Posted inReligions Science

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…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

A message from a disillusioned RSSB initiate

UPDATE: I should have noted in the original post that I strongly support Covid vaccine mandates, so have no problem with a religious group having vaccinated and non-vaccinated people sit in different locations. That protects the vaccinated, who are still at a small risk of getting Covid, from those who aren't vaccinated.  It always makes me feel good to hear from someone who has come to see the downside of belonging to a religious organization. Today I got this message regarding the organization I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), which is headquartered in India. Gurinder Singh…
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Posted inFundamentalism Politics

Cult of Trump shows danger of blind faith

Here in the United States we're facing a scary prospect in upcoming elections, especially the next presidential election in November 2024. A recent Forbes story captures the problem in its headline: "Poll Finds Most Americans Think An Election Will Be Overturned Because Of Partisan Sour Grapes." In a CNN/SRSS poll of 2,119 U.S. adults released Wednesday, 51% of respondents said it is somewhat or very likely that some elected officials will “successfully overturn the results of an election” in the U.S. in the future “because their party did not win.” That belief was held by 49% of Democratic respondents and…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Right in the middle is where life really happens

I really liked today's guided meditation by Jeff Warren, which I regularly listen to on the Calm iPhone app. So much so, I made a transcript of what Warren had to say. The ellipsis (...) in the transcript below indicate a marked pause in the guided meditation.  This afternoon I shared some copies of the transcript with my Tai Chi class. There's a close connection between the notion of staying in the center of a movement and basic principles of Tai Chi.  More philosophically, I enjoyed Warren's observation that when we're right in the middle, we have the greatest ability…
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Posted inMeaning of life

Let’s agree: life is difficult

With so many divisions in the world -- political, religious, nationalistic, plus many others -- sometimes it seems like there's nothing all of us can agree on. I suggest this as a foundation for finding common ground: life is difficult.  Not all of the time. Much of the time. And for some, most of the time. The degree of difficulty varies for each person, sort of akin to a gymnastics routine where a score is based in part on the degree of difficulty of the various moves. Yet no matter who we are or what circumstances we find ourselves in,…
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Posted inBooks Delusions Reality

Presumptions are necessary for reasoning to work

Almost everybody who has had a child -- that includes me -- knows how annoying it can be when they learn how to make "Why?" into a way to drive a parent crazy. You need to turn the TV off and go to bed.Why?Because it's late and you need to go to school tomorrow.Why do I need to go to school?So you can learn things.Why should I learn things? And so it goes, until the parent gets fed up and ends the discussion with "Because I said so! Go brush your teeth!" Andy Norman uses this sort of Why? reasoning…
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Posted inBooks Religions

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…
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Posted inBooks Religions

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…
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Posted inCoronavirus

I’m tired of our nation’s 9/11 obsession

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog, I just finished "On 9/11, let's remember the 659,556 Covid deaths."  Here's how I introduced that post on Facebook. I have to be honest. I'm tired of our nation's obsession with 9/11. Yes, it was a tragedy. But 9/11 pales in comparison to the tragedy of the Covid pandemic, which has killed 220 times as many people than died on 9/11. Radical Islam was responsible for 2,996 deaths. Radical Trumpism is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths that experts say could have been prevented. I refuse to mourn the deaths…
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Posted inConsciousness Science

Quantum theory doesn’t say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying.  But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts.  I no longer…
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Posted inAtheism God

I’m an atheist who has a personal relationship with God

The title of this blog post is surprising, right? How is it possible for an atheist to have a personal relationship with God? Answer: it's easy. I simply define "God" a lot differently than religious believers do. As described in Atheists should redefine "God" as all that exists, I look upon God as being synonymous with reality, or existence. So I find God awe-inspiring, mysterious, impossible to fathom.  After all, the greatest mystery -- one which almost certainly never will be unraveled by humans -- is that existence exists. Or as the mystery often is described, why is there something rather…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Life is uncertain

Might as well share a post I just wrote for my HinesSight blog. Here's how I introduced it on Facebook. l'm feeling kind of philosophical. (OK, a common feeling fof me.) Decided to write about how life only is predictable when looking backward, and not even then, really, because the events that seemed to cause our life to turn out a certain way could easily have been different. I use how my wife and I met as an example of how uncertain life can be.   https://hinesblog.com/2021/09/life-is-only-predictable-looking-backward/
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Posted inAtheism God

Atheists should redefine “God” as all that exists

The word "God" has a strong hold on people. So strong, even atheists sometimes use it, as in "God damn it!" Or "God bless you" after a sneeze.  So I've come to believe that we atheists need to appropriate "God" for our own purpose -- living without superstition, supernatural fantasy, and blind faith.  There's nothing wrong with that word, just as there's nothing wrong with any word. A word is simply made up of letters. The meaning those letters represent is entirely in the hands of humans. Unlike "gravity," say, there is no objective reality that the usual meaning of…
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Posted inAwareness

Better self-awareness comes from sharing our self with others

For many years I wrongly thought that the way to "know myself" was to engage in several hours a day of solitary meditation. Sure, I did learn some things about myself in this way and developed a lot of discipline by meditating every morning whether or not I felt like it. Now, though, I've come to realize that it is easy to fool ourselves when the only conversation we're having is within our own mind -- I talking to me; us speaking to ourself; one part of our psyche conversing with another part. As noted in my previous post about…
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