Posted inPolitics

Obama recognizes limits of faith

This is a great speech by Barack Obama on the proper place of religion and faith in public policy. He should get the churchless vote with these sentiments. Obama certainly has mine. I just wish he'd repeat it now, saying the same things he did in 2006, since he has a much bigger audience as the Democratic presidential candidate. For the broadband impaired (I'm not aware of a transcript of this video), here's some of what Obama said in the five minutes. These aren't quotes, just a summary of main points. --This is a nation not only of Christians, but…
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Posted inUncategorized

Hope I don’t have a brain tumor

That was the thought that went through my mind as I exited Border's bookstore today, hands empty, after browsing through the religion and metaphysics sections for quite a while. Because this was unusual behavior for me, notwithstanding my periodic bursts of fasting from spiritual reading (see "I abandon all hope in my book shelves"). Today, though, whatever title I touched felt lifeless, hypothetical, detached from reality. I couldn't even muster up much interest in the Atheism, Taoism, and Buddhism sections, where something usually turns me on. What struck me after fifteen minutes or so of half-hearted page-thumbing was the same…
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Posted inReality

Doubt, darkness, digging deep

I keep thinking about John Shanley's lines from my previous post. Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state…Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Doubt is a recognition that personal earthquakes happen. Magma can erupt at any moment. Continents shift. Fast, not requiring eons to reshuffle the contours of our existence. Yet each of us erects belief structures upon this unstable ground. We're drawn to do so by the same natural forces that…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Doubt shall set you free

I just came across a nice paean to doubt. Certainly, I like it.

I took part of the doubt quiz, then jumped to the study guide for “Doubt,” the play. The playwright, John Patrick Shanley, says:

Each of us is like a planet. There’s the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who’s your best friend? What do you want?

Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has no choice but to give way.

Read on for more from Shanley about embracing tectonic shifts.

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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Artifacts of my non-heretical heresy

My wife found some note cards when she was cleaning out a drawer. "Here," she said, handing them to me. "They're yours." No doubt. My handwriting is distinctive, in the sense of unreadable. But I can decipher my own scribblings. Most of the time, at least. (I've been known to hand a store clerk my grocery list and ask, "Can you tell me what I wrote down here?") I thumbed through the cards and realized what they were: an initial attempt to organize themes for the talks that I used to give regularly at meetings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Having a revival by yourself

I used to go to an Indian mystic meditation group's version of "church" every Sunday to have my faith renewed. Well, sort of. Actually, what I enjoyed the most was getting together with friends after the service (a.k.a. satsang) was over. We'd go out for coffee and talk about all sorts of stuff, including how unsure we were about what we supposedly believed in. Now on Sundays I skip the service and head right for the coffee klatsch. But some days I still have a lingering longing for a revival. Problem is, I don't know what I'm trying to bring…
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Posted inReality

Blast the religious loonies into oblivion

Passion. Religious believers consider that they're the only ones with it. For example, they have "The Passion of the Christ." It fills Christians with energy, conviction, determination, zeal. Well, there's also "The Passion of Reality." It fills me with exactly the same feelings. Just as fundamentalists are driven to rid the world of Satanic influences (including pagans like me), when I come across nonsensical dogmatic blathering my reality-loving blood begins to boil. I get fired up to defend the ramparts of truth against the neo-barbarian hordes who want to substitute superstition for science (and a scientifically founded spirituality). This morning,…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Death is a marvelous backdrop for life

First, kudos to Edward for his comment on my "Finding Meaning in Meaninglessness" post. Like follow kudo'er Adam, I love the line, I have found that my life is none of my business. A comment excerpt: There is no reason to be sure of anything. My certainty changes nothing of how I engage the world. Even being sure that I know nothing actually impedes my effective participation. I have found that my life is none of my business. I get that there are (at least) two things going on: what I think is happening; and what is happening. These coincide…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Finding meaning in meaninglessness

I was a true believing existentialist my sophomore year in college. I devoured Sartre, Camus, all those guys who I could picture sitting in a Parisian coffee house, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, sipping thick expresso, and waving their hands animatedly as they agreed, in so many ways, that Life, it is so totally fucked! (in a French accent and with more of a literary twist to the sentiment, naturally). That's just how I felt. So I got a tremendous amount of meaning out of all the meaninglessness that I absorbed from existentialist writings. That's what held me together through some pretty…
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Posted inUncategorized

Diving off the dock of fundamentalism

Why not jump all the way in? The water of openness is so inviting. Non-dogmatic, fresh, cleansing. Why continue to just dangle feet over the dock of fundamentalism instead of leaping free and taking the plunge? Because unexamined assumptions hold us back. We non-believers actually believe in more than we're aware of. Decrying religious absolutism, we've got some absolutes of our own enshrined in our psyches. This is one of the disconcerting (but in a pleasing way, like when you're shoved off a place you didn't really want to be at) messages I've gotten from Robert Burton's "On Being Certain,"…
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Posted inScience

Knowing that you know: impossible

It's strange, but the most familiar sensation we have also is the most mysterious: knowing. I know this. And yet, I don't. Just like everything else that I know. Or you know. Or anybody knows. We don't know how we know. Which means we can't trust what we know – not with 100% certainty. So this should squash fundamentalism of every variety. Except…people can't control their knowing. Reason, facts, information, persuasion: our sense of knowing isn't influenced by any of that. Our knowing can't be trusted. Yet it's what we rely upon at every moment. Go figure. (But you can't,…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Benefits of blogging and bitching

Yesterday I got an email from a Church of the Churchless visitor who offered me some advice: It seems to me like you spend more time writing on this blogging thing than is healthy for anybody to do….We all get disillusioned with something, but we can move on or we can waste our time bitching about our disillusionment in cyberspace all day. Well, I beg to differ. I'm not in cyberspace all day. Though when our well pump stopped working this afternoon, and I had to find a way to get it fixed at the start of the Memorial Day…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Meditation – an ever present “church”

I meditated before I became a true believer. I meditated all during my faith-filled years. And I continue to meditate now that I'm in my churchless phase. For me, meditation is an opportunity to open myself up to…whatever. The motto of the X-Files (American TV show) was "The truth is out there." Also, in here: consciousness. Where you don't need anyone else – no preacher, guru, rabbi, priest – to show you the way. Nor do you need to go some place – a church, temple, mosque – to be on the way. Which might well be no way. I…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Struggling to label my belief in unbelief

Sometimes silence says more than words. Recently an old friend asked me, "Do you still consider yourself to be a satsangi?" I stared into the depths of my Starbucks latte. I started to speak, then closed my lips. The question spiraled deeper into my psyche. I waited to see if it'd hit bottom. Satsangi – I knew what my friend meant by the word. An initiated member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a mystic-religious group with headquarters in India and branches around the world. But the term is used much more broadly. Wikipedia associates it with another belief system. And…
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Posted inHumor

Believe! In witticisms about belief.

I learn a lot in the bathroom, thanks largely to Funny Times – which habitually resides in a drawer within convenient reach of my white pondering place. The May issue features quotes about belief in the Curmudgeon column (using content from "The Big Curmudgeon"). I liked these quotations, because I believe them. The others obviously are wrong, so I left them out. --------------------------- The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. – George Bernard Shaw Men become civilized, not…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Morality thrives without belief in immortality

Why would believing in life after death make us act more morally? Religions argue that if people didn't anticipate some sort of afterlife – the nature of which depends on behavior in this life – there'd be little motivation to do the right thing here on Earth. To my mind, there's an even better argument in the other direction: a belief in immortality creates an atmosphere where life as it is here and now is disrespected, disparaged, and downplayed. That's immoral. A plane crashes. There's a disaster in a coal mine. A stray bomb kills innocent children. Religious believers say…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Proof of life after death? Not yet.

If truth can't be found on Google, it must not exist. That's my cyberspace-centric view of reality. So here's the result of my hour or so of Googling the question: is there persuasive scientific evidence of life after death? Short answer: no. As some commenters (one of whom was me) on my "Life is a mystery. Afterlife, ditto" post observed, if such evidence existed, it'd be trumpeted to the heavens – plus the front pages. Now, quite a few people believe that scientists and the media are censoring evidence of life after death. Such as this guy. There are two…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Life is a mystery. Afterlife, ditto.

I like how Zen talks about the need for a "great ball of doubt." It seems like I should have enjoyed a satori by now, my doubt is so balled up. Some days more than others. This was a good doubting day. I just had an interview with my Zen master, who, conveniently, is myself (makes it easy to get appointments). He reviewed the enigmatic koans that life presented me on this Sunday, along with my responses. I think he was pleased. But I can't say for sure. That doubt thing, you know. Sundays usually follow a fairly predictable routine…
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