Posted inReality

Nature is real, religion is illusion

Here's one big change that churchlessness has produced in me: I no longer believe that this world -- where all of us are living now -- somehow is less real than an unseen theoretical heaven or higher realm of the cosmos.In fact, it's hard for me to accept that I ever believed this, because it doesn't make any sense. What would make someone turn away from what is right in front of them and try to embrace something imaginary that has no demonstrable evidence of its existence? Short answer: religion.Or, some sort of mental illness. In either case, the nature-denier…
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Posted inScience

No psychic abilities found in Twitter study

Darn, I was hoping that my occasional Twittering had some cosmic significance. But an article in New Scientist, "First Twitter experiment probes belief in the paranormal," describes a study that showed a lack of metaphysical ability among 7000 people who signed up for a scientific use of Twitter.The formal part of the study, which took place over four days, tested both whether the group as a whole was psychic and whether believers outperformed disbelievers. On each day I travelled to a randomly selected location and asked everyone to send tweets describing their thoughts and impressions about the location. In the…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Punjab “deras” point to continuing caste tensions

A friend, Randy, sent me a link to an article about "Deras, Caste Conflicts and Recent Violence in Punjab." It's interesting. Twice I've visited Dera Baba Jaimal Singh in the Punjab area of India. It's the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an organization that practices a form of neo-Sikhism. Meaning, a living guru is worshipped, not the Adi Granth Sahib, a book (which traditional Sikhs revere in somewhat the same sense as Christians look upon the Bible, as God's word).I wasn't aware how many "deras" there are in the Punjab. The article says:In Punjab, the number of Deras are…
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Posted inBuddhism

Where Buddhism & science coincide — and divide

As noted before, I used to be a lot more attracted to Buddhism than I am now. My churchless scientific leanings cause me to shy away from faith-based religiosity, and I've learned that while Buddhism talks a pretty good "spiritual science" game, the actual playing is lacking.Owen Flanagan, a philosopher, explains why in his "The Really Hard Problem," a book I'm enjoying.The really hard problem is how meaning is possible in the material world. To me it's obvious how this is done: each of us makes our own meaning, right here and right now. No metaphysics required.However, religions want us…
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Posted inScience

Subjectivity is the experience of objectivity

Wow, this post title runs the risk of winning a blogosphere Yawn! award. But hang in there, reader -- this subject of subjectivity and objectivity actually is darn interesting.And as intimate to you and me as what we're doing at this very moment. Which, in my case, includes sipping coffee from a yellow cup and watching the letters I type on my laptop's keyboard appear on the screen. I'm experiencing those things, along with much more -- such as hearing my wife open a desk drawer and shuffle through some papers. Now, there seems to be a big difference between…
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Posted inBuddhism

On giving up Buddhism and Zen

My churchlessness must be heading into even deeper irreligious territory, because lately I've been enjoying criticisms of some minimally churchy spiritual systems -- such as Buddhism -- that I used to identify with.The problem I'm having with Buddhism is that it really doesn't deliver on the promise I often have heard from Buddhists: "You don't need to believe anything; just study your own mind and observe what is experienced in meditation."Well, that sounds good. But actually there's a pretty extensive list of preconceptions in this supposedly conceptionless faith.Reincarnation or rebirth. Karma. Non-existence of the self. The four noble truths (including…
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Posted inReality

Searching for the reality in nonduality

I've been enjoying a comment conversation that's been happening on my "Mind in the Balance" post. The basic theme is whether nondualism is just another belief system, like any other philosophy or religion, or a genuinely unique direct realization of reality.Might as well throw some of my own ideas into the discussion stew. First off, though, I've got to admit that while I understand the notion of "dualism" pretty well, "nondualism" has never lodged in a comprehension niche within my mind.Of course, nondualists like Ramana and Nisargadatta -- whose teachings I'm familiar with via a number of books I've read…
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Posted inReligions

Letting go completely of religion…tough to do

When I showed my wife, Laurel, what book I'd bought at the wonderful Paulina Springs Book Company in Sisters, Oregon, she said, "Gosh, you've become as enthusiastic a believer in atheism as you were a believer in what you believed before."Well, that's a lot of "beliefs" in one sentence. And I have to disagree with one of them, because I don't consider that I believe in atheism.Rather, to me atheism is the default position that everyone should accept, absent demonstrable evidence for theism. It is the absence of a belief in God, just as aunicornism is what we could term…
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Posted inReality

Meaning of life is made, not discovered

I love books that lead me to look upon something familiar in a fresh way. Like, life's meaning. I've spent a lot of time pondering the meaning of life. And, searching for it.Now that I've read about half of Eric Maisel's "The Atheist's Way" (highly recommended), I realize that my pondering is on the right track. The searching, not so much. In fact, Maisel has done a good job of convincing me that viewing the meaning of one's life as something to be discovered leads nowhere. Unless you want to adopt someone else's values, rather than your own.Before you can…
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Posted inBuddhism

“Mind in the Balance” unfairly slams science

Bummer. I thought I was going to enjoy B. Alan Wallace's "Mind in the Balance," since the subtitle points to an intriguing subject: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity.But the book turned out to be a disappointment, largely because Wallace is disturbingly anti-science and pro-religion, which shows that Buddhists can believe with blind faith in weird stuff just as other religious fundamentalists do.Right away I saw inklings of this. A sentence on page 1 had me nodding agreeably with Wallace:What's been hidden is meditation's role as a precision tool for exploring consciousness and the universe scientifically -- that is, using…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Is there anything wrong with life?

More and more, I'm wondering if the biggest problem with life is believing that life is a problem. Personally, I just don't see how there could be anything wrong with Life as a whole, capital "L" version.Yet religions tell us that there is. Christianity speaks of original sin, and of a fall from God's good graces. Similar teachings are found in Islam and Judaism. Buddhism informs us that life is suffering. In Hinduism, the everyday world is maya, illusion, not the place a psyche wants to be. The root of "religion" is relegare, which denotes a binding back to God.…
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Posted inHumor

Duhism — even more useless than Taoism (but funnier)

The Tao works in mysterious ways. Mostly, for me, through the Internet. If ultimate truth ever speaks to me, I figure it will be via my MacBook.So I smiled sagely -- my natural expression -- when I clicked on an email that informed me Bob Tzu now was following me on Twitter. Twitter etiquette demanded that I take a look at Bob's page to see if his Tweets were interesting enough to make me want to follow him.Which, they were. Bob Tzu had me at...Ignorance may not really be bliss... but it'll do in a pinch.Tomorrow, I will live in…
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Posted inBuddhism Taoism/Tai Chi

Buddhism and Taoism deconstruct religion

Even when I was young, a pre-teen, I was attracted to Taoist and Buddhist imagery. During my first visit to San Francisco's Chinatown at about the age of twelve, I bought a bunch of scrolls and artwork showing sages wandering on misty mountain paths.Where the heck did that immediate attraction for a philosophy I knew nothing about come from? I have no idea. But it was a premonition of things to come.Because now my churchlessness has evolved to the point where Taoist and Buddhist writings are just about the only kind of spiritual literature that my psyche can stomach. And…
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Posted inReality

Logocentrism isn’t cool for the churchless

Wow, this blog is rocketing upward in philosophical sophistication. After putting up a post where I used the word "deconstruction" as many times as I could, now I've got "logocentrism" in a title.My inspiration, as before, is a wonderful philosophy comic book by Jim Powell, "Deconstruction for Beginners" (which I surely am).The basic notion of logocentrism, which is a bad, bad, bad thing to Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, is sort of hard to pin down -- which is to be expected from a philosophical approach that dismantles the foundation of meaning.Here's a pretty good brief description.1. Belief that…
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Posted inScience

How to judge a “science of the soul”

Quite a few mystical, meditational, and spiritual entities (organizations or individuals) claim to teach a science of the soul. See, for example, here, here, here, and here.My previous post about the scientific method stimulated some pondering: how would a science of the soul go about trying to discover what, if anything, lies beyond the physical human brain and material universe?I'm assuming that "soul" refers to something metaphysical. If not, then it doesn't make sense to speak of a science of the soul, because plain "science" would be sufficient -- plenty of researchers already are delving into how our minds work,…
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Posted inScience

Science is the only way of knowing objective truth

It's amusing when anti-scientific true believers get on their fundamentalist soapboxes. I've had a good time reading the nonsensical comments on my spiritual pseudo-science post.I'll try to avoid sounding too condescending here, though I agree with biologist PZ Myers when he responded to a creationist with "I'll be condescending when condescension is deserved."First -- and probably most importantly -- everybody uses the scientific method in their everyday lives. Otherwise it would be impossible to live any sort of normal life. So those who criticize how science works are hypocrites, unless they also are criticizing themselves. Here's a simple depiction of…
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Posted inScience

“Quantum Gods” debunks spiritual pseudo-science

Traditional religions embrace a lot of crazy unsubstantiated beliefs. But so do modern New Agey sorts of spirituality, which often take a speck of scientific truth and try to inflate it into a grand explanation of the cosmos.So in addition to fundamentalist dogma, we churchless types need to train our skeptical guns on targets such as the film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" Personally, I liked this movie a lot more than, say, a speech by the Pope. However, since I'm fairly familiar with quantum theory (in a non-mathematical sense, at least), having researched it in the course of…
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Posted inPolitics

Evidence of Rumsfeld’s Christian war

Here's a great example of how unsupported religious beliefs get mixed up with politics and foreign policy, helping lead to war:Slides of former Bush defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's briefings to the White House where he juxtaposed war images with inspirational Bible quotes.Take a look.
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Posted inReligions

Don’t get drunk on someone else’s religious intoxication

I've always wanted to talk about deconstruction in a blog post. (The philosophical variety, not the demolition kind.) My only minor problem -- which shouldn't ever stop a blogger -- is that I knew next to nothing about the subject.But now I've read all 168 pages of "Deconstruction for Beginners," a terrific book. One of it's appealing points is that it takes a comic book style to deciphering Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction. And has quite a bit of talk about sex. Including drawings of naked women. This stuff isn't gratutious, as it contributes to understanding how deconstruction works…
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