Posted inPolitics

Religion makes Arab-Israeli conflict much tougher to solve

Tonight, during a wine tasting event, I chatted with a guy about the dismal state of national and international politics. Opposing positions have gotten absurdly extreme. Republicans have almost nothing in common with Democrats. Israelis have almost nothing in common with Palestinians. With such little common ground, there's no room for two parties at odds with each other to negotiate a mutually acceptable deal. We talked about how both Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians have an absurd belief that the territory Israel occupied in the 1967 war is "holy" or a "promised land." Absurd, because these religious claims are based…
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Posted inReality Science

A mind-blowing fact about infinity

What can you say about infinity? Well, the word has a pretty lengthy Wikipedia page, so clearly the answer is "a lot." Which makes sense, since if there's one thing we know about infinity, it's this: infinity is freaking big. Or at least, limitless. I suppose something could be infinitely small -- getting smaller and smaller without limit. But this would mean that it's a freaking big bit of small. God supposedly is infinite. Infinitely loving, infinitely knowing, infinitely powerful. Heck, God probably has an infinite number of positive qualities, being so infinite. This is assuming that God exists. We…
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Posted inBuddhism Mystics Spiritual practice/meditation

Mystical experiences prove nothing

Whatever I say in this post -- and as a blogger I never know what that is until I say it -- it won't be anywhere near as good as what David Chapman has said in his "Are Mystical Experiences Metaphysical Evidence?" So the best thing you could do is stop reading what I've written, and read Chapman now. The second best thing would be to click on the links I've given after you peruse this post. But if you've ever believed that a mystical experience means something beyond the obvious, that someone has had some sort of experience, I…
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Posted inReligions

Atheism challenges personal spiritual experiences

Here's some good news about the newest form of the "new atheism." It isn't just content to challenge theological propositions and supernatural world views, but also says prove it when religious believers cite personal experience as their reason for having faith in whatever they believe. At least, this is one of the conclusions I got from an interesting New York Times essay by Gary Gutting, "Beyond 'New Atheism.'" For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion. Most believers,…
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Posted inReality Religions

Conspiracy theories — another form of blind faith

One person believes that Jesus was resurrected after dying on the cross. Another person believes that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks. Each belief lacks a foundation of demonstrable evidence. Each belief almost certainly is untrue. Each belief has many adherents who vehemently hold to it, despite how bizarre their blind faith is. I'm a religious skeptic. I'm also a conspiracy theory skeptic. What seems strange to me is how people who decry fundamentalist religion often cling to fundamentalist conspiracy theories. But after reading Michael Shermer's new book, "The Believing Brain," I'm better able to see the connections…
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Posted inMystics Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Mysticism is as real as fundamentalist religion

Yesterday David Lane left this comment on a recent blog post: Yes, good point you make here about the epistemology of "knowing" in fundamentalist religion versus mysticism. Here is a link to something I wrote that dovetails with your point: https://sites.google.com/site/msacmagazinesparttwo/home/POLITICSOFMYSTICISM.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1 Because I always enjoy what David has to say, I clicked away and found an interesting six page PDF-file essay, "The Politics of Mysticism." Download Politics of Mysticism Here's some excerpts -- the formatting is a bit screwed up, since I copied text from the PDF file. No big deal, since you really should read the whole thing. Perhaps…
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Posted inMystics Science

“The Beginning of Infinity” — inspiring science

I don't know whether physicist David Deutsch's optimism expressed in his new book, "The 'Beginning of Infinity," is justified. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, so maybe his later chapters imply more of a downer that what I've read so far. His basic thesis, though, is both inspiring and believable. There are no limits to knowledge. Human life -- individual or collective -- is a never-ending journey on the path to more. Whenever there has been progress, there have been influential thinkers who denied that it was genuine, that it was desirable, or even that the…
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Posted inMorality

Without God, there’s no morality (and that’s good)

Religious fundamentalists often say, "If you don't believe in God, you have no basis for morality." This irritates non-believers like me. Hey! I'm moral! I know the difference between right and wrong. My morality just isn't based on supernatural dogmas. But what if those fundamentalists are correct? What if there's no such thing as atheist morality? And -- most importantly -- what if this is no big deal, because morality is as unnecessary to live a good life as believing in God is? Such is the basic thesis of Joel Marks' "Confessions of an Ex-Moralist." Marks is a philosophy professor,…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

What boxing up Rumi says about Me

For several decades I've had a series of literary infatuations. I'd fall in love with a mystical/spiritual author or genre and read everything I could on that subject. I had my Meister Eckhart phase. Along with a Christian mystic phase: St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Pseudo-Dionysius, whoever wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. I devoured writings by and about Plotinus. I was deep into Fritjof Schuon and other Perennialists for a while. And I never stopped being attracted to Buddhist and Taoist books no matter whatever other writings turned me on. But my biggest love affair was with…
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Posted inScience

We are natural born dualists

There's something strange about people who say "All is One" while believing in an immaterial soul or some other supernatural entity. This is a dualiistic idea that's at odds with oneness. Materialists actually are the true monists, because they hold that everything in existence is formed of the same substance. Michael Shermer makes this point nicely in his book, "The Believing Brain." This process of explaining the mind through the neural activity of the brain makes me a monist. Monists believe that there is just one substance in our head -- brain. Dualists, by contrast, believe that there are two…
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Posted inGod Religions

Every believer in God also is an atheist

Do you believe in God? If so, you're an atheist. Because you believe in a God, a singular God, a particular God. If you believed in all possible Gods, then I guess you deserve to be called a genuine theist. But such is rarely, if ever, the case. Religious true believers cleave to one God while rejecting the Gods that other people believe in. So they're atheists in regard to all Gods but one. Given the thousands of different religions, this means that the difference between an atheist who rejects all Gods but one, and an atheist who rejects all…
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Posted inPolitics

Presidential candidates should be quizzed about religion

To me, there's no place for religion in politics. Sure, virtually every politician in the United States who occupies a high office will be religious, because this is a highly religious country and voters are biased against atheists. But political decisions should be based on evidence, reasoning, values -- not blind faith in some supernatural force. (See some previous blog thoughts on this subject here, here, here, and here.) Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, who is about to step down and become a full-time writer, wrote a great piece: Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith. Which…
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Posted inReligions Science

Null hypothesis makes God a nothing

It's been a while since "null hypothesis" passed through my brain. Probably a college statistics class was the last time those words were thought about. So I felt like I was saying hello to an old acquaintance when I came across references to the null hypothesis in the final chapter of Michael Shermer's latest book, The Believing Brain. Science begins with something called a null hypothesis, Although statisticians mean something very specific about this (having to do with comparing different sets of data), I am using this term null hypothesis in its more general sense: the hypothesis under investigation is…
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Posted inHumor Religions

Two Portlanders go to church so you don’t have to

I like "Year of Sundays." Especially the tag line under the blog's name: we go to church so you don't have to Thanks, Joel Gunz and Amanda Westmont, who are fellow Oregonians. I've taken you up on your offer. You're both terrific writers (after each visit to a church or other spiritual gathering, Joel and Amanda compose separate descriptions of their experience). Portland, Oregon's alternative newspaper, Willamette Week, gave them a 2011 "Best Divine Dilettantes" award. If you’re in the market for a religious experience, Amanda Westmont and Joel Gunz might be able to lend you some wisdom. The pair…
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Posted inScience Spiritual practice/meditation

Religious Naturalism: sound science with a topping of awe

Thanks to a comment by Alex on a recent post about the wonders of the universe, I learned about Religious Naturalism -- which I wasn't very familiar with before. (Alex is with the Unitarian Universalists Hong Kong, UUHK.) May I introduce the philosophical/religious position which explores the religious depth (feelings of wonder, awe, inspiration, reverence, and humility; and contemplation of life and death) of the Universe as understood by science: Religious Naturalism More information: http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/2000_stone_2_1.pdf http://www.religiousnaturalism.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_naturalism In my opinion, your article is a wonderful exposition of Religious Naturalism (if you don't mind being so described). No, Alex, I don't…
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Posted inScience Universe

No need for God with “Wonders of the Universe”

I felt awe, inspiration, reverence, humility. Not from a religious ritual, holy book, or spiritual sage -- from the first episode I've watched of a BBC science program, "Wonders of the Universe." Youthful-looking physicist Brian Cox explained in Children of the Stars how the same 92 naturally occurring elements are found everywhere in the universe. So what we are, the universe is.I've heard this before, many times. But the way Cox put it seemed new and fresh. In the clip below he says that the building blocks of the universe -- protons and neutrons -- formed within the first few…
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Posted inReality

Life is as absurd as we make it

Is life absurd? Sometimes it seems to be. I ponder how large the universe is (a hundred billion or so galaxies, each with a hundred billion or so stars) and how old it is (about 13.7 billion years), and compare this with my puny earthly existence. How insignificant I am compared to the cosmos! How absurd it is that I consider my life to mean anything in light of my miniscule'ness! And yet... If you want to know how a philosopher persuasively addresses that and yet, give Thomas Nagel's "The Absurd" a read. I did so yesterday, finding it pleasingly…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

“Spiritual bypassing” is an inhuman religious affliction

Whether you've belonged to a Western or Eastern variety of religion -- Christianity or Buddhism, say -- almost certainly you know the sort of person Robert Masters is talking about in his book "Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters." When I'd come across one of them, I'd think, "Good god, just act like a normal human being instead of a pseudo-saint!" They'd be irritatingly self-righteous, emotionally detached, and uncaring about how they treated other people. Masters says: Signs of spiritual bypassing at work are perhaps most commonly seen in the minimizing, superficializing, or outright negation of…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

“Satsangi” is a seeker of truth, not a religious devotee

The literal meaning of the Indian word, "satsangi," is someone who associates with truth. However, various religious groups have hijacked the term to mean something else: a devotee of some particular dogma. Unless all of those dogmas are equally true, some of those "satsangis" are more genuinely associated with truth than others are. Going further, a real satsangi is open to truth in whatever form, shape, or manner it manifests. Thus a true satsangi can't allow himself or herself to be limited by any dogmatic religious barrier. Truth has to be followed wherever it leads. These thoughts were stimulated by…
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