Church of the Churchless

The pitfall of believing someone's testimony about God or the supernatural

Testimony. It's a common word in the law.

But until I read an essay in the New York Times book collection from their Stone Reader series, Question Everything, I wasn't aware that it had a philosophical meaning. The essay was about Deep Fakes where someone makes a convincingly real video of someone.

Contemporary philosophers rank different kinds of evidence according to their reliability. How much confidence, they ask, can we reasonably have in a belief when it is supported by such-and-such information?

We ordinarily tend to think that perception -- the evidence of your eyes and ears -- provides pretty good justification. If you see something with your own eyes, you should probably believe it. By comparison, the claims that other people make -- which philosophers call "testimony"-- provide some justification, but usually not quite as much as perception. Sometimes, of course, your senses can deceive you, but that's less likely than other people deceiving you.

...Now, with the emergence of deepfake technology, the ability to produce convincing fake video will be almost as widespread as the ability to lie. And once that happens, we ought to think of images as more like testimony than perception. In other words, you should only trust a recording if you would trust the word of the person producing it. 

Of course, here we're talking about physical eyes and ears. The possibility (which I'd say is a near certainty) of being deceived by someone's testimony that they've seen or heard God, or another supernatural entity, obviously is much greater.

For at least a deepfake video can be observed by anyone with functional vision.

This isn't the case with the vast number of instances where someone claims either to have experienced a mysterious physical object -- Bigfoot, alien beings, the Loch Ness monster -- or a mysterious supernatural object: God, heaven, angels, divine light.

They may sound utterly convincing. Such is possible for several reasons.

Maybe they're a good liar. Maybe they actually believe they experienced the mysterious entity, though in truth they didn't. And there's a very small, yet non-zero, probability that they did experience a mysterious physical or supernatural entity which really does exist.

So unless we give up on the idea of separating supernatural fact from fiction, which I'm definitely not willing to do, what's our option when presented with someone's claim that, say, they've experienced God?

If everyone who supposedly experienced God made the same claim, things would be simpler. But there are countless (almost) descriptions of God, many or most of them contradictory. God is a person. God is impersonal. God has a form. God is formless. God is forgiving. God punishes the wicked. God abhors violence. God wants believers to kill unbelievers.

One approach that I like has support in science. 

The Lie Lab has now come up with a new approach to lie detection in which people base their judgments on just one signal. A simple rule of thumb which focuses entirely on the level of detail in the story told by the 'liar.' It certainly takes a bit of getting used to.

"It feels very counterintuitive to just listen to what people are saying and not to pay attention to all kinds of other signals, such as how convincingly or emotionally someone conveys their story," explains Verschuere. "But people who tell the truth can give a rich description because they actually experienced the event, whereas although liars can come up with details, this increases their risk of being caught."

Of course, the Lie Lab approach is aimed at lies about things in this world, not a supposed supernatural world.

So that makes it more difficult to tell the difference between someone who truly believes they have experienced God or some other divine entity, and someone who is merely claiming this happened for a reason such as ego, money, fame, enjoyment fooling people.

Regardless, I like the emphasis on details. 

Anyone who claims to have had a supernatural experience should be closely questioned about what, exactly, the experience consisted of. After all, this isn't like the experience of going to a Taylor Swift concert. If a Swift lover exaggerated what happened there, no big deal.

But a religious devotee who claims to have experienced God is making a monstrous claim, one which, if proven to be true, would upend both science and spirituality. They can't be allowed to get away with a fawning acceptance of their claim, notwithstanding the natural human tendency to believe that other people are telling the truth. 

Instead, they should be asked questions like: 

How do you know you experienced God?
What did God look like exactly? 
If God spoke to you, what did God say?
Did you learn anything from God that wasn't already known to humans?
What did you do to experience God?

When I wrote my book about Plotinus, the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, I included a quote from a scholar that deeply appealed to me then, and still does. Here's what I said in a 2004 blog post, "How to talk to a fundamentalist."

Fundamentalists, especially those of the Christian and Muslim faiths, have a bad habit of wanting to force other people to live in accord with their beliefs. Another bad habit is making dogmatic statements unsupported by objective facts, and then feeling offended when someone challenges their dogma. Bad habits like these should be discouraged, not encouraged.

A classics scholar, A.H. Armstrong, has some apt advice about how to talk to fundamentalists:

When claims to possess an exclusive revelation of God or to speak his word are made by human beings (and it is always human beings who make them), they must be examined particularly fiercely and hypercritically for the honor of God, to avoid the blasphemy and sacrilege of deifying a human opinion.

Or, to put it less ferociously, the Hellenic (and, as it seems to me, still proper) answer to “Thus saith the Lord” is “Does he?,” asked in a distinctly skeptical tone, followed by a courteous but drastic “testing to destruction” of the claims and credentials of the person or persons making this enormous statement.

So the next time someone says to me, “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life,” I’ll reply: “Oh, really? How do you know? What makes you think that statement is true? I’m all ears, all highly skeptical ears.”

ChatGPT speaks about oneness, enlightenment, God, and chicken/egg firstness

Here's the second installment of an interchange Osho Robbins, a frequent commenter on this blog, had with ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot. The first installment is here. 

Even though I said in that first post that I'd share the rest of the chat in two additional posts, I decided to include all of the remaining chat in this second post. Because it's so long, you'll need to click on a continuation link at the bottom of this post to read the remainder of it.

This morning I shared in a post an interesting comment from Appreciative Reader, another frequent commenter on this blog, So if you want to see how a human looks upon God, in contrast to the artificial intelligence of ChatGPT, check out "People can't define God in any way they like."

Since I'm a big believer in spiritual independence, I resonated with a general sentiment that ChatGPT repeated numerous times using similar language in response to the questions asked by Robbins. Here's one example. ChatGPT speaks wisely here.

It is important to note, however, that the concept of enlightenment and the role of the perfect master may be understood differently in different spiritual traditions, and there may be different criteria for what constitutes spiritual realization and the ability to guide others on the path towards it. Ultimately, each individual must determine their own spiritual path and the guidance that is most helpful to them. 

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since oneness is about "ONE" how can there be individual souls in oneness?

The concept of oneness can be understood in different ways depending on the spiritual or philosophical tradition in question. In some traditions, oneness may be understood as a state of unity or interconnectedness in which all beings and phenomena are ultimately one and the same, beyond all distinctions and separations. In other traditions, oneness may be understood as the ultimate reality or essence of all things, beyond all dualities and limitations.

In the context of the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the concept of oneness is often used to refer to the underlying unity and interconnectedness of all creation, including the human soul and the divine. While the ultimate reality may be understood as a state of oneness, it is also believed that individual souls exist within this oneness, and that the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is to realize this oneness while still retaining individual consciousness and awareness.

According to RSSB teachings, the human soul is believed to be a unique individual entity, capable of experiencing its own unique journey of spiritual evolution and growth. While the soul may ultimately merge with the divine and realize its oneness with all creation, it is believed that this realization does not involve the loss of individuality or consciousness, but rather a transcending of ego and separateness to achieve a state of higher awareness and unity.

In this sense, the concept of oneness in RSSB teachings does not necessarily negate the existence of individual souls, but rather suggests that individuality is ultimately part of a larger unity that includes all of creation.

it is said that "there is only the one nothing else is real"

The idea that "there is only the One and nothing else is real" is a common theme in many spiritual and philosophical traditions, including Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, and certain schools of Buddhism.

In Advaita Vedanta, the One is often understood as Brahman, the ultimate reality that underlies all creation and is identical with the true nature of the individual self (atman). The idea is that all phenomena in the world, including the individual self, are ultimately illusory or unreal in comparison to the absolute reality of Brahman.

Similarly, in Taoism, the One is understood as the Tao, the underlying reality that governs all creation and transcends all distinctions and dualities. The idea is that all phenomena in the world, including the individual self, are ultimately transitory and impermanent, and that true wisdom and fulfillment can be found by aligning oneself with the Tao and transcending attachment to the material world.

In both cases, the idea that "there is only the One and nothing else is real" suggests that the true nature of reality is beyond the limitations of language and concepts, and that ultimate reality cannot be grasped through ordinary modes of perception and understanding. Instead, it is believed that realization of the One requires a direct experience or insight that transcends the illusions and limitations of the material world.

It is worth noting, however, that interpretations of the idea of the One may vary among different traditions and individuals, and that the concept of ultimate reality or absolute truth is often approached in different ways depending on cultural, historical, and personal factors.

what does RSSB say about this

In the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the concept of oneness or unity is also central, but it is approached in a different way than some other spiritual traditions. While the ultimate reality is often referred to as the One, the emphasis is not on negating the reality of the individual self or the material world, but on recognizing the underlying unity and interconnectedness of all creation.

According to RSSB teachings, the ultimate reality is a state of consciousness that is beyond the limitations of the material world, and that can be directly experienced through meditation and spiritual practice. This state of consciousness is often referred to as Sach Khand or the Realm of Truth, and is described as a state of infinite consciousness, bliss, and love.

While the ultimate reality is believed to be beyond the limitations of the material world, it is also believed that the individual self is real and that the material world is a reflection of the ultimate reality. The goal of spiritual practice is therefore not to negate the reality of the self or the world, but to recognize their underlying unity and to align oneself with the ultimate reality through meditation, selfless service, and ethical living.

In this sense, the idea of oneness or unity in RSSB teachings is not a rejection of the individual self or the material world, but a recognition of their ultimate reality and interconnectedness with the divine.

in the ultimate state of oneness, is there time and space?

In many spiritual traditions, the ultimate state of oneness or unity is described as a state that transcends time and space. In this state, there is often said to be no separation between the individual self and the ultimate reality, and no distinctions or limitations of any kind.

For example, in Advaita Vedanta, the ultimate reality of Brahman is described as "beyond time, space, and causation," and as the underlying reality that transcends all concepts and limitations. Similarly, in certain schools of Buddhism, the ultimate reality of Nirvana is described as a state of "suchness" or "emptiness," which transcends all distinctions and dualities and is beyond time and space.

In RSSB teachings, the ultimate reality is often referred to as Sach Khand or the Realm of Truth, and is described as a state of infinite consciousness, bliss, and love. While the ultimate reality is said to be beyond time and space, it is also believed that the individual self can experience this reality through meditation and spiritual practice.

It is worth noting, however, that interpretations of the ultimate state of oneness may vary among different traditions and individuals, and that the concept of ultimate reality or absolute truth is often approached in different ways depending on cultural, historical, and personal factors.

in a state of no-time and no-space can there be individual souls and where will they exist

In a state beyond time and space, the concept of individual souls as we understand them in the context of our physical reality may not be applicable. This is because the concept of individual souls is often based on the idea of separate, distinct entities with individual identities and characteristics. In a state of ultimate oneness or unity, these distinctions may not apply.

Some spiritual traditions suggest that in the state of ultimate oneness, the individual self merges or dissolves into the ultimate reality, and that the concept of a separate individual self may become irrelevant. In this sense, the question of where individual souls exist in a state beyond time and space may not be relevant, as the concept of individual souls as separate entities may not apply in that state.

However, it's important to note that different spiritual traditions have different views on this subject, and interpretations may vary. Ultimately, the nature of the ultimate reality or state of oneness is considered beyond human comprehension and description, and it may be impossible to fully understand or describe it through language or concepts.

what does it mean to transcend the ego

Transcending the ego generally means moving beyond the limitations and illusions of the individual self, and realizing a deeper, more universal aspect of reality. In many spiritual traditions, the ego is seen as the part of the individual self that identifies with separateness, individuality, and the material world, and that is driven by desires, fears, and attachments.

To transcend the ego means to recognize that the ego is not the true self, but rather a temporary construct that can be transcended through spiritual practice and self-realization. This can involve letting go of attachments, overcoming fears and desires, and cultivating a deeper sense of connection and oneness with the world around us.

Transcending the ego can lead to a sense of inner peace, freedom, and liberation from suffering. It can also be seen as a step towards spiritual awakening and self-realization, as it allows one to connect with a deeper sense of truth and purpose beyond the limited confines of the ego.

In many spiritual traditions, practices such as meditation, self-inquiry, and mindfulness are used to cultivate awareness and move beyond the limitations of the ego.

does RSSB lead to the transcending the ego

Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is a spiritual organization that aims to help individuals achieve spiritual growth and self-realization. One of the key teachings of RSSB is the importance of transcending the ego, as this is seen as a crucial step towards achieving spiritual liberation.

RSSB teachings suggest that the ego is a temporary construct that arises from identification with the body and the material world, and that it creates a sense of separation and isolation from the true self and the ultimate reality. According to RSSB, transcending the ego involves recognizing the illusory nature of the ego and cultivating a deeper sense of connection with the inner self, others, and the universe as a whole.

RSSB teaches that the practice of meditation is a powerful tool for transcending the ego and achieving spiritual growth. Through regular practice, meditation can help individuals cultivate inner awareness and develop a deeper understanding of the nature of the self and the universe.

Overall, while there are many different approaches to spiritual growth and self-realization, RSSB teachings suggest that transcending the ego is a key step towards achieving a deeper sense of inner peace, spiritual growth, and liberation.

paltu sahib, a famous mystic says "there is only ONE - there is no other" please explain

Paltu Sahib was a 19th-century Indian mystic and poet who is known for his spiritual teachings and poetry. One of his key teachings is the idea that there is only one ultimate reality, which is often referred to as the Divine, God, or the Ultimate Truth.

When Paltu Sahib says, "there is only ONE - there is no other," he is expressing the idea that there is only one true reality, and that everything else in the universe is a manifestation or reflection of that ultimate reality. This can be understood as a statement about the nature of existence, and the idea that all beings, objects, and phenomena are interconnected and part of a larger whole.

From this perspective, the concept of individuality and separation is seen as an illusion that arises from the limitations of human perception and understanding. The ego, or the sense of individual identity, is seen as a temporary construct that arises from the identification with the body and the material world, and that ultimately obscures the deeper truth of oneness and interconnectedness.

The idea of oneness is a common theme in many spiritual traditions, and is often associated with the idea of enlightenment or spiritual liberation. Through practices such as meditation and self-inquiry, individuals may seek to transcend the limitations of the ego and realize the deeper truth of oneness and interconnectedness that underlies all of existence.

People can't define God any way they like

It's always a pleasure to share perceptive well-written comments on this blog by Appreciative Reader. Below is my latest offering from him. I admire the breadth of knowledge Appreciative Reader has, along with his passion for truth. Calling out spurious reasoning (sometimes better called lies) by other commenters is a specialty of Appreciative Reader which I appreciate. This is a great example.

“Hi AP,
Some define God as, “I am that I am.” Others say, “God is Love.”
Some say God is a man with a beard who smites people.
Buddhists say it none of that but a place called Nirvana.
Everyone gets to define it how they see fit and believe accordingly. There is no one right definition for anyone.”

Posted by: 12 months left | April 15, 2023 at 10:33 PM

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Hello, 12 months left.

Pardon me, I’m going to disagree again. Disagree strongly. And I’m going to be blunt about it, again. I’m sorry, I don’t wish to be the Internet ass that keeps on flogging some issue beyond the limits of courtesy -- despite being completely in the right about this, and despite only correcting your very egregious error here, but even so it’s not a pretty thing to keep on doing beyond a point -- and so, after this last comment I’ll stop doing that, for now at any rate.

You’re completely totally mistaken about, like, everything you’ve said in that short comment of yours.

First: No, Buddhists don’t have some “place” called Nirvana; and they most emphatically don’t equate Nirvana with God. To actual practicing Buddhists, Nirvana simply means cessation, and Nirvana refers to the state of being of the practitioner, the meditator, who’s overcome desire, and therefore attained cessation of the impulse towards extraversion.

That comes with some superstitions involving rebirth and cessation therefrom, as well, which is obviously all nonsense; but it can, from a secular perspective, be viewed as a psychological state; and in any case, no matter which perspective you’re coming from, the woo-laden or the secular, but in neither case is Nirvana a “place”, or in any way connected with God as the word is commonly understood.

(Qualification to the above: I’m referring here to Theravada Buddhism, as actually practiced, as well as most major strands of Buddhism that I’m familiar with. I’m adding this qualification here in order to be extra scrupulous about one thing: Some extra woo-woo versions of Buddhism, Pure Land for instance, do go in for different planes of existence, that sort of thing.

As far as I know Nirvana isn’t one of those planes, Nirvana refers to cessation of existence beyond those planes; but I’m not overly familiar with those branches of Buddhism, and it is possible I may be mistaken. Probably no-one looks on Nirvana as a place; and on the off chance that some whackjob sects do, then these would at most be a very small minority and most assuredly not representative of Buddhists in general. And none of them equate Nirvana with God.)

Second: No one defines God as “I am that I am”, or as love. The former is a cryptic answer by the deity of the Old Testament to Moses, and the latter is a poetic reference to what some believe is an attribute of God. But neither of those amounts to a definition, not as the word “definition” itself is commonly understood.

Third: That last paragraph of yours, comprising those two sentences, is a jaw-dropping instance of misdirection. I don’t say you’re being deliberately disingenuous; and quite possibly you’re deluding yourself here, rather than lying on purpose to try to obfuscate things for your readers here; but the end result is exactly the same.

That last sentence is fine: agreed, God does mean different things to different people, and no one can insist on one single definition that everyone must accept. But as for the sentence preceding that: no, people don’t get to define God in any random way they like, most emphatically not.

I can’t just go and define my neighbor’s dog as God, and claim that God is born, and that God will die in the next ten or fifteen years at most (unless He happens to die before that of illness or from some accident), and that God barks and yips and pees on bushes, and that when God is horny He will hump any likely bitch He can lay His paws on.

That’s patently ridiculous. You can’t just make up your own random definition like that -- or at least, while you *can* do that, in the sense that no one is going to shoot you in the head if you do it, but it’s completely nonsensical to use words that way.

Fourth: Don’t forget that when Aquinas used those arguments, he was referring to the Christian God. This is transparent sleight of hand. In fact, this is a classic motte-and-bailey gambit: where you introduce an innocuous-sounding uber-milquetoast version of your thesis, speaking of God merely as “first mover” -- a definition that no Christian actually believed in, and nor did Aquinas himself, we can be sure of that -- and then surreptitiously slip in all of the baggage that goes with the word God, like consciousness and intelligence (and also, in Aquinas’s case, omnipotence, and omniscience, and omnibenevolence) without actually making the case for all of that.

That’s plain disingenuous, that’s plain dishonest. Aquinas should have been ashamed of himself, for trying to bamboozle the gullible amongst his audience like that.

And finally: As I’ve already shown in my previous comment, even if for the sake of argument I should grant you that very dodgy definition of God, even then it simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Because those using Aquinas’s argument -- you, for instance -- basically employ not one but TWO strawmen simultaneously: first, in how you define God; and two, in how you describe the current scientific consensus on the origin of the cosmos. I’ve discussed that clearly, if briefly, in my previous comment, and will not repeat that here.

Sorry, that whole Aquinas crap you’re trying to slip in here is completely totally fully mistaken, and transparently so, from beginning to end.

Here's the previous comment by Appreciative Reader that he mentioned above.

Are we doing Aquinas again? That man was brilliant for his times, if disingenuous and deluded; but anyone who swallows his infantile nonsense today is a complete idiot. What is a strawman argument is the idea that something arose from nothing.

As has been pointed out, quantum fluctuations have existed forever, eternally -- should you favor that model. Defining God as the uncaused first principle is, again, what is dishonest, disingenuous, a fabrication, a lie. That is Aquinas's definition, but not how God is actually defined. He also needs, at the very least, to be intelligent and conscious -- not to mention a host of other things as well, including omniscient, and omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.

Without those attributes, you don't get God, certainly not the Christian God, and not any God I know of. Not only is your definition of God dicey, but even that dicey definition does not hold up to the gotcha you fondly imagine it is.

There are many cosmological models. Quantum fluctuations birthing just the one universe is just one of them. If you define God as quantum fluctuations, that is plain wrong, a lie: because no religion defines God like that, and you are simply piggy backing on science shamelessly and distorting the end results of science.

And in any case that does not correspond with the more detailed cosmological models, like multiverses, and bubble universes, and so forth. There may well have been NOT ONE SINGLE, UNITARY CREATIVE PRINCIPLE, BUT A HOST OF THEM. Again, for his times Aquinas was fairly smart; but those who swear by him today are ignorant morons.

The difference between ChatGPT and religious poseurs is that the former has the honesty to clearly admit its error/s when pointed out, and the decency to apologize. Religious propagandists, on the other hand, simply turn tail when their lies are exposed, only to return another day with those same lies; and nor have they the decency to apologize. Stop flogging that idiotic Aquinas nonsense.

Religions exist because we can't grasp that the cosmos just is

For most of my life I marveled at the classic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

But with advancing age, and maybe some advancing wisdom, I came to prefer "There is something rather than nothing."

No why required. Just a factual statement. 

Because that why takes us into the realm of religion, and I'm no longer religious. Most religions, with the notable exception of Buddhism, assume there was a creator of the cosmos. 

So God is the answer to the why question. There's something rather than nothing due to God bringing the creation into being.

Of course, we then have to ask, "Why is there God?" For religions have to believe that something has always existed: God. 

While atheists like me prefer to believe that it is the cosmos that has always existed.

Sure, that's a mind-boggling notion. But only because the human mind is prone to boggle at the idea that existence has no beginning and no end. 

It just is. No creator of creation required.

The way I see it, our difficulty in wrapping our minds around that proposition is a big reason, maybe even the primary reason, why religions came into being and have such an attraction to most people.

For everything else we're familiar with has a cause that brought it into being. Even our universe, which is why I prefer to use the term "cosmos" when referring to everything in existence.

Science is confident that the big bang was how the universe came to be.

However, big bang theories don't start with absolutely nothing. They start with something: the laws of nature, and matter/energy that the laws of nature operate on.

So it seems clear that something always has existed. Those four words, something always has existed, never fail to produce a tingling sense of awe in me. 

I guess that feeling is somewhat akin to how religious people look upon God. However, there's a big difference between religious awe and secular awe.

I'm blown away by my inability to fathom how existence could have always existed. I don't have an answer for this. The question seems to be forever beyond human comprehension. 

By contrast, religious believers push this mystery away by assuming that God has always existed, and God created the cosmos.

They choose not to grapple with the notion that the cosmos just is. Always has been. Always will be. It just is.

I sympathize with that choice, though I think it leads to the false conclusion of God. 

For there's no doubt that the human mind is limited. We see beginnings everywhere in our world and the universe at large. Most people assume, then, that the cosmos must have had a beginning.

Our inability to rest easily in the blunt fact of the cosmos' "is'ness" seems to relate to a fundamental limitation of the human mind. 

We're habituated to causes and effects. So the idea of existence having no cause elicits a short-circuit in the human mind, which I believe results in awe. 

There is something rather than nothing. Wow! How freaking awesome!

But another sort of mind -- like an artificial intelligence or alien intelligence -- could look upon the simple "Is" of the cosmos as being completely natural. 

That other sort of mind wouldn't have any inclination to fashion a creator God, since that other sort of mind would see reality much differently than we do. Obviously I don't know what that vision would be like, since I have a limited human mind.

And maybe I've gone too far in even speculating about what that other sort of mind might be like.

All I'm saying is that I see a distinct possibility that religion has developed as a crutch to explain what our human minds struggle to comprehend about the cosmos. 

Being largely eludes us. We're much more comfortable with becoming, with creation. Yet what if the cosmos simply is? 

Nothing to figure out. No God stories required. Just an is with no beginning and no end.

Why asking for proof that God doesn't exist makes no sense

Today I watched a recorded episode of Bill Maher's Real Time HBO show. Scott Galloway, one of Maher's guests, was really down on TikTok, the video sharing service owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance.

Galloway thought TikTok should be banned in the United States because he believes the Chinese Communist Party is using it to undermine the patriotism of American young people. 

But he couldn't provide any evidence that this is happening.

Galloway just believed that the Chinese government was messing with the minds of our youth. At one point he said that it wasn't up to those opposed to TikTok to prove that the Chinese Communist Party was doing nasty stuff, it was up to those who support TikTok to prove that the Chinese Communist Party wasn't up to no good. 

Which made no sense to me.

That's the sort of argument I've heard a lot of from commenters on this blog who believe in God and don't like my skepticism about the existence of God. Prove that God doesn't exist, Brian, they'll say.

I'll usually respond with something like, That isn't how proof usually works. For it's very difficult, if not impossible, to prove that an entity doesn't exist. 

Yes, I realize after some Googling just now that some people do consider that it is possible to prove a negative. But reading some of those arguments made my head hurt, because they involved philosophical logic rather than common sense -- which is how I see the situation.

It seems to me that rather than arguing this question abstractly, it is easier to grasp by looking at a specific example. 

With TikTok, how could anyone be certain that the Chinese Communist Party isn't using the video sharing service to make young people have less faith in the United States?

Even if a diligent search of TikTok videos and the algorithm used to share those videos with TikTok users (i'm one of them) showed no evidence of dirty tricks by the Chinese Communist Party, it still would be possible, albeit unlikely, that the CCP was using a very subtle undetectable means of screwing with the minds of American young people.

That's why I believe that TikTok shouldn't be banned in this country unless there's actual evidence of malfeasance by the Chinese Communist Party. The First Amendment to our Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, which includes the freedom to view online content even if it is critical of the United States.

Meaning, while private companies can put limits on what people can read and see, the United States government can't ban a service like TikTok just because some politicians think it might be used to undermine confidence in our way of life. 

So someone who wants to ban TikTok needs to have solid evidence that this is justified, not just a belief that TikTok might become an arm of the Chinese Communist Party.

Likewise, someone who claims that God exists needs to provide solid evidence of this if they want skeptics like me to agree with them. There's no way to prove that God doesn't exist, since even if we assume that a search for God will come up empty -- as has been the case since the dawn of history -- the possibility that God is lurking behind some cosmic veil can't be ruled out.

In another blog post on this subject, I quoted Armin Navabi:

"There's no evidence that God doesn't exist."

When confronted with criticism, some theists will pull out this argument in an attempt to shift the burden of proof toward the critic. Although this tactic can feel very clever, it opens a door to absurdity.

This argument seems to suggest that we believe in everything, even things we have yet to think about, until that belief is proven false. That's simply not a logical way to perceive reality.

If the criteria for something being accepted as true was based purely on there being no evidence against it, an endless number of hypothetical objects could suddenly become "real." This has been the source of numerous playful thought experiments by skeptics around the world.

-- The flying spaghetti monster, who created the earth with his noodly appendage.

-- The invisible pink unicorn, whose "believers" logically know that she must be invisible because she has not been seen, yet have faith that she's pink.

-- The dragon in Carl Sagan's garage, a thought experiment he describes in The Demon-Haunted World. The dragon is invisible, floats in the air, generates no heat and is incorporeal, thus evading all forms of sensory detection.

-- Russell's Teapot, a hypothetical teapot that you cannot prove isn't orbiting the sun.

Of course, all of these examples were designed in good fun. Bertrand Russell does not actually believe that there is a teapot orbiting the sun. However, there is no way to definitively prove that these fanciful claims aren't true, which demonstrates the total absurdity of this line of thinking.

 

God should be able to find us, so give up the God search

After spending 35 years searching for God, some time ago I came to the belated conclusion that this is a really stupid thing to do.

For if God is too ignorant, or too uncaring, or too weak, or too busy with other stuff to find us, why should we exert any effort to search for a God who is much more limited than a human being?

Consider: experts say that if you're lost outdoors here on Earth, the best thing to do is stay put if you're unsure where to go and get unlost. (See here, here, and here.)

One reason to do this is that those looking for you will have it easier if you aren't wandering around aimlessly, expanding the area that needs to be searched. 

Note that I said "those looking for you." When people are lost, other people jump into action to try to find them, often at considerable risk to themselves. We humans care about each other. If someone needs help badly, almost always they'll get it.

God, though, assuming God exists (a highly dubious assumption), clearly isn't as compassionate as an average person, since God demands that we search for Him/Her/It rather than finding us and taking us to safety in God's abode, often termed "heaven."

It's understandable why an ever-increasing percentage of people decide to give up on this ridiculous game of hide-and-seek.

If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, and present everywhere, then why does God hide and demand that we do the seeking? That's what an asshole of a supreme being would do. Rather than waste time trying to please such a jerk, just say no to searching for God.

If you have an urge to know God, and feel there's a non-zero probability God exists and is worthy of being known, I suggest that you heed the advice of survival experts.

Stay right where you are. Ask God to find you. Then relax and live your life. If God shows up one day in a can't-be-denied fashion, great. If God continues to be absent, also great. Either way, you haven't wasted time and energy searching for a God who probably doesn't even exist.

I'm an atheist. That word means "not a theist." Meaning, us atheists don't believe in God because there's no demonstrable evidence God exists.

But most atheists, me certainly included, aren't 100% certain that God is a fiction. Being scientifically minded, I'm not 100% certain about anything, the way of science. So I'm open to the remote possibility that God could appear and make me into a believer, a theist. 

This is why I like to spend a bit of time in that drowsy period when I'm in bed at night, about to fall asleep, saying "God...God...God...".

I don't view this as a means of searching for God, as a mantra might be used. Instead, I see it as a sort of atheist locator beacon. Climbers will take a physical locator beacon with them in case they run into trouble while climbing a mountain.

My "God...God...God..." is like a GPS signal to me. Sure, if God exists and is omniscient, God should be able to know where everybody and everything in the universe is. I just like the idea of sending out a one word communication to God just in case God needs a mental locator beacon.

Plus, this helps me get to sleep. Not surprisingly, so far I've gotten no sign that God has found me. If this does happen, I'll be sure to write a post about it. And maybe change the name of this blog to Church of the Churched.

Could this happen? Sure. Is it at all likely to happen? Absolutely not.

God, like money, is real only because of the human mind

As I noted in a previous post about Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, I'm enjoying the book more now that I'm past the introductory chapters.

One reason is that Barrett doesn't just describe how emotions are made. She embeds that description in larger issues. For example, her "Emotions As Social Reality" chapter starts off with the classic question, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound?

Even though I should know better, when I ponder this question my first intuitive reaction is to visualize a big tree falling in a forest with no one around, and it sure does make a sound. 

But that's my imagination talking, not reality. Meaning, I forget that the question says no one is present to hear it, and that includes me -- even though I'm just visualizing the tree falling, not experiencing it in physical reality.

It's easy to make this sort of mistake. After all, for each of us, the only way we know anything about the world and our surrounding universe is through the human brain. So for us, reality basically is synonymous with "how we experience reality."

This is true even on the cosmic level, though scientists likely are less prone to this thinking error. 

I wonder, how would the universe appear if there was no consciousness in it? I wrote about this back in 2007 in Consider a cosmos with no consciousness. 

I try to imagine a cosmos with no consciousness. No human awareness. No animal awareness. No plant awareness. No alien life form awareness. No angelic awareness. No awareness of any kind. None at all.

(Note: I consider “consciousness” and “awareness” to be terms pointing to the same mysterious phenomenon, as this Wikipedia article implies).

Now, this is where the thought experiment should end, because it’s already failed. For I’m aware. And awareness, or consciousness, obviously can’t envision a cosmos with no awareness, for the same reason I can’t picture what the world would be like without me in it.

Nevertheless, I keep forging ahead because the experiment is so intriguing, ignoring the impassible existential abyss that’s stopped me in my tracks.

I consider a universe with no life, no awareness, no sentience. It’s easy to do. I think: “What a marvelously simple thought experiment!” The universe appears to me just as it does now, planets, stars and galaxies filling the fabric of space, yet with nobody conscious of it.

Obvious questions then crash the party of my thought experiment: Who is doing the considering of this cosmos with no consciousness? From what perspective is this entity contemplating the universe?

It dawns on me that this entity, namely me, is equipped with eyes that translate a certain wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation into perceptions of which I’m aware. Photographs of distant galaxies, for example, from which I derive some of the raw imaginative material for my thought experiment.

Yet what if I had the body of a bat and sensed with sonar? Or that of a snake with heat-sensing capabilities? The world would look entirely different.

So my envisioning of the cosmos as illuminated by light is terribly anthropomorphic, a fact I’m reminded of every time I walk the dog and watch her spending enthralled minutes sniffing a bush that my smell-impaired brain considers to be nothing special.

So not surprisingly, Barrett's answer is:

A falling tree itself makes no sound. Its descent merely creates vibrations in the air and the ground. These vibrations become sound only if something special is present to receive and translate them: say, an ear connected to a brain...Even after the brain receives these electrical signals, its task is not complete. The wave must still be interpreted as the sound of a toppling tree. For this, the brain needs the concept of "Tree" and what trees can do, such as fall in a forest.

A tree is indisputably real, though. So is a forest. And so is the cosmos, or universe. While these things appear the way they do to us only because of how human consciousness operates, there's little or no doubt that something would be there whether or not humans or indeed any other form of awareness is.

This is similar to how Barrett views human emotions.

A third and final riddle is, "Are emotions real?" You might think this question is ridiculous, a classic example of academic indulgence. Of course emotions are real. Think about the last time you were thrilled or sad or furious. These were clearly real feelings.

But in fact, this third riddle is like the falling tree and the red apple: a dilemma about what exists in the world versus in the human brain. The riddle forces us to confront our assumptions about the nature of reality and our role in creating it. But here, the answer is a bit more complex, because it depends on what we mean by "real."

Barrett explains that some things fall in a perceiver-independent category, such as subatomic particles. If there were no humans, there would still be subatomic particles. (Such was the case for virtually every moment of the universe's 13.7 billion year existence, until very recently.)

She goes on to say that "Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all constructed in the mind of a perceiver."

So these are examples of social reality. Human civilization, Barrett says, is literally built with social reality. Money, to offer another example, only has value because we human give it value. Otherwise money is just a piece of paper or electronic digits.

Yet this doesn't make money less important to humans (though it is utterly meaningless to our dog and other animals, or to a person who lacked the concept of "money"). 

Likewise, I see the notion of God as akin to that of money. It has immense value to people who imbibe the concept of "God" with meaning. But for those of us who don't embrace that concept, "God" is just a word that, like "money," only has meaning to those who create that meaning in their own mind. 

Unlike a tree, there's no evidence that God exists outside of the human mind. Thus God has even less significance that a tree falling in a forest with no one present to hear it, since that tree possesses an independent reality while God doesn't.

School board ditches pledge of allegiance due to "under God" language

Nice to see the Fargo, North Dakota school board did the right thing and stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance at its meetings after a school board member made some great arguments about why this didn't fit with their policy of inclusion.

After all, "under God" does indeed refer to the Judeo-Christian god. If the pledge said "under gods, or no god," that would be an accurate reflection of the wide variety of religious beliefs in the United States, which includes atheists and agnostics who don't believe in any god.

To see a brief video of the persuasive argument used by the school board member, check out Fargo School Board nixes Pledge of Allegiance due to 'under God' phrase.

If God doesn't exist, what difference does this make?

If my wife didn't exist, that would make a huge difference in my life for the worse. Same goes if my daughter, her husband, and my granddaughter didn't exist. I'd feel the loss terribly.

But when it comes to God, so what? 

God has had absolutely zero influence on me during my 73 years of living. I've never had any sort of relationship with God. 

The only effect God has ever had on me came from my attitude toward God, my belief or lack thereof in God, my imaginings about God. 

So if God exists, or if God doesn't exist, that makes no difference to me. Or I'd say, to anyone else, for we all create God in our image, or non-image.

There's no evidence that God has ever had any effect on anybody. All we can say is that believing in God, or not believing in God, has effects on people.

This is much different from, say, gravity. Gravity, unlike God, clearly is real. I drop something and it falls to the floor. That's gravity at work.

If gravity didn't exist, that newfound lack would change life on Earth so dramatically, life wouldn't even be possible anymore.

With God, though, believers and unbelievers in God live their lives in the same way, because God has no evident causal influence on anything or anyone.

If you disagree, share in a comment exactly how you know God makes a difference in your life.

What would be different if God didn't exist? To atheists like me, that's a trick question, since we're virtually 100% certain that God is a fantasy, so God already doesn't exist in the lives of believers.

Again, only their belief in God exists, not God.

As noted in a recent blog post, Philip K. Dick said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

When people stop believing in God, God goes away. This shows that God isn't real. By contrast, stop believing in gravity. You'll find that gravity is unaffected by belief.

How to reply to 14 crazy things religious believers say

Since it's July 4, Independence Day, here in the United States, I thought I'd mark the occasion by composing 14 replies to some crazy stuff religious believers might say. This is in line with my commitment to spiritual independence. And also because, as I said in a post on my HinesSight blog, I'm not feeling good about our political independence these days.

Enjoy...

If someone says, God must exist eternally, because the cosmos couldn't create itself, reply: If nothing created an eternal God, then nothing could have created an eternal cosmos, the difference being that the cosmos clearly is real, and there's no demonstrable evidence of God.

If someone says, Consciousness is immaterial, unrelated to the physical brain, reply: Then if I hit you over the head with this baseball bat, really hard, you'll still be normally conscious. I'm ready to try this experiment after you sign a form releasing me of all liability. Are you up for this?

If someone says, I have complete faith in life after death being better than this life, reply: Then why haven't you committed suicide yet?

If someone says, Atheists are immoral because only God and His messengers know the difference between right and wrong, reply: I double-dare you to tell this to the Dalai Lama, face-to-face, since Buddhism doesn't believe in God.

If someone says, I've had a personal experience of God, reply: And I've had a personal experience of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, so I win, 3 to 1!

If someone says, God has given humans dominion over all creatures great and small, reply: Excellent! Don't you have a dog and cat? I've been having a craving for a canine/feline stew, so crate them up and I won't have to shop for dinner.

If someone says, Anyone who rejects God is doomed to hell, reply: I'm sorry to hear of your impending horrific afterlife. Since there are thousands of different gods, you've rejected all but your single chosen god, so all those other gods are going to be super-pissed at you.

If someone says, My guru is God in Human Form and he deserves my selfless service, reply: What a coincidence! I'm also God in Human Form and have a lot of household chores that need doing. Here's my address. Look forward to seeing you soon. 

If someone says, God is real because I feel blissful when I think of Him, reply: It sounds just like how I feel whenever I think of Trump being convicted of a conspiracy to defraud Congress by plotting the January 6 insurrection, and thereby prevented from ever holding public office again.

If someone says, Words are powerless to describe the Almighty Lord, reply: Then why don't you shut the fuck up.

If someone says, Science is a pitifully poor way to know reality compared to mystical wisdom, reply: I look forward to getting your smartphone, computer, car, television, microwave, and all the other devices you own that are founded on modern science, since you're so dismissive of scientific knowledge. 

If someone says, Atheism is a belief system just as much as religions are, reply: Guess you also consider that people who have no interest in golf are believers in not-playing-golf, even though they never think about golf except when someone asks why they don't play that game. 

If someone says, There are no atheists in foxholes, reply: How do you know? Can you speak the language of foxes?

If someone says, Near-death experiences prove there's life after death, reply: Do you understand the difference between "near-death" and "death"?

How the heck could God create humans in her own image?

Today I was planning to write about another subject, but after responding to a commenter who embraces the idea that humans are made in the image of God (who I prefer to view as a nonexistent female, hence this blog post title), I went with that notion.

I'm not sure why Andrew Stephens shared the links in his comment. I'm assuming he uses Musk and Harari as examples of godless secularists, which probably is accurate. Personally, I admire both of these men, being a happy user of Musk's groundbreaking Starlink satellite internet system and having enjoyed each of Harari's brilliantly written books.

Brian, you will be pleased to know that Elon Musk wants to start human trials with Neuralink this year. https://www.wired.com/video/watch/wired-news-and-science-the-science-behind-elon-musks-neuralink-brain-chip

Also, Yuval Noah Harari describes humans as 'hackable animals' and 'useless eaters'. https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/hope-people-believe-in-scientists-instead-of-religious-leaders-yuval-noah-harari-on-covid-19-pandemic-1666859-2020-04-14

Some of us prefer to believe that humans are made in the image of God.

This was my reply.

Andrew, there's also some of us who prefer to believe that humans are made in the image of humans, and that dogs are made in the image of dogs, and that giraffes... you get the idea.

Do you actually think that God, the supposed creator of this vast universe, looks like a human? I realize that this is how God typically is depicted, an old white guy rocking a cool long beard, but this notion seems really dubious.

So what is it about humans that makes you believe we are the image of God? When I see the news each day, this strikes us as exceedingly unlikely. To offer a couple of examples, what is it about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump you find godlike?

If God is good with invading Ukraine and trying to overturn an election, I'm pleased to be an atheist.

I should also mention that it's as certain as anything in science that humans evolved into our present Homo sapiens species over millions of years. Billions, actually, if we go back to the first cellular life on Earth. Given your theory, at what point did humans become made in the image of God?

Was it only when Homo sapiens appeared on the planet? If so, what changed in the nature of Homo sapiens that wasn't godlike before our species evolved into its current form? Or do you believe other species in our evolutionary family tree, like the Neanderthals, also were made in the image of God?

I'm curious, because this whole "made in the image of God" thing has never made sense to me. It just seems way too anthropomorphic, aside from the fact there's no demonstrable evidence for God. If God exists, a big "if," I don't see how humans would be made in the image of God but not, say, alien beings in a galaxy far, far away.

Or do you consider that all conscious beings are made in the image of God? If so, I'll tell our dog the good news.

Proving how clueless I am about Christian theology, I had to Google "how are humans made in the image of God" before composing this post to learn that the image of God idea comes from Genesis in the Old Testament, so it is a tenet of Christianity and Judaism.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27).

Not surprisingly, there's no agreement about what it means for God to have created humans in her own image. As I said in my reply to Andrew, the Genesis passage predates our modern understanding of evolution, so the idea that God created Adam and Eve is, of course, ridiculous.

However, one website I came across asks, How could humans have evolved and still be in the "Image of God"? I was curious to know the answer, but it wasn't very persuasive.

How might these models of the image of God fit with evolution? At BioLogos we believe that God created humans in biological continuity with all life on earth; the distinct cognitive abilities we have were given to us by God through this gradual process. We also believe that God created us as spiritual beings; God established a unique relationship with humanity by endowing us with his image and calling us to an elevated position within the created order. Science cannot judge our spiritual capacities or divine calling, so there is no contradiction. These various views are affirmed by individuals in the BioLogos community, and in fact the views are not mutually exclusive.

Good try, though this approach goes against the plain language in Genesis that God created humans, not  that God set up a gradual billions-of-years-long process for Darwinian natural selection to come up with us Homo sapiens. 

I took a glance at some other Google search results, but my head started to hurt from reading Christian gobbledygook, so I didn't get very far with this. If you have a greater tolerance for that than I do, some links are here, here, here, here, here, and here. 

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.

Will Smith thinks God called on him to slap Chris Rock

In case you're one of the few people in the world who isn't aware of what happened at the 2022 Oscars show last night, here's a recap in a New York Times story. 

Will Smith apologized to the comedian Chris Rock on Monday evening for slapping him during Sunday night’s Oscars telecast after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which administers the awards, denounced his actions and opened an inquiry into the incident.

...The incident unfolded Sunday night after Mr. Rock made a joke about the buzzed hair of Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia, a condition that leads to hair loss. Mr. Smith responded by walking onto the stage of the Dolby Theater and slapping Mr. Rock, leaving stunned viewers wondering at first if the blow might have been scripted until Mr. Smith returned to his seat and warned him to stop talking about his wife, using expletives.

Here's a You Tube video that explains the incident, complete with some annoying ads that can be skipped after a few seconds.

I watched every minute of the Oscars, mostly because I wanted to see how many times Ukraine was mentioned by a presenter or Oscar winner. As I said in a post on my HinesSight blog, Ukraine got a disturbingly small amount of attention from the Hollywood elite.

The Will Smith slap made a lot more news. At first I thought it was scripted, but when Smith won an Oscar for his role as tennis father Richard Williams in "King Richard," his annoying acceptance speech made clear that he had something to apologize for. 

Here's the first part of that speech.

Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family. In this time in my life, in this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world.

Making this film I got to protect Aunjanue Ellis, who is one of the most strongest, most delicate people I ever met. I got to protect Saniyya and Demi, the two actresses that played Venus and Serena. I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.

I know to do what we do, you gotta be able to take abuse, and you gotta be able to have people talk crazy about you. In this business, you gotta be able to have people disrespecting you and you gotta smile and you gotta pretend like that‘s OK.

But Richard Williams, and what I loved, thank you D. Denzel (Washington) said to me a few minutes ago, he said, “At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.”

It’s like I want to be a vessel for love. I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena.

I just spit, I hope they didn’t see that.

I want to say thank you to Venus and Serena and the entire Williams family for entrusting me with your story. That’s what I want to do. I want to be an ambassador of that kind of love and care and concern.

I want to apologize to the Academy, I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees.

I called his speech "annoying" because I find religious hypocrites way worse than regular hypocrites. Will Smith said he's overwhelmed by what God is calling on him to do and be in this world.

That must include going up on stage at the Oscars and slapping a comedian who makes a joke about your wife's hair, after which Smith yelled profanities at Chris Rock. Sure sounds like something God would approve of -- particularly the Old Testament God, who was big on killing people.

Smith actually believes he's a loving person. Delusion has no bounds when you're a religious believer who thinks God is guiding you. A loving person doesn't do what Smith did. 

Someone who loves his wife and considers that a joke about her hair was out of comedic bounds could have sat in his front row seat and loudly said something like this to Chris Rock: "Hey man, that joke about my wife was tasteless. We need to talk about this after the show."

That would have been defending your wife, while not acting like a complete jerk. But, hey, when you think God is guiding you, there's no limit to what you feel is justified. That's how we get religious wars. Plus, the speech by Smith shows that he views himself as a martyr, just like Jesus.

It was dismaying to see Smith get a standing ovation from the Oscars audience. Sure, winning Best Actor deserves acclaim. However, slapping a comedian for making a joke about your wife deserves criticism. 

So the audience should have sat in their chairs and given Smith some polite applause. What's galling to me is that no award winner or presenter spoke up about the horrendous damage Putin is doing to Ukraine, shelling residential areas, killing women and children, destroying entire cities.

Since the Oscars audience gave Smith a standing ovation, maybe they're OK with violence. Which would be decidedly strange, since most of Hollywood leans liberal, being eager to defend attacks against Blacks,  the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized groups.

Apparently the 3.5 million refugees from Ukraine aren't marginalized enough for the Hollywood elite. Nor is a comedian at the Oscars. Maybe if they claimed God is on their side, as Smith did, they'd get more attention.

Fear of God's wrath is a lousy reason to be religious

Life is difficult. This is something almost everyone can agree on, believers and atheists alike.

But only religious people add to life's difficulties by imagining God inflicts pain and suffering on those who don't comply with whatever commandments their religion believes in.

I was a Catholic briefly as a child. I readily admit that I've never learned why confession is, or at least was, a big part of being a Catholic.

I simply remember that as part of my first communion, I had to confess my sins to a priest.

Being so young, I wasn't much of a sinner. So the best sin I could come up with was not going to mass regularly. The priest told me to recite some Our Father and Hail Mary prayers, which apparently absolved me of my sin and any retribution from God.

Fear of upsetting God is common in religions. When a guru or other holy person is considered to be God incarnate, or at least good friends with God, devotees fear upsetting them also.

Today I came across three separate references related to this notion of fearing God's wrath from very different sources.

This is part of Chapter 18 in Armin Navabi's book, "Why There is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God." That chapter is titled You'll become a believer when you are desperate for God's help.

Desperation often is born out of fear.

The idea behind this is that it's easy to be an atheist when your life is going well, but once you experience hard times, you'll believe in God or at least hope that he is real.

While this claim may be true for some people, it's certainly not a universal truth among atheists. Moreover, the existence of "deathbed conversions" and similar experiences does not prove the existence of God.

They only suggest that people are at their most irrational when frightened, in pain or delirious. The intense fear of death may drive some to accept illogical or irrational views out of desperation for comfort or a way to relieve or lessen their intense anxiety.

...Then, it's not that someone is desperate for God; they're desperate for some kind of comfort and emotional belief. The idea that fear could drive you toward the belief in God only goes to suggest that religious claims are commonly fear-based and not rooted in actual logic or evidence.

Here's a quote from a story in the February 28, 2022 issue of The New Yorker: After the Fall -- The Taliban fought for decades to retake Afghanistan. How will they rule? The Taliban are big on instilling fear, using the Muslim religion as justification for harsh measures.

He [Ibrahim Haqqani] spoke with the assurance of an all-knowing parent: "Severity is a global principle. Whenever there is chaos in a country, strict measures are put in place, and when things become normal again the strict measures can be relaxed." 

He went on, "God is patient. If a tribe takes the wrong path, denying the Quran and such things, then God gives them severe punishment. This is God's way and the world's way." 

Lastly, this is a passage from Johnjoe McFadden's book about William of Occam and the rise of modern science, "Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe." This is how people looked upon things in medieval times when plague was ravaging Europe.

The first epidemic burned itself out within four or five years but, over the following decades, outbreaks of the plague continued to devastate Europe with grim regularity. Looking for someone to blame, frightened rulers and citizens targeted the Jews and thousands were murdered.

Many others believed that man's wickedness was the cause of the divinely inflicted suffering so, in a bid to appease an angry God, donned sackcloth and ashes to wander from town to town to gather and mutually scourge each other with iron-tipped whips.

Yet flagellating, penance, prayer or purges did nothing to placate the fierce God. None were spared.

...With death around every corner, the scholastics abandoned scientific speculation and took to their prayers. It would be more than a hundred and fifty years before anyone else in medieval Europe took any serious interest in science.

What if God hates religions?

I'm an atheist who likes to imagine how God thinks. What allows me to do this is the same reason anyone is able to make a claim about God.

Since there's no convincing evidence that God exists, every person has an equal opportunity to imagine what this non-existent entity is like -- in much the same way that anyone can come up with a fictional story about characters they conjure up in their mind.

So I enjoy visualizing how irritated God is at religious people.

God is fine with people who use drugs, drink too much, watch porn all the time, have sex with anybody they want, get an abortion, and engage in any other sort of supposedly sinful behavior.

But when it comes to being religious, God absolutely hates this disgusting insult to all that is good and holy. I know, because God is using me as a channel to set humanity straight. Like all prophets, I shall speak the Word of God.

The only difference being, what follows is absolutely true.

If you don't believe me, too bad. Only I can testify to the majesty of the revelation revealed below, because ONLY I AM ME -- God's first and most important commandment.

God hates religions and religious people for lots of reasons. Chief among them is that no one knows anything about God. They're just guessing what God is like and what God wants. I'm no exception. However, God loves me for not pretending to know what God is like and what God wants.

I just make crap up about God, and am pleased to admit this. That pleases God mightily. 

God is especially pissed when religious people claim they have a special relationship with the Almighty. As if! God wants everyone to know that they all are equally beloved by God -- though God has a special fondness for atheists, since we acknowledge God's non-existence, and God likes truth-tellers.

Even if God existed, God tells me, there's no way Christians, for example, would be viewed any differently than Rastafarians or devotees of Zeus. The notion that God looks upon some people more favorably than other people is so fucking absurd, God lacks words to describe the absurdity.

Which is why I've been chosen to speak for God. 

God doesn't play favorites. When death comes, every person is going to end up in the exact same place: nowhere. And in the same condition: nothingness. Nowhere and nothingness... these are two words that please God beyond all others, since they describe the nature of God perfectly.

So what's the harm in believing in God? I asked God this question and got a one-word flaming response that burned its way into the depths of my consciousness.

Everything. 

Since God's nature is to be nowhere and exist as nothingness, each and every bullshit description of God that takes itself at all seriously -- and believe me, this revelation doesn't fall prey to that fatal error -- is blasphemy piled upon blasphemy with a big topping of blasphemy.

That's why being religious puts you on the Road to Hell. Or it would, if Hell existed. Which it does, because I've just imagined it. But my revelations about Hell must await another blog post.

Sneak peek: there's eternal suffering there for all who dare to speak of God without feeling in their innermost heart, "I'm just bullshitting."

Atheists more likely to believe in paranormal than religious people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why it makes no sense to ask for evidence that God doesn't exist

Over the years I've written numerous blog posts about the near-impossibility of proving a negative such as God doesn't exist. 

This isn't the way both science and common sense work.

We don't ask for evidence that invisible fairies aren't making our cars move. Since cars have engines, or motors if they're electric, there's lots of evidence in favor of engines/motors, so no need to deal with the invisible fairy hypothesis.

Same is the case with God. Or at least how atheists look upon God. 

Below is how Armin Navabi addresses this issue in his book, "Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God."

"There's no evidence that God doesn't exist."

When confronted with criticism, some theists will pull out this argument in an attempt to shift the burden of proof toward the critic. Although this tactic can feel very clever, it opens a door to absurdity.

This argument seems to suggest that we believe in everything, even things we have yet to think about, until that belief is proven false. That's simply not a logical way to perceive reality.

If the criteria for something being accepted as true was based purely on there being no evidence against it, an endless number of hypothetical objects could suddenly become "real." This has been the source of numerous playful thought experiments by skeptics around the world.

-- The flying spaghetti monster, who created the earth with his noodly appendage.

-- The invisible pink unicorn, whose "believers" logically know that she must be invisible because she has not been seen, yet have faith that she's pink.

-- The dragon in Carl Sagan's garage, a thought experiment he describes in The Demon-Haunted World. The dragon is invisible, floats in the air, generates no heat and is incorporeal, thus evading all forms of sensory detection.

-- Russell's Teapot, a hypothetical teapot that you cannot prove isn't orbiting the sun.

Of course, all of these examples were designed in good fun. Bertrand Russell does not actually believe that there is a teapot orbiting the sun. However, there is no way to definitively prove that these fanciful claims aren't true, which demonstrates the total absurdity of this line of thinking.

Ad hoc arguments

Carl Sagan's invisible dragon argument shows the futility of ad hoc arguments in explaining reality.

An ad hoc argument is one that makes excuses to rationalize away the valid criticisms of an argument without any evidence to support it. When the claimant desperately wants something to be true, she'll often employ an ad hoc argument to counter any arguments to her claim.

The dragon in Carl Sagan's hypothetical garage cannot be seen because it's invisible. A skeptic might press for evidence. But its footprints cannot be observed because it hovers in the air, and the dragon's invisible fire is heatless.

A rationalization can be formed to explain the absence of any form of evidence. These rationalizations don't make the original claim true. Indeed, it's easiest to make ad hoc arguments about things that don't really exist because that frees you up to create increasingly fanciful arguments.

When applied to theism, this ad hoc reasoning can be seen in the increasingly vague descriptions of God. The rationalizations discussed in the last chapter -- that God cannot be comprehended or described -- fall under the ad hoc fallacy.

Such rationalizations make God so vague that it becomes impossible to refute the idea, but they get the claimant nowhere closer to proving his claim. 

Disbelief is not the same as belief in something else

Telling an atheist to prove there is no God automatically assumes that this is what the atheist believes. While gnostic atheists confidently believe that there are no deities, many other atheists are agnostic atheists. 

In other words, these people do not believe in any gods, but they do not claim to be certain that gods do not exist. Gnostic atheists, meanwhile, do feel confident saying that no gods exist. Both are valid types of atheism.

It is important to note that atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. To understand the difference between atheist and agnosticism, visit AtheismVsAgnosticism.com

Lack of belief in deities is enough to classify someone as an atheist. Lacking belief in something does not mean that you believe it to be false; it just means that you have no conviction that it's true. 

For example, a friend of yours may believe that Ford is the best car company in the world. You have no particular opinion one way of the other. You don't believe that Ford is better than any other car brand, but you also don't know that it's not the best car brand. In this situation, you would be agnostic about your friend's claim.

In actuality, most people are atheist about at least some gods.

After all, there are thousands of gods throughout the history of world theology, but the majority of religious people have no problem in disbelieving Zeus, Thor, or Anubis. Jews and Muslims have no problem denying the divinity of Christ. Monotheists are well practiced in disbelieving other gods.

As Richard Dawkins put it, atheists simply take this one god further.

Religions demand perfect evidence from anyone rebutting their claims but offer none for their own claims. If faced with convincing evidence in favor of any deity, we should reconsider our position. 

But we need to ask questions and go where the evidence leads us, rather than try to lead the evidence where we like. By questioning everything, we follow the evidence, rather than trying to force the evidence to fit our presupposed conclusions.

I'm an atheist who has a personal relationship with God

The title of this blog post is surprising, right? How is it possible for an atheist to have a personal relationship with God?

Answer: it's easy. I simply define "God" a lot differently than religious believers do. As described in Atheists should redefine "God" as all that exists, I look upon God as being synonymous with reality, or existence.

So I find God awe-inspiring, mysterious, impossible to fathom. 

After all, the greatest mystery -- one which almost certainly never will be unraveled by humans -- is that existence exists. Or as the mystery often is described, why is there something rather than nothing?

I've written quite a few blog posts on this subject. It fascinates me. I never get tired of pondering it, even though I never get close to grasping a possible answer. (I'm in good company; no one else ever has either.)

Saying that God is the creator of existence is no answer at all, because the obvious question arises, who created God? 

If the supposed answer is no one, since God always has existed, the same answer can be applied to why the cosmos exists. There's no why, because the universe always has existed.

Which brings us back to the same question: why is there something rather than nothing?

Doesn't matter whether that something is the physical cosmos or a supernatural God. Each is something that must have always existed, since something can't be produced from absolute nothing. Thus the mystery of existence remains.

I love a good mystery, and this is the grandest mystery of all. 

That's why I'm pleased to have a personal relationship with God. I like being intimate with the mystery of existence. Like I said, to me God is synonymous with existence. 

It isn't that God is a person, obviously. I don't believe in a personal God. However, I do have confidence that I'm a person. Thus my personal relationship with God is all on my end, since so far as I know, existence can't have a relationship with anybody.

I do think that it'd be way cool if a personal God, a conscious being with all that omni stuff like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, actually was real. So occasionally I alter my strict atheist conception of God to include that possibility. 

"Hey, God, if you're out there, pay me a visit. Love to have a chat with you. You know where to find me, since you're all-knowing." 

Haven't gotten a reply yet. Thus I'm placing most of my philosophical bet on the God that is equivalent to everything in existence. This includes my conception of "God," since a concept is a neurological pattern in a brain, so it is existent.

I like my conception of God because it points to something that truly exists: namely, existence. Otherwise "God" is just an idea that refers to nothing other than itself. Imagine that "music" was just a concept and there was no actual music in the world. 

Then people would discuss the possible meaning of "music" without anyone being able to point to music that can be heard by the ears, rather than merely thought of with the mind.

This is the situation with every religion.

Religious believers chatter on endlessly about the glory of God, blah, blah, blah, but nobody ever can show that this God they're glorifying actually exists. Whereas I can play a huge variety of music in my living room by firing up the Sonos iPhone app and having it play songs on my speakers.

Further, music existed before humans did. It's possible to view birdsong as music, thunder as music, porpoise/whale communications as music. So my relationship with music has tremendous depth, because music is so much more than a concept.

I have a personal relationship with music. But music doesn't have a personal relationship with me. Same applies to God. My relationship with God isn't conceptual or a matter of belief. It is absolutely real, since the God I revere is everything that exists.

In short, reality. 

Atheists should redefine "God" as all that exists

The word "God" has a strong hold on people. So strong, even atheists sometimes use it, as in "God damn it!" Or "God bless you" after a sneeze. 

So I've come to believe that we atheists need to appropriate "God" for our own purpose -- living without superstition, supernatural fantasy, and blind faith. 

There's nothing wrong with that word, just as there's nothing wrong with any word.

A word is simply made up of letters. The meaning those letters represent is entirely in the hands of humans. Unlike "gravity," say, there is no objective reality that the usual meaning of "God" points to: a divine being who created our universe and takes an interest in what people do.

Given that thousands of religions exist, each with a different understanding of what "God" refers to, it makes sense for atheists to define that word in a fashion that makes sense to us.

More specifically, me, since naturally I don't claim to speak for all atheists. 

My preference is to view "God" as referring to all that exists. Yes, this is close to pantheism. However, I reject the theism part of pantheism. My notion is both simpler and more radical. 

In addition to referring to the universe, or the cosmos, as all that exists, I like the idea of being able to use God as shorthand for the same concept. God is reality. The reality that we know now, plus whatever additions to reality become known in the future.

Obviously this includes the laws of nature. 

Thus "God willing" is equivalent to saying "if the laws of nature bring this about;" "I pray to God that..." is the same as saying "I hope that..."; "Thank you, God" becomes "Thank you, reality"; "God is good" means "I see goodness in what exists."

Now, I realize that most people would see no point in repurposing "God" in this fashion. I agree in large part. But not entirely. 

Like I said, the word "God" is impossible to ignore. From an early age children are exposed to the various meanings of this word. As we grow older, we choose whether to embrace a traditional religious view of God or some other view. Yet just as pantheism includes the term "theism," so does "atheism." 

Not believing in God still brings up the notion of God, in much the same way someone who dislikes country music has to cite what is abhorred in saying "I hate country music." 

This is one reason I've become fond of the idea that there is a God atheists can embrace. When God means everything that exists, I can say, "Yes, I believe in God." 

True, this is the same as saying "I believe in reality." But that goes without saying, really. Who doesn't? Even psychotic people believe in the reality of their own deluded thoughts. 

I just don't want religious believers to be the only ones who decide what "God" means. For several weeks I've enjoyed playing around with using this word in the sense I've described. It's working for me.

When something goes well in my life, at times I say to myself "Thank you, God." I'm affirming that reality, or existence, has brought about a condition that is pleasing to me. I don't expect any response from reality, since the God I'm thanking isn't a conscious being.

Instead, I'm redefining a familiar word in a way that fits with how I've come to understand life and the world: as a vastly complex interconnected web of causes and effects that extend back to the big bang and forward into a possibly infinite future. 

Here I am, a very small cog in the machinery of the cosmos. Or, of God. My actions have some small effect on the rest of reality, but mostly I'm under the sway of causes and conditions that are hugely vaster and more powerful.

Calling all that "God" feels good to me. And like Janis Joplin sang, feeling good is good enough for me.

If "God" is all there is, science is the way to know God

The August 16, 2021 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article about the new James Webb Space Telescope that will be launched soon. It will be much more powerful than the Hubble space telescope. 

I liked the end of "The Youthful Universe." You can read it below.

Science truly is our best way of learning about "God" -- if by that word is meant everything that exists. That's how I've come to view God.

Sometimes during my day I'll say, "Thank you God." I'm not thanking a divine being. I don't believe in supernatural entities.

Rather, I use "God" as shorthand for the marvelous reality that is evident everywhere from the mysterious quantum realm of the very small to the unfathomable vastness of the universe that will be explored by the James Webb Space Telescope. 

So for me thanking God is simply an appreciation of the causes and effects inherent in the laws of nature that produced the thing I feel thankful for.

Once you get a taste of science, the offerings of religion seem horribly bland. Science, as the story excerpt below says, is about knowing. Religions are about believing, a much less appealing alternative.

The seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler studied the physical world for the messages he felt that God had written into the Book of Nature. Galileo, in fact, had supporters inside and outside the Church.

Sometimes people in power have been reluctant to acknowledge the truths that science uncovers. Each time we look farther, our universe gets larger. Or, depending on your perspective, we get smaller.

Astonomers take the position -- an incidentally ethical one -- of being radically in favor of knowing. 

Bob Williams, the former head of the Space Telescope Science Institute, grew up in a Baptist family in Southern California, one of five children.

He'd wanted to be an astronomer since the seventh grade, when he received a pamphlet on astronomy in science class; he then saved his paper-route money to  buy a telescope.

He earned a scholarship to U.C. Berkeley and studied astronomy there. 

"My father didn't want me to go to college," he said. "He told me that if I went to get an education I would lose my faith. And he was right about that. We were raised to take every word in the Bible as literally true. But then I was learning about continental drift. About evolution."

Williams said that he is often asked about faith.

Many traditions use the term "God" to mean, basically, everything that is. In that view, the universe itself is the Book, and astronomers are reading it as it is.

Sorry. No winner in "Tell me why you believe in God" contest.

Well, the first entries are in, and I'm not impressed. 

Four days ago I invited visitors to this blog to leave a comment on my "Tell me why you believe in God" post. 

I said:

I'm defining "God" as a conscious supernatural being with miraculous powers. If you're a believer with a markedly different definition, include that definition in your comment.

The responses were decidedly underwhelming. Some were interesting, but none were directly related to what I wanted.

Why someone believes in God.

This is surprising, since it sure seems like quite a few regular readers of this blog do believe in God. And in many or most cases, the God they believe in sure seems to be along the lines of how I defined God.

So why the vague, meandering, disjointed responses?

Hard to say. 

Since I'm an atheist, my #1 hypothesis is that since God almost certainly doesn't exist, no one has a good reason to believe in God, for the same reason no one has a good reason to believe in Santa Claus.

If I asked Why do you believe in the moon?, a reasonable response would be "Because I can see it in the sky and there's solid evidence that humans have landed on the moon and brought back rock samples."

That's a simple declarative sentence.

Yet no one provided a similarly simple declarative sentence about why they believe in God. I expected that someone would say, "Because a holy book says God exists," or "Because a holy person says God exists."

That's pretty much the reasons I would have given during my believing days. They aren't bad reasons.  They're the reasons most Christians would give, I suspect.

Instead, the main theme of the comments on my blog post was "I'm open to the possibility that God exists and am searching for the answer to this." 

OK. But most atheists would say the same thing.

Take me. I'm open to the possibility that God exists and I'm searching for the answer to this. So far I've seen no demonstrable evidence for God, so I strongly lean in the direction that God is a fantasy.

Another theme was "Words can't capture God, so there's no point in talking about why someone believes in God." 

OK. But words can't capture anything else either.

The word "strawberry" certainly doesn't capture the nature of this red tasty fruit. Yet if I ask a store clerk where the strawberries are, they can point me in the right direction.

Words can't capture a dream. Yet if someone asks me if I dreamed last night, and I remember my dreams, I can describe them. Not perfectly. Not completely. But imperfectly and incompletely. 

I don't tell the person, "I can't say anything about my dreams because they can't be captured in words." I use words as well as I can, then add the caveat, "But what I just said isn't how the dream really seemed to me."

Nothing is. Eating a strawberry is way different from saying "strawberry." However, we can do our best to describe what eating a strawberry is like, because strawberries are real, as is eating them.

So the non-responses to my question about why people believe in God helps solidify my view that good reasons for believing are rare not because God is beyond description, but because no one has had an experience of an actually-existent God.

Tell me why you believe in God

I'm a curious guy. I enjoy learning how people view the Big Questions of Life, including one of the biggest, Does God exist?

I used to answer "Yes." Now I'm an atheist who says, "Almost certainly, no."

But I'm well aware that many of those who visit this blog and leave comments on the posts here are believers in God.

So I'm inviting you to leave a comment on this post that explains why you believe that God exists. Or, if you have some doubts about this, why you're almost certain that God exists.

I'm defining "God" as a conscious supernatural being with miraculous powers. If you're a believer with a markedly different definition, include that definition in your comment.

There's no prize for the most persuasive explanation of why someone believes in God.

However, I'll single the best explanations out for praise in another blog post. Pretty darn good prize! (Unless you were expecting $100.)

"The God Equation" is about Einstein's impersonal god

I bought theoretical physicist Michio Kaku's latest book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, after seeing him interviewed by Stephen Colbert. 

I enjoyed the book, though I agree with some Amazon reviewers that it doesn't really break new ground. But since my understanding of the old ground is shaky, I enjoyed Kaku's take on familiar topics.

Particle physics. Relativity theory. Quantum mechanics. Big bang. The search for common ground between how relativity and quantum theories view reality. String theory.

Spoiler alert: physicists haven't yet come up with a viable Theory of Everything. String theory is the leading candidate, but string theory suffers from not-so-minor drawbacks such as an almost complete lack of ability to test its validity.

To a theoretician, all these criticisms are troublesome but not fatal. But what does cause problems for a theoretician is that the [string theory] model seems to predict a multiverse of parallel universes, many of which are crazier than those in the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter.

...Some might argue that these alternate universes are only mathematical possibilities and are not real. But the problem is that the theory lacks predictive power, since it cannot tell you which of these alternate universes is the real one.

Still, there's a lot to like about string theory.

It could resolve the conflict between relativity theory (space-time is smooth) and quantum theory (the subatomic realm is lumpy) by positing that extremely tiny strings are the fundamental constituents of reality.

Mystics would resonate with that notion, a point I made in my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder. Here's how Kaku puts it.

As a result of the torrent of equations, a new picture was beginning to emerge. Why were there so many particles?

Like Pythagoras more than two thousand years ago, the theory said that each musical note -- each vibration of a string -- represented a particle. Electrons, quarks, and Yang-Mills particles were nothing but different notes on the same vibrating string.

What is so powerful and interesting about the theory is that gravity is necessarily included. Without any extra assumptions, the graviton emerges as one of the lowest vibrations of the string.

...As physicist Edward Witten once said, "String theory is extremely attractive because gravity is forced upon us. All known consistent string theories include gravity, so while gravity is impossible in quantum field theory as we have known it, it's obligatory in string theory."

So while a huge amount of work remains to be done on string theory, there's a possibility it could live up to the title of Kaku's book, The God Equation. 

However, this wouldn't be the God most people worship, but Einstein's God.

In this and other letters, Einstein despaired of answering questions concerning the meaning of life, but he was clear about his thinking concerning God.

One problem, he wrote, is that there are really two kinds of Gods, and we often confuse the two. 

First, there is the personal God, the God that you pray to, the God of the Bible who smites the Philistines and rewards the believers. He did not believe in that God. He did not believe that the God who created the universe interfered in the affairs of mere mortals.

However, he believed in the God of Spinoza -- that is, the God of order in a universe that is beautiful, simple, and elegant. The universe could have been ugly, random, chaotic, but instead it has a hidden order that is mysterious yet profound.

In his final chapter, Kaku speaks about meaning in a familiar fashion that resonates with me.

In the end, I believe that we create our own meaning in the universe.

It is too simple and easy to have some guru come down from the mountaintop, bearing the meaning of the universe. The meaning of life is something that we have to struggle to understand and appreciate.

Having it given to us defeats the whole purpose of meaning.

If the meaning of life were available for free, then it would lose its meaning. Everything that has meaning is the result of struggle and sacrifice, and is worth fighting for.

Humans create God, not the other way around

Since there is no demonstrable evidence that God exists, where does the concept of "God" come from? Obviously, from the minds of humans. We create the idea of God, which includes the fantasy that God created us.

The November 9, 2020 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting review of a book by a Stanford anthropologist, T.M. Luhrmann, "How God Becomes Real."

Basically, by people doing things that conjure up their imagined God, in somewhat the same way as the reader of a novel throws themself into the story line to such a degree, the fictional creation can seem real while the novel is being read.

This is the description of Luhrmann's book on Amazon.

How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people―as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort―by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others―helps to explain the enduring power of faith.

Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more.

A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits―but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.

Here's an excerpt from the review by James Wood. 

Modern Christians in the West like to think of themselves as believers who have left behind any cultic relationship with a usable God. Doubtless not a few of them harbor a special disdain for American Evangelicalism, with its gaudy, prosperous instrumentalism. 

Certainly, if belief were plotted along a spectrum, at one end might lie the austere indescribability of the Jewish or Islamic God ("Silence is prayer to thee," Maimonides wrote) and at the other the noisy, all-too-knowable God of charismatic worship, happy to be chatted to and apparently happy to chat back.

But it is still a spectrum, and, indeed, any kind of petitionary prayer presumes a God onto whom one is projecting local human attributes. In this sense, you could say that Christianity is essentially a form of idolatry.

The difficult, unspeakable Jewish God becomes the incarnated Jesus, a God made flesh, who lived among us, who resembles us. Theodor Adorna and Max Horkheimer blamed Christian anti-Semitism on just this idolatry of the man-God: "Christ the incarnated spirit is the deified sorcerer." The called this "the spiritualization of magic."

Evangelicals are hardly the only Christian believers to draw this Jesus, the deified sorcerer, to them. I'm reminded of that whenever I see professional soccer players crossing themselves as they run onto the field, as if God really cared whether Arsenal beats Manchester United.

Luhrmann would say, with some justice, that in such cases we should focus more on the practice than on the beliefs. Crossing oneself is ritualistic, and she would probably add that the soccer player then performs on the field as if he and his team alone determined the outcome of the game, which is to say that -- in a sense -- he performs as if God didn't exist after all.

In "How God Becomes Real," Luhrmann calls this the art of possessing "flexible ontologies," because "people may talk as if the gods are straightforwardly real, but they don't act that way." A driver who prays that the car will stop without his using the brakes "would seem mad, not devout."

The real world, dependent on the laws of physics, runs easily alongside a highly elaborated and imagined belief-world, which shares several of he properties of fiction-making and fiction-reading. The Vineyard believers, Luhrmann discovers, learn how to "pretend that God is present and to make believe that he is talking back like the very best of buddies."

As with a fictional character, this God is at once absolutely real and not quite real. Luhrmann likens the capacity for imaginative absorption to being "engrossed in good magical fiction of the Harry Potter kind." 

...Her [Luhrmann's] major refuge is a kind of therapeutic pragmatism. She's fond of the verb "work." Prayer works, belief works, real-making works, she says, in the sense that, as far as these believers are concerned, God is made real; and these prayer practices therapeutically change the people who practice them. 

But does prayer "work" in the most important sense, of achieving what it proposes -- which is to communicate with an actually existing God? Luhrmann won't be drawn out, committed as she is to a kind of Feurbachian religious anthropology, in which God is merely the reality we conjure and create through our activities, imaginings, and yearnings.

What God might say, according to Spinoza

The following post turned up in my Facebook feed yesterday. Based on my understanding of Spinoza, I have some doubts that this really reflects his perspective on God, but it might. 

Regardless, I liked what Jillenne Moore shared in her post. (I'm assuming that Moore wrote it.)

When Einstein gave lectures at U.S. universities, the question students asked him most was: Do you believe in God? And he always answered: I believe in the God of Spinoza.

Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher considered one of the great rationalists of 17th century philosophy, along with Descartes.

According to Spinoza, God would say: “Stop praying. I want you to go out into the world and enjoy your life. I want you to sing, have fun and enjoy everything I've made for you.

“Stop going into those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and saying they are my house. My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That's where I live and there I express my love for you.

“Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner, or that your sexuality was a bad thing. Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. So don't blame me for everything that others made you believe.

“Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can't read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son's eyes—you will find me in no book!

“Stop asking me, ‘Will you tell me how to do my job?’ Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you or criticize you, nor get angry or bothered. I am pure love.

“Stop asking for forgiveness, there's nothing to forgive. If I made you, I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies, and best of all, free will. Why would I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? How could I punish you for being the way you are, if I'm the one who made you? Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity? What kind of god would do that?

“Respect your peers, and don't give what you don't want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life—alertness is your guide.

“My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step on the way, not a rehearsal, not a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing here and now—and it is all you need.

“I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues, no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record. You are absolutely free to create in your life. It’s you who creates heaven or hell.

“Live as if there is nothing beyond this life, as if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist. Then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is an afterlife, rest assured that I won't ask if you behaved right or wrong, I'll ask, ‘Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?’

“Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don't want you to believe in me, I want you to believe in you. I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck in your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea.

“Stop praising me. What kind of egomaniac God do you think I am? I'm bored with being praised. I'm tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? Prove it by taking care of yourself, your health, your relationships, the world. Express your joy! That's the way to praise me.

“Stop complicating things and repeating as a parrot what you've been taught about me. Why do you need more miracles? So many explanations?

“The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, that this world is full of wonders.”

Pastor's death shows that COVID-19 is larger than God

The evidence is in: the coronavirus, or COVID-19, is larger than God. Bishop Gerald Glenn, a pastor in Virginia who defied a social distancing warning, now is dead from an infection.

Despite warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to avoid mass gatherings and maintain social distancing, Glenn said in a sermon on March 22, "I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus," and announced he was not afraid to die.

Hopefully this will send a message to other people that they need to trust in science, not in irrational religious leaders.

Bishop Gerald Glenn

Religious people, why do you believe in God?

This blog attracts quite a few religious people, probably because my rational, reasonable, intelligent posts appeal to their subconscious mind, given how much of their conscious awareness is filled with faith-based religious dogma.

So I'd like to offer an opportunity to religious people to explain why they believe in God or some other divine entity. This includes the notion that there's such a thing as "God in human form," which is the basis of Christianity and some other forms of religion.

Leave a comment with you best explanation of why you believe in a higher supernatural power. I'm curious whether any explanations would make sense to an open-minded atheist like me. 

I'd love to see a reason for believing in God that's based on sound demonstrable evidence or a convincing argument. I'm doubtful that any religious believer who visits this blog can supply such a reason, but I'm waiting for it.

Still waiting...

Don't be 100% sure about anything, including God and life after death

In the course of looking through old blog posts yesterday to find those related to death, because I'm working on another book based on my writing on that subject, I came to a couple of posts that made me think, in my usual humble way, Dude, these are fantastic! They make so much sense, it's a freaking secular miracle!

So, behold...

Some ten years later, this is still my best guess about God. Also, about life after death, existence, and the nature of the self. Looks like I’ve reached a pretty stable stage of my atheism.

My best guess about God
May 3, 2010

Nobody knows what ultimate reality is, which religious believers call "God." All we have are guesses, some more defensible than others.

Here's mine — after some forty years of delving into mysticism, spirituality, religiosity, and philosophy. Subject to change, of course. If I've learned anything, it's that there's always more to learn. Or guess about.

I'll be as pithy as possible, a shift from my usual wordiness.

(1) God doesn't exist. Not in the sense of an all-knowing, all-powerful personal or individual consciousness. Or even a universal consciousness, though this is more likely than an anthropomorphic God.

(2) The cosmos is, always has been, always will be. In some form or another. Existence always has existed. If you want an eternal "God" to worship, there it is: existence.

(3) It may well be that our universe is just a very small part of the cosmos. But reality is thoroughly natural, not supernatural. Other universes, if they exist, are as natural as ours.

(4) We'll never understand the ultimate laws of nature. Or even know whether they exist. "Ultimate laws" probably is a human conception, not the way things really are.

(5) The biggest problem with being a member of Homo sapiens also is our biggest evolutionary advance: self-awareness. We are aware of being aware. Unlike other animals, we construct an ego, I-ness, by looping our awareness back onto ourselves.

(6) This creates a fear of death, because we know we're going to die. This creates a desire to exist forever, because we can ponder our non-existence.

(7) Thus springs up religion. Along with notions of God, soul, spirit, eternal life, heaven, and such. All are products of a self-created "self," which actually doesn't exist in the sense a stone, sunflower, star, or snake does. It is conceptual, not physical.

(8) Enlightenment — seeing reality as clearly as possible — is recognizing that ego, I-ness, selfhood, individuality, or whatever you want to call it doesn't exist.

(9) We're part of the cosmos. And the cosmos is part of us. We just happen to be beings who can conceptualize ourselves as separate from everything else, which we really aren’t.

(10) So when we die, we're dead, inasmuch as "I" consider myself to be a "Me." But the cosmos continues. And so will I. Just not as me. Whether this is a chilling or reassuring realization depends on how much "Me" is attached to my "I."

I’m confident that there’s no life after death. But not 100% confident. This is the way of science, and also of wise living. Never be absolutely sure about anything. Then you won’t fall prey to rigid dogmatism. And if a cherished belief turns out to be untrue, you’ll be more prepared for this.

Keep open a crack in your belief system
August 31, 2010

Ah, it feels so good to let in the light, to freshen the atmosphere, to relieve the pressure of a claustrophobic enclosure. Not anywhere outside — within our psyche.

All we need to do is keep open a crack in our meaning-of-life belief system, that conglomeration of thoughts, feelings, intuitions, knowings, and what-not which enable us to get out of bed in the morning, move through life with a sense of purpose, and offer us some answers to what's it all about?

Nothing is 100% certain. Including what I just said.

Hey, there might well be something that is 100% certain. So far, though, it isn't apparent. Even the most intensively validated theories of science, such as quantum theory, are considered by the scientific method to always be open to falsification.

So living in touch with reality requires that we remain open to the possibility that whatever we fervently believe to be true, isn't. Otherwise truth could smack us in the face and we'd pretend that we didn't feel a thing.

If you're absolutely sure that God exists, erase the absolutely in your mind. Ditto if you're absolutely sure that God doesn't exist. Double ditto for any other belief that you don't see yourself ever letting go of, or modifying.

Loosen your hold. Lighten your dogmatism. Lessen your certainty.

I'm not saying that we should uncritically embrace every alternative belief path that appears before us. The human mind generally moves along well-trod patterns for good reasons. Sticking with the tried and seemingly true allows us to learn from experience rather than having to figure out again today what was known yesterday.

However, whenever we find ourselves defending some position with unusually rigid zeal, that could be a sign that a retreat is in order. How far we move back from our personal 100% Certain Maginot Line is up to us.

I don't think it matters much how large the doubt gap is. Truth can slip through the eye of a psychological needle, or a wide open mental barn door.

What counts is that some crack exists in the otherwise solid structure of our belief system. This is where the benefits will come from that I mentioned above: lightness of being, freshness of attitude, relaxing of rigidity.

Recently I was lying in bed, about to fall into sleep, with thoughts of what one day will come, death, running through my mind. I mulled over one of my favorite frightening fascinating topics, non-existence.

I recalled how in a conversation with friends a few days ago, someone told a story about an atheist she knew who was in a hospice, close to dying. He kept asking staff and visitors, "What happens next? What happens next?"

Meaning, after death.

Now, since he was an atheist, one would expect that he already had an answer to his own question: nothing. When you're dead, you're dead. No more consciousness, no more existing.

But that prospect can be scary, especially if life feels like it's well worth living. If you're happy being alive, it's only natural to want to hold onto that good feeling for as long as possible.

That's why eternity is so appealing to religiously minded people. They don't believe they'll ever stop existing. To them death is just a transition to an even better life.

I could feel some familiar anxiety arising as I visualized my own non-existence (yes, I know that's impossible). I could tell that it was going to be difficult to fall asleep so long as I felt trapped within the bounds of a reality marked by an absolute finis at the moment of my last breath.

Then I thought, "That isn't absolutely certain. No one knows for sure what happens, or doesn't happen, after death. There's a slight possibility that my consciousness will continue to exist, just as I used to believe.”

Instantly I felt the mental pressure subside, like I'd opened a stress-release valve. I relaxed into a pleasant state of who knows? Sure, I still considered that the vastly most likely possibility is that death is The End.

But allowing even a small likelihood of To Be Continued into my mind changed everything. And the same would have been true if my certainty had been in life after death.

Cracks in belief systems are beneficial no matter what the content of our convictions are. It's never healthy to believe that you can't be wrong. That's egotistical, dogmatic, and, well, wrong.

In one of Huston Smith's books he talks of meeting a Zen practitioner who tells him, "I've got a new koan: I could be wrong.” Beautiful. Fully embrace that koan and it seems like enlightenment would be close at hand.

Ugh. Brady Breeze says fumble recovery in Rose Bowl was "gift from God."

Well, obviously my 2004 request to God for no more sky-pointing in televised sports events was met with deaf divine ears, probably because God doesn't exist, so has no ears (nor anything else, of course.)

Because here's Brady Breeze, safety for the Oregon Ducks football team (number 25), lifting his eyes skyward, along with his right hand, following his recovery of a fumble by the Wisconsin punter which he ran in for a touchdown.

Being a big Oregon fan, living as I do in Salem, about 60 miles north of Eugene, the home of the University of Oregon, naturally I was thrilled by Breeze's touchdown. And with the nail-biting 28-27 win that Oregon came away with, even though it seemed that Wisconsin outplayed Oregon for most of the game.

But when it came time for Breeze to make some remarks after he was named defensive player of the game, I wish he had kept his questionable theologizing to himself.

Breeze said on ESPN that the fumble recovery was a "gift from God." He then went on to use the word "blessings" several times in the rest of his remarks.

Hmmmmm.

I deeply doubt that Wisconsin players, and their fans, consider that Breeze scooping up the ball for a touchdown was a divine dispensation from God.

Assuming that God exists, for the sake of argument, it seems extremely unlikely that God would look down from heaven and decide that Oregon needed a break at that point of the game, so God made the Wisconsin punter drop the football so Breeze could recover it.

Of course, religious believers typically don't engage in this sort of reasonable logic. They just like to thank God for good things that happen to them, choosing to ignore the fact that often one person's good fortune is another person's bad fortune. 

For example, a believer might say "thank you, God" when a car pulls out of a parking space at just the right time for them to pull into it. Meanwhile, a person in a car behind them is disappointed that they have to keep on looking for a parking space. And both people could be devout Christians.

Here's an idea: religious believers should stop talking about what God does or doesn't do for them, since they have no idea whether (1) God even exists, and (2) what God is up to assuming God's existence. 

Will they act in accord with that good idea? Of course not. But that won't stop me from continuing to criticize sky-pointing and thanking God for fumble recoveries.

Do you believe Jesus was the Son of God?

It's Christmas day here in the United States. Seems like a good time to put up a poll about Jesus' divinity. Finally, a post from an Oregon blogger will settle the question! (In my dreams.) 

Feel free to leave a comment on this post if you want to expand on your poll answer, which is anonymous, of course.

 

 

Belonging is what we long for

I'm not religious now. But I used to be. 

What turned me off about religions was how divisive they often are. Each religion has its own theology, its own rituals, its own moral codes. 

I got tired of feeling special. I got tired of feeling different. My spiritual quest now is to find common ground, to come to grips with whatever universal human yearning leads people to seek solace in religions.

Today I started reading a book about how psychedelic entheogens -- psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, LSD, and I'd add marijuana in a sense -- can produce a sense of divinity that is common to other varieties of mystical experiences.

The second chapter of Entheogens and the Future of Religion featured a transcript of an extemporaneous talk by Brother David Steindl-Rast that he gave at a 1984 gathering of scientists and religious thinkers at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

I liked how Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, spoke of belonging as being what we all long for. Sure, as you can read in the passages below, he gives the term "God" to that to which we absolutely belong. 

Since I'm an atheist, I prefer "cosmos," "universe," or "world." But what's important isn't the word used to describe what we long to belong to, because there's no end to those words.

Family. Neighborhood. Friends. Nation. Lover. Humanity. Planet. Ecosystem. Life.

So many words, all pointing to a sense of belonging, of connectivity, of interrelationship. There aren't any bounds to belonging, because we can feel that we belong to all kinds of entities, with "God" being a traditional way of expressing the grandest sense of belonging (though again, cosmos or existence is equally grand).

Here's what Steindl-Rast says about belonging in his talk.

I thought I would briefly sketch how I see the relationship between spirituality and religion and theology -- all terms that have been tossed around here. In my understanding of it, and from the particular perspective from which I come to it, it all starts with our mystical experience.

This is one point where I would question how John Perry meant his statement. I wrote it down and tried to capture it verbatim: "It is impossible to convince the general public that there is such a reality as a mystical experience."

Now I question that.

I have had the opportunity to address all kinds of "general public." Some of them were most unlikely to be convinced offhand that there is such a thing as a mystical experience, let alone that they themselves had one. But I have never come across a group in which the majority could not be led to realize that they had had a mystical experience.

In fact, I am convinced that our typical awareness as humans, our human consciousness, is based on the mystical experience, i.e., the experience that we unconditionally belong. This is my way of expressing the essence of a mystical experience: an overwhelming sense of unconditional belonging. 

I would be very interested in hearing how some of you express the same thing from different perspectives.

I always try to speak about it in common human language, in terms that anybody can understand. First, I get people settled and willing to listen, willing to look at themselves. 

Then I ask them, "Does it make sense to you that before you are aware of anything else, you have a sense of belonging? Not necessarily before in time, but ontologically. Is that sense of belonging not the basis of your awareness that you are and who you are? 

Almost everyone says "Yes." That is enough for me.

...In some respects it is easier to speak about these things without using the term "God." It lends itself to too many misunderstandings. But if we want to use it as a kind of shortcut, it is in the context of our mystical awareness that "God" comes in.

For anyone who uses that term "God" will agree: God is the one to whom we absolutely belong. We are back at that sense of belonging. 

Before you fill this notion of God with anything else, you can say, those who use the term "God" correctly mean by it the reference point of our sense of belonging. But with this sense of belonging goes a sense of longing. Check that out against your own experience.

Here this whole thing comes in motion. This is something I cannot explain further. It is an experiential fact. We long for that to which we most deeply belong. Poets have expressed this very beautifully. T.S. Eliot says:

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and knew the place for the first time.

That is Home. Home is where one starts from. This tension of belonging and longing constitutes the dynamism of our inner quest.

What if God existed, but life after death didn't?

I think the question I asked in the title of this blog post is an excellent one. After all, most religious people believe in these two things.

(1) God exists
(2) Life after death exists

So what if only the first proposition was true? Would religion have such a hold over billions of humans if God was real and so was the finality of death?

Meaning, no life in heaven. No life in hell. No life after reincarnation. No life at all after we humans take our last breath.

I strongly suspect that religiosity would lose a large part of its appeal if the world's religions didn't have theologies along the lines of (1) and (2).

Which points to the seeming fact that while religious people talk a lot about their love of God, actually much of that love is based on a feeling of "If I do what God likes, such as worshipping her and obeying her commandments, then God will give me good things -- like a pleasant life after death."

Part of what got me to thinking about this was a conversation I overheard in a grocery store checkout line this week.

The checkout employee was telling a customer that the past few days had been tough for her. I didn't hear all the details, but apparently a friend, or relative, was in a car accident that led to them losing their legs. The checker then said:

I guess God had a plan for them that didn't include going back to Him now, but rather losing their legs.

In other words, it wasn't their time to die. Yet when they eventually do, God will welcome them. I can certainly understand the appeal of this faith-based belief, since it provides meaning to what otherwise would seem to be a senseless accident.

And I have no doubt that billions of people around the world find it easier to live their lives by believing that God is watching out for them and will take care of them after death.

However, just because a belief makes us feel good doesn't mean it is a pointer to something real. In many countries young children get a lot of joy out of believing in Santa Claus. Which, of course, is how atheists like me view God -- as a nice idea that doesn't have any foundation in reality.

Placebos work because the human mind is highly suggestible. Religious belief is akin to a placebo, since it has no active ingredients, yet provides benefits to many who imbibe it because they believe it works.

 

Breaking news about God! (don't get excited, there isn't any)

If you listen to CNN for more than a few minutes, especially if Wolf Blitzer is the anchor, you're guaranteed to hear "Breaking news!" 

Of course, usually it isn't genuine breaking news that hasn't been reported before, but rather fairly fresh news that I'd heard before, though not a whole lot.

When was the last time, though, that you recall hearing breaking news about God? 

I'll provide the answer: never. Not once in my lifetime, all 70 years of it, has there been a credible story about some new divine revelation from the Big Guy/Gal upstairs in heaven. 

For some reason -- and I'm pretty sure I know what this is -- all of the breaking news about God stopped being broadcast many hundreds of years ago, if not thousands. 

Today I was walking down three flights of stairs after a meeting of the Salem City Club. A woman slightly ahead of me on the top landing stepped to the side and said, "Go on by. I'm as slow as Moses."

Showing that I'm pretty much clueless about the Bible, I said to the woman and her husband as I walked past them, "What makes Moses so slow?" They gave me a quick Old Testament lesson about how it took Moses forty years to get his people to the promised land, if I recall what they said semi-correctly.

That got me to thinking about the Ten Commandments and other godly subjects.

Why have messages from God dried up now that the Old and New Testaments have been written, along with the Koran and other holy books such as the Adi Granth Sahib, Bhagavad Gita, and so on?

It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that with the rise of science, there's been an almost total decline in miracles. Now that miraculous events can be critically questioned and examined through the microscope of logic, reason, and demonstrable evidence, they've dried up.

Which leads me to conclude that either God is afraid to have his communications tested for veracity, or God doesn't exist. I'm going with the latter theory, being the most believable.

So the next time you pick up a newspaper, listen to the radio, or turn on a TV, ponder the fact that there's no new news about God. Which is pretty damn strange, given that religious believers consider that God is the ultimate reality, the power behind creation, the source of all that is good.

A lengthy silence can be construed either as the absence of an entity capable of making noise, or as a willful desire to not communicate one's presence.

The first possibility points to atheism being true. The second possibility points to some form of deism where God chooses to absent himself/herself/itself from the world. Both are far removed from what most religious people believe. 

Yeah, I know. This truth is painful. But it must be told. There's no news about God because either God doesn't exist, or God doesn't care about us. So get on with your life and pay attention to all the other news about things that are real. 

 

 

Thank God you know God doesn't exist

Here's some thoughts about Thanksgiving (holiday today in the United States) from "JB," a regular commenter on this blog. Can't disagree with anything he said. If God is in charge of this world, He/She/It would have to be a sadistic, uncaring psychopath. 

Much more likely alternative: God doesn't exist. Here's JB's comment on a recent post:

On this day of thanks, I also want to thank the precious lord God for all of his selfless care. I want to thank him for all of the children that are dying of cancer and all of the parents that spend every moment with that pain, telling their child that "it will be ok" when they know everything isn't ok.

I also want to thank him for all of the children that have been slaughtered in one of the many genocides that are happening right now. Hell, throw in those born with birth defects and strange syndromes. This person I know with spina bifida thanks God everyday that he made him in such a special way. God loves his special babies.

I want to thank God for watching over all of the families that got burned alive in this year's wildfires just as he has done on the last. Ditto for watching over the hurricane victims. I want to thank him for the 2004 tsunami and the 230,000 people that got wiped off the face of the earth in one fell swoop.

That just shows how much God values life. That was a good job. High-five buddy! Thank you for this sacred world, full of sacred agony. So, I want to thank God that I have the wherewithal to know that God doesn't exist.

 

Stephen Hawking asks "Is there a God?" (Spoiler alert: No.)

Being a big fan of both science and Stephen Hawking, naturally I had to buy his last and most recent book, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," which was published after he died this year.


So far I've only read up through the first two questions, "Is there a God?" and "How did it all begin?" Since Hawking was an atheist, you can predict what the answers are. But I'll save the details for later in this post.

First, I want to acknowledge Hawking's amazing courage and commitment to truth. He talks about the progression of his ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), which eventually left him only able to control his cheek movements -- but through technology he still was able to communicate via this means. 

I found this paragraph deeply moving.

My illness seemed to progress rapidly. Understandably, I became depressed and couldn't see the point of continuing to research my PhD, because I didn't know if I would live long enough to finish it. But then the progression slowed down and I had a renewed enthusiasm for my work. After my expectations had been reduced to zero, every new day became a bonus, and I began to appreciate everything I did have. While there's life, there is hope.

And in case you're wondering, yes, Hawking was an atheist until the moment he died. Apparently there are rumors to the contrary, but those are false. Like so many other atheists, Hawking found meaning in life without the fantasy of God. 

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”

Here's how Hawking starts off the chapter in his book that addresses the Is there a God? question. 

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything.

The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.

Hawking then makes clear what his overall attitude toward God is.

I do not want to give the impression that my work is about proving or disproving the existence of God. My work is about finding a rational framework to understand the universe around us. For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. Well, I suppose it's possible that I've upset someone up there, but I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature.

This is key.

The laws of nature are universal. So far, it appears that they operate the same way in every corner of the universe. Further, even though many religious people believe in miracles that supposedly defy the laws of nature, there is no demonstrable evidence that miracles exist, either now or in the past.

Thus where is the need for God, if the laws of nature are sufficient to understand the universe? (This understanding is incomplete, and likely always will be; however, science is by far our best means of comprehending the cosmos, since religion does a terrible job with this.)

Hawking then discusses scientific theories about the origin of the universe, as the Beginning of Everything appears to be the only area where religion might have something to say, since the laws of nature do a good job of explaining the current state of the universe.

He writes:

At the moment of the Big Bang, an entire universe came into existence, and with it space. It all inflated, just like a balloon being blown up. So where did all this energy and space come from? How did an entire universe full of energy, the awesome vastness of space and everything in it simply appear out of nothing?

Interestingly, because this was an idea that either I hadn't come across before, or failed to understand properly, Hawking describes how right now the universe is still "nothing" in terms of matter/energy. So nothing became another form of nothing via the Big Bang.

This is an easy to grasp metaphor.

Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he's not just making a hill -- he's also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out.

That negative energy now is in space. The positive energy is in mass and energy that comprises stars, galaxies, us. Again, nothing has become nothing in a different form. Hawking says the only question is "What could cause the spontaneous appearance of a universe?"

Here's his answer, which is based on the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

The laws of nature tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing.

The explanation lies back with the theories of Einstein, and his insights into how space and time in the universe are fundamentally intertwined. Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began.

Hawking concludes his Is there a God? chapter with this:

When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It's like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth -- the Earth is a sphere that doesn't have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it's my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.

This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust.

But there's a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that I am extremely grateful.

Now, to my knowledge Hawking doesn't address a question that I love to ponder, but which I admit may be an artifact of the limited human mind: Why is there something rather than nothing?

As we've seen, Hawking says that actually there is still nothing, even though our universe sure appears to be something, since the positive mass/energy is balanced out by the negative energy of space.

However, seemingly there had to be laws of nature within this nothing to allow that balancing to occur. And laws of nature aren't nothing at all, but something within nothing.

I suspect that Hawking looked upon Why is there something rather than nothing? as an uninteresting philosophical question, since there doesn't appear to be any way to answer it, even in theory. The question boggles the mind, but this probably is because our human minds are used to causes and effects happening within time.

If the cosmos always has existed, this takes us outside of time. And also seemingly outside of eternity. We're into a realm of "is'ness" beyond our capacity to envision. As I've noted many times before on this blog, it appears that something must have always existed. 

Religious people typically term this something God. Scientific people typically term this something the laws of nature that allow things to come from nothing. Either way, we're left with mystery, awe, the grand design of the universe which was Stephen Hawking's life work.

Meaning comes from us, not God

Many religious people wrongly believe that atheists, secular humanists, and others who don't believe in a personal God (most Buddhists and Taoists fit this category) lack meaning in their lives. Actually, we do.

Most of my friends and relatives are atheists. They live deeply meaningful lives. 

In his book, "Finding Purpose in a Godless World," psychiatrist Ralph Lewis explains how an unguided universe contains people who lives caring, loving, purpose-driven lives. Below is a summary of key themes in his book from the final chapter.

I've written a couple of other blog posts about Lewis' book:
"Why God is an illusion, along with other supernatural stuff"
"Why God is a psychological illusion"

Here's the excerpt from Finding Purpose in a Godless World. I want to point out that while Lewis calls our world "random," "unguided" is a better term for the world. Obviously laws of nature aren't random, or they wouldn't be laws. They just don't proceed from the guidance of a God.

A random world -- which according to all the scientific evidence and despite our intuitions is the actual world we live in -- is too often misconstrued as nihilistic, demotivating, or devoid of morality and meaning. My hope is that this book will help people to see the scientific worldview of an unguided, spontaneous universe as awe-inspiring and foundational to building a more compassionate society.

Nonbelievers and doubters of religion, as well as those who remain believers, can be reassured that the increasing trend toward loss of religious faith that is occurring in modern societies is not leading to a generalized loss of morality or to an alienated feeling of purposelessness and meaninglessness.

Far from being nihilistic, the fully naturalist worldview of secular humanism empowers us and liberates us from our irrational fears. With its emphasis on humans having to rely on ourselves and each other, it motivates us to live with a sense of interdependent humanistic purpose. This deepens our feelings of value, engagement, and relatedness.

The secular humanist worldview reminds us that while the universe doesn't care, people do.

We have seen in this book that biological, evolutionary factors can explain how it is that we are inclined toward generally prosocial, cooperative, and motivated behavior. Biological evolution enabled morality and purposive, meaning-oriented human behavior; cultural evolution refined it. We will need to continue to work actively toward this collective goal of more caring societies in order to further strengthen the progress of our species.

If, like me, you started out on this journey with a vague sense that our lives and the universe are somehow directed, then I hope you have experienced this book as a gentle invitation to move beyond the naive, soothing stories we have been telling ourselves about a purposeful universe. I truth you have encountered in its place a solidly science-based, yet deeply humanistic worldview, freed by rationality from neurotic torment.

In countering fears of societal nihilism, this book has walked a fine line, just as I try to do every day with my patients -- a line between cautious optimism and realism.

Societal progress in our increasingly secular modern era has been uneven and faltering; catastrophic derailments have occurred along the way and will always be a risk. But the long-term positive trend toward more compassionate, purpose-driven societies has been strong and unmistakable. Developing more caring societies is a realistic, far from naive project for humanity.

Those who have embraced science, not only as a profession but also as a worldview, tend to be among the most inspired and purpose-driven members of society. It is my hope that the worldview presented in this book might motivate you, valued reader, to become just such a person.

"Atheist Experience" guys demolish arguments of a supernatural believer

I've come to the conclusion that a big part of being a spiritual person is thinking clearly.

(When I say "spiritual," I don't mean religious or supernatural; I mean finding meaning in life, the underlying spirit of one's life, so to speak.)

If we don't think clearly, there's a danger that our emotions, feelings, desires, intuitions, and such will lead us astray. I'm certainly not saying that thoughts are more important than other aspects of our psyche -- just that we need to find a balance between the rational and non-rational parts of ourselves.

Case in point: this You Tube video is a 24-minute example of how a deist caller to the Atheist Experience TV show is utterly unable to discuss in any sort of coherent fashion why he believes God, or any other supernatural entity, exists. 

I watched the whole video, but in the first 5-10 minutes you can get a good feel for the discussion between the atheist guys and Jeff from Aptos, California. 

The person who emailed me a link to the video yesterday said:

Hi Brian, I just listened to this call on the call-in program called The Atheist Experience. What is so unbelievably fascinating about this call is that the caller has absolutely no clue about what's being said.

I would go further and say he is unable to comprehend or make sense of what the hosts of the show are saying so clearly. It is like they are speaking a foreign language.

 

The caller is so fixated on his own viewpoint that it is impossible to have a normal conversation with him. It is the same with many of the people who comment on your blog.

I agree that many Church of the Churchless commenters display the same lack of understanding of what it means to believe in the supernatural, and not to believe in the supernatural.

Over and over, the caller, Jeff, is asked to explain why he is a deist, a believer in God. He's repeatedly asked to provide reasons, or evidence, to support his belief in God. But all of his explanations are either circular, or unresponsive.

Of course, there's no demonstrable evidence of God, or I and almost every other atheist in the world would believe in God. After all, us atheists typically are open-minded, as Don and Matt, the Atheist Experience guys, are. 

As noted regularly on this blog, most recently in this post, atheism isn't a belief; it is the absence of a belief in theism, in God. Don and Matt keep pointing out that they aren't saying there is no God. Rather, they consider that because of insufficient evidence that God exists, they assume that not-believing in God is the wisest choice.

I liked how they interrupted the caller when he tried to answer their question about why he is a deist by starting out with, "But you..." They correctly said that when someone begins to answer a question about themselves with "But you...", it's clear that they aren't intent on providing an answer.

Asking an atheist to prove that there is no God is an example of how religious believers fail to think clearly. The burden of proof is on a believer, not a skeptic.

In a trial, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed a crime. Fairly frequently, the defense won't call a single witness. Why? Because they don't have to prove that the defendant didn't commit a crime.  

Likewise, an atheist doesn't have to prove that God doesn't exist. Atheists like me, and like Don and Matt, leave open the possibility that God or some other supernatural entity might exist. If there is sufficient evidence of this, we would believe. Because there isn't, we don't.

Of course, there are good reasons to believe in God, even if God doesn't exist. Here's some of them:

(1) It feels good to believe that death isn't the end of us, but the beginning of an afterlife.
(2) It feels good to be part of a religious community, given the social support that comes with this.
(3) It feels good to be provided a moral code, rather than having to decide what is right and wrong on our own.
(4) It feels good to consider that we're part of a "chosen people," instead of just being an ordinary person.
(5) It feels good to believe that a divine power is guiding your life.

Here's the thing though: just because something makes us feel good doesn't mean it is true. Fantasies can be fun. 

I regularly get comments on this blog along the lines of, "Brian, why are you trying to take away an important source of support for people, their belief in God?" My answer: "I'm not trying to do this. What I'm trying to do is learn the truth about God and supernaturalism in general."

For me, the arguments in favor of believing in God or the supernatural are weak, too weak for me to accept. Yes, I used to believe in not only God, but in the existence of living masters, or gurus, who essentially were God in human form. Now I don't believe in either.

However, since I used to believe, I understand the appeal of believing. Life is hard. The Buddha got it right when he taught that life is suffering. We all need shoulders to lean on. I get why most people in the world believe in God and the supernatural. This feels good.

There's nothing wrong, and a lot right, with feeling good. I'm simply saying that feeling good because of a belief in God is one thing, and that belief being true is a very different thing.

Science was mentioned in the Atheist Experience video as being our best way of determining what is true. For sure. Here's a 4-minute video in praise of science that's well worth watching.

Oneness is like the Hotel California: you can't leave it

I'm a big fan of spontaneous, well-written, heartfelt descriptions of how someone realized that atheism is the way to go. And if they've got a bunch of profanity in them, even fucking better!

So when I read a comment by regular Church of the Churchless visitor Osho Robbins that met those criteria, I knew the comment should be elevated into a blog post.

There's references to Indian words in the comment, but it can be understood just fine without knowing Indian philosophy. Briefly, Sach Khand is roughly equivalent to heaven. Sat Purush is God. And the lyrics to Hotel California are here. 

(The key lyric: "You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave!")


This is the sort of comment I envisioned when I started this blog fourteen years ago. One of my first posts was "Our Creedless Creed." It's worth reading whether or not you're new to this blog, because it shows what my philosophical intention was both at the start, and now.

I mention this because periodically I have to remind commenters on this blog that it's a damn churchless blog.

I'm fine with religious people commenting on my posts, so long as they keep preachiness to a minimum. Today I had to put one regular commenter, "777," on a month-long time out, because he was an unrepentant repeat offender -- too often preachy, incoherent, and off-topic.

Anyway, here's Osho Robbins' pleasingly on-topic comment. I've corrected a few typos and changed the formatting a bit to make it more readable.

Appreciative Reader, I read your comments. My first response is this: “I ain’t got a fucking clue.” However, now that you’ve raised the subject, I will attempt to give a rational explanation.

I have never bothered to categorize myself, but I’ll do it now – just for the hell of it. I am just thinking aloud here and have no idea where this will lead me.

First thing: I don’t like the ‘God’ word – nothing personal – just in case she is reading this blog. So I don’t fit into the theist category or the gnostic category. I neither believe in God; nor do I know there is a God. (personal god)

The issue I have with “God” is the ideas and concepts attached to that word. (A powerful, all knowing guy who lives in Sach Khand and hangs out with his two pals Anami Purush and Agam – or I might have that wrong – whatever.)

So I used to believe in a character called Sat Purush, many many years ago in the days when I used to follow Darshan and Thakar and Charan.

Back then I was definitely a Theist. Then someone told me it’s all bullshit.

My first reaction was that he just hasn’t meditated hard enough. But as I spent time with him, it became clear that he fucking knew what the fuck he’s talking about. Which is more than you could say about me at the time.

All I had was grand ideas and concepts about the inner regions and about the man in the sky and I “knew” I would get there one day and have a good chat with him.

He showed me that I was a fucking lunatic. And I fucking listened – and one day I fucking agreed. That day my life turned fucking around.

I still had one question that would not go away. “What do I need to do next?” “How will I realise this fucking oneness?”

He laughed at my silly questions. “You still don’t fucking get it, do you?” I admitted the obvious. Then he dropped the bombshell.

There is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to attain.

“You mean I am already there?” I asked in disbelief.

“Where?” he asked

“Well, you know, in the ONENESS?”

He laughed. “Are you fucking kidding me? You never left because you’re not allowed to leave. Nobody is allowed to leave. Nobody leaves.”

“You mean, it’s like the Hotel California?”
“I can check out any time I like?”
But….. “I can never leave?”
I laughed too. “You mean everyone is trying to get back to where they never left?”
“Well fuck me!” were my last words before I left him that night.

Oneness – at least to me – has nothing to do with God. There is only one thing that is real (the way I define real: changeless, formless etc). The oneness cannot be seen or experienced. It just is. Everything I say about it will be a lie.

I could call it “nothingness” and it would be just as valid (or invalid) as calling it the ONE. I don’t claim any mystical experience. I don’t believe there is any such thing. I believe the seekers make it out to be mystical because they don’t understand the simplicity of it. It’s a very simple realization.

Actually it appears I might actually be an atheist after all. The atheist says he doesn’t believe the theist claim of a God. Well – I don’t believe it. Since I don’t have a belief in a personal God of any sort – including Sat Purush.

The hard atheist goes further and says “I know there is No God”  I would say the same when it comes to a personal God. I now say categorically that there is no Sat Purush or Sach Khand. And his pals, Alakh, Agam and Anami don’t exist either, except in the fertile minds of the seekers.

So it turns out I am actually a hard atheist – a far cry from the Theist I once was, many years ago. Not sure where this leads – but at least it was entertaining to write about.

Atheism isn't a belief. It is the absence of a belief.

I don't know why it is so difficult for religious believers to understand that atheism isn't a belief. But during the 14 years I've been blogging here on the Church of the Churchless, I keep hearing, "Atheism is just another belief system."

No, it isn't. Atheism is the absence of a belief in theism, which means believing in a god or gods. (See here and here.)

Below is a recent comment on this subject by Osho Robbins. I liked the way he described the atheist position, and how he related this to a not guilty verdict by a court.

If I say I have a disbelief you are a king, it generally means that I believe you are not a king. If I have no belief one way or another whether you are a king, I would not say I have a disbelief you are a king.

Example: when a person is accused of a crime and is before the court, the verdicts are either GUILTY or NOT GUILTY. There is no verdict called INNOCENT.

Here's why: GUILTY verdict means: There is enough evidence to determine the accused is guilty. NOT GUILTY means: There is NOT enough evidence to determine the accused is guilty.

He may still have committed the crime. But there is not enough evidence to determine this. It does not mean he is INNOCENT, he may or may not be.

The atheist position is this: I don't think there is enough evidence to warrant a belief in god. Hence he says, I have a disbelief in a god. Lack of belief.

He does not say, "Therefore there is no god." Rather he says "there might be" but there is no reason or evidence to support the belief that there is a god.

Hence the atheist has no burden of proof. A negative cannot be proven anyway.

The burden of proof falls on the person who makes a claim. The atheist makes no claim. The atheist simply states he does not believe in a god. He is not saying there is no god. That would be making a claim. This is the 'soft' atheist position.

Why God is a psychological illusion

Billions of people believe that God is real, even though there is zero demonstrable evidence of God's existence. So there must be something in the human mind that produces the illusion of God.

In his engrossing book, "Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Care Even if the Universe Doesn't," psychiatrist Ralph Lewis quotes evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering on why people are so prone to supernatural beliefs. 

Theory of mind is mentioned in the quotes below. Heres's how Lewis succinctly describes what this is.

Part of people's belief in a higher power stems from our ability to form a "theory" about the mental state of another person wherein we can imagine or infer what that person might be thinking or feeling. This is referred to as "theory of mind."

Bering says:

As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the weight of selective importance placed on our theory of mind skills in that process, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system there to generate the physiological states we perceive.

...In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving -- or misbehaving -- people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down "untrustworthy" vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our "incompetent" computers.

Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states -- indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intentions toward us -- but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects do seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.

...So it would appear that having a theory of mind was so useful for our ancestors in explaining and predicting other people's behaviors that it has completely flooded our evolved social brains. As a result, today we overshoot our mental-state attributions to things that are, in reality, completely mindless.

And all of this leads us, rather inevitably, to a very important question: What if I were to tell you that God's mental states, too, were all in your mind?

That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain?

It may feel as if there is something grander out there... watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging. But, in fact, that's just your overactive theory of mind. In reality, there is only the air you breathe.

Thanks to Ariana Grande, I now believe God is a woman

Hey, I've become a believer. In God. Who is a woman.

The lyrics explain this profound theology:

You, you love it how I move you
You love it how I touch you
My one, when all is said and done
You'll believe God is a woman
And I, I feel it after midnight
A feeling that you can't fight
My one, it lingers when we're done
You'll believe God is a woman

I don't wanna waste no time, yeah
You ain't got a one-track mind, yeah
Have it any way you like, yeah
And I can tell that you know I know how I want it
Ain't nobody else can relate
Boy, I like that you ain't afraid
Baby, lay me down and let's pray
I'm tellin' you the way I like it, how I want it

(Yeah)
And I can be all the things you told me not to be
(Yeah)
When you try to come for me, I keep on flourishing
(Yeah)
And he see the universe when I'm in company
It's all in me

You, you love it how I move you
You love it how I touch you
My one, when all is said and done
You'll believe God is a woman
And I, I feel it after midnight
A feeling that you can't fight
My one, it lingers when we're done
You'll believe God is a woman

I'll tell you all the things you should know
So, baby, take my hand, save your soul
We can make it last, take it slow, hmm
And I can tell that you know I know how I want it, yeah
But you different from the rest
And boy, if you confess, you might get blessed
See if you deserve what comes next
I'm tellin' you the way I like it, how I want it

(Yeah)
And I can be all the things you tell me not to be
(Yeah)
When you try to come for me, I keep on flourishing
(Yeah)
And he see the universe when I'm in company
It's all in me

You, you love it how I move you
You love it how I touch you
My one, when all is said and done
You'll believe God is a woman
And I, I feel it after midnight
A feeling that you can't fight
My one, it lingers when we're done
You'll believe God is a woman, yeah, yeah

(God is a woman)
Yeah, yeah
(God is a woman, yeah)
My one
(One)
When all is said and done
You'll believe God is a woman
You'll believe God
(God is a woman)
Oh, yeah
(God is a woman, yeah)
(One)
It lingers when we're done
You'll believe God is a woman

Why God is an illusion, along with other supernatural stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five reasons why I don't believe in God

Since 2004 I've written 2,365 posts on this here Church of the Churchless blog. That's a scarily large number, which testifies to my commitment to churchlessness after spending 35 years being firmly churched in an Indian guru-based form of religiosity.

During the past fourteen years I've talked a lot about why I no longer believe in God. I've put forth numerous reasons for my conversion to atheism. Here's a fairly brief description of five key reasons. 

(1) Existence must always have existed. Most religions teach that God brought our universe into existence. But I've never heard any believer argue that God brought existence into existence. That's because God must have existed prior to bringing everything else into existence.

So it sure seems like existence must always have existed. Otherwise, how could anything exist, including God? This leads to a strong argument against God: if religious believers say that God has existed eternally, this means that existence has existed eternally. 

Thus where is the need for God, since eternal existence, along with certain laws of existence necessary for further acts of creation, fills God's role without the need to posit a supernatural being?

(2) Religions and supernatural belief systems differ widely. If God or some other supernatural entity existed, one would think that there would be considerable agreement about his/her/its nature. But there isn't. 

Yes, I'm familiar with ideas such as Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, since I used to argue myself that there was a common denominator to the world's spiritual belief systems. However, I now realize that I was doing my best to cram wildly different forms of belief into the peculiarly-shaped hole of the faith that I followed.

There are literally thousands of different forms of supernatural  belief in the world. The major religions are just the tip of the iceberg, given the number of animistic, ancestor-based, and other types of spiritual systems scattered across our planet. So either God exists in a dizzying variety of forms, or God doesn't exist.

I'm going with "doesn't exist."

(3) The cosmos is vastly larger than needed for most religions. Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, are examples of religions that were founded by a human being who was considered to be in some fashion "God in human form." Meaning, if not actually God, a messenger from God.

Problem is, there are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, which is a fraction of the cosmos (the known universe, plus at least that portion of the universe that has expanded beyond our light horizon, since space itself has expanded faster than light since the Big Bang).

The makes Earth utterly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Yet many, if not most, religions would have us believe that happenings on Earth reflected God's plan for creation. Well, if this is the case, why is creation so much larger than needed if humanity was made in God's image and has a special place in God's consciousness?

(4) Those who supposedly know God aren't anything special. Some religions teach that God sent a prophet, savior, or other form of messenger to Earth a long time ago. Other religions teach that there are God-realized people living today. 

Regardless, at best there is scant (I'd say none) evidence that those who supposedly have come to know God are any different from you and me. Sure, there are plenty of stories about miracles, divine powers, and such, but somehow these all occurred in the past.

Now that modern science has ways of assessing whether someone has supernatural abilities, the flow of miracles has dried up. Which leads me and other skeptics to wonder whether they ever existed in the past, other than in the gullible minds of believers.

(5) There's no demonstrable evidence that God exists. This is an overarching reason that encompasses some of what I've already said in this post. I realize that plenty of people, alive and dead, are convinced that they've had experiences that prove God or some other divine entity is real.

OK. There also are lots of people who claim to have experienced alien abductions, seen Big Foot, had visions of heaven after almost dying, and so on. It simply isn't possible to accept that every subjective experience reflects an objective reality. That way lies, if not madness, an inability to distinguish fact from fiction. 

Along with almost every other atheist, I'm very much open to evidence of God. I've meditated virtually every day of my life for the past fifty years, or so. I've prayed, sat at the feet of a supposedly God-realized guru, contemplated the nature of existence, looked for divine signs inside and outside of myself.

If God exists, God is doing a heck of a job of keeping hidden. So I choose to consider that God doesn't exist. 

There are lots of other web pages that discuss why someone doesn't believe in God. Here's one that I found to be nicely convincing. 

Young Sheldon beats a pastor at the God game

Young Sheldon is the precursor to Older Sheldon in the popular TV series, The Big Bang Theory. So says Wikipedia. Here's a video of Young Sheldon showing his scientific and logical skills as he gets the best of a church pastor. This clip gets Einstein wrong. He didn't believe in the Christian God. Einstein believed in Spinoza's god, which is Nature.

My atheist interpretation of the Lord's Prayer

Sometimes I feel like praying, even though I don't believe in God. The only prayer that I remember from my brief time in Catholicism as a child is the Lord's Prayer.

So I enjoy interpreting the familiar words from a scientific atheist point of view. 

Our Father who art in heaven,

The laws of nature aren't bound by time and space, being both universal and responsible for the space-time continuum of our universe. These laws are our father, mother, sister, brother, and every other sort of familial relationship we might consider ourselves having with them.

Hallowed be thy name.

We humans have an evolved consciousness that allows us to not only experience the universe, but to conceptually understand its workings -- which includes giving names to entities within our experience and formulating mathematical equations that reflect many of nature's laws.

Thy kingdom come.

Of course it comes. It is already here. The cosmos is unimaginably vast, but more and more of it is being comprehended through the advances of science.

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This "will" is the expression of the laws of nature, which govern the most minute subatomic earthly goings-on as well as the course of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. So far as is known, nothing in the cosmos fails to fall under the sway of those universal laws.

Give us this day our daily bread,

Nature provides for our needs through the presence of solar energy and the marvelous habitability of our one and only planet Earth.

and forgive us our trespasses,

Everybody screws up regularly. There is no such thing as omniscience, so human life is a continual effort to find the best way forward while avoiding danger spots as much as possible. Of course, the worst "trespass" is failing to preserve the natural environment that makes our planet so suitable for us Homo sapiens to prosper here.

as we forgive those who trespass against us,

Nobody is perfect, since there is no transcendent God or any other divinity able to rise above human frailties. So it makes sense to be tolerant of imperfection, since this is the way of the world. We can strive for the best, but we should be content with the good. 

and lead us not into temptation,

It is temping to believe in a nonexistent God, because this belief can provide some comfort and solace, but we need to resist the lures of supernatural fantasies. 

but deliver us from evil.

Which includes falsehood, superstition, and failing to recognize reality. Religion is one of the most common guises these "evils" come in, so we need to do our best to be delivered from it.

If God is real, why do religions disagree so much about God?

One of the best arguments against believing in God is that there so many varieties of religious belief.

This doesn't happen in science, where there isn't an Eastern or Western science. Nor is there a Chinese or American science. Because modern science deals with entities that are real, there's agreement on, say, how subatomic particles behave, or the equations needed to put a satellite into orbit.

A friend of ours recently overheard a conversation between two men sitting behind her while she was on a plane. It started with one of the men asking the other, "Are you a believer?"

Turns out he was, so they launched into a rather loud discussion about Christianity. All went well until friction arose after it was learned that one of the men was a Jehovah's Witness.

Then the conversation became rather heated. Is God a unitary being, or is God a trinity of Father, Son, Holy Spirit? Our friend said they argued about this question for the rest of the plane trip.

What this shows is that nobody knows.

Whether God exists. What God would be like, if God does exist. There's very little agreement among religions about God's nature. Even Christians disagree about what God is like. Mormons and Catholics have little in common other than faith in Jesus.

(I think they agree on this; maybe they don't.)

Now, I used to argue that there was a common denominator among religions. It just was necessary to focus on what mystics in various religions taught about God. 

But now that I've left behind my true-believing days, I'm aware that what I was doing was selectively choosing evidence for commonalities between mystical beliefs, because actually Christian mystics have a very different take on what God is like than, say, Sikh mystics or Islamic mystics.

So the fact that religious believers can't agree about God's nature is pretty conclusive evidence that God isn't real. The god of the Koran is very different from the god of the Bible. And Buddhists don't believe in any god at all, along with Taoists. 

As the familiar saying goes:

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

This atheist has a few simple questions for religious believers

I don't believe in God. I'm virtually certain that God doesn't exist, because there is no demonstrable evidence for a god or gods.

Thus I deeply doubt that anyone, alive or dead, has ever known anything about God other than what they make up in their own mind.

So I've got some simple questions for religious believers -- a number of whom are regular readers of this blog (which is kind of weird; it's sort of like avid meat-eaters frequenting a vegetarian web site).

I understand that many religious believers just have faith that God exists. They don't claim to have any special knowledge of a supernatural divinity. They hope to be ushered into God's presence after death. My questions really aren't for these people of faith.

Rather, I'm interested in those who purport to have experienced the presence of God, or at least a reflection of God, such as a holy spirit, angel, divine energy, or whatever. 

Here's my questions to them:

(1) Do you claim to know something about reality that isn't known to ordinary people? If so, what is this special knowledge, and how do you know that it is true?

(2) Do you claim to have an elevated sense of morality that isn't possessed by ordinary people? If so, what makes you a better sort of moral person from ordinary people?

(3) Do you claim to understand what God is like? If so, enumerate some attributes of God and how you came to comprehend them.

I ask these questions because I've spent many, many years talking to people who believe in God, and I've never met a single person who had a convincing story about an actual experience of God.

One would think (as I do) that anyone who has had a glimpse of God, if not a full- blown vision, would come away from that experience with some special knowledge, special goodness, special morality, special understanding, special something. 

If they can't demonstrate what this special something is, then they shouldn't expect that anyone else should take them seriously when they claim to have experienced God. Talk is cheap. Truth is expensive, in that it requires proof, evidence, facts. 

In everyday life, if someone says, "I know X," it is perfectly appropriate to ask, "How do you know X? What reasons do you have for believing your knowledge is true? Show me some evidence for X."

But in the realm of religion, people are allowed to spout all sorts of crap without being challenged. Well, this atheist, along with many of my atheist friends, is tired of religious believers getting a free pass on the Truth Train.

So I'm curious to see if any religious person steps up to the Truth Plate (to mix metaphors) and takes a swing at my three questions.

Egos gone wild: religious believers thinking God is on their side

First off, I've been there and done that: thinking God is on my side. So when I say that this is a crazy belief, I'm criticizing an earlier version of myself -- along with everybody else who has an ego massive enough to believe such a thing.

Which includes the Green family, founders and owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores. Yesterday I wrote a post on one of my other blogs, Salem Political Snark, "Here's 5 good reasons not to shop at Salem's Hobby Lobby." 

As part of my Google research for that post, I listened to an interview a Slate podcaster, Mike Pesca, did with Candida Moss, a professor of theology who wrote a book about the Green family's quest to Christianize the United States ("Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby").

Here's a transcript I made of part of the podcast where Pesca and Moss discuss how the Green family just knew that God looked favorably upon their decision to close Hobby Lobby stores on Sunday.

Pesca: In fact, they made a decision early on, the family did, to close the stores on Sunday. How they decided was kind of interesting. They kind of rolled it out slowly, and it wasn't going well at first. But then when it did, they took that as proof it was the Lord's plan all along. 

Moss: That's right. They started with states that only had a few stores and closed them there. And by the time they were done with Texas, which had the most stores, then their profits took off again. And they interpreted that as a sign that they had won God's favor. 

Pesca: It seems like there are so many instances in your book where that wouldn't be the accurate interpretation, or even a logical interpretation, or an interpretation, you know, that a reasonable person, or anyone approaching a reasonable person would have. But they always interpret everything as telling them that they're right and God is on their side.

Moss: That's right.

This is a dangerous belief.

What makes it dangerous, rather than just plain crazy, is the fact that the Green family has billions of dollars to spend on promoting their fanatical brand of evangelical Christianity, spurred on by their conviction that whatever they do, God approves of it.

Here's how I summarized my blog post on Facebook:

Don't shop at Hobby Lobby, which just opened a store in Salem. Here's the headlines of my 5 reasons why. Those who shop there are having their money go to:
(1) Denying contraception coverage to women employed by corporations owned by religious zealots.
(2) Teaching the Bible in public schools as "true" and "good."
(3) Smuggling artifacts from Iraq, an act that supports terrorism.
(4) Supporting the election of Trump.
(5) Helping fund a $500 million Museum of the Bible.

Item (3) above resulted in Hobby Lobby having to pay a $3 million fine to the government after the company was caught smuggling Iraqi artifacts. So I guess the Green family believes that God approves of illegal acts that support terrorism.

I realize how easy it is for religious believers to look upon themselves as God's chosen people. This belief is comforting. It soothes the ego, even though religious people put on a false humility with words such as "God is doing everything" and "I'm just a servant of the Lord."

False, because I've seen how religious egos go wild when devotees of a particular faith are told that they are looked upon with special favor by God. Or, in Eastern religions, by a guru who is considered to be God in human form.

I've both seen this in other people, and also in myself.

For example, when I used to give spiritual talks at a Sunday meeting of fellow believers, and I was late leaving for the place where the meeting was held, if I found that all of the traffic lights were green when I came to the intersections between my house and the meeting location, I'd look upon this as a sign that God was helping me be on time.

 Crazy? Yes. Just like the Green family believing that God is on their side? Yes. 

It took me many years, decades, really, before I came to realize that I'm nobody special, and that the universe isn't treating me any differently from everybody else. 

That realization was a relief, actually. I could stop pretending and start living an authentic, honest, down to earth life. 

God isn't on anybody's side, because almost certainly there is no God. (I'd leave out the "almost," but I'm scientifically minded, and in science nothing is 100% certain.)

Ancient religious writings couldn't predict modern science

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurel Hines
Salem

Believers, be clear about what sort of belief you want others to accept

Someone recently emailed me, asking if I read the many comments (223, currently) on a recent Church of the Churchless post. Here's part of my reply.

I admit that I haven’t read the many comments on this post in much detail. In my current irreligious frame of mind it just strikes me as mostly meaningless to discuss/argue about subjective experiences as if they reflect some objective reality. There’s no way to tell whether someone’s supposed “mystical” experience is anything other than a projection of their own mind absent some sort of convincing demonstrable evidence.

 

Logical or reasonable arguments can lead anywhere. To me, most of the content of the comments is akin to debating the details of how unicorns look and act. The first question to ask is, “Do unicorns exist?” If they don’t, then it is just an exercise in creative fiction to delve into details of an imaginary creature. 

 

Philosophical debates aimed at how one lives in this world strike me as quite different. I read a lot of philosophy, both explicit and implicit. Finding meaning in this world clearly is a subjective exercise. But the world itself is objectively real, which gives meaning to the search for meaning. 

 

Trying to find meaning in supernatural realms and powers for which there is no evidence of their existence strikes me as a waste of time. And I say this as someone who has wasted a lot of time in this pursuit.

Here's another way of expressing what I was trying to say in my reply: believers should be clear about what sort of belief they are claiming is valid, and so worthy of being embraced by other people.

The basic distinction is between subjective and objective reality, as I noted in my reply. Now, I realize that "subjective" and "objective" mean different things to different people. But the dictionary definitions make good sense. 

Subjective: characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind :  relating to or being experience or knowledge as conditioned by personal mental characteristics or states

Objective: of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers :  having reality independent of the mind

So let's say that someone speaks of experiencing God, heaven, or some other manifestation of a supernatural reality beyond the physical universe. For example, as in the above-mentioned comments, some people talk about astral realms, radiant forms, divine light and sound. 

I have no problem accepting that a person had an experience along these lines. After all, the mind is capable of creating many mental manifestations that are much different from everyday reality.

If you take a psychedelic drug, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you have a psychotic form of mental illness, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you meditate for lengthy periods, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you meet with a holy leader you're deeply devoted to, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
And if you deeply desire to have a certain religious experience, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences in line with that desire.

Naturally this doesn't exhaust the ways religiously-minded people can have deeply moving experiences of what seems to be a divinity beyond themselves. Every religion is awash with stories about devotees who have experienced a glimpse -- or a full-on encounter -- with the divinity they believe in.

I'm interested in these stories in much the same way I'm interested in hearing someone talk about going to Glacier National Park, a Monster Truck event, Paris, a Taylor Swift concert, or any other experience that leaves this person with an amazing feeling best expressed as "You had to be there to believe it."

Meaning, I accept that they had a profound experience. But I don't accept that this was an objective manifestation of reality.

Well, in the examples above the experience was of something objectively real, such as Taylor Swift. However, the person's experience of a Taylor Swift concert was their own, whereas the objective reality of the concert was independent of their individual mind.

In the case of religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences, often the discrepancy between subjective and objective is much greater.

After all, there is no shared experience of God, heaven, soul, spirit, or any other supernatural entity. All we have are descriptions of individual experiences, and there is no way to prove that these are anything other than the manifestation of a person's subjective mind.

So I wish religious believers would be clearer about what they claim to have experienced.

I had numerous profound encounters with what seemed to be a higher reality in my college days, when I imbibed LSD, mescaline, and other psychedelics. But I rarely, if ever, told other people that my psychedelic experiences were of an objectively real reality.

Yes, at the time the sensations I experienced seemed like a doorway to a higher state of consciousness. And maybe they were, in a personal subjective sense. Meaning, for me. Not for anybody else.

Yet religious believers often extrapolate from their individual personal experience of some supposed divinity and claim that their experience proves that the divinity is objectively real. Which, of course, it doesn't. 

"I had a subjective experience of X" is very different from "X exists as an objective fact." The first statement doesn't demand proof, because subjective experiences basically are unprovable. The second statement does demand proof, because it is a claim about universal reality.