Church of the Churchless

Our belief that we're freely acting agents causes pain and suffering

Want to feel better? Want to take steps toward genuine enlightenment? Want to embark on a journey toward truth and away from illusion?

All those wants can be achieved by giving up a sensation of being an independent agent, or soul, or ego, that stands apart from the laws of nature that govern everything else in existence. 

So argues Paul Breer in a persuasive fashion in his book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. I'm enjoying the book a lot. Here's excerpts from the first chapter, "An Overview of the Agency Problem," that provide a good overview of what the book is all about.

What I mean by agent is what writers of a more spiritual age called the soul and what modern psychologists refer to as ego. Despite the difference in coloring, all three terms refer to a common animating principle or entity that stands at the center of our being, directing our thoughts, decisions and moral judgments.

More that any feature of personality or physical appearance, it is this soul-ego-agent that we conventionally think of as our real self. It is that which ultimately distinguishes us from each other. When we get right down to it, you are you and I am I because of a difference in agency. We may resemble each other in behavior or looks. We could even be identical twins, but because the animating force within us is unique, we as individuals are unique.

That, at any rate, is what most of us have been brought up to believe.

Starting early in childhood, we are taught that our true self resides not in our bodies or even in our minds, but in our souls. As soul-agents, we are not only unique but, unlike all other creatures on earth, endowed with the power and freedom to cause our own behavior. We are more than bodies, more than minds. In our essence, we are spiritual beings.

That conception of homo sapiens is rarely challenged even by those who profess a materialist philosophy. The broad acceptance of free will among the religious and non-religious alike obscures the fact that the concept of agency rests on the same dualistic assumptions as our belief in God, the Devil, heaven, hell, the Holy Ghost, salvation, and divine judgment.

What makes free agency a specifically spiritual concept is the assumption that the agent's choices are not caused by antecedent conditions. They are mysterious, inexplicable -- unconnected to the chain of cause and effect which links all events in the material world. The agent is free, in other words, because of its power to cause behavior without itself being the effect of other causes.

To the extent that we humans possess that power, we quality as Unmoved Movers. We are godlike, divine, and not fully of this material world. There is reason to suspect, however, that the little man or woman inside of us (the homunculus) is no more real that any of the other spiritual entities with which we have traditionally populated the unseen world.

...If it should turn out that we are not souls or agents after all, what else is there for us to be? The answer is almost too obvious.

If we are not the prime movers of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, must we not be the thoughts, feelings, and actions themselves -- as well as the physical bodies in which those experiences arise? This much is certain: if we are not free agents, we cannot be the authors of our own experience and behavior. Nor can we be the internal managers who organize and process that experience: the experience organizes and processes itself.

It is not even appropriate to say that we are subjects having the experience. We are the experience. We are that which is happening here in these bodies. We are constellations of experience and behavior arising spontaneously out of genetic and environmental circumstance. We are also the physical structures in which those events are taking place. 

...My own interest in non-agency has evolved out of a five-year immersion in the chilly waters of Rinzai Zen. While I have long since given up what Alan Watts called "aching-legs Zen" for the comforts of reading and thinking I have retained the Easterner's concern with integrating philosophy into everyday life.

It strikes me as little more than a game, fascinating perhaps, but still a game, to embrace the idea of non-agency without taking steps to incorporate that idea into the way one deals with work, love, pain, death and all the other dimensions of human existence. Because the idea is so central, taking it in deeply has the potential for transforming the way we feel about almost everything we do.

...The book is both an argument and a strategy for replacing the illusion of agency with a view of ourselves as constellations of experience and behavior arising spontaneously out of circumstance. If there is any originality here, it does not lie with the argument against free will. That argument has evolved in a variety of places and constitutes a major chapter in the history of both Eastern and Western philosophy.

What may be new is the spelling out of how the illusion of agency adds to the pain of life and, paradoxically, how much freer we would feel if we were to begin defining ourselves as that which is arising here. 

...Straining, blaming, craving, defending and protesting are all implicated in the agency syndrome. Their emotional counterparts -- anxiety, guilt, despair, pride, and anger -- can be expected to change as behavior itself changes. For anyone patient enough to see the process through, the end result is a transformation of personality.

The more thorough the uprooting of agency, the more radical will be that transformation.

Discard religious and mystical fantasies. Just live life as it is.

I've come to feel that the strangest thing about religion and mysticism is how these dogmas introduce a big dose of strangeness into life that makes living way more complicated than it needs to be.

Here's another way of saying this: everybody's life is full of problems and challenges. But life itself isn't a problem or challenge. It's just life. 

So when a religion or mystical path tells you that you need to be saved, or enlightened, or self-realized, or god-realized, or cleansed of sin, or any other bit of bullshit that holier-than-thou preachers, gurus, and such like to blab on about, don't believe them.

You're absolutely fine just the way you are. 

Again, I'm not claiming that you should give up all effort and let things happen however they might. Keep on trying to improve the life of yourself, your loved ones, and other people.

Just discard the notion of some cosmic flaw at the core of your being that needs fixing.

You don't need to know God because almost certainly God doesn't exist. You don't need to attain a state of divine virtue, since that's a religious myth. You don't need to soul-travel your way to a supernatural realm, as there's no demonstrable evidence that you have a soul or that anything beyond the physical is real.

Simply be the human being that you already are.

Imperfect. Flawed. Yet doing the best you can. And that's plenty good enough. No need to beat yourself up about not attaining some religious or mystical fantasy about a heavenly world other than the one you, and me, and everyone else already inhabits.

I'd been thinking along these lines before I read this comment from Ron E., but Ron's thoughts stimulated me to ponder more deeply the theme of giving up imaginary life problems. 

I’ve just come across this quote from U. G. Krishnamurti; Although he often comes across as somewhat exasperating in what he says, the quotes below describes a certain life truism:

“This question haunted me all my life and suddenly it hit me: 'There is no self to realize. What the hell have I been doing all this time?' You see, that hits you like lightning. Once that hits you, the whole mechanism of the body that is controlled by this thought is shattered. What is left is the tremendous living organism with an intelligence of its own. What you are left with is the pulse, the beat and the throb of life.” - U. G. Krishnamurti.

It’s perhaps possible, that when certain thoughts, concepts and words are realised as being unnecessary in life, and cease to carry the ponderous weights of anticipated hopes and fears, then a certain lightness and freedom ensues – taking one back to the simplicity of being what one is and seeing life in general being as it is.

A believer in Putin's propaganda reminds me of religious dogmatism

Proving that I'm able to tolerate people who embrace absurd conspiracy theories, for several weeks I've been engaged in an exchange of emails with an acquaintance who also lives in Salem, Oregon.

His name is Jack. 

In the past Jack and I have corresponded about subjects we agreed on, both of us being on the left side of the political spectrum. But Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine revealed another side to Jack.

He buys in almost 100% to Putin propaganda about the war. Jack's sources for this disinformation are web sites biased toward Russia, if not controlled by them.

When he started sending me links about how Ukraine is led by a bunch of Nazis, it took me just a minute of Googling to learn how those stories emanated from Russian sympathizers or agents. I figured that Jack would be grateful when I pointed this out to him.

I was wrong. 

In the same way that religious fundamentalists often view an attack on their faith as a sign to redouble their commitment to God, the more I showed Jack the error of his Ukraine ways, the more adamant he became that he was right.

It didn't matter that reputable scholars, journalists, and intelligence experts all debunked Putin's lie that he needed to invade Ukraine to "de-Nazify" the country. Each time I pointed out the truth to Jack, he replied with more evidence from his unreliable sources.

Sort of like a Christian quoting from the Bible to show that the Bible is true. 

Given how much crap exists on the internet, it almost always is possible to find a web page, or many pages, that supports whatever crazy idea someone has. One way to avoid this trap is to cast your intellectual net as widely as possible, so you aren't taken in by some barely-true specifics that can masquerade as truth.

For example, it's true that Ukraine has some Nazis. But so does the United States. So does Russia.

I sent Jack a FactCheck piece about "The Facts on De-Nazifying Ukraine." It quoted experts on this who said there's a higher percentage of right-wing extremists in the United States and Russia than in Ukraine. So if Putin wanted to de-Nazify a nation, he should have started with his own.

However, when someone is more attached to an incorrect view of an aspect of the world that, for whatever reason, they find more satisfying than learning the truth about that aspect, it's really difficult for them to admit that they're wrong.

So I'm about ready to give up on my email correspondence with Jack. There's just little value in communicating with someone whose mind is closed.

I'm not saying that my own mind always is open to the truth. Like everybody, I've got my biases and blind spots. However, in my religious-believing days, which went on for about 35 years, I wasn't so much denying evidence as embracing a lack of evidence.

Meaning, to offer one example, I couldn't prove that the guru I followed was God in Human Form, as his teachings proclaimed. But nobody could prove that the guru wasn't God in Human Form, which allowed my blind faith to rush in where evidence to the contrary was lacking.

What's much more problematic is when, say, a religious believer denies evolution, since there's lots of evidence that evolution is true.

Similarly, I've told Jack that the atrocities and war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine really bother me, citing Bucha as one example. Today I got this bizarre message from Jack.

Now, about Bucha. The Russians were gone by the time those bodies were getting scattered about. It was either two or three days after the Russians left that the mayor himself publicly noted that all was well in the town.  No bodies were visible. But subsequent to that Ukies then began going house-to-house looking for evidence of residents who had been friendly with the Russians, killing them, and arranging their bodies neatly along the side of the street to make it handy for the photographers and to please Zelensky when he came to visit.

I have no idea where Jack got these totally false ideas. It seems almost too absurd for even the Kremlin to promulgate. though likely Jack's source was Russian propaganda. Because I can't stand lies that ignore the Russian war crimes committed in Bucha, I sent this reply to Jack.

Jack, you truly have bought into Russian propaganda 100%. The New York Times proved that bodies in Bucha were there weeks before the Russians left. The Times also did an in-depth investigation of the Russian atrocities in Bucha. Read and believe:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/04/world/europe/bucha-ukraine-bodies.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/11/world/europe/bucha-terror.html

Unfortunately, Jack won't believe the New York Times, or the many other journalists who have reported on the horrors that the Russian military brought upon residents of Bucha.

Once a truth-denying mental virus has infected someone, it can be extremely difficult for them to heal themselves and be in touch with reality. At first I felt a duty to help Jack see the light of Ukraine truth. But I've come to realize that if someone is addicted to conspiracy theories, they have to want to be free of their addiction.

No one else can do that for them.

Bullshit: "What you dislike in others is what you dislike in yourself"

There's a lot of New Age absurdities that irritate me. One of them is the ridiculous notion that if I dislike something about someone else, it's because I actually dislike that something in myself.

Oh, really? That's absurd. Sure, perhaps it is true in a few cases, but almost always we have a good reason for our dislikes.

I dislike Donald Trump because he lies incessantly, has a monstrous ego, lacks any genuine sense of morality, and exhibits an almost total lack of self-awareness and self-criticism. 

(Those are the dislikes that come most readily to mind. I could come up with more after a bit of additional thought.)

What I dislike about Trump isn't a reflection of my own mind, as a couple of annoying web pages I found say: "What You Dislike in Others is What You Dislike in Yourself" and "Introspection: Why You Hate in Others What You Hate in Yourself."

That makes no sense. Are we to believe that everybody who dislikes Trump, mostly liberals, share the qualities that they believe Trump possesses, while everybody who likes Trump, mostly conservatives, have none of those qualities?

It's a fact that what I dislike about Trump is part of Trump's personality. No doubt about it. Fact checkers have proven that he lies all the time. Most of us lie occasionally, but we feel bad when we're caught in a lie. Trump revels in lying, and he never admits he was wrong.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as projection. Sometimes people do indeed project their own disliked qualities onto others. There's been some notable instances of Republican politicians who were vehemently anti-LGBTQ, then were discovered to have engaged in homosexual behavior themselves.

In general, though, I agree with the thrust of what Jeff Foster says below in his book, "The Joy of True Meditation." His emphasis is a bit different from what I've been speaking about, but the theme of Foster's short chapter is in line with it.

The Path of the Broken Heart

"Clear up our vibration and you'll stop attracting bad things to yourself."

"If you have fears, if you have resistance, if you have anger, doubts and shame, then you must be in your ego, and totally unenlightened."

"If you think there's a problem with someone's words or actions, you are always the one who's confused."

"Everything is just your projection. Everything is in your mind. Everything is unreal."

"You attracted your pain because you desired and deserved it."

"You are too attached to the body. Go beyond the body. It's not who you are."

"The past is an illusion. Let it go immediately."

No, it's not always your projection. Sometimes you are seeing very clearly indeed.

No, everything isn't always "only in your mind." Sometimes you need to trust your gut instinct more, not less.

No, your doubts and fears are not a sign of your lack of spiritual evolution.

No, you do not attract abuse through a faulty "vibrational frequency."

No, you do not deserve to be violated in any way, in the name of truth, in the name of God, in the name of love, or in any other name. Your boundaries deserve to be respected, your "yes" and your "no" equally.

No, it's not okay for spiritual teachers to shame people "for their own good" (to shock them into awakening, to enlighten them, to help them drop their "ego").

I cannot support any spirituality that dismisses our tender, vulnerable, fragile humanity, that shames us for our precious human thoughts and feelings, that divides self from no self, sacred from human, holy from profane, absolute from relative, heaven from earth, duality from nonduality.

I once saw a popular spiritual teacher addressing a recently bereaved woman. He said, "Your heartbreak is totally unreal and only the activity of the separate self. You are pure Awareness, and nothing more. Your son, and his death, are just a convincing illusion of mind. One day the separate self will vanish, along with all suffering."

And in that moment, I saw a deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The invalidation of trauma, the false promises, the power games, the suppression of the divine feminine.

And I vowed to bow to that broken heart as if it were God Herself.

Until the end of time.

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.

Atheists more likely to believe in paranormal than religious people

Just in time for Halloween, a few days ago the New York Times had a story, "Many Americans Say They Believe in Ghosts. Do You?"

No, I don't. I also don't believe in God.

But lots of atheists do believe in paranormal phenomena, according to the story.

There are a number of different ways to quantify belief among Americans in so-called paranormal phenomena. One way is to ask a selection of people representative of the population if they believe in ghosts. In a 2019 IPSOS poll, 46 percent of respondents said they did.

Another is to ask what they fear. This year, according to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears, about 9 percent of 1,035 adults surveyed said they feared ghosts, and the same amount said they feared zombies; many more people said they were afraid of government corruption, the coronavirus or widespread civil unrest.

The last time Gallup surveyed people about ghosts, in 2005, 32 percent of respondents said they believed in “ghosts or that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.” When Gallup asked the same question in 1990, the result was 25 percent.

Such beliefs have pervaded American culture and media for centuries. But some researchers are now studying whether their rise may be tied, in part, to the rise over the last few decades of Americans claiming no religious preference.

“People are looking to other things or nontraditional things to answer life’s big questions that don’t necessarily include religion,” said Thomas Mowen, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University.

For a continuing study on religion and paranormal belief, for example, Mr. Mowen said he is finding that “atheists tend to report higher belief in the paranormal than religious folk.”

So this shows that atheists are open to supernatural phenomena, even if God isn't part of them. Also, it shows that atheists can be as gullible as religious believers when it comes to accepting the existence of things that lack demonstrable evidence.

Last year, the share of Americans who belong to religious congregations fell below 50 percent for the first time in more than 80 years, according to a Gallup poll released in March. And the percent of people claiming no religion nearly tripled from 1978 to 2018, according to the General Social Survey.

Still, even as religious frameworks for thinking about the meaning of life and death have become less popular in the United States, the big existential questions inevitably remain.

The General Social Survey found that as religious affiliation declined over four decades, belief in the afterlife remained relatively steady: In 1978, about 70 percent of those surveyed believed in the afterlife, and about 74 percent reported the same in 2018.

As Joseph Baker, the co-author of the book “American Secularism: Cultural Contours of Nonreligious Belief Systems,” put it: “People are outside of organized religions, but they still have this supernatural interest.”

I've got no problem with that. People should be free to pursue whatever interests they want, so long as they don't hurt others in the process. 

If believing in an afterlife makes someone feel better, great. Life can be tough. Whatever works for you, go for it -- again, if this doesn't harm anyone else. 

I'd much prefer to go on living after I die than to be dead and gone forever. Well, if the afterlife was pleasant, not hellish.

It's just really hard for me to believe in life after death in my current state of mind, though during my 35 years of religiosity I had no problem believing in both reincarnation and the preferable alternative of existing as a non-physical being in some higher realm of reality.

Yet I never believed in ghosts. I'm not sure why. After all, if I thought back then that it was possible for me to live on after my physical death, why couldn't others do the same as ghosts?

I guess one problem I had with ghosts is that they inhabit a difficult to believe in-between zone. Ghosts are physical enough to be visible to ordinary humans, yet supernatural enough to pass through walls and do other spooky stuff.

This could explain why more people believe in God than in ghosts. Of course, God also has a credibility gap. Somehow God is a supernatural being who also is able to produce physical effects in this world. But if God is omnipotent, that's no problem for God.

Ghosts, on the other hand, aren't viewed as omnipotent. (If any ghosts disagree, you can come visit on this Halloween night and set me straight.)

Presumptions are necessary for reasoning to work

Almost everybody who has had a child -- that includes me -- knows how annoying it can be when they learn how to make "Why?" into a way to drive a parent crazy.

You need to turn the TV off and go to bed.
Why?
Because it's late and you need to go to school tomorrow.
Why do I need to go to school?
So you can learn things.
Why should I learn things?

And so it goes, until the parent gets fed up and ends the discussion with "Because I said so! Go brush your teeth!"

Andy Norman uses this sort of Why? reasoning (or pseudo-reasoning) to illustrate a philosophical point in his book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."

(See here and here for my previous posts about the book.)

Many people consider that the essence of sound thinking is supplying reasons for something you consider to be true. That's basically correct, but two extremes need to be avoided.

One is requiring that every reason be backed up with evidence.

That leads to a infinite regress where every claim needs an evidential foundation, which itself needs an evidential foundation. This lays the groundwork for extreme skepticism where nothing is viewed as proven since every claim of truth depends on another claim of truth, and so on, and so on.

The other extreme is faith, a natural result of that sort of extreme skepticism about our ability to know reality.

If nothing can be known for sure, then why not have blind faith in this or that? This eliminates the need for reasons, and hence the infinite regress of reasons leading to the need for more reasons to support those reasons.

Norman concludes, persuasively, that the way out of these extremes is to recognize that presumptions form the basis for collaborative dialog aimed at gaining an understanding of some issue. This is the way of science, he writes.

Practicing scientists don't wipe the belief-slate clean, then painstakingly populate it only with evidence-based conclusions. Like all of us, they take many things to be presumptively true, and reason from them. (Without these presumptions, they wouldn't get very far.)

Science isn't special because it starts from scratch and builds everything from evidence and logic alone; it's special because it's resolutely committed to countenancing cogent challenges and making necessary revisions.

...Practicing scientists, in other words, give evidentialism a Socratic rather than a Platonic spin. They grow into a community of inquiry that takes many things as presumptively true, and for the most part, they accept those presumptions. That's part of the process of becoming a scientist. 

Sometimes, a scientist will challenge elements of the scientific consensus and succeed in overturning one or several of them. But they never discard all their discipline's presumptions, and start from scratch. If they did, they'd be doing something like Cartesian epistemology, not science.

...The New Socratic picture of reason, then, doesn't require us to abandon the sufficient evidence standard. Instead, it urges us to enrich our picture of how reasoning and inquiry work. Inquiry yields findings, which are then presumed, for the most part, to be true.

These presumptions become available for premising, and a spur to new inquiries. Often, these presumptions summarize accumulated evidence or otherwise encode hard-won insights. In this way, the evidence and insight they contain become the "basis" of new knowledge.

...So in a sense, presumptions are repositories of evidence.

This discussion of presumptions, along with my reading of the rest of Mental Immunity (I'm almost finished with the book) helped me realize why comment conversations on this blog so often go awry. Religious believers tend to ignore the implied presumptions that I and others who accept the scientific worldview make in our arguments.

Here's examples of what I presume:

-- Our universe is real, not an illusion.
-- Objective reality exists independent of the human brain.
-- Consciousness arises in the brain.
-- The human mind is subject to errors about reality.
-- Science is the best way to correct those mental errors.
-- Nothing is 100% certain, but some things are more certain than others.
-- Most of what science knows can be relied upon as true, until proven false.

These presumptions aren't wild or crazy. They are founded on a massive amount of study, research, and experiments aimed at understanding reality. When I refer to these presumptions, either implicitly or explicitly, anyone who disagrees with one or more of them has the burden of providing persuasive reasons why a presumption shouldn't be accepted.

That person probably has their own presumptions. They might include:

-- Our universe is illusory; reality lies elsewhere.
-- God is the creator and sustainer of reality.
-- Consciousness can exist apart from the brain or body.
-- Some humans have perfect knowledge of reality.
-- Religion or mysticism is the best way to know reality.
-- Perfect mystics or prophets have 100% certain knowledge. 
-- Science can't be relied upon, so it is fine to ignore it.

Problem is, those religiously-based presumptions aren't founded on solid evidence. So they aren't really valid presumptions at all. They're beliefs. If someone puts them forward as reasons for an argument being made, it makes sense to ask "Why do you say that?" 

This is a valid use of Why? because the so-called presumptions are anything but. They're the sort of reasons that may make sense to a religious believer, and can be fashioned into a mutually reinforcing set of beliefs, but they are very weak philosophically and scientifically. 

They're akin to the delusions of a psychotic who has a worldview that makes sense to them, yet lacks a grounding in the reality almost everybody else lives in. Sure, it's possible that the psychotic has an insight into reality that the rest of us lack, just as it's possible that a religious mindset is true.

The odds are just very high that such isn't the case, because the presumptions of both the psychotic person and a religious person aren't based on demonstrable evidence.

What makes a cult a cult?

The July 12 and 19 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting book review called "Beyond Belief: What makes a cult a cult?" Here's some excerpts:

If we accept that cult members have some degree of volition, the job of distinguishing cults from other belief-based organizations becomes a good deal more difficult. 

We may recoil from Keith Raniere's brand of malevolent claptrap, but, if he hadn't physically abused followers and committed crimes, would we be able to explain why NXIVM is inherently more coercive or exploitative than any of the "high demand" religions we tolerate?

For this reason, many scholars choose to avoid the term "cult" altogether. Raniere may have set himself up as an unerring source of wisdom and sought to shut his minions off from outside influence, but apparently so did Jesus of Nazareth. 

The Gospel of Luke records him saying, "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." 

Religion, as the old joke has it, is just "a cult plus time."

Acknowledging that joining a cult requires an element of voluntary self-surrender also obliges us to consider whether the very relinquishment of control isn't a significant part of the appeal. 

..."Not passive victims, they themselves actively sought to be controlled," Haruki Murakami wrote of the members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult whose sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway, in 1995, killed thirteen people. 

In his book "Underground" (1997), Murakami describes most Aum members as having "deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood" in the "spiritual bank" of the cult's leader, Shoko Sahara. Submitting to a higher authority -- to someone else's account of reality -- was, he claims, their aim.

Robert Lifton suggests that people with certain kinds of personal history are more likely to experience such a longing: those with "an early sense of confusion and dislocation," or, at the opposite extreme, an early experience of unusually intense family milieu control." 

But he stresses that the capacity for totalist submission lurks in all of us and is probably rooted in childhood, the prolonged period of dependence during which we have no choice but to attribute to our parents "an exaggerated omnipotence." (This might help to explain why so many cult leaders choose to style themselves as the fathers or mothers of their cult "families.")

...Yet our sense that joining a cult requires some unusual degree of credulousness or gullibility persists. Few of us believe in our heart of hearts that Amy Carlson, the recently deceased leader of the Colorado-based Love Has Won cult, who claimed to have birthed the whole of creation and to have been, in a previous life, a daughter of Donald Trump, could put us under her spell.

Perhaps one way to attack our intellectual hubris on this matter is to remind ourselves that we all hold some beliefs for which there is no compelling evidence.

The convictions that Jesus was the son of God and that "everything happens for a reason" are older and more widespread than the belief in Amy Carlson's privileged access to the fifth dimension, but neither is, ultimately, more rational.

In recent decades, scholars have grown increasingly adamant that none of our beliefs, rational or otherwise, have much to do with logical reasoning. "People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world," William J. Bernstein writes in "The Delusion of Crowds" (Atlantic Monthly). 

Instead, "They rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions." 

...The process by which people are eventually freed from their cult delusions rarely seems to be accelerated by the interventions of well-meaning outsiders. Those who embed themselves in a group idea learn very quickly to dismiss the skepticism of others as the foolish cant of the uninitiated. 

If we accept the premise that our beliefs are rooted in emotional attachments rather than in cool assessments of evidence, there is little reason to imagine that rational debate will break the spell.

The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves. The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether. 

Especially if cult life is proving unpleasant, the capacity for critical thought can reassert itself. 

QAnon is the religion of right-wing crazies

My wife and I have watched the first two episodes of HBO's "Q: Into the Storm" because we find QAnon both ridiculous and dangerous.

Ridiculous, because QAnon faithful believe in absolutely crazy stuff -- such as Hillary Clinton and other Democrats operating a pedophile ring out of the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant.

Dangerous, because so many followers of Trump in this country accept the QAnon insanity, including that mass arrests of Democrats will take place and the Orange One (Trump) will become president again.

I can't recommend the HBO series because it is much more boring than it should be, given its subject matter. 

As a review correctly points out, the makers of this documentary went overboard on filming the people involved in the web sites Q posts on in excruciating detail. Their disputes, eccentricities, and such are mildly interesting, but what gets lost are the larger questions.

Notably, how can so many people be so infatuated with the QAnon conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact?

I don't have an answer. All I can say is that the first two episodes show how closely related QAnon is to religiosity, a subject of a previous post, "QAnon and religion are both mass delusions." 

No one knows who Q is.

However, posts from Q appear on the Internet. Likewise, no one knows if God even exists, much less what the probably non-existent God is like -- since there is no real evidence of any communications from God.

Yet QAnon believers and religious devotees spend a huge amount of time conjuring up theories about their chosen faith.

Every detail of Q's posts is examined for hidden meanings, in much the same way religious writings and utterances of religious leaders considered to have a direct connection with God are studied by the faithful.

QAnon followers wrongly consider that they're part of a truth-seeking movement.

Even when predictions by Q fail to come to pass, his acolytes are spurred to dig deeper and find the reality hidden from everyone else -- you know, the people who accept facts and reason, a group I'm proud to belong to.

This bears a lot of resemblance to religious fantasies such as the Second Coming of Christ, the Christian version of QAnon's "storm." 

A new conspiracy theory called “The Storm” has taken the grimiest parts of the internet by, well, storm. Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

I'm bothered by the fact that so many otherwise normal people are so easily sucked into the fact-free whirlpool of QAnon. Sure, religions have been doing this sort of sucking for thousands of years, preying upon the gullibility of humans who enjoy a good story, even if it is made up.

QAnon, though, lacks the moral foundation that most religions have, which tends to limit how destructive they can be. So far as I can tell, QAnon has no ethical standards, no commitment to caring and compassion, no respect for open debate into the nature of reality.

QAnon, like the worst of the world's religions, only cares about spreading lies. Flee from it, if you're ever tempted to embrace some aspect of QAnon craziness. 

There are no essences, just interpretations

We humans want to make more of reality than is actually there. We believe that things have more substance, more independence, and more of an unchanging essence than is justified.

This is the message of my previous post about the relative nature of the quantum world. And as I noted in that post, it fits with a core tenet of Buddhism -- emptiness.

Buddhism emptiness doesn't mean a void, or nothingness. 

It refers to the fact that nothing has inherent existence. Nothing has an unchanging essence. Nothing stands alone, complete in and by itself.

In the book I've been writing about recently, "Why Buddhism is True," Robert Wright, the author, says that essence is closely linked to emptiness.

Essence, as we've seen, is central to the Buddhist concept of emptiness. At least its absence is central to the concept of emptiness. The idea of emptiness is that, while the things we perceive out there in the world do in some sense exist, they lack this thing called "essence."

Essence appears in quite a few of the neuroscience books I've read. Often the example used is of, say, someone being told that they could have a nice used sweater at no cost.

The person is delighted.

Then they're told that the sweater belonged to a murderer who killed his victims in a grisly fashion. Learning that, often the sweater offer is refused, because somehow the essence of the murderer is felt to be part of it.

More positively, Wright cites the true example of someone who paid $48,875 for a tape measure owned by John F. Kennedy, "apparently motivated by a sense that it was imbued with some sort of presidential 'essence.'"

He then wonders what would have happened if the successful bidder was told that a mistake was made, and the tape measure actually belonged to a plumber.

The bidder's altered facial expression would leave no doubt that there had been an alteration of feeling. A tape measure that moments ago inspired awe and adoration would now inspire nothing of the kind. A precious relic had turned into a mere object, emptied of the essence it possessed only moments before.

What this points to is another subject discussed by Wright, how perceptions and feelings are intimately related. In fact, they are virtually inseparable. 

Meaning, how we look upon something or someone is deeply affected by our prior experience and emotional attitude. 

I've talked about this sort of thing in reference to how devotees of a guru typically view his qualities in absolute terms, whereas actually they're relative.

I had personal experience of this when my wife went with me to see the guru who led the religious organization I belonged to at the time, Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Well, actually my wife went to Palm Springs for shopping and sightseeing. But she was able to see the guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, at a small group session where she got to sit in the front row.

She wasn't at all impressed. To her, Dhillon just seemed like a regular guy.

But to his devotees, the guru was imbued with marvelous qualities: love, wisdom, charm, and so on. This shows something obvious: beauty, or any other quality, is in the eye of the beholder, not anywhere outside.

Essence also is tied into stories, as Wright describes.

The stories we are told about things, and the stories we tell ourselves about things, influence how we feel about those things and, presumably, thus shape the essence that we sense in them. 

If the story behind a tape measure is that it belonged to JFK, that implies a different feeling -- and a different essence -- than the story that the tape measure belongs to a plumber.

If we think of ourselves as having a successful marriage and wonderful, thriving children, then the sight of our home probably gives off more positive vibes than if we think of ourselves as trapped in an obsessive marriage that has bred ne'er-do-well kids. And so on.

...But that's just one example of a more general illusion: that the "essences" we sense in things really exist, that they inhabit the things we perceive, when in fact they are constructions of our minds, with no necessary correspondence to reality.

Things come with stories, and the stories, whether true or false, shape how we feel about the things and thus shape the things themselves, giving them the full form we perceive.

I talk chakras and meridians with a churchless visitor

Following on the heels of a previous email exchange of views that I fashioned into a blog post, here's another one.

This time I was asked about a relative of a Church of the Churchless reader who surprised this person by embracing a yogic view of chakras that was "woo-woo." 

Here's the message that I got, followed by my response.

Dear Brian,

 

You might remember, a while back, you were kind enough to send me that lovely killer list of books that I'd requested for a cousin of mine who was working on her thesis.

 

Well, she finished that course of hers, and ended up starting a Yoga retreat of her own, and then ended up losing her fledgling entrepreneurial venture to the Covid thing. 

 

Which is sad, of course, but the other day I happened to meet her, after ages, and when I asked her why she wanted to start such a woo-woo venture in the first place (it doesn't -- didn't -- just teach you physical exercises and stuff, it claimed to clean your chakras and whatnot), we had a falling-out of sorts. 

 

No doubt we'll get over this, we're generally pretty close, and blood is thicker than water, et cetera, but the reason I thought to write about this to you is because this thought, this idea, it occurred to me, that probably there are people who instinctively shun the dodgy woo, and people who lack that instinct. 

 

My cousin, bless her soul, she's a good enough girl otherwise, probably is of the latter bent. I myself wouldn't dream of touching a woo retreat with a barge pole, ever, no matter how lucrative, but apparently this cousin of mine is open to that kind of deal.

 

I mean, it's weird.

 

First, because my cousin isn't the gullible kind that swallows this kind of nonsense.  And two, because she isn't the venal kind, the greedy get-rich-at-all-costs kind who is amoral about how she makes her money: exactly the opposite, in fact, she gave up a lucrative corporate career to shift to more "spiritual" vistas (and in general minus the superstition that sometimes comes with this hankering after the "spiritual").

 

My point is, I find it so weird, someone like my cousin going down this path. The setting up of this woo shop, I mean. 

 

And yet of my kin and my friends, that I discussed this with, not one found her "career decision" odd or unbecoming, not one. On the contrary, it was my criticism that came to be criticized, without exception. 

 

And when I find I'm the only guy who's seemingly thinking straight, in the midst of heaps and heaps of folks who're seemingly deluded, I generally pause and think, hard, whether I haven't somehow hit some blind spot of mine own, if I'm not missing something. And I really don't know whom else to ask!  Hence this email.

 

I'd welcome your views on this, well, on what is after all a non-issue, in the sense that this is nothing to do with me really,but which troubles me, nevertheless, on general principles.

 

With my good wishes, ________

 

This was my response.

 

_______, good to hear from you again. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to say anything wise, or even cogent, about your cousin’s embrace of woo-woo. Meaning, so-called “spiritual” stuff with no grounding in fact or reason.

 

Well, let’s make that a certain kind of reason — one that is founded on science, demonstrable chains of causes and effects, open to debate and questioning.

 

Chakra theory is reasonable within its own yoga context.

 

In my college days I got quite intense about yoga for a while, even teaching it under the auspices of the Greek-Christian yoga instructor who managed to cram together aspects of Christianity and Eastern religions into an approach that appealed to me at first, but later struck me as too damn weird.

 

Anyway, back then I accepted the notion of chakras, kundalini, all that stuff. Of course, I also accepted a lot of other stuff that now strikes me as, to not coin a term, overly woo-woo.

 

Bringing things more toward the present, for seventeen years I’ve been practicing Tai Chi with a nice group of people. I enjoy Tai Chi for a number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with the Chinese concepts of meridians and subtle energy channels that my instructor embraces, along with some members of my Tai Chi class.

 

I’ve learned to keep a faint smile on my face when the instructor, or anyone else, talks about how they feel the energy of Chi/Ki coursing through their body. I believe in energy, and I feel the energy of my body. I just don’t look upon that energy in the same fashion that they do.

 

Yet this has no bearing on my Tai Chi practice, in the same way that not believing in chakras would have no, or very little, bearing on the benefits someone gets from yoga practice. In these cases the extra topping of woo-woo doesn’t really change the character of the main dish of Tai Chi or Yoga.

 

So I can understand why most of your relatives and friends look upon your criticism of your cousin as being largely unjustified. After all, almost everybody believes in some weird stuff, whether supernatural (God/miracles) or natural (Big Foot/space aliens). 

 

I mean, woo-woo is a continuum, not a dichotomy.

 

I’m pretty sure that if the most scientific, reasoned, fact-based person in the entire world were pressed to disclose everything they believed in, deep down, and probably hidden from the outside world, would be some beliefs about objective reality that can’t be defended.

 

Many top-notch scientists, like Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, are deeply religious. By and large they don’t try to justify their religious belief by recourse to rational arguments. It is a matter of faith that offers meaning to them.

 

The way I see it, and the way I’ve argued it on this blog for seventeen years, is that someone’s religiosity or embrace of the supernatural is no one else’s business unless that someone attempts to force their beliefs onto others, or presents those beliefs on an open forum (like this blog, via comments) that invite a skeptical response.

 

If your cousin enjoys believing that chakras are true, fine. That isn’t your cup of tea, as the saying goes, but she enjoys sipping from it. 

 

Again, we’re talking about a continuum here. In the grand scheme of religious beliefs, ranging from least dangerous to most dangerous, I view a belief in chakras or meridians/energy channels as being way down on the “barely bad” side of things.

 

I doubt that anyone has ever gone to war over chakras, burned someone at the stake over chakras, or hurled threats of divine retribution if someone doesn’t believe in chakras. 

 

One thing that I find helpful is to physicalize woo-woo notions. Here’s what I mean by that. Chakras refer to different parts of the body. Those parts definitely exist. For example, we have a head. We have an abdomen. We have genitals. 

 

Our attention can be focused on different parts of our body. When I’m thinking intensely, I feel like I’m in my head. When I’m hungry, I feel like I’m in my abdomen. When I crave sex, I feel like I’m in my genitals. 

 

This isn’t what chakra theory is about, but it is some of what it’s about. Thus there is a bridge from a purely physical view of “chakras” to a yogic spiritual view of them. 

 

In a similar sense, I feel energy within my body when I’m doing Tai Chi.

 

I don’t know if that is the same feeling other people refer to when they speak of Chi/Ki. I look upon the energy as physical. They look upon it as spiritual or supernatural. Again, though, there’s a bridge between these ways of looking at energy meridians, because we’re speaking of a continuum, not a dichotomy. 

 

And it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that acupuncture, say, one day will be found to have a foundation in solid science. I’m unsure if this will happen, but I’m open to it. 

 

Thus you might find it interesting to speak with your cousin in more depth about her embrace of yoga, including what she finds appealing about chakra theory. There might be common ground between you and her in this regard. Or, maybe not. Regardless, it’s worth exploring. 

 

      — Brian

Cult of Trump shows how delusion is linked to blind devotion

Cults come in various forms. Sure, religious cults are what first come to mind, but any form of blind devotion to an authority figure can result in cultish behavior and attitudes.

On January 6 I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog, "Insurrection at Capitol today caused by the Cult of Trump."

This is what happens when people fall under the spell of an authoritarian cult leader.

A woman died today in the Capitol building after a mob incited by Trump stormed the building in an insurrection aimed at stopping Biden from being declared president-elect by Congress.

...The only good news out of today's disaster is that maybe, just maybe, it will cause those who have joined the Cult of Trump to find the guts to abandon the worst president in our nation's history.

It's astounding that so many people in the United States can be devoted to such a horrible person after Trump's many failings have been on prominent display for well over four years.

Somehow they've been sucked in to the black hole of Trump's ego, narcissism, lying, and inability to come to grips with reality, either choosing to stay in that dark place willingly or not having the capacity to break free of all the nasty stuff that Trump stands for.

A New York Times story, "'Our President Wants Us Here': The Mob That Stormed the Capitol," has this subtitle -- They came from around the country with different affiliations — QAnon, Proud Boys, elected officials, everyday Americans — united by one allegiance. To Donald Trump.

They traveled from various corners of resentment in 21st-century America. Whether motivated by a sense of economic disenfranchisement or distrust of government, by bigotry, or conspiracy or a belief that Mr. Trump is God’s way of preparing for the Rapture, they shared a fealty to the president.

In the rally that preceded the march to the Capitol (photo above), Trump told the crowd that he would be marching with them. That was a lie. Trump went back to the White House and watched the mob break in to the Capitol on TV, coward that he is. 

Now many of the Cult of Trump members who did what their beloved leader asked them to do are facing criminal charges. Serves them right. This wasn't a joke. A woman was killed during the storming of the Capitol, along with a policeman who died after being struck in the head by a fire extinguisher. 

It appears that Trump will be impeached again for inciting this murderous riot. Nonetheless, most of Trump's devotees will stick with him, because they have lost the ability to see him as he is, only as they imagine him to be. 

Here's a tweet that shows the quasi-religious fervor of Trump supporters.

And here's another tweet that shows how delusional the Cult of Trump can be. This Republican official actually believes that Trump will be president for another four years, even though Biden's electoral college victory was affirmed by Congress on January 6. 

Again, political delusions and religious delusions differ only in their subject matter, not in the warped state of mind that produces them. Likely this same official also believes that Jesus rose from the dead and redeems the sins of those who believe in him. Hey, that beats Trump! 

Why God is an illusion, along with other supernatural stuff

Here's a perplexing question: Why are so many people convinced that they've had an experience of God, or some other supernatural entity, when there is no demonstrable proof that these things exist?

Are these people lying? Some probably are, but not all. So the most likely explanation is that they've fooled themselves into believing that their divine experience was real.

How this happens is one of the subjects psychiatrist Ralph Lewis discusses in his fascinating book, "Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even if the Universe Doesn't." 

I've just started reading this book,  but can tell that I'm going to enjoy it a lot. Here's some excerpts from the initial 60 pages.

It is said that seeing is believing. But actually believing is seeing -- we often see what we believe to be there, misinterpreting our senses in illusory ways. Moreover, our senses are sometimes susceptible to complete hallucinations, creating perceptions out of nothing at all.

When people experience perceptions of non-actual reality, the last thing they are willing or able to believe is that those perceptions could have been due to their own brain malfunctioning -- their mind playing tricks on them...We give our subjective experience too much credence.

...Clearly we find our own subjective perceptions arrestingly compelling and are more willing to doubt the laws of physics than to doubt our own minds. People underestimate the capacity of our brains to create their own convincing realities.

They underestimate how powerfully realistic some dissociative experiences, hallucinations, and other well-recognized mental/neural misperceptions can seem. Come and sit in my office for a week and listen to people argue passionately (and even seemingly rationally) that their demonstrably implausible perceptions are real.

Then judge for yourself which explanation is more plausible -- that the bizarre experiences that you will hear described are actually real, or that the human brain can easily fool us into believing weird things.

...A scientifically valid hypothesis must therefore be constructed in such a way that the potential for it to be falsified is built into the hypothesis itself. In other words, it should be a hypothesis that is testable and that lays itself open to the challenge of potentially being proven wrong.

The hypothesis that all swans are white is falsifiable by finding a swan that is not white. In contrast, a hypothesis that there exists a green swan is unfalsifiable: it cannot be undermined by evidence because it is structured in such a way that it cannot be definitively disproved, no matter how many swans we find that are not green.

Supernatural and superstitious beliefs are almost invariably structured as unfalsifiable hypotheses. The existence of God is the green swan hypothesis. 

Psychiatric delusions are often also structured this way: the delusional person explains away evidence that contradicts the delusion by expanding and elaborating the delusion with additional layers of explanation.

For example, the doctor who points out the impossibility of the paranoid conspiracy against the patient must be one of the conspirators. Delusions typically cannot be reasoned away.