Posted inFundamentalism

Religion’s dangerous certainty

Yesterday I chatted with a guy who is deeply Christian, yet also moderately scientific. For at least twenty years he's come over when we needed some repair work done on our security system. Standing around, watching him do his circuit testing thing, we eventually get around to our usual philosophical conversation dance. I know he's a true believing Christian; he knows I'm decidedly something else. The Taoist art hanging around the house and bookshelves filled with titles like "The End of Faith" and "God is Not Good" probably is a giveaway. I'm also not shy about expressing my skepticism to…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Wanting. Do I want it?

I'm an expert wanter. I want, want, want. All day long, I want. Much of the night too, because my dreams are filled with wanting. When I'm hungry I want food. When I'm horny I want sex. When I'm sad I want happiness. When I'm scared I want safety. And so it goes, one wanting after another. Right now I want to write a blog post about wanting. After I finish, there will be something else to want. Dessert. Television watching. Dog patting. I've heard so many spiritual talks and read so many religious books about how important it is…
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Posted inUniverse

Hubble photo of deep space is naturally divine

There's no reason, none at all, to look for divinity in a holy book, person, building, or icon. The Hubble space telescope's Ultra Deep Field photograph of the farthest reaches of space contains more authentic mystery and awe than any religious dogma. And readers of the Sunday comics were exposed to it last weekend, thanks to Opus. Berkeley Breathed, Opus' creator, points to the craziness of considering that we humans are the center of the cosmos. Science has revealed, in countless ways, that the Earth and everything on it is just a part of the whole called Universe. A very…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Sant Mat’s “five holy names” aren’t so holy

Today Tucson Bob left a comment that got me thinking about my own evolving attitude toward mantra meditation. He said, in part: I will say that Sant Mat meditation, at least the basic technique of simran (mantra repetition), seems to me to have a dulling, dumbing-down effect that seems to interfere with intuitive perception. Imagine you are in a wilderness at night. It is pitch black and you know there is a predator out there. All your being, all your senses are fully in the moment listening for some sound or movement to indicate where that predator is. You are…
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Posted inSpiritual practice/meditation

Blink! Don’t think. “Religion is …”

Fill in the dots, those wonderful empty ellipses… One or two words, that's all it takes. For me, it's bullshit. For you, it could be anything. Including bullshit. "God's revelation." "Delusional." "Our salvation." "Worthless." The point is, each of us has an intuitive understanding of religion – which I take to include all sorts of spiritual, mystical, and meditational practices. You could say, we grok it. I've just starting reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink." Subtitle: "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." Appropriately, I'm going to intuit the message of the whole book after perusing just 40 pages. It's fascinating. Consider the…
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Posted inTaoism/Tai Chi Wu Project

Taoism wants us to be holey, not holy

I've been attracted to Taoism for a long time. Even before I knew anything about it. Early in my teen years (maybe a bit before) I visited San Francisco's Chinatown. I came back with a bunch of cheap art, bought from my allowance. I was enthralled with the images of misty mountains drawn with a few brushstrokes, usually including a tiny solitary figure walking along a path. Who knows where that early instinctive attraction to Taoism came from? I sure don't. My mother had no inclination toward Eastern philosophy or art. I wasn't exposed to such in any other fashion,…
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Posted inFundamentalism

Swarm theory supports spiritual independence

What makes a bee hive, an ant colony, a school of fish, or the stock market so adaptive? These swarms of individuals manage to do the right thing most of the time, yet they're leaderless. There's a lesson here. Independence leads to wiser collective decisions. Top-down control, the modus operandi of almost every religious organization, is maladaptive. A fascinating National Geographic article, "Swarm Theory," says: Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to…
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Posted inReligions

What’s wrong with me is wrong with religion

I had one of those oh, yeah! moments yesterday when everything became so clear to me. Now, I've had such moments before. In my "Mini-secret of universe revealed" I described a couple of them. One mescaline-fueled. One clear-headed. So I'm not claiming that my most recent epiphany is It, the Big One, a foretaste of my impending satori. But hey, it could be. And it's in line with my other revelations, though you might have to be under the influence of a psychedelic to appreciate my late '60s insight that it's all about a paper bag turned inside out. I…
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Posted inGod

Fifty proofs that God is imaginary

Ah, it feels great to have my faithlessness freshened. Thanks to God is Imaginary, I've been able to browse through cleansing pools of skepticism – proofs (some more persuasive than others) that the Big Guy Upstairs is a figment of religious imagination. The ones I looked at resonated with me. Proof #11 -Notice that there is no scientific evidence is something I've pondered a lot. It goes along with Proof #43 - Realize that a "hidden God" is impossible. Impossible for a Christian-sort of religion that posits a personal divinity who's interested in us, at least. For if God wants…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

I return to church. And sit through a sermon.

Yesterday I went to the Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) equivalent of "church," a satsang. It'd been quite a while. I felt right at home, though no more so than at the Beanery Coffee House – our post satsang destination. Old friends Ron and Rita had come down from Seattle for their almost annual visit. They enjoy the Salem Art Fair, even when I kid Ron about a leather cap making him look like one of the Village People. Ron is a faithful RSSB devotee, though by no means a fundamentalist. Me, I'm whatever I am now. Some would say,…
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Posted inReligions

On getting rid of those little men in your TV set

Douglas Adams – author, humorist, and great admirer of science – was fond of telling a story about how televisions work. Here's how his friend, Richard Dawkins, related it in his "Lament for Douglas Adams" (Adams died of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 49). A man didn't understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained about high-frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, transmitters and receivers, amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Balanced between belief and doubt

I enjoyed my 45 minute or so BlogTalkRadio conversation with medium Marcel Cairo yesterday. We were supposed to talk about Science, Spirituality, and Spinoza, which we sort of did. The archived AfterLifeFM show is here. To hear me in my (somewhat muffled) glory, scroll down and click on one of the symbols to the right of "Dismantling Dogma." The arrow thingie fires up Windows Media Player. Alternatively, I'll share my memory of some conversational highlights. This is the third time Marcel and I have talked over the Internet. We've got a thing going. As a medium, Marcel obviously believes in…
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Posted inPersonal/Stories

Me talk Spinoza on BlogTalkRadio today

Who knew there was such a thing as BlogTalkRadio? Not me, until medium Marcel Cairo invited me to be on his AfterLifeFM show today, 4 PM Pacific, 7 PM Eastern, some other time in between the coasts. Tune in. Or better yet, call in. You listen via the Internet by pressing the "Click here" thingie when the time comes. You can call in via any sort of phone: 646-478-5711. Our subject is Dismantling Dogma: Science, Spirituality, and Spinoza. I'm no expert on Spinoza, but I've filled up a large-post it note with pithy reminders of his philosophy, which should be…
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Posted inMorality

Morality has nothing to do with religion

Thanks to Middle Earth Journal, I learned about an exchange between Michael Gerson and Christopher Hitchens concerning whether religion is necessary for people to act morally. Gerson started it off with his "What atheists can't answer." With a title like that he should have known that an answer would be forthcoming. In fact, it took Hitchens just a day to come back with "An Atheist Responds." Hitchens, author of God is Not Great, is a tough guy to argue with. In this case, though, a middle school debate team could have handled Gerson with one argumentative hand tied behind their…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas Spiritual practice/meditation

Skepticism is the fruit of knowledge

James Randi is a magician. He knows the tricks. What's different about Randi is that he openly exposes the magic game, as I read in a recent AP story about him. He gave up performing as The Amazing Randi years ago, but his words to the audience at the end of each show foreshadowed his next act. ''Everything you have seen here is tricks,'' he would say. ''There is nothing supernatural involved here.'' Randi now dedicates himself to exposing frauds. His web site features a million dollar paranormal challenge to anyone who can demonstrate "super" powers in a controlled setting.…
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Posted inRadha Soami Satsang Beas

Ridiculing my own religious fundamentalism

Recently I made fun of keeping kosher – including the absurd practice of getting around a prohibition of lighting a fire on the Sabbath by starting an oven ahead of time and disabling its light bulb. Some commenters gave me heat for ridiculing this practice of observant Jews, even though I was careful to point out that I wasn't singling out Judaism. Every fundamentalist religious practice deserves to be laughed at. I replied to one comment with: Like I said, I'm an equal opportunity ridiculer. I particularly enjoy ridiculing my own previous unsupported beliefs. So now let's have some laughs…
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Posted inFundamentalism

My oven’s “Sabbath Feature” shows idiocy of keeping kosher

Before making fun of keeping kosher, I want to assure any observant Jew who comes across this blog post that I'm an equal opportunity religion-basher. So you're not being singled out because you're Jewish. It's your religious fundamentalism, which comes in many denominational varieties, that's deserving of some ridicule today. Which happens to be July 10. The temperature has hit an unusual 100 degrees here in Oregon. So there's good reason to keep the oven off today. However, not turning our Frigidaire electric wall oven on during the Jewish Sabbath (basically, Friday night to Saturday night) – that's kosher nonsense.…
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Posted inWu Project

Sheer absence of soul reveals its nature

Ah, sheer poetry. About the soul. Featured on the front page of The Oregonian Living section yesterday, of all things. I've poeticized a quote from Gunther von Hagens, creator of the Body Worlds 3 exhibit that I wrote about recently. In the exhibitionthe pure absence of the soulactuallyunderlines the soul The longer I aman anatomist,the closer I amto the soul just because ofits sheerabsence I was surprised by the tone of the story, headlined "Exhibit or exhibitionism?" The reporter, Nancy Haught, must have gone out of her way to find people who were offended by this display of plastinated human…
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Posted inReligions

Religions aren’t alike. I think I know why.

It's (churchless) confession time. I'm getting down on my bloggish knees and admitting to a mea culpa. Not a very juicy one, though. It's philosophical rather than salacious. For a long time I've been an advocate of the notion that under their dogmatic skins religions share a common skeleton. Aldous Huxley called this the Perennial Philosophy and wrote a book by that name. But now I've come to agree with Stephen Prothero, chair of Boston University's Department of Religion, who said in Newsweek recently that the proposition "The Major Religions are Essentially Alike" is false. Religious people do agree that…
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Posted inScience

Science is more spiritual than religion

On this July 4, Independence Day in the United States, let's remember that the founders of this country wanted its citizens to be free of religious tyranny. So you can bet they wouldn't be happy with the fundamentalist excesses in the United States today. Most of our founding fathers were deists who believed that religious beliefs have to be founded on reason, not holy books. To them, God is revealed in the laws of nature, not religious superstition. Science thus becomes more godly than religion, because the nature of the creator is revealed through (no big surprise) nature. Ann Druyan,…
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