Church of the Churchless

Zelensky's meeting with Trump shows danger of cults, political or religious

As I've noted before and surely will again, because it's the truth, the slavish devotion of almost all Republicans to Donald Trump mirrors the slavish devotion of cult members to their own Dear Leader who, in their eyes, can do no wrong.

Further proof of this was on plain display today after the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, met with Trump at the White House to sign a deal they'd negotiated regarding the mining of mineral deposits in Ukraine, along with discussing how to end Ukraine's war with Russia.

That meeting started off fine (a full video is here), but degenerated at the end into a shouting match in which Zelensky bravely attempted to speak the truth about the Russian dictator, Putin, and Ukraine's valid concerns about making a bad deal with Putin.

But in what appeared to be a pre-planned effort by Vice-President Vance and President Trump to undermine Zelensky and promote Putin, the last part of the meeting featured Vance and Trump acting like the cowardly dictator-lovers that they are, talking over Zelensky in a bizarre attempt to prevent him from speaking the proverbial truth to power. 

This video shows Trump and Vance acting like mafia bosses, threatening Zelensky with the loss of his country if he doesn't express enough fawning appreciation to Trump.

Zelensky is a real man, a warrior who has been fighting on behalf of his people for the past three years after Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Trump, on the other hand, is a weak cry-baby who has so little confidence in himself, he looks upon any criticism as a vicious attack rather than as something to be discussed and coherently responded to.

That's why Trump abruptly ended his meeting with Zelensky. The Ukrainians wanted to stay, have lunch, and then proceed with what had been planned for the rest of the day. However, Trump kicked Zelensky out because he can't tolerate anyone correcting his lies -- which in this case were plentiful. PolitiFact highlighted three of them. 

How this meeting ended was disturbing enough. Almost as disturbing was the virtually universal support Trump got for his outrageous behavior from his fellow Republican politicians. Senator Lindsey Graham has been a strong supporter of Ukraine. A few weeks ago he lavishly praised Zelensky at a European security conference.

But since he belongs to the Cult of Trump, Graham issued a statement condemning Zelensky. That's what Republican politicians have to do these days: kiss Trump's fat ass out of a fear that if they don't, Trump and his billionaire buddy, Elon Musk, will fund a primary challenge to them next time they run for re-election.

This is the political equivalent of followers of a religious cult leader keeping their mouths shut about the immoral and illegal things they know the leader is doing, but can't talk about because they're afraid of what will happen to them if they do. Being ostracized, for sure. Facing physical danger, a real possibility. 

Cult leaders get their power from the subservience of their followers. Whether it be Trump's authoritarianism or a religious cult leader's dominance over helpless followers (often women abused by the leader, which Trump also has done), the key to their success is creating a climate where criticism of the leader is a thought-crime and praise of the leader keeps a follower out of trouble.

To which I say, to hell with that. I'll never be silenced, nor will the majority of Americans who disapprove of the horrible way Trump is acting as president. European leaders were quick to support Zelensky, a great sign. Hopefully now they will be even more inclined to give aid to Ukraine, which already surpasses the value of American aid (Trump lied about that).

Thomas Friedman, a New York Times opinion writer, had a great short piece today about the meeting between Zelensky and Trump, "This Never Happened With an American President Before." Here's the whole essay.

What happened in the Oval Office on Friday — the obviously planned ambush of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine by President Trump and Vice President JD Vance — was something that had never happened in the nearly 250-year history of this country: In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.

You want an analogy? Imagine if, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel came to the White House this month, Trump and Vance told him that the war with Hamas had gone on too long, too many lives had been lost and it was costing America too much money, so it was time for Bibi and the Israeli people to do a deal with the Hamas aggressor.

Because Russia did to Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, what Hamas did to Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — a surprise invasion, murder and the ensuing sexual violence to wreak destruction on another nation and its society. Trump took Bibi’s side 110 percent against Hamas, and now he is taking Putin’s side 110 percent against Zelensky and Ukraine.

It is hard to express what a break this is in American foreign policy. We stood on the side of liberty and those fighting for it around the world. There are times the isolationist forces in our population have held us back and had to be persuaded. There have been times when — in support of the larger cause of liberty — against dangerous foes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we had to align ourselves temporarily with dictators.

But I can’t think of a single time when an American president declared that the democratically elected leader of a country preserving liberty was a “dictator” who started the war with his neighbor — when it was the vicious neighboring dictator who actually started the war.

If you listen to Trump, everything we have done for Ukraine is pure altruism. We have no actual interests at stake ourselves in its fate or the triumph of liberty there. We have no actual interest in the fact that Ukraine is protecting the European Union — a giant, pro-American alliance of free markets and free people. It doesn’t matter a whit to Trump what happens to the E.U. or Ukraine. All that matters is that Zelensky says “thank you” louder for our altruism and that, in the middle of his war of survival, sign over a generation of Ukraine’s mineral wealth to us.

This is a total perversion of U.S. foreign policy practiced by every president since World War I. My fellow Americans, we are in completely uncharted waters, led by a president, who — well, I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV.​

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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. 

If humans are the top of creation, what about Neanderthals?

The February 2025 issue of National Geographic features a fascinating story by Brook Larmer, "The Hunt for the  Other Humans." This got me to thinking about the common religious teaching that humans are the top of creation.

For example, the Bible says in Genesis:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,^[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

And an Eastern religion, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which I know a lot about because I was a member of the organization for 35 years, similarly taught that humans are the top of creation -- and that it is only possible to return to God if one has a human form (the group believes in reincarnation). Further, supposedly there always is at least one human who is God in Human Form, and who is responsible for taking "marked souls" back to the highest supernatural realm of creation.

Since I love to delve into weird theological questions, even though I no longer believe in God or the supernatural, a couple of way-cool graphic depictions of human origins in the National Geographic story got me pondering some pertinent issues about the whole "top of creation" thing.

Here's photographs of the graphic depictions. I've made them as large as possible.

The top graphic says: 

Homo sapiens are the only humans left on Earth today, but at one point we shared the planet with other species of ancestral humans, collectively known as hominins. As climates and ecological opportunities shifted, hominins migrated out of Africa, reconnecting and interbreeding with the descendants of their relatives who had made similar journeys thousands of years before.

So do all of the hominin species count as being the "top of creation," or only our species, Homo sapiens? The bottom graphic shows that hominins have been around for over four million years. If they count as ancestral humans, then the RSSB philosophy implies that Gods in Human Form have been on our planet for that length of time.

But let's assume that only species in the genus Homo count as humans. That graphic says:

Homo sapiens are the only remaining humans. Our genus, Homo, features relatively larger brains, full bipedalism, and the ability to make tools. 

The right side of the graphic shows that there have been about ten species in the genus Homo. Seemingly they all would count as being the top of creation, being humans. This includes our closest relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans. 

From the graphic, our species diverged from Neanderthals and Denisovans about 800,000 years ago, though the top graphic says that the oldest known Homo sapiens fossil dates from about 300,000 years ago. Thus those who believe in the RSSB teachings have to accept that there were Gods in Human Form at least that long ago, and almost certainly they killed animals and ate meat -- which is against the current RSSB teaching.

Another question is whether Homo sapiens is the species that will forever be the "top of creation." After all, evolution hasn't stopped. There's a good chance our species won't last forever. The National Geographic story says:

The disappearance of the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other groups around 40,000 years ago marked the end of millions of years when multiple groups of hominins walked the Earth. The current epoch is a historical anomaly, and Stringer [a paleoanthropologist] advises us not to be smug in our status as the last ones standing.

Neanderthals and Denisovans survived for half a million years; Homo erectus lasted nearly two million years. At the rate we're going, how successful will we look in 2,000 years, much less a million?

Ross Douthat's five varieties of mystical experience

I'm finding Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, less interesting now that I've gotten past the reasons Douthat offers for being religious, and have started to read how one goes about choosing a religion to believe in.

However, in his "The Myth of Disenchantment" chapter, which is within the why believe section, his description of five varieties of mystical experience struck me as both fairly unique and mostly valid. I'll use Douthat's own words to describe those varieties rather than attempting a paraphrase.

(1) Generic mystical experience. 

The first is what you might call the generic mystical experience -- "generic" not because it is boring or predictable but because it seems to be most commonplace and the most readily accessible through certain kinds of spiritual technique, common to religious traditions in both the East and West.

This is an experience in which the self's relationship to reality undergoes a dramatic transformation, and some deeper pattern of reality is apparently revealed. The revelation may take the form of a sense of oneness with the universe, of dissolving boundaries between the self and the world, of interconnection rather than separation within creation, with the ego and the individual personality seemingly evaporating. 

(2) Encounter with something absolutely other.

The second kind of mystical experience... involves a sense of encounter with something absolute and absolutely other. The first kind of experience can turn into the second kind; the line I'm drawing is hardly a clean one, but you see a definite difference when that transition happens, and the person having the experience is left with no doubt that Something is looking at them or pressing into and through them.

Here is an example...

"All at once I felt the presence of God... as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether... I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God has neither form, color, odor, nor taste... God was present, though invisible, he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him."

(3) The supernatural condenses to a particular being.

...The third category of mystical experience [is] in which the supernatural condenses to a person, a particular being, a face, words. In these cases the sense of otherness doesn't go away; these are still encounters with the numinous, unsettling and eerie or just seemingly impossible in their nature and effects.

But what's experienced is made manifest in a singular figure, a personality or group of personalities, a voice giving instructions, not just a harrowing or joyful experience of divinity or mystery. A vision of Jesus or Krishna would fall into this category; so would the innumerable encounters with gods and saints and angels, departed relatives and the Virgin Mary; so would the external voice speaking to you suddenly at some crucial moment in your life.

(4) The experience involves effects on material reality. 

This brings us to the fourth kind of mystical experience, from the point of view of Official Knowledge the most disreputable of all -- the kind of mystical experience that actually has apparent effects in material reality, whether miraculous, uncanny, or simply really, really weird.

...The most consistently attested example of the mystical interacting with the material is the phenomenon of miraculous healings -- seemingly impossible recovery after intercessory prayer. That attestation takes many different forms, with the simplest being the share of contemporary people who claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing.

It's about a third of Americans, according to survey data, with higher shares in other parts of the world, meaning that hundreds of millions of people around the globe believe that they witnessed a concrete supernatural intervention in their lives.

(5) Encounter with a being or force that has agency.

But the religious worldview assumes that these [miraculous] happenings are, at least in the more dramatic cases, the results of the free decisions of nonhuman persons with whom we can interact through prayer or magic -- God Himself, the gods, angelic or demonic beings, the holy dead, unclassifiable forces.

The most common kinds of mystical experience, the ones that just involve the self's experience of its relationship to the cosmos or to its own mortal flesh, can be reproduced to some degree under laboratory conditions. You can put the meditating monk in the MRI machine, you can get general replications of experiences (the details are another matter) among people going on an ayahuasca-mediated spiritual trip.

But the encounter with something entirely other, in which the other being or force or personality has agency as well, is just not the kind of thing that the scientific method is designed to measure or test, nor is the kind of event to which it makes sense to assign definite probabilities.

...The miracle or the vision of the demonic reaching-in is supposed to be specific to the individual; your own internal conditions play some unmeasurable role; and likewise the external agents can't be subjected to normal scientific forms of scrutiny because they're agents and not just impersonal forces -- and their own purposes and interests, for our good or ill, involve not being subjected to the rules that govern our material existence.

Now, I didn't include Douthat's mention of arguments against the validity of reports of mystical experience. That's a whole other subject, whether it makes sense to believe in any or all of the five varieties.

The probability of 1 through 5 being a genuine reflection of reality clearly seems to be in inverse relationship to their number. Meaning, a sense of being in touch with a deeper dimension of reality seems so commonplace, it's hard to argue that something real isn't going on in the mind of the person having the first kind of mystical experience.

Just standing on the top of a mountain, looking out upon the majesty of nature, often stimulates an experience of unity with everything in existence. I've had that sort of experience. Most people have. 

However, being in touch with a supernatural being that has agency, the ability to act and intervene in the lives of humans, this is much less common -- and also much less likely to be true. Yet its rarity makes such an experience more memorable when it happens to someone.

That's why a book about sitting on a beach feeling one with the cosmos while watching the sun set over the ocean won't be of much interest to people, while a book about meeting Jesus and getting a tour of heaven stands a good chance of being a best seller.

Photos of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, with rich and political people

Below I've shared twenty photos of the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, that were sent to me by someone who said:

Hello Brian, I want to put your attention on one matter that effects on the heart of common satsangi, the matter is Why do Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his intern Baba Gill like to visit only the houses of rich and political people and get photographed with them? Whereas none of them is a follower of Radhaswami cult and most of them are corrupt, jail inmates, non vegetarian, heavy drinker. Many of them are involved in drug business and have gone to jail.

I'm sending you few of photographs of GSD with rich and privileged people who are mostly corrupted and indulged in business which are dubious in nature. Plz make an article blog on this email with your effective writing which could convey the real message to common people. When even saints and sages, Baba start jumping around to meet rich people and politicians, then understand that the power is in authority, not in God. Thanx

 

I agree that the guru's propensity to associate with the rich, famous, and well-connected is at odds with a longstanding Radha Soami Satsang Beas principle that the main purpose of human life, as exemplified by the RSSB gurus, is God-realization, with worldly pursuits being secondary.

 

It sure looks like that principle now is for RSSB disciples to follow, while Gurinder Singh Dhillon is exempt from it. The captions below each photo are from the person who shared them with me.

 

Baba Gurinder Singh Dhillon bowing before the photo of Om Parkash Chautala, former Chief Minister of Haryana State, who was arrested on charges of smuggling and spent the last years of his life in jail on corruption charges.

With chief minister of rajasthan bhajan lal sharma.

With ex minister of punjab state Anil joshi

 

With chief minister of Jharkhand state Hemant Soren

 

With governor of punjab state gulab chand kataria

With chief minister of haryana state nayab singh saini

With bollywood actor Shaheed kapoor

 

With minister of punjab aman arora and baba gurinder and apprentice baba gill paid visit minister home

 

With Abhay singh chautala , ex opposition leader of haryana state , son of ex chief minister of haryana , and grand son of deputy prime minister of india Devi lal 

With Ashwani kumar chopra , owner and chief editor of oldest and leading newspaper of punjab state Punjab Kesari

 

With Ex chief minister of jammu and kashmir Farooq abdullah and with current chief minister of state jammu and kashmir Umar abdullah and both are known for non vegetarian

With ex minister of punjab state Rana gurmit singh sodhi 

 

With ex minister of punjab sunil jakhar and current head of BJP party in punjab 

Visiting home of minister of punjab aman arora's house

 

With ex minister of punjab state bikram singh majithia, grand son in law of maharaj charan singh, who spent time in jail in charges of drug rackets and drug trafficking and give shelters to drug mafia of punjab

 

Attending the party of ex deputy chief minister of Punjab's daughter wedding

Visiting house of minister of punjab aman arora

 

Doing Orthodox hindu rituals Agni prajvalit at the moment of visiting home of punjab minister with intern baba gill

 

With ex minister of punjab pratap singh bajwa

 

With bollywood actress, model  shehnaz kaur gill and her family

 

I'll also share a photo that I found, as I was curious about whether Gurinder Singh Dhillon had ever met with the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi. Turns out that he did.

 

AI, artificial intelligence, points to the mystery of how the mind works

Religiously-minded people like to invoke mystery as a reason for believing in God and the supernatural. They adore how holy books teach that the workings of divinity are beyond human comprehension, you know, the whole man proposes and God disposes thing. 

But it isn't necessary to go anywhere outside of the closest entity any of us has to ourselves to come face-to-face with a gigantic mystery, because that entity is the mind that experiences both mystery and everything else from our birth until our death.

In my previous post, "No, neuroscience doesn't support religiosity,"  I included a passage from Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

At the heart of their wonder was the technology's air of mystery, its oracular quality, the way it seemed to break with the patterns of Enlightenment science, in which sequences of replicable experimental processes are supposed to yield results that are trustworthy and verifiable because we can see, step by step, how the entire process works.

With AI, by contrast, the systems can be so complex that we don't always understand how they are generating answers to our questions... There's a black box at the heart of the machine, a hard-to-pin-down element inside the algorithms.

That description of AI was correct. But Douthat's conclusion was false.

But the quest to build an artificial intelligence also represents a place where the supernatural has returned to haunt the scientific project.

This is a ridiculous thing to say.

It reflects the weakness of Douthat's arguments in favor of being religious that he has to throw out absurdities like AI research being haunted by the supernatural. For actually, AI is merely demonstrating how the human mind, Non-artificial Intelligence, works. And the mind is thoroughly physical, being nothing more than the brain in action.

The February 24, 2025 issue of TIME magazine has a story, "DeepSeek's hidden warning for AI safety." Basically, that warning is that AI systems are becoming disconnected from human language, which means that it will be increasingly difficult to understand how the systems arrive at responses to queries posed to them.

In other words, the AI response may be in words, but the process that produced the response will be beyond the reach of words. Here's an excerpt from the story:

Of course, even human-legible AI has its problems. It might look like an AI is faithfully showing its work but some experts aren't sure if these explanations reveal how the AI really makes decisions. It could be like asking a politician for the motivations behind a policy -- they might come up with an explanation that sounds good, but has little connection to the real decision-making process.

As it is, our ability to know exactly how an AI model arrives at its answers is already riddled with uncertainty. It's true that today's most powerful models express chains of thought, in words, that appear to show their reasoning. But the process that creates those words happens at a deeper level: via complex mathematical operations inside a neural network.

Nobody truly understands how that math works. And so the worry is, an especially powerful AI system could potentially craft its chains of thought to conceal dangerous capabilities from monitors, all the while keeping its real logic hidden from view.

Well, this might turn out to be a valid worry. However, at the moment my attitude is that what's being described about how an especially powerful AI system could work is very much, if not exactly, like how the mind of every person on earth works.

Namely, the human mind comes up with thoughts, actions, and such that typically can be expressed in language, yet don't arise from expressible language. Instead, the products of conscious awareness flow from a hundred billion or so neurons that have trillions of interconnections.

How the heck could all that neuronal activity be described in any language? All that we humans are capable of is expressing in words or some other symbolic fashion the tiny conscious tip of a hugely larger unconscious neuronal iceberg.

Why did I decide to write this blog post? I can attempt to describe my conscious motivation, but that would be woefully incomplete. After I read the TIME story about AI, I had a wordless urge to use it as the basis for tonight's blog post.

Yet I have no idea what produced that wordless urge. It just appeared in my mind, in the same fashion as outputs of an AI model just appear without even the creators of the model understanding how this happens.

So as AI systems come ever closer to manifesting the goal of Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, it seems to me that we're just going to have to get used to the idea that AGI processes will be as much a mystery as the workings of the human mind already is.

Nobody freaks out because how we arrive at our everyday thoughts and actions is hidden beneath the veil of unconscious mental operations. At present, this means I'm not going to freak out about AI models behaving in a similar way. 

Until a freak out truly is justified, which I readily admit could happen in the not-so-distant future. (By the way, my computer just typed out "not-so-distant future" as soon as I'd typed "not-." This is a glimpse of how AI soon will become embedded in even routine daily activities.)

No, neuroscience doesn't support religiosity

A trend is evident.

With every fresh blog post I set out to write about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I have an urge to start off the title with "No." Obviously that's because I don't believe everyone should be religious, and Douthat's arguments in favor of that aren't very convincing.

Still, I enjoy being exposed to ideas that I disagree with. Not as a steady diet, but as tasty morsels occasionally. Douthat does about as well as could be expected with his ambitious goal: not to found religiosity on faith, but to a large extent upon reason.

In his "The Mind and the Cosmos" chapter, Douthat attempts to demonstrate that our current knowledge about how the mind works points to divinity, albeit in a circuitous fashion. 

For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI). What he says here is correct. Referencing a 2023 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Douthat writes:

At the heart of their wonder was the technology's air of mystery, its oracular quality, the way it seemed to break with the patterns of Enlightenment science, in which sequences of replicable experimental processes are supposed to yield results that are trustworthy and verifiable because we can see, step by step, how the entire process works.

With AI, by contrast, the systems can be so complex that we don't always understand how they are generating answers to our questions... There's a black box at the heart of the machine, a hard-to-pin-down element inside the algorithms.

So far, so good. However, he then goes off the rails by saying:

But the quest to build an artificial intelligence also represents a place where the supernatural has returned to haunt the scientific project.

This is Douthat doing his God of the Gaps thing, as I've noted in previous posts about his book. Just because it is impossible to tell exactly how AI arrives at its answers to problems doesn't imply that because it also is impossible to tell exactly how the human mind operates, something supernatural must be lurking behind the scenes. 

Douthat correctly says that the so-called hard problem of consciousness is still a mystery, though some persuasively argue that the hard problem of how conscious selfhood arises isn't really a problem at all, but a failure of looking upon the mind/brain correctly.

For all the advances in brain mapping, the mind itself is still irreducible, an enigma, a mysterious substance unto itself... If reading an argument makes you angry, if reading a novel makes you sad, if reading a poem stirs a sudden childhood memory, there is no material account of how that happens, how the outward act generates the inner experience.

Okay, I generally agree. But there's no immaterial or supernatural account of how that happens either. So I find Douthat's criticism of neuroscience to be unfair, in that he's equating a current gap in scientific knowledge about the mind/brain with a fatal flaw in the materialist outlook on reality.

In the end, the emperor is always naked: redescribe as you will, reduce as you may, nobody has any idea how or why the physical inputs that go into conscious experience, the stimuli from particular chemicals or light waves or exchanges between neurons, yield the actual experiences themselves.

Yet he also acknowledges the obvious fact that physical causes affect our experience.

Of  course consciousness exists in some kind of dynamic relationship to physical reality; nobody who's encountered alcohol or pot or caffeine doubts that the experience of selfhood can be altered by conducting chemistry experiments in your bloodstream or your brain.

I kept waiting for some convincing argument from Douthat about how the mind isn't just the brain in action, but is a link or emissary from a supernatural realm, but that argument never materialized. About the best he could do is roll out a weak argument that because it feels to us like the mind is something immaterial, it must be.

Which is to say that after five hundred years of scientific discovery, consciousness still looks just as supernatural in the colloquial sense -- meaning "super-material" or "super-physical," not just another arrangement of atoms but a distinct irreducibility of some kind, acting on physical reality without being physical itself -- as it did in the era of Descartes or Leibniz.

As he often does, in this chapter Douthat falls back upon a weak argument that despite science's best efforts, there is still a strong element of mystery about the brain/mind, this shows that religiosity is a better way of understanding reality.

In the end, the idea that we have available some clearly more rational or more scientific alternative to a "naively" supernatural understanding of the mind is itself fundamentally naive. Whatever consciousness may be, soul or mind, dream or spell, it self-evidently has its own integrity, its own being, which is intertwined with physical reality without being reducible to physical substances and their interactions.

We all know this, at some level, because we cannot not know it; the attempt to refuse the knowledge is itself a manifestation of the very thing that's supposedly being refused or overthrown. Mind cannot reduce mind; consciousness cannot explain itself away. The soul may not be exactly as ancient religions imagined it, but under any conceivable paradigm it will always be very much alive.

I'm confident that Douthat is wrong. I say this because his attitude is just like those who long ago couldn't conceive that thunder and lightning could be anything other than the acts of gods; and who not so long ago couldn't conceive that the speed of light could be constant and that light doesn't require a medium to propagate, or that natural processes could result in the evolution of species over hundreds of millions of years.

Words like "self-evidently" favored by Douthat can't substitute for the fact that often science overturns self-evident conceptions of reality. I'm highly confident that he is wrong about the mind being an exception to the rule that whatever science seeks to know, it makes steady progress in gaining that knowledge -- certainly to a much greater degree than religions do.

Pieces of churchless string too short to save

Many years ago, in that far-off time when local newspapers were much more vibrant and successful than they are now, our town's paper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a column written by someone who occasionally started his piece with "pieces of string too short to save."

Meaning, he was going to mention a bunch of unrelated things in his column that day, each of which was interesting, but didn't merit taking up the entire column. Today I figured I'd dust that saying off and do my blog post imitation of it, otherwise known as three-dot writing.

...Yesterday I heard from someone who asked me why I wanted to get the copyright for Life is Fair back from Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based spiritual group that I wrote the book for. The question surprised me. He'd heard about this from other members of RSSB. I just replied to him.

I’ve never asked for any changes to the Life is Fair copyright. It’s always been in the hands of RSSB. All I did was research and write the book, with help from other volunteers. I have no idea how anyone got the notion that I wanted to take back the copyright, especially since I never had it to begin with. Working on Life is Fair was simply an act of devotion to Charan Singh for me. 

I was told by Faith Singh that Charan dreamed of being able to hand out a little book about the karmic rationale for vegetarianism. When she asked me if I wanted to attempt writing such a book, I instantly said yes, motivated by love for my guru. I guess the lesson here is not to believe all the gossip that spreads around RSSB circles. Like gossip in general, sometimes it has a bit of truth behind it, and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case the gossip has zero truth behind it.

...I'm reading a book that appeared on a New York Times list of best nonfiction books published in 2024,  A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. Kevin Fedarko, the author, is really talented. Here's a paragraph that caught my eye as I was reading the book in the bathtub last night.

Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached -- and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves -- only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.

This passage also is amazingly well written.

The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon's rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if the ground itself were gasping for breath. But the most striking element of all, the detail that could burn a hole in the center of your consciousness, was neither the brilliance nor the ferocity of that heat, but its heft: its thickness and weight as it draped itself over the top of your head and across the blades of your shoulders, as if it were a blanket braided from material that was already in flames when delivered into the hands of its weaver. 

...This morning and yesterday I labored on writing an email to officials at the City of Salem that the Oregon Government Ethics Commission website informed me was a prerequisite for filing a complaint with the commission. In my case, I want to have them find that the Salem Mayor, Julie Hoy, engaged in a prohibited "serial communication" with members of the City Council that led to the City Manager being forced to resign.

The email was necessary to give the City of Salem 21 days to respond to the facts and circumstances of what I consider to be a breach of Oregon's public meeting law. After that, I can file a complaint with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, either appending the city's response, or telling the commission the city officials never responded. 

It was strangely satisfying to spend several hours writing a difficult email. I wanted to sound reasonable and factual while still conveying a sense of outrage at what the Mayor had done. Standing up for what I think is right often brightens my mood. National politics is far removed from my everyday reality. With local politics, I have a chance of making a difference, even if just a small change. The email became a blog post. If you're into geeky subjects like this one, check out "I just initiated an ethics complaint against the City of Salem."

...A recent issue of New Scientist has an article called "Wearables for the mind: A new wave of monitoring devices claim to improve our mental health, but do they work?" I've tried one of the devices, the Mendi headset, buying it when it was a Kickstarter project a few years ago. After liking the Mendi at first, I then got irritated with it.  

I like the idea of making concentration/meditation more scientific with neurofeedback, but the reality is that these sorts of devices are still in an early stage of usefulness. The person who wrote the article seemed to like the Muse brain-sensing headband the most. I agree with him that getting feedback via sounds is preferable to having to look at a screen, which the Mendi requires, as I prefer to meditate wit my eyes closed.

For now I'm going to stick with good old-fashioned meditation. Just me and my brain, doing our thing (assuming there is any difference between "me" and "my brain," which I suspect there isn't.

No, the big bang doesn't point to a divine creator

In my first post a few days ago about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I said that I bought the book because "I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them."

Here I'll finish my critique of his first substantive chapter, "The Fashioned Universe," which I started making in that initial post about the book. 

It's easy for me to do this, because I'm already seeing a theme emerge in how Douthat tries to make his case for religious belief. Though he's clearly an excellent writer and is knowledgeable about many subjects, as befits his status as a New York Times opinion columnist, it's almost disappointing to see him rely on trite God of the Gaps arguments. Wikipedia says:

"God of the gaps" is a theological concept that emerged in the 19th century and revolves around the idea that gaps in scientific understanding are regarded as indications of the existence of God.This perspective has its origins in the observation that some individuals, often with religious inclinations, point to areas where science falls short in explaining natural phenomena as opportunities to insert the presence of a divine creator. The term itself was coined in response to this tendency. This theological view suggests that God fills in the gaps left by scientific knowledge, and that these gaps represent moments of divine intervention or influence.

So it's a pretty lazy way to argue for a religious view of reality. All you have to do is find an area where science doesn't know something and claim, "See, that's evidence for God; science is clueless about this, while religion isn't."

Of course, that isn't true.

Religion is just as clueless as science is about how the big bang came to be, which includes where the laws of nature that guided the big bang came from. The difference is that science is open about its lack of knowledge in this area, while religion makes unverifiable claims about a creator God being behind it all.

Douthat writes:

The first blow to the idea of an indifferent cosmos was the twentieth-century realization that our universe appears to have a specific beginning, a point of origin prior to which not only space but time itself did not exist. 

If Darwin's theory arguably undermined a traditional Christian understanding of human origins, then the Big Bang theory offered a striking support for the Christian understanding of cosmic origins -- offering particular vindication to Augustine of Hippo, who insisted in the fourth century AD that God created time as well as space ex nihilo and exists outside both, in contrast to pagan critics of Christianity who assumed that the universe had to be eternal.

Okay, Augustine was correct about time being created along with space. But it was science, not religion, that came up with demonstrable evidence for the big bang. Douthat does make a good argument against the view of some scientists that the universe sprang out of nothing, the laws of quantum mechanics acting upon quantum fields. 

I agree with Douthat that quantum fields and laws aren't nothing. However, I have no problem envisioning that the cosmos has always existed, along with the laws of nature that allow universes to come into being within the eternal reaches of the cosmos, as this makes more sense to me than an unseen creator God having always existed.

Douthat also notes that the laws of nature are marvelously fine-tuned in a fashion that allows the universe, and life within it, to exist. I've read many science books that make the same point. He disparages the idea of the multiverse, which explains why the laws of our universe are so amenable to life: countless other universes in the cosmos aren't suitable for life, but obviously we are in one that is.

To escape the possibility of a single invisible God, it [the multiverse concept] posits an infinite number of invisible universes that we can never hope to reach or see. To avoid the mind-preceding-matter immaterialism suggested by the universe's apparent fine-tuning and the strange role of human observation in collapsing potentiality into reality, it posits an infinite system that by definition cannot ever be studied from within our material existence.

Well, neither can God. At least the multiverse concept builds on something indisputably real, our universe. Notions about God have no connection with here-and-now reality, being creations of the human mind divorced from anything that can actually be known by our usual senses.

By the way, Douthat's comment about human observation collapsing potentiality into reality at the quantum level is just one of various ways quantum theory accounts for the possible turning into the actual. It's incorrect to hold that consciousness is needed for this to happen. Other theories are popular in the area of quantum physics.

As noted before, Douthat has an annoying habit of choosing an unproven scientific hypothesis, elevating it to a scientific certainty, and then arguing how ridiculous science is for believing in it -- whereas actually science is comfortable with simply saying, "This might be true, or it might be false. More research is needed to determine which it is."

Because religions are so dogmatic, Douthat seems to believe that science is also, while the exact opposite is true. Science loves gaps in knowledge, for those mysteries are what allow science to make progress at learning more about the unknown.

"Believe" is a book that claims religions are true. I doubt it can do that.

I bought Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, not because I agree with that thesis. Rather, I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them.

After reading 25 pages, I'm impressed with Douthat's lofty goal, but not with his reasoning so far. Being a New York Times opinion columnist and a former senior editor at The Atlantic, it isn't surprising that Douthat is a talented writer.

He makes his points clearly. So kudos to him for that. And I admire how in his Introduction, he says that he doesn't want to take the easy way out when it comes to defending religion. Which is:

In contemporary arguments with atheists and skeptics, religious writers tend to make a few familiar moves. One is to insist that both critics and defenders of religion spend too much time focusing on dogmas and doctrines and specific claims about reality, when religion should be understood primarily as a practice, a habit of being that can be fully understood only communally and liturgically.

...To people who hover on the threshold of religion, open to belief but unable to quite get there, the implied advice is to set aside your skepticism, swallow your doubts, and just act as if you actually believe: pray and go to church, love your neighbor, sing the hymns or keep kosher, immerse yourself in religious literature and art, try to reap the psychological and communal benefits of faith.

The idea is to embrace religious practice somewhat in defiance of the reasoning faculties, making experience rather than argument your guide, and see what happens next. 

Instead, Douthat wants to convince the reader of his book that religions are a reliable guide to truth and reality, more so than a secular worldview that naturally includes science. 

This isn't a book about how religious stories are psychologically helpful whatever their truth content, or about how religious communities offer a valuable solidarity even if their doctrines are made up, or about how embracing the mystery of existence can make you happy in the day-to-day. Such benefits to religion clearly exist for many people, but those benefits accrue precisely because religious perspectives are closer to the truth about existence than purely secular worldviews.

And the benefits are not the best place to start, if we're after something more than just contentment and good vibes. Rather, we'll start with religion's intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.

Okay. Great. Rather than trying an end run around the formidable structure of modern science and secularism in general, Douthat wants to attack head on, busting right through the castle walls that, in his opinion, do a poor job of containing the truth about reality.

For Douthat, that includes the supernatural.

I'll be defending beliefs and practices that fall squarely on the supernatural and dogmatic side: real belief in a creator God or ghostly ancestors or a divine pantheon, real commitment to following Jesus or Muhammed or the Buddha, not just general ideas about the good life or cultural practices that you'd like to see handed on.

Being a Christian, Douthat admits "there is no way for me to be perfectly fair to the other religions I'm discussing, especially at the level of generality that this book is aiming for." Fine. But someone should have told him that in no way does the Buddha belong in the company of Jesus and Muhammed. 

Buddhism famously advises, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Meaning, Buddhist teachings not only don't require a belief in the divinity of the Buddha, such a belief in actively discouraged, since Buddhists are encouraged to be a light unto themselves -- a far cry from Christianity and Islam.

This morning I just made a start at reading Douthat's first substantive chapter, The Fashioned Universe, where he argues for the universe having been created by a supernatural entity, which for him is the Christian God. So far, I'm not impressed. 

Amazingly, somehow Douthat finds in the order of the universe as revealed by science evidence for religiosity.

For a general religious attitude to be safely discarded as irrational, modern science would need to have proved more than just the fallibility of the Ptolemaic system, or done more than sow doubts about the historicity of the early books of Genesis. It would need to have demonstrated that it's a fundamental mistake to interpret the universe as a whole as something structured, ordered, seemingly artistically created and mathematically designed.

This shows the flimsiness of his arguments. Modern science does indeed find that the universe is structured and ordered. But science doesn't view the universe as artistically created or mathematically designed. Those are religious sentiments.

Douthat wants us to believe that the orderliness of the universe needs to be explained. Who says? Maybe someday science will be able to do this. But maybe it won't. Perhaps we humans will never know why there are laws of nature rather than chaotic randomness. All we can be sure of is that if the universe wasn't ordered, we wouldn't be here, debating the origin of order.

This makes no sense to me. It is a classic God of the Gaps argument.

Douthat admits that cosmology and evolution are settled truths about the universe. Science has succeeded in presenting solid explanations for how the universe came to be as it is, and how life evolved on our planet. Yet because science only has unproven hypotheses about how order itself arose (the multiverse is one hypothesis), Douthat sees this as a reason to embrace religion's equally unproven hypotheses about a Creator God who designed the universe.

Darwinism established, with uncertainties around the edges of the theory, that an algorithmic process running over an extended period of time can generate increasingly complex and increasingly diverse machines made of cells and atoms. From small acorns, mighty trees; from the building blocks of life and the complex pressures of Earth's environment, stags and fungi, orcas and armadillos, praying mantises and human beings.

But those building blocks, that orderly environment, the system of the world in which the algorithmic process takes place, Hinduism's rta -- all this Darwin assumes as a given, not explained as the result of a blind process in its own right.

Here's the best description of Zen koans I've ever seen

Koans are an aspect of Zen Buddhism that I've always looked upon as wonderfully mysterious, yet unappealing. For in traditional Zen writings I'd read about a student being given a koan like "Does a dog have buddha nature?"

Then they struggled to figure out what the answer is, periodically having a get-together with their Zen master for him to see how they're doing, where usually he rejects their lame attempt at a response by hitting them on the head with his staff or screaming at them.

Not exactly something that sounds either pleasant or productive to me. 

But near the end of his book, Original Love, which I finished reading today, Zen master Henry Shukman presents a view of koans which makes more sense than any other description of koan practice that I've come across.

First Shukman describes koans in this fashion.

Koan training is an ingenious method for conveying the experience of awakening, and for learning to live it more thoroughly, in a rich, deep life informed by love.

Most koans are about things. A dog. A tree. A bridge. A flower. Autumn leaves. Somehow, in Zen, these ordinary things of the world contain the deepest truths. If these truths are explored through koans, then the most ordinary things can awaken us.

...What is the sound of one hand? Stop the sound of the distant bell. Make Mount Fuji take three steps. A meditator runs a koan through their mind as they sit, until they become absorbed in the phrase.

...What is the sound of one hand? A nonsense question. Yet if we refrain from getting into problem-solving mode, and don't try to unravel it like a puzzle, then we can allow the strange question to hover in our minds, like a full moon rising in the evening sky as sunset is darkening into night. There the hazy moon is, floating low in the sky. So the koan floats in the mind. We wait and see -- does it provoke a call, an ease, a quiet? Does it spark curiosity?

Then Shukman shares a guided meditation on Exploring a Koan. This sort of thing isn't in the traditional literature about koans. I'm grateful Shukman describes his approach to koan practice, as it is appealingly doable.

In this meditation we'll explore sitting with a classic koan. This one actually has two formulations: "This" and "What is this." We'll try out both in this sit. A key aspect of meditating with a koan is not to try to answer or resolve it. It may seem paradoxical, but instead of seeking a response, see if you can just state the koan in your mind and simply observe what effect the word or phrase has on the quality or clarity of meditation.

As with any other sit, start by finding a comfortable seated position. Let your whole body relax. Let your body be balanced, so all parts can relax downward around the central column of the upper body. (If you're reclining, then give yourself entirely to the support beneath you.) The spine has its own intrinsic capacity to hold itself upright. Let it do that by itself. Let your body be balanced around it, so everything else can drape and hang, like rigging gone slack on a tall ship at rest in a bay.

Feel the swells of breath rolling gently through you, slightly lifting and lowering the hull of your lower trunk. Let the rise and fall of the breath soothe you.

Now sense the space within which your body sensations are appearing.

Tune into the space within which sounds are arising. Note that they are really one space, one great space. 

Now, as presence starts to develop and you begin to inhabit your experience here and now, gently bring in the koan. Start by saying in your mind the word This... This... on each exhalation. 

Let the word come gently, quietly. You inhale... and then exhale, and in your mind you add the word This... to the longer, relaxing release of the exhalation. 

This... This... This 

Don't try to do anything special. Don't seek anything special. Just imagine that there is nothing more to be found. All that there is, is here right now. There is nothing but This... This

Again, don't look for anything. Just rest in exactly what is happening right now. This... This

How does it feel to hear the word This? Notice when you say it if whether the word has any effect on you that you can detect. This...

If the practice is feeling interesting or is arousing curiosity or appreciation, then stay with the feeling and continue as you are. This... This

If the practice is not particularly engaging, or if you feel like you have done enough of it for now, then we can shift to a different formulation. 

Now, in the same way as before, on each exhalation, add the words What is this...

Don't think of the words as a question to which you need to find an answer. Imagine that there is no answer and that the words are only a phrase. What is this...

Gently, quietly, and tenderly, pour this little phrase into the stream of your exhalation. 

Inhale ... and exhale: What is this...

What is this... What is this...

No straining, no striving, no answering. Just the words. Just the phrase. What is this...

Once again, see how it feels in your body and mind when you add this question into the space of your meditation Utter the phrase in your mind, and taste any aftereffects of saying it.

What is this...

And when you feel ready, drop the phrase and rest in silence and stillness for a few moments. Then bring some movement into your toes and fingers, your limbs, and your spine. Open your eyes and stretch. Come back to the space you're in, ready for whatever is next.

Thank you for being open to trying this.

Empathy is a sign of maturity, which is why Trump is so childlike

It's difficult to define morality, or for that matter, to define any other characteristic that most people would agree is part of being a decent human being. But that shouldn't stop us from speaking about morality, since common sense and intuition are a pretty good guide here.

In the February 2025 issue of Scientific American, there's an article about how the adolescent mind develops, "Growing the Adolescent Mind." 

The geeky details are interesting. However, what caught my eye was the mention of transcendence, which I usually think of as referring to something in the religious or spiritual sphere. After all, TM is shorthand for Transcendental Meditation, which has been popular since it started being taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1950s.

The psychologist who wrote the Scientific American story, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, says that transcendent thinking takes us beyond the here and now.

This emerging capacity to muse in abstract ways enables teenagers to understand themselves, their family, friends and society at large and to imagine what their own place in the world might be. Over time such transcendent thinking constructs resilience to adversity and places young people on a path to future satisfaction with life, work, and relationships.

No matter what age we are, being able to look beyond the narrow confines of Me is key to a mature vision of reality. The more we can expand our circle of caring, the greater our morality will be. Sure, it is natural to care most deeply about the people closest to us, family, friends, co-workers, and such. 

Knowing them intimately enables us to recognize their joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, hopes and fears. Empathy is fairly easy to come by when we feel like we know someone's interior life in addition to their exterior appearance and doings.

Yet we also can empathize with strangers, people we've never had any contact with and likely never will. For they share our basic humanity, no matter how their nationality, religion, political leaning, or any other characteristic differs from ours. 

And why stop with humans? Animals also deserve our empathy. This is the main reason I became a vegetarian about 55 years ago. I knew that I'd be upset (to put it mildly) if someone killed me in order to eat my flesh. So I empathized with the animals that often die cruel deaths to become a human meal. 

In the book I wrote for Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Life is Fair, which presented the karmic rationale for vegetarianism, a quote from Albert Einstein was included:

A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited by time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This consciousness is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few people closest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

There are many reasons why I dislike Donald Trump. I readily admit that I have a lot of difficulty mustering up much compassion or empathy for him.

Still, when my wife watched The Apprentice, a movie about Trump, I did feel some empathy, as it was clear that his father didn't shower him with love and his relationship with Roy Cohn, a jerk of an attorney who schooled Trump in how to manipulate people for his own ends, seemed to be a second-chance attempt with a father figure.

(My parents divorced when I was very young, and I only spent one hour with my father, so I understand the pain of not having what so many people take for granted.)

What bothers me the most about Trump -- even though I realize this isn't under his control -- is how he demonstrates such little compassion and empathy. Every relationship is transactional for him. He always wants to know what's in it for him, not what is best for the other person (or group, or nation). 

Not once have I seen Trump show that he deeply cares about the suffering of others. I've never seen him shed a tear for those less fortunate than he is. Yesterday I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog, "A USAID worker I know died helping others. Trump is trashing his memory."

In the post I shared some of the wonderful things that the United States Agency for International Development does for people around the world. Sure, this agency isn't perfect. No government agency is, just as no person is. I wouldn't mind if Trump set out to fix the things that are wrong with USAID, leaving its core humanitarian mission intact.

But Trump is taking a wrecking ball to USAID. His America First policy is the political equivalent of a Me-Me-Me narcissist who only wants to see their own reflection in a mirror. In my blog post I shared an excerpt from a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. 

I’ve seen genuine improvements in U.S.A.I.D. over the years. Its public-private partnership to tackle lead poisoning, announced last year, was a model of American leadership. And so from my travels, this is what U.S.A.I.D. has come to mean to me:

I’ve seen women and girls with obstetric fistula, a horrific childbirth injury, get a $600 surgery that gives them back their lives — and this is something that U.S.A.I.D. supports.

I’ve seen men humiliated by elephantiasis and grotesquely enlarged scrotums, occasionally requiring a wheelbarrow to support their organs as they walk. And U.S.A.I.D. has fought this disease and made it less common.

I’ve seen children dying of malaria (and I’ve had malaria), and I’ve seen U.S.A.I.D. help achieve major strides against the disease over the last two decades.

I’ve seen southern Africa ravaged by AIDS. And then President George W. Bush’s landmark program against AIDS, called PEPFAR and implemented in part through U.S.A.I.D., transformed the landscape. I saw coffin makers in Lesotho and Malawi grumble that their business was collapsing because far fewer people were dying. PEPFAR has saved 26 million lives so far. (In the coming months, I’ll see if I can calculate how many lives are lost to Trump’s cuts in aid.)

I’ve seen the suffering of communities where people in middle age routinely go blind from trachoma, river blindness or cataracts — and the transformation when U.S.A.I.D. helps prevent such blindness.

Trump scoffed that U.S.A.I.D. was “run by radical lunatics.” Is it radical lunacy to try to save children’s lives? To promote literacy for girls? To fight blindness?

If this is woke, what about the evangelical Christians in International Justice Mission, which, with U.S.A.I.D. support, has done outstanding work battling sex trafficking of children in Cambodia and the Philippines? Does Trump believe that rescuing children from rape is a radical lunatic cause?

Trump’s moves are of uncertain legality, not least because U.S.A.I.D. was established by Congress, but the outcomes are indisputable. Around the world children are already missing health care and food because of the assault on the agency that Kennedy founded to uphold our values and protect our interests.

To billionaires in the White House, it may seem like a game. But to anyone with a heart, it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.

Science is the best guide to spirituality

Some people believe that science is opposed to spirituality, that these pursuits operate in different realms of reality and an embrace of one implies a distancing from the other.

I've never believed this.

Even when I was in my most religious frame of mind, the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru considered to be God in Human Form, I remained intensely interested in what science has learned about our universe even as I explored the possibility of realms beyond the physical.

This is why the first book that I wrote on behalf of RSSB, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, was a study of how the new physics could be related to ancient mysticism. I deeply enjoyed reading a lot of science books, particularly regarding quantum theory, as that was a scientific area I was pretty much ignorant about.

It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that reality is a unified whole, not a mess of disjointed pieces. So whatever is true and real in the domain of science should be reflected in whatever is true and real in the domain of spirituality.

Of course, there are unproven conjectures in both science and spirituality, albeit more so in the latter than in the former, given the emphasis on backing up hypotheses with solid evidence in science. And one reason I like science so much is that even well-proven hypotheses are never taken to be 100% true, since there's always a possibility of them being proven wrong, or at least needing to be modified.

Still, it seems that two propositions occupy an intermediate position between raw conjecture and well-cooked fact in both science and spirituality, at least certain areas of spirituality such as Buddhism and Advaita. Meaning, there's both considerable debate about the propositions and considerable evidence in support of them.

They are: (1) We humans lack a self that is unchanging and immaterial, and (2) We humans lack free will, being bound by deterministic forces. In other words, we don't have a soul that survives our bodily death and we don't have the ability to avoid lawful causes and effects.

This puts us in the same position as everything else in the universe, so far as we know.

Every living thing dies. Every living and inanimate thing obeys the laws of nature. By not viewing ourselves as special in this vast, majestic universe, both science and some forms of spirituality (again, notably Buddhism) present us with an appealing view where humans are closely connected, inseparable really, with everything else. 

What I find beautiful about this viewpoint is how learning what is true about ourselves leads to learning what is true about the universe, and vice versa -- learning what is true about the universe leads to learning what is true about ourselves. 

Not all truths, obviously, but the two important ones I've mentioned: no self, no free will. This makes scientific reality a friend of spirituality, not a foe. I can bounce back and forth between books about neuroscience and Buddhism without worrying that one will contradict the other (at least, not by much).

These days science denialism is on the upswing among certain groups. In the United States, religious fundamentalists and extreme political conservatives are the worst offenders against scientific truth. They also tend to believe in a supernatural soul and God-given free will. 

Hopefully one day not only Americans, but people all around the world, will understand that learning what is true about ourselves and the world isn't to be feared, but to be embraced. Mysteries always will remain in both science and spirituality.

But we should lean into the darkness of mystery from the well-lighted solid foundation of what is currently known about reality, not the shaky ground of unproven belief.

It's great that a Zen master can be an atheist

[Before I get into the subject of this blog post, a note about keeping to the subject in comments on my blog posts. I just had to unpublish a comment on my previous post about the need to choose a religion, as the comment was related 100% to a defense of an outrageous action by the Trump administration that I wrote about last night on my Salem Political Snark blog. I'm fine with some mildly off-topic comments, but not those completely unrelated to the subject of a blog post, as that is highly confusing to anyone reading such a comment. What the heck does that have to do with this post?]

To me it's obvious that Buddhism not only doesn't require a belief in God, but is opposed to theism. Yes, there's a religious side to Buddhism. Some Buddhists view the Buddha as possessing miraculous supernatural powers. The Pure Land sect considers that a sort of heaven awaits after a believer dies. 

But on the whole, Buddhism is pleasingly God-free. Rarely do I come across references to God in books I've read about Buddhism. This is true of a book by Zen master Henry Shukman, Original Love, that I'm currently reading. However, Shukman fairly frequently refers to soul, which is uncomfortably close to God-talk.

That made me wonder a bit about Shukman's view of the supernatural, given that Zen is so down to earth and here-and-now oriented. Thankfully, I've come across some passages that reassure me about Shukman's non-godly credentials.

This is pretty damn direct.

And the levels of practice -- all they are, in fact, is levels of love. If this whole path of practice were not about love, then it wouldn't be worth it. But at the same time, love has no levels. Once we taste the love, on no matter which level -- mindfulness, support, or absorption -- we are well. We are okay, we are home.

And yet we can abandon ourselves more and more to love. So in another sense, there really are levels. But why love? Does that word indicate that this avowed "atheist" believes in some kind of universal love, also known as "God"?

On the contrary, the discovery of universal interconnectedness as an experience, not an idea, and of an all-inclusive dimension that makes us and all things one -- this is some kind of ultimate love, without any "supreme being" needed. Unless our connection to this love is the supreme being itself. 

Now, that last sentence does seem to open the door to God, albeit just a crack. But Shukman goes on to say on the next page:

So, yes, different faces of love. All we have to do is keep opening to them. And a time can come when we cross some kind of hump, turn a corner, or go over a steep slope -- something can happen where the center of gravity of our life tips from being located in the separate, anxious, lonely sense of me, to being more centered in the nameless love whose true face is always this moment just as it is.

Coffee cup. Morning light. Yellow pad. Pen getting a little sluggish, just one shade fainter, just one micrometer thinner in its line, as its reservoir of ink gets a little closer to being used up.

This is it. If you want to meet ultimate reality, encounter the supreme being, here it is. Right here. Right now. Staring you in the face, flooding into your ears, nudging you on every side -- table edge under your elbow, hard bench under your buttocks, warm barrel of pen in your fingers, and the whole spectrum of experience flooding in -- and there is nowhere to flood in from, and nowhere to flood in to. 

Instead, there is just this. Boundless. Perfect. Fully realized, fulfilled. Totally accomplished already. You. Your yourself. Forever this. 

And Shukman views the non-historical Buddha as inhabiting an imaginal realm that exists within human consciousness, not somewhere in a supernatural dimension of reality.

Religions clearly have archetypal figures -- entities who are said to inhabit an immaterial world, and come forth into intimate consciousness to guide and support their followers. That realm may be thought of as a supernatural place, a "heaven," where holy beings dwell, for example, but can also be construed as finding its home within a zone of the human unconscious that is both personal and transpersonal.

The word Buddha, for example, applies both to a historical figure who taught in northern India twenty-four hundred years ago, and also, especially in traditional Asian contexts, to a figure who dwells in an intermediate imaginal realm, real to its devotees but not flesh and blood, ready to be invoked as an agent of succor at any time or place.

In Christianity there is not only Christ but also Mary, and many saints besides, who occupy a zone equivalent to the mundus imaginalis. The very notion of a "heaven," where the saints, angels, and other divinities dwell, might be another term for the imaginal zone of consciousness.  

Opinion piece makes me wonder, why choose a religion at all?

Today I came across a New York Times opinion piece by Ross Douthat, "Looking for Faith? Here's a Guide to Choosing a Religion." (That link should open for everybody, being a gift article from my online subscription; if not, here's a PDF file.)
Download Opinion | Looking for Faith? Here’s a Guide to Choosing a Religion. - The New York Times

Douthat, a regular NYT columnist, based his piece on a book he's written that has a release date later this month: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

While I obviously don't share this assumption, being an atheist, I just put in an advance order with Amazon, because I want to learn more about the arguments Douthat makes, which, based on his opinion piece, supposedly include new scientific evidence pointing to our universe being designed and the existence of a supernatural realm.

I can guess what this evidence is. If I'm right, Douthat is on shaky ground. But I could be wrong, so I'll read this book to see how persuasive he is.

My take on the opinion piece is that Douthat doesn't make a compelling case for either (1) the desirability of becoming religious, or (2) following his advice about how to choose a religion. If he had simply said, choose a religion that appeals to you, if you have a desire to be religious, I'd have no problem with that.

After all, how we choose what to eat or what music to listen to, assuming those options are open to us (prisoners and castaways on a desert island aren't able to make those choices) is based on personal preferences. Likes and dislikes are subjective. They're hard to argue with, given that we all have them and they differ from person to person.

But Douthat goes further in a fashion I found confusing. Here's an excerpt from his opinion piece:

So the religious seeker, looking out across a diverse religious landscape, should assume that there exist less-true and more-true schools of thought, not one truth and a million fictions. And this suggests, crucially, that even if you start in what turns out to be a wronger-than-average place, you can still draw closer to ultimate reality by conforming yourself to whatever that tradition still gets right.

Let’s call this the Emeth principle, after a character in one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels. Emeth is a devout adherent of the religion of Tash, a vulture-demon, who ends up being welcomed into heaven on the grounds that in performing works of virtue, he has served the true god of Narnia, the lion Aslan, without knowing it.

This principle does not presume that all religions are identical, that there is no scenario in which any soul is ever lost. (Certainly it was not a matter of indifference to Lewis whether people worshiped Aslan or Tash.) The idea, rather, is that if God ordered the universe for human beings, then even a flawed religion will probably contain intimations of that reality — such that a sincere desire to find and know the truth will find some kind of reward.

Well, that's a really big "if" in the last sentence: ...if God ordered the universe for human beings... . This indicates that Douthat believes in just that, because elsewhere in his piece he also strongly implies, if not stating this directly, that a religious seeker will be guided to correct the errors in their seeking by a higher power.

Douthat also throws in some language for those who don't believe in a supernatural being who created the universe and helps people realize the nature of God.

Alternatively, does too much supernaturalism place an obstacle in the way of belief? Then it makes more sense to initially embrace the religious traditions that emphasize human ethical action or obedience to God’s law over and above miracle and mysticism.

It's clear by that "initially" that Douthat views Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions as the most true and real. Elsewhere in his piece he describes how someone was attracted to Zen Buddhism, practiced it for years, then realized that Christianity was their thing. He doesn't have any stories about people who start out Christian, then realize that Zen Buddhism is their thing.

What perplexes me is how Douthat can claim that the rightness or wrongness of a religion will become clear over time. I'd agree with this if he entertained the possibility that all religions are wrong that assume the existence of a supernatural God, since there is no objective evidence of this. 

This is why religiosity actually is akin to food or music preferences. It's a matter of taste. People can argue about their favorite types of food or music, but it comes down to a simple notion: I like it. Similarly, people belong to various religions because they like them. If they stop liking them, they either choose a different religion or give up believing in religiosity.

I reject Douthat's contention that it makes sense to choose a religion.

His opinion piece is incorrect when he claims that religiosity is making comeback. I haven't seen any evidence of this, just evidence to the contrary -- that the percentage of "none's" in the United States, at least, is steadily increasing. More and more people are choosing to be spiritual but not religious, or to just live life as it is without any form of spirituality. 

Likewise, the largest political group in the United States is nonaffiliated people, those who don't want to be Republican, Democrat, or a member of any other party. This doesn't mean they don't care about politics or improving our country. They just don't want to be confined in the box of a political party.

Douthat argues for the primacy of established large religions, somehow believing that having hundreds of millions or billions of members shows that a religion offers truths in accord with ultimate reality. No, it just shows that a religion is popular with lots of people. 

Falsehoods often are wildly popular, while the truth is shunned by many or most, being attractive to only a few.