Church of the Churchless

Live as if we and our loved ones are going to die

Admittedly this isn't the cheeriest subject for New Year's Eve, the last day of 2021 -- how we should live as if we and our loved ones are going to die.

But I got to thinking about this after watching an episode in Season 1 of Dickinson, an Apple TV+ series about Emily Dickinson, the 19th century poet.

Dickinson feigns illness in order to have more time alone in order to write her poetry. Her family has a doctor examine Dickinson. Given the sad state of pre-Civil War medicine, he misdiagnoses her as having a fatal disease.

What I found fascinating was how her mother, father, and brother reacted to the prospect of Dickinson's impending demise. 

One by one, they entered her room where she supposedly was dying and proceeded to be wonderfully honest.

Rather than their usual repressed selves, playing their rigid traditional roles, they spoke freely about their life, their regrets, their secrets. They could do this because their vision of Dickinson's soon-to-be death allowed them to be who they actually were, not who they pretended to be.

Sure, there are pros and cons of such honesty. Sometimes it makes sense to wear a mask that disguises our true self.

On the whole, though, I believe we'd be better off with that sort of transparency. Life is short. We don't have much time to come closer to our loved ones, friends, acquaintances -- the people who often fail to really know us because we don't allow them to see who we really are.

Being 73, I'm well aware that death can appear in a life at any time.

My mother, father, and sister all died at about my age. So in a sense I feel that I'm living on borrowed time. Several close friends from high school died many years ago. After watching that episode of Dickinson, I'm feeling like I need to live each day with a greatfer appreciation that I'm going to die.

Not immediately, almost certainly. But it could be sooner than I've envisioned -- which tends to be about ten years older than my current age, a bet that becomes less winnable with every passing year.

It's always bothered me that a Celebration of Life for someone only happens after they've died. That's when people speak about how much the person meant to them. Nothing wrong with that, but it sure would be a heck of a lot better if that honest talk happened while the person could hear those words.

Like most of my New Year's Resolutions, I'm not sure whether I'll be able to keep up this resolve. The Dickinson episode just made me realize how much I regret not being more open with my mother, father, and sister before they died.

Unlike Dickinson's family, there was no doctor saying "Your loved one is going to die." So there wasn't a sense of urgency that might have caused me to take a chance on being more honest about my feelings toward them.

Now it's too late, obviously. I think back to the one hour I had face-to-face with my father, a tale I've told in a blog post. 

When I saw him for the first and only time in a Boston hotel room, he'd told me that he was being treated for emphysema at a Boston hospital. But there was no mention of a fatal illness. So he and I wasted that one hour, as I described in the post.

My half-brother, Mike, opened the door. Apparently my father needed some support during this visit. John walked up to me and shook my hand. We didn’t hug or anything. No tears of joy. Nothing that you see in the movies. Real life isn’t like the movies.

What is real life like? Real life is having one hour in your life face-to-face with your father, and spending that time looking at General Electric manuals that he had arranged on the bed prior to my arrival, efficiently opened up to pages that he wanted to impress me with.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I dutifully thumbed my way through manual after manual, listening to my father’s stories about how he went into GE plants that were having problems and got them back up to speed. “What the hell?” I kept thinking to myself. “If this is how my father wants to spend his time with his long-ignored son, so be it.”

We got through all of the manuals. I shook his hand again. When the door shut behind me and I started walking down the corridor to my rented car, I was so happy. Not happy that I had finally gotten to meet my father—happy that I would never have to see my father again.

Which I never did.

There's no way to revisit the past. I deeply wish I could. I'd somehow summon the courage to say, "Dad, we have so little time together. Let's be real. I don't want to look at those manuals. I want to get a glimpse of who you really are, and show you some of who I really am."

Hopefully I'll do better in the future. There's always so little time, and so much we should honestly share with those we're close to.

We humans are animals. But most of us deny this fact.

I'm enjoying Melanie Challenger's book, "How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human." Here's some excerpts about our dental that we're animal.

The point here is that life is neither straightforwardly good nor progressive. This might be unbearable if it weren't for the possibility that humans are special. Something important saves us from the threatening parts of earthly life.

We're told this comes from the heart of human nature, some essential part of us. We can't see it and we can't measure it, but it marks us out as the most important life form on Earth.

For those with deep belief in a creator, we have a soul that is unique to the human body. For secular humanist thinkers, we have soul-like mental powers that are unique to the human brain. Each is a reason for why humans aren't truly animals. At least, not in any crucial way.

...This idea -- or something like it -- has been a source of profound solace for countless human lives. Whether it's the soul or some other property, these are ways to take humans out of a bewilderingly anarchic nature.

They are methods to save humans from the difficulties that nature's amorality presents to us. The idea may take on different hues in different times and places. But there's always something transcendent about humans that rescues us.

In this way, the major theories about the significance of human lives have the distinct whiff of psychological necessity rather than rational clarity.

...Hundreds of years of denying that we're an animal has left us with inconsistencies and confusion. 

...It is a testament to the depth of our denial that we are animals that we still can't admit this. All that we do, we do as animals. But we justify it as humans. The way we've structured the world is little more than the intuition of an animal whose greater interests lie with its own kind.

But we almost never confess to this. We tell ourselves instead that we have a soul. Or, if we don't want to call it a soul, we say there is a person inside us that is more important than the body from which it's made.

In this way, the bodies of other animals mean nothing. They are bits of machinery, spare parts. We may use them as we wish.

...It's worthwhile to note that no matter how deep into the physical substances of organisms we go, we never find an edge. There's no absolute dividing line between us and other animals, nothing that can offer us an unassailable moral category.

Science now shows us not only that the lives of other organisms are far more complex and sentient than we've sought to admit, but also that our traits -- to lesser and greater degrees -- are things that nature can reinvent.

A blow to God, perhaps. A far greater threat to a rational animal convinced it's the centre of things.

While the slightest insight into our experience shows how necessary it is to care about human lives, this doesn't separate us from the rest of our planet's life. Human life remains an animal life. Our awareness and our exchanges of ideas make us a powerful and sensitive animal, but none of this brings our animal life to an end.

That this idea has had such extraordinary influence across our societies is only now becoming clear. It is surfacing because it matters now more than it ever has that ten thousand years of modernity have delivered an animal that doesn't think it's an animal.

Respect for facts is a great virtue

I'm a lover of facts. That's why I'm a hater of religion.

Ah, but don't religions seek the truth? Not really. They claim to, but only in the sense that QAnon followers believe they're truth-seekers. 

In each case, religion and QAnon, truth is viewed much more as a belief, as something they hope is the case, rather than as an aspect of objective reality.

So facts are different from truth. There's lots of ways people define those two terms, as I learned by doing some Googling. 

This article describes the difference quite clearly.

A Fact and a Truth walk into a bar and ask for a drink.

The bartender says to the Fact, “What can I get you?” clearly ignoring the Truth.

The Truth complains to the Manager that the bartender didn’t offer Truth a drink. The Manager responds, “the Bartender didn’t see you because he doesn’t believe in you”.

I have been pondering the difference for quite some time. How can multiple people look at the same situation but have vastly differing opinions on what is fact? What I have learned so far is that the difference between a fact and a truth is that a fact cannot be disputed – it is real, quantified, qualified, and measured as fact – it’s real.

A truth is not the same – it is based on belief and/or an interpretation of a fact, “You believe that something is true”.

It may NOT be true, but you believe it to be true. It could be because of where you were brought up, how your parents raised you, or the external influences during critical time periods during your life. Your belief system is borne out of those influences. Is this the reason why positions vary so wildly as it relates to the pandemic or even global warming?

Facts should be the foundation of truth. But often they're not.

This is what allows a Christian to say, "I speak the truth when I say Jesus is the Son of God," or a devotee of a guru to say, "The plain truth is that my guru is God in human form."

Those aren't facts. They're beliefs. 

I stopped being religious when I realized that facts were more important to me than beliefs. For thirty-five years I diligently sought facts to support my beliefs. Not finding those facts, I chose to give up my belief.

The most recent issue of TIME magazine features a cover story of TIME's Person of the Year, Elon Musk. Following that story is a profile of the Heroes of the Year -- four people who were instrumental in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.

Here's an excerpt that mentions facts. I've boldfaced the part about fealty to facts.

Progress flows from the gradual accretion of knowledge. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, it started with the initially painstaking process of decoding the genomes of all living things; then folded in the development of sequencing machines that reduced that genetic reading time to hours; and finally weaved in the insights -- "Put it in a fat bubble!" -- that seemed to come in brilliant flashes but were actually the result of wisdom developed over decades working on how to manipulate a finicky genetic material called mRNA.

What drives it all might, in less divisive times, seem too obvious to mention: fealty to facts. It's the basis of the scientific method and the structure of our world. Without trust in objective reality, the lights don't turn on, the computer doesn't boot up, the streets stay empty.

...The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another, and trusted in facts.

What alternative do we have, really? Assuming we care about objective reality, and not just what subjectively feels good. 

Facts are what bind us together. They are the common denominator of human experience. Opinions are important also, of course. But opinions, like beliefs, are personal and subjective. In contrast, facts are a treasure that everybody can partake of.

There are many virtues. Respect for facts is one of them. These days, more than ever, we need people who do their best to honor facts. 

This doesn't mean never being wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Science progresses because recognizing when you're wrong is a big part of the scientific method. This allows false facts to be discarded and genuine facts to be embraced. 

So it's a virtue to have a shaky belief punctured by solid facts. That can be uncomfortable, because our beliefs are comforting. But if they're not factual, it's better to give them up.

We don't know, so live now

Yeah, it's a cliche, dating all the way from 1971. "Be here now." (I have a well-worn 1972 edition of the book.)

The book, though, actually doesn't talk a whole lot about the simple act of embracing the present moment as much as possible. Rather, it's filled with a bunch of Eastern mysticism/yoga philosophizing that I used to find appealing, but don't anymore.

What I do agree with is that now is a treasure that shouldn't be frittered away by paying undue attention to the past and future.

Sure, we have to be aware of what's happened in the past and what might happen in the future. That's a big part of being human. Memories and anticipations are part of our present-moment awareness. Meaning, everything we experience is now -- because we can't exist in the past or future, only now.

I need a reminder of this. So frequently I say to myself, "Don't know. Live now." 

Why do I add don't know? Wouldn't live now be sufficient to keep me centered in the present? Perhaps. I just find it helpful to keep in mind that what I think might happen, which is the foundation of both my disagreeable worries and pleasant hopes, is often (or usually) markedly different from what does happen.

Right now Oregon is under a snow state of emergency issued by Governor Kate Brown. The National Weather Service is forecasting between three and eight inches during today and tomorrow in the Willamette Valley, where I live.

This is a pretty big deal for holiday travelers, since snowfall will be much greater at higher elevations where passes in the Coast Range and Cascade mountains are. It's also worrisome for my wife and me who live in a rural area with a steep driveway and roads that aren't plowed.

Also, last February the Willamette Valley suffered through a devastating ice storm. Our electricity was out for twelve days. That wasn't fun, to put it mildly.

So it's understandable that when some significant snowfall was forecast in the next few days, and maybe into next week, I started getting PTSD-like anxiety about our electricity going off again, with all of the hassles that entails.

However, i'm finding that reminding myself, "Don't know. Live now," is helping to keep that anxiety at a manageable level.

After all, the National Weather Service is saying that because the approaching front isn't a solid mass of precipitation, but unstable air made up of a bunch of cells, snow amounts can vary considerably from place to place, even if those places are close to each other.

In short, what's going to happen the next few days is uncertain -- which is how life often is. Or even, usually is. 

Back in February my wife and I were watching TV when the electricity went out at about this time of night. We just finished watching several episodes of Ted Lasso before we took a TV break to do some other things, like me finishing this blog post.

It's quite unlikely that our electricity will go out tonight, since it hasn't even started snowing at our house yet. Thus I might as well live now, enjoying our evening, rather than worrying about what could happen electricity-wise. 

I've done everything possible to prepare for snow and cold weather. Vent covers are in. My AWD Subaru with its winter tires is parked at the top of our driveway. I bought some extra groceries last week. So why not relax into don't know?

Don't know is a marvelous thing to keep in mind. Most of us dislike not knowing. We prefer to believe that we have a good idea of what will happen, because that relieves our anxiety about the unknown. But actually I feel better when I embrace don't know rather than push it away.

In 2017 I wrote a blog post about this, "Wu chi" and "don't know" go nicely together.

It's funny (I mean, interesting) when you read a book and only one sentence sticks with you. I figure that if I remember it after many years, that sentence must have a significant meaning for me.

A meaningful sentence I recall from one of Huston Smith's books came from a Zen practitioner: "I have a new koan: I could be wrong." 

Beautiful! 

I'm wrong all the time. So I can totally identify with this sentiment. 

Lately I've been enjoying using a similar idea as a sort of mantra when I'm going to sleep at night and find that my mind is overly filled with thoughts of what be coming next in the world of politics, my own life, and other aspects of reality I care about.

Don't know. 

It feels really honest and refreshing to silently repeat those words inside my head. Don't know replaces the guesses, predictions, suppositions, hopes, anticipations, and such that otherwise would be rambling around my psyche.

Now, I'm not saying that looking into the future is bad. We human beings have a marvelous ability to create visions of what might be that are far beyond what other animals are capable of.

It's often useful to fashion scenarios of what Time may bring us after the present moment. However, predictions of what will happen beyond a few minutes, or even less, often are widely off the mark.

That's why don't know appeals to me so much.

Those two words remind me to remain open to anything and everything, really. No matter how confident I am that this or that will occur, the universe typically doesn't operate precisely (or even generally) in accord with my view of what will be.

Naturally don't know applies to grand cosmic anticipations as well as small mundane ones. 

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, typically have a clear sense of what will happen after they die. Heaven, God, afterlife, soul travel, reincarnation -- whatever it is, something predictable awaits.

But actually, they don't know. No one knows. Which is to say, as the above-mentioned Zen practitioner said: We all could be wrong. And likely are, when it comes to supernatural suppositions. 

 

Here's our 2021 Christmas letter

I don't believe in God.

But I do believe in Christmas letters, even with the word "Christ" in Christmas. However, my wife and I prefer to call it a Holiday Greetings, in part because some years I don't write it before Christmas.

This year, though, I was amazingly early -- a secular Christmas miracle. 

The theme is how an asterisk should have accompanied our usual reply of "Fine" to the query of store employees, "How're you doing?" In our Holiday Greetings we add the asterisk: Fine*

Here it is in both PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2021 Christmas Letter PDF

Christmas is a good time to debunk all religious belief

Naturally Christianity comes to mind in December, since Christmas includes the word "Christ." But I view this time of year as an opportunity to remind myself, and others through this blog, of the absurdity of all religious belief. 

Of course, it is only us atheists who look upon all religions as absurd. Since most people are religious, they view their faith as making good sense. It's those other religions that are absurd.

To offer a few examples:

-- Christians have no problem believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, and came back from the dead. But the notion that an angel dictated the Koran to Mohammed -- that's absurd!

-- The India-based faith I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, teaches that at the time of initiation the guru places a copy of himself, the "radiant form," in the consciousness of every disciple. But the idea that peyote or mescaline can lead to spiritual visions -- that's absurd!

Many other instances of religious hypocrisy exist, of course. So many, they're uncountable.

Those who hold any form of religious or supernatural belief consider that they are on the straight road to cosmic truth, while those other believers are on a twisting path of illusion. In 2010 I wrote about this in Believers need to take the "Outsider Test for Faith." 

Why and how do religious believers choose to accept a particular faith out of the many choices available to them? (4200 is one estimate)

Great question. Here's an ever better one: What makes someone confident that the religion they've chosen is true, while all the other religions are false?

John W. Loftus examines these issues in a book he edited, "The Christian Delusion." The first chapter I read was by Loftus, "The Outsider Test for Faith Revisited." He used to be a minister, until his deconversion.

I loved the chapter.

It lays out problems with religious belief that I've been aware of for a long time, but had never considered so clearly and cogently. The first version of Loftus' Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) can be read here. What I perused this morning includes some responses to objections true believers raised to OTF version 1.0.

...It's been observed that every religious believer rejects countless gods and/or other metaphysical entities, accepting just one: what he or she believes in. An atheist just goes one small step further: rejecting that one as well.

So Loftus makes the entirely reasonable argument that people should test their chosen faith in the same way they test other (rejected) religious, spiritual, mystical, or metaphysical belief systems.

...People will reject unsubstantiated claims in holy books... except the book they believe in. People will reject miracle stories... except miracles related by their own faith. People will reject the divinity of living prophets or messengers of God... except the person they accept as a genuine spiritual teacher.

Every religious believer, aside from the few who are genuinely open-minded, considers that he or she has found the One True Faith among the 4,199 or so false faiths. Yet how is this possible, logically or realistically?

It's like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average.

Laurel, my wife, and I got married in 1990. Back then Laurel believed in a New Age channeler who supposedly could communicate with spiritual beings when he went into a trance state. Laurel got tape recordings of those sessions on a monthly basis. 

I thought this channeler guy was ridiculous.

Meanwhile, I was an avid devotee of a guru who was considered to be God in human form, which Laurel found equally ridiculous. We had lengthy conversations where Laurel would try to convince me that her belief was valid, while I did the same about my belief.

Eventually the realization hit us that we were both right: meaning, each of our beliefs had no basis in reality. Those beliefs had given us comfort, but we gave them up in favor of truth -- which we consider means demonstrable evidence founded on facts, not a feeling that something is true.

In 2017 I wrote Jesus and Mohammed talk about truth vs. facts. That post included a right-on cartoon.

Descend into the valley of life, rather than climb the mountaintop

At first I didn't like a book I have about Pure land (Shin) Buddhism. But I've come to enjoy "River of Fire, River of Water" by Taitetsu Unno. Here's some passages about embracing the valley of life

The ideal of monastic Buddhism is transcendence of mundane existence, as if one were ascending to the mountaintop. In contrast, the praxis of Pure Land Buddhism takes place by descending into the valley, the shadow of the mountains. 

We find a similar contrast in Chinese civilization. Like monastic Buddhism the Confucian ideal may be symbolized by the soaring mountain peaks , manifesting the highest achievement of the literati. 

And like the Pure Land, Taoism is found in the valley and lowlands, a haven for those who do not fit into conventional society for whatever reason. But it is in this valley that life and creativity flourish. In the words of Tao-te-ching: 

The Valley Spirit never dies.
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the Doorway of the mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth spring.
It is there within us all the while;
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.

...In Japan, traditional Buddhist monasticism -- whether Tendai, Shingon, or Zen -- aims at the transcendence of earthly passions. Its basic  precepts consist of renouncing all family ties, maintaining celibacy, mastering rigorous disciplines, avoiding contact with the opposite sex, and engaging in elaborate rituals.

In contrast, Pure Land is the trans-descendence into the opposite world, the self-awakening to the immersion in the swamp of anger, jealousy, insecurity, fear, addiction, arrogance, hypocrisy.

...Shin Buddhism comes alive for those who live in the valley and in the shadows. It challenges people to discover the ultimate meaning of life in the abysss of the darkness of ignorance.

...Pure Land Buddhism might suggest an otherworldly orientation, but its primary focus is on the here and now. Not the here and now grasped by the controlling ego-self, but the here and now cherished as a gift of life itself to be lived creatively and gratefully, granted us by boundless compassion.

The bountifulness of great compassion makes possible our liberation from the iron cage of our own making.

 

Taoism is playful. Buddhism is serious. I prefer Taoism.

One of my favorite books is Ray Grigg's The Tao of Zen. His thesis, which he argues persuasively, is that Zen is rooted in Chinese Taoism, while Zen Buddhism is, obviously, rooted in Indian Buddhism.

Here's a lengthy excerpt from the "Buddhism in China" chapter. While it's possible to quibble with some of Grigg's conclusions, his basic contrasting of Taoist/Chinese and Buddhist/Indian approaches to life seems accurate to me. 

The indented italicized passages are quotations from other writers. I haven't included the footnotes that show where the quotation came from.

As Buddhism in China was adjusted to fit Chinese sensibilities, the distinction between it and the Taoist sects and religions began to blur. In the common mind a synthesis of Buddhism and Taoism began to take place.

Chinese versions of the Buddhist scriptures were adapted to Chinese ideas, and Buddhism and Taoism were often mingled together in popular belief.

This mingling did not take place among the more literary and scholarly Taoists. For them the integration of Buddhism into China helped to define and invigorate the Taoism of the Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu. 

Their Taoism involved ostensibly, no belief; it was and continues to be an aesthetic philosophy rather than a religion. 

Mahayana Buddhism is a religion that evolved from a philosophical base. Taoism and Buddhism can be reconciled philosophically but not religiously. Those following the original form of Taoism have been unable to relate to the Mahayana aspects of Buddhism.

Even in the popular mind some of these differences were not so easily resolved.

Buddhism was in many ways distinctly un-Chinese. The Indian belief that human beings live over and over again on earth was entirely unknown in China. The Chinese reverence for the family clashed with the Buddha's teaching that family ties were a hindrance to enlightenment, and the celibacy required of Buddhist monks.

Where Buddhism saw life as suffering, Chinese tradition regarded the order of nature as fundamentally good and the right life as one lived in harmony with nature. Far from wanting to escape from the body and individual personality, most Taoists wanted to prolong their individual existence indefinitely. 

In other words, a basic difference separates the character of Indian Buddhism and the native Chinese traditions of Confucianism and Taoism. 

Taoism is earthy. It is basically optimistic. It accepts in general terms that life is worth living and that nature, personified in the metaphor of the Great Mother, is essentially a balanced beneficence. 

Buddhism's character is more sober, less optimistic. As Richard Cavendish notes:

Although it has often been observed that Buddhism is a cheerful and good-hearted religion, the Buddhist attitude to life is intensely pessimistic. Life on earth is evil, painful and transitory. It is full of suffering and nothing lasts, nothing stays the same.

One of the characteristics of Zen that argues for a Taoist rather than a Buddhist origin is its lightness, its playfulness, its appreciative acceptance of life. Buddhism is serious, leaden, weighted down by Gautama's traumatic realization that suffering lies beneath the veneer of life's comforts, and pleasures.

The story of his own evolution from innocent prince to enlightened being is a revealing process. The emphasis is on the endurance and perseverance that the quest for enlightenment demands.

He struggles through seven years of wilderness meditation and asceticism before reaching realization. The same long struggle is reenacted later in China by Bodhidharma who sits persistently for nine years facing a wall. The literal truth of these stories is less important than the underlying attitudes they reveal.

The Chinese embrace life as worth living, and they seek ways of living it wisely and well. This is evident in the popular Kuan-yin, a maternal incarnation of the Buddha, who bestows fertility, safety, and comfort to her supplicants.

This same positive attitude is seen in the round and jovial folk-Buddhas of modern China who sit big-bellied and contented, or stand wide-legged and laughing. These images of the Buddha, unlike the austere and emaciated ones from India, invite a full and happy life.

Even in religion the Chinese enjoy life too much to waste it on asceticism and metaphysical exercises.

They would gladly sacrifice a few years for immortality as a good investment of time. They would willingly do t'so-ch'an (Japanese: zazen, literally "sitting meditation") to effect social harmony or  attain worldly gain and influence.

But they would not expend much energy on something as abstract and metaphysical as enlightenment. "Once you had enlightenment," they would ask, "what would you do with it?" The question is expressed with an appropriate mixture of playfulness and practicality in a Zen story:

A Zen roshi and a Hindu guru were walking together along a riverbank and decided to visit an adjacent island.
"Let's walk to the island," said the guru.
"Why not take the ferry?" suggested the roshi.
"Because," said the guru, "I've spent twenty years learning to walk on water."
"Why take twenty years learning to walk on water," asked the roshi, "when you can take a ferry for a penny?"

The same grounded practicality characterizes the Lao Tzu. As Victor H. Mair points out:

The Chinese classic emphasizes political skills and social harmony in preference to the theistic orientation of the Indian scripture.

The Mahayana religious component in Ch'an and Zen Buddhism emphasizes the zazen in emulation of the sitting Buddha of India. Very practical reasons exist for doing zazen but they have been overlayed with exhortations to persevere, to be like the Buddha, to sit until all sentient beings are saved.

In contrast, the Taoist element in Ch'an and Zen Buddhism is not interested in such theological objectives.

The purpose of protracted sitting is not to perpetuate itself but to release the practitioner into the spontaneity and freedom of merely being. The end of the searching and discipline is a full and balanced life lived gracefully and harmoniously in wonderful simplicity.

The sitter returns to the village to become fully engaged in the profoundly ordinary business of day-to-day existence. 

The Lao Tzu dedicates about half its wisdom to the affirmation of such worldly affairs. Although its treatment lacks the playfulness of the Chuang Tzu, it is nonetheless a clear confirmation of this life in this earthy place, fully committed to the worth that is inherent in the whole social and natural world.

Any discipline in Taoism is used to reenter fully what is already present. This is also the case in Zen.

Buddhism's discipline does not complete the cycle of leaving, returning, and reaffirming. It spins outward to become removed, unearthly, and austere, reluctantly present in the world as if living were a kind of selfless sacrifice. 

Believe in magic, so long as you don't really believe in it

I'm an atheist who has two wooden Christian crosses sitting on his bedside table. Those are the crosses someone sent to me in a mysterious package, as I wrote about a few days ago.

I've got no problem with religious symbols. Plenty of atheists love to visit beautiful holy places, admire religious art, and listen to religious music.

Problems arise when people believe that those symbols possess supernatural power. Sure, I'm open to the possibility that Jesus truly is the Son of God and answers prayers addressed to him. 

But I'm also open to the possibility of some other entity being divine. I just haven't seen any solid evidence that makes this more than a slight possibility, and so unworthy of being taken seriously.

I also believe in the placebo effect. If someone thinks a talisman of some sort has a healing power, or some other sort of power, then that belief can have a positive effect on the person.

Being 73, I was drawn to buy Steven Petrow's book, Stupid Things I Won't Do When I Get Old. It's got some good advice, and is filled with humor -- a nice combination.

Here's excerpts from his chapter, "I Won't Stop Believing in Magic." He's gay, which helps to explain his attraction to the rabbit.

The velvety rabbit with big floppy ears and a silver tiara came to me with a name tag that read "Fairy God Bunny." That was when I was in my mid-twenties and had cancer.

For five years, I carried this gender-bending rabbit with me everywhere, including to the hospital for labs, CT scans, and X-rays. I was never shy about introducing them to anyone, nor did I feel foolish, even though I was a twenty-six-year-old PhD candidate.

My friend Cynthia had given me the bunny soon after my testicular cancer diagnosis, reminding me several times that it had "magical powers." She later boosted those powers by adding a wand trimmed in gold lamé to complement its frilly tutu.

That bunny was intended to be my talisman, a magical defender against my cancer.

...Somewhere along the way I'd lost my sense of wonder. Enter the bunny, exactly when I needed a strong dose of magic, if not wonder. My Fairy God Bunny would start me on a journey of trying to regain the magic.

Years later I learned that I wasn't alone in this quest. Stuart Vyse, a psychologist and the author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, told me that many people turn to "irrational beliefs" in times of dire need.

Whenever medical science does not provide a cure, he said there's going to be a "psychological gap, the need of something better." Thus we have superstition, magic, paranormal beliefs, and religion.

"It's not uncommon to be of two minds and to say, 'I know this is crazy, but I'll feel better if I do it anyway," Vyse said.

I never abandoned conventional medicine. I followed my oncologist's orders. Three surgeries. Four rounds of chemo. Years of follow-ups. But I would not leave my fate in doctors' hands alone. The Fairy God Bunny would be my amulet.

...Five years after my diagnosis, my oncologist told me I was cured. I know I owe that cure to science and well-trained doctors. 

But I also think the hope embodied in the bunny made a difference to my well-being by reducing my anxiety, decreasing my heart rate, and improving my sleep, all of which gave me more good days than bad. 

Can I prove it? No. Does that mean it's not true? No. As Kaptchuk told The New Yorker, "We need to stop pretending that it's all about molecular biology. Serious illnesses are affected by aesthetics, by art, and by the moral questions that are negotiated by practitioners and patients."

All ways of saying, by luck or magic. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, I hope I'll never be too old to believe in fairy tales.

I get a mysterious package. Ideas about it welcomed.

Almost everybody likes a good mystery. I sure do. My fiction book reading is almost entirely in the genre of spy/espionage/counterterrorism novels, which involve a lot of intrigue.

So I thought I'd outsource to readers of this blog the contents of a mysterious package that arrived in the mail yesterday. If you have an idea about the meaning of what was sent to me, share it in a comment on this post.

Here's the envelope I got.  What caught my attention right away was the address and return address both being my address. My razor-sharp mind concluded, Whoever sent this to me doesn't want to be identified.

(CIA, I'm waiting for your call recruiting me as an intelligence analyst.)

Inside the envelope was a book. A book that I wrote back when I was an avid member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered spiritual organization with headquarters in India.

It was the first 1999 edition of the book, whose central theme was the karmic rationale for vegetarianism.

I thumbed through the pages, looking for any markings or messages. Nothing popped out at me. Of course, I know that spies can encode information in a microdot as small as a period, but I'm not about to inspect every period with a magnifying glass.

(Ooh, just remembered that I should have worn gloves, since a deadly nerve agent could have been put on the book. Looks like I won't be hearing from the CIA after all.)

In addition to the book, the package contained two wooden crosses, one kind of large and the other very small.

The larger cross has "Jerusalem" on the back. The small cross has "Jerusalem" on the front. No way to tell, of course, whether the crosses actually came from Jerusalem.

The tracking number showed that the package was mailed from Nashville, Tennessee. 

Like I said, a mystery. Someone spent $10.30, plus the cost of the book and the crosses, to send me a message. But I don't know what that message is.

Naturally the thought came to mind that the sender is a Christian who thinks I need some Jesus in my life. Maybe the fact that after the book's title page, there's this Bible passage, shows I could be receptive to this.

Be not deceived;
God is not mocked:
for whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap.
      GALATIANS 6:7

But if this was a proselytizing message, why not say so directly? And why mix together a book I wrote about karma and vegetarianism with two Christian crosses? 

Anyway, its nice to know that someone seemingly cares enough about my (nonexistent) soul to go to the trouble of sending me the package.

Like I said, if anyone has a theory about what the contents mean, share your idea in a comment.

Chinese painting points to the mystery of existence

Looking back, one of the stranger aspects of my childhood -- which included a lot of strange stuff -- was how my mother took me to Chinatown in San Francisco when I was fairly young, maybe 12. 

I came home with many inexpensive pieces of Chinese art that I put up in my room. Most were images that still appeal to me today. Misty mountains with a small figure of a person walking along with a pagoda or hut perched on the edge of a cliff.

I don't know where that instant attraction came from.

Nobody I knew had any interest in either Chinese art or philosophy. Maybe it stemmed from growing up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our house had a picture window in the living room that looked out at the high Sierras and Sequoia National Park.

And we were surrounded by smaller hills, with the Kaweah River flowing by close enough that I could hear the soothing sound of the water if I left a window open at night.

Anyway, I just finished reading an intriguing book by David Hinton, Existence: A Story. The Amazon listing says: 

The mystery of existence and our place in that mystery--as expressed in a single Chinese landscape painting: a new work of meditative philosophy by the renowned translator of the Chinese classics and author of Hunger Mountain.

The message of the book is difficult to summarize, because the Taoist philosophy underlying that message is notoriously difficult to conceptualize. I guess I'd call it something like Mysticism in plain sight.

Meaning, Chinese mysticism isn't other-worldly. It is rooted in the here and now of this world, especially the natural world.

This is the painting that's the focus of the book, Shih Tao's (1642-1707) Broad Distance Pavillion. 

And here's the last section of the book, which provides a good overview of Hinton's perspective on the painting. Stone Waves is another name for the artist, Shih T'ao. Inkstone-Wander wrote the poem that Shig]h T'ao inscribed on the painting.

The most crucial thing about the story of existence is that it knows itself to be mere story, as Lao Tzu and the Ch'an masters recognized, that it recognizes is own meaninglessness, its own vanishing.

Only when we forget story and explanation are we returned to dwell here in the beginning, where empty awareness and the expansive presence of existence are whole, a single existence-tissue vast and deep, everything and everywhere.

How strange that the story is most true when it falls silent. And yet, how liberating that we can return to begin at the beginning in that silence anytime, anywhere.

A simple room, for instance, morning sunlight through windows lighting the floor; a sidewalk cafe, empty wine glass on the table, trees rustling in a slight breeze, sunlit passersby; a routine walk through a park, late autumn trees bare, rain clattering in fallen leaves.

Or the mountain landscape in Stone-Waves' painting, where we share with Stone-Waves the culmination of his lifelong landscape practice. We walk to a mountaintop, face out across ridgeline beyond ridgeline, then close our eyes.

We forget everything we know, all of the ideas and knowledge and assumptions about ourselves and the nature of things. We forget Lao Tzu's seminal poem, forget Inkstone-Wander's poem and Stone-Waves' painting, and continue on from there, forgetting all of the thoughts and memories defining us each as a center of identity.

Here, we share this experience with Stone-Waves in the deepest possible way, for there is no longer any distinction between us as separate centers of identity.

We forget this entire story of existence, and turn to the empty darkness that is our own awareness, which is all that remains after this practice of forgetfulness, and we inhabit the expansive space of that darkness.

We abide in that darkness for a time, then open our eyes. We look as if it were sight seeing for the first time, seeing things as they are in themselves, free of all our tenuous human stories about them, our ideas and beliefs.

And there we find mirror-deep awareness and the ten thousand things filling that awareness, as it does in any routine moment of mindful attention to immediate experience: the expanse of awareness and the expanse of existence returned to their original nature as a single tissue, the existence-tissue vast and deep, everything and everywhere.

We gaze out onto dark-enigma, even if it is drenched in sunlight: ridge lines trailed out kingfisher-greens and indigo-blues, sea-ch'i mist billowing through valleys and rising up mountain slopes, through abandoned orchards, seething up to erase broken walls and houses, a city in ruins, scatters of wild chrysanthemum-blooms fading against winter, unharvested pears and apricots, and soon the mountaintop where Inkstone-Wander stands.

Here in the beginning, existence rustles. From nowhere else, it occurs and occurs. It gazes out at itself, and it is whole.

And as it is our most elemental identity, we too are whole. It is whole, but not complete, never complete. It is restless. 

It rustles, occurring and occurring. It wants to recognize itself, to orient, to celebrate. It wonders. It wants to know itself, to understand and explain, to decorate itself with story and meaning as if there were meaning.

It is whole, and it wants to begin: This is the story of existence, and it begins with a painting.

Mental Tai Chi and dissolving the remove

Yesterday I had one of those pleasing experiences where I got the same message from three different sources -- one inside my head, from me, and the other two from outside, a guided meditation and a book I was reading. 

First, me. I was idly going to sleep, not thinking about much of anything in particular, when the notion mental Tai Chi popped into my mind. 

For seventeen years I've been practicing Tai Chi under the guidance of a skilled instructor who is adept at teaching the martial aspect of Tai Chi, as well as the more typical relaxation/exercise aspect. 

One of the keys to Tai Chi, an internal martial art (in contrast to an external marital art like karate), is not meeting force with force. Instead, when it comes to dealing with some sort of attack, the idea is encapsulated in ABC.

Accept. Blend. Control. There's other words to describe these concepts. I just like the ABC'ness of these.

Say someone tries to punch you. Though this takes practice, the goal is to guide the punch away from you with minimal force. You accept the punch without letting it hit you, such as by gently diverting the punch past your head -- maybe with your hand/arm, or just by turning your body.

In doing this, you're blending with the attacker's movement, using their energy to redirect the movement into a more productive direction than you getting hit in the head.

Then control probably might be called for. This gets into defensive joint locks and other aspects of the martial side of Tai Chi that resemble controlling moves in other styles like judo, jujitsu, and such. The aim isn't to injure the other person, but to stop them from attacking you.

It struck me that mental Tai Chi is similar.

Except the "attacker" is words spoken by someone else, or perhaps our own mind. Instead of forcefully resisting what feels like a threat, we do our best to to accept the words and let them slide by, blending with them rather than trying to push them away or respond with our own attacking speech.

This is an ideal, of course.

I don't claim to be adept at doing this. I often react to an insult or accusation as a threat, rather than doing the mental Tai Chi thing. Meaning, I jump right to trying to control the other person, or my own mind, rather than first accepting and blending.

That morning I listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my iPhone's Calm app. It was called Dissolve the Remove. Here's a partial transcript.

The meditation teacher Susan Tiver has a nice phrase. She says meditation is often described as observing something, like the breath, as though we were operating from a distance, from a remove.

But meditation, she says, is also about dissolving the remove, about collapsing distance. Getting really close to our experience, really feeling what's here. I love this duality. That sometimes we want space around our experience. That's legit. 

And sometimes we want to collapse that space. We want to become more intimate with everything that's going on, more intimate with exactly how this moment is feeling, I'm right inside it. 

...There sometimes can be a sense that we're up here looking, and the sensation is down there, it's down in the body. Or maybe it's a sound that's out there in the world. Let's see if we can dissolve that remove a little bit. 

Come on down from the observing head, and climb into the body. So this is about feeling. Instead of only observing body sensations from a distance, see if you can feel what's here from the inside.

...When we truly dissolve the remove, what's left? Just one thing. A single experience of self and world, a single continuum of feeling and sensing that kind of blurs the boundary between inside and out. Intimate with everything.

In the morning I also read some pages in Happiness and How It Happens by The Happy Buddha (Suryacitta Malcolm Smith). Here's a passage I liked.

So how do we let go?

As an example, let's look at how we relax and let go when we meditate. When we sit, we tune into the felt experience of the body. As we do this, we sense how the body is. We may see that we're a little agitated, maybe a little tense.

We feel how we are and we accept how we are.

We don't try to relax but let everything be simply as it is. We let go trying to be different from how we are, which leads to greater relaxation. This is the essence of meditation, nothing special at all.

Within the felt experience of the body, we let whatever comes into awareness simply be and move on. Our work isn't to interfere or to try to change it, but to observe it and let go and relax. 

What the Woke Racism book says about religion

Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "Woke Racism" is a great book. The subtitle of the book is "How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America."

John McWhorter, the author, is an atheist. So when he calls woke racism a religion, that's intended as a negative judgement. 

In his chapter, The New Religion, McWhorter describes the ways what he calls The Elect (meaning, those who embrace woke racism) act in a religious fashion. 

Here's some excerpts from that chapter.

With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as Romans witnessed the birth of Christianity. The way to get past seeing the Elect as merely "crazy" is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are.

One thing that will discourage a general perception of them in this way is that they themselves will resist the charge so heartily. This is understandable.Early Christians did not think of themselves as "a religion" either. They thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems, whatever they chose to call themselves.

In addition, in our times, it will feel unwelcome to the Elect to be deemed a religion, because they do not bill themselves as such and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. It also implies that they are not thinking for themselves.

...To make sense of it, we must understand them -- partly out of compassion and partly in order to keep them from destroying our own lives. This can happen only if we process them not as crazed, but parishioners. 

To do this, we must examine the ways in which their new religion so closely parallels older ones. It makes what can seem like a mess of weird opinions and attitudes into something quite coherent.

The Elect have superstition. It is inherent in a religion that, amid various other tenets and commitments, one is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief. Certain questions are not to be asked, or, if asked, only politely. The answer one gets, despite being somewhat half-cocked, is to be accepted.

...Elect philosophy requires the same standpoint. One is not to ask "Why are black people so upset about one white cop killing a black man when black men are at more danger of being killed by one another?" Or one might go ahead and ask, only to receive flabby answers after which further questions are unwelcome.

...What you actually don't "get" in your quest to wring logic out of incoherent positions like these is that for the Elect, battling racism is to be questioned only in ways that reinforce the idea that the Elect are correct -- even at the cost of basic sense. This is superstition. 

The Elect have clergy. Think of the preacher praised for his sermon as people file out of church. It probably wasn't the kind of sermon that, for most of these people, blew their minds. They enjoyed it because it was a beautiful rendition of that which they knew before, and it gave them comfort. 

On race, the Elect cherish certain top-rate thinkers for their gifts in phrasing, repeating, and crafting artful variations upon points considered crucial. These are their priests, their clergy.

You need your preacher to keep telling the religion's truth, and to tell it often, since the superstitious, nonempirical wing of the ideology is easy to drift away from as real life impinges ever upon you in daily existence.

The Elect have original sin. The Elect, then, have magic, clergy, and also a conception of original sin. Under Elect creed, the sin is "white privilege." To anticipate a question, yes, I do believe that to be white in America is to automatically harbor certain unstated privileges in terms of one's sense of belonging. 

...But the issue here is not whether I or anyone else thinks white privilege is real, but what we consider the proper response to it. The Elect are to ritually "acknowledge" that they possess white privilege, with an awareness that they can never be absolved of it. 

...Coates and DiAngelo are calling these people sinners. Yet the sinners eagerly drink in the charge, revering their accusers, and come away from this self-mortification feeling energized. Cleansed. This is worship, by people embracing the self-mortification of the inveterate sinner, stained by the original sin of white privilege. 

The Elect are evangelical. "Why don't they allow people to have different opinions?" You're missing the point. The Elect can seem truly baffling -- until we see they are a religion. Specifically, an evangelical one.

To wit: Do we wonder why fundamentalist Christians do not see their beliefs as just one of many valid opinions? They see themselves as bearers of a Good News that, if all people would simply open up and see it, would create a perfect world. 

...To be Elect is to think in exactly the same way. Key to being Elect is a sense that there is always a flock of unconverted heathen. Many of the heathen are, for example, the whites "out there," as it is often put about the white people who were so widely feared as possibly keeping Barack Obama from being elected (twice).

The Elect ban the heretic. The Elect consider it imperative to not only critique those who disagree with their creed, but to seek their punishment and elimination to whatever degree real-life conditions can accommodate. 

There is an overriding sense that unbelievers must be not just spoken out against, but called out, isolated, and banned.

...The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous. 

...The Elect are members of a religion, of a kind within which the dissenter is not someone in disagreement but is a kind of environmental pollution. 

...The religious fervor is absolutist, complete with a Manichaean sense of good versus evil. Many recall Dana Carvey's Church Lady on Saturday Night Live, with her self-celebratory obsession with smoking out the doings of "SATAN?!"

...Why can't they allow other views? Remember, this is religion, not political science, and specifically a religion eerily akin to devout Christianity. To the Elect, racism is the equivalent of Satan. If I deign to walk by Satan with the idea that we just let him be, I am missing the point. I am "wrong."

Reason rules with God's will, karma, and laws of nature

Having written about reason and rationality recently, here's some thoughts that came to mind (weird phrase, since where else would thoughts appear?) as I was musing about how people believe in God's will and karma as other-worldly explanations for why things happen as they do.

It struck me that God's will and karma are appealing notions for many because they provide reasons for happenings that often aren't pleasant. Or are surprising.

For example, I know someone who got stage 4 lung cancer even though she never smoked. Thankfully, she's doing quite well, even after several years have passed since the diagnosis. She isn't at all religious. But if she was, probably the idea that her cancer is in accord with God's will would comfort her.

"Will" implies a reason behind it.

Otherwise we'd speak of "God's caprice" or "God's random choice." When someone wills that something happen, even if that someone is a supernatural being, seemingly there's a purpose that will is intended to achieve -- even if that purpose is unknown to us.

Likewise, karma definitely entails reason. Typically karma is viewed as encompassing more than one lifetime, though the word also can be limited to causes and effects occurring within a single life. Good karma is the result of positive actions; bad karma is the result of negative actions. 

You know, the whole as you sow, so shall you reap thing. 

Thus karma is nothing but reasons. Those reasons for why something is happening to us may be lost in deep time, if we believe in rebirth/reincarnation, but they exist nonetheless. At least, that's the way karma is conceptualized. 

( I wrote a book about karma, "Life is Fair," so I'm familiar with the term.)

Obviously there's another way to look upon the reason something is happening: as being in accord with the laws of nature. The benefit of this perspective is that it is scientific, not religious; factual, not fantasized; coherent, not confusing.

As with God's will and karma, often it is very difficult, if not impossible, to discern the precise reasons that produce a happening. In part this is because chaos theory, though deterministic, says that initial conditions can play a big role in an event.

Often this is called the "butterfly effect." A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can theoretically create an atmospheric instability that, over time, is magnified into a hurricane striking the United States.

Even so, the beauty of embracing laws of nature as the reason things happen as they do is that no outside concepts are required. No need to believe in the unseen will of an unseen God. No need to believe in the unseen force of karma extending across multiple unseen lifetimes.

We know about the laws of nature through science and everyday life. They are the manifestation of nature's reason. Sometimes they even can be described in mathematical terms. 

So if you're looking for a way to understand why life here on Earth is as it is, there's no need to look beyond three simple words: laws of nature.

Rationality leads to progress and morality

In his new book, "Rationality," Steve Pinker ends with a Why Rationality Matters chapter. Here's some excerpts. 

Pinker starts off by looking at human progress.

Though the availability bias hides it from us, human progress is an empirical fact. When we look beyond the headlines to the trend lines, we find that humanity overall is healthier, richer, longer-lived, better fed, better educated, and safer from war, murder, and accidents than in decades and centuries past.

Having documented these changes in two books, I'm often asked whether I "believe in progress." The answer is no. Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don't believe in anything you have to believe in.

Though many measures of human well-being, when plotted over time, show a gratifying increase (though not always or everywhere), it's not because of some force or dialectic or evolutionary law that lifts us ever upward.

On the contrary, nature has no regard for our well-being, and often, as with pandemics and natural disasters, it looks as if its trying to grind us down. "Progress" is shorthand for a set of pushbacks and victories wrung out of an unforgiving universe, and is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.

The explanation is rationality.

When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows (as opposed to other dubious pursuits like glory or redemption), and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others', they occasionally succeed.

When they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate, and we call the big picture progress. 

...Brainchildren of human ingenuity have also underwritten other historical boosts in well-being [in addition to life expectancy, marked lessening of hunger, poverty, and deaths from war], such as safety, leisure, travel, and access to art and entertainment.

Though many of the gadgets and bureaucracies grew organically and were perfected through trial and error, none was an accident. People at the time advocated for them with arguments driven by logic and evidence, costs and benefits, cause and effect, and tradeoffs between individual advantage and the common good.

Pinker then turns to how rationality leads to moral progress.

Progress consists of more than gains in safety and material well-being. It consists also in gains of how we treat each other: in equality, benevolence, and rights.

Many cruel and unjust practices have declined over the course of history. They include human sacrifice, slavery, despotism, blood sports, eunuchism, harems, foot-binding, sadistic corporal and capital punishments, the persecution of heretics and dissidents, and the oppression of women and of religious, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

None has been extirpated from the face of the earth, but when we chart the historical changes, in every case we see descents and, in some cases, plunges. How did we come to enjoy this progress?

...A popular view is that moral progress is advanced through struggle: the powerful never hand over their privileges, which must be wrested from them by the might of people acting in solidarity.

My greatest surprise in making sense of moral progress is how many times in history the first domino was a reasoned argument. 

A philosopher wrote a brief which laid out arguments on why some practice was indefensible, or irrational, or inconsistent with values that everyone claimed to hold. The pamphlet or manifesto went viral, was translated into other languages, was debated in pubs and salons and coffeehouses, and then influenced leaders, legislators, and popular opinion.

Eventually the conclusion was absorbed into the conventional wisdom and common decency of a society, erasing the tracks of the arguments that brought it there.

Few people today feel the need, or could muster the ability, to formulate a coherent argument on why slavery is wrong, or public disembowelment, or the beating of children; it's just obvious. Yet exactly those debates took place centuries ago.

And the arguments that prevailed, when they are brought to our attention today, continue to ring true. They appeal to a sense of reason that transcends the centuries, because they conform to principles of conceptual consistency that are part of reality itself.

Now, as we saw in chapter 2, no logical argument can establish a moral claim. But an argument can establish that a claim under debate is inconsistent with another claim a person holds dear, or with values like life and happiness that most people claim for themselves and would agree are legitimate desires of everyone else.

As we saw in chapter 3, inconsistency is fatal to reasoning: a set of beliefs that includes a contradiction can be deployed to deduce anything and is perfectly useless.

...The power of rationality to guide moral progress is of a piece with its power to guide material progress and wise choices in our lives. Our ability to eke increments of well-being out of a pitiless cosmos and to be good to others despite our flawed nature depends on grasping impartial principles that transcend our parochial experience.

We are a species that has been endowed with an elementary faculty of reason and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify its scope. They awaken us to ideas and expose us to realities that confound our intuitions but are true for all that.