Posted inPersonal/Stories

Live as if we and our loved ones are going to die

Admittedly this isn't the cheeriest subject for New Year's Eve, the last day of 2021 -- how we should live as if we and our loved ones are going to die. But I got to thinking about this after watching an episode in Season 1 of Dickinson, an Apple TV+ series about Emily Dickinson, the 19th century poet. Dickinson feigns illness in order to have more time alone in order to write her poetry. Her family has a doctor examine Dickinson. Given the sad state of pre-Civil War medicine, he misdiagnoses her as having a fatal disease. What I found…
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Posted inScience

We humans are animals. But most of us deny this fact.

I'm enjoying Melanie Challenger's book, "How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human." Here's some excerpts about our dental that we're animal. The point here is that life is neither straightforwardly good nor progressive. This might be unbearable if it weren't for the possibility that humans are special. Something important saves us from the threatening parts of earthly life. We're told this comes from the heart of human nature, some essential part of us. We can't see it and we can't measure it, but it marks us out as the most important life form…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

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…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Wu Project

We don’t know, so live now

Yeah, it's a cliche, dating all the way from 1971. "Be here now." (I have a well-worn 1972 edition of the book.) The book, though, actually doesn't talk a whole lot about the simple act of embracing the present moment as much as possible. Rather, it's filled with a bunch of Eastern mysticism/yoga philosophizing that I used to find appealing, but don't anymore. What I do agree with is that now is a treasure that shouldn't be frittered away by paying undue attention to the past and future. Sure, we have to be aware of what's happened in the past…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Here’s our 2021 Christmas letter

I don't believe in God. But I do believe in Christmas letters, even with the word "Christ" in Christmas. However, my wife and I prefer to call it a Holiday Greetings, in part because some years I don't write it before Christmas. This year, though, I was amazingly early -- a secular Christmas miracle.  The theme is how an asterisk should have accompanied our usual reply of "Fine" to the query of store employees, "How're you doing?" In our Holiday Greetings we add the asterisk: Fine* Here it is in both PDF and JPEG formats.Download 2021 Christmas Letter PDF
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Posted inReality Religions

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…
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Posted inBuddhism Taoism/Tai Chi

Descend into the valley of life, rather than climb the mountaintop

At first I didn't like a book I have about Pure land (Shin) Buddhism. But I've come to enjoy "River of Fire, River of Water" by Taitetsu Unno. Here's some passages about embracing the valley of life The ideal of monastic Buddhism is transcendence of mundane existence, as if one were ascending to the mountaintop. In contrast, the praxis of Pure Land Buddhism takes place by descending into the valley, the shadow of the mountains.  We find a similar contrast in Chinese civilization. Like monastic Buddhism the Confucian ideal may be symbolized by the soaring mountain peaks , manifesting the…
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Posted inBuddhism Taoism/Tai Chi

Taoism is playful. Buddhism is serious. I prefer Taoism.

One of my favorite books is Ray Grigg's The Tao of Zen. His thesis, which he argues persuasively, is that Zen is rooted in Chinese Taoism, while Zen Buddhism is, obviously, rooted in Indian Buddhism. Here's a lengthy excerpt from the "Buddhism in China" chapter. While it's possible to quibble with some of Grigg's conclusions, his basic contrasting of Taoist/Chinese and Buddhist/Indian approaches to life seems accurate to me.  The indented italicized passages are quotations from other writers. I haven't included the footnotes that show where the quotation came from. As Buddhism in China was adjusted to fit Chinese sensibilities,…
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Posted inDelusions

Believe in magic, so long as you don’t really believe in it

I'm an atheist who has two wooden Christian crosses sitting on his bedside table. Those are the crosses someone sent to me in a mysterious package, as I wrote about a few days ago. I've got no problem with religious symbols. Plenty of atheists love to visit beautiful holy places, admire religious art, and listen to religious music. Problems arise when people believe that those symbols possess supernatural power. Sure, I'm open to the possibility that Jesus truly is the Son of God and answers prayers addressed to him.  But I'm also open to the possibility of some other entity…
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Posted inChristianity/Jesus Personal/Stories

I get a mysterious package. Ideas about it welcomed.

Almost everybody likes a good mystery. I sure do. My fiction book reading is almost entirely in the genre of spy/espionage/counterterrorism novels, which involve a lot of intrigue. So I thought I'd outsource to readers of this blog the contents of a mysterious package that arrived in the mail yesterday. If you have an idea about the meaning of what was sent to me, share it in a comment on this post. Here's the envelope I got.  What caught my attention right away was the address and return address both being my address. My razor-sharp mind concluded, Whoever sent this…
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Posted inBooks Taoism/Tai Chi

Chinese painting points to the mystery of existence

Looking back, one of the stranger aspects of my childhood -- which included a lot of strange stuff -- was how my mother took me to Chinatown in San Francisco when I was fairly young, maybe 12.  I came home with many inexpensive pieces of Chinese art that I put up in my room. Most were images that still appeal to me today. Misty mountains with a small figure of a person walking along with a pagoda or hut perched on the edge of a cliff. I don't know where that instant attraction came from. Nobody I knew had any…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation Taoism/Tai Chi

Mental Tai Chi and dissolving the remove

Yesterday I had one of those pleasing experiences where I got the same message from three different sources -- one inside my head, from me, and the other two from outside, a guided meditation and a book I was reading.  First, me. I was idly going to sleep, not thinking about much of anything in particular, when the notion mental Tai Chi popped into my mind.  For seventeen years I've been practicing Tai Chi under the guidance of a skilled instructor who is adept at teaching the martial aspect of Tai Chi, as well as the more typical relaxation/exercise aspect. …
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Posted inBooks Politics Religions

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…
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Posted inReality Science

Reason rules with God’s will, karma, and laws of nature

Having written about reason and rationality recently, here's some thoughts that came to mind (weird phrase, since where else would thoughts appear?) as I was musing about how people believe in God's will and karma as other-worldly explanations for why things happen as they do. It struck me that God's will and karma are appealing notions for many because they provide reasons for happenings that often aren't pleasant. Or are surprising. For example, I know someone who got stage 4 lung cancer even though she never smoked. Thankfully, she's doing quite well, even after several years have passed since the…
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Posted inBooks Morality

Rationality leads to progress and morality

In his new book, "Rationality," Steve Pinker ends with a Why Rationality Matters chapter. Here's some excerpts.  Pinker starts off by looking at human progress. Though the availability bias hides it from us, human progress is an empirical fact. When we look beyond the headlines to the trend lines, we find that humanity overall is healthier, richer, longer-lived, better fed, better educated, and safer from war, murder, and accidents than in decades and centuries past. Having documented these changes in two books, I'm often asked whether I "believe in progress." The answer is no. Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don't…
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