Posted inReligions

“Religulous” warms my churchless soul

Here's a miracle: Bill Maher's anti-religion movie, Religulous, got us out of our Netflix habit and into a real movie theatre. Ensconced in Salem Cinema's alternative artsy atmosphere, munching on parmesan cheese-drenched popcorn and sipping a vanilla Italian soda, my wife and I relished Maher's skewering of the ridiculous side of religiosity. You can read about the flick on Wikipedia, which includes a summary of reviews good and bad. And You Tube has an interview with Maher that reflects the flavor of his movie. I enjoyed Maher's preaching the power and glory of the gospel "I don't know." For me,…
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Posted inReligions

Religion places bad bets on the left brain

Sometimes you hear, "He's a left brain person" or "Creativity comes from the right brain." Neuroscience is a lot more complicated than that, but it's still fascinating to read descriptions of the specialized functions in the two sides of the brain. Such as Michael Gazzaniga's "Spheres of Influence" in the June/July issue of Scientific American Mind. He describes research on split-brain patients where the major connection between the two hemispheres, the corpus collusum, is severed in order to treat intractable epilepsy. This allowed Gazzaniga and his collegues to study how the two hemispheres dealt with a problem that has a…
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Posted inDeath/Rebirth

Be thankful you’re not dead

It's Thanksgiving Day in the United States. In the rest of the world, I gather, it's a regular day. The real point of Thanksgiving seems to be to overeat, spend time with family members, and rest up for shopping tomorrow (big sales start in a few hours). My wife has made a couple of pumpkin pies. I've got a vegan Tofurky cooking in the oven. There's thankfulness pouring out of every pore of our daily newspapers and Internet news sites. I'm not big on holidays. I don't like following a societal script. Be thankful on Thanksgiving. Be worshipful on Christmas.…
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Posted inGod

Why EnlightenNext is so irritating

Dear God, deliver me from New Agey, Ken Wilber'ish, pseudo-evolutionary, integral philosophy B.S. like what just popped into my email inbox, courtesy of Andrew Cohen and his EnlightenNext crew. I just said that I had mixed feelings about Ken Wilber. Cohen's YouTube video adds quite a bit of weight to the absurd side of my attitude. If you've got eight minutes you want to waste, take a look. I can see why Cohen changed the name of his magazine from "What is Enlightenment?" Because talk like I heard on the video sure would earn a big fat "Not this!" from…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

No need to live life fully. Just live.

"Living life to the fullest" is an adage that used to mean much more to me than it does now. In my true believing days I'd be anxious that I was missing out on the purpose of earthly existence. Which I took to be: pursuing a spiritual path that would lead me out of the illusion of earthly existence. So, in accord with the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an Indian organization led by a guru), I diligently meditated for several hours a day and did my best to not get attached to worldly entanglements. I failed, of course.…
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Posted inWu Project

Trapped in the goal of having no goal

One of my pet peeves is how often I hear, "Brian, you think too much!" Almost always I'm told this by a true believer (generally in Sant Mat, my previous faith) who is using his or her mind to express that thought. So obviously that person isn't opposed to thinking, because they're doing it when they tell me "You think too much." What they really are saying is that they don't like what I'm thinking. Which, when expressed in a Church of the Churchless blog post, often has to do with the futility of religious believing. Those beliefs, whether Christian,…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Spiritual ego worse than worldly ego

Losing the ego... what's up with that? In most religions, particularly Eastern ones, this is supposed to be a supreme goal of spirituality. Yet no one has ever seen an "ego," much less the absence of one. I've come to feel that "losing the ego" is one of those phrases that sounds like it means something -- and gets repeated in sermons, satsangs, and such as if it did -- but actually points to an absurdity. How would a person without an ego, a sense of "I," personal desire, look? How would he or she be different from other people?…
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Posted inReality

Beyond Ken Wilber’s bounded reality

I've got mixed feelings about Ken Wilber. Sometimes he strikes me as a self-absorbed guy who's fervently marketing his Integral Philosophy as the answer to every question, even though it strikes me as a conceptual exercise without much reality meat behind it. Then I read something Wilber has written and resonate with it. (A sampling of my divided opinions toward Wilber is here, here, and here.) I wasn't planning to renew my subscription to "What Is Enlightenment?" when the magazine changed it's question mark spots and became EnlightenNext, an even more brazen vanity massager for Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen…
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Posted inHumor

Seven days of sex — religion I can get behind

Or, on top of. That's one of the great things about this story of a mega-church pastor urging his congregation (married only, please) to have sex for seven days straight. It lends itself to double entendres. I watched a story about "Thou Shalt Not Abstain" on CNN and couldn't resist getting out my Flip VIdeo camera and beaming it up to You Tube. My favorite part is about 1:10 in, when a woman says that the pastor hadn't touched on this subject before. At least, "not in so much depth." Giggle, giggle. It's refreshing to see religion addressing down-to-earth human…
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Posted inReality

The meaning of life? Life.

Pretty obviously, I'm entering the simple phase of my philosophical trajectory. In my life I've thought a lot of complex thoughts. I've written some complex books. I've followed a complex spiritual path (Sant Mat, which has lots of rules and posits a dazzlingly involved cosmology). I've embraced the teachings of a guru, Charan Singh, who had advice on countless subjects associated with the inner and outer life of his disciples. Now, all this strikes me as way too much. As do the intricacies of every religion. Most scientists suspect that simplicity lies at the heart of reality, notwithstanding the seeming…
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Posted inBooks

End of the spiritual search

Given how many mystical, spiritual, and philosophical books I buy from Amazon, my favorite online book store should be cautious about carrying this title:"Beyond Awakening: The End of the Spiritual Search," by Jeff FosterIndeed, since I read this slim book (141 pages, whose message could be encapsulated on one or two) I haven't bought anything in the What's It All About genre. But give me time. I doubt that I'm really at the end of my spiritual search. Could be, though. I like a lot of what Foster has to say, which is supremely simple. He ends the book with...Yes,…
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Posted inReality

Boxing up varieties of belief

Most people don't like to be put in boxes. Meaning, categories. Hey, I'm an individual, unlike anyone else! we like to believe. Fair enough. But I see nothing wrong with putting how we believe into boxes. So I've done just that -- stimulated into belief-categorizing action by a question that's been running through my mind recently: Why do some people's proclamations irritate or please me more than other proclamations? I'm speaking generally here, about all sorts of utterances. Verbal sayings. Blog posts and comments. Books. Magazine articles. Any way that someone communicates a belief from their brain into mine. Sometimes…
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Posted inReality

Shared reality is better than private reality

Sometimes you hear people say, "He's off in his own private world." Now, this may not be such a bad thing. But few of us would want to be in a totally closed off fragment of reality, because that would be exceedingly lonely. Comments on a recent post got me thinking about shared (or "intersubjective," as one person put it) realities, versus private realities. In my experience, the most satisfying moments in life are when I feel connected with other people. Or with nature. Or with some other animate or inaminate entity, such as our dog -- or my newly…
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Posted inScience

Belief is in the brain, so beware

Believing in the supernatural is easy: our brains lead us down the belief road without our knowledge. So there's good reason to be skeptical of religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences.Much, most, or all of the time (depending on your level of skepticism) your brain is fooling you.Such is the fascinating message of Sharon Begley's "Why We Believe" in a recent issue of Newsweek. I read her piece the day after my wife and I believed we were at the right election night party place, but really weren't. We weren't in a supernatural frame of mind, but some of Begley's believing…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

If you can’t find the party, try another place

I want to suck as much meaning as possible out of yesterday’s marvelous election results. So I’ll keep the party going (sorry, Republicans) with a story about how I couldn’t find the party. Which bears quite a bit of resemblance to how I wasn’t able to locate the spiritual extravaganza that supposedly was rocking on a level of higher consciousness, according to the meditation system that I followed for many years. In both cases, it eventually became obvious that I wasn’t in the right place. But the interesting thing is how non-obvious obviousness can be, if you’ve got your mind…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Make life more of a silent movie

I'm fond of encapsulating the meaning of life in a pithy phrase. Only problem is, I keep coming up with different capsules. Back in my psychedelic-fueled youth, it was "the universe is a paper bag turned inside out." Recently, I realized that it was folly to "overlay the actuality of my day with an idealized version of it." Today, it's "make life more of a silent movie." This thought came to me, and it seemed so enormously profound I instantly knew it must be the key to understanding everything. I only wish I understood what I said to myself. But,…
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Posted inScience

Getting down to rock bottom reality

I've never understood why science isn't worshiped by religious believers. After all, most religions believe that God or a higher power created the cosmos. So seemingly the next best thing to knowing God would be knowing how our universe works, since it stands to reason that the consciousness of the creator would be reflected in the creation -- in the same way as the psyche of an artist shines through his or her paintings. Normally my meditation nook's reading corner has several science books nestled comfortably next to spiritual and philosophical titles. I jump back and forth between them most…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Small things can be the biggest

For me, one of the hallmarks of churchlessness is being content with the smaller side of life. Maybe this partly comes from aging, but not all of it. Yes, I recall my 50th birthday, when a friend told me: “Now you won’t worry so much about accomplishing all that you set out to do.” What was unstated I took to be, “because you’ve passed your prime and don’t have much time left.” Well, if that was true at 50, it’s even more so at 60. Yet I don’t think age alone explains the increased pleasure I get from everyday life…
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Posted inScience

Thumbs up to naturalism, evolution, and Palin fading away

Today Pharyngula, a terrific science/ progressive/ anti-religion blog, hit the mark with links to stories on three of my favorite subjects. Exposing Sarah Palin for the fool that she is. Palin is against science. She's for the teaching of creationism. She doesn't think humans have much to do with global warming. Picturing her as vice-president of the United States: too irrationally scary to contemplate. This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise…
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