner's thesis. He provides a lot of evidence to support it, both scientific and philosophical. 

Naturally spiritual (using that word broadly) implications of this illusion are easy to come by. For example, it can be argued that the so-called enlightenment of Zen, Taoism, and such simply is an intuitive seeing-through of the illusion of conscious will. 

Meaning, the illusion that "I" am determining what I do (and also by implication, what happens to me) is somehow experienced as the scientific falsity that it is. Of course, this is just a fact -- assuming Wegner's hypothesis is correct, as it seems to be -- not any sort of supernatural or mystical state of mind. 

It is just our actual state of mind, seen for what it is. It'll take another blog post to explain this more fully.