Church of the Churchless

Quantum theory doesn't say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying. 

But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts. 

I no longer believe in most of the mysticism in that book, but the scientific stuff is still valid, by and large. I keep up with current developments in quantum theory through my subscriptions to Scientific American and New Scientist.

The August 28 issue of New Scientist is a special issue about Quantum Frontiers. The stories on this subject were all interesting and clearly written for non-physicists like me. 

What's crystal clear is that most people who claim quantum theory proves something mystical or spiritual about the cosmos don't know what they're talking about.

Quantum theory is mysterious, for sure.

So far science hasn't figured out how it relates to relativity theory, which explains how gravity works. The other forces of nature are amenable to explanation by quantum theory, but not gravity. This means that there's a good chance a deeper explanation of nature needs to be found that unifies relativity theory and quantum theory.

Frequently New Age types claim that quantum theory has shown that consciousness creates reality. This isn't at all proven. Yes, the quantum measurement problem is real. Somehow various probabilities of a particle having certain properties, like being in a specific location, are converted to a single actuality when a measurement occurs.

This is called the collapse of the wave function.

The mathematics of quantum theory are marvelously accurate. That's why modern technologies like computers and cell phones have become so ubiquitous. However, physicists don't agree about the philosophical side of quantum theory. Meaning, the explanation of what's going on behind the mathematics. 

Here's a graphic from the New Scientist special issue that does a great job of summarizing the various ways scientists have tried to explain what quantum theory means.

I like the objective collapse theory, in part because it doesn't involve a conscious observer collapsing the wave function. As the entry for this in the table above says, that explains how the universe was able to be real before consciousness came on the cosmic scene. 

Here's a story in the special issue on this subject: "Do we distil reality from the quantum fog, or does it exist without us?"
Download Do we distil reality from the quantum fog or does it exist without us? | New Scientist

QUANTUM stuff, whether single atoms, electrons or photons of light, is notorious for seeming to be here, there and everywhere – and indeed everything – all at once. It exists as clouds of possibilities, manifested in a beast you can’t get around when contemplating quantum mysteries: the wave function.

On one level, the wave function is just a mathematical expression that lets you calculate the probability a particle will manifest in a particular location, say. The mystery is the way the maths says that, once you look at it, the wave function “collapses” to leave something definite we can all agree on. This creates the picture of the world that our classically trained eyes see. But how does the mathematics relate to the reality before the measurement – and what exactly, if anything, does the act of measurement change?

Erwin Schrödinger expressed the unease we might feel about apparently “making” reality when he mused about a cat inside a box that might or might not have been killed by a random quantum process inside it. Before you look, he asked, is the cat dead and alive at the same time?

The orthodox take on quantum theory, known as the Copenhagen interpretation, says yes: the maths adds up, so just shut up and calculate. “From a practical point of view, it works perfectly,” says Angelo Bassi, a theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste in Italy. “But from a fundamental point of view, why should the wave function collapse?”

Some physicists argue that it all makes complete sense if you think of the wave function as a way to predict what might happen. It changes with time, just like a weather forecast. “The universe is not made of wave functions, just as it is not made of weather forecasts,” says Christopher Fuchs at the University of Massachusetts, a leading advocate for an interpretation of quantum theory known as quantum Bayesianism, or QBism.

For QBists like Fuchs, quantum theory is a tool for us to better navigate the world, not a description of the world as it exists independent of our presence. So of course the wave function collapses – and how could it be anything other than us doing the collapsing?

Or you can go to the opposite extreme and say that the wave function doesn’t collapse at all. In the many worlds interpretation, every possible outcome of a measurement encoded in the wave function happens in different universes. No one collapses anything at the point of measurement – the world just splits, carrying us with it into one particular branch.

If you prefer an answer that gives us a hope of understanding physical reality, and doesn’t invoke a multiverse that we can never hope to observe, there is yet another option: that wave functions collapse spontaneously, without the influence of observers. This “objective collapse” was first proposed in the 1970s, but has enjoyed a revival in recent years largely because it promises to submit to empirical testing. “The other interpretations simply aim at reinterpreting the wave function,” says Bassi, who is a proponent.

In this picture, the chances of an atom’s wave function collapsing on its own is so small that you might have to wait billions of years to see it. Group enough of them together, however, and it rises dramatically. The cumulative effect would be a kind of faint background “noise” of collapsing wave functions that a sensitive enough detector might pick up.

“Testing the large-scale limit of quantum mechanics”, or TEQ, is a project that aims to do just that, and perhaps write the observer out of quantum theory for good. Designed specifically to look for collapse noise, the project involves levitating a bead of glass a few nanometres wide using electric fields, watching its motion closely. The latest version was delayed, but Hendrik Ulbricht at the University of Southampton, UK, who is leading the experiment, expects results within a year. “We are all very excited,” he says.

Looking for noise isn’t something physicists typically do. “Usually, we suppress the noise as much as possible, because the physics is in the signal,” says Ulbricht. But there is an interesting precedent. When astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias first detected an all-pervasive background radio signal in 1964, they thought it might be coming from New York City, from other galaxies or even from nearby pigeons. Finally, they realised they had discovered the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation left over from the big bang. “There could be a similar story with these collapse models,” says Ulbricht. 

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. 

Life is uncertain

Might as well share a post I just wrote for my HinesSight blog. Here's how I introduced it on Facebook.

l'm feeling kind of philosophical. (OK, a common feeling fof me.) Decided to write about how life only is predictable when looking backward, and not even then, really, because the events that seemed to cause our life to turn out a certain way could easily have been different. I use how my wife and I met as an example of how uncertain life can be.

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/hinessight/2021/09/life-is-only-predictable-looking-backward.html

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.

Better self-awareness comes from sharing our self with others

For many years I wrongly thought that the way to "know myself" was to engage in several hours a day of solitary meditation. Sure, I did learn some things about myself in this way and developed a lot of discipline by meditating every morning whether or not I felt like it.

Now, though, I've come to realize that it is easy to fool ourselves when the only conversation we're having is within our own mind -- I talking to me; us speaking to ourself; one part of our psyche conversing with another part.

As noted in my previous post about a book I'm reading, Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness, the  outside environment provides important feedback about how well we're in touch with reality. For example, inside my own head I can fantasize that I'm in contact with higher realms of reality.

Out in the world, imagining that I'm in touch with something that isn't really there is much more difficult, because "there" is apparent to other people also. 

In a chapter called "Learning to Learn," Fleming describes the benefits of explaining things to others and communicating our thoughts in writing or out loud.

This helps to explain why I enjoy writing so much. By getting what is inside my head out into the world, I not only learn more about what I really think, I gain the benefit of other people being able to provide feedback to me about those thoughts.

We can understand why teaching and advising others can be so useful for our own learning by considering how it helps us avoid metacognitive illusions. 

When we are forced to explain things to others, there is less opportunity to be swayed by internal signals of fluency that might create unwarranted feelings of confidence in our knowledge. For instance, the "illusion of explanatory depth" refers to the common experience of thinking we know how things work (from simple gadgets to government policies), but, when we are asked to explain them to others, we are unable to do so.

Being forced to make our knowledge public ensures that misplaced confidence is exposed. For similar reasons, it is easier for us to recognize when someone else is talking nonsense than to recognize that same flaw in ourselves.

...External props and tools can also provide a new perspective on what we know. Rather than monitoring murky internal processes, many of which remain hidden from our awareness, getting words down on the page and speaking them out loud creates concrete targets for self-reflection.

...We naturally extend our minds onto the page, and the extensions can themselves be targets of metacognition, to be mused about and reflected upon just like regular thoughts and feelings. 

Metacognition is key to knowing yourself

I'm about halfway through reading Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. Basic concepts of the book are mind reading, in the sense of inferring what is in someone else's mind, and metacognition, literally thinking about our thinking, or more broadly, being aware of ourself. 

Since Fleming, a British neuroscientist, cites many research studies in his book, reading it can take some effort. However, Fleming is a good writer, and frequently uses examples from everyday life, so on the whole I'm liking it a lot. 

The title, Know Thyself, points toward a fact I've marveled at for a long time. We humans can turn our attention upon ourself in a way that other animals can't. Fleming's idea, which makes sense, is that this metacognition and mind reading (another term for the more usual "theory of mind") are closely related.

Meaning, many of the same brain processes are at work when we think "I feel bad that I got so angry" (metacognition) and "I believe that she thinks I'm mad at her" (mind reading). One is directed inward at our own mind; the other is directed outward at other minds.

And the same sorts of problems can arise in both metacognition and mind reading. We can be wrong about our own mind, and we can be wrong about other people's minds. Fleming writes:

First of all, it is important to distinguish between the capacity for metacognition and the accuracy of the self-awareness that results.

The capacity for metacognition becomes available to us after waking each morning. We can turn our thoughts inward and begin to think about ourselves. The accuracy of metacognition, on the other hand, refers to whether our reflective judgments tend to track our actual skills and abilities.

...In fact, metacognition is likely to be even more susceptible to illusions and distortions than perception. Our senses usually remain in touch with reality because we receive constant feedback from the environment.

If I misperceive my coffee cup as twice as large as it is, then I will likely knock it over when I reach over to pick it up, and such errors will serve to rapidly recalibrate my model of the world.  Because my body remains tightly coupled to the environment, there is only so much slack my senses can tolerate.

The machinery for self-awareness has a tougher job: it must perform mental alchemy, conjuring up a sense of whether we are right or wrong from a fairly loose and diffuse feedback loop. The consequences of illusions about ourselves are usually less obvious.

If we are lacking in self-awareness, we might get quizzical looks at committee meetings, but we won't tend to knock over coffee cups or fall down flights of stairs. Self-awareness is therefore less moored to reality and more prone to illusions. 

Those illusions basically involve us feeling that we know something that we actually don't know, or failing to feel that we know something which we actually do know.

There are lots of gradations, of course. The ideal is to feel uncertain about knowing things that our knowledge really is uncertain about, to feel confident about knowing things we really do know about, and to feel not at all confident in things that we don't know about.

That last "feel" is what makes us call a plumber when we know we don't know how to fix a leaky faucet. Lacking it makes us attempt a repair when we're not competent to do the job, something I have some familiarity with. 

(One sadly vivid memory is giving up on a faucet repair, calling a plumber, and have him simply reverse one of the parts I had backward. When I joked that this 30 second repair now was going to cost me $80, or whatever, he said "You're forgetting what it took me to learn how to do that 30 second repair," which was absolutely true.)

At an extreme, this sort of thing is called frontal lobe paradox.

The paradox is that people with frontal lobe damage may have significant difficulties with everyday tasks such as cooking or organizing their finances, but because their metacognition is impaired, they are unable to recognize that they need a helping hand. 

Without metacognition, we may lose the capacity to understand what we have lost. The connection between our self-impression and the reality of our behavior -- the reality seen by our family and friends -- becomes weakened.

A less extreme example is how most people believe they are an above-average driver, a statistical impossibility.

"Moon" movie points to shocking non-supernatural realization

A year or so ago I watched "Moon" via Netflix. I guess at this point I need to enter an obligatory spoiler alert, in case anyone hasn't seen this 2009 movie and thinks they might want to see it without knowing a crucial plot element.

This was an intriguing movie, though not super-entertaining. The acting was good, but not exceptional. What I distinctly remember was a shocking twist.

There Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is, at a base on the moon where a mining operation is taking place. He's looking forward to returning home after a three-year solitary tour of duty on the moon. 

Sam gets pleasure in recorded messages from his wife on Earth, who was pregnant when he left for the moon. Communication difficulties prevent live back-and-forth communication with his wife.

All this seems completely normal. However, through a series of events that I've mostly forgotten, Sam eventually discovers a shocking secret the mining company has been hiding.

Sam is a clone.

The memories he has of his wife and previous time on Earth were implanted in his brain. None of that is real. Sam isn't who he thinks he is, a human being like everybody else back on Earth. Though his body is human, his mind is artificial.

How Sam deals with this occupies the rest of the movie. 

What galvanized me as I watched "Moon" was that moment when Sam realizes that everything he relied upon to help  get him through his stint on the Moon was false. The foundation of his existence was shaken to the core.

Not only wasn't his Earth life what he'd thought it was, he himself wasn't who he thought he was. 

And this wasn't a shift in consciousness like, say, someone finding their more genuine self after psychotherapy, climbing Mt. Everest, or whatever. It was a total reversal of how Sam had looked upon the world. 

Well, even more than that, since a reversal implies that the thing being reversed is simply the flip side of what the reversal reveals -- like someone realizing they aren't heterosexual but homosexual. A big change, yet they're still sexual. 

Rather, Sam went from seeing himself as a normal human being to seeing himself as not at all human, but a manufactured clone, no different from hundreds or thousands of clones exactly like him that he discovers in a hidden section of the moon base.

What struck me about this aspect of the movie is how Sam's shocking realization could be viewed as a metaphor, or reflection, of another sort of shocking realization that could be possible for any of us. Not that we're a clone, but that we're not who we have always viewed ourselves as being.

Now, I don't know what that shocking realization might consist of. Or if it really would be shocking. Maybe it would feel entirely natural, as if we'd woken up from a dream that had been going on for our entire life.

I'm not talking about a religious realization, such as "God loves me" or "Jesus is my savior." These are additions to a mind that don't overturn a mind's  basic assumptions. Nor am I talking about something supernatural.

Rather, I see this realization as being along the line of "The world as I've known it is an illusion, but there is no world more real than this one." In other words, it is the perception of the everyday world that is turned upside down in some fashion, not the world itself, which remains just as it is.

My best bet as to what this sort of shocking realization could consist of -- which arguably is very much in line with Buddhist enlightenment or nirvana -- is an experience that the self we take ourselves to be actually doesn't exist. 

This is akin to what Sam experiences in "Moon," aside from the fact that Sam was distressed by the fact that he wasn't who he always thought he was, while the experience of selflessness would be much more pleasant, blissful even. Or at least no less pleasant or blissful than our previous existence as a self, just different in a difficult-to-describe way.

Along with this would be a realization that the free will we always thought we possessed also was an illusion.

I see this as a massive relief. I've had glimpses of such a state of being in which I see that who I am at any given moment is the result of causes and effects extending back to my birth -- and even far beyond that, to the moment of the big bang 14 billion years ago.

My view, which isn't at all original, is that evolution adapted us to an illusion of ego/self because this aided in our survival as early humans.

We continue to buy into this story of individual separateness because every human culture teaches it is true, even though some cultures (Chinese and Indigenous, for example) buy into it less than other cultures (American and European, for example).

Anyway, I like the idea that our view of ourselves could be upended in a dramatic fashion.

I'm not sure how this could come about. It simply seems like a real possibility that fits with experiences I had with psychedelics in my college days, and other experiences I've had with meditation/mindfulness since.

Mostly people we disagree with are well-meaning

Ooh, nice! I like it! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This used to be a non-controversial perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excessive wokeness is akin to extreme religiosity

Yesterday I wrote a post on my Salem Political Snark blog, "I get cited by Salem's Woke Police." Here I'll explore the connection between wokeness and religiosity.

Since many people who visit this blog don't live in the United States, woke is a word that means "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice." That sounds like a good thing, which usually it is.

But as the saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing.

About three weeks ago I helped start a new Facebook group here in Salem, Oregon. The instigator was a young woman who I've never met in person. She's young, very liberal, and seemed sincere about having a Facebook group that lived up to its name, Let's Discuss Salem. 

The woman told me that anybody in Salem could join the group: liberals, independents, conservatives, anybody. That appealed to me, since I mostly associate with fellow progressives, and I thought it'd be interesting to share ideas with people of a different political persuasion.

However, as you can read in the post I wrote about the Woke Police, it didn't take long for the administrators of the Facebook group to become so amazingly woke, sometimes I wasn't sure if they were being serious. 

For example, this is a new rule for the group that got added to other equally woke rules: "7) Telling members of marginalized communities how to think, feel, and act about their own oppression is prohibited."

So only Black people in the group (if there are any) can talk to other Black people about their issues. Ditto for Latino people. As a white person, I can't express an opinion about a Black issue. Only Blacks can do that.

As I said in my Salem Political Snark blog post:

I still believe that it is better to be overly concerned about racism, sexism, nationalism, and other nasty "ism's" than under concerned. 

However, a balance needs to be struck between awareness of social problems affecting minorities and other historically oppressed groups, and an overzealous righteousness where perceived affronts to social justice are criticized in an absurd fashion.

I emailed a link to my post to some Salem friends. One wrote back to me this morning with some wise observations. 

I have just read all of what appeared in the link below. To me, your most powerful statement included "shades of gray, political nuance...." Yes, precisely. Those beating the drums on both the right and the left, including the local "Woke Police," are sending overly simplified messages.

These are designed to capture minds and memories with catchy and easily remembered soundbites. and, in many cases, to quote Shakespeare in the speech by Marc Antony "to cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war..." to serve their particular goals.

The higher level thinking skills of critical thinking and analysis do not work well in these arenas. You have worked to challenge a general audience to think critically. Of course, that is at best a steeply uphill struggle.

The full statement she referred to said:

This is the problem with having a black and white view of the world. Nuance, shades of gray, moral ambiguity, political compromise -- that doesn't appeal to people on either the left or right who believe that how they see things is how everybody should see things.

Same applies to religious people who have a black and white view of the cosmos. In other words, fundamentalists. They view any deviation from their rigid perspective on reality as a dangerous heresy. I just read that the Taliban in Afghanistan are decreeing that music is forbidden, apparently because some weird interpretation of Islam says so.

A tiny bit of critical thinking reveals the absurdity of fundamentalism. But for those in the grip of it, that rigidity makes sense. And even is appealing. 

I sort of shudder when I remember that back in my true believing days, when the guru of the religion I followed decreed that animal rennet couldn't be eaten, I was one of the fundamentalists who obsessively read cheese labels for evidence that the rennet was animal or vegetarian. 

The woke fundamentalists of the Let's Discuss Salem Facebook page are similarly caught in the grip of a mindset that abhors reason, common sense, flexibility. Since I try to manifest each of those qualities, the Woke Police have become increasingly irritated with me.

Which not only doesn't bother me, I'm learning to enjoy it. I find a special pleasure in speaking reasonably when they talk about the necessity to not let a single politically impure post or comment appear on Let's Discuss Salem.

I have the impression that this rigidity gives that woke crowd a reason for being, since they can feel superior to fellow progressives like me who are a lot looser in our speech and attitudes. At the end of my Salem Political Snark post, I include excerpts from a The Atlantic story about research concerning the different political tribes in the United States.

It turns out that about a third of Americans are on the fringes of the left and right, so far out there they aren't interested in ratcheting down the rancor and finding common ground.

But about two-thirds of Americans do want to find common ground with those who see things differently. That's good news. Problem is, the extremists tend to dominate the news, because they're the ones screaming about this or that outrage. Same seems to be true of religion.

Most religious believers aren't dogmatic. They wear their religion lightly. They don't take themselves too seriously. They accept that people with different views are entitled to those views, and may even have something to teach them.

"The Web of Meaning" -- great book about finding our place in the universe

I've finished The Web of Meaning, by Jeremy Lent, a book with the subtitle, "Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe."

It's a lengthy book, 382 pages, that I enjoyed. My first post about it was "Marvelous mystery lies in the complexity of the world."

Lent wrote a related previous book, The Patterning Instinct. Both books discuss Eastern and Western religions in a well-informed manner. In 2017 I talked about The Patterning Instinct in "Indian and Greek thought are both dualistic. Chinese thought isn't."

In these passages Lent explains how ancient India embraced a form of dualism that differed in some respects from that of the Greeks, but still was based on the same sorts of splits found in Christianity.

...So if someone is looking for oneness, it won't be found in either Greek or Indian thought, which are both thoroughly dualistic.

Pleasingly -- because I'm attracted to Chinese thought, especially in the guise of Taoism (and Tai Chi, basically Taoism expressed as movement, which I've been practicing for 13 years), Lent is big on the Chinese way of looking upon the world, which he admires as being in tune with modern scientific thought and a naturalistic approach to oneness.

In his new book, Lent is still big on Chinese philosophy. Along with Buddhism and indigenous traditions (Native American and others), this is what is meant by "traditional wisdom" in his subtitle.

What he's after is an integration of what divides us in science, religion, philosophy, and other areas of human life. I heartily agree with Lent that any belief system which finds meaning in some realm apart from our world and this universe -- which is what Indian religions and Christianity have in common -- isn't going to heal the splits that plague us. 

Taoism and Buddhism have a lot in common with modern systems thinking. Since I completed the course work for a doctorate in Systems Science back in the 1970's before I became a Ph.D. dropout, I resonated with the many examples of how systems concepts reflect the reality of how reality works.

Here's some quotes from The Web of Meaning along these lines. 

Reciprocal causality is a lot like the Buddhist notions of dependent origination and emptiness. Reality isn't top-down causation, as religions would have us believe, with God at the top. 

We've seen that reciprocal causality is a defining element of integrated, self-organizing systems -- the system as a whole affects the parts, while the parts affect the whole. The relationship between mind and body is similarly reciprocal. While the mind affects the body, different aspects of the body are simultaneously affecting the mind. 

...As we've seen, a hallmark of living systems is reciprocal causality: interacting parts create the system, while the system as a whole affects how the parts interact.

Purpose doesn't come from outside the universe or outside of life. Life is its own purpose.

When a bacterium in a tank senses sugar is more concentrated in a certain direction, it will turn around, rotate its flagella like a propeller and swim toward what it wants. It's driven by the same sense of purpose that has urged life forward in an unbroken flow from the days of the first protocells: a desire to resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to ingest nutrients, metabolize them, regenerate its parts and pass its particular form of negentropy on to the next generation.

We're back to Weber's First Law of Desire: 'Everything that lives wants more of life. Organisms are beings whose own existence means something to them.'

...As we've seen, life is a self-constructed process. There is no programmer writing a program, no architect drawing up a blueprint. The organism is the weaver of its own fabric. It sculpts itself according to its own inner sense of purpose, which it inherited ultimately -- like all of us -- from the first autocatylytic cells: the drive to resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics and generate a temporary vortex of self-created order in the universe.

Consciousness is material, but this doesn't make it any less sacred.

Some people, viewing consciousness as something sacred, might object to the idea that it could theoretically be measured through scientific instruments. My personal opinion is that, rather than diminishing the sacred quality of consciousness, it opens a pathway that bridges the sacred and the scientific. 

In modern gewu, as in Neo-Confucianism -- and in contrast to Western dualism -- there is no inherent distinction between the spiritual and the material. It's the miraculous ways in which the material world self-organizes that create the conditions for all that is sacred and meaningful in the universe. 

Emergent phenomena show that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that at higher levels of organization newness emerges that can't be predicted by looking at more basic elements.

There is, as we've seen, a vast category of things -- life, mind, consciousness, music, cognition and rainbows, to mention just a few -- that are emergent phenomena, existing only as a result of complex, dynamic interactions between different entities. Meaning also belongs in this category.

In the same way that we can enact a rainbow by gazing into the rain, we enact meaning by the way in which we attune to the connective rhythms of the universe. Like music being played, like the refracted sunlight in the rain, the meaning potential is always there -- its just waiting for us to tune into the right wavelength and engage with it. 

...Just as music is an emergent phenomenon arising between a player and listener attuning through patterns of vibrations, so meaning is an emergent phenomenon enacted by a conscious entity as it relates an experience to other experiences. 

Death is a problem for us only insofar as we have a limited view of ourselves as an isolated being. 

At a deeper level, our identity as living beings can extend to embrace all of life. In the Western tradition, with personhood confined to conceptual consciousness, the existential fear of death has historically been alleviated by the belief in an eternal soul that remains intact after the demise of the body.

But much of this fear is the result of experiencing a self-identity separate from the rest of life. To the extent that we, as temporary eddies of consciousness, can recognize our unity with the entire stream of life of which we're a tiny part, there is less to fear from our own death.

As part of the unfolding cascade of negative entropy that has evolved in all its magnificence on Earth, we have never died for over three billion years. From this expanded perspective, as long as there is life, there is no such thing as death.

The Tao Te Ching hints at this deep insight when it proclaims, 'One who knows how to nourish life... has no place of death.'

"There is no path" -- poet Antonio Machado

For a long time I believed in a path. A path back to God.

The religious group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, taught there was such a path. One of their books was called "Path of the Masters."

Since I no longer accept that such a path exists, I like this poem by Antonio Machado. There are various translations from the Spanish. I've shared several.

Wanderer, your footprints are
the path, and nothing else;
wanderer, there is no path,
the path is made by walking.
Walking makes the path,
and on glancing back
one sees the path
that must never be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no path—
Just your wake in the sea.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes upon the sea.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking makes the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path that you
will never tread again.
Wanderer, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.

Walker, your footsteps
are the road, and nothing more.
Walker, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
Walking you make the road,
and turning to look behind
you see the path you never
again will step upon.
Walker, there is no road,
only foam trails on the sea.

Islamic Shariah law to be enforced by Taliban

The Taliban say they're going to rule Afghanistan under Shariah law, which is based on Islamic tradition and authority, such as the Koran. 

This doesn't bode well for Afghan women. 

So I'm curious. Many commenters on this blog are religious. They believe in God. They accept the authority of religious leaders.

The Taliban are religious. They believe in God. They accept the authority of religious leaders.

Explain then, religious commenters, why you likely reject the Taliban's religious beliefs, while you consider your own to be so worthy. 

The Taliban think they are acting in accord with the will of God. Other religious believers feel the same about their own faith. Yet how is it possible to say that this religion is a danger to humanity, and that religion is a benefit to humanity? 

Adherents of every religion think their religion brings benefits to humanity. The Taliban certainly believe this. 

Is anyone who comments here willing to defend the Taliban? If not, how is it that the Taliban's religious beliefs are considered to be bad, while other religious beliefs are considered to be good? 

Muslims believe the Koran reflects the message of God. Christians believe the Bible reflects the message of God. Sikhs believe the Adi Granth reflects the message of God. Mystical religions believe the utterances of a guru reflect the message of God.

Again, since every religion considers its teachings to be correct, how is it possible to criticize the Taliban's religious beliefs without criticizing all religious beliefs? 

Me, I choose the latter approach. I criticize all religious beliefs. 

Transcendence and immanence: two paths to attain oneness

It's important to not get one-sided in our approach to meditation and spirituality. After all, oneness is a laudable goal, even if it can't be attained perfectly.

(If there truly was only one, there would be no one else to know there was only one, so oneness would never be experienced.)

A one-sided coin doesn't exist. It takes two sides to make a coin. 

So we shouldn't get locked into a single way of looking upon oneness. Many commenters on this blog appear to be so enamored with transcendence -- leaving this world behind to find a better one -- they forget that a big chunk of humanity embraces Taoist and Buddhist approaches to oneness that are focused on immanence rather than transcendence.

Here's passages from Jeremy Lent's book, The Web of Meaning, where he discusses transcendence and immanence.

Later in his "Everything is Connected" chapter he investigates the question, "Could the sense of immanent oneness described in traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, and many Indigenous cultures be commensurate with these insights of modern science?"

I'll share his answer to that question in another blog post.

A critical step is to recognize that even among those who describe a vision of oneness, different cultural assumptions generate important distinctions over what that oneness signifies. 

Some traditions -- such as Vedic, Neoplatonic, and Christian -- emphasize transcendence as the route to the realization of oneness. Transcendence, which means literally to 'climb over,' implies that the world as we see it, with all its messy details, must be left behind to achieve a state of unity.

The higher you go, the purer and more visionary you become, until ultimately you might reach a state of communion with divinity up in the heavens. 

...The underlying idea that 'higher is better' is so embedded in language and culture that it has shaped our patterns of thought. 

When we hear about a 'peak experience,' a 'higher purpose' or the 'high point' of a journey, we instantly know that the references to height denote something good. Is it any wonder that we conceive of spiritual knowledge as something reached by transcendence?

But transcendence is not the only path for attaining a state of oneness.

An entirely different way to conceive oneness is through immanence (coming from the Latin for 'remain in'). From this perspective, oneness is not found in the heavens but is right here, in this world with all its disorderly muddle.

The immanent view of oneness came naturally to the Chinese, who had no concept of a transcendent, omniscient God.

'One takes the mass of confused things,' said Zhuangzi, the Taoist sage, 'and unites it as one ... For him who can but realize his indissoluble unity with the whole ... death and life, end and beginning, are no more than the succession of day and night.'

The Tao, Zhuangzi explained, is to be found everywhere in the world, not just in a transcendent realm: it is in the ants, the grass, the earth -- even in the 'piss and shit.' Zen Buddhism, influenced strongly by Taoism, similarly taught that enlightenment was to be found within the mundane realities of everyday life.

Master Rinzai, founder of a major branch of Zen, declared, 'If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.' 

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.

It took a while for this person to give up on RSSB

Yesterday I got this message from someone who said it would be fine to share what they said, but not their name. I always feel good when I hear that someone has benefitted from my blog posts.

I've told this person that I don't know what has happened to tAo. His comments were indeed interesting. But change is inevitable, including who comments on this blog. 

Hello Brain , how u doing n hope u r doing great at ur end. I am ________, initiated by Baba Gurinder Singh G in 2003. I am 45 years old now. I born and brought up in Orthodox Rssb family , my great grand father initiated by baba sawan singh g in year 1922 , my grand father spent 26 years in sewa at dera after getting retirement from punjab police as an officer , he was dera resident and died in dera .

I have been reading ur blogs on site church for churchless since year 2010 . I didn't like ur views at first . But after a year or more I found some reality in ur writings . I read all of ur rssb blogs twice or may be thrice with all comments on that .

I gave up my faith on baba g and rssb in year 2019 with very heavy heart , I had my own reason's for living the rssb faith with no hard feeling's. Actually I never had a pure faith or belief on rssb I was just keep going with it as told by my family and being told or preach by in weekly satsangs . I am very emotional person and feel guilty deep inside me for living the path , my heart says guru is true but my brain says Big No . 

I like ur blogs . I enjoy to read the comments also specially by tAo , Spence , osho , Tuscon , jesse , Jen etc. 

I missing tAo , why is he not commenting any more ,is he okay ? He is much experienced person regarding cult , I would love to hear about him from you , that's the reason also I'm mailing you. 

 

I like ur blog , please keep going , my best wishes always with you.

 

Regards , ___________

History of Religion cartoon

Pretty much sums it up.

What makes a cult a cult?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our bad qualities also are our good qualities

Yesterday I finished a 2,500 word essay for the consideration of 180 Medical, the firm that supplies me with urinary catheters. After I got a message from 180 Medical saying that they welcome essays about how people experience using a catheter, I wrote back saying I'm interested in this, having written a bunch of blog posts about my life with a catheter.
Download 180 Medical essay PDF

(I've also copied in the essay below.)

A marketing specialist with 180 Medical read some of those posts and suggested I write about my catheter-related depression and anxiety. It took me quite a while to get around to this, since it required dredging up memories that I've tried to suppress as much as possible.

But what I realized when I finally felt the urge to write about my depression/anxiety, along with what led up to it, is the power of being real, of speaking honestly, of recognizing painful facts. I didn't plan out what to write. I didn't make an outline. I simply started writing from the heart, letting what was inside me manifest in words on a screen as directly as possible.

Almost all of us want to present a positive face to the world. We like to display our positive qualities and hide our negative qualities. That's one reason I waited almost six months before I wrote what I said in February of this year I'd send to 180 Medical. 

I doubt that anyone who reads this will take me up on this offer, but I'll make it regardless. Share the biggest mistake you've made in your life in a comment. Or one of the biggest. Ideally, post it using your real name. Put it out there for the world to see. Then be aware of what happens.

If you're like me, you'll feel a weight lifted from your mind. It takes energy to keep the Good Me and Bad Me separate, at least insofar as how we reveal ourselves to other people. We're in a never-ending quest to make the story of our life seen by others appear with us as the Good Guy/Gal rather than the Bad Guy/Gal.

Yet it seems to me that our good qualities also are our bad qualities. They really aren't separate and distinct. I got to thinking about this after writing the essay. I walked out of an urgent care center, even though I should have gotten medical attention, for much the same reason that I've been successful in other areas of my life.

For example, I'm optimistic. I like to challenge authority. I enjoy going my own way. 

Sometimes those qualities lead to positive outcomes. Sometimes they don't. However, I can't split myself into two halves. I'm one person, with a mixture of qualities, abilities, tendencies, habits, ways of being in the world. The same me who screws up is the same me who succeeds.

Here's the essay. 

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

My catheter-related depression and anxiety
by Brian Hines
[email protected]

I wish I didn’t have to use a catheter to urinate. I wish I hadn’t made mistakes that may have caused my bladder to become dysfunctional, leading me to need a catheter. I wish I hadn’t suffered from so much anxiety and depression during the four and a half years I’ve been a catheter user.

But wishes are one thing. Reality is another. I’m going to be real with you. 

If you’re looking for a feel-good story of how a 72 year-old man has been coping with his catheterizing, look somewhere else. Sure, now I’m doing pretty well with my catheterizing. This wasn’t always the case, though. So i’m not going to sugarcoat those hard times.

In a movie about the life of C.S. Lewis, Shadowlands, a student tells Lewis, “We read to know that we are not alone.” 

My hope is that some people who also have had problems with using a catheter will read this and realize that even though our struggles mostly are private, we share a determination to make the best of a difficult situation. 

Up until the age of 68, I had no significant health problems. My family doctor would tell me at my annual checkup, “You’re a poster child for growing old.” I’d earned a karate black belt at age 56. I’d take my boogie board on vacations to Maui and catch big waves with the locals. I took up senior citizen skateboarding when I was 64.

I figured, wrongly, that I had many more years of good health ahead of me.

Yes, I had a prostate problem. It didn’t seem like a big deal, though. I took several prostate medications. I needed to urinate more frequently, getting up several times a night. I always got an aisle seat on airplanes to ease a trip to the restroom. 

Looking back, I should have realized that I needed to see a urologist. It became more difficult for me to start peeing, a different problem than having to pee too often. Yet I didn’t mention this to my family doctor. I thought I was just having normal symptoms of an enlarged prostate. 

Then everything changed in May 2017. My wife and I went to visit an old friend who I hadn’t seen in over 40 years. We drove to the Bend area from a vacation cabin we owned with three other families in Camp Sherman, Oregon.

Before getting to his house, I thought about stopping to pee. But I didn’t need to go that bad, so I drove on. Once we got there, our conversation on a deck overlooking the beautiful Deschutes River was so pleasant, I didn’t want to interrupt it by going to the bathroom.

When I finally did, I couldn’t go. Since this had happened before, I figured I just needed to wait a while and try again. Except, I kept trying every half hour or so, until someone asked why I was visiting the bathroom so much. 

This went on until mid-afternoon. By then I really needed to pee, but still couldn’t. My friend and his girlfriend told me that this was serious and I needed to get medical help. Good advice, which I didn’t take.

Well, actually I did, sort of. We Googled the address of an urgent care center in Bend. Driving there, I peed in my pants involuntarily. Luckily, I’d brought along some extra clothes.

I changed in the urgent care restroom, then saw a male nurse who asked what my problem was. “I can’t urinate,” I said. “At least, not voluntarily.” For some reason he wanted a urine sample. “Um,” I told him, “I can’t pee, so that’s not going to happen.” 

He gave me a glass. “Drink three glasses of water,” he said. “Then try to urinate into this bottle.” I should have argued with him, but I didn’t. I sat in the room by myself and drank the water. Then went into a bathroom and couldn’t urinate.

By that time I was distraught. I wasn’t thinking straight. I couldn’t pee on my own but had wet my pants. I was frustrated, tired, fed up. Holding the empty collection bottle in my hand, I walked out and told a different nurse that I wanted to leave.

“Do you want a catheter,” she asked me. 

I didn’t know what a catheter was. I didn’t care what a catheter was. I just wanted to go back to our cabin, take our dog for a walk, and wait until I could pee on my own again. Yeah, none of that makes sense. But at the time it did, because I was so upset with how the day had gone.

“No,” I told her. “All right,” she said. “You’ll need to sign a release form absolving us of responsibility for letting you leave without treatment.” Big danger sign, in retrospect. Yet I scribbled my name on the form.

The memory of what happened in the urgent care center is as fresh today as it was four and a half years ago. I agonize over that single word that came out of my lips, “No.” What if I had said “Yes”? Why didn’t I say “Yes”? One word. One little word. Choosing one word over another may have changed my life for the worse, forever.

We drove back to the cabin. I involuntarily peed in my pants again. After all, I’d just drunk three glasses of water in the urgent care center, when I already had been unable to urinate for about ten hours.

That night I keep getting up to see if I could pee. I couldn’t. The pain was bad. As soon as the sun was up I told my wife, “I need to get medical help.” We packed up and drove two hours to Salem. I peed in my pants again. A Salem Health urgent care nurse sent me to the Emergency Room.

There I got an indwelling catheter. Several weeks later, still unable to urinate much on my own, I was told that I’d have to do intermittent catheterization. Which I still am.

Several months after my traumatic urinary retention episode, I asked my urologist if my atonic, nonfunctioning bladder would have gotten back to the way it was if I’d said “Yes” to the offer of a catheter in the Bend urgent care center.

He said, “Perhaps.” I held it together until I got into my car. Then I cried all the way home. 

Almost every day since, I’ve thought about how stupid it was of me to refuse the offer of a catheter. I should have asked what a catheter was. I should have asked what would happen if I didn’t get the massive amount of urine in my bladder out. But I didn’t. And I can’t stop blaming myself for that. 

My wife is a retired psychotherapist. She thinks I have PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s probably right. However, it didn’t take long before I had an even worse mental problem: depression. 

(If you’re mildly depressed yourself reading this sorrowful tale, hang in there. It’s going to end on a positive note, once I get through the anxiety and depression stuff.)

I already wasn’t happy, to put it mildly, about facing a lifelong need to insert a plastic tube up up my urethra five times a day. When I started getting nighttime leg cramps, forcing me to wake up and walk around my bedroom until they went away, then doing this again a few hours later all night long, the lack of sleep helped push me into a full-blown depression. 

Not fun. At first I just thought I was tired. And sad about my non-functional bladder. Then my wife said, “No, you’re depressed.” She was right. 

I had no interest in doing things I used to enjoy, like write posts for my three blogs. From being afraid of dying, I started to think that, hey, death wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’d be free of feeling like I was in an emotional black hole with no exit sign.

My urologist’s office said there was no way the leg cramps could be related to my bladder problem. I pointed out that I’d never had leg cramps before, and now I did, shortly after starting to use a catheter. 

Fortunately, I was able to see a Sleep Clinic physician. After being prescribed gabapentin, the leg cramps went away. I also was fortunate that my primary care doctor’s office had a psychiatric nurse practitioner. She diagnosed me with Major Depression, Single Episode. 

So I now had a mental health diagnosis to add to my growing list of physical problems. I was prescribed an antidepressant, which over several months helped me climb out of the black hole I was in, along with counseling sessions with a social worker.

Depression was in my rear view mirror. Unfortunately, catheter-related anxiety was in the passenger seat right next to me, where it still sits. Worse, sometimes anxiety feels like it’s taken my place in the drivers’s seat — though gradually I’ve gotten better at keeping anxiety’s hands off of my mental steering wheel.

I don’t know whether the frequent trouble I have getting a catheter to pass into my bladder is typical for many men, or atypical. Regardless, this has been my biggest longstanding problem. 

In the early days I’d call my urology clinic and talk with the nurses who worked with my doctor. “I’m having trouble inserting the catheter,” I’d say. “Do you have any tips?” I’d be told to take a shower, go for a walk, or wait a while and then try again.

OK, but I wanted to get back to what I’d been doing before my bladder stopped working like it should. Eating out. Going to a movie. Visiting friends. If I went into a restroom at a restaurant to do my catheter thing, then found I couldn’t insert it, obviously taking a shower wasn’t an option.

And I didn’t want to interrupt a meal with friends by saying, “Sorry, I’ve got to go for a walk and then see if I can get a catheter into my bladder.” Not exactly a great dinner conversation topic.

Not being able to insert a catheter at bedtime was the worst. I was tired. I wanted to sleep. I needed to urinate. Yet sometimes I’d spend an hour or more lying on the bed, trying to relax with breathing exercises, so the damn catheter would pass into my bladder.

To make a long story short — and this story really is long — at times I got extremely frustrated and angry. My wife had to put up with quite a few outbursts where I’d either start crying or slam doors or both, because I was having such a difficult time inserting a catheter. 

I’d try catheters other than the Flex Coude Pro that I’d come to know and love. (Well, except when I couldn’t get it into my bladder.) But none of them were anywhere near as comfortable and easy to use as the Flex Coude Pro, so I stuck with it. 

Eventually I had the bright idea of trying a smaller size catheter, FR12 or FR10 rather than FR14. Often I could insert one of those when the FR14 wouldn’t go in.

Even so, I still am anxious about traveling or going anywhere where I might need to use a public restroom. I haven’t flown since I started using a catheter. I haven’t driven by car more than two hours from where I live. 

If I could be confident that popping in a catheter would go smoothly, I’d be hugely happier. That would allow me to view myself as simply differently-abled in how I pee. However, not knowing when I’ll have trouble inserting a catheter — I haven’t been able to predict when this happens — makes me anxious.

And when I have a particularly difficult time, my mind generates flashbacks to the traumatic day and a half back in May 2017 I’ve described. It must be similar to a war veteran hearing fireworks and feeling like it’s a roadside bomb. When I’m unable to insert a catheter, sometimes I feel panicked, like I did when I couldn’t pee at my friend’s house or in the urgent care center.

However, I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m a total catheter train wreck. I’ve learned a lot over the years. Most days now, things either go smoothly for me, or I’m able to handle occasional problems inserting a catheter with no freakout. 

I’ve accepted the fact that almost certainly I’ll have to use a catheter for the rest of my life. 

My bladder has recovered some function, but nowhere near enough, I strongly suspect, to ever justify prostate surgery. I got a second opinion from a medical school urologist who told me, bluntly, “You don’t have a prostate problem, you have a bladder problem.”

However, I always thought I had a prostate problem. It never occurred to me that my bladder might stop working one day, and my primary care doctor didn’t  bring up this possibility. 

I haven’t stopped regretting walking out of the urgent care center in Bend. However, I do my best to tone down that regret by focusing on a couple of things that allow me to fashion a story which doesn’t have me as the Bad Guy as regards my non-functional bladder.

First, my urologist said that not getting medical care sooner could have harmed my bladder’s ability to recover from the urinary retention episode. Could. This isn’t certain. So regardless of how I acted that day, I might well have still needed to use a catheter.

Second, during a cystoscopy (scoping of my bladder) by the second-opinion urologist, he said, “Look at that pocket in the bladder wall. That was caused by the bladder trying to push urine through your prostate for a long time.”

A long time. Those words imply that my bladder was gradually losing functionality for quite a few years, so slowly that I viewed this as a normal part of aging for a man with a prostate problem.

It’s difficult, but I’m learning to forgive myself. After all, there may not be much to forgive. 

I try to remember that life is difficult for everybody, and I’m more fortunate than many. As my wife frequently reminds me, I’m pretty damn healthy overall. I use a chainsaw on our ten rural acres. I put 40 pound bags of salt in our water softener. I can bicycle, lift weights, do Tai Chi.

Life isn’t over just because I have to use a catheter five times a day. As I’ve described, there were moments when I thought life wasn’t worth living. Now, though, I’m almost as happy as I was before. 

Almost. And that’s good enough for me, especially given the much darker days I went through with my catheter-related depression and anxiety. 

 

Thoughts are not facts -- great thing to keep in mind

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, yesterday I wrote "Covid reality: thoughts are not facts." It starts this way:

Driving into Salem today, listening to a news channel on satellite radio, I heard a public health expert say something that made me grab a piece of paper and write it down as soon as I came to a stop:

Thoughts are not facts. 

She was referring to wearing masks in schools as they reopen after a summer break. Like when a student or parent says, "But I thought that wasn't going to be necessary since Covid cases were declining so much a few months ago."

OK. You thought that. But thoughts aren't facts, they're just thoughts. The only way a thought can be a fact is -- no big surprise -- if the thought is factual.

This isn't an astounding new notion, that thoughts are not facts. I just hadn't heard those particular four words before. Now that I have, I really like them. 

I've started saying to myself, "Thoughts are not facts," when I catch myself worrying about something that might happen, but so far hasn't. Where's the facts that match up to my worry? Usually nowhere, because my worrying isn't connected to factual reality.

Often it isn't a big deal if people mistake a thought for a fact. But sometimes it is. 

Trump actually won the election, not Biden. 
Vaccines and mask-wearing aren't effective in preventing COVID-19.
Global warming isn't happening. 

These thoughts are in the heads of many millions of Americans. They aren't facts. They're false. Yet because those people mistake their thoughts for facts, tremendous harm is being done. 

So ask yourself: what thoughts do I have that are being mistaken for facts? Probably quite a few, if you're like me. I suspect that you'll be happier if you're able to do a better job of telling the difference between thoughts and facts. I'm finding that's true for me.

You might be thinking, "Aren't all facts expressed as thoughts?"

Yes, of course. But facts are grounded in our shared, observable, external reality. They refer to something objectively true that transcends the thought of any particular person. Other sorts of thoughts, by contrast, are subjective, even if they're shared by millions of people. 

Thus it is a fact that I enjoyed the taste of a bowl of popcorn I just shared with our dog -- a nightly human/canine ritual. However, this isn't a fact capable of being held by others, since I'm the only one able to experience how popcorn tastes to me.

If you want to believe that Brian Hines enjoys the taste of popcorn, great. But it isn't a fact that can be confirmed in any way other than believing the words I just wrote. Objective facts can be confirmed by others, which is why we can be so confident that Biden won the election, vaccines and mask-wearing are effective against Covid, and global warming is happening.

What could be better than contemplating the inner and outer worlds?

Today I finished physicist Anthony Aguirre's book, "Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality." Rather than describing how the book ends, you can read the ending yourself. I liked what Aguirre says here.

To me, one clarion message comes through: when you are tempted to think or say "the Universe is fundamentally like this," then go and sit and think some more.

So why do we like to divide things into opposing camps? Probably no small part of it is a rather strong drive, bestowed upon us by our evolution as surviving beings, to identify some certain things with ourselves, our group, our tribe.

The "selfing" process walls us off as individuals in an often hostile world and seeks to protect not just our bodies, but by extension, whatever we identify with. Our own beliefs tend to be converted into truth much more easily than is warranted. 

Even in the most abstract of questions, it's easy to see, in oneself or in others, a strength of belief that the world is a certain way -- material or ideal, free or fated, inherently good or evil -- all out of proportion to the actual evidence and even when confronted with many people believing quite different things for reasons they find just as persuasive. 

This is a tendency worth keeping a keen eye on.

But it isn't just tribalism. Convincing, opposing views persist because the questions are hard. The easy ones get settled and largely forgotten about. In a well-run government, only the hard questions come to the desk of the emperor (or president). So too with the structure we've built out of our hard-won understanding of the world, both individually and collectively.

Of course, sorting things into what has been settled and what is still unknown or open for debate is not always easy, or agreed upon. 

But overall, there is some sense of a cutting edge: the world really is not flat, but we can debate about the speed at which it is warming; lightning is caused by segregation of electric charges, not gods' whims; gravity is not a propensity to go down but rather a propensity for stuff to curve space-time in a particular way. 

Knowing exactly where this cutting edge lies can be something of an art. Sometimes it is obvious and surrounded by debate. Sometimes, as we've seen, it can be much more subtle, discoverable only through a careful skepticism of simple or familiar answers. But there it lies, still licking its chops.

Even knowledge of moral truths, which are perhaps harder to place on the subjective-objective axis of being, has progressed.

Slavery is wrong; discrimination is wrong; women are equal in worth to men; might does not make right. Even if they contain some invention as well, we must choose to see these as hard-earned discoveries that we cannot unknow.

We may then focus on how to to bring our reality in closer accord with these ideals, as well as tackle the still much more open questions: What makes a just society? How do we balance liberty and security? When does technology bring, or undermine, well-being? What does the future hold, with its quantum computers, artificial intelligences, genetic engineering, and interplanetary travel -- and how can we make that a future we really want?

The progress we've made so far comes from a long history of remarkable human effort and drive. Humans are agents of action. Minute to minute, hour to hour, week to week, we decide, decide, decide, and act, act, act. 

Our cognitive architecture is that of an astonishing prediction-and-decision engine, much of which runs with little notice. We dash across rocks, make coffee, and shuffle papers more or less on autopilot. But when the predictions or the decisions get hard, then suddenly they are at the center of our awareness. This can become very stressful, frightening even.

But it is also when we feel most alive, most interested, most awake. Who wants to read a novel or see a drama in which no character has to make a difficult decision, caught in a dilemma between conflicting desires and with only guesses as to what will come?

Yet humans don't just act and decide and feel. We have also learned to contemplate.

To think and ponder free-style on ideas and truths that may have elegance and beauty but near-zero utility. I'm often amazed that we can do this at all, let alone so well as to conjure an understanding of the metric structure of space-time, or the evolution of the quantum state, or the meaning and generation of entropy.

And we've learned to contemplate in other less intellectual ways. To very simply and purely be. To look ever more closely at our own minds and how they run. To see the minute gradations of our relations with others and with the world.

Like adventures in the physical world, this contemplation of the inner world and the world writ large can be exhilarating and even terrifying. As one's mental picture of the Universe and its operation shifts, reality can swing from being a comforting den to a windswept mountaintop to a dark forest and back again.

But you're made of that very, very special stuff, infinitesimal in the universe, that is able to appreciate this, and to take the adventure. The journey can be exhausting, true, painful, humbling, but I often feel: "What could be better?"

Who am I?
What is this?
Where, from here?

Here's an elusive cosmological koan to beguile you

When I saw a book called Cosmological Koans mentioned in another book I was reading, there was little doubt in my mind that it would be delivered to me by Amazon before too long. And so it came to pass.

Anthony Aguirre is a Professor of Physics at University of California - Santa Cruz. That is so perfect! I can't imagine a more appropriate place for a koan loving, Buddhism inspired, creative writing physicist than UC Santa Cruz. 

(I went to college at San Jose State in the 1960s; Santa Cruz beaches were a favorite spot for LSD trips, along with the mountains separating San Jose from the Pacific coast and Santa Cruz.)

For quite a while I could only read one cosmological koan chapter a day, because each koan stretched my mind so much. Aguirre mixes together science and philosophy in a wholly unique way. It's hard for me to describe this book, other than to say it is like no other.

But when I got to Part 5, "Who Am I? Don't Know!," I found myself in more familiar territory. So I've been reading several cosmological koans a day, eager to get to the final Part 6, "Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form."

Below is a passage from the Time and Free Will cosmological koan. You'll see that Aguirre skillfully keeps the reader off balance, as a physicist Zen master would. Just when you think his train of thought is heading in a certain direction, surprise!, it jumps onto another track. 

The two tracks are connected, yet also separate. This makes for provocative reading. Also, frustrating reading, since I have to attend closely to the subtleties of what Aguirre is saying, rather than letting his words wash over me in a free and easy fashion.

I like how Aguirre presents a fresh way of what being in the present is. Basically, there's no such thing. Although in a sense there is. "Now," he says, is the point where uncertainty in the history is the least. 

Brilliant. Along with perfectly obvious. Koan on...

Though the state-based and the history-based descriptions can be mathematically translated into each other, they give quite different feelings, and they relate to different aspects of how we experience the world. 

The state-based view accords with how we experience the present. The world is some way, which we infer from observations. The world's future is tightly connected to its present configuration in ways that are somewhat but not entirely predictable, and the future's unpredictability leads to feelings of both freedom and frustration.

But the past feels more history based: we look back at how things evolved through time, at full trajectories, at seemingly inescapable chains of cause and effect. We may have uncertainty about the past, but feel that the past itself is certain while our knowledge of it is partial.

We might also think of the future in terms of histories, playing our stories in our minds of how things could go. But we generally believe -- or at least act -- as if we are uncertain of the future because the future itself is uncertain, not just our knowledge of it.

The state-based and history-based perspectives also give very different senses of the uncertainties inherent in the "now." 

This uncertainty in the present state gives rise to a sense of "splitting" of the future into many different possibilities: from one uncertain present, many possible futures. Yet from the history-based view, no history starts now; each extends indefinitely forward and back in time. 

The uncertainty in the present is just a particular type of uncertainty in the history. "Now" is, in a sense, the point at which our uncertainty in the history is the least, and it is in the space-time locale at which the different possible histories say very similar things about our observable surroundings.

Our present knowledge thus allows us to select a subset of all possible histories that accord with our present view and knowledge of the world. We call this subset selection "learning about the world"; selecting a smaller and smaller subset means that the present state is more and more precisely specified, which in turn means that we attain greater and greater knowledge. 

Insofar as the two views can be mathematically related, there is no sense in which one is more "right" than the other. However, insofar as they are views of how the world works, we might be led more, or less, astray. 

In particular, we are quite used to thinking of "places" in space, so it is natural to think of "places" in time. And the mathematics of fundamental physics allows us to do this. Yet we also recognize that there are some "things" that have a wholeness that is rather at odds with divvying them up into parts that are here and there.

We recognize that we can't talk about the left-hand side of a thought, or the northern half of a computation, the east end of blueness, or the bottom of a smell.

We also understand that processes unfold in time, and by its very nature a process, which involves time, cannot be happening at an instant any more than an arrow can fly during a moment of zero duration.

Yet we are often tempted to think about things like "your mind now" or "the person up until some point in time." We slice time into past, present, and future as if we might really slice it this way without doing terrible violence; but we can't, any more than we can take a slice out of a person to study the operation of their heart.

If there is no "left side" of a thought, is there really a "beginning" of a thought, or an "end"?

If we don't slice up our minds, if we consider them as just part of a chain of events and outcomes, then look what happens: they become unfettered, extending over great distances in space and time and including books, relations, records, laws, statements, and arguments, as well as neurons.

Much more than they are extended in space, our minds are extended in time, as undivided processes playing out over many timescales. Our mental life is built largely of memory, and we function as intelligences and agents in the world largely through predicting, envisioning, and acting toward the future.

Any amount of introspection will reveal that we tend to spend most of our time in either what was or what might be.

Perhaps we should take this very seriously -- this idea that our very existence is contingent on being extended nonlocally in time. Many of the rather unsettling implications we've explored in Part 5 have hinged on an assumption that there is a state of a mind, a self, a consciousness, as it is right now. 

Could there be something fundamentally wrong with this notion that could extricate us from some of those disturbing directions of thought?

This view is slippery, elusive, and beguiling. 

A shattered rock teaches me something about a broken life

"Oh, no! Where did the rock go?" I looked out a window of our house and felt an impending sense of doom. 

Quite a few years ago someone we'd hired to do yard work had found an interestingly shaped angular rock about 18 inches tall (our landscaping has lots of rocks). He set up upright on a larger rock, then balanced a small rock on the tip of its decidedly sharp end.

Ever since, I'd carefully replaced the small rock when deer, our dog, strong wind, or some other force dislodged it. But I'd never worried about the larger angular rock.

Until it disappeared.

Well, not really. It was still there. Just in several pieces. The two guys who do our weekly yard maintenance had come on Monday. They'd focused on leaf/debris blowing, since our grass is barely growing in this unusually hot summer. 

(July was the hottest month ever in Salem, Oregon, going all the way back to the late 1800s when temperature records began to be kept. Which shows global warming is happening, and more intensely than expected.)

The guys must have knocked over the angular rock, shattering it on the large rock it was sitting on. When I saw the pieces I felt a strange sense of loss. Sure, it was just a shattered rock. But i really liked it!

Calming down a bit, I began to realize that all was not lost. The rock was still there. Just in pieces. I decided to see if the pieces could form a replacement balance rock. They could, even though the pieces were much smaller than the rock I'd come to love.

The new main rock was a piece of the old rock that shared its basic shape. The original balancing rock fit nicely on top of it. The rock piece below had a great shape, but I hadn't figured out to use it yet. 

Some additional reflecting turned my rock thoughts in a more philosophical direction. 

Life is full of breaking. Broken dreams. Broken relationships. Broken jobs. Broken health. Broken beliefs, religious, political, or otherwise. Broken all kinds of stuff. It's natural to feel bad when we see that part of our life has been shattered.

Hey, we liked our life as it was! Just as I liked the old balance rocks as they were. Thing is, though, we can always do our best to pick up the pieces of our broken life and refashion them into something new. 

Often this isn't easy. It takes time. But usually a new life comes into being that can be almost as satisfying as our old life. Maybe more satisfying. 

I had the bright idea of taking two shattered rock pieces into my office to see if they'd fit in a bonsai planting. I never trim the bonsai, but I water and fertilize it once a week. Amazingly, I've had the bonsai for about three years and haven't managed to kill it yet -- something I used to regularly do with house plants in my younger days.

The rocks sere a nice addition. The figurine of who I think of as a Taoist sage that came with the bonsai seems to approve, even though the balancing rock is poised to fall on his head.

This afternoon I wandered around our yard looking for a larger rock to replace the one that had shattered. I was OK with the smaller pieces, but they were much smaller than the rock I'd gotten used to looking at whenever I walked by.

I found one half buried in dirt. It's a pretty good replacement for Shattered Rock. When it starts raining again, the dirt should wash off.

So now I've got a balancing rock "sculpture" that is about as tall as Shattered Rock, with the bonus of three rocks being part of the sculpture, rather than just two.

And I found a way to use the interesting looking piece, along with two other pieces of Shattered Rock.

Yes, it's much easier to restore a broken balancing rock than to fix broken pieces of a life.

I'm just using Shattered Rock as a metaphor of sorts to remind me, and whoever reads this blog post, that even though it can be really disturbing to have some seemingly solid part of our life fall apart, frequently what replaces that broken part can turn out to be better than the original.

Or at least not much worse.

Marvelous mystery lies in the complexity of the world

Most of us want to believe in something greater than ourself. That's a worthy ambition. Problem is, religious believers head off in a misguided direction when they imagine that the something greater lies in a vertical direction.

Meaning, they fantasize that a heaven awaits above; or that higher supernatural regions of reality exist; or that their consciousness needs to be elevated beyond worldly concerns.

What these devotees of verticality fail to understand is this: the world right here and right now possesses all the majesty, mystery, and meaning that anyone could desire.

It just takes eyes to see, which, sadly, all too often religious believers lack -- because their attention is focused on mental concepts of a imagined vertical realm rather than the reality of what the world offers.

So what I'm encouraging people to do is extend their vision horizontally. Try to understand the marvelous nature of this world, all that extends in every direction from our own body/mind. 

Nature. Animals. Humans. Galaxies. Plants. Minerals. Science. Art. Culture. A limitless expanse that is partially known, yet mostly remains a mystery.

Not because it can't be known. Because it takes time and effort to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos, including the small portion we call Earth. 

It's a big mistake to think that scientists have a narrow, mechanistic perception of reality.

Sure, some do, but they're by far the exception. The prevailing view of modern science is strongly moving toward a systems approach that emphasizes complex interrelationships, not simple bits and pieces of matter/energy.

Jeremy Lent speaks of this in his book, "The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe." In the Introduction he says:

The Web of Meaning takes up where The Patterning Instinct [his previous book] left off, by laying out a framework for a worldview that could foster humanity's long-term flourishing on a healthy planet. It is a worldview of integration: one that identifies the unifying principles that flow through all things, while celebrating the differences that lead to the richness of our lived experience. 

It's a worldview that links together scientific findings in recent decades from such diverse fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience and complexity theory, showing how they affirm profound insights from the world's great wisdom traditions, such as Buddhism, Taoism, and traditional knowledge from Indigenous peoples around the world.

This integrated worldview breaks down many of the barriers that tend to separate different forms of knowledge and activity in modern society. 

We're accustomed to thinking of science as existing in a different domain from spirituality. We generally view the intellect as distinct from emotion; the mind as separate from the body; humans as separate from nature; and spiritual insight as separate from political engagement.

In the integrated worldview laid out here, each one of these domains is intricately connected with the others in an extended web of meaning.

A complex web of meaning. But "complex" doesn't necessarily mean confusing, disturbing, undesirable. Complexity just is the way the world is. 

Yes, we humans like to imagine that the world is made of discrete entities. There is me, and there is you. Two things. I am me, you are you. Pretty damn simple. 

And yet... 

When I'm with my wife I'm a different person than when I'm by myself. Or with someone else. Every relationship is just that: a relation between two or more entities, in this case, people. That relationship is more than the sum of the parts of the entities. 

It is a process, give and take, a flowing dance that can't be understood by freezing motion into a static "me" and "you." In every relationship between two living beings, there is an astounding degree of mystery, of unpredictableness, of creativity.

We have no idea who our self is. Not really. Almost certainly the reason is that the self doesn't exist. At least not in the way most of us conceive of it.

We imagine an unchanging core at the center of our being. Consciousness. Soul. Ego. Self.

Whatever name it goes by, there's no evidence of it, even though it seems entirely real. So does a mirage, until we drive close to the shimmering pool of water in the middle of a road and realize that it only exists as ephemeral waves given off by a hot road. 

(When I was a child my mother lived in El Paso and drove to New Mexico regularly, so I became familiar with this sort of mirage.)

We have a lot of difficulty grasping that there's no enduring self -- just relationships between our body/mind and the world.

Zen masters are fond of asking their students to point to that supposed self, to their imagined Buddha-nature, to the "I" lurking in their cranium.

When all that pointing is shown to be illusory, they advise looking instead to eating a bowl of rice, or to sweeping the floor, or to carrying a pail of water. We find ourselves by losing ourselves in the greater world.

Jeremy Lent says in his book:

Along with other Buddhist schools, Zen recognizes that, of all the cognitive patterns blocking a deep realization of reality, the most insidious is the belief that "I" am an objective and fixed entity, rather than a mere abstraction. Philosopher Alan Watts illustrates this by comparing the "I" to the illusory circle of light created by a whirling torch or the flight path made by a bird in the sky.

It doesn't objectively exist, but we create the abstraction by weaving together a pattern of past and future.

The word for this Buddhist insight, anatman, which literally means 'no atman', is often confusingly translated as 'no-self', but it would be more accurate to translate it as 'no-fixed-I'. 

The meaning of the ancient Indian word atman correlates closely with the Greco-Christian idea of a fixed eternal soul that is freed from the body at death. When the Buddha renounced this core Vedic belief with the principle of anatman, it would have been as revolutionary as an early Christian claiming that the soul didn't exist.

Believers in God have the burden of proof, not atheists

My wife has organized an atheist group that meets every Sunday here in Salem. Recently I noted that someone had shared a link to a book on the group's Facebook page. 

It looked interesting, so I bought Why There is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God.

I'm enjoying Armin Navabi's book. Here's info about Navabi that's on the back cover and Amazon listing.

Armin Navabi is a former Muslim from Iran and the founder of Atheist Republic, a non-profit organization with over one million fans and followers worldwide that is dedicated to offering a safe community for atheists around the world to share their ideas and meet like-minded individuals.

Armin was born and raised in the Islamic Republic of Iran and was indoctrinated thoroughly in the Muslim tradition. After almost losing his life in the pursuit of God's grace, the devastation of that event motivated him to seek a better understanding of the nature and concept of God and religious belief.

Armin's journey led him to leaving Islam and becoming an atheist. Wanting to reach out to others like himself, Armin continues to examine religion as well as the notion of God and interact with others to engage in thought-provoking and educational discussion.

I liked what Navabi says in his Introduction about the burden of proof. He reminded me of me in how he argued this. Great atheist minds think alike, I guess. 

One concept you'll see come up repeatedly in this book is the idea of the burden of proof. During any debate, it's the job of the person making a claim to provide support, evidence and reasoning for that claim.

It simply doesn't make sense to make an unfounded claim with no evidence to back it and demand that the other person to either agree with you or disprove your unfounded statement. 

...The burden of proof is a necessary part of any debate, regardless of the topic being discussed. Its utility in facilitating discussion is so well established that it's required in legal proceedings as well; the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty.

In the case of debates about God, the burden is on the believer to offer support for her position if she wishes it to be considered seriously. In reality, the only necessary argument against believing in God is simply that there is no evidence that any gods exist.

An atheist doesn't need to justify her lack of belief any further. This keeps the burden of proof on the side of the claimant where it belongs. The person making a claim has to provide the evidence for its validity.

Would you believe in the claim that flying pineapples exist until proven wrong without any evidence? Probably not. You would withhold belief until there is evidence to support such a claim. 

All the same, it's sometimes valuable to point out the fallacies in a claimant's argument. At the very least, this creates constructive discussion where all points are considered and examined. This can also introduce doubt, causing the other person to reconsider his or her position or consider searching for evidence before accepting a claim. 

Atheism exists on a spectrum. Some atheists claim absolute certainty in God's nonexistence. Others simply remain unconvinced and refuse to believe in a deity without compelling evidence. However, once one has a high enough level of certainty about something, they usually treat it as certain for the sake of practicality. 

After all, I cannot say with absolute certainty that my wife is not a professional assassin hired by the People's Republic of China to exterminate me. But I don't spend time worrying about the possibility because there is no evidence whatsoever to support it.

The same is true for the existence of God, although my wife being an assassin is actually more likely; that scenario, at least, would fall within the known scientific laws without contradicting the prevailing models explaining the universe. 

Open Thread 40 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it's because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Remember that I'm moderating comments, so it could take a while for your comment to be published. Almost every comment submitted to an Open Thread will be approved. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

I'm asked how to adjust to life after leaving RSSB

Here's a message I got recently from someone who has left the India-based religious organization I was an active member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). My reply to this person follows the message.

"baba ji" refers to the current RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon. "Seva" means service, volunteering. "Satsangi" is a RSSB initiate. "Satsang" is a RSSB meeting.

Hi Brian,

I came across your blog a while ago and it has been instrumental in helping me question my beliefs. My family is satsangi and I was raised in it. I think you and I had a similar loyalty to the path.  I would attend seva every weekend and sometimes in the weeknights too and was heavily involved in the regional and national satsangs when baba ji would come.  I always considered myself a satsangi; however, for seven years I was very deeply entrenched in the satsangi way of life.  For those seven years, my life revolved around seva, satsang and satsangis to the point that I sacrificed my non-satsangi friendships for the sake of the rs path.

10 years ago, I moved to a different city where I didn’t have access to the teachings.  The sangat was small, I attended a few satsangs but I didn’t put in the same amount of effort.  Now, 10 years later, I am slowly realizing that the path isn’t for me.  The financial scandal pretty much ended any hope for reconciliation, especially when I read on your blog that baba ji said he has diabetes and can’t attend court yet was holding satsang on the same day.  It is always preached that we need to be the best representatives of the guru so we do not bring shame to him.  What about him bringing shame to us?  How is he being a good representative of us? He also preaches about ‘haq halal di kamai’ or earning an honest living.  It is all so hypocritical.  

The worst part is, the fear is still there.  I’m typing this, but will something horrible happen to me now?  Will I go blind because I’m rejecting the guru?  I know it’s ridiculous, I’m a rational person, yet these wayward thoughts that have been programmed into me since I was 5 years old keep popping up and I don’t know how to shut them up.  There isn’t any guilt, I’ve been freely telling my family and close friends that I’m not binding myself to arbitrary restrictions anymore and I do truly think it’s a sham centred around cashing in. I’m still a vegetarian since that’s my own morality but I’ve pretty much stopped asking about ingredients at restaurants and do have a drink when I feel like it.  By all outward appearances I am untangling myself from the situation but inwardly, there is a smidgeon of fear that I can’t seem to erase.

At the end of the day, I’m not overly angry but more so disappointed and very very sad.  It is just so sad, I can’t believe it.  I feel as though I’m in mourning.  I guess the reason I’m writing to you is because you are so far ahead of me in this journey.  Did this happen to you?  How did you ‘unlearn’ the programming?  It seems you bought into the teachings as much as I did, maybe you can give me some advice on how to deal with this.

Thanks for your blog Brian.  I know you get a lot of flack for it, but it was instrumental in helping spur my critical thinking of the path.

This was my reply.

Thanks for your message. It makes me feel good to hear from people like you who find some value in my Church of the Churchless blog. 

Yes, I was very loyal to Charan Singh, who initiated me. Gurinder Singh, not quite as much, though I certainly did a heck of a lot of seva after Gurinder became the RSSB guru. 

 

Here’s some thoughts about how to adjust to life after RSSB.

 

(1) It takes time. To me it’s a lot like going through a divorce, something I did after 18 years of marriage. I loved my first wife. But we grew apart. At first I thought about her a lot, wondering if there was anything we could have done to save our marriage. Now I’ve been remarried for 31 years to a woman I love even more. And my first wife is happy with the man she has found. 

 

Likewise, it’s natural to spend considerable time thinking about your RSSB years, since this path meant a lot to you for quite a few years. That isn’t time lost. It’s time gained, since you’ve learned a lot about yourself, how you view spirituality, and such. Now I rarely think about my first wife, since I’m happy with my current wife. I also rarely think about RSSB now, except when I use it as an example in one of my blog posts. 

 

So my advice is to let your adjustment to breaking away from RSSB happen naturally. As the days, weeks, and months pass, you’ll find yourself feeling more comfortable not being involved with RSSB.

 

(2) Regarding fear, I don’t think this can be a productive basis for spirituality. Isn’t love much more important? What kind of god or guru would punish you for deciding to deconvert from a belief system? Certainly not any god or guru deserving of devotion. 

 

Yes, the RSSB literature contains references to nasty stuff that happens to disciples who stray from RSSB after being initiated. But almost certainly these are superstitions, written by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. And I speak as someone who wrote several books for RSSB. I did a good job with the books. However, I didn’t have any special mystical knowledge. Nor do, in my opinion, the authors of other RSSB books.

 

If it gives you some comfort, I broke away from RSSB around 2004. Seventeen years later, I haven’t noticed any bad things that have happened to me beyond what happens to everyone, like health problems as I’ve aged. 

 

(3) Keep in mind that nothing is 100% certain. That’s a scientific perspective, since science always is open to having hypotheses or theories revised or even overturned. Thus there’s a chance RSSB is correct in how it views reality, just as there’s a chance that any of the other thousands of world religions and mystical paths is correct. 

 

What you and I have done is increase our chances of learning the truth about God, life after death, and all that. Speaking for myself, what I do every day is spend a minute or two talking to God and the guru who initiated me, Charan Singh. 

 

I say something like, “Hey God/guru, I’d like to know you. I’d like to learn from you. I don’t know how to find you, assuming you exist. So it’s up to you to reach out to me. I’m here. Pay me a visit in my consciousness. Or if you want to prove that you exist in a physical manner, feel free to manifest a new Tesla in my driveway. Then I’ll really believe in you.” (I’m hoping God/guru have a sense of humor.)

 

Just because you have given up on RSSB doesn’t mean you have given up on searching for meaning, or on opening yourself to a possible supernatural reality. When I got divorced, I didn’t give up on women. I just gave up on a particular woman, and then found a different woman who was a better fit for me.

 

Likewise, the only reason you might feel like you’ve lost something is the strong devotion you had to RSSB still lingering in your mind. As I said, this is natural. You should feel good about that devotion. Just turn it in other directions now.

 

There are lots of things, people, causes, and such to be devoted to. Or to love. There’s nothing special about the devotion you gave to RSSB. What matters is devotion itself, not where it is directed. Every religion wants its followers to put the religion first, or at least above most other stuff in life. That’s crazy. Only you can decide what is most important to you now. Trust yourself.

 

Hope this helps at least a little bit. 

 

     — Brian

Capitol police are speaking the truth right now

As I write this I'm listening to televised testimony of four police officers who are appearing at the first meeting of the Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol.

Watch it, Church of the Churchless commenters who think truth is relative, that what experts and professionals say can't be trusted, that everyone is free to create their own reality, that this physical realm is an illusion, that objectivity isn't possible, and other blather spewed from your religious sensibilities.

Watch it, because the truth is being spoken by four brave men who put their lives on the line. One truthful sentence from them is worth more than a thousand bullshit comments about the relativity of truth.

Truth isn't relative. Truth is truth. It is the most important thing in life, because without truth we're living a lie. Me, I choose not to do that. Those four police officers also have chosen not to do that. 

Take some time to watch this testimony. I'm sure it will be available on You Tube.

Those commenters who consider that truth is something to play word games with, that it doesn't matter if people embrace falsehoods -- watch the four police officers talk about how a dangerous mob of thousands of Trump supporters invaded the capitol because they believed a lie, that the election was stolen from Trump.

Lies matter. Falsehoods matter.

They lead to assaults on law enforcement officers who are still recovering from their many injuries. So think about this, commenters on this blog, next time you want to defend a "everyone creates their own reality" bullshit philosophy. That's an insult to the truth-telling police officers.

None of you would have had the courage to defend the capitol. You don't even have the courage to defend the truth, which requires no physical bravery, just moral strength. So learn from the four police officers. They have a lot to teach you.

I'm enjoying my Mendi neurofeedback device

Recently I got the Mendi brain exercise (neurofeedback) device that I'd ordered early last year via a Kickstarter campaign. Repeated delays kept pushing back the estimated time us backers would get our Mendi.

Finally it came, from Sweden. Here I am modeling my Mendi. I took the photo in front of several katana swords and a fan in my office, because the Mendi has a certain Japanese/samurai look to it.

The Mendi web site describes what the device does.

An iPhone app connects with the Mendi via bluetooth. You train your brain by playing a game. You focus on a ball, with the goal to have the ball rise vertically. This video shows an early version of the app. The current version is a bit slicker, but works in the same way.

I've only been using the Mendi for a short time and need to do more exploring with it. This is my initial impression of what works best to get the ball moving upward.

My first try with the Mendi produced a pretty good score. I think this was because I simply focused on the ball and didn't try to make the ball go up.

The next few Mendi sessions didn't go so well, probably because I was trying to get a better score. From what I can tell so far -- and my experience likely is different from other Mendi users -- trying isn't the best way to train the brain.

Not trying is. 

Meaning, I do best when I simply look at the ball with a sense of open curiosity. This is hard to put into words. My best scores come when I'm alert and aware of the ball, yet am looking at it with no motivation to control it, just to observe it.

Which, of course, is what mindfulness is all about: nonjudgemental awareness of what is happening in the present moment. 

I started meditating in 1970 when I was 21. Now I'm 72 and have only missed a day or two of meditation in the past 51 years. So I have a lot of experience with various forms of meditation: mantra, open awareness, mindfulness, counting breaths.

But I've never used a neurofeedback device like Mendi. I'm seeing the benefits of it. When I enter a certain relaxed state of mind, the ball moves upward. If I'm tense or trying too hard, the ball jumps around or goes down.

I'm already able to visualize the ball going up and thereby approach the same state of mind I'm in when using the Mendi device. Can't say my life has markedly changed, just that I see the potential of this form of brain training. 

Here's a screenshot of my most recent session. 

This is what the three scores mean.

The app keeps track of all of your sessions. I was definitely in a zone during the 3-minute session at 8:24 pm yesterday. Focusing on the ball seemed quite effortless. I was sitting on the floor for that session, rather than in a chair.

A few times the app has told me that something was wrong, like I was moving too much (I wasn't) or light was shining directly on my head (yes, I was facing a bright window). It's advised to use the Mendi in a dim room.

This might explain whey I did better when I used my Mendi in the evening when it was almost dark here in Oregon. I also could have been in a more relaxed frame of mind.

Testimonials on the Mendi web site are impressive. But that's to be expected of testimonials on a web site. I'll keep experimenting with the device and report on how that goes in a subsequent blog post. Some early reviews are here, here, and here.

Truth isn't personal, but institutional

This morning I finished reading The Constitution of Knowledge, a book by Jonathan Rauch whose subtitle is "In Defense of Truth." 

As noted in a previous blog post about this book, Rauch persuasively argues that truth isn't personal, but institutional. Or social, if you have a dislike of institutions and prefer another word.

Here's a quote from the second to last page of the book that ends with a reflection of this point: "...and outsource reality to a global network of strangers."

As I wrote in chapter 1, the Constitution of Knowledge is the most successful social design in human history, but also the most counterintuitive.

In exchange for knowledge, freedom, and peace, it asks us to mistrust our senses and our tribes, question our sacred beliefs, and relinquish the comfort of certitude. 

It insists that we embrace our fallibility, subject ourselves to criticism, tolerate the reprehensible, and outsource reality to a global network of strangers.

For me, this was a fresh idea. Not that I wasn't aware of it. I just hadn't thought of how we humans go about arriving at a shared conception of reality in the clear way that Rauch speaks of. 

Understand: he isn't talking about subjective reality, personal experience. It doesn't take a global network of strangers for me to know that I like raspberries. That's a personal truth of mine which requires no one other than me and my taste buds to confirm.

But otherwise, I agree with Rauch that truth has to be social/institutional in order for it to be objective rather than subjective. 

Yesterday I went into the south Salem Ace Hardware store to buy some polycarbonate cutting blades for my Stihl trimmer. (I've found they work much better than the usual cutting line for tall grass and brush.) 

I told the Stihl specialist that in using the trimmer a few days ago, the poly blades got trashed when I was cutting thin brush. He was surprised. "Have you been storing the blades in water?" he asked. "No, I've seen reviews of the blades that say this is a good idea, but other users say it isn't necessary."

He was adamant that storing the blades in water would harden them. Indeed, when I got home and looked at the back of an old package of blades that I had lying around, I read that Stihl advises just that: storing them in water.

Institutional knowledge. When I looked at comments from people like me who simply use the poly blades, there was a diversity of opinion about storing them in water. But experts, and the Stihl company itself, said to do this. So now I've got a bunch of poly blades soaking in a plastic container. 

When you think about it, this is how knowledge passes from a potential truth to a very likely or certain truth. There has to be a community of truth-seekers who assess the validity of a potential truth. An individual can't do this on their own. 

Hillary Clinton correctly said that it takes a village to raise a child. And it takes institutions to arrive at shared truths.

Consider the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Even though Trump and much of the Republican Party did their best to overturn Joe Biden's victory, they didn't succeed. As was repeated often, "the institutions held."

County and state election officials. Secretaries of State in swing states. Courts, including the Supreme Court. Congress. Journalists.

These institutions stood up for the truth that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. If individuals had to argue about who won, we'd still be debating this question. (Indeed, Trump and his cronies continue to refuse to admit that he lost.)

Here's a few more passages from the final pages of the book.

The young Lincoln held that reverence for the law is the true north of America's constitutional culture. Reverence for facts is the true north of the reality-based community. 

Sometimes we get facts wrong. Of course. But we do not cheat. We do not cut corners. We hold ourselves accountable -- to others, to our community -- for rejecting convenient fictions and half-truths.

Because factuality anchors our integrity and defines our community, we renounce propaganda and truthiness even if we are the only person in the vicinity who is doing so. And just by doing that, we make a difference. 

As the great Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, "You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world."

...My biggest worry is Lincoln's biggest worry: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher."

By themselves, the forces of chaos and coercion lack the strength to unseat the Constitution of Knowledge, and if they did unseat it, they would have nothing to replace it with except a Hobbesian war of each of millions of personal and tribal realities against all the others.

What propagandists and social-media bullies and emotional safetyists and subjectivists and all the rest might succeed in doing, however, is to demoralize and confuse and intimidate, so that the reality-based community will lose heart and give ground.

...Yet the reality-based community has withstood much worse. It beat back the inquisitors who imprisoned Galileo, the dictators whose gulags spanned continents, and the racists and homophobes who sought to silence voices of freedom.

"Tomorrow morning," said Socrates, "let us meet here again." The conversation he and his young protege began 2,500 years ago continues, now spanning the world instead of just Athens, despite countless efforts to squash it.

Thanks to Appreciative Reader for defending the scientific worldview

There are three thousand word comments that deserve trashing. Then there are comments of the same length that deserve fervent applause from those of us who respect reality, truth, evidence, reason, and the scientific worldview.

That's why I'm sharing another lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" below. 

As you'll see if you read the following comment published on my Why neither unicorns nor God are to be believed in post, Appreciative Reader absolutely demolishes the religious perspective of another commenter, Spence Tepper.

If this were a boxing fight, it'd be called after the second or third round because too much damage is being done to the weaker opponent. 

Or, as Appreciative Reader points out below, the referee would warn Tepper to stop constantly retreating and refusing to engage in a fair fight. I share the frustration of Appreciative Reader, because I frequently encounter the same tactic by religious believers.

You point out the absurdity of a belief. You ask for evidence in support of it. You question why anyone should take that belief seriously when there's no reason to do this. You say that if this religious tenet is to be accepted, then why not accept every other unproven notion offered up by the thousands of world religions.

And the response is... ducking and weaving. Running away. Failing to engage. Spouting nonsense words that mean nothing but are filled with the fire and fury of a threatened religious believer.

So I'm grateful for what Appreciative Reader has done in his repeated attempts to get Tepper, and others, to respond in a reasonable fashion to the nonsensical world view of those who cling to beliefs that have no foundation in reality, yet comfort the believer and so are very difficult for the religious person to give up.

Hey, I've been there and done that. I spent many years, decades actually, clinging to a religious worldview. It met needs that I had at the time, so my mind wouldn't allow me to see the many contradictions, absurdities, and plain weird ideas promulgated by the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

It's a lonely task, doing what Appreciative Reader has done in his comment exchanges with Spence Tepper. Religiosity is the dominant worldview of most people in the world. Science, reason, open debate -- these are under challenge. 

Recently I read that about 50% of people in the United States either believe that President Biden wasn't elected in a free and fair election, and/or believe that Covid vaccines aren't effective. Both beliefs are false. The evidence is overwhelming that Biden won fairly and that Covid vaccines are effective.

Thus the Appreciative Reader - Spence Tepper debate isn't just about religious belief. It also is about the danger of large numbers of people believing stuff that clearly isn't true, going so far as to stage an insurrection at our nation's capitol in an effort to keep Trump as president, and Republicans urging people to not get a Covid vaccine, thereby causing needless illness and death.

Reality is too important to discard. Thank you, Appreciative Reader, for standing up for truth and the scientific worldview. I've been inspired by your comments and I know that others have been also, even if you mostly get responses from religious believers.

Here's the comment from Appreciative Reader.

Spence, I’m sorry to say our discussion has devolved to bizarre levels now. I really hadn’t expected you of all people to descend to desperately clutching at straws in this manner.

You keep ignoring the points I raise, and insist on straddling your soapbox instead. You keep conflating the actual conduct of scientific experiments with a scientific worldview. You keep ignoring the implications of the burden of proof. You betray (or at least, you project) zero understanding of the entire discussion around the functional equivalence of “accepting” and “not-rejecting”.

In discussing the dragon/unicorn thought experiment, you keep repeating you will try to find out more about the beast, despite having been told at the outset that it is impervious to all means of detection available to today’s science and technology; and you keep veering off into non sequiturs, like saying you’ll try to test whether the person making the (dragon/unicorn/religious/mystical) claim is of sound mind.

I don’t see this discussion really going anywhere, what it is doing is lurchingly retracing its own already trod steps, but still, I’ll try to address here, in one single post, the issues you raise in your last three or four posts that you addressed to me. The result is likely to be a lengthy post, I’m afraid, and so as not to make it even longer I’ll simply title out the main themes that you’ve written on (and that I’ll respond to), rather than actually quoting your words.

DISPROVING SPECIFIC GOD IDEAS : YOUR CHALLENGE

This is the part that I find truly bizarre. The part where you keep insisting, in the face of all rationality and reason, that no god ideas have ever been disproved by science, despite clear instances of such having been promptly presented.

Recall two of the most conspicuous contortions you had to resort to in the course of your last few comments.

First, when in response to your challenge I presented you with two specific examples of God ideas having been disproven, you turned around to demand of me how I know those are real Gods. Can you really, even now, not see the absurdity of even asking that question?

Some theist has presented very specific God ideas, and I have shown how a scientific worldview clearly refutes those ideas; whereupon what do you do? You demand of ME how I can be sure those are valid God ideas!! (And, when the entirely bizarre nature of the thought process that can think up this objection is pointed out to you, what do you do? You simply ignore it, and move on to talk of other things.)

And second, you then do the typical goalpost-shifting thing that theists seem to specialize in.

I’m going to address your “challenge” one more time now. Despite the fact that I’ve done it twice already, and despite having little real hope of piercing through any better this time. (And all we have on wager is your clear admission that your challenge has been met.)

ONE: The thurder-and-lightning producing Gods, Thor, and Odin, and Zeus, and Indra, and Varun, and whoever and whatever else that specializes in this superpower. Modern science has shown us the exact mechanism of these phenomena, and that mechanism has no need at all for any God entities.

(That is, to spell it out, we have no need to resort to hypothesize Gods in order to understand those phenomena as well as we do, ergo following Occam's Razor we have no need to posit any Gods, and we can safely not accept, or reject, the God hypothesis as superfluous and unnecessary in respect of those specific phenomena, and therefore those specific Gods.)

Further, we do have a means of directly falsifying the god claim as well. Believers in these Gods claimed that propitiating them by praying to them and sacrificing to them can help turn these elements in one’s favor, and angering them attracts their wrath.

No one does that these days, and yet we are not visited by some terrible wrath of these Gods, as represented by these elements wreaking some terrible disaster on us. To not see this as debunking is, I’m sorry to say, to harbor, despite an education in science, a decidedly irrational and anti-scientific worldview.

TWO: The God of the Bible, that people did believe in literally in vast numbers in times past, and in not negligible numbers even today. Showing that the creation myth presented in the Bible is erroneous, by showing that the mechanism of how the universe arose has no need of invoking a God, is enough to debunk this claim. Directly showing that the age of the universe is far older than claimed by the alleged Word of God, as recorded in the Bible, is direct falsification as well.

THREE: The sun-god in Norse legends that is driven in a chariot by two horses (or, in other versions, by one horse, whatever). As well as the sun-god of the Aztecs, that, unless propitiated with human sacrifice, will not appear to us again and will abandon us to eternal darkness and death. The "how" of the sun apparently going around the earth has been explained clearly enough by science, and none of that has need to invoke either Gods or chariots or horses.

And the claim has been directly falsified as well, because no one sacrifices human hearts to the sun-god any more, and yet the sun rises in the east every single day..

Spence, you aren’t by any chance spoofing me, are you? Pulling my leg, playing a trick on me, by putting me in the distinctly ridiculous position of solemnly holding forth on these elementary things in all earnest like this? If that is the case, then I applaud you, because you did take me in completely so far, and even now I have no more than a very tentative suspicion that your arguments might be no more than a practical joke. So that if the idea was to play a practical joke on me, you’ve been entirely successful.

To claim in all seriousness that your challenge hasn’t been met, despite these clear examples having been presented (and plenty more can easily be thought of), is to either be completely oblivious of the implications of a scientific worldview, or, if that is not the case, then it is to be literally delusional. Unless of course this is all a joke.

In claiming that your challenge hasn't been met satisfactorily, the arguments you employ are the equivalent of asserting that science cannot debunk the claim that the moon is made of cheese. Sure, you won’t find actual peer-reviewed papers, describing elaborate experiments conducted, that clearly tell you that the moon isn’t made of cheese.

But to latch on to that as some kind of justification for a worldview that claims that science does not directly refute clearly and DEMONSTRABLY absurd claims like that the moon is made of cheese (or that the sun is drawn around the earth by horses, and will abandon us unless we sacrifice to it; or that lightning and storms are caused by gods who will wreak destruction on us unless they are propitiated; or that the world was created six thousand years ago by a psychotic but immensely powerful god that will annihilate us and/or consign us to hell if we don’t abide by his commandments and his prophets’ and son’s instructions) is to have simply seen and maybe even to have participated in science, but to have come away with no more than a cargo-cult impression of what science actually is and what a scientific worldview actually entails.

WHAT YOU SEE AS THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS IN ATHEISM (OR AT LEAST, IN THIS PARTICULAR VERSION OF ATHEISM)

Let me quote you first on this, before likewise enumerating my response :

“Here is the fundamental flaw. I'll state it in three ways.
1. What science hasn't tested science cannot comment upon.
2. Evidence that has not been gathered is not non-existent.
3. The unknown is not non - existent. It is the basis of scientific inquiry.”

(1.) “Science” does not comment on anything. People do.

The scientific method is a tool that people use to suss out what is reasonable to believe, and what not. Thereafter, it is people who arrive at positions on different claims and issues.

We’ve been through this already, the difference between the scientific method and a scientific worldview. You’ve ignored that last discussion, and gone on with your inner monologue without referencing our past discussion on this.

To imagine that a scientific worldview entails referencing the scientific method only in such instances where there has been some formal scientific study, and in everything else either believing any random thing that one likes, or else not taking any position at all, is to arrive at some cargo-cult version of “science”.

The core of the scientific method is that one will not accept any hypothesis that one cannot back up with evidence. Any position --- and that includes the God question as well (or at least, some versions of it, that is to say, some specific abstract God-ideas) --- that cannot admit of direct evidence, it is simply not “scientific” to believe at all.

It is not that no evidence equals we have carte blanche to believe whatever we want, or that we must necessarily suspend any conclusion at all (which suspension of all conclusion is in practice sometimes/often simply not even feasible, in any case). It is that no evidence equals we have no reason to hold that position as true, no reason to accept it.

(2) “Evidence” refers to some support for some proposition or some hypothesis. Therefore, if evidence has not been “gathered”, it is literally not evidence at all.

Sure, whether we self-important humans catalog something or cogitate on something does not in any way impact the underlying reality. That is understood, obviously. Not once have I suggested otherwise.

The point is, in as much as evidence has not been “gathered”, it may perhaps exist, but in as much as we do not yet know of it, it is entirely and wholly fallacious to base any conclusion on such evidence. In as much as some conclusion that you seek to support via such not-yet-gathered evidence is fallacious, such conclusion we are constrained to not accept, that is to say, we reject such conclusion.

This is entirely straightforward. And your views on this are entirely mistaken.

(3) Similar to above. Agreed, the unknown is not non-existent, and, rather than saying “it is the basis of scientific enquiry”, I think it may be more precise to phrase it thus, “It can be the basis of scientific enquiry if we should choose to make it so.”

Anyway, minor nitpicking aside, I have not once suggested otherwise. But the question isn’t what does exist; the question is what do we believe, what belief or claim do we accept. If something is unknown then we can’t go around believing random things about it.

(Which, mind you, is what you are doing. You’re claiming there are no grounds to do science on God. And you take that as carte blanche to go ahead and believe in God --- which you have every right to --- but where you err is in claiming that such an attitude comports with a scientific worldview. The fact is it doesn’t.)

Nor is it that what is technically unknown, as far as formal science, we will necessarily suspend all judgment on. That science hasn’t explicitly considered and tested whether the moon is made of cheese, or whether the sun is drawn by horses around the earth, or whether the sun will not rise unless propitiated with sacrifice, does not mean that we will necessarily suspend all judgment on such.

(And I don’t mean idiosyncratic personal judgment, I mean a conclusion that comports with a scientific worldview.)

We know the approximate composition of the moon, so we can certainly conclude that it isn’t made of cheese. And what is more such conclusion will be fully in agreement with a scientific worldview, even though there are no papers published specifically on the subject, “Is the moon made of cheese?” Ditto questions about whether the sun is a God that is drawn by horses around the sun, or whether the universe was created by a psychotic and decidedly unpleasant God six thousand years ago.

Those aren’t flaws in atheism, as you claim they are. They are flaws in your reasoning and your own POV.

YOUR POST ON THE FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE OF “NOT ACCEPTING” VIS-À-VIS REJECTING A CLAIM

What you argue here is no more than yet more contortions, Spence.

That the hypothesis is not accepted (and, for that matter, not rejected either) by the people carrying on the experiment and for the duration of the experiment and analysis, that hardly needs pointing out. In any case, it *has* already been pointed out, more than once, in a separate context, which would be the context of distinguishing between the POV appropriate to the scientist researching some specific hypothesis, vis-à-vis the POV appropriate for everyone else. That is an out and out non sequitur as far as this particular discussion.

Should the experiment not bear the results the hypothesis predicts, then in the setting aside of the hypothesis there is no universal distinction between “not accepting” and “rejecting”, as you suggest. To speak of this in the context that you do is to not understand what was said at all, not even a little bit (hint, repeated for the third or fourth time already: refer back to Osho Robbins’s analogy of “Not guilty” vis-à-vis “Innocent”); or else it is to resort to deliberate disingenuity.

Here’s a concrete example that will make the distinction clear, using the overtly formal scientific setting that you seem to imagine imparts some especial sanctity that everyday examples don’t.

(It doesn’t, actually, and everyday examples are equally as effective, provided you grok the actual underlying implications of the scientific method. Nevertheless, I’ll try to accommodate your apparent fetish for examples from formal science.)

Contrast the Ether theory with the String Theory. The former is an example of a hypothesis rejected, while the latter is an example of a hypothesis not (yet) accepted. The experimental results in the case of the former clearly refuted the prediction that the ether theory had thrown up. It clearly showed that, rather than there showing up a difference in the speed of light, instead the speed of light remained the same.

That is direct refutation, leading to rejection. As far as the latter, there has been no direct refutation, at all, so far. But nor has there been any evidence that bears it out, no evidence that justifies bypassing Occam’s Razor. In as much as no evidence has been found, the theory is not accepted.

(Disclaimer: This example focuses only on the difference between “not accepting” and “rejecting”, and not on the actual promise that string theory holds out, or the fact that people are still working on string theory while no one works on ether theory. Don’t focus on that part of it, I clearly recognize that in that specific respect this analogy/example is imperfect. That string theory is not, as a result of yielding no evidence, tossed right out the window as the ether theory has been, is because it is early days still, and because it otherwise explains our observations so very completely. No doubt if in another fifty or seventy years string theory still does not bear out any evidence [that isn’t explained equally well by other, simpler hypotheses], so as to justify its far more complex structure, then it might be relegated to the museum or the trashcan as well, conceivably.)

Come on, man. Do I really need to spell this out like this all over again in words of one syllable? Have my many posts on this, already presented in this thread, as well as the many discussions elsewhere (including one whole thread we’d both participated in that was on this very subject) not made the distinction between the two amply clear, that you should compose the post you did just preceding, that betrays zero understanding of the difference between the two (and indeed between soft atheism and hard atheism)?

You know what it looks like to me? You’re not actually reading my posts. You’re basically focused on your soapboxing, while going through the motions of responding to my posts, all with the aim of somehow passing off your theistic worldview as somehow not anti-scientific.

Otherwise you wouldn’t so blatantly misread and/or misrepresent this part so completely so late into this discussion; and you wouldn’t keep on repeatedly and totally missing the point of the unicorn/dragon thought experiment (and keep raising tangential non sequiturs around it rather than actually addressing the meat of the argument presented via that construct); and you wouldn’t keep raising these wild objections to these very obvious and simplistic God-ideas having been clearly debunked by science (even as some more subtle God-ideas admittedly remain beyond the reach of such easy and direct debunking).

Apologies, Spence, if some of what I’ve said here seems rude. I really truly hope this thread will not sour the general regard we have for each other.

But … how do you even begin to hold a coherent conversation with someone who insists, in the teeth of all reasonable argument, that such blatant irrationalities like the Olympian Gods and the Aztec Sun God and Biblical God and the Norse Gods as literally depicted --- as well as, presumably, the moon made of cheese --- are not ruled out by a scientific worldview?

With someone who, at the end of a detailed discussion (indeed, more than one detailed discussion) around “rejecting” and “not accepting” (and soft atheism and hard atheism) comes out with an elaborate post that betrays either zero understanding of what was being said all along, either that or else it deliberately seeks to misdirect?

I’m going to walk away now from this discussion, but without the hope that I’d held yesterday of arriving in future at closer agreement and better understanding, because how on earth do you even address this bizarre state of affairs, where on one hand there is familiarity with (some of) the techniques of science, but on the other hand there is complete cluelessness as to its implications?

And I’m going to walk away more resolutely this time than I was able to yesterday, because although it started out promisingly enough, what this discussion has now devolved into is an apparently endless exchange of comments that is neither illuminating nor, at this point, particularly pleasurable. Again, my apologies.

Why neither unicorns nor God are to be believed in

Once again, I'm sharing a marvelous comment from "Appreciative Reader" on a recent post of mine.

I especially liked the Shadowfax part near the end. Shadowfax is an invisible unicorn impervious to detection by all means, yet lives in Appreciative Reader's spare garage.

Or at least, this is what Appreciative Reader claims. 

Should other people assign Shadowfax a 50-50 probability of actually existing? Of course not. They should consider that perhaps one day there will be evidence of Shadowfax, since anything is possible.

But until that day arrives, there's no reason to believe in this invisible unicorn. Just as there's no reason to believe in God, since there's exactly as much demonstrable evidence of God's existence as there is of Shadowfax's existence.

The difference between them, of course, is that billions of people believe in God, while only Appreciative Reader believes in Shadowfax -- and only to make a point about the scientific approach to understanding reality.

Here's the comment.

"Can we agree that personal choices, personal logic may be our best effort to be scientific, but do not actually constitute actual objective science?"

.......Sure, Spence. But with the qualification that that personal choice isn't a free-for-all, but follows the broad guidelines of what I'd referred to as a scientific worldview.

That is, to describe that worldview as an agglomeration of essentially personal choices is to add precision to what I'd earlier on termed "scientific worldview", but is not to actually change what that actually amounts to.

In other words, to state that this is a personal worldview, is not to let open the floodgates to accepting whatever some individual person happens to find likely or reasonable, not unless they can rationally defend it with reference to the scientific method and per the terms we've already discussed.

With those qualifications, sure, absolutely, agreed to that much.

But I was hoping for broader agreement than just that much. Let me have one more go at trying to arrive at it.

Following on what I'd just said, in my comment above, Spence, let me quote, and comment on, what you'd said in your previous post:

"... to claim science hasn't proved God exists and therefore God doesn't exist is a false statement."

To recognize that science hasn't proved God exists, and therefore, for all practical purposes, to hold that God doesn't exist, is the rational worldview that is in keeping with a scientific outlook.

Happy now, with that rephrasing? And taken in conjunction with my last two comments addressed to you, do you, finally, agree with my larger point?

For perspective, let me introduce you to Shadowfax.

There is, beyond my front garden, a spare garage that now is a store (a dump, more like) for sundry gardening equipment and supplies.

I claim that that garage houses a unicorn. A real unicorn. His name is Shadowfax.

Except he is invisible, and impervious to detection by all means, all technology, that are thus far known to man. Might some means be invented to detect Shadowfax in future? One day, maybe, why not? But not so far.

So what are you to make of this unicorn? Your science has no means to return a clear resounding “No” when asked if this unicorn exists. And of course, a “Yes” answer is out of the question too.

So then will you spend your days honestly believing that perhaps in Appreciative Reader’s garden there lives a unicorn, maybe yes, maybe no, with more or less equal probability of either?

That’s patently ridiculous, that approach.

If in the years to come science does come up with some means to show you that that unicorn is in fact real, then you will certainly start believing in it. But until then, it makes sense to simply reject the claim of the existence of that unicorn.

That, in brief, is what soft atheism is all about. That is the sane approach to arriving at a scientific worldview.

Otherwise you’ll spend your days half-sure and half-unsure about the existence of Olympus and the gaggle of gods and half-gods of ancient Greece, and of Shangri-La and Tibetan mystics with what are effectively superpowers, and of the literal rendering of all the tall tales in the Bible, and of the Hindu pantheon, and the (Vajrayana) Buddhist deities, and the Yeti and the bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster, the world as simulation, the world as projection of a brain in a vat, in fact any and every fanciful concoction of man’s fertile brain that hasn’t explicitly and directly been ruled out by science so far (and indeed even such things as science has actually rejected, because after all such rejection is tentative and may yet, in future, be reversed, given adequate evidence).

Shh, quiet now. Yes, Shadowfax? Oh, ok, I'll ask him.

Spence, Shadowfax instructs me to ask you if his refulgent being has impressed you with the splendor and the simplicity that is the scientific worldview.

(Which is the short form for "the personal worldview that is appropriate for the individual, arrived at basis regard for the scientific method as *the* most efficacious means devised thus far for arriving at the truth".)

What should I tell him?

Science embraces the unknown, but wants evidence of it

I'm a huge fan of the comments "Appreciative Reader" leaves on my blog posts. Which means, I agree with almost everything this person says.

I only wish that I could express myself as clearly and reasonably as Appreciative Reader does. He writes so expertly, I enjoy sharing his top performing comments in a blog post.

That's what I've done here. 

I don't mean to disparage the views expressed by other commenters. No doubt some other people would find their arguments more impressive than Appreciative Reader's -- because they resonate more with the mystical/religious worldview of some of the other commenters.

I just find Appreciative Reader's description below of how science looks upon the unknown to be right-on. Scientists absolutely love the unknown.

That's what powers science: a passion to find new knowledge by expanding the borders of the known.

But here's the thing. As Appreciative Reader argues, it isn't possible to specify what lies in unknown territory. If that could be done, some of the unknown would have become known. 

We can speculate and hypothesize about what lies in the darkness beyond the light of knowledge.

However, until that light illuminates a previously unknown entity, which enables people to assess the evidence for that thing and possibly admit it into the realm of the known, it makes no sense to speak of what's unknown as if it were demonstrably real.

Sure, God could exist. Sure, consciousness could exist apart from the brain. Sure, life after death could be true. These and many other "could's" are speculations that can't be accepted as fact until there's good reason to do so.

That doesn't stop individuals from claiming to have an experience of something unknown. It just prevents science-minded people from accepting those claims as being anything other than a personal experience. People claim all sorts of things that are highly unlikely, like alien abductions.

Saying so doesn't make it so. Evidence makes it so. Here's Appreciative Reader's comment.

Hello, Spence.

In your last two comments you quoted these words of mine, ""Until such time, as we do know such exists substantially, we'll treat is as not existing. Be it consciousness, or be it fairies."

And you started out your comments with these words, developing this theme further in the rest of your two comments addressed to me :

Quoting you this time: "That system of belief would put an end to all science. Science is based on exactly the opposite. That the unknown exist, and that to understand reality we must investigate and learn. Many things do exist that are unknown. Your statement is tantamount to claiming the unknown doesn't exist."
-------
This is exactly the kind of apparent ignorance about the nature and the implications of the scientific method that I'd spoken of on the other thread, that one sometimes comes across from people one would certainly expect to know better.

Not only that, this entirely misrepresents my own words, part of which you'd yourself quoted, to attempt to argue against a blatantly strawman version of my comments. The whys and the wherefores of this I'd rather not get into, but the 'what' of it is incontrovertible.
-------
The latter portion of what I've just now said, first, as that is so much easier to establish.

Here's what I'd said in my own comment, that you've quoted from (and I quote these extracts verbatim):

"This isn't in any way to shut oneself off from the possibility of what might be. Nor is it to shut oneself into unreasonable closed-minded certainty that nothing beyond what is known might ever be known. All the possibilities of Mystery, with a capital M, are acknowledged, and indeed honored. But not accepted, until one has reason to."

"Nor does it stop one from performing one's own researches. Into science, or into technology. Into fairies, on into mystic realities. Into whatever appears promising to one, into whatever appeals to one."

"I don't see we can do any more than accept things as they are. Which does not stop us from striving to find out more, in such ways as we are able and willing."

It is astonishing that you should apparently parse the above so as to conclude, as you do here, that "That system of belief would put an end to all science. ... Science is based on exactly the opposite. That the unknown exist, and that to understand reality we must investigate and learn. ... Many things do exist that are unknown. Your statement is tantamount to claiming the unknown doesn't exist." (etc)

You've read exactly the opposite of what I'd very clearly said in my post. I wonder why that is?
-------
Moving beyond these I-said-you-said inconsequentialities, let us turn to the more consequential part of your comment, that betrays a confusion about the implications of the scientific method, that is surprising coming from you.

Cue, at this time, Carl Sagan: “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” Because what you're advocating here is clearly the equivalent of having one's brains fall right out.

There are many things we don't know. The domain of what we don't know is far more vast, infinitely more vast, than what we do know. Further, what little we do know is tentative, and always subject to correction in future. But what are the implications of this?

It is reasonable to accept and treat as known what we do know thus far, no far how little and no far how tentative. The rest it is reasonable to reject.

And to reject something is neither to claim that it shall forever remain rejected, nor to turn away from exploration of it; to reject some hypothesis is no more than to not accept such at this time, and such rejection is always tentative and always subject to correction in future.

Like I'd said in the other thread, it is surprising that this obvious thing should need to be spelt out in this manner to those whom one would have expected would know better.

Let's take an actual example to make this clear.

There's this real-life hypothesis that our universe is a simulation. We don't know enough to incontrovertibly reject the hypothesis. Indeed there are actual physicists who are researching this very issue. But as far as actually accepting this claim, what is the reasonable stance?

The reasonable thing to do is to not accept this hypothesis, for now, to clearly reject this hypothesis, for now. Such rejection is not to say that one will not research this subject, nor to claim that one has shut oneself off from ever accepting this hypothesis; it is only to state that one does not have justification, at this time, to rationally accept this hypothesis.

For all practical everyday purposes, one rejects this hypothesis. (To emphasize again, that does not preclude people who are interested in the subject from exploring and researching it further.)

Thus with consciousness and mystical realities and the God question, which is clearly what this discussion is all about at bottom. Until the day we have reasonable rational grounds to accept such, we will not accept such. That is a perfectly sound position.

That does not stop us from speculating. Nor does that stop us from actually exploring and researching the issue. That also does not stop us from realizing the essentially tentative nature of our rejection --- which tentativeness is an intrinsic part of the scientific worldview --- and it does not stop us from promptly changing our mind in future should circumstances so warrant.

To see in this clearly stated position the antithesis of science, as you do, is to completely misunderstand one's clearly written words, as well as to profoundly misunderstand the nature of a scientific worldview.

Brain and conscious mind are linked like two sides of a coin

Here's some excerpts from a story in the June 2021 issue of Scientific American, "The Brain Electric," by Christof Koch. 

Koch makes some great points about the current state of science's understanding of the brain/mind. There's no doubt that the mind is the brain in action. Meaning, no brain, no mind. 

But even though the physicality of mind is clear, there's plenty of mystery left to be explored in the highly complex three pound hunk of meat that resides between our ears.

-- You're headed toward a storm that's a couple of miles away, and you've got to get across a hill. You ask yourself, "How am I going to get over that, through that?"

-- You see little white dots on a black background, as if looking up at the stars at night.

-- You look down at yourself lying in bed from above but see only your legs and lower trunk.

These may seem like idiosyncratic events drawn from the vast universe of perceptions, sensations, memories, thoughts and dreams that make up our daily stream of consciousness. 

In fact, each one was evoked by directly stimulating the brain with an electrode. 

As American poet Walt Whitman intuited in his poem, "I Sing the Body Electric," these anecdotes illustrate the intimate relationship between the body and its animating soul. 

The brain and the conscious mind are as inexorably linked as the two sides of a coin. 

...As neuroprosthetic devices move through clinical trials, they will help people with visual impairments see and those with physical disabilities perform actions such as steering a wheelchair with their thoughts, like the mind-Pong-playing monkey.

For everyone else, the benefits of highly invasive brain surgery are unlikely to outweigh the costs.

But the true Annapurna ahead involves understanding how three pounds of excitable brain matter is responsible for seeing, moving, and suffering.

Yes, the physical substrate of heaven and hell is rooted in bioelectric signals that obey natural laws. But that tells us precious little about how a trillion electrical signals spiking each second, streaming over networks of tens of billions of heterogeneous cells, constitute a sight, sound, or emotion.

Intracranial brain stimulation highlights the daily miracle of the brain's water changing into the wine of consciousness.

The question remains, though: What is it about the brain, the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe, that turns the activity of 86 billion neurons into the feeling of life itself?

It was easy to respond to this atheist challenge

Yesterday Anurag Nathyal left this comment on a recent blog post. I'm pleased to take Nathyal up on his challenge. Replies below in bold. At the end of this post I'll also share an excellent rebuttal to what Nathyal said by Appreciative Reader, a regular commenter on this blog.

I have a challenge for the atheists here. You say that we can't prove god is there. I ask you can you prove anything in this world? This may sound absurd at first but think about it.

It's tough for me to respond about "proof" any better than Appreciative Reader said in a reply to your comment, which I've shared below. He's right. In science and everyday life, we don't go about trying to prove things. Basically, we try to explain things. Often this is called "inference to the best explanation."

As Appreciative Reader noted, mathematics has proofs. Science and everyday life don't, at least not in a formal mathematical sense. So atheists don't ask for proof that God exists. We ask for evidence that God exists that pr0vides a persuasive explanation or reason for why, as you put it, God is there.

Science haven't been able to prove consciousness. The very basis of our existence. I bet can you prove anything. Literally anything? By proving I mean there should be no room for doubt. Can you even prove we are not living in a dream or this world is a computer simulation?

Again, science isn't about proof. It is about explanation. Neuroscience has made a lot of progress is understanding consciousness. How much progress have religions made? Zero, essentially. Also, you're mistaken if you believe that science has no room for doubt in its explanations. Every scientific explanation is open to doubt, to refinement, to being overthrown.

That's how science keeps learning more and more -- by challenging current explanations and looking for better ones. In science and everyday life we aren't after certainty. Instead, we seek the most likely and reasonable explanation. Such as, we aren't living in a dream or a computer simulation, though this is a possibility. 

You may think I have gone absurd but still you won't be able to answer my question. Can you prove that this world is real and not a dream. No you can't. All what you can say is that according to my experiences I believe the world is real. But still you can't say that you are certain of it because certain means having no room for doubt and that's not possible.

For some reason you keep asking us atheists to prove things, whereas if you want people to accept that God is real, you should be focused on presenting evidence that supports God's existence. Like I said, nothing is 100% certain. Since you appear to agree with this, I assume you also agree that it isn't certain that God exists. Correct?

All we do is believe. And if this argument isn't enough I have got another. How can you tell a person who doesn't feel pain how pain feels like. It's a real question not a hypothetical one. There are people who don't feel pain. And they just don't know what pain is. You can only try to describe them what pain feels like but you will never be able to know what it actually is.

This is true of everything. You have no idea what my experience feels like, and I have no idea what your experience feels like. No one can know someone else's experience, because all experience is personal. 

They might think that you are telling lies. You can't tell a blind person what it feels like to see. You can't tell a mute person what it's like to hear what you can do is try. They may tell to your face that you are telling lies.

Correct. And us atheists can't tell religious believers what it feels like to not see God. So you simply have a belief about atheists, because there is no way that you can tell what we actually experience. Nor can an atheist tell what a religious believer experiences. Again, this is true of every experience. 

Same goes with those who have experienced the allmighty. They can just describe to you. But they can't tell you exactly because words can't describe such things just like you can't explain to a blind how it feels like to see , you can't tell a mute person how it feels like to listen.

OK, but here's the thing. We know a lot about sight and hearing. Eyes see. Ears hear. And seeing and hearing are senses that tell us things about the physical world, the reality that we all share. By contrast, those who claim to have experienced God can't tell other people what sense they used to have this experience. Nor can they point to the divinity that the unknown sense produced an awareness of. So your analogy fails.

I'll say this again: if I see a movie, like Summer of Soul (great movie, by the way), I can try to describe why I liked it, but the description doesn't capture my experience of the movie. However, I can tell you how to watch the movie, so we can be sure we're having different experiences of the same reality. Where is this God you speak of? How can we be sure that your God is the same as the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or the thousands of other Gods? Which experience of God should I trust?

You can't describe pain to someone who doesn't feel it , there are some actual people like that. You just can't describe these things through words !!! You just can't !!! I will copy paste this message to every section of this website where there are atheists. Don't think I am a bot. I just need to say the same thing to everyone.

Your argument is weak, if you're trying to defend a belief in God. Psychotic people have experiences of realities that are only in their own minds. So do people who dream, or take psychedelic drugs. Again, this is true of every experience anyone has ever had or will have. No one can fully describe their experiences through words, because experiences aren't made of words.

But you've used a lot of words to argue why words can't capture all of reality. I agree with you, of course. What we do in science and everyday life is use words for various purposes, one of which is to explain the nature of reality. So I invite you to use words to describe how you had an experience of God, and what that experience consisted of. 

And I swear if you give answers to my these 2 questions. I will become atheist !!! Try to give a logical explanation , be true to yourselves.

In my opinion, you've just become an atheist. Congratulations! Glad to help. 

Here's the excellent comment from Appreciative Reader.

Hello, Anurag Nathyal. It's astonishing, how people are so very ignorant about the basics of the scientific method. And no, it isn't just you, and nor is this a derogatory comment against you: this ignorance is far more widespread, and extends to far more ...stratified realms, than one might imagine.

I don't think you're trolling. I do think you're honestly ignorant about this very basic thing, as so many others are.

The short answer to your question is: "Proof" is what you do in closed systems, essentially tautological systems, like logic and math. When it comes to the real world, and specifically when it comes to the scientific method, the operative word you're looking for is not "proof", but something like "best-fit model", or, more generally, "best and most consistent and most economical explanation", that is based on, another operative word, "evidence".

I'm not looking for a detailed discussion, just thought I'd send out a helping hand to a fellow human being who's seemingly grappling with an honest question. Just think over the short paragraph above, and you'll find your answer. You're welcome.

Here's what gives me pleasure (hint: it isn't religion)

Fairly often I get comments on this blog that amuse me, because they're so wrong. 

Someone will say, "Brian, you're obsessed with... " Bashing religion. Criticizing gurus. Talking trash about Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the religious organization I belonged to for 35 years.

That's laughable. 

Every couple of days I write a post for this blog. It takes me an hour or two. Otherwise I rarely think about the subjects that get discussed here on the Church of the Churchless.

I've got many other things that need attending to, most of which interest me more than the Big Cosmic Questions. Like, my family.

Currently I'm at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon, where my wife, Laurel, and I own a 1/4 share in a vacation house.

Sunday my daughter Celeste, her husband Patrick, and my granddaughter Evelyn came to visit us here, flying up from southern California and then driving across the mountains from the Portland airport.

Today we rented bicycles for the three of them. Black Butte Ranch has a great system of bike paths, most of them separated from the roads in this beautiful destination resort.

Here's a photo of my daughter and me at Aspen Lake, where we stopped on our afternoon bike ride. (I don't do much smiling in photos, because I don't like my smile.)

Then we stopped for lunch at the charming Black Butte Ranch store. It adjoins the stables where Evelyn went on pony rides when she was much younger than her current age of 14. She still likes horses.

After that we biked to the new Putting Course. It's freaking amazing. Way better than a practice green with a bunch of holes scattered around. The Putting Course has twelve challenging holes. 

Celeste took this photo of me, Patrick, and Evelyn. Laurel decided to bow out of the putting, since it was really hot and sunny today, and she doesn't do well in those conditions, being a blonde of Scandinavian descent.

Since I haven't golfed for well over 25 years, to say my putting was rusty is to insult rust. Almost by accident, I had a few decent putts. But most would have qualified for a video on how not to putt. We had a lot of fun though. 

Then we biked back to our house, stopping along the way to visit with another bunch of horses grazing in Big Meadow. (It really is big, very big). Evelyn made a friend. That's wildfire smoke in the background.

Black Butte was looking good. Patrick plans to climb up it tomorrow. (A road takes you about 2/3 the way up, then you hike.) I've done the climb quite a few times, so will pass on doing it again.)

Then we biked back to our Black Butte Ranch house -- played Scrabble, made corn on the cob plus rice and tofu for dinner, and went for a frisbee-filled dog walk on several holes of a golf course (after golfers had stopped playing. Here's a photo Patrick took of me and Evelyn on a boardwalk that crosses over a wetland area.

So this is what's consuming my attention at the moment. Your regularly scheduled Church of the Churchless programming will resume soon.

My wise advice that I'm not sure I understand

For quite a while a couple of pieces of paper have been sitting by my computer, emblazoned with what I'm sure is very wise advice that I scribbled down. 

Only problem is, it's been so long since I penned those scribbles, the inspiration that I wanted to convey through them has faded. 

But I still grasp the gist of my pithy platitudes. So here they are. (Now I can throw those pieces of paper away... finally!)

Reality is neutral. Pretty straightforward. I'm speaking here of the reality that exists outside of human minds. Which, given the vastness of the universe, is virtually all of reality -- minus the tiny bit that lives inside our brain cavities.

I like this thought because it puts things in perspective. Often we think something like, "The universe really has it in for me today," or "I think the universe is trying to teach me a lesson."

No, and no. Neither is true. Reality doesn't care about anything, including us. Reality is what is. It is we humans who construct positive and negative meanings out of the neutral materials of reality. 

Shakespeare said this in Hamlet:

Why, then, 'tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

Our stories should be believable. The inspiration for these words probably came from my wife.

She has a habit, which can be annoying at times, of blurting out while I'm engrossed in a movie or show we're watching on our TV, "That's not realistic." 

(See my blog post, Why my wife's "That's not realistic" drives movie-watching-me crazy.)

Laurel will even do this with animated films. She has a strong desire for things to make sense in a movie or television show. Me, I'm more comfortable with absurdity. 

But when it comes to real life, the stories we tell both about ourselves and the outside world, those stories should be believable. Certainly to ourselves. Ideally to others as well.

Otherwise we end up inhabiting a thinly populated reality, which isn't a sociable way to live.

I am how the world wants me to be. Sometimes I say this to myself when my day isn't going so well, and I'm blaming myself for screwing something up. 

That's usually an unbelievable story I've crafted (see above). 

Why? Because who we are and what happens to us is a massively complex web of interrelationships, causes and effects that extend far beyond the boundary of any particular person.

So I find comfort in the idea that how I am at any given moment is how the world wants me to be. Not in the sense of a conscious wanting, because that isn't how the universe operates. 

Just in the sense of my current state of being reflecting much more than whatever I did a little while ago. That whatever blossomed from seeds planted in a myriad of places.

Genetic. Familial. Environmental. Experiential. All extending from a time prior to my birth and continuing well past my death. There's no way any of us are masters of our own life. 

We're minute cogs in a much larger machinery that's far beyond our comprehension.

I now consider that I was a cult member for 35 years

Though for 35 years I was a member of an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form by his devotees, I didn't consider myself to have been in a cult.

But this morning I read these passages in the book I've been writing about recently, Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

Cults -- religious, Marxist, Trumpist, and others -- enmesh their adherents in infinite, impenetrable loops of self-reinforcing beliefs. They encourage and often require their members to isolate themselves from outside ideas and authorities.

...Inside the cultic bubble, every question has an answer, every implausibility an explanation, even if the answer is a change of subject or the explanation that you cannot believe your own eyes and ears.

"Well, damn," I thought, "given this reasonable definition of a cult, it does seem like I was in one." Namely, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a branch of Sant Mat (path of the saints, roughly translated).

Here's some reasons why I say that, referencing what Rausch says above.

Impenetrable loops of self-reinforcing beliefs. Here's an example. The guru, being divine, knows what is best for the disciple. That might mean inner progress through meditation that leads to visions of supernatural realms of reality. Or it might mean a lifetime of sitting in darkness and silence during the required several hours of meditation a day.

So whatever happens in meditation fits in with the RSSB teachings. There's no way for the disciple to say "this isn't working," because the guru knows what is supposed to happen to that person, not the person themself. Further, there's a prohibition of telling others about your spiritual progress, or lack thereof. Hence no possibility of learning from other people whether they're getting the promised results.

Isolate themselves from outside ideas and authorities. Faith in the guru is considered a requirement to make progress in meditation. Early on in the current guru's tenure, Gurinder Singh Dhillon said discussing the RSSB teachings on the Internet shouldn't occur. So he told RSSB disciples to isolate themselves from ideas that didn't come from official RSSB sources.

I ended up being fired as a speaker at RSSB meetings because I'd starting writing about RSSB on this blog. The reason that was given was that my blog posts were making people feel uncomfortable. Thus I was viewed as an unwholesome "authority" because I wasn't spouting the party line 100%, even though I'd written several books for RSSB and had been an authorized speaker for many years.

Every implausibility has an explanation. Ask why the RSSB gurus don't perform miracles if they're God in Human Form and you'll be told that the Big Man Upstairs has decreed that saints are forbidden to perform miracles because if they did, lots of people would want to be initiated by them in order to return to God, which would markedly reduce the number of souls in the physical creation, and that isn't supposed to happen. (RSSB believes in reincarnation.)

That's pretty much the same reason why the RSSB gurus forget people's names, make mistakes, get sick, and generally act like Non-Gods in Human Form. They have to disguise their divine nature or everybody on Earth would want to follow them.

What would be wrong with that, you may be thinking. Well, RSSB has the answer. When God created the physical universe, 90% of souls who were hanging out with God were eager to see what physical reality was all about. But 10% had to be dragged kicking and screaming into this universe.

Those 10% are destined to return to God after being initiated by a Perfect Living Master, which the RSSB gurus are despite not appearing perfect. So it's impossible for everybody to be God-realized, because most people on Earth are part of the 90%. OK, but how can you tell the difference between a 90% person and a 10% person? Ah, only the guru can tell. Which is why only some people end up following a RSSB guru, because they're part of the lucky 10%.

I could give more examples. But you get the picture. Of the cult I used to belong to.

Great argument against free will

I've written a lot about free will over the years, arguing for good reason that it doesn't exist.

(You can find those posts by searching my blogs for "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

Here's a great concise argument against free will in the form of a letter to the editor in a recent issue of New Scientist. 

Published 9 June 2021

From Adrian Bowyer, Foxham, Wiltshire, UK

A number of people quoted in the article on the hypothesis of quantum superdeterminism criticise it by saying it would make free will untenable (15 May, p 36).

Setting aside that this criticism confuses the desirable with the real, free will doesn’t need determinism (quantum or otherwise) to make it untenable. All it needs is logic.

Every event must be caused by one or more preceding events, be spontaneous or result from both. The two categories – caused and spontaneous – are disjoint, complemental and together universal; there can be no other sort of event instigator.

Thought is a parallel and sequential collection of events. If they are all caused, then there is no free will. If some are spontaneous, then there is still no free will: a spontaneous event is, by definition, not willed.

Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Well, the responses I got to my previous post, "Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community," were underwhelming. 

Not really surprising, since I said:

The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality?

Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge.

Read what follows.

Then, if you disagree with some of what Rausch says below, leave a comment on this post describing the nature of your disagreement. Others can then submit their own ideas. This is how knowledge is gained: by a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

No one could suggest a better approach for gaining knowledge than a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

So in this post I'm going to take a different approach, with the goal of convincing those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive perspective that there isn't any other valid means of gaining knowledge of objective reality.

Note that I said "objective reality." Obviously we all gain knowledge of subjective reality just by being ourselves. Every experience each of us has is subjective, since it isn't evident to other people.

There's no way anyone can put a thought, emotion, perception, or any other content of consciousness on a table and say, See, this is my experience.

Thus a basic assumption here is that there are almost eight billion subjective human realities, one for each person on Earth. Yet there is only one objective shared reality. Rausch writes:

The main idea of the Constitution of Knowledge, as we have seen, is that reality is what we know, not what you or I know. No purely personal belief can be knowledge, no matter how much merit you or I might think it possesses.

...A corollary is that members of the reality-based community accept that, despite their diversity, they are all exploring aspects of one reality. The Constitution of Knowledge does not require them to see the world the same way or to agree on facts.

In fact, it only works where people see the world differently and disagree on facts, so that they can test their ideas and surmount their biases.

Its unique capacity, however, is to force individual differences toward social convergence. It does so by requiring persuasion, which in turn requires that we try to account for our differences by comparing them.

Science has made astounding progress in the past several hundred years by doing just that. By and large, scientists the world over agree on the knowledge gained from the scientific aspect of the reality-based community.

By contrast, religious believers and mystics have made essentially zero progress in arriving at a common spiritual knowledge. The same questions are being debated today as were being debated hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Why? One obvious reason is that there's no persuasive evidence that a supernatural realm exists. Thus there's no way to test propositions about what that realm consists of, since almost certainly it exists only in the subjective minds of individuals.

Consider the religious belief system that I used to accept, that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a form of Sant Mat, an India-based religiosity that claims Perfect Living Masters can guide their disciples back to God by connecting them to the shabd, or Sound Current, the power that activates the cosmos.

That'd be amazing if it was true. But how would it be possible to determine the truth of RSSB or Sant Mat?

It can't be by accepting someone's claim that they're experienced divine light and sound. Hallucinations of that sort are commonplace. Psychedelic drugs can produce those phenomena. People can be mistaken. People can lie. People can fool themselves.

No matter how strongly someone believes in a religious, mystical, or supernatural tenet -- whether this belief is held by a small number or billions -- the question remains, Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God. Muslims believe there is no God but God and Muhammed is His prophet. Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, plus adherents of thousands of other religions all have their own unique beliefs.

Atheists and agnostics are skeptical about all of those beliefs. For good reason, because there is no reality-based community in the realm of the supernatural. Again, almost certainly this is because that reality doesn't exist.

Yet suppose you're someone who has had such a profound experience of a supernatural reality that you feel the need to speak your truth to others? (A number of those someone's leave comments on this blog.)

Again, why should I or anyone else believe you? 

It can't be because you've done the experiment of meditation, or whatever you want to call it, and the rest of us haven't. I haven't done any quantum mechanics experiments nor genetics experiments, but I accept the scientific knowledge in these areas.

I do so because there is a reality-based community -- researchers, journals, conferences, peer review, universities, government agencies, science writers, etc. -- that's skilled at assessing the validity of scientific propositions.

If a single scientist claims this or that is true, no one should believe them. Yet if their claim survives careful scrutiny by the reality-based community, there's good reason to believe them. At least until the claim is debunked.

With religious and mystical claims about the supernatural, so far none have become validated knowledge. 

Not miracles. Not ESP. Not life after death. Not astral projection. After thousands of years of attempts by humans to find proof of the supernatural, there's so little to show for this search, we might as well round it off to zero. 

The reason is that what Rausch says in his book is correct. 

By extension, the empirical rule also dictates what does not account as checking: claims to authority by dint of a personally or tribally privileged perspective. In principle, persons and groups are interchangeable. 

If I claim access to divine revelation, or if I claim the support of miracles which only believers can witness, or if I claim that my class or race or historically dominant status or historically oppressed status allows me to know and say things which others cannot, then I am breaking the empirical rule by exempting my views from contestability by others

...You have to check your own claims and subject them to contestation from others; you have to tolerate the competing claims of others; you have to accept that your own certainty counts for nothing; you have to forswear claiming that your god, your experience, your intuition, or your group is epistemically privileged; you have to defend the exclusive legitimacy of liberal science even (in fact, especially) when you think it is wrong or unfair.

Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community

I figured that I needed to share another excerpt from Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," that comes just before the passages I included in a previous post about this intriguing book.

Those Rules for Reality in the previous post have to be implemented by someone. That someone is the reality-based community. In another post I'll share what Rausch considers that community to be. 

Basically its people who are willing to act in accord with the Constitution of Knowledge, in much the same way patriotic Americans are willing to abide by the United States Constitution. Of course, there are strong disagreements about what is constitutional and unconstitutional. 

Likewise, there are strong disagreements about what is validated knowledge and what is unvalidated knowledge. But in both cases disagreements take place within the bounds of a Constitution that provides a framework and a process for arriving at agreement.

The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality?

Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge.

Read what follows.

Then, if you disagree with some of what Rausch says below, leave a comment on this post describing the nature of your disagreement. Others can then submit their own ideas. This is how knowledge is gained: by a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

What reality really is

So far, I have referred to reality and objective reality and the reality-based community without quite specifying what I mean. Now is the time to fill in that gap.

The question "What is reality?" may seem either too metaphysical to answer meaningfully or too obvious to need answering. 

When most people speak colloquially of reality, they mean the world as it really is, the world "out there," the world independent of human perception and cognition, the world as we would perceive it if we perceived correctly.

Surely that is what we feel reality to be, subjectively. Colloquially, people also use the terms "real" and "reality" to convey certainty or confidence that things are the way they are.

Reality, in common parlance, is that which is reliable and intractable and cannot be wished away: the rock we stub our toe on, the abrupt encounter with the ground when we fall. As Theaetetus and Socrates pointed out, however, such colloquial definitions are not very helpful.

The whole problem is that humans have no direct access to an objective world independent of our minds and senses, and subjective certainty is no guarantee of truth. (More like the opposite, because certitude is so often misleading.)

Faced with those problems and others, philosophers and practitioners changed their approach. Instead of thinking about reality metaphysically, as an external if unknowable "world out there," they think of it epistemically, as that of which we have objective knowledge.

More specifically, they think of reality as a set of propositions (or claims, or statements) which have been validated in some way, and which have thereby been shown to be at least conditionally true -- true, that is, unless debunked.

Some propositions reflect reality as we perceive it in everyday life ("The sky is blue"). Others, like the equations on a quantum physicist's blackboard, are incomprehensible to intuition. Many fall somewhere in between.

Propositions turn out to have some interesting properties. They are infinite in number and so never scarce, but true propositions are precious and comparatively rare.

Even so, the quantity of validated propositions -- of statements considered to be part of the canon of knowledge -- far exceeds the grasp of any human individual or even any large group of individuals. Propositions are not material objects, but neither are they purely ephemeral, especially if they are true.

Karl Popper claimed they exist neither in the realm of material things nor the realm of subjective feelings and perceptions, but in a third realm of their own, "the world of objective contents of thoughts."

Popper compared human knowledge to the webs spun by spiders or the honey produced by bees: "exosomatic organs" which animals build outside their bodies. 

In a similar fashion, humans create knowledge -- validated propositions -- and store their knowledge in  books and equations and libraries and databases, where it exists independently of our minds and bodies and could be discovered and used by an alien species millions of years from now even if humanity were extinct.

Propositions have no volition and can do nothing on their own. Yet once they are acquired by the reality-based network, they can interact with each other across the network: the modification, acceptance, or rejection of one proposition can force adjustments to many others.

Although the network is a human creation and all its participants are people, it far surpasses the comprehension of its creators, and it undergoes a version of natural selection, driven by its own dynamics.

The reality-based network behaves like an ecosystem, producing a body of validated propositions whose composition humans can influence but not control.

That is objective reality, insofar as we can know reality. The totality of those propositions is as close as we come to objective truth.

Now, you must have noticed that a phrase I used a few paragraphs ago, "validated in some way," hides a cheat. In epistemology, the whole question is, validated in what way? As we have seen, the epistemic and social consequences of validation using, say, a tribal oracle versus an authoritarian government versus social error-seeking are different.

And the systems are in many ways incompatible with each other. If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science -- open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network -- is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, al least in the reality-based community.

Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality.

That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.

It also sits uncomfortably with the populist and dogmatic tempers of our time.

But like the U.S. Constitution's claim to exclusivity in governing ("unconstitutional" means "illegal," period), the Constitution of Knowledge's claim to exclusivity is its sine qua non. Defending that claim is no small task, and so we need to understand the logic which supports it.

Rules for Reality -- which religious believers ignore

I'm a proud member of the reality-based community. This is a big reason why I no longer believe in God or supernatural phenomena. 

It'd be nice if these things actually existed. But "nice" is irrelevant when it comes to learning the truth about reality. Reality is what it is, not what individuals want it to be.

When I learned about Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," the title alone made me want to buy it.

I've only read two of the eight chapters, but I skipped ahead and read the passages that I've shared below. I like these Rules for Reality. They fit with my personal philosophy, though naturally Rauch states them more clearly than I'd be capable of.

The first sentence below echoes something I say often in my blog posts. 

Everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want, even if it isn't true. But if you want other people to accept your belief, then you need to submit that belief to the reality-based community for examination and criticism. Meaning, to people who embrace truth-seeking.

Religious believers, mystics, and such typically aren't willing to do this. They expect others to take their statements about reality seriously, even though they don't comply with the Rules for Reality below.

Rules for Reality

Say you believe something (X) to be true, and you believe that its acceptance as true by others is important or at least warranted.

X might be that the earth revolves around the sun, that God is a trinity, that an embryo is a human being, that human activity is causing climate change, that vaccination saves lives, that Joe Biden was lawfully elected president, or some other consequential proposition.

The specific proposition does not matter. What does matter is that the only way to validate it is to submit it to the reality-based community. 

Otherwise, you could win dominance for your proposition by, say, brute force, threatening and jailing and torturing and killing those who see things differently -- as we have seen, a standard method down through history.

Or you and your like-minded friends could go off and talk only to each other, in which case you would have founded a cult -- which is lawful but socially divisive and epistemically worthless.

Or you could engage in a social-media campaign to shame and intimidate those who disagree with you -- a very common method these days, but one which stifles debate and throttles knowledge (and harms a lot of people).

What the reality-based community does is something else again. In my book Kindly Inquisitors, I argue that liberal science's distinctive qualities derive from two core rules, and that any public conversation which obeys those two rules will display the distinguishing characteristics of liberal science. The rules are:

The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and 0nly insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.

That is, you are entitled to claim a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. 

In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it.

But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else's fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others' errors, even if you are confident that you are right. 

Otherwise, you are not reality-based.

The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.

Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to.

Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.

Mystery of existence is a chill up the spine, not a concept

For many years I've gotten a thrill out of the mystery of existence. 

This has nothing to do with what exists. It's all about the brute fact that something exists. Now, that something might well be infinite.

For sure it's huge -- countless billions of light years huge. And it's old -- at least 13.8 billion years old and possibly infinitely old.

All that is irrelevant when talking about the mystery of existence. 

What blows my mind with marvelous regularity is the chill-up-the-spine realization that all this, no matter what it consists of -- is equally present at the tips of my fingers typing these words and a galaxy at the farthest reaches of the universe.

There's no why at question here.

Why's have to do with stuff that exists. Why won't my car start? The answer is found in a chain of causes and effects. 

But existence must always have existed. At least, this is the inescapable conclusion of a human consciousness. Maybe a different form of consciousness would see things differently.

We humans have no acquaintance with existence. All we understand are things that exist. (Arguably, existence doesn't actually exist, but it makes sense to speak as if it does.)

Each of those things comes and goes. Even the universe, which arose in a big bang, according to modern science, and may depart at some point, according to some theories.

However, existence stands apart from comings and goings.

If existence hadn't always existed, nothing could have arisen within existence. Positing a god doesn't help, since an eternal god is just another way of saying eternal existence. Anyway, there's no proof of any god, while there's plenty of evidence for existence.

Whenever I write about this, it doesn't take long for me to feel like words are a very poor substitute for the feeling that leads me to search for those words.

Which basically can be expressed as simply Wow. Though those three letters -- W...o...w -- don't capture the feeling either.

Here's some of the blog posts I've written that attempt to describe that Wow in a much greater number of words.

Grappling with the fact that existence has always existed
Wow. Existence has always existed.
Existence exists. Amazing!
"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key
Existence is the only unchanging thing. If it exists.
Robert Kuhn's nine levels of nothing: mind-blowing
The beauty of boundless existence
Boundless existence--the backdrop to life's meaning

Is a mechanism required for realizing Oneness?

Below I've shared a lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" that deserved to be made into a blog post. Why?

Because the comment is nicely thought out and well written.

It addresses an interesting question: whether someone's experience of Oneness just happened, and can't be described in a step-by-step fashion, or whether a mechanism that leads to an experience like this can be communicated to others.

I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that in general, someone's spiritual realization is capable of being analyzed and critiqued to a significant degree.

As I've noted before, dreams are highly personal and unlike everyday experiences. Yet if I remember my dream, I can describe it to another person -- albeit with that description including language like "It was sort of like this" and "Hard to describe, but this is the best I can do." 

Of course, dreams aren't considered to be a reflection of a reality existing outside of the mind of the dreamer, while many, if not most, people view their spiritual experiences as reflecting something true about the world/universe/cosmos.

I'm assuming that an experience of Oneness is more like that, and less like a dream.

So while it doesn't make sense to challenge the veracity of a dream -- this is just what the brain does while we sleep -- it does make sense to question the nature of a spiritual experience, if the person who had the experience claims that it points to a truth about our shared reality.

As a final observation, I agree with Appreciative Reader that Oneness isn't what the Buddhist notion of emptiness is all about. Emptiness concerns the lack of a lasting essence or permanence in objects, including us.

The emptiness of existence is characterized by interdependence, interrelationships, dependent arising based on causes and conditions. Superficially this has to do with unity or oneness, but not in a deeper sense. 

Oneness implies a foundation to reality. Buddhism teaches that actually there is no such thing. Even emptiness is empty, not standing by itself as an independent metaphysical principle.

Here's what Appreciative Reader said in the comment. I've corrected a few typos and broken up some paragraphs to make them easier to read.

=========================================

Osho Robbins, I just read the seven posts you’ve addressed to me. Thanks for the detailed response.

I’ll compose this response to you in two parts. In the first part, I’ll touch on all of the points you raise, in those six posts of yours, in the order you’ve raised them ; but I’ll do that very briefly. I’ll number these out, and if you wish me to expand on any of these, then I’ll be happy to if you ask. And in the second part, I’ll concentrate on one specific part of your comment ; and I’ll do that at some length, because I think this might be crucial to our discussion, and will, or at least I hope it will, settle this might-there-or-might-there-not-be-a-specific-mechanism-for-Oneness issue once and for all.

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

(1) I’m afraid your Oneness is nothing at all like Nothingness, nor Buddha’s Emptiness. Do you remember, in our original discussion I’d clearly demonstrated exactly this to you, beyond all doubt, by quoting your own words back to you? I can do that here as well, if you want me to.

No, it isn’t, at all, a matter of semantics. Your Oneness, or Non-Duality, is very different from Nothingness, and no, it does not comport with the Buddha’s teachings.

(2) Your invoking the Buddha at that point was exactly and entirely a case of fallacious appeal to authority. We refer to Einstein or Newton as authorities when speaking of reality, because it is established that what they published, within their core field, is descriptive of reality.

That isn’t something we can say about the Buddha’s teachings, any more than we can say that about the Bible or the Quran. The only thing that the Buddha is a bona fide authority on, are his own teachings (just like the only thing that Tolkien is a bona fide authority on, is Middle Earth).

To invoke the Buddha’s words as an argument on actual reality is as fallacious as invoking LotR as an argument on actual reality : to do that you’d first have to show that what you’re referring does comport with reality in the first place.

(3) You’ve gone into great detail discussing your experiences. Despite not buying into the core arguments you present, nevertheless I do find your core experience fascinating, and your account of your broader experiences very appealing.

Please do not let my repeated refutation of such of your arguments as I find fallacious stand in the way of your sharing more of these, because I find them both enjoyable and instructive; and, like I’d said, in some odd way I find myself empathizing very closely.

(4) You’ve discussed at some length, across three posts, why you believe your Oneness is neither perception nor knowledge, and why asking for a mechanism is meaningless. I intend to focus on one particular example you’ve presented to illustrate your point, and address that particular example at some length ; and hopefully show you thereby, once and for all, what exactly I mean when I keep demanding that you discuss the mechanism of this knowledge, and why your claim that such demands are pointless is mistaken. I’ll do that in the next section of this post of mine.

(5) The video you’ve referenced, on the Multiverses, seems fascinating. (Watched a short portion of it for now.) As with the earlier one of Brian Greene’s that you’d linked, I’ve bookmarked it. Bears listening to, absolutely. One keeps putting these things off, time constraints I’m afraid, but thanks for posting the link. I’ll get to watching all of it when I can.

(6) You’ve asked me about the origin of thoughts, et cetera. That question is actually very much like that other question you’d asked me (Who am I?). Both questions are seemingly very deep, and people of earlier ages clearly had a blast faffing around with those questions, but modern neuroscience has very clearly and simply answered both questions.

The answer to the earlier question I’ve already given you. And the answer to the latter question is, apparently our thoughts arise in our brain before we even become aware of it. So that we are, in effect, no more than witnesses of our consciousness.

(Mind you, the above does not present you with a get-out-of-jail-free card. To answer the question you’d asked of Spence in a subsequent post : Even if, as it appears, the narrative we build around our actions and our lives is a post-facto construct, nevertheless that construct is still a fact, so that for all practical purposes that makes no difference.

Although sure, knowledge of this mechanism might nudge us to be more consequential in our evaluation rather than purely judgmental, but that’s about it, as far as what difference this makes.

You still need to produce the narrative explaining your thoughts and your actions, or else admit to ignorance of it. This last won’t help you in this particular discussion we’re having, because this is simply a broad outlay underlying all of our thoughts and actions, not just that particular realization of yours.)

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

And now, here’s the portion I wanted to focus on in some detail in this comment of mine.

In discussing why you think asking for a mechanism isn’t really applicable to your realization of Oneness / Non-duality, you present this example, that I’ll first quote here in full :

This is my answer. There is no mechanism because the thing you are asking about (How the oneness communicated) didn't happen.
It is like this:
Person A - sitting at home.
He does not realise he is at home.
He thinks he is somewhere else.
He now decides it is time to go home. He puts on his coat to leave the house to go home.
"where are you going?" asks his friend.
"I am going home" he replies.
His friend takes him outside the house.
"Take a good look: is that your house?
Look at the garden - it's your garden.
Look at the front door and the door number and the street name"
"Oh yes - you are right - I am already at home.
I was just mistaken for a while when I was sitting the settee" he says
He then re-enters his house and sits on the same settee.
Nothing has changed. He is sitting in the same place.
He has not gone anywhere.
His mistaken idea that he is not at home has been corrected,
He now KNOWS he is at home and does not seek to go home anymore.
What is the mechanism by which the home communicated to him that
this is his home? How does he know he is not mistaken again?
There has been no communication and no mechanism is needed.
He simply was mistaken when he thought he was not at home.
That mistake has been corrected and he can now see clearly that in fact he was ALWAYS at home.
He didn't go anywhere, and nothing has changed.
Only his mistaken notion (that he is far away from home) has been removed.
This is what it is like. ONENESS is already the case - always was and always will be. ONENESS did not suddenly happen. It always was. no mechanism is needed.”

In that example of yours, here’s how I’d describe the mechanism of how Person A, who had hitherto believed he was not at home, has now come to believe (or has come to know, if you prefer that latter word) that he is at home after all and in fact has been at home all along.

I think we can split up that process, or that mechanism if you will, into four distinct parts:

Step 1 : Person A, on being directed by friend, clearly sees his house and garden and neighborhood and door number and street name. Direct perception, if you will.

Step 2 : Person A then brings up the conception that he has of his own home.

(And what does that conception comprise of? We don’t know, in this case, because you haven’t detailed that. It’s probably his own memory, And it might, possibly, also include other ideas he’s gleaned about his home from other sources, including his friend’s words. If we are to study Person A’s identification of his present locale as his original home, then it becomes imperative that we do find out what exactly this conception of his own home comprises of, that is, how exactly he’s come by this conception.)

Step 3 : Person A then compares his direct perception of what he’s seen just now, with the conception that he has of his own home.

Step 4 : Having compared his immediate perception with his conception of his home, Person A then decides that his perception coincides with his conception of home (that is, his perception is either exactly identical to his conception, or else it is sufficiently close).

Therefore, he concludes that he is, indeed, sitting in his own home. As a result, he replaces his old belief (or old knowledge, if you will), that he’s NOT in his home, with this new belief (or new knowledge, if you will) that he IS, indeed, in his own home.

As you say, this is indeed a paradigm shift. That is, it is an outright overhauling of Person A’s worldview.

However, to say that no mechanism is applicable here is clearly entirely erroneous. There is a very definite mechanism at play here, that you yourself have not been aware of, because you hadn’t been watching out for it.

Now that I’ve clearly spelt this out, using your own detailed example that you yourself had presented to explain your POV, I hope you do understand what I’m asking for? I hope you now get what I mean by “mechanism”? And I hope you see how a demand that you clearly discuss that mechanism is entirely reasonable in a discussion on how Person A came to believe (or know, if you prefer the word “know”) he’s now at home?

And also, why I’m insisting that you discuss this mechanism also is probably obvious now. First, in order to clearly understand your POV — because any discussion of your Oneness is incomplete without a discussion of this mechanism, and because a clear understanding of your POV is simply impossible without a clear discussion of this mechanism.

And second, once you clearly describe that mechanism, then we can suss out to what degree we can rely on different portions of this mechanism. That is the only way to reasonably arrive at an opinion on how reliable is your realization.

(And forget me, even if I did not exist at all, even then I should think even for you this exercise would be essential, for you to clearly understand your Realization, and to then clearly evaluate if your Realization holds up to scrutiny. To simply gloss over those steps and to focus on the paradigm shift itself, while ignoring the underlying mechanism of that paradigm shift, and what is more to directly assume that that paradigm shift is bona fide, is clearly fallacious.)

(Mind you, I’m not saying here that your paradigm shift is fallacious. But I AM saying that your directly assuming that your paradigm shift is beyond examination, and your assuming without examination that it is bona fide, is what is fallacious. It is only after carrying out this examination, and this evaluation, that one can arrive at a reasonable conclusion as to whether that paradigm shift is bona fide or not. Because, as you can see, and as I can further elucidate at greater detail if you ask me to, each of those steps, in your particular example, can admit of error. Which is not to say there is necessarily any error there ; but absolutely, at every step there is the possibility of error.)

The point of clearly identifying this mechanism is twofold : first, it facilitates a clear understanding of your paradigm shift ; and second, it gives us a clear basis to evaluate how reliable is your paradigm shift.

I realize you might need to introspect, to go back to clearly recalling and visualizing that experience of yours, in order for you to clearly identify and to describe this mechanism of your realization of Oneness. Take your time, Osho Robbins. Identify the steps involved.

(Probably it will mirror the four steps that I myself identified in your example, but feel free to structure it out as you think might best capture the process.)

As and when you’re done with identifying this in your mind, and at such time as you’re comfortable doing this, let’s now, finally, have a clear description of the mechanism of your having arrived at your paradigm-shifting understanding of Oneness or Non-duality.

I love the natural concreteness of Daoism

Abstractions are fine. We humans have evolved to be able to conceive of abstract ideas such as love, justice, infinity, God, and so much else.

But it's possible to get lost in a maze of abstractions where each idea leads to another idea, and then another... no exit in sight. 

Daoism (or Taoism) is my favorite philosophy, along with non-religious Buddhism, because it's wonderfully concrete. I've practiced Tai Chi for seventeen years, which can be viewed as Daoism made physical. 

Yin and yang aren't abstractions in Tai Chi. They are directly experienced realities as a yin move flows into a yang move and a yang move flows into a yin move.

Now and then I turn to my bookshelf of Daoist titles and choose one to read before my morning meditation. Today it was Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation.

Here's some passages from the introductory section that I enjoyed re-reading.

The Daoist correlative cosmology begins from the assumption that the endless stream of always novel yet still continuous situations we encounter are real, and hence, that there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.

As a parody on Parmenides, who claimed that "only Being is," we might say that for the Daoist, "only beings are," or taking one step further in underscoring the reality of the process of change itself, "only becomings are." 

That is, the Daoist does not posit the existence of some permanent reality behind appearances, some unchanging substratum, some essential defining aspect behind the accidents of change. Rather, there is just the ceaseless and usually cadenced flow of experience.

In fact, the absence of the "One behind the many" metaphysics makes our uncritical use of the philosophic term "cosmology" to characterize Daoism, at least in the familiar Greek sense of the word, highly problematic. 

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The Daoist understanding of "cosmos" as the "ten thousand things" means that, in effect, the Daoists have no concept of cosmos at all insofar as that notion entails a coherent, single-ordered world which is in any sense enclosed or defined. The Daoists are, therefore, primarily, "acosmotic" thinkers. 

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For ancient China, time pervades everything and is not to be denied. Time is not independent of things, but a fundamental aspect of them. Unlike traditions that devalue both time and change in pursuit of the timeless and eternal, in classical China things are always transforming.

In fact, in the absence of some claim to objectivity that "objectifies" and thus makes "objects" of phenomena, the Chinese tradition does not have the separation between time and entities that would allow for either time without entities, or entities without time -- there is no possibility of either an empty temporal corridor or an eternal anything (in the sense of being timeless).

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It is for this reason that things resist "definition" in the literal sense of finis -- a practice that delineates some ostensibly discrete boundary around them, and thus reduces all relations to external, extrinsic transactions. 

With fluid and shifting boundaries among things, integrity for any particular thing does not mean being or staying whole, or even actualizing its own internal potential. 

Rather, integrity is something becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things. Integrity is consummatory relatedness. 

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The field of experience is always construed from one perspective or another. There is no view from nowhere, no external perspective, no decontextualized vantage point. We are all in the soup. The intrinsic, constitutive relations that obtain among things make them reflexive and mutually implicating, residing together within the flux and flow.

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A corollary to this radical perspectivism is that each particular element in our experience is holographic in the sense that it has implicated within it the entire field of experience.

This single flower has leaves and roots that take their nourishment from the environing soil and air. And the soil contains the distilled nutrients of past growth and decay that constitute the living ecological system in which all of its participants are organically interdependent. 

The sun enables the flower to process these nutrients, while the atmosphere that caresses the flower also nourishes and protects it. 

By the time we have "cashed out" the complex of conditions that conspire to produce and conserve this particular flower, one ripple after another in an ever-extending series of radial circles, we have implicated the entire cosmos within it without remainder.

For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child.

No, communion isn't about the body and blood of Jesus

I speak from experience as a lapsed Catholic when I say that communion involves swallowing a wafer and some wine, not the body and blood of Jesus.

OK, that experience was brief, since after I had my first communion, thankfully my mother let me decide whether to continue on to be confirmed as a Catholic -- which I definitely didn't want to do, since the black-clad nuns were scary, the mass was in Latin, the wood we had to kneel on was damn hard, and my Presbyterian boyhood friends got to enjoy their more pleasant Sunday School while I was listening to a priest drone on in a language I couldn't understand.

The thing with religions is, they all seem really weird to anyone who isn't a believer in that particular faith, while to those who embrace a religion, mostly it makes great good sense to them.

So as difficult as it is for me to recall in my current atheist frame of mind, for 35 years I was a member of an India-based religion led by a guru who was considered to be God in Human Form. Yeah, that's weird.

Equally weird were the teachings that the guru planted his "radiant form" in the consciousness of the disciple at the time of initiation; that radiant form guided the disciple all the way back to God; the reason initiation was necessary was because the Eastern equivalent of the Devil had stood on one supernatural leg for like forever, earning him a gift from God to keep souls trapped in this physical world where he could control them until a God in Human Form rescued some of them; and a whole lot of other strange stuff besides.

Which means, I used to accept religious teachings that equaled or surpassed the dogmas of Catholicism when it came to difficult-to-believe'ness. (I didn't really believe in all of them, yet I overlooked the most bizarre teachings in order to embrace the more reasonable ones.)

But now I'm a critic of that Eastern religion, and so feel comfortable also being a critic of Catholicism. Which is why I read an opinion piece in USA Today, um, today, called "Catholic truth on Communion belongs in public square."
Download Catholic truth on Communion belongs in public square - USA TODAY

I could tell from the title that I wasn't going to agree with it. Prediction fulfilled!

The woman who wrote the piece, Katrina Trinko, says that it is perfectly fine that bishops are laying the doctrinal groundwork for President Biden, a devout Catholic, to be denied communion because he favors abortion rights.

For some reason the bishops aren't going after the many Catholic Republican politicians who favor capital punishment, which also is a Catholic no-no. 

Trinko is upset that so many Catholics don't accept everything that their religion says is true -- a quality that endears me to those independently-minded people.

But as a Catholic, I’ve been stupefied by the news coverage and punditry, which lacks awareness of what the Catholic Church teaches, what the Eucharist is and, yes, what it means to be a practicing Catholic.

In a way, I’m not surprised. Polls regularly show a gulf between the values of many American Catholics and the teachings of the Catholic Church. For instance, more than two-thirds of American Catholics support legalized samesex marriage, according to a 2020 Gallup survey. Fifty-six percent of American Catholics agree with Biden and Pelosi, backing abortion being legal in most or all cases, per a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.

And when it comes to the Eucharist, plenty of Catholics aren’t even aware what the Church teaches, namely that the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Jesus. Only half of Catholics know what the Church teaches, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, which also found that 69% of American Catholics don’t believe the Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus.

Well, duh, of course the Eucharist -- the supposed transformation of bread and wine into Jesus' body and blood -- isn't real. It's just bread and wine. In fact, there's no persuasive evidence that Jesus even existed, much less that he was a divine being. 

Yet the urge to believe in unbelievable stuff runs deep in the human mind. Thousands of years of cultural indoctrination in religious mumbo-jumbo has caused the brains of billions of people to embrace dogmas that make no sense and have no basis in fact.

Again, I've been there and done that. 

The guru who initiated me way back when in 1971 would bless food that then became sacred to his followers. Occasionally people would bring some of it back to this country after seeing the guru in India.

Then they might share it with other disciples. I recall the time I got a small bag of guru-blessed treats (could have been rice cereal; can't remember exactly). Before I meditated I'd carefully pick out two or three bits of whatever it was and savor it as the mystical treat I believed it to be.

If I dropped some on the floor, no problem. I still ate it.

This wasn't like believing that the blessed food was the body and blood of the guru, but it was close, since we initiates of the guru considered that somehow the food contained the guru's essence.

I'm glad to have given up that idea, along with the other crazy stuff I used to accept. Hopefully someday many more that 69% of American Catholics will stop believing that what's consumed at communion is the real presence of Jesus.

Open Thread 39 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

Remember, off-topic comments should go in an Open Thread. 

If you don't see a recent comment, or comments, posted, it's because you've failed to follow the above rule. Keep to the subject of a blog post if you leave a comment on it. And if you want to use this blog as a "chat room," do that in an open thread.

As noted before, it's good to have comments in a regular blog post related to its subject, and it's also good to have a place where almost anything goes in regard to sharing ideas, feelings, experiences, and such. That place is an Open Thread.

Leave a comment on this post about anything you want to talk about. Remember that I'm moderating comments, so it could take a while for your comment to be published. Almost every comment submitted to an Open Thread will be approved. Personal attacks on someone are an exception, as is hate speech. Argue with ideas, not insults.

Though I haven't been doing too well on this, I'll try to remember to always have an Open Thread showing in the Recent Posts section in the right sidebar. If one isn't showing, I've added an Open Threads category in, naturally, the Categories section. You can always find an Open Thread that way.

So if you're a believer in some form of religion, mysticism, or spirituality, this is where you can put your "praise God," "praise Guru," or "praise _______" comments.

Salem Gay Pride speaker has a lesson for atheists

Last Friday my wife and I went to a Pride gathering in Salem's Riverfront Park. I wrote about it in "Scott Hosner speaks at 2021 Salem Gay Pride event." 

The seven-minute video I made of Hosner can be viewed below. It's worth watching for several reasons.

One is that Hosner's description of what it was like to grow up queer in the last part of the previous century shows how much progress has been made in LGBTQ rights since that time. That's really encouraging given the many social problems we face now.

(My daughter graduated from South Salem high school in 1990, which could be about the time Hosner was a student there.)

Another reason is that Hosner calls on members of other minorities to "come out" as he is urging queer people to do. This is needed to show that those who are part of a minority group are regular people like everybody else.

And if enough minorities band together, they can form a majority.

Atheists like me are a decided minority. It appears that we comprise somewhere around 3% to 10% of the United States population. 

A monthly discussion group that I'm a part of is almost entirely made up of atheists. Last night we talked about the pros and cons of being open about our atheism.

A woman who lives in a fairly conservative nearby town said that she's reluctant to let people know she doesn't believe in God, since religious believers can be nasty to atheists. 

That's true, but I think there are strong reasons for doing what Hosner recommends: be proud of who you are and what you believe, and don't be shy about opening yourself up to others. 

Here's the video.

There is indeed a presumption of atheism

Yesterday someone  left this comment on my post, "Sorry. No winner in 'Tell me why you believe in God contest.'"

There are arguments for theism. There are arguments for atheism. The failure of arguments for one side, does not mean that the other position is true by default. There is no "presumption of atheism" or "presumption of theism."

The commenter is completely wrong. What they said lacks any foundation in logic, reason, or direct experience.

I talk about this a lot on this blog. Almost always there's no way to prove the non-existence of something. What we do in both science and everyday life is demand proof that something exists.

If you say, "There's an invisible pink elephant standing on the sidewalk," it's absurd to consider that this statement is as believable as "There's no invisible pink elephant standing on the sidewalk."

Why? Because once we assume that things unseen and unprovable possess as much reality as things seen and provable, we've lost touch with reality. 

That's another word for psychosis. 

Now, it's unlikely the commenter is psychotic. They just have a deficiency in clear thinking, which is very different from being mentally ill.

That's why I'm writing this post -- to help them, and others, understand where they are going wrong in their approach to reality.

Glad to help! That's what we do here at the Church of the Churchless, help bring people back into touch with reality after wandering in the desert of religious delusion.

Hey, I've been a wanderer myself before I understood in what direction truth lies.

Atheism is the presumptive truth because there is no demonstrable evidence that any of the thousands of gods theorized to exist actually does. Atheism simply means "no theism" or "no god."

Likewise, no invisible pink elephants is the presumptive truth because there is no demonstrable evidence that such creatures exist -- except in the minds of people who claim that they see them.

Shivinder Singh's bail revoked to uncover conspiracy hatched by him

It's been quite a while since there's been any news about the financial scandal involving the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder), their relative Gurinder Singh Dhillon (guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas), Sunil Godhwani (who used to be the guru's close advisor), and others.

But a few days ago this story appeared in The Economic Times. Similar stories ran in some other publications. 

It's good to see that the Delhi High Court revoked the bail that allowed Shivinder Singh to stay out of detention, a goal being to uncover the conspiracy hatched by Shivinder and to trace the funds that were siphoned off from Religare Finvest Ltd.

Previous news stories have indicated that Dhillon and his family received some of those funds, which naturally raises the question of whether the guru was part of the conspiracy. This case has been under investigation for a long time. It looks like it will continue to be investigated.

Here's screenshots of The Economic Times story.

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.