Church of the Churchless

No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality

It isn't surprising that, as an atheist, I find a lot not to like in Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. However, what does surprise me is how weak Douthat's arguments are. 

For while I admire his clear writing style, as befits a New York Times opinion columnist, often he simply tosses off glib statements about the marvelousness of religious belief without backing them up with either solid facts or persuasive reasoning.

Here's an example from the book's "Big Faiths and Big Questions" chapter, which argues that the world's major religions are a better bet than minor religions for someone wanting to dip their spiritual toe into religious waters -- or if they're gung-ho, their entire being.

I think the process whereby we moved from localized religion to the world religions was in fact a movement toward greater understanding and wisdom, while the (partial, incomplete) abandonment of those religions has been the late-modern world's great mistake.

Rather than just being a way station on an unstoppable march from pervasive supernaturalism to disenchanted secularism, the great religions represented -- and still represent! -- a balancing that comes much closer than either modern materialism or primeval religions to capturing the full story of the world.

So if you are a seeker on the threshold of religion, a browser in the Bookstore of All Religions, it's entirely reasonable to let yourself be drawn toward a major world religion rather than fretting that religious truth might be hiding from you in some minor Californian sect or exotic mystery cult.

These religions spread around the world for a reason, they're available to you for a reason, they triumphed over primeval belief systems for a reason, they have moral and metaphysical commonalities for a reason -- and that reason is that they represented an advancement, a convergence, toward a truer picture of reality.

I'm far from being an expert in the history of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism (I don't consider Buddhism a religion, though Douthat does). But I'm pretty sure that the reason these became major religions wasn't because they were so great at describing a truer picture of reality than other religions consigned to minor status.

For example, Christianity prospered when emperors made it the Roman Empire's state religion in the 4th century. And Islam prospered through early Muslim conquests. Yet Douthat would have us believe that the major religions attracted followers through some sort of Darwinian Survival of the Truthiest. 

This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves.

Similarly, a religion does well when it meets the needs of people who encounter it. If being in touch with truths about reality was the greatest need of people, then science would be hugely more popular than religion. 

But this isn't the case. Many more people are devoutly religious than are devoted to science. The reason is that religions meet needs other than conveying truth. In fact, religions prosper by denying certain key truths, such as:

-- Everyone dies, and there is no persuasive evidence for life after death.
-- There also is no persuasive evidence of the supernatural.
-- Since something must always have existed, this is more likely to be nature than God.

Religions appeal to people because they offer an alternative to the sometimes bleak truths of secularism and science. We are born, we live, we die. There is no God looking after us. In the grand scheme of things, we matter very little.

A religion typically brings like-minded people together in a communal fashion. It feels good to be a part of something greater than yourself, to worship with others in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. I don't deny all that, having experienced these benefits during the 35 years I was a member of an Eastern religion (a minor one). 

However, now I still feel I'm part of something greater than myself: reality. I still have a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood: friends, family, acquaintances. Religions don't offer anything that can't be obtained from other sources. 

Heck, even if what you desire is unreality, a lack of truth, the far corners of the Internet beckon. There's no need to join a religion to unmoor yourself from reality, if that's what you want. Just seek out your favorite conspiracy theory.

Ross Douthat's five varieties of mystical experience

I'm finding Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, less interesting now that I've gotten past the reasons Douthat offers for being religious, and have started to read how one goes about choosing a religion to believe in.

However, in his "The Myth of Disenchantment" chapter, which is within the why believe section, his description of five varieties of mystical experience struck me as both fairly unique and mostly valid. I'll use Douthat's own words to describe those varieties rather than attempting a paraphrase.

(1) Generic mystical experience. 

The first is what you might call the generic mystical experience -- "generic" not because it is boring or predictable but because it seems to be most commonplace and the most readily accessible through certain kinds of spiritual technique, common to religious traditions in both the East and West.

This is an experience in which the self's relationship to reality undergoes a dramatic transformation, and some deeper pattern of reality is apparently revealed. The revelation may take the form of a sense of oneness with the universe, of dissolving boundaries between the self and the world, of interconnection rather than separation within creation, with the ego and the individual personality seemingly evaporating. 

(2) Encounter with something absolutely other.

The second kind of mystical experience... involves a sense of encounter with something absolute and absolutely other. The first kind of experience can turn into the second kind; the line I'm drawing is hardly a clean one, but you see a definite difference when that transition happens, and the person having the experience is left with no doubt that Something is looking at them or pressing into and through them.

Here is an example...

"All at once I felt the presence of God... as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether... I think it well to add that in this ecstasy of mine God has neither form, color, odor, nor taste... God was present, though invisible, he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him."

(3) The supernatural condenses to a particular being.

...The third category of mystical experience [is] in which the supernatural condenses to a person, a particular being, a face, words. In these cases the sense of otherness doesn't go away; these are still encounters with the numinous, unsettling and eerie or just seemingly impossible in their nature and effects.

But what's experienced is made manifest in a singular figure, a personality or group of personalities, a voice giving instructions, not just a harrowing or joyful experience of divinity or mystery. A vision of Jesus or Krishna would fall into this category; so would the innumerable encounters with gods and saints and angels, departed relatives and the Virgin Mary; so would the external voice speaking to you suddenly at some crucial moment in your life.

(4) The experience involves effects on material reality. 

This brings us to the fourth kind of mystical experience, from the point of view of Official Knowledge the most disreputable of all -- the kind of mystical experience that actually has apparent effects in material reality, whether miraculous, uncanny, or simply really, really weird.

...The most consistently attested example of the mystical interacting with the material is the phenomenon of miraculous healings -- seemingly impossible recovery after intercessory prayer. That attestation takes many different forms, with the simplest being the share of contemporary people who claim to have experienced or witnessed a miraculous healing.

It's about a third of Americans, according to survey data, with higher shares in other parts of the world, meaning that hundreds of millions of people around the globe believe that they witnessed a concrete supernatural intervention in their lives.

(5) Encounter with a being or force that has agency.

But the religious worldview assumes that these [miraculous] happenings are, at least in the more dramatic cases, the results of the free decisions of nonhuman persons with whom we can interact through prayer or magic -- God Himself, the gods, angelic or demonic beings, the holy dead, unclassifiable forces.

The most common kinds of mystical experience, the ones that just involve the self's experience of its relationship to the cosmos or to its own mortal flesh, can be reproduced to some degree under laboratory conditions. You can put the meditating monk in the MRI machine, you can get general replications of experiences (the details are another matter) among people going on an ayahuasca-mediated spiritual trip.

But the encounter with something entirely other, in which the other being or force or personality has agency as well, is just not the kind of thing that the scientific method is designed to measure or test, nor is the kind of event to which it makes sense to assign definite probabilities.

...The miracle or the vision of the demonic reaching-in is supposed to be specific to the individual; your own internal conditions play some unmeasurable role; and likewise the external agents can't be subjected to normal scientific forms of scrutiny because they're agents and not just impersonal forces -- and their own purposes and interests, for our good or ill, involve not being subjected to the rules that govern our material existence.

Now, I didn't include Douthat's mention of arguments against the validity of reports of mystical experience. That's a whole other subject, whether it makes sense to believe in any or all of the five varieties.

The probability of 1 through 5 being a genuine reflection of reality clearly seems to be in inverse relationship to their number. Meaning, a sense of being in touch with a deeper dimension of reality seems so commonplace, it's hard to argue that something real isn't going on in the mind of the person having the first kind of mystical experience.

Just standing on the top of a mountain, looking out upon the majesty of nature, often stimulates an experience of unity with everything in existence. I've had that sort of experience. Most people have. 

However, being in touch with a supernatural being that has agency, the ability to act and intervene in the lives of humans, this is much less common -- and also much less likely to be true. Yet its rarity makes such an experience more memorable when it happens to someone.

That's why a book about sitting on a beach feeling one with the cosmos while watching the sun set over the ocean won't be of much interest to people, while a book about meeting Jesus and getting a tour of heaven stands a good chance of being a best seller.

No, the big bang doesn't point to a divine creator

In my first post a few days ago about Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I said that I bought the book because "I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them."

Here I'll finish my critique of his first substantive chapter, "The Fashioned Universe," which I started making in that initial post about the book. 

It's easy for me to do this, because I'm already seeing a theme emerge in how Douthat tries to make his case for religious belief. Though he's clearly an excellent writer and is knowledgeable about many subjects, as befits his status as a New York Times opinion columnist, it's almost disappointing to see him rely on trite God of the Gaps arguments. Wikipedia says:

"God of the gaps" is a theological concept that emerged in the 19th century and revolves around the idea that gaps in scientific understanding are regarded as indications of the existence of God.This perspective has its origins in the observation that some individuals, often with religious inclinations, point to areas where science falls short in explaining natural phenomena as opportunities to insert the presence of a divine creator. The term itself was coined in response to this tendency. This theological view suggests that God fills in the gaps left by scientific knowledge, and that these gaps represent moments of divine intervention or influence.

So it's a pretty lazy way to argue for a religious view of reality. All you have to do is find an area where science doesn't know something and claim, "See, that's evidence for God; science is clueless about this, while religion isn't."

Of course, that isn't true.

Religion is just as clueless as science is about how the big bang came to be, which includes where the laws of nature that guided the big bang came from. The difference is that science is open about its lack of knowledge in this area, while religion makes unverifiable claims about a creator God being behind it all.

Douthat writes:

The first blow to the idea of an indifferent cosmos was the twentieth-century realization that our universe appears to have a specific beginning, a point of origin prior to which not only space but time itself did not exist. 

If Darwin's theory arguably undermined a traditional Christian understanding of human origins, then the Big Bang theory offered a striking support for the Christian understanding of cosmic origins -- offering particular vindication to Augustine of Hippo, who insisted in the fourth century AD that God created time as well as space ex nihilo and exists outside both, in contrast to pagan critics of Christianity who assumed that the universe had to be eternal.

Okay, Augustine was correct about time being created along with space. But it was science, not religion, that came up with demonstrable evidence for the big bang. Douthat does make a good argument against the view of some scientists that the universe sprang out of nothing, the laws of quantum mechanics acting upon quantum fields. 

I agree with Douthat that quantum fields and laws aren't nothing. However, I have no problem envisioning that the cosmos has always existed, along with the laws of nature that allow universes to come into being within the eternal reaches of the cosmos, as this makes more sense to me than an unseen creator God having always existed.

Douthat also notes that the laws of nature are marvelously fine-tuned in a fashion that allows the universe, and life within it, to exist. I've read many science books that make the same point. He disparages the idea of the multiverse, which explains why the laws of our universe are so amenable to life: countless other universes in the cosmos aren't suitable for life, but obviously we are in one that is.

To escape the possibility of a single invisible God, it [the multiverse concept] posits an infinite number of invisible universes that we can never hope to reach or see. To avoid the mind-preceding-matter immaterialism suggested by the universe's apparent fine-tuning and the strange role of human observation in collapsing potentiality into reality, it posits an infinite system that by definition cannot ever be studied from within our material existence.

Well, neither can God. At least the multiverse concept builds on something indisputably real, our universe. Notions about God have no connection with here-and-now reality, being creations of the human mind divorced from anything that can actually be known by our usual senses.

By the way, Douthat's comment about human observation collapsing potentiality into reality at the quantum level is just one of various ways quantum theory accounts for the possible turning into the actual. It's incorrect to hold that consciousness is needed for this to happen. Other theories are popular in the area of quantum physics.

As noted before, Douthat has an annoying habit of choosing an unproven scientific hypothesis, elevating it to a scientific certainty, and then arguing how ridiculous science is for believing in it -- whereas actually science is comfortable with simply saying, "This might be true, or it might be false. More research is needed to determine which it is."

Because religions are so dogmatic, Douthat seems to believe that science is also, while the exact opposite is true. Science loves gaps in knowledge, for those mysteries are what allow science to make progress at learning more about the unknown.

"Believe" is a book that claims religions are true. I doubt it can do that.

I bought Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, not because I agree with that thesis. Rather, I was curious about how Douthat would make his arguments, figuring that it would be easy for atheists like me to undermine them.

After reading 25 pages, I'm impressed with Douthat's lofty goal, but not with his reasoning so far. Being a New York Times opinion columnist and a former senior editor at The Atlantic, it isn't surprising that Douthat is a talented writer.

He makes his points clearly. So kudos to him for that. And I admire how in his Introduction, he says that he doesn't want to take the easy way out when it comes to defending religion. Which is:

In contemporary arguments with atheists and skeptics, religious writers tend to make a few familiar moves. One is to insist that both critics and defenders of religion spend too much time focusing on dogmas and doctrines and specific claims about reality, when religion should be understood primarily as a practice, a habit of being that can be fully understood only communally and liturgically.

...To people who hover on the threshold of religion, open to belief but unable to quite get there, the implied advice is to set aside your skepticism, swallow your doubts, and just act as if you actually believe: pray and go to church, love your neighbor, sing the hymns or keep kosher, immerse yourself in religious literature and art, try to reap the psychological and communal benefits of faith.

The idea is to embrace religious practice somewhat in defiance of the reasoning faculties, making experience rather than argument your guide, and see what happens next. 

Instead, Douthat wants to convince the reader of his book that religions are a reliable guide to truth and reality, more so than a secular worldview that naturally includes science. 

This isn't a book about how religious stories are psychologically helpful whatever their truth content, or about how religious communities offer a valuable solidarity even if their doctrines are made up, or about how embracing the mystery of existence can make you happy in the day-to-day. Such benefits to religion clearly exist for many people, but those benefits accrue precisely because religious perspectives are closer to the truth about existence than purely secular worldviews.

And the benefits are not the best place to start, if we're after something more than just contentment and good vibes. Rather, we'll start with religion's intellectual advantage: the ways in which nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us, while the religious perspective grapples more fully with the evidence before us.

Okay. Great. Rather than trying an end run around the formidable structure of modern science and secularism in general, Douthat wants to attack head on, busting right through the castle walls that, in his opinion, do a poor job of containing the truth about reality.

For Douthat, that includes the supernatural.

I'll be defending beliefs and practices that fall squarely on the supernatural and dogmatic side: real belief in a creator God or ghostly ancestors or a divine pantheon, real commitment to following Jesus or Muhammed or the Buddha, not just general ideas about the good life or cultural practices that you'd like to see handed on.

Being a Christian, Douthat admits "there is no way for me to be perfectly fair to the other religions I'm discussing, especially at the level of generality that this book is aiming for." Fine. But someone should have told him that in no way does the Buddha belong in the company of Jesus and Muhammed. 

Buddhism famously advises, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Meaning, Buddhist teachings not only don't require a belief in the divinity of the Buddha, such a belief in actively discouraged, since Buddhists are encouraged to be a light unto themselves -- a far cry from Christianity and Islam.

This morning I just made a start at reading Douthat's first substantive chapter, The Fashioned Universe, where he argues for the universe having been created by a supernatural entity, which for him is the Christian God. So far, I'm not impressed. 

Amazingly, somehow Douthat finds in the order of the universe as revealed by science evidence for religiosity.

For a general religious attitude to be safely discarded as irrational, modern science would need to have proved more than just the fallibility of the Ptolemaic system, or done more than sow doubts about the historicity of the early books of Genesis. It would need to have demonstrated that it's a fundamental mistake to interpret the universe as a whole as something structured, ordered, seemingly artistically created and mathematically designed.

This shows the flimsiness of his arguments. Modern science does indeed find that the universe is structured and ordered. But science doesn't view the universe as artistically created or mathematically designed. Those are religious sentiments.

Douthat wants us to believe that the orderliness of the universe needs to be explained. Who says? Maybe someday science will be able to do this. But maybe it won't. Perhaps we humans will never know why there are laws of nature rather than chaotic randomness. All we can be sure of is that if the universe wasn't ordered, we wouldn't be here, debating the origin of order.

This makes no sense to me. It is a classic God of the Gaps argument.

Douthat admits that cosmology and evolution are settled truths about the universe. Science has succeeded in presenting solid explanations for how the universe came to be as it is, and how life evolved on our planet. Yet because science only has unproven hypotheses about how order itself arose (the multiverse is one hypothesis), Douthat sees this as a reason to embrace religion's equally unproven hypotheses about a Creator God who designed the universe.

Darwinism established, with uncertainties around the edges of the theory, that an algorithmic process running over an extended period of time can generate increasingly complex and increasingly diverse machines made of cells and atoms. From small acorns, mighty trees; from the building blocks of life and the complex pressures of Earth's environment, stags and fungi, orcas and armadillos, praying mantises and human beings.

But those building blocks, that orderly environment, the system of the world in which the algorithmic process takes place, Hinduism's rta -- all this Darwin assumes as a given, not explained as the result of a blind process in its own right.

Science is the best guide to spirituality

Some people believe that science is opposed to spirituality, that these pursuits operate in different realms of reality and an embrace of one implies a distancing from the other.

I've never believed this.

Even when I was in my most religious frame of mind, the 35 years I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru considered to be God in Human Form, I remained intensely interested in what science has learned about our universe even as I explored the possibility of realms beyond the physical.

This is why the first book that I wrote on behalf of RSSB, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, was a study of how the new physics could be related to ancient mysticism. I deeply enjoyed reading a lot of science books, particularly regarding quantum theory, as that was a scientific area I was pretty much ignorant about.

It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that reality is a unified whole, not a mess of disjointed pieces. So whatever is true and real in the domain of science should be reflected in whatever is true and real in the domain of spirituality.

Of course, there are unproven conjectures in both science and spirituality, albeit more so in the latter than in the former, given the emphasis on backing up hypotheses with solid evidence in science. And one reason I like science so much is that even well-proven hypotheses are never taken to be 100% true, since there's always a possibility of them being proven wrong, or at least needing to be modified.

Still, it seems that two propositions occupy an intermediate position between raw conjecture and well-cooked fact in both science and spirituality, at least certain areas of spirituality such as Buddhism and Advaita. Meaning, there's both considerable debate about the propositions and considerable evidence in support of them.

They are: (1) We humans lack a self that is unchanging and immaterial, and (2) We humans lack free will, being bound by deterministic forces. In other words, we don't have a soul that survives our bodily death and we don't have the ability to avoid lawful causes and effects.

This puts us in the same position as everything else in the universe, so far as we know.

Every living thing dies. Every living and inanimate thing obeys the laws of nature. By not viewing ourselves as special in this vast, majestic universe, both science and some forms of spirituality (again, notably Buddhism) present us with an appealing view where humans are closely connected, inseparable really, with everything else. 

What I find beautiful about this viewpoint is how learning what is true about ourselves leads to learning what is true about the universe, and vice versa -- learning what is true about the universe leads to learning what is true about ourselves. 

Not all truths, obviously, but the two important ones I've mentioned: no self, no free will. This makes scientific reality a friend of spirituality, not a foe. I can bounce back and forth between books about neuroscience and Buddhism without worrying that one will contradict the other (at least, not by much).

These days science denialism is on the upswing among certain groups. In the United States, religious fundamentalists and extreme political conservatives are the worst offenders against scientific truth. They also tend to believe in a supernatural soul and God-given free will. 

Hopefully one day not only Americans, but people all around the world, will understand that learning what is true about ourselves and the world isn't to be feared, but to be embraced. Mysteries always will remain in both science and spirituality.

But we should lean into the darkness of mystery from the well-lighted solid foundation of what is currently known about reality, not the shaky ground of unproven belief.

Opinion piece makes me wonder, why choose a religion at all?

Today I came across a New York Times opinion piece by Ross Douthat, "Looking for Faith? Here's a Guide to Choosing a Religion." (That link should open for everybody, being a gift article from my online subscription; if not, here's a PDF file.)
Download Opinion | Looking for Faith? Here’s a Guide to Choosing a Religion. - The New York Times

Douthat, a regular NYT columnist, based his piece on a book he's written that has a release date later this month: Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

While I obviously don't share this assumption, being an atheist, I just put in an advance order with Amazon, because I want to learn more about the arguments Douthat makes, which, based on his opinion piece, supposedly include new scientific evidence pointing to our universe being designed and the existence of a supernatural realm.

I can guess what this evidence is. If I'm right, Douthat is on shaky ground. But I could be wrong, so I'll read this book to see how persuasive he is.

My take on the opinion piece is that Douthat doesn't make a compelling case for either (1) the desirability of becoming religious, or (2) following his advice about how to choose a religion. If he had simply said, choose a religion that appeals to you, if you have a desire to be religious, I'd have no problem with that.

After all, how we choose what to eat or what music to listen to, assuming those options are open to us (prisoners and castaways on a desert island aren't able to make those choices) is based on personal preferences. Likes and dislikes are subjective. They're hard to argue with, given that we all have them and they differ from person to person.

But Douthat goes further in a fashion I found confusing. Here's an excerpt from his opinion piece:

So the religious seeker, looking out across a diverse religious landscape, should assume that there exist less-true and more-true schools of thought, not one truth and a million fictions. And this suggests, crucially, that even if you start in what turns out to be a wronger-than-average place, you can still draw closer to ultimate reality by conforming yourself to whatever that tradition still gets right.

Let’s call this the Emeth principle, after a character in one of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels. Emeth is a devout adherent of the religion of Tash, a vulture-demon, who ends up being welcomed into heaven on the grounds that in performing works of virtue, he has served the true god of Narnia, the lion Aslan, without knowing it.

This principle does not presume that all religions are identical, that there is no scenario in which any soul is ever lost. (Certainly it was not a matter of indifference to Lewis whether people worshiped Aslan or Tash.) The idea, rather, is that if God ordered the universe for human beings, then even a flawed religion will probably contain intimations of that reality — such that a sincere desire to find and know the truth will find some kind of reward.

Well, that's a really big "if" in the last sentence: ...if God ordered the universe for human beings... . This indicates that Douthat believes in just that, because elsewhere in his piece he also strongly implies, if not stating this directly, that a religious seeker will be guided to correct the errors in their seeking by a higher power.

Douthat also throws in some language for those who don't believe in a supernatural being who created the universe and helps people realize the nature of God.

Alternatively, does too much supernaturalism place an obstacle in the way of belief? Then it makes more sense to initially embrace the religious traditions that emphasize human ethical action or obedience to God’s law over and above miracle and mysticism.

It's clear by that "initially" that Douthat views Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions as the most true and real. Elsewhere in his piece he describes how someone was attracted to Zen Buddhism, practiced it for years, then realized that Christianity was their thing. He doesn't have any stories about people who start out Christian, then realize that Zen Buddhism is their thing.

What perplexes me is how Douthat can claim that the rightness or wrongness of a religion will become clear over time. I'd agree with this if he entertained the possibility that all religions are wrong that assume the existence of a supernatural God, since there is no objective evidence of this. 

This is why religiosity actually is akin to food or music preferences. It's a matter of taste. People can argue about their favorite types of food or music, but it comes down to a simple notion: I like it. Similarly, people belong to various religions because they like them. If they stop liking them, they either choose a different religion or give up believing in religiosity.

I reject Douthat's contention that it makes sense to choose a religion.

His opinion piece is incorrect when he claims that religiosity is making comeback. I haven't seen any evidence of this, just evidence to the contrary -- that the percentage of "none's" in the United States, at least, is steadily increasing. More and more people are choosing to be spiritual but not religious, or to just live life as it is without any form of spirituality. 

Likewise, the largest political group in the United States is nonaffiliated people, those who don't want to be Republican, Democrat, or a member of any other party. This doesn't mean they don't care about politics or improving our country. They just don't want to be confined in the box of a political party.

Douthat argues for the primacy of established large religions, somehow believing that having hundreds of millions or billions of members shows that a religion offers truths in accord with ultimate reality. No, it just shows that a religion is popular with lots of people. 

Falsehoods often are wildly popular, while the truth is shunned by many or most, being attractive to only a few. 

Why it can be easy to talk with someone who has very different beliefs than you do

In these divisive times marked by so much animosity between people who believe in radically different things, whether these be in a religious, political, or some other "hot button" area, it was refreshing for me to read a book with a core message that deeply resonated with me. 

Namely, that it can be easier to share ideas with someone on the opposite side of a dualistic spectrum -- liberal vs. conservative in the realm of politics, believer vs. atheist in the realm of religion -- than to converse with someone who believes very much as you do.

Tim Urban explains why in his book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. I've written several posts about this book, which I found highly creative and engaging.

One of Urban's core concepts is the difference between horizontal and vertical approaches to investigating or discussing any controversial subject. He focuses on politics, but since I'm writing on a churchless blog, I'll use as an example the question, Does a supernatural realm exist?

Normally most of us think that addressing this question gets us into the sphere of religiosity. On one side there's people who have a strong belief in God, heaven, angels, and other supernatural entities. On the other side there's people who lack that belief, considering that this physical world is all there is.

This is the horizontal aspect of the question, similar to the left vs. right divide in politics. But Urban points out that there's a vertical aspect to the question: the manner by which the question of whether a supernatural realm exists is investigated and discussed. 

He calls this Higher Mind vs. Lower Mind. So if the horizontal axis of the question is Atheist vs. Believer, the vertical axis is Higher Mind vs. Lower Mind. This results in four possibilities: Higher Mind Atheist, Lower Mind Atheist, Higher Mind Believer, Lower Mind Believer.

Someone operating from their Higher Mind (we all have both, a Higher Mind and Lower Mind) on this question will be open-minded, respectful of differing views, eager to use reason and evidence, willing to admit uncertainty, dedicated to finding truth even if it undermines their current viewpoint.

Someone operating from their Lower Mind on this question will be closed-minded, dismissive of opposing views, reluctant to use reason and evidence, unwilling to admit they could be wrong, firmly committed to their current viewpoint even if the truth points in a different direction.

So two Higher Mind people likely would have a pleasant productive discussion about whether a supernatural realm exists even if they disagree about the answer to that question, because they share an outlook that allows for the possibility of learning more about the question through an open exchange of views where each person recognizes that while they currently lean one way or the other on the supernatural question, they could be convinced otherwise through reason, evidence, and other Higher Mind methods. 

Conversely, two Lower Mind people could get into an intense argument about the existence of a supernatural realm even if both of them have much the same perspective on this question, because they differ on exactly what that realm consists of and how it can be accessed, and they lack the capacity to discuss these issues in an open-minded, respectful fashion. 

Urban argues persuasively in his book that what ails not only American society, but societies all around the world, isn't really political, religious, and other sorts of disagreements. It's the increasing spread of Lower Mind viewpoints that prevent productive discussions of those disagreements.

Sure, we humans have always faced a choice between using our Higher Mind or Lower Mind in our interactions with other people. However, it does seem that Urban is correct in warning that various forces are driving us in the direction of Lower Mind interactions, which makes it much more difficult to find common ground on important societal issues.

Higher Mind people may disagree with each other, but at least they will understand each other. And from that foundation of understanding, agreement about what to do about a societal problem or question may eventually arise. Lower Mind'ness just leaves us stuck in our opposite corners.

Free speech is as important in religion as in politics

I'm continuing to enjoy Tim Urban's book, What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies.

He's a wonderfully creative thinker. It's rare that I can read 245 pages of a non-fiction book without coming across something that just seems wrong to me. But Urban's arguments are so compelling and well stated, so far he's convinced me of the rightness of every point he's made.

Recently I read his take on free speech. I'll just describe a few aspects of what he says about this important topic, which is enshrined in the United States constitution in a way that few other countries can match: The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

However, private organizations can restrict speech. And various influences, including cultural norms, can make it difficult or awkward for someone to speak freely. Urban writes:

Putting the Higher Mind and Primitive Mind aside for a minute, let's break every human into two parts another way: their Outer Self and their Inner Self. The Inner Self represents what a person thinks; the Outer Self represents what a person says. If we take any given topic, we can depict each of their viewpoints by where they're standing on the Idea Spectrum, and by the color of their head:

We can combine these using a shorthand notation. And we can color these to show what a person is thinking (brain color) and what they're saying (ring color). When a person is being honest and saying what they really think, the two colors are the same, allowing the thoughts of the Inner Self to pass unimpeded through the Outer Self and out into the world.

So, for example, when three people are having a conversation about a topic and everyone is saying what they really think, their brains link together into a three-brain thinking system:

In Chapter 1, we saw how human brains can have emergent properties, combining together into larger superbrains called genies. This only happens when the brains actually connect, which they do by way of expression.

So when people are able to speak their mind freely, good things can happen. This is a foundation of brainstorming. And of psychotherapy, scientific discussions, conversations with friends -- the list is almost endless of positive results through free speech. However...

When a person isn't allowed to say what they think, their ideas become quarantined inside their head, isolated from the outside world. From the communal brain perspective, where each individual human mind is a single neuron in a larger brain, it's as if the axons of the neurons have been hijacked, and any real neural communication ceases.

When I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru, for several years I did quite a bit of speaking on behalf of RSSB at meetings called satsangs. 

That word literally means association with truth. Yet often there was a large difference between the truth of what RSSB members were thinking inside their brains and what they were saying outwardly in public. 

Frequently I'd say something in a satsang along the line of "The easiest RSSB vow to keep is the prohibition against revealing inner mystical experiences, because hardly anyone is having any." Usually some people would come up to me after I'd finished speaking and say, "Thanks for saying what you did. I thought I was the only person who felt this way."

Urban writes:

A phenomenon that psychologists call "pluralistic ignorance" begins to set in when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes. Over time, hearing everyone expressing the same viewpoint, people start to doubt their own beliefs and assume that if everyone is saying it, there must be something to it.

...Throughout human history, clever opportunists have discovered that if you could control what people say, you could write the story people believed. You could dictate the values, the morals, and the customs. You could decide who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. You could create the laws, dole out the rewards, and inflict the penalties. If you could write the narrative, the group became your marionette.

The most effective puppet masters came up with depictions of reality that tapped directly into people's Primitive Minds. Some would stoke fear with stories of imminent danger or invoke rage toward a common enemy to fuel the Primitive Mind's natural fires. Or they might write stories of their own ruthlessness and inflict fear of torture and death on subjects. 

Others would claim knowledge of the divine in order to bring the afterlife into the picture and drive incentives to astronomical heights. 

Free speech is an antidote to these negative outcomes.

Beyond protecting against tyranny, free speech laws open the gates to a dynamic free-speech market -- the marketplace of ideas. In the marketplace of ideas, scientists freely do their research, philosophers freely philosophize, activists freely protest, journalists freely report, and artists and comedians freely challenge norms and test the edges of what's socially acceptable.

If the market's "supply" is made up of the ideas of millions of free-speaking humans, "demand" consists of millions of free-listening ears. To win the key currency of the market -- attention and influence -- ideas have to outcompete other ideas in the market.

In the same way that a free economic market has a natural tendency to push bad products to the fringes while elevating the rest, the marketplace of ideas serves as a vast information filter. Ideas are stripped naked and analyzed from every angle. This exposes and embarrasses false or unwise ideas and prevents them from spreading too widely.

The marketplace of ideas is messy, and it doesn't always succeed at sorting right from wrong and good from bad, but it's a far better system than the alternative: allowing the most powerful people to decide what's true and what's good.

Science says religion isn't so much wrong, as it is unnecessary

Thanks to fading highlighting, I've been re-reading theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's book, Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. 

I bought the book a few years ago and wrote several blog posts about it. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) Then I put the book aside and turned my attention to other books in my morning pre-meditation reading.

When I picked it up again recently, I noticed that I hadn't read a couple of the final chapters. I also saw that my yellow highlighting had faded considerably. To most people, that wouldn't be a big deal. But I'm a habitual highlighter of nonfiction books. It bugged me to have my highlighting of what I considered the most significant passages to be on the verge of disappearing.

So I started to re-highlight my old highlighting, this time with a brighter fluorescent highlighter. But as I did this, I recalled how much I'd enjoyed Hossenfelder's book and decided to re-read the initial chapters. 

That led to some additional highlighting of passages that struck me as more significant and interesting this time around. Now I've re-read almost everything I'd read before, and am glad that I did. I love books about modern science that are not only well-written, but have a certain pleasing edge to them, which this one does.

Hossenfelder frequently refers to something as unscientific or ascientific. These words point to a hypothesis that science has nothing to say about, since it isn't needed to explain anything about our world and the universe at large.

Here's a quote that I shared in one of my previous posts about the book, "Here's what makes something scientific or ascientific."

The distinction between scientific and nonscientific explanations is central to this book, so it deserves a closer look. Science is about finding useful descriptions of the world; by useful I mean they allow us to make predictions for new experiments, or they quantitatively explain already existing observations.

...The belief that an omniscient being called God made the chemical elements is not a good scientific theory. You might say it is in some sense a simple explanation, and maybe you find it compelling. However, the God hypothesis has no quantifiable explanatory power. You can't calculate anything from it. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it unscientific.

 

Hossenfelder, not surprisingly, given her background in theoretical physics, is big on quantifiable mathematics. But I think this sentence from the quotation above makes sense even with the "quantifiable" omitted: However, the God hypothesis has no explanatory power.

I say this because I can't think of anything that religions teach, or preach, that makes more sense than non-religious explanations of some subject, such as morality, how life arose, where earth's species came from, and such.

While modern physics obviously doesn't embrace any form of religiosity, Hossenfelder points out that speculative hypotheses put forward by some physicists are, like religious tenets, incapable of being proven right or wrong, because they have nothing to do with the world in which we live. She writes:

The key feature of the many-worlds interpretation is that each time a quantum measurement happens, the universe splits, creating what's commonly called a multiverse. 

...Advocates of the many-worlds interpretation believe that all the other universes -- the ones we don't observe -- are as real as ours. But in what sense are they real? Unobservable universes are by definition unnecessary to describe what we observe. Hence, assuming they are real is also unnecessary.

Scientific theories should not contain unnecessary assumptions, for if we allow that, we would also have to allow the assumption that a god made the universe. Such superfluous assumptions aren't wrong. They're just ascientific. The assumption that the additional universes in the many-worlds interpretation are real is one such ascientific assumption.

I must stress that this doesn't mean that the parallel universes of the many-worlds idea are not real. It means that any statement about their reality is ascientific. It is something you can believe or disbelieve, but science tells you nothing -- can tell you nothing -- about what is correct.

I agree with what Hossenfelder says as it pertains to hypotheses such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Those other universes are believed to have no connection with our own, so there's nothing that can be said about them, absent evidence of some connection in which another universe has an observable effect on ours.

However, when it comes to religious belief in God and the supernatural, I think science can assert more boldly about religious belief being wrong. Religions, after all, speak of God not only creating our universe, but remaining an active force within it through prayers being answered, miracles performed, and so on.

Since there is no demonstrable evidence of God and the supernatural having effects in our world, this means that God and the supernatural are unnecessary to explain how the world works. There's no phenomenon that requires a divine explanation.

Thus to me it seems justified to say that religions are wrong. But if we want to stick with how Hossenfelder views things, we can simply say that religious belief is unnecessary to explain our world and the universe as a whole. 

Religiously-minded people can believe whatever they want. They just can't say that their beliefs are necessary to make sense of the world. 

If God and the supernatural are real, where's the evidence of them?

Religiously minded people like to have it both ways. I know whereof I speak, because I used to be one of those people before I saw the error of my ways. 

The basic error is this: religious believers assert that (1) God and the supernatural can't be known through reason and the physical senses, yet (2) God and the supernatural are real, and deserve the respect shown to these divine realities.

So those of us who reject blind faith are supposed to accept that one or many someones, somewhere, some time, had an experience of God and the supernatural that can't demonstrated to other people, yet is used as proof that these entities are objectively real -- not merely subjective fantasies of the human imagination.

Frequently I see comments on this blog's posts that take issue with my praise of science and demonstrable evidence as the best guide to truth. A commenter will say that only direct personal experience can lead to knowledge of God and the supernatural.

Well, who can argue with direct personal experience? Not me, for sure. There's no way for me, or anyone else, to know what another human is experiencing. Each of us lives within a subjective bubble of consciousness that is off limits to everyone else. 

Perhaps one day neuroscience will evolve to a point where a highly advanced brain imaging device can reveal exactly what someone is experiencing. Not only their sensory experiences -- vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste -- but the detail of each emotion and thought, and every mental picture projected in the theater of consciousness.

We're a long ways from such a device becoming a reality. Such may never happen. But even if it came to be, what would this Experience Revealer be able to tell us about the truth or falsehood of what a person is experiencing? 

Very little. Arguably, nothing. Dreams are experiences. So are fantasies. So is imagination. Each of us is easily able to conjure images that exist only within our own consciousness, not anywhere in shared reality.

Thus even if personal experience could be released from the confines of an individual mind through an Experience Machine, once revealed to others that personal experience would need to be confirmed as reflecting objective reality in order to be viewed as anything other than the product of a subjective consciousness. 

If religious people want to elevate reports of personal experiences that supposedly point toward God and the supernatural as worthy of worship, I've got no problem with that. Nor do I have a problem with someone looking upon their own personal experience as a reflection of divinity.

What I object to is the basic error noted above. If the only evidence for God and the supernatural is personal experience, with reason and the physical senses irrelevant, then religious believers can't expect anyone else to accept their claim of divine knowledge.

Many years ago the Flying Spaghetti Monster was put forward as an object of worship. Though this was done in jest, the point was serious. The tenets of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, or any other religion are as unprovable and absurd as the Flying Spaghetti Monster is.

Anyone can make a claim about anything. That's free speech. But to be taken seriously, the claim has to be backed up with verifiable evidence. That's science.  

In both politics and religion, reports aren't the same as verified evidence

Building on my post of four days ago, "Harris-Trump debate shows how political lies are like religious lies," now I want to talk about how in both politics and religion reports aren't the same as verified evidence.

I got to thinking about this after watching a clip on X, formerly known as Twitter, from an interview Meet the Press host Kristen Welker did today with Republican Vice-President candidate J.D. Vance.

Leaving aside the fact that I can't stand Vance and his running mate, Donald Trump, I found the arguments Vance brought forward in favor of his belief that migrants from Haiti living in Springfield, Ohio are eating pet cats and dogs, along with geese in city ponds, to be both factually wrong and philosophically nonsensical. 

In case you aren't familiar with this unfounded conspiracy theory, I said in my previous post that Donald Trump brought it up in his presidential debate with Kamala Harris last Tuesday. Click on that link and you can see a video of the debate moderator pointing out to Trump that there's no evidence of Haitians in Springfield killing pet dogs and cats for food.

Didn't matter to Trump. He simply said that he's seen mentions of this on television, implying that it must be true for that ridiculous reason. (Trump mainly watches right-wing TV like Fox News, which lies as often as Trump does -- all the time.)

As you can see in the video below of Welker's interview with Vance (I've made the video start when they begin to discuss the pet cats and dogs thing), Vance acts a lot like Trump in saying that even though the City Manager and Police Chief of Springfield have denied that any pets or geese have been harmed by Haitian migrants, who are in this country legally, by the way, he's gotten reports from people in Ohio, his constituents, saying that this has happened.

To show the difference between reports and verified evidence, here's some examples of reports that lack solid evidence to back them up -- a mixture from politics, culture, and religion. It's been reported that...

Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, so he was ineligible to be president.
Alien spaceships have abducted people and conducted experiments on them.
Some Indian gurus have supernatural powers, such as an ability to remotely save their disciples from harm.
The 9/11 attacks in 2001 were orchestrated by the Bush administration, an "inside job."
Jesus returned to life after being killed by crucifixion and before that walked on water. 
The earrings Kamala Harris wore in her debate with Trump actually were earpieces her staff used to help her answer questions.
The moon landings were faked.
The current Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of a previous Dalai Lama. 
God can be realized by meditating in a certain way.
Other countries are sending their criminals to the United States through our southern border.
In 2020 the election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden, so Trump actually won. 
Allah wants Muslims to kill those who don't believe in fundamentalist Islam. 
There's a monster in the Scottish body of water called Loch Ness.

There's a slight -- extremely slight -- possibility that one or more of these reports is true. That's because it is extremely difficult to prove that something is false with 100% certainty. The best we can do is say "there's no verified evidence of this," which is good enough for science, and also for me. 

However, this allows people like Trump and Vance to make absurd statements, then say, "But there's reports of _______." Well, yeah. People report all kinds of stuff that isn't true, either because they've deluded themselves into believing it, or have a vested interest in spouting a lie. 

The problem, as others have noted in astute comments on this blog, is that it's extremely easy to make a false statement, but much more difficult to show that the statement is wrong. 

Last Tuesday it just took Trump a few seconds to say that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Journalists had to engage in considerable time and effort to contact city officials and determine that regardless of that claim, there is no verified evidence that any cats or dogs have been killed by migrants living in Springfield.

These adages from the Quote Investigator come to mind:

(1) A lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes.
(2) A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.

Sad, but true. The Quote Investigator says that it is unclear who came up with those adages. Apparently they evolved over time and got erroneously attributed to Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, among others.

Harris-Trump debate shows how political lies are like religious lies

In both politics and religion, lies are commonplace. I'm defining "lie" as a person saying something that isn't true, because there isn't any persuasive evidence supporting the statement.

God loves you is a lie, since there's no persuasive evidence that God exists, so there's no entity to love or do anything else. You'll go to heaven after you die is another lie given the lack of evidence for life after death.

People believe in religious lies for a variety of reasons. For example, it feels good to embrace warm supernatural fantasies that are more appealing than the cold truth of reality. Accepting lies also is a requirement for belonging to most religions, where people enjoy fellowship with other lie-believers.

But there's also great satisfaction in embracing truth, of being part of a reality-based community.

That's how I felt watching the 90 minute debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last night, the first (and maybe also the last) debate they'll have after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his horrible debate performance against Trump last June. 

Along with a couple of instant reputable polls, I felt that Harris won the debate. Not by a little, by a lot. I wrote about this in a post for one of my other blogs, "Harris beat Trump so badly in the debate, I almost feel sorry for him." 

CNN fact-checked both candidates, finding that in the debate Trump had more than 30 false claims, lies, while Harris had just one. In my post I wrote about one of the strangest lies Trump spewed. 

A memorable moment in the debate, which I'm pretty sure made the heads of Trump's advisors explode, because it was exactly what they'd advised Trump not to do, was when he brought up the absurd MAGA lie about immigrants from Haiti eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Obviously that's completely false. 

When Trump blathered on about this lie, I stopped our recording of the debate to take a photo of the split screen reaction from Harris. Her look, along with Trump's angry expression, summed up the entire debate. Harris relaxed and pleasant, Trump tense and angry. 

Here's a video of Trump lying about the pet killings by Haitian migrants. He also lies about Harris paying people to attend her rallies.

The scary thing is that about 46% of American voters, roughly, continue to support Trump even though it is obvious that he's a habitual liar. I'm confident that most of them espouse truthfulness in their personal lives.

So how is it that Trump can command such loyalty even though he shamelessly spouts all kinds of lies every time he opens his mouth? Well, for the same reason that religious leaders are supported and worshipped even though they shamelessly spout all kinds of lies every time they open their mouths. 

Cult leaders attract followers because many people enjoy belonging to a community of like-minded believers even though those beliefs lack evidence to support them, being lies. Standing up for truth is much more difficult than lying down and letting lies wash over you.

However, the truth is more satisfying than lies. Yes, it takes more work to separate fact from fiction, truth from lies, reality from fantasy. But that's why I'm a Democrat rather than a Republican, and an atheist rather than a religious believer.

I don't want to follow a cult leader, whether that individual is a politician like Trump or a religious personage like gurus who behave badly. Since 2004 I've preached the gospel of spiritual independence on this blog. 

Truth means more to me than belonging to a group that demands the acceptance of lies as the price of admission. The Democratic Party isn't perfect, nor are the atheists that I know. By and large, though, I enjoy the company of people who value truth and abhor lies much more than those who make falsehoods their daily companion.

That's why I enjoyed last night's debate so much.

Kamala Harris has her flaws, but she will be a hugely better president than Trump in part because truth comes easily to her, a testimony to her upbringing by an Indian mother and to a considerably lesser extent, by her Jamaican father who didn't have much contact with her after her parents divorced.

Sea level and evolution show that reality is shades of gray, not black and white

One of the reasons why I've come to dislike religions so much is that they're so prone to making absolutist statements. 

God is.... blah, blah, blah. The commandments to follow are... blah, blah, blah. You can tell good from evil by...blah, blah, blah. That's all bullshit, regardless of what the blah, blah, blah consists of. 

I say this for a couple of reasons.

One obvious reason is that religions don't deal in truth, they deal in fantasy. They make stuff up, then expect people to believe in it. If they don't, bad things are supposed to happen: hell, damnation, God's wrath.

Another more subtle reason is that reality isn't marked by sharp distinctions akin to the difference between black and white. While reality may seem that way at first glance, a closer look reveals shades of gray. 

Examples abound. 

A vacuum in deep space isn't really empty, but is filled with ephemeral quantum particles popping in and out of existence. Sexual desire isn't homosexual and heterosexual, but includes other varieties such as bisexual. The big bang wasn't a single moment of creation, but is ongoing as space continues to expand some 14 billion years later.

Here's a few more examples drawn from articles I read recently in The New Yorker and New Scientist. 

The New Yorker article by Brooke Jarvis is called "Sea Change: What the search for sea level tells us about living on our changeable planet." The Compass app on my iPhone tells me that I'm at 360 feet elevation. But what am I elevated above?

Well, sea level. Just about everybody knows that elevation refers to the distance above sea level. Few people, though, wonder about how sea level is measured, me certainly included. The article describes how difficult this is.

The oceans rise and fall with the tides, which are caused by the moon. Some places in the ocean are higher than others. Because of how our planet bulges as it spins, "the water levels of equatorial seas are some twenty-one kilometers higher than the sea ice at the North Pole." The oceans expand when warmer and shrink when cooler. Melting ice sheets raise the ocean level while growing ice sheets lower it.

It was only in 1929 that the U.S. adopted a shared reference for setting mean sea levels around the country; it was derived from calculations based on twenty-six tidal stations and 106,724 kilometres' worth of coastline surveying.

The article is based in part on a book about the quest to determine sea level.

"There is no progress to be found in the story this book tells, no constant improvement of knowledge, no approach to a more 'real' system of reference," von Hardenberg writes in his introduction. Instead, there's a story of people abandoning a belief in some perfect natural reference point as it slowly becomes  evident how complicated and changeable the planet on which they live truly is.

The line between the land and the ocean, after all, has never been fixed; it is a binary abstraction we impose on a place that, as Rachel Carson wrote, is forever "changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea." For animals and plants that make their homes in the intertidal zone, survival depends on flexibility, on adapting to a world in which the only constant is inconstancy.

The New Scientist article by Colin Barres is called "Becoming Human." Subtitle: "What is a human and when did such a being emerge? These fundamental questions about ourselves are surprisingly difficult to answer."

Our species is called Homo sapiens. But there have been other species in the genus Homo. DNA testing, such as via the firm Ancestry, shows this. Five years ago I got my DNA tested. I was mainly interested in where my recent relatives came from, but the test also showed a much more distant heritage: like most people, I have some Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA. 

So I'm mostly Homo sapiens, but not entirely. This indicates how it is difficult to draw a hard and fast distinction between who is "human" and who isn't. The article goes into this problem at some length, ending with:

A century after the discovery of the Taung Child, and 50 years after Lucy, we seem no closer to understanding when or why humans emerged. That is frustrating, but also, paradoxically, a reflection of how much progress has been made.

When researchers had just a handful of hominin fossils to work with, it was easy to spot the significant differences between them and to assume that there was a dramatic moment when our ancestors became human. It is because we have better evidence that we now know things are more complicated.

What is clear is that we didn't suddenly "become human" 2.9 million years ago when A. afarensis died out. That should come as no surprise. Evolution is a continuous process, and the propensity to divide life up into conspicuously distinct species and genera is less a reflection of fact than another human idiosyncrasy. 

Ultimately, where we draw the line between "us" and "them" isn't simply a biological question -- it is a philosophical one too.

Why we'll never agree about what is real, and what isn't

Ooh. That's an ambitious title for a blog post.

But since it came to mind, and it fits with some thoughts that have been rambling through my mind today, might as well stick with it -- even if what I write here doesn't really fulfill the ambitious promise of the title.

I'll start with a brief letter to the editor in the April 10 issue of New Scientist magazine. 

From Wolf Kirchmeir
Blind River, Ontario, Canada
If we accept that our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains, then the "self" must be part of the simulation. To ask whether we live "in" a simulation is a category error. We live as a simulation, not in one. 

This fits with both modern neuroscience and a lot of philosophy. Reality isn't something that is channeled directly into the human mind through our senses. Reality is fashioned by us through complex mental mechanisms that are almost entirely outside of our conscious awareness. 

A key part of this is prediction. The brain is constantly making predictions about what is expected to be experienced based on present sensory input and past experiences. So while it goes too far to say that we create our own reality, in some ways we certainly do. 

Eric Schwitzgebel speaks of this in his book, The Weirdness of the World. I'd put it aside for a while, but picked it up again this morning, reading more of the "Kant meets cyberpunk" chapter. This excerpt gives a feel for the rather sophisticated philosophy Schwitzgebel engages in. (Not surprising, since he's a philosophy professor.)

He refers to The Matrix. That movie featured people whose "bodies are stored in warehouses, and they are fed sensory input by high-tech computers." They can do things as they would in the ordinary world, including dancing.

Taking our cue from Kant, let's call the objects laid out around you in your immersive spatial environment empirical objects. In Neuromancer, the computer programs that the hackers see are the empirical objects.

In The Matrix, the dance floor that the people experience is an empirical object -- and the body-storage warehouse is not an empirical object, assuming that it's not accessible to them in their immersive environment.

For you, the reader, empirical objects are just the ordinary objects around you: your coffee mug, your desk, your computer. Our bodies as experienced in immersive spatial environments are also empirical objects.

In The Matrix, there's a crucial difference between one's empirical body and one's biological body. If you are experiencing yourself on a dance floor, your empirical body is dancing, while your biological body is resting motionless in the warehouse.

Only if you red-pill out of the Matrix will your empirical and biological bodies be doing the same things. Note that empirical is a relational concept. What counts as an empirical object will be different for different people. 

What is empirical for you depends on what environment you are spatially immersed in.

Guess I should share how immersive spatial environment is defined in the book:

Following David Chalmers, but adding "spatial" for explicitness, an immersive spatial environment is any environment (whether virtual or "real," interactive or static) "that generates perceptual experience of the environment from a perspective within it, giving the user the sense of 'being there.' "

As described in my previous blog post, a few days ago I ingested a gram of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) at The Psilocybin Center here in Oregon, where it is legal to use magic mushrooms in a regulated environment.

That fairly small dose modified my consciousness to some extent, but not by enough for me to have a full-blown psychedelic experience. Or even a partially-blown one. But regardless, a person under the influence of psilocybin is going to have a different experience of empirical reality than someone who isn't tripping on magic mushrooms.

As Schwitzgebel said above, "What is empirical for you depends on what environment you are spatially immersed in." I was reclining, listening to psychedelic music with my eyes closed, while the facilitator who had to be with me during the two-hour experience mostly sat across from me doing stuff on his laptop.

We were in the same room, but we were experiencing the room in different ways. Again, if I'd been having a full-blown psychedelic experience, my empirical reality would have been much more different from that of the facilitator. 

So even if we don't assume that there's a deeper reality producing the one we're experiencing now, as in the Matrix, it's still the case that the mind of every human being is simulating reality in a different fashion, as the New Scientist letter to the editor correctly noted.

Then there's the implications of a comment left by Ron E. today on my psilocybin post. I liked the comment for several reasons, including how it relates to the theme of this post.

Have been away – on and off – for a few weeks so just catching up with some of the latest blogs and comments. One of my trips was to London where I visited my one-time favourite bookshops specialising in philosophy, occult literature and a whole gamut of books featuring Advaita, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, Sufism, Judaism etc.

All the usual suspects were featured there – Alan Watts, J. and U.G. Krishnamurti, Nisargadata, Ouspensky (and many more); writers who featured prominently in my early days of enquiry – and apparently, are still popular with today’s seekers. Also, in a curtained section of the shop was an Asian looking chap – long beard, eastern clothes etc., who was giving readings of some sort.

I only stayed for a few minutes, leaving with some nostalgia and realising that a huge part of my life and identity was well and truly over. The same goes for the various spiritual groups I was in and out of years ago.

I’d say that this ‘seeking’ activity is okay and perhaps inevitable when one is younger; it all seems to be mixed in with looking for meaning and identity – perhaps lingering on for many of us into middle and old age. Some settle for some kind of secure base, perhaps an established religious or spiritual organisation, others gravitate toward gratifying projects or perhaps charity work.

It seems to be a type of personal evolution, and one that doesn’t have a final conclusion, a final revelation. Except that is, if one can live with the knowledge that there probably is no conclusion apart from our everyday reality – whatever you are doing, whatever that may be.

I agree with Ron. In large part, the sorts of books and writers spoken of above deal with a supposed hidden reality that underlies or produces the ordinary empirical reality each of us experiences in everyday life. 

Meaning, they posit something akin to the Matrix: a dimension of reality that is separate from what we habitually perceive. Schwitzgebel writes:

We can think of a spatial manifold as an immersive spatial environment in which every part is spatially related to every other part. The dance floor of the ordinary people trapped in the Matrix is not part of the same spatial manifold as the body-storage warehouse.

Suppose you are dancing in the Matrix and someone tells you that you have a biological body in a warehouse. You might ask in which direction the warehouse lies -- north, south, east, west, up, down? You might point in various possible directions from the dance floor.

Your conversation partner ought to deny the presupposition of your question. The warehouse is not in any of those directions relative to the dance floor. 

You can't travel toward it or away from it using your empirical body. You can't shoot an empirical arrow toward it. In vain would you try to find the warehouse with your empirical body and kick down its doors. It's not part of the same spatial manifold.

Thus in addition to the difficulty of people agreeing about the nature of the empirical reality of the ordinary physical world where we all bodily live, there's the added complexity of billions of people, most of humanity, believing in a religious, mystical, or spiritual supernatural place akin to that in the Matrix: a realm spatially distinct from this world, so impossible to discern with ordinary perception.

Call it God, heaven, astral plane, or whatever, debates about the nature of a supposed realm outside of, well, nature, are a big part of what many commenters on this blog like to discuss, as well as the basis for the myriads of different religions, mystical paths, and such.

So the way I see it, to me the mystery isn't why people disagree about what reality consists of, but how it is that we're able to agree to such an extent about reality. (Perhaps the answer is that if we didn't, as a species we wouldn't survive for very long.)

"Facts and the law" applies to religiosity as well as the justice system

I don't know much about how the justice system works in other countries, but here in the United States one of the most frequently heard phrases is "facts and the law." 

Those words were used a lot by commentators on the criminal trial of Donald Trump, which ended last Thursday with a 12 person jury deciding unanimously, as is required in criminal trials, that Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to disguise the fact that a $130,000 payment to a porn star was to keep her quiet just before the 2016 presidential election about a sexual affair with Trump that occurred four months after his wife, Melania gave birth to their son, Barron.

Prosecutors had to convince the jury that both the facts and the law merited a conviction, while the defense team tried to cast doubt on the facts presented by the prosecution. But here's an interesting thing: the defense couldn't argue that the law was wrong or doubtful, because the law is what it is, until it is changed.

There's something beautiful about this.

The justice system, when it works correctly (it has flaws, just as every social system does), is a marvelous way of resolving disputes in a reasonable, measured manner. Each side presents its case, the facts of the matter as they see them, before a judge or jury. Then the judge or jury decides the extent to which those facts are believable, and applies that assessment of the facts to the appropriate legal standard. 

To my mind much of the beauty here is akin to why sporting events are so pleasurable to watch. Every sport, such as baseball, has rules. Those are the "law." Umpires or referees observe what players are doing, the "facts." Then they rule on how the facts apply to the law. For example, if a pitcher misses the strike zone four times, the batter being pitched to is entitled to a walk, putting them on first base.

While players and coaches may disagree with a decision, usually they don't, or the disagreement is mild. By contrast, what drives me and others crazy about politics is how Donald Trump, an extremely poor loser, has complained about the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden being rigged against him, even though there's no evidence, no facts, that this is true. 

When it comes to religiosity, both the facts and the law typically are disputed. As I have noted many times on this blog, and will surely do so again many times in the future, there's a lack of demonstrable evidence that a supernatural realm even exists, much less that it has certain characteristics claimed by every religion -- all of which describe the supernatural in their own unique fashion. 

So both facts and the law are a matter of debate in religiosity. There's no way to adjudicate claims and counter-claims -- Jesus is the Son of God sent to absolve our sins; no he isn't! -- in such an amorphous situation. This leaves religions in the realm of personal belief, not impersonal facts. 

Complicating things even more, believers in the supernatural are unable to come up with a coherent explanation for how an immaterial entity, such as God, is able to interact or communicate with material entities, such as we humans. In my first book, I observed that this is akin to supposedly immaterial ghosts being able to show signs of their presence by turning on a light or knocking on a door.

As much as I'd like the supernatural to exist (reality would be a lot more interesting if it did), the laws of nature as they're currently understood by science fail to show any solid evidence, any facts, that this is the case. Thus both the facts and physical laws argue against believing in the innocence, so to speak, or religiosity.

Today I read this passage in neuroscientist Christof Koch's book, Then I am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. This is from a section on near-death experiences.

There are persistent reports in the popular media that patients who undergo near-death experiences have "flat-lined," with their electroencephalograms (EEGs) showing no significant electrical activity. A completely inert brain would indicate a brain in a deep coma, a brain that had lost its causal powers and that certainly wouldn't feel anything.

Therefore, according to this narrative, "conventional medicine" (voiced with dripping sarcasm) fails to explain their visions. Instead, we just have to accept that these patients have been granted a vision of the Afterlife.

I am extremely skeptical, as I've never seen a patient with a flat, isoelectric EEG soon thereafter wake up and claim to have been conscious. A key difficulty is aligning the clock time of the near-death experience with the EEG record, given the patient's confused recollections hours later, often under sedatives.

Remember what I called the neuroscientist's dictum, "No brain, never mind"? Neuroscience operates under the hypothesis that all thoughts, memories, percepts, and experiences are an uneluctable consequence of the natural extrinsic and intrinsic causal powers of the brain -- not supernatural ones. 

Unless there is extraordinary compelling evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon the principle that a silenced brain does not support consciousness. 

Note that Koch called this a hypothesis. That's the openness of science. If compelling fresh facts come along that argue for overturning our current understanding of the laws of nature, then some of those laws may need to be modified. 

That's how the justice system works also. It's fairly common to have a guilty verdict overturned when new evidence, such as a DNA test that wasn't available during the original trial, shows the innocence of someone who was convicted of a crime.

But simply saying so doesn't make it so. Not in the law, and not in religiosity. Facts matter. A lot.

If you become a religion of one, your worship will be effortless

Whenever I'm reading a spiritual or philosophical book and am generally enjoying its message, then come across a passage that I heartily disagree with, I remind myself of one of my early blog posts from 2005, "Become a religion of one." 

(I'll copy it in below, I like it so much.)

For the way I've come to view spirituality is as an intensely independent pursuit. After all, our search for meaning and purpose in life necessarily is personal, not collective. There's zero chance that any other person in the world is going to have exactly the same goals, values, and such as we do.

So while it can make sense to explore ready-made religions, philosophies, mystical teachings, and other approaches that promise to be a foundation for a satisfying life, my advice is to pick and choose what you most like about them and fashion your own unique "religion of one" from those pieces, along with what springs from your own imagination/intuition.

One advantage of this is that it enables you to more easily belong to a spiritual organization without feeling like it's stifling what you truly believe and care about. Accept the rules and dogmas that make sense to you while paying little or no attention to the rest. Don't expect the organization to perfectly meet your needs, because this is impossible.

This is akin to people eating at a restaurant with an extensive menu. Each person should order what they like to eat. Nobody should worry that their selections don't match those of anyone else in the restaurant. Spirituality is subjective. There's no objective truth here, unlike in science. 

Well, generally. My own personal philosophy of life includes a belief that free will is an illusion, along with the illusory notion of a separate unchanging self or soul. I consider that these are scientific truths, but I admit that there is room for debate with those who see things differently. 

Thus when I read a book by a scientist who I generally admire, yet who contends that free will is part of our human repertoire, something I'm doing now, I do my best to be open-minded about his arguments in favor of free will even though I'm virtually certain that he isn't going to markedly alter my basic perspective. But I might do this on my own.

Such is another benefit of a religion of one: it is exceedingly easy to modify the tenets of your unique belief system, just as it's equally easy to worship within that religion. Just be yourself.

Here's what I wrote in that 2005 blog post.

Most people belong to a religion with many members. There are about two billion Christians in the world, over a billion Muslims, and nearly a billion Hindus. Sure, company is nice, but here are some reasons to become a religion of one:

--You can hold a worship service whenever and wherever you want. Your church just needs to be as big as you are.

--No contentious arguments about leadership. Any jockeying for power in your religious organization will be between you and you.

--Doctrinal disputes are easily resolved. What you say, goes.

--If you’ve ever wanted to be known as “Most eminently enlightened great being” or “Her highly esteemed holiness,” within your own mind at least, this is your chance.

--Beer and tortilla chips can be your holy sacraments. Or, cake and chocolate.

--Sex between clergy and parishioners is absolutely fine. Encouraged even. It’s all in your own hands. Literally.

--Finding a name for your religion is easy: just look at your driver’s license. The hard part is deciding between “ism,” “ity,” or whatever. In my case, Hinesism sounds OK, Hinesity terrible. Hinesiosity, maybe. I need to schedule a meeting with myself on this.

--No worries about declining membership. You’re already as low as you can go (death will take your religion down to zero devotees, but that’ll be the least of your worries).

--Salvation is assured. All you need to do is write “salvation is assured” on a holy post-it note and then have faith in your divine revelation Heck, if it works for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, it’ll work for you.

--The next time someone says, “Who died and made you the pope?” you can reply with a straight face, “What do you mean? Nobody had to die, I’ve always held that office.”

But seriously…I’ve got shelves of books from each of the world’s great mystical traditions—Christian, Sufi, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu—that support the contention, “Become a religion of one.”

Science seeks universal material truths through a collaborative process of rigorous investigation. Mysticism seeks universal spiritual truths through an individual process of rigorous investigation.

Don’t believe it when you hear, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I” in reference to spiritual presence. In truth, that’s when God is not present—in a group.

Believe it: the best religion has a membership of one.

Jewish religious nationalism is behind Israel's horrible treatment of Palestinians

Anyone who wrongly believes that religiosity is a private affair of personal faith needs to educate themselves about the danger religious nationalism poses in many places around the world, including Israel.

I wrote a post about this yesterday for my Salem Political Snark blog, "Two well-researched stories show how badly Israel is treating Palestinians." 

One of those stories was a lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine, with the title shown above. Since I'm a subscriber to the online New York Times and gifted that link, you should be able to click on it and read this disturbing investigative journalism.

Below I've shared some excerpts from the story that focus on how Jewish religious nationalism has been a major force in Israel's oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank territory occupied by Israel. I've boldfaced passages that pertain most directly to religious extremism. 

What deeply irks me is how conservatives in the United States, and also some Democrats, sadly, keep talking about how the students engaged in campus protests against the inhumane way Israel is conducing its war against Hamas in Gaza need to educate themselves about the history of Israel.

Well, I suspect that most of the students are well aware of how badly Israel has treated Palestinians since the founding of Israel in 1948, I believe it was. In part the reasons why this has happened are rooted in ordinary nationalism. But the Jewish faith has played an even greater role, as you can read below.

Politics is always messy. However, when religion becomes intertwined with a political cause, typically positions become hardened and more extreme, since God's will is imagined to be the basis for religious nationalism. Which is what is happening in Israel at the moment.

Here's the excerpts with my boldfacing. 

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

Some of these people now run Israel. In 2022, just 18 months after losing the prime ministership, Benjamin Netanyahu regained power by forming an alliance with ultraright leaders of both the Religious Zionism Party and the Jewish Power party. It was an act of political desperation on Netanyahu’s part, and it ushered into power some truly radical figures, people — like Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — who had spent decades pledging to wrest the West Bank and Gaza from Arab hands. Just two months earlier, according to news reports at the time, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student named Yigal Amir.

Now Ben-Gvir was Israel’s national security minister and Smotrich was Israel’s finance minister, charged additionally with overseeing much of the Israeli government’s activities in the West Bank. In December 2022, a day before the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu issued a list of goals and priorities for his new cabinet, including a clear statement that the nationalistic ideology of his new allies was now the government’s guiding star. “The Jewish people,” it said, “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel.”

...With its overwhelming victory in the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel more than doubled the amount of land it controlled, seizing new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Now it faced a choice: Would the new land become part of Israel or be bargained away as part of a future Palestinian state? To a cadre of young Israelis imbued with messianic zeal, the answer was obvious. The acquisition of the territories animated a religious political movement — Gush Emunim, or “Bloc of the Faithful” — that was determined to settle the newly conquered lands.

Gush Emunim followers believed that the coming of the messiah would be hastened if, rather than studying holy books from morning to night, Jews settled the newly occupied territories. This was the land of “Greater Israel,” they believed, and there was a pioneer spirit among the early settlers. They saw themselves as direct descendants of the earliest Zionists, who built farms and kibbutzim near Palestinian villages during the first part of the 20th century, when the land was under British control. But while the Zionism of the earlier period was largely secular and socialist, the new settlers believed they were advancing God’s agenda.

...The Jewish Department found itself continually behind in its efforts to address the onslaught. In April 1984, it had a major breakthrough: Its agents foiled a Jewish Underground plan to blow up five buses full of Palestinians, and they arrested around two dozen Jewish Underground members who had also played roles in the Islamic College attack and the bombings of the Palestinian mayors in 1980. But only after weeks of interrogating the suspects did Shin Bet learn that the Jewish Underground had been developing a scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque. The planning involved dozens of intelligence-gathering trips to the Temple Mount and an assessment of the exact amount of explosives that would be needed and where to place them. The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah.

...That evening marked the beginning of Purim, the festive commemoration of the victory of the Jews over Haman the Agagite, a court official in the Persian Empire and the nemesis of the Jews in the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. Right-wing Israelis have often drawn parallels between Haman and Arabs — enemies who seek the annihilation of Jews. Goldstein woke early the next day and put on his I.D.F. uniform, and at 5:20 a.m. he entered the Cave of the Patriarchs, an ancient complex in Hebron that serves as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. Goldstein carried with him his I.D.F.-issued Galil rifle. It was also the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on that morning hundreds of Muslims crowded the hall in prayer. Goldstein faced the worshipers and began shooting, firing 108 rounds before he was dragged down and beaten to death. The massacre killed 29 Muslim worshipers and injured more than 100.

...The killings shocked Israel, and the government responded with a crackdown on extremism. Kach and Kahane Chai, the two political organizations most closely affiliated with the Kahanist movement, were outlawed and labeled terrorist groups, as was any other party that called for “the establishment of a theocracy in the biblical Land of Israel and the violent expulsion of Arabs from that land.” Rabin, in an address to the Knesset, spoke directly to the followers of Goldstein and Kahane, who he said were the product of a malicious foreign influence on Israel. “You are not part of the community of Israel,” he said. “You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.”

...The I.D.F. refused to allow Goldstein to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Hebron. He was buried instead in the Kiryat Arba settlement, in a park named for Meir Kahane, and his gravesite has become an enduring place of pilgrimage for Jews who wanted to celebrate, as his epitaph reads, the “saint” who died for Israel with “clean hands and a pure heart.”

...The warnings noted that rabbis in West Bank settlements, along with some politicians on the right, were now openly advocating violence against Israeli public officials, especially Rabin. Extremist rabbis issued rulings of Jewish law against Rabin — imposing a curse of death, a Pulsa Dinura, and providing justification for killing him, a din rodef.

...The ascent of a far-right prime minister did little to prevent the virulent, anti-government strain inside the settler movement from spreading. A new generation of Kahanists was taking an even more radical turn, not only against Israeli politicians who might oppose or insufficiently abet them but against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. A group calling itself Hilltop Youth advocated for the total destruction of the Zionist state. Meir Ettinger, named for his grandfather Meir Kahane, was one of the Hilltop Youth leaders, and he made his grandfather’s views seem moderate.

Their objective was to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israeli prime minister from 2006 to 2009, said in an interview that Hilltop Youth “genuinely, deeply, emotionally believe that this is the right thing to do for Israel. This is a salvation. This is the guarantee for Israel’s future.”

The real saints are ordinary people

"Saint" is a word that generally has religious overtones. For example, I used to belong to an organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that was part of the Sant Mat movement, which means "teaching of saints."

The RSSB saints were gurus who supposedly were God in Human Form, something I now deeply doubt. The Catholic church has a more expansive view of saints:

The saints of the church are a diverse group of people with varied and interesting stories. Their ranks include martyrs, kings and queens, missionaries, widows, theologians, parents, nuns and priests, and “everyday people” who dedicated their lives to the loving pursuit of God.

Religious and nonreligious people alike have found inspiration from their lives, particularly in the stories of saints who devoted themselves in service to the poor, sick, and disenfranchised, such as St. Mother Teresa and St. Vincent de Paul, among others.

Many of the saints who were persecuted for their faith, such as St. Stephen and St. Perpetua, showed remarkable forgiveness and patiently suffered through their trials and tortures. Some are revered for their simplicity and humility, including St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Several, notably St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, were writers and thinkers who shaped Western thought for centuries.

Then there's the Urban Dictionary definition, my favorite.

I like this because it doesn't have any sort of religious connotation. Indeed, to me the most impressive saints are, as this definition says, ordinary people who put others' needs before their own. Sure, not always, as this doesn't seem to be possible. But frequently.

That opens the door to sainthood for lots of people, probably most people. Which is as it should be. Genuine saints, not the fake saints revered by religions disconnected from reality by supernatural B.S., are usually little known, though greatly appreciated by those they serve.

Caregivers to those afflicted by dementia. Teachers who are overworked and underpaid. Sanitation workers. Advocates for the homeless. Immigrants who do the tough jobs Americans dislike, then send much of their money to relatives in their native country. So many others.

Sainthood isn't an either-or proposition. It's a sliding scale. Everybody possesses the capacity of acting in a saintly fashion. Some just are able to be compassionate and self-sacrificing to a greater degree than others. 

I'm definitely average when it comes to saintliness. There's nothing special about me in this regard.

But last Friday I had an appointment with the nurse practitioner who serves as my primary care provider. We talked about how to handle the sciatica in my right leg, which has gotten much more painful the past few months.

Since this was my first visit with the nurse practitioner after my doctor left the clinic and I needed a new provider, I told her about how the sciatica began four years ago, in early 2020. In the beginning it was super painful. Nothing could help the pain appreciably. The pain would laugh at the couple of Tylenol pills I'd take.

I'd cry out loud with the pain, and I'm normally not big on crying. I was determined to keep on doing what needed done around our non-easy-care house on ten rural acres. Back then we had a walk-behind mower. I'd mow the grass with tears streaming down my cheeks, the pain would be so bad. I got the grass cut, though.

Every day I'd walk our dog in the late afternoon, just as I'd done before the sciatica started. Some days I'd wonder if I could make the mile-and-a-half loop on roads in our neighborhood, which is quite hilly. Just as with the mowing, I'd hold the dog's leash while I cried out in pain, one step at a time. I'd want to quit and go home, but I never did.

In no way is what I did exceptionally saintly. I mention it just to give a personal example of how people can push through extreme discomfort because they want to feel useful and do something that benefits others. In my case, a wife and dog. 

Given my substantial ego, I'm proud of many things that I've done in my 75 years of living. However, doing household duties while I was racked with severe pain is something that especially pleases me, when I remember it. 

(That said, I'm still looking for ways to relieve my sciatica, since I'd prefer to be of service to others in ways that don't involve a lot of pain, even if that reduces my saintly rating.)

Religion and mysticism are nothing other than the placebo effect

We've all heard about placebos. You know, those inactive substances, such as sugar pills, that are used as controls in research designed to determine whether a genuine drug has positive bodily effects. 

Most of us also are familiar with the frequent finding that placebos turn out to be as effective as genuine drugs, or even surgical procedures. This is perplexing if we assume that the mind and body are separate entities.

But not at all perplexing given the obvious fact that the mind is the brain in action, and the brain is an organ of the body. So if someone believes that a placebo will benefit them in some physical way, that's one part of the body -- the mind/brain -- affecting another part of the body, such as pain receptors.

In her book, The Mindful Body, psychologist Ellen Langer speaks about the fallacy of mind-body dualism. That's been part of our worldview for thousands of years, in both Western (think Descartes) and Eastern (think Hinduism) forms.

Langer writes:

Any change is virtually simultaneously occurring in every cell of our bodies. If I lift my arm, there are differences in my brain from before I lifted it. If I have a thought about my dog, my brain has changed from before the thought. 

Rather than assume that while our minds are engaged, our physiology is inactive, or vice versa, seeing it as one implies that thought and bodily responses occur simultaneously. One might ask, "If I lose a limb or weight, does that mean I lose part of my mind?"

The argument is mind-body unity, not mind-body equality; your mind is certainly affected by your lost limb or change in weight, it's just not one-for one. One might also ask, "If my mind keeps changing, does that mean my body does so as well." The simple answer is yes. The body regenerates all the time.

So again, recognizing the truth of mind-body unity makes it easy to understand how placebos can be so effective. 

Whether people are given sugar pills, saline injections, or sham surgery, when someone believes the treatment will produce a cure, a cure often follows. Among the more striking examples is one in which the patient was told ipecac would stop vomiting and it did stop vomiting, even though ipecac is a medication that induces vomiting. 

Langer describes many other examples of placebo research conducted by her team at Harvard and other investigators. She notes that even when pills are labeled as a placebo, they still have a positive effect: "I believe this shows that as long as patients are induced to have positive expectations, an open-label placebo approach should work."

Reading about placebos in Langer's book this morning got me to thinking about how supposed supernatural experiences are almost certainly another manifestation of the placebo effect.

Of course, with rare exceptions religions and mystical practices don't openly say, "What we're offering doesn't have any proven ability to experience supernatural phenomena, but if you believe they do, there's a good chance you'll have that sort of experience."

In other words, as Langer said, there's plenty of research showing that positive expectations lead to the expected result, even if there's no direct causal connection between what someone is doing -- like meditating -- and a result -- like seeing divine light, hearing divine sound, or otherwise experiencing the presence of a divine being such as God.

A Christian fervently believes that the Bible is true. Jesus is the Son of God sent by Heavenly Father to save souls and take them to heaven. That belief can easily lead the Christian to feel that Jesus is a living presence. They sense Jesus guiding them, loving them, protecting them. 

Jesus isn't actually there. But the benefit they derive from this religious placebo effect is as genuine as if Jesus truly was a force in their life. That's wonderful, even though in no way does it prove that God, heaven, and such are objectively real. They're simply subjective perceptions brought into being by fervent belief.

Or to offer another example from my own brand of religiosity, Eastern mysticism variety, that I embraced for thirty-five years: a guru is believed to be God in Human Form, a divine being who places his supernatural form in the consciousness of a disciple at the time of initiation. 

If this belief is strong enough, and persistent enough, a disciple of the guru may have a vision of the guru, either during meditation or at some other moment. This supernatural vision can seem absolutely real, in the same sense as a sham surgery can cause a patient's knee pain to go away just as a genuine surgery would have.

Placebos work because the human mind is a powerful force. It's absurd to discount placebos by saying, "They're just in the mind." Actually, everything is in the mind. Without a mind, without consciousness, we can't experience anything. 

So I'm not discounting the value of placebos, whether of a religious nature or otherwise. I use them all the time. A physical therapist told me recently that the SalonPas and Biofreeze patches I've been putting on my right leg and butt to relieve sciatica pain during sleep don't do very much, if anything, given the nature of nerve pain.

Okay. I accept that. And I still use the patches. I visualize them reducing pain. I expect they'll reduce pain. I realize that my belief may not be founded in actual fact. That doesn't matter to me. What matters is that I feel a benefit from the patches. 

That's the beauty of placebos. They work because we believe they will. 

 

 

 

Two examples of religious dogmatism from here in Oregon

Today the Portland Oregonian, our state's largest newspaper, had two stories side-by-side about Republican lawmakers acting like the Christian dogmatists that they are.

It's amazing, speaking as an atheist, how religious believers can be so hateful and prejudiced toward people who aren't like them.

I'd never say that Christians shouldn't serve in an elected office. I'd also never say that an entire group -- in this case the LGBTQ community -- supported child abuse and pedophilia. But that's exactly what the Republican lawmakers said. 

That's shameful. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that enough of their conservative constituencies will like what they said, rather than viewing it as what it is: abhorrent. 

I've boldfaced the parts of the stories that outraged me the most.

A Republican Oregon lawmaker has suggested “you don’t want” Muslims, atheists and other non-Christians to serve in elected office.

Rep. E. Werner Reschke, of the small town of Malin near the California border, made the comments in a Jan. 17 appearance on “Save the Nation,” a talk show streamed on Facebook that is affiliated with the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported Monday. Reschke is a member of the association.

The show’s host, former Arkansas lawmaker Jason Rapert, for much of the episode asked Reschke about what he called the “sad reality of the lax treatment of drugs” in Oregon. Reschke said drug decriminalization “makes our state unlivable,” and argued that spirituality and church leaders are part of the solution.

Last week, Oregon Democratic lawmakers introduced a new bill that would undo a key part of the state’s first-in-the-nation drug decriminalization law, a recognition that public opinion has soured on it amid a fentanyl-fueled overdose crisis deadlier than any the U.S. has ever seen.

During the interview, Rapert also asked why Reschke feels it is important that Christians “be involved in government.”

“You go back in history, and you look at men and the struggles that they faced, and the faith that they had,” Reschke said. “Those are the types of people you want in government making tough decisions at tough times. You don’t want a materialist. You don’t want an atheist. You don’t want a Muslim. … You want somebody who understands what truth is, and understands the nature of man, the nature of government and the nature of God.”

The remarks prompted the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin nonprofit organization that advocates keeping religion out of governance, to call for Reschke to apologize to people in his legislative district or to resign. The group sent Reschke a letter last week saying his duty is to support the state and federal constitutions and not to promote his personal religious views.

Reschke told Oregon Public Broadcasting in an email that his comments had been “grossly taken out of context.” But when asked for more specifics about what he meant to say, Reschke did not respond.

Muslim state Sen. Kayse Jama, a Portland Democrat, told the public radio station that he was “disheartened to see one of my legislative colleagues express views contrary to American values, the U.S. Constitution, and our collective aspiration of building a more perfect union. Our ability to live and work with our fellow Oregonians who speak different languages, pray or vote different ways, celebrate different cultures is our strength.”

Here's the other story.

The newest member of the Oregon House of Representatives claimed supporting LGBTQ+ people was akin to supporting child abuse and accused drag queens of pedophilia in months-old posts on his campaign website.

Dwayne Yunker, a real estate broker and city councilor from Grants Pass, was appointed in December to finish the term of former Rep. Lily Morgan, who resigned to become the city manager of Gold Hill. Yunker was already planning to challenge Morgan in the Republican primary, arguing she wasn’t conservative enough for the southern Oregon district.

Yunker’s campaign website includes a post from last August titled “No to Gay Pride Month,” explaining his decision to skip the beginning of a Grants Pass City Council meeting to protest a proclamation about June as Pride Month. He was a member of the council at the time.

Yunker’s campaign post included claims that drag queens are pedophiles and events including family friendly drag shows or drag queen story hours are attempts to make pedophilia seem acceptable. He further declared that supporting Pride Month was akin to supporting child abuse. “It is shocking that any adult would endorse this child abuse,” he wrote.

Yunker expounded on his objections in a subsequent post, titled “Shouldn’t Christians avoid politics?” In it, Yunker wrote that he considered a statement in the resolution that LGBTQ+ people face persecution to be spurious. And he claimed LGBTQ+ people, who he referred to as “the ever-expanding alphabet movement,” discriminated against Christians.

“We cannot sit out afraid someone might call us right wing, homophonic (sic), or even Christian Nationalists,” he wrote.

Kyndall Mason, executive director of Basic Rights Oregon, called Yunker’s promotion of false ideas dangerous.

“The uninformed, hateful and false ideas written in Rep. Yunker’s blog posts are deeply dangerous, and will direct more hate to these constituents and all trans and queer Oregonians,” Mason said.

Yunker didn’t respond to a call or email from the Capital Chronicle on Tuesday.

House Minority Leader Jeff Helfrich, R-Hood River, defended Yunker’s right to express himself.

“While it may be hard for some leftists in Portland to understand this, many Oregonians — including members of the LGBTQ community — do not want children exposed to hyper-sexualized material that they are not developmentally able to understand,” Helfrich said in a statement. “Elected officials have every right to voice those concerns on behalf of the districts that they represent.”

Mason said in a statement that Yunker’s job requires him to serve all his constituents, including the LGBTQ+ Oregonians in his district.

Religious believers are in love with concepts, not reality

I find it amusing when religiously-minded people accuse atheist skeptics like me of thinking too much, of not being in touch with direct experience, of being in love with abstract concepts.

This is a classic case of, as the saying goes, the pot calling the kettle black. Meaning, as that Wikipedia article points out, psychological projection has taken over, and the accuser claims that someone else has the attribute that actually they have. 

For there's nothing more tied to thinking, indirect experience, and abstract concepts than religious belief.

The reason is obvious: since there's no demonstrable evidence that the entities assumed by a religion actually exist, the only way to bring those entries into being is through acts of imagination -- concepts unmoored from direct experience.

What sort of reality would these entities have if they weren't kept alive by the thoughts of those who believe in them? God, Soul, Heaven, Hell, Angels, Divine Grace, Holy Spirit, Enlightenment, Astral Plane, and so many more.

Absent human thought, none of these things would exist at all.

And even with human thought, they exist only as abstract concepts without any grounding in here-and-now reality that other concepts like money, gravity, and sadness have. I got to thinking about this today after reading another short chapter in Joan Tollifson's book Nothing to Grasp. 

One reason I'm enjoying this book is that even when I disagree with something Tollifson says, this doesn't bother me much, because whether or not I agree with her, I like how she makes me think more deeply about issues that lie at the heart of non-religious spirituality.

Here's some excerpts from the "What is This?" chapter.

Take a moment once again to stop reading and to simply appreciate the happening of this moment. Be fully present to the sounds, fragrances, aromas, visual images, somatic sensations -- not these labels, but the happening itself, this undeniable and utterly immediate present experiencing. 

What is this?

The thinking mind instantly wants to supply an answer. It wants to figure this out -- label everything, categorize it, explain it, understand it, analyze it, capture it, frame it, get control of it.

This is the function of the thinking mind, and it serves us well in certain basic survival situations such as food gathering, shelter-building, or navigating our way through new terrain. It has gotten us to the moon and to the top of the food chain.

Our conceptual maps are functionally necessary and not to be discarded, but no matter how accurate the map is, it is never the territory itself. And yet, we have a deeply conditioned tendency to mistake the map for the territory. We do this without even realizing we are doing it.

Some of our most commonplace concepts are so ubiquitous and pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that they are actually concepts. "The world," "the body," "the mind," "the self," "consciousness," "awareness," "nonduality" -- we throw these word-concepts around without ever stopping to wonder what we are actually talking about.

And next thing we know, we're lost in some conceptual confusion, very much akin to wondering what willl happen to me if I step off the edge of the earth. That's an imaginary problem, as all of us in the 21st century realize, but for people in earlier centuries, it seemed quite real.

...When we try to figure out "the meaning of life" or "the nature of reality," or when we try to come up with a conceptual understanding of Consciousness, Totality, God, or the Ground of Being, we inevitably end up frustrated and confused. 

Any conceptual picture of reality is always subject to doubt, and no metaphysical formulation ever satisfies our deep longing for Truth.

What satisfies that deep longing of the heart is the falling away of the attempt to make sense of everything. Of course, this doesn't mean we don't still make relative sense of things in a functional way in daily life.

But we stop trying to take hold of Totality, or grasp the Ground of Being, or figure out the meaning of life. Instead, we relax into simply being life. We learn to recognize (to see, to sense) when we're beginning to grasp or fixate, and in that recognition, quite naturally there is an ability to relax and let go.

When we stop trying to figure it all out, we discover that it doesn't need to be figured out, and in fact, can't be figured out! When we stop desperately trying to get a grip, we find nothing is lacking and there is nothing to grasp.

...If we say, "This is it," the words create the very split they attempt to point beyond. If we say "All is One," it is one too many. If we call it "nothing," it seems to deny the undeniable presence of everything. If we assert that "there is nothing to do," it seems to overlook the necessity of doing whatever we are moved by life to do.

If we assert that "there is something to do," it makes it sound as if something else is required in order to be what we already are. 

...The illusory bubble pops. We see that Here/Now is always unobstructed, boundless and open. It is open enough to include even resistance and contraction. Contraction is simply another form that formlessness is momentarily assuming, another fleeting appearance with no inherent reality.

Nothing needs to be different from how it is. We don't need to define or explain this present happening, and in fact, we can't! The only real answer to "What is this?" is to be awake and see.

I'm inspired by Sam Harris' sharp attacks on religion

Like all of us, Sam Harris has changed over the years.

Following the publication of his acclaimed The End of Faith in 2004, Harris became well known as an eloquent advocate for atheism against the foolishness of religion, joining other noted atheists -- Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett -- who were known as "The Four Horsemen of the New Atheism."

Since, Harris has written additional books and has fashioned a vibrant online presence through his Waking Up app and Making Sense podcast. He still bashes religion, but appears more concerned with other subjects, such as helping people experience the notions of no-self, emptiness, and lack of free will that are compatible both with Buddhism and neuroscience. (Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience.)

I was reminded of the old-time Harris when You Tube kept displaying to me a video called "Sam Harris: Arguments Against Religion - Part 1." This is a compilation of highlights from talks and debates Harris did after The End of Faith came out. 

I've been listening to the video while I exercise. It's inspiring stuff. Well, unless you're religious. Then you'll think this is blasphemous disgusting stuff. Harris doesn't pull any punches. He hits hard at the ridiculousness of religion, using facts and logic to make his case.

There's a quote in the Amazon listing for The End of Faith that reflects how I feel when I watch the video. 

"The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated....Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say."―Natalie Angier, New York Times

Truth-telling has tremendous power.

Harris isn't a comedian, though he does make humorous remarks, but this video has something in common with an edgy stand-up comic. We laugh because the comic is fearless about making fun of "sacred cows," forbidden topics, that usually aren't talked about in polite company. 

In Harris' case, it isn't so much laughter that he elicits from me (though sometimes that happens), but a sense of "Oh, yeah, that's just how I feel, but for some reason I've been reluctant to say it as directly as Harris does." Well, one reason is that I'm not as knowledgeable as Harris is, or as eloquent.

Can't do anything about that. But I can try to be more honest about how I genuinely feel about certain subjects, following in Harris' truth-telling footsteps. For example...

Harris spoke about the insanity of allowing Iron Age myths found in the Old Testament and Jewish lore to inform 21st century warfare and politics. A large proportion of Israelis believe that God gave the Jews territory in the Middle East, so they're now entitled to it. Lots of Christians in the United States believe the same crazy thing.

As Harris notes, a belief is a statement about reality, truth. It's different from a hope.

It isn't crazy for an Israeli to think, "I hope my country can keep control of the West Bank." I don't share that hope, since I favor a two-state solution where Palestinians have their own country. However, it's a lot more acceptable than a bizarre belief that God, the cosmic real estate agent, bequeathed land to Jews.

There's zero evidence supporting that belief, just as there's zero evidence supporting any other supernatural claim religions make. Yet religious people usually aren't challenged about their fact-free beliefs in the same way someone would be if they claimed the moon landings were faked, or that Donald Trump had the 2020 presidential election stolen from him.

Since Harris was speaking not long after the 2001 9/11 attacks by Muslim terrorists on the United States, he was blunt about the Koran -- which he correctly calls not the word of Allah, but one of the world's most boring and poorly written books. Of course, Muslims believe it was dictated to Muhammad by an angel, so every word in it is true.

That sort of religious dogmatism obviously is highly dangerous. Islamic martyrs believe that they'll head to paradise if they die killing infidels. Clearly they're wrong. But that's no comfort to those who lose their lives in the name of Muslim terrorism. 

I'm not as familiar as Harris is with Christian, Jewish, and Muslim history. I do know that he's absolutely correct about how the Bible in no way is divine, but purely human.

The content of the Bible has changed a great deal over the centuries. Some parts of it have been deleted, with other parts added. Editing has altered the meaning of passages to make them conform to how Christians want to spin the story of Jesus, whose supposed miracles aren't unique at all, but were taken from myths floating around the Middle East long before Jesus supposedly existed.

In short, all religions are B.S. (The only exception is non-supernatural Buddhism, which is highly psychological and thus open to confirmation or rejection.) This includes the Eastern religion I was a member of for thirty-five years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

The hour is late and I don't feel like pointing out all the absurdities taught by RSSB, many of which I never really believed in. So I'll limit myself to one absurdity that comes easily to mind: the belief that Kal, the negative power (think Devil, more or less) who oversees the lower realms of creation, got his position by impressing God with an impressive display of athleticism. 

Here's an excerpt from my 2009 post, "A dialogue about Radha Soami Satsang Beas." The dialogue was between me and Shiloh, who wrote to me because she was concerned about her sister being sucked into a cult. Shiloh asked me some questions about RSSB, which I answered, then got comments on those answers from Shiloh.

(5)  Are Kal and the mind used to dispel the disciple’s rational assessment of the master and his words and actions?

Brian: Absolutely. Questioning is supposed to happen before initiation. Afterwards, the initiate is warned to beware of Kal, the Universal Mind who stood on one foot for eons and earned the right from God to rule the lower regions of creation. (Shiloh: Great heavens! How spiritually athletic!)  Kal's job is to keep souls here, and the mind is his means of doing so.

Shiloh: I rest my case. The above-mentioned attitude nullifies the checks and balances ingrained into our very souls to guard against deception. Willfully giving up the critical mind must indefinitely commit one to labor, with dwarfed mentality, through a spiritual never-never land where the only hope of eventual rescue is through painful disillusionment. Since my sister defensively denied that there was any such requirement, she obviously knows, deep down, how dubious this is.

Sam Harris speaks truth to Russell Brand's B.S.

I'm a big fan of Sam Harris, the noted atheist who richly deserves his reputation as a rational mystic. For Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and also is deeply experienced in meditation, primarily the Dzogchen variety of Buddhism. 

Whenever I read Harris' books, listen to his guided meditations and conversations with other people, or view his videos, I come away impressed with his ability to clearly reason about difficult issues concerning all sorts of subjects -- notably including consciousness, religion, mindfulness, and social issues.

It takes me about 10 minutes to do my weekly watering of two bonsai plants that I bought at the Salem World Beat Festival about five years ago and have managed to keep alive even though I've never changed the potting soil and never trimmed them. I do fertilize them. So I've mastered the art of growing bonsai through benign neglect.

While I could mindfully do the watering without distraction, I've gotten into the habit of using that time to watch You Tube videos on my iPhone. Lately I've been looking at videos of Sam Harris. I was drawn to view an 86 minute video of Harris being interviewed by Russell Brand even though it took much more time to watch than a single watering session.

Brand is an English comedian and actor. While he occasionally makes sense in his interview with Harris, mostly I found his attitude irritating and his arguments faulty. Of course, my worldview is much closer to that of Harris than of Brand, so that helps explain why I think Harris came away the winner in their lengthy conversation.

Which I've shared below. I've made the video start about 11 minutes from the end. The final part of the interview, which begins a ways before when this video starts, is where Harris and Brand talk about consciousness, meditation, and religion. I really like what Harris says about the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- here.

He cogently argues that there's absolutely no doubt that the holy scriptures of these religions are human made, not divinely inspired. However, Harris neglected to give specific examples of how an omniscient God could have included knowledge in those scriptures that would provide proof of a godly being.

One example that has been cited by other religious skeptics would have been for God to direct a writer of some holy scripture several thousand years ago to include a mention of a scientific fact that would have made no sense to people of that time, yet would be proven true by modern science. Extra credit would go to God if the fact were expressed mathematically.

Anyway, here's the video. Harris's argument about why religions are clearly human made comes a few minutes after where I've made the video start. 

 

Religion plays a large role in the horrible Hamas-Israel war

Though I'm an atheist, I recognize that wars often don't involve religion to a significant degree. But sometimes they do, which means that rather than being a force for good in the world, religion encourages death and destruction.

Politically, my goal is to be an open-minded progressive. So I embrace the notion being espoused by many liberals on social media that it is possible, and indeed desirable, to simultaneously hold three views about the current war between Hamas and Israel.

(1) Hamas engaged in unforgivable terrorism when its fighters attacked Israeli citizens, killing women and children, decapitating infants, slaughtering young people at a music festival, and taking an estimated 150 people hostage. Now Israel is justified in fighting back against Hamas.

(2) Israel has fanned the flames of Islamic resentment in the Middle East by treating Palestinians in the occupied territories badly and showing little to no recent interest in pursuing a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict. The current right-wing administration of Benjamin Netanyahu has made a bad situation in the West Bank even worse through its oppressive policies.

(3) Most of the two million people living in Gaza aren't Hamas fighters. Israel should do everything possible to protect them during its war against Hamas. This entails complying with generally accepted rules of war to the greatest extent possible. 

It's impossible to separate out the role of religion here because Israel is a Jewish nation and Hamas embraces a form of radical Islam. That said, many Israeli Jews are opposed to fundamentalist Judaism, just as many Muslims in Gaza reject fundamentalist Islam. 

If the reasonable Israelis and Palestinians could get together and discuss a viable two-state solution, likely this could happen. It wouldn't be easy, but absent religious dogmatism, it'd be much more feasible.

What deeply irritates my godless mind is how Jerusalem (and the Holy Land in general) is viewed by all three Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam -- as a holy city. That's absurd, that a city can be holy because it contains structures that deserve to be revered.

Get a fucking life, is what goes through my mind when I hear that Jews want to control Jerusalem because it supposedly was the site of the Temple Mount during the reign of King David, and that Muslims are worried that Jews are going to mess with the Al Aqsa Mosque.

How can anyone believe that God or Allah or Yahweh really gives a shit about what happens to some old buildings? Is God that petty, that obsessive, that egotistical, to care about the place where some religious believers did something or other long ago?

It'd be great if somehow only Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists could go to war with each other on some deserted battlefield where only these religious zealots would be harmed. Sadly, that isn't possible.

Unfortunately religious craziness is going to cause more deaths among innocent people in the coming days, weeks, and months as Israel retaliates against Hamas and, likely, that retaliation hardens the resolve of Islamic fundamentalists to battle against the Jewish nation.

"Losers rule" helps explain both the Old and NewTestaments

Being an atheist, it's difficult for me to decide which is the weirdest and most unbelievable religion, because they're all weird and unbelievable.

Since I don't know a lot about Judaism, I was drawn to a piece by Adam Gopnik in the August 28, 2023 issue of The New Yorker, How the Authors of the Bible Spun Triumph from Defeat. Based on a review of a book by Jacob Wright, "Why the Bible Began," the article aided my understanding of what makes Judaism so strange.

Gopnik says that the Jews were notable losers.

The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world—persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated—and yet the tale of their special selection, and of the demiurge who, from an unbeliever’s point of view, reneged on every promise and failed them at every turn, is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts. Wright’s purpose is to explain, in a new way, how and why this happened.

The easiest explanation is that it happened this way because that’s the way God wanted it to happen. But this does not lessen the need to say how it happened.

If the primary cause of the Old Testament's triumph -- which I obviously don't believe -- is viewed as the will of God, Wright argues that the secondary cause is our love of losers.

The “secondary cause” for the Bible’s triumph, in Wright’s view, can be put simply: losers rule. More people remember the record-losing ’62 Mets than the pennant-winning ’62 Yankees. Division and defeat, Wright explains, made the Bible memorable.

Successive expulsions and exiles forced the Jewish poets and prophets, like Red Sox fans of yore, to imagine defeat as a virtue, dispossession as a gift, failure today as a promise of victory tomorrow. Defeat usually compelled other ancient peoples, as it does us, to invent rationalizations for what happened. (Yes, we failed to pacify Afghanistan, but nobody could have done so.)

In the face of regular defeat, however, the Jewish scribes had to ask whether defeat wasn’t God’s will in the first place, and so opened mankind unto a new contemplative possibility: that spiritual success and failure were not to be judged on worldly terms. Nice guys, or, anyway, pious guys, finish last and should be proud of their position.

Since Jesus was a Jew, we can see this principle continuing on into the New Testament. 

How much losing is there, really, in Christianity? At first glance, the Christian story appears to reverse the polarities and make a tale of universal triumph out of the old Jewish stories of particular defeat. But is this really so?

Debates still rage over whether the Jewish figure of the “suffering servant” presaged the Christian example. Whatever scholars conclude, though, the force of the Christian example surely lies in the extremity of the deity’s abasement, tortured to death in the most humiliatingly imaginable way and left to be buried as a criminal.

The Christian fable potently compresses the Jewish stories of suffering into a single story, unfolding over a single year. Indeed, doesn’t the emotional appeal of Christianity rest on its very Jewish ritualization of extreme suffering and humiliating defeat as a prelude to divine favor?

Consider the number of images of Crucifixion (Jesus dying) in Italian churches as opposed to those of the ascension (Christ rising). Christian art centers on a moment of anguish and defeat, and this is in essence a Jewish idea.

Donald Trump isn't at all religious. He just uses religion for his own selfish and authoritarian ends. One way he does this is by appropriating the Judeo-Christian notion of noble suffering. The more political and legal trouble he gets into, the more he hopes fundamentalists will view him as a martyr.

Before and after Donald Trump’s historic indictment and arraignment, countless MAGA Republican provocateurs have been noting the Holy Week timing and blasphemously comparing Trump to Jesus.

“As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the 3rd day, so too will Donald Trump,” tweeted one right-wing lawyer known for representing Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Other influencers making the comparison include Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, TPUSA Faith founder Charlie Kirk, and even Trump’s own attorney. Trump, himself, framed his arrest as an attack on Christians in an “emergency prayer call” on Tuesday, April 4, with televangelist and longtime aide Paula White-Cain, attorney Rudy Giuliani, and MAGA worship leader Sean Feucht.

Well, you've got to give Judaism, Christianity, and yes, Donald Trump, credit for turning weakness into strength, defeat into victory, humiliation into triumph. I don't consider that either of these religions, and certainly not Trump, deserve to be embraced for those reasons.

But as a marketing ploy, hey, it does seem that "losers rule" is effective. Most of us like a comeback story of someone who overcame difficult obstacles more than a tale of a person whose path to success had no detours or roadblocks.

Einstein: "It is the theory which decides what can be observed"

Here's my third post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the previous posts being here and here.

In my reading I've reached a sort of interlude in-between the first and last parts of the book, each of which deal fairly directly with a monistic interpretation of quantum mechanics, which explains The One title.

But two intervening chapters, "The Struggle for One" and "From One to Science and Beauty," focus on the historic struggle between monism and dualism in Western thought (there's very little mention of Eastern thought, which also has monistic and dualistic aspects).

I don't find these chapters as interesting as the more directly science-oriented ones.

However, reading them still was enjoyable, since I was familiar with most of the names of religiously and philosophically minded people with monistic leanings that either earned them praise or condemnation from the powers-that-be of their time.

Parmenides. Plato. Pythagoras. Plotinus. Dionysius the Areopagite. Eriugena. Meister Eckhart. Nicholas of Cusa. Giordano Bruno. Leonardo da Vinci. Spinoza. Schelling. Hegel. Goethe. Plus others.

Still, I could understand why Pas described how Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and other scientific pioneers arrived at their conceptions of the universe. It was less clear why Pas was describing the tenor of the times in ancient, medieval, renaissance, and other historic periods.

Then I recalled an Einstein quote that I'd included in my book about Plotinus, the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher: "It is the theory which decides what we can observe." The preceding sentence elaborates what Einstein meant: "“Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use."

This helps explain why Pas goes to considerable lengths to examine how monism and dualism have battled for supremacy in the minds of humans. Not that these are strict demarcations, since Plotinus, for example, said about the One: "Therefore he [the One] must fill all things and make all things , not be all the things he makes."

So I think Pas is correct when he asks how it was that the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was so adamant that nothing could be said about the mysterious underlying quantum reality which produced observable results in experiments involving the subatomic realm.

Though Pas doesn't consider that Bohr, Heisenberg, and other pioneers of quantum mechanics were motivated by dualistic Christianity where God is hidden and God's creation is manifest, he does believe that the views of all of us -- scientists and nonscientists alike -- are heavily influenced by how our surrounding culture sees reality.

Of course, it's distinctly possible, and in my view highly probable, that at some level the inner workings of nature are beyond all possible views, at least those capable of being conceived by the human mind. 

Even if this true, science is our best means of attaining a worldview that corresponds most closely to the world as it is. For while Einstein may be correct in saying that the theory decides what can be observed (for every observation entails assumptions), science uses observations of various types to confirm or reject theories -- thereby producing a feedback loop that leads to increasingly accurate theories.

Religion is considerably more blind in its worldview. For whether we're speaking of a major religion, a minor sect, a mystical path, a spiritual approach, or whatever, typically some sort of teaching leads to some sort of belief which leads to some sort of experience that fits with the teaching and belief. 

Thus a Christian is told that Jesus is loving, which leads to a belief that Jesus loves them, which causes an experience of Jesus' love ("Praise the Lord, I found a parking space!"), which is viewed as proving that the belief was true, even though it really doesn't, because the whole process was circular -- a teaching producing an expectation which produces an experience that supposedly proves the teaching.

Can your religion survive without supernaturalism? Buddhism can.

I'm pleased to present another comment from "Appreciative Reader," a regular commenter on this blog, that I liked a lot. (Not coincidentally, I agree with with what he says.)

Appreciative Reader makes a point that, while it appears obvious now that I've read the comment, I hadn't thought of before. Or at least, not as clearly as he expressed it. 

Namely, that some religions, mystical practices, and other forms of spirituality can function just fine without supernaturalism, while others require supernaturalism in order for their teachings to be coherent.

By coherent, I don't mean that the religion or whatever makes objective sense, as a scientific theory would, just that within the confines of that belief system, its tenets hang together in a fashion that is reasonable to someone who embraces the belief system.

As you can read below, Buddhism is coherent whether or not supernatural notions like rebirth and non-physical planes of existence are included within Buddhist teachings.

This explains why a 421 page book about the core Buddhist principles of emptiness and dependent arising that I finished reading today, Seeing That Frees, contains no mention of anything supernatural. At least nothing I recall, and I read the book quite closely.

It also explains why I came to doubt the validity of the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headed up by a guru I belonged to for 35 years that Appreciative Reader uses as an example of a religion that requires supernatural entities in order for its theology to work.

In addition to the examples of RSSB supernaturalism cited by Appreciative Reader, I'd add the belief that the RSSB guru is God in Human Form, having been sent by God to return "marked souls" to Sach Khand, a sort of heaven. 

If the RSSB guru is viewed as a mere fallible human being, the traditional RSSB teachings fall apart, because at their core is the assumption that the guru is divine and accompanies his disciples through higher regions of reality in various non-physical forms.

Buddhism, on the other hand, has no need to view the Buddha in any supernatural sense. He can just be a wise person who figured out a way to end suffering. 

Here's Appreciative Reader's comment.

Hello, Dungeness!

I'm afraid you may have misunderstood me there. What I was trying to say is this:

The Buddha’s methods are designed specifically to lead to the end of suffering, by doing two things: first, arriving at realization that there is no abiding self; and second, by going beyond desire and aversion.

Now that works, obviously, given the superstitions about rebirth and different planes of existence and so on. But it works equally well when those superstitions are got rid of: even without rebirth and planes of existence, these methods still help take us to realization of Anatta [non-self] and towards Nirvana.

On the other hand, Christian prayer and works and intercession and the rest of it, are geared specifically towards getting around Original Sin and reaching the Kingdom of God. So that if those assumptions are invalidated, then that invalidates the entire structure of Christianity.

Likewise, RSSB meditation is geared towards taking us out of the region of Kal [a negative power who rules lower regions of creation], and to Sach Khand [heaven, basically] all of that. And that makes sense only if Kal and Sach Khand exist. If those assumptions are invalidated, then that invalidates the basic, essential purpose of RSSB meditation, and of everything RSSB stands for.

Sure, there might be incidental benefits, like general physical and mental well being. As far as I know, these benefits have been evinced for mindfulness meditation, and not for RSSB meditation, and we might be jumping the gun in assuming that what applies to mindfulness methods applies also to RSSB meditation.

But, regardless of that, these benefits are only incidental. Both in the case of Buddhistic practices, as well as in the case of RSSB. There’s nothing wrong in taking advantage of such; that’s all good, why not; but that incidental wellness is just that, incidental, and has nothing at all to do with what either Buddhistic practices or RSSB practices are geared towards.

And, like I spelled out here, the essential Buddhistic “project”, if I may call it that, which is the cessation of suffering by recognizing that we have no abiding self and by decoupling from desires and aversion, stays valid even if we jettison the superstitions it is predicated on.

But the essential Christian project of going around Original Sin and attaining to the Kingdom of God, and the essential RSSB project of removing oneself from the domain of Kal and acceding to the Sach Khand region, these are completely invalidated if those assumptions, they are predicated on, are invalidated.

I understand what you’re saying, that unlike Christianity, RSSB does not demand that adherents swear belief in superstitions. And that the truth will reveal itself through meditation practice. Even if both those were true, even then, should those superstitions not actually be true, should Kal and Sach Khand not actually exist, well then, surely that renders moot the whole basic fundamental point of RSSB meditation?

Detection of gravitational wave "orchestra" shows power of science

Since I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times, I get frequent notifications of new stories on my iPhone. Some interest me. Some don't.

This morning it was a pleasure to be sent a story about how scientists were able to discover a background hum of gravitational waves, building on the first detection of these waves in 2015.

I've made a PDF file of the story, "The Cosmos is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find." It's well worth a read, having been written by a science reporter with a Ph.D. in particle physics. I'll share a few excerpts to whet your appetite for the whole story.
Download The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves Astronomers Find - The New York Times

On Wednesday evening, an international consortium of research collaborations revealed compelling evidence for the existence of a low-pitch hum of gravitational waves reverberating across the universe.

The scientists strongly suspect that these gravitational waves are the collective echo of pairs of supermassive black holes — thousands of them, some as massive as a billion suns, sitting at the hearts of ancient galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away — as they slowly merge and generate ripples in space-time.

“I like to think of it as a choir, or an orchestra,” said Xavier Siemens, a physicist at Oregon State University who is part of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, collaboration, which led the effort. Each pair of supermassive black holes is generating a different note, Dr. Siemens said, “and what we’re receiving is the sum of all those signals at once.”

The findings were highly anticipated, coming more than 15 years after NANOGrav began taking data. Scientists said that, so far, the results were consistent with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how matter and energy warp space-time to create what we call gravity. As more data is gathered, this cosmic hum could help researchers understand how the universe achieved its current structure and perhaps reveal exotic types of matter that may have existed shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

“The gravitational-wave background was always going to be the loudest, most obvious thing to find,” said Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University and a member of NANOGrav, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. “This is really just the beginning of a whole new way to observe the universe.”

...To detect the gravitational-wave background, researchers took advantage of the lighthouse-like nature of pulsars spread across the Milky Way. “Our detector isn’t something you can build in a lab or even launch into space,” said Thankful Cromartie, an astronomer at Cornell University, during Thursday’s news conference. “It’s closer to the size of the galaxy.”

Pulsars act like cosmic clocks, emitting beams of radio waves that can be periodically measured on Earth. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that as gravitational waves sweep past pulsars, they should expand and shrink the distance between these objects and Earth, changing the time it takes for the radio signals to arrive at observers. And if the gravitational-wave background is indeed everywhere, pulsars across the universe should be affected in a correlated way.

Rather than build a dedicated instrument, the NANOGrav team took advantage of existing radio telescopes around the world: the Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (before its fateful collapse three years ago).

In 2020, after more than 12 years of gathering data, the NANOGrav team released results from monitoring the timing of 45 pulsars. Even then, Dr. Siemens said, the researchers saw tantalizing hints of a gravitational-wave background, but they needed to track more pulsars for longer amounts of time to confirm that they were indeed correlated, and to claim a discovery. So the NANOGrav team approached colleagues through the International Pulsar Timing Array — an umbrella organization that includes collaborations based in India, Europe, China and Australia — and coordinated an effort to uncover the gravitational-wave background together.

This discovery shows why I love science so much. 

The researchers showed amazing creativity, competence, and dedication. They produced a scientific instrument the size of a galaxy by using data from pulsars spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy. This required a tremendous amount of teamwork from scientists across the globe. 

It's mind-blowing enough that the general theory of relativity says that gravity is the warping of space-time, which often is described as being akin to placing a heavy object on a stretchy piece of rubber. The object distends the rubber, just as mass distends the fabric of space-time. 

But to discover gravitational waves that traverse the universe at the speed of light, given how faint evidence for those waves is, that's beyond mind-blowing. A story on Space.com describes the precision that had to be achieved.

In the new research, the "critical evidence" that betrays the source of the signals to be supermassive black holes is a unique pattern found in the arrival times of pulses from a galaxy-sized cosmic antenna of nearly 70 millisecond pulsars in the Milky Way, according to a consortium of astronomers known as The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). Gravitational wave signals from black hole binaries overlap "like voices in a crowd" and result in an incessant hum that embeds as a unique pattern in the pulsar timing data, scientists say.

Scientists extracted that pattern by observing lighthouse-like beams from pairs of pulsars. Using various radio telescopes like the now-collapsed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in Canada, they collected data about the timing of those pulses every month for 15 years. Then, they calculated the difference between the pulses' actual arrival times and their predicted arrival times — which they could estimate within 1 microsecond, comparable to measuring the distance to the moon to within a thousandth of a millimeter, scientists say.

It amuses me when religiously-minded people say that scientists aren't interested in finding evidence for life after death, consciousness existing outside of the brain, supernatural phenomena, and such. That's totally wrong.

Scientists are devoted to learning the truth about ourselves, our world, and our universe. This newest detection of gravitational waves shows the lengths scientists will go to learn something important about reality.

Believe me, if there was substantial evidence in anything supernatural, scientists would be falling over themselves in the rush to study this phenomenon, since it would overturn longstanding assumptions about reality.

But religion never comes up with anything newsworthy about the nature of the cosmos. That's because religions deal in dogma, not facts. Which is why I'm a big fan of science, not of religion.

Truth is beautiful. Which is why religion is ugly.

Truth was on my mind in various ways today.

In the morning I listened to a Chris Hayes "Why Is This Happening?" podcast interview with Kate Crawford, an Artificial Intelligence expert. Then I read an essay in my Question Everything book about the limits of free speech. In the afternoon I made a video on our back deck where I performed the Water Boxing form that I learned in my Tai Chi classes.

I'll start with the video.

I wanted to show people what the Water Boxing form looks like, but I knew that since I'd never seen myself doing the form from the objective outside, only from the subjective inside, there would be some disturbing mismatches between how I thought I looked doing the form, and how I actually did. 

But I ended up feeling good about the video because it pointed out some things that I want to change about how I "play" (in Tai Chi parlance) the Water Boxing form. And while I called our back deck a "patio," I chalked that up to a split in my mind between wondering if I was talking loud enough for my iPhone to pick up my voice, and using the right words in what I was saying.

The truth can hurt sometimes. Yet usually it doesn't, being simply the way things truly are, so far as we can tell. Without embracing truth, we can't make genuine lasting progress in any area: such as work, relationships, education, sports, and yes, spirituality.

Back in my religious days, when I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based organization headed up by a guru, I was struck by how often the word sat (truth) was used by the group.

Satguru meant true guru. Satsang meant a meeting where people heard about truth. Satsangi meant someone who associated with truth. Sat nam meant the true power of the cosmos. I bought into all this "sat" stuff.

Until I eventually decided that if I was going to pursue the truth about reality, I couldn't remain a member of an organization that -- after my thirty five years of learning about its teachings and diligently practicing the prescribed lifestyle -- didn't really possess the truth that I'd once hoped it did.

So I left Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) because I cared about truth.

Truth, after all, isn't what religions like RSSB are all about. They're into top-down control, not open-minded investigation. The RSSB guru used to be fond of saying "It's my way or the highway." Meaning, either do what I say, or leave RSSB, regardless of whether what the guru says makes sense.

On the Chris Hayes podcast, Crawford, the AI expert, spoke about the importance of grounding artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT in facts. If this doesn't occur, then sophisticated chatbots can sound like they're providing reputable information through human-sounding language.

But that information may be faulty, flawed, false.

How can we tell the difference between fact and fiction then? On his MSNBC show, recently Chris Hayes (I'm a fan of his, as you can tell) had an opening monologue where he brilliantly talked about how Republicans here in the United States, notably including Donald Trump, wage war on truth. 

They did this by aggressively, and falsely, claiming that the traditional purveyors of truth and facts can't be trusted: science, the media, academia, government. Having demolished the faith of American conservatives in these institutions with their cries of Fake News!, Republicans said that Fox News and right-wing public figures were the only repository of truth.

Which was completely backward.

For just as religions tell their devotees to ignore science and reason, and embrace religious holy books and holy people, Republicans were urged to ignore reputable sources of truth and only pay attention to the spreaders of Big Lies like the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

The essay by Stanley Fish I read today, "Transparency" is the mother of fake news, speaks about how facts are arrived at.

The insistence on the primacy of narratives and interpretations does not involve a deriding of facts but an alternative story of their emergence. 

Postmodernism sets itself against the notion of facts just lying there discrete and independent, and waiting to be described. Instead it argues that fact is the achievement of argument and debate, not a preexisting entity by whose measure argument can be assessed.

Arguments come first; when they are successful, facts follow -- at least for a while, until a new round of arguments replaces them with a new set of facts. 

...It [the world of fake news] is created by the undermining of trust in the traditional vehicles of authority and legitimation -- major newspapers, professional associations, credentialed academics, standard encyclopedias, government bureaus, federal courts, prime-time nightly news anchors.

...This wholesale distrust of authoritative mechanisms leads to the bizarre conclusion that an assertion of fact is more credible if it lacks an institutional source. In this way of thinking, a piece of news originating in a blog maintained by a teenager in a basement in Idaho would be more reliable than a piece of news announced by the anchor of a major network.

Fortunately, Fish can't be talking about me and my blogs, since I'm a senior citizen in a living room in Oregon! And I subscribe to the digital versions of the New York Times and Washington Post, plus I subscribe to TIME, Scientific American, New Scientist, and The New Yorker.

I smile, and also cringe, when commenters on this blog say that there's no such thing as objective truth or facts, so everybody's opinion about reality is just as good as everybody else's. That's bullshit. Religions want you to believe that truth lies within yourself, and they can tell you how to find it. 

Actually truth is determined through a rigorous process of investigation, argument, debate, and a ferocious dislike of dogma. Sure, personal subjective truth is open to everybody. If you like blueberries, that's your truth. No argument there.

But what I care about in addition to personal truth is objective truth. For that we need solid evidence. And that's where religions, along with today's Republican Party, fall completely short.

Atheist me speaks to religious you

Here's the post that I wrote on my new substack account yesterday, and shared via a link on this blog. I like substack, but after a day of pondering how much I like it, I'm leaning toward sticking with my three blogs as ways to share my writing.

If I was starting fresh, substack would appeal to me. But given the many years of history I have with each of my blogs, it just seems to make sense to stick with what's working for me. I can always use substack as a backup to Typepad, my blogging service, since now and then Typepad has a lengthy outage.

If this happens again, you could head to brianhines.substack.com to see what I'm writing about while I wait for Typepad to be fixed.

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Atheist me speaks to religious you

Hi. I’m Brian. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God.

I used to, for 35 years. But not anymore. I’m addressing this post to those of you who do believe in God. Not with the goal of making you like me, a non-believer.

I just want to help you understand how us atheists and agnostics (who basically are undercover atheists) look upon religious belief.

 

Of course, I don’t speak for all atheists. I’m just sharing my own view. But most of my friends also are atheists, and we frequently talk about religion, so I’m pretty sure that what I’m about to say largely meshes with their perspective.

Let’s start with belief.

That’s obviously a big part of religion, which deals with mystery. What happens after we die? Is there a supernatural realm in addition to this material world? Is there a creator God or has existence always existed? Does morality reside in a divine will or is it purely human?

Questions like these aren’t objectively factual, like “How far is the moon from Earth?” They’re subjective, a matter of belief and, for religious people, faith. Atheists like me answer them either by saying no one knows, or talking about likelihoods: Since there’s no demonstrable evidence of the supernatural, probably it doesn’t exist.

But atheists have no problem with religious belief. At least, taken on its own. (I’ll soon explain what I mean by that.)

Life can be tough. Pain, disappointment, sorrow, disease, death — these and so many other misfortunes can be very difficult to deal with. The way I see it, whatever helps us get through difficult times is a good thing, so long as our source of support doesn’t harm ourselves or other people.

(Becoming a heroin addict isn’t advised for that reason.)

Marx famously said that religion is the opium of the people. OK, that’s fine by me. Believing in a God who cares about us; believing in a life after death much better than this one; believing that prayers can help a loved one in distress. If these beliefs aid someone in getting through tough times, they should imbibe that opium with gusto.

My own religious belief for the above-mentioned 35 years was of the Eastern variety. I was a member of an India-based religious organization headed up by a guru who was viewed much as Jesus was in his time: as a Son of God sent to return souls to their heavenly father.

When my mother suffered several strokes prior to her death in 1985, I found some solace by engaging in a sort of prayer related to the meditation practice I was taught by my guru. Because my mother was an avid seeker of truth, when I meditated I asked my guru to give any benefit that might accrue from my meditation to my mother, not to me.

I’d visualize my mother soaring upward toward a truth-filled heaven with every repetition of the mantra I’d been given to repeat, while I was propelled downward into darkness. Love for my mother made this exercise joyful. It gave me some peace of mind that counteracted my worries about her health.

But here’s the thing about my admittedly irrational religious belief. It was entirely private. I didn’t tell anyone about it at the time. Only recently did I talk in a post on my Church of the Churchless blog about how I acted after my mother’s strokes.

So this gets me to the downside of religious belief: when it ceases to be viewed as a subjective way of making sense of an often confusing, distressing, painful world and becomes seen as objective truth that should be accepted by everybody, including the non-religious.

This is where most atheists, me certainly included, have a big problem with religiosity. Too often here in the United States fundamentalist Christians want to impose their views on the rest of us.

If a religious believer doesn’t want to have an abortion, great. Just don’t try to pass laws that claim life begins at conception. Or if this attempt is made, buttress that claim with rigorous fact-based arguments about the nature of life, not by quotes from the Bible or some other holy book.

This tweet by a noted law professor about the recent ruling by a federal judge that could ban an abortion medication nationwide makes my point nicely.

If a religious believer doesn't accept gender fluidity, great. Stay firm in your personal maleness or femaleness. Just don’t encourage discrimination against LGBTQ people in schools, places of employment, or anywhere else. Science isn’t on your side, even if you consider that your religious scriptures are.

Understand: I’m not saying that religious people have to keep their faith under wraps. After all, here I am writing about my atheist perspective. Religious believers have the same free speech right.

The difference, though, is that we atheists don’t go around knocking on doors trying to convert people to godlessness. We don’t lobby politicians to elevate our perception of the cosmos into law. Sure, one reason we don’t do this is that atheists embrace reason and science, so secular society reflects our point of view.

But atheists also tend to be fiercely independent. After I came up with the title of my Church of the Churchless blog, I needed a subtitle. It took just a few seconds for me to come up with Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence.

Atheists, like cats, are difficult to herd. My wife organized an atheist Meet Up group here in Salem, Oregon. They get together every Sunday for conversation and godless fellowship. The group has few rules, and no beliefs that everyone has to accept. Just a commitment to being open-minded.

For me, people who belong to a religion should be like soccer enthusiasts. Fans of a professional soccer team go to a match dressed in the team colors. They cheer and chant wildly. They believe that their favored team deserves to win because it’s the best damn team in all of soccer.

However, they realize that fans of other teams feel the same way. They don’t consider that their soccer beliefs are based on an objective reality. It’s just how they feel about the team they’ve chosen to embrace.

It’d be nice if all of us could realize that beliefs are simply our subjective ways of looking upon the world, while facts point to an objective shared reality.

Trump's arraignment reminded me of connection between law and science

Today Donald Trump was arraigned in New York City on 34 felony counts involving the falsification of business records. 

Trump at his arraignment 

I was thrilled.

Trump is a horrible human being. He has lied and cheated his way through a life that, amazingly, until now hadn't included being charged with a crime. That changed today, and almost certainly Trump will be charged with additional crimes since there are other ongoing investigations into his wrongdoing.

Following the news about the indictment against Trump that was unsealed today, I heard lots of legal analysis on MSNBC and CNN. I also read stories about legal issues involving the indictment on the Washington Post and New York Times web sites.

I find the law fascinating. I also find science fascinating. But somehow I hadn't made a connection between the two until now. At least, not consciously.

Here's some of the parallels that come to mind.

Both law and science strive for objectivity. Judges and juries are expected to leave behind their personal biases and preferences in favor of rulings that rely on facts and the law. Scientists are expected to behave similarly, making truth the foundation of their investigations, even if their findings aren't what they hoped.

I said "expected" twice in the previous paragraph because law and science are imperfect disciplines. Mistakes are made. Scandals happen. False conclusions are accepted.

However, I have little patience for religious fundamentalists who criticize science and scientists because of those imperfections. I also have little patience for those who consider our legal system to be worthless because innocent people sometimes are found guilty, and guilty people sometimes are found innocent.

Perfection isn't the goal in law and science. 

The goal is to arrive at conclusions through a method that is better than any other approach. For example, judges and juries are much more likely to reach a fair verdict than a king or queen who sits on their throne and decides the fate of people accused of crimes.

And science is much more likely to discover truths about reality than religion is. Careful observation and experimentation, along with rigorous review of claimed findings in an open process, will beat blind faith and dogma when it comes to knowing things about our world and the universe.

But law and science both are messy. In a good way. Meaning, they are designed to be productively inefficient. 

Today the judge in the Trump case said that the defense has four months to file motions. Then the prosecution has four months to respond to those motions. This means that the next hearing in the case won't be until December 2023, with the trial not scheduled to begin until January 2024 at the earliest.

And it could be even longer. The defense is hoping for spring 2024. The trial will take months, probably. Then a verdict could be appealed. 

Like many other people, I wish our legal system would move faster. But I rarely, if ever, hear expert lawyers say that. They accept that cases move at a speed that is designed to arrive at the fairest outcome, not the fastest outcome.

Same applies to science. Research can take years, if not decades. A seemingly significant finding isn't accepted without question. It has to be reviewed by other scientists. It has to be published so others can critique the validity of the finding.

By contrast, religious experiences tend to be accepted uncritically by both the person who had the experience and people who believe that the experience confirms a certain theology. Preachers aren't accustomed to someone interrupting their sermon with "Excuse me, but I think you've got that wrong."

Lawyers and scientists are very accustomed to hearing this.

Winston Churchill's quote about democracy is appropriate here. Law and science aren't perfect, but they're a heck of a lot better than the alternatives to finding justice and truth.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Religion and mysticism are mostly conceptual

Reality can't be captured in concepts.

After all, it's extremely unlikely that the human brain has evolved to be able to completely capture the nature of the reality that fashioned both the human brain and everything else in existence.

But this doesn't take away the utility of concepts for making sense of the world.

"Tree" is a useful way of describing the general nature of vegetative entities that vary tremendously in size, appearance, and such, yet share common characteristics.

However, trees are part of the natural world. They are obviously real. 

Concepts that refer to entities which can't be observed by the human senses, or leave no trace via the effects they cause in the world (the quantum realm is an example of something unseen, yet decidedly real because of observable quantum effects) have less value.

Of course, I just made a value judgement about the value of concepts like "unicorn," "fairy," "devil," "god," "soul," "heaven," and other notions whose only discernible reality lies in the human mind.

Or better put, human imagination.

For many years I enjoyed a fantasy that I shared with billions of other religious believers: that the concepts of the faith I embraced at the time referred to things that were real, even though there was no evidence of them.

Karma. Astral plane. Divine light. Soul travel. Grace. God. Radiant form.

These and so many other concepts were repeated so often in books, talks, and other communications of the religion that I followed (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB), members of RSSB come to view the concepts as something as real as gravity or earthquakes.

What helped me deconvert from this religious and mystical fantasy was a realization that I was tired of living so much in the world of abstract concepts. I longed for substance, of being grounded in here-and-now reality rather than floating in there-and-then spiritual stories.

A thoughtful comment by Ron E. on a recent blog post stimulated these reflections about concepts.

He made some good points in the comment about how religious and mystically inclined people chase after concepts that point to nothing substantial. They're merely ideas that stimulate other ideas in the minds of people who enjoy a good religious or mystical story, even if the story is almost certainly fiction.

Here's what Ron had to say.

Gillihan makes the point that “...We are constantly thinking: even if we decide to stop thinking, our minds will keep doing it anyway. It's what they are good at. If they aren't telling us stories in words, they're crafting made-up scenes or pulling up images from our memory banks. Our minds are actually so caught up in thinking that we don't realize we're thinking.”

Maybe then, we can point to thinking as being the main cause of much of our perceived problems. Leaving to one side at the moment that thinking and the abilities we have for planning and generally improving our lives are beneficial, some aspects of thinking definitely have their down sides.

I’m thinking!! how we accept certain words as truths, as being able to explain something that is purely inference. I’m thinking of terms such as spirit, mind, soul, self, ego, spiritual etc. All these terms are concepts, ideas that do not exist in the natural world unlike body, brain, sight, sound, pain, joy and so on – yes, the physical world.

It seems that we invent many words and spend the rest of our lives trying to think (or meditate) our way into experiencing the states that we believe they describe.

When it comes to mental phenomena it is of course convenient to label the cognitive processes, but perhaps we need to remember that they are just terms describing what the body and brain does naturally.

Otherwise, we can easily become slaves in believing that there is something ‘spiritual’ or ‘other worldly’ about them – and off we go chasing the myths we believe they describe.

A quote that shows the arrogance of religious zealots

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

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

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

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

The quote came from Dov Morell.

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

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

Usually politics is marked by compromise and negotiating.

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

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

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

"Truth-Default Theory" helps explain why religions get away with falsehoods

Last Sunday a friend gave me his unread copy of Malcolm Gladwell's 2019 book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know.

I hadn't heard of the book before. It seems to be less well known than Gladwell's other books like Blink and The Tipping Point.

I'm enjoying it after reading the first few chapters. This morning I read "The Queen of Cuba."

A primary focus of the chapter is on how Ana Belen Montes, a Cuban expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency, got away with being a double agent for Cuba even though warning signs about her were obvious in retrospect, after it was discovered she was passing American secrets to Cuban officials.

Here's excerpts from the chapter that bear on the question of why people continue to believe the teachings of a religion even though they have doubts about it. 

The point of [Tim] Levine's research was to try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies? You'd think we'd be good at it. Logic says that it would be very useful for human beings to know when they're being deceived.

Evolution, over many millions of years, should have favored people with the ability to pick up the subtle signs of deception. But it hasn't.

...Tim Levine's answer is called the "Truth-Default Theory," or TDT.

...We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. 

...To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a "trigger." A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive.

We do not believe, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion.

We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

...Over 40 percent of the volunteers picked up on something odd -- something that suggested the experiment was not what it seemed. But those doubts just weren't enough to trigger them out of truth-default.

That is Levine's point. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

I'm going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it's crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar.

You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that's the wrong way to think about the problem.

The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human. 

...In the movies, the brilliant detective confronts the subject and catches him, right then and there, in a lie. But in real life, accumulating the amount of evidence necessary to overwhelm our doubts takes time.

...This is the explanation for the first of the puzzles, why the Cubans were able to pull the wool over the CIA's eyes for so long. That story is not an indictment of the agency's competence. It just reflects the fact that CIA officers are -- like the rest of us -- human, equipped with the same set of biases to truth as everyone else.

This fits with my own lengthy process of deconverting from the India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I was an active member of for 35 years. After I left the group and started writing about my doubts on this blog, some people would leave comments along the line of "How could you have believed in RSSB for so long, then rejected it?"

The obvious answer, which I recognized but couldn't give a name to such as Truth-Default Theory, is that I always had some doubts about RSSB and its teachings. After all, few religious people believe everything about their chosen faith 100%.

My doubts just didn't reach the enough level as mentioned above until I'd had sufficient experiences of RSSB not being what I originally thought it was to warrant cutting my ties with the organization. This is similar to how I felt about my first marriage, which lasted 18 years.

My wife, Sue, and I got along well for much of that time. But not perfectly. No marriage is perfect. Gradually, bit by bit, Sue and I grew farther apart, until one day the strains in our marriage passed the some level and hit the enough level where both of us felt a divorce was the way to go.

So even though someone may leave a religious group unexpectedly to those in the group, usually they've been having doubts about that religion for a long time. It just took a while for those doubts to rise to the level where they felt they needed to leave the group.

India's 1947 partition shows destructiveness of religion

My previous blog post was about Indian Prime Minister Modi's involvement in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, where about 1,000 people (mostly Muslims, I assume) were killed by Hindu nationalists.

But that death toll is nothing compared to what happened after the British partitioned India into a Muslim territory and non-Muslim territory in 1947. 

I don't know a lot about the Indian Partition. However, I learned something about it in an article in the January 2 & 9 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine article is called "Blood Lines: Seventy-five years after Indian Partition, have we learned how to say what happened?"

The online article is called, "Seventy-five Years after Indian Partition, Who Owns the Narrative?: Literature once filled in archival gaps by saying the unsayable. Now a younger generation is finding new modes of telling the story and finding new stories to tell." 

Here's a PDF file.
Download Seventy-five Years After Indian Partition Who Owns the Narrative?  | The New Yorker

It's heartbreaking to read how the partition was described by people who lived through it and in novels that cast a light on the horrendous happening through the lens of fact-based fiction. 

A Wikipedia article about the Partition of India says that Ghandi was opposed to the splitting up of India. In retrospect, he probably was right. However, for a variety of reasons the British rushed through a not very well thought-out plan for partitioning along religious lines. Wikipedia says:

The two-nation theory is the ideology that the primary identity and unifying denominator of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent is their religion, rather than their language or ethnicity, and therefore Indian Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations regardless of commonalities. It argued that religion resulted in cultural and social differences between Muslims and Hindus. The two-nation theory was a founding principle of the Pakistan Movement (i.e., the ideology of Pakistan as a Muslim nation-state in South Asia), and the partition of India in 1947.

The ideology that religion is the determining factor in defining the nationality of Indian Muslims was undertaken by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who termed it as the awakening of Muslims for the creation of Pakistan. It is also a source of inspiration to several Hindu nationalist organizations, with causes as varied as the redefinition of Indian Muslims as non-Indian foreigners and second-class citizens in India, the expulsion of all Muslims from India, the establishment of a legally Hindu state in India, prohibition of conversions to Islam, and the promotion of conversions or reconversions of Indian Muslims to Hinduism. 

There are varying interpretations of the two-nation theory, based on whether the two postulated nationalities can coexist in one territory or not, with radically different implications. One interpretation argued for sovereign autonomy, including the right to secede, for Muslim-majority areas of the Indian subcontinent, but without any transfer of populations (i.e., Hindus and Muslims would continue to live together).

A different interpretation contends that Hindus and Muslims constitute "two distinct and frequently antagonistic ways of life and that therefore they cannot coexist in one nation." In this version, a transfer of populations (i.e., the total removal of Hindus from Muslim-majority areas and the total removal of Muslims from Hindu-majority areas) was a desirable step towards a complete separation of two incompatible nations that "cannot coexist in a harmonious relationship."

Opposition to the theory has come from two sources. The first is the concept of a single Indian nation, of which Hindus and Muslims are two intertwined communities. This is a founding principle of the modern, officially-secular Republic of India. Even after the formation of Pakistan, debates on whether Muslims and Hindus are distinct nationalities or not continued in that country as well. The second source of opposition is the concept that while Indians are not one nation, neither are the Muslims or Hindus of the subcontinent, and it is instead the relatively homogeneous provincial units of the subcontinent which are true nations and deserving of sovereignty; the Baloch have presented this view, Sindhi, and Pashtun sub-nationalities of Pakistan and the Assamese  and Punjabi sub-nationalities of India.

In the end, religion was the primary criterion for dividing India into Muslim and non-Muslim nations. Of course, many Muslims still live in India, and I assume some Hindus, Sikhs, and members of other religions live in Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh. 

What's beyond sad is how communities where Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs used to live together harmoniously were afflicted by massive outbreaks of violence, which led to one of the largest migrations in human history. Here's how The New Yorker story by Perul Sehgal starts out.

Before it was an edict, and a death sentence, it was a rumor. To many, it must have seemed improbable; I imagine my grandmother, buying her vegetables at the market, settling her baby on her hip, craning to hear the news—a border, where? Two borders, to be exact.

On the eve of their departure, in 1947, after more than three hundred years on the subcontinent, the British sliced the land into a Hindu-majority India flanked by a Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), a thousand miles apart. The boundaries were drawn up in five weeks by an English barrister who had famously never before been east of Paris; he flew home directly afterward and burned his papers. The slash of his pen is known as Partition.

A tidy word, “Partition.” Amid what the Punjabis call the raula—the “uproar”—the region convulsed with violence, Hindus and Sikhs on one side, Muslims on the other. Entire villages were massacred. Neighbors turned on each other. It’s estimated that a million people were killed, and that seventy-five thousand women and girls were abducted and raped, a third of them under the age of twelve. Millions of refugees fled in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in history.

“Blood trains” crisscrossed the fresh border, carrying silent cargo—passengers slaughtered during the journey. Cities transformed into open-air refugee camps, like the one in Delhi to which my grandmother escaped in the night, alone with her children, feeding the baby opium, the story goes, so he would not cry.

Bhisham Sahni’s “Tamas,” a 1973 Hindi novel set in that period, brings such a camp to life. The exhausted refugees are greeted by a functionary of the Relief Committee with the unpropitious nickname Statistics Babu. “I want figures, only figures, nothing but figures,” he instructs. The refugees mill around him, unhearing. They weep, stare blankly. They repeat, in exasperating detail, every step of their journeys. “Why don’t you understand?” Statistics Babu pleads. “I am not here to listen to the whole ‘Ramayana.’ Give me figures—how many dead, how many wounded, how much loss of property and goods. That is all.”

Is that where the story lies? What do “figures, only figures” convey of the full horror and absurdity of 1947? Of a border that cut through forests, families, and shrines, that saw wild animals apportioned between the two countries and historical artifacts snapped in half?

In “Tamas,” the testimonies of the survivors reveal all that records omit and conceal. A refugee is desperate to recover his wife’s gold bangles: won’t Statistics Babu help him? Those bangles still circle his wife’s wrists, however, and she lies at the bottom of a well. It is a detail perhaps lifted from the case of the real-life village of Thoa Khalsa, now in Pakistan, where almost a hundred Sikh women drowned themselves and their children.

We don’t have the figures for women killed by their own families or forced to kill themselves in the name of protecting their honor. There are no records of those who died of heartbreak. My family migrated from an area not far from Thoa Khalsa. Only my great-uncle remained; he lay beheaded in the courtyard of his home. Three months later, his wife died—of grief, some say. Their children were scattered. There are no firm figures available for orphaned children, or for children abandoned along the journey because they were too small to walk quickly enough.

What I find difficult to understand, from my perspective here in the United States, is how it can be that India is still convulsed by Hindu-Muslim violence, with Prime Minister Modi's political party being devoted to Hindu nationalism.

Don't the people of India realize that the horrors of the Indian Partition must never be repeated, even on a much smaller scale? The United States has had to come to grips with the horror of slavery and the injustices African-Americans have had to deal with from 1619 to the present.

But at least there's an almost universal consensus that discrimination against Blacks has to be a thing of the past, though there's a lot of debate about how this is to be achieved. In India, though, my understanding is that Modi and his political party are dedicated to the proposition that Muslims are second-class citizens, and that India is basically a Hindu nation.

Sure, we have Christian nationalists in the United States. However, they are a fringe political movement.  Some Christian nationalists get elected to political positions, but they're nowhere close to controlling the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party, which controls the presidency and Senate, totally rejects Christian nationalism.

Which is why I worry about India. If Modi retains power in the 2024 elections, which recent polling says seems likely, Hindu nationalism will have even more of a foothold in India. That strikes me as really unfortunate, if it happens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worst thing about religions is unreasonable expectations

Since today is Christmas, supposedly the day Christ was born of a virgin (a crazy idea explored here), I feel like I should write about why I've come to dislike religions so much, whether of an Eastern or Western variety.

That's a difficult question to answer, because there's so much to criticize about these belief systems founded on supernatural premises that basically have zero grounding in any sort of evidence-based reality.

Here's an attempt that discusses something I haven't emphasized much in previous blog posts, at least not explicitly: 

One of the worst things about religions is how they encourage people to have unreasonable expectations about their life.

I say this as someone who enjoys what I've learned from various teachers of mindfulness.

Paying attention as much as possible to what is actually happening in the present moment, rather than mentally time-traveling to the past or future where regrets, memories, hopes, anxieties, anticipations, and such reside strikes me as a wise way to live. 

Part of mindful activity, I've found, is keeping comparisons of our current situation with that of other people to a minimal degree. Meaning, we should primarily be aware of our life as it is, not as how it would be if we were someone else.

I have sciatica pain in my right leg.

That physical pain bothers me, but it doesn't prevent me from doing what I need to do. However, sometimes I'll look at other people in a grocery store where I'm shopping and think, Most of them don't experience pain while standing or walking like I do.

This creates some extra emotional pain. I'll feel bad that I have sciatica and others don't. This isn't a massive emotional upheaval, just a disturbance in my feelings caused by a momentary expectation that instead of my right leg feeling the way it does, it should feel the way it used to: pain free.

Put another way, arguably contentment, or happiness, is when there's no gap in our life between what is and what should be. Or at least just a minimal gap. 

This doesn't mean having no goals. But I can have a goal of my sciatica going away someday without feeling that there's something wrong with me having sciatica now. A goal is an aspiration that might not happen. Achieving or not achieving a goal lies in the future.

However, when I have an expectation that something true about my life at this present moment should be different than it is, that creates an uncomfortable feeling. Life is giving me this, whereas I expect life should give me that.

I've read that surveys show that someone's satisfaction with their income is partly based on the actual amount they're getting, yet is heavily influenced by the person's comparison of their income with how others like them are faring. 

And it's clear that social media like Instagram affect the body image of girls: wow, everybody else looks so thin and beautiful, and I don't look that way, so there's something wrong with me.

Well, no, there's nothing wrong with you. You're fine just the way you are.

What's wrong is being led to feel that because you lack qualities others have, you expect that you should be like those other people. Since there's always someone who has what we lack, playing the Expectation Game dooms us to frustration.

Religions play that game to the fullest possible extent. This makes religions destroyers of contentment and happiness. 

Without religion, we'd accept that everyone who is born, eventually dies. Without religion, we'd accept that everyone is a mix of positive and negative qualities, of good and bad, as it were. Without religion, we'd accept that if change is needed in the world or our life, some physical work is needed to make that happen.

With religion, though, we get an expectation that eternal life can be ours; that it is possible to become a saint, an elevated being, even attain perfection; that prayer can tap into the grace of God and produce miracles at odds with the laws of nature and everyday goings-on.

Religious believers then strive mightily to attain the expectations that their chosen faith has put forward. No longer is it enough to live an ordinary human life, with all that this entails: education, play, work, marriage, child-raising, volunteering, and so much else.

Instead of simply accepting that what life offers us humans is what's possible for us, religions set forth unreasonable expectations of what we're supposed to do between our birth and death. Not only do what everyday living demands of us, but attempt to achieve divine or supernatural outcomes.

I don't know about you, but I'm happiest when I'm able to accept the circumstances of a present moment. If my leg hurts, that's OK. If our driveway is covered in ice, that's OK. If I'm unable to balance our checkbook, that's OK.

These are problems, for sure. But worse than having a problem is considering that you shouldn't be having that problem -- because now the problem is magnified by not only being a problem, but also being a problem that shouldn't be happening, so the problem is doubly wrong.

Agonizing over how to make your health better, your family more secure, your world more sustainable, or any of the countless aspirations we may have is absolutely fine. However, agonizing over how you're going to please God, ensure life after death, or enter heaven rather than hell is absolutely a waste of time.

Scientology gets much-deserved ridicule in South Park episode

There's so much competition for The World's Craziest Religion, it's impossible to pick a clear winner. But Scientology has to be somewhere near the top of Mt. Crazy.

I say this even though I don't know very much about Scientology.

Well, until today. For after watching a South Park episode that was on one of the televisions in the aerobics room of my athletic club where I exercised this afternoon, I feel like I do know a lot about Scientology.

You can too, if you watch the 22-minute episode. Wikipedia has a summary of the plot of "Trapped in the Closet" if you're more into reading. And below I'll share some You Tube clips from the episode. 

South Park is wonderfully irreverent. Not just about religion. About everything. It's an animated series that appealed to adults. I've never laughed harder than at some South Park episodes. 

In the Scientology episode, Stan gets exposed to what Scientologists actually believe. Again, this sounds really, really crazy. However, every religion, pretty much, is equally crazy, just in different ways. Here's the clip:

Through a series of events, Stan is considered by Scientology leaders to be the reincarnation of L. Ron. Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Trotted out to reveal Stan's fresh revelations, which are supposed to earn him and a Scientology leader $3 million, Stan goes rogue and tells the truth in this clip.

Proving that crazy religions don't have a sense of humor, the Church of Scientology targeted South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone by investigating them with the goal of finding embarrassing stuff that they'd done. 

Obviously Scientology didn't realize that the twisted minds who came up with South Park wouldn't be at all easily embarrassed. Apparently the investigation fell flat. 

I've only watched about half of this video. It was made by a guy who was a Scientology member for many years. He shares clips from the South Park episode, adding in his commentary on what was right-on about Scientology, and where South Park took some liberties with Scientology dogma in the name of comedy.

A philosopher's take on fate, Buddhism, religions

Before the book I've been writing about recently -- Kieran Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way -- is put away on a bookshelf where I'll have trouble finding it (my books aren't organized very well), I wanted to share some final observations from Setiya that I found interesting.

No such thing as fate. I agree with Setiya that fate doesn't exist, at least not in the sense of events in our life being preordained. I'd say, though, that they're ordained, in that chains of causes and effects control everything in the cosmos outside of the rarified realm of quantum mechanics where probabilities rule. But that realm has no bearing on everyday life.

In this passage Setiya is talking about an episode in baseball.

No one''s life can be reduced to one event, one enterprise, or one ambition. Each is made of facts and facts and facts. Nor is there any fate to be discerned in what transpires. As we relive the season, the at bat, we see how differently things could go, the sheer contingency of failure and success.

More than that, we see how tempting and how dangerous it is to tell the stories of our lives as if they had some hidden teleology, driving onward to predestined ends.

...We can be at fault for failure, but the chaos of contingency in life -- the pitch that dips or doesn't, the catch that bounces from the heel of a glove -- reminds us that control is never absolute and often limited. Whatever your mistakes, moreover, there is more to you than the failures they explain, more than any project you pursue.

Buddhism is mistaken. I can sort of see why Setiya makes the following critique of Buddhism, but he's speaking of the religious side of Buddhism, the supernatural side. There's also a secular side to Buddhism that does proclaim that living in the present moment is the wisest thing to do. (Atelic means being unfinished, incomplete.)

An alternative reading of the film treats life in Groundhog Day as an allegory for samsara, the cycle of suffering conjectured by Buddhist philosophy, in which we live life after woeful life according to the law of karma. The goal is to be free of this cycle, no longer reborn, in the nothingness of nirvana. Thus Phil escapes from repetition to mortality.

Whatever its merits, the Buddhist interpretation of Groundhog Day, and of human life, is not the same as mine. For Buddhists, the power of now is about the transience and emptiness of reality, overcoming attachment to persons and things, the liberation of disengaging from what is fragile, perishable, shifting. For me, it's the opposite. 

To value the atelic is to attach oneself to the present. It's not about emptiness but fullness, not about detachment or liberation but engagement with, and attention to, what is happening now.

...In Midlife, I wrote about meditation as a way to reorient oneself to the atelic. To focus mindfully on breathing, sitting, listening to sounds, detached from future goals to learn to appreciate the present; it nurtures an ability to find atelic value that transmits into everyday life.

Not all religions appeal to God. Setiya is absolutely correct about this. It's a good thing to remember when religious believers make a sharp distinction between atheism and religiosity. Actually, some religions, like Buddhism, are atheistic.

The first thing to say is that not all religions appeal to God. Beside the monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- there are polytheistic religions like Hinduism, and religions that arte nontheistic, like Buddhism.

It's not easy to say what these religions have in common, what makes them religions, binding together a "total reaction upon life" with creeds and doctrines, rituals and practices. But one element of any religion is belief, or faith, in something that transcends the ordinary world -- if not God or gods then a metaphysics of some kind, as in the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness and the puzzling proposition that there is no self.

Religion is, I believe, essentially metaphysical. It provides a picture of the world as a whole that guides our total reaction: how we are meant to feel about life, the universe, and everything. This might involve our relation to God or it might not; but it always involves a metaphysics of transcendence. 

Take Buddhism, for instance. What distinguishes Buddhist meditation from mindfulness as a method of stress control is the aim of ending suffering through discovering the truth -- in particular, the truth that you don't exist. If neither you nor those you love are real in anything like the way you once believed, mortality and loss are less traumatic.

(That is the idea, anyway; it's never been clear to me why discovering this "truth" is not at least as traumatic, like being told that everyone you know, including you, is already dead.)

To come to terms with life through meditation for serenity, or through talk therapy, is not to be religious, or to know the meaning of life, since it is not to discover any such truth.

Putin is an autocrat. So are many religious leaders.

Today Vladimir Putin, the autocrat who controls Russia with extremely little opposition or checks and balances, did what authoritarians like him do.

Act horribly.

In Putin's twisted psyche, he has the right to unilaterally declare that four regions of eastern Ukraine now are part of Russia, following sham referendums in those regions where soldiers knocked on doors and demanded that people vote yes or no on joining Russia.

Not surprisingly, the fake voting produced strong majorities in favor of becoming part of Russia. Now Putin can claim that if Ukraine attacks those regions, as it certainly will keep on doing, that's an attack on Russia.

So nuclear weapons could be used to defend the fictitious motherland. 

That's crazy. But few people in Russia will call out Putin's craziness, because he holds virtually all of the power in his country, having smashed dissent and a free press.

On the whole, I prefer religious authoritarians who preach their own brand of craziness, because they don't control nuclear weapons or command armies. At least, I hope they don't. If Iran or ISIS were to get a nuclear weapon, I'd be deeply worried at religious zealots being able to carry out their destructive fantasies. 

The appeal of autocrats is perplexing. 

Many gurus, for example, attract throngs of disciples who want to be told how to behave and what to believe. I guess not thinking for yourself is easier than being spiritually independent. I fell partly into this trap when I was a member of a guru-centered religious organization for 35 years.

However, I retained a healthy amount of skepticism even as I outwardly complied with various rules. And almost certainly a large proportion of the Russian population is skeptical about Putin's ability to rule their country.

Problem is, autocrats -- whether political or religious -- appeal to the darker side of human nature. They put forward a vision where following their dictatorial orders will lead to great rewards, material or spiritual. Reportedly Putin's speech was autocratic in both regards, political and religious.

Thankfully, Putin has few allies in the world. Even China and India are lukewarm toward his claim of eastern Ukraine now being part of Russia, though they do business with Putin in other regards.

I can only hope that autocrats have a steadily diminishing fan base.

Yes, it can be easier to follow an authoritarian than to chart your own course in life. But I've never regretted leaving behind the religious autocracy of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, led as it is by a guru whose utterances are viewed as divine commands.

One day, perhaps in the far future, Russia will become a democracy. I'm less confident that autocratic religious organizations will do the same, but it's certainly possible. 

Here's what makes something scientific or ascientific

Recently I was talking with someone about Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious group centered on a guru that I was a member of for 35 years. 

I mentioned to this person that I'd always loved science, so one thing that attracted me to RSSB way back in 1970 was that it sometimes used Science of the Soul to describe itself. 

I liked the idea of a spiritual science. But back then I hadn't given a lot of thought to what makes something a science.

There's lots of different definitions. In her book, "Existential Physics," here's how Sabine Hossenfelder speaks about science and what she calls ascience or nonscience.

The distinction between scientific and nonscientific explanations is central to this book, so it deserves a closer look. Science is about finding useful descriptions of the world; by useful I mean they allow us to make predictions for new experiments, or they quantitatively explain already existing observations.

...The belief that an omniscient being called God made the chemical elements is not a good scientific theory. You might say it is in some sense a simple explanation, and maybe you find it compelling. However, the God hypothesis has no quantifiable explanatory power. You can't calculate anything from it. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it unscientific.

So while Science of the Soul sounds nice, my current conclusion is that it has nothing to do with science. After all, there's no evidence that soul even exists, much less that it is capable of revealing hitherto unknown knowledge about reality.

God is a belief. Soul is a belief. Returning to God via one's soul is a belief. These can be comforting beliefs, but if we're concerned about truth rather than mere comfort, it has to be admitted that those notions are thoroughly religious, not scientific. 

Which as Hossenfelder said, doesn't make them wrong. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to prove conclusively that something doesn't exist. God and soul may exist. However, there is no demonstrable evidence that they do. 

Hence, God and soul are ascientific, which is pretty much the same as nonscientific. Atheism simply means not-theistic with the addition of a beginning "a." Same applies to ascientific.

Hossenfelder views theories about the multiverse (other universes that can't be observed) as ascientific even though many scientists speak and write about them a lot. She writes:

The scientific status of these multiverse ideas is thus the same as that of the many-worlds interpretation [of quantum mechanics]. Assuming the reality of something unobservable is unnecessary to describe what we observe. Hence, assuming that these other universes are real is ascientific. 

This isn't a particularly difficult argument, so I find it stunning that my physics colleagues can't seem to comprehend it.

...Well, as I have explained so often, this isn't about what I believe or not; it's about what we can know or not. I am saying that what's beyond what we can observe is purely a matter of belief. Science doesn't say anything about whether it exists or doesn't exist.

Hence, claiming it [the multiverse] exists is ascientific, and so is claiming it doesn't exist. If you want to talk about it, fine, but don't pretend it's science. At that point they're [her physics colleagues] usually either confused or offended or both.

...No one should be denigrated for what they believe in. If you want to believe in the existence of infinitely many universes with infinitely many copies of yourself, some of whom are immortal, that's fine with me. 

But please don't pretend it's science.

Now, I feel the same way about nonscientific religious beliefs, which I used to embrace. I realize how appealing those beliefs can be. They supported me for many years. I can't blame anyone for holding on to such beliefs. 

Life can be painful, difficult, scary, frustrating, sad. If an unscientific belief helps you get through life with more ease, great. Keep on believing if that works for you.

But as Hossenfelder says, please don't pretend that what you're doing is science, a reflection of what reality actually is like. Religious belief doesn't cause problems when the believer understands that what they have faith in is purely subjective with no clear connection to objective reality.

However, when religious belief is wrongly considered to be Truth From On High, that's when harmless belief turns into dangerous dogma.

How minds change. It isn't by brute force.

Since I started this blog in 2004, I've been trying to change the minds of religious believers in the direction of being less dogmatic, judgmental, and rigid.

In this endeavor I've been guided mostly by my own experience and intuition. So when I saw a book review in the July 2 issue of New Scientist about "How Minds Change: The new science of belief, opinion, and persuasion" by David McRaney, I was interested to see what the book is all about.

After all, how many of us have changed our mind about something after someone started screaming in our face that we were wrong, they were right, and we needed to start thinking like them?

In my case, exactly never. So these passages from the review rang true to me.

McRaney spends time with former members of the Westboro Baptist Church in the US, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America", learning how they came to disavow their vitriolic beliefs and become more beneficent to others.

The answer, he finds, isn't willing people to come around to your point of view, but letting them realise the folly of their ways.

...The concept -- that, with more knowledge, long-held hypotheses can be disproved -- isn't likely to be news to New Scientist readers. But it doesn't make McRaney's book any less interesting.

Indeed, his writing is a tonic for those who might scratch their head at how others could be so nonsensical as to distrust vaccines, believe the Earth is flat or subscribe to any other number of conspiracy theories.

It helps shift perceptions from the unhelpful attitude of "this person is stupid and beyond help" to "this person has a different frame of belief, and they can be encouraged to think more deeply about the issue."

Because that is the big discovery of those Californian campaigners and the neuroscientists behind them: simply shouting facts at disbelievers doesn't change their minds, rather it entrenches their belief -- as anyone who has tackled a tricky dinner table conversation will know.

Instead, to change minds, you have to not change minds at all. You have to let people come to their own conclusions -- though, of course, you can help them get there by posing the right questions.

Makes sense. 

When I got remarried in 1990, my second wife, Laurel, didn't share my belief at the time that the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) was God in Human Form. Though she made no attempt to dissuade me from belonging to this India-based religious organization, Laurel would ask good questions.

Such as, how can you be sure the guru is God in Human Form? I'd basically reiterate the RSSB teachings, which came down to an unconvincing "I have faith that this is true and by following the instructions I was given at initiation by the guru, hopefully one day I'll know for sure." 

If Laurel had been been confrontational, I would have become more defensive than I already was, hardening my religious conviction rather than softening it. 

Her questions, though, slowly seeped into my mind, along with other ways that gradually brought me to doubt that what I wanted to be true, actually was. So in the end I came to my own conclusion that I needed to distance myself from the organization that I'd been a devoted member of for 35 years.

That conclusion, though, was the result of all kinds of influences.

My meditation experiences. Books I'd read. Discussions with other RSSB members. Learning more about the guru. Giving talks on behalf of RSSB that required me to ponder which parts of the RSSB teachings seemed reasonable, and which were difficult to believe.

I think it's easier to help someone with changing their mind when you have a genuine relationship with them. This is why counseling can be effective at resolving a personal problem, while reading a book generally isn't. 

On this blog, as is the case with social media in general, most people only know each other as existing in cyberspace, not physical space. This makes it more difficult, though not impossible, to pose questions that will help the other person see things differently, and not be even more determined to look upon those things in the same way.

Appreciative Reader, a frequent commenter on this blog, is quite skilled at this. He's adept at questioning assumptions of other commenters without being excessively confrontational.

For example, recently someone claimed that consciousness has to exist after we die, because nothing existent can be destroyed. Sure, that's a tenet of matter/energy. It changes form, yet still exists. But Appreciative Reader pointed out the obvious.

Since consciousness almost certainly is a product of the brain, then when the brain and body die, changing form into the constituent atoms, consciousness, like life itself, no longer exists -- just atoms do, which become new entities. 

A few cogent questions and observations revealed the hollowness of a belief that consciousness is eternal. I'm not sure if any minds were changed, but they might have been.

What grounds religion and mysticism in reality? Nothing

During the 35 years I was a believer in an Eastern religion -- Sant Mat, of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas variety -- I spent a lot of time pondering how it was possible to know whether a description of God, spirit, soul, heaven, or something else supernatural really was true.

Meaning, that the description wasn't just a bunch of words strung together in a fashion meant to be convincing, but actually reflected the nature of an aspect of reality that transcended this physical universe.

My first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," was an examination of how the new physics related to ancient mysticism. Of course, the mysticism I spoke about happened to be that preached by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), since mysticism comes in many varieties.

I made fun of the notion that a religion should be accepted as true just because a holy book or holy person says it is true.

Aside from this being an obvious circular argument, I said that it was akin to someone writing to the Nobel Prize committee saying that they deserved the physics prize because they'd laid bare all the secrets of the cosmos, the caveat being that the members of the committee would have to wait until after they die to see the evidence of this person's marvelous scientific accomplishment.

A letter like that would quickly find its way into the trash.

But it reflects the core of the world's religions. The claims of a holy book or holy person are accepted on faith, usually accompanied by a belief that a person with such faith will be presented with evidence after their death that the religious teachings they followed while alive are true.

So where does that leave a believer in religion or mysticism?

I argued for the existence of an objective but non-symbolic domain of spiritual reality. It could be experienced by a meditator who, not surprisingly, given what I believed at the time, followed the meditative approach of RSSB. However, that domain couldn't be described in any fashion.

My attitude now is, good try, Brian. But unconvincing.

Well, by "unconvincing" I mean that if there actually is an objective but non-symbolic domain of spiritual reality, nothing can be said about it other than Nothing can be said about it. So religious believers and mystics should, to put it bluntly, just shut the fuck up. 

Enjoy your supposed religious or mystical experience, but don't burden the rest of humanity with bullshit about how marvelous your revelation is, even though it can't really be put into words, so just believe that what is said is true -- which gets us back to the guy/gal who wants a physics Nobel Prize merely because they claim without evidence they've discovered every deep truth about the cosmos.

I'm not a philosopher of science. But I've read a heck of a lot of science books during my 73 years. There isn't a single scientific method, just a wide variety of approaches aimed at understanding what's true about our world and universe.

Some approaches are based on observation. Some are based on experimentation. Some are mostly mathematical. Some are entirely mathematical. All scientific approaches, though, must be capable of being described via words, images, numbers, something. 

This enables scientists to examine a potential fresh truth, subject that claim to rigorous criticism and examination, then decide whether it deserves to be accepted or rejected, with the proviso that, either way, additional research may call into question the first determination of truth/untruth.

Science is grounded.

It makes mistakes, for sure. But the general thrust of scientific inquiry is toward an ever-increasing store of knowledge. Science works so well because it is a public enterprise, many scientific minds collaborating at learning truths about the universe that can be proven provisionally, until an even better truth is revealed.

By contrast, religions and mysticism never progress. A key reason is that they are thoroughly subjective and individualistic. A religious or mystical claim can't be proven to be true, because the claim only exists within the confines of a human mind.

There's no grounding in an observation, experiment, mathematical equation, or other communication that allows for the claim to be tested against objective reality. Almost certainly this is because religion and mysticism have no connection with any objective reality other than this physical world which we all share.

So religious believers and mystics aren't devoted to truth. They are devoted to feeling good about themselves. This makes it frustrating for scientifically-minded people, who are seeking truth about objective reality, to have a discussion with religious or mystically-minded people.

This happens all the time in the comments section of my blog posts. Someone scientifically-minded challenges a claim made by a religious or mystically-minded person. In science, that challenge would be taken seriously, because both sides share the same goal: truth.

But in the comments section (I'm thinking of exchanges between Appreciative Reader and Spence Tepper, for example), the religious or mystically-minded person is seeking to defend their personal perspective or experience. 

They want to continue to feel good about their religious or mystical beliefs. So they engage in all sorts of "word salad" techniques in which all kinds of things are said, except for a saying that directly addresses the challenge directed at them by the scientifically-minded person.

And so it goes. Two ships passing in the night, because one ship is navigating toward truth, and the other ship is navigating toward defending their indefensible personal beliefs. 

Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too.

If you're absolutely certain that you know what is true, this is a very good sign that you're wrong. Also, that you are religious rather than scientific.

This is one of the compelling insights theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli talks about in the concluding chapter of his book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity."

In another post I'll describe why Rovelli views the as-yet-unproven theory of quantum gravity as the best approach to resolving the divide between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. For now, I liked what Rovelli had to say about the approach of science so much, I'm sharing portions of it below.

This really is brilliant. Nothing astoundingly new. Just stated in a fresh appealing fashion. Rovelli captures why I love science so much, and why I've come to dislike religiosity so much.

This acute awareness of our ignorance is the heart of scientific thinking. It is thanks to this awareness of the limits of our knowledge that we have learned so much. We are not certain of all that we suspect, just as Socrates was not sure of the spherical nature of Earth.

We are exploring at the borders of our knowledge.

Awareness of the limits of our knowledge is also awareness of the fact that what we know may turn out to be wrong, or inexact. Only by keeping in mind that our beliefs may turn out to be wrong is it possible to free ourselves from wrong ideas, and to learn.

To learn something, it is necessary to have the courage to accept that what we think we know, including our most rooted convictions, may be wrong, or at least naive: shadows on the walls of Plato's cave.

Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing in what everyone says. Not having absolute faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers.

We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe. The centuries in which people had faith in what they believed were the centuries in which little new was learned.

Had they trusted the knowledge of their fathers, Einstein, Newton, and Copernicus would never have called things into question and would never have been able to move our knowledge forward. If no one had raised doubts, we would be still worshipping pharaohs and thinking that Earth is supported on the back of a giant turtle.

...A scientist is someone who lives immersed in the awareness of our deep ignorance, in direct contact with our own innumerable limits, with the limits of our understanding.

But if we are certain of nothing, how can we possibly rely on what science tells us? The answer is simple. Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us.

It is precisely its openness, its constant putting of current knowledge in question, that guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science. 

When Einstein found better answers than Newton, he didn't question the capacity of science to give the best possible answers -- on the contrary, he confirmed it.

...The nature of scientific thinking is critical, rebellious, and dissatisfied with a priori conceptions, reverence, and sacred or untouchable truth. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical distrust in certainty. 

This means not giving credence to those who say they are in possession of the truth.

For this reason, science and religion frequently find themselves on a collision course. Not because science pretends to know ultimate answers, but precisely for the opposite reason: because the scientific spirit distrusts whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers or privileged access to Truth.

This distrust is found to be disturbing in some religious quarters. It is not science that is disturbed by religion: there are certain religions that are disturbed by scientific thinking.

...To live with uncertainty may be difficult. There are those who prefer any certainty, even if unfounded, to the uncertainty that comes from recognizing our own limits. There are some who prefer to believe in a story just because it was believed by the tribe's ancestors, rather than bravely accept uncertainty.

Ignorance can be scary. Our of fear, we can tell ourselves calming stories: up there beyond the stars there is an enchanted garden, with a gentle father who will welcome us into his arms. It doesn't matter if this is true -- it is reassuring.

There is always, in this world, someone who pretends to tell us the ultimate answers. The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. Because they have got it from the fathers; they have read it in a Great Book; they have received it directly from a god; they have found it in the depths of themselves.

There is always someone who has the presumption to be the depository of Truth, neglecting to notice that the world is full of other depositories of Truth, each one with his own real Truth, different from that of the others.

There is always some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words: "Follow me, I am the true way." 

...For my part, I prefer to look our ignorance in the face, accept it, and seek to look just a bit further: to try to understand that which we are able to understand.

Not just because accepting this ignorance is the way to avoid being entangled in superstitions and prejudices but because to accept our ignorance in the first place seems to me to be the truest, the most beautiful, and above all, the most honest way.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" a compelling story of religion gone bad

Having just written the title of this of this blog post, the question that comes to mind is whether there's ever a compelling story of religion gone good. 

In my current atheist frame of mind, the answer is no. But during the 35 years I was a believer, Eastern religion variety, I would have said, "Of course there is, my chosen faith."

Problem is, everyone who buys into a religion thinks the same way. Their faith is absolutely great, almost faultless. It's those other faiths who give religions a bad name.

My wife and I have started watching Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu, which is based on a true crime story involving the Mormon religion. The first episode shows the grisly murder of a woman and her child.

At first the husband is the prime suspect. But it doesn't take long for the Utah detectives on the case to realize that a lot more is going on involving a very large Mormon family. (Is there any other kind? Mormon tend to have many children.)

Several things struck me about what we've watched so far.

One is how religion does bind people together strongly. This can be good or bad, depending on the nature of the religion. When Allen, I think his name is, brings his girlfriend to a gathering of his Lafferty family, everybody there greets her warmly in a decidedly Mormon fashion.

They do so because she's introduced as a devout Mormon.

That makes her part of the religious club to which they all belong. So there's much talk of Heavenly Father this and Heavenly Father that. (So far, it appears Mormons don't use "God" very much, preferring "Heavenly Father.")

I used to enjoy this feeling of belonging when I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an Indian religious organization headed up by a guru. I knew that I could go anywhere in the world and be warmly welcomed at a meeting of the group, especially if I said some magic words.

Not "Heavenly Father." Rather, "Radha Soami." That was an all-purpose greeting of the group. Also, a way of saying thank you with hands folded. Or a way of ending a talk. Kind of like Aloha, I guess. 

During the many years I was the secretary/leader of our local RSSB group, my phone number was listed as a contact person for the organization. My wife, Laurel, wasn't a satsangi, as members of RSSB were called. 

Often when the phone rang and it was a RSSB initiate on the other end, Laurel would hear "Radha Soami." She'd then say, "Hello." Typically the other person would repeat, "Radha Soami." Laurel would keep saying "Hello" until she heard "Hello" in reply.

I thought this was great.

Every religion has some cult-like aspects. Radha Soami was used as a phrase in much the same way the Mormons in the show we're watching would say Heavenly Father. It marked you as part of the in-group.

But my wife wasn't part of RSSB, though she supported me during the time I was a member of RSSB. So people didn't know what to think when they'd phone my number and hear "Hello" rather than "Radha Soami."

Of course, this wasn't a big deal. It just indicated how every religion has ways to tell the difference between those who belong to that faith and those who don't. Mostly those ways don't cause any real problems.

It'll be interesting to learn, as we get further into Under the Banner of Heaven, what caused some members of the Mormon religion to murder the woman and her child.

I suspect those who did this ghastly deed were under the sway of an extreme cult-like frame of mind, as opposed to the usual "normal" religious cult-like attitude.

 

Will Smith thinks God called on him to slap Chris Rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the first part of that speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoying religious stories is fine. Just realize they're fiction.

As I've noted before on this blog, I'm a big believer in good stories. I enjoy reading fiction. I enjoy watching fiction. 

It never fails to amaze me that I can be sitting in our bathtub every evening, nestled in hot water with a vaporizer full of quality Oregon marijuana, holding an escapist thriller book (I love Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp novels; he's a CIA operative), getting excited about whether Rapp is going to succeed in his latest exploit -- while I know full well that Mitch Rapp is a creation of Flynn's imagination, or in the case of the Mitch Rapp book I'm reading now, the imagination of the author, Kyle Mills, who took over writing the series after Flynn died.

It seems clear that one reason religions are so successful in drawing people into their fold is that they're skilled at telling compelling stories. About the religion's founder, such as Jesus. About the religion's divinity, such as God. About what the divinity has done, such as creating the universe.

Those stories wouldn't be nearly so captivating if the human mind wasn't capable of what I effortlessly accomplish each night in a bathtub: look upon fiction as being real, even as we understand that it is made up.

OK, in the case of religions, the stories are usually officially considered to be non-fiction, being based in reality. But I'm confident that many, if not most, religious people recognize that the stories told in their church, temple, mosque, gurdwara, or wherever, probably aren't real. 

Doesn't matter.

A good story grabs us and inserts our mind into a made-up reality that bears a lot of resemblance to actual reality. We get excited. We get sad. We can't wait to find out what is going to happen. We worry about the fate of characters we like. We rejoice in the downfall of characters we don't like.

It'd be interesting to know if highly religious people are more prone to embrace fictional stories than less religious people. This strikes me as a distinct possibility.

Here's an observation based on a sample of two: my wife, Laurel, and myself. Laurel is even more avidly atheist than I am. She's also less into reading fiction and watching certain types of fictional TV shows than I am.

Currently we're making our way through the streaming series, Yellowstone. We've just begun Season 3 of what I believe are four seasons.

Laurel likes what she watches to make sense. Not complete sense, but fairly close to what typical people would do in reality. Me, my attitude is that if I want to see reality, I just have to look around at the world. 

When I watch a fictional TV show, I want to be drawn into a different sort of world than the one I'm familiar with. I want the writers and actors to captivate me with a story that's so intriguing, I forget that the story is made-up.

So my wife and I have some gentle disagreements about Yellowstone.

She'll point out why it is so unlikely that this or that would have happened the way it did. Even though I agree with her, I'll reply that when I'm watching this show, I want to relax and let what the writers and actors have created wash over me with minimal commentary or criticism from my mind.

Of course, I know that what I'm watching is fiction. Like I said, the human mind, naturally including my mind, has an amazing ability to simultaneously feel like something fictional is real, while knowing that it isn't real.

Preserve that feeling when you're exposed to religious stories. It's fine to enjoy them. Just don't forget that the story almost certainly isn't true. That way you can find enjoyment in fiction while realizing it's unreality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desperation often is born out of fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin is an authoritarian. So are most religious leaders.

There are lots of reasons to support Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia. One key reason is this: it wasn't Russia that invaded Ukraine. It was Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian ruler of Russia.

Now, defenders of what Russia did might say that in the United States, the president is the commander-in-chief of the military. So a decision to go to war rests with the president. 

Actually, that isn't true. Our Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war. Recently American presidents have usurped that power in various ways, but the Constitution hasn't changed. 

But in Russia, Putin is completely free to start a war on his own. He didn't become the so-called "president" of Russia in a free and fair election. He got that office through underhanded means, which is how he has remained in power for several decades, with no end in sight unless he is overthrown.

Speaking of no end in sight, that's a decent description of how long the tables are when Putin meets with those who report to him. Here he is with two of his generals after the Ukraine invasion.

This is an apt image of an authoritarian.

No sitting in a circle with some colleagues, having a free-spirited discussion where everybody's opinion is valued. One man at the head of a table, staring at two generals who know that agreeing with Putin is a must if they value their jobs. And their lives.

I've been using "authoritarian" frequently in my blog posts about Putin's totally unjustified invasion of Ukraine. I see this word as a noun as well as an adjective, as in Putin is an authoritarian.

Today it dawned on me that while Putin is an authoritarian, along with the leaders of China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and some other countries, and Donald Trump is a would-be authoritarian, the dictionary definition of the word applies to many religious leaders also.

The Pope is chosen by a bunch of cardinals. He isn't elected by all Catholics. After becoming Pope, he isn't responsible to anyone else, so far as I know. Others can advise the Pope, but no one can impeach the Pope or otherwise remove him from office.

Ditto with gurus.

If they don't announce themselves as a guru, usually they are appointed by a previous guru. Then they remain the leader of their religious sect until they die or quit. Their followers typically are expected to have blind faith in their authority.

Which, the way I see it, makes them authoritarians. 

Or course, there are degrees of authoritarianism. Putin is a truly nasty authoritarian. He murders journalists and political opponents. He makes dissent a crime in Russia.

Often the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, is lumped in with authoritarian leaders, but Modi was elected and while he's an extremist, I view him as a moderate authoritarian -- not at all a compliment, but a step down from an extreme authoritarian like Putin.

The same applies to religious authoritarians. The current Pope strikes me as kind and gentle, as does the Dalai Lama. Both enjoy concentrated power as the head of their religious organizations, yet they're decidedly mild authoritarians. 

The Supreme Leader of Iran, by contrast, has enormous political and religious power. So I'd definitely call him a high level authoritarian.

Writing that last sentence caused me to realize that I've always used "him" in connection with "authoritarian." Maybe there's a woman who is an authoritarian ruler, either political or religious. I just can't think of one. 

Wacky religious news: Islamic sex cult and baptism gone wrong

My wife, Laurel, a proud atheist, enjoys finding stories about the bizarre side of religions (assuming there is anything other than bizarre in religiosity).

Recently she came across the tale of Adnan Oktar, a Turkish sex cult leader. 

In the end, it was not the British deep state, Darwinists, Jews, Freemasons or any of the sinister cabals that Adnan Oktar long railed against that defeated him. It was the Turkish judiciary.

On Monday, the notorious 64-year-old preacher, often referred to in salacious headlines as a "sex cult leader," was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud, and attempted political and military espionage.

It marks the end of a long and bizarre career for the preacher, television host, author and filmmaker.

Beginning his career in the 80s as a firebrand orator, railing against Jews, Freemasons and Charles Darwin, he later became (in)famous for his shows on Turkish TV, in which he would discuss Islamic principles while scantily clad women with bleached blonde hair danced around him to popular music. These women Oktar referred to as his "kittens".

Oktar did have some very attractive devotees.

Naturally I couldn't resist looking on You Tube for videos of the "kittens" dancing around Oktar on Turkish TV. Found one!

Another religious story I read about in our local newspaper was much less salacious, but equally weird in its own way. Who knew that a Catholic baptism would be invalid if the priest got one word wrong?

Damn, now I'm worried that my own ticket to heaven (admittedly, a heaven I don't believe in) is in danger, since I was baptized as a baby Catholic. 

When is a baptism not a baptism?

When the cleric presiding at the ceremony alters the ritual language in such a fundamental way that it undercuts its meaning, according to the Vatican.

And even the altering of a single, crucial pronoun can render a baptism invalid, it says.

A Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Andres Arango, resigned Feb. 1 as pastor of his parish in Phoenix, after acknowledging he had been using the incorrect baptismal formula during more than two decades of priestly ministry in Arizona, California and Brazil.

Arango used the formula, “We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," instead of the prescribed singular pronoun: “I baptize you ...”

Theologically, that makes all the difference, the Vatican ruled in 2020, because it's not the “we” of the congregation doing the baptizing, but rather the “I” of Jesus Christ, working through the priest.

Now the Diocese of Phoenix is putting out a call to anyone who underwent the ritual under Arango to receive “valid” baptisms — and potentially other rites of initiation. The diocese estimates that thousands were affected.

Baptism is the basic rite of initiation into the Christian faith. In Catholic theology, baptism is considered a sacrament — a visible rite conveying spiritual grace — and is “necessary for salvation,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “The church does not know of any means other than baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude” — that is, heaven.

For a sacrament to be valid, it has to be presided over correctly, the church teaches.

“Baptism for us is for salvation, so it’s a big deal. We need to make sure to make it right,” said Jay Conzemius, moderator of the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s tribunal and past president of the Canon Law Society of America.