Church of the Churchless

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

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

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

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

Bishop Gerald Glenn

Jesus' blood won't save you from COVID-19. Not on Easter. Not ever.

Since I don't believe in god -- the Christian god or any other god -- today being Easter meant exactly nothing to me.

I "celebrated," using that word extremely broadly, by finishing up some field mowing that I started several days ago, and wrote about yesterday on one of my other blogs in The poetry of field mowing in the coronavirus era.

My wife had an online Zoom meeting of the atheist group that she leads at noon today. I didn't take part, but I listened to some of the discussion, which included talk about how some churches are continuing to hold services here in Oregon even though those gatherings are banned by our Governor's stay at home order.

Yes, religious people are acting irrationally and irresponsibly. What a non-shock. That's the nature of religion: ignoring reality and embracing fantasy.

Recently a CNN reporter talked to a woman who was in her car after leaving a church service in Ohio. She epitomizes the danger of zealous religiosity. As you can hear her say in the video below, the woman believes that "being covered in Jesus' blood" will keep her safe from the coronavirus.

What an idiot. There was no sign of Jesus' blood on her, naturally. So the blood is all in her crazed mind. Ordinarily that wouldn't bother me, since I'm used to religious fundamentalists believing all sorts of crazy crap.

However, as the reporter pointed out to her, that erroneous belief in Jesus' blood protecting her when she goes to Walmart or wherever could lead to other people becoming infected. So not only is this woman ignorant, she's selfish -- viewing her Christian fantasy as being more important than keeping others safe.

Here's the video.

 

A physicist speaks fondly of art and the stories we tell ourselves

Art and science aren't at odds with each other. They are just different ways of understanding the world, friends rather than foes. Many artists love science. Many scientists love the arts. 

The notion that scientists are cold-blooded creatures who only care about objective reality obviously is ridiculous. But some people believe in that ridiculous notion.

So that's why I'm sharing some passages from physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe."

Here's part of what Greene says about art in his book's Instinct and Creativity chapter.

Art may have had adaptive utility directly at the level of the individual, a perspective I find particularly compelling. The arts provide an arena unbounded by the strictures of flat-footed truth and everyday physical reality, allowing the mind to jump and twist and tumble as it explores all manner of imagined novelty.

A mind that assiduously sticks to what's true is a mind that explores a wholly limited realm of possibility. But a mind that becomes accustomed to freely crossing the boundary between what's real and what's imagined -- all the while keeping clear tabs on which is which -- is a mind that becomes adept at breaking the bonds of conventional thinking. Such a mind is primed for innovation and ingenuity.

...I'm partial to the view that sharpening ingenuity, exercising creativity, broadening perspective, and building cohesion provides a template for how the arts mattered to natural selection.

With this perspective the arts join language, story, myth, and religion as the means by which the human mind thinks symbolically, reasons counterfactually, imagines freely, and works collaboratively. Over the sweep of time, it is these capacities that have given rise to our culturally, scientifically, and technologically rich world.

All the same, even if your view of art's evolutionary role veers toward creamy desserts, we can surely agree that myriad forms of art have been a steady and valued presence throughout human history. Which means that inner lives and social exchanges have embraced modes of engagement that do not place a premium on factual information conveyed through language.

...The most arresting art can induce in us rarefied states of mind and body comparable to those reduced by our most affecting real-world encounters, similarly molding and enhancing our engagement with truth.

Discussion, analysis, and interpretation can further shape these experiences, but the most potent do not rely on a linguistic intermediary. Indeed, even for language-based arts, it is the imagery and sensations that, in the most moving experiences, leave the most lasting mark.

As elegantly described by poet Jane Hirshfield, "When a writer brings into language a new image that is fully right, what is knowable of existence expands."

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow speaks too to art's singular capacity for expanding the knowable: "Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides -- the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can't receive."

And without that other reality, Bellow notes, channeling thoughts set down by Proust, existence is reduced to a "terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life."

Survival rests upon amassing information that accurately describes the world. And progress, in the conventional sense of increased control over our surroundings, requires a clear grasp of how these facts integrate into nature's workings. Such are the raw materials for fashioning practical ends.

They are the basis for what we label objective truth and often associate with scientific understanding. But however comprehensive such knowledge may be, it will always fall short of providing an exhaustive account of the human experience.

Artistic truth touches a distinct layer; it tells a higher-level story, one that in the words of Joseph Conrad "appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom" and speaks instead to "our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation... in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear... which binds together all humanity -- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

...Make no mistake. We are all bags of particles -- both mind and body -- and the physical facts about the particles can fully address how they interact and behave. But such facts, the particulate narrative, shed only monochrome light on the richly colored stories of how we humans navigate the complex worlds of thought, perception, and emotion. 

And when our perceptions blend thought and emotion, when we feel thoughts as well as think them, our experience steps yet further beyond the bounds of mechanistic explanation. We gain access to worlds otherwise uncharted. As Proust emphasized, this is to be celebrated.

Only through art, he noted, can we enter the secret universe of another, the only journey in which we truly "fly from star to star," a journey that cannot be navigated by "direct and conscious methods."

Although focused on the arts, Proust's perspective resonates with my own long-held take on modern physics. "The only true voyage of discovery," he once said, "would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others."

For centuries, we physicists have relied on mathematics and experiment to reshape our eyes, to reveal layers of reality untouched by generations of the past, to allow us to see familiar landscapes in shocking new ways. 

With these tools, we have found that the strangest of lands have emerged by intently examining the very realms we have long inhabited. All the same, to acquire such knowledge and to utilize the power of science more generally, we must follow the unshakable directive to look past the peculiarities of how each of our distinct collections and cells takes in the world, and home in on objective qualities of reality.

For the rest, the all-too-human truths, our nested stories rely on art. As George Bernard Shaw put it, "You use a glass mirror to see your face, you use works of art to see your soul."

Small things become big joys during the coronavirus crisis

With so many people suffering because of the coronavirus, it's natural to feel anxious, unhappy, even depressed. But I'm finding that the isolation and altered routine caused by Oregon having a Stay Home, Save Lives order has some bright spots.

Sure, I no longer can go to Tai Chi classes. Nor can I go to our athletic club. Meeting a friend at a coffee house is a no-no. I still go grocery shopping once a week, but wear a mask and gloves. The dog park we used to enjoy is closed. 

So much is different now. Along with many millions of other people, I've been cast out of the activities that were so familiar to me, I took them for granted. Now that they're gone, I realize how precious they were.

But like a handful of flowers blooming in a otherwise stark desert, other things in my daily life now stand out, because the mental backdrop that used to be filled to overflowing with busyness -- time to go here, then there, and after that, another here-and-there --  has become a largely blank canvas against which small things are showcased.

A few examples...

-- Standing in the checkout line at a store where I'd perused the completely empty shelves where toilet paper once was stacked high, I noticed a bundle of toilet paper in the cart of the woman in front of me. Ah, Seventh Generation, I said to myself. That would be in the organic/health food section of the store.

And so it was, on a bottom shelf, a place where most shoppers wouldn't think to look for toilet paper. Returning to the checkout line, the cashier said, "Ah, I see you found the secret place." "Yes," I told her, "but we must speak softly to keep the secret." Returning home with the precious toilet paper, I felt as proud as if I'd killed a saber-toothed tiger and brought it back to the cave. 

-- When I'm out and about on an essential trip to a grocery store or pharmacy, I enjoy driving to the Starbucks nearest to where we live. I can't see how many cars are in the drive-through lane until I turn into the Starbucks parking lot, which now, of course, has few cars, since coffee houses and restaurants are limited to takeout only. 

Sometimes so many cars are in line, I feel it isn't worth it to join the queue, especially if I have cold or frozen groceries in the car. But when I enter the parking lot and see only a few vehicles in the drive-through lane, a burst of happiness explodes in my brain. When I hold up the Starbucks app on my iPhone for the barista to scan the bar code that pays for my Grande Decaf Nonfat Vanilla Latte, I enjoy the brief encounter with a coffee house amployee that I used to take for granted.

-- My wife walks our Husky mix, Mooka, in the morning. I walk her in the late afternoon. This has become the most important item on my otherwise mostly empty calendar. Sometimes my wife says, "I can walk Mooka if you don't feel like it." "Oh, I sure do feel like it," I tell her. "This is a high point of my day." Even though pre-coronavirus, I have to admit that sometimes it felt like an unwelcome chore.

We live in the country, about five miles from town. There's a two mile loop on curvy roads that Mooka and I go on every day. It has some fairly steep hills, ups and downs, so the loop is a good alternative to the elliptical trainer that I used to use at our athletic club three days a week, while I watched one of the televisions. Now I watch real life, 3-D life.

Today a neighbor was herding her goats down the road to another neighbor's home, apparently to have them munch in their pasture. Mooka was transfixed by the sight. She's a curious dog. This was her first sight of goats on a road. It was a special moment for dog and human. Not a big thing, just a small thing that created considerable joy for both a canine and a Homo sapiens. 

Don't use hydroxychloroquine without a doctor's order

I do my best not to censor comments left on my blog posts, which must be approved by me before they're published. But I'm going to change that rule for comments relating to the coronavirus pandemic.

Facts, truth, and science are our best weapons against COVID-19. So I have zero tolerance for people who spread untruths about it. I apologize for not acting sooner to prevent some false comments from being published. But better late than never.

Specifically, ignore anyone who says that hydroxychloroquine should be taken without a doctor's order to either prevent or treat a coronavirus infection.

This should never be done. It can be extremely harmful, even deadly. There are clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine underway. Doctors have the authority, in the United States at least, to prescribe it for COVID-19 patients.

So do not, repeat, do not, take it on your own, and do not, repeat, do not, give it to anyone else, like a family member or friend.

I'm ashamed that the president of the United States, the hugely incompetent Donald J. Trump, has been promoting hydroxychloroquine in his rambling, incoherent, mostly fact-free White House coronavirus briefings. The fact that Trump favors the drug is a strong argument against using it, since almost always Trump is on the wrong side of the truth/lies divide.

Understand: it may turn out that hydroxychloroquine is a worthwhile drug to use in the treatment of COVID-19. However, medical experts are warning against its use outside of a well-informed decision by a doctor to use it for this purpose, or in a clinical trial.

The Atlantic has a good story on this subject, "Why Does the President Keep Pushing a Malaria Drug?" It's written by James Hamblin, a physician who teaches public health at Yale University. Excerpts:

Based on the limited evidence so far, giving hydroxychloroquine to people could very well be—as with most drugs that modulate the immune system—of some benefit in some circumstances. Some people will be made sicker by it, depending on underlying physiology, other medications they’re taking, timing, and dosing. Identifying who stands to benefit and why requires data, and several randomized controlled studies of hydroxychloroquine are under way.

But Trump has plunged ahead. On March 28, amid his constant enthusiasm, the FDA issued an emergency authorization allowing the use of hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19. Even still, the agency urged that the drug should be given only to patients “for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.”

Some hospitals in the U.S., including Massachusetts General Hospital, have begun incorporating hydroxychloroquine into treatment protocols, at the discretion of an infectious-disease specialist. Other institutions are more guarded. At the University of Washington, doctors are advised in official treatment policy that although the drug has been shown to inhibit replication of the virus in cultures of monkey kidney cells, “it has not been shown to be an effective antiviral” in living organisms. The University of Michigan Medical School advises its doctors that “the current body of literature and local experience does not support the routine use of any specific treatment regimen, including hydroxychloroquine, for patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection.”

...On Saturday, Trump suggested research exists that shows people with lupus don’t get the coronavirus, implying that their use of hydroxychloroquine protects them. “There’s a rumor out there that because it takes care of lupus very effectively, as I understand it, and it’s a, you know, a drug that’s used for lupus,” he said, “so there’s a study out there that says people that have lupus haven’t been catching this virus. Maybe it’s true; maybe it’s not.”

There is no such study.

In fact, it appears that people with lupus who have been taking hydroxychloroquine for that condition have been infected with the coronavirus. So says a doctor.

Given the surge in eBay sales of chloroquine phosphate, and the anecdotal reports in Arizona and Nigeria of patients poisoning themselves by self-administering chloroquine formulations, there’s concern throughout the public health community that Trump’s exhortations to try the drug could do more harm than good. Of course, Trump isn’t encouraging self-medication, telling Americans instead to “go through your medical people.”

So what do the medical people say? Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, has attempted to caution against the idea of hydroxychloroquine as a preventive medication. He tweeted Sunday: “Patients with lupus, arthritis, other conditions are *already* on hydroxychloroquine. And we are diagnosing them with Covid-19 LEFT AND RIGHT.”

To repeat, don't believe false rumors on the internet about hydroxychloroquine. Don't accept anecdotal reports that it is OK to self-treat yourself with this drug. Do take hydroxychloroquine if you have COVID-19 and your doctor has prescribed it.

A story in The Guardian also is worth reading. Here's an excerpt from "Trump touts hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid-19. Don't believe the hype."

Why is Trump touting it?

Trump was influenced by a widely publicized study in France where 40 coronavirus patients were given hydroxychloroquine, with more than half experiencing the clearing of their airways within three to six days. This apparent improvement is important as it would curtail the timeframe in which infected people could spread Covid-19 to others.

However, experts have warned that the study is small and lacks sufficient rigor to be classed as evidence of a potential treatment. The French health ministry has warned against the use of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19, with Olivier Véran, France’s health minister, saying that it shouldn’t be used by anyone with the exception of “serious forms of hospitalization and on the collegial decision of doctors and under strict medical supervision”.

What does the evidence show?

The French study followed work by Chinese researchers which suggested that hydroxychloroquine can slow infections from Sars-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid-19, by blocking it from entering cells in the body. But more recent, albeit small-scale, research from China has shown that patients who were treated with the drugs fought off coronavirus no more quickly than those who didn’t get it. Indeed, one patient given hydroxychloroquine severely worsened in condition while four patients on the medicine developed signs of liver damage and experienced diarrhea.

Regardless of these findings, any drug being used for a certain purpose before full clinical trials are completed is, by definition, untested and unproven. It’s too early to say if hydroxychloroquine can have a major benefit or not.

The European Medicines Agency, an agency of the EU, has said hydroxychloroquine should not be taken by coronavirus patients except for clinical trials or emergency use programs.

As always, follow the science. Lives depend on it.

And don't bother leaving a comment on this post about hydroxychloroquine that isn't backed up by a reputable source. You'll just be wasting your time, because it won't be published. On the other hand, include a link to a good source of scientific information, and likely I'll approve your comment.

Trump acts like a cult leader in his coronavirus briefings

Because Oregon is under a shelter in place order from Governor Brown and my usual routine has been disrupted, I've been entertaining myself (broadly speaking) by watching Trump's coronavirus briefings most afternoons -- including today.

Not surprisingly, they're horrifying.

Early on in Trump's presidency I thought that his egotism, incompetence, habitual lying, and incoherent babbling was as amusing as it was disturbing. But that was when Trump's personal defects didn't directly threaten American lives, just indirectly, such as by his repeated attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare.

Now, though, there's nothing funny about the failure of Trump and his cronies to deal properly with the coronavirus crisis. Everything I and other progressives worried about since Trump was elected has come to pass. 

Most presidents do their best to rise to the occasion when our country is in a serious crisis. Trump, on the other hand, has relished sinking to the depths. In the coronavirus briefings he blatantly lies, feels sorry for himself, attacks journalists, insults health care professionals, and undercuts the medical experts who have to stand next to him while he spouts nonsense.

Many thousands of people in the United States are going to die unnecessarily because Trump bungled the crucial early months when it was known that the coronavirus was coming to this country, but Trump downplayed its seriousness and failed to get a testing program underway immediately.

A lot of things bother me about how Trump behaves in the coronavirus briefings. My overarching irritation is how he acts like a cult leader rather than the president of a constitutional democracy. 

Almost invariably, whenever someone other than Trump speaks from the podium they are forced to begin their remarks with fawning praise. "I want to start off by thanking President Trump for the bold leadership he has been showing throughout this crisis." Meanwhile, Trump stands there, doing his best imperious Mussolini impersonation. 

Benito Mussolini and Donald Trump

Like a cult leader, Trump can't stand to be criticized or questioned.

When a reporter starts to ask a probing question about some dubious Trump claim or obvious screw-up, he interrupts them, then often spews insults at them. The one thing he doesn't do is give an honest answer or admit to a mistake.

Though Trump's imperfections are obvious to anyone with an eye to see or an ear to hear, those who surround him know that if they speak up about a false statement or unwise policy, they won't be around for long. So they stand there, a fake smile painted on their faces, forced to act as if each and every utterance of Dear Leader makes perfect sense, even when gibberish is bubbling out of Trump's mouth.

Yesterday, for example, Trump was ranting about how the previous administration had left the cupboard bare of medical supplies in the federal strategic stockpile. Supposedly this explained why there is so little left to deliver to states and cities fighting the coronavirus. 

A reporter started to ask an obvious question. "But you've had three years to refill the stockpile. Why wasn't this done?" Trump interrupted him and launched into a diatribe about something or other. Which left the reporter with no choice but to sit there and listen to the crap Trump was spewing.

For if he had yelled out the truth, likely the Trump administration would have banned the reporter from future briefings. 

And you know, that's what I wish would happen. Which also is what I wish would happen at every religious cult gathering where some man (women rarely are cult leaders) is looked upon with fawning devotion by his followers as he spouts lies, falsehoods, and untruths that bear no resemblance to reality.

If a few of those followers, just one even, would stand up and say, "This is bullshit; I'm not going to listen to it anymore; I've got better things to do," that would be so refreshing, so brave, so courageous.

I keep waiting for someone to do that at Trump's coronavirus briefings. So far, no one has. They keep on listening to the garbage that comes out of Trump's mouth, unwilling or unable to stand up for the truth against a man who has no respect for it. Such is the danger of cults.

They suck good people in, then make it very difficult for those people to escape from the grip of the cult leader. The only good news is that usually cults merely destroy the psychological well-being of their members, not their physical being. With Trump, though, his malevolence is going to lead to a great many unnecessary deaths. 

Behold the evidence.

A foreigner's scary tale of being checked for COVID-19 in India

Here's a description someone emailed to me yesterday about what happened after they wanted to be checked out in India for possibly having COVID-19, the dreaded coronavirus.

Hopefully this doesn't describe a typical medical experience in India. If it does, India is in deep trouble as it fights the coronavirus (currently the country is in the midst of a three-week stay at home lockdown). 

If you aren't aware what paan is, check out the Wikipedia page about this commonly chewed substance in India.

I was in India recently. Just got back a little over a week ago. Had a great time for the most part skateboarding a bit, visiting one of my best friends, and just bumming around looking for potential investment properties and doing touristy things.

To make a long story short, I'd been coughing since almost the first week I arrived in India, attributing the cause of the cough to the fact that I was in a place with more air pollution than hell, and I was also smoking super strong clove cigarettes all day every day.

But the cough never went away totally even when I stopped smoking altogether, and as the corona hysteria grew it made me a bit nervous about myself, but more importantly for the people I was staying with.

One day I asked the hosts I was staying with to call the corona hotline India had set up, and was instructed to immediately go to one of the well known hospitals in the city. The family assured me that it's the most advanced place with the most professional doctors and all that stuff.   

Since I thought I should minimize risk and not unintentionally spread corona to randoms on the street, I walked to the main road at about 11PM and called an Ambulance, thinking they might have some sort of transportation procedures. I was wrong.

Between my own crappy attempts to give directions in Hindi plus locals on the street speaking to the dispatchers on my speaker phone, it took almost 15 minutes just to explain where I was. No big deal for me, but I imagine people die there all the time just from the incompetence of the people on the phones who ask pertinent questions such as "aap foreign hai?" (are you foreign) over and over again.

Moving on, an ambulance finally arrived and I was instructed to get in and not touch anything. The ambulance was the dirtiest thing I've seen in any kind of medical scenario in my life, and they drove like madmen, nearly making me fly off my seat about 10 times. 

After a few seconds we arrive at the hospital, and the first thing I see is a big sort of half indoor half outdoor enclosure packed full of people coughing, screaming, crying and sleeping. There is wet paan spit every few inches on the road, stray dogs are everywhere in and around this tent-like building and the noise is basically no different than the streets of India.

The whole place looks like a war zone with the exception of the workers who all seem not to give a fuck about anything at all. I told myself that I'd run away if they tried putting me in that tent place. Luckily they didn't.

After being instructed to stand near the van in 3 different places, I'm finally escorted into a packed waiting room which is also full of sickly people milling about aimlessly, causing ruckus and of course staring at me. I was wearing a mask, but still made a useless attempt to maintain distance from others.

After waiting around for a few minutes I'm escorted back outside and toward another building altogether. There I'm instructed to wait outside, which is a good thing since that, too, is the wrong building. After stopping at two more buildings and walking around the spit drenched roads,  we finally arrive at the place where I'll be made to stay overnight.

While entering the building and walking up the stairs, the first thing I notice is that the paan spit isn't reserved for outdoor areas, and even the halls of this medical building are covered in the distinct red stains seen everywhere else in India. It's not a good sign but I have no other choice really since it was announced that anyone who doesn't go to the hospital when instructed has committed a crime.

Americans are fools who follow laws. In retrospect, it may have been wiser to just come back to USA.

So finally I get to the second floor, known as the first floor in India, and take a seat on a bench. A man comes out who I assume is a doctor and asks me a lot of questions as well as takes my heart rate. I ask if he's gonna take my temperature and his response is something like "No, we don't do anything like that here" which doesn't give me any confidence at all.

I'm eventually taken to an area with rooms full of beds which I guess is the quarantine area. It's across the hall from the "infectious disease ward" but itself isn't labeled. 

Upon entering the room, the first thing I notice is that the sheets on my bed are stained, and that the attached tray has a bunch of pieces of rice on it, which means it wasn't only not disinfected, but hadn't even been wiped clean of food. Strewn about the floor are wrappers and the packages from bandages, swabs and other medical paraphernalia, and like many things in less important sectors of Indian society, things were generally disorganized and broken. 

After a few minutes the doctor comes back to tell me that I will be tested for corona in the morning and that I should sleep, so I decide to get up to use the restroom, and make my way down the hall to find what was maybe the most concerning thing about this already frightening adventure I'd been on.

The restroom I'd been instructed to use is a squat toilet that looks as though it's never been cleaned, and has no toilet paper or one of those ass sprayers that are becoming common, but instead has the old style tap and bucket, meaning that the people in the quarantine (which luckily was only me at that point) are supposed to clean their ass with water and their bare hand.

The handleless door had that appearance of something decades old with layers upon layers of filth that had been smeared and scraped in every direction a millions of times. Filth which in this case is mostly fecal matter. Thank God I only had to pee and did my best not to touch the door.

I left and searched in vain for a place to wash my hands. There was no sink, no soap. Nothing in that hall but a really dirty bottle of hand sanitizer near the door of my quarantined room.

Not only until the next morning did I find in the same hallway another restroom with a western style toilet and a sink to wash my hands. The problem with that one was that it, too, had no toilet paper, ass sprayer or even bucket and water tap, and on top of that, the toilet had no seat and the water was literally black.

Around 3 in the morning some random dudes came into the quarantine, since I guess the security guard decided to go elsewhere, and asked me "koi aya?" (has anyone come).  I attempted to tell them that I had no clue wtf they were talking about, and after a minute or so they realized that yes, I was indeed foreign and that they should stand, stare and talk about me for a while before leaving.

I went back to sleep.

Around 7 or so the doctor-ish guy returns and says he'll give me a test, but not for corona. I'm told that due to my long stay in that city and no exposure to any known cases, I'm not eligible and I'll instead be tested for bird flu, swine flu and all that other stuff.

They send me to another doctor who gives me some meds for plain pneumonia and I go back home to the room I was renting. Later after a lot of hard work, I find some phone numbers online of alumni from the medical college, and get a number to retrieve my test results, which are negative. No swine flu. Awesome. 

I decide when I get to my room that I need to leave India, but surprisingly not due to the chaos, but because I felt bad for my wife being in USA alone, and I knew that any plans I had were not gonna work at that time. Booked my tickets the next day, and good thing I did. My flight was the last Air India flight out of the city, and for reasons nobody ever told me, they confiscated my documents and I almost wasn't able to get on the flight. 

Before I left I started to feel the tribal tension and famous racism of India starting to build up. Kids in the neighborhood who once wanted to be around me every day were now looking at me weird, fat women on the street were pointing at me and saying "corona corona!" and in one market the shop owners were saying that I came to India just to spread the virus.

My hosts said that neighbors started coming to their house asking about me and saying I had to leave, never mind the fact that a local singer was suspected of attending parties about a mile from where I was staying while she unknowingly had corona and potentially spreading it to many other celebrities and politicians. No, it's the foreigners who are doing it! Even if I'd had it, it'd be from Indians since I was there from before corona.

But whatever. People are idiots.

Now I'm reading about foreigners being kicked out of their hotels and rented homes all over India, and them and their children being spit on, pelted with stones and attacked at random on the streets.  Nobody is really talking about it anywhere, as can be expected. Meanwhile mindless Americans are crying about the word "kung flu" and making bad jokes international news.

Anyway, I'm back home. Self quarantined. Feeling good. Making music. I feel lucky. Things could be a lot worse for me.

As for India, if that disease catches on, they have no way to stop it. Whatever assurances the government is giving are hollow. Police beating poor people on the street will do nothing but cause riots which are already happening anyway. It's sort of like their disastrous "demonetization" failure all over again, except about 1000 times worse. In that one, foreigners were being groped and molested at the ATM machines and banks, but not kicked out onto the streets and attacked by mobs. 

In a lot of ways I really love that place, and many of my favorite people live there, but it'll probably be my last trip to India. I saw a side that I don't want to see more of. 

Good luck to everyone there, and be well, Brian.

Brian Greene: "Behavior is fully governed by physical law"

I love the idea that free will is an illusion.

Sure, for each of us it feels like we can freely choose what to do. But as I've observed numerous times before, it also feels like the earth stands still and the sun sets, which is another illusion.

So if we want to know reality as it is, not as how we consider it to be, it's important to not overly trust our subjective perceptions, because that can lead us astray.

I've continued to enjoy my reading of Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe." Today I finished the Particles and Consciousness chapter, which has a section on free will that made great good sense to me.

Both rationally and emotionally. 

Emotionally, it just is so much more appealing to know that I, and you, and everybody, am not an isolated independent actor who writes my own lines in the play of life. Rather, we are parts of a unified whole, the universe. What we do isn't up to us, but to an amazingly vast interconnected web of causes and effects.

Here's how Greene cogently describes an argument that "knocks free will back on its heels."

Your experiences and mine appear to confirm that we influence the unfolding of reality through actions that reflect our freely willed thoughts, desires, and decisions. Yet, maintaining our physicalist stance, you and I are nothing but constellations of particles whose behavior is fully governed by physical law.

Our choices are the result of our particles coursing one way or another through our brains. Our actions are the results of our particles moving this way or that through our bodies. And all particle motion -- whether in a brain, a body, or a baseball -- is controlled by physics and so is fully dictated by mathematical decree.

The equations determine the state of our particles today based on their state yesterday, with no opportunity for any of us to end-run the mathematics and freely shape, or mold, or change the lawful unfolding.

Indeed, following this chain ever further back, the big bang is the ultimate source of all particles, and their behavior over cosmic history has been dictated by the nonnegotiable and insensate laws of physics, which determine the structure and function of everything that exists.

Our sense of individuality, value, and esteem rest on our autonomy. But faced with the intransigence of physical law, autonomy withdraws. We are no more than playthings knocked to and fro by the dispassionate rules of the cosmos. 

Sounds good to me. I've got no problem with being a cosmic plaything. But why does it seem otherwise to us? Greene has an answer.

Our choices seem free because we do not witness the operation of nature's laws in the world of particles. Our senses and our reasoning focus on everyday human scales and actions: we think about the future, compare courses of action, and weigh possibilities.

As a result, when our particles do act, it seems to us that their collective behaviors emerge from our autonomous choices.

However, if we had the superhuman vision invoked earlier and were able to analyze everyday reality at the level of its fundamental constituents, we would recognize that our thoughts and behaviors amount to complex processes of shifting particles that yield a powerful sense of free will but are fully governed by physical law.

So what's the difference between a human and a rock, given that each is fully governed by physical law? Here's how Greene addresses this important question in a persuasive fashion.

Within the rock there's just not a whole lot going on. What makes you special is that your sophisticated internal organization allows for a rich spectrum of behavioral responses. 

The point, then, is that when evaluating free will there is much to be gained by shifting attention from a narrow focus on ultimate cause to a broader perusal of human response. Our freedom is not from physical laws that are beyond our ability to affect. 

Our freedom is to exhibit behaviors -- leaping, thinking, imagining, observing, deliberating, explaining, and so on -- that are not available to most other collections of particles. Human freedom is not about willed choice. Everything science has so far revealed has only strengthened the case that such volitional intercession in the unfolding of reality does not exist.

Instead, human freedom is about being released from the bondage of an impoverished range of response that has long constrained the behavior of the inanimate world.

Open Thread 31 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

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

This hasn't been happening recently, as some commenters have been using blog posts as a "chat room," basically, so from now on I'm going to vow to do better at not approving comments submitted on a regular blog post if the comment doesn't deal with the subject of the post. 

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. 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.

Brian Greene: "Nothing supersedes the laws of physics"

I've been needing some cosmic scientific perspective during my morning pre-meditation reading time, given how the coronavirus pandemic dominates the news and peoples' psyches.

Physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe," has been meeting that need nicely. He's an excellent writer, thinker, and popularizer of scientific truth. 

Here's an example of what appealed to me in the first four chapters. I'm sure I'll be sharing more from the book as I get deeper into it.

Nothing supersedes the laws of physics. I love this bold simple statement. It rings true to me. If you disagree, feel free to leave a comment on this post in which you provide specific, detailed, persuasive, demonstrable evidence of something that lies outside the laws of physics.

Here's passages from the Information and Vitality chapter where Greene makes this persuasive claim.

By this point you may have concluded that life's molecules must have aced their studies of organic chemistry. Otherwise, how in the world would they know what they are supposed to do? How does DNA know to split down the middle and attach complementary bases to the ones it has exposed, creating a duplicate molecule?

How does RNA know to make copies of sections of DNA, transport that information to the appropriate cellular structures where yet other distinct but related molecules know how to read the genetic code and link up appropriate sequences of amino acids into functioning proteins?

Of course, the molecules don't know anything. Their behavior is guided by the blind, mindless, unschooled laws of physics. But the question remains: How do they consistently and reliably carry out a stunningly intricate series of complex chemical processes?

It's a question that harks back to my paraphrasing of Schrodinger's primary query in What is Life?: The jostling and careening of molecules within a rock are governed by the laws of physics. The jostling and careening of molecules within a rabbit are also governed by the laws of physics.

How do they differ?

We have now seen that the rabbit's particles are guided by an additional influence -- the rabbit's internal archive of information, its cellular software. Importantly, critically, vitally: This information does not supersede the laws of physics. Nothing does.

Instead, much as a water slide doesn't supersede the laws of gravity but through its shape guides riders along a specific trajectory they would otherwise not follow, the rabbit's cellular software is carried by chemical arrangements that through their shape, structure, and constituents guide various molecules along trajectories that they, too, would otherwise not follow.

...The point, then, is that information in a cell is not abstract. It is not a free-floating set of instructions that molecules need to study, memorize, and execute. 

Instead, the information is encoded in the molecular arrangements themselves, arrangements that coax other molecules to bump or join or interact in a manner that carries out cellular processes like growth, repair, or reproduction. Even though the molecules inhabiting a cell lack intent or purpose, and even though they are thoroughly oblivious, their physical structure allows them to accomplish highly specialized tasks. 

In this sense, the processes of life are molecular meanderings fully described by physical law that simultaneously tell a higher-level, information-based story.

For the rock, there is no higher level story. When you use the laws of physics to describe the bumping and jostling of the rock's molecules, you're done. But when you use the very same laws of physics to describe the bumping and jostling of rabbit molecules, you are not done. Not by a long shot.

Overlaid on the reductionist story is a whole additional story that tells of the rabbit's unique molecular arrangements that choreograph an exquisite spectrum of organized molecular motions. And it is these molecular motions which carry out higher-level processes within the rabbit's cells.

Indeed, for the rabbit, and for us, too, such biological information is also organized on larger scales, guiding processes that act not just within individual cells but across collections of cells, yielding the hallmark quality of coordinated complexity. When you reach for a cup of coffee, the motion of every atom constituting every molecule in your hand, arm, body, and brain is fully governed by the laws of physics.

Again, with gusto: Life does not and cannot contravene physical law. Nothing can.

But the fact that a huge number of your molecules can act in concert, coordinating their overall motion to cause your arm to reach out across a table and your hand to clutch a mug, reflects the wealth of biological information, embodied in atomic and molecular arrangements, directing a profusion of complex molecular processes.

Life is physics orchestrated.

Be strong, India. Your 3-week coronavirus lockdown is a wise decision.

I'm no fan of Prime Minister Modi, because he reminds me of President Trump in some disturbing ways. But his decision to institute a strict lockdown of everybody in India for three weeks is the right thing to do -- even though this is going to create a lot of hardship. 

A New York Times story, "Modi Orders 3-Week Total Lockdown for all 1.3 Billion Indians," describes why the lockdown is needed.

NEW DELHI — India’s prime minister ordered all 1.3 billion people in the country to stay inside their homes for three weeks starting Wednesday — the biggest and most severe action undertaken anywhere to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

“There will be a total ban of coming out of your homes,” the prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced on television Tuesday night, giving Indians less than four hours’ notice before the order took effect at 12:01 a.m.

“Every state, every district, every lane, every village will be under lockdown,” Mr. Modi said.

The breadth and depth of such a challenge is staggering in a country where hundreds of millions of citizens are destitute and countless millions live in packed urban areas with poor sanitation and weak public health care.

Though India’s number of reported coronavirus infections remains relatively low — around 500 — the fear is that, should the virus hit as it has in the United States, Europe or China, the consequences would lead to a disaster far bigger than anywhere else.

...In his televised address, Mr. Modi basically said there was no choice.

“If you can’t handle these 21 days, this country and your family will go back 21 years,” Mr. Modi said. “The only option is social distancing, to remain away from each other. There is no way out to escape from coronavirus besides this.”

...India has some of Asia’s biggest slums, and experts fear what would happen if the coronavirus spreads in a city like Mumbai, home to 20 million people, where space is at a premium and many families squeeze six or even eight to a room.

Understand: I'm not minimizing the difficulties this is going to create in India. The New York Times story talks about this, which includes the fact that Modi only gave four hours notice of the lockdown. How many Indians have three weeks of food and other essential supplies in their homes?

But the alternative is even worse, allowing the coronavirus to spread unchecked. 

Here in Oregon, where I live, yesterday Governor Kate Brown announced a Stay Home, Save Lives executive order that is a much milder form of what is being imposed in India. This is a summary of that order.

We're free to leave our homes. We can visit groceries, pharmacies, restaurants (take-out only), gas stations, and other places. This afternoon I went to a UPS store to mail in a passport renewal, a pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions, and a Starbucks drive-through to cheer myself up with a decaf nonfat vanilla latte.

It felt good to get out and do some normal things, though the passenger seat of my car is filled with a N-95 mask, gloves, cleansing soap wipes, and hand sanitizer. (My wife has asthma, so we're being especially careful to avoid the coronavirus, since it attacks the lungs.)

Given that our daily life has been much different since the coronavirus outbreak in the United States became serious, I have a lot of sympathy for people in India.

The lockdown there is much more strict than what any place in this country has put into place. But again, now is the time to be as strict as possible. The longer governments wait to control an outbreak, the more lives will be lost and the more extensive economic damage will be.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump doesn't realize this, nor does Brazil's right-wing president. Trump wants to ease restrictions within a few weeks even though coronavirus cases in the United States have been rising rapidly, as have deaths. And Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is echoing Trump's idiocy.

Yesterday I wrote about the horrible thing Trump wants to do in "Trump wants people to die so he can be re-elected." 

I can't believe how many times I've said, "Trump can't do anything worse than what he did today." But he does. And today was the latest example of appalling worstness.

During the daily White House coronavirus briefing, where Trump hogs the microphone while other officials cower in the background, doing their best to keep a poker face as Trump rambles on semi-coherently, our Idiot-in-Chief announced that he wants to make saving lives a distant second priority to resuming business as usual by the end of March.

Why? Well, because he doesn't want the country to be in a recession, or even depression, when the 2020 presidential election happens in November. 

Of course, if hundreds of thousands of Americans, or even millions, have died from the coronavirus by November 2020, it is extremely unlikely that Trump is going to win the election. People know that lives are hugely more important than money. Money can be recovered. But death is final.

So as India suffers through the next three weeks, I hope Indians keep in mind that as bad as things will be, they would be much worse if Prime Minister Modi hadn't ordered the lockdown.

Religion is bringing out the coronavirus stupid in people

Not surprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic is causing religious people around the world to turn to superstition, fantasy, and unproven remedies. 

Naturally they'd be much better off if they paid rapt attention to the public health experts who are using science and facts in their advice about how to keep from being infected by the COVID-19 virus.

But religion often brings out the stupid in people. Especially when they're afraid of an unseen menace. Like a virus. Or the devil. The difference being that a virus is real, and the devil isn't, along with God and other imaginary supernatural entities. 

Today the New York Times has an interesting story, "In a Pandemic, Religion Can Be a Balm and a Risk." Below are some passages that focus on the risk of believing untrue things.

As I've frequently said on this blog, I have no problem with religious people believing in crazy stuff -- so long as their craziness doesn't adversely affect others. In other words, keep your weird ideas to yourself.

Unfortunately, dealing with the coronavirus requires that everybody follow recommended public health practices that are based on sound science. Just as with immunizations, if too many people fail to do this, then COVID-19 will keep on infecting more people at an exponential rate. 

So this is a great example of religion being a danger to society. There's no way to pray yourself out of getting the coronavirus. But hand washing and social distancing will help. A lot. 

Here's excerpts from the New York Times story.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Down on earth, the coronavirus outbreak was felling lives, livelihoods and normalcy. A nation-spanning blessing seemed called for. So up went a priest in a small airplane, rumbling overhead at an epidemiologically safe distance from the troubles below, wielding a sacred golden vessel from a cockpit-turned-pulpit.

Before his flight over Lebanon, a soldier at an airport checkpoint asked the Rev. Majdi Allawi if he had a mask and hand sanitizer.

“Jesus is my protection,” said Father Allawi, who belongs to the Maronite Catholic Church. “He is my sanitizer.”

Religion is the solace of first resort for billions of people grappling with a pandemic for which scientists, presidents and the secular world seem, so far, to have few answers. With both sanitizer and leadership in short supply, dread over the coronavirus has driven the globe’s faithful even closer to religion and ritual.

But what is good for the soul may not always be good for the body.

Believers worldwide are running afoul of public health authorities’ warnings that communal gatherings, the keystone of so much religious practice, must be limited to combat the virus’ spread. In some cases, religious fervor has led people toward cures that have no grounding in science; in others, it has drawn them to sacred places or rites that could increase the risk of infection.

In Myanmar, a prominent Buddhist monk announced that a dose of one lime and three palm seeds — no more, no less — would confer immunity. In Iran, a few pilgrims were filmed licking Shiite Muslim shrines to ward off infection. And in Texas, the preacher Kenneth Copeland braided televangelism with telemedicine, broadcasting himself, one trembling hand outstretched, as he claimed he could cure believers through their screens.

...People may have already unknowingly spread the virus in the name of piety.

Despite New York’s recent bans on large gatherings, several large weddings went ahead in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jewish communities, which have reported a spike in confirmed cases in recent days.

Iran is home both to one of the world’s worst outbreaks and to dozens of major Shiite Muslim shrines, which have remained open to crowds for weeks even as the coronavirus left the country shellshocked.

...India has so far refused to call off an annual festival that starts Wednesday in honor of the god Ram, also known as Rama. In normal times, it draws as many as a million people to Ayodha, which some believe to be the birthplace of Ram, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

The state has asked devotees to celebrate at home this year. Organizers, however, are carrying on.

“People are getting the opportunity to have glimpses of Lord Rama,” said Vinod Bansal, a national spokesman for the group, Vishva Hindu Parishad. “It’s not appropriate to deprive them of this opportunity.”

...Amid the coronavirus anxiety, it was perhaps inevitable that some would interpret the pandemic as a divine missive. What it said was less clear.

Some Egyptian Muslims expressed certainty on social media that God was smiting non-Muslim countries by giving them the virus, apparently unaware that Egypt has registered nearly 200 cases and may have many more uncounted. Some Islamists, especially supporters of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, cast the outbreak as punishment for the Egyptian public’s support of the military takeover that brought the country’s authoritarian leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to power in 2013.

Some sought earthly remedies inspired by higher powers.

Video emerged last week of Hindu activists in India drinking cow urine to stave off the coronavirus. At the Lebanese government hospital where infected patients are being treated, a woman recently arrived carrying a mixture of holy water and dirt dug from the mausoleum of Saint Charbel, who is revered among Lebanese Christians. Some Christians were said to be drinking similar solutions as a precaution.

How are you coping with the coronavirus outbreak?

Since this blog attracts people from many countries, I'm curious to learn how you are coping with the coronavirus, or COVID-19, outbreak. 

Leave a comment on this post, if you like.

It'd be good to know both how people in your part of the world are handling the disruption in everyday life that, likely, has been imposed by government authorities, and also how you yourself have been affected. 

What disturbs you the most about what's going on? What bright spots can you find in this otherwise dark and distressing situation?

All I ask is that you keep religion out of your comment. This is a time when everybody should be coming together to fight a common enemy, the COVID-19 virus. Religion and politics shouldn't play a role in this. 

Our common humanity, and susceptibility to getting sick or even dying from the virus, is what binds us together. The coronavirus doesn't care if you are a Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or whatever. Nor should the medical professionals we're counting on to guide us through the COVID-19 outbreak.

Here in Oregon, where I live, there are 88 reported cases and one death out of a population of about 4.2 million. But testing for the virus has been very limited, so the actually number of cases must be far greater.

A few days ago Governor Brown issued an order to close bars and restaurants, including coffee houses. Only take-out food can be ordered from restaurants. This afternoon I got a latte from a drive-up window of the French Press coffee house in south Salem. I left a generous tip and told the barista, "You deserve this. I know this is a tough time for you and other employees."

After that, my wife and I took Mooka, our dog, to the Minto Brown dog park. The sun was out. Temperature was in the 60s. Lots of people were at the park, since schools are closed until the end of April and many businesses have either cut back on employees or closed temporarily (hopefully not permanently).

While we were watching dogs running around playing with each other, and walking around with other people (keeping six feet apart, naturally), it was easy to forget that a deadly disease is wreaking havoc on the world. It also was nice to get away from the news for a while and simply experience a pleasant outing in great weather.

My Tai Chi classes have been cancelled until further notice. My wife and I no longer go to our athletic club, which I'm unsure is even open. The monthly Salon discussion group that we're a part of isn't going to meet in person, though we might try conversing through video conferencing.

Grocery stores shelves are mostly bare of toilet paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer, and disinfecting cleaning supplies. I couldn't find bread when I went shopping on Monday. But on Tuesday our natural food store had some. Joy! I felt like someone in World War II must have when food in short supply was available.

I've been writing about the coronavirus on my other two blogs. Here's links.

My thoughts about the coronavirus outbreak
I'm not wearing gloves because of cold, but of old (COVID-19)
Salem's city officials need to WAKE UP about the COVID-19 outbreak
My daughter clues me in to why small businesses need help fast
Progressive policies will win the war against COVID-19

Don't spread false information about coronavirus

Science can be trusted. Though it isn't 100% perfect, science is way better than other ways of knowing -- especially when it comes to the coronavirus, COVID-19. 

I just discovered that a frequent commenter on this blog left several comments on my HinesSight blog that referenced false information from mythical "Stanford board" advice about dealing with the coronavirus. 

That information has been deleted by me. 

Please, COVID-19 is tough enough to fight without people spreading false information about it. Here's the truth.

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

CNN) — Contrary to what some may think, not everything on social media is rooted in fact.

Case in point: A recent viral coronavirus "simple self-check test," which medical experts say is completely inaccurate.

Written on what appears to be the iPhone notes app, the three-part post falsely claims that people can find out whether they have coronavirus simply by holding their breath for more than 10 seconds. If they can hold their breath without coughing, the test claims they don't have the virus.

The post, which began circulating Twitter, Facebook, and emails last week, was falsely credited to a member of the "Stanford Hospital board." Stanford Health Care spokeswoman Lisa Kim told CNN the "dangerous" post is not affiliated with Stanford Medicine and "contains inaccurate information."

Misinformation about COVID-19 symptoms and treatment falsely attributed to Stanford is circulating on social media and in email forwards. It is not from Stanford. Official information from Stanford is available at http://healthalerts.stanford.edu .

To debunk all the false information included in the post, CNN spoke to Dr. Robert Legare Atmar, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine.

Myth: Drinking water will protect you from the coronavirus

CLAIM: "If you don't drink enough water more regularly, the virus can enter your windpipe and into lungs."

Whoever penned the post also wrote that people should drink water "every 15 minutes at least" to wash the virus down through the throat and into the stomach, where the acid will supposedly kill the virus.

REALITY: Atmar said there is no evidence from any other respiratory viruses that proves this approach works.

"Even if it worked at all, which it doesn't, people still breathe in from their nose, not just their mouths," Atmar told CNN. "This would still only protect the mouth and not the nose."

Myth: Gurgling water and salt will prevent the coronavirus

CLAIM: "A simple solution of salt in warm water will suffice."

Along with gurgling a water and salt solution, the post also suggested drinking warm water can kill the virus.

REALITY: Based on data from other respiratory viruses, saltwater "would not be expected to work," Atmar said.

By recommending people to drink warm water, the post implies the temperature of the water inactivates the virus, which Atmar said is entirely incorrect.

Myth: If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you're OK

CLAIM: "Take a deep breath and hold your breath for more than 10 seconds. If you complete it successfully without coughing, without discomfort, stiffness or tightness, it proves there is no fibrosis in the lungs, basically indicates no infection."

REALITY: Atmar said this is simply "not correct."

"When someone has an acute viral infection it can be difficult to take a deep breath and not cough because the airways are irritated. That's all it means. It doesn't say anything about fibrosis, even though people with fibrosis might struggle doing it. Being able to hold your breath for 10 seconds also doesn't mean someone doesn't have coronavirus."

Myth: If you have a runny nose, it's just a cold

CLAIM: "If you have a runny nose and sputum, you have a common cold. Coronavirus pneumonia is a dry cough with no runny nose."

REALITY: This isn't completely true, Atmar said. A runny nose can be a symptom of the flu, allergies and other illnesses.

And while many patients of the coronavirus do have a dry cough, those with coronavirus pneumonia also have had or could have a productive, or "wet," cough which produces phlegm (sputum), according to Atmar.

Myth: If you have the coronavirus, you'll get pneumonia

CLAIM: "The virus then blends into a nasal fluid that enters the trachea and then the lungs, causing pneumonia." The post also said the virus first infects the throat, which would give patients a sore throat for three to four days before blending into a nasal fluid.

REALITY: This is also not entirely accurate.

The time sequence for coronavirus symptoms vary from patient to patient, and not all patients will have a sore throat, Atmar said. Not everyone with a sore throat has coronavirus, either, and not all coronavirus patients will develop pneumonia.

Myth: Coronavirus patients will experience a drowning sensation

CLAIM: "The nasal congestion is not like the normal kind. You feel like you're drowning.

REALITY: This isn't true.

"That does not sound like any other respiratory virus people are infected with and many patients with coronavirus have not had nasal infection at all," Atmar told CNN.

Myth: By the time a person with coronavirus is hospitalized, their lungs will have experienced fibrosis

CLAIM: "By the time they have fever and/or cough and go to the hospital, the lung is usually 50% fibrosis and it's too late."

Fibrosis is the irreversible scarring of the lung which can lead to respiratory failure.

REALITY: This is totally incorrect.

"This information is extremely alarmist," Atmar said. "Fibrosis only develops in the minority of patients and 80 percent of coronavirus patients experience only the mild symptoms of the disease, so this is incorrect."

The incubation period for coronavirus, Atmar said, is two to 14 days. Symptoms usually begin with five to six days of exposure, with the first week including a cough, sore throat, fever, and muscle aches. Only the minority of patients will experience the second week of severe respiratory symptoms and may be at risk of fibrosis.

While the coronavirus is an issue everyone in the world should be taking seriously, the spread of false information can be both dangerous and deadly.

If you aren't sure if something you are reading about the coronavirus is correct, the best thing to do to is to check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or your local health department -- not social media.

Excellent comments about RSSB guru's failure to be honest

Here's three comments by "j" on the post I wrote yesterday, RSSB guru wants to keep his tax returns secret. 

They're excellent. Reasonable. Factual. Well-written.

I heartily agree that Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, isn't living up to the ethical standard of even an average person, much less a religious leader who supposedly is God in Human Form.

Enjoy. I've corrected a few typos and added some paragraph breaks to make the comments easier to read.

Not "the appropriate stage" to reveal his tax returns? How many more of Gurinder's followers need to go to prison while he remains mum on using them for shady financial deals? Anyway, I thought Gurinder has retired from business life long ago and, as he told us, was just "living off the money his family gave him."

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

What happened to RSSB's much-trumpeted heritage of being the most ethical religion on the planet? For decades RSSB has portrayed itself as the religion known for "honest living."

Almost every RSSB book points out that the RSSB guru isn't like all the other gurus and religious leaders. He doesn't live off his followers. He doesn't receive gifts. He's in all ways a solid, peerlessly honest, straight dealing, law-abiding citizen.

Speaking of honesty, let's all examine our motives for taking initiation. How many of us took RSSB initiation in part because we were impressed by the claims it made for the guru's integrity? I'm not an RSSB initiate myself, but I have to admit that the rhetoric about the guru's impeccable honesty did have a significant effect on my opinion of him and this religion.

RSSB advertised itself as the only ethical religion left on the planet. I don't think that's an exaggeration. Charan's talks and RSSB books had nothing good to say about any other religions or even other sant mat gurus, and everything good to say about the other gurus in his line, and by extension, himself.

And the biggest claim that the RSSB gurus make, aside from being God? That they "live off their own earnings." That may have been true in the days of Sawan and Jagat Singh, but since they departed this world 70 years ago, the odds that the RSSB guru is self-supporting seem thinner than a 2 cent chapati.

Now we come to this financial scandal. I've given Gurinder the benefit of the doubt and have waited a long time for him to do or say something that suggests he's above suspicion of chicanery. But every time Gurinder is called upon to help straighten this matter out...he comes up with a flimsy excuse.

When he's called upon by the Sangat to say something to clarify matters, he is said to make smart remarks. Moreover, Gurinder refuses to go to court because he says his diabetes prevents him from leaving home. Gurinder refuses to let the court see his tax records, even though he stated that the only income he has is money his family gives him.

Gurinder is being sued for borrowing over 1M from a non-satsangi and not paying it back. Three of Gurinder's followers are in prison right now for a scheme that involved moving money through accounts connected to Dhillion family members -- who btw were paid a salary for taking part in money laundering, but are apparently getting off scot-free.

One of those followers is adamant that Gurinder was involved in ordering these movements of funds. OK, let's take all that together: Is it really unreasonable to suggest that Gurinder is less than honest?

Some of us have been saying from the outset that the truth behind this scandal, and Gurinder's guilt or innocence, will be discerned by the courts. I said that and still believe it.

But when I said it, I kind of expected for Gurinder to at least cooperate with the courts. I didn't expect him to embark on a strategy of stonewalling India's legal system with BS excuses, and that's exactly what the present Guru of Beas is doing.

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

"So is the concern for his health... unless you've now chosen to ascribe perfect health and 'superpowers' to him." From what I understand from the official RSSB website, Gurinder is still actively participating in giving public satsangs not only in Beas, but in Mumbai, Raipur, Indore, etc.

https://www.rssb.org/satsang_schedules.html

But according to Gurinder's lawyer, the Guru is far too frail to attend court and explain his part in a financial scandal. After all, the lawyer says, diabetics need their special meals. Does a diabetic's need for special meals mean they can't show up for court? That's what Gurinder is claiming through his lawyer.

Is that really true? I know of a diabetic who had his leg cut off and still got around town with riding the bus and a wheelchair. Perhaps he was a perfect master.

This is a financial scandal where we know considerable sums of money went into accounts controlled by the guru's family members and accounts associated with the guru himself. Yet the guru is refusing to step up in the most basic of ways to clear things up.

No, I'm sure not suggesting that Gurinder is Perfect. Far from it. I'm suggesting he's far from perfect. That is, far from being as honest as the average person.

As for Gurinder's personal finances and his tax statements, RSSB says right there on its website that Gurinder is retired and living off the money his family gives him. According to people who attend Gurinder events, Gurinder also says, boasts really, that he is innocent of any financial skullduggery because he only gets money his family gives him.

In other words, Gurinder has chosen to make his financial status public. He's claimed that his financial affairs are an open book. He's declared he's not a businessman and is simply living off the charity given him by his apparently wealthy family.

But now that Gurinder is called to prove that precious contention, he balks before the court with another empty excuse. All while the people he'd "advised" molder in prison. This makes twice that Gurinder has refused to cooperate with India's legal system.

On both occasions, his justifications for non-cooperation are transparently bogus. I think it's indefensible.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

RSSB guru wants to keep his tax returns secret

Here's the latest development in the financial fraud saga involving the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder) and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Today a story in India's The Economic Times says that Dhillon has told the Delhi High Court that he wants to be exempted from producing his personal income tax returns.

Since Malvinder Singh has said that the RSSB guru and his family ended up with most, or all, of the money illegally siphoned from Religare, a public corporation, obviously it is important for investigators to see the Dhillon tax returns.

If Dhillon truly is innocent, as he claims, why doesn't he make his tax returns available to the High Court? His secrecy points to guilt, not innocence.

Or maybe the RSSB guru considers that he is God in Human Form and doesn't have to comply with worldly laws.

Gosh, I wonder where he could have gotten that idea. Oh, yes, that is a fundamental part of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings. So that's how Dhillon would have come to think he is godly.

RSSB chief seeks not to put ITR on record

The chief of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has sought exception from filing income tax returns (ITR), telling the Delhi High Court that it contained 'personal information' and that this was not an 'appropriate stage' to produce such documents.

Teena Thacker

New Delhi: The chief of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has sought exception from filing income tax returns (ITR), telling the Delhi High Court that it contained 'personal information' and that this was not an 'appropriate stage' to produce such documents.

The court had earlier asked Dhillon and his family members to file ITRs, after he denied of having any liability towards RHC Holdings, a company promoted by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh. The Singh brothers, who had previously controlled Religare Enterprises and Ranbaxy LaboratoriesNSE 5.63 %, are facing probes by various agencies for alleged financial irregularities.

They were also ordered to pay Rs 3,500 crore to Daiichi Sankyo under an arbitration award over the sale of Ranbaxy to the Japanese company. In an affidavit filed before the court, Dhillon said being individuals, his family members and he did not “maintain balance sheets” and filing ITR would cause “severe prejudice” to them. Dhillon had earlier admitted of his financial dealings with the Singh brothers by annexing copies of bank statements.

UPDATE: Someone just sent me a photo the print version of the story. It has some content that wasn't in the online story.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Zen circle reminds me that perfection is a fantasy

Here's my new piece of art, courtesy of Amazon and a 8X10 frame that I put the print in. It doesn't really have an up or down. I just like it oriented this way, though I might change my mind. 

(I don't keep it on a rug. That was for a photography purpose. Normally it sits next to a bathroom sink where I can peruse it when I wash my hands, which is frequently, given the coronavirus scare the world is going through.)

I got the print, which admittedly isn't traditional, given its color, after reading a paragraph in Lesley Hazleton's book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto. I like how it reminds me that perfection is an abstract idea, not anything that actually exists

Here's the passage, which was in her "Imperfect Soul" chapter.

The great Zen Buddhist masters knew what those who seek perfection do not: it leaves us cold. A classic Zen exercise is the ensō, the circle hand-drawn in a single fluid brushstroke. It is close to perfect, but never there.

If perfection is what you want, you can produce it anytime by using a compass or computer, but the ensō defies such mechanistic precision; indeed, it is often incomplete, left slightly open as though in invitation to everything beyond it.

And each one is different, never the same circle twice. You can see the hairs of the brush in the drag of the ink on the paper; trace the fluidity of the moment when the stillness of meditation was released in one rapid stroke; sense the calm grace of the artist.

The beauty of the Zen circle lies precisely (or more precisely, imprecisely) in its imperfection. That is what speaks to us and draws us in.

A perfect circle is uninteresting, a closed system containing nothing, while an imperfect one vibrates with warmth. It invites us into the moment of its creation, into that single deep exhalation as the hand arced through the air, the brush over the paper. 

It is open, human, fallible -- an expression, that is, of soul.

Perfection is an imaginary ideal, a lifeless dead end

This morning I finished the book I've been blogging about recently, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, by Lesley Hazleton. It's a wonderfully thoughtful and well-written description of what it means to be an open-minded agnostic (or atheist), rather than a closed-minded religious believer.

Below are some passages that I liked in the concluding chapter, "Imperfect Soul." 

Hazleton starts out by debunking the notion of perfection. There's no such thing. Perfection, she says, is an idea, not a fact. This rings true for me, based on my 35 years of experience with an Indian religious organization whose teachings wrongly proclaim that there is such a thing as a "perfect living master."

Actually, there's no evidence that the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization is led by a guru, or master, who is perfect. Far from it. RSSB gurus make mistakes. Their knowledge is incomplete. They are as clueless as anyone else about what will happen in the future.

In other words, the gurus are flawed human beings, as are we all. Yet their disciples cling to the idea of perfection as a concept with no grounding in reality. Hazleton writes:

Perfection may be an ideal, but whether it's a desirable one is another question. Ideals are by definition products of the imagination rather than of reality; they exist, that is, as ideas, not as facts.

The perfect truths of theology, claimed as "absolute truths," are thus inherently self-contradictory, because as William James noted, truth is always an evolving idea.

"It is temporary and constructed from our own experience..." he wrote. "The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine all our temporary truths will some day converge." It is, in short, imaginary.

Then Hazleton explores the unappealing rigidity of perfection. The rigidity arises because the imaginary ideal of perfection doesn't tolerate anything other than 100% perfectness. Again, not in reality, but in the religious theology. That produces a dead-end, since there is no way forward once someone or something is viewed as perfect.

There's an icy starkness to perfection, a kind of echoing emptiness. Perfection, that is, is soulless. And lifeless. It's real meaning is right there in its origin: the Latin perficere, to finish or to conclude. A perfect life would thus be one that is completed, and there is only one way that can happen.

Perfection is literally a dead end. And to be alive is necessarily to be incomplete and thus imperfect, each person in his or her own particular way.

This is why the idea of perfectibility seems so hollow to me. The definiteness, the absolutism, the dead-endness of it -- all these leave no room for life.

The perfect tomato in the store turns out to be tasteless, genetically engineered fo shelf appeal, not for the palette. A flawless face seems blankly unapproachable, leaving me unable to do anything but puzzle at its unnatural symmetry. Complete agreement with whatever I might say leaves me gasping for intellectual air, longing for something more than a mirror of my own thoughts.

In the latter part of the chapter, Hazleton speaks about soul. It's a difficult word to define, since people use "soul" in so many different ways. The one thing we know soul is not, of course, is a supernatural something-or-other separate and distinct from the body, since there's no demonstrable evidence of this.

Perhaps you have to be slightly crazy to even try to talk about soul in secular terms. The more you try -- the more I try, in any case -- the greater the risk of falling into cliche, into the trite generalizations and warm fuzziness too often mistaken for spiritual insight.

...A strong whiff of sanctimony hovers over the word, burdened as it has been with such modifiers as blessed and immortal. That tyranny of the definite article -- the soul -- reasserts itself with impeccable conviction, and conventional theology again becomes more hindrance than help.

...Yet I persist, because I sense -- and sense is the only word I can use here -- that it's important to reclaim soul from those who still conceive of it as a thing with an immortal life of its own, independent of the body. 

However vague we may be about it, I think most of us recognize soul not as a thing, but as a dimension of being that defies the narrow lens of dogma, going far beyond traditional religious ideas such as those I grew up with.

Here Hazleton does her best to point toward what soul means to her agnostic self. It's a quality of being. It's an emphatic openness to reality, the opposite of walling ourselves behind dogmas of one variety or another. This takes courage, since it is easier to embrace  some form of religious absolutism where no doubts or questions are tolerated. 

Soul as a matter of courage? If so, it's not the obvious courage of a lauded hero, but the quieter, everyday kind of courage it takes to be open to the world. 

It's not that some people have no soul, but that the quality of soul in them seems to have shriveled, turned in on itself as though in retreat. They have taken a defensive position, and built a wall around themselves.

...You wall yourself off when you expect the worst. Better the devil you know, you tell yourself, than the unpredictability of the unknown; better to be ruled by the past than by hope for a different future. 

You try to persuade yourself you are strong because you have made yourself impregnable, but you live nonetheless in a state of fear. Your view is blocked. You have closed the gates and walled yourself off from the world -- even, at the extreme, against the world.

And if the gates remain open? 

Could having soul be a matter of being brave enough to be vulnerable -- to acknowledge the risks of being vulnerable, that is, and to willingly embrace them nonetheless? Because risks they are. Those I think of as brave souls know this.

In a way, they're the personification of soul music: they often bear the scars of bitter experience, and yet are not ruled by fear or resentment. Not that they are saints; they are as deeply flawed as you or I, but they accept their own flaws, and thus those of others.

And if they seem to have gained a certain ease with the world, it is a hard-earned one. It's as though they have persevered and come out the other end of hardship worn and weathered, but with a deeper appreciation of what it is to be alive.

They welcome both the unknown and the unknowable, explore without preconceptions, and place their faith in trust, preferring the chance of being proved wrong to the illusory certainty of always being right.

Open and closed: perhaps these are the terms in which we need to think. Not soulful or soulless, nor brave souls or timid ones, but open-souled and closed-souled. Where the latter contracts and retreats from others, the former expands, reaches out, is open to the world instead of guarded against it.

Few people are entirely one way or the other, of course. Most of us can open up on occasion, yet are still tempted to close ourselves off when under stress. 

We struggle with trust, and uncertainty, and doubt, and find ourselves searching for the security of conviction even as we recognize its falseness. We're brave at times, fearful at others; we're contradictory, and paradoxical, and fallible. Which is to say, we're human.

But at our best, we respond to soul with soul, as happened with someone whose real name I don't even know posted a comment on an earlier attempt of mine to puzzle out what we mean when we say that someone has soul.

"I'm not sure I understand," she wrote (a gentle way of saying that I hadn't been very clear), "but I think I recognize it. It's what makes my heart swell -- what makes me glad to be alive." And then: "Is this it?"

We make our own meaning in an indifferent universe

Here's a great question that Lesley Hazleton asks at the start of the Making Meaning chapter in her book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto.

What do you do when someone tells you about a treasured experience that you know is in all probability untrue? True to that person that is, but not objectively true.

Since people share all kinds of religious and mystical experiences in comments on my blog posts, I'm confronted with this question often. Usually I have the same answer Hazleton chose when a woman told her about orca whales lining up and singing to her as she stood on a low cliff overlooking the ocean.

I chose discretion over honesty because I had no desire to hurt this person by questioning what was clearly so meaningful to her. There can be great beauty in the enterprise of making meaning, that very human desire to find significance in the world. But it seems to me essential that we be aware that this is what we are doing, and that we retain a certain sense of bemusement, even amusement, at our proclivity to translate the world into human terms. Aware, that is, of our own subjectivity.

Life is difficult.

Whatever helps us get through the day, the week, the month, the year, the lifetime -- that's to be embraced, even if it is based on a fantasy. I have no problems with fantasy, nor does Hazleton. But I heartily agree with her that it's important to recognize that the meanings we ascribe to the world are our meanings, not an objective meaning inherent in the universe.

Here's some additional passages from the Making Meaning chapter about how the absence of objective meaning creates a wonderful space for us to fashion our own subjective meaning.

The absence of an "ultimate" meaning of life -- a grand, over-arching explanation of everything -- does not render life empty of relevance. On the contrary, it makes it all the more relevant. 

It means we can no longer use divine intent as an excuse, in the same way fatalists talk of fate. It places responsibility directly on us -- responsibility for how we act, for what we do, for our relations with others, with our society, with our planet. 

It is we who determine meaning by what we do. And part of that meaning is the awareness that we are not and cannot always be in control, that we are indeed subject to chance, to serendipity, to the unforeseen, the unanticipated, the fortuitous. 

I see no reason why meaning and significance should be any less for knowing how vast the universe is, and how small I am in it. Far from being appalled by this, I am excited by it. It allows for life as an adventure, and for the unexpected and under-appreciated value of misadventure -- for wrong turns and dead ends, chance discoveries and unintended turns.

It makes life a matter of open-ended exploration instead of a predetermined slog along a straight line from birth to death.

Instead of what's the meaning of life, then, I'd rather ask what makes my life meaningful. Instead of mission, I'm happy to wake up in anticipation of a new day, with work I want to return to, people I want to walk and talk with. Happy, that is, to wake up with desire, with appetite, and with the bemused acceptance of being human, fallible, and imperfectly rational.

I rejoice in there being no single meaning -- in there being instead a multitude of meanings, an infinite number of ways in which we exercise our subjectivity and imagination, rendering meaningful what is objectively meaningless. Meaning is ours to make, and to choose.

The search for meaning, then, is itself a choice. It offers the hope of a consoling narrative that will stave off the awareness of an indifferent universe. 

It's the go-to defense against the fear of insignificance, against the realization that there's nothing personal in nature -- that it's not about me, or you, or us -- and that whatever narrative we detect in it is entirely of our own making. We make ourselves significant. We persuade ourselves that whales sing to us. Even, as happened to me, that a snow-covered mountain speaks to us.

...I may like to think that I have no illusions about the terms of my existence on this planet, but that itself is merely an illusion: my own pathetic fallacy. Romanticism lingers, a sop to my vanity, to my sense of the centrality of my own existence.

However clearly I think I accept the case with which I could, at any moment, cease to exist, some part of me stubbornly refuses to accept my own insignificance, and sees personal meaning in impersonal forces. I shamelessly insist, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, on my own significance.

Embrace uncertainty, doubt, and open-minded faith

I'm an ardent worshipper of Amazon, because it brings me so much inspiration. My current object of literary worship is a compelling little (204 pages) book by Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto.

Now, I don't see much difference between atheism and agnosticism, but Hazleton does, so I'm good with that. I'd still argue that at times she views atheism as excessively certain God doesn't exist, because every atheist I know (including myself) would be pleased to acknowledge the existence of God if there was good reason to do so. 

Which, there isn't.

But this is a minor quibble with the book. So far I've read three of the eight chapters and I'm liking it a lot. Hazleton is an excellent writer. And I agree with almost everything she says about the need to embrace mystery and the unknown, not a rigid fundamentalism marked by rigid conviction that the Truth about the cosmos already is known.

Here's some passages from the "In Doubt We Trust" chapter I read this morning. In the passage below Hazleton addresses why people are so fond of belief and so distrustful of uncertainty.

Sociobiologists have argued that humans have an innate bias toward belief as a matter of physical survival. A prehistoric hunter would have been wiser to take a rustling in the forest as ominous than to blithely trust it was not. Or, in more familiar terms, better safe than sorry. If this theory means that I would not have lasted long in a prehistoric forest, I can live with that.

But it may also go some way toward explaining why so many people long for certainty: why they experience uncertainty as an unpleasant state of being, as though a saber-toothed tiger were waiting to pounce, and why, despite the occasional criticism of someone as credulous and thus liable to believe anything at all, the idea that belief is good seems built into the way we think.

Someone may be praised as being true to his beliefs, for instance, as though the act of belief were a value in itself, a moral stance, no matter the content of the belief in question. In matters of religion, belief can even develop into something of a full-time occupation -- a profession, in both senses of the word.

You don't simply believe; you become a believer. You are defined by living in the state of belief, both in the eyes of others and in your own.

Belief can then develop into an impassioned state of being where the act of believing is more important than its content, which is why the most ardent fundamentalists can turn into the most vehement atheists, flaming red socialists into deep-blue conservatives, hedonists into ascetics (and all, by the same token, potentially vice versa).

Conviction is deadening, in Hazleton's view. No one should be certain of their convictions, because there's a reason "conviction" and "convict" are so similar. Rigid convictions keep us confined in a mental jail of fundamentalist self-righteousness.

The more firmly I hold a belief (and note that word hold, that sense of possession, of its being mine), the more liable it is to fossilize into conviction, as tightly constricted as that army cot, or as a convict in his cell. And when my belief is so adamantly held that it becomes central to my identity, your disbelief then undermines not only the assumed truth of what I believe, but me. 

This is no mere schoolyard "I am right and you are wrong."

Instead, it is "I am right and you are wrong, and your wrongness is a threat to my identity." Or even to my existence. As Samuel Johnson put it in rather more elegant terms: "Every man who attacks my belief diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy." 

To be secure in one's convictions is thus to be absurdly oxymoronic, since conviction is really a state of insecurity. If you know something for a fact, you have no need to believe in it or to be convinced of it. You need belief only when you are not sure. Belief is thus the product not of knowledge, but of uncertainty. It contains within itself the possibility of disbelief.

If I gird myself in the psychic armor of righteousness, it is precisely because on some level, conscious or not, I am aware of my vulnerability. Why else would I need any kind of armor?

As with the stiff gait of an elderly arthritic person, the tenacious rigidity of conviction indicates not strength, but frailty. Or perhaps it is an evasion of a deeper, more complex, and far more challenging response to uncertainty, which is to embrace it. 

For Hazleton (as for Alan Watts), faith is an open-minded pursuit of understanding and knowledge that has no guarantee of success. Thus faith is founded on doubt, on unknowing, because without doubt there is no fuel to power the engine of faith.

Those I know of deepest faith are not convinced. "Perfect faith" is a cruel and absurd oxymoron so far as they are concerned. Their minds are not made up, and their faith offers anything but smug self-satisfaction. Indeed they have faith not only despite their doubts, but precisely because of them.

They have made a commitment to faith, not in the assurance that they are right and that they have found or possess the truth -- the consumerist approach to religion -- but in the acknowledgment of how much cannot be known, and how presumptuous it is to imagine that everything can be.

They do not claim to have all the answers, or worse, the answer. Instead, they have a deep sense of unknowability, of the ineffable mystery of existence referred to in metaphysical shorthand as God.

Here Hazleton says that doubt is what makes religion, or any other aspect of life, human. Indeed, people who lack doubt generally are insufferable: self-righteous, full of themselves, lacking in humility. The #1 criterion of spirituality is the willingness to honestly say, both to oneself and others, "I could be wrong."

As Graham Greene indicated in his novels of those struggling with faith, doubt is the heart of the matter. It is what keeps religion human, because when doubt is banished, faith is rendered moot. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith but absolute, heartless conviction, a blind and blinding refuge from both thought and humanity.

You are certain that you possess "the Truth" -- inevitably offered with that that uppercase T -- and this certainty easily devolves into dogmatism and righteousness: a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right. You occupy this assumed truth, stake it out as your exclusive territory, and see all who live beyond its borders as a threat.

Then you add insult to injury by loudly insisting that in this, you and you alone are, as fundamentalists say, "the faithful."

...But faith -- and the vulnerability and humility that come with it -- is the most important thing lacking in fundamentalists of all religious stripes. Indeed, their absolutism is the opposite of faith, and this makes them the real infidels. By insisting on absolute belief, they have found the perfect antidote to thought, and the ideal refuge from the hard demands of faith.

They don't have to struggle with it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel, or like Jesus in his forty days and nights in the wilderness, or like Muhammad -- not only that night on the mountain but throughout his years as a prophet, with the Quran constantly urging him not to despair, and condemning those who most loudly proclaim that they know everything there is to know, and that they and they alone are right.

Terrified of what existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard famously called "the leap of faith," fundamentalists cling to conviction. 

Physicist Brian Greene talks about the cold, cruel, wondrous universe

Here's an excerpt from a story in the most recent issue of TIME magazine about physicist Brian Greene and his new book, Until the End of Time. (I've ordered it, naturally.)

I get hugely more inspiration from science books like this one, because they're founded in reality, not fantasy, as religious writings are. I've been there and done that. Now, like Greene, I embrace the cold, cruel, wondrous universe.

There's a lot of satisfaction in such neat solutions to head-cracking problems. But there is an equivalent neatness to the ostensibly dispiriting conclusions Greene reaches in his books and in his research: that unhappy business of a cold universe, an insentient universe, of the individual as just a quantum contraption, behaving as a product not of choice but of probabilities and randomness.

It's where the free-will thing comes in: the universe is guided by quantum probabilities, and your "choices" are simply a part of that, the way a local breeze is part of the global weather system.

"My feeling is that the reductionist, materialist, physicalist approach to the world is the right one," Greene says. "There isn't anything else; these grand mysteries will evaporate over time."

But despite such empirical bravado, Greene says more too -- and whether he likes it or not, it's not reductionist, and if it's written in a book like Until the End of Time, it could be written in the Vedas as well.

"Rather than feeling, 'Damn, there's no universal morality,' 'Damn, there's no universal consciousness,'" he says, "how wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience and it's nothing more than stuff? That stuff can produce Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that stuff can produce the Mona Lisa, that stuff can produce Romeo and Juliet? Holy smokes, that's wondrous."

The rational physicist with the deeply spiritual brother surely meant the holy as just a figure of speech -- but if so, he picked an apt one.

John Oliver shows how bad India's Narendra Modi is

I'm not a fan of political leaders who base their policies on religious fundamentalism. Since the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, is doing just that, I enjoyed John Oliver's humorous takedown of Modi on last weekend's "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver." 

Here it is, for your own enjoyment.

 

Open Thread 30 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

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

This hasn't been happening recently, as some commenters have been using blog posts as a "chat room," basically, so from now on I'm going to vow to do better at not approving comments submitted on a regular blog post if the comment doesn't deal with the subject of the post. 

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. 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.

Religious people, why do you believe in God?

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

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

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

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

Still waiting...

Religious belief is an untrue concept

So why do so many people, billions really, believe untruths about God, heaven, spirit, soul, angels, devils, and other unseen entities of which there is zero proof of their existence?

Because of the Cognitive Revolution, according to Yuval Noah Harari, a historian who has written three compelling books, Sapiens, Homo Deus, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (I've read all of them).

The February 17/24 issue of The New Yorker has a lengthy story by Ian Parker about Harari. Here's an excerpt from "The Really Big Picture." 

I think Harari is absolutely correct about religious belief being an example of how the evolved brains of humans enabled us to begin communicating untruths, which helped people to cooperate by binding them together in a shared fantasy.

in Chapter 2 of "Sapiens," Harari describes how, about seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens began to develop nuanced language, and thereby began to dominate other Homo species, and the world. 

Harari's discussion reflects standard scholarly arguments, but he adds this gloss: during what he calls the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens became uniquely able to communicate untruths.

"As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled," he writes, referring to myths and gods.

"Many animals and human species could previously say 'Careful! A lion!' Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, 'The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.'"

This mental leap enabled cooperation among strangers: "Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins."

Here's another passage from The New Yorker story that I liked. Harari is a big believer in meditation of the Buddhist Vipassana variety. He frequently goes on retreats that last from 10 days to as much as a month.

Harari is correct: there's no such thing as an eternal essence. Belief in such a thing is another example of a mental concept that religious believers embrace because it makes them feel good. But truth is something different from feeling good.

"21 Lessons" includes extended commentary on the life of the Buddha, who "taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying." 

Harari continues, "You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind, but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfied you... 'What should I do' ask people, and the Buddha advises, 'Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.'"

Evolution shows how we are a small twig on the tree of life

Evolution is a scientific fact. Sure, all facts are subject to being proven wrong. But the chance of that happening to evolution is very slim, because the evidence for evolution is so strong.

Since I love to learn about true things, this is why my pre-meditation reading each morning often consists of a science book. I see no reason to pick up a religious book any more, because my eyes have been opened to the falsity of believing in God or other supernatural entities.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Joseph LeDoux's book, "The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains." 

I'm a habitual highlighter of non-fiction books. I supplement my highlighting with notes in the back blank pages found in most books, where I write down the page numbers of subjects I found most interesting, along with a highly personal system of underlining, circles, question marks, arrows, and other notations that remind me of portions of the book that I considered significant.

Here's some passages from the 432 pages in LeDoux's meaty/tofuy book that garnered significant markings. Before each one I'll briefly explain why I liked them.

I heartily agree with LeDoux that conscious awareness is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to goings-on within the human brain, and likely every other kind of brain. We simply have no clue about what most of our 100 billion neurons with their trillions of connections are up to. He writes:

Behavior did not arise to serve the subjective mind. It came about and persists to enhance fitness -- to keep organisms alive and well so that reproduction can occur. 

This perspective puts the behavior of humans and bacteria, and all organisms in between, on a level playing field, one in which consciousness, in the sense that humans mean by the term in everyday life, has a peripheral role in most of the history of life.

If we commit to the very reasonable assumption that over the long course of evolution behavior has mostly been generated by nonconscious systems, and that behavior, even in humans, should be assumed to be nonconsciously controlled unless proven otherwise, the science of behavior would advance much more smoothly.

And, by the same token, so would the science of consciousness. This is the perspective I will take as I guide you on our ascent of the tree of life in the remainder of this book.

One of the most ridiculous things about religions is that they usually consider humans to have been created by God in God's image. This is clearly not true, given the fact of evolution. Like every species, Homo sapiens is different from other forms of life, but not better or worse than those other forms.

Evolution does not create superior or inferior organs or tissues; it created diversity through divergence (not by accumulation of features).

What works in a given environmental situation is determined by natural selection, but as the environment changes, or the group moves to a new niche, new traits become important and previously useful traits can become detriments.

In trying to understand how changes in brains over the course of vertebrate evolution gave rise to our own behavioral and mental capacities, we thus have to take care to climb the vertebrate tree of life without using Edinger's ladder, and also to be cautious not to overinterpret the differences we encounter.

We are newer and different, but not better.

As I have pointed out, we have to guard against anthropocentric tendencies, but also against anthropomorphic ones. In other words, we sometimes attribute too much to other animals, and sometimes to ourselves. We have to find the right balance, which I strive to do in the coming chapters.

However, we humans do possess a marvelously capable brain that has impressive cognitive powers. Yet as LeDoux notes at the end of this passage, human cognition is an outgrowth of capabilities that our evolutionary ancestors possessed.

Our species has survived and thrived not by being bigger, faster, or stronger, but by being clever. We haven't, like most organisms, simply evolved by adapting our Bauplan to the world as it changes; we have used our cognitive abilities to change the world. We do so because we think it might be advantageous to our bodies and way of life, or that it might simply be interesting to tinker with nature.

No other animal, not even our closest primate relatives, can have an idea like building a skyscraper, finding a cure for a disease, composing an opera, or writing a novel, then describe it to a colleague, plan how to execute it, and carry it out.

That human cognition is unique in no way means we are better or more entitled than our ancestors or animals with which we currently share the planet. It just means we are different. Unique though it may be, human cognition emerged by building on cognitive capabilities possessed by our mammalian ancestors.

There's zero evidence to support the idea of a conscious soul separate from the physical brain. Consciousness is one aspect of the brain in action, not something ethereal or supernatural. Research on split-brain patients proves this, since basically their consciousness is divided into two parts -- which couldn't happen if a unitary soul was the source of consciousness.

Because language is usually controlled by the left hemisphere, split-brain patients are able to give verbal reports about information presented to the right half of visual space, which is preferentially seen by the left hemisphere, but cannot name stimuli in the left half of visual space, which is seen by the right hemisphere

They can, however, respond nonverbally to the stimuli seen by the right hemisphere, by pointing toward or grabbing objects with the left hand, which is preferentially connected to the right hemisphere. Similarly, when blindfolded, these subjects can name objects placed in their right hand, but not objects placed in their left hand.

Such findings showing that conscious experience can be isolated in a specific part of the brain by cutting axonal connections provided compelling evidence for something that scientists long believed but could not prove: namely, that consciousness depends on the brain's neural circuits, and is not, as Descartes had said, associated with a separate, nonphysical, soul.

I'm completely open to the fact that people have religious and mystical experiences, in part because I've had those experiences myself. (This doesn't make those experiences objectively true, of course.) But science teaches us that it is wise to be cautious about trusting the accuracy of accounts of any experience recounted by memory, since the brain engages in top-down reformulations of the memory every time it is remembered.

As Gerald Clore, Daniel Kahneman, and others have noted, the closest we ever come to the truth of experience is when we are in the experience. Everything that happens later is a top-down reinterpretation of the memory of the original experience.

In therapeutic situations, such revisionist histories can be revealing of one's psychological tendencies and proclivities, but they can never be as true to a past experience as the experience itself was in real time. The mere act of retrieving a memory can, through the process of memory reconsolidation, change the nature of the memory (this is a natural process through which memories are changed after retrieval, requiring restorage).

The longer the amount of time that passes between the actual experience and the memory of it, the greater opportunity to revise and reconsolidate it upon retrieval of the remembered narrative.

Here LeDoux repeats his contention that we humans are different, not special. We are part of a four-billion-year process of evolution that continues to this day, and will keep on for as long as life exists on Earth. 

Our survival circuits connect us to the survival history of organisms with nervous systems. And the universal survival strategies that survival circuits and behaviors tactically implement connect us to the entire history of life. Separation of the history of emotions and other states of consciousness from the deep history of survival circuits allows us to see our place in this ancient story.

Like all other species, we are special because we are different. Our differences are important to us because they are ours. But they are mere footnotes in a four-billion-year-old saga. Only by knowing the whole story can we truly understand who we are, and how we came to be that way.

Maybe it's time to give up on hope

I'm conflicted about hope, the desire for something to happen. It certainly seems like a good thing, a shoulder to lean on in tough times, a positive compass heading when happenings in your life are going in the wrong direction.

I've relied on hope a lot, as have we all, most likely. I've dreamed of better times, of bouncing back from a disappointment, of finding a way to accomplish something difficult.

For most of us, it's difficult to imagine not living without hope. 

If we get sick, we hope we'll soon be well. If a romantic relationship falls apart, we hope that love will return to our life in a different guise. If we're fired from our job, we hope that our next employment opportunity will be better.

So hope appears to be a psychological drug with no negative side effects. It lifts us up when we're down, a mood elevator that doesn't require a doctor's prescription. 

However...

There's also something to be said for giving up on hope. It's unclear to me whether that saying, whatever it might consist of, outweighs the benefits of hope. I simply have a feeling, based on my own experience, that hope isn't always a good thing.

One drawback is that it contains the seed of disappointment. Whether that seed sprouts depends on the outcome of our hoping. If we fill our mind with a strong desire that X will occur, the appearance of Y with no sign of X is going to cause us to feel letdown. 

Now, would it be better if there was no hope for X? I don't know. Perhaps.

That way, if X comes to be, it would strike us as a wonderful surprise, not the fulfillment of an expectation. And if X never happens, the disappointment caused by a gap between hope and reality wouldn't exist. 

Another potential drawback is that hope can prevent us from living in the here-and-now. It's tempting to fill our mind with visions of what might be, rather than what is. Taken to extremes, this can prevent us from fully appreciating the life we actually have, because it is so different from the life we hope for.

Still, I find it difficult to recommend giving up on hope, which is why the title of this blog post starts with "Maybe." Hope can be the only thing that stands between us and despair. Yes, hope can be a crutch. But when we're limping along, a crutch can be what we most need.

Since I've become a fan of mindfulness, a middle ground strikes me as a good way to go. Keep on hoping, yet be aware of what you're doing.

Sometimes I say aloud, "Yes, I hope that..."

This helps me realize that I've got an expectation that might be fulfilled, or it might not. There's no guarantee, just a hope. It's when a hope becomes an obsession that problems arise. If we can't stop thinking, "It would be so wonderful if...", perhaps we've allowed hope to occupy too large of a place in our life.

Or, maybe not. There's certainly an argument for letting hope become as grand as possible, bigger than a mountain, more enduring than a diamond.

Like I said, I'm conflicted about hope.

Near-death experiences are "real" only because people have them

A New York Times opinion piece makes an excellent point about near-death experiences that applies equally to all kinds of spiritual, mystical, and religious experiences.

There's plenty of evidence that people have these sorts of experiences. So that makes them real in a limited sense.

It's the same sort of reality that arises when someone goes to a country music concert and absolutely loves it. Their mind produces a feeling of subjective pleasure from being at the concert. 

However, this doesn't mean that the concert was objectively lovable. Someone who doesn't like country music could be sitting right next to the "loves it" person and have an experience of "hates it."

Likewise, John Fischer, the author of this opinion piece who has written several books about near-death experiences, says that while there's no doubt that people have them, there's no solid evidence that they prove the reality of life after death, heaven, and such.

Being similarly scientifically-minded, I keep this in mind whenever I hear about someone's claim that they've had some sort of supernatural experience. I'm perfectly wiling to accept that they believe they had a supernatural experience, while being deeply skeptical that the experience actually was of a supernatural reality.

Here's the opinion piece. I've boldfaced passages that refer to the "real" question.

Owen Gent

“Have you stood at the gates of doom? Or looked through the gates of death? Have you been to the edge of the universe?” In the Old Testament, The Voice from the Whirlwind poses these questions to Job.

The implied answer is no, for these seem to be divine prerogatives. For humans, heaven is a gated community, and we typically can’t even peer through. This is one reason (among many) near-death experiences inspire awe: They seem to give us a “God’s eye” view of what really lies beyond. They take us to the edge of the universe.

While it’s not exactly a scientific term, most of us have an agreed understanding of what “near-death experience” means. Obviously, an N.D.E. takes place in a “near-death context” — a situation in which one’s life is in jeopardy.

Most who have studied or discussed them agree that to count as an N.D.E., the experience must occur while the individual is not wakefully conscious and have a significant number of these aspects: an “out of body” experience in which one seems to be floating above one’s physical form and can see it and its surroundings; a life review; guidance by deceased loved ones or revered religious figures toward a “guarded” realm (a light in the darkness, a gated or fenced domain, the other side of a river).

Many people who have had an N.D.E. report being profoundly transformed — less anxious about death, more spiritual and more “prosocial” (including more concerned with morality).

These sorts of experiences have been reported throughout history and across cultures. Plato described one in “The Republic” — the Myth of Er. They are partly dependent upon the particulars of an individual’s life situation, religion and culture, but there are common elements as well.

For instance, the religious figures may be different — a Christian would see Christian figures, a Buddhist would see Buddhist figures, Hindu gods and goddesses would appear in a Hindu’s N.D.E., and so forth. Yet at a deeper level there is guidance by respected figures, a voyage led by trusted mentors from the known to the unknown. This time it is perhaps the most daunting journey, from life to death. Loving guidance on our last journey, or the last leg of our journey, is deeply resonant.

In popular literature, N.D.E.s are almost always interpreted “supernaturalistically.” They are interpreted as showing (or “proving”) that the mind is not the same as the brain and can continue after the brain stops functioning, and also that the mind has contact of some sort with a “heavenly” or nonphysical realm.

The titles of popular books about N.D.E.s proclaim that “heaven is for real” or that we have a “proof of heaven.” Medical doctors and neuroscientists writing about these issues claim that N.D.E.s offer “evidence for the afterlife” and “consciousness beyond life.” They think of them as round-trip tickets to the Good Place — the trip of an afterlifetime.

The proponents of a supernaturalistic interpretation of N.D.E.s insist that they are “real.” The neurosurgeon Eban Alexander’s “Proof of Heaven” even includes a chapter titled “The Ultra-Real.” I do not deny that people — many people — really have N.D.E.s, with their reported contents. They really have these experiences, just like people really dream.

So N.D.E.s are real in the sense of “authentic” — they really occur. No one should deny this; to do so is to disrespect a vast majority of those who sincerely report them.

There is, however, another sense of “real”: accurate. Are N.D.E.s, interpreted literally, accurate depictions of an external reality? This is an importantly different question. It is crucial not to slide from “real” in the first sense to “real” in the second, but this is precisely what many of the supernaturalists do. N.D.E.s really occur. But we cannot infer from this that they accurately depict guidance by deceased loved ones to a nonphysical realm.

The big question is: Do N.D.E.s provide a proof of heaven? Or hell? I don’t think so. None of the arguments is persuasive. There are clear, vivid dreams and hallucinations. There are deeply profound and transformative experiences caused by the ingestion of psychedelic substances. All of these experiences present their contents as “ultra-real.”

This is a known feature of any spiritual experience, and N.D.E.s are a kind of spiritual experience. People throughout the world have sincere and absolutely certain belief in their religions, but it does not follow from this sincerity and certainty that the religious beliefs are true, literally interpreted. How could they all be, given their radical differences? So too with N.D.E.s.

The arguments for supernaturalistic interpretations of N.D.E.s are glaringly problematic. Many of the most visible proponents of the idea that N.D.E.s prove the existence of an afterlife are doctors. They include Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon; the cardiologist Pim van Lommel; and the oncologist Jeffrey Long.

It is important to emphasize that their conclusions are not medical but philosophical. The ideas that the mind can separate from the body and have contact with a heavenly realm are clearly not medical conclusions, and physicians have no special authority here. After all, they are physicians, not metaphysicians.

I trust my physician to interpret my blood work, but not to let me know that my soul left my body when I was under general anesthesia. It is striking that some doctors employ such homeopathic doses of logic. They are trapped in a kind of tunnel vision.

It would be desirable to have a more plausible interpretation of N.D.E.s which they are real in both senses: They really occur and they are accurate. I propose that we interpret N.D.E.s as fundamentally and primarily about our journeys from life to death — dying.

Most N.D.E.s depict a journey toward an imagined guarded realm, but not a successful passage to it. Just as in the literature on living forever, such as the ancient “Epic of Gilgamesh” or myth of Tantalus or the quixotic search for the Fountain of Youth, we come ever so close, but in the end we don’t quite make it. In N.D.E.s we get right to the gates, but we don’t go through; we get right to the edge of the universe, but we stop there.

N.D.E.s show not that there is an afterlife, but that it is possible to die well, surrounded by loving companionship. We can die in sterile, cold hospitals — alone. (There are negative N.D.E.s.) Or we can die in a more humane setting, surrounded by loved ones. N.D.E.s are thus real in both senses: They really occur, and they accurately portray these possibilities.

They are important because they remind us of the possibility of dying well. We don’t have to accept either extreme: that N.D.E.s do not really occur or that they prove that heaven exists. They point us to something profound and beautiful about dying. They give us real hope, not false hope, in facing the next part of our journey, whatever that will bring.

John Martin Fischer is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of “Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife” and “Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life.”

Every religious person is wrong, almost certainly

One of the strangest things about this Church of the Churchless blog is how many thoroughly "churched" people visit here. I'm glad that they do, because a diversity of opinions in comments is a lot more interesting than a comment monoculture.

But as I've observed before, it's sort of like a bunch of confirmed carnivores frequenting a vegetarian web site, where they leave lots of comments about how wonderful meat-eating is. 

Anyway, I understand that devotees of the religious group that I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), don't have many places on the Internet to discuss the RSSB teachings and the RSSB guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, so I'm pleased to offer them this.

It's just that since I've been a happy atheist for so many years, seeing discussions of God, karma, divine regions of reality, the guru's miraculous powers, and such feels decidedly weird.

I find it difficult to believe that the true believers who comment on this blog actually consider that they have discovered the truth about ultimate religious reality that is hidden from the billions of other people in the world who believe otherwise.

After all, elsewhere on the Internet there are countless web sites, blogs, and discussion groups where believers in other faiths, mystical paths, and spiritual philosophies are talking in the same fashion about how fortunate it is that they know the truth about what supposedly lies beyond the physical.

Earlier this month I shared a post about what Ricky Gervais said in his most recent interview with Stephen Colbert. It bears repeating, because Gervais made so much sense.

GERVAIS: … Atheism is only rejecting the claim that there is a god. Atheism isn’t a belief system. So this is atheism in a nutshell. You say there’s a God. I say, “Can you prove that?” You say no. I say, “I don’t believe you then.” So you believe in one God, I assume?

COLBERT: Uhh…. in three persons, but go ahead.

GERVAIS: Okay. But there are about 3,000 to choose from… Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more.

So what are the chances that any religious believer is correct about what, if anything, exists in the realm of the supernatural? Very, very, very small.

First, something supernatural has to exist, and there's no demonstrable proof of that. Second, a particular religion (or religious person) has to have learned the truth about the supernatural realm that there's no proof of, and there's also no proof of that. 

But you wouldn't know this by listening to religious believers of all persuasions discussing the finer points of their chosen faith as if it was absolutely, positively, undeniably true. 

And that's just freaking strange. Of course, I've been there and done that, so I understand the appeal of considering that somehow, against all odds, the secrets of the universe have been revealed to a very special person, ME!

The fact that billions of other people around the world believe the same thing rarely enters the mind of religious believers. However, it sure enters my mind, which has been opened up now that I'm an atheist who doesn't feel special at all.

"Trying Not to Try" -- I'm still trying to digest this book

Some books are meant to be read, re-read, and then re-re-read. I think I'm on my re-re-reading of Edward Slingerland's marvelous Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity.

I've written a couple of previous blog posts about the book:
The social value of getting wasted
"Trying Not to Try" is a great book about wu-wei, spontaneous action

I love this book because I love Taoism. Or Daoism, if you prefer that spelling. I also love modern neuroscience. Since Slingerland combines ancient Taoist philosophy and cutting edge psychological research in his book, Trying Not to Try hits a literary sweet spot for me.

Here's some passages that illustrate key themes in the book.

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has spent a good deal of his career exploring what he terms the "ironic effects" of conscious, intentional effort. In words that sound like they could have come straight from the Laozi, he observes: 

"Many of our favorite goals, when pursued consciously, can be undermined by distractions and stressors to yield not just failure of goal achievement but the ironic opposite of that attainment. We achieve exactly what we most desired not to do."

He and his colleagues have amassed a large body of evidence suggesting that we get depressed when we're consciously trying to be happy, anxious when we're trying to relax, and distracted when we're trying to concentrate. When we try to consciously forget something, we remember it more clearly; when we try to make ourselves sleep, it makes our insomnia worse.

Trying to stop thinking of sex is the best way to think of sex. If you want to make someone overshoot when they are attempting a putt in golf, tell them to try as hard as they can to not overshoot. 

In a wonderful study entitled "The Putt and the Pendulum: Ironic Effects of the Mental Control of Action," Wegner and colleagues not only documented the pernicious effect of golfing instructions but also showed that asking someone not to move a pendulum suspended from their hand causes them to move it even more, and specifically in the direction they were told to avoid.

...Ironic effects are not confined to physical movements, emotions, or physiological processes like trying to fall asleep -- they extend to the moral realm as well. Subjects who are explicitly instructed to be fair and unprejudiced actually become more prejudiced. 

...Thinking that you are good can make you bad. Talking about positive behavior can encourage negative behavior. Laozi is clearly on to something when he warns us that consciously trying to be righteous will, in fact, turn us into insufferable hypocrites and that anyone striving to attain virtue is destined to fail.

Now, the fact that I'm reading Trying Not to Try for the third time, or maybe the fourth, shows how subtle and difficult to grasp is the distinction between trying, not trying, not trying to not try, and any other way of looking at spontaneity. You either have it, or you don't. 

Maybe. Perhaps you can both have it and not have it. Or partly have it and partly not have it. 

What I do know, both by observing myself and others over my 71 years of living, is that the last paragraph in the quotations above is right-on. Trying to be righteous does indeed turn us into insufferable hypocrites. 

Which is one reason I'm pleased to have discarded religious belief. Almost always, religions have rigid moral codes. Thou shalt do such and such. Thou shalt not do this and that. Religious believers feel proud of their humility, while often failing to act with as much kindness and concern as a young child.

They try so hard, they fall flat on their hypocritical butts. They're so concerned with doing something wrong, they're incapable of naturally acting rightly. 

Here's another passage from the book regarding Chan/Zen Buddhism.

One famous koan story, for instance, begins like this: "A monk said to the Zen master: 'I have just entered the monastery. I beg you, teacher, to provide me with instruction.'"

This monk sounds a lot like the pre-fast Yan Hui, an eager Boy Scout, with clear expectations about what he is to learn, and probably a subtle desire to demonstrate his ambition. A keener, as we would say in Canada.

The master asked, "Have you eaten your rice porridge?"
The monk replied, "Yes, sir. I have."
The master said, "Then go wash your bowl."
At that moment the monk was enlightened.

The key to enlightened wu-wei is not learning more about doctrine but seeing and responding appropriately to what is in front of you.

The Chinese Zen master who compiled the collection in which this koan appears comments, "It is only because it is so clear that it is so hard to see. People go looking for fire using a lighted lamp; if they only realized that the lamp itself was fire, they'd be able to cook their rice much sooner."

Open Threads are now going to be insult-free

Some religiously-minded people have been using the Open Threads on this blog (free speech for commenters) to insult other commenters in a nasty way.

I apologize for allowing this to go on, though I have been disapproving some of the extra nasty comments.

My rationale, for what its worth, was that allowing religious people to show how hateful and mean they are demonstrates why it makes sense to either be an atheist, or to be a religious person who is a normal nice human being who respects the views of others.

But now I've decided to adhere to the rule I've stated in every Open Thread post.

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. Argue with ideas, not insults.

A commenter who doesn't use his real name, but goes by "Georgy Porgy," has been one of the worst offenders. So from now on Georgy Porgy is no more. He, or she, can take their hateful comments and spew them somewhere else. 

And if he or she tries to comment under another fake name, Georgy Porgy will have to behave himself or herself, unlike the little boy in the namesake children's rhyme. 

Georgie Porgie, Puddin’ and Pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry,
When the boys came out to play
Georgie Porgie ran away

So Open Threads are now safe for people to leave comments on. Like I said, the worst offenders have been religiously-minded people, mostly followers of a guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who heads up the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) religious group. 

Why they think it reflects well on Dhillon and RSSB to be so nasty is beyond me. But it does show that religiosity can bring out the worst in people, not the best.

Malvinder Singh accuses RSSB guru of conspiring in financial fraud

Here's a more interesting story from the Indian Financial Press, as compared to the rather blah story I shared yesterday about the financial fraud saga involving the Singh brothers and their relative, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Below is a The Economic Times piece that echoes a point I made yesterday.

Investigators and courts in India appear to be doing their best to avoid taking a close look at the role Dhillon and his family may have played in conspiring to benefit from the money that was fraudulently siphoned from Religare, a company once controlled by Sunil Godhwani, the guru's personal financial advisor.

I could be wrong -- an ever-present possibility -- but it looks to me that if the RSSB guru pays back the money that he got (he's claiming he owes nothing; Malvinder Singh disagrees), then he won't face further investigation and possible charges.

This would be disappointing, both legally and morally. However, the justice system sometimes works in mysterious ways, and likely the Indian justice system is more mysterious than many systems.

I've boldfaced passages that refer to Dhillon.

NEW DELHI: Former Fortis HealthcareNSE 1.26 % promoter Malvinder Singh, arrested in a case related to alleged misappropriation of funds at Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL), told a Delhi court Tuesday he has paid back the money to the entities concerned. The submission was made before Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Gurmohina Kaur during hearing of arguments on the bail plea moved by Singh in the case lodged by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Delhi Police.

The court has put up the matter for further hearing on February 6.

Advocate Manu Sharma, appearing for Singh, further said that the probe agency “cherry picked” him because of his affiliation with the family of spiritual head of the Radha Soami Satsang Gurinder Singh Dhillon, who allegedly conspired with other co-accused in the case in carrying out financial fraud.

He added Singh, who is in judicial custody, claimed that he has paid back the alleged laundered money to 14 entities through which he had received it.

“The probe agency is not investigating the Dhillon family. Singh has paid the money back to 14 entities. The probe agency need to investigate why the money has not been paid back to Religare yet,” the counsel said.

“Also, the promoter does not have any direct shareholding with any of these entities. If these entities do not return the money to RFL, it is not his fault,” he said.

Sexy Super Bowl halftime show wasn't liked by Christian fundamentalist

Over on my HinesSight blog I addressed the all-important question of whether last Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show was too sexualized.

Check out my post, "Sexy Super Bowl halftime show by J. Lo and Shakira offends some, but not me." Here's how it starts out:

Call me courageous -- Brian, you're so brave! -- but I've got to take an outspoken stand on yesterday's Super Bowl halftime show featuring Jennifer Lopez, a.k.a. J. Lo, and Shakira.

I am unabashedly in favor of beautiful women wearing as little as possible during a musical performance, and dancing in a sexually provocative manner.

There. I said it.

Let the .000001% of men who disagree with me take me to task, along with the almost equally small percentage of women who believe that female performers should cover themselves demurely on stage, and dance as if a Puritan God was watching.

If you didn't see the halftime show, you're in luck. Here's a video of the whole performance, which my wife and I thought was fantastic. 

However, this morning someone on my Twitter feed shared a tweet by conservative religious nut-job Franklin Graham, with this right-on comment: 

Imagine if your church were less worried about women displaying their sexuality and more worried about your president trying to rape them.

More of the same in Singh brothers/RSSB guru financial fraud case

There's not much noteworthy in yesterday's Business Today story about the latest development in the (seemingly) never-ending saga of the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder), their guru relative (Gurinder Singh Dhillon), and a supporting cast that includes the guru's personal financial advisor, Sunil Godhwani. 

The Supreme Court of India is once again telling the Singh brothers that they need to come up with the money to pay a $500 million settlement award to Daiichi Sankyo. And once again, Malvinder Singh is telling the court that he doesn't have the money, after which, once again, the court is saying that all those who owe money to a company once controlled by the Singh brothers need to repay the money.

Which may include Dhillon and his family, according to a previous order by the court. Or, it may not, since Dhillon has denied owing any money. Anyway, here's the copied Business Today story, which for some reason has yellow highlighting where links are included in the original online story. 

I've boldfaced two passages that I found interesting. The Supreme Court appears to be doing its best to not punish those involved in the purported financial fraud involving large amounts of money siphoned from the RHC Group once controlled by the Singh brothers. But if that money isn't repaid, perhaps punishment follows.

Hearing a case filed by Japanese firm Daiichi Sankyo, the Supreme Court on Monday asked former Fortis promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Singh to submit a plan to refund Rs 1,175 crore each by February 24.

Malvinder, through his lawyer senior advocate Dushyant Dave, told court he need more time to pay the amount. To which, the court asked him to issue notices to all those who owe money to RHC group.

The bench, headed by Justice Deepak Gupta, also granted two sessions of four hours each for Malvinder and Shivinder Singh to visit their lawyer's office and do the meetings. The Singh brothers are lodged in Tihar jail under judicial custody.

The bench also said they don't want to punish people if there is a scope for recovery and that every opportunity should be provided for recovery.

In the last hearing, the apex Court had held Malvinder and Shivinder Singh guilty of contempt of court for violating its order to not divert their stakes in Fortis Healthcare.

In March 2019, the Japanese firm had filed a contempt plea against the Singh brothers for disposing of their assets in violation of the court order. Daiichi Sankyo had alleged that the execution of the arbitrary award of Rs 3,500 crore was in jeopardy as the promoters disposed their controlling stakes in Fortis Group.

Daiichi Sankyo is locked in a legal battle to enforce a Rs 3,500 crore arbitration award against Singh Brothers, accusing them of concealing information after they sold Ranbaxy in 2008.

The apex court also asked Daiichi and Fortis Healthcare to reply to Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) plea on allowing Malaysia's IHH Healthcare Bhd open offer to take over the hospital chain. The court will hear the case on March 16.

Last month, market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) had filed special leave petition (SLP) in the Supreme Court to allow IHH Healthcare to proceed with an open offer for Fortis Healthcare, arguing that the Malaysian operator had completed the transaction before a court's decision freezing deal in December 2018.

The court's December 2018 decision came after Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo argued that certain transaction between Fortis Healthcare and IHH Healthcare violated the court's directions. It also alleged that the change in control of the hospital chain had been orchestrated by Singh brothers.

The Singh brothers sold Ranbaxy to Daiichi Sankyo in 2008 for Rs 10,000 crore. In 2013, Daiichi paid $500 as felony charges in the US for selling adulterated medicines, following which it filed an arbitration case against the Singh brothers.

By Chitranjan Kumar

Open Thread 29 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

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

This hasn't been happening recently, as some commenters have been using blog posts as a "chat room," basically, so from now on I'm going to vow to do better at not approving comments submitted on a regular blog post if the comment doesn't deal with the subject of the post. 

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. 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.

Ricky Gervais nails the ridiculousness of religion

It's Super Bowl Sunday here in the United States, so I've got to save my time and energy to watch grown men try to give each other brain injuries in front of a national audience. 

(Soccer, which the rest of the world calls "football" for some reason, is less crazy, though its fans are even more fanatical.)

So today I'm sharing a great post from the Friendly Atheist blog, Ricky Gervais to Stephen Colbert: "You Don't Believe in 2,999 Gods. I Don't Believe in Just One More."

Hard to argue with Gervais' argument.

GERVAIS: … Atheism is only rejecting the claim that there is a god. Atheism isn’t a belief system. So this is atheism in a nutshell. You say there’s a God. I say, “Can you prove that?” You say no. I say, “I don’t believe you then.” So you believe in one God, I assume?

COLBERT: Uhh…. in three persons, but go ahead.

GERVAIS: Okay. But there are about 3,000 to choose from… Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more.

And when Colbert said that Gervais' belief in science was a form of faith, he had a comeback.

...GERVAIS: … Science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book… and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book, and every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would [produce] the same result.

COLBERT: That’s good. That’s really good.

GERVAIS: So I don’t need faith in science. I don’t need faith to know that, probably, if I jump out of a window, every other time somebody jumps out of the window, they smash to the ground because of this thing called gravity.

Here's a video of the conversation between Gervais and Colbert.

Investigation into Singh brothers and RSSB guru financial fraud saga continues

The Economic Times has a new story about the investigation into financial fraud involving the Singh brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder), Sunil Godhwani, Gurinder Singh Dhillon (guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas), and others.

I've boldfaced some passages for emphasis. Basically the story shows that authorities in India are still engaged in finding out in whose hands the illegal money transfers ended up, and where the money is now. So the financial fraud saga continues...

 

NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is in the process of approaching foreign jurisdictions, to get details of more people and entities that may have involved in laundering money linked to the alleged Religare fraud.

In its charge sheet that accused former Religare promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Singh of money laundering, the agency said it is in the “process of issuing letters rogatory (LRs) to foreign jurisdictions”.

The agency also told a local court that of the total Rs 2,036.69 crore of estimated proceeds of crime, investigation over Rs 300 crores has been completed. “Investigation in respect of identification of remaining proceeds of crime and accused that are involved in money laundering is in progress,” it said in the charge sheet, which ET has seen.

The matter came up for resumed hearing on Wednesday when copies of the charge sheet were supplied to the accused.

On account of the ongoing legal battle between Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, a copy of the charge sheet could not be supplied to RHC Holding, a company privately owned by the brothers which is also an accused in the charge sheet. This is because there was no legal representative to appear for RHC Holding.

Special public prosecutor for the ED, Nitesh Rana, told the court that the brothers, along with co-accused Sunil Godhwani and others, are “involved in process of acquisition, layering, possession, concealment, use and projection of proceeds of crime generated out of criminal activities”.

Singh brothers and Godhwani had denied any wrongdoing.

Elaborating on the alleged role of the two brothers, the charge sheet said, “Malvinder and Shivinder Mohan Singh incorporated and used multiple conduit companies for the purpose of siphoning off public funds from Religare Finvest Limited (RFL) by way of sanctioning and disbursal of loans under corporate loan book (CLB)”.

It said the conduit companies were associated with the Singh brothers. This is “clearly established on the basis that the directors of the said companies have accepted that they were relatives or associates of the promoters (Singh brothers). And that properties owned by the conduit companies were being utilised for the benefit of the promoters as also the fact that some of these companies were purchased by the promoters in 2017-18,” the charge sheet said.

It alleged that the funds “siphoned off” by the brothers and Godhwani through “sanctioning, evergreening, layering of CLB loans were ultimately utilised for repaying existing liabilities” of the company of Singh brothers “or the acquisition of properties for the benefit of Malvinder and Shivinder Mohan Singh”.

The agency said it may file a supplementary charge sheet if its investigation in India as well as abroad ascertains involvement of more individuals involved in laundering and parking of proceeds of crime.

Underlining the role of RHC Holding, the agency said the company acquired Rs 150 crore of proceeds of crime and “utilised the said amount in repayment of its existing liability towards RFL by projecting it as untainted”. It added: “RHC group entities have not only been used as conduit companies but in some cases are the ultimate beneficiary of the proceeds of crime.”

Elaborating on the alleged modus operandi, the agency said proceeds of crime “through a complex maze of interconnected transactions” have been layered and “integrated in the main stream economy for evergreening of old loans”. The proceeds were also used for other purposes and for the acquisition of property, it claimed.

ET was the first to report on January 22 that the Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police, in its separate charge sheet, had alleged that the Singh brothers had “diverted public money from group entity Religare Finvest to shell companies and used it to square off their personal liabilities”.

Executives at Religare Finvest, the group’s lending arm, had approved unsecured loans worth hundreds of crores to the shell companies within two hours of getting the proposals, even when these companies themselves had not sought the loans, the EOW said. The Singh brothers had joined the board of Religare Finvest in 2016 with the intention of diverting money to these 19 shell companies, the EOW alleged.

Reality: it's not all about you

Many years ago, too many to count, a friend brought a tape recording to our house (yes, tape) of a talk that contained a marvelous little poem by David Ignatow. I wrote down his words. I've thought a lot about them ever since.

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.

In my religious-believing days, I would look for portents, signs, indications that the cosmos had something to say to me. If I was late getting to a meeting of my spiritual group and every traffic light would be green as I approached it, I'd consider that God was on my side.

(Or the guru, since I belonged to an organization headed up by one.)

Even after I embraced atheism, I'd still occasionally wonder, what message is the universe sending to me? My present-day answer: no message at all, because reality, like a mountain, is what it is. It's not about me. Or you. Or anybody else.

Today I was late for my 4:30 pm Tai Chi class, per usual. I felt like I'd get there close to on time, until I noticed flashing lights of several police cars that were diverting traffic from the street I was on because of an accident.

I had to go out of my way to detour around the blockade. Pleasingly, a car pulled out of a parking space as I got close to the building that houses the Tai Chi class. Somehow I was almost on time, a remarkable feat that a classmate remarked on.

But I didn't look on this as a comment on my life. It was just life, just a sequence of events that had nothing to do with me, even though I was experiencing them.

A few days ago I had coffee with someone who wanted to talk about local politics, one of my favorite subjects. Our conversation went in many different directions, so I can't remember what led me to quote the Ignatow poem, which I managed to mangle while still conveying the meaning accurately.

I told this person that my goal is not only to be able to look at a mountain as not being a comment on my life, but something more radical: to look upon my own life as not being a comment on my life.

Meaning, it'd be nice to be content with viewing the things that happen in my life as what they are, and not as a reflection of me. Which probably won't make a whole lot of sense to other people, though it does to me -- more intuitively, than rationally. 

Recently I jotted down something Sam Harris said on his Waking Up daily guided meditation that I listen to on my iPhone. It kind of fits with what I'm talking about here. He's speaking about our conscious awareness.

Drop back into the condition of everything arising on its own, the ground of experience.

Harris, being a fan of Dzogchen Buddhism, doesn't consider that we have, or are, a self. There's nobody inside our head watching and doing stuff. There is simply life happening, "everything arising on its own." 

Fact gap in the Singh brothers and RSSB guru financial fraud saga

A few days ago I wrote about the latest turn of events in the fascinating drama of two once-billionaire brothers (Malvinder and Shivinder Singh), their guru relative (Gurinder Singh Dhillon), and the guru's right hand man (Sunil Godhwani). 

In that post, "Delhi Police financial fraud charges point to RSSB guru's involvement," I noted that there is a fact gap between the Singh brothers and Godhwani being charged with money laundering, and the apparent funneling of much, most, or all of that money into the pockets of Dhillon, his family and close associates.

So important questions remain to be answered.

Such as: (1) Are investigators in India going to reveal who ended up with the money diverted into loans to shell companies, who orchestrated this financial fraud, and what the purpose of the fraud was?

(2) Assuming Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family were the ultimate beneficiaries of much or all of this money, will Indian investigators have the political backing to delve into the Dhillon family's involvement in the illegal money transfers and hold them to account if they were active participants in the fraud?

Another way of looking at this admittedly confusing, complex case is to recognize that there are criminal and civil components to it. The Delhi Police charges address the current status of the criminal component.

And the High Court of Delhi has been addressing the civil component in the course of trying to figure out how the Singh brothers are going to be able to pay a $500 million settlement they owe to Daiichi, a Japanese company that bought their Ranbaxy pharmceutical firm.

In July 2019 I wrote about the Dhillon family's role in this part of the case in "Delhi High Court requires recovery of money from RSSB guru." I shared a Business Today story in that post. Here's an excerpt from that story.

RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon, wife Shabnam Dhillon, sons Gurkirat and Gurpreet and daughter-in-law Nayan Tara Dhillon are among the 56 entities from whom Delhi HC has ordered recovery of monies Singh brothers-Malvinder & Shivinder-owe to Daiichi. Money will also be recovered from former Religare chief Sunil Godhwani and brother Sanjay Godhwani, according to the Delhi HC order.

BusinessToday.In had reported on March 12 that Singh brothers can only pay the $500 million order against them to compensate Daiichi, provided the money owed to them by RSSB chief Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family is recovered. In his submission, Malvinder has maintained that he can pay the arbitration order provided he can recover the money owed to him.

So we're left with the above-mentioned fact gap.

Malvinder, Shivinder, and Godhwani have been charged with money laundering. But Malvinder says that the laundered money, basically fraudulent loans, ended up with Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family.

Since the adage "follow the money" usually holds true in criminal financial conspiracies, loose ends will remain in this case until there's a definitive answer to who got the laundered money, why the laundering took place, and who organized the fraud.

There's a variety of ways to tie together what's currently known, or strongly suspected, in this case.

One of the best summaries was put together by Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog. Tepper appears to have modified his views to some extent, but I still consider what he wrote in July 2019 to be an excellent overview of the case, even though almost certainly it isn't a completely accurate description.

I shared Tepper's comment in a post called "Great overview of RSSB guru's financial fraud involvement." Here's the comment again. As noted in the post, I added some links and made a few corrections.

Hi Osho. You wrote, "I don’t think it’s a matter of 'guilty or not guilty' but more a matter of recovery of the money."

Logically that makes little sense nor does it reflect the High Court of Delhi order. The court determined responsibility, and therfore guilt, and on that basis moved guilt away from Malvinder and onto Gurinder and company.

The Singh brothers held the legal responsibility to pay the Daiichi FDA penalty against Ranbaxy. But the High Court transferred that to Gurinder and company in June.

Malvinder claimed that he and Shivinder had loaned money to Gurinder, his family and associates, amounting to more than enough to cover the penalty. At first the Supreme Court indicated that they didn't care about the Singh's other business dealings, and held them directly responsible for repayment.

But when Malvinder was unable to pay up he filed a criminal complaint with the EOW (Economic Offences Wing) of the Delhi Police pleading his case that Gurinder, his wife, sons and associates owed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and interest and hadn't repaid for years. These were the monies he needed to pay the Daiichi penalty.

Malvinder went further to document his efforts, pleading repeatedly in writing with Gurinder to help, but with no response from Gurinder.

Even before Malvinder filed his complaint the SEBI and the Fortis board had conducted separate audits that showed fraudulent loans being siphoned through shell companies.

Business journals had conducted their own audits and found that Gurinder and his family were the recipients of nearly a billion dollars in loans through a variety of shell companies. And some of Gurinder's family were involved in the creation and maintenance of the frauds.

All the participants and recipients of the fraudulent loans are satsangis who pledged vows of loyalty to the Master, in this case Gurinder.

By June various additional detailed and indiependent audits had been conducted by the Serious Crimes Division of the Delhi police, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, and the new board at Religare (who filed their own complaint directly implicating the loan recipients and claiming this was all a big scheme involving several people who had knowingly participated in the construction and execution of several frauds).

Then in June, after much deliberation, the High Court of Delhi rendered a judgment that Gurinder, his family and associates, among others, were directly responsible for repayment of their delinquent loans, in full.

The High Court, essentially, verified what Malvinder claimed, and placed responsibility, and therefore culpability, directly onto Gurinder et al's shoulders. The High Court further froze Gurinder et al's assets as they were delinquent over several years in payment.

Guilt, culpability and responsibility have already been determined and payment ordered. For the funds Gurinder et al took, Malvinder is no longer responsible to repay that portion of the Daiichi penalty. The full responsibility is now directly upon Gurinder and company's shoulders, by judgment and order of the High Court of Delhi.

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

Delhi Police financial fraud charges point to RSSB guru's involvement

Below is a story in today's The Economic Times that appears to confirm previous reporting in the Indian financial press about the involvement of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), in financial fraud.

I've boldfaced the mentions of Dhillon and RSSB. 

The story restates what already was known. Money from Religare Finvest was diverted into shell companies, many or most of which were controlled by followers of RSSB. These were unsecured loans that reportedly went into the pockets of the Dhillon family. See two previous posts of mine on this subject.

RSSB guru identified as beneficiary of fraudulent funds
RSSB guru had better have a big bank balance

It's difficult to tell what exactly happened here, but the following Bloomberg graphic I've shared previously seems to reflect the basic money flows mentioned in today's The Economic Times story.

The Singh brothers (and Sunil Godhwani) used shell companies to extract money from Fortis and Religare and funnel it into the Singh brothers' private holding company, RHC Holding. Unsecured loans then were made to Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family, sometimes through other shell companies.

It's unclear why the money was never paid back.

There's been reporting that the Dhillon family invested the money they got into real estate deals that went bad. This would explain why the Singh brothers and Godhwani had to keep money circulating back and forth through shell companies to disguise the fact that money had gone out in unsecured loans that wasn't being paid back.

So important questions remain to be answered.

Such as: (1) Are investigators in India going to reveal who ended up with the money diverted into loans to shell companies, who orchestrated this financial fraud, and what the purpose of the fraud was?

(2) Assuming Gurinder Singh Dhillon and his family were the ultimate beneficiaries of much or all of this money, will Indian investigators have the political backing to delve into the Dhillon family's involvement in the illegal money transfers and hold them to account if they were active participants in the fraud?

Here's the story in The Economic Times.

NEW DELHI: Religare EnterprisesNSE -2.10 %’ former promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Mohan Singh had diverted public money from group entity Religare Finvest to shell companies and used it to “square off their personal liabilities”, the Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has said in its charge sheet against the brothers.

Executives at Religare Finvest, the group’s lending arm, had approved unsecured loans worth hundreds of crores to the shell companies within two hours of getting the proposals, even when these companies themselves had not sought the loans, the EOW said. The Singh brothers had joined the board of Religare Finvest in 2016 with the intention of diverting money to these 19 shell companies, it alleged.

The procedure adopted to peruse documents for approving loans was nothing but a “paper formality”, said the charge sheet filed last week in a local court, in a funds-misappropriation case filed by Religare Finvest. ET has seen the charge sheet.

Malvinder and Shivinder Singh had denied any wrongdoing on their part.

A “prominent feature” of the entire process was that these “shell/dummy companies” never made any request for loans, the charge sheet said.

It noted certain instances where the loan approvals were given almost immediately. On September 1, 2016, a loan of Rs 162 crore to Modland Wears Pvt Ltd was proposed at 3:14 pm and was approved at 4:36 pm — within 82 minutes. On the same day, another loan of Rs 165 crore to Artifice Property Pvt Ltd was approved in 103 minutes, it said.

The charge sheet alleged that after the Reserve Bank of India in 2014 redflagged abject lack of rigour deployed by Religare Finvest (RFL) in its corporate loan book, as opposed to strict scrutiny in SME loans, it resorted to “Google check”, as well Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction, Registrar of Companies, Cibil and KYC checks. “But no assessment of repayment capacity was done,” it said.

The agency said the only “precaution” it took was that the credit notes used to read “the corporate is known to the promoters of Religare and based on their comfort, we are proposing the deal”. The loans were cleared on "verbal instructions" of the promoters, it added.

Filing the charge sheets against the Singh brothers, former Religare chairman Sunil Godhwani and two others, the EOW said “despite being a listed company, no corporate governance norms were adhered with respect to the disbursal of loans”.

The EOW has questioned directors of the 19 shell/dummy companies named by it. Five of the directors told EOW that they were “namesake” directors and that they all were “followers of Radha Soami Satsang Beas and old acquaintance of late Parvinder Singh, father of Singh brothers”, the charge sheet said.

The “dummy” directors further claimed that they “signed the documents which were sent to their house through a messenger/employee of promoters at the year end and received salaries from the companies”, the EOW said. They also said none of them were signatories of the bank accounts of the companies.

According to the charge sheet, these directors claimed that all the 19 entities “were controlled and owned/operated by Malvinder and Shivinder Singh through their employees of RHC Holding Pvt Ltd (owned by the brothers) and its subsidiaries”, and that the companies were “not separate entities and were operating from the office of RHC Holding…”

“Malvinder and Shivinder used shell/ dummy entities along with the management of REL (Religare Enterprises) and RFL to divert the money from REL to their holding company, by adopting circuitous transaction to conceal the fake transactions and to make them appear genuine,” the EOW said.

During his questioning, Malvinder Singh told EOW that "Sunil Godhwani and his team at Religare managed and ran the affairs of RHC and its subsidiaries, decisions of money movement between REL, RFL, Babaji (Radha Soami Satsang chief Gurinder Singh) entities and RHC group entities".

Fastening entire responsibility on Godhwani and his team for "mismanagement" of RFL, Malvinder Singh told the EOW that "the management changes at REL in July 2016 were done at the direction and instructions of Babaji”.

Malvinder Singh has further alleged that "Religare and its subsidiaries owe money to RHC Holdings and not the other way around. Fern Healthcare, Modland (which are described as shell companies by the EOW) owe money to RHC Holdings and its subsidiaries and were fraudulently made part of the RHC Group without any diligence, valuation or any board approval. This was done by Shivinder Singh to shield Babaji and his family members to personally owe over Rs 1,000 crore to these entities," he has alleged.

Shivinder Singh, on the other hand, has denied the allegations stating that he took retirement from active life and went to Radha Soami Satsang Beas in 2016. He said he was completely unaware of the operations at REL and RFL.

Woman who doesn't feel pain shows mind-body connection

I'm 71. I've experienced a lot of pain and anxiety in my life, as has everyone. Well, almost everyone. Because a 72 year old woman who lives in the Scottish Highlands says she has never felt pain or anxiety, and scientists are making progress at learning why.

I learned about Joanne Cameron via a fascinating article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, "A World Without Pain." Here's how it starts out.

Joanne Cameron

We like to think that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, or more resilient, or . . . something. Deeper. Wiser. Enlarged. There is “glory in our sufferings,” the Bible promises. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” In this equation, no pain is too great to be good. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,” Dostoyevsky wrote. “The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”

We atheists get in on the action by insisting that the agony of loss elucidates the worth of love. The hours spent staring into the dark, looping around our own personal grand prix of anxieties, are not a waste of time but a fundamental expression of our humanity. And so on. To be a person is to suffer.

But what if our worst feelings are just vestigial garbage? Hypervigilance and pricking fear were useful when survival depended on evading lions; they are not particularly productive when the predators are Alzheimer’s and cancer. Other excruciating feelings, like consuming sadness and aching regret, may never have had a function in the evolutionary sense.

But religion, art, literature, and Oprah have convinced us that they are valuable—the bitter kick that enhances life’s intermittent sweetness. Pain is what makes joy, gratitude, mercy, hilarity, and empathy so precious. Unless it isn’t.

“I know the word ‘pain,’ and I know people are in pain, because you can see it,” Joanne Cameron, a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher, told me, in the cluttered kitchen of her century-old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands. Cameron has never experienced the extremes of rage, dread, grief, anxiety, or fear. She handed a cup of tea to Jim, her husband of twenty-five years, with whom she’s never had a fight. “I see stress,” she continued, “and I’ve seen pain, what it does, but I’m talking about an abstract thing.”

Because of a combination of genetic quirks, Cameron’s negative emotional range is limited to the kinds of bearable suffering one sees in a Nora Ephron movie. If someone tells Cameron a sad story, she cries—“easily! Oh, I’m such a softie.” When she reads about the latest transgression by Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, she feels righteous indignation.

“But then you just go to a protest march, don’t you? And that’s all you can do.” When something bad happens, Cameron’s brain immediately searches for a way to ameliorate the situation, but it does not dwell on unhappiness. She inadvertently follows the creed of the Stoics (and of every twelve-step recovery program): Accept the things you cannot change.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how the mind and body are so intimately connected.

Of course, the mind is the brain in action, and the brain obviously is part of the human body, so in that sense it isn't surprising at all that the "genetic quirks" mentioned above allow Cameron to go through life in such a blissful fashion.

Some people spend years, decades, or an entire lifetime trying to achieve through meditation and other practices what Cameron has been able to achieve simply by virtue of her genetic inheritance.

This shows that notwithstanding unsubstantiated claims about human consciousness being something immaterial and separable from the body, there's plenty of solid evidence that we are physical beings living in a physical world.

I was tempted to also say, end of story, but that wouldn't have been true. There's so much complexity in the brain, including how the brain interacts and communicates with other parts of the body, that it will be a very long time, if ever, before we understand all of the mysteries of human experience.

Being a fan of marijuana, which is legal here in Oregon, I found this part of The New Yorker article interesting.

Cameron does not have neuropathy: she can feel all the sensations the rest of us do, except pain. The most striking difference between her and everyone else is the way she processes endocannabinoids—chemicals that exist naturally in every human brain. Endocannabinoids mitigate our stress response, and they bind to the same receptors as the THC in the kind of cannabis you smoke.

Normally, they are broken down by an enzyme called fatty acid amide hydrolase, or faah. But Cameron has a mutation on her faah gene that makes the enzyme less effective—so her endocannabinoids build up. She has extraordinarily high levels of one in particular: anandamide, whose name is derived from the Sanskrit word for “bliss.”

About a third of the population has a mutation in the faah gene, which provides increased levels of anandamide. “That phenotype—low levels of anxiety, forgetfulness, a happy-go-lucky demeanor—isn’t representative of how everyone responds to cannabis, but you see a lot of the prototypical changes in them that occur when people consume cannabis,” said Matthew Hill, a biologist at the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute, who was a co-author of the Cameron paper.

The faah gene, like every gene, comes in a pair. People who have the mutation in one allele of the gene seem a little high; people who have it in both even more so. Jo Cameron is fully baked.

It could be that one day, after much more research, scientists will be able to concoct a drug that mimics what comes naturally to Cameron: a pain and anxiety free life.

However, there's a valid argument that this wouldn't be desirable, since pain and anxiety have some useful functions. 

I asked Matthew Hill—a renowned expert on cannabinoids and stress—if there was any downside to Cameron’s biology, and he laughed out loud. “Yes! From an evolutionary perspective, it would be tremendously destructive for a species to have that,” he said. Without fear, you drown in waves that you shouldn’t be swimming in; you take late-night strolls in cities that you don’t know; you go to work at a construction site and neglect to put on a hard hat.

“Her phenotype is only beneficial in an environment where there is no danger,” Hill asserted. “If you can’t be concerned about a situation where you’d be at risk of something adverse happening to you, you are more likely to put yourself in one. Anxiety is a highly adaptive process: that’s why every mammalian species exhibits some form of it.”

The New York Times had a story about Cameron in March 2019, "At 71, She's Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why." It's shorter than The New Yorker piece and also is well worth a read. Here's an excerpt.

In retrospect, she sees how her genetic disposition may have aided her at work. After years as a primary-school teacher, she retrained to work with people with severe mental disabilities. Erratic, aggressive behavior never riled her, she said.

But though having this mutation may sound like a dream, there are downsides. One is that she is quite forgetful; prone to losing her keys and her train of thought midsentence. The other is that she’s never felt the “adrenaline rush” that other people talk about, she said.

Calm clear consciousness -- my new favorite "mantra"

OK, calm clear consciousness isn't really a mantra for me, notwithstanding the title of this blog post.

Those are just three words that I've been saying to myself a few times a day, because they do a good job of summing up my current approach to meditation and spirituality.

Here's some additional words that explain part of the meaning that I attribute to calm clear consciousness. 

Consciousness. Everything we have experienced, are experiencing, and will experience is dependent on consciousness. No consciousness, no experience. 

But there are degrees of consciousness.

There's a big difference between someone comatose, in a dreamless deep sleep, awake, and so on. We also can be conscious but not aware, such as when we do something yet don't know that we did it -- like locking a car and then wondering if the car is locked as we walk away from it. 

And consciousness is inherently subjective. Humans have a different form of consciousness from other primates, and even more different from bats, birds, bees, and the many other living creatures that appear to possess consciousness to one degree or another.

Thus consciousness is private. No one has direct access to anyone else's consciousness. At least, there is no demonstrable evidence of this.

Some people view consciousness as something separate from what we are conscious of. I'm skeptical about this, since I have no idea what consciousness without some conscious content would feel like or be like. 

That, though, is a peripheral issue for me. The brain produces consciousness. Whether consciousness is something that can stand alone, or is always associated with some conscious experience -- that's scientifically unanswerable at the moment, and may always be.

Clear. We don't see things as they are, but as they appear to us. That's the nature of conscious experience. Just as there are degrees of consciousness, so are there degrees of conscious clarity.

This is difficult to put into words, though I think almost everyone knows what I'm talking about. 

Sometimes life seems murky, shadowy, difficult to discern. In my experience, this occurs most often when too many things are competing for my attention at the same time, since the human brain isn't equipped to multi-task. 

Typically we can do one thing at a time well; two things with some difficulty, like driving while having a phone conversation; three things at a time is very difficult, like driving, talking on the phone, and changing the station on a car radio.

So to me, "clear" has a lot to do with being mindful.

Meaning, knowing what we're experiencing while we're experiencing it. If I lock my car, that's an experience. However, if i don't know that I've locked the car because I was thinking of what to have for dinner while performing this habitual action, i'm into murky conscious territory, not clear territory.

In other words, I aim to be as clear as possible about what I'm doing, feeling, thinking, and otherwise experiencing. Not in the sense of watching myself as an outside observer, but rather as a conscious undistracted subject.

Calm. Even if water isn't murky or clouded, it still can be difficult to see what's beneath the surface of it if the water is rocked by waves.

Likewise, even if my consciousness is quite clear, if I'm focused on one thing and am well aware of it, my emotions can make it difficult to really tell what is happening with my experience. Or, can make it difficult for me to respond appropriately to what I'm experiencing. 

For about 30 years I've practiced some form of martial arts. Karate at first, then a mixed form of martial arts, and Tai Chi for the past 16 years. 

So this has offered me a lot of direct experience of what happens when my mind isn't calm. Being anxious about getting hit in the face doesn't help with not getting hit in the face. All it does is make me tense up, which reduces my ability to dodge a punch and respond in an effective fashion.

Likewise with other situations where I'm not calm. Arguing with someone when I'm angry doesn't help me "win" the argument (assuming anyone ever wins an argument; I just can't think of a better word).

But I've also found that it doesn't help to pretend that my mind is calm when it actually isn't.

Which gets me back to mindfulness. Simply saying to myself, "I'm upset," has a way of making me less upset, because speaking those words to myself creates some distance between the emotion and my awareness of it.

Anyway, I'm enjoying playing around with using calm clear consciousness as words that represent a sort of goal for me.

I'm a believer in the power of our unconscious or non-conscious mind, which modern neuroscience and psychology tell us is by far the greatest part of our mind. Since most of us talk to ourselves a lot, it makes sense to me to speak some words, now and then, that point to how I'd like my mind to be.

Not all of the time, obviously, since I don't have that much control over my mind. But more of the time.

Calm clear consciousness. Something to aspire to.

 

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

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

So, behold...

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

My best guess about God
May 3, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meaning, after death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another mini-enlightenment visits me on a yoga mat

I'm assuming, and hoping, that my many mini-enlightenments are adding up to an eventual maxi-enlightenment -- in the same way saving spare change found in pockets eventually totals to some real money.

Today I added to my mini-enlightenment score card while standing on a mat in an exercise room at my athletic club where I do some Tai Chi and yoga after doing my elliptical trainer and weight lifting thing.

I decided to take a photo of the just-after-mini-enlighentment moment in case I ever attain maximal Buddha nature, and those who revere me want documentation of something analogous to the Buddha's realization under the Bodhi Tree. Plus, I like how the sunlight illuminated the mat, and how marvelously the color of my Darn Tough socks matched the mat.

Naturally the wisdom that flowed into my psyche as I was doing a yoga movement can't be expressed in language, being an ineffable showering upon me of cosmic truth. 

But I'll try to distill my mini-enlightenment into a few inadequate words.

This, right here and now, that's all there is, and will ever be. Experiencing that truth had an immediate emotional impact on me. Namely, relief.

I recall that I'd been thinking about what to have for dinner, what time the Democratic presidential debate tonight was, and other mundane thoughts. But when my mini-enlightenment hit, I realized that no matter what happens in my life, no matter what I do, no matter if pain, pleasure, or anything in-between becomes my lot -- in a very real sense, it's all the same.

Reality. This. Right here and now.

Sure, the details of here and now are ever-changing. But that everything anyone ever can be aware of is localized in here-and-now was a realization that relieved any pressure on me to be somewhere there-and-then.

Because that place would turn out to be another here-and-now.

And so it goes, for every moment of every person's life, until a last breath brings an end to here-and-nows. (Since I'm a proud atheist, I view life after death as an extremely low probability; greater than zero, but not much greater, like maybe .0001%, or a thousandth of one percent.)

If you want to peruse some of my other mini-enlightenments, the Great God Google has revealed them to me. See here, here, and here. Pleasingly, one of them involves another photo of my legs and feet!

Money laundering case leaves questions about Dhillon family involvement

It's difficult to know what to make of a development in the financial fraud saga involving the Singh brothers, Sunil Godhwani, and Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

Godhwani was the guru's right-hand man and personal financial advisor.

An India Today story (see below) says that India's Enforcement Directorate has charged Shivinder and Malvinder Singh, plus Godhwani, with money laundering. But details are lacking as to how and why this occurred, and who the ultimate beneficiary was of the laundered funds.

Also, the story says that the amount of money in question is only Rs 150 crore, which I believe is about $20 million. Yet the total amount Religare Finvest Ltd. reportedly lost via fraudulently diverted funds was 2,397 crore, or over $300 million. So this seems to be an initial step by the Enforcement Directorate, not a final one. 

The company involved here, Star Artworks Pvt Ltd, was one of 21 entities mentioned in a March 2019 Business Today story that I cited in a blog post, "RSSB guru had better have a big bank balance."

I titled the post the way I did because it's been reported that the Dhillon family was the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars from companies once controlled by the Singh brothers and Godhwani, money that now is being required to be paid back by Indian courts.

A graphic I included in the blog post indicated that the Dhillon family got huge amounts of money via loans from RHC Holding, a holding company of Malvinder and Shivinder Singh. The address of Star Artworks Pvt Ltd. is the same as RHC Holding Pvt Ltd, which points to the tangled web of shell companies and financial transactions that authorities in India are trying to unravel.

Here's the January 10 India Today story.

The Enforcement Directorate Friday filed a charge sheet against former Fortis Healthcare promoters Shivinder Singh and his brother Malvinder before a Delhi court in a case related to alleged misappropriation of funds at Religare Finvest Ltd (RFL).

The final report, filed before Additional Sessions Judge Sandeep Yadav, also named former CMD of Religare Enterprises Ltd (REL) Sunil Godhwani (58) as an accused.

In the charge sheet, filed by ED's Special Public Prosecutor Nitesh Rana, the probe agency has accused all three of money laundering, punishable under sections 3 and 4 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

The court took cognisance of the charge sheet and issued production warrant against them for January 20. All the three accused are currently in judicial custody.

The ED also named RHC Holdings Pvt Ltd as an accused in its charge sheet.

It said the accused had acquired proceeds of crime to the tune of Rs 150 crore through Star Artworks Pvt Ltd, derived out of criminal activities and utilised the amount in repayment of its existing liability towards RFL by projecting it as untainted.

"Therefore, accused persons were involved in acquisition and utilization of proceeds of crime generated out of criminal activities and its projection as untainted property, thereby have committed the offence of money laundering as defined under sections of PMLA," said the charge sheet, filed through advocate A R Aditya.

The ED had alleged that both the brothers, along with others, transferred an amount of about Rs 1,000 crore to various persons from entities linked to the corporate loan book and finally, the money was siphoned off.

The EOW registered an FIR after it received a complaint from RFL's Manpreet Suri against Shivinder, Godhwani and others, alleging that loans were taken by them while managing the firm but the money was invested in other companies.

"They put RFL in a poor financial condition by disbursing loans to companies with no financial standing and controlled by them. The companies to which the loans were disbursed willfully defaulted in repayments and caused a loss to RFL to the tune of Rs 2,397 crore," the police had alleged.

RFL said in a press release that since the time the offence took place, the company has undergone a complete revamp of its Board of Directors.

"All efforts continue to be made to rebuild the business, mobilise fresh capital and correct the transgression and legacy issues of the past. The management and internal controls at the Group and all subsidiaries' level have also been revamped, bringing in much needed assurance to employees about a stable and action-oriented management," it said.

On being a Technicolor person in a black and white world

Recently someone sent me a message saying that it had been quite a while since I'd written about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the spiritual organization based in India that I was an active member of for 35 years.

This person wanted another RSSB post.

Well, though usually I write about what's on my mind (I have three blogs that represent different parts of my mind), and RSSB rarely makes an appearance in my psyche unless there's some news about the RSSB guru being reported in the Indian financial press, responsive blogger that I am, here's a RSSB-related post.

The theme -- Technicolor people in a black and white world -- popped into my head for a couple of reasons.

One is that when I've talked to journalists in India who want to learn about my history with RSSB and how I view the current guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, I try to convey to them the "magical thinking" that permeates ardent RSSB devotees and their gatherings, especially when the guru is present. 

Here's how I tried to describe that feeling in a 2005 post, "Bursting belief bubbles."

I used to believe in belief. It felt good to believe that my religious beliefs were better than other peoples’. I recall standing in line at a movie theatre, feeling exactly like someone standing in line at a movie theatre, when I remembered to do my guru-given mantra.

Instantly I thought to myself, “I’m special. I’m unique. I’ve got a spiritual practice known to only a few.” I stood straighter. I looked at the spiritually impoverished human beings around me with proudly compassionate eyes. “Ah, I have something they don’t. How fortunate I am not to be them.”

Now I pray, “God, whatever or whoever the hell you are, burst my belief bubbles and lead me not into self-righteousness. Blessed be reality.”

My believing now is centered around the notion of pressure. This isn’t something I believe in as much as I feel. I no longer like the feeling of being inflated more highly than the surrounding world. It takes too much effort to keep my ego-pump running all of the time.

Once I read on the Internet how members of my spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, considered themselves Technicolor people in a black and white world. That’s a telling and accurate image. It is true for virtually all types of religious people, though, not just a few.

That last line still rings true for me, but from my current perspective I'd enlarge it beyond religious people.

Sure, I still think religions encourage their followers to believe that they possess a certain vividness that those who belong to other religions lack. However, so do political parties, sports teams, colleges/universities, corporations, and so many other examples of how we humans collect ourselves into "tribes."

Religiosity really turns up distinctions, though, since true believers have so much at stake. Notably, life after death, heaven and hell, all that sort of stuff. 

I'd try to explain to the Indian journalists how devotees of the RSSB guru create an atmosphere of blind faith that makes it very difficult for ordinary reality to break through their thoroughly indoctrinated minds. I speak from experience, since I used to be one of those devotees.

Every little thing that happens in a gathering where the guru is present can take on an importance that seems ridiculous to those who don't share the RSSB belief system. OMG! The guru looked me in the eyes! OMG! Did you see how he smiled at that lady's question! Etc. Etc.

The thing is, though, that sort of We're so special mentality isn't founded in any sort of objective reality. My wife, who wasn't a RSSB initiate, attended a meeting in Palm Springs where she got to sit in a front row just a short distance from the guru. After the meeting was over, I asked her what she thought of Gurinder Singh Dhillon.

He just seemed like a regular person, she said. Which is true. For most people. But to those who are RSSB devotees, the guru is a hyper-Technicolor person in a black and white world. Otherwise, he's just an ordinary person, as I noted in "Did I see God in first class?"

I may have seen God in first class. The first class section of an Alaska Airlines flight from San Francisco to Palm Springs, to be exact. Or, maybe I didn’t.

In the early ‘90s I was traveling from Portland to attend a “bhandara," or spiritual gathering, of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) devotees in Palm Springs. After changing planes in San Francisco I found myself in a right side aisle seat in the coach row directly behind first class, idly watching other passengers board.

A middle-aged Indian gentleman caught my eye. Bearded, he was wearing a white turban and blue jeans. His first class seat was across the aisle and one row up from mine. Before sitting down he glanced around the rear of the plane and our eyes briefly met. Then he took his seat and I returned to perusing a magazine. Nothing special seemed to have happened.

But it had, to quite a few other people sitting near me. For they were Bay Area RSSB members who also were heading to Palm Springs for the bhandara where the satguru (true guru) was to speak. And that Indian gentleman sitting a few feet away from me was the satguru—Master Gurinder Singh.

I began to hear whispers. “That’s him.” “The master is sitting in first class.” “I don’t believe it.” I hadn’t recognized Gurinder Singh, even though I’d seen him before at a bhandara in Vancouver, B.C. Fervent RSSB devotees consider the satguru to be God in human form, much as Jesus is regarded by devout Christians.

The difference being, Jesus is dead and Gurinder Singh was sitting alive and well in an Alaska Airlines first class seat. Imagine that a Christian gets on a plane and sees Jesus seated a few rows ahead of him and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the atmosphere on the flight to Palm Springs—among the RSSB disciples, at least.

I got mildly caught up in the excitement. However, even back then, when I was much more involved—psychologically and otherwise—with RSSB than I am now, I didn’t consider that seeing the satguru was a big deal. And until I made the connection between “Indian man wearing a turban” and “Master Gurinder Singh,” seeing him wasn’t even a small deal.

For I didn’t feel a hint of anything special until the disciples around me started up the “It’s him!” whispering campaign. Wouldn’t you think that if a person truly is God in human form, such would be obvious? Not just to those who already believe in the person’s divinity, but to everyone—believer and unbeliever alike. Jesus, of course, suffered the same lack of recognition. If his purported godliness had been transparently apparent, impossible to deny, by the time he died Jesus would have had a lot more than a handful of followers.

Psychedelic researchers speak of the importance of set and setting in determining the nature of a LSD (or similar drug) experience. “Set” includes the personality of the individual; “setting” includes cultural views about what is real. If someone with a devotional frame of mind joins a group like RSSB that affirms the divinity of a guru, then this person may very well see God sitting in first class. I, on the other hand, just saw an Indian man.

Open Thread 28 (free speech for comments)

Here's a new Open Thread.

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

This hasn't been happening recently, as some commenters have been using blog posts as a "chat room," basically, so from now on I'm going to vow to do better at not approving comments submitted on a regular blog post if the comment doesn't deal with the subject of the post. 

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. 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.

Psilocybin helps people die without fear or regret

I'm not a big fan of death.

Being alive strikes me as, well, a heck of a lot more appealing. More than infinitely so, in fact, since the difference between (1) being alive, and (2) dead and gone forever, is the same as the difference between something and nothing. 

How many zeros does it take to equal one? The answer is... not even an infinity, because no amount of nothing can equal even the smallest something.

But since death is inevitable, the next best thing is to not fear it. Or at least, not to fear it too much.

Which is why I've been enthralled by a 60 Minutes episode, Psilocybin Sessions: Psychedelics Could Help People with Addiction and Anxiety. Not just once, but twice, since it was repeated after its initial showing.

Click on that link and you can read a transcript of the episode. Here's some excerpts that include the part I found most interesting, since it dealt with a cancer patient's fear of dying.

For most of us, psychedelic drugs conjure up images of the 1960's. Hippies tripping out on LSD or magic mushrooms. But these powerful, mind-altering substances are now being studied seriously by scientists inside some of the country's foremost medical research centers. They're being used to treat depression, anxiety and addiction. 

The early results are impressive, as are the experiences of the studies' volunteers who go on a six-hour, sometimes terrifying, but often life-changing psychedelic journey deep into their own minds.

...We were told we couldn't record anyone participating in the study while they were on psilocybin because it might impact their experience, but we were shown how it begins – without the psilocybin. 

You lay on a couch, with a blindfold to shut out distractions and headphones playing a mix of choral and classical music – a psychedelic soundtrack with a trained guide, Mary Cosimano, watching over you.

Everything is done the same way it was for the LSD experiments scientists conducted in the 1950s and 60s. Some of the most dramatic results have been with terminal cancer patients struggling with anxiety and paralyzing depression. 

Kerry Pappas: I start seeing the colors and the geometric designs and it's like 'oh this is so cool, and how lovely' and, and then, boom. Visions began.

Kerry Pappas was diagnosed with stage III lung cancer in 2013. During her psilocybin session, she found herself trapped in a nightmare her mind created.

Kerry Pappas: An ancient, prehistoric, barren land. And there's these men with pickaxes, just slamming on the rocks. So… 

Anderson Cooper: And this felt absolutely real to you?

Kerry Pappas: Absolutely real. I was being shown the truth of reality. Life is meaningless, we have no purpose. And then I look and I'm still like a witness, a beautiful, shimmering, bright jewel. And then it was sound, and it was booming, booming, booming. Right here right now.

Anderson Cooper: That was being said?

Kerry Pappas: Yes. "You are alive. Right here right now,  because that's all you have." And that is my mantra to this day.

Kerry Pappas

Later in the segment, Michael Pollan, who took psilocybin in the course of writing his book, How to Change Your Mind, described why he thinks psilocybin has such a potent power to alter someone's perspective on reality. Then Pappas talks some more about how psilocybin has eliminated her fear of dying.

Michael Pollan: It seemed so implausible to me that a single experience caused by a molecule, right, ingested in your body could transform your outlook on something as profound as death. That's-- that's kind of amazing. 

...Michael Pollan: There is a reason [that love is on a Hallmark card]. And one of the things psychedelics do is they peel away all those essentially protective levels of irony and, and cynicism that we, that we acquire as we get older and you're back to those kind of "Oh, my God. I forgot all about love." (Laugh)

Pollan said he also experienced what the researchers describe as ego loss, or identity loss - the quieting of the constant voice we all have in our heads. 

Michael Pollan: I did have this experience of seeing my ego-- burst into-- a little cloud of Post-It notes. I know it sounds crazy.

Anderson Cooper: And what are you are without an ego?

Michael Pollan: You're, uh… (Laugh) You had to be there.

Researchers believe that sensation of identity loss occurs because psilocybin quiets these two areas of the brain that normally communicate with each other. They're part of a region called the default mode network and it's especially active when we're thinking about ourselves and our lives.

Michael Pollan: And it's where you connect what happens in your life to the story of who you are. 

Anderson Cooper: We all develop a story over time about what our past was like and who we are.  

Michael Pollan: Right. Yeah, what kind of person we are. How we react. And the fact is that interesting things happen when the self goes quiet in the brain, including this rewiring that happens.

...Michael Pollan: Maybe the ego is one character among many in your mind. And you don't necessarily have to listen to that voice that's chattering at you and criticizing you and telling you what to do. And that's very freeing.

It was certainly freeing for Kerry Pappas. Though her cancer has now spread to her brain, her crippling anxiety about death is gone.

Kerry Pappas: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I feel like death doesn't frighten me. Living doesn't frighten me. I don't frighten me. This frightens me.

Anderson Cooper: This interview frightens you, but death doesn't?

Kerry Pappas: No.

It turns out most of the 51 cancer patients in the Johns Hopkins study experienced "significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety" after trying psilocybin. Two-thirds of them rated their psilocybin sessions as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. For some, it was on par with the birth of their children.  

Kerry Pappas: To this day, it evolves in me.

Anderson Cooper: It's still alive in you--

Kerry Pappas: It's still absolutely alive in me.

Anderson Cooper: Does it make you happier?

Kerry Pappas: Yeah. And-- and I don't necessarily use the word happy. 

Kerry Pappas: Comfortable. Like, comfortable. I mean, I've suffered from anxiety my whole life. I'm comfortable. That, to me, okay. I can die. I'm comfortable. (LAUGH) I mean, it's huge. It's huge.

Sounds good to me. No, more than good. Great!

Which is why I'm hoping that the Oregon Psilocybin Society is successful in gathering enough signatures to put an initiative on the November 2020 ballot that would legalize the use of psilocybin in my state. And then, that voters approve the measure.

Measure 34 will legalize access to “psilocybin services” – also known as psilocybin assisted therapy – statewide.  Psilocybin, currently a Schedule 1 drug, would be administered in licensed therapeutic environments, supervised by trained facilitators. Rooted in research, the service model involves a sequence of sessions, including preparation, psilocybin administration, and integration afterwards. Each client will be screened for contraindications prior to scheduling a psilocybin session. Clients would not need a mental health diagnosis to qualify.

Why science can be trusted

I'm an admirer of science.

My mother played a big part in fostering this when, in my childhood years, she bought me science kits, chemistry sets, and the like. I fondly remember cramming a card table into my bedroom closet, putting a light bulb over the clothing rod, and happily conducting experiments in my very own "laboratory."

Our home also featured a subscription to Scientific American, which I still get, along with the British science magazine, New Scientist. I rarely read religious or spiritual books anymore, because I'd rather learn about reality instead of myths.

But until I finished reading Naomi Oreskes book, Why Trust Science?, I hadn't given much thought to why science has been so effective in learning truths about the world.

Often on this blog I've extolled the virtues of the scientific method. However, early on in her book, Oreskes -- who is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University -- dispelled this as a reason for why science works so well. She writes:

There is no identifiable (singular) scientific method. And if there is no singular scientific method, then there is no way to insist on ex ante [before the event] trust by virtue of its use.

OK. I'll agree with a Harvard historian of science on this point, since obviously she knows much more about the scientific method, or lack thereof, than I do. 

By the way, some Googling of my own blogs revealed that in 2012 I'd written about Oreskes' previous book, Merchants of Doubt, which is about how mercenary scientists aided tobacco and chemical companies in hiding the scientific truth about the products they were peddling, something that is happening now with the fossil fuel industry's attempts to make global warming denialism look reasonable.

So if the scientific method isn't why we should trust science, what is?

This quotation from Why Trust Science? provides an overview of Oreskes' argument. Which basically is that, as the book jacket says, "the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted."

My arguments require a few caveats. Most important is that there is no guarantee that the ideal of objectivity through diversity and critical interrogation will always be achieved, and therefore no guarantee that scientists are correct in any given case.

The argument is rather that, given the existence of these procedures and assuming they are followed, there is a mechanism by which errors, biases, and incompleteness can be identified and corrected. In a sense, the argument is probabilistic: that if scientists follow these practices and procedures, they increase the odds that their science does not go awry.

Moreover, outsiders may judge scientific claims in part by considering how diverse and open to critique the community involved is. If there is evidence that a community is not open, or is dominated by a small clique or even a few aggressive individuals -- or if we have evidence (and not just allegations) that some voices are being suppressed -- this may be grounds for warranted skepticism.

Oreskes gives examples of where science seemingly has gone wrong. However, it turns out that these examples of bad science actually prove her thesis, because in each case there wasn't a genuine consensus among a scientific community -- just a small number of scientists who loudly claimed that something was true which later turned out to be false.

For example, in 1873 Edward H. Clarke, an American physician, argued against the higher education of women because it would cause their ovaries and uteri to shrink, thereby adversely affecting their fertility. Female physicians argued against this at the time, but since most doctors back then were male, Clarke's ideas were given more credence that they deserved.

Thus Oreskes persuasively argues that diversity in a scientific community is important if scientific findings are to be given a rigorous examination that will make them more likely to be defensible.

Our personal experiences -- of wealth or poverty, privilege or disadvantage, maleness or femaleness, heteronormativity or queerness, disability or able-bodiedness -- cannot but influence our perspectives on and interpretations of the world. Therefore, ceteris paribus [all other things being equal], a more diverse group will bring to bear more perspectives on an issue than a less diverse one.

...Put another way: objectivity is likely to be maximized when there are recognized and robust avenues for criticism, such as peer review, when the community is open, non-defensive, and responsive to criticism, and when the community is sufficiently diverse that a broad range of views can be developed, heard, and appropriately considered.

...The key point here is that often "assumptions are not perceived as such." They are so embedded as to go unrecognized as assumptions, and this is most likely to occur in homogeneous communities.

Of course, religious communities rarely exhibit any of the qualities that make science so successful. 

By nature, they are closed, not open. They resist criticism, viewing faith as superior to reasoned argument. They are defensive when their belief system is challenged. And religions are notably reluctant to change their views. 

On the other hand, says Oreskes:

When we observe scientists, we find that they have developed a variety of practices for vetting knowledge -- for identifying problems in their theories and experiments and attempting to correct them.

While these practices are fallible, we have substantial empirical evidence that they do detect error and insufficiency. They stimulate scientists to reconsider their views and, as warranted by evidence, to change them. This is what constitutes progress in science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmmmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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