Church of the Churchless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Losers rule" helps explain both the Old and NewTestaments

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

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

Gopnik says that the Jews were notable losers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can your religion survive without supernaturalism? Buddhism can.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Appreciative Reader's comment.

Hello, Dungeness!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detection of gravitational wave "orchestra" shows power of science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This discovery shows why I love science so much. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth is beautiful. Which is why religion is ugly.

Truth was on my mind in various ways today.

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

I'll start with the video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that information may be faulty, flawed, false.

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

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

Which was completely backward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atheist me speaks to religious you

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

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

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

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Atheist me speaks to religious you

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

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

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

 

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

Let’s start with belief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump at his arraignment 

I was thrilled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perfection isn't the goal in law and science. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawyers and scientists are very accustomed to hearing this.

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

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

Religion and mysticism are mostly conceptual

Reality can't be captured in concepts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or better put, human imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's what Ron had to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A quote that shows the arrogance of religious zealots

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

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

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

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

The quote came from Dov Morell.

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

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

Usually politics is marked by compromise and negotiating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

India's 1947 partition shows destructiveness of religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worst thing about religions is unreasonable expectations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have sciatica pain in my right leg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientology gets much-deserved ridicule in South Park episode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A philosopher's take on fate, Buddhism, religions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin is an autocrat. So are many religious leaders.

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

Act horribly.

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

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

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

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

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

The appeal of autocrats is perplexing. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's what makes something scientific or ascientific

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scientific status of these multiverse ideas is thus the same as that of the many-worlds interpretation [of quantum mechanics]. Assuming the reality of something unobservable is unnecessary to describe what we observe. Hence, assuming that these other universes are real is ascientific. 

This isn't a particularly difficult argument, so I find it stunning that my physics colleagues can't seem to comprehend it.

...Well, as I have explained so often, this isn't about what I believe or not; it's about what we can know or not. I am saying that what's beyond what we can observe is purely a matter of belief. Science doesn't say anything about whether it exists or doesn't exist.

Hence, claiming it [the multiverse] exists is ascientific, and so is claiming it doesn't exist. If you want to talk about it, fine, but don't pretend it's science. At that point they're [her physics colleagues] usually either confused or offended or both.

...No one should be denigrated for what they believe in. If you want to believe in the existence of infinitely many universes with infinitely many copies of yourself, some of whom are immortal, that's fine with me. 

But please don't pretend it's science.

Now, I feel the same way about nonscientific religious beliefs, which I used to embrace. I realize how appealing those beliefs can be. They supported me for many years. I can't blame anyone for holding on to such beliefs. 

Life can be painful, difficult, scary, frustrating, sad. If an unscientific belief helps you get through life with more ease, great. Keep on believing if that works for you.

But as Hossenfelder says, please don't pretend that what you're doing is science, a reflection of what reality actually is like. Religious belief doesn't cause problems when the believer understands that what they have faith in is purely subjective with no clear connection to objective reality.

However, when religious belief is wrongly considered to be Truth From On High, that's when harmless belief turns into dangerous dogma.

How minds change. It isn't by brute force.

Since I started this blog in 2004, I've been trying to change the minds of religious believers in the direction of being less dogmatic, judgmental, and rigid.

In this endeavor I've been guided mostly by my own experience and intuition. So when I saw a book review in the July 2 issue of New Scientist about "How Minds Change: The new science of belief, opinion, and persuasion" by David McRaney, I was interested to see what the book is all about.

After all, how many of us have changed our mind about something after someone started screaming in our face that we were wrong, they were right, and we needed to start thinking like them?

In my case, exactly never. So these passages from the review rang true to me.

McRaney spends time with former members of the Westboro Baptist Church in the US, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America", learning how they came to disavow their vitriolic beliefs and become more beneficent to others.

The answer, he finds, isn't willing people to come around to your point of view, but letting them realise the folly of their ways.

...The concept -- that, with more knowledge, long-held hypotheses can be disproved -- isn't likely to be news to New Scientist readers. But it doesn't make McRaney's book any less interesting.

Indeed, his writing is a tonic for those who might scratch their head at how others could be so nonsensical as to distrust vaccines, believe the Earth is flat or subscribe to any other number of conspiracy theories.

It helps shift perceptions from the unhelpful attitude of "this person is stupid and beyond help" to "this person has a different frame of belief, and they can be encouraged to think more deeply about the issue."

Because that is the big discovery of those Californian campaigners and the neuroscientists behind them: simply shouting facts at disbelievers doesn't change their minds, rather it entrenches their belief -- as anyone who has tackled a tricky dinner table conversation will know.

Instead, to change minds, you have to not change minds at all. You have to let people come to their own conclusions -- though, of course, you can help them get there by posing the right questions.

Makes sense. 

When I got remarried in 1990, my second wife, Laurel, didn't share my belief at the time that the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) was God in Human Form. Though she made no attempt to dissuade me from belonging to this India-based religious organization, Laurel would ask good questions.

Such as, how can you be sure the guru is God in Human Form? I'd basically reiterate the RSSB teachings, which came down to an unconvincing "I have faith that this is true and by following the instructions I was given at initiation by the guru, hopefully one day I'll know for sure." 

If Laurel had been been confrontational, I would have become more defensive than I already was, hardening my religious conviction rather than softening it. 

Her questions, though, slowly seeped into my mind, along with other ways that gradually brought me to doubt that what I wanted to be true, actually was. So in the end I came to my own conclusion that I needed to distance myself from the organization that I'd been a devoted member of for 35 years.

That conclusion, though, was the result of all kinds of influences.

My meditation experiences. Books I'd read. Discussions with other RSSB members. Learning more about the guru. Giving talks on behalf of RSSB that required me to ponder which parts of the RSSB teachings seemed reasonable, and which were difficult to believe.

I think it's easier to help someone with changing their mind when you have a genuine relationship with them. This is why counseling can be effective at resolving a personal problem, while reading a book generally isn't. 

On this blog, as is the case with social media in general, most people only know each other as existing in cyberspace, not physical space. This makes it more difficult, though not impossible, to pose questions that will help the other person see things differently, and not be even more determined to look upon those things in the same way.

Appreciative Reader, a frequent commenter on this blog, is quite skilled at this. He's adept at questioning assumptions of other commenters without being excessively confrontational.

For example, recently someone claimed that consciousness has to exist after we die, because nothing existent can be destroyed. Sure, that's a tenet of matter/energy. It changes form, yet still exists. But Appreciative Reader pointed out the obvious.

Since consciousness almost certainly is a product of the brain, then when the brain and body die, changing form into the constituent atoms, consciousness, like life itself, no longer exists -- just atoms do, which become new entities. 

A few cogent questions and observations revealed the hollowness of a belief that consciousness is eternal. I'm not sure if any minds were changed, but they might have been.

What grounds religion and mysticism in reality? Nothing

During the 35 years I was a believer in an Eastern religion -- Sant Mat, of the Radha Soami Satsang Beas variety -- I spent a lot of time pondering how it was possible to know whether a description of God, spirit, soul, heaven, or something else supernatural really was true.

Meaning, that the description wasn't just a bunch of words strung together in a fashion meant to be convincing, but actually reflected the nature of an aspect of reality that transcended this physical universe.

My first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder," was an examination of how the new physics related to ancient mysticism. Of course, the mysticism I spoke about happened to be that preached by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), since mysticism comes in many varieties.

I made fun of the notion that a religion should be accepted as true just because a holy book or holy person says it is true.

Aside from this being an obvious circular argument, I said that it was akin to someone writing to the Nobel Prize committee saying that they deserved the physics prize because they'd laid bare all the secrets of the cosmos, the caveat being that the members of the committee would have to wait until after they die to see the evidence of this person's marvelous scientific accomplishment.

A letter like that would quickly find its way into the trash.

But it reflects the core of the world's religions. The claims of a holy book or holy person are accepted on faith, usually accompanied by a belief that a person with such faith will be presented with evidence after their death that the religious teachings they followed while alive are true.

So where does that leave a believer in religion or mysticism?

I argued for the existence of an objective but non-symbolic domain of spiritual reality. It could be experienced by a meditator who, not surprisingly, given what I believed at the time, followed the meditative approach of RSSB. However, that domain couldn't be described in any fashion.

My attitude now is, good try, Brian. But unconvincing.

Well, by "unconvincing" I mean that if there actually is an objective but non-symbolic domain of spiritual reality, nothing can be said about it other than Nothing can be said about it. So religious believers and mystics should, to put it bluntly, just shut the fuck up. 

Enjoy your supposed religious or mystical experience, but don't burden the rest of humanity with bullshit about how marvelous your revelation is, even though it can't really be put into words, so just believe that what is said is true -- which gets us back to the guy/gal who wants a physics Nobel Prize merely because they claim without evidence they've discovered every deep truth about the cosmos.

I'm not a philosopher of science. But I've read a heck of a lot of science books during my 73 years. There isn't a single scientific method, just a wide variety of approaches aimed at understanding what's true about our world and universe.

Some approaches are based on observation. Some are based on experimentation. Some are mostly mathematical. Some are entirely mathematical. All scientific approaches, though, must be capable of being described via words, images, numbers, something. 

This enables scientists to examine a potential fresh truth, subject that claim to rigorous criticism and examination, then decide whether it deserves to be accepted or rejected, with the proviso that, either way, additional research may call into question the first determination of truth/untruth.

Science is grounded.

It makes mistakes, for sure. But the general thrust of scientific inquiry is toward an ever-increasing store of knowledge. Science works so well because it is a public enterprise, many scientific minds collaborating at learning truths about the universe that can be proven provisionally, until an even better truth is revealed.

By contrast, religions and mysticism never progress. A key reason is that they are thoroughly subjective and individualistic. A religious or mystical claim can't be proven to be true, because the claim only exists within the confines of a human mind.

There's no grounding in an observation, experiment, mathematical equation, or other communication that allows for the claim to be tested against objective reality. Almost certainly this is because religion and mysticism have no connection with any objective reality other than this physical world which we all share.

So religious believers and mystics aren't devoted to truth. They are devoted to feeling good about themselves. This makes it frustrating for scientifically-minded people, who are seeking truth about objective reality, to have a discussion with religious or mystically-minded people.

This happens all the time in the comments section of my blog posts. Someone scientifically-minded challenges a claim made by a religious or mystically-minded person. In science, that challenge would be taken seriously, because both sides share the same goal: truth.

But in the comments section (I'm thinking of exchanges between Appreciative Reader and Spence Tepper, for example), the religious or mystically-minded person is seeking to defend their personal perspective or experience. 

They want to continue to feel good about their religious or mystical beliefs. So they engage in all sorts of "word salad" techniques in which all kinds of things are said, except for a saying that directly addresses the challenge directed at them by the scientifically-minded person.

And so it goes. Two ships passing in the night, because one ship is navigating toward truth, and the other ship is navigating toward defending their indefensible personal beliefs. 

Science has a radical distrust of certainty. Me too.

If you're absolutely certain that you know what is true, this is a very good sign that you're wrong. Also, that you are religious rather than scientific.

This is one of the compelling insights theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli talks about in the concluding chapter of his book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity."

In another post I'll describe why Rovelli views the as-yet-unproven theory of quantum gravity as the best approach to resolving the divide between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. For now, I liked what Rovelli had to say about the approach of science so much, I'm sharing portions of it below.

This really is brilliant. Nothing astoundingly new. Just stated in a fresh appealing fashion. Rovelli captures why I love science so much, and why I've come to dislike religiosity so much.

This acute awareness of our ignorance is the heart of scientific thinking. It is thanks to this awareness of the limits of our knowledge that we have learned so much. We are not certain of all that we suspect, just as Socrates was not sure of the spherical nature of Earth.

We are exploring at the borders of our knowledge.

Awareness of the limits of our knowledge is also awareness of the fact that what we know may turn out to be wrong, or inexact. Only by keeping in mind that our beliefs may turn out to be wrong is it possible to free ourselves from wrong ideas, and to learn.

To learn something, it is necessary to have the courage to accept that what we think we know, including our most rooted convictions, may be wrong, or at least naive: shadows on the walls of Plato's cave.

Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing in what everyone says. Not having absolute faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers.

We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe. The centuries in which people had faith in what they believed were the centuries in which little new was learned.

Had they trusted the knowledge of their fathers, Einstein, Newton, and Copernicus would never have called things into question and would never have been able to move our knowledge forward. If no one had raised doubts, we would be still worshipping pharaohs and thinking that Earth is supported on the back of a giant turtle.

...A scientist is someone who lives immersed in the awareness of our deep ignorance, in direct contact with our own innumerable limits, with the limits of our understanding.

But if we are certain of nothing, how can we possibly rely on what science tells us? The answer is simple. Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us.

It is precisely its openness, its constant putting of current knowledge in question, that guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science. 

When Einstein found better answers than Newton, he didn't question the capacity of science to give the best possible answers -- on the contrary, he confirmed it.

...The nature of scientific thinking is critical, rebellious, and dissatisfied with a priori conceptions, reverence, and sacred or untouchable truth. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical distrust in certainty. 

This means not giving credence to those who say they are in possession of the truth.

For this reason, science and religion frequently find themselves on a collision course. Not because science pretends to know ultimate answers, but precisely for the opposite reason: because the scientific spirit distrusts whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers or privileged access to Truth.

This distrust is found to be disturbing in some religious quarters. It is not science that is disturbed by religion: there are certain religions that are disturbed by scientific thinking.

...To live with uncertainty may be difficult. There are those who prefer any certainty, even if unfounded, to the uncertainty that comes from recognizing our own limits. There are some who prefer to believe in a story just because it was believed by the tribe's ancestors, rather than bravely accept uncertainty.

Ignorance can be scary. Our of fear, we can tell ourselves calming stories: up there beyond the stars there is an enchanted garden, with a gentle father who will welcome us into his arms. It doesn't matter if this is true -- it is reassuring.

There is always, in this world, someone who pretends to tell us the ultimate answers. The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. Because they have got it from the fathers; they have read it in a Great Book; they have received it directly from a god; they have found it in the depths of themselves.

There is always someone who has the presumption to be the depository of Truth, neglecting to notice that the world is full of other depositories of Truth, each one with his own real Truth, different from that of the others.

There is always some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words: "Follow me, I am the true way." 

...For my part, I prefer to look our ignorance in the face, accept it, and seek to look just a bit further: to try to understand that which we are able to understand.

Not just because accepting this ignorance is the way to avoid being entangled in superstitions and prejudices but because to accept our ignorance in the first place seems to me to be the truest, the most beautiful, and above all, the most honest way.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" a compelling story of religion gone bad

Having just written the title of this of this blog post, the question that comes to mind is whether there's ever a compelling story of religion gone good. 

In my current atheist frame of mind, the answer is no. But during the 35 years I was a believer, Eastern religion variety, I would have said, "Of course there is, my chosen faith."

Problem is, everyone who buys into a religion thinks the same way. Their faith is absolutely great, almost faultless. It's those other faiths who give religions a bad name.

My wife and I have started watching Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu, which is based on a true crime story involving the Mormon religion. The first episode shows the grisly murder of a woman and her child.

At first the husband is the prime suspect. But it doesn't take long for the Utah detectives on the case to realize that a lot more is going on involving a very large Mormon family. (Is there any other kind? Mormon tend to have many children.)

Several things struck me about what we've watched so far.

One is how religion does bind people together strongly. This can be good or bad, depending on the nature of the religion. When Allen, I think his name is, brings his girlfriend to a gathering of his Lafferty family, everybody there greets her warmly in a decidedly Mormon fashion.

They do so because she's introduced as a devout Mormon.

That makes her part of the religious club to which they all belong. So there's much talk of Heavenly Father this and Heavenly Father that. (So far, it appears Mormons don't use "God" very much, preferring "Heavenly Father.")

I used to enjoy this feeling of belonging when I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an Indian religious organization headed up by a guru. I knew that I could go anywhere in the world and be warmly welcomed at a meeting of the group, especially if I said some magic words.

Not "Heavenly Father." Rather, "Radha Soami." That was an all-purpose greeting of the group. Also, a way of saying thank you with hands folded. Or a way of ending a talk. Kind of like Aloha, I guess. 

During the many years I was the secretary/leader of our local RSSB group, my phone number was listed as a contact person for the organization. My wife, Laurel, wasn't a satsangi, as members of RSSB were called. 

Often when the phone rang and it was a RSSB initiate on the other end, Laurel would hear "Radha Soami." She'd then say, "Hello." Typically the other person would repeat, "Radha Soami." Laurel would keep saying "Hello" until she heard "Hello" in reply.

I thought this was great.

Every religion has some cult-like aspects. Radha Soami was used as a phrase in much the same way the Mormons in the show we're watching would say Heavenly Father. It marked you as part of the in-group.

But my wife wasn't part of RSSB, though she supported me during the time I was a member of RSSB. So people didn't know what to think when they'd phone my number and hear "Hello" rather than "Radha Soami."

Of course, this wasn't a big deal. It just indicated how every religion has ways to tell the difference between those who belong to that faith and those who don't. Mostly those ways don't cause any real problems.

It'll be interesting to learn, as we get further into Under the Banner of Heaven, what caused some members of the Mormon religion to murder the woman and her child.

I suspect those who did this ghastly deed were under the sway of an extreme cult-like frame of mind, as opposed to the usual "normal" religious cult-like attitude.

 

Will Smith thinks God called on him to slap Chris Rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the first part of that speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoying religious stories is fine. Just realize they're fiction.

As I've noted before on this blog, I'm a big believer in good stories. I enjoy reading fiction. I enjoy watching fiction. 

It never fails to amaze me that I can be sitting in our bathtub every evening, nestled in hot water with a vaporizer full of quality Oregon marijuana, holding an escapist thriller book (I love Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp novels; he's a CIA operative), getting excited about whether Rapp is going to succeed in his latest exploit -- while I know full well that Mitch Rapp is a creation of Flynn's imagination, or in the case of the Mitch Rapp book I'm reading now, the imagination of the author, Kyle Mills, who took over writing the series after Flynn died.

It seems clear that one reason religions are so successful in drawing people into their fold is that they're skilled at telling compelling stories. About the religion's founder, such as Jesus. About the religion's divinity, such as God. About what the divinity has done, such as creating the universe.

Those stories wouldn't be nearly so captivating if the human mind wasn't capable of what I effortlessly accomplish each night in a bathtub: look upon fiction as being real, even as we understand that it is made up.

OK, in the case of religions, the stories are usually officially considered to be non-fiction, being based in reality. But I'm confident that many, if not most, religious people recognize that the stories told in their church, temple, mosque, gurdwara, or wherever, probably aren't real. 

Doesn't matter.

A good story grabs us and inserts our mind into a made-up reality that bears a lot of resemblance to actual reality. We get excited. We get sad. We can't wait to find out what is going to happen. We worry about the fate of characters we like. We rejoice in the downfall of characters we don't like.

It'd be interesting to know if highly religious people are more prone to embrace fictional stories than less religious people. This strikes me as a distinct possibility.

Here's an observation based on a sample of two: my wife, Laurel, and myself. Laurel is even more avidly atheist than I am. She's also less into reading fiction and watching certain types of fictional TV shows than I am.

Currently we're making our way through the streaming series, Yellowstone. We've just begun Season 3 of what I believe are four seasons.

Laurel likes what she watches to make sense. Not complete sense, but fairly close to what typical people would do in reality. Me, my attitude is that if I want to see reality, I just have to look around at the world. 

When I watch a fictional TV show, I want to be drawn into a different sort of world than the one I'm familiar with. I want the writers and actors to captivate me with a story that's so intriguing, I forget that the story is made-up.

So my wife and I have some gentle disagreements about Yellowstone.

She'll point out why it is so unlikely that this or that would have happened the way it did. Even though I agree with her, I'll reply that when I'm watching this show, I want to relax and let what the writers and actors have created wash over me with minimal commentary or criticism from my mind.

Of course, I know that what I'm watching is fiction. Like I said, the human mind, naturally including my mind, has an amazing ability to simultaneously feel like something fictional is real, while knowing that it isn't real.

Preserve that feeling when you're exposed to religious stories. It's fine to enjoy them. Just don't forget that the story almost certainly isn't true. That way you can find enjoyment in fiction while realizing it's unreality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desperation often is born out of fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin is an authoritarian. So are most religious leaders.

There are lots of reasons to support Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia. One key reason is this: it wasn't Russia that invaded Ukraine. It was Vladimir Putin, the authoritarian ruler of Russia.

Now, defenders of what Russia did might say that in the United States, the president is the commander-in-chief of the military. So a decision to go to war rests with the president. 

Actually, that isn't true. Our Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war. Recently American presidents have usurped that power in various ways, but the Constitution hasn't changed. 

But in Russia, Putin is completely free to start a war on his own. He didn't become the so-called "president" of Russia in a free and fair election. He got that office through underhanded means, which is how he has remained in power for several decades, with no end in sight unless he is overthrown.

Speaking of no end in sight, that's a decent description of how long the tables are when Putin meets with those who report to him. Here he is with two of his generals after the Ukraine invasion.

This is an apt image of an authoritarian.

No sitting in a circle with some colleagues, having a free-spirited discussion where everybody's opinion is valued. One man at the head of a table, staring at two generals who know that agreeing with Putin is a must if they value their jobs. And their lives.

I've been using "authoritarian" frequently in my blog posts about Putin's totally unjustified invasion of Ukraine. I see this word as a noun as well as an adjective, as in Putin is an authoritarian.

Today it dawned on me that while Putin is an authoritarian, along with the leaders of China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and some other countries, and Donald Trump is a would-be authoritarian, the dictionary definition of the word applies to many religious leaders also.

The Pope is chosen by a bunch of cardinals. He isn't elected by all Catholics. After becoming Pope, he isn't responsible to anyone else, so far as I know. Others can advise the Pope, but no one can impeach the Pope or otherwise remove him from office.

Ditto with gurus.

If they don't announce themselves as a guru, usually they are appointed by a previous guru. Then they remain the leader of their religious sect until they die or quit. Their followers typically are expected to have blind faith in their authority.

Which, the way I see it, makes them authoritarians. 

Or course, there are degrees of authoritarianism. Putin is a truly nasty authoritarian. He murders journalists and political opponents. He makes dissent a crime in Russia.

Often the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, is lumped in with authoritarian leaders, but Modi was elected and while he's an extremist, I view him as a moderate authoritarian -- not at all a compliment, but a step down from an extreme authoritarian like Putin.

The same applies to religious authoritarians. The current Pope strikes me as kind and gentle, as does the Dalai Lama. Both enjoy concentrated power as the head of their religious organizations, yet they're decidedly mild authoritarians. 

The Supreme Leader of Iran, by contrast, has enormous political and religious power. So I'd definitely call him a high level authoritarian.

Writing that last sentence caused me to realize that I've always used "him" in connection with "authoritarian." Maybe there's a woman who is an authoritarian ruler, either political or religious. I just can't think of one. 

Wacky religious news: Islamic sex cult and baptism gone wrong

My wife, Laurel, a proud atheist, enjoys finding stories about the bizarre side of religions (assuming there is anything other than bizarre in religiosity).

Recently she came across the tale of Adnan Oktar, a Turkish sex cult leader. 

In the end, it was not the British deep state, Darwinists, Jews, Freemasons or any of the sinister cabals that Adnan Oktar long railed against that defeated him. It was the Turkish judiciary.

On Monday, the notorious 64-year-old preacher, often referred to in salacious headlines as a "sex cult leader," was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud, and attempted political and military espionage.

It marks the end of a long and bizarre career for the preacher, television host, author and filmmaker.

Beginning his career in the 80s as a firebrand orator, railing against Jews, Freemasons and Charles Darwin, he later became (in)famous for his shows on Turkish TV, in which he would discuss Islamic principles while scantily clad women with bleached blonde hair danced around him to popular music. These women Oktar referred to as his "kittens".

Oktar did have some very attractive devotees.

Naturally I couldn't resist looking on You Tube for videos of the "kittens" dancing around Oktar on Turkish TV. Found one!

Another religious story I read about in our local newspaper was much less salacious, but equally weird in its own way. Who knew that a Catholic baptism would be invalid if the priest got one word wrong?

Damn, now I'm worried that my own ticket to heaven (admittedly, a heaven I don't believe in) is in danger, since I was baptized as a baby Catholic. 

When is a baptism not a baptism?

When the cleric presiding at the ceremony alters the ritual language in such a fundamental way that it undercuts its meaning, according to the Vatican.

And even the altering of a single, crucial pronoun can render a baptism invalid, it says.

A Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Andres Arango, resigned Feb. 1 as pastor of his parish in Phoenix, after acknowledging he had been using the incorrect baptismal formula during more than two decades of priestly ministry in Arizona, California and Brazil.

Arango used the formula, “We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," instead of the prescribed singular pronoun: “I baptize you ...”

Theologically, that makes all the difference, the Vatican ruled in 2020, because it's not the “we” of the congregation doing the baptizing, but rather the “I” of Jesus Christ, working through the priest.

Now the Diocese of Phoenix is putting out a call to anyone who underwent the ritual under Arango to receive “valid” baptisms — and potentially other rites of initiation. The diocese estimates that thousands were affected.

Baptism is the basic rite of initiation into the Christian faith. In Catholic theology, baptism is considered a sacrament — a visible rite conveying spiritual grace — and is “necessary for salvation,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “The church does not know of any means other than baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude” — that is, heaven.

For a sacrament to be valid, it has to be presided over correctly, the church teaches.

“Baptism for us is for salvation, so it’s a big deal. We need to make sure to make it right,” said Jay Conzemius, moderator of the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s tribunal and past president of the Canon Law Society of America.

Respect for facts is a great virtue

I'm a lover of facts. That's why I'm a hater of religion.

Ah, but don't religions seek the truth? Not really. They claim to, but only in the sense that QAnon followers believe they're truth-seekers. 

In each case, religion and QAnon, truth is viewed much more as a belief, as something they hope is the case, rather than as an aspect of objective reality.

So facts are different from truth. There's lots of ways people define those two terms, as I learned by doing some Googling. 

This article describes the difference quite clearly.

A Fact and a Truth walk into a bar and ask for a drink.

The bartender says to the Fact, “What can I get you?” clearly ignoring the Truth.

The Truth complains to the Manager that the bartender didn’t offer Truth a drink. The Manager responds, “the Bartender didn’t see you because he doesn’t believe in you”.

I have been pondering the difference for quite some time. How can multiple people look at the same situation but have vastly differing opinions on what is fact? What I have learned so far is that the difference between a fact and a truth is that a fact cannot be disputed – it is real, quantified, qualified, and measured as fact – it’s real.

A truth is not the same – it is based on belief and/or an interpretation of a fact, “You believe that something is true”.

It may NOT be true, but you believe it to be true. It could be because of where you were brought up, how your parents raised you, or the external influences during critical time periods during your life. Your belief system is borne out of those influences. Is this the reason why positions vary so wildly as it relates to the pandemic or even global warming?

Facts should be the foundation of truth. But often they're not.

This is what allows a Christian to say, "I speak the truth when I say Jesus is the Son of God," or a devotee of a guru to say, "The plain truth is that my guru is God in human form."

Those aren't facts. They're beliefs. 

I stopped being religious when I realized that facts were more important to me than beliefs. For thirty-five years I diligently sought facts to support my beliefs. Not finding those facts, I chose to give up my belief.

The most recent issue of TIME magazine features a cover story of TIME's Person of the Year, Elon Musk. Following that story is a profile of the Heroes of the Year -- four people who were instrumental in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.

Here's an excerpt that mentions facts. I've boldfaced the part about fealty to facts.

Progress flows from the gradual accretion of knowledge. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, it started with the initially painstaking process of decoding the genomes of all living things; then folded in the development of sequencing machines that reduced that genetic reading time to hours; and finally weaved in the insights -- "Put it in a fat bubble!" -- that seemed to come in brilliant flashes but were actually the result of wisdom developed over decades working on how to manipulate a finicky genetic material called mRNA.

What drives it all might, in less divisive times, seem too obvious to mention: fealty to facts. It's the basis of the scientific method and the structure of our world. Without trust in objective reality, the lights don't turn on, the computer doesn't boot up, the streets stay empty.

...The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another, and trusted in facts.

What alternative do we have, really? Assuming we care about objective reality, and not just what subjectively feels good. 

Facts are what bind us together. They are the common denominator of human experience. Opinions are important also, of course. But opinions, like beliefs, are personal and subjective. In contrast, facts are a treasure that everybody can partake of.

There are many virtues. Respect for facts is one of them. These days, more than ever, we need people who do their best to honor facts. 

This doesn't mean never being wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Science progresses because recognizing when you're wrong is a big part of the scientific method. This allows false facts to be discarded and genuine facts to be embraced. 

So it's a virtue to have a shaky belief punctured by solid facts. That can be uncomfortable, because our beliefs are comforting. But if they're not factual, it's better to give them up.

Christmas is a good time to debunk all religious belief

Naturally Christianity comes to mind in December, since Christmas includes the word "Christ." But I view this time of year as an opportunity to remind myself, and others through this blog, of the absurdity of all religious belief. 

Of course, it is only us atheists who look upon all religions as absurd. Since most people are religious, they view their faith as making good sense. It's those other religions that are absurd.

To offer a few examples:

-- Christians have no problem believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, and came back from the dead. But the notion that an angel dictated the Koran to Mohammed -- that's absurd!

-- The India-based faith I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, teaches that at the time of initiation the guru places a copy of himself, the "radiant form," in the consciousness of every disciple. But the idea that peyote or mescaline can lead to spiritual visions -- that's absurd!

Many other instances of religious hypocrisy exist, of course. So many, they're uncountable.

Those who hold any form of religious or supernatural belief consider that they are on the straight road to cosmic truth, while those other believers are on a twisting path of illusion. In 2010 I wrote about this in Believers need to take the "Outsider Test for Faith." 

Why and how do religious believers choose to accept a particular faith out of the many choices available to them? (4200 is one estimate)

Great question. Here's an ever better one: What makes someone confident that the religion they've chosen is true, while all the other religions are false?

John W. Loftus examines these issues in a book he edited, "The Christian Delusion." The first chapter I read was by Loftus, "The Outsider Test for Faith Revisited." He used to be a minister, until his deconversion.

I loved the chapter.

It lays out problems with religious belief that I've been aware of for a long time, but had never considered so clearly and cogently. The first version of Loftus' Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) can be read here. What I perused this morning includes some responses to objections true believers raised to OTF version 1.0.

...It's been observed that every religious believer rejects countless gods and/or other metaphysical entities, accepting just one: what he or she believes in. An atheist just goes one small step further: rejecting that one as well.

So Loftus makes the entirely reasonable argument that people should test their chosen faith in the same way they test other (rejected) religious, spiritual, mystical, or metaphysical belief systems.

...People will reject unsubstantiated claims in holy books... except the book they believe in. People will reject miracle stories... except miracles related by their own faith. People will reject the divinity of living prophets or messengers of God... except the person they accept as a genuine spiritual teacher.

Every religious believer, aside from the few who are genuinely open-minded, considers that he or she has found the One True Faith among the 4,199 or so false faiths. Yet how is this possible, logically or realistically?

It's like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average.

Laurel, my wife, and I got married in 1990. Back then Laurel believed in a New Age channeler who supposedly could communicate with spiritual beings when he went into a trance state. Laurel got tape recordings of those sessions on a monthly basis. 

I thought this channeler guy was ridiculous.

Meanwhile, I was an avid devotee of a guru who was considered to be God in human form, which Laurel found equally ridiculous. We had lengthy conversations where Laurel would try to convince me that her belief was valid, while I did the same about my belief.

Eventually the realization hit us that we were both right: meaning, each of our beliefs had no basis in reality. Those beliefs had given us comfort, but we gave them up in favor of truth -- which we consider means demonstrable evidence founded on facts, not a feeling that something is true.

In 2017 I wrote Jesus and Mohammed talk about truth vs. facts. That post included a right-on cartoon.

What the Woke Racism book says about religion

Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "Woke Racism" is a great book. The subtitle of the book is "How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America."

John McWhorter, the author, is an atheist. So when he calls woke racism a religion, that's intended as a negative judgement. 

In his chapter, The New Religion, McWhorter describes the ways what he calls The Elect (meaning, those who embrace woke racism) act in a religious fashion. 

Here's some excerpts from that chapter.

With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as Romans witnessed the birth of Christianity. The way to get past seeing the Elect as merely "crazy" is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are.

One thing that will discourage a general perception of them in this way is that they themselves will resist the charge so heartily. This is understandable.Early Christians did not think of themselves as "a religion" either. They thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems, whatever they chose to call themselves.

In addition, in our times, it will feel unwelcome to the Elect to be deemed a religion, because they do not bill themselves as such and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. It also implies that they are not thinking for themselves.

...To make sense of it, we must understand them -- partly out of compassion and partly in order to keep them from destroying our own lives. This can happen only if we process them not as crazed, but parishioners. 

To do this, we must examine the ways in which their new religion so closely parallels older ones. It makes what can seem like a mess of weird opinions and attitudes into something quite coherent.

The Elect have superstition. It is inherent in a religion that, amid various other tenets and commitments, one is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief. Certain questions are not to be asked, or, if asked, only politely. The answer one gets, despite being somewhat half-cocked, is to be accepted.

...Elect philosophy requires the same standpoint. One is not to ask "Why are black people so upset about one white cop killing a black man when black men are at more danger of being killed by one another?" Or one might go ahead and ask, only to receive flabby answers after which further questions are unwelcome.

...What you actually don't "get" in your quest to wring logic out of incoherent positions like these is that for the Elect, battling racism is to be questioned only in ways that reinforce the idea that the Elect are correct -- even at the cost of basic sense. This is superstition. 

The Elect have clergy. Think of the preacher praised for his sermon as people file out of church. It probably wasn't the kind of sermon that, for most of these people, blew their minds. They enjoyed it because it was a beautiful rendition of that which they knew before, and it gave them comfort. 

On race, the Elect cherish certain top-rate thinkers for their gifts in phrasing, repeating, and crafting artful variations upon points considered crucial. These are their priests, their clergy.

You need your preacher to keep telling the religion's truth, and to tell it often, since the superstitious, nonempirical wing of the ideology is easy to drift away from as real life impinges ever upon you in daily existence.

The Elect have original sin. The Elect, then, have magic, clergy, and also a conception of original sin. Under Elect creed, the sin is "white privilege." To anticipate a question, yes, I do believe that to be white in America is to automatically harbor certain unstated privileges in terms of one's sense of belonging. 

...But the issue here is not whether I or anyone else thinks white privilege is real, but what we consider the proper response to it. The Elect are to ritually "acknowledge" that they possess white privilege, with an awareness that they can never be absolved of it. 

...Coates and DiAngelo are calling these people sinners. Yet the sinners eagerly drink in the charge, revering their accusers, and come away from this self-mortification feeling energized. Cleansed. This is worship, by people embracing the self-mortification of the inveterate sinner, stained by the original sin of white privilege. 

The Elect are evangelical. "Why don't they allow people to have different opinions?" You're missing the point. The Elect can seem truly baffling -- until we see they are a religion. Specifically, an evangelical one.

To wit: Do we wonder why fundamentalist Christians do not see their beliefs as just one of many valid opinions? They see themselves as bearers of a Good News that, if all people would simply open up and see it, would create a perfect world. 

...To be Elect is to think in exactly the same way. Key to being Elect is a sense that there is always a flock of unconverted heathen. Many of the heathen are, for example, the whites "out there," as it is often put about the white people who were so widely feared as possibly keeping Barack Obama from being elected (twice).

The Elect ban the heretic. The Elect consider it imperative to not only critique those who disagree with their creed, but to seek their punishment and elimination to whatever degree real-life conditions can accommodate. 

There is an overriding sense that unbelievers must be not just spoken out against, but called out, isolated, and banned.

...The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous. 

...The Elect are members of a religion, of a kind within which the dissenter is not someone in disagreement but is a kind of environmental pollution. 

...The religious fervor is absolutist, complete with a Manichaean sense of good versus evil. Many recall Dana Carvey's Church Lady on Saturday Night Live, with her self-celebratory obsession with smoking out the doings of "SATAN?!"

...Why can't they allow other views? Remember, this is religion, not political science, and specifically a religion eerily akin to devout Christianity. To the Elect, racism is the equivalent of Satan. If I deign to walk by Satan with the idea that we just let him be, I am missing the point. I am "wrong."

Supernatural beliefs lack both causes and mechanisms

When I press on certain keys on my MacBook Pro keyboard, magic happens!

Which you can see. Because I can touch type, words form on my laptop's screen. After I publish this post, the words appear on my Church of the Churchless blog.

Of course, all this isn't really magic. There's a chain of causes that leads to the words appearing in a blog post. Underlying those causes are hidden mechanisms -- software, hardware, internet functions, and such -- that most of us don't understand very well.

But what we're certain of is the overall way someone typing out thoughts at home can share those ideas on the internet, or worldwide web, even if we don't grasp the finer details of this.

When it comes to the realm of the supernatural, though, and religiosity in general, both causes and mechanisms are lacking. Well, let's make that believable causes and mechanisms with a foundation in demonstrable evidence.

This is a big reason why, after 35 years, I couldn't continue believing in the India-based religion that I once embraced wholeheartedly. 

I became a devotee of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) because I liked the supposedly scientific nature of this mystical approach to meditation and God-realization. However, over time the RSSB teachings made less and less sense to me.

I was asked to believe that I had a soul that could be separated from my body. But there was no evidence of this soul. I was asked to believe that the RSSB guru could know what his disciples were doing from afar, but there was no reasonable cause or mechanism that allowed this to occur.

Many other examples could be given of how the RSSB teachings basically involved a lot of mumbo-jumbo, ideas that made sense only if you didn't think about them very much. This "science" actually turned out to be as much of a faith-based religion as Christianity.

Now, it's true that science often doesn't completely understand the mechanisms underlying causes. For example, gravity causes apples to fall from a tree. Einstein figured out that the mechanism is curved space-time.

But quantum theory doesn't have its own explanation for gravity that fits with Einstein's. So many physicists suspect there's a deeper mechanism that explains gravity which is compatible with both relativity theory and quantum theory.

Still, modern science is hugely better at describing how the world works than religion and supernaturalism is. In large part this is because science seeks causes and mechanisms that can be tested empirically, not just talked about in vague ways.

RSSB taught that consciousness is immaterial. That allows the conscious soul to survive the death of the material body. Left unexplained was how immaterial consciousness was so obviously affected by changes to the material brain such as being hit on the head with a baseball bat or undergoing anesthesia.

If the soul goes offline when you have surgery, how does it survive death? If the soul is who we really are, why doesn't it manifest when consciousness is temporarily absent from the brain?

In his book, "Rationality," Steven Pinker speaks about causes and mechanisms.

Even once we have established that some cause makes a difference to an outcome, neither scientists nor laypeople are content to leave it at that. We connect the cause to its effect with a mechanism: the clockwork behind the scenes that pushes things around.

People have intuitions that the world is not a video game with patterns of pixels giving way to new patterns. Underneath each happening is a hidden force, power, or oomph.

Many of our primitive intuitions of causal powers turn out, in the light of science, to be mistaken, such as the "impetus" that the medievals thought was impressed upon moving objects, and the psi, qi, engrams, energy fields, homeopathic miasms, crystal powers, and other bunkum of alternative medicine.

But some intuitive mechanisms, like gravity, survive in scientifically respectable forms. And many new hidden mechanisms have been posited to explain correlations in the world, including genes, pathogens, tectonic plates, and elementary particles.

These causal mechanisms are what allow us to predict what would happen in counterfactual scenarios, lifting them from the realm of make-believe: we set up the pretend world and then simulate the mechanisms, which take it from there.

Why people with religious delusions do fine in everyday life

I've finished Steven Pinker's book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. I enjoyed it, though some chapters were a bit tedious.

The final chapters, though, held my interest. Here's what I liked most in the next to last chapter, "What's Wrong With People?" Meaning, why do so many people believe such crazy irrational stuff?

It starts off with a great George Carlin quote.

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.

Pinker then describes some reasons that prevent people from reasoning correctly. The first is motivated reasoning. 

The obvious reason that people avoid getting on a train of reasoning is that they don't like where it takes them... The mustering of rhetorical resources to drive an argument toward a favored conclusion is called motivated reasoning.

The motive may be to end at a congenial conclusion, but it may also be to flaunt the arguer's wisdom, knowledge, or virtue. We all know the barroom blowhard, the debating champ, the legal eagle, the mansplainer, the competitive distance urinator, the intellectual pugilist who would rather be right than get it right. 

Another is myside bias.

Politically motivated numeracy and other forms of biased evaluation show that people reason their way into or out of a conclusion even when it offers them no personal advantage.

It's enough that the conclusion enhances the correctness or nobility of their political, religious, ethnic, or cultural tribe. It's called, obviously enough, the myside bias, and it commandeers every kind of reasoning, even logic.

...The myside bias is not an across-the-board personality trait, but presses on whatever trigger or hot button is connected to the reasoner's identity.

This gives us a big clue about why people with religious delusions -- which in my view includes everybody who is religious, as I was for 35 years -- function just fine in everyday life. 

Defects like motivated reasoning and the myside bias only come into play when someone has to provide reasons for why they believe something that means a lot to them, yet isn't grounded in reality.

Your crazy Uncle Joe, who embraces every wacko conspiracy theory he sees on Fox News or hears from Donald Trump, is a great mechanic who can diagnose car problems with ease. His ability to reason is fine in that area, yet it sucks when he's asked to defend a bizarre notion like Pizzagate.

Pinker says that what you mean by "believe" is key to understanding how this can be.

Mercier notes that holders of weird beliefs often don't have the courage of their convictions. Though millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington (the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a predecessor of QAnon), virtually none took steps commensurate with such an atrocity such as calling the police. 

...At least Edgar Welch, the man who burst into the pizzeria with his gun blazing in a heroic effort to rescue the children, took his beliefs seriously. The millions of others must have believed the rumor in a very different sense of "believe."

That sense points to mythology, the domain of religion, conspiracy theories, and other areas of life that aren't meant to be taken as literally true -- though believers often claim they are. This is why Christians and other believers in a heavenly realm that's much better than our world don't kill themselves to enter it right away.

They believe in this as mythology, not as reality. Pinker explains:

People divide their worlds into two zones. One consists of the physical objects around them, the other people they deal with face to face, the memory of their interactions, and the rules and norms that regulate their lives.

People have mostly accurate beliefs about this zone, and they reason rationally within it. Within this zone, they believe there's a real world and that beliefs about it are true or false. They have no choice: that's the only way to keep gas in the car, money in the bank, and the kids clothed and fed.

Call it the reality mindset.

The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience: the distant past, the unknowable future, faraway people and places, remote corridors of power, the microscopic, the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical.

People may entertain notions about what happens in these zones, but they have no way of finding out, and anyway it makes no discernible difference in their lives. Beliefs in these zones are narratives which be entertaining or inspiring or morally edifying.

Whether they are literally "true" or "false" is the wrong question. The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose. 

Call it the mythology mindset. 

...And for all the conquests of the reality mindset, the mythology mindset still occupies swaths of territory in the landscape of mainstream belief. The obvious example is religion. More than two billion people believe that if one doesn't accept Jesus as one's savior one will be damned to eternal torment in hell.

Fortunately, they don't take the next logical step and try to convert people to Christianity at swordpoint for their own good, or torture heretics who might lure others into damnation.

Yet in past centuries, when Christian belief fell into the reality zone, many Crusaders, Inquisitors, conquistadors, and soldiers in the Wars of Religion did exactly that. Like the Comet Ping Pong redeemer, they treated their beliefs as literally true.

For that matter, though many people profess to believe in an afterlife, they seem to be in no hurry to leave this vale of tears for eternal bliss in paradise.

What if God hates religions?

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

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

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

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

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

The only difference being, what follows is absolutely true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything. 

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

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

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

Science is repeatable. Religions aren't.

There are lots of reasons to choose science over religion. Chief among them, of course, is that science comes up with solid knowledge about reality, while religion doesn't. 

But I find science's repeatability to be an especially appealing feature of science. 

Meaning, if somehow all scientific knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth, while leaving humanity intact, there's little or no doubt that this knowledge eventually would be rediscovered. 

In other words, science is repeatable. It's methods aren't dependent on one-of-a-kind happenstance, like Einstein being born at a particular time and place with certain aptitudes. 

If Einstein hadn't come up with his theories of special and general relativity when he did, someone else would have trod the same scientific ground not long after.

Ditto with Darwin's theory of evolution. Others were on the verge of publishing their own take on evolution just when Darwin was about to, which, I recall reading, spurred Darwin to finish writing "On the Origin of Species" as soon as possible.

We can also easily imagine an alien civilization in a galaxy far, far away having much the same understanding of scientific reality as we humans do. Sure, their language, concepts, mathematics, and such probably would markedly differ from ours.

But almost certainly they'd have a similar understanding of atomic particles and the forces of nature as we do. After all, their basic physical reality would be the same as our basic physical reality.

By contrast, things would be very different if somehow all religious knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth. Or if we came into contact with an alien civilization and learned about what beliefs, if any, they might have in the realm of religion 

What are the chances that Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism would reappear if no trace of these religions remained? Essentially, zero. 

Same with every other religion, since each religion is heavily dependent on historical circumstances that can't be repeated. Jesus' supposed birth and death. The Koran being dictated to Muhammed by an angel. Hindu beliefs arising from ancient Indian sources.

Because Buddhism is the most psychological, and least supernatural, of the world's major religions, it's teachings would have the best chance of being rediscovered if all trace of Buddhism vanished. Even so, Buddhism obviously is a product of the insights arrived at by a specific person. 

Take away the Buddha, and you would still have Buddhism, yet in a markedly changed form. But take away Einstein, and the theory of relativity would be totally unaffected, since the theory rests on the nature of reality, not on any particular person.

Of course, most religious people find the non-repeatability of their faith to be a desirable feature. It gives them a pleasing feeling of being special. Jesus died for our sins so that we might live for eternity with our Father in heaven. Cool!

Unreal. But cool. 

Me, I prefer reality. Which is why I love science so much.

Particular people are responsible for scientific discoveries -- they don't fall out of the sky like snowflakes -- yet this knowledge has little or nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the nature of our world.

How religions disable our reasoning practices

Here's a marvelous excerpt from Andy Norman's book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think." 

I read it this morning and realized it's a terrific way to explain what's wrong with the irrationality of religion. Norman imagines that someone wants to figure out how to best undermine human reasoning that enables us to distinguish truth from falsehoods, what's real from what's illusory. 

As you'll read below, what results is... (no big surprise) religion. 

Imagine yourself part of a team charged with stress-testing civilization's all-important reasoning practices. The team has an initial meeting, and the question is posed: How can we best disrupt human reasoning practices? The task is then clarified: How can we cause not just temporary disruption, but lasting damage?

"We" would probably begin with a little reverse-engineering: we'd take apart the mechanism and see how it works. This would lead us to the lever-like functioning of reasons and the key role of reason's fulcrum. We'd come to realize that our reasoning practices hinge on a norm that requires us to accommodate ourselves to good reasons.

Then we'd ask: How can we disable this norm?

We might start by creating a loophole in the requirement. Specifically, we could grant that yielding to better reasons is often a good thing, but deny that it's always a good thing. Certain beliefs, we might argue, are too important to be hostage to rational fortune.

Then we'd carve out an exemption and insist that convictions X, Y, and Z belong to a special, protected class. We might call these convictions "articles of faith."

Then, we could spread the good news that this exemption exists.

We'd probably appeal, first, to those who resent rational constraint and explain that on certain subjects, it's okay to believe and assert things without evidence. From there, we could extend the exemption to claims that fly in the face of evidence -- things made unlikely by, or directly contradicted by, facts.

Claims about miracles and virgin birth, for example.

Of course, we might need to traverse this path gradually, giving people time to acclimate to each expansion of the rationality exemption. We could hasten the decline of rational standards by making some articles of faith mandatory: not just permissible, but required. In fact, we could make them nonnegotiable -- the mental equivalent of the immovable object.

The beauty of this approach is that, once such articles of faith are installed, efforts to dislodge them further degrade reason's fulcrum. The lever is obstructed, and something's got to give. A glance at history confirms that we're on to something here: reasoning practices are highly vulnerable to such stresses.

Next, we could sell people on the idea that credulity is virtue. 

We could promise fantastic rewards for those who believe and threaten terrifying punishments for those who doubt. We could invent a being capable of delivering such rewards and punishments and make people fear him. Why can't you see this being? Because he's invisible. Why does he need you to believe in him? Never mind: just take our word for it. Why can't we see others experiencing their rewards and punishments? Because all that happens in the afterlife.

If all of this seems patently ridiculous, so much the better -- by which I mean, so much the worse for rationality norms. As the Red Queen told Alice in Wonderland: believing impossible things takes practice. 

A saboteur of rational accountability norms must take this to heart. To wreak real havoc, you've got to think big. Go big or go home. Tepid irrationality is for chumps. Real saboteurs wield patently unreasonable claims. When called on it, they double down on the delusion: that's the way to do real damage to rationality norms. 

We can also stigmatize those who take epistemic standards seriously. If they're outspoken, we can demonize them. We can label them, say, infidels, heretics, heathens, apostates, or blasphemers. We can teach believers to shun and hate them. We can instruct believers to kill nonbelievers (as sacred texts sometimes do). 

Only a few believers need to follow through: the rest of the nonbelievers usually get the message and stop enforcing rationality norms. A little intimidation goes a long way.

We could also harness identity-protective cognition. The idea, again, is that people will usually bend rationality norms in order to protect their identity. The thing to do, then, is get people hooked on one or another ideological identity -- preferably before they're old enough to understand the consequences.

We could saddle children with the identities of their parents. Install an ideological identity early enough, and identity-protective thinking will often be with that person for life. From then on, challenges to identity-defining beliefs will feel offensive and somehow unfair. This is sure to damage reason's fulcrum. 

We can also harness humanity's tribal instincts. We can build communities around arbitrary doctrinal differences and have the members of these communities validate each other's defiance of rationality norms. Us-versus-them stories can be counted on to stir deep emotions and skew rational judgment.

We can exploit humanity's "mattering instinct"-- our need to feel that our lives matter.

To do this, just sell a group on the idea that they're God's chosen people. Or better yet, that God has some mysterious mission for them. Faced with temptation like that, rational resolution often crumbles. Mattering myths are highly seductive -- and useful for subverting rationality norms.

We could exploit the evolved  brain's penchant for kin sympathy. Those who share the tenets of the faith, for example, could be called "brother" or "sister." We could exploit our natural deference to authority. Authority figures in the community could be called "father" or "mother superior." The sky being at the center of the big myth could be referred to as "lord" or "king."

We could confer status on the most aggesssibe champions of the faith, calling them "reverend," "holy father," "guru," or "ayatollah." We could give these champions a platform and an audience -- a "pulpit," say, and a "flock." They could use this platform to publicly violate rationality norms and celebrate the defiant disregard of such norms. 

Stories glorifying the sort of blind faith that Abraham had for God would be especially useful. (The founding parable of the so-called Abrahamic religions involves a father, Abraham, willing to sacrifice his son to prove his devotion to God.) See Abraham's breathtaking willingness to sacrifice not only his reason but also his son? The clear implication is that that's the sort of faith to aspire to.

We could develop a concept of the "sacred" or "holy" that paints certain things as too precious to question. We could label entire lines of inquiry profane. Or sacrilegious. We could promote contempt for intellectual virtues and deride rationality norms as "scientism run amok." 

Religious beliefs can be false, yet useful

My wife turned me on to Andy Norman's book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think." She's listening to it via the audiobook. I'm reading the print edition.

The Covid pandemic has taught us all a lot about immunity against viruses. Vaccines help us fight off a Covid infection by strengthening our defenses against the viral invader. Likewise, Norman argues, minds are prone to being infected by bad ideas. 

Unfortunately, there is no way to get a shot that wards off bad ideas. Instead, his book describes ways we can protect our mind from being taken over by them. 

Norman is a philosopher who developed his approach through many years of trying out ways to get his students engaged with the ideas he was teaching. I've shared a lengthy excerpt below from his The Ethics of Faith chapter. You'll see that Norman is a careful thinker who uses reasonable arguments to make his point.

Sure, that's what most of us aspire to. But often we fall short of that ideal, for reasons made clear in "Mental Immunity." 

I liked how this excerpt ends with an important conclusion. Often we focus on whether a belief, faith-based or not, is true or false. That's important, but beliefs also can be useful or harmful. So a religious belief could be false, yet useful to the believer. 

A related notion is that a belief can have "upstream" evidence and "downstream" implications.

Meaning, evidence from the real world can flow upstream and provide evidence for or against the belief. Separately, though, is the downstream effects that flow from the belief, whether or not the belief is supported by evidence.

This is why religious believers who comment on my blog posts often cite the benefits they've gotten from their beliefs. That's a downstream effect. Again, this may have little or nothing to do with the upstream evidence about whether the belief is correct.

Here's the excerpt. 

Stories like these are the backbone of William James's defense of faith. He calls them cases "where faith in a fact can help create that fact." I call them cases of self-fulfilling belief. His point is that our attitudes frequently "run ahead of scientific evidence." And often, that's a good thing.

What are we to make of this argument? 

For starters, we have to acknowledge that people need confidence, hope, trust, commitment, and resolve -- five secular cousins of religious faith -- and for many, religious talk works to bolster these attitudes. 

Second, these attitudes tend to be conducive to mental health: a confident, hopeful, trusting, and resolute mind is healthy almost by definition. 

Third, these attitudes are ingredients of what biologists call "prosociality" -- they tend to build social capital in ways that benefit not just the self but also others. We should all be grateful, then, for the well-meaning efforts of religious people devoted to building trust, hope, and moral commitment.

James saw that Cliffordian scruples could impinge on people's "right" to willfully boost healthy attitudes. For this reason he labeled evidentialism "insane." He had a point. For it would be unwise to prohibit all use of non-evidence-based mind hacks. 

Suppose that a castaway on a desert island allows herself to believe that she'll be rescued. Suppose she does this in utter defiance of the evidence, but harms no one, while quadrupling her odds of survival. How could such believing be unethical? 

I'd like, at this point, to apply my training in dispute resolution to mediate the centuries-old dispute between religious and secular outlooks. What if each side has a piece of the truth? What if we don't have to choose just one of these truths and throw out the other? What if, instead, we opened up a "both..and" alternative to the traditional "either...or"?

Many religious beliefs require the believer to willfully suspend disbelief. Belief that Jesus rose from the dead, for example. 

The problem is that this involves the willful suspension of basic standards of cognitive accountability -- standards that apply in other domains. But what if there were genuine alternatives -- mind hacks that promote healthy, prosocial attitudes without requiring us to violate important norms? 

What if we could have the benefits of religion without pretending to know things we don't really know?

Do such alternatives exist? I believe they do. Consider Defense Exhibit A, where "precursive" faith in a stranger's friendliness helps to bring about a friendship. James implies that the friendship "cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming," but is this true? Are there really no alternative paths to the hoped-for result?

Here, off the top of my head, are four:

Option 1: Infer from the evidence of past experience that any given stranger is likely to prove friendly. Here the belief is not definitive ("This stranger will prove friendly") but probabilistic ("This stranger is likely to prove friendly"). It has the virtue of being evidence-based, though, and can still have the salutary effects. (Notice, by the way, that blind trust in all strangers is probably more trusting than is warranted, wise, or safe. This observation shows that it makes sense to temper pro-social attitudes with evidence.)

Option 2: Admit that you don't have enough evidence of the stranger's friendliness (and thereby decline, on evidentialist grounds, to believe it) but all the while remain resolutely hopeful that the stranger will prove friendly. The hope can function in place of the belief and pave the way for the friendship, but without violating evidentialist scruples.

Option 3: Just commit to being friendly to strangers -- regardless of their likelihood of reciprocating the friendliness -- on the grounds that it's the right thing to do. On this approach, you needn't pretend to know something you don't really know; you simply act friendly because that's the kind of person you wish to be. The hoped-for friendship can then form without irresponsible believing entering the picture.

Option 4: Smile anyway.

The trust involved in Option 1, the hopefulness of Option 2, the moral commitment of Option 3, and the smiling demeanor of Option 4 are all dimensions of cognitive health. Arguably, they're what faith advocates have been after all along. But none of them are inherently religious. 

And that's the point: the valuable aspects of religious faith can be had without willful self-deception. 

The intellectually questionable supernatural trappings can be left behind, because there are honest, evidentially responsible ways to achieve the same result. The same healthy attitudes that religions have long been in the business of cultivating can be induced in other ways.

Is it fair, though, to describe religious belief as "willfully self-deceptive"? Does it invariably involve "pretending" to know things you don't know? Or pretending to believe things you don't really believe? Perhaps not. Perhaps sincere religious belief is none of these things.

The self-fulfilling beliefs James likens them to, however, are all of these things. 

In Exhibit 1, a man pretends to know that a stranger will prove friendly. In Exhibit 2, a woman wills herself to believe that she has what it takes to do the job. In Exhibit 3, Cassius Clay psyches himself up with extravagant claims of his own greatness. In Exhibit 4, a woman helps herself to the comforting (and quite possibly delusive) belief that God will provide.

In fact, the way James defines it, faith is inherently delusive. For "faith in a fact" can only "create the fact" if the belief starts out false. 

Think about it: James was arguing that it's okay to pretend that the not-yet-actual is already actual -- providing the pretense has the potential to change the world and, in so doing, mitigate the falsehood. There's no escaping it: James was endorsing willful dishonesty -- of at least limited duration. 

Of course, he was also laying the groundwork for a revolutionary reinterpretation of religion. James showed us that we can understand religious wisdom as functionally useful even when it is not literally true. The first step is to recognize that religious beliefs are, at bottom, expedients for inducing desirable attitudes.

A religious claim doesn't have to be true to feel deeply right. The feeling of rightness can stem instead from its power to express allegiance. Also, believers throughout history have argued for religious claims on the grounds that they're useful. 

Claims about heaven and hell, for example, are often explicitly defended on the grounds that they help keep people in line. More generally, religious claims also have a pragmatic usefulness that is mistaken for truth. The idea that "God will provide," for example, can be marvelously calming whether or not it is true. "Jesus loves me" may meet a psychological need more reality-based believing can't.

I was a Quaker for about a decade because my mother loved the Quaker idea that "there is that of God in everyone." She lacked upstream evidence that we are in fact God-infused but had a clear grasp of the idea's downstream consequences. By dignifying us all, the idea makes it harder to mistreat people. She liked it and signed us up.

There's a larger lesson here, and it applies to secular as well as religious beliefs.

Beliefs have both logical properties and causal properties. They can be true or false and they can be useful or useless. Likewise, they can be evidenced to this or that degree and they can be more or less harmful. Ethically speaking, all of these properties matter, and responsible agents take account of them all. 

But here's the thing: they do so without confusing them. Useful does not mean true; nor does well-evidenced mean harmless. 

Excessive wokeness is akin to extreme religiosity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I said in my Salem Political Snark blog post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full statement she referred to said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islamic Shariah law to be enforced by Taliban

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

This doesn't bode well for Afghan women. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History of Religion cartoon

Pretty much sums it up.

Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

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

Not really surprising, since I said:

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

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

Read what follows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, why should I or anyone else believe you? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have options. In religions. In everything else.

I'm continuing to enjoy my reading of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of my previous post. 

Her core idea is that motivated reasoning, where we ignore what's true because our motivation is to preserve our current belief structure, leads to a soldier mindset aimed at defending our beliefs from that unwelcome intruder, reality. 

By contrast, a scout mindset values truth-seeking through accuracy motivated reasoning. Our goal is know what is really there, not what we hope is there, what we'd like to be there, or what others want us to believe is there.

One of the appealing things about a scout mindset is how it provides us with way more options than a defensive, protect-my-beliefs at all costs soldier mindset. 

In her "Why Truth is More Valuable Than We Realize" chapter, Galef speaks of tradeoffs.

We trade off between judgement and belonging. If you live in a tight-knit community, it might be easier to fit in if you use soldier mindset to fight off any doubts you have about your community's core beliefs and values.

On the other hand, if you do allow yourself to entertain those doubts, you might realize you're better off rejecting your community's views on morality, religion, or gender roles, and deciding to live a less traditional life.

Easy to say. Often not so easy to do. 

I regularly get emails from people who are encountering resistance from their family when they express doubts about the religion they were brought up in.

For example, the organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered religious group headquartered in India. Traditional Indian families tend to be close-knit and hierarchical.

If a child decides to head off in a different religious direction after becoming an adult, they can be made to feel guilty, like they're doing something wrong and letting down their parents. 

This is unfortunate.

Family bonds are important, but not if it means someone has to live a lie, pretending to believe in something that no longer appeals to them. Wise loving parents understand that their children, along with everyone else, have to find their own way in life.

Feeling like you have no options is an indication that you've fallen into a soldier mindset dominated by motivated reasoning.

It's difficult to imagine doing something different when you're encased behind a high thick wall of firmly held beliefs. Questioning their validity would entail peering over that wall and trying to determine how true those beliefs really are.

If they're found to be deficient in truth, you might need to find a way to get over the wall of your beliefs and explore new territory that reflects reality more fully. 

There's no reason why you can't remain close to family and friends who choose to remain within the belief structure you've left behind. But sometimes there's a price to be paid for being independent: ostracism, criticism, shunning.

Everybody has to decide whether truth is more important than getting along.

But the way I see it, if someone is willing to ditch you for going your own way, they were never really your friend. Genuine friendships, genuine family relationships -- they're based on something much deeper than shallow beliefs. 

Notably, love. 

QAnon, like religion, doesn't care about truth

Last night my wife and I finished watching the sixth and last episode of HBO's "QAnon: Into the Storm." 

I've written two previous posts about how QAnon bears a lot of resemblance to religion. (See here and here.) 

QAnon devotees are like religious believers. Neither cares about actual truth, while both pretend that they understand reality in a deep sense that eludes ordinary people.

I found the HBO series fascinating.

It shows us the people behind QAnon -- the computer geeks who administer the sites where Q posted his "drops," often enigmatic and usually totally wrong observations about politics and what-not.

We also see the people who interpret Q's communications via podcasts, You Tube channels, and the like. They're akin to high priests who mediate between the Almighty and the mass of believers.

The final episode doesn't definitively say who Q is, but a lot of evidence points to Ron Watkins, including Watkins' own words. 

Ron Watkins

Watkins was the administrator of 8Chan, which morphed into 8Kun, the places that Q chose to host his posts/drops. His father, Jim Watkins, also plays a large role in the HBO series.

Both Ron and Jim are intelligent schemers. They're highly watchable, along with being highly irritating at times. 

When the closing credits of the final episode appeared, I said to my wife, "I wonder if the faith of QAnon followers would be shaken if they knew that probably Q is a computer geek who wears a green baseball cap, not a high level government official with a super secret Q security clearance."

She replied, "It wouldn't matter to them. They'd continue to believe what they want to believe and wouldn't trust that Ron Watkins likely is Q."

My wife is right. 

After all, there's no demonstrable evidence that the founder of any religion actually knew anything about God, nor that God even exists. Yet billions of people worship that non-existent entity regardless.

A FiveThirtyEight review of the HBO series made the same point. (Cullen Hoback is the director of QAnon: Into the Storm.)

But even if Hoback had managed to elicit a full confession, it likely wouldn’t have much impact on QAnon as a movement. Q followers would do what they always do when confronted with conflicting evidence to their belief system: they would either dismiss it or find a way to fold the information into their worldview.

Even if someone admitted that Q’s posts were a complete fabrication, it would not be enough to penetrate the hard outer shell of belief for many followers. Q, after all, has gone underground. He (or she or they) hasn’t posted since Dec. 8, 2020, the longest stretch of silence since Q first began posting in 2017.

It's interesting that Q's postings started in the first year of Trump's presidency and ended when it became clear that Trump had lost to Joe Biden.

These were dark years for truth-telling, in Washington D.C., at least. Now truth is making a comeback, since the Biden administration is hugely more committed to honesty, science, and transparency. 

The final episode of the HBO series ends with footage of the January 6 attempted insurrection at the nation's Capitol, where  Biden's electoral college victory was being finalized. 

QAnon believers were convinced that somehow Trump would stage a "storm" of a comeback, arresting his enemies, including leading Democratic politicians, and remaining president. When this didn't happen, the QAnon faithful were deeply shaken.

Just like religious believers when, say, the predicted second coming of Christ comes and goes with no appearance by Jesus. 

However, the power of mass delusion is very strong. QAnon still has lots of adherents, as does Christianity, obviously. Inconvenient truths aren't going to dissuade people who believe in falsehood that's immune to disproof.

In a brilliant move, Episode 6 of QAnon: Into the Storm shows the Trump rioters breaking into the Capitol as the Jefferson Airplane song, "White Rabbit," plays. 

This musical paean to going down the rabbit hole, psychedelic variety, made the attempted insurrection look like the bizarre fantasy that it actually was. Sadly, I couldn't find any clips of the final episode with White Rabbit playing.

But you can hear this classic song by Grace Slick via You Tube video. I'll also share the trailer for the HBO series and a CNN interview with Hoback where he talks about his strong suspicion that Ron Watkins is Q.

QAnon is the religion of right-wing crazies

My wife and I have watched the first two episodes of HBO's "Q: Into the Storm" because we find QAnon both ridiculous and dangerous.

Ridiculous, because QAnon faithful believe in absolutely crazy stuff -- such as Hillary Clinton and other Democrats operating a pedophile ring out of the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant.

Dangerous, because so many followers of Trump in this country accept the QAnon insanity, including that mass arrests of Democrats will take place and the Orange One (Trump) will become president again.

I can't recommend the HBO series because it is much more boring than it should be, given its subject matter. 

As a review correctly points out, the makers of this documentary went overboard on filming the people involved in the web sites Q posts on in excruciating detail. Their disputes, eccentricities, and such are mildly interesting, but what gets lost are the larger questions.

Notably, how can so many people be so infatuated with the QAnon conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact?

I don't have an answer. All I can say is that the first two episodes show how closely related QAnon is to religiosity, a subject of a previous post, "QAnon and religion are both mass delusions." 

No one knows who Q is.

However, posts from Q appear on the Internet. Likewise, no one knows if God even exists, much less what the probably non-existent God is like -- since there is no real evidence of any communications from God.

Yet QAnon believers and religious devotees spend a huge amount of time conjuring up theories about their chosen faith.

Every detail of Q's posts is examined for hidden meanings, in much the same way religious writings and utterances of religious leaders considered to have a direct connection with God are studied by the faithful.

QAnon followers wrongly consider that they're part of a truth-seeking movement.

Even when predictions by Q fail to come to pass, his acolytes are spurred to dig deeper and find the reality hidden from everyone else -- you know, the people who accept facts and reason, a group I'm proud to belong to.

This bears a lot of resemblance to religious fantasies such as the Second Coming of Christ, the Christian version of QAnon's "storm." 

A new conspiracy theory called “The Storm” has taken the grimiest parts of the internet by, well, storm. Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

I'm bothered by the fact that so many otherwise normal people are so easily sucked into the fact-free whirlpool of QAnon. Sure, religions have been doing this sort of sucking for thousands of years, preying upon the gullibility of humans who enjoy a good story, even if it is made up.

QAnon, though, lacks the moral foundation that most religions have, which tends to limit how destructive they can be. So far as I can tell, QAnon has no ethical standards, no commitment to caring and compassion, no respect for open debate into the nature of reality.

QAnon, like the worst of the world's religions, only cares about spreading lies. Flee from it, if you're ever tempted to embrace some aspect of QAnon craziness. 

Religions are sort of like conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories always have been around. But they've proliferated, in the United States, at least, in recent years.

Donald Trump deserves much of the credit, better termed blame. 

Trump never saw a fact that he didn't like to denigrate, calling every media story which irritated him "fake news." 

Of course, almost always there wasn't anything fake about the news. However, Trump's devotees came to feel like they were in a special club of People in the Know.

Meaning, people who think they know what is really going on in the world. Which is much different from actually knowing.

At the moment, QAnon is the craziest conspiracy theory, though it has lots of competition. 

What gives QAnon its special wacko flavor is that supposedly there's someone who goes by "Q" who's privy to deep dark astounding secrets, such as that Democratic politicians and other liberals are part of a pedophile ring.

More specifically, a ring "devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse and cannibalization of children, all with the purpose of fulfilling the rituals of their Satanic faith."

That's absurd. No one should believe it. But a great many people do.

Likewise, every world religion makes other sorts of absurd claims. And billions of people believe those claims -- such as that Jesus was born of a virgin birth and Muhammed had the Koran dictated to him by an angel.

Recently I came across two stories in The Atlantic about conspiracy theories that got me thinking about their relation to religious belief. 

"What Conspiracy Theorists Don't Believe" starts out this way. 

Some people believe the most extraordinary things. Earth is flat, and airplane GPS is rigged to fool pilots into thinking otherwise. COVID-19 vaccines are a pretext to inject thought-controlling microchips into us all. The true president of the United States is Donald Trump; his inauguration will happen on January 20, make that March 4, make that a date to be arranged very soon.

The question “How could anybody believe this stuff?” comes naturally enough. That may not be the most helpful question, however. Conspiracy theorists believe strange ideas, yes. But these outlandish beliefs rest on a solid foundation of disbelief.

To think that Trump is actually still the president, as some in the QAnon movement do, you first have to doubt.

You have to doubt the journalism practiced by any mainstream media outlet of any political persuasion; you have to doubt all the experts and the political elites; you have to doubt the judiciary, the military, and every other American institution. Once you have thoroughly disbelieved all of them, only then can you start to believe in Trump’s ascension being just around the corner—or in lizard overlords or alien prophets.

Religious fundamentalists also doubt. Notably, they doubt science and the scientists who produce scientific research. 

Without doubting evolution, for example, it is much more difficult to embrace Godly creation stories. Yet it doesn't really work to make believers in something unbelievable accept evident facts. Typically that just makes them harden their stance in favor of what they already believe. 

Instead, says the story:

When someone has dismissed the obvious facts, repeating them will not persuade him to see sense. But when people are given time and space to explain themselves, they may start to spot the gaps in their own knowledge or arguments. The psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil coined the phrase “the illusion of explanatory depth” to refer to the way our self-assurance crumples when we are invited to explain apparently simple ideas.

I like to do this when someone asserts that human consciousness isn't produced by the brain.

OK, then explain why anesthesia makes people lose consciousness? Or being hit in the head with a baseball bat? If consciousness isn't physical, why does Alzheimers change consciousness so much? Or a brain tumor?

The other story is "The Truth Seekers Are Coming." It talks about the people who claim to be devoted to truth, yet what they consider to be true is decidedly weird -- just like religious truth seekers.

Sometime in the middle of the pandemic year, and sometime in the middle of a prolonged and compulsive scroll through Instagram, the “truth seekers” came into my life. The term was showing up over and over in the bios and captions of the women I followed, so often that I was starting to feel as if I were seeing things.

The lockdowns seemed to have inspired a new kind of internet identity: There were truth-seeking fashion bloggers, truth-seeking travel influencers, and truth-seeking expectant moms who prayed that their daughters would be truth seekers too.

Some would even seek the truth across platforms, beckoning their followers to new podcasts about the truth, new Telegram group chats in which the truth was up for discussion, or new lines of truth-related merchandise.

“If Jesus were walking the Earth today, do you think you’d see him for his miracles?” a QAnon-obsessed fashion blogger and “relentless truth seeker” asked several weeks ago. “Or would you label him a conspiracy theorist?” I knew why she was asking, and it was not because she was leading Bible study.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the “truths” these women had in mind were highly suspect and disturbing ones.

They wanted all the facts about the Democrats’ scheme to harvest the blood of children, and all the evidence proving that the COVID-19 vaccines have microchips in them. The stress of that pursuit frequently culminated in angry speeches, delivered to a front-facing camera, about how Instagram was trying to silence their unpopular opinions and original perspectives.

Like-minded Instagrammers may refer to themselves as “critical thinkers” or “true journalists,” among other coded phrases, but the term I saw most often—the succinct and pretty hook that has pulled so many women down the rabbit hole—was truth seeker.

A message from someone finding purpose in Judaism, and my response

Recently I found a message from someone in the depths of my email inbox that I had ignored for a long time.

I wrote back to them. A few days ago I got a reply, which I'm sharing below. 

It's a well-written honest explanation of how they went from being non-religious to finding a sense of purpose and belonging in Judaism. 

I can understand why someone would embrace the commandments/rules of a religion rather than struggling to find their own moral code, even though this doesn't make sense to me any more.

After this person's message, minus their name, I've shared my reply to them.

Brian, thank you so much for getting back. I read through our conversation and I am blown away by the full span of emotions I used to feel at the ripe age of 22. I've recently returned to Judaism and have found a lot of peace and meaning in it.

My view of Judaism is very similar to a Zen interpretation of Buddhism: I can't explain to you why G-d exists or whether anything in the Torah is historical, but I know what the practice does for me and that it is beneficial.

As I reread our conversation, I realize I take you a lot more seriously now than I did then (if you could believe that). Memories come back to me of thinking "well maybe he doesn't know" regardless of my affirmations I've expressed; for example, when you say that Buddhists are just as dogmatic, I remember denying the possibility (due to dogmatic thinking), although now, in retrospect, I come to understand that reality.

Judaism has truly given me a lot of divine purpose. I find that it has this uniqueness that there's something in it for every Jew. They say for every two Jews, there's three opinions. I find that to be absolutely true because, as someone looking for spiritual fulfillment, freedom from attachment, and a drive for my compassion, I find all that there ready for the taking.

The idea of taking all of my concerns, throwing away their selfish value, and using them for the purpose of serving G-d is a level of detachment itself.

The idea of G-d is so far away from human understanding that taking all my pleasures and my pains and realizing that it is for the purpose of worshiping something completely intangible has the function of removing the responsibility to be concerned with them from a selfish point of view.

I've noticed that the less I worry about my happiness and more about the happiness of The Intangible Creator, the happier I really am due to the abandoning of my sense of self.

Three times a day I say the most important prayer in the Jewish religion, known as the Shema. Hear O' Israel, The L-rd is Our G-d, The L-rd is One. Meditation is a necessity during this blessing as I run the ideas through my mind respectively, "I am given this responsibility to serve G-d, He is in control of everything and I don't have to worry, and He pervades all matter and all entities and ideas, therefore nothing should ever feel unfamiliar."

This is the Jewish version of taking refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha.

Another thing I love is Shabbat. This is the fact that once a week, we turn off all of our electronics and spend a joyous day where worry is forbidden, family is together, and we are disconnected from all the strain and pain of the world that our phones make sure to frequently remind us of.

I've absolutely fallen in love with Judaism. Once again, I could never point to science and explain why it confirms my beliefs, but I can explain why it makes me happy and can improve my life; and it has.

The amount of "everyday" philosophy that it's provided has been enormously helpful. It's a huge relief to stand on the shoulders of giants with thousands of years of moral documentation. The greatest thing that made me come to the realization that Judaism was something that I needed goes back to the day I "found G-d." I was sitting in my car one night after a tough visit with my therapist.

I was at a crossroads trying to decide if I wanted to do the "right thing" or the "easy thing." The easy thing was something that I knew to be obviously immoral but would allow me to live my life the way I wanted.

Sitting in my car writing down all my thoughts and feelings, I realized that in a case like that, I would not do the right thing unless I subscribed to a form of objective morality to keep myself accountable. I realized that my subjective morality was too unreliable to make me do the right thing and I really wanted to do the right thing.

Right then and there, I felt a rush run over me and an intense calm from the idea that I could prescribe to my life the Torah and finally have a manual on how to live my life in this clueless world. And that's what I did, I subscribed to this ancient morality and decided to do the right thing.

I ended up having my cake and eating it too. Everything happened to go as smoothly as it could be. Ever since then, I feel a huge responsibility to make the world a better place which I am enthusiastic to bear.

I'm sorry to come back to you after reading your blog for about three years about open-mindedness and free choice to seem that I support the established order. However, Judaism is not Christianity and a wandering Jew like myself would be pleased to find that if happiness is what we're all chasing, we may be able to find it in our own backyard. After all, as the Buddha taught, peace isn't something you find outside of yourself.

Thank you for your correspondence and I hope this new year finds you many blessings.

Here's my reply to the message above.

 

I’m glad that you have found so much support in Judaism. I look upon Judaism as being as much about fostering a sense of community among Jews as being a belief structure.

 

Regarding the latter, which includes complying with the Torah, I’ll simply do some arguing (very Jewish!) and observe that your distinction between subjective and objective morality, though superficially correct, has to be taken in a larger context.

 

There is no evidence that Torah morality, or any other religiously-based morality, is objectively true in the sense of reflecting a universal law, as scientific laws do, particularly laws of physics.

 

So choosing to accept a certain form of religious morality is a subjective decision. There’s little doubt that if you had a Hindu background, you’d now be finding support in Hindu traditions. Ditto for any other religion that was a part of your heritage.

 

In no way am I saying that the satisfaction you feel in following Judaic law isn’t genuine and real. We all need something to lean on.

 

I’m just suggesting that in my view the only possibly genuine form of universal human morality needs to rest on evolutionary principles, which some philosophers and scientists are attempting to do. For example, it seems clear that early humans were more likely to survive and thrive if they had a common set of moral beliefs, of what is right and wrong.

 

And our sense of empathy and compassion is tied into this, since the more we help others in our “tribe,” the more likely the group can handle challenges.

 

So it’s no wonder that you are finding such satisfaction in belonging to your particular Judaic tribe. Members of every religion feel the same way, as do secular people like humanists and atheists. However, the latter lack rituals such as those you mentioned, so this limits the power non-religious groups have to bind people together.

 

        — Brian

Religious nationalism must be fought, no matter the religion

Nationalism is dumb. Religious nationalism is dumber.

Believing that your country is superior to all others makes no sense, since lots of people in many countries, maybe most countries, consider that they're fortunate to live in the best country on Earth.

But at least there's no doubt that these countries exist. They have governments. They have boundaries. They can be photographed. So nationalism, as misguided as it is, has a foundation in objective reality.

Religious nationalism, though, adds a fantasy -- the unproven belief that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, or some other religion is rooted in a supernatural realm that truly exists even though there is no demonstrable evidence of it.

This makes religious nationalism a delusion attached to a irrational assumption.

Not surprisingly, religious nationalism is destructive. Hindu nationalism leads to violence and oppression of minorities in India. Jewish nationalism makes it more difficult for Israel to reach an agreement with Palestinians. Islamic nationalism encourages terrorists. Christian nationalism fosters divisiveness in the United States.

Actually, more than divisiveness. Christian nationalists played a central role in the January 6 insurrection at the nation's Capitol that was notihing less than a coup attempt. 

An opinion piece in USA Today describes how the Trump rioters who broke into the Capitol used Christian rhetoric to justify their unjustifiable actions. Here's excerpts from "Christian nationalism is a threat, and not just from Capitol attackers invoking Jesus."

After a portion of the mob entered the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, a handful of men mounted the podium. One of them lifted his hands and cried out, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name. Amen.” Then Jacob Chansley, sometimes called the "QAnon Shaman," took his bullhorn and announced gratitude to God for being able to “send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”

Bare-chested to expose his white supremacist tattoos, he had paused briefly to remove his Viking-inspired horned headdress and cap — presumably to assume a properly humble posture as he claimed the United States for himself and his fellow-believers.   

...It is easy to protest when white Christian nationalism turns violent. Within the chorus of critics, however, are a substantial number of Christians who plan to take the country for Jesus another way. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, a leader of the misinformation campaign that led people to believe (falsely) that the presidential election was stolen, is among them.

Speaking in his official capacity as attorney general of Missouri in 2017, he proclaimed at a “Pastors and Pews” meetingthat their charge is to “take the lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm and to seek the obedience of the nations — of our nation… to influence our society, and even more than that, to transform our society to reflect the gospel truth and lordship of Jesus Christ.”

Hawley is aware that not everyone will become Christian, but believes we should all live by his interpretation of Christian values. The lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, asserts that elected officials should look to Scripture when making policy, “because every problem we have in America has a solution in the Bible.”  

Look, there's nothing wrong with loving your country, just as there's nothing wrong with loving your religion. But this is akin to loving your spouse or children.

Love isn't a competition. I can love my wife and my child without thinking that they are the very best wife and child in the whole world. It would be crazy  for me to think that way.

Yet that's what religious nationalism does. It perverts the natural love of country and religion into an extreme view that elevates a particular country and a particular religion into an exalted position that is indefensible and dangerous. 

Science requires demonstrable evidence. Religion doesn't.

Most mornings recently I've been reading a chapter from Michael Strevens' marvelous book, "The Knowledge Machine." It describes why science is so effective at understanding reality.

I find the book inspiring, both scientifically and spiritually.

Ever since I started this blog in 2004, I've been using the term demonstrable evidence frequently. Often I ask for that -- demonstrable evidence -- when someone makes a supernatural claim.

Maybe they claim to have seen God, or something Godly. Maybe they claim to have experienced a cosmic realm beyond physical existence. Maybe they claim some sort of special power like ESP. 

There are lots of possible "maybe's," because the human mind is capable of imagining all kinds of things that aren't real, yet seem like they could be, or should be.

Strevens makes clear that scientists aren't immune from those sorts of wishful thinking. Scientists are just like everybody else: imperfect, flawed, prone to thinking errors.

But modern science has something that enables it to generate valid knowledge about reality that other fields such as religion and mysticism lack: the iron rule.

I wrote about it in "The iron rule of science is empirical evidence." 

The title of that blog post sums up the iron rule. When scientists argue about whether this or that is true, they must "conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone."

Now, this doesn't mean that scientists, or anyone else for that matter, can't entertain ideas unfounded in empirical evidence.

So if someone wants to leave a comment on this blog about how they are certain that God exists, I'm totally fine with that. They believe strongly in God. Fine. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs.

However, the moment someone claims that God or some other supernatural entity is objectively real, we have a problem. We also have a problem if someone expects that other people should respect their claim as being valid.

To make the problem a non-problem, I like to ask people, "What is your demonstrable evidence?" In other words, empirical evidence. 

If someone is claiming that they're  privy to secrets about the cosmos that turn upside down the scientific understanding of reality, asking for proof is entirely appropriate.

Sure, I understand the objection religious believers have to this request. This is what I said in my previous post about the Iron Rule.

Now, I realize that religious people say that an experience of God or some other supernatural entity can't be proven, since it takes place within the psyche, not anywhere outside. 

OK. But that means a supposed supernatural experience is akin to a dream. It is available only to the person having the experience, and there's no way to tell whether the experience points to a reality outside of the consciousness of that person. 

So religious believers need to stop claiming that what they experience has any sort of objective truth. Like a dream, the reality is in the consciousness of the beholder, not anywhere else.

Of course, a religious believer can continue to have faith in their supernatural entity, whatever it might consist of, without demonstrable evidence. They just have no right to expect that anyone else will take them seriously if they claim that this entity has any effect in the physical world.

For if there is such an effect, it falls within the domain of science. Thus a miracle or a miraculous capability, such as knowing what is in the mind of someone else, must be demonstrated through empirical evidence. 

Otherwise it is just an unfounded belief. And the world is full of them. Nothing special to see here if there is no demonstrable evidence.

 

The iron rule of science is empirical evidence

For thirty-five years I belonged to a religious organization that called itself, among other names, the "science of the soul." I liked this name at first, but eventually I began to wonder if the organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), really understood what science was all about.

After breaking away from RSSB in 2005, I kept asking on this blog if religious believers could provide demonstrable evidence of God, spirit, soul, heaven,  higher realms of reality, or any other supernatural entity.

So far, I've gotten no such evidence. 

Which isn't surprising, because if there was solid evidence of anything supernatural, this would be amazing news. Everyone would be talking about it. Arguments about the validity of religious experience would have an empirical foundation.

Since this hasn't happened, I've become highly dubious of claims that it is possible to have a scientifically-based religion. A book review by Joshua Rothman in the October 5, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, The Rules of the Game: How Does Science Really Work?, helped confirm this attitude of mine.

The book discussed in the review is "The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science" by Michael Strevens. The author is a philosopher of science at New York University. He makes the case that the core of science is something he calls the iron rule.

Here's passages from the review that explain what the iron rule is.

The allocation of vast human resources to the measurement of possibly inconsequential minutiae is what makes science truly unprecedented in history. Why do scientists agree to this scheme?

...Strevens thinks that they do it because they have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the "iron rule of explanation." 

The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, "if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with"; from there, they must "conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone."

Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens's rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That's because it isn't intellectual but procedural.

"The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think," he writes," but on what arguments they can make in their official communications." Still, he maintains, it is "the key to science's success," because it "channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment -- all the fires fuming in the human heart -- to one end: the production of empirical evidence."

Makes sense. Before modern science, Rothman says, thinkers like the ancient Greeks and more recently, Descartes, for example, tried to come up with all-encompassing views of the cosmos that were founded in logic (roughly speaking) rather than evidence. 

Religions always have done this sort of thing, of course. They come up with interesting stories, then package them in holy books like the Bible, Koran, and such. There's a certain internal logic to the stories, but no way to test their truthfulness. 

Thus the value of philosophies, like religions, can be debated without end, because they lack the empirical evidence of modern science. I'm well aware of this, since I've gotten over 61,000 comments on this blog during the 16 years of its existence.

Religiously-minded commenters have been saying the same things for all of those years.

Which is fine. I like philosophical debates as much as anyone, even if there is no end to them. However, I'm also a lover of science -- because science makes progress in finding truths about the world due to its requirement that anyone who makes a truth claim has to provide evidence to back up the claim.

Now, I realize that religious people say that an experience of God or some other supernatural entity can't be proven, since it takes place within the psyche, not anywhere outside. 

OK. But that means a supposed supernatural experience is akin to a dream. It is available only to the person having the experience, and there's no way to tell whether the experience points to a reality outside of the consciousness of that person. 

So religious believers need to stop claiming that what they experience has any sort of objective truth. Like a dream, the reality is in the consciousness of the beholder, not anywhere else.

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.