Posted inChristianity/Jesus

Some scholars view the Gospels, and Jesus, as familiar stories about demigods

For me, the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, Islam -- are the most difficult both to read and to understand. The Bible's Old and New Testaments, along with the Koran, just don't appeal to me. There's no coherent philosophy or even theology that is readily apparent.  Obviously observant Christians, Jews, and Muslims find much inspiration in their holy books. But when I've read them, they seem boring and poorly organized. Which isn't to say that Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist writings are exemplars of clear writing. They aren't.  However, while I have to work at it, these Eastern religions (or philosophies)…
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Posted inAtheism Religions

It’s perfectly fine to be a religion of one (or a non-religion of one)

I really like the idea of being a religion of one, for reasons laid out in "If you become a religion of one, your worship will be effortless." After all, since there already are thousands of different religions, why not add one more: your own personal faith. That's why when I started this blog in 2004, it took me just a few seconds to come up with the tagline at the top of this page: Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence.  Not surprisingly, Ross Douthat, the author of Believe: Why Everybody Should Be Religious, differs with the whole religion of…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth Mindfulness

Death is the best encouragement for mindfulness I’ve come across

Typically it isn't easy for me to stay focused on the present moment without having my mind conjure up all kinds of unrelated thoughts. This happens not only in my morning sitting meditation, but also in my Tai Chi classes (Tai Chi has been termed "meditation in motion"). Today in class I was doing my best to pay close attention to my movements. That worked for a while. Until it didn't. Then I found myself contemplating what I was going to have for dinner, whether I was going to get rained on when I walked back to my car, and…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Why the amazing stories we tell about our life aren’t really all that special

We humans are natural story-tellers. Being a highly social species, we love to tell other people tales about how our life came to be what it is, and usually those stories find a receptive audience.  Everybody likes a good story. But I've been thinking about a fatal flaw that strikes at the heart of many stories: though they often, if not usually, feature some special event that was, if not exceedingly unlikely, at least out of the ordinary, a more detached perspective calls such specialness into question. This gets at our tendency to put ourselves at the center of our…
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Posted inNeuroscience

Pressure is off, according to neuroscience: there’s no “real you” to be found

For about 35 years, during the religious phase of my life, the Eastern philosophy I'd embraced had a sort of mantra: self-realization before God-realization.  Meaning, first we disciples needed to discover our true self as Soul, a drop of the spiritual ocean. Then we could proceed to the next step, becoming one with the ocean of God. Or at least as close to oneness as is possible for a soul-drop.  The basic notion, which is shared with other spiritual approaches and also some psychological theories, was that there's a "real you" hidden inside each of us. Through meditation, prayer, introspection,…
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Posted inAtheism Consciousness Neuroscience

More reasons why I’m liking the modular mind theory

As I continue reading Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, I keep coming across ideas that make me pleased I forked out $16.97 to Amazon. The book is well worth the money. Here's some additional points from Kurzban that appealed to me. Press Secretary versus President. Most of us like to think that basically we're in charge of our thoughts and actions. Maybe our emotions also, though they seem more out of our control. In other words, we're the President of the entity we call "myself." Kurzban has a different view. He…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the RSSB guru, reportedly off the job as of April 1

Here in the United States, and in quite a few other countries, April 1 is April Fools' Day. That's when people engage in practical jokes and hoaxes, which are sometimes close to believable. I doubt that the news of Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious organization that I belonged to for 35 years, giving up all of his official duties as of April 1, 2025 is a hoax. But all I know for sure is that Osho Robbins, who comments occasionally on this blog, emailed me a link to a video that…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

The conscious “you” isn’t your self any more than unconscious parts are

The good news keeps on coming from my reading of Robert Kurzban's book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind.  In my previous post I talked about how Kurzban persuasively argues that the modular view of mind shows that there isn't a singular "I" inside our cranium, just a multitude of "We's." This makes our human nature hugely more interesting than if each of us were a single entity.  As the poet Walt Whitman said: Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) Most of us try so hard to…
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Posted inNeuroscience

The modular view of mind says there is no “I”, just a contentious “We”

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the being each of us calls "I" didn't really exist, at least not in the way most people think it does, as a coherent unified self?  I think so, though I realize this is a disturbing thought to those who depend on the "I" hypothesis to give their life meaning. Given my Buddhist proclivities, I view the situation much differently.  The way I see it, the "I" I've considered myself to be for most of my life is the cause of many problems. For example, anxiety, because "I" wants things to go the way "I"…
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Posted inBuddhism Mindfulness

We impose meaningfulness on the world through our stories

Yesterday my increasingly buggy blogging service, Typepad, kept generating a "503" error message all day long, so I wasn't able to write a post for one of my other blogs. I just did that, composing "My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense."  That post includes a mention of my recent post here about human cognition being amazingly slow, so it's worth a read. You also can see photos of an attractive creek that runs through our rural property. Plus our electricity is off at the moment, owing to some downed power lines…
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Posted inConsciousness Neuroscience

Human cognition is amazingly slow, about 10 bits per second

I came across a fascinating article in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, "Brains produce thoughts surprisingly slowly." (Online title: "The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace.") You can read the article via this PDF file.Download The Human Brain Operates at a Stunningly Slow Pace | Scientific American Often you hear that the human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe with its 80 billion or so neurons tied together with trillions of interconnections. That may be, but this impressive product of evolution works much slower than the smart phones most of us carry…
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Posted inBuddhism Personal/Stories

Theory of mental modules made me feel better about my many failings

I love it when after reading something in a nonfiction book, it doesn't just make sense to me intellectually, but deeply touches me emotionally.  That's how I felt after reading a chapter in Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True book, "How Thoughts Think Themselves." Before describing the wonderful feeling I had, I'll share some of the intellectual side of Wright's message -- which is based on a blend of Buddhist teachings, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience.  He says this about the theory of mental modules in relation to mind wandering: Though the trains of thought that carry you away from direct…
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Posted inBuddhism

For Buddhism, taking the “red pill” means more than just mindfulness

It's been quite a while since I've watched The Matrix. You know, the movie where really real reality is very different from how things appear to those trapped in illusion -- which in this case is being confined in a pod, hallucinating that what you're dreaming is actually true. Robert Wright starts off his Why Buddhism is True book by using the red pill/blue pill choice in The Matrix as a metaphor for what Buddhism seeks: the truth about life. The prison is called the Matrix, but there's no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The…
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Posted inBuddhism Science

Evolution doesn’t care if feelings are true, just that they are good for us

In a recent post, "No, major religions don't provide a truer picture of reality," I noted that evolution doesn't care about truth, just about whether genes are passed on to the next generation. Of course, this is just a manner of speaking, since evolution isn't about caring or not-caring. This goes against one of the primal facts about evolution: that species prosper not because they possess a greater grasp of reality, but because they are adept at passing on genes, organisms being well suited to the environment in which they find themselves. After writing that, I came across a mention…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Here’s a thoughtful critique of Radha Soami Satsang Beas — well worth reading

I've received a critique of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a religious organization headquartered in India and led by a guru, from someone who wants to be anonymous, preferring to be called "LGG." Here's the PDF file.Download Critique of RSSB The critique is thoughtful and well-researched. Below I've shared the first six pages of the 53-page document. There's plenty of white space in the document, which I've minimized in my copy and paste below, so it doesn't take long to read the document.  Even if you aren't familiar with RSSB, but especially if you are, I'm confident that you'll enjoy…
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Posted inReality Religions Science

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

It isn't surprising that, as an atheist, I find a lot not to like in Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. However, what does surprise me is how weak Douthat's arguments are.  For while I admire his clear writing style, as befits a New York Times opinion columnist, often he simply tosses off glib statements about the marvelousness of religious belief without backing them up with either solid facts or persuasive reasoning. Here's an example from the book's "Big Faiths and Big Questions" chapter, which argues that the world's major religions are a better bet than minor…
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Posted inMorality Politics

Academy Awards speech about Palestinian suffering shows power of compassion

Having just spent much of my evening watching the Academy Awards (thankfully, I recorded the show, so could skip the commercials and boring parts, as it ran for three hours and forty-five minutes), I had been planning to write something short on a different subject for this blog. That plan changed when I saw the acceptance speech for Best Documentary, which went to "No Other Land," a film about the destruction of a Palestinian village in the West Bank by the Israeli military. The men who gave the acceptance speech were Palestinian co-director Basel Adra and Israeli co-director  Yuval Abraham.…
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Posted inFundamentalism Politics

Zelensky’s meeting with Trump shows danger of cults, political or religious

As I've noted before and surely will again, because it's the truth, the slavish devotion of almost all Republicans to Donald Trump mirrors the slavish devotion of cult members to their own Dear Leader who, in their eyes, can do no wrong. Further proof of this was on plain display today after the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, met with Trump at the White House to sign a deal they'd negotiated regarding the mining of mineral deposits in Ukraine, along with discussing how to end Ukraine's war with Russia. That meeting started off fine (a full video is here), but degenerated…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Science

If humans are the top of creation, what about Neanderthals?

The February 2025 issue of National Geographic features a fascinating story by Brook Larmer, "The Hunt for the  Other Humans." This got me to thinking about the common religious teaching that humans are the top of creation. For example, the Bible says in Genesis: 26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image,    in…
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Posted inMiracles Mystics Religions

Ross Douthat’s five varieties of mystical experience

I'm finding Ross Douthat's book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, less interesting now that I've gotten past the reasons Douthat offers for being religious, and have started to read how one goes about choosing a religion to believe in. However, in his "The Myth of Disenchantment" chapter, which is within the why believe section, his description of five varieties of mystical experience struck me as both fairly unique and mostly valid. I'll use Douthat's own words to describe those varieties rather than attempting a paraphrase. (1) Generic mystical experience.  The first is what you might call the generic mystical experience…
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