Church of the Churchless

Speak out! About politics, religion, everything.

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog, yesterday I wrote "Speak out about Trump's attempt to steal the election." 

Almost certainly Trump won't succeed in this. His defeat was so large, extending over five states that he won in 2016 and lost in 2020 (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia), there's no way lawsuits and recounts are going to overturn Biden's win.

Still, it's important for everyone who cares about democracy to speak out against this attempt to thwart the will of voters, even if it has little chance of coming to pass. I shared some excerpts from a September 2020 piece by Marc Elias, "What Did You Do When Democracy Was at Stake?" 

This is what Elias had to say about speaking out.

To combat this threat to our democracy, it is not enough for us to file lawsuits. It is not enough for the media to report the news. And it is not enough for citizens to shake their heads at the damage he is doing.

We must display civic courage and speak out.

Justice Scalia wrote that “requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”

We must all commit to civic courage where it is the least comfortable—in the town square, in front of our neighbors and families, in our workplaces and in our daily lives.  We must each, as individuals, stand up and speak out about the importance of our democratic institutions and fundamental rights.

Absolutely. 

If someone says, "The only reason Biden won was Democratic voter fraud," it's important to say to them, "You're wrong. No voter fraud has been found in any state. Biden won a free and fair election."

Probably you won't change their mind. But you might. 

What's certain is that you have stood up for the truth by speaking out about a falsehood. And this is as important to do in areas other than politics. If someone says, "Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions aren't causing global warming," the proper response is, "You're wrong. Global warming is happening because of carbon pollution by humanity."

There are many values worth honoring. Truth is one of the most important, because without truth, it is difficult to truly love, help others, be courageous, or do the other things that make life worth living. 

I started this blog in 2004 in large part because I wanted to speak out against religious untruths. I'd call them "lies," but since some people sincerely believe the falsehoods promulgated by religions, often it makes sense to say That isn't true rather than You're lying.

If someone says, "I know that God exists," ask "How can you be sure?" Press for details. See if they can point to demonstrable evidence that God is real. Don't be content with bland statements like "I feel Him with me." 

I'm not saying that you should go out of your way to puncture someone's religious belief bubble. People have all kinds of reasons for believing in God or some other supernatural entity. If they keep their faith private, no problem. Each to their own.

But when claims about the nature of reality are made, truth claims, then lovers of truth have to speak out in defense of their beloved. Untruths need to be called out. If a religious believer simply says, "I believe in God because this makes me feel good," great. There's nothing wrong and a lot that is right about feeling good. 

That's akin to a Trump supporter saying, "I don't want to accept that Biden won because this hurts." OK. That's honest. We all turn a blind eye to some things that are unwelcome or uncomfortable to us. And many aspects of life lie outside of the bounds of objective truth. 

Art, music, philosophy, friendship, charity, the list goes on and on.

The way I see it, this makes defending truth, where it exists, even more important -- since the comparative rarity of objective truth points to its preciousness. Biden has defeated Trump. That's the truth. Trump doesn't want to admit this. 

Yet almost all leading Republicans are afraid to speak the truth to Trump. They fear his tweetful wrath. They fear for their own re-election if they go against Trump's fantasies. So they stay silent, or tell reporters, "I acknowledge that Biden won, but I can't say this openly on the record."

That's cowardice. Truth is more important than any person. Sure, we have to use common sense. To cite a common example, if you were hiding Jews in your house in Nazi Germany, speaking the truth if the Gestapo knock on your door isn't the thing to do.

But usually, speaking out about the truth is the thing to do. The sooner Trump comes to grips with the fact that he has lost, the better our country will be. Every Republican who stays silent about the election outcome is hurting our democracy.

What is the problem religions are trying to solve?

One of the reasons I'm now an atheist after having embraced an Eastern form of religion for 35 years is that it eventually dawned on me that religions are trying to solve problems that don't really exist. 

This isn't the case with other cultural institutions. 

For example, health care agencies try to solve the problem of people getting sick. Environmental groups try to solve the problem of pollution. Educational advocates try to solve the problem of helping children learn.

It's possible to disagree with how these problems are being addressed, but not with the fact that these are real problems. By contrast, Christianity, along with other religions, sees a big problem with sin. Which raises the question, what are they talking about?

"Sin" is a concept. It isn't something real in the same way sickness, pollution, and a lack of learning are. It's an idea that sprang from the minds of humans. "God" is another concept that doesn't refer to anything real. It's another idea that sprang from the minds of humans.

Put those two concepts together, "sin" and "God," and you've got the makings of a religion -- Christianity. 

Most religious people, though, fail to realize how thoroughly they've bought into the concepts of their faith. So thoroughly, they never question the reality of those concepts. 

Notions like God, heaven, sin, karma, soul, spirit, and such are discussed as if they possessed the same reality as trees, air, sunlight, water, dogs, and other entities that clearly exist.

So my advice to religious believers is this.

Think clearly about what problem, or problems, your chosen faith is trying to solve. If all you can come with is a self-referential statement like "The Bible says humans have original sin that only Jesus can forgive," then you've embraced a bunch of concepts that have no grounding in reality.

An exception is Buddhism, which is why Buddhism often isn't considered a religion, but a way of living. 

Buddhism says that life is suffering. That's appealingly concrete. We know that life exists. We also know that suffering exists. Finding a way to deal with the problem of suffering is the foundation of Buddhism.

Somewhat similarly, my take on Taoism is that the problem it addresses is how to live in a flowing fashion, not being bound by rigid rules or attitudes.

"Flow" is a bit more conceptual than "suffering," but having been an avid student of Tai Chi for sixteen years -- Tai Chi being a physical expression of Taoist principles -- I can confidently say that flow is something that can be observed by others and felt by oneself.

Contrast that with the central concept of the Eastern religion that I belonged to for three and half decades: God-realization under the guidance of a Perfect Living Master. There's no evidence that God exists, so no evidence that God-realization exists.

Likewise, there's no evidence that a Perfect Living Master (or guru) exists. As I've observed before, if you stuck a supposed Perfect Living Master in with a bunch of other people and asked someone to pick out the perfect master/guru, there would be no way they could do this, because there is no concrete reality underlying the abstract concept of "perfect living master."

A recent issue of New Scientist has a column by Graham Lawton called "The war against reality." It deals with the thoroughly absurd notions promulgated by those who embrace QAnon. As Lawton writes:

To cut a long story short, QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that contends the world is run by satan-worshipping paedophiles who traffic children for sex and for a life-extending compound that is extracted from their adrenal glands. 

It is named after a shady character called Q, who posts "inside information" on internet message boards. While it is all total and utter nonsense, two US presidents loom large in the QAnon narrative: Obama as one of the controlling elites and Trump as Q himself or the leader of the fight against the elites and the "deep state", a shadowy organisation that really runs the US.

Totally crazy, right? There's no evidence of what QAnon believes in. Yet a disturbingly large number of people think QAnon speaks the truth. Likewise, there's no evidence of what religions believe in, yet billions of people are religious.

Here'a another quote from Lawton's column that is a great summary of what turns me off about religion.

On a good day, I think of QAnon as a fascinating case study of human psychology and behaviour, laying bare how far from reality our minds can stray, how social forces can drag people into parallel universes and how we can sustain beliefs in the face of what is irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

It's amazing how fictional stories can seem so real

If you ever wonder how religious stories -- Adam and Eve, Krishna, Moses, so many others -- are believed by billions of people, go into a movie theater. (Or remember doing this, if theaters are closed where you are because of the Covid crisis.)

If it's a horror film, likely you'll hear shrieks of terror. If a thriller, gasps of surprise. If a romance, tears being wiped away.

We humans have no problem being drawn into a fictional story to such an extent it arouses much the same emotions as if the drama was happening to us in real life. Yet part of us recognizes that we're watching something made-up.

So we embrace a "willing suspension of disbelief."

This has been on my mind lately because a few days ago I re-discovered a series on Netflix that I watched a single episode of years ago, "Designated Survivor."

I've become addicted to the show, having watched about half of the first season. It features Kiefer Sutherland, who I loved in "24," though he plays a very different character this time. I love politics, mysteries, thrillers, and intelligence agency intrigue -- all of which feature prominently in Designated Survivor.

The strange thing is, and given what I said above, actually it isn't really very strange, I get so immersed in the engrossing plot lines that I become worried about what will happen to the main characters who are heroes, not villains. 

"No, Hannah, don't trust him," I'll scream inside my mind, "likely he's part of the scheme to kill the President." (Hannah being a FBI agent.)

Yet I'm watching the plot play out on our TV or my laptop. I'm perfectly aware that I'm streaming a Netflix show. I know that I'm seeing actors speak scripted lines. I can tell the difference between reality and this bit of fiction.

But I still worry that the good guys will be fooled by the bad guys. I agonize if there's a cliff-hanger at the end of one episode, being eager to find the time to fire up Netflix again and see what happens in the next episode. 

In short, I'm acting almost exactly like religious believers do when they feel deep emotions upon, say, hearing a moving sermon about how Jesus' love for humanity was so great, he died for our sins. 

I don't think this is true, of course.

And I strongly suspect that if pressed, a large percentage of Christians would admit that they aren't sure this is true either. They simply love the story as told in the New Testament, which I readily admit is a compelling piece of fiction -- in my atheist opinion.

A big difference between my devotion to Designated Survivor and the devotion of people to religious stories is how serious we are about the object of our attention.

I have minimal interest in converting people to become a Designated Survivor fan. When I've watched every episode I'll move on to viewing or reading other works of fiction. If someone tells me they can't stand Designated Survivor, I wouldn't argue with them. I completely understand that what I'm fixated on is made-up, not an inherent aspect of reality.

Still, there's a common element between me and religious people. We both love a good fictional story.

Spiritual independence should be celebrated every day

Tomorrow, the fourth of July, is Independence Day in the United States. It commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Britain's King George on July 4, 1776. 

Here's another blast from my blog post past that I wrote on July 4, 2005. Some of my views have changed over the past fifteen years, but I still like the basic theme of this post.

Celebrate your spiritual independence

The fourth of July is when we in the United States celebrate our country’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. It’s also a good day for anyone in the world to celebrate his or her independence from Small-Minded Religion.

Religions don’t start out this way, though: small-minded. Without exception the source of each great religion can be traced to people who somehow were able to break the bounds of normal human consciousness and experience truths beyond the sphere of everyday existence.

Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Nanak, early Hindu sages: all shared with humankind a remarkably original revelation or philosophy. While culturally they necessarily followed in the footsteps of historical predecessors, their spiritual attainments broke new ground.

As is the case with mystics in general. It’s difficult to make contact with the divine. Reading holy books, worshipping in holy places, obeying holy men and women, carrying out holy works—these things are easy to do. They’re within the capability of almost anyone.

Such is the province of small-minded religion, where the limitless experience of great mystics is reduced to narrow confines. Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and their spiritual brethren refused to be constrained by the accepted religious teachings of their day. This is why they are called “great”: they stood above shallow traditions, possessing a vision that pierced the clouds of conventional wisdom.

In short, they were spiritually independent. But independence only grows well in the wild. It doesn’t thrive when transplanted into the rows and furrows of garden-variety religion, for the priestly classes consider spiritual independence to be a vice, not a virtue.

The strange thing, of course, is that the revered founder(s) of every religion possessed the very quality that “protectors of the faith” now assiduously attempt to stamp out in followers. Namely, an aversion to following. More precisely, an aversion to following any practice that doesn’t lead to direct experience of the highest truths.

Jesus overthrew the small-minded dogmas of the Judaism of his time. But when Meister Eckhart attempted to overthrow the small-minded conceptions of the Catholicism of his time, he was condemned by the Pope as a heretic. Thus spiritual independence becomes a vice after an original independent spiritual vision has become codified into a rigid theology of do’s and don’ts, rights and wrongs, approved truths and condemned heresies.

In my opinion, anyone who reads widely in the diverse literature of the world’s religions, and approaches these writings without preconceived notions of truth and falsehood, must almost necessarily come to this conclusion: There are many ways to the One, or God. For given the marvelous variety of spiritual and mystical experience, it must be that either (1) all but a few of those who report direct contact with the divine are deluded, or (2) divinity appears in a myriad of guises.

I lean strongly toward the second option. I find it extremely difficult to believe that only one person, or one religion, or one spiritual practice leads to the One. If ultimate reality is viewed as a mountain, with the highest truth lying at the summit, then many paths can be taken up the slopes. Only at the very top do the paths converge at unity; diversity otherwise marks the way.

So independence is the hallmark of genuine spirituality. An independent seeker of God, the One, allows divinity to reveal itself without constraints, without preconceptions, without manmade boundaries. There are no hard and fast rules in spiritual mountaineering; you make your way from where you find yourself, blazing your own trail—because your experience belongs to no one but you.

Certainly others can help support and guide you, but obviously they aren’t you. Only you can honor, preserve, protect, and, most importantly, expand, your spiritual independence.

Along these lines, as an addendum to this post I’ll share an excerpt from a 1974 essay, “Live Not by Lies,” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Writing in the Soviet Union shortly before he was arrested and exiled to West Germany, he speaks of spiritual independence in a much more political context.

But I liked how he spoke of the choice that must be made for truth or falsehood, spiritual independence or spiritual servitude, regardless of the consequences. The applicability to those who desire to be free not of political domination, but of religious domination, is clear (a seeming typo has been changed, “talk” to “walk”).

The fourth of July is when we in the United States celebrate our country’s declaration of independence from Great Britain. It’s also a good day for anyone in the world to celebrate his or her independence from Small-Minded Religion.

Religions don’t start out this way, though: small-minded. Without exception the source of each great religion can be traced to people who somehow were able to break the bounds of normal human consciousness and experience truths beyond the sphere of everyday existence.

Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Nanak, early Hindu sages: all shared with humankind a remarkably original revelation or philosophy. While culturally they necessarily followed in the footsteps of historical predecessors, their spiritual attainments broke new ground.

As is the case with mystics in general. It’s difficult to make contact with the divine. Reading holy books, worshipping in holy places, obeying holy men and women, carrying out holy works—these things are easy to do. They’re within the capability of almost anyone.

Such is the province of small-minded religion, where the limitless experience of great mystics is reduced to narrow confines. Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and their spiritual brethren refused to be constrained by the accepted religious teachings of their day. This is why they are called “great”: they stood above shallow traditions, possessing a vision that pierced the clouds of conventional wisdom.

In short, they were spiritually independent. But independence only grows well in the wild. It doesn’t thrive when transplanted into the rows and furrows of garden-variety religion, for the priestly classes consider spiritual independence to be a vice, not a virtue.

The strange thing, of course, is that the revered founder(s) of every religion possessed the very quality that “protectors of the faith” now assiduously attempt to stamp out in followers. Namely, an aversion to following. More precisely, an aversion to following any practice that doesn’t lead to direct experience of the highest truths.

Jesus overthrew the small-minded dogmas of the Judaism of his time. But when Meister Eckhart attempted to overthrow the small-minded conceptions of the Catholicism of his time, he was condemned by the Pope as a heretic. Thus spiritual independence becomes a vice after an original independent spiritual vision has become codified into a rigid theology of do’s and don’ts, rights and wrongs, approved truths and condemned heresies.

In my opinion, anyone who reads widely in the diverse literature of the world’s religions, and approaches these writings without preconceived notions of truth and falsehood, must almost necessarily come to this conclusion: There are many ways to the One, or God. For given the marvelous variety of spiritual and mystical experience, it must be that either (1) all but a few of those who report direct contact with the divine are deluded, or (2) divinity appears in a myriad of guises.

I lean strongly toward the second option. I find it extremely difficult to believe that only one person, or one religion, or one spiritual practice leads to the One. If ultimate reality is viewed as a mountain, with the highest truth lying at the summit, then many paths can be taken up the slopes. Only at the very top do the paths converge at unity; diversity otherwise marks the way.

So independence is the hallmark of genuine spirituality. An independent seeker of God, the One, allows divinity to reveal itself without constraints, without preconceptions, without manmade boundaries. There are no hard and fast rules in spiritual mountaineering; you make your way from where you find yourself, blazing your own trail—because your experience belongs to no one but you.

Certainly others can help support and guide you, but obviously they aren’t you. Only you can honor, preserve, protect, and, most importantly, expand, your spiritual independence.

Along these lines, as an addendum to this post I’ll share an excerpt from a 1974 essay, “Live Not by Lies,” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Writing in the Soviet Union shortly before he was arrested and exiled to West Germany, he speaks of spiritual independence in a much more political context.

But I liked how he spoke of the choice that must be made for truth or falsehood, spiritual independence or spiritual servitude, regardless of the consequences. The applicability to those who desire to be free not of political domination, but of religious domination, is clear (a seeming typo has been changed, “talk” to “walk”).

Eastern Oregon churchgoers thought Jesus would protect from COVID-19. He didn't.

Here's another in the endless supply of reasons not to be religious. Or, if you want to be religious, to not be a fundamentalist. It destroys your ability to engage in critical thinking.

Meaning, using reason to learn how the world works, and to act in accord with that wisdom.

Oregon, where I live, has done much better than most states during the COVID-19 crisis. In large part that's because we have a Democratic governor, Kate Brown, who put in place a stay at home order early on and has managed reopening in a judicious fashion, allowing counties to relax social distancing rules only if they meet certain guidelines.

In the generally wide open spaces of Eastern Oregon, Covid cases have been minimal. But that changed when a massive outbreak occurred in Union County. 

It didn't take long to figure out that the source of the outbreak was a church that defied public health rules that were in effect. Today the Portland Oregonian has a story about the idiocy of the Lighthouse Pentecostal church.
Download Everything we know about the eastern Oregon church at the center of state’s largest coronavirus outb

Apparently members of the church somehow thought that Jesus, or God, would overrule the laws of nature and virus transmission in favor of their true believing selves.

Well, that blind faith didn't work out well for them. I'd like to think that this will make them put more trust in science and reason than in the fantasies embodied in their Pentecostal teachings, but almost certainly this won't come to pass. 

Here's excerpts from the Oregonian story. 

A church in a small eastern Oregon county linked to the state’s largest coronavirus outbreak held worship services in the weeks before hundreds fell ill.

At least 236 coronavirus cases are tied to Lighthouse Pentecostal Church, near La Grande in Union County. The number of cases in Union County increased tenfold, from 22 to 240, in three days after the outbreak came to light. The outbreak led Union County to voluntarily return to Phase 1 of Gov. Kate Brown’s phased reopening plan — the county had been at Phase 2 when the outbreak happened. There are now 258 coronavirus cases in the county of 27,000 people.

Leaders of Lighthouse Pentecostal Church have remained silent for the most part about the outbreak. Yet social media posts and interviews with other faith leaders shed light on how the church came to be at the center of Oregon’s largest coronavirus outbreak, and how it has responded since.

The church, which operates in Island City near La Grande, has held several gatherings since May that appear to have violated Brown’s restrictions to limit the spread of coronavirus.

In a May 22 Instagram post, Lighthouse Pentecostal Church said it would begin in-person services Memorial Day weekend “in accordance” with President Donald Trump’s demands that states allow churches to open. At the time, Union County was still in Phase 1 of reopening, in which religious groups are not allowed to convene in large groups. The governor allowed faith groups to meet in gatherings of 25 people if congregants stayed a certain distance apart.

A Facebook video uploaded May 24 by the church showed hundreds of worshipers in the church dancing, singing and moving around in close proximity. The video was later deleted.

A faith leader at the church wrote in a Memorial Day Facebook post that he was proud to be an American, listing one of the reasons as being “able to attend church in our building.”

...Pastor Dan Satterwhite, who leads an affiliated Lighthouse Church in Pendleton, pointed to a Bible verse that he said may have guided the decision to hold services in Union County: Hebrews 10:25.

The verse instructs Christians to have personal contact with each other in order to live out the faith they proclaim, Satterwhite said. It tells believers how to help each other move toward love and good deeds, “Not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

...Before the outbreak, the church’s Facebook page published updates nearly every day. The posts included videos of preachers delivering daily devotionals, livestreams of church services and advertisements of free supplies the church offered to people in need earlier in the pandemic.

The church stopped posting on its public Facebook page Wednesday and has deleted all posts from after June 12. On June 17, it created a private Facebook page.

A person who answered the phone at the church June 15 hung up when The Oregonian/OregonLive asked about the Union County coronavirus outbreak. Every day since, the church has not answered the phone or responded to emails.

Three different leaders of the church declined interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

In a now-deleted daily devotional video published June 16 on Facebook, Pastor James Parker appeared to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I appreciate everybody being cooperative with what was decided and doing your best to help,” Parker said. “In the end, our fruit will show that what we’re doing is the right thing, and more people need to do what we did. The more people that do the right thing, the easier it’s going to be for the rest of the world to combat this pandemic that we’re going through.”

Parker did not further explain what “the right thing” is, and the church did not respond to a request for clarification.

Religion is bringing out the coronavirus stupid in people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's excerpts from the New York Times story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some sought earthly remedies inspired by higher powers.

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

Perfection is an imaginary ideal, a lifeless dead end

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if the gates remain open? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every religious person is wrong, almost certainly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ricky Gervais nails the ridiculousness of religion

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

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

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

Hard to argue with Gervais' argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmmmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belonging is what we long for

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now I question that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Science rocks at comprehending the universe

When has somebody using the faith-based method of religion made a spectacularly accurate prediction about how reality behaves? Never. Not ever. 

But people using the tools of science have done just that. This is one reason, among many, why science rocks and religion sucks. 

I've finished the marvelously informative and entertaining book about calculus, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe, that I've written about previously here and here.

Below is an excerpt from the final chapter, where Steven Strogatz, the author, discusses how amazing it is that calculus can be used to make predictions about reality that are as precise as one in a hundred million.

Religion has no choice but to bow down at the feet of science and admit that when it comes to comprehending the mysteries of the cosmos, there's a clear winner. And it sure isn't religion. 

Behold what Strogatz has written. I find this hugely more appealing than any religious text, since I've seen the light and decided that I much prefer truth over fiction, facts over falsehoods, open-minded inquiry over faith-based blind belief.

By wielding infinity in just the right way, calculus can unlock the secrets of the universe. We've seen that happen again and again, but it still seems almost miraculous. A system of reasoning humans invented is somehow in tune with the harmony of nature.

It's reliable not just at the scales where it was invented -- at the everyday scales of ordinary life, with its spinning tops and bowls of soup -- but also at the smallest scales of atoms and at the grandest scales of the cosmos. 

So it can't just be a trick of circular reasoning.

It's not that we're stuffing things into calculus that we already know, and calculus is handing them back to us; calculus tells us about things we've never seen, never could see, and never will see. In some cases, it tells us about things that never existed but could -- if only we had the wit to conjure them.

This, to me, is the greatest mystery of all: Why is the universe comprehensible, and why is calculus in sync with it?

...The first example [of the eerie effectiveness of calculus] takes us back to where we started, with Richard Feynman's quip that calculus is the language God talks. The example is related to Feynman's own work on an extension of quantum mechanics called quantum electrodynamics, or QED for short. QED is the quantum theory of how light and matter interact.

...More important, it's the most accurate theory anyone has ever devised... about anything. With the help of computers, physicists are still busy summing the series that arise in QED, using what are known as Feynman diagrams, to make predictions about the properties of electrons and other particles. 

By comparing those predictions to extremely precise experimental measurements, they've shown that the theory agrees with reality to eight decimal places, better than one part in a hundred million. 

This is a fancy way of saying that the theory is essentially right.

It's always hard to find helpful analogies to make sense of such big numbers, but let me try putting it like this: a hundred million seconds equals 3.17 years, so getting something right to within one part in a hundred million is like planning to snap your fingers exactly 3.17 years from now and timing it right to the nearest second -- without the help of a clock or an alarm.

There's something astonishing about this, philosophically speaking. 

The differential equations and integrals of quantum electrodynamics are creations of the human mind. They are based on experiments and observations, certainly, so they have reality built into them to that extent. Yet they are products of the imagination nonetheless. They are not slavish imitations of reality.

They are inventions.

And what is so astonishing is that by making certain scribbles on paper and doing certain calculations with methods analogous to those developed by Newton and Leibniz but souped up for the twenty-first century, we can predict nature's innermost properties and get them right to eight decimal places.

Nothing that humanity has ever predicted is as accurate as the predictions of quantum electrodynamics.

I think this is worth mentioning because it puts the lie to the line you sometimes hear, that science is like faith and other belief systems, that it has no special claim on truth.

Come on.

Any theory that agrees to one part in a hundred million is not just a matter of faith or somebody's opinion. It didn't have to match to eight decimal places. Plenty of theories in physics have turned out to be wrong. Not this one. Not yet, at least. No doubt it's a little bit off, as every theory always is, but it sure comes close to the truth.

Religious delusion is alive and well in India, as elsewhere

Here's a great example of how closed-minded religious believers are able to deny reality, an Economic Times story about how a spiritual leader is still trusted by his followers even after being convicted of rape and murder. 

This is how the story starts out.

SIRSA: Nothing has changed over the last two years for Baljeet Insaan. Her devotion to “pita ji” remains intact. She says prison bars cannot contain his healing effect. After all, she says, he cured her of cancer 20 years ago.

There are many like Baljeet who swear by Dera Sacha Sauda sect chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh’s “powers”, more so at the Dera headquarters on the outskirts of Sirsa in Haryana, even after his arrest and conviction for the rape of two followers and murder of a local journalist who exposed the scandal in 2017. Though followers at the Dera compound deny it, the Dera following has come down considerably.

But this has not deterred the present followers from looking towards the Dera for solutions to all their problems, including who to vote for.

Helium balloons are a bad way to grieve someone's death

Yesterday my wife and I went on our usual late afternoon dog walk. Meandering along a trail here in rural south Salem, Oregon, I spotted something unusual about twenty feet away. 

Walking over to it, I realized it was a deflated helium balloon. Here's what was written on it. (Hard to tell whether the words came from one person, or several people.)

Dear Grandma, I really wish you were here. I love you so much. Thank you so much for having your kids. They are a blessing. I love them so much.

I wish you were here. See you in heaven, someday soon. Have fun in heaven, Grandma. I love you so much.

Leaving aside the sentiments, it's a really bad idea to set loose a helium balloon for any reason. They litter the landscape. They can be harmful to animals. And helium is a rare element that is needed for reasons other than sending a message to a dead woman. 

I understand why people want to engage in some sort of ceremony after a loved one has died.

Whoever wrote on this ballon obviously was religious. But why would someone think that Grandma was better able to read words written with a sharpie on a balloon, than to tune into a relative's thought?

I've talked to my mother after she died. I didn't believe she could hear me, yet it felt good to speak to her as if she was still alive.

I never had the slightest inclination to write to her, though, especially not on a balloon. 

So Christians, or any other religiously-minded group, should ponder the absurdity of believing that someone who supposedly is in heaven needs to be communicated with via decidedly materialistic means. 

If you believe in the supernatural, shouldn't it be possible for a deceased person to use a divine means to tap into the sentiments of those here on Earth?

Sure seems so. Thus ditch the writing on balloons thing and simply think, Grandma, I love you so much. That will be cheaper, easier, and way more environmentally-friendly.

If God is beyond thought and language, then shut up if you're religious

I'd like to rephrase in a more blunt fashion what I quoted Donald Hoffman as saying in yesterday's blog post. Here's Hoffman.

If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry -- the scientific method. That is taking it seriously.

Some topics -- such as God, the good, reality, and consciousness -- have been claimed to transcend the limited scope of human concepts and thus the methods of science. I have no quarrel with someone who claims this and then, being consistent, says no more about these topics.

But if one does say more, then "What can be said at all can be said clearly" and probed with the scientific method.

And here's my blunter rephrasing:

If you believe that God, or anything else supernatural, is so ineffable it's beyond thought and language, then, please, shut the fuck up and don't say anything to the rest of us about what can't be talked about.

On the other hand, if God, or anything else supernatural, can indeed be discussed in thought and language, then be prepared for some damn tough questions about what evidence you have for your belief.

Do you get it, religious believers? You can't have it both ways.

Meaning, you can't blather on about God, soul, spirit, karma, heaven, astral regions, mystical powers, or any other sort of supernatural shit if you claim that all this stuff lies beyond the domain of human concepts, thoughts, and language.

Just be silent. Keep your ineffable experience to yourself.

Because believe me, there's nothing more boring than to have someone drone on about their supposed experience of God or something else divine, then have that person respond with "It was a personal experience" when asked to provide evidence of its existence.

Guess what?

Everything anyone experiences is personal. There's no such thing as an impersonal experience. But it's possible to talk about personal experiences when what's been experienced exists in a realm of shared reality. 

For example, yesterday my wife and I went on a bike ride at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon with my daughter and granddaughter that involved stopping for a photograph in front of Black Butte. You don't have to take my word for it. Here's a photo. (I don't like to smile much, or at all, in photos because I don't like my smile.)

But no one really knows what my experience of the bike ride that included a stop to feed carrots to horses grazing in the Big Meadown was like. Yet obviously I don't go around claiming that everyone should do what I just did, and have the same experience that I did.

So why do religious believers talk endlessly about how everyone should love Jesus, follow the teachings of Muhammed, embrace a living guru, or whatever? I have much more evidence to support my experience of Black Butte Ranch than any believer has about a supposed supernatural experience.

The difference between us is that I know that my experience was of a genuine reality, so I feel no need to try to convince others that what I experienced was real. On the other hand, religious believers like to blab on, and on, and on about things that there is no evidence for -- except in their own minds.

This is why they should shut their mouths unless they're prepared to present persuasive evidence that what they experienced is true. Please, don't bore those of us who like to exist in reality with your fantasies. Look, I'm fine with fantasies, so long as they are acknowledged as such.

That's what every book of fiction is: a fantasy of the author's mind. Ditto for every movie other than documentaries, or every piece of art that isn't a photograph. I have no problem with people sharing supposed supernatural experiences if they admit that there's no reason for anyone else to believe that the experience was of something objectively real.

But as Hoffman said, once you claim to be able to express your religious experience of a supernatural reality in words or concepts, be prepared to have skeptics like me try to tear apart your arguments. Reality is too precious to be diminished to someone's personal fantasy.

Science is our best method of knowing reality

Here's a basic fact: science is well-suited to understanding the nature of reality.

Religion, on the other hand, is a very poor way of knowing reality. So religious belief must bow down to the scientific method if a believer makes a claim about God, soul, spirit, heaven, life after death, or some other supernatural subject. 

Below are excerpts from a book that I've finished reading, "The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes." In a concluding chapter, Donald Hoffman, the author, makes some great points about the primacy of science in separating fact from fiction. 

Because we humans are prone to so many perception and thinking errors, science uses debate, arguments, and reason to distinguish flimsy dogma from solid truth. 

I especially liked how Hoffman demolishes the viewpoint that because some aspect of reality supposedly is beyond the bounds of language and concepts, beliefs about this ineffable something-or-other have to be accepted by other people. Wrong. If something is outside of language, nothing can be said about it.

Including "this is true." Meaning, if someone claims to have experienced the ineffable existence of God, they should say nothing, because there's nothing that can be said about God. 

On the other hand, if this person wants their belief to be adopted by others, then they've entered into the realm of science. Present your arguments for the existence of God. Show us your evidence for God's existence. Engage in debates with people who disagree with you. Refute arguments for the non-existence of God.

Here's the excerpts from the "Community" chapter of The Case Against Reality.

Science, like philosophy and religious practice, is a human endeavor. It is not infallible.

Each of the many attempts to demarcate, from first principles, science from pseuodscience remains, at best, controversial. What science offers is not gold-standard beliefs, but a potent method for winnowing beliefs that derives its power from the way it engages with human nature.

We are a species that argues.

Experiments show, and evolutionary theory explains, that we reason best when we argue for an idea that we already believe, or against the idea of another that we disbelieve. We did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth. We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion. 

As a result, our reasoning is plagued with foibles, such as a bias toward information that supports what we already believe. The scientific method exploits all of this.

Each scientist argues for her idea, and against contradictory ideas of other scientists. In this argumentative context, our reason is at its sharpest: each idea garners the best support of reason and evidence its proponents can muster, and each endures the best impalement by reason and evidence its detractors can counter.

Add to this sharpening of reason the demand that ideas be precise -- mathematically precise, when possible -- and the phoenix of science arises from foibles of human nature.

Science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry.

It orchestrates the better angels of our nature to promote reason, precision, productive dialog, and an appeal to evidence. It curbs our proclivity for the vague, deceptive, dogmatic, and imperious. Inquiry into any question that captures the human imagination -- including meaning, purpose, values, beauty, and spirituality -- deserves no less than the full benefit of this orchestration.

Why not deny our best chance to better understand?

...If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry -- the scientific method. That is taking it seriously.

Some topics -- such as God, the good, reality, and consciousness -- have been claimed to transcend the limited scope of human concepts and thus the methods of science. I have no quarrel with someone who claims this and then, being consistent, says no more about these topics.

But if one does say more, then "What can be said at all can be said clearly" and probed with the scientific method.

Can science describe who we are? I think so, in the sense that we can, by the scientific method, evolve and refine theories of who we are. But if science cannot describe who we are, then imprecise natural languages such as English certainly cannot describe who we are.

We have no better means of crafting explanations than the scientific method. An explanation that descended from on high, but could not be tested and debated, would be no explanation at all.

Religious fantasies are different from ordinary ones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Changing your mind is a superpower. Use it.

I have a superpower. But unlike those with superpowers who inhabit the pages of comic books and the screens of movie theaters, my astounding ability is available to everyone.

It's called changing your mind. 

I'm sure you've used it  -- many times. After all, we change our minds about countless things during the course of our lives. For example, I've changed my mind about my...

Politics (Used to be conservative, now I'm a liberal).
Cars (I've gone from a 57' VW bug to a 2017 VW GTI, with many other makes in between). 
Marriage (Got divorced, then remarried).
Profession (Earned a master's in social work, then went into health planning/research).
Eating (Loved meat until I became a vegetarian in 1970).
Residence (Grew up in the country, then lived in cities, now back in the country again).
Religion (Was Catholic for a while as a child, then a believer in an Eastern religion, and now an atheist).

So how is changing your mind a superpower? After all, everybody does this, all the time. True, but since we're so used to changing our minds, it's easy to overlook how marvelous this ability is.

First, to change your mind you need to have one.

Rocks don't have minds. Nor do stars. Living beings, though, have various sorts of minds. We humans have a powerful one. Other primates, ditto, though to a lesser degree. Plants have some sort of cognizance, but probably not a mind. Computers are very adept at certain tasks, yet so far lack what we would call a "mind."

Thus people are able to learn, adapt, modify our thinking, feeling, intuition, and such.

Because very little of human behavior is controlled by instinct, we have the capacity to transmit knowledge between people and across generations. We can read Plato and understand a great mind that lived thousands of years ago, thereby altering our own.

One of the best things about being able to change our mind is how good it feels, and how freeing it is. 

Yesterday I wrote on one of my other blogs about how I struggled to figure out why my DR Field Mower wouldn't start. I changed my mind several times over several days, with a foolish "fried battery" mistake thrown in. But in the end I learned what the problem was, with the aid of a friend who is much more knowledgeable about machines than I am.

I watched him methodically evaluate possible reasons for the mower not starting, with his mind changing about the various possibilities as he went along. This is similar to what a doctor does when arriving at a diagnosis, or a scientist when testing a hypothesis.

If a mind stays stuck, it can't move in a more productive or realistic direction. We have to be willing to give up an idea in order to embrace a better one.

Of course, "better" and "worse" can be difficult to discern in some situations.

When a mower won't start, it's easy to tell which is the better idea. It's the one that, when followed, leads to the mower starting. (In my case, we disabled the neutral switch, which was broken, and the mower started just fine -- so that was a good idea.)

In the examples I gave above about some of the areas in which I've changed my mind during my 70 years of living, most people would agree that in these areas, there aren't objective criteria about which of my mind-changes were better or worse.

Subjectively, though, I can confidently say that my current 2017 VW GTI is a much better car than the 1957 VW bug that I drove in college.

For one thing, the heater works in my GTI, so I don't have to scrape ice from the inside of the windshield while driving along, like I had to at times in college. But if someone is a collector of old cars, a '57 VW bug (or beetle) could be much more attractive to them than the modern car I have now.

Ditto for the other areas.

Though I'm a proud progressive, I'd never say that this is the only valid way of thinking about politics, since conservatives can have equally good reasons for thinking the way they do. And when it comes to marriage, my first wife and I were pleased to be done with each other after 18 years of wedded bliss that eventually turned into non-bliss.

Yet she and I both found other partners with whom we were wonderfully compatible. That's the nature of life: it changes. And as life changes, so does our mind (or, as our mind changes, so does life).

I'm not saying that change is always welcome, or even tolerable.

That isn't what I mean by changing your mind being a superpower. Sure, it is possible to reduce anxiety, fear, suffering, and such by altering one's thoughts and feelings, but I'm not aware of anybody who can remain completely unmoved by severe pain, disappointment, or loss. 

What is possible, though, is altering our psyche to embrace a new reality, even though it may be unwelcome. That's a superpower in and of itself -- the ability to say "This is...," no matter what those three dots stand for.

Here's some examples of what I mean.

On this blog I've been writing quite a bit about the legal, financial, and ethical troubles involving the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I was a member of RSSB for 35 years, so I like to use this organization as an example of how religions can be wrong, and do wrong, since I'm so familiar with it. 

(If I'd remained a Catholic for 35 years, then became an atheist, likely I'd be using Catholicism as an example of bad religion.)

Fairly frequently commenters on my blog posts about the Dhillon family's alleged criminality will say something like, "Brian, when it turns out that the guru did nothing wrong, you're going to be unable to accept this." 

That really isn't true. 

Because I'm adept at changing my mind, if the Indian legal system ends up exonerating Gurinder Singh Dhillon, I'll accept that reality with very little trouble. In the same fashion, back in November 2016 it took a few days for me to fully accept that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States.

But it didn't take long for my mind to adjust to a new reality.

Now I'm hoping Trump will be a one-term president. If that doesn't happen, and he is re-elected, I'll be disappointed. However, I won't deny that this happened. (I do worry, though, that Trump won't be able to accept the reality of a 2020 defeat.)

I'll end by noting that even though I'm used to many varieties of religious craziness after 15 years of regularly writing here on the Church of the Churchless, it still surprises me when a commenter expresses extreme surprise at how I could have changed my mind about the validity of the RSSB teachings after being a member of the organization for such a long time.

Often I'll ask them how many things they have changed their mind about during their lifetime. Have you stuck with the same job, same car, same residence, same friends, same political views? Almost certainly not.

There's something about religion that encourages a rigidity of mind that isn't nearly as evident in other areas of life. Members of some religions, like Mormonism or Scientology, will shun people who leave the religion. Yet if someone changes their mind in a way that leads them to join the religion, that's not only fine, it's marvelous. 

For many fundamentalists, mind-changing is a one-way street. It's great if you convert to their religion, yet horrible if you deconvert.

Strange? Yes.

But since just about every religion believes that it, and it alone, is privy to the eternal ultimate truth of the cosmos, this encourages true believers to denigrate anyone who embraces that religion, then chooses to leave it. I guess changing one's mind makes those fundamentalists fearful that their chosen faith really isn't true.

Which, almost certainly, it isn't.

I feel good about having changed my mind to realize this. It's much more pleasurable to accept reality as it is, or at least as it appears, than to cling to a rigid way of thinking that no longer makes sense to me.

Critical thinking welcome here. Preachiness, not so much.

On this blog I've gone back and forth with moderating comments. After deciding a few weeks ago to return to approving comments before they're published on this blog, I'm feeling good about doing this.

I'd rather have just a few -- or even just one -- thoughtful comments on a post than a bunch of irrelevant comments, especially if they're of the "Praise God!" or "Praise Guru!" variety.

But for many years my boundless Buddha-like compassion for religiously-minded beings has led me to offer an "open thread" option to those who want to express themselves in a fashion that isn't appropriate for comments on regular blog posts. Such as, being preachy.

(Here's the newest Open Thread that I just put up.)

This is a big difference between open-minded atheists like me, and dogmatic religious devotees.

I can pretty much guarantee that few religious web sites or blogs allow commenters to criticize their faith, while most non-believers are fine with open discussion of their viewpoints. 

Critical thinking is key. I love comments that exhibit thoughtfulness, even if the commenter disagrees with me. 

Now, I don't have a definition of "critical thinking," nor do I feel like looking one up. Instead, here's my ideas about what this entails.

I'll start with the most important word, critical, since I think most people understand what thinking means. Critical can mean "important," and that's certainly true with critical thinking. It also connotes a certain skeptical questioning, not taking things on faith.

A critical thinker isn't a blank slate, since all of us have preconceived ideas, assumptions, world views, and such.

However, we need to be willing to hold the attitude "I could be wrong." Many, if not most, religious believers aren't willing to do this. Though they may use critical thinking in other parts of their lives, they put it aside when it comes to their belief in God, heaven, life after death, and so on.

The main goal of critical thinking is to understand reality as clearly, completely, and accurately as possible. A related goal is to enable individuals to have productive discussions of what reality consists of, since without critical thinking as a foundation for such discussions, they'd degenerate into people making claims that stifle open debate.

Let's imagine a group talking about global warming -- it's causes, consequences, and what should be done about it. Then someone chimes in with "Jesus saves!" or "God is in control, so no worries." That would stop the discussion in its tracks.

Critical thinking mainly is directed at objective reality, the world outside of our internal subjectivity. 

If someone says, "I believe in God," or "I like chocolate ice cream," there's little that I'd feel like saying in response except, perhaps, wonderful. However, if that person says "God is real," or "Everybody should like chocolate ice cream the best," I'd want to argue with them.

During the 15 years I've been posting regularly on this blog I've seen countless (almost) examples of religious believers mixing up their subjective faith with objective reality. No reasons need be given for subjective faith, but very good reasons must be provided if a claim is made about objective reality.

Typically, truths about objective reality require an extensive process of review, discussion, debate, and criticism.

No one gets to say "the world is like this: _____" without that claim being put under the microscope of critical thinking. Saying so doesn't make it so. Facts, evidence, sound arguments -- those things make it so.

Look, I'm not saying that every comment on this blog outside of an Open Thread needs to be an intellectual tour de force. I'm simply encouraging visitors to this blog who want to leave a comment on one of my posts to be thoughtful in your arguments. Which doesn't mean serious, necessarily. Humor and thoughtfulness are allies, not enemies.

Each of us should be able to laugh at our mistakes, our tendency to believe that we're correct even in the absence of evidence, our unwillingness to admit I could be wrong.

Again, I see this as a difference between us atheists and religious believers.

I'm not certain that God doesn't exist. I'm open to evidence and arguments that God does exist. All I ask is that religious believers have the same attitude. Admit that you aren't certain God exists. Be open to evidence and arguments that God doesn't exist.

If this happens, we can have a dialogue based on critical thinking. 

Here's a few cartoons about critical thinking.

 

I'm an atheist with more faith than any religious believer

A week ago I came up with the title to this blog post.

The next day I wrote a comment in reply to someone who goes by "In Search Of" that ended up being a good start to explaining why I consider that atheist me has more faith than religious believers.

Here it is.

Following my comment you'll find excerpts from one of my first Church of the Churchless blog posts from way back in 2004, "Just have faith." I'm pleased that while I've become more of an atheist over the past fifteen years, my basic faith in reality hasn't changed.

In Search Of, you asked: "Brian, help me out here. Am I being unreasonable? Why can't I get an intelligent response to my question? Are we unable to differentiate between logic and faith? Or are the two at opposite poles? Is this the real question we're trying to answer? And is it an answerable question?"

Great questions. Interestingly, I came up with the title of a future blog post yesterday that I wrote down for future reference: "I'm an atheist with more faith than any religious believer." In brief, here's what came to mind that led to the idea for this blog post.

I have faith in reality.

Not just bits and pieces of reality, but reality as a whole -- the entire unimaginably vast cosmos, including the aspects that we humans currently know about and also the parts that remain a mystery. Sure, I also have faith in discrete entities. My doctors. Scientists. My VW GTI. My MacBook Pro.

But it isn't possible to have 100% faith in anything discrete.

For example, every finding of science is open to revision if new facts are revealed. Ditto for my faith in my car, which has had defects that needed to be fixed. And certainly ditto for religious leaders, even those like Gurinder Singh Dhillon that are supposedly "perfect masters."

Yet even given all that, I believe in a cosmos that operates according to some beautiful laws of cause and effect.

This applies at the quantum level also, though the laws appear to be more probabilistic than deterministic. Still, probability is a law, or quantum mechanics wouldn't be such a precise science that's responsible for much of our modern technology.

So my mantra is: "I open myself to reality, however it may appear." I wrote a blog post about this: "An atheist meditation that pleases God."

Where I went astray during many of my 35 years of being devoted to RSSB and the Sant Mat meditation practice was having undue faith in a particular aspect of reality. Namely, RSSB and the gurus in that tradition. My observation is that many others fall into the same trap.

They ignore evidence that doesn't fit into their mental model of what reality is like.

But reality doesn't give a shit about our mental models. Reality is simply what it is: reality. As another favorite saying of mine from Philip K. Dick puts it, "Reality is that which, when we stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

The guru's financial dealings/wrongdoing aren't a matter of belief. They're well documented. But RSSB devotees are so used to relying on belief, they aren't able to accept that no matter what they believe, reality remains.

So no, I don't believe that faith and reason are opposed.

At least, not in how I view faith: as trust in a reality that exists independent of our beliefs about it. Thus my view is that it's up to us humans to do our best to understand reality, not for reality to comport with our beliefs about it. That latter option leads to magical thinking.

I see it all the time in comments on this blog. RSSB devotees feel that if they only scream loudly enough into cyberspace, "The guru did nothing wrong! The guru is God! Stop criticizing the guru!", somehow this will change the reality of the guru's behavior.

All of our mental models are false to some extent.

However, we get so attached to them, often there is no crack in the mental model armor where greater and more accurate knowledge can enter.

Religious people are especially prone to this, because their need to believe that not only this life, but also their afterlife, is in the hands of a higher power is so strong, so compelling, so desperate, their reluctance to adjust their mental religious model is equally strong.

With my VW GTI, which I like a lot but am not hugely devoted to, I still found it difficult to accept that a creaking in the sunroof really was a major defect. I tried quite a few ways to fix it before it finally dawned on me, and my dealership, that the whole thing needed to be replaced, basically. See: "My VW had a creaky sunroof. Here's the tale of a 5-week repair."  

There's an analogy here.

Sometimes an entire mental model needs major refurbishing, or even replacement. That's what happened with me and the RSSB teachings. Well, looks like I just wrote a good portion of the above-mentioned planned post. Thanks for giving me that head start.

And here's the excerpts from the above-mentioned "Just have faith" post.

Faith is wonderful.
Faith is all we need to be spiritual.
Just faith. Faith alone.
So we shouldn't have faith in anything other than pure, naked, empty faith.

...Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith:

Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered.

Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos.

You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos.

For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

Yuval Noah Harari: All religions are fake news

Here in the United States it's our misfortune to be suffering through a president who blabs incessantly about "fake news." Which, in his addled mind, means any news that tells the truth about the lies, misdeeds, and unwise policies being foisted on Americans by Donald Trump and his cronies. 

But historian Yuval Noah Harari talks about a different sort of fake news in his third book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. As noted in a recent post of mine that included some quotes from Harari's new book, I liked his first books (Sapiens and Homo Deus).

This offering from Harari strikes me as even better than his first two. Harari is a marvelously clear thinker with a knack for making complex ideas seem appealingly simple. When I read him, I'm constantly saying to myself, I knew this, but I didn't know that I knew it until Harari pointed it out.

Here's an excerpt from the "Post-Truth" chapter in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

You'll see that while Harari considers all religions to be in the business of promulgating fictions, he recognizes that these can be useful fictions. Obviously that doesn't make them true. Just useful. 

In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives.

Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them

As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.

So if you blame Facebook, Trump, or Putin for ushering in a a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves into a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran.

For millennia, much of what passed for "news" and "facts" in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons, and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld. 

We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn't like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit -- yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years. 

Some fake news lasts forever.

I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that's exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion, and we are admonished not to call it "fake news" in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath).

Note, however, that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion. Just the opposite. For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity's tool kit.

By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible. They inspire people to build hospitals, schools, and bridges in addition to armies and prisons. Adam and Eve never existed, but Chartres Cathedral is still beautiful. 

Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and can still encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous, and creative -- just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace, and the Harry Potter books. 

Again, some people might be offended by my comparison of the Bible to Harry Potter. If you are a scientifically-minded Christian, you might explain away all the errors, myths, and contradictions in the Bible by arguing that the holy book was never meant to be read as a factual account, but rather as a metaphorical story containing deep wisdom. 

But isn't that true of the Harry Potter stories too?

If you are a fundamentalist Christian, you are more likely to insist that every word of the Bible is literally true. Let's assume for a moment that you are right, and that the Bible is indeed the infallible word of the one true God. What, then, do you make of the Quran, the Talmud, the Book of Mormon, the Vedas, the Avesta, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead?

Aren't you tempted to say that these texts are elaborate fictions created by flesh-and-blood humans (or perhaps by devils)?

George Carlin jokes about absurdity of religion

In an email message, a regular Church of the  Churchless visitor recommended that I check out a George Carlin video about Christianity. 

When I searched You Tube, a pleasing variety of videos popped up where Carlin bashes religion. So I picked the one that's gotten the most views, 11 million. 

Enjoy.

Carlin hits on a lot of great points, including the crappy job that God is doing with the world, the ridiculousness of combining the threat of hellfire with God's love for us, why praying makes no sense, and the insatiable demand of religions for money, money, money.

Science is never certain. Religion should do the same.

For a little light reading today (I'm being ironic) I picked up my copy of physicist David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes -- and Its Implications."

Thumbing though a chapter I'd already read, The Nature of Mathematics, I came to this passage. It made me wish that religions, mystical paths, and other varieties of supernaturalism were as wise as science.

Mathematicians are rather proud of this absolute certainty [that mathematical proofs are true], and scientists tend to be a little envious of it. 

For in science there is no way of being certain of any proposition. 

However well one's theories explain existing observations, at any moment someone may make a new, inexplicable observation that casts doubt on the whole of the current explanatory structure. 

Worse, someone may reach a better understanding that explains not only all existing observations but also why the previous explanations seemed to work but are nevertheless quite wrong.

Galileo, for instance, found a new explanation of the age-old observation that the ground beneath our feet is at rest, an explanation that involved the ground actually moving. 

Virtual reality -- which can make one environment seem to be another -- underlines the fact that when observation is the ultimate arbiter between theories, there can never be any certainty that an existing explanation, however obvious, is even remotely true.

It isn't difficult to think, "I don't know for sure." Religious believers should give that thought a try, rather than considering that 100% confidence in a faith is the only way to go.

Since religions believe in dogmas that often contradict each other, clearly not all religions can be true. (Of course, my position is that none of them are true.) So it makes sense for followers of a religion to entertain the possibility that what they believe could be untrue.

Science makes progress by embracing challenges to current ways of looking at the cosmos. Unfortunately, religions are locked into rigid belief systems that make it impossible for them to come steadily closer to truth like science is able to do.

That's why I love science and reject religion.  

Give up feeling special. You're not. Religions are lying.

People feel special for all sorts of reasons. For example...

Ego. "I'm especially good-looking/intelligent/talented/etc. etc."
Love of country. "I'm a citizen of the greatest nation in the world."
Luck. "I won the lottery and now I'm set for life."
Upbringing. "My parents always told me I was special."

But religions are one of the biggest purveyors of specialness. Which makes them especially dangerous. Why? Because feeling special sets us apart from all of those other non-special people who are so obviously inferior.

Of course, the weird thing is that most religions teach that their devotees have a special relationship with God or a higher power. I talked about this in "Why atheists are more 'spiritual' than religious believers."

Maybe this statement seems paradoxical to you: I feel more genuinely spiritual now that I've stopped believing in God. 

But it makes good sense to me. Here's the main reason why.

I no longer feel special.

Virtually every religion and spiritual path considers that its adherents have a special relationship with God or whatever other supernatural entity they believe in. 

There are so many chosen people on Earth, they vastly outnumber the unchosen, the non-special group I'm pleased to be a part of.

I understand that feeling special has its own delights.

In my case, I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization which taught that those approved for initiation by the guru had been "marked" to return to God/heaven after a karma-cleansing meditation process.

Cool!

For about 35 years I embraced the enjoyable belief that, out of all the billions of people on this planet, I was one of a relative few who were the special beloveds of the supreme being. 

Of course, devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims feel the same way, along with countless believers in other theological belief systems. 

Eventually I started to realize that all the talk I was hearing about being "humble servants of the Lord and the guru" was, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit. Genuine humility wasn't much to be seen among devotees of my spiritual organization.

Not surprising.

Since members of this group were told over and over that they've been singled out by a higher power to learn cosmic truths and experience realms of reality not available to other human beings, naturally a pervading sense of "tribal" pride was evident throughout the organization.

We were the cool kids in the spiritual lunch room. Other faiths were inferior, since they didn't have the direct connection to God we did. 

I'm happy that this form of egotism has been discarded.

Sure, I've still got lots of other self-centered tendencies rattling around in my psyche, as we all do. But to get rid of The Big One, a belief that God had chosen me to be his best buddy for eternity, whereas my infidel wife wasn't going to get the same afterlife prize -- this increased my humility quotient by a lot.

Now I don't expect that I'm going to have any different sort of afterlife anyone else does. Namely, I strongly suspect, none at all. 

If you want more motivation to discard a religiosity that is making you feel special, check out some other blog posts I've written on this subject:

Religions are wrong: in the cosmos, humans aren't special
The universe is indifferent to us. But religions believe we're special.
We humans think we're special. What makes us believe that?

Great message from someone who doubts dogma about Gurinder Singh and RSSB

Getting an email like the one below makes me feel good about what I've been able to accomplish through this blog from its founding in 2004 to the present. 

Every person who comes to recognize the downside of religiosity -- whether this be in an Eastern or Western guise -- contributes to an upswing in the world's respect for truth. 

And truth-telling is in danger right now, as evidenced by TIME magazine choosing the 2018 Person of the Year to be journalists, guardians of the war on truth. But really, we all need to take on that job, guarding truth.

As you can read below, the young person who wrote to me about their doubts regarding Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization headed by a guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, is standing tall for truth even though this means going against the grain of his religiously-minded family.

Hopefully this person's story will inspire others to break free of dogmatism and enjoy the wide open spaces of the truth about reality. Enjoy...

Gurinder Singh Dhillon

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

Hi Brian,

First of all, I would like to thank you for your work on your blog and the diligent reporting of the flaws present in Radha Soami Satsang Beas. You are one of the few objective sources of information about it, free from dogma.

 

Your work exposing the flaws behind this path has helped me tremendously.

 

I was born into a satsangi family and raised to believe in Gurinder Singh as a perfect master. I found your blog at least a decade ago, when I was in my teens, and you helped me to discover the truth and learn things about Gurinder Singh and RSSB that no satsangi would tell me. Your work is so important because you discuss things few others are willing to on the internet and are a source of true information for me.

 

I also want to thank you for your reporting on the recent financial scandal involving Gurinder Singh and his family.

 

Despite having found your blog around 10 years ago (more or less) and neither believing in Gurinder Singh nor considering myself a Radha Soami for about as long, I had kept my personal doubts and beliefs a secret from my very satsangi parents. Because of their expectations, I still felt the need to go to satsang and attend official visits even though I did not believe in it at all.

 

I was quite afraid to communicate to them my true thoughts about it because they are so dogmatic and I didn't think they would understand my point of view. As a young person, the feeling of not being understood by my satsangi family was very much a deterrent to me and pushed me to just go through the motions of attending satsang to avoid their disapproval.

 

In recent years, I have been going through some things which has pushed me to live more authentically and to stop pretending things for the benefit of other people. Perhaps, this is a part of my natural growing up process. Therefore, I totally stopped going to satsang, including official visits, 2 years ago but always danced around the issue as to why when asked or pressured by my family.

 

When you reported the financial scandal, when I saw this being published in a reputable news source like Bloomberg, and when I read Sheena's book, I felt like I finally had enough information to explain my point of view to my parents with backed up arguments that are hard to refute. I felt that a lot of people would finally see the flaws present in the RSSB organisation as it is hard to reconcile the image of a perfect master with financial crime.

 

It was very naive of me to believe that the Bloomberg story would be the catalyst for truth I hoped it would be.

 

I did express my views out in the open to my parents and explained very clearly why I neither follow Gurinder Singh nor support RSSB or have any intention to get initiated at any point in the future. The point of this long-winded email is to report to you what the general mood seems to be among satsangis after the news broke, as told from my personal viewpoint and with my personal opinions attached.

 

My parents seemed to experience a lot of cognitive dissonance between their beliefs versus the news. Several things came up in my discussion with them:

1. They believe Gurinder Singh to be totally unaware of the financial goings on and the victim of someone else's shady behaviour. 
2. The above is reinforced by the fact that my uncle, who is a regional head and has spoken to Gurinder Singh personally, says that Gurinder Singh feels and has said that "they are all blaming me". 
3. Apparently my uncle had a "vision" of Charan Singh telling him not to believe what he reads.
4. Regarding the private plane and it being inappropriate for a spiritual leader to own one in the first place when the funds could be used towards charity, my parents think that "times were different" when Charan Singh was master and now that we are living in "modern" times we need a "modern" master who does not need to live as "simply" as previous ones. 
5. My father claims that the Bloomberg article was sponsored and written with an anti-RSSB agenda in mind.

You might think to yourself, okay this is just one person's parents and not representative of the general population of satsangis, but actually the sentiment seems to be shared among most within the satsangi community where I live. 

 

I have spoken to friends who do believe in Gurinder Singh and what I was told was that when the news first broke it was a very "hot topic" in satsang for a few weeks until it died down. My friend speaks for the younger group of sevadars and what I am told came out of those discussions is that:

1. People have concluded that Gurinder Singh is an innocent victim who was totally unaware of all that occurred (as stated above).
2. Sheena is motivated by hatred of Gurinder Singh as her reason for publishing her book (not true! I read her book and felt her to be very genuine and compelling). Regarding Sheena, one person said that Gurinder only made comments about her supposedly sleeping with many men to "diminish her karma". I don't really know how that would work and there are so many problems with this statement I don't know where to begin.
3. Many in the group said they don't really know what is true and what is not but they don't really believe Bloomberg is telling the truth as regards what went on nor believe that Gurinder Singh could knowingly do such a thing.

It seems to me that the cognitive dissonance between what people want to believe versus the reported news is leading many to choose to believe either that the Singh family is totally innocent or that their actions are justified in some ways than to confront the possibility that the person they believe in is not what they believed him to be. 

 

It is now December, months have passed, and no one talks about it anymore. My parents went to Beas as normal this month and are raving about their visit as usual. I feel like people have concluded that the scandal "cannot possibly be true" and everything just returned to business as usual.

 

I am quite disappointed that more people did not use this opportunity to reexamine the nature of the organisation they support. I know that cognitive dissonance is a very well known phenomenon so I should not be surprised but I think it is a wasted opportunity but from my part, I feel glad to have finally found the courage to state my beliefs, or rather non-beliefs, even if others don't believe me or support my decision. 

 

I credit you, in part, for helping me find the courage to do so through your extremely valuable work. Please keep it up, we need you to be the voice of sanity in a sea of dogma. This is an important thing for young people especially who have grown up only hearing dogma about RSSB rather than objective facts.

 

I just wanted to share with you my experience as many may be wondering how satsangis are reacting to and processing the news. If you want to publish my words please keep me anonymous.

 

Kind Regards,

The danger of religious abstractions

Here's an interesting letter in the October 6, 2018 issue of New Scientist:

From Steve Brewer,
St. Ives, Cornwall, UK

Sofia Deleniv describes self-awareness as an illusion, and on your cover you call it a "delusion" (8 September, p 28). What wasn't discussed was its power to turn the whole world as we view it into "illusions" by the process of forming abstract concepts and ideas about it.

By developing and interconnecting these abstractions, we have produced our various sciences. Through them we have achieved enormous power over ourselves and the natural world.

Self-awareness may yield this great power, but it also results in the broader illusion -- held by many -- that this world of abstractions is more real than the natural one. In this world of concepts, individuals have become just another concept and so are dehumanized.

Recognizing this as the most dangerous delusion may help defend our humanity.

It's impossible to know exactly what the letter writer is referring to when he speaks of the dehumanization of individuals via abstract concepts.

But, hey, I'll jump in and share my idea: it is religion. 

After all, what else has very little connection with the natural world, being almost wholly made up of abstract concepts? Religion is nothing but concepts. So is mysticism. So are all other forms of supernatural spirituality.

As I frequently point out on this blog, there is no way to discern whether a person standing in front of us has an intimate connection with God or some other supposed divinity. 

If they claim to be an athlete, we can ask to see their athletic prowess. If they claim to be a musician, we can ask them to play a song. If they claim to be a scientist, we can ask for their academic and professional credentials. 

When it comes to all things godly, though, words, concepts, and abstractions are all we're going to get. Sure, maybe the person appears to be a moral, upstanding, compassionate human being. And so are countless other people who don't claim any connection with God.

Further, religions often downplay the importance of this world, and of the human body, because they embrace concepts about some more perfect supernatural realm, often called "heaven." 

So as the letter writer says, individuals become just another concept. Instead of being who they are, in all of their human complexity, they become categorized as a sinner, a fallen soul, someone trapped in maya, a person needing redemption, a shadow of their true spiritual self.

Again, these are just a bunch of concepts.

Science, at least, engages in concepts about the real world. Religion engages in concepts about imaginary worlds, which is why religious dogma has no predictive power. That's why I much prefer science over religion. 

Science touches reality. Religion only touches the human mind.

"We've got to get out of our own heads." I really liked this observation by Michael Shermer near the beginning of a podcast interview featuring him and Philip Goff.

Shermer was speaking about how Eben Alexander claimed he went to heaven while in a coma, but actually there's solid evidence that he didn't. Heaven was just a place he made up in his head.

Also, Shermer notes that Sam Harris, the noted atheist neuroscientist, writes in one of his books about taking MDMA (ecstasy) that led to a rather similar mystical experience. Except, Harris never claimed to have experienced a reality outside of his own head, which shows he's much more honest than Alexander.

What I love about science is that it is dedicated to understanding reality as it exists outside of our heads. Yes, science also studies what goes on inside the human brain, but almost always this occurs largely, or entirely, as an effort to comprehend reality as it is, not merely as the human mind considers it to be.

Religion and mysticism, on the other hand, are thoroughly mental pursuits.

Believers in religion or mysticism never get outside of their own heads. They live in a world of concepts, imagination, and other forms of subjective experience. They're never able to demonstrate that they've contacted a reality which isn't the world in which we all live, yet they claim that such exists.

Which gets me to a passage from my new favorite book (until Amazon delivers another book I like even better).

"The Order of Time" by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli is both marvelously written and scientifically fascinating. I started reading it this morning and didn't want to put it down -- but had to so I could go to coffee with a friend, where, not surprisingly, I brought the book and talked about it with him.

Rovelli is an expert on time, which is one of the most mysterious subjects in science.

I'll write more blog posts about the book when I'm further into it. Rovelli does a better job of explaining relativity theory in a way that I can understand and remember than any other book I've read that addresses this subject. And I've read a lot of them.

Anyway, below is a passage from one of the first chapters that I liked a lot.

Rovelli speaks about how scientists often start by coming to an understanding of reality that can't yet be confirmed by observation. In other words -- Einstein is a great example of this -- an understanding begins within the scientist's own head, yet eventually is confirmed by objective reality.

He also observes how things that seem self-evident often are overturned by science. When was the last time, or heck, a first time, religion has done this? Answer: never.

Reading Rovelli's book this morning, I felt embraced by the warm glow of reality, a feeling that wasn't all due to the coffee I was drinking. I find it tough to read books about religion or mysticism these churchless days because they just seem so insubstantial. Like I said, they're all about ideas, concepts, fantasies, imagination. 

I love science because I love reality.

Science gets me out of my own head into the world that exists whether or not I do. Sure, I still meditate after I read for a while, and I enjoy the sense of exploring the nooks and crannies of my psyche. But science books like "The Order of Time" are where I find the most inspiration, mystery, and wonder -- not in so-called spiritual books.

Here's the Rovelli quotation: 

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

In antiquity, Anaximander understood that the sky continues beneath our feet long before ships had circumnavigated the Earth. At the beginning of the modern era, Copernicus understood that the Earth turns long before astronauts had seen it do so from the moon.

In a similar way, Einstein understood that time does not pass uniformly everywhere before the development of clocks accurate enough to measure the different speeds at which it passes.

In the course of making such strides, we learn that the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices.

It seemed obvious that the sky was above us and not below; otherwise, the Earth would fall down. It seemed self-evident that the Earth did not move; otherwise it would cause everything to crash. That time passed at the same speed everywhere seemed equally obvious to us... Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes.

Humankind as a whole does the same.

Don't let illusory scarcity scare you into religion

I rarely read self-help books, but I saw a story in TIME magazine about Brene Brown and decided to get one of her books. After reading some Amazon reviews, I settled on "Daring Greatly." 

It's mainly about the courage to be vulnerable, to take chances even when the odds are against us, to reveal ourselves honestly without a guarantee that other people will like what they see.

Brown brings up scarcity in an introductory chapter.

Given the topics I study, I know I'm onto something when folks look away, quickly cover their faces with their hands, or respond with "ouch, "shut up," or "get out of my head." The last is normally how people respond when they hear or see the phrase: Never ___________ enough. It only takes a few seconds before people fill in the blanks with their own tapes:

-- Never good enough
-- Never perfect enough
-- Never thin enough
-- Never powerful enough
-- Never successful enough
-- Never smart enough
-- Never safe enough
-- Never extraordinary enough

...The counterapproach to living in scarcity is not about abundance. In fact, I think abundance and scarcity are two sides of the same coin. The opposite of "never enough" isn't "abundance" or "more than you could ever imagine." The opposite of scarcity is enough, or what I call Wholeheartedness.

As I explained in the Introduction, there are many tenets of Wholeheartedness, but at its very core is vulnerability and worthiness: facing uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks, and knowing that I am enough.

Today is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. Many holidays are rather strange -- Christmas features Santa Claus, and Easter the Easter Bunny -- but Thanksgiving projects its own strong scent of strangeness.

This morning one of the two newspapers we get, the Salem and Portland papers, had to be put in our mailbox because each of the newspapers was super-thick, being filled with a large number of advertisements for post-Thanksgiving "Black Friday" sales. 

So while Thanksgiving Day itself is billed as a time to get together with friends and relatives over a tasty turkey dinner (being vegetarians, my wife and I get a meatless roast), with at least some of the talk being about what people are thankful for, the next day starts off a pre-Christmas shopping season in which buy, buy, buy and more, more more drowns out the we're thankful for what we've already got vibe of Thanksgiving.

Our consumer-driven economy is fed by more, not by enough. 

Now, I'm not saying that wanting more is a bad thing. It is very much a good thing when a lack prevents someone from being able to enjoy life.

We need more food when we're frequently hungry. We need more money when we're always broke. We need more friends when we're feeling lonely. We need more purpose when life seems meaningless. We need more health care when we're sick and can't get medical treatment.

The list goes on, and on, and on of important human needs that require more to make them right. However, as Brown observes, there's also many times when we feel that something is lacking in our life -- a scarcity -- though actually it is difficult, if not impossible, to point to a genuine lack.

The lack really isn't in ourselves, but in our response to a cultural or societal expectation. 

This is how, as an atheist who deconverted from religiosity after 35 years of believing that I lacked God (Eastern mystical variety), I've come to look upon religion. There are genuine human needs that religions fulfill. Yet there also are needs founded in a spurious sense of scarcity that require skepticism.

Here's some examples of what I consider to be spurious needs: requiring salvation; forgiveness of sins; protection from the Devil; having an afterlife in heaven rather than hell; feeling part of a "chosen people," being told what morality consists of; learning about the nature of reality from a holy book rather than science; having the Big Questions of Life answered by a religious authority figure rather than by ourselves.

On the positive side, and I'm basing what I say on those 35 years of mostly feel-good moments as a religious person, here's some examples of genuine needs that a religion can fulfill: feeling part of a caring community; celebrating together via rituals, ceremonies, and group meetings; opening ourselves up to the majestic mystery of existence; asking the Big Questions, even if persuasive answers are lacking.

I realize that many people are going to disagree with my take on spurious versus genuine reasons for being religious.

If someone considers that God is unquestionably an objective fact, rather than a subjective belief or unproven hypothesis, then they're going to look upon what I just said with decidedly skeptical eyes. I'm just speaking about how I see things, which is all any of us can do.

Three comments show absurdity of "karmic blaming"

Karma can be a dangerous concept. It's harmless enough if we simply think of it as the laws of cause and effect that guide our universe. 

But when people extend this concept to include supernatural fantasies, such as that our actions in past lives have determined what happens to us in this life, then the notion of karma needs to be criticized harshly. The not-nice canine in the Dilbert comic strip, Dogbert, captured the essence of this nicely.

And it doesn't matter whether someone uses the term "karma" or some other word. It's the idea of karmic blaming that has to be fought.

Wikipedia describes Jewish deicide, the idea that because Jews were responsible for Jesus' death, they deserve horrible things being done to them. 

Jewish deicide is a historic belief among some in Christianity that Jewish people as a whole were responsible for the death of Jesus. The antisemitic slur "Christ-killer" was used by mobs to incite violence against Jews and contributed to many centuries of pogroms, the murder of Jews during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.

Even more directly, India's highly discriminatory caste system, which persists to this day, is based on religious ideas about karma and reincarnation. 

There is a vital link between Karma theory and the caste system. Karma theory is based on Law of Karma, where an act or deed done by a human being, good or bad, accompany the dead soul and determine the soul’s destiny in its future births. A soul will get reincarnated as human being or animal or insect, according to the accumulated good deeds or bad deeds done in the previous lives.

The position a soul occupies in the hierarchy of the caste system closely correlates to the accumulated deeds of the past. A person of good deeds will be reborn in the higher caste, for eg., as a Brahmin, and a person of bad deeds, as a dog or a Chandala (a lower caste). Please refer to Kaushitaki Upanishad or Chandogya upanishad to get more information on this.

So today I was eager to squash the ravings of frequent commenter "777" to the illogical bits that they deserve when he strongly implied, if not outright said, that Steven Hawking's ALS disease was the result of bad karmas -- and that suffering people need to learn from their mistakes in past lives.

I found this so insulting to Hawking and other people who suffer that, as you can read below, I called out "777" on his lack of compassion and deluded religiosity. I forgot to add that if he's so convinced that he's right, he should be using his real name in comments rather than hiding behind a pseudonym.

Here's our comment exchange, plus a right-on comment from JB who further demolished the rantings of "777."

 

"Seven Types of Atheism" is intellectually dishonest

Last month I shared a critical Amazon reader review of John Gray's book, Seven Types of Atheism, in a blog post: "Great review of 'Seven Types of Atheism' by someone who hasn't read the book."

I said in the post that I wasn't going to buy the book. Then I changed my mind. Not sure why. Maybe I wanted to see if the book was as bad as I thought it would be.

Now that I've read Seven Types of Atheism, I'm glad I did. Here's my own review.

The most glaring irritating thing I found in the book was that Gray defines atheism on page 2, then forgets his own definition on the following pages. Here's the early-on definition.

A provisional definition of atheism might still be useful, if only to indicate the drift of the book that follows. So I suggest that an atheist is anyone with no use for the idea of a divine mind that has fashioned the world. In this sense atheism does not amount to very much. It is simply the absence of the idea of a creator god.

OK, as an atheist I generally agree with this. There could be other types of gods than a creator god, but the major world religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism -- all teach that the world was created by a divine mind, or being.

So I figured that in the rest of his book, Gray would view atheism as how he defined it: the absence of the idea of a creator god. This fits with how I view my atheism. It also fits with how every atheist I know views atheism. Again, as the absence of a belief in god.

But in many places in Seven Types of Atheism, Gray speaks of a "religion of humanity," a "self-deifying humanity," "secular religion," and such. How could this be if atheism is the absence of the idea of a creator god? Wouldn't religion then be the presence of the idea of a creator god?

No, not according to Gray's twisted logic. 

Because on page 3 of his book, Gray offers up a decidedly strange definition of religion. It isn't a belief in god, creator-variety or otherwise. Nor is it an attempt to understand reality in terms of supernatural or divine phenomena. Rather, Gray says:

A provisional definition of religion may also be useful... Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.

Wow. What a weird definition of religion. The Amazon reviewer who hadn't read the book nailed Gray on this, since he'd heard Gray speak in the same fashion in an interview. Here's part of what that reviewer said.

Gray said: If you asked an anthropologist or a sociologist or even a cultural historian about religion, not one of them nowadays, or very few of them, would think of religion as bodies of theories or beliefs or propositions which try to explain the world.

For starters, if we're talking about the three Abrahamic religions, they absolutely assert theories, beliefs and propositions for the purpose of explaining the world.

In a feeble attempt to support this claim, Gray uses a straw man. He says, "The myth about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden was never meant as an early theory of how life came about on this planet." Even if that is true, it doesn't change the fact that the Abrahamic religions assert that God had a hand (direct or indirect) in the creation of the universe, which ultimately led to the creation of humans, with whom God has a special relationship.

Moreover, the Abrahamic religions assert that God has a hand in laying down morals. Clearly, these assertions are intended as theories, beliefs and propositions.

Thus what Gray does at the beginning of his book is intellectually dishonest. He defines atheism as the absence of the idea of a creator god. But he doesn't define religion as the presence of the idea of a creator god. Rather, Gray defines religion extremely broadly as "an attempt to find meaning in events."

Again, wow.

The day I got married was deeply meaningful to me. So apparently I make a religion out of marriage. The results of last Tuesday's midterm elections were deeply meaningful to me. So apparently I make a religion out of politics. 

But obviously every attempt by us humans to find meaning in events isn't religious in nature. But this obviousness isn't apparent to John Gray, because the bulk of his book is an attempt to paint atheism with the brush of religion, since atheists find meaning in events, history, humanity, and other non-godly entities.

Wait! Aren't atheists defined by Gray as lacking a belief in a creator god? Yes, but Gray says atheists are religious because they find meaning in events. Thus every person on Earth who finds meaning in events is religious by Gray's absurd logic. 

Here's some passages from Seven Types of Atheism that reflect this absurdity.

But it was Saint-Simon who first presented the religion of humanity in systematic form. In future, scientists would replace priests as the spiritual leaders of society. Government would be an easy matter of 'the administration of things.' Religion would become the self-worship of humankind.

...Having renounced the idea of any divine power outside the human world, human beings could not avoid claiming divine powers for themselves.

...A free-thinking atheist would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom.

...Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology, and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism.

Gray doesn't believe that "humanity" exists. Only individual humans do.

Fine, he's entitled to that belief. I don't agree with him, because our species, Homo sapiens, does have common characteristics, and the modern world has erased many of the borders that used to separate humans by geography, culture, and such. 

John Gray doesn't believe that our species advances. This is highly debatable. Witness how slavery, the subjugation of women, and world wars have faded away (though still existent, or possible) in the past several hundred years. 

But since Gray holds that belief, and he wanted to bash atheism in his book, he needed to define religion in such a way that anyone who finds meaning in human events or history is "religious." Hence, humanists are religious, and any atheist who finds meaning in a hope that humanity is progressing is also "religious."

I'm an atheist. I'm a progressive. I'm not religious. I don't believe in a creator god.

So Gray ignored the reality that the vast majority of atheists simply don't believe in god. But this fact doesn't fit with Gray's desire to make atheism into a secular "religion," so he ignored it.

Join the godly, supernatural, mystical "I Don't Know For Sure" club

It gives me great pleasure to invite not only visitors to this blog, but everybody in the whole freaking world, to join a non-exclusive club I've just formed:

The I Don't Know For Sure club. 

Admission is free. There are no dues. Also, no meetings. Nor any sort of organization. This club exists only in the minds of those who answer "no" to a simple question.

Are you 100%, completely, absolutely, without-a-doubt confident that what you believe about god, the supernatural, and mystical experiences is objectively true?

Now, though this question is simple, I still feel a need to explain it.

What I'm after here is getting people to consider whether there is at least the tiniest sliver of doubt that their spiritual/religious beliefs, or lack thereof, are true.

And I've used "objectively" to define true.

Meaning, I'm not asking about whether someone has an absolutely firm belief that, for example, God either exists or doesn't exist; that life after death either exists or doesn't exist; or that it is possible or impossible to experience a supernatural realm.

A belief is subjective. I'm asking about objective reality. For it sure seems that either God exists, or God doesn't exist, no matter whether humans believe or don't believe in God. 

I've become an atheist. I no longer believe in God, life after death, or supernatural mystical experiences. Yet here's the thing: 

I don't know this with absolute certainty. So I'm a non-card-carrying member of the I Don't Know for Sure club, with a membership number of #1 (which, as noted above, only exists in my own mind).

If you also want to join this club, leave a comment on this post to that effect.

And if you like, mention whether you're (1) a religious/spiritual believer who isn't 100% sure that what you believe is objectively true, (2) if you're an atheist who isn't 100% sure that your non-belief is objectively true, or (3) someone in-between who isn't sure whether whatever it is you believe or don't believe is objectively true. 

My theory, which admittedly may not hold up, is that despite the obvious great divide between religious believers and atheists, there's a thin bridge that unites most of them: a recognition that what they consider to be objectively true, may not be.

In my case, I see atheism as being much more probable.

But this means there's a chance I could be wrong. I readily admit this, and have done so frequently in my churchless blog posts. That said, I don't think there's a high probability I'm going to live on in some ethereal form after my bodily death.

However, if this happens I'll be overjoyed to tell whatever loving divine being I meet on the "other side," Wow, I sure was wrong. (If it's a hateful devilish being, I won't be as enthusiastic about this.)

Admitting that no one knows for sure strikes me as a wonderful way to bridge the gap between religious belief and atheism. Sure, it isn't a wide bridge, given that I suspect many, if not most, people would say they're at least 99% sure that, say, God either exists or doesn't exist.

But any admission of "I don't know for sure" leaves open the door to looking upon those with different views with a kinder, gentler, less dogmatic eye.

And this is a very good thing in our current world where people are increasingly divided into opposing tribes that find little or nothing good to say about the other side, or see little or nothing they have in common.

Radha Soami Satsang Beas admits it is a religion

Religions often come in for well-deserved criticism. They're dogmatic, judgmental, holier-than-thou, and divisive -- since every religion considers that it knows the truth about God, while all those other religions are false. 

(This is why atheists like to say, as Ricky Gervais put it to Stephen Colbert: "There are about 3,000 gods to choose from… Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more.")

Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) is an Indian group that traditionally has denied it is a religion, but rather a "science of the soul." During the 35 years I belonged to RSSB I went along with this, because I liked to think of myself as a spiritual but not religious sort of guy. 

And during the 14 years that I've had this Church of the Churchless blog, I've typically called RSSB a spiritual organization, which is how RSSB refers to itself. See:

But thanks to good research by Sarah, who shared some links in comments on my posts, it now is clear that Radha Soami Satsang Beas officially considers itself a religion. Here's proof. 

As shown above, an application by RSSB for development of land in Melbourne, Australia for a "place of worship" says that Radha Soami Satsang Beas is a worldwide religious organization. 

And a newspaper story about the development describes the thoroughly religious activities that will occur at the Melbourne center: spiritual discourses, devotional songs/hymns, meditation areas.

Lastly, Michael Cooke, the RSSB head in Australia, said that he was happy the Supreme Court ruled that Radha Soami Satsang Beas truly was a religion, not a philosophical organization. 

So now it can be confidently said that RSSB is a religion like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. etc. It is based on faith, not science; blind belief, not evidence; communal rituals/worship, not individual experience. 

In the past, including during the days of the previous guru, Charan Singh, RSSB didn't have so many religious tendencies. But the current guru, Gurinder Singh Dhillon, has put a lot of emphasis on building centers around the world, and expanding the RSSB headquarters in the Punjab. 

Dhillon also has spent a lot of time and effort enriching himself and his family through highly dubious financial schemes, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Thus it is entirely fitting that during his reign as guru, RSSB has openly become a religion.

It's well-known that religions are money-making machines. 

Wise observations about spiritual experiences and religious craziness

One of the pleasures of having this blog is being able to read comments from blog visitors that make me think, "Wow! That was beautifully and wisely said."

Sometimes when this happens I share a comment in a blog post so it will be more visible. Such is the case with two comments from "JB" that you can read below. Each was left on a recent post, "Meaning comes from us, not God."

This comment by JB relates to the supposed truthfulness of spiritual/mystical experiences. I agree with what JB says, though these experiences often have more to them than simply emotionality. JB does address this in an interesting way, saying that an impression of cosmic unity, for example, derives from the emotional state, rather than the other way around.

Spence wrote: "Whatever it is it is built into the human frame, the healthy and functioning human frame, at least for some of us. The fact that the details are found in spiritual writings of the Word and the Light down through the ages give confirmation to those of us who have experienced these things repeatedly since early childhood that they are truthful..."

I think you are right that these experiences are "built in". The capacity for "mystical" experiences are "built into the human frame" as much as the capacity for any psychological experience is built into the human frame.

I don't think anyone is disputing that these experiences occur. It is true that they occur, yet one must question whether they are truthful in terms of the interpretations typically ascribed to them.

All manner of human emotional experiences have repeatedly occurred throughout the ages and all have been documented since the birth of written language. That they have repeatedly occurred and have been written about cannot be construed as constituting evidence attesting to their truthfulness.

I think these experiences certainly can be healthy, yet they can also be unhealthy as evidenced by all of the mystic-gurus that become abusive and exploitative. The experience of seemingly becoming "one" with the universe apparently has different effects on different people. For some, the ego apparently expands to the size of the universe.

Speaking more about mystical experience: these consist of intensely positive emotions coupled with a sense of ultimate existential unity, the "rightness" of everything, and an underlying impression of love and benevolence embracing everything. I think that the impressions are secondary to and derive from the immediate emotional state.

Simply put, the world appears perfect because you feel so damn good.

This is analogous to the experience of falling in love with a person, where the world itself seems to become brighter and more beautiful. This is a well-known and documented experience of people falling in love. The positive emotion seems to generate an attendant change in perception. Of course the world hasn't changed from what it was before, it just feels different.

If you have ever read any case histories of people experiencing extreme negative emotions, there is often an attendant alteration of their perception. The world becomes disjointed, everything seems "wrong", and everything seems imbued with doom or malevolence. For some, these experiences repeatedly occur.

The point is, the emotional state seems to inform the perception. I think it would be as wrong to assert that mystical experience provides a true window into the essence of existence any more than the diametrically opposed emotional state. The positive experience is certainly healthier, as it is conducive to survival, but I think it would be wrong to call it truthful.

And this JB comment briefly discusses something I've also wondered about: how religious tales (I'd call them fables) would be viewed if they emanated from a single human mind, rather than being embraced by a collection of people that often numbers in the many millions, or even billions.

Brian wrote: "Wouldn't it be bizarre if, say, someone dressed in a Wonder Woman costume kept proclaiming, 'You've got to believe in Wonder Woman! She's real, not a fantasy!' Likely this person would be viewed as having some sort of mental illness."

I've often asked believers to take a particular religion and imagine what it would be like if these beliefs had not been institutionalized and spread like a contagion throughout civilization, but rather were proclaimed by one single person.

Take Christianity as an example. Imagine none of the teachings of Christianity existed and one person started uttering statements like:

"There is a male creator God who has a son, whom he sent down to be killed by being nailed to a piece of wood so that humanity could be forgiven for a disease passed down from a woman who listened to a talking snake with wings and ate a piece of fruit from the wrong magical tree."

This person would be considered to have a mental illness with psychotic features. Yet there are literally millions of people that believe this. Thus, beliefs that would clearly be categorized as mental illness when exhibited by one person, are categorized as religion when they are embraced by millions.

It's just a numbers game. Religion is culturally sanctioned mental illness. Fill in the blank with Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, or any of the sub-cults (Kabbalah, Sufism, Gnosticism, Vedanta, etc). The result is the same.

Absolutely. One of my favorite crazy stories from the Sikh/Sant Mat tradition is that of Kal, the ruler of the lower realms of creation, earning his exalted position from God after standing on one leg, and one foot, for many yugas -- which is a really long time. Who knew that lower gods have legs and feet just like us?

Advice for RSSB believers about how to deal with news about their guru

Yesterday this comment was left on a Church of the Churchless post, "Great BusinessToday video about RSSB guru and Singh brothers." The commenter wondered how to break the news about Gurinder Singh Dhillon's financial misdeeds to Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) devotees who had put a lot of faith in their guru.

Dear Brian Thanks for your blog and exposing the truths!! It is really sad to learn all the truths of recent events. I had a feeling somethiing is corrupt but it still came as a shock when my intuition was confirmed with facts.

I am not part of Sant mat myself but do know people that I love that is. They don’t know yet and I just don’t have the heart to break this news. I can just imagine that if your whole belief system was based on the idea of a perfect living master and to found out he is not so perfect after all, will pull the rug underneath you.

Especially this path’s standards are so high in terms of diet and moral life. How do you break such news to somebody you love while you know their world will be shattered? How have other Satsangis took the news? Is it best to just keep quiet and wait till truth be revealed? Ruth

Ruth asked some good questions.

Since I was a member of RSSB for 35 years, and embraced the Sant Mat teachings for almost all of that time before I stopped believing in them, I've had to deal with the same difficult process of breaking away from a spiritual philosophy that used to mean so much to me.

All I can do is suggest the following advice, which I've shared in a "laundry list" form -- because everybody is different, and I want to give people a variety of ways to deal with disillusionment in a spiritual path or religious dogma. So I'm going to list these ideas as they come to me, without trying to arrange them in a particular fashion.

(1) Truth, Sat in an Indian language, has to be our primary concern. Without truth, we're lost in a maze of falsehoods. So whenever truths are revealed about a guru, master, religious leader, or whoever, those truths should be embraced, not pushed away.

(2) Truths can be painful. But the pain of living a lie, or living in illusion, is greater. Yes, fantasies can be fun. But eventually fantasies are revealed to be much less substantial than truth, since truth always wins out in the end. Why? Because reality is hugely more powerful than illusion.

(3) This is one of my all-time favorite sayings. When I used to give talks at RSSB meetings (satsangs), I'd often cite this quote from Philip K. Dick: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." So if a spiritual or religious belief is given up, nothing is lost, because reality is beyond beliefs.

(4) When we expect someone to be perfect, we're bound to be disappointed. So don't expect perfection. Not of your spouse, friend, relative, co-worker, boss, political figure, or... a guru. Everybody makes mistakes. Some are innocent mistakes. Some are willful mistakes. Regardless, expect imperfection, not perfection.

(5) Taoism, which I'm drawn to as a philosophy, says that the world is made up of yin and yang, light and darkness, positive and negative, substantial and insubstantial, embracing and rejecting, and so on. Opposites are what make the world go 'round. If we welcome only one side of a pair of opposites, we're ignoring a big part of reality.

(6) Often people think, "If such-and-such happened, my life wouldn't be worth living." But usually, when that thing does happen, life is still very much worth living. We humans are resilient creatures. Don't underestimate your capacity to adapt to a difficult situation, and then move on from there.

(7) It's natural to want to feel special, which includes being part of a special group, one especially favored or beloved by God. However, what if God, or the cosmos, actually doesn't play favorites? What if it doesn't matter whether someone believes in this or that, but simply does their best to be a good human being? (As you can guess, this is how I consider reality operates.)

(8) Consider: out of all the religions, spiritual paths, and mystical teachings in the world, what is the chance that you have come across the Only One that is objectively true? Very small, right? Yet almost every believer feels that they have found that Only One. Isn't this more than a little egotistical or self-centered? 

(9) What people often find most satisfying about a religion or form of spirituality isn't so much the concepts that make up that teaching, but the good feeling they have from being part of a group that accepts them, welcomes them, supports them. Yet it is possible to have that same good feeling after someone leaves a certain group, because there are countless groups that accept, welcome, and support.

(10) Think about how many changes have occurred in your life. Most likely you've changed homes, friends, jobs, cars, lovers, pets, hairstyles, clothes, sports, and so much else. So it isn't strange that people also change their religion, spiritual path, or mystic teaching. This is normal.

(11) Doubts also are normal. Often people who belong to a certain religion or spiritual group wrongly believe that everybody else in the group but them has perfect faith, because usually expressing doubts isn't welcomed. Believe me, almost everyone has doubts, whether they admit this or not.

(12) Trust yourself. If you trusted yourself when you decided to join a religion or form of spirituality, also trust yourself if you decide to leave it. Don't be led astray by a group's teaching that leaving it will bring horrible consequences, such as a nasty afterlife. Almost every group has ways to keep members from leaving. Know that you are stronger than those ways.

(In case you're wondering, yes, this 1976 cartoon really was drawn by Charles Schulz. Read the comments on that post.)

Everything can be reduced to the survival instinct

One of the benefits of having this blog is getting intelligent, provocative, thoughtful emails about some churchless topic. Often I'll enjoy the message so much, I'll ask if I can share it in a blog post.

Such is the case with what you'll read below. The premise of this mini-essay is that survival is the central concern of us human beings. 

I think the author gets this pretty much right.

For sure, almost all religious belief includes a focus on survival after death. Having and raising children provides some immortality of sorts. Altruism, as noted in the essay, contributes to group survival. Every act of creation -- writing, music, art, and such -- can be viewed as making a bit of what is inside us live on outside of us.

Acknowledging that survival is a primal human imperative doesn't take away from the value of the acts that proceed from this drive.

Rather, it leads us to recognize a simple truth: as much as we'd like to think that we're distinct from other kinds of creatures, we really aren't.

Yes, at the moment Homo sapiens is the dominant species on our planet. However, our instincts are similar to those of other animals, albeit more sophisticated due to our capacity for language and abstract thought.

Read on...

I've enjoyed reading your posts on the sociobiological underpinning of religious belief, spurred by your reading of Finding Purpose in a Godless World. That book has been on my wish list and I've finally decided to pick it up.

I've long been fascinated with the etiology of supernatural beliefs and, as mentioned in our prior conversation, I find the argument that religion is an evolutionary phenomenon (i.e., survival strategy) quite persuasive.

I've been recently reading about HADD (Hyper Agency Detection Device), a subset of the Theory of Mind, in which an evolutionary advantage is gained by imputing agency to inanimate forces and events.

At least this was the case when we were roaming the savannahs.

This belief today—of linking Being and the existence of the universe to an intelligence—confers a different advantage, if the term can be used. It bestows hope to the believer in what is otherwise a futile existence.

At the risk of being criticized for a broad oversimplification, I genuinely think that everything can be reduced to the survival instinct. All value ultimately derives from survival value. Even the noble human traits such as love, compassion, and altruism have their origin in the survival imperative. 

Why do human beings nearly universally admire selfless individuals and resent self-absorbed individuals?

This is an interesting question to pose to people, as I think this response is simply taken for granted without much inquiry into the source of this sentiment. People know they have an inherent dislike of selfish people, but getting them to articulate exactly why is another matter entirely.

 I would contend that we inherently dislike selfish, arrogant, and greedy people because they detract from group survival. Thus, what is "right" and "wrong" could be alternatively framed as what is conducive to group survival and what is deleterious to group survival, respectively. 

In terms of self-sacrificial altruism, why does group survival prevail over self-preservation in some people?

This behavior is not easily answered, but we see it in other species as well. Selflessness and even the giving of one's life to save another are not examples of divine supernatural virtue, but rather represent the survival impetus in an augmented form.

Love itself—the loftiest of all human tendencies— is ultimately a survival strategy, and a very successful one at that (both individually and collectively). The singular root of all behavior, from the most vile to the most "saintly" is this most fundamental drive. 

Returning to the hope that the religious believer is imbued with: what is the perennial hope found in religious belief?

Is it not, once again, representative of that fundamental drive—survival. Religion promises some form of survival for the individual, the tribe, humanity, or all of life itself. Divorced from the promise of survival, religion would entirely lose its power.

So it seems that the bulk of human behavior derives from, revolves around, and is aimed at survival, either in the short term, long term, or in an "everlasting" sense. Our programming is, in the final analysis, very simple indeed. 

Thanks again, Brian. I hope you are doing well.

Hobby Lobby ad in Oregonian calls for a Christian theocracy

I'm not a fan of Hobby L0bby, to put it mildly.

When they opened a store here in Salem, Oregon, I did some research on the company and wrote a blog post that listed five good reasons not to shop at the store. Here, in headline form, is what I said shoppers at Hobby Lobby  were supporting:

(1) Denying contraception coverage to women employed by corporations owned by religious zealots.
(2) Teaching the Bible in public schools as "true" and "good." 
(3) Smuggling artifacts from Iraq, an act that supports terrorism.
(4) Supporting the election of Trump.
(5) Helping fund a $500 million Museum of the Bible.

Here's another reason not to shop at Hobby Lobby -- the company buys a full page ad in newspapers around the country close to July 4 that in very clear terms calls for the United States to be a Christian theocracy. 

This is a photo of the ad that ran in yesterday's Portland Oregonian. 


If you want to read it, here's a link to the ad on the Hobby Lobby web site. But wait... there's a better way to read Hobby Lobby's paean to theocracy.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has put together a way-cool annotated version. You click on a quote in the Hobby Lobby ad, then you can read the quotation in its original form and context.

Often it turns out that Hobby Lobby has purposely mangled the quotation to make it better fit their Christian theocratic world view.  Many of the quotes are deliberately misleading, which shows how little respect Hobby Lobby has for truth-telling. 

A letter to the editor in the Eugene Register Guard does a good job of critiquing the Hobby Lobby ad.

The Register-Guard’s full page “paid advertisement” from Hobby Lobby on July 1 offends me on several grounds. One, it’s right-wing evangelism masquerading as a 4th of July ad. Two, it says “A good America is a Christian America.” Three, it uses misleading, out-of-context quotes as evidence.

I have nothing against Christianity or Jesus. I love them both. But mixing Jesus with government is dangerous and misguided. God and Christianity trump the Constitution. This ad offers random quotes — endorsements — for God-and-Christianity by a few Founding Fathers and 18th and 19th century judges. What’s not there: The founders and Supreme Court vehemently disapprove of mixing church and state.

Alas, somehow Hobby Lobby fell in love with theocracy. Hobby Lobby owners should watch “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s a feel-good series for everyone, and exactly what America needs.

 And here’s a tip for the R-G. Maybe try harder to discriminate between paid advertising and religious right recruitment? There’s even a clue in the bottom banner of the ad itself: “If you would like to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, visit Need Him Ministry ...” and “download a free Bible for your phone.”
     -- Michael Janover, Eugene

Janover is correct about the founders of our country being opposed to the United States becoming a Christian nation. I've written numerous blog posts on this subject. Check out my post, "More quotations from 'Nature's God,' a marvelously insightful book," for links to several of them. 

Here's some quotes from that book that I shared in the post:

The opposite of the Empire of Reason is in reality the Empire of Faith. Hobbes calls it "the Kingdom of the Fairies"; in more modern terms, we could say that the opposite of democracy is theocracy.

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Thus, superstition permits individuals suffering from one set of passions to feed off individuals suffering from another according to a logic that neither side understands, and in this manner society lacerates itself in a fury of thoughtless self-destruction. 

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No proposition could have elicited more support from the radical precursors to the American Revolution than that the priests are the chief instrument of tyrants.

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Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America's founders saw the matter.

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The equality that Jefferson announced and that Lincoln partially advanced is at bottom the demand that all power must explain itself. In reality, the revolutionary force in the Declaration of Independence is the guiding principle of philosophy.

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Every thing in the universe strives to persist in being, say the radical philosophers, and the power of nature through which the human mind strives to persist is the power of the understanding.

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From the radical position that Locke and Spinoza share, it follows that religion is not a fundamental category of human experience for legal or political purposes in either its public or its private aspects.

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The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

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This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

Video shows craziness of Hindu fanaticism

This Twitter tweet contains a video that can be seen here. Religious fanaticism comes in many forms, in this case Hindu.

Why this atheist is more saintly than religious believers

This proves nothing except that seeming synchronicities sometimes occur in a pseudo-miraculous fashion.

This afternoon I was thinking about what to write about on this here Church of the Churchless blog, and came up with the idea of talking about how I happily allow about 90% of the blog comments to be from religious believers, almost all of whom are still adherents of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) faith that I deconverted from about fourteen years ago -- after being a strong RSSB devotee for some thirty-five years.

I was going to point out that this shows how much more open-minded us atheists are than religiously-minded people. What do you think the chances are that, for example, a Radha Soami Satsang Beas or Catholic Church web site would welcome a majority of comments that denigrate the teachings being promoted on the site?

Slim to none. (Much closer to none, than slim, I'm pretty sure.)

That's because most religions are dogmatic, while most atheists and agnostics are open-minded. Regular readers of my posts will note that almost always I say things like "Almost certainly there is no God." I talk about my atheist beliefs in this fashion because I can't be sure God doesn't exist; I just see no demonstrable evidence for the existence of God.

If that evidence came to light, either out there in the world or in here within my consciousness, I'd be pleased to change my mind. Yet how many religious believers are willing to say that? "Almost certainly there is a God,  but I can't be sure about this." 

Anyway, I was all ready to write a post along these lines when I saw that a new comment had been made by Jen. It was so close to what I'd been thinking about, I'd call it "miraculous" if I believed in miracles. Which, I don't.

Spencer, I should point out, is another frequent Church of the Churchless visitor who loves to use this blog to leave comments extolling the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings that I no longer believe in. Here's what Jen said:

Spencer you say: "What Brian writes is simply out of ignorance, and prejudice of others he does not know, understand or choose to believe. He simply invents an explanation that works for him. But it denegrates the legitimacy of true spiritual experience. He himself is victim to his own mind's refusal to acknowledge the evidence before him."

Spencer you also say: "This is why I strongly encourage people not to judge other people's personal experiences whom we have never met and do not know. It can't be done objectively and is generally just the bad habit of personal prejudice."

Why should we believe someone else's inner experiences? We aren't supposed to speak about them because its very egotistical and we are not really interested anyway and it just sounds like boasting. Spencer what makes you think you have the right to criticise another, especially when this is Brian's blog.

I think Brian has the patience of a saint, either that or he does not read through all of the comments, or if he does read them he allows others to have their own point of view, which is something you do not allow.

We are all entitled to choose to believe what we want. He is entitled to be an atheist, he does not preach about it and wtf has it got to do with you and vinny? Quote vinny: "Problem with atheists is that their half-baked mind is unable to comprehend Atomic energy/Shabd vibrating since ages, so the solutions they offer are half-baked. These Atheists are not worthy of sitting at the feet of any Physicist, forget about Saints. Always misguiding innocent people, more dangerous than Snakes, these Atheists are a threat to any civilized society."

Spencer, I don't understand you and vinny, you preach about love and yet you show no respect for others and their opinions.

Excellent points, Jen. 

Spencer and other religious believers are very much welcome to comment on this blog, because I'm committed to open discussion and dialogue. 

Regarding Jen's noting that either I have the patience of a saint, or don't read through all of the comments, the truth is about halfway between these extremes. I have considerable patience with people who disagree with me, and I also make a habit of scanning every comment to make sure it isn't "spam" but is at least somewhat on topic.

I read some comments in their entirety,  but lengthy comments often get just a quick glance. Even though I'm retired, I still feel pressured for time, in part because my wife and I live on ten non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem (Oregon) that require a lot of work to maintain. 

And I've got two other blogs that I write for, along with three Facebook pages related to my local citizen activism. So this Church of the Churchless blog is just one of many activities that compete for my attention.

A test that science passes and religion fails: reality "kicks back"

How do we know what is real? This is a question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for as long as we humans have been pondering the nature of reality.

I don't pretend to know the answer, but I resonate with physicist David Deutsch's approach to the question. In his book, "The Fabric of Reality," Deutsch views explanations as being key to understanding what is real. He writes:

Explanations are not justified by the means by which they were derived; they are justified by their superior ability, relative to rival explanations, to solve the problems they address. That is why the argument that a theory is indefensible can be so compelling. A prediction, or any assertion, that cannot be defended might still be true, but an explanation that cannot be defended is not an explanation.

Now, I realize that this quote isn't exactly crystal clear. Which is understandable, because Deutsch's scientific world view isn't reducible to a couple of sound bites. But I'll try to do just that with another nibble at his philosophical perspective regarding understanding.

What is an explanation, as opposed to a mere statement of fact such as a correct description or prediction?

In practice, we usually recognize the difference easily enough. We know when we do not understand something, even if we can accurately describe and predict it (for instance, the course of a known disease of unknown origin), and we know when an explanation helps us to understand it better.

But it is hard to give a precise definition of 'explanation' or 'understanding'. Roughly speaking, they are about 'why' rather than 'what'; about the inner workings of things; about how things really are, not just how they appear to be; about what must be so, rather than what merely happens to be so; about laws of nature rather than rules of thumb. 

They are also about coherence, elegance and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity, though none of these things is easy to define either.

Deutsch uses Galileo as an example of how mere prediction is much different from genuine understanding. He says that at first Galileo didn't get into trouble with the Catholic Church even though he promoted a sun-centered (heliocentric) view of the heavens. The reason: the Church viewed Galileo's theory as just a way of predicting the motions of the planets.

Thus the Church was able to keep on believing that the Earth was at the center of the cosmos by considering that the planets behaved as if they orbited the Sun, not that they actually did so. 

To our modern sensibilities this doesn't make sense. But we live in scientific times that are far different from the religion-dominated era of Galileo. 

Deutsch says that one reason the sun-centered view won out was that the Church's perspective required a belief in everything that Galileo taught (because that was how fairly accurate predictions of planetary motions could be made), plus an additional belief that somehow reality was responsible for making it seem as if the sun was at the center of the cosmos, even though it actually wasn't. 

For example, if one were asked why a planetary conjunction occurred on such-and-such a date, or why a planet backtracked across the sky in a loop of a particular shape, the answer would always be 'because that is how it would look if the heliocentric theory were true'.

So here is a cosmology -- the Inquisition's cosmology -- that can be understood only in terms of a different cosmology, the heliocentric cosmology that it contradicts but faithfully mimics.

Religions obviously fail to produce the same sorts of understandings about reality that science does. In fact, it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a single fact about the world that any religion has produced that science didn't already know. 

This is a major stumbling block for those who consider that religion has a privileged view of reality. If this is the case, why hasn't a saint, prophet, or other holy person ever come up with an explanation of some phenomenon that was so persuasive, that explanation eventually came to be added to the world's common store of knowledge?

Here's one reason: religion deals largely with supernatural entities that lack what David Deutsch calls "kick back." This term is derived from the story of Dr. Samuel Johnson responding to Bishop Berkeley's solipsistic view that matter doesn't really exist by kicking a rock and saying, "I refute it thus." 

Philosophers correctly point out that Johnson didn't really refute Berkeley's assertion by kicking the rock. Rather, Deutsch uses this episode to point out a criterion for reality:

But Dr. Johnson's idea is more than a refutation of solipsism. It also illustrates the criterion for reality that is used in science, namely, if something can kick back, it exists. 'Kicking back' here does not necessarily mean that the alleged object is responding to being kicked -- to being physically affected as Dr. Johnson's rock was.

It is enough to say that when we 'kick' something, the object affects us in ways that require independent explanation. For example, Galileo had no means of affecting planets, but he could affect the light that came from them. His equivalent of kicking the rock was refracting that light through the lenses of his telescopes and eyes.

The light responded by 'kicking' his retina back. The way it kicked back allowed him to conclude not only that light was real but that the heliocentric planetary motions required to explain the patterns in which light arrived were also real.

I was a religious believer for about thirty-five years, so I'm intimately familiar with the many ways people convince themselves that God, Jesus, a guru, angels, spirit, or some other form of divinity is "kicking back' within their consciousness.

Prayers seem to be answered. Unusual events are viewed as miracles. Sights and sounds are perceived in meditation. God is viewed as working in mysterious ways that are plainly apparent to believers.

Yet there is scant evidence that any of this adds up to reality "kicking back" with evidence of a supernatural realm. If there were, converted atheists like me wouldn't be so skeptical of religious claims that fail to stand up under not only close scrutiny, but any kind of serious examination. 

Science progresses with its understandings of the universe. Religion doesn't. This alone points to the failure of religious believers to demonstrate that reality does indeed "kick back" when someone attempts to understand divinity.

Yes, all sorts of phenomena do transpire within the minds of believers. However, almost certainly this is their own psyches kicking back against themselves. Meaning, religious beliefs result in mental phenomena produced by those same beliefs. This isn't the sort of really real reality that Deutsch, along with along scientists, are looking for.

Me neither. I'd much rather know something demonstrably true about the world, even if this is a small thing, than believe in the grandest religious fantasy. 

All statements about the material world are subject to science

"Spirituality" is a word that's difficult to pin down. In my current atheist frame of mind, I consider that the term refers to an attempt to find meaning in life -- this material life, this physical life, this life here on Earth. 

Such is how Daniele Bolelli speaks of the need to rekindle our appreciation of what the senses bring to us. In his book, "On the Warrior's Path," he writes:

Our bodies are the kingdom of lost continents and unknown lands. Columbus, Livingstone, Stanley, Marco Polo, and Neil Armstrong are just Boy Scouts compared to the explorers of the inner space. The first step to unlock the doors of perception and sniff the scent of the Secret is to awaken the five senses from the numbness that normally surrounds them.

When the senses wake up, people talk about altered states, but actually nothing about them is altered. The only real alteration is the sleep into which we often let them fall. Bringing them back to life is the only natural thing we can do. 

It is as if we defined the starting of an engine as an "altered state" only because we consider normal leaving it turned off. The fascination many people have for "supernatural" phenomena is the result of their lack of deep knowledge of what Nature is about.

...Ecstasy is not a faraway, unreachable dimension. It is right here, just a few feet away from the sleep of the senses. As William Blake put it: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." The miracle of ordinary reality is revealed to those who have eyes to see it and ears to hear it. 

But many people -- most, actually, given the popularity of religions -- believe that the spiritual quest is to get in touch with a supernatural domain of reality. God, spirit, soul, angels, heaven, miracles, these are believed to point to a realm beyond physicality, a world of the Absolute.

I've started reading Alan Lightman's engaging book, "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine." Lightman is a philosophically minded physicist who looks at the marvels of the universe with awe. He had a sense of infinity one night when he turned off the motor of his boat, laid down, and looked up at the stars.

Lightman writes:

I have worked as a physicist for many years, and I have always held a purely scientific view of the world. By that, I mean that the universe is made of material and nothing more, that the universe is governed exclusively by a small number of fundamental forces and laws, and that all composite things in the world, including humans and stars, eventually disintegrate and return to their component parts.

...Yet after my experience in that boat many years later, I understood what Lord Indra of the Vedas must have felt when he first drank soma and could see the light of the gods. I understood the powerful allure of the Absolutes -- ethereal things that are all-encompassing, unchangeable, eternal, sacred. At the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, I remained a scientist. I remained committed to the material world.

Every culture in every era of human existence has had some concept of Absolutes. Indeed, one might group a large number of notions and entities under the heading of Absolutes: absolute truth (valid in all circumstances), absolute goodness, constancies of various kinds, certainties, cosmic unity, immutable laws of nature, indestructible substances, permanence, eternity, the immortal soul, God.

Absolutes sound great, right? I used to strongly believe in them. For many years I was obsessed with the notion of Ultimate Reality, and even believed that one day I would understand it, and maybe even become one with it. So like Lightman, I too understand the appeal of Absolutes.

But here's the catch:

Finally, the tenets of the Absolutes have not been proven, nor can they be proven, certainly not in the way that science has proven the existence of atoms or the law of the pendulum swing. Unprovability is a central feature of all Absolutes. Yet I did not need any proof of what I felt during that summer night in Maine looking up at the sky.

It was a purely personal experience, and its validity and power rested in the experience itself. Science knows what it knows from experiments with the external world. Belief in the Absolutes comes from internal experience, or sometimes from received teachings and culture-granted authority.

...We have found no physical evidence for the Absolutes. And just the opposite. All of the new findings suggest that we live in a world of multiplicities, relativities, change, and impermanence. In the physical realm, nothing persists. Nothing lasts. Nothing is indivisible. Even the subatomic particles found in the twentieth century are now thought to be made of even smaller "strings" of energy, in a continuing regression of subatomic Russian dolls.

So a spirituality founded on a belief in supernatural Absolutes cannot be proven to be correct. We may feel that it is correct, but feelings can lead us astray. We may experience that it is correct, but experiences can lead us astray. We may be convinced that it is correct, but convictions can lead us astray.

This isn't to say that Absolutes have no value. Since billions of people believe in them, clearly they serve some human purpose. Lightman says:

The Absolutes comfort us. Imperfect beings that we are, we can imagine perfection. In search of meaning and how best to live our lives, we can turn to irrefutable precepts and principles. Certain of our material death, we can find solace in the permanence of our ethereal souls.

What's important, though, is to be honest with ourselves.

We need to realize that because Absolutes are unprovable, we have no way of knowing if they have any reality outside of our minds. But this is the case with lots of things: feelings, thoughts, imagination, fantasies, wishes, dreams, and so much else within our psyches exist only as neurochemical traces within our cranium.

If we seek certainty, or rather, near-certainty, it won't be found in Absolutes. It will be found in science, because this is the only means we humans have developed that allows us to say with a high degree of confidence, "This is true not only for me, but is a truth about the world that lies outside of me."

As Lightman puts it:

I respect the notions of God and other divine beings. However, I insist on one thing: I insist that any statements made by such beings and their prophets about the material world, including statements recorded in the sacred books, must be subject to the experimental testing of science.

In my view, the truths of such statements cannot be assumed. They must be tested and revised or rejected as needed. The spiritual world, and the world of the Absolutes, have their own domain. The physical world should be the province of science.

This makes a lot of sense. People are free to believe whatever they want about God and other Absolutes.

But when those beliefs intrude upon this physical world, and obviously this happens with regularity, such as when religious people want their dogmas to be enshrined in governmental policies or cultural institutions, those purported Absolutes need to be challenged vigorously.

"Prove it!" is an entirely reasonable demand if someone wants their personal spirituality to be accepted as universal truth. I do that frequently on this blog, and not surprisingly I've never gotten any demonstrable proof of an Absolute. 

Here's a good definition of religion

Most people are religious. But sometimes it's hard to tell what is a religion, and what isn't. Is Christianity a religion? Is Buddhism a religion? Is being devoted to your favorite sports team a religion?

(I'd answer "yes," "probably," and "no" to those three questions.)

The Patheos site has a story, What is Religion, Anyway?, that contains a definition that makes a lot of sense. Here's how it starts out:

Christian Smith is the Notre Dame sociologist who identified the religion of America’s youth as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and who exposed the bias in the field of sociology.  Now he attempts to put the field of the sociology of religion on a more rigorous basis in his new book Religion:  What It Is, Why It Works, and Why It Matters.

The book includes many provocative insights, which we might go into later, but I’d like to concentrate first on the question of definition.  What is religion, anyway?  A field needs to define its subject matter before it can get very far in investigating it, but the sociology of religion has had problems with this.

A religion, says Smith, is not necessarily about God, the afterlife, or a justification for morals.  Though some sociologists have approached the question in those terms, not all religions have these things.

Religion cannot even be defined as a particular set of beliefs, since many people practice a religion without necessarily agreeing with all of its beliefs or even knowing very well what they are.  He gives the example of children, though the same could be said of other adherents whose knowledge of their religion is sketchy, at best.

Nor is religion to be defined by a sense of transcendence, the meaning of life, a sanction for the culture, the experience of the numinous, personal identity, or community belonging.  Again, sociologists of religion have defined religion in these terms, but these are actually effects of religion, not religion itself.

It is possible to find these things apart from religion, to find the meaning of one’s life in political action or to experience transcendence through art or to gain a sense of community through a group of friends.  A religion’s vitality–or lack of it–might be assessed by how well it creates–or has ceased to create–such effects.

But the question remains, what is religion?  What is a definition that encompasses all religions in all of their diversity?  Here is what Prof. Smith comes up with:

“Religion is a complex of culturally prescribed practices, based on premises about the existence and nature of superhuman powers, whether personal or impersonal, which seek to help practitioners gain access to and communicate or align themselves with these powers, in hopes of realizing human goods and avoiding things bad.” (22)

The “superhuman powers” can be God, gods, or impersonal forces.  “In hopes of realizing human goods,” these powers might be prayed to, supplicated, or ritually manipulated; or the practitioners might learn to conform themselves to these forces.

Given this definition, I'd say that a secular Buddhism wouldn't be a religion, since no superhuman powers would be involved. But a supernatural Buddhism that assumes the reality of reincarnation and karmic influences that continue from life to life would be a religion. 

Regarding the content of religious beliefs, today on satellite radio I heard a discussion about "fake news" in social media such as Facebook. 

The person being interviewed was knowledgeable about what sorts of social media posts grab people's attention. Not surprisingly, posts that fit with someone's point of view, have an emotional "bite" to them, and are shocking or salacious are going to be more likely to be paid attention to.

This comment made me think of religion: "If not constrained by facts, this can make a story more attractive."

So it's no wonder that religions have so much appeal. They aren't at all constrained by facts, being free to make up stories that fit perfectly with what people want to hear.

Worried about dying and being dead forever? No problem, religions have a story for that.
Worried about not being loved by a powerful supernatural being? No problem, religions have a story for that.
Worried about having to decide what is moral? No problem, religions have a story for that.

It's amazing, really, that more people aren't taken aback by the fact that almost universally religions have good news for humanity. Well, us atheists think about this, but few religious people do. 

They just accept the stories told by their religion without wondering, "How can it be that everything I want to be true is part of the tales told by my chosen faith?"

Well, because religions aren't constrained by those annoying things called facts. Anybody can come up with a appealing story if they don't have to worry about reality. Fairy tales often end with "And they lived happily ever after." 

It's easy to make imaginary stories have happy endings. That's why religions are so popular.

Keep the feeling of religion, and discard the theology

I don't believe in God. But I believe in the feelings that accompany belief. 

So now that I've realized the falsity of religion, I've discarded the theological aspects of my former belief system and kept the positive feelings.

Here's some examples.

I used to enjoy the feeling that God was looking out for me, managing my life in such a way that even bad experiences were aimed at bettering my long-term salvation chances. This made me feel hopeful about the future, since I considered there was a trajectory to my life that would end with me becoming familiar with divinity, and maybe actually merging with it.

Now, I'm simply hopeful. The feeling is the same. I've just eliminated the crazy theological reasons I had for believing that the future would turn out fine.

Serving God (or a guru, for I was a member of an organization that believed the guru was God in human form) was another enjoyable feeling. Back in my true believing days I engaged in a lot of seva, as it was called, which is an Indian term for service, or volunteering.

Well, I still like to feel like what I'm doing is benefitting others.

But I've discarded the notion that there's some sort of special benefit to being of service to a supposedly Godly person or organization. This allows me to enjoy the sensation of "selfless service" without having that feeling rest on an imagined theological foundation.

People cling to religion because they like the good feelings that come with believing. 

What I'm suggesting is that those feelings are separable from the theological framework, rituals, holy books, forms of worship, and other trappings of a religion. 

In the same fashion, happiness is a feeling. But obviously there are many ways for someone to be happy. There isn't a single cause of happiness, just as there isn't a single cause of the good feelings that people enjoy from embracing religious beliefs. 

You can give up religion and keep the feelings. 

For many years I was the secretary, or leader, of the people in my town who embraced the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an Indian religious organization.

I'd arrive early at the place where we held our Sunday morning meeting to get the room ready. I'd sweep the floor and arrange folding chairs just so, getting them all lined up nice and neat. I enjoyed the feeling of seva, being of service.

Today I went to Lowe's and bought 16 bags of garden fertilizer and 6 large containers of weed preventer (we have a really big yard, living as we do out in the country). My wife had noticed spring weeds beginning to pop up, and March is when I spread weed preventer, so today seemed like a good time to do it.

I was careful. I did my best to put the weed preventer every place in our yard that needed it. I enjoyed the feeling that after some rain arrived in a few days, it would be activated and stop weeds from sprouting. This was "seva," service -- just not to any imagined God or other divinity.

It was service to my wife and to myself, because we enjoy our yard more when it looks good and doesn't have a bunch of weeds. The good feeling I had after a couple of hours of work was very similar, if not exactly the same, as the feeling I used to have when I was performing volunteer service for a religious group.

So it doesn't make sense to cling to a religion because you enjoy the feelings that come with being a believer. Those same feelings can be produced in a myriad of different ways. Keep the feelings; ditch the theology. 

If God is real, why do religions disagree so much about God?

One of the best arguments against believing in God is that there so many varieties of religious belief.

This doesn't happen in science, where there isn't an Eastern or Western science. Nor is there a Chinese or American science. Because modern science deals with entities that are real, there's agreement on, say, how subatomic particles behave, or the equations needed to put a satellite into orbit.

A friend of ours recently overheard a conversation between two men sitting behind her while she was on a plane. It started with one of the men asking the other, "Are you a believer?"

Turns out he was, so they launched into a rather loud discussion about Christianity. All went well until friction arose after it was learned that one of the men was a Jehovah's Witness.

Then the conversation became rather heated. Is God a unitary being, or is God a trinity of Father, Son, Holy Spirit? Our friend said they argued about this question for the rest of the plane trip.

What this shows is that nobody knows.

Whether God exists. What God would be like, if God does exist. There's very little agreement among religions about God's nature. Even Christians disagree about what God is like. Mormons and Catholics have little in common other than faith in Jesus.

(I think they agree on this; maybe they don't.)

Now, I used to argue that there was a common denominator among religions. It just was necessary to focus on what mystics in various religions taught about God. 

But now that I've left behind my true-believing days, I'm aware that what I was doing was selectively choosing evidence for commonalities between mystical beliefs, because actually Christian mystics have a very different take on what God is like than, say, Sikh mystics or Islamic mystics.

So the fact that religious believers can't agree about God's nature is pretty conclusive evidence that God isn't real. The god of the Koran is very different from the god of the Bible. And Buddhists don't believe in any god at all, along with Taoists. 

As the familiar saying goes:

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Life is suffering. The opioid crisis is one proof of that.

Kudos to TIME magazine for devoting an entire issue to a special report on the opioid crisis in the United States, "The Opioid Diaries." The photographs and accompanying text were disturbing, but that was the point.

To show life as it is, not as how we might like it to be. 

I wish there was an easy answer to suffering. But there isn't. It is hard, impossible really, to judge people who, in their quest to relieve their suffering, turn to drugs. Here's an example from the TIME story.

"I got in a car accident and was in the hospital for three or four months. At first, I took it for the pain as prescribed, as needed. I started to like the buzz so I began taking more than I was supposed to. Then a family member introduced me to heroin, and I actually cried at first because I didn't feel any pain. All it takes is one time."

That's the dream almost everybody has -- to find a cure for suffering.

Opioid users seek that cure through drugs. Dangerous drugs, unfortunately, since street drugs are both cheaper and more powerful than prescription opioids, so deadly overdoses are killing thousands every year. 

Religious beliefs of various kinds are much safer. But there's quite a bit of truth in Karl Marx's famous observation, paraphrased as Religion is the opium of the people, or Religion is the opiate of the masses. 

Like drugs, religion is addictive. I know, because I was hooked on an Eastern guru-centered religion for over 35 years. It was difficult for me to wean myself from the good feelings I got from my belief system. 

It didn't take away all of my pains and sufferings, not by a long shot. However, I got a lot of solace from believing that the events in my life had a cosmic meaning, since my guru supposedly was taking care of my karmic account so, as the saying went, "A sword thrust would be reduced to a pinprick."

I also enjoyed the reassurance that death wasn't the end, but rather a beginning. For either I'd be reborn with an opportunity to make further spiritual progress as a human, or enjoy the company of the guru in his divine form in higher spiritual regions of reality. 

That's addictive stuff! The prospect of dying and being dead forever is scary. So I read this description by a sheriff of carfentanil's effects (a very powerful synthetic opioid) with a mixture of horror, understanding, and even a bit of envy.

"Unfortunately it's so addicting that if you die, addicts want to go to that dealer to get that more potent compound. It's unbelievable. They're chasing the next best high. They're not worried about dying. It changes your brain chemistry where death doesn't faze you, death isn't a fear anymore."

Well, if there's ever a drug that takes away the fear of death without nasty side effects (like dying), sign me up for a lifetime supply. 

Since I'm a recovering religion addict, I know how powerful supernatural belief systems can be. So along with not judging opioid users, I also do my best to not judge people who are using religion to get through life by relieving some of the suffering that comes with being a sentient human being.

That said, I try to use this blog as a form of "tough love" for those who are still in the grip of religiosity. For I've found that even though it is difficult to give up faith in a higher power, the rewards exceed the withdrawal symptoms. 

I feel like I'm more in touch with reality now.

I've broken out of the shell of my dogmatism, which I needed to protect me from skeptics who asked uncomfortable questions such as, "How do you know what you believe is true?" I wanted my beliefs to be true so badly, I was willing to ignore anyone or anything that cast doubt on them.

It's tough to face the suffering that is a big part of life head-on with eyes wide open. Like I said, I totally understand why people turn to drugs, religion, or anything else that promises to offer relief. Whatever gets you through the day is a difficult thing to give up.

So aside from the final sentence, which my atheist mind rejects, I like this advice from Angela Davis, a social worker with a facility that cares for opioid-exposed babies. 

"If your family member is struggling with addiction, love them. Don't fight them, don't judge them. And for the love of everything holy, pray for them." 

Religion is a warm bath. Atheism is a cold shower.

I love not only warm baths, but hot ones. It feels good to be immersed in water close to my body temperature. It relaxes me, makes me feel comfortable, sometimes puts me to sleep.

When I want to wake up, though, a cold shower is much better.

Now, I don't actually take cold showers unless our water heater is broken and I'm desperate to get clean. However, I have taken a cold shower of truth, which is why I chose atheism over religion after some 35 years of being an ardent believer in God, soul, spirit, and heaven.

(Eastern religion variety)

Because I'm deeply familiar with both religious believing and atheist doubt, I know what I'm talking about when I say that it takes much more courage to be an atheist.

Believing in God, or some other form of supernatural divinity, is easy. Most people in the world, and certainly most people here in the United States, are religious. So being a believer puts you in the majority, which is like being in a warm cultural bath of godliness.

Even if someone doesn't follow the same faith as you, if you're religious you get a heck of a lot more respect than if you're one of those damned atheists who are all hung up on that disturbing word, truth. 

Disturbing if you're religious, that is. Those words are music to the ears of truth-seekers, like me. 

It wasn't easy for me to give up the warm bath of my religious beliefs. After all, I'd spent almost four decades believing that I was special, one of God's chosen people, destined for a pleasant afterlife, embraced by the cosmos in a fashion few other humans were.

Fantasies are fun. Reality can be painful.

I'm pleased to report that, like many others who have chosen clear-eyed truth over blind faith, I've come to realize that it is more important to live life honestly than to hold onto religious lies.

There is no demonstrable proof of God. Likewise, there is no convincing evidence that anyone, alive or dead, has known God. But the human mind is adept at weaving together stories that create a pleasing myth. 

God loves us. God has sent a messenger to save our souls. God has a wonderful plan for us if we have faith. 

What's not to like about these sentiments? Well, one big thing: almost certainly they aren't true. (Us scientifically minded atheists know that nothing is 100% certain, but 99.99% is good enough, and I'm generous when I give a .01 chance of God actually existing.)

So if you've given up on religious fantasies, or are on the way to doing this, congratulations.

You've bravely chosen truth over lies, which is a very good thing. Have courage and keep treading the truthful path. It won't always be comfortable, but it will be much more satisfying than embracing religious falsehoods.

"Your mind is the perfect epitome of religious fanaticism"

I admire thoughtful, rational, well-reasoned put-downs of religious fanatics. That's why I'm sharing a marvelous comment on a recent post by "Appreciative Reader" that totally destroys the credibility of another commenter, "D.r."

The whole comment is well worth reading as a great example of how to respond to religious bullshit. But my favorite part of Appreciative Reader's comment begins with the one-sentence paragraph, It occurs to me that you may be wondering why I’m wasting so much time with you.

I really resonate with the last part of the comment. It makes so much sense, I'll repeat it here:

But I come now to the third and most important reason of all, and that is : it is important that fanatics like you are everywhere called out and held to scrutiny and even, when appropriate, to ridicule. A very large portion of the world’s misery is due to fanaticism; and if we don’t immediately step on fanaticism the moment it raises its ugly head, then we are indirectly facilitating the growth of the cancer of fanaticism.

Every time that fanatics like you open your mouth to pour invective and ridicule on other people’s sincerely held faith while at the same time blithely claiming respect for your own pet delusions, every time that fanatics like you pollute rational and courteous discourse with your malicious and discourteous proselytizing, if we can immediately and firmly call out your bullshit (even if we personally are not necessarily being targeted), then we will have contributed in some small way towards making the world a slightly saner and safer place.

Here's the full comment from Appreciative Reader.

Quote D.r : “I contradicted myself there.”

No shit you contradicted yourself there! “There", indeed! You say that as if that is the one single contradiction that you’ve made, and which single instance I now point out to you. Your contradictions, friend D.r, are truly legion! My longish comment to you, addressed to you in that other thread, was a compendium of sorts of a whole host of them. All clearly documented and clearly demonstrated.

I refer to Open Thread 11 : go back and refresh your memory if you wish by re-reading the unbelievable comments you have posted there. After reading that comment of mine (addressed to you, and posted on January 29), what you do is to abjectly, cravenly, throw your hands up in surrender, eschewing even the barest pretense of rationality, eschewing even the appearance of critical thinking ; you retreat entirely from that particular discussion without showing any signs of having even understood what was being said to you ; and you respond there, instead, with some out and out non sequiturs, plucked out of thin air.

What is one to think of someone whose comments appear practically half-witted when the discussion moves to their own faith, their own beliefs and their own irrationalities ; and who, paradoxically, suddenly turns around and writes sharp and intelligent comments, all awhirr with critical thinking, when examining the irrationalities within others’ belief systems? As has happened here again and again and again?

Take these short responses you’ve made to me, right here on this thread:

I tell you clearly in so many words that, basis your repeated protestations, I no longer think you’re trolling, that I do not, repeat DO NOT, think you’re trolling ; to which you respond by complaining that I’m trying to show you up as a troll! God above, man, can you not READ? That’s, like, textbook strawmanning!

Then you go on to say : “I don’t put down other people’s faith or experiences” -- and, amazingly, astonishingly, go on, in that very same sentence, to say “I simply point out that meditation is dangerous and leads to delusions”, by which you mean, as is clear from your other comments, you mean not to highlight dangers (real or imagined) in this endeavor, but to imply that all of those whose experiences are predicated on meditation are deluded.

It is but a short step from there to, for instance, describing Jim Sutherland as mentally deranged, and, to take another instance, to peremptorily dismissing the heart-felt and sincere personal observations of Manjit, which he was kind enough to discuss here specifically on my request.

(And here’s the thing : if some out-and-out atheist were to do this sort of thing, I’d call them plain-spoken to the point of being obnoxious, but nevertheless consistent ; and especially in a “Churchless” blog their plainspeak, although perhaps unkind, may not really be out of place ; but for someone that claims that God “touched” them, for someone who solemnly claims they’ve actually had visions of God, for such an out-and-out apparent nut job to try to so peremptorily and rudely dismiss other people’s experiences, while continuing to gibber on about their own experiences and pet beliefs, that is … well, words fail me as I look on the grotesquely unhinged mentality that can make such comments in all earnestness.)

Here’s another gem from you : ”I do put down atheists though and I don't give a crap what you or anybody else thinks about that. I have zero respect for atheism. I hope you understand.” Well, I’m afraid I myself don’t have an overabundance of respect myself for people who do not treat others with respect. Even when such disrespect is not necessarily directed at me personally. I hope you understand!

And then, finally, you round off your comment here to me with that perfectly absurd gem of a non sequitur, where you say to me “I’m still not convinced that you aren’t an atheist”. That’s breath-taking, the sheer irrelevance and absurdity of that last nonsensical non sequitur.

And in that original sentence I quoted in my first comment addressed to you here (where you say that you can tell the real from the fake, etc), while your premise itself appears to have been mined from some deep dark recess within your own physiology, nevertheless that premise is yours ; and you seem unable to comprehend that single-line premise that you yourself hold, and what that premise, coupled your well-documented past conduct on here, says about the nature of your own experience. (Hint : that word, “fake”! Per YOUR standards and basis YOUR thinking, basis YOUR premise, not mine!)

#FacePalm!# ------ How can someone be so consistently bipolar in their commenting, alternatively apparently half-witted (when talking about their own beliefs, seemingly unable to parse simple sentences) and then, next moment, suddenly all razor-sharp and rational and logical (when talking about others’ belief systems)? I’d mentioned schizophrenia only in jest in my previous comment, but perhaps you do need to go get yourself tested!

Anyway : This discussion with you, across threads, was singularly unprofitable, but at least it was, in retrospect, not without some entertainment value! God knows I’ve tried to reach out to you more than once, including right here on this thread, despite your absurd and often obnoxious commenting on here! I’ll know better henceforth than to risk my sanity by trying to engage with you any further on this subject!

It occurs to me that you may be wondering why I’m wasting so much time with you.

I was just now about to press the “Post” button, when that same question occurred to me : why, I found myself asking, have I wasted so much time thinking about you and talking of you? It’s an interesting question in itself, because I generally like to keep well away from the bickering that is so common in Internet forums. I think the answer is, apart from the entertainment (which after all is only fleeting), I think in a weird sort of way, getting to interact with you was an instructive process.

Your mind is the perfect epitome of religious fanaticism.

What passes for thought with you, where this subject is concerned, is classic : my own religious delusions are gospel truth, to be respected and revered, and anyone who doubts the authenticity of my spiritual experiences and my religious faith is wholly wrong and misguided ; and what is more, others with their own spiritual experiences and religious thoughts and beliefs are also equally misguided ; and both these categories of people are fair game for peremptory dismissal as well as unprovoked rudeness and insults.

Logical rational thought have no place where my pet delusions are concerned; and yet, where others’ cherished beliefs are concerned, logic is a sound tool, as long as it can be used to swat those beliefs down. That’s you in a nutshell, D.r, when it comes to this particular subject : fascinating, isn’t it?

Your tragedy is, you’re born in the wrong time and the wrong place. You’d fit right in, had you been born some four to five hundred years ago (or earlier). I’m sure getting to live during the Inquisition would be your idea of heaven. Had you been born in those times, you’d get to not only insult those who don’t share your delusions, you could even end up physically hurting them by snitching about them to the authorities.

Even in present times, had you been born in, say, Syria, even then you’d probably fit right in with some of the folks there (always provided your delusions were of the Islamic variety, as opposed to the Christian variety). How do you like that idea, incidentally : I may have just now charted out the perfect calling for you : as long as you’re prepared to junk your current delusions and to embrace the One True Faith (Islam) and the One True God (Allah), you can always book a one-way ticket to one of those places that you read about in the papers, and you’ll find yourself in the company of your spiritual brothers, people who think exactly like you do.

Incidentally: I’m usually a stickler about being just as courteous online as I am in real life. But being less than perfectly polite with the likes of you is fine, at least at times. Jesus may have advocated turning the other cheek : but I am personally fine with reciprocating in some measure the rudeness of those who are gratuitously contemptuous of and discourteous to others. It is as good a means as any of keeping people like you in check.

Anyway: I was talking, in the latter half of this comment, about why I’m spending so much time on you. I’ve listed two reasons already. The first was entertainment (albeit of very questionable taste). The second was instruction about how the mind of the religious fanatic works.

But I come now to the third and most important reason of all, and that is : it is important that fanatics like you are everywhere called out and held to scrutiny and even, when appropriate, to ridicule. A very large portion of the world’s misery is due to fanaticism; and if we don’t immediately step on fanaticism the moment it raises its ugly head, then we are indirectly facilitating the growth of the cancer of fanaticism.

Every time that fanatics like you open your mouth to pour invective and ridicule on other people’s sincerely held faith while at the same time blithely claiming respect for your own pet delusions, every time that fanatics like you pollute rational and courteous discourse with your malicious and discourteous proselytizing, if we can immediately and firmly call out your bullshit (even if we personally are not necessarily being targeted), then we will have contributed in some small way towards making the world a slightly saner and safer place.

How deluded are you? (If you're religious, you'll score higher.)

The most recent issue of New Scientist has a story called "Delusional You." The online version is differently titled: Grand delusions: Why we all believe the weirdest things.

Now, most of us consider that it is other people who are deluded, and that we're an exception, being nicely connected to reality. Which, I suppose, is another delusion. Here's an excerpt from the story.

That we are all prone to delusions may not be so surprising. A range of cognitive biases makes the human mind fertile soil for growing all kinds of irrational beliefs. Confirmation bias, for example, means we ignore inconvenient facts that go against our beliefs and uncritically accept anything that supports them. Desirability bias leaves us prone to shoring up beliefs we have a vested interest in maintaining because they make us or our group look good. Clustering bias refers to our tendency to see phantom patterns in random events, impairing our ability to draw logical conclusions from the available evidence.

The New Scientist story includes the Peters Delusion Inventory, "which is the most widely used measure of delusional proneness."

I was pleased to find that I scored in the low range, having answered "yes" to only two of the 21 questions. And one of them seemed problematic to me, Do you ever feel as if some people are not what they seem to be? Yeah, I feel this often, particularly when I'm around politicians. This can be reality, not delusion.

Anyway, below is the Peters Delusion Inventory. I couldn't resist putting four decidedly religious'y questions in red, and three more spiritual/New Age'y questions in purple. This shows that religiosity, or more generally, belief in special powers, makes it more likely that someone will be delusional.

This is somewhat at odds with how the story says we should look upon delusions. 

First we need to be clear about what a delusion is. "There's a loose way of talking about delusions -- like when we talk about the 'God delusion' --“ which simply means any belief that's likely to be false and is held despite lack of evidence, or even in spite of the evidence," says Lisa Bortolotti at the University of Birmingham, UK. The psychological take is more nuanced.

Delusions are still seen as irrational, but they are also idiosyncratic, meaning the belief is not widely shared. That rules out lots of things including most religious beliefs, conspiracy theories and the denial of climate change. Furthermore, the idiosyncratic nature of delusions makes them isolating and alienating in a way that believing, say, a conspiracy theory is not. Delusions also tend to be much more personal than other irrational beliefs, and they usually conform to one of a handful of themes.

Hmmmm. The way I see it, just because a delusion is widely shared doesn't make it less of a delusion. Consider the four religious'y questions in red below. 

Lots of true believers do feel they are especially close to God, have been chosen by God in some way, believe in the occult, and sometimes feel they have sinned more than the average person. These aren't idiosyncratic beliefs; they rest at the heart of some major religions and mystical paths.

And the questions in purple are widely held by those who follow certain meditation practices.

In the thirteen years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, I've seen many comments from people who believe in telepathic communication, consider that it is possible to completely stop thinking, and view thoughts as alien to the supposedly pristine "soul consciousness" that is separate from the mind.

Now, feel free to take the delusion test.

How Deluded Are You?

Almost everyone is vulnerable to delusions, but some of us more than others. These 21 questions constitute the Peters Delusion Inventory, which is the most widely used measure of delusion proneness. Give yourself one point for each “yes” and zero points for each “no”, then tot up your score.

1 Do you ever feel as if people seem to drop hints about you or say things with a double meaning?

2 Do you ever feel as if things in magazines or on TV were written especially for you?

3 Do you ever feel as if some people are not what they seem to be?

4 Do you ever feel as if you are being persecuted in some way?

5 Do you ever feel as if there is a conspiracy against you?

6 Do you ever feel as if you are, or destined to be someone very important?

7 Do you ever feel that you are a very special or unusual person?

8 Do you ever feel that you are especially close to God?

9 Do you ever think people can communicate telepathically?

10 Do you ever feel as if electrical devices such as computers can influence the way you think?

11 Do you ever feel as if you have been chosen by God in some way?

12 Do you believe in the power of witchcraft, voodoo or the occult?

13 Are you often worried that your partner may be unfaithful?

14 Do you ever feel that you have sinned more than the average person?

15 Do you ever feel that people look at you oddly because of your appearance?

16 Do you ever feel as if you had no thoughts in your head at all?

17 Do you ever feel as if the world is about to end?

18 Do your thoughts ever feel alien to you in some way?

19 Have your thoughts ever been so vivid that you were worried other people would hear them?

20 Do you ever feel as if your own thoughts were being echoed back to you?

21 Do you ever feel as if you are a robot or zombie without a will of your own?

0-5 You are less prone to delusions than most. Your thinking style is probably more analytical than intuitive.
6-7 Congratulations! You are normal. The average score is 6.7, with no difference between men and women.
8-21 You are more prone to delusions than most. You are likely to think intuitively and jump to conclusions.

         Schizophrenia Bulletin

Militants kill 305 Sufis in the name of God. Religions are crazy.

All terrorist attacks are despicable and difficult to comprehend. But when Muslim militants killed 305 Sufis, members of their own religion whose supposed crime is viewing Islam differently -- that's freaking insane. 

Back in my true believing days, before I saw the atheist light, for several years I became a huge fan of Rumi. I bought just about every English language book about Rumi and his teachings. Rumi was a Sufi. So this helps explain my outrage at the killings in the Sinai Peninsula. 

Here's some excerpts from a New York Times story, "Who Are Sufi Muslims and Why Do Some Extremists Hate Them?"

Sufism is a mystical form of Islam, a school of practice that emphasizes the inward search for God and shuns materialism. It has produced some of the world’s most beloved literature, like the love poems of the 13th century Iranian jurist Rumi. Its modern-day adherents cherish tolerance and pluralism, qualities that in many religions unsettle extremists.

But Sufism, often known as Islamic mysticism, has come under violent attack in recent years. On Friday, militants stormed a Sufi mosque on the Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 305 people in what officials are calling the worst terrorist attack in Egypt’s modern history. The attack followed several assaults on Sufi shrines in Pakistan over the past year carried out by Sunni extremists. (The vast majority of Sufis are Sunni, though some are Shiite.)

What is this form of Islamic belief, and why has it come under assault?

...Sufism, known as tasawwuf in the Arabic-speaking world, is a form of Islamic mysticism that emphasizes introspection and spiritual closeness with God.

While it is sometimes misunderstood as a sect of Islam, it is actually a broader style of worship that transcends sects, directing followers’ attention inward. Sufi practice focuses on the renunciation of worldly things, purification of the soul and the mystical contemplation of God’s nature. Followers try to get closer to God by seeking spiritual learning known as tariqa.

...Sufism has shaped literature and art for centuries, and is associated with many of the most resonant pieces of Islam’s “golden age,” lasting from roughly the eighth through 13th centuries, including the poetry of Rumi.

In modern times, the predominant view of Sufi Islam is one of “love, peace, tolerance,” Mr. Knysh explained, leading to this style of worship becoming synonymous with peace-loving Islam.

...The Islamic State targets Sufis because it believes that only a fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam is valid.

Some fundamentalists see the reverence for saints, which is common in Shiite Islam, as a form of idolatry, because in their view it shows devotion to something other than the worship of a singular God. Some consider Sufis to be apostate, because saints were not part of the original practice of Islam at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, who died in 632.

...Imam Feisal said that attacks on Sufi worshipers, besides being a “major sin,” are the result of the politicization of religion in the region over the past few decades. Egypt, in particular, he said, is a place where that politicization has fueled extremism.

“When religion becomes politicized,” Imam Feisal said, “it is not good.”

America versus the Godless Civilized World: we're crazily religious

I just finished reading a disturbing chapter in Kurt Andersen's book, "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire."

Disturbing, because in America Versus the Godless Civilized World: Why Are We So Exceptional?, Andersen presents facts about our zealous religiosity that sent chills up my atheist spine.

These facts weren't totally new to me. But they were conveyed in a way that made it clearer than ever how religiously wacko the United States is -- not only compared to other advanced countries, but even countries with a reputation for religious mania.

Here's some quotes from the chapter:

According to a Gallup Poll in 1968, only 5 percent to 14 percent of Scandinavians said they attended church every week, as opposed to 43 percent of Americans at the time. And religious commitment in most of Europe has plummeted ever since. In the U.K. in 1985, for instance, a third of people said they had no religion at all; by 2012 it was up to half.

Unlike the Earth's other moderns, we have rushed headlong back toward magic and miracles, crazifying some legacy churches, filling up the already crazy ones, inventing all kinds of crazy new ones.

The loosest measure of religiosity doesn't require any particular belief in the impossible: Does religion play a very important role in your life? is a survey question Pew asks in dozens of countries. 

At the top of the rankings are African and Muslim and Latin American countries, as well as India and the Philippines -- places where between 61 percent and 97 percent of the people say religion is very important in their lives. 

In the developed world, the percentages range from 11 percent in France to 33 percent in Britain -- except, of course, for the United States, where it's 59 percent, right between Turkey and Lebanon. 

The results are the same again and again, no matter how or where the questions are posed.

A majority of Americans tell Pew they pray every day; in the rest of the developed world, those fractions are one-tenth or one-fifth. Elsewhere in the developed world around half the people never pray; only one in nine Americans admit they never pray. 

Among the citizens of twenty-three countries surveyed in 2011 by the international research firm Ipsos, people in only three -- Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey -- believe in heaven and hell more than Americans do. Our faith in an afterlife is greater, for instance, than that of Mexicans, Brazilians, and Saudi Arabians. 

While a majority of Americans think the devil is in some sense real, in nearly all other predominantly Christian countries, even the Philippines, devil believers are small minorities.

Is the Bible "the actual word of God... to be taken literally, word for word?" Although more than a quarter of Americans think so, in the rest of the rich world, the actual-word-of-God populations range from 4 percent to 10 percent.

Did God create humans in finished form at the start? Among people in thirty-four more-developed countries asked whether they accept evolution, the United States is second from the bottom, ahead only of Turkey. On a different list of two dozen countries ranked by belief in evolution, Americans' disbelief is exceeded only by that of people in South Africa, Brazil, and three Muslim countries.

Although the United States is by far the largest importer of things, we have become the world's great net exporter of fantasy. For the last century, we have created, defined, and dominated the ever-exapanding, increasingly global culture industry -- from advertising to movies to recorded music to television and digital games.

Alongside the shiny pop-cultural fantasies, we're also phenomenally successful exporters of exciting fantasy religion. The market is the Third World, and we are saturating it. 

A century ago, right after Americans invented Pentecostalism, no more than one-tenth of one percent of earthlings were Pentecostals and  charismatics. Today it's 10 percent, one hundred times as many, more than half a billion Christians -- including a large majority of the world's Protestants -- who believe they're routinely speaking in a mystical holy language,  curing illness by laying on of hands, hearing personally from God.

...Why are we so peculiar? Why did Americans keep inventing religions and maintain so many beliefs that people in other affluent countries never took up or else abandoned? 

...Most of the scholars examining this question, because they're scholars, and thus are expected to stay in their lanes and suppress tendentious speculations and hunches, exclude the X-factor, our peculiar and multifaceted American credulity that is the subject of this book.

Tocqueville's archetypal American in the 1830s stopped his frenzied making and selling to think impractical thoughts only when "his religion... bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven." 

Over the next two centuries, as we ran out of New World forests and frontiers to clear and settle, as life kept getting easier (and for many of the least fortunate over the last couple of decades, gloomier), we've extended those occasional glances toward Heaven into a fixed and frenzied stare.

Like I said, this is disturbing. 

Americans' credulity regarding God and all things supernatural predisposes them to also believe in other falsehoods: for example, that human-caused climate change isn't happening; that tax cuts somehow produce more revenue for the government; that homosexuality is a choice; that an embryo is a full-blown person with concomitant rights.

Religion is bad enough as it is. Adding to the badness are the side effects of religiosity caused by a propensity to elevate unfounded personal belief above demonstrable fact- and reason-based truths. 

Sadly, many Americans consider our over-the-top love of religion to be something to be proud of, a faith-filled badge of honor. Actually it is an embarrassment.