Church of the Churchless

A quote that shows the arrogance of religious zealots

If there's one thing that religious zealots aren't, it's humble.

Well, actually there's many other things that they aren't also. Like, in touch with reality; thoughtful; reasonable; open-minded; respectful of truth.

But a lack of humility stood out in a quote I came across in an article in the February 27 issue of The New Yorker, Minister of Chaos: Itamar Ben-Gvir and the politics of reaction.

It's about one of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's cabinet members. Ben-Gvir is a right-wing extremist who was named the national security minister.

The quote came from Dov Morell.

Morell used to embrace the views of Ben-Gvir and those like him who don't believe that Muslims should have any place in what they'd like to be a completely Jewish Israel, and are fine with killing Palestinians who protest draconian Israeli policies in the West Bank.

Morell now says he is "firmly in the left," having seen the error of his previous ways. The article says:

As part of his religious activism, Morell came to know Ayala Ben-Gvir. He described her and Ben-Gvir as "amazing people who want to do terrible things." 

Those on the far right did not consider themselves extremists, Morell said: "When you believe that the world came with manufacturer's instructions, then you have to follow those instructions."

Wow.

Not only do Ben-Gvir and his wife, Ayala, believe that their Jewish God created the world, they also believe that cherry-picked passages in the Old Testament and other Jewish scriptures reflect the instructions of God as regards Israel and the so-called Holy Land.

Which isn't holy enough to encompass love and respect for the Palestinians whose territory Israel has occupied since the 1967 war enabled Israel to take the West Bank, and thereafter commence the building of Jewish settlements on land that was supposed to be part of a two-state solution.

Currently Israel is being torn apart by the division between Israelis who want their country to respect the rights of Palestinians and be a nation of largely secular laws, and Israelis who embrace right-wing religious authoritarianism aimed at making non-Jews second-class citizens in their country.

Usually politics is marked by compromise and negotiating.

But as Morell noted, Ben-Gvir and his allies view themselves as being God's agents -- which doesn't leave room for flexibility in interpreting the "manufacturer's instructions." Such is the danger of religious extremism.

It makes people with passionate political views unwilling to compromise. Political extremism is bad enough. When combined with religious extremism, we get a holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness that sees no limits to what should be done to bring about God's will on Earth.

Of course, no one has any demonstrable proof that God even exists, much less what God's will is. However, that doesn't stop religious zealots from believing that they're acting in accord with a divine decree.  

Image of Muhammad causes uproar. I'm pleased to share it.

It's bizarre how fundamentalist Muslims get so upset over images of their Prophet Muhammad, whether these be paintings or cartoons. Just another example of the utter irrationality of religious believers.

Today the New York Times had a story, "A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job." This happened even after the instructor told her students in advance what she was going to do and on the day of the showing gave the students another chance to say if they had a problem with this.

Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.

In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.

In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.

Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.

...After Dr. López Prater showed the image, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action.

Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.

After reading the story, naturally my first thought was, I've got to share the image on my blog. Here it is, along with two other Muhammad images in the New York Times story.

Over the years I've taken pleasure in writing other blog posts about Muslim sensitivity regarding images of Muhammad. It's really disturbing that Muslim fanatics have killed people over this absurd religious dogma.

Cartoons of Muhammad create huge uproar
Muslims have been depicting Muhammad for centuries
If a cartoon inflames religious passions, so what?

Leaving dogma behind is like discarding a confining diving suit

I've read a couple of chapters in David McRaney's book, "How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion." 

One chapter I skipped ahead to read, because I was curious to learn how some people enmeshed in the hateful Westboro Baptist Church were able to leave this Christian cult. 

(The book says Westboro members would do things like protesting the funeral of Matthew Shepard, "a young gay man who was beaten, tortured, and left for dead in a remote portion of Wyoming by two men who offered him a ride home from a bar. At his funeral, the church carried signs that read NO TEARS FOR QUEERS.")

Here's some excerpts from the Westboro chapter. They're about Zach, who used to be a Westboro member. The first passage relates to the fact that a gay waiter at an Olive Garden restaurant recognized Zach as having recently left Westboro.

After that meal [which the gay waiter paid for], he started wondering if all of the assumptions tied to his former life were true. If his beliefs about gay men were wrong, then what else? 

His first thoughts were of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and how Westboro had told them the girls who go to their concerts were "simple sluts." Simple-minded, stupid, and promiscuous. He immediately, and for the first time, questioned it.

He felt overwhelmed by a torrent of information that he once considered noise. All at once, he began to feel an intense uncertainty not only about what was true, but about who he was.

He said the most alarming thing was the realization that if he had gone to Olive Garden while he was still in the church, the waiter's act of kindness might not have made any difference at all. He would have found a way to interpret it differently.

Zach was still unpacking what it all meant. He was shocked to realize he was open to all sorts of change, and once he realized it, an array of alternative beliefs, attitudes, and values became newly acceptable.

"The first time I talked to a Jewish person, I thought what Westboro taught me at first, and then I was like, 'I don't want to listen to that.' I want to try to see reality for what it is. I want to think with an open mind and to make discoveries. There's a great deal of mystery in this world that I walk in, in this universe."

Today, he said, "I have gay friends. I have bisexual friends. I have pansexual friends." He was still struggling, though, still rebuilding his models, still expanding his mind. Zach said he recently began dabbling with Buddhism.

Zach reiterated that he didn't leave the church because he changed his opinions; he changed his opinions because he left the church. And he left the church because it had become intolerable for other reasons. 

Leaving opened him up to the possibility he could be wrong about many things, and that began a difficult period of rebirth.

...His whole life, Zach remained trapped in dogma, wearing it like a diving suit, interacting with the same world as the people shouting from across the picket line but never making actual human connection with it.

Zach has since taken off that suit.

He is even taking part in the parallel universe across the street. He's spent time at Equality House and participated in pickets against the church, holding signs with messages like YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL and FORGIVE AND FORGET. At those protests, he shouts, "Let's kill them with kindness," and "Let's show them what loving your neighbor is all about."

...I said it reminded me of what we had spoken about earlier, an insight from Piaget: how once we learn something is incorrect, we also learn that the source from which we learned that thing can be incorrect, which opens us up to the idea that maybe the sources we trust could be wrong about a lot of other things.

Delusion of imagining you're an instrument of the divine will

Here's a right-on illustration by L.K. Hanson. I saw this on a Facebook post yesterday. The person who shared it said that Hanson's work appears in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

When people talk about being a special instrument of the divine will, I'm reminded of Garrison Keillor's description of his fictional Minnesota small town, Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

In the world of fundamentalist religion, all the believers are especially attuned to God's will. Which can't be, given how different religions typically are from each other. But their delusion works for religious believers, since it allows everybody to be above average when it comes to knowing what God wants.

Even crazier, of course, are the smaller number of fundamentalists who go a step further up the above average scale by claiming they actually communicate with God. Or, at the height of grandiosity, purport to actually be one with God in some respects. (Sometimes, in every respect.)

In a blog post called "My strange RSSB initiation story" I related how in my last year of college a bunch of us got involved with a crazed Greek yoga teacher we called Yogiraj who tried to meld East and West by establishing his Christananda Ashram.

After we confronted him about how he'd used his initiation into Radha Soami Satsang Beas by Charan Singh to create his own personal Sant Mat philosophy with him as the guru, he told us that Jesus actually was his best divine friend.

One day, after the store closed, we got up the guts to confront Yogiraj. What a scene it turned out to be. I still remember it well.

We were standing near the back of the store, us six in a semi-circle facing Yogiraj. We told him about our doubts -- that what he was teaching at the ashram had been copied from RSSB and wasn't the real deal.

Yogiraj's reaction was fiercely intense.

Those Greek eyes blazed with anger. "Charan Singh isn't my guru!" he yelled. "Christ is my guru! He talks to me! He tells me what to do!"

That was enough. With those words it all became clear. We knew that Yogiraj went on his own retreats down in his basement, doing god knows what. What it was, we now realized, was him getting face time with Christ.

More accurately, what he imagined to be Christ. (Christians, of course, would disagree with my skepticism.)

Looking back, while we were correct to view Yogiraj as delusional to believe that he was chatting with Jesus Christ, it's strange that we were so unquestioning of the RSSB teaching that the guru was God in Human Form.

Maybe the difference was that Yogiraj flatly stated that Jesus, the supposed Son of God, was telling him what to do, while the RSSB gurus generally have been more reticent to say that they communicate with God -- though they're fine with the RSSB books that say the guru is God's emissary to the world.

Anyway, the Bertrand Russell quote is as apt today as when Russell said it. More so, in fact. These days both Democratic and Republican presidents are fond of ending speeches with "And may God bless these United States of America."

If God exists (a gigantic "if"), wouldn't God bless every country equally? I no longer believe in God, but if I did, I sure wouldn't consider that God is a Christian, Muslim, Jew, or any other religion. It seems clear that religions are made by humans, and God is also, almost certainly.

Finale of "Under the Banner of Heaven" shows absurdity of religion

Back in May I wrote about a streaming series on Hulu, "Under the Banner of Heaven." In the title of that post I called it a compelling story of religion gone bad. 

The series is based on a true story, the murder of a young woman and her baby at the hands of extremely fundamentalist Mormons.

Last night my wife and I watched the final episode. It tied things together nicely, and was the most philosophical of any episode in how the characters talked about atheism and religious belief.

Detective Jeb Pyre, a devout Mormon white guy, has a Native American partner, Bill Taba. Taba is a professed atheist. He doesn't even believe in the message of a tribal chant he sings near the end of the final episode.

He simply says that he likes the sound of it, so he sings it now and then.

The Mormons are constantly referring to Heavenly Father this and Heavenly Father that, since "Heavenly Father" is how they refer to God. 

What we see in the final episodes is the danger of believing that your thoughts and intentions are coming from Heavenly Father. This is the same risk that comes when anyone of any faith embraces the delusion that God or God's messenger is communicating with them directly.

Sure, people can do crazy things and believe crazy stuff even without believing that God is behind their doing and believing. But fanaticism is more likely to take hold of someone when they think they're doing God's bidding.

That's what happens with the murderous Mormons. 

They're discussing how to handle some members of their family who aren't considered to be sufficiently devoted to what the fundamentalists consider the true original teachings of the Mormon Church. Then their leader plays the Heavenly Father card.

He says, basically, "I've heard from Heavenly Father and he wants them to be killed." That pretty much ends the discussion, since no one wants to go against Heavenly Father's will. 

Of course, Taba views this as totally bizarre from his atheist perspective, while Pyre is better able to understand what's going on, being a Mormon himself. As the series progresses, Pyre takes an increasingly loose view of Mormonism, since his investigation into the murders shows the danger of religious fundamentalism.

I really liked a scene where Taba and Pyre are driving along in their police vehicle, trying to figure out where the Mormon murderers are going to strike next and how they can be found before they kill again. 

Taba gets fed up with all the talk from Pyre about Heavenly Father, even though Pyre isn't a fundamentalist Mormon. Taba pulls the car over in a remote area and stalks away to an overlook. Pyre walks after him.

Taba tells Pyre (I'm paraphrasing), "Look at this beautiful nature, Jeb. That's what it is, natural. No Heavenly Father needed. Stop thinking that you have to invoke Heavenly Father to figure out what's going on with this case. Use your brain. Your natural brain. Forget all that Heavenly Father bullshit."

That leads to a breakthrough, now that Pyre has eliminated some unnecessary Mormonism from his detective consciousness. 

After the murderous Mormons have been apprehended, Pyre is shown taking his elderly mother for an outing to a gorgeous spot. I recall it was a pristine lake with mountains in the background. His devout Mormon mother says something like, "Oh, look at what Heavenly Father has given us. It's so beautiful."

But Pyre is looking at life differently now. He tells her, "Mom, forget Heavenly Father. Isn't it enough that you and I are together right now?" She says with a sense of relief while hugging him, as if a religious weight has been lifted from her also, "Yes, Jeb, yes. It's enough."

Here's a You Tube video about the finale, with mentions about the religious aspects.

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.

Cult of Trump shows danger of blind faith

Here in the United States we're facing a scary prospect in upcoming elections, especially the next presidential election in November 2024.

A recent Forbes story captures the problem in its headline: "Poll Finds Most Americans Think An Election Will Be Overturned Because Of Partisan Sour Grapes."

In a CNN/SRSS poll of 2,119 U.S. adults released Wednesday, 51% of respondents said it is somewhat or very likely that some elected officials will “successfully overturn the results of an election” in the U.S. in the future “because their party did not win.”

That belief was held by 49% of Democratic respondents and 57% of Republicans, as Democrats have fretted about new laws in GOP-controlled states that increase partisan officials’ power over election administrators and restrict ballot access.

Republican skepticism appears to be drawn from former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen: 78% of Republicans agreed that President Joe Biden “did not legitimately win enough votes to win,” while 63% overall said he did.

Recent moves by Trump and his allies are likely to only worsen Republican voters’ faith in elections. Trump and California recall candidate Larry Elder, a right-wing radio host, repeatedly and baselessly claimed in the run-up to the vote that it would be stolen through widespread fraud. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, handily beat back the recall effort on Tuesday.

Religious believers like to claim that there's nothing wrong with blind faith. Actually, there is. 

Even though Donald Trump lost a free and fair 2020 election to President Biden, Trump has never stopped making the utterly false claim that the election was stolen from him.

This Big Lie has infected the minds of the vast majority of Republicans -- 78% according to the poll referenced above. That's a highly disturbing number. Over three-fourths of those who belong to one of the two main political parties in the United States have lost touch with electoral reality.

Why? It isn't that the truth of the 2020 election is difficult to find. It's plain to see by anyone with vision that isn't clouded by blind faith in the utterances of Trump, who still commands the loyalty of most members of the Republican Party.

There are clear parallels between the Cult of Trump and a religious cult.

Both cults are led by an authoritarian leader who lives by the sentiment, "My way or the highway." Meaning, you either agree with me, or you should leave the cult, because obedience to the leader is non-negotiable. 

Both cults tell their followers to distrust facts disseminated by mainstream sources: scientists, journalists, academics, government agencies. Anyone who fact-checks the falsehoods spewed by the cult leader is branded as "fake news."

Both cults promise wonderful things to those who commit to blind faith in the cult teachings. Trump's devotees are told that he'll become president again, maybe even before the 2024 election, once the truth of his 2020 victory is revealed. This is akin to a Second Coming where the faithful will be rewarded and unbelievers cast into hell.

Both cults punish heretics. Republican politicians who disagree with Trump are banished from leadership positions in their party and face a primary challenge from someone more faithful. Religious cults shame and threaten those who leave the cult.

Now, I'm not saying that all fundamentalist religious people act in cultish ways. Nor am I saying that all Trump supporters worship him as their Dear Leader.

However, it seems unarguable that when unquestioning blind faith replaces reason and independent thinking, bad things happen in both politics and religion.

Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning

Ooh, nice! I like it! 

That was the voice that speaks inside my head after I'd written the final two sentences in a Facebook message.

Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning. They just find meaning in their lives in a different fashion than we do.

The woman I was communicating with responded with a pleasing "Well said!" My sentiment exactly. 

I said what I did in regard to a religious group, Salem Awakening, that's been having outdoor services in a public park on the riverfront. Some people distrust Salem Awakening because they have organized protests against Planned Parenthood in the guise of the Church at Planned Parenthood.

(That isn't an actual church. It's more like a franchise, since churches in various cities use that name when they protest outside a Planned Parenthood clinic.)

Even though members of the Proud Boys militia group, which took part in the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol, provide security for Salem Awakening when they're doing their Planned Parenthood protest thing, I'd told the woman that I didn't think Salem Awakening was up to anything nefarious.

Like I said, almost certainly the religious people doing the protesting are well-meaning. They just find meaning in a different fashion than a progressive atheist like me, who supports a woman's right to choose an abortion, does.

More and more I'm bothered by the tendency of many to demonize people who have different values than they do -- political, religious, whatever. As noted in a recent post about extreme political correctness, "I get cited by Salem's Woke Police," a sense of overzealous righteousness can lead to viewing those with different views as not just mistaken, but contemptible. 

I don't believe in God. But I used to, an Eastern religion variety. I'm a progressive. But I was raised by a highly conservative mother, and shared her Republicanism until I went to college. 

So I can completely understand why so many people find meaning in religion and right-wing politics. I no longer share those views. However, in no way do I perceive religious believers and conservatives as being bad people. They're just people who look upon certain aspects of the world in a different way than I do.

This used to be a non-controversial perspective.

Each to his or her own. We can agree to disagree. I disagree with what you're saying, but I defend your right to say it. Catch phrases like those reflected a culture where reasonable people could discuss controversial subjects in a courteous fashion. 

Things have gone downhill in this regard. Often way downhill. On the far reaches of both the political left and right, a substantial number of zealots look upon anyone who doesn't subscribe to their extreme views as unworthy of respect. This carries over into other areas, such as religion. 

Instead of being critical of someone else's perspective, there's an effort to cancel their right to express that perspective.

Instead of viewing them as well-meaning people with a different viewpoint, they're seen as dangerous promoters of a meaningless outlook on life.

Jonathan Rauch talks about this in his excellent book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth." Here's an excerpt from his chapter  Cancelling: Despotism of the Few.

Criticism seeks to engage in conversations and identify error; canceling seeks to stigmatize conversations and punish the errant. Criticism cares whether statements are true; cancelling cares about their social effects. Criticism exploits viewpoint diversity; cancelling imposes viewpoint conformity. 

Criticism is a substitute for social punishment (we kill our hypotheses rather each other); cancelling is a form of social punishment (we kill your hypothesis by killing you socially). Criticism reflects the values of the Constitution of Knowledge, seeking to inquire and learn. Cancelling reflects the values of propaganda, seeking to manipulate the information environment. 

Now, most of us don't encounter cancel culture because we aren't part of a university, social media niche, or other place where views that dissent from What is Deemed Acceptable are met with derision from those who have placed a claim on the truth as only they can know it. 

As noted above, my eyes have been opened to this distressing cultural phenomenon after being vilified on Facebook as an old white man whose views are worth precisely nothing because I committed the heinous sin of deviating from wokeness orthodoxy. 

(In that post I didn't include all the insults directed at me, only a sampling.)

I'm grateful for the experience, which admittedly was much less intense than the cancelling meted out to professors, journalists, and others who got on the wrong side of extreme left-wing dogmatism. The far right has its own brand of closed-minded dogmatism, of course.

Stuck in the middle are the vast majority of Americans, who probably constitute at least two-thirds of the United States population, but a decided minority of the outrage.

What I hope for is an outpouring in support of reasonableness that will counter the irrational screaming from the fringes. My contribution to this is a sentiment that I like a lot. Again:

Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning. They just find meaning in their lives in a different fashion than we do.

Religious fantasies are different from ordinary ones

Fantasies are fun. They're a big part of being human. Fictional books, movies, dreams, music, paintings -- all these and so much more is founded on imagining an alternative reality to that which surrounds us now. 

Other animals may also fantasize (our dog seems to have "cat/squirrel chase dreams" where she makes excited noises and moves her paws), but we humans are the top fantasizers on our planet.

Problems arise, though, when fantasies are mistaken for reality. Or, taken too seriously.

Recently my wife and I were transfixed by the Netflix film, "Homecoming," which shows Beyonce's astounding performances at Coachella in 2018. I wrote a post about the film on my HinesSight blog. 

There were many shots of extremely enthusiastic young people in the front rows nearest to the stage.

Black girls seemed to be the most energized and awestruck by Beyonce and her hugely talented crew of dancers, musicians, and singers. It isn't an exaggeration to say they were in a state of ecstasy, watching the Homecoming performances.

Yet likely every person in the vast audience knew it was a performance. I say "likely" only because psychedelics like LSD can temporarily alter someone's perceptions to such an extent, a musical extravaganza could be viewed as an alternative reality.

Leaving aside that possibility, though, the two-hour show crafted by Beyonce and her artistic directors would have been recognized as a performance even as audience members were whole-heartedly embracing the sights and sounds of Homecoming. 

There really isn't much of a difference between the artistry of the Coachella performances of Homecoming and the fantasies conjured up by the world's religions, mystical paths, and supernatural fables. All were created by humans to entertain, inspire, and captivate.

However, religiosity is a strange mixture of fantasy and delusion.

Meaning, true believers forget that much of  what they're embracing has minimal or no connection with reality. They mistake concepts and abstractions -- God, soul, spirit, heaven, Devil, and such -- for something substantively real.

A Pearls Before Swine comic from March 18, 2019 captured this phenomenon nicely.

Self-delusiontopia is where religious believers spend a lot of time.

I know, because I used to make that place a frequent home. Sure, mostly I was in contact with reality, or I wouldn't have been able to work at a job, raise a child, play tennis, drive my car, and do all of the other things that require a close connection to how things actually are, as opposed to how we fantasize them to be.

Non-religious fantasies also can be powerful, of course. Here's an excerpt from an article in the September 3, 2018 issue of The New Yorker, "Bad Bargain: Nicki Minaj and the power of fans."

In 2014, Billboard launched the "Fan Army Face-Off," a bracket-style online vote that pitted pop stars' fans against one another. The crowd-sourcing exercise was not exactly original, but its language -- which set fan bases up in imaginary battles -- encapsulated the increasingly combative state of pop-music fandom.

Some fan-group monikers have become household names: Beyonce has the Beyhive, Justin Bieber has Beliebers, Rihanna has a Navy, Selena Gomez has Selenators, Taylor Swift has Swifties. 

Unlike, say, the way Deadheads followed their band from city to city, this modern style of adoration takes place chiefly online, where it is driven not only by jubilation but by fierce defensiveness. Followers pounce on anyone -- big, small, notorious, anonymous -- who criticizes their idols.

There is a dark, obsessive energy to such devotion; fittingly, these crusaders are now often referred to as "stans"  -- a reference to a song by Eminem, from 2000, which tells the story of a fictional fan named Stan who writes increasingly unhinged letters to the rapper before driving his car into a river.

Reading this, naturally I was reminded of the decidedly weird phenomenon of the religious believers who likewise obsessively defend their chosen faith or guru (often Gurinder Singh Dhillon) in comments on this blog.

I've been surprised at why someone would spend so much time and energy reading posts on a Church of the Churchless blog, given that they are clearly in the "churched" camp.

The New Yorker article gave me a new perspective on this. These are fans of a particular religion who are so immersed in their fantasy life that they can't stand any reality-based criticism of their idols.

Weird? Yes. But equally weird is freaking out when someone criticizes Nicki Minaj or Beyonce. People are simply weird -- though obsessive "fandom" is especially intense in the religious sphere.

Salem Women's March 2019 had some crazy religious counter-protestors

Last Saturday there was another Women's March here in Salem, Oregon. As I did with the 2017 and 2018 marches, I took a bunch of photos, then shared them in an Adobe Spark web page that you can peruse by clicking on the image below. 

There were some Christian fundamentalist counter-protestors at the event on the Capitol Mall.

I'll share a photo of their signs, along with my commentary on one of the signs below the Adobe Spark link. Or you can view the photo and my comment on it by clicking on the Women's March Salem 2019 link.

Caution: if you're an avid fan of President Trump, be prepared to see many photos of signs that vilify him. 

The "cover girl" (or cover woman) on the web page is my wife, Laurel. She's also an avid atheist who has organized a MeetUp group that convenes every Sunday to support people in the irreligiosity. 

Here's the photo of the fundamentalist Christians, along with my commentary. 

Here's a closeup of the Christian fundamentalist hate signs. Pleasingly, I'm guilty of all of the "sins" in the sign on the left: I accept abortion, multiple religions, marijuana, porn, alcohol, and same sex relationships. Also, how could these guys be against fornicators? Do they think they're the product of a virgin birth? Me, I'm fine with hell fire, since I'm a proud evolutionist.

More religious craziness, Hindu temple variety

Every religion has its own brand of craziness. None is exempt.

Why? Because the very notion of supernaturalism is crazy, since there is zero, repeat zero, demonstrable evidence that gods, angels, souls, heaven, hell, or any other supernatural entity exists.

When I was younger I used to believe that Hinduism was a bit more appealing than, say, Christianity, because it wasn't as dogmatic a religion. However, as I began reading about Hindu nationalism in India, I came to realize that many fundamentalist Hindus are just as crazy as their counterparts in other religions.

Case in point: a New York Times story, "Her Visit to a Men-Only Temple Went Smoothly. Then the Riots Started." Here's some excerpts that show how bizarre and dangerous Hinduism can be.

KOCHI, India — One morning this month, Bindu Ammini stood at the base of a steep, forested trail in southern India and looked up: She was a three-mile hike away from making history.

Two hours later, at 3:45 a.m., Ms. Ammini and a friend became the first women to enter the Sabarimala Temple, a centuries-old Hindu shrine, after India’s Supreme Court struck down a longstanding rule preventing women of menstruating age from visiting.

In the wake of that ruling, a dozen women tried in October to climb a slippery path leading to the temple. None of them made it, as men screamed in their faces and hurled coconuts.

Video of Ms. Ammini’s journey on Jan. 2 shows two women in long black gowns striding through a gilded archway. They maneuver past mostly placid men. “Our visit has been very smooth,” Ms. Ammini, 40, says to the camera.

A few hours later, the rest of India woke up. Pandemonium followed.

Protesters in the state of Kerala, where the shrine is, threw crude bombs at the police. Over 3,000 people were arrested. At least one person was killed. Dozens more were injured.

Within hours of the women’s trip, a priest had shut down the Sabarimala Temple to sprinkle water for a “purification ritual,” evidence to some that the ban was rooted in a belief that menstruating women were dirty.

Wow. This story makes Christianity look positively tame in comparison to Hinduism. Christians believe in a lot of unbelievable stuff, but at least they aren't prone to rioting when someone supposedly defiles a holy place.

And while the Biblical god can be nasty, at least that divinity doesn't discriminate against women of menstruating age.

Every year, millions of people wait for hours to climb the 18 gold-plated steps leading to the Sabarimala Temple, one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines. For centuries, however, pilgrims say they have observed a de facto bar against women between the ages of 10 and 50, thinking that to allow menstruating women inside would disturb the temple’s celibate deity, Lord Ayyappa.

I found the last part of the New York Times story inspiring. It takes a lot of courage to stand up against religious extremism. I admire the women in India who are doing this.

New challenges await the women. The Supreme Court plans to consider review petitions, though lawyers do not expect a reversal of the verdict. Earlier this week, after the women left a safe house, Ms. Kanakadurga’s mother-in-law beat her so badly with a piece of wood, she said, that she was hospitalized.

Ms. Ammini said she was realistic about her safety, fretting about a recent ominous “silence” in Kerala. But the way forward — “to serve the society, work with Dalits, women, for blacks” — had never been plainer or more urgent, she said.

“They may attack me, they may kill me, but I feel no fear,” she said. “I am struggling for existence.”

Churches shouldn't be able to discriminate against gays

On one of my other blogs, Salem Political Snark, I wrote a post this afternoon that already is getting a lot of online attention here in semi-sleepy Salem, Oregon -- the state capital that often is referred to (especially by me) as the centerpoint of places in Oregon that people really want to go to: the coast, the Cascade mountains, Portland, and Eugene.

Check out "Two reports of how Broadway Coffee House/Commons discriminates against LGBT people." Excerpts:

Someone contacted me about a year ago about how the Broadway Coffee House here in Salem refuses to allow gay people to be employees, because the business is controlled by the Salem Alliance Church.

As you can read below, the pastor of the church believes this gives them a religious license to discriminate, sort of like how Agent 007 had a license to kill, even though under normal circumstances this is illegal. 

According to the Oregon State Bar, it is legal for religiously affiliated businesses to engage in discrimination against LGBT people. But this doesn't make it right.

Here's what the person who contacted me, who wanted to remain anonymous, said. I recall that this message came through Facebook after I'd written a blog post about how Hobby Lobby mixes religion with its business practices. 

I saw your post about hobby lobby, so I think I feel comfortable sharing more ...the "business" I am referring to is Broadway Coffee house. Turns out it is not an actual business and all proceeds go to pay church staff and support the church ministries of Salem Alliance Church .

Seems like something the public should be aware of, especially since I was told gay people would not be able to work there

Yes. I met with the head pastor a year ago to confirm that it was true . The pastor told me that the baristas are church staff and have to be employees of the church and follow church rules to work there . He also said that they do not need to follow non discrimination laws because they are an outreach ministry...not a licensed business. I think the general public should know this.

It feels very underhanded to keep that info from consumers. Myself and about 40 others who live around the coffee shop have been boycotting Broadway for over a year now . We just want them to put up a sign that says the coffee shop supports the ministry of the church and is not an equal opportunity employer. If they do that, we will end the boycott.

 

...I've never understood why our country tolerates discrimination in the name of religion when the same behavior is illegal for non-religious people to engage in.

What's next, allowing religious people to drive drunk if this is part of their belief system? Allowing anyone with a hateful belief system to discriminate? Why should a collective discriminatory belief system be treated differently than an individual discriminatory belief system?

The City of Salem has held a number of meetings at the Broadway Commons.

But recently public meeting for the Downtown Streetscape and Our Salem projects have been held elsewhere. It'd be good to know if this was because of the Broadway Commons' discrimination policy against LGBTQ members of the Salem community.

If so, great. Kudos to the City of Salem.

If not, then the City of Salem and other government agencies should make it a policy to never hold meetings at the Broadway Commons until the Salem Alliance Church starts acting in the name of love, not discrimination, like religious organizations are supposed to do.

        Broadway Commons

Christian missionary killed by remote tribe shows idiocy of religion

So, here's a quiz for you.

Someone learns about an island inhabited by about 50-100 members of a tribe that has had very little contact with civilization. The nation that the island is a part of has decreed that no outsiders are to set foot on the island. One reason is that the tribe members lack immunity to many diseases common in the outside world, so they could be decimated by contact with outsiders.

Should this person:
(A) Give up any idea of visiting the island. 
(B) Sneak onto the island with the intention of changing the tribe over to their way of thinking.

If you're a normal, rational, caring human being, almost certainly you will choose (A). But if you're an evangelical Christian, or another sort of religious believer committed to converting unbelievers, you'll be tempted to choose (B).

Which is just what Christian fanatic John Chau did. And he paid for that idiotic decision by losing his life after the tribe members shot arrows at him.

I rarely think he/she got what they deserved after learning of an untimely death. With Chau's death, though, I've got to admit that this thought has settled firmly in my mind.

Chau believed he was on a mission from God.

Of course, God doesn't exist, so that belief emanated from his own religiously-deluded mind. We know what transpired in that Jesus-soaked brain prior to his death, because he gave his diary to the fishermen who smuggled him onto the island. Several stories, here and here, describe some of his entries. 

"You guys [his family] might think I'm crazy in all this, but I think it's worth it to declare Jesus to these people."

"This is not a pointless thing. The eternal lives of this tribe is at hand."

"I love you all and I pray none of you love anything in this world more than Jesus Christ."

“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?”

This shows the danger of religion. It makes people do stupid things. Sure, people do stupid things without religion, but when you add supernatural fantasies into the mix, a person's Stupid Quotient soars to new heights.

Chau didn't speak the tribe's language. So far as I know, no one else does either, given how difficult it has been to study the tribe. So Chau couldn't tell them about Jesus, since they couldn't understand him.

I'm tempted to say, what was this guy thinking?

But that question is answered by Chau's diary entries. He wasn't thinking about what was best for the tribe on the isolated island. He was only thinking about his Christian delusion that it was up to him to save the tribe from an imaginary Satan who he fantasized was keeping the tribe from knowing his imaginary God.

There's one good thing that came from Chau's death, though. It makes atheism look really good in comparison to religious zealotry. 

Indian guru convicted of rape. His followers riot, killing 32.

Ah, the craziness of religious belief is on full display in India.

First, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, a guru who claims millions of followers, was put on trial for raping two women in 2002 at the headquarters of his Dera Sacha Sauda group in the town of Sirsa.

The guru

His devotees apparently were anticipating that this supposed God-man would get better legal treatment, considering his purportedly divine status. 

The town ordered an indefinite curfew to stop his followers from gathering but thousands had already left for the town of Panchkula where a court was due to give its verdict.

Singh drove in a convoy of cars from his Sirsa headquarters to the court down a deserted highway, accompanied by hundreds of police.

Ram Niwas, a senior government official, said mobile internet services had also been suspended in the states of Haryana and Punjab to stop people from spreading rumours and causing unrest. The army was on standby.

In 2014, the attempted arrest of another guru on murder charges ended with his followers attacking police with clubs and stones.

But the guru was found guilty. That kicked off riots which have killed dozens and injured hundreds.

At least 32 people were killed and more than 350 sustained injuries as Panchkula turned into a virtual warzone after Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh was found guilty of rape by a CBI court on Friday. The followers of the godman have gone on a rampage in three states. The rioters torched at least two railway stations, a power grid and petrol pumps in Haryana. In Delhi, a train was set on fire in Anand Vihar and two buses were also torched. Media persons, including News18 staff, came under attack. The government's claims of keeping the situation under control fell flat.

Sure, religious believers will say this is an anomaly and doesn't really reflect on the glory of God. I disagree. Fanatic beliefs often end in fanatic behavior. 

When people believe that God is on their side, and they're confident that what they're doing is God's will, horrible things often are done in the name of an imaginary divinity.

This is just one more reason to forsake blind belief and embrace open-eyed reason. It is highly dangerous to believe that you know truths about reality that are hidden from others and that there is no possibility of your being mistaken. 

"I don't know" and "I could be wrong" are sentiments that should be cemented in our minds. Otherwise, even if we don't riot and kill people, we'll be prone to other sorts of fanatic dogmatism that were violently demonstrated by the followers of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh.

In Saudi Arabia, atheists are considered terrorists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Satanic Temple is a positive force for good. Praise Satan!

Satan, the Devil, is a religious myth. So I like how The Satanic Temple has taken this bit of dogmatic ridiculousness and made it into a way of promoting rationalism and free inquiry. 

From their FAQs:

DO YOU WORSHIP SATAN?

It is the position of The Satanic Temple that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition. As such, we do not promote a belief in a personal Satan. To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. The Satanist should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things. Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse.

Hard to argue with that.

Unless you're a believer in the sort of supernaturalism that created the notion of Satan. Here's what happened at a Pensacola, Florida City Council meeting when a Satanist tried to deliver the invocation, having gotten the right to do this by none other than the Constitution of the United States.

 

The sight of Christians trying to drown him out at first, waving their hands in prayerful gestures, scared to high heaven (so to speak) by the devilish words they thought he was going to speak (but didn't) -- wonderful. 

This video dramatizes the absurdity of religious belief, how it can turn some people into rigid, frightened caricatures of what a normal human being should be.

One can ask, of course, why members of The Satanic Temple should be able to give an invocation when the group is so critical of religiosity. There's a FAQ for that:

IF YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE SUPERNATURAL, HOW IS TST A RELIGION?

The idea that religion belongs to supernaturalists is ignorant, backward, and offensive. The metaphorical Satanic construct is no more arbitrary to us than are the deeply held beliefs that we actively advocate for. Are we supposed to believe that those who pledge submission to an ethereal supernatural deity hold to their values more deeply than we? Are we supposed to concede that only the superstitious are proper recipients of religious exemption and privilege? In fact, Satanism provides us all that a religion should, without a compulsory attachment to untenable items of faith-based belief: It provides a narrative structure by which we contextualize our lives and works. It provides a body of symbolism and religious practice — a sense of identity, culture, community, and shared values.

Another great activity of The Satanic Temple is After School Satan, which is a counterweight to Christian after-school religious brainwashing. My wife and I ordered a copy of "The Satanic Children's Big Book of Activities." I can hardly wait to read it with my nine year old granddaughter.

Not surprisingly, After School Satan is a bit controversial. Check out a Washington Post story, "An After School Satan Club could be coming to your kid's elementary school." 

The Satanic Temple — which has been offering tongue-in-cheek support for the fallen angel in public arenas that have embraced prayer and parochial ceremonies — is bringing its fight over constitutional separation of church and state to the nation’s schools.

But the group’s plan for public schoolchildren isn’t actually about promoting worship of the devil. The Satanic Temple doesn’t espouse a belief in the existence of a supernatural being that other religions identify solemnly as Satan, or Lucifer, or Beelzebub. The Temple rejects all forms of supernaturalism and is committed to the view that scientific rationality provides the best measure of reality.

According to Mesner, who goes by the professional name of Lucien Greaves, “Satan” is just a “metaphorical construct” intended to represent the rejection of all forms of tyranny over the human mind.

The curriculum for the proposed after-school clubs emphasizes the development of reasoning and social skills. The group says meetings will include a healthful snack, literature lesson, creative learning activities, a science lesson, puzzle solving and an art project. Every child will receive a membership card and must have a signed parental­ permission slip to attend.

“We think it’s important for kids to be able to see multiple points of view, to reason things through, to have empathy and feelings of benevolence for their fellow human beings,” said the Satanic Temple’s Utah chapter head, who goes by the name Chalice Blythe.

Sounds good to me. Sign me up for a Satanic Temple t-shirt.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's absurd radical Islamist theology

By their very nature, all religious theologies based on irrational supernaturalism don't make sense.

But some theologies are more non-sensical than others -- particularly destructive ones which call for violence and killing in the name of God. Like that preached by the head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

He was on TIME magazine's Shortlist for 2015 Person of the Year, losing out to Angela Merkel. In the Person of the Year issue, al-Baghdadi got a two-page writeup. 

The Quran, Islam's holy book, was a big part of his life from an early age.

Born into a religiously devout lower-middle-class Sunni Muslim family in Iraq in 1971, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri, who years later adopted the nom de guerre al-Baghdadi, was an unexceptional, shy child, according to recent biographies based on interviews with those who knew him. He never excelled at religious scholarship but was talented at the recitation of Quranic verse. In college and graduate school, he studied the style and technique of reciting the Quran, and he wrote a master’s thesis on a medieval commentary on the subject.

Then al-Baghdadi developed his own bizarre take on Islam.

Baghdadi has elaborated an apocalyptic vision of a final battle between the forces of radical Islam and the West. In a Ramadan sermon delivered in mid-2014, he declared slavery to be the universal human condition: Muslim believers are indentured to Allah, while nonbelievers are the rightful property of Muslims. He also said the time of death for each man and woman is pre-ordained, implying that all killings must be the will of Allah. This teaching paved the way for his chief spokesman to deliver the following message to ISIS supporters everywhere a few months later: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European,” the spokesman said, “kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military.”

There's obviously a whole lot not-to-like here.

Slavery is the universal human condition? Well, I can sort of understand the notion of Muslim believers being "indentured to Allah," since religious people often consider that God is the master and they are obedient servants of the Almighty. 

Followers of a guru often look upon him/her in a similar fashion: being an embodiment of divinity, the guru's teachings and orders are to be accepted in an unquestioning manner. 

This is weird enough, but al-Baghdadi's contention that "nonbelievers are the rightful property of Muslims" goes way further into Wacked Out territory. It's one thing to surrender oneself to Allah; it's a whole other thing to believe that Allah wants all non-Muslims to be subject to Islamic believers.

Which includes killing the disbeliever "whether he is civilian or military." I usually can find some tiny bit of reasonableness buried in theological doctrines, but it is impossible for me to do so in this case. Unless Allah is a total psychopath.

Then there's al-Baghdadi's take on destiny and free will. 

It isn't out of the ordinary for a religious believer to consider that a person's time of death is pre-ordained.

We often hear statements like, "His time had come" or "God called her home" at someone's passing. Also, one way of looking at Einstein's theory of relativity is that everything in the space-time continuum is just there. In a sense, everything has already happened, though it doesn't seem that way to us.

So I can accept the possibility (if not probability) of determinism -- a secular variety, at least. 

However, positing that "all killings must be the will of Allah" clearly is an effort to evade responsibility for ISIS' despicable acts. Anybody could use this sort of justification. After murdering someone, a Christian could say "The Devil made me do it."

Sure, it is what it is, as simplistic as this saying is, makes sense to me. But it is what it is, because Allah wants it to be that way-- gibberish.

Nobody knows whether Allah even exists, including al-Baghdadi. Discerning what the non-existent Allah wants obviously is even more problematic. So there's no defensible reason for any Muslim, or indeed any believer in some other religion, to consider that what happens in the world is the will of a supernatural being.

I assume that al-Baghdadi must also consider that all killings of ISIS followers also is the will of Allah, as is happening right now in the fighting for control of Ramadi. 

Six hundred to 1,000 Islamic State fighters were said to have been in Ramadi when the overall offensive began two weeks ago, but several hundred of them have been killed in fighting and airstrikes since then, according to Iraqi and Western officials.

So I'm wondering how al-Baghdadi will spin the ISIS defeat if Ramadi is taken over by Iraqi forces.

This must be the will of Allah, right? Or does Allah only will the deaths of non-believers? If the latter is true, then some force greater than Allah must be at work in Ramadi, making al-Baghdadi's Almighty not very mighty.

Of course, any attempt to make sense of al-Baghdadi's ridiculous theology is bound to fail, since it is non-sensical, like the foundation of every religion. It's just that al-Baghdadi's irrational beliefs are way more dangerous than most theologies, leading as they do to so much death and destruction. 

No surprise: Planned Parenthood shooter is a religious fanatic

I don't believe in ESP.

But it didn't take any supernatural powers of perception for me, and many others, to accurately predict that the man who entered a Planned Parenthood clinic, killing three and wounding nine, was religiously motivated.

A well-researched New York Times piece, "For Robert Dear, Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack," describes Dear's religious sensibilities. Excerpts:

He found excuses for his transgressions, she said, in his idiosyncratic views on Christian eschatology and the nature of salvation.

“He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Ms. Micheau said in the court document. “He says that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases. He is obsessed with the world coming to an end.”

...He was a man of religious conviction who sinned openly, a man who craved both extreme solitude and near-constant female company, a man who successfully wooed women but, some of them say, also abused them. He frequented marijuana websites, then argued with other posters, often through heated religious screeds.

“Turn to JESUS or burn in hell,” he wrote on one site on Oct. 7, 2005. “WAKE UP SINNERS U CANT SAVE YOURSELF U WILL DIE AN WORMS SHALL EAT YOUR FLESH, NOW YOUR SOUL IS GOING SOMEWHERE.”

A number of people who knew Mr. Dear said he was a staunch abortion opponent. Ms. Micheau, 60, said in a brief interview Tuesday that late in her marriage to Mr. Dear, he told her that he had put glue in the locks of a Planned Parenthood location in Charleston.

...One person who spoke with him extensively about his religious views said Mr. Dear, who is 57, had praised people who attacked abortion providers, saying they were doing “God’s work.” In 2009, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for the privacy of the family, Mr. Dear described as “heroes” members of the Army of God, a loosely organized group of anti-abortion extremists that has claimed responsibility for a number of killings and bombings.

...He argued with users of the site who disagreed with his religious posts, deriding them as “slaves” and “demons” who would suffer at the end of the world. On Oct. 7, 2005, he wrote, “Every knee shall bow an every tongue will confess that JESUS IS LORD.”

...“She says she can’t believe he was capable of such things, and I think that’s what’s upsetting her most,” the relative said about Ms. Bragg. “He believed he was doing God’s will, and I’m sure he probably wanted to die in the process of carrying out what I’m sure he thought was right.”

So Robert Dear was a Christian terrorist.

Even though abortion is legal in the United States, and there is no evidence that Planned Parenthood did anything illegal when it was paid small sums for providing fetal tissue for medical research purposes, Dear's religious beliefs led him to believe that he was doing the godly thing when he attacked the clinic.

Dear didn't act alone, of course.

Though he apparently didn't have any direct accomplices, Dear was aided and abetted by all of the lies spouted about Planned Parenthood by many Right to Life zealots, including several GOP presidential candidates (notably Carly Fiorina). 

I liked this reader comment on the NYT story by "Ami." Speaking about Dear, Ami said:

So he's the American Christian version of ISIS, but the muslims are terrorists and he is a what exactly?

And the yapping heads he listens to happen to be significant political figures, instead of radicalized Imams, And if the Imams are stirring up extremism as so many red politicians so adamantly vocalize, and fueling Islamic terrorism, then what are these politicians themselves? Seems they're fueling a fanatical base of extremists to incite acts of violence.

At least both sides are carrying out god's will. I'm glad I don't pray to either of those gods.

Me too.

In fact, I don't pray to any god. I find that it is much easier to be a good person by forsaking religious approaches to morality, since these almost invariably lead to an overblown sense of self-righteousness and entitlement.

Religious believers don't just think they are doing the right thing when they act in accord with some made-up set of theological superstitions. They believe they are doing the divine thing, the godly thing. 

This makes religious fanatics dangerous in a different way than secular fanatics. Secular extremists typically are seeking to achieve some worldly end. While they might be crazily wrong, their motivations have at least a tenuous connection with everyday physical reality. 

But when a religious fanatic considers that the future of his immortal soul demands killing in God's name, this is a supersized motivation. It appears that Dear wasn't simply angry at Planned Parenthood for providing abortion services; he thought that those who attacked Planned Parenthood clinics were doing "God's work."

Of course, no one will ever know what made Robert Dear do what he did. Not even Dear himself.

The oft-heard search for motive in attacks like this one rests on an extremely dubious neuroscientific assumption: that a person's conscious will determines what he or she does.

Actually, decision-making is much more complicated, being highly influenced by unconscious factors. Out into consciousness pops an intention to do something. From where it came, nobody knows. 

Imagine asking a married person, "What caused you to marry your spouse?" How believable would the answer be? Is it really possible to ascertain someone's motive for marrying a particular person? Can even that person accurately say why he or she decided to commit to their spouse?

Likewise, why does someone like Robert Dear decide to kill other people? The causes are numerous, mysterious, complex, largely hidden. Dear's trial will be much more successful at bringing out what he did, than why he did it. 

Yet in one way or another, we all fall prey to the illusion that we know. 

We know what is right and wrong. We know what is good and bad. We know what needs to be done to make the world a better place. We know why we're drawn to do this rather than that. We know that inside our head there is a distinct self called "me" who is in control of our thoughts and actions.

Robert Dear also thought, "I know." So what made him so dangerous compared to most other people?

I'd suggest, Dear's religiously-inspired conviction that his knowledge was divinely inspired. Like I said before, religiosity supercharges/supersizes an ordinary belief that we know what is best, what needs doing. A fanatic religious believer has no doubts. 

Yet doubting is a sign that one is in touch with reality.

Nothing is absolutely certain. Every truth is provisional. Such is the way of science. Dialogue, discussion, debate -- this is the way we should resolve differences over what is true or false, right or wrong, moral or immoral.

Not by taking a rifle into a Planned Parenthood clinic and shooting people. Not by Carly Fiorina lying about Planned Parenthood and refusing to admit that what she said on a presidential debate stage wasn't true. 

Fiorina spoke straight into the camera. “Anyone who has watched this videotape—I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, to watch these tapes,” she said referring to undercover videos first circulated in July. “Watch a fully-formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.’ This is about the character of our nation, and if we do not stand up and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.”

...To be clear, Fiorina, like the other Republicans attacking Planned Parenthood, doesn’t have her facts straight. 

Absolute faith in one's infallibility often leads to hurting others in the name of a fanatically-held erroneous belief. 

It appears that Robert Dear wrongly felt that he was following God's will by shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic. It appears that Carly Fiorina wrongly felt that speaking falsely about Planned Parenthood in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary was justified somehow.

Dear God Who Doesn't Exist, deliver us from the evil of religious fanaticism. 

Such is my secular prayer.

"Imagine" is the solace I needed today

After hearing about today's attacks in Paris, I considered writing a blog post about religious fundamentalism. But then I realized that John Lennon had already said everything I wanted to say.

And in a much better way.
-------------------------------

Imagine

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

 

 

 

Hindu fundamentalists are killing freethinkers in India

Well, a story in the New York Times, "India's Attack on Free Speech," makes me feel better about religious craziness in the United States.

We have lots of fanatic Christian fundamentalists in this country. But we also have the First Amendment and a healthy respect for free speech. Our Christian nationalists don't kill anti-religion bloggers. (Good news for me!)

In India, though, people are being killed for speaking their faithless minds.

I'd thought that India was making progress on becoming a liberal democracy akin to ours ("liberal" means something different in this context from the usual liberal/conservative distinction). But apparently not. 

Here's how the story starts off:

London — IN today’s India, secular liberals face a challenge: how to stay alive.

In August, 77-year-old scholar M. M. Kalburgi, an outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in 2013, the activist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered for campaigning against religious superstitions.

These killings should be seen as the canary in the coal mine: Secular voices are being censored and others will follow.

While there have always been episodic attacks on free speech in India, this time feels different. The harassment is front-page news, but the government refuses to acknowledge it. Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence is being interpreted by many people as tacit approval, given that the attacks have gained momentum since he took office in 2014 and are linked to Hindutva groups whose far-right ideology he shares.

Earlier this month, a leader of the Sri Ram Sene, a Hindu extremist group with a history of violence including raiding pubs and beating women they find inside, ratcheted up the tensions. He warned that writers who insulted Hindu gods were in danger of having their tongues sliced off. For those who don’t support the ultimate goal of these extremists — a Hindu nation — Mr. Modi’s silence is ominous.

What gives, India?

You have a history of religious acrimony, but also a history of religious accommodation. Maybe I've been wrong about this, but I've viewed India as a place where all sorts of spiritual beliefs, including having none at all,  were accepted.

So it was disturbing to read this:

This is a turning point for India, a country that has taken pride in being a liberal democracy and that often adopts a high-minded tone when neighbors fall short of the same standards.

...Like the murdered bloggers, the Indian victims held liberal views but were not famous or powerful. Mr. Kalburgi had publicly expressed skepticism toward idol worship in Hinduism, but he didn’t pose a threat to anyone.

While the authorities are pursuing the culprits on a case-by-case basis, the overarching attack on free speech has not been addressed. The threats and killings have created an atmosphere of self-censorship and fear.

...The goal of transforming India from a secular state to a Hindu nation, which seems to be behind the murders, is abetted not just by the silence of politicians, but also by the Hindu nationalist policies of the ruling B.J.P.

...It’s also not surprising that Hindu fundamentalists would feel empowered in the shadow of a Hindu nationalist government. Still, few expected that freedom of speech would become a contestable commodity and that some who exercised it would lose their lives.

...It’s hard to accept what is happening in India. It is easier to ignore or dismiss the attacks and the threats as a liberal persecution complex or a phase that will last only as long as the B.J.P. is in power. But the country is undergoing a tectonic shift that will have long-term repercussions.

The attacks in India should not be seen as a problem limited to secular writers or liberal thinkers. They should be recognized as an attack on the heart of what constitutes a democracy — and that concerns everyone who values the idea of India as it was conceived and as it is beloved, rather than an India imagined through the eyes of religious zealots.

Indians must protest these attacks and demand accountability from people in power. We must call for all voices to be protected, before we lose our own.

Religious fundamentalists kill bloggers and other secular activists

There are plenty of reasons to reject religion. A big one is that fundamentalism makes people so crazy, they not only want to kill people who criticize religiosity, sometimes they actually do kill them. 

Below is a piece by Sanal Edamaruku that I came across in New Scientist.

Ananta Bijoy Das likely was killed by Muslim extremists. Edamaruku also writes about other secular activists who were killed by Hindu extremists. He himself was threatened by Christian extremists. 

It isn't just one religion that produces murderous true believers. They all do. Lesson: stay away from religion. 

Here's the opinion piece by Edamaruku.

Free speech's front line

After the murder of yet another rationalist blogger, exiled author Sanal Edamaruku calls on governments to defend the free speech of those who stand for science

MASKED men with machetes killed Ananta Bijoy Das last week in Bangladesh. He was murdered for his honesty and integrity, for standing up for rational, sceptical thought and scientific reasoning in the face of religious bigotry.

The 30-year-old edited the journal Jukti (Reason), blogged vigorously and had written a book on Charles Darwin. He felt religion was opposed to human dignity.

He is not the first brilliant young rationalist in Bangladesh to die in a pool of blood. On 26 February, Avijit Roy, moderator of the internationally renowned rationalist portal Mukto-Mona (Free Mind), was murdered. And Washiqur Rahman, who criticised the attack, was killed on 30 March.

The deaths of my Bangladeshi colleagues are shocking. I was in regular contact with Avijit, who used to reproduce my articles in Mukto-Mona. And Ananta was to be my guest in Finland after he told me that he had been invited to Stockholm by free speech group Swedish PEN. He never made it; Swedish officials in Dhaka refused to grant him a visa.

Rationalist blood has also been shed in my former homeland, India. Narendra Dabholkar, who criticised oppressive Hindu superstitions, was murdered in 2013 in Pune. Govind Pansare, a rationalist who criticised Hindu radical groups, was killed in February this year.

My own life was threatened three years ago, after I identified the source of the "miracle" of a dripping Jesus statue in a Mumbai Catholic church as a blocked drain. Agitators were employed to attack me. I escaped. But then came blasphemy complaints, arrest threats and the cardinal's demand for my apology. I refused, and extremist Catholic groups discussed my assassination. I left for Europe and have not returned.

The enemies of reason are afraid of word, pen and keyboard. They try to stop the flow of free thought with guns and cleavers. But rationalists are not so easily stopped. More and more writers and bloggers are emerging to join those challenging such bigotry.

Governments must defend free speech for those who stand for science and progress. If a rational point of view can't be expressed freely, much that we value about civilisation will be at stake.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Free speech's front line"

Sanal Edamaruku is an Indian author who lives in exile in Finland. He is the president of Rationalist International

Criticizing Islam isn't racist

I enjoy getting comments on my blog posts. Many add informative extras to what I was writing about. But sometimes I read a comment that makes so little sense, my only reaction is a bewildered "huh?"

Such as this one, submitted in response to "Of all the crazy religions, is Islam the most dangerous?"

I was a big fan, but now you lost me. Now you just seem racist to me. Sorry. I'm no fan of religions, any of them, but it's fundamentalists that are the problem. I don't like it when people target any particular group. The Muslims I know would completely disagree with your interpretation of their faith. Sorry.

First, how is it possible to be racist when Islam isn't a race? Islam is a religion. Devotees of Islam belong to various races. I criticize Christianity a lot. Does it make sense to call me a racist for doing so?

Second, the commenter failed to address my question. Which is a fair one.

Sure, most Muslims don't engage in violence in the name of their religion. But neither do most adherents of any other religion. However, it's reasonable to ask why those who kill others in the name of their religion so often are Muslims.

Yes, it can be argued that these terrorists are simply using their religion as an excuse to carry out violent politically-motivated acts. 

This doesn't explain the special proclivity of Muslims to engage in violence when it clearly is motivated by religious belief, though. As noted in my previous post, members of no other religion riot if someone burns their holy book or draws insulting cartoons of the religion's founder.

Andrew Zak Williams does a good job of addressing the "racist" charge in his New Atheism should be able to criticize Islam without being accused of Islamophobia.

Surely, rational discourse should be permitted to tiptoe cautiously along the hallowed corridors of the house of Islam without the guards frogmarching it out, bellowing allegations of racism and bigotry. Cannot we not agree that the real issue is whether the critiques of Islam proffered by today’s prominent atheists are correct?

For instance, does Islam fall short when it comes to women’s rights? Does it trample free speech while enforcing its own precepts, by the sword if necessary? By all means, apologists may disagree with the likes of Harris and biologist Jerry Coyne. But what signal is sent by a refusal to permit the issues to be even debated?

One can dream up allegations about any religion that are so obscene that no beliver should be expected to respond. But take the suggestion that Islam has some way to go before it promotes gay rights beyond the level of a misnomer. Or that its holy book, taken literally, demands an embrace of violence and reprisals that wouldn’t be tolerated by any humanist ethos.

These allegations, on their face, are wholly consistent with observation. What’s more, its tenets and precepts have real consequences and repercussions for all of us. What is it that leads apologists and liberal writers to nevertheless consider that Islam shouldn’t have to answer these charges, and that those who bring them are merely dressing their bigotry in a cloak of intellectualism?

I'll feel a lot better about Islam when Muslim leaders around the world overwhelmingly denounce violence in the name of their faith whenever and wherever it occurs. So far, they haven't.

This tells me that we need to keep asking whether Islam is a particularly dangerous religion.

Pope acts like an bigot in denouncing gay marriage

How could anybody believe the Pope is a spiritual person worthy of emulation?

Clearly the Pope is a narrow-minded bigot who is woefully ignorant about both modern science and the basics of human compassion.

Here's proof: "Pope says future of mankind at stake over gay marriage." 

The defence of the family, the Pope said, "is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears."

On Monday, the Vatican's newspaper described laws on gay marriage as an attempt at a communist-like "utopia", a day after tens of thousands of demonstrators turned out in France to support legalising both marriages and adoption for gay couples.

Truthfully -- a word the Pope and other religious leaders have no use for -- homosexuality isn't a conscious choice, as the Pope believes. As many gay people have pointed out, who the hell would choose a sexual orientation that is so much more difficult to live than heterosexuality?

And there is essentially (if not exactly) zero evidence that gay marriage is bad for children, or weakens traditional marriage. I live about 75 miles from Washington state, where gay marriage was legalized recently.

I can testify that my marriage, which happens to involve a man and a woman, hasn't been affected at all. The Pope is just spouting nonsense, all too easy for religious fundamentalists to do.

There is, though, some good news in the story.

France's parliament is to debate the government-backed "marriage for all" bill early next year.

With President Francois Hollande's Socialists enjoying a strong majority, the bill is expected to pass despite vehement opposition from the right and religious groups.

Irritating putdowns of pseudo-spiritual wannabes

Even when I was a religious true believer, Eastern mysticism variety, I tried to avoid being irritatingly sanctimonious. People who consider themselves holier-than-thou are difficult to be around. And I necessarily associated with quite a few people who didn't believe in what I did.

Such as my first wife, who early on deconverted from the India-based Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) faith that I held on to for about thirty-five years. And my second wife, who always has been an "infidel" from the standpoint of RSSB.

When I gave talks at RSSB meetings, I often used her as an example, saying that it makes no sense for any devotee of a particular spiritual belief system to view themselves as being superior to others.  After all, isn't spirituality supposed to have something to do with humility, love, compassion, acceptance?

Having run this churchless blog for almost eight years, I'm familiar with the putdowns of pseudo-spiritual wannabes -- because so many of those putdowns are directed at me in comments and emails. Here's some of the techniques I find most irritatingly amusing, because they are so nonsensical.

After I share those, I'll end with a suggestion about how to really put me, or another religious skeptic, down. 

"Brian, you haven't had [such and such] experience. You're a spiritual loser." 

This is an exceedingly lame argument.

No, I haven't experienced the blazing love of Jesus. No, I haven't had a peyote-fueled vision of the divine. No, I haven't felt the cosmic compassion of Buddha by repeating Namu Amida Butsu. No, I haven't astral traveled through inner regions of reality.

Who has experienced everything that religions, spiritual faiths, and mystical practices say is possible to experience?

And who can prove that any of these experiences are more than subjectively personal? I've had countless experiences that nobody else has. In fact, all of my experiences are unique to me, because no one can ever know someone else's conscious experience.

So this putdown is so weak as to be meaningless.

"Brian, you would have had [such and such] experience if you'd stuck with [such and such] longer. You're a quitter."

This is how I usually respond to this attempted putdown: Have you ever changed your mind, done something different, gone in a different direction, discarded one thing and picked up another? 

Nobody -- repeat, nobody -- keeps on the same track forever. I can't understand how it is that many religious believers convert to a particular faith, then view any subsequent conversion to another viewpoint as a ghastly sin.

If they'd always felt that way, they would have stuck with what they originally believed. Or their lack of belief. We all learn from our experiences. We all discover what we like and don't like. We evolve in our understanding of what makes life meaningful for us.

Yet even though change is the only constant from birth until death, somehow religious fundamentalists imagine that once a believer in X, always a believer in X. If Y comes to look more true and desirable, the devil must have worked his wily ways.

Ridiculous. Please, come up with a better putdown.

"Brian, you do [such and such] and say [such and such]. You're an immoral egotist." 

So what if I am? And how is it that supposedly you can judge me without being an immoral egotist, but when I criticize somebody or something, I'm all wrong?

Everybody has different standards of right and wrong. We all do what we feel we should. We're all trying to journey down the road of life in the best way possible. Still, I often disagree with what someone else is doing.

Politics is one of my passions. Every day I read the news and think, "Geez, what the Republicans are doing is so obviously wrong." But I realize that to them, us progressives are wrong. I try to avoid making absolutist moral judgments.

Which reminds me of some passages I read today in one of my favorite books, Raymond Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent." He describes four people. Smullyan likes the fourth a lot. The first, not at all.

The fourth says, "Why do I act as I do? To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea why. It is simply my nature to act as I act, and that's all I can say." ...The last one delights me utterly!... He is the one who is completely natural, spontaneous, and unself-consciously helpful.

...The first says, "I regard it as my duty and moral obligation to help my fellow man." ...But the first man! Good heavens, what a monstrosity!... People like the first man are so often pompous, vain, ego-assertive, puritanical, inhuman, self-centered, dominating, and unsympathetic. They are the people who act out of "principles." In a way, they are even worse than people who don't help others at all!

l don't know if I'm egotistical. I just do what I feel like doing.

Sure seems like that also is what people who criticize me for being an egotist are doing. Difference is, I don't feel superior to other people when I do what I feel like doing -- which makes me less egotistical! 

Anyway, this gets me to how someone could really put me down for what I'm doing here on the Church of the Churchless: provide some super-good evidence that I'm wrong to be skeptical about god, soul, spirit, supernatural powers, and all that.

Ooh! That would show me!

I'd have to admit that what I've been saying in so many blog posts is wrong, wrong, wrong. I'd have to bow down before the truth: God is real; the soul survives bodily death; spirit is the ultimate reality; some people have supernatural abilities.

Actually, I'd be happy to do that: admit I was wrong. It'd be nice to know that there's more to life, existence, and the cosmos than what appears to be. More is better, for sure. Especially if it really is better. 

Problem is, for the putdown to be effective, you need to bring your best stuff.

Facts, demonstrable evidence, proof. No one ever has been able to do this throughout all of recorded human history, so I doubt anyone is going to submit a blog post comment or send me an email with truly convincing arguments for some sort of divinity.

That's why I'm pretty sure those unconvincing putdowns will continue. Those who don't know, but believe they do, are spiritual wannabes who can't stand people like me who look at them and say, "Oh, really?"

Why a Christian woman denies global warming

My wife, Laurel, has been engaging in an exchange of emails with a Christian woman who used to do the same thing with Laurel's sister -- try to convince a religious skeptic that the Bible is God's inerrant truth.

Which, of course, is complete bullshit. 

As is this woman's response, after Laurel noted that viewers of Fox News are horribly misinformed about the reality of global warming. She replied:

It is because I am a Christian that I don't believe in global warming.  

My wife then emailed her:

I am curious why being a Christian causes you to reject that humans are causing global climate change. Doesn't God expect human kind to take care of the planet, and couldn't it be that we are being careless and greedy, and not tending nature as we should? 

Here's the Christian woman's fundamentalist, unscientific, irrational response. My often-caustic commentary is in red. 

I believe in the literal account in Genesis.

Poor you. I suspected that everything you wrote after this would be absurd. I was right. But at least you've given me the gift of making fun of Christian dogmatism. Thanks for that.

God created the heavens and the earth in six days and when He was done He said it was very good. He put everything into the earth that humans and animals would need to survive, including vegetation of all kinds. Because the earth was created at the sound of God's voice and according to His plan, He is in absolute control of His creation.

OK, let's assume you're right. Meister Eckhart, a medieval Christian mystic, said in one of his sermons, “Now I hear you ask, ‘How do I know that it is God’s will? My answer is that if it were not God’s will even for a moment, then it would not exist. Whatever is must be his will."

So if you believe that global warming is God's will, then efforts to combat global warming also are God's will. Likewise, women having abortions is God's will, as are attempts to curtail abortions. In other words, if whatever is happening is God's will, this simply tells us that God is nature, all of reality, a nice pantheistic view that doesn't require the existence of a personal God.

It takes my breath away when I consider the majesty and power of the Lord that is revealed in nature and all of its complexities, including climate and weather. Read the book of Job Chapters 38-41 and allow yourself to believe that God is real and that He has designed the earth with a purpose greater than ourselves.

No, I'm not going to allow myself to do that. Since God supposedly is in absolute control of everything, obviously God doesn't want me to believe in the Bible, or God would make me believe in this ridiculous pre-scientific book written by ignorant tribesmen.

The Lord sets the boundaries of the sea, (Job 38:8-11; Psalm 147:17; Haggai 2:17). He controls the rain and snow (Psalm 147:8 - He covers the heavens with clouds, provides rain for the earth, and makes the grass grow in the mountain pastures. Psalm 147:17-18 He hurls the hail like stones. Who can stand against his freezing cold?  Then at his command it all melts. He sends His winds and the ice thaws.  

Exactly what the Koran says. You and militant Muslims are on exactly the same wavelength.

God is in control of the earth yet he appointed man to take dominion over it.  He put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to take care of it and be good stewards of the resources God gave them. God gave dominion over the earth to man. In contrast, the EPA is driven to control and restrict our use of God's resources.

I'm confused. Isn't the EPA run by men (and women)? Isn't the EPA administered by a president who was elected by the majority of American voters? If God gave dominion of the earth to man, and mankind has decided that global warming and other forms of environmental pollution are problems that need to be resolved, isn't this in line with God's plan? Where in the Bible does it say that "dominion" means trashing the planet?

Yes, he wants us to manage the earth's resources efficiently and does not want us to be greedy about it. Gen. 2: 15-16. We are ultimately accountable to God for our actions.  I don't need to be told that I must use an expensive and hazardous light bulb to help save the planet. Who is really benefiting and profiting from this new legislation? 

The light bulb manufacturers. They're in favor of moving away from inefficient and outmoded incandescent bulbs. You just said God is in control of everything. Doesn't "everything" include new energy efficiency standards? 

Genesis also makes it clear that it was breaking God's moral laws that brought a curse upon the earth.

The Old Testament also makes it clear that adulterers should be put to death. I take it you are in favor of this and all the other absurd crap in the Bible, since you take the Bible literally. Hope you're keeping your dangerous bull penned up securely. (See here.)

Environmentalists want us to believe that a curse is upon the earth because we are wasting and mis-using the earths resources. Before sin entered the world through Adam and Eve, their was no death or struggle for survival upon the earth. If death and struggle have always been a part of life on this planet then we would have absolutely no need to accept the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ on the cross as our substitute for our sin. 

Huh? Curses aren't part of the belief system of us secular environmentalists. If they were real, after writing posts on this here Church of the Churchless blog for almost eight years I'd be in bad shape given how often true believers curse me. And yes, death and struggle HAVE always been a part of lie on this planet. Just look at the evolutionary record that you don't believe in.

God judged the earth and destroyed His Creation in the days of Noah with the world-wide flood (Gen. 7-9) because the people on the earth were corrupt. They rejected His commandments and were lawless to the point that God regretted making man-kind. The only man on the earth who knew and feared God was Noah so he instructed him to build the ark and warned him that he was going to to destroy the earth with a flood. 

You must be freaking kidding me! I can't believe that any educated 21st century person still believes in Noah's Ark. I mean, I know people do, but to read an email from someone who actually accepts tribal superstitions is different from intellectually understanding how prevalent Christian dogmatism is. I hope you don't vote, but I'm afraid that you do. Scary.

Talk about an EPA cataclysmic nightmare! Every shred of vegetation, along with decaying bones and all carbon shelled land and marine animals were lost during the flood. How was the carbon dioxide going to be removed from the atmosphere now?  Where was the oxygen that was needed to sustain life on the planet? If it is only plant-life that sustains life on the earth and supplies humans with the oxygen we need to survive, then Noah and his family would have surely perished in the flood, but God revealed His Sovereignty once again by keeping them alive to repopulate the earth and take dominion over it again. Gen. 9: 1-3. It probably took a year for the waters to recede and for plant life to begin growing again. The Lord was in absolute control of this process from beginning to end.  Except for the grace of God, Noah and His family would be extinct. 

Except for the gullibility of both ancient and modern humans, fairy tales like those in the Bible wouldn't exist. Do you realize that every other religion also has its own stories of creation and destruction which contradict those in the Bible? Science is the only "story" worthy of being believed, because it is founded on facts and open to revisions when new understandings come along.

It is fascinating to realize that huge reservoirs of plants and vegetation and carbon shelled animals that once existed on the earth before the flood were buried in the earth and are now the basis for fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas, etc). These are God-given resources that were purposely put into the earth by God's design to use for man's sustenance and enjoyment.   

Along with wind power and solar power, I assume you agree, since everything on Earth is god-given, including the skeptical thoughts that are powering this post. Which include, "How did all these fossil fuels have time to be produced if the Earth was created only 10,000 years ago, as most literal believers in the Bible consider?" And, "If fossil fuels can be produced so quickly, why aren't we seeing fresh supplies of coal and oil being produced from recently buried vegetation?"

My hope is in Jesus Christ because someday God will destroy this earth and create a new heaven and a new earth. Rev. 21:1 I know with full confidence and absolute certainty that I belong to Him.

And my hope is that your eyes are opened to the reality of the cosmos. Many people believe in God without any evidence that God exists. I understand why you want to believe that you "belong to HIm." It's nice to have a good friend, even if imaginary. We all need someone to lean on, even if that entity doesn't exist outside of our own mind.

But even if you continue to believe in God, consider how absurd it is to divide reality into what you think should be, versus what actually is. 

You don't seem to deny that global warming is occurring. So notwithstanding your first statement that I shared in this post, your skepticism about global warming appears to be with what should be done about it, not with the fact of its existence.

This -- among many things -- confuses me about fundamentalist Christians. As noted previously, if God is in control of the world, then whatever is happening in the world is God's will. This includes efforts to protect the environment, as well as efforts to trash the environment.

Since both environmentalists and anti-environmentalists supposedly are doing God's will, since nothing happens without God commanding it, we're left with meaningless theology. Skeptics like me are part of God's plan, and religious believers like you are part of God's plan.

This all cancels out to become "Whatever is, is." We humans are still left with the same decisions, same choices, same moral dilemmas. That's why I prefer to leave God out of the equation.

Hate mail about me going to hell. Oh, well.

Well, wish me luck in hell. That's where I'm going according to this email message. But at least my dog likes me! (When I give her chew sticks after her dinner, at least.)

But seriously... if there's a hell, it's hate. I don't hate. I just disagree and express my honest opinion. So I feel like I'm far away from hell.

HINES [PIG]

I WENT THRU YUR BLOG COC AND I SEEN U HAVE WRITTEN ALL BULLSHIT ABOUT ALMIGHTY BABAJI WHO IS THE ALMIGHTY GOD IN HUMAN FORM

U BLOODY PIECE OF SHIT U HAVE ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD TO WRITE BLOGS AND CRITICISE THE ALMIGHTY BY DOING THIS UR NOT ONLY SPOILING YUR HUMAN BIRTH BUT ALSO RESERVING A PLACE IN HELL IN WHICH U WILL DWELL FOR AGES

THE HELL AND THE SATAN AWAITS YOU WITH OPEN ARMS FOR THE DEEDS YOU HAVE DONE FOR WHICH YOU WILL NOT BE FORGIVEN

IF U THINK BY WRITING A BLOG U CAN INFLUENCE ANY1 THATS YUR WRONG CONCEPT BCOZ EVERYBODY KNOWS THE PIG LIKES DIRT AND A PIG LIKE U LIKES THE FILTH OF THIS WORLD SO DWELL IN SHIT WHERE U BELONG ETERNALLY

HAVE A NICE TIME IN HELL

Integral egos gone wild: Wilber and Cohen relish worship

As I said in this post, I used to have a love-hate thing going on with Ken Wilber and his Integral philosophy. (Click on that link and you'll be led to examples of what I liked and disliked.)

Last night, though, I got around to reading the September - November 2009 issue of EnlightenNext, a magazine devoted to uncritical lauding of Wilber's work, along with that of his Integral comrade, Andrew Cohen.

When I got through reading "The Second Face of God," I'd reached a clear conclusion: Wilber and Cohen aren't aiming to go beyond the limitations of religiosity in their quest for an Integral spirituality; they're out to found a new religion -- with themselves as the worshipful objects of devotion.

Of course, this won't be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to the steadily increasing signs of cult behavior in the Integral community, as documented by Integral World. 

For example, this article by Elliott Benjamin discusses his personal experiences of the cult dangers at the Integral Institute. A piece by Be Scofield documents the abuse lavished on his students by Andrew Cohen, who calls himself a "guru." (William Yenner does the same in "American Guru.") And Ken Wilber's slide into narcissism is the subject of V. Gunnar Larsson's essay.

I've read many, if not most, of Wilber's books. At first his Integral Vision appealed to me. But the more I've reflected upon it, the less I like it. In two paragraphs, here's the basic reason why.

Wilber is a masterful organizer of other people's ideas. His grandiose goal is to take every idea about anything that humans have ever come up with and fit it into his complicated typology of quadrants, levels, states, stages, and what not. Wilber doesn't really try to sort out truth from fiction. Everything is true, just in different ways.

So there isn't a way to prove that Integral philosophy is right or wrong. It's simply a big conceptual filing cabinet in which all kinds of ideas about all sorts of subjects (science, morality, religion, evolution, child development, etc.) have been arranged in a hugely complicated fashion that reflects the hugely complicated mind of Ken Wilber.

OK, so now I'll return to "The Second Face of God" and show how this dialogue between the "guru" (Andrew Cohen) and the "pandit" (Ken Wilber) points to some serious shortcomings of their Integral Vision.

First, Wilber and Cohen assume that God is real without offering up any evidence that this is true. They don't feel that they have to, because in the Integral scheme everything is true. That's why it's integral: nothing is left out, no matter how crazy some notion might be.

Thus Cohen starts out by saying:

I’ve always been very interested in what the word “God” means. If God represents the Absolute dimension of life, the highest spiritual reality we can conceive of, then what does God look like? And what does God feel like—what is the experience of God?

Well, it is whatever people say they experience. And this can be divided into first, second, and third person experiences.

Thus some people experience God as their own "I am" subjectivity (first person); others experience God as everything in existence (third person); while still others experience God as a "thou" who is an object of devotion, submission, and gratitude (second person).

Again, Wilber and Cohen don't present evidence that God exists. Nor do they even claim that if God exists, this divine being is more truly experienced in a first, second, or third person fashion.

No, since Integral philosophy is about integrating everything, no matter how crazy (or non-existent) some notion might be, Wilber and Cohen talk about how important it is for people to embrace the second person "I/Thou" relationship with God -- which is, of course, exactly what Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are all about.

Submission. Devotion. Prostration before the Almighty.

Which, it turns out, includes Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber. But before I document their desire to be worshiped in much the same fashion as they want God to be, here's what they say about the need to bend one's knee before God.

But second person means a Being with intelligence. Many religions the world over conceive of spirituality in second person. They practice it, for example, with guru yoga, where you see your master as the embodiment of Spirit, and you use your interaction with your master to help learn how to interact with God or Goddess or Spirit.

...Ultimately, to become an integrally and evolutionarily enlightened individual, the ego is going to have to come down at least on one knee, if not both.

...the fact of the matter is that guru yoga, done correctly, is a way the student faces God as Other. The guru is apparently other -- his or her consciousness is other than mine. Therefore, I need to submit to that guru, but I need to do it in very specific and careful ways.

...Then at the level of consciousness, we must accept that some people are actually more developed, more evolved than others.

...But to really put into practice this understanding of hierarchy and generate awareness of the second face of God, we need to enter into relationships with individuals who have demonstrated to us that they are more evolved than we are.

Well, it's not hard to guess who Cohen and Wilber are talking about here: themselves.

After all, their life mission is to bring about an evolution of consciousness through the magic of the Integral Vision. Their magazine is filled with offers to attend workshops, buy books and videos, and make donations to the EnlightenNext movement.

If Wilber and Cohen aren't viewed as the elevated dispensers of spiritual wisdom that they claim to be in the bios that accompanied the "Second Face of God" article, their revenue stream could suffer. So we read:

Andrew W. Cohen: Guru [n. Sanskrit]: one who teaches spiritual liberation from his or her own direct experience or realization.

Ken Wilber: Pandit [n. Sanskrit]: a scholar, one who is deeply proficient and immersed in spiritual wisdom.

Ego-loss apparently isn't part of the qualifications for being a guru or pandit, because Wilber bemoans people who just don't understand how important it is to bend their knees and accept the authority of teachers like him.

Consenting to the presence of God has a necessary component of submission, and that's exactly the component that the second face of God always required. That's what gets it in trouble with people who don't understand it and who mistake it for authoritarianism.

But, on the contrary, that's actually the component that is so deeply uprooting to the ego's authoritarian ways. The people who criticize these types of practices with teachers as being authoritarian are right, from a certain point of view. There is something that's authoritarian, but it's actually the ego of the practitioner!

So the guru and the pandit are always right. Even if...

Cohen coerced donations from disciples, in one case to the tune of $2 million. His students were slapped, ridiculed, made to do thousands of prostrations before his photo, forced to immerse themselves in a near-freezing lake for an hour, and other humiliations.

Hey, that's all part of getting rid of the student's/disciple's ego. If you can't recognize that, you're not worthy of being part of the Integral Vision cult.

In another article in the same EnlightenNext issue, Cohen talks about how important it is for students to submit to the teacher's authority, since hierarchy is the nature of the cosmos according to Integral philosophy.

The real question to pose to students is, "Are you capable of humbling yourself enough so that Spirit will be able to move through you as it moves through me?"

...You love them so much that you actually don't care about their ego at all.

...So a truly enlightened teacher sees all individuals who come to them as potential vehicles for Spirit and doesn't really care so much about the personal, psychological, emotional predicaments of the particular individuals and the predicaments of their egos.

That's just what wife-beaters say, along with would-be gurus like Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber: I'm hurting you for your own good; you deserve it.

Well, I say: bullshit to that.

Run, don't walk, from Cohen and Wilber, EnlightenNext, and any attempt to entice you into a religious cult masquerading as Integral enlightenment.

What they're pushing is old-fashioned religion in a New Age guise. Cohen and Wilber are the high priests, and they're looking for submissive acolytes who will worship them and submit to their authority.

Draw Mohammed Day freaks out fundamentalist Muslims

Example #[infinity] of why religions are so ridiculous: Pakistan shuts down Facebook over a page that promotes "Draw Mohammed Day."

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority issued the order a day before "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," scheduled by a Facebook group with the same name. "Obviously it (the blocking of Facebook) is related to the objectionable material that was placed on Facebook. That is why it is blocked," said Khoram Ali Mehran of the telecommunication authority.

Check out Everybody Draw Mohammed Day! on Facebook. No reason not to -- aside from defying the will of Allah and being damned for eternity, along with having your throat slit as a godless infidel. (Seriously...death threats have been made by Islamic crazies._

I thought of submitting my own caricature of Mohammed, since this is prohibited by a few supposed hadiths (sayings) of the prophet, and I like defying religious conventions. 

But I'm a lousy artist.

And on the Facebook page I found a drawing by someone who shares my artistic sensibilities. So I'll share this drawing of Mohammed as my contribution to the cause of laughing at religious fundamentalism.

Texas dismisses Thomas Jefferson from schools

We didn't need more evidence that religious fundamentalists are dangerous wackos who seek to undermine American freedom and independence -- but, sadly, here it is:

The Texas State Board of Education removed Thomas Jefferson from the school curriculum, replacing him with John Calvin, who, not surprisingly, also was a religious wacko.

Jefferson, on the other hand, held unconventional Christian beliefs and strongly argued for the separation of church and state. He also, of course, was the third president of the United States, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States.

But in Texas he doesn't exist. Not according to the conservative-dominated state school board. A live blog report shows it only took twenty-one minutes to erase Jefferson.

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau,  Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

9:51 – Dunbar’s amendment striking Jefferson passed with the votes of the board’s far-right members and board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas.

Is this un-American, unpatriotic, and incredibly stupid? Yes.

Republicans on the Texas State Board of Education also don't want school children to know about the prohibition of a government-sponsored religion in the Bill of Rights, since they clearly are out to make their brand of fundamentalist Christianity into just that.

To hell with the Constitution. To hell with Thomas Jefferson. To hell with academic standards. (Amazingly, the board revised the curriculum without any input from scholars, classroom teachers, or experts in the social sciences.)

On the plus side, this outrage against history probably is leading many people to dig into why Thomas Jefferson is so threatening to religious true believers. I'm one of them.

This morning I found my copy of "The Godless Constitution" and turned to the chapter, The "Infidel" Mr. Jefferson. I learned that in the 1800 presidential race between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams:

The floodgates of Christian anger opened upon Jefferson in a concerted effort to paint him as a "French infidel" and a "howling atheist." The Reverend William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister in New York, wrote a pamphlet opposing Jefferson because of "his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or in other words his rejection of the Christian Religion and open profession of Deism."

Jefferson had plenty of company among our nation's Founding Fathers (sorry for the sexist language, but this is what the founders almost always are called; I guess there weren't any Founding Mothers).

This is a first for me -- quoting from an Ayn Rand web site -- but it speaks the truth.

As the quotes on this page illustrate, the claim that America was founded on Christianity is a myth. Many of the Founding Fathers and Revolutionary War leaders were Deists, and upheld a firm separation of church and state.

Here's some additional quotes from "The Godless Constitution" that point to Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment values. He'd never be able to be elected to high office today, even though Jefferson is considered one of our greatest presidents.

Jefferson had suggested (as we noted in the last chapter) that it was not of interest to the state whether his neighbor believed in twenty gods or no God, since "it neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

The second offensive passage appears in Jefferson's argument that only reason, persuasion, and free inquiry, not governmental coercion, find and advance truth.

---------------------

It was this strident Enlightenment rationalism, his constant juxtaposition of reason and superstition, free inquiry and religious coercion, that made Jefferson seem so dangerous a threat to his Christian enemies.

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[To Jefferson] Priests were the subverters of reason and enlightenment, for centuries duping decent Christians into "burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand." They weave "spells" for their flocks, "moulding their minds as wax in the hollows of their hands." All priests, Jefferson claimed, "dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight."

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Outspokenly anticlerical and vigilant to exclude religion from public life as he may have been, Jefferson was, it must be emphasized, not himself a godless man. He was in fact living proof of his own argument that religion as private conviction could flourish without public endorsement.

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He believed fervently in the one God who had created all men equal. While never formally abandoning the Episcopalianism of his Virginia youth, he usually identified himself as a Unitarian. In this respect he was deeply influenced by the writings of his scientific friend the Reverend Joseph Priestley.

They both rejected the Trinity as a "metaphysical insanity" and shared the general deistic rejection of the miracles of the Bible, the divinity of Christ, and the doctrines of original sin and blood atonement. Jefferson, in fact, predicted that one day in a rational America everyone would be a Unitarian.

---------------------

Far from being one of "the bitterest enemies of Christ," as the Reverend Mason claimed in 1800, Jefferson embraced a personal religion shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus. He called his own creed "the philosophy of Jesus" and referred often to "the purity and sublimity of his moral precepts."

Thomas Jefferson said, ""I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know." He made up his own Bible, leaving out the unbelievable stuff. (You can read it here.) For his churchlessness alone, not to mention his other accomplishments, Jefferson deserves better than being disrespected by the Texas State Board of Education.

I shall honor his contributions to the United States and the world by vowing to never set foot in Texas (unless absolutely necessary) or watch a Dallas Cowboys football game (only the cheerleaders).

Faith healing kills another Oregon child

Last year the father of Ava Worthington was convicted of criminal neglect for allowing his child to die rather than seek medical attention.

Ava had the misfortune of being born to parents belonging to Oregon's Followers of Christ church, where children die at an alarming rate because of crazy faith healing beliefs.

An investigation by The Oregonian claimed that at least 21 out of 78 minors found to be buried in the church cemetery died of preventable causes, including simple infections which would be easily treated with routine antibiotics.

Now, make that 23.

The parents of teenager Neil Beagley (grandparents of Ava) have been convicted of criminally negligent homicide for not having their son treated for a congenital urinary blockage. 

Instead of taking Neil to a doctor, his parents, members of the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City, attempted to heal him with prayer, anointing with oil and laying on of hands.

Oregonian columnist Susan Nielsen gets it right in criticizing laws that allow religiosity to be used as an excuse for behavior that is inexcusable.

So the jury voted to convict the Beagleys. Sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 18. What's left now is a nagging feeling that Oregon remains an accomplice to faith-based crimes.
 
For example, it's considered child neglect under Oregon law to "fail to provide adequate food, clothing, shelter or medical care that is likely to endanger the health or welfare of the child." This law would be straightforward enough without additional language favorably singling out parents who choose religion as their sole form of care.
 
Also, Oregon gives faith-healing parents some legal protections from being charged with murder or first-degree manslaughter. The Legislature eliminated the spiritual defense for several types of crimes about a decade ago, after a string of child fatalities, but kept a few special protections in place.
 
To top it off, the state grants favorable treatment to faith-healing parents during sentencing. These parents get a rare exemption from the state's mandatory sentencing laws based not on their actions or individual circumstances but solely on their religious beliefs.
 
What a blessing that must be.

Andrew Cohen -- an abusive American guru

Outrage. Anger. Disgust. An overwhelming desire to cancel my subscription to the EnlightenNext magazine.

These were some of my reactions as I read through an expose of Andrew Cohen, a self-proclaimed "guru" who talks a good spirituality game but clearly plays by very different rules.

Earlier I shared some passages from Stephen Bachelor's excellent introduction to "American Guru," a book authored by William Yenner and other contributors who were long-time disciples of Cohen and experienced or saw his abuses first-hand.

As the events recounted in this book reveal, Cohen's demonization of his students' "egoic tendencies" -- tendencies which he himself has supposedly transcended -- extend far beyond instructive spiritual "lessons," providing him with a pretext for the administration of harsh discipline and punishment and the induction of soul-destroying intimidation and guilt.

Cohen coerced donations from disciples, in one case to the tune of $2 million. His students were slapped, ridiculed, made to do thousands of prostrations before his photo, forced to immerse themselves in a near-freezing lake for an hour, and other humiliations.

Regarding the lake immersion:

I had lost consciousness at about 50 or 55 minutes, just shy of the full hour... It took me two days to feel normal again. I do feel that this was one of the most dangerous things that Andrew had his students do.

...I find this one of Andrew's most ham-handed responses as a teacher, subjecting a large group of women to the same giant hammer without regard for what would be appropriate and useful for individuals. I also acknowledge how stupid and sheeplike it was for me to participate.

Yes, often I wondered "Why did these disciples put up with all of Cohen's crap?"

But it's unfair to judge people who are being abused by someone in a position of power for not asserting themselves strongly. My wife was a psychotherapist for quite a few years. She had many clients, mostly female, who found it very difficult to break away from someone who was severely mistreating them.

Andrew Cohen was (and is) a spiritual charmer. That's what unethical gurus do: use their charisma to lure disciples into their lair, then take advantage of them.

The What Enlightenment??! blog shows the seamy side of Andrew Cohen, including the disturbing story of how he conned the two million dollars from Jane O'Neil.

In the context of the world outside Andrew's community or cult, what he did was illegal, something called "undue influence." It is akin to a therapist seeking sexual company from a client or a priest who manipulates a parishioner into donating to the church. I imagine if it wasn’t me, there would be others like me who would have and I am sure continue to give away their money and soul to him as I did. If someone still within the community reads this and considers giving away their wealth, please reconsider. It was the greatest mistake of my life.

I'm sorry that I ever subscribed to EnlightenNext, a magazine that's devoted to singing the praises of Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber -- who act as a mutual admiration society in their regular "The Guru and the Pandit" articles.

For sure, I won't be renewing my subsciption. I've got no desire to support anything associated with an American Abusive Guru (Cohen was the founder of EnlightenNext).

Kudos to William Yenner for blowing the whistle on Cohen. Yenner had to wait five years to publish his book after escaping Cohen's clutches, because Cohen's lawyer had him sign a gag order in exchange for refunding $80,000 Yenner had given to Cohen.

Disturbingly, many people are still being sucked into Cohen's "Evolutionary Enlightenment" and "Integral Vision" bullshit. As Yenner says:

This is where twenty years of preaching truth and freedom have gotten EnlightenNext and Andrew Cohen: banal infomericals calculated to attract the most innocent and idealistic among us, while what happens behind closed doors -- how he treats his subordinates and even those closest to him, his dismissive attitudes toward women, the physical and mental abuses he engages in, and in which he encourages others to participate -- are to remain shrouded in mystery.

Well, hopefully not any more.

New Age beliefs aren't as bad as fundamentalism

I like Roger Ebert's take on religion. He has a nuanced, properly skeptical attitude toward God and matters metaphysical.

During in all the endless discussions on several threads of this blog about evolution, intelligent design, God and the afterworld, now numbering altogether around 3,500 comments, I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist--which I am. If I were to say I don't believe God exists, that wouldn't mean I believe God doesn't exist. Nor does it mean I don't know, which implies that I could know.

Let me rule out at once any God who has personally spoken to anyone or issued instructions to men. That some men believe they have been spoken to by God, I am certain. I do not believe Moses came down from the mountain with any tablets he did not go up with. I believe mankind in general evidently has a need to believe in higher powers and an existence not limited to the physical duration of the body. But these needs are hopes, and believing them doesn't make them true. I believe mankind feels a need to gather in churches, whether physical or social.

But when I read Ebert's recent post that essentially equates New Age beliefs and fundamentalist creationism, I can't quite agree with him.

New Age beliefs are the Creationism of the Progressives. I move in circles where most people would find it absurd to believe that humans didn't evolve from prehistoric ancestors, yet many of these same people quite happily believe in astrology, psychics, reincarnation, the Tarot deck, the i Ching, and sooth-saying. Palmistry and phrenology have pretty much blown over.

If you were attending a dinner party of community leaders in Dallas, Atlanta, Omaha or Colorado Springs and the conversation turned to religion, a chill might fall on the room if you confessed yourself an atheist. Yet at a dinner party of the nicest and brightest in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and (especially) Los Angeles, if the hostess began to confide about past lives, her Sign and yours, and her healing crystals, it might not go over so well if you confessed you thought she was full of it.

Well, he's right about the last part.

I've ruffled some New Age feathers myself when someone notices my barely concealed smirk as he or she extols the virtues of an unproven homeopathic nostrum or makes some other claim that violates both common sense and current scientific understanding.

So I entirely concur with Ebert that non-religious claims about supernatural phenomena should be looked upon with the same skeptical eye as fundamentalist dogma.

But here's the thing:

There never has been a New Age holy war. I've never met a believer in astrology, reincarnation, channeling, and such who was out to convert others. The New Age types I know are much more open, non-dogmatic, and flexible than religious true believers.

Plus, almost everybody has some irrational (or non-rational) views of the world. My mother was highly intellectual. Yet when she talked about something she hoped would happen, often she'd add "knock on wood."

And then look around for some wood to rap her knuckles on. As a kid, I never thought much about this. It seemed natural and harmless enough. Which, it was.

For a long time I avoided walking under ladders -- another childhood superstition that I was exposed to. Even now I pause for a split second before doing this, a holdover behavior from my youth.

It doesn't bother me if someone believes in "weird" stuff. If you could see what goes on inside my head on any given day, there's no doubt that you'd say about much of it, "Wow. That's really weird."

To me, of course, what transpires in my psyche is normal. Because my thoughts, emotions, and whatnot are part of me, just as yours are part of you. Familiarity breeds non-weirdness.

Roger Ebert doesn't want a New Age believer or a creationist to be President.

My only purpose today is to state early and often that if a Presidential candidate believes early humans used saddles to ride on the backs of dinosaurs, as they are depicted at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, that candidate should not be elected President.

And if a candidate counts among close friends and advisors anyone in communication with the spirit world, that candidate should not be elected President.

And if a candidate accounts for the fact that humanoid and dinosaur bones are never found at the same level in the fossil record by evoking the action of sediment after the Great Flood, that candidate should not be President.

And if a candidate has a spirit guide, consults his or her Chart and takes more than a passing amusement in the horoscope, that candidate should not be elected President.

Personally, I'd be considerably happier with a candidate holding the second and fourth paragraph views, rather than the first and third.

Ebert correctly calls upon the mass media to "fact check" a politician's unfounded metaphysical beliefs just as strongly as his or her worldly statements.

But there's a difference between believing something that is opposed to scientific knowledge, and believing something that is outside the bounds of what is known to science.

Creationism is wrong, because evolution is correct. However, communicating with spirits is unproven, not wrong, because science hasn't shown that human consciousness doesn't continue to exist after a person dies.

I'd be more attracted to a Presidential candidate who has a bit of a wild and crazy side, than someone thoroughly rational, hard-headed, and tightly-controlled.

It's human to be weird. We've just got to keep it within bounds. And not demand that others share our weirdness.

Satan exists...but only in deluded minds

Recently ABC's "Nightline" featured a face-off on the question, "Does Satan Exist?" Watching the recorded show last night, my wife and I were amazed that this is a subject for debate in the 21st century.

It's an example of how many religious people haven't progressed from exceedingly primitive beliefs. Astoundingly, more Americans believe in the devil (59%) than in the theory of evolution (47%).

Scary.

Which also describes the mindset of Pastor Mark Driscoll and former prostitute Annie Lobert (founder of "Hookers for Jesus"), who handled the arguments in favor of Satan's existence.

Opposing them, and getting frequent cheers from me, were Deepak Chopra and Bishop Carlton Pearson.

When I condemned myself to hell for a free DVD I talked about Pearson in a blog post, since he had a revelation from God that hell is a place in life, not after death. That made me feel better about selling my soul for a DVD.

He's still making good sense. In the debate Pearson correctly pointed out that the Bible was written by men, not by God, so it can't be taken literally. (Clips of the Nightline faceoff can be viewed here.)

Most interesting to me was a theme that keeps coming up on the Church of the Churchless: the difference between subjective and objective experience.

If something is evident only to me, it's subjective. If I can show that thing, or demonstrate that it exists, to other people, then it's objective. (Objectivity and subjectivity have other facets, of course, but my definition is good enough for a blog post.)

Lobert said that she's convinced Satan exists because she saw him in the eyes of her prostitution clients. I wish Chopra or Pearson had asked her if she was able to get any of these guys to go to an optometrist for a checkup.

If an eye doctor looked in their eyes and also saw Satan, that'd be pretty convincing -- especially if a camera could photograph the devil sitting on the retina.

Chopra said that Satan is in peoples' minds, not anywhere outside. Likely Lobert's emerging guilt and shame about the profession she was practicing caused her to project those feelings onto her clients.

Another instructive moment came when a female audience member chided Chopra for thinking that electromagnetism, gravity, and other scientific facts were more real than her personal experience of God.

Chopra could have come up with a better response, but he did fairly well. He said that he didn't deny her experience. Yet he felt his approach was more consistent with the laws of nature.

Thus he was pointing to the difference between a subjective experience, the truth of which can't be questioned by other people, and an assertion about shared experiences in objective reality, which damn well can be questioned for its truthfulness.

The woman proclaimed (pointing around the audience):

I'm saying that Jesus is your savior, and his savior, and their savior. I'm saying Jesus is true for everyone, and if you don't believe in him, you don't get to be with him.

I liked Chopra's response.

In that case, I feel really sorry for you. I want you to be saved.

Saved from fundamentalism, closed-mindedness, fanciful beliefs, misguided thought processes, being trapped in a constricted world view.

But it isn't only Christians who need to be saved. We all do, to some degree. It's easy to mistake personal experiences for universal ones, and demand that others embrace our subjectivity as their own.

We've got no right to do that. The day I started this blog I had to come up with a tagline to put under the name at the top of the web page.

"Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence" came quickly to mind. In over four years I haven't been impelled to back away from those words.

Watching fundamentalists fumble with the question, Does Satan Exist?, sure didn't change my mind.

Tips on talking to a fundamentalist

While this blog is for churchless folks, we get some fundamentalist visitors also. I enjoy having comment conversations with them, even though I can get frustrated with preachiness and closed-mindedness.

Soon after I started the Church of the Churchless I wrote "How to talk to a fundamentalist." With more than four years of additional experience in this area, it's time for an update.

Fundamentalism is defined in various ways. I like this Wikipedia definition: "clinging to a stubborn, entrenched position that defies reasoned argument or contradictory evidence."

If someone is certain they're right, it's tough to have a productive conversation with them.

So it's good to learn early on whether you're dealing with a fundamentalist, since most of us have better things to do than try to open up a mind that is nailed shut. A simple question, if answered honestly, is a helpful aid:

Do you consider that you could be wrong?

When you hear a "yes," that's an indication of openness. It turns the conversation in the direction of offering reasons for a religious, spiritual, metaphysical, philosophical, or mystical belief.

Because if there's a possibility of being wrong, no one else should be expected to accept an assertion on blind faith. And if you are told, "no," I'd look elsewhere for conversational companionship (unless you're a glutton for dogmatism).

Fundamentalists aren't always honest in answering this question, though. They might feign broad-mindedness just to get a foot in your psychological door. Or they might not be aware of how rigidly attached they are to unfounded beliefs.

Thus often it's necessary to diagnose a fundamentalist attitude in the absence of an outright admission. "The Guru Papers" has some useful observations.

Fundamentalism is essentially about controlling people. It can only operate in authoritarian hierarchies because unchallengeability can only be passed down and enforced in this way. ...Fundamentalists all share the same viewpoint that what must be returned to are the unchallengeable and unchanging dictates of a higher power.

...The great psychological appeal of fundamentalism is that it offers certainty. Certainty can feel better than doubt and confusion. It can eliminate internal conflict, or at least suppress and bring relief from it.

...Certainty must be able to withstand challenges and counter-evidence -- anything that brings doubt. No combination of reason and experience can give the necessary kind of certainty, especially about the future. So faith is the key to religious certainty.

...A simple universe with a simple good (those who follow the rules), and a simple evil (those who do not), and simple explanations that can never be disproven are necessary for certainty.

It only takes reading through some active comment conversations, such as the one on this post, to see how valid these points are.

Fundamentalists, who can follow an Eastern guru as easily as a Western god, aren't used to being challenged. They don't like it.

They're accustomed to nodding their heads during talks or sermons where everyone agrees (or feigns agreement) about the tenets of their shared faith. Thus when they preach dogma in a forum like this blog where questioning and skepticism are valued, a culture clash quickly becomes evident.

What's particularly interesting is how the fundamentalist's need for hierarchy and authoritarianism gets projected onto those who disagree with them.

It amazes me (and regular visitors to this blog, I'm sure) when someone speaks of my followers or acolytes. I only wish.

I can't tell you how many times I've written a post that struck me as astoundingly wise, inspiring, and reflective of reality, then waited for my well-deserved praise to arrive through cyberspace.

And waited... and waited... and waited.

Which is pretty much what I do when I throw a ball for our willful dog, whose accommodating Lab side unfortunately is overruled by her willful German Shepherd side when it comes to retrieving.

Or when I try to convince my equally assertive wife that she should accede to one of my philosophical positions, which she's managed to resist during our nineteen years of marriage.

What's going on here, it seems, is that fundamentalist visitors to this blog can't understand how people can simultaneously (1) be deeply committed to understanding what life, spirituality, and meditation is all about, and (2) be deeply uncommitted to accepting on faith someone else's understanding. Including mine.

This accounts for all the talk in the above-mentioned comment conversation about me, and others by implication, giving up on seeking the truth merely because we're looking for it in a non-fundamentalist fashion.

That's ridiculous. But ridicule is one of the tools used by fundamentalists. In "The Guru Papers" this is one of the six strong indications of belonging to an authoritarian group:

No deviation from the party line is allowed. Anyone who has thoughts or feelings contrary to the accepted perspective is made to feel wrong or bad for having them.

So when a shaming tactic is used by a fundamentalist, throw it back at them: "Shame on you! For trying to shame me! Keep your guilt to yourself!"

Fortunately, I've found that most religious people consider their personal faith to be just that... personal.

A guy used to come to my Tai Chi classes who was a devout Christian. I enjoyed him a lot. He'd call me "Brother Brian" and bless me. He was so sincere, so humble, and so accepting of my own beliefs, we got along great.

It isn't differences in beliefs that is the problem.

It's holding onto a belief with such rigidity and certainty that alternative views are rejected out of hand, and any questioning by a skeptic is rejected as the devil's handiwork. 

That's when it becomes next to impossible to talk to a fundamentalist.

“God’s Christian Warriors” shows crazy side of religion

Anyone who thinks that Christianity is a warm, fuzzy, loving religion needs to watch, or read, God's Christian Warriors – part of a CNN special series on Muslim, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalism.

The whole idea of a religious warrior is crazy, of course. That's what made the two hours my wife and I finished watching last night especially weird.

When someone fights for something real, that's understandable even if you don't agree with their cause. But when you see people all passionately fired up to defend something imaginary, that's bizarre. It'd be diagnosed as insane if it weren't for the pervasiveness of religious mental illness in so many cultures around the world.

Now, I'm all for a decent dose of craziness, because it makes life much more interesting. Unadulterated sanity is boring. However, the caveat is that crazy people can't mess up the lives of others. Then they have to be dealt with.

Unfortunately, it's tough to medicate the 53% of Americans who, according to CNN's Christiane Amanpour (host of the series), believe that evolution is wrong and creationism is right.

Nor to treat the delusions of the now deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell while he was alive, when he responded to Ms. Amanpour's question about whether he still believed that this nation's abortion policies caused us to be attacked on 9/11.

If we in fact change all the rules on which this Judeo-Christian nation was built, we cannot expect the Lord to put his shield of protection around us as He has in the past.

Yeah, that shield sure was working well during the Civil War, when millions of Americans died. And go figure: the Supreme Court hadn't legalized abortion yet. Must have been some other national depravity that caused the Lord to lower his protective shield back then.

This way of thinking is utterly strange. Yet it was repeated over and over again during God's Christian Warriors. Most of the time by angry white men who are absolutely, completely, 100% convinced that they know what's right and how the world should behave.

If the loving touch of Jesus has made them humbler, gentler, and kinder, I can only wonder how off-the-wall they were before Christianity transformed their souls.

Jimmy Carter, a Christian president who seems to understand a more genuine message of Jesus, said:

It's impossible for a fundamentalist to admit he is ever wrong, because he would be admitting that God was wrong.

Well, that's only the case if you consider that you know all about God. Which Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists do, because the Bible and Koran tell them so (leaving aside the not-so-small problem of the many contradictions between Old Testament, New Testament, and Koranic revelations).

It's when religious zealotry merges with political policy-making that things really get crazily scary. Pastor John Hagee is a fervent Christian Zionist. Israel can do no wrong in his eyes, which only see the world through Biblical blinders.

Amanpour asked him whether God really has a foreign policy. Indeed He does, Hagee said. In line with a "Supporting Israel" page on his web site, Hagee referred to Genesis 12:3 and told her:

Concerning the Jewish people, that's His [God's] foreign policy statement.

If you don't have that Old Testament passage memorized (and I hope to God you don't), here it is.

And I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all nations of the earth be blessed.

Dear lord. Hagee, along with millions of other true Christian and Jewish believers, wants the 21^st century foreign policy of the United States to be guided by a vague Biblical verse written thousands of years ago. That'd be comical if it wasn't so serious in a nuclear age.

Fortunately for my teeth grinding (which otherwise would have been nearly continuous throughout God's Christian Warriors), there were a few Christians scattered throughout the program who embodied a more appealing form of Christianity.

Jimmy Carter was one. Richard Cizik, a prominent environmentalist evangelical, was another. (He says that polluters will have to answer to God, not just government.)

My favorite non-crazy Christian was pastor Greg Boyd. I've got to like an evangelical who's considered a heretic by fundamentalists. He talked about seeing a Fourth of July service at another church.

And there was patriotic music playing and a flag waving in the background. It showed a silhouette of three crosses. And four fighter jets came down over the crosses and split, with a flag waving in the background.

And there were some people who stood up. They were ecstatic. And I started crying, because I -- I wondered, how is it possible that we went from being a movement of people who follow the messiah, who taught us to love our enemies, to being a movement that celebrates fighter jets, that fuses Jesus' death on the cross with killing machines?

And that was, I guess, a -- a wakeup call to me about how serious this problem is among evangelicals in America.

The problem of unfounded righteousness always is going to be with us so long as Christians fail to recognize that they're fallible human beings, just like the rest of us.

It's fine to have personal opinions about what's right and wrong. It isn't fine to try to impose them on everybody else, using blind faith in an unknown God as your battle cry.

That happens to be the name of Ron Luce's movement: Battlecry. Luce, a forty-six year old, is out to save the youth of America. From what, I'm not sure. But whatever it is, it's dangerous. Amanpour asked him why he's declared war on the American lifestyle.

We call them terrorists, virtue terrorists, that are destroying our kids. They're raping teenage America on the sidewalk. And everybody's walking by as if it is OK, and it isn't OK.

Hmmmm. I guess Luce is upset because teenagers are having sex, smoking pot, drinking and doing other stuff that teenagers have always done.

If Luce was a decade or so older he'd have a memory of the '60s, like I do, and realize that a better term for "virtue terrorists" is "having a good time." (In fact, he admitted that he did these things himself when he was younger).

My parting piece of advice to any Christian warriors who read this post is this: it's all right to be who you really are, and allow other people the same freedom.

Observe the case of Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who came into the news today after pleading guilty to a bathroom stall incident. If you turn to Craig's senatorial web site, on his personal philosophy page you can read that one goal of his is to:

Defend and strengthen the traditional values of the American family.

That's great. And personally I've got nothing against Craig's bathroom stall behavior, so long as it is consensual. Here's what is reported to have happened after Craig went into a public rest room that was already occupied by a plain clothes police officer.

According to Roll Call, the arresting officer alleged that Craig lingered outside a rest room stall where the officer was sitting, then entered the stall next door and blocked the door with his luggage.

According to the arrest report cited by Roll Call, Craig tapped his right foot, which the officer said he recognized "as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct."

The report alleges Craig then touched the officer's foot with his foot and the senator "proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times," according to Roll Call.

At that point, the officer said he put his police identification down by the floor so Craig could see it and informed the senator that he was under arrest, before any sexual contact took place.

One more Christian warrior, who was rated 100% by the Christian coalition, bites the hypocritical dust. May many more follow in his footsteps until honest this-is-who-I-am-ness rules the land.

Senator Craig, it's OK if you're gay. Just be who you are. Michael Vick, just tell us that you're sorry for your dog fighting – saying you've found Jesus doesn't make your apology any more believable.

Religion’s dangerous certainty

Yesterday I chatted with a guy who is deeply Christian, yet also moderately scientific. For at least twenty years he's come over when we needed some repair work done on our security system.

Standing around, watching him do his circuit testing thing, we eventually get around to our usual philosophical conversation dance. I know he's a true believing Christian; he knows I'm decidedly something else.

The Taoist art hanging around the house and bookshelves filled with titles like "The End of Faith" and "God is Not Good" probably is a giveaway. I'm also not shy about expressing my skepticism to his certainty.

That's what I notice the most when I talk with Tom (not his real name). His certainty. About certain things, at least.

When he's diagnosing a problem with our security system, he's open to all possibilities. He eliminates them one by one until he's found the reason for our maintenance call.

But when our conversation turns in a metaphysical direction, Tom is darn sure of where he stands. Whereas I'm not. So we don't usually argue. Instead, he'll express his firm opinion and I'll respond, "Well, that's interesting. But I don't know how we'd ever know it for sure."

A topic yesterday was how God, or by inference any unseen non-physical being, would affect goings-on here on Earth. Tom opined that all it would take would be the subtlest tilting of a material or mental action in one direction or another.

Like when you can't decide whether to accept a job offer. You ponder the pros and cons, finding them almost equally balanced, then end up saying "Yes" or "No" on an intuitive feeling of This is the right thing to do.

Tom thought this is the way God intervenes in human affairs, with imperceptible nudges. I said, "OK, that's a possibility. Chaos theory tells us that small actions can have big effects. But it doesn't seem like there'd be any way to prove that God was responsible, since in this case the action is undetectable."

From there we went on to other subjects. Tom considered that he knew something about God. I didn't. I couldn't prove Tom was wrong. I didn't feel like I had to. I also couldn't prove that fairies don't exist. Or unicorns.

And I also don't feel like trying to change anyone's religious mind. Especially if they're not open to the possibility of changing.

When the topic of global warming came up, however, I was seriously tempted to do some arguing. Fundamentalism is only tolerable to me when it doesn't affect anyone else. In this case, it does. Like, every living thing on the planet.

Tom is as sure that humans aren't causing global warming as he is sure about how God acts in the world. The difference between the sureties is that his climate change convictions are demonstrably wrong, given the current scientific consensus, whereas his religious convictions simply can't be demonstrated to be right.

I needed to get to my Tai Chi class, so I didn't have time to tell Tom that (1) It isn't true that all the other planets are warming just like Earth, and (2) It also isn't true that increased output from the Sun is sufficient to explain recent global warming.

Those were just a few of the certainties that my conversational companion should have been a lot more uncertain about.

However, fundamentalism in one sphere usually carries over into others. It's rare to find a religious fundamentalist who is open to accepting scientific truths. That's because science demands a basic (dare I say "fundamental"?) attitude of uncertainty.

And that's certainly unacceptable to a fundamentalist.

In the August 4 issue of New Scientist there's an article, "Can we learn to love uncertainty?," by David Malone. Some excerpts:

You might think that no one could argue with the value of certainty. It has the air of one of those indisputably good things, like world peace or motherhood. But I would argue that the pursuit of certainty has become a dangerous addiction. Like alcohol, it makes us feel safe, but it is also making us stupid and belligerent.

Few notions have become as deeply embedded in our culture as the belief that there is a perfect certainty to be had – and the desire to have it. It has survived virtually intact the transition from religion to rationalism as the touchstone of our society. Even as science squeezed out belief in God and scriptural certainties, a perfect law-governed creation remained; it was just under new management. Science has become, in the minds of many, the new guarantor that there is certainty and that we can attain it.

Well, I don't know what Malone means by "many." In the United States it's definitely nowhere near a majority. Many more Americans are convinced that religion offers certitudes than that science does.

Still, Malone correctly points out that if people are looking for certainty in science, they'll be disappointed.

We need to reach an accommodation with uncertainty. Not only is the universe uncertain, but so too is human knowledge. Science as a process should never have fostered any illusions about this: it was always about provisional truths, and knew it. Perhaps it's time for us to finally accept that we shouldn't believe in science because we think it's certain, but precisely because it's not.

Certainty is totalitarian. It forecloses further thinking. Not one of the theories devised by Newton, Darwin, Einstein or Planck is certain and perfect. Powerful and beautiful they undoubtedly are, but they are still partial and incomplete approximations of truth.

…The profound discoveries of modern mathematics and science show that life and thinking flourish only in the luminal and fertile land that lies between too much certainty and too much doubt. The art of scientific inquiry is to tack back and forth between the two.

The art of philosophical and spiritual inquiry also.

But if I'm going to make a navigational error, let it be in the open seas direction of doubt, because certainty is a reef that stops the good ship Inquiry in its tracks.

Swarm theory supports spiritual independence

What makes a bee hive, an ant colony, a school of fish, or the stock market so adaptive? These swarms of individuals manage to do the right thing most of the time, yet they're leaderless.

There's a lesson here. Independence leads to wiser collective decisions. Top-down control, the modus operandi of almost every religious organization, is maladaptive.

A fascinating National Geographic article, "Swarm Theory," says:

Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.

It's interesting that selflessness, losing the ego, being a part of something bigger than yourself, becoming a drop in the spiritual ocean, is an almost universal religious theme.

Devotees often dress alike, think alike, act alike, feel alike. They engage in seemingly ant-like behavior, as I wrote about in "Sand, servitude, and satguru." The usual belief is that submission to a higher authority is the way to become a part of the whole (or Whole) rather than just a part.

Yet living entities that are truly part of a collective, a swarm, don't act that way at all. Independent individual decisions each contribute to adaptive group behavior.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize.

Thomas Seeley is a biologist at Cornell University who studies bee decision-making. These "dumb" creatures turn out to be smarter than a lot of human organizations. The bee rules are: (1) Seek a diversity of options, (2) Encourage a free competition among ideas, and (3) Use an effective mechanism to narrow choices.

This is pretty much the scientific method. It's also much closer to how effective businesses are managed today than the traditional "I'm the boss" approach.

Even when I was a Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) true believer, my scientific outlook on spirituality led me to question some central tenets of this mystic-religious faith.

One of which was: Spiritual experiences can't ever be disclosed. This supposedly was to prevent the ego-expansion that would occur if a disciple were to let out "I saw God today" and started being revered by other disciples.

However, it also had the convenient effect (for the organization) of preventing disciples from comparing notes and arriving at a collective decision about whether the meditative and other practices enjoined by RSSB produced the desired results.

An ant colony or bee hive couldn't last for very long under this sort of injunction. If all the bees believed, "I just found some juicy flowers, but I can't tell anyone," the hive's food supply would rapidly dwindle. It's by each foraging bee independently communicating what's been found that a collective intelligence forms.

This goes a long way toward explaining the rigidity of fundamentalist religious organizations. Their top-down decision making, in which all of the authority is vested in the top levels of a hierarchy, who themselves are guided by strict dogma and hidebound holy texts, prevents the group from evolving to be in more of an accord with reality.

Religions are good at doing the same old thing. Preaching to the faithful, proselytizing, maintaining firm boundaries between Us and Them. Mechanical production lines are similarly good at churning out the same product.

But if situations change, or if the product turns out to need improving, that's when independence becomes a huge asset.

In fact, almost any group that follows the bees' rules will make itself smarter, says James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. "The analogy is really quite powerful. The bees are predicting which nest site will be best, and humans can do the same thing, even in the face of exceptionally complex decisions."

Investors in the stock market, scientists on a research project, even kids at a county fair guessing the number of beans in a jar can be smart groups, he says, if their members are diverse, independent minded, and use a mechanism such as voting, auctioning, or averaging to reach a collective decision.

Not surprisingly, the article touts the Internet as a key way in which people can behave more like bees. Open information sharing leads to more intelligence.

This humble blog is an attempt to contribute to more informed choices in the religious arena. People's comments on my posts, and the comments on those comments, are very much like the waggling and dancing that bees do when they return to the hive.

"I experienced this. I went there. This is what I found." As truly-told information from many individuals is aggregated and spread among the hive, wiser decisions are made.

So every time someone honestly shares their take on some subject under discussion here, they're helping to produce a swarm intelligence.

That's how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do…no leadership is required.

…Think about a honeybee as she walks around inside the hive. If a cold wind hits the hive, she'll shiver to generate heat and, in the process, help to warm the nearby brood. She has no idea that hundreds of workers in other parts of the hive are doing the same thing at the same time to the benefit of the next generation.

"A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert.

…If you're looking for a role model in a world of complexity, you could do worse than to imitate a bee.

My oven’s “Sabbath Feature” shows idiocy of keeping kosher

Before making fun of keeping kosher, I want to assure any observant Jew who comes across this blog post that I'm an equal opportunity religion-basher.

So you're not being singled out because you're Jewish. It's your religious fundamentalism, which comes in many denominational varieties, that's deserving of some ridicule today.

Which happens to be July 10. The temperature has hit an unusual 100 degrees here in Oregon. So there's good reason to keep the oven off today.

However, not turning our Frigidaire electric wall oven on during the Jewish Sabbath (basically, Friday night to Saturday night) – that's kosher nonsense.

When we bought the oven in the course of kitchen remodeling, I noted that the manual referred to a Sabbath Feature "for use on the Jewish Sabbath & Holidays." Intrigued, I headed over to a URL mentioned in the manual, http://www.star-k.org/. There I entered the weird and wacky world of keeping kosher, something I knew very little about.

I still don't. Not surprising, since a few minutes of browsing around this web site doesn't begin to unravel the intricate details of one of the most bizarre forms of religious ritualism.

Jewish law prohibits all sorts of activities on the Sabbath. Here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article that pertains to our oven's Sabbath Feature:

Another example is the prohibition (according to Orthodox and some Conservative rabbinic authorities) against turning electric devices on or off, which is derived from one of the "39 categories of work (melachot)". However, the authorities are not in agreement about exactly which category (or categories) this would fall under.

One view is that tiny sparks are created in a switch when the circuit is closed, and this would constitute "lighting a fire" (category 37). If the appliance is one whose purpose is for light or heat (such as an incandescent lightbulb or electric oven) then the lighting or heating elements may be considered as a type of fire; if so, then turning them on constitutes both "lighting a fire" (category 37) and "cooking" (a form of baking, category 11), and turning them off would be "extinguishing a fire" (category 36).

Another view is that a device which is plugged into an electrical outlet of a wall becomes part of the building, but is nonfunctional while the switch is off; turning it on would then constitute "building" and turning it off would be "demolishing" (categories 35 and 34).

Some schools of thought consider the use of electricity to be forbidden only by rabbinic injunction, rather than because it violates of one of the original categories. A common solution to the problem of electricity involves pre-set timers for electric appliances, to turn them on and off automatically, with no human intervention on Shabbat itself.

Good god! I've believed in some strange spiritual stuff, but not this strange.

A fellow blogger, John, has pretty much the same attitude toward not turning an oven on during the Sabbath as I do. And he offers some insights into the rationale for keeping kosher.

Which basically is that there isn't any reasonable reason for the injunctions. It's a matter of fundamentalist obedience to religious doctrines that make no sense.

You probably have to be a rabbi to fully understand an oven's Sabbath Mode. I did my best to warm up to the Star-K Online discussion on this subject, but my brain got fried pretty quickly.

Apparently it's OK to start cooking before the Sabbath, and it's also OK to open the oven door and take food out on the Sabbath, but it's not OK if an oven light goes on when the door is opened, so make sure it's unscrewed (on our oven, the light stays on the whole time the Sabbath feature is active; that keeps kosher, but also contributes a mite to global warming, so you're going to incur the wrath of Al Gore).

Reading some other pages on the web site, including Kosher 101, I kept having to remind myself that this wasn't a satire. I mean, who comes up with this stuff?

1. Equipment used to manufacture products containing non-kosher ingredients may acquire non-kosher status. Thus, production that takes place after non-kosher production is completed can be rendered non-kosher by virtue of the equipment used, even if the ingredients are kosher.

2. Non-kosher equipment can be restored to a kosher mode by a variety of ways, usually depending upon the way in which the non-kosher product was produced. This process is referred to as Kosherization. Usage of a non-kosher product in conjunction with liquid, e.g. a non-kosher soup, requires treating the kettle with boiling water to restore its kosher status. Non-kosher products that were produced where there is no liquid cooking medium, i.e. an oven band, require a different technique. This equipment must be treated by high heat in order to restore its kosher status.

Kosherization seems to be a way of dealing with Jewish cooties. Like "real" cooties, they're unseen but highly contagious. I remember getting them all the time in elementary school, mostly when a girl touched me (ugh!).

But come on, observant Jews of the world. There comes a time to grow up and lose the fear of cooties. Live dangerously. Try using your oven on Saturday without the aid of its Sabbath Feature.

There are, though, a few fundamentalist Jewish rules that I could get behind. Like the encouragement to have sex on Shabbat, particularly on Friday night.

Now we're making sense.

Not seeing is believing

Andrew Sullivan offers up another alternative to “I’ll believe it when I see it” and “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

In his TIME essay, “When Not Seeing is Believing,” Sullivan points toward “I’ll believe it when I don’t see it” as the preferred theology for the 21st century. Or any century in which fundamentalism threatens to rend the fabric of secular civilization.

How, after all, can you engage in a rational dialogue with a man like [Iranian president] Ahmadinejad, who believes that Armageddon is near and that it is his duty to accelerate it? How can Israel negotiate with people who are certain their instructions come from heaven and so decree that Israel must not exist in Muslim lands?

Equally, of course, how can one negotiate with fundamentalist Jews who claim that the West Bank is theirs forever by biblical mandate? Or with Fundamentalist Christians who believe that Israel's expansion is a biblical necessity rather than a strategic judgment?

There is, however, a way out. And it will come from the only place it can come from--the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians.

The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.

I like Sullivan’s embrace of spiritual doubt. He says, “If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding…There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren’t, it would not be God.”

However, I feel that Sullivan goes further than is justified in claiming that God can be partially comprehended via Scripture, reason, religious authority, and our own experiences of the divine.

He doesn’t explain why, if this is so, religions are all over the theological map. It’s difficult to discern much agreement between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism on what It is all about.

So I wish that Sullivan had left off the last two words of, “If God is beyond our categories, then God can’t be captured for certain.” Give fundamentalism a dogmatic inch, and it’ll take an undoubting mile.

The tent of “I don’t know” can comfortably hold every person on Earth. But allow differing species of certainty to creep in under the flap and pretty soon the screeching and hollering will begin.

Infidel! Evil-doer! Pagan! Apostate! Devil-worshipper! Unbeliever!

It’s difficult to envision what a genuinely uncertain belief in God would look like, though. If doubt is the mainstay of a spiritual practice, what separates believers from the faithless?

Well, seemingly nothing. Which brings us all under the tent of unknowing, a nice place to hang out together.

Intelligent design believers settle for second-rate God

If I’m going to believe in God, I want to put my faith in a top-notch creative power. The very best. A1. That’s why the God of evolution is so much more appealing than the God of so-called “intelligent design.”

Which doesn’t seem to be a very intelligent divinity. I mean, what kind of half-baked god creates human beings then, according to intelligent design dogma, slaps himself on the head and says, “Oy! I forgot to make eyes that work! Better get going on some redesigning.”

Creationism, after all, has been discarded (publicly, at least) by Christian fundamentalists. Their new Godly poster child, intelligent design, often is considered to co-exist with Darwinian evolution. Up to a point.

That point is reached when random mutations and natural selection are insufficient mechanisms to produce some highly complex feature, such as the human eye. The intelligent designer then supposedly steps in and makes things right.

I’d always thought that this notion showed a lack of faith in God. But it took a letter to the editor in the July 9, 2005 issue of “New Scientist” (which I just got around to reading) to convince me that such is the case.

Vasudev Godbole (how I hope this is his real name!) of Seevetal, Germany writes:

You report that the Smithsonian has cancelled the screening of a film that “ponders ‘purpose within cosmic evolution’”—the idea that has become known as “intelligent design”. One interesting question that no one seems to ask is why people feel a need to adopt this viewpoint.

An engineer who builds a plane that travels from London to New York without a pilot is more intelligent than an engineer whose plane needs a pilot. Yet passengers may feel better in the second type of plane.

Similarly a God who creates evolution, which needs no further intervention, is more intelligent than a God whose creation needs constant supervision and directives. Perhaps some people feel better and more cared for by the second type of God, and then out of gratitude declare this to be the more intelligent.

This psychological problem is at the root of a lot of the hostility shown by advocates of intelligent design (ID) towards those who argue for evolution. This gratitude can become so compulsive, vehement, “holier-than-thou” and even neurotic that the ID-ists start vilifying those who reject ID.

When the evolutionists refuse to buckle under, the ID-ists become even more angry and hate-filled, and wish to take over the state and enforce this “gratitudinal” behaviour and related “holiness” by means of laws or other threats. “How dare you deny or be ungrateful to a caring God?”—that is their bitter-angry question.

They are 110 per cent sure that a God who intervenes every half an hour is more caring than a God who intervenes only at infinity. In the depth of their psychology this is what motivates the ID-ists and drives them to ridicule or demonise the evolutionists.

Much nuisance has emanated from those who wish to enforce gratitude towards their God.

Yes, indeed. This relates to the drive to seek God’s approval that I talked about in my last post. The truly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God of evolution (and of the Taoists, and the Buddhists) doesn’t need our recognition or respect.

The semi-intelligent, shaky, mistake-prone, insecure, devotion-starved God of fundamentalist Christianity does.

So which God should you put your faith in? It’s clear to me: the God of evolution.

“God Laughs and Plays” but doesn’t go to church

I figured that I’d enjoy a book subtitled “Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.” And I did.

“God Laughs and Plays” is David James Duncan’s paean to fly-fishing rather than pew-sitting, to practicing Christian love rather than judgmental hatred, to finding inspiration in God’s natural creation rather than the artificial human dogma found in misnamed “holy” books.

A talented writer like Duncan best speaks for himself. So I’ll shut up and let him do the saying. Here’s some passages that I especially liked:

Intense spiritual feelings were frequent visitors during my boyhood, but they did not come from churchgoing or from bargaining with God through prayer. The connection I felt to the Creator came, unmediated, from Creation itself.

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Following intuition and love with all the sincerity and attentiveness I could muster, I consciously chose a life spent in the company of rivers, wilderness, Wisdom literature, like-minded friends, and quiet contemplation. And as it’s turned out, this life—though dirt-poor in church pews—has enriched me with a sense of the holy, and left me far more grateful than I can say.

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God is Unlimited. Thought and language are limited.

God is the fathomless but beautiful Mystery Who creates the universe and you and me, and sustains it and us every instant, and always shall. The instant we define this fathomless Mystery It is no longer fathomless. To define is to limit. The greater a person’s confidence in their definition of God, the more sure I feel that their worship of “Him” has become the worship of their own definition. I don’t point this out to insult the fundamentalists’ or anyone else’s God. I point it out to honor the fathomless Mystery.

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If you’ve got yourself a little faith community and feel some love and mercy bubbling up in it, why mess with that? Why “structure” it? Why “enchurch” it? Why not just live it and be thankful?

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To judge by the conservation voting records of those the Christian Right supports in Congress, however, the majority of fundamentalists see Mother Earth as a trampoline upon which we must stomp, the harder we stomp the more proud of us God will be, for Earth is fleeting, and only here to launch us toward heaven, so why not blow mountains up and dump them as rubble on top of streams, and why not support, from the pulpits of our so-called houses of God, so-called conservative candidates who conserve nothing but corporate profits reaped through our Armageddon-aimed Earth-stomping agenda?

We nonfundamentalist students of the Bible can think of many reasons not to practice such a “faith”—the words, example, and Person of Jesus chief among them.

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Needing church—which I have to admit I define as “two or less gathered in His Name”…

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A second thing that attracted me to Jesus at age seven: His father was allegedly God; and God had made the world and trees and rivers and stars and mountains and birds and clouds and sunlight and raspberries and animals and snowflakes and wildflowers and wilderness; and even though nobody could prove any of this like, scientifically, I loved the world God had allegedly made so much that it seemed like a good idea to love God, too.

Trouble was, I didn’t. Loving Creation made sense to me the same way that loving, say, Peanut M & M’s made sense. You tossed a handful of Peanut M & M’s in your mouth, crunched down, your tastebuds fired off, and without even trying, Yum! Love! Gratitude! Piece o’ cake. Loving the Invisible God Who’d created Creation, on the other hand, felt more like trying to love the unknown and invisible people who worked at the Peanut M & M’s factory.

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As for my having left institutional religion behind without bitterness: how in the Name of the Lover of field lilies, the poor, the prostituted, and His own murderers, could I be bitter about having traded self-righteousness, pharisaism, judgmentalism, and church pews for sunlit river banks and rising fish and moonrises over Rocky Mountain ridges and the path of intuition and salmon runs and great literature and world Wisdom traditions and abiding friendships and the incessant following of the sweet scent of love?

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I consider the infinite wilds to be the divine manuscript. I hold these wilds to be the only unbowdlerized copy we have of the Book that gives and sustains life.

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The word “mysticism” still means little to me as an experiencer, since everything I experience continues to simply be what it is. But as the beneficiary of certain inner experiences that have guided my life, and as a writer in love with a world in which much of what is visible is abused and much of what is life-giving is unseen, my respect for the word “mysticism” grows if only because, by definition, it shepherds us toward realms in which “what is” is much more than physical.

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If we are ever to rise to new levels of consciousness or to the Beauty that is Truth, we’ve got to describe our perceptions as consciousness truly perceives them. I therefore confess my lifelong love for a wilderness found outside myself, till once in a while I encounter it within.

It’s a wilderness entered, it seems, through agendaless alertness at work, rest, or play in the presence of language, rivers, mountains, music, plants, creatures, rocks, moon, sun, dust, pollen grains, dots, spheres, galaxies, grains of sand, stars, every sort of athletic ball, cells, DNA, molecules, atomic particles, and immaterial forces.

It’s a wilderness that occasionally “inside-outs” me, leading to a Teilhardinian burning and Leopoldian harmony that leave my mind wondrous happy but far, far behind. It’s a wilderness my trusty dog, Reason, will never succeed in sniffing out or chomping up, yet a wilderness I’ve been so long and grandly assailed by that I’ve lost all but comic interest in the dog’s endless hounding and suspect that even he begins to enjoy himself when the wilderness flips us inside itself.

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If I stake my life on one field, one wild force, one sentence issuing from Sinai it is this one: There is no goal beyond love.

One last quote. Concerning the title. From Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic theologian whose teachings were so truthful he was accused of heresy by the Pope.

Truly! Truly! By God! By God! Be as sure of it as you are that God lives: at the least good deed done here in this world, the least bit of good will, the least good desire, all the saints in heaven and on earth rejoice, and together with the angels their joy is such that all the joy in this world can’t be compared. But the joy of them all together amounts to as little as a bean when compared to the joy of God over good deeds. For truly, God laughs and plays.

Mel Gibson’s passion of drunken anti-Semitism

Ah, more evidence of how fervent Christian fundamentalism converts people into jerks. First we hear that Mel Gibson, he of “The Passion of the Christ” fame, has been arrested for drunken driving.

“Well,” I think, “that shows Gibson has human failings like everyone else. Hopefully this will knock him off his holier-than-thou religious horse.”

But then a review of the arresting officer’s report finds that Gibson went on an anti-Semitic tirade when he was arrested. According to TMZ.com:

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League, among many others, had serious concerns about anti-Semitism that seemed to be evident in “The Passion of the Christ.” Diane Sawyer asked Mel Gibson about these accusations in a 2004 interview.

Sawyer asks, “Are you anti-Semitic?” Gibson says, “No, of course not...For me, it goes against the tenets of my faith…To be anti-Semitic is to be un-Christian, and I’m not.”

Right, Mel, you’re not. A true Christian, that is. Like lots of fundamentalists, Gibson talks the spiritual game a hell of a lot better than he plays it. Here is the mug shot of Hypocrisy.

Listening to conservative talk radio this evening, I was surprised to hear little sympathy for Gibson. Not many were buying the theory that his anti-Semitic rantings were caused by his drunkenness.

I agree. I haven’t been drunk since my high school days. But I remember that guys who were jerks before they got drunk turned into bigger jerks after downing a six-pack. Angry guys got angrier. Funny guys got funnier. Alcohol brought out what was inside them.

So I find it hard to believe that a devout loving Christian with no anti-Semitic leanings would, upon being arrested for drunken driving, yell “F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

“F***** cops!” I could believe. Not “F***** Jews.”

Let’s raise a glass, then, to one more in a long line of crusading moralistic fundamentalists whose Christianity is loudly evident on their lips but sadly absent from their hearts.

Mel Gibson has entered a recovery program. I wish him the best of luck in getting free of dependence on alcohol. And also, dependence on Catholicism. Neither are doing him any good.

[Next day update: today Gibson admitted to making anti-Semitic remarks but denies that he is an anti-Semite. Interesting. Does this mean that he now will admit that he made a pro-Christian movie, but will deny that he is a Christian? The Jewish Anti-Defamation League finds Gibson's protestations of "I said it but I didn't mean it" unconvincing. I agree.]

Eastern fundamentalism

Last night someone said to me, “So you were part of an Eastern form of fundamentalism.” For a moment I was taken aback. Me, a fundamentalist?

On this weblog I like to foam at the mouth about the dangers of fundamentalist religious attitudes. (By the way, did you hear the one about a man who walks into a bar and sits down between an alligator and a born-again Christian woman?)

Fundamentalism takes many forms, and is defined in various ways. Scott Bidstrup says:

In my view, a fundamentalist religion is a religion, any religion, that when confronted with a conflict between love, compassion and caring, and conformity to doctrine, will almost invariably choose the latter regardless of the effect it has on its followers or on the society of which it is a part.

Somewhat similarly, Bruce Lawrence says that fundamentalism is “the affirmation of religious authority as holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction.”

Focusing on the root of the word, my take is that fundamentalists mistakenly assume that they have attained something fundamental, and cling to it with all their might no matter what. Even when evidence points to that supposedly fundamental thing as being contingent, subjective, shallow, or derivative.

Yesterday, during a meeting of our Salem churchless discussion group, I was talking about how someone had emailed me and asked if I was an initiate (a.k.a. “satsangi”) of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian-based spiritual organization). If so, she wanted to know “are you still in it or found another way?” I replied:

I am indeed a RSSB initiate—from way back in 1971. Last Sunday I was asked by a friend, “Do you still call yourself a satsangi?” Good question. I said, “I don’t know what to call myself now. The word ‘satsangi’ doesn’t mean much to me anymore. It’s just a word. I am still avidly interested in knowing who I am, and what the nature of ultimate reality or God is. That’s the important thing, not what I call myself.”

Have I found another way? Another good question. I don’t follow the RSSB vows with the same diligence I used to. I meditate for about an hour a day, not 2 ½ hours. I have an occasional glass of red wine. I experiment with alternative mantras.

Maybe I’m doomed. But I figure that if God is so picky and demanding that He/She/It will send me to hell, or deprive me of salvation, because of these seemingly small things, then maybe this isn’t a God that I want to be saved by. My wife forgives me for my faults (except when I forget to re-seal the whole wheat bread loaf in its plastic bag with a twisty tie—that’s unforgivable!). Won’t God?

My way now, whatever it is, is more open than it used to be. I’m less sure of myself. I’m more receptive to other people’s ideas and beliefs, so long as they aren’t dogmatic about them. I don’t believe that RSSB possesses the whole truth about the cosmos, though it might. I just don’t know.

It was after I told the group my “sins” against the RSSB commandments—less time spent meditating, some wine now and then, repeating a different mantra than I was taught—that the Eastern fundamentalism comment was made. Interesting. I’d always thought of these more as rigid rules rather than as manifestations of fundamentalism.

But I readily admitted that Eastern religions are as prone to fundamentalism as are Western religions. In the case of RSSB, or Sant Mat, the rigidity doesn’t come so much from dogmatic adherence to scripture as from a belief that the guru who heads the organization is a God-man.

When God speaks, you’d better jump! However, the problem with purported scriptural or personal God talk is that it’s impossible to know from what source the words really spring. Divine or human? Can’t tell.

So the reasonable thing to do is to keep an open mind. God talk always comes to us through a human writing or voice. Thus it is most likely that “God” actually is a member of Homo sapiens who honestly but erroneously believes that God is speaking through him, or is deceiving us about the source of his all-too-human revelation.

Like I said, though, you just don’t know. And that “don’t know” is what separates fundamentalism from genuine spirituality. Fundamentalists deny their not-knowing. Genuinely spiritual people humbly admit to it.

For several decades I was a true believer. I didn’t meditate for two and a half hours a day, using the mantra I was given by the guru, eschewing even a drop of alcohol, because I was experiencing a greater degree of spiritual realization via these disciplines. No, I was doing these things because I never thought of questioning them.

I was a fundamentalist. Obedient, dogmatic, unscientific. I liked to say that I was a spiritual scientist conducting the experiment of meditation. But I didn’t question why the results I was getting weren’t what was hypothesized. Nor was I open to altering the experiment based on those results, as any genuine scientist would have done.

My eyes are open now. Of course, a RSSB fundamentalist would say that I’ve been blinded by my ego, or maya, or mental machinations, or bad karma. Maybe. I don’t know.

All I know is that mystery has come to seem fundamental to me, not particular rules, commandments, dogmas, or theologies.

Amazing! I agree with William Bennett.

Over on my HinesSight blog I’ve shared the astounding news that right-wing moral pundit William Bennett and I agree about something: the Muhammad cartoons that are freaking out the Muslim world.

In my post, “State Dept. wrong about Muhammad cartoons,” I agree with Bennett that when terrorists use Islam to justify their actions, then that religion becomes fair game. For cartoonists, lampooners, comics, politicians, ranters and ravers, editorialists, whoever. (Oh, I almost forgot: bloggers too.)

Actually, religion should be fair game under any circumstances. There’s nothing special about religious belief that makes the First Amendment inapplicable to it. Freedom of expression applies to speaking about religion as much as anything else.

If you haven’t seen the blasphemous cartoons yet, I found a site that has more readable versions of them (compared to the image I posted previously). Take a look here.

Cartoons of Muhammad create huge uproar

If you’re a devout Muslim, read no further. For below you’ll see drawings of Muhammad, as published in a Danish newspaper, that have caused true Islamic believers to cry “Blasphemy!”

(click on image to enlarge the blasphemy)
And more. There have been boycotts of Danish products, ambassadors recalled, bomb threats, and demonstrations. Today, as the BBC reported, the “Muhammad cartoon row intensifies.”

Newspapers across Europe reprinted the cartoons that were originally published last September in Jyllands-Posten as part of an article about self-censorship and freedom of speech. I’m pleased to support this effort to keep fundamentalism from infecting the health of secular democracies.

Muslims, relax. Do you really think that Muhammad or Allah is going to be disturbed by the publication of a few cartoons depicting how the artist visualizes the founder of Islam? Given that a disturbingly large number of Americans consider that most Muslims are fanatical crazies, you aren’t doing your religion any good by acting in accord with that stereotype.

Wikipedia has an excellent detailed rundown of this controversy (including descriptions of each drawing). This is a classic example of how rigid religious dogmatists can make a mountain of aggrieved righteous indignation out of a molehill of free speech expression. Here are some excerpts from the Seattle PI story:

Demonstrations and condemnations across the Muslim world continued. The Supreme Council of Moroccan religious leaders denounced the drawings on Wednesday. "Muslim beliefs cannot tolerate such an attack, however small it may be," the statement said.

…Mohammed Bechari, president of the National Federation of the Muslims of France, said his group would start legal proceedings against France Soir [one of the newspapers that reprinted the drawings] because of "these pictures that have disturbed us, and that are still hurting the feelings of 1.2 billion Muslims."

Earth to the Muslim world: People get disturbed by lots of things every day. People get their feelings hurt in lots of ways every day. Almost always these things and these ways aren’t illegal or immoral. They’re just part of life in a society where people can freely express themselves.

Most of humanity, I’m confident, doesn’t want to live in a repressive culture where every action is judged against the dictates of a holy book. Those who do want to live that way, go ahead. Just don’t impose your beliefs on the rest of us.

Update: a day later, the controversy intensifies. A 2/2 news story says:

Defending its decision to publish the cartoons, France Soir wrote: "Imagine a society that added up all the prohibitions of different religions. What would remain of the freedom to think, to speak and even to come and go?

"We know societies like that all too well. The Iran of the mullahs, for example. But yesterday, it was the France of the Inquisitions, the burning stakes and the Saint Bartholomew's Day [massacre of Protestants]."

Yes, imagine. Then, spread these cartoons far and wide until Muslims--and every fundamentalist--realizes that genuine spirituality is worlds apart from blind adherence to dogmatic dictates.

Christians say God punished New Orleans

The Universist movement has found that a disturbingly large number of sermons on Sunday, September 4, preached that Hurricane Katrina was the will of God. New Orleans supposedly incurred God’s wrath because it was sinful and decadent.

"If there's ever been a city that's needed to be swept clean of the sin and the wickedness it's New Orleans," said Chris Hodges, Church of the Highlands, Birmingham, Alabama.

Breaking new ground in meteorological science, Tim Bourgeois of the Tree of Life Christian Church in Canoga Park, California revealed that:

When there are storm winds, they don't just meet because a low pressure area happens to meet with a high pressure area in the upper atmosphere and suddenly this wind just randomly, naturally occurs, and waters randomly fall along with it. This is God's word at work in the midst of his creation.

Now, I’m sure that these are minority views. Most Christians, like most Americans, have been wonderfully generous and non-judgmental in responding to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Nonetheless, the Universists have a point:

This is 2005, but Christianity's various denominations were unified this week in thought circa 1205…The world has moved on since the dawn of Christianity and its heights in the Dark Ages.

Reading the ridiculous stone-casting sermons got me thinking about the root of such magical thinking. In my opinion it is a feeling of specialness.

Meaning, some people (in this case, fundamentalist Christians) believe that they enjoy a special relationship with God. This enables them to know God’s will, his likes and dislikes, and what is sinful. That special position at the right hand of God enables these faithful to interpret earthly events through their unique divine understanding.

Which is garbage, I’m highly confident. However, I then considered how I’ve held similar—though less extreme—beliefs about my own specialness. For in 1971 I was initiated into the mystical-spiritual path of Sant Mat, also known as the Path of the Saints or the Science of the Soul.

There are various branches of Sant Mat. Theological differences abound. Not all agree with the teaching of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the branch I’ve been associated with, that there are “marked souls” who have a special relationship with God. Supposedly I’m one of those souls, since I’ve been initiated into the RSSB fold.

My wife isn’t. She’s unmarked, I guess. I’ve never been able to recognize my mark, but apparently it is visible to those with eyes to see. Here’s how this highly questionable theological hypothesis is described in “The Journey of the Soul,” a RSSB children’s book:

After a while God willed the creation. He sent forth a wondrous luminous wave of Sound and Light from his own Being and made the entire creation from it. He made skies, planets, suns, moons, and stars. He made mountains, valleys and deserts, oceans, lakes, rivers and streams. The creation was majestic and beautiful…but there were no living things in it to enjoy it.

So God decided to put on a play, using his souls as actors, and his new creation was the theatre! God was the Director, and He named his play, “Life.” Almost all of the souls wanted to be in his show, so God told them they could leave their Home in the Ocean of Light and journey down to be performers in the theater of creation.

But there were a very few of the little souls that did not want to go at all. They wanted to stay home with their Lord. But He told even these to go and enjoy being in his play, too. Then he put a mark on each one of the souls that wanted to stay with Him, and promised them that one day He would send for them and have them brought back to their Real Home with Him.

He told all the other souls that if they ever decided they wanted to come back Home again, He would mark them too. One day, through God’s boundless Grace, He would help them come Home, too.

Thus if you’re not one of the original marked souls—like marvelously fortunate me!—you’ve still got a chance to jump on a later soul train headed Home. You just won’t get there as soon as I will.

I have come to reject my specialness. I don’t consider myself better than anyone else, especially not my wife, who is a more compassionate and caring human being than I am.

Every religion wants to be special. As I’ve observed before, religious faiths are like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.

The Christians who consider themselves morally superior to the homosexual, whoring, gambling sinfulness of New Orleans (which, of course, is why people loved to go there, including George Bush in his younger days) aren’t so different, really, from the members of Radha Soami Satsang Beas who consider themselves to be “marked souls.”

Feelings of specialness are feelings of specialness. They’re all repugnant to me, though some manifestations of “I’m special!” are more repugnant than others.

Isn’t spirituality supposed to be about humility and not feeling superior? I’ve always thought so, but maybe I missed a memo from God.

Take a stand, don't go to church tomorrow

I could have written this for the Church of the Churchless, but I just finished a rant--I mean, a passionate well-reasoned essay--called "God must be a Buddhist" on my HinesSight weblog. I concluded that not going to church tomorrow would be taking a stand against the demons.

Unitarian Jihad needs to get rolling

Just a day after Laurel and I joined the Unitarian Jihad, Senate majority leader Bill Frist demonstrates why this campaign against religious extremism is needed so badly.

The New York Times reports that Frist, my least favorite U.S. senator (especially after he outrageously dared to “diagnose” Terri Schiavo’s condition from videotapes and medical records) “has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as ‘against people of faith’ for blocking President Bush's nominees.”

Senator Frist, I have some news for you: there are lots of “people of faith” who are pleased that the Democrats are preventing a few unqualified nominees from getting lifetime appointments to a federal judgeship.

I am one of those people. It isn’t necessary to be a Christian to be a person of faith. There are many varieties of faith. Some don’t even have a name, not being associated with an organized religion. These might well be the truest faiths.

It’s a strange conception, this notion of Christian right’ies that only people who have a belief in God exactly like theirs have high moral and ethical standards. The New York Times article says that Christian conservatives consider that the battle over the nominees is part of a 30-year culture war.

I don’t understand what culture and religion have in common. I’ve always thought that the eternal God and all things divine were far above ephemeral cultural comings and goings. But if the Christian right wants a culture war, we of the Unitarian Jihad are prepared to fight for truth, justice, and the universal way.

Universal. Not Christian, not Islamic, not Jewish, not Buddhist, not Taoist, not anything with an “ian,” “ic,” “ish,” or “ist” attached to it. The American government represents everybody. Christians are part of that everybody, but just a part. No part should be able to run rough-shod over the whole, even if it is a majority part.

I have no problem with politicians who have strong religious beliefs. I do have a problem with politicians who don’t recognize the relativity and subjectivity of those beliefs, mistaking them for absolute commandments From On High. No, they’re just beliefs. And they have to be rationally defended in the court of public debate just like any other beliefs.

The most annoying characteristic of religious fundamentalists like Frist and his Christian allies is their sense of entitlement. “Because I believe it, it must be so.” No, it doesn’t. Again, your beliefs are just beliefs. You may believe that Terri Schiavo should have had her feeding tube reinserted, abortion is a sin, and gays shouldn’t marry. Fine. Just remember that other people have valid reasons for believing differently. Argue about your differences, but don’t claim that you have a direct line to God.

The first communiqué of the Unitarian Jihad says it nicely:

Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups with brains enough to understand the difference between political belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios, kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance" by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.

Sounds good to me. Bring on the Jihad.

Flee from the fear of God

Yesterday John, a commenter on my “Reality is the best religion” post, gave me some advice: “If you desire to become more wise than [sic] consider that wisdom begins with the fear of god.”

I must be a real dumb-ass, because I’ve never been able to muster up much of a fear of God. I’m afraid of a lot of things—death, disease, Bush appointing a Supreme Court justice, missing the final episode of “Survivor”—because I have either directly observed these fears or can reasonably imagine their occurrence.

But I’ve never seen God. And I bet John hasn’t either. So how does he know that it’s wise to fear God? Maybe God doesn’t even exist, in which case fearing God would make as much sense as fearing the boogeyman. I can understand why an impressionable child would believe that something unseen lives under his or her bed and threatens to get them. I can’t understand why a mature adult would believe in an unseen God who is similarly deserving of fear.

Strangely, John also said, “In this world there is nothing so real like the love of Jesus Christ.” Since Jesus is purported to be the son of God, this implies that God also is real. How could a son be more real than his father? I suppose a son’s love could be more real than his father’s love. Yet it seems to me that if God exists, it is much more likely that God’s love would surpass Jesus’ love rather than fall short of it.

Trying to understand why I should fear the loving Christian God, I perused scripture on a “Why Fear God?” web page. It didn’t make much sense. First I read that "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (John 3:16 NIV). Ah, eternal life: that sounds good. Sign me up.

A bit further down the page, though, I came to "The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread.” (Isaiah 8:13 NIV), and also, “But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.” (Luke 12:5). Oh, hell: that isn’t appealing. Cancel my application.

The Christian God described in the Old and New Testaments isn’t somebody I want to spend any time with. Certainly not eternity. He’s a father who only loves children who fear him: As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. (Psalms 103:13)

I also read, “To find balance between love and fear look to your childhood. As children, we all loved our earthly fathers, but we feared the times of discipline (which was for our own good). ‘The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the LORD are sure and altogether righteous.’ (Psalms 19:9 NIV)"

Well, I grew up without a father. And my mother believed in maternal love, not fearful discipline. So I guess I didn’t experience the child abuse that apparently is needed to appreciate why I now need the fear of the Lord.

My wife is a psychotherapist. Frequently she counsels people who are being, or have been, harmed by a “good Christian” man who thinks that his woman and children should fear him just as God teaches that He should be feared.

If you find yourself in such a situation, flee it. Do something about it. Fight it. Don’t put up with it. Life is too short and too precious to be lived in fear. Don’t be afraid of a human father, and don’t be afraid of a heavenly father. All too often people put up with fear because they are more afraid of losing the security that an authoritarian father-figure provides.

Mussolini made the trains run on time and Saddam Hussein kept the electricity on. Well, I’d rather wait for a train and eat in the dark than live under a dictator. In the same fashion, I’d rather deal with the consequences of having an open mind than live confined in the dogmatism of a fundamentalist theology.

This page, “Reality versus God and the human illusion of fear” from Escape from Watchtower.com nicely encapsulates the choice between being (in the author’s words) a Mr./Ms. Fundamental, Theist, Formula, Religion person or a Mr./Ms. Mystic, Poet-Thinker, Existentialist, Agnostic, Nontheist person. The author added “science” in the first category, but I question whether it belongs there. For a religion based on fear, such as fundamentalist Christianity, is rooted in a primitive pre-scientific misunderstanding of how the world works.

Science knows that the cosmos is lawful, not arbitrary. The universe shows no evidence of a Zeus-like God who capriciously throws sinners into hell and elevates the faithful into heaven. Yet the religious faithful believe in old texts from a bygone age which were written by people who viewed the world in an unscientific fashion. Those people didn’t know any better; we do. So it is time—actually, long-past time—to embrace spiritual beliefs that are in tune with how reality is, rather than how it isn’t.

Buddhism isn’t immune from rituals and religiosity, but the core of this spiritual philosophy reflects a modern mindset. My Christian correspondent told me that wisdom begins with the fear of God. This excerpt from the second page of an essay called “Why Buddhism?” makes a lot more sense to me:

From the Buddhist point of view, wisdom is based on right understanding and right thought, the realisation of universal law and the development of insight. Insight means not only to see the truth, but to perceive the way of complete liberation from the state of unsatisfactoriness in life.

Therefore, real wisdom cannot be found in academic institutions or in the laboratories of scientific research, nor even in a place of religious worship where people go and pray or perform rites and rituals. Wisdom is within the mind itself. When experience, understanding, realisation and purification are complete, this wisdom, comprising of the highest perfection, will arise and be seen. The aim of life is the attainment of this wisdom. Instead of searching into outer space, man should make the effort to explore the space within. Then he could reach his final goal.

Buddhism advocates right action, or morality, but not out of a fear of God. Rather, “Evil is to be avoided for the welfare of all living beings, not for fear of god or his punishment.” I’ve been a vegetarian for over thirty-five years. The main reason I don’t kill animals for food is because it would seriously bother me to know that I’ve made them suffer. I also consider that karma and reincarnation are part of the fabric of reality, so I also don’t want to incur the consequences of unnecessary killing (which is immediately evident in the form of diseases related to meat-eating).

Believing in universal laws of natural consequences, causes and effects, is much different from believing in a whimsical personal authoritarian God who punishes sinners and rewards the faithful.

This choice of beliefs can be simply encapsulated in a T-shirt slogan.

Which is most appealing to you: this or this?

I’ll take “No Fear,” please.

Religion should unite, not divide

Laurel, my wife, was moved to write a meaningful short essay yesterday: “Religion Should Unite, Not Divide.” Like me, she’s been disturbed by all the fundamentalist-inspired divisiveness evident of late. Well, also evident of early, for as long as there has been religion, there has been religious intolerance and inhumanity.

We both believe that the only way to be spiritual is to be non-religious. Religion is mostly about belief; spirituality is mostly about experience. A disturbingly large percentage of purportedly religious people don’t practice what they preach. They claim to aspire to unconditional love, then vote to discriminate against homosexuals. They claim to renounce unjustified killing, then proudly support the slaughter of innocent people in Iraq.

Laurel says in her piece that if the unity of God truly is the goal to which religious believers aspire, then churches and other places of worship should be an earthly reflection of this oneness: “If this were the role of religion, the only valid religious teachings would be those which teach love, acceptance, and unity with all people.”

Well said. As much as I like the meetings of the spiritual group I attend most Sunday mornings, I cringe inwardly every time I hear a speaker say, “We are so fortunate to be among the chosen few who have been blessed to return to God.” Laurel, entirely appropriately, frequently teases me about this divisive attitude.

Putting on her best Saturday Night Live “Church Lady” voice, she will say to me: “You’re saved, but Satan has doomed me to hell!” “Yes, you’re right,” I’ll reply with tongue firmly in my cheek, “But I’ll try to put in a good word for you when I see God.”

We joke about how almost every religious or spiritual group, including Radha Soami Satsang Beas (Science of the Soul), which I’ve been a longtime member of, considers that its followers, and they alone, are the “chosen people.” If you add up all the supposedly chosen people in the world—Christians, Jews, Muslims, and members of other exclusive sects—the unchosen such as Laurel are in the minority. (I recently wrote about this “all believers are above average” strangeness in “You’re religious, but are you right?”

Here is Laurel’s essay, which she has submitted to our local Salem Monthly alternative publication. As she says at the end of the piece, we’re thinking about forming a Church of the Churchless group here in Salem which would meet in physical reality instead of the blogosphere. If you’re interested in being part of such a group, send us an email.