Church of the Churchless

Militants kill 305 Sufis in the name of God. Religions are crazy.

All terrorist attacks are despicable and difficult to comprehend. But when Muslim militants killed 305 Sufis, members of their own religion whose supposed crime is viewing Islam differently -- that's freaking insane. 

Back in my true believing days, before I saw the atheist light, for several years I became a huge fan of Rumi. I bought just about every English language book about Rumi and his teachings. Rumi was a Sufi. So this helps explain my outrage at the killings in the Sinai Peninsula. 

Here's some excerpts from a New York Times story, "Who Are Sufi Muslims and Why Do Some Extremists Hate Them?"

Sufism is a mystical form of Islam, a school of practice that emphasizes the inward search for God and shuns materialism. It has produced some of the world’s most beloved literature, like the love poems of the 13th century Iranian jurist Rumi. Its modern-day adherents cherish tolerance and pluralism, qualities that in many religions unsettle extremists.

But Sufism, often known as Islamic mysticism, has come under violent attack in recent years. On Friday, militants stormed a Sufi mosque on the Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 305 people in what officials are calling the worst terrorist attack in Egypt’s modern history. The attack followed several assaults on Sufi shrines in Pakistan over the past year carried out by Sunni extremists. (The vast majority of Sufis are Sunni, though some are Shiite.)

What is this form of Islamic belief, and why has it come under assault?

...Sufism, known as tasawwuf in the Arabic-speaking world, is a form of Islamic mysticism that emphasizes introspection and spiritual closeness with God.

While it is sometimes misunderstood as a sect of Islam, it is actually a broader style of worship that transcends sects, directing followers’ attention inward. Sufi practice focuses on the renunciation of worldly things, purification of the soul and the mystical contemplation of God’s nature. Followers try to get closer to God by seeking spiritual learning known as tariqa.

...Sufism has shaped literature and art for centuries, and is associated with many of the most resonant pieces of Islam’s “golden age,” lasting from roughly the eighth through 13th centuries, including the poetry of Rumi.

In modern times, the predominant view of Sufi Islam is one of “love, peace, tolerance,” Mr. Knysh explained, leading to this style of worship becoming synonymous with peace-loving Islam.

...The Islamic State targets Sufis because it believes that only a fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam is valid.

Some fundamentalists see the reverence for saints, which is common in Shiite Islam, as a form of idolatry, because in their view it shows devotion to something other than the worship of a singular God. Some consider Sufis to be apostate, because saints were not part of the original practice of Islam at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, who died in 632.

...Imam Feisal said that attacks on Sufi worshipers, besides being a “major sin,” are the result of the politicization of religion in the region over the past few decades. Egypt, in particular, he said, is a place where that politicization has fueled extremism.

“When religion becomes politicized,” Imam Feisal said, “it is not good.”

America versus the Godless Civilized World: we're crazily religious

I just finished reading a disturbing chapter in Kurt Andersen's book, "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire."

Disturbing, because in America Versus the Godless Civilized World: Why Are We So Exceptional?, Andersen presents facts about our zealous religiosity that sent chills up my atheist spine.

These facts weren't totally new to me. But they were conveyed in a way that made it clearer than ever how religiously wacko the United States is -- not only compared to other advanced countries, but even countries with a reputation for religious mania.

Here's some quotes from the chapter:

According to a Gallup Poll in 1968, only 5 percent to 14 percent of Scandinavians said they attended church every week, as opposed to 43 percent of Americans at the time. And religious commitment in most of Europe has plummeted ever since. In the U.K. in 1985, for instance, a third of people said they had no religion at all; by 2012 it was up to half.

Unlike the Earth's other moderns, we have rushed headlong back toward magic and miracles, crazifying some legacy churches, filling up the already crazy ones, inventing all kinds of crazy new ones.

The loosest measure of religiosity doesn't require any particular belief in the impossible: Does religion play a very important role in your life? is a survey question Pew asks in dozens of countries. 

At the top of the rankings are African and Muslim and Latin American countries, as well as India and the Philippines -- places where between 61 percent and 97 percent of the people say religion is very important in their lives. 

In the developed world, the percentages range from 11 percent in France to 33 percent in Britain -- except, of course, for the United States, where it's 59 percent, right between Turkey and Lebanon. 

The results are the same again and again, no matter how or where the questions are posed.

A majority of Americans tell Pew they pray every day; in the rest of the developed world, those fractions are one-tenth or one-fifth. Elsewhere in the developed world around half the people never pray; only one in nine Americans admit they never pray. 

Among the citizens of twenty-three countries surveyed in 2011 by the international research firm Ipsos, people in only three -- Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey -- believe in heaven and hell more than Americans do. Our faith in an afterlife is greater, for instance, than that of Mexicans, Brazilians, and Saudi Arabians. 

While a majority of Americans think the devil is in some sense real, in nearly all other predominantly Christian countries, even the Philippines, devil believers are small minorities.

Is the Bible "the actual word of God... to be taken literally, word for word?" Although more than a quarter of Americans think so, in the rest of the rich world, the actual-word-of-God populations range from 4 percent to 10 percent.

Did God create humans in finished form at the start? Among people in thirty-four more-developed countries asked whether they accept evolution, the United States is second from the bottom, ahead only of Turkey. On a different list of two dozen countries ranked by belief in evolution, Americans' disbelief is exceeded only by that of people in South Africa, Brazil, and three Muslim countries.

Although the United States is by far the largest importer of things, we have become the world's great net exporter of fantasy. For the last century, we have created, defined, and dominated the ever-exapanding, increasingly global culture industry -- from advertising to movies to recorded music to television and digital games.

Alongside the shiny pop-cultural fantasies, we're also phenomenally successful exporters of exciting fantasy religion. The market is the Third World, and we are saturating it. 

A century ago, right after Americans invented Pentecostalism, no more than one-tenth of one percent of earthlings were Pentecostals and  charismatics. Today it's 10 percent, one hundred times as many, more than half a billion Christians -- including a large majority of the world's Protestants -- who believe they're routinely speaking in a mystical holy language,  curing illness by laying on of hands, hearing personally from God.

...Why are we so peculiar? Why did Americans keep inventing religions and maintain so many beliefs that people in other affluent countries never took up or else abandoned? 

...Most of the scholars examining this question, because they're scholars, and thus are expected to stay in their lanes and suppress tendentious speculations and hunches, exclude the X-factor, our peculiar and multifaceted American credulity that is the subject of this book.

Tocqueville's archetypal American in the 1830s stopped his frenzied making and selling to think impractical thoughts only when "his religion... bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven." 

Over the next two centuries, as we ran out of New World forests and frontiers to clear and settle, as life kept getting easier (and for many of the least fortunate over the last couple of decades, gloomier), we've extended those occasional glances toward Heaven into a fixed and frenzied stare.

Like I said, this is disturbing. 

Americans' credulity regarding God and all things supernatural predisposes them to also believe in other falsehoods: for example, that human-caused climate change isn't happening; that tax cuts somehow produce more revenue for the government; that homosexuality is a choice; that an embryo is a full-blown person with concomitant rights.

Religion is bad enough as it is. Adding to the badness are the side effects of religiosity caused by a propensity to elevate unfounded personal belief above demonstrable fact- and reason-based truths. 

Sadly, many Americans consider our over-the-top love of religion to be something to be proud of, a faith-filled badge of honor. Actually it is an embarrassment. 

 

What does it mean if you are, because you have to be?

The title of this blog post sounds like a theological or philosophical question. Actually, it is an outgrowth of a scientific theory, that of eternal inflation. 

Which doesn't mean that the price of stuff keeps going up forever. In this context it means universes being created without end. So in an infinity of universes, there is room for anything and everything to happen. 

However, even though the question of meaning in an inflationary universe has a scientific origin, physicist Brian Cox says that answers to this question can arise from anyone, which naturally includes you and me. 

Here's an excerpt from Cox's book, "Human Universe." Note that he uses the word probably to describe eternal inflation. This is a theory, not a proven scientific fact. 

And so we reach the end. Defining the Big Bang as the initial hot, dense phase of our observable universe that gave rise to the CMB [Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation] 380,000 years later, we understand what happened before.

There was a period of inflationary expansion, which could have been driven by a scalar field in accord with the known laws of physics. That inflationary expansion is probably still going on somewhere, spawning an incalculable number of universes as we speak, and it will continue doing this forever.

We live in an eternal universe, in which anything that can happen does happen. And we are one of the things that can happen. 

Did the whole universe have a beginning, an essential external cause in the spirit of Leibniz's God? We still don't know. Possibly there was a 'mother of all Big Bangs', and if so, we will certainly need a quantum theory of gravity to say anything more.

What does this mean? 

The wonderful thing for me is that nobody knows, because the philosophical and indeed theological consequences of eternal inflation have not been widely debated and discussed. My hope is that in trying to summarize the issues, regrettably briefly and necessarily superficially in the television series and in a little more depth here, these ideas will be accessible to a wider audience and stimulate discussion.

This is desirable and necessary, because ideas are the lifeblood of civilisation, and societies assimilate ideas and become comfortable with their implications through understanding and debate.

If eternal inflation is the correct description of our universe, it will be the artists, philosophers, theologians, novelists and musicians, alongside the physicists, who explore its meaning.

What does it mean if the existence of our universe is inevitable? What does it mean if we are not special in any way? What does it mean if our observable universe, with all its myriad galaxies and possibilities, is a vanishingly small leaf on an ever-expanding fractal tree of universes? What does it mean if you are, because you have to be? 

I can't tell you. I can only ask -- what does it mean to you?

Meditation practices only "work" in specific cultural settings

Some people claim that specific sorts of meditation practices are akin to a science that produces the same results, no matter who is doing the meditating or where the meditation is being done.

A thoughtful piece by David L. McMahan, "How Meditation Works: Theorizing the Role of Cultural Context in Buddhist Contemplative Practices," casts doubt on this claim.

I came across McMahan's essay in a re-tweet by David Chapman of someone else's tweet:

I had to jump through some online hoops to download the PDF file. Here it is:
Download How_Meditation_Works_Theorizing_the_Role

The general thesis seems totally believable to me.

People who meditate are influenced by the culture in which they live, which includes the context of the religion or spiritual approach that their meditation practice is embedded in. So there's no such thing as a "pure" form of meditation that stands apart from the mind of the meditating person.

Here's some quotes from the essay that will give you a feel for McMahan's approach. His "Two Meditators" introduction sets the stage for later arguments.

I would like to begin with a simple proposition: meditation works. Now to a qualification that makes things more complicated: what it means for meditation to work—the work meditation does—is different, sometimes radically different, in diverse contexts.

Let me illustrate this by imagining two practitioners of the basic Buddhist meditation practice of mindfulness of the breath. One is a contemporary American female professional who practices modern insight meditation (vipassanā) and modern secular mindfulness practices.

The other is an ancient monk—let’s say around the beginning of the common era—in the movement established by Gautama the Buddha. Both are serious practitioners, and both are drawing from the same text, the locus classicus of Buddhist meditation, the Sutta on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.

They both sit down in the same posture—legs crossed, back straight, hands in the lap—and bring their attention to the movement of their breath. If we could secretly scan their brains, the same parts might be lit up with activity, while blood flow to other parts is slowed to a trickle.

The goals of these two meditators are very different. The modern woman is trying to relieve stress, get along better with other people, achieve more mindfulness in her daily life, and so on, all within her family life. The ancient monk is seeking to enter a transcendent state beyond rebirth and suffering while living in a monastery and being celibate.

But more to the point, similar meditation practices are apparently accomplishing aims—for example, “engag[ing] the world rather than withdraw[ing] from it”—nearly the opposite of the ideals of ancient meditation practices, which explicitly recommended withdrawal from the world. The work meditation does, therefore, is determined by the surrounding ideas, aims, attitudes, and cultural context of the practitioner.

Again, such practices do not simply produce particular, precisely reproducible mental “states” that are the same across time and space. They are part of larger complexes of ways of being in the world in particular social imaginaries.

We all make maps of the world. Not geographic maps, but a mapping of how reality is and how we fit into it. Meditation isn't separate from these maps; it is part and parcel of how we view the world. So the idea that meditation shows us reality "as it is" is false. 

As McMahan says, there's a strong inclination to have experiences that conform to our map of reality. How often do Buddhist meditators have a vision of Jesus and convert to Christianity? How often do Christians have a meditative insight that leads them to convert to Islam?

Very rarely, if ever.

Most meditators have likely considered their maps to correspond to a pre-existing architecture of the mind and reality; therefore, they have considerable incentive to interpret and produce experiences that conform to the map.

Buddhist meditators, therefore, have striven to identify the markers of transition between the first jhāna and the second, to look for signs that they have attained stream entry, or to discern whether they have truly had insight into the Buddha’s teachings on impermanence.

They have questioned basic intuitions, like that of a continuing, enduring self, and instead have tried to isolate and identify the five aggregates in their own experience. In later traditions that insist that all phenomena are illusory, practitioners must train their minds to see the world itself as a dream. In some traditions, they must try to imagine the world and themselves as having Buddha nature, perfect and already awakened, despite the ample evidence to the contrary.

They must, in other words, reimagine themselves and the world in ways suggested by these maps, not only interpreting but also cultivating their experiences accordingly.

Near the end of his essay, McMahan revisits the two meditators.

Are the modern professional and the ancient monk doing something utterly different? Certainly there is overlap: both follow their breath, calm their minds and bodies, try to cultivate compassion and avoid hatred, greed, and delusion. But the familial, institutional, social, cultural, civilizational, and cosmic contexts in which they enact these values could hardly be more divergent.

The modern professional has a family to which she is deeply committed, a job that sustains her, arts and entertainment, and broader commitments to gender equality, human rights, individual choice, and many other non-negotiable goods. She lives, in other words, in an entirely different social imaginary with different default intuitions and a different repertoire of possible ways of being.

Some of the things that mindfulness helps her with are expressly forbidden the monk: parenting, money-making, love-making, play-watching. So mindfulness and meditation help to cultivate a very different kind of person in this case than in the earliest contexts (as well as monastic contexts today).

Moderns have discovered new uses for ancient tools. Clearly these are flexible practices that have been adapted today to quite different ends within very different lifeworlds.

Of course, if you really want to understand the subtleties of McMahan's excellent essay, read the entire piece.
Download How_Meditation_Works_Theorizing_the_Role
I've just shared an overview of some key concepts. Here's a quote from the end of the essay that points to McMahan's emphasis on looking at both the "inside" of the meditator and the "outside" of cultural influences to grasp what works and doesn't work in meditation.

By all means we should measure what is measurable, but we should not think that such measurements—be they oscillating brain-waves, blood flow to various parts of the brain, respiration, and so on—get down to the real “facts” about meditation to which all other “data” (beliefs, social situation, cultural factors, relations of power) are extraneous.

We must understand all of these factors together systemically. The study of meditation should not succumb to the modern cult of calculability in which something is only real when it is measurable and measured. 

Prayers are useless. Murdered victims were in a church.

Wil Wheaton, an actor, is getting criticism for this Twitter tweet that was in response to a call for prayers by House Speaker Paul Ryan following the murder of 26 people in a Texas church. 

Wheaton apologized to offended religious believers, but the points he was making really don't deserve an apology.

 

First, it is absolutely true that prayers are useless.

There's no evidence that praying changes anything in the absence of some physical action. The most scientifically rigorous study of prayer showed no effect on the recovery of people who had heart surgery (prayed-for people actually had more complications, not less).

As Wheaton said, the 26 people who were killed by Devin Patrick Kelley were sitting in a church. If they weren't praying at the exact moment Kelley began shooting, almost certainly they had been praying beforehand.

Yet politicians love to call for "thoughts and prayers" after every mass shooting. So do the anchors on cable news shows. It's a ritual that does more harm than good, as an atheist, Hemant Mehta, cogently argued in Prayer is Useless and Has a Downside.

While the main purpose of prayer may be to help others, it never demonstrably does that. Prayers benefit only those believers who say or hear them. Prayer gives them comfort. It lets them think they have some control over a situation that may be out of their hands. It’s the last resort of people who have run out of ideas, and the first resort of people who never bothered to think about how they could actually fix the problem at hand.

This is not harmless. There’s a very real downside to praying.

It lulls believers into a false sense of accomplishment. We cannot solve our problems – much less the world’s – through prayer. We often see people with good intentions praying for victims in the wake of a tragedy, but prayer is useless without action, and those actions make the prayers irrelevant. To paraphrase the great Robert Green Ingersoll, hands that help are far better than lips that pray.

I have no problem with “prayer” as an act of meditation. In fact, many atheists can tell you the benefit of silent self-reflection. The delusion occurs when you think someone else is hearing your thoughts and acting on them.

When it comes down to it, prayer is illogical, even in religious terms. If God has a plan, why try to thwart it? If God can be swayed by prayers, what kind of God would allow the horrors we see in the world? And if two devout believers pray for different things, how does God choose the winner? (I'm sure the San Antonio Spurs would love to know the answer to that.)

Prayer is nothing but a powerful placebo. We’d all be better off accepting that.

So Wheaton was completely justified in taking Paul Ryan to task for calling for prayers rather than some sort of action that would actually do something to stop more mass shootings. Here's some of what we know about the killer.

The US Air Force has said it is investigating its apparent failure to enter information about Texas shooter Devin Patrick Kelley's criminal history into the national database.

Ex-airman Kelly was court-martialled for domestic violence in 2012, and was barred from owning or buying guns.

But last year he was able to purchase a rifle he used in Sunday's attack on a small church outside San Antonio.

He killed 26 people and fled the scene. He was later found dead in his car.

The killer was able to buy an AR-15 assault rifle and other guns. He took 15 30-round magazines into the church and fired all of that ammunition at the people sitting in pews, along with the assistant pastor giving the sermon. 

I don't believe in God.

Those who do have to come to grips with the fact that being in a house of worship and offering up prayers didn't prevent 26 people from being killed. Given that fact, how could anyone conclude that more praying is going to do anything to help those at risk of a future mass shooting?

Wil Wheaton's tweet may have been politically incorrect, but it also was politically right-on as regards the reality of gun violence in this country. The reason we have more gun deaths than other advanced countries is because we have more guns and we fail to regulate them properly. 

Columnist Eugene Robinson spoke truly in "The blood of innocents is on our hands."

“Thoughts and prayers” are fine. Locking arms “through the tears and the sadness,” as President Trump prescribed, is all well and good. But none of this does a damn thing to stop, or even slow, the carnage.

...Why did he do it? We may never be certain; the assailant, 26-year-old Devin Patrick Kelley, is dead. But we can say with certainty how he did such an unspeakable thing: with a gun designed for warfare, a weapon that has no business in civilian hands.

...The United States is alone among advanced countries in having gun policies that facilitate, rather than obstruct, deadly rampages such as Kelley’s. The Supreme Court has made clear in its rulings that the Second Amendment permits reasonable gun-control measures. This crisis is political, not constitutional.

You and I have the power to elect leaders who will reduce gun violence. The blood of innocents is on our hands.

Ancient religious writings couldn't predict modern science

My wife, Laurel, has had another faithless letter to the editor published in our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal. The paper titled it, "Newspaper can't be faulted for decline in respect for God." Enjoy:

A recent letter to the editor suggested the a decline in "respect for God," even by newspapers, is responsible for an increase in crime (as supposedly evidenced by the space given to sports versus religion).

The newspaper is merely keeping up with the times and focusing on fact versus fiction.

In this day and age, people are smarter than in the past, (especially younger people) and as science evolves, they see the conflict between science and religious myths. They are increasingly non-religious and would rather spend their free time in enjoyable activities (like sports) rather than meaningless rituals and hearing someone spout the same old ancient stories that have little to do with modern life.

Perhaps if ancient religious writings are found that support facts of modern science, evolution, and which predicted a world of automobiles, solar cells, and gene therapy, people would read a big scientifically supported "religious section."

Humans gave up believing in the sun god and a myriad of other gods as science evolved. Religion is not needed for moral behavior. A number of non-religious European countries have far less violent crime. Newspapers should report on realty, not myth. That is up to churches.

Laurel Hines
Salem