Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Sam Harris doesn’t really believe in God

Wow, that was scary for a moment. I open up Newsweek and find an article with the headline, "Sam Harris Believes in God." My churchless brain started to scream, Noooooooo! Sam, how could you become a believer?! After all, Harris wrote a couple of great anti-religious books, "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." It would have been disappointing for me to find that he had gone over to the dark side of blind belief. Fortunately, the very first paragraph of the story started to relieve my anxiety. Sam Harris, a member of the tribe known as…
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Posted inBooks Buddhism

Buddhism’s consensual core isn’t supernatural

What is the essence of a religion? That is, how can we tell whether someone is a "real" Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or whatever? What degree of supposed heresy is beyond the bounds of a belief system? These are tough questions to answer, in part because they are religion-specific. Hinduism seems to be a lot more accomodating of alternative viewpoints than Christianity is. Yet Mormons usually are considered to be Christian, even though they stretch the gospel truth (so to speak) in some far-out directions. I got to thinking about this after having a comment interchange with Todd on…
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Posted inBooks Death/Rebirth

Here’s a tale from the afterlives

I'm hugely enjoying David Eagleman's "Sum: forty tales from the afterlives." This is a marvelously creative and thought-provoking book, unlike anything I've ever read before.

Sum is a work of fiction (maybe). The back cover says:

With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.

There's no way to explain the book. So I'll simply share one of the tales that I especially enjoyed. Read on.

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Posted inBuddhism

Buddhist atheism irks B. Alan Wallace

Wow, I thought serious Buddhists were supposed to be full of compassion, empathy, and oneness with all sentient beings. Guess not. Because I just quickly read through a scathing critique of Stephen Bachelor's "Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist," which B. Alan Wallace hates. (Thanks to Ira for an email that turned me on to this essay in Mandala, a Buddhist magazine.) Wallace is a leading Buddhist thinker who tries to meld science and spirituality. According to Wikipedia: His life's work focuses on a deep engagement between Buddhist philosophical and contemplative inquiry and modern science and philosophy, with a special emphasis…
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Posted inBooks Science

What do you believe but cannot prove?

This is a great question. Seeing it on the cover of a book in Sisters' (Oregon) Paulina Springs Books made me instantly believe, "I'll be standing at the cash register soon with my VISA card in hand." I couldn't have proven that I'd end up buying What We Believe But Cannot Prove, yet I believed it. And it turned out that I was right. What I didn't know at the time, though, was that all of the mini-essays in the book are available for free online at Edge. So if you want to learn how some of the most brilliant…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Open Thread 8

It's been a while, but Open Thread has been resurrected. I got a few comments that didn't fit with a recent existing post, so it seemed fitting to give them a home here to start the OT 8 off. Here's another Open Thread (previous OTs are still open, of course). Leave a comment about anything you want to talk about. Comments on other posts need to be related to the subject of the post, or they will be candidates for deletion. So an Open Thread is the place for miscellany and whatever. Feel free. Just observe the comment policies (click on…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Mental “avalanche” can cascade you to a better place

If we're on the slope of a steep snowy mountain, it makes sense to be afraid of an avalanche. Bodies usually don't fare well by suddenly being ripped from their moorings in a violent manner. But minds/brains, they're different. Having our psyche turned upside down, twisted around, mixed up topsy-turvy... this can be marvelously interesting, productive, creative, truthful -- maybe even enlightening. A New Scientist article, "Disorderly Genius," describes how the brain operates on the edge of chaos. Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as…
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Posted inBooks Morality Radha Soami Satsang Beas

Sam Harris says morality can be scientific

I love Sam Harris' books. His "The End of Faith" came out about a year after I started this churchless blog in the fall of 2004. It provided me with a surge of faithless energy, validating my decision to do what I could to help rid the world of destructive religious dogma. "Letter to a Christian Nation" (2008) also was a winner, but didn't appeal to me quite as much. Never having been a Christian (aside from pretending to be one in my early elementary school years), I guess his focus on the ridiculousness of Christianity seemed self-evident to me.…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Religion doesn’t add anything to human experience

Here's a big misunderstanding that most religious people make: when they feel good, they attribute those positive feelings to their religiosity -- not realizing that if they didn't have faith in God, Guru, Brahman, Allah, or whatever, they'd feel just about the same. I say this because I used to be such a person. For the thirty-five or so years I was an active member of an India-based religious organization I was almost always in a positive frame of mind. I was energetic, confident, productive, and happy. But this also describes how I was before and after my immersion in…
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Posted inBuddhism Reality Science

Relationship is the essential nature of reality

Some people are attracted to an "Eastern" holistic outlook on life. Others, to a "Western" analytical viewpoint. I've always thought that these were just two different ways of looking at reality, with each having its strengths and weaknesses. But some passages in Winifred Gallagher's Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life present another possibility. She describes research by psychologist Richard Nisbett about how Americans and Japanese describe an underwater scene quite differently. Americans focus on the largest and most colorful fish, while the Japanese would say things such as "It looked like a stream. The water was green. There were rocks…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Taoism/Tai Chi

Are Buddhism and Taoism akin to Sant Mat?

People here in the West often speak of "Eastern religions" as if they were all alike. This shows how little understanding citizens of predominantly Christian nations have of other cultures. Actually, some Eastern faiths have as much, or even more, in common with the Big Monotheistic Three (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) as they do with monistic/atheistic teachings such as Buddhism and Taoism. Case in point: Sant Mat, which means the "path of saints." For about thirty-five years I was an active member of an India-based Sant Mat organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, so I know whereof I speak. That's why I…
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Posted inBuddhism Radha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Vastness might be us, not a separate self

Somebody in my house picked up Suzanne Segal's book, "Collision With the Infinite, " this morning. Outwardly, it seemed to be me. But inwardly, it didn't feel that way. Even though I've got a bunch of books in my meditation area that were ripe for reading, I was drawn to move into an adjoining bedroom and look over the contents of a couple of bookcases. My right hand followed my eyes after I spotted the book. Holding it, I didn't have a sense either that I'd made a decision, or that a decision had made me. Something simply had happened.…
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Posted inMiscellaneous

Churchless potpourri

I've got some interesting links floating around my email inbox, thanks to blog visitors who wanted to share some churchless info. Also have a few other cyberspace-inspired thoughts floating around my psyche. Might as well toss them all into a potpourri post... ----------------------------------- Wow! How did the United States ever come out victorious in World War II without having "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Makes me wonder why every president now finds it necessary to say May God bless the United States of America at the end of his State of the Union speech. (Thanks for sending the…
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Posted inBooks Science

Possibly I’m becoming more of a “possibilian”

My first bloggish foray into possibilianism had a pretty mild title, "Nothing wrong with being a churchless 'possibilian'." After reading more about this meaning-of-life stance in the most recent issue of New Scientist, I find myself increasingly enthusiastic about David Eagleman's attitude toward uncertainty. His piece is called Beyond God and atheism: why I am a possibilian. It's a nice blend of creative openmindedness and scientific where's-the-evidence? I have devoted my life to scientific pursuit. After all, if we want to crack the mysteries of our existence, there may be no better approach than to directly study the blueprints. And…
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Posted inGod Reality Wu Project

“God” is the absence of “me”

I don't believe in God, not as this word is commonly understood. I don't see any sign of a personal divinity who created and oversees the universe, nor any indication of an omniscient and omnipresent universal consciousness. Here's the newest news about proof of God's existence: there isn't any. Isn't it more than a little strange that precisely zero progress has been made in the thousands of years of recorded human history toward conclusively resolving The Big Question: "Is there a God?" Yet I'm akin to Mike, a regular Church of the Churchless visitor, who has commented, "I'm a diehard…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

How to hold on when religious belief lets go

Today I got an email from someone who reminds me of me, just a lot younger. He speaks of losing confidence that the religious organization I was a member of for over thirty years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, is what he once considered it to be. But this loss of a belief hasn't yet been balanced by a gain of...what? I've come to the conclusion that the RSSB movement in general doesn't have what it takes to be called a 'Science' (as they call it.) It does not stand up to rigorous questioning, and is not wiling to share experiences,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

The A,B,C’s of getting along with life

Sometimes I wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and immediately feel something is wrong. Actually, this isn't true. Nothing is happening in the world outside of my head that shouldn't be. But I've fast-forwarded my life beyond the present moment. Looking ahead to making coffee, taking the dog out with me to get the newspaper, eating breakfast, and then starting on the daily chores that come with living in a non-easy-care home, my psyche gets disconnected from here-and-now reality. This produces that sense of wrongness, which most people feel in one way or another. We Homo sapiens…
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Posted inBooks Spiritual practice/meditation

Wonder — the sole essential of spirituality

It's been a steady substitution. The less I've filled myself with organized religion, the more I've felt a ever-increasing sense of wonder. I guess I needed to empty myself of theological beliefs, faith-based concepts, and imaginary anticipations of a promised divinity around the corner in order to become much more aware of the Wow! that is right here, right now. Existence. Life. Consciousness. The amazing fact that we are, that the cosmos is. There's nothing more divine (in the sense of "tasty," as in "that chocolate cake was divine") than this sense of all-encompassing wonder. It isn't a wonder caused…
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Posted inBooks Science

No need for God in Stephen Hawking’s universe

Stephen Hawking, noted theoretical physicist and cosmologist, is one of the smartest guys in the world. He's also an astute marketer, as shown by the title of his newest book, "The Grand Design" (which I finished reading this morning). Hawking and his co-author, physicist Leonard Mlodinow, are going to sell quite a few copies to clueless religious folks who see "design" on the cover and think, Ooh, great, some scientific proof for intelligent design! They'll be disappointed when they get to the final chapter and read: Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Secrets of universe revealed…sort of

That's a rather humble title for a blog post. If it was on the cover of a book, a mediocre-seller would be almost guaranteed. But since I pay good money for the privilege of sharing my views, I figure that truth in blog post advertising is the right policy. I'm a firm believer in "sort of's," as contradictory as that might seem (I'm also into contradictions, except when I'm not.) The older I get, the more often I've been having aha! moments where a curtain lifts on... something I'm not sure about, and I get a strong insight into... something…
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